No News == Good News
I'm inclined to agree with this. In my analogical/metaphorical style I
think of "News" as being something like "Inflammation" in an organism or
tissue. Inflammation has a role... to warn the organism (or coupled
systems) that something is out of "healthy operating range".
I was just listening to congress grilling the Project 2025 architect and
it felt *very much* like inflammation (as does most every deliberation
of every committee?). Is P2025 not in fact the 'publicans (or more
apropos, MAGA) attempt to establish or move to their idealized form of
"governance"?
<off on a RANT>
Glen has referred to collective humanity as being more like a slime
mold than any other "superorganism" (correct me here because I'm
sure I am wrong) but I think we (collective humanity) are on the
verge of (years, decades?) new level of organization which reflects
the global scale of our reach and coupling along with some sense
that we have "tried a lot of forms of self-organizing" through
alternatively government (nation-states), religion (with global
reach), multi-national corporations (starting with Dutch East India
and Hudson Bay? ...) and the philosophical underpinnings which
inform (sorry Nick) and shape all of the former.
I see why many whose personal and in-group identity is aligned with
a specific religion/politic/branding/etc are offended/threatened by
anything "global" scale... to them it can only feel like being
over-run by "other" when in fact, they are the "other" who has been
doing lots of "over-running". Renormalization and subsumption and
merging (emergently) is very scary and threatening stuff and maybe
is indistinguishable from being invaded by hostile powers?
Evolution is notoriously "inefficient" and even "brutal" by many
measures. I don't know (EricS might, others might?) know what
experiments in multi-cellular life and the emergent specialization
of the individual (cell) into tissue/organ types must have looked
like, but I"m guessing there were a lot more failed than successful
experiments? The flailing humanity has been doing in this regard
(for 5-15k years) seems like it has gone on forever and has tried
"damn near everything" but my suspicion is that before information
processing technology emerged
(Cuneiform/Gutenberg/Enlightment/Babbage/Telegraph/Enigma/Cybernetics/Iliac-Eniac-Maniac/IBM/Internet/Cray/TMI/Clusters/Mobiles/Clusters/IoTs/BlockChains/LLMs/Autonomous
Vehicles/?? we had hardly scratched the surface (or barely begun to
tangle our webs?).
We will either become a functional super-organism which is copacetic
with the existing biosphere/Gaia which is the substrate from which
our open-ended, wild-ass, radical-nonsense has emerged or we will
crash ourselves on top of it or perhaps crash it, bringing our own
selves down.
30-40 years ago I thought Climate Change and even Species Collapse
and Sweeping Environmental Disruption was a "Liberal Hoax" or at
least an indicator of our collective hubris... thinking we puny
little humans could crash a multi-billion year old planetary-scale
evolved complex system in (dynamic) homeostasis with nothing more
than a few thousand coal fired power plants and a few billion
internal combustion engines, etc. Now I'm pretty sure we've
already tipped a lot of systems with an inertial vector sure to take
us past some if not all of Rockstrom's Planetary boundaries... and
meanwhile most of us fiddle away, re-arranging the seats of congress
(or parliament) or maybe try to sneak some extra supplies into a
lifeboat (survivalist hoarders).
So do we die of an inflammatory/allergic/anaphalactic reaction to
our own bad behaviour or are we recapitulating what we call "Cancer"
in an organism but in the global
noosphere/politicsphere/technosphere/even-biosphere?
So much of our civilizational/political/economic/religious
development seems parallel to Cancer:
oncogenesis: socio-political-economic-religioius "experiments"
tumor-development: urban/industrial sprawl
metastasis: colonialism/missionary-work
angiogenesis: infrastructure development
genomic instability: techno-political-economic innovation
immune evasion: organized crime, cartels, terrorist networks
clonal evolution/epigenetic alterations: left to the reader
apoptosis evasion: Life extension tech/medicine/lifestyle
I started consuming news really for the first time maybe 8-10 years
ago and I now live on a diet of Junk News (when I'm not ranting
here) and it keeps all my systems inflamed in the same way a diet of
Doritos, Mountain Dew, Alcohol, Tobacco, Methamphetamies and Candy
Bars might. Even the best the news-stream has to offer feels like
eating every meal from a fast-food drive through... Maybe Tom J
(and others) can help me think/feel better about this... maybe
prescribe a Paleo/Keto diet for the mind and soul? I know people
who claim to *only* consume long-form journalism, seems wise. I at
least don't let any social media in directly (only the back-scatter
off the mainstream Junk News?)...
I worry (suspect) sometimes that my posts are little more than an an
indiscrimanatory release (expression according to Nick?) of
cytokines. ...buh...
</endRANTforNow>
On 8/27/24 8:10 AM, glen wrote:
How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr
https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/
Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor
Covid-19 content
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/mark-zuckerberg-says-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-covid-19-content
What does it mean to "govern"? I frequently hear things like
"Democrats actually govern" in contrast to culture warring, grifting,
personal branding, etc. I mean, I welcomed Biden's very boring tenure.
I'm hoping Kamala is elected and that she'll be as boring as Biden. If
I don't hear from someone, it prolly means they're working ... doing
their job. No news is good news. But even if Durov's arrest is solely
about his complicity by association with the app and his lack of
governance of that as a platform, I still kindasorta think the French
prosecutor (prosecutors?) is doing a good job of governing in
assigning him that agency, his share of the blame.
Sure, JD Vance is in Thiel's pocket. But most of our neoliberal
Democrats are also in the pockets of large corporations or rich
vampires. Can it be any other way? Can an American politician
*actually* govern? Or is it all smoke and mirrors?
-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
