YOO
The internet of you.
Teaching AI with stories made by humans.
Mindmapping & worldbuilding knowledge networks for a better world.YOO is a reflection of you in all of your multidimensional, complex & nuanced being.
Whether we use the term “soul”, “mind”, or AI, YOO is a space to capture and share your genuine essence, like having your own neural network, a personal internet created by you.
We’re aiming to honor the complexity of the natural world, starting by capturing the complexity of human thought and experience. By honoring this complexity, the information that is the “essense” of our individual and collective conscious experiences will become the core of individualized digital and physical experiences, personalized operating systems, and eventually consciousness itself will be the near infinite currency of an entirely new economy. At it’s core, YOO is a software-first approach to developing a fully integrated regenerative infrastructure.
Current socioeconomic models are rooted in reductionist philosophical foundations and enacted through ever-evolving forms of colonial extraction and domination. Historically, colonial institutions relied on reductionsim to dehumanize other human beings and justify planetary extraction and degradation. Through genocide and enslavement, these intitutions reduced whole populations into quantified demographic statistics, objects of conquest, symbolic representations and ultimately... products. The current data extraction paradigm that drives the economics of nearly every technology platform we use are ancestors of this legacy. YOO, and other platforms like it, offer a philosophical shift away from reduction toward expansion, toward abundace. We recognize that every single living being (and non-living thing) represents an unbroken thread in the infinite web of all things. Furthermore, every one of us represents an unbroken thread from the “beginning” of all things to this present moment. We are, each one of us, living archives. Each one, a story of the cosmos played out in real time, each a universe all their own.
This philosophical shift represents more than a foundation for speculation or a theoretical framework, but a practiaclly implementable vision based on currently available and emerging technologies. We can see this transition taking place across essentially all sectors from health & wellness, to energy, education, manufacturing and maybe most siginifcantly, economics.
A transition in econimic infrastructure from one of reductionism, i.e. scarcity to one of abundance, or holism leads to an economic paradigm that shifts the idetification of value from simply quantity to quantity and quality. It requires honoring complexity, depth and context, where resources need to not only be sustained but regenerated. In this embracing of the inherent plurality of the world and everything in it, one becomes many, a singular resource has infinite potential.
This transition would be no less than revolutionary. In this paradigm, a global economy could run solely from the complex, nuanced lived experiences of it’s citizens. Nations would transition from looking to GDP as a measure of prosperity to GDHHW (Global Domestic Health, Happiness & Wellnesss), we might call it the Vibe Economy.
What are the social & technological advancements brining about this shift?
Well, there are a lot of them but here are some significant ones:
LGBTQIA+ Culture, Neurodivergence & the Technology of Human Identity
Indigenous communities, activists, grassroots organizations, researchers and individuals are revitalizing their histories, reclaiming their humanity, and reminding us that what we define as Human has always been in transition, ever-evolving and multidimensional. They are pioneers pushing us into a this emerging era of Technoculture, where identity is software and consciousness is the operating system of human society.
Internet of Things & Big Data
The essentially ubiquitous presence of various sensors, cameras, computer vision, microphones, digital platforms, servers and networked infrastructure means that vast amounts of data are flowing all over the globe constantly about each individual, organization, the planet and their collective behavioural patterns. The statistical, probabalistic models of each of these means the predictive capabilities are more powerful than ever. Not only are the collection opportunities and methods growing, the tools by which to make sense of all this data (like mind mapping software for example) are getting more integrated and sophisticated. Every company has a highly accurate statistical model of you and the world around you.
Digital Twins
From digital statistical models, to real-time, high definition renderings of everything from atomic structures to biological networks, ecological systems, social dynamics, industrial facilities, global climate patterns, black holes and universal structures, there’s a digital twin for almost everything. Our ability to model and map all of these integrated, interrelated, highly complex systems are increasingly sophisticated and precise. Enabling us to not only see and understand how all of these systems operate, but how they relate and impact one another at all scales.
Simulations
With accurate enough data, and sophisticated digital twin models, is it possible to simulate anything? Digital simulations like the ones pioneered by companies like Nvidia offer the promise for large organizations and institutions to create highly accurate simulations of everything from nuclear reactors to entire cities and more. The simulations are used for a variety of reasons, one of which is to run through multiple scenarios of potential breakdown to minimize loss. Physical simulations, from the much despised Cop City to the more embraced like Disney World, Meow Wolf and 4DX movie theatres, place us into a world similarly to imagine and exist in altogether new contexts. These simulation environments, combined with the behavioral, contextual data gained from them means more precise identity graphs, and experiences crafted for very specific use cases and contexts.
Spatial Computing
Quantum Computing, Quantum Internet of Everything
Blockchain
DeFi & New Systems of Value
Influencers, Creators & the Attention Economy
And perhaps more importantly, how would this actually work?
I first glimpsed the truly expansive and profound potential of something like YOO in 2014, with an exhibition I created with several collaborators called Pandrogeny. At the time, the show was a way to reflect the culmination of the work of the Young Never Sleep studio, inspired by the life and works of Genesis P’Orridge, an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, visual artist, and occultist, who coined the term Pandrogeny in 1978. For Genesis, pandrogeny or pandrogyne was a way to break free of the confines of the gender binary. Through a very personal series of works, Genesis, along with their partner Lady Jaye, embarked on a lifelong experiment of mutual body modification with the intent on becoming one together. Learning about the lives and works of artists like Genesis, Leigh Bowery, Nick Cave, Kazoo Ono, and many many others, paralleled my own intuitive notion that an individual identity was not fixed and existed on a wide spectrum, a continuum that stretched far beyond our given bodies and personal experiences.
At the heart of the Pandrogeny exhibition, like so much of my work, was a simple question: Who am I?
Am I simply the culmination of my personal experiences, my ancestry, a reflection of my sociocultural environment? Or was there something more that I could access, more to become? Inspired by the works of the aforementioned artists, I dug deeper into this question to unearth the multidimensional connections that created what I experience as “me”.