(2016-09-28) Rao The Inner Game Of Exploding Minds

Venkatesh Rao: The Inner Game of Exploding Minds

In a world where your imagination, rather than your context, is the limiting factor, how fulfilling your life is depends not on external circumstances, but on your inner, mental game

The crucial thing about digital technologies is that they are so much intimate, personal, and flexible/programmable that they behave differently.

The "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.

We are surprisingly close to this kind of technology already, but it exists in a fragmented state and must be assembled piecemeal. It also extends through life rather than a schooling period

To understand this process, we have to switch gears and talk about an inner process of personality evolution that loosely tracks external life events but is visible only to you and your closest confidants

Whether it is others who define your script, or yourself, if the personality-script fit is not right, generative life energy begins to drain away from you, triggering an internal, existential crisis.

Now this is the important part. To choose life is to choose to put yourself together again each time your inner realities shatter in small or big ways. Enter technology.

Whether you exit a bout of severe depression by making art, starting a new company, baking up a storm of cookies, or going insane trying to learn VR programming, the choice of tool and how you inhabit it MATTERS. (Maker)

praxis and poiesis, which very roughly, mean "doing" and "making" (or "production").

Praxis can be understood as a socially situated form of doing

Poiesis can be understood as an internally situated form of doing

To be product-driven is to be poiesis driven in a deep way

To be customer-driven is to be praxis driven in a deep way

Choosing poiesis over praxis as your mode of doing is to choose to be unreasonable

Praxis with a new technology often looks like what critics call "solutionism,"

Solutionism is nevertheless socially situated because it accepts existing ideas about what is worth doing

Poiesis often looks like self-indulgent pursuit of your own private idea of what you think is worth doing.

The New Economy is new precisely because it is young enough to have a strong dual tradition of BOTH poiesis and praxis, which wind around each other like strands of DNA, creating the genetics of a new societal order.

you cannot let either pure poiesis or pure praxis drive you. The dynamic balance that will most renew you with generative life force is unique to you, and your goal is to find it anew with each regeneration

You cannot get beyond a certain scale with praxis alone. Praxis by itself simply cannot disturb the universe enough. It needs the poetic imagination of poiesis to put a dent in the universe.

Now for the optional extra part: if you choose to go beyond and reshape the world beyond your own life, your relationship with tools will create larger realities like billion-dollar corporations that shape the lives of billions.

Poiesis by itself cannot scale either. It can only create precious-snowflake artisan scale hipster realities

Amazon is an example of a company that led with praxis, and then acquired enough poiesis

Google and Facebook began with poiesis, but also acquired enough praxis

Twitter is perhaps self-destructing via wild poiesis/praxis (reductively, product/customer orientation) swings.

These individual and collective processes of being and becoming, through making and unmaking, doing and undoing, create self-sustaining new realities out of crumbling old ones: this is autopoiesis. The poetry of emergence through creative destruction. Sofware eating the world is perhaps best understood as the world giving birth to itself at all levels from individual to entire planet, through one of the biggest autopoietic events in history. Fasten your seat belts. (Software is Eating the World)