🐈

13/ And of course when people go flying they then end up traumatized and guarded in future interactions. The other thing that's cool about the flyball governor is that the potential energy that's stored automatically gets used to restore speed if the engine power drops

14/ Anyway, the point of talking about the flyball governor, aside from "it's super cool!" is to point at how governance can be something that's built into the system rather than tacked on top, and it NEEDS to be something that can regulate in both directions, otherwise WHOOPS

15/ One metaphor I've heard people use for regulating group dynamics is of a cell membrane (what's my prompt again? "Spatial metaphors for human systems" ...idk what counts as spatial - everything's pretty spatial to me. I guess I'll avoid computer stuff tho—doing great so far)

15.....? welp this is its own thread now: (about 10 tweets - it'll link back here at the bottom so you can navigate)https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1340882874912833539 …

16/ ...six minutes left, what else is important? I better say something about hierarchy. Hierarchy, as the assymetric organization of things into different functional levels, is a vital part of this beautiful fractal universe. It can breed power abuses, but so can any context.

17/ Trees are hierarchical in organizing how the roots connect to the branches and out to the leaves. There are also of course rhizomes or weird wandery cacti that don't have a clear hierarchy, but even these have cellular hierarchy. This is called a functional hierarchy.

18/ The "can't see the forest for the trees" metaphor is another example of hierarchy, in this case more in terms of abstraction. Trees are one level of abstraction, one level of analysis, forest is another. Up higher is maybe a whole biome or climate.