Our world faces multiple global crises that are growing in both severity and urgency. These are not limited to a climate and ecological catastrophe¹, a worldwide rise in nationalism², and an unsustainable growth-based economy that has led to extreme wealth inequality ³.

Simultaneously, we’re observing multiple revolutions in human behaviour and values. One example from the last century is that we’ve extended our empathy to a wider and wider spectrum of conscious beings through the civil, animal, LGBTQ and other rights movements.⁴

On top of that, rapid technological change is giving us more power than ever before, bringing us some hugely positive revolutions, but at the same time driving newfound crises. For example, advances in robotics and AI promise to free us from menial labour but also threaten to unleash widespread unemployment and further deepen inequality.

One important point is that technology isn’t just a neutral tool we use to achieve our aims.⁵ Instead it shapes our very values themselves. For example, our growing addiction to digital devices is slowly drowning us in a sea of distraction, making us less connected to one another and less aware of humanity’s situation.

These revolutions and crises are all interacting, cross-pollinating and influencing one another, culminating in the giant clusterfuck of what it is to be a human in the twenty first century. And it’s only going to get crazier.

Humanity walking the tightrope

Humanity’s current predicament is like that of a tightrope walker, and an inexperienced one at that. We’re teetering on a rope above a deep canyon, walking a narrow path between ruin and global flourishing.

If we fall into the abyss it will mean at best the deaths of billions of sentient beings and the suffering of billions more, and at worst the end of life on earth. Don’t slip, humanity. One false move and it’s all over — maybe forever.

Some astronomers have even hypothesised that the reason we haven’t yet encountered alien life (the Fermi paradox) is because all intelligent species inevitably face these challenges, but most of them fail and don’t live to tell the tale.⁶ The abyss is littered with the corpses of tightrope-walking civilisations who slipped and fell.

On the far side of the abyss, is the dramatically better world we should be aiming for. This world has the potential, at least, to provide fulfilling and meaningful lives for all humans on earth, in harmony with the countless other organisms who share our planet. We’d use our advanced technology to serve a deeper well-being for all in line with our innate desires for creativity, connection and curiosity.

At present, we’re a seriously unsteady, unfocussed, and uncoordinated tightrope walker. Indeed, most of us aren’t even aware of the tightrope crisis. Those of us who are feel powerless to help. Even fewer people have ideas about how we can work together to get out of this alive — or at best, unscathed.

So making our way across the tightrope is the biggest fucking challenge but also the biggest fucking opportunity of our time.

So for a while we’ve been asking: what needs to change to help humanity get through this cataclysmic transition? How can we learn to walk the tightrope to a better future in a time of exponential change?

Attempting to answer these questions has led us to the concept of operating systems. An operating system is the values, beliefs and tools of a society. It is like the “big stick” that the tightrope walker is holding to stay balanced as she is battered by the winds of change.

We are converging towards a truly global society, economy and culture — so it’s not just the operating system of the UK or of Egypt that matters, but of the planet as a whole. The modern operating system has given rise to institutions that span the entire globe, and with them, an increasingly connected international civilisation.

Which operating system for the planet?

The problem is that our current operating system is fucking everything up. It is the root cause behind many of today’s pressing crises. For example, some of the values inherent in the current operating system — materialism, the profit motive, an obsession with growth, meritocracy, individualism, devaluing natural environments and seeing them only as resources — have created a global economy driven by insatiable consumption of finite resources. This is inherently unsustainable and destabilising. Eventually we’re going to run out of the rare metals needed for your iPhone, the fossil fuel reserves will dry up, and ancient rainforests will be decimated beyond repair…

“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a finite planet, is either mad or an economist.”― Kenneth Boulding

We can’t carry on like this.

Even though most of us don’t realise it, we both embody and create the current operating system on a day-to-day basis. It goes a long way to determining pretty much every aspect of our lives: from our career choices, to our relationships, to how we spend our time and money. Growing up within this operating system shapes our thinking so deeply that we find it hard to even consider the possibility of an alternative. We are unable to take an outsider’s view and see how our world could be different.

Our everyday behaviour reinforces the system and propagates it worldwide, forever washing away hundreds of irreplaceable native cultures with inherently different values. Languages, family values, traditions and knowledge are being forever lost to the history books — replaced by iPhones, designer clothes, meat eating and materialism. These huge populations are adopting the current operating system with incredible fervour, their newfound desire for material and financial wealth adding greatly to the many global crises. We can’t deny them this life because we’ve been living it ourselves for so long. But the big fat lie we’ve all been sold is that the Western lifestyle leads to happiness. It doesn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact⁷.

We need to replace our current operating system with a new one. It’s not surprising, really. If you have a computer, you need to upgrade the software from time to time. Like a software engineer we need to design and deploy the new operating system of society that will replace the old, confront today’s global challenges and lead to more human flourishing.