Socialist Intelligence
How Humans Learned to Inhabit Shared Worlds
Introduction: We Produce One Another
There is a familiar way of imagining intelligence.
Intelligence belongs to an individual. It resides, somehow, inside a person’s head. Some people possess more of it than others. We test it, rank it, credential it, hire it, reward it, and sometimes attribute unusual historical accomplishments to those said to possess exceptional quantities of it. More recently, we have begun to speak as though intelligence might also reside inside machines.
This conception seems almost self-evident. Individual people think. Individual people remember, reason, anticipate, invent, decide, and solve problems. Intelligence therefore appears to be a capacity contained within individuals and manifested through their actions.
But consider what is required for even the most apparently individual act of intelligence.
A person reading these words did not invent the language in which they are written. They did not invent the alphabet, the conventions of punctuation, the distinctions carried by the vocabulary, or the innumerable prior conversations through which the argument becomes intelligible. They did not independently create the practices through which they learned to read, question, compare, infer, and respond.
A mathematician works with inherited notations and accumulated proofs. A mechanic encounters a machine whose design condenses generations of experiment and practical experience. A physician interprets symptoms through traditions of observation, classification, research, and apprenticeship. A musician improvises within forms that make the improvisation recognizable as an intelligible departure rather than random sound.
None of this means that individuals contribute nothing distinctive. Individuals notice what others miss. They combine inherited materials in unprecedented ways. They resist assumptions, introduce differences, and sometimes alter the conditions under which everyone else proceeds.
But the apparently solitary intelligence of the individual is already populated by others.
It may therefore be worth asking whether we have mistaken the point at which intelligence becomes visible for the place where intelligence is produced.
Perhaps intelligence does not reside wholly inside the individual. Perhaps much of what we call intelligence arises among differentiated beings, through their relations, within the shared worlds they become capable of inhabiting together.
That possibility is the subject of this series.
Shared worlds
We routinely recognize shared worlds without possessing a general name for them.
Someone begins explaining an idea and asks, “Do you catch my drift?” Another replies, “I see where you’re going.” A child joins a game already in progress. A musician enters a song after hearing only a few measures. A guest gradually realizes what kind of gathering they have entered and how people are expected to behave. Several people confront an unexpected problem and begin acting together without first writing a constitution.
In each case, something more is happening than the transmission of information between separate minds.
The participants are entering or generating a field in which particular words, gestures, objects, histories, expectations, and possible actions acquire mutually consequential meanings. They do not need to understand everything identically. They need enough practical alignment to recognize what is happening, what matters, what might happen next, and what responses would make sense.
To join a game is not merely to memorize a list of rules. One must learn what counts as a move, when it is one’s turn, what other players are attending to, which actions are permitted, which are clever, which are unfair, and how this particular instance differs from an abstract description of the game.
A person can know the formal rules of baseball and still fail to understand what is happening in a particular inning. Conversely, someone may acquire a workable sense of a game long before becoming able to state its rules explicitly.
Participation requires inhabiting a shared action-world.
Conversation works similarly. Words do not carry their full significance by themselves. Tone, timing, setting, prior exchanges, bodily expression, social position, implication, and anticipated response all contribute. “Fine” can indicate satisfaction, resignation, anger, dismissal, compliance, or a desire to stop talking. Participants do not resolve these possibilities by consulting a dictionary. They draw upon their situated involvement in a developing encounter.
Meaning is not merely transmitted. It is enacted, tested, adjusted, repaired, remembered, and sometimes contested.
Families, friendships, workplaces, rituals, games, classrooms, political organizations, artistic traditions, neighborhoods, professions, religious practices, and online communities all generate partially shared worlds of meaningful possibility.
These worlds overlap. They may support one another, conflict, or remain mutually opaque. A person competent in one may be lost in another. A gesture of respect in one setting may be interpreted as submission in another. A joke that strengthens intimacy among friends may become cruel in a workplace. The same object may become a tool, commodity, gift, sacred presence, piece of evidence, or inherited obligation depending upon the field in which it appears.
Human life does not unfold within one universally shared world. It proceeds through many overlapping, nested, contested, and temporarily activated worlds.
I have previously called these emic participation fields: fields whose meanings become actionable from within participation rather than being supplied solely by an outside observer. That terminology may or may not survive in the final form of this project. For the moment, “participation field,” “shared action-world,” and “shared world” will often do most of the necessary work.
The field is not only human
Our easiest examples involve human beings acknowledging and responding to one another. That can lead us to make mutual recognition between human interlocutors the defining condition of participation.
But the shared worlds humans inhabit have never been composed solely of humans.
Consider a community living for generations beside a river.
Changes in the river’s level, color, temperature, speed, surrounding vegetation, animal populations, and deposited material may indicate an approaching flood, a change in weather, the presence of fish, upstream disturbance, contamination, or a good time to plant or travel.
People respond through settlement, movement, harvesting, restraint, construction, ritual, teaching, and memory. Those activities alter the river system in turn. They may preserve its capacity to sustain life, damage it, redirect it, or make certain future responses impossible.
The river does not need to converse like a person or recognize human beings as moral agents for the relation to become reciprocal. Human activity changes the river; the river’s changed condition reorganizes what humans can perceive and do.
The reciprocity is asymmetrical. It may unfold across seasons or generations. It includes intention and accident, living beings and material persistence, signal and constraint.
The environment participates by affording, resisting, recording, soliciting, changing, and limiting. Human beings participate by detecting, interpreting, remembering, altering, caring for, exploiting, and responding.
An environmental participation field is not necessarily a conversation. It is an ecology of consequential uptake.
The significance of a wetland, forest, coastline, animal migration, or seasonal cycle may be generated through recurring relations among human bodies, plants, animals, soil, water, weather, tools, paths, stories, accumulated observations, remembered consequences, and practices of use and restraint.
No single constituent contains the whole field. The field is sustained through their continuing interaction.
This means that the shared worlds humans learned to inhabit were always simultaneously social, bodily, ecological, material, historical, and more-than-human.
The claim that “the earth is our relative,” encountered in many Indigenous accounts of land, can be misunderstood if it is treated merely as poetic language or a speculative belief about the earth’s inner nature. Within a participation field, relative is a practical and normative category. A relative does not simply possess value. A relative enrolls a person in expectations of care, restraint, memory, obligation, continuity, and return.
To say that one belongs to the land rather than owns it reorganizes the field of possible action.
Ownership places the land inside the owner’s project.
Belonging places the person inside a relationship that also makes claims upon them.
The distinction will matter later when we examine how shared worlds become abstracted into territory, property, resources, and assets. But it matters at the beginning because it prevents “shared world” from becoming merely another name for agreement among human minds.
Humans inhabit meanings together within material worlds they did not create by agreement.
The evolutionary problem
How did organisms with separate nervous systems, different bodies, and necessarily idiosyncratic histories ever become able to inhabit enough of the same world to act together?
No organism can directly enter another’s experience. We cannot inspect one another’s sensations, memories, intentions, or interpretations. Whatever occurs within one living body must cross some threshold if it is to become consequential for another.
Signals are therefore indispensable.
A movement, sound, expression, touch, scent, posture, rhythm, mark, artifact, environmental change, or patterned absence can make some aspect of a situation available for consequential response. But a signal does not possess fixed meaning merely because it has been emitted or detected. It must be distinguished, interpreted, and incorporated into continuing activity.
A cry may indicate danger, pain, excitement, anger, deception, or play. Its significance depends upon histories of interaction, the identity of the caller, the surrounding situation, the listener’s condition, and what follows after others respond.
Signals acquire significance within relations.
Humans did not invent sociality, communication, coordinated behavior, distributed perception, or environmental responsiveness. Other living beings cooperate, compete, warn, deceive, care, hunt, migrate, build, imitate, teach, and alter their surroundings through elaborate systems of interaction.
The distinctively human development may therefore not have been the invention of shared participation as such. It may have been the extraordinary elaboration of participation fields: their density, flexibility, reflexivity, portability, nesting, cumulative preservation, and capacity for deliberate reconstruction.
Humans developed unusual capacities for joint attention, imitation, turn-taking, teaching, role-taking, narrative memory, rhythmic synchronization, symbolic abstraction, reputational sensitivity, and reflection upon failures of mutual understanding. We became able not merely to coordinate, but to discuss coordination; not merely to follow norms, but to argue about them; not merely to inhabit shared worlds, but to represent, preserve, compare, and intentionally modify them.
A perception no longer had to remain confined to the person who perceived it. A discovery could become a practice. A practice could become a tradition. A warning could become a story. A route could become a path. A tool could preserve the accomplishment of someone absent or dead. A distinction introduced in one encounter could become available in another place and another generation.
Human formations acquired capacities for perception, memory, judgment, and action that no individual member possessed alone.
We became participants in transpersonal intelligences.
The intelligence between us
Imagine several people moving through an unfamiliar landscape.
One notices changes in the weather. Another remembers a water source. Another recognizes animal tracks. Another detects rising tension within the group. Another can repair a damaged tool. Another recalls a story about what happened in a similar place many years before.
No one contains the whole situation. Yet if these perceptions and capacities can circulate, be tested, corrected, remembered, and made available for coordinated action, the formation can respond more intelligently than any participant could alone.
The participants do not have to share a single consciousness. They may disagree, misunderstand one another, conceal information, or pursue partially conflicting purposes. But their activities can become sufficiently coupled that what one detects alters what others can do.
The intelligence lies not only in the people considered separately. It lies in the circulation among them.
It lies in who notices, who speaks, who listens, what can be said, what is believed, how uncertainty is expressed, how disagreement is handled, which memories are retained, which warnings are ignored, and how errors are repaired.
A group of individually capable people may act disastrously if its relations suppress warning, reward conformity, hide uncertainty, or concentrate authority in the wrong places. A formation composed of people with limited individual knowledge may become remarkably capable if it can distribute attention, preserve differences, coordinate effectively, and correct mistakes.
The arrangement matters.
The field matters.
The pathways through which signals travel matter.
The conditions of participation matter.
What we call intelligence may therefore be partly an ecological property: a capacity generated by relations among differentiated beings, inherited forms, artifacts, infrastructures, and environments.
Schmooze
For years I have used the ordinary word schmooze to point toward these processes.
In everyday usage, schmoozing usually means informal conversation, sometimes with an implication of amiable talk, networking, or social maneuvering. I use it more broadly to name the recurring relational activity through which participants signal, interpret, respond, adjust, coordinate, remember, contest, and generate actionable meaning.
Schmooze need not be harmonious. Argument is schmoozal. So are negotiation, instruction, ritual, mutual aid, rivalry, gossip, collective improvisation, courtship, punishment, and political struggle.
What matters is that the participants’ activities become recursively consequential for one another.
One response alters the meaning of the next. A misunderstanding prompts repair. A gesture opens or closes a possibility. A proposal changes the field of available action. A distinction introduced in one encounter becomes available for later use.
The word helps name the activity binding together nodes, signals, frameworks, histories, infrastructures, constraints, affordances, and criteria of uptake.
But schmooze should not be imagined as something already completed individuals subsequently decide to do.
Individuals and schmoozes produce one another.
Every schmooze depends upon the differentiated bodies, perceptions, histories, vulnerabilities, and actions of its participants. Yet participation also helps constitute those beings as the particular individuals they become, shaping their identities, competencies, expectations, dispositions, obligations, and possibilities for action.
This resembles what Kant described as an organized whole: the parts generate and sustain the whole, while the whole produces and sustains the parts as the kinds of parts they are.
The whole may be evanescent. A conversation, game, argument, sexual encounter, emergency response, or coordinated movement may last only moments. But while it persists, the participants are partly constituted by the field they are jointly producing.
The schmooze does not hover above them as a superorganism. It exists only through their activity. But the individuals do not enter it unchanged as completely self-contained units. They become these participants, occupying these roles, possessing these possibilities, partly through the field itself.
The relation is one of mutual individuation.
The individual does not arrive first
It is tempting to preserve a final refuge for atomic individuality by saying that the biological organism exists first and is then socially shaped into a person.
Even that sequence is too simple.
By the time elaborate human communality had developed, schmoozal formations were already helping determine which organisms would be conceived. Courtship, attraction, kinship systems, incest prohibitions, alliance, status, residence patterns, religious rules, economic conditions, family negotiations, affection, violence, and culturally organized expectations all affected who encountered whom, who reproduced, and under what conditions.
Human beings commonly talked, signaled, danced, negotiated, displayed, courted, promised, prohibited, or coerced before they reproduced.
Culture entered the causal chain of biological existence.
After conception, gestation, birth, nourishment, protection, touch, care, language, environmental conditions, and social recognition all helped sustain and differentiate the developing organism.
Organismic integrity remains real. Living beings possess boundaries, mortality, histories, and partially autonomous activity. But organismic differentiation does not establish social priority.
The individual does not emerge from nowhere and subsequently join society. Schmoozal and ecological relations precede, produce, sustain, and continually reorganize the individual.
Nor does this mean that the individual is merely a passive product of the whole. Particular participants are not interchangeable carriers of a preexisting culture. Their differences help generate this field rather than another. Who notices what, who resists, who is trusted, who remains silent, who introduces an unexpected signal, and whose embodied history becomes consequential all alter what the whole can become.
A capable shared world must preserve enough commonality for participation and enough difference for discovery, correction, and transformation.
Individuality is not the enemy of collective intelligence. It is one of its conditions.
But individuality is itself collectively and ecologically produced.
Consciousness at the threshold
This mutual constitution may also alter how we think about consciousness.
Consciousness is commonly imagined as a private interior contained within the individual. But human consciousness may be understood, at least partly, as liminal activity through which the distinction and relation between node and field are continually negotiated.
Much of what occurs within a living body cannot be directly shared. Sensations, affects, memories, and neural processes must be selected, shaped, and rendered into forms capable of crossing into a participation field. Conversely, signals arriving through the field must be interpreted in ways that can reorganize the organism’s continuing activity.
Consciousness participates in both directions.
It helps make some portion of the node available to the shared world and some portion of the shared world available within the node.
But the threshold does not merely connect two fully completed domains. It participates in differentiating them.
Through liminal activity, an organism learns what is internal or external, what may be attributed to itself or another, which impulses become recognizable as intentions, when it is being addressed, what can be expressed, what must remain unspoken, and how its conduct alters the field.
The self is not simply waiting behind the threshold. It is partly generated through the threshold’s operation.
This gives us a provisional relationship among several concepts:
Schmooze is the recurring relational activity.
Liminal consciousness is among the processes through which nodes and fields become mutually available and mutually differentiated.
Schmoozal intelligence is the enlarged capacity for perception, interpretation, memory, evaluation, and action generated through the resulting ecology.
Individual intelligence may then be understood not as the opposite of schmoozal intelligence, but as a locally concentrated and partially internalized manifestation of it.
Even solitary thought is often populated by traces of prior schmooze. A person anticipates objections, rehearses explanations, invokes inherited standards, imagines another’s response, stages an internal disagreement, or reformulates an idea until it becomes sayable.
The apparently solitary thinker carries a portable, incomplete, and continually revisable model of shared worlds.
Communities preserve participation fields
Immediate encounters dissolve. Communities create conditions through which participation fields can be preserved, reactivated, interwoven, and made available when needed.
A community is not one enormous shared framework in which everyone understands everything identically. It is better understood as an ecology of overlapping and partly latent participation fields:
households, friendships, workplaces, rituals, games, care relations, stories, institutions, customary expectations, shared places, political practices, and material infrastructures.
Communities preserve histories. They stabilize roles. They maintain reputations. They train newcomers. They provide recurring opportunities for repair. They retain artifacts and places through which prior meanings can become active again.
A short exchange between familiar people may mobilize an enormous sedimented history. A path can preserve previous movement. A tool embodies experiments conducted by people now dead. A story carries a warning across generations. A ritual can reactivate expectations without requiring their complete explanation.
This accumulated relational capacity constitutes what we have elsewhere called sociopolitical soil: the inherited and continually cultivated conditions through which collective perception, judgment, and action become possible.
When those conditions deteriorate, the loss is not merely sentimental.
A society deprived of recurring relationships, shared spaces, community memory, and opportunities for consequential participation may become less able to perceive, interpret, deliberate, coordinate, and act.
A fragmented society may be not only less communal, but less intelligent.
Why call it socialist?
The title of this series deliberately introduces a complication.
I am not using socialist intelligence to mean intelligence possessed by socialists. Nor am I claiming that every form of collective cognition is socialist, benevolent, egalitarian, or emancipatory.
Armies, corporations, empires, intelligence agencies, bureaucracies, fascist movements, and organized criminal networks can all generate formidable transpersonal capacities. Schmooze can support mutual aid or coordinated predation, collective discovery or enforced conformity, democratic deliberation or command.
The general phenomenon is schmoozal intelligence.
“Socialist intelligence” names a particular propensity and affordance within it.
Participation fields make it possible for capacities manifested by one participant to enlarge the capacities of others. A discovery can become a common practice. A warning can become collective memory. A skill can be taught. A distinction developed across generations can become available to a child who did not help originate it. One person’s limitations can be compensated for by another’s differentiated competence.
The underlying form is:
commonly generated capacity becoming commonly or mutually enlargingly available.
That is not yet socialism as a modern political doctrine. But neither is the use of socialist merely metaphorical or politically empty.
It identifies a form of production in which participants produce not only a common result but one another’s developing capacities. The whole becomes more capable through differentiated contribution, and the participants become more capable through access to the whole.
Socialist intelligence is intelligence organized as a commons.
It does not dissolve individuals into an undifferentiated collective. It describes a process of mutual individuation: people become more distinctive and capable through participation, while their distinctions enlarge what the shared world can perceive and do.
This tendency can be defeated, enclosed, captured, or redirected. Knowledge can be monopolized. Roles can harden into castes. Coordination can become command. Shared symbols can legitimate domination. Institutions can appropriate intelligence generated throughout a field and attribute it to a chief, sovereign, executive, owner, state, or machine.
“Socialist” therefore names a possibility within schmoozal intelligence, not its guaranteed outcome.
From anthropological propensity to political socialism
The political relevance follows, but not as a simple deduction.
The argument is not:
Human intelligence is socially constituted; therefore every proposed socialist institution is justified.
Nor is it:
Early human communities were socialist societies in the modern sense, and political history should return us to their natural condition.
The argument is more limited, but still consequential.
Libertarian and capitalist political thought commonly begin with an atomic individual. The individual exists first, possesses faculties and labor power that are originally their own, and enters social relations by agreement. Society may then make claims upon the individual, but those claims require special justification because they appear as intrusions upon an antecedent ownership.
The sequence usually runs:
the individual exists;
the individual possesses capacities;
the individual produces;
society subsequently taxes, regulates, redistributes, or restricts what was originally individual property.
Our account contests the presumed starting point.
The economically productive person has been generated through histories of care, language, teaching, inherited knowledge, ecological participation, public infrastructure, collective labor, community reproduction, and accumulated technique. Even the identity of the person as an independent owner and contracting subject is socially instituted.
This does not erase individual claims, effort, creativity, bodily integrity, privacy, or deserved recognition. It places them inside the ecology that made them possible.
The political question therefore changes.
It is no longer only:
Why may society take from an independently productive individual?
It becomes:
How should capacities and products generated through mutually constitutive relations be attributed, governed, distributed, and returned to the fields that made them possible?
Political socialism can then be approached not as the artificial subordination of naturally self-sufficient people to a collective, but as an attempt to construct institutions adequate to the common production of human capacity.
That does not settle what those institutions should be. It clears away a false ontology that has made them appear inherently illegitimate.
Civilization and the abstraction of shared worlds
The capacities generated through immediate participation can be partially preserved and transported.
Words, stories, diagrams, rituals, maps, laws, numbers, tools, records, money, classifications, and procedures can condense products of previous schmooze into forms available beyond their original setting.
This portability made cumulative culture, large-scale coordination, science, historical memory, complex technology, and institutions possible.
But abstraction also introduces danger.
A portable condensation necessarily leaves much of its originating field behind. A rule can travel without the history that made it sensible. A metric can become more authoritative than the activity it was designed to represent. A classification can replace situated judgment. A map can make land legible to distant administrators while rendering local relations invisible.
The same process that allows knowledge to circulate allows authority to travel without accountability.
The projects we call civilization developed institutions capable of aggregating, standardizing, preserving, and commanding abstracted products of many local participation fields.
Writing, taxation, territorial mapping, standardized measures, bureaucratic categories, property systems, archives, military organization, law, and centralized administration enabled commanding nodes to see and act across larger populations and distances.
The distributed intelligence of local worlds could be appropriated by a center that then appeared to be the source of order.
The ruler received credit for the capacities of the polity. The bureaucracy’s categories became more authoritative than the lived worlds they compressed. Local knowledge became raw material for a metanode whose purposes participants could not readily alter.
This is one form of the principle of the excluded schmooze: capacities generated through a field are attributed to its most salient or commanding node while the relations that produced them disappear.
Hierarchical aggregation was not the only possible use of abstraction. Human societies have repeatedly developed federative, commoning, municipal, and heterarchical arrangements. But abstraction created possibilities for scale and concentration that transformed the relation between locally generated meaning and distant authority.
Capitalism and the capture of socialist intelligence
Capitalism intensified these processes.
It generalized abstraction and fungibility through money, wage labor, commodity exchange, standardized time, accounting, alienable property, transferable ownership, corporate organization, quantitative productivity, and competitive markets.
Situated activities and relations could increasingly be rendered commensurable, exchangeable, and governable from outside their originating participation fields.
Land became real estate or productive acreage. Work became labor time. Knowledge became intellectual property. Attention became an advertising resource. Human capacities became human capital. Community relations became markets, networks, audiences, or demographic data.
Capitalism did not abolish schmooze. It organized immense schmoozal formations.
Workers coordinate production. Scientists build upon generations of research. Programmers use shared languages and libraries. Communities reproduce care, competence, trust, and social stability. Users contribute attention, content, feedback, and data. Public institutions educate people and finance infrastructure.
Capitalism depends upon transpersonal intelligence at every level.
Its distinctive operation is to interrupt the common return of those capacities.
A contribution generated through a field is bounded, attributed to a legally recognized node, converted into an alienable asset, and accumulated by an owner.
The entrepreneur appears to create what the workforce, public infrastructure, inherited science, and social ecology made possible. The corporation appears intelligent while the distributed knowledge of its workers becomes an input. The market appears to coordinate what innumerable institutions, conventions, states, and relationships sustain.
Capitalism privately appropriates the products of socialist intelligence while concealing the socialist organization of their production.
Intellectual property
This account places intellectual property on a different footing.
The problem is not merely that copyrights and patents last too long, impede innovation, or distribute rewards unfairly. The prior question is how an idea, expression, invention, or technique becomes imaginable as the exclusive property of a discrete person or firm.
A song, program, formula, design, or text can be understood as a portable condensation of schmooze. It gathers inherited language, conventions, tools, education, prior works, collaboration, institutional support, and individual difference into a form capable of traveling beyond the encounter in which it was produced.
The individual contribution is real. But capitalism transforms attribution into something further: alienable exclusionary power.
The work becomes a bounded object. A rights-holder can restrict access, license use, transfer control, incorporate it into corporate valuation, or prevent competing development.
The creator supplies the moral story. Capital acquires the asset.
This does not mean that everything socially generated should become freely available for unrestricted extraction. A commons is not an ownerless resource available to whoever has the greatest capacity to appropriate it. Attribution, livelihood, privacy, contextual integrity, community authority, stewardship, and legitimate restrictions must be distinguished from transferable proprietary control.
But once intelligence is understood as schmoozally produced, intellectual property can no longer appear as the natural recognition of isolated creation.
It becomes part of the capitalist machinery through which collectively generated capacities are bounded, enclosed, and accumulated.
Artificial intelligence
Contemporary artificial intelligence brings these processes into unusually clear view.
The systems grouped under the term “AI” are heterogeneous. Generative models, predictive classifiers, recommendation systems, robotics, surveillance technologies, and scientific tools do not constitute one coherent object simply because marketers and journalists place them beneath a common label.
That disaggregation will matter.
But the dominant generative systems already illustrate a basic operation. Vast archives of human language, imagery, code, research, culture, classification, and feedback are detached from their originating relationships and converted into training material. The resulting computational capacities are then attributed to models controlled by a small number of firms.
Society’s accumulated activity becomes raw material.
The condensed capacity becomes proprietary capital.
Society purchases access to processed traces of its own intelligence.
This is not simply a dispute about whether an individual work was copied or whether a creator deserves compensation. It is an industrial-scale reattribution of intelligence.
The machine appears to possess what the social field produced. The firm appears to have created what it assembled, enclosed, and operationalized. The underlying schmooze disappears twice: first when human intelligence is represented as the possession of discrete individuals, and again when the traces of those individuals’ shared activity are represented as the intelligence of a proprietary machine.
AI may then be deployed to weaken the very participation fields from which its capacities arose.
An answer can replace the conversation through which judgment develops. Generated prose can replace the struggle through which thought becomes articulated. Automated instruction can reduce contact with teachers and peers. Centralized recommendations can displace local knowledge. Synthetic cultural products can crowd out communities of practice. Administrative models can replace situated deliberation with standardized output.
The system harvests accumulated intelligence and may then compete with the practices that replenish it.
A society can therefore become more capable of generating outputs while becoming less capable of generating intelligence among its participants.
The question ahead
The argument of this series will not be that individuals are unreal, that collectives are inherently wise, or that every traditional community should be preserved.
Nor will it be that all technology is alienating, that artificial intelligence has no useful capacities, or that political socialism follows automatically from human sociality.
The argument begins more fundamentally.
Individuals and shared worlds are mutually constitutive.
Human intelligence emerges through schmoozal and ecological relations that generate both transpersonal capacities and the differentiated participants capable of contributing to them.
Communities preserve and reactivate these capacities. Abstraction allows them to travel. Hierarchical institutions can aggregate and capture them. Capitalism converts their products into alienable assets and attributes their ownership to discrete nodes. Intellectual property formalizes parts of this enclosure. Contemporary AI concentrates it in technical systems capable of being deployed as external powers over the people and fields whose activity made them possible.
The political question is not merely how intelligence should be redistributed after it has been produced.
It is how forms of life produce intelligence in the first place.
Which relations make participants more capable?
Which institutions preserve common knowledge and permit it to grow?
Which arrangements allow individual differences to become sources of collective discovery rather than grounds for subordination?
Which abstractions allow meaning to travel while preserving answerability?
Which formations concentrate socially generated intelligence in commanding nodes?
Which technologies enlarge the intelligence of their surrounding fields, and which make people increasingly dependent upon capacities controlled elsewhere?
And what would it mean to build institutions that recognized intelligence as an achievement of shared worlds rather than the private possession of isolated beings?
Humans did not first become independently intelligent and then discover cooperation.
Through inhabiting shared worlds, we became the kinds of individuals capable of producing them.
We have become accustomed to looking for intelligence in the most salient node: the gifted person, the leader, the expert, the institution, the state, the corporation, the machine.
This series will look instead at the activity among the nodes—and at the worlds, human and more-than-human, that make the nodes possible.
It will ask whether intelligence is often what schmooze becomes capable of doing.
And it will explore the possibility that socialism, at its most fundamental, is not simply a program for redistributing what separate individuals produce.
It is an effort to construct institutions adequate to the fact that we produce one another.
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