AKASHA Conversations #7 — Regenerating The Social Fabric Through Play
We were pleased to be joined by James Weir and LCC from we{collective} (WeCo) for this month’s AKASHA Conversation. WeCo is building a platform that creates public places in holonic structures. WeCo defines itself as “a collective intelligence experiment working to manifest the world brain by 2030.” 🌍
The WeCo initiative explores three important topics:
- Innovations in organizing information
- Novel methods of creating together
- Unique applications for being together
James shared his motivation for developing WeCo and his path of transitioning from an ideator to a self-taught developer. Both James and LCC share the conviction that we are on a trajectory towards a global civilization that needs new forms of governance. The current Web may be a manifestation of H.G. Well’s World Brain, but in its current form, it is not fit for what was envisioned.
We need various decision-making tools and methods to explore further and find a shared global understanding. James noted that the democracies of today are still operating in an archaic manner, as in the time before the internet, while online social media platforms remain privately owned. There is currently a misalignment between incentive designs, decision making, and the user base generating valuable content. The above reasoning resonates with the AKASHA Foundation and our mission to build an open framework to serve future online communities. 🤝
WeCo is informed by Ken Wilber’s holonic paradigm and Integral Theory. This approach posits that our brains, world, and universe are built on nested patterns that repeat in larger and smaller dimensions. A community forming with the shared context of a single city might initially be small enough to meet in one single space. At the same time, the increasing number of participants and their increasingly diverging interests will still all have in common the same physical location while forming more and more nested subgroups. Thus, WeCo features a holonic nesting of its communities - with WeCo spaces having the ability to be integrated into a potential holacracy.
We also dived deep into a WeCo space named Castalia, which features a dedicated user interface that allows its participants to play the Glass Bead Game, named after Hermann Hesse’s famed novel. The Glass Bead Game of WeCo is described as “a trans media co-creative embodied sense making game” and possibly the first real incarnation of Hesse’s fictional world that even Magister Ludi Josef Knecht would have loved to play in our new digital realm. This game manifestation is LCC’s interpretation of what was mysteriously described by Hesse. To create the World Brain and steward, a global civilization, LCC believes there must be an individual and collective understanding of 24 fundamental concepts. Therefore, participants can build more profound knowledge of specific key topics through conversations. The positive feedback loops of interconnectivity among the players may then be translated from the game to the real world. Currently, LCC believes our World Brain is in a nascent state, being disoriented and perhaps progressing through “puberty.”
The World Brain needs our help to evolve beyond its current state if we are to face the massive challenges impacting our societies successfully. The clock is ticking…2030 is approaching.
Watch the full presentation and follow-up discussion below! 👀
About the AKASHA Conversations
AKASHA Conversations is a regular webinar exploring the critical
questions of decentralized social networking, with expert presentations
informing and inspiring open dialogue and action. To put it another way,
AKASHA Conversations is designed to foster the collective design of
decentralized conversation.
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