[FRIAM] hot time in town tonight

[Steve Smith]

For those here fascinated by the impending (or not) Apocalypto (Mel
Gibson), Jackpot (William Gibson), Rapture (Evangelicals) or Redux
Deseret (Dave West), I submit the following novel series by a very
prolific Santa Fe Author, S.M. Stirling, called "the Emberverse"  set in
the days and decades after an abrupt shift in one or more physical
constants yielding a world where most concentrated-energy systems no
longer work,  Electricity, Internal Combustion, Steam power, Explosives,
etc. all just "fizzle", and the result is a Utopian/Dystopian world
dropped into feudalism with a backdrop of high-functioning
self-organized societies around Pagan/Wiccan principles.  

I met Stirling in 1998, soon after he moved here and quite a while
before he started this particular series, but he was already quite
prolific and quite impressive in his works...  with acute attention to
detail whether it be scientific, historical, political or
sociological.   I used to see him writing on a laptop at a table in
Joe's Dining at the Y of Rodeo/Zia, but never interrupted him as I think
he was in his "zone"...   I'm guessing Joe gave him a bottomless cup... 
this was usually mid-late mornings for me... or call it early lunch.

I have no limit to my capacity for morbid fascination, and Stirling's
works feed that well, though I will admit to dropping off reading his
Emberverse after maybe three novels?  There may be as many as 8?

You gotta love William Gibson's term: "Jackpot" described from a
somewhat distant future (maybe 2100 or later?) looking back at "these
times we are in"  with some perspective of hindsight.   He describes
this "Jackpot" as something of a "Slow Cooked Apocalypse"
<https://thequietus.com/articles/28340-william-gibson-agency-interview>
.   This link (author Robert Berry) introduced me to a mid-century
movement attributed as a form of Anarchism, referred to as Situationism
or Situationists
<https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jan-d-matthews-an-introduction-to-the-situationists#:~:text=The%20Situationist%20International%20(1957%E2%80%931972,and%20worker%20revolts%20in%20France.>. 
I'll defer to Glen's quicker, more focused mind, and quiver full of
Anarchist tropes and ideas as to whether these Situationists in any way
correlate with his offered "Anarchic Syndicalism", but what little I
have investigated suggested there is a shared rhyme scheme at the least?

- Steve

Glen writes:

> < I suppose one could make an argument in the form of renormalizing an infinite number of variables. Let's imagine society is describable by an infinitely long math expression (a right hand side only, not implying an equation), where each term has a coefficient, modifying its contribution to whatever set of composition functions the expression uses (+,⨂,⊙, …). But at any given time or locale only a finite number of the coefficients have non-zero value. Then we can think of an apocalypse (or efflorescence) might be a shift in which coefficients have zero values. Maybe the number of non-zero coefficients shrinks (or grows, respectively). Maybe a discrete event might happen to zero out all the non-zero terms and non-zero another set of zeroed terms. Or maybe non-zero-ness smoothly flows around the coefficients. IDK. But if you think this way, words like "apocalypse" kinda lose their intensity. >
>
> The relatively high-level composition functions might involve, say, actions of the government, and the relatively low-level the functioning of a calcium pump.   Counting those functions that involve humans as distinct from other material or forms of life is arbitrary but if all those functions became un-callable due to typing considerations,  then that's one way to define an apocalypse:  Everyone is dead.   If the economy collapses completely, or it becomes impossible to feed most people, that might also reasonably be labeled an apocalypse.  (Simply tabulating what is human-involved means tracking the dynamics of things:  Unwinding the stack of those compositions and doing attribution, that is hard by itself.)   One could do broader attribution to count other species, like with the Chicxulub impactor.   I was thinking more on the boundary of extinction when those that have the awareness to fight or flight do so, and that is an indicator of their general fitness.
>
> On the other hand, if there are variations in the number of highly-correlated deep compositions versus less-correlated deep compositions, that seems more in the realm of politics.   Serious but not apocalyptic. 
>
> Marcus
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ 
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200922/e7347d83/attachment.html>