A New Year, a New Platform

A new year, a new platform.

The Messenger was hosted on Revue for almost two years, which, in turn, was housed within Twitter. While we were out there collecting wisdom, Elon Musk bought Twitter and decided newsletters weren't worth his time.

Bye bye Revue.

We had to find a new home in a hurry. Fortunately, LinkedIn (where you're reading this essay), has a lot of features that Revue doesn't.

Change is good and we aren't complaining.

Talking about change, new things have been brewing inside Socratus. As a teaser, we give you four words in two phrases:

1. Philosopher's Depth

2. Midwifing Ecosystems

Suppose your best friend called you out of the blue to say they were joining a community that intended to move to Mars, you might decide to rummage inside your cupboard and fetch several hats:

1. The Engineers Hat: is such a trip feasible? Is the technology mature? Can we realistically expect to go to Mars in our lifetimes?

2. The Accountant's Hat: is such a trip affordable? Can we realistically expect to go to Mars on a middle class income?

3. The Philosopher's Hat: why go to Mars? Is it even the right place for humans to live? Can we realistically expect to flourish there?

Philosopher's Depth is a way of asking the unspoken questions that lie behind the quest. It's not averse to technical or financial considerations, but it makes sure that the technical bits go hand in hand with the human bits. Which is particularly important for the wicked problems that make life on Earth hard for most of us. We are going back to philosophy's roots as the 'love of wisdom' in a collective avatar: we are in love with collective wisdom, and we are creating tools and spaces that augment our capacity to be wise. We will be sharing those ideas, tools and spaces as we develop the Substack iteration of the Messenger.

But what is the 'collective' in collective wisdom?

Collectives can take many forms. Some are a mass united around a single purpose, like the people waiting for a train at Churchgate station. Some are hierarchies organised around a mission, like a company that makes reusable bags. But neither of these collectives are capable of handling a wicked problem with its varied demands and conflicting objectives. Over the past year, we (i.e., Socratus and some of our partners) have come to the belief that the kind of entity that solves -or dissolves- a wicked problem has to be distributed, decentralized and with multiple niches for multiple actors.

It takes an ecosystem to solve a wicked problem.

For the last three years, we have been flogging the slogan 'Socratus is the Midwife of Collective Wisdom.' Now that slogan has a twist at the end: 'Midwifing the collective wisdom of ecosystems.' We will be documenting the ecosystems we midwife in the Messenger. In particular, we will be sharing the work being done by our Food Systems, Urban Systems and Situated Economy labs and how they see the wicked problems in the Food/Urban/SE systems and the networks they see as most capable of doing something about these wicked problems. We will also talk about some emerging projects such as ‘climate citizenship’ and at the very edge of the possible, wild hypotheses like ‘nothing in society makes sense except in the light of the planet.’

What we haven't told you is how we are going to document our journey for that's a matter of showing, not telling. Without revealing what's coming (wait and watch!), keep an eye out for new media forms and new storytelling methods.