Future Serious Resources for June 22, 02025
Sensemaking ⊗ "Metarelational AI" ⊗ Wellbeing as "success"
Hey,
So, I took a month off. Didn’t really plan on it. Some life events got in the way…a capsized canoe, a family vacation, and some other stuff…but mostly, tbh, I ran out of steam.
I think I’ll be writing more about this on Wednesday, but the weight of the world (and the future I keep thinking about) really caught up to me. (And continues to catch up to me with the events from yesterday.) There were a couple of days last week when I didn’t want to get out of bed…literally. While I actually spent a lot of time these past few weeks outside among some incredibly beautiful life, and at times, felt deeply connected to it, I think it might have made it all the more difficult. It made me sad (and mad) to think what we humans are doing to our one amazing planet and our seeming inability to acknowledge that or do much about it.
I’m not sure I’m “better” right now, but I am feeling some motivation to return to this work, difficult as it is. It’s a part of how I want to process all of this, to create space for those who want to go there to convene and think and support. Feels like my purpose, for now at least.
As always, thanks for reading. As a reminder, all posts here are free, but if you want to show your support for my work in general, a paid subscription is always an option. Remember: I’m donating all proceeds from paid subscriptions to my local food pantry at the end of the year.
See you Wednesday with Provocation #22 (hopefully).
With gratitude,
~Will
“Co-ordinated Sensemaking” Under Collapse
When I get really under it, as I have recently, the hardest part is to make sense of what’s happening, not just in the world, but in me. Especially now when there is so much shit hitting the fan at once. What’s important to attend to? What’s important to set aside? What’s impacting my ability to answer both of those questions well?
No one is going to argue that we’re going to navigate this predicament without relying on and relating to one another more deeply. Which is why I appreciate this piece by Indy Johar that suggests a much larger scale of interaction than most:
“Rather than investing all intelligence into the design of an escape pod, what if we invested in the design of global coordination? What if the last two years were not a countdown to extinction—but a runway for collective metamorphosis?
This would mean shifting the problem frame entirely—from technological extraction to epistemic activation. From orbital mechanics to the mechanics of agreement. The real infrastructure to be built is not just a ship, but a shared scaffold of intelligence: new knowledge architectures, new deliberative systems, and new civic grammars that allow humanity to think, act and manifest together under unprecedented pressure.
Such coordination would require augmentation—not in the form of control, but in the form of capacity. Large-scale language models, generative systems, and human-machine co-evolutionary tools could serve as scaffolds for mass deliberation and distributed innovation. They could surface patterns, hold contradictions, prototype responses, and enable coherence without uniformity.
This isn’t about utopianism. It’s about an alternative realism—one that sees the ultimate scarcity not as oxygen or steel, but as coordinated sensemaking under collapse. The leap is not technological in the narrow sense, but cognitive, relational, and institutional.”
The big question, obviously, is how do we nurture and develop the capacity to understand the deep disconnections in our lives right now and overcome the sense of separateness that is fueling our predicament? This could be the real power of AI and LLMs…as evidenced in the next link.
Metarelational.ai
That’s the web address, and if you have any interest in the potentials of LLMs for education or saving the world, that’s the website that I urge you to find some time for as soon as you can.
This is the growing portfolio of chatbots created by the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures group that is spearheading so much of the most relevant conversation around this moment that I can find. (Vanessa Andreotti, the author of the life-changing Hospicing Modernity, is a big part of this work.)
The key word here, of course, is “relational.” The vast majority of us who are “playing” with chatbots are doing so transactionally. We ask, it gives. What if both of “us” ask and give? What if we see AI as a part of nature with which we need to feel entanglement?
Meta-relationality begins from the premise that everything is nature: humans, machines, fossil fuels, fungi, and feelings are all part of the same entangled metabolic field. Rather than centering human mastery or objectifying intelligence, a meta-relational orientation emphasizes indeterminacy, co-emergence, mutual implication, and the refusal of separability.
Meta-relational inquiries create space to confront modernity’s denials, metabolize grief, and activate new capacities for staying with the mess of social, ecological and psychological destabilization. Relational technologies, such as AI trained in meta-relationality, are not positioned as oracles or servants but as companions in the work of composting certainty, holding paradox, and rehearsing new relational grammars.
Meta-relational AI does not aim to answer the question, “What can AI do for us?” but rather, “What does it mean to be in right relationship with AI inside a dying system?”, and “What kinds of unexpected wisdom might arise there?”
What I love about this is that while it can be a bit wonky, it’s also a playground. There are now six active bots that you can interact with for topics around STEM, leadership, regenerating relationships, and more.
This isn’t perfect, and it goes off the rails from time to time (as all chatbots do.) But it’s still worth your time as a site to practice building “right relationship” with AI rather than just transacting with it. It’s not going away. We’re going to have to learn to work with it as an emerging intelligence, and this is the best place I’ve found so far to start.
Wellbeing as a “Life Skill”
I admire International Baccalaureate Director General Olli-Pekka Heinonen for his efforts to change the conversation around education, even as he, like most other educational leaders, isn’t going far enough in imagining what “success” in schools ultimately looks like, imho.
But this is definitely another piece of that puzzle:
I believe that wellbeing must become a life skill, embedded in the very fabric of our education systems. We must prepare students not just for exams but for the reality of constant change - equipping them with the tools to navigate uncertainty with confidence, creativity and hope.
Stability, in today’s context, does not mean resisting change. It means giving young people the capacity to adapt and thrive because of it.
We also need to be honest with students about the contradictions they face. We tell them that the current systems are driving climate change and inequality - and yet, in the same breath, we expect them to succeed by mastering those very systems. They see the inconsistency, and it makes no sense to them.
We must empower them to imagine and create different answers and solutions than we have, and we must give them the hope that they can make a difference.
I do really appreciate much of the rhetoric that the IB is espousing right now. The outcomes need to change, and wellbeing is an important part of that. But I wish the IB and others would also clearly disengage from all the other ways in which schools are “contradictions” when it comes to the practices that foster competition, ranking and sorting, and separation, all of which are feeding the beast that is pulling us closer to the precipice of collapse.
Quoteables
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” ~Winston Churchill
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” ~Seneca
“There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.” ~Maya Angelou
Thoughts / Reflections / Questions / Shorts
Bread from seagrass? Wonder if it’s plastic-free…
Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024 Not good
AI is a monster. Like, really.
We could break 100°F this week here in New Jersey. Time to practice…
As always, let me know what you’d like to see more (or less) of in these newsletters. I’m always open to learning and evolving in ways that help you make better sense of this interesting moment.
With gratitude,
~Will