Book launch: On Community — a modern manifesto
It’s taken a year — but it’s live and ready for everyone to have. On Community was edited by Karen Mok and designed Kaleigh Tirone Nunes. Aside from a helping hand at editing, co-authoring (with Christian Busch) and authoring — I ran the Sandbox Community for 3years (2014–2017). Taking it from 600 people on a facebook page, to a global identity, developing the community to over 100 countries, 40 city-hubs and 1500 young leaders. This book is a compilation of the challenges and insights from running the community. You’ll also find some thought-pieces from members of the community to spark discussion on what it means to be a member of the global society of humanity. I’d like to share a short section from the book we’ve launched, hope you like it.
“We reflect on ourselves and our place in the cosmos in a constant state of evolution; this evolution is noetic, an evolution of the mind.” John Hands
I’d like to share a short section in which I’ve drawn on COSMOSAPIENS by John Hands, I hope you like it!
Humans are the only known species that not only know, but know that they know. We reflect on ourselves and our place in the cosmos in a constant state of evolution; this evolution is noetic, an evolution of the mind. We move from familiar settings to increasingly unknown circles of influence, converging and diverging as we explore our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with society. With this reflective consciousness, actualisation shifts from the individual to community. As such, our future responsibility is to design communities that navigate global societies and identities. As individuals we will seek out communities that promote heterogeneity, and so we are responsible for building spaces for people of different origins and geographies to gather.
In 25,000 years, humans have asked the same questions: What are we? Where do we come from? And why do we exist? Three thousand years ago in India, we began seeking answers using philosophical speculation; one-hundred fifty years ago, we turned to science. Yet, the latest models presented by cosmologists fail to account for 95% of the universe. The central ideas are untestable and hence not scientific. John Hands argues that what makes humanity different as a species is our reflective consciousness. Our ability to be conscious of ourselves and those around us is the foundation for a conscious global community of the future era.
In the modern era, however, the instincts of Darwinism — competition, aggression, hierarchism, divergence — are no longer as valuable. This is because reflective consciousness, which promotes cooperation, altruism, complexification and convergence, is accelerating. It’s collaboration (Greek, sin agonismos) not competition (Greek, agonismos) that have caused the evolution of successively more complex species. And so, how we collaborate, converge, and connect defines our humanity. It is our cumulative knowledge and community that will enable us to tackle the biggest issues of our time.
We build community in the modern era to be a home for co-creating and leveraging collective intelligence to meet the greatest challenges of our future. We build community to nurture the individual using transformational experiences that raise collective consciousness and accelerate the generation of new ideas and solutions. We build community to give voice and agency to local subcultures and nurture their ability to impact the greater whole. We build community for the conscious, collaborative, borderless future that awaits us.
For more, check out the Amazon ebook download here or get the physical copy here. Feel like reviewing? Happy to send you a free ebook. I’d love to know what you think, honestly. We’re currently looking for help in getting this into the hands of community builders — or whoever you feel would enjoy reading it and discussing its content.
Happy Reading!
Watch more from Karen Mok here:
Collaborators include:
Christian Busch, Alexandros Pagidas, Daniel Ospina, Fabian Pfortmüller, Manuela Verduci, Charlotte Terrien, Charles Michel, Rachel Katz, Konstantina Zoehrer, Peng Scheerer, Annie Hodges, Scott Shigeoka, Achyutha Sharma, Mark Kaigwa, Gwen Yi, Cesar Torres, Rahaf Harfoush, Alex Barrera, Elaine Truong, Sarah-Marie Hopf, Nettra Pan, Aisha Sheikh, Gillian Rhodes, Sonia Sarkar, Easkey Britton, Ashley Ellis
#Community #CommunityArchitecture #Belonging #Identity #Humanity
