“User-led content ‘production’ is build on iterative, evolutionary development models in which often very large communities of participants make a number of usually very small, incremental changes to the established knowledge base, thereby enabling a gradual improvement in quality which – under the right conditions – can nonetheless outpace the speed of product development in the conventional industrial model.

“Such modes of content creation – involving large communities of users, who act without an all-controling, coordinating hierarchy – operate along lines which are fluid, flexible, heterarchical, and organized as required by the ongoing process of development; they are more closely aligned with the emergent organizational principles in social communities than with the predetermined, supposedly optimized rigid structures of governance in the corporate sphere. User-led content creation in this new model harnesses the collected, collective intelligence of all participants, and manages – though in some cases better than in others – to direct their contributions to where they are best able to make a positive impact.”

Axel Bruns Phd- BLOGS, WIKIPEDIA, SECOND LIFE, AND BEYOND: From Production to Produsage.

Cultivating a vision for life is not an easy task, which is why we can all do it together. Shredsomething is somewhat of a different social networking site. It is kind of like the difference between seeing your favorite band in a stadium arena or at a small camping festival. Sites like MySpace and Facebook are constantly making enormous profits through the sale of its users’ information to marketing agencies. By doing this, corporations can devise new products for consumers that they will absolutely need before they even knew they existed. On MySpace and Facebook, the initial hope of meaningful interaction becomes drowned out in a sea of freakshow consumerism, devastatingly, during a time where we must start thinking outside of the lines which culture has drawn if we hope to survive as free human beings.

Over ten years ago, writer and philosopher Terence McKenna once said we need to stop consuming culture, a profound indication that we had reached a point in our history in which thinking freely is no longer an option. Groupthink and mass consumerism serve as a dangerous breeding ground for political injustice, which in the age of globalization offers the possibility of unprecedented corruption as well as destruction to the earth and biosphere.

It is difficult to know what to do. Many of us growing up into this world find it difficult to sift through the mass amounts of information. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook sometimes feel like a hyper-mall/movie theatre reality. Think of Shredsomething as a sacred online space, where hopefully truth and illumination will flourish, something more along the lines of a collective online sanctuary.

We operate on the basis of love and truth. By using WordPress, an open source blogging client, we will do our best to embody these ideas. We are doing this for no other reason than for the love of the planet and the love of humanity.

Shredsomething will best succeed if each and every one of us creates our own sacred space filled with books, movies, music, writings, artwork, ideas, stories, etc… By using the blogging tools provided, each and every one of us can express ourselves in a calm and collective, cool and expressive manner. From there, we will have a common blog space, where each user is asked to contribute in any way they see as beneficial to the Shredsomething community. The common blog space will also feature up to date RSS feeds from what we find as the most honest and noteworthy news sources around the web, ranging on a variety of topics, as well as interesting member blogs.

As you can maybe tell, this will provide an amazing opportunity to inform yourself, and engage yourself with other conscious human beings on this planet. Members can “tag surf” the blogs within the community to find common interests, from business opportunities to music collaborations. We will encourage users to join The Couch Surfing project to make these online dreams physical realities, but more than anything provide a beautiful space for people to celebrate this chance to be here.

What we hope will most come out of this is the collective documentation of our ideas at this time, which will hopefully propel us into the next stages of humanity. We are in a time where scanning books into PDF files, trading lectures and movies, and having discourses over long distances is more than possible, in fact I believe the world is begging us to take these steps.

According to mycologist Paul Stamets, in the aftermath of a large asteroid impact 60-million years ago, because of a lack of access to sunlight, fungus ruled the earth. Mycelium networks worked their way throughout the soil, connecting various species of plant life on earth. These networks transferred and allocated resources, essentially re-cultivating life on planet Earth.

The Internet, according to Stamets hypothesis, is a natural consequence at this time because it reflects an already pre-existing model which has existed for over 60-million years. The human race is now equipped to take on the responsibility of supporting all life on this planet, and re-cultivate our lives which have been in the grips of cultural engineers far too long. And if we do so, I think it offers the possibility of more peace, harmony, and love than we can at this point conceive.