Chaos
It has been almost 100 days since I last published anything other than short form Mastodon posts and in that brief time it seems that chaos now reigns supreme, so I’m going to propose that the Lyapunov time of society (and politics in particular) is 100 days. OK, sure, that’s nonsense but look around, so is everything else.
It is too easy to apply hindsight to identify the particular butterfly wing flapping that led to whatever tornado is spinning or more accurately, the kaleidoscope of butterflies that should shoulder the blame. Time for some random finger-pointing within this centidiurnal period to spot a few flaps that potentially led us here or could be leading us into the storm to come.
Political Upheavals
The end of 2024 saw a lot of elections and changes of government (peaceful and not-so-peaceful), the first flaps of a deepening susurrus. In addition to the upending outcome1 of the US election we also had collapse2 in France, upheaval3 in South Korea, regime change in Syria, Namibia getting its first female president, changes in Lithuania, Ireland, Germany, Iceland, Romania, Chad, Greece and more. There’s a lot of change going on and the needle is shifting towards conservative and somewhat extreme attitudes. Globalisation is definitely in the firing line, which is a big issue for countries like Ireland (generally in the top 10 according to the KOF index). Introspective, protectionist policies once again dominate and suspicion of your neighbour is the norm.
Of course, all these things have their own causes and you could choose to keep going back until the beginning of time4 but this is just an “exercise” in finger-pointing.
Scams
Valentine’s Day probably had a lot of people flapping this year, no more so than in Argentina where their president Javier Milei sent a short-lived post5 on X promoting a new cryptocurrency called $Libra, which turned out to be a rug-pull scam that cost about 75 thousand people an estimated $87,000,000. The ensuing scandal continues to rumble, leading to class action lawsuits and has drawn the attention of the US DOJ and FBI. Milei is the same person who gifted Musk a chainsaw to wave on stage supposedly to represent the deep cuts being made to government. While not exactly the gentle flapping of butterfly wings, the consequences of the chainsaw are only just beginning to surface.
Wars
There are about twenty wars, insurgencies or major armed conflicts going on in the world today. We tend to only hear about three or four of these at any point in time, depending on proximity, potential impact and the similarity of the affected societies to our own. Some conflicts have been going on for so long that media fatigue has set in and we no longer hear about them6. Some, despite the longevity, are so severe and consequential that they occupy the headlines 24/7. It would be misleading to try to attribute to a single wing flap the kind of disaster we see unfolding in Ukraine, even if you take the butterfly net back to 2014, but the world witnessed one such flap live on TV only a few days ago: US Vice President Vance asks Zelenskyy if he has ever said “thank you”. What happened in the seconds, minutes, hours and days since that flap is a tornado of epic proportions and could have grave consequences for the entire world.
Faux Pas
In February, Mozilla Corporation (the commercial arm of the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation) published a Terms of Use document for Firefox, their free browser product, that took their user community by surprise and led to accusations that Mozilla was turning into another tech service that was going to milk their users for their data. The subsequent retractions/clarifications did little to assuage these fears and mainstream media7 were quick to take shots into the hole that Mozilla just kept digging. A few wrong words on a probably unnecessary document and a multi-million dollar company could be on the ropes. While I don’t personally think they intended to suggest they wanted permission to exploit their users’ data, I’ve now ditched Firefox and moved to the compatible Gecko-based8 Waterfox. Flap, flap, flap.
Next?
None of us have crystal balls, at least not the kind that can see the future, so we go from day to day seeing the flapping of wings with no idea of the consequences. It’s truly chaotic, in both the mathematical and experiential senses. Perhaps something small that happens today will lead to something massive 100 days from now and if the past is any guide, we won’t like it.
Or maybe we will? Crystal ball time…
the FBI search for documents was a wing-flap that tipped the scales in favour of running for a second term ↩
due to Macron’s early election wing-flap ↩
from the flapping wings of Yoon Suk Yeol’s surprise declaration of martial law ↩
the ultimate wing-flap about 13.8 billion years ago, or 26.7 if alternative models are correct ↩
do they still call these ‘tweets’? ↩
for example, the Amhara conflict in Ethiopia or the Kivu conflict in DR Congo ↩
also a Mozilla project but completely Open Source and thus less likely to be abused ↩
Categorised as: Legal and Political, LUE