I am starting to appreciate how important etymology can be in revealing the interior meanings in our everyday use of words. Our words are slippery and have gone through many transformations before they end up in our voice and bodies. We go to the theater and to movies not for the text but for the subtext,Our bodies are information processors.
I consider myself to be a modeler. I believe this is a new artform. We are a performance by the territory.
We can work on this together. Here is a quote from that section of the paper that outlines a future.
“The emerging post-capitalist economic system can be anticipated. It will highly dynamically, flexibly and adaptively implement extra-economic factors into the exchange processes by a mix of universal basic income, citizen score systems, decentralized blockchain infrastructures, and the management technologies developed in platform capitalism. This will be realized by the inversion of the principle of the latter: after companies have adopted technologies that originally were developed for the public, the public will re-adopt and re-socialize the management technologies enhanced in the competition between the companies exploiting the niches in virtual space.”
Although I like the evidence that Davor presents, and find it compelling, I dont imagine that Capitalism, in it’s current forms, is going to die out anytime soon. Without interior developments that correspond to the greater complexity Davor predicts, this post-money movement won’t happen automatically. Most people shop to self soothe. Other ways of finding satisfaction will have to be developed. Sharing high quality attention can be extremely satisfying.
We will have to intend for this to happen. It might happen if there are enough persons who want it to happen. Hence my i intense interest in working in small groups to learn how to re-direct attention skillfully. If we arent able to train our attention we will be extinct pretty soon. Davor recognizes this and points to the need to develop a capacity for shared meta-attention(s) in motion. But he doesn’t develop this, as he stays in the theoretical and the meta-theoretical. Gidley’s research may resonate with this. Can we find the patterns that connect?
I am working with vast energies and I have blown a fuse on more than one occasion so I know how difficult this challenge is. I am inviting a few people to focus a shared meta- attention on the interiors of the future people who will be able to handle this kind of complexity. We are not there yet but we can create conditions for this adjacent possibility. In a sense it is already here, as Michael declare recently.
We may be the first generation to undergo this mutation that Gebser and Sri Aurobindo intuited. The Internet Age is here. The increasingly noisy online environments, with scattered attention, manipulated by gadgets and flat screens, will be a cause of the catastrophe, if cannibal forms of Capitalism are not willing to adapt to the greater cognitive capacities that are being opened up by the technology.
Hence, my desired outcome is to create a niche where the old fashioned use of the crayon ( re-connecting us to the field of childhood joy) and the high speeds of the internet can be used for knowledge creation in small social units that can oscillate between attentional styles, from the fast and highly focused, to slower and diffuse, to the very slow and immersive. As you may recall Kerri Welch maps brain states to the Structures of Gebser. The fast rhythms carry innovation, the slow rhythms stability and power. Chunk down and chunk slow.
Unfortunately, the flat screens inhibit the slow and the subtle from functioning properly in the repertoire of our attentional styles. These styles essentially blend rhythmic, analogue, gesture and affects. The voice carries across all of these qualities of our attention. We resonate with or are interrupted by the attention of others. We can be uplifted and inspired by those who are in synch with us or distressed by clashes in attentional styles. Trans-individualization can be modeled. We are already doing this. Can the idiosyncratic gifts or one person become transferable to another?
I can summarize this paper, ( it is not an easy read) and some of our research here. We are, in the video, of our last session, developing new language games, and techniques to re-combine these complex kinds of cognitive/affective communiques from the field. We are using open eyed trance states for oscillating between different ways of knowing. This is, as I tend to repeat, a meta-skill. If every kid learned clean language in school we would see a huge shift cultural capacity within a generation.
We are, as you have pointed out, Doug, engaged in Post-formal education. We are putting this on our maps. Then we have to co-create the territory. Individuate and Intergrate.
These are some of my meta-reflections. I am looking forward to learning more about yours.
By the way, I think Davor, references Merlin Donald, who was the focus of some of our previous discussions. I recall Ed had much to say, but I dont want to overwhelm him with too many models. I respect that others have to find their own pace. As I live in the fastest place on the planet I expect I am often out of synch with others who may live in more stable places.
I also want to add this guy, Giuseppe Longo, who shows us the dangers of the Computer metaphor. I think this compliments what we are working out. Interested in your response. I think Ed and others at the Cafe might appreciate this. Maybe we can weave all of this research together somehow?
