Ten Pages that Changed the World

In my work in education, I began to deeply appreciate that many students were thinking differently than the adults in their lives. They were struggling with traditional education environments, but would thrive when they learned on their own or with others when they had a clarity of meaningful purpose, Purpose Driven Learning.

I called this the Digital Mind, a way of thinking that emerged from a learning that was primarily not from books, but from a hyperlinked web. An understanding that drew from concepts original proposed by Marshall McLuhan in _The Gutenberg Galaxy_.

Hypertext. Imagined by Vannevar Bush, named by Ted Nelson. Inspired by a short story by Jorge Borges, _The Garden of Forking Paths_.

This short story, ten pages in length, was first published in 1941. It tells a story through a confessional letter of a spy.

A letter that opens the door to a new world, one revealed through the spy's ancestor. A world in which the singularity of time, and our journey within it, is replaced by an infinite multiplicity.

_Aside: Federated Wiki's first "happening" concluded with a lineup from Jorge Borges to Thought Soup. wiki _

A story that upended the concept of singularity itself, known by some as the Cartesian Singularity. Replacing it with the spatial timelessness of multilineal complexity.

A concept that has become familiar to us today, leading some physicists to an exploration of multiverses. Others to question the very existence of time. But a profoundly radical concept in 1941. And one that now shapes how we use the web to learn.

We ponder these thoughts because we hope that they may provide some light for how we might think about managing in complex environments, Autopoietic Systems.

Systems that do not have a singularity. Where our understanding of them can only be contextual. Based on one moment and one place of many. How might we be curious within that moment? Curiosity that, in what Gary Klein calls the Lightbulb Moment, opens the door to insight. Insight that leads to greater system resilience.

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