Have an incredibly erotic dream with Jennifer D., back from the Culture Capitals 2000 project in Prague. Will have to email her. Otherwise watery squint-eyed watching of rotating the stellar field.

This morning, a raptor circles a hundred meters away with its mate hidden in the trees along Pool Creek, making a creeeewing sound. It’s the same noise it made when I wandered over to the creek earlier in the morning. All the birds are noisy — it makes a multi-dimensional flow which lies on the ear with pleasing insistence. No need to move the head, as the sources are in motion and occasionally in sight.

No one else down here today. I could feel it on the way down, the road just opened late in the day, although it didn’t seem in bad shape at all. They’ve been improving it with trucked-in gravel for a majority of the fifteen miles over the last decade. There were a few spots where folks had driven through when it was wet, and this was something of a mess — a hint of how horrible it can get after a storm.

Been thinking about the bush-whack agenda for the next ten days or so — with some trepidation regarding the carnivores, the mountain lions (Puma concolor — pumas, cougars, catamounts) specifically. The experience several years back in Upper Pool Creek Canyon comes to mind, and is not one that I would want to repeat. So it goes.

(Canada) geese (Branta canadensis) calls are echoing around, coming from upstream at the confluence and downstream from the opposite shore under Steamship Rock. Last night I kept thinking it was people on rafts talking, but it’s no human heard for the last 15 hours.

How to connect this place with the Wendover experience. The sporadic expressions of military order — literally expression — generated from the huge globe-spanning techno-social system, compared to this place.

Para-state organizations (sanctioned by law or social(elite) mandate) can operate at a less intrusive level than purely geo(political) entities — they don’t tend to attract near the enmity of a military presence, yet they have the same affect of tapping into the life-energies of a population and gathering that energy back into the geo-political entity that sanctions their existence.

Coke in China: gets the Chinese people to drink, to spend life-time/life-energy on Coke’s strictly controlled energy source. This process supplies the Chinese government with convertible/abstracted energy (money) in the form of direct and indirect taxes on the process — on Coca-Cola, on the salaries of the workers, on raw material import tariffs, etc. It also clearly supplies Coca-Cola with the same. Coke draws human energy into a system which guarantees the flow of that convertible/abstracted instrument.

Hunting, gathering, human-driven agriculture all demonstrate this on a granular level where it is relatively easy to see the connections and full pathways of energy flow. But as the techno-social system gets more complex, the connections are more widely displaced. Then with the addition of abstracted systems of exchange, the system becomes very complex and it is difficult to tease out the interconnections of even a simple example. However, even deep in the abstracted system, individuals are using their life-energies/life-time in maintaining the widest-scale pathways of the globe-spanning techno-social system. We are all implicated! And, indeed, observing this clearly on any scale — from ‘natural systems’ to any scale of social system — it is easy to extrapolate the limits and consequences of what is only to be considered a sustainable system at a cosmological scale. At localized and extracted systems levels, such as “human life on earth,” it may not be sustainable, is not sustainable. But the extraction process is purely abstract, and considering things from a holistic/unified point-of-view, it is sustainable. The universe will go on. Sounds like a contradiction.

So, how to reconcile all this to different scales, locales, etc?

Today, mulling the difference between technological determinism (as a self-propagating system on its own immutable trajectory) and the reciprocal idea that human social systems selectively construct the systems of technology they ‘desire’ (subject to all the variability of the particular social system within which the technology is embedded). Then, within that selection process, thinking about the process of development and the general trend towards greater complexity. Do these processes ever trend generally to greater simplicity? Does desire ever, on a wide social scale, ever become directed to less material abundance? Is material security predicated with amassing more-than-sufficient material wealth? Or do society-wide technological systems collapse towards simplicity only in cases of ‘natural’ disaster.

[Complexity and simplicity are used here as general indicators of the depth and breadth of the techno-social system's process of provision and production that leads to services, situations, or products deemed necessary for participants. Metrics of complexity would include geographic proximity, ease of access, energy density, and the number of substantive steps required to produce a product or create a desired energy flow. The relative necessity of a product is highly subjective and varies widely between different systems. Necessity is a cultural construct. Complexity may be indicated by the number of discrete steps that can be described that a process passes through -- steps/degrees of flow alteration.]

When examining a production system, the primary question would have to be, “does this process end with a net gain of energy that can be utilized for the evolutionary advantage of the social system?” This question itself would suggest the inevitable rise of an elite subgroup when the wider population reaches certain environmental carrying thresholds — where that (evolutionarily optimal) subgroup is carried by the energy-providing activities of a wider group. But this is another issue to look at later).

The existence of (the) ‘natural disaster’ suggests that the state of a particular techno-social system may be seen essentially as the (ordered) organization of flows to keep back natural chaotic forces or to push those natural forces along certain (technologically-defined) pathways. Does this make the system merely at the affect of natural laws, and thus binding it into a materially deterministic framework? nah, that ignores quantum, with its statistical outcomes. Although obviously, any techno-social system is bound to thermodynamics and all other prescribed or yet unknown ‘natural laws.’

System collapse to simplicity is obviously a result of the ‘natural’ disaster precipitated by war (as an extension of human survival mechanisms?). War is the impingement of one techno-socially organized and directed expression of ordered energy onto another — with one set of system pathways disrupted to greater simplicity. Loss could be defined by the destruction of the internal structure for the directing of cumulative energy of participants in that social system. Winning is essentially acquiring access to the total (or partial) energy sources of the losing social system. This includes individuals, and all the pathways of energy flow that they have constructed — these are then directed, incorporated, into the winning system.

The whole deterministic model seems to focus on material interpretations — that is, metrics of ‘advance’ that will happen along an apparently calculable technological trajectory. Rather, as outlined here, there are conditions of technological advance and retreat that are framed by other factors which make the prediction of a trajectory highly inaccurate. The first being the level of complexity of the techno-social systems, the second, the efficiency of that system, and the third, the stability. All of these factors fluctuate over time and are deeply embedded in a milieu of human factors. The general trend, however, looking at the broad arc of the history of technology is to increasing complexity, variable-yet-generally-increasing control by social systems of a wider range of ‘natural’ energy flows. Is it deterministic to say that there will be an increase in complexity of any techno-social system unless interrupted by natural disaster? [Clearly, the complexity of a (the!) techno-social system is limited, as the energy basis for the system is not infinite: what does that imply?]

What motivates this evolution to increasing complexity? The short answer could be the drive to reproductive advantage — evolutionary motivations for life to not just continue, but continue with advantage over the competition. It is easy to see that the affect of this drive could be interpreted as having its own character and endless source of ‘forward’ motivation. But clearly the ultimate source for that is, again, the impelling force of life-systems to simply continue and continue with ever-greater complexity (creating an ever-widening ring of increasing entropy). So, the ‘explanation’ for technological change, as a social phenomena, ultimately rests, as do all social systems, on the fundamentals of living systems.

Vastly complex systems obscure the actual and perceived level of reproductive advantage — for example, while modern Western medical advances have increased overall abilities for successful propagation of the species, the wider technological system on which that (medical)sub-system depends generates substances (and situations) toxic to reproductive viability and life in general. One would then have to argue that the reproductive viability increase is for a limited number of the total population. Those remaining after the cull who benefit from technologically augmented survival, while the biologically and energetically compromised remainder are ‘used up’ in supporting the few. The increase of complexity may be directly correlated to the larger absolute number of people, combined with the drive to absolutely optimize reproductive capabilities of those in the positions of power at the same time as the elimination of all actual or potential competing life-forces.