Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 100! Golden Nuggets...
Greetings Centenarians!
This week is a milestone worthy of a celebration - today, Emergent Futures Lab publishes its 100th newsletter!
Written largely under the cover of morning - 1:30 am to be precise. I'm wide awake as if I'd had a full night's sleep. Nothing new - I experience this about once a month. I consider it a gift, not a curse. It’s never about not having had enough sleep, but rather, I get to enjoy more waking hours than most. These early rises are my favorite of days, for these are my most productive days. A full day's work uninterrupted before the day stirs with others. Almost. 3am and Bogart just charged the office door open with his nose. Bogart’s my 8.5-year-old Boston Terrier, and he owns the heart and schedule of the Frasca clan. Now he’s doing his paw-stomping dance, signaling it’s time for a walk. It seems 6am comes early ‘round here.
Alright, to demark this milestone, we decided to take a different approach to the “best of” model. Rather than link to each newsletter, which we’ve done. Or give you a line from each newsletter which we’ve also done. We went a step further, rereading every volume and pulling a golden nugget from each one, accompanied by a short narrative, insight, or introduction into what we were thinking or doing at the time or why the selection is important.
Next, a big THANK YOU to all those that have signed up for the newsletter and/or commented on our LinkedIn posts over these last few weeks. Next week we will announce the winners of the book giveaway – good luck to all who qualify!
Finally, before we dig into this unusually long newsletter below (even for us), we recommend viewing it on our website, as any and all email clients are certain to crop this newsletter due to its length.
Onward to this compendium of shares, writings, dialogues, drawings, hypotheses, theories, practices, activities, and approaches from the nearly last two years?!:
Vol 1 - Kickoff: We shared a great NY Times article, plus the LinkedIn commentary on how thinking happens outside the brain.
Vol 2 - Harvard's Got it Wrong: The beginnings of our glossary emerged as we started to write a definition of radical innovation: Radical innovation is a novel qualitative change – a change-in-kind and not simply a change-in-degree. Radical innovation makes new worlds and new paradigms, it is not simply improvements on the existing…
Vol 3 - Book Launch: We announced the launch of our book - the Innovation Design Approach (which we are giving away ten copies of next week!). Within the announcement, we cite the book, pages 63–64:
“Creativity involves attunement to realities' ongoing inventiveness…
Once we understand these intertwined concepts (creativity is a worldly more-than-human process) it makes no sense to talk of creativity as having a singular author, or being an internal human property.
Now, for many, this might feel interesting but beside the point — “sure the world is also creative, but how are humans creative?”
Which is a fair point, if creativity is an environmental and worldly phenomenon then our practices of creativity cannot be thought of as being in a separate realm. Human creativity is the skillful participation in and collaboration with dynamic systems and emergent phenomena.
Thus human creative practices are first and foremost processes of active attunement and experimental engagement with these complex worldly events of ongoing creativity. We are less the originators than the skillful joiners and participants in journeys that will shock all of us. To love and become actively creative is to shift our senses from a focus on the self, ego, or any one thing, to an emancipatory vision of ourselves swimming in, carried forward by and changing in response to a vast creative engaged open-world bubbling with inexplicable novelty.”
Vol 4 - Worlding: Something interesting about these volumes, they mark the passage of time. Like an old ship captain’s log. Here we are reminded of the first workshop we did post covid at Montclair Design Week titled: “Other Worlds are Possible” – here are some of the takeaways from that event:
Vol 5 - Innovation - Wrong Models & New Models: we launched our five-part series on the problems with existing models of innovation (and creativity).
We published the first article in this series “You Can’t do Innovation till you Realize what it is not” The three key takeaways from this are:
If we don’t know where our models of creativity come from and how they work we will keep repeating them (and their problems) unconsciously (not so good).
Vol 6 - Farewell to Ideas: Volume 6 marks a radical shift in the newsletter: The emergence of the newspaper cover image we draw for each newsletter volume. Volume 6 - Farewell to Ideas is timeless:
Vol 7 - Thinking is not in your Head: We have always challenged the notion that ideas and thinking are in the head. Volume 7, “Thinking is Not in Your Head,” does a good job of getting into the why and how:
To say “thinking is not in the head” is still shocking for people to hear – more likely, you might get dismissed as simply absurd. But nonetheless, the field of cognitive studies has moved significantly in that direction, especially the approach of Enactive Cognition (this week we wrote an article that went into this, you can find it here).
Micheal Anderson summarizes this approach quite well:
“We are [embodied] social environment-altering tool users. Tools give us new abilities, leading us to perceive new affordances, which can generate new environmental (and social) structures, which can, in turn, lead to the development of new skills and new tools, that through a process… of scaffolding greatly increases the reach and variety of our cognitive and behavioral capacities”
If we dig a little deeper, the Enactive Approach can be quickly understood with five concepts:
Thinking is:
Diagramming the enactive approach to thinking:
Vol 8 - Creativity at Work - There is Nothing to See Here: Here we examine the question: can you make the new without vision?
The short answer: When it comes to disruptive forms of novelty – the answer is that you neither need nor can have a vision of what you are going to do. So, how does it happen then?
To illuminate our point of view, we shared a video of a lecture by Gary Tomlison, a really useful thinker on this topic (we love his three books: A Million Years of Music, Culture in the Course of Human Evolution, The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning). There is a wonderful moment in the lecture when Gary is discussing how some of the earliest stone tools were created. These tools are quite sophisticated, and difficult objects to make. The question is: were these pre-human hominids planning and then making?
Vol 9 - Creativity Unmasked: We unmask creativity with a wonderful short story about how cooking eggs is a creative, embodied act that exceeds the mind. If you like to cook and deem yourself a creative / innovator, you might want to go back and read this short volume.
Vol 10 - Affordances - A Creative Life Lives in the Middle: To help our readers understand the concept of worlds and worldmaking, we shared a practice you might want to try:
Worldfullness:
In the midst of whatever you are doing, stop and sit on the floor. Right there and then. If you are cooking in the kitchen, stop and sit on the floor. If you are writing or zooming at the dining room table, stop and sit on the floor.
Notice how nothing is available to you – connections are severed. Practices disappear. Stay with this without doing anything for a moment.
Now, there on the ground, start to make whatever you were doing work again. Do this in a provisional manner – can books prop up your computer to afford you typing or zooming. Or do you need to lie down fully to afford typing. Feel how you are sensing new affordances in things and reweaving your being back into pathways and actions.
Do this slowly, savor each added affordance. Welcome it and acknowledge it as part of yourself.
As you expand back into yourself, feel and hold in awareness the extended nature of yourself. Stay with this for a while.
Vol 11 - Difference Differing: Where do we begin? Volume 11 was written heading into the Thanksgiving break. Rather than take the week off - we wrote this volume with enough meat on the bones to make soup and sandwiches for a month. We use rivers, whirlpools, and eddies to the humble coffee mug to dig into affordances, systems, and more. Plus a Thanksgiving playlist, practice, and a poem:
Even in a person
Most times indifferent
To things around him
They waken feelings –
The first winds of autumn
~ Saigyo (1118–1190)
Vol 12 - Introducing Creative Processes: One of the primary tasks of our innovation approach includes a term we mention quite often: blocking. To share where others are naturally and instinctively blocking helps us all understand the technique and potential.
Few embody the approach of blocking better than Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against The Machine, AudioSlave, The Nightwatchman, Bruce Springsteen, and more. From volume 12, here’s how he described his process (as you read, keep blocking what exists in the back of your mind):
“My playing transformed when I began to identify as the DJ, pundits were saying that the guitar was obsolete, because DJ’s could make any sound a guitar could make with samples. I took it upon myself to try to make DJ’s obsolete by making any sound they could make with my bare hands.
By deconstructing the possibilities of that wood and wire, I took the first tentative steps to be an artist. The toggle switch, the tuning pegs, the power jack, every inch of the guitar became fair game for creating sound and texture.
Now my eight hours a day were spent practicing the eccentricities in my playing. Make a mistake? Repeat it 16 times and make it the cornerstone of the song.
And more and more I became inspired by sounds, and ideas, outside of rock ’n roll: police helicopters, animal noises, sci-fi films. I began to find my own voice on the instrument and began forging a sonic vocabulary that was uniquely my own. The guitar was squealing, beeping, mooing!”
Vol 13 - Accidental Techniques: In volume 13, we detail the process of blocking, showing how you can implement it into your creative practices in four steps:
To get really experimental, you would do this a number of times, where eventually a threshold would be crossed and a radical difference in kind would emerge.
Vol 14 - Other Worlds are Possible Here, we detail and context the unintended using a favorite example - making a cup of coffee:
The first step in moving from potential – the known, to the possible – the unknown – where creativity and novelty really thrive, is to have a nuanced understanding of the full scope of the unintended.
The example we are using in this diagram is the simple act of making coffee.
We are always situated in a specific and ongoing Event (making coffee) that has its own logic that requires an Environment which gives rise to us -- a situated Agent which in turn entails this environment and co-emerges with the Event.
Underpinning this is an Assemblage of equipment, practices, contexts and larger forces that stabilize, constrain and channel the spontaneous Self-Organizing properties of matter into intentional potentials.
This gives rise to a real but Virtual Field of activity (all the potentials of the assemblage to do certain things). For example all the forms of coffee beverages that the assemblage allows: a pour over, an espresso, milk based coffee drinks, etc.
We termed this whole situation a Taskscape.
Vol 15 - Creativity on Holiday: Offered this book recommendation to read around the fireplace during the holidays:
The Dawn of Everything (David Graber and David Wengrow) – if you’ve been endlessly frustrated by the hype that terribly reactionary and wholly inaccurate global history books such as “Sapiens” have gotten over the last few years – then this is the book for you. It is aptly subtitled “A New History of Humanity” and it lives up to that title offering a paradigm altering view of what human history is, what progress might mean and how diverse the possibilities are for new modes of being alive. (Now, we say this only having read the first 119 pages (it clocks in at 500 plus pages)... what we can say is it is a perfect winter read so far…
If you’ve not read it yet, it still pairs well with a fire; this time of year makes it a campfire…
Vol 16 - 2022 - the Year of Innovation and Creativity: Was published at the end of 2021, celebrating a New Year and new beginnings. But why wait for a new year to renew a commitment to change when right now is the only time to begin such a practice? If you’re contemplating new resolutions, perhaps this will jolt you:
The beginning of the new year is a moment to renew our sense of hope, possibility, and commitment to change.
This is the year to make your New Year’s resolutions include being more creative and innovative in all that you do – work, cooking, relationships, education, new projects, contributions to society, and the ecosystems that support us.
However, there are few concepts more fraught with cliches and so poorly understood as “creativity.” Our plan as we go into the new year is to offer a series of newsletter articles on alternative outlooks, practices and frameworks for creative processes over the next month. This week of the transition to the new year we are focusing on “what is a good general approach to engaging with creativity?”
Creative processes and invention should be approached with intentional practices that result in impact and change. Much like your fitness goals include a specified regimen, developing creative engagements should be no different.
Saying “I will be more creative” is a great and powerful start — but it is not enough. There is much more to it. One great place to start is with simple reminders — rules and lists can act as these great reminders.
Vol 17 - Worlds and Worldmaking - Part 1: What is a person? Are river’s people? We challenge the Modernist logic that deep down, there is only one world (reality) and many cultures by asking: “How should we understand a contemporary animist claim that rocks, tools, and rivers are people? – What does it mean to be of-a-world? What is the relation between creativity and worldmaking” These questions will challenge your creativity. Worth a read…
Vol 18 - Towards a New Model of Worldly Creativity: Is a deep examination of traditional Western assumptions about creativity in contrast to a worldly creativity (see volume 17). Just look at this image – the left, classical creativity, is locked into linearity while the right, a new worldly creativity (our proposition), is dynamic, self-organizing, and emergent:
Vol 19 - The Style Guide: Examines the misconception that creativity is located in one's head. Fact of the matter is you cannot find creativity in a brain any more than you will find flight in a wing.
We return to this example often because it is so profound:
Because flight, just like creativity, is relational. Flight is the outcome of a specific relationship — and to fly you need to hold this relationship together. Yes, you need wings, but you also need a body, air density, currents, atmospheres, land, heat and much else. But more than any of these things you need practices that produce actions that equal flight.
How you bring things together creatively (style) determines what can emerge… So a true “style guide” is needed for creativity…
Vol 20 - Something From Nothing? On Emergence and Creativity: Authorship, ownership, and who made what dominate the theme of this volume, contrasting eastern and Western philosophies. But all we need from it are these two lines:
Ideation is finite
Emergence is infinite…
Vol 21 - Key Tools for Emergent Innovation: Not sure why we were surprised to stumble across this great list… but there it was, smack dab in the middle of the newsletter titled: Key Tools for Emergent Innovation:
Vol 22 - Introduction to Strategies Practices and Approaches...: Takes on the topic of Probes and Pirate 🏴☠️ Projects:
Probes and Pirate Projects can take endless forms:
Good examples of this can be found in interventionist art such as the work of the Yes Men Bhopal Project, or in the Fluxus art of Alison Knowles - Make a Salad, and Yoko Ono Cut Piece. Or the crawls of PopeL.
Vol 23 - Emergence & Ecology for Experimental Impact: What is nature? We found ourselves asking this very question over and over as we wandered Central Park with 40 students from around the globe + 5 faculty from the University of Graz, Austria:
We met everyone in the middle of Central Park for a picnic.
Starting in Central Park was an important beginning point. While the park might look like it is shaped out of an existing natural state — an “original” state of nature, it is a wholly co-shaped landscape. Tens of thousands of tonnes of rocks were blasted out, and tens of thousands of tonnes of soil were moved in. Many human and non-human communities were removed and new communities brought in. Central Park was made into a place of “nature” alongside the project of making a world of humans and non-humans.
Being in Central Park allowed us to attune ourselves and the students (via a number of exercises) to the reality that we are always co-shaping environments via a mutually reinforcing set of habits, and practices. It allowed us to attune ourselves to the reality that the concept of an “original state of nature” is itself an emergent framework arising from a specific history that itself needs to be considered critically.
Over the course of the day in the park (and later at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) we came to recognize that “nature” is not a universal experience, and that nature is a constructed conceptual framework and physical reality. Which is to say nature really exists because we (the “we” here being far more than just humans) carefully and collectively made it so via a series of long historical processes.
Vol 24 - Innovation is Working in the Dark: An incredibly important volume on embodied knowing… But what might be interesting to you is we share a sliver into our morning routines:
Jason and I like to get up early, long before the sun rises and work in the quiet darkness of the early morning hours.
Jason: I'm usually up around 4am (1am doesn’t sound so early now). It’s always been natural to wake in this hour, often rising just minutes before the alarm is set to chime. I find the still darkness of the quiet pre-dawn hours the most comfortable and productive. At the desk without the pull of others' needs. Working out to set my day. Or on the road in perfect solitude.
Iain: Usually the first thing I do is greet our cat Blacktop and let him out. Then I just stand outside in the dark breathing in the cool air and enjoying the darkness. The darkness of night is not a metaphor, nor is it the opposite of light. It is a beautiful period where standing on my step it is impossible to see what is out there, even as I know that I am surrounded by buildings, and in each building other people are going about their morning lives. This condition of knowing and not-knowing is always there…
Vol 25 - On The 4 Tasks of Innovation: One question that stood out to us in this volume is: How to Do Things Differently When We Are Always Already Doing Things?
Our answer:
There are no clean breaks, fresh starts, or blank slates. We are always in the middle. From birth — and even when we are part of our mothers in her mothers womb we are already learning a “how” — an embodied know-how that will later give rise to a knowing-what.
Thus the learning of a new concept is always connected to new embodied practices, habits, tools and environments. As we move into the how — it is important not to take what we say as abstract information — immaterial ideas that can be slotted into a bank of ideas. All concepts live between their abstraction and their actualization in our bodies, habits, tools and environments.
To change how we think requires we change how we live. This is something we have stressed: thinking is doing and doing is embodied, embedded, extended and enactive. As we write about the how we will always try to make sure these aspects are present — but it is important to invent for yourself new habits, tools and environments that will give rise to a romance and an emerging path of joining creative processes. Without this we will simply have old wine in new bottles.
Vol 26 - Innovation Practices - Problems Without Methods: this quote, floating at the top:
“Some of the major disasters of mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology.” A. N. Whitehead
Vol 27 - The Greeks Weren't Creative?: Buried inside the history of classical creativity and our examination that the Greeks did not believe in creativity as we know it was this little gem:
We live in a world where many worlds exist. And because of this we know that genuine differences exist:
Our most cherished concepts are not universal. Nor are they ahistorical. Other cultures and other eras live and lived in very different ways. To believe otherwise leaves us assuming that everything and everyone is just a variation of the same. And that these variations all happen to be confirming our default starting values, concepts and assumptions…
…and nothing could be further from a creative position than this…
Vol 28 - Why Does Creativity Keep Focusing on Mental Phenomena?: We posed a question that merits further pondering:
What if creative outcomes have happened despite our approach — not because of it?
Vol 29 - Creativity is to Surrender: Why we need to slow down and recognize that we are still deeply invested in a human-centered “idea” driven models of creativity. Idea centric models should really worry us because:
Given the challenges we all face — it is morally and aesthetically unacceptable to continue in our historical practices — we need to believe in the world and work from the assumption that other worlds are possible beyond anything we could know or imagine.
Vol 30 - Strategic Blocking for Innovation: This image deserves a second look where we detail creativity as equal to strategic blocking of ongoing worldmaking:
Vol 31 - Feeling and Sensing into the New: Worth repeating: Seeing What Is in Front of Us Is Really Hard.
It turns out that recognizing things that are odd, out of place, or different is exceedingly hard. This is called attentional blindness.
In one experiment, highly trained pilots didn’t see a plane parked on the runway as they prepared to land. This might seem impossible. But, there have been many studies of this. In a famous one participants are asked to watch a video of a basketball game and count the passes each team makes. In the middle of the game a person in a giant gorilla suit walks through the frame. When asked about the gorilla afterwards, most people did not notice it. This is not a one-off study, it has been done in countless forms — when presented with anomalies in the flow of work most often the anomaly is not noticed.
This matters because the new first emerges as something odd, different, and out of place – so how do we recognize the new?
Vol 32 - Are We Born Creative?: We had a deep and rich conversation on LinkedIn where we posted, “we are not born creative,” exploring this from various perspectives. This naturally led to a really great discussion which is really worth taking a moment to read.
Vol 33 - Collaboration Made You: We’ll leave this here:
For Innovation What Does This New Approach To Collaboration Look Like?
First: there is only collaboration — individualism is an ideology and not a reality. All actions are deeply collaborative even when we glibly ignore this with a stance of heroic individualism. Our individuality is an outcome of, and dependent on, our deep collaborative reality — we are intra-subjective beings.
Second: collaboration is more-than-human. No we are not getting new-age — the simple fact is that things — from critters to objects to systems to events to forces to actions all have agency and this agency plays a critical active role in all innovation.
Third: Collaboration produces a distinct emergent whole — the quality of a dynamic system that is irreducible to any of the parts or even the sum of the parts. Innovation emerges from the collaborative whole in a way that cannot be reduced to a single cause or linear series of causes.
Fourth: The collaborative “whole” makes its parts — once parts collaborate and a distinct “whole” emerges it exhibits “global to local” agency and makes its parts. Both the innovation and you are the outcomes of the same collaborative creative process/event.
Fifth: Creativity is a worldly phenomenon — the event of reality is involved in ongoing creativity which is all around us (and in us) at all times. Our collaborative creativity involves skillfully joining (e.g. collaborate with) realities ongoing creative processes. Our innovation practices begin in and emerge out of collaborations with realities ongoing creativity.
Vol 34 - Inventing Problems: 8’s a good number:
8 Suggestions for Inventing Problems
Vol 35 - Articulating Novel Worlds: 6 reasons why inventing problems matters to your creative work:
Vol 36 - Why Reinventing Problems Matters to Innovation: Iain sketching Scotland:
Vol 37 - Problems Solve Nothing - They Make Worlds: Critical to keep in one's mind as we navigate the climate crisis - It is important also to say that the Problem-Solution model as a linear process is also profoundly and dangerously shortsighted in a reality where causality is always non-linear and indirect. As Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out in Under a White Sky - many of the challenges humanity faces today are a result of “people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”
Vol 38 - Sustaining What? Ethical Innovation and Mystery: Iain’s portrait of Ivan Illich - There are “rivers north of the future… we open a horizon on which new paradigms for thought can appear.” Beautiful!
Vol 39 - Creativity after Individuality, Innovation after Nature: An example of closed-ended problem solving:
The ban of plastic shopping bags is a great example. It is seen as a practical, effective and useful thing to do. Single-use disposable plastic shopping bags are a serious problem, so let's get rid of them!
But when you ban the bag does the problem just go away because the bag is gone?
Where bans have been put in place the actual use of plastic has increased. Why? People use those bags for many things from lining garbage bins to scooping up dog poop. When they buy them they buy thicker bags, thus more plastic is used.
This is why we have to look at what they do — how they participate in actual ways of being alive.
But that is not the worst of it, the relational assemblage is vast and the effects are equally vast and complex:
So what does the ban achieve? It tips the system into new equally problematic states making matters worse and giving people a false sense that something has been done.
Our particular consumer assemblage is highly resilient, and for those approaching it in a linear solution innovation manner (developing targeted bans, and innovating new sustainable products)— totally confounding. A series of bans (bags, straws, etc.), plus more recycling, plus new sustainable products does not equal environmental change — they are actually making things worse (while seeming to make things better — which is even worse).
For us, in this example we see clearly the fingerprints of our models of creativity, innovation and understanding of “nature”. We are thinking we can creatively solve problems separate from engaging with them, that our actions mirror our intentions and are neutral, and that agency resides solely with us, etc.
Vol 40 - On Minds and Mindsets: This entire volume is dedicated to mindsets… but here’s why:
This week we wrote a post on Mindsets that really sparked a great conversation — there are, as of this morning, over 370 comments. “Comments” does not really describe how rich the discussion is – we encourage you to take a look. We have tried to engage everyone. It is really wonderful to be developing a rich collective dialog on this topic — thank you!
Vol 41 - Resituating Agency and the Mental in Creativity: In a volume loaded with stunning drawing after stunning drawing and another hotly contested debate over metaphors emerge on LinkedIn, this quote remains at the heart of us:
“The form, configuration, or topology of a system limits or prevents certain possible behaviors the parts could have on their own, while simultaneously opening up new possibilities for them in virtue of the states the system as a whole can access.” (Evan Thompson)
Vol 42 - What is the Use of Half a Wing?: Wings never evolved for flight — winged flight was an unintended by-product of a scale. Darwin did not come to this conclusion initially. Mivart challenged Darwin’s first attempt at evolutionary theory forcing Darwin to go back and reconcile the one hole his theory was struck with.
For the whole story, this volume is worth a read…
Oh, and next time someone pokes a hole in what you present, keep Darwin in mind.
Vol 43 - Defining Exaptations: Leaves us with The Four Types of Exaptations:
Vol 44 - Folding In And Out Of Exaptations: Here we were in the thick of Exaptations for the first time (the second time was volumes 89-94). Fortunately, we left behind some swag:
Knowing more about evolution and exaptations is really helpful. There is vast literature on the topic.
Here are some useful entry points:
Vol 45 - 12 Propositions for Exaptive Practices: We share a bit about how we approach writing and creating material for LinkedIn, our blog, and this newsletter:
On Our Daily Practice With Words
During the week we get up early — usually around 5 and take a few hours before the day gets busy – to sense, reflect and write in the midst of our daily practices of doing and experimenting.
Throughout the week we make notes and talk about the newsletter. Settling on a topic and testing things out early in the week across various mediums. We deliberately don’t write things far in advance or reuse exactly what we’ve already written. Our writing practice is part of our daily practice of experimenting and working within creativity and innovation. As such it needs to be in an intimate dialog — and be in a relay with the rest of what we are doing during the week — getting ahead of practice with concepts draws one out of the agency of the event of creativity and how it might remake us.
Most of our daily writing gets published on Linkedin – it’s a great way to test and experiment in real-time some of the ideas we are kicking around— and get a meaningful discussion going (that then shapes the things we are doing outside of writing). Some weeks these posts explore the same topic as our newsletter and can get directly folded into the newsletter. Other weeks the two wander off in their own exploratory direction.
Vol 46 - It Is All Processes Within Processes: We believe strongly that processes are at the core of all that we do and encounter. This volume is our first foray into the matter:
What is a Process?
Our lives consist of countless interwoven processes that repeat. These range from infinitely small to massive: the process of our heart beating to climate change. And while these two processes can seem worlds apart each touch the other: our heart is further stressed by rising temperatures, and our diet to keep our hearts healthy by eating lean meats are shaping what lives on the planet and this is impacting the processes contributing to climate change.
Worth going back for a read…
Vol 47 - Summer Reading 2022: Last summer's reading list required 3 summers to get through all the recommendations. But what’s really important is buried in the bottom just before signing off:
Go to real bookstores and book fairs! If you are in the NYC area check out Wendy’s Subway -- great bookstore. They also just published JJJJerome Ellis The Clearing — amazing work.
Vol 48 - The Best of -- So Far –: Be a bit strange to share a line from a best of volume in what essentially amounts to another best of volume. Fortunately, Volume 48 is the lucky keeper of Jason’s favorite newsletter front page:
Vol 49 - On Processes: Part Two — Cutting into Processes: Ok, we cheated on this one… we followed a link in the newsletter to one of Iain’s LinkedIn posts for this brilliant quote that had us processing processes:
“In the context of contemporary science… “nature” does not consist of basic particulars, but fields and processes… There is no bottom level of base particulars with intrinsic properties that upwardly determines everything else. Everything is process all the way “down” and all the way “up”…” (Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, p. 440)
Well, that’s it for us this week… till next Friday when we will announce the book winners and continue this journey across newsletters 50-99!
Till Volume 101,
Keep Your difference Alive!
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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