What You Get Is the World

What You Get Is the World(theconvivialsociety.substack.com)

20 points by longdefeat 3 years ago | 10 comments

I don' think there was ever a time when people would wax lyrical about their condition, so the current era too seems full of people lamenting their life experience.

What seems to be different as we plod along the human development journey is the feeling that nowadays we should be doing better. That we know enough, have built enough, have de-risked and controlled enough to be more at ease with ourselves and the environment.

rektide 3 years ago | |

More and more reality has effervesced up into very high levels. Wave after wave of corporate buy out, of labor being sent to the cheapest labor.markets (touched on at the beginning) have lead to an erosion of belief in ourselves & our communities, all while costs of living spiral ever higher.

I agree there's feelings we should be doing better. There's a feeling that we should have developed towards a more sustainable & maintainable way of living. It's hard to remember how recently emerged so much of the world really is, how recent at-scale industrialization began. And it seems to be happening under it's own schemes- the author talks about the technique* evolving itself, a memetic system of self-preservation where negative-externalities are all too often someone else's problem, where human existence amid what is wrought is left for others to figure out. And there's just not many great examples of people at the helm, able to move us towarss better.

college_physics 3 years ago | | |

One consequence of the broader scientific, technical and economic development is that humans now dominate practically every nook and crany of the planet (at least at their own physical scale).

I think the consequences of that development are by far not fully internalized yet by our vast and dispersed numbers that indulge a bewildering variety of legacy mindsets and pre-globalisation cultures.

The term globalization is typically used in rather narrow context (trade exchanges between countries) and we even consider that it is reversible. In fact its really useful to highlight the "globe" aspect of the term (the finite sphere). This changes the boundary conditions in which societies evolve.

We have moved from flat, open, expandable cultural islands where negative externalities can simply be ignored, and the social dynamics admits unstable (exponential growth) solutions, to enclosed, finite and deeply interconnected societies where the only viable solutions are harmonic oscillations (sustainability)

Assuming we don't head into collapse due to our mental inertia, it will take a couple generations for legacy mindsets to get crushed by the new reality and new paradigms for social governance ("technique") to evolve.

mach1ne 3 years ago |

What's fundamentally keeping humanity mis-aligned is the fact that our very being is not aligned for altruistic cooperation. Every one of us is painfully aware that we could be living in an utopia right now. Literally the only barrier is the fact that exploitation is (or at the very least appears) more beneficial than cooperation to the exploiter. This barrier is so fundamental because it defines our existence, our agency. It is not baked into our faculty of decisionmaking, it is our faculty of decisionmaking.

h2odragon 3 years ago |

So few of us have ever faced our basic needs; we have no idea what's important and what's not. Being fed, watered, warm, and clean is the assumed base state of our existence, without consideration of the effort it took to achieve that state.

When those things cost more we could be content with them. Now we have this feeling we're cheating, somehow, because life is so easy.

kurthr 3 years ago | |

Go camping for a week. Get off the beaten track and see the vista of nature. Carry your clothes, your food, your house. Realize how uncomfortable, challenging, beautiful, and humbling the world around us is.

I would recommend doing it in an appropriate place, with friends, during a nice time of year. The small changes we often make to our environment will become apparent and you'll still have a better perspective on the luxury we enjoy vs the needs you truly have.

TedDoesntTalk 3 years ago | | |

You could also try fasting for 2 days. Or 3. You’ll have a new perspective like after camping for a week.

GingerGator 3 years ago |

Many people have not had to worry about meeting their basic needs and therefore do not understand the value and effort required to maintain a comfortable standard of living, leading to a feeling of guilt or cheating due to the ease of modern life.

rektide 3 years ago |

There's a thread interwoven in here about integrative pulling together, about caring, that I hope tech can better do. The current approach of many different apps, many ealled gardens feels hostile to the restful, formable/malleable, condusive set of systems we might be able to actually handle.

It starts out quite high level, and I think tech often does push out to different ends rather than help pull together:

> When I think about the forces shaping modern society, I tend to characterize them as centrifugal rather than centripetal forces, which is to say that these forces tend to pull us apart rather than bring us together.

And the impact of current digital systems:

> When I consider the forces operating on the person, however, a different frame comes to mind. These I think of as forces which deplete rather than renew us. As I used to observe with some frequency, the arc of digital culture bends toward exhaustion.

> What I mean by this is simple: when we think of the way our days are structured, the kinds of activities most readily on offer, the mode of relating to the world we are encouraged to adopt, etc.—in each case we are more likely to find ourselves spent rather than sustained. The default set of experiences on offer to us are more likely to leave us feeling drained and depleted rather than satisfied and renewed. In our consumption, we are consumed.

We are subject to narrow confined systems, and the feeling of being coralled & contained & worked by theee systems rather than being made competent, knowing workers of tech is widespread & problematic. Ursala Franklin speaks of holistic versus prescriptive technologies[1], work versus control technologies, which both divide between tech that aims to genuinely ennoble versus tech that shapes us. Most tech has indeed de-personalized, has become far off, aloof, non-integrative, even the tech like social networks & tiktok, which offer minimum control.

Rather than this hostile technical ecosystem, tech ought to have data-portability, interoperation, protocols. We oight have freedom of clients, have user agency. Such that refinement & easing, on our terms, is possible to explore.

There's works like Karli Coss's personal infrastructure[2] that pioneer what a cohesive, malleable system might be. But this is stealing the fire back from the corporate overlords.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html and more, https://hn.algolia.com/?q=beepb00p.xyz