Posts Tagged ‘kondratieff cycle’

About the Next Wave of the Kondratiev Cycle

Thursday, April 17th, 2014

The Future Center Smart Systems will be launched, 23-4-2014 in the Hague.

To prepare for the interactive part of the meeting this document has been written to provide some Food for Thought.

What is a Future Center?

A Future Center is a place to connect and innovate. We want to create an environment that facilitates interaction and stimulates collaborative action. We want to support cross-innovation and make it possible to make new combinations. Last but not least we want you to challenge Science to produce valuable insights at the right time and the right place.

A Future Center is a Smart System. At this moment it is an interaction system that helps Humans to innovate. In the Future we wil automate the Future Center and automate the innovation-process itself.

What is a Smart System?

A Smart System looks like a human being. It is equipped with a Sensory-Motor-System, a Mind, Imagination and Emotions.

Smart Systems senses the outside (and his inside) world with much more sensors-types than the five sensors of his human look-a-like.

A Smart System is able to react very fast with its predefined processes on a event that is detected by its sensors.

A Smart System is an adaptable system. It is able to analyze and improve its behavior, communicate with a human being and other Smart Systems in an understandable way.

Smart Systems are there to compensate the human biases. Smart Systems are able to transform and optimize everything that contains some kind of structure.

Smart Systems  can optimize software, data and content using software/data/text-mining, analyze patterns, predict the short and sometimes the long term.

Smart Systems are perfectly suited to provide the knowledge needed and answer the questions humans ask. They are able to train humans in an almost real situation using simulators.

Smart Systems can be fun to play with.

About Cycles

In 1931 the US Department of Commerce assigned Edward Dewey the task of discovering the cause and underlying dynamics of the Great Depression. Dewey created a special institute called the Foundation for the Study of Cycles that is still in existence.

The most interesting observation of Dewey is that Cycles restore themselves all the time and are connected by a Harmonic (“Musical”) Pattern. Dewey discovered that we cannot control the Cycles.  Ups and downs are a fact of life.

The most researched Cycle in history by far is the Kondratiev-Cycle named after the Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev. The Kondratiev Cycle has a periodicity of 52 years.

The Kondratiev arises from the combination of basic innovations that launch technological revolutions that in turn create leading industrial or commercial sectors.

In the year 2000 the Kondratiev was at his top and is now in a decline that will take 26 years.

Currently we are in  the Kondratiev Spring Phase. It is the time of what Schumpeter, a big fan of Kondratiev, called Creative Destruction.

The old structures are dying and the new structures that will start the new upward wave are created.  It is a time of tremendous disruptions.

About the Software Factory

The last wave that started around 1950 was dominated by the rise of the centralized computer.

This computer was based on the factory-model of Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor of the previous wave.

Between 1950-2000 isolated creative programmers united in big software factories that are controlled by unified standardized methods and processes. Between 1950-2000 the programmers automated their own processes.

The methods are now transformed into standardized (BPML-)process-models that are abstracted into standardized (VDML-) business models that are filled with Industry-Models. An example is the ARTS-model that covers Retail.

Creative programmers are now replaced by creative business-modelers.

About the Next Wave, The Network of the Human Mind

On Christmas 1990 Tim Berners-Lee working at CERN published the first version of The World Wide Web. He launched the theme for the next wave, The Network.

From 1950 until 2000 the causal linear manual processes were automated but now the next level, the network of the human mind is at stake.

At the end of this wave around 2040 or much earlier as some people predict, the machines will imitate and surpass the human because they will unite in a global brain that can be connected to our Brains if we want that to happen.

At this moment we are creating the memory-banks of the Global Brain by producing billions of connected parts that contain complete human life’s, theories, music, movies, measurements and much more that we are now unable to imagine.

A Short Scenario for the Next Forty Years

It is clear that the Business-Domain-Models will speed up the process of value-chain-integration and value-chain-reversal.

This means that the customer will be in control of the value-chain en there will be direct contact between customer and producer. Value-chain-integration will in the end remove all the intermediaries in the value chain.

Value chains will finally converge into one standardized value chain. Best-practices of separate value-chains will become leaders in the new value-chain. Cross-innovation, combining the best of all worlds, is the way to move on.

To give customers control of the value-chain producers have to simplify their products and make it possible for the customers to create their own version of the product they want.

Products have to become configurations of simple building blocks that can be split into variable parts and infrastructure.  Product-configurators will connect to other configurators. This makes it possible to create completely new combinations.

In the next step the data that is produced by the systems will be analyzed and processes will not be controlled by human made models but by models that are created by statistical pattern recognition tools. The systems will understand humans and predict human behavior and adapt themselves to the human needs.

In the last stage the software will produce an image that reduces the complexity of its whole. It will create a virtual human world that gives us the illusion that we are still in control.

At that time most people will play and not work.

Challenges

The most important question you have to ask yourself is if your company is part of the “old world” that will finally be destructed by creativity or is already part of the new wave.

The big problem is change management,  how to move from the current state to a for most companies and institutions unknown future. Companies, Institutions and People have to transform their collaboration patterns,  their software, their data and their expertise.

The change process is accelerating. Almost all companies and institutions (and governments) are stuck in their installed base of software and their hierarchical organization structure that is not created to respond fast to the challenges that come from the outside word.

LINKS

About Smart Systems

About The Industrial Revolution

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

industrial revolutionThe Industrial Revolution started with the mechanization of the textile-industry (1740-1790) in England.

A new collaboration concept the Mill, later translated in the Factory, is invented. The Industrial Revolution is preceded by the Renaissance.

The Renaissance is a Creative Phase.

The Industrial Revolution is a Social phase. A Social phase changes the way people cooperate.

Small scale cooperation structures were destroyed and replaced by large-scale cooperation structures.

The Industrial Revolution not only changed the way people cooperated in labour. It also changed the way Cities and Countries cooperated.

At the end of this phase (the Second World War) Europe and the World (UN, China, and India) started to Unite. Cooperation on the Level of the World became possible but was finally not realized.

The French Revolution (1789) breaks the power of the Aristocracy. The Bourgeois (the merchants, the entrepreneurs, the middle class) use the Mill to produce cheap standardized products on a large scale. They became the new Rulers of Society.

The mill and later the factory not only destroyed the Aristocracy.

It also destroyed the Small Scale Collaboration Structure of the Guilds. The Guilds, operating on the level of the City, took care of almost everything at that time.

They operated hospitals, educational facilities and insurance. When the mills turned into factories many people lost their job. The big cities were populated with very poor and hungry people.

Nobody took care of the sick and the old. They became the Prolitariat, the Under-Class. The existence of the Prolitariat produced a huge tension in society.

russian revolution2This tension was resolved when many pressure groups or movements (Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, and Communists) finally agreed upon new large scale institutions.  

The State, Parliament, Democracy, Voting, and The Union came into existence.

The Social Welfare State was constructed. Government took care of almost everybody.

The first Cotton Mill was opened in 1742. In 1762 Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny. It was operated by hand.

With the invention of the steam-machine (1769, Watt) manual labour was not needed anymore.

In 1785 the first mill was opened that used a steam-machine (the power loom).

The Steam Machine became a Major Paradigm. It highly influenced Physics (ThermoDynamics, Entropy) and Psychology (Freud).

steam_engineIn 1781 Kant wrote his book Kritik der reinen vernunft. He excluded the Imagination (illusions) and the Emotions (love, care, values, quantity) out of reasoning and introduced the concept of mechanized thinking (Logic). Kant excluded Art (Imagination) and Religion (the Emotions) and invented Science.

Mechanized (Scientific) Thinking was used to Optimize the Mill. Slowly it grew into a (big) factory. At the end of the Industrial Revolution Logical reasoning produced its most briljant artefact, the All Purpose Computer. The Computer became a major Paradigm.

The-Railroads-Of-The-World-124Between 1790 and 1840 the world was covered with Railroads. They facilitated the spread of the Industrial Revolution.

Cities flourished and died according to the distance to a railroad station (A node). Many infrastructures were created in this period (Telephone, Sewers, Water, Gas, and Electricity). Later the concept of the railroad was implemented in Traffic (Highway) and Computers (networks, hubs, servers). The Railroad Network became a major Paradigm.

Mechanic thinking resulted in Standardization. Between 1890 and 1940 Mass-production, Mass-consumption and Mass-media dominated society.

TFordThe first step was set by Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor with the production of the T-Ford. The theories of Taylor are until now (most of the time not recognized) used in many forms to optimize work-processes.

The end of optimization is reached when everything is turned into a Utility. A Utility is a Network that operates without Human Beings and transports Objects.

When we look at the Industrial Revolution from a higher perspective we can see the elements of the Cycle at work.

A phase of Creativity is followed by a Social Phase. It is the phase of Power Conflicts (Competition) and the construction of new Movements, new Groups and finally of new Institutions (The State, The Corporation).

The Hierarchy was the major control paradigm of this period. Everybody wanted to move to “the Top”. The Race to the Top was also visible in architecture. The SkyScraper with the Management at the Top became the Symbol of Power.

watching tvThe Industrial Revolution gave the Masses, the Slaves of the Middle Ages a better place. They changed from a Slave into a Consumer.

The Slave was dominated by his Owner. A Consumer is dominated by his Senses. On the Macro-level we see a move from the world-view of Control/Social (Master/Slave) to a Sensory/Social-pattern.

Will Mc Whinny called the Game of Sensory/Social The Game of the Market. The Industrial Revolution produced the Game of the Market.

At the end of this period the Masses controlled the Market. We are now in a demand oriented economy. This created a big problem for the mass-producers.

They controlled the masses and are desperatly trying to keep their position by Manipulation of the Media.

What is Going to Happen?

stock marketOn the level of the Kondratiev-cycle (Period 50 years) a phase of Creativity and the Individual was started in 1950.

This phase ended around 2000.

The move to the Individual challenged the structures of Mass-Production. People wanted to be treated as a Unique Human Being.

Industry found a solution to this need. They invented Mass Customization and User Involvement and went on with the Game of the Market.

This phase is now followed by a Social Phase (Start 2000). The Customer (the new Ruler) is organizing itself in Smart Customer Networks.

The Very Long Cycle (Precession, Period 25.000 years) and the Cycle of Culture (Periodicity 1250 year) is also changing its focus.

On the level of Culture we are moving to the Centre. We are converging on a new and unknown level, Earth. During the Social Phase of the Industrial Revolution huge collaboration structures were formed (EG, UN, NATO, China, India, …). These structures are challenged by the Individual in the Next Phase. The solution of this conflict is a network of small local structures that is part of a large global network (“Think Global, Act Local”).

The precession cycle is moving from the Dark Phase into the Light. This is the most interesting and unknown development. Current Human history has never experienced a shift from the Kali Yuga to the Golden Age. The Golden Age is a period of intense spiritual development, a movement to a New Level of Conscioussness.

It shows itself in a move to religion and mysticism but also in a new awareness about what is really happening in the world.  This new awareness is frightening to most of the people. They cannot understand the major changes that are visible. The predictable future is gone. Everything is on the move and the movement is excellerating culminating in Point Omega, the Big Leap into Nothingness.  

Long Term Phases always dominate short term phases. The effect of this will be tremendous and almost unpredictable.  An unpredictable future is a Future without a Perspective.

Some people expect a dramatic negative change. They are waiting for the Apocalyps. Some people expect the Return of Paradise and a jump to a higher consciousness.

I really don’t know what will happen.

If you read my blogs I am constantly trying to find the solution of this very complex conjunction of cycles. I keep you informed. 

About Fools, Pyramids and Bubbles

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

foolsDuring the so called E-Commerce Bubble allmost everybody believed that when you sell something on the Internet you will become an instant multi-biljonair.

I did not believe this at all. The funny thing was that almost nobody believed me. I waited for the Bubble to burst.

To my surprise the E-Commerce Bubble became the biggest bubble I ever experienced. At a certain moment I even started to believe I was wrong and something really special was happening, The New Economy.

Later I discovered the reason why the Bubble was able to grow to an extreme proportion. The Long Term Economic Cycle called the Kondratieff-Cycle was at that time in an UP-mode. The Economy was expanding and many people were looking for a nice investment opportunity.

When the Bubble exploded the Kondratieff was moving Down and the Exploding Bubble excellarated the downfall.The Kondratieff will start to rise again around 2020. Until that time we will be in a state of Recession.

The people that promoted E-Commerce believed that Commerce was all about Communication. Just Tell Everybody You are There and Business will Come. But When Everybody is telling Everybody that they are selling Something Nobody will Find you. To find you they have to know what they are looking for. People used a search-engine to find what they were looking for.

E-Commerce created a new problem. The problem was “how to Manipulate a Search-Engine”. The problem was solved by the Search-Engine itself. Just Pay us and we Put You on top of the List. At that time I did not realize that the biggest money-maker in E-Commerce would be the creation of a “fraudulent” search-engine.

At that time we believed the only type of company that would benifit from E-Commerce was a Mail-Order Company. Amazon.COM was our favorite example.

I knew that the Old Companies were unable to create a Website with a connection to the Back Office. Their Legacy Systems would block them.

I reseached Logistics, Languages, Legal and Fiscal Issues and the big Cultural differerences between the many Countries in the World you could reach with one simple Website.I found out that there are a lot of questions you could ask about Commerce that many people never asked because Normal Commerce was “Just Happening”. We are immersed in Commerce and take many things for granted.

I got in contact with people in the US that where doing the same research. We decided to create a European CommerceNet. The EG asked me to participate in a big effort to solve the problems of SME’s in E-Commerce. We identified many issues that had be resolved.

Finally the Bubble exploded.

the-foolEconomic Bubbles are happening all the time. The simplest explanation for the appearance of a Bubble is The Bigger Fool Theory. When you buy something and your investment becomes questionable you believe you will always find a “a bigger fool” who pays the price of your life. Humans are positive thinkers. They believe they will always make a profit.

The bigger fool theory is an example of a positive feedback mechanism. Everybody feels things will go up. If this happens they want to become part of the tremendous success. What many people don’t realize is that positive feedback has to be compensated by a negative feedback.

Everything in the Universe is expanding and contracting. People who are entering in the beginning of the rise make a lot of money. People that join when the decline starts lose everything. A Bubble is a very complicated, unbalanced, unfair and sometimes even fraudulent exchange-mechanism. A fraudulent exchange mechanism is called a Pyramid-scheme or a Ponzi-Scheme. A Bubble is a Ponzi-Scheme where nobody is playing Mr.Ponzi.

In the E-Commerce Bubble many people used the Ponzi-Scheme to make a lot of money. I don’t want to offend my collegueas but I am convinced many financial advisors knew the Bubble would burst some day and did not tell this to the people they were advising. They did not tell the truth for many reasons.

They were completely ignorent about the technology and the effect of the technology on companies but the most important reason was sadly enough the fact that they were making a lot of money themselves. They became greedy. Greed is the Fatal Attractor behind all the Ponzi-schemes.

Economic Theorists proved that the Ponzi-Scheme can also be applied to other areas of our society like The Housing Market and the Government Pension System. All of them will finally end in a Bursting Bubble. The people that will win are always first users. The Housing Market Bubble is already exploding, The Pension Bubble is on its way.

LINKS

About Entrainment and Bubbles

How Socrate changed the Cycle of Western Civilization

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

SocrateMany people Project their Knowledge of the Now to History. They Think that People Thought the same Thoughts many years ago.

To understand the Spirit of The Time we have to understand the Historical Context People lived in. One way of doing this is to look at a shared foundation and study the Historical Variations on the Central Theme.

This idea corresponds with the Insights of Micheal Bahktin. He called the central theme The Chronotope, “The place where the knots of narrative are tied”. I used his theory to have a look at the Cultural Cycle of History.

I combined the theory of Bahktin with the Economic Cycle Theory of Kondratiev. To my big surprise Kondratiev and Bahktin use a different periodicity (50, 250 years) of the Cycle but the stages of the Cycle were the same.

What surprised me more what that the periodicities of the Cycles where related by the factor Five. When you know the basic periodicity the only thing you have to do is multiply or divide by five and the same pattern, the Basic Fractal of History, emerges. The Five or the Pentagram shows itself in every culture on Earth. When we transform this structure in three dimensions it shows itself as a Spiral or a Moebius Ring.

A beautiful example of a projection of the Now on History was a visit to the Cave of Lascaux in France. An anthropologist was explaining to us what we were seeing.

The Cave contained many Spiraling Abstract Paintings. She told us that the Cave was used for rituals and the many pictures we saw had a symbolic meaning. I did not believe that because the theory of symbolism was “invented” by de Saussure (1857-1913).

The people that lived in the Cave had no idea of Symbolisms and Symbols. They just painted what they “saw” in the Outside World and the Inside World. If I place myself in their Context I cannot Imagine they were Thinking a lot. I feel they were Experiencing Nature in all his states of Wonder and Terror. Imagine what a beautifull Sky they were experiencing every Night and you will understand why the Sky Father was the major Force they felt.

The people that lived at the time of the Cave of Lascaux always situated their Holy Places at the crossings of important Ley Lines. These Ley Lines represent the Spiraling Knots of the Electro Magnetic Field of the Earth (the Earth Grid) .

Highly sensitive people can still feel the PowerPlaces and it is not strange to assume that the sensitive people at that time (“the Sjamans”) could do the same. Just like the Current Sjamans they could travel Space/Time by performing Rituals (Spinning, Chanting the Sacred Tones), Lucid Dreaming or by eating Sacred psychoactive plants like the Peyote and the Amanita Muscaria (the Soma).

Symbolism was a theme of the Spirit of the Time of a stage in the development of the Kondratiev Wave that operated between 1890 and 1940. It was the time of Standardization (Control, Plan).

The stage before this stage (1850-1890) was related to Energy (Ego, Self, Desire, Fire). It was the time when the Steel Mills were created, the research in Chemistry started and Alexander Noble invented Dynamite. I was able to map every phase of the Kondratiev Cycle to the Cycle of Bahktin.

The 5 phases of the Kondratiev Cycle (5×50 =250 years) could be summarized at a higher level, the Industrial Revolution. I found out that the Industrial Revolution was a Social Movement. A Social Movement is always preceded by a Spiritual Movement, the Renaissance.

I started to map the Cycle again with a periodicty of 250 years. The time-interval between 1450 and 1700 is called Renaissance. It is the stage of the Spirit and Ideas. The model fitted.

I went back 5×250 years (200-450). In this time Christianity was created by the Roman Emperor Constantine I. He used the widespread Cult of Mithras to introduce Christianity in the Roman Empire. Again we are in the stage of the Spirit. The Model fitted.

I jumped to a higher level of the Cycle (The Cycle of Civilizations) and travelled further back in time. I arrived at the time of the Cave of Lascaux. At that time many caves contained “abstract pictures”. The pictures look like Spiraling Spirals.

Later the spirals where placed in a Medicine Wheel and connected to Animals (Eagle, Bull). The same animals appear in the Medieval Cathedrals but now they are related to the Apostles. Even the medicine wheel (a labyrinth) can be found there.

If you walk this wheel in the Cathedral it will point you to all the important stories that are told. Just like the Medicine Wheel the Cathedrals (build by the (Free) Masons) where an educational tool to tell about the Spiral of Life. Suddenly I saw the big picture.

Every step in the Cycle was nothing but a new way to show the “same thing” again and again. The spiralling spiral came back all the time but on a different level.

What happened around 550 BC?

At that time an Innovation in Religion came into the World. This innovation can be summarized by the famous statement of Socrate Know Thyself. The same statement can be found in the Gospel of Thomas and is also the central theme of the teachings of the Buddha. The Gospel of Thomas is a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Gnostic Library of the Essenes, dated 50 BC.

Jesus said: Whoever knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything . . . But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty“.

Boeddha became an Inspiration in the East. Socrate and Jezus were killed. From that time on an enormous amount of people were killed in the West when they wanted to Know Themselves, find the Whole in their Inner World.

They could not experience the Roman Religion through A System. Know Thyself was a huge threat to the Rulers of Western Civilization. Constantine simply took over Christianity to preserve the power and made it into a Roman System. A system of Laws to Obey. He practiced the old Roman trick of Divide and Conquer to save his Empire.

Between 1450 and 1700, the Renaissance, the tides started to turn. It took another 250 years (1950) before the people in Europe started to find their own Identity again. We are now in the Stage of Individuality of the Cycle and are slowly entering the state of Empathy. It shows itself in the many attempts to create Networks (Communities). The Internet is one of the major Western technological inventions to support this.

The Cycles of East and West (and North and South) are coming together. The Eastern Cultures embrace Western Culture and the Western Culture embraces Eastern Culture. We can create Harmony by a fuse of everything the Human Race has Learnt when a new cycle started around 550 BC.

The Cycle of The Earth is almost at The Breaking Point. According to many environmental scientists we will soon experience a very fast Reorganization on the Level of Earth. The long term cycle of Earth is restoring itself.

Not only Earth will restore itself. The original Spirituality of the civilization of MU, will be restored. An ancient Bhuddist prophesy speaks of the darkest hour of the Dark Age, when the rivers of materialism burst their banks, and plague, famine, greed and warefare beset desperate people everywhere.

That Dark Age will soon end and the new Golden Age will appear. Many living buddhas are now here to bring the precious healing Dharma to anyone ready to receive it.

Prepare Yourself for a Spectaculair Change

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

About A year ago I was writing a strategy for a company. Suddenly I got the idea I was writing something I had already written a long time ago. I got the feeling that “History was repeating itself”.

I started to investigate and suddenly I found a Pattern. The pattern I found was the Kondratiev Cycle.

Behind the Kondratiev Cycle another pattern appeared. Kondratiev related the cycle already to the Seasons. The Seasons where at time also a subject I was investigating.

I was very interested in Acupuncture and Chinese Philosophy. I already found a mapping of the World Views to the Seasons and the theory of narratives of Bahktin. With ease I could translated the themes of the Kondratiev Cycle to Major Narratives. I made a picture and started to calibrate. The dates I found where significant.

Another insight appeared when I started to have a look at the website of The Cycles Research Institute. This Institute has gathered a immense amount of data about cycles.

The most interesting document was a document of the Founder of the Institute (Dewey) where he tried to explain strange relationships between cycles that were “independent”. What he found was something he called Harmonics. Harmonics are created when waves are entangeld. They can be compared to overtones in Music.

The last and most dramatic insight came from Ray Tomes. He found a pattern behind the pattern of the harmonics Dewey discovered. This is his main conclusion “The Universe consists of a standing wave which develops harmonically related standing waves and each of these does the same“.

If you are interested in Religion you will you notice that he is writing a very old “mystical” statement. He is writing about what people in India call The Svara.

The proper translation of the word Svara is the current of life-wave. It is that wavy motion which is the cause of the evolution of cosmic undifferentiated matter into the differentiated universe, and the involution of this into the primary state of non-differentiation, and so on, inand out, for ever and ever. The Svara is the manifestation of the impression on matter of that power which in man is known to us as the power which knows itself“.

The pattern behind “History Repeating itself” was the Current of Life Wave.

What I also found out is that the numbers behind the pattern were related to multiples of 5. I started to calculate “Important dates” and “Major Overtones (Harmonics)” and went back as far as 5000 BC. The pattern fitted. I was completely overwhelmed by the regularity of the clocks and the many levels that were in Motion. The Universe was playing Music, The Music of the Spheres.

The last thing I did was to use the pattern and move forwards in Time. I found a remarkable date (2012). It was the date where many many cycles of history would harmonize (A major conjunction) and “start to swing back“. At that time I did not know about the predictions of the Maya’s and others. I learnt about that a year later.

I can tell you one thing.

Prepare yourself for a very spectaculair time ahead.

Nothing will stay the same.