This paper is a summary of an Aspen Institute sponsored in-depth roundtable session, written from the perspective of one informed conference observer (Bollier). The participants are leading thinkers in the many complex areas this paper covers (economics, systems theory, human behavior, human futures, information technology evolution, etc) and are listed on page 57. A selection of their key insights shared in the paper are listed below:

A "push" economy is geared towards mass production, anticipating consumer demand, and routing resources to the right place at the right time, to create standardized and mass produced products. By contrast, a "pull" economy is based on open, flexible production platforms that are used to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products, "pull" model companies are demand-driven, and assemble products in customized ways that serve specialized or local needs, usually using "rapid" or "on the fly" processes.

Several global corporations are moving towards "pull" methods, and away from "push" models; ie., Toyota, Dell, Cisco, Li & Fung. These companies employ different variations of Value Network models, that share information about overall network performance and best practices for serving specialized needs, among hundreds or even thousands of partner companies that make up the network. This creates an intra-network knowledge commons. Some companies also work closely with Open Source Software projects, thereby expanding their "pull" network, and expanding their knowledge commons into a broader Open Commons via Open Source Software project contributions. Thus, "pull" business models also tend to be Network Value-Increasing, and Commons-based business models as well.

"Pull" models can also be platforms for creating "increasing returns dynamics." This is due to "pull" models being based around loose and flexible networks that are already configured to scale as growth occurs. So, growth does not incur the huge overhead costs in administration that "push" models must contend with. Pull platform key characteristics include modular and loosely-coupled networks, open channels that better harness the passion and commitment of innovation communities. "Pull" platforms also will tend to influence public policy with regards to education and innovation, as more companies tend to gravitate towards the "pull" models.

The areas where "push" models tend to succeed in business are in areas where people do not know what they want, and prefer to shop from pre-made selections (Ikea, Home Depot). However, there are even "pull" models to found here, in the form of user-driven innovation, such as mountain biking, extreme skiing, hot rodding, etc. In these pro-amateur niches, customers don't necessarily know what they want, but do want to be a participant in the "pull" network that creates the product.

How do you tax a product that is made in 23 different countries? "Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them. This will influence laws about intellectual property, education, taxation and more.

"Pull" economies are not just centered around finding creative ways to "outsource/offshore jobs" away from one place and to the places where "labor" is "cheaper". Successful "pull" models have encouraged and aided "insourcing", where more jobs are created, for instance in the United States by "foreign sources (a total of 7 million cited by this paper), than are out sourced (a total of 600,000+ cited by this paper). This is because pull models seek out, not just the "cheapest" labor, but the best ways to add value to the production networks. So, they can scale to many participants around the world, regardless of local labor costs, to find the best participants needed for specific specialized productions.

The social dynamics of "pull" models are highly centered around creating relationships of trust, sharing knowledge, and close cooperation among network participants. In "pull" models, non-market value creation (tacit knowledge, intangible value) is generally steered towards a commons-based model. A commons is used as a "collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably." Many of these commons are made possible by networked information technologies (the internet).

Bollier suggests that "if online commons are going to be useful to business, companies will need to do more work to develop protocols for identity and reputation management". This is because the use of the commons is based around trust. It also due to the need for ways to measure qualitative value in intangible assets beyond money, like knowledge, individual performance and value multiplication, and network wide performance/value multiplication.

Roundtable participants also noted that "pull" models will pose challenges to current education regimes that are centered around training people to participate in "push" economies. One of the participants mentions that " Computers, software tools, and Internet resources make possible some radically new styles of learning. By using pull-based systems, students can function much like businesses in the pull environment: They can access resources they don't control and put themselves into flows of activity, rather than just building inventories of static, objectified "knowledge."

The authors distinguish between emotions that operate primarily in dyadic relationships and emotions that operate in a significant manner in collective contexts. The authors examine the evolutionary role each emotion and cite research about ways these emotions might contribute to the creation and maintenance of cooperative behaviors: "This chapter is premised on the claim that human cooperation is profoundly shaped by, and perhaps only possible because of, emotions. We will examine the manner in which different emotions shape behavior in cooperative contexts…Although framed within an evolutionary psychological perspective, our goal is not to present definitive evidence of the validity of this particular approach, but rather to spur future investigations of the role of emotions in cooperation. Toward that end, on an emotion-by-emotion basis we will both briefly describe a variety of existing findings and present a number of hypotheses, specifying discrete, testable predictions whenever possible."

Emotions that are primarily dyadic include romantic love, gratitude, anger, envy, jealousy, guilt righteousness and contempt. Romantic love is seen as a means of overcoming a barrier to the kind of cooperation we see in parenting -– the temptation to defect in the short term on a relationship that requires a long-term investment. "A number of investigators have suggested that some emotions can be understood as mechanisms design to commit people to behavior that yields long-term payoffs, thus overcoming the temptation for short-term defection. Romantic love, a universal human emotion that underpins pair bonding, appears to be such a mechanism."

Where romantic love is about how one feels about another person, gratitude addresses how one feels about somebody's behavior, and can be an emotional currency that binds one to reciprocity. "Gratitude focuses both attention and a positive, affiliative orientation on a party who has supplied the actor with a substantial benefit. In the context of its initial elicitation, gratitude seems to prompt the actor to recognize a valuable interaction partner and subsequently signal a willingness to reciprocate."

Why do people get so angry when someone cuts ahead of them in a queue or in traffic? This is clue to the evolutionary advantage of anger as a means of protecting ones own interests, but when it comes to the thus-far unexplained human propensity to punish cheaters, even at a cost to themselves, anger might be instrumental in conferring advantage to a group that requires monitoring and sanction of free riders in order to maintain a public good or create an institution for collective action: "If gratitude is elicited by receipt of a benefit, its opposite is anger, elicited by actual ar attempted exploitation or harm. More formally, anger is the response to the infliction of a cost. In addition to showing an "irrational" willingness to reward generosity, subjects in behavioral economics experiments also show an eagerness to punish uncooperative partners…Together, these results clearly demonstrate that even within the confines of finite anonymous games, angry individuals often place paramount importance on harming the transgressor, and are willing to incur substantial costs in order to do so."

The commonsense view of social evolution as the product of choices made in the marketplace of cultural possibilities resulting in the continuous betterment of the human condition is flawed.

The rise of civilization, paradoxically, reduced the natural limits separating societies. In such a situation, Schmookler's Parable of the Tribes describes how, in a situation in which two or more actors desire to exploit a limited resource, power becomes important and a contaminant of the possibility of peaceful co-existence:

All of a group of tribes living within reach of each other choose peace. However, if all but one choose peace, there are four possibilities for the threatened neighbors:

• Destruction.
• Absorption and enslavement.
• Withdrawal to a less desirable place.
• Imitation of the aggressive behavior.

Technological innovation and “improvement,” far from making things inevitably better, can extend the reach of aggressors throughout the world.

Cultural homogenization and the diminishment of diversity happens both through benign, commonsense choice (i.e., innovations as improvements) as well as through compulsion by dominant aggressors.

Theorists have posited that pure tit-for-tat strategies in iterative prisoners dilemma games were invulnerable. Is this correct? The authors seek to answer this question by examining the ability of various prisoners dilemma gaming strategies to withstand invasion by other competing strategies.

Bender and Swistak examine a gaming strategy universe that includes the strategies:

• Tit for tat - a player will initially cooperate and then in future rounds mimic the behavior of their opponent.
• Tit for 2 Tats - a player will cooperate for the first two rounds and then defect in rounds where their opponent defected in the previous two.
• Suspicious Tit for Tat - a player will initially defect and then will mimic their opponent in future rounds.
• Always Defect
• Always Cooperate
• Grim Trigger - Begin by cooperating, if opponent defects then always defect afterward.

These strategies were examined in pure conditions where only one existed, and then competing strategies were introduced. If a given strategy could withstand incursions by competing strategies it was deemed "stable".

Stability proved to be a continuum. All strategies proved to have points of equilibrium. At this point, a strategy can withstand its maximum level of incursion. That point is that strategy's maximum stability.

Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change, explores and develops the theory of the late Clare Graves - a "bio- psycho- social-" understanding of how human's collectively respond to their living conditions and how these responses prompt the emergence of latent value systems / thinking capacities. Graves proposed "that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiraling process marked by regressive subordination of older, lower-order behaviour systems to newer, higher-order systems as man’s existential problems change." Spiral Dynamics is not so much a theory of the evolution of individual consciousness as it is a theory of the co-evolution of human consciousness and its "life conditions". As our consciousness evolves through this co-evolution, we create problems which cannot be solved at the level of thinking where they were created, but at the next level above.

Based upon and extending Graves's original work, Beck and Cowan identify eight distinct value systems (vMemes) and life conditions in the global milieu.

First Tier vMemes address subsistence, fear oriented concerns (Note: the color coding was appended later only as a memory aid and serves no other purpose. The letter coding following the colors is Graves' original system which denotes the value system first and its life conditions second.):

1. Beige (A-N) - 'Do what you must to stay alive.' savanna grasslands
2. Purple (B-O) - 'Keep the spirits happy and the 'tribe's' nest warm and safe.'
3. Red (C-P) - 'Be what you are and do what you want, regardless.'
4. Blue (D-Q) - 'Life has meaning, direction, and purpose with predetermined outcomes.'
5. Orange (E-R) - 'Act in your own self-interest by playing the game to win.'
6. Green (F-S) - 'Seek peace within the inner self and explore, with others, the caring dimensions of community.'

Second Tier transition takes us from the subsistence to the being levels:

7. Yellow (G-T) - 'Live fully and responsibly as what you are and learn to become.'
8. Turquoise (H-U) - 'Experience the wholeness of existence through mind and spirit.'
9. Coral (I-V) - (Unclear to Beck & Cowan at the time of publication.)

These value systems are called vMemes, or value system memes in reference to Richard Dawkin's term 'meme' (essentially an idea which lives and replicates in the neural substrate of the brain). A vMeme is a wave-like, meta-meme which acts like an attractor for the smaller, content-rich memes that Dawkins proposed. Generally speaking, vMemes possess these basic Qualities:

1. vMemes manifest the core intelligences that form systems and impact human behaviour.
2. vMemes impact all of life's choices.
3. vMemes express both health (for-better) and unhealthy (for-worse) qualities.
4. vMemes are structures of thinking in that they determine how people think or make decisions in contrast to what they believe or value.
5. vMemes can brighten or dim as life conditions change.

Each vMeme is ideally suited to the problem solving of their corresponding life conditions. Mismatches of the two can result in many varying behaviors on both the group and individual level, including both riots and warfare or peace and prosperity depending upon the individual vMemes and life conditions and their movements. vMemes can both progress and regress down the spiral, this movement marking the rise and fall of empires and cultures, as well as the major epochs of humanity. While no vMeme is necessarily better or worse than any another, in that each is ideal for its corresponding life condition, the higher vMemes are better for dealing with higher levels of complexity. Further, Graves states that "for the overall welfare of total man's existence in this world, over the long run of time, higher levels are better than lower levels an that the prime good of any society's governing figures should be to promote human movement up the levels of human existence."

Responding to the contextual life conditions they arise within, vMemes evolve upwards on a spiral structure, embodying higher levels of complexity as they do. The levels of complexity of the various vMemes may be divided into two tiers, but are ultimately unlimited as the Spiral is an open system with new vMemes emerging in response to the co-evolutionary emergence of new life conditions at the top. While an individual, group or organization may be strongly characterized by a single vMeme, they are also comprised of all of the lower vMemes as well. For example, an organization's ostensible motivations and outputs might be reflect one vMeme, while a good portion of the employees' methods of achieving those objectives and outputs might be largely of another. This onionskin-like aspect of the spiral demonstrates one of the fundamental dynamics of vMeme and life condition upward evolution (in the direction of increased complexity), to transcend and include those below.

Spiral Dynamics also lays out nuanced details as to the conditions, pathways and variations of vMeme change on the spiral. These insights in combination with the in-depth details of identifying and interacting with the various vMemes, provide a 'field manual' and 'templates' for restructuring and fine tuning organizations of all types. Through the development of an appreciation and understanding for the need for varying value systems in corresponding work and living contexts, more nuanced and effective engagement, cooperation and collaboration with individuals and groups, both on the local and global levels, becomes possible.

Technology, history, and social impacts of technology are most often framed in terms of hardware, software, and finance, but communication technologies have the potential to change the way people think, communicate, and organize social groups. These impacts are sometimes framed by Moore's law (microprocessors and chips grow more powerful and less expensive over time), Metcalfe's law (the value of a technical network grows as the square of the number of nodes grows) and Reed's Law (when technical networks enable people to form social groups, the value of the network grows as two raised to the power of the number of nodes - much faster than just the rate of growth of technical networks). The group-formation enabled by the Internet makes it possible for people who don't know each other and who are located in different parts of the world to connect with each other in regard to shared interests - economic, social, cultural, and political. When communication technology enables people to organize collective action in these spheres, civilizations change. Now that the power of computing and communication has untethered from the desktop and leaped into billions of pockets, the forms of collective action are erupting in places and spheres of life where computation and communication had never reached before.

At the point where billions of people have access to personal communications and the instant information that the Internet provides, the aspects of cooperation and collective action discussed by Axelrod, Ostrom, and others comes into play - the capabilities of the emerging mobile mediasphere enable forms of collective action that were not possible before.

Moore's law means that the quantitative capabilities of chip-based devices grow so quickly that they translate into qualitative changes over periods of decades; today, billions of people carry devices that are thousands of times more powerful than the first personal computers, and cost a fraction of the price. At the same time, the users of these devices discover and exploit communication capabilities, social potential, political leverage, economic opportunities that were not dreamed of by those who designed, manufactured and sold the technologies. The technologies that make smart mobs possible are in the earliest stages of development, similar to the state of the personal computer in 1980 and the Internet in 1990. Yet the political demonstrations and electoral leverage that manifested in the Philippines, Korea, Spain, the USA and elsewhere - deposing governments and electing others - show the potentially disruptive power of smart mobs, even in their earliest stages.

At the same time, primitive ad-hoc computation collectives such as SETI@home and folding@home indicate new forms of computing emerging from the collective, voluntary efforts of millions of computer users. And GPS chips add the power of location-based services to the mix: people are mobilizing social networks and information in the immediate time and space.

Economically, the ability to gain profit by sharing with others, rather than only by competing - as manifested by Amazon, Google, eBay, open source software and other enterprises - is making a new kind of economic enterprise possible. Commerce is ancient, markets are as old as the crossroads, but capitalism is only about 500 years old, enabled by technologies such as joint stock ownership companies, shared liability insurance organizations, double entry bookkeeping. Now, the peer production methods exhibited by open source communities and other enterprises hint that humans have not stopped inventing new forms of economic collective action.