[FRIAM] on government

[steve smith]

On 8/27/24 11:06 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> Simply having interests, or the courage of your convictions is immune 
> evasion, if I understand.   The problem with news, social media and 
> many kinds of communication is that they risk decreasing social 
> entropy.  People become too similar.   People stop trying because they 
> feel pressured to conform or feel superseded and redundant.  
>  Antidepressants to the rescue..
>
I have become rather enamored of Michael Levin's work, a recent talk he 
gave emphasizing the depth (cellular up through multinational 
organizations) and breadth (human across 
mammal/vertebrate/multicellular/colony/single-cell/synthBio/organoids) 
"apex" of self-organizing systems helps *ME* to think about the 
well-made point you have here (having interests is immune evasion)....

  I (want to?) believe that "enlightened self interest" can be expansive 
enough to span these scale and exoticism spectra?  Allow a more measured 
"immune response" rather than the cytokine storms and anaphalaxis we 
court all the time?

Must *I* storm the capitol if one (or several or many) 
legislators-en-residence don't attend to my personal-petty preferences 
(interests) well enough? Some say yes, but I think they just like 
storming  and tearing down any symbols of "governance" (except their own 
rebel/nazi flags/armbands?).  Must I occupy/capture a city block (or 
more) and demand total eradication of the immune system (defund the 
police) because in fact the immune system can be pretty damned 
discriminating in it's also-indiscriminateness?

Re: antidepressants:  If TV was the opiate of the masses, modern 
streaming shite in it's myriad forms is the Meth (or Fentanyl or maybe 
PCP?) of modern internet culture?   I'm at least half-hooked...  and on 
a good day it makes me think I can fly!  Or not.

> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *steve smith
> *Sent:* Tuesday, August 27, 2024 9:53 AM
> *To:* friam at redfish.com
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] on government
>
> No News == Good News
>
> I'm inclined to agree with this.  In my analogical/metaphorical style 
> I think of "News" as being something like "Inflammation" in an 
> organism or tissue. Inflammation has a role... to warn the organism 
> (or coupled systems) that something is out of "healthy operating range".
>
> I was just listening to congress grilling the Project 2025 architect 
> and it felt *very much* like inflammation (as does most every 
> deliberation of every committee?).  Is P2025 not in fact the 
> 'publicans (or more apropos, MAGA) attempt to establish or move to 
> their idealized form of "governance"?
>
> <off on a RANT>
>
>     Glen has referred to collective humanity as being more like a
>     slime mold than any other "superorganism" (correct me here because
>     I'm sure I am wrong) but I think we (collective humanity) are on
>     the verge of (years, decades?) new level of organization which
>     reflects the global scale of our reach and coupling along with
>     some sense that we have "tried a lot of forms of self-organizing"
>     through alternatively government (nation-states), religion (with
>     global reach), multi-national corporations (starting with Dutch
>     East India and Hudson Bay? ...) and the philosophical
>     underpinnings which inform (sorry Nick) and shape all of the former.
>
>     I see why many whose personal and in-group identity is aligned
>     with a specific religion/politic/branding/etc are
>     offended/threatened by anything "global" scale... to them it can
>     only feel like being over-run by "other" when in fact, they are
>     the "other" who has been doing lots of "over-running".  
>     Renormalization and subsumption and merging (emergently) is very
>     scary and threatening stuff and maybe is indistinguishable from
>     being invaded by hostile powers?
>
>     Evolution is notoriously "inefficient" and even "brutal" by many
>     measures.   I don't know (EricS might, others might?) know what
>     experiments in multi-cellular life and the emergent specialization
>     of the individual (cell) into tissue/organ types must have looked
>     like, but I"m guessing there were a lot more failed than
>     successful experiments? The flailing humanity has been doing in
>     this regard (for 5-15k years) seems like it has gone on forever
>     and has tried "damn near everything" but my suspicion is that
>     before information processing technology emerged
>     (Cuneiform/Gutenberg/Enlightment/Babbage/Telegraph/Enigma/Cybernetics/Iliac-Eniac-Maniac/IBM/Internet/Cray/TMI/Clusters/Mobiles/Clusters/IoTs/BlockChains/LLMs/Autonomous
>     Vehicles/??  we had hardly scratched the surface (or barely begun
>     to tangle our webs?).
>
>     We will either become a functional super-organism which is
>     copacetic with the existing biosphere/Gaia which is the substrate
>     from which our open-ended, wild-ass, radical-nonsense has emerged
>     or we will crash ourselves on top of it or perhaps crash it,
>     bringing our own selves down.
>
>     30-40 years ago I thought Climate Change and even Species Collapse
>     and Sweeping Environmental Disruption was a "Liberal Hoax" or at
>     least an indicator of our collective hubris... thinking we puny
>     little humans could crash a multi-billion year old planetary-scale
>     evolved complex system in (dynamic) homeostasis with nothing more
>     than a few thousand coal fired power plants and a few billion
>     internal combustion engines, etc.   Now I'm pretty sure we've
>     already tipped a lot of systems with an inertial vector sure to
>     take us past some if not all of Rockstrom's Planetary
>     boundaries...   and meanwhile most of us fiddle away, re-arranging
>     the seats of congress (or parliament) or maybe try to sneak some
>     extra supplies into a lifeboat (survivalist hoarders).
>
>     So do we die of an inflammatory/allergic/anaphalactic reaction to
>     our own bad behaviour or are we recapitulating what we call
>     "Cancer" in an organism but in the global
>     noosphere/politicsphere/technosphere/even-biosphere?
>
>     So much of our civilizational/political/economic/religious
>     development seems parallel to Cancer:
>
>         oncogenesis: socio-political-economic-religioius "experiments"
>
>         tumor-development: urban/industrial sprawl
>
>         metastasis: colonialism/missionary-work
>
>         angiogenesis: infrastructure development
>
>         genomic instability: techno-political-economic innovation
>
>         immune evasion: organized crime, cartels, terrorist networks
>
>         clonal evolution/epigenetic alterations: left to the reader
>
>         apoptosis evasion:  Life extension tech/medicine/lifestyle
>
>     I started consuming news really for the first time maybe 8-10
>     years ago and I now live on a diet of Junk News (when I'm not
>     ranting here) and it keeps all my systems inflamed in the same way
>     a diet of Doritos, Mountain Dew, Alcohol, Tobacco, Methamphetamies
>     and Candy Bars might.   Even the best the news-stream has to offer
>     feels like eating every meal from a fast-food drive through...  
>     Maybe Tom J (and others) can help me think/feel better about
>     this... maybe prescribe a Paleo/Keto diet for the mind and soul?  
>     I know people who claim to *only* consume long-form journalism,
>     seems wise.  I at least don't let any social media in directly
>     (only the back-scatter off the mainstream Junk News?)...
>
>     I worry (suspect) sometimes that my posts are little more than an
>     an indiscrimanatory release (expression according to Nick?) of
>     cytokines.   ...buh...
>
> </endRANTforNow>
>
> On 8/27/24 8:10 AM, glen wrote:
>
>     How Telegram's Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr
>     https://www.404media.co/how-telegrams-founder-pavel-durov-became-a-culture-war-martyr/
>
>
>     Mark Zuckerberg says White House ‘pressured’ Facebook to censor
>     Covid-19 content
>     https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/27/mark-zuckerberg-says-white-house-pressured-facebook-to-censor-covid-19-content
>
>
>     What does it mean to "govern"? I frequently hear things like
>     "Democrats actually govern" in contrast to culture warring,
>     grifting, personal branding, etc. I mean, I welcomed Biden's very
>     boring tenure. I'm hoping Kamala is elected and that she'll be as
>     boring as Biden. If I don't hear from someone, it prolly means
>     they're working ... doing their job. No news is good news. But
>     even if Durov's arrest is solely about his complicity by
>     association with the app and his lack of governance of that as a
>     platform, I still kindasorta think the French prosecutor
>     (prosecutors?) is doing a good job of governing in assigning him
>     that agency, his share of the blame.
>
>     Sure, JD Vance is in Thiel's pocket. But most of our neoliberal
>     Democrats are also in the pockets of large corporations or rich
>     vampires. Can it be any other way? Can an American politician
>     *actually* govern? Or is it all smoke and mirrors?
>
>
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