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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 185! The Second Error in Considering Technology and Creativity: Systems...
Good morning active flows of assemblaging,
Spring is really in the air. Here the rains are meeting blossoms at the tips of seemingly every growing thing. It is the new moon, and Eid al-Fitr begins Saturday or Sunday – when the new moon is visible at sunset — our kindest wishes to all who are celebrating.
We're excited to share some great news: we are currently actively experimentally developing an important qualitative evolution in Emergent Futures Lab. This transformation has emerged over the last year via talking, probing, experimenting and testing with many of you to develop the new possible ways that we might add more creative value to your Emergent Futures Lab engagements.
One of our many probes was around developing new forms of conversation, which became the experimental proposal to establish a “MasterMind” group.
We talked about this in a number of newsletters. However, the challenges of the Mastermind Model for a global 21st century community became quite apparent to us quite early on:
While early on, we knew this was not going to be the ideal approach, nonetheless what was great about this probe is that it led to many creative discussions that collaboratively pushed the general project towards something more expansive, responsive, and multimodal.
Soon, something completely different began emerging: a dynamic, semi-synchronous community platform where both synchronous and asynchronous events could take place, and where the ecosystem itself could foster connections across time zones, with opportunities emerging spontaneously – and ultimately value could develop without the constraining logic of a fixed conversation group.
As a result of speaking and testing and developing diverse ecosystems with many of you in our community, we have emergently and collectively begun the co-creation of an entirely different model than what we had initially put forth (which comes as no surprise!).
Now, after this last year of experimenting with many of you behind the scenes, we are pleased to announce the launching of our own online ecosystem. We are calling it:
“WorldMakers”
WorldMakers represents for us a qualitative shift in how we engage with you – and ultimately how we all engage with each other. It is an online ecosystem designed to support and catalyze a global community of creative changemakers interested in radically new ecosystemic and emergent approaches to innovation.
Our Co-Evolutionary Journey (with you)
Our approach to developing WorldMakers is one of collective probing, experimenting, and following what emerges. Over the last couple of months, we've been quietly co-developing some of the foundational aspects of the ecosystem with a small group of collaborators. The conversations, live events, and relational emergent developments in this process of creative participatory sensemaking have really exceeded our expectations.
Because of this, we feel confident to move into the next phase of the co-evolution of WorldMakers. For this phase, we are seeking a select group of “Co-Evolutionary” members who will help to further evolve the community's culture and features. Our plan is that when the ecosystem reaches a vital, robust, and highly generative plateau, we'll end this co-evolutionary phase of enrollment and prepare for our full launch (we are roughly anticipating that might occur in early fall).
If you're excited about the possibility of joining us and becoming a Co-Evolutionary member of WorldMakers and helping us co-develop this new approach to building an alternative innovation ecosystem, then please take a moment to apply to be part of our Co-Evolutionary Team. Accepted members receive exclusive benefits, including a far lower lifetime pricing that won't be available after our fall launch (see below).
For those curious about what makes WorldMakers fundamentally different from anything we've offered before, here's a deeper look at what we're in the process of co-evolving together:
And we are crazy excited about all of this! This is, for us, the next phase in a movement to fundamentally reimagine creativity and innovation, together. Our goal is to create lasting, positive change in the world around us.
“Co-Evolutionary” Members Shaping the Future of Innovation: This is a hard thing to pull off alone – we are currently accepting applications for Lifetime Lock-in of a ‘Co-Evolutionary Membership” to Worldmakers at $40/mo – that's a cost that just covers expenses (versus the formal fall launch price of $100+/mo).
And – you get the coveted Co-Evolutionary Members Badge (we've got some very cool crow badges in the works).
If you're ready to be part of the founding group shaping the future of emergent and ecosystemic innovation, now is your chance--apply to join our beta “Co-Evolutionaries” Team today.
(Now – Back to Our Usual Programming:)
This week, we continue our exploration of technology – and our mini-series within this series on “the three common mistakes in considering technology”. The idea with this mini-series is to help us reorient our approaches to technology away from considering technology to be just about discreet singular physical things – and usually very modern ones at that (eg, hi-tech gadgets). And our hope in orienting away from this essentialist approach to technology is that we can reorient towards a far more dynamic, holistic, embodied, relational, emergent, and networked approach to technology.
In all of this, we are trying to move the conversation about technology from the singular shiny new discreet object to the stable ways in which we make specific effects happen.
This leads us to what would be our most general definition of technology: the stable ways in which a collective produces stable effects.
Obviously, this is super abstract, so here is a simple example: Think of speech: We use a highly organized set of embodied sounds (spoken language) to have “communication effects”. Speech – the extended world of spoken language – in all of its vast variations is a technology. It is a collective practice – embodied spoken “languaging” that has stable effects: “communication”
This definition of technology brings us back to where we began this series in Volume 183 – looking at the earliest definition of the word technology or “techne.” Two thousand five hundred years ago, when the Greek-speaking peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region created the term techne (the word that evolved into our modern term “technology”), it meant a skill, a craft – a practice of making. Techne was understood as the activity of making, and Poiesis was the process of making (how something that was not there came into being). While today we tend to equate technology – techne with things, it is still just as important today to see it as an activity.
“Technology is the activity of making effects happen in a stable way.”
What is critically important in this alternative approach to technology is that it gets us away from conflating technology with discreet things that are also neutral in their impact on us. Techne – technology is never about a discreet thing but co-ordinated nested practices – an assemblage that has specific transformative effects.
Last week, we began exploring this networked logic of technology by using the example of a bed. Now, we might overlook beds – and not really consider them prime examples of a technology – but they are, because of their mundane, banal invisibility and ubiquitous nature, an ideal example.
First, why is a bed a “technology”? Quite simple: because the bed is a key part of an activity that produces stable “sleeping effects”.
But it is not something “in” the bed that by itself produces these sleeping effects. The bed has effects precisely because it is specifically integrated into a whole host of interconnected embodied practices, other objects, and constructed environments. And this gets us to the first mistake we wanted to focus on last week (Volume 184): Technology is not the discreet object – the pen, smart phone, the book, or the bed – it is the dynamic assemblage-practice that is the technology. As we pointed out last week:
“It is not just that you have a bed, but the bed is a frame with distinct mattresses, springs, screws, bolts, sheets and more sheets, duvets, blankets, duvet covers, pillows and pillow covers – and pillows of all kinds: throw pillows to body pillows shaped pillows, backrests, bedside tables, lights, and night lights, bed testing safety equipment and certification organizations, carpets, vacuums, shades, blinds, dusting cloths, pajamas, buttons, night music, snoring aids, sleep therapists, dream analysis, pharmaceutical sleep aids, discourses on sleep, diplomas on sleep therapies, laws governing the composition and off-gassing of carpets, sleep monitoring tools, alarm clocks, noise regulations, bed bugs, specialized insecticides, heated floors, tree farms, cotton fields, specialty stores, the mattress tag police, and unique shipping techniques…”
The obvious challenge of this approach is that what a technology is becomes far more nebulous. We no longer have the comforting illusion that this is the discreet thing itself that produces the effects – or simply does what we are already doing in our “human nature”. We now have to contend with complex webs of embodied practices, integrated tools, and diverse environments – and their effects
And then, to make things seemingly more nebulous, the boundaries of where one assemblage ends and another begins are inherently unclear. The assemblages-practices producing sleep effects are overlapping, nested across multiple scales, and geographically disparate. After all, what do noise regulations, bed bugs, and pharmaceutical sleep aid research have in common?
Even after considering the drawbacks of how nebulous this approach might seem (at first), the great advantage of this approach is that the illusion of technological fixity and inevitability also falls away, and we find ourselves in a far more active creative and ultimately political space.
How do we mean this? Once we understand technology as a mutable dynamic assemblage containing unlike things working in integrated ways such that they extend and transform some human capacity, then there is a creative space for us to play from within an assemblage to shift effects.
And in this shift to understanding technology as “assemblage construction” and ongoing “assemblage reconfiguration” from inside opens up the space of creativity as a social question: politics is the practice of experimentally assembling configurations.
This far more distributed, entangled, networked, mutable, and emergent definition of technology, agency, and politics should not come as a surprise. Think of AI – “Claude” is not some discreet entity – a magical tool just sitting on your screen. It has a vast infrastructural footprint that requires a massive amount of energy, which we are currently actively debating and legislating. Additionally, there are ongoing lawsuits and strikes around what content should be allowed under what conditions to be used to “train” these systems (can AI use an author's creative work for free?). And a vast unseen exploited global labor force that is used to train these systems is organizing (“Workers of the world unite – you have nothing to lose but your algorithms!”). Others are asking questions about why there are certain patterns to the data and outputs (Check out this great interview with Catherine D’Ignazio on Data, Power, and what gets counted).
We are all involved and implicated in the creative practices of assembling and ultimately worldmaking... This then brings us squarely into what we see as the second big mistake that is made in how we approach technology:
While the term “web,” “network,” or even “system” does an important job of stressing the relational, interwoven and holistic nature of the relations between things that give rise to effects – these terms can also lead us to consider technologies to be far more fixed and monolithic than they are.
Once we understand that things have the effects that they have because of how they are connected in stable webs and networks, we are in a very close proximity to the world of “systems” and “systems thinking”. Now, this is a good thing – we should make this shift from a reductive and essentialist object thinking to a more relational and distributed systems thinking. But there is a “trap” that many fall into in this shift to a more integrated and “systemic” way of thinking in general. And that trap is to treat networked things similarly to objects – they, in being treated as discreet “systems”, become “things”.
For the classical systems thinkers, the systems analogies tended to run towards very static and stable models that always feel, via analogies, closer to how we imagine subways, train systems, and factory production lines – than the dynamic, messy, contested things we experience in daily life – whether it involves experimenting with communicating, sleeping or AI…
With many of the now standard approaches in Systems Theory, it can feel like everything in this world is neatly arranged in very stable ways, with fixed options (“this will lead to that”) and where once you enter the system, there is only one set of clear possibilities. We can see this most clearly in how some systems thinkers talk of inputs, outputs, resources, and feedback loops as if they were so many nodes and stops on a “subway system” of stable production. It can feel like agency, time, history, and change have been removed in favor of presenting an ahistorical, unchanging network. It is worth pausing and just Googling “systems mapping.” Look at the results. One after another, you will see our complex reality mapped as if it were a train system. This exercise helps one get a sense of the logic – and its problems…
Once we map complex agentially ambiguous assemblages as “systems” of inputs and outputs – using the formal tools of classical systems thinking it is a simple shift to now framing change as a strategic process of working with essentially linear “leverage points” in the system neatly scaled from small impact to great impact in a nested set of predefinable outcomes (here is it worth considering Donella Meadows famous list of twelve leverage points).
What is wrong with all of this?
We could say that time is missing, but that, while correct, would be too simple. Systems thinking in regards to technologies misses two key aspects: the twin conjoined realities of adaptivity and emergence.
Here is the problem: assemblages and the relations within an assemblage are not like railway tracks – the relations change the components. What does this mean? The path of the tracks will change what the stations are! And that is an impossible stretch for “systems thinking”.
Let's take a simple enough example: love (though there is ultimately nothing simple about this!). Think of the relation(ship) of love between two people. This relation (“love”) is not a line that just connects two points (or what in systems thinking would be considered “resources”). It – love – is rather an emergent creative (adaptive) relation that changes (creates-transforms) each of the parties (the so-called resources) in unique ways that will surprise them. The relation “dominates” the parties. And the relation (love) is a practice intrawoven with other practices, concepts, and habits. And as the parties change, the relation changes in irreducible ways. The atemporal language of “resources,” “inputs,” and “feedback loops” of systems thinking does not in any way get at such an active, durative, and evolving process.
Now, let's consider an example from the work of the pioneering systems thinker Donella Meadows in regard to where to intervene in a system. She advises not to intervene at the level of “numbers” – such as minimum wage because they take “enormous effort and ultimately never move far enough to have a meaningful impact”. But this is to treat the political struggles over developing an economy that is based upon a “living wage” as if these are discreet battles that can only have linear direct outcomes (e.g. wages go up or down). But what if organizing around wage triggers something else entirely? What if, in the push back, something so inflammatory is said and effectively seized upon that a profound and unique unexpected shift happens?
This can seem far-fetched – but the protesters, for example, that eventually played a significant role in bringing down the totalitarian government of East Germany were at first “simply” protesting for better holiday travel possibilities. They were, in Meadows terms, protesting about “numbers”...
Reality is far more surprising, dynamic, and ultimately complex than Systems Thinking will allow for… Causality is always acting when we least expect it in non-proportional ways. The small, trivial, and seemingly pointless suddenly entrains other processes, and something outside of probabilities emerges.
While the promise of Systems and Systems Thinking has always had a powerful draw for us (because it suggests a way to completely break with the reductive essentialism of “object thinking”) – but in its classical form it reproduces many of the errors of essentialism, reductivism and a linear approach to causality that it was striving to overcome. Ultimately, to develop a creative approach to technology, we will have to look elsewhere…
Because of this, we choose to conceptualize the entangled logic of technologies as neither a network or a system but as an assemblage within a complex context (here we are following the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers, and others). The concept of an “assemblage” does a far better job than the concepts of “networks” or “systems” at capturing the active, open, emergent, and responsive nature of the seemingly nebulous set of subjects, practices, tools and environments (in short “complex” in the sense used by the complexity sciences).
With the term “assemblage,” we can already sense that we are talking about something that is (1) constructed (eg, “assembled”), and (2) actively creating/transforming (eg, “assembling”). In short, something – a “technology” is beside, below, and above the human subject and has agency because of how it comes together and stays together.
Our lives are lived in complex worlds. And here, we mean “complex” in the specific sense used by the complexity sciences. This, our reality, is one where processes spontaneously self-organize into semi-autonomous logics that lead to emergent outcomes that are irreducible to any one aspect. In complex systems, which ultimately all human systems are, causality (if we can still speak about causality) is profoundly non-linear.
Another aspect of this error of treating systems the same way we treat things (reductive a-temporal essentialism) happens even with management consultants that embrace a complexity perspective. Management consultants who embrace complexity often try to perform a sequestering operation – much like environmentalists who wish to contain “nature” within National Parks and cannot recognize the radical microbial biodiversity of a suburban mall. These consultants wish to divide up reality and limit where complexity works to one quadrant of a neatly subdivided reality – as if reality comes in the neat and distinct flavors of simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic…
After this meander into systems and complexity, let's now come back to technology. If we go back to our example of the technological assemblage for sleeping effects: It always consists of unlike things: mattresses, night lights, bed testing safety equipment and certification organizations, snoring aids, sleep therapists, dream analysis, pharmaceutical sleep aids, discourses on sleep, diplomas on sleep therapies, laws governing the composition and off-gassing of carpets, sleep monitoring tools, alarm clocks, noise regulations, bed bugs, specialized insecticides…
While this listing of many of the components of the contemporary “sleep assemblage” is long, complicated, open-ended, and messy, the experience is a “relatively” simple one:
We dawn our pajamas, slip under the covers, push the cat aside, read for a brief moment, turn off the night light, and are hopefully soon asleep until the alarm goes off and feet slip into house shoes and shuffle off towards coffee. Or even when we cannot sleep, we toss and turn night after night – things cohere: sleep or insomnia…
A complex relation dominant assemblage of unlike things creates an emergent seamless experience of co-emerging human practices within the space of the assemblages stabilizing and stabilized propensities.
But, given all this, why then is experience so consistent? Why do technologies seem to have a very fixed logic? Doesn't this point towards the “essence” of a technology – to what it alone does?
We do not need to fall back into some false essentialism in regards to things – the answer is simple: the assemblage is self-reinforcing. This process is what is often termed canalization. We add thing to thing to thing in a reinforcing cascade:
Mattress is added to Box Spring is added to body pillows is added to weighted blanket is added to air purifier is added to grey noise system is added to embodied habits is added to childhood stories is added to abstractions is added to blackout shades…
And at some point, this assemblage crosses a threshold and begins to have a type of “ratchet effect”: whatever the input, the system pulls in one direction, much like a barb works its way in no matter the direction of agitation: Propensities…
Well – that is it for another week. In this upcoming week, try slowing down and feel how technologies are “like” systems – without ever being a “system.” Experiment with assemblages – sense the vast political set of creative possibilities. embrace technologies as a fundamental part of what it is for anything to be alive – from single cell bacteria to the complex cultures of Orca.
Have a beautiful and experimental week inventing technologies to keep difference alive!
Keep Your Difference Alive!
Jason, Andrew, and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
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