The solution: a 3-dimensional life-centric global coordination tool that weaves self, human connections, and planetary impact.

I’ve started PART 1 of this series of articles stating that the root cause of our metacrisis lies in our inability to perceive ourselves as abstractions of the whole. Our lack of awareness of the interconnectedness of all systems and ecosystems leads us to decision-making that jeopardizes our existence. In PART 2 I've shared a spontaneous dialogue in which I explain much of the political-economic background sustaining the present proposal. In PART 3, I'll introduce a conceptual framework for a systemic solution that enables the self-organization of support networks through post-monetary task allocation based on commons management.  

"We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us."

"Your definition of a problem will shape your solution."

These internet quotes are great starting points for understanding our way in and out of the current mess. I'll state the problem as:

A lack of understanding of the unfolding nature of reality as a coherent whole prevents the development of a global collective intelligence towards the common good.

The pervasive narrative of separation,

which states that the Ego (the one who thinks) is completely separate from the object of their thinking, influences behavior that materializes such narrative through the impulse to break everything into independent pieces. The fragmented worldview has created boundaries between nations, religions, cultures, racial groups, political-economic thoughts, humankind and nature, and even between the body and the mind.  Whereas fragmentation might be useful for practical and technical activities, once it is applied to the perception of the self and its influence on the whole, this division creates an illusion about the nature of reality and leads to endless conflict and confusion.

The universe is made of a flux of interconnected events and processes, where both observer and observed (Ego and object) mutually affect each other as merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality. The physicist David Bohn called this worldview the Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement. He uses concepts of relativity and quantum theory to explain how the world shouldn't be perceived as made by separate independent building blocks, but rather of different aspects formed in the whole flowing movement with relative autonomy and stability which will ultimately dissolve back into it. How these different aspects or abstractions form and maintain themselves depends on their place and function in the whole.

Through this perspective, we can start to internalize that the thought produced by the Ego is not a description of reality as it is, but simply an insight into the world and a part of an unending development of new insights. Paradoxically, because of the interconnected aspects of the whole where the observer influences the observed and thought influences matter, the belief that theories give true knowledge of reality creates limitations and confusion that, for instance, allow the theory of separation to materialize through experiences such as wars, exploitation, violence, scarcity, and all sorts of conflicts and destructive behaviors.  

Just as the different cells in your body are aspects of the undivided wholeness of you, different humans are part of the undivided wholeness of humanity, and humanity is part of the undivided wholeness of the living system, the living system is part of the wholeness of Earth, and Earth of the universe. The tiniest proteins moving around inside your cells as biochemical cascades are part of the undivided movement and the fractal reality of the universe. Moreover, if your cells cease to coordinate as a whole you cease to exist as a human and are absorbed back into the movement of the living system, just as if the living system ceases to coordinate as a whole it will be absorbed back into the movement of the Earth.

To have clarity of perception about the place and function of humanity in the flowing movement of the universe we need to move past limiting thoughts and start coordinating as a whole. We are not doing so. Hence the importance of

developing global collective intelligence towards the common good.

The sociologist Lester Frank Ward once said: “The extent to which [society will evolve] will depend upon the collective intelligence. This is to society what brain power is to the individual.” Furthermore, it's important to differentiate collective intelligence from collective behavior, as the latter does not involve shared intent and a common goal.  So from a global perspective, even though many authors have coined terms such as "world brain” and “planetary mind”, we haven't yet achieved a state of global collective intelligence because we lack a shared goal and our coordinating forces are still guided by the narrative of separation towards self-centered outcomes.

Here I won't get into details about collective intelligence, as it is a rich field of research about group behavior and organization. Instead, I'll focus on global collective intelligence which is much less approached by researchers, perhaps because of the very nature of the prevailing fragmented thought that prevents us from seeing humanity as one undivided whole.

For definition sake, I have adapted the version presented by Jean-François Noubel in his paper Collective Intelligence, The Invisible Revolution, published 20 years ago. So, henceforth I imply that:    

To support the exercise of perceiving humanity as one undivided whole, I suggest we put all human behaviors throughout history in a spectrum. From the worst to the greatest, from the most hideous to the brightest, this spectrum represents what we are as the flowing moving of humanity. Thus, as every choice of action we make gets added to the spectrum we are able to affect its flowing colors and meaning. You are not a separated individual, you are an autonomous slice of the whole humanity spectrum. With that in mind, GCI can allow us to collectively agree and act upon a redesign of humanity and what it means to be human.

What is so powerful about this mindset shift is that it allows the emergence of shared goals for the common good. Collective intelligence alone does not entail that the shared intent of the group is benevolent, on the contrary, it has been used for many evil doings. The same can apply to GCI, if we don't internalize wholeness and the greater well-being of all life forms as our most fundamental shared goal we risk falling into the same miserable outcomes. That's why some thinkers and friends prefer to use the term Collective Wisdom to bring about a shared intent for an overall benign outcome.    

Moreover, once you start to see other humans, not as enemies, but as forms of you that were shaped and maintained in different parts of the flowing movement of humanity through different experiences and biological formations, you begin to realize that the autonomous slice of you finding its highest place and function in the whole is just as important as the other slices finding their perfect place and function. Thus, we can suggest that another fundamental shared goal would be guaranteeing that all humans have their basic needs met so they can thrive as capable and benevolent beings.

It might be hard to imagine some close-minded individuals embracing such a narrative. But as mentioned before, once we shape our tools, our tools shape us. So, if a group of individuals, who I'll call Sintropians, have such foundations as an emergent shared goal and they design a tool to foster that through GCI then it will model the behavior of others.  

Sintropians are people who agree to be forces of syntropy inside the humanity spectrum. Syntropy (Sintropia) is the coordination force of creation, it's life's energetic principle of order and internal organization that attracts together ever-increasing complex forms to create something new. While entropy breaks things down, syntropy guides them together. It could be translated as life force or the energy behind the phenomena in which life creates conditions conducive to life, as it is mostly diffused through regenerative agriculture practices. The Sintropians I'm calling forth work inspired by life's coordinating principles to guarantee that we, as life forms, also create conditions conducive to life by building GCI as a life-centric tool.

How can Sintropians develop a tool for global collective intelligence towards the well-being of the whole?

Once we have established that to solve humanity's issues we must coordinate not as opposing forces but as differentiated aspects of the same whole, we can begin to wonder what kind of coordination proprieties can influence work that fosters the well-being of the whole and GCI is a viable answer.  

For the development of GCI we must consider many aspects. I have already mentioned the importance of establishing an object-link, which represents the shared intent that inspires different individuals to unite and self-organize. Besides that, other coordinating structures must be considered.

Before progressing to other features, it's worth recapping the two suggested object-links that should guide the development of GCI tools to ensure their proper function as catalysts of wholeness-based behaviors.  

The Sintropians who feel as an emergent property of their being the calling to build GCI in pursuit of these goals must initially look to the current state of the world, where we are drowning in wars, polarization, social inequalities, fake news, environmental destruction, corruption, and all the others symptoms of a failed world to realize all we need to let go of.

Most of our current habits of interaction and organization, which are rooted in fragmentation and destructive competition, are not suited for the development of a wholeness-based GCI. The basic cognitive processes needed for any kind of intelligence—collective or otherwise, like decision-making, problem-solving, sensemaking, remembering, and learning, are heavily impaired by the conflicting interests embedded in our geopolitical-economic arrangements. The first step to developing such cognitive processes globally is eradicating the perverse incentives guiding people toward individualistic actions by presenting them with an alternative coordinating language written through wholeness principles. For that, I suggest we experiment with

Post-monetary task allocation based on commons management.

New information technologies make possible new ways of organizing human activity, so we must leverage that to influence wholeness behaviors. When it comes to organizing labor across societies, we have been using the same technology for millennia: money. Throughout history, money has taken many shapes, forms, and functions allowing much of the societal progress we see today. However, compared to the information technology now available to us, money has become a suboptimal mechanism for task allocation and transaction tracking.

By Bernard Lietaer's definition, money is an agreement, within a community, to use something as a means of payment. In its purest form, it can represent a token of gratitude, a reward for a social achievement, or compensation for mutual aid. Notwithstanding, Western culture has turned it into a purely commercial medium of exchange, typically geographically attached to a nation-state, created out of nothing by bank debt against payment of interests. That's the tool we are using to facilitate exchanges among people and globally guide our socio-economic motivations, it might be clear why we cannot use it to foster a wholeness-based GCI.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Upton Sinclair

"But consider how much more difficult it is to convince someone that doom is around the corner when the money is still coming in."
Andrew W. Lo

Post-monetary

If the narrative of separation is the root cause of the metacrisis, the monetary system is the conductor of fragmentation. Noubel argues that "collective intelligence will be unable to thrive as long as its participants are obliged to compete with one another in attaining this scarce resource called money". The scarcity and competition we currently face when forced to 'earn a living' (as if we haven't already been gifted with life) are artificial properties of money, created and maintained by those in power to control those who don't have it.

Even if we design an alternative currency, free from the competition, subjugation, power dynamics, wealth accumulation, and exploitative permissions embedded in present money, it would be much harder to cleanse ourselves from the problematic logic and habits we have for trading, dehumanizing transactions, materialistically storing value, and extrinsically motivating work. Rather, if the goal is to allow the emergence of collective intelligence, we should use the economic model inherent in it, the gift economy.

In a gift economy, exchanges and transactions are done without an auxiliary currency and the motivations are mostly intrinsic. It works because as humans we have many social psychological drivers of contribution, such as reciprocity, talent recognition, sense of duty, intellectual stimulation, curiosity, tutoring, skills-building, reputation, social status within a community of peers, collective identity, hedonic pleasure, increased human capital, sense of efficacy, playfulness, artistical devotion, spiritual rewards, love, among others. When coordinating within a gift economy each participant finds a strong individual advantage that motivates him to give the best of himself, allowing the convergence between individual and collective interests. The more you give as products and services, the greater your wealth, and the greater your likelihood to receive in return, as each transaction is highly personal.  

According to Noubel, the gift economy is one of the main qualities found in communities where original collective intelligence is at work, along with an emerging whole, holopticism, social contracts, polymorphic social architecture, circulating objects-link, and a learning organization. Even though the gift economy has been a natural aspect of human collaboration, present in many indigenous and traditional societies, it was obscured by colonialism and the modern economic system. Thanks to cyberspace and the peer-to-peer movement it has recently regained traction as it overcame geographical limitations and reached large scales.

Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society. (Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, p. 70)

Task allocation

The gift economy is clearly a nightmare for socio and psychopaths. Instead of emphasizing on materialistic things you can hold and accumulate, it forces you to build connections of mutual aid. If once you had a sterile means of exchange that did not track the evil tactics done to earn it, now your earnings depend solely on your good deeds and reputation. It dissolves the illusion of independence built upon millennia of dehumanized monetary transactions and shines a light on the interdependent nature of any society. I would argue that the gift economy is the economic language of love, it's the most natural way to transact between loved ones and peers. In consequence, its close relational ties are also its limitations.  

The gift economy does not require a ledger or receipts. The transactions are recorded as a bond between giver and receiver, and honor and reciprocity become the inalienable means of exchange. It is also more than pure barter. Many pre-capitalistic societies would organize competitive gift-giving rituals and ceremonies, such as the Potlach and Kula, to foster wealth transfer and establish political and religious hierarchies between clans. Either way, the gift economy has been tied to interpersonal, communal, and geographic relationships, which prevents its scale as a worldwide information system, unless we start recording gift transactions properly.

Not only gift transactions but any transaction for that matter. We must recognize that advances in modern society require us to collaborate with unknown (and even unfriendly) people, with whom we might not want to establish any type of bond, much less one of reciprocity. However, being able to determine their contributions and efforts towards the well-being of the whole might change our approach to that unknown part of ourselves. So, to overcome the gift economy's interpersonal and geographic limitations and simplify contributions measurement, I suggest we go back to the basic element of labor and resource organization: task allocation.

By “task” I mean every activity you perform, every piece of work assigned to you by existence. When your unique DNA was formed and you started existing as a single cell, your first task was to duplicate and you started a cascade of syntropic reactions that is still gathering matter as you. If wholeness is the ultimate purpose, we must bring wholeness back into our every task, because once we turn tasks into habits and perform them as a human collective we create a culture. So a culture of wholeness starts with choosing wholesome tasks.

Tasks and habits have built and destroyed empires, they translate our values and beliefs and are the building blocks of civilizations. Task allocation is now globally governed by "an invisible hand", an out-of-control power structure forcing us to compete for our worth and resources. Within a wholeness-based GCI, task allocation is governed by our shared emergent role, by our agreed desire to foster the well-being of the whole.  

With clear goals in mind, we can start to coordinate as a whole and allocate tasks based on the individual ability to give and contribute. Progress in information technology can allow us to distribute tasks that match intrinsic motivation and personal availability, and safely track commitment and contributions. The gift economy can be globally scaled with the development of a personalized task recommendation engine, in which you are asked to follow your curiosity and pursue what you genuinely care about in the stewardship of your community and ecosystem, and that can guide you to collaborate with people your inner child is comfortable and safe enough to come out to love and play.

The beauty of simplifying an economic system to a task management system based on intrinsic motivation and gift-giving is that it follows the fractal reality of nature, and can be used to manage a household, a small community, a city, and our ultimate home, the scapeship Earth. Telling people what tasks -from the pool of tasks needed to foster the well-being of the whole-  are more aligned with their personal goals and inclinations is not enough to support holistic management. For that, we have

Commons management.

The concept of commons management became famous due to the work of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences awardee, Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons. The book challenges the 'Tragedy of the Commons' theory, which is rooted in fragmentation and states that due to self-interests people will fatally deplete a shared scarce resource unless controlled by a central authority such as the state or the market privatization. To counter-argument, Ostrom analyses long-enduring, self-organized, and self-governed common pool of resources (CPRs) where people managed their commons over long periods of time without central authorities because the individuals jointly using the CPR would communicate and establish agreed-upon rules and strategies to improve collective benefits. By devising their own rules-in-use, individuals using such CPRs overcame the 'tragedy of the commons'. The analysis of the similarities between these successful self-organizing communities rendered the description of 8 design principles for commons management:

1. Clearly defined boundaries - Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions - Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material, and/or money.
3. Collective-choice arrangements - Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.
4. Monitoring - Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.
5. Graduated sanctions - Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms - Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.
7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize - The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities.
   
   For CPRs that are parts of larger systems:
8. Nested enterprises - Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises. (Governing the Commons, p. 90)

These design principles represent an alternative organizational model based on experienced sustainable communal living that allows us to escape both the greatest reinforcers of the narrative of separation, The Leviathan and The Market. Even though the principles must be adapted to the cybernetic advances of modern life and the holistic mindset of this proposal, they are a great starting point for shifting our behavioral patterns and management responsibilities about our commons. Moreover, these are guidelines on how to build collective intelligence towards the common good and exemplify that it is possible to align individual and collective interests.  

With these parameters for organizing, we can test the post-monetary task allocation system to manage the commons. The personalized recommendation engine should be included within a structure that supports the creation of clearly defined commons in which individuals or nested enterprises can coordinate the execution of tasks around provision/stewardship, appropriation/appreciation, monitoring, governance, conflict resolution, and any emergent other. Through this perspective, every task is connected to a commons and those within the boundaries of the commons have the responsibility (and proper information system) to self-sustain it.    

To make it even more comprehensive, the concept of commons should expand from non-excludable goods to anything a group of people decides to share, including private property and you, your gifts, and your workforce. E.g. treating your overly vacant summer house as a commons between extended family and friends means you now share the rights of usage as well as the responsibility to manage and respond to its task allocation. Whereas, treating people (and life forms) as commons means recognizing the potential within all of us and establishing relationships of appreciation and stewardship necessary to create support networks. Those who benefit from your existence in any way should be included in your support network graph so they also share the responsibility of managing and responding to the task allocation that ensures your well-being.  

All these tasks of appropriation/appreciation and provision/stewardship can be tracked, weighted, and exposed to help avoid free-riding, over-appropriation, and under-provision of any set commons, including Earth. Sintropians can now accomplish its GCI goals with a coordinating structure that allows the nested self-governing of their bioregions and support networks while avoiding perverse incentives and supporting individual growth with the use of a personalized recommendation engine that allocates tasks based on intrinsic motivation and personal goals.

However, to effectively organize and deal with the mass amount of data created through this 'post-monetary task allocation based on commons management' CGI system, we must support

The creation of a healthy information ecology,

which comprises the flow and management of information following principles of righteousness and truthfulness. It is crucial for GCI and can only be achieved if we follow the steps above to guarantee people have the right incentives and motivations so they can be inspired to openly share knowledge and trust that the signals transmitted by each individual are at the service of the whole.

For proper problem-solving and decision-making (and the other cognitive processes required for collective intelligence) we must be able to access truthful information about the situation. To manage a commons we must collect and analyze its data.  Noubel references Holopticism as an important characteristic of collective intelligence systems, which can be described as the perception abilities of each participant about the moves of the others and the emerging figure of the whole as they flow forming a distributed real-time informational landscape.

To foster the well-being of the whole means that initially, we have created an informational landscape where we can collectively and momentarily define what the well-being of the whole even means. As mentioned, the nature of reality is of flowing movement, therefore the definition of the well-being of the whole is constantly evolving. A GCI system must accommodate different insights about everything, allowing them to be analyzed and tested for effectiveness and reason. Any form of fixed self-word view should be avoided to guarantee all ways of looking at a matter are integrated and open to new facts.  

A wholeness approach to knowledge and data means we respect every input of information as a signaling part of the flowing movement of reality, charged with antecedences and consequences. We treat the information ecology as one of the globally shared commons, with its proper governance, and sanctions, because it is the structure in which GCI can be formed to fulfill its role in fostering the well-being of the whole. Thus we allow information to flow consciously because it's in my best interest, as I am the whole.

To ensure our perception is guided by the relevant insights, 'unbiased' open-source research and experimentation must become routine practices, as they grant us the ability to observe, test, learn, and refine information about reality. From this common pool of data, we can discover the appropriate sort of action relevant to the whole.

"To end this illusion [of fragmentation] requires insight, not only into the world as a whole, but also into how the instrument of thought is working. Such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life, mental and physical, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation."
David Bohm

To achieve the healthy information ecology required for the holistic coordination of GCI, we must integrate the data produced throughout all the

dimensions of the human experience.

Even though we are part of one whole, we are differentiated for a reason. Differentiation increases complexity and function. Life forms became more specialized once information got nested and DNA was surrounded by a permeable membrane. The paradox of creation is that even if we are an abstraction within a much greater flow of energy, matter, and vibration, we are gifted with permeable membranes that grant us autonomy but also cognitive limitations preventing us from seeing the interconnected flow in which we are embedded.

Not surprisingly, the evolution and differentiation of our species has followed the evolution of our information systems. Our ability to gather, process, and control the flow of information between our membranes has granted our position as a dominant species. Now it's time to progress further and allow data to flow more purposefully so we consciously align our uniqueness to the well-being of the whole.

Inside each human membrane, we produce information in three stances: 1) the Self, comprising everything unique to your existence, your thoughts, and biological processes; 2) human connections, representing all communication, signals, and decisions exchanged intraspecies; 3) planetary impact, representing every externality and interference we metabolize as part of the living system. The fractal nature of the universe again shows that the individual data is made of humanity's data, which is made of the planet's data, and also the other way around, because information as energy, matter, and vibration is constantly flowing through and cross affecting the dimensions.      

Self

Regardless of your level of awareness, a cascade of events within the whole granted you existence just so you could also be part of the movement and leave your marks and contributions to its flow. From the simpler task of breathing to the most challenging decisions, you are impacting the whole. Therefore, how each of us chooses to live is of common interest.  

We are protected within a permeable membrane so we can uniquely process and control the flow of information. As a consequence, we manifest our unique gifts, talents, and disturbances. Every thought process, emotion, decision, feeling, and biological response represents an output offering to the universe. As humans, evolution allowed us to set powerful offerings when it gifted us the distinct cognitive ability to imagine and question. While other beings mostly rely on responsive patterns, we can also rely on reflective inputs. The human self has a special role because it questions and seeks to know itself. Who am I? What am I here for? What’s my life’s purpose? We ask weird questions and when we can’t find the answers we imagine, we create, we look beyond what is here into what could be made of it.

Inquiry allows us to problem-solve and innovate while self-inquiry helps us change, evolve, and calibrate our choices. Within the flow of the universe, humans have been awarded a steering wheel. But to use it we must look at the causalities and implications of our every actions. How are you choosing your tasks and habits? What is the level of awareness behind your decision-making process? Are your actions driven by your goals for the future, your subconscious drives, or societal pressure? How free are you to pursue what you genuinely care about?

Understanding your place while shaping your function in the world is not a simple endeavor. Change starts with how we perceive the world and the level of awareness about our actions. That's why we have tools for time and task management, goal setting, meditation, journaling, vision boards, ego check, etc. All tools for personal growth and organization are at the service of your steering wheel, but they should also be at the service of humanity's steering wheel, aka GCI. Once you have reflected upon your habits, goals, priorities, skills, and intentions, you can choose to flow this information and train the personalized task recommendation engine to support your achievements.

What are you being called to love, protect, and heal? We all care about something and the more we care the greater our willingness for action. If we all share the answer to this question, meaningful connections, and powerful work can be cultivated.

Human connections

There is no sense of self without outside input. The uniqueness held within the individual is bounded by its environment. We might have a steering wheel but the road is full of blockages and restrictions and to have a better view of the road to help our navigation we must connect ourselves to the human collective. That's our greatest superpower, the ability to collectively coordinate based on the intraspecies flow of information.  

Languages, gossip, storytelling, arts, training, contracts, rules, agreements, and debates, are just a few examples of relational tools spontaneously developed as a result of our interactions. To make sense of the world and form our choices we need to share ideas, get feedback on our habits, and receive support, appreciation and inspiration. Besides our powerful intellectual communication, we also share bonds at many other intimacy levels, such as recreational, physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual, and energetic. We need these inputs to give life meaning. There are many types of interactions connecting us and shaping the unique flow inside humanity's membrane.

The reflections done within the self dimension should now gain a collective scope. How are we choosing our tasks and habits? What is the level of awareness behind our decision-making process? Are our actions driven by our goals for the future, our subconscious drives, or self-imposed pressure? How free are we to collectively pursue what we genuinely care about? These inquiries held by peers in groups of all sizes can allow us to re-experience politics at nested levels. At the same time, the quality, expressions, and outcomes of these intraspecies bonds can be signalized in dynamic social graphs and build the foundation for the analysis of support networks.  

A key feature of GCI is perceiving how humanity's body is guided by the constant flow of thoughts, beliefs, and affections, so we can course-correct if it's not aligned with our shared goal. Understanding how and what we are collectively deciding is a crucial step to managing and consciously planning our impact on Earth.

Planetary impact

Both the human individual mind and humanity's collective mind function as navigating systems to the flow of matter we are physically part of. Regardless of our level of awareness, our existence means we are constantly metabolizing matter and affecting the ecosystem. All our life's sustaining processes have a planetary impact, from the food one eats to how we organize our food system. How we supply our demands for water, food, shelter, energy, mobility, health, education, leisure, manufacturing of goods and tools, and communication, all boils down to how we interact with other living and non-living beings.      

We need information from our surroundings to make up our minds about how we want to show up in the world, and once we do, our actions ripple a new flow of information. The feedback loops between species and ecosystems happen when we observe, collect, and analyze all data produced in our bioregions to measure the externalities of our choices, tasks, and habits. Within the planet's membrane, we materialize the individual and collective thoughts of the others' spheres. Sintropians, who want to be life-sustaining forces, must use this data to build GCI and materialize a future in which we share healthy thriving ecosystems and all life forms are protected from extinction.  

We are data cyborgs, scattered data cyborgs!

Information organically flows between the membranes of the abovementioned dimensions. However, what can appear to be an exercise of fragmentation is actually an attempt to highlight the unities within the whole. Even though humans are so uniquely different, a fraction of our biological information (DNA) is the same and therefore we are very similar. The same goes for the living system and our planet. The diversity granted within humanity should be praised as a power and wisely used to enhance the complexity of our collective presence.

Differences in thoughts, beliefs, tastes, and desires can be analyzed and directed toward a shared goal and outcome. The division of labor that has been globally guided by the prompt: how can I make money? trap ourselves in a narrow (and honestly dumb) mindset and human resources usage. We focus on the individual struggle and disregard many aspects of other dimensions. Instead, the division of labor should be prompted as: how can I serve the whole (myself, my community, and Earth)? And to intelligently reply to this question we need information about the spheres to sensemake the whole and manage the commons.  

Thankfully, much of the data produced within the spheres is now digital. We express ourselves and our interactions as digital information. The revolution in information technology has allowed us to cross geographic barriers, and now information about the whole can travel unimpeded. At least that should be the goal even though it's not the case yet.

From the self perspective, the digital version of you, your digital mirror aka data cyborg is currently scattered throughout many private companies that own and control your data. The information you produce is not at the service of any greater good, rather it is being used only to foster consumption and manipulation. Worstly, because your data cyborg is scattered it cannot function properly, meaning you don't have control over it so it cannot fulfill its full potential in supporting your growth and self-realization. Your data cyborg is a reflection of you, and you should manage it accordingly.    

Imagine your data cyborg as an RPG card, with your set of strengths, skills, weaknesses, preferences, aspirations, affiliations, achievements, battle/work history, etc. It can even show your biological markers and health status. Maybe add a time distribution display to help balance your life between self-care, social interactions, and creative work. Knowing yourself so well, when the quests/tasks come in it's easier to decide which battle to take.

Within the intraspecies membrane, imagine your data cyborg expressing your opinions and engaging in discussions knowing that the signal you share is being measured and analyzed to support decision-making. The debates have meaning and clear expected outcomes, either finding a synthesis between arguments or turning the divergencies into experimental studies so arguments can be tested. You are no longer a hopeless voice between billions, but a conscious catalyst of insights self-organizing in nests of different sizes and purposes. Your connections are more than just an audience, they are your support network.

The magic happens ecosystemically and your data cyborg influences your physical reality. Imagine your cyborg connecting you to work opportunities on what you intrinsically care about. Even people who cannot care much about anything other than themselves are also free to do their thing as long as they respect what others care about and are supported by their community. No more bullshit jobs and waste of energy, time and resources. People are honest enough to do what fulfills them, and responsible enough to do what has to be done to ensure the well-being of the whole. The highest social achievement is given to the greatest supporters, so no incentive to hold back your talent, solution, or knowledge. Leadership emerges and shifts organically. Treating your building, your street, and your neighborhood as a commons, connects you to the humans around you and allows the flexibility to quickly problem-solve internal issues. Sharing the learnings and impacts between nearby commons makes it possible to collectively care for your bioregion.  

Probably you are currently sharing somewhere on the internet much, if not all, of the personal, relational, and work information mentioned above. I am not proposing anything new or outrageous, but rather just an improvement on how we organize and use our data cyborgs to achieve GCI. However, it might be scary to think of this amount of information gathered in one spot. If the idea hasn't occurred or frightened you, well it should.        

Technological and ethical implications

Information is power, that's common knowledge. What might be not so clear is that information is power because it profoundly affects decision-making. A powerful flow of information is required to reach a state where GCI, by analyzing and influencing individual behavior, can embrace and transform the world's complexity into a desirable future. In the wrong hands, such power could cause serious damage.

The way we treat and manage data today is captured by fragmentation, and sharing data can lead to harmful and destructive outcomes. The slight possibility of human rights infringement should be enough to consider a system that strives to foster the well-being of the whole as a failure. The biggest technological implication is considering whether is it possible to develop such a system in a way that personal autonomy and ownership over the data are protected as sacred? Each individual and group should be able to decide and control the information flow outside its membrane, and discussions and agreements should be held to decide what information is required for coordination, what can be held private, and secure forms of sharing data while protecting privacy.  

There are very strong aspects of surveillance, traceability, behavior analysis, and persuasive technologies present within this proposal that must also be discussed for its ethical implications.  

Centralization is another important aspect for consideration. Even though we are one whole, it is a very special whole differentiated in zillions of forms throughout the universe. Looking at GCI through a centralized lens would turn it into a rigid structure, susceptible to attacks, and unable to respond to the everchanging aspects of reality. As one of the global commons, it should be collectively owned and managed. Its operating system should change and evolve as we change and evolve, organically and as a product of collective inputs. People should be able to freely contribute and create applications and changes within all dimensions. It should have the flexibility to reflect different individual and collective needs while sharing the same basal language to allow proper function, connectivity, and interoperability between all.    

Energy usage is also a huge bottleneck. Perhaps we are not at a stage yet in which we can guarantee that such a huge amount of data can be processed with renewable energy sources.

I know that some open-source technologies, such as machine learning, AI, decentralized protocols, and web3 should be considered to achieve this endeavor. As I don't have the skills to build it, for now, I'll stick to my abilities of synthesizing this vision with the hope of finding tech-savvy Sintropians to show me the way.

The invitation

The beauty of this proposal is that it's a bottom-up solution in which the hypothesis can be easily tested on a small scale. The hypothesis being: everybody cares about something, and the drives of love and caring should be the primordial forces guiding human organization.

Through a glocal (global-local) process of re-inhabitation at the bioregional scale we can learn to nurture and reintegrate into the regenerative community of life as a planetary process — place by place, ecosystem by ecosystems. We can re-learn the art of appropriate participation and being a healing influence on the systems we depend on and emerge from. We can design for human and planetary health!
Daniel Christian Wahl in Bioregional Regeneration for Planetary Health

At the end of the day, it's just a task management tool with a peculiar narrative embedded in it. If it doesn't work to support a group of volunteering friends to manage a communal space, it most likely won't work at any other scale. Why don't we test it hyper-locally? Is it feasible?

In summary, my intention here is to share with peers something I care about, a part that expresses my uniqueness. This is my syntropic proposal, the work I was intrinsically motivated to do in support of all life. I've been holding on to this vision for more than 4 years now so I'm really happy to share with you this landmark :D

If you came this far I'd love to hear your comments. So please, add to it. Challenge me, share some support, any chains of thoughts, feelings, discomforts, inspirations, anything that arouses inside of you please let it out your membrane. Let’s see what flows!

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