Bloatedness in an ocean of ever-expanding ignorance

Rui Vale
3 min readMay 16, 2018

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Those two are the main ones, the structuralistic existential constraints on the goal.

Bloatedness is the quality or state of being bloated, as overfilled with a substance that’s been growing and stretching to the point of becoming excessively large; that’s the stuff I’m amassing to extract what I intend to write.

Then, there’s the ever-expanding ignorance, a dreadful awareness of a non-deliberate state of bliss on the disregard of important information or fact.

One is supposed to be onto something creative, keeping in mind that stuff is only creative if it’s novel and useful at the same time, even if just for aesthetic, contemplative purposes.

How to reach the edges of these two nested bubbles?

Doesn’t seem to be a weakest link here, they don’t even seem to intersect.

It doesn’t also seem to be scaling well.

Appears non-linear, or at least indirect, like throwing something at a target that cannot be seen by the aimer.

What’s more or better here, then?

Let’s see. To come up with something creative — see above — to the already saturated realm of organizing and managing such complex, artificially-ridden, human endeavours, one has first to start with some pretty basic tenets, to provide at least some context.

Hence, human nature. One has to account for that, at least while we — humans — are still in the loop. As the poet once said, there are no rules to it; everyone is an exception to a non-existent rule. But, an approximation is needed, to better grasp some of what’s to be found ahead, like the nature vs. nurture thing, at least.

Hence, worldviews. Not so much the individual ones; that should have been dealt with in previous hence. No, here one should be dealing with a bunch of ideas and beliefs about what stuff there is and how it’s supposed to work, for groups large and small.

Hence, people assemblies. This one I stole from the Baroness, of what she termed “neuronal assemblies” on her explanatory approach to human consciousness, that by the way, I don’t buy — or really get, but found very keen to my idea of how people would assemble for a purpose.

Hence, immaterial artefacts. The meta-things we come up with to get on to come up with other things, like org structures, frameworks, mindsets — the more or less flimsy, glamorous stuff.

Hence, life cycles. The Ouroboros. The product ones and, very particularly, the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). As software is eating the world, it’s cycle is also permeating everything else, especially in the latest of its incarnations, the Agile mantra, with a capital “A”. What’s with this? Is this any good? Let’s dig in.

Hence, unpunctuated equilibrium. This is actually a pun on the punctuated thing in biology. Will we get there, eventually? What should one do in the meantime — while waiting on the singularity-fuelled super-abundance?

Might there won’t be a prelude or a colophon; too soon to know that, I suppose, or maybe this was nonetheless other than the prelude itself.

Let’s chop it up then, shall we?

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Rui Vale

Cherubinic debunker on business, life, and technology