Re: <nettime> Managing complexity?

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 03.04.19 11:38, James Wallbank wrote:
> Felix, this is the sort of post that social media conditions me to want
> to click "Like" but also to feel that it's an inadequate response.
> 
> I'd only add (or perhaps, draw out):
> 
> * "Managing" is the wrong way to think about maximising human welfare
> (or, indeed, achieving any defined objective) when interacting with
> complex systems.
> 
> * Perhaps "Surfing" is a better concept - dynamically balancing on
> roiling, turbulent, unknowable medium to plot a course at least
> approximately intentional. Some of the time.


Hi James,

I'm glad the clunky set-up of a mailing list doesn't provide the option
to simply click "like" :)

I'm not a philosopher and I'm skeptical about defining terms too neatly,
but I think here, the terminology is crucial. Because it expresses how
we conceive the relationship to the larger socio-ecological environment
in which we are living.

I agree that "managing" is not a good term, with all its connotations of
"central management" or "top-down control". But surfing is deficient in
the other way, it doesn't really account for the enormous influence
humans have on the environment and it evades the political questions
about what kind of world we are living in. Human civilization cannot
just wait for the right wave to come along, but is part of what produces
the waves in the first place.


On 31.03.19 15:50, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

> However, self-organising systems are emergent - they can exhibit 
> fundamental properties that did not exist at all in an earlier state
> of the system.  As humans, we cannot be blind to what properties may 
> emerge, unless we say we have no ethical concerns at all if the
> system throws up properties such as unfair and degrading exploitation
> of others or ecological imbalances.
This is really important, in my view. Even as we try to develop a more
connected, systemic perspective, one in which agency is distributed and
heterogeneous,  I think it's crucial to acknowledge that humans are
still different from all other agents, in so far as they alone can
think, and act, on the level of the overall system and its emergent
effects, rather than just within their limited domains.

Clive Hamilton, in "Defiant Earth", stresses this point, arguing against
Haraway and others, who view humans as just one group of agents among
many others. He calls this "anti-anthropocentrism" and argues for a "new
anthropocentrism".

While I'm not sure that's the greatest of terms, what he means by it is
basically this: Because of their unique positions, humans need to take
responsibility for the earth, without assuming the ability to control it
(as in the the fantasies of "ecomodernist" geoengineers).

"Responsibility without control", seems like a good approximation to an
way of conceptualization how to life within a complex, nonlinear system.


Felix



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