For those here fascinated by the impending (or not) Apocalypto (Mel Gibson), Jackpot (William Gibson), Rapture (Evangelicals) or Redux Deseret (Dave West), I submit the following novel series by a very prolific Santa Fe Author, S.M. Stirling, called "the Emberverse" set in the days and decades after an abrupt shift in one or more physical constants yielding a world where most concentrated-energy systems no longer work, Electricity, Internal Combustion, Steam power, Explosives, etc. all just "fizzle", and the result is a Utopian/Dystopian world dropped into feudalism with a backdrop of high-functioning self-organized societies around Pagan/Wiccan principles.
I met Stirling in 1998, soon after he moved here and quite a while before he started this particular series, but he was already quite prolific and quite impressive in his works... with acute attention to detail whether it be scientific, historical, political or sociological. I used to see him writing on a laptop at a table in Joe's Dining at the Y of Rodeo/Zia, but never interrupted him as I think he was in his "zone"... I'm guessing Joe gave him a bottomless cup... this was usually mid-late mornings for me... or call it early lunch. I have no limit to my capacity for morbid fascination, and Stirling's works feed that well, though I will admit to dropping off reading his Emberverse after maybe three novels? There may be as many as 8? You gotta love William Gibson's term: "Jackpot" described from a somewhat distant future (maybe 2100 or later?) looking back at "these times we are in" with some perspective of hindsight. He describes this "Jackpot" as something of a "Slow Cooked Apocalypse" <https://thequietus.com/articles/28340-william-gibson-agency-interview> . This link (author Robert Berry) introduced me to a mid-century movement attributed as a form of Anarchism, referred to as Situationism or Situationists <https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jan-d-matthews-an-introduction-to-the-situationists#:~:text=The%20Situationist%20International%20(1957%E2%80%931972,and%20worker%20revolts%20in%20France.>. I'll defer to Glen's quicker, more focused mind, and quiver full of Anarchist tropes and ideas as to whether these Situationists in any way correlate with his offered "Anarchic Syndicalism", but what little I have investigated suggested there is a shared rhyme scheme at the least? - Steve Glen writes: > < I suppose one could make an argument in the form of renormalizing an > infinite number of variables. Let's imagine society is describable by an > infinitely long math expression (a right hand side only, not implying an > equation), where each term has a coefficient, modifying its contribution to > whatever set of composition functions the expression uses (+,⨂,⊙, …). But at > any given time or locale only a finite number of the coefficients have > non-zero value. Then we can think of an apocalypse (or efflorescence) might > be a shift in which coefficients have zero values. Maybe the number of > non-zero coefficients shrinks (or grows, respectively). Maybe a discrete > event might happen to zero out all the non-zero terms and non-zero another > set of zeroed terms. Or maybe non-zero-ness smoothly flows around the > coefficients. IDK. But if you think this way, words like "apocalypse" kinda > lose their intensity. > > > The relatively high-level composition functions might involve, say, actions > of the government, and the relatively low-level the functioning of a calcium > pump. Counting those functions that involve humans as distinct from other > material or forms of life is arbitrary but if all those functions became > un-callable due to typing considerations, then that's one way to define an > apocalypse: Everyone is dead. If the economy collapses completely, or it > becomes impossible to feed most people, that might also reasonably be labeled > an apocalypse. (Simply tabulating what is human-involved means tracking the > dynamics of things: Unwinding the stack of those compositions and doing > attribution, that is hard by itself.) One could do broader attribution to > count other species, like with the Chicxulub impactor. I was thinking more > on the boundary of extinction when those that have the awareness to fight or > flight do so, and that is an indicator of their general fitness. > > On the other hand, if there are variations in the number of highly-correlated > deep compositions versus less-correlated deep compositions, that seems more > in the realm of politics. Serious but not apocalyptic. > > Marcus > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >
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