 10 days and then then heading out to Albania. So, busy late summer for me. Albania sounds great. Wow. I'm going to attend Unfinished in Bucharest in a couple weeks. So I will be nearby. I'll throw a pebble across the border toward Jordan. Yeah. Yeah, we can wave at each other. The great wall separating Albania from the rest of the world is down, but I don't think it's been discovered by cheap flights from England yet. So I'm hoping that there's still some authentic Albanian experiences to be had. And thanks to you and Leif, I will be speaking also in Kaunas Latvia at a business school conference there about stuff that's kind of fun. Excellent. Yeah, Kaunas is a nice town. I think you'll enjoy it. I think so too. I'll put a link to the conference in the chat right now. Yeah, good. How is everybody else? Good. Ken, how are your feet? Ken, better. Slowly, slowly. Good. Good. Glad to hear it. So, today is a check-in format and I think people will gather in as we gather in. It's nice to see everyone. Gil's phantom note taker has shown up, so I assume Gil will be trailing right after. Sort of like having a scout who beats the bushes out ahead of you to flush game. Oh, good. And Jesse's drawing. Hank, it's been a while since you've been here, but you know the routine. Why don't we go Hank Barry Ken for check-ins. Okay. Well, I've been away for some time, but that doesn't mean that my attempts to make the world a better place have stood still. I am involved with a group from the five Nordic countries who are planning a kind of working conference next year in Reykjavik about the future or the futures of Nordic democracy and that embedded in the context of the futures of democracy in general. And we'll be probably using a kind of interactive positive cartography format for shaping this working conference. There will be people from the five Nordics and other countries involved. It will be at the moment an on-site face-to-face. We're looking at somewhere between 60 and 80 people. And not that we want to answer the questions in advance, but what the program committee is probably going to suggest as a good outcome from the conference are a series of new generation future centers and future labs as we're calling them at the moment within different parts of each of the five Nordics and linked together so that there'll be a maximum possibility of consulting citizens and residents of all types about how they want democracy to develop. That's not the only thing I'm working on but it's something that's coming up soon. I've got another working work meeting on that this coming Monday. In preparation for that, I took part in a one and a half hour Nesta program about the futures of online democracy with more than 300 people from all over the world taking part. That was last Tuesday and I was very disappointed to discover there's nothing new going on. They are dealing with how to leverage collective intelligence through IT. No mention of the metaverse or the betaverse talking about activities that have been known and tried out at least the last 10 years so a bit disappointing in that and they still find that the best input for furthering democracy are face-to-face sessions as opposed to online sessions so I'm certainly hoping that there'll be turn arounds in the furthering online participative democracy in coming months and years. I think that's enough for now and I'll pass the word to whoever you want Jerry. Thanks Hank. I was just going to ask you well you sort of checked in the way I was going to ask you which was hey has anything notable flash by that was interesting and memorable and you're like well I'm kind of disappointed because there's nothing new flashing by and I'm wondering if through the the other work or other events you've been in so it's just sort of how is like democracy is complicated online democracy is really complicated how is it shaping up in your head? In my head yeah in my head it has a lot to do with the things going on in the metaverse. I think the metaverse if it develops the way people on this call I think would like it to develop and I know Jerry you and I have talked about things in terms of what you like to call the metaverse there'll be a lot of very interesting possibilities for people to experience simulations and scenarios of different futures and that could be different futures in terms of any kind of policy option that might be might be on the agenda for any government whether it's municipal regional national or transnational and on the basis of a concrete experience plus reliable background information be able to make informed choices about what they really would like to be part of policy or be part of the implementation of policy and I think the technology is already there amongst a growing amount of people and I think also young people the will to transform the present archaic systems of democracy are there and we need to put our hands together and actually do it and it's one of my reasons for being very interested in the Nordics because in general they are the most democratic of countries in Europe and since they are already starting to worry several years in advance about the futures of democracy there I think that might be a place to set up future labs for prototyping. I love that, thanks Hank. I just put in the chat the last the last exciting thing I went to about democracy was in 2013 hosted by the institute for the future run by Jake Dunnigan who's awesome and it was the reconstitutional convention and I met a bunch of great thinkers in the space there and my head was bouncing around a lot after that event and I wish that event had become a standing event because it was a good crowd and it was a great topic and we were going at it in a productive way but it was a one-off alas anyone else with thoughts on democracy or want to jump in otherwise we'll go to Ken please. I posted in response to one of Gil's emails yesterday IFTF has an upcoming event or no it's not IFTF it's long now I think it's long now has Barry excuse me not Barry I'm looking at Barry's face here it's got Stuart Brand Jonathan Haight and Kevin Kelly talking about the future of democracy in the next cycle of history come and so I'll dig that link up and put it in the chat looks like it'll be a really good event to join. Thank you thanks Ken. Very nice yeah sounds great let's go Barry Ken Jesse. Oh well good morning everybody I hope the yard crew doesn't make too much noise out there mowing the grass. Not not hearing them at all right now so you're in good shape. That's good I've only I got a little bit less than an hour because I have to jump to another meeting at the top of the hour that happens also every Thursday. I don't have too much to say there's nothing really new going on what's going on is recurrence of the same old unsolved problems that have been burbling along since really since the dawn of recorded history since the dawn of civilization and I think as as I age I become more aware of how formidable how intractable how ubiquitous they are and how they affect people in profound lifelong ways and it's not that I haven't thought about them a lot of these I've spent the last one third of my one fourth of my professional career thinking about these global problems as opposed to thinking about technical problems that I could earn a living at these are problems that nobody earns living at but what's interesting is that a lot of the same tools for thought that one uses to solve systemic problems in a narrow discipline also apply to these systemic problems that afflict humankind and have afflicted humankind literally for thousands of years and I've written about them you know I've got to the age where most of my thinking is behind me and whenever I spend any time thinking about something I always write it up when it's fresh and when I've got all the right vocabulary and complete sentences and paragraphs and so I've written up about governance systems I first ran into dysfunctional governance systems most directly in online communities I mean you run into dysfunctional governance here local community in your state in national politics but but there you're kind of distant from those and I really began to get up close and personal with governance systems in online communities and that's where I really began to think about it in depth and so I I wrote it up more than once more than one way over more than more than a decade and a half and one of the things about democracy I think it might have been Churchill said um democracy is the what is it he says is it's the worst kind of government except for all the others some quote to that effect and what occurred to me about democracy is that it's a successor to theocracy and autocracy and other autocracies that preceded it and there there is a model that says that government's kind of cycle it's a cycle that was first proposed by GM Bautista Vico BICO called the bicony and cycle and he says yeah we started off with theocracies you know mill so many millennia ago and then we went to aristocracy and democracy and monarchies were in there too and when they fail and they eventually fail communities will cycle around to the next one you know recurring loop and Vico noticed that in these transitions you enter these periods of chaos and what happens is the chaotic cycles are lasting longer and longer like we never really get out of the chaotic cycles and I was thinking about this what was on my mind is here we are on the internet and the internet has probably as many nodes on it as there are human beings that use them and the nodes on the internet all talk to each other and they don't fight with each other I mean maybe they did at the beginning they they had erratic connections but now the internet the nodes on the internet operating on our internet protocols operate very functionally very peaceably and I I asked myself how how come humans can't do that how come machines can communicate very efficiently without going to war with each other when humans can and the answer is it's in the name protocol humans tend to regulate themselves with statutes and and legislation and rules especially when you're very young you learn that you have to follow the rules and people in power get to make the rules and people who are not in power have to follow the rules and somewhere along the line when I was doing some research in in how to teach science and mathematics I came across a new branch of mathematics new then it's called chaos theory I know this tells you how chaos is created in the first place that's interesting because normally you don't want to make chaos you want to make order and I said what is it about making chaos intentionally and the insight which is by the way not highlighted in the literature but it's there the easiest way to make chaos is to set up a system of rules and follow them religiously without deviation and the easiest way to see this is with children's board games children's board games you don't roll the dice you just have a strategy and you have a small set of rules you can memorize the rules it's easy to remember them and if you play the game correctly you don't cheat you don't you don't disobey the rules and if you look at a simple children's board game like checkers or chess or more complicated ones like go or reverse I there's an astronomical number of perfectly legal games and if you look at the state of a game board in the middle you really can't predict the end and actually children's strategy games are sort of the introduction to chaos 30 because they are examples of chaos and then you know that in mathematics you can generate a chaotic system like a fractal with a very simple recursion law so you have a few set of rules maybe only one or two or three and you and you follow them repeatedly every move obeys the rules and you get chaos I go what the hell how do you get a order and then I went back to my graduate work in systems theory and optimization I go well you have to build a system model and if you have a good system model you can mathematically solve it by inverting the system model for the function that you have to plug into the feedback loop and feedback control theory tells you how to do that I go I get that I get that in technology we build feedback loops where the function feedback loop solves the system model and they they behave gracefully well regulated why the hell can't we do that in human systems the answer is because we don't use functions we have a dysfunctional system because we try to regulate it with rules and that's a math error and that was an insight that kind of came to me about 20 some years ago and I wrote it up and I wrote it up in a article that uses a word that Jerry had actually outlawed in what these workshops paradigm you're not allowed to say the word paradigm I don't know if you remember that I'm not sure I outlawed it but I remember it got sanctioned heavily and yeah yeah to put a quarter every time you said the word pair yeah so the paradigm shift would be you start off with rules which define games and and also dramas and the next level up is protocols and protocols become familiar because the internet's full of protocols that is the technology in history and then the next level from protocols is functions and we live in a dysfunctional society because we don't rely on functions except in very technical systems where we intentionally build carefully crafted functions and then the next level up from functions is models and we talk about system modeling and systems theory and then you get to the fifth level which is an ecology of systems and I go my god we are at we are at the kindergarten level rules hardly anybody even knows what a protocol is or a function think of functions of a gathering where you eat wine and cheese within socialize with a bunch of people and models well people talk about models but maybe the ones that you look at in magazine but not not system models and ecology of systems I'm thinking holy shamoli we've got to escalate four levels up from the rule-based system that's dysfunctional to get to a high functioning system where our regulatory mechanisms are constructed by solving the system models of how humans behave and that's theoretically possible it's been on paper at one level or another for a very long time and I look at that I go but there's no way to implement it because how the devil are you going to get this population of homo schleppians to agree to implement this level of advance of this advance of civilization from rules to protocols to functions to model systems it hasn't happened in you know in the history of humankind it hasn't happened in my lifetime and the likelihood of it happening is frankly dwindling and yet the literature is there and so I look at this thing and I say the same thing is happening over and over again people people have written up these these these insights it's in the literature and now what do you do you just sit back and and sort of wait for it to materialize well maybe but I'm not expecting it to materialize in the remaining 15 or 20 years of my time on this planet very that is a lovely a lovely riff thank you um Stuart Brand talks about pace layering uh danela meadows has the many ways of intervening in a system these are all layered models have you considered your model against those and also uh do you have a link to the piece you just mentioned that you posted 27 years ago is that around online yeah actually it's called paradigm shift I'll just put up yeah homo kevachians definitely we don't want homo schleppians yeah yeah oh you should see the riffs on on that in the in the chat okay um but um but yeah have you considered your the model you just described relative to pace layering and meadows intervention points or are those things similar they're probably similar I haven't I mean I I read Kevin Kelly's book and I commented on it and I think actually he included the comment in one of his later books um but no I haven't I haven't read the one that you just mentioned but as near as I can tell the only difference between other versions of these ideas in mine is just the choice of words and and the use of systems theoretic applied mathematical language because most people don't use mathematical language as they put into narratives well the other thing that that you triggered for me was my dislike of game theory which comes not from any deep knowledge of game theory but from an awareness that all too often I've seen men use game theory to try to understand social dynamics and explain them and in so doing just butcher what happens to humans um just over and over and over and I'm like so disappointed every time somebody says oh when in game theory I'm like ah man and then I try I try to keep from from like just being dismayed by what's about to come but um but but it feels like we try to we try to develop these models when when in some cases all we need is simple rules like assume good intent or deep listening and loving speech or or whatever um let me pass to grace who has probably more than a thing to say about this topic yeah let me know if can you um do you okay we hear you okay but your audio is coming your audio is kind of coming in and out yeah i'm kind of is that a tunnel now it's worse oh you're in a tunnel okay good tunnel well bad time sounds great thanks um cool neil we've not I mean we started at 20 minutes ago roughly so we've not been going that long okay now glad to see you yes like the Verizon guy Verizon guy now i'm in a new tunnel though oh perfect um yeah so I guess my comments very similar to what you said Jerry in terms of um uh grace your audio your audio is not working for us yet um I'm gonna I'm gonna ask that you wait a minute until you're in a clearer place to jump in and don't forget what you're about to say I'm sorry it would be if at first it was possible to hear you and then yeah or or put it in the chat either way um but sorry about that my apologies um anybody else uh want to jump in where we were yeah I'd like to make a comment here please do um you know we want to move from this order to order but the problem is that it's like uh moving from steam to ice if you go to too much order you lose the life so we want to stay in between but all our effort is carrying us towards more order and and we have a I think we have a innate human desire for order or at least for peace and not too much disturbance and yet too much order is is basically problematic we need a we need a we need a a moderate amount of turbulence so that change is allowed to happen and so that things aren't locked down too hard I guess I don't know something like that um cool well um Neil did you want to jump in please yeah I missed the earlier part picking up can you hear me um probably still muted hang on no you're fine you're fine oh good hi everybody uh sorry I'm late um yeah there's order there's chaos and there's chaos in between emergence happens in the gap between order and chaos through self-organization and self-organization generally happens around either a strange attractor or because of the need to get away from something which is repelling so that natural gradients in in nature are generally formed by away from and towards so in the cosmos we're attracted towards gravity and therefore get sucked into and create you know universes and galaxies and all the way down to planets um in terms of self-organization of people you need to disrupt coherence compassionately otherwise you get stuck in wrong patterns and especially when most people are currently in over their heads incapable of seeing the complexity incapable of recognizing where we are on the clock of the world making sense and getting enough people around you to have a critical mass that can also make sense is very very difficult because of you know complexities around what is true what is not what is real what is not what is happening what is not and so you need coherence you need compassion to hold patterns longer than they would otherwise be comfortable because you have to actually hold things together until new patterns conform and so all of these things are emergent um but you can actually facilitate emergence provided you create safe enough conditions to both challenge and allow recurrence Peggy Holman has a wonderful book on this called Engaging Emergence and I'll leave it at that for now and nice to be back um thank you very much Engaging Emergence here it is um I think there we go thank you so much Grace I don't know if you're in a better audio place but you wrote into the chat so you're wondering about the balance between architecting a system that goes towards something and a system that is more like a response system that is designed to stay within certain boundaries I like that um it reminds me also of Rodney Brooks who wrote long ago about making robots that behave in sort of lifelike ways that very simple functions about how to sense and respond to your environment turned into really lifelike behaviors that were better than any attempts by AI researchers to actually do scene analysis and derive you know goal seeking and other kinds of things it was very interesting that that simple simple rules followed um closely or quickly worked really well um so let me go back to the queue uh let's go Ken Jesse Pete hello everybody um so the health update I have been I've walked twice this week for about 25 minutes each time and it has not resulted in severe pain in my foot so that's a really nice thing I'm doing every other day kind of taking it slow because I don't want to end up with a relapse um interesting conversation about democracy you know we're our book group on dawn of everything is is almost coming to a close I think we have two chapters left if I'm not mistaken and um one of the things I've learned from this book is there is no there's no template for how people can live you know there have been so many experiments so many different ways of coming together in different forms but another thing I learned is the idea that we went from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to quote the agricultural revolution which actually took 4 000 years to um to take root ha ha which means it's hardly a revolution um and tribes lived right next to each other one tribe would be would be having slaves and other would be you know totally egalitarian so there's really no uh one size fits all but there's tremendous creativity in the ways that people are able to come together and I think a lot of the problems that we have with our democracy right now and by the way the United States was downgraded to a flawed democracy back under the Obama administration by the economist um uh unit that that evaluates democracy is whenever special interests take over and start to game the system so that they can get their uh their way and so we don't really have a democracy here in the U.S. anymore at least not what it used to be um the Nordic countries actually are among the best um and even there I think there's still a lot of voices missing from the system so you know I'm always about can we get as many stakeholders as possible in the room and listen deeply to their concerns so that they get filtered into whatever approach we're going to come up with to handle our challenges and I think that's our challenge right now is not to invent the perfect form of governance because it's going to be different based on geography and background and culture and tribes but to be able to bring together people and um and just say you know you you have a voice in this we want to hear what you have to say and we may not be able to accommodate everything you want but we're going to make sure that you're you're included in whatever uh process goes on here for creating order out of our out of our system um hey Mike look like you're on a plane there oh you're yeah yeah so you're going to quarrel on poor cool um thanks for joining us so anyway that's those are just my quick thoughts on on democracy and and getting voices into the system um and letting go of that myth that we had this evolutionary progression because we didn't that's all cherry picked that's not the actual way that humans have evolved and there's tremendous ability for us to um form and reform and and to be in places where okay we're we're in a chaotic space here so let's talk about how to be in chaos instead of trying to figure out how do we fix it you know sometimes if you can hang out in the chaos long enough a completely different level of order makes itself known but if you're so uncomfortable that the chaos means you have to move somewhere really quickly chances are you're not going to go back you're you're going to go back to something that doesn't actually work so those are my thoughts on that topic thanks for listening and ken I just want to sort of build a little on what you said in the middle which is this nothing without us nothing about us without us is an important principle to people who think the way we're thinking in this room and yet defeating it is a key principle for people trying to maintain power so so making sure that you can make decisions away from the people who were affected uh in some way sort of holding privilege or designing a democracy that's really sort of a representative democracy that has this electoral college that has senators that were built to to make sure the south could you know outvote the north around slavery like that like even the american perfect wonderful democracy has all of these weirdnesses baked into it to kind of distance us from actual decision making and then and then the counter argument is oh direct democracy whatever that is would be terrible and oh my gosh you can't have everybody voting on everything nobody's smart etc etc you can't trust people and there's all these like circular arguments that we've that I think we've all been involved in over time in different kinds of ways I'm going to paste a link to a thought in my brain called variants of democracy there are many and that's just democracy among the many different kinds of ways of organizing society which is the point grace is trying to make which is like hey as soon as we use the lens or the filter of democracy we're limiting our ability to imagine what what's actually possible so I love everything we're putting into the conversation here thank you there's something about um when I was consulting at UC Santa Cruz my first day there they said welcome to UC Santa Cruz we're 33 to 1 as a tie and I was like no that's not consensus that's blocking you know consensus is when the whole group says we want to find a way through and we will continue to work on this until we can all come to something that we agree we can support it may not be my favorite thing but I'm like I'm I'm good I will support this and what grace just put in there around power is you get people who say no it's going to be my way or the highway and I am going to you know drive this thing no matter what and then you get you know patriarchy and and a minor the tyranny of the minority over the majority and we have to keep finessing this thing it keeps showing its rearing its ugly head again and again it's not going to wait anytime soon it's a long-term problem shows up across cultures and times and space and um and yet what I've again going back to dawn of everything I think we forget that there's so many other ways of coming together and um that narrative that says this is the natural progression this is where we are gets in the way of remembering that we could do this completely differently um and especially now where we have so many tools for uh polling people and finding out what they what they think and bringing them together in conversation so that they can actually have real thoroughly thought through input as opposed to just uh crowdsourcing an idea where you just get the top thing off someone's head but they actually sit in conversation with other people and go oh I hadn't thought about that and then they come out with a different product um that's all available but it's not being very well used at this point agreed Neil yeah thanks um sorry to jump the queue on on on this but I attended the r3.0 conference in Amsterdam last week uh I think Gil was there in the in the virtual audience and um it's around redesign for regeneration and resilience and part of what you're talking about coming from the conference uh consensus is no longer possible uh given the mess we're in and on the stage we had a power play uh unintended I'm sure it was set up by the conference leaders to actually show this is the cognitive dissonance in the room we had a young activist who was mourning literally literally the assassination of activists she knew in the amazon and we had sitting next to her the two corporate sponsors both men in their 50s and 60s who uh we're talking about we need to go gently slowly slowly business as usual with a bit of a twist and they were good blokes but when somebody actually said what gives you despair and what gives you hope they couldn't answer that they had to change it from despair to concern and yet you can feel it we've got adult we've got adult children we've got kids we've got grandkids and we know we're not doing enough fast enough consensus in that room would have been impossible but there is zero space zero space for holding the cognitive dissonance that comes up between competing and conflicting worldviews with different views of reality and different vested interests we need to actually be having mechanisms for collective sense making which allow us to recognize the realities that are staring us in the effing face and then say and now what which is the name of the initiative we've just launched our website and i'll come to that later but the point i'm trying to make here is there is zero mechanism now for true consensus for things that really matter and that is the problem and that is the issue in in america it is issue in australia and even the false horizons i heard horizons mentioned that we reach where we think we've reached consensus are less than what is necessary we are going to have to learn to live with massive disruption as system boundaries completely break down and we are in that collapse already we're just lucky enough in the global north to be able to talk about it and i want to point i agree with everything you said i want to point out that the word consensus there is no consensus on the word consensus it's a very tricky word for some people consensus actually means a hundred percent of people agreed and i took a scott peck workshop many years ago about his book the different drum and the first thing he did was talk about consensus and how in an earlier group the foundation for community encouragement had come up with their own definition of consensus which was roughly i'm going to paraphrase that everybody feels like they've been heard and can agree to move forward but there's not a hundred percent agreement quickers have a thing called sense of the meeting which is sort of like that it's really interesting but but but like the word democracy with consensus is a word we use a lot and and and it can be like your mileage may vary wildly on on what it is or how it works thanks neil um so many comments that i've lost where i pasted who's next how about jesse pete gill thanks jerry hi everyone hey it's such a delicious conversation and i don't know i i guess i'll reintroduce myself for those who don't know me um i'm involved in addressing i'm a learning strategist and i'm very passionate about sleep and insomnia and addressing insomnia through a holistic approach and i use data analytics and nudges and my secret isn't in the routines although that's very important um but in the mindset about solving problems in general and often nothing changes but the mind when addressing issues like anxiety and insomnia so when we're talking about these issues can sense the that feeling in the room there's the chaotic environment that we're in and that we're projecting into our future it's um yeah it's not just about setting up our environment but responding to the environment but i do want to make a shift and talk about leveraging collective intelligence to address the recurring systematic problems that that you are talking about um i listened to william macaskill uh that he's the author of what we owe the future and he was talking about how the brains of humans are three times as big as chimpanzees but it's not about that that makes us evolve so much faster it's how we leverage many brains together to work together towards an outcome and we're the only species that um well the way that he said it was way better than that but um we have a leg up in that so i really love that what barry brought up um in terms of leveraging um about systematic power and the discussion of power because if we can leverage systematic power um that barry spoke to but for the good of society in the planet um i think that that there is a true chance there and i am not and i am optimistic i remain that way and that that's typically me but um we'd love to sit in a room with people who are saying oh boy there's not much that we can do from here um it's i'm losing hope to lift that up immediately because with the power of the right tools with the right people in the right time so much can change so um that's what i'm doing i'm addressing that through ai um on on something called goodstrings.ai so if anybody's interested in learning more about that we'd love for you to reach out i love that jesse do you want to see a little bit more about goodstrings yeah so if you go if you go there right now goodstrings.ai it's just a survey um because the intake form so everyone you know when you say you're pulling strings that's we're talking about power right um and politics or and um money and why not leverage those strings in a good way by connecting the people that are interested in the same addressing the same issues so this leans into SDGs and the donor economy and so what we're doing is connecting people to address topics they're more most passionate about with people who want to support that and that could be a person who is a writer it could be a speaker it could be um a person a vendor to address the whole supply chain but once you connect people those strings start forming in a good way and that's the theory thank you really appreciate that yeah so feel free to go there and add your own each one of you um is a candidate for for seeding this database and i'm really excited to be here so thank you thank you i really it's lovely to to have you in the conversation and i'm i'm loving this conversation too so um let us go pete gill stacey and thanks good morning everybody and uh given a choice between covering uh one thing at reasonable speed or eight things at hyperspeed um i'm going to pick hyperspeed um uh things that are top of mind for me right now um super still super excited about AI art and illustration um if you're interested at all in imaging images art photography anything like that you should be playing around with uh dolly or stable diffusion or mid-journey or one of the other tools it's it's amazing um uh massive wiki is going well um we just did a a change yesterday that introduces um author date uh change notes for every file on the wiki on the all pages list right now it's only released on the lionsburg wiki but we'll migrate it to the other wikis soon so that kind of finally gives us a decent version of recent changes for a wiki and and super exciting um i need to market my massive wiki more um my first place is probably going to be talking about it uh in the obsidian forums but need to spread it out a little bit more anyway um i'm going to be i'm working on a massive wiki version of the group work stack much loved kind of pattern language that some of us know about i'm super excited about that uh and bill anderson and i have started talking about um the the hard part even though we've spent a lot of time doing technical stuff with the massive wiki the hard part is actually how you wiki together wiki philosophy in the wiki way so we're going to start doing that exploration soon um coming back to to ken uh talking about dawn of everything there's a punch line i put in this one and it's the end of the thing i posted before that um one of the one of the things you come away from the book realizing or understanding um in a way that was worth the whole book uh is that we have this assumption that human societies get more complex complexity must mean hierarchical organization and that's just like something that's baked into us and it seems like a a law of physics and they demonstrate over and over and over that there's nothing physically lawful about that um hierarchy and especially domination is not a way that humans inevitably gather themselves into societies and and they have a number of illustrations of societies that had um you know relatively flat organization and not this dominance hierarchy that we think is is um inevitable it's not at all inevitable um vincen and i uh i'm i'm doing the coding on something called chat chainsaw where you can pour in a zoom chat and it comes out broken up into messages um in a way that vincen's going to be able to let people bookmark or link or connect single messages out of a chat with the links that are in them and things like that so we're super excited about that bi-weekly plex dispatch comes out next week uh send me an email with what's live for you in the network uh can be really short just a couple sentences and and i'll try to get it in the issue um another thing that's kind of been going on for a while is this idea of drop-in calls calls that don't really have an agenda but have a scheduled time i'm keeping on the plex weekly calendar i've got a grid of calls i'd love to fill in more i'd like to see more of us going to each other's regular calls and just hanging out i'm also kind of interested i haven't started doing this but um a few of us you can book time fairly easily with us on account but you're something like that and so i think it would be cool to kind of i'd like to add kind of a list of those you know if you want to get hold of pete um you know this is how you sign up for you know half an hour an hour with him um finally just this morning um i was reflecting on interestingly enough some of the ways that we've organized ourselves in matter most and i came up with this kind of hierarchy of design um i i was telling somebody that one of the one of the things that we do on matter most is not think about or not facilitate very well um how we're using the channels which is fine um it's not a problem um but it's uh i feel like it's a lost opportunity so it's a little bit on my mind and so then it made me think about things and uh right now we have a lot of places where we think we have designed interactions but what we're actually doing is emerging into the way we interact we could have been doing it and in some designed way and design facilitation kind of the same thing but then one of the things that i was reflecting on is that even when we do design it's kind of like um uh unicentric uh some one person said i think we'll do it this way or maybe two people got together and agreed on i think we'll do it this way um another thing is maybe polycentric design where we've got different design ideas competing often without without reflecting on that that they're competing so you know i've got a way of facilitating the space she's got a way of facilitating the space they've got a way of facilitating the space we all think that we're doing it together the same way and each of us is fighting essentially without realizing it um about you know i i don't understand why this isn't going well or i don't understand what's going on and it's partly this polycentric design um what we don't do a lot i think is kind of the the top end of this higher top end of this steps um which is collaborative design and shared design where we actually say hey um we're interacting in the space let's collaboratively design how we want to interact with us let's talk about um the way that we interact and not only um not only do that together but you know that i think a level above that i called it shared design this is essentially the idea of kind of consensus right let's not only talk about doing it together let's like ideate together but then actually let's come to some kind of agreement about how we how we've designed it um and obviously iterate on that um you know uh do it for a while get some feedback uh re ideate and and redesign so um maybe i'll write something more about that that uh gradient maybe maybe i won't we'll see that's it thanks that was a hyperspeed tour through many things then still made sense it's kind of crazy um thank you for that anybody with comments about any that okay um uh neil just a quick one um the last part you said there was very related to what we've talked about before in terms of the need for meta constitutional rules what are the rules that we can agree on by which we will agree on the rules um and then you know within that so what what does the systems context what are the ethical principles uh what are the capability maturity requirements what are the educational requirements and this is the real difficulty we have with our current democracies is that we automatically ascribe an adult intelligence and the capacity to go beyond uh in over our heads to actually make decisions on behalf of all of us um if a plane is crashing do you give a joystick to every passenger and this is the issue we have so how are we going to decide who makes decisions on our behalf and how are we going to collectively make decisions uh i love the idea of design and i think that holding space for that once you've brought people up to speed in the same way that say a citizen's assembly is done can be a very good way of getting a collective agreement on ways that are better for the way we'll go forward but if your understanding of reality is flawed then the outcome will be flawed is there anybody who doesn't have a flawed understanding of reality in this call that's a great great question great question ken and and yet this is the challenge we have uh if you take the spiritual bypass model then you know reality is still being formed and we can create our own reality and don't worry about these real things that are actually happening like the drying up of the european rivers or the burning of the amazon or the size uh an area the size of Italy burning in australia or the floods in pakistan right and yet there are elements of that reality which are real for everybody uh but we just some of us choose not to see them and unless we can face that reality and then live the questions together then we're not going to be able to find some sort of consensual agreement love that um next in our qr gill stacy curl and gill you represented three times in my gallery view i think that i think though the one you logged out of is still sort of present and will probably time out or something and your notakers there as well so so you are you're outnumbering us soon i'm trying to skew the consensus cherry excellent yeah yeah thank you everybody this great call i'm gonna have to leave the top of the hour just heads up on that really appreciate all that's gone before pete it takes me a while to catch my breath after your hyper deliveries thank you for everything that's in there um jesse good to meet you i want to hear i like i'm gonna track down the threads i want to hear more about your insomnia work on the theme of hope uh in the face of the despair that uh neil shared from the r3.o conference i find i find hope in the unpredictability in the non-deterministic nature of the mess it looked you know what looks awful but could change and dawn of everything has fed that in a number of ways just seeing the you know not just the enormous variety but the trending in and out of human society over these tens of thousands of years and even societies that move seasonally from hierarchy to to non-hierarchical organization um gives me gives me kind of a broad opening into the enormous varieties in the prospect and the unpredictability of even what looks absolutely certain ahead of us on the landscape back to what barry said earlier in ken's conference um later on the call i i fall more on the ken and neil end of the spectrum than the barry end of the spectrum on this conversation and barry as i listen to you you have a lot more faith in the deterministic potential of humans encountering complex systems and i don't you know somebody can you just talk about the flawed understanding of reality i take that as a given that there is not possible an unflawed understanding of reality or maybe more specifically a universally shared interpretations of what reality is because we encounter it through our interpretations and they're always subjective and they're always rooted in our history and our biology and our experience together and so forth and you know good lord you know you can plant people on the street and have a cargo car drive by and they won't agree on the color of the car so i don't want to i don't want to hear a lot about reality although you know rivers running dry and people starving to death is a reality spell maybe we'll spell it differently or something um but how we how we encounter that river running dry how we feel about it how we think about it what we do about it that's of a very different order and so you have the people at the conference talking about no i'd rather talk about concern than despair you know around the same objective reality of so many deaths for so many reasons and so forth so um um so i i think barry i heard you say that as you i like the stacks the stacks are good and uh and orienting but i think you said that with an sufficient understanding of systems and system complexity you can actually solve in a mathematical sense uh for things and i think that's folly in the realm of human affairs and the emergence from complex adaptive systems that we're living in it's it's great for orienting but it's not like push a button on a big enough computer and where you get an answer to this stuff it's more in the mess of how human beings interact and coordinate i love the notion of shared design you know i i often go back these days to norbert weiner's cybernetics book from 1940 whatever was eight or seven or something like that which which was subtitled um um communications and control in whatever i forget the whole subtitle and i keep on replacing communications and control with communications and coordination because i think we're in a realm that we can't control and we have to bloody well figure out how to coordinate among ourselves in all these various ways um can you pop in the chat the thing about the nutmeg book and if you could rift for a moment on on the shift that those folks were asserting from humans as part of a living world to humans as a factor of value from non-living systems which by the way coincidentally is you know co-parallel with emerging capital 500 or whatever years ago um the nutmeg curse thank you but yeah ken pete if you just say a little bit about ken a little bit about the rift that you gave me or somebody in recent weeks about that and how fundamental it is to the messes that we've created and our ways of navigating them so i'll leave it at that thank you everybody for this rich rich conversation ken you want to send that threes to there yeah um i'm about 150 pages into a 300 page book so um just have that as context then that makes curse nutmeg only grows on a very small number of islands in the dutch east indies and um nutmeg shows up in egypt 300 years before christ so these people had been trading across the indian ocean uh india afghanistan all the you know they had um small little tiny island they had this huge web of interconnections with uh traders and including up and down in japan stuff and then um the dutch east india company in 1521 came in and said uh we're taking over we want the we want the nutmeg so um we will kill you we'll enslave you or we'll drive you off the island but get the hell out of here because it's ours now and uh around that same time late uh early 1500s a new idea was taking shape in europe which saw the earth not as alive which had been the the previous paradigm without i'd hope i have to pay a quarter for that um so they um this new idea was that the earth is inert and it only is productive when humans work it which is why when the europeans arrived on the shores of north america they looked at the land and couldn't see that had been worked and they said therefore we are within our rights to take it from the indians because they're not working it they're not making it productive and um it's there's a very interesting chapter on what happened they said you know we can't even call it war uh because what happened in north america was way beyond war uh the author calls it omniside they were basically destroying everything in their path and when you have an ideology that says the world is inert it's simply a pile of resources that's only useful when we are exploiting it when we're extracting things when we're burning things you know then you have um the ability to destroy the world and the other thing about this book is it talks about uh agency human beings have this tendency to ascribe agency only to human beings but if you grew up in a in a world that's alive a volcano has agency a spice has agency land has agency the climate has agency we are seeing this now you know the the the world that we are living in is one where suddenly there's a lot of agency on the part of nature that's showing up in ways that are incredibly troubling to human beings because we always assumed it was inert and incapable of adapting but if you burn enough fossil fuels you will change the climate if you put enough chemicals into the environment you will change your biochemistry um anyway so that's that's just a little quick riff on what's in this book it's a very well written book the guy's a novelist it tells a great story and it's also in many ways incredibly depressing so just know that if you decide to take it on um i'm enjoying reading it i'm getting a lot out of it and there's things that sometimes i'm just like oh my god how did we freaking get this yeah ken thank you for that very much the one thing i would add is that for all of our talk about consensus and community human deliberation and various kinds of constellations for most of our history we for better or for worse lived with the same people for our entire lives in a relatively small circle it might have been a hundred people it might have been a hundred thousand but uh you know one of the freedoms that graver and when grow talk about it's a free is the freedom to up and leave your society and go somewhere else but mostly people stayed with each other and had lifelong relationships with each other and what got worked out got worked out within that social context that is so far away from where we are now where we have you know infinite mobility and the the blessing and the curse of being able to come together in groups like these but not be wedded to each other and not have our lives dependent on each other uh and and not have a kind not have the kind of commitment to stand with each other in trouble uh in life and death circumstance and we have that conceptually we have a certain kind of loyalty to each other in this groups and the many groups we're in but it's different than you know living in a great great great grandparents have lived it's a very different context and we're trying to invent something in this very differently patterned world and with that I'm sorry I've got a hop to another call previously scheduled uh big love to you all I'll listen to the rest of the recording and see you next time thanks Gil yeah thanks a lot there's so many good books that intersect here uh Braiding Sweetgrass Neil just put Mill and a Good Child in the in the conversation not Meg's Curse so so many of these and Ken and I were sort of uh riffing on this uh yesterday or yesterday the day before uh on how do we digest all of this together so that the different juicy nuggets of insight are more easily available to us how one of my frustrations is that OGM doesn't use OGM tools that much we don't we don't we don't help one another we do help one another digest or at least look toward the resources I think we're very good at saying oh this is a juicy topic here's a book here's a book here's a movie here's a documentary here's a person here's a movement we do that a bunch and I'm busy like quickly collecting them up and trying to steward them you know put them into my own little map um but we we and and then Pete has sort of slowed down the speed and said let's take a book the dawn of everything and let's get together and go chapter by chapter and do book club style like like deconstruction of what's in there which is super useful how do we then share out the nuggets of wisdom in some easier to use and implement way and in some way that also merges these threads in the way that this conversation feels like it's doing nicely so how do we make that more explicit or available online just a thought uh so we have at this point um Stacy Carl Rick Ken first I just have to tell you I want I want to let you know people get very uncomfortable by my dog's sense of agency they don't like that at all um yeah I just want to share something positive because before getting on the call I was watching something that I've been like dreaming about for 10 years and I really think it would be the right direction to go when I hear you know the conversations about decision making and power dynamics so I've been on a news blackout for a while and I had some free time so I put on Al Jazeera English which is what I usually do to try to catch up and there was there was a conversation about the black hole and it was a male moderator and it happened to be three female um professors but what was really interesting about it is that after they had their discussion all the questions came from YouTube and what I noticed is that the male interviewer who quite frankly was not as sharp as the professors kind of mocked one of the questions coming in which I thought was a fascinating question and it was answered in a way that made perfect sense but I'm pointing it out because you know Grace had put in the chat about power dynamics and had it not been for the dynamics of you know the three experts who were willing to take on the question seriously that one figure could have just squashed the whole discussion so I just wanted to mention that and I really the idea of just regular ordinary people being able to ask questions of experts to me is okay to be able to come to some sort of consensus however we decide to define that word so that's my checking thanks Stacy the power of gatekeepers is enormous gigantic and so many people are gatekeeper a long time ago I think I told the story here of Murray Rothbart a libertarian who writes a critique of one of my favorite books Carl Polanyi is the great transformation and in his critique basically basically is telling his followers do not bother reading this horrible work which does this this this this this it's a terrible thing like like he's basically gatekeeping for his community because if they were to go read it they'd be like oh this is kind of cool and this guy's not yelling and he doesn't commit any of these sins that Rothbart accuses him of committing and the same thing is happening politically at this point where with the demonization of socialism and whatnot you know this is happening constantly all the time gatekeepers are also opinion leaders and influencers and their job in some sense I mean Putin is managing somehow to keep Russia on the tracks of being this horrible despicable pariah in the world even though internally the media is all like hey no no dissent you know don't don't talk about this so this this just happens all over the place and Pete thank you that is uh that is in fact the letter that Rothbart wrote um so let's go back to our cue where we had Carl Rick Grace yeah fascinating conversation today as always uh yeah I've got um uh that work out my phd actually took the um I actually withdrew and will be reapplying next um and uh I'm uh kind of going back going back to the basics and things so I have I've had idea I'm been a big follower of getting things done sorry sorry to interrupt Carl can you just do us a favor and tilt your screen down so I can see your face okay I was I was about to out things I was about to have the same thing thank you really connecting with your hairline that's good yeah um yeah with getting things done and uh then um I ran across the book on the Zettel castan that um it's a thing about writing and stuff too because it's uh some of the writing things it's like really getting granular too and I'm on there's the Pomodoro technique um just 25 minutes or less I don't know a lot of people but just kind of going back to the basics um I work at the general services administration and we were really at the forefront of so many things I'll post the link to it we have a sustainable sustainable facilities tool um and things that's publicly available and really amazing that we've just gotta um had people given us a briefing yesterday yeah it's just um it's really it's it's really we're at the the hub in fact one of my friends at Jokes were the BAS of government we don't help we don't provide the services to citizens directly we help other agencies provide them better but we really um so there's that piece of it I'm also getting more involved in the IEEE the International Society for the System Sciences and the woman is going to be running it she's the president-elect she's actually here in the DC area um at George G.W and she's been in France for three years but she's coming back so I'm looking forward to talking with her more um one of my primary mentors is William E. Smith he did a lot of work with the World Bank and United Nations and he is um he talks of his framework is about purpose and power so that's um a core part of my sense making um process is kind of just there's almost like this intuitive um recognition of power relationships among the things that it tends towards three and nine-component frameworks and um things so that's um one of the one of the papers I'm writing was looking at at his work there and um Ardose Field Theory and some other things there um I guess with one of the some of you probably know uh you know Jeff Conklin and stuff too all his work with dialogue and issue and issue mapping um it's it's interesting because both Jeff Conklin and Edward DeBona with um six thinking hats they so focused on it as um facilitation methods for real-time meetings but there's so much power there in in using it for individual sense making and things too um so yeah that's um oh yeah and then there's a well out of um Doug Engelbart's the other and the other major influence for me and there's a guy Froda Eggland and I don't know if um he has his whole future of text process and we've got the symposium symposium coming up the 27th and 28th of September here it's on um virtual reality type of stuff and I had no idea there's this whole XR accessibility community they just had a massive symposium of their own earlier in the summer and stuff so I've been working to make some connections there but um yeah just a lot of fascinating things going on right now can I check in um thanks Carl thank you very much and you're you're just involved in lots of things that are interesting that mix together in interesting ways so um thank you for sharing all those resources with us as well um we have Rick Neil John and I guess Rick had to jump off my apologies um so let's go straight to Neil and John then Michael and me oh fantastic thanks guys um yeah as I mentioned we attended the R3 point I'm in Lervin in Belgium for those that haven't met me online before um my partner uh both life partner and apocalypse partner and Billen is a a psychologist uh our partner Australia is a master facilitator and I'm a poet and um systems thinker photographer who weaves together the pieces and we just released our website uh called and now what I'll just post it here in the chat sorry post it too soon a minute ago to jump jump the gun on me um in terms of what this means for people this is this is this is pretty heavy stuff um we don't shy away from facing the reality of where we currently are on the clock of the world and I just wanted to put it out there for people if you don't feel like reading something that uh might scare you because it's too scary don't um there's a warning on the door so if you're coming through the homepage you'll see the warning on the door if you come in I hope you find that you see the beauty goodness truth love uh grief um and all of those elements of still living in the now uh that are so critical in this period that we're in we talked before uh earlier on this call about civilizations I think Bill was mentioning civilizations moving on or leaving your civilization there is nowhere to go anymore we are on one planet we are interconnected we're in hyper complex systems and they're in collapse so I'll leave it at that I don't want to take up too much of your time um I'd be really interested in considered feedback on what we're doing not just on technical details but if anybody's got any hints on you could do this better if you do this I'd be really handy I'm more interested in do you feel it do you need to talk do you know others that need to talk we think there's a massive using the horrible marketing term market for frustrated concerned and unable to show up people from full on executives who are starting to become more and more evident in their in their talks even uh uh macron came out on the 28th uh talking 28th of august talking about we've reached the end of abundance uh and the end of insouciance um and they're predicting the the collapse that we know is happening they're not actually collapse aware enough to state that and they're very careful in democracies to do that but uh you can feel it in Europe we've luckily had 13 millimeters of rain uh since we got back but we're in the middle of potentially a 500 year drought sorry 500 year return interval drought rivers that are meant to be cooling nuclear power stations or supporting coal traveling along the Rhine no longer run the power isn't running the Rhine is drying up the Loire is drying up so we have major issues ahead I know the class isn't on this call he's talking about food security we've got food security water security energy security our energy prices in Europe are going to increase three times if not five times this winter alone potentially putting power out of reach for most people um uh most people on less than normal salary uh so there is so massive social unrest coming um and I'm here uh with the team that we've got to provide uh if necessary confidential coaching services uh courageous conversations which will potentially be 12 uh a heartbeat of inner and outer work um and then also uh facilitated uh keynote listening and uh system synthesis which I do pretty well and then essentially up to whole system design if we can find anybody with sufficient critical mass anywhere in a bio region to start doing something meaningful given where we're at so thanks for much for hearing me guys I'm sorry it's such a dull message it's um literally the culmination of my life's work uh exactly thanks Neil and and in tongue firmly in cheek I've kind of been missing our doom our extremely doomy conversations and uh you are framing it in a way that's very much about how do we get through this and now what how do we help uh and I just I just realized I needed to rearrange a couple things in my brain so I I put and now what under the thought uh that says we're driving uh our bus over the cliff what should we do uh which is connected to we're in the middle of five crises or pick a number of crises or whatever else and then to take just an amateur slice at how people are coping with this I just wrote down it seems like it seems like people might be anywhere on this kind of a spectrum of simple despair where what they need right now is actual maybe physical support or psychological support or something but they're in a in a really dire situation then there's discouragement or doubt or wondering what you know this idea that it's just me I can't have anything sort of disempowerment or lack of agency or whatever that might be then there's people in action doing stuff some of whom are just picking up litter on beaches or whatever it might be but taking some action changing their behaviors and their consumption in different ways and then I think on the far other end of this spectrum is some form of transformation where we actually come together and use our senses and understand sort of the combinatorial effects of systems thinking and a bunch of the stuff that Barry put on the on this call early combined with the ways you're looking at the world Neil and and just kind of leveraging efforts in order to cause quicker deeper more important change in some way and that's and to me that's a different in type or in kind from just taking action on something which is useful you know even just buying less stuff is useful or going all electric or who knows what but but there's some some spectrum of action there that I think is interesting and helping people realize which place here they are in may be useful helping people realize that there's a space to the farther right in this conceptual diagram might be useful so that they can say oh gosh I could step out of just doing this and step into that and here's how and where I don't know I just thought it off for that up if I can just add one thing I gave a talk at the r3.io application partners day which was the day following the two day conference and it was called the collapse roller coaster they created the space for me to talk about the collapse roller coaster unfortunately the technology on the day failed me so I ended up sitting hunched over a computer not being able to see the audience of about 10 or 12 behind me and with the online audience not being able to see me at the end of that I had an overwhelming urge to sob I could not help it I did not feel supported by the community because they cannot see it they cannot feel it and they have not sufficient capability maturity or consciousness to actually feel it and know what to do with it so nobody knows how to handle this stuff this is this third space stuff and the other thing that hurt really badly was the fact that we were in a sustainable basement right a concrete stepped basement underneath abn amro the sponsors the air conditioning was groaning and crunching it was sounded like mosquito coast uh with harrison ford with the oh god you know the and I literally left that space unable to breathe went upstairs stood there stunned in in the glass restaurant looking which way to go turned right into the courtyard wondering am I going into the wrong space there was a sunny courtyard and I lay on a wooden bench with people walking past me in suits and I looked up and I realized the reason I was feeling this pain was that I was literally in the belly of the beast the belly of the beast which is incapable of seeing this incapable of acting fast enough and unable to actually invite us upstairs to the board rooms to have these conversations and so I'm happy to share my presentation with the ogm online group that obviously won't have the words with it but this is heavy shit and if you're not feeling it right you will and when you do remember us I'll do my best okay thanks thank you thank you neil thank you um john michael than me was that me that's you john oh great wow uh hard to come after neil with anything proportionate significance uh but thank you for that neil um I I'm going to ted x marin this Saturday you know another one of these efforts we all know about uh I'm guessing that quite a few I'm reading the network state which is free you can get the pdf online I'm guessing grace it's it's very unlikely that she hasn't read it uh but it's from a perspective of a somewhat of a pre pre crypto crash very strong bitcoin maximalist but it's it's much richer than that I mean even though I would disagree on and we would all disagree about a lot of things in there but there's a lot of stuff about uh a network quasi-state non-geographic collaborations of people and the importance of exit voting like you you collaborate with your friends virtually and you're all working which is of course you know a very elite view of looking at things and you say to a city you know you need to change your policy on x or we're all going to leave and it's credible because you're you're all virtual that was a that was an interesting idea definitely an interesting idea and there's other interesting ideas which those of us who want to organize new kinds of not just virtual but virtual live in the crossover that's the real interesting thing is what's the crossover between the digital community and the real community and in what ways can a partial state not a not a legal not necessarily a legal state but a substantial collection of people that can issue something like a self sovereign identity and issue it let's say to refugees who can't get one from their government uh you know this this becomes an interesting force in the world um and so that's that's what i'm reading and i'm writing a story about about democracy emerging in a Kiwanis club in the Midwest i figured i anchor it's nice anchored in something very midwestern corn fed i'm even calling the main character james stewart you know after obviously jimmy stewart you know okay so that's what i'm working on um grace i don't know if you can jump in from the train but if you want to give it a try because i'm sure you have a lot to say here i don't know what i would say um really i yeah the network state it's it's a really interesting concept right the concept that any group of people could break off and legal or not legal have their own economic system based on the fact that you could now print your own money pretty easily i think that the maximalist view is incredibly ignorant about the embodiment of their actual physical beings and we've been seeing you know shutdowns of cloud computing we've been seeing people being arrested we've been seeing that actually as an industry and what the three we don't own even the steel on you know like we don't own the boxes that are hosting our network and so to what neil was speaking about it's like look if you haven't got a garden it doesn't matter that you can print money on a blockchain you're gonna go hungry and that's really the basis of the network state that we're creating is much more ground-based and beloges like fantasy about we're gonna have these networks state with just one commandment it's like well how are you gonna agree on something like should we fund the fire brigade if your you know one commandment has nothing to do with that and so we're really basing it on reformating culture i hope we're not as late as neil seems to be indicating that we are but uh but yeah i think it has to start with the physical presence and recognizing that we need to support our bodies otherwise we don't really have freedom or independence thank you so much very much um neil did you want to jump again or are you waving goodbye no i was just waving to to what was just said so thank you oh that usually that usually that's like a two-hand way sorry i had a book in the other hand exactly you were you were like so i was like would you like the floor good good sorry for the mistake on signal no thank you um michael you have the floor boy um i had had some stuff in my head and and since i got here very late um everybody who's said something has fed into um the stuff i'm thinking and the the interrelationships are kind of exploding out my ears um i'm thinking about um uh you know the gatekeepers zettle kosten shared informational linkage uh decentralization um the general services administration uh um it it i'm i'm really struck by um the fact that almost everything that we want to happen is ironically um you know the things that we have to do together are those served by the places that we gather um and by the means we have to gather and that as long as we're as we're stuck um you know getting together in an ephemeral zoom call or getting together in a facebook group or getting together on this you know this bulletin board this live event this all these things that don't speak to each other and don't address the thing that jerry you were talking about i mean this you know if the information does get harvested it gets stuck in the silo of your brain or the silo of you know somebody else's uh second brain or zettle castan you know system or and and the means for us to be able to share them are kind of dependent on each of us having one of those and and being decentralized enough to be networking those not on some corporate owned space and not having to side between a hundred different efforts to be the answer um and you know i don't know where the general services administration or the uh post office or uh you know or or any of the other more infrastructural um and you know i realize that's limited to this country which is unacceptable you know but i i mean where is the you know the the the funny thing about you know looking to anything like the un or any anything that is the assembly of the hierarchically chosen representatives of the world is that that's the same problem and you know it's interesting when we were first working on factor my my former partner was had come out of the un and you know the the the notion of a global social network sanctioned by the un was something that was floated internally and met with absolute horror because the last thing that this this organization born of the hierarchy wants to do is empower citizens to communicate it with each other directly and and you know you know and move things um so i'm you know it's not gonna come it's not gonna come from on high and uh you know the borderless state that john talked about um the you know self-sovereign identity that's kind of necessary for that um the disintermediation from gatekeepers um yeah i'm i'm i'm just overwhelmed by the desire to um to facilitate that in any way that i can and you know and give up you know what what as a platform builder you know i've tried to do toward the idea of of i to call lowest common denominator interaction because i think it's the highest thing um but a way for um individuals to control what they do in their second brain their their zelocastin system share it tentatively instead of um tentatively and with control over who they're sharing it with instead of this um constant corporate and social pressure now social pressure to present to the world as expected of you and to consume the feed as as expected of you and and kind of economically necessary for these corporate interests but rather to share very judiciously and um and consciously and intentionally and consume only what is you have filtered based on on the trust that you have in different people um and and their vetting um and you know not not be not for nobody to have the freedom to put something in front of you that that is going to be there to to outrage you um which wouldn't happen if the individual had control it happens because you know we are making ourselves victims to algorithms that work on that principle because they're supported by advertising i i do really and maybe i'm having too much faith in in individual human nature but i do think that people would consume information very differently and with a different kind of skepticism if um it was not being pushed at them and if they had to choose what they were pulling in um so that was sort of a a brain dump but um it relates to stuff i'm actually doing and and it was um spurred in large parts but um you know the particulars of what i just said by trying to get the things that people here were saying i'm always glad even when i have to be really late that i show up here because i hear things like um i'm i'm glad to hear on their own and also you know feed people i'm thinking so thank you thanks michael um those are things that i'm scratching my head about as well it's it's all there there's just so much energy and and justified concern around the feeds that we're all drowning in and what effect they have on society and decisions and politics and power and all that that whatever we can do to improve that is absolutely worth it so great stuff um i'm going to check in really briefly uh i am on the 25th i'm heading out for a better part of two weeks uh to first i'm going to catch up with april in madrid for less than 48 hours then i'm going to go to book arrest and be part of unfinished 2022 i'm speaking i'm keynoting at the start and then i'm going to have office hours basically in some corner of a courtyard that's apparently beautiful with my brain and whatever anybody wants to come by and do i urge anybody in ogm to register for the event like the last couple years that the event is free they just want people to put in a little bit of a little bit of energy into the into the mix and i'm going to sort of dive more into the rest of the speakers in the event shortly so i'm look look at what they've got and see what you know how that fits back into ogm and i'll try to report back there and then thanks to leif edvinson and hank i'm going to go to latvia and join a business school conference where people were wearing jackets from photos and i'm like wait does my jacket still fit so i'm kind of in that state i've got to figure out if my wardrobe is up to going to a business school but other than that i'm really looking forward to talking there and they've they've been very nice about fitting me into the program in a couple ways and then i'll travel back i think on october 7th so yeah the city of kaunas which i hadn't heard of before and is having a cultural year or something like that and it should be a lot of fun so that also means that i may not be able to make a lot of my call commitments during those two weeks in some cases i may make them the way grace is dropping in from a train and you know going to munich but also that it opens up opportunities to do our calls a bit differently so if anybody wants to suggest that or pick up some of those that would be awesome and with that your daughter took half your jackets did she tell you about it or were they just missing grace um that's very funny oh good good so she she sought approval that's that's nice um so with that i want to thank you all for being here and um wish you a happy rest of week and i'll uh see you all in the intertubes take care everybody thank kond thanks for being here a little bit