Dear Friends of The POP-UP School,
As we approach the final days of our 2025 year, I would first like to thank all of you for your support and encouragement. This year has been a transition year for many of us, as well as myself. As I wrote in this post, many of the signifiers that have been driving our community (at large) no longer seem relevant. I find myself, once again, looking for what is presently latent in the future-now.
As teachers, as elders, we cannot expect for our work to be relevant in its original form forever. It is up to the future generations to re-discover the work that has been embedded in the past like fossil evidence of distant eras. A couple of generations ago, people started looking inward — sociologists call it the “inward turn.” But something entirely new is advancing— something that I wrote about 5 years ago in this article — about the arrival of a new type of human: the post-formal actor. Today I understand this phenomenon as the end of the era of inner development and the beginning of a new era of agency. From the perspective of this new current of agency, we might be seen as having been turned inward for too long.
Although many of my followers here at the POP-UP School and elsewhere, are still deeply invested in the “inward turn” I have always resisted this trend. I have preferred to discuss bodies is space over psychological narratives, tried to emphasize embodied postures, cognitive stances, and active experimentation over introspection — what some might call “everyday Vipassana” (remember the chain saw on the dining room table story!).
We ended up the 2023 year with the notion of a Lyric culture, and the question of ontological design in back loop realities. This led me to a big question
Who gets to build the world we live in?
This was the key topic of my presentation to UNGA panel last year, and it still seems key to what we ought to do — what we must do— facing the new era of agency.
This question is one of the foundation questions of The Divinity School (which is a work in progress). It led to the notion of two experimental learning tracks for innovating into this new-found reality. One track seeks to discover The Horizons of Biological Intelligence, while the other track seeks to discern what it means to Naturalize Machine Agency. There are several intitiaves already in play toward these goals, one of which is my pet-project on designing an evaluative AI (which you can follow here) which is my own experiment in naturalizing machine agency. If you want to learn more about this initiative, read these introductory posts from earlier this year:
This is all preamble to what I am hoping to contribute here at the POP-UP School starting in 2026. I want to create a movement that has lasting power to build the world(s) we hope to see. We are entering an era of radically advanced, radically novel agency, and we need to pair that with an awakened understanding of what is actually happening, with a heightened sense of moral agency and an understanding of the space of moral action, while holding a beacon of meaningful purpose and the role of the new human.
My plan right now is to keep the subscription prices at the same low cost as 2025, but I will be offering longer, participatory and dialogic courses through an external website. Those of you who are paid yearly subscribers will get a 25% discount on those courses. Those of you are paid monthly subscribers will get 10% off. Look for those courses to be announced this coming spring.
There’s a lot more to say, but substack is warning me that this is near the email limit, so I’ll end for now. Hope you are enjoying the end of this year, and looking forward to the energy of a new year.
Bonnie
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