unfolding

unfolding

systems may come to necessitate their own propagation, he suggests, when we use them.

In an interview with his biographer, Alexander noted, “We give names to things but we don’t give many names to relationships.”

a rule set

pattern languages contain an inherent rule set that determines their logic

context

genetics

Almost every ‘system as a whole’ is generated by a ‘generating system’. If we wish to make things which function as ‘wholes’ we shall have to invent generating systems to create them.

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Levin defines “intelligence” as the capacity to achieve the same goal via different means

Language action

Language-Action

Guidance on future action

Language-Action

pacing

pacing

understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world

Der größte Fehler der Linken war, dass sie die Kapitalismuskritik aufgegeben und den Faschisten überlassen haben.

"Viel zu lernen du noch hast"

"Überall sind Augen. Es sind keine blinden Flecken mehr übrig. Wovon sollen wir träumen, wenn alles sichtbar wird? Wir werden davon träumen, blind zu sein."

"Solar Bones",

"Ein ungewöhnlicher Roman über einen gewöhnlichen Mann"

urgency of rebuilding “islands of trust” in communities before building out from there

open world

“It’s harder to protect your reputation for reliability than to damage it. It turns out that, as usual, offence is cheaper than defence,” he says. “Everybody who cares about the preservation of any institution has to stop everything, ring the alarm bell, and start thinking about how to preserve that ‘membrane’ in a way that is morally permissible.”

People haven’t really come to grips with the fact that it’s not just personal privacy that matters, it’s also institutional privacy

Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscas. (Destroy the author of things to understand the infinite universe.)

practical truth

all control in human minds is via emotion

You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful. We’re so lucky to be alive!

Another pandemic is coming, this time attacking the fragile control systems in our brains—namely, our capacity to reason with one another—that we have used so effectively to keep ourselves relatively safe in recent centuries.

strict liability laws, removing the need to prove either negligence or evil intent

The appified society is wrong when apps become necessary infrastructure, since infrastructure should be controlled by the people democratically, not privately owned by corporations.

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map business problems onto a solution space that involves choices of software

IDE's like to hide a lot of details about whats really happening under the hood

We are all together in this, alone.

we shouldnt build anything new, we should try to make compatible the mindsets and tools that we already have

Manche sprechen bereits davon, dass das Informationszeitalter vom Zeitalter des Rauschens abgelöst wurde.

Es ist in wenigen Jahren von einem Ort der dezentralen und offenen Kommunikation, der niemandem gehörte und in dem alle Informationen gleich behandelt wurden, zu einem Spielball von einer Handvoll Konzernen und Milliardären geworden, die nun von den Plattformen zugunsten weniger Kapitalanleger ausgebeutet werden.

Herrschte im klassischen Kapitalismus, wer über „die Produktionsmittel“ verfügte, so ist es im digitalen Kapitalismus derjenige, der über die „Mittel der Verbindung“ verfügt.

"KI" dient der Bequemlichkeit der meisten Menschen: Sie müssen weniger tippen und weniger denken, um einen gewünschten Anschein zu wahren.

Überwachung, Vereinheitlichung und Kontrolle

Typically, if you can't afford to make the repair, you definitely can't afford to skip the repair either.

Web programming is plumbing. It’s just ripping out old pipes and putting in new pipes. It’s a dirty, ugly job. The old pipes are covered in greasy grime and the new ones are cheap plastic that keeps breaking and nothing fits together like it is supposed to.

As citizens, we can create meaningful organizations that span our communities but without the permanence (and thus overhead) of old-school organizations.

we’d probably be better off with the Fortune 500,000 than the Fortune 500. Scale brings with it the ills of Seeing Like a State; the authoritarian high modernist mindset takes over at large scale. And while large organizations can exist, they can’t be the only ones with access to, or ability to, afford new technologies. Enabling the dynamic creation and destruction of new organizations and new types of organization—and legal and technical mechanisms to prevent lock-in and to prevent enclosure of public commons—will be essential to keep this new fluid era thriving. We can create new “federated” networks of organizations and social groups, like we’re seeing in the open social web of Mastodon and similar technologies, ones where local groups can have local rules that differ from, but do not conflict with, their participation in the wider whole.

TensionThe ability to see like a data structure afforded us the technology we have today. But it was built for and within a set of societal systems—and stories—that can’t cope with nebulosity. Worse still is the transitional era we’ve entered, in which overwhelming complexity leads more and more people to believe in nothing. That way lies madness. Seeing is a choice, and we need to reclaim that choice. However, we need to see things and do things differently, and build sociotechnical systems that embody this difference.This is best seen through a small example. In our jobs, many of us deal with interpersonal dynamics that sometimes overwhelm the rules. The rules are still there—those that the company operates by and laws that it follows—meaning there are limits to how those interpersonal dynamics can play out. But those rules are rigid and bureaucratic, and most of the time they are irrelevant to what you’re dealing with. People learn to work with and around the rules rather than follow them to the letter. Some of these might be deliberate hacks, ones that are known, and passed down, by an organization’s workers. A work-to-rule strike, or quiet quitting for that matter, is effective at slowing a company to a halt because work is never as routine as schedules, processes, leadership principles, or any other codified rules might allow management to believe.The tension we face is that on an everyday basis, we want things to be simple and certain. But that means ignoring the messiness of reality. And when we delegate that simplicity and certainty to systems—either to institutions or increasingly to software—they feel impersonal and oppressive. People used to say that they felt like large institutions were treating them like a number. For decades, we have literally been numbers in government and corporate data structures. BreakdownAs historian Jill Lepore wrote, we used to be in a world of mystery. Then we began to understand those mysteries and use science to turn them into facts. And then we quantified and operationalized those facts through numbers. We’re currently in a world of data—overwhelming, human-incomprehensible amounts of data—that we use to make predictions even though that data isn’t enough to fully grapple with the complexity of reality.How do we move past this era of breakdown? It’s not by eschewing technology. We need our complex socio-technical systems. We need mental models to make sense of the complexities of our world. But we also need to understand and accept their inherent imperfections. We need to make sure we’re avoiding static and biased patterns—of the sort that a state functionary or a rigid algorithm might produce—while leaving room for the messiness inherent in human interactions. Chapman calls this balance “fluidity,” where society (and really, the tech we use every day) gives us the disparate things we need to be happy while also enabling the complex global society we have today.

However, it’s not this particular system that failed but rather the mode of society that depends on rigid systems to function. Replacing one rigid system with another won’t work.

The complexity of society today, and the failure of rigid systems to cope, is scary to many. Nobody’s in charge of, or could possibly even understand, all these complex technological systems that now run our global society.

Now, nebulosity, complexity, and the breakdown of these systems is all around for everyone to see.

But that’s not the case for a computer, or a robot, or even a corporate food service, which can’t navigate the intricacies and uncertainties of the real world with the flexibility we expect of a person. And at an even larger scale, our societal systems, whether we’re talking about laws and governments or just the ways our employers expect us to get our jobs done, don’t have that flexibility built into them. We’ve seen repeatedly how breaking corporate or government operations into thousands of disparate, rigid contracts ends in failure.

while concepts help us understand reality, they aren’t reality itself

modern technology lets us all see like a state

The hope is that, because we have better algorithms that can help us make sense of even more data, we can somehow succeed at making systems work where past societies have failed. But it’s not going to work because it’s the mode of thought that doesn’t work.

The challenge with previous generations of tech—and the engineers who built them—is that they got stuck in the rigidity of systems.

To boost its search engine rankings, Thai Food Near Me, a New York City restaurant, is named after a search term commonly used by potential customers. It’s a data layer on top of reality. And the problems get worse when the relative importance of the data and reality flip. Is it more important to make a restaurant’s food taste better, or just more Instagrammable? People are already working to exploit the data structures and algorithms that govern our world. Amazon drivers hang smartphones in trees to trick the system. Songwriters put their catchy choruses near the beginning to exploit Spotify’s algorithms. And podcasters deliberately mispronounce words because people comment with corrections and those comments count as “engagement” to the algorithms.These hacks are fundamentally about the breakdown of “the system.” (We’re not suggesting that there’s a single system that governs society but rather a mess of systems that interact and overlap in our lives and are more or less relevant in particular contexts.)

Beyond simply dividing time, computation has enabled the division of information.

clocks enabled the division of time

from a society centered around interpersonal dynamics and communal interactions to one that was systematic and institutional

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i11.12712

BuildingonStar’smotivationtoexploretheinfrastructures’operations – decodingthemaster narratives and exclusion mechanisms – our motivation is also deeply com-mitted to justice and inclusion.

According to Star (2015: 480), “many information sys-tems employ what literary theorists would call amasternarrativeor asinglevoicethatdoes not problematize diversity. ȃis voice speaks unconsciously from the centerof things” (Star 2015: 476, our emphasis). ȃis voice includes and excludes, createsinsiders and outsiders. In this sense, infrastructure is a “fundamentally relationalconcept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized practices” (idem).Actually, it is the invisibility that makes the embodied infrastructure moreencompassing. Whereas the physical infrastructure can be permanently up-dated – new buildings, new computers, new collections – the embodied infras-tructure can remain inert throughout these visible changes.Moments of crises – like the present times – make this inertia more visible

Although less visible, this second meaning of infrastructure points to some-thing that is, nonetheless, as real as buildings, rooms, storage shelves, and collec-tions.

(e.g., Star 2015). It is learned as part of membership in a given community of prac-tice.It manifests itself as a set of embodied standards usually perceived as‘natural’by that community’s members.

As a relational concept, infrastructure is a fundamental part of human or-ganization, embedded in other structures, social arrangements, and technologies

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Welche Faktoren machen die Allmenden im Netz wirklich nachhaltig? Es gibt viele Aspekte, die relevant sind, um Allmende-Güter im digitalen Raum nicht nur bestehen, sondern auch wachsen und gedeihen zu lassen. Zum einen rechtlich-regulatorische Maßnahmen, die eine Einhegung verhindern. Da ist der Klassiker die freie Lizenz, die in der Wikipedia oder auch bei freier Software zum Einsatz kommt und verhindert, dass etwas, das gemeinschaftlich, kollektiv erstellt wurde, wieder zur Ware wird. Ein zweiter Aspekt ist, dass die Allmende ihren Wert nur behält, wenn sie kontinuierlich gepflegt und immer wieder erneuert wird. Zu einer Allmende gehört eine Community, die sie befüllt, aber auch nutzt. Das müssen nicht dieselben Leute sein. Nur ein kleiner Bruchteil der Menschheit befüllt die Wikipedia. Aber die ganze Welt nutzt sie. Niemand würde fordern, dass sie nur Leute nutzen dürfen, die auch beitragen. Ich unterscheide in der Regel zwischen einer Community, die zur Allmende beiträgt, und einer Crowd, die sie nutzt. Um eine nachhaltige digitale Allmende zu haben, braucht es beides. Wobei die Community für die bloße Existenz wahrscheinlich wichtiger ist als die Crowd.

Emodi said the good rapport the government initially had with journalists soured over time."Public relations people and spin doctors ruined that, because you stopped having conversations and started delivering messages and then that created suspicion," said Emodi. "And that's a bit of a spiral."According to Emodi, "people got a little paranoid" in the premier's office and that led to a desire to control information, and the message, more tightly.

Die Plattformen, die unsere zukünftige politische Öffentlichkeit formen, gehören jedoch nicht uns als aufgeklärter Gesellschaft, sondern den Digitalkonzernen. Big Tech entwickelt und kontrolliert diese Medientechnologien. Und genau damit entgleitet uns unsere eigene demokratische Souveränität. Wir selbst haben als Gesellschaft keinen Zugriff mehr auf die Grundlagen unserer eigenen Demokratie.

lots of commercial products because the reality is these often have a better UX and larger user numbers.

“synapses that fire together wire together”

Selbst die Inkohärenz seines Werkes ließe sich mit Adorno und dessen Bemühen um eine »nichtsystematische Theorie« vergleichen. Hatte dieser doch schon festgestellt, dass das Denken im System nur das schlechte Produkt einer Welt ist, in der das System total herrscht. Adornos Konsequenz war, den Essay als die bestmögliche Form der Philosophie zu bestimmen, welche die Dinge nicht im Begriff festgenagelt, sondern in der Konstellation umstellt.

You don’t need to build your brand. You are allowed to have fun on the internet.

Ich glaube jetzt, dass das die Lösung ist Ken Merten XS Verlag 2024, 248 S., 23 €

Für mich passt "mündiger Bürger" und "ich will das alles nicht wissen" einfach nicht zusammen. Und ich bleibe bei der Bezeichnung "Recht auf Dummheit".

Die meisten User bestehen auf ihr "Recht zur Dummheit".

March 15th 2024

978-0231198240