Notices by James Fairbairn (james@mastodon.exitmusic.world), page 2

To seek to fix the world by applying the same technological ideologies that fucked it up in the first place is a fool’s errand.

If synthetic fertilizer destroyed our topsoil’s humus, let us engineer a world that can survive without topsoil. If deforestation decimated rainfall in the tropics, let us engineer a planet that can survive with arid tropics. If our political culture destroyed democracy, let us engineer a world that can survive without democracy.

No. Do you see?

It’s not the bad politics or the bad management skills or the bullshit. Those aren’t the source. The source is the presumption that a few of us have the will (and because of that, the right) to fix the world. And that those few of us deserve all the wealth and power that come with that.

Know this, if you happen to be EA- or e/acc-adjacent. This is not our world to fix, just as it was never our world to fuck up.

I’m hoping that the emergence of the real Musk into public view this past year - the Great Unmusking, if you will - is causing some Messiah-complex sufferers to reorient themselves to the world, to their own understanding of it, to other beings, and to the inevitability and regenerative potential of loss.

Looking for an EA Exodus; an e/acc/:q!; a move towards right relation with others, death, and life.

Hoping, but not persuaded.

Let life thrive. Design in partnership with living systems and let those systems grow us all back towards health. Let nature heal itself; let it create conditions for human nature to heal itself too.

Be a steward of regrowth to creatures around you. Expand your horizons, to live in sympathy with more perspectives. Also reduce your influence on the world hidden beyond those horizons, whether geographical, socioeconomic, or perceptual.

This is what “design” and “technology” can mean for us now.

@amerika no, it really doesn’t mean that. The opposite of equality is hierarchy. The opposite of uniformity is diversity.

Nature abhors uniformity, not equality. Look at any measure of ecosystem health you care to imagine.

“Worried about climate change? These systems theorists show us a future that’s stranger than we can imagine”