One day, as I was driving home after picking up my son from preschool, I came up with a new world order.

I usually have the radio tuned to Sweden's public broadcaster, and my son, sitting in the back seat, sometimes asks about what he hears.

What is war? Who is the king? How old is the king? Where is China?

One day they were talking about the United Nations on the radio. So he asked:

"What is the UN?"

Once again, it made me think about how outdated the current world order is, and how it ought to be changed.

A fleeting thought twenty years in the making

The idea did not come completely out of nowhere.

My opposition to geopolitical realpolitik was what first drew me into politics more than twenty years ago. Instead, I wanted to see a pro-democracy foreign policy.

Realpolitik means that power and self-interest take precedence over human rights. It becomes an excuse to accept dictatorship, abuses, or betrayals of smaller actors because doing so is considered beneficial to one's own state and power.

The dictators behave worst, but even democracies have a tendency to become guided by realpolitik when it comes to foreign affairs.

Later, after being elected to the Swedish Parliament (with a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee), I proposed the creation of an Alliance of Democracies (which absolutely nobody joined me in supporting). After leaving politics, I became involved with the Alliance of Democracies Foundation.

So for more than twenty years I have thought, read, debated, written, and voiced opinions about geopolitics, while reflecting on what kind of world order we should have.

Stronger tyrants gave us democracy

In 1648, after years of negotiations, the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War in Europe and established the modern principle of sovereignty. In other words, each country would decide for itself on its internal affairs: laws, politics, system of government, economy, and religion.

Previously, power in Europe had been overlapping and highly hierarchical, with the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor serving as supranational authorities capable of intervening in the affairs of local rulers.

The peace settlement established that each state and its ruler had exclusive authority over its own territory.

States recognized one another's borders and right to self-determination, creating an international system of formally equal states that, in principle, were not supposed to interfere in one another's internal affairs. This gave us the sovereign territorial state.

The kings and princes were delighted. At last they were king of their own castles!

But all good things come to an end.

By establishing fixed geographic borders and the principle that a central authority held exclusive power within them, the territorial state created a unified arena for politics.

To compete in this new system of rival states, rulers were forced to build strong military organizations, which in turn required bureaucracies capable of collecting taxes and maintaining order. This concentration of power led to royal absolutism, but it also created an effective state apparatus.

When the ideas of popular government spread, both in thought and in action, the people could take over this state apparatus and thereby govern the country themselves. In this way, more and more countries became democratic.

The problem with sovereign states

At the same time that the sovereign state enabled the rise of democracy, it also became the dictator's best friend. Since states were not supposed to interfere in the internal affairs of other states, tyrants were free to tyrannize as they pleased.

A person who murders, tortures, starves, and oppresses people at home is welcomed by the international community as "Mr. President," or people pretend that they are royalty. In 1932, the Al Saud family declared themselves royalty. In international contexts, such as the United Nations, their king is addressed as His Majesty King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Immoral and ridiculous at the same time.

In the current world order, democracy and dictatorship are treated as equals because it is territory and nationhood that possess rights (despite all declarations of human rights). As a result, a democratically elected leader enjoys the same rights as an absolute ruler. Nor does the democrat have any right to interfere in the dictator's internal affairs.

After the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s—when someone really should have interfered in their internal affairs—this principle began to erode somewhat, but the fundamental idea remains in place today.

Human sovereignty

Instead of tying political power to a geographic territory, this new world order begins with the individual human being.

From the sovereignty of nations to the sovereignty of individuals.

Every human being is the fundamental political unit.

All people should possess a form of world citizenship that stands above citizenship in any nation.

Decisions affecting the world should not be made by national representatives of peoples, but directly by the people themselves.

(I am certainly not the first person to have this idea.)

I believe people would be more central if people themselves made the decisions directly. There would be less focus on national power interests and the immoral actions that often follow from them.

Global issues in particular suffer from competition between nations. It would be considerably better if all countries were democracies, but even then there would remain an inherent power problem.

Global issues must be handled better and should be decided directly by the many people affected by them.

Most importantly, however, we must establish the principle that every human being belongs to themselves. A person is human because they are human, not because they belong to a particular nation. A nation does not automatically have the right to govern me simply because I happened to be born there.

Even though many countries have democratized their systems of government, the underlying foundation still assumes that the individual is subordinate to the territory into which they were born.

When value instead begins from the premise that each person belongs to themselves, and that rights are attached to human existence itself rather than to a passport issued by a state, part of the space that states currently use to justify abuses disappears.

If a system instead rests on voluntarism, consent, and the right to choose one's own communities, then all institutions are forced to deliver genuine value in order to earn people's participation. They can no longer demand obedience simply by pointing to a border drawn on a map hundreds of years ago.

What happens to my country?

Perhaps you enjoy being American, Chinese, or Swedish. And who are we supposed to cheer for in the World Cup if countries disappear?

I do not believe geographic belonging or local cultures will disappear. It is deeply human to feel connected to the place where one lives and to the people who live there.

What will change is the power that nations possess, not whether you love or hate seeing Norway win all the gold medals at the Winter Olympics.

But how would it work?

Such a new principle naturally raises a million practical questions.

How would decisions be made?

Would billions of people have to vote all the time?

I am actually not worried about that.

We will find answers to all those questions. Human beings are good at that.

The transition from today's system will not happen through revolution or because governments voluntarily surrender their power. Instead, parallel systems will emerge that are so superior that they gradually outcompete nation-states as decision-makers.

But first we must establish a new foundational principle.

United humans

We can already see that the current world order is beginning to crack.

The way it is happening is not good, but we do need a new world order. The current one is immoral.

It is time to take the next step.

In principle, this means moving sovereignty one step further.

From a world order built on the sovereignty of nations to one built on the sovereignty of every individual.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

Talking machines

It was the late 1800s. The Wild West era was nearing its end, but there were still plenty of saloons where cowboys quenched their thirst. It was also here that a new technological innovation created the music industry’s first major crisis.

Thomas Edison had invented the phonograph, which could both record and play back sound. Sound waves were etched into a rotating wax cylinder, and when the needle later traced the same grooves, the diaphragm began vibrating so the sound could be heard through a horn.

Edison, however, became preoccupied with the light bulb, and development of the phonograph stalled. In stepped another of the era’s leading innovators, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell. He further developed the device and sold the patent to a man named Edward Easton, who founded the Columbia Phonograph Company.

The purpose of this “talking machine,” as Edison called it, was not music. Instead, it was marketed as an office product for dictation.

At first, sales were decent, but then they suddenly began to slow. Bad turned worse, and Easton set out across the country to understand why.

Singing machines

He found the answer in the saloons.

There, he discovered that the talking machines were not being used to record speech, but to listen to music. Someone had added a coin slot to them, and people were more than willing to pay to hear music that way.

Easton quickly realized that the real money would be in selling the music, not the device that played it.

Marching band music was popular at the time, and Easton signed an exclusive agreement with the U.S. Marine Band and began selling the recordings.

Easton’s company still exists today, now known as Columbia Records.

Crisis and rebirth

Since then, the music industry has gone through crisis after crisis, yet each time it has been reborn and grown larger.

The next major crisis came in the 1920s and 1930s, when radio broke through and almost wiped out record sales. Within a few years, the industry was reduced to five percent of its former size.

Was recorded music now dead? Who would want to pay for music when it was available for free on the radio?

Instead, radio became the industry’s single greatest growth driver. When new songs were played on the air, music spread as never before, and hit after hit was created.

Soon, radio, record sales, and touring existed in near-perfect harmony.

This cycle, and the music industry’s short memory, are well documented in the book Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry. It was published in 2015, when many claimed that streaming was the industry’s worst crisis yet.

You’ll never guess what happened next.

In 1999, the global music industry set a record for recorded music revenue at around $41 billion (adjusted for inflation). The CD had led people not only to buy new music, but also to repurchase albums they already owned, wanting them on CD instead of vinyl.

Then came file sharing and streaming, and the bottom was reached in 2014, with revenue at $17 billion.

Since then, there has been strong growth. The latest figures are from 2024, when revenues climbed to nearly $30 billion.

At the same time, revenues from live music, such as tours, have increased and now exceed those from recorded music. Recently, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour became the highest-grossing tour of all time.

The music industry is therefore generating more money than ever before.

But now a new technological innovation arrives to spoil the increasingly upbeat mood: AI music.

AI is hated within the music industry

AI-generated music does not seem to be popular within the music industry. Not at all.

Here are a couple of quotes:

1. "...machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country", says one musician.

2. "...imagining orchestra pits full of ‘technicians’ instead of musicians", argues a musicians’ union.

Sorry, I tricked you. Those are not comments about AI music, but about earlier technological developments that were said to threaten music.

The first quote is from 1906 and criticized the phonograph. The second is from the early 1980s, when a British musicians’ union wanted to ban synthesizers and drum machines.

These quotes are repeated today, only now about AI music.

“The building blocks of music belong to us, to human beings. That's going to be a battle we all have to fight in the next couple of years: Defending our human capital against AI.",” Sting told the BBC.

Veronica Maggio wonders whether a ban might be best:

“Maybe it should be banned, right? Although bans are never really… that’s not exactly a fun world. But it would be nice if they didn’t get to number one,” she told Aftonbladet.

“…if it’s not a person who has actually felt those emotions, then they’re not real feelings. And that’s not something I want to take part in,” says singer Ida-Lova.

Can’t anyone come up with any new arguments?

This is yet another example in the extraordinarily long tradition of repeating the same arguments against new technology, over and over again. And that tradition is by no means limited to music — it exists everywhere. Is it really too much to ask that we learn something at some point? Why do the same arguments have to be recycled again and again?

Every time, we end up laughing at them after a while. Ha, how could anyone have been so foolish as to want to ban synthesizers/satellite dishes/Walkmans/radios/comic books/heavy metal — and so on.

It becomes especially irritating when it comes to music, where this cycle has played out so many times and each time the industry has emerged in better shape on the other side. Moreover, even before AI, technology has been central to the creative process.

Today, professional recorded music is made almost entirely with the help of digital technology.

Everything usually starts in a music program where the song is written, vocals are recorded, and sounds are built using synthesizers and ready-made audio clips. The vocals are recorded with a microphone through an audio interface and can then be adjusted with effects — for example autotune, which helps the voice sound cleaner or gives it the polished tone of modern pop and hip-hop. Producers use digital tools to mix everything neatly and prepare the track for release.

Why is this considered “real music,” but not other music that comes out of a computer

Should the talentless be allowed to make music?

But what happens when any talentless nobody can churn out music? The same thing that happened in the 1890s, when far more people began listening to music through phonographs, which led to more people creating it. The same thing that happened in the 1930s, when far more people began listening to music via radio, which led to more people making music and record sales hitting new highs.

That’s not to say AI music won’t change and shake up the music industry. It would be very strange if it didn’t. Some will be disadvantaged, others will benefit. Sheet music was the 19th century’s way of distributing music, and its sales never returned to previous levels after 1890 and the breakthrough of the phonograph.

What happens when barriers are lowered is not that quality disappears (even though, of course, a lot of bad music will be created that no one wants to listen to). What primarily happens is that variation explodes.

That is one of the main threads in my book: when tools become cheaper, faster, and easier to use — when we can create simply through our human language — human creativity and potential are unleashed. Not because everyone suddenly becomes a genius, but because more people can experiment, more can combine, more can fail, and therefore more can succeed. Creativity is not a mystery that lives in a select few. It is a process. And processes scale when tools improve.

AI in music is precisely such a tool.

Today, it still takes years of training to master an instrument or production techniques. That’s good — craftsmanship should exist. But what happens when a teenager with an idea can test a full arrangement in a few minutes? When a songwriter can hear their lyrics in ten different genres before lunch? When someone without a strong singing voice but with musical sensitivity can create vocals that convey exactly the emotion she is aiming for?

It doesn’t mean craftsmanship dies. It means more people enter the room. We'll see – and hear! – many variations, some survive, some change everything.

History shows that every time we’ve gained better tools for creating sound, music has become richer. The piano replaced the harpsichord. The electric guitar transformed rock. Synthesizers opened entirely new landscapes. Digital production created genres that were previously technically impossible.

An amplifier

AI is no different in that respect. It is an amplifier. Just as a guitar sounds more powerful and different with the help of an amplifier, so will humans with AI as their amplifier.

It amplifies ideas. It amplifies speed. It amplifies the desire to experiment.

And perhaps most importantly: it amplifies people who previously stood outside. Those who couldn’t afford studio time. Those who didn’t get into music school. Those who lacked the right networks. When tools are democratized, the same thing happens as when the printing press, radio, and the internet broke through: more voices are heard.

Like Linus Andersson, who has cerebral palsy:

“It’s good that everyone gets to have different opinions, but I wouldn’t have been able to create music if I hadn’t had this app,” he told SVT.

Will there be more junk? Yes. Of course. There was with radio. With CDs. With YouTube. With Spotify.

But there was also more brilliance.

Not everyone in the music industry is negative. The ever-innovative ABBA-Björn Ulvaeus is writing a new musical with the help of AI. He is concerned about rights issues — and those need to be sorted out — but that is not the same as trying to slow down the technology.

“I believe these AI tools, in the hands of creative people, can result in fantastic new artistic expressions… I can imagine AI as an expansion of my frame of reference, giving me access to a world beyond my own musical experiences,” he writes in SvD.

AI is not the end of the music industry or artists.

It is another rebirth.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

Religious behavior in a secular age

You’re sitting with friends at a café. The four people before you have all ordered a bun. When it’s your turn, you say, “An ice cream, please.” No one says anything. Yet something shifts in the air.

It’s a ridiculous situation. No one really cares what you eat. And still, you all feel it. A microscopic tension. An invisible question lingering half a second too long.

Choosing ice cream when everyone else chose a bun is not religion with a god and a church, but it is religion in its most basic form. An invisible crack in the fabric of community, onto which everyone at the table projects their values and opinions, constantly scanning for signs that everyone is moving in the same direction. Or that they are not.

What religion is, how it arose, and why it still exists is something I recently explored through Robin Dunbar’s book How Religion Evolved. It gave me a new perspective on religion and strongly influenced further reflections on how religion remains very much present even though society has become increasingly secular.

Dunbar argues that religion did not primarily evolve to explain the world but to create social cohesion. Through shared rituals, songs, and stories, larger groups could stay united and cooperate. That provided evolutionary advantages. Religious communities became stronger, more enduring, and more successful than groups without these elements.

So far, no culture has been found anywhere that practices no religion at all. Religion thus seems deeply embedded in how we function as humans. Dunbar suggests that religion is as natural a part of human nature as laughter, friendship, and love, and has likely existed ever since language emerged.

Today, many of us live in secular contexts. But if religion is as natural to us as laughter, can we really have abandoned it?

Religion without God

Once I began thinking of religion as something natural, it became obvious that it exists all around me. It has simply taken new forms. These expressions can be divided into two fundamental human drives.

First, we have a deeply rooted need for tribal belonging. Robin Dunbar emphasizes that religion’s primary function was to create social cohesion, and that need has not disappeared. Today we find our congregations in new places. It shows up in extreme brand loyalty, where criticism of a product can be perceived as a personal attack, or in the world of sports. There, religious mechanisms live on through strict rituals and a sharp division between us and them, creating instant community with strangers who wear the same colors.

Second, we carry an insatiable need for order and meaning. As Nassim Taleb shows in his analyses of randomness, humans have a hard time accepting chaos. We see patterns where none exist. We see meaning where there is only chance. We engage in magical thinking, more often than we like to admit. We prefer a bad explanation to no explanation at all. Where traditional religion once offered answers to life’s big questions, we now see conspiracy theories offering a poor explanation that is easier to accept than acknowledging that something is too complex to truly understand. The idea of a hidden plan is simply easier for our brains to handle than the thought that the world is often random and beyond our grasp.

These examples show fragments of religion. The congregation, the rituals, the myth-making. They exist separately, scattered throughout our secular culture. But there is one phenomenon that gathers the whole mechanism in one place: our era’s fascination with dystopia.

The silent rules of group dynamics

In every community, there are unspoken rules about what is right and wrong to think and say. In church, you confess your faith and follow the dogma. In secular groups, we confess by signaling our values. We show belonging by sharing the right opinions, reacting to the right things, calling out those who think wrongly, and being mildly outraged about the right problems.

In many contexts, there is an unspoken agreement that the world is heading in the wrong direction. The climate, democracy, young people’s mental health, trust between people. The details vary between groups, but the underlying story is the same. It was better before, and it is getting worse.

This narrative functions as a creed. You show belonging by sharing it, by collectively lamenting the state of things. There is something almost cozy about shared worry. You “suffer” together. You show care by sharing each other’s concerns. Participating in this ritual confirms that you belong to the group and share its values.

Group dynamics operate through reward and punishment. Those who affirm the group’s worldview receive positive feedback, likes, agreement, validation. Those who challenge the group’s basic assumptions are met with suspicion, questioning, or silence. The reward system is subtle but powerful. We quickly learn which opinions earn social points and which come at a cost.

The one who does not fully participate breaks the group’s moral agreement. In a community where it is virtuous to acknowledge how bad everything is, optimism becomes almost a sin. Not because of optimism itself, but because of the disloyalty to the group. You are a heretic.

Gaining status through devotion

Hugo Mercier shows in the book Not Born Yesterday that in subgroups, people are often rewarded extra for being the most devoted and taking more extreme positions. It is not enough simply to agree. The one who shows the greatest commitment, pushes the boundaries, and most clearly marks out deviants gains the highest status.

This drives groups toward ever purer positions, where moderation can be perceived as weakness or disloyalty.

It is a pattern we recognize from religion. The most devout, the one who fasts longest, who sacrifices most, gains the highest esteem. In secular contexts, we see the same dynamic. The one most outraged by injustice, who takes the clearest stance, who compromises the least with “wrong” opinions, earns the most respect within the group.

This creates a competition in orthodoxy that gradually shifts the group’s center. What yesterday was an extreme position becomes today’s standard, and tomorrow something even stronger is required to show true devotion. Moderate voices fade away or fall silent, not because they have changed their minds, but because the cost of speaking becomes too high.

By being the one who most clearly calls out the heretic, you gain social status. And it is in this pursuit of the group’s recognition that the subtle cost of deviation becomes most palpable.

Why pessimism?

Why has pessimism become one of our time’s dominant creeds? Part of the answer is biological. We are biologically predisposed to this behavior. Negativity bias means our brains react more strongly to threats and problems than to positive news. Our very existence is due to our ancestors having this survival mechanism. Messages of doom stick. Good news slides off. That is why a dark worldview can feel more real than actual data.

Pessimists can appear smart and responsible. Optimists are easily dismissed as naïve or simplistic. The most irritating form of optimism is not shallow cheerfulness. That is easy to brush off as ignorance. What truly provokes is well-informed, calm, non-provocative optimism. When it is grounded in facts and data, it can no longer be dismissed as uninformed. What remains is to question motives and cast suspicion.

Saying “it was better before” requires no precision. It feels emotionally true even when it is factually false. When someone, for example me, instead says “no, it was worse before in almost every measurable way,” it makes the sorrow unnecessary. This is not about facts but about belonging. Questioning the group’s consensus is perceived as a threat to the community itself.

Understanding our own nature

None of us is immune to the mechanisms of religion. Since religious behavior is evidently part of our human nature, we are all influenced by the need for belonging, moral frameworks, and rituals. We are all drawn to communities that confirm our worldview. We all feel that warmth when someone agrees with our concerns, and the chill when someone questions them.

Understanding these mechanisms does not free us from them. But it gives us the opportunity to reflect. When we recognize our own religious behavior in secular disguise, we can ask ourselves whether it truly serves us well.

And the next time someone challenges the order of the universe by choosing ice cream when everyone else chose a bun, see it as practice. Even if it grates just a little, it is those who dare to challenge who actually make things happen in the end. That should be encouraged.

Tobias Wahlqvist

(And the person was probably just craving a scoop of raspberry licorice ice cream, not trying to overthrow the social order. Even if your religious instincts tell you otherwise.)

My American love story

I love the United States. Or loved it. Or still love it, just a little less? In a different way? It’s complicated. And as it always is when a love cools – it’s sad.

The first seed of that love was planted on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 2004.

A little more than 20 years later, I stood with tears in my eyes in Liberty State Park, looking at the Statue of Liberty and wondering whether divorce was inevitable.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Back in 2004, blogs were the latest thing and I had started one. I was studying to become a teacher and had just joined a political party, so I wrote about all sorts of things. Since it was an election year in the United States, I began writing about the race between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Following and writing about American politics felt like watching The West Wing. Entertaining and, at the same time, intellectually stimulating. I applied for and received a small grant from a foundation to travel to the United States for the election.

That’s why I found myself standing in the middle of the night on a nearly deserted Pennsylvania Avenue, looking at the illuminated Capitol building. Here and there, muted music drifted from different election night gatherings.

I had hoped Kerry would win, but predicted Bush would.

I shivered, both from the cold and from the feeling of being at the very center of power and history. This was something I wanted to keep being part of.

So I kept blogging and traveled to the United States more and more often. First for the 2006 midterms and then three times in 2008. It was a presidential election year again, and since no sitting president was running, it was a completely open race in both parties.

Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Joe Biden. John McCain against Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Paul, and Mike Huckabee.

New Hampshire is the first primary state, so that’s where I went—and it became one of the greatest experiences of my life. It’s a small state, so within a 45-minute drive you could attend campaign events with all these candidates. You could see them, meet them, and talk to them. I greeted every single candidate and spoke with John McCain.

Unfortunately, all I managed to say was: "Hello, I'm from Sveeeeden".

Here, the most powerful person in the world was about to be elected, and yet little me, who wasn’t even American, from little Sweden, could speak directly with the candidates. What an incredible system.

I also heard the most extraordinary political speech I have ever experienced live. Barack Obama in a school gymnasium in Concord. We had to wait outside in the cold for over an hour, so my toes were frozen stiff by the time we got inside. But wow, it was worth it. It was almost frightening how affected I was. This is what I wrote at the time:

“When Obama shifts into high gear and talks about hope, you feel like you could go out and do anything for that man.”

Afterward, we shook hands, and that too received a review:

“His handshake and presence as he moved through the crowd were the best so far. Or maybe tied for first place with John McCain, who also felt very genuine.”

Despite that speech—and despite agreeing with the Democrats more often than the Republicans—I ended up volunteering for John McCain’s presidential campaign. There were many positions of his I didn’t share, but I believed his foreign and security policy would be best for the world. His upright style and willingness to challenge others appealed to me.

As early as 2000, he saw through Vladimir Putin. While his opponent in that campaign (McCain ran for president for the first time then), George W. Bush, wanted to wait and see, McCain said:

“We know that he was a member of the KGB. We know that he came to power because of the military brutality ... I’m very concerned about Mr. Putin.”

In the 2008 election, McCain warned that Putin’s sights were now set on Ukraine.

I clearly had nothing against Barack Obama, but I still chose McCain, and in the summer of 2008 I spent a month in Nevada knocking on doors for him.

Always wearing a rather distinctive T-shirt that the candidate really liked, when I once again met him at a campaign event in Reno.

I kept blogging and returned to the United States again and again. My blog grew into the largest Swedish blog about American politics, and I was increasingly invited to comment in the media. In 2012, I was one of three experts in Swedish national newspaper, SvD, ahead of that year’s presidential election.

Then came the 2016 presidential election.

Donald Trump rode down an escalator and launched his improbable campaign.

Like so many others, I gave him very little chance of succeeding. Unfortunately, I was completely wrong.

When Trump’s victory march gathered speed, it stopped being fun. He represented almost everything I disliked, both politically and personally. The foreign policy that McCain and most Republicans had stood for, he turned 180 degrees. That, on top of all his other flaws and shortcomings.

I lost the desire to comment, declined most media appearances, and in 2018 I shut down the blog:

“When Donald Trump was elected and so many sensible people voted for him, it was no longer fun. I still follow what’s happening, but not at all like before. Instead, I read biographies of former presidents and hope that I’ll wake up from this nightmare.”

I met John McCain one more time. He led a delegation to Sweden. By then I had become a Member of Parliament, and when they visited the Parliament I spoke briefly with him and showed him the photo of the two of us in Reno in 2008. He chuckled and said:

“Good memories, my friend, good memories.”

He died in 2018, and my post about it became the blog’s final entry.

A deeper love

But Trump did not kill my love for the United States. On all my travels, I had also come to know America beyond politics. I made friends and acquaintances across that vast country.

I simply loved Americans. They are so friendly and generous. Without hesitation, they open up even the most reserved Scandinavian. They are optimistic and rarely suffer from small-mindedness. I come alive when I’m in the United States. Nothing feels impossible. The American Dream doesn’t feel like just a dream. A country by and for optimists.

Of course, there are things that irritate me. When the winner of the Super Bowl proclaims itself world champion, you can’t help but facepalm. The coffee is basically bean-flavored water, Fahrenheit is incomprehensible, and the date format just as confusing. But there are plenty of things about Swedes that irritate me too.

Over time, my love for the United States grew so deep that I even began to see my own future there. Greater opportunities — bigger everything. That’s where I wanted to live. At one point I tried to get a visa to move there, but it didn’t work out. The hope, however, lived on.

Divorce?

That’s why the shock was almost physical when I landed in the United States in the spring of 2025 and suddenly didn’t feel welcome. This country, which had received me with open arms, now seemed not to want me.

At least that’s how it felt. Donald Trump had been re-elected president. A horrific and incomprehensible decision. Once could be a mistake. When he was voted out after four years, I regained some hope. But to elect the man again?!

When I arrived that spring of ’25, he was at his most aggressive. Sky-high tariffs, threats against Greenland, attacks on Ukraine, the public humiliation of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Something broke in the world’s relationship with the United States — and in mine.

But after a few days, the initial shock faded. Something decisive had happened: I had started talking and spending time with Americans again.

They are still there. Some have gone off the rails, but most have not. They were who they had always been.

On the way home, I had a long layover in Newark, so I took a taxi to Liberty State Park, right by the water next to the Statue of Liberty.

The symbolism was as exaggeratedly ridiculous as in certain Hollywood movies. There I was, walking with the Statue of Liberty in the background, my thoughts about America, myself, and the world spinning in my head.

That’s when it came for the first time: a deep sadness. I almost started crying several times.

I had felt it when Trump was elected the first time and when I shut down the blog, but now it was stronger.

The country I had loved so much was gone. The Americans were still there, but the American Dream was, at best, clouded. What had happened to this remarkable country — and above all: what would happen next?

The United States had begun a journey toward becoming an authoritarian, corrupt mafia state. But what would the future look like? Since that afternoon in Liberty State Park, I’ve been thinking and analyzing precisely that.

Sometimes — quite often — emotions take over and I feel discouraged. But then I look beyond the most sensational headlines and see flashes of hope. And sometimes they shine rather brightly.

The dictator’s handbook

“What’s happening in the United States closely follows an authoritarian playbook common throughout history and around the globe today,” writes Jamila Raqib, head of AEI, which studies and teaches nonviolent resistance.

Donald Trump is following the handbook for would-be dictators. He has tightened his grip on the Republican Party, which proved to be full of timid yes-men. The politicians within the party who have stood up to him are very few.

Trump rewards loyalty. That’s why he chose to forgive Marco Rubio and JD Vance, who were once sharply critical of him but have since bent the knee and now sit obediently whenever he snaps his fingers.

Trump punishes anyone who stands up to him, even when it harms him in the short term.

The signal is clear. If you are loyal, everything is forgiven. If you are disloyal, Trump will use every weapon in his arsenal to destroy you.

Research on how democracies erode shows that the pattern is almost always the same — and point by point, Trump follows it:

Independent institutions are politicized. Trump has placed loyalists in charge of the FBI and lashes out at the independent Federal Reserve chair who refuses to obey.

The justice system is turned against political opponents. His attorney general delivers baseless indictments on demand.

Elections and democratic processes are delegitimized. Trump fabricated claims that he won the 2020 election and pardoned those who stormed the Capitol to stop the transfer of power.

The media are attacked. His assaults have been constant since 2015, far beyond what can be considered legitimate criticism.

Critics and minorities are dehumanized. From his very first campaign, he mocked all kinds of people, not least those with disabilities.

Power is concentrated. Through his stranglehold on the Republicans, he effectively controls Congress.

The democracy playbook

But defenders of democracy have a handbook too. Gene Sharp studied how Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. successfully led nonviolent movements and devoted his life to analyzing such struggles. He founded the AEI and, through decades of research, compiled extensive knowledge about how dictators can be toppled — and leaders seeking to push a country in an authoritarian direction can be defeated — using nonviolent methods.

It was Sharp who helped spread the knowledge behind so-called color revolutions. In a dictatorship, each individual citizen feels powerless and alone. But when millions of people wear the same color, everyone can see that this is not the case. On the contrary, they are many — and therefore not powerless at all. That and other methods have helped bring down numerous tyrants and oppressors around the world, from Ukraine to Serbia to India.

We are now seeing an active resistance beginning to organize in the United States. They need a clearer plan, with sharper tactics and strategy, but it is starting to take shape — and engagement is at record levels.

Demonstrations and other protests against Trump are four times as common now as during his first term. And it is not only in liberal areas that people are protesting. More and more demonstrations are being organized in districts where Trump received strong support.

We also see active resistance from some states, courts, universities, civil society organizations, independent media, individual prosecutors, and public officials.

When Trump retreated in Minnesota, removed the head Greg Bovino, and then pulled back ICE, it was an important victory.

The democratic brake

The most powerful mechanism for slowing the authoritarian drift is, of course, elections. The United States is still a democracy, albeit a wounded one. In November 2026, the midterm elections will be held. All seats in the House of Representatives and one third of the seats in the Senate will be contested, along with a number of gubernatorial and local elections.

At the moment, much suggests that these elections could prove costly for the Republicans.

Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unpopular.

Only Richard Nixon had a worse approval rating at the start of his second term.

Trump is losing trust across all policy areas, even in those where he has been strongest, such as immigration.

A president’s popularity always affects the midterms, and given how completely dominant Trump is within his party, this year’s election will be no exception. Republicans could very well lose the House of Representatives and perhaps even the Senate in November.

After that comes the 2028 presidential election. Trump likes to talk about running again. It would be extraordinarily difficult for him to succeed in doing so. The Constitution is extremely clear, contains no loopholes, and cannot realistically be amended on such short notice. It is, of course, easy to imagine Trump disregarding the Constitution. But elections in the United States are decentralized, and not something he has total control over.

To override that would require some form of armed force. Precisely because the system is decentralized, it would mean a full-scale military takeover to make it work. Nothing can be ruled out, but such a move would crash the U.S. economy and devastate its global relationships. The outcome would not be guaranteed, which means the risk would be enormous even for Trump. The consequences — even if he succeeded — would be so severe that it is unlikely he would attempt it.

It is more probable that one of his loyalists — Marco Rubio, JD Vance, or Donald Trump Jr. — would run instead. But none of them would be able to distance themselves from Trump, and his popularity would therefore be decisive.

If Trump continues as he has begun — with chaos, confrontation, conflict both domestically and internationally — while the problems he was elected to solve remain unresolved, his popularity is unlikely to increase.

The greatest risk

The single greatest risk, as I see it, is election manipulation. Trump will try to cheat. Tampering with votes themselves, but also creating chaos and the risk of violence at polling stations.

Within immigration enforcement, ICE, he has built what could become a powerful instrument. Illegal immigration to the United States has been a long-standing problem, and Trump has significantly reduced it. It is not unreasonable to argue that people living in a country illegally should be deported.

But ICE has developed into something far beyond that, not least as we saw in Minnesota, when they shot Alex Pretti in circumstances close to an execution.

It is not hard to imagine that in the next election, these masked enforcers could be deployed to closely contested districts, where engineered chaos around ICE operations might tilt the balance in favor of the Republicans.

That is when the lessons from Gene Sharp and all the successful nonviolent revolutions will be decisive. It is under these circumstances they are battle tested.

We saw in Minnesota and its aftermath, Americans do not accept what happened there. A strong organization around the elections will make it very difficult to cheat in a decisive way.

The Americans will save America

All of this requires something: courage and determination from a sufficient number of Americans.

It was faith in that — in the American people — that gave me hope there in Liberty State Park. The risk that the United States becomes an increasingly authoritarian country is real. It could happen. We must look that truth straight in the eye.

But it is by no means decided that it will. I do not believe the American people will allow it. We see how they are beginning to rise.

People who, at the risk of their own lives, are prepared to defend freedom. The struggle may go on for many years. Some wounds will take a long time to heal. The old America will not return, but after 250 years perhaps a new America will be born from the old one.

Before I got into the taxi back to the airport, I turned one last time toward the Statue of Liberty. Once again it felt like a bad Hollywood movie, but right there and then I felt a strong conviction that our love story will continue. It may take years of couples therapy, but our love will bloom again.

Mathias Sundin
Arge optimisten

Un-nostalgic (is that even a word?)

I am extremely un-nostalgic, rarely look back, prefer what is new over what is old, and can easily get irritated when people dream about how good things used to be.
Partly, I think it’s about fear. If people get too nostalgic, it risks spilling over into unjustified criticism of what is new, and I want us to travel faster toward the future, not slower.

But then I came across a word that allows me to be a little nostalgic. And helps others better handle their grief over what has been lost:

Technelegy.

It’s not a misspelling, but a fusion of two words: technology and elegy. An elegy is a poem of lament for something lost or for the passage of time. More melancholy and wistfulness than deep, black sorrow.

The poet Sasha Stiles created the word, and it is also the title of her book.

She describes technelegy as a blend of optimism and melancholy.
Technology stands for progress, forward motion, and that dizzying feeling that comes when you try something new. A sense of possibility, novelty, and anticipation of where it might take us, which doors it could open, what new creative territory it might lead us to.

This combines with the poetic elegy’s mournful homage to what has been lost. An awareness that innovation always brings obsolescence. Progress always has a cost. That’s not unique to today’s technology, but has marked humanity’s entire journey.

And so it is. Even I can agree with that. When something new takes over, something else is forgotten. Even if the new is usually better, and you really don’t want the old back, it can still be okay to feel a longing for what has disappeared.

The word technelegy can help us process feelings about the society that no longer exists, but without getting stuck in nostalgia. Instead, it lets us simultaneously look forward to what is new.

For me, it helps to be more tolerant of nostalgia. Recently I read a text by Rickard Swartz in Dagens Nyheter, and the further I read the more my irritation grew. He described how AI translation ruined communication with his Hungarian friend.

Since Hungarian and Swedish are so different, German had been their common language. But it was not grammatically correct German.

“For years, the supreme deity of the German language has been forced to sit in his heaven and listen to our shameless abuse of his creation, holding his ears shut and surely more than once considering finally putting an end to the misery,” Swartz writes.

When Swartz recently received a letter from his friend, it felt different. His German was suddenly much better, almost perfect.

An AI had polished his language.

“Yes – it was him. But not like before,” Swartz writes. “I no longer found his systematic grammatical errors, his fondness for certain words and phrases, the ‘Hungarianisms’ that had crept into his German.”

At that point in the text, I started muttering to myself. Oh come on, is it now bad that people can communicate better?! A solution to a problem is turned into a problem. What nonsense…

But then I caught myself. Technelegy!

Suddenly I could take in Swartz’s feeling. His friendship was partly in the uniqueness they shared. The unpolished language was a part of his friend – and now it was gone. Of course you can feel wistful about that.

At the same time, maybe technelegy can help Rickard Swartz feel hope and excitement that AI will help reduce language barriers between people, and lead to new friendships being formed.

Is there nothing then that I, as a progress extremist, miss?

After my discussion with Sasha Stiles, I started thinking. After a while, I came up with one thing: Video rental stores.

I miss walking down to the corner, spending a long time choosing a movie, buying some candy and soda, and then going home to settle into the couch. It was a bigger event than just turning on a film on Netflix. A process, almost a ritual, that made the overall experience better.

That doesn’t mean I want streaming video to disappear, but it feels good to miss video rental and experience a little wistfulness about a time that will never come back.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist

China will win the AI race, was a commonly held opinion and concern until recently. However, this viewpoint has become less vocal since the release of ChatGPT.

Many who held this belief referred to the book "AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order" by Kai-Fu Lee. Given his background as a high-ranking executive at Apple, Microsoft, and Google's head in China, later becoming a venture capitalist in China, he was seen as a credible source. U.S. Senator Mark Warner even recommended the book to others in Washington with an interest in policy.

But Kai-Fu Lee made the same mistake as many others.

His argument for China's advantage in AI was based on the need for massive amounts of data for training, which China has due to its disregard for personal privacy.

"If data is the new oil, then China is the new Saudi Arabia," he wrote.

Chinese startups are also much more aggressive than their American counterparts and fiercely market-focused. The domestic market is huge, so these startups quickly become large companies.

American startups, on the other hand, were described as vague and more focused on "disruption".

Most importantly, it was a clash of two systems. A messy democratic system, unfocused due to unwelcome changes in power. Struggling to set and execute clear plans. The authoritarian system did not have these problems and had an ambitious and clear AI plan until 2030.

These factors, he believed, gave China a clear advantage.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth

But, like many others, Kai-Fu Lee's main mistake was his faith in the authoritarian system. The messiness of democracies is not a weakness, it's a strength. The most important part of a plan is the ability to correct course.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, as Mike Tyson said.

The democratic system does not guarantee that the best decision is made at every instance or that the best leader or party is chosen. However, democracies are better at changing and correcting what goes wrong. Problems are inevitable. The best way to handle them is not to stick rigidly to a five-year plan but to be flexible and adaptable.

Since criticism is allowed in democracies, mistakes are brought to light and can be corrected. If the current leaders fail to do so, they are replaced.

This same messy system is also the best at creating new things, at innovating. The kind of "disruption" Kai-Fu Lee viewed as a weakness.

Such disruption suddenly gave the U.S. a wide lead in the AI race. The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked the beginning of a new era with generative AI. A dramatic breakthrough that changes the world.

Why such breakthroughs are much more likely in democracies than dictatorships was explained by Warp News three years ago, when many believed not only that China would dominate AI but several other areas as well. This is what Johan Norberg wrote in Opened or closed will determine China's future success:

Dictators don’t like surprises. And that is why sooner or later, their societies stagnate. Thriving, innovative economies rely on experiments, feedback and trial and error, and they are unpredictable by nature.

I also wrote on the same theme in China will not dominate the world unless it becomes a democracy:

The internet could never have been born in China. So the next internet, the next revolution of the same dignity as the internet will be born somewhere else.

This is what happened. Generative AI is a revolution on par with the internet. It was not included in China's AI plan. It was born in the messy, vague – and democratic – United States.

What happened to Kai-Fu Lee? He has started a generative AI company in China, which is based on AI technology licensed from... Facebook.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

At the 1964 World's Fair in New York, a competition was held where inventors could win 50 dollars. A young boy named Frank Walker took the bus there, dragging along a large, heavy bag. He hoisted it onto the table in front of one of the judges, David Nix.

The bag contained a jetpack. Nix raised his eyebrows and straightened his back. This was interesting.

"I guess I got tired of waiting for someone else to make one for me," said Walker.

"Does it work?" asked Nix.

"Um, yes, mostly," Walker replied, squirming. "The only thing is, technically, it doesn't... fly."

"But if it did, what would its purpose be?" Nix asked. "How would it make the world a better place?"

"Anything is possible," said Walker.

"What do you mean?"

"If I saw a child with a jetpack flying over me, I would believe anything is possible. I would be inspired. Doesn't that make the world a better place?"

"I suppose," said Nix, "If it worked. Unfortunately, it doesn't. And if it doesn't work, it has no purpose at all."

Walker didn't get the 50 dollars, but he got something that would prove to be more valuable, a pin. With such a pin, one could enter Tomorrowland.

In this Tomorrowland, dreamers and innovators gathered to create a better future for humanity. Their leader was David Nix.

One of their inventions was an AI Monitor. It could predict future risks. To get people to act faster and solve the problems causing the risks, they began broadcasting warnings about the dangers directly to the people. By frightening them, they would wake up, they thought. The effect was entirely different from what they expected.

"How do you think people reacted to the prospect of impending doom?" asked David Nix. "They devoured it hook, line, and sinker! They did not fear their decline; they repackaged it. It could be enjoyed as games, TV shows, books, and movies."

Seeing this, Nix became cynical and decided to close access to Tomorrowland. It was better to leave the rest of humanity to their fate.

"At every moment, there is the possibility of a better future, but you people don't believe in it. And because you don't believe in it, you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality."

When the dreamers and innovators left humanity to its fate, the AI Monitors' doomsday clock began to count down to zero. Soon, it was over. With a 100 percent certainty.

But then, suddenly, the probability of doomsday changed. From 100 percent to 99.9994 percent.

Somewhere out there was someone who did not accept that future. Who believed that it was the belief in doomsday itself that led to doomsday. This created a small hope, which unsettled the probability calculation.

The hope came from a teenage girl, Casey Newton. She had met an adult Frank Walker.

Exiled and banished from Tomorrowland, where he had questioned Nix, he lived alone and bitter.

When he saw how Newton's optimism unsettled the doomsday calculation, he decided to break into Tomorrowland and destroy the AI Monitor.

Of course, this was something David Nix would not allow them to do. He had decided to let humanity perish.

"You ponder over this terrible future, you resign to it for one reason: That future does not require anything of you today. Yes, we saw the iceberg on the Titanic, but we steered towards it anyway, full speed ahead. Why? Because you want to sink. You gave up."

With the help of a now functioning jetpack, Walker and Newton managed to defeat Nix and destroy the AI Monitor.

But that was, however, just the beginning.

"The hard part is not to tear down and destroy a machine that tells us the world is ending. The hard part is to figure out what to build instead," said Frank. "For that, we need you all."

"Dreamers. We are looking for those who dream," Casey added and took out new pins.

"Give them to those who have not given up. They are the future."

The 1964 World's Fair in New York was not an official world's fair. A country could not host more often than every ten years, and Seattle had hosted just two years prior. However, rules were seen at best as a recommendation by New York's legendary and ruthless city planner, Robert Moses.

To attract people despite the unofficial stamp, Moses turned to another legend, Walt Disney. Through the success of Disneyland, he had proven that he could do just that.

For the world's fair, the future optimist Walt Disney built a Progressland where a Carousel of Progress demonstrated the effect (ha ha) that electrification had on prosperity and development.

When the world's fair ended, the Carousel of Progress moved to Disneyland and Tomorrowland.

But it was a different Tomorrowland that Frank Walker had been granted access to. It only exists in the movie of the same name. Please excuse the spoiler, but the movie is almost ten years old, so I thought it was okay. Tomorrowland is definitely worth watching (available on Disney+), but not great as a movie.

The message, however, is spot on. It's the dreamers we need. The future is created by optimists. When you find them. Give them a pin.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

1994

Sweden is in crisis. Severe budget cuts. Unemployment is rising. After a 500 percent interest rate, the government had to give up and the Swedish krona floats. Or sinks, rather. Crisis packages are stacked on top of each other. It's depressing in Sweden.

But something is happening, even if it's barely noticeable yet.

Eva Lindencrona Ohlin hosts a meeting with Tim Berners-Lee in Stockholm. A few years earlier, he had created the World Wide Web. Ten people attended.

2000

Just six years later, Newsweek visits Stockholm and names the Swedish capital "the European capital of the Internet."

They are fascinated by Jonas Birgersson, Christer Sturmark, and other IT entrepreneurs and note the difference: "The Swedish economy, a wreck less than 10 years ago, has bounced back."

The article was published on February 6, 2000. The date is interesting because the dotcom bubble burst exactly one month later. On March 6, 2000, the Stockholm Stock Exchange reached its highest level to date. It had risen 80 percent in five months. The next day began a dramatic decline, the largest in Swedish history. Larger than the Kreuger crash.

But what burst was a financial bubble with crazy valuations. The ideas that the IT evangelists spread did not burst. On the contrary.

2003

Skype is founded by the Swede Niclas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis. It becomes Sweden's and Europe's first truly successful internet company. The first unicorn. A startup with a valuation of over one billion dollars.

The significance of Skype is great. As a role model, but also a catalyst for hundreds of other startups. Alumni from Skype have started 950 companies, in 50 countries, with 65,000 employees and an ecosystem value of over $3 trillion.

For Sweden, Skype was the start of a long line of successful startups. Spotify, but also a whole bunch of other unicorns. For over ten years, Stockholm has been the city that produced the second most unicorns, after Silicon Valley, measured per capita.

In 2021, it was Bloomberg's turn to visit Stockholm and be fascinated by the Swedish startup miracle: From Spotify to Minecraft, Sweden Proves Fertile Ground for Unicorns

Even if not measured per capita, Sweden ranks high. Fourth in the number of unicorns in Europe. And the population is just 10 million.

What did Sweden do right?

In an op-ed, it is pointed out that Sweden has recently started to lose pace in terms of digitization and the internet, and they wonder what we have done wrong.

It's an interesting question, also discussed at the latest Swedish AI Commission meeting.

I come to this from a different angle: What did Sweden do right in the 90s? And can we learn something useful for today's AI era?

It's something I've been thinking about for at least ten years. During my first year in Parliament, I visited about 40 startups, venture capital companies, and people active in the Swedish startup scene to try to understand just that. After I became a member of the AI Commission, I have delved deeper.

I started at the home of Eva Lindencrona Ohlin, who in 1994 hosted the meeting with Tim Berners-Lee. In addition to that, she is Sweden's first female doctor in computer science, and was deputy director general of innovation agency Vinnova.

She had baked a delightful cake and I almost ruined the good mood when I pulled out some cinnamon bun semlas from Willys.

But her husband, Tomas Ohlin, and I shared one and were jointly surprised at how good they are.

I know Tomas Ohlin because he is a Warp Premium Supporter and in this context, a perfect person to talk to. Tomas is one of Sweden's IT pioneers, "exhibited" in Sweden's Internet Museum. In the 70s and 80s, he contributed to laying the groundwork for what would become the Swedish IT miracle. Among other things, he imported the first social media to Sweden, laid the groundwork for the KOM system, proposed remote medical care, and introduced "text-TV-internet."

Moreover, he was the chief secretary of the first Swedish IT Commission in 1994.

"The most awesome commission we've ever had," he says.

One thing I got stuck on during our discussion was how positive the discussion around IT and the internet was in the 1990s. Even in the news media. Or non-negative, as Eva points out. Despite Sweden being in a serious crisis, it didn't spill over onto IT.

Trusted the citizens to use IT right

Something that another IT pioneer confirms. Christer Sturmark is today a publisher at Fri Tanke publishing, but in the 1990s he was one of the three leading IT entrepreneurs and evangelists (together with Jonas Birgersson and Johan Stael von Holstein.)

We meet at SoHo House and he provides insights from the IT commissions he participated in in the 90s and early 2000s. One of these commissions proposed the home PC reform.

It was really an impossible political reform. The government spent four billion taxpayer kronor to subsidize people getting PCs at home. It did not require them to use them to increase their productivity, or anything like that. The government trusted that people would do something useful with them.

One million people got access to a computer through the home PC reform. At the same time, Sweden began to expand broadband at a rapid pace, mainly thanks to Jonas Birgersson.

Sweden became the most computer- and broadband-dense country in the world. That, combined with the evangelists daring to dream about the future of the internet and talk about these visions, laid the groundwork for Skype, Spotify, Klarna, Minecraft, and other unicorns.

What can we learn from the 90s?

In the op-ed they write that "just enough is not enough to create a Swedish AI miracle."

I agree with that. And to achieve it, we can be inspired by the 90s.

We are now in the same situation, at the beginning of a paradigm shift. Then it was the internet, now it is generative AI.

If we get Swedes to use generative AI more than anyone else, before everyone else, we will win.

Generative AI unleashes creativity. Those who can't write, draw, code, design, or create music, can now do that. The country that first and best unleashes that creativity wins.

It will be unleashed by people becoming centaurs. Half human-half machine.

Winning is actually the wrong term here. If Sweden becomes very good at using generative AI, it doesn't stop Denmark, the U.S., Ghana, or Australia from doing the same thing. Two countries that are equally good at generative AI will not outcompete each other, they will pull each other upwards.

But even if it's not about winning, you can still come first and take the lead. The country that uses generative AI the most, will soon attract major media attention, fascinated by an AI miracle.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over," wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich in The Population Bomb in 1968.

They continued:
"In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

The Population Bomb sold over two million copies and became one of the most influential books of its time.

So, what happened? In the 1970s, a new era for humanity began, with significantly fewer people dying from starvation.

Fifty years later, Paul Ehrlich evaluates himself in his autobiography, Life: A Journey Through Life and Science. In it, he calls himself an "eternal optimist" (I am now preparing a lawsuit for false advertising). He admits that not everything in the book was entirely correct, but above all, that he was way too optimistic in his predictions (I am also considering suing him for defamation).

After reading The Population Bomb, Life, and some interviews with him, I believe Ehrlich's incorrect conclusion comes from a crucial mistake. A mistake that I believe is the most common and serious error pessimists make. He sees people as a burden, not an asset. He sees a mouth to feed, not a brain that can produce a world-changing idea and the tenacity to realize it. We have a certain amount of food, if the population increases, the food will run out. It's not that he is misanthropic (and I by no means want to demonize Paul Ehrlich); he just grossly underestimates what people can achieve. On the margin, we could increase the amount of food, but not nearly enough, and therefore he believed hundreds of millions would starve to death.

When Ehrlich was preaching doom at the end of the 1960s, just such a world-changing development was underway.

The Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug's idea was that it would be possible to develop much more resistant crops that yielded larger harvests and could feed more mouths.

Borlaug was not only imaginative, he was persistent too. Under extremely tough conditions in Mexico, he experimented relentlessly for 15 years before his work bore fruit. A plant with a thicker and shorter stalk, resistant to diseases, wind, and insects, and which yielded much larger harvests. From 340 kilos to 1100 kilos per acre, an increase of just over 220 percent.

Borlaug's work, and he himself, spread to India, Bangladesh, and several parts of the world. An American aid worker called this the Green Revolution, and the name has stuck.

In 1970, two years after The Population Bomb, Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Many argue that the Green Revolution helped to save the lives of a billion people.

Blind pessimism

Had Paul Ehrlich completely missed the Green Revolution, therefore believing in mass death? No, he even mentions it in The Population Bomb, but only briefly as "more efficient agriculture."

But his fundamental error – the inability to understand humanity's capacity – plays out here. At best, more efficient agriculture could slightly mitigate the disaster. If you combine an overly negative view of the current situation with an inability to understand humanity's capacity for progress, you can end up as far off as Ehrlich. That, more than anything else, makes pessimists naive.

The tragic part is that he hasn't learned. Not one bit. Life is based on exactly the same philosophy. Overpopulation is still a problem, not because people will starve to death, but because it leads to climate change and other environmental issues. His solution is also the same. We should go backward, become fewer, do less.

Despite the fact that progress proved his world-famous prediction dramatically wrong, he still believes that humanity is a bomb.

It's not. Living in freedom, exchanging ideas, and trying new things is a recipe for progress. Then we can solve problems like people starving to death, or having a society built on fossil emissions that create environmental and climate problems.

Humanity is not a bomb. We are a rocket.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

I have written before about Norman Borlaug and Paul Ehrlich's predecessor, William Vogt.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

In Anders Bolling's extensive examination of the sixth mass extinction, he interviewed Paul Ehrlich and calls him "the world's most cheerful pessimist."

Warp NewsAnders Bolling

Thanks to Tom Skalak, David Deutsch, Steven Pinker, Nicklas Lundblad, David Deutsch, Odd Bolin, Gerd Leonhard, Oskar Söderström, Joakim Jardenberg, Klas Hallberg, Martin Olsson, Thomas Ahlström, Richard Maltsbarger and Kevin Kelly for comments and feedback.

We are high jumping without a bar

You've made up your mind.
You're going to become the world's best high jumper!
Which method gives you the best chance of success, training with or without a bar?

Humanity is constantly evolving. But we are high jumping without a bar.

On a global level, important things like life, health, wealth, and education are improving. This is thanks to everyone who sees a chance for improvement and is determined to realize it. Most big problems are getting smaller, but progress should be faster.

This is because we have no goal. You can improve at high jumping even without a bar, but if you have a goal and measure your progress, you see faster, more powerful results.

What do we want with humanity? Where are we headed? Where do we want to go? What do you want? What do I want?

Humanity needs a goal. A direction.

Seeing the bar

Kevin Kelly writes in The Case for Optimism:

It is extremely difficult to create a desirable future without first envisioning it. To imagine is really the first step in creating anything. Therefore an essential chore for making a future we want to live in, is to imagine what it is like and how we get there.

When we envision what we want to achieve and pull together to do it, we can achieve incredible things in a short time. The moon landing in the 1960s. The Covid vaccines in 2020. The UN's Millennium Goals helped lift a billion people from extreme poverty.

Imagine if we clearly envisioned the future we want.
Imagine if we pulled together to create it.
Imagine if we had a clear goal, showing how we take humanity to the next level.

For that, we need a bar to jump over.

The solution: Warp Levels

The solution is that we decide what the next level of humanity should be. That gives us a common goal to work towards. The bar to jump over.

I call it Warp Levels.

The number of levels can be as many as we wish; we can think far into the future if we want. But the most important is the next level.

With Warp Levels we know what it takes to level up humanity.

An example of Warp Levels

It was when I made a draft of levels, that I truly understood how powerful this could be. I asked ChatGPT to make them for me, and this is the result.

So this is just a very simplified version of the levels based on the imagination of ChatGPT, and also too few levels, I think. But it might give you an idea of what it could look like.  

Decided by us

The point is that it is not just one person (or one AI), or a small group, that decides, but many. Only then do we get real diversity of ideas and levels.

If we create levels and make them concrete and ambitious but within reach, we can have a common goal to work towards. The bar to jump over.

This is what we'll achieve with Warp Levels

• More ideas, debate, discussion, and more thinking about the future. Today we seldom think about what we want with humanity. We have opinions on certain areas, like climate, economy, and political ideology, but not often broader than that. With Warp Levels, there would be an ongoing discussion about this.

• Diversity of ideas about our future. If many people think about and express their vision for the future, a lot of exciting, realistic, unrealistic, whole- and half-crazy ideas will emerge.

• A constant analysis of where we are right now in our development. There are many lists, rankings, and statistics with various measures of development, but nothing combined for what level humanity is at right now.

• Awareness of what level humanity is at. Hans Rosling, among others, has shown that people generally have a poor grasp of the world's development. With Warp Levels, we will have a better grasp of both where we are and where we are going.

• A direction for humanity, both short- and long-term. Humanity has never had a direction before. It has become what it has become. Now we would get that and not just for the next ten years or so, we can set goals for an unlimited number of levels, as far into the future as possible.

• Clear overall goals for humanity. For the first time, we get a goal, or rather thousands of smaller goals that form a larger goal.

• A large number of sub-goals that individual people, companies, countries, and organizations can work on. Each level will consist of several smaller goals. As an individual, you can contribute to one or more of them, while contributing to the whole, leveling up humanity. The UN's sustainability goals work like this.

• Global cooperation. Through Warp Levels, we would be encouraged to work together across national borders. The world would look less like a 'zero-sum game' and more like a collaborative project.

• Awareness of when we make progress. Each time a new level is reached it will be highlighted (I also think we should have a big party every time we level up!) and the work to reach the next level also creates an awareness that we are making progress, that we are not going backward.

• Creates a positive feedback loop. When we see that we are making progress and reaching new Warp Levels, it creates more optimism and motivation to continue making progress. This can create a positive feedback loop where progress leads to more progress.

• Understanding that humanity always has evolved. When problems are discussed today, many often miss that the problems have become smaller, and often they mistakenly believe they have become bigger. If we show historical levels that humanity has previously passed, from our inception, it is easier to understand that humanity is not in a certain way, but that we develop and change.

• Warp Levels are not just for optimists. If we decide to achieve important goals, people with different views on the future will work to achieve them. Who doesn't want humanity to level up?

• More will think that the future should come sooner. When we have a new level to work towards, which means a better life for many people, few will argue that we should try to reach it as slowly as possible, or not at all.

• More people will work for the future to come sooner. Many will actively work for us to reach the next level as quickly as possible.

• Everyone can contribute. The work of thinking about what levels we should have, what direction and goals humanity should work towards, and the job of getting us there is not limited to a few groups or professions. A filmmaker can visualize his opinion in a movie, an artist in his art, an engineer in his innovations, a politician in his speeches and proposals, and so on.

How do we create Warp Levels?

There are a lot of things that need to be figured out.

• What level are we at now? In order to reach the next level, we need to determine what level we are at now.

• How do you level up? Should there be a number of sub-goals that all need to be achieved? Or should we collect points?

• How do we know that progress really has been made? If we use the example of everyone living in democracy, who should we rely on to determine what proportion live in democracy? There are several different lists and rankings, which one should we choose? For each goal or sub-goal, there must be a way to verify progress.

• Who decides the levels and how? Should it be the UN? Politicians? The people? Which people in that case? Should it be done in voting, or in some other way?

• How often should the content in the levels change? It will not be possible to exactly predict what is possible in the next or the upcoming levels, and the content needs to change.

Many more questions need answers, but these are some of the most obvious ones. I have ideas about answers to several of them, but I'll save them for later. I plan to talk to many people about them and my answers will likely change.

One thing I know already. I think the levels should be decided directly by the people. Not by the UN, governments, parliaments, and politicians. They should absolutely be involved, but it would be a step forward in itself if humanity's direction was decided directly by humanity.

Where do we start?

To have a major impact on humanity's future, Warp Levels need to be adopted at least as broadly as the UN's sustainability goals. A massive task, to say the least, and it will take a long time to achieve.

But you don't have to start big. It's fine to start on a much smaller scale. Gather a group of people who give initial answers to the above questions and then decide what the upcoming levels should contain.

Then you work actively both to reach the next level and get more people involved in Warp Levels. Over time, you develop the levels and more and more people are involved in deciding, refining, and improving.

The way forward

I will now start talking to people to find answers to the many questions. When there are enough answers, it's time to start doing. To create and determine the levels.

Moreover, I will ask as many as I can about what they want for humanity. What they think the next (and the next and the next) level should be. Which bar they want to set and why we should jump over it together.

I won't be able to do this alone. Anyone who wants to help is welcome to do so.

If we succeed, it will indeed be history in the making. For the first time, humanity's future would be directly determined by humanity.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

Do you wish in the mid-1990s that you had realized how big the internet was going to be? That you could have been a Mark Cuban or Jeff Bezos? Did you understand, but not act? Or were you, like me, too young to be part of the early internet revolution?

Then you have the chance again.

The breakthrough we saw in 2022 for generative AI for creating text and image, and now within sound, music, and video can be as big or bigger than the web.

The need is enormous and immediate

And it won't take several years for the changes to start to happen. Blockchain is also a revolution, but it has required a runway that is now 15 years long, and people are still looking for the killer app (or building, if you see bitcoin as it).

The killer app for generative AI is the production of text, and it is already here. The need for it is enormous and immediate. An average company or organization produces gigantic amounts of text each year. Emails, reports, minutes, internal communication, websites, blog posts, social media - and so on. All this text can be created faster and better with ChatGPT.

Companies and organizations will soon be able to calculate how much money they will save and assess how much quality will increase. With such figures in front of their eyes, it won't be long before they implement it in their operations.

A massive wave of human creativity

Just that will be enormous - but at the same time only make up a small part of the whole generative AI revolution.

A gigantic wave of creativity will be set free.

I described that in this Optimist's Edge article:

💡 Artificial intelligence will unleash massive untapped creativity from non-professionals, by giving them the tools to create things that were previously only available to professionals.

Learning to paint takes years of practice. With AI, anyone who wants to paint only needs to learn how to use AIs that paint.

When we, via AI tools, can also create music, other types of sound and video - and of course combine them - even more creativity will be unleashed. This creativity has so far been trapped, but can now come out.

However, the most important point, fittingly enough, comes from ChatGPT:

"There may also be potential for AI to create entirely new forms of creative expression that we have not yet imagined."

Some jobs will be replaced by AI, but far more will be created from this creativity.

It's happening now

Jump back in time to 1995. Think about everything that would be built on top of the internet, which did not exist then. Think about the gigantic companies that have been created, which did not exist then. The enormous fortunes that have been built, which did not exist then. The services with billions of users, which did not exist then.

Here we are again, 2023. All this will be created again, but differently. Large companies, enormous fortunes, services used by everyone.

But not only that.

We will create new ways to express ourselves. In 1995, there was no YouTube and thus no YouTubers with millions of viewers. Of course, neither were there influencers with millions of followers and growing empires around them. And who, in their right mind, thought that something as impossible as Wikipedia would work?

Generative AI unleashes our creativity and gives us new ways to create.

But almost none of it is done.

There are dozens of low-hanging fruits.

Reach out and grab one.

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

You know the saying: We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.

A longtermist would say: We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

William MacAskill's book, What We Owe The Future, is the bible of 'longtermism'.

Longtermism is a philosophy that prioritizes the long-term consequences of our actions and decisions. We're talking thousands, even millions of years.

In his book, there is a simple but extremely powerful idea:
A change in values affects not only us who are living now, but all future generations.

A change in values affects many future generations

The abolition of slavery came from a change in values. When slavery was widely accepted, millions of people were captured and enslaved. When society's values changed, it was abolished.

The abolition affected all the slaves who then became free. But not only that. It affected all future generations where millions of people avoided living as slaves. It still affects a large number of people today who would have lived as slaves if values had not changed in the 1800s.

Just over a hundred years ago, women in Sweden were allowed to vote for the first time. It was an improvement for those who lived then, but it has impacted every Swedish woman since then.

Support for same-sex marriage in the United States has gone from 27 percent in 1996 to 71 percent in 2022. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to allow such marriages. Soon after, other states followed, and in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that it applied to the entire US.

In 2015, all homosexuals who wanted to get married could do so, which was an improvement for them. But the change in values also applies to all homosexuals who want to get married today, tomorrow, next year, the next decade, or the next century.

A global change in values affects hundreds of billions of people

If a value changes for all or a very large part of humanity, it does not only affect the eight billion people living today. It affects all these eight billion people's children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren, and so on.

Tens of billions of people. Maybe hundreds of billions of people.

New values around optimism

If we want to create a better world, it is worth investing in a change in values.

Imagine if we could create a change in values around optimism. If many more people saw the future optimistically.

The future is created by optimists; it's not just a catchy slogan on our t-shirts. It happens to be true.

Kevin Kelly explains why in The Case for Optimism:

It is extremely difficult to create a desirable future without first envisioning it. To imagine is really the first step in creating anything. Therefore an essential chore for making a future we want to live in, is to imagine what it is like and how we get there.

He continues:

On the surface, an optimistic belief might seem no more valid than the stance of pessimism. But the deep history of new ideas makes it very clear that the optimistic stance of believing something is possible is a requirement to make anything new real, and is thus more powerful than pessimism. In the long run, optimists shape the future.

Make the future come sooner

If we can increase optimism about the future, many more people will come up with ideas for a better world. Some of these ideas will be turned into research, products, services, companies, organizations, and values.

Some of them will fail, but many will have a small but positive impact on the world. A few will have a significant impact on all of humanity.

Together, all these new ideas will have a positive impact on humanity, life on Earth (and other places we choose to live).

With more optimism and hope for the future, we will get to experience these things earlier. And ideas that may never have been born otherwise will see the light of day.

Imagine

Imagine if the value around slavery had changed a hundred years earlier. How many more people would have been spared from living and dying as slaves.

Imagine if everyone had gotten the right to vote five hundred years earlier. Democracy is the strongest force for prosperity and a better society that we have invented. How much better would the world have been if that change in values had come earlier and reached many more people.

Imagine if the values around homosexuality had changed much earlier. So many who had been spared from hiding their love in the closet and being subject to threats, hate, and persecution.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
- John Lennon

Our mission

That is our mission. To make the future come sooner by bringing about a shift in values in humanity. So that pessimists, not optimists, are seen as naive.

The good news is that shifts in values can be achieved by a small group. MacCaskill shows in his book how a few people played a significant role in initiating the shift in values that led to the abolition of slavery.

If we succeed in creating a mind-shift for humanity, it will not only affect us who are living here on earth right now, but all generations that follow us.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
- Margaret Mead

Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist

Read more on why we should make the future come sooner.

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

In the first two parts of this series, we have seen how a lack of knowledge about the progress of humanity and the negative bias in media, makes people pessimistic about the future. But we also have our own brains working against us.

Availability heuristic, or bias, it’s called in psychology.

"We base our sense of risk and danger on anecdotes and images that are available from memory."

Says Steven Pinker, who, in addition to writing books on world development, is also a professor of psychology at Harvard.

This mental shortcut is used to quickly evaluate a situation. The problem arises when these anecdotes or images in our memory don’t match reality.

There are plenty of examples of availability bias with serious consequences. For example, doctors who have recently experienced an illness are more likely to make that diagnosis, even if facts point in a different direction.

Another more positive example is awards, at least for those who win them. Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and realized that the best way to win awards was to win awards:

“I soon learned that one wins awards mainly for winning awards: an example of what Bob Merton calls the Matthew Effect. Once one becomes sufficiently well known, one's name surfaces as soon as an award committee assembles."

Simon won a dozen big awards and was named an honorary doctor from no less than four universities.

Strong mental pictures

For a large part of my life, whenever someone mentioned Africa, or I read or saw "Africa" somewhere, my thoughts were drawn to the images I saw as a child. Poverty, children with swollen bellies, flies crawling on their faces.

When I began to become aware that there was a world outside of my own little bubble, there were famines in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa on the news. It affected me so strongly and the reporting was so extensive that the images were etched into my memory. So deeply that they stayed with me for decades.

Since then, I have learned new facts about Africa:

• Extreme poverty has decreased dramatically.

• Life expectancy has increased from 37 years to 62 years since 1950.

• GDP per person has increased by about 25 percent since 1990.

Africa is still the poorest and most vulnerable continent, but there has been significant progress.

My old images of Africa have finally been replaced by others. Now, I think primarily of the African startup entrepreneurs I have met. Those who speak optimistically about how they are leapfrogging into the future. Instead of building a copper network for telephony, they skipped it and went straight to mobile phones. In the same way, they can skip development stages and move more quickly into the future.

But it took several years of seeing other images for the old ones to be replaced.

Warp NewsAnders Bolling

When we are fed daily with negative news, it is easy to believe that they represent reality. Especially about things that are really awful, which may affect us deeply. Against that kind of emotion, facts are fighting a losing battle.

“People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is largely determined by the extent of media coverage.”

Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.

We are extra alert to perceived danger

Our brains are trained by evolution to be extra attentive when something could be dangerous. That was not so bad 150,000 years ago. If someone in your group had seen tigers in the distance, and now you think you see some movement in a bush nearby, just going over there and checking it out was of course a pretty stupid idea. Once upon a time, that was vital information, but now we live in a much safer world.

Hans Rosling writes in Factfulness:

“We need to learn to control our drama intake. Uncontrolled, our appetite for the dramatic goes too far, prevents us from seeing the world as it is, and leads us terribly astray.”

You can compare this to sugar intake. In the old world, it was a good idea to eat all the sugar you came across. For who knows when the next chance would come? There was no risk back then to consume too much sugar. So our bodies rewarded us when we found sugar and told us to eat everything we could. Our bodies still cling to that belief, but in a society with an excess of sugar, it is no longer a very good idea.

The dramatic, negative news is like sugar for us. Our brains suck it in because it thinks it’s good for our chance of survival. It has not yet adapted to a world where the dangers are much smaller than just a few hundred years ago.

We must learn to live in a new way. Hans Rosling again:

“Factfulness, like a healthy diet and regular exercise, can and should become part of your daily life."

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

"How can you be an optimist, don't you follow the news?" people sometimes ask me.
"No, that's why I'm an optimist," I reply half-jokingly, half-seriously.

I have great respect for journalism. I'm even married to a journalist. Good journalism is one of the finest, most interesting and most important things we have in society. Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's exposure of the Watergate scandal is the crown jewel. It shows the importance of journalism in society. Not to mention all the journalists who risk, and lose, their lives around the world when they report on corruption, warlords, oppression, and crime.

With that said, there is a lot in journalism that can and must improve.

If it bleeds, it leads

No one interrupts regular programming to tell you that everything is going well. Of course, this is understandable, but at the same time, the media's focus on negative events can skew our view of reality. Not because the news itself is wrong or fake, but because the balance between negative and positive events is wrong.

In Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now, he goes through the state of the world. Almost all of the 70 graphs in the book point in the right direction. But not the one for the media and news. The data scientist Kalev Leetaru uses sentiment mining, which assesses the tone of an article or news item. What words does an article contain, words that describe something bad, or something good?

He did this analysis on the news in 130 countries over forty years. Over those four decades, when humanity saw its greatest progress ever, the news became more and more negative. The world became more peaceful, less violent, richer and healthier than ever. If you based your worldview on the news, you would most likely think the opposite was true.

News about climate change is unbalanced

An example of this is climate change. The topic deserves a lot of attention and the dangers it poses should be highlighted in the media. IPCC's reports should be taken seriously, and the media attention around it should be massive.

Obviously, much of that reporting will be negative, because climate change is a significant problem. But the solutions and everything positive that is done to stop climate change should also receive considerable attention.

A couple of years ago news emerged that up to one million species are at risk of extinction, based on a report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, IPBES. One significant reason for this is climate change.

The report received a lot of media attention worldwide, often with the most negative headline and angle possible. The report does say that one million species could go extinct, but that scenario is less likely than other scenarios with fewer extinct species. Thus, media reporting did not focus on the most likely scenario, but on the most negative. Also, critical questions were often absent and researchers with a different view received little or no attention.

About a month after the warning from IPBES, another report appeared. It was also linked to the UN and came from the UN's top scientific adviser in the Trillion Tree Campaign. Thomas Crowther is a Professor of Global Ecosystem Ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His work aims to generate a holistic understanding of the global-scale ecological systems that regulate the Earth's climate.

You can say that professor Crowther is obsessed with trees. Or rather, the number of trees and their impact on the climate. The first thing to ask then is how many trees there are on Earth. Crowther has counted them, and in 2015 he published the study in Nature. There are a little over three trillion, 3,000 billion trees on the planet.

The next step was to find out how many trees could be planted and its impact on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, because trees that grow bind carbon dioxide. Using satellite data and machine learning, the world's soil has been analyzed based on whether trees can be grown and what kind of tree would be best suited.

The result was published in another prestigious science journal, Science. The researchers show how massive tree planting could capture as much as two-thirds of all human-caused CO2 emissions, at a low cost.

"This is way bigger than the next best solution, and this is by far the cheapest," commented Thomas Crowther.

You would think that media that report so much about climate change should give such optimistic news a great deal of exposure—especially considering all the attention given to the IPBES report a month earlier. The research from professor Crowther shows a significant counter to climate change in general, but more trees and forests could also be very good for biodiversity.

Warp News studied the impact in Swedish media, which are usually very interested in climate issues. The report on tree planting received only a tenth of the space as the report on species extinction, and often with a negative angle and critical questions in the article. Compare the headlines from Sweden's largest news service, TT, which all other media use:

"UN report: One million species risk extinction."

"Solution to climate change met with skepticism "

Of course, critical opinions are welcome, but shouldn't they be heard in both cases?

This is a prime example of the negative balance we saw in the study of the tone in news media.

Unbalanced news media gives people a distorted view of the world

The fault is not in reporting negative news but in the balance. Why should a piece of negative news get ten times more attention than a positive one in the same area? There is no rational journalistic explanation for that. (There might be other explanations.)

As we saw in the previous article on why people are so pessimistic about the future, facts matter.

"There is a clear correlation between the knowledge of facts and optimism. The more you know about the state of the world and its progress, the more positive your view of the future will be. The less knowledge you have, the more negative view of the future."

News media affects people. Negative news contributes to people having the wrong facts about the world and it affects their mindset.

That is the main reason we have founded Warp News and share fact-based optimistic news. That will help balance people's news feeds and give people a more factually correct view of the world.

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

Warp NewsMathias Sundin

There is a widespread lack of knowledge about humanity's fast, and positive, progress.

Professor Hans Rosling discovered this when his students refused to believe him when he showed them statistics on how rapidly poverty was decreasing and literacy increased.

This was unexpected because getting into that education required the highest grades and the course was in global health. Students like that should have knowledge about the state of the world.

Can the professors beat the chimps?

To get a clearer picture, he subjected them to "The Chimpanzee Test." He put together five pairs of countries where one country had a twice as high child mortality rate as the other and asked the students to choose which country in each pair they thought had the highest.

You can test yourself:

Sri Lanka or Turkey?
Poland or South Korea?
Malaysia or Russia?
Pakistan or Vietnam?
Thailand or South Africa?

If you were to write the names of the countries on bananas and ask chimpanzees to choose, they would on average get 2.5 right out of 5 possible.

The students got an average of 1.8.

Rosling also gave the test to the professors at Karolinska. The ones who each year awards the Nobel Prize in medicine. They got 2.4. Almost as good as the chimps, but only almost.

The correct answers were Turkey, Poland, Russia, Pakistan, and South Africa. They had at least twice the infant mortality rate as Sri Lanka, South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Did you have a better result than the monkeys?

If you, on average, have a worse result than just guessing – worse than random – it means you have a skewed view of the world. Your knowledge about the world is so poor that you do not guess, but answer incorrectly.

The students and the professors’ ignorance led him to found the Gapminder Foundation.

How do other people compare to chimps? Gapminder has tested the populations of several countries. Twelve questions with three options for each question. An average chimp would get four out of twelve right.

In the 2017 test, only ten percent had better results than the monkeys.

• 90 percent would have gotten better results if they hadn’t even read the questions and just guessed.

• As many as 15 percents were wrong about every one of the twelve questions.

• Zero percent had all the right answers.

• The chimps didn’t lose in any of the 12 questions.

• Of the three options, the most negative answer was usually the most common.

• On the issue of extreme poverty, most people believe it has doubled over the past twenty years when it has in fact fallen dramatically.

If one does not keep track of what fantastic progress humanity has had in recent decades and instead believes that things are getting worse, then it is of course pretty natural to be pessimistic about the future.

Hans Rosling tragically passed away in 2017, only 68 years old, but he left behind a rich flora of fantastic TED talks, funny interviews, the book Factfulness, the Gapminder Foundation that Ola and Anna continue to run and a number of people inspired by him. One of these heirs is Max Roser. He runs Our World In Data, which is bursting with statistics on the state of the world.

In rich countries pessimists are in majority

In a post, Wrong About the World, he shows that more than half of those surveyed believe that the world as a whole will be worse or unchanged in the next 15 years. Developed countries usually have the largest group of pessimists. Only a few percents think the future will be better. Japan is at the bottom, closely followed by France, Belgium and Italy.

It is in countries with a lower standard of living where you can find the optimists. Indonesia, China, Senegal, India, Nigeria and Kenya are at the top. 68 percent of Kenyans believe the world will improve in the next 15 years, compared to 10 percent of Japanese.

Facts will make you more optimistic

There is a clear correlation between the knowledge of facts and optimism. The more you know about the state of the world and its progress, the more positive your view of the future will be. The less knowledge you have, the more negative view of the future.

In the same survey as above, where people were asked about their views on development over the next 15 years, their knowledge of the world was also measured. Those who had zero correct answers about the state of the world were the greatest pessimists about its future. Only 17 percent of that group thought the world would be better, compared to 62 percent of the group that had the highest number of correct answers.

It makes sense. If you think the world is getting worse, and you are maybe convinced that it has been so for a long time, why would it suddenly get so much better in the next 15 years? And if you see what great progress has been made, over a long period of time, but especially in recent decades, then it is reasonable to assume that this can continue.

Fact-based optimism

That is why it is so important to spread fact-based optimistic news. People have gotten their skewed view of reality because there is generally too much focus on problems and misery.

One should not ignore problems or try to put a positive spin on them, nor ignore successes and try to put a negative spin on good news.

Fact-based optimism must be everywhere. In the news but also in movies, books, TV shows, political debates and when we talk to our families around the kitchen table.

Mathias Sundin
Editor-in-Chief

Chris Nolan is a multiple Emmy-winning director-writer, author, story expert, branding expert and serial entrepreneur. He is working on a documentary TV series called Protopia: The Good Future.

Destination: Protopia

Futuristic Barbara Marx Hubbard said, “The future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality.” She added, “As you see the future, so you act and as you act, so you become.”

Well, what if we could imagine a world that is continually getting better, becoming more abundant, improving our livelihood and health, and creating unheard of opportunities and possibilities? What if that were, in fact, the world we are now living in? Then, according to Hubbard, we should all be acting and behaving with optimism and hope. Yet, the opposite is true. The world is awash in pessimism and fear of tomorrow. There’s a malaise, even a dread about the future.

So, what’s the disconnect? Why is the real story of a better future not being told? Why is the truth so distorted? And what’s that doing to our imaginations? Neuroscience tells us stories affect our physical and mental makeup on many different levels. Stories can change our brains and directly impact our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and actions. They shape our world.

So, if our brains use stories to make sense of the world then how are the unavoidable and increasingly apocalyptic news and entertainment narratives shaping our worldview? It’s no wonder we can’t possibly see any good in the future. Or what Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, calls Protopia. This isn’t Dystopia or Utopia but simply a future that is getting exponentially better and better.

The Good, The Bad and Your Brain

There’s a reason these negative stories stick with us. Human brains are evolutionarily wired to be nine times more negative than positive. The more fear-based the story, the more it catches our attention. Thus, the old newspaper adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Unfortunately, this negative default mode can prevent us from seeing the good in the world (or even ourselves). When we’re always in survival mode, we have a hard time grasping just how abundant our lives are and why this is an amazing time to be alive. Yes, we have enormous challenges: The looming consequence of climate change, continued water and energy needs, geopolitical and social unrest, a growing marginalized population, species extinction, and a need for greater empathy for all living things.

But we’ve also doubled the lifespan of the average human, income around the world has tripled, and despite recent inflation, the cost of goods (food, energy, transportation and communication) has dropped 1000-fold. Global literacy has gone from 25 to 80 percent. Furthermore, technology continues to make things more available and sustainable by driving down the cost of food, energy, healthcare, and housing.

Soon the entire planet of eight billion people will be connected. When that happens the pace of innovation will be mind-boggling. AI will become ubiquitous and dramatically enhance human capabilities by allowing us to solve problems that have heretofore been unanswerable. But sadly, we don’t see progress. Because another neural glitch in our brain’s medial frontal cortex limits our ability to comprehend the speed of exponential change.

The human brain evolved in an environment that was local and linear. In our ancestors’ lives everything was a day’s walk away and the rate of change was very slow. Just over a century ago, the speed of a horse was as fast as information could travel. Now, if something happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it a millisecond later. The world has not only become global but exponential. This new era is what I call VUCA MAX.

VUCA MAX: The Future is Moving Faster Than You Think

Massive accelerating exponential change really started kicking in around 2020 during a pivotal point in human history we weren’t prepared for. In our documentary: It’s VUCA: The Secret to Living in the 21st Century — our mission was to help the world catch up to these radically changing times.

VUCA is an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It was coined by the military in 1987 to explain the uncertainty of the 20th century and is a very apt way of explaining the conditions and environment of the early part of the 21st Century, in which we were witnessing Moore’s Law — every 18 months the power of technology was doubling — and transforming the world. It’s why the smartphone in your pocket is now a million times faster, a million times cheaper, and a thousand times smaller than a supercomputer in the 1970s.

Now, the exponential convergence of Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s Law, and Wright’s Law have created VUCA on steroids. The doubling is converging and compounding. VUCA is now Massive, Accelerating and eXponential. It’s now VUCA MAX. To give you an idea just how fast the future is moving, in the next 10 years we will see 100 years of change. In the next 80, we’ll see 20,000 years.

Unfortunately, our evolutionary propensity for negativity and linear bias overwhelms us and leaves us vulnerable to our worst fears and distorted dystopian outlooks. It not only blinds us to the truth about the future, and how the future is more abundant than ever — but it also has an adverse impact on our mental health.

Can Entertainment Save Tomorrow?

There’s always been criticism of the news media and entertainment emphasizing sensationalism and exaggeration over reality. Fear-mongering and manipulation go back to yellow journalism culminating with Orson Wells’ 1938 radio broadcast of a Martian invasion.

Now, of course, we know that dystopian scenarios in movies and networks are fictitious. However, given our predisposition to fear and negativity, the entertainment media must be aware of and held both responsible and accountable for the creation and manipulation of the public zeitgeist. Going forward, I will make the augment that there are ways to dramatize narratives and even present dystopias, but still create a more balanced, realistic, and even exciting view of the future.

Tomorrowland

“Tomorrow is a heck of a thing to keep up with.” — Walt Disney.

Walt Disney was a technological innovator, science fiction storyteller, and futurologist. He dedicated Tomorrowland with the words:

“A vista into a world of wondrous ideas, signifying man’s achievements … a step into the future, with predictions of constructive things to come. Tomorrow offers new frontiers in science, adventure, and ideals: the Atomic Age, the challenge of outer space, and the hope for a peaceful and unified world.”

As part of the Disneyland television show, Walt presented three one-hour “science factual” episodes that mixed humor with hard scientific facts to give the audience an exciting glimpse into the future.

Let’s contrast that protopian vision with the 2015 movie, “Tomorrowland”. In the film, the antagonist sabotages humanity’s vision of the future by beaming horrific prognostications and the imminent collapse of the human race into everyone’s heads. And since our brains are wired to gobble up negativity and fearful information, the antagonist’s broadcasts easily transformed humanity into a pessimistic and hopeless populace without will, purpose, or dreams.

Although the villain is a bit stereotypical, the theme and plot mirrors what’s happening in our world today. Namely, that a constant fare of grim, paranoid, fearful apocalyptic programming can’t be good for our heads.

No Future Is Perfect

Hollywood movies and TV haven’t always tilted toward dystopia. The classic sci-fi movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” had some dystopian themes (everyone remembers Hal) but it also portrayed the evolutionary development and limitless potential of the human species.

Two seminal futuristic narratives of the 1970s, “Star Wars” and “Star Trek”, also had some dystopian story elements but overall, they were positive narratives with hopeful endings. Star Trek narratives took on many weighty themes including racism, religion, genocide, extinction, mental illness, sexism, morality, death, and time travel.

And even though Star Trek took place in space, the stories were always allegories about life on Earth, which is why the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises have been charting a course for a hopeful future for half a century — while many dystopian-themed programming has exhausted their storylines.

Where Is Our Lucy?

Ironically, Star Wars and Star Trek were not easy sells. All but one studio turned Star Wars down and no major studio would touch Gene Roddenberry’s plan for a race and gender-integrated crew representing the future of humanity. In fact, if it weren’t for Lucille Ball, there would be no Star Trek.

Lucy had just divorced Desi and was now running their independent production company Desilu. Star Trek was sold as a western in space, but the pilot was rejected by NBC. The series was dead. But, because Lucy was now swimming in profits from reruns of “I Love Lucy”, she did something unheard of. She paid for a second pilot and is credited as the main reason Roddenberry achieved his positive vision for the future.

Some might say dystopias are an easier sell and perhaps even easier to write. Or as British Sci-Fi writer Brian Aldiss calls them, “cozy catastrophe” stories. Many are basically horror stories with simple plots and clearly identified evil. Protopias on the other hand build plotlines calling for deeper multidimensional layers, character development, and complexity.

Positive Signs: It Can Be Done

Cory Doctorow is one of the most relentless and inventive authors writing at the junction between speculative fiction and real tech. Doctorow is on a mission to inspire positive futures. “Protopia is not the assumption that nothing will go wrong. Being hopeful means believing that when things break down, we can rebuild them. It’s still possible to model positive future outcomes and have a dramatic story.” Doctorow adds, “Disasters are where we rise to the occasion. They are humanity’s best moments, when we sacrifice ourselves for others.”

This is one of the things we addressed in the documentary, “It’s VUCA. The Secret To Living in the 21st Century”, that in times of great chaos and uncertainty, people have always demonstrated the greatest fortitude, resilience, courage, and empathy for each other. Things go wrong. People make mistakes and disagree, especially concerning the criteria used to govern technologies or how to deal with big complicated, future challenges — but we figure it out.

A shining example of a Protopia film is “Arrival” directed by Denis Villeneuve based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. It’s about a linguist enlisted by the United States Army charged with learning how to communicate with extraterrestrials that have arrived on Earth before tensions lead to an intergalactic war. “Arrival” not only provides a window into what communicating with other sentient species might look like, but it also portrays aliens as bent on saving humanity rather than annihilating it.

The Power Of A Single Image

Even a single image can change the story.

In 1966, the world was consumed by pictures of mushroom clouds and atomic bomb tests. The images of the nuclear blasts made people feel that civilisation was doomed. Being a photographer and activist, Stewart Brand knew that images change people’s behaviour. So he began a campaign for NASA to release an image of the whole Earth in space.

Brand even made-up buttons that asked, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the Whole Earth yet?” When NASA finally released the image of the Whole Earth taken by NASA astronauts, this single, hopeful, beautiful image blew away the dark atomic clouds.

People not only saw a brighter future but it helped create what became the transformative ecological movement. We were no longer passengers on a planet, we were the crew and responsible for its wellbeing. This one image changed the story from humanity being capable of destroying itself with technology to humanity being capable of discovering itself.

Sixty Seconds To Protopia

As a branding and storytelling expert, I’ve had first-hand experience with the power of story and messaging. One of the best examples is Apple’s “1984” considered the greatest TV commercial ever made. It opens in a dystopian world that’s disrupted by a singular woman who hurls a sledgehammer at a giant screen displaying the Big Brother broadcast — destroying it. Not only did the revolutionary ad almost single-handedly bring computers into the mainstream, changing the world as we know it, but it defined in our minds Apple’s protopian vision of the future of technology.

We now envisioned computers as empowering individuality and saving humanity from a bleak future of control. A control represented at the time by the giant computer behemoth Big Blue or IBM. Today, Apple is the most valuable company in the world whereas IBM no longer sells personal computers and is one-tenth the size of Apple. It’s a stark example of how the stories we tell about the future contribute to how we imagine the future, which in turn can become reality.

Bringing The Future Home

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired and former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review (the descendant of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog) postulates:

“Perhaps at this stage in civilization and technological advance, we enter into permanent and ceaseless future-blindness. Utopia, dystopia, and protopia all disappear. There is only the Blind Now.”

Kelly continues to hope that our current future-blindness is only a passing phase that future-blindness is not an inescapable or permanent affliction of our modern world, which brings us back to storytelling.

Once Upon a Time in America we were so excited and awestruck by the possibilities of the future that we celebrated progress with a worldwide story known as The World’s Fair. New York World’s Fair featured “The World of Tomorrow” and people came back from it proudly sporting buttons that said, “I Have Seen the Future.”

I grew up in Seattle where The Century 21 Exposition in 1962 (also known as The Seattle World’s Fair) saw the construction of the Space Needle, now the iconic symbol of The Jet City. Century 21 featured a futuristic monorail and a trip to a better “World of Tomorrow” which, ironically, was during the height of The Cold War. “The World of Tomorrow” began with a ride in the Bubbleator, a 19-foot diameter spherical Plexiglas elevator. General Electric and Johnson’s Wax built model home interiors that brought the future home. It explored the life of the woman of tomorrow, featuring a household with “push-button ease” for everything but changing the baby.

World’s Fair’s partnered with leading American companies and entertainment companies to educate people about the future. At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Disney debuted four major attractions including Ford’s Magic Skyway, It’s A Small World sponsored by Pepsi-Cola/UNICEF, Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln from the State of Illinois, and General Electric’s Progressland. These attractions eventually became part of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. And, following their success, Walt moved forward with Project X, which would become EPCOT — the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

These World’s Fairs helped humanity visualize, celebrate, and physically experience technological progress and the benefits of the future. Unfortunately, the last World’s Fair in the United States took place in 1984.

A Way Forward: Urgent Optimism

Jane McGonigal from The Institute For The Future believes, “This is a time for urgent optimism.” We need to flip the script on the dark future otherwise heading into the unknown has little value. In other words, we have to believe the struggle is worth it. But to do this, the future needs champions.

Whether the story is presented by an entertainment company, a corporation, a city expedition or an individual with a vision, we need to embrace Protopia narratives and experiences. Stories that become a force for The Good Future and positive stewards of renewed optimism. By guiding the world toward a more realistic view of the future, we empower people, especially younger generations, to believe things are getting better, not worse — and give them hope and inspiration that they can meet the grand challenges of tomorrow.

Today, young people are chronically pessimistic and depressed about their future. In a recent survey of 16 to 25-year-olds in ten countries over 50 percent said, “humanity was doomed”, which is why it’s more important than ever to behave as if the world is evolving not collapsing. It only takes one person with the vision and the right story to change the consciousness of the planet.

As Barbara Hubbard said: “How we see the future determines our story, how we act, and become.”

Let’s uplift imaginations toward the unimaginable possibilities and abundance ahead. Let’s reverse fear and the dystopian zeitgeist by creating stories that can change the world for the better and inspire bold vision and ambitious action. And empower people to become the heroes of tomorrow’s stories.

Chris Nolan

Chris Nolan is a multiple Emmy-winning director-writer, author, story expert, branding expert and serial entrepreneur. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

His latest documentary It’s VUCA: The Secret to Living in the 21st Century. His latest book is VUCA MAX: The Future of Leadership and Peak Performance Coaching

He is working on a documentary TV series called Protopia: The Good Future. It is part of The Good Future Project.

On a stunning sunny morning on the way to school with my 9-year-old, I open the front door and exclaim: “Welcome to your beautiful world!”

My daughter retorts with a sullen look: “No, it’s a terrible, polluted world.”

Another time, I ask her 11-year-old sister, who has just arrived home from school, what she learned today (all kids love that question, right?). Her reply: “That your generation has destroyed the planet.”

So, that’s just great. The Debbie Downers of our time have quietly claimed my kids. And they are, unfortunately, not the only victims. By now, the study that shows a majority of young people believe humanity is doomed has topped every news site and the topic of climate anxiety has given birth to a new genre of despondent reporting.

“The level of anxiety can be crushing,” trembles the National Geographic in a newly written screed that kicks off with a millennial couple recounting how they wrestled for a decade (!) with the “ethical quandary” of whether to bring “another human onto an already crowded planet.” (she wanted to raise a “climate ally,” he feared for the child’s future).

The article keeps the gloomy personal stories coming. A 17-year-old in Brooklyn considers shelving his dream of becoming a history teacher; how is he going to be able to explain to his students why “we didn’t do anything” about climate change? Another teen in the same borough shares what it’s like to grow up “in the shadow of a ticking clock.”

For youth overcome by despair, there is a course on eco-grief at the University of Washington that teaches grieving rituals and mindfulness. But I pity no one more in the article than the 4-year-old boy who bursts into tears when he realizes his mom set the table with a container that can’t be reused or recycled.  

“That hit me really hard,” the mom says, apparently not reflecting on who bears responsibility for scaring the bejesus out of her son.

Fortunately, for worried parents, the media also has an affinity for writing, “How to talk to your child about climate change.” I do a search myself and end up on Motherhood, a parenting site, where the “anxiety-inducing” topic is presented alongside “5 Powerful Quotes by Greta Thunberg,” including the classic, “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic…” The next stop on my online journey is a national morning show that chose an image of a burning inferno to illustrate a segment on talking climate with kids (“Tell the truth” “Talk about feelings”).

My truth

Here’s my truth: The best scenario for kids is for the media to stop acting like a megaphone for the doomsday faction of the environmental movement and for adults to resist falling for every sensational headline. Taking the climate threat seriously does not need to be synonymous with treating every absurd claim as a profound truth. No, my generation has not destroyed the planet. No, humanity is not doomed within a certain number of years. There is — surprise — a whole bunch of people who actually “do something.” In fact, they do more than most people will ever know since what they do can’t be turned into panic-triggering storylines.

Until the media makes nuance a hallmark, I will tell my kids to treat apocalyptic headlines like tobacco ads (I borrow this idea from the journalist Matt Taibbi). To read another doomsday tirade by a one-note columnist is about as good for your health as chain-smoking a pack of cigarettes.

So, what happened to the couple that debated whether to have a baby? Well, their son arrived last year. The new dad even admits his baby boy has cured his “activism-depressing climate despair.” Nihilism, he has realized, is no longer an option.

Ulrika G. Gerth is a Swedish native who lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three daughters.

Air pollution is exhaust gases and particles that occur in harmfully high concentrations, usually due to human activity. The negative health effects of air pollution became particularly evident after hundreds, in some cases thousands, of people died as a direct consequence of smog in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. One of the most noted cases is 1952's "The great smog of London", which is estimated to have caused up to 12,000 deaths.

In 2020, around 90 percent of the world's population breathed polluted air. According to the WHO, air pollution is one of the biggest global health challenges of the coming decade. Awareness of air pollution's damage to people has increased as the long-term health effects of air pollution have become increasingly apparent around the world. But how does it look in Sweden?

Of the 26 Swedish air pollutants that the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency measures, 24 have decreased in absolute numbers during the period 1990–2018, while Selenium and PCBs increased. In several cases, it has been a matter of sharp reductions in emissions, for example reduced emissions of lead into the air by 97 percent. Emissions decreased at the same time as Sweden's population increased by roughly 1.6 million and the economy almost doubled.

Reduced by 52 percent

On average, these 26 emissions have decreased by 52 percent since 1990. The high-performing group includes Lead (-97 percent), Arsenic (-86 percent), Sulfur oxide and HCB (-83 percent). After that comes an intermediate layer with several reductions in the range of 70 to 80 percent such as Nickel (-75 percent), Mercury and Chromium (-74 percent). The majority is found around -50 to -65 percent. Then there is a smaller group where the reduction was below 50 percent. Related to per GDP unit, the decrease was even greater as GDP almost doubled during this time period, as seen in the table below.

Table 3. Air pollution emissions 1990–2018. Emissions are given as a percentage of 1990 levels. In the column on the far right, the emissions have been put in relation to the increase in GDP of 85 percent that took place during this time. Source: The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Taken from the Statistics Norway statistics database).

Why have emissions decreased?

How did it happen that emissions decreased? The reduction in emissions of volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides over the past 30 years comes from the transport sector. Catalytic exhaust gas treatment is the biggest explanatory factor. Catalytic converters for passenger cars were first introduced in the United States in 1975 due to the 1970 Clean Air Act with requirements to reduce emissions of toxic substances from internal combustion engines. Over the years, the regulation of emissions has been tightened, which has resulted in more efficient exhaust gas treatment.

Between 1990 and 2018, the reduction in emissions of metals, particulates, persistent organic compounds (e.g. dioxins) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) has mainly occurred in the industrial sector through efficiency improvements and better purification equipment such as electro-filters and scrubbers.

The industry performs best

There are large differences between different sectors regarding the emissions of these 26 air pollutants, industry has performed best with emission reductions of 66 percent, followed by Heating (-47 %), Domestic transport (-43 %), Solvents (-43 %) and Agriculture ( -14 %). Electric and district heating, Waste and Work machines are largely unchanged. Foreign transport is the only category that has seen a clear increase in its emissions (+66%).

The development is often attributed to stricter limit values ​​for emission standards and the application of best available technology. The IPPC directive (Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control), which was adopted by the EU in 1996, meant that emission limit values ​​would be based on best available techniques (BAT - Best Available Techniques). The principle means that the most effective established technology to protect the environment and which is at the same time technically and economically applicable must be used. The EU draws up so-called BAT conclusions, which specifically reflect the current best available technology.

Political measures have paved the way

Political measures such as taxes, subsidies and, in the next stage, outright bans seem to have paved the way for Sweden's environmental successes and made it rational for economic actors to both conserve resources and develop new technology.

Sweden has reduced the vast majority of air pollution emissions over the past 30 years. Some emissions have decreased only marginally, such as ammonia, while some have decreased by up to 97 percent, such as lead.

At the same time, Sweden's economy has almost doubled and the population has increased by roughly 1.6 million since 1990, which means that we get more out of less.

Although much remains to be done, the results are encouraging. More for less appears to be possible through a combination of streamlining, new technology, taxes and legislation.

Jonas Grafström, researcher and deputy CEO at Ratio
Christian Sandström, assistant professor at Ratio and Jönköping International Business School

The basis and figures are available in the book Mer för mindre? – tillväxt och hållbarhet i Sverige. Read more about the book here (Swedish).

Warp NewsJonas Grafström

The logic of individualism has been dominant in Western capitalist society over the last century.

But it wasn't always like this. For millennia everything had been shared in traditional extended families: from living space between humans and animals, to every material good such as clothes and tools, to raising children or caring for the elderly.

This was a reflection of the natural order itself, as in every ecosystem all living beings are closely linked to others and nothing is considered useless.

This concept of sharing and interdependence has gradually been lost with the advent of industrial development, economic growth, and the linear economy. In a world where everyone can easily buy what is needed for their livelihood, sharing resources is often seen as an unnecessary hassle.

This kind of society has produced many benefits, it's useless to deny it, and has led to great prosperity within a few decades. But can we find something even better?

What if we voluntarily change the rules of the game?

Although no one hopes to return exactly to the lifestyle of centuries ago, some new industrial, organizational and social models, based on sharing and on the evidence of the interdependence of all living beings, offer interesting win-win possibilities.

Sharing raw materials

The main option is that of the Circular Economy, which is actually very linked with sharing. Just think that by creating circular and interdependent supply chains it's possible to start from a single raw material - shared between sectors that are originally separated - to develop products very different from each other, without wasting even a drop.

What does it mean? Gunther Pauli, founder of the Zeri project, in the book Blue Economy presents some efficient ideas and projects.

For example, mushrooms grow by consuming food waste and make a high protein food and are therefore perfect vectors for a circular economy. One of the largest and most waste-producing industries is coffee: about 99.8% of the coffee coming out of a plantation is discarded.

By integrating the two industries, therefore cultivating mushrooms on coffee waste, it's possible to reduce the costs of mushrooms production as well as speed up its processing.

This integrated industrial model translates into:

• a large increase in business by about 15 billion more for the coffee industry if it also integrates the production of mushrooms

• new jobs, estimated at 50 million globally

• lower environmental impact

Let's take tomatoes instead: the tomato skins commonly discarded could be reused in the tomato supply chain itself, in other food industries, but also to produce red pigments for coloring clothes, red lipsticks, and anti-UV sun creams.

Why doesn't this happen commonly? Because taken individually, these tomato-based processes would not be economically convenient. But integrated all together in a production line of tomato-based food, dyes, lipsticks, and UV creams could be overall economically affordable.

The lesson here is that getting out of the core-business logic, by embracing several market areas that share the same raw materials, could produce multiple benefits.

Sharing resources locally

One branch of the circular economy is called Industrial Symbiosis. It means building large industrial districts where resources are shared locally between various players, creating a large common body, in which:

• materials are managed jointly so that the waste of one becomes a free resource for the other

• heating and cooling cycles of several industries are shared so as not to require energy to operate

• water and electricity are managed by a single network, minimizing losses

• local integrated management makes it possible to exploit the resources present in neighboring industries, even for completely separate supply chains, with zero transport needs

A famous and widely documented example of industrial symbiosis is the Danish district of Kalundborg. Founded in the 1960s, it originally consisted of 6 private partners, including the world's largest insulin producer, Novo Nordisk, the world's largest enzyme producer, Novozymes, northern Europe's largest sewage treatment plant, largest power plant electric power plant, and the largest oil refinery in the Baltic region.

An analysis of Kalundborg flows carried out in 2015 quantified the economic savings for that year at about 24 million euros. The reduction in water consumption is estimated at around 25%. In addition, 5,000 houses receive district heating thanks to district operations.

Although counterintuitive, sharing resources can therefore lead to greater independence for a community at the local level.

Sharing the use of a product

Perhaps it is not immediate to understand, but sharing any product's use is a winning logic. You are entering the world of the real Sharing Economy and the so-called Product-As-A-Service (PAAS).

Many products are already managed with the as-a-service mode through the payment of a fee. Just think of Spotify or Netflix: you don't have any music CDs or DVDs with movies, however, you have an infinite amount of multimedia available through a single platform.

This logic applied to tangible products such as cars can lead even to greater benefits.

Let's think of car-sharing services like Share'nGo. The supplier doesn't sell a material product but a service: hours of driving. The efficiency and maintenance of the car is a responsibility of the supplier, who therefore takes advantage if the car is efficient and always well maintained. Otherwise, it would lose out economically as well as credibility.

But what happens when the manufacturer itself sells a service and not the product?

For example, Ikea is promoting the Circular Hub project to supply furniture by subscription. The big difference here is that the manufacturer remains the owner of his product, so it's much more convenient for them to develop long-lasting products as well as easy to recycle as the contract ends.

Software, cars, furniture, tires, houses (Airbnb), clothes (Rent my wardrobe). All products can be shared efficiently, in order to have fewer properties but better and more comfortable services.

Warp NewsMaria Eriksson

Sharing ideas

Even more complex to accept than sharing materials, waste or products is sharing ideas. Although the world of scientific research is increasingly open to sharing inventions and research, industry works in reverse. Every little innovation is covered by a patent and applied only to a single company.

Far from proposing the abolition of industrial secrecy, many companies are promoting research through Open Innovation. This means sharing product design and development ideas in partnerships with other industries, companies, research centers, users, and consumers.

The simplest examples are open-source software platforms such as Mozilla, where both the product and the source code are freely available to everyone. Another example is Samsung, which employs collaborative research strategies extensively through several ventures, partnerships, and start-ups.

In Local Motors they went further as product development is completely open by means of a co-creation platform, available for engineers, developers, or simple car enthusiasts. You don't even need to be registered to their platform site to see and contribute to the new designs.

Instead of decreasing their earnings, open innovation promotes the further development of companies and projects, focusing on the best ideas and speeding up their translation into a product available on supermarket shelves.

Sharing the benefits

Nature does not think as individuals but as whole ecosystems.

The rules of nature and physics cannot be changed, but those of the economy and of our industry and society can.

To build a more eco-sustainable and comfortable world, to promote social equality but also new business, a good option is to increase sharing and embrace a common vision of the world.

We are not individuals but a species inserted in a deeply interconnected world. It's a fact, and by reasoning according to reality, we can discover so many benefits that we do not even remotely believe possible.

Warp NewsMarco Borsari

Warp NewsMarco Borsari

WISDOM OF CROWDS, part 2.

The first part can be found here.

At the Warp Institute we want the future to come sooner. That is our mission, because we are convinced that the future will be better than the present, and very much better than the past.

To show that the future is bright, let us look at two points in human history.

When humanity took off

Around a campfire a hundred thousand years ago, a group of sapiens of the genus Homo sat. They had obviously learned to control fire, and had some simple stone axes as tools, but otherwise, they and their relatives had not done much in the over two million years they existed on the planet. They couldn't talk to each other, had no clothes, no boats, could not fish, did not sew, did not grow food and had no domesticated animals.

Yet this particular species, Sapiens, within a hundred thousand years, would take full control of the planet, and even leave it and take a step out onto another celestial body.

If the progress had continued at the same rate as the first two million years for Homo, or at the same rate as the first hundred and fifty thousand years for Sapiens, this would not have happened. They, we, would probably still be sitting there by the campfire.

So, what happened?

It was not a physical change. Anatomically those humans were the same as we are now.

The acceleration of human development began a hundred of thousand years ago and has accelerated ever since. At first a slow acceleration, but then about three hundred years ago we pushed the petal to the metal and more has happened in the last three hundred years than in the three hundred thousand years before that.

The reason for the acceleration a hundred thousand years ago and three hundred years ago is the same.

The secret to our success

Joseph Henrich is a professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and Head of the Department with the same name. In his book The Secret of Our Success, he shows how our collective intelligence is behind humanity's progress. That we learn from each other and build our knowledge on the knowledge of others and, all the time as a collective, become smarter.

When we couldn’t share our knowledge between groups of humans, the knowledge constantly died out. One step forward, one step back. For example, if someone makes a better stone ax. This person maybe teaches others in the same group, but if something happens to this group of people without the knowledge being spread to other groups, it will die out. And if that happened, there was no way to find the knowledge again. It was gone, until someone invented it again. No Google to search, not even Altavista.

That must mean that this situation changed a hundred thousand years ago. Otherwise, progress would still be almost at a standstill. The only reasonable cause for the change is that enough people lived close enough to each other for a period, so that knowledge could be spread between different groups.

That theory was tested by three other researchers, Mark Thomas, Adam Powell and Stephen Shennan, in an article published in Science. They note that the population density in eastern Africa, ninety to one hundred thousand years ago, reached the level required to confirm Henrich's theory.

For the first time, ideas began to spread among enough people that more knowledge would survive than die out. Knowledge began to accumulate. Humanity received a collective intelligence.

Does that mean the strong acceleration of the last three hundred years is also due to the increased spread of ideas and knowledge?

Democracy is humanity’s best innovation

That's exactly what happened. In the 1600s and 1700s, we began to establish democracy and freedom of expression (and a scientific revolution with a method to evaluate ideas.)

I showed in the last premium article the tremendous collective intelligence that comes from independent thinking individuals, and that was what we got back then.

"Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act independently."

James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds.

More people's ideas were allowed. We tested more ways to do things. We learned from each other, we rejected bad ideas and embraced those that were a little bit better. We also now had the printing press where we could store, mass-produce and spread ideas cheaply.

This wealth of ideas led to even better, cheaper and faster ways to store and spread ideas. Telegraph, telephone, phonograph, radio, television, fax, mobile telephony, computers and internet.

We are now at a time when half of humanity lives in some form of democracy and half of humanity has access to the internet. The opportunity to spread ideas and build new knowledge on old knowledge is better than ever before.

With each passing year, the opportunity becomes even greater, as more people leave poverty, more people get basic rights, more people get access to school and the opportunity to spread their ideas on the internet.

The formula for humanity shows that the future is bright

The opportunity to think freely and access to technology, that is humanity's simple, yet so very powerful formula.

That is why the probability of an even better future is greater than ever. For a hundred thousand years we have given ourselves greater right to think freely. To have more, better, and cheaper ways to spread ideas through technology. There is no reasonable reason why this development would stop. On the contrary, it is most likely that it will go faster.

That makes it reasonable that the future will be bright.

However, it does not happen through magic, not automatically.

We must constantly give ourselves more freedom and improve our technology. Half of the world's population still does not live in a democracy. Half of all people do not have internet access. It is our job to help everyone get that opportunity.

Then we can make the future come much sooner.

Mathias Sundin

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