On an Aeroflot flight from London to Moscow in 2004 something struck me as extremely odd. Looking up at the air vent above my seat, there was a hair spray painted onto the air conditioning grid. Not only this, but the grid was also clearly manufactured by hand. The more I investigated the interior of the old Ilyushin 86, the more I became aware of the remnants of the hands who had manufactured this plane.
After years of flying in the machined plastic interiors of Boeing and Airbus planes, this evidence of manual work on the plane left me shocked at first. It looked shoddy and unprofessional. It made me wonder what the wiring looked like and if there were other hairs or cracks in areas of the plane of more consequence than the air ducts.
Then my thinking shifted. After all, these planes were the legacy of a communist system. Perhaps these overt symbols of handy work was a testament of hard, honest contact with a comrade.
The people who made the plane were made visible by these tiny artefacts. And in so doing their work was recognized.
You were not flying alone.
Many years while watching the vampire movie “only Lovers left alive” I was reminded of this flight, and these thoughts.
Jim Jarmousch’s genius elegantly writes a new magic power to the lore of vampires. Not only do they absorb the karma of the people they drink blood from, they can sense and absorb the physical history of objects.
They know exactly how and where a box was manufactured. They know through who’s hands it has passed. As we dive deeper into the world of quantum physics, these kinds of energy signatures, embedded in objects can become imaginable. With the right kind of sensing equipment and algorithms to interpret the data, we too may one day see the energy fingerprints that people leave all around them.
We too may see the whole process in the artefact.
Which brings me to the last mini-ice age. As a child we used to have placemats with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s depiction of the seasons. I grew up thinking that the scene with hunters returning in the snow simply was the way Europe looked.
I observed the scene without understanding the system that made it possible.
The latest scientific measurements tell a far deeper and more sinister tale behind these classic images of white Christmases and snow filled landscapes.
The most critical part of this ice age was between 1645 and 1715 where winter temperatures were estimated to be about 2 lower than at present. This cooling at the time when industrialization was just kicking in, has puzzled scientist for decades. Everything from sun spots to tidal shifts in the Atlantic have been blamed.
With more sophisticated measurements, better scanning and algorithms, we can now see the actors in the system more clearly.
As Europeans started to have contact with the Americas after 1492 there was a massive depopulation and redistribution of land use across the two continents. It is estimated that 56 million people died between 1492 and 1600. Vast empires disappeared leading to massive reforestation at an immense scale (estimated at 55.8 Mha).
The fast-growing trees that sprouted in the areas where farmers had kept them in check before consumed so much carbon dioxide that it reduced the global CO2 count by 3.5 ppm.
When we now look at these images of Europe, we should also see the wholesale destruction of the American cultures, wisdom and civilizations. The hunters walking through the snow are only possible because there were no more hunters walking through the snow in North America.
The pineapples and coffee celebrated in European courts being the symptoms and symbols of contamination. Advanced, evolved bio-engineering feasted upon by people living in the petri-dish of cholera, smallpox and measles.
In some ways we see echoes of this in the current reverberation of the Omicron tsunami.
Contaminating cultures
For far too long Western countries have turned blind eye to the drastic inequality in global healthcare systems. Poorer countries are somehow deemed not equal in their needs and requirements for standards of care.
This neglect caused the preconditions to breed a super variant that has now come back to bite the systems that viewed themselves as superior.
Another quote from Donella H Meadows:
“There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.”
When the purposes are political, the definition if system boundaries will be artificially constrained by cultural concepts such as voter rights or political borders.
A virus does not read a constitution. A xenophobic political system based on the concept of exceptionalism does not protect you from a pandemic. As Meadows again so succinctly summarizes: “You maybe able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.”
And what is the consequence of our systemic blending and hyper globalized accelerated infection?
Contact kinetics
In the “The Dawn of Everything,” David Graeber and David Wengrow unpack how European societies were changed fundamentally when they encountered the true freedom and foresight of native American societies.
Americans were stunned at Europeans’ lack of compassion and subservience. They could not understand how humans could be so blind to the suffering of their fellow humans.
Subsequent generations have worked at reducing and erasing this philosophical and intellectual impact, claiming that such idealism is the naïve holdout of “primitive” societies. That progress demands hierarchy and inequality.
A post rationalization of the destruction and extractive mindset that Europe imposed on the world.
Yes, we may have committed genocide, but we brought you electricity and bureaucracy!
Or along such lines the consequences of a selfish individualism are justified.
The inability to see systems has fed a consumerist mindset fed by short term extractive economic choices. A society that poisons its water, air and land is the purest symbol of system blindness.
Has our ability to see the system behind the signs improved at all over the last 600 years?
Surround sight
In a sense blockchain is starting to capture the karma of artefacts. By storing the entire history of transactions and agreements, you can dive into and feel the flow of a system in the fingerprints on its data.
My friend Karl’s project to build an “internet of impact” has received a welcome official boost by being promoted by the Scottish government. We are beginning to use the connectivity of a digital paradigm to stitch together the (elegant) digital equivalent of “spray painted hairs on the air vent”; to see the people and processes behind our products and services.
Can we educate a new generation to see beyond the dazzling allure of now and instant gratification to fully appreciate the processes and systems behind their clicks and likes? Can we invite the full value chain into our appreciation of an event?
Many years ago I read a quote that shaped my thinking profoundly:
The weight of a temporal moment is determined by how much of the past and future are present within it.
When we start adding the mass of the moment to bounded bits, we may just begin to develop “system-sight.”
Let’s take that leap!
Three key take-outs:
1. SenseWhat information do you include in your appreciation of a product? How broad is your awareness of the total cost of delivering convenience and service?
2. SeeDo you have clear visual references of what it has taken to make what is in front of you possible? What exactly does the farm look like that your chicken salad was harvested at?
3. ShowAs part of a system you are both recipient and source. How do you show up on someone else’s dashboard? How does the system change based on your partictipation?
P.S, the audio on this newsletter tells a totally different story (:
