from the DeepMind of Josh Plough

Bring me back to the Collective DeepMind

29.

The Octopus of Progress:
Or a lighthearted suggestion for a collaborative future.

So here we are in 2021, sat at a table looking at each other through screens. Looking back at an exhausting year that has brought out the best and worst in us. But mingling amid the terror, fear, boredom and grief is intuition. A feeling that something has changed, and to repeat a well shared meme:

We don’t want to go back to normal, because normal was the problem.

So how can we stretch past this present, squeezing our bodies into the corners of seemingly (im)possible futures? It’s a laboured metaphor, and one that’s doing its rounds on Linkedin, but they’re beautiful creatures and deserve to be celebrated. So we’ll look to the octopus for help, and not just for its mystic abilities of prediction. But for its decentralised brain, its sensitive body and its ability to get out of situations that look utterly hopeless. They are beasts of optimism, whether in the jaws of a shark, or squishing through an impossibly tiny hole. And one can only feel joy and awe when watching them.

No bones: those formal and arcane structures that get in the way.