Societal Reimagination: The Think, The Thing & The Gathering
In a network, navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.
Scylla, a six-headed monster, a symbol of the heaviness of things.
Charybdis, a whirlpool on the other side of the narrow strait, a symbol of the lightness of being, the eternal return.
Scylla and Charybdis
Corner of Too Heavy Code and Too Light Life
What code do we code, what signs, shared with who else, forming life and signs, co-extensive and co-extending?
“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.”
— Joe MacMillan
Path and Virtue; Virtue and Path
In life, you’ll get cards. The game proceeds out of how you play them, how you hold the cards, your own and others’ and how you fold and unfold what bets gets made.
“The nature of reality is transactional.”
— Alan Watts
Here’s how to Think, Thing & Gather, really well, together
Here’s what we should have done. Fifteen characteristics of living systems.
It’s not too late to thing really well together:
- Life and Signs, co-extensive and co-extending
- Biosemiotics
- Evolution: emergent, unfolding and evolving purpose
- Code
- Epistemology
- Thinks, Things & Gatherings co-evolving, navigating continuity and change
- Computer
- Language
- Systems Intelligence: attention turned situational awareness, will turned flow, intelligence turned ability and behavior turned agency
- Computing
- Biomimicry: strategies with millions of years of field-testing, conducive to ecosystems
- Nature
- Networks of networked agency
- Phenomenology
- POODLE: Perceive, Observe, Orient, Design(divest, discover, design, decide, develop, deploy and distribute), Learn, (En)Act
The Think
Here’s where you are finding yourself. Do different. Now’d be good
Postmodern mainstream media. Not only has it grown increasingly weaponized (Orange Zombie Clowns, now with warning signs on twitter), together with its weaponized cousin, proprietary platform programming, or as it is more commonly known, “social media” it has also brought us to the very brink of The Immateriality of Digital Discourse. You Mind, but you ceased to Matter.
fifty shades of Kundera
With ordinary people, social media participants, down to tiredly reacting to memes, wallowing in shared misery, reinforced by catgifs, selfies, content marketing and mostly uninformed opinion.
Small Steps, Different Arcs and Preferable Outcomes
Situations emerge inbetween salient
features and overall meaning.
Zen of Medium Tasks: Discernment Capability
A thing is not a what, it’s a how. Situations emerge in between salient features and overall meaning. What unique individual thinks you bring to the thing, is what brings out the nature of the gathering, the event, the situation you find yourself.
— How would I know I’m doing it? Doing the thing?
— Flow. Flow is how you know.
Here’s what we can read up on and understand
Three fields to read up on and understand, in order to re-weave, between how people think and how nature works:
- biosemiotics
Life and signs, co-extensive and co-extending - biolinguistics
Life and signs, cultivating (dialogue) and co-evolving (human evolution) - biomimicry
Life and signs, joint sauntering and paths made by walking
You Beat Yourself Up, You Belittle Yourself, Until You Don’t
A Game of Versus:vs Reframed as Hothouse in which to Flourish
All the vs is good if seen as, reframed as, creative tension. Creative tension is then at its happiest, generative and regenerative best, if provided with both a dynamic framework in which to unfold and resolve, and a rich and inclusive enough context in which to grow, thrive and flourish.
Corner of Muddling Through, Nestedness & Adjacent Possible
Sometimes people are being happy with vs and happy with creating vs as well. This often creates situations which contain nestedness. It’s a detour. Parts of the Oligarch Hellscape tour and the obeisant muddling through the social cognition abattoir, could be panoramic. Mind, the glitch. Do notice the portals, the adjacent possible. Consider stepping through.
American, Chinese and Russian Dolls Moving Around Inside Klein Bottles
These nested qualities afford different tracings. Sometimes it’s like russian dolls, sometimes it’s moebius strips, sometimes it’s Klein Bottles.
A situation affords tracings.
Literature in general and Poetry in particular, catalyzes and cultivates diagrammatics and discernment capability
Codifying these tracings, capturing them so others can use them, is poetry. Weaving art and poetry into overall meaning is diagrams.
Diagrams afford discernment. Applying diagrams builds discernment capability.
Any sufficiently novel tracing is indistinguishable from art.
