Hi from Australia. I'm a member of the Australian Greens, and I propose that the single policy of the Greens, the single identifier for now be that we are the anti-Trump party. Whatever he stands for, we stand against.
He supports lies. We support Truth.
He supports autocracies. We support Democracy.
He celebrates death and destruction. We support Life and Living. We are pro-Creation.
He is distinctly creepy (much more apt in my opinion than "weird"). We support decency.
I have proposed that the Greens send a senior representative to visit America in these troubled times, to find common cause with the Democrats, with Native Americans, and with Afro-Americans, with the United Nations.
In these troubled times, I think decent folk in decent parties should make their only policy to be anti-Trump. The rest will follow, but if you object to every single thing he says, you can't go far wrong - haha
I don't think there's a toxic dump safe enough to put a creature like Murdoch.
We're happy that he's upabove rather than downunder. You're also welcome to keep a few of our other exports that also reek. For some reason, they all seemed to find the allure of virtually unalloyed wealth and power a good reason to leave the (happily) peripheral place Australia has in the world.
Actually, James Murdoch seems exceedingly moderate compared to Rupert and Lachlan. As do his sisters. Rupert was on the left side of politics when he first started publishing but obviously became corrupted by money and power. A probably almost universal failing I suppose of all those damaged billionaires.
As for a nuclear waste dump, I think Murdoch represents a poisonous essence that exceeds radiation for toxicity. His containment facility would just about have to be custom designed to meet adequate engineering standards.
That's too easy. although to prospect of them dying a horrible death from solar radiation does give a little comfort.
But actually, I think the perfect solution is to put $Trump in gaol in Guantanamo Bay. He'd have to go into solitary confinement for months on arrival, otherwise someone would enjoy gutting him.
The oligarchs from $100 M up are automatically sent to Guantanamo Bay too. The State could get a sizeable income from turning that into a Reality TV show.
Just imagine the sort of conversations you could overhear between Putin, Drumpf, Musk, Vance, Murdoch, Xi Jinping, Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos etc etc. If you stream that, people would pay good money for the privilege of watching a "Lord of the Flies" scenario on steroids..
One thing the techbros and their tech-accelerationism are very mistaken about is the idea of exponentiality and a singularity. What we're seeing is not a 'singularity point' but instead a 'complexity crunch' (and frustration about that makes deciders try to 'force' a way through, this, I think, is also part of what is happening, the complex society becomes so hard to change that everyone gets frustrated and 'violence' (like DOGE) becomes a natural reaction that even is getting a lot of sympathy from the public.
For the Digital Revolution the decrease of agility comes from digital technology's fundamental brittleness. This leads to ever more inertia when large (machine-)logical landscapes are being created. In part, I think, we see a reaction to this state of affairs.
the subconscious mind continues seeking familiar cues to allay any doubts of it's own sincerity concerning truth or recognition of novel concepts... it has been the device of the self convinced to assume the lead in groupthink... where this leads is up for discussion...
Nick Land. That was the first I'd heard of him. There is only one problem with the enlightened narrative; as an economic historian, I ran his scenario through the 1st-century Roman metropolis to see if it fit, given the alternative meanings of the words in the salad. The only one I'm having trouble with is 'transversal replication.' If I had to guess, it would be the Silk Road from Rome to Chang-an and the economic system replication it induced. It would be different from gene exchange due to the impossible distance.
OK, sorry but I should apply the same logic to your essay, wherein, polycrisis implies something countable, while omnishambles combines the random and unknowable. Anyway, I've carried around the word used by the Annales affiliates in the 20s and 30s: "conjuncture" is the same in French and English. To my discernability with time series, it implies normal, quiet times suddenly giving way to historical shifts due to previously independent components. Take Kyivan Rus, Norsemen who mastered the fur trade and gangsters to mastery of beleaguered Moscow, moved to Kyiv further down the trade route to Byzantium by the 9th century; the conjuncture torqued the local villagers into serfs and Christianized them by force; and opened the north-south trade route to slaves and exotic luxuries. That's what it was for four centuries, till driven out back to Moscow by the Golden Horde, who took locals as slaves and sold them to the Rus for transport south.
Anyway, conjuncture incorporates both polycrisis and omnishambles. To quote the masters, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
muskrat is unwinding drumpfs magical drapery behind which there is nothing real... endless bluster isn't governing and willy nilly dismemberment of the services people rely on is the oncoming train in the tunnel... USAID, having been almost the sole positive foreign policy agency has been turned into an anti USA debacle by the muskrat/fratboy wrecking mob... imagine having life sustaining medicine or food left to rot while helpless victims are then turned into haters of the USA, radicals use our actions to their own advantage... MUSKRAT IS A CHINESE AGENT... so what? drumpf is an putin stooge and enabler... we have seen the first stages of reich wing insanity, the lumpen dregs electing a preening fool, now we see the fruits of this folly... next are the JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF going to act to save our nation? it's clear the GQP is feckless and civilian involvement is piecemeal at best... SCOTUS is a dim possibility but still untested... if john roberts may yet achieve enlightenment we still have a chance...
Dominoes falling in all directions - pretty much the agenda of the ideologues behind Trump. But did they foresee the scale of disaster when the deranged puppet just upended the table?
The thing about complex adaptive systems is that there really is no point in attempting to "predict" them.
In fact, unlike the observational modes you can lean back into in Obvious and Complicated systems (in Cynefin framework terminology), the Complex requires prodding the system (i.e., experimentation) to understand both its mechanisms but also what are the adjacent possible to where you currently are operating.
Autocratic or "king"-lead systems are the antithesis of control in a complex adaptive system, because any individual doesn't matter nearly as much as all of the relationships between the constituent parts. In those complex times, many seek a father figure to save them from the chaos when it actually engenders the exact opposite.
We learned way back in the days of cybernetics that the only successful way to attempt to manage, or just work with, the complexity of a system is you must counter it with a regulating system that is at least as complex -- as you posted last year (https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/cybernetics-is-the-science-of-the). This requires diversity, a wisdom of the crowds, and innovation at the edges. None of which are possible under this administration that is trying to extinguish every chance of that from ever happening.
So much here that rings true, But perhaps most importantly, we need to look at the disastrous effects of "Thin skin and thick skull...an unfortunate combination in a leader" meaning that he has likely never even heard the term systems thinking let alone consider how that plays out at this level of hyper complexity
1. The current US leader is following the tech industry practice of extracting value from its software and platforms, squeezing out any value for others in its ecosystem. This inevitably destroys the economic ecosystem around it, and the software or platform declines. In the case of the US, this will reduce the markets for US goods and services as other nations decide to find less coercive, mutually beneficial trade [and security] partners.
2. Europe is now facing a major financing issue. Firstly to rearm as the US becomes less ally and perhaps more enemy. This will strain its national and collective economies. Secondly, Europe was finding some difficulty managing the green energy transition. The UK seems to have halted this in looking for shorter growth. The effect of these 2 problems could collapse Europe's relative strength while the inexorable global heating will create more economic and political problems. This is truly the polycrisis facing Europe.
It will be a sad transition to a Chinese global hegemony due to a failure to act collectively.
So much here that rings true, But perhaps most importantly, we need to look at the disastrous effects of "Thin skin and thick skull...an unfortunate combination in a leader" meaning that he has likely never even heard the term systems thinking let alone consider how that plays out at this level of hyper complexity
I'm going to disagree on the Nick Land question - it is a particular style of writing that I don't usually like much, and the ideas are regularly abhorrent, but there is an energy and a weird chaotic poetry in the overload that the likes of Curtis Yarvin simply don't have in them.
I don't have the energy to parse the whole thing, but he's using words that almost mean something to create a feeling of meaning and action, but if you look closely, there's neither. Like song lyrics that don't quite make sense, but the guitar part slaps.
Thanks and fixed - the bit where I left out the 'not' in the sentence "the most significant government in the world is absolutely acting as a homeostatic regulator" is even more embarrassing ....
That's a lot to digest. I think at can be summarized as Trumpty-Dumpty and MuskRat inflicting chaos (what's more complex than a chaotic system?) to seize absolute power.
I for one would like to see you elaborate on making a more flexible responsive state and creating different (presumably constructive) feedback loops between state and democracy.
This is a very thoughtful piece - but why do you illustrate it with an AI generated image?
...our feeds are already full of them.
and we know all the AI image training data was stolen from defenceless illustrators
... as well as defenceless newsletter writers:/
shouldn't we show some cultural solidarity?
Hi from Australia. I'm a member of the Australian Greens, and I propose that the single policy of the Greens, the single identifier for now be that we are the anti-Trump party. Whatever he stands for, we stand against.
He supports lies. We support Truth.
He supports autocracies. We support Democracy.
He celebrates death and destruction. We support Life and Living. We are pro-Creation.
He is distinctly creepy (much more apt in my opinion than "weird"). We support decency.
I have proposed that the Greens send a senior representative to visit America in these troubled times, to find common cause with the Democrats, with Native Americans, and with Afro-Americans, with the United Nations.
In these troubled times, I think decent folk in decent parties should make their only policy to be anti-Trump. The rest will follow, but if you object to every single thing he says, you can't go far wrong - haha
"I have proposed that the Greens send a senior representative to visit America in these troubled times..."
Yes, please do. We could use all the help we can get.
And please take the Murdoch's with you when you return home.
I don't think there's a toxic dump safe enough to put a creature like Murdoch.
We're happy that he's upabove rather than downunder. You're also welcome to keep a few of our other exports that also reek. For some reason, they all seemed to find the allure of virtually unalloyed wealth and power a good reason to leave the (happily) peripheral place Australia has in the world.
What about a nuclear waste dump? I think that would be sufficient to handle the likes of Rupert and Sons.
Actually, James Murdoch seems exceedingly moderate compared to Rupert and Lachlan. As do his sisters. Rupert was on the left side of politics when he first started publishing but obviously became corrupted by money and power. A probably almost universal failing I suppose of all those damaged billionaires.
As for a nuclear waste dump, I think Murdoch represents a poisonous essence that exceeds radiation for toxicity. His containment facility would just about have to be custom designed to meet adequate engineering standards.
Fair enough. James and his sisters can stay. We can put Rupert and Lachlan on a SpaceX rocket and send them out of the solar system.
That's too easy. although to prospect of them dying a horrible death from solar radiation does give a little comfort.
But actually, I think the perfect solution is to put $Trump in gaol in Guantanamo Bay. He'd have to go into solitary confinement for months on arrival, otherwise someone would enjoy gutting him.
The oligarchs from $100 M up are automatically sent to Guantanamo Bay too. The State could get a sizeable income from turning that into a Reality TV show.
Just imagine the sort of conversations you could overhear between Putin, Drumpf, Musk, Vance, Murdoch, Xi Jinping, Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg, Bezos etc etc. If you stream that, people would pay good money for the privilege of watching a "Lord of the Flies" scenario on steroids..
One thing the techbros and their tech-accelerationism are very mistaken about is the idea of exponentiality and a singularity. What we're seeing is not a 'singularity point' but instead a 'complexity crunch' (and frustration about that makes deciders try to 'force' a way through, this, I think, is also part of what is happening, the complex society becomes so hard to change that everyone gets frustrated and 'violence' (like DOGE) becomes a natural reaction that even is getting a lot of sympathy from the public.
Innovations tend to follow an S-curve. The beginning of that *looks* like exponential growth, but that is misleading. The techbros all grew up in that period so it has become their look at the digital revolution. In reality, automation provides an increase in productivity, but the price is always less agility. And this is what we have seen over the last 5 decades or so. (video: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/11/10/hello-human-intelligence-meet-complexity-crunch/ or text: https://ea.rna.nl/2024/09/28/like-we-dont-see-air-we-dont-see-the-digital-revolution/ ).
For the Digital Revolution the decrease of agility comes from digital technology's fundamental brittleness. This leads to ever more inertia when large (machine-)logical landscapes are being created. In part, I think, we see a reaction to this state of affairs.
This relation between productivity and agility even holds for human intelligence where most is actually 'mental automation' (convictions and the like) which are rather hard to change (part of https://ea.rna.nl/2022/10/24/on-the-psychology-of-architecture-and-the-architecture-of-psychology/).
the subconscious mind continues seeking familiar cues to allay any doubts of it's own sincerity concerning truth or recognition of novel concepts... it has been the device of the self convinced to assume the lead in groupthink... where this leads is up for discussion...
Nick Land. That was the first I'd heard of him. There is only one problem with the enlightened narrative; as an economic historian, I ran his scenario through the 1st-century Roman metropolis to see if it fit, given the alternative meanings of the words in the salad. The only one I'm having trouble with is 'transversal replication.' If I had to guess, it would be the Silk Road from Rome to Chang-an and the economic system replication it induced. It would be different from gene exchange due to the impossible distance.
OK, sorry but I should apply the same logic to your essay, wherein, polycrisis implies something countable, while omnishambles combines the random and unknowable. Anyway, I've carried around the word used by the Annales affiliates in the 20s and 30s: "conjuncture" is the same in French and English. To my discernability with time series, it implies normal, quiet times suddenly giving way to historical shifts due to previously independent components. Take Kyivan Rus, Norsemen who mastered the fur trade and gangsters to mastery of beleaguered Moscow, moved to Kyiv further down the trade route to Byzantium by the 9th century; the conjuncture torqued the local villagers into serfs and Christianized them by force; and opened the north-south trade route to slaves and exotic luxuries. That's what it was for four centuries, till driven out back to Moscow by the Golden Horde, who took locals as slaves and sold them to the Rus for transport south.
Anyway, conjuncture incorporates both polycrisis and omnishambles. To quote the masters, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
muskrat is unwinding drumpfs magical drapery behind which there is nothing real... endless bluster isn't governing and willy nilly dismemberment of the services people rely on is the oncoming train in the tunnel... USAID, having been almost the sole positive foreign policy agency has been turned into an anti USA debacle by the muskrat/fratboy wrecking mob... imagine having life sustaining medicine or food left to rot while helpless victims are then turned into haters of the USA, radicals use our actions to their own advantage... MUSKRAT IS A CHINESE AGENT... so what? drumpf is an putin stooge and enabler... we have seen the first stages of reich wing insanity, the lumpen dregs electing a preening fool, now we see the fruits of this folly... next are the JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF going to act to save our nation? it's clear the GQP is feckless and civilian involvement is piecemeal at best... SCOTUS is a dim possibility but still untested... if john roberts may yet achieve enlightenment we still have a chance...
Dominoes falling in all directions - pretty much the agenda of the ideologues behind Trump. But did they foresee the scale of disaster when the deranged puppet just upended the table?
Reading the piece later today, but just wanted to say this title really got me
The thing about complex adaptive systems is that there really is no point in attempting to "predict" them.
In fact, unlike the observational modes you can lean back into in Obvious and Complicated systems (in Cynefin framework terminology), the Complex requires prodding the system (i.e., experimentation) to understand both its mechanisms but also what are the adjacent possible to where you currently are operating.
Autocratic or "king"-lead systems are the antithesis of control in a complex adaptive system, because any individual doesn't matter nearly as much as all of the relationships between the constituent parts. In those complex times, many seek a father figure to save them from the chaos when it actually engenders the exact opposite.
We learned way back in the days of cybernetics that the only successful way to attempt to manage, or just work with, the complexity of a system is you must counter it with a regulating system that is at least as complex -- as you posted last year (https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/cybernetics-is-the-science-of-the). This requires diversity, a wisdom of the crowds, and innovation at the edges. None of which are possible under this administration that is trying to extinguish every chance of that from ever happening.
So much here that rings true, But perhaps most importantly, we need to look at the disastrous effects of "Thin skin and thick skull...an unfortunate combination in a leader" meaning that he has likely never even heard the term systems thinking let alone consider how that plays out at this level of hyper complexity
2 things.
1. The current US leader is following the tech industry practice of extracting value from its software and platforms, squeezing out any value for others in its ecosystem. This inevitably destroys the economic ecosystem around it, and the software or platform declines. In the case of the US, this will reduce the markets for US goods and services as other nations decide to find less coercive, mutually beneficial trade [and security] partners.
2. Europe is now facing a major financing issue. Firstly to rearm as the US becomes less ally and perhaps more enemy. This will strain its national and collective economies. Secondly, Europe was finding some difficulty managing the green energy transition. The UK seems to have halted this in looking for shorter growth. The effect of these 2 problems could collapse Europe's relative strength while the inexorable global heating will create more economic and political problems. This is truly the polycrisis facing Europe.
It will be a sad transition to a Chinese global hegemony due to a failure to act collectively.
So much here that rings true, But perhaps most importantly, we need to look at the disastrous effects of "Thin skin and thick skull...an unfortunate combination in a leader" meaning that he has likely never even heard the term systems thinking let alone consider how that plays out at this level of hyper complexity
Nick Land really likes polysyllable words.
Nick Land doesn't understand language or how to write
I'm going to disagree on the Nick Land question - it is a particular style of writing that I don't usually like much, and the ideas are regularly abhorrent, but there is an energy and a weird chaotic poetry in the overload that the likes of Curtis Yarvin simply don't have in them.
I don't have the energy to parse the whole thing, but he's using words that almost mean something to create a feeling of meaning and action, but if you look closely, there's neither. Like song lyrics that don't quite make sense, but the guitar part slaps.
True, but he’s fucking nuts.
I think Paul Krugman was referring to Hyman Minsky, not Marvin Minsky.
Thanks and fixed - the bit where I left out the 'not' in the sentence "the most significant government in the world is absolutely acting as a homeostatic regulator" is even more embarrassing ....
I didn’t even notice that! My brain just filled in the missing “not.”
That's a lot to digest. I think at can be summarized as Trumpty-Dumpty and MuskRat inflicting chaos (what's more complex than a chaotic system?) to seize absolute power.
I for one would like to see you elaborate on making a more flexible responsive state and creating different (presumably constructive) feedback loops between state and democracy.
The Christian Nationalists are behind all this mess.
They are courting Armageddon. They all think that they will see Jesus in their lifetime. I think Jesus will be pissed.
Unfortunately that defames root vegatables which are far superior.