Starting a superstructure is only the beginning. The real task is envisioning what it can do, how it will work, and who you need to work with. If you're not a member, consider joining now. If you are a member, be bold, jump in, and use the superstructure to start organizing for survival. Edit it, add to the vision, and make it real, online and off. And don't forget to rave.

More about Superstructures

• Speculative Culturesmithing

  "We can rebuild that culture for you wholesale"
  
• Founder: JohnGS
  
  collaboration, culture, anthropology, culturesmithing, social analysis,
  
  
• Who We Need
  

  This superstructure needs people who participate in innovative communities, groups that reuse, recreate, and reform cultural and social formations.  That includes people who participate in gaming (RPGs, LARPS, MMORGs, etc), fan subcultures, historical re-enactors, online social communities, etc., people whose hobby or vocation is making culture, every day.  This is not about trendsetting or manipulative cultural ideas, it is about the daily activity of forging social and cultural ties.  People who participate in communities that use imagined or improvisational social interactions and cultural frameworks are doing the kind of activity that can teach us how to review and remake some of the ideas that are leading us to annihilate ourselves.

  This superstruct also needs social scientists, policy-makers, and information brokers.  Their job is to identify the cultural assumptions and practices that are problematic and work with the first group to think of ways to reshape the behaviors and thought patterns that are contributing to the species' destruction.  These two groups will collaborate via direct discussion, role-playing simulation, and whatever other methods they feel will produce results.  The goal is to come up with ways to conceive of the world and relate to one another that steer us away from our suicidal path.

• How to join
  Your mission is two-fold: briefly discuss what talents you bring to this superstruct, and then tell us about a cultural assumption or practice that you think is making things worse, and one possible way to improve or rethink it.  For a gold star, find someone to link up with and start working on that problem right now!
• Mission
  

  This superstruct is an exercise in applying pragmatic re-imaginings of the cultural assumptions and practices that are contributing to the demise of the species.  By examining specific ideological and ontological cultural expressions critically this superstructure seeks to understand how certain notions and activities not only create or exacerbate current problems but reproduce ideas that make solving these problems more difficult.  By realizing that we all create and reproduce culture, and that thus we can recreate it, this superstruct tries to connect people and communities who frequently innovate cultural formations with those who often set the agenda for culture change.  

  Culture is an adaptive and collaborative mechanism for human survival that has often been ossified, essentialized, and professionalized.  Culture is a set of precepts and assumptions that govern how we perceive reality and interact with the world around us, but people power that process.  We need to realize that everyone is a cultural revolutionary because cultural ideas and practices depend on us to be transmitted and actualized.  If people understand the adaptivity of their capacity for culture, we can use that capacity to live creatively, not destructively.

• What we can accomplish
  
  • What can this supserstructure do?  Two things, for a start.  One is what it says: find problematic cultural and ideological notions and activities, speculate on ways to change them, and then try to make those changes happen.  The second is more subtle, and more about the nature of culture and how we think it works.  Culture is not a discrete system and is not a solid object.  What this superstruct proposes is that we recall what culture actually is, which is a human capacity for adaptation and collaboration.  It is a medium of exchange and collusion, a way to view reality and deal with it in groups.  And if you look around, you see people reworking culture all the time.  This superstructure wants to discover and promote ways of changing specific cultural things we think and do to maximize our survival, and also remind us that we all have the capacity to do this.
• How this superstruct works
  
• Other information
  
• Discuss this superstructure
  

  • I've already started countering the idea/mindset I think is most destructive: "My little efforts won't be enough."  So my struct, "Everyday Heroes" is trying to get the stories out there, the actors connected, and utilize the power of community to "rave" every little thing we can--in whatever form we can.  I'm trying to spread FAITH (in ourselves, in humanity) because FAITH is POWER.

     

    JohnGS: That is the first step: trying to identify an idea or practice that keeps us from working productively together.  The next step is to analyze that idea and take it apart, and then brainstorm ways to combat it.  In the sense of culturesmithing, the goal is to not just counter the idea, but talk about and try out new frames, perspectives, and embodied practices that get people out of the unhelpful mindset and into one that puts them firmly on the collective survival path.

    Thanks for identifying a specific way for us to contribute! The cultural practice that I think is currently devastating online culture is the zero-cost to commenting on someone else's work (videos, blog posts, etc.) Unsolicited comments that are hostile, draining, etc. are a huge cognitive drain for anyone trying to make or accomplish something online. It's like the spam problem -- email is free, so you can spam the world with unsolicited messages. Unsolicited commenting clogs the participation sphere and often demoralizes people who are trying to provide value or build something interesting. I would like to prototype a virtual currency deposit system whereby all commenters must leave a deposit (amount set by the person whose work is being commented on) that is fully refunded if the comment is deemed relevant, useful, sociable, etc. I actually have a pretty detailed design for such a system, but I'll just start here with the basic idea!--POSTED BY AVANTGAME

    Avantgame: This is the first step: identifying a drag on the socio-cultural system.  Negative commenting without consequences, cost, or responsibility is indeed a problem.  I have been involved with political and policy discussions on open fora that start out great but then get derailed by trolls and saboteurs, most of whom are just "doing it for the lulz."  And I think that this needs to be examined more and ameliorated in a multi-faceted way.   In terms of culturesmithing, I would want to look at why people do this, while also considering ways to improve the system itself.  For example, if people do this because the topic makes them feel uncomfortable, frustrated, or talked over, are there techniques we can teach moderators to deal with these feelings?   Are there ways we can limit anonymous posting without limiting freedom of speech, ways to postively value contributions that build the conversation (like your deposit system!), or ways to get at the elements that make these kinds of participants want to drag down these discussions?  

    I would want to do some virtual ethnography on  this, and perhaps work up an anthropologically-sensitive, open self-interview survey to try to see if the abusers themselves can give us some insight into why they feel the need (or feel they have the right, in come cases) to create this sort of negative drag.  I would also be interested in hearing what sorts of social and symbolic rewards they feel they get from this, and how this feeds into (o maybe off of?) the format of the communication system.  I would also want to survey moderators of different types of fora to get their input on how these sorts of abusers effect communication and discussion, and what their cultural assumptions are about the type of people that do this and what can be done to deal with them.  What is the value of this negativity to the perpetrators, and what might be contained in our current responses to them that may feed them?

     Those are just a few things to consider in taking a culturesmithing approach to the matter.  

    What I would then propose is to create a few simulated fora (perhaps in an RPG format), and give people roles as moderators, participants, and trolls, with some guidelines and ethnographic information to base their characters on, and have them run some speculative discussions using these roles.  Making it a game with defined goals might impel people to really get into it.  The purpose of this is threefold: to give the participants a chance to act and think in ways they might not in general; to insert hypothetical solutions into the mix to see what impact they have; and to see if the research information gathered does give us a clearer picture of why this occurs.

    That is very off the top of my head, but that is kinda what I had in mind for this struct.

     

    A destructive cultural assumption: that old + shabby = poor and slovenly. The pressure to conform to aesthetic expectations of "one's place in society" helps drive our consumer-driven ethos, resulting in an immense amount of waste and unnecessary consumption. What can we do? Promote "shabby chic." If major figures in sports, arts, business, entertainment and society publicly flaunt mended clothing, dinged cars, scuffed shoes, not as a fashion statement but as a sincere endorsement of conservation, we can make an impact on people's perception of how they "ought" to look to  fit in. Maybe we can engage in a bit of one-upsmanship, since people have an innate need to compete: tag clothing, accessories, appliances with the date of purchase. "My sweather is older than yours! I've had it since college, actually." Reverse snobbery can be "in"  Posted by E.izabeth Merritt

    ---I would like to see more details about the comment deposit system, and would like to be contacted for participation in testing that system. I'm not sure 'negativity' is how you want to describe the problem, though. All too often, that word is used by hermetically sealed, cheering-peanut-gallery subcultures, such as fundamentalists, alternative medicine, political partisans, and multi-level marketing pyramid schemes, to exempt their proposals from accountability. The power of positive thinking is their substitute for results. Frankly, the unsolicited comments have had a wonderful effect on their clientele. The term you want might be something like "frivolous griefing". The virtual currency deposit system can help this. Constructive critics will be perfectly happy to lose their virtual currency deposit if necessary, and will take seriously their obligation to make their suggestions friendly, specific, easy-to-understand, and hopefully even nurturing.--POSTED BY NEMORATHWALD

• Related stories
  
• Other superstructures we are collaborating with
  

  • 11/02: Some news about initial collaboration!   Facilitators from two other superstructures have asked about working together.  Revsparker from Everyday Heroes has offered to help get the word out and operationalize any ideas that we come up with.  His group can "spread new cultural memes, practices, rituals, and actions. We're collaborating with many others to get a 'grapevine' of healthy cultural practices and attitudes built."  I think that idea of a grapevine through which we can spread new ideas and actions is a good one to think with as we develop this superstruct.  I'm going to brain-blast some ideas for this in the next day or two and post them here, and encourage others to do the same.

     

    Also, rtgarden2019 has asked for collaboration with the Bright Green superstruct, I think as both a source of ideas and as a disseminator and tester of them.  Which of course means it is time to start fleshing out the work that this superstruct can do and seeing if it jibes with what others need and are trying to accomplish!  I urge folks who have joined or want to work with the idea of culturesmithing to start brain-bashing out some questions and objectives that they think would contribute to making this superstruct active, and how those in turn might open up the 'struct to collaboration with others.

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