Bridging Polarity: A Modern Prophecy
A Bridge Between Indigenous Communities and The Crypto Era for an Open Society.
This short series aims to present a new intercultural dimensions to address the overlapping crises of our time. For this purpose, I will explore the solution of connecting two opposite spectrum of humanity.
On one side, the Indigenous Peoples with inestimable wisdom and ancestral knowledge about the web of life, and on the other side, Cypherpunks with cutting-edge technologies and ingenuity to navigate the web of society. How can we coordinate these two communities to liberate a new realm for humanity?
In the first part of this trilogy, I will present the power of stories as the ultimate force to shape our reality, and why their respective destinies are meant to share a modern prophecy.
In the second and third part, I will propose a framework to coordinate Indigenous Peoples with Cypherpunks around their common vision of an Open Society.
The Cultural Artefact
In an increasingly complex world where nation-states, private companies and individuals compete in a battle of conflicting interests, what stories do we want to write together to address the challenges of our time?
Let’s start by the observation that our collective degradation, societal as much as psychological, is a clear consequence of our disconnection from the living world. An article in the Washington Post published in 2017 a survey that reported that ‘7% of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows’ — a paroxysm in the richest country of a western culture out of ground. Knowing this, we must urgently change trajectory and renew links with the organic. For that, we can rely on our favorite evolutionary tool : the Culture.
From the classical Latin cultura, ‘care’; past participle of colere, ‘to take care’, the Culture can be defined according to the anthropologist and biologist Joseph Henrich as the set of acquired forms of behavior that human beings have accumulated over time. This natural edge explains the expansion of humans on planet Earth and our lightning domination over other species. The Culture allows us to rapidly acquire set of skills necessary for our survival without having to relearn the synaptic origin of our collective brain, like languages or mathematics. With Internet, this edge is reaching new all-time high and mark the emergence of a planetary culture — the overview effect of our hyper-social legacy.
The Culture can therefore be compared to a collective intelligence that captures and governs our behaviors in a conscious and unconscious way, like the hive that organizes its colony around a common mission: its survival. What would happen if the bees were suddenly disconnected from the flowers to be gathered? I can assure you that this colony would quickly die. Metaphor of a senseless reality that only reflects us back to ourselves, our humanity is disconnected from the flowers of life and we are right now paying its deadly price: the metacrisis — a modern-day-ragnarok.
Stories — The Genesis of our Evolution
Story through imagination is the highest source of power in this world. It’s all about what we believe as true that creates the force behind our reality. Those who control the stories, control the matrix.
Note that I will deliberately use a biblical language as a cultural continuum of our Western story to rewrite.
In the 21st Century, we should think seriously to have a decentralized and transparent approach about which stories we want to print in our cultural mind. As a result of this lack, our society is plagued by hidden narratives running in the background of our unconscious, programmed from birth by millennia of domination and hyper-agents possessing god-like powers over us.
Because yes, the ruling class is really aware of this invisible force. Governments, military commanders, and multinationals all invest massively in the production of science-fiction to shape our mind in their convenience. They have understood that it is through imagination and stories that humanity travels in time and can be controlled. To control the story is to control the collective — the Hive.
“In 2017, PwC, which advises 440 of the world’s 500 richest companies, published a guide entitled ‘Using Science Fiction to Drive Innovation.’ In the U.S., the company SciFutures sells the services of a hundred science fiction writers to Visa, Intel or Pepsi. Experimental.Design, founded by the former head designer of Minority Report, builds anticipated worlds for Nike and Boeing. It’s called “sci-fi prototyping,” “futurecasting” or “worldbuilding […] In the summer of 2019, the Defense Innovation Agency (AID), emanating from the French military, announced the creation of a Red Team. Inspired by the American model, this team must bring together several science fiction authors to think about the future of war, with the instruction to “free ourselves as much as possible from the usual means of foresight.” “We are prisoners of our daily mindset,” explains Emmanuel Chiva, director of the IDA. To break through the wall of the imagination, we need to call on people who think outside the box. Science fiction writers are among them” — Emilie Poivet, How SF is recuperated by the multinationals and the army. Socialter: the awakening of the imaginary, p42–43, 2020.
If our stories are so important in influencing the cyclical flow of our evolution, isn’t it time to listen to those who still gather the sweet nectar from the Garden of Eden?
The counters of these untouched stories are unfortunately becoming increasingly rare. We can still identify them among Indigenous Communities where they still hold an intimate link to our origins. What will happen if we lose forever the memory of our Genesis? Better not to think about it, right?
Indigenous Peoples hold the power to guide humanity towards a global systemic transition that will expand future generations beyond our imagination. By choosing to listen their ancestral wisdom and traditions we will return to the etymology of the Culture — to take care.
A Match Made in Heaven
Now we have found the counter of our stories, we still have to find its medium of expression. How to promote new symbols in a world where information has become overabundant and increasingly competitive? If in the past cultural transmission was slowly circulated from generation to generation through the important role of the Elders, today, it is clear that the source of cultural transmission is made on the Internet, where human attention becomes a scarce and hard resource to get.
This is where the match between Indigenous Peoples and Cypherpunks is made in Heaven. A highly beneficial reciprocity for both parties, where together they could master the power of attention and light the sacred fire of a future to come.
Cypherpunks are the ones who understand better than anyone else how to travel in the depths of the digital land, similar to healers using the dark secret of plants to travel the unconscious path of our mind. In some extend, both are hackers (= as a person who delights in a deep understanding of the inner workings of a system). In the other way around, Cypherpunks could also be seen as indigenous, a native community of The Dark Forest — ‘an encrypted world where communities are free to define their own destinies’. They were the first to preserve the beauty of the digital space, and so, are the light to follow for those who are committed to explore the true nature of the world wide web.
Bridging these two communities could spark new forces where the positive reputation and symbolism of Indigenous Peoples could highlight privacy and cryptography as a fundamental human rights. In exchange, Cypherpunks could guide Indigenous Peoples to expand their communities in the infinite garden of cryptography, and together finally unlock the door of an Open Society.
A cultural bridge between the Native Forest of our origins and the cosmic Dark Forest of a new beginning. At the end, is there really a difference between those two communities? or is it simply the tipping point of a civilisation closing cycle to come?
For those willing to explore the depth and beauty of indigenous culture, there are infinite possibilities here in Brazil. A free space to iterate new experiences around privacy and Web3 technologies. More on that in the following parts.
Onward.
Extra reference : The Media-Shaman Manifesto (1997)
