On transculture, metaconcerts and hyperobjects
Recently I tried to capture some ideas from ongoing dialogues between Jordan Hall, John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques that revolve around the idea of Civium and hacking the deep code of culture to allow for an emergence of a truly global collective intelligence, a global virtual city, with planetary consciousness and a brain.
After some weeks I think I get a bit better some parts of their intellectual jazz sessions so I want to update my thinking on Civium. The project is based on the deep insight from Geoffrey West’s Scale, that showed how some human built systems like cities are unique in their super-linear scaling as opposed to nature where we observe sub-linear scaling that put the upper bound on some big organisms, such as tall trees, whales and elephants. If the population of a city doubles, the rate of innovation, wealth, crime and pollution more than doubles. If you would get a global virtual city, with e.g. 6 billion minds connected online, you could in theory accelerate the rate of innovation many times over.
Another concept behind Civium is TAP, or “the adjacent possible” that states what is possible with the current levels of (psycho)technology and how to move towards increasing these possibilities and “create a recursive and synergistic or autopoietic machine” that would produce low-hanging fruits in some problem space of interest.
A practical example is Tesla that started at the top of the market, with Tesla Roadster that only a fraction of people can afford. But this small success opened adjacent possibilities to invest into research of cheaper batteries and open the possibility for purchasing EVs to orders of magnitude more people with the Tesla Model S. And then the same loop was closed yet again, and this allowed Model 3 to arrive. Next year even the most affordable car brand in Europe, Dacia, plans to launch their EV crossover.
Which means that the technology went through a cycle in a Wardley Map, from Genesis, Custom-built, Product into a Commodity. In the language of Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Peter Thiel we could say that TAP helps us to bootstrap the desired future. This was recently done in other areas, such as cultured meat and plant-based meat.
Another idea is Gregg Henriques’ ToK System, or Three of Knowledge System. It describes four distinct emergencies that happened in big history. From Big Bang to matter. From matter to life. From life to mind. And from mind to culture. Life can be described by evolutionary synthesis. Mind can be described by behavioral investment theory. And the emergence of culture is connected with the emergence of language and the justification hypothesis that describes cultures as justification systems.
The Civium aims at arriving on the next emergence that can be, in my opinion, described as transculture. Culture can be viewed as a meta-behavior, or a set of acceptable behaviors for some niche. The question is what could be meta to culture? A good example in this problem space is, in my opinion, how an AI behind Google Translate created its own metalanguage with a meta-grammar to better translate particular languages.
I used the term metaculture before, but maybe transculture is better, because it refers to the concept of transmedia by Jeff Gomez. The idea is to create trans-narratives that work within ecologies with various heroes and stories. A trans-narrative is different from mata-narrative. Trans-narrative allows for diversity of cultures and memetic tribes and their collaboration. And captures their shared deep essence.
Meta-narrative is just a big narrative of a dominant culture as in the western modernism and imperialism. Trans-narrative allows for fractal localism and doesn’t aim at universalism. John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall describe how “narratives create heroes but dialogues create networks”. And they aim at arriving at this transculture with an ecology of psychotechnologies and practices that support better intercultural and inter-tribal communication and emergence of trans-paradigmatic mind. A mind that is able to shift between paradigms and find a higher synthesis between them.
Civium, a virtual city with its transculture will be something like a meta-protocol for global collaboration and acceleration of innovation. I think it will allow metaconcerts to proliferate. Metaconcert is a term introduced by Gregory J.E. Rawlins in his online book The Human Swarm. He compares our mental tools to our physical and institutional tools. And he says that our mental tools for effective collaboration are still in “the stone age” and the internet with a computer revolution could change that profoundly in the near future.
As Alexander Bard says, the printing press allowed for printed language and rapid spread of science and technology. And the internet brought an interactive language and a new topology of networks, with distributed hierarchies and attentionalism as opposed to top down hierarchies of the printing press and Napoleon’s army and capitalism.
Metaconcets can have a lifespan of a fly and allow for global and short collaborations in the human swarm. So a transculture is an infinite game, a sense that we are one united humanity, a super-organism, and metaconcerts are short or longer finite games, e.g. allowing for effective antagonistic cooperation, an elegant term by Albert Murray.
I also follow dialogues between Andrew Sweeny, Alexander Bard, and Thomas Hamelryck who explore similar topics, from deep history through Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Daoism into digital shamanism and netocracy. And I see these two different ongoing dialogues as a useful dialectic between more continental philosophy approaches and more analytical approaches developed across the pond by Vervaeke, Hall and Henriques.
Vervaeke and Hall discuss how the “new Buddha is the sangha” (monastic community). Similar to how Žižek talks about God becoming Holy Spirit of the community. Alexander Bard critiques this approach of “religion that is no religion” and a fear of utopias, and says that religion is ever present and we need a religion proper, a religion for a digital and networked age.
Vervaeke and Hall also discuss how happiness can be divided into: subjective wellbeing, meaning and success. I think, these three modalities can be viewed through lenses of Forrest Landry and his three modalities popularized by Daniel Schmachtenberger — the first-person, the second person and the third-person view.
So, the meaning part of happiness is attained in a crew, in a collective unit, as We. John Vervaeke says how parents with young children experience both a decrease in subjective wellbeing and in success, but they experience an increase in meaning. Similarly, old people experience these decreases, but experience an increase of meaning. The question for Civium is if both three can be nurtured and increased in the long-term through what John Vervaeke calls reciprocal opening and contrasts with reciprocal closing.
I see utopias as hyperobjects and not perfections. Similarly, Alexander Bard refuses the idea of infinity and perfection, and embraces instead the idea of completion and wholeness, influenced by Zoroastrian monism. He presents three utopias — Syntheism, Cosmopolis and Ecotopia. These can be again viewed through Forrest Landry’s metaphysics and modalities, through lens of doing, becoming and being. I think Cosmopolis and Civium are quite similar ideas.
I think the ability to see hyperobjects is connected to trans-paradigmatic mind and this connection can be explored further. Daniel Schmachtenberger does that. But we could connect it to the idea of utopias as hyperobjects. Alexander Bard currently explores his two new terms anoject and hyperject that are connected to a term by Julia Kristeva — abject (something hated, a scapegoat). Anoject is an anonymous crowd that does the scapegoating, and hyperject is the heroic person who goes against the crowd to serve some higher value, such as truth and beauty.
Similarly, I wrote how Balaji Srinivasan distinguishes between the ability to do social diligence (following the opinion of others) and technical diligence (individual or collective learning and due diligence based on facts).
How to arrive at these three utopias — Syntheism, Cosmopolis and Ecotopia? Through reversing the cycle of reciprocal closing (addiction) that can be described by: consuming, exploiting and adapting. And instead, to allow for reciprocal opening of the opportunities and capabilities, use different verbs: syngesting (prosuming), imploiting and exapting.
Syngesting is my verb, but it means something like prosuming — creatively digesting the pain of life and synthesizing it into something beautiful. Imploitation is a tantric concept and a term introduced by Alexander Bard as the opposite to exploitation, and it is something like regeneration and postponement of pleasure. Exapting is a term I heard first from Dave Snowden, but John Vervaeke uses it a lot and it means finding novel uses for some tools in different contexts through serendipity — using a lucky chance for innovation and rapid prototyping.
I am excited by such dialogues and ideas like Civium and the efforts to nurture various psychotechnologies to arrive at some novel emergence of something beyond culture and systems of justification to create a united human swarm.
And as both Gregory Rawlence and Daniel Schmachtenberger say — we as the human swarm need to transform from a caterpillar, through a liminal stage of a cocoon, into a butterfly.
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