To be determined #

The simplified message of this book: understand people, not as we wish us to be, but as we are. #

We make honest mistakes. We are incredibly creative in our problem solving. We can keep moving the needle closer to a humanist ethics. 

Remember, too, that people do not calmly accept a place under someone else’s hegemony. We do not quietly die when our use is done, according to the doneness as deemed by someone with more money or power or information. We get angry when other people do bullshit things that make our lives harder. Spark desperation, and desperate acts will ensue.

The more trauma we live with, the more messed up our cognitive chain gets while living more in the reaction state, until and unless a person decides to do the very uncomfortable thing of trying to heal their hurt.

People keep on keeping on, until they don’t. We are not constrained to living exactly as we have lived to date. We can change, and do all the time. We butt up against new people and ideas that spark us to develop new ways to deal with them, and sometimes that is so effective that we start testing its use elsewhere, too. That’s accidental change. We can also change based on reflection and study: intentional change. This book is an outcome of intentional change, based on trying to understand something massively complex, in a way that didn’t offset the bits that don’t easily fit. 

Our history informs us. What we’ve done once is easier to do again, but there was still an inception point. Inception points can happen again, and the thing done once might only be once. We might not actually drop another nuclear bomb.

Our history informs us. What we’ve done multiple times becomes easy. What we’ve done a multitude of times becomes habit. Habits are hard to break. A person with a habit of harming others won’t change just because they are found and incarcerated or fined. Others need to stay involved.

We tend to escalate our big changes: from the spark of an idea, to thinking about it, to talking about it — all before doing it. It’s an experiment. Having the thought doesn’t mean you are going to do a thing. Thinking it through, talking it through, doesn’t mean it is happening. As more people are involved, there are more that will keep an idea on track. With a big project, even the start of doing doesn’t mean it will be finished when and in the exact form it was foretold — every development team has experienced this. 

Then there are our multitudinous architectures. We leverage many; some of us can manage a few, some of us a handful, and some of us seemingly infinite. The father you know could very well be mostly that man with everyone he meets; or you could be privy to his desperate decisions architecture, or his protectionist ones. If he prioritizes his relationship with you, seeing him around others may never give you insight that he could modify his thinking. 

What we can really, really know? Change is coming. It might be one person’s spark of an idea to modify something that’s annoying them, or it could be a team of people building a new tool.  They maybe even make egregious mistakes on some intrinsic level that wasn’t dreamt of in their philosophies, and need to be dug into again to course correct.

To assume there will ever be a thing so fundamentally right as to be untouchable is a failure of imagination. As long as we can adapt, as long as we can problem solve, as long as we can find a way to muddle along together, we have incredible potential. 

The flip side? Our species could self destruct, and even make our world unlivable for anything else. We could devolve to territorial omnivores with little language. Our continued presence here as an intelligent species isn’t a given, but a future-sense I personally like to build upon.

Biodiversity and cultural diversity puts more bets on the table of chance and change. We don’t know what’s coming. To survive into the depths of time, make all the bets we can. Figure out a social fabric that can mediate between intrinsically antagonistic cultures.  Focus on the philosophy of mediation over the definition of specificity-focused right and wrong.

It effectively means that we’re managing the networked data by accumulating various and changing cultures. Each culture is a lens. New cultures will spring up and fill in gaps and help to piece together the network as a whole. People as a whole will need to come to terms with the idea that their most comfortable cultural matrix cannot be imposed on everyone they interact with. Ultimately, what matters is a healthy balance of those four quadrants of environment, distributed well, and with constant reevaluation as technology and understanding gets ever closer to the quality of truth.

People aren’t data, but data and people are intrinsically intertwingled. 

Data is a core tooling of our processing and navigating the world. People are actively, knowingly creating data that would have never existed without us, and we are navigating more data now than ever – and (barring collapse) it’s going to increase. 

People are not just noticing and reacting to data. We’re actively chasing it, and using it to make decisions. We’ve developed novel approaches to try to understand data and shift our decisions to realign to goals — economics is a prime example. We’ve grown to understand that our interaction with data is complex, and have developed scientific methodology to try to weed out some of the behaviors around it that lead to false interpretation. On the flip side, we’ve had people so intent on doing what we’re trying to weed out that they have actively found ways around scientific methodology to use the standard to prove misinformation, and politics to thwart the surfacing that it is misinformation — or even outright, bald-faced lying. 

We are actively capturing and storing passive information “just in case” it will become something useful: sensors, CCTV, online tracking of every movement, etc. It’s proven useful. We’ve developed deeper understanding of weather patterns for it. But we’ve also created a net-new surveillance economy for it. Pockets of people are actively manipulating the fabric of information, including all three core processes of information architecture (orientation, findability, navigation), in order to stack the deck in their favor, focused on a win-lose scenario. 

I can’t stress enough how much I believe everyone needs to be reading Robert D. Hare and comparing our current economics, politics, and information technology with the core behaviors of the dark triad (quadrad in some later works). Gaslighting, goal post moving, siloing information, “trust me”, over-aggressive behavior early and often, gross manipulation, just to name a few of the manipulative behaviors. I do believe we are growing to understand the implications. Moving into a new city, a new house or apartment, a new job, and new project as our information patterns continue down this rabbit hole is becoming harder. There is a solid thread of trustlessness involved, and that is a response to iteratively wishing you hadn’t trusted. 

When manipulation and lying become the fabric of everyday life, you can’t trust. The closer to your everyday, the more you watch for signs of trustlessness – until just being the new is enough to make you have to prove that you could be trusted. And the goalpost will continue moving, because IT is being used as a mass effect driver for those who are actively scamming to just keep trying with the next person until they  find someone with an iota of trust left.

There’s one key factor to understand when dealing with humanity’s darkness: they believe in win-lose. 

They believe, to their very core, the very end of their time, that the only way to win is to see others lose. To lose their money for something of lesser value, to lose their livelihood, their food, their shelter. To lose their happiness, their sense of safety, their understanding of the world; to lose their belief in the very idea of fairness. To lose, in the end, their orientation to the world at large, to lose their health, and to lose their lives. 

When you see the world as win-lose, you never really win until there’s nothing left for someone to lose. 

I sincerely hope that we’re going to figure out the most immediate shifts of IT design without me having to detail them in the models. I can (maybe should) write out some mapping as ancillary materials. But this one book — this one large, encompassing, complex-as-fuck model — can stick to the core idea without drawing finite lines of influence. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t. You, dear reader, are a person. You are exactly why I wrote this. While I am absolutely positive that I will strongly disagree with some interpretations and how some people leverage the understandings I drew,  that’s not the reason to try to direct them to where I think they should be. We need lensing more than I need my ego.

Any well-articulated idea can become a weapon. There are weapons in here, and I know it. All the ones that I'm aware of are already understood in pockets out in the world. The best inoculation to these weapons is understanding. That’s what I focus on when I worry. 

When I hope….my goodness, the breadth and strength of my hope knows no bounds. I hope more people grow to understand the importance of information, the flavors of truth, and the incredible potential in each of us, and in our whole. 

Our current situations are not necessarily the sum of all our potential. Our current cultural and social expressions are turtles all the way down; but, we’re turtles for the subsequent generations. If we work the problems, we survive. The problems include all of our bad actors and how deeply they are currently affecting our cultures and ersatz, fledgling, wanna-be society. 

So, dear reader, today is the first day of the first blushes of a potentially different understanding. Are you going to set it aside, dismiss it out of hand? Are you going to attack it as something threatening your safety, discordant to your sense of reality? Are you going to study some areas you consider problematic? Are you going to start making some tweaks to systems near you?

You decide, per your own ouruborus of perception, based on what information you’ve let in, what seems to work in your cognitions, and according to you environment. 

Together, all the decisions accumulate. You get to do you. 

This book will most likely be a passing glitch on a few consciousnesses – too intellectual, too humanist, too complex, not having a hand-over-fist, short-term profitability throughline. But I hope against logic that maybe, possibly, the models edge a little closer to a quality of truth. 

Peace be in you -  Angela