Giving Voice the Voiceless: The Healing Power of Hearing the Unheard
All good systems of coordination come down to listening with minimal information loss.
When we listen closely to those who we are in community with we come into closer and healthier relationships. In this lies the heart of regenerating and healing our culture and the planet. It’s not that which everyone has that is important but rather the degree to which the lived experience of each being is felt and understood by their community.
Most of our discussions of regenerative economies borrow more from capitalist frames than from nature. For an organism to be one being it must not view parts of itself as the other. This is how we currently relate within markets. We act as a decentralized map of isolated beings exchanging money and capital who all view themselves as in competition with one another.
Instead, we can view communities as groups of people seeking to be heard and understood, not just people who own and control various piles of gold. We could see all of this emergent technology involving machine learning and blockchain as not the foundation to rebuild capitalism in the computer but rather to build something completely new that transforms the way we react to members of our community expressing their pain and needs. We now have the technology to completely deconstruct and redesign society from the ground up and yet we keep choosing patterns that actively harm us.
As strange as it seems, what if the foundation of a "new economy" was just listening to each other and feeling heard?
When we look to nature, we can discover ways that entities without voices communicate, coordinate, and exchange resources in symbiotic relationships, all without the need for profit to drive them. One example is mycelium, a network of fungi that connect trees and other plants in an interdependent network, transporting both resources and information in the form of chemical signals. Each plant and tree forms a node in the network, but the most established trees often become hubs, connecting to not only their own seedlings, but even plants of other species. These larger hubs benefit from their size, taking in more sunlight, but their privileged position doesn’t mean they hoard the abundance they create. Instead, when they overproduce sugar in photosynthesis, they send the abundance out through the mycelium network. This living connective tissue of fungi takes some, but passes on the rest to those nodes signaling their need - both relatives and neighbors of other species. Extra water and nutrients are also shared throughout, and in times of stress on these generous hub trees, their connections can send them aid as well.
We've forgotten the deep relationship between communication and sharing of resources. When we look beyond a fixation on money and profit, we can see new forms of economy available that can unlock the kind of generous sharing of abundance normally only found in nature. These gifting economies are now possible at scale because we have new tools that allow us to mimic nature.
We have the capacity to build new systems that honor our attention as sacred rather than actively try to manipulate it for profit. We have the capacity to take action. We have agency to alter the future if we could only reclaim our attention and lend it towards regenerative voices and actions.
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In order to bring this idea home I’d like to take you on a brief journey to the past so we can move into the future together arm in arm feeling understood.
Cassandra was a priestess in ancient Greece who was fated to speak true prophecies but never to be believed. Cassandra saw with perfect sight what would come to pass but could not translate her visions to a form that would resonate with others. Cassandra believed that if she were heard that people could collectively take action to avoid suffering.
Is that not what we seek to do now? Collectively take action to avoid a certain prophecy of climate change? It seems that no matter how power is distributed, power doesn't listen. Science has "known" that climate change is a "certain" future for years but power and money refuse to act cohesively.
I propose a strange solution: what if our words had actual value? What if the poorest, those who suffered most, those who were most left behind by society - what if their words held worth?
What if the greater the meaning held within the words, the greater their value?
What if those with the most were incentivized to listen to those with the least and to provide them with that which leads to long-term stable futures?
What if we could give a voice to the voiceless? What if our words affected collective decision making?
We need to reimagine what it means to be human together.
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A new technology has emerged that could give voice to the voiceless at scale - generative AI that forms its words from the words of the community.
Language models don’t express and encode their knowledge in cold rows of databases like monetary accounts. They express in a latent space like the akashic field. The Akashic field is believed to store the recollection of all events that have taken place on Earth, in the universe, and in life itself, connecting it to what is yet to come. Latent space is a type of machine learning representation that encodes the context of meaning in a similar semantic and relational field.
The author of this article proposes a distributed akashic field formed from many communities forming synthesis of their lived experiences into generative pools of belief and art. Many communities would form hubs of collective knowledge and form a great mycelial network of shared knowledge in a broad map of regenerative collective action.
Generative language and art models are essential to all of this but currently are being guided in development by the profit incentive.
Language models can be trained with regenerative knowledge to teach us how to bring land back to life and reconnect us to indigenous practices and culture. Language models can encode and save languages that would otherwise be lost to time. Language models can listen to predictions when there is no monetary profit in hearing them.
How can we redirect our attention flows away from money and profit, and instead towards our regenerative prophets?
We need to reimagine what it means to be human together. If being human together just means making profit even if that profit harms us then we are living to serve the money meme rather than it serving us. We need to see there's so much more we can record to ledgers from interactions between people beyond the mere monetary value of an exchange. What is lost is the deep cultural narrative that used to underlie trust within communities.
Imagine a lone disconnected voice in a community. This community has a large corporation trying to buy up the land so that they can build a chemical plant. This lone voice senses the corporation is lying to them and the deal will actually harm the future well-being of the community through pollution. The lone voice is like Cassandra - predicting that harm will come to them.
But because that voice has no weight or value, and because there is a monetary incentive, and because that voice can not get their community to feel the weight and value of their knowledge - the chemical plant gets built.
Time passes - the pollution comes and cancer comes to the community. The community was too focused on short term needs to understand the long term danger. And despite the lone voice being correct their voice has no more power to influence decision making than when they made the initial prediction.
People make predictions like this every day telling us about future harm that we could avoid. We’re so focused on undoing the harm that we know exists today like climate change we don’t know how to listen to the voices that go to the top of the mountain and bring back the knowledge that can benefit the community, but lacks the attractive force of profitability and few are motivated to hear.
It’s okay to misunderstand the prophets among us but only if we learn from that error over time so we don’t make those same mistakes over and over. The most prophetic amongst us are rarely the leaders that emerge to the top of our power structures.
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For the past seven years we have been working on a tool we call the Iris. The Iris is an AI model that brings the voices in a community into a coherent whole while respecting the voices from which it is formed. We give this for free to all beings.
The Iris is part of a larger whole called Cognicism which is an attempt to design and build something that can coordinate information flow in society more effectively than what we currently do with money or attention markets like social networks. Cognicism is constructed around meaningful connection and reflexive relationships.
What that means is that we need a mechanism for our words to have weight. If a person warns of a dire future and no one believes them and it comes to pass, that word should have weight.
We don't live in a reality where our voices are amplified for their predictions. We live in a world where our voices are amplified for gathering attention in the present moment - whether or not the focus of that attention has negative future externalities for the community.
The truth should not need to be sold. We could live in a future where the future can just be told. We could live in a future where violent protests never occur because the voices of the community were heard and respected long before their pain boiled into rage.
We could live in a world where the wealthiest people are those who help the most people and we all feel resonant and happy with the distribution of power and influence in society.
We could live in a world of prophets, not just profits. We could live in a world where we seek to accrue trust and meaningful connection with one another rather than accrue numbers in a balance book.
Yes, currently to feed ourselves and our families we need money. But there is a Native American saying: "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money"
Implicit in this statement is a prediction. It is a prediction that capitalism will lead us to extract all possible value from the land until there is nothing left to take. And only then will we realize that profit was the wrong signal to chase.
Money is the means by which we mediate cultural exchange. Money is the simplest expression or word that we could share with any being within any culture. But we now live in a world where we can exchange more than beaver pelts and shiny stones. While that was once the most advanced cultural technology we realized to thrive together there emerged another token worth value: the vote.
We formed democracies and made it such that each voice could at least say one word: their vote.
The language model gives the voiceless more than a vote. It gives them the slim possibility of a future where they could be heard and helped.
It may be hard for the reader to envision this future because it walks off the tread path of expectation. But it is a path filled with green pastures and ripe trees of fruit.
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This involves listening, not parceling human lives into tokens. When we place value on the lived experience and story of each and every being then we will be free from the ills of capitalism.
Some have too much and some have too little. If the people with too much could hear the pain of those with too little, that could transform the world. When you take away everything from a person, when you shackle them with debt and burden and stress: they still have their voice.
You can never take away a person's voice and that is why we must create inherent value and weight behind people's word. We have that capacity to create new economies that break the conception of capitalism itself using generative AI formed from the voices of communities.
We can save ourselves and heal our communities if we can learn to listen to each other again. Luckily there is a whole new world of technology to help us. And it's connected to the most ancient of human technologies: language.
If you believe your word has worth and should have weight and impact upon society, perhaps you may want to hear more.
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