The physical and social environment #

What we’re aiming for #

This aspect of the model is intrinsically defined by hope: each quadrant is named for the broadly beneficial, non-disruptive held quality, not the lack, nor the power dynamic.

This a reflection of a humanist credo: that our best case scenario is to aim for the whole to attain a sense of wholeness and wellbeing, and that our differences will become a source of wonder and diversity that will promote our long-term survivability. 

To make a tool that already assumes that everyone already has attained this hopeful model is hubris. Our current win/lose cant in our economic system literally assumes that this hope cannot exist. The first step — and it is faintingly, gut-wrenchingly a drop in an ocean — is to look at our tools and try to build in latch points for those who are lacking in particular aspects of the quadrants.  We can't even do safety and health, the quadrants on the 'survive' side of the 'survive/thrive' spectrum, in a way that isn't skewed by win/lose.

Information technology is touching everything. The idea that it could affect any aspect of our full environment might come with a knee-jerk, “no, wrong,” reaction. After all, it’s an abstract tool run on electricity and bytes, unable to change the physical environment.

But it does. We can order groceries, call the police, learn how to fix a toilet, and use a meditation app. All this can be done from our phone, based on information encoded before our particular moment in time, to be leveraged as the usefullness arises. Our entire health-supporting infrastructure — water, electricity, heating gas/oil, sewage, the roads to get help to where it's needed — leverages sensors, dashboards, information sharing, and management controls (e.g., streetlights) to keep it all functioning with minimal interruption.

When we can do that, and we design technology that generates pathways to support one business over another by the simple expedient of existence or nonexistence in the complex data connections and perception of the user, that affects environment. It affects what businesses are thriving and surviving, and it’s affecting the individuals in being able to ‘vote with their money’ on what objects, consumables, services, ethics, relationships, etc., they want to develop.

It is removing agency. It is stifling emergence. It is making the possibility of free agency impossible.

There are so many models in our existing works – in sociology, psychology, story mechanics, anthropology, and more – that try to say “this is how we work, these are the environmental constraints of what we’re responding to.” An analysis of a significant fragment of them, breaking across the disciplines silos, would be fascinating. 

But most of them, when I looked at them with critical thinking and triangulation, were too intent on the expression. They were leading, making sense of a foundation with the idea that this set of outcome behaviors makes sense. Often, there were the binaries: when this set of behavior makes sense, this other set doesn’t, so we aim the data at what works for our goal. It builds in confirmation bias.

It wasn’t what I was looking for. I didn’t want to build in any judgement beyond, “hey, people seem to thrive more easily with this going on.” Then I stumbled on a few paragraphs in Kat Holme’s Mismatch, talking about how her daughter looked at the possible underlying model. My model riffs from that. 

Which just underscores: everyone is brilliant about something. Age, skin color, gender, authority, etc. — none of it is a signifier. They are just skewed narratives of someone looking to lean more towards the "win" of a win/lose dichotomy.

Environment is a system #

This is not news. But have you really thought about what that means?

Most of us think about system in terms of a complex intertwingling of functions — like our health system, or the tax system.

But system actually implies more. It’s not simply that it’s complex and intertwingled, although it is. A system is also interdependent.

Sometimes that means that there are shared resources, like in a design system where a change in one place dominos into all its use cases without people having to touch every point. 

In the case of environment, the system has even deeper implications. It means that if there is a shortfall or overage in one aspect, other aspects stretch or contract to keep the whole out of a failure state, with the aim at the most antifragile balance possible. The nodes have a cumulative effect; the area contained by it can be more or less flexible in size, shape, etc. The connectome is elastic, tensile, and variable — at least.

A system, simplified, is a network; albeit complex, with each node and connectome able to switch on and off, be stressed, and have those states affect the ecology as a whole. A system is a network with it's interdependency ignored.

Like any network, it can be encapsulated into a node and that node can be set within other architectures.

It is entirely possible for an information architecture to be organized systems involving multiple layers of overlapping and nested systems, each acting independently and affecting the whole.

It is also possible that a system is included in multiple architectures — and for the reuse of the system to be lost as part of the simplification to document architectures, to more easily disseminate information.

It is also possible that in an attempt to simplify an architecture, a system was mistakenly considered negligible, and its affect becomes a hidden source of stress.

So, when you get into the environmental factors, understand that what they encapsulate is systems-deep. Each system’s outcome impacts another system, which in turn coalesces into a quadrant. The quadrants act as a system, too. An individual can feel stressed-but-functional and have one of those quadrants all but failing. If they continue as-is, eventually the system will reach a breaking point. 

When any of these quadrants are stressed — let alone if multiple are — it affects the next two movements. 

So, the environment portion of the model is a simplified form that is representative of an incredible depth of complex systems. They are four juxtaposed, equal-weighted nodes squished in the interstices of two spectrum nodes set at 90 degree angles, with the center left empty for the upcoming nested models. 

Physical and social #

I’m rolling these together because they impact each other. They get so interdependent that we forget the concessions we make, socially, for our physical environment; and vice versa. 

They inform our minds. Any aspect of them can twist or clear cognition.

The impact can be as fast as a flash flood, or as slow as generations-long impacts based on the dichotomy of preferential vs. held-back health care.

All the ways our cultural decisions have impacted these quadrants are seen in our news and research and libraries. It’s really, essentially, an egregious simplification of incredibly complex interactive connectome and systems.

It’s also what every person has to manage in their daily lives; it’s how our individual decisions accumulate and impact others and our world. It’s where we can see the most egregious shortfalls, mismanagement, and usury. 

We don’t really know today what we will need tomorrow. We can just make best guesses, and try to leave plenty of wiggle room in the systems.

Think of all we need to learn to balance if we ever want to board a spaceship for a far-away star. Assuming we want to stay in our biological bodies, it would need to be a closed system — no periodic stops to take on water or food or oxygen. It would basically need to do everything our world does for us today. We wouldn’t just be carting ourselves across space and time, but an entire self-supporting environment.

To be able to do that, we need to understand our world. To understand our world, it needs to survive. We need to pull back from our planetary boundaries and begin healing what we have, so we can better understand what we might need to build. 

Surviving #

To survive means we continue as a living being. But the mostly-unspoken part is that an intrinsic part of the US culture is that we are expected to have hardship to survive.

It is expected that survival isn’t easy. We experience pain, hunger, emotional upset; we carry on. The unspoken message is that, as long as we carry on, we should be grateful for it. I don’t know if this is ‘natural’. I don’t think it’s a relevant narrative until/unless there is a win/lose dichotomy involved, urging a larger population to accept hardship so a smaller population can own yachts.

Surviving in one quadrant does not mean that all quadrants are in lockstep. They act as an elastic system, pushing and pulling on a person’s resources.

In other words, health can be in baseline, but flow state can be highly functioning. Each person basically gives weight to each quadrant according to their current processing chain — so even if their health is a hardship, they can still be an ultimately fulfilled person. Stephen Hawking is an exceptional example.

I reiterate: we cannot assume the nuances of one are the reflection of everyone. Just because Stephen Hawking can make novel sense of the universe data does not mean everyone can. Just because the average person can walk, doesn’t mean Stephen Hawking could.

Thriving #

We want to experience the more pleasant feelings, feel energy coursing through our bodies, and have survival be a foregone conclusion. We want to feel like our minds are pinging along in mastery of our preferred states. We want to thrive. 

Thriving means that we have all the resources needed to support a particular quadrant, with extra set aside in case of misstep or calamity. We know when stress comes that we have plenty to bend with it, without breaking. Once we have that, we feel like it’s not wasteful to experiment. 

Why #

Why get so high, so abstract, with so few concrete details, but nodding to vast sections of our evolving understanding?

Simple. We people are incredibly creative, not only in how we problem solve, but in what we think of as problems and how we go about solving them. 

A group thinks the problem to solve is making sure a another group (the ‘culture’ going forward) lets go of their understanding of the world as a step to accepting the group’s understanding. The culture seems to be moving information and understanding through a symbol: dance. 

The culture thinks the problem to solve is making sure their culture continues despite economic and psychological abuse, and now a form of their communication is being outlawed or ignored.

These are two facets of the same node. The problem is less about the dance, communication, and information movement, and more about two communities butting heads about what “community” means. 

The group thinks that it means only one community can exist, and it’s hell-bent on making sure it wins; it’s stuck in a win/lose paradigm. As long as the culture exists, it’s not winning. 

The culture thinks that community is what people make it, and accept that different people can build different communities — that their community can still exist alongside, as long as physical resources are prudently shared.

The group demonizes and dehumanizes dance because it’s become an expression of agency. It’s concrete. It is binary: an action done, or not done. The litigation of the smaller variations of community can be controlled and demonized as they show up without pre-approval and manufactured consent. It is literally goal-post moving. The outcome is intended to be a complete subsumption of the culture — to make the culture and their understanding of interaction not exist, so there can't be any pushback about the righteous nature of win/lose, so they will accept their hardship.

The culture talks about freedom community, and the message is lost because it’s not as concrete as dance and the permutations of dance. It’s framed as off-subject. 

But get high enough in the patterns, look for the abstractions of the movements of data and information and the environments they produce, the decisions and actions they spawn, and the distraction of concrete/dance loses its hold. It becomes clearer who is willing to live and let live, and who is intent on winning while others lose.

Social technology #

The concrete action of being able to contact your friends and family in a forum where people can easily drop in and out of conversations can be appreciated. The action — typing in one place and having it seen and responded to across a vast geological region, but with the specific people you wish to share it with — is concrete. 

It is the whole of the environment that is the abstract. It can be contextualized. 

The data being shared is not contained to the people it’s willingly shared with, regardless of how it feels to the group. There is a technological backbone just as concrete, needing energy to work, and people to organize it, as the device being typed on by an individual. Each individual buys a device, charges it, makes sure the apps they want to use are installed and in a place where they can find them. The same thing is happening — in a much larger form — to the servers that hold the ‘cloud’ of communication and history.

The device at each person’s fingertips  already has scads of now-taken-for-granted hours invested in it, to make the information structure that translates the press of a key to a letter on a screen, and different keystrokes added (in a repeated action) until a word is formed. The string of letters is contextualized to a language, which another group of  someones have contextualized into spellings and phrases that pop up to ‘fix’ mistakes. The fix itself is based on acknowledging culture agreements, and needed because a great swath of individuals within the broader culture will delegitimize a communication because it’s misspelled — despite that the spoken communication would have been trusted and accepted. 

There is a reason these things have happened. We can get stuck on the idea of the precise reason why we, individual, use a thing. 

Nothing is free in a purely capitalistic society. Yes, a device was purchased. Yes, each person pays for the power that is being intermittently threaded into the device, and the apps/software that they are running. 

Anything that seems free means that there is a larger contextualization in which it is still profitable. The only entity in our capitalistic society that is willing to at least consider not being profitable — of doing something just because it makes life easier and a little closer to thriving — is our government. 

Data is moving on these social platforms. It is freely given to the people of choice — or so it feels. To leverage the servers, the electricity feeding the servers, the programming that makes the communication possible, that has worked to smooth out rough edges and add a little delight, all requires money. 

Data moves. Money is a form of data, and it is moving, too. It must come in to go out, and if you aren’t paying for it: where does it come from? 

The indicators are there in your feed. Data is moving. Can you turn down the marketing? Can you remove the unwanted ads and news and pushes to get into more focus groups and interest factors? Are you seeing patterns in what you see here, and when you are in the broader internet?

Living in today’s world, definitely. Want to see it working? Look for something you haven’t looked for before. Look for land in a different country. Heteronormative? Look for a gay bar. Watch TV with commercials to see something new being marketed, and look for that on your device. 

Then pay attention to how much is served to you about that new thing going forward. How quick is it to try to build on that opportunity? How often does it come up? Then look again, out in the wide internet, and see how it increases.

Nothing is free in a purely capitalist society. Data moves. You have provided your data freely, to a set of people who you trust the most, and the people housing that data — not for free, not out of the goodness of their heart, not for the benefit of society, with no profit made from the device in your hand or the electricity that’s running it — has found it’s opportunity to create capital. 

Each person with an account is potential capital. 

The logic of pain #

It is common (not universal) across cultures and centuries of history, to dismiss pain as unreal, or to come up with and foster narratives that pain can’t possibly be as bad as communicated, or the person is just a whiner.

There are three big reasons to do this:

• Play to the court of public opinion
• Stop the complaint at the source, without having to admit wrong or change
• Not having experienced a similar-enough reference point pain

Most instances will, as exampled in my own life (I lived with frequent migraines during a time when the reality of migraines was scoffed), include a smattering of all three. They can be further invested with driving emotion, like anger (liking the outcome of the status quo and reacting to the removal of it), fear (pressure from another party to act this way), trauma (this is how they were treated, they’re just teaching what the world is like). The list can go on and on.

But here’s the deal: I have yet to find an instance of community-wide pain, communicated and gaslit with the hope of brainwashing, that did not benefit some bottom line. I have yet to find someone who is gaslighting about that pain that isn’t somehow benefiting from it, whether it’s ensuring they continue to get work or gathering money, power, and position from the pain point.

Pain is a behavioral indicator. It is literally your body, spirit, mind, or ethics telling you hey, this isn’t right. You then start tracing it back, whether it’s to a splinter in your toe or starting to unpick the dynamics of a really fucked up relationship.

Most of us accept and expect an allotment of pain. We understand at a baseline level that sometimes some immediate pain is necessary to shift a situation to a preferred pathway. We understand that sacrifice of something we hold dear (or it wouldn’t feel like sacrifice) is how we can balance the whole. 

It’s not unlike a rabbit chewing off their foot to be released from a trap. 

The problem comes when, in our social dynamics, pain is not respected. Specifically, that other people’s pain is dismissed as not relevant to the quandary or process at hand, or not real, or not worth honoring as a valid information point. 

It’s easier for someone not feeling the pain to keep on keeping on, and to try to manipulate those who are feeling pain. 

But look at the places where the narratives are so deep as to be “known”. There is a strong narrative that black people don’t feel pain like people (implicit: white), so ignoring their pain is relevant and good. 

There is a fundamental mislogic in the core and how it dominos out. The inception point was at the point of enslavement. A black person took a harder beating than anticipated in order to fall into line, or managed the pain of a medical treatment without as much ‘fuss’.

First: did they, or was is communicated in a way that didn’t hit perception? Did they simply never receive the teachings that a little bitter giving-of-way will lessen pain?

Was the beater so focused on the intended outcome that the only way they could wrap their head around it was, “oh, this person doesn’t get pain.”  Think about it. Rather than, “oh, this person has a depth of self-worth that is irreconcilable with my specific goal of forcing subservience,” a whole bunch of people magically discounted pain as a standard human quality.

But then when a complaint of pain arises, it’s dismissed. The empathic logic would be that when pain is communicated, there would be a moment of horror that this person who can take so much more pain is now affected. 

But instead the status quo is to dismiss. Empathy (I could never take that with such fortitude!) has already been removed. A goal — work accomplished, wealth built, children born, their sacrifice for your gain — has already been produced. The slavery of black-skinned people, easily scannable as different in a caucasian population so they can be noted in a crowd, is the most egregious point where this illogic has erupted, but it’s not the only. Ask any woman with non-standardized, no-unexpected-blood pain, what hoops she had to go through to get medical help. Ask any non-cis person how easily they can navigate the world. Ask a handicapped person how frequently they are subliminally told, "you don't belong here." Ask the person whose generational farm is failing because water was privatized, purchased, and shifted away from the natural flow. 

The logic of pain dismissal #

The logic of pain dismissal is troublesome. Logic, based in early decisions acknowledging that pain will happen whether it’s from a whip, or a scalpel, or shame, or isolation, or any of the multitude of things that cause us pain, says that these leverage points were used because they were effective. Pain is, again, a behavioral indicator. It’s the thing that is most likely to produce change quickly. Pain was meted out for a reason, whether that reason was as short-term and bloody as cutting into a body to relieve deeper pain, or as abstract as wanting a cookie that someone isn’t willingly handing over and starting to call them names.

To dismiss pain that has been leveraged as a behavioral modifier is information cherry picking at its most egregious. To do so because there is not irrefutable blood and death only goes to show how much empathy had to be disengaged to get to this point. 

The dismissal of pain is an implicit escalation. It is low-key promising more, because your pain isn’t real enough yet. 

The miscalculation of pain — equating the damage of lead poisoning to the loss of a few million dollars in a profit already counted in millions — is beyond illogical once the context of environment is included.

The implication of our laws — which are mass-held agreements — is that everything short of blood and death is questionable. That until we hit that point of undeniable malfeasance, the recourse is fuzzy and twistable. 

Except that entire swaths of our population actually have metrics that show a systemic escalation of disease and death, and it still isn’t enough. It shows up in facets of gender, race, age, poverty. It’s shows up in the differences between third-world, exploited countries, and first-world countries. It shows up in our workplace. 

Pain is happening. For all intents and purposes, just by following the logic abstracted away from emotion, other people’s pain is being consistently used as a leverage point, and then dismissed because what is wanted from other people (there loss) hasn’t borne the full fruiting (someone's win) yet. And from the patterns in place, that fruiting won’t be seen as full until the entire segment is dead. 

To deal with it, the segments leveraging the behaviors are contorting their logic and emotions to fit their goal. Then they push narratives so they aren’t alone — so third parties are complicit and can’t really, logically, stand for change. These are so complex at this point that the same person can be a first party enactor, second party goal, and third party complicit. The only way to tease it out is with a good therapist and robustly tracing information.

But here’s the thing: exposed logic is harder to contort. It’s why we articulate ideas — gather with trusted others to springboard, or write, or paint, or play music. Those of us in search of function want to poke and test our logics, including emotion, to see if we can break them and what we can learn in how it broke. 

Empathy alone is not the answer. In our current dominant culture, empathy itself has been weaponized: used with leading logic to force agreement as a matter of course. It’s not the quality of truth, but a narrative of truth. As a narrative, it’s leading us astray. 

It assumes, as a piece of the unquestionable logic, that there can be only one answer. It assumes, as a piece of unquestioned human existence, that suffering is a given. It assumes that the hierarchy is implicit, understood, and stable. Then it concedes empathy, and requires it for their pain as more important — because it's already higher in the hierarchy — than anyone else's. They use it to again dismiss the request for empathy by requiring empathy based on hierarchy.

But read the logic as a process, and you’ll find the issue. If there can be only one; if suffering is a natural part of human existence; if the hierarchy is a foregone conclusion, and then if we’re counting pain; certain pain is more important and must be weighted against the whole. In this cognitive path, their pain is the only relevant pain. Empathy must include our bad actors, including the pain they cause, and before the pain they caused.

Their biases are showing. Not easily sussed out, not easily understood because it’s all tied up with trying to acknowledge pain that has been going unacknowledged. But it’s there, it has implicit standards that the dismissers are unwilling to talk about, and possibly going as far as lying and hiding to make them unable to talk about. But the logic is there. It’s the only way their argument hangs together. It’s also not far from the way the system currently works, or the implicit tangle wouldn’t be so hard to manage. 

A system full of pain is not a long term viable solution. A system spreading the pain beyond humanity to compromise our very environment is not long term survivability.

These are not generation-spanning functions, but short-term, solipsistic near-enough-to-functioning, personally ease-building system of containment and extraction. They are focused on radishes while the world wobbles and approaches failure. While wealth is intended to be going to the next generation, we’re fast approaching a world where we’ll soon reach a ‘next generation’ whose members won't survive to adulthood, mostly or entirely depending on how fast the environment cascades into true dysfunction. 

Solipsism at the degree we’re talking about is not an easy characteristic to understand and earmark. The bare facts and narratives at the point of inquiry can easily be twisted to serve the solipsistic. The only way I’ve found to date to better understand where the solipsism is truly harbored is by thinking in systems, and then pushing and pulling those systems. There are examples everywhere, and if we consider fractals in our human behaviors, we can more easily find the solipsisms by how they impact broader environments. 

The discourse at the point of behavior change will sound about the same. It will sound like two sides, neither willing to compromise, and both yelling at the other to acknowledge their pain — after the dismissal of pain doesn’t find traction. One is rooted in perceptual truth, one is rooted in fantasy. The more truthful one will rebalance across swaths iteratively; the smoke and mirrors will deepen inequalities, widen wealth disparity, and increase pain. 

What the US has been doing since the 1970’s has been the latter: deepened inequalities, widened wealth disparity, and increased pain. Information technology, while a boon in some ways, is fueling traction to increase these negatives in other ways. 

It’s not easy to unknow what’s been a given. It’s not easy to communicate with people higher in a hierarchy that assumes the hierarchy is a natural and beneficial human expression of order. 

The easy path is the status quo, follow the hierarchy, live your life and let others deal with their own mess — ignoring that the mess is one with which they were impressed. The path of least resistance is easy. It’s easy to accept the blame meted to an entire gender as not being ‘tough and smart’ enough to understand the hierarchy. It’s easy to accept that those who already live in physically-bound pain (whether bodily or economic) can’t understand your existential pain, so they should just trust the system. It’s easy to accept that in a world of less, you deserve more as long as you follow the provided and supported patterns (white, male, degreed). It’s easy to accept that to suffer is to be human, and that to have progress means that some humans should suffer less and others should suffer more. It’s easy to design suffering as an implicit indicator of non-human, to lessen empathy and the urge to fix the pain.

Until you realize that the 'easy' path is a monoculture. That diversity of thought, expression, work, and problem-solving is being constrained so a few people can win more easily. It's not broad surviving and thriving that we're supporting.

Information technology is powerful. An unquestioned status quo, narrowly defined and spread far, won’t ease pain. Following the loudest, most aggressive voice won’t ease pain. Falling for specious logic and narcissistic narratives won’t ease pain. Doing any of these will increase pain exponentially.

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