Neuroscience in the Global Village

 By 2030,  mental illness had so plagued the Global Village that the regard for Clinical Psychologists and Psychotherapists was the lowest of any medical profession. Murder, Suicide, Clinical Depression, wars and genocide threatened the entire planet. Global issues like climate change, pandemics, and drought were seen as  affecting only individual nations, not the entire planet. Any attempts to resolve these problems on a global scale were met with suspicion and tribalism. Many nations turned to mind control drugs to fight the growing mental decay and depravity. But this only provided temporary relief, and initiated drug dependencies that often exacerbated addiction to those drugs. Finally, in desperation, Residents looked to neuroscience for answers. 

Neuroscience is the study of how the nervous system develops, its structure, and what it does. Neuroscientists focus on the brain and its impact on behavior and cognitive functions.

Psychology is the study of behavior and the mental processes which lead to behavior—thoughts, feelings and desires. Psychology observes these behaviors and processes indirectly. Neuroscience delves deeper into the human mind, observing biological and chemical processes in the brain and nervous system.

Neuroscience has traditionally been classed as a subdivision of biology. By 2030, however, it became an interdisciplinary science which liaises closely with other disciplines, such as mathematics, linguistics, engineering, computer science, chemistry, philosophy, psychology, and medicine. Armed with these strategic disciplines, Residents sought evidence-based solutions to global social problems under the domain of social neuroscience.

Social neuroscience – this interdisciplinary field is dedicated to understanding how biological systems especially human beings, implement social processes and behaviors. Social neuroscience gathers biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social behavior. It uses social and behavioral concepts and data to refine neural organization and function theories.

Cultural neuroscience – looks at how beliefs, practices and cultural values are shaped by and shape the brain, minds and genes over different periods.

Cognitive neuroscience – the study of higher cognitive functions that exist in humans, and their underlying neural bases. Cognitive neuroscience draws from linguistics, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science. Cognitive neuroscientists can take two broad directions; behavioral/experimental or computational/modeling, the aim being to understand the nature of cognition from a neural point of view.

Neuroscience methodology is a multi-modal approach to treatment that uncovers the root cause of human issues or challenges that are not discovered by traditional psychiatry. Neuroscientists look at the brain within the context of daily life. This context includes  biological, psychological, social, and spiritual influences.

This comprehensive approach to mental health has shown that psychiatric conditions are not single or simple disorders. They all have multiple types, so the same treatment plan won’t work for everybody, and it could make symptoms worse. For this reason, Residents of the Global Village created a database, with over two billion brain scans, used to identify various types of ADD, anxiety, depression, and many other mental health conditions afflicting life in the Global Village. Armed with this data, Global Village neuroscientists compiled a guide designed to halt the mental illness pandemic and restore sanity.

The practice of mental hygiene was something that can be easily incorporated into anyone’s life—and it doesn’t really cost anything. By adopting the five simple strategies, Residents were able to shift to new habits that improved their overall well-being.

1. Have a regular morning routine.

Starting each morning in a similar way can help you feel more grounded and focused as you prepare for the day ahead. Some people may find that sipping a cup of tea while reading or listening to the birds sing can help them feel centered. Others may spend 15 minutes in meditation, going for a walk, or doing some yoga. Whatever it is that helps you feel calmer and more mindful, rather than rattled and rushed, is good for your mental hygiene.

2. Disinfect your thoughts.

If your mind is filled with ANTs (automatic negative thoughts) that run rampant, it’s likely making you feel miserable, stressed, anxious, or depressed. Unfortunately, ANTs are very common—especially as social and political discord continue to abound, the COVID-19 pandemic still looms, and the nightly news seems to be filled with one tragedy after another. All of these can trigger the emotional centers in our brain, making those ANTs feel difficult to control.

The good news is that you can get the upper hand with them by learning to challenge the ANTs that are infecting your mind. Here’s how:

For each ANT you have, write it down and answer the following questions about it:

• Is it true?
• Is it absolutely true—with 100% certainty?
• How do you feel when you have this thought?
• How would you feel if you didn’t have this thought?

Then, flip the ANT you started with to its opposite and see if this new thought isn’t actually truer—and more accurate—than the ANT is.

Whenever you catch yourself ruminating on an upsetting thought, take a few minutes to challenge it. With practice, your thinking will become more realistic and improve your emotional health.

3. Fit in time for physical activity.

The many benefits of exercise for your mental and physical health can’t be overstated. Not only does it help with your fitness, but it also promotes the growth of new brain cells and increases the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, as well as endorphins, which are the body’s natural pain-relieving hormones. Physical activity can induce calmness and clarity, which elevate your mental hygiene. Exercising doesn’t have to be a chore—choose a variety of activities you enjoy. Better yet, get an exercise buddy to make it more fun. Even if you can only squeeze in 10-15 minutes at a time, it is still worth the effort.

4. Make good decisions about what you eat.

 “Food is medicine, or it is poison.” Everything you drink or put on the end of your fork can help your feel energized and focused, or end up making you irritable, tired, and foggy-headed. A healthy balanced diet includes lots of fresh produce, clean protein, healthy fats, such as the ones from avocado and coconut, and foods like walnuts, salmon, and flax seeds that are high in omega-3 fatty acids. Starting your day off with a boost of protein, whether it’s a brain-healthy smoothie, eggs, or almond flour pancakes can provide you with the energy and focus needed to achieve your goals. Sugar, processed foods, and alcohol do not support your mental or physical health, so steer clear of these. To help you make better decisions about food and beverages, every time you plan to consume something, ask yourself, “Is this good for my brain, or bad for it?”

5. Prioritize your sleep.

When you don’t get adequate amounts of sleep, it affects the health of your brain and body beyond feeling cranky and tired. Sleep deprivation can increase the risk for mental health issues like depression and anxiety, make you prone to cravings, addiction, and brain fog, cause weight gain, and elevate the risk for type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.

One reason for this is that while you sleep, your brain undergoes a critical process during which it eliminates toxins and waste that are normal byproducts of cellular function. These mechanisms help to keep your brain healthy, which is a vital component of good mental hygiene.

Making the necessary changes to get at least 7 hours of sleep each night supports your mental and physical health and will help you think more clearly, manage your thoughts, make better decisions, and give you the energy necessary to accomplish what you need to do.

These guidelines can help you get the zzzzzz’s you need:

• Avoid anything that interferes with your sleep, such as caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. Even though a drink might help you feel drowsy, alcohol decreases the stages of sleep that are the most restful.
• Create a regular sleep schedule by going to bed at the same time each night and getting up at the same time every morning.
• Keep your bedroom dark, cool, and quiet. A white noise machine can help eliminate distracting sounds.
• Turn off your devices and the TV at least an hour before you hit the hay. The blue light they emit can keep you more alert when your brain should be winding down.
• Supplements like melatonin and magnesium can promote better sleep.
• If you snore or stop breathing while asleep, have your doctor order a sleep study to assess for sleep apnea, a condition that deprives your brain cells of oxygen.

 When you have a better brain, you have a better life—a better career, better grades, better relationships, better moods. That's just the way it is in the Global Village.

Careers in the Global Village

 

If you have a business admin degree with an emphasis in marketing but would like to fly airplanes and hunt poachers while teaching children how to live off the land, you can do so in the Global Village.

The Future matures in the Present. If you really have an aptitude and skills for this diverse list of careers you can thrive in the Global Village.

Stability was the curse of the Industrial Age. Mass production cannot be sustained if everything is in flux. Producers must know that there will be a market for their goods, or the investment risk is too high. Even the shortest downturn could send profits into a downward spiral. Workers whose wages depended on the fate of the market experienced wealth and poverty on the same curve as the market.

It is not like that in the Global Village. Producers are compensated for their work at the time it is rendered. Residents call this "work as a metered service" or piece work. If the job involves assembling widgets, then the worker is paid the agreed per-unit price when each unit passes inspection. Payment is made by transferring value, via cryptocurrency, from the client's account to the worker's account. With the assistance of artificial intelligence, the client or employer, is able to scan the completed unit and link it to the worker who contracted to produce it. The internet makes remote management possible. So it is not unusual for the worker to reside in one country, while the client resides in another. All Residents of the Global Village enjoy dual residency.

• Their IP address makes them bona fide residents of the Global Village.

• Their Land address makes them bona fide residents of the community where they reside.

By eliminating intermediary roles in the manufacturing process, workers are free to contract their services how and when they wish. Neither the client nor the worker are constrained by geophysical location or long term labor contracts. With few exceptions, nearly every physical task and service can be performed by any Resident willing and able to fulfill a client's request.

NFT license agreements protect their intellectual property rights and their ability to produce goods and perform services. These legally-binding agreements can represent any certified or professionally appraised talent or skill covered by their personal token.

Likewise, every client must have an NFT that proves their legitimacy and financial status before any contract can be initiated.

The Global Village economy runs on the principles of

Consumerism

. Everyone is a producer, and likewise everyone is a consumer.

This economy comprises two main components: the independent producers who contract to make an object or provide a service; and the consumers who need a specific product or service.

The bedrock of the Consumerism model is the balancing mechanism that is not dependent on Government or Third Party control to function . Instead, it uses autonomous systems controlled by artificial intelligence to maintain the balance between producers and consumers. Repetitive processes for component manufacturing are performed by workers who have been put on contract by winning a bid for the effort. The contract is an NFT issued by the client for the production of x-number of widgets at a fixed price per unit. Qualified workers who produce the units are paid directly each time a unit passes inspection. Payment is made by a simple transfer of value from the client's account to the worker's account. Services are metered in the same way but may be tailored to accommodate the preferences of the consumer. Since these transactions are between the client and the provider of the service, payment can be metered the same as for production. No intermediary is required to facilitate the transaction.

Bake Sales in the Global Village

During the Industrial Park era, it was not unusual to hold bake sales to fund school activities like Band and Sports that were not adequately supported by the school's budget.

 Photo by Russ Ward on Unsplash

Over time,  sports like football and basketball attracted fans willing to pay to see matches between rival teams. Soon the football and basketball teams were bringing in enough revenue to support the team, with surpluses going into the school budget.

However, in the Global Village, there are no schoolhouses or sports to support with Bake Sales. Instead, we have crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet. It is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance.

Rather than one or two major investors, a “crowd” funds a project or business, There are four different types of crowdfunding: rewards, donation, debt and equity.

Global Village educators and tutorial creators turn to PATREON for the funds they require to offer their services to those who need, but cannot afford them. This provides:

Predictable & sustainable revenue

Monthly pledges means they know exactly what they're getting paid each month.

Independence

They are not reliant on Government funding, Parochial Institutions, or Bake Sales to sustain their projects. Over time, the people they help become their biggest contributors.

Community

They cultivate a professional relationship with their student-clients without the bureaucratic obstacles often imposed by School Boards and Politicians.

 

So, there are no bake sales in the Global Village. 

 

Your Attention Is a Valued Asset

 Why is attention important in the Global Village?

Attention paves the way to being remembered – to standing out amongst all the other messages coming at Residents at any given time and winning a spot in the minds of potential contacts and the opportunities they may present..

Do people pay attention to advertising?

A recent survey found that 40 percent of respondents aged between 30 and 44 said they generally paid attention to commercials, compared to 50 percent who said they did not.A

 

 The proliferation of media across the Global Village, had made it difficult to capture the attention of potential contacts and work. Even back in the Transition period between the demise of the Industrial Park and the rise of the Global Village android was sending out 11 billion notifications per day, and on average, GV Residents were checking their phones 150 times per day for short bursts of 30 seconds.

In the Industrial Park, this would indicate successful marketing of goods and services.  But in the Global Village it only indicated that attention was becoming a valued commodity.  In the online environment viewability is widely acknowledged as a significant challenge, and a viewable advert doesn’t necessarily mean the viewer has paid attention to the advert. The rise of adblocking software also disrupted the flow of  opportunities across the Global Village.

More than 51 percent of Residents felt bombarded by unsolicited advertising. Advertising Association think tank Credos, showed that public favorability towards advertising hit a record low of 25 percent in December 2018. According to Credos, this was the latest measure in a "long-term decline" in attention paid to on-line advertising.

There is an inverse relationship between the availability of information and the attention. Increased information results in a scarcity of attention. This meant that attention had become a precious commodity in the Global Village..

The media industry is focused on reach and interruptive attention

The digitalisation of content and distribution has made attention cheaper and easier to capture, and the abundance of data has enabled optimization. This has resulted in a reach led approach to attention, focused on interruption strategies, grabbing attention and maximizing eyeballs.

The reality is however, that attention is a finite resource. Put simply there are only so many hours in the day. Attention strategies that are based on the premise of interruption, capitalizing on low quality attention and maximizing reach could prove problematic for the long-term health of advertising. Attempting to squeeze more and more attention out of increasingly distracted Residents risks undermining our overall capacity for attention .

Communication strategists such as Oliver Feldwick and Faris Yakob have questioned the sustainability of an attention-grabbing approach. So an ad hoc team of interested Residents sought a more sustainable approach.

Achieving a sustainable approach to attention

The starting point is an appreciation that not all attention is equal, and that we need to place greater emphasis on quality attention. Quality attention is not just clicks, it can’t be measured in eyeballs alone, it’s about time well spent, it’s about focused and immersive attention. Yacob gave us a spectrum of attention, to acknowledge for example that the requisite two seconds online hoping to attract a click is very different to watching a 30 second commercial in a darkened movie theatre.

So instead of grabbing attention, Residents thought about cultivating attention over the long term; That would be a more sustainable approach. This means prioritizing an approach that values meaningful media experiences, that wasn’t interruptive.

How to measure attention

The challenge, as always, comes back to measurement. While it’s relatively straightforward to make an intellectual argument for quality attention, Residents  wanted to be able to quantify ‘quality attention’. The difficulty here was that with a mix of complex and subtly different metrics, it is incredibly hard to compare attention across different platforms.

Time spent is one of the standard ways to measure attention, unfortunately it’s not as simple as that. A report from Ipsos MORI and Lumen acknowledges that, even in the online environment where dwell time is a standard metric, this doesn’t provide the full picture. Analysis of creative performance of digital communication found that a well created digital advert can deliver recognition at a glance and aid brand impact. When a weaker ad might not perform even with a longer dwell time. This led to the need to consider intensity of attention; this refers to a more qualitative understanding of attention.

There are different types of attention

With this in mind, Bournemouth University developed a framework for understanding attention, which acknowl- edges there are different types. Informed by a variety of theories, they asserted that attention sits on a spectrum from top down, which is conscious and immersive, to bottom up, which is unconscious and fast.

There is also a need to consider how people process information. Information can be processed cognitively, i.e. analytically based on supporting arguments, often text based or lists of attributes or features. Or they can be processed emotionally based on value expressive goals linked to self identity. Typically these are more reliant on imagery and seek to engage moods, desires and feelings.

It can be argued that different objectives and sectors are better suited to different types of attention, so it’s important to consider this when planning a campaign. A useful way to think about this is the idea that attention has different modes: studying, soaking up, skimming and scanning. You might select one of these on the basis of the creative you are working with, the message that you are trying to communicate or the behaviour you are trying to change. Advertisers can use any or all of these modes depending on their objectives. For example, the above Smart Energy campaign used all four modes deploying cinema and advertorials in magazines for top down immersive attention and display advertising and video online to achieve bottom up interruptive attention.

Media channels don’t naturally sit in one mode or another; many straddle a number of modes depending on how the channel is deployed and the creative treatment. A magazine for example, can be studied, soaked up or skimmed depending on the title, whether the consumer is reading in print on, social or online, and the creative approach taken with the commercial message. For example, a display advert, a partnership strategy, a home page take-over or an online influencer campaign.

From this framework, the important take out is to work with the type of attention that your brand objectives, creative and media channels are best suited to. This is the best way to achieve a higher quality of attention.

Quality attention drives actions

Measuring attention is undeniably a challenge. A single metric is unlikely to fully account for the different types of attention and all the variety of factors that influence it. In our ‘Attention Please’ whitepaper Bournemouth university highlighted five contextual factors that need to be considered when measuring attention.

a) Advertising goals: Purpose of the advertisement (desired outcome, remind, inform, change attitude, build brand etc).

b) Personal goals: Utilitarian or value expressive (and specific nature of those goals).

c) Media moment: how the media is being experienced (escapism, diversion, killing time).

d) Media brand/channel relationship: Consumers’ relationship with particular media brands (pleasure, purpose, trust, relevance, credibility, personal connection, emotion, control, personal choice, loyalty).

e) Advertising relationship: Consumers’ relationship with an advertisement (part of experience, relevance, distracting, annoying etc).

So is all this complexity worth our attention because ultimately the measure of success in advertising comes back to proving effective outcomes. For attention to be taken seriously as a topic, there needs to be a link between attention and important KPIs, such as purchase and consideration.

Neuroscience provides some compelling insight into this question. In this field, attention is referred to as memory encoding, and memory encoding is seen to be a crucial metric. The science shows that if something isn’t stored into memory, no matter how much we enjoy it at the time, it can’t possibly affect our future behavior – if it’s not stored away into memory, it’s simply not there in our heads.

The significance of memory goes even deeper than this, because our brains are very selective about what is stored away, and we tend to encode things for which the brain has already identified a use. Therefore, if something is encoded into memory, this is both an enabler and predictor of likely future behavior.

In neuroscience, we find that attention really matters because the ultimate goal of any campaign is always to create some kind of behavior change. 

The Solution 

If attention has commodity value, why not appraise and reward it like any other commodity in the Global Village? With that in mind, the team recommended two rules governing the distribution of any form of  digital advertising across the Village:

The recipient of the advert must consent via an opt-in code provided by the sender.  Failure to provide the code with the advert will result in fines and possible suspension of license

1. The recipient of the digital ad must consent via an opt-in code provided by the sender.  Failure to provide the code with the ad will result in  spaming fines and possible suspension of license to use the Internet for any type of advertising.
   

2. The consent agreement must include a compensation agreement detailing the fees the sender will pay for various levels of attention to the digital advertising. The recipient's code will be used to track these fees so that no other personal information can be collected or shared with affiliates of the sender.
   

Getting Educated in the Global Village - Phase 3

Web3 represents the next iteration of the World Wide Web. It’s built upon blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, and is characterized by greater decentralization, transparency, and shared ownership. Web3 looks set to transform work as we know it.

Hiroshi Watanabe/Getty Images

During Phase 1 [2020-2021]of the transition from the Industrial Park model to the Global Village model, educators were forced to question long-standing assumptions and develop strategies that were both affordable and available. Those strategies forced school administrators to distinguish between the superfluous and the essential elements of getting educated in the Global Village. Phase 2 [2022-2025] applied Lessons Learned during Phase 1 to create a robust and sustainable system of education for the Global Village. Phase 3 brought the metaverse to educators. Schoolhouses had given way to hibred learning environments. These environments provided the perfect foundation for curriculum designed exclusively for the metaverse.

 

Web3  transformed learning as we once knew it. And the decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, was the vehicle that led the charge. 

DAOs are effectively owned and governed by people who hold a sufficient number of a DAO’s native token, which functions like a type of cryptocurrency. For example, $PROB is the native token of popular social DAO called Problem Solvers, and students who want to build their problem-solving skills  can buy, earn, or trade it. Today, there are many permutations of DAOs as there are skills valued by Residents of the Global Village.  DAOs run the gamut from education organizations, to venture funds and grant programs, to social networks, video games, financial and tech platforms.

 

I

More Autonomy Over Where, When, and How We Learn

 

As DAOs proliferate, instead of having one teacher and a weekly "class time" schedule, learners might spend an entire week acquiring "problem-solving" skills. This is already typical amongst early adopters to the space. The Global Village creator economy, populated by would-be vloggers, bloggers, and podcasters earning $POB tokens from a variety of projects. These may include coaching, consulting, and content curating. In turn, these tokens finance increasingly more complex problem-solving sessions in which these skills are both learned and practiced in real life simulations.

 

Freedom to Do More Fulfilling Simulations

 

The technology-centric nature of DAOs may result in routine learning  being automated, freeing learners up to cultivate all of their skills and talents. In turn they can  spend more time on activities that most benefit themselves and fellow Residents of the Global Village.

While 85% of today’s global workforce is disengaged at work, DAOs will give people more freedom to choose learning tokens that resonate with them, and  work with others who align with their talents, and values. 

More Decision-Making Power

 

Learners will be able to use their DAO’s native tokens to vote on key decisions. These kinds of decisions by DAO members evolved from the eBay and Amazon use of the star rating system to weed out distrusted vendors and reward those most praised by buyers. In the Global Village this same system is used to separate "just in time" skill-building from "just in case" skill-building. Young Residents who are anxious to find their place in the Village have little time to waste building skills that may not have immediate application. So the "just in case" skill builders are left to senior Residents who want to refresh their knowledge base.

 

Different Compensation Structures

 

While early DAOs had a set of core contributors (at least in the early stages) who were engaged on a full-time basis and even earned salaries, Residents are now contributing to DAOs by completing individual tasks, or given “retainers,” when they have attained a high level of the skills in Leadership, Team Building, Problem Solving, Sales, or Communications.

An early version of "retainers" was the  learn-to-earn (L2E). An example is the platform RabbitHole, which paid you to learn about Web3 applications. Other versions include create-to-earn (C2E) — such as writing articles or designing artwork in exchange for tokens, and use-to-earn (U2E), such as posting comments and engaging with Web3 social media applications such as Minds.

In addition to all of this, token holders can also speculate on their tokens, the price of which might increase in value over time based on supply and demand, much like traditional shares in a company.

 

Learn From Anywhere

 

As many traditional educators with apparent trust issues continued to hide behind the cloak of “team bonding” while sending everyone back to in-person instruction led by a teacher in the wake of the pandemic, DAOs not only don’t care where you learn, they also don’t care when you learn or what you look like while you’re learning — in fact, many contributors are recognized only by their Avatar.

Instead of in-person learning from a classroom  all year long and having two to four weeks off, most DAO contributors will likely work remotely, bond in virtual social spaces such as CryptoVoxels or The Sandbox, and for several days or weeks a year, get together in real life for nostalgic "homecomings".

 

Traditional organizations that demand that their employees go into the office for two to three days a week effectively anchor their employees to life in one place — usually close to a central business district. Firms with such archaic and mobility-limiting positions will likely find it increasingly difficult to win the battle for Millennials and, in particular, Gen-Z talent.

Some might argue that DAOs, like many gig economy companies, threaten labor rights, but DAOs themselves are looking to address this. For example Opolis, a digital employment cooperative, helps DAO contributors and contractors get their health insurance and 401K retirement plans in order.

 

The DAO movement is still in its infancy, and has a number of its own challenges to work out when it comes to governance and trust. The mainstream adoption of Web3 rests upon the resolution of questions related to user experience (UX), security, scalability, and regulatory clarity. However, at the current pace of talent acquisition, capital-raising, and innovation in the space, mainstream proliferation could happen sooner rather than later.

 

At its core, Web3 promises more fulfilling and outcomes-focused work, with a fairer distribution of ownership and rewards — and that is a future worth building.

 

Gourmet Meals in the Global Village

Automation did not replace cooks  and waitstaff in the Global Village. Instead, ways were found to deliver the same  gourmet meals and dinning nuance offered by fine restaurants in the Industrial Park.

                                                     Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

As one of the last industries to be automated in the Industrial Park, major fast food franchises developed  ways to fully automate the frying and grilling machines that cook french fries and grill burgers. The goal was to manufacture and deliver meals the same way other products were handled in the Industrial Park.

The missing part was the control mechanism that links orders placed remotely or in-person with the machines that prepare them. They had already automated the ordering mechanism using AI components that convert a customer’s voice to choice selections. The next step was to have that order prepared, boxed and ready to pick up curbside, or delivered via a food delivery service, some even used autonomous vehicles to speed orders to the homes and offices of waiting customers.

That was only the beginning. Once the process was perfected, it was integrated into gourmet meal and ethnic food preparation and delivery. The phrase, “untouched by human hands” became a mantra across the dinning out industry. However, it took nearly a decade to automate the nuance and nostalgia of dinning facilities staffed by old-fashioned chefs and congenial wait staff. During the transition from the Industrial Park to the Global Village, dining out by those who could afford this experience, considered automated food service a symbol of poverty—not an economic blessing.

Then came the pandemic of 2025. Although science and rapid vaccine development made a total lockdown unnecessary,  the measures that still had to be taken disrupted the food service industry.  The army of young waitstaff that had made the dinning room nuance possible throughout the early 21st Century had succumbed to the lure of big money in the trades and the therapeutic care industry. While there were plenty of gourmet chiefs, the pandemic bankrupted many top-notch restaurants and left many gourmet chefs with no place to practice their culinary arts. So the industry pivoted to a hybrid service system. 

In the Global Village of today[2026] the Chefs have their own personal kitchens sans dine in area. Meals are ordered via their on-line website, made to order, and drop-shipped to diners in special containers that preserve the heat and flavor. Depending on their distance from the Chef's kitchen, meals are delivered by autonomous ground vehicles or drones. However, like the recopies for Coke Cola and KFC, the technique used to give the Dine from Home customers the same nuance  they might get in a high scale restaurant is a trade secret. That's just the way it is in the Global Village.

Work as a Metered Service

Stability was the curse of the Industrial Age. Mass production cannot be sustained if everything is in flux. Producers must know that there will be a market for their goods, or the investment risk is too high. Even the shortest downturn could send profits into a downward spiral. Workers whose wages depended on the fate of the market experienced wealth and poverty on the same curve as the market.

Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash 

It is not like that in the Global Village. Producers are compensated for their work at the time it is rendered. Residents call this "work as a metered service" or piece work. If the job involves assembling widgets, then the worker is paid the agreed per-unit price when each unit passes inspection.  Payment is made by transferring value, via cryptocurrency, from the client's account to the worker's account. With the assistance of artificial intelligence, the client, or employer, is able to scan the completed unit and link it to the worker who contracted to produce it. The internet makes remote management possible. So it is not unusual for the worker to reside in one country, while the client resides in another.  All Residents of the Global Village enjoy dual residency.

•  Their IP address makes them bona fide residents of the Global Village. 
•  Their Land address makes them bona fide residents of the community where they reside.

By eliminating intermediary roles in the manufacturing process, workers are free to contract their services how and when they wish. Neither the client nor the worker are constrained by geophysical location or long term labor contracts. With few exceptions, nearly every physical task and service can be performed by any Resident willing and able to fulfill a client's request. NFT license agreements protect their intellectual property rights and their ability to produce goods and perform services. These legally-binding agreements can  represent any certified or professionally appraised talent or skill covered by their personal token.  Likewise, every client must have an NFT that proves their legitimacy and financial status before any contract can be initiated.

 

The Global Village economy runs on the principles of Consumerism. Everyone is a producer and likewise everyone is a consumer. This economy comprises two main components: the independent producers who contract to make an object or provide a service; and the consumers who need a specific product or service.  The bedrock of the Consumerism model is the balancing mechanism that is not dependent on Government or Third Party control to function . Instead, it uses autonomous systems controlled by artificial intelligence to maintain the balance between producers and consumers. Repetitive processes for component manufacturing are performed by workers who have been put on contract by winning a bid for the effort. The contract is an NFT issued by the client for the production of x-number of widgets at a fixed price per unit. Qualified workers who produce the units are paid directly each time a unit passes inspection. Payment is made by a simple transfer of value from the client's account to the worker's account. Services are metered in the same way but may be tailored to accommodate the preferences of the consumer. Since these transactions are between the client and the provider of the service, payment can be metered the same as for production. No intermediary is required to facilitate the transaction.