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.
Tag: governance
Technology at scale preferentially industrialises the parts of human nature that are easiest to measure, repeat, monetise, automate, and weaponise. Those parts are rarely our best ones.
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.
Europe’s unrest is sustained by a self-reproducing system of conflict in which opposing positions become mutually sustaining and unresolved grievances become politically and commercially valuable.
A humanistic philosophy informed by system dynamics: why simple solutions often displace problems across time and systems rather than resolving them.
The scale of the consequences has changed while the competitive selection tests for authority remain embarrassingly small.
Political systems are historical constructions, not immutable necessities. Their persistence does not establish their continuing adequacy.
Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.
Civilisations persist by continually reorganising themselves. The unanswered question is whether conflict, crisis and systemic collapse/renewal remain the principal means through which that persistence is achieved.
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AI isn’t coming to save us
AI can not save us, but it will facilitate a vast amount of short-term profit. The actual human and environmental cost will be considerable.
Institutions rarely fail because they cannot recognise problems. They fail because recognising problems is not the same as escaping the conditions that reproduce them.
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the same problem
The most important pattern in modern society is the one almost nobody is looking for.
