📚 Notes on "Reclaiming Meaning" as Career Path 🏆 Ordinary Visionaries
Inspired by a new collaboration with ASU and wondering how "weird" can "stable" be.
“The sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behaviour. As we think, we live. This is why the assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist study. It moulds our type of civilization.”
– Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 1938, p. 63)
Happy Lunar New Year, everyone! One more day until I ship my conversation with the visionary K. Allado-McDowell, an emblem of the kind of future human I see coming into being as part of a larger, more relational identity with vegetable and mineral intelligences. (I explain why in this recent short talk on AI-Assisted Transformations of Consciousness, in case you missed it.)
Because it’s very likely that if you are reading this, you’re on a quest to harmonize the “how” and “why” of life, the time feels right to talk about the nature of this work. Humans On The Loop began with an incredibly hard choice to leave the safety of a org whose vision I believed in so that I could serve that vision (as I understood it) better. The weird thing is that leaving also felt like joining: knowing there are countless kindred spirits I would find along the way, and that I was enacting something like a mythic gesture many others made before me, this project makes me feel like learning-as-I-go is also teaching-by-example and discovering a new community across the phase transition. Each of us has to make a choice like this at some point in our lives, putting “values” over “value”, and the more of us who do it out in public, the sooner we’ll live in a world shaped by that integrity.
In other words, if we would like the world to be one in which beings flourish, we have to choose the rich potential of uncertainty at least as often as we choose to follow things like money, pride, convenience, and “rationality”. Especially when we know full well that the status quo is killing us and we are only holding on because it’s easier to live by someone else’s story. Therein lies the paradox that “everybody” knows this story, but improvisation isn’t following a script. “That which can be named…” Etc.
This came into deeper focus for me in a group of sixteen people whose one thing in common was that all of us were not sure what comes next. I met them all last Thursday at the launch of ASU’s Center for Science and The Imagination Project Centrifuge Fellowship. (CSI has been a top collaboration target for me for a decade, and I’m very grateful that Rohit Krishnan helped put this thing together and invited me.) This Fellowship is meant for weirdos on sabbatical to help each other cook up bold experiments together. I get the sense that we’ll see more initiatives like this as Global Weirding picks up steam.
Since Project Centrifuge lives at the intersection of collective intelligence and strange career moves, the workshop raised a number of important questions for me:
• Am I actually on sabbatical, or am I working even harder than when I had a steady job in a kind of endless liminality? (Am I a masochist whose indie “mycopunk” gig hides the fact that I would rather network endlessly than suck it up and “fit in” somewhere less precarious but kinda boring?)
• Is society actually on the cusp of supporting radical new kinds of work, or is trying to feed a family with philosophy forever doomed to be a pastime of the bourgeoisie?
Well, here we are. If I can make a living helping other people ask these questions, that’s victory. Big “if” — I am still $40,000 shy of feeling like an expert — but it is at least a Great Adventure.
Let’s enjoy ourselves as we investigate just how exactly sense-making…makes sense.
Here are resources that might help you if this sounds familiar.
📚 Notes on "Reclaiming Meaning" as Career Path
Since Humans On The Loop is a public goods applied research project, I want to share as much of the good stuff I’m reading with you as I can. But “listicles” go above and beyond the promised scope, so if you enjoy this please become a patron. (We love to see you in the next monthly members hangout at 3 pm MT on Feb 15th!)
This first batch of reading centers on Project Centrifuge-like topics such as why the legacy systems aren’t working for people devoted to maverick questions, how to make maps as you go, why artists matter when you’re off the map, and being an incorrigible generalist.
If we’re going to meet power with wisdom, we need more than new funding strategies and institutional forms. We need to rethink how we allocate attention and how we settle on (if possible) new structures in our models of self, community, and world.
To reference Whitehead again, via Meghan O’Gieblyn’s masterful essay on “Embracing Habit in an Automated World” (which I recommend above every other item on this list as central and preliminary and guaranteed to rock you):
More and more tasks become incomprehensible to the worker. (One thinks of Alfred North Whitehead’s remark: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”) If one follows this trajectory to its logical end, Weil argues, the result would be a society that functions “without a single human being understanding anything at all about what he was doing.”
See also Owen Barfield via Joy Marie Clarkson’s review of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi (Read it please. It is amazing.):
Barfield tries to account for the “pure cussedness” of the fact that “the more able man [sic] becomes to manipulate the world to his advantage, the less he can perceive any meaning in it.” Attempting to construct a history of language, Barfield argues that when the scientific method hardened into an epistemological outlook, horizons of scientific knowledge exponentially expanded, while horizons of meaning began to contract. Ingrained to a “habit of inattention,” we began to treat the world as an object quite separate from ourselves, and thus quite alien.
Yeah, let’s not do that. But if we’re ingrained to a habit of inattention, healing our alienation literally means paying more attention to the wholeness that is already the case and never wasn’t. Which was, incidentally, Richard Doyle’s point in episode one.
Not all of the short reads below touch on this basic issue of reclaiming meaning and reconciling ourselves with the richer nature (human and otherwise) from which civilization has alienated itself. But you can read them as a kind of practical guide to the social dimensions of what a somewhat-less-alienated world might look like: a world that refuses to be simple but rewards us with the joy of ongoing exploration.
Start wherever you’re inspired, but I’ll try to string it all together:
What is the equivalent of a PhD for independent research?
Priya Rose on why we need more support for indie scholars, and what that might look like. Using Nadia Asparouhova’s pathless path as a case study, and arguing between the lines for the Fractal University Rose helps run in NYC. One of my favorite (long) tweets of 2024. Why do so many people care about this?:
Credentialism is dying
Relatedly, OSV’s shot-across-the-bow explains succinctly why they support rogue weirdos like myself. (Rhymes hard with one of my most popular essays of all time.) But credentials evolved for a reason and institutionalizing the self is not a sustainable response to the existential challenges all institutions have to deal with right now:
The Death Of The Personal Brand (And What Comes Next)
Dan Koe on how to discover your life’s work through experimentation. If you’re asking these questions, you are very likely a member of the:
Octopus economy
Dave Kang on how some of us are too multifaceted to “fit in” and how to re-think your life accordingly if you’re one of these octopi. A very humane approach to structured self-knowledge given the constraints and unique opportunities of the Web economy. But if you’re one of these people, chances are you need to learn:
Where to draw the line?
Gordon Brander on how to break down systems, even when you really can’t. A useful counterbalance to seeing everything as connected…good for evening out a right-brained approach and for reminding the left brain these are wholes, after all. Once you have mapped the systems you need to, look for:
Places to intervene in a system
Gordon again, talking about the brilliant work of Donella Meadows. I see Humans On The Loop as operating very high up on this list, which presents intense strategic issues familiar to anyone working “upstream” of easier interventions…and begging the question of where “wisdom x tech” projects can make more modest and achievable impact. Hold this list in mind as you consider a second set of acupuncture points in the hyperspace of “What am I doing with my life?”:
Strategy questions
Seth Godin’s list of first-principles questions you should ask yourself about your project to help ground it in a fundamental understanding. These are questions about what you’re trying to ship, which broadly defined means any technology. While broadly applicable to anyone, working alone or on a team, this is especially useful for those working out on the frothy edge of things…people like artists:
Seeking an artistic tribe for an emerging cultural paradigm
Sylvie Barbier at Second Renaissance brings the role of the artists and storytellers back into the above conversation with a lovely manifesto. But of course there are artists among scientists, also — and like all hyper-sensitive pattern detectors they need a place where new ideas can be sheltered and incubated:
Science needs a third space
Seeds of Science wants to support research that can’t find a home in academia or industry. What does a “third space” for science look like? My guess is that more of them will show up as the world gets crazier and we have to collectively get better at thinking on our feet. So storm chasing seems like a perfect analogy for sailing through the next few years:
The 10 Most Important Rules of Storm Chasing
How we should make decisions in fast-moving environments with limited information — like maintaining situational awareness, focusing on real-time feedback from the environment, and avoiding task saturation. Key for chaos navigators.
Lastly, and in other news:
🏆 Ordinary Visionaries
Robert Middleton’s show Ordinary Visionaries gathers inspiring discussions with “everyday people who have put their visions into the world and taken action to make a difference.” We talk about my very nonlinear life, with a focus on how to thrive in uncertainty, listen deeply, and transform complexity into opportunity.
“Ultimately, Michael's mission is to inspire people to ask better questions, imagine new possibilities, and live in harmony.”
A very grounded, easy-going, plain-spoken conversation and a good point of entry into my head and heart for those who aren’t already well-acquainted. And of course Middleton’s archives are going to introduce you to a heap of interesting people you probably would have never found otherwise…
I’ll leave you with one final quote to savor:
"How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
– Niels Bohr