Metacrisis Journey Day 4: Emergence, Complexity, and Collaboration
The Roots of the Mycelial Adventure
Chaos Science / Emergence
Emergence has fascinated me since my dad picked up and brought home a copy of James Gleick’s Chaos in the late 80s. From there through my highschool encounters with Fractals (first as an art form, then via Fractint, which also introduced me to the beauty of open source software), I was mesmerized. I’d hand-calculate plasma clouds and Mandelbrots just to feel the way the math moved. After school in grade 12 my best friend (and now co-Director at Thaumazo) Ken and I would take over the computer lab and experiment with genetic algorithms. Years later as we travelled across India together, we read Feynman, and a textbook on Neural Networks.
Consensus, Group Dynamics and Pattern Language
That love of emergence blended with my love of community building and connection, leading to 15 years spent in Windsong, a cohousing community run at first through consensus, then later via Sociocracy. As a key part of the Facilitation team for 5+ years, and under the tutelage of consensus trainer Tree Bressen, I dove deep into collective decision making and wisdom, participate also in her “Group Pattern Language Project”, whose end-product was an open source pattern language of group dynamics I still use regularly, and fostered an ongoing love of Pattern Language as effective approach to exploring complex domains related to thriving.
As our time at Windsong wound down, I got a taste of how emergence could play out more globally.
COVID, Collaboration and Community
In 2020 COVID-19 hit our family shortly before the lockdown. As we shut the doors of the Emerging Media Lab and went remote, as so many did, I was looking for ways to not go stir-crazy at home, and to feel like I was doing something productive in relation to this crisis.
I stumbled across the machine learning community Kaggle, and the COORD-19 challenge: a chance for people to team up and use Natural Language Processing to parse through the sum total of human knowledge about COVID-19, a massive dataset released to the public to help expedite an understanding of the pandemic and how to deal with it.
New to NLP, I was looking for a good entrypoint, and was fascinated by a post by AI entrepreneur Artur Kiulian. I won’t tell that full story here (though you should check it out in his words), but his core approach was to totally ignore the rules of the COORD-19 competition, and instead try to gather the largest and most skilled group of machine learning experts he could to have as substantial an impact as possible on the course of COVID-19. Deeply inspired, I joined and watched it grow from a small handful of 30 or so people to a community of over 1300 ranging from high school students in India to senior NASA specialists. Critically: Artur was meticulous about bringing everyone to the table as peers, and helping us as a community determine not just our direction, but the rubric we would use to figure out our direction. With my background in consensus and community building I ended up focused in those domains, and worked with an extraordinary team to figure out how to build fast, cross-cultural collaboration in a high stakes environment.
This work on an approach our colleague Marie Bjerede would term “Unmanagement” was the largest scale exercise in high-stakes emergence I’d seen, and opened my eyes to the power of this form of collective action. As my friends and I formed Thaumazo, the lessons from CoronaWhy heavily informed my thinking around building a peer-based positive impact community.
Back to Nature
But why Mycelial? Because beyond allegory and metaphor, Nature is the most potent source of inspiration and learning around complexity we have access to. I come from a family passionate about ecology. My mother’s mother Mary Linda was a Mycologist, and a love of birding, time in nature and respect for what we can learn when we pay attention to the natural world was passed strongly on through her family.
My cousin (another of her Grandsons) Vardell introduced me to the Audubon Expedition Institute, where I spent my first year of University living on a bus, learning Consensus and collaboratively determining the sites we’d visit to meet our curriculum’s objectives. This exploration of deeper approaches to Democracy was also my real introduction to the works of Buckminster Fuller, whose Critical Path I found riveting. His emphasis on returning to nature for inspiration on how complex systems can and should work shaped my experience of human design tremendously.
A part of my research over this fellowship will be into the natural systems from which I think we can learn the most about effective emergent collective action. I’ll talk more about Mycelia later. And bees. And of course, people.
But this gives a little background on why this adventure is Mycelial — it’s emergent, and involves a combination of:
- Research and domain mapping (sending out shoots)
- Connecting with people engaged in academic, corporate, governance and nonprofit work related to the Metacrisis
- Seeing where there’s useful nutrients (knowledge, resources, actions, problemspaces) that can flow from one person or group to another
- Trying to make some of those connections happen.
The goal is a Mycelial network, quietly helping interconnect the people doing the necessary work to help humanity and our ecosystem survive and thrive. Like Bees looking for a new nesting site, collectively we need to explore better options for thriving, and decide collectively to make a move from our current mode on the planet to something better.