2003-02-22 A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History i like this idea of "abstract machines". different nonlinear systems which have behaviours in common... the way rocks are stratified in rivers, the way institutions arise... these are examples of machines that work in the same way. the dichotomy between hierarchy and meshwork is good too, and (being independent of dimension) can be either object or activity. push and pull. the amount of words that reuters/ associated press put out... x000000 vs x00000 -- there's a typo there somewhere, which is it? [it turns out 3000000 is about correct for reuters, 25000000 for ap] On the surface this book is an exploration of the previous millennium of Western history from three perspective-metaphors: - Geology/mineralisation The consumption or FLOW OF MATTER AND ENERGY, the laying down of strata as a historical process and this being a mineralisation, a breaking of symmetries -- city walls, institutions, human and social skeletons. - Genes/memes The FLOW AND INTENSIFICATIONS OF REPLICATORS, knowledge stores. Using the city as the fundamental unit, the various organisations of these. Evolution... large predators (humans) as decoration on the climax state of a meshworked (climax == maximally so) plant ecology. Stratification (evolution) as double articulation: sort first, then bind to stratify. - Linguistics Spread of language, the way domination occurs. Memes, norms, x and x as the basic social replications. Language as an individual thing, socially constrained. And across these there are a number of common themes: - Hierarchies and meshworks Two ways for things to come together. Hierarchy is tellic, goal oriented, "push". Capitalism (the "antimarket") is hierarchical, as is Standard English. Meshworks don't look externally. The external environment says "you can't do this" (a topology of possibilities) rather than "do this" (in hierarchies the next move is governed by moving round the topology). Each move is set down and reabsorbed into the meshwork. There are hierarchies of meshworks, and meshworks of hierarchives. These are set on a scale - because real world systems are always mixed - of stratification. Everything is changing, destratifying or restratifying. There's the possibility that the most destratified states created the most rigid hierarchies. - Abstract machines Different systems have behaviours in common. A hurricane is a nonlinear system which occurs with a certain energy distribution in the atmosphere; the same setup in society will produce the equivalent (which may look completely different). It needn't happen in time: the frozen spiral in crystalised rock is a construction like the evolving meshwork city state (maybe). Behaviours rotated across dimensions are still the same. - No progress There's no progress as such, just an accumulations of things on top of older accumulations. The present encodes the past. Humans have been fundamentally the same for ages, cultural knowledge keeps changing. We're the product of two thousand years of stratified scientific and philosophical thinking -- we're bad at thinking in destratified ways. This has permeated everything. Modern government comes out of a military stratified system. The capitalist system is "antimarket". Markets are a way of action-at-a-distance for barter, money abstracts here. But they're supposed to be frictionless. Capitalism says to horde goods to influence the price, or to dump goods, or to travel far distances to establish monopolies. Doesn't work like the (meshwork) market. The antimarket takes over business which would benefit from economies of scale, and hierarchises it (this is only a small section of the total possible businesses). It builds in hierarchies ("push" activities) into everything, hybrid corn has to be bought every year from the seed manufacturer, GMO corn has to be used because it's the only corn immune to the pesticides. The internet is currently a meshwork, but could end up being dominated by hierarchies (like the rest of the West). Lots of references of D&G and the strata, Excellent book. These notes don't capture the scope of this book, which only now I've read it (pretty much in one sitting) is beginning to sink in. We don't have the words to talk about these systems. When Adam Smith simplifies the market model, it's not a simplification at all because we lose those bits that actually make the market. Ditto city models. Ditto linguistic theory? Trying to recast everything in terms of flows and intensifications; trying to abstract to stratifications (cities and institutions from people); trying to model everything in terms of replications; trying to re-model the adaptive landscape because every move that is made and every move something else (or the environment makes) changes that landscape; looking for stand-alone reasons for things (language learning, institutions happening) rather than large trends. Trying to do all this recasting and pull in all of history is pretty tough, so the book's an irreducible whole, very hard to break down into definite points, almost inpenetrable because it builds its own language as it goes along. But very much worth it. There's no definite anecdote I can relate stuff to from this book (not like Victorian Internet, say), but it's given me vocabulary for the push/pull dichotomy, and a framework to think about other systems. ==== It's actually very simple the idea you come away from the book with, but it's so fundamentally counter to the way you think the world works, that's why the book's so big. It's like... I remember when I was younger trying to think things out, and they were never the sort of things you could just make a decision on. You had to completely think or write out the entire subject, close off the logic branches, reinterpret everything you learned, and then finally, when the entire system (finally) because self consistent... it would collapse into a smaller thing. The memebullet for ATYoNH is enormous, it has to be so well shielded, but the meme itself is tiny. It's like the coming down the mountain thing. There's a complexity exchange limit on speaking, but people can think better than that. Rare people can think so enormously better that they can collapse ideas in ways that will open up correctly.. travel up the mountain of complexity, and come down with stone tablets and the 10 commandments. Which might be what the bible is, like this book. Humanity's been around for ages pretty much unchanged. People must have had these ideas before. We're all of the same flesh, snakes of flesh through space/time. But all in a different - yet self-consistent - language. So it makes sense to people, when people read it [the bible] all, it's makes implicit sense because that *is* how the universe works. But they can't explain it because they haven't got the words, not in our world anyway. And so it looks divine, because this meme that is so right appeared from nowhere and they can't get there from here [the 21st century aggregation of norms]. But of course the bible has accreted and been gamed, just like the antimarket games money/the_market. ==== Some links: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=meshworks+hierarchies http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/ http://www.mediamatic.nl/magazine/previews/reviews/weelden/weelden=delanda.html