About Now & Up
About me and the Now & Up project
Welcome!
The focus of this Now & Up is to look at the challenges we face and what we can do to move forward.
What are we already doing well as a species?
What are some of the stumbling blocks?
What, if any, potential solutions do we have access to now and in the future?
As part of this journey we’ll dive into philosophy, language, culture, new and evolving forms of intelligence.
We’ll look at what other civilisations - past and present - are doing to address these issues.
This is an incredible moment in time
The technology we created to help us has, in many cases, surpassed our ability to comprehend, manage or keep pace with it.
Machine learning allows AI to teach itself to solve problems and reach goals.
As a result, the algorithms powering our social media networks are often incomprehensible, even to their original developers.
These are algorithms that quite literally influence the behaviour of billions of humans.
Mass food production is now such a complex, mechanised, global enterprise that our involvement is increasingly as specialised cogs in a greater whole.
Most of us could not survive without the seemingly ‘invisible’ technologies that power our world and keep us alive.
Yet even with these seemingly god-like technologies at our disposal we seem to be facing an existential crisis.
A crisis of the natural world… a crisis of identity… a crisis of meaning… a crisis of how to move forward.
As humans we’re caught up in a series of syntax errors
So many of the topics which we self flagellate over are syntax errors.
Decades of increasingly fraught ‘us and them’ narratives in the mainstream media paint a world where psychopaths lurk on every street corner…
Where no one can be trusted, where it’s every person for themselves.
It doesn’t matter if the crimes we see reflect the behaviour of less than 1% of the population.
If they occupy 90% of news stories and column inches, that’s the space they will occupy in our brains.
A fentanyl strength diet of Social Media outrage has wired us for anxiety, suspicion and hopelessness.
It has also distorted reality.
Our ability to trust, rationalise or empathise has been eroded by the algorithms.
Ideologies are labelled as science. We catastrophise over constructed enemies.
But there is good news. There’s always good news.
First principles thinking and mimicry are superpowers
Much of what we fear has no basis in reality.
We often start movements based on intricate, ingenious, but deeply flawed interpretations of so-called ‘foundational’ ideas that we rarely question.
We have a history of doing this.
Until recently we had no concept of evolution and believed the world was flat.
We treated headaches by drilling holes in people’s skulls.
We delivered babies after dissecting cadavers.
But we learn from new and better information.
Our greatest strength as a species is our ability to communicate ideas with one another and to mimic.
“This is the best way I’ve found to do this, now you try”
And then we iterate and improve.
It might not seem like it ‘in the moment’ when the world seems like it’s burning, when no ones listening, when humanity seems to be taking a backward step…
But think of what we have done.
We need to embrace the happy accidents
We have effectively created the first machinations of telepathy (the internet connected smartphone in your pocket).
We’ve figured out how to fly.
We managed to feed ourselves way beyond (what we thought was) the planet’s capacity.
We’ve cured diseases.
We’re recoding DNA.
Much of our success is as a result of the happy accident.
We like to think that we set out to discover a thing and then do it but our greatest discoveries are often byproducts.
Penicillin… X-rays… anaesthesia
Our ability to conceptualise and repurpose these happy accidents is something we don’t nurture nearly enough.
We’re attracted to the over confident blaggards who promise - with great and unwavering certainty - that they have the answer.
We dismiss the champions of nuance.
This is about luxuriating in a solution focussed playground of ideas
Let’s start from the ground up.
We are all locked, to greater and lesser extents, in our own umwelt.
Understanding this allows us to detach ourselves from the blame game. We can sidestep the ideological introspection and self-flagellating and get on with the business of problem solving.
Nothing is truly knowable so we should test everything.
What works? What doesn’t work? What should we test next?
The hive mind is a wonderful thing. The herd mind needs guardrails.
Nuance is to be celebrated.
There is treasure amidst the chaos.
I hope you enjoy this Substack and I look forward to interacting with you.
Tommy Orme, Now & Up