Dear IEC Friends,
In today’s fast-paced world, technology has become an integral part of our daily lives. From smartphones to social media, we are constantly connected to the digital world around us. As technology continues to advance and shape our society, it’s crucial that we take a step back and examine its impact through an integral lens.
By understanding technology from a holistic perspective that takes into account all aspects of the human experience, we can unlock new insights and solutions that benefit individuals, organizations, and society as a whole.
In this article, we’ll explore the integral approach to technology through the 2 abstracts of each presenter in the thematic section of Technology at IEC.
You can find them in our final program, and read along to see the details of the presentations:
Integral’s Technology Problem: How Do We Grow Next
The modern integral movement has been marked by late-adoption tendencies and the inability to innovate from the same ‘leading-edges’ of consciousness which we ostensibly espouse when it comes to technology. This tendency has endemic properties and must be addressed formally in order to support the involution necessary to become participants in the *Planetary Awakening* we wish to facilitate. With every passing year the dominating influence of technological paradigms and systems increases and we are reaching inflection points this decade from which we may never return.
As addressed in my previous presentations, this lack of future-centric thinking puts most integralists into a reactive stance to the ongoing march of technological progress (or regress) and leaves many to participate as mere consumers of the cultures purveyed by Orange-worldview agents.
Across this presentation & workshop series I will orient a we-space in the exploration and direct experience of:
- the De-mystification of the primary drivers of internet technologies and underscore what about human nature gives rise to them
- the Addressing the coming major coming waves of technology from AI to Web3, blockchain, crypto, BCI, AR and more…
- the Inventorying of recent milestones in technological history and name the developmental stages they arose in response to
- the Identification of the dominant-modes of discourse each system and platform gives presence and voice to
- the Reflection upon and catalog the modes of agency that internet systems are dominated by and the mindsets they reify
- the Diagramming the collective dynamics that emerge as a social-media comes into existence and the mobile-web takes over
- the Embodying of more holistic or integral cognitions using technology to facilitate integration, balance, growth and even healing & wellness
From here we will individually look at how our own unique contributions to culture and society can begin to lean-into emerging technological practices so that we might collectively better orient to the leading-edges of unfoldment and thereby either a) draw influence from the new boundary, and/or b) push or determine what the new boundary conditions to be thereby leading the very techno-economic evolutionary unfoldment of civilization as a pro-active integralist.
Breakthroughs and Blindspots of Big Tech in Teal
Many “Big Tech” corporations attract engineers by prioritizing their employees’ well-being as well as productivity. Some have even adopted Teal cultures (LL) and practices (LR) for human-centered collaboration at scale. For example, groups that value psychological safety uncover more – and more diverse – perspectives when brainstorming and problem-solving.
Google’s engineering organization is arguably the world’s largest, most “Teal-ish” collective, embodying Laloux’s Teal principles of self-management, evolutionary purpose, and wholeness. We illustrate these aspects with a case study of Google’s approaches to hiring, collaboration, performance evaluation, and promotion. By applying an Integral lens, we also identify blindspots that arise when advanced cognitive intelligence is not matched by other lines of development. We discuss how that impacts Big Tech’s response to the societal-level challenges posed by social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
With Love
The IEC Team