The Tyranny Of Structurelessness
Hey friends,
I am sending you all love.
Tomorrow’s events:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. Every Tues, Wed, and Thurs @ 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Playing the Infinite Game During the Meta-Crisis w/ James Carse. June17th @ 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Breaking the Frame w/ Travis Mann. Every Wednesday @ 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
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June 16, 2020
I feel impatient and irritable and insensitive.
In hustle mode I become socially cold, and easily annoyed, and judgemental if people are not keeping up. This often leads to bouts of existential loneliness, as I do not feel close to anyone.
I do not want dead pursuits, where I feel cut off from people, and then hustle to secretly win their love. There is a sense that something is here though, and I am riding something that feels alive, and I am asked to hustle to keep it alive. I had a vision, and I am constantly bombarded by daemonic inspired ideas, which fill me with a sense of purpose. This is coupled with a potent confidence and an innocent craziness; that I am capable of doing what I am being asked to do.
I had a meeting with some of the Stoa facilitators yesterday, and Travis called the meeting Brainstorm to Beautify The Stoa. We started by taking turns talking about what currently excites us about the Stoa and how we think it could become more beautiful. Building community was the common thought for beautifying the Stoa.
I feel this and I think beauty is found in communitas, but “community” is different from communitas, and I do not want to make the same mistakes that most “communities” make. I see most communities get hijacked by groupthink, or colonized by some aggressive and unapologetic memetic tribe. It also was gestured that the Stoa should be run by the collective intelligence.
I get deeply annoyed at the suggestion of handing over the keys over to the collective intelligence, especially at this stage. A lot of people in the “sensemaking web” talk about collective intelligence, which I think in theory is awesome, but I sense most people do not know what the fuck that means. I also see people giving mouth service to this term and justify their poorly thought out community design as “doing” collective intelligence.
I am wary of what Jo Freeman calls The Tyranny of Structurelessness, described in Z Magazine as: this apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied.
While Freeman was thinking about radical feminist collectives, I see this manifesting in a lot of communities that sing the praise of collective intelligence. If you throw a bunch of people into a room, that are unindividuated, have a naive inclusivity bias, and have absolutely no power literacy, then this is going to quickly turn into a enmeshed dramatic shitshow.
This is not going to happen on my watch. I do not want to be, nor be thought of as a strongman, and I want to be kept in check from becoming one, which is partly why I am writing this in a public way. However, I am viewing my role of the steward as something different, and I see the Stoa as something different.
I like the thought of the Stoa being a non-entity as long as it can, one that does not become incorporated or has some formal committee and membership, or shit like that. Maybe one day it will but maybe it can just exist as an incubator of beauty for now.
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