Paradigms and Gaps
February 11, 2025
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Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
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New Work
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Grok’s Scandals
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Yawning & the pod is about Choline and Anxiety
Paradigms and Gaps
Back in 1960, the concept of paradigms was developed by Thomas Kuhn to refer to our framework of reality—what we seem to know, what seems to be true, the assumptions we make based on that seeming knowledge, and our resulting sense of the context in which we exist.
This concept is especially useful when assessing scientific progress, as we can convincingly carve up history in to ages based on the predominant medium used for tools (Stone Age, Iron Age, etc). But we can also organize history, the present, and our theorized future based the most common means of communication (telegraph, radio, internet), by the conflicts that influenced life at a given moment in time (Civil War era, WWII era, Vietnam era), and by countless other paradigmatic framings.
A fundamental trait of paradigms, though, is that one gives way to another. And such paradigm shifts can be difficult for those who go through them. People who grow up in the age of the radio and with post-WWII lifestyles might find themselves completely flabbergasted by the mobile internet and post-War on Terror realities.
A similar concept, the Gramsci Gap, was posited by an Italian philosopher and politician named Antonio Gramsci back in the first half of the 20th century.
If you think in terms of paradigms, this “gap” refers to the space between one paradigm and another; the experience of living through a paradigm shift. And in these gaps (which he called interregnums), Gramsci said, “...a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
This conception of these gaps is often poetically (and perhaps more usefully) translated as, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”
Gramsci was a communist, and thus was very interested in the shift from one type of government to another, but I would argue these gaps are common across all aspects of life, if you look for them.
Between one paradigm and another you tend to find all manner of upsetting, uncomfortable, discordant things that in some cases are completely distinct from (and maybe in opposition to) what came before. And that’s true whether we’re talking about the shift from one conflict-informed era to another, or if we’re discussing the shift from a world without practical AI to a world in which AI systems and tools seem to be all anyone talks about.
These gaps and their associated monsters appear at all scales and magnitudes of experience, some plaguing us at the individual level while others attack our institutions, our international interconnectedness, and our civilizational accomplishments and expectations.
As with many difficult things, the only way to get to the other side of these gaps is by going through them: surviving the tumult and creating the world that will replace our previous, now-defunct one.
Which isn’t typically a pleasant experience. And because some such gaps last decades, even generations, this is generally a marathon effort rather than a sprint.
That said, those of us who live through such moments also have the opportunity to shape our future paradigms. We have to spend our days fighting monsters, but we may be able to play a role in deciding what the next world looks like, and maybe even how quickly it coalesces and falls into place. Which isn’t something every generation has the opportunity to do.
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What Else
I suddenly find myself on three fairly active Signal groups, all of which are tied to real-life, consistent get-togethers, and I think this is the flavor of digital socializing I’ve been missing now that social networks are more about shoveling addictive and doomscrolly content than servings as platforms for person-to-person communication.
Also: If anyone’s in the Oshkosh area and wants to attend Ariana’s artist talk and gallery opening reception, that’ll be on Feb 19th.
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