Wildfires Are Destroying Bolivia’s Rock Art

This represents an authentic cultural as much as an ecological catastrophe. History is characterised by the constructive, recombinatory sedimentation of complexity over time. It is a procedural thread that is also (and simultaneously) deeply infused with entropy, disorder and systemic disassembly. It is interesting to consider that while biological and deep cultural complexity generally progresses quite slowly and evolves over long time scales, the relative immediacy of destruction and erasure is pronounced.

Information (as cultural, biological complexity) is always deeply entangled with entropy (as a probabilistic drift towards disorder). Physics and complexity science provide us with the analytical tools for understanding and negotiating systemic, civilisation-scale entropy – often enough with concepts and approaches adopted from the natural world’s own optimal problem-solving solutions. Building new models and approaches is also a gradual and adaptive process of conceptual metamorphosis; all it takes is one idiot with a torch of myopic ideological absurdity to burn it all down. I see a pattern developing here.