igcd

But most human beings don’t naturally organize the world through metaphors of domains or hypertext; instead they mentally map the world according to their social networks of friends, family, and colleagues. So it should come as no surprise that we now find ourselves gravitating toward a new platform grounded in those social maps.

Sometimes lost is where you need to be. Just because you don’t know your direction doesn’t mean you don’t have one

By thus returning to the taken-for-granted realm of subjective experience, not to explain it but simply to pay attention to its rhythms and textures, not to capture or control it but simply to become familiar with its diverse modes of appearance - and ultimately give voice to its enigmatic and ever-shifting patterns.

But can we even hope to catch a glimpse of this process, which has given rise to so many of the habits and linguistic prejudices that now structure our very thinking?

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back at ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities.

I sat stunned and mesmerized before this ever-complexifying expanse of living patterns upon patterns, my gaze drawn like a breath into one coverging group of lines, then breathed out into open space, then drawn down into another convergence.

We are less fascinated by, and therefore less apt to observe, evolutionary processes that make their way not by violent eruptions but by the slow, steady spread of a dye through one social layer after another. The name of the man who has lighted a fuse fastens itself upon our minds; the name of a man who has merely spilled a stain is often lost before the stain can reach us.

In short, we notice what happens by holocaust but not what happens by gradually increasing habit. Yet a quiet habit of thought that has come to its term is every bit as powerful as a concept enforced by gunfire.

It takes time for the time of an idea to come. Thinkers work, as a rule, in isolation, gathering up the threads of present history - the new accidents of invention, the new impulses of feeling - and weaving them into coherent patterns that may be named and used.

We are all of us compelled to read for profit, part of contacts, lunch for contracts, bowl for unity, drive for mileage, gamble for charity, go out for the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house. Minutes, hours, and days have been spared us. The prospect of filling them with the pleasures for which they were spared us has somehow come to seem meaningless, meaningless enough to drive some of us to drink and some of us to doctors and all of us to the satisfactions of an insatiate industry.

So how do we accelerate the emergence of new economic models that deal with the challenges we are facing in a systemic way? How do we lay the ground for both a social and economic coupling and a political breakthrough? What could constitute an effective transformational model? An umbrella under which our aspirations could be gathered? A tree from which to grow a wealth of micro and macro solutions? A social object that could mobilize efforts so as not to leave the healing of our ills to the adoption of scattered and confidential initiatives and to the natural evolution of consciousness and behaviors… while time is running out… Could a new economic model be built around the commons? Think a minute. What are the commons? All the things that we inherit from past generations that we ‘find’ around us, which enable our livelihood. The natural, genetic, material, physical, social, cultural, intellectual, creative resources; the capital and assets that belong to no one or to humanity collectively, that enable us to become what we can become, live what we can live, access what we can access, accomplish what we can accomplish and evolve as part of an ecosystem. They are the pillars around which the social and economic couplings can be catalyzed, where the corporation can meet society’s needs and where economy can meet ecology.