Examining the SHAPE of Existence, Part 1
Envisioning the interconnectedness of everything through Spheres of Human Activity, Proximity, and Engagement
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”
— Sir Winston Churchill
In a previous article, I introduced Ripple Detection, a comprehensive model to map out the various spheres of human activity, proximity, and engagement (SHAPE), along with a quality check on our digital feed for complete, aligned, reputable, and ethical (CARE) content as a map and compass mental model to help cut through the bullsh*t and keep things in context.
As an award-winning technologist, designer, and researcher who has specialized in digital workflows and sense-making of complex systems around people & places, it’s time we talk about how it all fits together. In this follow-up article and Part 1 of a two-part exposition, I lay out examples for each of the various SHAPE domains and their conditions and the ways that I leverage this understanding to think through the impact of technology on humanity.
Align to Objectivity
Before I get into the main topic, I have a small adjustment to my initial CARE model and a great story of continual improvement and the criticality of choosing our words intentionally.
A wonderful colleague, Jeanette Cajide, pointed out a valid concern that “aligning with what I know is true” could be a scary implication as someone's subjective truth can often overshadow their logical objective understanding. I think the simplest correction to this is altering my acronym to CORE, replacing the “A” for “align” with “O” for “objective,” which is the core value I am proposing.
We must be more careful to verify ideas that are subjective vs. objective. Opinions are fine, but we should not mistake them for objective truths. Measurably verifiable things that occur regardless of our desired position or outcome should hold a deeper value to us and our civilization. Without that distinction, we spiral into chaos quicker than we may ever realize before it’s too late.
In his book Starry Messenger, Neil deGrasse Tyson lays out an astute perspective on our relationship with ‘truth.’ He lays out three types of ‘truth’ that reflect how people tend to use them to support an argument: personal truths (subjective), political truths (subjective), and objective truths (obviously, objective.) The first two are principles and positions we hold based on personal belief, while an objective truth can be tested/proven outside ourselves and beyond our opinion. It supersedes any singular position and is a testable fact for everyone, regardless of belief.
Objectivity is essential to critical thinking, which is essential to knowing what you can trust. Trust is central to our AI conversation and one of the five aspects of predictive and generative design methods to help clarify expectations I wrote about previously. Predictive and generative AI tools will catapult us into an “even deeper misinformation era,” as Jeanette put it. We now need to equip our minds with the tools to clearly define objective or subjective content as we scroll through life’s events, which can be hard.
One way to maintain an objective perspective is to build a habit of filling the gaps with other verifiable information not presented immediately, but it’s tough with large systems. Hence, my proposal for Ripple Detection is a mental tool to help provide scaffolding that frames your understanding of how one event, idea, or headline impacts the system of things around you. So, why is this harder today?
Bigger Worlds Around Each Us
Our individual worlds are much bigger today, and so, too, the setting & context around a topic might stretch from the Self or Society out to the Earth and our place in the Universe. Given our interdependency on globalization, the internet, and ubiquitous engagement with digital products, I am exploring how we might more easily understand things on a planetary scale since those largest entities surrounding and consuming us are very difficult to wrap our heads around.
Thinking from an object-oriented-ontology (OOO) perspective, Timothy Morton coined a name for these largest of objects as Hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are objects so massively distributed in time and space that they transcend spatiotemporal specificities, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. So big yet so close to us, they tend to impact our lives in ways we may not perceive. I’m investigating technologically induced hyperobjects and the impact of technology across all SHAPE (Spheres of Human Activity, Proximity, and Engagement) domains.
Over a series of articles, I will explore our techno sapiens condition through each SHAPE domain in more detail to see what events, ideas, and human activity tie back to how we think about ourselves and what ripples we can start to visualize. I want to discover a simpler way to configure a meaningful understanding of our hyperconnected and hypercomplex world. To better grasp what I’m talking about, this Part 1 introduction overviews the smaller four SHAPE domains that relate most closely to ourselves, what is included within each, and how to think about their scale and impact.
The SHAPE of Existence, Part 1 (Self — Humanity)
AI and Quantum Computing are blasting through our knowledge horizon and very quickly catalyzing the collective processing of understanding, making it more critical to have a mental model in place to envision better how it all goes together. It could also be useful in fighting Skynet when the AIs turn sentient, but we can talk about that later. It still might be futile to try and know how everything — always — all-at-once fits together, but here we are, attempting to do the very thing mankind has pursued from the beginning of time: know the truth about things and how it all works. Let’s get into the first four SHAPE domains and their significance in making up the backdrop of your everyday existence in Part 1 of examining the shape of existence.
Since the human brain likes to classify things naturally, using this framework as a rubric for the system of all things is helpful. When I come across a new perspective or news story that sounds like there must be more to it, I think about what other level of things might possibly influence what I’m hearing (or vice versa) and research those other aspects to fill in the missing knowledge. I’ll often look for an opposing view to understand where they’re coming from and whether what they’re saying also holds to the CORE model. The primary outcome I seek is consensus from scientific, academic, or institutional organizations presenting factual, testable, and ethically studied results. Objectively, these are the most clear understanding of a topic, but not always the final definitive answer.
Below is a Part 1 breakdown of the more human-oriented SHAPE domains of Self, Society, Civilization, and Humanity. I’ll break down Earth, the Universe, and Existence and how they are more regularly impacting our daily lives in a Part 2 article as these relate to us but at a much bigger scale and complexity.
I’ve structured each section to provide its primary objective question, scope, relative size, level of complexity, brief description, and some typical disciplines associated with each one. They all work together to paint a more rounded perspective of how our existence is shaped and makes up the backdrop of our everyday activity as a species.
SELF — Complicated and very small.
How does X impact us as individuals, and our perception of the world in relation to ourselves?
The shape of the ‘self’ considers the impact on an individual’s physiology, psychology, behavior, and power to affect change. We might think of this as the id, ego, and superego described by Sigmund Freud or the public mental health conversation that is becoming more prominent as we start to unpack the impact of social media.
Self is also shaped by the discoveries in neuroscience on how our brains collect, retain, and recall information and how we offload a lot of that memory to our devices. It’s all in our heads; some things are scary, while others are valuable. We are never removed from the context of what we observe, but it can sometimes be easier to think about outside systems without our participation.
As we continue to interact with AI platforms, we may find a different mental path or neural structure to form as we lose interest or need to think about some things from a different perspective.
SOCIETY — Complicated and relatively big.
As a collection of individuals, how is the way we interact with each other impacted by X?
Scaling out a little wider, we act as a collection of individuals that shape the form of Society. The shape of Society considers the collective behavior of individuals leaning on, among others, the life sciences, sociology, community building, local economics, and value-based belief systems like politics or religion.
We might think of this as culture-based events, activities, and values. In some ways, it’s more about how we come together or define our differences as part of a community of like-minded individuals. Some find it difficult to define culture, while at the same time, we can describe its attributes.
Society is the complicated interactions we have with the close proximity to others from ourselves outward, and in turn, a reflection of each of the conditions under which we exist.
CIVILIZATION — Complex and very big.
As a society with institutions, how does X impact what is valued most so to support it infatically, and what determines something should be deprecated?
Scaling out even a little wider, we act as a society within an environment that shapes our Civilization through public access to products, businesses, and various entities providing a variety of values. The government helps regulate our social interactions, banks help fund entities that support those interactions, and entire countries form an identity across those policies and entities as a type of social contract or regional identity.
However, at this scale, we start to lose personal ties to things unless they have very specific meaning to the self. A sports team from our hometown might bring us together, but not all people subscribe to participate. A government crackdown on its citizens in another country might not have any personal effect on us, but it might cause our country to react with stricter laws, giving it an indirect and possibly invisible impact on our lives.
Things exist around us, and while we may not participate directly, they enact a series of events that affect us indirectly. Those can be more difficult to foresee until they cause us direct pain (or joy, but typically pain); sometimes, that’s too late to make a difference.
HUMANITY — Hypercomplex and extra large.
As a collective of civilizations, how does X impact our humanitarian values, principles, and culture?
Scaling outward another magnitude further, the shape of Humanity encompasses all humans, which is hovering around 8.05 billion people as of this article, according to Worldometer. Humanity is a type of phase change compared to the previous SPHEREs, being everyone (extra large) and yourself as an individual (intimately tiny). As our collective civilizations grow exponentially more complex, tracking how things might impact each other becomes much more difficult.
At this scale, we are typically completely void of emotional ties except for that which is core to existing as a human, instead approaching things more abstractly. One reason for this is the inability to remove yourself from what you observe, making it very difficult to measure anything about it objectively. Timothy Morten has coined these as Hyperobjects, which are either systematic or conceptual ‘objects’ that are so large we cannot step outside of them to observe them objectively.
Whether we participate or not, we all are affected by them because, this least common denominator as a species, we are all part of the same system. Digital products, particularly social media, are experimenting with this fact at a global scale as a technology-induced hyperobject, and we are struggling to keep up with its impact.
The COVID-19 epidemic is the clearest, most recent example of humanitarian impact, not just in lives lost and affected forever, but in how digital media, combined with globalization and our always-on culture, augmented how we see ourselves. As techno sapiens, we will encounter more technology-induced hyperobjects and need to figure out how to better deal with or at least co-exist with them.
Final Thought
Each SHAPE domain is a pool of opportunity, discovery, and nuance where entire disciplines work to unpack their secrets. My goal is to simplify the landscape they create and understand how they fit together to form an environment that impacts you and me. Winston Churchill rightly claimed, "We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us.” Well, we’re not only living within physical walls of brick and glass as an increasing amount of activity, proximity, and engagement with others is spent in the digital world. Our social activity has gone fully digital with social media; now, even work is largely split across a hybrid existence. The proximity between you as an individual and millions of other people has shrunk from thousands of physical miles to everyone in the palm of your hand. Our engagement is not just our local community anymore; even the lowest digital accounts have a global community.
We are shaping digital products as constructs for our minds that are shaping us even more intensely than we may realize. It is way overdue for a mental model to us understand the shape of the environment we are forming from those digital products and their influence on our existence. I hope you’ll consider leveraging Ripple Detection to build out an objective SHAPE Map of your surroundings, taking CARE of the information you consume as a compass to guide you through it. Stay vigilant, my friend.
If you’ve made it this far, I sincerely thank you, and I encourage you to follow me here and connect with me in the comments on any thoughts this may have inspired.
