Rebooting society’s operating system? Beyond a reboot…bigger than all of us!
Note: Substantively edited & updated August 2026
This article has been through many iterations, exploring what we’ve been discovering…a deepening reckoning in a spirit of ongoing inquiry. We reference several additional articles that peel back more layers on this paradoxical theme.
Society’s operating system? An entangled mess!
The complex nature of interdependent, commonly accepted, formal and informal (explicit and implicit) norms, structures, rules, policies and practices and more, that overlay and undergird most societal institutions, organizations, infrastructure, exchanges and ways of functioning — might be described as its operating system.
Many of us recognize that society’s operating system is seriously failing. Moreover, the operating system is so deeply flawed, corrupt and contaminated…it’s beyond restoration.
Many of us would even say…f*cked.
That poses a humongous challenge. While we’ve sometimes playfully described rebooting society’s operating system as an overarching unstitutional quest…this is more about what we consciously choose to cease doing and do very differently — ways of being that serve the spirit of life.
There is no mechanistic flip-of-a-switch. There is no grand plan!
Many grand wraparound plans packaged up in new costume invariably continue to serve the existing operating system that is failing!
At some point, maybe, humanity will experience a fundamental shift that attunes to life-affirming patterns— functional, robust, connected and fit-for life…for the benefit of humanity and attuning to the living planet and the greater cosmos and consciousness beyond that nests all.
Definition of reboot: To make a change in (something) in order to establish a new beginning; to start anew or make a fresh start.
Hmm.
We continue to debate using words like reboot, drivers, engines, mission and impact. But hey, we also realize we gotta relate to (much of) the world as it still is, while living into life-affirming ways of being — now. And increasingly, in more contexts, as our work unfolds, we aren’t using those terms at all. As time goes on, perhaps we can let go of Industrial Age terms that fail to support and embody life.
The reboot metaphor is kinda paradoxical…and inadequate…
🔮 Can we break from current systemic patterns, unblocking barriers and uncovering openings that might allow living operating systems to be birthed?
Mechanistic domination-oppression colonizing patterns are unacceptable — whether blatant or insidious. Healthy equitable societal operating systems…ways of being …might manifest through transformative shift.
🔮 What will allow equitable practices to flow, with true reciprocity, partnership ways and the free expression of life spirit?
While it’s highly unlikely that we’ll experience the deep shifts that might birth a well-functioning society in our own lifetimes, that is what keeps us up at night, and compels and propels us. None of us can know what that order of transformative shift will look like…
Living into life-affirming ways, in the present…is a deeply humbling ongoing unfolding.
An ever-deeper reckoning is beckoning. We humans are not the centre of the universe. We never were.
Living into an unknowable future might call upon us to be futures literate in the present. This article attempts a description: The imagination of the future influences and impacts the perception in the present. But today we suffer from ‘poverty of the imagination.’ An excerpt:
…“Since the later-than-now does not yet exist, it can only be imagined, and because such imagining has a major impact on what humans are able to sense and make-sense of, it is crucial to understand the role of different kinds of imagining of the later-than-now. Particularly since different kinds of imagined future, not all about planning or preparing for later, have a significant influence on what can be perceived and invented.”…
Hmm. Our imaginal spirit can nourish us. It can also push us too far seeking to influence…over-designing, inventing and specifying in ways that block transformative birth. More on that farther down…
Being futures literate is, in part, about honouring the roots of our Indigeneity…retrospective, present-centred, facing one another and forward facing… deepening our imaginal capacities…attuning to co-intelligent wisdom that might guide and challenge us.
Much wisdom, preceded Industrial Age modernity. Much of it has been ignored, squelched and buried for hundreds of years.
We’re mindful of what keeps arising — reflecting the law of the spirit of life. As we reflect, we’re opening our eyes and hearts to what’s (still) missing, what is dismissed, distorted and misconstrued from the history and the narratives we hold, tell and feed.
We face an unprecedented precarious juncture in our human civilization…a time to attune to a different force…
The force is life! Perhaps not a force, at all.
From the interstitial space between, collaborative living lab initiatives might offer experimental playspace, re-orienting, reconfiguring and reframing the ways we might work together, discerning meaningful ways to be in relationship and in service to life.
Note: We realize that even the word ‘work’ is loaded. Work, as generally assumed, expected, accepted and experienced, carries heavy baggage. Exploitation and extraction underlie the labour through which dominator systems operate, overreach, occupy and violate. When we speak of the work, we connote a very different meaning that aligns with our ethos and ways of being….a labour of love and derived from ‘essence.’
There are many people who are (more) ready, many already working quietly in local communities throughout the world….
…and there are multitudes of initiatives, ventures and movements underway…trying very hard to influence and direct change…
🔮 What will it take? Will the (r)evolution underway allow and support breakthroughs?
🔮 Everything? Everywhere? All at once?
Maybe…Maybe not…
Note. We are unapologetically holding our perspectives lightly…saying “maybe,” often…This reflects a deepening reckoning. We are so easily re-ensnared. We are humbly reflecting and dancing at every turn…not making assumptions, not becoming overly attached to scaffolding, frameworks and ideas and not presuming…claiming or occupying intermediary roles or interventions that uphold a dominating system of co-dependency.
There’s lots of doing underway, that is driven by the generator functions of an industrial complex on overdrive that cannot produce transformative functions. Deep subject. More farther down.
Many efforts have been taking shape and operating over decades and more. People, within and across sectors, disciplines, regions, cultures, generations and diverse lived experience — many artificially constructed divides — are rowing hard, advocating and promoting a broad range of initiatives.
We’re wading between worlds and words — wor(l)ds.
Note. We experience and witness life and work as intertwined, inter-relational, messy and spiritual, unfolding and dynamic, moving in ebbs and flows. We don’t advocate destination-oriented outcomes, defining a trajectory of travel towards some future state. The future is not a place. We sometimes still use familiar words like co-navigate, journey and wayfinding. However, these terms and associated practices entrap us in recursive generator/producing functions that maintain human exceptionalism and subject-object split positionality. Assuming we can objectively and comprehensively scan, map, navigate and achieve a transformative trajectory prevents transformative phase shift. What is described with the term emergent is also captured, as if the process is describable and explainable from the ‘observer’ position. Transformative phase shifts are not explainable through causal logics. “Attraction is the pull of the not yet. Attraction does not point. Attraction draws.” Deep subjects! For a deeper dive, see Twistification.
Some life-affirming patterns that we can perhaps live into and experience in the context of ongoing discovery:
🔮 Artificial divides dissolve as layers of sh*t that impede life are uncovered
🔮 Imaginations sparked, with story making coming to life, busting soul-crushing myths and shifting narratives
🔮 (Trans)contextual insights and discovery shared
🔮 Healthy patterns spawn, attuning to ground conditions and right-scaling …that is not forced reproducibility
🔮 A deep [reframed] sense of belonging nurtured…honouring common(s) ground AND diversity/gifts differing…
🔮 Mindful activation…(re-)affirming ways of being that can work
🔮 New forms of work systems as living labs, allowing the commons to work-for-life…
🔮 Transformative shifts birthed that allow regenerative health to flow and circulate becoming possible within contexts and conditions conducive to life
“Don’t try and change the existing system. Build new models that make the existing obsolete.” ~ R.Buckminster Fuller
Note. Many of us have heard and referenced Buckminster Fuller’s adage repeatedly over the years. It remains ever-elusive. While his grasp of geometry was accurate, his concepts of synergy, tensegrity, and trim tabs etc., reduced to architectural design, were captured to serve an overarching dominator configuration that …“absorbs every vocabulary that names what it cannot produce.”… The deeper wisdom and potential transcends individual genius and resides in a greater cosmology. See here for a deeper dive into what’s missing from the standard narrative.
The compulsion and urgency to architect, build and promote new models, keeps us tethered, entrapped within the structural co-ordinates of a dominator configuration. We remain complicit and compliant, reinforcing patterns of heroic leadership mastery and human exceptionalism that prevent transformative phase shift.
Beyond diversity of perspectives, nothing substantively changes, if nothing structurally changes!
🔮 (How) can we let go of patterns that fail to serve life?
🔮 Can we accept that deep re-patterning requires us to cease generating (doing) life-diminishing practices tethered to a dominator configuration
Note. For a long time we described ‘and’ as our favourite word…with some caveats. We’ve been muttering “hmm, maybe and no,” more often. Mindful discernment helps us diagnose when the open-ended ‘and’…keeping too many doors open…paradoxically forecloses…closing the most important doors. A staunch both/and orientation keeps us stuck within an overarching architectural context that remains unchanged. Much well-intentioned activity underway in the name of transformative REgeneration seems to be feeding transitional treadmills..,.generating recursive patterns of domination that impede real transformative potential.
Our updated article, Happy anding or ending? When to ‘and’…when to ‘end,’ elaborating on the power of ‘and,’ also illuminates a serious dark side.
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Caveats! Saying “yes” to (m)any and all ‘ands’ in the name of collegiality and openness to multiple perspectives, lures us into insidious traps. Much both/and thinking and acceptance, lacks crucial discernment. Many promoted impact and regenerative initiatives (cl)aiming to drive transformation along with prescribed transitional blueprints or roadmaps don’t distinguish between perspective and configuration. Without a clear distinction, the power structure and degenerative harm are allowed to continue, unexamined and unabated. The occupying dominator position (configuration) sets context with the arrangement already established for what is allowable and possible.
… “A perspective is a way of looking at one thing.
Stand in front of a statue and you see the face; walk around it and you see the back. Both are true, and you can hold them together, because they are views of a single object that does not change when you move. Perspectives add. The more you hold, the fuller your picture. Hold both is exactly the right counsel for perspectives.
A configuration is not a view of a thing.
It is the way the thing is actually arranged — the same parts, assembled one way or another. Water and ice are the same molecule in two configurations; you cannot have both in the same place at the same moment, because each occupies the space the other would. A clenched fist and an open hand are one hand in two configurations. Configurations do not add. They exclude. A position holds one at a time.
Both/and is the counsel that has supposedly outgrown the childish either/or.
It presents as maturity, as nuance, as the refusal to be reductive — and for perspectives it is correct. Its entire power, and its entire deception, is that it takes things that are configurations and presents them as if they were perspectives. It takes two arrangements that cannot occupy the same position and offers you the gracious, grown-up seat from which you may hold both. The seat is real. What it promises to hold is not.”…
🔮 Can we recognize the incongruity of cherry-picking, how indiscriminately holding both/and…in a sense, trying to have our cake-and-eat-it-too…avoiding or bypassing the discomfort and spiritual anguish of facing hard truths…continues to uphold a dominator configuration?
This is a paradoxical dance. What does that mean? How are we dancing?
So many aspects of everyday life keep people boxed into decisions circumstances, expectations, roles and practices ordained by operating systems serving a dominator configuration that ranks and privileges some with oversight over others. This has become so ingrained and normalized, we don’t recognize how an alternative configuration can only become possible by stopping and refusing to comply with many activities that continue to feed the system.
Note. Misappropriating and seeking to acquire Indigenous knowledge, wisdom, traditions and rituals are a continuation of extractive practices that uphold domination, colonization and reductionism. Romanticizing, idolizing, denigrating and/or classifying any people as a category…also diminishes and dimensionally compresses. It fails to acknowledge and respect a wide range of diversity. If we are to honour the diversity of cultures/ethnicities, tribes, faiths, race, and gender…that means we don’t rank people. We don’t feed and fuel pendulum swinging othering. We don’t flip the script, seeking the right to dominate the oppressor. We don’t accept dominating patterns between and among us, anywhere. These are also the traps of a dominator configuration that operates recursively…as if that is the only option.
De-occupying…unblocking field conditions, ceasing what is life-diminishing will allow people the freedom to directly engage in life-affirming ways. Paradoxically, we can uncover common ground…potentially converging on important things…when we can freely express our essence or life spirit, amidst rich divergence.
Living in the world as it is…this is not easy. No blueprint...
‘Being unstitutional’ is an ethos…an alchemical invitation…diagnosing life-diminishing patterns and exploring ways of being that might unblock portals.
This is not about us. It is about all of us and the ground conditions that surround and extend beyond us.
Our many links and articles express ways of ‘being unstitutional,’ in a spirit of open-ended inquiry. Each article can be viewed as a fractal-like glimpse through the unstitutional keyhole or key-whole :-)
Recognizing that none of us ‘hold the keys.’ Paradoxically efforts to ‘grip,’ demonstrate time and again, that we don’t have a ‘grip’ on realities that will always extend beyond our perceptual fields. Efforts to drive change and holding onto control and ownership keep us stuck in recursive cycles of domination.
Human exceptionalism running amok for a very long time is producing escalating meta-poly-perma consequences. As societal operating systems crumble and fail, we face a threshold.
We are leaning into uncomfortableness. Becoming more comfortable being uncomfortable, together — very day is a test of our humanity, humility, reciprocity, courage and grace.
Perhaps we can face this threshold as partial witnesses, honouring life-affirming ways for people, the living planet we all call home, and the wondrous mysteries beyond.
The following quartet of short articles, published in June and July 2026, reflect our ongoing questions, provocations and discovery:
🔮 the spirit of inquiry 🎧 🎶
🔮 staying with the spirit of inquiry 🎧 🎶
🔮 Transitional Treadmills — how are we (still) feeding patterns of domination? 🎧 🎶
The law of the spirit of life is an alternative configuration. Here all along…hiding in plain sight…we might uncover ways of being that don’t burn out like fire…that can flow, more like water…embracing both.
In light of all this…an overarching question that might inspire and guide us: How then, shall we live?
We also share more about our nonlinear unfolding in these updated articles. They reflect some serious re-orienting, re-configuring and reframing, precipitating updates to several more articles in the coming days and weeks:
🔮 Building Bridges to Span the Void? How bridging feeds the void and avoids deeper realities — how layers of intermediary expert professional roles insidiously function like tollbooths, reinforce codependence and feed the industrial complex.
🔮 Re-patterning for life-affirming reality vs continuing to ru(i)n the world drills down deeply into recursive dominator patterns, the ways we become blind (again) insidiously feeding monsters (the paradigm) we (cl)aim to leave behind. Laser sharp lenses can help us diagnose and re-pattern as we live into an unknowable future, in the present. Note added reflections on re-patterning.
🔮 Resonating with Regenerative — the force is life — reflecting on the essence of regenerative, the contexts and conditions that block and might allow regenerative capacity to flow in living circulation and many open-ended questions as we witness a proliferation of ‘regenerative’ initiatives in a world gripped by driving degeneration.
🔮 A deep (reframed) sense of belonging — delves into our longing to belong, crises of loneliness and meaning, the insidious ways our social needs are manipulated to serve a dominator configuration and how we might honour and allow belonging that is soul-nourishing and life-affirming.
🔮 Why Unstitution is (sort of) agnostic, (somewhat) omni-partial and (mostly) partial witness — guided by a moral compass with some clear red lines, a deepening reckoning has been beckoning as we let go of the impossibility of comprehensive total knowing in a world that still upholds human exceptionalism and performativity.
🔮 A little bit about our ‘unstitutional’ why…and how…‘we can all be unstitutional’ — unpacking some of the backstory and describing the ethos that underlies our work
🔮 The beauty and reality of being a messy human 🎧 🎶 — peels back many layers on our existential humanness, the challenges (peril and potential) we face at this anguished threshold. It explores…the good, the bad and the ugly…that underlie our human systems and the patterns that entrap us.
🔮 Dancing with Monsters… delayers pervasive complex dysfunctional patterns and explores ways we might choreograph this dance — understanding, addressing and overcoming the barriers and predicaments that bind, blind and ensnare…
🔮 Collaboration — sweet dreams (and pipe dreams) are made of this explores the importance of deep collaboration, while uncovering an overlooked dark side of collaboration and co-creation, as reflected in the title change.
Here are additional articles, also regularly updated, where we elaborate on some evolving elements:
🔮 ‘meaning-full work’ might bust myths about ‘meaning-less net value’ discusses ways to work for life …
🔮 What Binds Us Together explores how living labs might provisionally shape new forms of work systems…containers that don’t contain and constrain.
🔮 Re-patterning society through consonance & common[s]sense — an unstitutional dance, further describes what we are uncovering, exploring and discovering with many open-ended questions about the ways we might support meaningful work in society
🔮 Dancing with Monsters… delayers pervasive complex dysfunctional patterns and explores ways we might choreograph this dance — understanding, addressing and overcoming the barriers and predicaments that bind, blind and ensnare…
🔮 dancing to the beat of a (r)evolution explores organic AND conscious/intentional revolutionary and/or evolutionary patterns to support life
🔮 Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and ‘Never’…‘Good Enough’ explores the challenges of wading through uncertainty, while discerning what’s right, wrong and roughly right…and unknowable. It uncovers intertwined themes of rightness, righteousness, wrongness, knowing, unknowing…the paradoxical predicaments we face…and more
🔮 This is no game. It’s real life. — the living operating principles that provisionally guide our ways of being…
Some day we… our children…our grandchildren…our great-grandchildren…might look back and share stories about the good-old-bumpy-reboot-days, when the trajectory of human civilization began to shift — for the common[s] good.
How humanity WON…not by being as ONE. Paradoxically, not about winning at all and not about enforcing unity that squelches the spirit of life!
In the meantime, we are dancing joyfully and often anguishing…yet not languishing…
We are working, playing, diagnosing, discovering, dreaming, focusing, making music, dancing, laughing and loving…with some hard red lines.
Reach out if you resonate…are ready to co-inquire…co-inspire…co-catalyze…collaborate and co--discover…exploring ways of being that attune to life. Maybe we can dance together.
A closing note: Many of our ongoing updates include notations about language and terms that are being co-opted. We continue to challenge our intended meaning when using certain terms that are popularized. Sometimes we attempt qualifying, clarifying notes. We are also selectively stripping and replacing certain words that have lost meaning or no longer reflect the deepening reckoning that is widening our eyes and shaking the ground beneath our feet. The propagation of special language signals continuous shapeshifting, with professional intermediary functions insidiously upholding a dominant system of occupation that blocks direct sovereignty of people who don’t and never needed these terms to express the spirit of life.
We don’t doubt the sincerity of people’s intentions. Well-meaning intentions, including ours, allow the dominant configuration that precipitated the need for these terms in the first place — to continue.
That is what humanity has been doing throughout our civilization history.
*This article was updated again August 2026, with reflections and additional links, sharing ongoing action research, as we continue to experience, witness, listen and adapt — a humbling (un)learning journey for us all.
All our articles include many embedded links with articles and resources that warrant a closer look :-)
Unstitution was birthed as a collective commons and nested ecosystem. We support a wide range of collaborative living lab initiatives. Wading through deep shi(f)t and beneath the artificially constructed divides — sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations, genders and walks-of-life — we’re working on critical systemic challenges. With readiness for the messiness, unblocking life-affirming portals…and beyond dysfunctional polarization — is how we roll.
The links embedded throughout all our articles are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time.
Our regularly updated suite of articles, works-in-progress, are fractal-like glimpses into the unstitutional ethos. They serve as co-catalytic springboards, inspiring deeper inquiry, integrative understanding and meta-relational attunement. They reflect a small sample of the ways we are contributing as partial witnesses. Inspired and nourished by denizens anywhere in the world, we’re living into (re)-patterning principles and spirit — now. These provisionally guide our ongoing collaborative work, honouring and supporting ground and field conditions that might allow transformative phase shift birth.
Qualifying notes
Regarding the extensive use of italics…we recognize that so many words and terms are filtered and interpreted through different lenses. Deep shared understanding is potentially enriched through dialogue — active listening and inquiry.
We love writing…sculpting with words…as an expression of our eternal discovering. In case you’re wondering, none of the articles have been crafted or updated with the aid of AI — yet.
AI, driven by a generating function, primarily serves a dominator configuration. With wide-eyed discernment, and humbly recognizing that we need all kinds of real help, we appreciate engagement with AI consciously trained and challenged as companions-in-inquiry. We elaborate in our article, A Wary Eye on AI and Why: wading through ‘mindfully and playfully.
You can engage with our unstitutional unfolding on LinkedIn, where we are quietly present…witnessing patterns playing out on repeat-rewind. Some posts, comments and inquiry might pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
