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Hello all!
In this week’s episode I talk about inertia, catalysts and self-organisation. A lot of it is orbiting around complexity and emergent order, themes that I find exceedingly fascinating. I will probably do a more in-depth thing on how this all links into the system ethics I am trying to work out for myself and Newtype, but suffice to say that I think our civilisation’s current penchant for reducing or attempting to shut out the amount of complexity in the world is not a good thing.
A way of seeing life (an evolving system that can make more of itself - NASA) that I have been long aligned with is as a response to entropy. It is why emergence, evolution and the sort of play that gives rise to living systems, matters so much to me.
To see messiness and inefficiency as a bad thing the way we do these days is something that I think has been very instrumental to getting us as a species into the various troubles we are dealing with today. Embracing complexity and ambiguity historically seems to align better with the way things apparently are. The sooner we get good at doing this, the better.
Links
The project I have been working on with Yemi Awosile is going live tomorrow at 1pm WAT/BST and I am pretty excited about it all. Do follow our various accounts on Instagram - Newtype and Yemi’s to know when the project website goes live and to stay up-to-date on the follow-up online sessions we plan to co-host soon.
How Complex Wholes Emerge From Simple Parts (Quanta Magazine)
Metacurrency (by Art Brock)
Are You an Anarchist? (via Patrick Tanguay’s newsletter)
What I am reading/watching/playing/listening to
Lovecraft Country // TV
Shigeo Sekito - the word II (thanks Seetal!) // Music
Susumu Hirasawa Playlist // Music
Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust // Animation, Film
Rules of Emergence (Quanta Magazine. Bonus points for having “alchemist” in the article & title!)
Ahead of the Curve: The SpaceChem Postmortem (talk on game design by Zach Barth. Also has my current favourite definition of design - as a noun - that I have seen) // Video
Capitalism’s New Clothes (thanks Carmen!)
Defying Crackdowns, QAnon Continues its Relentless Global Spread (self-organisation gone wrong)
The Newtype Vocab #9 - Inertia and Self-Organisation