Upcoming events:

• Sunday Feb 15: Community Hub call 22.7
• Tuesday Feb 17: The Oasis
• Friday Feb 27: IS Connection Call
• Friday March 6: Limicon 2026 begins!
• Sunday March 15: The 5-Year Celebration

Last week's newsletter was The 5-Year Celebration — Launching a New Era, and the Community Hub call was titled "Behind the Screens".

For the next month, I intend to not-shut-up-about the 5-Year Celebration (March 15th at Community Hub time at Limicon) and its implications. I can't do otherwise — the opportunity is so large, the time so ripe, that I want to break through any normal "yeah whatever, thing of the week" shrug-off might have hit you last week. But why would a new era of IS matter, and why now?

Well, first I'll draw upon the "have you seen the world lately?" line of urgency. Not the direct urgency of "bad things are happening, oh no stop it now" but rather that the world is waking people up in the last two months to the trends that situationally-aware sensemakers have been dancing with for years:

• AI has accelerated again in the last two months, as we continue into an intelligence explosion of unknown speed and ceiling. This is roughly the "February before Covid" moment and software developers are the canaries yelling that something big is happening and starting to break into public awareness. Software ate the world, and now it's eating itself, and things are about to get weirder and weirder.
• The Minneapolis murders, combined with the Epstein files, together appear to have been a tipping point in the American culture wars, where common knowledge is dawning that this isn't just left-vs-right, postmodern-vs-modern tussle but rather egocentric-power-gods authoritarianism taking advantage of the battlefield to try a takeover. I think we likely won't go into full chaos with this November's midterms, but we're reaching a coming-to-grips process that will be the major US arc this year.

The other part of "why now?" is that we're ready. Five years happens to be a nice round number but wasn't some communist "five year plan" or magic number — it's just What Is Emerging from the slow and steady growth in our capacity. We have the practices and the principles, and the "waking up" (of situational crises triggering developmental shifts) in the world feeds the densification of the connections and energy within our fringe ecosystem.

At Intentional Society we're pioneering a culture of fractal human thriving, and it's time to cohere the village level. We're scaffolding developmental capacity to bridge the wisdom gap, and putting wisdom into action. We're stabilizing collaborative culture and are ready to apply it to coordination with a relational web. All this is what the new era of the 5-Year Celebration is pointing at — and to do it in a big room full of collaborators resonating together, that seems like the spark-jump to expand the campfire.

Cheers,
James