⚛️ Playing With Perspectives: The Six Dimensions of Humans On The Loop

History and protocols for knowledge art on our co-evolution with technology

🗺️ Updates, Context, Exposition

While its parent project Future Fossils Podcast keeps on rolling (with some great episodes in queue!), I’m finally in the groove with Humans On The Loop. This new “applied project” focuses my work with Conversations as a Service (CaaS) on providing public goods for cultivating:

1) Agency in the age of automation; and
2) Wisdom in the creation and use of magical technologies.

For deeper context on this project, read this pitch and action plan, this slide deck, and this intro essay. Deep thanks to Cosmos Institute, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, and Imaginal Seeds for helping me buy precious time to work on this! I’m three-for-two on grant applications, funded 28%, and hopeful. Bless the ones who understand and have the means to help.

This project feels like I am finally Answering The Call, and in the process learning how the topics I’ve explored for years connect below the surface — how everything and everyone I know all fits into a bigger pattern. With more clarity than ever, I’m devoted to the work of helping people (and collectives) learn to play amidst the transformations, to upgrade from oppression by the finite games of legacy institutions to joyous participation in the infinite game of superabundant planetary culture.

The short and easy way to put this is:

Let’s dream better. Let’s improve communication and coordination toward the futures that we truly want. Let’s get better at decision-making and reflecting on the how and why of what we do. Let’s put philosophy and art to work (but also: let’s remember that work is in service of our dreams, of better living, and that “useless knowledge” only serves our goals if our goals are beautiful and good).

There are many ways to think and talk and act about all this — and that’s the point, and I am leaning into that plurality. By changing how we interact with multiple perspectives, we can enact profoundly different angles on The Real that transcends any one of them. What seems insoluble while viewing things in one way tends to suddenly resolve itself from others, or dissolve itself entirely in a higher logical order by holding different points of view together stereoscopically to find new depth. (All knots in 3D come apart in 4D, and so on.)

I am doing this because I see it as the duty of my generation to continue in the great work of the last. One of my greatest guides and inspirations, the poet and historian William Irwin Thompson, coined the term Wissenkunst (German for “knowledge art”) to describe the play of ideas in complex fields of information, an evolution from the one-to-many linear academic lecture into the co-improvisatory sense-making we need to navigate our age of networked systems and nonlinear dynamics. After leaving MIT in 1972 a self-professed “atheist in the Vatican” of globalist technocracy, he went on to found The Lindisfarne Association, a planetary culture think-tank and ecologically-curated who’s-who of latter twentieth century luminaries that lasted forty years and moved the world in subtle but enduring ways.

While on tour in 2010 I binged all of The Lindisfarne Tapes, their recorded sessions from 1974 to 1978, which shaped the way I think about the vital role of transdisciplinary discourse in the emergence of new cultural forms he saw rising from the ashes of modernity. Although he never took me as a formal student, our conversations (including some on record: 2011, 2013, 2017 Pt 1, Pt 2) made me who I am today and helped me to make sense of where I fit in the ecology of minds: by “fitting” nowhere, I can bridge and courier, translate and synthesize, provoke and catalyze. There are a lot of us. Itinerant philosophers and prophet vagabonds, it turns out, grease the wheels on which our world spins.

Even before I found Bill Thompson’s work I learned that this is how to solve a paradox. Now I’m making this my full-time job by building a repository of perspectives on technology and wisdom that can be repurposed to illuminate the local contexts in which each of us must live our own tough questions.

But, more: This is a form of live performance art that models how you might decide to organize your knowledge graph and social networks, find cohesion for your narrative, connect constructively and playfully, make maps that may not be The Truth but get you where you want to go. This is a protocol for improvising with ideas and people.

And: This is commons-building work — not merely making artifacts for others to dig up, but fostering relationships. Soon I’ll host some live salons, but right now you can “find the others” in the Holistic Technology + Wise Innovation Discord server, a communal space where you can co-curate, co-moderate, reflect, invite discussion, and discover new collaborators. It isn’t Lindisfarne, but it’ll have to do for now.

Image: MG x AI Test Kitchen. Prompt: “six-dimensional iridescent purple neon glass knot”.

⚛️ Pulling Six Threads Out of Billions. Which Six?

Letting someone else decide how I organize my knowledge might be interesting (and we do this all the time) but surrendering the creative work of folk taxonomy to algorithms seems off-base. Eventually I’ll train an AI model with these conversations and see what new connections might surprise me, but because this is authentic inquiry I want to start with a hypothesis: that limiting the space to somewhere between five and ten big themes will serve quite nicely. (Seven is the magic number, plus or minus two.)

Out of the thousands of discussions that have led me to this point, I have noticed six themes that I will use in Humans On The Loop to thread it all together. Consider these the six notes of a chord called “Techno-Wizardry”, or six elemental gestures we can trace through latent space as we learn how to dance with possibility in ensemble improvisation with the Noosphere our craft reveals…

Each of these co-arises with each other and none of them have priority. Each yields important insights and discloses strategies hidden by the others. The documents this inquiry makes possible will be intensely hyperlinked; imagine each as lenses through which our understanding of each other is transformed.

The six dimensions of this project are:

🤝 Informed Consent

How can we make “the right” decisions when perfect knowledge is impossible? Are there even such things as “right” decisions, or must we accept that every choice we make is provisional and subject to revision? How can we afford the cost of never settling our minds amidst an ever-changing world? How can we ensure that “more power” means — perhaps counterintuitively — “less violence”?

🕹️ Addiction/Gaming

It’s easier to do things when they’re fun…but it’s also easier to get people to do what you want when you hijack their reward systems. Convenience is the first addiction that lies upstream of every other, and making life convenient is the lazy person’s metaphysics of technology. Rivers run downhill but people stand upright; how can we resist the siren song of entropy and organize our lives to make good use of natural flows while not allowing ourselves to become their slaves?

👁️ Accountability & Oversight

Who watches the watchmen? John Perry Barlow used to say he didn’t mind transparency as long as it went both ways. Each of us is biased so if we are to wield power fairly we need checks and balances: states, markets, and civil societies (within which academia should belong) evolved to make up for each other’s deficits. But economies of scale have hollowed out the practices of human culture and replaced them with transactions calculated by opaque, unauditable forces. If you have superpowers, who do you ask to keep you honest?

🏛️ Multiscale Cognition/Regulation

You make choices based on “the adjacent possible”, the options co-determined by both bottom-up and top-down influences in a complex weave of interactions that extends into the subatomic and the cosmic. Regulation isn’t just the work of states and markets but entire ecosystems and communities and your own nervous system and the germs inside your guts. Technology enhances agency in some ways by providing leverage, but also limits agency in others by creating new complexity and unpredictable behavior. How can we govern better knowing that each choice emerges from and helps constrain a landscape of unthinkable complexity?

🪄 “Spellcasting”

Magic is code poetry and code is magickal working. In the words of John Lilly, language allows “metaprogramming the human biocomputer” — and of course this way of speaking brings some worlds into being and forecloses others. As natural language and brain-machine interfaces become default, what we say and even what we think will shape our built environments….the gap between what we imagine and our physical reality is shrinking. As “software eats the world” and (more broadly speaking) biology becomes the domain of culture, virtual environments spill out into shared spaces and it’s up to us to reimagine initiation for an age of cyborg wizards.

🤰🏼 Technology &/As Parenting

Inventors cannot predetermine how a billion users will eventually find new functions for their big ideas. Parents do not get to tell their children who to be. And when you mix both types of unpredictable creations? Time to focus more on nurture and continual revision/steering than on some insane myth of impeccable foresight or perfect parenting. Every new invention is a giant, uncontrolled experiment. If “it takes a village”, how can we solicit everyone’s participation in the work of raising the next generation well? Who’s accountable, and how can we reward caregiving better?

🪺 What’s Next?

These six dimensions frame each conversation I’m recording for this series. In the coming weeks, while I pitch to distributors (suggestions welcome!), I will offer longer framing riffs on each. My hope is to illuminate how all of them connect, what each inspires or triggers, and how the act of pivoting between perspectives helps you navigate your own relationship to tech of all kinds.

Feel free to write back with your stories and reflections! I would love to hear them.

But first, a comment on The Stakes, and a request:

This is the nuance I am trying to help cultivate in conversations on responsible technology, wise innovation, ethical AI, community relationships, and governance.

This series is a public resource. Humans On The Loop cannot be sold. I will not warp this inquiry to coddle venture funding. I am not trying to capture value but to reveal it, and to foster a creative commons. Your ROI is a future you actually want to live in.

I’m looking for:
1) Organizational backing/affiliation;
2) Promotion, distribution, and administrative support; and
3) The money to feed my family while I work on this and pay for a few key contractors.

I do not want to crowd fund this, but if you care about this work and want to hand a glass of water to me while I’m on this marathon-as-prayer, you can:

And if you want immediate tangible benefits from your investment, hire me as an advisor. My brain is for rent as a low-cost, low-commitment, high-yield catalyst for your own path-finding process or to catalyze “Aha!” moments in your team meetings.

Lastly: I am exploring every possible avenue for synergy and coalition building. How can we join forces? I’m open to suggestions as long as they leave me time to work on this, and strongly favor invitations to apply what I am learning in concrete and project-focused team inquiries. Let me know what’s on your mind.

More soon…

(More links for people with undying curiosity.)