Understanding, episode 4: Future
In a network, in transition, what if understanding is our ability to hold space for the possibility of knowledge, as it discloses its relevance to unexplored aspects of things known?
The Players
In order to embrace an increasingly enkinaesthetic awareness:
Shu: School of Hard Knocks, Annealing Our Inner Beauty
8bn roles: 8bn shards of spirit, turned beautiful beyond belief, forming one emergent, evolutionary purpose.
Ha: Life as if Design and Prosaics; Prosaics and Design
No roles. Design synthesis as including divestment from roles that no longer serve.
Ri: Enkinaesthesia
Roles as going into Synkinaesthetic Character, learning into aliveness, in order to be of service to the evolutionary journey of the soul.
The Scene
2014–2016
The lost rabbit hole years, the last imploding stage of old, ersatz, 20C media.
2017–2019
Networks designed to enable (knowledge) logistics, rather than advertising.
2020–2022
Humanity rising to the occasion
(or not) depending on how much
resonance and resilience we’ve
managed to broker through our
new distributed, distributive
platforms.
2023–2025
Data and Narratives. Uncovering
the options we need, rather than
using data to reinforce what we’ve
already got.
2026–2028
Demise (and possible partial rebirth) of institutions on all levels. Core dynamic behind the transformation: awkward procedures, too much lag time between cognition and action. The insufficiency of Davos.
2029–2031
Understanding. Experiential understanding. A proliferation of grassroots movements. Most of which will fail. Some of which will succeed, turning societal imaginal cells, depending how quickly the institutions realize they need to remove themselves.
2032–2035
Last hours of ancient beliefs. All kinds of weird shit — tribes, reactionary movements, conspicuous consumption bordering on Elysium-levels. Out of which a deep unlearning of obsolete beliefs. Birth pains of sustainable regions, some which will make it, some which will not.
2036–2038
Equity and ecology co-evolving. Achieving decent livelihoods for all the human beings that remain. Regions increasingly coordinating needed efforts.
The above originally written 2015 Mar 9.
2019 Mar 21:
2039–2041
Wealth re-distribution on an unprecedented pace and scale. The redemption of the oligarchs by our children.
2042–2044
The challenge here is the rapid proliferation of seemingly good enough centers and attractors, yet gathering, rallying around them too quickly, will risk re-kindle the last remnants of old, tribal, deep, excluding cultural patterns.
2045 and beyond
When, out of a few and small changes, there emerges a total transformation. A planetwide, convivial Ice-9 event. Our birth into planetary stewardship.
The second half of the 21C will be characterised by our collective, collaborative, cocreative capabilities for stewarding autopoietic shift. There’s three main scenarios:
- Slow Crash (default & devil take the hindmost)
- Elysium (crash & entitlement separate)
- Long Boom (equity & ecology)
Slow Crash, Elysium & Long Boom
All three scenarios remain a choice. You making a choice is mandatory, since avoiding making a choice is also a choice. It is a massively multiplayer sensemaking game called 8bn, where Planet, People and Play are ongoingly moving along evolutionary trajectories.
Planet, People & Play
What is good in all three scenarios, is that all the poor and all the uber-rich can be counted on to react in fairly predictable manners.
If we develop our collective imagination as if
it is our core 21C Literacy, we will make it.
Otherwise we will not.
The wild card, the key uncertainty, is if a small proportion of humanity, if we (whoever decides to rise to the occasion) coordinate our imagination and imagineering.
300k humans stewarding our transition
My best guess for now — we need to gather together 300k people, to achieve critical catalytic mass, including kickstarting new covenants and new currencies.
Generative sequences enabling structure-preserving transformation
Some of the patterns, generative sequences and heuristics used, collaborative sensemaking, automatic for the people, participatory inquiry, are ongoingly disseminated.
2017 Nov 26:
Patterns of Participatory Play
There is, as of now, a fieldtested large finite set of patterns, that can be used to divest from old, obsolete narratives and timelines, in favour of different, evolutionary trajectories, re-aligning around our cultivating ability and growing capability to instigate autopoietic shift.
divest, discover, design, develop, decide, deploy & distribute
Conversations that Mind and Matter
One of the ways to fieldtest the patterns, is through turning comments and comment threads into conversations that mind and matter. Conversations that mind and matter then turned distributed leadership — and — through the pattern language, through an english with less bad bits, engaging in conversations at scale.
Conversations at Scope and Scale
If we do, if we engage in social cognition, conversations at scale and distributed leadership, these times can be shortened.
The strategic outcome at all levels and scales:
actionable insight
Corner of Data & Story
Actionable Insight, in two complementary senses:
- actionable insight as an outcome of well designed, warm data augmented, data science platforms (representation)
- actionable insight as an outcome of comment threads that mind and matter (enaction)
