Why I’ve Been Wading Upstream This Whole Time.

FROM THE FILES OF THE C-of-C-C ATHWART HISTORIAN,

Peter R. Mossback.

“Life is that which swims against the current of entropy.”

— Norbert Wiener, echoed through the cybernetic reeds

“We did not resist modernity only to be conquered by nostalgia. We bucked the current by walking against it.”

— A Council maxim, now clarified

A New Political Compass

I once assumed I was only a crank—an oddball shouldering upstream while the age cheered the tide. I distrusted both the techno-saviors of the left and the human-exceptionalists of the right. So I walked against them. I didn’t know why.

Now I do.

After reading Dan Zimmer’s “A New Political Compass” in Noema, I recognize myself as what he’d call an Up-wing thinker—not a Silicon Valley transhumanist, mind you, but an Up-wing preservationist with muddy boots and a sun-yellowed gaiter. Zimmer reframes our map from Left/Right to Up/Down, an axis that runs through a deeper shift: valuing Life (as persistent, anti-entropic pattern) rather than “Man” as the measure of all things. Once you see that, decades of wading upstream begin to make sense. 

❖ The stream is entropy

Norbert Wiener’s 1948 insight hovers behind Zimmer’s compass: Life survives by locally reversing the slide toward sameness—by processing information well enough to secure the energy that keeps form from dissolving. That’s why a root cellar can be metaphysics, not nostalgia: preservation as a practical defiance of decay. My upstream posture wasn’t antiquarian; it was anti-entropic. Zimmer’s essay makes that logic explicit in political terms. 

❖ Up and against

In Zimmer’s schema, Up and Down are biocentric, cutting across Left/Right. Up leans toward Life understood primarily as information processing—patterns that can, in principle, migrate from flesh to other substrates. Down leans toward Life as complex systemic entanglement—Gaian balance, limits, feedbacks. The clash isn’t tech vs. trees so much as pattern-expansion vs. system-maintenance. That’s a cleaner reading of our age than the stale Left/Right quarrel. 

❖ The Council knew (even if I didn’t)

Now I see why the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists bottles sunlight in yellow—why we pickle names, salt idioms, smoke folkways. We were never merely “pro-human”; we were pro-perseverance—for whatever keeps Life lively against the drift. Zimmer notes that planetary systems self-stabilize and sometimes amplify tiny disturbances into catastrophes (ozone taught us that). Upstream conservation isn’t Luddism; it’s timing—knowing what to brace, when to yield, and where to divert the flow. 

❖ My hand outstretched

I’ve long pictured myself in a cold Pennsylvania creek, left hand gripping a book, right palm raised to the current—not to forbid it, but to fortify a small eddy of form so that something can be preserved and follow me upstream. If, as Zimmer argues, humans are the aperture through which Life passes to unlock wider possibility, then walking upstream was never mere resistance.

I went upstream before the others so that Life might pass through—or so I tell myself now. In hindsight, it was an early-stage entropy mitigation protocol I was never formally authorized to initiate. But then again, the Council has always had a soft spot for unauthorized foresight.

—Peter R. Mossback

Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists

Athwart Historian, Keeper of the Upstream Flame