EMERGE IS A MIRROR TO THE LIMINAL WEB. We re-introduce it to itself. That function -- along with the need to cultivate more channels of intergenerational wisdom transmission in the emerging transformational, integrative and regenerative communities -- is essential. It expresses itself, in part, through presenting individuals and their journeys into the leading-edge of human sensemaking.
Meet George Por.
-------------------------------------------------------------------I met a hippy, a hacker, a hermetic, and, more recently, a hipster. When I looked into the mirror, sometimes one, sometimes the other looked back into my eyes. I recognized those characters in my life and what connects them only after reading Hanzi Freinacht’s
The Reign of Hackers, Hipsters & Hippies.
Like many of my generation's hippies, I went to India in the ‘70s, seeking truth in meditation and sacred sexuality. That trip turned me into a meditation teacher but didn’t extinguish the “social justice” flame in me, which animated my student years in the '60s.
Returning to the West and running out of money, I found a job in a computer store in Oakland and started experimenting with how one can use the then-fledgling computerized bulletin boards and online networks to create more democratic workplaces by augmenting the employees’ collective intelligence. As a columnist at a magazine in California in the ‘80s, I wrote about the socially innovative uses of computer-based communication. That earned me the “
hacker” reputation and an invitation to the Hackers Conference, although I haven’t written any line of code.
After the left-to-right brain move of my life (from a hippie to a “hacker”), the pendulum of the journey swung again back to the right-brain world, this time to the world of a
hermetic. I can’t forget the scary and exhilarating experience, around 1992, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, of sitting in the pitch black inside of a sweat lodge and chanting the Sacred Twenty Count of the indigenous people of North and Central Americas, which our lineage holder brought to us. It is an esoteric meaning-making system, a sort of meta-narrative that accounts for 20 archetypal energies of the universe and life on Earth. It also contains the founding wisdom of the Medicine Wheel that I’ve been using since then for patterning my Circle of LifeWork in my annual personal ceremony.
Fast-forward to the beginning of the 21st Century, the beginning of which finds me as a Senior Research Fellow at INSEAD, an international business school in Fontainebleau, near Paris. There, I leverage my theories of online networks, prefigurative social movements, and the cultural capital accrued during my work at UC Berkeley and in the Complexity Research Group of the London School of Economics.
In the ‘20s, I developed new concepts and frameworks that made me a “
hipster,” in Hanzi Freinacht’s sense of the word, such as
Transformative Communities of Practice,
Enlivenment Theory of Change,
Wisdom-focused AI, and
Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI) spawning the symbiosis and sympoiesis of human and AI agents.
The last one goes to the heart of my current work, the possiblity of a metamodern superorganism emerging from large-scale CHI.
This is the season of my life when I can let all 4 Hs come out, play, and dance with each other. While the perfect storm of our global crises is looming on the not-too-distant horizon, the 4 Hs invite all metamodernistas to prepare for it with the perfect play.
“
to deepen the struggle
until it is reborn as play”
— Hanzi Freinacht
