Exploring the ideas of ecotopia and syntheism with Alexander Bard
Now in 2020, I happen to circle back to where I started in 2016, a year when I was fascinated by the collaboration between Slavoj Zizek and Jean-Pierre Dupuy and ideas such as “bootstrapping the desired future”, “enlightened doomsaying”, self-transcendence and the Newcomb’s Paradox. Dupuy was a close friend of René Girard, the guy who came up with the mimetic theory of conflict and showed how Christianity helped us to fight this tendency to imitate each other and over the ages slowly tamed the ancient collective violent outbursts of scapegoating and witch hunts. With my friend Tomas Uhnak we did an interview with Jean Pierre Dupuy on the role of the sacred in taming violent imitation.
From Effective Altruism to Game B
In 2017 I got deeper into the Effective Altruism movement and we did some more or less regular meetups in Bratislava and met some effective altruists from Vienna, Prague and Brno. I like the spirit of the movement that is focused on hard facts and cracking big problems, like how to achieve the biggest bang for the buck, and save the most lives and improve wellbeing with limited resources. But at the same time, I felt that the movement, by mixing mostly economics and philosophy, lacked back then the key ingredients of complexity science and a certain epistemic humility that would prevent them to mess up with complex (eco)systems. Also, the EA movement operates still within this rivalrous paradigm of instrumental rationality, trying to outsmart the other guy on the block. They consider existential risks as the most important, but haven’t yet fully grasped the idea of generator functions of existential risks (one of them being rivalry), and how the civilization as it exists now is inexorably self-terminating.
So the idea of Game B that could be scalable beyond Dunbar number and the idea of creating some liminal spaces attracts me a lot and I prioritized exploring this space and reduced my involvement with EA a bit. Currently I like the idea of liminal spaces, like incubators for Game B, that would also serve as decelerators for Game A, and retreat centers in rural areas (including a dose of digital detox) that could spin-off communities of embodied practice and collective non-hierarchical wisdom. There are some examples from Game A — elite forces where trust is high and teams are small and environment is complex. The highly efficient Formula1 pit stop operators. Scientists in places like Santa Fe Institute, who collaborate effectively across disciplines and invented new fields like complexity science.
In 2018 it seems that something changed in the cultural scene as Jordan Peterson became the hotly debated person. He challenged various orthodoxies and politically correct views and made the meme of personal responsibility appealing. And a syndicate of podcasters with diverse ideologies was formed, The Intellectual Dark Web. In 2019 there were several offshoots of this phenomenon and a part of it merged into a scene, that is less preoccupied with culture wars and more focused on quality dialogue and sensemaking through embodied practice that could form a new kind of collective intelligence, a swarm instead of a mob, an interactive and creative mind hive of equals. So this is a turn from a hierarchical Game A structure that runs various ideologies as scripts, to something more decentralized, playful and interactive and equal.
John Vervaeke emerged as a Jordan Peterson 2.0 and also started his youtube lecture series called Awakening from The Meaning Crisis. He popularized the ideas of psychotechnologies and four kinds of knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory). People started to realize more and more, that you cannot learn how to ride a bicycle by reading books about biking and bicycles. One needs embodied practice, one needs for example two years of apprenticeship until new connections in the brain are formed and some tasks are automatized via procedural knowing. This is also what Dave Snowden, another complexity thinker, akin to Nassim Taleb 2.0, talks about.
The Intellectual Deep Web or Sensemaking Web was formed, with complexity thinkers such as Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Bonnitta Roy and various other podcasters as central nodes. They take a lot from Dave Snowden, but also from process philosophers, including Deleuze, and complexity science. They managed to bring a totally new level of clarity to various social issues (e.g. existential risks and their generator functions, such as rivalry) and were able to hold various opposing views and form a more holistic perspective.
Alexander Bard urges us to build ecotopia instead of endless discussions
Enter Alexander Bard. A Swedish philosopher and a pop star who is akin to Žižek 2.0. He is well versed in these Sensemaking Web circles but challenges them as too focused on etiquette and dialogue and too little focused on big visions. In other words, they are too focused on form and too little on content. They are building “a container” or a culture through practicing various psychotechnologies such as antidebates, circling and aim to arrive at group sovereignty and a group flow, hoping that some solutions will pop out this way. But Alexander Bard says that they should focus more on creating actual technologies for the ecological utopia, or what he calls ecotopia. And this requires hard work and years of effort.
I understand Bard’s point and agree that this is probably an issue of achieving a right proportion of efforts — both form and content are important, but probably there is a trade-off between them. If you have a perfect form, you might lose some content. On the other hand, I do think that psycho-technologies are still technologies and they are highly scalable — you don’t need money to reframe debate into anti-debate and split debates into two, a sensemaking debate to speed up collective learning and collective wisdom, and a sports debate to practice rhetoric.
Here wisdom is something like learning how to learn how to learn faster, or meta-meta-learning. In other words, wisdom is learning how to accelerate the speed of learning how to learn.
Also to challenge Bard a bit, it is worth to note that Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall cofounded a company called Neurohacker, that aims to create the best nootropic stack based on complexity science and enhance empathy in the process. So, this effort alone is very similar to Bard’s vison of “machines helping us to love strangers better”. We need this to decrease existential risks and improve global collaboration past the nation states. Here, it is not machine intelligence, cooperating with humans as machine-human hybrids, or what Schmachtenberger and Bard call symbiotic intelligence, here we talk about an effort to create nootropics based on complexity science and holistic approach, without trade-offs, e.g. between deep focus and multitasking, or without trade-offs between productivity and empathy. And these pills shall not replace other psycho-technologies, such as breath work and meditation, or gratitude journaling, etc. Nor shall they be addictive.
A vision beyond sustainability towards regeneration and health
Alexander Bard, besides ecotopia and syntheism (more on that below), came up with another great concept called imploitation as opposed to exploitation. It is basically an idea of a “tantric practice” of withholding, of investing, of cultivation and repairing. A very circular-economy-like idea. An idea for regenerative practices, including regenerative economy, and regenerative agriculture. This would be great for Bard to highlight and understand — that we need to constantly circle between various opposed perspectives, but aim for a right measure or a right balance. In this way the idea of imploitation is similar to regeneration of complex systems, or the idea of over-compensation and anti-fragility. Basically we need to go beyond the paradigm of sustainability into the paradigm of regeneration and over-compensation. As Tom Chi (invention catalysts) and Dave Snowden (peak predators) explain, sustainability itself is too low of a benchmark because it is not meta-sustainable. Because if one eco-friendly company (peak predator) collapses, there is a period of races to the bottom, a period of unsustainability and heightened existential risk. So, put simply, we need to plant more trees than we cut, much more, to account for the lean times of cut-throat and unsustainable competition. This is as basic as saving up for the bad times, but it is easier said that done. See Tom Chi and his talk on companies such as BioCarbon Engineering, that are able to plant trees at 60x efficiency, by repurposing (exapting) previous military tech of drones shooting tree-pods to the ground combined with AI
Today we still see even the best corporations with the best CSR to promise e.g. carbon-neutrality or energy-neutrality until e.g. 2025 or 2030, in line with Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2030. But this is in itself (meta)unsustainable, because these companies can be anytime replaced with less ecological companies, they should leave more in the eco-bank as an inheritance, not just zero in 2030. Basic idea regeneration and health, instead of sustainability and equilibrium. And this health and regeneration requires anti-fragility, meaning right amounts of stress followed by over-compensation. Periods of relaxation and periods of hard work.
We need new psychotechnologies such as better visial mapping to accelerate innovation in the Game B
Now we can get to Bard’s grand vision of syntheism, of creating God in the internet age, of achieving the maximum productive and effective collaboration with a globally connected interactive mind-hive via internet. These machine-human hybrids, or symbiotic intelligence, should help us to “love the strangers better”. This is the big task and I proposed the idea of universal basic scholarship as an alternative to universal basic income. Because UBI is about transfers and zero-sum, universal scholarship is about co-creation, gift economy, and related spin-offs that can be created and also later monetized. So universal scholarship, combined with techniques such as Rapid Prototyping by Tom Chi, and hit-based investing via patient venture philanthropy, could start to point us in the right direction and get us on a trajectory.
Yes we still need a culture of Game B, anti-rivalry and infinite games of playful collaboration, instead of cut-throat competition fed by the current venture capital. And yes we probably need a next level of social networking technology that would help us to create symbiotic intelligence, instead of attention hijack through bullshit, in the technical sense, and culture wars. So this is a big task.
Another big task is to come up with big visions and yes here I agree with Bard. Peter Thiel does that, based on René Girard, in his book Zero to One, that has become the startup-bible. Jean Pierre Dupuy a friend of René Girard does that through concepts such as bootstrapping the desired future, self-transcendence and Newcomb’s Paradox that is a technical example of self-transcendence, or meta-rationality (wisdom). Mariana Mazzucato tries to do that by reviving the idea of moonshots focused on climate change, and well also the Left does that by coming up with ideas such as The Green New Deal.
But there are some missing spots and innovations that need to yet become a part of our stack of psycho-technologies to be able to pull this about. So yes, the idea of infinite now promoted by Bard, a set of transformative events with finite duration along our timeline are needed. We need to increase the quantity and also quality of these transformative events — e.g. zero to one — in terms of a new innovation such as drones planting trees being created via a focused effort, e.g. over various hackathons, or over various sessions at some rural decelerator, where people can slow down, let their old paradigms go and refocus on something new.
Basically we need to accelerate the experimentation and imploitation of various technologies to create innovation catalysts in the complex domain, like the drones planting trees using AI. And at the same time we need to decelerate the unhealthy and unproductive competition in the complicated domain. So accelerationism and decelerationism are not opposed if you see the process of back and forth oscilation. Rushing to commoditize the new innovations from complex domain, and use them once they become commodities to build yet higher stack of technologies that are commoditized, and use that stack to accelerate yet further the research and experimentation and imploitation in the complex domain. I am using here the model of Wardley Maps, by Simon Wardley, that is somewhat similar to Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework and also uses Snowden’s peak predator theory to an extent and combines it with the idea of OODA Loops and Sun Tzu teaching to radically improve situational awareness.
Building the stack for a Game B
So for personal sovereignty and health we can use a wiser version of biohacking, including natural nootropics, using complexity science, not complicated medicine with trade-offs. Or what Teleb calls via negativa, or periodical fasting and circling off some substances. For culture building, or group sovereignty and group flow, we use the playful infinite game of sovereign equals, or Game B. For accelerating group learning, collective intelligence, and research of new technologies we use rapid prototyping by Tom Chi that is somewhat similar to what Bonnita Roy does with group flow. For financing of that research and learning we can use gift economy and the idea of universal basic scholarship, something like GiveDirectly, but not for testing universal basic income, but for accelerating collective learning and wisdom (meta-meta-learning). This can be combined with equity crowdfunding for the spin-offs and spin-outs.
For better strategy, or much better situational awareness, we can use Wardley Mapping. Which brings me back to Alexander Bard and his idea of four big innovations — spoken language, written language, printed language and interactive language. There was actually a long period prior to spoken language, and it was visual language through painting, hence cave paintings or maps with mammoths. So the next psychotechnology to be exapted is in my opinion much better visual mapping, by e.g. Wardley Mapping that can bring ideas such as OODA Loop and bio-economy with thropic cascades to a whole new level. This can be repurposed for the Game B ideas, meaning decelerating competition in the Product and Commodity spaces of the Wardley Map, and accelerating collaboration in the Genesis and Custom-built spaces of the Wardley Map.
This brings me to syntheism and machine-human hybrids or symbiotic intelligence. This technology would use something like Sensemaker software by Dave Snowden for personal journaling on one side, and effective group collaboration, and on the other hand for weak signal detection and distributed ethnography, or for what Bard call digital anthropology on a global scale. So a much better facebook, without advertising and without hate and mob scapegoating and culture wars. I think the best would be to just let facebook experiment with a paid version for subscribers that would get a much better quality of service and collaboration. But I guess a much better social network needs to be created and the old social networks need to be challenged. I see Letter.wiki, and others trying this somehow for anti-debates.
A vision to accelerate Hard Tech (circular economy and space industry) and using SDGs to achieve that
But what would be the unifying big vision with a clear deadline and a set of long-term all-win goals, or yet better heuristics and ethics. Well for starters we have the Sustainable Development Goals with a a clear deadline of 2030 and we could select some targets as priorities, using novel approaches of Game B, complexity science, network analysis, bio-economy… and we could prioritize those that can accelerate Game B the most, and thus accelerate global health of our ecosystems and also health and regeneration of our global hive-mind.
So the health maximalization, through antifragility and regeneration, for our global hive-mind shall be one target. Improving personal and group sovereignity shall be another target.
And the moonshot idea in fact needs to include both circular economy and also space industry — but not with the focus to leave our planet, but to protect our planet with nano-satelites, et cetera. So basically we need to accelerate Hard Tech sector, including circular economy and space industry, as a priority and accelerate the experimentation with all-win cultures and movements, such as Game B, and decelerate unhealthy competition in the commodity space, in the obvious and complicated systems space.
You can support my writing and videos on these topics and my small podcasting project Between Ideas & Subcultures through Patreon or PayPal.
