essays from the field

Transmissions

Musings and inspiration received from our deep listening.

transmission : 000 · pinned
Humanity was born with one superpower: listening. The ability to overhear the world talking to itself, and to respond.
000

Born Listening

The manifesto: what OUROS believes, and why Gnoia was built.

published
001

The First Player

The founder's own account of the choices that led here.

coming
002

A Poverty of Attention

In 1971 an economist saw that a world rich in information would be poor in attention. Everything the phone became was in that sentence.

published
003

Asking Came First

The oldest writing anyone can still read is a record of people asking the world questions. Asking came first. Writing was invented to keep the answers.

published
004

A Way of Seeing

What the old practices of asking were actually for, according to the people who study them: a way to see a situation whole, with the future left open.

published
005

The Rarest Form of Generosity

Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. What she meant is harder than the poster version, and it is the standard Gnoia is built to.

published
006

Two Minutes of Nothing

What two minutes of silence does to the human body, and why Gnoia ends every session.

published
007

What Should a Machine Remember?

From the first chatbot, which forgot everything, to the companions that remembered too much: what a machine should keep of what you tell it, and who it belongs to.

published
008

A Beginning in the End

Six decisions inside Gnoia, each with the industry pressure against it and the thinker who showed why it should hold.

published
009

A Million People Listening

The evidence for the manifesto's boldest line: attention is physical, it passes between people, and at scale it changes what a society can see.

published
010

Where This Goes

Where this goes from here, and how to take part.

coming
011

Our Cave

Neuroscience spent twenty-five years learning what the contemplative traditions had already mapped: perception is built, and it can be trained.

published
012

The Law of the Good Neighbour

Two archives of the symbolic imagination, built by hand before anyone could search.

coming
013

The Quality of the Silence

What we hear in the pause before an answer, measured.

published

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[ 001 and 010 are still being written ]