The ‘exquisite complexity’ was about things like snowflakes, I remember. To say ‘water freezes and becomes ice’ is to miss the point of /snow/. It’s false reductionism to deny the existence of snow as a phenomenon. Snow is *cool*, in a very McLuhan kind of way: each snowflake is complex, but collectively they form an elegantly simple and very different state of being.

In IT, everything gets packaged as a ‘new phenomenon’ almost as soon as it’s discovered in its own right. It’s one of the things the machines let us do. Trouble is, most of that packaging is pure exercize of the ego with no respect for reality. A /big/ cooling off of the IT world is due, in which the whole tower-of-Babel collapses and something new and beautiful is revealed.

Perhaps this relates to your earlier comments about ‘exquisite complexity’?

There is a modern tendency to shortcut the Art stage, however, and without Art to plunge ahead and create false words. To bury ideas beneath onion layers of the same meaningless stuff. Our overheating never cools; our Arts are forgotten. This in itself is a new Word, but a language of one Word is not helpful. I think there are no shortcuts; we must rediscover Art in our activities.