The biological basis for world government in the context of climate change
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1214863776354308096.html
Nation-states have been captured by interests interpreting the global situation as one of zero-sum survival, following the same lines of instinctual reaction which precipitated WWII.
The scope of these reactive interests is to survive what they perceive as the collapse of human civilisation, and the subsequent global holocaust, bottleneck, or Jackpot, in which several billion humans lose all human rights and are de facto 'deniably' murdered.
Apart from its abject moral and ethical failure, this interpretation of the situation is counterfactual. The bottleneck we face is one of planetary homeostasis and habitability:
"In the Gaian bottleneck model, the maintenance of planetary habitability is associated with an unusually rapid evolution of biological regulation of surface volatiles ..."
"If life emerges on a planet, it only rarely evolves quickly enough to regulate greenhouse gases and albedo, thereby maintaining surface temperatures compatible with liquid water and habitability."
If we fail to meet this challenge, which is the goal of the methods described herein, the Earth most likely fails as a life-bearing planet, full stop.
The alternative is to interpret the biological function of humanity not in the terms of selfish genes, but as an evolutionary mechanism designed to both trigger and manage the transition of the planetary biome to self-managing homeostasis.
Human capacity to adapt to climate change now requires the translation of the adaptational mechanisms of evolutionary biology to planetary scale.
Humanity's rapid proliferation, extraction of carbon into the atmosphere, development of a single integrated global network, and use of this network to recapture carbon, may be the very mechanism by which this translation occurs.
Suspiciously just in time, the major work of translating evolutionary biology to planetary scale has been recently completed. The essential forms and functions of a sustainable human civilisation do not have to be built, but already exist as the open web.
In that it recapitulates evolutionary biology as a medium that allows for continual integrated adaptations across local-global scales, the open web itself is the essential form and function of sustainable human civilisation.
A corollary is that the apparent reversal of the net from an open system with utopian promise, into a dystopian one of mass surveillance, results from misinterpretating the web as subordinated to national sovereignty, when in fact it is organically super-ordinal to it.
This is demonstrated in both the dissolution of the political classes in the informational flows of the net, and in the blocking of the open web by nations devolving to authoritarianism.
In this context, the metaphor of the internet as a planetary neural net that has grown over older social systems, in the same way the neocortex grew over the brainstem, cerebellum, and limbic system, is now formally concrete.
The neocortex and evolution of the nervous system enabled organisms to dematerialise physical conflicts into symbolic social behaviors.
This enabled social-political systems to perform these functions at geographic scales, which in turn has enabled the open web to perform them now at the global scale.
In the 21st century, then, humanity only makes evolutionary and ecological sense as a nascent, distributed global brain, serving the self-regulation of the biosphere as a whole.
The open web must now be literally understood as a globally distributed social superorganism akin to physarum polycephalum, scaled up from the microbial to the global.