Appreciating and Encouraging Unpredictability
Unpredictability enlivens our world. We must protect, celebrate and strive for it.
Remixing ideas from On Freedom by Timothy Snyder that resonate strongly with my work on identity systems and the imperative for sovereignty over our digital selves, as we are recognised, remembered and responded to within the digital realms we inhabit.
I have more words to come, but I have been struggling to pull the threads together into something coherent. I wanted to get something out, and this feels worth saying.
Unpredictability is rarely discussed.
Rarely acknowledged as desirable.
And yet.
Our capacity for unpredictable action is what enlivens our world.
We should embrace it. Celebrate it. Strive for it.
We must resist predicification. The rendering of our selves as predictable objects that can be nudged and steered towards ever more probable states.
See predictification for what it is, a mechanism of control by those who would seek to direct our activities towards purposes that are not our own.
Instead, let us strive to freely inhabit and orient ourselves within our own unique world of values.
Drawing on the lessons of our lived experience to make value based judgements in the present moment as we make choices about the action to select from the possibilities we uniquely perceive.
Through these choices, through these actions, we affirm what we believe is good in the world and work to sustain and amplify it in the future.
Unpredictability is a feature, not a bug.
We were all shaped by different pasts, both directly experienced and socially embedded within.
We all embody and enact different values.
We all desire different futures.
The past and the future are made present through the colouring and structuring of human experience. They provide a lens and frame through which to translate and interpret the bodies mediated sense of reality at any given moment.
The meanings we make from it. The possibilities we perceive in it.
How could this be anything other than unpredictable.
That is even before you consider the environment we humans inhabit and experience. Or the other, equally unpredictable others they encounter within it.
As humans discover, explore and overcome the constraints of their environment.
As we recognise the existence of others and see both the world and themselves through the imagined experience of the other.
As we attempt to establish, confirm and maintain a shared, intersubjective experience in order to coordinate joint activity.
We discover new possibilities. Learn new capabilities.
We question our values. And challenge theirs.
This is the unceasing process of becoming that all humans participate in.
The choices that we make. The actions that we take. Intending to affect the future.
Improbable and unpredictable.
They have effect on the world and on the others that inhabit it. They change them. And change ourselves.
And in doing so they ripple out into the future, illuminating, expanding and constraining possibility spaces for unpredictable activity.
The sheer complexity of these possibility spaces are indescribable and unimaginable.
Life in all its beauty.
However, today, we find ourselves at a strange place.
On the one hand, our capacities for acting with effect on the world are exponentially increasing. Through our technology, we have been able to extend our bodies, amplify our capabilities and exert ever more influence over reality.
On the other hand, our technologies, our machines have rendered us ever more predictable. Ever more controllable.
Such that the purposes we apply these newfound capabilities towards are not our own. Our actions are not oriented nor grounded within our own freely chosen values.
Our digital machines have isolated us from our bodies, exploited our reward mechanism and corralled us into socially conformant groups.
Such that many of us find ourselves living in unreality. Our biases confirmed by those we find ourselves virtually surrounded by.
We no longer make sense of the world for ourselves. No longer interact with those who cause us to question ourselves and recalibrate our values.
This is a poor world. One lacking imagination. Lacking joy. Lacking freedom.
It is a waste of the moment we find ourselves in.
So step out of the cage. Throw off the shackles you helped place around yourself.
Rejoin the world. Find your values. Discover your why.
Live your life.
Sovereign and unpredictable.
With gratitude to Timothy Snyder whose insightful book inspired me to write again and who does much to resist tyranny and expand the sphere of freedom in the world.
So much richness here! As I said, I hope to have more soon.
