No.18 — Seeing like a data structure ? Empty innovation ? Futurization and de-futurization
Seeing like a data structure
Diagnosing what’s going on in society right now, how our multiple systems function and the issues that emerge from that, is not an easy task. It’s probably unfair then to also expect solutions from one article , but that’s what I was hoping for by the end of this one.
“In his book?Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott found that to understand societies and ecosystems, government functionaries and their private sector equivalents reduced messy reality to idealized, abstracted, and quantified simplifications that made the mess more ‘legible’ to them.” In this article, Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier bring this idea basic idea to today, where more and more of the world is being mapped to data structures, which are used in software and by AI.
As we know, “a map is not the territory” and as we abstract more and more of our world and lives into data structures, we lose some of the details and fuzziness of reality. At the same time, the systems and tools we use, or are exposed to, are harder to understand. This abstraction leads to a disconnect from the real-world complexities they aim to represent, and this oversimplification can result in decisions and systems that fail to address the true intricacies and needs of the real world, leading to broader societal and ethical implications.
The authors call for a shift towards building tools that enable users to navigate the intricate world of data while acknowledging the limitations of technology in fully grasping the complexities of human society. That’s the unsatisfying bit at the end, their examples seem insufficient, facing this massive issue of understanding. Still, if the prescription is incomplete so far, the diagnosis is well worth the read and a very valuable lens through which we can contemplate systems, AI, large corporations, and politics.
But our desire to abstract never went away, and technology, as always, serves to amplify intent and capacity. Now, we manifest this abstraction with software. Computing supercharges the creative and practical use of abstraction. This is what life is like when we see the world the way a data structure sees the world. These are the same tricks Scott documented. What has changed is their speed and their ubiquity. […]
These hacks are fundamentally about the breakdown of “the system.” (We’re not suggesting that there’s a single system that governs society but rather a mess of systems that interact and overlap in our lives and are more or less relevant in particular contexts.) Systems work according to rules, either ones made consciously by people or, increasingly, automatically determined by data structures and algorithms. But systems of rules are, by their nature, trying to create a map for a messy territory, and rules will always have loopholes that can be taken advantage of. […]
The tension we face is that on an everyday basis, we want things to be simple and certain. But that means ignoring the messiness of reality. And when we delegate that simplicity and certainty to systems—either to institutions or increasingly to software—they feel impersonal and oppressive.
Empty innovation
Blistering talk by tante at Re:Publica 2024 on the current state of innovation. He argues that it is not leading to meaningful progress and is instead empty, only used as a fake impression of moving forward but actually just turned to profit. In his view, true Innovation should bring about change and not just novelty, and we should reintroduce politics in the innovation discourse. He also reminds us of the importance of demanding genuine societal progress rather than settling for superficial technological advancements. His language and intensity of opinion might be a bit much for some, but, as with the first piece, I believe the diagnosis is on point and this time so is the prescription.
We have kind of settled on using Innovation mostly technical Innovation but also organizational Innovation whatever to operationalized progress we want to feel that as a society everything moves forward like we are getting somewhere something’s happening. […]
These days I think something changed like we just we just innovate it’s just about the momentum it’s not about going somewhere it has no destination it just means you need to be moving. Innovation has been decoupled from purpose and it’s not only just been decoupled from purpose, it has been decoupled from invention. […]
The best way for you to actually innovate is by telling your peers and your communities about the world you want and the life you want.
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Futures, Fictions & Fabulations
“Les Matérialistes is a participatory futurism pilot project on the circular economy of building materials in Quebec and beyond. To define the initial scenario for Les Matérialistes, we invited over 25 stakeholders from the Québec and international ecosystems to a participatory futurism workshop and made a map of key trends and best practices from around the world.”
“Corresponding to the two methodologies of dealing with the future in the field of sociology, future-oriented design can also be divided into two categories: one pursues the exploration of possibility, and the other pursues the confirmation of achievability. Both contribute to shaping the future, but currently the two are cut off from each other. In this paper, a new design approach is proposed, which tries to simultaneously guarantee the possibility exploration and realizability implementation of the future, by considering multiple visions in the futures and selecting the preferable one, and further describing the path.”
“The UNESCO State of the Ocean Report offers insights on ocean-related scientific activities and analyses describing the current and future state of the ocean.”
Misc
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