Very interesting and much appreciated. The knowledge overload is the result of our ancestors moving from a real to a symbolic territorial sense of value. That real world of the Hunter-Gatherer lifeway had limits and could only sustain a certain number of clan/band living inhabitants, whereas the world of symbolic territory is limitless and has led to our current massive overpopulation/overconsumption, which is unsustainable, so "overshoot" and fossil fuel created GHGs driving climate collapse. Mother Nature is forcing us to shift back to a sustainable "reality" or perish in the many millions from climate catastrophes, starvation, war, stress diseases, or suicide. But, are we listening to reality or just continuing on our merry psychotic way? Trump is not a bizarre tangent but, rather, emblematic of our deteriorating mental health and physical well-being. Thank you, Rachel for a stimulating discussion and all of your work. We are not alone. Have a blessed day!
On the traditional vs. decentralised media, does anyone remember the "War on Sensemaking" series on the Rebel Wisdom podcast. In part V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v5RiMdSqwk, Daniel Schmachtenberger gives this rather exhausting monologue about the problems we face making sense of the firehose of information. His attempt at a solution was the Consilience Project https://consilienceproject.org/ , but I'm not sure what's happening with that.
On War and Innovation, there does seem to be a marked correlation, but as David Edgerton says, the people who suffer in war always seem to be missing from this narrative. However, would we have had advanced air travel without the world wars, the computer age without Bletchley Park, the space age without von Braun's V2 rockets, nuclear energy without the Atom bomb, the Internet without the Cold War and ARPA? You could argue that war, or at least the military accelerated all of these technologies, but we weren't wise enough to harness them non destructively. And now AI?!
I think the innovation argument assumes, as you allude to, that all progress is good. We have all been good 'consumers' over the years and adopted the new technologies into our lives without question. It has in fact become a necessity in many cases just to live in this in this runaway consumerist world. Back pedalling now is a titanic undertaking even though it is probably what we should do.
In terms of the information overload this is a somewhat similar problem. Having democratised the internet the floodgates have been opened and it will be a perilous and possibly fruitless task to reverse. Efforts by Daniel et al are noble and at least provide a flagship for the counter assault but these things have a dynamic that isn't always clear and it is much more likely that guiding our canoes through the rapids rather than paddling upstream will see us in calmer waters.
I thought the same..it would be interesting to hear what he thinks three years later. Interestingly, if you look at the consilience project, the latest article talks about naive progress, which leads us back to the discussion about innovation and the military.
I've been following David Edgerton through the Frezzos connection myself, and this was a great conversation, thank you. There is so much discussion about the failure of the left, George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier being an early example. I'm interested in Edgerton's new book on agriculture, which 'local agrarianist' I see as central to any discussion of just and sustainable futures (see La Via Campisina). Work in this space somewhat undermines the argument that there has been no countervailing force to capitalism, and I wonder if it is component of 'global' discussions that a sense of abject fear, powerlessness and fever dreams of total domination or destruction are seeded. I wonder also, how useful national governments are (which David makes clear they are) when those governments are captured by or doing the work of corporate pay masters. This suggests a renewal of governance is needed, which I think will come about through a peopled local agriculture and community provisioning, that underpins local direct democracy.
Thanks, Rachel, for another interesting episode from someone who has considered opinions that are based on research and still open to questioning. I like your gut approach to interviewing as it always seems to spark the more lively and engaging content. David clearly appreciated it!
I was interested in the state structures part towards the end as this is something I have been considering recently and examining my somewhat Anarchistic tendencies. I tend to agree with David about the necessity for state level governance but (and this is the more anarchistic bit) I was thinking about inverting the power structure so that state government was subordinate to regional government which itself was subordinate to local government. Each level would have its sphere of responsibility but the essential guiding policy would be determined through first a written constitution and second citizens' assemblies that would set the mid term direction. There is so much more to think about in this vein but some human-centred think tanks (I am abandoning 'left' and 'right' tags whose definitions no longer hold) might, along with many other economic and ecological issues chew this over.
And while I'm on one, where are our human-centred think tanks? Clearly, most of the money is in the individualistic profit making sector but surely there is enough cash in the more socially aware sections of the world to fund one or two. This is one of those contradictions that you spoke of that in these spaces there is so much congruency of thought but so little connection. How can we bring people together and pool all this good work to form a significant political and economic alternative?
Thank you for the point about the overwhelm from scrambling to make sense of a situation that we can't make sense of yet, I feel that so hard!!!!! Both in terms of not wanting to engage with media (and I think a lot of young people feel this way now) and in terms of not wanting to say anything about it at all lol. It's like we need to see that running at the same pace as this military industrial complex or whatever the hell this blackhole is is also falling right back into the same entity that's overwhelming all these other systems that need to hold their own power on their own and go at their own paces. Like the pace itself or the structure/organisation/flow of movement itself is a foundational part of what the system can and should do... There's so much mimicry happening (maybe as self-defence for real or imagined threats, but also I think mimicking pace is natural to us as organisms) when what is needed is slow thoughtful evolution I suppose. I had a similar thought when I was at this talk about Indigenous knowledge systems and caught myself wondering how Indigenous science could rival atomic weapon science and then realised that I was very very wrong to have gone on that competing trajectory looking for some solution when in fact, the solution is closer to slowing down, localising, affording something else power than what we have become accustomed to which is what those Indigenous knowledge systems were already focused on
please interview Neil Davidson and Anne Millen https://andnowwhat.be/about/ with complete collapse acceptance and finding beauty and regenerative potential within humanity.
Revolution is necessary, and believe it or not, we could create an extraordinary new social media specifically designed for Peaceful Revolution, just as soon as enough of us have had enough bullshit... www.humbledeeds.com
Very interesting and much appreciated. The knowledge overload is the result of our ancestors moving from a real to a symbolic territorial sense of value. That real world of the Hunter-Gatherer lifeway had limits and could only sustain a certain number of clan/band living inhabitants, whereas the world of symbolic territory is limitless and has led to our current massive overpopulation/overconsumption, which is unsustainable, so "overshoot" and fossil fuel created GHGs driving climate collapse. Mother Nature is forcing us to shift back to a sustainable "reality" or perish in the many millions from climate catastrophes, starvation, war, stress diseases, or suicide. But, are we listening to reality or just continuing on our merry psychotic way? Trump is not a bizarre tangent but, rather, emblematic of our deteriorating mental health and physical well-being. Thank you, Rachel for a stimulating discussion and all of your work. We are not alone. Have a blessed day!
On the traditional vs. decentralised media, does anyone remember the "War on Sensemaking" series on the Rebel Wisdom podcast. In part V https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v5RiMdSqwk, Daniel Schmachtenberger gives this rather exhausting monologue about the problems we face making sense of the firehose of information. His attempt at a solution was the Consilience Project https://consilienceproject.org/ , but I'm not sure what's happening with that.
On War and Innovation, there does seem to be a marked correlation, but as David Edgerton says, the people who suffer in war always seem to be missing from this narrative. However, would we have had advanced air travel without the world wars, the computer age without Bletchley Park, the space age without von Braun's V2 rockets, nuclear energy without the Atom bomb, the Internet without the Cold War and ARPA? You could argue that war, or at least the military accelerated all of these technologies, but we weren't wise enough to harness them non destructively. And now AI?!
I think the innovation argument assumes, as you allude to, that all progress is good. We have all been good 'consumers' over the years and adopted the new technologies into our lives without question. It has in fact become a necessity in many cases just to live in this in this runaway consumerist world. Back pedalling now is a titanic undertaking even though it is probably what we should do.
In terms of the information overload this is a somewhat similar problem. Having democratised the internet the floodgates have been opened and it will be a perilous and possibly fruitless task to reverse. Efforts by Daniel et al are noble and at least provide a flagship for the counter assault but these things have a dynamic that isn't always clear and it is much more likely that guiding our canoes through the rapids rather than paddling upstream will see us in calmer waters.
Thanks for giving me an excuse to revisit Daniel's discussion/s - hasn't lost any relevance over the last 4 years.
I thought the same..it would be interesting to hear what he thinks three years later. Interestingly, if you look at the consilience project, the latest article talks about naive progress, which leads us back to the discussion about innovation and the military.
I've been following David Edgerton through the Frezzos connection myself, and this was a great conversation, thank you. There is so much discussion about the failure of the left, George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier being an early example. I'm interested in Edgerton's new book on agriculture, which 'local agrarianist' I see as central to any discussion of just and sustainable futures (see La Via Campisina). Work in this space somewhat undermines the argument that there has been no countervailing force to capitalism, and I wonder if it is component of 'global' discussions that a sense of abject fear, powerlessness and fever dreams of total domination or destruction are seeded. I wonder also, how useful national governments are (which David makes clear they are) when those governments are captured by or doing the work of corporate pay masters. This suggests a renewal of governance is needed, which I think will come about through a peopled local agriculture and community provisioning, that underpins local direct democracy.
Thanks, Rachel, for another interesting episode from someone who has considered opinions that are based on research and still open to questioning. I like your gut approach to interviewing as it always seems to spark the more lively and engaging content. David clearly appreciated it!
I was interested in the state structures part towards the end as this is something I have been considering recently and examining my somewhat Anarchistic tendencies. I tend to agree with David about the necessity for state level governance but (and this is the more anarchistic bit) I was thinking about inverting the power structure so that state government was subordinate to regional government which itself was subordinate to local government. Each level would have its sphere of responsibility but the essential guiding policy would be determined through first a written constitution and second citizens' assemblies that would set the mid term direction. There is so much more to think about in this vein but some human-centred think tanks (I am abandoning 'left' and 'right' tags whose definitions no longer hold) might, along with many other economic and ecological issues chew this over.
And while I'm on one, where are our human-centred think tanks? Clearly, most of the money is in the individualistic profit making sector but surely there is enough cash in the more socially aware sections of the world to fund one or two. This is one of those contradictions that you spoke of that in these spaces there is so much congruency of thought but so little connection. How can we bring people together and pool all this good work to form a significant political and economic alternative?
Thank you for the point about the overwhelm from scrambling to make sense of a situation that we can't make sense of yet, I feel that so hard!!!!! Both in terms of not wanting to engage with media (and I think a lot of young people feel this way now) and in terms of not wanting to say anything about it at all lol. It's like we need to see that running at the same pace as this military industrial complex or whatever the hell this blackhole is is also falling right back into the same entity that's overwhelming all these other systems that need to hold their own power on their own and go at their own paces. Like the pace itself or the structure/organisation/flow of movement itself is a foundational part of what the system can and should do... There's so much mimicry happening (maybe as self-defence for real or imagined threats, but also I think mimicking pace is natural to us as organisms) when what is needed is slow thoughtful evolution I suppose. I had a similar thought when I was at this talk about Indigenous knowledge systems and caught myself wondering how Indigenous science could rival atomic weapon science and then realised that I was very very wrong to have gone on that competing trajectory looking for some solution when in fact, the solution is closer to slowing down, localising, affording something else power than what we have become accustomed to which is what those Indigenous knowledge systems were already focused on
please interview Neil Davidson and Anne Millen https://andnowwhat.be/about/ with complete collapse acceptance and finding beauty and regenerative potential within humanity.
?transcript
Revolution is necessary, and believe it or not, we could create an extraordinary new social media specifically designed for Peaceful Revolution, just as soon as enough of us have had enough bullshit... www.humbledeeds.com