Starting this Wednesday …
🕊️ The Wise Agency: Accomplish Consciously, Together 🕊️
Featuring:
Pay-what-feels-right (you can attend and pay for just one session).
Sign up via Metalabel:
“Inverse courses.”
My new favourite experiment.
The idea: instead of the common teacher–student dynamic where an expert imparts knowledge and grades students at the end, a “steward” proposes a theme—ideally some kind of envisioned new knowledge or skill—and, from a stance of not-knowing, guides the collective intelligence toward greater insights, with the students ultimately “teaching the teacher.”
Or at least, that’s the idea.1
The first half of a session is a presentation—top-down knowledge—as a prompt, which then sets up bottom-up, emergent insights: the main event of the session.
Basically, slide presentations (the best artistic genre, really) + a collective dialogue, or “intersubjective meditative practices,” as some kids call it today.
They have been going quite well. We’ve had two last year…
The Entity Pill — Investigating “discarnate entities” that many are talking about these days, from a proposed discipline of “transperspectival demonology.”
Internet Real Life (hosted with the one and only Katherine Dee) — Sensing into the dialectic: Internet Optimism (Thesis) vs. Internet Pessimism (Antithesis), moving toward Internet Realism (Synthesis).
Now, we just finished another on Friday, probably our best yet…
Worldview Studies — Sensing into the worldviews, past, present, and future, that are shaping our world.
I’ll list at least three ingredients I think make an inverse course work…
Firstly, you have to have a syllabus: a carefully curated collection of eclectic writings around the proposed topic.
🌐 WORLDVIEW STUDIES SYLLABUS 🌐
Secondly, have a theme song.
You have to have a theme song, since it sets the vibe for what is being co-discovered. Play it before the session begins to prime the collective for where we are heading.
For The Entity Pill …
For Internet Real Life …
For Worldview Studies …
What a banger from ARIEL PINK, and a very fitting vibe for the worldviews we were about to explore…
Times like these I get depressed and I feel so sad
I think that I’m fucking wrong
If I’m wrong it’s for the best and I feel so sad
Cause everyone’s fucking wrong
Everyone’s fucking wrong
Thirdly, you just have to trust what emerges. Have the optimal grip between control and resonance. Treat the experience as artwork. And, as the steward, do not be afraid to be selfish in what you want to learn, which, consistently so far, results in a sense of selflessness toward what others want to learn.
The Stoa has always been a sense organ for me, helping with sensemaking and sensebreaking around a facet of reality. These inverse courses make this process just a little more sophisticated.
In Worldview Studies, we had three presenters, all high-quality and up-and-coming Substackers: rina, Gary Sheng, and Simon Pearce.
First up was Rina …
A great presentation to start us off, which, to my understanding, argued the following:
The 500-year project of modernity is ending.
The internet opened the proverbial doors for meta-perspectival awareness to become widespread.
AI has opened the door to a new metaphysics beyond materialism.
The worldviews in play today are reacting and responding to this vibe shift, and according to Gary and Jordan Hall, three are fighting for the “soul” of humanity…
They are:
The Transhumanists
The Ethno-Pagans
The Universal Sacred
As Gary and Jordan are meta-Christians, they are betting on the Universal Sacred.
Simon, the next presenter, had a slightly different tripartite …
His framing:
Bayesians
Postmodernist New Left
Civilizational Traditionalists
Rather than meta-Christianity, his proposed response is meta-rationality (à la David Chapman).
At the end of his session, Simon asked us, “What’s next?”
I took up this question and officially2 concluded the course with a summary of the presentations, then leaned into speculating about the timelines in front of us through the filter of accelerating technological change…
When studying worldviews, you reach a point where you have to, using the raw materials of the collective conscious and unconscious, simply imagine what comes next.
There are many useful tools emerging for this, one of which is “pragmatic imagination” from Ann Pendleton-Jullian and Seely Brown: a form of imagination that works practically with perception and reasoning (and their limits) to help us navigate what’s next.
Speculations lead to further experiments, ones that allow us to play freely, meaning to allow exploratory, open-ended, and non-linear insights to emerge from the collective ether, which, in my experience, they always do.
I also sense that having a social container for this free play to take place is, as my friend and attendee of the course Khalil JRM calls it, a world viewport, allowing worldviews to take shape and be shaped.
With this experimental play in mind, our next experience starts this Wednesday with The Wise Agency, an inverse course on moving away from mere “high agency” toward “wise agency”: accomplishing the right thing, in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason, and with the right people.
It’s also the first time The Stoa will be happening simultaneously in person with a cohort of 20, and online, hopefully with you.
Bonus session!
Serving as a bridge between the Worldview Studies and The Wise Agency experiences is a session we are having this Wednesday at 12 p.m. Eastern called:
HeadOn is a moonshot project using AI to transform online conflict into connection, rebuilding the internet’s social fabric amid growing division and institutional decline.
Philosopher-builder Adam Boaz Becker, founder of HeadOn, a moonshot project using AI to transform online conflict into connection and rebuild the internet’s social fabric amid growing division and institutional decline, will visit The Stoa to seek guidance from our collective wisdom to help close the “meta-perspectival gap.”
Closing the meta-perspectival gap means learning to see how our viewpoints interact and limit understanding. By recognizing and integrating multiple perspectives, individuals can reduce polarization and foster empathy.
Would love to have all the Stoans there to help Adam out!
Free for all. RSVP below…
See my “Inverse Course” presentation here to learn more:
We had excellent bonus sessions in this series, which will be released on the YouTube channel soon.
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