Card Sessions: The Core Challenge

behavior > feedback > agency

“There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness.”
— Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

This is invaluable:

“La reconnaissance en soi-même, par le lecteur, de ce que dit le livre, est la preuve de la vérité de celui-ci et vice-versa, au moins dans une certaine mesure, la différence entre les deux textes pouvant être souvent imputée non à l’auteur mais au lecteur. De plus le livre peut être trop savant, trop obscur pour le lecteur naïf et ne lui présenter ainsi qu’un verre trouble avec lequel il ne pourra pas lire. Mais d’autres particularités (comme l’inversion) peuvent faire que le lecteur ait besoin de lire d’une certaine façon pour bien lire ; l’auteur n’a pas à s’en offenser mais au contraire à laisser la plus grande liberté au lecteur en lui disant : « Regardez vous-même si vous voyez mieux avec ce verre-ci, avec celui-là, avec cet autre.”
― Marcel Proust

Boundary Objects: Books, Literature and Reading

“The recognition in oneself, by the reader, of what the book says, is in itself a proof of truth, and vice versa, at least to some extent, the difference between the texts can often be imputed not to the author but to the readers. Moreover, the book may be too scholarly, too obscure for the naive reader and thus only present him with a cloudy glass through which he will not be able to see clearly, nor read. Other peculiarities (like inversion) may cause the reader to need to read a certain way in order to read well; the author does not have to be offended by it but on the contrary can leave the greatest freedom to the reader by saying to him: ‘See for yourself if you see better with this glass, with that one, with this other’…”
— Marcel Proust

“In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”
— Marcel Proust, via Alain de Botton

Card: Texts

Texts and interpretations (literature as boundary objects) adding nuance, creative tension and a widening of scope, affording signal processing: holding generative space amidst situational awareness, pathways and preferable outcomes.

Any sufficiently advanced text is indistinguishable from …

“Mais d’autres particularités (comme l’inversion) peuvent faire que le lecteur ait besoin de lire d’une certaine façon pour bien lire…”

“Pour bien lire…”

behavior > feedback > agency

Behavior

Those three words, “Pour bien lire…” are close to my core dismissal of a particular online behavior:

proprietary platform programmed like button clicking to the exclusion of writing, reading, conversing and arriving at a deepening and widening of (shared, sharable) understanding.

“…dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
— Walt Whitman

“>” = “social” media; feedback

Feedback

I’m obviously also wary of, for related reasons:

• catgif sharing (virtue signalling being a pleb and produce inside a proprietary platform, a state of learned helplessness emojiency)
• selfie sharing (cynicism, nihilism, narcissism, solipsism, the four horses of Meaning-making Apocalypse, aka The Waste Land, T. S Eliot)
• mostly uninformed opinion (QBacca storming the Capitol as a literacy, zeitgeist and social fabric marker)
• content marketing (roasting marshmallows while Rome burns)

Those four Apocalypse Genres, driven by Shared Misery inside Social Cognition Abattoirs thinly disguised as “social media”, make up around 98% of all the digital content on proprietary platforms (fb, insta, chat, …)

“>” = social social media: feedback, multi-order cybernetics, understanding understanding

Agency

Agency: Signal Processing

• information processing: one gazillion selfies and catgifs
• insight: divesting from the Shared Misery
• signal processing: holding generative space amidst situational awareness, transition pathways and preferable outcomes

Card Sessions
Cards considered in light of questions. All cards are possibility space affordances. All decks are frames (the theme or themes). All card sessions are designed to help you reflect, reframe and rethink. The generative closure is insight, alignment around the unfolding vector of the question, and agreement among the players on next steps.

Game^n
Game^n is to agency, what game is to behavior.

A Game and game^n environment provide a space with contrived, unpredictable contingency where players get to suspend their disbelief and level up their behavior, in favor of experiencing small group agency, forming patterns of relationship, interaction and play conducive to preferable outcomes.

Lab^n
Cards, decks and sessions can be combined with other literacies, tools and practices, forming labs.

Lab^n = Card Sessions x Game^n

Card: Infinite Play

these are my cards and
if you don’t like them,
I have others

Community is the answer. Let’s play a large finite set of different questions?

— How many others?
— Curiosity is a good thing. Most welcome to sign up to a session…

Preferable outcomes?

Social media turned social social media, where social once again includes social cognition and social collective intelligence, where social media, social computing and social machines are designed in service to preferable futures of our own understanding and making.

Divesting from our treasured unhappiness, pursuing intersects of eudaimonia, economy and ecosystemics, adding our unique thing to networked knowledge, idea markets and coordination of human effort, in service to one trillion trees, one million villages and seven generations.