Brandian returns

A few months back I read Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything. It led to a fun conversation with Mike Travers, out of which came the idea of a “Brandian return”. Think of it as the complement to a Whitehead advance. Quoting in full:

“We could cut by decade, or by technological era – mainframe, personal computer, early internet, internet boom, mobile, cloud, social media. At each stage there are advances at the protocol level – in hardware, software, and socioculturally – that flavor the development of history. And then there is the payoff: maintenance isn’t just a thing now; it’s something that keeps coming back to the surface. I’m led to the idea of a Brandian return. There’s actually a line in the book, something like “every civilization has to choose to care.” You advance, you get all the benefits, but at a certain point you realize that something which was made invisible still matters – community, face-to-face relationships, whatever was abstracted away. You don’t throw away the advance; you correct course, return to what was lost, and position for the next jump.”

Recently, I’ve realised that Brandian returns don’t really operate on the order of decades, even if those decades contain accelerated rates of progress like we’ve seen since the 1960s. They don’t even really kick in on the order of generations; humans are, in many senses, a lot more collectively obtuse than that. I actually think the the span of World Machines—1,000 year timelines with three, 400 year, overlapping emerging, dominant and fading World Machines—is the right resolution.

Given that I’m interested here in alternative paradigms of computing and intelligence, I thought it would be fun to try and pick up the Brandian returns associated with computing and intelligence across recent World Machines. To clarify, here’s an explicit definition of Whiteheadian advances alongside Brandian returns:

I’ll settle for proposing a handful of these returns from the active Day (Divergence) and Dusk (Modernity) machines, whilst also positing the returns for the Dawn machine (Liveness).

First, let’s flesh out the dynamics a tad more.

A Brandian return is essentially a Whitehead advance that has begun to deteriorate. An invisible aspect of life as it’s known becoming visible to the alive. It’s less creaky door hinge and more a nation’s health service failing.

The timescales are important here. If a Whitehead advance materialises and is enshrined over the course of a 400 year period, then Brandian returns must be similarly scaled. They must be like century-scale plot lines. Calls to re-industrialise in Western countries that have “forgotten how to make things” is a good candidate. Another is the example cited above; the initial rise of high quality subsidised healthcare and its subsequent endangered status. Both take decades to gather momentum, unfold over the course of generations, spend a long while descending messily into incapacity, and then require decades more to coordinate repairs to the lost capacity in the appropriate form (if deemed of sufficient value).

A World Machine, then, could be said to be a combination of Whitehead advances and Brandian returns that together determine the meta themes of the given regime. The exact ratio of that combo, to me, seems to be that for every three Whitehead advances one Brandian return will have to occur. So let’s say that every World Machine makes twelve Whitehead advances; in the subsequent World Machine, three of those will become Brandian returns and need deliberate, careful (re-)protocolisation.

The central claim: each World Machine makes twelve Whiteheadian advances over its Dawn and Day span. Of those twelve, three will decay to the point of requiring Brandian returns. These returns are performed by the succeeding Dawn Machine, not the one that made the advance.

With that claim in mind, let’s turn to Aneesh Sathe’s Prime Radiant. It allows one to “chart the machines civilization runs on — the joint-stock company, the nation-state, the cloud platform — across three overlapping eras. Scrub the years and watch them ignite, couple, load with tension, and decay.”

Given the claim above, what we’re looking for is three Whitehead advances from the Modernity Machine that get the Brandian return treatment, a further nine Whitehead advances that belong to the Divergence Machine proper, and which three of these Divergence Machine advances will become the Brandian returns that empower the emerging Liveness Machine. Because I’m interested in kinocomputing I’ll focus solely on computing and intelligence.

So I asked Prime Radiant: “What significant advances in computing and intelligence paradigms were made in the Modernity and Divergence machines?” This is what we got (supplemented with some further digging elsewhere).

Modernity Machine’s Whitehead advances that became Brandian returns in the Divergence Machine?

The Divergence Machine’s own Whitehead advances?

Ignoring the many possible disputes concerning the literal correctness of the above identified advances and returns, let’s now try to select the three advances that we will have to protocolise as Brandian returns. To me, it seems that coordination, risk and intelligence are the critical trio.

Our capacity to leverage intelligence to effectively coordinate mitigations of long-term risks and options on long-term upside seem at great risk of collapsing. We know more than we ever have, yet we’re carrying the most severe coordination burdens just as we approach potentially existential risks to humanity. To prevent death, the Liveness Machine must, as a whole, enable us to revitalise the intelligence-coordination-risk pipeline.

The way to do that has much to do with groundedness and embodiment. The tail end of the Divergence Machine led to true divergence; a severance, a cut off, a discontinuity. We’ll have to learn how to become continuous once again.