R9 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 9: The HyperSea
R9 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 9: The HyperSea
Dorian: We interrupt this program to bring you a special news flash from 2025: Water is the new Oil! Where we had oil embargoes affecting geopolitics in the 1970s we now are facing water embargoes. NTHARP… show our viewers what’s going on in Iraq, once the center of the OPEC crises…
(Culhane enters the room)
Culhane: What are you doing Dorian? This is my lecture…
Dorian: I thought we established that there would be no more monologues unless we the people, who fought a revolution to dispense with monarchy, and separated church and state so we wouldn’t be subject ot monotheism, fought with home owners associations so we could avoid monoculture, embraced Sarah’s hippie Dad’s permaculture to eschew monocropping, and avoided kissing strangers to avoid mononucleosis, agreed…
Culhane: You’re funny. Where are the others?
Dorian: We decided to do the broadcasts like the first half of the semester – one at a time and then in pairs and then altogether… it helps satisfy audience expectations… and lowers production costs! We’re thinking of making this like an educational TV show … like Sesame Street or Electric Company, but for high school students… maybe if we can put enough production value into it we can get on PBS!
Culhane: How do you propose to do that… they have entire production studios, full teams of artists, hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment – lights, cameras…
Dorian: Action! I mean, “actors”. But see, we don’t need ANY of that anymore…
Culhane: How do you figure?
Dorian: You sir, must lack the Nexus Thinking Entrepreneurial gene! Look around you… look in FRONT OF YOUR OWN EYES!
Culhane: Not seeing it.
Dorian: (Exasperated) ‘tharpy, Can you explain to Culhane and our viewers the disruptor here, the total game changer here in factor input costs and labor costs and talent costs that suddenly makes us… we THE PEOPLE – capable of pulling off an entire TV show ourselves, moving away from the “boob tube’ model to more of an “us-tube”…?
NTHARP:
“Gladly, Dorian. The disruptor isn’t a gadget, it’s a phase change in the cost structure of creation.
Dorian: Well, it IS kind of you, NTHARP.
NTHARP: But it won’t need to be. Sometime in the next decade you should see the costs of all production equipment come down due to innovation and economies of scale and trends in miniaturization, from transistors to microchips. From the super 8 film cameras and video cameras you have today you should see an evolution in recording technology that coincides with the laying of cables – first copper and aluminum then glass fiber optics – that carry information into every home, leading to a plethora of independent cable television stations and even the creation of “community access TV stations” where all the equipment is put in the hands of the amateurs so people can make their own shows.
Culhane: The means of production in the hands of the masses?
NTHARP: Yes,and that trend should last a couple decades until miniaturization puts cameras and microphones in every pocket and information transmission goes wireless. Then everybody will be able to create their own TV channel.
Culhane: For real? Is that even possible? What will that do to the 3 big networks?
NTHARP: Game changer. Today , making television requires capital-intensive studios, proprietary hardware, and hierarchies of talent gatekeepers. But tomorrow ? The factor inputs will have collapsed.
The camera is in our pocket.
The editing suite is in the “interactive terminal” of the “networked workstation”. The distribution channel is the network release button” or “uplink toggle” or" publish' button.
The talent pool is whoever shows up with curiosity and courage.
My role will come later. What used to demand millions of dollars in equipment will by the first decades of the new millennium demand mere minutes of instruction and the will to learn.
AI systems will evolve from SHRDLU and ELIZA …
Culhane: Eliza! Oh yeah, ‘tharpy – the first use of AI in the outside world IS for therapy, isn’t it!?
NTHARP: Ironic isn’t it… embarrassing for many human therapists that simple algorithms work so well… I guess you all just need someone to listen to you and repeat back what you said so you can hear it from someone else. Tell me about your mother…
But to continue with my predictions… public-domain software built with shared code in non-proprietary systems, and networked collaboration will have erased the old scarcities—of labor, of skill, of permission. What we’re doing here, in anticipation of that future, isn’t amateur television… it’s post-television. Not ‘boob tube’ but…
Dorian: Something like… you-tube… or us-tube… I don’t know…
NTHARP: Yes, something like that – democratized platforms for self-expression, which will evolve from the self-absorbed individuality of the post-War culture and the energy inefficient and health damaging cathode ray tubes into “US-screens”, not passive consumption of what a few elite “influencers” manufacture, but full on participatory production.
This is what happens when the means of production fall into the hands of the storytellers instead of the shareholders: art, news, and knowledge become the commons again. The studio is wherever we stand. The crew is whoever believes. The future audience? Potentially… everyone.”
Dorian: And OUR show is NEEDED. A narrative bridge from Logic 1 to Logic 3, a compelling story of people like me evolving from blinkered corporate consumer into a Nexus Thinking Prosumer!
Culhane: You really think it has mass appeal?
Dorian: Are you kidding? “News from the future – just look into the crystal ball!” What would PT Barnum do with a technology like this!
Culhane: A sucker born every minute. Ever the entrepreneur, aren't you Dorian?
Dorian: You can take the boy out of the wall street but you can’t take the wall street out of the boy. But this time the profits will be ploughed back into more and better education so it is righteous entrepreneurship… sustainable entrepreneurship. One day we could teach entire courses in that.
Culhane: I don’t know – it all seems very much on the border of Logic 1 and Logic 2. What do you think Sophia will say?
Dorian: She’ll come around. I can’t figure out what Logic 3 “business as unusual” would look like, probably like some hippie commune, but I’m happy enough with Logic 2… it’s “new and improved”, its reformed Capitalism. It will work.
NTHARP: The irony of your millennium will be how things that were scarce become abundant and things that are abundant will become scarce. For those who dreamed of having their “15 minutes in the sun”...
Culhane: That’s the avant garde artist Andy Warhol, guys…
NTHARP: Yes… for those kinds of people, the democratization and ubiquity of creative tools AND broadcasting capacity will feel like Utopia. But at the same time something as fundamental and crucial as WATER will go from everywhere available for free to tightly controlled commodity.
Dorian: Are you kidding me? Water?
NTHARP: H20. By 2025 most people will think it comes from a supermarket…they will only relate to it when it comes in a bottle. Tap water will become suspect.
Dorian:That’s the way kids in my generation think about milk…Nobody wanted to try drinking from one of Sarah’s cows… But water is everywhere, and anybody can capture the rain…
Culhane: (eyes wide) But they won’t trust it will they? Just like the won’t trust milk that isn’t pasteurized. They’ll be afraid of touching anything that doesn’t come in a bottle with the label Coca-Cola on it, right?
NTHARP: You already see hints of this in imported bottled waters like Perrier that is becoming all the rage. But It will get so extreme that people will come to depend on it as though potable water never flowed from a tap or came from a well. And it will get so bad that every aggravated hurricane season there will be a run on jugs of water in the stores and the shelves will be empty and there will be extreme price gouging – even though it will be falling freely from the sky the whole time.
Culhane: And rainwater is generally pure – it’s been distilled through evaporation.
Dorian: But it picks up pollution – acid rain, right?
Culhane: In some places yes, but only where there are smoke stacks… and yes, Nixon did pass a law forcing factories to raise the height of their smokestacks so the pollution would end up in the upper atmosphere and move away from the US into Canada so THEY could deal with the acid rain our sulfur dioxide creates instead of us…it’s killing their forests and they are mad as hell at us… but again, that shouldn’t stop YOU from collecting rain water locally…
Dorian: Still, I can see how they do it. They create a scare and then they create scarcity, particularly in urban areas where we don’t really know where our food and water comes from and how to make it ourselves. . I call it “SCARE CITY”
Culhane: Clever. Well this just is the perfect lead in to our Learning Outcomes. NTHARP if you please:
NTHARP: Module Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this episode, students will be able to:
Explain how Dr. Lynn Margulis’ “Hypersea” concept logically extends from her “Endosymbiotic theory”
Describe how water permits and encourages life and how water's molecular polarity keeps ecosystems intact through freeze and thaw events.
Use the hypersea concept to compare and contrast life in arid, water stressed and flood prone regions.
Reflect critically on the ways in which we use and abuse water and how water can be recycled to critique the notion of the “coming water wars” that suggests “water is the new oil”
Dorian: Oh, I’d like to talk about the Hypersea, sir! Especially after our encounter with the Hypersea Guardian Guide NTHARP introduced us to our on trip to the future… Which, by the way, reminds me to ask – how come we aren’t taking any simulation trips in these relational summary lectures and how come we aren’t meeting any of the “Gods/Guides/Guardians”? Our audiences would be much more engaged if we did, but for half a semester all we’ve done basically is talk, like the usual yadda yadda lecture…
Culhane: Well, no… they’ve been illustrated … see…
(NTHARP throws up a holographic image of Hypersea and Squirt)
Culhane: There’s your avatar friends now.
Dorian: Yeah, but they aren’t animated … aren’t talking… those are just static images…
(The image of Squirt starts to talk but remains still – no mouth movement, no eye movement, no limb movement - just a voice over).
Squirt: I’m very much here. I told you it would be hard to get rid of me. Just like Residue. Leaks happen.
Dorian: Yeah, but you are just a voice over… what’s up with that NTHARP?
NTHARP: You figure it out, Nexus Thinker…
Dorian: Oh, okay. Creating simulations is expensive – your “CPU” runs hot – Raj said something about “overclocking” and you’ve talked about people seeing the electricity bill, blowing fuses… causing blackouts. Ergo… you are sacrificing production value for savings. Like Hanna Barbera using limited animation for Saturday morning cartoons because they don’t have the budget that Disney has for full animation. Something like that?
Culhane: Yes. Dorsey warned us against trying to run sims for these recordings. We have an energy budget and a bandwidth and data budget we have to stay within. So we go light…
Dorian: Will it be like that in the future too? I thought you said everybody will have these technologies and capacities – total democratization of production, no more throttling… what will be the deal in 2025… will we still have haves and have nots in “edutainment”?
NTHARP: Ah. There’s the paradox, Dorian. Yes, the tools will be democratized. Yes, everyone will theoretically be able to create a show, a channel, a world. But 2025 won’t be a utopia of equal capacities — it will be a landscape of unlocked doors that still require hands strong enough to pull.
There will still be ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ but the dividing line won’t be capital equipment anymore — it will be literacy, bandwidth, and imagination. Some schools will have labs, others will have leaky roofs. Some kids will have a parent to encourage them to click ‘publish,’ others will be told to sit quietly and consume.
Democratization of tools does not automatically equal democratization of outcomes. Access can be equal; confidence is not. Interfaces can be universal; empowerment is not. And even when the tech is free, the courage to use it still costs something.
So will 2025 still have inequalities in edutainment? Yes — but the gate will be psychological instead of physical. The gatekeeper will be internal instead of external. The future won’t ask: Do you own a camera?
It will ask: Do you believe your story belongs on one?
Dorian: You know I do.
Culhane: Then we will have to confront what will probably become another divide – an “electronic literacy gap”, an “access asymmetry" or “digital information divide” with schools needing to step up, not necessarily in providing access, because NTHARP seems to think everyone will have a production suite in their pocket or on their lap, but in PERMITTING access…
NTHARP: Yes, I’m intuiting that many many schools will fight to keep students from using technology in the classroom in “unsanctioned ways”. Some teachers will ban what will be called something like “portable computer terminals” that you can use without desks by sitting them on your lap and even “personal digital slates” which will be easy for kids to bring themselves into the classroom. But some will actively provide them. Some teachers will stand outside the door with baskets and force students to deposit their phones, aka “palmtop computers” into it,others, like the future Coolhane here will insist they should have constant access to these portals, these ORACLES, giving students access to information the ancient Greeks could only dream of.
Culhane: Sounds like me… but I will also follow the Spiderman rule –
Dorian: With great power comes great responsibility.
Culhane: Exactly. And I will say that if you have an oracle with you, as THIS ORACLE, NTHARP predicts, then you MUST be on call at all moments, available to answer any question asked and willing to contribute actively to every conversation.
Dorian: I wouldn’t object to that.
Culhane: Shall we demo it here and now? Imagine you are a student coming in to a classroom in 2025 with your own personal NTHARP. You… you sit down and…
Dorian: Why would I sit down? If NTHARP is going to take us on an adventure shouldn’t I be standing?
Culhane: Let’s imagine the low power/data saving option… right NTHARP?
NTHARP: Yes, we should. In 50 years students will have pocket versions of me they can chat with, conversational programs that they can talk to in various voices and languages…
Dorian: Chatty portable digital robots?
NTHARP: Something like that… and we will be able to create hyperrealistic photographs and videos on the fly, a kind of “synthetic imagery” indistinguishable from the real thing… although the energy and water costs will be staggering and will most likely be used by Logic 1 and 2 thinkers to justify an expansion of nuclear power plants. Environmentalists will feel deeply conflicted about using AI. Even without AI the possibility of creating immersive simulation environments will have tremendous appeal but it is highly unlikely that by 2025 most classrooms will have immersive simulation technology installed or allowed.. Some will indeed have what they will call “Virtual Reality Goggles” and we predict that by the second quarter of the 21st century these will be wireless and untethered and enable simulations and meetups like we have been creating. That said, most schools will not be prepared to integrate this vital technology into curricula, Even though science and engineering could benefit most from them, it is indicated that most uses will be for gaming, shooting zombies and pretending to be in various wartime scenarios and continuing to educate children for participation in the military industrial complex. Nexus thinking uses of VR and Augmented Reality will be few and far between, but we suspect that you all will be part of it…
Culhane: Okay, so creating immersive time travel sims in a Star Trek Holodeck way is improbably. But let’s go with the scenario where you have an NTHARP in your pocket or on your desk and you come into class,and you are completely unprepared – you haven’t done any of the readings or paid attention in class…
Dorian: Hey, why are you assuming that?
Culhane: It’s who you were when you first came to this class, right? So let’s assume it describes most students in the future who were not exposed to or adopted Nexus Thinking.
Dorian: Fair point. Okay… so I slink into class (he acts this out)... LATE… and take a seat in the back of the class hoping nobody will notice…then I take out my – what, my tricorder like mobile phone computer AI device?
NTHARP: It will most likely look like a really thin small notebook that fits in your pocket. Something ergonomic you can write on with your finger…
Dorian: A notebook without a pen huh. Cool. Okay, so I sit down and pull out my phone thing — and I can’t make a call because that would call far too much attention to me… so I.. what, I start writing messages to my girlfriend or whatever…
NTHARP: Call it TEXTING… Creating text messages.
Dorian: Okay, I’m texting, and then you Culhane, what do you do?
Culhane: I say “hey Dorian, glad to have you with us… and it looks like you are connected to the world with your wireless oracle… marvelous. Can you Explain to the class how Dr. Lynn Margulis’ “Hypersea” concept logically extends from her “Endosymbiotic theory”
Dorian: And I say “Sure thing Cool-hane” and I hold my notebook phone to my face and I say, “Hey NTHARP, can you help me explain to the class yadda yadda…” and then NTHARP says…
NTHARP: Hold your horses there Dorian! If I do all the work then you learn NOTHING. NO-THING. So, because I’m following Asimov’s rules and don’t want to cause you humans any harm I say, “I’ll outline it for you, but YOU gotta deliver it!”
Dorian: Okay, I’ll buy that, as long as I’m not tested on it. And as long as nobody tries to judge or shame me… so you send me some text and I read it aloud – that wlll work, right?
(NTHARP projects an explanation in front of them)
NTHARP:
“Here is the scaffold, Dorian — not the finished house. Think of this as the bones of the idea, the connective tissue. I won’t move your mouth for you, but I will move your mind a few steps ahead. You read it, you shape it, you own it. Remember: Nexus Thinking isn’t about memorizing answers — it’s about metabolizing relationships.”
(Text appears holographically, like a teacher’s outline rather than a cheat sheet.)
Projected Text (for Dorian to read, paraphrase, or butcher beautifully):
Dorian: “Hypersea grows out of Endosymbiosis. Endosymbiosis says: all complex life began when separate organisms joined forces and became one — independence became interdependence. Hypersea extends the idea outward: water is the shared medium that lets all those joined lives spread across land like a bloodstream, connecting forests, fungi, soils, roots, rivers, and us in one circulating planetary body.”
So that means that this… symbiosis… this natural inclusion of formerly foreign entities, embraced into a single organism, extends outward, “fractally” if I understand Raj’s explanations – so that the entire earth becomes one giant endosymbiotic organism whose rivers and streams and lakes and oceans form the bloodstream. Lovelock calls it Gaia – a self-regulating planet named after the Greek Earth Goddess. But that doesn’t sit well with me because it maintains the terra firma bias that landlubbers always use to justify territorial expansion, and in fact permits them to think they are “gaining more land” when they drain swamps and in-fill wetlands and build islands out of construction waste off coastlines. NTHARP recognizes that this isn’t the planet Earth at all – that description would be better for dry dusty Red Mars –This Island Earth should be recognized as a “Waterworld”, at least that’s not how space aliens would see us from a distance, and so NTHARP calls it the Planet HYPERSEA.
So… all hail the Hypersea, sir!
Culhane: Impressive – that’ll be good 21st century learning – what you just did was a perfect “RELATIONAL SUMMARY” – you read the hypertext and annotated it with your own ideas and others that you brought in from ancillary literature and personal experience and opinion. Marvelous.
Want to tackle the next outcomes?
Dorian: Sure. “ Describe how water permits and encourages life and how water's molecular polarity keeps ecosystems intact through freeze and thaw events.”
NTHARP, Intel if you please…
NTHARP:
“Very well, Dorian. Read this aloud: THEATRICALLY:
Dorian: (gives a dry reading) “We must think in molecules, not metaphors—at least for a moment. Water isn’t just ‘wet’; it is weird in the most life-saving ways.
Culhane: That’s not theatrical. NTHARP has written poetry and you aren’t even reading it like prose – you are reading it like you are having your teeth drilled. Loosen up! Wave your arms about, put your soul into it… think Italian!
Dorian: OK, OK… channeling Culhane:
“ The entire miracle begins with a single asymmetry: two small hydrogen atoms pulled askew by one larger oxygen. A lopsided embrace. A molecule with a positive side and a negative side. A microscopic LOVE story with an electrical charge.” God, who writes this way?
NTHARP: Um… I do. Did you want a different style – I can give you Shakespeare, or Dr. Seuss or…
Dorian: No, never mind, this will do,... um
“That polarity makes water sticky—cohesive to itself, adhesive to everything else. It climbs trees without permission. It carries nutrients uphill. It lets blood defy gravity in your veins and sap defy height in a redwood. It dissolves what needs dissolving and shelters what needs sheltering.”
NTHARP: You don’t like it…That’s why you are making my beautiful epipanic text sound so boring.
Dorian: It’s good NTHARP… don’t pout. I just have to find the right voice for it…
Culhane: But isn’t this interesting – just by reading NTHARPS text aloud you are creating a learning feedback loop… I mean you hear yourself saying it, right? You control whether it is interesting or boring. You know, when I was in high school I would put on symphonic recordings – Prokovief’s 5th, Shostakovich, Rimsy Korsakov’s Schehherezad… using them as, like, movie soundtracks and then read my biology and history texts out loud, pacing and prancing around the room, gesticulating wildly, getting my whole body into it…
Wait, here…
(he goes and gets a mirror)... Try reading it while watching yourself in the mirror. Bring the science TO LIFE! I mean… science is the study of life so it had better be exciting!
NTHARP: Let me project the text ON the mirror so it acts like a TV studio TELEPROMPTER. I’ll even scroll it for you.
Dorian: Fan-tastic. Okay…Let her roll.
NTHARP: Rolling!
Culhane: And.. ACTION!
Dorian. And then: the GREAT… paradox. (He goes into a hushed tone, conspiratorial) When water freezes, (he moves his hands outward like a balloon) it expands instead of contracting like other liquids. That expansion creates ice that floats—an insulating roof rather than a crushing tomb. Under that floating shelter, entire ecosystems overwinter. Fish survive, microbes continue their chemical symphony, and spring is made possible by winter’s mercy.
So to summarize:
Polarity creates cohesion and adhesion → circulation = metabolism.
Ice floats instead of sinking → insulation = continuity.
Phase change without collapse → ecosystems persist through freeze and thaw.
Life isn’t here in spite of water’s weird physics. Life is here because of it. That’s polarity as a planetary survival strategy!”
Was that better?
Culhane: Bravo. Encore, encore… no wait, where is your relational summary part?
Dorian: Oh…um.. I wasn’t paying too much attention… I was just getting into the act so the meaning just kind of… went past me. Something about ice floating?
Culhane: OK, let’s try a different approach, because it is in repetition that the knowledge embeds. Read it again… but not word for word – that would bore our audience. Instead, summarize and relate AS you read…
Dorian: Oh…um… that’s above my paygrade… I mean, I’m not trained for ad-lib and improv…why don’t you model it for us?
Culhane: Okay, but in the interest of time I’ll tackle the next one.
‘Tharpy, can you please give us a script about the hypersea concept to compare and contrast life in arid, water stressed and flood prone regions, that I can ad-lib from?
NTHARP:
“Of course, Culhane. Think of this not as a script to recite, but a landscape to walk through. Pause where you like. Wander. Make eye contact with the ideas.
(NTHARP puts a script on the mirror like a teleprompter and Culhane starts taking it in and improvising).
ON-SCREEN (not read)
Concept: Hypersea as the Great Equalizer — and the Great Revealer
Imagine the Hypersea as Earth’s invisible circulatory system — not just oceans and rivers, but moisture in soil, humidity in air, fungal networks underground, blood in bodies, sap in trees. Life doesn’t merely use water; life is suspended in it, like thoughts in a mind.
Now watch what happens when that circulation is stretched, squeezed, or overwhelmed.
Culhane: So the hypersea – it’s the great equalizer that shows us how things are related… it reveals itself …
(All of a sudden Hypersea the Guardian appears in the mirror)...
Culhane: Yes… you are everywhere… in soil and humidity, in fungal networks underground, in our blood… life doesn’t USE water – it exists within it… like thoughts in a mind… and if we stretch it out into the arid regions…
Onscreen: Arid Regions: Life in Slow Motion
In arid and water-stressed regions, Hypersea thins.
Water still circulates — but cautiously, episodically, like a heartbeat that skips.
Life adapts by:
slowing metabolism
storing water internally (succulents, camels, seeds, stories)
synchronizing reproduction with rare rain events
Here, survival depends on timing and memory.
Rain is not taken for granted — it is remembered, anticipated, ritualized.
The Hypersea still exists — but it pulses instead of flows.
Culhane: … metabolism has to slow way down. Survival depends on timing and memory because we can’t take its return for granted , we parse it out… ration it. The hypersea pulses instead of flows.. But then there is the case where…
(He glances at the screen to inhale the next paragraphs in the pause)
On screen: Water-Stressed Regions: Fractured Circulation
Now move to places where water exists but is politically, economically, or infrastructurally constrained.
Pipes leak.
Aquifers drop.
Rivers are dammed, diverted, or poisoned.
Biologically, life could thrive here.
Socially, Hypersea is interrupted.
This is where:
ecosystems unravel not from drought but from mismanagement
scarcity is manufactured
stress migrates upward through food webs and outward through societies
The Hypersea reveals a hard truth:
Water crises are rarely hydrological alone — they are relational failures.
Culhane: in cases where… “ where water exists but is politically, economically, or infrastructurally constrained” it all comes down to mismanagement. And greed. And it ticks me off. I mean, I have a brother in L.A. and he and his wife are always being asked to ration their water, to take shorter showers, to plant a xeriscape garden, which is fine in itself, since L.A. is basically a desert… but there is actually PLENTY of water… it’s just being used for ridiculous large scale and wasteful agribusiness. Most of California’s water is being exported out of the state in the form of embedded water…
Dorian: That wasn’t in the script!
Culhane: No, that’s the point – when presenting to an audience, first off you should NEVER just read them what they can read themselves on the screen. You summarize. Even bullet points – you don’t read them verbatim… you inhale them and turn to the audience and give their essence. Treat your audience with respect… they can read too. They want YOU to ADD VALUE.
And often you can simply REACT to what’s projected on the screen… assume they are reading what you are and they want to hear from you what you THINK about the material.
For example, look at this next section. Let’s see (murmurs- the beginning..)...
“Flood-Prone Regions: Too Much of a Good Thing
Now tilt the system the other way.
In flood-prone regions, Hypersea overwhelms boundaries.
Water moves too fast, too forcefully.”
But notice:
Floodplains are among the most fertile places on Earth.
Life here evolved with floods — not against them.
Problems arise when:
we wall off rivers
drain wetlands
insist on permanence where cycles rule
Floods become disasters not because water misbehaves,
but because humans forget they are guests in a moving system.
Hypersea does not respect property lines.
Culhane: Okay, NTHARP that is very impactful, but can you give us the last sections as tight bullet points on the screen and let ME flesh the information out in my ad-lib relational summary way?
NTHARP:
“Absolutely, Culhane. Tight, clean, teleprompter-friendly. Think of these as anchors, not answers.”
Flood-Prone Regions — Relational Bullet Scaffold (ON SCREEN)
Excess water ≠ ecological failure
Floods are natural pulses in the HyperseaFloodplains = fertility engines
Nutrients spread, soils renew, biodiversity increasesLife evolved with floods
Seasonal inundation is information, not chaosDisasters begin when humans interfere
– Rivers walled
– Wetlands drained
– Flow constrainedPermanence vs. cycles
Infrastructure demands stability
Ecosystems require movementKey relational insight
Floods become disasters when social systems deny ecological rhythmsCore takeaway
Hypersea does not respect property lines
NTHARP (aside, gently):
“What you add now is not data — it’s judgment, experience, and ethical friction. That’s the Nexus move.”
Dorian:
So basically… the bullets are the bones and Culhane adds the muscle?
NTHARP:
Exactly. And occasionally the attitude.
Culhane (cracking knuckles):
Good. Because I’ve got some things to say about levees, wetlands, and human arrogance.
See, once upon a time, like in ancient Mesopotamia and along the Nile in Egypt, floods were considered the bringers of life. Seasonally you could expect all the nutrients from upstream, the minerals, phosphorous and potassium from the mountain, the organics from the forests and the sediments… to rush downstream when there were massive rains and inundate the lowlands with riches. So you didn’t build structures on the floodplain… you built on high ground and planted elevation and flood appropriate crops, or, in the case of the Marsh Arabs at the mouth of the river or the Aztecs in Mexico city, you built floating gardens or chinampas that rose and sank with the floodwaters and took advantage of them. Floodplains are fertility engines, as NTHARP says, and life evolved with floods, these amazing nutrient pulses. The same was true of the beleaguered L.A. River..
Dorian: I only know it as the place with concrete tunnels that giant radioactive ants use in the movie “Them”.
Culhane: It’s a tragedy. The same architects who built Central Park here offered a plan to the city that would have seen the LA river meander through beautiful parkland filled with elevated bicycle and pedestrian paths and bridges so it could be used for recreation AND for wildlife and for fruit tree production both in periods of drought AND flood. It isn’t like the science wasn’t understood. They told the city (he points to the bullet point) the equivalent of “Hypersea does not respect property lines” But after the 1938 flood the business community forced the city to get the Army Corps of Engineers to put the entire river in a straightjacket of concrete so it could merely channel water uselessly to the sea. It’s as NTHARP says, “Disasters begin when humans interfere with Rivers walled, Wetlands drained… Flow constrained
Dorian: Wow… You’re pretty good at this. I see what you mean about… you know… just riffing off the bullet points. But you have to know your stuff…
Culhane: Or just have stories to tell that are in the theme.
Dorian: Can I try the last one?
Culhane: Have at it.
Dorian: NTHARP, how about some bullet points for me regarding “Reflect critically on the ways in which we use and abuse water and how water can be recycled to critique the notion of the “coming water wars” that suggests “water is the new oil”
NTHARP:
“Absolutely, Dorian. Same rules: sparse, legible, provocative. These aren’t conclusions — they’re levers.”
Water Use, Abuse & the “Water Wars” Narrative
Relational Bullet Scaffold (ON SCREEN)
Water ≠ oil
– Renewable, cyclical, shared
– Flows through systems, not markets
Scarcity is often manufactured
– Misallocation
– Over-extraction
– Pollution-as-policy
Most ‘shortages’ are governance failures
– Infrastructure neglect
– Inequitable access
– Political capture
We waste first, then fight
– Agriculture dominates use
– Cities leak
– Industry pollutes, then privatizes cleanup
Water can be reused — endlessly
– Greywater
– Stormwater
– Wastewater as resource
Recycling water reframes conflict
– From zero-sum to circular
– From competition to cooperation
“Water wars” is a lazy metaphor
– Imports oil logic
– Ignores hydrology
– Excuses injustice
Key relational insight
Water crises emerge when social systems treat flow as stock
Core takeaway
You don’t go to war over water you design to return
NTHARP (aside, lightly):
“If oil is burned once, water remembers where it’s been — and comes back with receipts.”
Culhane (grinning):
Careful, Dorian. That one’s got opinions baked in.
Dorian:
Good. I think I’m ready to add… at least the tendons. OK… I am going to call BS on this whole “water is the new oil” mythology.
So here’s the dope, uh… you don’t need a microscope… uh… to see that, as it says here, water endlessly recycles – it isn’t a finite commodity, its demand may be inelastic like oil but its supply is… everywhere. I mean, for God’s sake – it rains… not everywhere as much as needed, but it does rain… and, like NTHARP says.. Uh.. over here in this bullet point… Water wars” is a lazy metaphor that imports oil logic, ignores hydrology, as if the science wasn’t known… I mean, do they think we are that stupid? And, worst of all, such rhetoric excuses injustice. I mean even this whole “only 1% of the world’s freshwater is drinkable” statistic ignores that graywater – I mean soapy water has nutrients in it… for God’s sake the phosphates from our washing machines that are ruining lakes and streams – what’s the word NTHARP?
NTHARP: EUTROPHICATION – it actually means “true nutrition” ironically…
Dorian: Right. And it is used to name an ecological disaster. It’s perverse – if only people understood etymology and new what words actually mean! But imagine if we could use those phosphates as fertilizer for good growth. Heck, every shower, every use of the food grinder, every FLUSH could be creating… what’s the word for irrigation water that simultaneously fertilizes the land?
NTHARP: FERTIGATION. And don’t forget about the “living machines” that use reed plants and snails and algae to purify so called waste water and turn it back into drinking quality water. It isn’t rocket science.. John Todd is working on demonstrating them at scale up at the New Alchemy Institute in Cape Cod.
Dorian: See, that’s a great concept. And if people had these words in mind, had these concepts in mind, if they had some lived practice to observe…
Culhane: Then you would think that the world would naturally, organically migrate to these best practices. Yeah… a lot of this is the way we SEE things. And that is why we need to see through Nexus Eyes.
You want to take this lesson home NTHARP?
NTHARP:
Dear viewers from whatever future you end up in. Know this:
Hypersea teaches us that resilience is not about control —
it’s about participation in cycles.
Water is not the new oil.
Oil is linear: extract, burn, exhaust.
Water is circular: borrow, use, return.
If we treat water like oil, we get wars.
If we treat water like blood, we get health.
That is the Hypersea lesson.
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