The Cambria Zeitgeist

What's Happening? What's New? What's Evil?

Don't ask! Read below. Get the Stigmata!

The concept of stigmergy, allows coordination/evolution to occur through the traces of past activity left in a shared medium rather than through central planning or direct communication.

How to do it according to AI.

Shift Information to the Environment: Instead of relying on information stored in individual minds or transmitted via messages, design the environment to offload and store information. This turns the shared medium into a collective mental map that guides the actions of others.
Ensure Actions Leave Visible Traces: Every action taken within the environment should produce a mark or trace that is visible to other participants. These traces serve a dual purpose: they act as a memory of what has already been accomplished and as a signal for what work remains to be done.
Prioritise Local, Simple Decisions: Collective intelligence flourishes when participants can make simple, local decisions—such as "what is missing?" or "what looks wrong?"—rather than needing to understand the global picture. Global structure then emerges from these localized interactions.
Create Self-Correcting Feedback Loops: The environment should allow contributors to build directly on top of previous work, enabling the system to be self-correcting. For example, in Wikipedia, editors correct errors or add missing information they perceive on a page, which then stimulates further refinements by others.
Design for Asynchronous Collaboration: Because stigmergy uses "passive traces" lying in wait to be sensed, it allows agents to coordinate without being present at the same time or even knowing who the other participants are. This makes the system highly scalable and robust, as the work adapts to the current state of the medium rather than a rigid, fragile plan.
Build Around a Focal Point: Successful stigmergic environments, use a document visible to everyone as a focal point that aligns actions without the need for endless meetings or emails.

'What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.' — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Although we are, thankfully, well out of the loop and have zero 'influence', out there are clever thoughtful writers and media shaping the new zeitgeist (see links below) well worth reading and following.

The People we actually read and follow:

Politics & World Affairs
Cory Doctorow, Shankar Narayan, Yascha Mounk,
The Free Press, Robert Reich, The Unreported Truth,
Racket News, Tina Brown, Will Hayward,
Nation.Cymru, The Daily Beast, Satirical Planet News,
Paul Murphy, Postmodern iconoclast,

Artificial Intelligence
Hybrid Horizons,
Enrique Dans,
Alberto Romero,

Worth Reading
Nasim Nicholas Taleb,
Scott Galloway,
Joan Westenberg,
The Writing Cooperative,
Wes O'Donnell.
Liminal Britain,

Featured Book

UFO's, Aliens and the Fairy Kingdom

The principal UFO and associated phenomena that have occurred in Celtic countries in the last 120 years. Of interest to those who are interested in a) Celtic history and folklore; b) increasing instances of UFO phenomena, especially those in Wales; c) evolving scientific and parapsychological research concerning the origins of such phenomena, in particular areas of research into fairy-lore and other associated mythology parallels.

More info and to BUY

We are on Substack and Medium.

💡

Follow us on: BlueSky; X; Threads; Facebook; Instagram; LinkedIn

Check out the latest articles and curated lists below.

Read below our lists of articles by Medium writers we follow on topics of interest to our audience such as writing advice, politics, evil things happening in the world and more.