Filtered for Simplicity

Simplicity

Simplicity is difficult, after all, no less than complexity. Both require taste and skill. Neither is less artificial or more natural than the other. Both are necessary for good writing. And when either becomes a forced regimen, exclusive of the other, the results can be only hideous. Good writing is produced not by forsaking the beautiful for the sublime or the exorbitant for the restrained, but by finding new ways of orchestrating the interplay between them.

How to Write English Prose

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Much of good design is refusing to do what’s bad.

Designing a New Old Home: Materials and Hardware

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Elegance is a popular place. Dieter Rams, a massively influential product designer and successor to Bauhaus, popularized the functionalist school of thought, invoked famously in the designs of Apple products. In his Ten Principles for Good Design, Mr. Rams states rule number 10 is “Good Design is as little design as possible”, explaining it’s “less but better”:

“because it concentrates on the essential aspects and the products are not burdened with inessential”

In Praise of Messy Design

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Counterpoints: Messiness and Complexity

First off, that last link in the previous section: In Praise of Messy Design

Yet, when I meet with other experienced game designers, we find ourselves admitting to fascination with decidedly inelegant game designs, and envious of those designers that permit themselves this kind of latitude. ... Maybe I enjoy messy design because it allows for more variety. When you cut away the unnecessary and create only the ‘critical’ gameplay and systems, you are following a design path to its logical endpoint. There only needs to be one Threes because it is already perfect; you can derive variations, but you cannot improve on it (sorry 2048). There is only one perfect toothbrush handle.

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A previous post on here, It's Complicated:

There's a growing tendency to treat simplicity as a proxy for correctness

which links out to more of Sarris's writing, also.

'Perpetual motion meatball'

Recognising the calls and songs of even a few species of birds can enrich one’s understanding of the world by revealing an almost forgotten aspect of the grammar of reality

This is a fabulous read by Steven Lovatt, on the Guardian from a couple of years ago. It gets at a lot of the joy I feel about birds.

'The Earth could hear itself think': how birdsong became the sound of lockdown

That reference to 'the grammar of reality' is something I've talked about before, perhaps even on here. Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing was a magnificent read a few years back (probably a similar time to when the Guardian piece was published, actually, though I missed the latter at the time). She talks about the idea of enriching our layers of perception -- adding things that weren't there before [for us].

This has been my experience. The shift from maybe barely noticing birdsong at all, to hearing it, to not having to think about what a particular bird is -- the sound of a particular song becoming a direct referent for a particular bird. It's amazing to experience this shift, for multipel reasons.

Becoming aware of birds has been very enriching for other reasons. I have never lived somewhere where I have felt so connected to the area. Much of that, for me, comes down to birds. Knowing which areas are frequented by different birds. Seeing the hidden places where they nest. Forming relationships with the nonhuman inhabitants of the area.

That article above also contains some of the most magnificent descriptions of birds, and some of my favourite writing I've seen recently, hands down. Just:

Wren Tiny, brown and mouselike, with cocked tail. Bustles low down, too fast for the eye. A tuft of tumbleweed on the trellis. A perpetual motion meatball. Flight direct, whizzing, weightless, like a shuttlecock on a tiny motor. Sings repeatedly from cover, very loud, and tart, ending on a rapid trill.

It's incredible. 'Perpetual motion meatball.'

Blackbird Dark of feather and mien. Breeding males black with marigold bill and eye-ring. Females leaf-litter brown with lemony bill and an undercoat of speckles on the belly. Emits tetchy clucks, hysterical rattles and a sinister ventriloquial whistle. Spring song is glorious – rollicking and woozy. Spot them on aerials at dusk.

More at the link. I have ordered his book.

Monday Morning Miscelleny

Monday morning, at the beginning of another cold snap. Our fish aren't happy about it. The cold, that is -- they seem largely indifferent to Mondays.

We have a pond with goldfish and a couple of koi. Most of them are defective in one way or another. We have to have one or other of them inside in a big plastic tub a few times a year. For one of them, that looks to be becoming a more permanent arrangement.

Very temporary setup. The pot was to try to give her some cover/something other than a featureless tank while we got hold of a few plants.

She's had persistent buoyancy issues -- floating on the surface of the water, often flat like she's actually dropped dead -- for quite a while. We've become more zen about it over time, since we've had a vet look at her and there's nothing that can practically be done about it, but ahead of the big temperature drop last month, I noticed she had a bunch of red sores and infected patches. We got her inside and warmed her up.

They're very sensitive to temperature. Their immune systems are at their peak at something like 17 celsius. They mostly 'endure' winter. It turns out Hawthorne has a long-term health condition which just makes her extra sensitive to it, so may have to winter inside from now on.

(We've not been able to do anything about one of the others, who seems to be spending winter lying in various dramatic poses, looking sad.)

We were surprised to find the sheer level of personality that fish have. Contrary to all the myths of empty-headedness and evaporating memories. They behave as individuals, are social, and need stimulation. I don't know if they recognise us, per se, but they're certainly very aware of us, and will gather at the window in the morning, demanding food.

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A jay on the bird table this morning. That's always a good start. (A Eurasian Jay, for any of you who might be more familiar with the blue jay.) Corvids apparently prefer flat tables rather than feeders. I was thinking we'd get the local magpies. But the jays seem to have staked their claim, about which I am very happy.

Archive photo. But same jay, same table.

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Something can be wrong or at least inadequate on the sentence level, yet on the paragraph or page level, be faithful and correct. A rotten move in a short piece of reportage, the only move in a non-fiction book.

The sentence level (Against)

This resonated with me. Even writing very loosely and informally on here, it's easy to become obsessed with accuracy in miniature. Not saying the wrong thing, or an incorrect thing -- but also not saying too imprecise a thing. Which actually generally doesn't help the process of getting stuff down, nor the quality of what you turn out. Obviously there is still a need for due care and attention, but that's not the same thing as an obsessive caveating in the micro.

The slow, creeping dark of winter

I had something to write about this morning, but decided partway through (having been interrupted by having to go chase a cat) that it wasn't something I was comfortable writing about. You can go read about it here, anyway, and it says most of what I would have added: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/rpg-fans-irate-as-dd-tries-to-shut-its-open-game-license/

In brief, though, I'm not sympathetic to WOTC at all on this. A key part of the stated purpose of the OGL was to 'encourage the kind of network externalities that would make the D&D rules system more popular, thus increasing sales of the game's core rulebook and allowing others to profit off of content based on that system.' It's deeply churlish, to put it mildly, to turn round at this stage and try to reap more of the rewards while throwing off any of the responsibilities.

Rainy here today. The slow, creeping dark of winter. The birds seem active, though, but I suppose they have to be.

I'm coming off about five days of semi-insomnia, where I've managed to get only about 50% of the sleep I need, for no discernibly obvious reason. That broke last night (which chemical intervention), which is only a mild improvement. It has made returning to work needlessly trying.

Today, I am this fox:

Christmas, but for birds

We went out for a walk on Christmas day. It was gloriously quiet, even in the fairly dense part of London in which we live. What struck me was how many birds there were, hopping around openly and singing, even as late as 10am.

There are plenty of birds around us anyway -- we spend a significant amount of time watching and feeding them -- but it was a joy to see them just... owning the streets a little. Within an area of a few square meters, we could see something like 10 different species, and Merlin (the fantastic bird ID app from Cornell Labs) picked up 6 or so different songs all at the same time. We saw two woodpeckers, poking around one of the trees.

I wonder if birds effectively end up with 'festivals' aligned with significant human ones in a given region. Not things they are observing, as such, but odd days that come around only a few times a year where the human behaviour and movement patterns that shape where birds can go, and when, are so wildly different that an usual amount of space gets ceded to them.

You can see this a little on a week-to-week basis. The quiet of Sunday morning in parts of a city lets the birds range a little more freely, for a little longer. I've often wondered how sensitive they are to these patterns? They're certainly smart and aware enough, en masse, to identify them. Do they anticipate them? (terrible Band Aid music plays 'Do they know it's the week-end at alllll?')

And even if they can discern patterns on the scale of the week, can they anticipate the ones that come around only once a year? Do they struggle to sleep, the night before human Christmas, knowing that they have a whole day to romp around more-or-less as they please? Or does it come as a strange shock, every year, to find the streets so oddly unpeopled? Do they think they've taken over at last? (The crows probably do.)

Obviously it's absurd to posit the idea that crows might celebrate Christmas (though we have taken to bringing them a Yule feast of grapes and eggs). But the idea that they might be aware of the specialness of a day, even if it's one that exists as the shadow to something in the human calendar, actually makes a lot of sense to me.

The Secrets of Cities

Cities have secrets. Their ways and nooks and systems. I think we only get to learn a few of them, really. There are probably people out there who have something approaching a holistic understanding of cities, but it's such a tangled nexus of disciplines and secrets, I struggle to imagine anyone has the truest pictures at this points.

Cities are our triumph and our folly. Absurd hyperobjects which we (some of us) live as part of, with their structural complexity having grown and grown in multidimensional layers.

Look at the street furniture around you. The manhole covers and junction boxes. The strange, unexplained objects which surely must have some purpose. The sprayed markings on the pavement. The little riveted metal points around the place.

They aren't actually arcane, and plenty of people understand them -- though I expect most who pass by and benefit them have no idea what they are. A few years ago, I went a bit mad in Toronto and did a bunch of writing about this.

This is part of what I mean when I say 'secrets' -- codes and systems that we can learn to read in part.

I'm also, as I so often am, talking about birds. There's a street near my house which is really good for birds. Starting in early summer, swallows come to nest in the roofs of the houses (apparently, they have been doing so for more than twenty years). There are dozens of little cavities in which starlings nest, easy to miss until you see them flying in and out to build or to feed their young. When you watch pigeons long enough, you can identify the spots they're going to love to lurk.

Infrastructure. Animals' sharing of 'our' space. Architecture. Logistics. Desire lines. Movement patterns. Markets. Green spaces. Clay.

I always want to learn more. I think a lot of what I want to learn is really about cities. I know a lot more now than I did a few years ago -- can see and read a lot more of the city. But it's nothing, really. Peering through a gap in a hedge at something strange and beautiful.

Look, I made you some content

Re: this post on 'content': https://warrenellis.ltd/mc/content/

I've seen various pushback on the word 'content', used thus, in recent years. It's definitely a reponse, most proximally, to the Marvelification of everything. People ask over and over again, torturously, 'are video games art' (yes). This is sort of the opposite end of that -- deploying terminology which, intentionally or otherwise, shifts the emphasis away from these sorts of works -- written, visual, audible, etc. -- as being works of art and instead places it on their being works of entertainment or commerce.

Here's the thing, though. As much as I do recognise this trend and people's irritation with it -- I do think there is at least an element of it driven by the corporatisation of everything -- I still find it a useful and specific term.

The end of the first paragraph of this post is an example of this. I was groping around as to what to refer to these... things as if we have to omit terms like 'art', etc. 'Content' did actually feel like the natural choice there for me (instead, I went with 'these sorts of works' which feels functional but vague).

Perhaps my tolerance for this term comes from working in video games -- especially on a live service game. The idea of a 'content schedule' makes absolute sense, and I don't see another obvious word that could plug into that gap while describing the same thing. It's all writing, but it's not all all writing. The content (yes, content) takes different shapes, so we can't straightforwardly call it 'stories' or something like that, either. 'Content' feels right.

I'm all for using terms thoughtfully, and yes, it feels kinda meaningless to stick the label 'content' on anything when that's not what we really mean. But sometimes, we do mean content, particularly in terms of recognising the status of something as a mixture of art, entertainment, and commerce.

The Box and Ox

I'm reading The Box (Marc Levinson), a book about the history of containerised shipping. Some of the early chapters focus on Malcom McLean, often credited (inaccurately but not without reason) with inventing containerised shipping.

Something that stuck out to me were the eerie parallels with certain lonE skuM who have been in the news a lot lately. McLean was:

• A businessman, not an engineer or inventor
• Much wealthier/more propped up by family influence and the resultant opportunities than his later attempts at spinning a personal history would suggest
• Kind of an asshole, reading between the lines
• Known for doing the unexpected -- his insight, such that it was, was in rethinking what shipping companies did (as the book points out, they were generally thought of as being in the business of operating ships rather than moving cargo, and the mindset shift was significant)
• Interested doing very sketchy things to circumvent troublesome government regulation
• The bar-setter for how leveraged buy-outs happen today

Some of it is quite uncanny.

Thoughts on this:

• This has given me (vomit) slightly more appreciation for Musk. Specifically in the context of the valid criticism that's often thrown at him: he hasn't really invented anything. Which is true! It's wrong to present him as some visionary engineer or inventor! But also, McLean did still do something significant without 'inventing' anything in the sense we mean.
• (That comparison dies pretty quickly on the lips, though. The best thing I can really say for Musk, even through this lens, is that he's brought a bunch of smart people together at SpaceX and, in spite of his horrible management style and general lack of competence exhibited these past weeks, managed to not get in the way too much. I do wonder, though, what a less horrendeous person with access to the same resources might have enabled to happen. Though, I suppose you don't get those resources without being a horrendous person.)
• Unlike Musk (and this is where you can breathe a sigh of relief as I reveal I haven't had a brain transplant), McLean seems to have actually known what he was doing and been moderately smart and savvy as a businessman. He was obsessed with cost-cutting and finding ways of eking economies out of a legacy business. And he was good at it. Box feels like it's trying not to be hagiographic about McLean, but there is a certain element of these stories at a remove that still do make them feel quirky and inevitable, and thus the man feel like more of a visionary, whether or not that was actually true. We basically write these myths about Musk now*, though, but at least people seem to be wise to his general incompetence as well.
• And the leveraged buyout thing, I mean come on:

National City's headquarters on wall street, wits-ton advised that McLean himself would have to convince the bank's top loan executives to approve the loan. The bankers told McLean that the loan was too risky and Wriston too inexperienced. "He's just a trainee," one of them said. "He may just be a trainee, but he's going to be the boss of both of you pretty soon," McLean shot back. As McLean remembered later, "They said, 'Maybe we'll take another look."

The loan was approved. But the deal was still not done, and a competing buyer, also financed by National City, had grown interested in Waterman. To avoid any chance of a slipup, the lawyers decided that the entire transaction needed to be completed simultaneously. On May 6, Waterman's board and McLean's bankers and lawyers convened in a Mobile boardroom only to realize that the board lacked a quorum. One of the Wall Street lawyers quickly took the elevator downstairs, stopped a passerby, and asked whether he wanted to earn a quick fifty dollars. The man was promptly elected a Waterman director, making a quorum. The Waterman board members then resigned one at a time, with each being replaced by a McLean nominee. The new board immediately voted to pay a $25 million dividend to McLean Industries, and with a phone call the money was wired to National City. As the meeting broke up, lawyers for the opposing bidder served the board with legal papers to prevent the transfer of the dividend, but the bank already had its money and McLean had Waterman. Typical of McLean's financial acumen, he laid out only $10,000 of his own cash to gain control of one of the country's largest ship lines through what later became known as a leveraged buyout. "In a sense, Waterman was the first LBO," Wriston recalled

McLean's prize was a formerly debt-free company whose bank loans and ship mortgages soared to $22.6 million at the end of 1955, nearly ten times its $2.3 million of after-tax income.

—The Box, Marc Levinson, p.61

Thread -- The Trust Thermocline

I'm not really 'doing' Twitter any more, but here's an interesting thread I came across the other day via a comment on Ars Technica:

https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904

The concept is the 'Truth Thermocline', i.e. a sudden step-change in how the erosion of user trust suddenly and catastrophically manifests as action.

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

I suppose the mechanism here is that users have limited ways of signalling their dissatisfaction, particularly in the 'actionable negative' context, except for the high-energy, high-impact method of cancelling their subscription, or whatever the equivalent is. This makes it very much a lagging indicator, and all the soft-shoe buildup to that is 'much harder to take seriously' for the organisation at large.

But it all reaches critical mass at once, and the bill comes due.

Monochronic time

The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture.

This caught my interest yesterday (originally via the superlative Sentiers newsletter). It covers a bunch of varied ground, but particularly contrasts the tendencies of 'monochronic' and 'polychronic' time and the things they enable and disable (or valorize and denigrate).

This resonates a lot with me, and taps on a point that's cropped up a lot over the past few years, which is that our assumed social structures around time, work, and output aren't in any way 'natural' -- they're things we have adopted (or, really, had imposed upon us), but which it's hard to regard as anything other that 'water' (as to a fish). The article name-checks ADHD specifically, for instance, which is an example of something which is not necessarily an issue for someone in and of itself -- it becomes an issue when they're required to fit into a narrow social box designed for an entirely different neurotype.

By contrast, I think I am actually very well set up for a monochronic working culture. My own brain weirdnesses play some part in this, but they definitely make me very good at the demands of monochronic work (at least without some of the self-defeating negative cruft the article gets into) and also monochronic structure makes my brain feel good.

(It's not always personally good for me, in that the more I have been able to lean into these tendencies, as powerful as they are, the less flexible I have become in other spheres.)

Privilege and situational flexibility obviously play a role here. The article does get into the various social assumptions around what has enabled monochronic time to become what it is to us, namely, depending on and/or rendering invisible certain other forms of labour, usually around caring and maintaining (e.g. all those famous novelists who were famously prolific, but had their wives acting as their combined secretaries and homekeepers).

I -- at least as far as I can honestly see -- do not depend unfairly on other people's labour to work this way. But there are always other vectors of privilege at work that let me devote all this time and energy to working in this manner and the latitude and autonomy to change how I work.

I'm running out of time for this post (case in point -- I'm time-boxing this blog draft so that I can move on to the next thing in my schedule at the appointed time), but I've also found myself starting to think more seasonally in the past couple of years. This might just be an aging thing, or derived from a greater understanding of the flex and flux in my own energy levels, but I'm more aware of wanting to turn the dial up and down at different times of the year. Something to read on and explore more.

The cognitive dissonance of meat

CN food and meat for this post

We've been cutting down on meat again recently. We weren't eating much before the pandemic, but the various lockdown food logistics made me less picky about it in the short term, and it's taken time to have the spare brain cycles to reapproach this.

I actually don't have any issue with eating meat in and of itself, but there are some very real factors that change that. My concerns generally hinge on environmentalism, but even more compelling for me is trying to square the cognitive dissonance of how I feel about and relate to non-human forms of life. At a fundamental level, we need to acquire energy with specific nutrients to sustain our bodies, and that fairly inevitably involves deriving it from other organisms in our environment. But there are some more pressing factors of modernity which cut in, here.

First is our level of technology and abundance. We actually have the means to subsist on less meat, and the level of abundance means there are few barriers or restrictions how much meat we can/will consume if we do so without reflection.

I use 'us' here in two senses: first, humanity at large, but also, importantly, us as in 'me and my immediate family specifically'. The distinction matters. It's too easy to make a moral issue of meat consumption from a comfortable middle-class perspective, ignoring the huge disparity in food availability both globally and in this country. So, this is not to moralise, or ignore other people's realities. But it is true for me that I have the latitude to choose, and therefore, I think, a greater moral burden.

The second is that the real problem is the scale at which humanity produces and consumes food. A lot of this hooks into core capitalist and consumerist problems, but it all amounts to: producing meat ethically at scale while sustaining existing expectations around personal consumption habits is impossible. (Just think about how much more it costs to produce and buy high-quality, more ethical meat.)

All of which pushes me to be more conscious in how I consume meat.

This isn't as simple for me as just 'giving it up', though. I have various other food issues that means further narrowing what's available for me to eat can cause problems, particularly in contexts where I don't have such direct control of my food prep and consumption. There are also other concerns with meat-alternatives or other non-meat foods that have different environmental or ethical problems.

So my current planning is around the sourcing and quality of the meat I consume. I'm being mindful of quantity on top of that, but generally being properly selective on these criteria has that effect anyway.

My main heuristic is whether I'm able to find reasonable-sounding information about the sourcing and production of the meat that I buy. I don't always have the context and expertise to clearly evaluate that information where it exists -- or guarantee that it's not being misrepresented in some form -- but the ability to find such information from a restaurant or butcher in the first place (with no obvious red flags) is a shortcut towards a certain kind of quality.

In practice, this has worked out to us largely not eating meat (except when travelling where there are few or no other options), and buying and cooking it only on occasions where the extra labour is worth it.

(I also feel better where I can use a piece of meat more thoroughly, e.g. buying a couple of pork chops, turning them into a few dishes, making stock from the bones, and picking the leftover meat off during the stock-making process for another meal. It fosters a kind of connection with the thing you're actually cooking, and feels vastly less wasteful.)

Technical solutions to social problems

I've started going back to the gym. At last! It has been, apparently, 10 months since my previous session. And there weren't that many then, either, since the year+ gap enforced by, well, you know.

Annoyingly, I was in my best shape of the past decade before the pandemic kicked off. That is a... pretty small loss, all things considered, but having spent so much time being knocked off my training game by this and that and LIFE, it had felt good to get back to that point.

I enjoy picking up heavy things and putting them down again. I think because I'm hypermobile, highly dynamic forms of exercise tend to fill me with... a certain anticipatory dread at best and major physical discomfort at worst. So, something focused and singular that also plays well with other aspects of my physiology... is fun. I struggle to motivate myself to do most other forms of exercise with the same obsessive regularity.

One thing that's struck me about this return to the gym is that the only thing that puts me off from going is a relatively minor (but subjectively massive) social awkwardness element. Specifically: if someone is using one of the (annoyingly finite) pieces of equipment I need, the thought of asking them when they'll be done and/or putting myself in the proverbial queue becomes an oddly insurmountable challenge.

I think it's a combination of a) loud background music/noise, b) a situation with no established social script, and c) me being there for a task that requires a mostly interior focus, being asked to mode-switch to an exterior one. I would mostly rather chew my own arm off than try to have that awkward non-conversation every damn time I go to the gym. It is, in effect, enough to put me off going altogether, and I have done my best, most consistent training in the past when I've had a schedule that allows me to go the gym at unorthodox times.

My instinctive response here is one that annoys me, which is the 'techno-solutionist' approach of having some external queue-layer, the digital equivalent of putting a coin down on the pool table. Tap a button on your phone, put yourself next in line for the squat rack, or see how long the wait is. But really, that's a distraction. All this actually is is a 'talking to people problem', and solving it by other means is just a bit silly.

Anyway, I was reminded of this partly by 'This DC-Area High-Tech Toilet Startup Wants to Solve the Public Bathroom Problem', which is also an extremely silly technological solution to a social problem (though in this case, 'social' in the 'vital public infrastructure' sense).

God, but it's so silly. "The sanitation industry is one of those that has not really been touched by much innovation and disruption". It doesn't need disruption! It just needs some modicum of public investment to accommodate a basic bodily function! Why are we putting up with this and coming up with tortuous solutions when it's so fundamental and basic?!

Anyway, as an antidote to that, look back to Belonging for some nice Simon Sarris writing which is relevant here. Going back to a space, again and again, is in itself a valuable thing for building familiarity and a sense of belonging. (Maybe it'll even be enough to get me to talk to a person.)

Belonging

A rare saturday blog, for two reasons. Firstly, I'm off next week, and will not be blogging (at least on a schedule), and secondly, I just read an article which had some nice connection points with yesterday's shard.

There exists a certain kind of romanticism to be found even within the everyday belonging, though it often seems to hide from sight. Is it possible to cultivate this familiar mysticism of the world?)

Familiarity and Belonging, Simon Sarris

The article is actually about belonging in places, and the significance of familiarity, repetition, existing in spaces without the expectation of novelty. But it did chime for me with the idea of finding beauty in the everyday -- in what's here, with us, now.

The article did speak to me more generally, though. I'm not someone who particularly craves travel, though I enjoy it in moderation. We've started making repeat trips to a particular place in the forest, which initially came out of expedience and limited access/energy during the pandemic, but has taken on a pleasant quality of its own. When talking about it, I've always felt some implicit need to apologise, almost, for travelling without novelty. The way this article recasts that -- that familiarity is specifically a good in and of itself -- is something that helps me a lot.

Beauty in the everyday

If you happen to be a Fallen London subscriber (or want to be! Start playing the game, it's excellent! https://www.fallenlondon.com/), you can catch my first 'Exceptional Story' for Failbetter, A Columbidaean Commotion on there this month.

Even if you have nothing to do with Fallen London, however, you are mandated to go and check out the utterly incredible poster for the story, done by Toby Cook.

It's about pigeons. As anyone who follows me doubtless already knows, pigeons have become somewhat of a pandemic obsession (birds generally, really, but pigeons are something special). I know they get a bad rap (which is partly what the story is about), but they're really so remarkable. I know that I never really looked at them that closely before. It's true that many of those in cities are in poor condition -- but that's generally down to poor living conditions and no access to clean water, as the birds actually have very good hygeine standards -- but pigeons just really are beautiful when you start looking.

The city pigeons we see are feral versions of the wild rock dove. Pigeons were humanity's first domesticated birds, before even chickens, and we've spent a long time living with each other. Now, they're largely abandoned (hence 'feral') and often marginalised in city spaces (I know they can behave in pestish ways, but they are not inherently pests). They nest in buildings edifices, alcoves, crevices, because they're reminiscent of their natural cliff environments. They are really remarkable flyers.

I'll say this for pigeons, though, even if you're sceptical: if you can find them beautiful, it will make your life better. Just being able to see them, everywhere you go around cities, pottering, soaring, existing as a bunch of wonderful feathery idiots, that will add so much to your life. To turn something banal into something that's a daily delight and pleasure. The art of noticing, seeing, connecting with the world of which we are. To find beauty in the everyday.

Photo by: Ash McAllan

Peeling back the skin

A read from the weekend:

Murmurations: Returning to the Whole, adrienne maree brown, Yes! Magazine. Encountered via the Dense Discovery newsletter.

One of the first steps we can take towards generating internal accountability is to develop an assessment of why the world is as it is. This requires us to leap from the uninformed faith we have in the societal myths we were given as children, to the informed faith that we need in order to co-create the real world as adults. This informed faith is based not in cultural myths, but instead in lived experience, political education, and analysis. And this informed faith can allow us to embark on the right assessment, which then helps us find the balance between understanding the systems that have most deeply shaped us, and the responsibility we have over our own lives, choices, and impacts.

This makes me think back to something I linked last week: Seeing wetiko (in The Great Mind Virus).

How does this connect for me? I'm thinking of the impetus to see beyond social illusions -- see the water in which we swim for what it is. To move towards new systems that account for more than ourselves. To learn to unthink our core conceptions of politics and governance.

The fragmentation that has resulted from colonial constructs of race, gender, class, and power has wounded many of us so deeply that we identify more with the wound than with any experience of wholeness or oneness. Because we identify with the wound, we fight against each other over differences that don’t need to be battles. We opt in to these constructs, often without conscious choice.

I think what resonates for me in this piece is the idea that we are a species in denial. The articulation of the need to engage with that in meaningful and constructive ways without shying away from the harm of it all.

I want to live in a world where humanity has a more generous, encompassing view of what the world is and our place in it. I don't know how we get from here to there, but it feels like what's talked about here -- cultivating the ability to dispel illusions and accepting accountability -- is a fundamental part of it.

It hadn’t always. She’d grown up with flags everywhere, learning Founding Fathers history on base. To her, America was a myth, a dream, a story people told, and like a lot of first impressions, she had not realized just how right that one was until it was too late. ... Pop had fought for this country, and so had Mom in a sense, and so had all the beautiful, broken, uniformed boys and girls she’d grown up idolizing on base. But it was not her country. She knew it only through bad history and untold stories in languages Pop had not wanted her to learn. You had to work to know this place as it truly was—she’d had to work, in her own heart, to peel back the skin of what she was taught. To excavate.

—Max Gladstone, Last Exit

The Great Mind Virus

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).

No such thing as a nut

'There's no such thing as a fish.' So goes the podcast name. The same is true for other things, like seagulls and panthers.

I mean, it's obviously nonsense intuitively, but the slightly pedantic-but-interesting point underlying it is that there is no singular thing in our established animal taxonomies that constitutes a 'fish' or a 'seagull'.

It reminds me of the smart-arse point that peanuts aren't really nuts. Sure, that's true, in that in the botanical domain, 'nut' has a specific meaning to which peanuts do not conform (from memory, they are 'legumes' in this context, but don't quote me on that). But in the naming and referencing of things, we draw a distinction between what constitutes a 'botanical nut' and a 'culninary nut'. And it's usually perfectly clear what we're talking about when we refer to these things outside of specialised domains. ('I told you I was allergic to nuts!'/'Yes, but peanuts are legumes!') Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is about knowing not to put one in a fruit salad.

It's all about frames of reference -- the context in which we're referring to a thing. And, perhaps more broadly, the idea that there's some perfect taxonomy that correctly captures and refers to all things, and language is failing when it doesn't adhere to that specific taxonomy, regardless of context. Whereas context is just a huge part of how we communicate, and language without context is worth a whole hell of a lot less.

I'm tired and don't have the time or brain to fully draw connections here -- but this is something that ties up with various things in Ways of Being, and Can draw the lines so neatly as we like them -- the idea of maps and models overtaking a more generalised reality.

Corpus Corporate

Dear friend Jack shared a reference to 'egregore' with me the other day, which is a word I think I lost about seven years ago. There's been this concept-shaped hole in my memory around a specific term for 'collective thought manifesting an entity', but it's long slipped me by. It's not necessarily the same thing as a Pratchettian belief model, but it certainly rhymes with it.

(Compare tulpa.)

Jack shared it via this tweet in particular: https://twitter.com/arachnocapital2/status/1551364109970526208. Corporations are, most certainly, organisms in their own right.

Charles Stross:

Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.) —Invaders from Mars

I was going to write a whole thing here about my current thoughts, but it turns out I wrote a full-on essay on this back in 2018, so I'm just going to link to that:

The Cthulhu Corporation, alt/thought/process ed. 87

It runs longer than these shards tend to, and some of the specifics/examples are a shade out of date now, but still fundamentally sums this up and is worth your time if this topic interests you.

James Bridle does talk about this in Ways of Being -- once we start expanding our definition of intelligence (as we damn well should), how can we regard a corporation as anything else?

BUT IT ALSO reminds me of something recently from Dan Hon, talking about a paper titled 'If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious'. That's here: https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s12e20-dan-really-are-you-even-reading-what-youre/, under the heading 'Materialism'.

Anyway, this was going to be a simple one, and in fact it's involved double the normal time I spent on these digging into the archives and cross-referencing stuff. But that itself has been interesting.

'Can draw the lines so neatly as we like them'

Taxonomies are immensely valuable in helping us categorise things and form mental shorthands to understand reality. They can also be immensely misleading and constraining when we forget what they're actually for.

Taxonomies -- literally 'the arrangement of names' -- gives us frameworks, lenses, boxes into which to sort things. (They are also a tool, per yesterday's post, by which the state can more effectively control the world -- which is both a desirable and undesirable thing.) But, also per yesterday, taxonomies are not themselves the world. The map is not the territory

This legibility disaster pattern repeats itself across many domains. Scott gives us dozens of examples spanning urban planning, agriculture, census-taking, more. The failure follows a Procrustean pattern:

1. Make a map to accomplish systemic goal

2. Reality is too complex and refuses to fit into map

3. Remake reality in the image of map

4. Systemic collapse

–Soulbinding Like A State

The more we treat taxonomies like they are the territory, the more we err into decisions (personal and systemic) that push towards systemic collapse. The more we become averse to the messy complexity that is life itself, the more we cleave towards simple solutions as seeming more appealing (because complexity is hard; but It's Complicated).

This all sounds very governance- and systems-focused, but consider how this applies to, say, gender or sexuality. Taxonomies ('labels') are useful for specific things, but when we treat them like they are reality rather than a handy abstraction of it, we run into serious problems. Also, we must also remember that taxomies are inevitably created by people. Lots of these are just those that we happen to have inherited from previous people, often startlingly recently. And because they have been part of our milieu growing up, we treat them as if they are somehow foundational parts of reality itself.

I think this also impacts the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The taxonomies and labels that we accept tend to limit our imagination -- or our ability to really listen to the story someone else tells about themselves, instead tripping over its representation in simple terms. See: New Deep Narratives: we need new stories of what it means to be human, which I linked back in Imaginations of Politics and Governance.

It's also representative of how we view and engage with the world more broadly. James Bridle talks about this cogently and interestingly in Ways of Being.

(I actually wrote a poem last month, largely by accident, and inspired by my reaction to a few things, Ways of Being being one of them. I'm still figuring out what to do with it, so it's not available anywhere yet. But this post's title is drawn from it.)

Legibility of life

Lots worth thinking about in this piece: Soulbinding Like A State, which I came across via Sentiers. Much of it folds neatly in with a bunch of thinking about governance and politics, but I wanted to call out one thing that ran a bit tangential to that:

Scott details a pattern of disaster that repeatedly manifests around legibility. His opening example is from the late-18th century discipline of “scientific forestry”.

A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this mess? Much easier to clear the forest and plant a legible “scientific” forest. Uniform rows of trees that produce good lumber. Now we can count the trees, make a map, track sustainable yield.

Illegible natural forest vs legible “scientific” forest (Scott, 1998, “Seeing Like a State” pp. 16-17)

What’s missing from our map? Everything else. The forest has been made legible to lumber production. In the process, the entire ecological web of trees, shrubs, birds, bugs, moss, soil microbiota are stripped away. They didn’t fit into our map.

By the second generation of planting, there is a noticeable decline in forest health. Within one century: Waldsterben, forest death, ecological collapse.

This is what I was angling at in The Bretton Oak, and connects back with the concept of externalities. Something like that tree is only legible to the state (in this case, the local council) through the specific vectors through which the state sees reality. Trees -- most non-human life, actually -- is not treated as having any intrinsic value. That is not visible to the state. (And, it must be said, the same problem applies to how the state sees human lives as well, too much of the time time.)

The state sees -- saw -- the Bretton Oak only in the ways through which a state can see. In this case, in terms of the (purported, possibly under-investigated!) damage it might have on human dwellings, and in terms of its own budgetary considerations. The life of the tree -- one which had lived, richly, for six centuries -- is an externality, invisible to the state. It does not meaningfully factor in to the calculation of how the state should act.

This is what I was trying to convey when I said:

And in this is the perfidy of the thing. I truly don't believe that anyone is sat there, twirling a moustache as their plan to kill a six-hundred-year old being comes to fruition. This is not just the outcome of individual decisions, but systems.

And what does that say about our systems? This is practically the definition of an externality problem -- the existence of the tree is not something neatly recognised by any of the human systems at work here, and it is the being in the loop that has no agency nor any 'standing' or material power. By the same token, destroying it -- killing it -- doesn't come with any real, manifest penalty in the contexts of those systems. So, through that lens, it makes complete sense that this is the outcome -- it's one that's essentially all upside with no downside from the point of view of the system -- and the blame is spread thinly, with everyone thinking like they've made the 'correct' proximal decision based on the situation that was presented to them.

(The Bretton Oak)

This is also an illustration of how systemic harms can operate without necessarily the animus of any of the people involved in the chain of decisions. No one involved in making this happen has to regard the destruction of the tree as a good thing or desirable outcome in order for it to happen. Nor does the existence of these systemic mechanisms absolve them of their contributions.