This was in my weekend magazine last week:
Seeing wetiko on Culture Hack, by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk.
I think it's a really interesting piece at framing some of the big problems. The biggest problems, probably. Beyond all the mechanisms of capitalism, the mindset that underpins it is the worst issue of all. Second worst, actually; worse still is the fact that we regard such things as fundamental: outcomes of how the world works rather than something we have created and imposed upon it, a singular version of things ('As if these peopled systems were just something// we had dreamed beyond the glass//And were not names//we had inscribed upon the world to make it in our chosen image')
Not quite on the same topic, but Ways of Being has a similar take on Alan Turing's vision of computing. We've essentially ended up down one branch of the trousers of time in terms of our definitions of computing, when actually there were more and more diverse ways we could have gone with that. But it's such a part of our milieu, we don't see the water any more.
Some connections that jumped out to me from the piece:
- The reference to the Milgram experiments threw me. They're definitely misrepresented in general, and don't stand for what people think they do. There was some selective editing and presentation of the results, and some big flaws in the original experiment Which all comes down to: it's not evidence for the cruelty of humanity. The Criminal podcast had a good episode on this. Doesn't undermine the article, but snagged me.
- The obsession with growth pointed to (which seems increasingly mad to me as I spend more time in the world -- it just doesn't make sense), and the focus on 'value creation' vs actually doing all the other things we desperately need to do to keep our world running, reminded me of Deb Chakra's Atlantic piece 'Why I Am Not A Maker'. We need doctors, teachers, nurses, those doing the work of family, and instead we reward (sometimes venerate) executives, bankers, etc.
- '"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."' John Muir. I keep coming back to this quote (I've heard it before, but I think I came across it most recently in, shocker, Ways of Being, because that book's such a perfect nexus point for all my other thinking at the moment. The quote's been rattling around my brain since then.) Everything is hitched to everything else. Things are complicated. We, ourselves, are included in 'everything'. We are hitched to everything else in the universe. Within cells interlinked.
- The piece cuts to the thing, the always-thing: the body corporate and how it's just another living being (mostly trying to eat us).