0.1 About the Emergent Code chronicles

These Emergent Code chronicles come out of a life-long interest in social and business cultures and working with them.

Emergent code is a look at the art and science of creation, in a digital world.

It is a guide for the digital human.

Emergent Code is also a personal story and a manifesto. You may not agree with all of it, or even some of it, but I hope it will make you think about what you do agree with, and why.

For this is a story about consciousness. This blue, marbled planet we live on is being wired up. For the first time in history, we’re creating a recursive intelligence greater than our own, a new entity, from us but not us, called code.

Code questions the very essence of who we are, what we are and what we want to become, as digital humans.

Code now operates extensively across the entire planet, fundamentally changing the nature of the interfaces we interact with.

But code is drawn without any morality in its algorithm. It exists without a sense of what’s right and wrong beyond a kind of binary brutality.

This immense new force is shaping much of what being human means today. As we become co-dependents with it, code puts the fundamental nature of humankind into the spotlight.

I think we have to ask ourselves, openly, logically and creatively, what we want next for humans, given the power that code affords to us.

There is a science, the science of coming together, a ‘conscience’ forming, our group mind. This consciousness will be the collective knowledge that comes from being conjoined. It is a science for our own protection, a science for the common good.

This is why, I think, alongside technical code being scripted, there’s another code to write, an emergent code.

This is not a code that can be left to a gilded few in Silicon Valley.

It’s not just for the ones who program the programmed, as Doug Rushkoff wrote about. Emergent code is always in beta, a work in progress.

It’s for everyone, all of us, to write and formulate.

I hope this is a useful provocation in that direction.