Futurism, communities, interest groups, systems thinking

There's a trainload of people out there grappling with despair regarding the trajectory of our planet, concerned that we're regressing morally and mentally, and the system we live in is broken and corrupt.

But, is it possible to avoid apocalyptic ruminations and channel energy into constructive thinking? Try to identify opportunities, look ahead and work towards building a better world?

If anyone's interested, let's build some sort of theory and classify what's wrong with the world, then our immediate surrounding, our social groups and finally ourselves.

Next thing would be defining what are the frustrations that stop us from being content and work on how to remove them. I'm imagining some sort of co-operative sub-groups that would have more power and more expertise and use collective wisdom to overcome problems.

It's really a tabula rasa - let's see what emerges :-)

Good afternoon!

I'll continue publishing some random stuff until (hopefully) someone else joins the conversation.

This is something I call "Interfaces without Implementation" - it's a geeky name usually associated with software design.

The gist is that we live in the society and we've been brought up to believe that the society has all the answers. It's also our "conditioned" reality because, arguably, we're more societal creatures than natural. Most of natural threats have been counteracted by the society, so most of the threats that we are facing are the ones coming from the society itself.

Then the premise is that we have an elaborate list of specifications for the society we live in and we think of those as buttons that do something. Let's say - a button in a submarine labeled "Raise the Periscope". So we're taking stock of what's available and find all sorts of useful buttons and levers and we chart our navigation plan confident that we have every eventuality covered.

Now, I go on to say that unless we test these buttons or unless someone is accountable that behind these buttons there's actuation and what happens as a result lives up to the design specification - we can't be sure that these buttons are not just mocks - interfaces without implementation.

Anyway, have a read and comment. It's all a bit of fun.

https://slantpositive.vercel.app/Interfaces%20without%20Implementation

What if, actually, nothing's wrong and 'everything' except our perspective is working perfectly? What if even our perspective is perfect AND nothing is wrong?

One can take it in the direction of philosophy - so we have an entertaining chat, which is perfectly fine. Another option is that frustrations that we have are real. Not only frustrations of having a bothersome existence but, more importantly, frustration of inability to communicate ideas, inability to get people to cohere around sense making and finally - frustration of being unable to create.

Creative existence for us is making things better and finding more about ourselves, so that's a bit circular. But regardless whether everything is perfect or everything is wrong - the fun to be had is in the shaping and moulding.

What if our seeking fun is the problem?

Thread title made me think of this - https://shows.acast.com/wild-with-sarah-wilson/episodes/indy-johar-the-starkest-collapse-prognosis-ive-heard. (Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs talking a bit about systems thinking and the future).

I don't know what you're actually talking about though.

Yep, this is pretty much one perspective on looking at the planetary/societal problems. That's the first bit that I addressed in the intro - it's this appeal to humanity that we're heading in the wrong direction and it's about 2 groups of people - one saying - how can the world not see that we're working against the clock to stop destroying humanity and the planet and the other who don't see anything wrong with the world - it's just a cycle and they get on with minding their own business and taking care of their families trusting that the system will evenutally get back into sync.

What I'm proposing is the 3rd way - where we acknowledge that the world is changing and that we, individually or collectively, are facing deterioration of our lives (or at least not improving) - so we think out of the box and start thinking of ways to create new relationship between us, nature and society and build "structures" to make ourselves less sensitive to the changes and more in control with what really matters to us on a micro level. A good word is making ourselves "anti-fragile". That also includes - not being so sensitive to overreacting to some negative things like climate change, far right rise... etc. :-).

Another day, another thought :-)

This one is about friendships or about "meaningful" relationships.

What I'll try to capture here is how we're "holding back" from maximising the potential of connections with people because we're trying to minimise inter-personal risks and want to remain independent and minimally committed.

Important thing to bear in mind here is that we, as individuals, are at our weakest when it comes to our relationship with the outer world (nature, society), but the most sovereign when it comes to personal agency.

The modern society emphasises the importance of being independent financially and emotionally in relation to each other, but being totally dependent on the society (having a nominal value of 1 in terms of political, economical power).

This is a huge area and I don't want to go into details, just a taster or a conversation starter :-)

https://slantpositive.vercel.app/Friendship%20Reinventing%20Bonds%20as%20Cornerstones%20of%20a%20New%20World

Midweek reflection.

It would be interesting to conduct a survey and ask people what are the most pressing frustrations (or factors that give them anxiety/angst and stop them from enjoying life as much as they could) and come up with an ordered list.

For example:
1) money problems
2) relationships problems
3) inability to buy house
4) work / business issues
5) lack of freedom / independence
6) psychological issues - anxiety
7) loneliness

The premise is that in a large enough pool of people - you'd have capacity to deal with all of those. There are people very good at doing admin stuff and there are people are very good at dealing with physical situations. There are some with alternative perspectives, deep wisdom, cognitive abilities...

That could be a basis for creating groups/clubs/organisations that wouldn't aim to be therapy groups, but try and actually remove the underlying (physical or psychological ) problems.

Those could be simply co-operatives - an organisation that would be projecting a higher consumer power (maybe) by, let's say, purchasing car or house insurance for 10,000 members and project a greater bargaining might.

There could already be a demand for something like this that wouldn't be subversive in terms of its relationship to the state, but help with the alienation problem and the lack of capacity/capability.

...what are the most pressing frustrations (or factors that give them anxiety/angst and stop them from enjoying life as much as they could) and come up with an ordered list.

For example:
1) money problems
2) relationships problems
3) inability to buy house
4) work / business issues
5) lack of freedom / independence
6) psychological issues - anxiety
7) loneliness

Huh. For me, it's

1) being far outnumbered by people who don't consider top-down government fundamentally illegitimate
2) daily reminders of the shocking lack of sustainability of such systems (hard to imagine the house of cards lasting much more than another fifteen years)
3) daily reminders of the astronomical, incalculable waste of human potential inherent to such systems
4) what people are shaped into by the powers that be in order to preserve their power; chiefly the widespread blindness to the absolute importance of critical thinking
5) the insane, stupid, horrible, trashy, obvious junk, material and cultural, churned out by capitalism and constantly firehosing everything, turning the natural world into toxic landfill at an ever-increasing rate, with zero indication of stopping before it physically can't continue, because money has been allowed to become the measure of all things on one hand, and on the other, to gather in clumps so dense it behaves like matter forming a black hole
...and so on.

I've spent decades scratching my head over whether there's any way to sidestep the looming consequences of allowing ourselves to be ruled in a system predicated on domination, and if I've figured out one thing, if there's any escape, we need to be so damn clever...

Trying to reform a system, based on domination, to not be based on domination is futile - there are all these supposed avenues to perhaps gain some sliver of agency, by this means or that, but as far as I can see, such possibilities amount to little more than a mirage; huge success in that framework would be orders of magnitude too insufficient.

What would a successful revolution have to look like, I've asked myself over and over and over. Recently, a halfway plausible notion sort of fell into place. I've long suspected that certain sorts of people, who value critical thinking and scoff at egotism, who like to understand as much as they can and employ a detached perspective capable of taking in the long view, would be able to collaborate far more effectively than a representative sample of the populace. Arguments wouldn't be a fruitless waste of time demonstrating only tribal loyalties, but would be interesting discussions synthesising compatible viewpoints.

What makes the viewpoints compatible is an abiding concern with understanding reality, and the certainty that one's own perspective is limited and biased. Stupid bullshit concerning in-groups and out-groups and arbitrary articles of faith as signifiers of such are looked upon with scorn. Because we're open to refining our perspective, we can have a useful conversation, and it turns out we agree on most things, because while there are infinite ways to be wrong about reality, there is a limited number of ways to be right about it.

So how about, as we try to figure out how to be clever enough to sidestep the vast mess created by folks running buggy software, how about we leave them out of it for now, and talk amongst ourselves. Figure out a way to build something we'd like to see as a foundation for a society which could actually persist without obviously dooming itself.

See, there's the constraint which I feel could really restrict the arguments to a manageable scope - can we keep doing this for a hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand? How do we create a way of life which can actually persist? Not many possibilities to choose from there, so not much to argue about, at least between people familiar enough with reality.

Surely, anyone who's considered all this to any serious extent, must agree that top-down domination is pretty close to the ultimate way to minimise human potential, and if we're to start solving all the incredibly difficult problems we've made for ourselves, we need to look at how the rest of nature organises itself and come up with a bottom-up system.

If you look at Wikipedia, there's a clue. FOSS, another. Android hacking and the ROM scene, another clue. Imagine there was an operating system you could flash onto your phone, which evicted the profiteering corporations from it, and allowed it to communicate with other phones on a peer-to-peer basis without the need for a cell tower. And imagine that all the software on it was geared towards facilitating your sovereign management of our collective destiny, in which every citizen of our world is duty-bound to help everyone climb Maslow's hierarchy, so that we can maximise the number of actualised intellects collaborating to solve our problems.

How do we feed, house and clothe everyone, and stop drowning the world in our shit? How do we pull our heads in and stop the extinctions you can set your watch by, each one a crime orders of magnitude worse than genocide? Not gonna happen while money matters.

The currency of the future must be kudos. The calling of journalism doesn't exist to keep a small number of domineers behaving acceptably; it exists to keep everyone behaving acceptably. We don't need police - we need a system which effectively manages social pressure.

We need nerds to lead us out of the darkness, by putting their heads together and building Humanity Corp, the co-op which seeks to make money irrelevant to its members, where your job is to follow your intrinsic motivation and fulfil your potential, working to create enough synergy to out-compete all the other corporations and swallow them up, and eventually render national governments irrelevant.

How about something like that?

Wow, what a great response, thanks! Exactly what I've been hoping for.
There are so many discussion topics here and we'll be drilling into those one by one.

There's one thing that I'd like to address first (as you've validly raised it) and that's our paralysis of thinking due to the sheer complexity of problems that are facing us and the infinite derivation of new emerging problems and pathways as a result of the indeterminate nature of the results of our tempering and modelling.

There's only one solution to it - Gordian Knot! When something is too complex for untangling - the proper course of action is to cut through it! Then, instead of looking for million cures to cure million diseases - you're looking for one magical cure to cure them all.

You still need to scope out stages and avoid overthinking in terms of looking ahead in terms hundreds of years.

But important thing is also not to fool ourselves that a revolution can change the situation with any permanency. Also not to blame rogue individuals for the predicament of the planet (Rene Girard's mimetic theory - Girard suggested that societies tend to transfer their collective guilt onto a single person or group, the scapegoat, to resolve social tension or conflict. This scapegoat is then expelled or killed, which temporarily restores harmony).

But important thing is also not to fool ourselves that a revolution can change the situation with any permanency.

I dunno; complex systems often spend a lot of time in equilibrium states - maybe, if the most relevant dimensions can be identified, and a serious effort was made to discover and create an optimal system of organisation for ourselves, we could have a set of sacred precepts with the combined authority of religion and science, subject to modification only by evidence-based consensus.

We have large communities of people collaborating on all kinds of endeavour, with great success. What if there were as many people seriously engaged with generating our optimal system of organisation, as there are currently devoted to, say, speedrunning old Nintendo games?

Currently, there are vast armies of folks devoted to pulling us in the opposite direction, in service to the demented architects of this fascist death cult of neoliberal capitalism. What if we enacted an embodiment of the rejection of the bogus social contract by refusing to accept the options on offer and creating the world we want for ourselves?

I have a vision, and it's punk as fuck.

I think that a part of the problem is this (blind?) belief in quantitative analysis and optimal systems.

I also think that the answer is partially philosophical, maybe even metaphysical or even religious.

Nietzsche touches on it in his superhuman concept - it's about reaching true potential, or new potential - through self transcendence and self overcoming - which pretty much means breaking rules, or ignoring consensus, ignoring facts and seeking new perspectives.

It's true, complex systems spend time suspended - waiting for the "leap" conditions. I'm trying to hint at those and I'm saying - the structure doesn't provide answers how to break out of the structure. It only establishes rules how to keep that equilibrium.

Again, it's always a temptation to "statistically, scientifically..." look for causality - but IMO that is not what it takes to break out of our predicament. Or, in other words, we should stop looking behind our backs and focus on what's ahead.

And one of the truly untapped powers of the universe is bringing individual consciousnesses closer to each other and establishing protocol for collaboration - or you could even call it a "love protocol", which at the moment exists only in a very specific way and seems underutilised.

Need to candyflip the populace, huh.

Build a religion around hallucinogens.

yes, changing consciousness is one way to do it....

Back to an interpersonal protocol that would work without the "trusted" third party. Imagine we all have on our machines a customisable communication protocol that could broadcast and receive messages from anyone and we can set up various filters and challenges - so first we allow individual protocols to talk between themselves and find out whether there's a match - then move onto personal communication.

That' s how we could get rid of all the 3rd party portals FB, LinkedIn... and have total control.

But, there's a bit of psychological work that needs to be done - to establish rules of engagement so people know what to expect, how to protect themselves, how to communicate at the right level. That could be AI assisted.

Neato. Probably would want some sort of weighting for proximity too; talking to folks on the other side of the world is all very well, but IMO we need to be thinking about building local communities up from their current status as extremely tenuous or virtually nonexistent. Dunbar's number should probably figure somehow...

Have you seen this? https://cabin.city/
It's just one of many similar concepts.

Hadn't seen that, no. Looks pretty cool.

many similar concepts

?