Knowledge tech and dreams

Practically every rabbit hole I fell down led to the same conclusion: in order to solve the world’s biggest challenges, we need to figure out how we can create enough collective wisdom to do so.

When I was a teenager, my family and I moved back to Finnish Lapland from the Bay Area where we had spent the second half of my childhood. It was somewhat intense for me. I was a 15 year old California kid stuck in the middle of nowhere — far from my friends and what I felt like was the centre of civilisation at the time. I started to wonder what really was the purpose of life. Why was I here? How bizarre was it that I happened to be alive, co-existing with these people, in this specific moment in time and space? And furthermore, what was this incredible species I was a part of? How did we get here, and where are we going?

I began to think a lot about that last part: where we are going. The more I reflected on it, the more acutely aware I became about the importance of this question. And frankly found it entirely absurd that this wasn’t being discussed, widely across society, all the time. I remember asking my physics teacher what his thoughts where, if he didn’t find it ridiculous that people spent so much time and energy on minute details when we had the whole future of everything to deal with?

As time went on, my curiosity around existence, consciousness, and our common future grew. Eventually, I discovered existential risk as a formalised field of study and found it both beautiful and immensely relieving that there was a group of scholars and thinkers working on this. I started familiarising myself with the literature, diving into each risk category — climate, AI risks, nuclear war, biotechnology, and more. It became increasingly apparent to me that solving a single one of these threats wouldn’t get us to a place of greater safety. The more I read, the more I began to feel we were facing something so much bigger, deeper, and more fundamental than we were willing to admit. The world had changed, but our ways of living, collaborating, and governing couldn’t keep up.

I went through several phases and thought experiments on how I could work on this problem. In 2017, I was trying to figure out how I could build a virtual country on blockchain — thinking that would enable us to redefine our relationship, ideas, and purpose regarding nation states. (Was very happy to see Balaji Srinivasan publish The Network State last year!) I became so infatuated with the concept that I started obsessing over the power of the thought itself, wondering if the mere idea was more influential than the actual existence of it at this stage. I imagined how we could utilise the power of culture to communicate the most interesting ideas to more people. Logic being: if X number of people thought about Y, could that lead Z number of people to build something. Perhaps that could bring lasting change.

In the end, practically every rabbit hole I fell down led to the same conclusion: in order to solve the world’s biggest challenges — across climate, AI risk, nuclear, or whatever it may be — we ultimately need to address the foundational question of how we can create enough collective wisdom to do so. The internet gives us a massive opportunity here. We have all the data and information in the world, and plenty of ways to organise it for the purpose of ‘productivity’. The next iteration of the social internet has to be about more sense-making, creativity, and authentic self-expression. We want to shift the focus from productivity to creativity, to turn data → information, information → knowledge, and knowledge → wisdom.

This techno-social way of thought is the starting premise of Sane, and if I may be so hopeful, the knowledge tech community as a whole. I feel we are on the brink of something big that could permanently change the course of humankind, for the better. These ideas are being advanced by brilliant fellow founders and thinkers like the Collective Media crew, this group of misfits, Jerry Michalski, Steve Huffman, and enablers such as John Borthwick, Ev Williams, and Cyan Banister. This gives me a lot of confidence that we will see the ‘countercultured dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion’, as Fred Turner puts it, alive and well on the internet.