Interest groups that don’t require too much cohering along the lines of DAOs seem like a good next step towards empowering people and introducing new relationship/collaboration/social structures paradigms.
I’d like to see a research into the frustrations of people who belong and thrive in the current reality - the frustrations that “frustrate” their aspirations. That would be the basis of interest groups, rather than tapping into the planetary pain.
Over the last few years I’ve been trying to gauge interest and form a group of people to benefit from putting the assets together and exchanging capacities, with little success…
Yesterday I went to a presentation by this group. (There must surely be organizations like this all over the world). Co-op are formed for a whole host of reasons, and some work better than others. But the presenter spoke similarly to your insight that cooperative can address specific issues and it need not be for comprehensive philosophical or lifestyle commitments.
For a group to be useful, command respect and present a power - there needs to be an accumulation of various types of capital. If we were to put together a club of pre-school kids - they’d have no real influence in the world.
If you think about people who are characterised by a large quantity of capital - they are usually independent, discerning and meritocratic. They want to preserve their independence and only co-create as and when and specifically…
Thank you, Robert. There’s a real coherence in your framing—Pogany’s chaotic transition, Gebser’s mutation, the Skinnerian loop of failure and reinforcement. You trace the spiral without forcing it into any one system, which I deeply appreciate. I’ve always felt a discomfort with the rigidity of developmental frameworks when applied to culture, especially when they claim to chart an inevitability. Your weaving feels more like tending a fire in the open air than building a blueprint.
And yes—your line about “model communities as proof-of-concept” resonates strongly. Not as utopias, but as lifeboats, resonant microcosms, places where the mutation already lives and breathes. I’ve long believed that systems collapse not from a lack of critique, but from a lack of alternatives that feel real. What’s needed isn’t the perfect vision—it’s a functioning one.
Your role as “academic hunter-gatherer” is one I recognise, and perhaps share. And it seems our philosophical toolkits are aligned: Gebser, Pogany, Wilber, metamodernism, and something beyond all of them, still unnamed.
Let’s keep the thread alive. If you’re open, I’d be glad to continue exploring how these ideas land in real soil.
Thanks for vote of confidence! This model is just lately hatching out, and has yet to really test its wings.
In thinking of possible extensions, it occurs to me that Skinnerian reinforcement learning is about the most primitive education model out there. It’s the first chapter in any educational psychology book, precisely because it is so simple. I’d say it’s the default learning model if society just muddles through and no one tries to visualize or communicate much anything in advance.
Of course, if that’s how it was for everyone here, why we are bothering to discuss these matters? Implicitly - there must be a model beyond Skinner. Vygotsky’s ideas about scaffolding and zone of proximal development would be good starting points, I believe. If we can visualize better alternatives to head-on crashes into hard limits, and if we can scaffold those understandings in ways that make them widely graspable, we may be able to train up or inspire a large enough fraction of society to better avoid at least the very worst outcomes in future cycles.