The Whole Earth Design Project Launches A Worldwide Appeal For VIGs

NEW YORK - Sept. 4, 2013 - PRLog -- The Whole Earth Design Project is sending out a call for an international army of volunteer information gatherers to participate in an audacious and ambitious effort to design a virtual economic system in cyberspace as a possible template for the real world.

    The goal is to envision an ecologically and environmentally sustainable economic system capable of providing every individual on the planet with all of life’s essentials.

    According to Walter Szykitka, organizer of the project, such an objective is clearly attainable. “We have an abundance of human and natural resources, and we have a deep understanding of the physical, chemical, biological, and electromagnetic forces operating on this planet. All the ingredients are there.”

    “What we want to do,” he said, “is allow our imaginations to run wild with the possibilities of a world in which we use all our technological and scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of all humanity. Perhaps we can paint a vision of the future so appealing that people will work to make it a reality.”

The WEDP was inspired by the great futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, the designer of the geodesic dome who understood early on that we are all, crew and passengers alike, fellow travelers on Spaceship Earth. In the Sixties he proposed, but was never able to fully launch, what he called The World Game, in which successive teams of experts were to join in the search for a way to “make the world work for all humanity.”

     Similarly, the WEDP plans to rely heavily on hundreds of individuals and organizations that have been identified as possessing extensive knowledge and experience relevant to the project’s objectives. The first stage of a four-stage effort will involve authoritatively establishing the feasibility of providing everyone on Earth with all of life’s essentials. This will involve the organization of ten workgroups (consisting of volunteer information gatherers, or VIGs), each group focused on one of ten of life’s essentials: air, water, food, clothing, and shelter, as well as access to communication, information, transportation, health care, and energy.

    Participants in the various workgroups will contact those experts to solicit their help in assessing the present situation and in determining the best way forward in respect to their particular areas of expertise.

    “At the outset,” Szykitka explained, “we want to find out what needs to be done and what we have to work with. We want to know the answers to two questions in respect to each of ten essentials:

    “1. What percentage of the planet’s population now has access to that essential?

    “2. What would be required to provide access to the rest of the population?”

    When each of the workgroups has received input and guidance from a wide range of experts, they will be asked to use all that expertise as the basis for articulating an authoritative consensus.

    Then, when all ten reports are completed and the results are integrated into a single presentation of the planet’s resources and needs (accompanied by statistics, charts, and graphs), the WEDP will have established that the objective of providing for everyone on the planet is feasible. In other words:

    THERE IS ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE!

    Thereby undercutting scarcity as the justification for capitalism and competition’s role as the dominant and ruinous ethos of our era, while at the same time laying the groundwork for imagining a world in which cooperation becomes the prevailing social principle. At least, that’s the expectation.

Szykitka, who characterizes himself as “an unreconstructed Sixties radical utopian,” received another source of inspiration for the WEDP in 1968 when the Beatles released their White Album, which included a track called Revolution, with the following lyrics:

    You say you want a revolution.

         Well, you know, we all want to change the world.

    You say you got a real solution.

         Well, you know, we’d all love to see the plan.

    The explosive emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement two years ago clearly exposed the widespread and deep levels of discontent with the present system. And the Occupy Movement’s characterization of the widening economic divide as between the 1 percent and the 99 percent proved to be a highly effective meme. However, it is generally understood that what the that movement lacks is what the Beatles wanted to see: a plan

    The Whole Earth Design Project is Szykitks’s attempt

to organize a collective effort to produce such a plan.

The call for VIGs, therefore, is a call to those who are looking for a way to get involved with a unique and exciting group effort to point the way forward at a time of growing social, political, and economic unrest.

    Because the WEDP has great educational potential, Szykitka hopes that economics professors around the world will get their students involved. Retirees, many with valuable expertise and experience, and who may be looking for something exciting to get involved in, are also seen as potential participants, as well as activists of all ages and circumstances who may have a few hours available to help bring together the pieces of this planetary vision.

Those interested in participating in this project, in becoming volunteer information gatherers, are invited to write to info@thecoalescence.net. They are asked to provide information about themselves, whether they have any particular expertise to contribute to the project, and which of the ten workgroups they would prefer to work with. Szykitka expects the VIGs to be offered specific research assignments by the end of September. Any living in the New York metropolitan area are invited to join the Whole Earth Design Project Meetup group at www.meetup.com.

    To learn more about the project, visit the website at www.design.thecoalescence.net.

    To learn about the social philosophy on which the WEDP is based, read Szykitka’s book -- THE COMING GLOBAL COALESCENCE – How Powerful Evolutionary Forces Are Transforming Seven Billion Individual Humans Into a Single Harmonious Social Organism -- online at www.thecoalescence.net.