Civ 2.0 as a learning framework

Discussion
#1

recently I’ve become interested in critiques of our civilizational way-of-life and have found that they’ve made it easier for me to frame many different topics of interest into one coherent direction of inquiry.

I’m beginning to seriously suspect that many of the fundamental assumptions and customs that have underpinned every known civilization for the last 5,000 years need to be seriously re-examined and that the conditioning of growing up inside of a civilization makes it nearly impossible for a normal person to spontaneously arrive at this conclusion by themselves.

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with that in mind, I’m creating this thread to:

  • point out questionable assumptions that our civilization (Civ 1.0) asks us to make
  • highlight ideas and techniques that I believe are better placed inside of a new civilization (Civ 2.0)
  • speculate on the transition process from to Civ 1.0 to Civ 2.0

I’m aware that this concept is impossibly huge and ambitious, but importantly I’m not suggesting that we storm the gates of city hall and declare a new utopian society! I’m just proposing this as a framework for organizing information and structuring our learning efforts. this thread may just end up being a place for me to dump cool links ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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#2

There are a few extremely useful metaphors in this post about modern gods that I want to highlight in this thread. I will analyze them within the Civ2.0 framework when I have some more time.

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#3

Moloch

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

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#4

The Uruk Machine

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#5

Questionable Assumption: The primacy of the analytical mind.

Related to the Uruk Machine, one assumption that I’m interested in exploring is the relative importance of the rationalizing, ego-driven, analytical aspect of intelligence. The world’s spiritual traditions usually warn us that this aspect tends to have an imprisoning effect on our consciousness, and that we would be better off transcending the hold that it has over us. This seems to be a core aspect of wisdom, so the fact that rationality, positivism and scientism don’t have much to say about the limits of this style of intelligence, and the fact that these philosophies completely dominate Civ1.0 thinking is questionable to me. a wise civilization should know the limits of its own ability to analyze.

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#6

Questionable Assumption: The effectiveness of industrial monoculture food production

I recently took a design course on permaculture and can definitely see that our style of growing food causes all sorts of downstream problems in society, from poor nutrition to environmental stress. I still need to do deeper research but it seems that annual monocultural food production is one of the key culprits when any civilization collapses and disappears. The food system needs to be a key area of focus within Civ2.0 framework.

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#7

Questionable Assumption: limitless trust in markets, money and commodity exchange

There is no doubt that money and trade can be useful, particularly when strangers want to transact, and so they are a key component of a global society. however, the punishment for over-emphasizing their importance in a civilization typically is a reduction of complex relationships to numeric values, which in turn leads to terrible consequences like slavery, destruction of natural resources, loneliness and warfare. Civ2.0 should be much more cautious of creating markets and seek to de-commoditize as many aspects of Civ1.0 as possible by creating tight networks of kinship and catalyzing them to easily foster mutual aid. the end result would be a social safety net that is actually social.

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#8

Hey Andy. I’m of the same mind. Just followed you on Twitter. Have you seen the GameB discussions happening there? Jordan Hall etal? Also, I just came across the Rally Point Alpha FB group https://www.facebook.com/groups/625210141012983/ headed up by Hall and Jim Rutt. Interesting times!
Rhys

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#9

I’ve been seeing the GameB term come up a bunch but have yet been unable to figure out what it actually is. Is it a cohesive thing, or more a loose collection of people/ideas? Or something else entirely?

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#10

It’s an emergent collection of people and ideas. A strange attractor for a bunch of related ideas about civilisation redesign. Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jim Rutt are kind of the thought leaders. The term was coined back in 2012. It’s been reignited recently and has been getting traction as a meme. Twitter is where it’s evolving in my opinion. There’s talk of building a community in NodeBB or similar to allow for longer form discussion. Lots of podcasts, medium articles and recently group zoom chats. Check out my Twitter timeline for more stuff.

#11

too bad @zandy never replied because I think the connection to the gameB effort is obvious. I think - the book : Education in a time between worlds - was also discussed here in the forums. I came to Zak Stein and the book directly from the GameB trajectory ( Jim Rutt Podcast)

GameB has been struggling with problems of coherent narrative for some time, but that may be because its much more an aspirational thing that a fixed set of goals. Still methods for collaboration need to be found and I think P2P learning formats are very much one of the things missing there.