Hope is a method: If I do something about this situation, I might change it enough so that I can do something else about this situation.

An optimist decides not to equip the Titanic with lifeboats because it is unsinkable. A pessimist doesn’t bother to swim when the ship sinks and is lost at sea.

To be hopeful is to tread water because so long as you haven’t gone to the bottom, rescue is still possible. It’s not a sure thing, and you might have to try something else if you can figure out another tactic, but everyone who gave up sank, and everyone who was fished out the sea kept treading water.

Hope is the necessary, but insufficient, precondition for survival.

Cory Doctorow from Hope, Not Optimism.

I am ashamed of my century
for being so entertaining
but I have to smile

from Naphtha by Frank O’Hara

Going Critical

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

I’ve had this essay stashed in my to read pile for ages and it was totally worth the wait. It explains the concept of ‘diffusion’ in networks using concision, clarity and interactive demos. Better yet, you can tweak the parameters of the demoes live to get an intuitive grasp of how, for example, transmission rates affects critical thresholds. Reading this and playing with the demos has given me a much better understanding of how memes, infectious disease, knowledge and culture spread through networks. The end of the piece, which focusses on how cities / density are powerful both for positive (scenius, cultural transformation and intellectual breakthroughs) and negative (infectious disease, shitty social phenomena) reasons was particularly interesting. One to read on a desktop, not mobile.

Democratically elected governments can to some degree adapt to spatially extended responsibility, because our communications technologies link people who cannot meet face-to-face. But the chasm of time is far more difficult to overcome, and indeed our governments (democratic or otherwise) are all structured in such a way that the whole of their attention goes to the demands of the present, with scarcely a thought to be spared for the future. For [Hans] Jonas, one of the questions we must face is this:

“What force shall represent the future in the present?”

from Tending the Digital Commons by Alan Jacobs