If Socrates and Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today today and decided to build a collaborative website with their friend William Blake to innovate education into edupunk and make money doing it … How’d they go about it? We wanted to find out so we hacked their etherchat-channel. Sadly, William wasn’t logged in.

Socrates: Some of my own thinking go along the lines of a simple gamification of contributer content, building on our meme ‘that which is most recent is your pitch, that which is current is your product, that which is old is your brand’…
Leonardo: I like it
Socrates: Most recent 3 entries are free. Then up to 3 categories of weekly webinars (individually user defined subscription/payment system) are paid. All older material (and raw source files) are also free (some with and some without subscrption)
Socrates: “The past is your brand, the present your pitch and the future your project.”
Socrates: /product/artwork/whatever
Socrates: Open source business. Trialogues are simply behind-the-scenes brainstorms
Leonardo: we need a means by which we can become a trusted provider of content such that our ideas carry weight and recognition, in the same way that academics who contribute to wikipedia are now being looked upon favourably
Socrates: Contributors, collaborators and colleagues coalesce, confidently combining cool creative computercapabilities.
Socrates: Something somesuch
Leonardo: community reciprocality, like this (http://flattr.com) but for social capital
Leonardo: in fact flattr is similar to http://togethr.at
Socrates: Man once, we combine the first decent example of all these ideas we can sell just the knowledge. Many people will only consider switching to a complete new wave system when it is demonstrated to them
Leonardo: zactly, nothing speaks louder than success
Leonardo: combine these ideas with your civic experiment and boom
Leonardo: breaking news: we’ve created a new model for civilization
Socrates: LOL. Scoop.it!
Socrates: There must be many like us, now that people are more naturally connecting. We are probably, as a group, well ahead of the game – but we are also sometimes (in that regard) maybe too early on the ball (or we may become, with approprite audience). Also. There are so many people having great ideas and starting new projects out there. Totally semantic overload. Whether designed agenda (unlike) or approaching similary, we (as a humanity) seem to do a lot to drown each other out
Socrates: Maybe it’s just an effect of urbanisation, hybridization and matrixification
Leonardo: we are certainly “niche” and it hard in a lot of cases to articulate the clarity of a vision needed to influence enough people
Leonardo: I mean just look at Terrence McKenna
Leonardo: he was way ahead of his time
Leonardo: his ideas make more sense today than they did back in the 80′s and 90′s
Leonardo: given the ground that our group is traversing I think what may be of key importance is actually location
Leonardo: both online and offline
Socrates: Interesting. More?
Leonardo: different places have different infrastructures which ultimately affect peoples understanding of their enviornments and what can and can’t be done
Leonardo: i had a mushroom trip that got me thinking about cultural evolution
Leonardo: ofc. it is happening fastest where information flows are fastest
Leonardo: i.e. twitter is the engine of culture (memes) in some sense
Leonardo: but offline it is cities where people are evolving fastest (culturally)
Socrates: Ahhyes
Leonardo: given the discussion I had with William about economics and corporate protectionism I actually think that think kind of futuristic cities we’ve read about may well appear in unexpected places
Leonardo: case in point… Chile
Leonardo: really big on future tech right now
Leonardo: and space industry
Leonardo: lots of natural resources
Socrates: I hadn’t at all kept apraised of that. Thanks
Socrates: Something to build on… for sure
Leonardo: anywho, as Steve Keen said… “politics is too important for politicians and economics is too important for economists”… as europeans shipwrecked with leaders who are running us into oblivion the pressure is on ordinary people to self-organize and create a new society from the ground up
Leonardo: it’s not that we are in competition with them
Leonardo: but rather they will not act unless the people do
Leonardo: the vision has to come from the people
Leonardo: not the state or corporations
Socrates: SPOT ON
Leonardo: 4th sector hybrids are the way to go
Leonardo: social enterprise / co-operatives etc
Leonardo: in light of “technological unemployment” the stability of society depends upon wealth redistribution
Leonardo: we are already in the singularity (the curve atleast)
Leonardo: we are already experiencing the effects
Socrates: Yep. I feel it a little more each day. It’s almost become the hardest thing to believe that one will just live each and every day through it, learning a little more, loving and longing and that all the incredible things will seem like ‘sure, ofc its already here’ when we hear they already happened
Leonardo: yep, it’s amazing. I was watching a review of news from 2011 today and was thinking how it is only going to get more erratic
Leonardo: mckenna was spot on with that assumption
Leonardo: we are riding the wave of novelty
Socrates: Yep. Dream up a newboard and you’re set.
Socrates: One of the points I mentioned in a previous video: If there is a novelty attractor, then the not only most holistic strategy, but also the one with the greates universal change of longevity would be to tunee in and ride those flows, transforming as much as we can
Leonardo: absolutely and we can see this happening already if you look at the propensity of information to free itself from control. A living system needs diversity to be healthy
Leonardo: our evolution into the translinguistic substrate is through the emerging lifeform of the internet
Leonardo: and by choice it excludes none
Socrates: “We are anonymous” explained
Leonardo: if the internet can be viewed as a superorganism then it is beyond control
Leonardo: you cannot create superintelligene and lock it away
Leonardo: it is omnipresent
Socrates: It is indeed
Leonardo: I think we will see some rather interesting iRobot situations appear within our lifetime
Leonardo: suddenly the AI will decide to upgrade the energy system of the planet into 100% renewable energy for example
Leonardo: it could happen very quickly with super AI
Leonardo: as we become more transhuman the danger to human life is actually computer viruses
Leonardo: imagine having a virus which destroyed your cerebral implants
Leonardo: nanovirus
Leonardo: I also think that another interesting thing to think about is surveillance
Leonardo: we are the watchman watching the watchmen
Leonardo: “the transparent society”
Leonardo: even governments can’t hide
Leonardo: they are rendered obsolete by their habitual ways of deceit
Leonardo: people self-police through AI and collective intelligence
Leonardo: panarchy
Leonardo: the main force obstructing this is corporatism imo
Leonardo: in fact corporatism is a loaded gun pointed at the face of the planet
Socrates: ‘Nuff said