Student D

I'd like to push this further. If we think in terms of schismogenesis — Gregory Bateson's concept — what we're really describing is a process where differences keep amplifying, splitting apart. Taken to its end, you just get a fracture between super-entities.

So we can't only think about positive feedback. We also need negative feedback. Bateson described it through a Balinese example: a mother deliberately provokes her child, and when the child protests, she simply ignores the protest. That ignoring becomes the negative feedback — it prevents the antagonism from escalating without limit.

So if we want to maintain a community while also preserving noise — preserving the productive tensions within it — we need a system that can hold both positive feedback and negative feedback at the same time. How do you actually build something like that?