Notices by neil 🍄 (neil@social.coop), page 12

@arden The thing about online homes on the web that I mentioned was a recent blog post: https://doubleloop.net/2019/07/28/municipal-online-housing/

@arden I'm reading the book Future Histories by Lizzie O'Shea at the moment, - https://www.versobooks.com/books/2960-future-histories

Really good stuff so far... if you're interested keep your eyes on Verso, they sporadically have like 90% off sales on their ebooks..

Says O’Shea:

“We need to protect space in our minds for the vulgar and the strange, for the unpredictable experiences of living free from the influence of commercialism. Like the flâneur or flâneuse, we should aim to cultivate curiosity through this liberated lens.”

In the frame of digital urban planning, this quote from Jane Jacobs’ (discovered via Future Histories) is very IndieWeb:

“What a wonderful challenge there is! Rarely has the citizen had such a chance to reshape the city, and to make it the kind of city that she likes and that others will too. If this means leaving room for the incongruous, or the vulgar or the strange, that is part of the challenge, not the problem. Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”

O'Shea is using urban planning as an analogy for thinking about how we could design our digital spaces. Riffing off Freud's thoughts about the mind as a city, and Jane Jacob's work on cities and planning.

I'm liking this, I was thinking about it recently, with an online presence being like a person's home on the web. Taking it up a layer you think about digital urban planning, how these homes (and other things) fit together to make a city. I like it as a frame. 

Good bit in Future Histories about the Marine Police Office, the oldest police force in England.  Set up in cahoots with the merchants, to enforce wage labour paid by time and stamp out the labourers taking stock from the employers.

"The origins and functions of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class." -- Alex Vitale

Today's words of the day are:

- thistledown

and

- blackberries

I've been doing a thing where I've written a blog post and then broken it up into a bunch of toots all posted at once. Dunno if that's good, bad, ugly? Could just link to the blog post. Still thinking on and off that the microblog medium is not the best medium for me. Seems difficult (or an art) to be nuanced about anything in 500 characters or less.

Anyway, all fascinating stuff. I don't think I would really call it a documentary, in the sense of historical record. It's more of a visual essay, one man's (elegantly crafted) opinion. Certainly getting me thinking about a few things, can't ask for more than that.

I can't really figure out if he's presenting history as technological determinism or social determinism. It seems a bit of both, e.g. Rand influences tech bros, tech bros build selfish tech, selfish tech drives selfish society. Or nature influences cyberneticians, who translate the technology to the society.

(Part 3 gonna be some synthesis or middle ground? Is he going to suggest that society is dynamic, we shouldn't cling to a notion of natural balance, that we need a radically new system to beat climate breakdown and inequality, and that technology should serve society, not the other way round? If so. I'm down with that.)

So probably the common theme between the two episodes is that of being against blind faith in technology for societal ends. Part 1, he didn't like the undue faith given to algorithms to support selfishness and neoliberal financial systems. Part 2, he doesn't like how ideas from technology were used to support the idea that humans are relatively unimportant cogs in a larger system.

I think he was making the point that nature doesn't tend towards a stable equilibrium, so we shouldn't lean on that idea for our social systems. I don't think I've seen a modern environmental movement, at least the ones I'm interested in, suggest that we *don't* need to radically change the system though. Maybe I need to read more into the Club of Rome and what it's current descendents are.

The suggestion that the ideas of the balance of nature and ecosystems thinking is all bunk, is all new to me. That's really interesting. I've fairly unthinkingly bought into a strain of thought that we are affecting an implicit natural balance, the narrative that we're interfering with delicately balanced ecosystems, and that we need to not do that, in order to prevent the worst of climate breakdown. I'd never really thought of that as being concomitant with trying to preserve an unequal system.

I found it really interesting when talking about the Club of Rome and limits to growth. Apparently the idea of stopping growth and finding ‘a natural balance’ (in an attempt to curtail climate catastrophe) was protested at the time as being akin to Jan Smuts’ ‘holism’ – a disingenuous and racist way to maintain a currently unequal system. I guess the protestors weren’t championing growth, though – presumably they wanted a complete system change altogether.

I think he probably strawmans cybernetics a bit for his own ends there, but I suppose machine control makes for a good boogieman. He also seemed to be saying that hiearchy creeps in, however horizontal and interconnected you try to make your structure, so you shouldn’t bother trying a flat structure. Again, I don’t think total flatness is really how cybernetics presents systems theory though (although I don’t know a lot about cybernetics to be fair.)

I think the main gist of the argument was against the ideas from systems theory and cybernetics that either nature or society have a tendency to self-regulate and self-stabilise. He seemed to be making the point that all attempts at a kind of social homeostasis are doomed to failure, because it’s based on flawed thinking, and that it doesn’t translate from machines to societies.

Let’s see – it was linking together ecosystems, cybernetics, counterculture communes, the Club of Rome’s take on tackling climate change, and some of the revolutions in the first decade of the 2000s where social media was kindling.

Watched the second part of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: “The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts”.

Like part 1, it is very enjoyable. The themes are all up my alley, although I didn’t really seem to pick up on an overarching thread as much in this part. Struggling to piece it together into something coherent in my head. I guess it had less well-known characters to wrap a story around.