Literacy in this century means, in part, understanding both “the map is not the territory” and that our maps become our territories – not just how to read them, but how they are made, what they omit, and why. We must rediscover how to get our bearings when we have no maps at all, and learn how to tell when they are taking us somewhere we do not want to go. For populations who’ve grown up reliant on turn-by-turn driving directions and “just for you” news feeds, this will be no mean feat. In 1973, Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s short video Television Delivers People laid bare the nature of modern media: “If something is free, you are the product.” The warning backfired, becoming a design standard for modern technology and the attention economy. Even though the phrase “You are the product” now has its own Wikipedia page, more of us are productized than ever, the extraction excruciatingly precise and omnipresent. Many of today’s most useful wayfinding tools are built with data either stolen by surveillance or surrendered in exchange for “free” services. Our lives are siphoned into frighteningly detailed dossiers for training the proprietary algorithms and predictive models those in power weaponize to engineer society. The enormous asymmetrical advantage baked into these systems – “Big Tech knows more about you than you know about yourself” – makes the ownership and legibility of infrastructure a question of reality control. If you want a piece of that reality, you must allow yourself to be remade in its image. With maps that position surveillance-as-intelligence, we’re presented with a false binary: institutionally-owned superintelligence or individual data sovereignty. Join the Borg or stick your head in the sand. Either way, Moloch keeps on gaining ground. The first option intoxicates us with its promise of collective power. Why not use whatever tools you can if they will make you superhuman? After all, your data’s in there, too; you’ve earned the dividends. Submit to more extraction and you too can benefit from (metered) genius-on-tap. We are told the only other option is to reject the future by retreating into isolation. When legibility only flows upstream, going dark is the last refuge of personal agency. Opting out makes sense: deprive “the enemy” of information and preserve yourself, or so the logic goes. But as the evolutionary arms race between surveillance capitalism and the people it preys on turns the once-open Web into a dark forest, we cut off our collective nose to spite our face. Isolated from each other, we lose awareness of precisely the shared context and aggregate value creation we need to navigate this ever-weirder century. And even if we try to leave, we create a visible gap. Predatory practice separates the target from the herd, and a negative space in the data analytics is still legible to the system. Not only does the hyper-individualistic extreme of privacy protection cut us off from group smarts, it makes us more vulnerable in other ways, including as targets. Both paths accept an outdated map on its own terms. They both assume the world has only two dimensions, and legibility belongs to either individuals or institutions. Both serve to reify the power structures we inherited. Escaping Flatland means discovering (or re-discovering) another axis of motion. Consent breaks the false binary with a third dimension: opt-in legibility. When all of us choose what to make visible and to whom, personal agency and collective intelligence nourish one another and the sky opens up. We can see the fractal and nested contours of the systems we inhabit. With selective shared context, our communities form along gradients of intimacy and we can have more say in our destiny. Insight and storytelling power flow to where they’re needed. Freed from enclosure, high-dimensional cartography stops being a tool of alienation and oppression. We develop shared literacies that undo value capture and let us satisfy our inborn drive to pool our minds without losing vital otherness along the way. “[O]rganizations which design systems…are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” — Mel Conway Community-owned, selectively legible, sovereign architecture gets our thinking out of cages and into flocks. Flatland power can’t follow us up the z-axis into our new spheres of reality. This is why structural legibility may be the most consequential choice available as we design our digital environments. We are not alone in this work: Stafford Beer devoted his career to giving organizations a nervous system. Christopher Alexander searched for “the quality without a name” that gave us intangible, objective sense of aliveness in our built environments. Elinor Ostrom proved that well-governed commons don’t end in tragedy, but flourishing. J.C.R. Licklider and Bob Taylor evangelized a non-existent Internet because they saw the promise in computers to help us actually communicate with one another. None of these navigators worked in isolation. Each of their contributions was made possible thanks to a whole community of peers engaged in vital and enlivening questions. Access to what Brian Eno called “scenius” – “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene” – is essential to our species. As we stand on the cusp of strange new AI worlds made possible by vast collective data sets, consent-based scenius-at-scale has never been more necessary. But, for the first time, it’s within our reach. Whole article here: atlasresear.ch/blog/toward-w…

Full episode, transcript, show notes, community: michaelgarfield.substack.com…

War is a kind of mating—a dance of cultural recombination in which both sides take on each other’s characteristics and join in novel structures. Just as your own nucleated cells are “holobionts” made from different species of bacteria that fought each other to a standstill until they became conjoined as anatomically distinct but reproductively coupled organelles, each new cultural ecology begins in the reciprocal projection of evil and culminates in the form of a new “meta-individual.”