Technology Without Industry

> a lot of that is junk and meaningless. "Dead code", so to speak

... so far as we currently know.

DNA is only mostly software; it's also a physical molecule. Many of the columns in a DRAM chip look like a waste of capacitance until you know what alpha particles are and what ECC does.

> the blind spot in our eyes, which is there for no real reason

It's there for a very good reason, the optic nerve connection. Only cephalopods have figured out a better solution, and it's not at all clear that it would work for humans.

Our eyes have to tolerate a lifetime of much-higher UV exposure than sea-creatures, for starters. Cephalopods' optic nerves grow in from the retina toward the brain, and there's a huge bundle of complicated connections to make where they "meet in the middle". Vertebrate optic nerves grow out from the brain and embed themselves in the retina, so there's no wiring problem to solve.

> Decentralizing the power to inflict massive violence leads to a ton of death

Does it? If history is any indicator (and I believe it is), the opposite seems to hold true: the centralization - i.e. monopolization - of violence enables violence without impunity, and as that monopolization approaches its logical conclusion, so does that monopolized violence increase in magnitude and breadth.

In contrast, decentralized violence keeps everyone accountable; any aggressor has to be prepared for the very real possibility that one's victim can and will retaliate with equal force. As Heinlein said: "an armed society is a polite one".

I go back and forth on this. I am NOT in the "decentralize everything" camp. But I fear power more than chaos. Chaos turns over. Power resists that. Power seeks its own structural stasis. But in chaos, there's a fertile and teeming intertidal zone in every churn of a chaotic system. (though it is uncomfortable for us as inhabitants, and that is fuckin real)

I've had the privilege to be involved in both tech, biochemistry, and a few years of community organizing, and there's something going on here that's interesting. There's maybe some redemption of decentralizing forces, even though they invite chaos. If there is a redemption, it's in a dynamism I don't see articulated too often.

It's like we need some force that decentralizes at the edges (that pushes itself out, and invites more entry across the boundary of in-and-out), but that once inside, it's agents repel themselves from power -- repel themselves from the center.

In my community organizing conversations, we speak of this concretely around the term "we". We want members who are new and drifting around the edges, considering entry -- we want them to feel welcome to step over the boundary into a space, and feel welcome to use the word "we" as early as they care to. But then as people stick around, they'll use "we" more, moving toward the center. But as they cross some fuzzy threshold, a good "leader" or steward in such a community should pump the breaks. They should resist using the word "we" too comfortably -- they should resist using the word "we" to wear the community like a mech suit in conversations. They need to work hard to prevent themselves from falling toward the middle of the group and making themselves central. And if all members navigate this dynamics well, then you end up with a leaderFUL organization, with many leaders. And that community is fractal, almost holographic -- any fragment of that community contains a low-resolution version of the whole :)

I believe this dynamic is important to all stable and complex systems of the certain sort that we humans are :)

EDIT: I'm quite interested in these intersections, so if someone is reading this, pls feel free to poke me on Twitter @patconnolly if any of this runs parallel to your own complexity science or network science interests!

I like your power/chaos analogy and it seems healthy to me to invite both centralization and decentralization at the same time or a flux between the two. If power and chaos always kept one another in check they'd create a symbiosis that would benefit everyone