Philosophy

Philosophy Guild discusses philosophy and its application to Noisebridge and the world. Since 2019 we have been exploring metamodernism, anarchist theory, spiral dynamics, epistemology, and the relationship between ideas and community life.

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Origins: Spiral Wizards (2019)

The group was founded in early 2019 under the name Spiral Wizards — a name chosen, as nthmost put it, "because it's a great excuse to make some pointy hats." The founding thread captures the original framing and the frameworks the group set out to explore.

The original scope of the group was broad and ambitious. Frameworks and lenses included:

• The Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory, known as Spiral Dynamics
• Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development
• Jungian analysis — archetypes, dreams, personality psychology (nthmost was actively offering free Jungian analysis sessions at NB in January 2019, two months before Spiral Wizards launched)
• The Big Five (OCEAN) personality model
• Robert Kegan's model of adult cognitive, affective, and social development

The premise: Spiral Wizards roam over vast mindscapes seeing patterns and connections others typically filter out.

Early reading shared in this period included:

• A Brief History of Spiral Dynamics (ResearchGate) — with the observation that "I like how there's a footnote that calls out how 'old white dude' the field is."
• A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse (metarationality.com) — on how postmodernism can destroy the very pathways people need to get to and past it.

The group later renamed itself Philosophy Guild as its scope expanded and its connection to Noisebridge's Guilds system formalized.

In-Person Meetings at 2169 Mission (January–March 2020)

First Meeting (January 30, 2020)

The inaugural meeting was held in the Hackitorium at 7:30–8PM with an announcement that same day: "Hey kids! Wanna wax pseudo-intellectual and discuss the finer points of transition from post-modernism to meta-modernism? Think Joe Rogan is fascinating as a cultural phenomenon, but can barely stand to listen to him for more than 10 minutes? Us too! Let's talk about the Bernie Sanders thing."

Topics covered: metamodernism, Noisebridge-style anarchy, and Spiral Dynamics. The idea of a Reading Club (explicitly not a Book Club, since the material might be podcasts or articles) was popular. The second meeting was set for February 12th.

Second Meeting (February 12, 2020)

The second meeting announced topics:

• Post-modernism and why it exists
• Modernism and its current position and importance in the world
• Meta-modernism and why it is being talked about

Participants were asked to bring any texts, videos, or podcasts they found useful to the conversation.

Third Meeting (February 26, 2020) — 18 attendees

This meeting was the largest and most documented of the in-person era. Eighteen people showed up. Noisebridge-style moderation and note-taking were used to keep conversation flowing. The full thread is archived at 3rd Philosophy Guild Meeting, Feb 26 2020.

Attendees (with their own introductions):

nthmost (she/her) — I create groups like this in order to have better conversations.

Chris (he/him) — background in philosophy, studied Foucault, planning return to academia.

Anthony — came to the first meeting via the Discuss forum.

Jote (they/them) — community organizer, circling, Transformative Justice and system change.

Adithya (he/him) — I have a techie side, a spiritual side, embodied activism.

Tom (he/him) — Integral and SD practitioner for 20 years; Facebook friends with Hanzi Freinacht; had messaged Hanzi to ask about meetups and found Noisebridge.

Jade (she/her/they/them) — studied psych and CS; Yay existentialism!

Brett (he/him) — turned on to The Listening Society by Alex.

Aurora (she/her) — blazed through The Listening Society and started Nordic Ideology.

Henry Adams (foxyboots) (he/him) — introduced to Spiral Dynamics by nthmost 2-3 years prior; shared frustrations about limitations of the SD community. Later co-organized the Wednesday Lounge Jitsi meetings.

Steve (he/him) — PhD in theoretical physics; got into metamodernism via Seth Abramson's framing of "wtf Trump is doing"; interested in mysticism and Theravada practice.

Joshin (he/him) — "meditated more than I've read"; several years at a monastic community in Vermont described as "metamodern" by its membership; starting the next chapter of this in the Bay Area.

Sage (she/her) — recovering scientist; new to the Bay.

Alex (he/him) — Makes sense to me to have a new system in society where human development is priority. I've been looking for a way to conceptualize politics — decision-making as relates to complexity.

Lydia — just launched Modality magazine; exploring the meaning of life.

Jonathan (he/him) — I've long understood that there's something missing from the systemic rationalist worldview. The answer is not to become anti-rational.

David Jay (he/him) — interested in relationship and strategic thinking.

Andy — attending as a fly on the wall.

Key exchanges and formulations:

Brett: "Hold the perspective that includes all perspectives." — metamodernism as a stance that crosses political and personal.

Henry (foxyboots): "A productive tension between rationality and postmodernism — irony and detached humor giving us safe distance to go deep."

Jote: "Cut to the bone rationalism and trembling spiritually. Agility of state change." — on Hanzi Freinacht's formulation.

Lydia: "Classic scientific materialism fails as 'the only way to make meaning.'"

Brett (on metamodernism): "Democratization of metanarrative." — the room responded: DAYUM.

Tom: Hanzi's five dimensions — effective value meme, emotional depth, emotional state, mental development, and cultural code. The deconstruction/reconstruction dynamic: how do we ensure forward momentum instead of the postmodern trap of constant deconstruction?

nthmost: "I watched people get bullied out of Noisebridge by supposed woke folks. It's personal for me."

nthmost: "It is OUR JOB to meet people where they are at. It is not for us to somehow 'raise people up' to be metamodern — that would not be rational or possible or even desirable."

Adithya — on identity politics: "The alt-right is postmodern. It's a bid for a new kind of power. And what are progressives using? Identity politics. Because of the truthiness of postmodernism."

Aurora — on post-scarcity: "If our material abundance continues, it will either be Make Work to capitulate to Protestant work ethic, or maybe we'll fall into scarcity via climate change or epidemics, or maybe we can figure out how to make people's lives more meaningful in a context of abundance."

Brett — on the will to power: "If I don't OWN my will to power, that's going to come out sideways. Part of the irony is to recognize that when you are effecting some change, you are causing an oppression of some form (probably)."

Henry (foxyboots): "Something that pushed me into philosophy is trying to work out a way where you can flip the framing from the negative to the positive."

The meeting ended well after 10PM. The final topic was: How do we communicate this to others? Brett's answer: "Best way is to demonstrate it. Finding the truth in anything anyone is saying."

COVID Cancellation (March 11, 2020)

The fourth in-person meeting was cancelled the day it was scheduled to happen: "San Francisco city officials have declared 'no unnecessary gatherings' as the coronavirus continues to spread, and I have heard from at least half a dozen potential folks from the last meeting that they don't want to chance it. We're not quite prepared to transition to a remote format yet, so tonight just catch up on last week's notes and keep reading The Listening Society."

The Pandemic Campfire: Jitsi Era (May 2020 onwards)

From 2020 through the pandemic years, the Philosophy Guild kept a small fire burning on Wednesday nights at 8PM via Jitsi. The transition happened in stages: first a Facebook group (which had reached 61 members by March 2020), then Online Town, then Jitsi.

The format was refined by co-organizer foxyboots (Henry Adams), who wrote the framing that would define the era:

"This meeting is a casual space, rather like a large communal table in the back of a mildly pretentious cafe. Pull up a virtual chair! Type something in for us to call you under your video box, and join the conversation. As happens when you drop in on a communal table, we'll get to know each other as we talk rather than have formal introductions."

"There's no agenda, although it is assumed that everyone has a basic understanding of metamodernism, and is comfortable with some form of spiral dynamics a.k.a. the Graves model."

The conversations were informal — drop in, drop out, no agenda, no formal introductions — and drew both Noisebridgers and people who had never set foot in the space. Some of the most sustained intellectual intimacy of that era happened in those calls.

That chapter has drawn to a close. The people who showed up for those Wednesday nights have stayed in touch and speak fondly of what they built together.

Applied Philosophy: Guild Theory and Executive Functioning

Alongside the regular meetings, a parallel thread of applied philosophy emerged — turning these ideas into a theory of how Noisebridge itself should work.

In July 2019, nthmost opened Executive Functioning Under an Anarchist Flag (and the discussion it sparked), posing the question: Is it possible for an anarchist organization to wield the kind of cognitive control over its own ongoing choices needed to ascend to better levels of overall health and well-being?

The essay introduced the concept of formations — practices developed so that when the time comes, one only has to name the formation to mount the proper team response. Unlike a hierarchy, a formation is a practiced collective readiness. The essay asked whether Noisebridge could learn to enter and exit formations without the usual baggage of "who's ruling whom."

Respondents included Boots (drawing on non-hierarchical crew work), Julee (citing Lucinda Childs and John Cage — anarchic choreography as organizational model), and Steve Phillips (elimisteve).

In May 2020, nthmost and elimisteve opened the Guild Theory Brainstorming thread, aimed at getting Noisebridge Applied Philosophy into recorded form. elimisteve framed the Guild model in information-routing terms: Guilds as O(1) routing — new people can find like-minded people instantly, rather than the O(n) search of talking to individuals one by one.

nthmost on her actual motivation: "I'm driven more by seeing people suffer needlessly than anything else. What I saw in 2018 was that the failure to ensure that systems and information were inherited smoothly from one set of folks to the next made people distrustful of each other."

The open question from this thread that was never resolved: What's preventing Guilds from devolving into mutually-distrustful tribes? The MetaGuild? Shared values? The question is still live.

Also in 2020, Jason Stone opened Towards an Anarchist Hackerspace, proposing a prefigurative model — free association, subspaces, subleases. nthmost's response situated Noisebridge within its literary and philosophical roots:

"Among Noisebridge's founding inspirations was the novel The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Definitely worth a read if you haven't already."

And on why the Guild model scales where simple doocracy hits its limits:

"Guilds were invented to solve the greater-than-Dunbar's-number level of problem — distributed decisionmaking and the having of Nice Things at a hackerspace where no one really owns anything."

The thread also worked through why property ownership is corrosive to anarchist community: what might usually be petty disagreements blow up to knock-down-drag-out fights when there is actual material property at stake.

The Next Era

The Philosophy Guild is moving into a new phase, with a focus on anarchist philosophy and the development of a theory of conversational praxis — how we talk to each other, why it matters, and what a practice of genuine conversation looks like in a space like Noisebridge.

See also nthmost's user page for related writings on anarchism at Noisebridge.

Further Reading

See Philosophy/Reading_List for an annotated reading list drawn from Philosophy Guild discussions since 2019.

Wednesday Lounge Conversations (archived guidelines)

The original principles of the Wednesday Lounge, written by foxyboots (Henry Adams):

• Natural conversational flow
• Choose your level of participation - lurking is welcome
• Drop in and out as you please

Per those principles, we never stopped for an agenda, to catch people up on huge topics, or for formal (re)introductions. All three interrupt the flow — and introductions in particular put people on the spot in what was meant to be a casual environment.