To be alive in the sense found in A Timeless Way of Building, a system would have to: 1. avoid piling unresolveable stresses onto the people inside it, 2. maintain its own aliveness through self-sustaining evolution and repair, and 3. avoid worsening the life of the systems around it, ranging from peer-level technical systems to things like “civil society.” This framework is so heartening to me because it torches the constructions of a system’s inhabitants’ well-being and the spillover of generated stresses into the wider world as externalities we need not consider.
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