www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pG-...

I like Europic architecture and all but I do notice when design languages are more about constraint, conformity, and conquest of the environment than about expression and exuberance.

We need to invest in utopian narratives. Blueprints of better futures to fight for. Detailed mechanics of a better world. Open up new space in people's minds instead of trapping them in a hole with no way out.

Dystopias work well as mirrors, or allegories, but overall they do more harm than good in shaping society, and should not be revered.

"Cautionary tales" work on the personal level. They do not work on a societal level because there will always be people who want to be on the other side of the cautionary tale.

Imagine shaping ourselves as a species borne from nutritional abundance! We can absolutely create those conditions for everyone. Instead of our species being trapped by ghosts of the past. How boring and claustrophobic.

I think we're at a point where we can experiment with transcending our evolutionary pressures. Exploring new neural architectures. Creating conditions for such exploration. We have enough agency as a species to bootstrap ourselves completely new evolutionary paths.

So it seeps in, destabilises control, fuelling more anxiety, often fuelling the desire for more control, more conquest.

Conquest and control is a way to simplify the world around us so that it makes the most sense with the least amount of cognitive effort. Instead of understanding reality as it is, we become compelled to contort it into forms we understand. But of course, reality is untameable.

That is why nuance doesn't scale. The evolutionary pressures shaping us selected against it.

Allowing conflicting information to be metabolised simultaneously is metabolically expensive. Empathy is metabolically expensive. Nuance is expensive. Most brains streamline for what is relevant for the person's immediate survival context.