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How to develop a planetary consciousness ⊗ Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto ⊗ Because your algorithm says so

This week →{.caps} How to develop a planetary consciousness ⊗ Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto ⊗ Because your algorithm says so ⊗ Okorafor, Palmer, and Gibson

A year ago →{.caps} A favourite in issue No.161 was Touching the future, stories of systems, serendipity and grace by Genevieve Bell.

How to develop a planetary consciousness

It’s a fail on my part that I have yet to pay close attention to philosopher Achille Mbembe, who seems to be thinking in directions very relevant and overlapping with this newsletter. Here he’s interviewed for Noema by Nils Gilman and Jonathan S. Blake on the word “planetary,” which Mbembe uses to describe the current state of world-scale interconnection. For him, it “immediately evokes a connection between life and its futures on the one hand, and the Earth on the other hand.”

They look at three “mega processes”: the growing power of high-tech corporations and finance, “technological escalation” (how computation is changing the way we experience the world), and the “contradiction of living in an era of unprecedented mobility and interconnection that is also an era of enhanced borders.” The conversation also covers subsidiarity, nation-states, global governance options, the techne, and risk.

I want to note three things. First, Mbembe, who has a PhD in history at la Sorbonne, talks of “the archive” to refer to the history and culture of the animist metaphysics of precolonial Africa and of “the archives of the whole world, not just the archives of the West.” I don’t know if it’s a typical framing in some fields, but I love it. Second, I’ve recently paid some attention to indigenous futures and indigenous peoples{.internal} more broadly, which has often related to North America and Australasia specifically. There is, of course, quite a parallel with the precolonial archive of Africa by way of a sensibility to the non-human. Third, while he’s not talking about precisely the same thing, it’s also helpful to attach this piece to Benjamin Bratton’s [[planetary-sapience|Planetary Sapience]] (also at Noema) for planet-scale visions.

==Planetary politics should be connected to a politics of life, to a politics of the Earth. That includes all creation: all the people of the world; the creations or works of humanity; the mass of things we have invented; animals, plants, microbes, minerals; and mixed bodies (which is what we all are). In other words, the whole physical universe, all of reality, including (since I’m drawing from the African pre-colonial archive) spiritual and biological energies consistent with the definition of the living world.== […]
“The nation-state is contingent: It is not imperative or necessary. It wasn’t always there, and nothing says it will always be there.” […]
How do we live with irreconcilability? What kind of life is likely to emerge out of conflictive opinions and positions that will never be reconciled? And how can we live with them without opening up the doors to civil war? A civil war not only within specific nation-states, but a civil war at a planetary scale. […]
==The French term for knowledge is connaissance, a word that literally means “being born together.” We have to institute an act of radical decentering that forces us to be born together again. It seems to me that that’s what a new planetary consciousness forces us to undergo — and I believe it is possible.==

Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto

Casey Newton, who bills himself an “open-minded sceptic” about crypto, interviews Molly White, creator of Web3 Is Going Just Great (that’s an ironic title if you didn’t know). Beyond the snark of some of her writing, I think her view of crypto, Web3, and DAOs is quite sharp and well-thought-out. Especially worth a look because the part about Wikipedia (White is a longtime Wikipedia contributor) points at something important; many of the people behind these new projects are either simply trying to make money or trying to fix things they don’t know about (like guiding a community), or that they don’t know enough about (like copyright law).

While it’s on an entirely different ‘lives are dependant on this’ level, there’s a strong parallel, in my view, with international aid, which too often helicopters in help with no knowledge of the situation on the ground. A lot of the stupid mistakes with crypto, Web3, and DAO projects can be looked at in this way; just naively jumping into something they know nothing about. Add to that, of course, the grifters and scammers who know precisely what they are doing, and also add projects with prior knowledge and good intentions, I’m sure there are some. (Reply and tell me!)

When I watch DAOs spring into existence and encounter a lot of the same difficulties we’ve seen over and over again, I often find myself wondering how many members have ever been involved in community-run projects in the past. I think a lot of people are dipping their toes in for the first time, and learning a lot of things the hard way, with very high stakes. […]
==It’s also a deeply complicated subject, and I doubt there are any people who have a deep understanding of all of the topics that web3 projects often have to consider: the technology, sure, but also security, economics, sociology, politics, law… So everyone is operating with various levels of knowledge in some subset of those things, and it’s easy for considerations to be missed.== […]
I am hoping that even if web3 turns out to be a disaster, and I do think it will, some of those people stick around, and keep going with open source software and community-driven projects without all of the blockchain bullshit. That could be very powerful.

Because your algorithm says so

A lot of what I share regarding algorithms is from the technical or ethical side, this one at The Cut touches on that but is taken from the angle of users’ attachment to the apps, and the psychological implications of that. Some of the quotes are a bit, I wouldn’t say disturbing, but it’s getting there. The main takeaway for me is: when might we get algos that aren’t from advertising-based companies, not made for some form of (or exploitable as) surveillance, and might even operate locally to our devices?

As you start watching and liking posts, you go deeper into a niche you’ve co-created with the platform’s famous algorithm. Betancourt knows it sounds intense, but ==she feels like her FYP truly understands her inside and out: “I feel like it’s really a reflection of my subconscious thoughts; even things I never say out loud, it will know.== […]
“My For You Page is literally a culmination of everything that I am,” she says: a “perfect” reflection of her liberal politics and satirical sense of humor, but also of more personal things like her attachment style and trauma. It’s not perfect, of course. No matter the platform, algorithms will never have the full picture of who we are. […]
To Sullivan Facknitz, a 30-year-old grad student based out of Vancouver, ==being perceived by the algorithm felt the same as being perceived by any institution with power — like, for instance, a university.==

Okorafor, Palmer, and Gibson

Randomly, I happened on these three reviews of books by great authors in the same week. On Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor, Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (I finished the first one just hours ago and describing it as “a brilliant, ambitious, exhausting 25th-century epic,” as the author of the review does, is on the money), and a look back at Gibson’s Neuromancer.

Instead of picking one, and since all three include spoilers (although if you haven’t read Gibson’s almost forty-year-old novel yet, don’t blame me for spoilers!!), I’m just linking to all of them with one quote each. Note that unless you are incredibly anti-spoils, they are all readable anyway.

In the eye of the sandstorm: On Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor

Okorafor further notes, “I identify with that idea of viewing yourself as a cyborg. A lot of those ideas are what drive Noor, the idea of accepting and knowing what you are and choosing to move through the world on your own terms.”

Ada Palmer and the weird hand of progressI’m with Voltaire here.

So what would Voltaire make of the modern world? Palmer likes to imagine him showing up in our time. “He would say, ‘Oh my God, you've eliminated smallpox, and look at your women, who are so alive and controlling their bodies! Divorce is so much easier; that's wonderful. And oh my God, you went to the moon, and science fiction is a whole giant genre! And everyone is mostly naked all the time. And geography is weird, and the continents are different, and Europe is one country in a confusing way, and you have Christian-Muslim religious wars and anti-vaxxers,’” Palmer says. ==He would be “amazed and delighted” and “curmudgeonly uncomfortable.”==

William Gibson’s Neuromancer: Does the edge still bleed?

Everything he sees has layers of meaning and speaks of the past, the present, and the future all at once. […]
Gibson has a talent, evident in all his novels and stories, for observing and analyzing the strangeness of the life around us. He writes on the bleeding edge of everything he observes—technology, politics, human society and consciousness—and ==he extrapolates beyond that edge into a future created from observation of our own time, so the path to that future is strange but intelligible.==

Asides

Sent this Dispatch to members{.internal} earlier this week: [[conscientious-urban-tech?note=no|Conscientious Urban Technology, an interview with Bryan Boyer]]. “The founding Director of the University of Michigan’s new Urban Technology program, on the growing importance of technology in cities, data, architecture and design, feedback loops, generalists, and futures.”

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