I’m advocating for decentralization of all of our systems, and removal of the top-down architecture of administration. This is something I’ve been talking about for more than ten years. It’s well past due for not only discussion, but implementation.
Our systems over the last century have, like those of the Romans, been predicated on the idea of centralization, of top-down, of megalith. In other words, we have a pyramid scheme in terms of how we get things done. This isn’t just in terms of physical organization, it’s also very much how we’ve been taught to think.
Back in the 90s, when the Internet was trying to be birthed, it was stalled for a while by the fact that the central servers were inadequate to handle the anticipated traffic. I wrote a letter to Senator Gore, who was involved with some of the people doing the thinking at the time, about Indra’s Net.
Indra’s Net is a metaphor that Douglass Hofstadtler talks about in his book, “Godel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid”. Indra’s Net has infinite threads that go horizontally through space and vertically through time. At every junction of these threads is a crystal bead- an individual human- and every bead contains the reflections of not only every other bead, but the reflections within every other bead, so that the infinity of the net is reflected, as with a hologram, within every single individual.
Shortly after I typed that letter out on my trusty IBM electric typewriter, things shifted. I like to think that letter might have had an influence. So despite the jokes, Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet- and neither did I- Indra did [with a little help from the brilliant Mr. Hofstadtler].
Right now, more than a decade later, we need to come to the realization that while the pyramid is an admirable geometrical form, and quite impressive as a megalithic construct, it’s a static object with limitations that render it unsuitable for the dynamism of a living flowing system- particularly one of great size.
We need to adapt instead to the idea of complex interconnected systems- systems that are predicated, like quarks, on both object and flow. Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev included my characterization of the Divine as being like a quark on the album "All Is Dream" with a little girl saying, “I’m a particle! I’m a wave! I’m a particle! I’m a wave!”. We need to adapt that mindset of being both at once, too. We’re individual people- particles- but we're also able to act and create- waves.
The systems we need to create right now are ones that can handle the quark principle of being both something that is and something that acts. They also have to take into consideration the concept of Infinity in that “crystal bead” kind of way- interconnected and aware of one another, able to provide essentials for one’s self and one's neighbors, scaled to human needs and human endeavors, but also able to interact with the enormity of the world at large in a coherent manner. Like the internet, like the quarks that make up the fabric of Reality by continually bouncing off of one another, we must become flexible and self-contained in our local systems while remaining connected and interactive in our megasystems.
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