Estimated reading time: 6 mins : 59 secs
Things get faster. My kids travelled round the world before they could walk. We seem to be getting through an epoch a decade; this is my third epoch, maybe the fourth?
Julian Barnes’ Porcupine is about the overthrow and subsequent trial of a communist dictator, Petkanov, in a fictional East European country. It’s set on the cusp of the very real epochal handover which took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 90s.
Petkanov taunts his prosecutor, Solinsky, with a question about his alleged monstrous nature. Monsters are, by definition, something ‘other’, he says. You can’t escape from the ‘other’ and it makes little sense to put monsters on trial for they have – literally – no capacity for culpability. From the New York Times review:
“Either I am a monster or I am not,” Petkanov says to Solinsky at the end of the trial. “Yes? If I am not, then I must be someone like you, or someone you might be capable of becoming.”
Eschatology used to be about monsters and gods. Now it’s about people like us. Many of the Possible Future Global Catastrophes are still essentially monstrous, it’s true. But the sins of omission that are their mostly likely cause are uniquely human.
It’s not like we’ve not had it spelled out clearly. Nicholas Nassim Taleb has given us Black Swans and warned why globalisation is combinatorially dangerous. Buzz Hollings gives us Panarchy:
Holling and his colleagues call their ideas “panarchy theory”-after Pan, the ancient Greek god of nature. Together with anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter’s ideas on complexity and social collapse, this theory helps us see our world’s tectonic stresses as part of a long-term global process of change and adaptation. It also illustrates the way catastrophe caused by such stresses could produce a surge of creativity leading to the renewal of our global civilization. . .
Panarchy theory had its origins in Holling’s meticulous observation of the ecology of forests. He noticed that healthy forests all have an adaptive cycle of growth, collapse, regeneration, and again growth. During the early part of the cycle’s growth phase, the number of species and of individual plants and animals quickly increases, as organisms arrive to exploit all available ecological niches. The total biomass of these plants and animals grows, as does their accumulated residue of decay-for instance, the forest’s trees get bigger, and as these trees and other plants and animals die, they rot to form an ever-thickening layer of humus in the soil. Also, the flows of energy, materials, and genetic information between the forest’s organisms become steadily more numerous and complex. If we think of the ecosystem as a network, both the number of nodes in the network and the density of links between the nodes rise.
During this early phase of growth, the forest ecosystem is steadily accumulating capital. As its total mass grows, so does its quantity of nutrients, along with the amount of information in the genes of its increasingly varied plants and animals. Its organisms are also accumulating mutations in their genes that could be beneficial at some point in the future. And all these changes represent what Holling calls greater “potential” for novel and unexpected developments in the forest’s future.
As the forest’s growth continues, its components become more linked together-the ecosystem’s “connectedness” goes up-and as this happens it evolves more ways of regulating itself and maintaining its stability. . .
This growth phase can’t go on indefinitely. Holling implies-very much as Tainter argues in his theory-that the forest’s ever-greater connectedness and efficiency eventually produce diminishing returns by reducing its capacity to cope with severe outside shocks. Essentially, the ecosystem becomes less resilient. The forest’s interdependent trees, worms, beetles, and the like become so well adapted to a specific range of circumstances-and so well organized as an efficient and productive system-that when a shock pushes the forest far outside that range, it can’t cope. Also, the forest’s high connectedness helps any shock travel faster across the ecosystem. And finally, the forest’s high efficiency makes it harder for it to realize its rising potential for novelty. . .
Overall, then, the forest ecosystem becomes rigid and brittle. It becomes, as Holling says, “an accident waiting to happen.”
So in the late part of the growth phase of any living system like a forest, three things are happening simultaneously: the system’s potential for novelty is increasing, its connectedness and self-regulation are also increasing, but its overall resilience is falling. At this point in the life of a forest, a sudden event such as a windstorm, wildfire, insect outbreak, or drought can trigger the collapse of the whole ecosystem.
We’re living in the midst of shallowness and a narcissism epidemic - is one way of looking at it. Another is that, with the monsters demythologised and events moving so fast and everything hyperconnected in panarchic intertwingularity, we have a new perspective on things. It’s not so much we’re shallow, but that our view on the world has tilt-shifted.
It doesn’t make much sense to stop and stare too much at individual details in the Garden of Panarchy; a systems approach is more useful. This distance is easy to misconstrue, though. A holistic worldview and misanthropy can seem to have a great deal in common.
In The Third Man, Harry Lime (played by Awesome Welles) famously describes his feelings about the ‘dots’ from a high vantage point on the ferris wheel in an occupied post-war Vienna’:
Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?
He goes on:
Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs – it’s the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I.
From these elevations does temptation come – Matthew 4:8:
Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them.
But there are good temptations and bad temptations; there’s monsters and there’s people like us.
While most of us aren’t collapsitarians, I do sometimes wonder if we don’t have a fascination for the game of civilisational collapse. I suspect that the post-apocalyptic scenarios of many games and films is more about a sense of agency and power than it is about tragedy. Armageddon looks like fun.
Finnish research on The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming [PDF] studied things like fun. The researchers observed this in players of Super Monkey Bowl 2:
Unexpectedly, we found that Event 1 (the monkey falls off the edge of the lane to the depth of outer space) elicited an increase in positive affect as indexed by an increase in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity, and a decrease in negative affect as indexed by a reduction in corrugator EMG activity. In addition, the event elicited arousal as indexed by an increase in SCL (IBI data were somewhat equivocal). Thus, although the event in question represents a clear failure, several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment. This is an important finding suggesting that event characteristics such as visual impressiveness and excitingness may be more potent determinants of the emotional response of the player compared to the meaning of the event in terms of failure or success.
Gaming thinker, Jesper Juul, is cautious of reading too much into this, but notes in this piece on gamers’ contradictory views on failure:
Although players do not want to fail, they may nevertheless enjoy it when feeling responsible for it. . .
. . . failure is central to the experience of depth in a game. . .
More:
50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography from Smashing Magazine
Why does tilt-shift photography make things look tiny?
The more famous quote from the Awesome Welles Ferris Wheel scene is this:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.
Games, fantasy and delusions of agency: Ferris Club
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Simon,
Great piece about worrying times and the complexity linkage from the ecology of Hollings, to Tainter (Power Law dist.) and Taleb are definitely there…can I throw in Mandelbrot’s fractal (self similarity) for good measure!?
David
Definitely!
[...] true! See the research on the Psychophysiology of Videogaming cited near the bottom of this random essay on my personal blog ie where I write about stuff that probably has no practical application, to say [...]
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