I've been sitting with this piece through my travel and another warm data training. I keep returning to your ideas and wanted to share where it took me. I think you've located something formative in our paradigm shifts, and there's a place where I wanted to keep pulling on the thread after you'd tied it off...
The Kauffman friction is interesting. You introduce it, honor it, and then land on: mutualistic function is fine, over-optimized function is devitalizing. For more mechanistic parts and wholes, this perspective fits perfectly.
I kept wanting to ask—what happens when we apply that same functional designation to *humans* inside institutions? The heart doesn't know it's been labeled a blood-pumper: It doesn't own and become that designation. People, on the other hand, internalize the function they've been assigned and the harm isn't just in over-optimization - it's that we stop knowing we made that designation in the first place. The frame (map) becomes the territory. And then we lose the capacity to ask why we described the world that way at all.
For me that's where the devitalization really lives—not just in the reduction of complexity, but in the foreclosure of the meaning-making that generated the categories to begin with. It's not only that we arrest the process; we arrest our ability to revisit the arresting.
I'm also genuinely curious about your conclusion that repair can only happen locally. I feel the pull of it, but I work with organizations at scale and I keep finding that I can't quite land there. It seems like there might be something between "schematic engineering from above" and purely local tending - some way of metabolizing the tools of scale back into living practice, rather than just abandoning them.
The question I sit with is whether the problem is scale itself or scale without feedback to the living thing it's touching.
Thank you for sharing this - I would not have gone down this rabbit hole without you and we should explore it further in a real time discussion!
On that question of what happens when we apply that same functional designation to humans inside institutions... this reminds me of how Snowden separates complexity (e.g. ants) from anthro-complexity (not ants, can't be computationally modeled or describes as merely "simple rules scaled"). Groups of humans aren't colonial organisms, so they can never have a fully "functional" relationship because their individual degree of agency prevents them from being captured so completely by the whole... or maybe it's just that they're unlikely to and probably shouldn't (extremist suicide bombers come to mind as individuals, at least metaphorically, fully captured to the degree that they are components, nothing more.
This reminds me of a thing in part of Meghan O'Gieblyn's book "God, Human, Animal, Machine", in which she describes the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. The way it's described, when information becomes integrated to a certain degree, consciousness arises. But the theory also posits that when that thing (say, a neuron) becomes too integrated within another whole, it ceases to be conscious and simply becomes an aspect of the consciousness of the greater system. I thought that was really interesting, because it reminded me of how collective homogeneity can cause groups of humans to process information less like a bunch of individuals and more like one larger structure with humans somewhat facilitating the functions of that processing, without being fully conscious themselves. Kinda like how the internet, by integrating us more completely with one-another, has arguably been a net loss for individual capacity and agency. The marketplace of ideas is overrun with epistemic behemoths comprised of functionalized once-humans, and it is very hard to reignite consciousness in those who have given it up.
Now I'll riff a bit on the "all solutions are local not global" thing:
I think you're right that there's an in-between engineering and local-only solving. There is a way to scale solutions to be context-aware at the local level, but local sensing is what facilitates its efficacy. The problem with scaled solutions to complex problems is that they apply context-inappropriate information to problems which are perpetuated locally, by local actors/agents/contexts (e.g. seeing like a state). This is why I tend to say only a complex thing solves a complex problem. The only appropriate scaled solution is one that facilitates both sensing and response at the local level. The information generated at the local through sensing does not first and foremost need to inform strategic shifts at the global scale (though it can help to inform degree of appropriate constraint on those complex deployments), but at the local, which means your scaled solution is in fact just the deployment of sensing/solving processes, or the removal of constraints so that the local becomes self-organizing.
We absolutely should have a convo on this. It could be ep 1 of our podcast with Austin.
I especially like this sentence - To de-complexify a thing is to devitalize it. I find your thinking in this piece resonant. Integrates concepts from the warm data vernacular with complexity thinking and philosophy. I love the Sufi quote and the reference to Frankenstein wrench and The Overstory. Speaks to me also of this difficult to comprehend political moment in the US. Over efficiency and optimization have blinded America in my view in this historical moment. AI does not help to illuminate the blind spot.
Thank you Aliki :) I've been thinking a lot about Frankenstein after re-reading the book and watching the new movie, both of which are great. The monster doesn't start with violent impulses. He develops those out of frustration for being denied connection with human beings, which is his most intense desire throughout the story. I appreciate your connecting it to the current political moment as well. That is most certainly on my mind as I write about these subjects.
Daniel,
I've been sitting with this piece through my travel and another warm data training. I keep returning to your ideas and wanted to share where it took me. I think you've located something formative in our paradigm shifts, and there's a place where I wanted to keep pulling on the thread after you'd tied it off...
The Kauffman friction is interesting. You introduce it, honor it, and then land on: mutualistic function is fine, over-optimized function is devitalizing. For more mechanistic parts and wholes, this perspective fits perfectly.
I kept wanting to ask—what happens when we apply that same functional designation to *humans* inside institutions? The heart doesn't know it's been labeled a blood-pumper: It doesn't own and become that designation. People, on the other hand, internalize the function they've been assigned and the harm isn't just in over-optimization - it's that we stop knowing we made that designation in the first place. The frame (map) becomes the territory. And then we lose the capacity to ask why we described the world that way at all.
For me that's where the devitalization really lives—not just in the reduction of complexity, but in the foreclosure of the meaning-making that generated the categories to begin with. It's not only that we arrest the process; we arrest our ability to revisit the arresting.
I'm also genuinely curious about your conclusion that repair can only happen locally. I feel the pull of it, but I work with organizations at scale and I keep finding that I can't quite land there. It seems like there might be something between "schematic engineering from above" and purely local tending - some way of metabolizing the tools of scale back into living practice, rather than just abandoning them.
The question I sit with is whether the problem is scale itself or scale without feedback to the living thing it's touching.
Thank you for sharing this - I would not have gone down this rabbit hole without you and we should explore it further in a real time discussion!
On that question of what happens when we apply that same functional designation to humans inside institutions... this reminds me of how Snowden separates complexity (e.g. ants) from anthro-complexity (not ants, can't be computationally modeled or describes as merely "simple rules scaled"). Groups of humans aren't colonial organisms, so they can never have a fully "functional" relationship because their individual degree of agency prevents them from being captured so completely by the whole... or maybe it's just that they're unlikely to and probably shouldn't (extremist suicide bombers come to mind as individuals, at least metaphorically, fully captured to the degree that they are components, nothing more.
This reminds me of a thing in part of Meghan O'Gieblyn's book "God, Human, Animal, Machine", in which she describes the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. The way it's described, when information becomes integrated to a certain degree, consciousness arises. But the theory also posits that when that thing (say, a neuron) becomes too integrated within another whole, it ceases to be conscious and simply becomes an aspect of the consciousness of the greater system. I thought that was really interesting, because it reminded me of how collective homogeneity can cause groups of humans to process information less like a bunch of individuals and more like one larger structure with humans somewhat facilitating the functions of that processing, without being fully conscious themselves. Kinda like how the internet, by integrating us more completely with one-another, has arguably been a net loss for individual capacity and agency. The marketplace of ideas is overrun with epistemic behemoths comprised of functionalized once-humans, and it is very hard to reignite consciousness in those who have given it up.
Now I'll riff a bit on the "all solutions are local not global" thing:
I think you're right that there's an in-between engineering and local-only solving. There is a way to scale solutions to be context-aware at the local level, but local sensing is what facilitates its efficacy. The problem with scaled solutions to complex problems is that they apply context-inappropriate information to problems which are perpetuated locally, by local actors/agents/contexts (e.g. seeing like a state). This is why I tend to say only a complex thing solves a complex problem. The only appropriate scaled solution is one that facilitates both sensing and response at the local level. The information generated at the local through sensing does not first and foremost need to inform strategic shifts at the global scale (though it can help to inform degree of appropriate constraint on those complex deployments), but at the local, which means your scaled solution is in fact just the deployment of sensing/solving processes, or the removal of constraints so that the local becomes self-organizing.
We absolutely should have a convo on this. It could be ep 1 of our podcast with Austin.
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece, thanks!
Thank you!
I especially like this sentence - To de-complexify a thing is to devitalize it. I find your thinking in this piece resonant. Integrates concepts from the warm data vernacular with complexity thinking and philosophy. I love the Sufi quote and the reference to Frankenstein wrench and The Overstory. Speaks to me also of this difficult to comprehend political moment in the US. Over efficiency and optimization have blinded America in my view in this historical moment. AI does not help to illuminate the blind spot.
Thank you Aliki :) I've been thinking a lot about Frankenstein after re-reading the book and watching the new movie, both of which are great. The monster doesn't start with violent impulses. He develops those out of frustration for being denied connection with human beings, which is his most intense desire throughout the story. I appreciate your connecting it to the current political moment as well. That is most certainly on my mind as I write about these subjects.