https://www.youtube.com/live/HUR8dQM4cBw?feature=shared&t=2071
by @khinsen
John Culkin (1967) : We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
This has been the main axiom/guiding line I have been using for everything I do. I have no way of verifying its validity myself, that is why I call it an axiom.
And Conway’s law… for a societal level of effect.
When I realized that software is a way of shaping the behavior of the user and that of society, I considered it as one of the most important insight I had.
The free software movement is not about the freedom to change the software, but to change ourselves through software.
Similarly for Malleable software!
I want to mention a few pitfalls that I have encountered with regard to this quote.
What we are is determined by us. The environmental effect is minimal.
In reality, our choices are under certain technological and natural constrains, for example, our income, our type of employment. Our attention has been captured through algorithms.
Youtube for example has decided to enable by default the autoplay feature. Even wanna-be dictators like
Donald Trump cannot do what he wants. A small rise on the cost of debt of the government due to the sell off of treasury bonds has made him roll back his tariffs.
Ian Paul Wright has rightfully in my opinion described our capitalist system in a cybernetic view, where even capitalists are not free.
Wrong solutions:
We need to empower the individual and allow her to form free associations with others.
The problem of this local view of reality is that it disregards effects that happen in a global level, see ian’s cybernetic view. Most effects in our society are in fact due to dynamics that can only be seen for this global perspective.
You can read more on this on this post that is a response to an article by Heather Marsh that proposes stigmergy as the solution.
We will build a society , we will decide collectively, and we will be completely free. No other factor will alter our decisions / control us.
Lastly, there is this purity myth among anarchists mostly that we will build a society with no control and no power. This is impossible. What we need is to understand how we are controlled, whether the control is good or bad and alter that control. We cannot eliminate the control and we should not eliminate the control.
For example, traffic lights change the behavior of the drivers, but we need them in some cases. A support system that helps an individual when he needs it is also a form of control. We want to create controls that increase our happiness and our well being.
No system is perfect, we need to be able to have self reflection and change our own controller. This is the loop that we need to build.
Cybernetics is definitely helpful to understand how the world works, and constrains us. Unfortunately, it isn’t widely known, not even among people with university degrees.
Podcast host Nate Hagens uses the term “economic superorganism”, which is perhaps more accessible than cybernetics jargon. I don’t know of course if his listeners get the message.