The context that might make possible the kind of binding across multiple time horizons of care, local context evaluation, understanding and formulating value together. I would speculate that, and this is certainly what I'm oriented towards in terms of lifelong building and collaboration. Certainly one of the components gets very deeply for the energy that seeks to innovate and produce. That for sure needs to be bound to orientations, towards healing, capacity to communicate, and the capacity to create art as well, to engage in the kind of process that is probably more towards that exploration rather than exploiting side of things might be critical for the very capacity to metabolize perceptions of the world into a context that we can see from different angles or can make accessible to others.
And so there are these different features which would be critical, in my opinion, to function alongside that which seeks to innovate. And it's a more holistic process in terms of relational connectivity and transformation, which you might associate with wisdom. Every product begins as a conversation. Life began as a network.
No intelligence exists without a landscape through which to quest. Individuality is partitioned collectivity for the sake of parallel branching investigation. And yet, most organizations are fabulously bad at fostering the illegible soil from which legible value grows, or the people who work to cultivate the networks of ideas and people that allow new paths through possibility to form. Markets and states are notoriously ill-equipped to invest in the collective intelligence we call innovation because it is hard to justify the allocation of resources in a noisy search for unproven value when the structure favors optimal configurations.
We need conceptual frameworks on which to hang formal models. But art lives on the margins of modernity, luxury at best. The novelty at renders visible regarded as the fruit of quantitative systems rather than their fertilizer. Even institutions that attest to the virtues of noise tend so far to favor spending on known value.
And especially so, in environments where intense competition makes it hard to choose bet hedging. But the more uncertainty, the more the strategy cracks open to accommodate experiment. The more anomaly, the more apparent the value of self disruption, longer learning periods and looser and more provisional models. More listening.
The weirder the world gets, the more obvious it becomes that intelligence is plural, and that pluralistic methods out-compete the strongly bounded, narrowly defined, exclusive, highly specialized approaches that one out instable quiet times. Theory now lives side by side with molten inference and rapid iteration, causal mechanistic thinking on the back foot working its post-mortems, in a world that often calls for improv and intuitive decision making. Neither is enough, both are necessary. Formal models help constrain the search space, play explores that space more fully, and at speeds required, in a landscape of accelerating feedback.
In a world where AI shapes so much behavior, science needs the arts as much as art needs science. We'll see how long it takes for the incumbents to accept this. Greetings Future Fossils, your host Michael Garfield. Although this week I'm the guest of a special episode I recorded with the wonderful Tim Adolin of Voicecraft in Melbourne, Australia, brother from Down Under, a philosopher as he describes himself innovating with Camaro's paradigm of value cultivation today.
Someone who, like myself, regards conversation as a service, specifically in service of organizational and individual learning. Where are we right now? In September 2024 my mind is on the transformation that organizations of all kinds are being forced to undergo by digital media and the logic of networks as kind of a macrocosm to one of this show's most popular topics, which is the metamorphosis of self-construction and subjectivity that we as human beings are experiencing in the digital age. Tim and I didn't really, originally intend to release this conversation, but decided that it was so good that we would drop it on both of our shows.
So I'm really pleased to share this with you. You can think of this as the context and conceptual frame backing my decision to strike out into the woods and work rhizomatically to foster an intellectual commons outside of the strictures of administrative bureaucracy with the project Cubans on the Loop about agency and the age of automation, which I am glad to announce has reached nearly half of its funding goal thanks to a large donation from BitNser. Huge thanks to everyone feeding me and my family as we engage in work that is chronically under resourced by the low-dimensional value calculus of most modern organizations. I'm honored and grateful that I get to introduce some of you anyway to Tim, Adeline and to share this delightful co-exploration through a field of possible interpretations about where we are, why we are here, where we're going and what it's going to take for us to get there together.
Please check the show notes for more information about my projects and his and to support us in this work. Thank you for listening and enjoy. My primary intention was to sit down and get to know you really. Obviously we've spoken a little bit about potential conversations in the future and there's a few people I'd like to invite together.
I think the orientation that is towards a new metaphysics of technology but really well that's incorporating a sense of wanting to understand and perhaps remember reconnect with what it is to relate with tools, what it is to relate with technology as part of a process of envisaging what makes sense as we look toward how to be in relation to what human civilization is becoming. So it's that dual movement backwards and forwards to try and locate actually who we are and what we're doing in the present. So that's an interesting direction for us to take over the coming maybe weeks and months. I did just want to touch back on though you were mentioning in terms of people's orientation towards stepping into dialogue and the need for that to be more of a pull than a push.
That's certainly something I've related to a lot. Yeah, many thoughts about that and something else which comes up in the business context as well which I think is adjacent to this but very much relevant to the same phenomena is that in opening up properly to dialogue, to real thinking, that is opening up the membrane a little bit more than might be usual in business context and so is this person welcome in the internal of whatever the identity of the business is of maybe there are secrets, maybe there's some desire for competitive advantage and so there's a kind of context for trust building and relational connection which itself involves if it's healthy at least some amount of interaction and in that sense a kind of dialogic relationship and so having to go out and in that sense sells something to someone is yeah perhaps there's a lot of intermediary steps in terms of actually cultivating that trust which are well very difficult to resource and that's when it looks at you look at culture building effort and a whole context for relationality in the context of art, commons, culture and so there's no need fit in a business or organizational world really in my opinion for the most part unless people are as you say already at a place where they are trusting in their capacity to cultivate trust. Yeah it's curious I left my last job to start catalyzing or cultivating public discourse on the question of if we assume that we are capable of doing anything we want with technology if we have succeeded in the progress narrative of collapsing the gap between what we can imagine and what we can make possible then how do we select what becomes physical like how do we select what of our imagination is given the privilege of form and I left that job working as a research analyst for a stealth AI startup because I thought that was the work that I was going to be doing within that group I had been brought in after work with the Santa Fe Institute performing as like what Jennifer Brandell calls an interstitiary or after years of hosting their podcast I realized that according to the quorum sensing I was doing with the organization itself that I was producing far more value by helping an international network of researchers stay abreast of one another's work then I was doing an amplifying the brand of the institution to people that were not familiar with it and of course there was plenty of that right like you're on a megaphone but when I was brought into SFI hired to be the social media manager I kept telling them social media is predominantly rhizomal it's networks it's relationships it's a two-way intersection and viewing it as merely an arm or an extension of like a promotional engine as so many brands do is not really befitting the nature of this particular organization because you guys specialize in complex system science and you're thinking in terms of networks and you're thinking in terms of mutually co-constructive adaptive social interactions and so how can we use these tools the way that a really savvy social media influencer would which is not merely as a television channel but as a watering hole as a prompt as a dip in the attention landscape where you encourage generative social encounters and select the Facebook group for us if I worked really well in that and the podcasted too but in a different group in a group that was predominantly concerned with the formation of scientific hypotheses the show acted as a moment of high temperature synthesis in the process of actually performing research reflecting on findings making speculative links between different areas of research going back into it and so when I got out of that and I went into the AI company I was convinced that what I had been hired to do was to generate those kinds of conversations in service of the cultivation of an ecosystem around their vision of the future of computing and I was very inspired because they spent three months paying me to establish context about the original founding vision of the personal computer and the internet and the way that people like JCR Lick Lighter and Bob Taylor and Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay and all these people saw human computer symbiosis as being able to externalize and translate our mental models into the frameworks that someone else can understand that the computer is assisting in that rather than creating an information scaling crisis which is what we got instead we deviated profoundly from the original intent of all of this stuff and ended up pursuing efficiency gains and the capitalization of economies of scale afforded by computer communication networks and we now have the loneliness epidemic and cancel culture and coordination problems at scale are all consequences of our failure to actually land the original vision which was that the computer would act as a symbiotic interlocutor in the way that I was acting within the research network so that it could propose that maybe like the way that I'm speaking can turn through some sort of metaphorical entailment hyperspace and then you would receive it in the way that made the most sense to you on the basis of your own life experience and that you would be able to work with the computer as a partner in communication rather than the damn thing that you have to communicate with in order to participate in this accelerating treadmill productivity arms race in the global economy but it turned out that in the course of doing all that work the question that was originally raised explicitly as something that I was supposed to help answer in background research and then became the question I felt was most important to the success of this startup was how does wisdom keep pace with technology and so to your point about trust and about intimacy and relationality I said look it doesn't matter how amazing the computer systems that this group builds are there's there is a certain audience that is going to be sold simply on the basis of an engineering accomplishment an amazing thing that you have done but we live in a world in which we are grappling with pandemic anxiety around the consequences of similar engineering successes and the unintended consequences the knock-on effects of all of the stuff and so the best thing I believed that we could have done is to start inviting the elders that I was already learning about and talking with from the history of modern computing into a conversation about what is possible if we actually managed to realize the vision through this approach we needed to be able to create a village around the baby we needed people to not fear this new thing that's coming into being and it just seemed to me eventually like I would have an easier time doing the work of generating those dialogues outside of the organization where my work was not as coupled to market forces and the pressure on that group to raise money and to exist yeah I wonder how much that has to do with beauty and how that contributes to the strength and the quality of an attractor that actually draws people in to relationship and how much having that become subservient to the names of an organization is in somewhat of a conflict with the kindling of motivation to actually show up and participate and contribute to whatever that field is I'm really just thinking out loud but when I think about voicecraft for instance I don't think that it's possible to create a vital local field if there isn't also participation with and relationship with a field broader than that and so there's something about the quality of the voice in that sense and of communication which wants to be able to relate with boundaries move beyond them and I think the sensitivity towards anything that's wanting to orient or control or mediate expression that isn't sourcing itself from something which is rooted in a deeper dedication in a sense like an opening and a resourcing to deeper dedication not supposing that there is necessary there it is I've accessed it again that's the deepest dedication but there's a process of opening oneself up to that perhaps that you could think about it cognitively in terms of self-correction but certainly I relate to it more through a kind of a poetic lens in terms of what it is to undergo the process of showing up and sharing as best I can as appropriately as I can yeah I just realized I'm very curious to ask you a bunch of questions here just about your life in general and what you've experienced because my sense of view all of a sudden is that say all of a sudden I had this before but were you born in America yeah so yeah obviously I lived in America for spent a couple years in America but obviously born in England I live in Australia now America has a lot more people and there's a lot of people doing a lot of stuff it seems like in many regards there is a larger more connected awareness among people who might care loosely about the kinds of things that we're pointing to here and so your experience working with different organizations and also learning I'm sure being frustrated at times picking yourself up going again finding your way into contexts where you can see the kind of influence you can have all of that stuff is super interesting to me in terms of how you've then come to orient yourself now I'm picking up a sense of needing to resource from your own sovereignty in a sense how you're wanting to undergo this forthcoming inquiry or of course one that's ongoing in terms of wisdom and technology but yeah I'd be curious for you to deepen out in a way what you're already speaking to what has essentially I'm wondering what have you experienced both as positive but also as lacking and where have you felt that the edges for you that you need to all right you need to be careful of that one I need to work carefully with that one I can try and answer that in the course of trying to connect everything that you just said because one of the things I heard you illuminate in all of that was any system or any intelligent system this is generally true that you see Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik coined this phrase the explore exploit tension it's related to Ian McGill-Chryst's bilateral brain hemispheric different modes of attention that in each of us there is how do we make the most of the resources that we have how do we achieve what we are trying to achieve it's an optimization function and then there is the other system which is more holistic creative playful noisy it's like a hedge against that optimization function being mistaken in some way which is why play in spite of all appearances to the contrary and art and the work of cultural creation are evolutionarily sustainable persistent characteristics of advanced intelligence play exists throughout the animal kingdom in organisms that occupy environments of a certain level of complexity such that the instincts that they inherit need to be supplemented with some sort of learning phase about the world that they're actually growing up in you can think about exploration as a way of reconciling adaptation across multiple different timescales I bring this up because this to me says a lot about the problem that I have seen working within organizations and almost everyone I've talked to about this has seen within organizations in particular it shows up in mission driven nonprofits and it shows up in profit driven organizations with a particular revenue model and corporate charter everywhere you look you have this threat basically a mission driven organization can lose sight of the mission by over allocating attention and resources to simply existing survival as a proxy for accomplishing what it exists in order to accomplish can become that sort of devil's bargain and to actually integrate the evolutionary wisdom of play into an organization that is driven by a particular vision of social impact or some kind of cause or even a profit driven organization that believes it knows what it is what its brand story is what its product is like my cousin used to consult in Berlin for the BMW group and she was there when that organization went through a kind of metamorphosis from regarding itself as an automotive manufacturer to a supplier of mobility platforms because god bless them they had a department of internal disruption that was looking 10 years out and could see that autonomous vehicles are going to take over at some point and that in the process of new forms of transportation emerging and the automation of those forms we might be moving from a regime in which we have someone who buys a car and owns it to something more packet switching and time shared rental of vehicle fleets and that those fleets are all learning from each other and it's a whole different system that looks much more like the transition from buying a CD to streaming music out of what used to be when I was working in the music industry in 2007 they were calling it the celestial jukebox and the company that I worked for would have beaten Spotify to the punch if they had managed to convince all of the four major record labels that we were moving out of an ownership paradigm and into an access paradigm and they couldn't see that at the time and so a lot of companies got served because they had lost sight of the higher purpose to which they were yoked which is putting people together with music and we're thinking entirely in terms of this ego story of what we do is we sell music or what we do is we sell cars and like if Nintendo had struggled with that they would still be selling playing cards because they the Nintendo was founded in what 1888 as a playing card company everyone knows it as a video game company now but in another hundred years it might be something else the core essence of that company is gaming or at least that's how it seems and so as I've moved through my life my dad says your career is not a ladder it's a lattice as I've moved across the lattice I've gotten more and more abstract in my understanding of my professional functions because I've seen the ways that those functions are elicited and mutually enacted through different professional environments and once upon a time I had a very different idea of what I am economically this is something we were talking about earlier before you hit the button about legibility and about having to communicate one's value and I think a lot about this with respect to the way that you define work being legible or illegible to a particular system of accounting be it a market or an administrative bureaucracy HR is very much the same kind of problem trying to integrate the different styles at play in this for instance also like eldership right like eldership in the modern world has been largely abandoned in western civilization because we have this preoccupation with newness and progress and this belief that we're just not living in the world that you grew up in dad but we're to start from a position of Chesterton's fence don't remove the fence until you know why it's there and ask why in traditional human societies elders appear literally everywhere what is this function it has to do with the human social units aggregating and encoding stable features of the environment again over multiple different timescales so the modern world is strange in a lot of ways but one of them is that it only sees productivity within a particular spaceship temporal horizon and therefore does not understand the value of grandparents without which human beings wouldn't even exist because grandparents are what allowed for cumulative cultural evolution in the first place so yeah I don't know I feel like I might be straying from your question but like a question of growing up in America in particular as opposed to Britain or Australia is frustrating for me specifically because being trained as an evolutionary biologist we learned about the difference in evolutionary dynamics in large and small populations and in continental populations beneficial advantages a mutation that confers some sort of improvement in a trait actually do not stick as easily as they do in smaller island populations because there's so much more noise there's so many more individuals in those populations that those advantages tend to get washed out due to genetic drift due to random processes and in smaller island populations because one individual constitutes a much larger relative fraction of the society an evolutionarily beneficial mutation sticks much more easily this is akin to the biophysical scaling laws that govern the percolation of nutrients through an organism and years ago when I first spoke to economist brian arthur about this we were riffing on a piece that he wrote for mckenzie in 2017 about how the bigger an economy is the more it needs something like a circulatory system in order to actively pump all of the wealth that is generated by that economy through the entire body in the same way that like below a certain threshold you don't need a heart in a ball of 16 cells but once you start getting into these like macroscopic animals complex life requires a circulatory system because you can no longer rely on the passive diffusion of nutrients so living in the united states one thing i've noticed is that it's not enough to have good ideas in the way that like you can be a smart person in a small network and benefit from the advantages of that small network in the uk in a way that you can't in like kansas city where you are effectively washed out in this enormous cultural noise field in the u.s and so in the u.s and i could be wrong about this but my sense is based on quantitative research done on the evolution of new musical styles that it tends to be the case that when there is a major innovation in music this is based on the big data analysis done by echones in 2015 on streaming data that showed that most of the international pop stars were coming out of island the uk australia new zealand island nations where it was easy to saturate your scene but it was isolated also and so you could create a scene in the first place whereas in the united states we are dependent on the institutional mechanics of the manufacture of pop stars which are then yoked far more tightly to market forces and i can send you a link to a paper i wrote about this and about how like the bigger the field within which you are trying to innovate the more you have to actively counter the suppression of innovation which means that you actually have to pay for advertising here in order to be heard and that's really annoying because even then you are still subject to having to address in some way the demand of the market and what it recognizes as legible here i get that that all fit together really well as a response yeah so a couple things that stood out to me is really clear compressions of some of what you're speaking to one is the say forgetting or disconnection of the music industry thinking they were in the business of selling music rather than connecting people with music now obviously there's still plenty of selling music from another sense of the word but not being able to recognize paradigmatic shifts due to a kind of an inconsement in the grammar of the previous one is relevant there but it obviously links this sense that if one has the capacity to actually reconnect to the their rays on d'etre in a given domain then one might gain a sense of how a seed or something from the depths of the soil can find its way to the surface even in the case of shifting tectonics or something like that you brought up this notion of legibility and earlier in the conversation in that same response you mentioned the difficulty that the company work had convincing people of what was coming and that brings us to this ongoing question really that i'm always in relation to is the kind of appropriateness but also just the general dynamics of inviting and maybe it's not just invitation that's the interesting thing about it i do sometimes think in terms of other categories as well because when i think of social organizations it's not always an invitation that goes out sometimes there's a summons sometimes in that sense one's capacity to contribute is called for given their obligation they might have already made and committed to a context and maybe there isn't time for an invitation process there's something and i feel there's a worthiness to that as well like being picked for a team if you've been part of the squad it's not inviting you to play you're in the squad you're going to play on the team or what kind of selecting you now that takes me off the point so i'll just go back to the notion of invitation but in effect it's coming into address with people to open perception and risk trusting a different way of seeing and part of what's between us here as well is the value and the critical role that a pre-existing field plays and the dynamics of the field play in terms of the openness and the flows whether you want to think about that in terms of resources or perhaps just dynamics of saturation you mentioned or if there's openness to new connections to be made at all in some sense whether or not there is support in a field to actually encounter novelty then there's also you mentioned the notion of eldership and what i often mention in relation to that someone who you may have spoken to he might have seen around his name's Bruce Olderman we did an elder circle podcast with Bruce and one of the things that he spoke about as a quality of eldership he said i was more to it but what i remember at least was the articulation is to be a field in which time ripens and it is a very tricky thing to gather together for a sufficient amount of time to appreciate the function and the value of contributions which seem to play out and make themselves known over different periods of time maybe someone even begins a conversation with a story or several stories which are hard to follow but might populate the imagination and the capacity of the group to be able to reference and communicate over the coming couple hours and that's just a very micro example of course there's much more complicated than that when we i suppose the imagination here goes to thinking about contexts in which and this is something i don't know if you've mentioned it by name exactly but it's for sure relevant in the context of your current work something i've spoken to many people about but it's something i'm often hesitant to speak about too much because it's quite memed as a thing she's the notion of wiser innovation how important is that okay we know you've got a lot of energy to make stuff can we maybe hold on a second what do we want to do we want to be care about obviously that's like i'm believing would be critical but i sometimes i'm concerned that i'm gonna say concerned but sometimes feel that the sort of the hectic momentum and the drive and the incentive and all these things that are playing out in the context of business as usual to actually meet that and metabolize that and to actually address the energy that really is playing out in that context is probably in my opinion unlikely to happen in plug in experiences had in a boardroom because some people have won the opportunity they've outcompeted all the other people doing wise innovation to be able to talk to some people and yet i'm not knocking that because the orientation is good and yet the monstrosity of actually what is at play speaks to the energy to metabolize and the relational field it is a cultural transformation process that seems to be necessary in order to connect into the kind of processes which could encourage or pull or retract groups of people into a slightly different way of being so it's a big thing yeah and the only other thing i'll just reflect back in terms of what i heard in your response has to distinguish america from smaller island places i think that's very interesting what i'm taking from that is one might need to in a way be a little bit more the word careerist is coming to mind but it's essentially what i'm seeing is the need to plug in to pre-establish networks i live with an american family i spend some time in america the pool towards growing up and joining a company is quite strong because the company is well paid your health insurance and there's a lot of like bondage to companies in a very big way and it's not quite the same in you obviously got that you go further back you've got the remnants of industrialization you've got your factories and whatever but i don't think the connection to company is quite the same here people might disagree but it seems like it's precious to go through there's a lot of resources it's way more resources and it feels like there's more vibrancy in some sense but i wonder if it is the case as you say it's that much more difficult to start something new at the level of culture without going through pre-existing pathways and then what there's a capacity to gather resources and maybe do something different i really don't know yeah where i'm going with this i am just curious i'm talking to people i'm often like i need to be able to taste the context i need to taste it i need to smell it whatever that the particular relational field is i guess i'm just curious about what you're tasting at the level of brightness for the kinds of learning and experiences and the holding together in process over significant periods of time where resources have to go into supporting the field before it has come to a crystallization point that's going to look anything like extraction in the language of this exploit extracting right a lot of this is about and as you began with your work with the Santa Fe and how you're seeing things i see things very similarly in terms of tremendous value that goes into cultivating a field and a network of connections and relationships between people so they can better understand each other which then creates tremendous possibility but a lot of that is invisible and i certainly maybe from a complexity perspective you might have more to say about how that type of thing could in principle be measured or modeled although we might still want to push back on just exactly how much that measuring and modeling should lead in terms of the process of actually tending the value creation in some sense because at the end of the day at least from my perspective there's a deep sort of a radical kind of authenticity which is truly necessary in order to cultivate rich deeply rich relationships and that in some sense always is the first person sourcing of that i do often see as potentially subversive or pretend destabilizing of the whatever the governing constraints are that we're in fact even wanting to support that and that's okay so we've got to be able to dialogue in relation and that's why you need to feel and so in this in this sense of seeing how vital contexts might work and then you see like the village for the child but then it's having all the pieces come at once and i'm just curious about how you relate to that phenomenon in your own work and where you feel that you're called to contribute in relation to that given the necessity of how you're seeing the landscape yeah usually i'm the one asking questions that long i'm gonna be the one this time saying let me see if i can get to all of that i'm gonna start by assuming i can't and then i can only answer half of it which is that this question of wise innovation actually comes up in dialogue every day now with the people that i interact with online my friend Andrew Dunn working on getting the school of wise innovation off the ground with which i'm nominally associated my friend turquoise sound who's got her own institute of wise innovation these are trending terms right we are aware of a need for wisdom at a time when it is necessary for us to be able to sense make you talk to vervake and all these guys and yeah we have this information scaling problem we have an overproduction of data i just read this piece for a on magazine in which i was saying the feature is the bug when it comes to a quantitative approach to a systematizing approach to reality that scaling communication networks means that we can talk to anyone in the world at once and it means that those messages have been stripped down and decontextualized to the degree that you're just talking about in a way that now actually getting to know someone feels like a revolutionary act because it is inherently intention pace of communication and depth of communication are at odds with each other in society right now which is why you either see people who are like the podcast will save humankind or people who are like what a waste of time get to the points and that you really bury the lead on that one they listen at three x if they listen at all and this piece i just wrote for a on was about how you know a huge part of the epidemic of loneliness and the problems that we're having with coordination at scale is because suddenly we care about scale in a way that we didn't because we are capable of communicating at a global level but we've never even tried to coordinate at scale before because it was impossible and it turns out like i was saying at the beginning about like how we've missed the mark with the original dream for the personal computer that years of working online and social media punctuated growing up alongside instant messaging and realizing just how easy it was to get into a really tragic misunderstanding with someone online that would not happen in person the years that i was stuck in an extremely rocky tumultuous relationship with the woman who is now my wife because we were trying to maintain that relationship over text and that is the gap between the richness of in the room conversation and sms or like really literally anything else even video calls all of the relationships that i had in my 20s with people that i became infatuated with and then i drove across the country to meet them and then they smell wrong and there's like all of this dimensionality so yeah wise innovation it's a really interesting crossroads between our recognition that we need to be better at integrating the avalanche of information that has been afforded us through these economies of scale and the super exponential growth of data production on the one hand and then cutting across that we are still caught inside the logic of that machinery which is obsessed with innovation it's obsessed with the productive years of a person's life it's obsessed with novelty which really when you think about noticing differences and being attracted to novelty is one of the most fundamental properties of cognition it's not really advanced you get bored if you are exposed to the same stimulus you habituate to it and the more intense you're stimulus the more rapidly you habituate and we've seen the economy do this Naomi Klein's book Shock Doctrine talks about like we've capitalism has gotten to the point where there's no geographic frontier anymore and so it has to eat itself and the way that i see this disaster capitalism that we're in right now the reason that organizations like facebook are so incredibly successful precisely because they foster the decontextualization within which outrageous fuel that acts as a flywheel for engagement on the platform and the sale of ads right like this whole framework that we're in meshed in right now is the ouroboros and eventually you get whoever's at the head of the ouroboros that thing continues to rotate and you get the situation that's described by a really hilarious facebook group called silicon valley just reinvented the bus again where it's like the obsession with innovation the obsession with novelty leads to an erosion of that kind of time binding that Bruce Alderman talks about you mentioned i've talked about this with eric davis on the show also about cultural plasticity and neuroplasticity and how chasing neuroplasticity you have to be really careful with just how far down that road you go because you can end up losing sight of who you were in the first place of what mattered that if we become too mutable then we can no longer be sure that we have maintained the continuity of our values or the context and so like this was a thing that i watched i've seen in a lot of organizations that managed to remain adaptable by flushing out the storykeepers by maintaining a high burn rate and a high throughput and at the organizational level it looks a lot like what in the brain of someone under the influence of extremely potent psychedelics like dm t where the information processing demands of that experience exceed the ability of the brain's default mode network to actually create narratives about what's happening you lose the self because you're so busy absorbing the novelty turns the kinesa don't give into astonishment that's what the elves told him when he was in dm t space and something like that is going on right now with us as a planet where it's like the i talked about this with kevin kelly when i had him on for future fossils 165 and we argued over the merits of global urbanization because on the one hand every single person is moving into the city it's a very easy choice to move into a situation of greater optionality of greater economic opportunity of greater possibilities for the discovery and expression of self on the other hand those that opportunity space is purchased at the cost of the that like that system devouring the latent space of the ecological intelligence that's stored in economically-eligible systems and the cultural intelligence of these like frustratingly conservative confining traditions right my buddy micha minyano calls me a psychedelic conservative because it's like there's a golden mean in there somewhere like i am not happy citing with progressives or traditionalists because either one of those suggests a strategy that you then clamp on top of every possible situation in different situations called for titrating that to one degree or another this whole issue with wise innovation is really strange to me because i tend to be of the mind that we are placing entirely too much emphasis on innovation and yet that is the language that you need to use in order to communicate with the business world in order to convey and cultivate wisdom right again i was talking with rima boshadhanan earlier today of indot dialogue dot co and rima and i were talking about our suspicion of innovation because often what is needed is actually maintenance a kind of respect your elders if we're gonna have innovation what we really need is trains and that's not a new thing that's a thing that got ripped up in the united states by the automotive industry and like all of the rail that had been laid almost all of it was pulled up and turned into cars and that's exactly the kind of pathology that ought to be addressed again i'll say one more thing about this and i know i've missed a lot in what you asked and you can double down on whatever you feel like i've missed but i used to work at sfi with jeffree west and jeffree is famous for his work on biophysical scaling laws connecting biology and the science of cities and the science of human institutions and his work underlies a lot of my thinking his work with ryan and christian brown and chris campus and elisa mora and others underlight a lot of my thinking on this he and manfred laudicler were on future fossils episode 212 last year to talk about what the mathematical term that jeffree uses is the finite time singularity which is an accelerating sequence of innovation crisis cycles where the unseen effects that externalities negative externalities produced by some innovation end up creating a crisis through the production of endogenous novelty that then must be innovated into in order to avert and the nature of complex adaptive systems the nature of cities as social reactors is that every new technological innovation that's plunked into the ecosystem of all technologies increases the recombinant space of externalities super exponentially and so every new crisis happens faster than the last and laudicler who's an evolution biologist and west as a physicist are saying and this gets back to what we're saying about sometimes a mission driven organization loses the plot and has confused its existence with the mission to which it was originally assigned at birth innovation as an end unto itself is the self-terminating algorithm because eventually that next crisis comes faster than the systems ability to adapt to it and depending on who you ask we're well over that waterfall and so i'm not here to fear monger because the degree to which a system collapses when it hits that finite time singularity is the whole different question we're not talking about immortal transhumans among the stars or the polar earth is a paperclip machine when civilizations have collapsed in the past they tend not to go extinct they tend to in the words of annalie newitz scatter adapt and remember and what happens is that crossing the carrying capacity of that system finds the water level it rebalances itself in the form of a diaspora of smaller civilizations that can actually adapt to the crises that they create like the anasazi of the american southwest did not go extinct but they're not a lost civilization it's a civilization whose knowledge and populations fragmented into a number of different splinter populations each of them maintain a piece of the cultural memory of that original high civilization same thing happened to the mia the same thing seems to be happening to the world wide web in as much as we're escaping from the so-called dark forest into what vincatech ralka's the cozy web of discord servers and mighty networks and more human-scale organizations where people are not as concerned that they're going to be preyed upon by surveillance ad revenue so yeah i'll stop there that was awesome and that was awesome yeah so i feel like there's a little bit of work to do to reintroduce the thinking around wiser innovation i think you deepen the context a lot there i did think to introduce the notion it's often spoken about in terms of the etymology of religion it's that relegré that re-binding and a lot of people speaking about this one of the things i noticed was seemed to me to be quite core to where argument meet invitation that daniel schmaktenbergo recently made in some least one dialogue with nad haggins though i believe it would have been included in the progress narrative one as well he's inviting to be thinking about that effectively there was a call there to support the orientation towards developing technology as such but not to the degree that that process should be unbound from a more complex set of concerns and cares you might say values and appreciation for the ecology and that's in effect a very basic point but seems to be at the core of how we relate to the dynamic that is wisdom power and how humanity technology and nature relate but there's a lot in that notion of re-binding and partly why i'm bringing it in is just to give another lens on what i was attempting to present in terms of what i would see as critical to the context that can actually support wiser innovation in a way you're thinking towards some other frames that will be helpful perhaps for conceptualizing how we might continue to think about this process in terms of the fragmentation of the scattering of knowledge and people given the collapse or degradation of a larger context because of course we exist in a time in which there is famously quite a lot of atomization and fragmentation and we find ourselves also amidst what do people call it fifth generation warfare propaganda and the manipulation of psychology and social psychology online and otherwise and as you rightly point out the landscape of participation on the ordinary internet is just toxic and no one likes it and yet many of us still feel that it's necessary to engage with and you can certainly look at x and facebook and what have you very much as fiefdoms in the way that yannes verifact is pointing to and he talks about techno-futilism and this type of thing of course that terms being around in other contexts but the movement towards smaller more relationally in touch less predatory contexts online let's just take that for a moment this is often something we discussed recently in the voicecraft network with various people interested in we had a conversation actually earlier this week with the pharynge and Michelle bao and zinghosh feel about the in effect some of the dynamics of web 3 and its attempt in effect to respond to some of this stuff but in effect the colonization in a sense of much of the orientation of web 3 by exactly the same kind of parasitic dynamics which we might be wanting to bring to attention here to remember nevertheless the contexts that might make possible the kind of binding across multiple time horizons of care local context evaluation understanding and formulating value together like I would speculate that since this is only what i'm oriented towards in terms of lifelong building and collaboration will probably be enough time in this particular expression to share all of these different things but certainly one of the components goes very deeply for the energy that seeks to innovate and produce now it seems to me that for sure needs to be bound to orientations and cares the world healing capacity to communicate and the capacity to create art as well in that sense to engage in the kind of process that is probably more towards that exploration rather than exploiting side of things might be critical for the very capacity to actually metabolize perceptions of the world and reality that we meet into a context that can then be related to more coherent you can see from different angles or can make accessible to others as a kind of permissionary function to art in our god and so there are these different features let's say of process in the context of whether network perhaps on a smaller scale community which would be critical in my opinion to function alongside that energy or that spirit which seeks to innovate and it's a more holistic process in terms of relational connectivity and transformation and all these type of things which you might associate with wisdom of course action and do i'm not trying to de-emphasize that one of the things i might imagine about that and perhaps approaching it in terms of a school makes sense i certainly think creating educational context is valuable profoundly valuable but right it seems like there might need to be buy-in let's say from entities which might otherwise in the present system be in competition with each other who can come to recognize and need to collaborate at a higher order level and some of the logics that presently run in terms of this internal external division which i mentioned right at the beginning which can get in the way of enabling actually what it means to participate in dialogue really in that sense collective intelligence and understanding i'm proposing to you speculatively in this conversation that the kind of binding of whether organization and effort in effect in the future i think not only does that need to see itself grounded as well in some kind of notion of place i do think there are memes like cosmolocalism which are relevant here which can provide some clarity with respect to how local contexts might relate with the broader global so is there a kind of binding with a kind of identity with context about place and also processes which might not ordinarily fit in the context of how a business might think about their need to innovate to stay up with the market but that also may need to be collaborations among business and organizational entities which might otherwise see themselves as in competition in order to in effect support again the kind of field that can actually undertake and metabolize that for in a sense its own sake the kind of process which would be experimenting on its way towards supporting that which could innovate more wisely so we need to fragment down a bit so something a bit more manageable at level but to the degree it's too isolated there's also i think i made an issue there with respect to what's actually taken into account not only from the sense of perspective and stakeholder but i think also in effect the collaborative landscape of care itself seems to be importantly bound up with the kind of depth of process that's required to undergo and if it feels there isn't enough of that bound together then the orientation and desire and effect to go deep and risk in that process isn't going to be present either and that becomes then like signaling and inviting that's when i continue to come back to the level of artistic cultural influence and invitation into in effect pretty transcendent type of interaction because of its recognition that the binding context and the resources and stability that could actually support the kind of gathering i'm pointing towards here its time has not yet come and yet there's an orientation and a lighting up towards that way and in effect like a giving and an open sourcing there's memories involved too at the extro-t it's just great for rainbows so i'm in a good space to synthesize everything that you just said but yeah i think about the stuff a lot one thing i did not get to a moment ago was that la vichlor and west when we were on future fossils said we need to think about innovation as not merely something that does or does not exist because not all innovations are created equal and what we're actually talking about is the need for different kinds of innovations or movements along semantic network in latent space or whatever movement across the surface in a mathematical abstraction if that's your way of doing it getting from here there and so movement in one dimension or in one direction of that space is not equivalent to movement in another and Jeffrey ended that conversation by saying something that i have since heard mcgill christ and vervakie and schmachtenberger in their trilog on the psychological drivers of the metacrisis spent a lot of time talking about what kind of spiritual revolution akin to the emergence of religion in the actual at the axial age right you're really gary comes back and john is very fond of pointing to that as the dimension in which innovation continues to make sense and i'll also say that la vichlor is an evolution biologist and west as someone who studies the scaling of the emergence of tumors in organisms as they grow and therefore the scaling of anti-cancer mechanisms in organisms like an elephant has vastly more anti-cancer genes than you do because it's a much larger bureaucracy it has to put into place far more negative feedback mechanisms to prevent rogue cells from expropriating the resources of that organism for boundless growth that was something that came up time and time again in the work at sfi this metabolic theory of cancer advocated by people like john pepper of the national cancer institute and how mathematically generalizable that model is to what we've seen happen on the surface of this planet thanks to the liberation of stored fossil fuel like petrochemical energy into the metabolism of human civilization so what we lack right now are the regulatory mechanisms to prevent the profit motive from eating its own tail like when when daniel in his conversations with nate higgins talks about this thing that keeps him awake at night which is that he sees things in terms of game theoretical framework and asks how can it be that a positive sum kind of infinite game thing can outcome p a totally sociopathic optimized contest algorithm and the reason i see that as vexing him is because at least in what i have heard him say on these things the game theoretical model does not account for the fact that this is happening across multiple different scales simultaneously and that where states and markets have failed to perform a negative feedback regulatory function for these kinds of runaway positive feedback mechanisms there are other things that stand in the way of that like the reason that we have not annihilated ourselves with nuclear weapons is because even when the order came in to fire the guy working at the desk of the nuclear submarine said no that we're talking about there's regulation at the level of the federal government there's regulation at the level of the guy with his finger on the button and of course nowadays it's different but they're trying to close that gap and if you're if you are entrusted with the nuclear authentication codes then someone is standing there with a gun ready to shoot you if you say no and replace you but the answer to that question is a question of how can we do a better job of not collapsing these concerns into a single plane of regulatory infrastructure like when i think about the question of how does restraint survive as an evolutionarily stable strategy what we're talking about again is something like the high beta portfolio or bet hedging in human populations where you have like neuro diversity as a consequence of the benefits conferred to the society as an individual by maintaining a portfolio of diverse models as they are like instantiated in the anatomy and cognition of different people right so like perspectival diversity even at the level of like human individuals is part of the way that nature has handled this situation we do not all think alike or we would be subject to these kinds of runaway terrible outcomes and that's a huge part of why i have felt motivated to pursue these kinds of inquiries with humans on the loop because it is the condition of modern people whose human messoscopic level the neighborhood the church community family tribe mutual aid networks so on to the degree that we have allowed economies of scale and efficiency and the convenience of replacing reciprocal trust with trustless transactional mechanisms we have forgotten that we can even form relationships in the first place and that regulation of like Kevin Kelly and what technology wants spends a good bit of that book on the omish and how the omish do not just automatically assume that they need to adopt new technologies they get together and they regulate themselves at the level of that community and the omish are not even a clade properly it's like each community of omish people make their own decisions about whether or not they're going to adopt cellular phones or if they are do they get one or does everybody get one what do they need when i spoke to Gregory Landoey on future fossils who co-founded Regent Network Regent Foundation which is the web 3 based registry for ecosystem services it's through land stewardship it's the the marketization of land stewardship and i spent a long time asking him how this kind of system was robust against the kind of attacks that we see happening in carbon markets where they're not operating and they've lost the plot it's about carbon now we swap it out it's about the proxy rather than ecosystem health and Landoey's point was that if you allow land stewards to determine what metrics function for the registration of ecosystem health on the market then the people living in the Amazon basin are going to have a different idea of what counts than the people who are stewarding the Great Barrier Reef for the people who are managing Pacific Northwestern fisheries in in Alaska or in British Columbia and that this sort of heterogeneous patchwork of strategies prevents the whole thing from collapsing into one easily exploited low-dimensional field when i'm thinking about humans on the loop one of the main thematic pillars of this discourse is about multi-scale regulation and living here in Santa Fe actually living in the United States after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and everyone was expecting FEMA to come to the rescue and FEMA did not the federal emergency response was not there for people and in fact i had friends on the ground in New Orleans who were trying to help people and were arrested by the National Guard and were prevented from assisting in the disaster recovery which is just insane and the way i look at it is like it will become more and more obvious that daddy is not here to save you and that we are capable of rebalancing the power asymmetries that like i'll say there is a great paper hold on let me pull this up samples and Wendy Carlin wrote a piece in 2020 called the coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative i'll send you a link to this sam is this fabulous economist who worked with MLK and he and Wendy wrote this piece on how we think in terms of states and markets now but there is this third poll which is the poll of the civil society and i would say there is an additional poll that is left out of that kind of calculus which is your own executive function your own ability to make decisions and like we talk a lot about the choice made by the individual in lifestyle consumerism like you do you but really that individual has been hollowed out by behaviorism and by quantitative cognitive psychology and neuroscience weaponized by capitalism so that your participation in society has been enslaved entirely to a market based or legislative incentive landscape and very few people can be said now compared to like other times in history to be making decisions on the basis of personal values that are not tightly coupled to survival in an incredibly asymmetrical game so the last thing i'll say about this is that kevin clark of content evolution i don't know what you call himself a futurist and business leadership consultant or he tends to talk to his clients about survival success and significance and that these are loosely equivalent to dependency, independency and interdependency and my perspectives on all of this have been shaped by 20 plus years of thinking about the dynamics of major evolutionary transitions like when you were talking about membranes what is it that shapes the process whereby single-celled organisms start to enfold into one another so intimately that they began to reproduce as a single organism what is it about the landscape of competition overlaid over this geography of the anatomy of organisms and what is the adjacent possible as dorokoffman puts it what is within reach of a beneficial mutation such that they can evolve into the direction of coupling their processes with other organisms and becoming a meta individual and i see all of this in this the sense of there are cases in which some parts of society have atrophied those qualities that afford an easy restoration or rediscovery of that civil society like at some point like if you're the borg it's like a heroic work to be hue and like to rediscover i am hue to rediscover your individuality we're right on the cusp of this question of if even homeless people have to have cell phones then we have gamified participation in non-consensual tech landscape to the point that you're making a choice to participate but it's really a choice of survival and i want to see a world where the choice to say yes is actually a choice like it's not a choice if saying no results in excommunication from the society or death i see a lot of hope in this situation in that you brought up care and like an ethic of care i think comes into this like jordan greenhall was just talking about this on twitter about how there's adults and then there's parents and parents are like a different level of adulthood and i was like as a parent i'm inclined to believe that but it's actually more complicated it's that parenting is a condition it's not the only condition but it is a condition in which your personal values you may have to redesignate them as subservient to the care of another being and if you're an especially affluent wealthy parent you may be able to replace that kind of sense of relying on the care of your community in order to take care of your kids with again with this transactional exchange that happens with like parents who never actually grow up in the way that jordan's talking about because they can just farm their kids out to paid child care but there's also this condition where i've seen a lot of people who are more or less economically invisible the circus that william ron Thompson talks about running under the current of civilization through history i see it in the in the festival world in itinerant artist communities that my buddy henry andrews brought up that living in san francisco even now means that you are forced into co-housing with people simply to afford to live there and so there are like attractor basins here that are not parenting but that still make multi-cellularity the most obvious decision and make interdependency between individuated modern egos that become networked and porous as a way of subsisting in an intensely competitive landscape uh the most reasonable game theoretical outcome one more thing which is just that you're not going to find homogeneous groups excelling at this again because diversity is core to collective computation as a strategy when i look at how to balance for instance the fact that private industry allows you to get things done but it is coupled to market forces in a way that academia at least ideally should not be that science itself claims not to be or aspires not to be that the government is ostensibly decoupled from those things i see something like a tripartite regulatory structure emerging at every level of civilization down at least to the human and probably below if we really think about the evolutionary utility of our different organ systems where you have something like industry and private enterprise and markets being the mcgillchrist left hemisphere you have art culture and academia being the mcgillchrist right hemisphere and then you have government being the life support system that enables those things but it is not subjugated to either concern right because obviously chasing aesthetic beauty becomes a survival risk at some point and as we've been talking about this whole conversation seeing everything as an opportunity to exploit the world will in fact eventually cut you down and so there is like a sort of holy trinity of regulatory voices that i think are going to become obvious to people as things just become more intense and those strategies become more obvious no matter how developed you are as a person or how broad your sphere of moral concern like war makes for strange bedfellows right like it will just be the case that as we move deeper and deeper into the poly crisis that new forms of polycentric institutions are going to evolve out of the institutions we have and so i'm actually very hopeful in this regard yeah beautiful thank you there's a lot and i think we'll move this to a close now i'll just offer just a brief reflection at the end there in terms of the tripartite model you're speaking to this has come up a lot over the years in our voice graph context at different scales for sure in a value and civilization as well as a common series thinking a lot about the relations between the market state and commons as you were speaking there i realized although i think this has been discussed in network sessions as well that you think about the good true and beautiful as mapping fairly nicely onto the articulations you gave there with obviously up using in terms of the art and culture and true in terms of the market and the government seeking to mediate and regulate the good in some sense now speaking about that in the ideal is important and then recognizing where we are in a pragmatic sense in relation to how these entities are in fact functioning is also relevant and in terms of as you say the kinds of organizations that are in potential waiting to form i think we'll be looking at things from different contexts and with different degrees of fidelity and i think there's a lot of really valuable thinking to be done there at one very small scale of functionality i'd invite you actually i think you'd really enjoy checking this out as well as listen as what if they happen i think i forget which episode it was might be 54 but it's called Wiser Pathways it was with a forest in john viviki for example john viviki and the conversation mostly oriented around forest giving an articulation of the governance process at a small group level between in the context of the concepts meritocracy democracy and consensus in terms of how the flow in that context could work no this was specifically for small groups that i forget the number up to i don't know if it was done bar the roughly 150 dumbbar number or smaller than that it might have been 60 to 80 or something or even lower regardless i'm just flagging that as among so many things i'm actually i really enjoyed talking to you and i'm very enthusiastic about the ongoing potential for conversation and of course as i'm seeking to invite a few others into a group conversation we can have about some of this stuff perhaps from a slightly different basis but i'm yeah very much looking forward to that yeah so much there mate so much there and i think it's probably just best if i just put a pin in it and allow that settle and look forward to for the dialogue it's so funny looking at your youtube channel when i are clearly cut from the same higher dimensional eminatory manifold no i like you saying that i like it no i'm picking up on that too hyperpicking up on that too yeah i mean thanks to you thanks again for listening everyone i highly recommend that you go dive into the archives of voicecraft and scope tim's work if you like future fossils obviously please subscribe rate and review the show and consider becoming a patron on sub stack or patreon whatever floats your boat or help me connect with sponsors for humans on the loop you can find lists of the episodes i have already recorded upcoming for future fossils and for humans on the loop in the show notes very excited about some of these recent guests just had probably the most philosophically edge dwelling conversation i've ever had on the show recently with eric wargot and jf martel i'm recording with howard ryan gold this week it's nuts uh go check out the list and wet your appetite and i hope that i'll see some of you in the discord server where static recordings become living interactions have a wonderful week slash yon