Nature is a Language

[version]

companies have "branches" as if they're all one organism (a tree) with many branches

Can anyone think of further examples of this? The co-opting of terms of nature for things like banks, car companies, etc. Sinister if you run with Burroughs' contention that Henry Luce's naming of his publications Time, Life and Fortune were attempts to take control of the things themselves.

What happens when capital no longer seeks to dominate nature, but identifies itself with it?

Indeed.

 

[catalog]

STEM (Science Technology Engineering Maths) in education discourse

 

[version]

"Root and branch reform," is another, and the "cloud" re: computing. "Virus." "Grassroots." I did it myself here - "What are the flora and fauna native to the internet?"

I suppose the thing is you take what you know and, like Luke said when we were discussing 'Revealing the Map', certain metaphors are irresistible and just make sense to us. The arborescent pattern shows up all over the place, it's our model for lots of things.

 

[version]

@mvuent's 'phenomenology of electroacoustic music' comes in here too. That stuff inspires all sorts of geological, biological, etc. descriptions and metaphors. I'm listening to more of that South Korean stuff I posted in the glitch thread and it like sounds like a digital rendering of burbling, shifting topographies. Tectonic plates. Seething magma.

 

[Murphy]

 

[Clinamenic]

Theres a lot of mycological metaphors in the regenerative/distributed/etc tech movement. I'm going to a conference in August called dWeb Camp in the redwoods, where a bunch of techies set up tents and talk about internet protocols and whatnot.

DWeb Camp 2024

We invite you to join us at the DWeb Camp!

dwebcamp.org

 

[luka]

Can anyone think of further examples of this? The co-opting of terms of nature for things like banks, car companies, etc. Sinister if you run with Burroughs' contention that Henry Luce's naming of his publications Time, Life and Fortune were attempts to take control of the things themselves.



Indeed.

wtf lol this is my idea dont give him credit for it!

 

[mvuent]

one idea that comes to mind is bernie krause's niche hypothesis about how animals evolve to share sonic space in very intricate, coordinated ways over time. he says that the oldest, healthiest animal habitats are spectrally similar to the most elaborate forms of human music-making like symphonies, in that you have a multitude of different voices that are balanced across the frequency spectrum so as to all be intelligible. each animal voice occupies its own "audio channel"—or in some cases, as one of his illustrations shows, exists in multiple frequency bands in between other sounds. reading his stuff, you wonder if the full-yet-balanced quality of a symphony, or a lot of well-mastered modern music, sounds appealing to us because of how it simulates this type of environment.

 

[version]

reading his stuff, you wonder if the full-yet-balanced quality of a symphony, or a lot of well-mastered modern music, sounds appealing to us because of how it simulates this type of environment.

Wonder whether something similar applies to colour. There's something pleasurable about even a colourful meal or bowl of fruit; lush greens, vibrant oranges, ripe reds, etc. all on the same plate. There's obviously a strong pull to the use of colour in the visual arts too.

 

[Murphy]

one idea that comes to mind is bernie krause's niche hypothesis about how animals evolve to share sonic space in very intricate, coordinated ways over time. he says that the oldest, healthiest animal habitats are spectrally similar to the most elaborate forms of human music-making like symphonies, in that you have a multitude of different voices that are balanced across the frequency spectrum so as to all be intelligible. each animal voice occupies its own "audio channel"—or in some cases, as one of his illustrations shows, exists in multiple frequency bands in between other sounds. reading his stuff, you wonder if the full-yet-balanced quality of a symphony, or a lot of well-mastered modern music, sounds appealing to us because of how it simulates this type of environment.

 

[version]

'Landscape' is one that gets used a lot, e.g. political landscape. People refer to 'mountains' of debt.

 

[Corpsey]

This is the type of thread luka loves, no wonder he's back, this might have been the klaxon that called him

 

[version]

This is the type of thread luka loves, no wonder he's back, this might have been the klaxon that called him

I reckon it's had the opposite effect. It's too much his thing. He'll instinctively want to kill it.

 

[Corpsey]

He sometimes claims he wrote the tempest you know

 

[mvuent]

"all songbirds sing in the ecstatic mood, and not in the lyric" - intriguing, too bad i didn't grow up in the 1800s so i have no idea what that means

 

[mvuent]

Wonder whether something similar applies to colour. There's something pleasurable about even a colourful meal or bowl of fruit; lush greens, vibrant oranges, ripe reds, etc. all on the same plate. There's obviously a strong pull to the use of colour in the visual arts too.

yeah, and a colorful meal can often = healthy (or so i was told as a kid), which maybe ties in with something gus wrote about prospect-refuge theory:

And this is what Dennis Dutton has argued about landscapes: probably not coincidence that the generically beautiful vista has abundant amounts of water and verdure. Show a buncha eight-year-olds pictures of the savannah, and they’ll end up preferring (on vague aesthetic grounds) approximately the sorts of ecologies you’d pick if you were running a functional analysis on survival odds. Many of the elevated perspectives landscape paintings take match roughly to the predictions prospect-refuge theory makes.

nature as a language of survivability...

 

[version]

We Need To Rewild The Internet | NOEMA

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

www.noemamag.com

 

[sus]

Can anyone think of further examples of this? The co-opting of terms of nature for things like banks, car companies, etc. Sinister if you run with Burroughs' contention that Henry Luce's naming of his publications Time, Life and Fortune were attempts to take control of the things themselves.



Indeed.

I don't like this framing because we take all our words from nature. There's nothing special or sinister about the private sector doing thing except some vague "capitalism bad" vibe

 

[sus]

Pound's fossil poetry get into this, but you can get it from Lakoff as well

 

[Slothrop]

Theres a lot of mycological metaphors in the regenerative/distributed/etc tech movement. I'm going to a conference in August called dWeb Camp in the redwoods, where a bunch of techies set up tents and talk about internet protocols and whatnot.

Something something Merkle trees something something.

The other thing that tech is full of is "ecosystems" - the Docker ecosystem, the scientific Python ecosystem, the Rust ecosystem, the Salesforce ecosystem...