We like growth because it is a clear sign that a system is healthy and functional, and because it consists of rapid, exciting change we can perceive in its entirety; a perception that is generally not possible in systems whose rhythms or periodicities are greater than or close to our own (Such as the generally epochal changes of the biosphere or the evolution of a species, or even – at a more local scale – the concurrent development of our children, siblings, parents and childhood friends). When we do perceive changes in these greater systems, it may be proof of seasonality – a sign of cyclic self-replenishment in living systems – or a non-cyclic period of rapid, erosive or exponential change which necessarily impacts on other interdependent systems.

We might hope the growth pattern for industrial civilisations would resemble that of a single of the individuals that make it up; this would be both comforting and aesthetically pleasing. An infantile period of rapid exponential growth, with perhaps some crises between childhood and adulthood, followed by a long period of maturation, consolidation and perhaps propagation, in which we become (at least comparatively) wiser, more comfortable in our skin, more capable… better. But the developmental pattern of western civilisation since at least the onset of capitalism, but also traceable in the expansion and attitudes of the Roman Empire, has been sporadic, compulsive, unmeditated, and ends in premature destruction. It resembles nothing so much as a monopoly, a cancer, a viral epidemic, an unconscious, self-propagating and horrifically single-minded entity which parasitises other systems more easily than it partners with them; which routinely exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, and even when it manages to achieve sustainability, only uses this as a springboard to further multiplication and consumption; which is so lethal to itself and other systems that it is scarcely recognisable as a mammalian culture at all.

Civilisational cultures, like species and individuals, must endure or adapt to systemic requirements strikingly similar to those described in Darwinian selection in order to survive. They must arrive at a relationship of symbiosis with their habitat, develop characteristics uniquely suited to that habitat, be competitive and sustainable, develop strong relationships with other, perhaps dramatically differing, cultures. Potential perils and opportunities for consolidation and expansion extend upon every possible vectoral path,  and so must be kept closely in check.

Like an individual, a culture or civilisation as a whole can behave mindfully or reactively, be a paragon of creativity and culture or a slave to the instincts, prejudices, fears and desires of its populace. With the historical threats of survival vanquished – if only for the moment – industrialised cultures, like the individuals that comprise them, are free to bloat or slide into their worst excesses of extremism and intolerance, apathy and self indulgence. This freedom from constraint is the most immediate risk we run as we approach the long-dreamt of post-scarcity society; and we will come to realise, if we have not already, that even if we achieve mastery over the systems of this world and the worlds beyond we will still need to manage our own appetites and instincts, that even as we refine our most futuristic technologies the darkest, most secret instincts and desires of our ancestors can still bring us down if they are not carefully and honestly examined and taken into account.

In civilisation as in an individual, it is when a threshold of growth has been reached that development begins to be turned inward and the character of a system begins to clearly differentiate from others of its kind. Promises become fruits; flaws become seeds of destruction; motives and strategies become recognisable and characteristic practice. The mystic becomes differentiated from the priest, the surgeon from the wiccan, the bureaucrat from the potentate, the master from the slave.

The end of growth only means decay if we have pursued our growth to the extreme. What unfurls steadily, does not grow beyond its means, and is capable of weathering changes will survive, as always; and it is in the philosophies and practice of such systems that the best hopes, clearest motives and most nourishing fruits of humanity will survive to propagate in the long future that lies before us.

Order is difficult to define with reference only to itself, but it can be simply and accurately described as an absence of disorder. Disorder is a noticeable property; it shows up clearly and distressingly. When a system is in perfect order it is invisible, because nothing within it stands out against it. All its conflicts and turbulences have come to balance and complement each other; all its parts and functions have worked themselves into a unified, integrated whole.

Control implies disorder – or competing forms of order – suppressed and restrained. It is an aberration of the process of order, because disorders are a stage in the process of stabilisation and must work out into their own balances and self-regulating flows. Control likes to think of itself as order because it can define itself similarly, as an absence of disorder, but only because under conditions of control all signs and symptoms of disorder are continually suppressed.

Control implies determinism; the ideal state and its beneficiaries have been decided and all aberrations from this vision must be suppressed. Both revolutionary and conservative states are vulnerable to this development because of the idealistic single-mindedness their respective ideologies require of them. It is the determinism inherent in the beginning of control that seals its end; it is essentially closed to innovation, adaptation, and emergent synergies and is incapable of rapid reformulation in the face of changing circumstances.

Clearly some forces in the world – specifically, corporations – are capable of rapid reformulation in the face of changing circumstances, and yet arguably exert greater, if more subtle, control over populations and culture than repressive states and regimes ever did. The rigidity of control in corporations expresses itself in the all-or-nothing determinism of its products; among other things, corporations seek to control the reproducibility of seeds, the conditions of use of their data files, the desires and inclinations of their markets and the laws which bind them. Apparent order is a barely maintained lid on deep-seated divisiveness, greed and ambition in all its parts and determinism is apparent in its overriding need to overrun, absorb and transform into capital as much as it possibly can. Any money made by any other system is interpreted as a lost opportunity for itself; and any system not bound by the system of ownership and capitalisation is unthinkable, an aberration, a potential source of wealth wasted.

Inequitable control clearly involves the intentional disadvantage of some and the benefit of others; under true conditions of order, benefit is gained on some level by all parties, even if the immediate experience of it seems detrimental (as in the grief caused by the necessity of mortality). But provided it is close enough to the optimal balance of genuine order, control can be a positive force; it’s just that the powerful social impulses that lead to the desire and capacity to control – the pursuit of power, prestige, wealth and advantage – lend themselves more easily to a desire to control and be seen to control, rather than allowing the system to regulate itself with minimal interference. The self interest which generates the initial desire to control may inherently be incapable of perceiving or caring about its own limits. Self regulation is unthinkable, and so other social forces must limit or diffuse the capacity of any one group to derive excessive self benefit to the detriment of others.

When control does closely match a system’s optimal steady state, its benefits can be profound. Everything, not merely favoured classes, groups or species, flourishes. Interference is minimal, and dissensions and diversions from the mainstream are encouraged and supported, since it is recognised that it is out of these divergences that successive phases of development occur. Such a result is proof that control has approached its closest harmonic with true order, and the salad days are here.

Yet money is entirely conceptual; an abstraction; an exercise in wish fulfilment, depending on consensus for its existence. As a representation of value, it exists entirely within human culture and has no inherent connection to the earth or other species. This makes it a direct product and expression of human (even cultural) value, power, attention. A resource, a work of art, an expanse of land that is utterly worthless today can become invaluable tomorrow, purely as a product of human attention and value and the utility to which it can be turned. The inverse is also true; monetary value rapidly evaporates where attention flags or utility has been exhausted or superseded.

The value of money collapses where exploitative industrial activity has degraded the local environment. Precisely in proportion to the extent that it polarises value, the single-minded pursuit of money at the expense of every other form of value ultimately renders money itself valueless. There is therefore a very real bell curve to the value of money. Where it does not exist, it is of course worthless. Where it exists exclusively, independent of the value of other systems, it is worthless. Midway between these extremes, at its highest efficiencies and closest correlation with the systems whose health and utility it represents, money has the greatest value.

Initially physically represented as a rare or valuable item in itself – a shell, a coin of metal, an authenticated piece of paper or fabric – money has further superseded physical form to become a yet further representation, a representation of a representation, as data in computers.

One aspect of the operation of money that is frequently cited as a proof of its instability and volatility is the fact that there is far more ‘assumed’ money in circulation in the form of credit than actually exists. (Let’s for a moment ignore the fact that even where it ‘actually’ exists, physical representations of money are still only representations of value with no inherent value in themselves.) This super-saturation is actually a quality common to many if not all dynamic systems, depending on the medium of flow that circulates within them. Living systems, for example, keep the energy derived from sunlight suspended in constant flow, exceeding the capacity of inert matter to retain it (the energy released from oil is an example of such energy retained millions of years after it was first collected by primeval forests). Within the Earth, molten stone flows as lava, suspending and retaining internal temperatures, and on its surface the transpiration and ecological systems keep water moving between the atmosphere and the surface, and between individuals.

This of course doesn’t justify or excuse the actions or behaviour of individuals and organisations whose activity collapses markets and monetary value when they attempt to extend the hypothetical value of money yet further through speculation. Like any dynamic system, the economic system can tolerate a certain amount of this parasitic behaviour. But sooner or later, depending on the parasitic system’s own behavioural and replicatory structure and whether its activity is kept in check by the equivalent of an immune system, parasitic activity may reach its own saturation threshold and ‘kill’ its host.

In industrial societies, money drives activity. Organisation simply can’t be done on any kind of sustainable basis in industrial society without considering money. Like individuals in an ecosystem, organisations need links to other organisations in order to flourish, and if these are reliant on money for expressions of value and interaction, then those they interact with become so, too.

If individuals choose to reject money as an expression of exchange and yet remain active as cultural participants within an industrial society, can they do without some medium of flow? Non-monetary societies exist, but lack the reach and capacity for internal development that the inclusion of an expression of development and interaction such as money affords. What is an animal without blood, a plant without sap, a planet without a transpiration cycle?

Perhaps money itself isn’t the problem so much as the way money is structured. What if money decayed as everything else decays? Then the value of money would be inherent in its continuous rechannelling back into other activity; it would become a more perfect representation of flow which could not be usefully hoarded, and Oligarchies and Monopolies would reduce to reasonable limits as a consequence. What if money changed into other forms of value depending on local conditions, the way water becomes vapour, ice or liquid, or is chemically reconfigured within animals and plants? After all, urban value is not the same as wilderness value. What if it translated as effortlessly between states at technological-ecological boundaries as effortlessly as gases, liquids and solids do at different temperature thresholds?

The unsuitability of the use of money as a medium for the replenishment of ecological health due to its interdependence with industry is clear; resources unused by human industry is anathema to capitalist economy. Yet without a healthy ecology, humanity (and by extension money and industry) cannot survive, and so some kind of ecological equivalent capable of generating a resistance to the activity of money and industry must be developed for the good of both.

To furnish a superficially innocent example: the narrative. The reader or listener was traditionally drawn through a story by a compulsion; to know the answer to a riddle, to see the completion of a symmetrical form or relationship. As they progressed through a narrative they would learn and be shown things, generally things related to the compelling form in terms of subject or theme. This is the structure of a healthy narrative, whose goal is not only to hold attention but to instruct, to reveal, to form conceptual structures and metaphors and describe relationships. The utility of the narrative is the relationships through which it flows, drawn on by the compulsion to find out what happens in the end.

Emptied of these useful things, the narrative becomes an addictive form whose end is never satisfied, which drives further immersion in similar narratives, such as daytime soaps, promotional cartoons for toys, or detective-show rituals of the tracing and eradication of divergence from mainstream behaviour. From the perspective of a culture like that of capitalism, which has become all about harnessing behavioural drives to drive profit and sales, this is ideal; the emptier the narrative is of deep meaning, the more attention is available for advertising and the more certain it becomes that the unsatisfied consumer will seek out other narratives reminiscent of those which most stimulate them.

Addiction develops wherever the impulse and its satisfaction are short-circuited, and behaviour is diverted from the nourishing incidental landscape of trace elements through which biology expects it to flow, negating trivialities like nourishment by simulating flavours, and reproduction and social bonding through porn. Alternatively it blossoms as constraints diminish; many are the creative individuals who, reaching the pinnacle of success to which their talents deliver them, find that money suddenly presents no limit to indulgence, and destroy themselves, their talents and their relationships.

As an expression of what we do in the absence of constraint, addiction may even be useful; it tells us what drives us, what is most important, what we most desire; and perhaps, more importantly, how our unrestricted drives can be modified and consciously channelled by will and value to the exclusion of all else. Once we recognise and become dissatisfied with the temporary solutions of addiction we can resolve to pursue our desires and needs properly, with all the difficulties and challenges they entail, and savour them when we finally achieve them, as they are meant to be savoured.

Unfulfilled desire is the source of the tragedy with which addiction is associated. We create our monsters where we live and love; the desire for a thing also creates a desire to achieve it more easily, circumventing the difficulties, and this is the source of all addiction.

Addictions lampshade powerful,perhaps otherwise unknowable personal impulses that, re-furnished with that intervening landscape of obstacles and challenges, could be channeled to generate further stability and diversity. Perhaps a genuine solution to the empty addictive form is not to repress addiction, but to reconnect motive impulses with their primal paths and aims, the messy imbroglio of behaviours, consequences and conditional alignments the drives and imperatives are meant to carry us through, in turn generating other, perhaps more complex and subtle challenges as we mature through adversity.

We tend to dislike our limitations, no matter how useful they are to us. They’re generally experienced negatively, because they are meant to deter us from harmful activity; the pain of injury or heartache, for example, teaches caution in activity and relationships; and famines and scarcity indicate resources have been exploited to their near limit. When we possess the capacity to solve these instead of recoiling from them, we decouple ourselves from vital informational inflows.

The recognition ofconstraint need not equate to disadvantage either, particularly in any creative endeavour. In a sense constraint can stimulate such forms, by giving them clear delineations against which to define themselves, generating genres and breakthroughs. Among numberless other examples, Picasso’s abstraction is defined by his refutation of realism, Georges Perec’s acclaimed novel A Void exists only because of its evasion of the letter E, the steam train’s engine acquired its distinctive shape and revolutionary power-to-weight ratio in order to pull large loads through narrow tunnels, and every film Peter Greenaway has made has been built around the same plot, with only the skin – characters, actors,  settings and genres – retaining the quality of difference.

Water is metaphorically represented in our society as money.

Water is itself a monoculture which has changed the earth dramatically.

The best and most nourishing thought, politics and organisational structures express the qualities of water and its channels: clarity, unconditional nourishment, communicability, ease, flow, mutual differentiation.

It should thus be apparent that the best quality of water is expressed and maintained in flow. This raises immediate issues with the control of any kind of flow. The flow of water can be channelled and controlled with pipes; but water’s nourishing capacity is then directed exclusively to a single, predetermined end – where its profusion, far in excess of what is needed, makes it ignored and even despised. Once flowing in a pipe, it is neither nourishing diversity nor being modified or receiving input from it, so its quality is degraded. In order to restrict the growth of lethal organisms that would otherwise develop in this uncompetitive environment it is then treated with chemicals like chlorine. Once it has been used for its human utilities – drunk, washed in, urinated and defecated into – it is channelled through further pipes as an undifferentiated, degraded, and chemical-saturated flood, sometimes via a filtration facility such as a sewage treatment plant, to the sea.

In the course of this control and diversion of water flow, we can see several human values and purposes at work.

1. Water is gathered and concentrated from the diverse system (environment) into a dam or similar homogenous body, a plentiful supply recalling a lake.

2. Micro-organism competition is eliminated chemically with chlorine. The root of a competing biostable dynamic system (micro-organisms) is eliminated.

3. The water is then channelled to exclusive uses by humanity. No further dynamic systems or competing systems are permitted to form along the course of its flow.

4. Any onflow other than that to its intended point are considered leaks, flaws in the system, and are eliminated.

5. The channel is hidden, allowing the water to be conceptualised as separate, concrete entities at a series of points: sources or sites of supply, sites of consumption, and sites of disposal. The concept of flow is not eliminated but obfuscated.

6. The pipe itself is the precise expression in three dimensional space of the two dimensional concept of a line connecting the various sites of supply, consumption and disposal. When they are functioning as intended, flow occurs in one direction only along these lines.

7. Generally the site into which the water collects is not noticed, as it is far from the urban environment. When it collects in an urban environment it is configured not as a supply but an inconvenience which may even interrupt other activity. As long as it is conceptualised this way, the only action applied to it is drainage.

The control of water provides some important examples of the dangers of controlling complex systems according to abstracted conceptualisations of them, and the distortions and unintended consequences that can result. The similarities this particular mode of control shares with all attempts to control other dynamic systems – monetary economies, belief systems, the human immune system, agriculture, ecology – are both obvious and useful. It also demonstrates how ‘mere’ ideas and conceptualisations shape and modify real space and vital systems.

Because it is deterministic, involves manufacture and construction and is thus guided by design, the way the system as a whole is conceptualised is crucial to the constructed system’s final form and any disruptions that occur at the interface between these. Everything that happens is controlled, and when functioning, proceeds according to its forseen end. No other influence is allowed. Only humans and human use are considered.

Water is gathered because it is recognisably valuable and essential. The core assumption, perfectly reasonable from an abstract point of view, is that the more of it we have access to, the better our prospects for survival and comfort. This was a perfectly valid assumption in previous eras, when human populations were smaller, non-urban or nomadic. If we existed in the abstract universe the abstraction presupposes the water would simply be there, never depleting or increasing, never altering in quality, never evaporating, never being absorbed into the soil, flowing on into plants or other animal species. It would go only where we wanted it to, and the channels along which it flowed would be perfect linear abstractions, indestructible, incorruptible and permanent. Other systems would be external systems, populated by abstract externalities which could be comfortably ignored. Should these externalities affect our own systems, they could be comfortably eliminated as intruders, unlawful competition, dangerous to the smooth functioning of the system we designed.

Unfortunately we do not live in such a simplified, abstracted universe of self-contained wholes, and so, practised on a sufficiently large scale, this idealised management of water flow leads to a range of critical problems which would be entirely eliminated if it were conceptualised differently, managed in a way that also allowed it to flow freely through the other systems which depend upon and even generate it.

Our urban plumbing systems evolved from those used in Rome and Greece, and are still based on their essential treatment of systems as a series of self-contained abstractions. Like the political, religious, abstract and metaphysical systems evolved for practical management by those civilisations, the use of these and their descendant forms are no longer suitable for our needs.

Ownership is another thorny issue that proceeds from abstraction: the idea that our use definitively precludes the use of others and particularly other systems is utterly unviable today, and the source of multiple conflicts arising purely from that assumption. The ownership of water is a particular absurdity.

The monopolisation of resources by humanity has catastrophic consequences, as co-existing stabilising systems, deprived of nutrition and flow, stagnate or die off. Other examples are the monopolisation of available biomass for agriculture; the monopolisation of space for habitation, farming and mining; the monopolisation and extraction of mineral resources, and the monopolisation of public space by commerce and advertising. It’s no accident that monopolisation is concentrated in the heavily industrialised and centralised cultures. It’s unthinkable in a holistic, animistic context. This also means that focusing on ’solving’ those relatively few, characteristically invasive cultures – realigning perceptions and viewpoints, reorganising political structure and values – should go a long way toward solving the skew humanity puts on ecological systems.

In the urban system, water is used to perform tasks for which it may not be the only available medium. In terms of sewage it makes waste ‘go away’ as an abstract whole. By necessity, we are coming to understand that the way that waste is broken down and reassimilated by microbes and other organisms is the crucial element, that no matter where we transport this waste if it isn’t ressimilated some way it doesn’t disappear. Since waste can no longer be disappeared by displacement, its transportation isn’t necessary and it can be reassimilated locally, for example in our gardens. This rethinking of the treatment of faeces then permits a flow-of-least-resistance rethinking of the dissipation of industrial waste, a far more vital but otherwise irresolvable concern.

The best use of water is in the sustenance of diverse living systems. Like it or not, humanity is only one among these many. Both the ecological and the social crisis proceed from centralisation and control, and perceptions of ubiquity, rather than diversity, as the most stable intra-structural relationship. Both are solved by the encouragement of diversity in the system and its ongoing nourishment.

Under conditions of flow, an interdependent process develops in which the flowing medium and the flowed through medium enable and define each others’ characteristics. It is impossible to definitively say which makes which; they emerge through mutual association. Paths of least resistance, and the self reinforcement of these where the flow or pressure is greatest and most persistent create differentiation.

Consider a river carving a valley. The flow of water is clearly the active component, but the process of shaping is mutual, and mutually differentiating. The structure and material of the substrate influences the rate of flow, which produces further self-differentiating properties. The impermeable rock of mountain ranges, their height and steepness produces a swift flow which carves deep valleys. As the valley develops, more water is directed and collected into the river, generating erosion and deepening the valley; where the edge of the valley forms a ridge it influences the atmosphere as moving warm air collides with cool, forming clouds and generating rainfall; where the flow of water is consistent or at least predictable, plants will be able to establish themselves, limiting erosion and generating further transpiration. Consistent swift flows might produce rounded holes in the rock, channelling the flow in a curve to produce a hard edge of force which carves another hole at some point along its curve, generating turbulence and rapids. A gentle slope and softer substrate produces a slower river whose bed is not committed to and deepened by differentiation; instead the bed spreads sinuously back and forth, deposition generating an erosive path of least resistance at the inner edge of curves. In this case he river further differentiates the flatness and fine grain of the substrate, spreading soil evenly to further produce the plain.

The phylogenetically inherited basic structure of the brain develops similarly in response to information and stimulation. A continuous sensory awareness is drawn to particular elements that stand out from the babble according to subconscious associations which we have either learned is significant or inherited an association with danger, comfort, excitement, curiosity; this neural focus is attention. Attention generates an emotional response, varying in intensity according to the intensity of the stimulus, generating thoughts, associations, and reactions. Attention and emotion create mind, through the establishment of emotionally-charged associations and inferences which are the subjective experience of the formation of dendrites, neurons and other cell types which form the brain’s physical structure. This structure demonstrably grows or diminishes in accordance with attention; for example, people who are blinded develop neural structure associated with other sensory inputs to compensate, people develop intense phobias to sometimes innocuous stimuli through association, and theoretical learning not used fades quickly, while that which experiences the most frequent use continues to gain in complexity.

Further, attention in turn generates technology, which further shapes attention; personal experience translates to social experience as it is communicated or shared, developing consensus which smooths the way to the realisation of particular ideas and conceptual structures over others; attention, culturally configured as science, philosophy and the arts, articulates the boundaries of awareness and develops theoretical structures which help organise the information gathered by these; and the failures and misconceptions of technological intervention develop dysfunctions within the otherwise experientially complete whole of our ecological system, thus creating differentiation and allowing us to develop the system theory which is hopefully capable of modulating those interventions…

The tendency of systems in motion to differentiate and strengthen flow in this way is the single clearest, physically observable proof against a conception of the universe as undifferentiated, random chaos. This conception of non-human systems as chaos has much in common with the colonial doctrine of terra nullius, allowing the projection of a formless, random universal void in which we can instil our own systems of meaning and order without guilt. Randomness is possible only under conditions of ubiquity, where the process of differentiation is negated in order to satisfy the need for reproducability and human control. As Einstein put it, “God does not play dice.”

Most of us seek advantage in our lives. It’s one of the main motivators of activity in society; why we strive for better jobs; why we  seek the most attractive, interesting and successful people as potential mates; why we fight against the rules that limit our business opportunities; why we both crave the cost-free exposure granted by internet popularity and prosecute the cost-free digital dissemination of our painstakingly developed cultural artefacts; it’s why we work out, go to seminars, get educations, learn to dance, learn to drive, learn to cook exotic dishes, spend hours doing sudokus or trawling CGI dungeons in pursuit of that elusive elite drop.

The pursuit of advantage is a Very Good Thing. If we didn’t strive to outcompete the other guy we wouldn’t have natural selection or evolution, and where would we be then?

However, sometimes the advantages we strive for and occasionally gain have consequences we didn’t intend. The high-phosphate fertilizer we used to boost our crop output is running off into the river system, causing algal blooms and destroying precious reefs; our ingenious financial tools have delivered us unimaginable wealth, but destroyed the financial structure without which that wealth is meaningless; our next-to nothing food production costs have made it possible to expand our brand into tremendous new markets, but is giving a large percentage of those profit-generating consumers cancer; the kick-ass hunting strategy we developed has wiped out our prey, and now the enormous population that technology made possible is facing starvation and probably cannibalism. Sometimes winning is worse.

Dysadvantage is essentially correlated with the disruption or manipulation of the metasystem within which the targeted system is nested. This may be intentional, or simply the product of a particularly successful survival strategy.

It may also coincide with the failure to recognise and acquiesce to an indicative limitation; for example, human population increase leads to all kinds of failures in agriculture and fish stocks as resources are depleted beyond their capacity to regenerate. Under historical conditions this would have led to a range of alternatives, any of which would have generated sustenance, if not improvement, of the system as a whole: we might have moved to an area where resources were more plentiful; our target species might have adapted to our predation, limiting the numbers that could be gained; our own populations might have decreased through any number of emergent behaviours (famine; warfare developing from conflict over resources; decreased fertility due to lack of essential nutrients); or we might have developed some kind of permaculture, carefully husbanding resources and maintaining the relationships between the cohabiting systems upon which we and other systems rely.

But there is hardly any longer a scrap of habitable land that isn’t occupied by people, and so there are really no places to move; our innovations proceed more rapidly than species and systems can adapt to them, and rather than scaling back our own populations we have been ’solving’ the threat of food shortages with a series of industrially-enabled technological innovations; chemical fertilisers, genetically engineered salt and drought tolerant crops, irrigation and diverted waterways, echo locators and satellite imaging for fish schools. The consequent exhaustion of resources depletes not only the resources we target but the species and ecologies that depend on them; and perversely, the human population we are trying at all costs to maintain and increase comfortably are themselves condemned to destruction or at least a dramatically decreased quality of life within a generation or two, as food chains collapse and food stocks fail… purely as a consequence of the technological innovations we have established in an attempt to guarantee their survival.

Because dysadvantages stem from these failures to recognise the inherent and natural limitations and requirements of systems, they tend to cascade as technological and strategic solutions feed in to further complications.

The solution to dysadvantage is insight and self restraint. When it is recognised that the fundamental requirement of any systemic innovation, whether technological, philosophical, behavioural, political, cultural, religious, intellectual, attitudinal or whatever is not to guarantee more absolute acquisition, power, truth or moral justification, but to better enable the system to persist in time, everything develops differently.

In post-industrial society we are conditioned to regard all limitations as harmful, restrictive and unfair. Sometimes they are, but not always. The difference between inhabiting a system of necessary limitations and one of restrictive limitations is the difference between living within the walls of a house or those of a prison. Ultimately we must accept that no matter what, we will always exist within the boundaries of something else, and that the health of that something else – and thus our own potential health – is our primary concern. We are a species that has developed a tremendous gift, the capacity to transcend and directly influence the very systems that contain us. We are not the first such species to evolve to such a point on Earth. Like plants and bacteria before us, we have to ensure that our own survival entails the survival of species and systems incomprehensible to us. Any benefit gained from personal advantage is dependent upon and only relevant within the vitality of the system we inhabit, and the vitality of that system must have primacy over any advantage we seek for ourselves.

Ubiq is produced when the focus of a manufacturer shifts away from the quality of the object they’re manufacturing in favour of cheaper source material, better marketing, or just plain shifting units. A product which devolves into ubiq may start out as a very high quality item; in fact the more favourable its initial reception the better, since this creates a long-lasting and powerful association of quality in the mind of the consumer and the market as a whole which can absorb a lot of contradictory evidence before it begins to erode. Common sense re-evaluation of the item as its quality declines is frequently countered by a persistent flood of positive marketing and uncritical pop-cultural acceptance. Ubiq forms beneath a veil of increasingly effective and appealing packaging, within manufactories closed to public scrutiny, in sweatshops and battery farms, in food factories and fast food franchises and the multiple layers of production that chain between food source and outlet.

Ubiq is impossible without association. The first sense is in the psychological context of the word; the ubiq item is associated with a quality or nutritional value which it does not possess. This generally derives from marketing or the superior quality of previous versions. The ubiq is essentially filler for the marketing, which might comprise anything: cheesy, abstracted fun, a nostalgia for the good old days of craftsmanship, humble, honest goodness or the technological wonders of modern food production.

The second sense is association on the level of appearance; the ubiq item appears similar to an actual contemporaneous item of greater quality, value or functionality while being much cheaper. This second type proliferates in online stores and discount outlets in the form of desirable items like televisions, DVD players and other electronic goods, tools, fashion accessories, toys. It especially proliferates to capitalise on short lived fads and consumer frenzies. Metals are replaced by plastics spray-painted to resemble metals; product designs are copied; brand names are slightly reshuffled; and the warehoused leftovers of previous fads are exhumed and repackaged to parasitise new consumer cravings.

In food technology, ubiq is ubiquitous. A focus on cheapness, longevity, transportability and consumer appeal makes fruit, for example, a mockery of itself. The item only has to appeal or last up to the point of sale; this sublimates taste and nutritional content to visual appeal and favours technological interventions like the irradiation, waxing and even painting of fruit. These interventions, while ultimately degrading the quality of the fruit, also add extra costs to the fruit’s production, requiring further centralisation and thus longer periods of transportation and storage as the fruit is stored up and its market period stretched to ensure the maximum concordance of demand and availability. This, of course, demands still further developments in technological intervention, shelf life, genetic engineering, brand identity development, agricultural methods… it is important to note in this case the way technological interventions proliferate to solve the issues generated by centralisation and monopolisation, rather than the entire system simply being decentralised, localised and more widely distributed to generate both a reduction in costs and improvement in the fruit’s freshness and quality.

The research and independent manufacturing of esters, revolutionary from a manufacturing perspective, represents a potentially fatal break in the association of particular tastes and smells with specific nutritional requirements. With this breakthrough any sufficiently tasteless and potentially edible matter can be reworked to taste like any other, and the possibilities of edible ubiq become endless.

A rare positive sense of ubiq is when the material from which an item is made does not matter and has no effect its functionality, but is simply an expression of the methods of manufacture and technological development of the culture which produces it as a whole. A bowl or a cup, for example, may be made from different materials according to ease of manufacture and supply; they may be made from bone, clay, bronze, woven plant fibres, ceramic, porcelain, steel, aluminium or plastic without the material impacting in any way on their use; their significance of course varies widely according to rarity and age. In heavily industrialised society, packaging substitutes for the skin which contained animal prey, fruit etc into a unified whole. Its current source in the synthesised compounds of petroleum and crude oil combined with its disposable, castaway nature make it a terrible source of pollution; but this will change as organic compounds come into wider use and dissolution is designed into the compounds themselves. Regardless of whether this society survives or destroys itself, a thin layer of undissolvable synthetic material will mark this epoch as neatly and unequivocally as the layer of ash that marks the K-T boundary in the worldwide geological record.

In ubiq, mind and matter fuse to a rare degree. So much of the construction of ubiq involves the construction of meaning and value in the mind of the consumer; it is in this, if nothing else, that ubiq is marked as a product of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, if not of the period of technological determinism as a whole as it develops and evolves to neatly fit our minds, our desires, our fears and expectations. As in the illusion of political control, advertising, value and significance, anywhere the quality of the actual begins to lag behind the illusion of the perceived, ubiq can proliferate to inherit the earth.

It’s not difficult to see which factors or vectors of technology end up producing this ubiquity. It begins with the deterministic nature of rational thought; only what can be conceived can be made, and of what is made only that which is of the most utility and convenience will survive through replication, so more of less tends to be made.

This leads to a further source of ubiquity; while the general reproductive strategy of life is combinatory, that of technology is replicatory. Two seeds beginning with an identical genetic code would grow into similar plants, but the unique conditions of their growth ensures that they would grow into differentiated plants; a little more sunlight, different mixes of nutrients at different stages of growth, predation and competition would all subtly differentiate the final result. In contrast, production generates essentially the same item, time after time. Further, technological solutions are selected for just as species are, but at a dramatically reduced numerical scale; a handful of engineering solutions might solve the problem of getting water up a hill the same way all over the world, but the number of species which might cater to an essential ecological niche – breaking down carcasses into soil, scavenging, pollenating – could run into hundreds or thousands as variable habitats, temperature ranges, available ancestral species and symbiotic relationships differentiate ecologies.

Ubiquity may even be seen as an aim of evolution, or at least a motivator at the level of individual preference. In accounting for tendencies toward biological homogenity, Johan Koeslag coined the term koinophilia, the preference for avarageness, or for traits in a mate which will reduce one’s own deviation from norms ¹. Photographic overlay studies of attractiveness ² indicate that a composite blended face is more attractive than that of any single individual, and that the same proportional template is sought across races, cultures and sexes. This impulse has dramatically divergent results once channelled through either a bio-reproductive or technological strategy, however; it is the difference between the face of a genetically well-matched individual and one almalgamated from a range of types through plastic surgery.

Ubiquity is deeply entrenched in post-industrial culture and scientific practice. Statistical studies strive for an ideal of the average mean as a baseline; equality is, at least superficially, held as the single noblest ideal in politics and social theory; paranoia makes it dangerous to stand out too much from the crowd; and mass media homogenises diverse preferences and needs into markets for mass production. For manufacture, mass replication of a single design grants tremendous economies of scale, guarantees availability, and simplifies production.

At least in the short term, ubiquity ensures the survival of all, regardless of fitness or applicability. Where all qualities, flaws and strategies lead to more or less the same outcome, traits are muddied and dispersed; ubiquity, like fitness, selects for and reinforces itself.

One of the most serious repercussions of ubiquity, however, is the way it bleeds lived experience of the quality of authenticity. It’s hard to enjoy the memory of those wild raves and concerts when you reflect that those emotional highs and lows were produced by the same designer drugs everyone else was taking, synchronised to a set that might have played exactly the same, to the very note and cadence, in different cities and countries across the world, to an essentially similar audience channelled into a similar venue by the same guerilla marketing bitzkriegs, music TV channels, and album hyping. It’s difficult to feel that your family and friends are a collection of unique individuals when they’re expressing the same opinions as the characters and experts in the same TV shows they and everyone else watch while eating the same fast food or magazine-inspired menus for dinner using the same plates and cutlery as everyone else who shops at their superstore of choice, clothed in the same trends supplied by the same stores in the same malls, inhabiting essentially the same suburbs with the same fast-food restaurants, petrol stations and furniture chains as any other number of families in similar socio-economic strata across the world.

Where, then, does the solace come from? In a world where biodiverse forests and other habitats are cleared to make way for soy, wheat and other monoculture crops, where livestock are denied a normal existence and are born, raised, and butchered in feedlots to produce ubiquitous matter which are channelled into generic products with different packaging, where consent and opinions are as mass-manufactured as the buildings, schools, textbooks and clothing, finding that you do or like things differently to the people around you may be among the most useful and satisfying things you can do while living on the planet. Gigacorporations, their products and effects may well be the most destructive, remorseless and unassailable entities on the planet, but they depend on homogenous and consistent populations for survival; and under such conditions any departure from ubiquity, practised by enough people in enough facets of their lives, can change the course of the ubiquitous present, and so that of the ubiquitous future.

Charles Darwin,

On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

An imbroglio is a tangle of crossed purposes.

The imbroglio functions and regulates itself through the interaction of a diversity of distinct, interdependent dynamic systems. Because it is not deterministic, it does not rely on the known in order to innovate and develop successful strategies. This makes it a truly creative system.

The imbroglio is by definition dynamic. It is never still; it is always developing, adapting, responding. Although it is not controlled, it is not chaotic. It is stabilised by a few emergent properties rather than enforcible rules or mechanistic controls. It is almost unfathomably complex within and clear and simple at the face.

It is constantly selecting for fitness, efficiency, innovation, intelligence, clarity, communication, sustainability, diversity and differentiation.

The interaction between paths of least resistance and paths of greatest resistance create differentiation at all active levels. What is used develops; what is unused truncates or dies out. The things its member systems do while falling into their various paths of least resistance generates a balance of tension and further developments of dynamism, not deadness, inactivity or equilibrium as it is defined in physics.

Occasionally a species or other system gains cascading advantages which allow it to exceed the boundaries imposed on it by the imbroglio system, and it aligns into a monoculture. The monoculture rapidly multiplies before either stabilising as part of the imbroglio or exhausting its fuel and collapsing. Should it fall, the monoculture makes a wave of innovation in all surviving systems both possible and necessary.

The imbroglio develops stability over time as it increases in diversity. Non-adapting, tenacious survivors create a mesh of interdependence within which continually proliferating innovators fill the gaps and create occasional cascades of advantage which open new developmental possibilities.

In terms of the ecosystem, these are, in order of their establishment first as a monoculture and subsequent integration as an inherently stable underlying system: Geology and radiation; photosynthesising single celled organisms and water; social systems, e.g. corals and cooperating single cells; fish and crustaceans; flowering plants and insects; reptiles and birds; mammals; and potentially, machines.