Snowboarding & Social Tech.

Today is the fifth and final installment of TTLA's 2009 interview with Matt Harrison, founder and executive director of The Prometheus Institute, and author of the book, American Evolution.

TTLA: In addition to hip-hop, what's another example of modern "American Evolution?"

MH: Another example I give, very personal to me, is snowboarding. Back in the '80s, a bunch of stoner / surfers decided to strap some trays to their feet. It seemed stupid. Everybody thought it was stupid. Ski resorts banned them. There was a big civil war between the snowboarders and the skiers. And two decades later, snowboarding is a billion dollar industry. We have seven Olympic medals, we all watched on TV, there's a Wheaties box cover and inspired little kids.

There's an example of freedom of choice "? somebody deciding to slide a different way down a mountain created billions of dollars of economic growth, created national pride for our country "? all from literally a rebellious decision. A rebellious decision created all this value in our society. That's freedom of choice. That's evolutionary freedom of choice in action. Those are the kinds of stories I talk about in the book.

TTLA: Is there a scientific evolutionary equivalent of hip-hop or snowboarding?

MH: Basically the scientific bridge that I draw is with this concept of what I call "social technologies," which I borrow from this author, Eric Beinhocker, who wrote a book called The Origin of Wealth that introduced the idea. [Beinhocker was a McKinsey Global Initiative Fellow.]

Social technology is defined as an idea in pursuit of a goal. It's literally anything "? any sort of concept or rule to do anything. How to build this table. How to slide down a mountain on a ski slope. How to make this Kindle. For every idea, there is a social technology. So you can see that any economic growth is really just the progressive adaptation of social technology. You can break social technology down biologically to DNA in the genes and the phenotype, the individual organism, and by the way they interact, and the way evolution selects each organism versus selects the social technology in the social context. That would be the closest relationship you could think of "? the music of Jay-Z as just an organism in the evolutionary scheme. So as we select Jay-Z's music, as we preserve it "? it reproduces in a sense as people buy it and it goes platinum. Same thing as an organism reproducing and satisfying the natural selection.

Read part one, part two, part three, and part four of this interview.

TTLA: I admit I'm unfamiliar with the Origins of Wealth book.

MH: It's obscure. That's why I feel the need to write this book. Because it's a new idea and it deserves attention.

TTLA: I take it that title is culled from origin of species. Is this a significant now line of thought I've been missing?

MH: That's what's exciting. There actually is an undercurrent of broadly evolutionary economics is the biggest one "? that's what Beinhocker's book was.

And this book came out last year, Michael Shermer who runs Skeptic magazine, he wrote this, Mind of the Market. It's on the same topic "? his is more on evolutionary psychology. So it's a lot more primate experiments controlled behavioral economic experiments talking about certain ingrained features of humans and things like that. He actually alludes to the point I make explicitly in my book, which is that freedom of choice has an evolutionary value in adaptation in the human social context.

In my view, this is the next great movement in social science. You see it not only in evolutionary economics but you also see it in physical systems just about constant self-organization. Stuart Kauffman [Director, The Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics] is a science writer on the topic. Lee Smolen is a theoretical physicist who talks a lot about self-organization in the universe perhaps as being one of the newer scientific principles in the universe. Smolen specifically argues that self-organization, as he calls it, is really the next great movement in social and physical sciences. That its just beginning, it's the newest thing. It's what relativity was right when Einstein was discovering it. Its Newton's law was right at the beginning. It's the next great movement. For me, that's an exciting time.

TTLA: Is this coming of age due to social media?

MH: I think the potential for the idea to gain traction is greater now because we see self-organization now. That's what's profound. We see internet technology. Another example I use in the book is Amazon.com to represent freedom of choice. Everybody looks at Amazon and we all like it because we can find whatever we want. But you never thing that you also can also find tons of stuff you don't want. All the stuff you despise. Everything you disagree with. Everything you hate is on Amazon. And it's all for sale. Isn't that bad? Isn't that something that we should be boycotting Amazon for having these products? Nobody thinks that way, because we all realize, well, our freedom of choice is good because we can find what we want, we can see the value. This is all good. So I really do think that there are these cultural technological examples of freedom of choice, of evolution, spontaneous order, self-organization and I think that's making it easier.

As for the science, I can't tell you why it's now, and not in the 1940s. it just is. That's what I really think is the most important for everything, for there to be a bridge. Nobody knows about evolutionary economics, nobody knows about self-organizing. Unless they're into this field. But there's no broad-based understanding of it. But if there were, I think there'd be a lot more interest in it. I think all the trends together make for a really exciting topic.

[End of Series]

Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user king damus. It was used under Creative Commons license.