I realize there's a lot out there on the subject, but do you have any specific reading recommendations summarizing the effect of the US dollar's reserve currency status on middle America? It's a history I've been interested in learning.
In addition to local journalism, cooperatives are another way democracy can show up close to home. Combining the two, I believe 404Media.co is effectively a journalist-owned outlet (i.e. a worker coop).
I too appreciate the clarity and structure of your writing. And the topics.
Non-consensual consent seems to me related to Heidegger’s ‘throwness’, which Google Gemini summarized as:
> In Heidegger's philosophy, "thrownness" (German: "Geworfenheit") refers to the idea that humans are passively "thrown" into existence in the world, without choosing their circumstances or having any control over their "being-in-the-world," essentially meaning we are born into a pre-existing world with a set of conditions and limitations that we did not choose; it signifies the fundamental fact that our existence is not something we actively create but rather something that has already happened to us.
Found the first few paragraphs an interesting exploration of the concept of “curation”. Also interesting was the concept of a semioscape, and its location within a broader latent sociosemioscape. Then talked about curation algorithms ability to both reflect the larger culture and also influence it. Suggested that algorithmic curration accelerates and recursivly affects itself, the content creators, consumers and the larger social context.
> The phrase “the network is the territory” captures the idea that the associative connections and relationships within a network—whether digital or physical—define how meaning is generated, interpreted, and circulated. In this sense, the network becomes a map of meaning itself, shaping the cultural landscape (the territory) rather than merely reflecting it. Networks, through their curatorial structures, dictate what cultural artifacts, symbols, or semiotic objects become visible, relevant, or influential. As these networks grow more complex and intertwined, they increasingly influence our experience of the sociosemioscape, the broader cultural environment where meaning is produced and exchanged.
> The point about baby-eaters and wasps and starving elephants isn't, just, that Hart's God – the "Three O" (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) God – is dead. That's the easy part. I'll call it "shallow atheism." Deep atheism, as I'll understand it, finds not-God in more places. Let me say more about what I mean.
I like the idea of ‘individuation’[0] where individual things (rocks, living bodies, minds, societies) come into being from their preindividual environment. As I understand this idea, it is just that a mind individuates within a body, and that mind comes to call itself ‘I’. So it’s not that we existed before a mind individuated, but rather we come to find ourself recognizing ourself as ‘I’ after individuating.
There is a model of nested dynamic systems called 'panarchy'.
> Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring [which sometimes is a collapse], and renewal. These transformational cycles take place at scales ranging from a drop of water to the biosphere, over periods from days to geologic epochs.
This reminds me of the cybertician Gordon Pask's idea of m-individuals and p-individuals.
> A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. [1]
Also some interesting related ideas in an article named "The Autonomous Cognitive Agency of Social System" in a book called The Practice of Thinking by Marta Lenartowicz and Weaver D.R. Weinbaum (2022).
Can't those who don't have children still influence other's children? Famous childless people include Rosa Parks, Arthur C. Clark, the Dali Lama, Edwin Hubble, Oprah, Angela Merkle, Bill Hicks, Dr. Seuss, T.S. Elliot and George Washington. Surely they influenced the future.
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