Experience & Virtuereality, episode 27: Grace

In a network, always and already in transition, seeing ourselves through,
a conversation can be a vehicle where we invite grace.

We might be beyond carrying capacity and beyond any reasonable
odds of success, salvaging the whole thing. As we move through
the 21C, how are we homesteading the planet? What games are we giving our attention? What attention, turned what situational awareness?

In a network, in transition:
our learning, annealed, turned virtue.
Our unlearning, embraced, turned path.

That said, a collapsing superset of old, increasingly obsolete prefab narratives, in various stages of decline and decomposition, might be just the alchemical kick up our collective behind, to spark new life, new movement, new flows.

“The conversation is the work.”
— David Whyte

Conversations that Mind and Matter
Conversations that mind, enact, cultivate, transform and matter, with
card-play and card-play conversations at individual ingenuity, small group genius scope, social social media reach and social machine scale.

… gather around worthwhile dilemmas
and formulate generative center questions
with preferable outcomes in mind …

Card: Information
The measure of information is
proportional to conversations
that mind, enact, cultivate,
transform and matter, in light
of differences making a
lasting, convivial difference.

… pick cards and associate …

Card: Conversation
Conversations that mind, enact, cultivate,
transform and matter, in light of cultivating
networks through attention turned situational
awareness, in service to re-enacting open,
participatory and convivial inquiry graphs.

… turn intelligence into ability …

… turn behavior into agency …

… turn information into knowledge …

My own take on conversations, conversations that mind and matter, is an attempt at becoming increasingly aware of how our intentions, perspectives, languages, practices and tools, shape our re-aligning around centers and how our re-enactment of experienced worlds, shape us in return and shape what futures we leave as legacy, seven generations to follow.

… cultivate your own unique sign use
to create and capture the relevant next …

Card: Understanding
Holding space for the possibility
of knowledge, as it emerges, unfolds,
directs and discloses its relevance to
unexplored aspects of things known.

… take shared understanding as generative closure …

Worthwhile Dilemmas: 8bn Individual Minds

“It is just this tension and interplay — between critical rigor and the potential discovery of larger truths — that has always informed and advanced the drama of our intellectual history. Yet in our own time, at the start of a new millennium, that drama seems to have reached a moment of climactic urgency. We find ourselves at an extraordinary threshold. One need not be graced with prophetic insight to recognize that we are living in one of those rare ages, like the end of classical antiquity or the beginning of the modern era, that bring forth, through great stress and struggle, a genuinely fundamental transformation in the underlying assumptions and principles of the cultural world view. Amidst the multitude of debates and controversies that fill the intellectual arena, our basic understanding of reality is in contention: the role of the human being in nature and the cosmos, the status of human knowledge, the basis of moral values, the dilemmas of pluralism, relativism, objectivity, the spiritual dimension of life, the direction and meaning — if any — of history and evolution. The outcome of this tremendous moment in our civilization’s history is deeply uncertain. Something is dying, and something is being born. The stakes are high, for the future of humanity and the future of the Earth.”
— Richard Tarnas

Patterns of Play^n
Patterns of play can be situated before, after,
around, to the side and between the cards.

… embrace the fact that you and everyone
else is always and already in a transition …

Cards for Insight: Card Session Format

… gather around worthwhile dilemmas
with preferable outcomes in mind …

Card: Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity refers to the shared
understanding and mutual perspectives
between individuals, facilitating deeper
relational and cognitive connections.

Cards for Insight: Use the cards to address worthwhile dilemmas

... engage together with others in different games than
games people play, combining wicked problems, cards,
patterns of play and insights in a context of networked
and online, interactions, conversations and transactions ...

Card: Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity is the dynamic process and collective
product of shared intentions, information, experiences,
knowledge, understanding, and relational meaning-making.

… observe how human life unfolds on this bluegreen
corner of the universe, how we are yet to gather around
seeing ourselves through the 21st century …

Cards for Insight: From old to new
Meet the universe halfway. Obey evolution. Divest from
the old part of the s-curve and make the jump to the new.

Notice what happens right now in the largest cities.

• increasingly inhumane sprawls (thinly disguised by old
  guard politicians reassuring us that “things are fine” )
• NYC divesting from oil, and suing oil companies
  for decades of pollution and misinformation

Notice the Orange Zombie Clowns with Nuclear Launch Codes, how media perverts and distracts. Here’s what you need to do. Let go of your outrage and your outrage fatigue. Let go of your desire to see everyone through. Let go of the overextending yourself that is driven by hope not yet anchored in essential character. Let go of bringing others onboard, beyond carrying capacity. Let go of all non-essentials. Cultivate your circles of concern, influence and confluence. Let go and let come.

stay on the path

We left nature in favor of towns, philosophy and commerce. Now, we are facing the task of surviving, moving beyond both nature and culture, yet re-weaving both in an infinite play — and beyond surviving, thriving throughout any which trajectory of our choosing, experiencing both pleasant glens and bustling cities, yet confined by neither.

thriving throughout trajectories

Once we have survived, once we have succeeded and moved beyond, our next tasks are all about returning, together with a select few others, sharing our newfound insights, our stories, gripes and grapes turned processed, aged wine, with a few more. And more, seeding what needs to be seeded, cultivating what needs to be (re)built.

new patterns of play, piercing through old mulch

“Socrates, always eager for philosophical discourse, agrees to accompany Phaedrus into the open country where they may together consider Lysias’s text and discuss its merits. It is summer; the two men walk along the Ilissus River, wade across it, then settle on the grass in the shade of a tall, spreading plane tree. Socrates compliments Phaedrus for leading them to this pleasant glen, and Phaedrus replies, with some incredulity, that Socrates seems wholly a stranger to the country, like one who had hardly ever set foot outside the city walls.”
— David Abram

You are almost always a bit of a stranger to your true nature, slightly less youer than you, which means your signal processing is at times biased from your pretending to be someone you are not. Noise brings you invaluable, unlearning lessons.

old, rigid and tired

In this your fragile unnatural state, it is in the nature of old, increasingly obsolete narratives, to suck as much of your life-force from you as possible, leaving you old, rigid, tired, with your non-committal like button clicking leaving you with little to no real nor lasting gain for your sacrifice.

Love, hope and trust, while admirable characteristics, are almost fully highjacked by prefab narratives. This of course also goes for what shadows we project on others, what narratives, stories and online behavior we have turned into blunt instruments.

love, hope and trust almost fully highjacked

The very premise for the why of our ability to perform, the space in which we are able to intelligently perform, is biased by love, hope and trust. You need to let go of all three — and — seemingly as if by miracle and magic, having all three restored and as if new, embracing a deep unlearning, coming more fully alive.

In a network, your ability to perform signal processing is evolving,
as a function of your ability to co-articulate nature.”

The challenge here, is that the networks themselves are in transition, or rather, our graphs we used to rely on for evolutionary fitness and landscape traversal, no longer provide reliable maps, nor paths.

Cards for Insight: Game^n, as in play adjacent to the games people play

The networks are degenerating, decaying and dying — because we are.

degenerating, decaying and dying

“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature
throughout the centuries is the notion of ‘independent existence.’
There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood
in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

Philosophy gave us the ability to hone and cultivate our thoughts and our culture. We went from fishing rods to iphones, from grapes to wine. Our thoughts brought us languages, technologies and weapons of mass distraction, most which we are yet to learn how to wisely wield. Some smartphones we need to turn increasingly practical wisdom.

ability wisely wielded

Card: Synthesis
In a network, in transition, in our
individual and collective movement,
our reach beyond grasp, there and back
again: synthesis, selfhood, service.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend
as distinct from ability, which is capacity
to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
— Alfred North Whitehead

Act wisely? Wend wisely? Wield wisely? When? Where?
As soon as you rediscover yourself between synthesis and
service, as soon as you accept being yourself, you can articulate authenticity — your own, others and the rest of the world.
Without your own selfhood as a meaning-making node, no amount
of signal processing will make any meaningful difference.

trust movement

Trust movement. With the help of a few, select others, engage in what signal processing that makes for movement, making a difference in the world.

“The nature of reality is transactional.”
— Alan Watts

A world moving away from prefab narratives, turning increasingly different networks, returning increasingly ecosystem, in which your own natural self always and already was, is and will be, a conversational, transactional part of intention, perspectives, language, tools and pracice, in a context of nature.

“Socrates’ claim that trees have nothing to teach is a vivid indicator of
the extent to which the human senses in Athens had already withdrawn
from direct participation with the natural landscape. To directly perceive
any phenomenon is to enter into relation with it, to feel oneself in a living
interaction with another being.”
— David Abram

Returning, small moves, to our always and already living participation
in an infinite play, in a context of signal processing, in service to
the transactional nature of reality.

Signal Processing: Eleven Fundamentals of Meaning-making
Design Synthesis co-evolving with knowledge mapping: signal processing, throughput and augmenting intelligence

1: Access

Roped Path, Browsers, Apps, API’s, Platforms, Ecosystems, Networks…

“In a network, in transition: code that augments our convivial transactions, code that brings us forward, together.”
@johnkellden

Maybe we should have done less catgifs.

Maybe we should have done less catgifs. However, the roped paths we are weaving inside our digital sandbox, needs to carry us all safely through, which means that there just might be a point or two, with selfies, catgifs, uninformed opinion and content marketing.

not completely useless

Virtue Signalling: Not Completely Useless
If nothing else, there’s as of this moment, platform code that scales, some fledgling awareness of virtue signalling. Our digital, virtuereal bus, can be equipped with 8bn seats. Now we need some analog real tires to get some traction.

In A Network …
In a network, means precisely that. There’s no sitting on the sideline when it comes to digital platforms, no such thing as travelling together with others while looking at the bus from a distance. You’re either on and in the bus, or bust.

In Transition …
In transition, simply means that the bus is going places and you as well. What individual, team and collective desires [TIMN] you form part of, is the destination, or at the very least, a picture postcard pitstop along the way.

convivial code augmenting our transactions

“The nature of reality is transactional.”
— Alan Watts

Coding An 8 bn Seat Bus Engine
Some of the code needs to be digital and some needs to be analog. 21C Graph Traversal, by any other name, would become as tensegral.

“We made it? What happened? We happened!”

Perfectly Possible Possibility Spaces
The vehicle itself is not a problem anymore, there’s Elon Musk batteries, solar cell roof tiles, drones that can deliver anything to anyone, permaculture principles and Paul Polak sets of principles for practical problemsolving. The vehicle is perfectly possible to build.

There’s also Participatory Inquiry decks of cards, cards that when drawn and played, catalyze processes of participatory inquiry.

Participatory Inquiry Deck of Cards: 21C Roadmapping
The strategic outcome of the Participatory Inquiry deck of cards, when small groups of people learn how to play them really well together with others, is a patterning that co-evolves with possibility spaces — in short, blueprints for building our ability to shape and enact 21C Roadmapping.

“The nature of virtuereality is imaginal.”
@johnkellden

A Streetcar Named 21C
The engine and the fuel though, well, we simply wont get there sharing selfies and catgifs. Uninformed opinion is not much better. It’s part of the engine alright, but always at risk of being driven by the peanut gallery in the back seats, the conspiracy nuts, the curmudgeons, the technocracy experts, almost always heading straight for any which lemming cliff feels most near and dear to them.

Oligarch Highjacking

We can’t do Oligarch Highjacking of the 21C Engine much longer either, they are increasingly realizing that their time is up. A bit of a hassle getting them on the same bus as the 8bn humans, as well.

An Ersatz Named Content
Content marketing is probably the engine part in worst shape — since it almost invariably comes with a backdoor code and thingies (current euphemism: big data) that enables a select few to siphon off part of the flow, part of the juice for their own purposes. Kind of like one million smaller vehicles using the momentum of the bus, rather than getting onboard with everyone else. Such content, much ersatz, what shine. Amaze.

Such content, much ersatz, what shine. Amaze.

“Intelligence turning ability turning trimtabs towards thrivability.”
@johnkellden

Roped Path
Code that brings us forward, together. Signal processing. The digital part of the signal processing is digital ledgers and protocols. The analog part of the signal processing is conversations that mind and matter.

now, we build

Now? Now, we draw new cards, engage in a different inquiry, weave new ropes, enact new roped paths. Now, we build.

21C Platforms Turned 21C Places

“In a network, the best place to story knowledge is amidst, among and inbetween people, people turning intensely human.”
@johnkellden

A platform that co-evolves together with its participants ability to access and achieve an increasingly natural cocreation of value, needs to be all about connected intelligence.

review, story, tasks, generative review

Review
There is no substitute for connected intelligence. The generative review, through which participants can emulate, enhance and experience, is resonance. The optimal way to apply connected intelligence, is to catalyze and then tap into, the we.

Story
In terms of bounded rationality, how to represent connected intelligence on a platform, using code: cards, culture code, language, chat, digital code, story episodes, anecdotes, images, video — is by understanding dissonance, reflexivity, resilience, reach and resonance.

reflexivity, resilience, reach and resonance

“The nature of reality is transactional.”
— Alan Watts

Tasks
In our 21C Places, situated somewhere in our 21C Platforms, our tasks, our playing increasingly well together with others, moving towards shared understanding, aided by our connected intelligence co-evolving with our contextual intelligence, is part, parcel and parsing of our roped path.

- You do know that you’ve painted a picture where an 8bn seat bus is traversing a roped path, right?

- Actually, no. The bus is for when everyone has more or less traversed their own unique roped path together with a select few, finding themselves and many others, about to climb aboard.

Don’t worry if you’re still out there climbing — we’ve saved you a seat. Thank you for reading and for sharing this with others. Now. Go. Do.

2: Amplify

Intention, perspectives, language, tools, practice

“In a network, evolutionary agents interacting and co-evolving with interdependent intentions, perspectives, languages, tools and practices.” @johnkellden

Every moment we are sufficiently present in the here and now of our own practice, we are re-aligning and re-enacting ourselves and our wor(l)ds.

“Social cognitive processing involves several elaborate stages with constraints at each step. The sequence of the steps is basically the same as in cognitive psychology, starting with perception, followed by a preliminary categorization and then by a more or less thorough comparison with information in memory and finally by further processes such as inferences and judgments.”
— Hanna Pishwa, Language and Social Cognition: Expression of the Social Mind

The constraints of social cognitive processing

response-ability, reflection, resonance and reach

The re-alignment around one or several center attractors, purposes, means to an end — is, happens and takes place through a diverse set of complex responsive processes, including conversations.

“I prefer to view language through the lens of thought.”
— Michael C. Corballis, The Recursive Mind

My own take on conversations, conversations that mind and matter, is an attempt at becoming increasingly aware of how our intentions, perspectives, languages, tools and practices, shape our re-aligning around centers and how our re-enactment of experienced worlds, shape us in return.

different tribes, different enactments of social

Many human beings of a western persuasion find it strange, when aboriginal shamen paint their faces and recite ancient ritual in order to go on a dream-quest, yet are not finding it strange at all, to go sit in a coffee shop, latte in hand, pretending to be important and busy. Different tribes, different rituals and different enactments of lifeworlds.

“…the Dreamtime does not refer to the past in any literal sense (to a time that is finished and done with), but rather to the temporal and psychological latency of the enveloping landscape. Different paths through the present terrain resonate with different stories from the Dreamtime, and indeed every water hole, every forest, every cluster of boulders or dry creekbed has its own Dreaming, its own implicit life. The vitality of each place, moreover, is rejuvenated by the human enactment, and en-chant-ment, of the storied events that crouch within it.”
— David Abram

rejuvenated by the human enactment

Language as UI and Conversation as UX
Underpinning the Conversations That Mind And Matter, is a pattern language, a large finite set of patterns, large enough to enable language as UI and conversations as UX (ie next gen chat and digital conversations) yet also finite, allowing for next gen heuristics and algorithms to augment network coordination, co-evolving with our very conversations, guided by a next gen cybernetics, driven by our (reclaimed away from proprietary platforms and obsolete media) social cognition.

Social Cognition
A (network) graph, is the product of processes and social cognition. Social cognition is how we coordinate ourselves in networks, and how we coordinate networks.

how we coordinate networks

Conversations At Scale
Significant and relevant parts of this large finite set, can be realized using next gen digital ledger approaches, effectively helping us create and interact in, conversations at scale. At human, increasingly eco-normalizing, scale.

Eco-normalisation
Relating a particular aspect of agency, (business) activity and practice to an underlying level of ecosystemics.

beyond prefab narratives

Evolutionary Agency Beyond Prefab Narratives
Two of the social artifacts we need to let go of and unlearn, is prefab narratives and inference shortcuts. The generative review through which we can assess our unlearning success, is opinion — our ability to not burst out in (uninformed) opinion, and a related benefit, becoming increasingly able to remain aware of narrative bias and pressures.

The strategic outcome out of social, is evolutionary agency.

eco-normalisation of culture and nature

Social, writ distributable and scaleable — is evolution. The (re)alignment, is eco-normalisation of culture and nature.

3: Address

Blockchain (and related artifacts and affordances)

“In a network, in transition: language as ui; conversational intelligence, flow and performance as ux.”
@johnkellden

The pattern language sitting underneath the Participatory Inquiry posts, can be extended all the way to around 170k patterns, cards, posts — making it of equal size to the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary.

english without the bad bits

This means that the pattern language turned AI-augmented server, can provide “english without the bad bits”.

“On one of our walks along the narrow cliff trails that wind around the mountain, the dzankri pointed out to me a certain boulder, jutting out from the cliff, on which he had “danced” before attempting some especially difficult cures. I recognized the boulder several days later when hiking back down toward the dzankri’s home from the upper yak pastures, and I climbed onto the rock, not to dance but to ponder the pale white and red lichens that gave life to its surface, and to rest. Across the dry valley, two lammergeier condors floated between gleaming, snow-covered peaks. It was a ringing blue Himalayan day, clear as a bell.”
— David Abram

It also means, a whole lot of different(local, bespoke needs) ledgers, protocols — platform formats and practices, can be designed, working with language as UI and co-evolving with conversational intelligence, flow and performance, UX, in continued development — AI co-evolving with IA, intelligence augmentation.

cards catalyzing conversations co-evolving with group intelligence turned shared understanding and stories

The growing set of Participatory Inquiry posts, are written and shared, with this in mind. They’re posts, patterns and playable cards, rolled into one.

4: Augment

Knowledge, Data and Story, Man and Machine, UX and UI, …

“In a network: knowledge logistics.”
@johnkellden

Knowledge. Let’s start with data.

Data
In a network, data is the intersect of will and intelligence, will turned flow and performance. Warm data is data cultivated in a context of dialogue, learning, generativity, mutuality, play, nature and connectivity.

agents, stakeholders, participants, fellow enactors

The key for agents, stakeholders, participants, fellow enactors to co-evolve with the cultivation, is mutuality. The strategic outcome of participants co-evolving with the cultivation of warm data is contextual intelligence.

Information
Information is the intersect of situational awareness and will turned flow. Ie, without data supporting, wireframing our information, there’s a risk with information too selectively sifted and sorted, reinforcing our own separate, separative, polarizing will.

Knowledge
Knowledge is the intersect of imagination and situational awareness, with our own and others’ existing behavior the core constraint and, should we so choose, providing us with ample opportunity to learn, unlearn and relearn, turning constraints into catalysts for creativity, play(work) and co-creation.

turning constraints into catalysts

Wisdom
Wisdom is the intersect of intelligence and imagination. If our behavior is too much of a constraint, to the detriment of our imagination, the intersect of intelligence and imagination becomes polarized, conflicted, resisted and in extreme cases, non-existent.

unwisdom of tribal behavior and gaming for personal gain

Gaming? Yes, the less than good part of gaming. The unwisdom of tribal behavior, rigid institutionalisation, frantic market busy-ness and gaming networks purely for personal gain.

Ability
Ability is our acting wisely upon things apprehended. In order to act wisely, there needs to be sufficient knowledge relevant to the domain of action and this knowledge needs to be sufficiently informed and the information needs to be built on top of data, preferrably warm data. Whereto? An unfolding of our essential character, meeting with evolutionary purpose, out of which both a growing ability and a dedication to our own unique learning journey.

dedication to our own unique learning journey

Possibility Spaces and Knowledges, Co-evolving
The generative sequence of data, information, knowledge and wisdom can be combined with contextual intelligence in order to enact a possibility space. Once enacted, our ability grows.

corner of contextual intelligence and possibility space

Knowledge Logistics
In a network, this is yet to happen. Knowledge logistics is the intersect of knowledge and logistics, the intersect of intelligence and flow. What usually keeps us from happening flow is our insistence and attachment to personal will to the detriment of intelligence, ie, our inability and/or unwillingness to cultivate data, instead too often relying on (too cold, too extractive) data and belief structures not of our own making.

too rigid attachment to belief structures

It Ain’t Happening! Wha?
What usually keeps us from happening intelligence is our too rigid attachment to belief structures, often thinly disguised as story and narrative. Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world, until we believe them, whether the data and the available information supports this or not. Story and narrative is two of our most magnificent social, cultural, civilizational artefacts. Avoid misusing them.

- But, but, you know, I’m the victim here!

And one gazillion other excuses to similar effect. In order to move beyond unnecessarily limiting, too finite patterns of play — return to data, information, knowledge and wisdom.

Knowledge Logistics, How To Get Started
Reflecting on our own attachment to too personal will and our own too rigid attachment to belief structures, this becomes the optimal starting point from which to grow our own unique ability to instigate knowledge flow and become a proactive participant in knowledge logistics.

essential character and evolutionary purpose

Knowledge
Knowledge is the intersect of imagination and situational awareness, should we so choose. These our choices can over time become increasingly guided by synthesis, selfhood and service, turning us on a path of essential character, shaping and embracing being shaped by, evolutionary purpose.

5: Adapt

Dynamic mindset, social learning, feedback loops, cybernetics

“In a network, the best place to store knowledge is in other people.”
@johnkellden

Social learning can mean many things:

agreed procedures — culture and institutions

socially sanctioned action — eg law

continuity and change — eg adoption lifecycles

sustainment — how we take care of each other

subtle resistance — annealing our essential character and enticing our evolutionary purpose

Through rediscovering and re-weaving these five dimensions and more, we embrace our own part in an evolving social fabric.

6: Anneal

Social cognition, social sense of self, character

1. school of hard knocks
2. groupthink inside TIMN prefab narratives
3. sovereignty: synthesis, selfhood, service

“In a network, different choices, combining into new forms, new bundles, out of which outcomes that serves.”
@johnkellden

You’re doing it wrong.

You’re doing it wrong. Which means, you shouldn’t change all that much. Instead, embrace your wrongness, your shortcomings and your failures as invaluable sources of insight. Anneal your insights in a way that provides five things:

Different Choices
Particularly choices that grows your ability to apply a light touch to things. The generative review is decision quality. The whole thing is being kind yet persistent enough to yourself that your authentic, real story emerges. The tasks are all about sharing that story with the world. Once you do, time for yet another go at performing a generative review.

“In a network: generative review, your unique story, tasks and generative review.”
@johnkellden

Experience
Live. Imagine yourself one hundred years of age, looking back, embracing a sense of wonder, awe and satisfaction, remembering you did one hundred and three percent of what was possible. Now, return to your here and now, and make good on your promise to your future self. Go. Do. Live.

“In a network, make good on your promise to your future self.”
@johnkellden

small moves

Difference
Small moves. Enact the smallest possible steps, changes, choices that makes for an optimal and optimizing difference. Keep on moving, inside your mind, together with others and the world, until you realize you are always and already making a difference. What difference does it make? All the difference in the world.

“In transition, anneal your insights in a way that serves — serves your synthesis, your selfhood and your being of service to the world.”
@johnkellden

Culture
Grow something. When you grow something: your own synthesis, selfhood, service — don’t just do something, be fully present — there.

choice, flow

Here, the generative review is group flow. The story is how you and others enact and re-enact possibility spaces, in your local community, in networks, wherever you happen to find yourselves doing things. Group flow includes chaos, trust and flow. If all those three qualities are present, you’re doing it right.

flow — flow is how we know

“In a network, in transition: enact, perceive, observe, orient, decide, act and re-enact — all in a context of generativity, mutuality and learning.”
@johnkellden

Transition
Transition, thy name is movement. Trust movement. Trust, movement. Movement, trust. There’s a unique set of patterns that is you, a unique combination that is your essential character. Once you start expressing your character, you move onto your unique evolutionary trajectory, towards doing your unique part in our collective, evolutionary purpose. This is the transition.

move onto your unique evolutionary trajectory

Fear, Anger, Worry, Doubt and Anxiety
Sure, we could spend a lot of time tickling and reinforcing those parts of our minds in which we remain attached to our own anti-patterns. But why? What purpose would it serve? What purpose is our fear and anger serving, if we only keep encouraging it? Is not our everyday enrollment in the school of hard knocks, proof enough that we are doing it wrong, that we are doing more than enough of this already? What if we give ourselves a different choice?

Embracing all these patterns and anti-patterns, turning our attachment to our own stuckness, into flow, into movement, is our part, parcel and parsing of the transition.

your every moment, a choice

Fear? Embrace it.

Anger? Hell yes! Turn it into resolve, a rekindling of motivation and a healthy re-enacting of convivial boundaries, including confronting everything that is not of service to you and the world.

Worry? Congratulations! Your future self is on the phone — pick it up! Listen. Listen forth what will make a difference. Listen as if you do have a choice. Your anxiety is excellent preparation and your doubt is the one sure sign that you are deep down, able to choose.

7: Axapt

A new word, intersect of accept and exapt, biosemiosis, novelty and evolution

“In a network, where tribes, institutions and markets are turning ecosystem — structures and processes — flow.”
@johnkellden

Only in movement, trust; only in trust, movement.

Air
A slightly more serendipituous air, vibrant far away codes brought close, including, doing our intuitive win-win-win bidding.

Only in trust, movement.

Water
Drop by drop, sip by sip, once again sacred, life. Deep and flowing, new water ways, connecting local, thriving markets.

Bright our embodied spirits flight,…

Fire
Institutions transforming, out of the ash of oppression, a new warmth rekindling data: convivial cultural halfway houses, way stations orchestrating new scenes, new 21C coordinates, crucibles for our transition to community.

…tracing evolutionary trajectories in…

Earth
Finding ourselves once again in a clearing in the forest.

:::wordlessly bowing to one of the last remaining shamen:::

:::the shaman sitting next to us, bowing back, welcoming us back to ourcellves:::

• my feet are new again and my toes are waking up, remembering our music, and soon I will join all our relations, singing, gardening, stewarding
• you have done well

:::you and the shaman smiling, recognizing each other in your hearts:::

:::shaman gets up, bowing, bidding you farewell, moving into immanent place, returning nagual:::

a new, slightly different shimmer and
silent refrain, reinhabiting…

A vibrantly thriving, resilient conversation between and among biomimicry, biosemiotics and music. An intensely human, ecosystemic becoming.

…a world turned air, water, fire and earth.

Air, Water, Fire & Earth — Our Quintessential Becoming

“To be sure, our obliviousness to nonhuman nature is today held in place by ways of speaking that simply deny intelligence to other species and to nature in general, as well as by the very structures of our civilized existence — by the incessant drone of motors that shut out the voices of birds and of the winds; by electric lights that eclipse not only the stars but the night itself; by air “conditioners” that hide the seasons; by offices, automobiles, and shopping malls that finally obviate any need to step outside the purely human world at all. We consciously encounter nonhuman nature only as it has been circumscribed by our civilization and its technologies: through our domesticated pets, on the television, or at the zoo (or, at best, in carefully managed “nature preserves”). The plants and animals we consume are neither gathered nor hunted — they are bred and harvested in huge, mechanized farms. “Nature,” it would seem, has become simply a stock of “resources” for human civilization, and so we can hardly be surprised that our civilized eyes and ears are somewhat oblivious to the existence of perspectives that are not human at all, or that a person either entering into or returning to the West from a nonindustrial culture would feel startled and confused by the felt absence of nonhuman powers.”
— David Abram

Our Fifth Element — Embraced, Enacted, Extended

• We made it.
• What happened?
• We happened.

8: Attend

Craft & Beauty

1. behavior (contentment(local optimum), denial(boundaries), confusion(information) renewal(unlearning, fitness space traversal), contentment(diff local optimum)
2. attention turned (situational) awareness
3. will turned flow (centers, attractors)
4. performance (intelligence turned ability)

“In transition, imagination and craft, craft and imagination.”
@johnkellden

a board by any other geometry, would sound as resonant

We
Playing the violin, or any other resonant instrument of our unique talent and effort, is becoming one with the transceiving of beauty and evolving wholeness, through our embodied, enacting selves as well as through the instrument of our passion and choice. Transforming behavior into beauty.

We, impacting on Me
Attention. Listening to a violin concerto, reading a book, tending the gardens of our conscious presencing, is how we download culture-ware in our minds. Attention co-evolving with real, virtual and virtuereal, situational awareness.

Me
Will annealed into flow. After ten thousand hours of deliberate practice, embracing a playfulness disposition, out of which overnight success: flow.

Me, impacting on We
Individual and collective intelligence combined and turned into performance. Playing a card is how we enact our choice select 2x2’s, through which moving cards and moves we make a dent in our biosemiosis, in our lifeworld, co-evolving with culture.

Playing Our Cards & Moving through Our 2x2 Boards

2x2 Board

• behavior: internal We
• attention: internal Me
• will: external Me
• performance: external We
• “A set of ten thousand deliberate hours by any other name, would turn as sweet.”
• How do I work this thing?
• By going through a series of steps, until you’ve gathered the necessary and sufficient dispositions and the corresponding gear.

How To Move
A generative sequence, a set of eleven dispositions, exploring our space and our negative space with grace.

1. Pro-Act
2. Embark on a Quest (any which beginning step works wonders)
3. Read a Book, Listen to a Concert (go virtuereal young human)
4. Design a Platform (any which immersive enough artifact, social object, waterhole mixtape)
5. Add a Considered, Considerate Comment (to a conversation about to happen)
6. Re-enact (Virtue)Reality (depart, immerse, distill)
7. Embrace Change (access, attract, achieve)
8. Play a Card (one card, one particiant, one move at a time, co-evolving with a chosen, generative, structure-preserving, transformative sequence)
9. Hold a generative enough space for a Dialogue and then a Metalogue (evolving a conversation that mind and matter)
10. Immerse in a Story turning Narrative, in a Moving Experience, in Character (there’s no-one youer than you)
11. Instigate a Movement, A Community, A Way Station

Craft, Gear, Quest & Beauty
From the eleventh, the sequence returns to the first: a good enough Way Station in which we explore, acquire experience in order to hone our craft and gather practical wisdom related to what Disposition and Gear is relevant for both our further Quest, and in due time, our returning to the Village and via the Way Station, the Concert Hall.

9: Adopt

Conversations that mind and matter; distributed leadership and followership; win-win-win approaches

“In a network, the conversation is the work and work is a subset of play is a subset of process is a subset of life.”
@johnkellden

In a network, the formal, horizontal aspect of a working network — meaningful connectivity, story and data, data and story — is guided by an underlying informal aspect, that in China is understood as guanxi.

Contextual Intelligence
In a network, the formal, vertical aspect of a working network, the organizing structure, takes place in a context of nature, dialogue, generativity, creativity (elimination of options), intelligence, performance, learning and mutuality.

Conversations that Mind and Matter

Both the meaningful connectivity and the guanxi (Chinese & Universal) comes alive and into being through a set of complex responsive processes, co-evolving with the organizing, the organizing structures:

• codified intentions
• culturally sanctioned perspectives and frames
• socially adopted language
• tools in common use
• practices

Here, practices are to be understood as an ongoing creative tension between a representational subset, a theory/practice duality — and an intersubjective enactivity superset, where

“..attention to communicative practices or activities in which conversation, text, context, and extra-linguistic material are conjoined to form meaning and objects, and produce organizing effects.”
— Mylene Hardy

Some thinks make time The word thing can refer to both a place where communicative practices are put to good use exploring and resolving important affairs as well as (the crafting of) meaningful objects.

A choice, select set of these effects are then over time turned into social, cultural artifacts, forming a Tea House Sequence, a generative sequence:

organizing, organizing structures and organization

Thinks co-evolving with things. We shape things that shape us in return and in kind.

“Some thinks make time. Some things take time.”
@johnkellden

Thriving sovereign individuals in vibrant, salutogenic societies

In a vibrant, healthy network,

• organization co-evolves with complex responsive processes (eg stakeholder dialogue)
• organizing structures are characterised within a structuring superset including eudaimonia (selfhood), economy (service) and ecosystemics (synthesis) and
• organizing can be seen as both a subset of flow as well as a set of patterns (path, virtue) in the intersect of process and structure.

Ends & Means
The purpose of guanxi is to attend to all the necessary and sufficient aspects of human affairs, guided by the overarching principle of maintaining harmony between heaven (selfhood) and earth, evolutionary synthesis and ecosystemics, with prosperous interactions (servant leadership, followership and economical transactions) as one of the means.

Living Systems & Contextual Intelligence

“People must simultaneously compute their interest as it intersects with that of the object they orient to, in the context of the relationship they are involving themselves in with others who share their object orientation but not necessarily their view of the appropriate orientation to it.”
— James R. Taylor

People, Play, Planet

The networks and the graphs that forms out of this ongoing re- and co-orientation, can be seen as including three dimensions:

• people: learning & mutuality (eudaimonia)
• play: creativity & generativity (economics)
• planet: nature & dialogue (ecosystemics)

Needless to say, these three: people, play and planet, form one system, one living, evolving system. Nature and Culture, Culture and Nature: Mind & Matter. Conversations that Mind and Matter.

10: Achieve

Intersect of essential character(virtue) and evolutionary purpose(path)

“In a network, four degrees of separation between strangers turning friends.” @johnkellden

Reporter:
— How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbours when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?

Farmer:
— Why sir, didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbours grow inferior, sub-standard and poor quality corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbours grow good corn.

Meraki

“Meraki is not an adjective. It is a noun. Like the English word “gusto” As in “I eat with gusto.” You do something with “meraki”. You do it with a good feeling, with a light heart and a smile. With all your heart. The best way to translate it would be to listen to the seven dwarves sing, “Whistle while you work…” Meraki.”
— Toni Diakogeorgiou

Seed & Sprout: A Generative Sequence

Essential Character
This is the seed. Although at times hidden deep inside layers and layers of things you believed about yourself, things someone else told you — there’s a seed you — and once it unfolds and you sprout into being, there will be no one that is youer than you.

Transformation
The first thirty years of your earthly existence, is there for you to honor your mother, growing up as one magnificent convivial human being, making her proud.

The middle third of your life is all about making your father proud.

The concluding third of your life, is all about letting your unique light shine, transforming yourself into a human being capable of making an invaluable dent in the universe.

this is your mileage may vary evolutionary trajectory

“Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

You were here for a brief spell, and your true character turned poem, made all the difference in the world.

your true character turned poem

Nature & Culture: A Patterning that Re-Aligns
Intention, perspectives, language, tools & practice. This is our 21C Quest, to re-weave a new covenant between nature and culture. Biosemiosis or bust.

Symmathesy
A context of nature, dialogue, generativity, creativity, connectivity, learning & mutuality.

Action: Path & Virtue, Virtue & Path
Stay your own unique course, yet cultivate your ability to hold space for Ichigo Ichie with strangers turned friends, should the opportunity arise.

“Gardener, there is no far away virtue. The field is turned abundant, in a larger more inclusive here and now, one planted seed at a time.”
@johnkellden

one planted seed at a time

“Wanderer, there is no path.The path is made by walking.”
— Antonio Machado

11: Attract

Review, story, tasks, generative review, generativity, regenerativity, symmathesy, vitae, (warm) data, contextual intelligence, actionable insight(intersect of timing, luck, experience and ability)

“In transition: review, story, tasks and generative review.”
@johnkellden

Beyond Networked Individualism And Trivial Pursuit
“The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people get together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the web is to support and improve our web-like existence in the world. We clump into families, associations and companies. We develop trust across miles, and distrust around corners.”
— Tim Berners-Lee

The Four Corners of Proprietary Digital Platforms

• catgifs
• selfies
• content marketing
• opinion

“In a network, there is a place beyond catgifs, selfies, content marketing and uninformed opinion — let’s meet there.”
@johnkellden

beyond catgifs, selfies and weaponized discourse

“In recent years, people with access to a computer and an internet connection have had the capability to deploy social media technologies to identify, mobilise and lead online tribes and start to break down some of the barriers to more inclusive communities.”
— Alex Grech

Participatory Practices: A Primer

Review

• review according to existing (often hierarchical) metrics
• intelligent review
• generative review

Story

• role-playing inside prefab narratives
• developing a sense of character
• unfolding evolutionary purpose

Tasks

• suffer, ten thousand hours in the school of hard knocks
• survive, out of which 10k hours, your designing and deploying working (coping) strategies
• thrive, going the extra mile beyond mere surviving, surrendering to a vision larger than your old self

Participatory Practices: Is it working?

• generative review -> change
• evolutionary purpose -> action
• thriving -> flow

In short, if you embrace change, engage in deeply meaningful action and experience flow, you are doing it right. Otherwise, check the above where you can make whatever necessary and sufficient tweaks, getting you there.

a change of perspective, you’ll get there

From work as a finite game, to play as a slightly more infinite.

“In a network, work is a subset of play is a subset of process is a subset of flow is a subset of action is a subset of change is a subset of life.”
@johnkellden

Play: Circles of Concern, Influence & Confluence
First you learn how to play. Then you learn how to play well. Nested with those two, a third dimension, how to play well with others. There’s also a fourth, a synthesis of these three: how to play really well with others in a context of increasingly more ecosystemic circles of concern, influence and confluence.

—Give me a clue?

— If you’ve mastered all that, you are clearly ahead of me and I’d love a chat — in which you could clue me in how you did it?

Thank you, for being here, for showing up, for reading, for finding the others and making a unique lasting convivial dent in the universe.

“In transition, the divergence of 8bn individual perspectives needs to be (re)combined with the convergence of ecosystemics, economy and eudaimonia, in a context of community.”
@johnkellden

Your Move

— What do you mean with “transition”?
— If we lead and follow the above, and get the h out of our own slightly different, slightly better ways — the transition already.
— What do you mean with “in transition” then?
— A change of perspective, a proactive surrendering to reality. Life as if an infinite play, a participatory inquiry writ ecosystemic.
— What’s with all the “episodes”?
— It’s two things: each episode is part and parcel of an underlying pattern language, a finite set that can be augmented by code, by algorithms — and each episode can also be seen as one building block of a narrative, a narrative which we can help co-create.
— Ok, so I’ve read a few of them, how do you work them?
— There’s a beginning outline of a methodology, in episode 3: Your Move
— How many patterns and episodes are there?
— There’s quite a few patterns combined with a (large) finite set

All of the above in order to provide nuanced enough algorithms and participatory inquiry conversation bots — and smaller (bespoke) sets, designed and written so as to form a pattern language and patterns of play, accessible for humans. Humans and machines. Algorithms of loving grace.

Which leads us “back” to

1: Access

New Doors

“In transition: attractors, adjacent possibles and slightly new paths through new doors.”
@johnkellden

Let’s say you install a Stargate Portal in your home. Even though you might never end up activating it, let alone intend to go through it — it would still make a difference. Distant worlds would suddenly be as if right there.

“Stuart Kauffman’s revolutionary notion of the Adjacent Possible as an organizing principle in nature shares much in common with logician Charles S. Peirce’s understanding of the universe as an ever-unfolding ‘process ontology’ of possibility space that is brought about through the recursive interaction of genuine possibility, transiently actualized order, and emergent (but never fully deterministic) lawfulness.”
— Donald Favareau

Let’s say you build a vegetables garden together with your neighbors and it’s large enough and tended well enough for you to become near self-sufficient when it comes to food. Suddenly you have disrupted the traditional way of things, if traditional includes going by car to the local supermarket.

“…organisms live out their lives perpetually confronted with negotiating the omnipresent Relevant Next, and are informed by the biological capture of their (and their lineage’s) previous engagements in doing so. And because that “capture” of previous agent-object-action relationships are instantiated as biological signs for the guidance of the organism, not only are “successful survival strategies” within a given possibility space captured (as in traditional accounts of Natural Selection), but captured as well within those signs are the entire complement of previously untaken but still veridical real-world possibility spaces that are inseparably ‘entangled’ with that sign, and just awaiting exploration by the organism.

Thus, while all action in the universe is both current-context dependant and next-context creating, the emergence of ever-more complex semiotic capabilities in organisms has expanded the possibility space of immediate-next-action in the world exponentially, and has brought into being not a pre-given, singly end-directed ordered world, but an emergent, many ends-directed world of promiscuous, unforeseeable and interacting telos.”
— Donald Favareau

Curated Parts of Elsewhere
Stargates and vegetable gardens remain a bit uncommon. What most people do have installed in their homes, is something called television and more recently something called wireless wifi, through which we can access select, curated parts of worlds significantly outside our local sphere.

something called television

Which means, if we are using our television and our wirelessly connected screens, watching food shows and sharing catgifs, we’re doing it wrong. Not wrong in an absolute sense of course, there’s always going to be massively multiplayer scaffolding around all signal (culture by any other name would smell as homogenized), but eventually, wrong as in not optimal, given our evolutionary trajectories unfolding through our semiospheres. The next leg of our journeys, outcomes partially unknown. Once the wooden ships arrive, will you be ready?

Go Adjacent Possible, Young Human!

Once the wooden ships arrive, will you be ready?

Eddie Smith:
“The adjacent possible is the basic motivation behind all human progress. Countless people have died on the doorstep of new entry ways so that others could walk on in. North America was once an adjacent possibility to Europe, and once found, further adjacent possibilities emerged in the west.”

Adjacent Possible
An ever-present set of opportunities at the boundaries of our reach

“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. It captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.”
— Steven Johnson

In the face of all this, given that we can’t go west anymore, what is a business to do?

Dave Snowden:
How do you change a system which is entrained around perverse behaviour?

Map the current dispositional state of the system

Within those maps identify … patterns of behaviour adjacent to the present but in a more desirable position

If there are no adjacent possibles, … you need to take actions that disrupt or perturb the existing attractor mechanisms to allow the adjacent possible to emerge

You need the patience to wait for the right moment, but also the courage to act if time is not with you. Wisdom lies the ability to distinguish between those two states.

Life and signs are co-extensive — how about business and technology?

“For only living systems have evolved, by necessity, the ability to “capture” relevant aspects of their own relations with the immediately given Adjacent Possible and to preserve those recipes for future interaction possibilities as biologically instantiated signs. By so doing, such living systems move into the Adjacent Possible by “collapsing the wave function” of possibility not just probabilistically, as inanimate systems appear to do, but guided by a dynamic that, in every instance, partakes of both the persistently conserved access to the reality of the outside world guaranteed by the feedback cycle of the Uexküllian funktionskreis, and by the emergent yet still evolutionarily flexible system-internal values arising from the organism’s (and its lineage’s) previously captured sign relations, which are biologically instantiated as replicable facilitative system biases and generative constraints.”
— Donald Favareau

signs of life amidst generative constraints

A good business is a business that shows some signs of life. Perhaps both business and technology carries deep within, a desire to come more fully alive, if only through us. Is that a part of our lifeworld where we are yet to capture its full, fully vibrant, relevance? Could this be part of our continued journey? If we find these new doors, gather a company of a few others, venture forth new businesses, what stories do we bring back, what insights do we share with others?

there’s simply no chance in h you’ve managed to read all the way down here — but if you did, we seriously need to have a chat — zoom?

Questions. Questions Are Good
What signal processing, co-evolving with what chosen company, what business, what behavior re-aligning with what evolutionary trajectories through which fitness landscapes? What noise, facilitating what signal processing abilities? Why, what, how and whereto?

• We made it?
• What happened?
• We happened.

Get it? Got it. Good
Now go do good. In your every moment of signal processing, dismiss what insults your soul. Embrace what draws it forth. Invite grace. Weave circles of concern, circles of influence, circles of confluence. Confluence turned spirals. Listen generatively to what grace is yours to invite, hold and wisely wield, until turning intensely human. See as if with new eyes. Perception writ grace, unfolding path.

@redcharlie1

Play? Sign up here:
Adjacent Possible Playground
https://adjacentpossible.social/#card

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 Modular Knowledge Repository.