Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures
Collective Flourishing
Our tools for navigating the future haven't kept pace with its growing complexity. Creating new systems that integrate a deep understanding of people, profound advances in modelling and foresight, and expressive interfaces could help us see, reason, and choose a better future together.
Co-Creation: Systems Thinking Beyond the Machine
Complexity thinking is all the rage — in the arts and sciences. Yet, there are two different strands of thinking about complexity, which are often confounded. The first comes from cybernetics, focussing on control in complex situations. The second is ecological, aiming at sustainable participation in a reality beyond control. Their difference rests on a fundamental distinction: is complexity rooted in feedback regulation or collective co-creation? While feedback remains mechanistic, co-creation generates new spaces of possibilities. We need it to understand life and its evolution. And it empowers us to rewrite our future, to escape our mechanistic cage without abandoning scientific rigor. In this paper, we illustrate how we implement these powerful yet abstract principles through our artistic and philosophical practice.
A Systems Literacy Manifesto
In 1968, West Churchman wrote, “…there is a good deal of turmoil about the manner in which our society is run. …the citizen has begun to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.”[1] Churchman was writing at a time of growing concern about war, civil rights, and the environment. Almost fifty years later, these concerns remain, and we have more reason than ever “to suspect that the people who make major decisions that affect our lives don’t know what they are doing.” Examples abound.
Welcome to the Relational Design Lab | LX Cast | 19 comments
Today I am VERY excited to share with all of you about my new home, Relational Design Lab! This R&D studio brings together a number of projects and will, I hope, grow to encompass many more. I imagine this lab as a gathering place for curious people who want to think about systems, and not in the typical mechanistic way they are described and implemented in technology. Instead, we'll feel into living systems, fractal ways of being, where the how is as important as the what. Over time, I hope the Lab will be a home or a waypoint for designers, researchers, community organizations, artists, storytellers, and technologists to explore togetherness together. Our 'theory of change' focuses on paradigm shift. Big change takes practice and possibility. Paradoxically, paradigm shift is a result of many small changes and repetitions in our behaviour and belief systems. We embrace emergence, mutual support, collective practice, and storytelling. One thing feels pretty clear, we need technology that is designed in solidarity with mutual care, does not depend on the whims of big corporations or its surveillance, and is joyful to use. To live in this reality, we also need to consider how business, funding, governance, scale, and context affect our work. We need embodied ways of knowing and sharing knowledge alongside our technical reasoning. And we need to face the reality of the consequences of our actions and those of our ancestors. This is not a project that aims to solve all the world's problems, but instead, to nurture the capacity for doing things together. We support and practice responding with curiosity and care, not with answers or attachment to ideals that no longer make sense amid collapsing systems. We are not "hiring" for this project now but there are many ways to get involved and would welcome opportunities to collaborate. Some of the projects we're holding include Folk Tech, Spacious, SEED Founding, and Relational Source License. We're also developing a very cool workshop process to help other organizations explore relational design through a community-driven futurism process. As ecosystem supporters, we are developing relationships with many aligned groups and projects as well. There will be more communications coming! If this all sounds like something you would like to support, contribute to, keep track of, or develop relationship with, for now you can subscribe to our calendar here https://lnkd.in/gPRFW7zC and message me directly! | 19 comments on LinkedIn
ver.ooo
Curious about systems — how they behave, how they fail, and what they get up to when nobody is steering.
Field Theory: AI as Social Science Question, Object & Tool
Uses of advanced artificial intelligence are changing how societies organize labor, govern, produce knowledge, and make meaning. In light of these developments, this essay argues that AI models, tools, and systems pose three interrelated imperatives for social science: they demand renewed attention to social theories of how technology, human experience, and social order are entangled; they require study as objects of inquiry in their own right; and they offer capabilities that may transform—or upend—the practice of social investigation itself. From Weber’s analysis of rationalization to Du Bois’s study of technology and inequality to contemporary scholarship on algorithmic governance, the essay examines what social science distinctively offers: the capacity to historicize the apparently unprecedented, to trace connections across scales, and to center those most affected by technological change. It identifies how algorithmic systems are remaking the distribution of opportunity and risk as a central task of social inquiry and asks what futures social science might help bring into being.
How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our shared systems for a changing world
'Pulsing with wisdom and humanity... a masterpiece' ED YONG'A hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world' CORY DOCTOROW'An extraordinary book' MARK MIODOWNIK'You won't see the world the same after reading this book!' AUSTIN KLEONEvery day, we are granted the power to travel at high speeds, fly, see in the dark, summon water from distant mountains and electricity from the sun. The systems that run our world are invisible to us until they fail.Infrastructure enables lives of astounding ease and freedom that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. These technological systems - the most complex and vast ever created by humans - have allowed us to work collectively for the public good. But these systems are now beginning to fail us.Engineering professor Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, and just how much they shape our lives - but also the price they extract, who pays it and in what ways, as well as the threats to our infrastructure in a changing world.From Snowdonia's Electric Mountain to a solar plant in southern India, Chachra shows how we can rebuild our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. We need to learn how to see these systems and to transform them, together, because the cost of not being able to rely on them is unthinkably high.
Episode 5: Metaphors for AI, with Shannon Vallor
This week, Adam talks with Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of AI, about the metaphors we use to talk about AI and ourselves. They also dunk on libertarians and San Francisco billboards, and consider what kind of hope we can have for the future of technology.Messages: • Support the show at patreon.com/DreamingAgainstTheMachine • Follow us on Bluesky and Instagram • Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts! • Check out other great podcasts from Multitude like Wow if TrueAbout the show:Dreaming Against the Machine is a podcast about envisioning a realistic and hopeful future. Each week, the show’s host, journalist and astrophysicist Dr. Adam Becker, will have an earnest (and entertaining!) conversation with a guest about possible futures, seen through the lenses of history, science, and culture. In a world where tech oligarchs and their power fantasies are driving visions of the future, Dreaming Against the Machine aims to take back the terms of the public conversation about what our world can and should be.
The Silent Majorities: six groups across society whose views point to systemic change
Expressing our shared concerns can drive public confidence in systems change.
Grow like Trees: An Organic Approach to Societal Regrowth
2026 is the year that system breakdown became impossible to deny. Democratic norms, societal norms, rule of law, the fabric of the social contract tearing as we watch. Or hide, unwilling or unable to face the unravelling. The hopeful among us see opportunity through the dark. Tentatively or boldly we
Orion Reed
My research investigates the intersection of computing, human-system interfaces, and emancipatory politics. I am interested in the potential of computing as a medium for thought, as a tool for collective action, and as a means of emancipation.
The Systems Thinker
The Systems Thinker works to catalyze effective change by expanding the use of systems approaches. All articles are available free of charge in an effort to expose as wide of audience as possible. Browse, share with others, save your favorites and tell others about this valuable resource!
Resilient Data Futures — Discourse Graph
A living, content-addressed, contributable form of the SciOS Resilient Data Futures whitepaper.
Resilient Data Futures — Discourse Graph
A living, content-addressed, contributable form of the SciOS Resilient Data Futures whitepaper.