A thinker for 2020 — Alexander Bard
Jordan Peterson was a major cultural phenomenon of 2018. Or rather The Intellectual Dark Web as a scenius (collective genius of a scene) was the thing. Peterson made personal responsibility cool again as a meme. But he, as many others, misunderstands Marxism and lumps the whole Left into one postmodern mess.
In 2019 various other thinkers and scenes surfed this huge JBP wave. And one of the most interesting scenes was “The Intellectual Deep Web”, also known as Sensemaking Web, with memes such as Game B, embodied practices and collective intelligence, and with thinkers such as John Vervaeke (colleague of JBP), Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Bonnitta Roy.
These guys are less keen on the postmodern “either/or” fights and culture wars, and much keener on coming up with synthesis of views and really hard questions and problems. Such as, what are the generator functions of existential risk? Can we build a Game B civilization on anti-rivalrous and antifragile foundations and scale it past the Dunbar number? How can we protect our information ecology and end the current war on sensemaking that exacerbates existential risks and creates polarization? I think the difference between these guys and the original IDW from 2018 is like the difference between Nassim Taleb, who likes to troll a lot, and Dave Snowden, who is also cynical and critical but much kinder, humbler and more constructive complexity thinker.
I bet the 2020 will be bigger for thinkers from Continental Europe, especially thanks to an emerging thinker Alexander Bard. He is akin to Žižek 2.0 and he was the first “internet philosopher” back in the 90s in Sweden. He and his partner wrote Netocrats some 20 years ago and expanded it into The Futurica Trilogy. And now they have a new book Digital Libido which I read and highly recommend.
Bard is also active in these “Sensemaking Web” circles and is always fun to watch and read. He sees the invention of internet as a similarly big earthquake as once was the invention of printing press. This squares well with the Game B idea built on non-hierarchical and bottom-up collective intelligence, and interactive hive-minds, instead of inter-passive mobs that we see in current social networks that propel endless culture wars and fractured memetic tribes.
Game A (civilization beyond Dunbar number until now) is built on the inventions of written language that enabled permanent settlements, and the invention of printing press, that enabled the invention of Napoleon’s army, the top-down hierarchical collective intelligence, where for the first time every soldier could read and write. And this served as a blueprint for nation states, institutions, schools and corporations. Here Bard meets Jordan Hall.
But Bard says that these Anglo-Saxon thinkers are all about etiquette, and focus too much on the quality of discourse instead of building big visions. We need quality dialogue across memetic tribes we need to end culture wars. But this is only a half of the solution and we need also content, a big vision to propel us forward, not just some (anti)debates, circling and embodied practices. Alexander Bard contrasts a big vision for earth as a garden full of sensors, he calls “ecotopia”, with the current almost religious and moralistic fervor of environmentalism. He also thinks that “God exists”, but only in the future propelled by the internet. God wasn’t created yet, and we need to create him through “syntheism”. By collaborating effectively on a global scale and achieving symbiotic intelligence with the help of machine intelligence, that will help us to love our neighbors beyond the nation state.
I wrote more about Alexander Bart in my previous article. And since then I got to know his ideas a better. I think he could be a bit more aware of the distinctions between complex and complicated, as Dave Snowden puts it, and the need for anti-fragile and non-rivalrous solutions. But his clear vision and drive is really enchanting. Bard is writing a new book with his partner which should be focused on nomadology — on the big vision and how to get there.
If I could add my two cents to this effort I would suggest Alexander Bard to follow people like Tom Chi, a co-founder of Google X, who has his rapid prototyping methodology (somehow similar to what Bonnitta Roy does with group flow) and contrasts research (phase) with development (phases). Tom Chi is about as close to ecotopia as you can get, with his talks about technologies that can serves as invention catalysts, and companies such as BioCarbon Engineering, a company that wants to plant billions of trees way faster and cheaper by using drones and AI. (This is related to the importance of radical repurposing, or exaptation, e.g. of military technology for ecological purposes, and not the other way round by weaponizing technology).
Another influence to follow would be Simon Wardley and his effort to make corporate consultants obsolete, by his Wardley Mapping, that combines the ideas of OODA loops, peak predators/S-Curves with Sun Tzu teachings and practical visual mapping of the journey various innovations need to take, before they are commoditized (in the complicated domain), and could be included in a stack to propel further innovations (in the complex domain). So this is related to the idea of nomadology and could consolidate the seemingly opposed needs for accelerationism in the complex domain, with the need to decelerate competition in the complicated domain. Both are needed. Basically it’s all about process, timing and situational awareness.
I am looking forward to explore more of Bard’s ideas and books, and how these fit with the bigger picture of Game B, existential risk and bootstrapping a desired and definite future.
