Discussion
Happy holidays, fediverse!
I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us.
@outer Hey, thank you!
@kissane T-shirt or poster material
"why knenmore clothe dyrer make terrible scream bd smell"
@kissane Thank you for the work that you are doing!
@kissane Thank you for writing this very thoughtful and insightful piece. In my work at the Internet Society, the topic of “Internet resilience” has been a focus for me for the past few years… but in the last year or two I have come to think more expansively that Internet resilience requires *electrical/power* resilience… and also *human* resilience (especially in the form of local technical communities)… but your essay makes me think of the dire need for *information* resilience, too. 🤔
@kissane Thank you for writing this very thoughtful and insightful piece. In my work at the Internet Society, the topic of “Internet resilience” has been a focus for me for the past few years… but in the last year or two I have come to think more expansively that Internet resilience requires *electrical/power* resilience… and also *human* resilience (especially in the form of local technical communities)… but your essay makes me think of the dire need for *information* resilience, too. 🤔
I read the whole thing, carefully and slowly. It is dense, but not overly so. There's a lot to it.
The metaphor is pretty damn apt.
And the/a "solution" (there isn't one, I know, but us humans can only Do Things) is kinda one me and my punk friends have revived from a long sleep: culture making on the ground, person to person, and making those threads that matter between us.
Thanks for that!
@tomjennings I think that has to be part of it—we stabilize against erosion by building up root networks and I think about that all the time.
Localized islands of culture. That's how a lot of punk stuff was made in the first place, out of necessity.
It's also why this modern idea of constantly holding some big picture up as a goal is often bullshit. Internet culture promoted it. Life is lived here and now.
@kissane I have been thinking a LOT about how we only really “know” things in groups via how we build and maintain shared understandings. This is largely because I found out that Peter Naur (yes THAT Naur) wrote an article in like 1984 (https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf) that helped me define a frame about my impulses towards documentation and being thoughtful to future team members (including oneself). So kind of intense to see it expanded to EVERYTHING & being internally screaming YES YES OMG.
@r343l I think the impulse to document everything is perhaps more helpful than we broadly acknowledged! I am bookmarking this for reading asap, ty!
@kissane I have had to fight (gently) throughout my career to argue that documentation that becomes incorrect / outdated is better than NONE because at least that tells future people what we THOUGHT about how code/systems should work or what we planned to do which means future-us can reconstruct past shared mental models to some degree of accuracy, and thus resist loss of knowledge over time (due to attrition, etc.)
@kissane that's good work, Erin. Not just an insight, but one that suggests possible courses of action.
Re: the insight, I was marginally involved with the Makers movement in the 2000s. A common challenge was: can you explain X from prime principles? Almost always no, we could not. (Arduino founder Massimo Banzi, though, claimed he could, for most common objects - a fridge, for example). "Atoms are hard", people used to say. Hence the culture of instructables, documentation, and community.
@alberto_cottica Thank you! And that feels right to me, at least—realistic humility about our cognition seems like a first step toward building toward more stable and resilient ways to know things.
@kissane
Thank you! This was a great read and at the end, I love the thanks to Kathryn Schulz. The Really Big One occupies a permanent tab in my browser for a yearly re-read. Yours might now too.
@kissane
Another tiny correction, about half way through:
sold - solid
"When a series of shocks that are very big and close together jackhammer into a loose flooded substrate, sold ground liquefies."
@kissane Thank you for your deeply insightful article and valuable work. Your thesis on digital foundation densification is truly enlightening, and many others — in different geographies — could and should follow your lead. Happy holidays!
@kissane This, and I want to look you in the eye as I say this, Erin, this is the best and most consequential thing you have ever written. [Of that subset of those things that I have seen.] I'll be returning to this article often.
@kissane I've been thinking about this for three days now and I've only scratched the surface of how it relates to stuff I'm working on, but here's maybe my first usable insight.
The meaning of a given term or concept is an entrenched semantic-memory trace that is abstracted from multiple events in episodic memory. But the weird thing about being linguistic creatures is that the episodic events our semantics are abstracted from
@kissane oh damn, this is tremendous. I've been thinking (more accurately: being recurrently terrified) that "flood the zone" has been the most important tool for upending our knowledge systems, but you've gone way further and with such great writing. Enjoy the holiday and thanks!
@kissane
If I were to extend this metaphor slightly, I'd say that the plate tectonics driving this earthquake is yes all of the changes in the technological process of information, but more deeply the geological tensions built into the concept of the enlightenment — itself a thing constructed from the rubble of at least three societies and used as the bedrock on which to build modernity.
Another thread here is the success of the 50s red scare and cointel-pro at suppressing the practice of peer grassroots political education among the left, leaving the social counternarratives that could have stabilized some parts of the political landscape to obscurantist academic work and it's non-academic counterculture opposites.
@dymaxion I still feel unequipped to fully and properly reexamine the enlightenment (maybe someday!) but full-throated agree on the second half. I had a section about ACT UP in there, but it's now in my 7k-word scarps (sic) file.
@kissane
It's a lot to engage with if you want to dig into the history deeply, but I think there's a lot more to be gained by digging into it broadly instead. Even the very tasty last and loose version that the Davids did in the Dawn of Everything has a lot to say when you read across it into this narrative.
I guess thinking where this came from is useful also from the perspective of accepting the impermanence of this order of knowledge and dreaming about what can come after, even if there's going to be a generation or three between now and then. Understanding this now breaking notion of knowledge as having been just as intentionally designed to suit the needs of power as the disinformation etc wave that's breaking it is interesting.
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@kissane @davidruffner This stuff is very deep. It's very entertaining, but it takes a while to ponder and absorb the multifaceted aspects of what you're saying.
I haven't even clicked all the links you're tying together, and the connections are diverse.
(Also, I haven't programmed as part of a big project in 20 years, now, so it's hidden by time and creaking head bones.)