Dear Peter, Tim, Ed and All,

There is an excellent way to handle the presentation of actionable information in a meaningful, readily accessible way, and there is a body of data to add to the work on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which we (or others) may be able to access.

Pharos is or was a U.S. initiative to help people choose building supplies. They gathered data on 15 variables related to environmental, workforce, customer empowerment, end-of-life, and other categories of impacts for each material or product. Different product categories could have different impact categories measured and / or aggregated to arrive at 15 (for graphic consistency), depending on what they identified as significant.

They assigned values to the data in each category: bad (red), borderline (orange), and good (green), like traffic lights. They made a graphic mistake in showing red near the center of the pie, orange in the middle range, and green; only the red would show for bad, but the red and orange would show in the slice with the green for good. It will be far better to have the entire pie slice be in the single color that applies to the impact category. It will also be far better to include all products, and even all identifiable services, and to match incumbent categories with replacement categories. An example of the latter is to match internal combustion automobiles and pickup trucks with electric vehicles, and with efficient transit and transport alternatives, in combination with design of urban and rural places and economies to minimize required trips. So if a knowledgebase documents a new design for an economy, vehicles designed for the current system get an orange rating in this impact category, and those well-designed for the new economy get a green.

This gives consumers and organizations the opportunity to plan ahead with their purchases, even if it will be a little more expensive or less convenient in the short term, while the paradigm shift is under way. It can provide extremely powerful support for grass-roots-based, asynchronous, multi-sector, virtual coordination to achieve the paradigm shift, across the entire 99%. (If the current polarization between the Tea Party and the rest of the 99% continues, it can facilitate fluid decision-making and effective action, despite their opposition. Psychologically, that will cause loose adherents to peel away as they realize that it is a lost cause, eventually 'consigning it to the dust-bin of history'.)

I would correlate each individual product with its UPC code, which is almost impossible to hide, given today's inventory control technology. When faced with a choice of products in a store, the consumer simply scans each shelf tag (or package if necessary) with a smart phone or computer camera, resulting in a row of pie charts with varying amounts and distributions of red, orange and green for the products offered. The consumer can click on a chart for more details, and click again on a specific pie slice for more detail yet, and (presumably) click on any statement for the research that backs it up. This essentially dis-intermediates the merchant and the manufacturer's advertising from the decision-making process. Just as Adam Smith expected (and was used to), everyone has (nearly) complete information about each provider at their fingertips, during the moment of decision. (If manufacturers and merchants switch to near-field signaling or another non-visual system, phones can evolve to read the new codes, which can be paired with the line items in the database.)

So where do we get the data? From the work on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), from Project Censored, from the environmental movement, from unions (they are happy to name the union-busters they deal with), from health care and public health systems and their outcomes research (much more coming soon), from workers compensation / safety agencies and their causation research, and from crowd-sourcing (to get information on both good and bad from the people who witness it). Also from the REACH Initiative of the European Union, which has been forcing EU manufacturers to spill the beans on their environmental impacts for years now, and which gave our Department of Commerce a copy of the database, asking only that they share whatever research they do on the subject, in return. The project would need to get access to the database, and hopefully also get an agreement to receive updates, either from the DoC or from the REACH Initiative.

In other words, in this scenario, there is no way to hide for corporate (or local) pirates. This will slash their political power quite rapidly.

And regarding Ed's last note, guess who has time on their hands, gets into everything and everywhere, is often obsessively desirous of being a super-hero, and always wants to be able to contribute? Why, children, of course! Give them the tools to document (and geo-locate) every bad smell, every toxic spill, every frown or sneer, every suffering person, every anything that is not nice and does not feel good, and they will use those tools at every opportunity! Better yet, also encourage them to document and celebrate everything that is nice and feels good! Aggregate all that at multiple geographic scales, and make it as actionable as is feasible, and we will have enormous business leverage, and a whole new political scenario.

Peter, I think this would solve the problem you raised; it would become a meme; and it would greatly accelerate the replacement of bad products, or products from bad companies, with good ones. The stock market, because of its speculative nature, would anticipate earnings declines among those manufacturers / products identified as bad, or even as less good than their best competitors, and would reduce their stock valuations accordingly. That is the ultimate punishment in business culture, because it reduces companies' power to access capital at preferential prices compared with competitors, placing them on a slippery slope that ultimately falls away precipitously. That withdrawal of support for the bad companies creates large financial holdings looking for favorable places to invest -- which are, of course, the good alternatives! Thus the good companies get both the brand credibility and the capital availability to rapidly expand their market share.

Because this all takes place within the fundamental publicly declared rules of 'the system', it has the psychological impact of a natural evolution, and a market takeover can occur in a fraction of the time required to erode the right wing under a 'business as usual' scenario. If the Blessed Unrest is unable to persuade legislative, executive and Congressional incumbents to change horses, the new leaders will be the ones with surplus capital to spend on the political process, and they will be able to fund their socially-supported challengers sufficiently to allow upsets at the polls. If the Democratic Party remains locked down by corporate interests even under these circumstances (and even if it isn't), the Green Party will welcome the new coalition. A new plurality will be surprisingly easy to create within one or two election cycles. (There are several other aspects to that which I won't cover here.)

Obviously those who are, or who recognize that they will be, identified as bad or marginal, will seek to block this process, so it needs to be easy to download, store, and update it, both as a whole and in specific market segments, and designers need to ensure that the repositories are so widespread and so hardened that they cannot be eliminated. By giving lots of people the capacity to update them, yet maintaining audit trails of (and metrics about) changes to guard against distortion for any reason, the system can have the resilience and flexibility to shine a light on attackers and the companies they seek to protect, as well as on the already-known bad apples among manufacturers.

Perhaps not so obviously, there is also a Geographic Information System aspect to this work. Most of the really well-recognized brands are global corporations, but the majority of small, independent businesses are local or regional. While the TPP and other trade agreements are designed to crush local competition to global brands (and extractive and manufacturing industries) by removing their regulatory protections, this database can use one pie slice to show whether a business is local or regional (green), national (orange), or international and not from a local, regional or national organization (red), and when you click on it, show its geographic territory. This would probably not be anticipated by the current trade regimes, and it would be difficult for them to outlaw it, since it would not be a government-sponsored operation, but rather, a broadly-supported, and unifying, initiative of the Blessed Unrest [Paul Hawken], operating under the protection of free speech laws and public advocacy law groups. By doing it well and documenting how and how well, it could have a very good chance of maintaining that protection, and it would be a very good rallying position for resistance to government collusion and / or oppression in any related arena.

Finally, Peter, the above does not specifically address 'society as a whole', but it covers the underpinnings of the current organization of power. It would be technically feasible to expand it beyond products and services to any other potential subject of decision or discussion. And should societies reach the point of wanting to have a completely robust, curated discussion of every issue, Jack Park has developed a design for supporting just that; he was kind enough to give me a white-board presentation a few years ago. Should we want to add a good means of voting to existing discussion platforms, the California Green Party is using a fairly good one for votes by its Standing General Assembly, which supports Ranked Choice Voting. Anyone wanting to could adopt it or expand on it.

Namaste',

Mark