“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

― Richard Buckminster Fuller

BFI Challenge FAQ:

What is a “trimtab”?
Buckminster Fuller referred to the function of a trimtab in nautical design as a metaphor for how individuals could make a difference in the world and potentially change the course of humanity.

A large ship moving through the ocean has great momentum. Turning the rudder changes the direction of the ship but with great effort. Using a trimtab — a small flap on the trailing edge of the main rudder — creates a low pressure area next to the rudder allowing the main rudder to turn the ship with substantially less effort. In airplanes trimtabs are used in a similar fashion. They are often affixed to the wing and tail flaps to greatly reduce the control force required by the pilot to maintain position and stability.

With respect to Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the trimtab metaphor is used to characterize a comprehensive strategy, that is conceived in such a manner and strategically placed into the prevailing system at such a time, in such a place, where its effects can be maximized, thereby creating the most advantageous change with the least amount of resources and energy on a relative basis.

Illusion is a revolutionary weapon
(…)
The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association. When the lines are cut the associational connections are broken.
(…)
And now the question as to whether scrambling techniques could be used to spread helpful and pleasant messages. Perhaps. On the other hand, the scrambled words and tape act like a virus in that they force something on the subject against his will. More to the point would be to discover how the old scanning patterns could be altered so that subject liberates his own spontaneous scanning pattern.
(…)
The aim of this project is to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherent in all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation.

The apathy here is, first subjective — the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation — the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision-making. Just as the university influences the student way of life, so do major social institutions create the circumstances in which the isolated citizen will try hopelessly to understand his world and himself.

The very isolation of the individual — from power and community and ability to aspire — means the rise of a democracy without publics. With the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle, progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection between community and leadership, between the mass and the several elites, has been so wrenched and perverted that disastrous policies go unchallenged time and again.

from Michael Hauben’s “Participatory Democracy From the 1960s and SDS into the Future On-line”:

PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY (…)

The Port Huron Statement called for the implementation of participatory democracy as a way to bring people back into decisions about the country in general, and their individual lives, in particular. (…)

Miller writes that in a 1960 essay, “Participatory Democracy and Human Nature”, Kaufman had described a society in which every member had a “direct responsibility for decisions.” (…)

“Participation” explained Kaufman, “means both personal initiative — that men feel obliged to help resolve social problems — and social opportunity — that society feels obliged to maximize the possibility for personal initiative to find creative outlets.” (Miller, p. 95)

A participant at the Port Huron Conference, Richard Flacks remembers Arnold Kaufman speaking at the convention, “At one point, he declared that our job as citizens was not to role-play the President. Our job was to put forth our own perspective. That was the real meaning of democracy–press for your own perspective as you see it, not trying to be a statesman understanding the big picture.” (Miller, p. 111) (…)

Tom Hayden, Miller writes, understood participatory democracy to mean:

“number one, action; we believed in action. We had behind us the so-called decade of apathy; we were emerging from apathy. What’s the opposite of apathy? Active participation. Citizenship. Making history. Secondly, we were very directly influenced by the civil rights movement in its student phase, which believed that by personally committing yourself and taking risks, you could enter history and try to change it after a hundred years of segregation. And so it was this element of participation in democracy that was important. Voting was not enough. Having a democracy in which you have an apathetic citizenship, spoon-fed information by a monolithic media, periodically voting, was very weak, a declining form of democracy. And we believed, as an end in itself, to make the human being whole by becoming an actor in history instead of just a passive object. Not only as an end in itself, but as a means to change, the idea of participatory democracy was our central focus.” (Miller, p. 144)

from CrimethInc’s The Party’s Over!:

“LOOK, A BALLOT BOX – DEMOCRACY!!”

If the freedom for which so many generations have fought and died is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth checking a box on a ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was before, then the heritage our emancipating forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is
nothing but a sham substitute for the liberty they sought.

For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they create a sonic and emotional environment, transforming the world that in turn transforms them. Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system – a harmony in human relationships and activity. To get there from here, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS

No one can represent your power and interests for you – you can only have power by wielding it, you can only learn what your interests are by getting involved. Politicians make careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy; in fact, they are a priest class that answers only to itself, and their very existence is proof of our disenfranchisement.

Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we have ceded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and control of our living environments
to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities. But we don’t have to simply choose between presidential
candidates, soft drink brands, television shows, and political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and social structures and power, we can establish a new society on the basis of freedom and cooperation.

from CrimethInc’s Don’t Just Vote:

Voting for people to represent your interests is the least efficient and effective means of applying political power. The alternative, broadly speaking, is acting directly to represent your interests yourself.

The London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) was born again a few years ago proudly proclaiming 35 years of no-existence. Itnewsletter it publishes includes constant references to druidic ley-lines, masonic influences in architecture and occult sources of power seen as a way of broadening the political critique of urban geography with the ‘occult’ implicit suggestion that there always is ‘something else’ behind the most banal aspect of life.

from Center for Tactical Magic’s “Applied Magic(k) – An Introduction”:

In the Western traditions of ritual magic(k) and occult practices there is often a “lust for results” that demands linearity in the form of cause-and-effect. In such cases, practitioners become ill-at-ease when they summon a demon to defeat racist presidents and no one shows up to take the job. Nearly every other expression of magic across the globe regards the magical act as a liminal space that appears during the performance. This is a zone of transformation; a place where the rules of everyday life are suspended and alternative realities can trickle in. In some cases, a shaman will perform a conjuring trick as a way of illustrating the zone of transformation. Thus, it is not the “trick” which is magic, but the performance/perception. The tricks are part of a performance that leads the audience to a mental state where the real magic can take place. Thus the shift occurs in the perception of the audience rather than in the hands of the shaman. The best magicians also recognize this dynamic among their own audiences and perform accordingly by designing and performing illusions and/or rituals that are relevant to people’s lives…

from Anne-Marie Schleiner’s “Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming”:

A promising tactic for the early Situationists was the unpredictable yet forceful potential of play — what anthropologist Victor Turner termed the “liminoid,” or the freeing and transformational, moments of play when the normal roles and rules of a community or society are relaxed. After these temporary situations “players” settle once more into fixed roles. The Situationists proposed to adopt this liminoid “subjunctive mood” (when anything can happen) into a more general approach, a way of doing and being in the everyday, in order to transform material life with ludic actions. As Debord remarked,

We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it. Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type.

Situationist games do not respect the boundary between play and work, leisure and non-leisure, between “real life” and Huizinga’s “magic circle”, the separation from “normal space” that facilitates immersion in games and play. Situationist games are not sports and are not relegated to sports stadiums, arcades, or Playstation home entertainment set-ups. Situationist games bleed into the city, the workplace, the buyplace, the personal computer, the mobile phone, public and private transportation and communication, and into and inside escapist rule-based game environments themselves. In transgressing the “magic circle,” a Situationist gaming tactic attempts to give transformative potential not just to play but to “normal” life.

from CrimethInc’s “There is a Secret World Concealed Within this One”:

This world, the so-called “real world,” is just a front. Pull back the curtain and you’ll see the libraries are all filled with runaways writing novels, the highways are humming with escapees and sympathizers, all the receptionists and sensible mothers are straining at the leash for a chance to show how alive they still are. . . and all that talk of practicality and responsibility is just threats and bluffing to keep us from reaching out our hands to find that heaven lies in reach before us.

You can taste it in the shock and roar of a first, unexpected kiss, or in the blood in your mouth that instant after an accident when you realize you’re still alive. It blows in the wind you feel on the rooftops of a really reckless night of adventure. You hear it in the magic of your favorite songs, how they lift and transport you in ways that no science or psychology could ever account for. It might be you’ve seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code without a key…

Revolution is simply the idea we could enter that secret world and never return; or, better, that we could burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath entirely.

Under the paving stones, the beach.

Let’s not change bosses. Let’s change life.

- May 1968 graffiti

So maybe what we have today are not problems, but meta-problems.
{…}
We understand the problems. We also, pretty much, understand the solutions. But their real-world application is a whole unpickable, integrated clusterfuck.
{…}
[Open source bazaars – media-effective denial memes spread virally through community far quicker than effective strategies of rebuttal do.]

“… build a politics …” So, first, can you define politics? I’m taking my definition from the first line of Wikipedia’s politics page: “… a process by which groups of people make collective decisions.” Observing government, politicians, etc, behavior, and applying “The purpose of a system is what it does” rule of thumb, what is usually going on is the application of predetermined & set ideology to all problems (as well as clashes between 2 or more ideologies, and the occassional attempt at finding some compromise between ideologies.)

In contrast to that, engineering has developed a whole bunch of tools & techniques for effective problem solving – root cause analysis, 5 whys, cost benefit analysis, total cost of ownership, trade study, risk analysis, and so on. I’ve never heard any politician, journalist, commentator or analyst mention any of these concepts. As long as we continue to just throw ideology at every situation, instead of actually using our best problem solving techniques, things will continue to get worse.

Switching gears:

Bakan’s The Corporation argues (IMO compellingly) that corporations behave like psychopaths (incapable of empathy or guilt, reckless, deceitful, etc.) And corporations are inextricably intertwined with government, news/media & military, such that they are, arguably, one large psychopathic system.

Up until recently, I was basically convinced that corporations, government, or both, can be changed via application of cybernetic & systems engineering principles. Factoring in the psychopathology makes things tricky – assuming this is valid, or at least a valid analogy, “changing” the system may not even be possible, at least in any real substantive fashion. Psychopaths don’t usually respond to treatment – it usually just makes them better at being psychopaths. The only thing that occurs to me would be to find ways to “convince” the system that it is its own best interest to substantively change.

This then generates other questions – and it is getting late now…

Here’s a good starting point for where this is going, if you aren’t familiar – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points

The twelve leverage points to intervene in a system were proposed by Donella Meadows… She started with the observation that there are levers, or places within a complex system (such as a firm, a city, an economy, a living being, an ecosystem, an ecoregion) where a “small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything”

The concept
The Kingdom
The basic premise of the idea was summed up by writer Mark Waid as, “It’s all true.” It presumes that all of the stories ever told about a character are equally valid stories. For example, despite overt contradictions between the versions of Superman (and his adventures, supporting characters, and setting) that appeared in:
{…snipped list of Superman versions…}
no one of these versions supersedes any other as canon. This was a repudiation of the prevailing approach to continuity in superhero comics, in which only the currently-used version is considered valid, rendering prior stories which are inconsistent with this continuity officially apocryphal.

As it appears within comic stories themselves, Hypertime is a superdimensional construct which—under very limited circumstances (prescribed by editors in the real world, and by various in-story rules within the DC Universe itself)— can allow versions of characters from one continuity to interact with versions from another. For example, in The Kingdom, a version of Superman extrapolated into the future briefly encounters the Siegel/Shuster version.

Hypertime works like this: the main, or “official” timeline is like a river, with a nearly infinite number of distributaries —alternate timelines— branching off. Most of the time, these alternate timelines go off on their own and never intersect with the main timeline. On occasion, the branches return, feeding back into the main timeline – sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily. Thus, history can sometimes change momentarily and then change back (or not). If characters from a very different Hypertimeline move into our own, this accelerates the process, causing more noticeable (but shorter) changes to the timeline …

Due to this connection with algorithmic information theory, entropy can be said to be that portion of a system’s information capacity which is “used up,” that is, unavailable for storing new information (even if the existing information content were to be compressed). The rest of a system’s information capacity (aside from its entropy) might be called extropy, and it represents the part of the system’s information capacity which is potentially still available for storing newly derived information. The fact that physical entropy is basically “used-up storage capacity” is a direct concern in the engineering of computing systems; e.g., a computer must first remove the entropy from a given physical subsystem (eventually expelling it to the environment, and emitting heat) in order for that subsystem to be used to store some newly computed information.

from the abstract for Rolf Landauer’s The physical nature of information:

Information is inevitably tied to a physical representation and therefore to restrictions and possibilities related to the laws of physics and the parts available in the universe. Quantum mechanical superpositions of information bearing states can be used, and the real utility of that needs to be understood. Quantum parallelism in computation is one possibility and will be assessed pessimistically. The energy dissipation requirements of computation, of measurement and of the communications link are discussed. The insights gained from the analysis of computation has caused a reappraisal of the perceived wisdom in the other two fields. A concluding section speculates about the nature of the laws of physics, which are algorithms for the handling of information, and must be executable in our real physical universe.

…to solidly re-define “myth” and provide the first glimpses of a “unified theory” of the elements of philosophy, psychology, media studies, anthropology and folklore which all overlap within this single concept of myth, and specifically immanent myth.

from James Curcio’s status update on his Immanence of Myth collection:

… and James’ list of questions on that link is just brilliant …

Looks like lots of other really really good stuff going on at the Modern Mythology blog: a quick favorite from Mr. VI’s Unlearning Reality : Afragility, Twitter, and Embodying Myth as Incunabula:

Because the tension between reality and fiction is manufactured in an attempt to avoid acknowledging the fact that the majority of existence has fictive qualities; that apparently fundamental things are actually agreed upon fictions.

In many contexts, the mythic is seen as exterior – the Otherland, the Outside or perhaps some transcendent realm. It can also be viewed as completely interior – all in the mind, unpossessing of an external reality.

Such a division is ridiculous.

Kayfabe

The sophisticated “scientific concept” with the greatest potential to enhance human understanding may be argued to come not from the halls of academe, but rather from the unlikely research environment of professional wrestling.

Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasized that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity’s future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling’s insiders as “Kayfabe”.

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called “a promotion”) sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which “breaks Kayfabe” is called “shooting” to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called “working”.

Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. Perhaps confusing battles between “freshwater” Chicago macro economists and Ivy league “Saltwater” theorists could be best understood as happening within a single “orthodox promotion” given that both groups suffered no injury from failing (equally) to predict the recent financial crisis. The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the “string” and “loop” camps would seem to be an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intra-promotion rivalry given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity.

What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery. While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling’s status as a pseudo sport, what few alive today remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport (known as “catch” wrestling) which held its last honest title match early in the 20th century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action, or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested. This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks which define the category of activity which wrestling shares with other human spheres:

• A) Occasional but Extreme Peril for the participants.

• B) General: Monotony for both audience and participants.

Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants. As such Kayfabrication is a dependable feature of many of our most important systems which share the above two characteristics such as war, finance, love, politics and science.

Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling’s system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.
At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

Kayfabe, it appears, is a dish best served client-side.