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Our world works as well as it does, feeding and provisioning 7.8B people with food, water, antibiotics, vaccines, smartphones, roads, transportation, etc. because it does NOT center humans the way a small 30-person hunter-gatherercommunity did when world-pop was 100,000.
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The only way to be human at this scale and complexity of civilization is to realize that humans are not the center. Merely the privileged beneficiary of the system being somewhere close to working order.
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We are all Eloi living on the surface of the leviathan pretending that what we care about in our little lives is what matters for the whole to work -- family, music, jokes, twitter, etc. The small minority who center a search for the actual soul of the beast get tagged villains.
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Yes, there are venal elites, corrupt patterns, oppression, and all that, but all that is STILL human centric. It is peripheral to the way the machine works the way first class vs. coach and legroom issues are peripheral to how an airplane flies at all.
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I think trying to make things human-centric and focusing on ideological blame games is the Original Sin of systems thinking. It's as silly as trying to make the solar system geocentric by force. The center is where the center is.
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Replying to @vgr
Seems like you bristle at the bad-faith arguments on all sides, do you resent the search for alternatives to ‘greed is good’ & obvious lies of the global capitalist bourgeoise? More Foucault than Marx, aren’t we supposed to make things more human-centric? question our systems?
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The human imperative is to always be seeking new ways to decenter ourselves, shed more layers of our anthropocentric conceits, and try harder to discover the true centers of things that concern us.
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It is *easy* to diagnose and act on systems in human-centric ways because human brains are wired to work exceptionally well around questions of fairness and cheating. That does NOT mean questions of fairness and cheating are the most important questions.
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To return to my plane example: Is it unfair that some assholes occupy too much overhead bin space? Yes. Is it unfair that tall people have to be cramped in their seats? Yes. That doesn't mean any of it is central to how planes fly.
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To return to my original point of departure for this rant -- why DON'T we have maps of financial fallout damage the way we do wildfires or bomb damage? Why is our situation awareness of what is actually happening so shockingly bad?
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Replying to
Is that data even theoretically public? Sounds like such a map would require the secretest of financial secrets to be opened up.
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Partial views are visible -- the budgets of city governments, the balance sheets/quarterly reports of publicly traded companies, the budgets of many government departments... rates of foreclosure on loans etc etc. It's just very hard to pull a composite picture together.