Prigogine – Treehouse Writers

I have started a new practice – ahead of New Year’s Resolutions – of reading a book for a short time in the morning and again in the evening. The morning practice started as a way of calming myself after doing my morning exercises before I check my blood pressure, but it is growing into something more, a way of setting up my day.

The evening practice is intended to give my mind something to chew on while falling asleep so that it’s engaged with something besides worry. (Worry is not helpful for falling asleep.)

At the moment I’m reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time in the morning and Ilya Prigogine’s The End of Certainty at night. This was partly chance – Rovelli’s work is in short chapters, perfect for ten minutes of reading at a time and the Prigogine book is from the library and will have to be returned and is also a book that is best read slowly, in short periods.

Both of them are about time and physics – Prigogine won the Nobel for chemistry, but his work was in thermodynamics – and they do fit together well.

I should point out that I am not a physicist nor have I ever wanted to be that or a scientist of any kind. What interests me about both these books is not the science, but the way the science underlies philosophy and the way our world actually works.

Essentially, I am searching – I am always searching – for different ways to get at deep truth.

One of the things I learned in my many years in Aikido is that it is good to take classes from different people because then you get a glimpse of truth from more than one point of view. That is likewise true of reading a variety of people on a variety of subjects.

Part of what I’m looking for these days is how to deal with the polycrisis – or maybe polycrises – we face these days with the right wing extremists getting in the way of addressing climate change, wealth inequality, misogyny, racism, and other deep problems as well as creating new problems by their very existence.

I no longer think ordinary politics is a useful path. I will leave that to the people who still believe that it might work. I will vote and such, but I will not count on anything done through the U.S. political system to solve any of the real problems or to even get the extremists out of our lives.

So then the question becomes, what can we do? Continue reading “The Complexity of the Future”…

Back in the late 1990s, when we were all getting used to email and setting up websites and googling was so new it wasn’t a verb yet, the business pages of our newspapers were full of stories that went something like this:

The internet is fun, but how is anyone going to make money off of that?

Fast forward twenty-fiveish years and we have been overwhelmed by the answer: capitalism. Turns out the internet wasn’t immune to being taken over by people who were more interested in short-term profit than in making cool stuff that worked and was useful to people.

This is an even deeper situation than enshittification. Ed Zitron calls it the Rot Economy and he discusses it in great detail here. (Very long and very worth reading.)

So these days we have constant updates that break things, apps that limit your rights in a way that using regular web browsers does not, and devices intended to steal our attention by constantly intruding.

I remain amused by the idea that the young folks are digital natives because they’ve grown up with cell phones and tablets. What they’ve grown up with are devices that have set us up for the worst excesses of so-called AI, ones that supposedly think for you, only they can’t actually think, so they approximate.

And because those young folks are not also raised with the knowledge of how things work, they don’t always recognize the many errors. Plus they assume – because it’s true of everything they use – that everything will glitch all the time.

As I’ve said before, it’s absurd to lump Boomers, who have been using computers for 40 years and include a large number of people who built their own or wrote their own software, with their parents and grandparents who were approaching retirement years in the 1980s and 90s and didn’t have to learn to use this stuff for work.

I may not be great at Discord, Slack, and online meeting multitasking – in fact, I suck at all of those – but I am very good at recognizing when I’m being bamboozled. And a large amount of what’s going on in the digital world is, in fact, bamboozlement.

Late stage capitalism ate the tech industry and — unfortunately — the internet. Continue reading “Tech and the Present”…