A Kickstarter for A New Civilization

A few days ago, my friend Liam Sharp sent me this video from the British Television program Charlie Brooker’s Wipe.

The gist is this: there are profound powers of control out there that have enormous influence over the Narrative — the stories that we tell in order to make sense out of the world. As a result, we can’t make sense of what is going on. Who are the bad guys? Who are the good guys? Who did what to whom and why? What is important and what is a distraction? Its become nearly impossible to have any real confidence in the answers to any of these questions.

If you’ve looked at my foundational assumptions, you will remember that I believe that the only viable path forward for humanity is a “hard reboot” of our total social architecture. As a consequence, this video does not strike me as odd or even challenging. In fact, I find it a bit refreshing. So — we can no longer trust any of our institutions of authority? Our organs of political, journalistic and even scientific truth-formation are fatally suspect. What are we to do? Clearly — reinvent new ones.

This will, of course, be difficult. And if you believe that it is possible to simply muddle along under our current architecture, perhaps with some modifications or reforms, my approach will feel (far) too risky and you might want to stop reading here.

But if, like me, you’ve come to the conclusion that the current game that we are playing — all the way down to its most fundamental code — is no longer viable, then you can join Mr. Holmes in the highest form of pragmatism: “. . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Our challenge, as usual, will be fear. And, in particular, it will be fear that comes from two different areas. Fear of two very different flavors.

Historically, those who are ostensibly in charge of (or most benefit from) a current institutional order will fear and resist forces of change. Particularly forces of profound change. We can expect this to be true in our current Great Transition as well. This is in spite of the fact that we can objectively consider how dangerous it is for all of us to attempt to maintain a society of scarcity. Indeed, it is in spite of the fact that a society of abundance will raise even the highest contemporary boats — consider that Louis the XIV, the vaunted Sun King of Versailles, entirely lacked internal plumbing, air travel or a tooth brush. Presumably some, perhaps many, of our contemporary power elites and oligarchs will understand this and assist the Transition. But others will not and it is entirely likely that they will use their access to the various organs of control developed over the past century to keep us stuck. Many paths run aground on those rocks — nipped in the bud, disoriented, or crushed with violence.

The second flavor of fear is more universal: the whirlpool of chaos. A Great Transition of necessity involves a breakdown of structure and many, perhaps all of the zones of safety that we have come to rely on. This is necessary because in general those “zones of safety” are obsolete structures that are holding us back. Nonetheless, to the degree that it opens us into the unknown or the untried, that opening leaves us feeling unsafe, unsure and captured by fear. Historically, this has been a most potent recipe for a people willfully choosing tyranny.

In order to thread this needle it is needful, then, that we design a disruption that simultaneously brings decisive power to bear (enough to unwind and overwhelm the forces of control) while at the same time providing a minimally-threatening “safety net” that gives our suddenly liberated energies a sense of orientation and a pathway to safety.

So, lets take a look. I don’t have the answers, but I do have some suggestions that I hope will be helpful to those who are aware of the situation and are (collectively and individually) trying to make this work. I have identified four “components” that I believe are necessary, though not quite sufficient to our task. In this essay, the view must of necessity be at a high level. Future posts will address each component in some deeper detail.

A New Sensemaking Apparatus

I addressed this component briefly in my previous essay, Reinvent Everything. Appropriately so, as it might be said that this function, the sense making apparatus, is the single most important component of any collective endeavour. Simply: how do we go about taking advantage of our many different experiences and capacities to do a much better job making sense of our world and making both collective and individual decisions.

Science, for example, has been a powerful sense making apparatus for the past 500 years. Using a combination of repeatable experiments, provable mathematics and a communal (nee “peer reviewed”) approach to both critique and knowledge sharing, it has been able to coordinate the distributed efforts of tens of millions of people around the globe to “make sense” of an extraordinary amount of our collective experience.

More prosaically, we have the totality of journalism and much of our organizational (e.g., corporate) structure. It is a very useful view to see all of this as different approaches to getting the most “sensemaking” out of different groups of people.

In every case, the most fundamental breakdown of sensemaking is a breakdown of trust. If I can trust you to be acting with integrity and good faith, then I can trust the perspective and information that you bring to me to at least be as clear and truthful as you can make it. The “oh dear” expressed in the video at the top of this essay is responding to the deep breakdown of trust that has come to characterize most and perhaps all of our current sensemaking apparatus.

I was recently introduced to Dave Snowden, a rare practitioner of “applied complexity science” who has done some groundbreaking work in crafting new tools for collaborative sensemaking. The bottom line: there is good reason to believe that a deep reinvention of every single mechanism of sense making that we currently use is ripe. This is cause for great optimism. Can’t make sense of the world through what you read or hear in newspapers, television and radio? Stop using them altogether and start helping to construct the new tools.

It appears to be entirely plausible to completely replace our entire suite of sense making techniques within the decade — and in making critical mass progress in just a few years. This will, of course, be the consequence of a large number of different initiatives. The foundation of all of which will be “scaling trust”.

In my next essay, I will suggest a set of models on how we might construct new sensemaking architectures and propose two concrete approaches that I believe are practicable in the immediate term. I believe, although I cannot prove, that this is where we should begin — because effective sensemaking tools make everything much, much easier.