all the things, in all the non-orders.
*
re-realizing something that you've always known must be a little bit like the snap of a rubber band, the growing distance between two points being the source of tension in of itself; at some point, the tension relieves itself. your fingers slip. material rubs against material, objects collapse. band returns to a stable state.
*
quick notes for myself:
1) the world is made out of the stack, navigated through by dense overlapping layers of technology, space, culture, politics, language. anthropology looks at everything; applied anthropology needs to wield anything. yelp makes you move. space orients you. words delight you. thoughts consume you. food contents you. warmth energizes you.
however; ux !== ui, and ui !== technology; like what c.s. lewis says, what something is made out and what something is is different; to paraphrase/modify that, what something is and what something does is different, and moreover, what something does and what something creates by what it does is different.
the network is the configuration of entanglements, 'what it is made of'. 'what it is' is the trembling you see when you tug on one of the cables. 'what it does' is the gestalt effect before your eyes when the cables are tugged in such-and-such a way, by whom, at what location.
all apps are social, all websites networked, all politics about power, all books about language. all koolaid is flavored, all water is hydrating. the question is always: in what way, and how, and what kind of statements can be made that are falsifiable, have enough at stake to be wrong?
what's clear is that the world, the stack, if we're to use bratton's language, is not clearly predictable. we have platforms, as-a-services, layers of abstraction, mechanisms of fulfillment. the world swirls faster, and to be honest, more excitingly. actions and designs come out of left field.
2) actions are created by skills. a skill is when one has a high probability to successfully navigate a domain of activity in which there is a complex yet stable defined distinction between failure and success.
domains of activity in which this distinction is blurry are usually interpretive modes, methods of understanding, narratives, etc.
skills allow you to launch things that you can understand with interpretive modes. critical engineering is about making things. accelerationism is about discussing things that could be made. critical engineering > accelerationism.
3) discussion is gloriously fun, but at some fundamental level, ultimately unfulfilling, like playing chess with yourself. in discussion, one can only be right, but never wrong.
being wrong is better than being right.
being proven wrong is fascinating, because in the error messages that you receive, it provides a whole bevy of responses that are unstable, unclear, and previously unknown. external ecologies provide a complex field in which unpredictable truths lie.
machine learning (for example, with artificial neural nets) is all about taking an abstract structure that can model any formula, and training it. training requires a training set upon which the model is pushed at, over and over again, until the model gets it right (validated via the test set).
corollary: 'getting it right' feels like pushing at things over and over again.
corollary 2: if you're not dealing with external ecologies (science, language, math, the natural world, politics, ecosystems, markets, etc) that are unpredictable, you're probably not learning.
Q: when you meditate, are you dealing with external ecologies?
Q: when you wander in a city, and wonder about your relationship to your itinerary, are you dealing with external ecologies?
4) when you sniff it, if it smells good to you, go follow it.