The untapped potential of fragmentation-integrating systems

Differences that should start making a difference.

Our world is tormented by contradicting perspectives:

• What is the right way to deal with various crisis (e.g. Covid-19) within our families, communities and on a political level?

• What is true? E.g. were Pallets of Bricks Planted at Black Lives Matter Protests?

Individually and collectively we are quite bad at holding and tending to theses rifts that we ourselves create. The result of that is, that our collective reality is a fragmented landscape. Ones personal role in that landscape will inevitably be one of these three:

• 💢 fragmentation-inducing — If i am unaware of / unconsciously entangled with the fragmentation within me and around me i thus will add to the overall fragmentation of the world.

• 👀 fragmentation-aware — The more i am aware of fragmentation the more carefully i might tread, becoming less reactive, growing more resistant to polarizing influences.

• 🩹 fragmentation-integrating — Eventually i might grow to be able to tend to the rifts / fragmentation.

These 3 roles mirror the Pocket Projects proposed shift from a trauma-inducing, to a trauma-informed to, finally, a trauma-integrating society. 📈

As a software-developer i am hyper-aware how much of a role technology plays in shaping our perspective and how little fragmentation-aware and instead fragmentation-inducing our digital systems, like social media, search engines, forums and messengers currently are.

I belief that fragmentation-aware and even fragmentation-integrating systems could be build. To investigate how current systems deal with contradicting perspectives and what higher possibilities lie untapped let’s imagine this:

You want to build a public online collaboration platform where users can can post arbitrary statements (simple sentences) and annotate those with tags. The purpose of the project would be to provide a useful resource to the public whereby users can filter through the statements by means of the accumulated tags. Statements once added can not be deleted or altered in any way. Users can only browse statements and add/remove tags.

Now imagine as an example a user would post the statement “Covid escaped from a lab“ and add the tags “covid“ and “truth-bomb“. Soon an other user comes along, sees the statement and disagrees as he or she thinks the “truth bomb” should be dropped, no pun intended, and a “wild speculation“ tag should be added instead.

We got ourselves 2 contradicting perspectives. 🎉 How could our fictional collaboration platform system that we want to design deal with such contradictions?

I will map out a few of the many possibilities by portraying increasingly aware / complex and able system designs - each corresponding to a stage in the spiral dynamics developmental model. Knowing spiral dynamics might add to the enjoyment but is not required. Here we go:

Stage Red 💪💢

Spiral Dynamics Stage Red being aggressive and impulsive and valuing immediate gratification might create a system that would allow any user to just delete any tag they don’t like. Of course the enraged other user would just add his or her tag right back. An aggressive back and forth might ensue. 😠

The system at this stage can not be be considered in any way fragmentation-aware and contradictions are hence not addressed. Maybe servers go down due to aggressive clicking. 😅

Stage Blue 👑

Spiral Dynamics Stage Blue valuing stability at the price of individual freedom might design a system that assigns some kind of singular authority, a dictator if you will, that alone can accept or dismiss any tag additions or deletions. Statement creators might reign over the statements they initially created or each user may reign over the tags they added. However such a dictatorship would be set up in particular - the result would most likely not be in the benefit of the public.

The system at this stage can still not be be considered in any way fragmentation-aware and contradictions are hence not addressed - there is just a little less noise - yay.

Stage Orange 💪👨

Spiral Dynamics Stage Orange striving for individual autonomy might design a system that might implement some sort of majority vote. Tag additions and deletions could be voted for and a tags would show up to the public if the majority of voters would support that.

The system could at this stage be considered somewhat contradiction-aware as the voting result would unmistakably reveal it. By definition the system would only work well for the majority of users while being biased against minorities.

Stage Green 👬💞

Emphasizing inclusivity, yet discriminating against those that are not themselves inclusive, this system would not be happy with a majority vote but instead actively run and “police” the platform. It would actively include minorities but would ban or censor users that fall short according to their own particular set of values. Let’s call it the facebook-model. 😏

The system at this stage is very contradiction-aware and would make a lot of diverse users happy even though those might not necessarily amount to a majority in numbers. The contradiction can however not really be considered fully addressed as certain users or views need to be excluded. In addition the centralization of power required to police the system is a weak spot that invites abuse. It’s easy to condemn such a systems flaws, as they are currently debated a lot in public debate, yet such a system likely outperforms the previous ones.

Second Tier Stages 🎉

All the systems so far are basically known models that exist in the wild. None of them is truly inclusive and able to hold contradicting perspectives. Yet the latter is just what the spiral dynamics second tier stages do - they can hold and responsibly manage contradictory perspectives as they are increasingly fragmentation-aware and fragmentation-integrating.

Many people moving into second tier and the systems they’d (co-)create would amount to a paradigm shift just that might have the power to:

• deescalate and/or transcend political polarization

• eventually solve the meta-crisis / ecological crisis

• design anti-fragile systems

• transitioning form the finite Game A to the infinite Game B

• …

As said before - the contradictions that torment our world only do so because we and our systems are so bad at holding and tending to theses rifts that we ourselves create. Second tier individuals and technological systems will not make contradictions go away - they will (lovingly) embrace it. 🤗

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” — Einstein

The next “level” of technology, which might be called second tier or fragmentation-integrating technology would be characterized by

• not furthering polarization

• understanding / mapping out the present fragmentation of perspectives

• assist and support conciliation work

Stage Yellow 🤗🌐

Spiral Dynamics Stage Yellow valuing diverse rational and subjective perspectives would create systems that can hold contradiction. How might this work in our toy model? One user can remove a tag while the other user can still see it. By not creating artificial scarcity by insisting on one reality where a tag can either be present or absent the system not only respects the individuals views but at the same time also starts to map out the rifts and contradicts that are present. Of course users that do share certain views also need to see the same tags. Technically we might call this the establishment of “reality tunnels”.

In our toy model the basis for the reality tunnels would be the fact that users do add and remove certain tags. Users that perform the same action would be moved into the same reality tunnel and start to see more of what users “like them” see. Other reality tunnels would just be a button away, however, as we don’t want to lock users into a filter bubble.

This might sound complicated but it’s important to stress that we just model real world fragmentation phenomena that are anyway present among social groups and individuals. Just as you might have to model in yourself where your discussion partner is coming from the system will have to perform a similar function. Systems like google or facebook do know a lot about their users views - deduced them from their actions - be it through likes, search queries or those of their peers. They model your beliefs, yet not in order to reveal fragmentation but to maximize the attention they get from you - and they do all their modeling in secret. 🥷

A more honest way might be to handle the model of the users views transparently and invite participation by letting users refine or correct the created model(s). One could possibly picture such a model as nothing more that a set of memes (held beliefs). And a meme could be represented as nothing more that an arbitrary statement. Given all the data points the system might use those memes to assemble the reality tunnels in various ways. In some contexts a users position might be modeled quite broadly by e.g. by mapping their beliefs of a left-right political spectrum or more granularity by “subscription” to particular memes. For example 2 users might vote for the same political party yet completely disagree on how Covid-19 related policy should look like. The distinct spiral dynamics stages and tiers can interestingly be considered to be claims of naturally occurring reality tunnels. In fact spiral dynamics is specifically concerned with clustering value memes.

Depending on the context different means of modeling reality tunnels would need to be explored - experimentally and scientifically:

• emulating the tier 1 mechanisms like majority vote or dictatorship would likely still need to be employed around questions of coordinating action or efforts or funds in a given community

• some policing might be desirable around measurable objective truth in a e.g. scientific field

• “meme based dating” 😂 might require a certain level of secrecy or rules of often one can change ones reality tunnel…

In summary a stage yellow system would model the present contradictions and accordingly assign users to a growing number of reality tunnels which can be thought of as meme clusters. In the process a fragmented landscape of various sometimes disjointed sometimes overlapping perspectives / realities would emerge.

The price for such a system would be it’s higher inner complexity as well as possibly a higher cognitive load for users as more choices may need to be made.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. — Einstein

Such a system would drag the ugly truth about the fragmentation of our world into broad daylight. Polarities and affinities would be clearly distinguishable. It might be a sobering realization. However:

A problem well stated is a problem half-solved. — Charles Kettering

And half-solving fragmentation might just be what a yellow system might be able to offer.

Stage Turquoise 🧑‍🤝‍🧑👭🤝👫👬

Spiral Dynamics Stage Turquoise valuing and deeply emphasizing with all perspectives would build it’s system on top of the yellow fragmentation aware system and offer opt-in mechanisms and/or processes that support consilience and trancendence. These consilience-tools would never be about pushing a certain agenda on anyone! Instead the aim would be to facilitate dialog between realities. The facilitation aspect would likely include something like match-making by matching participants whose reality tunnels have a certain maximum or minimum divergence or convergence. The facilitation could also be ritualized / gamified. Ingredients could be e.g.:

• participation in a CTIP (collective trauma integration process)

• playing a cooperative game

• dialog spanning multiple themed sessions

• forming of duads or triades or bigger groups

• art-therapy methods like assembling collages or digital art installations

• turn-taking in talking or chatting

• initial meditation or body or emotional awareness exercises

• invitation of a mediating third party

• engaging in non-violent communication

• exploration of shared controversial values

• emergency pause (e.g. muting all participants for 60s)

Outcomes might be:

• 🔥 escalation - “this was a bad experience“, reality tunnels diverging further e.g. though a participant signaling “no more interaction with participants with characteristic X“ where X could be age, sex, creed, profession, etc.

• 😐️ no-change in conviction but maybe still a meaningful exchange 🌸

• 🤔 a user might move into a reality where he/she holds a certain position less strongly and starts considering alternative perspectives as well - which could be step towards a possible transcendence of the old believes…

• 💡 one reality tunnel dissolving to an other - if one party was “convinced” and/or learned something new.

I hope this post makes clear that there is no need to be stuck with fragmentation-inducing technology. We can evolve ourselves and our technology! Moving toward second tier / fragmentation-aware technology - be it through a search engine, social network, or some trans-http / distributed ledger or in an other way would be a huge success for human kind and an endeavor I’d love to know of and/or be involved in. 🙏

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source of the post preview image: @marcuslofvenberg