New blog post:

Introduction to my first, incomplete draft of a description of the Understanding phase of my Social System Lifecycle. It borders on the technical so I thought I’d summarize it here:

https://ericlawton.org/2023/09/11/understanding-social-systems/

#systems #systemsThinking #socialSystems

@blacklight It's actually the system unfolding itself :) #SystemDynamics #SocialSystems

Decriminalization: How police drug seizure, even without arrest, can create harms.

https://theconversation.com/decriminalization-how-police-drug-seizure-even-without-arrest-can-create-harms-212435

Using police to "solve" this systemic social problem illustrates H.L. Mencken's "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong"

#socialSystems #systems #AbolishThePolice

In my latest blog post, I discuss the relationship between the values we hold, our requirements for the systems we inhabit, the design of those systems and the conflict between the desires of the various affected parties.

#SystemsThinking #socialSystems

https://ericlawton.org/2023/08/10/systems-and-values/

Under capitalism:

The purpose of food is to generate profit.

The purpose of housing is to generate profit.

The purpose of healthcare is to generate profit.

The purpose of ___ is to generate profit.

The rest is just a means to that end.

The purpose of the media is to generate profit and to persuade you that it's all the other way around.

And eventually, someday, even the profits will trickle down, if you work hard enough.

#purpose #socialSystems #systemsThinking

https://ericlawton.org/2023/08/08/do-systems-have-purposes/

Another blog post, explaining a life-cycle I am suggesting for understanding and changing #socialSystems

Summary:
In my tools description section on the Social System Life-cycle, I described and explained the origin of my MADPEA process description.

I finally got round to finishing and posting the last of my #socialSystems blog posts that I had started on while things were a little hectic around here.The title, I now realize, could be read as rather grandiose but it is the subject of the post:

https://ericlawton.org/2023/08/08/the-meaning-of-justice-2/

#justice

I finally got round to finishing and posting the last of my #socialSystems blog posts that I had started on while things were a little hectic around here.The title, I now realize, could be read as rather grandiose but it is the subject of the post:

https://ericlawton.org/2023/08/08/the-meaning-of-justice-2/

#justice

Here's another #socialSystems post, this time on design.

Some social systems are at least partially the result of deliberate design. This is usually early in the history of relatively small systems.

Beyond that, they tend to evolve in response to their environment and the evolution of their internal parts.

#design

https://ericlawton.org/2023/08/08/system-designs/

I finally got back to my writing on #SocialSystems on my website https://ericlawton.org/.

In case you're interested, there's a brief explanation of the obstacles that got in my way, but they're just personal. https://ericlawton.org/2023/08/03/another-restart/ and the real posts are at the first link.

@davidshq

Since I assume you mean #socialSystems, aren't they both the problem?

Systems that actively teach people to be nationalist, partisan, self-centred consumers who think the poor, refugees, sick, deserve their fate but plutocrats deserve their wealth and power.

Neither can be understood in isolation.

> How to pick the right credit card to maximize your reward points and cashback

> Points and cashback are great

Really?

Or do they just increase use of credit cards, paid for by consumers?

Where does the cash we get back come from?

Higher prices for what we buy, so merchants can pay transaction fees? Higher interest for those who can't pay off their balance every month?

Or are the credit card companies taking a hit on their profits? 🤣

#systems #socialSystems

https://www.thestar.com/business/personal-finance/how-to-pick-the-right-credit-card-to-maximize-your-reward-points-and-cashback/article_111f0f96-7462-55fb-b499-eea5d5313f73.html

TED Radio Hour: Audacious Solutions

Episode webpage: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1185073724/audacious-solutions-to-big-problems

#socialsystems

Laws don't work for the ruling class without discretion in when they're enforced. They're only enforceable by violence and the consequences of mistakes are too high. If the law calls for the immediate arrest of a powerful person the cops need legal cover for not doing it. This discretion stabilizes capitalism, it's not humane, but it can be spun that way.

The ruling class also needs discretion in how violations are punished. In slavery times laws often specified physical punishments for Blacks and fines for whites. After abolition they gave the judge a race-free choice between jail time and fines and no explanation to judges of who got which was necessary. This is our current system, which also stabilizes capitalism, and which also obviously isn't humane. The ultimate goal is stability, not humanity.

But cops are individuals and they have their own personal purposes as well as the purposes they're hired to serve. Like all people cops will use every capability available to further these purposes, including enforcement discretion. Cops have a culture and new uses for old tools will spread. So for instance individual cops can use discretion for extortion, sexual ("you know I'm not required to write this ticket, ma'am, but I don't have any reason not to") or otherwise.

Maybe the rulers didn't intend some of these uses when they set up the system, but they're adaptable and may incorporate them. They might not have specifically designed the system to facilitate rape, but if it stabilizes they'll keep it. Rapist cops are happier with a steady supply of victims and if enforcement discretion supplies this without destabilizing the system cops protect then why would the rulers change it? Probably the rapes themselves stabilize the system in some monstrous way I don't understand.

Now imagine 600 years of this developmental evolution of violent control to promote stability, of incorporating selected adaptations, new uses for the tools. Doesn't our current system, relatively self-maintaining compared to slavery or other more obviously horrific capitalist systems, seem like a plausible product of such a Darwinian process?

One consequence of this idea is that complex social tools like the police don't have a single purpose they're meant to effect. As a tool a police force has various capabilities, which are used by anyone who has the power to use them in order to further their own purposes, including individual cops. These uses change as new capabilities are understood and integrated into the system and this process changes the system itself. Systems don't have purposes. People have purposes and systems, like all tools, have only capabilities

This idea has been useful to me as an explanation for how social systems function. It has been tempting for me to be distracted by ultimately fruitless discussions about the true or the original purposes of social systems, like the purpose of the cops is public safety or social control, or the purpose of public schools is education. Then the discussion turns to how they've deviated from the true purpose and how can we get them back to that? Well, in practice we can't, and I think the reason for that is that the original purposes don't control any aspect of the present uses. These are determined by the current users, whose purposes are the only relevant purposes. This is how I understand the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it's supposed by anyone to do.

#Systems
#SystemTheory
#Abolition
#Anarchism
#Police
#StateViolence
#SocialSystems
#Cops
#SocialEvolution

If the title of this podcast appeals to you as much as it does me, then we should probably get to know one another. Thanks to Emeline for inviting me on, for the opportunity to share and for the exceedingly generous description. I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to actually earn it.

#StarTrek #Sharing #Space #SciFi #SocioPolitical #SocialSystems #SpacePolicy #Futurism

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/building-a-star-trek-universe-from-a-socio/id1487933047?i=1000581008939

#introductions 👋

Excited about #art #urbandesign #socialsystems #books #humanrights and a thousand other things.

Designer living in #Boston. Wide generalist with strongly held loose opinions. 😆

Started a design agency. Built a small #bootstrap #saas company on the side. Joined a startup as second #design role until it went public. Joined another startup as first designer until sold for $2.1 billion.

Built #designresearch teams and held #productmanagement interim roles along the way.

🤟

@vortex_egg
Add to this the OODA loop concept: that any executive system operates through a repeated cycle of observation, orientation, decision, and action. And that loci of power seem to be closely associated, in both positive (executive) and negative (obstructive) senses with these four capabilities.

Positive power comes from the ability to observe, orient, decide, and act. Negative power comes from the capacities to obstruct observation, obstruct orientation, obstruct decision, obstruct action.

An ossified social system is one in which these obstructions themselves have become systemic, structural.

Crossing threads with @hhardy01 esp. re: hydraulic empires.

#power #SocialSystems #OODA

3/end/

@vortex_egg One characteristic distinction I've noticed of expansive vs. mature or contracting groups (firms, NGOs, academic movements, nations, cultures, civilisations) is that the principle power among the first is executive, of acting or doing, whilst of the second is obstructive, especially through veto power (literally "I forbid").

In expansive phases, people seem to simply go out and do things; build transcontinental railroads, crosstown subways, statewide academic university systems, fluy to the moon, split atoms (peacefully or otherwise).

In mature or contracting phases, opposition power is expressed variously; literal veto, gridlock, NIMBYism, protest, riots, strikes, sabotage, regulation.

I'm NOT arguing that one of these is superior to the other, simply that they're characteristic.

#OODA #SocialSystems #power

2/3

@vortex_egg Ossification, in this context, seems often to mean following an adjacent-possible path to a local optimum (or equilibrium point) from which there is no ready transition to a superior state.

Sometimes that problem is merely political will. Sometimes it's more than that.

#power #SocialSystems #OODA

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