@minikomi @neauoire this is reminiscent of the central theme of Seymour Pappert’s book “Mindstorms”. Also, it would be really neat if an eventual spinoff of the uxn REPL could be an interactive turtle-graphics setup 🐢 🐢 🐢

@freakazoid So when you get a cold, we’re generally less inclined to bombard your body with biological-censorship (antibiotics) because you’ll be better off in the long run by letting your immune system figure it out. But, if there is an assault that threatens the survival of the organism, what is one to do?
This is sort of a personal choice for sure. But what if the organism we’re talking about isn’t just an individual, but a collective organism?

@freakazoid back to your idea of letting this play out to make us stronger in the long term: to quote John Maynard Keynes “in the run, we’re all dead” :) Rugged individualism is awesome for individualists, but the idea that the fate of society should be decided by the invisible hand of evolutionary fitness is kind of Libertarian.

@freakazoid I’ve had a lot of opportunities over the last decade or so to think about how Capitalism’s imperative to monetize human attention has sort of turned the reasoning faculties of our collective organism into a weird testing ground for ever crazier stimulants. In my less optimistic moments, I think the result is a twitchy paranoid sitting in a living room, flipping channels looking for the next hit.

@freakazoid Democracy operates by way of public opinion, and this is generally good if you want people to have agency in charting the path of the society they inhabit. Here’s a spontaneous metaphor that will likely fall apart under hard scrutiny: If society is an organism, then there are channels for moving resources and information through it. We often benefit from occasional attacks on our biology. It makes our immune system stronger.

@freakazoid I think information literacy is something that needs to be better taught in general. As to reconciling the imperative to censor disinformation with the rights of free speech, this is a great example for how our squishy human intuition might sometimes do a better job than absolute, amoral formula approaches to justice.