wet forest moon folklorist
#socialTech post: thinking in systems
americans want to follow rules (or just follow influencers who figure out the rules for us) in part because we are socialized to be quiet and consume, to take things at face value. the harder things get, the more we want the certainty of order imposed by others
but when we practice thinking about systems -- how the things in our life are interconnected and what the nature of those relationships are -- we're so much better equipped to navigate complexity
wet forest moon folklorist
people are talking about how Octavia Butler "predicted" the chaos in LA , but a big part of that is she understood the patterns of our society & could project them forward. she was a student of the systems we live within.
more of us can practice thinking in systems, examine how systems nest within one another, and be strategic about how to interrupt and shift patterns of destruction into patterns for living. this is why i think systems thinking is one of our most important social technologies!
wet forest moon folklorist
pattern is one word for a system of relationships that somehow repeats itself across time or space. if we understand a pattern we know how to react to its various permutations, and won't keep getting fooled by its surface presentations. we also can look at the feedback loops of that pattern for strategic places to shift it.
for example, those of us who understand enshittification already blocked meta, lol. we don't have to wait for bad results, we understand how the pattern works
wet forest moon folklorist
our universe and our earth unfold via complex, overlapping, and interrelated systems. this is the nature of our reality: we live in and are ourselves part of systems operating both at scales we can study and also at scales our scientists do not know how to study
though humans across time have no doubt evolved ways of relating to the complexity of our world, our current society has very little cultural infrastructure for it. so its on us to (re) learn these relationships, to think in patterns
wet forest moon folklorist
of course tons of people are struggling enough with its contradictions to reach beyond the surface of American consumerism and look for something deeper. too often they get scooped up by bad faith actors who correctly diagnose that something's wrong, but offer up the worst possible explanations and paths forward
to address this, liberals pursue fact checking, but fact checking is not critical thinking. to consider the phenomena in front of us, we have to be students of relationship and pattern
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