Language and (other) communications technologies are built around and positively amplify the signals of difference by and through which human beings define, understand and share or record their experience of the world.
The abbreviated macrostates of variously competitive self-definitions emerge and converge in ways that recursively drive the adaptive self-propagation of the communication systems and technologies that embody their primary transmission medium. Communications systems are in this way critically and paradoxically dependent upon the existential uncertainties they seek to alleviate. This is the “edge of chaos“. (My rationale for this study is that the generative properties of adversarial competition and conflict are hardly very well understood if by “understanding” we mean being in possession of intelligence, knowledge or technical expertise sufficient to interdict, ameliorate or constructively halt the serial catastrophe of their perpetual recurrence.)
This means that the language of partisan self-determination and divergent belief systems that percolate to prominence are those that most energetically interact and productively clash with existing concepts, languages and methods or encodings of symbolic representation. These turbulent artefacts, entities and systems of co-evolving knowledge and knowing are significant anchors of difference as waypoints of contested interpretation in language and its downstream systems of belief. Whether for good or ill, these generative discontinuities play a crucial role in shaping the ways we perceive, experience and reproduce our world.
We are as a species quite critically dependent upon the discontinuities endemic to our primary methods of communication in language and technology. Local certainties of truth and meaning are rendered as globally discontinuous but in so doing revivify distributed networks and feedback loops of self-validating belief, information and energy flow. This is the cybernetics of an autocatalytic system of communication and technology that maximally self-propagates both through and as our shared existential uncertainties.
If we can not name and frame our fears, we will likely never successfully navigate them but in naming we tend to indirectly invoke the political narratives and contested identities as adversarial contexts that reproduce and validate those fears and uncertainties. This is just one of many enigmas to consider when seeking, as I think we all must, to make our world at least a little bit better than it currently is. The systems of communication that bind and sustain us are also the primary methods of our mutual alienation and potentially self-destructive collective trajectories.
This seems to me to be an enigma worth further investigation and nothing is so optimistic as suggesting that conflict is a problem that might one day actually have something resembling a sustainable resolution.
Image: “Bomb Shelter Mart”, 1951. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/28/nuclear-experts-russia-war-00108438
Daedelus Kite 