The visionaries
A few months ago, I discovered that, in the BC19 era (Before-Covid19), a few people around the globe had a strong sense that humanity’s development over the last 200,000 or so years was coming to a critical point. A major transition or phase shift was inevitable – but with some major unknowns: the timing, the nature of the transition, the eventual result and the trigger (if any).
The nature of the transition will almost certainly involve chaos. In the past, all civilizations have come to an end. Why should ours be the exception? But chaos need not be our final destination. We are not helpless, unaware creatures, subject to the inevitabilities of fate.
Our 200,000 years of evolution have brought us to the point where we face these unprecedented, even existential, dangers. But that same 200,000 years of evolution has also developed our capacities and understanding and consciousness to unprecedented levels.
It’s crunch time: do we accept chaos or embrace the opportunity?
When complex systems are subjected to high stresses, they can either collapse into chaos or reconfigure into something more powerful and resilient. (“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”)
Many of the people who have been thinking about this see the potential for this transition to be more positively transformative than any cultural or structural change in humanity’s history.
When it smacks you in the face, you have to take notice
The fragilities of civilization that could become a trigger for this phase shift have been talked about for a long time – decades in some cases. They include climate change, nuclear war, biological war, cyberwar, drone war, eco-system collapse, global financial system collapse, natural resource shortages (especially water), mass migration pressures, misaligned AI, a meteor strike … and so on.
And, of course, a global pandemic. Something very much like the one that’s just smacked us in the face and woken us all up.
So is this IT?
Maybe. Maybe not. It may take several years before that starts to become clear. The emotional, financial, economic and governmental power disruptions will be playing out for decades in ways no-one can foresee.
But now that we are in the C19 era, these issues are suddenly of concern to many, many more people.
At the very least, almost every human adult and teenager has become viscerally aware of humanity’s susceptibility to global pandemics. It’s no longer an abstract talking point of interest only for the experts. A huge number of people are now beginning to understand the fragility of our current world order and question the stability of their lives.
Once we experience one global threat which we previously felt was not worth our attention or emotional energy, we become much more aware of, and concerned about, all the other global threats.
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So, the idea of a transtion into chaos, even oblivion, is now a concern for a great many more thinking people.
But it’s essential to keep in mind that such a transition has two possible directions. We have to learn to live with experiencing existential concern right alongside seemingly unwarranted excitement at this once-in-a-humanity opportunity.
If you’re still with me, thanks!
In time, this site will help you find the information behind all the assertions I’m making, and provide some help in answering questions such as..
“what does it mean for me?” And “what should I be doing about it?”
Let me immediately state the obvious. There are no easy answers. In fact, it’s not productive to have a mindset of ‘looking for answers’. Don’t look for certainties.
Except for this: we certainly cannot wait for our traditional authorities to find solutions. Or, in fact, for any authority.
For a positive outcome, the only way through this is bottom-up. Not top-down.
Each of us has to individually find our own path which, to the best of our understanding, avoids perpetuating the problem. And each path will be unique, and no-one can tell us what it is.
But although we each have to find our path individually, we don’t need to do it in isolation.
The role of this site
There are already many excellent resources available for learning about these idea, and for participating in various local and global communities.
My goal for this site is not to replicate what these other entities are doing, but to curate and structure the content in some way, and provide links to and descriptions of the source material and people involved.
Exactly what this will look like or how it will be used I can’t tell at the moment – but I can glimpse some pretty exciting potentials. It seems to me that there is an urgent need for something like this, so I’m setting it up with little planning and I’ll see how it evolves. One reason I think there is a need is that it would have been very helpful to me 6 months ago, and also today.
My credentials are that I used to be a knowledge management consultant, and also that I have some experience using WordPress tools that are excellent for representing and displaying structured content.
Over the next week or two, there should be some content appearing. But in the meantime, to prove that I’m not some poor soul that’s gone of the rails with too much self-isolation, here one of the best sources of information I’ve found for you to follow up with.
If you’re someone already operating in this area, make sure I don’t miss you by getting in touch via the first form below.
Also use this for any comments or questions.
Use the second form to register on my email list to be kept informed about developments of this site. Eventually, I’ll use this list to share information about developments of and news about the people and entities that I list on this site: but for now, I’ll just be reporting on major developments here.
Let’s connect!