Introduction
Mask I: inscribing yourself by appropriation.
The Fukeshu secretly purchased a building that belonged to one of the larger Buddhist temples.
Mask II: inscribing yourself into a legitimate tradition.
By faking several papers claiming their historical origins as coming from China via a priest named Chosan, the Fukeshu tried to secure their position. They also produced a copy of a license from the first Edo Shogun, Ieyasu, giving them the exclusive right to solicit alms by means of shakuhachi playing. The Fukeshu asked for official recognition of their temple. The government demanded the official document. The Fukeshu claimed it was lost.
Mask III: inscribing yourself by incorporation.
The shogun granted their request – why further embitter already vengeful men? – on the condition that they act as spies for the government. Fukeshu accepted.
Mask IV: music as a cover story.
The Fukeshu played soft melodies and overheard intimate conversations.
Mask V: the flute as a cover story.
When a samurai became ronin he could no longer wear his double sword. So, these wandering priests redesigned the shakuhachi. The flute became a formidable club as well as a musical instrument.
Mask VI: the mask.
If we read these steps backwards there always seems to be one more mask:
“Eine Maske mehr.”
“- Wanderer, wer bist du?” Ich sehe dich deines Weges gehen, ohne Hohn, ohne Liebe, mit unerratbaren Augen; feucht und traurig wie ein Senkblei, das ungesättigt aus jeder Tiefe ans Licht gekommen ist- was suchte es da unten? – mit einer Brust, die nicht seufzt, mit einer Lippe, die ihren Ekel verbirgt, mit einer Hand, die du noch langsam greift: wer bist du? Was tatest du? Ruhe dich hier aus: diese Stelle ist gastfreundlich für jedermann – erhole dich! Und wer du auch sein magst: Was gefällt dir jetzt? Was dient dir zur? Nenne es nur: Was ich habe, biete ich dir an! – Zur Erholung? Zur Erholung? O du Neugieriger, was sprichst du da! Aber gib mir, ich bitte – Was?Was? sprich es aus! – Eine Maske mehr! “Eine zweite Maske…”
The final layer is nonexistent, the essence never material, the object ever empty.
In the end there is always a bunch of guys and women making up stories and living them as if coming alive.
But in finding the story, and in telling it, we have learned.
We have learned along the way.
We learn along the way.
What is the most important thing we have to learn?
To discern between friend and foe.
Life flows in grand 400–500-year cycles. We are lucky or unlucky to be at the end of one and the beginning of a new one. As Gramsci said, this is a time of monsters, the old is not yet dead and the new cannot yet be born. Gramsci was a realist. His most important concept ‘hegemony’ is politically neutral, it did not favour a progressive side, it favored those who acted on it, and those who act on it. [1]
The shift this time is from competition as the driver of energy and societal underpinning to collaboration.
The cycle runs from 1452, the ability to print books and distribute learning tools to our current real pragmatic political moment in which Artificial Intelligence and the Iran War collide. This period is characterized by crippling mental capabilities. It took hundreds of years before schools were built. It created copyright patents on the illusionary claim that single individuals create out of thin air without any social context. Hereditary power structures, notions of re-presentation underpinning ‘democracy fabricated a ‘real’ and an ‘accurate positioning of ‘facts’ have facilitated the metabolic shift we experience and feel as the cycle, nearing its end, spits out all its filth or residue crystallizing its core characteristics of negativity, historical violence and repression of all other intelligences, innate stupidity and narcissistic egoism as pure form, as witnessed in today’s politicians and political indecency. It is not yet fully dead, but is a worm wriggling on a hard hook, withering. Yet it can still cause damage. It must encounter only a void. No energy should be directed to it. It keeps it alive a little bit longer.
Stay calm, get well, relax, exercise, quit habits that you created as an antidote to the situation to escape. You no longer need them. We can get excited but not too excited. The shift towards collaboration is tuned to bringing better practices, but human suffering, notions and real acts of good and evil, miscommunication and misunderstanding will stay in any cycle.
Prigogine, in his 2003 “Surprises in a Half Century”, summarizes the following experiment:
You have two large boxes connected by a small channel. The ant’s nest is displaced from one box to the other. Ants are crossing the channel to recover the initial situation. Deneubourg has found a way of identifying the individual ants. The surprising result is that there are two groups of ants: active ants and lazy ants. The active ants cross the channel repeatedly. The lazy ants remain most of the time in the same box. Deneubourg selected out the lazy ants and made the same experiment. The astonishing result is that some of the lazy ants then begin to work. [2]
There are certain alignments in our behavior in groups that seem to stay in any cycle. But something has changed though: the nature of power itself. Psychologists specialized in the behavior of larger groups of people try to explain the relative ease with which one is able to exert influence over masses by assuming
a causal force which bears on every member of an aggregate, and also for each individual there is a large number of idiosyncratic causes (Stinchcombe, 1968: 67 -68n) He continues: “Now let us suppose that the idiosyncratic forces that we do not understand are four times as large as the systematic forces that we do understand….As the size of the population increases from 1 to 100, the influence of the unknown individual idiosyncratic behavior decreases from four times as large as the known part to four tenths as large as the known part. As we go to an aggregate of a million, even if we understand only the systematic one-fifth individual behavior as assumed in the table, the part we do not understand of the aggregate behavior decreases to less than 1 percent (0.004).
This shows how top-down power works and why scaling itself has become such an important indicator in such a system of ‘success’. Imagine you want to start a project or ‘do something’ with your friends or neighbors, say 5 people. This means that you have to take into account before you do anything – state a goal, negotiate deliverables, or even a first date on which to meet for a kickoff – that all five people relate to huge idiosyncrasies and generic forces that have to be aligned or overcome before you can even say ‘Hello’. This shows how difficult it is to ‘start something’ Understanding the nature of these social relations in the above terms show how difficult it is to script moments of fundamental change, as hierarchical systems by the very fact that they are top down can concentrate on managing systematic forces relatively effortlessly. That which they cannot predict or control remain lone dissident, strange or abnormal voices, or ‘sudden events’. With the internet these idiosyncrasies have been able to organize and raise their weight in the ratio, and the internet of things will allow these even further, bringing the sensor network data sets individuals can handle to them on their devices. This acceleration of weak signals into clusters, organized networks and flukes cannot be managed anymore by formats that are informed by and that inform systematic forces as the nature of these forces has changed. People will start seeing more tales of sharing and collaboration. The tables are turning. Pretty soon people will start seeing competition for what it is: bullying.
Relationships between humans and their habitat are characterized by shifts in the qualities of ‘things’. The first phase facilitates the becoming of a species. In biology differences between men and animals is seen as the gradual intelligence to use things as tools and build ever more complex ones. Up until the Industrial Revolution religion-built stories of how people should behave by investing certain things with meaningful qualities and not others. After the Industrial Revolution things became ubiquitous as property and symbols of status. This second phase builds the experience of community (based on inclusion and exclusion). People die for things and are killed because of them. Scarcity gives them value. A third phase paves the way for individuals to stage themselves and build relatively rigid clusters of value based on actual and potential amassment of ‘things’. [3]
The first lay the foundations for the anthropocentrism that saw flora, fauna and other species as existing as resources to men. We now see the detrimental effects in Climate Change and Peak Oil. The second phase has to move ‘magical’ thinking into the Renaissance and build a foundation of the ‘real’ that is acceptable to most if not all citizens that are in deep social and economic inequality. It does this by creating enemies on all possible levels, harnessing these campaigns through inclusion and exclusion schemes. The industry scenarios on the internet of things by the huge system integrators and big business foresee a ‘property less’ future.
Recent research asks if the Amazon was a natural forest in 1492, “sparsely populated and essentially pristine, or instead, were parts of it densely settled and better viewed as cultural forests, including large agricultural areas, open parklands, and working forests associated with large, regional polities”? Embedded -in this view of the Brazilian Amazon region is a “dynamic change and variability, including complex social formations and large-scale transformations of the natural environment, describing major settlements or towns with large-scale roads and productive techno-economies, rich artistic and ritual traditions, and organized martial forces… documenting fairly large regional populations that lived in dispersed small settlements and larger residential and ceremonial centers… and structural earthworks, as well as ramps, road and settlement nodes are marked by linear earthworks at the margins of roads and plazas (curbs) and around major settlements (ditches), which have been mapped using high resolution GPS technology.” This is further described as “small polities being part of a regional peer-polity – a confederation of culturally related territorial polities extending across an area roughly half the size of the Netherlands and likely numbering well into the tens of thousands.”
Why is it so hard to find stories of collaboration? There are two reasons. The first is that many examples can not be seen as meaningful by the dominant paradigm. Stories of collaboration and sharing have been moved into a literary mode: tales of wonder. Albert Nolan writes: “the best example of Jesus’ attempts to educate the people to share what they had, was the miracle of the loaves and fishes (Mk 6: 35-44 parr). This incident was interpreted by the early Church and by all the evangelists as a miracle of multiplication- although this is never explicitly said by any of them…The event itself was not a miracle of multiplication; it was a remarkable example of sharing”:
Jesus was preaching to a large gathering of men in a lonely place. It was time to stop for a while to eat. Some had no doubt brought food, others not. He and his disciples had five loaves and two fish, but they suggested that the people be told to go and ‘buy themselves something to eat’. Jesus says, No, ‘You give them something to eat yourselves.’ They protest but he tells the people to sit down in groups of fifty and taking out the bread and the fish, he tells his disciples to ‘share it out’. (p.51) Now either Jesus told the others who had brought food to do the same within their group of fifty or else they, seeing Jesus and his disciples sharing their food, began, of their own accord, to open their food-baskets and to share the contents. The ‘miracle’ was that so many men should suddenly cease to be possessive about their food and begin to share, only to discover that there was more than enough to go round. There were, we are told, twelve baskets of scraps left over. Things do tend to ‘multiply’ when you share them. The first Christian community in Jerusalem made the same discovery when they tried to share their possessions…This then is what selling all your possessions means; giving up the surplus and treating nothing as your own. The result will always be that ‘none of their members was ever in want’ “(Acts 4:34) (Jesus before Christianity, The Gospel of Liberation, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977 p.141)
There were never any miracles, just remarkable acts of kindness and sharing. As we can see now how strongly these simple acts by simple men and women threatened centralized structures, we realize decentralization and distributed procedures have always felt more real and natural to humans. The core driver was and is love. Love shelters and cares for what is near, acts carefully and thoughtfully in the neighborhood and with compassion to all that is far and invisible. Decisions are tuned to what is near and what is far away either in space or in time. The emancipation of things to ‘talk’ in our language and take thor place in our natural ecosystem is what brings us this rupture, this beginning of a new grand cycle. Of course, its key starter, the tcp-ip protocol – pass on the packet – is currently flowing through the centralized forces – centralized currencies, individual riches seen as ‘success’, legal structures framing property over lives, notion of territory seen as natural producing surveillance of all actors – and producing weak results. But these systems are all crumbling even if they do not yet know it themselves.
An ontological shift feels strange at first, as if the normal procedures of decision-making are no longer functioning. Intercentrality describes a situation in which extreme centralization and extreme decentralization can work together in an organizational structure that can be alternated within the system as a whole and within specific components: infrastructure and applications. The concept extrapolates traditional governance, open source, privacy and literacy activists, and the foundation of today’s hybrid infrastructure: connectivity (5G/6G), semiconductors (ASML, NXP, TATA, Micron, Vedanta, SPEL), IoT and IIoT, ML and AI, and Quantum. The solution is on the device level. The solution and future wealth of India is on the device level. [4]
With things as our allies, distributed device architectures and decentralized notions of agency and power are rapidly becoming the new standard. We have initiated standards and framework activities to develop a technical reference architecture framework for an open 6G device ecosystem which provide all the capabilities of current smartphones, together with a fully secure digital wallet, trustworthy AI, and potentially also a router (e.g. for neighborhood floating hotspots), all enabled from open trusted hardware modules in the devices and using open source applications. The motivation is to move away from closed device ecosystems controlled by individual companies by enabling a new governance structure based on open-source development on the new 6G connectivity platform. The consumer use case for 6G would be better served by this open approach, but it is currently lacking an industrial and societal framework. The intent is to support development of devices in a public-private structure, and to enable development of a new device Operating System – different from the closed ecosystems commonly used on current devices (e.g. Harmony, Apple and Android). We want trustworthy AI running from the hardware in the 6G phone. [5] This work seeks to build an ecosystem on the devices with open-source applications overseen by foundations and stewardships. It has been approved as an IEEE Industry Activity: IEEE IC25-009-01: A Technical Reference Architecture Framework for an Open 6G Device Ecosystem. An Industry Connections Activity Initiation Document (ICAID) [6] Everyone is welcome to join.
The smartphone was configured in 2007. It has not had significant conceptual new updates. It has created wealth for the phone and app store makers, and it left democratic processes fully out of any form of control, but regulatory measures that leave government and institutions in the role of bogeymen, taking tools away. The device is not a tool, it is infrastructure. Over a billion phones (and billions of IoT devices) are the Cloud (edge), and run AI locally, training on trustworthy sources. This distributed system can be powered by an energy infrastructure that decides AI optimization and integration into infrastructure, physical AI. Native applications in the triangle AI, IoT and 6G will lead to distributed intelligence in IoT and a 6G smartphone needing a distributed grid with community storage. Community batteries “are shared energy storage systems that allow multiple households or organizations to store and use electricity locally.” [7] 6G has a five-year window to deployment. The cost of not doing this is to remain dependent on growing foreign digital capabilities. So we move from our current operational programming rules – to distribute security – towards organizational principles that are guided by the principle of distributing insecurity. Just like life does. When tools match our intent to collaborate the world can start to heal.
A pair of Japanese Komuso or “Monks of Emptiness.” Original Source: Unknown
Notes
1) We are in the process of losing our foremost thinker of and on concrete historical scenarios, Antonio Gramsci, to a reactionary right-wing cause. Gramsci himself has become entangled in a position to which he had given much thought, namely, Ceasarism. Ceasarism can be said to express a situation in which the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner: But Ceasarism “does not in all cases have the same historical significance. There can be both progressive and reactionary forms of Ceasarism; the exact significance of each form can, in the last analysis, be reconstructed only through concrete history, and not by means of any sociological rule of thumb. Ceasarism is progressive when its intervention helps the progressive force to triumph, albeit with its victory tempered by certain compromise and limitations. It is reactionary when its intervention helps the reactionary force to triumph, in this case too with certain compromises and limitations, which have however, a different value, extent and significance than in the former.”[1] http://www.internationalgramscisociety.org/igsn/articles/a09_5.shtml [back]
2) https://www.eoht.info/page/Lazy%20ant%20study [back]
3) The pattern is the process. The loop is the thing. Always a thing. And no, trust me, it is not the other way around. https://org.noemalab.eu/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/kranenburg_rules_of_inno_3.html [back]
4) See my recent book: Springer Brief in Political Science: Statecraft and Policymaking in the Age of Digital Twins, Springer Nature Switzerland, February 2025 DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-80645-2
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-80645-2 [back]
5) When 6G arrives, phones will likely feature backward compatibility, allowing them to connect to both 6G and 5G/4G networks, similar to how 5G phones currently support 4G. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2182603®=3&lang=2 [back]
6) Sebastian Frey is Chair. I am Vice Chair. We started January 2026.
https://standards.ieee.org/industry-connections/activities/a-technical-reference-architecture-framework-for-an-open-6g-device-ecosystem/ [back]
7) https://www.vest.energy/blog/unlocking-the-opportunity-for-community-batteries-in-the-uk [back]
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