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I feel like the left has been using 'systemic' to mean what you are calling 'stygmergic' for decades.
If the anti-left factions need a new word taken from a different discipline to acknowledge this idea we've been talking about forever, then that's frustrating, but ok...
Anyway, the difference is both clear and important: to stop a conspiracy you intervene on people, to stop stygmergic phenomena you intervene on the environment/system.
This is why individual bigots and prejudiced person are not needed for affirmative action to be a sensible idea with predictably good outcomes. It is why platform moderation and algorithm design are not really about punishing 'bad' posters. It is why ACAB is a statement about systems and is not countered by one nice cop, or a hundred thousand.
Etc.
What "predictibly good" outcomes are you thinking of when it comes to affirmative action? From my perspective AA has been a massive failure. The acheivement gap on standardized tests is as big as ever despite 2 generations of institutionalized discrimination in favor of blacks at our nations universities. From my perspective this makes total sense. The reason for mean scores amongst blacks has never been lack of educational opportunity, it's genetics, so it can't be fixed by increasing educational opportunity. But i suspect you believe something else.
The goals of AA aren’t really to close the achievement gap, they’re to create a small class of black elites who went to Harvard/Yale/Stanford and work in elite occupations in the private and public sector, as a kind of integration with (formerly) white society. The idea is that in the long term this creates a more racially harmonious society because it isn’t ‘just’ whites (and Asians) on top. I’m not defending or condemning this, just saying that this (ie a form of benevolent racial spoils system) is the implicit object of affirmative action.
If that's the goal AA supporters haven't been very honest about their goals. The stated goals are to uplift blacks to make up for their lower preformance due to the legacy of discrimination and to improve the educational experience through increased diversity. I think unwavering acheivement gaps showed that the first goal has failed and while AA does increase diversity (this is almost tautological) I'm unconvinced that this actually has an educational benefit, the surrounding studies are highly manufactured.
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I think the goals of AA as now practiced are even less coherent that this - giving a slot to a foreign student from Madrid in preference to one from Paris doesn't achieve any of these goals, but it does increase your "Hispanic" percentage. I suppose at least some of the scholarship Nigerians are going to go the OPT/H1B route and stay in America as technically-Black elites.
As far as I can see, elite institutions in the US now feel obliged to make numbers on diversity without any sense of why they are doing so.
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