prologue

It happened on our shift - this mass mistreatment of ourselves and the systems that came before us. Self-parasitism left unchecked, unchallenged. There can be little doubt that we will be seen as the neanderthal or homo-erectus of this past. Hardly human, because we were capable of behaving with so little humanity towards each other, and with so little respect for the complexity that birthed us that we could destroy it.

For dozens of generations, we let emergent power and self interest shape our will - teach our children, and we hardly noticed as it turned suicidal.

on emergence ...

"We live in an emergent universe, in which the interaction between its parts, be they people or electrons, gives rise to emergent collective behaviors that are different from those of the parts separately and are generally unpredictable from knowledge only of those parts and their interaction. To understand this emergent universe, scientists are replacing the traditional reductionist approach, with its focus on using the individual components as basic building blocks, by an emergent perspective, in which the focus is on characterizing collective emergent behavior and the search for the collective organizing concepts and principles that bring it about"

african fractals

This ones on fractals and self-organising algorithms in African culture/history. Check it out if you're at all interested in fractals, bottom-up self-organising patterns, or using indigenous knowledge in current solutions