This is part of the book, "The Future of Text: A 2020 Vision"
By Jeremy Helm (submitted for publication February 19, 2020)

Structured Listening: Technological design to help humanize humanity

What are we to make of an apparently suicidal - or at least blindly reckless - human species?

I argue what’s missing is clarity about what communication is in relation to our shared humanity - in short, what’s missing is each other. Using this common sense truth of who human beings can be for each other in communication, I advance a proposal for what digital networking ought to be for communication.

For the last thirty years we’ve invested in one paradigm of digital designs that’s inherited a preexisting cultural error. Our numbed condition will persist while we avoid confronting humanity’s systemic conflict. Too easily satisfied, our attention passes over the short circuiting in this putative global digital brain. Consider that every other issue is actually a symptom of this oversight.

If civilization was a video game, to have any chance to play the game through, this is the puzzle we have to solve to pass our current historical level.

By the time you finish reading this you will consider yourself necessary to this global digital reboot, not out of duty but simply because it’s more fun.

Communication

We suffer under the illusion enemies are among us, when in fact conflict exists only at the level of our strategies - not at the level of our shared humanity. Without making this distinction our perception short circuits and we hang on to our strategy as if it’s the need, and relate to projections of each other as enemy[1] - which of course provokes further the history of humanity's self-attack.

Listening for our shared humanity, we discover an underlying ‘why’, which can show up as needs, values, commitments, etc - all of which provide an access to renewing our relationship. In fact, creating new strategies is the easiest thing - the work needed is in getting to the requisite quality of connection from which new strategies arise naturally.

Everyone has this strong view of what’s possible in communication - or at least has the capacity to recover it. Speaking and listening from an inquiry into “what are they/what am I feeling/needing?” we nurture this capacity in each other - that experience of life where we can trust each other and the process.

The Internet

We've gotten a sense of how quality of attention can open up new outcomes. Now imagine that the design of digital networking is like the ‘fine tuning’ of the universe: different design, different possibilities for life. The Internet is our largest medium for communication on the planet, so it’s essential that it is wired to bring out the best in us. The inspiration I’m working with here is the original vision for Hypertext[2] - Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, which has been called “First thought, best thought.”[3]

The World Wide Web, in use since the early 90’s, wasn’t designed with the infrastructure to allow for frictionless payment to authors - a mechanism would have fairly spread the wealth amongst content creators, rather than primarily platform creators.. However, first on the scene in the 1960’s, Ted had an uncluttered view, and so conceived of digital publishing as a whole. “Our huge collective task in finding the best future for digital networking will probably turn out to be like finding our way back to approximately where Ted was at the start.”[4] says Jaron Lanier, author of Who Owns the Future?, a book-length treatment of Ted’s ideas[5] with an economic focus on the design sense of Ted’s copyright system “for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation at any time and in any amount.” Xanalogical Structure[6] is what it takes to track these linked connections in real time. Transcopyright, the literary, legal and business arrangement[7] brings about “a balance of rights and responsibility while at the same time reducing friction. That’s a rare, magical combination.”[8]

With this protocol as law of the network, your participation would automatically create for you the property of your own data - it’s automatically part of the functioning of online citizenship. Like water to the fish, the online world is our earthly communication space, and we are all first class citizens. I join Lanier in the call for rebooting our information economy for human ‘data dignity’, but I see more in the subtlety of Xanadu still…

Civilization’s next milestone

Your online identity, your data body, is currently spread across multiple commercial operations. Lacking the critical dimensionality of hypertext, the World Wide Web’s .com, .etc, Domain Name System and numerous App environments are all silos, incapable of holding space for a truly connected world. The nature of hypertext is like hyperspace, not some past based ‘desktop metaphor’ for exclusive concentrations of computers which hold us in some data peasantry. New metaphors are needed to put attention on this possibility. Something like an ecosystem of ecosystems[9]. My possibility is humanity listening for the completion of historical conflict, which is included within a larger cultural realization I characterize as best practices want to be practiced[10].

For the flourishing of life on earth, the ‘minimal viable product’ we need is communication[11]. As citizens in a social conversation, our aim is participation in and the design of a maximally inclusive convergent process where the conversation that gets displayed first online is the speaking that emerges from a listening of the greatest number of participants[12]. Success in this forum will become the de facto vetting for leadership, with politics and economics reconfigured within communication.

Hypertext frees up conversations to exist in new relationships to each other. Instead of ‘where?’ (like ‘this URL’) we can imagine a map of ‘what (is this content about)?’, and within that topic, conversations will vary by how inclusive and relevant they are. The basic equation for any particular piece of content goes ‘quantity of unique negative feedback, divided by the number of its overall views’. This is the mechanism of a listening/synthesis, ‘circuit’[13] within Xanalogical structure, responsible for sorting out[14] the topological dimension extending from the semantic map of ‘views’ - conversations, juxtaposed & networked together in an ‘argument[15] structure’.

You create listening wherever you are when you practice it. What does this listening ‘sound’ like? Here’s one verbalization:

Nothing is wrong, no one is in trouble. If you’re angry with someone, or someone’s after you, join this conversation, and both of you will be heard fully.

Because oppositional communication becomes the least efficient thing across the conversational topology, split topologies[16] inherently incentivize listening for what’s beneath their gap of conflicting strategies. A sort of vertical integration or positive feedback loop comes into play between listening circuits and the dignity of data as labor. It’s as if the market automatically creates jobs for addressing ‘what doesn’t work about civilization’. Across all domains, people are interacting with an emergent complexity of self-governance through hypertext platform.

The more of our shared humanity we bring present in communication, the deeper the structure of solidarity we’re listening into for inspiration[17]. Rather than anticipating others as a cause of scarcity, abundance and creativity is generated up front by structured inclusion.

References

Since ‘they’re against our needs’. This is the distinction I see as the core of ‘Nonviolent Communication’, as formulated by Marshall Rosenberg.

“Hypertext” being a word he coined.

From Jaron’s book:

*Who Owns the Future?* Which inquires, ‘How do we have a strong middle class, even while more and more of the economy is eaten by software, and increasingly machine learning?’

Unfortunately, other than as an ongoing source of inspiration, Ted’s work has been on the sidelines.

A generic term for the important, dimensional difference between Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web & Nelsonian insight: Xanalogical Structure, is what I mean by “hypertext”.

Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use by Theodor Holm Nelson http://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html

Who Owns the Future? p. 225

See the relation between the bold passages above in the second paragraph.

This is a synthesis of Stewart Brand’s 1984 quip that ‘information wants to be free’ & the often omitted countervailing ‘information wants to be expensive’, a valid paradox that nonetheless had been resolved by Ted two decades earlier. https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-at-30-hackers-and-information-wants-to-be-free/ & see Who Owns the Future? p. 226

Communication as the ‘enemy ending’ best practice of Marshall Rosenberg, who was hitting his stride around the same time as Ted. But it’s as a Rosenberg process in Nelson structure where it could start to be a product. If I had a time machine I would introduce them to have Project Xanadu preempt the World Wide Web and be our Internet based publishing space.

In Mirror Worlds. Or: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox ... How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean, computer scientist David Gelernter speaks about this and provisionally dubs it “topsight” (p.52), though he comes across it from a different angle, it has a similar significance for him - see p.184 “repair the shattered whole.”

Being conceptual and process oriented, ‘circuit’ because it is a mechanism like experiment or law. I’m making a point to highlight the mechanical-like functioning of my augmenting proposal because you may have a reflex assumption that to accomplish what I’m pointing to requires an additional breakthrough in something.

Which I’ll limit myself to describing here as the following.

Inspired by the etymology - process of ‘reasoning made clear’.

The appearance here of the living persistence of historical conflict.

In this vision, technology is wiring us together in relationship, rather than a tool of tracking/predicting behavior and offloading this reductionism into Artificial Intelligence.