Great read Austin. In reading this the word tribalism comes to mind. It’s become a bit of a buzzword online that is really only used in a negative context in the “us vs them” type of way that you mention but our tribal nature as humans has a ton of benefits at the local community level. Groups of people working toward a common goal and sharing ideas in their local community can create tons of positive change. The sheer scale of the internet shifts our focus to global problems and away from our local communities which actually directly impact us much more of the time.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the “naive pessimism” you mention that permeates a lot of comment sections on the internet. I think Naive pessimism can be a self perpetuating cycle in the sense that the more pessimistic you get, the less you want to get out and change things happen for the better. “Nothing is going to change so I might as well not try”. The algorithm obviously also dumps gasoline on this problem by shoving bad news in your face if it knows that you’ll engage with all of it.
I live on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia (Cortes Island) in a small weird niche community. Here is the 2040 story I would like to make into a TV series based in this place. Would you like to help me?:The Salish Sea
A TV series proposal
Pilot
Water is Life is the background music for this preview
First camera shot
Close up:
You see a kayak paddle dipping into the water and as the water drips off the end of the paddle the sunshine glitters off of the water
The camera pulls back slightly
You see the paddle going in and out of the water in a rhythm and hear and see strong and heavy breathing puffs of vapor in the cool air
You see strong hands and arms pushing on the paddle, a woman's hands
The camera pulls back and you see a young woman in a kayak breathing hard moving the kayak forward very quickly with her paddle, her kayak is filled with a large medicine pack
Audio: you hear an eagle call, laughing, far away in the tree tops, otherwise all is silence
The camera pulls back again from above to see the woman skirting the shoreline of the temperate rainforest
Camera dissolves into a flashback of the same young woman lying down with her eyes closed. Next to her is a chalice filled with Psilocybe Cubensis mushrooms
Pan the room: she's in the middle of a healing ceremony with other people playing a drum, rattle, and a beautiful and haunting song in the background
In her vision she is communicating with a woman in labor and the spirit of that woman’s baby you see it as a numinous light around the woman; they're asking for the midwife’s help through her vision in the ceremony
Then the camera shot is back on the young woman as she pulls the kayak up onto the shore above the tide line pulls her pack off of the back and runs up to a cabin in the woods
As she enters all the people in the room light up with relief and gladness she's there
She sees the young woman in labor and she comes over and washes her hands with hot water from the table next to her. She puts her hand over the woman's heart and looks into her eyes and she sees what she needs to do
We find out that this is the year 2022 and the Treaty of the Salish Sea Nations has been signed by all Indigenous Nations surrounding the Salish Sea. The treaty’s purpose is to help bring back the cetacean population that used to live in the Salish Sea and by doing so, heal the land, the sea, and all the creatures and peoples who live there.
The baby born is our protagonist, the young woman who will bring all the people of the nations together. Fighting for the lives of the Indigenous people, all the tribes of all the people coming together to fight the oil corporations.
The purpose of this series is to create a realistic vision of what could be possible if we do unite now. It is also a way to educate people about how psychedelic medicine could be used for healing. The premise is that each episode is focused on a different spirit medicine, how it is best used, and how it can heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually. How the people can use it to reconnect with the whole ecology of the sea and the land and the air.
Fast Forward to 2040:
Our protagonist, the baby, now grown into a strong and beautiful young woman, is now the student of the midwife who birthed her. She is riding and steering a ground effect hydrofoil transport with her hair and leathers flying in the wind.
The camera pulls way back and up: We see other hydrofoils scooting across the water ways of the Salish Sea as the highway between busy gatherings and villages all around the Salish Sea. Some people are tending medicinal cannabis greenhouses and creating medicines from the plants. There are large medicinal mushroom growing operations of all kinds. Peyote and cactus are growing in specially created sunrooms that also serve people who have seasonal depression. They are doing hot yoga under these big bright lamps and the cacti are growing all around the edges of the room.
There are groups of teenagers from both First Nations and Second Nations tribes building small boats of all kinds together. Other groups are maintaining trails that carry all manner of traffic (people walking with bundles and backpacks, horses, solar electric rickshaws) down to the shores and along the shores in all directions. You see people creating sweat lodges and holding ceremonies of all kinds. Gatherings, music festivals, Rainbow gatherings, and Sundances are occurring in many places. Speeding across the water and then flying above a village, you see circles of all kinds with young and older people dancing and making music and passing a talking stick. Gardens are everywhere and small cottage farms with some animals. People live in treehouses, cabins, tiny houses everywhere, some connected and some off in little clearings,
There is no industry, no large engines, no fish farms, no tankers. No big noises are allowed in the water to disturb the cetaceans and the fish. Scientists on lab boats are testing the water. Other biologists are working with whales, dolphins, porpoises talking with each other through hydrophones and translating their sounds into meaningful phrases. Some whales bring their babies up to a boat in order for the people to touch them and jump up out of the water.
Possible storylines for future episodes:
The Native American Church has been established in many of the First Nations Communities all around the Salish Sea. The peyote traditions from Central and Southwestern America have been adapted for the temperate rainforest and the peyote is grown in all the solar energy generation plants all around the Salish Sea. In the ceremony the people will experience a past life during a spiritual emergency in the 1700’s. Colonization and genocide create the need to pass on the spiritual understanding to future generations. The people in the ceremony experience the coming of a full circle in this generation. The astrological geocentric conjunction of the 1960’s recurs in the 2040’s creating numinous light cracking through many peoples’ experiences.
In another ceremony, the journeyer envisions someone being murdered and they know they must go and look for what happened. In another, a team of journeyers work with a corporation CEO who is convinced he must be in the ceremony and will see how to transcend the greed in his business.
The concepts of spiritual emergence, sustainability, restoration justice and indigenous healing will figure prominently. Ecological warriors, spiritual leaders, shamans, artists, musicians, will be the ones who open themselves and find the light is breaking through them into the culture. The Hopi prophecy of Koyaanisqatsi plays out as the archetypal forces of this time lay the ground for the spiritual emergence of increasing numbers of people.
After Seeing this Series: Integration of Spiritually Emergent Experiences
Once you experience this TV series, Salish Sea, you will be an inspired, motivated, energized citizen of this world. You will want to go be a part of this new world and be willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen. Those people who are experiencing spiritual emergence now will see templates of emotional and physical healing and spiritual practices that will help them to integrate their experiences and help them to understand what is happening inside them.
This series will be shot and edited on Cortes Island between 2019 and 2022.
A state of the art film studio and editing suite will create the foundation for future films to be made all through the Salish Sea. Documentary and journalism schools will have electives on Cortes.
The hydrofoils (ground effect transports), high CBD cannabis greenhouses, peyote cactus greenhouses and solar energy generator houses will be created here as an ongoing part of a sustainable industry here.
The TV series and the ceremonies created here will form the basis for ongoing sustainable material culture after the filming is done.
In the near future, it is probable that both MDMA and psilocybin will be approved for wider medical use in special treatment facilities. Hollyhock would be a suitable site for such a treatment centre. State of the art trauma and addiction treatment using indigenous healing ceremonies and sacred medicines will form the backbone of the healing work.
Feels like the missing piece here isn’t scale, but the layer where meaning and coordination happen. Small weird groups thrive because they control that layer - before algorithms, before virality, before incentives flatten everything.
Right now, that layer is primarily happening in our slack channel, and to some extent our comments section. Where have you seen that layer be effective in other communities?
Slack and comments are definitely where that layer shows up most visibly today, but I’ve seen it surface in other forms too, especially where shared context persists beyond any one channel or tool, like in long-running open communities and social annotation tools like hypothesis. None of the existing setups really solve it end-to-end, which is why I’m experimenting with this as a separate layer above web content. Still early - very much lab stage, with alpha kicking off in Q1
Building in layers over the web rather than silos enables community-governed rule enforcement and consent as well as content and trust over the entire web. This is key to providing digital rights (e.g., privacy and sovereignty), protecting against malicious AI, and enabling collaboration on planetary level as envisioned in the 1960's by Douglas Engelbart, the forgotten father of the modern computing and the web.
Maybe this is what you're building, but what is a "layer over the web" that isn't siloed and enables community governance?
We'll definitely be trying out Metalabel's DFOS when it launches (tentatively scheduled for January now) and I'm hoping that will come close to being that better layer. But I'm also very open to custom-built ideas too.
I see DFOS as very aligned in spirit, but scoped differently. What I’m calling a meta-layer is more about the underlying coordination substrate, identity, consent, and governance, that could support things like DFOS across the broader web, via SDKs that let anyone build apps that operate over the entire web using sidebars, smart tags, or overlay interfaces.
By a “layer over the web,” I mean something that attaches to existing pages rather than pulling everyone into a new silo, so context, discussion, and rules stay with the content. Meta-communities (i.e., communities that operate across the web) can accept federated strong auth so identity is community-chosen rather than platform-imposed, and governance is enforced through tooling rather than moderators alone, including secure execution environments for things like rule enforcement and consent. It’s still early: lab stage with alpha in Q1. But this work builds on ideas laid out in the Metaweb book (Taylor and Francis, 2023) and is now being carried forward through the Meta-Layer Initiative. We are seeking organizational partners to weigh in on standards for the interface layer. https://themetalayer.org/partners
Whoa, fascinating 🤯 I just signed up for the Metalayer partnership to learn more...
Looks like Hypothesis is one of the case studies!!! I actually trialed this earlier in the year but found it terrible to use in practice. The IDEA of it though is something I am very down for. I would love to be able to annotate the internet alongside a community of people.
Will check out the book for more case studies. Thanks for pointing me in this direction!
Great read Austin. In reading this the word tribalism comes to mind. It’s become a bit of a buzzword online that is really only used in a negative context in the “us vs them” type of way that you mention but our tribal nature as humans has a ton of benefits at the local community level. Groups of people working toward a common goal and sharing ideas in their local community can create tons of positive change. The sheer scale of the internet shifts our focus to global problems and away from our local communities which actually directly impact us much more of the time.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the “naive pessimism” you mention that permeates a lot of comment sections on the internet. I think Naive pessimism can be a self perpetuating cycle in the sense that the more pessimistic you get, the less you want to get out and change things happen for the better. “Nothing is going to change so I might as well not try”. The algorithm obviously also dumps gasoline on this problem by shoving bad news in your face if it knows that you’ll engage with all of it.
I live on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia (Cortes Island) in a small weird niche community. Here is the 2040 story I would like to make into a TV series based in this place. Would you like to help me?:The Salish Sea
A TV series proposal
Pilot
Water is Life is the background music for this preview
First camera shot
Close up:
You see a kayak paddle dipping into the water and as the water drips off the end of the paddle the sunshine glitters off of the water
The camera pulls back slightly
You see the paddle going in and out of the water in a rhythm and hear and see strong and heavy breathing puffs of vapor in the cool air
You see strong hands and arms pushing on the paddle, a woman's hands
The camera pulls back and you see a young woman in a kayak breathing hard moving the kayak forward very quickly with her paddle, her kayak is filled with a large medicine pack
Audio: you hear an eagle call, laughing, far away in the tree tops, otherwise all is silence
The camera pulls back again from above to see the woman skirting the shoreline of the temperate rainforest
Camera dissolves into a flashback of the same young woman lying down with her eyes closed. Next to her is a chalice filled with Psilocybe Cubensis mushrooms
Pan the room: she's in the middle of a healing ceremony with other people playing a drum, rattle, and a beautiful and haunting song in the background
In her vision she is communicating with a woman in labor and the spirit of that woman’s baby you see it as a numinous light around the woman; they're asking for the midwife’s help through her vision in the ceremony
Then the camera shot is back on the young woman as she pulls the kayak up onto the shore above the tide line pulls her pack off of the back and runs up to a cabin in the woods
As she enters all the people in the room light up with relief and gladness she's there
She sees the young woman in labor and she comes over and washes her hands with hot water from the table next to her. She puts her hand over the woman's heart and looks into her eyes and she sees what she needs to do
We find out that this is the year 2022 and the Treaty of the Salish Sea Nations has been signed by all Indigenous Nations surrounding the Salish Sea. The treaty’s purpose is to help bring back the cetacean population that used to live in the Salish Sea and by doing so, heal the land, the sea, and all the creatures and peoples who live there.
The baby born is our protagonist, the young woman who will bring all the people of the nations together. Fighting for the lives of the Indigenous people, all the tribes of all the people coming together to fight the oil corporations.
The purpose of this series is to create a realistic vision of what could be possible if we do unite now. It is also a way to educate people about how psychedelic medicine could be used for healing. The premise is that each episode is focused on a different spirit medicine, how it is best used, and how it can heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually. How the people can use it to reconnect with the whole ecology of the sea and the land and the air.
Fast Forward to 2040:
Our protagonist, the baby, now grown into a strong and beautiful young woman, is now the student of the midwife who birthed her. She is riding and steering a ground effect hydrofoil transport with her hair and leathers flying in the wind.
The camera pulls way back and up: We see other hydrofoils scooting across the water ways of the Salish Sea as the highway between busy gatherings and villages all around the Salish Sea. Some people are tending medicinal cannabis greenhouses and creating medicines from the plants. There are large medicinal mushroom growing operations of all kinds. Peyote and cactus are growing in specially created sunrooms that also serve people who have seasonal depression. They are doing hot yoga under these big bright lamps and the cacti are growing all around the edges of the room.
There are groups of teenagers from both First Nations and Second Nations tribes building small boats of all kinds together. Other groups are maintaining trails that carry all manner of traffic (people walking with bundles and backpacks, horses, solar electric rickshaws) down to the shores and along the shores in all directions. You see people creating sweat lodges and holding ceremonies of all kinds. Gatherings, music festivals, Rainbow gatherings, and Sundances are occurring in many places. Speeding across the water and then flying above a village, you see circles of all kinds with young and older people dancing and making music and passing a talking stick. Gardens are everywhere and small cottage farms with some animals. People live in treehouses, cabins, tiny houses everywhere, some connected and some off in little clearings,
There is no industry, no large engines, no fish farms, no tankers. No big noises are allowed in the water to disturb the cetaceans and the fish. Scientists on lab boats are testing the water. Other biologists are working with whales, dolphins, porpoises talking with each other through hydrophones and translating their sounds into meaningful phrases. Some whales bring their babies up to a boat in order for the people to touch them and jump up out of the water.
Possible storylines for future episodes:
The Native American Church has been established in many of the First Nations Communities all around the Salish Sea. The peyote traditions from Central and Southwestern America have been adapted for the temperate rainforest and the peyote is grown in all the solar energy generation plants all around the Salish Sea. In the ceremony the people will experience a past life during a spiritual emergency in the 1700’s. Colonization and genocide create the need to pass on the spiritual understanding to future generations. The people in the ceremony experience the coming of a full circle in this generation. The astrological geocentric conjunction of the 1960’s recurs in the 2040’s creating numinous light cracking through many peoples’ experiences.
In another ceremony, the journeyer envisions someone being murdered and they know they must go and look for what happened. In another, a team of journeyers work with a corporation CEO who is convinced he must be in the ceremony and will see how to transcend the greed in his business.
The concepts of spiritual emergence, sustainability, restoration justice and indigenous healing will figure prominently. Ecological warriors, spiritual leaders, shamans, artists, musicians, will be the ones who open themselves and find the light is breaking through them into the culture. The Hopi prophecy of Koyaanisqatsi plays out as the archetypal forces of this time lay the ground for the spiritual emergence of increasing numbers of people.
After Seeing this Series: Integration of Spiritually Emergent Experiences
Once you experience this TV series, Salish Sea, you will be an inspired, motivated, energized citizen of this world. You will want to go be a part of this new world and be willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen. Those people who are experiencing spiritual emergence now will see templates of emotional and physical healing and spiritual practices that will help them to integrate their experiences and help them to understand what is happening inside them.
This series will be shot and edited on Cortes Island between 2019 and 2022.
A state of the art film studio and editing suite will create the foundation for future films to be made all through the Salish Sea. Documentary and journalism schools will have electives on Cortes.
The hydrofoils (ground effect transports), high CBD cannabis greenhouses, peyote cactus greenhouses and solar energy generator houses will be created here as an ongoing part of a sustainable industry here.
The TV series and the ceremonies created here will form the basis for ongoing sustainable material culture after the filming is done.
In the near future, it is probable that both MDMA and psilocybin will be approved for wider medical use in special treatment facilities. Hollyhock would be a suitable site for such a treatment centre. State of the art trauma and addiction treatment using indigenous healing ceremonies and sacred medicines will form the backbone of the healing work.
Two of my favorite lines from this focused and succinct foreword:
"Groups that are small enough to stay weird, focused enough to get things done, and intentional enough for their work to build on itself over time."
"We embrace the idea that writing is thinking and the best way to learn is to build."
Both capture what you're up to with The Elysian, too, Elle.
Austin is really the best. He's got the spirit of it for sure.
Feels like the missing piece here isn’t scale, but the layer where meaning and coordination happen. Small weird groups thrive because they control that layer - before algorithms, before virality, before incentives flatten everything.
Right now, that layer is primarily happening in our slack channel, and to some extent our comments section. Where have you seen that layer be effective in other communities?
Slack and comments are definitely where that layer shows up most visibly today, but I’ve seen it surface in other forms too, especially where shared context persists beyond any one channel or tool, like in long-running open communities and social annotation tools like hypothesis. None of the existing setups really solve it end-to-end, which is why I’m experimenting with this as a separate layer above web content. Still early - very much lab stage, with alpha kicking off in Q1
Building in layers over the web rather than silos enables community-governed rule enforcement and consent as well as content and trust over the entire web. This is key to providing digital rights (e.g., privacy and sovereignty), protecting against malicious AI, and enabling collaboration on planetary level as envisioned in the 1960's by Douglas Engelbart, the forgotten father of the modern computing and the web.
Maybe this is what you're building, but what is a "layer over the web" that isn't siloed and enables community governance?
We'll definitely be trying out Metalabel's DFOS when it launches (tentatively scheduled for January now) and I'm hoping that will come close to being that better layer. But I'm also very open to custom-built ideas too.
I see DFOS as very aligned in spirit, but scoped differently. What I’m calling a meta-layer is more about the underlying coordination substrate, identity, consent, and governance, that could support things like DFOS across the broader web, via SDKs that let anyone build apps that operate over the entire web using sidebars, smart tags, or overlay interfaces.
By a “layer over the web,” I mean something that attaches to existing pages rather than pulling everyone into a new silo, so context, discussion, and rules stay with the content. Meta-communities (i.e., communities that operate across the web) can accept federated strong auth so identity is community-chosen rather than platform-imposed, and governance is enforced through tooling rather than moderators alone, including secure execution environments for things like rule enforcement and consent. It’s still early: lab stage with alpha in Q1. But this work builds on ideas laid out in the Metaweb book (Taylor and Francis, 2023) and is now being carried forward through the Meta-Layer Initiative. We are seeking organizational partners to weigh in on standards for the interface layer. https://themetalayer.org/partners
Whoa, fascinating 🤯 I just signed up for the Metalayer partnership to learn more...
Looks like Hypothesis is one of the case studies!!! I actually trialed this earlier in the year but found it terrible to use in practice. The IDEA of it though is something I am very down for. I would love to be able to annotate the internet alongside a community of people.
Will check out the book for more case studies. Thanks for pointing me in this direction!