Re: <nettime> The Left Needs a New Strategy

[Adam Burns <adamb@free2air.net>]

Hi Brian,

On 19/01/2021 19:29, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Democracy as collective self-governance basically works - to the
> extent it ever does work - when different groups of people achieve
> consensus and even some degree of common purpose by peaceful,
> procedural deliberation.

I am of the opinion that this may have been true.

But.

Does this least worse form we call democracy scale in our current
environment?

In my humble life of something over 50 years, human population has
doubled. Despite the tragedy of the death rate of COVID, it has hardly
made a dent on human population growth. The entire global pandemic has
put back human population growth back by less than a week.

Now add time. And digital media & platforms. And speed of propagation of
machine mediated communications. Global scale communication (with its
current limitations) is now almost instant and vast in reach. Albeit in
forms controlled and influenced by relatively new media players.

We are, I believe, stumbling in the dark. Human beings (animals) need
space and time to digest change and to recognize patterns.

The more we come to understand the nature of large complex systems, the
more we see that certain qualia only make sense at certain ranges of
scale before models, concepts, and classifications break down.

As James Lovelock has recently written in his book Novacene, do we need
silicon to add to our carbon to help the universe look and understand
itself further through the conversion of energy to information? Or is
this something we cannot abide?

I'm unsure whether we really understand where we are at this point of time.

Not that we ever have!

Best to all,

Adam.

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