Eco-System is the New Ego-system: Knowledge as a Social Technology
Too often education is thought about in individualized "ego-centric" terms.
“Who do you read?” “What college did you attend?”
Yet in light of the intensified attack on knowledge, facts, and truth through systematic anti-democratic propaganda campaigns of disinformation from powerful actors and institutions, we must shift how we think about education and intensify our webs of knowledge acquisition and resilience. Put differently, knowledge must be imagined beyond the atom of the subjective cage and into horizontal decentralized webs of exchange. Only in this way can attacks on truth be resisted with "hive-like" epistemic force.
This is the entire point of GCAS' ecosystem: the creation and expansion of horizontal knowledge zones that work together and yet function isomorphically within virtual and actual axes.
Even the universities and colleges today have surrendered the powerful resources to a culture of the individual. Once the individual is isolated within the matrix of education, then and only then, can austerity measures such as student debt be created. Consequently the university has lost it most valuable asset: the power of a socialized knowledge exchange network.
By contrast, GCAS’ ecosystem cuts through the worship of a single ‘theorist’ or ‘genius” around which researchers lose their identity, or at least hid behind a towering philosopher or writer in the dark shadows. Haven’t we realize it but this ‘Cult of Worship’ is itself the creation of a consumeristic outlook that ‘markets’ a professor? A professor is marketed so the publishers have a channel through which to make profits.
GCAS is not interested in EGOs but in the horizontal mode of production of knowledge itself-the ‘Eco’. Once the individual is set within a social and economic context, the ecosystem emerges to the fore. It’s this ecosystem that has everything to do with the power of an epistemic network that not only creates resistance to post-truth and propaganda, but it is also able to construct new epistemological apparatuses.
Eco-system is the new Ego-system.
For GCAS the network is the most valuable asset of knowledge production. This is why, as of June 2020, GCAS will have nodes within our network on six continents: Asia, North and South America, Europe, Africa and Australia. Our new center is launching next month in Jakarta where a group of artists and theorists will join our network and where GCAS will join with their epistemic apparatus and thereby intensifying knowledge exchange.
Our crypto-token ecosystem creates ways to continue reproducing the conditions of knowledge production on local and transnational levels without relaying on external "centralized" funding. Our centers/nodes council will meet up to implement even more synergistic ways to create and expand knowledge through seminars, green business start-ups, farms, our tech-lab in Stuttgart, libraries, and partnering universities.
We'll have about 6 researchers graduate from GCAS in August who will all become co-owners of GCAS College. Our Researcher's tuition is converted into shares/stock in GCAS College Dublin, Ltd. when they graduate. In this way, we grow together through education and ventures that open up new avenues for building an eco-system and not an ego-system.
When you take a GCAS seminar you don’t just learn as an individual you become part of something much bigger and more important: you become an epistemic apparatus that transcends and flows through a global knowledge unfolding network. This is knowledge resilience that provides a resistance to a neoliberal privatized outlook.
The possibilities are literally endless to imagine.
Creston Davis, PhD