^ “The opportunity we face is the flip side of a problem that has become endemic; the transports across which we communicate, perhaps especially this one, are owned. And the interests that own them are, by being corporate, nonhuman.

Whoever ‘controls’ the transports with which we communicate can derive from our activities… our concerns… and can thus use highly sophisticated means to effectively engineer aspects of our minds and social behavior. So those who control ‘the wires’ will become the effective analog of gods. Because they can record and analyze all that is transmitted ‘across’ the interfaces, as well as directly deciding what appears … where… and to whom.

What empowers this process is intention and purpose. The intentions are commercial and protomilitary, the purposes relate to observation of and control over the development of mind-like states in vast populations. I speak then, of psygenics: the intentional generation of psychologically charged communications environments driven by analytic data acquires from those who participate in them.

A primary asset in these processes is contagion, and it is relatively simple to study the nature and character of how (and why) we exchange communications activity… mathematically. Our activities have become something more valuable than money, when taken collectively… because they produce something money cannot ordinarily buy: population intelligence. Given the wealth of data available for analysis and testing… we have nearly achieved a situation where the data related to our existence is in many domains more valuable than our existence. Each of us is actually in a direct competition, an evolutionary competition, with the data we generate by existing in our national and electronic societies.

This is the world we live in now.

The opportunity we face is to invert this model; to collect, analyze, share and transform our relationships with each other, the data we produce and interact with, and the analytic results. In simple terms: we take control of the wires we use, ourselves, and build even better analytic resources with our own data… while reaping the benefits of them in our social and learning activity. If we are to build pyramids of analytic assets for vast corporations, why not build them together, for each other… and have them directly available to us… as our activites compose them?

We could invert the whole concept of surveillance by inventing systems that use the analytic assets we create together to alert us to threats and opportunities that matter in our own lives, interests and social situations. And we can establish ways to assemble teams of people interested in producing advanced socio-cultural situations in which we can recover the capacity to intellligently engineer social contexts in our modern situations.

So the opportunity that faces us is to establish a mutual learning-synthesis engine. Ways of gathering and relating with analytic data that open up new vistas of possibility for our physical, social, intellectual and creative discovery. And, perhaps, a way of ‘playing’ at the invention of intelligent contexts… that could transform what it is to live and participate in human culture, by giving us new models and roles in a context we, ourselves, assemble and explore together.

It’s not a bold vision; it seems that something similar may happen… eventually. But in our current situation it’s a radical idea; that by taking control of the information we ourselves generate, and assembling a collaborate environment where we share and magnify the specific usefulness of the resulting analytics… we can invent new ways of assembling human society together… and form intelligent teams capable of actively and effectively addressing many of the seemingly intractable ‘problems’ that our general failure to form intelligent cultures produces endlessly as symptoms.

We can invent a way to magnify the powers of our curiosity and learning activity … that will revolutionize human relations with language, information, media and knowledge. And place the results in the hands of the common people. Or we can continue to live in the world we do now, where surveillance produces cash and control assets in unimaginable quantity, for corporations… speculators, criminals, and governments.

Long ago there were pirate radio stations that broadcasted without licenses. This was one way of taking back the wires. In our situation, we need to take not only the wires… but the analytics and their interpretation. This requires engines capable of producing the desired benefits from the recording and analysis of our interactions with devices and data. In our hands, these will not be mere commodities — we will use them to learn how to engineer better minds, lives, relationships… purposes.. work… and culture. And we can use them to solve problems that are otherwise unnaproachable.”

— an intelligence agent