Life Finds a Way

Cohen's idea that some kind of "semantic discontinuity" is required for cultural advancement struck me as very apt, but I question whether this can lead to any useful prescriptive contribution because I'm not sure the absence of semantic discontinuity is even possible.  Cohen wants the law to actively create semantic discontinuities, but this seems to presuppose that the law is capable of creating an airtight, "seamless" framework in the first place.  I thought this presumption was uncharacteristically Pollyannaish of the work: In my view, semantic discontinuities will find a way to pierce through regulatory architectures in all cases.

I see this inevitable piercing of regulatory architectures as the most salient feature of modern political life.  I see Cohen's insight here as a kind of variation on Hayek's economic calculation problem: It's impossible to represent all knowledge in a system within a mere fraction of that system.  This epistemological problem is compounded in the political context, I think, by the state's monopoly of force.  Cohen seems to be very uneasy with allowing a large corporate actor (such as a government) unidirectional surveillance power over a population, but I'm not sure she appreciates how radical a position her "operational transparency" is.  I think such "operational transparency" is an inevitable result of government's fallibility, but these days, those who eavesdrop on the eavesdroppers are liable to be branded enemies of the state and locked in solitary confinement.  

I thought Meredith's worries about "learned helplessness" are intriguing, but I see no reason for the panic to spread.  Human flourishing has always been dependent on some technological knowhow or other ever since we left Eden -- that is, ever since we started earning our bread from the sweat of our brow and the glint of our farming tools.  We've moved from dependence on the ecology of the forest to dependence on the ecology of global human culture as brought to us by networked technologies, with a pit stop at feudal agriculture in between.  

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[Randy Picker]

With apologies to Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, I take it.

[Noah]

obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkWeMvrNiOM

[Randy Picker]

With many of the same mannerisms we saw as he was being transformed into a fly.