The Side View emerged during a moment of uncertainty and transformation.

One of our central aims, to make sense of how we make sense, is a direct response to the increased levels of noise, polarization, and confusion that pervade our traditional and social media systems. TSV launched in this context alongside a host of new media platforms that, exhibiting something like a collective immune response, emerged spontaneously nearly at the same time to counter a shared sense of ambivalence about our legacy institutions and their ability to guide right action.

While uncertainty remains high, this is also a time for positive change.

The barrier to communication has never been so low. If our collective sensemaking systems previously relied on—for better and worse—tightly controlled institutions and networks, they now take the shape of 10,000 minor voices.

At once local and distributed, this new landscape of sensemakers prefers to exist in the ephemeral spaces of social media, wikis, DM groups, podcasts, and digital campfires. These are environments that host living and dynamic conversations, generating exploratory modes of inquiry that make sense of the present moment from multiple perspectives, geographic locations, and disciplines of practice.

As individuals, our ability to intuit the shape of the future remains limited, but this individual uncertainty has become a collective opportunity. So, in what does this opportunity consist?

We are, as a collective, developing new organs of perception.

It’s time for the sensemaking conversation to address this reality, combine these active threads, and coalesce in a single location, letting these voices crystallize into a few explicit statements that can then be carefully contemplated, evaluated, and responded to.

These dialogues have formed around a network of concepts—attractors for action that orbit phrases like the Long Now, governance futurism, ecology of practices, metamodernism, memetic mediation, Game B, integral philosophy, collective intelligence, the meaning crisis, warm data, meta-rationality, and sensemaking. These concepts and frameworks have been deployed to challenge and transfigure our own faculties of understanding.

This issue marks a meeting place for these conversations.

To help organize the material, this issue’s contributors are set into three larger categories. These are Wayfinding Cultures, Ecology of Practice, and Metamodernism.

Wayfinding Cultures

Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz opens the issue by looking at long-term thinking, a primary goal of The Long Now Foundation, as a mode of askēsis. That is, Brysiewicz approaches long-term thinking from the perspective of the perceptual transformations required to enact it. When we think of collective navigation, it’s easy to think in spatial terms alone, but as Brysiewicz says persuasively, time is also essential to this equation, especially when we begin to think on the scale of 10,000 years.

In her essay, Bonnitta Roy sees the question of navigation as rooted in our ecological and evolutionary inheritance, suggesting that our capacity for perception—or for wayfinding, as she puts it—grows out of our actions and dynamic relationships more than it does our maps and models. By looking at our cognition in the wild, Roy brings to awareness the perceptual feedback loops that make possible skilled action in everything from horseback riding to combative sports to rock climbing to seafaring, and more.

Nowadays it is common to ask questions about the influence of power in our lives, and to interrogate its role in our sensemaking structures and political arrangements. Wolf Tivy engages this theme in a tone that is at once declarative and interrogative stating simply, power exists, how shall we use it? This frame launches Tivy’s experiment in civilizational governance, moving us towards a speculative but considered image of authority that is responsible to our collective selfhood. What would you do if you were in control?

Closing out the first section, Nora Bateson looks at the interfaces of our mutual learning systems, in other words, to the intricate ways in which sense is made in living orders by living beings. Bateson and her collaborators discuss how groups and communities can learn to perceive and respond to the complex issues they face. Through her work with Warm Data Labs, Bateson offers a new lens through which we can better understand our ecosystems, organizations, and social institutions.

Ecology of Practice

The second section, Ecology of Practice, turns on an emerging set of themes variously connected to what John Vervaeke has dubbed “the meaning crisis.” More generally, the essays offer a set of practices and understandings that can be put to use for healthier sensemaking routines. To that end, Raymond Finzel describes the role of emotion in navigation. Emotions, on Finzel’s account, are not merely responses to our encounters with the world, but are themselves perceptual faculties through which we engage with and understand the world in more nuanced ways.

Christopher Mastropietro and John Vervaeke in their co-written article offer both a symptomology of the meaning crisis and an account of the practices that have re-emerged in its wake, including Stoicism, mindfulness, psychedelics, gnosis, participation, and other approaches that together re-invigorate the vita contemplativa. The authors situate their claims both historically and psychologically, offering a multidisciplinary view of the meaning crisis that addresses head on the problem of nihilism in our times.

Davood Gozli engages this conversation richly, and from another angle. If the meaning crisis is in part a consequence of our atomization, Gozli asks, are we not at risk of reproducing its very structure by attempting to ameliorate it through any number of isolated (and isolating) activities, such as listening to the podcasts and YouTube lectures through which many of these ideas find their expression? Gozli walks us through this contradiction, offering new insight along the way.

While increased atomization is a risk wrought by the new media landscape, Jessica Burton shows that we’re using a double-edged sword. Drawing from online communities that have emerged around the work of key figures in developmental thinking, including David Chapman and Robert Kegan, Burton draws out the many ways that personal development is key to our collective navigation, showing in the process how community can and does thrive online.

Two final essays in this group, by Peter Limberg and Jason Snyder, take a different approach to the online renaissance of thought with which this issue is concerned. As self-described memetic mediators, Limberg and Snyder approach the problem of ideological fragmentation from two different angles. Limberg takes a cultural perspective to the problem by coordinating action among the different epistemologies, values, and worldviews that lead memetic tribes into acrimonious conflict with one another.

Snyder for his part takes a contemplative and psychological approach to the problem of mediation, suggesting that mediating between groups is also an effort to resolve our own internal cognitive dissonance, externalized, as it were, onto our multifaceted encounters with the world and the people in it. Both men help us navigate through the in-between worlds of diplomacy and collective intelligence.

Metamodernism

The final section of the issue takes up the theme of metamodernism. Readers familiar with the term will know that it has become an anchor for several different “schools” of thought. By bringing together the perspectives of Greg Dember, Brent Cooper, and Jeremy Johnson, TSV hopes to bring to its reader a high-resolution image of what metamodernism is and where it might go. These articles take up metamodernism from the vantage point of Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s influential paper “Notes on Metamodernism” (Dember), the so-called Nordic School of metamodernism advanced by Hanzi Freinacht (Cooper), and the phenomenology of consciousness approached advanced by the intellectual mystic Jean Gebser (Johnson).

These essays are significant for the images of the respective camps they render, but also for their ability to take-up the positions of their interlocutors, resulting in an energetic exchange in which the authors offer both a distinct view and engage ­with that of the other writers. This publication marks an important moment for metamodernism as a whole. Whether the approach taken is developmental, cultural, or phenomenological, these essays position metamodernism as an inflection point in our ability to navigate what lies before us as the philosophies of the 20th century give rise to those of the 21st. As Johnson writes in his essay, “How can we listen to tomorrow if we have yet to clarify what belongs to yesterday? We don’t just need new maps that order the world in the same old ways. New vision is required. New ontologies reshape the map, and reshape us.”

Compass Points

I’ll close this introduction by noting that this issue goes only some way towards making more vivid a rich but often ephemeral discourse. The liveliness of these dialogues can never be adequately captured in the pages of a journal like The Side View. The words in these essays are merely tools for navigation, compass points that show the way. And yet, it’s a testament to the quality nature of these discussions that we can come together and take a snapshot in time—a freeze frame of a living, entangled whole—so that others not participating in these day-to-day encounters may take part in the adventure of ideas.

Likewise, my hope is that if you are steeped in these dialogues, this collection of essays will offer you a welcome change of pace, an opportunity to engage with the work through a wider glance, and in a slower mode, so that we may better see where this path should unfold into the future. There is much more to be said for the ideas expressed within these pages. Indeed, we are still in the nascent stages of this medium and its message. Perhaps upon your reading you will gain a new insight worth sharing, a new faculty for understanding that the rest of us need to hear right now. We welcome the dialogue.

The mutation is underway. May our brightest concepts, practices, and intuitions meet it.