• 10 Posts
  • 114 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • The forces at play are far greater than you realize in scope and scale

    I know it’s a turn of phrase but you don’t know me. I realise the scope and scale of how the world works, thanks.

    Your pitching

    The future you want

    You’re assuming a lot given what I’ve said. It’s not an “in effect” thing either. You talk about actual systems in a way which invokes Gandalf magic when they work like Penn and Teller magic. You assume the article and any defense of it is naive, but you’re missing the simple reality that sometimes you can simply remove huge amounts of complexity and get a better result.

    The internet, for example, is not magic. There were several competing communication protocols, from circuit switched systems to fax to pagers. The internet is able to do all of those jobs, and it is a simpler system than the ones which existed in the past. It moved some complexity around, and therefore removed a bunch of complexity which was unnecessary.

    This increase in simplicity is also called the second industrial revolution.

    Simplification is always regressive and backwards.

    Perhaps you prefer the term decomplecting? Complexity is an overloaded term, but you literally follow up “simplification as a regressive thing” with a bunch of simplification which is effective. Since we are sharing reading lists, perhaps a bit of Dr Fatima and Think that Through on Youtube might help you. It’s clear you do not understand the article nor my points.



  • Often it’s a bit difficult to make an abstract point out of examples. You seem to be countering those examples with today’s zeitgeist, the exact thing the article is looking to counter.

    The person decided this was the normal they wanted and where they chose to live.

    This would be true if all else were equal, but it isn’t. Society built roads. It had to tear down housing to build the roads. The house prices went up because corporations bought up the housing stock and are using it to manipulate rents. None of that was the “choice” of the farmer. One cannot just opt out. “oh no thanks. I’ll just take efficient public transport and we can just rip up the road network. Just give me one of the houses we build through more dense development.”

    Things are going to increase in complexity unless civilization collapses

    Why? Many folks today are talking about making society resilient over efficient, with respect to COVID and supply chains. This is a direct ask for reducing complexity. The 15 minute city is an ask to reduce complexity. Complex societies fail.

    Ultimately, the issue is cultural.

    The issue is hegemony. Every company claiming to benefit you are building a fiefdom and you are the bricks. You can work around it but you have to beat the products and services you buy into submission. This is true of phones, computers, cars, TVs, subscriptions, AI, and increasingly how it asks more and more of us. People say “the things we own end up owning us” but no one says that about a fridge, or a washing machine.