Published on to joshleeb's blog
G’day!
This month has been fairly light on personal project work. The reason for this… We have relocated to London!
There’s been a lot to pack up in Sydney, and lots to get setup in London but we are settling in and move into our new place next month.
In the few spare moments this month I’ve started down a rabbit whole into the domain of Ecology and Society, looking into environmental governance and seeing how it relates to large, organic social structures such as the internet.
This was kicked off from reading We Need to Rewild the Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon which popped up on the Lobsters front page. In their article, Farrell and Berjon liken the current evolutionary path of the internet to the method of “scientific forestry” developed in Central Europe in the 18th century, and how it analogizes to the monopolization and anti-trust behaviors we have been witnessing on the web to optimize data collection and corporate profits.
The article made reference to the concept of The Pathology of Command and Control which led me to reading papers on the topic.
- Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management (Holling, Meffe, 1996)
- Institutional Failure in Resource Management (Acheson, 2006)
- The Pathology of Command and Control: A Formal Synthesis (Cox, 2016)
I’m still working my way through these papers and the references they cite. But so far it’s exciting to be looking into a new domain and seeing what can be learnt and applied to software projects and my thoughts about tech.
That’s all for now, see you next month!