Three Months of Neo-Cybernetics: Cybernetic Implementation in Digital Communities
Time flies when you’re immersed in the world of networks and complex systems. The past three months have been a whirlwind of activity, even though our presence here on Medium may have seemed quieter.
December has been a period of work and progress, marking some small milestones in our journey towards building a positive future. Below is a quick recap of what happened in December within our community.
The ALANA Codex
A product of our recent work has been the ALANA Codex, developed in collaboration with The ALANA Project and its founder Stella Achenbach. The Codex is a living chronicle of pivotal events within the ALANA community, minted on the Polygon blockchain in the form of a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). It represents a cultural artifact designed to foster a sense of responsibility and active engagement among community members.
The people responsible for the management of Codex’s cover the role of the Keepers, or the custodians of information and the upholders of the community’s history and ethos, ensuring that every event recorded in the story is captured and preserved.
Read more about the ALANA Codex
The design of the role of the Keeper also sets the scene for creating new organizational frameworks that enable decentralized leadership within open online communities.
Contributions
Shoutout to katoshi for his contributions in December, covering diverse range of topics such as the origin of life and its chemical evolution, also exploring profound questions of our existence and our complex society. Below are some recommended readings from Katoshi:
- Can Life Arise from Inanimate Matter: The Perspective of Autonomic Fission
- Why Do We Become Busier as Technology Advances: A Perspective of Severity
- Thinking about the Concept of Web4: Agents Augmented Liaison
- Role of Personality and Emotion in the Era Without Language
Additional recommended readings are Dr. Wolfgang Stegemann’s article on nematodes and consciousness and Philo Sophies’s essay about Life as an Autopoietic system.
Embracing Complexity and the Metacrisis
On a personal note, over the last few months I’ve been diving into the philosophy of Metamodernity, or a view of life that see ourselves immersed in a post-industrial, global society. I’ve also explored the concept of Metacrisis, or a theory that describes the interrelated, underlying drivers of the crises of the 21st century. Both the concepts of Metamodernity and Metacrisis, can help us put into perspective the context of the global society we live in: complex, interconnected and subject to clusters of global catastrophic risks.
With digital technologies woving themselves into the fabric of our lives over the last three decades, our world has been moving towards a cultural global system that is interconnected, diverse and contains subsets of self-organized networks that transcend traditional geopolitical borders.
In this landscape, we see the rise of glocal-virtual communities, glocal in the sense that are rooted in specific contexts or interests and at the same time are not confined to their immediate environments; as well as their nodes that don’t act as isolated entities. Instead, such communities, or networks, branch out, establishing multiple connections and interactions on a global scale, forming new own symbolic systems and even new digital economies based on their own digital currencies.
Due to the impact of the Internet and digital technologies and this shift towards a networked global landscape, it is essential to embrace complexity and study the dynamics of human society in a planetary context that factors in human psychology, technology and the environment.
I believe that cybernetics, with its focus on system dynamics, feedback loops, and the holistic interplay between components, provides a foundational framework for understanding the nature of our global society and design systems that can help navigating the greatest challenges of our century. Nowadays, no element exists in isolation, since every action, reaction, and interaction is part of a larger, dynamic communication network where nodes and cluster of nodes exchange economic and cultural value.
To effectively address and work towards possible resolutions of the Metacrisis, it is imperative that we adopt a holistic approach, one that emphasizes the harmonization of diverse perspectives and a multi-layered analysis of systems. This holistic methodology is rather a necessity, as the complexity of our era demands a strategy that can navigate its nonlinear nature.
Looking Ahead: Envisioning the Future
As we’re reaching the threshold of a new year, I’ve started outlining some key themes that will guide our journey over the next 3 months. Please note that these themes are not final and feedback from the community of readers is also welcome.
- AI and AGI: explore the potential of AI systems to achieve human-like level of intelligence. This raises profound philosophical and ethical questions about the nature of intelligence and what it means to be sentient.
- Metamodern Age and Metacrisis: Continuing to explore the implications of the metamodern era and the overarching metacrisis, aiming to synthesize such fascinating concepts into a brief series of articles.
- Consolidation of Neo-Cybernetic Professions: Bringing together diverse fields under the umbrella of Neo-Cybernetics, creating a synergy that transcends traditional boundaries. Taking an holistic approach to system design can help forge new job roles and ethical frameworks essential for the holistic application of Neo-Cybernetic principles.
- Education for Adaptive Futures: Our focus will be on exploring education methods to prepare individuals for the complexities of the 21st century and the metamodern age. Emphasizing adaptive learning, systems thinking, critical thinking and futures thinking, we aim to cultivate minds that are versatile and ready for the challenges ahead.
- Cybernetic Governance: Investigating new models of governance rooted in cybernetic principles, we’ll explore concepts of adaptability, equity, and sustainability in decision-making.
- Adversarial Behavior: Understanding the dynamics of conflict and competition in complex systems, we’ll delve into strategies to address these challenges in various domains.
- Power Structures: Conducting examinations of power dynamics within systems to shed light on how power influences decision-making and societal structures.
- Collective Intelligence: Our focus will also be on harnessing the power of collective intelligence, exploring how diverse groups can collaboratively solve problems and innovate.
- AI Agents & Swarms: The study of AI agents and swarm behavior will help us understand how these systems can autonomously perform complex tasks, offering insights into distributed computing and robotics.
- Virtuality & Virtual Identities: As AI and digital media adoption increases year by year, we’ll explore the formation of virtual identities and their impact on personal and social dynamics.
- Symbolic Internet: Examining the internet’s evolution into a symbolic medium, we’ll analyze how symbols and metaphors shape online interactions and cultural expressions.
- Web4: Finally, we’ll explore the concept of Web4, envisioning a future where the internet is more intelligent, interconnected, and immersive, driven by technologies like AI Agents and Blockchain protocols.
In closing, these themes for the coming months represent potential pillars upon which the future of our publication will be built.
Keep on following us as we embark on this exciting journey, reimagining networks and our place within them.
Thank you,
Daniele
