I. Utopia: 10 (or so) Visionary Scenarios
[INDEX]
01. Just Browsing
Browsing is much more systematized in 2050. It is recognized as an integral part of learning. Thus, it has been optimized to be done on any occasion as easily as possible.
Browsing should require minimal input and engagement from the learner, so it is possible in many different contexts of passive engagement. While on the tram, while you relax on your couch, while on a walk in the mountains, while on a run, doing the chores. Browsing doesn’t require you to leave the comfort and ease of ordinary language. In 2050, browsing is actually much easier.
There are many different channels to browse through, just as you browse through radio channels. But the channels available are of much higher specificity.
Thus, for example, you can choose a certain resolution and just listen to a channel that is a collection of nothing but abstracts of the most popular books in a given field. You get in your car, click the play button, and all you will get to listen to are abstracts, relatively low-resolution big pictures. Thus, a car trip can give you a sense of the newest literature in a given field or the most relevant literature on a given topic.
Or you choose to listen to only the favorite passages of the podcasts your top ten favorite thinkers are listening to this month. Instead of listening to hours and hours of podcasts, you get a selection of the passages that mattered to one or a group of trusted opinion leaders. With that car trip, you could get an orientation for what the major ideas are that those around you are finding important.
Or you choose to listen to only critical comments about a certain claim or paragraph in a book. You subscribe to the comments on a paragraph, you choose only those critical of the paragraph, and once you click the play button, all you get is two hours of criticism of a paragraph you subscribed to. In those two hours, you will gain a sense of where most of the criticism is going and coming from. It will then be up to you to think and evaluate which criticism seems valid to you.
Or you choose to listen to the favorite passages in the books your favorite thinker is currently reading and wrestling with. Without much of an effort they would leave a trace behind for you to follow. Or you could choose a channel to listen to the daily notes of your favorite thinker, to listen to which ideas they are currently working on and developing. In two hours, you could get a sense of the entire research activities of the past month of someone you follow.
With many different ‘channels’ available, you can freely choose the resolution of the content and the filter criteria by which to order the content. There are many variations of how to order the content of a channel. You can order it by topic, by resolution, by media type (audio or text), by how influential it is to a chosen reference group, by its relation to certain statements, by differentiation and difficulty.
But once you have picked a channel and filter criteria, all that remains to be done is to sit back and listen. There is no need for you to sit in front of a computer with your back straight. You just put on the headphones and go your way. Such browsing provides us with a sense that something exists, that it is ‘out there’ to be engaged with. No more. No less.
02. Just Skimming
As browsing is an essential part of learning in 2050, so is skimming. Skimming is a process requiring more active engagement from the learner. It is not something you can do while driving a car or on a hike. You need to make decisions and take turns. Yet it is still part of the curation process, the context of discovery, and less a part of the context of justifying an idea and defending it technically with arguments and data.
If you want to get the gist of the overall argument of an article before you delve into it, if you want to see its impact on others before reading it, you skim it. You skim through the passages that the author highlighted as their major thesis or idea. This already gives you a hint of the telos of the article, of where the article is going.
Here again, you can choose to look up what your favorite other specialists took out to be the major ideas they took from the article for themselves. And if you wish to use a generalized perspective, you can overlay all available highlights of the major impactful ideas and look at the heat map, at which passages overall influenced certain interest groups or the average reader the most.
You can continue to skim by having a look at which passages in a text were skipped by most users. Or which passages didn’t make sense to most readers. Or which passages they didn’t agree with. You can also skim for connections to other texts, to immediately see the web of relationships between the text and others within the discipline.
If this has raised enough attention and interest, you can then choose to skim more systematized perspectives on what the article is about. If you want the author’s perspective on what they found most important in their own article, you read their abstract. If, on the other hand, you want to see what other opinion leaders you already trust found to be relevant, you read their respective abstracts of the article.
But you can also generally skim through all available abstracts of the article and let the memex order them by general popularity, difficulty, or popularity among a chosen interest group. For example, if you are a novice to the field, it would make sense for you to see the abstracts of other students rather than the abstracts created by professionals within the field.
If you are interested in the immediate propositional content of the given text without engaging with its specific language and terminology, you skim the guiding questions and assessment questions added to the article by students. They break the text down into its purely propositional and factual content, by which you can decide whether it is likely to be of relevance to you.
Even before any further engagement with the text, you will now have a visual representation of which passages mattered the most to people and where most disagreement occurs, and more differentiation will be necessary to make a convincing point. Skimming will have provided you with a sense of where the article’s ideas might fit within your own frame of mind.
03. Committing and Studying
In the year 2050, commitment and studying are not something you are left alone with. Browsing and skimming prepare you for the actual commitment phase in which you embrace new content and make it your own, content that potentially changes and expands your mind.
The memex shows you other committed readers of a text. It also shows you active and forthcoming study groups you can join. Some of these study groups are organized by universities. While as an external participant, you cannot join their active discussions, you can still at least watch and observe their activities and have access to the content they generate.
Thus, you can see their comments on difficult passages, you can see the instructor’s references to other literature, and you can see guiding questions and answers. And since your own remarks in the margins don’t block the discussion of the study group itself, they can see activities stemming from outside the course. They can see questions and remarks posted by outsiders that can be integrated and become an integral part of the study group.
If, on the other hand, you choose to join fully open study groups, you would be able to actively guide the discussion as well. You could post abstracts, screencasts, and guiding questions that are part of the group activity to engage with. You could link to other lectures or articles expanding on ideas expressed in a paragraph. You could attach your own in-depth critique of an idea in the margins.
Participation in such study groups comes in different commitment levels. If you just wish to passively watch others have a discourse over the text, you can take part as a passive observer. You will get to know how others think about the text, and without having read it with full attention, skimming passages and ignoring others, you will still get away with a sense of how potent this text could become for you personally in the future. But you will not have much of a voice. You won’t be able to take away from the speaking time of those with higher commitment levels.
Thus, while everyone has a protected area to meet with others who have a similar depth of understanding, everyone has a right to a space that cannot be disturbed by outsiders not playing by the rules. What happens in these spaces is still partially visible to all. Partially, though, because higher commitment levels also oftentimes mean higher vulnerability. And to be willing to be vulnerable, we must feel secure in the first place.
04. Taking an Academic Course
In the year 2050, academic education allows for multiple degrees of commitment. Students have to consciously choose their commitment level, they have to in advance choose which grade they are willing to commit to before they enter a learning space.
If they are willing to spend only a minimal amount of time in a highly controlled environment, that’s perfectly fine. They can then use the free time to commit to other courses that suit their knowledge interests better. Grades are thus not something that surprises you after the fact but something you consciously choose before entering the learning space.
Every commitment level comes with its own responsibilities. The lower the commitment, the easier it is to pass the course ‘passively,’ without really deeply engaging with the content. And every commitment level comes with its own course content that you are expected to cover. Here again, the memex framework is used to organize the different types of content depending on your commitment level.
In the lowest level of commitment to an academic course, you are expected to at least read a minimal number of texts and visualize your reading by leaving highlights using the memex. In this commitment mode, one can also use the already-made abstracts and guiding questions created by the more committed participants to prepare for the final exam. These propositional statements are something you can easily passively learn without the need to make the content stick and hook into your mind permanently. This is something that can be done ‘well’ in a few days.
In other words, you can be ‘successful’ at a lower commitment level. No deeper understanding of the texts is necessary, no active involvement, no taking part in active discussions, reading further associated literature, or reading and commenting on annotations created by others. And yet, by the end of the course, one will take away a sufficient amount of information to know where the discourse is roughly at and what it is about.
Passing a course in this ‘passive’ mode results in passing the course with the worst positive grade according to the grading system. Yet it is an experience of ‘success,’ an experience of having done something ‘well’ within the confines of given expectations on all sides — the learner, the teacher, the discipline, and the institution.
If, on the other hand, you want to commit to a higher grade, you also need to commit to a higher degree with more responsibilities. Starting off with meeting the expectation that you have read the texts with full attention and have added your own annotations and highlights prior to ‘class.’ You should also be prepared that the gatekeepers of the group might ask you questions and expect you to take a stand. They might expect you to speak in front of others and defend your position.
With this higher commitment and responsibility also comes more rights. You will be given more time to speak and have an influence on the overall course of the conversation. Similarly, your annotations will have been read by other participants who might respond to them. Or they might have been read by the gatekeepers to then address them in ‘class’.
The higher your commitment, the more freedoms you will be granted. Once you have a higher level of commitment and have engaged with all the texts in depth, it is not necessary for you to prove you can answer all the guiding and assessment questions. You are freer to follow up on your own interests and individual take on the texts. But this means you are expected to create your own abstracts, your own essays, your own annotations, and discuss annotations with others. You will be expected to cover much more text and far more perspectives involved than the passive learners who just read the summaries and major propositional ideas.
But you will also be rewarded by being seen; by leaving something behind that can be of use not only to your peers but also to other future study groups and external observers who are not officially part of the course.
You would thus have choice and self-guided learning combined with social responsibilities and have become a content creator yourself. Even before you publish your first paper, you would have published something that is helpful to others. In this maximal mode of commitment, you have become one of the gatekeepers of the text with responsibilities such as creating assessment and guiding questions, up to summaries of entire discussions about the text. Your job is now not only to understand the text with others but to be able to critically dissect it and guide others through the territory.
05. Close Reading of a Paragraph
You are closely reading a paragraph of an article and have difficulty making sense of it. After several attempts, you give up on the original source and open up the annotation section to have a look at what other students of the text took away from it. At a glance, you can see who has spent a significant amount of time studying the article and particularly this passage. And you notice, at a glance, that others are struggling as well. Many have avoided the passage and left it uncommented. And the few comments that have been left behind seem less comprehensible than the original passage. With an exception.
One of the comments makes a plausible and comprehensible claim. You open up the details of the annotation to find out that the author didn’t come up with it from nowhere. The annotation references a different passage of the original author; a passage where the author has a different take on the said issue, which is way more comprehensible. With the help of the community, you now know that the author just had a bad day. Just had a bad paragraph. We all end up writing incomprehensible or confused ideas. But with annotation, this is not the end of the world because such articulations are not the end of history but open to evolution, expansion, and correction.
Another direction I could take on a paragraph is to delve into its different iterations. The paragraph, having been produced as part of the memex framework, gives me as a reader access to its different iterations. For example, I can go back in time to its first unpublished version. I can go through its different iterations and trace how the idea was developed and what evidence it is based on. Every unit of thought expressed on the memex can go through different iterations. And every unit of thought can be connected to the source of its inspiration and other units of thought it is connected to. Sometimes the author is not aware of these connections, and it is up to the community to point them out.
Returning to the first draft of the paragraph, I can see a significant shift in the direction and scope of the major argument. I can see where the author is coming from, what they read at the time of coming up with an idea, the notes they took, the passages they skipped in the literature that inspired them, and how the literature they read influenced their thinking.
It turns out too much tinkering with the text has led the author to lose their initial idea out of sight. But with a versioning system at hand, it is visible how several ideas merged into one. In this case, a messy one. Without a versioning system, this would have been very difficult to track. And yet, this is how we think. In constant new attempts to rethink and recontextualize something. Sometimes ending up in sentences we ourselves don’t understand anymore.
This was an expansion of the text on the temporal axis. Without memex tools, such a grouping of content is very tedious and difficult to achieve. On the other hand, if a piece of text lacks such history, it is very likely propaganda since propaganda lacks a developmental process. The reasoning behind propaganda is invisible to the reader, and what is visible is a finished product.
The same thing, this expansion and clarification, can happen by browsing through the additional cross-references created by the readers. By browsing the evidence linked to the passage. By browsing other related discourses. Zooming into what other authors have to say on the same issue, it becomes clearer what our author had in mind; it becomes clearer that our author had been thinking with the background and context of other thinkers in mind, assuming a frame that the readers are not aware of.
This is what secondary literature does with complex texts anyway. It expands on them and clarifies the context and the genesis of how an author arrives at their conclusions. But here, the secondary literature is an evolving joint effort of an entire community, a living and developing structure that you can plug into or contribute to yourself.
06. Judging the Veracity of a Political Post
You are reading a political entry on social media. You can’t really situate the information at hand because it is outside the scope of your expertise. Many people have shared the content and engaged with it.
To properly sort the feedback, you open up the heat map and annotations to see how others engaged with specific passages of the text. Since the text itself is not scientific and doesn’t provide any evidence but rather uses evocative speech, you turn to the annotations to have a more fine-grained view of the text and see whether actual references have been added to support the major claims.
Now, the usual way we would expect comments to be added would be as a blob to the entire text. But not so with social annotation. Here, every comment that is added needs to specify which sentence it is about and what kind of statement it is about. This is whether the original statement is a main point of the overall argument or whether the original statement is a fallacy. Thus, you get a set of highly specific interactions for every single sentence.
These annotations are sortable and filterable. You can filter for annotations that see the claim as a framing fallacy or as a logical fallacy or as empirically wrong. For every statement of the original post, you have a number of different annotations ranging from agreement to critique. All forms of responses can coexist, those who support a statement and those who criticize it.
But you as a reader have the power to visualize which interest groups resonate with a certain response. With a click, you can see what actual specialists in the field think about a claim or see what a chosen group of people think about a claim or what a certain individual thinks about a claim. You as a reader have the power of the community to see lacking empirical evidence and rhetoric tricks on the spot because someone else has made the effort to flesh them out.
It is up to you as a reader to make up your mind whether you rather resonate with the criticism or those who support the statement, whether a passage indeed is rhetorical in nature and deserves the red marker or whether it deserves a gold star, whether you regard it as a logical fallacy or not.
But in any case, for every sentence of the original post, you have immediately available the most common directions you can take from there. You have available the connections between the given passage and different texts. You have available the empirical evidence. You have available a linguistic deconstruction of the text, taking it apart into its constituent metaphors and distinctions. It is then up to you to make up your mind and leave the curation to the community.
And since logical fallacies and framing fallacies are pre-built as filter options, they have become part of common sense. You don’t need to teach them explicitly, just as you don’t have to teach people explicitly how to use a mouse because you stumble upon framing fallacies in almost every article you read. They have become a part of the medium itself, just as the news feed is a part of social media that is self-explanatory.
07. Looking up a Topic
In 2050, we don’t Google that much anymore. When it comes to fragmented and punctual information, we do, but if we really want to learn systematically about something, we use the memex tools. If you search for ‘addiction’ on the memex, you will be able to immediately browse different types of cumulative learning paths and resolutions that you can take on the issue.
For one, if you choose passive commitment and low resolution, you would get a playlist of podcasts discussing the respective topic that you could subscribe to. All you would have to do is push the play button and get a general first sense of the topic while on your way to work or jogging or cleaning the house. You could passively listen in to simplifying accounts that give you a sense of the complexity of the issue at hand in an entertaining and discursive manner.
And without the necessity for self-guided putting together, you would get only the relevant passages; only the segments that are relevant to your search would be played from the different podcasts. During a road trip, you would have heard some of the major pragmatic perspectives on the issue as they express themselves to a lay audience. But contrary to Googling, you would have a cumulative experience, the experience that during a road trip, you would have heard the major names and ideas related to the issue at hand and not just a small fraction.
As with the examples discussed so far, here as well, you could choose to subscribe to a selection of podcast passages from your trusted peer group. Only the passages that your peer group regards as relevant to the topic would be played. Or only the passages that your significant others have selected as relevant would be played.
If you then wished to learn more, the memex can provide you with lectures on the issue. Like with the podcasts, you would be able to sit back and passively listen in to only the passages in the lectures that were relevant to your search.
If you still stick with the topic, it is time for more active engagement. The memex can provide you with a reading list of the most popular literature on the topic. This reading list is a direct representation of how influential certain literature has been on its readers. It is a one-to-one representation of how influential certain ideas are in a reference group.
By changing the reference group, the results will change accordingly. So if you choose the reference group to be academics of a certain field, you would get different results than if you choose the reference group to be laypeople.
You are free to refine the actual reference group and limit it to suit your own knowledge interests. Thus, you could see the most influential literature on the topic for a specific school of thought or paradigm. If your background is phenomenology, you will obviously be interested in reading about addiction from a phenomenological perspective. It would be easy for you to see where the center of gravity of your discourse is on the topic because you could immediately see the most influential literature for your academic peers.
Approaching ‘addiction’ as a layperson, on the other hand, you will frame a less academic and more pragmatic approach to the issue at hand. However, you are free to order the available perspectives in whichever way seems suitable to you. You could browse by university departments and countries or simply browse within your family circle to see which literature the people around you have read so that you could engage in meaningful conversation about the topic of addiction. One of the saddest things in life is when, after somebody you knew dies, you find out you had a common passion you never talked about.
So, while ‘anything goes’ on the topic of addiction, this means you can choose which perspective to take in and all perspectives are ‘allowed’, you would still be able to clearly keep these perspectives apart as belonging to different paradigms and specialist groups.
Whether you choose to discuss the topic on the level of layperson generalizations or academic high specificity is up to you, but both perspectives don’t get blurred; they are clearly distinct with their own measures for validity and precision, and one perspective cannot silence another. They all are equally visible and connected to the topic ‘addiction’. Their visibility to you is determined by your knowledge interests. It would then be up to you to internalize a given perspective, but you would at least know it exists and what injunctions to engage with if you wanted to do so.
As of today, on the other hand, this mere orientation, this mere sense of how many different perspectives on a topic are out there and influential, would take you years of research and curation to accomplish.
If your interest in the topic still persists, you can choose to actively take part in some of the many actual study groups for a given topic. Similarly to study groups for an article, such study groups come in different levels of commitment and with their own respective community of knowledge experts and gatekeepers whom you could approach for guidance. You would become a student of the topic as others are; that is, you would be expected to read primary sources on the topic, compare them with other perspectives, and critically assess them if you wanted to truly commit to the topic and study it.
Topics are entire galaxies. If you want to learn about one, you have to learn about others at the same time since they go together. The more complex the topic at hand, the more challenging the courses will be, sometimes spanning several other topics to be covered as well. But no matter where you start, the courses being connected to other topics will point you and redirect you to the other topics that you will have to cover. Mind maps will give you an overview of the entire framework of questions and issues that are connected to our topic at hand and need to be studied in toto to understand the isolated part.
08. Looking up an Author
Looking up an author on the memex leads to a similar picture as looking up a topic. Authors, like topics, usually are entire universes. You need to be acquainted with their entire oeuvre to properly contextualize them and understand them.
As with searching for a topic, here as well you could start off by listening to low- resolution takes on their work. By passively listening to how their ideas impact the thinking of others. By listening to only the favorite passages of a given target group, say your major opinion leaders. Or by listening to only the passages a given target group doesn’t agree with. You could, if you feel like the author has something to contribute to your worldview, also step it up with lectures and more academic secondary content and then join actual study circles and read the primary sources themselves.
Thus, if you choose to study an author, you would have access to study groups for all their major works and would have an opportunity to study together with others. Together with gatekeepers who are already familiar with their work. Gatekeepers who guide the reading process and put together abstracts, guiding questions, explanations, terminological clarifications, further references, and meaningful tasks for you to solve. Like creating a video summary, playing through different perspectives on a certain paragraph, reading other sources that are critical of our author and summarizing their points and putting them in the margins.
Every single one of the author’s works would be broken down with abstracts, highlights of major theses, further references, and explanations. Every single one of their works would have its impact on others attached right on the spot, namely in the margins. You could see how influential the work is, which other authors it has inspired. You could see all the criticism leveled at it, not spread all over the internet and across hundreds of books, but right there, attached to the precise passage it belongs to in the margins. The actual things others have to say about a passage would have been taken back from another source, like a book or an article, back to the margins of the source they belong to.
The author, on the other hand, could use all these layers of additional information, which basically visualize all the already-existing interactions with their text, to either come back to an idea and better explain it, rethink it, or drop it as a whole, replace it with something new that takes in the criticism and evidence from the margins.
The author themselves wouldn’t have to perform a tedious search for relevant interactions with their work but would have all the interactions already right there, in the margins. Thus, the author, if they so wish, could filter for only the comments added by, say, Jürgen Habermas. Or maybe they are interested in how their work is received by students only, then they can actively filter for that specific interest group and revise their ideas to be more accessible to this specific target group — given this is their major target audience from the start.
In a sense, again, it doesn’t really matter where you start. And this is true for both the author and the readers. Because all knowledge paths ultimately lead to an overall referential totality that covers the entirety of the author’s oeuvre. You might even start by reading a specific passage in one of their books without knowing anything about the author at all, and still, the references in the margins would point you to all the other passages that belong to the same galaxy and knowledge space as the paragraph you just read and need to be covered as well. You would be provided with textual and video summaries of others that are more accessible than the original. The author, on the other hand, could easily gain an overall picture of how their work is received and what requires further differentiation, and what has been understood by the audience as intended by the author.
Just as with a topic, after intensive engagement, you could say that you understand how the topic is approached from different paradigms. Similarly, in the case of an author, after some time, you could say that you understand where the author is coming from, both from their own perspective and from the perspective of a certain paradigm criticizing the author.
The process described here would roughly take several years to curate if you wanted to implement it as of today. It would take years to gather together the relevant voices and how they respond to the text.
09. Writing an Article
When writing an article using the research done with the memex as a foundation, it is your annotations that grow into that article. You don’t start out from scratch with divine inspiration, but a coherent narrative is grounded in friction with others. And these others, your sources, are already visible since your starting point, your first reflections and ideas, are already attached to their inspiration right there in the margins.
The annotations in the margin become their own versioned primary source that others can then annotate. An annotation can thus grow into a chapter of a book or into an actual study on a given question, including its own research and new primary sources. This means that those reading your chapter can go back to where it all started, the annotation in the margins.
No matter in which direction you zoom, every unit of meaning, be it a text or spoken word, has ancestors to refer to, sources that inspire it, and descendants that build on it and expand on it. Every unit of meaning can have different versions or iterations, documenting the development from a rough intuition to a fully articulated and defended claim.
Your sources for an idea are visible, and so are the reactions of readers to your first published draft.
Breaking and non-breaking changes to your position would be visible. This means your article wouldn’t stand as unchangeable but rather as a constant draft in the making. Being able to republish newer versions of your initial article would allow you to always have a single source of truth for your most recent position. That is, you wouldn’t need to, as is the practice in academia today, write ever new and newer papers making slightly different points.
Once you have taken in as much feedback as you can and have come up with a version that you cannot further refine and feel happy about, it is up to the community to create additional learning material on top of it. Students might come up with useful simplifications of ideas, useful metaphors, or references to other texts. Students might point out connections that you, as the author, weren’t aware of.
This entire genealogy of a text would be fully visible to others. In the memex, they could search for your notes and drafts. They could search for snippets of text attached to original sources in the margins. But they could also search for random ideas and observations that you haven’t yet systematized. Your personal notes would be available to others. This is something others could consciously filter for.
Using the memex, you can thus search for the pure text independently of where you published it. In the memex, it appears as a unit of thought with ancestors and descendants. That is, you don’t have to browse different sources and webpages. The memex syndicates and gathers all text together from all across the internet that belongs to you and places them right in the margins, where they belong.
10. Choosing a Career Path
In 2050, learning a discipline is available to all, and your age or financial background doesn’t make a difference. You might be 10 years old; still, if you want to learn about the discipline of philosophy, it is as available to you as to anyone else. Because what you have available is not the propositional content of philosophy but guides and paths to the actual practice of philosophy.
While there are endlessly many things that can go wrong on a learning journey, from personal trauma to just reading the right books in the wrong sequence, what most learners inadvertently need are at least four things: obvious talent and resonance for a style of thought; someone to guide you through the complexity at hand through orientational knowledge; a social experience of doing what you do together with others; and the experience of others recognizing what you do as valuable from the very start.
While the first element is something very difficult to steer or have an influence on, the latter three we will have learned to make all available in the year 2050.
In 2050, you can listen in to introductory lectures and seminars on philosophy, if you are interested in the subject, and thus get your orientational knowledge. You can learn from the best how to engage in a knowledge practice and not just from the propositional results of doing the practice. You can spend a summer browsing through lectures in different disciplines and passively sitting in to get a sense of what a paradigm feels like, what it can make you see and experience.
Furthermore, you can immediately join in doing the practice; you are not only limited to watching. Using the memex, you can hook your own annotations to specific passages in an article. You can add your questions to a timestamp on a lecture. Other students of the same text might pick those up and expand on them. You can create connections to other impactful ideas that you stumbled upon. You can translate and define terminology that is new to you.
With other learners engaging in the same practice of sharing their learning experience and notes, you can look into what others took from a discussion, what they took from a text, what words they looked up, and which questions and ideas stuck with them. You get a sense of how they approach a text and how that text influences their thinking.
Just as you can look into the notes that others take while reading a text or listening to a lecture, the same goes for other subjects, like learning to play an instrument. Instead of reading books on harmony, you can jump right into the practice session of someone else who is actually experimenting with harmonies and join them. You can watch their daily routine of taking a piece apart. You can watch their daily routine of learning to improvise. You can join them in trying to play something by ear.
On any step of your learning journey, you can join others practicing the same unit of knowledge as whatever you are currently engaged with. And on any step of your learning journey, you can become an active creator of new content.
Whether it is a piece of music, a post on social media, an article, a book, or a lecture. For example, you open up Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and can find others who practice the same prelude that you want to learn at the same time. Or you open up a poem and can see others who are reading it or planning to read it. With a few clicks, you can set up a meeting to get together and read the poem together. The availability of traces left by others in the text allows you to get in touch with them and have meaningful conversations.
From the moment you show interest in learning a paradigm, you have the opportunity to join others in the process of enculturation into said paradigm. This is how in 2050 it is possible for kids to become proficient in areas very early on, as it is possible today for a very lucky few who have a guide and mentor on their side. Knowledge is not something that falls into age groups.
What the lucky few have today, namely competent guides to help them direct their learning efforts and not end up in dead-ends or a loss of motivation, people around them who appreciate their efforts and listen to them “perform,” peers who help them grasp complex issues on the level of complexity they are capable of, is something that all human beings have available in 2050.
The result of orientational knowledge, social learning, and personal recognition being easily available to all in the year 2050 is that when you end up choosing a career, you do so on the grounds of a solid foundation of already knowing what “it is like” to experience the world through the specific paradigm chosen. In other words, you know what you are getting yourself into.
So while between your first encounter with a new paradigm and you becoming an active member or representative, there still lies the widely quoted 10,000 hours of practice and engagement, your first encounter with “your” paradigm can be easier whenever you feel ready for it, in your youth, long before you can officially enter university. And keeping up the commitment is much easier with peers to help you on your way.
You don’t have to wait until it’s basically too late to feel the world and figure out which styles of thought, which knowledge culture suits your talents and interests. And you don’t have to be alone while figuring it out.
11. Bildung Everywhere, Depth Everywhere
In 2050, opportunities for Bildung are everywhere around you. To get orientational knowledge, you do not have to visit a special institution. Bildung is not something happening in closed spaces, but the other way around, all spaces imaginable have been transformed so that their inherent activities tacitly foster Bildung. All spaces imaginable have been transformed to become partly transparent to their environment. All spaces imaginable have been transformed to offer what they have to offer in different degrees of resolution and commitment.
Take watching a movie. In 2050, it is not an isolated and passive activity anymore. It is embedded in a wider network of mutual exchange. Picking a movie rests on prior interactions with significant others who raised your interest in it in the first place. On the other hand, watching the movie is not over with having watched it. Rather, after watching it, people can enter discussion spaces that are designed to invite the processing together with others of what you just experienced.
In 2050, our spaces are so designed, including our movie theaters, that they invite the dialogical and people finding each other who have something to say to each other.
As of today, on the other hand, the dialogical is rather an exception than the norm. Obviously, people talk a lot to each other — maybe even too much. But if you think about it, the opportunities for targeted discussions to talk about something specific that inspires you or to talk about depth are very limited. For that to happen, we need exposure to stimuli that inspire us.
This means we need exposure to art, literature, science, philosophy, and the ability to talk about that exposure with others. But as of today, most of these activities happen in private. And what is the likelihood that a passage I read in a book that inspired me and is meaningful to me will be something a random alter, someone I stumble upon in a club, will have something meaningful to say about? It’s basically zero, that’s why we can’t help but end up talking about the weather.
How would it look if as of today you wanted to talk with others about a movie that you just saw? You would have to shout into the audience after the movie was over and ask whether someone wanted to talk to you about it. And even if you found people to join you, if you wanted to have a discussion with others after the movie, you would have to search for a different and proper space to have that discussion. Asking for the dialogical within our present-day spaces borders on a perversion and being creepy. At the very least, it takes unnecessary effort and time to find minds you can have a meaningful exchange with.
This is not so in 2050. Spaces are built with the dialogical and Bildung in mind. This is why the activity of exposure to a movie is tied to a space where you can talk about it. Just by entering that space, you signal an interest to talk with others about what you just experienced. And this space is already filled with people who have something to say about the movie, including people whose passion it is to talk about symbolism and people who have watched this movie many times over.
The same goes for listening to music or theatre. Live performances offer an opportunity to invite the creators into a discursive space after the performance. The boundaries between those who create and those who consume, the intelligentsia who devote their lives to culture, and the common people who spend most of their lifetime on mindless activities and labor, are becoming more and more meaningless. And if anything, YouTube has shown us that there is an abundance of talent out there. Outstanding musicians many have never heard of. We don’t lack creators, but we lack spaces for them to be appreciated.
The general principle of how spaces are built in 2050 is that they are designed with the dialogical and Bildung in mind. People in huge living complexes don’t just live in their isolated apartments anymore. They have their private space, but they also have areas available where they can cook together with others. They have shared spaces where they can watch movies together, where they can make music together. Every living complex literally has its own town hall and opportunities for people to get together in discursive ways, to practice together and see others practice. And what happens in these spaces doesn’t stay in these spaces. Channels are created to connect with other spaces and communicate with them, leaving something behind for others to see.
Similarly, in 2050, even living in the countryside is not isolated from the global mind. Even there, you have the opportunity to visit cultural centers where Bildung is done in public. These are places that bring together everyday activities and Bildung.
As already stated, it doesn’t matter where you start anymore because every single injunction that inspires you already contains, as an augmented layer, an entire universe of other possible interactions and relations.
12. Becoming a Generalist
In 2050, becoming a specialist is no longer an end in itself. As we have seen so far, reality does not come in nicely separated domains of knowledge that can be mapped by academic or other disciplines. Ideas are connected to other ideas across all disciplinary boundaries.
The memex allows you to add connections to a paragraph across all disciplines. If you think a physicist can help clarify an issue, then you just link to their argument. If you think a sociologist can help clarify the issue, then you just link to their respective argument. The memex is not there to stop you from crossing disciplinary boundaries; it supports cross-referencing ideas beyond paradigms.
Learning is a visible and trackable process in 2050. The learning path itself is visible all along, and the steps you have to take are visible to all. In the year 2050, enculturation into a paradigm is thus much less of a “mystery.” Learning is not something that some are magically capable of while others aren’t. Learning is much more a matter of choice and commitment, a matter of finding the learning path that suits your knowledge interests and temperament.
The steps and injunctions you have to take to conquer a territory, the different paths to the top, are visible and right there in front of you from the very beginning. You see the sources you need to cover, you see the experiments you have to perform, the individuals you have to approach, you see the discussions you have to go through right on the spot, before even having engaged with a knowledge practice itself. You see different styles of approaching the discipline, different learning paths, and dead-ends to be aware of.
The disciplines have developed many channels through which they reduce their complexity down into the lifeworld of all. That’s where they pick up laypeople. Not through mass media, but through low-resolution channels that are connected to higher-resolution channels.
There are many successful learning paths into a discipline, and on most of them, you are supported by a community of peers and never left fully alone to figure out the impossible. With enculturation being easier and taking up less of your lifetime, the appreciation for different paradigms has risen as well. Paradigms are valued for their actual contributions and are not defined as competitors to be excluded.
This is why learning a disciplinary field, even learning about the view of an author, is much more straightforward in 2050. Everybody can do it because the curation part has been done by the community for them. All you need is to take up the injunctions of a learning path that suits your temperament and enjoy the ride. You don’t spend 90 percent of your time on curation and finding relevant sources for inspiration. You don’t need to wait to go to university to go through enculturation.
And with every discipline, every knowledge practice, every author being broken down into multiple levels of resolution, you can choose how deep you want your enculturation to go. You don’t have to swallow the whole fish anymore to get the gist of a knowledge practice, to gain a sense of what it can do and what it can’t do. You don’t have to become a theoretical physicist to see the major injunctions and practices leading to a physicist’s perspective on a phenomenon.
You don’t need to go through the entire enculturation of a discipline to grasp “what it is like” to apply the respective paradigm and see through it. You don’t have to go through all the details of physics to get the gist of what a physicalist perspective can make visible in a given situation.
With these two at hand, enculturation being much more efficient and adapted to individual interests and coming in different degrees of resolution, in 2050, becoming a generalist is much easier. Doing a grand narrative is actually its own discipline. Looking into all available paradigms and seeing how they influence our self-understanding as human beings is its own job. It’s a doable job for which you don’t have to lock yourself up and just read for twenty years.
On the other hand, all specialists are at the same time generalists to some degree. Having used the memex tools to learn a discipline and make their discipline visible to others, they immediately see the “practice” of doing a grand narrative itself. They see their discipline in the context of other disciplines.
This ability to hold a generalist’s perspective as a specialist and contextualize one’s own findings shifts the academic disciplines themselves away from a totalizing tendency to “own” the entire lifeworld to simply transparently showing what they have to contribute to it. Disciplines don’t exist as hermetic circles anymore claiming absolute knowledge, but all recognize their duty to translate back their findings into a common language and shared overall reality.
Thus, in 2050, society at large has more Bildung or orientational knowledge. Every average person is capable of spotting framing fallacies. They know the limits and potentials of specific academic disciplines. Because every average person has taken up many dozens of learning paths — even though they might not be actively studying a field at university — they are capable of understanding where a perspective is coming from and where it can take us.
Every average person has, to some degree, become a content creator and is in touch with all strata of society. They learn from everyone and everyone contributes. Every average person knows more about what is going on in the various disciplines because the gap between the lifeworld and the world of specialized perspectives has been closed. Scientists don’t have to filter their perspective through narrowing communicators who are not scientists themselves, but their views are made visible on different levels of resolution by the learning community itself, by students who have internalized their work and created secondary material that summarizes and explains their positions.
Thus, all scientists need to do is properly make visible the sources of their ideas and annotations. The rest of spreading their ideas on different levels of differentiation, the community does for them.
This means that in 2050, every average person is much closer to the actual research being done. They don’t have to rely on news media to get a message across, but they can see the impact of scientific research immediately. With this direct connection to the knowledge practices, all citizens are much more capable of taking in the totality of existence as it shows itself through these knowledge practices than they are today. They are capable of seeing the world through the eyes of multiple disciplines and perspectives at once.
