How engagement incentives, selective censorship and data extraction weaken cooperation, and why peace depends on changing what our communications systems reward.
Tag: Peace
As the world approaches catastrophic conflict, wealth and power remain invested in preserving the arrangements driving instability. Asking for peace has become almost absurd, while preparing for destruction is considered perfectly sensible.
Language does more than convey meaning. Its recursive rhythms reproduce belief, conflict and the conditions through which societies persist.
Categories
How Societies Sustain Life
A society sustains peace through care, difference and collective intelligence, organising its institutions to preserve life, enable participation and adapt to changing circumstances.
The power to destroy an institution does not confer the authority to abolish it. The United States cannot extinguish the International Criminal Court through coercion without replacing the legal principles upon which its own claims to sovereignty and authority depend.
Categories
Peace, man…
You wouldn’t think peace would be so difficult, but we’ve built an entire civilisation around making war easier.
We are building extraordinarily intelligent machines to solve a problem whose governing assumptions remain remarkably primitive.
The question is whether civilisation can preserve its capacity to continue without making recurrent destruction the principal instrument of its renewal.
Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
The current US President destabilised one of the most tightly coupled junctions on Earth, then seemed surprised when the consequences spread. The deeper problem is that political, ideological and socioeconomic systems often reproduce themselves through the disorder they create.
Categories
peace, pieces, holism
Peace is not the absence of conflict but the difficult art of sustaining difference without collapse.
Categories
Ethical Selves
What is missing precedes the language with which we attempt to describe its consequences.
