Flaubert famously said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I suppose the effect of being irregular and disorderly in your life is that you end up meek and unoriginal in your work. But people much older than me seem to cheerfully handle much more demanding and incoherent travel schedules and retain their creative momentum, so clearly I’m doing something wrong. There’s a Pareto frontier here and it looks like I’m nowhere near it. Let’s call it the Flaubert frontier.
Through a mix of design and accident, we’ve created a novel environment that is at once strongly shaped by human behaviors and highly opaque to normal human sensory modalities. But we haven’t instrumented this environment well enough to make up for our sensory deficits. Worse, we seem to collectively lack the instrument rating to fly this civilizational airplane. So we are flying blind into the anthropocene, without the appropriate instrument rating, on a wing and a prayer.
“At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase.”
““found design fiction” is stuff already lying around (“the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed” ==> some future stuff is lying around).”
“Civilization, in many ways, is the safe cultivation of dangerous curiosity. The sophistication of a civilization may be judged by the kinds of dangerous questions its members allow themselves to ask.”
Curiosity does not seem to be a fundamental drive, unlike what I am told are the three basic biological drives (seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and conserving energy), so it is probably derived. Curiosity requires a certain energy surplus, since its visible signature is a restless dissipation of energy, but it does not seem directly motivated by energy conservation concerns. So is it derived from pleasure-seeking or pain-avoidance or some mix of the two? Does that make a difference?
