Cognitive Justice: Wisdomversify or Die (Updated!!!: with Links)
Hello weary home-bodies. It is I, lord Quagczar.
I have taken form here in the swamp lands south of the Indus river, overflowing with water, rot, waste and rebirth during this season of monsoons. I spend my days busily collecting glitch, and my nights roaming the nala, but pause to give you this prophecy and warning.
As an assigned protector of your cognitive diversity I am always on the lookout for future human situations caused by new speciations in the information ecosystem. What are these emergent bifurcations that set you apart, send you ahead or backwards and set you against each other?
Ruptures in the space time continuum are always an impetus for new forms of knowing, new ways of living, and, often with you humans, new forms of violence. You could minimize the damage-done in the quest for an extended sensing apparatus by using livingry, not weaponry as a driver. True, this would be slower, but it would allow you to practice the precautionary principle and would hurt less in the long run. Your body might be your temple, but not if you keep you crushing it with the weight of the commercially co-opted detritus from the military industrial complex. I find you humans a most violent and ignorant lot, and would be tempted to leave this planet or wipe you out completely if I wasn’t assigned your protectorate!
Now for my latest cautionary transmission: be careful what you look at. Learning to see can open up new doorways or damn you to blindness. Not everyone needs to see everything all the time, in fact this is a guaranteed recipe for electronic-snow-blindness, but drilling too far down in any one direction of the information ecosystem promises to end in skulls filled with poison gas and bleeding eyeballs. I find your burnt-brain meandrathal’s a tasty treat and humorous diversion, but too many casualties in the quest for knowledge means the end of both of us, so heed this telling with action.
Some information environmentalists claim that knowledge equity is an issue of access, pointing to the digital divide, but that argument is tied up in the tired narrative of progress and Western hegemony. Is not the ability to identify and speak to bird species lacking in the digerati? Perhaps instead of sending the tech-enabled social entrepreneurs to these lands abundant in info diversity we need to reverse source tribals armed with ecological narratives most peculiar to the mental-model-scarce untied states of america. I fear that not taking into account these non-normative and arrational narratives is creating some serious mental monocultures in the information ecosystems of planet earth.
You have been warned. Wisdomversify or die!
