Climate, technology and chaos Blog

This is really a follow up to the last post where some ways of dealing with features of complexity have been discussed. Some of this is a bit vague but that is because knowledge about complex systems is often symbolic and points somewhere, rather than finds its object easily..

• Refrain from further disrupting an already disrupted system by pushing it towards disruption, unless there is a good reason to believe correction will kick in. Be experimental as such a procedure can be disastrous, without safety back ups
• Cultivate diversity and redundancy. We can ask what redundancy might need increase? I suspect that rather than cutting back social security we need to prepare to increase it, to deal with the oncoming flood of disasters that will spiral through the system
• Be aware that the system can be maladaptive and adjust it away from that as gently as possible, seeking the fictional balance, stopping imbalance and reducing the maladaptive tendencies. This may not be easy, and will probably take political action.
• Be aware of the dynamic contexts of any challenge within complex systems. Boundaries are generally fictions.
• Realise that changes will interact with different systems. Systems can only rarely be isolated. It is probable that systemic problems will require many different approaches simultaneously, so that many of the systems involved can change together. I’ve suggested that it is useful to consider seven mutually interactive systems.
  • Ecology and Planetary Boundaries – the donut in Donut Economics
  • Energy systems – as these are fundamental to what can be done, and are also often implicated in power relations
  • Technology, what is available, how much energy it takes, how much pollution and harm it enables, what it links that was previously separated, how it affects power/economic relations
  • Illth production: pollution, recyclable waste, harm to workers and users, dispersion of material, physical entropy, destructive extraction
  • Economics and power. Money and modes of organisation are inseparable from power and regulation.
  • Information – tells or hides awareness from people.
  • Psychology, most social behaviour cannot be deduced from psychology, but psychology is implicated in social behaviour.
• Small changes can make big differences. Look for tipping points.
• Knowledge is fundamentally uncertain and we will be unconscious, or unaware, of some important factors.
• Information is always being distorted, by business, governmental and self-confirmation processes. It can never be certain, but we can try and make it as reliable as possible and not ignore all stuff we don’t disagree with.
• We live with limited predictability, and inherent uncertainty, so wee need to be ready to find out how experimental policies work, rather than assume the policy must work.
• Trends may be predictable, so check your trend prediction.
• Try discover what patterns are emerging. They could point to trends.
• If a trend going the way you want is establishing, it may be easier to work with it.
• Systems cannot always be reduced to their elements. Reductionism can be useful, but is only useful up to a point.
• Systems change, so is what you think you know about the system still relevant? What are the new and relevant trends?
• Pay attention to the local as well as the global.
• What steps can people take locally, and how can they be supported in taking them?
• Will these local actions feedback into the main system, and support useful change?
• Unintended consequences and ‘disorder’ can tell us useful information about how the system works. Do not ignore them.
• Work with natural dynamics rather than just trying to impose willed control.
• As systems tend to escape control, we even more need to work our way with the system and feel into it, to gain a sense of what we are working with.

Some general hints(?):

Activating the pattern seeking parts of the mind

• Activate the pattern seeking parts of our thought, through quiet immersion and listening and then testing and evaluating that understanding.
• Observing natural systems with care, is a good way of building up ideas and senses of how such systems work, how they can be surprising and so on.
• Looking at, or listening to great art, (again with care) according to some, may also happen to produce the same kinds of effects. Art is often about patterns and patterning.
• This should help in other parts of the world, as well as possibly calm the nervous system and help psychological integration.
• Again, the patterns you might observe should be treated experimentally, not as truth.

Climate generosity.

• Act without waiting for the situation to be fair.
• Don’t expect that others will act first.
• If others exploit you, that is ok, keep acting.
• Set the example you would like others to follow.
• Organise to act generously with others, build a community of generosity and see what happens.
• Give people the goods and support they desire.
• Compete in your generosity.
• Be prepared to experiment and make mistakes.
• Don’t expect people to like you for acting.
• An example is organising to gift solar panels to public buildings. People in the industry might help for the publicity. The more panels you get out, the less pollution you deal with.
• Try and set up community energy as generous community. This can be extremely hard work, but you are doing something.
• Try promote circular economies.
• Find people, departments and businesses who can help.
• Generosity feels good, and if done well builds ties between people. Ties between people helps get people motivated and acting.
• This might be easier for old people who don’t have to look after children or hold down a job, but everyone should be welcome.

Experimental Politics

• Experiment. only by experiment can you learn much about how a system works.
• Try things out. Expect failure. Keep what works.
• Climate generosity is an experiment. We test it out to see if works in the situation we are in.
• Look to other people and emulate what is working for them.
• Change what you take from the ecologies and the ‘waste’ you put into them, if there are issues in your local area.
• Look for unexpected consequences, some of them may support generosity, some of them undermine it. How do you engineer more of the support?
• What moves local politicians. It may not be what “everyone expects.” See how they and other people react.
• Try out new ways of being generous, or persuading others to help.
• That people may look out for themselves does not preclude them being generous in some parts of their lives, if there is a perceived benefit for them.

Community

• We live in community.
• Community adds to resilience as people know and help each other in calamity.
• Communities can become generous naturally, if people feel safe that their gifts will be return in forms that are useful to them.
• With a purpose, communities can really gather together and act.
• We can sometimes find the purpose through experiment. What gets people to act together? Is it better to have small groups working on different projects? or to allow a bigger group to develop to possibly do bigger things?
• Communities can be built in niches which are concealed from the main fields of power and convention, and thus be more free to be inventive and not confined by the processes of power. They can also be self-destructive.
• Communities can build a “scenius,” (or a culturally creative scene) which also helps invention and builds creativity, in both co-operation and rivalry.
• Communities do have factions and rivalries, and there will be disputes, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Gives more views on life and what is happening.
• The factioning gives experience with complexity.
• The bonds may force people together to solve the problems, but beware of outsiders boosting factions for their own purposes.
• Communities are pattern generating, again they help understand, or to recognise lack of understanding, of how systems work.
• The psychologist Adler asserts that building community feeling is part of maturation and developing psychological balance and resilience.
• It makes people feel good as well as have more support when needed.
• Conversation and cooperation can help build community and mutual recognition. Is it safe to discuss climate change and feelings with each other? Are there forbidden topics and why? (Forbidden topics may be forbidden for a reason).
• Community projects can include:
  • Community recycling projects.
  • Food composting projects
  • Community gardens
  • Community discussions on problems
  • Trying to restrict harm and ‘illth’
  • Cleaning rivers or parks
  • Community Renewable Energy

Communities can organise from the bottom up, responding to local conditions. Normally structured corporations and governments cannot, or more precisely will not, because they want to maintain authority.

The point is that everything you can do together helps, and may help in the future.

General features of complex systems

Complex systems are multiply interactive self-modifying systems. Participants in the system respond to events in the system.

This results in a few consequences, and challenges.

•Nothing exists by itself. The existence of elephants, for example, requires mutual evolution between proto-elephants, plants, predators, parasites, water, sunlight, genetic errors and so on. Elephants would not exist without the systems they exist within. Likewise, humans would not think they way they do without a history of politics, culture, gender roles, art, sciences, elephants, invasions, replication mistakes and modifications, and so on. Thought is a product of the system individual humans exist within. It does not exist by itself in an individual brain with no history or interaction. Social life exists similarly. Elephants and thought etc in some sense are distributed, because they are part of many overlapping systems. Hence we always need to be aware of the dynamic contexts of any challenge (as it does not exist by itself), and these contexts can also be considered to be complex. It may be possible to immerse oneself in the system to gain a sense of pattern and immersion, and of the mutual dynamics of participants. Traditionally sitting in nature and listening an dobserving is one way of doing getting a sense of the system and it could be useful, if only to train people in looking for connection and pattern. However, as always, any understanding gained has to be evaluated and tested.

Changing technology has effects on everything else. The big example being steam power, which not only allowed massive technological change but also organisational change which allowed capitalists to become dominant, and strip the workers of rights of place and skill. That transition required laws to enable a new form of exploitation and worker disempowerment. Computer tech was thought to challenge conventional social power relations, but the power relations seem to have won out, even the internet has produced instability of information and knowledge. It is a reasonable fear that climate technologies can also alter oranisation and future trajectories, Hence their is resistance and perhaps over-optimism..

•Existence is flux, with no permanent balance. Taking this point and the previous point we can say that being and existence are distributed, connected and ongoing processes. Another point is that there is no eternal balance of nature. The system shifts all the time. Joint evolution-conflict is inherent in complex systems and systems change. However this recognition of change and instability, does not mean there are not more stable and less stable ‘equilibrium trajectories’. The more the system is disrupted, the wilder the swings become as it journeys towards a new temporary equilibrium. If the system keeps being disrupted, then it will keep behaving wildly and take longer to settle down. So the less disruptive we can be of the global ecological system, or the more we remove disruptions and (in particular) continuing disruptions, the more time we have to adapt to inevitable change. In terms of planning, the more GHG we produce to keep on running as we are, the worse the situation will become, and the less likelihood of stability.

•Diversity, redundancy and resilience. It appears that diversity of participants is good for system resilience, because it allows a variety of responses. Monocultures are vulnerable to disease sweeping through them, or to parasitic invasions, because all participants respond in similar ways, and hence an invader, which can steer around those responses, will possibly wipe out everything destroying the whole eco-system (but allowing the possibility of an eventual new start after the destruction). If there are a number of different participants providing similar eco-services, then the chance of some of them surviving, and their ecology surviving with them, is greater. The more efficient the system, then the less ‘slack’ it may have, and the less capacity for useful and responsive behaviour. For example, ‘just in time’ economic supply systems work well when the system is stable, but when the system is inevitably disrupted, or some interacting system changes, the lack of redundancy makes the system vulnerable, and over-stretched. Many human organisations are now designed to work with their human participants at maximum stretch and tension, hence they become vulnerable. On the other hand, too much redundancy and diversity might also disrupt a system. We have to experiment to find the most healthy and likely balance in any given situation.

•Evolution and equilibrium without ‘harmony.’ Systems involve maladaptation and adaptation. As already stated, natural systems can be temporarily balanced, but that does not mean they are harmonious in the sense that the English use of that word requires. Creatures eat each other, avoid being eaten, can explode disastrously in numbers, can be killed off by ‘invading species’ and so on. The point is that, while systems adapt to forces and changes, the systems’ adaptation can often be considered to be maladaptive for some participants, or even for a subsystem, and become less welcoming, or even kill them off. Many current human systems, including the dominant systems seem to be self-undermining in this sense, and will lead (if not to the destruction of humanity and other participants) to the destruction of the patterns of organisation and survival they have developed and depended upon. Fossil fuel burning for energy, industrial agriculture, human and ecology crushing use of technology, production of pollution, neoliberalism (and the impact of business on government), corporate information systems, etc. all reinforce, and contribute to, those patterns of self-destruction. Consequently many human systems need change to diminish their self-destructive nature. A particular problem is that information systems rarely act to convey accuracy everywhere.

•Complex all the way up and all the way down. Complexity operate at all levels. For example, Humans are part of complex social and ecological systems, they are also built up of complex systems. Most of our body weight can be made up of participants who don’t share our DNA, such as bacteria which live within us. Some of our cells also seem to have parts which started evolving independently but then became part of us, like mitochondria. Killing bacteria we are not harmonious with, can also kill the bacteria that we need for proper functioning. Even though eternal balance is a fiction, this fictional balance of the system is important, and should be attended to, or disrupted minimally without due need (if, for example, the new arrival bacteria or virus is absolutely harmful or lethal). Imbalance needs to be curbed or compensated for. Neoliberalism might be thought of as a harmful virus which has penetrated the system and is killing it. When installed technologies can disrupt the complexity differently at a different levels. For example turbines may kill apex predator birds, or cause migration problems, while keeping the land fairly unchanged and the air unpolluted. Coal dust may bring lung problems at the same time coal offers reliable levels of energy.

•Boundaries are unclear. Different fields interact. Different systems have ‘fuzzy boundaries.’ As implied above, ecologies are no longer independent of human economic and production systems, and economic systems are not independent of ecologies and planetary boundaries. Information is not independent of economic or political actions. In a not entirely accurate slogan “Everything Interacts.” Solutions to current challenges can only be isolated from their effects on other systems in rare and particular cases. Hence we look for disruptions that our response set is causing.

Overlapping fields are a big problem when it comes to climate technologies. Modern society has been powered by fossil fuels, that has enabled development, military superiority, technology, long ‘efficient’ trade routes, transport, suburbs and so on. As the basis of this society, and as largely now owned and controlled by a relatively few extremely rich, ruthless and powerful corporations (some governmental most private), there is an inbuilt resistance to taking climate change seriously, replacing the main cause of climate emissions, or developing climate tech in itself. This is generally supported by other industries which use fossil fuels or provide electricity and by governments. All sides seek to generate economic stability within complexity. The most popular technologies in terms of policy are imaginary technologies or technologies we know will make no difference to fossil fuel sales. Similarly big agriculture (particularly livestock ag) tries to inhibit the important agricultural transition to less polluting mass farms and feedlots. Smaller regenerative and organic farms challenge the agricultural dominance, just as community renewable energy challenges the power of corporate electricity. Likewise, fossil fuel companies can cash on on the illth system which supports many other businesses or sources of power, that have depended on pollution and poisoning from GHG, to oil spills, plastic, micro-plastics, fertliser overflows, industrial chemicals, dumping pollution in rivers, tire dust in the air and so on. Restrictions on ecological damage, damage profits all over the place. Pollution discussion is fairly rare, as is still decent discussion of climate change and options. Corporately installed renewables, can cause resistances, as it is cheaper to destroy the ecologies rather than live with them, different locals get different paybacks which generates social upheaval and discontent, and there is little consultation because businesses have not needed to make consultation and many climate technologies do not have a planned lifecycle, and there is little provision to deal with end products when they are not longer in use.

•Small changes can make large differences. This can be known as the ‘butterfly effect’ or as ‘non-linearity’. Because everything interacts (and the system seems multi-causal), then small apparently irrelevant changes can have unpredictably large effects as the change works its way through the system. Changes do not always even-out as in an averaging effect. Part of working with the system is finding out the difference between averaging and consequential changes. Tipping points occur when stress accumulates and there is a sudden change of state, which is magnified through the system and sends it into instability. We are pretty certain that a massive release of methane as tundras melt will increase the rate of global warming, completely destabilise the weather, and make it impossible to return to what used to be normal. Furthermore the ‘tipped’ change will probably be so rapid, that we cannot adapt or catch up with repairing the destruction it produces. Tipping points, that feed into disruptive and maladaptive change should be avoided. However, the idea that small changes can have big effects should also be taken as encouragement. Even small actions against climate change or for adaptation may have large ‘positive’ effects. They may not, and due to limited predictability we may not be able to tell in advance, but do not be discouraged by the smallness of your individual actions.

•Not completely knowable The ‘world and human systems’ are too complicated to be known in detail. The only accurate model of the system is the system itself. In this situation, knowledge has a tendency to become primarily symbolic, which is difficult if the symbols are tied into a symbolic system of self-reinforcing dogma and distraction. However, different people in different positions in the system will inevitably see things differently. This is extra-information not necessarily to be condemned in itself. For example it is reasonable to assume that followers of Donald Trump are actively reporting their discontent and sense of the failure of the system they live in, even if they cannot theorise it in a way which non-followers understand, or if Trump proposes solutions (such as more pollution, greater corporate power, more riches for the hyper rich, and persecuting illegal immigrants and trans people), which will not solve any of their problems. Ignoring their sense of system precariousness is folly. Change may need to be cultivated which they can recognise as benefitting them. As information is never complete, we all (not just our opponents) have an unconsciousness of vital knowledge. This unconsciousness can be reinforced by the unconsciousness and consciousness of others, forming a social unconscious, which leads to problems. Hence a degree of humility about one’s knowledge is important.

Neoliberal economist F.A. Hayek agrees with much of this unknowability in economics and the world. This is the formal reason for his dislike of government planning. Governments cannot know or anticipate everything, which is quite true. However, he tends to ignore corporate planning or cartels, and he reduces all relevant or important information to the price system. This reduction is an unintended way to increase unconsciousness, because not everything essential to the system is priced in capitalism. Power relations even force some ‘externalities’ (illth creation, pollution, health effects etc) outside the price system, so capitalist destruction can have no recognised destructive effect. Power relations constantly distort the price of products. Cartels force up prices, some businesses can temporarily force down prices, to drive others out of business. And it is not certain that everything can be priced, such as the atmosphere, or especially future events and shortages. Events may be vital later on and worth nothing now. So he ends up using proto-complexity theory to reinforce capitalism’s own destructiveness by removing information and removing any consideration of other interacting non-priced systems which are dismissed..

•Systems have limited predictability. They are unpredictable in specific, but possibly by trend. Because of these multiple interactions, maladaptation, cross interaction between apparently different systems, butterfly effects and tipping points, in general, we cannot predict specific events with much expected accuracy. Economic predictions are notoriously unreliable, the classic example being the predictions that economic crashes could no longer occur, because of free markets seeking perfect balance, or because we know how to prevent them. Events take people by surprise. We may, however, be able to predict trends. We know that the weather will get wilder and more intense the more we issue GHG and the more we keep destroying the ecology, but we don’t know for sure what the weather will be like in a specific palce in exactly two weeks. Limited predictability and lack of total knowledge, implies uncertainty is normal, and must be taken as normal. This then means that policies have to be experimental, tried out and tested to find out if they work. Policies may have to be abandoned, despite emotional attachments. Ideal dogmas are likely to lead people astray. People who have different knowledges, from their different locations, must be listened to. Local residents may understand local areas better than people at a distance.

•All systems take in energy and produce ‘waste’ Energy sources can vary from food and use of other organisms to nuclear. The Waste is important. Waste is material or energy which can be recycled: such as organic excretions, dead bodies etc. If the systems produce more waste than can be recycled or produce pollution (waste which can not be recycled), then they will eventually come to points of strain, transition to something else, or decline from self-poisoning. This can be an example of cumulative small changes making a big difference

•Emergent patterns. Patterns emerge from system interactions which cannot be predicted by the actions and behaviours of participants. The system is “greater than the sum of its parts.” Trying to understand the systems by reducing them to parts is often not helpful, although it can help to understand participants. Reductionism is only useful up to a point. Introduction of a new ‘system’ can change the patterns of emergence. As systems can be maladaptive, we cannot assume that the emergent patterns are friendly towards all current participants

Technology, energy and physical entropy may add to the problems. Technologies can add to problems by adding links, breaking links or strengthening links between systems and thus altering the system without intention. The more energy expended, the more the system may be changed. Energy, not already part of the natural system, easily generates illth. Some technology may tend towards high physical entropy, in that it wears out or decays quickly or encourages the decay of other events, again changing the system. The effects of technology are likely to be unpredictable, hence we cannot assume that a technology will be beneficial until it is used at a large extent.

•When complex systems are undergoing change, previous knowledge may no longer be helpful. When the system is moving into a new state, history may not be enlightening and nothing is the same. For example, in agriculture, changed and unstable weather conditions, with no continuity with previous experience, make it difficult to know what and when to plant. It may stretch a farmer’s finances. It may be hard to get good years which compensate for the bad years. If the system stabilises, this may start producing a new set of traditions and regular behaviours. Similar problems occur with insurance. Insurance is based on history, knowing what is likely to happen and charging the insured so that the risks of payouts are covered by the income. When you don’t know the likelihood of disaster this can no longer be done with any ease or certainty. It means insurers have a higher risk of going bust. One way to deal with that is to lower coverage for floods, fires etc, or massively increase charges, just to make sure the insurer can survive. Neither is good for customers, and insurers may find that people decide it is not worth paying for what they perceive as unreliable coverage. Loss of custom further drives up prices and the cycle keeps getting worse. This means, that while we cannot ignore history, again we have to be experimental, within the boundaries within which we can survive. We have to be ready to change, and to support people from being severely hurt by unexpected change. Social services almost certainly need to be changed, increased and improved to help people handle, and survive, the problems we face.

•Complex systems escape control. This should be pretty obvious by now. The firmer we try to control things, then the more likely the system will follow its suppressed dynamics and ‘rebel’. People have tried to enforce a mode of economy, living and control which disrupts the natural dynamics and boundaries of the system we depend on for life. People are still trying to enforce that system, despite it not working. The systems as a whole always react to what we do, and can appear to disrupt the process of control. The implication is that we need to be gentler, and work with the ‘human’ and ‘natural’ systems in ways which are sensitive to the response of those systems, and which may then generate a modified course of action. It is possible that one way of doing this is to relax centralised government and corporate control, and let locals experiment with what to do. The central authorities main job should be to help locals respond, and provide backing financial and informational, to allow people to experiment. For example community power is likely to increase local revenues to enable more adaptation and to provide resilience when the main grid system collapses. But this needs helping. At the moment it can be quite difficult to achieve, because the system is set up for corporate large-scale operations, and that system acts as an inhibiter and obstacle to change. Useful local change may give support for politicians who want to cultivate local responses, and the change may be able to be transferred elsewhere.

•Unintended consequences are normal. If we live in a system with uncertain knowledge, and which escapes control. Then we will always generate unintended consequences. These consequences must be looked for (as they will be present), and not ignored as they tell us something about how the system works, or how it responds to our actions and ideas. What appears to be disorder is useful for understanding system processes. Repressing that disorder not only does not remove the system disorder, but it stops us from dealing with it until it is too great.

Dealing with the challenge

While this can make everything seem impossible we should remember that:

People deal with complexity all the time

• In conversations – who knows where they will end up?
• In daily life. Life seems to always be suffering some disruption.
• Community is always complex, yet we generally live successfully enough with others.
• Community can sometimes be built in “niches” outside the notice of the main power and economic systems and create its own “scenius” which helps experimentation.

We have always lived within complex systems. We have evolved within complex systems. They make up our normal environment. Problems may largely arise when we go out of our way to ignore complexity, we aim for complete control over a system and attempt that control through force, when societies get so big that our understanding is overwhelmed, or we as a society refuse to change to meet new conditions.

The next page discusses this… some more