What Worked and What Didn't

General
1

After a few years of observing different groups grappling with the response to the polycrisis - I wonder if it’s time to have an honest retrospective. Most of the strategies and themes outlined below come from certain assumptions that are not there anymore.

  1. There was a lot of activity in building various directories and charting maps. Attempts to categorise and classify. Identify influences and catalogue main intellectuals. The assumption was that people will consume, connect, action on the information.

  2. Co-living and DDS received a lot of attention. There were courses and different white papers. Groups got together, communities built and connected. Then everything cooled down. I believe some of the LifeItself hubs shut down. What happened?

  3. Recently there has been talk about the upcoming course on Collective Action. Given everything that’s been going on in the world and the failure of collective action to meet the challenges, do we still believe in it?

  4. A lot of attention has been given to the Ai - both as a potential threat but also as a way out of the crisis. What difference can we make by either cheering it or criticising? The Ai is fundamentally changing the landscape by affecting the power asymmetry between the people and the oligarchs to unprecedented levels. But do we have any say in how it’s being rolled out?

Going forward - what’s our take on democracy - especially our flavour of it? A lot of assumptions aroudn what we do are based on the electorate having a say. That is also based on proletariat having power to stop “the production” and force capitalists to negotiate.

Do we still believe in international institutions, principles of universal justice, etc..

While often discussing the need to produce our own food, build new types of communities and reconnect with the nature - we don’t talk about personal safety. We don’t talk the reliance on global infrastructure and the mercy of the power not to destroy the nature or simply deny access to it.

Why don’t we do future modelling?

2

In addition to the above - there have been no truly innovative ideas that are radically different from what’s already been tried. We’re still totally stuck in Modernity and rationalism. It’s all about the hope to encapsulate an algorithm that will scale up humanity in the right direction without getting entangled in human dynamics.

3

What do you mean by the failure of collective action to meet the challenges? I can think of instances of collectives who have failed to achieve their collective aim, and instances of success. Much of the Civil Rights movement in the US, for example, was quite successful.

And what might be the alternative? To me it seems self-evident that achieving significant goals require organized effort by collectives.

4

If you think that collective action (in the shape and form we’re seeing it around us) is an efficient method and on track to meet the challenges, that’s fine. Everything that I wrote above is just my opinion and designed to make people think on the topic and start conversation.

5

“Organised effort by collectives” is too broad to be useful. It’s the nature of that organising that we need to think about.

I introduced “collaboration under constraint” a few research meetings ago. Not sure if you were present.

6

Collective action has been generally successful for humans since the Paleolithic. But which collective are we discussing here? Using what action? With what goals?

7

Sure, armies, companies, state bureaucracies, etc… if you’re talking about broad definition of collective action.

However, if we consider Olson - then it is closer to our idea - voluntary cooperation among individuals with shared interests…

Which I think doesn’t work - or doesn’t work very well in its loose format

8

Could you be more precise about what you’re saying doesn’t work and why? A lot of action that’s been quite successful, like American Civil Rights as I mentioned, would fall under this umbrella. I know you’re just expressing your opinion, but I’m not quite sure what you’re critiquing, and what you might be suggesting as an alternative. Do you have your ideas about collaboration under constraints documented somewhere? And is this something that can’t be considered voluntary cooperation among individuals with shared interests?

9

Not looking to argue. That’s precisely how I don’t want to spend my time.
Not interested in debating history.

If we understand success as something between
“we’re crap, but it’s OK” - - - - - - - - - - > “we’re winning”
I’m interested in what’s on the right.

10

Yes. Let’s do that.

Here is a case study. I’m wrapping up a vacation here: https://makah.com/

By the late 19th century, the Makah people were down to under 700 tribal members, due to imported diseases and a century of colonial expropriation. Today that are making a comeback. We toured their museum yesterday. This people has been in this place for thousands of years. What interested me was how at least some of their traditions persisted, albeit embedded in globalized modernity. (There is a Japanese family in one cabin near us, and couple European families also nearby). The Makah economy currently involves fishing, logging, ecotourism, and a variety of retail businesses.

There are tsunami warning sirens all around here, and it struck me “tsunami” is good metaphor for what happened to the Makah. Colonization, modernity, and globalization are like a great wave of culture and politics that broke over this people beginning around 250 years ago. Somehow they stayed fixed to their land and maintained at least some degree of cultural identity.

Would the Makah in their heart of hearts really want to go back to weaving ceder bark clothing and subsisting from seal meat and seagull eggs? I kind of doubt it. Although they are proud of their heritage (whale hunting in cedar canoes was their supreme physical and spiritual test), I’m guessing they’d like to keep diesel fishing boats, electrical appliances, central heating and so forth. As native American reservations go, this one looks pretty gentrified. Very nice community gym in the center of town!

Take this case study and generalize it all over the world. The first peoples everywhere have been occupied and expropriated time and again by one wave of invaders after another. Some native people have maintained ancient lands and cultures, generally on the fringes of the world, but most of us ARE the tsunami. I know I am. My family surfed the wave of European colonialism and washed up here. That was almost 200 years ago. The day before yesterday (in Makah time), but not exactly just off the boat, either. Native? Not native? Native-ish? Legacy and cultural history appear to form a spectrum …

So in modeling the future, it depends quite a bit on point of view. The Makah, I would imagine, would like to stay put, maintain heritage, and take advantage of whatever innovations make life better for them. They might also like to regain big chunks of ancestral land that slipped from their grasp during prior centuries’ heyday of appropriation and assimilation. I’m not sure detaching from the wider world is really an option for the Makah, but they seem to be rolling with the tide, so to speak, which is a skill they mastered eons ago.

But what about those of us less attached to a particular piece of land, less committed to a very specific ethnos? Global energies are vast and volatile. What place is there for those of us who just ride the wave, because we are the wave?

11

What you’re doing here is analysing someone else’s past and second guessing what they’d like for their future.

I think it needs to start with you, Robert. Ignore the past, think only about the future. Freeze a particular frame and think how you’d like it to look. Then consider different models to get you there. Analyse what that future might entail, what sort of dynamics will get in motion - we’re too much in the past. It’s either that or we have no desires and imagination.

12

The funny thing about future visualization is how it is entirely projected from experience of the past. Are you able to imagine something completely de novo, with absolutely no prior precedent? Suppose you could … suppose you really see it, and it’s absolutely brand shiny new and never perceived before by anybody’s eyes. Suppose that happens … but then how might you communicate it? How might you express it to the rest of us? Any words you might choose to paint a picture of such a radically novel future are themselves the fruits of cultural legacy, with deep and resonant historical connotations. As far as I can tell, any image of the desired future is a commentary on what transpired in the past. Given what memory, perception, and projected imagination (itself a function of memory and perception) give us to work with, what of that would we wish to maintain, and what of it would we be prefer to be different?

The Makah are going to figure out their own futures without consulting me, but the future I am working toward can certainly be inspired by the experience of the Makah. My sense of the future involves “Cascadian” identity. That identity is informed by wind and waves and surf and sea. To be Cascadian means as well to be surrounded by trees and mountains and to relate to that woodland in complex ways. Getting better aligned with those natural rhythms is what my vision of future largely involves. Modernity, in general, needs to be dialed back and more attuned to more primal experience. Not abolished so much as realigned.

You want action plans? I’ve got action plans! But lets save those for a few dozen future posts. Just now I’m hearing waves outside the window …

1 Like
13

I think we need more imagining and less rationalising. Enjoy the ocean!

14

First of all, with respect to cognitive processes, let’s take it from none other than David Hume:

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

Someone here may want to stand up for “rationalising” as the best sort of process, but it won’t be me! Iain McGilchrist recently wrote at great length about how imagination and reason can and should relate to each other, so if we can agree to agree on that, I’d prefer to move on to applications …

To me, “imagine” is a requirement for pattern matching. Pattern matching allows for future scenario planning. The idea is to match what is happening in the present to patterns that occurred in the past, to take note of how such patterns unfolded in the past, and then to project what similar processes might imply for the future. None of this is deterministic. It is indeed very much an exercise in imagination - trying to visualize what MIGHT happen if certain scenarios indeed play out. Reason, however, is also involved - mostly to draw out logical implications of what happens when things like growth functions hit limits that can only result in some sort of inflection point. For example, Romantic ideas about having all of us move back to indigenous villages and weave our own clothing from natural fibers while feeding ourselves from backyard gardens don’t look nearly as plausible if one counts calories, populations, acres, and plant and animal productivity rates. That indigenous world only worked on much smaller scales than what we have now. A fully return-to-indigenous future would require something like a 99% reduction of current populations. Just imagine how that might play out …

Here is an article that illustrates the sort of future scenario visualization I consider worth pursuing.

https://open.oregonstate.education/permaculture/chapter/david-holmgrens-future-scenarios/

15

I’m going to speculate here and say that “imagining” is something to do with the scale of aspirations and a type of thinking. I still fondly remember reading “Screw It, Let’s Do It” by Richard Branson. Not a good book, not a great moral story - yet full of primeval energy.

As for pattern matching - I see the same pattern of talking and not progressing here, hence this post…

16

Umm … it’s an online discussion board! Not to be confused with the physical world! Anything I would qualify as personal progress, or as social progress for the various organizations I connect with, happens out there in physical space. Also, the very notion of “progress” needs qualifications around scope, scale, trajectory and so on. It’s very easy to throw stones at anything as “not enough progress” unless there is some sense of goals and metrics around whatever “progress” is supposed to be. What sort of “progress”, posted here, would look like “progress” to you?

17

There is a lot in this post. But let’s start with the “polycrisis”. For me, it’s always time for an honest retrospective!

The polycrisis can be viewed through all sorts of lenses. My preferred approach is to start with the long sweep of civilizational history and then to characterize the current moment against that background. Viewed from such a multi-millenium angle, the most distinctive thing that strikes me lately is all the great historical civilizations coming together and rubbing up against each other on what is effectively becoming a shrinking planet. Some highly relevant subplots to that story involve technology and population. In the technology subplot, early modern Europe gathered all the best technologies from all over the world, synthesized them through the Scientific Revolution, and then reexported the package through industrialism and colonialism. The net effects of all that included a massive increase in global human population as well as equally massive destruction of non-human biosystems all over the world. Sorting through the geopolitics of historical civilization clash, fueled by population dynamics, constrained by ever more dire ecological limits, provides at least the broad outline of the polycrisis.

In considering the effectiveness of some intervention or another, it is useful to reflect on scale. Historians such as Braudel, Toynbee, and Spengler have noted that historical civilizations evolved on cycles of 1000 years or so. Braudel, in particular, analyzes three levels of social structure with differing rhythms of change. Political regimes turn over relatively quickly, in time spans measured by years or even months. Economic cycles are more generational in scope. Cultural/civilizational cycles are what Braudel calls longue durée , changes that require many centuries. Against that background, anyone expecting massive civilizational change in just a few years, because some scattered groups on the Internet think such changes are a good idea, really is not sizing up the required scope of work with any realistic sense of proportion!

By my reckoning, the “coming together” phase of human civilization really got started roughly 200 years ago. I’d guess then we have something like 800 years ahead of us before humans on Earth really share a unified planetary civilization in any deep way that includes personal perspectives, emotions, and values (what German philosophy often calls Geist or Kultur). All any of can do about any of this now is to lay down ground work for our children and our childrens’ children and our childrens’ childrens’ children and so on. I’m currently, for example, reading about what Herder had to say about these matters (through the interpretation of Habermas), and I personally don’t think Herder wasted his time at all. Did he “solve” everything? Of course not! But we could all do far worse than to think about the problems Herder thought about, in half so adept a way as Herder thought about them.

So have any of us accomplished anything much about this lately? I tend to view these matters through a “glass half-full” lens, so yes, I’d be happy to point to a thing or two. But New World Orders are not built in a day - nor in a human lifetime - so anyone who wishes to peer into the void and see only the void itself would not be unjustified in doing so!

18

Responding to this thread and the ongoing discussion more generally, I think the notion that we ought to examine what has worked and what hasn’t is spot on. At the same time, I think it’s a hopeless endeavor unless specific criteria that are winnable or losable are included in the discussion. Is there something we could agree on that would indicate that the discussion board (which I’m assuming is the subject being discussed) is either progressing or regressing?

19

Possible metrics include both quantitative and qualitative. On the quantitative side are things like number of active users, frequency of posts, time on platform, etc. The qualitative side would involve things more like user satisfaction surveys or unstructured narrative capture from the user community. All of that just speaks to discussion board engagement as an end in itself. One might also consider - why was the Forum established in the first place? What is the role of the Forum in the wider ecosystem of Life Itself/Second Renaissance? Also, what is the role of Life Itself/Second Renaissance in even more generalized cultural ecosystems? By way of metaphor, I saw some mussels attached to a rock in a tide pool the other day. What is the “success” metric for those creatures? How about for the rock? How about for the tidepool? How about for the indigenous people who manage the rock and the tidepool to attract tourists like me? How about my satisfaction level in visiting the mussels on their rock? (Pretty good, actually!) We could go on … and on … and on … gaming out ultimately if our every heartbeat is sufficiently transformational in the looming shadow of Moloch. I’m fine if people want to apply quantitative and qualitative methods to the “success” of the Forum or to any of the partner Life Itself/Second Renaissance media channels. It’s the sort of thing organizational leadership should be doing periodically to manage organizations. (At the beach, I was careful to complete the socioeconomic survey upon leaving, so the hosts can gauge the fiscal impact of my demographic’s gazing at mussels on the beach. I was glad to do it. People need jobs. The resort business needs to be properly aligned to demand.)

All that said … my theory of cultural change is that new behaviors start with persons; persons create expressions and artifacts; those expressions and artifacts are taken up by other persons (or not), behaviors, expressions, and artifacts that resonate in wider social systems get replicated; in this way novel performances and expressions become commonly adopted. Personally, this place is one of my favorite “test kitchens” and I experiment with a lot of ideas here. Some of those ideas get “canned” for wider distribution. (See my forthcoming textbook, for example). I’m likewise seeding and cultivating a spectrum of local organizations. My “blue sky” thinking - often worked out here - gets translated into all manner of ground level activity. People do real things in the real world related to all the thinking on my part that ages in the cask hereabouts. So I’d be sad if the Forum was not here!

20

Big topic. It’s not clear to me who you mean by we. This pronoun could refer to:
a) those of us who aren’t in a position to put our thumbs on the scales of the future (e.g. oligarchs, tech CEOs, etc) – in other words, the “99%”. The “bottom” in the “top vs bottom” dichotomy that people are coming to prefer over “left vs right”.
b) those of us who are consciously trying to improve the world and who are likely to be engaged in discussion like this one.
c) those in the 2R movement.
d) those who participate in the forums.
e) those participating in this thread.

I would contend that, if we have any chance in using AI productively, then it’s most plausible to demonstrate this by climbing the ladder (a - e) above. In other words,

  • we must first demonstrate that AI can help in this thread
  • then we might be able to demonstrate that it helps in other threads
  • then we might be able to demonstrate that it can help in the 2R movement
  • then we might be able to demonstrate that it can help positive change efforts in general
  • and so on.

Perhaps those of us participating in this thread (or spectators) may have ideas about how AI could be used to further the discussion – i.e. to help us figure out what worked and what didn’t. In my next message, I will ask an AI agent designed to analyze such questions to weigh in, in order to demonstrate, hopefully, that an AI can help us not talk past one another.