The Internet isn't just one network. There are at least three distinct expressions of this technology that originated in the United States in 1969. J.C.R. Licklieder, a physiological psychologist who led the engineering team developing the ARPANET, dreamed of an "intergalactic network" that connected all humanity through what he saw not as a computational system but the world's latest and greatest communications medium. While this has happened in a way, the internet also remains distinctly segmented by the social and economic goals for the people employing it. It is also barely an infant in terms of the technology's age.
Most expressions of networking in human society carry the trait of division, arguably an artifact of the etiological events of the Tower of Babel, the Gigantomachy or the tale of Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta which point to ancient geographic dispersions as well as changes in social and economic focus. From language to nation states, humans have learned to function with these divisions, and I speculate they are necessary to keep our species from falling wholly under domineering forces beyond conventional understanding. That said, cooperation is possible and necessary, even in division. With the emergence of network society, we now have tools that are much more powerful than bureaucracy and central authority to compute such collaborative action.
Here at the Network Theory Applied Research Institute we support network society by creating programs and tools we believe will enhance internet-based society for common people. We derive much of our influence for project development from theological and fictional literature. One work in particular gives us a ripe environment for thought experiments on the future of network society. Frank Herbert was raised Catholic and eventually converted to Zen Buddhism, but was also heavily influenced by Islam. In the Dune series, which has recently been resurrection by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, the Orange Catholic Bible plays a minor role as a well respected ecumenical document within the Imperium. It's origins span tens of thousands of years prior to the events of the movies and include expressed influences from Islam, Buddhism and Christianity and also lifts nearly whole verses out of the Chinese Tao Te Ching. Its contains such memorable quotes as, "Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a human mind,", "the meek shall inherit the universe," and "thou shalt not disfigure the soul,".
What is most interesting about this fictional document is its fictional origin. The Dune series is a lengthy contemplation about the dangers of centralized authorities, especially those political or religious in nature. Yet, the OCB is a work of centralized interreligious dialogue. Bureaucratic dialogue would have been the only method of producing such a document in the mind of someone writing in the 1960s, pre ARPANET, but today, we have the internet, human-based computation and collective intelligence networks. Herbert casually displays prescience with elements of his fictional universe. After the Butlerian Jihad, the humans of the Dune universe began a work of mass value elicitation concerning "the common belief that there exists a Divine Essence in the universe," which culminated in the amalgamated OCB.
Most humans have a belief in divine essence, but are divided in their hypothesis of what/who it is, where it is and it's relationship to us. Recognizing the dawn of network society, we think the human race needs the type of prompting imagined by Herbert to decide how to answer modern global crisis and that the response will largely be a matter of theological responsibility. It is these values that drive us to honor nature over economy. However, corporate and nation state institutions (socialist and democratic) are largely and necessarily atheistic. Most religious leaders are also handicapped in this situation. They rely on patrons for their livelihood and as a result, each sit atop doctrinal mountains formed by laymembers of the faithful. Competition between them is even fiercer than between nation states, albeit less violent, with Christianity alone having more than 40,000 denominations. The paradox of needing to employ centralized leadership to prompt the global masses which is incapable of prompting us in this very particular situation is the reason for the Lost Sheep Research Fellowship.
The Lost Sheep is a network society for interfaith dialogue, driven by the scientific method. It supports small chapters of participants who study not only their faith, but respond to others using a standardized network protocal for study and expression. The method of study is the close reading method and the method of expression is reciprocal teaching. Both of these are literary interpretation methods used to develop students from middle school into university.
We believe this pattern of node development and expression will produce an open, decentralized network capable of exercising collective intelligence over the length and breath of human theology, philosophy and culture-- a network theology with enough wisdom to speak to the dialect of any human faith. We hypothesize this process will take centuries but once achieved, the network will be capable of cultivating the chaos of human thought universally toward a collective goal. While on the surface this sounds a bit like Herbert's Bene Gesserit, the Lost Sheep employ a mechanism he couldn't dream of.
Collective intelligence within an internet-based network produces a mind that is more responsive and farther seeing than any nation state. National governments use bureaucratic controls to research and develop responses to problems, standardizing the models upon which their solution will be inflicted and obliterating the natural freedoms associated with life. Though they work to an extent, national bureaucratic "sight" is often devastating to those the state does not explicitly plan to see. Collective intelligence on the other hand, requires the distribution of solutions to the public in order that they make their own choice as to its utility. There are nearly as many internet users as there are humans on the planet. Each is a potential node in any collective intelligence network.
Systems like these seem like chaos to a state, which tends naturally toward the interests of its governing figures, but to the driver on a highway, or the user of a language, it is freedom of decision. This is also the bane of profit-seeking institutions who see open-source, freely distributed tools like language as wasted energy. But I argue the energy of ebonics is not lost on African Americans, nor is any other version of pidgin English produced around the world by British colonialism. Despite nearly always existing in the presence of primary and tertiary langauges, pidgin English links the communities using it with a sense of national and indeed international consciousness. What may be said about human-based computation systems like the Lost Sheep Research Fellowship? While they certainly work like language in a way it is hard to predict the future, but we certainly aren't playing around with temporary, profit seeking fixes that amount to band-aids on bullet wounds:
If you would like to learn more about the Network Theory Applied Research Institute's Lost Sheep Research Fellowship, visit www.ntari.org/lsrf. Starting a chapter of Lost Sheep is easy! Just follow the instructions at the link above
To learn more about Collective Intelligence Networks we suggest reading the Collective Intelligence Project's Whitepaper found here
