Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #85
From intelligence to wonder, to the disruption nexus model, the meta interface, more-than-human governance and the joy of climate action
Welcome to Creative Destruction! This newsletter curates the most thought-provoking perspective shifts and reframings to help you rewild your mind and build a more beautiful, nature-connected, and just world!
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THIS WEEK → 😮 From Intelligence To Wonder ✊ The Disruption Nexus Model 📱 The Meta Interface ➕ More-Than-Human Governance 🚿 Embracing The Joy Of Climate Action
Rabbit Holes 🕳️
As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to rewild your mind and help you create a better world, plus a few short reframings below. Enjoy!
#1 😮 From Intelligence To Wonder
Read this article to completely shift your view and understanding of intelligence! I really mean it! Amidst all the AI hype, this is an essential read to step out of anthropocentric worldviews and re-discover the immense beauty and awe that the world offers. (For those who want to step even further into this rabbit hole, check out my older posts Beyond the Hype: Fresh Takes on AI and Natural Intelligence.)
“Intelligence is not and never has been a single entity. Instead, it is a hominin-shaped heuristic, a way for us to easily perceive valued characteristics in other people. Like beauty, it lies in the eye of the beholder. And just as we cannot expect to automate the personal, shifting lens through which each of us sees beauty, a search for anything like artificial general intelligence (AGI) misses the point: nothing in intelligence makes sense except in the light of humanity, and our own evolved perceptions. […]
Paradoxically, we value intelligence as a marker of individual success, yet it exists both as a collective of our own neurons, and an aggregate of collective behaviour. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya, we keep using this word, but perhaps it does not mean what we think it means. […]
Intelligence is not a single empirical, positivist quality that exists in nature – it’s a way we identify co-occurring traits that, in our species, are likely to mean ‘success’. Intelligence is real, because it’s real to us, but it’s not one thing. As an analogy, think of a rainbow. Rainbows exist, sure, but only to someone watching water droplets with the sun at less than a 42-degree angle at their back. A rainbow is a unified concept that indexes a known thing, and yet a rainbow is inherently a matter of perspective. […]
The things we call intelligence have transformed us from small, slow, physically weak apes to the solar system’s most lethal apex predators. However, when we ask whether other animals are intelligent, we’re not usually asking what capacities or kinds of bodies were advantageous in their evolutionary past. We’re really asking whether they do things the way we do. Sometimes, the Venn diagram of animals’ success strategies overlaps with ours (hello dolphins!). But in seeking intelligence, we’re really seeking ourselves – seeking success strategies that match those found in our own evolutionary story. […]
Eventually, instead of talking about how machines, animal collectives, or individual birds and bugs exhibit intelligence, we should be better prepared to investigate how they evolved or iterated those actions in their own evolutionary spaces, unshackled from human-shaped standards. […]
Like gazing through a stained-glass window at a vibrantly coloured, snow-covered landscape, intelligence isn’t just what we’re looking for, it’s what we are looking through. Humans value intelligence, and that is not about to change. What may change is our capacity to appreciate other kinds of life on their own terms, divorced from anthropocentric box-checking. […]
We won’t just see more clearly, we’ll see more than we did before. If intelligence is no longer a default metric for species’ worthiness, how might our value judgments shift? Would we be more inclined toward wonder, and might this wonder impel us to conserve the other wondrous creatures with whom we share this planet, and the environments in which they evolved their own flavours of success? We think that would be the smart thing to do.”
» Aeon | What Is Intelligent Life? by Abigail Desmond & Michael Haslam
#2 ✊ The Disruption Nexus Model
What turns a crisis into a moment of disruptive change? In this insightful article, Roman Krznaric, author of the forthcoming book History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity, explains with examples that next to war, disasters and revolutions, there is only one final context in which governments carry out transformative and effective crisis responses: disruptions.
“By ‘disruption’ I am referring to a moment of system instability that provides opportunities for rapid transformation, which is created by a combination or nexus of three interlinked factors: some kind of crisis (though typically not as extreme as a war, revolution or cataclysmic disaster), which combines with disruptive social movements and visionary ideas. These three elements are brought together in a model I have developed called the Disruption Nexus (see graphic).
Social movements play a fundamental role in processes of historical change. Typically, they do this through amplifying crises that may be quietly simmering under the surface or that are ignored by dominant actors in society. […] However, a third element alongside movements and crisis [is] required to bring about change: the presence of visionary ideas. […]
Hannah Arendt argued that a crisis was a fruitful moment for questioning orthodoxies and established ideas as it brought about ‘the ruin of our categories of thought and standards of judgement’, such that ‘traditional verities seem no longer to apply’. […]
The 2008 financial crash illustrates what happens in the absence of unifying ideas. Two corners of the triangle were in place: the crisis of the crash itself and the Occupy Movement calling for change. What was missing, though, were the new economic ideas and models to challenge the failing system (exemplified by the Occupy slogan ‘Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing’). […]
If we are to bend rather than break over the coming decades, we will need rebellious movements and system-changing ideas to coalesce with the environmental crisis into a Great Disruption that redirects humanity towards an ecological civilisation.”
» Aeon | The disruption nexus by Roman Krznaric
#3 📱 The Meta Interface
writes about the meta interface that stands between us and the world as it is, thereby diluting the intensity of day-to-day life. Another mind-bending article that relates to my post In A Land Far, Far Away and to the Age of Average theory.
“An interface is a surface that stands between you and a system. It hides the background circuitry, rendering it in a simplified form that enables you to interact with the system without understanding it. […]
We live with interfaces within interfaces, but some are harder to recognize that others. For example, a shelf in a supermarket is an interface between you and thousands of supply chains connected by planet-spanning logistics systems. The simple electricity plug point on your wall is an interface between you and the global energy complex. You don’t have to see or understand the messy geopolitics of coal, oil and gas to make your toaster fire up. You just need to plug in to the interface.
We didn’t always have interfaces like this. For much of human history, life was far more un-intermediated. 50,000 years ago we were locked into tangible and visceral direct engagement with environments, objects and communities. You could smell the antelope in the hide that covered you, and see the skeleton of the creature that provided it. Even 500 years ago life remained very direct. Walking into a city, you’d get an intense feeling of being in a very specific place in a very specific time. You might inhale smoke, released from the direct burning of charcoal to cook meals, while you navigated through informal markets displaying unpackaged goods from nearby localities.[…]
The trend over time, however, has been formalization and standardization. Informal peer-to-peer systems slowly get dissolved and replaced by large-scale formal bureaucratized systems that stretch across time and space. This gradually pries us away from direct experience. You don’t see your neighbour cutting the throat of a goat any more. You see them with a bag of groceries containing plastic-wrapped, industrially-farmed beef cutlets. This increased indirectness dilutes the intensity of day-to-day life. […]
The biggest development in our world, though, isn’t just this new breed of corporates obscuring physical supply chains with digital interfaces. Rather, it’s those companies that provide interfaces into the interfaces, the platform corporations that act as infrastructure for all the others. This is Big Tech, and it’s their interfaces that have become the most pervasive, iconic, and inescapable. They stick to us everywhere we move, and colour our entire reality. […]
For the first time in history, then, the entire planet is almost fully covered in a thick layer of intermediary interfaces-of-interfaces. […] This collage is becoming a meta-interface that covers the world like a membrane between us and everything.”
» | The Three-Faced Interface by
✚ Random Reframings
“The growth of the economy is contingent on our dissatisfaction—because our dissatisfaction leads to consumption.”
“Venturing into breathtaking outdoor spaces seems to help us step back, slow down and, most importantly, think in the long term. I call this style of thinking ‘longstorming’ because encounters with sublime geophysical and ecological environments can invite the mind to brainstorm about our long-term futures and pasts.” Vincent Ialenti (on how to ‘longstorm’)
“In a world where history, media, science, education, and public health are all deeply political — having arisen from specific structures of power and social relations — it is vital to go beyond “becoming informed.” Kamea
More-Than-Human Governance by DemocracyNext: “There is a growing network of people and places exploring and practising how governance and policy design can draw on more-than-human and planetary intelligences.”
The Roles of Culture in Response to the Earth Crisis by Bridget McKenzie: “This think-piece aims to reframe and state the case for the roles of Culture in response to the Earth crisis, to generate new areas for investment and evidence-gathering.”
🚿 Shower Thoughts
That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!
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