- Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human behavior could change. Marketing is about finding money by making sure it doesn’t. The future arrives along a least-cognitive-effort path.
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In a way, when we ask, is there a sustainable future, we are not really asking about fossil fuels or feeding 9 billion people. We are asking can the Manufactured Normalcy Field absorb such and such changes?
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This is already starting to happen. Instead of a newspaper feeding us daily doses of a shared Field, we get a nauseating mix of news from forgotten classmates, slogan-placards about issues trivial and grave, revisionist histories coming at us via a million political voices, the future as a patchwork quilt of incoherent glimpses, all mixed in with pictures of cats doing improbable things.
The waning Field, still coming at us through weakening media like television, seems increasingly like a surreal zone of Wonderland madness.
One of his best posts, IMO.
I haven't read anything this packed with insight in quite some time. Really unique perspective. Badge.So for this bucket of experiencing the future, what we get is a Darwinian weeding out of those manifestations of the future that break the continuity of technological experience. So things like Google Wave fail. Just because something is technically feasible does not mean it can psychologically normalized into the Field.
Instead, what is unevenly distributed are isolated windows into the un-normalized future that exist as weak spots in the Field. When the windows start to become larger and more common, economics kicks in and the Field maintenance industry quickly moves to create specialists, codified knowledge and normalcy-preserving design patterns.
Aldous Huxley recognized this. Its the whole basis of Brave New World (but we've covered that topic so many times on HUbski that I won't beat a dead horse). But its the reason that I agree with this: There are engineering solutions that currently exist to lots of our current problems. For example, if we all were vegetarians, food would be cheaper, the environment would be healthier, we would be healthier, etc. Its simple solution to a deep and deepening problem. But these types of solutions aren't acceptable since they require large scale qualitative social change.The mainstream seeks placidity while the edge seeks stimulation.
In a way, when we ask, is there a sustainable future, we are not really asking about fossil fuels or feeding 9 billion people. We are asking can the Manufactured Normalcy Field absorb such and such changes?
IMO this could be described as a disconnect between the Normalcy Field and an inescapable future. No doubt the discussion of climate change is distorted by the Normalcy Field: If it's not obviously happening, it's simply not happening. The definition of it 'happening' is then 'when the Normalcy Field can't absorb it'. -Which is really what we are hoping to avoid in the first place.