January 2024 Newsletter

Musing more about cascade and complex systems dynamics

These monthly newsletters are an attempt to give a rundown of some of what I’ve been thinking about and working on over the month. I go back and forth between wanting to draw them into a unifying theme or handle it more like a link-list along with free-form notes and commentary.

Time and attention have again made the decision for me on that account… more of the latter than the former. I hope it is of interest.

I’ve been reflecting on “everything changes / everything stays the same” a lot lately, and thinking about what work I’ve done previously is worth taking a second look at, and which should stay in the past. It often feels like all of the work I’ve done over the years is a kind of ship of theseus (another recurring theme of late); the parts are updated and revised, but the overall shape and angle of investigation remains more or less the same across the span of decades. I’ve found entirely forgotten essay fragments written in the late 90s that mirror recent musings, which also calls to mind the motif of the labyrinth.

Here we will simply note that mazes are in relation to directions what betwixts-and-betweens are in relation to opposites. In passing through a maze one is not going in any particular direction, and by so doing one reaches a destination which cannot be located by reference to the points of the compass. According to Irish folk-belief, fairies and other supernatural beings can cause a man to lose his bearings…it is when the voyagers have lost their course and shipped their oars — when they are not going anywhere — that they arrive in the wondrous isles. (Alwyn and Brinley Rees)

In 2017 in the second half of the Narrative Machines chapter, “The 107 Trillion Dollar Suicide Machine,” I wrote:

Soon, the system we built will itself maintain to the parameters of the system, and machines will build machines. It’s just a low hum now, just outside our frequency of hearing. But we can feel it.

There is not, however, a certain inevitability to our doom. We might consider HANDY, a thought experiment developed to analyze sustainability, which concludes, “Collapse can be avoided, and population can reach a steady state at maximum carrying capacity if the rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level and if resources are distributed equitably.” (“Human and nature dynamics: Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.”)

We could soon have the means available for the first time in human history which allow us to no longer be slave on a field, or forager, or be owned by kings or corporations. But we are liable to turn it into a nightmarish hell instead, because our governing, corporate sentience isn’t constructed around collective best interests. When the robots take our jobs, there’s no good reason we should be fighting for table scraps or living on the streets as houses sit empty. But there many of us will be, retreating into the past, not building that bridge to our own future.

They will have us starve rather than let the machines cook us breakfast.

I’ve wrestled for a long time with the insufficiency of analysis to bring about changes in the system being analyzed. The two aren’t linked. Sure, there are more studies being done, more words being written (as I am here). But it’s not hard to see how cloistered off “more studies needed” is from the needs of the present moment.

In that vein, this study floated across my feeds recently. While hitting on many of the points I’ve raised in a previous blog post, “The Cascade” (as well as in many other places), there is some rather questionable thinking going on when it comes to solutions, both in likelihood and possibly ethically.

The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot,

“Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change. In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioural drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot. We demonstrate how current interventions are largely physical, resource intensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviours). We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress. We explore three drivers of the behavioural crisis in depth: economic growth; marketing; and pronatalism.

These three drivers directly impact the three ‘levers’ of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. We demonstrate how the maladaptive behaviours of overshoot stemming from these three drivers have been catalysed and perpetuated by the intentional exploitation of previously adaptive human impulses. In the final sections of this paper, we propose an interdisciplinary emergency response to the behavioural crisis by, amongst other things, the shifting of social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste. We seek to highlight a critical disconnect that is an ongoing societal gulf in communication between those that know such as scientists working within limits to growth, and those members of the citizenry, largely influenced by social scientists and industry, that must act.”

Better late than never? In all seriousness, how exactly are they intending to enact this mass-consent for the global-scale cultural re-wiring that engineering an ideal solution to overshoot is going to demand? I recognize that it’s difficult to try to reverse engineer a practically viable society — as Carl Sagan gnomically put it, “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.”

I don’t have that solution, to be clear. I’m still working on figuring out what the problems actually are.

Despite the overwhelming demand for solutions, we need to consider the way that things occur within the actually existing systems around us — what outcomes do they privilege, and why?

Let’s talk a little more about “systems thinking,” because it has some bearing on what we’re actually talking about here.

Flight of Starlings

One of the books I’ve been reading this month is In A Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems, by Giorgio Parisi, a renowned physicist and 2021 Nobel Prize laureate. It presents an insightful journey through the study of complex systems, using the captivating behavior of starling flocks first as a metaphor, and then charting the process of turning metaphor into “science.” That in particular has been a long-time interest of mine, and it was fascinating hearing about how that process looks to someone with a very different methodology, (thanks in part to his extensive grounding in mathematics, which I do not have).

The book encapsulates many elements of systems theory, as I’ve discussed here: a conceptual framework that emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the components within a system, and the diverse range of hidden connections that weave them in response to one another. To varying extents, all systems are parts of other systems, and scale is a point that needs significant consideration when studying these things. As Parisi discusses, it is quite curious how some patterns and forces remain virtually the same across vast differences in scale — the whirlpool in your tub and the Milky Way galaxy, as an easy example — whereas others are entirely changed when scale changes — the default example being the contrast between the behavior of subatomic particles and pretty much anything in the realm of our direct experience.

This is also true in regard to which physical properties and forces do and don’t map within different domains and contexts, as well their relative scales. The behavior and properties of each element in a system are deeply influenced by their relationships within the system. Just as the movement of an individual starling is meaningful only within the context of the flock, the components of a complex system cannot be fully understood in isolation.

Order and structure emerge spontaneously from the interactions of system components, without external guidance. This self-organization is evident across various domains, from biological to ecological and social systems.

This has been one of the perennial ideas in my life, from my first book (“mother hive brain!”) to present projects, so I’ve found it a fascinating read, most of all when he deals with the heuristics and assumptions involved in developing a theory, which has been very familiar to me despite my experience coming from the more “intuitive” approach of so-called continental philosophy.

When I see the individual events in news stories, it’s very hard not to see the interweaving that’s going on, to ask systems questions, and wonder at what phase transition states are lurking out there. It’s important to emphasize the fact that drivers are frequently not causes, but by and large what’s interesting about individual current events tidbits is the combined puzzle of narrative and systemic trend. (I went into this in more detail in “The Speed of Digital Myth”)

A few of those stories that have been on my radar lately:

Attacks in the Red Sea Are Reconfiguring Global Trade Again, Odd Lots Podcast (Spotify or Apple)

“A string of recent attacks by Yemen-based Houthi rebels on commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea to the Suez Canal have forced global shippers to once again shift how they transport goods. It’s just the latest in a multi-year string of disruptions to global supply chains. It also comes just as pandemic-era supply chain stress seemed to be in the rearview mirror. So what is the geopolitical and economic impact of this latest disruption?”

Last year the cause of interruptions was x, then it’s y, then it’s thanks to the Houthi. Ships are being fired on, as a semi regular event which hasn’t been the case for many decades.

This is a good example of what drivers increasing the probability of other events looks like. It isn’t as if the near-field model of causality (A->B) is at play here, but there will be a constant “whack-a-mole” situation, where seemingly unrelated events happen with greater frequency and/or severity, depending.

We will see over coming years how this trend develops, as it is all too easy to recognize the larger pattern but overfit your speculation re: something more near-field. One of the concerns of course is that by the time it is patently clear what exactly is happening, it’ll likely be too late to reverse the compounding drivers at work.

Wherever we happen to be in this trajectory, it seems increasingly clear that challenges to interconnectedness (the level of complexity required to maintain the infrastructure, as well as the infrastructure required to maintain that complexity) are on the increase, and yet it is remarkable how infrequently you see the question raised of whether this is also a part of overshoot / collapse currently underway?

(My hunch is that it is).

Again I think of the question I raised in The Cascade: what would “tipping points being reached and exceeded” actually look like from the inside, with the understanding that the essentially instantaneous in terms of the material historic record (that which is recorded in bone fragments and bubbles of CO2 in ice) is a matter of decades or even centuries?

Some more breadcrumbs that might indicate where we are in regard to accelerating towards environmental phase changes…

Dr. John Campbell on YouTube covering the “odd” excess death figures over the past couple years:

Life insurance / increase in deaths US/UK 2023

We’re seeing “wartime levels of excess deaths nearly across the board.”

This further ties into many points made in the “the Cascade”: We still see an effort in the press to explain both mortality and ongoing chronic illness as some sort of knock-on effect of “social distancing” and masking, as if the haphazard and short-lived changes that actually occurred in broad-based behavior could possibly be at cause for increasingly alarming statistics pertaining to the debilitating effects of these pathogens.

I have my theories about some of these figures in regard to how many are attributed to Covid vs those that Covid contributed to (not generally counted), considering just how many studies there have been indicating a variety of troubling possibilities in regard to long-term effects, nevermind multiple infections. But that’s beside the larger point when we’re looking at underlying, cross-domain trends.

The linked study above was small, however, there have been literally hundreds like it, and many others that are either larger or consolidate data from many smaller studies — we have to accept that this is dealing with a real effect, even if there remain many uncertainties about how it will play out in the global population over time.

Generally speaking, we’ve been told to expect the following as “climate change” accelerates increased chance of pandemics and increased chance that they are novel pathogens, migrant crises, increased chance of violent conflict (whether locally attributed to ideological or resources), increased amplitude of effects in some of these domains along with the increased incidence, and so on. That seems to be what we are seeing. Not proof positive of anything, but as cross-doman trends go, things are not looking great from where I’m standing.

There are many who would rightly point out that the general trends over the past 200 years in the bulk data seems to paint the opposite picture. Overall dramatic improvement. This is true in many domains. Air pollution. Infant mortality, etc. This is part of a larger discussion I’d rather not get sucked back into here, but it bears mentioning.

While a thorough analysis of long and short-term trends is clearly beyond the scope of these brief installments, in terms of explanatory devices, we should remind ourselves that the time during which we see the great spike in “quality of life” in a statistical sense (notably not representative of the common or individual experience in many places of course) coincides directly with the time-period in which we started to extract massive amounts of energy from the ground.

As we so often find in folklore, the blessing is frequently a curse in disguise. (Sometimes the opposite is also true, although it would seem not so much in this one).

From the 2014 edition of my novel Party At The World’s End,

Imagine, a mere century ago, the first cars were coming off the assembly line. There was an untamed frontier, and that became America’s first unifying myth. America really did git ‘er done. She was willing to do anything to make it happen. Lie, cheat, and steal. Genocide. Anything was possible to the crazy bastard willing to risk it all. At least for those lucky enough to be born rich, white, male, and willing to take on that post- Enlightenment ideal of Manifest Destiny.

A century later, we see what that myth of has delivered: a white hot moment of high petrol fuel, in geological time just a hit of crack rock. The addict knows only ash will remain, that it was their rent money — that they can’t keep going like this. Yet they do, like a cockroach dragging its broken body across the floor, its abdomen an empty husk, most of its legs floundering as if in severe palsy.

We all knew. We were all on the take. We burned through the world like addicts. Like addicts, we used each day to leverage the future, and soon started hocking it as well. Next month’s paycheck. Next year’s. Our children.

Our children’s children. We used one another, as we always have, like users and pushers. The analogy is so sound that it’s facile. Governments wage false wars on drugs because the psychology of user and abuser is one they’re familiar with. No surprise. And yet the shock in our voice was genuine, when all our accounts ran dry, when our friends were no longer assets we could drain. Then comes denial, bargaining. Then comes the mad power scramble. If we want to know the future, just imagine David Hoyle dragging himself slowly across broken glass in the awkward silence between commercial breaks, and you’ve got a pretty good idea.

None of this is based off of niche information — what is striking to me is how little any connections are more widely drawn, given that we’re destabilizing the ecosystems we live within and depend on.

A little snapshot on the war side of these prognostications:

Escalation in the Middle East, the BBC

Civil War in Sudan, The Red Line Podcast, (Spotify)

Sudan is entangled in a rapidly escalating civil war, marked by widespread protests, violent clashes, and an alarming surge in refugees fleeing the turmoil. Amidst this chaos, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swift advances are now intensifying fears of a potential state collapse, one that would likely plunge the region into chaos. With a fragmented government and military embroiled in enforcing their contentious autocratic rule, Sudan’s path to peace appears increasingly precarious.

War in Somalia, The Guardian

Somalia is prepared to go to war to stop Ethiopia recognising the breakaway territory of Somaliland and building a port there, a senior adviser to Somalia’s president has said.

A memorandum of understanding signed on 1 January allowing landlocked Ethiopia to develop a naval base on Somaliland’s coast has rattled the Horn of Africa, one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Somalia claims Somaliland as part of its territory and has declared the deal void. Last Sunday its president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, called on Somalis to “prepare for the defence of our homeland”, while rallies have been held in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, against the agreement.

Genocide debate in Gaza, Parallax Views Podcast, (Spotify)

I spoke with Holocaust and genocide studies scholar Raz Segal, an Israeli historian, about a piece that he wrote in October 2023 for Jewish Currents entitled “A Textbook Case of Genocide”. Segal argues that Israel’s action in Gaza do, in fact, amount to a genocidal assault on Gaza and that multiple statements from various Israeli officials shows the intent. This conversation should be especially relevant in light of Netanyahu’s most recent statements. We discuss international law, Prof. Dov Waxman’s criticism of Raz’s Jewish Current piece, misunderstandings of what genocide is, settler colonialism, other genocides and ethnic cleansings in history, the protests against Israel’s current approach to Gaza, and much, much more.

A far longer list could be drawn here. Haiti. Bosnia. Political violence within the U.S. has been increasing, and very likely is about to get worse. Conflict on its own is hardly a new event in human history, however, the convergence of data points here is something we dismiss at our own peril.

Amidst all the complexity, the only silver lining seems to be that the primary drivers of overshoot are mostly the same: systems that are built around assumptions of limitless growth, and societies that privilege feeding that machine. Things get dark very fast when you start talking about “reducing demand” in the context of a phenomenally unequal, zero-sum society.

As the measurements from 2023 get tabulated and analyzed, it’s clear that it was an “unpredecented” event in terms of heat. We’re probably going to have to start getting used to that word. Berkeley Earth already published the average annual temperature on Earth for 2023 → +1.54 °C compared to the period 1850–1900. Based on the current trend, we will permanently exceed +1.5 °C sometime between 2025–2035. The question on everyone’s mind now is how the coming years will compare.

A few more breadcrumbs…

Antarctic octopus DNA reveals ice sheet collapse closer than thought, (Phys.org)

Mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from 1992 to 2020, (Commentary, The Guardian)

I’d like to turn briefly to further woolgathering in a different direction, following from the ideas I put forth in “What Kind of Smart Is It?” about intelligence, machine and otherwise…

Scientists discover a framework in the brain for organizing the order of things, (Study at Nature.com)

“Ultraslow oscillatory sequences in MEC may have the potential to couple neurons and circuits across extended time scales and serve as a template for new sequence formation during navigation and episodic memory formation.”

I think this is an interesting development. I’m curious to see what developments begin in this direction (if any) re: the embodiment “problem”.

A preprint that is also relevant re: embodied consciousness:

Why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational (preprint)

I’m still chewing on this one, so little commentary for now, but it bears consideration in regard to the ideas already introduced.

Projects:

The Witch-hunters

Last month I put up the player character setting information for our upcoming (online) Fallen Cycle playtest, which provides considerable background on the setting of the kingdom of Chernaya.

Next month I hope to do something similar with one of the campaigns we’ve already run — the cyberpunk crime-noir tinged BLACKOUT 2054 — as it was a favorite of mine, a setting I’d like to return to in the future in one format or another.

I talked more about the reasons why I’ve been investing so much of my development time into RPGs the past couple years here.

Digital Painting WIP

I put in more time than I’d initially planned on this digital painting for the Fallen Cycle website. I was inspired by a couple archetypical ideas (the rat goddess of Varanasi, as well as the ‘widow’ form of Dhumavati) but was also just free exploring a vibe for an upcoming Oyun Lore section on the site.

As with much of my visual work lately, I’ve added LLM facilitated comping into the compositing phase of my existing process, however, for those that care about such things, a considerable amount of scribbling by hand is still involved. I put in about 12 hours on this one, when all was said and done. I’m sure I could put in half that just detailing the tattoos more clearly and any number of other things, but as my interest in it hit a wall, I’m calling it done until there’s a good excuse to keep going.

I know this update has been kind of all over the place, but if it’s any consolation, that’s just where things are at these days. Authenticity, right?

Catch you all next month with more thoughts and WIPs…