Irina was there to hug people on arrival. There were no strangers, though many had not yet met. Some had cycled here from nearby, others had left their bicycles at home, flown by aircraft, walked, caught the train across Europe.
[There are some simple rules guiding how this is written. It tries to use descriptive language, in third person. It tries to focus on actions, not embodied meanings, if possible (not always). It switches vantage points, as though changing camera view, or maybe jump cuts? A static view gets boring. Some recordings were used in its construction, because memory is not what it used to be.]
Irina was there to hug people on arrival. There were no strangers, though many had not yet met. Some had cycled here from nearby, others had left their bicycles at home, flown by aircraft, walked, caught the train across Europe.
This was Amsterdam. [The term 'cosmopolis' came up, later in the day, by Venkatesh Rao who beamed in as a strange intermixture of generative AI and video pixels. A cosmopolis, a city that contains multitudes of cities, cultures, ways of being all in the one place. An old term, there to ask us how far we've come in our ability to imagine complexity. But that’s later.]
There is coffee, rooibos tea, juice, grapes, figs, pretzels, croissants, and greetings. There are chairs in rows, there are short presentations by Martjin and Iksander, there are interjections, someone (Irina) trips and falls, her coffee splattered all across the wall. In other words, there is formality and informality.
Indy Johar arrives a little late, just as the wind and rain gathers force. The wind howls at us as he speaks about the climate collapse we are living through. Rain lashes the windows. Our makeshift structure feels as though it could be unmoored at any moment.
Indy brings authority to the room — but he won’t tell lies like other people in authority do. He explains that 3 degrees 'is the world we are operating in'. Three degrees means eight degrees in large cities. Three degrees sees much of the world around the equator, where billions reside, become uninhabitable. Three degrees means wet bulb moments, when a human body cannot sustain itself under conditions of humid heat. The rain and the wind lash the windows; we are in a makeshift structure in the Metabolic Lab; we are attentive to his message.
Indy assures us: he does not come out of randomness. He has spent many years establishing collective movements of change makers, impact hubs, consensus builders. Consensus, he says, escapes context, and context, particularly differential context, is what we each have. To build consensus over time means narrowing the individuation of context, and in so doing flattens change. Organisations thrive through differentiation, not consensus.
Now Indy of Dark Matter Labs is the figurehead of multivariate team during times of planetary emergency. This is all to say, he says, that the forms of bounded and unbounded organisation are what now matter.
Indy won’t tell us but he will show us how to unlearn. He seems to be saying that centrally controlled organisations will over time lose their edge. He says civics is really going to matter.
Indy won’t tell us but he will try to show us how to unlearn what we think we know. He doesn’t use notes, he has minimal slides. He wants us to revisit our terms of engagement with the world. For example: He tells us that insurance companies are a “service organisation that exist to price risk”. If your risk goes up, I charge you 2000. If it goes up, I charge you more. An insurance company that exists to price risk is not going to be a company that seeks to reduce or mitigate that risk. Three degrees in the UK means the rails start to buckle. It means riots, it means whiplash effects in price. High quality nutritional food has become 82% more expensive in the last two years alone.
Three degrees means ‘climate breakdown’, not climate change. Amsterdam, like London, may plummet to minus 20, or crank up to 40.
This is volatility, this means loss of farming which depends on stable weather patterns. This is a fundamentally different ecological context, a different operating context. We are listening to the numbers now. 814 billion: the money going into mitigation. 10 billion: the money going into adaptation. Will these terms even matter soon?
But we need to consider more deeply now what bounded and unbounded mean; why these terms matter.
The 'bounded organisational object' is the nation state. This is where we are going here. How does a nation state secure itself in the face of this volatility? How does it protect its citizens from shocks? What does a term like 'security' mean, when we are so globally produced? Security, says Indy, is not bounded, it's metabolic.
Security is systematically entangled.
Indy brings our minds to the matters of nutrients, critical minerals, farmland, but then asks us about cognitive security. What happens when we disarm society of the capacity to think? This is the challenge of LLMs.
Indy is not the only person talking like this.
An un-dated piece by Jonathan S Blake, associate director of programmes at the Berggruen Institute, takes a similar view.
Shortly after Indy speaks, he takes some questions, then leaves. He was running late, and now he must be off again.
The wind is wild outside.
Irina asks us for a moment, to calm our nerves. Her nerves are high, with the wind raging outside, and the messages shared by Indy are challenging.
We all take a moment to breathe together. To feel what it likes to be present here, together, before we take a walk outside, to learn about the story of hope that is Metabolic Lab. Where it is wild outside.
Getting whipped by wind and rain outside
