#lapp school

page 588 - if you're like me you know of Michel Serres' commentary on the parallels between child sacrifice to the god Baal in ancient Carthage and the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986 from the translator's note at the end of Michel Serres with Bruno Latour -- Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Roxanne Lapidus, trans.). University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Once you read that the incineration of children and animals inside the enormous brass statue of a largely forgotten god is a form of worship and religion akin to incinerating astronauts inside a metal tube live on TV while it hurtles towards the heavens, you can't unthink it. Go ahead and debate whether the societal roles held by premodern religion and (post?)modern science are at all comparable, Serres and Latour do! The answer: maybe yes maybe no, but those visuals, my GOD. And you have to wonder at the breadth of knowledge on hand to even be able to draw the comparison in the first place.

As our attentions are crushed by technology and we no longer retain things in situ what does that mean for new ideas and the opportunity for synthesis. It's all well and good to offload mental power to your phone, I can look it up as many times as I need to, but if you haven't retained the dual infernos each can enter and exit your conscious and subconscious brain without having the opportunity to collide, spark a connection and burn society to the ground in a productive way.

The worry is that AI will surpass us and turn us all into paperclips but as our brains atrophy and our intellects cramp AI doesn't need to do much to overtake us and win. Using it saps us of strength and stamina and it passes us not with its own ever increasing speed, but because we are collapsing backwards.

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page 588 -

"These conversations make repeated reference to Michel Serres's 1987 book Statues, in which he draws parallels between the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger at Cape Canaveral on January 28, 1986, and the ancient Carthaginians' practice of enclosing humans in a gigantic brass statue of the god Baal and incinerating them there, as a sacrifice to their deity (as described by Gustave Flaubert in his novel Salammbô). The similarities, according to Serres, include the immense cost to the respective societies in erecting these "statues," the active role of "specialists" (scientists/priests) in setting the event in motion, the presence of a large crowd of onlookers, who witness the events open-mouthed in horror, and the repetitive nature of the event (replayed again and again on television screens; actively repeated in Carthage whenever national events seemed to require it). Other parallels Serres draws between the two events are the avowed goal (the heavens) and the fact that the statues, the brass deity and the high-tech rocket, were more than simple objects: they played a powerful social role.

Perhaps the most difficult for readers to accept is Serres's contention that denial played a large role in both events. Since the Carthaginians incinerated both animals and children in their statue of Baal, even the parents of the sacrificed children allegedly denied that the cries they heard were those of humans. "Those are not humans, but animals," they are quoted as protesting. We are engaging in a similar form of denial, according to Serres, when we say that the Challenger explosion was an accident; such accidents, he insists, are predictable, according to the laws of probability. Statistics detect in large numbers what we cannot perceive in individual cases. Thus, our technology contains shadowy areas of archaic violence.

page 588 - the Lapp School's fixation on snowflake motifs in their data visualizations came about because they most accurately reflected a Lapp interpretation of the data encountered in the real world. They felt that what we would now call mainstream economics relies too heavily on simplified versions of existence, or versions that have no connection to reality at all; up and to the right not being commonplace in the natural world. Indeed, depending on the timescale one was looking at, they would happily argue data should be seen cyclically or down and to disintegration. Entropy and all that.

page 588 - the Lapp School's Sea Creature model is based in real world experience and data sets. It replaced a pre-existing theoretical model.

The original model was conceived of by a group of non-Lappsian economists situated in a small fishing village at the far end of a towering granite fjord. Despite a bustling harbour full of bobbing dorries and clinkers the economists barely knew the sea and had certainly never seen a sea creature. The model stated that sea creatures were non destructive beings in their environment. Because it is a creature of the sea a sea creature loves the sea and everything in it. It will therefore never exhaust its habitat, the sea, and will never need to be controlled or have its behaviour reined in by King Triton, fishes, the government, etc. Despite their power and appetites sea creatures could be largely ignored.

The new model instead frames sea creatures as rapacious and dangerous. They are an indeterminate growth animal and as such consume their environment and resources regardless of any long-term damage. Once the sea is eaten the land is at risk as well.

page 564 panel a - I sound so lame! The ideas are valid but my writing is so BORING.