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.
@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 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.
@kissane magnificent. Also, I loved…
“about as much fun as larping Un Chien Andalou” 😆😬
@kissane Larping Un chien Andalou is a really unsettling image that I won't shake for a while. I marvel though at that one nerve ending that at one point reached out, connected, held on for all that time and now let that comparison pop up. The brain really is amazing.
@kissane dear Erin, thank you for your thoughtful paper. The connection between a physical, concrete, event and the abstract world is a good one.
Happy holidays to you.
@WestLawns Thank you!! And I wish the same for you!
@kissane Wonderful article, thank you so much for writing and sharing it. BTW, you're missing a word in this sentence: Not because the circumstances of megathrust earthquakes in fjords are literally the same as the societal problem of collective derangement, but because it gives me new ways to take problem apart and see how the pieces interact.
@crackhappy Thank you! I edited this one with such a smushed brain and it shoooows
@onpaperwings @HEX I am a devotee!
It is roughly 5k words long and some of the densest abstract thinking I've tried to do in years and I started drafting it while still in the last huge year-end push at Unbreaking.org and finished this morning.
I am toast. See you in January!
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