As of 11 September 2026 · 31 texts from June 2025 to September 2026
This overview summarises the contributions of the blog emerging-life.org in the order in which they appeared. Each entry states in a few sentences what the text is about and closes with a line indicating what it builds on and what it newly introduces. Anyone reading the entries one after another will see the line of development: from the question of what reality even is for a single human being, through the question of how many people can plan a future together, to a concrete citizen server in a municipality in Hesse.
Included are the opening text, the 27 experiments and the three substantively load-bearing insertions Nos. 6 to 8. Not included are texts dealing exclusively with the collaboration between human and AI.
The line of thought in brief
The series begins with the individual human being and asks how he or she has access to reality at all (Nos. 4 to 7). It establishes that each person knows only their own inner world, and asks how joint action can arise from this (Nos. 8 to 11). The answer: through a jointly produced, verifiable knowledge that comprises a starting situation, goals, changes and a procedure for deriving consequences (Nos. 12 to 17). After an examination of what the new AI tools can contribute to this (Nos. 18 and 19), the theory condenses into the concept of a universal self-process and is applied to the democratic municipality (Nos. 20 to 23). From No. 24 onwards, the real experiment in Schöneck is under way: starting situation, epistemology, the water example, an overview of tasks — and finally the citizen server.
🌍 emerging-life.org — The Project
8 June 2025
The opening text explains what the blog sets out to do. The guiding question is: What is life, and how can we understand, preserve and shape it? The text argues why this question cannot be answered by an individual. Individual knowledge exists only in interplay with many others; only from this arises what we call collective knowledge, and this can extend across space and time far beyond what any one person could ever grasp. At the same time the text names a limit: human brains are capable of collective achievements spanning centuries, but they struggle to process many moving data and structures at once. This is precisely where programmable machines come in — and, for a few years now, machines that are barely distinguishable from humans in conversation. The author announces that he will work with such a machine rather than avoid it.
Connection: The starting point of the series. Sets the guiding question and names the tension between collective knowledge and limited human processing capacity.
Experiment No. 1 — The Journey Begins: What Is Life … Even With You?
12 June 2025
The opening piece opens up the space of questions without yet ordering it. What distinguishes animate from inanimate matter? What are emotions, and why can they block thinking? Are autocracies better than democracies? What does climate actually mean? The text deliberately places these questions side by side because they belong together. It names the scale of the subject — a single human body consists of some 37 trillion individual cells, each of them autonomous — and asks openly whether the undertaking is not simply mad. The answer: even if no solution stands at the end, one may then understand better why one does not yet know. The aim is also fixed: to describe the reality of life on this planet in such a way that as many people as possible can understand it, in everyday language.
Connection: The first experiment text. Establishes the guiding question and the commitment to general comprehensibility, but does not yet order anything.
Experiment No. 2 — The Human as a Reference Point for “Reality”?
16 June 2025
A short, largely methodological text. It records that in this undertaking the human being is the one who establishes the connection to reality: he is the only participant who lives in a real world and can check there whether a description holds. The substantive yield is small; the text mainly clarifies the working procedure for the experiments that follow.
Connection: Continues No. 1. Contains little on the subject matter itself, but is often cited later because it fixes the human being’s role as the testing authority.
Experiment No. 3 — Back to the Start
19 June 2025
An interim clarification after two experiments that went differently than planned. The text describes what makes a language-capable machine so hard to see through: the problem is not its inner workings but its behaviour. Its texts read as though written by an articulate human being, yet they can be factually wrong or freely invented, and checking their truth lies outside the machine’s capacities. Alongside this runs the remark that we humans know astonishingly little about ourselves either: knowledge about the brain hardly helps to understand a person’s observable behaviour. Both sides, then, are hard to see through from outside — from which follows the task of naming limits soberly rather than lamenting them.
Connection: Continues No. 2. Formulates the principle of naming limits rather than raising claims — a stance that marks the whole series.
Experiment No. 4 — Layered Reality(ies)
20 June 2025
What we call “reality” is not a single thing but a sequence of layers. The text distinguishes six: the outer physical environment including the body; the body’s interior with its own cellular activity; the way the body registers external events; the processing in the brain; the cognitive elaboration with abstractions, memories and emotional colourings; and finally the relations of meaning between linguistic signs and objects. What matters is this: what a person subjectively takes to be “reality” is the inner layers — and these have no one-to-one correspondence to the outer world. Language can bridge this distance and make cooperation possible, but it can equally mislead. What is treacherous about such disorientation is that it does not hurt: it often even feels good, because it is simpler, and by the time the error becomes apparent it may be too late. Thinking that corresponds to reality remains strenuous.
Connection: Continues No. 3. Introduces the R-scheme that the whole series later uses — extended to R8 and supplemented in No. 14 by R9.
Experiment No. 5 — Reality as Process
24 June 2025
The layers from No. 4 are set in motion. The text explains how the domains connect: sense organs translate events in the outside world — sound, light, warmth — by chemical and electrical means into events inside the body, where they are passed on as signals from cell to cell. The decisive step comes next: merely registering a change does not take one far. Only when an event is grasped as part of a connection — when I drink, the thirst subsides — and when the brain can also remember such connections, does knowledge arise about what must happen for something to occur. A fundamental remark is placed first: we do not stand opposite reality, we are part of it. Our bodies consist of the same building blocks as their surroundings, but have brought forth forms of organisation known nowhere else.
Connection: Continues No. 4. Turns the layer model into a process chain and introduces memory as a precondition of knowledge.
Experiment No. 6 — The Role of Language
27 June 2025
Speech sounds and written characters are at first nothing but perceptible objects in the environment. What is special about them shows only in their use: people can learn to link particular sounds with remembered images — the word “house” with the idea of a house. The text describes how this linkage arises and why it is never unambiguous: objects are almost never perceived in isolation but always as part of a context, and the same thing can appear under different concepts. A fundamental observation about the brain comes first: while reality brings forth an unbroken stream of events, the brain produces from it a world in suspended mode — movement becomes fixed states. This makes the world appear ordered and familiar, although the order is a construction. That humanity has learned to compare such constructions with reality is what we today call science.
Connection: Continues No. 5. Places language as a domain of reality in its own right and connects everyday understanding with science.
Experiment No. 7 — The Role of Emotions
30 June 2025
The text adds a further domain to those so far: the emotions. An admission comes first — despite many thousands of scholarly works there is to this day no generally accepted theory of emotions; the relevant disciplines offer a multitude of partial models that play hardly any role in people’s everyday knowledge. The text can therefore only draw attention to some aspects, above all to how emotions act upon the other domains. Alongside this stands a reflection on technology: creating a tool is one thing, but everyday life must also be arranged so that the tool can take effect at all. Otherwise even highly developed technology faces the fate of a scrapheap.
Connection: Continues Nos. 4 to 6. Adds the emotions as a domain of their own — by the author’s own estimate the least researched and at the same time the most powerful in its effects.
Experiment No. 8 — Which Future?
1 July 2025
For the first time the question is asked what “future” actually means. Nobody has ever met the future or spoken with it; the word is at first only a combination of signs. Its meaning arises only when a person links it, through learning, with experiences. The text locates where thinking about the future takes place: where the brain forms sequences out of perceptions and memories and tentatively plays through new, not-yet-experienced sequences. Bound up with this is a restriction: a person is free to think what he wants — but because the real world keeps changing, it is at no point certain that what has been thought still holds. An overview of how the domains distinguished so far act upon one another is placed first.
Connection: Continues Nos. 4 to 7. Shifts the enquiry from the present to the future and names its uncertainty as a structural feature.
Experiment No. 9 — Which Future? In Words, with Goals
2 July 2025
As long as a person thinks to himself, his thoughts remain private and invisible to others. The text asks how they become communicable. For this, speaker and hearer need at minimum a shared stock of signs and, on both sides, learned relations between these signs and their own ideas. Only a part of what a person can think is graspable in language at all. Two questions stand at the centre: when does such a train of thought describe a future that could actually come about — and how can it be jointly checked whether what was thought ahead has come to pass? With this the enquiry crosses beyond the perspective of the individual for the first time and approaches the question of how several people can agree on shared goals.
Connection: Continues No. 8. The transition from the individual to the group — and the first formulation of the demand that statements about the future must be verifiable.
Experiment No. 10 — Can Knowledge and Emotions Be Scaled?
4 July 2025
If two people can share their planning for the future — can any number of people do so? The text examines what this would require and takes a step back to do so: how does one actually describe an everyday situation in everyday language? Using a simple photograph with five objects, it plays through what happens in naming — objects receive names, names are assigned to more general concepts, and all of this presupposes background knowledge that the other must share. An observation about the relation of knowledge and feeling comes first: joint planning needs trust as a precondition, and trust can be encouraged by shared, verifiable knowledge. It cannot be compelled; feeling remains the freedom of the individual.
Connection: Continues No. 9. Introduces trust as a necessary emotional condition of joint planning and raises the question of scalability.
Experiment No. 11 — Individual, the Bigger Whole: Is There Meaning?
6 July 2025
The text states a society’s knowledge problem in its full sharpness. Over the past one or two centuries the sciences have gathered more knowledge than in all previous history — but they struggle to integrate it. The term “specialist” is not an insult; it describes a historical situation: if even science can barely bring its own knowledge together, what are all those to do who are not scientists? Making matters worse, whole areas of human life and behaviour have not been systematically investigated at all. Alongside this stands the situation of the individual: a person finds himself at birth in a particular place, with no choice in the matter, embedded in the everyday processes of the people already living there, and must learn from there to understand himself and his surroundings.
Connection: Continues No. 10. Explains why shared knowledge does not arise by itself — and names trust and knowledge as an initial problem to be solved simultaneously.
Experiment No. 12 — Our Cloud of Knowledge: How Can This Work?
13 July 2025
Here the shared knowledge being sought receives a name and a form for the first time: a shared dynamic cloud of knowledge. The text stresses that such a cloud does not simply exist — it must come into being, and if everyone is to experience it as “ours”, it must also be produced by everyone. Because life situations and abilities differ, not everyone will contribute in the same way. Four requirements are formulated: the contents must represent reality verifiably; they must be able to capture changes; they must permit a transparent procedure for deriving possible subsequent states from known changes; and they must make it possible to formulate goals against which success can be measured.
Connection: Continues No. 11. Gives shared knowledge a definite form for the first time and formulates the four requirements that recur in all later experiments.
Experiment No. 13 — Cloud of Knowledge: Let’s Play It Through
16 July 2025
What stood as a concept in No. 12 is tried out here on an example. At the centre stands the insight that knowledge, while present at a given moment in a given form, represents only one moment within an ongoing process. The example comes from Schöneck for the first time: population figures, water consumption and water supply are considered as quantities that characterise a starting situation, and it is played through which changes in these quantities are within reach in order to achieve an agreed goal. The text announces the intention actually to build such a cloud of knowledge, because the concept will not be understandable from an example alone.
Connection: Continues No. 12. The first application to Schöneck and the first announcement of a real implementation.
Experiment No. 14 — Meta-Reflection and the New Reality Domain R9
27 July 2025
An interim assessment intended to make the broad line of the experiments so far visible. The view is ordered into perspectives nested within one another: universe, planet Earth, the phenomenon of life, Homo sapiens, its tools. The main thought begins with the individual: a person cannot himself produce the conditions he needs in order to live. Water comes from the tap because many act together; learning requires an environment and time; illness requires care by others. Out of such functional cooperations arise service systems in which many people act together towards a purpose — and with them something that points beyond the individual: an “over-individual functional we” that pursues goals of its own, pools resources and produces effects. Unlike the earlier domains, no fixed boundary in space or time can be given for this “we”.
Connection: Gathers up Nos. 4 to 13. Extends the reality scheme by the over-individual domain and leads to the question of goals taken up in No. 15.
Experiment No. 15 — Goals: Bets on the Future
30 July 2025
The text clarifies what a goal actually is and builds a minimal model for the purpose: a team of at least two people, at least one agreed goal, a concrete starting situation, and a set of actions in if-then form whose effect must be verifiable in reality. What matters is where the meaning sits: a goal exists as a linguistic expression, but its actual meaning arises only inside each individual team member, on the basis of what that person has learned. The subtitle calls goals mediators of happiness and misery — they mediate between what one hopes for and what comes about. It is indicated that modern societies need very many such associations, and that above them further ones form which provide overarching services.
Connection: Continues No. 14. Gives the over-individual “we” a verifiable structure and makes goals the measure of success.
Experiment No. 16 — Future as a Community Project
10 August 2025
The guiding question is how people can plan the best possible shared future on a lasting basis. The obvious objection — is that not inhuman, given that everyone has goals of their own? — is taken up and answered: without the individual there is nothing shared, but the individual can also achieve nothing lasting for himself if the shared space of everyday life is not so constituted that each person can achieve what is possible for them within it. The reason lies in the bodily constitution of the human being: he finds himself as a concrete, finite creature from which he cannot step out, and this constitution permanently requires an environment that makes his survival possible. The text also places a continuous glossary at the front for the first time, gathering the concepts of the series so far.
Connection: Continues Nos. 4 to 15. Joins individual freedom and collective planning into a single argument and unifies the terminology for the first time.
Experiment No. 17 — The Concept of a Future Generator, Created by Citizens for Citizens
26 September 2025
The most extensive text of the series and its technical core. It describes a procedure by which a group of people can derive possible future states from their knowledge — close to everyday life, transparent to everyone, capable of algorithmic support and meeting scientific standards. The procedure consists of four parts: a description of the starting situation, a description of the goals, rules for possible changes, and an instruction for how to apply these rules to the starting situation. All four exist as texts in everyday language. This allows every participant to follow the process by hand — and a simple computer program can carry out the same calculation in support, without anyone having to trust it blindly. The text explains at length why this can work: language has a double nature, existing outwardly as sound and sign and inwardly as cognitive structure, and the brain links the two — that is what we call meaning. The text connects this to the empirical concept of science and calls the format an integrated sustainable empirical theory (iSET, in German: iNET).
Connection: Continues Nos. 1 to 16. Translates the cloud of knowledge into a concrete procedure and establishes the link to the concept of science for the first time.
Experiment No. 18 — Can Generative AI Help Humans?
11 January 2026
After a pause of several months the series turns to the question of what the new language-capable machines can really do. The finding is sober: the knowledge of such a machine is unchanged from its date of creation onwards, that is, static. It can take in current information through a buffer, but its actual answer rests on data from the past. The greater the temporal distance from that data and the faster the real world changes, the more this temporal discrepancy weighs. The text notes that this assessment deliberately departs from the prevailing view, and explains why the clarification was necessary: because alongside the blog a real experiment in an actual municipality is being prepared, and the roles must be precisely determined for it.
Connection: Continues Nos. 1 to 17. Determines what the technology can and cannot contribute — the precondition for giving it a defined role in the municipal experiment.
Experiment No. 19 — Generative AI as Momentum of a Collective Human Intelligence
25 January 2026
The text reverses the direction of view. Many people are so impressed by the new technology that they rate it more highly than themselves; talk about the human being falls silent in the process. Against this the text holds: because people must hold their own in an oncoming and largely unknown future, they depend not only on knowledge about the past but above all on knowledge about the future — and this is never sufficiently available; it must be worked out afresh every day. That requires creativity, courage and a willingness to fail. The author’s position: without this technology we cannot solve our tasks adequately, but without us the technology is no more than high-grade scrap. The human being thus moves back to the centre — as part of the larger phenomenon of life.
Connection: Continues No. 18. Returns from the tool to the human being and prepares the descent from the global to the local level.
Experiment No. 20 — Philosophy of Truth as a Universal Self-Process
3 March 2026
Here the central theoretical concept of the series arises: the universal self-process. The phenomenon of life, runs the thesis, consists not in the individual life form but in an overall process that makes individual life possible and could, by its functional principle, continue indefinitely. The text sets itself apart from the widespread expectation that technical intelligence will surpass human intelligence before long; it regards the starting scenarios of that expectation as oversimplified. In its counter-proposal technology does not disappear but enters into an ever closer connection with the process of life. A concept of culture is also introduced: a group of people who must work together in order to survive agree, on the basis of their needs and experiences, on goals and rules for a shared space of action — and this space acts back on every individual.
Connection: Continues No. 19. Introduces the universal self-process as the guiding concept and anchors it in a concept of culture.
Experiment No. 21 — The Municipality as an Instance of a Universal Self-Process
20 March 2026
The large concept is applied to something small: a democratic municipality. The people there live in a perpetual now that seems to know no yesterday and no tomorrow — and yet it changes constantly. There is no real tomorrow; there are only images of it in the head, more or less probable, wrapped in a cloud of uncertainty that grows the more imprecise the citizens’ shared knowledge is. Imprecise knowledge can be improved, but only if citizens deliberately measure their images of tomorrow against what actually happens. If the two do not match, one can learn from this and adjust the assumed rules of change. The municipality thus faces exactly the problem that characterises the universal self-process: it must generate a future that does not yet exist, and it can do so only on the basis of knowledge that always remains incomplete.
Connection: Continues No. 20. The decisive transition from the global to the municipal level — from here on Schöneck is no longer an example but the subject.
Experiment No. 22 — Municipality: Weak Point Citizen Communication
24 March 2026
The text names a conflict built into the democratic order itself. Elected representatives are independent of the citizens during their term: they are to serve the good of all but not make themselves dependent on the interests of individuals. This has good reasons but carries explosive force. For the accustomed division — power in the parliament, participation every five years at the ballot box — is coming under pressure: through the growing number of unsolved problems, through rising complexity, and through the fragmentation of the public into many channels with opposing worldviews. More and more people consider their representatives overwhelmed; accustomed trust develops cracks. In such a situation the temptation of populism is strong, for populist communication takes aim directly at fears, where differentiated reflection would only get in the way. The previous practice of keeping citizens away from ongoing processes thereby becomes a problem in itself. As a remedy a democracy laboratory is sketched: software with which citizens and elected representatives can play through proposals and get to know how the parliament works.
Connection: Continues Nos. 19 to 21. Names the communication gap between bodies and citizenry as the decisive weak point — and sketches a tool against it for the first time.
Experiment No. 23 — Self-Programming through Daily Life: Both Blessing and Curse
8 May 2026
The most detailed text on why understanding one another is so hard. Out of the recurring impressions of the environment, images of a person’s everyday life form within them — including a self-image. These images appear to be one’s own, although they largely come from outside. The brain builds them automatically, without conscious effort, and draws on images already in place in order to classify what is new. Opinions thus form rapidly and take effect. This mechanism is necessary for survival — but it is not neutral: what we gain this way is helpful in the short term, heavily simplified in the long term, and quickly out of date. Reconciling it with reality costs method, energy, time and communication. From this follows the guiding question: can citizens escape this mechanism at least in stretches? The text then shows why joint action is possible at all, even though each person has only their own inner world — because all human beings are embodied in the same outer world and language attaches to precisely that. Finally the practical transition: describing a situation is not automatic but a conscious effort, and it must be done so that as many as possible can understand it.
Connection: Continues Nos. 19 to 22. Provides the deepest justification for why shared knowledge must be actively produced — the text to which No. 27 later refers explicitly.
Experiment No. 24 — Starting Line-Up
30 May 2026
Here the real experiment begins. The text describes the starting situation in Schöneck: the municipality’s embedding in district, state and federation; the nesting of the rulebooks from the Basic Law through the Hessian Municipal Code to the standing orders of the municipal parliament; and the bodies — the municipal council as parliament, the municipal executive board, the mayor, the administration. Particular attention goes to two special cases. The advisory bodies such as the local and senior citizens’ councils are elected by the citizens and are close to them, but have no right to speak in the parliament and are rather kept at arm’s length. The Zukunftswerkstatt (Future Workshop), resolved by the parliament in 2023, is meant to fill the communicative space between citizens and parliament on a non-partisan basis. On 29 April 2026 the new parliament was constituted. From here on the text passes over into the description of a real process: the theoretical concepts remain, but are to be charged with empirical reality.
Connection: Continues Nos. 19 to 23. The threshold from theory to real experiment — from here on the series describes ongoing events rather than concepts.
Insertion No. 6 — Integrated Sustainable Empirical Theory
1 June 2026
The epistemological answer to the situation created by No. 24. The starting point is a double position: the author writes about the municipality as an object and is at the same time that object himself. Because he and all his fellow citizens can change their behaviour at any time, yesterday’s description may already be wrong today. The text turns this to productive account — a yesterday at least marks a state that did take place, and whoever collects and compares many such states can formulate assumptions about possible futures. A criticism follows: classical empirical science, it argues, has always acted as though a clean isolation of phenomena were possible; that is a fundamental error. From this follows a distinctive concept of truth: the truth of a model lies where all participants agree to the descriptions of what has been observed so far and where the predictions later prove correct. There is no absolute authority; the first and last authority are the citizens themselves. Three stages are distinguished: the classical empirical theory; the sustainable empirical theory, which additionally takes in the participants’ goals and measures; and finally the integrated form, in which embedding in the social process is not an accessory but a condition.
Connection: Continues No. 24. Supplies the concept of truth on which everything further rests, and gives the framework its name.
Experiment No. 25 — Day 36 in 61137: What Should Be Done?
4 June 2026
The text poses the question from the point of view of an ordinary citizen: how am I to know which tasks are pending in my municipality? The obvious route via the municipal website and its sections is followed. Two documents prove particularly informative: the 2024 annual accounts as an audited state of the past, and the 2026 budget as a bindingly formulated assumption about the future. The one says where the municipality stands, the other where it claims to be going — but what the municipality wants to become in substance is not there. The budget sets the frame of constraints; the substantive goals must be formulated in addition. By whom? The figures mark the problem: 11,837 inhabitants, of whom 9,369 were eligible to vote; 5,343 actually voted; and the result is 37 municipal representatives. Around 2,468 inhabitants have no voting rights, some 2,000 of them under 18. This raises the question whether, beyond the official bodies, there are further sources of insight into the tasks ahead.
Connection: Continues No. 24 and Insertion No. 6. Applies the distinction between secured past and assumed goals to concrete municipal documents.
Insertion No. 7 — Everyday Life, Meta-Levels, Action (Example: Water)
6 June 2026
The most vivid text of the series. At the water tap it plays through what it means really to understand an everyday process. That water comes out can be experienced — it can only be understood once one knows the chain: house pipe, street main, elevated reservoir, pumping station, wells, district works. And behind that the origin of the water itself: precipitation, of which the greater part evaporates or runs off at the surface and only a small part reaches the groundwater; clouds arising from evaporation off the seas and forests; deforestation, which reduces the available water vapour; rising temperatures, which raise evaporation but also produce more energetic clouds and less predictable rainfall. Then the concrete figures: Schöneck obtains only 15 to 20 per cent of its water from its own wells, the supplying district works have only 60 per cent from their own sources, and the groundwater level in Hesse has been falling for years. From the example the text develops three stages: understanding, then thought experiments about possible consequences and goals, then a plan with means and deadlines. And a fourth condition: even the best plan comes to nothing if not enough inhabitants seriously commit to carrying it out. For undertakings that affect everyone, only genuine joint projects of bodies and citizens should therefore come into question.
Connection: Continues No. 25. Makes visible on a concrete example how the global and local perspectives hang together — the most tangible demonstration so far of the claim behind the whole series.
Experiment No. 26 — Day 39 in 61137: Tasks and Decision Processes
7 June 2026
If the analysis holds, the question is what the inhabitants and their representatives can do in order to keep a lasting overview of all pending tasks and the state of their processing. This is easy for neither the 37 elected members nor the remaining inhabitants, and it is also largely unclear how citizens’ expectations find their way into the formulation of tasks at all. The text takes up the concept of the meta-level from Insertion No. 7: as soon as someone thinks about something, talks about it or writes about it, others can take up that view — news reports, newspapers and websites work in this way. At this point demokratielabor.org is introduced, then still an early test version. The site is to offer a continuous overview of the municipality’s tasks and of the processes needed to analyse them and bring them to the point of decision. The claim is expressly limited: nobody knows all the tasks; that is impossible in the nature of the case. The site does not understand itself as a counterpart to the municipal website but as a complement — and its success depends on whether every inhabitant really can make themselves heard on it.
Connection: Continues Nos. 24 and 25 as well as Insertions Nos. 6 and 7. The point at which the analysis turns into a concrete tool.
Insertion No. 8 — Self-Determination of Citizens: Can Politics Help?
27 July 2026
A look back over the path of the whole series — from the survivability of life on the planet, through ever smaller living spaces, down to the municipality as the basic element of almost every state — and a further sharpening: the concern is not with municipalities as such but with those that claim to be democratic. The text asks what the good of the people actually is and how politics is supposed to know what the citizens want. In the process the citizen is differentiated: nobody is simply a citizen, each passes through phases of life — child, adolescent, adult, senior — with entirely different needs, and all of them require a supportive environment. The multitude of institutions, groups and businesses forms the space in which citizens develop, and the concept of the economy describes this space only inadequately. At the end the decisive sentence: whatever the bodies decide by majority — if those decisions are not carried by sufficient knowledge about the real situation of the citizens and about the likely developments of the coming years, they cannot decide appropriately at all.
Connection: Continues Insertions Nos. 6 and 7. Explains why a political level is needed, and makes communication between bodies and citizens the central question.
Experiment No. 27 — Collective Knowledge with a Citizen Server
8 September 2026
The summary of the larger context and at the same time the starting point of the citizen server. The text goes through the chain once more: the individual with their needs, emotions and cognitions, where needs and emotions can override thinking at any moment; everyday life as the concrete place in which a person finds themselves on every single day; and the shared knowledge without which no coordination is possible. Writing, the book and the library made such knowledge possible in earlier millennia; today the internet and servers do so — but printed books do not suffice for survival in a highly dynamic world: knowledge must be available where it is needed, and at the time when it is needed. From this follows the practical step: the Citizen Server Schöneck has been launched, as a permanent experiment in which only what proves useful is programmed, and what does not prove itself disappears again. Its task is to build up the knowledge that the political bodies, in concert with the citizenry, need for future-proof decisions.
Connection: Continues the preceding experiments, with particular reference to No. 23, which treats the subject matter in detail. Summarises the larger context and directs attention to the launch of the citizen server.