WISDOM
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TOWARDS
Conscious Commerce by Maria Kostelac
Large corporations today employ between 200 to 400 times more people than what populated any of Europe’s most prominent medieval cities. It’s predicted that by 2020, the size of the global middle class will have almost tripled to 4.9 billion, from 1.8 billion in 2009. At last count, the number of unique mobile connections operating across the internet outnumbered humans by 1.2 billion. This dense interconnectivity removes the effect of the physical barriers (like oceans and mountains) that forced separation between nations. It also means that more machines than humans are communicating with one another to share information about and make decisions on behalf of humans in real time. As citizens, we have instant access to all of human knowledge and history via the super-computers casually commuting our pockets and handbags in daily life. Such power could not even have been imagined by the leaders of vast empires of eras past. An unprecedented public relations paradox exists for the governments and corporations that once monopolised the communication channels now democratised by the internet. Those with authority over these civil, corporate and electronic populations have far greater socioeconomic reach, influence and political power than any of the conquests the invasions of monarchs and moguls could ever have delivered. Simultaneously and somewhat conversely, the same technologies affecting the democratisation of the planet’s airwaves, information flows and broadcast resources afford a single country’s military the detonation power capable of inflicting summary ruin upon the earth. The simultaneous presence of wide-distribution (democratic) and high-concentration (autocratic) forces of power presented by these scenarios has not been possible in all of living history. That both phenomena concurrently dominate our lived experience of the personal and public is of pivotal consequence to life as we know it.
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Given these compounding trends, the idea of human prosperity continuing to be driven by ‘consumerism’ - the premise that spending money and consuming goods is good for economies - is a daunting and wholly annihilistic prospect which poses an existential risk as formidable as atomic fallout. Conservative estimates from The Global Footprint Network hypothesise that servicing of Earth’s 7.1 billion humans by current American middle-class expectations will require four more earths (5.4, if we go by the equivalent income standards norms in the UAE). Because these calculations exclude the analysis of potential eco-system collapse, carbon emission effects or sustainability of cropland (i.e. the package effect of consumption), these numbers are criticized as being a drastic underestimation of actual impacts. By such estimations, it can be argued that the only thing more detrimental to ‘the future’ than global fallout is global prosperity. But ‘commerce’ need not be synonymous with ‘consumption’. To relegate ‘the effects of commerce’ on humanity’s history as being either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ would be to ignore the wisdom we can tap from the hard lessons and stunning achievements of past experience. It can be argued, for example, that little has achieved more for world peace than supply chain management.
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