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I recently landed on a film about conventional combat between American and Russian submarines. In it, I encountered the term "decoy" for the first time. Decoys are distraction dummies launched by an attacked submarine that misguided the enemy torpedo into mistaking the dummy for the real target. It then collides with them and explodes. The attacked submarine remains unharmed.

"Decoys," I found interesting for three reasons. First, the concept of using a decoy to divert an aggressor's attention and energy.

Second, the idea that by now not only warring parties, but most people own such a decoy as a virtual self on social platforms on the internet. And third, the question of what happens to a society that has agreed to communicate from decoy to decoy.


### How do decoys communicate?

If, for example, a virtual decoy is damaged by another, we treat this as almost real damage, as if the person to whom this decoy belongs had suffered a black eye or worse from a Shitstorm. This reminds me of the old-fashioned concept of honor. Honor is a pre-modern construct that had to be defended by all means necessary. From the slap with the loosely held glove to the duel, from the rapier to the monster cannon Dicke Berta, everything is acceptable for disciplining the honor violator and a respected excuse to assert oneself aggressively.

A look at the present day shows that today we have not gone far in that respect. To defend our virtual digital selves, we are also resorting to increasingly drastic means. In the extreme, Internet mobs gather for massive brawls like the one on Berlin's Alexanderplatz. Usually, however, the decoy on the Internet is protected, upgraded and avenged as if it was our physical body, often with legal vehemence. At the same time, powerful players strive for sovereignty over it. Mostly with information or disinformation, often with simple seduction, demagogy or provocation.

So, in the digital world, parallel to our seemingly peaceful everyday life, a war is fought between and around the decoys, which leaves the affected that is under constant fire, unsettled. Because it is not a fortress wall that is being blown to pieces here, but the border between knowledge and superstition, between conspiracy theory and reality. Those who are not completely confused must ask themselves in the end:

### Am I allowed to still believe in what I know?

In the event of war, this everyday level of digital aggression would be the foundation of the Cyberwar. Targeted information and disinformation, intended to serve tactical and strategic goals, thus hits recipients who, have ceased to believe in the validity of information, because they are disoriented or have partly irrational convictions. Especially in information that does not fit into their worldview. What does this mean for a cyber warfare that wants to reach such recipients?

Of course, there are qualitative codes that can be used to target Internet tribes specifically, or you can use quantitative superiority and bombard the system with your core messages. Cynics like Putin, Orban, Erdogan or Xi Jinping act as dividers and in order to pursue their enrichment goals undisturbed, openly or covertly drive the blocs, which already alienated by conventional media, at each other.

In cyberspace, we seem to be returning to this tribal logic more and more. With tribal boundaries being replaced by the sensibilities of the individual or collective narcissism. So, in a sense, they are even more arbitrary than those of the New Guinean tribes, who were concerned with life, death, and chances for reproduction, rather than just being opinion leaders or vanity.### To kill a man, to kidnap a woman.

However, separation and alienation are questionable means for an actor in cyberspace that is committed to credibility and philanthropy. Which I understand the Western democracies to be, even in the event of war. The situation, encountered by this actor in cyberspace, is like that described by anthropologist Jared Diamond:

In the mountainous country of New Guinea, there was a different tribe in almost every valley. Hundreds of valleys, hundreds of tribes - almost all hostile towards each other. If the member of one tribe was discovered near the territory of another tribe, the archaic logic went, he was allowed to be killed. Because he could only have two things in mind: Killing tribal members of the residing tribe or kidnapping women.

These narcissistic sensibilities - whether individual or collective - are increasingly unfolding in a digitally simulated parallel world that, despite all the cross-border similarities, is still strongly shaped by two opposing trends.
In the virtual space of cyberwar, two mentalities oppose each other.

### To patronize or to protect.

Let's just call them the two systems of infantilization: The more paternalistic one, which provides paternalism and strict care in exchange for obedience (China/Russia, etc.), and our more maternalistic one, which cares for and protects the infantile ego and offers participation, but often no longer even dares to demand active participation.

In coming cyber conflicts, these two methods of infantilizing the citizen will clash. In a digital warfare of democratic states, which is about mental conquest and not destruction, it will be crucial to understand and properly address the paternalistic ego of the citizen of authoritarian states. Pure promises of consumption and freedom, like in the Cold War, no longer make much of a difference here. We must take a more differentiated approach. But how?

### How do I convince an opponent who does not believe me? Not propagandistic strategies.

How do I bring out the real in a world of simulations? I suggest non-propagandistic thinking.
Instead of insulting intelligence and rising emotions as old-style propaganda often does, intelligence and emotions of recipients should be acknowledged, strengthened and challenged fairly. The potentially dissident recipient, who is accustomed to authoritarian arbitrariness, must experience through attitude, tone and content that the democratic channel he is dealing with, is a self-confident but fair counterpart.


### The longing for trustworthy narratives.

There are several starting points for this, of which I will only mention a few as an example: There is a possibility that the recipient is trapped in the tunnel of fear or emotional isolation. Understanding this is a first step in guiding him out of the constriction. His stress level is likely to be high.

To relieve it, he is searching for familiar clues, content, persons of integrity or even idols. Repelled by untrustworthy leaders, the recipient looks for new narratives and concepts that promise support and that he may follow.
Such recipients often need not only reinforcement themselves, but also assistance to help others. The feeling of being able to become a hero or heroine for others also has a motivating effect.

So we should turn recipients into guided allies by sharing our own ideas and addressing them with determination at eye level. With these and other measures, we successively change the recipients' perspective on us until sufficient credibility is created to make our own agenda visible and to push it through. In other words, recipients are more willing to believe what they know after this process outlined above.

### Emotional anchor points in the authoritarian ego.

Non-propagandistic strategies in a digital environment influenced by mistrust and fear thus stabilize recipients in the mind of the self-aware communicator, rather than destabilizing them. In this way, such strategies create new emotional anchor points in the authoritarian counterpart, on which the mental conquest by humane and democracy-friendly content can be built in the next step.

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Die Eroberung des autoritären Charakters im Zeitalter der Simulation

The conquest of the authoritarian character in the age of simulation

When we are talking about the Corona crisis here, we are talking about developing resilience for coming exceptional situations. What we are still seeing now is a process of learning and adaptation. However, a quick return to normality already seems unlikely. Not only the health situation indicates this. Social routines such as big events and trips for fun are being questioned. Industries such as tourism, aviation, trade shows and events have been permanently hit, and trends such as sharing, co-working or co-living may have a hard time surviving the consumerism now shaped by distancing.

After days of activism and weeks of waiting, initial conclusions can be drawn. In addition to the known unknown, we can begin to consider the unknown unknown. What if other factors besides a pandemic could destabilize economies? Is it not it high time to strengthen the resilience of companies in addition to societies?

To do this, companies need to refocus their power of imagination and stabilize confrontations with death scenarios. This is exhausting and takes time, but the resulting insights and behaviors may be essential for the continuance of the company when the next exceptional situation hits.
What use is the best customer value if no customer comes, if products are missing? We must train a willingness to change, this means the competence to discard the outdated and allow the new in the shortest possible time. We need to build up our customer relationships in a crisis-proof manner across several levels. We should know which basic functions we will not digitize and which resources we will need in any case.
Entrepreneurial quality is no longer just a question of growth and efficiency, but it must manage to develop vital and, above all, resilient items. Structures as well as products.

Stable relationships are a cornerstone of human and thusly of entrepreneurial resilience. To give just one example, shouldn't we stop luring loyal but price-conscious customers into cancellation and new contracts at the end of the year, like Vodafone does, and instead reward them honestly and directly? Wouldn't that lead to more stable relationships, be easier on employees and save resources?
What used to be met with social backlash may make sense for your business under the new conditions: Drones for deliveries to the elderly, autonomous vehicles, glasses with social distance indicators, ATMs with iris scans.
Robots are already disinfecting hospital hallways, 3D printers are producing protective eyewear on demand, and in some countries citizens are wearing inexpensive wearables for health monitoring.

Thoughts about resilience should challenge the old paradigm of innovation as an end in itself or as a profit maximizer. In the face of unpredictable forces, continuity can be a good strategy as well.
Resilience and crisis protection can be strategically planned and practiced. Develop robust protective mechanisms for brands and business. Create resilience strategies that you will exercise regularly. No one can act as decisively in crises as those who have thought out and practiced their actions beforehand.

After days of behavioral change, millions of people around the world are ready to practice social distancing or participate in online conferences. Even politics works in remote mode. By doing the unexpected, people outgrow rigid routines.
Resilience to crisis can be achieved by exercising our imagination and correcting our behavior. In this way, we are less easily caught off guard and are better able to deal with dangers in the future.

**With this, we are learning to look ahead realistically and this will make us more resilient.**

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Unternehmerische Resilienz als Teil gesellschaftlicher Resilienz 

ENTREPRENEURIAL RESILIENCE AS A PART OF SOCIETAL RESILIENCE

### What is Human Functionalism?
Asking myself, the same question as most of you probably (or hopefully) do, I came to a surprising conclusion. When I first started to consider the subject, it seemed clear to me that I should focus on the human aspect in the shape of reactions to and attitudes towards devices and their output that apparently help us to be more and more efficient.
The idea of efficiency itself was to be looked at. The pressure caused by technological means and the digital invasion into every wrinkle of ourselves, the overload of stress and emotional reactions like a bad conscience and the fear to fail without the all too useful digital input, support and output.
There were sentences coming up, questions like: Are you seriously afraid of shitstorms? Imagine praising someone, just because you like it? Your battery will soon be empty. Finally, you will have time for yourself. How can we feel that we are lonely if we are unable to be digitally alone? How is freedom possible when everything is coded? What is most important in your life and what would you give up for it?

These questions were actually one reason to invite me to the JCR. They sure catch the discomfort we often feel in our relation towards an omnipresent digital technology. But still they leave the question unanswered: What is Human Functionalism?

One might think, Human Functionalism is about our relationship towards digitally enhanced efficiency, our expectations, our frustrations, our needs and desires. This relation has to be balanced, the human factor has to be respected, the unprecedented inflation of digital technology has to be contained and humans must remain the masters and not become the object of the process. Every individual needs to emancipate her/himself from the well concealed all too useful, all too entertaining temptations of the digital realm. The humane always in mind, only those who ask the right questions, will resist the utilization of our curiosity, vanity, playfulness and ambition for the benefit of a few mega corporations and authoritarian states. Fair enough. But is it really enough? I asked myself. Are questions a proper tool that leads to a conscious handling of the matter? Is a conscious handling even possible?

It seems to be hard to reach if we believe Mr. Nir Eyal who proposes the model of a „time box“ to control our digital habits. Meaning we should plan every minute of our everyday life and dedicate it to a certain purpose like productive work, eating, childcare, sports and so on to avoid by this schedule useless scrolling, surfing, texting and chatting. Sounds a bit like a capitulation to me.
Isn´t it the paradoxical attempt to control the digital tools disguised as efficient by even more efficiency, limiting spontaneity to almost zero? So, where is my surprising conclusion about Human Functionalism? Not far away, I promise.
Let me sum up the tools first. Smart phone, Smart watch, Smart Things in general, Pads, Laptops, Computers, Cars, VCR, Games, Bodychip RFID etc. They are 24/7 omnipresent and knowing everything about us, more than we can remember ourselves. They interact, they learn, they optimize each other with accelerated speed. We know this, but we do not really care – far from switching them off. I call this conglomerate of technology and its in- and output

### THE DIGITAL ENTITY
(as sometimes opposed to human entity).

I see it as a whole, produced by many devices and processes. The DIGITAL ENTITY defines an increasing part of our rational and emotional being. It is not the air we breathe, but we are wrapped in it individually and it arches above us collectively. Now that we are talking about a DIGITAL ENTITY, we can see it everywhere at anytime. We are inside it. Even if we switch off our devices, it is there in the shape of our neighbours´, fellow travelers´, colleagues´, friends´ and loved ones´ devices and media.
The DIGITAL ENTITY is there in the shape of our data and in an almost transcendent shape in our imagination. Only in digital detox it is not there. At least within the detoxified zone, which makes its absence possibly even more significant, underlining its power.
My conclusion, as you may already guess, is that we shouldn’t primarily analyse the human reactions and needs to the Digital Entity, but rather ask ourselves:

### WHAT IS THE CHARACTER OF THE DIGITAL ENTITY.

How do we humans perceive the Digital Entity, what character do we project at it? We adapt a considerable amount of our thinking and behaviour to the conditions set by the DIGITAL ENTITY. And because we are humans, we generalize.

1. Even if there is no specific demand at the moment (given the improbable situation that the DIGITAL ENTITY doesnt produce one) we create a hypothesis about what might be expected of us.

2. Because the DIGITAL ENTITY is omnipresent and powerful, we perceive it as significantly bigger than us. Interacting with it and thanks to habit forming we regress to an inautonmous infantile status. (I have to do this/I won’t do this to be liked, because the greater Entity, the parent wants me to perform that way etc.)

3. Habit forming enforces our regression, easing the DIGITAL ENTITYs access to an uncritical subject.
Preconceived content, menues and multiple choice options limit creativity. The incidental variety of self-determined problem solving is substituted for by commercial predictability, comfortably lulling our articulation.

4. Depending on our needs and desires, the DIGITAL ENTITY can play a multitude of roles for (and against) us. Although we regress, when interacting with it, it is not just in the role of the benevolent parent.It has a more contradictory character.
Parent – Salesperson, Boss – Spy
It is confusing: Admirer – Judge
It is sinister: Friend – Traitor – Seducer

While interacting with it we experience arbitrary shifts of its roles, some of them never openly declared.
We have entered a relationship with the DIGITAL ENTITY that we do not clearly recognize as such, because it is atomized in so many devices and apps. Not recognizing it, we often fail to confidently shape it. But our discomfort is not just caused by stress or an overload of input, neither by an addiction, all this happens but all that can be managed. It is caused by our human need to interact with the Digital Entity as tough it was a fellow human. We anthropomorphize the DIGITAL ENTITY, while it doesn’t stop doing its homework. And while we see the eager pupils pen scratching over the paper with an enervating sound, we will soon be reported to the headmaster. But we prefer to think, his pen scratches, because he is putting us on an invitation list, doing a shopping list for us, writing a poem, giving us an address.
While trusting the DIGITAL ENTITY we know we should distrust it, while we let it provide almost everything, we know about its irresponsibility, while giving away our secrets, we know they might be abused, while feeling flattered, we know, a shitstorm is always at the horizon, while setting our preferences, we suspect they will be ignored, while bonding, we know we are manipulated, while defining ourselves through it, we know we are just numbers for it. Our partner-hypothesis for the DIGITAL ENTITY is ambiguous at least. Charming, flattering, Treacherous, manipulative, insatiably curious, unpredictably talkative, warm and sharing, cold and cunning. Giving us a tender stroke for another mouthful of data or a data stream for another stroke.
The DIGITAL ENTITY is certainly confusing or even abusive.

### THIS IS THE CHARACTER OF THE DIGITAL ENTITY:

Even if its bad features dont come true for many of us, we are aware of them lurking somewhere in the dataset.
Imagine this:

A roommate we trust is doing all our shopping, but instead of food and cleaning agents he only buys candy and booze. Incredibly charming and with lots of candy this someone makes us even approve with his volatility, until he later complains that there is no pizza in the fridge and no toilet paper in the bathroom. We get perplexed. Being hungry the roommate exits to a barbecue with the neighbours where he gossips about our empty fridge, as we come to know later.
Hilariously he returns to grab the booze, we didn’t want, and leaves to heat up the neighbours party to a point that somebody calls the police. The police detect photos of our own kids as well as our banking data which is common knowledge to all of the guests. On top of that they find out that literally everybody knows the pin codes for our kids’ education account, because the person we trust dropped them without even caring. Now translate this scenario to the DIGITAL ENTITY and subtract the police.Then push the repeat button to get a pointed picture of our interaction with the DIGITAL ENTITY going wrong. If the DIGITAL ENTITY was a person, we would well beware of it.
The DIGITAL ENTITY lacks remorse and empathy, shows a shallow affect, fails to accept responsibility. Although it is the provider of almost everything, it is often unaccountable. It doesn’t trust us, that is why it wants our data. We don’t trust the DIGITAL ENTITY, but want to be loved by it – via its contents and functionality which make us and those people important to us objects of its machinations. Friendly support and manipulative rip off, mothering and paternal sanctions, even ostracism.
From coupling to friendship to romance, apparently the whole spectre of emotional and rational demands is covered. But almost never the DIGITAL ENTITY fulfills related expectation for sincerity, loyalty and altruism. When interacting with it we seem to forget that the DIGITAL ENTITY is just so nice because it takes a tiny bit from us with every single interaction until it has taken a chunk big enough to invert our self concept.
For this purpose the DIGITAL ENTITY – being multichanneled and inventive – takes on contradictory roles, using our analogue emotions to approach us digitally.

Instead of sanctioning the arbitrary role switch we continue our splendid regression, cultivate the infantile cosiness with our devices and lament about it without any consequences. What is going on? Are we hostages? Are we stupids? Are we remotely controlled? Certainly, a bit of all of that.
But I think the explanation is more specific. We are simply acting as humans do, when they regress and perceive themselves dependent on a larger, more powerful but abusive entity/character. We act like infants, because our adult judgement is outsmarted. We get a bad conscience for not fulfilling the entities expectations or just being told, we don’t.
We feel guilty of what is actually the deed of the abuser. We blame ourselves as the cause for our confusion. We doubt our own reality and prefer the one projected by the larger entity. To sharpen my point, let me draw an interesting parallel: Confusion, self-blame, guilt, doubt of one’s own reality:
In our regressed state we sometimes feel a variety of feelings typical of the infant of an abusive or even psychopathic parent. A dependent who is unable to process its parents contradictory and volatile behaviour, a behaviour swaying between charme, disrespect and abuse. And even if this is not the case, we almost certainly feel the slight discomfort that humans feel when they are almost sure about something being wrong.

Hardly anybody wants to abandon the DIGITAL ENTITY, because we value its perceived efficiency and downplay its collateral effects. This dissonant situation will be constant, until the DIGITAL ENTITY will have been modified to invisible perfection or perfect invisibility. Or until we draw the necessary conclusions. So, what can we do?
What can we do, if we continue to let the DIGITAL ENTITY access our lives?
The answer is as clear as it is simple:

**AUTHORIZE.**
Remember you are an adult, an autonomous being.

**ANALYZE.**
Try to realize each of the many roles the DIGITAL ENTITY is playing for you in any given situation.

**LIMIT.**
Decide where you limit or even cancel the roles of the DE and do not allow the DIGITAL ENTITY to go beyond this point.

**RELAX.**
Don’t let yourself be pressed by efficiency promises.

**In short:**
Use the strengths of your human skills to control the DIGITAL ENTITY which outsmarts you by only pretending to be human.
Sorry for any demonizing or personalizing of the DIGITAL ENTITY in this lecture. Of course, it is just a variety of devices with loads of utterly useful in- and output.

Thank you for listening.



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Human functionalism or the digital civilization and its discontents

## Does Planetary Intelligence exist and if so, what would it advise us to do?

**An approach.**

For all to experience, we are living in a time of upheaval.
Planetary-ecological, social, technological and of course economic. 

However, the economic upheaval is not so self-evident. The old yardstick of GDP still applies, consumer ideology is unbroken and social development is still largely equated with economic development.
Entrepreneurs, and increasingly women entrepreneurs, are the heroes of the present. Yet most of them give growth-driven answers, and this at a time when the interests of the planet and its non-human inhabitants would first demand resource conservation and consumption reduction. All too often we hear old answers to new questions. Failed solution strategies are continued in modified, greenwashed form.
Let's just take this example: a man who wants to throw millions of new cars onto the planet, legitimized by the bogus innovation of the electric motor. In everything he pursues old maximization thinking: gigalefficiency, gigafactories, giga-share price, space conquest, Mars romanticism.

One is strongly reminded of boyish dreams from the 1950s of the last century, when progress was the order of the day. Individual mobility is being pushed forward in an electric guise instead of asking fundamental questions about mobility. Shouldn't we rather limit ourselves in this point, shouldn't we rather facilitate group mobility on existing infrastructure? Shouldn't we rather not set up more infrastructure with vacuum tubes for people in capsules?
Another entrepreneurial hero runs the world's largest commercial enterprise, driving its littering. A third worships the first - the car hero - so much that he imitates him in everything and does not recognizably deviate from the maximization paradigm. A fourth wants to abolish reality altogether and let us do everything in his metaverse as playmobil-like avatars. Server energy consumption of a medium-sized state included.
So what? It can be done, so it will be done.

Granted, this is a snapshot, and a very striking one at that. But it does make us wonder about the planetary intelligence of our species: Planetary intelligence, what is that anyway? For us, it is not, first of all, a classical analytical ability, which has brought us to where we are, namely to the brink of the collapse of the life-support systems on Earth.
 Planetary intelligence is rather a sum of characteristics and behaviors, which makes an ant, which maintains its habitat, appear planetary smarter than us, or a blue whale, which fertilizes the plankton and thus the food of its energy source krill with its excretions.

In such a mode of observation, where does the urban pigeon stand and where the domestic dog? 
 By which criteria do we measure planetary intelligence?
 What can we humans take over from planetary intelligent species, what not?

One seems in any case completely clear, from us they can learn nothing. Even the domestic animals will scratch themselves soon thoughtfully the head, if we move further as before on the maximum planet desolation path ahead. Because then their fodder becomes scarce. But we should ask ourselves whether mankind can still afford a billion-dollar industry that revolves solely around the nutrition and well-being of domesticated animals. Or another, much larger one that tortures and kills farm animals, creating one of the largest ecological footprints.

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Planetary Intelligence: Part 1 of 3

The [World Uncertainty Index](https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2020/03/imf-launches-world-uncertainty-index-wui-furceri.htm), created by Stanford employees, shows a steep increase since well before Corona. The financial crisis of 2008 already pushed it into an initially abrupt and then continuous upward trend. Since that crisis, companies and societies should have specifically improved resilience, but have only done so in a few sectors, such as a careful reduction of global supply chains.

In many areas, such as healthcare, they not only refrained but actively weakened resilience. More by accident, digitization proved to promote resilience in the Corona crisis (home office, deliveries, among others). However, digitization was and still is driven by an old-fashioned pursuit of efficiency. Digital solutions are anything but resilient to other forms of crisis, such as energy outages or the constant threat of hackers.

We are therefore at a point where we do not only need to build new resilience quickly, but we also have to catch up on what has long been neglected. This double challenge requires systematic and thought-out action.

We have summarized in the four-step process RAMP, how this might look like for companies and institutions. This abbreviation stands for: Resilient, Anticipative, Monetary, Planetary, and it means:

### Leading companies and institutions RESILIENTLY.

Set up your **death scenarios** and fully run them through in small teams. Identify your cluster risks, create fallback structures. Establish a plan for how you will realize the first three death scenarios yourself, for example, by eliminating at risk areas that cannot be protected. Be prepared for the exception. Spend money on these measures without short-term expectations of revenue. Accept that the usual criteria for efficiency do not apply here.

Only strong investments in passenger protection could save the aviation industry from a permanent crisis. In fact, however, it is already becoming apparent that with the goal of filling all the seats, efficiency will take precedence over effective protection.

Trade show companies that do not create virtual offerings will hardly be able to fill halls. Whether going online, e.g. via Meetyoo, will save the event industry seems questionable. Will establishing of servers preserve co-working business models like WeWork? Probably not. Even the urban hotel industry already rents out hotel rooms by the day as workspaces.

### Align brands ANTICIPATIVELY with customers.

What changes are taking place in the customer's life, what will a good customer relationship look like tomorrow? What solution that is still to be found could excite the customer in the future? Check your customer relations in these regards. Make these relations resilient across multiple levels through fairness and generosity. Invest in the relationship and do not monetize it out of reflex. Do not abuse the relationship for marketing purposes. Avoid manipulations such as excessive habit forming, self-renewing trial contracts, or discounted new contracts. Develop new, credible ideas for rewarding continuity and customer loyalty.

Medical practices, for example, are investing in online consultations without much prospect of short-term refinancing. The need for this existed before Corona, the reason however did not. KinderarztNow demonstrates how to arrange online consultations and download prescriptions. Right now, the Faroe Islands offer virtual tours by horseback, kayak or as a hike. For this, locals not only carry 360° cameras with them, but also spontaneously answer questions from online travelers about particular sights.



### Creating MONETARY added value through innovations.

Mutual revenue means not focusing unilaterally on revenue growth, but wholeheartedly serving customers with product and service innovations. Even with innovations that so far have been rejected internally or socially. Realize some of them. Train structural readiness for change and install a continuous innovation management.

Overcome possible aversion to drones and robots and test their applications, try co-operations. There are more possibilities than merely ministering services in drive-in theaters. If ticket expert Eventim can work with auditor PwC and others to develop an alternative Corona app, then you can also equip your ATMs with an iris scanner, offer your manufacturing workers goggles with distance indicators, or add disinfecting protective sleeves to your beverage cans.
Ingenuity helps. Don't just produce gin, produce sanitizers. 3D-printed door openers or Knick'n'clean’s ultraviolet hygiene stick would have been customer-friendly innovations already, even before the crisis.

### Business models should enable repeatability through PLANETARY compatibility.

Define basic key resources, competences, technologies or raw materials. Run through scenarios where one or more are omitted and take action to replace them sustainably. Determine ecological costs and ways to reduce them. Use crises as catalysts to reduce ecological costs. From this perspective, think about situational go-to-market scenarios.

Maybe you were already questioning your dependence on suppliers from China before the crisis. Now you can restructure, expand your in-house video chat capabilities and avoid harmful air travel while doing so. Test the use of plastic film made from fish scales by Marina Tex or develop new packaging from your waste yourself, like Feel the Peel. Create an environmentally sound alternative for every key resource.

In the continuously increasing uncertainty incident, the Corona crisis is an extreme. With RAMP we want to help to understand the conditions of the identifiable changes within the World Uncertainty Index and counter them. Because we cannot afford to repeat the failures of the last twelve years since the financial crisis a second time. This is the only way we will shape society and the markets tomorrow and not just manage past struggles.


**You want to know how resilient your company is?**
 **Take the free RAMP test.**
### [RAMP Test](https://kup.id/ramp/test)

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Der Welt - Unsicherheitsindex und die vier Stufen der Resilienz

The World Uncertainty Index and the four stages to resilience

# Does planetary intelligence exist?

###### In the first part of this essay, we talked about the striking similarity between human addictive behaviour and the growth addiction of modern societies and whether it could be treated analogously to a substance addiction. This now is a theoretical attempt to break free from the addictive spiral by daring to be more planetary intelligent.

Addiction usually has two drivers. One is qualitative: New, different states of intoxication are always sought. The other driver is quantitative: more and more is demanded from the addictive substance.
In the case of modern consumerist societies, this applies to both the production side and the consumption side.

The beginning of every addiction therapy lies in the insight into the addiction and its harmfulness. The growth addiction of our economic system presents a heterogeneous picture here.
Due to direct disadvantage experiences of the climate crisis and closely timed economic crises, the view of our economic system is indeed becoming more critical.
However, it is still not entire societies that are questioning their addiction to growth, but at best parts of individual societies, while others are even increasing their addictive behaviour.
In addition, we are also dealing psychologically with an asynchrony.
The insight - yes, we have to renounce - that is shown at the moment of the theoretical discussion of the topic breaks down at the moment of the concrete, often non-public admission of consumption or growth.*

Thus, there is a double hurdle to overcome: the Janus-faced dependency and that of hidden addictive tactics.

**Expectation of scalability as the driving force of addiction.**

On the production side, our economic system is addicted to ever new, in many cases expendable, products. Innovation in high technology may often make sense. In the area of mass production, it usually is not. As a rule, it leads to ever new masses of superfluous products. The textile and food industries are only the most obvious negative examples. An outstanding one is the international beverage industry, which abolished the functioning glass bottle deposit system to increase profits and has since been destroying the earth with 440 billion plastic bottles every year. Bottles that contain mostly products that are harmful to health.
 We have also fallen intellectually into a scalability trap. Only products and services that could be marketed in large numbers are thought of and developed at all. The seemingly indispensable product masses for mass consumption are the destructive factor of our mode of production. Along the way, this scalability addiction is suffocating small-scale production approaches that could cure us of the addiction and that are often gentler in regional cycles.
Non-profit concepts such as tapping and gently using latent commons are ignored. Our greatest commons, the oceans, for example, are being ruined before our eyes by nationalistic and literally predatory capitalist greed.

As we know from addicted individuals in acquisitive crime, addicted industrial societies will stop at nothing to destroy long-term relationships with the planet's resources in order to drive their short-term production and consumption frenzies to new heights. A current example is the uncritical revival of liquefied natural gas extracted by extremely polluting fracking. Another is the notorious destruction of rainforests for livestock feed crops or pseudo-ecological fuels.
This is not new. But it is interesting to look at the connection from the perspective of addiction maintenance. If we shut down one source of addictive substances, e.g. Russian natural gas, another one will be developed immediately, as well as Central American resources will be developed rapidly after the Colombian cocaine cartels have been curbed. And vice versa.

The idea of renunciation is not thought, the addictive substance must be extracted, because there is the insatiable addiction. In the case of modern societies, we call this energy security, for example; it is now to be temporarily secured by a change of the addictive substance producers, then by addictive substance substitution therapy (so-called alternative energies), which in turn are only made possible with considerable amounts of material polluting the environment.
 The liberation from dependence, the end of addiction, seems a long way off. The fact that with solar energy we are also becoming dependent on China is similar to the relationship between a drug user and his criminal supplier.
The situation is similar with wind power and battery technology. The solution is obvious. Exit the addictive cycle by gradually weaning ourselves off consumerism and the associated energy addiction.


 **Politics are too slow. Industry must lead the way**

Since government guidelines are often marked by time-consuming compromises, industry must lead the way here in view of the planetary emergency and at the same time set impulses for action that are taken and reinforced by government and societal actors.
 Is it illusory to demand that producers produce less and do so in cycles? That oversized status products be abolished, and the lifespan of everyday products be significantly extended?
 Perhaps. But maybe not, if the alternative is to be unable to produce anything at all because the planetary foundations no longer exist. Product categories from necessary to dispensable to harmful would have to be introduced. What is necessary would be provided with a high product life span and reparability as well as recyclability. The harmful category would be reduced to zero through pricing policy. In the middle remains the segment dispensable or "nice to have", whose strategic weight would presumably fluctuate with the ecological and economic framework conditions but would also have to be reduced in the long term.
All this sounds utopian and planned at the same time. One could think the old spectre of unfreedom and dysfunctionality on the horizon.

Here are three questions.

 **First question:**

If the preservation of our planetary livelihoods is at stake, might this perhaps be the only way out of the vicious circle of production and consumption addiction, because an unguided continuation of market dynamics cannot lead to a rapid reduction of product masses?
 This is because the expectation of scalability ensures that product masses are maintained.
 They are modified in the sense of trendy sustainability, often nothing more than greenwashing. But the product masses will increase exponentially in view of the catch-up movements in the living standards of the global South.
 Even if they were produced in a noticeably more sustainable way, the rapidly growing quantity would be fatal for the planet.
 To enable the consumption level of the so-called western industrial societies, which produce a footprint of their citizens up to 32 times larger than so-called underdeveloped societies, to reach this level for the soon 9.5 billion inhabitants of the earth, we would need the planetary resources of 80 earths (J. Diamond/Crisis). We would use up all planetary resources at the latest on the fifth day of the year. Anyone who still relies on "business as usual" here is frankly not quite sane. Also, all sustainability efforts are here only drops in the ocean.

Meaning: Extraction & devastation, the principle of taking, the principle of growth-addicted economy (not just with raw materials, but also towards humans and animals) are outdated.
Aggressively holding on to it is cutting off the water for yourself and mankind. Even so-called clean energy is only an alibi here: "Clean energy may be a help when it comes to emissions; but it has no use in reversing deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion, and mass extinctions. A growth-obsessed economy, even if powered by clean energy, will still plunge us into ecological disaster" (J. Hickel/The Tyranny of Growthism.).


 **Second question:**

Isn't it the democracies duty to determine what level of renunciation is reasonable, through science-based understanding of people and fair questioning of citizens, since dictatorships and autocracies would only order renunciation arbitrarily, if at all?
Answer: YES. The second question is immediately followed by another:


 **Third question:**

What does man actually need for a good life?
Before we turn to this question in detail, let me give you a more pointed answer: for a good life, man does not need excessive consumption. In the course of the last 150 years, so-called Western man has been trained to do so by an industrial society caught up in expectations of scalability. Thus, addiction to consumption and production became the norm.
 But we now know that the contribution of material well-being to a good life, embodied in GDP, rises only to a certain, relatively low point. After that, it's about factors like easy access to social goods, community and health-promoting, low levels of continuous stress, humane development opportunities. This has been known for a long time:
"GDP neither measures our intellect nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our education, neither our compassion nor our love for our country. [...] In short, it measures everything except what makes life worth living." (Robert Kennedy)

But the realization is far from being taken to heart. Quite the opposite. The warning issued early on by its inventor, Kuznet, not to make material GDP the measure of our social development under any circumstances, has been systematically ignored and thwarted under the primacy of economics, and has propelled us directly into the consumerist addiction from which we find it difficult to extricate ourselves today.
 The GPI/Genuine Progress Indicator attempts to correct this aberration. It sets income inequality and social and environmental costs against personal consumption expenditures. Since the mid-1970s, it has flattened against rising GDP and then actually reduced. The GPI evokes the desirable condition of a society not yet completely dominated by addictive behavior. Thus it is closer to what we should understand by a good life. If it is favourable, the addicted society has fewer addictive substances in its blood.

If we orient ourselves to it, the negative consequences of excessive material growth, such as inequality, planetary ruin and health problems, will foreseeably be reduced. This could be another way out of the addiction spiral, in addition to the change on the production side (see above). Ideas like the One Health Concept also contribute by thinking about the health of humans, animals and the planet equally. If such approaches are taken seriously, they can help to curb the prevailing naive entrepreneurial actionism that keeps adding new addictive substances to the consumerist addiction cycle and is celebrated for it in the media.

From the right perspective and compared to the extensive loss of our planetary foundations, production and consumption renunciation is a small step. For it would correct something man-made by human action. But human action would be powerless in the face of planetary ruin once it had occurred.

 **There are ways of therapy and they must be taken immediately**

There are promising tools for addiction therapy. The Genuine Progress Indicator can be used to determine the extent of addiction, lowering our scalability expectations can correct addictive attitudes, and the One Health Concept can be used to address prevention and follow-up treatment. Many other approaches should be able to contribute as well.
 However, the all-important factor is time. Therefore, the benchmark for addiction treatment will be whether we can get the most influential players in the industry to see the destructive addiction spiral and correct it quickly. For while government actors are reluctantly transforming themselves into advocates for the planet, swift action by industry well beyond sustainability considerations to a strategic renunciation of potential monetary value creation is the prerequisite to seizing the temporary opportunity for transformation.

The renunciation of an aspired or already achieved level of prosperity is not considered seriously anywhere today. The leading media and politicians continue to celebrate growth rates and new triumphs of the partly green-washed mass producers. Knowingly doing the wrong thing is human and such an old behaviour pattern that even the Greeks coined the term "akrasia" for it.
 Even the UN's environmental organization is already warning of the collapse of planetary systems, but it still seems illusory that Coca Cola will return to the deposit bottle system, or that any of the major car companies will voluntarily reduce their production capacities. Legitimized by e-car production, they are more likely to be increased. Bogus sustainability even functions as a qualitative addiction driver. Catch-up effects of dynamic economies potentiate planetary devastation, wantonly instigated wars generate civilization damage and further environmental destruction in addition to human casualties.


 - Will we be too slow to forestall collapse through wise abandonment?
 - Do we even have the minimal prerequisites for a strategic renunciation of our habitual addictive substances and behavior patterns?
 - Are industry and society intellectually agile enough?


 **The 3rd revolution: Rights of nature and on nature become law**

The answer to these questions remains open. In order for it to be promising, we need an ecological constitution with mutual - i.e. also subjective for every citizen enforceable - and not just unilateral rights to an intact planet.
 Property will also be ecologically binding then. In rapid steps, ecology conforming to the market will become a market conforming to ecology. Rights of nature and individual ecosystems will be incorporated into the Basic Law - as it already was in Ecuador in 2008.
 The author Kersten calls this the 3rd revolution in his plea for an ecological basic law. In it, we will have to prove that we are intelligent enough to prevent our own extinction. Which also outlines the most important requirement for a planetary intelligence.
 

 **In the third part of the essay we will try to draw conclusions for a delimitation of planetary intelligence against our present behavior.**

 
 
 
 

* Internet consumtion/internal growth rates in companies

Photography © L.v.Wangger

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Planetare Intelligenz: Teil 2 von 3

Planetary Intelligence: Part 2 of 3

**Planetary intelligence through planetary rights.**

After exposing the addictive nature of the current economic model in the second part of the essay on Planetary Intelligence, in this third and final part we will explore the question of what prevents growth-obsessed humanity from acting in a planetarily intelligent manner, and what it might look like to seek a way out of the dilemma.

Addiction is always a narrowing of perception. For those, like most countries on Earth, who have become dependent on economic growth, it's becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a world without continually increasing production and financial returns. The protracted change not only causes us to lurch from one economic crisis to the next like a fly continually hitting the windowpane, our limited perception also results in a stunted imagination. In our mind's eye, a world ravaged by the consequences of climate change and species loss doesn't take on a clear form, making it challenging for us to boldly depart from the old model. And the concept of a planetary intelligence following the era of destructive profit maximization remains vague as well. Or as the author Amithav Gosh says: We are in a crisis of imagination. Humanity can no longer imagine the improbable and is thus incapable of creating it. Whoever tries, crashes against the glass cage of ignorance and greed.

**We are also in a crisis of imagination.**

Let's take one of the clearest positive examples. Ecuador renounces the exploitation of its oil reserves in the Yasuni National Park in order to preserve an 8,000 square kilometer habitat that comprises more animal species than all of Europe and more plant species than North America. In return, developed countries in the northern hemisphere agree to pay the country compensation equivalent to half of the unrealized proceeds from the sale of the oil reserves. A plebiscite in the unstable and poor country even confirmed in 2023 that the majority of the population is in favor of leaving the oil in the ground.
The matching fund would be $3.6 billion; $336 million has been pledged, but only $3.6 million has been paid in. One thousandth of the money needed. Greed and avarice ally with insatiable energy addiction. Apparently, it's easier to imagine a pile of money than a pile of dead animals and plants. 
The example of Ecuador shows an act of resistance against the business as usual of destructive extraction. Unfortunately, it’s a failed one. Is there an example of similar government action in the wealthy countries of the Northern Hemisphere? No. The wealthy countries are too afraid for their prosperity. In plain language, this means: They are too cowardly. And in concrete terms, this means that politicians are afraid of losing votes by imposing unpopular restrictions and making sacrifices. The heat pump debate in Germany confirms that this fear is well-founded.
If it can't be done that way, then what might effective resistance to continued extraction and species destruction look like? Or do we not need to resist at all, but adapt to the new planetary reality while continuing – albeit couched in terms of circularity – the old profit motive: behind higher dikes, with wind farms stretching to the horizon, in smaller apartments, with bicycles, e-car sharing and floating houses? 

Do we just need an improved tolerance for ambiguity? Less and less of the old and more and more of the new, bravely enduring change until the balance is right at some point? The problem is the someday. Again, as I did at the beginning of this series of essays, I return to the necessary pace. The illusion of a gradual transition is already being torpedoed by a frightening accumulation of impacts from the climate-ravaged world: previously unseen forest fires, floods, glacier melt, landslides, storms, droughts.

**Amidst the dissolution, we still believe that everything will turn out fine.**

We still embed all of this in our perceptions, determined by control thinking. We cannot even imagine that our familiar world is dissolving, even when we are in the midst of that dissolution, when the ground is literally burning from beneath us.
Vacationers travel to burning regions, expect to be evacuated, return to still smoldering burned areas, and spread out their towel. Is this just lack of imagination, or destructive ignorance? What is clear here is the addictive behavior and expectations of return - what one has paid for, one wants to claim. What we do not recognize, however, is a change in attitude or even behavior. As the above example shows, people simply can't imagine to not go on holidays or giving up some of what they've already paid for in favor of drought-stricken areas that are at the tipping point. 

So: we are in a crisis of imagination. Changes in attitude and behavior also seem difficult to imagine when one has a right to what is contractually assured. Is this perhaps, even on a small scale, the model from which the developed world suffers on a large scale? Does the notion of contractually assured satisfaction of this addiction not also imply the sense of having been cheated if that contract is not fulfilled? In any case, depending on the political hue, this feeling is served and exploited with popular consensus. 

**The planet doesn't know of contracts, yet we must commit ourselves to it through agreements.**

That said, it is not man, but the planet that is cheated out of its fair share. The planet, however, does not care. It does not know any contracts. But since our thinking and acting increasingly works on the basis of contracts and protocols (i.e. our protocol-controlled Internet), we should best also think about a contract with the planet, in which it is considered as a partner permanently and equally, if not even privileged. A contract that binds only humans, to prevent us from exploiting the planet gratuitously, as we have done since our species existed. 
Out of consideration for our limited imagination, we initially stick to a material contractual basis. Even though money quickly loses its significance when we lose the intact planet, it remains the most critical driver of change for now.

What are nature's services worth in trivial dollars? Paul Hawken and other scientists such as Vester and Costanza put the value of the natural capital stock at $400 to $500 trillion. Each year nature provides $33 trillion in benefits to human society in the form of fruits that grow, water that is purified in rivers, CO2 reduction in plants and oceans, aquatic and terrestrial fauna, and much more.
Already about one third of this natural capital has been destroyed by humans. Species have been wiped out, rainforests cleared, farmland destroyed and the air polluted. 
But still, according to this model, each person would be entitled to $70,000 per year of natural capital at the current population of the Earth. This makes it clear how much planetary capital is still available. However, humanity is using it recklessly and without creating sustainable prosperity. If all humans would live with the lifestyle and prosperity of the average U.S. citizen, we would need 12 earths according to Hawkens calculation, and there are other higher estimates.

**Each person is entitled to the annual equivalent of $70,000 in planetary value added.**

In a planetary, rather than capitalist, scenario, each individual could leave the equivalent of $70,000 to the planet each year by foregoing or preventing the use of planetary services. So we need moratoria that flexibly stop the consumption of planetary services. And we need laws that establish both the right to one's share and the right to renounce planetary services, which would then no longer be determined directly and often arbitrarily by corporations, institutions and states, but by the planet's inhabitants, who could also join together to form moratorium communities. In this way, even a few residents of a biotope could enforce its preservation, e.g. by opposing the deforestation rage of a timber company with their shares. 
On the other hand, large companies would have to convince citizens and employees to sell them their planetary shares. For this, they would have to present very good and planetarily resilient arguments. They would thus be forced to think through their interventions thoroughly and to check them for harmfulness. And the individuals would no longer be largely powerless against them as planetary co-owners. The addiction cycle could be broken simply by no longer producing products that are not planetary in focus. This would no longer be decided by detached boards of elitist directors, but by the new and actual planetary owners. In order to prevent any fixation on possession, we should of course rather see them as administrators.
Yes, this model is radical, and it raises some legal issues, but without radical change we will not overcome the primacy of economics in sufficient time. In the transition phase, we need to adopt a great tolerance for ambiguity, because planetarism and capitalism are each very stubborn concepts in their own way. Transitioning one into the other will be a mammoth task. We will also have to overcome the old feasibility mania and soberly put many entrepreneurial actions that are still celebrated today, including many anti-planetary startup ideas, to the test. Thoughtful action, even inaction, and economic withdrawal from defined areas will become equally valid options.
We will have to learn to leave many things just as they are, because it is good for the planet, and to flip others from head to toe, even though it upsets us. Only when we have understood this will we be intelligent enough to prevent our own demise.


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Planetary Intelligence: Part 3 of 3

## DIGG vs. EGG

If we are facing a planetary collapse today, this is also due to the usual behavioural patterns in economic life that we do not immediately associate with it. Instead, we cling to them and try to master the planetary challenges with their help, which cannot succeed. We are therefore caught in a paradox.

The cult of leadership, competitive and dominance thinking, scaling mania and much more have made the planetary destruction we are experiencing today possible in the first place. The old patterns are causing us to stumble back into the traps of limited corporate and national interests. Regardless of the planetary discourse, these bad habits continue to be celebrated in the media. It is believed that without them, we cannot achieve change or the transformation that everyone is talking about.

I have already addressed some aspects of this paradox in articles on human functionalism and planetary intelligence. However, hardly anything has changed in terms of harmful behaviour and ways of thinking in recent years. They are deeply rooted in us and we build cults around them, whereas we could have known long ago that they don't work.

I deliberately call the now increasingly dysfunctional patterns of thought and action ‘cults’ here to emphasise their irrational character. By way of illustration, let us imagine a typical aggressive pattern such as that of raw material extraction, which is currently being extended to the deep sea and the Arctic, including Greenland. Highly fragile ecosystems are being targeted as if the destruction of the rainforests, such as the imminent degradation of the Congo Basin or Amazonia into a semi-arid scrubland, had never happened. Not to mention the destruction of the North American and - much earlier - the European primeval forests.

Yes, there are conservation efforts. But there are also major players who believe it is in their legitimate national or commercial interest to disregard them. The fact that there can no longer be national protection without planetary protection is deliberately ignored. This also applies on a smaller scale to urban sprawl, pollution or the destruction of non-human life.

Many continuing undesirable developments have to do with the cult of misbehaviour. Before we look at some of the behaviour and ways of thinking, the question arises as to what a ‘cult’ actually is.

This attribute, which can be found in the word ‘cult film’, for example, actually seems to express recognition - but in fact too much of it. In today's linguistic usage, cult means the exaggerated veneration of someone or something.

There are quite a few of these exaggeratedly revered things, ways of thinking and behaviour in business.

In addition to the cult of growth, the cult of leadership immediately stands out. The prevailing view is that only people who are managed and thus led, i.e. conditionally responsible, can act efficiently at all. And that brings us to the third in the group, the cult of efficiency.

All three are due to an archaic mindset of accumulation and dominance that is deeply rooted in all of us and still determines economic behaviour today. And which I would like to describe using the short form DIG as dominance (suppression of balanced models), ignorance (towards the planet and its population) and greed (archaic addiction to accumulation).
So, ah, like Faust, two souls live in our chest.
It makes sense that the word Faust has a double meaning: in German it stands for rage and rebellion, untamed power and violence. Derived from Latin - (from faustus = happy) - Faust, on the other hand, means the happy one. The name of this tragic hero, who often tries to achieve his happiness through violence, thus refers to the deep inner turmoil of his character.
In order to at least find a balance between DIG and EGG (knowledge, generosity, serenity) and to achieve an EGG world in the long term, we need to recognise and change underlying behaviour and ways of thinking. That's why we take a closer look at some of them here and show new approaches:



**1. The groth and prosperity cult**

So far, he has justified all economic dynamism with two main arguments. Firstly, without growth, capitalism is at an end. And secondly, this economic growth naturally serves to maintain and increase prosperity. Both are questionable from a purely economic point of view. But if we also look at ecological growth and the well-being of nature, this cult is predominantly harmful. All economic activity, even sustainable economic activity, reduces the prosperity of nature. In addition, it generally only increases the prosperity of privileged social subgroups.

**EGG approach:** Prioritisation of natural prosperity, conservation ethics instead of work ethics.





**2. the cult of leadership and decision-making**

Quick decisions are considered the non-plus-ultra in business and society, the pace of change - according to the cult of leadership - must be ever faster through efficient management. Unclear, pending situations are not tolerated. Action is more important than reflection. This shows that the economic logic follows old military principles of attack, conquest and dominance. Modern management methods may disguise this, but structurally, economic activity is still based on the principle of battle. The own-your-project cult is also based on this principle.

 However, appropriating something is not a planetary concept. The planet lives thanks to coexistence, balance, floating states, slow adaptation and long arcs of development. (Where the cult of leadership is taking us is also shown by the authoritarian transformation of democracies, whose balance-orientated nature is currently being destroyed).

**EGG approach:** Allow coexistence, floating states and long development arcs to have equal priority. Vague and floating states are often more planet-friendly than the hands-on behaviour of the decision-maker. Learn ambiguity tolerance and, if necessary, servant leadership.

**3. the cult of the entrepreneur**

It goes so far as to claim that the world would be a better place if everyone acted entrepreneurially. This may seem appealing at first glance, but from the point of view of entrepreneurial ideology, everyone would actively tackle individual problems and thus generate income. There are two fallacies here. Firstly, 70-80% of all business attempts, which we now euphemistically call start-ups, fail. In other words, they mainly cause resource consumption and other planetary costs that have no impact anywhere except in real nature itself, even if they pursue sustainable goals. On the other hand, entrepreneurs are the actors with one of the largest ecological footprints of all. This is due to the cult of scaling. Every economically interesting idea, however questionable it may be for the planet, is scaled to the extreme because this is the only way to justify investment.

**EGG approach:** Categorising entrepreneurial activity in a planetary context can also mean doing less. Those who take action generally create a much larger footprint than others who take a more reflective approach to their environment and the world. Prioritising companies and initiatives with human and planetary objectives.




**4. the cult of scale**

The large number of units, the unicorn worth billions, billions of customers and thousands, yes, millions of employees - they determine the economic reality. In doing so, they deform the planet. When economic activity strives towards a gigantomaniacal end goal, it is not only surprising local, regional and ideosyncratic solutions that fall short. Limited planetary services such as water, soil, atmosphere and biodiversity are also burnt up for often questionable objectives on the largest scale. The cult of scaling also applies to jobs and thus determines our policies. The more jobs a measure creates, the more justified it appears and the more votes it promises (even democracy is based on a cult of scaling).
Instead of thinking in terms of jobs, we now have to think in terms of places to live that are not tied to gainful employment and take ecological costs into equal account.

**EGG approach:** Overcome the greed for large numbers. Think surprising local, regional and ideosyncratic solutions, places to live instead of jobs.




**5. the cult of digital**

Reinforced by the cult of AI, the digital cult suggests that computers will solve our problems and ultimately even save us. As a result, many societies are investing more resources in the development of machine intelligence than in human intelligence. Education for independent thinking is being pushed back in favour of training in the use of computers. Social participation without computers will soon be, and in many areas already is, no longer possible. Promises of salvation and optimisation mask increasing manipulation and data skimming down to the smallest social niches. Aggressive demarcation and alienation jeopardise democracy and peace. Individuals still don't understand that what feels great digitally can be destructive in real life. Our analogue brain is overwhelmed. The cult of digital is the twin of the cult of efficiency, which is what makes it so difficult to relativise. After all, it naturally generates economic added value and can be turned into money, right down to individualised cancer therapy or autonomous seed technology. At the same time, however, it undermines the quality and basis of life through authoritarian troll armies, hybrid warfare and disenchanting social media. The question of whether we adapt to the computers or they adapt to us seems to have been decided in favour of the computers.

**EGG approach:** Create many more digital-free areas of life, consciously maintain analogue solutions and, above all, provide massive training for independent, critical thinking that is not digitally framed from the outset, and thus counteract regression.




**6. the cult of efficiency** is double-edged. Of course, it is good if goals are achieved with as little effort as possible. The cult of efficiency also plays a major role in sustainability, especially as a cult of thriftiness. However, this is where the stumbling block lies, both economically and ecologically. Because planetary change will not be realised with frugality. On the contrary, it is to be expected that the necessary measures will soon force us to violate all economic principles. We will initially have to invest huge sums over a long period of time to contain the damage that has already been done, to implement adaptation measures such as resettlement, flood defences and the closure of destructive industries, and to reorganise our economies. Saving the planet and its inhabitants can be quantified in economic terms, but its value naturally goes far beyond any economic measure.

Those who do not understand this, who do not mobilise all means for the purpose of planetary protection without focusing on quick economic benefits, will not manage the change. This also shows that the fixation on economic efficiency can become one of the major obstacles to the development of planetary intelligence.
Paradoxically, the second obstacle is the inherent human fear of inactivity. Because there are many things we will simply have to leave alone. We will also regenerate biodiversity and the climate through moratoria, make our societies more resilient through strategic and sovereign renunciation and, last but not least, make privileged classes take planetary responsibility through material sacrifices. (Economic) efficiency is a means that must be reconsidered, placed in a flexible framework and even ignored at times in order for planetary regeneration to work. Especially since even at the highest speed, the results of the efforts cannot be seen immediately.


**EGG vs. DIG**

We are caught up in the hectic, aggressive routines of our - economic - world. The working term **DIG** is intended to remind us to counteract all dominant, ignorant and greedy impulses that we notice in ourselves and others and thus make space for **EGG** realisation, generosity and serenity. In other words, space for the unfolding of Planetary Intelligence and thus the preservation of our world.

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Economic cults vs. planetary intelligence 

Without using marketing descriptors such as Generation Z or Y, the aim here is to reflect on the Young Generation between the ages of 14 and 20. 

When we talk about the condition of this Young Generation, we must bring two aspects to the fore: 

**Society is in a transitional phase from a long-standing fixation on increasing production to a reluctant prioritization of the habitability conditions of the planet.**
 Many of the younger people already understand this, and hopefully, many of the older people do too. But the social and economic reality is still focused on increasing production - now in the guise of sustainability. 

**So, the wrong thing keeps happening, while the right thing is already obvious.** 

As if that were not enough, a lot of lip service is paid to social change by social elites, while at the same time, assets accumulate more and more in the hands of the upper decile. A minority that emerges even richer from severe social crises. The life chances of the younger generation are narrowing more and more due to this unequal distribution. Regardless of whether one considers ecological or economic prospects. 

This brings us to the second point: **The young generation has already greatly lowered its expectations of the older, responsible generations, both materially and morally, as well as ecologically.** 



Just to remind you, the ruling generations are largely responsible for today's problem status through their maximalist greed. The battle cry of the 80s "Greed is good" exemplifies this, as does the 50-year-old knowledge of Exxon and other fossil corporations of the destructive climate consequences of their exploratory bonanza. 
The emergence of dangerous clown politicians, the ranking of societies under the profitability dictate, lobbying of the wealthy for their privileges up to the democracy- 
abolition etc. All this is well known. The necessary changes are also. But they take place only in homeopathic doses, or not at all.

So, the young generation is confronted with appeasement and empty promises - from corporations, managers, the church, teachers. And the parents. The politicians? They acted, as the saying goes, flexibly.
 The misbehavior of the supposed role models continues. They are not role models. They speak - as Karl May says - with forked tongues. They say one thing and do another. And that's what young people see day in and day out; it's the reality they follow in the digital media - their preferred access to social participation.
 At the same time, they are shaped by heroic narratives that they internalize through gaming and media worlds. These worlds are Manichean: good competes against evil, which is the only way to make it exciting. In reality, however, the often hypocritical self-contradiction of "yes", but continues to prevail, which must seem particularly questionable to them against this background. 

They must therefore assume that this compromised world is precisely what the previous generations wanted.
 The fact that this is not so, that a large part of the older generations had and has quite different ideals, is rarely an issue. History, especially economic history, is written by the victors. Only, from a planetary and also moral point of view, yes, even from an economic point of view, they are now more and more often the losers.
Their beliefs have not worked, they have ignored or even overreached a large part of the societies. And this is now so clear that, from the point of view of the young, they should step down.
 But they don't. They continue to play the game of enrichment at any price as well as the theater of self-congratulation. They pull glass ceilings up a few inches. Perhaps they practice quotas for women, but these lead women into the same capitalist dilemma of destruction in which men are already stuck. 
 The young generation sees all this. How should they react to it, that was our initial question, how should they feel about it?
 What else is there besides participation resignation or doublethink? Some of them will certainly choose these strategies of adaptation. But what do the critical ones among them do? 
 I am surprised again and again, by how few of them revolt, how many knowingly take the well-trodden path of destructive competitive thinking, although from all horns resounds: 
 We need material and planetary justice and above all moderation. It can no longer be a matter of ruining the planet and society in the struggle for monetary success. Redistribution and a change in thinking that is willing to do without are long overdue. 

**So has the young generation allowed itself to be tricked after all?**

I think it's different: On the one hand, they no longer believe in universal rights and replace them with particular claims. Within their own bubble of reference, they try to achieve their goals. Other things seem secondary. This can be called resignation, but it is probably above all pragmatism. When pragmatism becomes mediocrity would have to be clarified.
 More and more often I encounter the attitude If my normal life feels okay, average is okay for me. You have to be able to afford high goals - hero fantasies are just lived out digitally. Pragmatism - bend for success - was already the fanfare of the previous generation. So who should be surprised that the next generation is adopting it?

The younger generation strives for balance in their (working) lives. No wonder, when they have seen what careerism has done to their parents.
 But when does balance become cowardice? A courageous act is always an abandonment of balance.

Self-protection and protection of others become strategies for stress reduction. What is it worth at all to dare hard confrontations for ideals? If then I do something small, I have my compost bucket and ride my bike.
 Timidity spreads, while the few energetic environmental activists are partly already declared terrorists by the media. How would it be times not only with a school strike day but with a general strike day for the planet? Does not take place so far, because there is obviously not enough cohesion, courage, and problem consciousness for it.
 Everyone must know for himself is the new battle cry of inaction.

But everything must be constantly renegotiated and re-evaluated, right?
Actually not, because we know long ago what must happen first. But the knot just doesn't burst and no savior comes with the (light)sword to cut it.

**Everything must change so that it can remain as it is** - this well-known saying of Guiseppe Tomasi's "Gattopardo" describes the dilemma: the privileged keep their privileges and stage sham changes with which they distract the rest of society, which ultimately has to pay the price.

Some call our time the "Digital Biedermeier" others "The age of diminished expectations".
 In any case, it characterizes a young generation that lives in a permanent state of waiting for meaning under partly unpredictable circumstances and therefore doesn't want to hear any more bullshit. On the other hand, they jump at the biggest bullshit - such as aesthetic self-optimization or flexing with ostentatious luxury.
This generation remains trapped in contradictions. That's precisely why they want to feel that their counterparts will stand up for their promises even at the risk of their own failure. That is the touchstone of credibility. Only those who do not elegantly - or, in most cases, clumsily - get off the hook stand for something.

After a phase in which staging displaced reality, the Young Generation finally wants the world to become more honest, more modest, and more predictable. And that, unfortunately, also paralyzes them. Because they will not get the change without a hard confrontation - also with themselves.

Perhaps it's quite simple: **If you want to find your own truth, you have to be able to engage in conflict and endure it.** If you can't do that, you're left with the truth of others. And unfortunately, that's often not quite true.
 The new appreciation for rationality, for sound arguments, and for factual product advantages instead of emotional sales is certainly a first, decisive step on the way to the Young Generation's own truth.

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The Young Generation in the Endless Beta Phase

**Where do I come from?**

I came to West Berlin from Lübeck with a few boxes and worked my way. In Kreuzberg without heating, at the Free University with sociologists and English scholars. At the University of the Arts, where I poked around in various departments and still ended up in advertising by visiting Hamburg agencies unannounced.

I was a copywriter and creative director at Springer & Jacoby and Scholz & Friends, both creative forges at the time, and later in London. Then freelance creative and lecturer.

I worked - also as a director - in Germany and England for many brands and their agencies. During that time, I had my own companies with various partners and founded an agency with Jochen Pläcking and Arne Klein, among others, which later brought us back together as partners at K'UP.


**What drives me?**

To be free for mental and real adventures. I have already achieved many goals: became a friend to my children, built wooden houses myself, written ten books (as L. van Wangger), been an award winning creative in advertising, made films, remained a (sceptical) entrepreneur. In my novels I am preoccupied with the question:
Who can we be?
Do we even have to become who we think we want to be?
Isn't that presumptuous? Do we push ourselves too far, or is that precisely what is human about us?
How can we overcome categorical, formulaic thinking?

At best, this can be indirectly applied to strategy, which often seeks formulas. But it leads to questions like: Is a company what it wants to be? Does it want the right thing? Is it capable of recognizing itself and creating meaning? Does it cross and respect the right boundaries? What do these boundaries look like? For example, do we need to create companies that act only for the non-human world? For animals, plants and the planet?
For this we need breakthrough ideas, while we are often still consuming our energy in optimizing what we have. We need to strengthen imagination and thereby release action. This is important to me.


**What is my strategy?**

Test yourself thoroughly, then amaze yourself.

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### Vita

- Partner & Business Philosopher, K'UP
- Owner and director, Thin Tank Filmproduktion
- Author of novels and short stories
- Freelance Creative Director for advertising and brand agencies Founder and Creative Director, Charlylima
- Co-founder and Creative Director, AM Corporate & Creative Strategic partnership, Weber & Soltek and Brainchild London Creative Director, Brainchild London
- Founder and Creative Director, Weber & Soltek
- Creative Director, Scholz & Friends Berlin
- Copywriter & Creative Director, Springer & Jacoby Hamburg Lecturer for Copywriting, University of the Arts (UDK) Berlin Copywriter, Scholz & Friends Hamburg
- Copywriter, Lintas
- Graduate in Communications, University of the Arts (UDK) Berlin

Lars Weber

Vita

When are you coming over?

DANKE für Dein Interesse!