As an academic recently poi nted out: 'We must finally have the humility to say that we can't model uncertai nty accu rately.' And to add, as far as I ' m co ncerned, that, despite the propaganda of Progress, confidence never will be automatic!
B ut let's get back to Karl Popper and his indeterminism . According to Popper, and his ' feedback loops' , events influence our opinions every bit as much as these same opini ons influence events. But the acceleration of the real , of real t i m e , i s t u rni ng our si tuati on o n i t s head, since, from now on, it is accidents and not j u st events anymo re that influence our deep feelings. And th is has reached the point where the co mmunity of opinion of our mutual interests is now taken over by the ' community of emotion' of the present instant, with emotional synchronization subsequently taking over from the standardizatio n o f p u b l i c o p i n i o n that was, all the sam e , at the root of represe ntative democracy.
And note how, wi th M andelb rot, Karl Popper's 'feedback loop' j ust keeps on shrinking, l ike some peau de chagrin, with the accruing ri sks that this implies fo r the su rvival of o u r old political parties, now l iterally overtaken at speed, m uch like econom ic investors. The systemic crash under way since 2007 afects the pol itical top b rass of the Republic every b i t as much as those of the big banks in a market that's interconnected thanks to twenty-first cent u ry program trading, with the high-frequency electro nic platfo rms of the flash trading that was responsible for the CYBERCRAS H of 6 M ay 2010 functioning outside human time, thanks to the time machine of Stock Exchange computers.
THE GREAT ACCELERATOR
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