Some Good Ideas
I've been trying to write this for a very long time. Every time I try for an outline, it gets jumbled. It starts as a flash of possibility that feels inspiring, and then by the end, I've explored one aspect of it or it's a mess.
I think it's better as a mess. Here's a tour of some good ideas. But first, some challenges.
Direct
- Developing a politics and supporting technologies to help reduce inequality
- Developing a politics and supporting technologies to help the environment
A related and important narrative challenge
Promoting curiosity to combat complacency or inattention. Curiosity beats knowledge for fighting climate change.
The Good Ideas
Ecology
1. Nature/Systems/etc. need attention and curiosity for their own sake if we're going to improve them.
2. They can be good inspiration for models, terrain that should be contested to chip away at the hegemony of business ontology/goals.
3. Doing things only one way curtails imagination, and the concept of "ecology" itself promotes a variety of forms, actions, processes, priorities, and inquiries.
Social Ecology
We can borrow its goals, and let them lead us to models.
Social Ecology Principles:
- Non-hierarchical
- Mutualism
- Unity in Diversity
- Homeostatic
- Moves to ever greater degrees of freedom/complexity/diversity
- Functions through a degree of spontaneity
- Unfolding of potentiality
Complex Systems
A way to explore what constitutes an ecology (or system) and how the parts interact with one another. (http://donellameadows.org/)
Cybernetics
As conceived of by Norbert Weiner and expanded by Stafford Beer. Ideas like the viable system model and Ashby's Law can point to where something is lacking.
Cat/Set Theory
Useful to elicit likely possibilities of a system or to abstract/build bridges between social, ecological, and technical structures/processes.
Biomimicry
A specific inspiration for models or analogies, rather than just for materials and products. We can build processes, data structures, algorithms, and protocols that are inspired by plants and other wild things.
Analogies/Models/Aphorisms
They're fine to use. We use worse ones all the time, especially ones of business and economics. They can be made more adaptable/precise with math sometimes. They could have predictive, descriptive, or normative power, but probably not all of these, all the time. That would be a high bar.
Tactics of Social Movements
- Entryism (software quality, data structures, pairing, protocols, Efficiency/Productivity)
- Narrative Work (stop expecting something to win, not "alternative" but "viable", developing new aphorisms and slogans)
- Prefiguration ("this is how we could work" remote, non-commercial, open).
Ideas to Explore
Reproduction
These ideas are pollen. They hybridize with billions of other ideas. We all have fields of those. We see what will mix to bear fruit. We find places to plant. Germination. Growth. And we can build feedback loops just like that.
Or we can clone and graft.
Inflorescence
I don't know how to make these ideas bright and bring the bees in. Plants know their pollinators. They know what they see and how to make little mazes to dust their bodies with pollen. The luckiest people probably get to have a few million conversations. I hope I can be lucky like that and the good flowers match the good pollen.
Germination
Where do the seeds go? What do they need to grow? Is it time passed or time determined? Is it building the soil?
Garden
I have a library of seeds and flowers you might not have seen. Let me know if you want a tour or to tell me about yours at evan@novc.org.