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Dee Brooks's avatar

I saw your post on the APF mailing list (linked to this piece), asking about 21st century ideas. Thought I’d reply here since I prefer to lurk over there.

One exciting 21st century area of research and praxis that I’m not seeing reflected in most visions of the future is Complexity Science. Dave Snowden’s work is very interesting, for example, and does tie in here around sense-making.

I do see complexity-informed perspectives reflected in your most recent work. We see distributed bottom-up change in Stealing Worlds (and also Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail, come to think of it, though it’s not exactly a happy vision), but those seem to be exceptions. Ministry For The Future and Termination Shock (to pick prominent examples) rely on centralized control by a limited number of actors managing to change the world in significant ways. I’d love to see MFTF’s vision realized, but it’s very old school in terms of proposed governance, and I think that sort of thing only works in fiction.

Means to enable distributed yet coordinated action at systemic scales has become a minor obsession of mine. I think it’s an unexplored source of massive potential given the connectivity we enjoy today. I’d love to see more people telling stories of distributed change.

It’s probably not easy, since stories tend to require heroes. I guess that’s part of our problem.

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Wilma Schroeder 🇨🇦🇺🇦's avatar

Fascinating especially as a therapist whose understanding of family systems was shaped by Maturana’s theory (among others)

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