My highlights:
If we do not start with a strong conception of what we and the world ought to be, we risk succumbing to designs that reward short-term payoffs or are dictated by those who stand to profit from our attention.
To build a world hospitable to us, that is for us, is to build a world that nurtures and encourages human flourishing. Flourishing is the capacity to develop the aspects of our being that are our most distinctive to humanity: self-make, cultivate our character, develop rationality, and realize wisdom. When we misunderstand our nature, we build false worlds on vast scales and end up remaking ourselves in order to fit them.
The more we develop our rationality, the more we are able to build worlds suited to that development; the more conducive our environments are to developing our capacity for rationality, the better we are able to pursue and achieve flourishing.
This is not to say that to focus on human flourishing is to create an anthropocentric world for humans and humans alone. Human flourishing relies on close contact with reality, and this reality necessarily involves the environment into which one is thrown: into nature, alongside other creatures, subject to physical laws, and on planet Earth.
In order to develop rationality and wisdom we need at least: sufficient order, self-knowledge, attunement of attention, and insight.
We perceive a place as alive when it is structured or organized to allow congruence within us – the capacity to align us with our biological reality and natural desires, allowing those forces to move freely.
Artifacts and technologies mediate between humans and world – they actively shape the ways in which we can be present in the world and the ways in which the world presents reality to us.
Perception and action allow the user and the object to co-constitute a new reality and shape how we live in the world. Protocols have characteristics that encourage or discourage certain actions or modes, which then either enable or restrict the capacity of its participants to pursue flourishing. Protocols posses an inalienable moral dimension.
Stability: to continually change a protocol is to remove the ability for participants to follow it. There should be a stable process of change that itself remains the same. Participants have more agency through the actions that a protocol allows them to carry out, but if they are able to see it, they also have opportunity to act in ways that deviate from the protocol.
Constraint: Save participants from the complexities of decision-making. This may encourage passivity in participants at the expense of any agency that may have been gained through the existence of constraint. Flourishing requires the cultivation of character, which almost always requires that we examine the systems to which we are beholden and that we break with our narratives and frames. This requires us to take responsibility for our own development – a mindset at odds with mindlessly following a protocol. The perception of control is not an indication of alignment to the reality of the situation – it is only an indication that one is operating within a realm of familiarity. What is graspable is not necessarily an accurate representation of how things truly are. Protocols may, in this way, encourage illusions and self-deceptions that stand in the way of the pursuit of flourishing.
Legitimacy: Perceptions that the protocol has been designed and implemented by figures of authority. Can also become a knowledge store, imbuing them with even greater authority. Civilizations evolve through strategic forgetting. Participants are empowered to act in the absence of firsthand knowledge where that knowledge is encoded in the protocol, but a failure to identify that knowledge as their own might encourage a denial of responsibility. Faithfulness to a protocol can eclipse questions of whether one should be following a protocol at all.
Narrativity: Protocols reveal and create worlds. Directs attention to a particular area, bringing it into existence. The familial and social protocols and psychological habits developed from childhood fundamentally determine how we see and inhabit the world – mentally, emotionally, and physically.
Building protocols in ignorance of their mediating role and corresponding moral dimension means we are more likely to build worlds not made for us.
Flourishing facilitates the proper functioning and evolution of the protocol, making the protocol alive and not merely effective.