Reason Iteration: 06
Wednesday, 06 September 2017
Claiming organization.
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What does it mean to be organized?
It means, to assemble one’s thoughts into some semblance of intelligence.
When the first words were written, they were merely symbols, scratched out on cliffs and on rocks and on stone — meanings meant to represent the divine, the natural, the human order of things.
These systems of meanings expanded into formal writing: stories turned into histories, turned into religions, turned into philosophies. Philosophies are technologies, because they organize thinking — they provide some semblance of order.
Order is necessary for a chaotic world. From periods of chaos the libraries emerged, as a response to chaos — Civilization cleaved to the meaning preserved in scrolls.
The first libraries organized their scrolls by subject. Their scholars would read the scrolls, and copy the scrolls. In copying the scrolls, sometimes they would get new thoughts — and they would write new scrolls of their own.
Great philosophers introduced whole new subjects, or re-organized subjects and subject relationships, or overturned the thinking of a subject — they did not just think new thoughts, although that they did.
So it is, that philosophers not only introduced tools of thought, they used tools for thought — and those were the implements of writing, scrolls and libraries. Without these tools, their thoughts and systems of thought might not have been thought, and would not have survived to this day.
Since the time of the ancients, there has been the advance of the printing press, and the advance of the personal computer, and the advance of the internet. The internet itself was a technology driven in part by academics seeking a new mode of communicating.
Orthodoxy, Library and The Academy — these three are a trinity of technology, and they have always gone together. Orthodoxy, that is, the system of thought, the philosophy, the religion, the hierarchy of values. Libraries collect thinking, and so they collect orthodoxies to organize and systematize their thinking — the library’s taxonomy itself being both a technology and an orthodoxy. The taxonomy of a library — its organization of subjects — always reflects its way of thinking about the world, its way of organizing the world, its mode of synthesis. The Academy, these are the people who think, who think about thinking; who create new thoughts, who organize existing thoughts.
Now The Academy of our day is dominantly Scientific in its pretensions. Even the Humanities, in their envy of Science, pretend to be scientific — although an embarassing 82% of papers published in humanities journals are never cited. The Sciences proper organize themselves with journals and databases.
Bureaucratic beyond repair, The Academy fails to re-invent itself. It fails to recognize that it has not reached the end of history, that it needs to undergo a revolution, that it stands on economic, technological and philosophical ground that needs to be examined.
If there were any health left in The Academy, it would still be worthy of the name. But at best, academia is a turgid industrial-complex, and at worst, it is a venomous snake poisoning Civilization with Neo-Marxist philosophy, masquerading as Post-Modernism.
Supplanting the old philosophical foundations of The Academy with Neo-Marxism, is like cutting off the limb of a tree one is sitting on. But worse than that, is that the decision to do this is activist and insidious in nature, and is neither examined nor debated.
Ground should be examined. What is the ground of The Academy? The ground of The Academy, this ancient institution of Civilization, is, as we have said, economic, technological and philosophical. Let us examine each.
The Academy is economic. How is it economic? It is economic in that it takes time to think, and time is a resource. In that time is a resource, it is interchangeable with other resources, by the medium of money. In that thinking is a resource, it is also interchangeable with other resources, by the medium of money. Thinkers afford to think because Civilization values their thinking, and pays them to think.
This begs the question, whom is thinking useful to? Traditionally, it has been perceived as useful to students, whom have paid for their education, so that they might apply it in their elected professions. Inspired thinking has transformed industry after industry for generations — how? Technologically. Thinking — philosophical, political, historical, scientific, economic or otherwise — incarnates in organizational form. Organizations themselves are technologies, technologies that themselves build technologies, that turn inputs into outputs. Individuals are technologies — and so is The Academy. The primary business model of academia has been for generations to turn curious students into individual thinkers. They manufactured minds.
The Academy is also economic in the tools that it uses. What do scholars do? They think, they debate, they research, they perform experiments, they practice all the various intellectual arts — or are supposed to. Where does all of this material go? Certainly not onto scrolls. For a long time, it was printed in books and published in journals. Over time, the great university Libraries become early databases, collecting and categorizing and assembling all of this knowledge into some coherent structure.
But today, in the second decade of the 21st century, the Library and The Academy are essentially unchanged from the 20th century. Most of the journals and databases are now online, but, as technologies, they are horribly designed, unusable and irrelevant. Architecturally, they are the same old thing, just online. There are PDFs. There are footnotes.
Spotify is a shocking juxtaposition for the Library. Spotify has become a universal Library of music. For all its faults, for all its taxonomical and design flaws, it has successfully become the catholic orthodoxy for musical organization. Nearly all music is accessible and commoditized and shareable for a tiny fee. Netflix has done something of the same, although less comprehensively, with visual media.
No wonder then, that we talk about music and movies more than we talk about books. There are other reasons for this that relate, of course, to the abject failure of our education system, the death of The Academy. But this factor is major.
Even with a relatively large budget for buying digital books, I have amassed a fairly small eBook library of about 200 books. The problem with this, of course, is that it is not shareable. Nor is there an easy way for me to share my notes or thoughts on any of this content.
This is why I say The Academy is technological. For of what utility is it to have a library such as mine, if I cannot share the books with others, and if there is no public place for me to share my thoughts? I share them on Medium, and I do so at risk of violating copyright laws.
I am against copyright laws, not because I don’t believe authors should be compensated, but because I believe that this business model needs to be disrupted, and is long overdue for it. How can thinking change the world, if it is trapped — if it cannot be openly read, openly shared, openly discussed and debated?
Moreover, I almost exclusively read the classics, that is, the writings of the dead, instead of the writings of the living. Why? Because, again, of the economic and technological failures of The Library and The Academy in our time. Because they have so failed to innovate, nobody reads their books and journals and databases — and there is no way of achieving a dashboard view. I say dashboard view in the sense of gestalt. There is no way of understanding how all of these works relate to each other, which are important, and for what reasons.
The brain itself is structured in a radial design, with neurons and synapses. If there was to be an interface of the future, it would be mind maps. Mind maps visually demonstrate essential relationships in a way that is intuitive and easy to navigate. Digital mind maps are certainly the best interface for a digital brain.
But barring that, much can be done with existing technologies and existing interfaces, to organize and represent relationships between data.
The entire internet is now The Library of Civilization, and the internet is chaotic. As as a library, its virtue is that it has the minimum of structural standards necessary to display webpages. But its virtue is also its vice.
The internet is chaotic, which means all of our information is chaotic. Information is expanding at such a rapid rate, how can we ever make sense of it? Information becomes useless unless it is organized. So the vast majority of the internet is useless.
The internet is organized based off of searches and links between webpages. But this in no way is an end of history. In no way is this the best way to organize, categorize and view the vast amount of information amassed over time. There is a better way.
There is a better way to organize the world’s information than the failed university libraries or even than the internet, as indexed by search engines.
There is a better way. I state this as an assertion. Because there is always a better way. But what is the better way?
Let us return to this question. Let us first ask another, which is: What is the point of having a local mind? That is, an individual mind.
The internet is a global mind. The ancient libraries, which were, in the aggregate, The Library of Civilization, as the internet is today — were forms of global minds.
The world-mind nature of libraries was a secret that was concealed for millennia, and perceived only by a few — these few were perhaps the scholars who defended and preserved The Libraries as a sacred bequest.
But the world-mind nature of the internet is, today, extremely obvious. A decade ago it was obvious. A decade before that it became obvious to the world, and triggered an economic boom.
What becomes of the world-mind? The assumption everywhere today is stated in these two breathless syllables — A.I. Artificial intelligence! Oh, flight of the imagination.
Our fear and our hope is that the world-mind, that is, the internet, will somehow morph into the ‘A.I.’ that will either destroy us or save us. If it saves us, our hope is that it ushers in a socialist utopia, whereby it does all the work, all the thinking, regulates equality perfectly — becoming the ultimate babysitter, but making us essentially irrelevant.
This is a pathetic aspiration. But our imagination has so far failed, that it has proven incapable of conjuring up any vision worthy of action.
The question returns: What is the point of having a local mind? Which is to say, What is the point of being an individual? We are individuals. Let us ask ourselves. What are we doing all day long? We are downloading from the internet. We are uploading to the internet. We are buying from the internet. We are selling to the internet. What is the significance of this?
Individuals are individuals insofar as they are different. They are different insofar as they have their own minds, which think differently, which process information differently, which have processed different information in the past, which are processing different information in the present.
The world-mind can never replace individual minds, because it is essentially different. The world-mind, is at best, a synthetic intelligence — that is, it organizes and coordinates and syncs and aligns and harmonizes and standardizes and facilitates transactions. But it does not think for itself.
The world-mind does not think. It is not in the nature of the world-mind to think. If the world-mind thinks, it is a thinking emergent from all of its constituent intelligences. If the world-mind acts, it is a coordinated action emergent from all of its constituent intelligences.
What is conspicuously absent? What is conspicuously absent is individual minds, team minds, company minds, market minds, group minds — many kinds of local minds, but most of all, the atomic individual minds. To the extent that these minds exist at all in digital form, their data is scattered across various apps. And if you were given access and able to see their Gmail, their Google Drive, their Slack — or alternative equivalents — you would see that they are hilariously disorganized and not networked.
As a result, most individuals and organizations are disorganized, uncoordinated, chaotic and noisy. What is organized, coordinated, orderly and clear in the world are transactions. Markets tend to be more organized than the individuals and organizations that transact in them. Because transactions tend to be transparent and standardized. What if all mental activity was transparent and standardized — broken into its basic units, networked together, sorted, categorized, tagged, analyzed, shareable, viewable as dashboards and interfaces?
What of the world-mind? The internet is more transparent and visible today than local minds, but it is also a disorganized, chaotic mess.
The question returns:
There is a better way to organize the world’s information.
What is the better way?
It stands to reason that something is possible today that has never before been possible, and that is, the re-establishment of Orthodoxy, The Library and The Academy — on new technological, economic and philosophical ground.
Synthetic Intelligence organizes data and runs processes. It organizes nouns and does verbs. Who for? For individuals and organizations. So that? So that they can stop doing work, and start doing their real work. Which is? Which is thinking, relating, creating, deciding.
Synthetic Intelligence is new technological ground, because it organizes and networks digital brains for the first time, with a standard framework. For the first time, individual data becomes organized to an extent that it can rightly be called the individual’s digital brain, instead of just her disorganized data. Team and company data becomes organized to an extent that it can rightly be called the company’s digital brain, instead of just its disorganized data. All of it becomes networked together to an extent that it can rightly be called a synthetic intelligence. All digital brains become compatible to an extent that the entire architecture emerges as Synthetic Intelligence.
Synthetic Intelligence is new economic ground, because it previously cost too much time and money to organize information. Not only was it cost prohibitive, it was technologically impossible to achieve. Not only does Synthetic Intelligence liberate time, it allows for new uses of time, new uses of information, new ways of thinking about information and engaging with information, it inspires new creative forms. These are the benefits of organizing data. But what of running processes? New levels of operational efficiency, alignment and coordination make possible futuristic interactions between individuals, organizations and market participants.
Synthetic Intelligence is new philosophical ground because it destroys traditional orthodoxy, while making possible a new synthetic orthodoxy, an orthodoxy of unorthodoxy. By harmonizing minds, it allows for unprecedented synchronization of differences, which allows for more creativity and more divergence. Thinking can become more eccentric, without losing its relationship to all thought.
Even individuals who insist on organizing their digital brains according to their own ways of conceiving of data and data relationships, will be operating within a framework that is capable of many views — capable of absorbing their eccentric perspectives — without losing standardization, without losing the ability for others to see their data in their any way they please; their eccentricity just enriches the system.
In the same way, custom processes do not break the system. The system builds upwards from custom processes into standard processes, allowing for any level of customization, without damaging the robust integrity of the framework.
This is philosophical because it synthesizes thought and action within a single framework, it allows for inductive and deductive thought, it allows for standardized and eccentric thought, it allows for individual or group thought, it allows for any orthodoxy and any criticism of orthodoxy.
Organization: Thinking: Individuals
Philosophy: Information: Scholars
Orthodoxy: Libraries: The Academy
These are identities. I could generate more. These words are different insofar as they reveal different aspects of the same underlying phenomena. Let me demonstrate this.
Every orthodoxy is a philosophy and every philosophy organizes thought.
Every thought is information stored in a library.
Every individual is a scholar in the academy.
Lastly, I will introduce a final identity set.
Synthetic Intelligence: World Mind: Local Minds
- All philosophy and orthodoxy can be organized by a Synthetic Intelligence.
- All thinking and information is stored in the library of the internet world-mind.
- In The-Academy-without-walls that is the internet, every individual with a local mind is a scholar.
Strange as it sounds, this future is ancient. What has been with us for eons takes a new shape. These identities have always been technological. Governments, markets, science and industry have all shared a technological, economic, and philosophical ground. Now they reveal themselves to us anew.
Invest ten million dollars for ten percent of my company.
ἰδοὺ, καινὴ κτίσις
τὰ ἀρχαῖα παρῆλθεν
γέγονεν καινά.
Behold, a new creation!
The old has passed away;
the new has come into being.
