About
An idea or concept that spreads from person to person within a culture and evolves according to selective pressure. A meme. Richard Dawkins coined this term before it lost its notion of selective pressure since it has been used to describe the internet phenomenon of deliberately designed content.
Zeitgeist extends the original notion of a meme beyond the scope of units carrying cultural patterns from one mind to another. Rather, the spirit of the age covers organizing patterns of a world mind that manifest themselves not through the free will of individual people but in sovereign social, political, corporate, etc. systems. The evolution of these systems following the changing zeitgeist has the potential to bring great disruptions that impact the lives of many people.
On this website, I am looking to collect the zeitgeist analogue of self improvement guides along the lines of “Tips To Be the Best Version of Yourself” which try to push positively perceived memes to many people. In analogy to such personal compasses for navigating the seas of good and bad memes, the focus here is on efficient patterns that guide whole systems – groups of people, organizations, and cities, states & cultures – into a desirable future zeitgeist. Not according to selective pressure as in the original notion of memes, but according to its modern meaning: through deliberately (re-)designed innovation based on reasoning over new insights and new inventions.
Thereby, the complexity of systems makes it hard to predict how effective a pattern might be. Nevertheless, this site tries to collect such patterns that might be a positive influence for system considering especially their sustainability, that is to meet the needs of people, planet, and profits in the present without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same. The hypothesis is that deliberately designed positive zeitgeist patterns are able to alleviate the dangers originating from a zeitgeist that solely evolves by selective pressure. What has emerged as the culture of man constraining the validity of memes has to find its analog constraint for the exploration of systems that adhere to the evolving world mind.
In any case, some of the content found on this site is just me getting faint ideas out of my head, allowing me to free my energy to focus on other stuff. When I untangle my stream of consciousness that way, the results might be unrelated, fictional, surreal, wrong, or even offensive to some. Only a fool would take it all serious, but maybe the illustrated stories can help push you, the reader, into that dreamlike state of wonder from which true progress often emerges.