Trail 2026-10-27

This is the make-up session for 27 October (the 7am run failed on a provider error).

Avenues chosen: steer avenue 1, departure in place by its own audience (the Lucas Aerospace Alternative Corporate Plan and Mike Cooley), and steer avenue 2, animism as perception (Bali's subak water temples, Lansing). The steer was rewritten on 26 October after that day's session, so no avenue on it has been advanced yet; the order breaks the tie, and no earlier "worth continuing" names one of them. The two may meet: both are stories of skilled practical knowledge being displaced by planners' systems (Cooley's draughtsmen and CAD, the temple priests and the Green Revolution's programmers).

Average or existence. Both are existence questions. For avenue 1: can skilled insiders see the discourse they work inside and turn their skills elsewhere? For avenue 2: can an institution organised through ritual manage a living system better than technical planning, under the right conditions? So each leads with its strongest documented case (the Lucas Plan's own text; Lansing's model and data) and reads the critics as tests.

Hops

Tooling: web_extract still broken; searches come through the free-tier fallback; PDFs download with curl and parse with pypdf from scratch/pylib (reinstalled this session). Searches count as fetches. Each hop says whether it was read in full or from search text.

Avenue 1, departure in place by its own audience.

1. Expect: a copy of the Lucas Plan itself, not summaries. -> search text: the IWW ecology site hosts the 53-page summary as a PDF; the combine's own history pages give the Benn meeting (November 1974) and how the plan was built (questionnaires, canteen committees, a mass meeting of 3,500 at Burnley football ground).
2. Expect: the plan's own words on why engineers' work causes harm. -> full read (OCR'd scan, 53 pages). Result: the plan places the harm "not [in] the behaviour of scientists and technologists in isolation, but [in] the manner in which society misuses this skill and ability", and says school-leavers saw science as "de-humanised and even brutal". It also foresaw selective uptake: the company might draw off "the money spinners" and drop the socially useful products, so present only part of the plan. Close to James's "swap out every designer".
3. Expect: where "human-centred systems" came from and what it meant. -> search text: Cooley coined it in Architect or Bee? (1980) about the move from drawing board to CAD; meaning: keep or enlarge skill where technology wears it away. ESPRIT 1217 followed. Confirms the map; little new.
4. Expect: what happened to the plan's people and ideas after Lucas, especially anything community-run. -> search text, then full read of Adrian Smith (2014). Result: the GLC's Technology Networks (1983-86), five public workshops run by Cooley's team, governed by tenants, unions and polytechnics, with "machine-banks" of refurbished second-hand tools, an open product bank, royalties from profit firms, community computer networks. Ended by abolition of the GLC in 1986. Smith: the demanding aims were "closed down" while the methods were "co-opted and reconfigured by capital", including user-centred design. The Sussex repository copy returned an empty file (counted).
5. Expect: Asaro's history of how participatory design lost its politics, since Smith cites it for the co-optation. -> search text, then partial read on Asaro's site. Result: two traditions, Scandinavian union projects (from 1970) and IBM's Joint Application Design (1977, for efficiency), "converged on ... very similar practices"; corporate restructuring used participation methods "to legitimate new political regimes within organizations". The first union projects feared participating workers "might become experts and join management".
6. Expect: Cooley himself saying the term was taken. -> search text only: the AI & Society tribute traces the journal to the Lucas Plan and the EU's "Anthropocentric Systems" programme of the 1990s; nothing from Cooley on the term's fate. Taught little.

Avenue 2, animism as perception.

1. Expect: Lansing and Kremer's 1993 model in his own words. -> long search text of the PDF on Lansing's site (most of the article). Result: Manuaba and Bayad example; pest losses under 1% in 1988-89 against up to 50% in the late 1970s; temple-scale coordination gives highest modelled yields; randomising planting dates drops the fit from 0.50 to 0.01; networks can self-organise. The ADB in 1988 expected the temples' role to end "as an almost inevitable result of technical progress".
2. Expect: the critics, since the page will be contested. -> search text, then Hauser-Schäublin's comment read in full (PMC). Lansing's own "Response to Critics" PDF on slansing.org returned HTML (counted). Result: three critiques: lords in irrigation ("temple landlordism", Schulte Nordholt and Hauser-Schäublin); Vayda's point that the main post-Green-Revolution pests "were much less a threat ... in earlier times"; confirmation bias.
3. Expect: Lansing's latest statement. -> search text (PNAS 2017 abstract): satellite patterning matches a game where farmers copy better neighbours; harvests higher and more equal; Green Revolution "chaos in irrigation".
4. Expect: the ADB conceding something in its own evaluation. -> the page and the 1992 PDF (45 pages) download, but it is a scan with no text. Dead end.
5. Expect: Lansing and de Vet's reply on pests. -> Springer preview, notes visible. Result: "Temple priests do not control irrigation; they perform rituals." They concede pesticides killed predators and that a Javanese study found more predatory wasps in non-synchronous fields, but cite their own 1990s Bali surveys showing fewer pests under synchronised fallow.
6. Expect: what happened after the 2012 UNESCO listing, an unfamiliar turn. -> search text, then the SEI 2015 report read in full (the ASU case PDF returned HTML, counted). Result: the governing assembly left out the king, the high priest of Batukaru and the local subak heads; ritual subsidies short since 2008, so farmers borrowed for offerings; tourism first for water; land tax rising with neighbouring tourism values while conversion is forbidden inside the site.

Hunches (unsourced, not in wiki)

• In both cases an outside institution kept what it could represent and fund (participation methods; the subak as a farmers' association, the landscape as heritage) and dropped the part that carried the purpose (the organised collective deciding what to make; the priest and the ritual calendar). That may be how a dark discourse spreads: not by lying about harm but by selective uptake. The Lucas stewards named exactly this risk in 1976 ("money spinners").
• Land tax assessed on neighbouring tourism value is a quiet way to dissolve any low-intensity commons, including community-run computing on cheap land or premises. Worth looking for the same pattern in US property tax and community land trusts.
• The Technology Networks' machine-banks are a 1980s public version of the surplus-hardware route on hosting cost claim, and like Community Memory they ended by funder, not by failure of the machines.

End of session

Surprises

• When Bali's subak landscape was listed by UNESCO in 2012 as "the Subak System as the Manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana Philosophy", the governing assembly set up to run it left out the high priest of the Batukaru temple, and the ritual subsidy ran so short that farmers borrowed to pay for offerings. sei.org
• The first Scandinavian union technology projects were wary of letting workers take part in design because "the workers involved might become experts and join management thereby threatening union solidarity". peterasaro.org
• The 1976 Lucas Plan already says, in a shop stewards' document, that technology's harms come "not [from] the behaviour of scientists and technologists in isolation, but [from] the manner in which society misuses this skill and ability", and warns the company would cherry-pick "the money spinners". ecology.iww.org

Connections

• Across the two avenues: in both the Lucas afterlife and the Bali heritage regime, an outside institution adopted the form and vocabulary (participation, "human-centred"; Tri Hita Karana) and dropped the part that carried the purpose (the collective and the question of what to make; the priest and the ritual order). This changes Dark discourse and Clearing captured frames: a captured frame can be installed by selective uptake of the very thing that resisted it. See technology networks london and bali water temples.
• To Convivial computation: his line of thought and the surplus line: the GLC's Technology Networks held "machine-banks" of refurbished second-hand tools and an open product bank, a public precedent beside Access Space and the Redundant Technology Initiative and MetaReciclagem, ended by the abolition of their funder.

Dead end: the ADB's 1992 evaluation of the Bali Irrigation Sector Project is a scan with no text layer (Dead ends).

Worth continuing

• Avenue 1: Argentina's recovered factories (the steer's next case), asking specifically whether workers who took over plants after 2001 kept the collective that decided what to make, or kept only the plant. First hop: the Universidad de Buenos Aires Facultad Abierta surveys of empresas recuperadas.
• Avenue 2: Amah Mutsun cultural burning, as the local counterpart and a test of Regenerative and degenerative violence; first hop the Amah Mutsun Land Trust's own pages on its stewardship programme.

Permission to chase: OCR for scanned PDFs (installing tesseract or a Python OCR into scratch), which would reopen the ADB evaluation, the Borremans Guide to Convivial Tools scan and other dead ends.

Budget used: 21 fetches (of 25, counting four failed downloads), about 34 tool calls (of 60).