The most complex kind of conflict is where both values and rules of engagement are not shared, and within this dissonant…

The most complex kind of conflict is where both values and rules of engagement are not shared, and within this dissonant condition, both are asymmetrically legible.

This is the regime I think of as magical weirding, where all sides feel like something magical is going on, whether they are winning or losing. Magical weirding is the conflict regime induced by everybody simultaneously trying to figure out the capabilities of a new generation of technology, equally unfamiliar to all at the start. The Great Weirding we’re in now is obviously due to the emergence of a software-eaten world.

The point of the nested 2x2 is to show the emergence of a new dimensionality to conflict via symmetry breaking and unflattening. We bootstrap from 2 dimensions to 4 by adding legibility asymmetry along 0, 1 or 2 axes.

Dimensional emergence is a kind of arrow of time (the future is higher dimensional, with hidden degenerate dimensions becoming visible and non-degenerate via symmetry breaks; somebody award me an honorary crackpot physics degree already).

If the nested 2x2s are confusing, here is the same set of ideas illustrated in a flattened, serialized, evolutionary view. Some information is lost in this view, but the “ascent of conflict” aspect via increasing conflict dimensionality is clearer. On the plus side, this view reveals the evolving temporal structure of the conflict patterns more clearly, which the nested 2x2 view does not.

(via https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/the-ascent-of-conflict )