IS: Humility and ambition in a new era
Upcoming events:
- Sunday Feb 22: Community Hub call 22.8
- Tuesday Feb 24: The Oasis - caravan campfire with Danielle J
- Friday Feb 27: IS Connection Call
- Tuesday March 3: The Oasis - Limicon Prep Party
- Friday March 6: Limicon 2026 begins!
- Sunday March 15: The 5-Year Celebration
5-Year Celebration newsletter series:
- IS: The 5-Year Celebration — Launching a New Era
- IS: New "era"? Why now?
- IS: Humility and ambition in a new era (this newsletter)
Last Sunday's Community Hub was practice experimentation called "Disruption Metabolism".
In writing to you today, I continue to prepare for the 5-Year Celebration (March 15th at Limicon), alongside excellent technical and storytelling work being done by the IS Workteam supporting both the "where we've come from" and "where we're going together" parts of the party we're assembling.
That storytelling work included the phrase "both humbler and more ambitious" from Shaun in my inbox today, and I have a strong "yes! integrating that polarity!" response to that. The spirit of declaring a new era of Intentional Society is absolutely reaching for a synthesis that... well it reminds me of
this piece also today from Sandra, writing about "Open-Hearted Productivity" via a two-week work retreat experiment woven with Intentional Ventures, holding both the power of AI-assisted prototyping and the "what's right?" of data ethics, while pointing at "agentic sages" which comes from
this piece on Wise Agency from Peter Limberger, striking a chord pointing at the intersection of high consciousness and high agency. That in turn inspired Tom Morgan who just yesterday was pointing at Network of Networks as what's coming next, using the World Wise Web language from Turquoise who also inspired Andrew Dunn w/ 10,000 Wisdom Schools, then there's Nico's Wisdom Economy and... well, can you start to smell the scenius?
Where is Intentional Society positioned in this scene? Liminal Web, World Wise Web, a Second Renaissance, is it one scene or many? Tom's take was that "The Liminal Web was wisdom seeking money and agency, the World Wise Web is money and agency seeking wisdom." I'll claim that, especially with the upcoming funding announcement on March 15th, Intentional Society can claim some space near the center of that triangle. (Which itself is not the triangle of the most important three words...)
Can we integrate the polarities and put it all together? I think we can get excitingly close! There's the ambition. Can we do it "ourselves"? Heck no! There's the humility. It's not about James, it's not about everyone else in Intentional Society, it's even about whose name for the meta-scene becomes the one that sticks in the mainstream when critics start straw-manning as it becomes big enough to draw attackers.
Humility speaks against the egoic "I did it, therefore I am great!" and when the rigidity of "I" itself dissolves, there's an inter-being beyond humility. Ambition speaks toward the power of "You can just do things!" and toward the (ironic if you're metamodern) sincerity of grounding goals in love fractally, and when rigidity of "fixing/saving" dissolves, there's a fluidity of being-and-becoming beyond ambition.
So yes it's "humility and ambition" paradoxically together, and at the same time the integration is neither of them really. It dissolves them both and transcends the frame in which they are locked in unsolvable tension. I work (am still working) to embody my power and agency and wisdom without compromising on any of them, and I know so many of you do too, and with enough intentionality we can make amazing strides not as egoic achievers but as agentic sages becoming wise collectives ("islands of coherence") leading cultural evolution toward more beautiful futures.
Cheers,
James