21th century options and opportunities create enormously eclectic and diverse structures which I call untraceable structures. Such structures can be anything: society itself, industries, social groups, law enforcement networks, government local or global, educational systems, self-organized groups, anything.

The sheer vastness and complexity of these structures makes them untraceable. These structures are all interconnected, each one taking its input from the output of other structures. They are also deeply obscure: very few people know how they work, what keeps them ticking. These structures cannot even be outlined with certainty: where does one structure end and another begin? What happens to other structures when one of them fails? What happens when the success of one structure means the failure of another structure?

We are notoriously bad at choosing for which we have two solutions: social learning and social knowledge. Social learning creates conditions in which we can learn what we could otherwise never learn. Since each social occasion is unique so is what we can learn as participants. Social knowledge is the spreading of awareness between people as a consequence of special circumstances that are larger than one or a few people. Such special circumstances are called Kairos in systems theory.

What is special for me may be inconsequential for you so Kairos and the social knowledge that follows is not uniformly spread between people. Depending on your interests and personality certain events will move you and others won't.

Together social learning and social knowledge are caused by what happens to untraceable structures and at the same time affect these untraceable structures. Here's a simple example: in the Tour de France of 2007 the German national television decided to broadcast the three-week cycling event as long as no cases of doping were found. As soon as cheating cyclists were caught in between races the German television would stop airing the Tour de France races for the remainder of that years event. Sure enough cyclist were caught and the German television responded as promised.

In 2008 the French anti-doping agency changed their methods so that doping cases would only be announced after the Tour de France was over, denying the Germans the opportunity to disrupt television broadcasting again. These kinds of action and counter reaction cycles happen every day all around the world and we're often spectators. Social learning is an attitude where we become aware of such social interplay.

Both the French pride and prestige derived from hosting the world toughest cycling event as well as the German irritation with doping in sports are untraceable. The way these motivations and intentions are intertwined and affect structures, institutions and groups is untraceable. We might be able to predict or guess events before they happen, and we might be able to similarly estimate their consequences. It's not just that we can't know what what will happen upfront, we're often unable to even know or find out what has actually happened after the facts.

This is typical for untraceable structures: events that influence our daily lives in small and big ways seem unavoidable, seem to defy all intervention and are hard to inspect or research. The pervasive 20th century explanation is that institutions are required to organize large groups of people in order to get certain desired outcomes, and that these institutions have to work according to rules that cannot take personal circumstances into account. In other words: institutions know they affect people yet have to make simplified assumptions about the overly complex world in order to function.

But this view of the world is flawed: it's not so much that the world is overly complex - it often isn't - but that the world is unknowable, untraceable. Complexity can still be known - albeit requiring serious effort. But the world is inherently untraceable: impossible to inspect and understand, despite our best efforts.

The 21th century view on untraceable structures is that to know something about the world or to learn something about the world we have to immerse ourselves. We can't stay at the sidelines and work according to flawed assumptions. Instead, we have to go through the efforts of social learning and remain perceptive of social knowledge. We have to map untraceable structures to the best of our knowledge and constantly stay on the outlook for events that might impact our position in the world. The challenge is not dealing with complexity, it's staying relevant.

Although the ideas behind untraceable structures are deeply phylosophical they aren't very hard to understand. Many of the phenomena we've experienced in the first decade of the 21th century are perfectly in line with the laws of untraceable structures. Throughout this book you will be guided through the different elements and processes that are related to untraceable structures. But you won't learn much by simply reading this book. You will be faced by many challenges that can be broadly categorized as either social learning or social knowledge. In other words, you will have to immerse yourself in the 21th century - which is all around you - and adapt your world view from one of complexity to one of relevance.

Learning something new about the world requires us to learn something new about ourselves. That is why life is a highly positive experience. Even at the most devastating and overwhelmed moments we still have the opportunity to learn something new about ourselves. The 21th century will force all of us to move from individuals that interact with a world that is separate from the self to people who are fully integrated with the untraceable world.

Being integrated or not with the untraceable world is a matter of disposition: what are you aiming for and how are you reading other people? The main reason why so much wealth was created during the 20th century is because an individualistic attitude is much more expensive than a community attitude. A more expensive attitude consumes more resources and shares less, meaning that production and trade have to increase resulting in more wealth.

Yet while the 21th century will force us to become less individualistic it won't be for the obvious reasons. We won't become less individualistic because of resource depletion, food and water shortages, overpopulation and so on. Instead, we will become less individualistic due to our own internal conflicts. The excessive individualism we read in the behavior of others - not just in consumption but in all kinds of attitudes - encourages and even forces us to be equally individualistic, leading us so far as to question our own sense of identity.

Our reading of other people and our relationships with other people create what I call an emotional identity: an identity that is largely determined by how we feel we fit in the world, and by what other people are doing. In a very individualistic world like ours our emotional identities will be very individualistic as well. In fact, it will overshoot, creating such a individualistic identity that we can no longer identify with ourselves, let alone with others. This emotional identity is created regardless of who we would like ourselves to be. Through our perceptions our emotional identity is forced upon us.

As we doubt our own identity more and more as well as our relationships with others and with society at large we start building a second identity: a traced identity. This identity is constructed through reading what other people are doing, but reading their behaviors as expressions. Based on those expressions we try to trace who these people are and ultimately who we are. We've all been building this traced identity for a long time now and in this 21th century our traced identities are finally starting to get some significance.

Our traced identity is the product of a lot of searching, a lot of questioning, and a lot of observing. This traced identity - once it becomes somewhat developed - gives us the important power to fundamentally ask questions about our emotional identity and the emotional identity of others and of society. It also allows us to connect with people that are also working on their own traced identity, and allows us to compare notes.

Such a world where people have two identities and where traced identities are starting to matter is fundamentally different from a world governed by emotional identities. A traced identity is much more malleable that an emotional identity which also makes it more ephemeral. A traced identity depends much more on memory, remembering and organizing knowledge. It requires significant training before an adult brain can form a traced identity. But most importantly, our traced identities significantly change the way we look at the world, and ultimately change the world. A traced identity is a searching, inspecting, demanding identity. It's much more open to learning and organizing knowledge, but it will also be very demanding.

People with a developed traced identity continue to have an emotional identity and they will have to learn to make the two work together. Personally I'm trying to do this by learning how emotions work in our brains and how they affect our behavior. I often fail spectacularly at striking a balance between my emotional and traced identities, usually when my emotional identity gets the upper hand.

Yet I feel that my traced identity is what has kept me sane over the years. Now that the 21th century is well on its way and traced identities are starting to take over the world I'm glad I can work on my traced identity with more vigor and help spread the idea and how it relates to untraceable structures.

Emotional identities are pretty useless for living in an untraceable world. They depend completely on what others are doing and how we want ourselves to be seen by others. Creating a traced identity for many people is a pretty big challenge, most people are even unaware that they can have a traced identity. Emotional identities very often means that we "don't get it". Because emotional identities are tuned to the people we spend time with the most, understanding or learning about people or social phenomena we're not involved with becomes very challenging. Traced identities are much better at understanding unfamiliar phenomena provided that we challenge ourselves to get the best possible knowledge.

Emotional identities often fight against phenomena or people that are conceived at a thread. Just the fact of having a somewhat developed traced identity will in many circumstances allow us to react much more productively to unknown events. Yet traced identities can have their downsides as well. Traced identities are based on assumptions about how the untraceable world is fundamentally structured. The purpose of a traced identity is to bring personal structure in untraceable structures, but to be able to do such a thing we need to make some assumptions on how we think that structure looks like.

Whenever we are confronted with evidence that our assumptions have been wrong we need to go through the expensive effort of re-evaluating and rebuilding our traced identity, or risk loosing our traced identity altogether. This reassessment is likely to happen regularly early on when we form our traced identities. These are exercises we have to go through to increase the effectiveness of our traced identity. The ultimate goal of a traced identity is to navigate a world that is inherently unnavigable by integrating ourselves into that world to ever large extends. The closer our traced identity matches the underlying structure of untraceable structures the better we'll be able to navigate.

Traced identities is what is guaranteed to make us attracted to communities and less attracted to individualism. Obviously, spending enormous effort in creating a second identity is a very individualistic endeavor. However, the point is to integrate ourselves and our behaviors with structures that are created by many. The most important difference between traced identities and emotional identities is in how they affect our behaviors: emotional identities will copy behavior while traced identities will integrate behaviors.

Copying behavior gives us an emotional reward by attributing value and importance to what others are doing. Integrating behavior gives us structural reward by confirming the value of social learning and social knowledge. Both identities are based on what other people are doing, the difference is in how they affect our behavior and thinking. Both identities are formed through our perception of the world so any sensory input is likely to affect both of our identities at the same time.

An attitude of copying attributes value to behaving like others are behaving, a fundamental desire in all social species. An attitude of integration attributes value to finding one's own place in the world, a fundamental desire of our species. Key to integrating yourself is describing the world as you experience it. By publishing accounts of your experiences you give others the chance to integrate you and your experiences in their own personal structures.

In order to make sense of the big domain of untraceable structures, and in order to get you to work on your traced identity this book has to do more than introduce. You will need to get down to business and the remainder of this book is designed to do just that. Fundamental to operating a traced identity is an understanding of untraceable structures. You will also need to get experienced in both social learning and social knowledge. You will have to reassess your own personal history and integrate that in your own traced identity.

You will need to look at the world around you - your studies or job, your role in society, your likes and dislikes, your ambitions and desired outcomes, your integration and place in the world, the institutions around you, how institutions affect people around the world, and so on - and integrate all those things in your traced identity.

Next you will need to explore the untraceable structures. You will need to find out that integrating yourself with the world is very different from copying from others. Copying is fundamentally a one-way modification: you copy from other people which doesn't cause a modification for them. Integration is fundamentally a two-way modification: you take on a new structure and by doing so you modify that structure. That modification might affect other people which in their turn integrate that modification and might modify the structure and so on.

Finally, you will need to practice both social learning and social knowledge. The abundance of information - a relatively new condition - means that new structures have been created that didn't exist before. Social learning allows us to learn something about these new structures that we weren't aware of before. Social knowledge is the valuable bits that are hidden in abundant information. Social knowledge is discovered by detecting what untraceable structures are doing, how they are changing and how they are affected by seemingly undetectable forces.

The main goal of this book is to create augmented identities: identities that are formed by our relationships with untraceable structures. Relationships always happen in a medium. Media might be proximity, disposition, attitude, challenge, goals, destinations, transport, location, interests, search, emotions, and so on. Media make relationships possible yet media have to be detectable to exist. As an example, I believe an important revolution will happen when people can cheaply and reliably visualize their own brain activity. The output of what our brains are doing can become the input for how we behave.

Media has to be perceived in order to exist. What we perceive influences our identities because our identities are the basis of our perception of reality. Our identities allow us to be observers and our identities have to change in order to know observed changes or novelties in our realities. An important part of that reality is what we call information. Information is a mysterious thing. It's difficult to argue that a spreadsheet file is information and our perception of the structure of the universe is not information. Information is strange because once something is characterized as information everything in the world automatically becomes information.

Information is abstract bits of data about existence. In the age of computing everything is information because we realize that what we perceive through our senses is actually abstract information about the world. What we perceive are not the things themselves, they're sensory input about those things. That sensory input is abstract: it's related to things that exist but only describe those things.

Hence, information is everything that we perceive. Our identities provide a context in which to evaluate that information. Information becomes valuable when we can relate what we already know to what we perceive. This discovery of patterns enhances our understanding of the world and there's nothing we care more about that about that world.

Life - being alive - is equal to the ability to process information. Hence, the information that we process is our life. Traced identities provide an alternative way for processing information. Our emotional identity is what makes us human. Our traced identity is what makes us 21th century humans.

Existence is equal to being processed as information. To the best of our understanding the first life in the universe is 4 billion years old in the form of single-cell organisms. The universe before the rise of life did not exist. The history of the universe prior to the rise of life came into existence once humans started studying that history. It's a counter-intuitive description but it's consistent with the laws of life and existence.

Ever since philosophers and scientists started to studying the universe they've contemplated about structures and phenomena before they were actually observed. It's a crucial aspect of identity: the ability to make predictions about both life and existence within the identity framework of the person that makes the observation.

Media is the shared acknowledgement of the architecture of information. This makes media a relative concept since it depends on the acknowledgement of living beings. A visually impaired person will not have the same architecture of photographs as a visually fluent person. This acknowledgement requires living beings to communicate about the architecture of information. Living beings do this through behavior. Behavior is the way in which the architecture of knowledge is acknowledged. All living being have the capacity to perceive the behavior of other living beings. This does not have to be conscious behavior, and living beings do not have to be aware of the existence of other living beings. It's the ability to perceive behavior that matters.

Remember that existence is a consequence of being processed as information. Hence, by perceiving behavior the existence of the thing is taken care of. Plants for example don't know from each other that they exist. But information processing doesn't require a theory of mind, in fact it doesn't require a mind at all. Plants - even the most simple ones - process information in all kinds of ways. First of all, they process sunlight. Photons are information about the sun and by extension about the universe. Sure, photons are physically real things, but until they are being processed as information they don't exist.

Plants have complicated relationships with bacteria. Bacteria process information, but plants also process information about bacteria. Bacteria have been discovered that help plants to grow on marginal land [1]. These bacteria create enzymes and hormones that help the host plant to grow. Plants don't "know" about bacteria, enzymes or hormones but they do respond to them and this response is a proof of information processing. Sure, the underlying processes are chemical and biological but fact is that these plants and these bacteria fit together. The output of one is a suitable input for the other. That is, the output of one affects the other.

Information is everything that is perceived, or more specifically, information is everything that can be perceived. Plants can perceive the produce of bacteria, hence they can perceive information that is provided by the bacteria. Information processing is mindless, meaning that taking output as input is sufficient to do information processing.

Structure:

- Introduction

- Identities

- Untraceable Structures

- Information Theory

- Social Learning

- Social Knowledge

- Wealth

- Value and Meaning

- Money

- Tracing A New Identity

- Augmented Identity

This structure sucks, I need to find a message for this book. What's the message?

The message is: agency and structure are perceived as one. How does that happen?

Because structures are untraceable it's uncertain what is cause and what is effect. Agency is the idea that all actions have a cause and that this cause is the agent. Structure is the idea that immobile objects need external forces to be applied in order to cause effects.

The idea of untraceable structures is that effects can no longer be linked to causes with certainty. Without certainty there are no causes because a cause needs an effect.

[1]http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090126104349.htm

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Long before the advent of computers our ancestors have realized that the universe is computable. Computers make computation easier, more reliable, faster and cheaper. However, computers introduce new problems, most importantly the problem of consistency. A human computer can both know the parameters to compute, the algorithms to use, and the validity of both input and output. Computers are very poor at choosing algorithms and can say very little about the validity of output.

Hence, computers cannot make any meaningful claims about the consistency of a computation. For example, it cannot determine if the selected algorithm is the correct one, or if the input data correctly describes elements in the real world. Computers however are part of the universe,

[The fallacy is that data needs to adapt to our needs at this moment. That's a very individualistic view. The real goal is to mix ourselves with the data - to stop seeing ourselves as distinct from the data - so that both the data and we adapt.]