Energy-centric anthropology & circuits...
We are just circuit making organisms from the right begging! All ecology is about creating complex and strange circuits and even human values are nothing more than some effects of these evolutionary defined mega-circuits running energy storage and consumption! Odum’s hardware prototypes simulating & testing ecosystem models based on energy flows and their analogy to circuits have a funny revival in this "energy-centric" thinking in a strange form of cultural analytics - Ian Moriss' "energy capture" measured in kcal/cap/day (food energy person has for its disposal per day & even non-food energy) and his crazy comparisons between foraging, farming, and fossil-fuel production as something having correlation to social organization and human values... so the egalitarian nomads consume something of 6 000 kcal/cap/day, hierarchical farmers in agricultural civilization anything from 20 000 to 80 000 and then plural, democratic, nonviolent modern man has up to 110 000 kcal/cap/day.... and he is inspired by this other energy weirdo Leslie White who in 1940 reduced all anthropological questions to a piece of bad math - history as C (culture) = E (energy) x T (tech)... the multiplication for him is rather "metaphorical" (he wants to state some strange function - more energy we harness per capita per year/more culture we develop OR technological means of using this energy in work).... The social networks of the future will be like some carbon markets of kcal/cap/day stock market so we finally embody this ideal Pythagorean utopia... You have to love these guys, it is all quirky and playful in a way, but where does this cybernetic need to have input/output model come from? The love of thermodynamics, which reached its peak with Rolf Landauer famous 1961 principle, which basically states that all information equals the amount of energy, heat, entropy created when we try to delete that bit or unit of information... and this whole obsession with order and disorder, destruction, irreversibility behind thermodynamics as some law that rules everything is questioned only on the quantum scale (wonderful summary)... But back to the circuits, they are not just blueprints of machines nor some embodied and materialized cybernetic feedback mechanisms, maybe they are our last attempt to save the great chain of being, claim there is something of a soul or energy, which wonders across organisms, materials and spaces through which we can connect everything, influence, translate and conquer... and simply ignore that we exist surrounded and immersed in scales of incomprehensible complexity that are so good in ignoring us both in space and time and even energy ;-) This energy-centric thinking is a plea for pure immanence or something of that kind... where circuits are like mirrors, desperate attempts to make everything around talk to us, acknowledge us, become part of us.