In short, we need a new renaissance – we need an era in time where we are brave enough to assess and overthrow the ideas that have gone before us and sweep in a new form of modernity based on science and deep understanding of the humanities. A key aspect of the renaissance period was interdisciplinarity – polymaths spanned the boundaries of science, maths and humanities.  In our new version, however, we need to also span environmental sciences in a much deeper and broader way.

Instead of walking away from education and scholarship, we need more of it forging a path forward and illuminating parts of the way towards socially, environmentally and economically sustainable societies.  Interdisciplinarity at its very core requires cooperation around data and communication of knowledge. Ideally, this would push our political classes far beyond the current rhetoric and into depth of understanding about how to change our world.

As we realise we need to travel less, pollute less, consume differently and ensure a transition to a just and sustainable world, we will need to move towards loosely-coupled coordination methods, ones where high-level agreements can be complemented with regional and local implementations. For example, we at DCentral have placed this as the core of our research agenda – using data and decentralised technologies for the creation of sustainability and social good. Through taking an interdisciplinary approach – combining Economics, Cybersecurity, Information Systems and Design disciplines, we are working to redefine our expectations of decentralised technology and our understanding of the structures of democratic systems themselves in the era of digitalisation.

There is no reason that the digital economy of the 21st Century needs to be organised the same way as the one of the 20th Century. Data now forms the basis of large parts of our economy – but we have done little so far to truly grasp that, engage with it or build out new methods of cooperation. Data both requires new methods of co-ordination to genuinely ensure data is put to work for all, and places in our hands the very tools of the new modes of coordination that we need. We cannot, however, rely on our old models – we need to think through at depth our deepest assumptions of how we should organise human activity, how we should engage with our physical world and those species that share this space with us. We cannot find these new models in our established modes of cooperation – we have no choice but to build new ones.  Rather than fear these changes, we need to accept them for what they are – features of a dying social order – and start to build new connections and new structures of collaboration that work for our entire planet.