This morning we were scrambling to find the pictures from that morning long ago in Jerusalem- afternoon? This memory thing is tricky, but there is digital evidence of past days. In that one, we were kneeling on the stones in Jerusalem where it is said Jesus walked. It was his last physical entry into the Holy City. Our visit there only had some minor echo of the Passion recalled this Sunday. There was something quite moving about our attempt to race through the New Testament in a couple days. We were doing the Stations of the Cross at one point, celebrating one end of the Holy Week while honoring the other. This was the shattered window of our hired car 🚗 through which someone put a part of the old city wall. Wrong license plates.

We are in another of those transformational times now. There are wonders and challenges. We don’t yet understand the consequences of the technologies we have embraced with abandon. This wider social development is likely to be profound.

At the moment, social information narratives are in conflict. There had been a “Day of Something” scheduled to occur at the Supreme Court yesterday. It was cancelled, since the somewhat bellicose justification for the demonstration was threatened by the nature of the shooting event in Nashville. The nature of the information battle is informative. We took an internal poll at Socotra House, the one not disclosed via standard information sharing speech protocols. We originally signed non-disclosure agreements about that, but that legal precedent appears to be under question with the other big legal thing we will be hearing about (at increasing volume) for the next twenty months.

We have experience watching blinking lights. As former workers in the Indications & Warnings trade, there are memories of times when just a few “indications” of change in the interest list were cause for concern. Standard stuff- truck movements, crates of objects of interest increasing. Signals stuff. Observations would be derived from increasing the sources and methods devoted to the problem. It could cause a color change in alert status and all sorts of other things would change in response. In our time, connectivity has essentially weaponized what used to be advertising. Old times? A few blinking lights could cause concern. In the information saturation of our new world the whole big panel seems to be alight and active in discord.

Like the weather, everything changes in our world. We are in one now, and are determined to learn from it. One of the challenges to pragmatism on the future is that there is likely to be a lot to learn.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Publisher’s Note: Gentle readers, something strange came up the other day. Since the HQ was relocated to a denser-populated portion of the Commonwealth, there was interest in strategic inventory streamlining. Having just emerged from the production process on the three-volume WWII-Cold War project, the determination on next project issuance was on the table. We sent requests for stock information to the three distribution centers, and the response included one that was surprising. “Stones of the District” is something the Chairman did before expanding the product line. It is startling- color pictures throughout the book of the original monuments. Not recognizing production costs, the little volume wound up costing more than $20 on Amazon. There is one review- the Chairman did it- and not surprisingly he gave his work “five-stars!” Written in the mid-2000’s, the mile-by-mile examination of the original Boundary Stones of the District of Columbia was a microcosm of its energetic history. And there is a lot we wouldn’t try to do today, you know? So, the Chairman said get back with Amazon and offer a digital version of the book and give it away.

– DeMille