To note:

The following posts, which date back to 2020, are fragments of a big idea-vision that I’ve been working on for some time. Currently, over 1,000 pages are being honed into a slim book. And, conversations are being held. Should you wish to engage, I welcome you to write at the email above—with the caveat that I might not be able to answer quickly. Thanks for your interest, Casey

Dear Leftist-Progressives (& Others): Be Internet Visionary

You cringe. The next internet will surely take all of humanity even farther from the living earth and what dignity is left to us.

Crypto disasters, transactional losses—all prove your instinctive repulsion to the next internet/web3. Look what’s happened with social media: more violence, degradation, a political sphere emptied of coherence. Weaponize that further?

I get it. Until, that is, I look at humanity’s evolutionary position. We’re in the Anthropocene now. Our position to the earth and one another as creator-drivers is a new position. We are tasked with seeing changes taking place inside physical, biological, cultural realities—the world(s) of our making—as an urgent matter of public mind.

How shall we mediate this living planet to ourselves? What kind of news and discourse is called for?

It’s clear that legacy media fails us on a daily basis. Important stories are routinely missed or suppressed. Yet, today’s media problem isn’t a problem that can be solved by breakaway journalists starting their own news outlets.

The problem we face is a logic problem.

We just can’t see physical, biological, cultural realities in their own terms and conditions. We are, in truth, functionally blind to them. Why? Because we question through well-established economic, political, and social interests. Such interests have their own views, their own questions and discourse. And, everyday, money flows through their structures and systems, reifying that collective blindness.

It’s time for a paradigm shift. A shift that identifies humanity’s need to learn physical, biological, and cultural realities as the primary world(s) of our making.

For the first time, humanity is becoming conscious of having a mind unto itself. It’s true that our shared public mind is, today, highly irritable, polarized and paralyzed. Nonetheless, we are self-birthing a collective public mind. Identifying what we need to know is on us.

Imagine going online everyday as a student or worker or in your free time to question ‘what is going on’ on the planet. A living planet. A living planet that’s alive in ways yet to be seen. And, in the seeing, in the discovery, radically shifts public understanding of creative/destructive action.

Imagine going online everyday as a learner among learners, questioning ‘what is going on’ within cultural life—the emo-cognitive matrices of being human—as a matter of public urgency.

Imagine having the technological means to initiate or join inquiries underway through questions you’d not previously considered: Through views of the planet and humans that place old assumptions in a new light. Through indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through other species’ ways of knowing and being. Imagine exposure to the full spectrum of perceiving-feeling life forms and how such questioning—how such learning—informs public reasoning.

Here’s where the next internet/web3 merits full attention. How will it be designed? How could its architecture enable all of us to become inquirers? How could money flows reinforce the informed and self-informing public mind? How might democracy itself ‘level-up’ through such an informed public mind?

Let’s not freeze in a cynical distaste for all things internet. Let’s have some confidence in ourselves as moral/ethical creatures driven by an insatiable need to know so that we can be wise.

Let’s be clear that the questions and concerns driven daily by contentious economic, political, and social interests will not inform humanity as needed.

Let’s be visionary. Let’s see that questions and concerns driven by humanity’s need to know physical, biological, cultural life will vastly, radically re-inform our very idea of economic, political, and social life.

And, do so in the timeframe called for by eco-human crises.

Let’s understand that we are at the end of one paradigm and at the beginning of a new one.

Let’s put our heads to what needs to be built next.

—Casey S. Walker

Ten Points to Introduce a New Public Mind

The informed public mind that democracy depends upon can no longer be achieved through public news and discourse produced through contentious economic, political, and social interests.

In the 21st century—in the Anthropocene—humanity is united for the first time by a public need to know physical, biological, and cultural realities as creator-drivers of those realities (who are also created by them). This position is a new position. With it comes a new need to know.

A new philosophy of public mind is called for as design of the next internet/web3 takes off. Recapitulating old paradigm ideas of public mind—where a logic of human harm-benefit dominates—would be a grave misstep.

Changing the news is humanity’s #1 imperative, the trim-tab of our time. Turning public attention and curiosity to physical, biological, and cultural realities, frees the public mind to ask questions essential to learning, essential to ethically-charged discourse, and essential to wise action.

While some argue that humanity already knows or seeks to know physical, biological, and cultural realities, such an argument ignores the default nature of questioning produced through economic, political, and social interests. In truth, the science that gets done is the science that gets funded, which is almost exclusively driven by financial, commercial, and military interests. In truth, the primary public interest in the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, rivers, landmasses, and biota—the fundaments of planetary life—remains fixed on losses and damages to human life, jobs, and property. In truth, indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing remain off-radar unless useful to natural resource management or human rights campaigns. Assumptions that humanity is freely pursuing scientific inquiry, is free of blinding self-interest, or freely engages extant ways of knowing, are wrong in every way that counts to an informed and self-informing public mind in today’s world.

How could a public mind look at physical, biological, and cultural realities in their own terms and conditions? What questions would be conceived and pursued? What ethical yield would arise? To all such queries, the answer is surprisingly simple. As simple as asking what one will see, objectively and subjectively, when attention is turned to realities under one’s nose that were previously ignored, dismissed, backgrounded, or simply unimagined. The full reality of a child, a mountain, an ocean, a gut biome, internal and external electromagnetic energies, and so forth, emerges into the present moment. Human curiosity—legitimized and magnified by a shared need to know—takes off. Who is this being? What is this ecology in its soundscapes and species, weathers and chemistries, perhaps its exchange of ions? What is going on in the middle ground between observer and observed? What emotional conditioning obstructs or distorts perception? What kinds of perception are possible? Which tools are useful? The significance of such learning is nearly inestimable. Ethical capacities surpass the ethics of human harm-benefit. Human-centrism is replaced by relational intelligence. Discernment for wise action flows in all directions, bottom-up, horizontally and vertically, free of crippling resistance. Wise action becomes common sense.

The question of how we, the people, will choose to mediate the world to ourselves, is a question of evolutionary consequence. What we, the people, determine to be the most important news and discourse of our time is determinative of what we, the people will pay attention to, think about, support through consensual action, and expect representatives to represent. Starkly put, the aims and goals of today’s public mind stand at an evolutionary crossroad. Either the public mind remains passively informed by contentious economic, political, and social interests, or the public mind equips itself through internet/web3 with a new level and kind of learning key to the enlightenment of creator-drivers of physical, biological, and cultural realities.

Today’s economic, political, and social chaos worldwide—much-exploited and over-determined by powerful parties—is precisely what can be expected at the end of a paradigm that no longer functions. The paradigmatic aims and goals of an economic, political, and social worldview no longer serve. In philosophical terms, the ‘know-what’ and the ‘know-how’ crucial to ethical life, the life of the mind, the informed public mind of a democracy—all of which organize and govern—are being and will continue to be mis-identified.

A new paradigm—a physical, biological, and cultural worldview—is not just an idea, it’s an idea that can be birthed. Designing the next internet/web3 to equip every person with the capacity to question (or join in questioning) what is going on within physical, biological, and cultural realities, is, one could say, the greatest and most urgent design-work that can be imagined.

As social media crashes and burns, reduced in many ways to a cacophony of old paradigm voices, a new and acute hunger is rising. People want to come into alignment with the questions that matter, that inform action, that recognize the creativity possible between humans and earth. Building mind media that mediates physical, biological, and cultural realities, is exactly what needs to be built.

Casey S. Walker, November 2022

September 3, 2020

Opening Salvo:

Today, I feel a searing tenderness for all the grief I’ve lived through over 64 years, and savor the somewhat improbable fact that I am rancor-free. During last week’s fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains, it occurred to me that if I were a tree, I’d be a redwood. Fire-resistant, many-storied—eyeing the ashy, mulchy ground down below and seeing a nursery.

But, I drive a hard bargain. As do many who’ve lived and worked with the creeping certainty that the center of our worlds as we’ve known them—the whole of economic, political, and social life, the collective histories of humans on earth—cannot hold much longer. No institution, expertise, or display of human decency can fix what isn’t working. No amount of exposure, accountability, or reform can get down into or reverse the tsunami of precarity upon precarity already too long in motion.

Which brings me to the intellectual vein I’ve been working for years: As an editor, I could see from the get-go that determining content meant having a strong handle on what the public mind needs to be thinking about. Get that wrong, and not much else can be gotten right. In literary terms: ask the wrong question—or fail to ask the right one—and the plotline of human action will move inexorably toward tragedy. Obliviousness is fatal.

Which brings me to the point of this letter: In every way that counts, obliviousness is where we’re at in America, and obliviousness is where humans are at on earth. It’s 2020, and the vast majority of us are stuck asking questions of vanishingly small yield in a world that is burning, flooding, fighting, and dying before our eyes.

What does the public mind need to be thinking about? What questions ought we be asking? The prevailing idea has remained the same since the inception of news journalism. An informed public mind—one that can achieve democracy—is a public mind exposed to the best, most penetrating investigations, debates, and analyses that can be mustered from the goings-on in the public square: economic, political, and social life. Hold abuses of power to public account and uses of power will be improved.

Here’s the snag: The event horizon of today’s physical, living planet and of human cultural existence, is an event horizon that can’t be found in such a public square. It doesn’t exist there. It exists elsewhere—and is certainly not the focus of news editors’ attention. The questions that would and could be conceived there cannot begin to form or self-assemble.

Here’s where I’m going: Now’s the time to shift event horizons. Now’s the time to see that humanity’s event horizon has, indeed, already shifted. It shifted the moment we saw that nature isn’t so much happening to us, as we are happening to nature. Climate change, biome change, viral change, cognitive change—all of it—are changes occurring downstream from human actions that are, from the start, uninformed.

Radical shift: The time for a new idea of public news media is here, now. Despite everything humans know about the physical, living world, we cannot see what’s going on there. We’re flying blind. Reeling from crisis to crisis. Daily changes taking place in the earth’s atmosphere—and in oceans, on land, through migrations—are, at best, seen as problems that can be managed through markets, laws, and labor policies.

It’s not the worst of public news media that’s our problem, it’s the best. It’s not fake news that drives obliviousness, it’s so-called real news. We are in a public news paradigm crisis. Our eyes are on the wrong event horizon. We fail to ask questions that need forming. We persist in the paradigmatic assumption that events of greatest significance—and the greatest abuses of power—occur in economic, political, and social realities.

None of our old paradigm assumptions holds true. The most significant events occur in the physical, living world. The greatest abuses of power occur each time a person—an editor, a writer, reader, viewer, or listener—abdicates the questioning that’s called for.

In a world more nonsensical with each passing day, the trick is to avoid meltdown. The trick is to see that non-negotiable shocks may be waking us up, even slamming us against the wall, but are not the point. The point is we’ve reached end-paradigm.

Persevere, of course. But each of us lives, now, in the real world of the Anthropocene (or Aquarian Age, Moment of Evolutionary Pivot). It’s time to radically reinform economic, political, and social life with knowledge that cannot be seen or imagined there. It’s time to see the fate of earth and the fate of democracy as one and same. The enemy is not authoritarianism, it’s an uninformed public mind.

Which brings me to the single greatest opportunity I see at this precise moment: The design and construction of an online platform—public mind media—tuned to physical, biological, cultural existence as the event horizon of greatest public importance.

Innovators commonly say it’s easy to overestimate what can be done in two years, and easier still to underestimate what can be done in ten. Once a creation is set in motion, it can easily gain a life of its own. By this I mean to say: The timetable for ecological collapse need not be daunting. The timetable for democratic collapse need not be daunting. What could be achieved in ten years is downright dazzling.

I am here to serve. Offer guidance. Lead as necessary. One thing is certain: we need to get to work, and not in a small way. Early angel investment is called for—investment equal to the scale of building a news media platform. And early intellectual investment is called for—intelligence equal to the challenge of birthing a new paradigm.

Join me in creating such a platform. Ask how you can contribute intellectually or financially.