Rereading All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace for Agora node club.
https://anagora.org/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace
Category: Uncategorized
I’ve come across quite a few books recently that make a connection between leftist politics, climate change and one or multiple of complexity science, complex systems, cybernetics, and systems thinking.
+ Doughnut Economics
+ Free, Fair and Alive
+ Anarchist Cybernetics
+ Emergent Strategy
+ Cybernetic Revolutionaries
And @lollonero@antinetzwerk.de just shared “Komplexität «Chaostheorie» und die Linke.”
I’m on holiday having some downtime so naturally I enrolled in the Introduction to Complexity MOOC from the Santa Fe Institute.
It’s fantastic so far. for the Unit 1 assignment you code up a little ant foraging simulation in NetLogo.
https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/119-introduction-to-complexity
I’d like to have a bit of a hobbyist play around with agent-based modelling. I did it a long time ago with object-oriented languages, but a language with strong actor model creds seems like a good place to look nowadays. I’d like something where visualisation of the world and its agents is fairly simple. I’m up for learning something new. Any thoughts / advice? Two possible things that seem pretty relevant are Elixir or Spritely Goblins.
Listened: GO BIG #2: A Big Idea to Rethink the Economy
Some good stuff on the paucity of GDP as a metric. Also a chat with Kate Raworth on how Doughnut Economics is becoming quite well known lately.
And they speak to Rokhsana Fiaz about what is happening in Newham in London, which sounds pretty rad – community wealth building, citizens’ assembly, and participatory budgeting.
https://www.cheerfulpodcast.com/rtbc-episodes/go-big-rethink-the-economy
Listened: Ray Ison and Ed Straw, "The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking: Governance in a Climate Emergency".
Enjoyed this interview. Sounds like a good book.
In a nutshell – politics is failing our home, the biosphere, massively. The biosphere and climate change needs to be at the centre of governance. Systems thinking is a means to do this.
https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-hidden-power-of-systems-thinking
Whenever I get that stab of feeling like there’s too many ideas to explore, too many books to read, too little time to do it in, I remind myself not to turn to productivity systems, efficiency improvements and the like, but to knowledge sharing and communities of practice, and remind myself that you don’t need to know it all, knowing things is not just an individual pursuit but a collective endeavour.
Perhaps obvious but a nice little lightbulb flash for me, was that systems thinking appears to generally be a recent incarnation / labelling of (a particular part of?) cybernetics. Makes reading on cybernetics feel less like learning a dead language, and makes systems thinking feel a bit more weighty.
"…Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"
"That we shall die."
"Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."
— The Left Hand of Darkness
"There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protected/protective. One is respected and judged only as a human being. You cannot cast a Gethenian in the role of Man or Woman, while adopting towards “him” a corresponding role dependent on your expectations of the interactions between persons of the same or opposite sex. It is an appalling experience for a Terran…"
— The Left Hand of Darkness