Enter the Multiple
How the discovery of quants, bits, and genes is leading us into a more complex civilization.
Bernhard Resch and Theodore Taptiklis
Around the globe, people are feeling their way into new ways of living. Disenchanted by the trajectory of ‘never enough,’ of career, consuming, and polluting, they are breaking with modern life. Many are flirting with a spiritual reckoning, learning to refuse the ideology of individualism itself. They are endeavoring to mend our severed ties with one another, our broken relationship with nature, and our alienation from our bodies. Overlapping movements are pioneering strange but exponentially more successful, satisfying, and healthy ways of living. This is their story, the effervescent reinvention of our social fabric, the adolescence of a new age.
Can you hear the dissonant rhythms of typewriter keystrokes, and smell the dust on the books in library stacks? Can you feel the weight of telephone books? Their heaviness seemingly mocked by ephemeral pages, always about to tear as you riffed through them? Yes? A world is slipping away.
The civilizational project of the global North is collapsing. At its moment of greatest triumph, Modernity has exhausted its grassroots. Our society has depleted its planetary resources, social glue, and human selves. It has been outmoded by its own technological advances. We are living in a corpse, and the rotten smell is all we know.
Let us treat you to a breath of fresh air.
Soon our descendants will look back unbelieving that we could neither see employment as a form of serfdom nor treat information as a commons. Are you ready to admit that trading and consuming must be complemented by gifting and caring? Can you fathom the vastness of life outside the templates offered by our institutions? Come and join the many who are already creating vibrant new modes of living, working, loving, being, and relating!
The only thing you have to risk is to lower your guard. Gather your courage; share your grief and tender dreams.
Masses and modules
Looking back at the Moderns. It is the year 1492. A man is standing in front of the Spanish queen Isabella I. His name is Antonio de Nebrija, and his proposal is about to change the world. The scholar had constructed a grammar and dictionary of the Castilian language. While not without precedent in human history, he proposed his grammar as a means to teach an everyday language: The idea of a mother tongue taught in schools was born. Thereby, he created the modern citizen, whose language is allocated by the state.
In this fateful year, Nebrija’s technique to rule the people through the standardization and singularization of what can be thought and said coincided with the ravages of the conquistadors. Together these events heralded the centuries-long destruction of vernacular world-making in local groups both in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ world. In hindsight, Modernity replaced a kaleidoscope of established, successful, and autonomous local cultures with a uniform society of the masses. Today, our lives overwhelmingly revolve around homogenizing institutions — schools, hospitals, factories, offices, parties, associations, and shopping centers. In these places, our very ability to mobilize words, to sense our bodies, and to construe the world is ironed flat.
However, massification would not have been possible without its companion separation. To break traditional social chains — bonds of belonging, commoning, and hospitality — human life was divided into a series of segregated domains. Modern men became ‘modular men’ that had to learn to enact specific roles: inter-generational communities were split into father-mother-child units; stewards of shared resources turned into workers and owners; folks became citizens.
Our modern selves can be seen as a ‘repertoire of behavioral elements’ rather than persons; roles that we mobilize in different domains of our life: at work, home, church, clubs, etc.
Similarly, enlightenment philosophy separated humans from nature, our minds from our bodies, and profit-making from the wider economy. We split ourselves and our relationship to the world to become masters of causality, efficiency, and control. We modeled ourselves and our world in the image of the machine, replacing the cycles of days, nights, and seasons with the ticking of the clock.
Today we realize that the progressive tick-tock eats us alive. No gadget, no love affair, no project, no positive bank balance, no holiday, no niche experience, no mindfulness practice, no diet or beauty treatment, no new life choice, neither offspring nor legacy will keep us satiated. Modernity has left a gaping void between atomized, alienated and fragmented individuals and a mass society of strangers. Sacrifice is the shadow lurking behind this concept of civilization; the unconscious sacrifice of people’s own capacities for world-making, for developing purpose and authentic life in the midst of others. And what for? For the idea of a world order, for insatiable ideals that torment us with their desires but are always out of reach. A rule that depends on us being forever broken.
You may find yourself bouncing on your trampoline, momentarily glimpsing a long row of indistinguishable suburban backyards full of unused trampolines. You may be walking across a busy cityscape seeking eye contact that no one returns. You may sense the draining atomization, that feeling of being alone in the middle of a deafening party. Maybe, you are yearning for compassionate encounters, shared creation, and contemplation?
You are not alone.
A new hope
This is the story of the disaffected elites of our time, of the triple-H population: the hipsters, hackers, and hippies. But it is also the story of the last strongholds of pre-modern indigeneity among Māori in New Zealand, the locals of Chiapas in Mexico or Kerala in Southern India, where the space between individuals and masses is not lost.
Let’s take a look at this triple-H population, the privileged dropouts, scheming and building at the edges of the creative economy. They are finding each other in peer-to-peer and open source software design networks, in intentional communities around ecovillages and cohousing projects, in coworking spaces, impact hubs, fab labs, and freelancer coops, at transformational festivals and all kinds of burner gatherings; as psychedelic explorers, digital nomads, developers, designers, researchers, freelancers, sharing activists, stewards, co-creators, changemakers, and facilitators.
They have designed a new generation of events — hackathons, open spaces, and retreats — peak experiences, where they mess around with the social bonds, norms, and practices that make togetherness. As they listen and talk in circles, as they exchange stories and gifts instead of arguments, and as they collaborate while paying attention to the different responses of their hearts and stomachs, they are creating a new kind of mutual attunement that forms around their vulnerability and difference. In the last couple of years, these co-creative events have been branching out into more permanent forms of association. People in these neo-tribes, organized networks, and urban villages are now prototyping something that is exciting and outrageous at the same time…
Digital indigeneities
So, where will we be in let’s say fifteen years? The most covetable workplace will not be located within a firm. Avant-garde economic life will revolve around communities or more precisely, around trans-local networks of intimate groups. It may take the form of an urban village, melding local intergenerational housing, coworking facilities, maker spaces, urban farming, unschooling groups, hospitality, as well as recreational and cultural venues. Its economic arteries will flow through work-families that favor a stable livelihood for their members, through entrepreneurial coalitions, and problem-specific swarms; all of them connected to global infrastructures, platforms, and commons. In these spaces, ownership will be distributed between contributors, stakeholders, and shareholders, leaders will have lost their autocratic powers, and employment will no longer operate as the grandchild of slavery.
Importantly, this is not a fight against but a queering of capitalism. A realization that profit-making is only one section in a broad spectrum of economic activities. For many, it is a dawning that the commons, not private property and the state might be a more productive way to develop and distribute in the digital economy. It is crucial to understand that digital indigeneities do not pitch profits and business against the social good. They grow on each other’s soil. What we see is the rise of a myriad of groups experimenting with new forms of organizing that prioritize healthy livelihoods over profits. These groups pursue constructive ambiguity. They fuse participation with efficiency, encourage mutual care while maintaining individual boundaries, and seek a togetherness that thrives through the development of autonomy.
Modern fetishization of either the market or the state is revealed as ideological blindness. Cleavages such as ‘workers vs. capitalists’ and ‘progressives vs. conservatives’ will increasingly be seen as “so 20th century” — as relics of a time gone by.
We can compare our historic moment — we call this the Rise of the Multiple — to Romanticism, brimming with new actors, relationship opportunities, and life choices.
Modernity has outcompeted the guilds of the Middle Ages by inventing the bourgeois, the worker, the manager, the colleague, the school friend, the pensioner, and the romantic spouse. Similarly, the Multiple is introducing exponentially more successful, autonomous, and supportive ways of life, as accomplices, crew-mates, or stewards.
Let’s remember: The common denominator of all these bold experiments is a playful quest to regain our ability to create the world on our own terms. Digital indigeneities — time-honored practices of human encounter adapted to the digital age — are creating relationships that distance ourselves from the desires and ideologies that modern society thrives on. They tap into an enormous creative potential because they enable people to show up as themselves — sometimes exhilarated, full of potential, at other times grumpy and a bit depressed. As we recognize other people’s struggles in our own experience, our lives touch each other in moments of disclosure, difference, and aspiration. We realize that at each moment we can wrestle with our shared meanings and multiply them.
With this recognition, the shades fall from our eyes, and we are ready to break with massification. We refuse a separated and administered life that starts in kindergarten and school, leads into universities and workplaces, whose difficulties are treated in hospitals and churches, and that ends in a retirement home.
However, pioneers of this movement have to acknowledge that they are up for an immense task that encompasses a relational, organizational, as well as a spiritual transformation: a reckoning with our minds as bodies; an attentiveness to our feelings, sensual impressions, and emotions; a joint exploration of how our doing lands with each other, and finally an appreciation of incompleteness, polycentric uncertainty, and systemic perspective-taking. But most difficult of all, this project entails a yearning for a new kind of belonging. How to abandon our habit of building a shared culture in opposition to some out-group? Can we have communities that do not depend on sameness? Can we harness our differences as the greatest source of learning?
Luckily and against all the odds, bearing in mind the relentlessness of western imperialism, we might find unexpected allies in the last remaining manifestations of ancient indigeneities. In those people who find it unthinkably strange that children are not raised by a village but in a nuclear family. Listening to them we might recognize the inhumanity of putting our little, eccentric, and old ones into institutions. Attending indigenous gatherings we might see the contrast with our narrow argumentative conversations, our instrumental thinking, and our fixation on self-interest in our workplaces. This experience might inspire us to make room in our meetings for listening and storytelling, for the needs of our bodies, for the settling and naming of our differences, for feasting and singing.
We can already hear your criticism: But what about the rule of cool, where charisma and cliques come to dominate? What about tacit group values that exclude some people? Didn’t we create laws, institutions, and bureaucratic processes specifically to overcome the tribal and nepotist nature of pre-modern societies! Self-actualization and safe spaces won’t lead you into a better world, only engagement with power structures will do so.
It’s time, dear critic, to reboot your Enlightenment consciousness.
Welcome to the Age of Entanglement
Big leaps in social evolution are always associated with the integration of new technologies. First, we make our tools, and then they make us. The fire encouraged us to talk, written thoughts erected empires, and the printing press launched us into outer space. Today, we are experiencing an unprecedented collision of three mind-bending discoveries: quants, bits, and genes. If we can’t expand our self-understanding, our perception of the cosmos, and our modes of organizing to match the vast capacities of these technologies, then, there is a good chance for humanity to be consumed by the intensity of this epic encounter.
Quants
Particles behaving so strangely that even Einstein was not able to process their movements. On the subatomic level, there are no things, just happenings. We see a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities that acquire their thingness in a restless swarming. At the quantum level, everything is entangled in a melding and a dancing. The observer determines the quality of the observed. Answers are not found by looking for causality, but by recognizing the superposition of a constellation from its rainbow of possible interactions, probabilities, and outcomes.
Modern science has expelled us from the center of the world and the animal kingdom. Postmodernity dislodged us from the center of rationality and things. In the Multiple, we realize that we are no center at all. We are a momentary actualization of a myriad of possibilities, an ongoing crystallization of crisscrossing influences — a thousand histories, experiences, and relations, ungraspable desires, and drives. The idea of being an individual seems nothing more than the delirium of an inflated ego. From now on we can’t see ourselves as linearly developing entities, more as phase jumps on an immeasurable plane, learning and unlearning, assimilating, cohabiting, while we go through a series of excesses and moderations.
This reckoning means that we are finally ready to give up the phantasms of universal solutions, of true paths, and whole selves — a frightening but liberating thought. If there are no ultimate truths, we can free ourselves from the spell of ideology and start living in the tension between right and wrong. Entanglement thinking rewards those who embrace more perspectives. Gone are the days of finding problems and solutions according to some unacknowledged world-view. Now, we make and are made by co-developmental relationships through which we sense the complexity around us. We attempt to go meta, to think in systemic and paradigmatic terms, to look into the abyss, then embrace the tension and respond to the emergent potentials. The hard part is to accept our insignificance within a vast cosmos. We are no more than twinkles of consciousness, but we also carry the whole universe within us.
Bits
Historically, we modeled new technologies in the image of old ones. Today is no different. With the boundless creative potential of digital technology at our fingertips, all we could imagine was to force the zeros and ones into pages. The web as a vast, jointly created book. Now, it seems that we have reached a tipping point: we begin to understand that there is no border between off- and online. We can manipulate our reality, augment it or even step into a virtual alternative. We give birth to machines that have the power to learn, adapt, create, and evolve.
Now, we seem to be ready for new kinds of digital dreams, but given our present structures of society and ways of living, we end up in nightmares all too soon. We have seen computers as cathedrals of Modernity, bestowing us with the power to control knowledge. Unexpectedly, they have unleashed something very different: systems with an emergent properties that we cannot understand holistically. We have built our own jungle, and it has a life of its own.
The Age of Entanglement challenges us to discard our deep convictions of domination, control, normalization, and separation. The modern story is simply not useful anymore. Instead, we have to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity. We must accept the downfall of master planning, understand the power of concurrent experiments, and play with incremental changes. Changemakers might realize, however, that there are no ways of working that are entirely free of power. We see emergent hierarchies and pluricentric forms of organizing, whose tensions we can only ever attempt to ride not resolve. We might accept that our nudging, cajoling, and tinkering will fail all the time — but not necessarily in a fatal way.
Under these circumstances, the urgent task is not to build the next master plan but to grow our capacities to embrace tensions and uncertainties. To work with complexity means to unmanage, to look to the side, and become curious about one another. Imagine what we might achieve if we start with building relationships instead of being puzzled by problems. Then, we can go on from there with our joint efforts. Holding more perspectives in this way enables us to dwell in the space of not knowing, confident that the bigger picture and the routes for adaptation will naturally become apparent.
Genes
The future: chimeras, multiple human species, engineered organisms, and evolved machines. Biotechnology, the newest in the triumvirate of epochal discoveries, will soon confront us with a mind-boggling multiplication of difference. It evokes no less than a spiritual revolution. A new kind of mutual attunement that encourages us to experience otherness as a source of learning and association. We are talking about an intimate togetherness that thrives on the recognition of shared aspirations, where we are not shy to draw on the resources of others and respond to their needs.
A range of groups has already begun to develop literacy in how to create psychologically safe and socially sensitive group spaces. By disclosing our authentic and vulnerable qualities, we viscerally experience the incomplete nature of all standpoints; the excitement, suffering, and failure of others come to life in our own existence. Once we realize that difference doesn’t reside within individuals, but arises between us, we establish the preconditions for setting essentialisms and judgments aside.
In this process, we can draw on the knowledge of old ‘analog’ indigeneities to transform our sterile meeting practices into gatherings that include our histories and differences. Meetings that start with relationship-building and ample time to settle all participants. Spaces that guide us into co-creative action, active listening and reflection or sacred contemplation. Regular practices that remind us to replace our opinions with our storied experiences, to name our feelings as well as our thoughts, to negotiate our values within our operational goals, to humanize us in each other’s eyes.
Our ability to sense and think has been governed in our name. It’s a phenomenal adventure to re-discover how to feel, taste, hear, smell, and see together with the others around you. We are all a vital part of the web of life. The vast creationist potential of the universe is lying dormant between us. What if from now on we work by building relations first? What if we recognize our different experiences and perspectives as our greatest gifts? All that’s needed from you for a ‘world where many worlds fit’ is some courage to share you tenderness and grief. Stay with the trouble. After all, we’re all just human; forever incomplete, caught in-between. But be assured: Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
Multiply yourself, enjoy a multiplicity of relations, dive into a multitude of cosmoi!
Enter the Multiple.
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Curious to learn more about organizational design and group learning for the Multiple? Continue with Richard D. Bartlett’s Microsolidarity proposal and Theodore Taptiklis’ call for Microattunement. Or simply join our work at Between Us.
