Open Stewardship and the Commons+Introduction
We begin an exploration in Process Architecture. As with any exploration, we don't know as much as we would like about the territory we enter, and we are driven by vision and opportunity. Even naming the territory we set out for can be problematic; Columbus set out to find a shorter route to the Orient and found the New World. The territory is human possibility. If we are at all successful, we will end up naming many of the important waypoints and territories that we will discovered along the way.
Little of what we discover will be new. What is new is the intention to bring humanity as a whole to a higher level of being. When we survey human knowledge deeply, we find that explorers have been there before. Human wisdom is present, if fragile, throughout human history and no doubt pre-history as well. What is far more uncommon is collective wisdom. If we set out to explore Collective Intelligence, Wisdom and Consciousness, we can find a different path into a more open and generative future for ourselves and all of the co-inhabitants of our world. Some explorers suggest that these collective phenomena may have first emerged naturally at the small group level, and that this is part our genetic and cultural heritage. We must first gather about us the best of these practices from human experience, and form into exploratory bands well equipped for the open territory ahead.
Civilization's structures are cracking and failing under the weight of modern material culture, and post modern culture cannot lift itself out of the mire of 20th century celebrations of grotesque horrors and banalities alike. This is not the place for explaining how things will devolve if we don't wise up soon, and other things obvious to anyone looking ahead in even the simplest ways. The old ways of addressing problems with solutions of "more, better and different" ways of doing things aren't going to save us. Yes, life is resilient and the planet will survive, but will we? Humility is realizing that humanity doesn't have to survive for life to go on; what's better is to recover the resilience we share with all of life.
The riches that we seek are of this world, but they are not things that are easy to capture and hold. The last few decades have seen accelerating technological change, particularly information systems for processing and communicating in signs and symbols, which have gone from zero to everything in a not yet complete century. Technology will not save us, but it is part of the difference we need. We are all new to the phenomena of being digital. Our technology never just alters what we can do; it changes who we are. Cities and written texts arise together, such that we cannot tell which came first. Writing emerges from counting and then accounting for the many complex transactions of increasingly complex urban and inter-urban life. Not that the scope of writing is limited by useful purpose. In evolving systems, capacities can emerge that don't have a clear purpose initially, or emerge to fill a role and then be put into service of new ends. Language itself likely emerged similarly, with immediate survival benefits in the coordination of collective action of social animals, but take on a much greater role in enabling new domains of action. Spirituality and art as well as science and philosophy. It makes possible new domains of evolution in the social space in the evolution of social structures and collective processes.
Notice that human history is a blink of the eye in the larger scope of history, and that the modern digital revolution is but another stage of a longer unfolding. For humans, we have been continually been extending our phenotype with technology and culture. This is definitive of the Neolithic Age, and just maybe we are experiencing the final shifts of this massive development. To survive we need to become different. We cannot just go back to more pleasant times in a fit of reactionary modernism, romantic nationalizm or forward with a californian ideology. We've tried that, and it is the source of much of the worst of the 20th century. Let us declare a new age for humanity. Let us invite an open future founded on compassion and care. Let us declare an end to scarcity.
We will need to become Jedi Knights of the new age, mastering both the technological and the social forces that are even more critical in finding a path forward. We will develop new technologies that serves us in our individual and collective quests to heal our world. To be sure, the technological change is also driving the old systems to the brink of failure. We cannot shed our technological cloaks, we must use them to become even more fully human. That means being even more in touch with our animalistic roots, while at the same time growing in wisdom and compassion. We invite all humanity to stand up for all living beings.
Distinguishing the field of Open Stewardship is an opportunity to call into question stewardship in general. Where we see something more like open stewardship is in fields where the merrit of the idea is primary, and there is an absense of centrallized authority. In most scientific fields, there are well known communities who are reading each other's work and gathering regularly in small subgroups to present ideas and contest them until something recognizable as truth for the group is acheived. The truth is always provisional as the work is never completed, but well known results become the stable bedrock of current understanding, even if it is later overturned in a paradigm shift that ushers the field into a new age. The best work of humanity is always anarchistic in this way.
Unfortunately, some of our most critical fields of practice have been captured by a parasitic system. Much money and power is concentrated in just a couple of financial capitals where global power is also concetrated. There is a long history, short in relative terms, of how things came to be this way, and it is also clear that most of the people of the world suffer under this system that is run for the few, by the few. The money created by this system is scarce, it is designed that way for the benefit of the few, and fear keeps it in place. This isn't meant to be critical of the people who put this system in place and evolved it to where we find ourselves now. There were structural and historical reason why things went this way. Scarcity is the means of control in all of the large collectives that had emerged, but these large collectives have wills of their own, and it is now time to move to new, organically organized structures. It turns out that money scarcity is largely an illusion created by thinking about central banks as if they are the same as ordinary businesses or households. They aren't, and a more expansive and generative system of money would fix much of this.
It is pretty obvious that these systems cannot stand. Like the game of Monopoly, the end game is always with all the money in one pot, and the system is effectively dead.
Fortunately, we are not the only ones concerned with technology and the way it impacts people's lives:
A Shift to Humility: Andrew Zolli on Resilliance and Expanding the Edge of Change
As we started to bring together these scientists and technologists and engineers and designers and people working in fields so new they had no name. One of the highest compliments we can give someone is to call him a weirdo. The reality is the future often belongs to the weirdos. Something really amazing started to happen, which is that all these collaborations started to occur. People started to do stuff, we could barely stop them. What's going on here, all of these people saying are going to start this project or start this company and we decided to work on this problem together. And so, we began to put in place the infrastructure to identify, train, refine, scale, those collaborations. Today we run fellows programs where we identify and train some of the world's next best generation of talent in social and ecological change. We train working scientists to become better communicators and collaborators and leaders. That network works in more than 100 countries, and serves the lives 300 billion people. And, once a year they come back to this little village in Maine. Part of what makes it work is that we are in someone's home.
This book is organized as an initial exploration of new territories to be explored. We name and describe them as we go, and leave much to be explored by those who might follow. Open Stewardship is an idea that emerged from community dialog and the desire to create a kind of open space for leadership that is rare and precious when it occurs. First we will explore how common space is created in declaration of fields of practice. Open Stewardship is this same type of declared common space, and we would naturally self-apply its own principles. Next follows the invitation to participation and the process arts of building passionate and engaged communites.
This is also a digital book, written on a Wagn, and as such, you are invited to sign-up, sign-in and even help write chapters in the book. For that you would need to be added to some circles of engagement in recognition of contributions.