Card Sessions: Plurality
In a network, one billion human individuals, on a spectrum between behavior and agency.
Card: Plurality
The importance of the plurality
of modes of knowledge.
“The laws of nature are large average effects which reign impersonally.
Whereas, there is nothing average about expression. It is essentially
individual. In so far as an average dominates, expression fades.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Card: Practical Wisdom
Practical wisdom as a good enough
heuristic, able to discern a requisite
variety of modes of knowledge.
Boundary Object: Practical Wisdom
Reading, writing, sharing and generative listening,
in a context of understanding and understanding
understanding, in service to holding generative
space for divergence, emergence and convergence,
with relational meaning-making as process and
metalogue as a good enough stopping rule.
Stewardship in Transition
One of the more important applications of the above, is solving for leadership, ownership, followership and stewardship, in a context of the two coming decades of human civilization in transition.
Related challenges:
Individual intelligence turned ability:
behavior > understanding understanding > agency
The stopping rule is understanding understanding and multi-order cybenernetics, resolving into metalogue.
Collective intelligence turned different social constructs:
The tribal erroneous assumption is to assert behavior as a stopping rule.
The erroneous assumption of (gamed) markets is to assert agency as a stopping rule.
Both of these assumptions are dangerous precisely because they are almost right. They create adjacent possible realities, separate from the rest of the universe, the rest of the ecosystems:
Social Constructs and Our Human and Nature Relevant Next
“The major problems in the world, are the result of the difference
between how nature works and the way people think.”
— Gregory Bateson
TIMN, Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks, are social and societal constructs. They are helpful means, useful when used constructively and convivially in a context of people, purposefulness and planet, and quite dangerous when pursued as ends.
All social constructs shortcuts our individual, small group genius and social collective intelligence inference and inference ladders.
Boundary Object: Inference Spiral
Inference ladders turned knowledge, scaffolding and spiral through our experienced world.
Perceive
Presence, spirituality, science, insights and/or breakthrough experiences. Transcending the known and learning into aliveness. Glimpses of a larger reality.
Observe
Observable data and experiences.
Orient: Identity
We select data and construct provisional identity and information from what we observe. Personality, social sense of self and persona. Ongoing semi-transparent mediation between individual, narratives and society.
Orient: Data turned Information
These selected data becomes internalized according to our essential character and evolutionary sense of purposefulness.
Design: Patterning
Dynamic patterning relevant to our (9E) cognition. Good decisions, but our thoughts doesn’t always make it so. Consciousness as a handshake protocol between conscious (10 bits/s) and unconscious ( 10M bits/s).
Design: Sensemaking
Our embodied self rationalizes the above through eliciting patterns of relationship, interaction and play: play, enact, sense and respond.
Decide: Meaning-making
We add meanings ( embodied, personal, cultural, causal, spiritual ).
Decide: Assumptions
We make assumptions based on the meanings we’ve added.
Enact: Conclusions
We draw conclusions.
Enact: Beliefs
We adopt beliefs about the world and enact virtue and path; path and virtue, accordingly.
Act
We take actions based on our beliefs.
Unfold
We experience a seeming continuity of being, as if living inside our own umwelt, where our actions meets others actions and reactions, in the game/play of life.
Actionable Insight
Human beings were ever only in danger because of assumptions.
“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
With this, we’re back full circle, with information turned knowledge as scaffolding and spiraling, to a careful consideration of the importance of plurality of knowledge.
flow = structure x process
“x” = patterning
Patterns of relationship, interaction, play and play^n
Behavior, as a wicked problem, can be addressed by adding a smidgen of practical wisdom to our knowledge and an ounce of knowledge to our attachment to our own personal opinion (going around in circles). This can help turn problem spaces into possibility spaces. Possibility spaces can then be addressed via design.
DAO: Pattern of Patterns
Patterns of Relationship (cooperativism), Interaction (protocols), Play (greed, FOMO) and Play^n (coordination at social machine and networked scale).
“Although many DAOs would not embrace the label of digital cooperative, one could say DAOs embrace cooperativism as a protocol, meaning an evolving set of relational practices that are distinct from traditional corporate structures or decentralized autonomous corporations, because they prioritize member ownership.
The label cooperative is further qualified here by digital because today DAOs act primarily to coordinate around digital assets.
However, as the concept of DAOs evolves in practice, its digital primacy will fade. DAOs, as we will see, also introduce new dimensions that exceed what the operating principles of a digital cooperative notionally encompass.”
— Kei Kreutler
It’s a good enough outline of DAO as a pattern, with a system of sub-patterns.
DAO as a pattern of patterns, can, and I believe must, be extended to combine with any and all syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information and signal processing, that would at least begin to weave a new paradigm into being.
This paradigm, rather than being THE paradigm, would be more beneficial (eg generative, regenerative) if it is forkable, that is, local (online small group genius, startups, local communities, local villages, bioregions) would be able to build on their own paradigm version.
Think paradigm (the one we need to see ourselves through The Waste Land (the second half of the 21st Century) as a boundary object.
Boundary Object
A boundary object with enough of a core set of common sense commons governance to work at (social machine) scale, yet also provide interpretative slack to work as far out a distributed, local edge as necessary and sufficient.
Github pulled off something somewhat similar to such a boundary object.
In short (yes, I’m skipping over tons of things, please add them as you see fit) we need a boundary object that would work as a Github for Human Communities, Societies and Civilization, a CivBO.
Boundary Object: CivBO
With 8bn humans, each one having access to UBI, just by having a CivBO account.
The invaluable emergent and unfolding vector with everything Bitcoin, Blockchain, DAO, Ledger, Tokens and everything else loosely related to Crypto, is how is early signal of an adjacent possible and relevant next, a gradual, then sudden, jump over to the second half and different vector of a human societal s-curve.
[Card, Adjacent Strategies here]
Once there’s a critical mass having made the “jump”, we can begin in earnest with what Innovation of Ways is both needed and possible.
Innovation of Ways
Designing Different Ways: Opportunity
luck = opportunity x preparation
luck f(actionable insight) = opportunity f(pattern matching) x preparation f(complex responsive processes)
flow = structure x process
- How would we know?
- Flow. Flow is how you know.
Knowledge Flows
- knowledge as aviation: joint sauntering
- knowledge as navigation: practical wisdom
- knowledge as thinks, things and gatherings: holding generative space for a requisite variety of lines of inquiry, unfolding paths and transition pathways
- knowledge as communication: interface
Interface
Language as UI, Conversations that Mind, Cultivate, Unfold and Matter as UX
Social computing interface as a generative sequence:
proprietary platform > platform > place > playground > wise playground
A social machine progression, from programmed behavior (humans as produce), to circles of networked agency. Social machine and social computing as place, is to 103% about multi-order cybernetics in information ecologies, resolving via understanding understanding and metalogue, to play.
Card: Play
“Play is a cultural activity through which a society frames itself. Play is an expressive and/or narrative activity to construct collective and cultural identity.
Play allows people to create and recreate cultural identity in light of their reality.”
— Johan Roos
Card: Context
relational
meaning-
making
Card Deck as Frame, Framing and Reframing
Information in a context of relational meaning-making.
Boundary Object: Framing (contextual intelligence)
information in a context of
relational meaning-making,
annotated and adopted
according to related local
boundary objects and small
group genius context
Contextual Intelligence
Contextual intelligence can be seen, understood and applied as a lens through which to observe platform, place and playground dynamics and (lack of) generativity. Think sitcoms and how the characters never evolve, and you have the problem with current proprietary platform participation “social media” in a nutshell.
The solution to all social machines is to add a smidgen of social cognition to the social media interaction, turning it into social social media.
The big lie of big data (proprietary platforms) is the assumption of averages to the near full exclusion of experiences and expression.
Human Evolution: An Adventure of Ideas
Experiences and their human expression, is how humans construct identity, culture, social collective intelligence, civilizational discourse and human evolution.
“The laws of nature are large average effects which reign impersonally.
Whereas, there is nothing average about expression. It is essentially
individual. In so far as an average dominates, expression fades.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Expression inside big data context are only important to the extent that it can be rendered into “content”, and not even meaningful, relational content, but content predominantly serving the proprietary platform algorithms, with humans left to fight for crumbs, crumbs of popularity, attention and acknowledgement.
Solving for Stewardship
One of the more important insights and applications of all of the above, is solving for leadership, ownership, followership and stewardship, reclaiming and leveling up our modes of thought as they relate to and evolve with platforms, platforms turned wise playgrounds, in a context of the two coming decades of human civilization in transition.
