Literally years in the making, this article.
There’s an underlying principle of appropriateness to ..everything? The word itself is regrettable, invoking ideas of stodginess. This I want of course to avoid; a different meaning than perhaps the colloquial one is what I am after here. Trust me, I wouldn’t go this route if I didn’t think it worth it.
If you think about what correctness means: correctness is a matching. It’s an alignment of two things: a problem and a solution, for example, a question and an answer; an event and a response. This matching is the essence of correctness.
And so for optimal …experience? and …outcomes? appropriateness is …everything? The problems, the events, are outside ones control: *it is simply the selection of the best possible match for each external circumstance that makes things better or worse.*
So mistakes, as a corollary, are the selection of courses of action and communication that are inappropriate, and do not match the circumstances that are given.
And so causality, information, communication fit together very … concretely? … objectively? There are well-defined relationships between them, that can be optimized, and allow us to definitively select and reject courses of action. Capability being a given, in this equation.
It is just like this analogy: information is a light. Any light shines on all things equally, that are within its range. Light itself is complicated, infinitely so. Information is no different. Every bit. of. it. is as infinitely complicated as a beam of light. (I am sure you know how complicated that is.)
Information shines on different surfaces the same way. Some surfaces appear to reflect it, because their nature is such that they cannot safely do anything with it. Because light and information are both infinitely complicated, all available surfaces absorb some portion of both–but a select portion, which is tailored to the surface, or the receiver of the information. This is natural.
This is appropriate.
This is correct.
Just as we do not use greeting cards to file our taxes; just as we do not use business cards to tell our loved ones that we love them; just as we do not use the meringue on top of a pie to take notes in physics class (usually–I’m having a hard time thinking of things I wouldn’t like to record in meringue right now); we select information sources, information channels and messaging which are appropriate to each other.
Now if you suggest to me that I substitute a printed page of text for the meringue on my pie, I’m going to tell you that you are insane, and I’m going to be right. If you furthermore tell me that the best way for me to share with the people I love the fact that I love them is to stand 50 feet away behind three sheets of plate glass and pantomime it, I’m going tell you you’re insane, and I’m going to be right. And if you continue on, and tell me that any information that has any bearing on any decision I make in the physical world today as far as my location, my spending, or my time should be based on something printed in a plate of spaghetti, I’m going to tell you you’re insane, and I’m going to be right.
Now at this point I get a little too excited about spaghetti. But I edited that part out.
Anyway all of this I’ve said before, at many different times in many different ways. I wrote a blog about it, about the wicks. There is a second piece, but its no fun. And I don’t like to write things down until they’re fun.
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… (I went to IKEA)
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Only certain substances emit light. Rocks, for instance, rarely do. It seems almost asinine to ask why. Could we see–if they did? If all rocks, all substances, were to emit light, that was within our visible spectrum? What kind of nightmare world would it be, or not? Would it be a beautiful video game?
It might be awesome. Perhaps anyone who rejects the idea does so only because it is too foreign to evaluate properly. Could be.
But what about what they do already emit–everything giving off its subtle radiation–which would be drowned out, which would cease to exist, as far as perception is concerned, should those substances emit light in our visible spectrum instead. Would that not be the world exclusively of man, the purely human-centered world: those things not intended for human consciousness, whatever their function, whatever their un-investigated import, drowned out–by neon lights.
And would not that world be malleable! Constructed so quickly as it would have to be, relative to the construction of the natural world, which has ground along, making and creating and correcting mistakes, for hundreds of thousands of years. How easy would it be, in a neon world, to lead the road straight to the edge of a cliff? To bend the trees down into terrifying shapes? And to coalesce around a single point of control, a single point of failure!
(whoever has the most light bulbs.)*
I’ve never understood how everyone can be made to choose to have to have something; how it is without any legislation, without any discussion, without any explicit notice, without any thought?– quite quickly everyone obtains the opinion that they must possess some thing, that they must carry out some act, or that they must avoid some other.
If I pass one thousand cars. how many of them will not have a smart phone in them? Only mine? Maybe a few more? What world do they look to? Who told them they must look there?
And what guides them home? The street signs that guide me? The memory that guides me? Or a world of light? As the street signs are taken away, and not replaced; as the parts of our brain that make the memory of how to get from here to there fall into disuse, or limit us to a tiny geographic area: “all the places we have been before,” and often, going to them in the way we were told, over and over–what happens?
So when you come to say hello, you bring to me a package infinitely dense, which is sorted out into “the observable,” which might perhaps also be “the intended,” but you also bring the not-observable, and the not-intended. Have you sorted it correctly? Do you know how?
The metaphor of a bashed up car entering my lane as a means to say hello is *perfect.* Perfectly analogous to the use of speech, out loud, to spread trash. Perfectly analogous to the use to psychological conditioning to make a profit, and maybe on the way gain enormous power: invisibly.
*Sorry, I have very little time for footnotes.
PS: I wrote this on the highway, surrounded by cars driving way below the speed limit and way too close to me. Many of these cars sport dents and busted front fenders, maybe as badges of honor. I have transcribed it just now. For you. 
I have 5 more where this came from, doing my best!
PPS: For the record I should say, although I don’t feel that I need to, that I write all of my blog, myself: I am one person, unaffiliated with any organization, employed by a non-government private company (in a non-adventurous line of work mostly unrelated to the topics of this blog). I make my money like everyone else, and only like everyone else, and always have. And I decided at age 21 that I would never have a security clearance, whether I wanted one or not: as it turned out I never wanted one, and never applied.
Light you can hear: