00 - viable pathways book-zine

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about

the viable pathways book-zine is a research-in-development publication that covers a wide range of topics, exploring different media formats and design patterns for more nuanced understanding and effective learning. it's an attempt to bring all of the most important contents of this garden into a structured, more gradual and cohesive presentation.

fundamentally, it's an inquiry into post capitalist systems and ways of being:

how can we create systems that enable us to conceive thrivable societies, playing, coordinating and collaborating towards more, sacred, regenerative and resilient presents & futures?

there is a myriad of different perspectives and research on the complex human predicament we're in, often called the anthropocene, polycrisis and the metacrisis. and even where there's some agreement amongst these views, there is often divergence on what to do/how to move beyond it.

i'm asking: what are these different perspectives, what are their theories of change, how do they converge & diverge, and could they be complementary?

the goal of my research was to map, understand and curate multiple cohesive approaches to answer the question:

how can we address the profound spiritual/psychological, ecological, economic, sociopolitical, technological and educational challenges we're going through and create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible?

as a single young person trying to do research in this very broad direction, the goal of my sharings here isn't to come up with any comprehensive, ultimate thesis. i draw from people who have been asking these questions for their whole lives with the aim of establishing a basic knowledge commons that can better inform us in designing and enabling new, more resilient and regenerative systems, lifestyles and ways of being.

i believe this process of open sensemaking, curation and learning out loud will be ever-more important to navigate the very complex, polarized and heavily propagandized information ecologies we're embedded in, with care, love and community, as we navigate both personal and societal collapse.

in this spirit, an appropriate sub-title could be: "a curation: how far a 26-year-old could go". it'll present it as both an anthology and a series of original articles, plus accompanying maps, designs, prototypes and illustrations.

the structure of the zine

the main questions i'm been asking throughout the zine are:

1) what is the actual situation we find ourselves in, across many perspectives and dimensions, and what's needed to transform that?

first you'll find a curation of resources presenting both wide and deep overviews of the human predicament and the underlying dynamics at play.

2) what existing response approaches exist? what's their theory of change? what are their level of development and context of applicability?

i'll present maps, studies and analyses comparing these approaches.

most of the content under these investigations will have the #metacrisis tag.

after getting a lay of the land and navigating through these different perspectives (this might take a while) - as an outcome of this research, we'll dive deep into a couple of my personal key inquiries:

3) how can we design art, technology and games support consciousness development and ecosystems regeneration?

a.k.a. how can we develop systems and structures to support life thriving on earth?

here we can look at many initiatives that aren't necessarily metacrisis-aware, but are still contributing significantly to the whole, working towards consciousness development and regeneration. relevant pages in this garden will have #alchemy, #design, #lab, #regen or #player tags.

we'll draw inspiration from them for my own designs, prototypes, etc - across all these 5 domains.

4) how can we design life more like a sacred game?

a sacred game is an infinite one. one that's deeply fun, collaborative, challenging, meaningful and fulfilling.
a game that honors the beauty and mystery of life, that challenges and supports us to flourish - to discover ourselves, unfold our potentials and share our gifts with others.

this comprises most of the "development" part of my work. the L1F3 support systems, and all their theory of change and unfolding designs, prototypes, etc. relevant pages in this garden will have the #l1f3 or #metagame tags.

there's a lot to be said on it and i won't get into detail now, but just for some people who might have read this and have a resistance with the game frame (probably due to its often seen competitive, game-theoretical win-lose dynamics), i want to say something - i share that same hesitation.

that's why the concept of game i'm using here is closer to the infinite game and omni-win dynamics observed by thinkers such as buckminster fuller in the world game and communities such as fourgames, metagame.wtf and startover.xyz.

why not use just "play" then?

because games introduce the distinction of serious play. a game can be a container in which you can reduce your scope of action and feel like you truly "gave it your best" at it - it may be an epic journey in which you thrive and learn/gather feedback from that - or you can also fail miserably and learn a bunch of other lessons from that. it provides a context for a profound, immediate, experiential form of learning, since you have a very tight application of the OODA loop.

so my investigation and development in this direction is really an inquiry into how we can:

transform life into a real-world massive multiplayer online-and-offline collaborative self-transformation & regenerative civilization-building game.

(see more at: l1f3 game)

i'll dive a lot more on the motivations, background and philosophical basis of this research on the zine itself.

a few of the findings

for people eager to dive into the contents, a few of the foundational findings (at risk of repeating what many metacrisis folks bring up) were:

there were a plethora of references that informed these perspectives, which i'll dive into in the publication (see: references map - coming soon), but the most interesting part (for me) of this research comes after deeply grappling with the context and root causes: when we're mapping/analyzing responses.

one question persisted throughout the research is:

amidst all of the complexity of ourselves and the world, where should i/we be most focused on?

john vervaeke points to this process of ongoing sensemaking and meaning-making as the process of recursive relevance realization, which starts to give us glimpses of a few answers in his awakening from the meaning crisis lectures.

but there are many other powerful perspectives. my attempt in this is to navigate through them and organize/reflect back in ways that are both practically orienting and challenging of deeper consideration.

a useful synthesis - though still a starting point - which i hope can support especially young people embarking on this journey of deep reflection and transformation, could be:

although maps can be very useful, there is no recipe. cultivating our own wisdom, nurturing our dharma and endeavoring to unfold our unique selves do seem like worthy pursuits. perhaps with a lot of sincere research and decentralized coordination we can clarify the nodes in the system where there's the most suffering and work to transform that, but ultimately, it goes beyond utilitarian optimization towards mitigating suffering. there's something beyond that, often unexplainable, about what each of us feel most called to be/do/become.

one big challenge though is that often we don't even know what challenges and possibilities exist - both inside of ourselves and out there in the world! the predominant systems in our societies are not designed for us to have this kind of visibility and collaboration. our local efforts can be very impactful and important, but as long our society has globalized risks and potentials, coordinating across the superorganism to find our place(s) in the whole must become not only a possibility, but a responsibility - hopefully for increasingly more of us.

it can take several years of trial and error, research and experimentation to find the communities, terms, perspectives that resonate and enrich our worldviews/ways of living - and even more time to find ways to make focusing on your part of the puzzle a viable financial possibility.

are there ways to make this journey less frustrating, isolating, tiresome and confusing?

i think so. and my first two steps were: 1) attempting to clarify what exists out there, and 2) attempting to challenge/strengthen my worldviews for coming up with a theory of change for my own expression in the world.

so that's what this book-zine is all about: mapping existing approaches/theories of change, consolidating my findings based on cold & warm data into a knowledge commons in more accessible and nuanced ways (which helps with elucidating possible developmental pathways/learning trails), and attempting to make sense of the complexity going on - clarifying important low-hanging fruits, leverage points & critical points of intervention.

the compilation you will find below is still a work in development, but it's already partly available and being constantly updated. in it, i share in a lot more detail everything i've found. but in case you've already resonated, below i describe the status/next steps of this work and how you can contribute to it if you'd like.

⚠ coming soon!

what you'll find below are some drafts of this publication. check back in a few weeks/months for (hopefully) more polished versions!

a note on where i'm going next:

before and throughout all of this research, i've held and developed long-time intuitions about the potential of games/serious play, networks and regenerative technology design as powerful & under-developed responses to the metacrisis.

i'll present several perspectives, references and prototypes that fundament my worldview and would love to further refine them to test/implement through the L1F3 support systems.