Still buzzing from my first year at the legendary
@GETDWeb Campout in Berlin! What a week of idea-remixing and relationship-building in service of better futures, making allies for
@atlasresear_ch and scheming at the bleeding edge of commons-owned collective intelligence work.
Very honored I was invited to speak. My talk mapped the evolutionary strategies employed by complex systems to successfully navigate information scaling crises, and the implications for our next, much more dynamic and
#flourishing economy.
Talks will be up on
@internetarchive soon! Comment and I'll send the link when it's ready.
Teaser:
Most people working at the frontier of anything genuinely important right now share a specific, uncomfortable experience: the sense that the work that matters most — the work that is irreducibly contextual, relational, and hard to explain — is invisible to institutional incentive structures. Researchers who follow genuinely novel threads get penalized by metrics optimized for legible consensus. Builders who prioritize trust and care over throughput lose funding rounds to faster-moving competitors. Artists, educators, and community organizers are ignored by the very systems their work keeps alive. Meanwhile, the recommendation algorithms that were supposed to connect us have collapsed the information landscape, gradually narrowing the adjacent possible available to each of us and eroding the cognitive diversity that any healthy collective intelligence depends on.
The frame this talk offers is a structural account of why these experiences are happening simultaneously, why they are symptoms of the same underlying dynamic, and how to see the very existence of the
#DWeb ecosystem as evidence that we are on track for a total inversion of economic value.
Drawing on twenty years of research into complex adaptive systems and major
#evolutionary transitions, Michael Garfield (formerly Santa Fe Institute, Long Now, Mozilla) will recast our current economic, ecological, and epistemic crises as a transitional moment in the emergence of
#TheLivingWeb: a future of thriving
#collectiveintelligence enabled by decentralized sensemaking infrastructure.