Adjacent Possible Playground: Human Murmuration
Explore new perspectives and gain insight around questions
Cards for Insight
At the core of the Card-Play and the Card-Play
Conversation, the why and the how.
Why:
Use the cards to explore new perspectives
and gain insight around a chosen question.
How:
Pick cards and add your thoughts between.
Shape questions, cards and insights into stepping
stones, unfolding your own path.
“Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and daring: it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.”
— T. S. Eliot
As I navigate through the vast digital landscape of social media, I find myself enveloped in a whirlwind of perspectives, each one offering a different lens through which to view my online presence and interactions. It’s a space characterized by VUCA — Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity — where the line between personal and public, real and virtual, seems to blur with every step, every card I’m dealt, every card I play, every move I make.
In this networked environment, I grapple with the narratives that shape my understanding of myself and other humans, amidst platform algorithms and prefab content. There’s voices around me speaking of caution, urging me to remain silent, while others suggest going all in, embracing the one gazillion likes and shares. Yet, amidst the noise, I hear echoes of possibility — the potential to connect, turning silence into conversations, turning content into comment threads, figuring out how to build communities, finding the others, enacting change.
Amidst my moving between looking at narratives and moving as if inside them, my journey unfolds like a story of cynicism and immersion. I am the protagonist, I am the shaper of my own world, navigating the moral twists and turns of digital platforms while right underneath, grappling with my own ethical dilemmas and desires for connection. Each decision I make, from non-committal like button clicking, to sharing glimpses of my true thoughts with the world, becomes a plot point in a never-ending story, shaping a narrative connecting what part of myself I offer to the world, while remaining true to my essential character, even though I’m yet to fully understand who I really am.
In the midst of the onslaught and spin of information, can I find a center? In our competing for scarce attention, can we gather around a question?
As I reflect on the contextual intelligence at play, and whatever response-ability I can tease out from my own taking thought, I recognize the forces shaping my online experience — the algorithms that curate my feed, the advertisements that tempt me, and the social dynamics that influence my behavior. It’s a complex ecosystem, where my personal agency intersects with external pressures, where the line between influence and autonomy blurs, the tug between loosing myself in whichever social stigmergy human murmuration happens to flicker through my own small screen, and the desire to curl up in my Netflix cave, eating berries.
— Your move.
— What?
— Your card move, moving in the direction of rediscovering yourself,
learning into aliveness, finding the others and unfolding wholeness.
Real and virtuereal life unfolding in full technicolor 4D
There’s three dimensions in the below diagram.
- information turned ability
- behavior turned agency
- information turned knowledge
— What’s the fourth dimension?
— Time.
Meeting the Universe Half-way
Time as in the unique generative sequence of your own essential character, meeting the universe and embracing your own evolutionary purpose, half-way. Move in that general direction. Return to your fellow humans in the valley down below, and share your newfound insights.
Amidst this complexity, I search for meaning — a way to make sense of the myriad perspectives that surround me. From the possibility space of problem-solving to the generative power of storytelling, I seek out the next steps in my digital journey. I find myself drawn to the idea of online community as a more human approach, rediscovering authenticity and meaning-making, yet also seemingly unable to shake the convenience of the like button blitz through my five hundred socials, the unexpected twists, the meh and nah of withholding my generosity towards my virtuereal friends, the weight of regret, the unbearable lightness of online life, the comfortable numbness. And isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?
As I navigate this terrain, I am reminded of the finite nature of my existence — the finite games I play, the finite relationships I cherish, and the finite time I have to make an impact. And yet, amidst the finite, I glimpse the infinite — the infinite potential of human connection, the infinite possibilities of online literacies guiding our digital innovation, and through it all, beyond all signs, sign posts and interfaces, the infinite beauty of the universe itself.
In this moment, I find myself at a crossroads, negotiating my self-interest against the backdrop of my relationships — with loved ones, with colleagues, with my online community, and with the world at large. I strive to meet the universe halfway, to find balance between my own needs and the needs of others, between my desires for connection and my concerns for privacy, for slowly unfolding into the fullness of my true self.
And so, I take a deep breath and forge ahead, guided by the wisdom of the perspectives that surround me. I may not have all the answers, but I am committed to seeking them out — one comment, one step at a time. For in this networked world, amidst the volatility and uncertainty, I find solace in the knowledge that I am not alone — that together, we can navigate the complexities of our own real and virtuereal landscapes and find meaning in the connections we create.
We made it? What happened? We happened.
Human associations and AI-assisted annotations.
Cards for Insight: LLM’s
Cards, patterns of play and card-play conversations combine,
facilitating exploring paths between worthwhile dilemmas,
generative center questions and preferable outcomes.
There’s around 500 cards in the source deck, with more than 120k
two-card and 21M three-card combinations. With four-, five- and
six-card combinations mapping to LLM’s, Large Language Models, facilitating human associations(card-play) combining with
AI-assisted annotations(prompts and responses).
Think cards with an underlying pattern language and with an underlying Modular Process Onto-Epistemology forming part of an Online Commonplace, with a searchable Knowledge Repository.
