Cards for Insight: Poiesis
In a network, there’s a place beyond marketing. Let’s meet there.
While everybody’s sleeping, the boats put out to sea,
and John Kellden is swimming alongside the mini-sub.
… use your imagination and adopt a virtuereal, play^n disposition …
Adjacent to the Online Knowledge Commons,
a virtuereal room, the Decoded Living Room
Dr. Chen, an anthropologist, studies in the Decoded Living Room, analyzing how various online texts, signs, sign systems and symbols encode cultural narratives. The adjacent Dreamscape Gallery intrigues her with its potential for studying collective consciousness and networked human social collective intelligence.
Card-Play Conversation: Human Social Online Collective Intelligence
The Decoded Living Room
There’s a card-play conversation in progress …
Card: The Emoji Archipelago
Dr. Chen:
- I’m fascinated by how emoji use seems to transcend
language barriers. It could be a window into
understanding cultural values online.
Participant 1 (Technologist):
- Absolutely! We could use AI to analyze emoji usage
patterns and map them onto cultural dimensions.
Participant 2 (Artist):
- But wouldn’t that flatten the nuance of individual
expression? Emojis can be ironic or playful too.
Dr. Chen:
- True, but large-scale patterns might still reveal
underlying trends. Perhaps combining this card
with ‘The Disinformation Maze’ could help us identify
fake news campaigns that exploit cultural biases.
… switch back to a reading disposition …
Card: Autopoiesis
A thousand times each day,
your inference ladder climbing,
building blocks of reference.
… pick two cards and add your thoughts between …
Card: Submersion
Finding ourselves moving
below the surface of the
marketing narrative oceans.
… pick two cards and add your thoughts
to, before, after, around and between …
History recalls how great the fall can be
While everybody’s sleeping, the boats put out to sea
Borne on the wings of time
It seemed the answers were so easy to find
Too late, the prophets cry
The island’s sinking, let’s take to the sky
— Fool’s Overture, Supertramp
… pick cards and add your thoughts conducive
to real and virtuereal lines of inquiry …
Card: Inference Ladder
“Every time we interact with someone, that experience
enters the ladder at the bottom. That same experience
zips up the ladder in the blink of an eye, exiting at the top.
This process happens thousands of times a day without
us knowing it.”
— Trevor Maber
… pick cards and take thought, noticing your own inference ladder at play …
Card: Inference
Prehension, reality and facts, selected reality,
interpreted reality, assumptions, conclusions,
beliefs, actions and experience.
… pick cards and play everything, making
small moves, unfolding your next steps …
Card: UPOODDEAU
Understand, perceive, observe, orient,
design, decide, enact, act and unfold.
… pick cards and rediscover the generative
nature of reality through play …
Card: Question
A question is mind rediscovering the generative
nature of relating with reality and virtuereal reality,
extending its social cognition online, exploring how
texts, signs and sign systems can be explored in light
of an iterated adjacent possible, paths unfolding into
generative lines of card-play, combining questions,
small group genius card-play conversation and
insights, transforming them into possibility.
… pick cards and add your thoughts
to a gathering around a question …
Online Knowledge Commons
These cards you are finding here while reading and reflecting, with all their 120k two-card combinations and 21M three-card combinations, can be played in online places, card-play conversation gatherings around an Online Knowledge Commons, enacted and homesteaded by members, participants and players, forming an online community of card-play conversation practice.
… imagine yourself, finding yourself in a virtuereal place …
Adjacent and adjacent possible to the virtuereal Online Knowledge Commons, there’s players enacting a small group genius, gathered in a virtual Relay Station.
Having shared some considered, considerate thoughts with the card-players in the virtual Relay Station, we return to the Decoded Living Room. Peering inside, we catch an ongoing card-play conversation, with a Newcomer that arrived shortly before you, having brought a new card to the table.
Newcomer:
- Greetings, fellow explorers of the collective mind! I couldn’t help but overhear your fascinating discussion. I brought a card that might add another layer to your conversation.
(Holds up the card titled “Question”)
Newcomer (cont.):
- This card, titled ‘Question,’ reminds us that at the heart of all exploration lies the act of questioning. It’s through these questions that we unlock the generative potential of both reality and the virtual world.
They then gesture towards the two cards already in play:
Newcomer (cont.):
- It connects beautifully to ‘The Emoji Archipelago,’ for instance. By questioning the underlying meaning of emoji usage, we can unlock deeper insights into cultural values. Similarly, ‘The Disinformation Maze’ benefits from a questioning approach. By asking critical questions about information sources, we can better navigate the maze of online content.
Dr. Chen:
- That’s a brilliant point! The act of questioning empowers us to analyze and interpret the vast information available online. It becomes a filter against misinformation and a key to unlocking the true potential of collective intelligence.
Participant 1 (Technologist):
- Absolutely. Perhaps we can also connect ‘Question’ with the idea of the ‘Global Mindhive.’ By posing well-defined questions to this collective intelligence platform, we might unlock solutions to complex problems that were previously beyond human reach.
Participant 2 (Artist):
- And don’t forget the power of questioning in storytelling! ‘The Hyperlinked Mythology’ thrives on questions that spark new narratives. What if… how about… these are the seeds from which new myths are born.
… return from your virtuereal disposition, to a reading disposition …
The new card, “Question,” becomes a catalyst for deeper exploration through the card-play conversation in the Decoded Living Room. It highlights the importance of critical thinking and curiosity in unlocking the true potential of human social collective intelligence, enacting virtuereal places, shaping and homesteading digital signs, weaving virtuereal, real and peer-to-peer card-play into new lines of inquiry, extending our embodied selves, our play^n dispositions and our social cognition, online.
Card: Online Social Cognition
Extending our social cognition
online, our ability to understand
and use social information.
… transform your attention into situational awareness,
whether real, peer-to-peer, virtuereal or online …
Card: Glare
There’s a place beyond
the glare that obscures.
Let’s meet there.
“There are two kinds of light — the
glow that illuminates, and the
glare that obscures.”
— James Thurber
Card: Glow
Other people will recognize
your learning into aliveness
by your unique glow.
… pick cards and learn into virtuereal
presence and embodied aliveness …
Card: Question
Generative questions are less weaponized and more
convivial versions of OODA and more playful (play^n)
versions of Inference and UPOODDEAU.
… pick cards and reframe your own
feedback loops in light of conviviality …
Card: Identity
Who are you, and what
evolutionary purpose
do you serve, as you
anneal your own
essential character?
… pick cards and rediscover who you are …
Card: Identity
Identity in a context of aliveness: Poiesis
- mythopoiesis: to do gladly that which is different than dopamine hit shiny content consumption like button clicking, and more real
- sympoiesis: to move, to move-with, to meaning-making-moving-with
- ecopoiesis: to perceive butterflies in service to seven generations to come
- technepoiesis: to sculpt time, to language ourselves and others alive and coordinate at social machine scale
- autopoiesis: to enact generative places in light of centers drawing forth a requisite variety of lines, paths, s-curves and chreods, letting go from the behaviors associated with Grand Theft Data and The Frittering, seeing ourselves through the Waste Land
- aphanipoiesis: to unfold at oblique angles from scarcity and marketing monoculture, to learn into aliveness, mutuality and unfolding wholeness
- synkinaesthesia: to mind, agency and co-evolution, and vectors of plenitude, what enkinaesthesia is to fields of human nature and nature nature
… pick cards conducive to trust
and movement; moves and trust …
Card: Identity
Embracing a wholesome character to your
acceptance of life and discovering the
generative nature of its contingencies,
encounters and entanglements.
… pick new cards and place them adjacent possible
to the cards you’ve already been dealt in life …
Card: Identity
“Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.”
— Joseph Campbell
… pick cards and read the signs in light of images, diagrams,
metaphors, associations, annotations and autopoiesis …
Card: Identity
What’s Identity?
It is not toil, yet feet happily descended and moving.
Nor technology wielding arm,
nor tracings of a too social sense of self inscribed on face,
nor any other part contested between
uniqueness and belonging.
To name, to another: What dialogue?
In a network, that which we call a chat.
By any other name would be as enactive.
So 8bn secret friends would, were they not story bound,
enacting that innate perfection, already awed.
Without that proprietary entitlement,
dear fellow human, rekindle your naming;
And for our naming, wending I and Thou and Thee,
coming alive, becoming ourcellves.
… pick cards and add your thoughts to the
emerging, unfolding and evolving metalogue …
Card: Identity
“To be human requires the study of structure.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
… pick cards and add your thoughts between …
Card: Flow
flow = structure x process
“x” = patterning in general and shared understanding in particular
patterning: explore words in english ending with -ing, eg playing,
designing, divergent thinking(generative card-play), convergent
thinking(performant card-play), propriocepting thought, taking
thought(Alfred North Whitehead), formulating and gathering in
card-play conversation around generative center questions,
finding and collaborating with others, f2f and online, meeting
strangers turned friends, participating as a networked organizing
principle, and, meeting the universe half-way (Karen Barad).
… explore precisely one gazillion other cards, combining …
Card: Cards
Cards are play, solving for
adjacent possible, insight,
understanding and shared
understanding affordances.
… pick cards and use the cards to
explore new perspectives and gain
insight around chosen questions …
Card: Understanding
What if understanding is our
ability to hold space for the
possibility of knowledge, as
it emerges, unfolds, directs
and discloses its relevance
to unexplored aspects of
things known?
… pick cards and cultivate shared
understanding as generative closure …
Card: Shared Understanding (processes)
Effective communication in light of
the information being conveyed.
Conversational intelligence turned
ability to hold shared context.
Metalogue conducive to mutuality,
learning, coherence and comprehension.
… experience flow; flow = structure x process …
Card: Shared Understanding (structures)
Language as UI; conversations that mind,
cultivate, transform and matter as UX.
… pick cards and add your thoughts between,
enacting and pursuing lines of inquiry …
Card: Truth
The nature of reality is
conversational in light
of what particular dent
in the universe you are
rediscovering yourself.
“Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our ideas from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy:
it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”
— Neil Gaiman
