Cybernetic Empire (draft 0)
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We are foremost a cybernetic empire, and that is most apparent in the very delicate and Anglo form of cybernetics (arguably, the only extant, or at least the original form of, cybernetics, see Land musing how in hindsight it may prove that the telos of the Anglo was to usher in technocapital superintelligence) required to build cybernetic systems.
That is, I have been so impressed by the delicacy of the personalities required to build aerospace systems, especially ones which must think and live and react, and how to make the companies and leadership structures work that are able to (a) discuss (b) deliberate but ultimately productively/correctly (c) decide how and where to accept uncertainty regarding the design and requirements of these systems,
So impressed by the absolute and unobvious necessity of very particular, strikingly American relationships to truth, labor, conflict, and above all, ownership/responsibility, required to get work done at all, but more so, to get work done effectively without clogging the channels with constant communication (see before for another example of how challenges are posed by how difficult it is to talk about these things) (because the whole point of aerospace is that you do not have a pre-existing formalism, this is cutting edge, this is subtle, this is far from intuition, but requires the adaptation of intuition if you are to move quickly enough to succeed),
And how both those things—the leadership and the work ethic—would absolutely utterly crumble if not supported by at minimum a large minority of True American personalities, who possess that cybernetic frontier-anglo sublime for dealing with the unknown, and who are essential to digest and distribute very discreet bits of Labor such that even those who do not possess that same sublime can contribute to the cause
I don’t know how you would do it any other way. I would love to see what Chinese aerospace looks like from the inside
It is insane though how consistently the only people who are able to bounce back and forth between seeing the whole picture without being overwhelmed by it, & Resist the desire to nerdily consume the complexity (as if it were spectacle) to then tenaciously dig into the stubborn particulars of making one thing actually genuinely work, reliably, in the real world
(But it being the right thing! Because they were patient and willing to contextualize it first! Without anybody digesting it for them, bravely poking their head out into the swirling ambiguity of stuff outside their field to check that what they’re about to do actually matters!)
Are all without exception extremely American (this includes a very American British guy)
I would say like 50% of the Americans ever do this, about 25% consistently so, & 5? any? of the others do. It seems very overwhelming or uninteresting to them. Maybe there’s something mythological about being a little american kid into american rockets that makes you care about the bigger picture + doing what needs to be done.
For those who don’t have this—It does also seem that there’s a sort of shyness, or fear, a lack of belief in their own manifest destiny, if you will, to be wrong. Whether that’s chicken or egg I don’t know and I frankly don’t know that it matters, but I do feel a sense of empathy that it seems that having a believed status as slightly outside, slightly other, produces the very fact that distinguishes it—not enough good risk-taking.
I think it’s not just the prior that your errors are survivable but also the prior that your errors, and unsurvived failure, is somehow necessary to formation in a broader more spiritual sense. That is, a bit of a romance for burning boats. Probably speculating way too far, but there does seem to be a moral certainty that somehow lies at the root of it.