E47| Civium & The Problem Of Civilization

• What is it for minds to come together and do something of value?
• An introduction to Civium – a response to the problem of civilisation itself
• The problem of civilisation as the problem of cities
• Cities as growth attractors, and the relationship between sub-linear scaling and super-linear scaling (income / innovation
• The difference between growth and increase, referencing Tyson Yunkaporta
• Increasing quality of relationships
• Decoupling the virtual from the physical
• Reconnecting with nature at the dunbar level, while connecting more effectively in the virtual
• Separation, extraction, storage
• The trade of relevance for salience
• Discernment and recognising that it’s possible to choose sacredness over the hyper salient
• Choosing what the heart and mind can both say yes to
• Flows, game-b and clearing up the signal gestured at, but not clearly so, by the term non-hierarchical
• The centre as a shared sense of the what and the why
• Proceeding from coherent wholes
• Growing, not just doing, as a way of knowing whether one is in right relationship

People Referenced

Nora Bateson; Alexander Bard; Jeffrey West; Tyson Yunkaporta; Zak Stein; Daniel Schmachtenberger; John Vervaeke; Luis Bettencourt; Jim Rutt

Keywords (Mostly AI Generated)

Relationship; City; Civilisation; Speaking; Notion; Increase; People; Problem; Conversation; Center; Trade; Bodies; Create; Virtual; Grow; Minds; Nature; Context; Human; Game-b; Game-a

By way of introducing Jordan to those who aren’t familiar with his thinking in the civilisation design space, here’s just a small slice: he’s been a multiple tech entrepreneur and angel investor. He was on the founding team of mp3.com which made early moves to decentralise the music industry, and went on the found DivX, which made the first critical move in developing the video technology which ultimately laid the pathway for things like YouTube and Vimeo.

After exiting DivX he joined the Sante Fe institute, a world-renowned home of complexity science, and became involved in topics including futurism, artificial intelligence, complex evolutionary dynamics, conflict management, and crisis management. During that time he became a co-founder of Game-b, a design space for the development of an alternative to Game-a, or the story of civilisation so far, understood to be on a self-terminating track.

With a grounding in deep philosophy and history and years of practice as part of the deep code collective intelligence project, Jordan exemplifies an artfulness in dialogue that’s particularly resonant with this project. In this conversation we discuss some of the core thinking behind his more recent Civium project, which seeks to bring together decades of thought and research relating to civilisation design.

To watch Jordan’s YouTube series on Civium and find a whole lot more value than just that, go here.

To read some of his work go here.

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