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.
I liked John C. Wright's notion in his "Golden Oecumene" novels of the "First Mental Structure" and so on, I think they were in the "Eighth Mental Structure" by the distant time of the novel, with their minds half in and out of cyberspace all the time, every memory editable. An impression was given that we are already in the Second Mental Structure, or maybe the Third, where Second was Gutenberg, and Third is us and our ubiquitous Internet.
I'm not that sure that educated individuals today think all that differently from Descartes or Faraday, but there's no question that a overall society that is now literate (<50% in the early 1900s), educated, and connected, behaves differently than a society in 1930.
It would be great progress in SF, if SF could stop looking back longingly at feudalism (Dune, Star Wars, Foundation) and imagine real democracy of an informed public. It would be helpful to look around Europe instead of UK and America, which have done some feudalism-backsliding in recent years.
I'd like to see some SF that imagined a non-feudal corporate structure. You mention shooting Libertarianism in the head, but one of the funniest things to me about modern business is that we have a number of Libertarian-talking CEOs, particularly tech CEOs. But these alleged "libertarians" run absolutely feudal management structures where they are in control! Not one of them runs a libertarian company, where there are two competing IT departments, and three HR departments, competing to handle the HR files by being the best HR department, or turning in IT projects for Marketing more quickly. Every single one is another top-down pyramid, with those below utterly under the control of the pyramid level above them.
What if somebody actually tried Chomsky's "Anarcho-Syndicalism" and it worked, for coordinating corporate departments?
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.
Fascinating especially as a therapist whose understanding of family systems was shaped by Maturana’s theory (among others)
I liked John C. Wright's notion in his "Golden Oecumene" novels of the "First Mental Structure" and so on, I think they were in the "Eighth Mental Structure" by the distant time of the novel, with their minds half in and out of cyberspace all the time, every memory editable. An impression was given that we are already in the Second Mental Structure, or maybe the Third, where Second was Gutenberg, and Third is us and our ubiquitous Internet.
I'm not that sure that educated individuals today think all that differently from Descartes or Faraday, but there's no question that a overall society that is now literate (<50% in the early 1900s), educated, and connected, behaves differently than a society in 1930.
It would be great progress in SF, if SF could stop looking back longingly at feudalism (Dune, Star Wars, Foundation) and imagine real democracy of an informed public. It would be helpful to look around Europe instead of UK and America, which have done some feudalism-backsliding in recent years.
I'd like to see some SF that imagined a non-feudal corporate structure. You mention shooting Libertarianism in the head, but one of the funniest things to me about modern business is that we have a number of Libertarian-talking CEOs, particularly tech CEOs. But these alleged "libertarians" run absolutely feudal management structures where they are in control! Not one of them runs a libertarian company, where there are two competing IT departments, and three HR departments, competing to handle the HR files by being the best HR department, or turning in IT projects for Marketing more quickly. Every single one is another top-down pyramid, with those below utterly under the control of the pyramid level above them.
What if somebody actually tried Chomsky's "Anarcho-Syndicalism" and it worked, for coordinating corporate departments?
All Chat really is is an expensive toy. It can supplement the work of some people but it can't entirely replace it.