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Holoscopic

infrastructure for the new social internet

How it works

TLDR

• Group conversations that produce knowledge
  • About how to have group conversations that advance human culture
    • Holoscopic combines tools from social media and open democracy for an examination of our culture, creating models of social discourse that enable groups to see and act from the perspective of the whole.
    • Each exploration generates structured repeatable processes that can be copied, altered, stacked, studied and compared on common data frameworks so we can collectively advance the conversations that define our society.

Make maps of culture

Concept: Maps transform the world

Maps transfer knowledge from one to another

(Maps began as communication between individuals: "Over the hill, through the pine trees, cross the stream by the big rock then go to the base of the nearby tree...")

Maps let us compare and expand knowledge across time

(explorers venture out to discover the world and bring back records (maps) or revisions. Those revisions are copied and taken on new journeys, each adventure expanding or refining the collective project of knowing and navigating the world.)

Maps allow us to see the whole

(Though first recognized through study of the night sky, at some point the idea spread that all the far lands of the world connected in a great loop. Maps make this real. You can hold the globe and identify all its parts. This was a radical shift in perception for human kind. The flat map with fuzzy unknown around the perimeter become a globe. Known.

The project of map making entered a new phase. No longer expanding but filling in layer upon layer of useful information.)

Maps unify layers of intersecting knowledge

(The atlas was born. And Google Earth and Maps. Earth sciences, industrial planners, bureaucrats, everyone with information to share mapped their data onto the surface of the globe. New functions became possible. We can zoom in and out from a view of the milky way to the furniture you keep in your backyard. In place of landmarks we have coordinate systems that allows us to coordinate on a global scale, build navigation systems that automatically plan your journey on, foot, road, boat and air. In a sense the world is unknowable and ever changing. In other ways we can see it completely and these ways are functionally very empowering for us.

Next: How do we take the transformative power of maps and utilize it to advance human culture? )

Activity: Mapping Culture

Why Map Culture?

To See as Collectives

Despite the grand promise of maps ability to reveal the whole, these culture mapping activities are not global in scale. This is not so much an attempt to “see everything” as a set of tools that allow people to see more completely the communities and movements that we are a part of; the premise being that we need to hone our collective ability to see before we can coordinate harmoniously at greater scales.

To See Spectrums

Culture exists on a spectrum.

There are the definite artifacts of culture—the objects, the recipes, the ritual practices—but within society these manifest to varying degrees, with some placing great meaning and others merely gesturing towards past meaning. Other parts of culture are implicit, our way of describing how things get done. Within and between both there are countless nuanced variations that

Maps help us place our varied relationships on spectrums so that we can develop more nuanced language for coordinating across beliefs.

To See Change

We witness the every day feelings desires decisions of those in our life but when it comes to societal change we often only note official events: a new law is passed, a new technology hits the market, war, IPO, birth, collapse. If we want to scale a culture of collaborative innovation we need more nuanced feedback loops for the ways that we are all gradually changing.

What do we map?

We Map our interests, our fears, our perceptions and the plans that we make as a result.

We map where we are most sensitive, as well as, which sensitivities make us nimble, and which impair us.

We map our relationship to ideas: purpose, prosperity, truth, leadership, wealth. What do we all see when we look at society’s foundational ideas.

We map “wholes”. What does completeness look like in individuals, in relationships, families, communities? How do they build whole society?

How do we map?

Pick a topic

this is a graph:

this is a map:

By adding a piece of social context and making it interactive it becomes a map of a group’s relationships to a particular subject.

Study Collective Identity

Concept: Wholeness

Wholeness = seeing all the parts in place

[https://ifs-institute.com/resources/articles/internal-family-systems-model-outline | Internal Family Systems] is a therapeutic system that sees human identity as composed of parts that compete or collaborate. It provides a framework for identifying, creating space for and or healing those parts. Success is described as the discovery of the core ‘self’ and its coming into leadership of the whole.

Before a person can instruct, shape, fix themself, they must see their self.

Wholeness = collective progress

As all the parts of a person have a kind of evolutionary urge, so do the individuals and collectives within a society. As we can see by the ideological conflict that afflicts our relatively prosperous society, it is not enough to have nominal, ‘objective’ progress, the evolutionary urges of all parties must be seen and fulfilled.

This is near unthinkable at the scale of society but there are scales and domains for which this can and does occur. This project is aimed at (1) making this particular brand of wholeness visible and (2) reproducible.

Collectives ‘see’ through ideas

Individuals see individuals. The can witness the events that make up another individual’s life.

Collectives see archetypes. We tell stories and position ourselves and others in relationship to them.

These could be ancient stories like those in religious texts, prompting us to maintain some fleeting knowledge.

These could be modern anecdotes that redefine our relationship with change. For example, the founding of scientific laws are always paired with stories. “We thought X but we couldn't explain Y, then we tried Z and discovered…”

These stories and associated values are given names and become leverage points for our collective discussions.

Whole Seeing = Power

Like those that speak a common language, a group whose members all believe the same core stories is able to coordinate far more easily than those that don't because they dont have to go through the process of translating.

On the other hand a homogeneous group is more fragile when entering unfamiliar territory because they must develop a new knowledge from scratch. This is very difficult when it conflicts with core beliefs.

Archetypal stories do not convey the full complexity of a human life and yet they allow us to know something about all who share them. In the same way we can design abstractions that allow us to see and Translate a diverse set of understanding of the world. Such a tool would provide us the power of unification while maintaining sufficient diversity to weather the unexpected.

Activity: Collective Introspection

This is a description of how social maps can be used by a cohort to observe and extract knowledge from a shared process of self exploration.

Pick a topic

An individual in the group observes some pattern in themselves. In order to 'sense' the groups relationship on the topic they create a map and invite everyone to

Create a feedback loop

Introspection involves more than categorization. There must be input and output and cycles that allow for refinement.

For instance 2 questions:

• Q1: "Who are we?" (Observe the distribution of ideas relating to a topic.)
• Q2: "What do "we" do?" (Map the ways the various identities enact their ideas.)

Every time the loop repeats there is an opportunity to observe the evolution of both aspects.

Observe Change and Reframe

Change happens in certain ways.

For individuals:

• intended or unintended outcomes
• harmonious or turbulent relating

• moving toward simplification or complexity. Do things “make sense”.

For the group: either converging on or diverging from ideals and strategies.

When things go wrong we are forced to reassess, redefine our way of thinking or looking at a situation.

As a group finds itself coming into resonance around new ideas, the sequence of social maps provide a documented journey, stories that span from the individual to the collective, and a well-defined conceptual process that others can follow in order to validate or differentiate from.

Conceptual frames that allow us to see wholes at greater scales with less effort are like a social technology and like all powerful technologies, they spread.

Program Humanity

Can we make the evolutionary insights of individuals and groups into self-replicating knowledge systems? Can wholeness be as contagious as fear and division?

Concept: Open Source Social Algorithms

Here I take the ubiquitous example of ‘social programming’ as understood in the context of social media and repurpose it for the generation of whole-human social technologies.

Algorithms guide us through known solutions

In the context of mathematics or computer code an algorithm is a process or set of rules to be followed, that can produce a desired change in state.

For a tangible example: the rubik's cube. This is a puzzle that most would consider challenging or complex but that is in fact "solved".

There is a sequence of steps someone can use to complete the cube from any state. No knowledge of the patterns in the cube are required, no creative experimentation and discovery, just reading the cube and following instructions. This is the essence of most algorithms.

Social Algorithms help humans decide what to do

A Social Algorithm is a process or set of rules that allow humans to solve complex creative problems in collaboration.

Democracy

Democracy gives a set of practices for arriving at a prosperous society but it doesn't define what that state looks like. It merely creates a context where humans can have a better chance at assessing and improving their conditions. Steps: Talk about it. Vote on a course of action. Execute. Reassess who gets to talk about it. Repeat.

Science

Science is a social context for observing the world and arriving at common understanding. It doesn't tell us which experiments to perform or when we have it figured out or what the truth is. Humans remain the creative agent.

‘Whole’ Social Programming

Nobody wants to be programmed but everybody likes a good program.

That is, no one wants to be changed against their will or without their knowing, but just as the car subsumed the horse for transportation purposes, we love when others can package their knowledge in ways that make our life better.

The question here is can we create a context—trust relationships—and a delivery method that makes it both appealing and profitable for us to scale any process to the entirety of our civilization?

Name any technology and imediately there are arguments, was the spread of the car good for Humanity, for the earth, etc? Certainly this is a tricky proposition but here is one person's attempt at defining a region of our culture and a method through which we might try:

Can we learn to create things of and by the whole?

In certain ways we already have

Here's where we come back to the metaphor of the map. The value of the map is not to see every detail of the entire globe, it is to have various levels of abstraction which allow us to both see the whole and navigate our local environment specifically.

Diseases are viral. Knowledge is momentous.

In order for open, transparent tools to spread they have to be attractive, functional and travel well.

Virus, contagion, these are somewhat scary words at the moment. I use them simply because we all have a reference for how rapidly diseases can spread to the whole of humanity.

Social Media and the virality of memes revealed the powerful dynamics of cultural change as influenced by an economic ratchet. This is an example of a system where ideas travel really well, producing very attractive culture (people can't stop watching) but that are not filtered for their usefulness to the collective.

Science attempts to find and spread useful information. When we discover concepts that seem so core to the working of the universe that they apply in all (known) cases we call them laws.

Building social activities + systems that are desirable, useful and able to spread to all humans is more than just an effort to direct or fix humanity. It is a functional lens through which we can truly begin to see how we work.

Are there 'laws' (not mandates, universal patterns) that govern the human being? Can we see them together? Can we use them to built technologies that accelerate our social evolution?

Activity: Running Human Code

Certain patterns are both so deeply aligned and profoundly powerful that upon their initiation they spread and evolve infinitely. Life is the best example. This is a pattern of wholes (bacteria, example, example) forming larger emergent wholes. The goal here is to witness and develop knowledge about this process as applied to ideas.

Identify a topic

Select a topic that matters to

Initiate feedback loop

Explicit, predetermined steps

What do we see if we look at ourself this way.

Let the collective steer

Allow the crowd to take over.

Visualize the results

Graph evolution of maps

Close and Document

After participation drops

Participate

Wiki

You are reading this on a wiki. A wiki is a form of publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. That means every aspect of this site can be edited by its users. This is also where we document learning journeys and algorithms (see below). Every page of this site can be discussed on its talk page. Click here for instructions on using the wiki.

Social Maps

Social maps are the basic unit of collective sensing for this project. Use these to probe for topics that are ripe for collective learning. The intention is to find topics + communities for which there is some creative tension, some diversity of vision without being a crippling trigger zone. These are generally one-offs,

Open Learning Sequences

Open sequences have cohort of members interested in exploring a topic which is meaningful to them. These are open ended explorations of collective identity related to a topic.

Each map is a question for the collective. How do we see x? What we want to do for y? How has z changed our perspective?

Intentional Community

Concept

You start with 10 questions. Then allow the users to take over. Once activity drops below a certain level the activity automatically closes and goes read-only.

Mapping feedback loop

What is your intention?

What is your experience?

What is advancing your intention?

What is blocking your intention?

How are you changing?

Axes are internal external positive action negative action positive intention negative intention not bad just subtractive removing something

Social Algorithms

Algorithms = programmed map and activity sequences. Social experiments with stated hypothesis and method.