Aesthetic Reveries, Part 3
Janus
I understand that governance “update” is a facetious idea about a morbidly serious matter. As we witness the Internet devour mass media, we are reminded that ingestion is a blood sport. For example, journalists have always pandered to their own audience, but as the internet suffocates their margins we are seeing an obfuscation of the divide between news and op-eds at the cost of our social harmony. We ought to expect that any process of governance update will create much more confusion and conflict. That said this process seems to be inevitable.
Governing systems function because of their ability to command and control through a communication technology. As our communication tools are changed by the internet so will the way we control key governing processes. The issue is that this change is not guaranteed to be a positive one and it will depend on the choices we make in the next decade. We can view our choice through the lenses of the two fundamental functions of a living system. The first function is coordination, and the second is discovery, or exploitation and exploration, stability and adventure, order and chaos. These functions are indivisible and reflexive and good governing philosophy should respect both in the same way that it respects the reciprocity of top down and bottom up processes. Yet, different interest groups assign a quasi axiomatic importance to the one they represent.
For example, let’s take Niall Ferguson, a historian and fellow of the Hoovers Institute. Niall wrote a book titled “The Tower and the market”. With such a poetic title I was hoping he would present the choice the West will make in the 21st century with a bit more courage. Alas, he retreats in fear in the arms of that which is known and familiar. Here’s the thesis he brings forward:
“The key question is how far this network of economic complexity poses a threat to the hierarchical world order of nation states. Can a networked world have order? In light of historical experience, I very much doubt it. “
I’ll spare you watching the video in the link and give you his answer. Niall thinks we need to control the network. In the international sphere we need to continue relying on the UN Pentarchy, and on the national scene he thinks we should increasingly regulate the likes of GAFAM, although he admits antitrust regulation will not be feasible to control these companies. In a way I understand why he is conservative in his approach. However, on the other hand I wonder how he does not understand that GAFAM is sui generis in the effect it is having on humanity and it ought to be studied and understood on its own terms.
The problem I have with this idea, is that Google is already one of the largest lobbyists in DC and I am sure Niall is familiar with the idea of regulatory capture.
"For public choice theorists, regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus their resources and energies in attempting to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, will ignore it altogether”
As the knowledge economy advances, the knowledge flows that swell through GAFAM’s systems increase in value. It stands to reason that GAFAM will increase in power and it will use regulations to sustain its competitive advantage by increasing barriers to entry for possible competitors. Here’s how Benjamin Bratton puts it in his book The Stack:
“That designable future of Cloud Polis will not evolve on its own, as if determined by some autonomous space of calculative variables. It will appear in coevolution, sometimes complementary and sometimes violent, with other existing modes of political imagination and organization, including the Westphalian state and its inept adaptation to global ecological governance. This is complicated by how the future of the state will also develop through its incorporation of the Cloud as its own field of vision, domain, and jurisdiction, in parallel with the Cloud further incorporating state functions. What, if anything, finally grounds these counterclaims? In one sense, the practical locus of governmental control is over the capacity to structure, police, and, especially, tax flows: flows of people, money, data, energy.
Through the control of the interfaces of input and output, be that a port city, a great firewall, or a superjurisdictional seizure, the taxation of flows is both the means by which states execute the right to exact capital and the result of sovereignty. In turn, that sovereignty over flows of value is translated into the right to issue standard guaranteed currencies, through which those flows are measured and which symbolize the sovereignty that legitimizes that claim in the first place. Money is also a way to identify the content of flows through abstracted equivalencies and, through the Address layer, to enforce territorial claims over identification itself. But as Cloud platforms have perhaps more direct means to validate them, competing claims for unenforceable identifications of taxable flows may be where critical conflicts for the coevolutions of Cloud governance also rest.”
I have my doubts about where critical conflicts will arise, but I am interested in the idea of governance update as an emerging coevolution as I think there is a higher probability of this vector being dominant. I am specifically worried that in our near future governance update will simply be an update of the means of senile and corrupted state institutions to increase the totality of their reach on their citizenry. And although regulatory capture might accelerate the process I don’t think it will be the key way this coevolution will arise. I find soft power to be more conducive to a practical alignment of goals between the East Coast’s paper belt of human computers and the West Coast’s Silicon Valley of machinic computers.
Naval Ravikant in his essay the American Spring reminds us that top down order can emerge from the bottom up and Adam White in his exemplary article Google.gov describes in detail what Naval paints in broad brushes. The article is focused on GAFAM’s first letter close relationship with US institutions and their governing philosophy but I think similar mechanisms apply to the other letters of the acronym. Here's what Adam White says:
“As Google’s sense of public obligation grows, and as progressive government becomes ever more keen on technology as a central instrument of its aims and more aware of tech companies’ power to shape public debates, it is not difficult to see how Google’s role could expand. At the very least, Google’s ability to structure the information presented to its users makes it a supremely potent “nudger.” As Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue in their 2008 book Nudge, how information is presented is a central aspect of “choice architecture.” As they put it, “public-spirited choice architects — those who run the daily newspaper, for example — know that it’s good to nudge people in directions that they might not have specifically chosen in advance. Structuring choice sometimes means helping people to learn, so they can later make better choices on their own.” If the “public-spirited” publisher of a daily newspaper can have such an effect on a community, just imagine the impact Google might have nationwide, even worldwide.”
I would probably give the whole article a read, it’s phenomenal. But let’s hear what Mr. Bratton has to add on the subject : “[Google’s] “organization of the world's information” strongly depends on the incorporation of the work done for its global index by its Users, and the blending of that work into new aggregates, so as to better train that machine's capacity to simulate, motivate, and mediate Cloud economies with thought-by-thought, gesture-by-gesture granularity. One wonders what the Soviet cyberneticians of the 1950s and 1960s, with their plodding ledgers and “gosplans,” would make of such a system if it were stripped of its patina of American hegemony. “
Indeed, Evgeny Morozov, was able to make a similar connection between our technological elites and the Soviet dream: “On the left, Evgeny Morozov does not want to see the data stores of the likes of Google and Facebook scattered to a dozen different versions of these services. Rather, he argues, they are natural monopolies: they get better and better at each task they take on when they have access to more and more pooled data from all the tasks they perform. The ultimate Left logic here is toward fully automated luxury communism, in which massive firms use machine learning and 3-d printing to solve hunger, save the environment, and end the problem of scarcity. Left centralizers also argue that problems as massive as climate change can only be solved by a Hamiltonian approach.”
This sounds like a scary story one political group would tell you about their adversaries in order to embolden their base. On the other hand, Gerard Weinberg wrote that “the thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster”. He called this the Titanic Effect. The danger of Evgeny’s vision can be seen as much more probable when we think of culture as downstream of technology. As technology changes the socio economic fabric of society, culture follows. What we consider moral, changes with time. Boris Groys reminds us that regardless of morality there’s a strategic military and political imperative to get control of the information networks that determine the nature of our societies: “The goal of future wars is already established: control over the network and the flows of information running through its architecture. It seems to me that the quest for global totalitarian power is not behind us but is a true promise of the future. If the network architecture culminates in one global building then there must be one power that controls it. The central political question of our time is the nature of this future power.”
In the name of protecting order, as more aspects of daily life become facilitated by computer algorithms it’s easy to see how the West will become seduced by the Chinese experience of government partnership with private companies to enforce a singular governing philosophy. The urbanist Adam Greenfield writes for the Atlantic :
“As far as the ruling elites of Zhongnanhai are concerned, though, “sincerity construction,” or the process that results in stability and public rectitude, is something far too important to be left to the unplanned interactions of millions of city dwellers .
Seen in this light, order produced from below is not reliable enough to be trusted. It leaves too much room for chance. And worst of all, from the perspective of a party bent on perpetuating its control, it does nothing to prevent the possibility of contagious urban insurrection. Social credit offers a salve to all these concerns. These disciplinary measures first reach individuals in the form of soft incentives, of the type familiar to Westerners from corporate loyalty programs. Citizens with higher social-credit scores enjoy discounts or upgrades on products and services, like hotel rooms or internet connectivity.
The Chinese state relies upon private enterprise to implement social credit and extend its tentacular reach. Top-tier concerns like Alibaba’s Alipay, Tencent, Baidu, the mobility-on-demand service Didi Chuxing, and the massively popular dating site Baihe either contribute significant elements of the system’s architecture or incorporate its rulings into their services. It is no longer surprising that inventions born in Silicon Valley wind up being adopted around the world, disrupting long-standing social conventions and arrangements. So why shouldn’t the same thing be true when innovation appears with Chinese characteristics?”
I find Adam’s arguments to be on point. The plausibility of such a future for the West becomes easy to swallow when you read this article and understand that the culture wars are especially caustic at companies like Google. As a matter of fact, all key technology companies have become ground zero of the American culture wars. When the One Ring is built they come to posses its power.
Most of the employees of these companies are intelligent and measured people doing an honest day of work and providing for their family. The trouble is that these are not the people that are going to determine the future of these companies. As Taleb writes in the dictatorship of the small minority, “it suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.”
If you think that intransigent minorities from the two sides of the political spectrum will battle it out and cancel each other I have bad news for you. I have to agree here with, David Gelernter when he says: “Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.” Talk about the theory-ladenness of observation. America’s culture producing institutions are so consumed by one worldview it becomes hard for them to see their perspective as political. In fact, it would be somewhat disingenuous to describe the internal politics of technology companies as a culture war, it’s more like a cultural bloodbath with a decisive victor.
As the networked induced disorder will increasingly become a threat to the status quo, a bipartisan intelligencia will lead calls for regulations of the network in the name of order. These calls for order will find internal support in tech companies and the result will end up progressively resembling the Chinese Social Credit system. When the fatalism of this picture feels risible I am reminded of the Titanic Effect.
Now, in the interest of definite optimism, I want to paint a picture of another possible future. It’s important to articulate these aesthetic ideas because the aesthetic ideal comes before the architecture of the solution, a step which will not be discussed here. These ideals serve as a harmonic background upon which various individuals can come to contribute a melody, much like in OSS development. Also, as we go through a process of change, I believe that at all scales of society communication of a forward looking vision is the most important element in decreasing the cost of change because a shared vision reduces confusion and the potential for conflict.
Before we sketch in broad strokes an alternate view, we need to understand why the culture that created the Internet could turn against its own principles of free speech and open communication.
Sisyphus
Our dominant cultural regime made its appearance in a recognizable form in the 60s. The irony is that 60s culture helped push the internet aesthetics to the mainstream. During that notorious decade Stewart Brand, a curious chap from the Bay Area, was inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s ideas on the importance of tool building in improving society:
“(Fuller) really got me and others focused on that. Lots of people try and change human nature but it's a real waste of time. You can't change human nature, but you can change tools, you can change techniques." And that way "you can change civilization".
Inspired by these ideas, he went on to create The Whole Earth Catalog, published between 1968 and 1972. The catalog functioned as a proto-internet. Thomas Rid writes in Rise of the Machines:
"Brand’s vision was to turn the catalog itself into a tool. The CATALOG was to form a feedback loop. The catalog was part of a whole system, a dynamic, and self-regulating system. The catalog itself, with its supplements and its community, was the learning mechanism. Learning was a crucial part of counterculture. To those hungry from mind expansion and knowledge, both psychedelic drugs and computers had instant and intuitive appeal."
This is how his collaborator Michael Rossman put it: “In the cybernetic description of process the corresponding passage is to a higher order of control - one that makes possible heterarchical rather than hierarchical control systems”. You might be thinking this is just 60s mambo-jambo infused with LSD, and you would not be that far from the truth, but I think there’s more to the story.
Yaneer Bar-Yam a physicist who presides over the New England Complex System Institute thinks Rossman’s story checks out, at least based on what I can understand from this excerpt:
“The history of human civilization reflects a progressive increase in the complexity of large scale behaviors. Early civilizations introduced a few relatively simple large scale behaviors by use of many individuals (slaves or soldiers) performing the same repetitive task. Progressive specialization with coordination increased the complexity of large scale behaviors. The industrial revolution accelerated this process which continues till today. When the complexity of collective behaviors increases beyond that of an individual human being then hierarchical controls become ineffective.
Hierarchically controlled systems must yield to networked systems. Note that a system which has fixed energy and material can change its complexity profile only by transferring activities from one scale to another. Increasing complexity at one scale must be compensated by decreasing complexity at another scale. However, an increasing human population, and the addition of sources of energy during the industrial revolution (coal, oil and gas), violated these conditions, enabling the complexity to increase on all scales. As indicated on the horizontal axis, the scale of human civilization also increased.”
Brand writes in the CATALOG: ”Up until now, power has been in the hands of "government, big business, formal education, church". Now "a realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog."
The picture described by Yaneer and Brand is similar yet I see one key issue with it. Empowering individuals to use their reason in choosing how they shape their life will produce social divergence. I suspect Brand and his academic contemporaries gave praise to individual choice as they imagined reason to be a tool for convergence in a future where the superstitions of the past have been washed away. The hope was that as we get educated and apply reason we will automatically collapse in one worldview like physicists might. A poem from 1967 beautifully presents this naive worldview:
“I like to think
(its has to be!)
Of a cybernetic ecology
Where we are free of our labour
And joined back to nature,
Returned to our mammal
Brothers and sisters
And all watched over
By machines of loving grace.”
This view of reason’s converging effects stems from its achievements in the physical sciences which the social scientist have been trying to copy without much success for decades, leading to the creation of the cheap knock off called scientism. Although try listening to a debate about the validity of M-theory and you’ll see that even physicists can get animated as much as the fans of Milano’s football derby.
I think people living with a modern mindset underestimate the multidimensionality of human reality. To see reason as an engine of divergence think about an alien race with the equivalent of a reverse neutron bomb choses to erases all traces of our collective knowledge without harming our bodies. Given enough time part of our collective knowledge will reappear. Some of the work that will necessarily reappear will be Euclidian Geometry, Newtonian Mechanics, Organic Chemistry, QED, and Nonlinear Dynamics, but probably not all mathematics we have today as I think "mathematics is not a closed or bounded system, but it opens up at every step to a universe of human imagination." Let’s call this Category 1 knowledge which finds it’s origin either from a logical necessity or from an unchanging physical character of nature. (I agree with Chaitin’s interpretation of the fundamental chaotic nature of mathematics and I think some path dependency will affect even our mathematics, however, I am willing to let this go and say that probably most of our math will necessarily reappear.) Now, Category 2 knowledge involves Baudelaire, Marx, Smith, Kadare and the works of Aristophanes. Basically everything that makes life fun. This type of knowledge will not reappear, regardless of how many monkeys with a typewriter we throw at the task. I am not making any comments on religious text as depending on your beliefs you might accept they will reappear again.
The set of works that will not reappear are a representation and product of our social environment. What does this tell us about social truths? Social reality is complex and our understanding of it happens through evolved myths in religious texts, literature, astrology, and economics. The creation of these bodies of work is highly path dependent on the tradition and history of the individuals that have produced them. This multidimensional social reality has presently collapsed around a few competing texts. This political synthesis has historically been achieved by religious institutions. Then, Universities followed from religious institutions and have been aided in their multidimensionality collapsing work by the one to many mass media.
The historically reliable work of convergence Universities and mass media have provided us with, has been made harder by the Internet. If “mathematicians think in symbols, physicists in objects, philosophers in concepts, geometers in images, jurists in constructs, logicians in operators, writers in impressions, and idiots in words.”, they can all rest assured the Internet will provide all of them with fresh and aged prime material ready for theorycrafting. Unfortunately, there are few reliable sources that can collapse this thinking around their gravitational force. What I expect to see in the coming decades is people creating their quixotic stories about how the world works, and what we should do with in the future.
Now here comes the fun part, just like the internet can help you find your physical look alike, it can do the same thing for your mental one. Communities are forming around interpretations of the world and are creating their jargon and games. This dynamic makes it harder for groups to understand each other. They might be looking at the same event, but because of the theory ladenness of observation they don’t interpret it equally. Understanding their implied meta-framework takes work. Other groups are not willing to put in the work because they have ingroup obligations for where to invest time and energy.
These development seems to be at least in principle healthy. The last two centuries have seen atypical political agglomeration both a result and cause of our improved ability to affect the world at scale. Surely, allowing for this political cooling processes to heat up is only natural and healthy.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell understood well the issue of theory ladenness and applied it to a larger scale. In the introduction of his book on the “History of Western Philosophy”, he compressed the cosmogony, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics and aesthetics of our most eminent thinkers in the following cyclical dynamic:
“Throughout this long development, from 600 B.C. to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them. With this difference others have been associated. The disciplinarians have advocated some system of dogma, either old or new, and have therefore been compelled to be, in a greater or less degree, hostile to science, since their dogmas could not be proved empirically. They have almost invariably taught that happiness is not the good, but that "nobility" or "heroism" is to be preferred. They have had a sympathy with the irrational parts of human nature, since they have felt reason to be inimical to social cohesion. The libertarians, on the other hand, with the exception of the extreme anarchists, have tended to be scientific, utilitarian, rationalistic, hostile to violent passion, and enemies of all the more profound forms of religion. This conflict existed in Greece before the rise of what we recognize as philosophy, and is already quite explicit in the earliest Greek thought. In changing forms, it has persisted down to the present day, and no doubt will persist for many ages to come.
It is clear that each party to this dispute--as to all that persist through long periods of time--is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible. In general, important civilizations start with a rigid and superstitious system, gradually relaxed, and leading, at a certain stage, to a period of brilliant genius, while the good of the old tradition remains and the evil inherent in its dissolution has not yet developed. But as the evil unfolds, it leads to anarchy, thence, inevitably, to a new tyranny, producing a new synthesis secured by a new system of dogma.”
Yet this cycle is not celebrated by Russell. Like many in his days he was shell shocked by the results that two industrial World Wars had on the human spirit. In his view, the cycle must be stopped for humanity cannot survive another war. He adds:
“The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and ensuring stability without involving more restrains than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed only the future can determine.”
Alas, he dared not accept that the term “doctrine of liberalism” is but an euphemism for the “superstition of liberalism” and belief in it is irrational, meaning outside of reason. All the systems we create will have trade offs, the question is if we will be able to address the trade offs of liberalism in time. Nonetheless, at least now we have an understanding for why I think the Western establishment will not allow the Internet to continue its work. As evidenced by Russell’s desire to stop the cycle, I think the picture of the divergent role of reason + Internet when viewed pessimistically leads to the justification of top down intervention on the later. However, when viewed optimistically I think it tells us that the divergence of visions is the proper telos of the Internet and we should let it free to run its course. In a way Brand’s vision of tools that allow humanity to learn individually is already here, and the response we are seeing from the establishment is equivalent to the one the Internet pioneers were combating. This response is deeply rooted in the High Modernist aesthetic that still permeates our thinking.
High Modernism had faith in the converging properties of science and technology and as such they gave importance to standardization. The world I see the Internet creating is the one the High Modernist were fighting against. That world, even after modernity's early cooling effect, exhibited a multitude of local differences which made it hard for the state to bring order to the masses. It’s fashionable in my circles to praise Jane Jacobs, an urban planner with a bottom up bias, and trash Le Corbusier, an architect as well as a high priest of the High Modernist Church. That said, let’s give him a fair day in court and listen to what he had to say :
“The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. People will say: “That’s easily said! But all your intersections are right angles. What about the infinite variations that constitute the reality of our cities?” But that’s precisely the point: I eliminate all these things. Otherwise we shall never get anywhere.”
It seems that Le Corbusier wanted to “fix” the problem of too much variation in human affairs. And Brand wanted to fix Le Corbusier’s fix of too little variation. Modern politics and the state served as a force for standardization, creating many ills along the way, but also allowing for the creation of the modern world. A world that sustains the life of 7 billion people. Le Corbusier speaks for both modern politicians and technologists. The desire to create large scale formal systems means that infinite local differences need to be ironed out. In other words, to create order, in the absence of computers, we used to standardize humanity. Perhaps this is what Alexander Stoddarts meant when he said “Clearly, modernism is something we do to other people”. The intensification of politics, standardization and top down interventions were needed to create modernity. Benjamin Bratton observes how important political top down standardization has been for our technology:
“...a platform's regularity is often guaranteed less by laws than by technical protocols, and this is one of several ways that the sovereign decision is built into the platform's interfacial partitions and surfaces. This kind of intrasystemic standardization was essential to the epochal metatechnologies of industrialization and post-Fordism, revolutionizing the manufacture, distribution, and consumption of massive quantities of identical tangible and intangible items. Because protocols are in place to standardize physical and immaterial properties of integral components and discontiguous manufacturing processes—from the width and direction of grooves in a screw, to the costs of stamps and the nomenclature of international postal zones, longitudinal mean times, cryptographic keys for international monetary transfers, stochastic synchronization of data transfers, and so on—the pace and predictability of industrialization could unfold as it did.”
Also, Gilder writes similarly in Knowledge and Power regarding the importance governance stability and standardization have for the creation of technology:
“Ever since the Wealth of Nations, economist have imagined that entrepreneurs seek equilibrium and order. Hundred of conservative economist have followed Friedrich Hayek into the intellectual swamp of “spontaneous order” and self-organization.
Entropy is a measure of surprise, disorder, randomness, noise, equilibrium, and complexity. It is a measure of freedom of choice. Its economic fruits are creativity and profit. Its opposites are predictability, order, low complexity, determinism, equilibrium, and tyranny.
Predictability and order are not spontaneous and cannot be left to an invisible hand. It takes a low entropy carrier (no surprises) to bear high entropy information (full of surprisal). In capitalism, the predictable carriers are the rule of law, the maintenance of order, the defense of property rights, the reliability and restraint of regulation, the transparency of accounts, the stability of money, the discipline and futurity of family life, and a level of taxation commensurate with a modest and predictable role of government.”
I want to follow Gilder’s laude to a purposeful political dogma with another excerpt from Bratton which should serve as a reminder that humanity has always searched for salvation in its constructs. These constructs were initiated and often used by the governing elites to cement their power.
“The emergence of planetary computation as a global and intelligent system can be traced in broad strokes from perhaps Roman and Chinese military accounting, to the first Victorian calculators through to today, and it is marked by celebrated breakthroughs as well as long-ignored dead ends, some of which are eventually celebrated retroactively. By their appearances on the scene, it seems that every globalizing communication network, from printed books to telegraphy, railroads, radio, telephony, and television, was celebrated (and lamented) as the coming of some universal political community, messianic or degenerate or both. In their formative years, new regimes of digital global media are as well invested and
inflated with world-historical importance, as signaling the ultimate arrival of a too long postponed cosmopolitanism.”
In this section I wanted to show the essential problem of government innovation. Firstly, the problem rests in the fact that there is no solution to life, only trade offs. All innovation comes as a superposition of damnation and salvation and we cannot achieve a categorization of the innovation by an objective methodology especially when the innovation unseats the governing methodology or the final étalon with which we measure it.
Secondly, we see that this understanding seldom helps in assuaging the desires of various groups to push forward their schema for how humanity ought to change. For intelligence and consciousness, much like a muscle, will seek to be in action and in doing so will always seek for the transformation of its environment. Yet, although these changes might seem to be tied only to fads, we are often reminded that men do have a nature. A nature that requires us to live our life by a set of standards. Although these standards vary in space and time we tend to see some consonance. The true, the beautiful and the good will always entice the human soul and empower it with vitality.
I think the most important constant we see in society is this cycle between order and chaos. Russell’s comments on the development of the History of Philosophy point to this unchangeable reality. “Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.” Or as the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter put more poetically: “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.” If you want to get a feel for this concept pick up the book The Goal, a dramatization of the life of a manufacturing plant leader that discovers the meaning of the phrase no solutions, only trade offs.
It’s not that hierarchy must give in to the network or that the network must be controlled by the hierarchy. It’s that for humanity to continue we need to embrace the tug between the two and allow it to continue as an infinite dance or if you prefer, as an infinite game. The trick is in recognizing at which rotation of the loop our society is at the moment and help it gyrate along.
Ars Est Celare Artem
When we understand the role technology had in past utopian schemas we are better positioned to understand the other choice we can make with our future informational technologies.
We can see a future of continued acceleration and one of fundamental reaction. The first is represented by the philosophy of accelerationism, the second by anarcho-primitivism. Both these futures seem lunatic. There’s another way and I think it starts with an idea. The idea that progress does not exist. We merely change. If we recognize this idea, we can see again the deep cyclicality of our lives, we can see again the importance of ritual and the Sacred. Maybe the answer to Hippocrate’s “Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile” is simply “Ars est celare artem”. Which means “It is true art to conceal art”. In my interpretation to conceal art on a generational scale means to solve or hide away the problems and the trade offs of the previous generations. In other words, the best technologies solve the problems created by previous technologies. The best governance systems solve the accumulation of problems that were not solved by the previous system.
Our minds allow us to load only fractured pieces of the emerging noosphere and the chaotic vastness of this organic-electric-mechanic edifice rivals that of the gargantuan Lovecraftian monsters. Dehumanization at the hands of this inhuman scale is in fact indistinguishable from Lovecraftian cosmic horror. In the place of the unknown, we have a paralysis that stems from incompressible reflexive dynamics and uncomputable solutions. Modernity with its faith in rational methods started subduing nature and encapsulating it in human knowledge and technology. Yet nature has the final laugh as our technology and knowledge become so interconnected as to render reductionist linear methods powerless. The nonlinearity of our technological world becomes apparent by the impossibility of keeping track and understanding how our perceptions of the world are affected by the information we access on the Internet.
As our knowledge grows we will be able to manipulate our environment at larger scales and in more dimensions. The potential ability to terraform planets gives us the feeling that our technology and knowledge might give us the gift of divinity; able to give and take life with a bolt like Zeus at the top of Mount Olympus. Yet drunk on our new found divinity and playing with planets in the cosmos we will still be like a child playing with little colored balls, always in search of meaning and belonging. The inescapable limits of knowledge and the fundamental scarcity of human existence will always be there to humble us and remind us of our nature.
It seems that Complexity Theory, with its focus on Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos Theory, has yet to make any major discoveries and is simply the creation of the linear aesthete slowly and painfully rediscovering the role of the Sacred unknowable. This Sacredness is deeply tied to the human constants of the true, the beautiful and the good. If I judge these to be that which gives strength to the human soul, I find them to be a respect for the individual need for autonomy, a family, a community and the shared Sacred story that ties them together. A story that gives life a sense of adventure.
When we think about which cultures will thrive in the future, we can think of cultures that will not be hypnotized by the promise that technology will save them. These will be cultures that understand that it all rests on the vitality of the human soul. The mastering of Complexity Theory might simply mean designing tools that bring this balance to the human soul. Creating technology that protects the ability of the individual to protect his environment from standardization drowning the voice within.
Presently, as humanity tries to make sense of this new technological ecology and orients itself in it, our demands for help to the State are met by more technological encroachment. Federal and Supranational government intervention achieves the same results as technology, since they both take us out of our local decision making loops, rendering us less able to govern our environments. "Fixing" tech issues with the use of top down mechanisms misunderstands the key issue that no amount of top down governance can wipe out the human need for participation and governance reciprocity instantiated in individual responsibility.
Top down and bottom up governance is reciprocal, but the knee jerk reaction our "intellectuals" have towards the top down coupled with democracy's perverse incentives have created a bloat of trade offs that are being shouldered by more technology and economic growth. Asking for more top down intervention to solve tech's trade offs simply feeds the Leviathan and crushes the human soul.
Hayek understood how the desire to formalize and rationalize the environments of other human beings ultimately leads to tragedy: "What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”
Yet, the idea of removing humans from decision loops, even the ones that tie them to meaningful communal life, are often seen only as a positive occurrence. In fact within the current neomaniac zeitgeist there exist no methods to distinguish between decision loops that are Sacred and uncompromisable, and those that are not. Did we remove your parents’ influence in your marital choice and substitute it with an algorithm? Great! That’s progress! Intellectual humility and reliance on traditions have been constructed to be the scapegoat that, once dealt with, will result in the salvation of mankind.
Thomas Sowell comments on this trend from the perspective of political economy, however, his arguments can easily be applied to technophiliacs :
"The hallmark of the vision of the anointed is that what they consider lacking for the kind of social progress they envision is will and power, not knowledge. But to those with the tragic vision what is dangerous are will and power without knowledge, and for many expensive purposes knowledge is inherently insufficient. In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the anointed have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume, first that they have more knowledge than the average member of the (public) and second that this is the relevant comparison.
The real comparison however is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, rather the total direct knowledge brought to bare through social processes, like competition of the marketplace, and social sorting involving millions of people, versus the second hand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group.
Moreover, the existing generation's traditions and values distill the experiences of other millions in times past. Yet the anointed seem to conceive the issue as one of the syllogistic reasoning of the past versus the syllogistic reasoning of the present. Preferring to believe that improvements in knowledge and reason permit the former to be dismissed."
Alas, I don’t think our times have heard Sowell’s message and the hierarchical State continues to use the natural standardization effects of technology to increase its control. My views on technology, much like Sowell’s view on the government, are based on the simple but elegant idea that our knowledge is and will forever be limited and precaution is especially important as we increase our ability to scale effects globally. The way forward is by following the pendulum back in its swing into a future that helps balance the totalitarian push for order with local autonomy that creates a richer human experience focused on solving problems in space rather than in time.