Joint Salon: Networked Minds - lydgate/mindmeld GitHub Wiki

Networked Minds: The History and Future of Collaboration

Salon Description

  • **Interintellect hosts Bryan Kam and Isabela Granic join forces with a new salon that aims to take a deep dive into the history and potential of networked thought.  **

  • “The great driver of scientific and technological innovation [in the last 600 years has been] the increase in our ability to reach out and exchange ideas with other people, and to borrow other people’s hunches and combine them with our hunches and turn them into something new.”

    • ― Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From

  • Why do some collaborations result in creative explosions? In this salon, we'll discuss the theory and practice of collaboration. We will start by considering the history of famous "scenes" throughout the world and across the centuries. Are there common conditions that can explain the efflorescence of philosophy in Ancient Athens, the output of the Bloomsbury Group or the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in London, the Beat Generation in New York and San Francisco, or the Dadaists in Switzerland? Why do musical genres sometimes erupt with such energy -- with the wild power and pathos of the Punks in the 70s? How is it that so many scientists came from the same handful of Hungarian high schools? Is there a code to the constructive alchemy or competitive pressure produced in the close (and often fraught) famous partnerships -- Lennon and McCartney, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Freud and Jung, Bogart and Becall, Gauguin and van Gogh, Marx and Engels, Kahneman and Tversky?

  • In the second half of the salon, we will explore whether the principles that made creative collaborations so productive in the past might shed light on how best to approach the affordances and pitfalls of the digital age. We will cover the pragmatics of collaborative thought on the internet. Which tools are useful, and which are distractions? What can we learn from enormous collaborative efforts like Wikipedia, Github, and the Linux kernel? Could tools or processes provide scaffolding for collaborations which reliably exceed the potential of any of its individual members? How can we capture ideas in writing without impeding the energy and speed of thinking aloud together?

  • Great to read or watch pre-salon:

  • Time zones:

  • 9:00 PM in London

  • 10:00 PM in Berlin

  • 4:00 PM in New York

  • 1:00 PM in San Francisco

  • Why not add the ii Calendar to your calendar?

First draft:

  • In this salon, we'll cover both theoretical and practical ground to understand how minds connect when they are at their most intellectually productive, efficient, and creative. We will start by considering the history of collaborative thought and examine some of the most famous "scenius" across the world and over the centuries. Are there certain common conditions that can explain the deliberate overturning of traditional poetics by the Beats in San Francisco, the visual magic of the Dadaists in France, the power and pathos of the Punks in the 70s? We will also consider the characteristics and interactive dynamics of creative duos over the centuries. Is there a reliable code to the alchemy between partners like Lennon and McCartney, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Bogie and Bacall, and Gauguin and van Gogh?
  • In the second half of the salon, we will explore whether the principles that made creative collaborations so productive in the past are equally applicable in our current age of digital connection. We will cover the pragmatics of collaborative thought as it can and does manifest on the internet and cover a range of specific tools for thought that could level up our collaborations. In particular, we are interested in asking whether there is one or a set of tools that could be used to scaffold collaborations such that innovations in thinking arise from a collection of minds that are irreducible to any one collaborator. We will search for models of networked thought, as well as tools to instantiate those models, that can be used to support the processes that can ratchet and accelerate phase transitions between networked minds.