Efficiency in transactional systems vs generative ones

Reflecting on this more... (thinking aloud) 🏭 In a dissociated, transactional system (eg typical corporation) efficiency is ~external: output per input (widgets/h, energy/$, etc) 🕸️ In an integrated, generative system, efficiency is ~internal: value & meaning per unit struggle

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean · May 11, 2020

If there's a way to do something that takes 1.5× as much time and is three times as pleasurable, which is more efficient?

May 13, 2020

What I'm pointing at here is: if you have one system (eg boss) measuring the efficiency of another system (eg worker), that it considers to be separate from itself, it will tend to try to extract maximum output, with minimal regard to the health & flow of the system in question.

This is the basic way-of-thinking that our society has been built on basically since agriculture. Robert Gilman calls it the Empire era. Videos here: context.org/foundation-sto…

If you read accounts of cultures not based on this (eg in Jean Liedloff's The Continuum Concept (1975)), you can see that they're approaching life in a totally different way than this.

Here's an excerpt from Christian de Quincey's Radical Knowing quoting someone talking about a kind of culture based on a "lush sensuality", and caring for well-being. (The challenge for culture crafters is to simultaneously have this PLUS grokking the value of science etc)

It's possible to run a company as an integrated, generative system (a fuckton of contemporary business books are trying to point at this) though by default the attractor basin for most companies doesn't really care about human experience, due to measuring efficiency as out/in.

I'm tentatively putting struggle as the denominator of the generative system efficiency... I basically mean internal friction or dukkha. Clearly time or energy isn't it—at ecstatic dance, spending more time in flow or burning more calories isn't a "cost"

Tiago Forte @fortelabs · Jun 30, 2017

Where does the energy you feel when the beat drops come from?

Ultimately, even in integrated generative ecosystems, one does still need to track efficiency in a sort of input-output sense, particularly EROEI (energy return on energy invested). It's not that that goes away, but the relationship to it changes.

I feel like there are a bunch of dangly threads & half-thoughts here and I am just gonna leave it like that because it's time for dinner and getting off twitter. I'm enjoying leaning more into thinking out loud and being a little messy 💦