By Murray Blockchain. Murray is a model, motivational speaker, and personal ruggedization life coach based in an off-grid seasteading community.
The objective of the upcoming ‘Thought Forms’ series is to take up the question of agency in relation to polycrisis. In subsequent pieces, we’ll explore several different frameworks for organization and problem-solving that have helped to orient our thinking. We'll also examine their shared features, perhaps gaining insight into how general principles may help or hinder forms of adaptive agency in relation to change. Tentatively, some of the frameworks we’ll look at include:
Permaculture
Mutual Aid (Anarchist version)
Autocatalytic Sets
Cybernetics
The SES (Social-Ecological Systems) Framework
Chaos Magic
Biomimicry
Web3 lol
Note: This list is evolving and subject to substantial alteration. If you have ideas, go off in the comments.
Prefigurative Glossary
The words we use to talk about the world also shape the world. For the heads out there, I don't want to provoke a materialist/constructivist cage fight with that statement. But I do want to address some terms, laying the ground for the next several pieces, starting with 'framework.'
Framework
Coming from a background in web development, this term does not spark joy. It feels carceral. When I hear someone talk about a framework, I think pitch deck; TED talk; onboarding; streamlining; 'solutions;' smooth surfaces shrouding the dopamine harvester. I feel myself grimacing over CSS files trying to understand what I did wrong.
Perhaps this neurosis is entirely my own - certainly others have different, even positive, associations with the term. The point in bringing this up is to highlight a particular, technocratic entrenchment of many of the concepts and language we'll be using in this piece. For me, language coming from cybernetics, systems thinking, and network science is some of the most useful for navigating polycrisis and thinking about agency and change. This same language also has deep roots in the US Military Industrial Complex and Silicon Valley, and might raise hackles for anyone wary of those places or generally aloof towards ‘technocratic solutionism.’
When the language we use to talk about change becomes 'co-opted' or ossifies into specific meanings within a dominant narrative paradigm, it constrains the possible futures we can imagine using the language we have. So, I want to acknowledge the ways in which terms like 'framework', 'resilience', 'scale', and others I'll be using here carry some technocratic baggage and are vulnerable to co-option as neoliberal powerpoint buzzwords. I also want to suggest that this need not be their only destiny.
Agent/Environment
Throughout these pieces, I'll talk about agency in two ways. The first comes from Information Theory, where the 'agent' is a unit of information that interacts with an 'environment' (or 'fitness landscape'). The information content of an agent is what makes it distinct from the environment around it: "The difference that makes a difference," as Gregory Bateson has famously said. 'Information' in this context is a notoriously difficult concept, even for people that have studied it for years (arguably on par with the related concept of 'entropy'). What is important for our purposes is twofold: groups of agents interacting give rise to complex behavior (this is the concept of 'emergence'); and, there is a mutual exchange between agent and environment (agents shape their environment and their environment shapes them - evolution through natural selection is an example).
We can visualize the agent/environment relationship in terms of a group of molecules (agents) in a solvent (environment), a group of cells (agents) in an organism (environment), a colony of ants (agents) in a field (environment), or a species (agents) in a bioregion (environment).
Within the scope of the latter example, we can just as easily say, "People responding to the world around them." This is, more or less, the second way I will talk about agency - at the human scale, as social and political agency. The bounds of 'group' and 'environment' are a core concern of all politics. And politics is an emergent property (for better or worse) of people interacting with one another and their environment. 'Environment' in this case includes all of the social, political, economic, and cultural factors that make up a 'world,' as well as the 'natural' environment. (Donna Haraway’s ‘natureculture’ is consistent with this usage of ‘environment.’)
We will be looking at frameworks that take up the question of agency in response to environmental volatility. What forms of agency might emerge as adaptive responses to global change, or how might existing forms of agency adapt? We have covered 'frameworks,' 'agent,' and 'environment.' What of 'volatility' and 'adaptation'?
Volatility
Volatility, as I mean it here, relates to both the degree and rate of change. (Line goes up or down a lot fast.) It is not necessarily bad - volatility can be very exciting. Savvy investors can make a lot of money off of volatility in a market. However, in relation to climate change, resource availability, and political and social stability, volatility usually makes life harder for most. When an environment changes a lot quickly, the things that evolved to live in that environment are forced to adapt (in some cases also quickly).
The impacts we are seeing today from carbon emitted decades ago suggest that the future will be characterized by an increasingly volatile global climate. Heatwaves, drought, floods, and fires intersect with agricultural production, housing, migration, water. More volatility in one system - like weather - can, does and likely will continue to breed more volatility in another - like food. These feedback relationships are central to the 'polycrisis' concept. As is the inherent difficulty in developing predictive models that can capture these complex relationships and provide holistic synthesis. For that reason, many of the frameworks presented here emphasize building resilience to volatility in general, rather than targeting isolated risks.
Adaptation
I'll use 'adaptation' primarily in terms of forms of social organization (the second usage of agency) responding to environmental volatility. A key concept to keep in mind is that of 'adaptive capacity:' Rather than proposing specific adaptations, the emphasis is on being able to respond effectively to uncertainty and change. While adaptive capacity includes 'resilience' - typically implying 'bouncing back'- it also encompasses the potential to leverage change towards transformation, not just preservation or perseverance.
Note: Like the tentative list of frameworks, this glossary is also an adaptive entity. And it’s also subject to volatility. We will add, subtract, update, be a vessel for words from the future to insert themselves into reality, etc.