(2022-11-07) Brander Thinking Together

Gordon Brander: Thinking together. While analyzing a global history databank spanning 10,000 years, Jaeweon Shin, et al found a disconcerting pattern. Civilizations scale until they are overwhelmed by the information environment they create. This is The Information Scaling Threshold.

We also suggest a mechanism to help explain social collapses with no evident external causes.

When a society hits the information scaling threshold, it stalls out. It can’t function until it invents new ways of making sense that can cope with the complexity of the information environment. And societies that don’t pull off this transition? The paper posits they collapse.

The internet has massively increased the complexity of our information environment, but hasn’t yet produced the tools to make sense of it. Old forms of social sensemaking—institutions, universities, democracy, tradition—all seem to be DDOS’d by the new information environment.

Philosopher Paul Tillich posits that when social sensemaking fails to keep up with reality, we experience it as a kind of mass neurosis. Everybody has a crisis of meaning at the same time.

The timing here seems unfortunate. We’re facing planetary challenges. (grand challenge)

But, then, maybe the information scaling threshold is why we’re experiencing these crises in the first place?

*What do we do now? I see three trends that seem like part of the winding path forward.

• Thinking with a second brain
• Thinking together at Dunbar-scale
• Thinking with the network

To go beyond the information scaling threshold, we’re going to have to leverage all three.

Thinking with a second brain

The internet has increased the complexity of our information environment. To have agency in this environment, we need to become complex too. We’re going to need a second brain!

Can we find ways to make meaning together over the internet?

hiding just under the forest floor we can find a warren of small-scale private communities. Discords, slacks, groupchats. Semi-secret spaces that are invite only. The cozyweb.

It turns out people cooperate beautifully in groups of 150 or less (Dunbar’s Number).

These cozyweb communities have all of the features that Elinor Ostrom identifies as necessary for governing a commons without tragedy:

In a small community, everybody knows everybody, and can keep track of what they do. This makes small groups repeated games

Thinking with the network

We’re all networked together. This is new! Researcher Simon DeDeo considers it a phase transition in human culture, dividing history into three eras:

The user-generated content era, where most information is produced/consumed by users, in a tight feedback loop between attention allocation and content production/consumption 3rd

At scale, we become a medium for manifesting memes, like synapses in some global social brain.

Sometimes it seems like this brain has a mind of its own. It cues you in to COVID weeks ahead of everyone else. It manifests memestonks and NAFOs. Some Very Online people started talking about these memetic manifestations as if they were entities, calling them egregore.s

Maybe it is possible to construct new social networks that generate egregores which are friendly toward humans? Let’s call this the Egregore Alignment Problem.

Infrastructure belonging to everybody

Meanwhile, the trends above are colliding with a nascent driving force, a shift from closed platforms to open protocols.

Why protocols? Why now? web2 is mature, and growth is plateauing. The early-aughts platform playbook is played out. We can see this in the shift toward b2b SaaS, which signals the paradigm has run out of consumers

As growth slows, the relationship with users becomes adversarial.

The value of credible exit is now clear.

At the same time, self-certifying cryptographic protocols, including IPFS and, yes, blockchains are bringing new kinds of decentralization within reach.

If you squint, you might see a future in which large parts of protocols become self-funding and sustaining. User-ownership has become imaginable.

A protocol for thought

This is why we’re building Noosphere, a protocol for thought. It spans all three scales:

Thinking with your second brain. Noosphere is made up of spheres—notebooks that belong to you, secured with keys that only you have access to.

Thinking together at Dunbar-scale: Follow friends, and make sense together. Spheres that follow each other can establish decentralized friend-to-friend networks—private p2p pocket universes that function like a groupchat or shared wiki.

Thinking with the network. Every follow is a synapse in your second brain. Follow friends and friendly AI to get updates in your feed.