Translator: Dora Dzvonyar Reviewer: Sohaila Ashraf
Imagine this:
It’s nighttime.
You’re sitting at home on your sofa, watching television.
Suddenly,
the lights go out, and your TV goes black.
You get up slowly from your seat and feel your way to the window.
Outside, everything is dark, too.
You notice the silhouettes of your neighbors
who've stepped outside to see what’s going on.
You realize, this is a power cut.
A blackout.
How do you feel?
I must admit, blackouts make me nervous.
Maybe professional paranoia
from someone who's worked in the energy sector for too long.
(Laughter)
But seriously.
I believe prolonged and widespread blackouts
are a major threat, especially to large urban populations.
Why?
Because our survival has become totally dependent on electricity,
on energy in general, and on the tools we feed with this energy.
Today I want to share a vision of a new energy system with you -
a system in which tools and technology do play an important role;
a system, however, in which free and responsible humans take center stage,
not people enslaved by their tools.
But before we go to the future, let’s look back into history -
the history of Energy Man,
the human being in search of a better life.
What do the pyramids of Egypt
and the Cologne Cathedral have in common?
Both were built primarily with the power of the human body.
For tens of thousands of years
the muscle power of Metabolic Man is driving the economy.
Metabolic Man, on average, burns 2,500 calories,
some 80% of which go straight to his basic body functions.
Only the rest can be externalized
for hunting, for seeking protection from the cold, or simply for slaving away.
Metabolic Man is dreaming of more energy.
More energy for basic human needs,
like safe food preparation, reliable heating, or clean lighting.
At the end of the Middle Ages,
with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
Metabolic Man taps into new sources of energy
outside the human body,
notably coal, oil, and gas.
He transforms these new energies into electricity or uses them directly.
At the same time, he develops new tools - power tools,
not only for transportation but also for household chores -
this, by the way, is a washing machine -
and for communication.
Increasingly, his new power tools
free Metabolic Man from physical slave labor.
Metabolic Man becomes Industrial Man.
Industrial Man is the ruler of his new tools,
and now these tools drive the economy.
Industrial Man starts dreaming.
Dreaming of a society, a leisure society, in which tools do all the work for him.
He starts to believe in progress, innovation, and limitless growth.
At the same time, he falls victim to marketing
and becomes a hyper-consumer.
He wants more comfort, he wants more speed,
he wants more things, he wants more stuff.
Ever larger quantities of energy are needed to support his lifestyle.
At the end of the 20th century,
this lifestyle is not only polluting the air,
his lifestyle is also eating up land;
it’s separating his home and his workplace;
and it’s isolating Industrial Man from his neighbors.
If Industrial Man wants to go from A to B, he must use transportation tools.
These tools eat up more space and more energy.
Marketing tells Industrial Man that cars mean freedom, mobility, and speed.
In reality, though, they just turn him into a commuter.
Industrial Man consumes large amounts of energy,
yet only travels at the speed of a bicycle.
Transporting his child from home to kindergarten, to school and back,
he's practically depriving it of its feet.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Industrial Man gets radically new tools.
Marketing tells him that these new tools are "smart."
smart phones,
smart homes,
smart meters,
smart grids,
smart cars,
smart cities,
smart contracts.
At work, Industrial Man spends half of his time
simply trying to cope with the new tools.
At home, an artificial intelligence starts talking to him.
Somewhere out of sight, his children escape to online worlds
because real spaces have become lifeless.
Industrial Man’s smart new world depends on huge server farms.
They gulp vast amounts of energy.
They are owned only by a handful of global corporations.
These corporations’ power to control billions of people
could not have been dreamt of by any king, tyrant, or ruler of the past.
Industrial Man doesn’t feel smart at all.
He feels exhausted, lonely, and powerless.
His body, mind, and soul, they all need technical help.
Industrial Man feels he has become
Prosthetic Man.
Prosthetic Man cannot live without tools anymore.
They have taken control of his life.
It’s dark.
Prosthetic Man wakes up and realizes
the tools that were meant to liberate him have enslaved him.
Some of you look a little bit sad now.
(Laughter)
Let’s see if we can find a way out of this misery.
Here’s a quote from Ivan Illich, the Austrian-American philosopher:
"People need new tools to work with
rather than tools that work for them.“
The key feature of these tools, according to Illich,
is their conviviality.
Conviviality, derived from Latin, stands for "living together.“
Convivial Man is a maker, not just a consumer.
He acts autonomously and interacts with the people around him.
Convivial Man designs tools according to his taste
and puts them to use in caring for others.
Now, what are the convivial tools we need for a new, human-centric energy system?
Tool number 1: The real group.
Not the Facebook group, by the way, and not the WhatsApp group.
Real groups of people are perfect convivial tools.
That’s because they are containers
for skills,
for tradition,
and also for passion.
What’s more, groups allow people to come together,
to work together, and to pursue goals.
But do groups have the power to transform our energy system?
To answer this question, let’s look at a local example.
Here in Munich, there’s a housing cooperative
named WOGENO.
Twenty-five years ago, the WOGENO founders had a dream.
They wanted to live in houses that had no landlords,
houses with affordable rents,
houses that were free from speculation and gentrification,
and houses that would support an ecological lifestyle.
In the tough Munich property market,
with only a handful of Deutschmarks in their pockets,
the WOGENO founders started the quest for their first own house.
Today, a quarter of a century later,
the WOGENO cooperative owns 23 apartment buildings all over Munich.
These buildings accommodate more than 1,000 people.
One of the latest WOGENO developments is the multi-generation living quarter
in the district of Forstenried in the south of Munich.
The project is a cooperation
with the local Waldorf school parents association.
On the 20,000 square meter site
there is a kindergarten, a school, a gym, a market garden, and a canteen.
Plus an apartment building that accommodates some 70 households.
In addition to housing,
the WOGENO people also took back responsibility for their energy.
Specifically, they started producing their own electricity
and to share it with friends, family, and neighbors.
This brings us to convivial tool number 2:
Human-scale machinery.
Take affordable and easy-to-use micro power generators.
Or the combined heat and power station in the basement of the Forstenried project
Here, two relatively simple motors
simultaneously produce heat and electricity.
Ecologically sound,
they extract the full energy from the gas they burn.
More human-scale machinery:
Electric vehicles
like cargo bikes or small cars, all available in a sharing scheme.
It goes without saying that these vehicles are fed
with self-made electricity from rooftop or basement.
Last but not least, tool number 3:
Convivial software.
And this is what my team and I are working on.
In 2010, we met the people from WOGENO.
We felt immediately that their group culture
could be the future of decentral energy.
WOGENO was strong living proof of concept and confirmed two of our core assumptions.
First, affordable and easy-to-use micro power generators
just fascinate people.
They just want to share with family, friends, and neighbors
what they have produced.
Secondly,
that the internet offers a great way
to build meaningful software.
Software that allows groups of people to coordinate their efforts
in pursuit of a sustainable future.
So at BUZZN, we went to work and developed convivial software tools.
One such tool is a display which aims to visualize
an invisible commodity like electricity in a group context.
This bubbly chart is delivered
to the staircases of the Forstenried project.
The big outer circle represents the current-owned power generation.
Each blue bubble inside represents one household or other consumer.
The chart gives all passers-by an intuitive understanding
of the current supply/demand situation and how they perform as a group.
This, in turn, is an opportunity to change behavior
and pursue targets like self-sufficiency.
Today, for example,
the group has managed to source almost all of its electricity locally
from own sources.
In other words, its autarky level is at 99%.
Energy groups also need tools for administration,
especially tasks that formerly were done by a utility company.
Meter data needs to be collected.
Invoices must be printed.
User data must be managed.
To name just a few.
Currently, BUZZN is used by some 2,000 households across Germany
who either give or take power in their group.
Some 40 million households in this county alone
are still waiting to be organized in the spirit of convivial energy.
It’s dark.
Prosthetic Man wakes up and realizes
the tools that were meant to liberate him have enslaved him.
I do not believe that phones, homes, grids, or meters will ever be smart.
What I do believe, however,
and what I’ve learned from dozens of projects in Munich and elsewhere:
Humans can be smart.
Smart in the sense of understanding that too much energy
and tools too powerful are destructive.
And smart in the sense of designing convivial tools
that allow them to care for the people and the environment around them.
Now, if you want to take back responsibility for your energy,
if you want to take back control over your tools,
then please drum up your family, friends, and neighbors,
put some solar panels on your roof,
start producing your own electricity,
develop software that’s helping and not manipulating people,
and start sharing energy with your group!
Thank you.
(Applause)