Mailbag, Episode 1-3

The historian/political scientist/anarchist James Scott borrows the term "iatrogenic" from medicine to describe how many of societies' attempts to control rivers (e.g., levees) only cause the rivers to become more unruly.

Iatrogenic illnesses are ailments caused by medicine or medical care. Iatrogenic systems are ferociously hardy because simple attempts to solve them just feed them. You can think of the capitalist work ethic where the only way (besides inheritance) to secure a life of financial independence outside of capitalist pressures is to dive head first into the capitalist waters and work hard at a lucrative job for a long time (see adherents of the FIRE movement).

Social media seems like a classic iatrogenic system. You dunk or subtweet an egregious post and it makes the poster post more. The truly skilled poster posts by not posting. Never posts. Learning not to repost bad posts is a major spiritual milestone for the internet citizen.

2. An irony is that if the best way to steward the internet is to never post, doesn't the internet disappear under ideal stewardship? Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" tries to solve a related problem in postmodern discourse. The problem is, every deconstruction, no matter how profound, rests on some logical/linguistic "center" that itself is not real or stable. So every deconstruction can itself be deconstructed and you just have infinite regress. If postmodernists know this, what's even the point of writing for each other any more?

Derrida's solution is freeplay which is about recognizing existience as full of other world with their own "centers" that are yet all connected. A mistake is anchoring yourself to any of those single centers. Freeplay is hopping worlds with "the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation".