Good luck everybody

The universe is made out of feedback. I mean that quite literally. Feedback is all there is, and everything there is, is feedback.

I’m a cyberneticist, which is the most profound subject in the world, and also the stupidest. Cybernetics is about literally everything, and yet we have virtually nothing to say about it. There is only one kind of feedback for us to know about, and in principle it’s ridiculously easy to understand. Although, like numbers, it does come in two flavors – positive and negative – and multiple feedback loops can combine. That’s where it gets interesting.

Positive feedback is when a change exacerbates itself. Wealth is an example of positive feedback: Beyond a certain point, the more money you have, the easier it becomes to make more money, and therefore the more money you’ll have. Rinse and repeat. Left to its own devices (e.g. without progressive taxation, or ultimately a revolution), this process will accelerate, and all of the money in the world would end up in one person’s pocket. We’re not all that far from this point now. The other side of that exact same coin, is poverty. The less money you have, the harder it is to make money at all, and without help, beyond a certain point, people just get poorer and poorer.

Negative feedback, on the other hand, is when a change tends to undo itself. If we get too cold, we find ourselves putting on more clothes, and we warm up again. If we get too hot, we take them off again. If a restaurant starts to get too noisy, eventually nobody can hear each other speak, and so, unless that restaurant is in San Francisco, things tend to quieten back down again.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple, which is kind of the point. Every feedback loop exists in the context of many others; some positive and some negative. Positive feedback loops are racing towards oblivion, while negative feedback loops are trying to hold them back. They often act like switches, so that positive feedback can hold sway up to a certain point, and then negative feedback will kick in to stop it. Occasionally vice-versa. The balance of power changes all the time. If it wasn’t like this, the universe wouldn’t be a universe. And life wouldn’t exist.

There’s a lot of feedback about. Really. A LOT. We can see something like a million, million galaxies. On average, each of those galaxies contains something like a million, million stars. Every star, along with the planets around it, contains an incomprehensible amount of matter, and every single teaspoon of that matter contains something like a million, million, million, million atoms. Each of those atoms is a tiny swirl of cause and effect that feeds back on itself in a way that means it never stops swirling, and the atoms all interact with their neighbors, creating reality.

And that’s just the ‘space’ part of spacetime. This dance has been going on for tens of millions of centuries, and who knows how many times the process has reset itself and started again. Perhaps just the once, but perhaps an infinite number.

Somewhere, in a tiny, tiny, totally insignificant corner of this incredible maelstrom, are you and me. In the scheme of things, we are utterly irrelevant. All of human history could be blown away by a random asteroid and our closest neighbors wouldn’t even notice.

But that’s from a cosmic perspective. From our own personal perspective, we and our fellow life forms on this little green planet, here in the tenth millennium or so since the end of the latest glaciation, really matter. We are the actors in our own little play, but also the audience. We care about how that play turns out. And why shouldn’t we? To us, the local feedback loops of cause and effect, including the machinations of our fellows, are really important. Every life deserves saving; every death deserves mourning; every wrong deserves righting.

I say all this, partly because you need to understand where I’m coming from. Feedback is going to crop up a lot, and especially the feedback that creates lives and minds. But also, I’m writing this at 5am, unable to sleep, just a couple of days before the 2024 American election. By the time you read this, it may be over.

In psychosocial terms, there is some really interesting but somewhat alarming feedback going on around here, and it meshes with a lot of big things going on elsewhere. We live in very interesting times. Malcom Gladwell might call it a tipping point.

Much of this feedback is called politics, and I guess it’s impolite to talk about politics, so I won’t. That’s for you to make up your own mind about, even if you kill us all. But which way will things end up tipping?

I have no idea – that’s how the future works. Well, I do have some predictions, because dynamics is my thing, but they’re probably as unreliable as anybody else’s, in the present dynamical context. We will see, I guess.

Nevertheless, we have got ourselves in a right mess, haven’t we? Somehow, bizarrely, someone with a severe personality disorder, who by rights should be receiving compassionate professional help in a facility somewhere, is actually a viable contender for president. Never mind the politics that this person and those around him claim (and I do mean claim) to believe in, the personality disorder itself is a clear and distressingly predictable thing, to anyone who understands what they’re looking at. George Orwell, for one, had a pretty good handle on that sort of personality. And yet Trump may actually win. He (kind of) won before, and a lot of people, both inside and outside this country, are determinedly trying to help him do it. Even if he loses, a lot of those people will still be here, angrily wishing he’d won. At least for a while, until the general milieu adjusts.

And this, not the slightest bit coincidentally, is happening right as we reach a global tipping point with regard to our climate. Again, I’m not here to argue with you about that, although I don’t imagine there would be much argument among ourselves. What I’m concerned with is the feedback.

All feedback loops have what I call a null point. Negative loops tend to return the system towards that null point, while positive feedback loops drive the system away from it. In positive feedback, the null point creates a watershed. A tiny difference in the starting point can lead to massive consequences (this, of course, is the foundation of chaos theory, of which cybernetics is a close cousin).

Forgive the imagery, but I remember once urgently going to the bathroom outdoors, at a place on the U.S. Continental Divide. If I had faced in one direction, my pee would theoretically have flowed into the Atlantic, whereas if I’d pointed in a slightly different direction, it would have flowed into the Pacific. But which direction was which? Tiny undulations in the landscape might have made a big difference.

Which direction is which, now??? We are standing on a watershed – a tipping point. None of us has much say about which way it tips, and yet, collectively, we are the whole reason it will tip one way rather than the other. I guess if there’s any kind of practical point I’m trying to make, it’s this: If you are a U.S. citizen (I’m not), and you haven’t yet voted, for heaven’s sake, make sure you do! Your vote might be the one that makes the difference. And not voting is itself a vote. You should at least let yourself feel that you weren’t the one who let the side down. Although I guess I’ve probably left it a bit late to mention this…

But in terms of the bigger picture, I don’t know much about anything, really, but I do have a very good grasp of dynamics, and I think things are actually beginning to right themselves. It might get bumpy for a while, though, and things which are just bumps for those of us who survive them can be the end of everything for those who don’t. Nevertheless, speaking on the timescale of history and despite being a pessimist by nature, I feel fairly optimistic about the way things are likely to go, as long as we all try not to step off the cliff.

I just wish with all my heart that people understood more about feedback; especially things like oscillation and thrashing. But they don’t. Nobody teaches it in school. On the whole, people just run around randomly, like headless chickens. Although, to be fair, sometimes randomness can be a powerful dampening or even centering force – a close cousin of negative feedback. Better chickens than lemmings, I suppose…