In “What’s happening on Jan 13th?” I talked about bringing my internet friends Suntzoogway & Lukas Hammarström to Ithaca NY to help me figure out next steps for my work.
Your world model seems to be missing something very simple, correct me if I'm wrong: why would the principal, or corporation etc, care about the person with less power? The answer is: THEY ALREADY DO CARE! They are spending enormous amounts of money trying to convince them of certain things (propaganda), and when the public opinion doesn't go their way, that destroys (1) the company (2) the politician, etc.
I don't think you understand what this is - which is why your words are unconvincing (and feels good because it gives me greater conviction that there's no good reason why this won't work). The "what's happening on Jan 13" maybe gives you more context, but you have to think of this as an "open intelligence agency". It doesn't work without the scale. If you have the scale, you have influence. This isn't a "I hope people in power do the right thing" thing. This is "everyone in power wants to use this thing, because it lets them shape the narrative" (and that includes people down the power ladder fighting the people one rung above, and below). Coordinated power one rung below beats uncoordinated power one rung above.
(If they're both coordinated maximally them the rung above wins. But part of the foundation of this theory, and don't laugh, I'm serious: coordination is love, so you can't be coordinated, with power, and "not care" / do harm without creating a way for someone to usurp you. I wrote about this in the "assymetry of good & evil" post)
I came across this a (thanks to @Tom S, and possibly of interest to @Lukas Hammarström as a psychologist) that seems to describe pretty well what you’re observing about the vibe, and I wonder -
How does/could your corporation model account for the societal phenomena described? I feel like your model focuses heavily on the execs as the ones directing the show, and less so on the extent to which the situation arises from the employees themselves, beyond the simple issue of information/propaganda. Or if this not a necessary layer for your model, why not?
TL;DR = Some* humans have been living in a sheltered, illusory “assumptive world” of “the taken-for-granted beliefs that the world is predictable, that effort leads to reward, and that the future can be meaningfully shaped”. When that world flickers, “Long held narratives about who I am, what matters, and what kind of life is worth striving for begin to fall apart” along with “fundamental assumptions about safety, progress and continuity.” “Past efforts can come to feel pointless and the present becomes something to be endured.” Attempts “to move away from pain - into techniques, diagnoses or transcendent narratives” are “professional and spiritual forms of bypass.” It’s only through “engaging [accurately!!] with the deeper question of why the foundations of our civilization are unraveling”, and leaning into [valid] dread and “anticipatory grief”, that we find meaning and motivation, whereas “As long as we remain attached to what could have been, movement toward any other possible future remains blocked.”
*This is like an HR report on a specific department, the ones who’d been naïve and having fun at a cost to everyone else. The janitor has never been thrilled, nor were the creatures who used to live/hunt/forage where the office building now exists.
> focuses heavily on the execs as the ones directing the show
I focus on this mostly because it's currently a "magical explanation sink".
By that I mean, it's not that people aren't testing reality, it's that when they do test it, and their predictions fail, they attribute the cause/reason to the black box that they can't see the inside of (the "people at the top"). Now, if you manage to get visibility into those black corners of your map, you can stop assuming that the answer exists, but is just hidden from you.
Also, side note: substack replies on blogs DONT let you @ tag people, which is really dumb. I think we can use this as a kind of "public correspondence" but we need to use the "notes" instead of a reply to a blog (where you can @ people in the replies there)
so now that we’re here in a note the tags should work? (or maybe they already did in the previous comment and my information is wrong?) @Tom S @Lukas Hammarström
This “execs v janitor” convo is a relevant metaphor in my personal life. A retired friend, a longtime former C-Suite exec who has far more than enough $ means to live a fancy footloose life, and who has a small sense of the world-going wrong (shorthand: wealthy liberal boomer), just decided to take a job management consulting a real estate development firm in New Mexico as a way to add purpose back into his life plus provide a sweet bonus influx of cash. I asked: are they perhaps at least working on affordable housing? No, they are building luxury rentals units to be wholly owned by the firm.
He and I can sit together and bemoan the usual things that those of the ‘traditional’ or mainstream left do, and yet it seems his ‘storyline’ does not point to an off-ramp of service. Despite glimmers of recognition of the sucking sound of inequality, and despite well-knowing what I’m always on about, he’s going to happily chug along into this new endeavor.
Now that I’m typing this up, I don’t know if it adds up to anything. I suppose it’s a long way of saying that some people are purposefully not going to see or hear, the executives are not going to change their behavior (nor the majority of middle-management either) and such a reminder of that fact should not surprise me. It will be nice if your project, Omar, gains traction. Perhaps you’ll have more success with those who have not built up such a decades-long winning story based on a narrative that is now taking a sharp-turn. Can the deepness of the groove of the story of a life / can the deepness of the groove of a worldview be transcended?
I would to believe the answer is yes Tom, because I am one such case (who quit my [big tech] job and am here now doing whatever this is). Now, not very many people have followed, because the path ahead of me here is uncertain, and rather scary to be honest.
If I saw a coworker quit, to do more meaningful things, and then 2 years later, he's doing worse, trying to figure out how to make money, I might hold off, especially if I have kids & a family to support. But if I saw that guy succeed, and have a job/a story well laid out that I can fit into, then maybe I will take the leap.
The old grooves can be replaced by creating new grooves that are ready to slot into. They don't need to be as deep as the old ones. A shallow groove in a more beautiful / internally aligned direction is better than a deep groove in a morally bankrupt / not fulfilling direction. But COMPLETELY untapped ground? that's a hard sell.
We're out here digging new paths, but we have to thrive too, otherwise it just fizzles out
they don't need to - silence, or a fake answer, are both indicators of "broken pipes", of "who is the bottleneck" !
This of course requires the discernment on the user side to tell when they see a "fake answer". This all hinges on (1) personal ability to test, to trust your self to test for truth (2) to have & grow your trust network
i guess i look at this from a legal perspective applied to local vs. county, state, national governments - they (meaning those in power) absolutely do not want you to have more local autonomy so elevating your concerns doesn't travel through pipes at all
there are people who worked for USAID who promptly enrolled in Berkeley Law (a good and decent person who i personally trust)
"this is already how decisions get made globally in the world, it’s just that most people don’t see how their day to day decisions propagate across the superorganism."
Yes. I feel this. Many of my 'insights' about how to fix the world are already in process even if not explicitly declared as such.
"And I think the trick is making this visible without complete chaos ensuing."
Why though? My understanding of what would be seen in this case is "we're all connected" and "we are actually listening and working at it but it's complex".
re:the chaos, if you realize that your thoughts & essays cause changes across the global superorganism, then you are responsible for the consequences. You might nudge the world in a particular direction, and it might create permanent damage.
It's an enormous responsibility, to have power. It is not equally distributed. It changes quite fast. We need to be ready.
I had a tweet a while ago that was quite polarizing, I asked "would you be happier if you got exactly what you wanted" and a lot of people were like "of course, by definition!" But those who got it were like "no that's terrifying" (if you don't know or aren't sure what's actually good for you)
ok, yeah. in a way I see the ugly parts of internet culture as the symptom of just that chaos, humanity still trying to cope with the reality of being connected to everybody all the sudden.
In a recent post I use the analogy of a women who gets evaluated to determine whether she's pregnant and when she's going to give birth. The doctor *stays in their lane*, performs all the tests, and determines with supposed certainty what the patient's trajectory is. The issue is that reality doesn't proceed in controlled conditions where you can isolate variables. The doctor has failed to research whether the patient has an plane tickets booked, and whether that particular model that is scheduled for that flight has any manufacturing flaws. The patient dies in a plane crash, never has a baby. It was foreseeable, but only to someone who thinks over everything, and we're not taught to think that way. Applying this to "why not" and the big picture, all of these solutions (fixing a pothole, scripting a better movie) might result in improvements in a constrained sense, but people are failing to ask about the plane that we're all on. I think I would end up assigning ❌ to many things on the basis that "that's going to be hard to launch/maintain after the food stops growing or reaching us"
yes - the purpose of "why not com" is to go all the way to the terminal bottleneck (especially if your patients keep dying because they all keep going on the same type of plane/in the same way, the people in power may not ask "why are the predictions not working" but the people who are actually curious and "waking up" would ask and find those with the answers, as long as they're visible/speak a language that makes sense to them)
"That when I encounter a problem here in Ithaca, I can bubble it up to the person in Ithaca who can solve it."
This becomes trickier given the conditions of deindustrialization. One person might have an *idea* that can help ("solve" seems like a stretch - when, e.g., modern medicines stop being manufactured and distributed, we're simply going to see a lot of people succumb to disease. e.g. 2 million Americans have Type 1 diabetes and without insulin will be dead within 14 days) ... but the implementation of that idea will require physical labor, which means that you also need to get the whole town/county on board, and cooperating and coordinating, on something that many of them have never experienced before and never expected to experience. Unhappy campers.
And do we have enough garden/farm equipment for everyone? Imagine how many glass jars one household needs to store a winter's worth of preserved food (that's assuming we've all perfected the technique). Here's one visual - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SeXb20U3-w. Multiply by every household in our town/county. And then that's supposed to also work out for additional towns. I think it's worth TRYING to develop the skills and acquire the supplies but so far, we're positioned to be caught sh*t outta luck.
That’s right, and so Omar’s idea is to bubble up the information to a larger / large enough contingent of locals in order to address potential implementations of physical changes that might address future pain. Likewise or alternatively the idea could bubble up national or global knowledge of future pain points which may help trickle back down locally.
Idealistic? Utopian? Naive? Probably. But why not try everything.
I haven’t thought about quantum social change in a few years (Karen O’Brien). I’m not suggesting you and Omar dig into her work (if you don’t know it) but dropping here as a placeholder for further conversation, and I’ll also revisit / share notes if they seem like they might be helpful.
I'm not clear about the coordination part. If my network is small how do I learn that others are already working on it? Maybe I get started because I don't know the others, and then there are multiple efforts happening. Or, if I learn that the others are out there, maybe I just drop it and look for something else that no one has done yet, even though my iteration might have identified helpful aspects the others don't come up with.
Meantime efference copy puts me in mind of Peter Godfrey-Smith on Octopus intelligence: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/ as well as the practice of focusing from Eugene Gendlin (using a careful body-mind feedback loop to 'focus' in on the best decision / best way forward. In effect your body helps inform your mind).
What I wanted to depict with the "phone call chain sketch" is that you don't need a big network, all you need is an input & output. You need to follow some protocol for "broadcasting" your needs (what & who you're looking for), and that helps people who do what I do (who keep track of all networks and shuffle information, and people, across)
There is a trust bottleneck here - this "ambassador" you're speaking to might do a good job taking your information where it needs to go, or they may be skimming off the top/making things worse. What I'm trying to advocate for here is protocols so you can tell when the person is doing good or not. One way to do that is by having the ability to connect directly to other networks when you need to verify (this usually is a costly thing, but should have the option to do it when needed)
One kind of "experiment" we did this past year is what I've been thinking of as a "mic check" (https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/my-first-open-source-psyop-postmortem), to see if one network can "hear" or respond to the other. I envision a world where we do this regularly to check if our information pipes are working, so that if there is a real need for network A to reach network B, that there exists some path (even if it goes through several other networks/these "ambassadors")
One easy example that come to mind is when the water stops flowing from your taps and the toilets stop flushing. Some people know better than others how best to deal, and others will be desperate for guidance on wtf to do with their poop, so word would spread fast. The challenge might be, though - at that point, will everyone be yelling too loudly to hear a good idea?
If your network is small, you expand it through, eg, why not dot com.
If you're abandoning your work because others are working on it, you have a responsibility to give them access to your work in progress, so that if there's something to be learned, they have access to it. And to discuss the work with them, if they ask, because your not knowing there was someone working in it means the pool of competent sounding boards is somewhat small.
I think you highly underestimate how incredibly asymmetric *power dynamics* are. In the bubbling up example, why would a principal or a mayor care about a question asked by a high school student? Or to give a more tangible example which people love to memory hole, why would privileged people care about what working class people lost during the covid lockdowns? Software engineers get to work from home in a post-covid world, why would they care about the jobs lost, and the local businesses owned by people they've never heard which got wiped away?
I'm not just talking about selfishness here, but *systemic* selfishness. If large businesses didn't optimize for profits, they would lose out to others which do. If politicians weren't corrupt and promised far more than they delivered, they wouldn't get re-elected. See also: Meditations on Moloch, the Rule for Rulers, and in general, game theoretical dynamics which shape our world (arms races, technological progress which cannot be stopped, tragedy of the commons, etc.)
If the idea isn't so much to replace or change the people in power, but to instead get enough people to coordinate so that power dynamics do not dictate our interactions, then this doesn't solve another fundamental issue of our world, which is its *atomization*.
People who think in atomized ways ask questions like: "how do we make school better? how to make it so that work isn't so soulless? how do we make technological progress more sustainable?" But a broader perspective would ask why those structures exist in the first place: "Why do we even send children in school, a place isolated from everything else (work, family, nature, etc.) where they are inculcated in a purely internal institution (i.e. your performance is evaluated by the teacher, not by what you do in the real world)?" Or "why has technological progress driven our world to begin with? What are the drivers and to what extent is it a conscious process?"
The importance of understanding atomizing collectives and atomizing questions lies in the following dynamic: problem-solving always takes an atomized form, because divide and conquer has been the most effective way to coordinate people. The problem with that approach is that the problem solvers are *never* incentivized to care for the whole.
People in medicine tell us how to be healthy in a world which constantly makes us disconnected from our body, and more and more unhealthy (sitting in front of a desk all day, driving to places, eating food grown on poor soil). People in businesses care about providing services and maximizing their profits, without any incentive to care about the environment. People in law institutions think about how to bring about a "fair" world without ever interacting with the outrageous economic reality of our times and its downstream consequences.
On and on, hyper-specialists working in their tiny field of expertise, with no broader context for a more harmonious whole.
But the thing to understand isn't just that "compartmentalization bad", it's that 1) it results from many dynamics which bring about our world in the first place (it's easiest to coordinate people through divide and conquer as mentioned, amongst other dynamics) and 2) there is once again an incentive to not care about the whole, similar to the game theoretical dynamic described above with regards to power.
A charity that tries to get to the root of the problems it tries to tackle, whether environmental or social (and the two are of course intertwined) won't get anywhere. It will run into a wall, people will be frustrated, be demotivated and burnout, and the charity will probably disappear. But one that starts with more actionable, *definable* goals, such as helping the pandas in China, or install water pumps for remote areas in Ethiopia, builds momentum because it's satisfying to see those definable metrics go up.
This sounds good in the short term, but in the long term what does this lead to? As everyone who thinks about metrics knows, Goodhart's Law is an ugly friend which keeps showing its head up. "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". The charities which optimize for their definable goals end up becoming more popular in the eyes of the public, because their impact is clear and they can attract shareholders who know what to expect from their investments.
But what this leads to in practice is that the initial intention of doing good in the world becomes captured by the need to maintain the structure. The charity provides money and hope to its workers and many other people. Why would it try to shake up the foundations of the very system which causes the problems it tries to address?
In practice that never happens. Charities which become successful never want to remove the roots of the problems which they are working at addressing. They *need* the problems in order to get value for themselves.
You can call this selfishness, and in a sense it is, but the dynamic that I'm talking about is far more subtle to grasp. It's the way in which intentions in an atomized and complex world become self-serving and deviate from their initial good intentions. Charities dare not win, because they can't afford to. They need to keep struggling against the very same system which gives them their money and attention.
I claim that this is true for all large-scale movements aiming at changing the world. There is never an incentive to take care of the whole, and more generally, never a *locally optimum series of moves* that leads to that. Just like you can't explain in rational, utilitarian terms the value of consciously loving someone, you can't explain in market-driven locally optimum terms the value of taking responsibility for the whole. So no one ever will.
I don't expect you to ever change your opinions based on what I've written, but this is what I predict will go wrong with your project. It won't account for the inherent power dynamics that drive our world, it won't account for its atomization either, and it won't account for the way that good intentions get captured and morph over time.
What do you think about local-only responses to local issues of concern? For example: forget global charities building wells in far flung countries. Can local charities help ensure local people have clean water, and leave it at that?
There’s two local charities near me that I appreciate. One gives free healthcare to uninsured people. The other re-distributes prepared commercial food that would otherwise enter the waste stream. Small scale local organizations that deliver tangible results without intention to grow.
Now: maybe the success of these ideas translates to a town in the next county establishing a similar effort. Copycat the good idea.
Local assessment and influence is the only thing I can see working sustainably and without the corruption of incentives that large-scale effort produces.
The problem is that in the short-term, it’s very difficult to not feel like you’re being overrun by the steamrollers of the modern world, i.e. local economies are being constantly eroded by companies like Amazon which are so unbelievably more convenient than anything a local business might provide.
But economy aside, yeah when it comes to doing good in the world, I only trust in small-scale actions, because that’s the only way that the feedback of intention + action + result completes, and that the process of atomization can start healing. Otherwise you have to replace ‘intention’ with ideology/chasing metrics, and ‘results’ with ‘metric we are optimizing for’, and it becomes a number game once again.
I'll "yes, and" this and say, this project is about expanding that scope of "local". My "local" includes my immediate family & friends, my trust network, my coworkers. Take that tight trust network, and expand it as far as you can + create a public entry point to it (anyone can come to you, but you don't let anyone in your trust network, unless you trust them)
the fastest growing internally coherent/aligned trust network wins (as we do this process we will run against networks that are coordinating but in secret. And they won't admit they are coordinating, but it will become very clear if we are coordinated)
The triple-win framing is the core insight here. What stood out to me is that even "bad" questions create value by calibrating public expectations vs reality. Reminds me of how internal wikis fail in orgs because theres no incentive to maintain them, but this solves that by making the maintenance itself valuable. The real challnge is probably getting critical mass without devolving into Stack Overflow toxicity.
Your world model seems to be missing something very simple, correct me if I'm wrong: why would the principal, or corporation etc, care about the person with less power? The answer is: THEY ALREADY DO CARE! They are spending enormous amounts of money trying to convince them of certain things (propaganda), and when the public opinion doesn't go their way, that destroys (1) the company (2) the politician, etc.
I don't think you understand what this is - which is why your words are unconvincing (and feels good because it gives me greater conviction that there's no good reason why this won't work). The "what's happening on Jan 13" maybe gives you more context, but you have to think of this as an "open intelligence agency". It doesn't work without the scale. If you have the scale, you have influence. This isn't a "I hope people in power do the right thing" thing. This is "everyone in power wants to use this thing, because it lets them shape the narrative" (and that includes people down the power ladder fighting the people one rung above, and below). Coordinated power one rung below beats uncoordinated power one rung above.
(If they're both coordinated maximally them the rung above wins. But part of the foundation of this theory, and don't laugh, I'm serious: coordination is love, so you can't be coordinated, with power, and "not care" / do harm without creating a way for someone to usurp you. I wrote about this in the "assymetry of good & evil" post)
I came across this a (thanks to @Tom S, and possibly of interest to @Lukas Hammarström as a psychologist) that seems to describe pretty well what you’re observing about the vibe, and I wonder -
How does/could your corporation model account for the societal phenomena described? I feel like your model focuses heavily on the execs as the ones directing the show, and less so on the extent to which the situation arises from the employees themselves, beyond the simple issue of information/propaganda. Or if this not a necessary layer for your model, why not?
TL;DR = Some* humans have been living in a sheltered, illusory “assumptive world” of “the taken-for-granted beliefs that the world is predictable, that effort leads to reward, and that the future can be meaningfully shaped”. When that world flickers, “Long held narratives about who I am, what matters, and what kind of life is worth striving for begin to fall apart” along with “fundamental assumptions about safety, progress and continuity.” “Past efforts can come to feel pointless and the present becomes something to be endured.” Attempts “to move away from pain - into techniques, diagnoses or transcendent narratives” are “professional and spiritual forms of bypass.” It’s only through “engaging [accurately!!] with the deeper question of why the foundations of our civilization are unraveling”, and leaning into [valid] dread and “anticipatory grief”, that we find meaning and motivation, whereas “As long as we remain attached to what could have been, movement toward any other possible future remains blocked.”
*This is like an HR report on a specific department, the ones who’d been naïve and having fun at a cost to everyone else. The janitor has never been thrilled, nor were the creatures who used to live/hunt/forage where the office building now exists.
https://jembendell.com/2026/01/24/dont-forget-the-dread-deeper-healing-in-the-metacrisis/
> focuses heavily on the execs as the ones directing the show
I focus on this mostly because it's currently a "magical explanation sink".
By that I mean, it's not that people aren't testing reality, it's that when they do test it, and their predictions fail, they attribute the cause/reason to the black box that they can't see the inside of (the "people at the top"). Now, if you manage to get visibility into those black corners of your map, you can stop assuming that the answer exists, but is just hidden from you.
Also, side note: substack replies on blogs DONT let you @ tag people, which is really dumb. I think we can use this as a kind of "public correspondence" but we need to use the "notes" instead of a reply to a blog (where you can @ people in the replies there)
so now that we’re here in a note the tags should work? (or maybe they already did in the previous comment and my information is wrong?) @Tom S @Lukas Hammarström
This “execs v janitor” convo is a relevant metaphor in my personal life. A retired friend, a longtime former C-Suite exec who has far more than enough $ means to live a fancy footloose life, and who has a small sense of the world-going wrong (shorthand: wealthy liberal boomer), just decided to take a job management consulting a real estate development firm in New Mexico as a way to add purpose back into his life plus provide a sweet bonus influx of cash. I asked: are they perhaps at least working on affordable housing? No, they are building luxury rentals units to be wholly owned by the firm.
He and I can sit together and bemoan the usual things that those of the ‘traditional’ or mainstream left do, and yet it seems his ‘storyline’ does not point to an off-ramp of service. Despite glimmers of recognition of the sucking sound of inequality, and despite well-knowing what I’m always on about, he’s going to happily chug along into this new endeavor.
Now that I’m typing this up, I don’t know if it adds up to anything. I suppose it’s a long way of saying that some people are purposefully not going to see or hear, the executives are not going to change their behavior (nor the majority of middle-management either) and such a reminder of that fact should not surprise me. It will be nice if your project, Omar, gains traction. Perhaps you’ll have more success with those who have not built up such a decades-long winning story based on a narrative that is now taking a sharp-turn. Can the deepness of the groove of the story of a life / can the deepness of the groove of a worldview be transcended?
I would to believe the answer is yes Tom, because I am one such case (who quit my [big tech] job and am here now doing whatever this is). Now, not very many people have followed, because the path ahead of me here is uncertain, and rather scary to be honest.
If I saw a coworker quit, to do more meaningful things, and then 2 years later, he's doing worse, trying to figure out how to make money, I might hold off, especially if I have kids & a family to support. But if I saw that guy succeed, and have a job/a story well laid out that I can fit into, then maybe I will take the leap.
The old grooves can be replaced by creating new grooves that are ready to slot into. They don't need to be as deep as the old ones. A shallow groove in a more beautiful / internally aligned direction is better than a deep groove in a morally bankrupt / not fulfilling direction. But COMPLETELY untapped ground? that's a hard sell.
We're out here digging new paths, but we have to thrive too, otherwise it just fizzles out
Amen!
https://bsky.app/profile/tomschloegel.bsky.social/post/3lhycukgkik23
Grassroots movements can have more power than the pros, if the right combination of people and incentives or disincentives coalesces.
Why do you assume the experts above you want you to have the answer
Their existence depends on generating new complexity for you to struggle with
they don't need to - silence, or a fake answer, are both indicators of "broken pipes", of "who is the bottleneck" !
This of course requires the discernment on the user side to tell when they see a "fake answer". This all hinges on (1) personal ability to test, to trust your self to test for truth (2) to have & grow your trust network
i guess i look at this from a legal perspective applied to local vs. county, state, national governments - they (meaning those in power) absolutely do not want you to have more local autonomy so elevating your concerns doesn't travel through pipes at all
there are people who worked for USAID who promptly enrolled in Berkeley Law (a good and decent person who i personally trust)
i do not find this to be an encouraging signal
"this is already how decisions get made globally in the world, it’s just that most people don’t see how their day to day decisions propagate across the superorganism."
Yes. I feel this. Many of my 'insights' about how to fix the world are already in process even if not explicitly declared as such.
"And I think the trick is making this visible without complete chaos ensuing."
Why though? My understanding of what would be seen in this case is "we're all connected" and "we are actually listening and working at it but it's complex".
re:the chaos, if you realize that your thoughts & essays cause changes across the global superorganism, then you are responsible for the consequences. You might nudge the world in a particular direction, and it might create permanent damage.
It's an enormous responsibility, to have power. It is not equally distributed. It changes quite fast. We need to be ready.
I had a tweet a while ago that was quite polarizing, I asked "would you be happier if you got exactly what you wanted" and a lot of people were like "of course, by definition!" But those who got it were like "no that's terrifying" (if you don't know or aren't sure what's actually good for you)
ok, yeah. in a way I see the ugly parts of internet culture as the symptom of just that chaos, humanity still trying to cope with the reality of being connected to everybody all the sudden.
yes exactly
re: "why not" -
In a recent post I use the analogy of a women who gets evaluated to determine whether she's pregnant and when she's going to give birth. The doctor *stays in their lane*, performs all the tests, and determines with supposed certainty what the patient's trajectory is. The issue is that reality doesn't proceed in controlled conditions where you can isolate variables. The doctor has failed to research whether the patient has an plane tickets booked, and whether that particular model that is scheduled for that flight has any manufacturing flaws. The patient dies in a plane crash, never has a baby. It was foreseeable, but only to someone who thinks over everything, and we're not taught to think that way. Applying this to "why not" and the big picture, all of these solutions (fixing a pothole, scripting a better movie) might result in improvements in a constrained sense, but people are failing to ask about the plane that we're all on. I think I would end up assigning ❌ to many things on the basis that "that's going to be hard to launch/maintain after the food stops growing or reaching us"
yes - the purpose of "why not com" is to go all the way to the terminal bottleneck (especially if your patients keep dying because they all keep going on the same type of plane/in the same way, the people in power may not ask "why are the predictions not working" but the people who are actually curious and "waking up" would ask and find those with the answers, as long as they're visible/speak a language that makes sense to them)
and!
"That when I encounter a problem here in Ithaca, I can bubble it up to the person in Ithaca who can solve it."
This becomes trickier given the conditions of deindustrialization. One person might have an *idea* that can help ("solve" seems like a stretch - when, e.g., modern medicines stop being manufactured and distributed, we're simply going to see a lot of people succumb to disease. e.g. 2 million Americans have Type 1 diabetes and without insulin will be dead within 14 days) ... but the implementation of that idea will require physical labor, which means that you also need to get the whole town/county on board, and cooperating and coordinating, on something that many of them have never experienced before and never expected to experience. Unhappy campers.
And do we have enough garden/farm equipment for everyone? Imagine how many glass jars one household needs to store a winter's worth of preserved food (that's assuming we've all perfected the technique). Here's one visual - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SeXb20U3-w. Multiply by every household in our town/county. And then that's supposed to also work out for additional towns. I think it's worth TRYING to develop the skills and acquire the supplies but so far, we're positioned to be caught sh*t outta luck.
That’s right, and so Omar’s idea is to bubble up the information to a larger / large enough contingent of locals in order to address potential implementations of physical changes that might address future pain. Likewise or alternatively the idea could bubble up national or global knowledge of future pain points which may help trickle back down locally.
Idealistic? Utopian? Naive? Probably. But why not try everything.
I haven’t thought about quantum social change in a few years (Karen O’Brien). I’m not suggesting you and Omar dig into her work (if you don’t know it) but dropping here as a placeholder for further conversation, and I’ll also revisit / share notes if they seem like they might be helpful.
I'm not clear about the coordination part. If my network is small how do I learn that others are already working on it? Maybe I get started because I don't know the others, and then there are multiple efforts happening. Or, if I learn that the others are out there, maybe I just drop it and look for something else that no one has done yet, even though my iteration might have identified helpful aspects the others don't come up with.
Meantime efference copy puts me in mind of Peter Godfrey-Smith on Octopus intelligence: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/ as well as the practice of focusing from Eugene Gendlin (using a careful body-mind feedback loop to 'focus' in on the best decision / best way forward. In effect your body helps inform your mind).
What I wanted to depict with the "phone call chain sketch" is that you don't need a big network, all you need is an input & output. You need to follow some protocol for "broadcasting" your needs (what & who you're looking for), and that helps people who do what I do (who keep track of all networks and shuffle information, and people, across)
There is a trust bottleneck here - this "ambassador" you're speaking to might do a good job taking your information where it needs to go, or they may be skimming off the top/making things worse. What I'm trying to advocate for here is protocols so you can tell when the person is doing good or not. One way to do that is by having the ability to connect directly to other networks when you need to verify (this usually is a costly thing, but should have the option to do it when needed)
One kind of "experiment" we did this past year is what I've been thinking of as a "mic check" (https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/my-first-open-source-psyop-postmortem), to see if one network can "hear" or respond to the other. I envision a world where we do this regularly to check if our information pipes are working, so that if there is a real need for network A to reach network B, that there exists some path (even if it goes through several other networks/these "ambassadors")
One easy example that come to mind is when the water stops flowing from your taps and the toilets stop flushing. Some people know better than others how best to deal, and others will be desperate for guidance on wtf to do with their poop, so word would spread fast. The challenge might be, though - at that point, will everyone be yelling too loudly to hear a good idea?
If your network is small, you expand it through, eg, why not dot com.
If you're abandoning your work because others are working on it, you have a responsibility to give them access to your work in progress, so that if there's something to be learned, they have access to it. And to discuss the work with them, if they ask, because your not knowing there was someone working in it means the pool of competent sounding boards is somewhat small.
You make things better by putting in the effort.
I think you highly underestimate how incredibly asymmetric *power dynamics* are. In the bubbling up example, why would a principal or a mayor care about a question asked by a high school student? Or to give a more tangible example which people love to memory hole, why would privileged people care about what working class people lost during the covid lockdowns? Software engineers get to work from home in a post-covid world, why would they care about the jobs lost, and the local businesses owned by people they've never heard which got wiped away?
I'm not just talking about selfishness here, but *systemic* selfishness. If large businesses didn't optimize for profits, they would lose out to others which do. If politicians weren't corrupt and promised far more than they delivered, they wouldn't get re-elected. See also: Meditations on Moloch, the Rule for Rulers, and in general, game theoretical dynamics which shape our world (arms races, technological progress which cannot be stopped, tragedy of the commons, etc.)
If the idea isn't so much to replace or change the people in power, but to instead get enough people to coordinate so that power dynamics do not dictate our interactions, then this doesn't solve another fundamental issue of our world, which is its *atomization*.
People who think in atomized ways ask questions like: "how do we make school better? how to make it so that work isn't so soulless? how do we make technological progress more sustainable?" But a broader perspective would ask why those structures exist in the first place: "Why do we even send children in school, a place isolated from everything else (work, family, nature, etc.) where they are inculcated in a purely internal institution (i.e. your performance is evaluated by the teacher, not by what you do in the real world)?" Or "why has technological progress driven our world to begin with? What are the drivers and to what extent is it a conscious process?"
The importance of understanding atomizing collectives and atomizing questions lies in the following dynamic: problem-solving always takes an atomized form, because divide and conquer has been the most effective way to coordinate people. The problem with that approach is that the problem solvers are *never* incentivized to care for the whole.
People in medicine tell us how to be healthy in a world which constantly makes us disconnected from our body, and more and more unhealthy (sitting in front of a desk all day, driving to places, eating food grown on poor soil). People in businesses care about providing services and maximizing their profits, without any incentive to care about the environment. People in law institutions think about how to bring about a "fair" world without ever interacting with the outrageous economic reality of our times and its downstream consequences.
On and on, hyper-specialists working in their tiny field of expertise, with no broader context for a more harmonious whole.
But the thing to understand isn't just that "compartmentalization bad", it's that 1) it results from many dynamics which bring about our world in the first place (it's easiest to coordinate people through divide and conquer as mentioned, amongst other dynamics) and 2) there is once again an incentive to not care about the whole, similar to the game theoretical dynamic described above with regards to power.
A charity that tries to get to the root of the problems it tries to tackle, whether environmental or social (and the two are of course intertwined) won't get anywhere. It will run into a wall, people will be frustrated, be demotivated and burnout, and the charity will probably disappear. But one that starts with more actionable, *definable* goals, such as helping the pandas in China, or install water pumps for remote areas in Ethiopia, builds momentum because it's satisfying to see those definable metrics go up.
This sounds good in the short term, but in the long term what does this lead to? As everyone who thinks about metrics knows, Goodhart's Law is an ugly friend which keeps showing its head up. "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric". The charities which optimize for their definable goals end up becoming more popular in the eyes of the public, because their impact is clear and they can attract shareholders who know what to expect from their investments.
But what this leads to in practice is that the initial intention of doing good in the world becomes captured by the need to maintain the structure. The charity provides money and hope to its workers and many other people. Why would it try to shake up the foundations of the very system which causes the problems it tries to address?
In practice that never happens. Charities which become successful never want to remove the roots of the problems which they are working at addressing. They *need* the problems in order to get value for themselves.
You can call this selfishness, and in a sense it is, but the dynamic that I'm talking about is far more subtle to grasp. It's the way in which intentions in an atomized and complex world become self-serving and deviate from their initial good intentions. Charities dare not win, because they can't afford to. They need to keep struggling against the very same system which gives them their money and attention.
I claim that this is true for all large-scale movements aiming at changing the world. There is never an incentive to take care of the whole, and more generally, never a *locally optimum series of moves* that leads to that. Just like you can't explain in rational, utilitarian terms the value of consciously loving someone, you can't explain in market-driven locally optimum terms the value of taking responsibility for the whole. So no one ever will.
I don't expect you to ever change your opinions based on what I've written, but this is what I predict will go wrong with your project. It won't account for the inherent power dynamics that drive our world, it won't account for its atomization either, and it won't account for the way that good intentions get captured and morph over time.
What do you think about local-only responses to local issues of concern? For example: forget global charities building wells in far flung countries. Can local charities help ensure local people have clean water, and leave it at that?
There’s two local charities near me that I appreciate. One gives free healthcare to uninsured people. The other re-distributes prepared commercial food that would otherwise enter the waste stream. Small scale local organizations that deliver tangible results without intention to grow.
Now: maybe the success of these ideas translates to a town in the next county establishing a similar effort. Copycat the good idea.
Local assessment and influence is the only thing I can see working sustainably and without the corruption of incentives that large-scale effort produces.
The problem is that in the short-term, it’s very difficult to not feel like you’re being overrun by the steamrollers of the modern world, i.e. local economies are being constantly eroded by companies like Amazon which are so unbelievably more convenient than anything a local business might provide.
But economy aside, yeah when it comes to doing good in the world, I only trust in small-scale actions, because that’s the only way that the feedback of intention + action + result completes, and that the process of atomization can start healing. Otherwise you have to replace ‘intention’ with ideology/chasing metrics, and ‘results’ with ‘metric we are optimizing for’, and it becomes a number game once again.
I'll "yes, and" this and say, this project is about expanding that scope of "local". My "local" includes my immediate family & friends, my trust network, my coworkers. Take that tight trust network, and expand it as far as you can + create a public entry point to it (anyone can come to you, but you don't let anyone in your trust network, unless you trust them)
the fastest growing internally coherent/aligned trust network wins (as we do this process we will run against networks that are coordinating but in secret. And they won't admit they are coordinating, but it will become very clear if we are coordinated)
The triple-win framing is the core insight here. What stood out to me is that even "bad" questions create value by calibrating public expectations vs reality. Reminds me of how internal wikis fail in orgs because theres no incentive to maintain them, but this solves that by making the maintenance itself valuable. The real challnge is probably getting critical mass without devolving into Stack Overflow toxicity.