Re: <nettime> Managing complexity?

What are the boundary conditions that define the limits to which one's cognition can clearly perceive the system?
How porous (or how impermeable) are these boundary conditions?

As a sentient being, the clarity and authenticity of my boundary conditions are defined by the skin of my body. As one tries to expand awareness beyond the body, this clarity reduces drastically (although there are practices by which I can work to expand the limits of my clear cognition). I cannot treat the limits of my skin as a closed and impermeable boundary, for that would violate the second law of thermodynamics which states that any closed system moves rapidly towards the maximum possible level of entropy (basically, what happens when I die). If I am to continue to live, my body as a system must be open to energy flows from the environment. These may be physical flows, such as air and food, or they may be flows such as companionship and community which preserve my inner mental health.

These energy flows must sustain the condition that the biologists Maturana and Varela termed as ‘autopoiesis’, or ‘self-making’. The energy flows through my body resist entropy and remake my body on a constant basis. Of course, this process is on a declining scale and I will eventually die, but that loops into a larger system of autopoiesis at a scale beyond individual bodies. As long as I am alive, I can live only as an open system that achieves autopoiesis - a term that some theorists have defined as ‘the ratio between the complexity of a system and the complexity of its environment’.

Since I must think and act from the inside out, this implies that I must perceive and organise my existence as within a nested hierarchy of complex systems. My body, by itself is a complex system, but then works outwards toward family, community, neighbourhood, city, and all of this must respect being embedded within the earth (as Gaia?) - the primary complex living system that no human can escape. The principle of subsidiarity must prevail here, where the lowest level in the hierarchy is self-sufficient to the maximum extent, and delegates what it cannot deal with upwards, and there is a chain of communication in both directions along the hierarchy. Autopoiesis and subsidiarity are the basic principles of life that cannot be violated.

Unfortunately the conceptual framework by which we perceive and organise ourselves works in the opposite direction. The economic assumption of the invisible hand as a means of managing complexity rests on the assumption of each individual as a selfish maximiser of his/her own utility. In other words, governance and market regulation seek to push us towards seeking to be closed systems. And the ideal of the social contract treats the individual citizen as politically passive, assumes that government possesses the expertise to offer welfare to citizens through the rule of law, and each citizen will willingly sacrifice a portion of liberty in order to partake in this welfare. This provokes a top-down system that suppresses subsidiarity.

Any closed top-down system can resist entropy only through power, and since power has an inherent impulse to conquest, we create a capitalist model that is predicated on indefinite growth. As Kate Raeworth remarked, we have an economy that must grow whether or not we thrive, whereas we need to thrive whether or not the economy grows. There have been two major waves in the history of global capitalism that have allowed the space for growth, and the two overlap to some extent. The first was colonialism, which lasted till the mid-20th century, and was halted by the turmoil of the world wars. The second was globalisation, which started with the international gold standard, followed by Breton Woods, and eventually led to the current neoliberal model epitomised (in theory) by international trade agreements. This second wave is also coming up against structural limits.

Eventually a closed top-down system will come up against problematic consequences from the unwatched complexity in its environment. This could take many forms. To name a few: (a) tribalism that leads to the collapse of international agreements; (b) social revolution as a consequence of tribalism (which can unfortunately tend to use violence and/or terrorism as its strategies); or (c) the fallout of climate change and global warming. These closed systems are doomed to failure, but we have to ask, ‘At what cost?’

The failure to recognise this leads to the surreal situation Douglas Rushkoff describes in an article Patrice had posted earlier on Nettime, where Rushkoff describes his meeting with a small set of very wealthy individuals who labour under the illusion that Rushkoff has advice to offer on how to leverage technology to remake their boundary conditions as impenetrable and impermeable closed fortifications.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity

We must remember that if someone had proposed the idea of democracy to people in the 14th century, they would probably have scoffed and dismissed it as an impossibility saying such a thing has never existed in history. Democracy was born in, and eventually evolved from, the thoughts of a few brave thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment. We need to relive that effort, and the redesign of the social contract on the principles of autopoiesis and subsidiarity is the need of the hour.

Best,

Prem