Over coffee, Captain Fractal considers a civilisation whose communication systems increasingly reward the behaviours that undermine its survival. The machinery isn’t broken. That’s the problem.
Tag: feedback loops
When humanity finally runs out of idiots to put in charge, it turns to Captain Fractal. Armed with decades of systems thinking, a ridiculous hat and a dangerous understanding of consequences, he sets about un-fucking civilisation.
From social media and human psychology to Gaia and cosmic self-regulation, an exploration of identity, feedback, emergence and the illusion of control.
The paradox is how to preserve a planetary civilisation’s capacity for emergent self-regulation without irreversibly surrendering it to the political, economic and technological artefacts, entities and systems established to manage and control it.
Categories
Holism and Climate Change
Climate change is not occurring inside a stable planetary system. It is altering the persistent structure of relations among climatic states, variables and phases, changing the conditions under which subsequent states become possible and probable.
Communication systems can make an interpretation familiar before it has been examined, significant before it has been understood, and consequential before anyone establishes whether it is true.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
Technocratic complexity and populist caricature are parts of the same feedback loop. Each produces the conditions that sustain the other.
01-DD
02-DD
03-DD
Institutions rarely fail because they cannot recognise problems. They fail because recognising problems is not the same as escaping the conditions that reproduce them.
