Being early is wrong but it leads to meaningfulness

All my life I have been regarded as an avant-garde thinker and builder of things too early for their times. I was able to nurture and grow this Future Casting capability as an advantage in my life but I think that I haven’t learned how to use it properly yet. Strangely enough I had periods of my child and teenager life where I used it properly. But now that I am an adult and father of two child I have been pondering this existential question: Am I too early ?

I was told that being Early is Wrong. This was the Driver for that article. I never actually listen to the nay-sayers of this world. I am a humanist. I envision a preferable future (not a probable one) where software design, artificial intelligence & adaptative architecture are built to promote calmness, reduce distractions and Augment Active Imagination. But I couldn’t refute the argument.

It is in fact true that releasing novel ideas or new usages for old things are in Peril in a always-on culture. It is also hard to communicate the New in a risk-averse environment. Familiarity is a very strong design principle and meaningfulness isn’t yet a design principle that is elevated at the same level.

Let’s go back in time a little bit to understand how I’ve built my personal capacity for Future Casting and let’s try to find what are the Design Principles we can use to develop a preferable future together.

At 8 years old I invented a framework to teach children of my class how to create Books where you are the Hero. It was considered a novelty then to even have thought of building such a framework since the very phenomena of Books where you are the Hero were just starting to catch on at mass scale.

Technically these types of Books were very popular in the United States since 1975 and I didn’t considered myself early then. I wanted to understand how to craft such interactive stories and I invented a framework that was a sort of complex decision-tree diagram with questions to allow the Book creator to think of which actions, expressions, character & landscape descriptions should take place once the reader made a decision to progress in the story. It literally looked like an Information Architecture Diagram for a Website or a Game Design Script which I actually produced later on in my professional life. It also gave me a tool to explore the world around me and structure my self. I had found a way to structure my continuous stream of thoughts.

Let me explain how my consciousness & attention mechanisms works.
I am a sponge. A deep thinker. The world become me when I concentrate enough (I was calling myself a telepath but maybe I was just an Empath). I absorb the emotions of the people around me. Their feelings and thoughts are channeled into a sort of Numinous Stream that I can feel physically and intelligently direct in a direction.

For me all creativity is not created, it’s discovered ! Ideas are floating in space-time, somewhere in the Noetic Fields and they come to you when you are receptive or when you go to physical places that attract ideas. I had a special gift to direct my imagination and develop my curiosity. I was a lucid dreamer. I was already envisioning reality as a bizarre cosmic whole blending dreams and reality.

I always felt like an Alien Child and strongly felt that I came from another planet. Yes I am was a wild child and already a kind of poet. I felt like I had a message to craft. I was a feeler. Everything I touch had a message for me. I remember closing my eyes calling for a storm in my mind and opening my eyes as a storm literally was forming above my head.

I was simply promoting non-conventional ways of thinking at an early age and kept going until I realized Education Systems & Society Norms were being imposed over the very natural thought process I had allowed to shape my creativity and expressivity.

At 13 years old I realized that being in Wonder with the Stars and the Cosmos led me to think I was going to be an Astronaut. To become an Astronaut was one of my dearest dream.

I discovered that to become an astronaut you had to go thru a military training. Everything became disenchanted. I wasn’t emotionally built for that. I had to develop an emotional framework to be functional in this world.

I then digressed from the visual thinking process that helped build a structural process framework to channel my thought and went in a complete different direction. I started channeling my inner daemons and explored languages. I was reading the dictionary (english and french), memorizing every words, discovering their origins, the symbols they got extracted from, the countries they emerged from, the myths they were part of. It was a semantic quest. I was trusting another intelligence that was guiding in the process. I never truly put a name on it.

Actually I tried to call it something. I was called Stry-B. There was also another term I used that sounded like Deleate (later on I figured out that it was because I loved the word DELETE on the computer keyboard). This was actually a form of Branding. I was learning to put cool alien names of my processes.

One day I went to buy a red notebook in which I started exploring another dimensions of my writing. My father is probably the only human who saw this notebook. It was filled with ExoLinguistic experiments and unknown symbolic writing. I was emitting sounds when I was writing in it. I was signing every page with a sort of Violent Hand Movement. The signatures looked like a Pulse, a sonic wave.

I was 15 and my brain was demanding more and more connections and writing & sketching stuff all the time was the only way to feed it. I was starting playing guitar. My parents bought me an Electronic Keyboard and I started creating all sort of sounds with my voice — I was very dedicated at it and was able to imitate all kinds of sounds (nature sounds, machine sounds, instruments sounds, animal sounds). That was it. I had found The Emotional Process Framework I needed to complement my Structural Thought Process Framework and my WorldBuilding Narratives Framework.

Visual Thinking, Linguistic/Narratives and Music.

I starting writing very complex poems with Old English, composing songs lyrics that I did not even understood. I was in love with how narratives worked on the brain, how the semantic structures were built to trigger neurons and lead to contemplative or neurotic experiences. But with my new Emotional Framework I was able to express something new. Intentions. I was able to make other people feel what I was feeling using my Voice.

At 17 years old I passed a career test at School. The only result that came out was: CLOWN

I had a good feeling about it. I didn’t know why the machine algorithm concluded that it was my result but it helped me a lot to become who I am today. It’s a kind of milestone in my Psychological History. It sent a signal to the deepest part of my brain. Intrinsic Motivation. I always was motivated by inner forces. If I was a clown then I could be/do anything. I was a shape shifter, a performer, a scenographer, a surrealist, a poet, a child, a messenger … a storyteller.

I had to explore the implications of that purpose, I had to develop my autonomy and master new skills.

At 18 years old my father introduced me to Ainsi Parlait Zarathoustra the most fabulous book of Nietszche. I discovered the word Poëisis.

According to Wikipedia: Poïesis (Ancient Greek: ποίησις) is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω, which means “to make”. This word, the root of our modern “poetry”, was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and person with the world.

There are two forms of poiesis: Autopoiesis and Allopoiesis

Practopoiesis is a theory of adaptive organization of living systems in which autopoiesis of an organism or a cell occurs through allopoiesis among its components. The components are organized into a poietic hierarchy; one component creates another. In the brain this hierarchy leads the capability of learning to learn.

Martin Heidegger refers to it as a ‘bringing-forth’ (phusis as emergence), using this term in its widest sense. He explained poiesis as the blooming of the blossom, the coming-out of a butterfly from a cocoon, the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. The last two analogies underline Heidegger’s example of a threshold occasion: a moment of ecstasis when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another. (These examples may also be understood as the unfolding of a thing out of itself, as being discloses or gathers from nothing [thus nothing is thought also as being]).

In literary studies, at least two fields draw on the etymology of poiesis: ecopoetics and zoopoetics. As “eco” derives from the root “oikos” meaning “house, home, or hearth,” then ecopoetics explores how language can help cultivate (or make) a sense of dwelling on the earth. Zoopoetics explores how animals (zoo) shape the making of a text.

In their 2011 academic book, All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly conclude that embracing a “meta-poietic” mindset is the best, if not the only, method to authenticate meaning in our secular times: “Meta-poiesis, as one might call it, steers between the twin dangers of the secular age: it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form. Living well in our secular, nihilistic age, therefore, requires the higher-order skill of recognizing when to rise up as one with the ecstatic crowd and when to turn heel and walk rapidly away.”[4]

Furthermore, Dreyfus and Dorrance Kelly urge each person to become a sort of “craftsman” whose responsibility it is to refine their faculty for poiesis in order to achieve existential meaning in their lives and to reconcile their bodies with whatever transcendence there is to be had in life itself: “The task of the craftsman is not to generate the meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill for discerning the meanings that are already there.”

Until 18 years old I didn’t knew what I would be studying in College.

I went to college without knowing exactly what studying Communications & Arts would bring me to. This was not a career-driven education choice. I was following my guts.

I went to university to study narratology and practice Cinema. Cinema was the perfect framework to craft my future. A mix of Visual, Music, Technology, Languages, Narratives, Ethnography, Politics and Psychology.

With Cinema I discovered how to script my story so that I attract great talents to make the film. I learned how to build teams (and loose them). I learned how propaganda, advertisting and media worked. I discovered Jean Baudrillard and Federico Fellini at the same time. I discovered that Cinema was a mind programming tool. I discovered we where living in a programmable world.

After my Cinema Studies ended I took some class in Interactive Media Arts and Performance. I was hooked. I was able to express the Clown, the Daemons, the Scenographer and the Researcher in me at the same time. My last performance got set in an old abandoned pool in an Old Building and was composed of 1000 nylon wires all interconnected and crossing over walls to walls. Hundreds of words floating in space attached to the wires where exposing the implications of the Arrival of the Internet in our lives.

It was 1996. My step dad who was a successful telecommunications entrepreneur told that there was a future in the internet that I had the mindset to succeed with it. I followed the advice. I decided to leave my Film Director dream to explore the Internet and its implications for Society. Did I really quit my Film Director dream? After writing all of this I think I actually sticked to my Film Director dream and everything I really did was to do research for my main film: My life.

So I don’t know how I ended up here. I guess it was too early to write this post. Here is the short list of what I really had to say.

1- Talk to your Inner Child is the only way to stay Wild and playfully Constructive.

2- Distracted Minds do not appreciate Nature

3- Playfulness is at risk in an automated world

4- Randomness is necessary for Serendipity to occur

5- Poetry is Creative Leadership

6- Innovation is Applied Poetry

7- Humanities and Arts shall shape the high-tech society