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Nathan (Nate) Kinch's avatar

Mate, a brilliant attempt (essay in its truest form). I do not have the capacity at the minute to give wholesomely back in the form of useful feedback (I will aim to do that later). Instead I’ll simply say, thank you for being you and doing what you do.

✨ Michael Garfield's avatar

Thank YOU. Feedback definitely not *required* — but generative dialogue always helpful in thinking about the *next* thing worth writing, "alone" (a community takes the posture of aloneness through performative isolation of its members in the creative act) or "together" (a single entity appears to itself in myriad forms to self-sense from multiple vantage points).

Jordan Rohrlich's avatar

Hell yeah! I've always found planetary awareness happens in those little moments of "same same but different" when traveling to a far away place, and somehow finding things to giggle about with a friendly village dude

✨ Michael Garfield's avatar

Totally. One of my favorite books of all time was a manual for this kind of thing — Vagabonding by Rolf Potts:

https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/137

✨ Michael Garfield's avatar

Of course, an American can also learn a lot about the world by visiting an Australian McDonalds

Jordan Rohrlich's avatar

Love ralf potts! "Fortunately, we were all born with winning tickets—and cashing them in is a simple matter of altering our cadence as we walk through the world."

Becoming Human's avatar

My mantra:

Local, relational, mostly opaque

✨ Michael Garfield's avatar

That’s a good way

Joshua Natarajan's avatar

Very interesting... I have spent the past few months building an open-source ecosystem simulation where tiny invisible ML models drive life like behavior with no real purpose, the world just plays as itself out. Throughout this process I made choices that only make sense through the lens you are articulating here plants go dormant instead of dying (roots persist, rain triggers recovery) populations collapse and reconstitute through stress cycles and the whole thing/sim emerges from simple local rules rather than top-down orchestration.

I named it līlā but the resonance is unmistakable. Your point about representation vs participation is exactly the need I was trying to bring together without knowing how to express it. Wrote about the philosophy behind it here if you are interested https://postcorporate.substack.com/p/the-unseen-hand

Mathew Mytka's avatar

Epic essay! I say when the map is not the territory and the territory is a lossy compressed map of the field then playing with the difference makes all the difference. Thanks for the effort in crafting this and the invitation to read and radically playcipate :)

Jesse Parent's avatar

Excited to read this, might be what I was looking for.

The Viscous Field's avatar

Yeah, the refusal of the easy fantasy of overview. It feels closer to the knowledge that coherence has to be generated from within the turbulence, not outside it. Not order replacing uncertainty, but a more participatory form of recursive organization arising within it.