Our globally integrated system is decaying, and we need collective sense-making to survive. That means understanding why others think differently and deliberately consuming media across the political spectrum, from Mother Jones to Breitbart, to find the signals buried under noise. Partisan escalation is an arms race that won't get us to coordination.
empire breaks down. Right now we have a fully globalized system and it's in the process of breakdown, where all of the previous systems did break down but they were localized. This one will not continue to actually be able to help influence the rest of the world in a positive direction. It just won't. It is in kind of a decay process. The question is whether it decays into just less and less function and relevance, or whether it decays and reboots. And in order to do that, a cultural enlightenment is a prerequisite is necessary. Is everyone recognizing that collective choice-making has to be based on collective sense-making, and are we starting to really invest not in doubling down on our own bias, but in the capacity to make sense of things well, the capacity to understand why other people are thinking the things that they do, and the capacity to communicate well so we can coordinate? How to fix collective sense-making is a big, hard topic, and I I absolutely can't say that myself or the groups that I work with or anyone I know has the whole thing figured out. It's why I want more people to understand both how much it affects all the other problems that you care about and how it's upstream to those, and some of the factors contributing to it so that more collective intelligence starts working on various aspects of the solution. When we think of the commons, we think about some shared aspect of the world that is both a resource that we have shared access to but also some shared stewardship of. Well, the information commons is what is the space of information out there about what is true that informs our capacity to make choices? And we can see that just like a smokestack billowing pollution into the air, most of what is being put into the information commons is pollution. If there are whole chunks of populations that you only have pejorative strawman versions of, where you can't explain why they think what they think without making them dumb or bad, you should be dubious of your own modeling. Take in the news that they're taking in for a week, right? For a day. Go to Mother Jones for a day if you're on the right. Go to Breitbart for a day. Take it in and try to seek, if I'm continuously getting this, and what are the issues that I face as a being if I really put myself in that person's shoes? And it's not just so you can empathize with the dumb people. It's that there's some actual signal that you might have been missing. Most all of the positions right now have some signal and a bunch of noise. So we want to be able to seek to understand so we can actually get the other humans that we need to be able to coordinate with, and that we can get the parts of signal. We can be able to see where there's signal and noise, and we can start to synthesize the signal across the space. If you feel a combination of outraged, scared, you know, emotional, and very certain with a strong kind of enemy hypothesis orientation, you have been captured by somebody's narrative warfare, and you think it's your own thinking. Even if you win at a local battle, whatever technologies you use to win, whatever social tech or info tech or whatever you use to win, the other side will reverse engineer and come back, and you're just escalating an arms race. You're not moving towards real shared sensemaking and coordination. This doesn't mean you never take a position. It means that you take a position that is trying not to just continue warfare but trying to elevate the whole space which requires me understanding the whole space better.
