(2019-01-20) Hall Situational Assessment 2019 AOC Edition

Jordan Hall: Situational Assessment 2019: AOC Edition. From my perspective, the true center of this war is between different forms of collective intelligence. The 2016 election served as a notable inflection point in the conflict and, therefore, one might take the Trump Administration as the source and driver of the decentralized collective intelligence that John Robb called “the Trump Insurgency”.

My sense is that the reality is precisely the other way around: decentralized collective intelligence is fundamental and, broadly speaking, not intrinsically aligned with any given policy or political philosophy. The Trump election was only an early example of something on the surface riding an upwelling from the depths.

the struggle is beginning to shift to its more dynamic phase. The Blue Church is breaking down.

Front One: Communications Infrastructure.

From my perspective, 2018 was the year that the Blue Church died and that the center moved from the establishment mass media to the emergent new media.

I would like to suggest that the events of the Ford/Kavanaugh complex represented the formal end of the era of the Blue Church the beginning of the interregnum.

During the confirmation hearing and subsequent vote on Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavanaugh, the leadership of the Democratic party made what I would consider to be a classic error.

they activated the #resist collective intelligence

they woke the dragon. And for the next two plus weeks, the American Zeitgeist exploded in a decentralized culture war between the Insurgency and #resist.

While the end result was ultimately cranked out through the usual turnings of the bureaucratic political sausage machine, the deep story is that during that entire time, the Establishment was completely out of control. They could not shape or frame the narrative and could barely keep up with reporting on it. Instead, the essential power of the frame had shifted from broadcast-type media to decentralized-type media.

we don’t quite know how these new forms of collective intelligence will show up. But we are starting to get a sense. For example, in 2018 we were able to observe two major emergences of the type: the “Intellectual Dark Web” and “QAnon.”

In both the Intellectual Dark Web and QAnon we are witnessing (and, perhaps actively participating in) decentralized collective intelligence undertaking the slow process of (re)membering the Logos.

The Intellectual Dark Web

the conflict has settled with the IDW as the clear victor

*the IDW is turning its attention inward: what, precisely, is going on here?

For now, this loose collection of thinkers is self-identifying as an emergent re-discovery of “how to have a good conversation.”*

my sense is that the next major threshold in the development of the IDW as collective intelligence is when their intention turns from ‘good’ conversation to ‘meaningful’ conversation.

Making Sense of QAnon

QAnon is an example of an decentralized collective intelligence endeavoring to “boil up” out of non-sense into sensemaking.

If you watched slowly and carefully throughout 2018, you had a chance to witness the birth process of a decentralized collective intelligence in real time.

Front Two: The Deep State

To my mind, the Mueller Investigation is an example of where the Deep State is able to grasp an aspect of the Insurgency (the Trump Administration) that is legible to old fashioned Deep State power. And, like Arnold blasting away at the T-1000, the Deep State is making the mistake of thinking that a well placed headshot will kill the Insurgency. If my read is correct, this might temporarily slow the Insurgency down, but, ultimately, will simply cause it to evolve at a more robust pace. This entire approach continues to represent the “last war”.

By contrast, I propose that the real action of 2018 and now into the future is already taking place on a very different stage: the Big Tech platforms.

Boy did 2018 light up the Battle for the Internet

We saw Facebook reel from backlash surrounding its role in the 2016 election and then begin to endeavor to control the narrative that can flow across its platform at an algorithmic level. We saw Twitter begin to actively prune accounts based on speech-indexed heuristics and YouTube paying much closer attention to which video channels could monetize advertising.

Of course, the conflict would move to this frontier where desert and jungle meet.

when Sargon of Akkad, a YouTuber who rose to fame during #gamergate with his criticisms of PC culture, was unilaterally removed from Patreon, a new line was drawn. Within minutes, the story was spreading across social media (most notably Twitter) and within days, Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson (two members of the IDW with large and highly attached followings) began the process of pushing back, ultimately announcing plans to leave Patreon and to create a new, competitive, platform.

the conflict is not about politics, money or power in any ordinary sense. Rather, it is about a struggle to control the shape of the territory itself.

While surface conflicts like that between the IDW and Patreon are one aspect of the conflict, I would like to suggest that that true depths of the decentralized War Machine lie elsewhere. Again, the “world historic aspects of this war show up in the exploration of different forms of collective intelligence and power in the emerging landscape”.

If you want to really understand the nature of the war, you are going to have to go into the prime materia out of which the complete novelty of decentralized collective intelligence is emerging: consider the notion of Butterfly War (born in the Chans) as described here.

My bet here is that soon we are going to start seeing parts of the Deep State defecting and looking to establish their own territory in the new decentralized world (if this hasn’t begun already).

Front Three: Globalism

It seems that we don’t need to spend much time here. As expected, without the power of the United States as an anchor and in the context of new media routing around old control structures, the forces of globalism are being routed world-wide.

A decomposition of the neo-liberal order to some form of multi-polar nationalism seems to be the next move on this front. But, I expect this stage to be ephemeral. As decentralized collective intelligence continues to gather its power, the nation-state will find itself in a global ecosystem with entirely new forms of political consistency that are more fully aligned with the future.

Front Four: The New Culture War

If 2018 was the year of Jordan Peterson, then perhaps 2019 will be the year of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. With the breakthrough of AOC, the Culture War has entered a new phase.

As the Church falls away, the “children of Blue” will emerge in a Cambrian explosion and reach out to engage in all out culture war with the still nascent Red Religion. To my mind, AOC is the first major example of a “child of Blue”.

For clarity, I would contrast her with Tulsi Gabbard who might be considered the ‘last great hope of the Blue Church.’

AOC is an Achilles dipped up to the heel in the Styx of decentralized media. Her style of communication is fluid, continuous and direct. She does not stand above and outside of the conversation, attempting to influence it with authoritative ‘good opinion’. Rather, she is in it — sensing and responding to a “social” that is always present and that is coextensive with her identity.

AOC will likely behave very differently from the waves of idealistic young Boomer congressmen and women who came to Washington in the 70's through 90’s with big ideas — only to melt into the party machinery. Her power is connected to an entirely different source then the Churchly powers of the DNC. As she experiments with and demonstrates this new power, she will be showing precisely how few clothes the Emperor is wearing.

Pity Pelosi and Schumer. Soon, they will be facing a Blue Insurgency

If this comes to pass, the many different tribes of the Blue Insurgency will meet the many different tribes of the Red Religion in an intrinsically global + virtual conflict and we will have entered the “tapioca” stage of the Culture War.

What might this expanding decentralized Culture War look like? Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes at the Intellectual Explorers Club took an excellent first swing at it in their Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0. ((2018-09-14) Memetic Tribes And Culture War 2.0)

If you are running a 20th Century sensemaker, it will feel like a descent into some flavor of madness. However, if we open into a sensemaker from the future, it begins to look substantially simpler. Not easier, unfortunately, but simpler. (sense-making)

The War for Collective Intelligence

While we can’t keep track of a volume of water at the micro level, we can capture its most meaningful aspects at the macro level.

more interesting things happen at the boundary, when one phase transitions into another.

From this point of view, Culture War 2.0 is rather simple. We might say that under conditions of accelerating change, humanity is now rapidly approaching a “phase transition.” We are moving from one way of being human to another, rather different, way of being human.

Bret Weinstein once shared with me that the specific adaptation that made us most fundamentally human might have been the evolved capacity to navigate niche transitions in much faster than biological time. Throughout our species’ developmental history, we found ourselves pushed to the edge of extinction many times. Over and over again, our survival depended on becoming capable of leaving one niche and adapting to a new one. Ultimately, this problem itself became our fundamental niche. Evolution finally found a way to create a species whose niche is niche transition.

Evolution did this by moving almost all of our adaptive specialization from the biological (hardware) layer into the cultural (software layer). And it coded (at a very deep level) a capacity to shift from “culture mode,” where we are limited to using the tools in our given cultural toolkit, into a creative “liminal mode,” where we can form collective intelligence to navigate complex reality directly and with remarkable fluidity.

Letting go of everything that we think we know, indeed, letting go of a mode we might call “knowingness,” is no joke.

This will be the final installment of Situational Assessment. From this point forward, my entire focus will be learning how to come into coherent collective intelligence and learning how to scale that coherence. This is not the sort of thing that is at all available to broadcast-type communication like this Medium. Instead, I am joining a new project, where we will be practicing embodied coherence and using that new level of collective intelligence to design, prototype, and embody the next layers of coherence and collective intelligence at both larger and broader scales

If you would like to participate in this project, the good news is that its very nature is that anyone who chooses to do so is already in some fundamental way, doing so. There appear to be three major aspects, each one of which is a reflection of the others.

Sovereignty: knowing when you are able to respond to the world and when you are merely reacting. (congruence)

Right relationship: finding your right place in the bigger story. (self-actualization)

Coherence: entering into a relationship where the whole is simultaneously much more than the sum of the individuals and the individuals are much more themselves for being part of the whole.

I would propose that this is the very fabric out of which abundance has always been woven.