🎎 networked living - practical tools and perspectives for empowering collectives amidst accelerating attention & experience economies

#essay #🌿
note

the contents of the writing below are currently haphazard, disjointed and all over the place. please proceed at your own risk. (or don't. feel free to come back later when it'll be hopefully updated and improved.)

about

in this essay i argue that the next stage for intentional collectives is to consciously integrate the concept of networked living.

we'll talk about: third spaces, energy management, facilitation/community organizing tools, curation/shared brains, communal/digital infrastructure and life design as ways to move beyond divise patterns of interaction, towards integrating interdependence into people's actual ways of living.

perspectives on this page come mostly from a few different places - folks in the cozy web/indie web/slow web communities, my experience with several facilitation tools and practices, and in spiritual/philosophical/regenerative circles...

context

my experience of the COVID-19 pandemics was 1 year longer than everyone else. when it struck, i was already on my 11th month isolated from the world.

i was going through some intense emotional healing processes, and found that my only way to cope was to read, meditate, research and ritualize. so during that time i had the privilege - and challenge - of spending 95% of 3 years alone, in my room, introspecting, learning about myself and the world (via books and the internet), while rediscovering what moved me.

during that time, i couldn't find many online communities that resonated with what i was experiencing and the themes that were alive to me. so this time in isolation made reflect and research a lot on the themes of belonging, the internet, community building and memetic tribes, especially related to the state and the potential of our information ecology and online communities.

in 2023, my life has been pretty much the opposite. going to ecovillages, farms, marginalized communities, courses, retreats and all sorts of cultural, local community events in são paulo, brazil.

in this article, i aim to gather my findings, curation and perspectives on the future of communities and the internet - and subjacent themes, such as the metaverse, trust networks and a lot more. i bring special attention to intentional online communities and third spaces as cultural attractors. they're places that can feel more like home than at home or at work.

definitions

so, what's the role of communities? how about intentional ones?

how about community organizers - or community organizing as a whole?

as a crude but interesting starting point, one could say, answering all of the above: to meet collective needs and coordinate the use of resources.

beyond formal institutions, communities have long organized as sanghas, collectives, communities of practice, local/bioregional representations and more.

a deeper inquiry we'll dive into: what's the role of curation, communities & distributed sensemaking amidst accelerating attention & experience economies? and what tools are available/necessary for them?

x) facilitation - the limitations of the current paradigm

we've seen a rise in "community managers" - whether in corporate contexts or in social organizing, and a wider recognition of several facilitation tools and methods.

despite my appreciation for many of them, for the longest time, i've been carrying a frustration regarding many approaches, and - sorry friends (it's not about you!) - with many facilitators too.

i feel that most of these approaches have a lack of depth and continuity, which is directly tied to a non-recognition of hierarchies and systemic influences on people's lives.

while potentially powerful on their impact on transforming individual consciousness, their effectiveness on any form of societal transformation seems - in my analysis - thwarted by this.

many of these approaches have good intentions of being holistic, integrating lots of people and perspectives, but while embedded in a widespread reality of time scarcity, in an economic system designed towards unidimensional (monetary) optimization, they can often be disregarded as "cool", "cute" or "aspirational" approaches, with low or no practical outcomes.

in trying to integrate multiple perspectives as equally valid, this posture gets in the way of precisely recognizing the unique power and wisdom that each different perspective holds. their unique place in the whole. some perspectives are more important, impactful, holistic than others - depending on the context. and they need to be recognized for it!

just like people's contributions, availability, responsibilities in a certain project are different - they often aren't equally important for it - and therefore, should not be equally compensated (financially or otherwise). a dynamic process of sensing and engaging, that honors people's stage of development across different lines, create the possibility to actually create.

i'm not the first to point this out, but i'm verbalizing it here since there are many emergent approaches trying to address this, but i'm yet to find a single one that goes broad and deep enough. to me, this points to this circumstance as an open field of investigation and development for many years to come.

it's no surprise then that the L1F3 support systems i've been envisioning aim to integrate these tools/perspectives into people's daily lives and activities. and sustain them as part of a wider context - anchored on a more wholistic approach to value and resources allocation (i.e. life streaming). so these tools stop being siloed, cool things that you apply once at an immersion and then forget about it.

x) emergent responses

integral theory & metamodernism provide philosophical, scientific and [sociological?] grounding for it.

música do círculo and some cooperation pedagogy activities are beautiful examples of how to meaningfully integrate different levels of development in ways that are synergistic for the whole.

metadesign: designing the context in which designing/co-creation happens.

fundamental patterns.

before exploring comprehensive approaches, let's dive into topics:

formats such as world café, unconference, liberating structures or microsolidarity

create open space for emergence and attempt to tap into collective intelligence.

however, like i mentioned in continuity, these ways of relating require ongoing practice to be cultivate such intelligence.

but not only practice. these practices don't happen in a vacuum - what substrate are they happening on top of?

curation, etc comes in.

🌀 third spaces / energy management & resources management article:

early expressions of "metamodern guilds", in the direction of "NAOs":

what it helps with the most:
don't start from scratch -> shared/pre-determined context: music, visuals, language, etc...

⭐️ make distinctions around collective intelligence [spaces / tools / systems] clear, visible, explicit - accessible & persistent.

-> shared values + visible resources + mapped ways to create value = enable collaboration

[high-value/high-return activities - trust networks (DAOs/coops) - circular economies]

🚨 issue/challenge: coordination.

enabling it:

💭 subconscious:
TfT / web3 / XR -> semantic, distributed, spatial web

trust/knowledge networks.

knowledge structures -> lists, trees, grids, networks (graphs)

—————-

my curation can be of the utmost value if:

in my writing, i can share/clearly state the insights/learnings i gathered by inhabiting these diverse archetypes/domains of knowledge.

e.g.: present my CEP+N at each article.
-> design nerds: daniel, rieki, vassão, etc
-> builder nerds: sephist, dgardens, etc
-> art: fablab, mdc, domestika, rap geek...

intro

the dilemma of every artist/creator - personal vs economic incentives

the magic that is unlocked in community

resonance, possibility.

cherished and encouraged to be your most unique self.

decentralization of resources -> 16x population, 100x resource consumption.

market intelligence, trends, foresight.

creator, curator & experience economies
unique potentials and challenges of in-person vs virtual communities

if there's something that persisted even after a lot of western influence and colonization (for its lights and shadows) in the global south culture is that we're a lot more communitarian. everyone is friends, everyone is family.

communities like MoL and instituto amuta recognize this and are deliberately studying and practicing culture-building in more intentional, conscious and regenerative ways.

technology-enabled communities

every technology has values embedded in it.

sari captures my feelings well when she says:

and for deeper perspectives and practical examples of highly intentional and transformative technologies, check out this podcast episode on building collective intelligence tools for human alignment with nicholas brigham from goodly labs.

i will dive into the deep implications of this, but i'll start with the aspects of the creator/experience economy that most people are familiar with.

CEP+N

creator communities, online courses, institutional communities

mighty networks, discord, telegram/whatsapp

lofi girl, the jazz hop café, - ambient content.

(they're in fact virtual spaces)

esports orgs, game guilds, real-life collectives

-> RPGs / MMOs / neopets / LoL...

M3 - virtual hackerspace & community

[hackerspace]

[XR book]

the stoa - community-driven spaces -> next instance:
vibecafe.xyz

leveraging tools like gather to enable communities to be synchronous yet flexible, whisper/chatGPT to generate transcripts/blog posts/mindmaps, capsule.video to do shorts + other tools to promote connection, add serendipity and augment conversations (infranodus, etc).

others:

gaoa.network / intentional society / etc...

metaverse folks (VRchat)
-> bluesky example.

creator economy folks, metalabel, DAOs as groups of friends with a treasury

RADAR - future in sync

shared brains (knowledge commons), nature of social media

ultimately, sari captures it well here:

main references:
other orgs building tools:
decentralized social media initiatives:

for an even deeper understanding, beyond distributed cognition, we can also have augmented intelligence with AI agents, visualizations, and more.

moving castles is a pioneer work on this field, people/acquaintances/moritz bierling also shares a rich conceptual understanding of the space, which influenced my own understanding and experimentation with secondary minds.