//BNJMN (7/23/19): Ok, hear me out– I think Donald Trump and Borris Johnson ascendeding to become chief executives of a country is good evidence David Foster Wallace has taken over as cosmic script writer and it’s gonna be post-mordern farce from here on out.

//BNJMN (7/22/19): I’ve been slowly working through this book “Being Ecological” by Timothy Morton and there is one particular concept that I’ve been chewing on.

The idea is this: we are familiar with the idea that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but there are times when the opposite is true. Sometimes a whole is less the sum of its parts. Maybe much less than the sum of its parts even.

I’m still thinking about the idea, but a particularly visceral, easy to access illustration of this is the example of the holocaust. The holocaust was horrible and it’s easy to say it was horrible. But what’s not easy is going through the list of the 8 million odd people who were murdered, one by one, and say that each murder was horrible. It would take days or weeks or months.

As an aggregate, the crime of the holocaust was just one thing—an operation to purify Germany of undesirables—but it was made up of 8 million murders, each of which is in some ways just as evil as the idea of the holocaust itself as a whole. You can tell that this is true because if we lived in a world where only 4 million were killed in the holocaust, we wouldn’t think the holocaust was any less evil. Its evilness is maxed out. The whole is less then the sum of its parts.

This isn’t to say that the concept “holocaust” isn’t useful and necessary, but the process of bundling it into existence inherently diminishes the actual total of the things the holocaust refers to.

I kind of hate this particular example, because it seems so trite, but it’s a pattern that applies to anything with scale, and the interesting thing is that literally everything has scale when you consider the number of things it’s made of.

The one area I’m still trying to understand how this fits in is when emergence happens—that is to say when a system of small things work together and are defined by the effect that they create. Is the sum of the cells in the human brain larger than a consciousness? Is the sum of the individuals in a culture greater than the culture itself? I’m not really sure.

//BNJMN (7/21/19): I’m finally getting around to listening to the Hamilton cast album. It’s really good…shocker. The guy who plays King George is so good.

//BNJMN (7/17/19): I’m in research mode this evening. I’m trying to figure out different approaches for content management.

I’m not really happy with the CMS’s I’ve used…I was looking at Ghost, which seems very cool, but ultimately I’m not sure how it fits into what I’m interested in. I’m in a gray area with this little e-commerce project that I’m focused on—my current solution is a bit hacky (I’m using forestry.io), but there aren’t that many better options that I’m turning up.

//BNJMN (7/13/19): I’ve discovered I sorta kinda love taking photos at fairs. Lots of good cheesiness.

//BNJMN (7/12/19): Actually doing some illustration work for the first time in a few weeks…oof…rusty.