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The interdependence[1] of the world is one of those things that's impossible to untangle. Everything seems to relate to everything else, long chains of dependencies.
What if we could try and untangle those dependencies? To see how a war in one country causes a commodity like wheat to go up in price in developing nations, which causes political tension in a key exporter of cadmium, which causes the supply of cadmium to drop and price to go up, which causes the production of batteries for electric cars to slow, which causes... and on and on.
The trouble, as always, is that untangling those chains of dependencies is very difficult, especially after the first few steps. It's also inherently speculative. As a result it seems like a job that's well-suited for collaboration, for people to argue it out and tend towards some sort of hypothesis, always uncertain but at least the product of an effort by many.
It seems important, though, to untangle these dependencies. The world continues to get more and more complex, and it's clear that the chains of dependencies are only going to get longer and more opaque. A democratic effort[2] to wrestle with and understand these chains seems like a noble one, and a necessary one.
Last updated Sun Mar 27 2022 in Berkeley, CA
1: /thought/interdependence.gmi
2: /thought/new-possibility-generation-systems-to-capture-the-sprirt-of-democracy.gmi