Remind me: have we talked much, here, about my notion of the “convivial stack”? This is the idea that, to the greatest extent possible, community governance, the built environment and the technological surround should all, simultaneously be designed so that they are open, participatory and actively invitational; modular, user-modifiable and extensible; and reward experimentation?
The systems that underwrite our survival on the planet need to be engineered such that we can meaningfully intervene in their operation and improvement, at all ages; that they invite that intervention, and are robust enough that they do not fail in the face of experimentation; that they account for and explain their own functioning; and that they organize non-exclusive communities of practice around them that are more than formally open.
@adamgreenfield Yes! You mentioned convivial stacks before and your concern about the appeal of that particular framing. But it definitely appeals to me.
I'd like to participate in these conversations. I'm currently writing something around 'reclaiming the stacks' / ecosocialist ICT, and reviewing existing tilts in this direction.
I’m not sure how I feel about direct action against those who would wear these in public, myself, but I can tell you right now there will be a robust constituency for that.
I really appreciate, in spacefaring fiction, when the author has included a diagram of the ship or environment in which the action takes place. MacInnes – so good at furnishing “In Ascension” with vivid, telling description otherwise – hasn’t described the layout of the Nereus in a way that allows me to grasp where the characters are in relation to one another. In another story it might not matter; here it does.
@nyrath That’s nice, yeah, particularly in that it departs from the emergent conventions of ship design in realistic sf. I like and appreciate those conventions, and hugely prefer such designs to e.g. Star Trek/Star Wars craft that fly through the void as through a displaced medium, but they do tend for obvious reasons to be of a sameness. (I really dug Syd Mead’s design of the Leonov in “2010” precisely because it demonstrated flair within a working knowledge of physics.)
@nyrath@adamgreenfield I prefer a "spinning baton" style of artificial gravity spacecraft.
Here's where I'd lament the lack of depictions of these, except there finally is one in Stowaway. Scott Manley consulted on that and he quickly prototyped a design in Kerbal.
One incidental benefit of the "baton" is that the crew module has an intuitive layout. With a cylinder or something with hoops, internal layout/navigation is far less intuitive. (And more difficult to film, if live action.)
The philosopher Ivan Illich, one of my go-to influences, died pointlessly and painfully from a tumor which could have been treated - that he could have had at least some respite from but which, in accordance with his beliefs, he refused treatment for. So we don't have to take him as gospel truth in everything. But I think he had a point about technology, and in fact complex systems more generally.
How might these technologies be made to account for themselves, in ways that ordinary people can understand? How might they be made transparent, such that their workings become subject to democratic oversight and accountability? What can you do to ensure that their operations do not abscond from the human comprehensibility and justice, including the interests of nonhuman life?
@adamgreenfield I'm glad Illich seems to be having a bit of a moment right now/again. I'm very wary of projects that seek to distribute expertise in a way that leads to what I refer to somewhere as "the burden of participation", but I also think undeniably the tech should be of, by, and for the peoples, and conviviality is a good way to conceptualize this.
My proposition to you: gay men, particularly if they identify as leather daddies, know how to age carefully and without surrendering their sexuality better than your average straight man does, and I could learn a thing or two from them.
@adamgreenfield There's a pragmatic side to it, too (deception, camouflage). In a street riot context, you can go places and be places you couldn't if you looked like you were just back from Burning Man or something.
@acousticmirror@adamgreenfield agree wtih this--there are many good reasons, not only practical, to not have one's politics have a pigeon-hole-able uniform, or to not wear it if they do
Every Sunday for the past month or so, I’ve posted threads previewing my forthcoming book “#Lifehouse” for folks who follow me here. A bunch of them asked me to make yesterday’s thread public, so they could share it with friends they thought might have an interest in it, and after some consideration that’s something I’m willing to do. So please enjoy this discussion of one of the ideas in the book I’m most hoping readers find useful: a neat little bit of social technology I call “the #pragma.”
@adamgreenfield I think this is a great idea. I mean, it's not new, but having a word, a specific way to talk about it, seems helpful. So, principals, and pragmas.
@Laura It’s not new, not at all! But I have found it very helpful, myself, to have an anchor for the idea, a way of talking about what we so often find difficult to address. I hope you find it as useful as I have.
So this is something I’ve just tripped over that tickles a certain part of my mind, that I also think a whole bunch of you would be interested in & probably have not heard of – it seems like it might be useful in mapping out the distributed functions and institutions of a local #solidarityeconomy or #circulareconomy. http://valueflo.ws
@bernini@bonfire@lynnfoster@bhaugen This, along with the thermodynamics of calculational tools at scale, constitutes my primary objection to blockchains. And it’s not like it’s working out well for the zealots either: just as I predicted six or seven years ago, the most salient decisions for crypto – the ones that fundamentally condition the space – all seem to be playing out in the very terrestrial courts code was supposed to supplant.
@adamgreenfield
I have to say, though, that the original blockchain design was brilliant. Whovever Satoshi is.
I worked in distributed consensus algos between 1998 and maybe 2001 and they were hard. Blcckchain was the first practical distributed global consensus method.
I wish more people used What3Words – I find it extremely helpful in coördinating meetups in large, potentially confusing public places (big parks, particularly busy intersections, airports, shopping centers, etc.), but folks always look at me like my head’s on backwards when I suggest it. https://what3words.com/
@jonty@Edent@philgyford@adamgreenfield One positively dangerous aspect of it I noticed recently, if you live in bilingual part of the world: The 'three words' for the same place are completely different in the two languages:
Here’s what I mean by “low-diligence”: Of the five cultures I’ve lived in as an adult, the American, Japanese, Korean and Finnish in addition to that of the British Isles, the UK is on the lower end of the scale in terms of the care and attention to detail people bring to bear on everyday tasks. As we’ve discussed before, this is true across classes, backgrounds and occupational sectors here. It’s true in the NHS, in the academy, in the trades and above all in business. I can’t explain it –
I only observe it. People you rely on for important things lose critical documents. A task that you’d expect to be done right the first time needs to be redone and then redone again. The wrong kind of emulsion is specified, or the financial support is deposited in someone else’s account, or the wrong form is filed, or the referral is lost in the mail. (These are all real examples from the past year of my life.) And when you layer brittle, overspecified and inflexible digital processes over this
Sunday! And that means it’s time for this week’s #Lifehouse thread. Last week we talked about the #pragma; this week I want to cover something that I see as at least as important to the idea of a functioning Lifehouse network or federation, which is the distinction between formal openness and a quality I think of as “invitationality.”
Where agencies like the Red Cross distributed generic aid packages impersonally, and in a manner that inscribed a vertical savior/saved relation between people, the Occupy Sandy approach started with a natural conversation. (There were other salient differences in approach, too, as you’ll see in the book, but this is the one I want to drill into today.) When OS volunteers met someone who’d been displaced or otherwise injured by the storm, they started by simply asking: “How are you doing?”
However unwise it may be to present such a broad diversity of projects and aims with such brutal schematicity, I think it’s fair to say that most “open” projects – whether Wikipedia or the open-source hardware community or even many nominally “participatory” political formations – are merely open to newcomers in a formal sense. And very often, as I’ve seen & heard directly & for myself, the convenors of some such project wonder why there doesn’t seem to be the community uptake they’d hoped for.
A good friend of mine thinks that the way I habitually structure sentences, with lots of clauses and parentheticals and so forth, is in itself diagnostic of ADHD. I find this idea intriguing.
@simon_brooke@adamgreenfield I think one way complex (as opposed to chaotic) sentence structure can come about is if you grow up reading more than socializing, since language for speech and for writing is different. But reading more than socializing can happen if you are #ASD or #ADHD (if you couldn't focus enough on conversations when you were young), so that doesn't narrow it down.
What troubles me still, a year and some after finishing “The Ministry For The Future,” is that this kind of just-so handwaving on Stan’s part was taken seriously – remains, if anything, the current gold standard for thinking through the contours of our crisis in speculative or imaginative form. But it’s ducking every question that matters, every last one.
@ttiurani No, we don’t look to fiction for strategy (or only a fool would, anyway: see “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”). My beef isn’t even with Stan, not really. He’s entitled to write whatever he wants. My beef is with the reception this book received, mostly at the time of release but even now in some quarters.
Started reading “A Half-Built Garden” a few days ago, and – apologies to those of you who’ve enjoyed it/recommended it to me – found it so awful that I haven’t gone back to it. I have detailed thoughts as to why this is, but honestly they don’t matter. Let’s just say this book is Not For Me, and leave it at that.
@cian Strangely enough, for me the best solarpunk is solarpunk "avant la lettre", that is, authors who have been crucial in shaping what we now understand as "solarpunk". I mean KSR, Ursula, etc.
Specificaly, KSR's "Ministry for the Future": more "solar", and much, much more "punk" than anything labeled as "solarpunk".
It's misguided in places, but KSR solves the problem of how to write an optimistic plot by situating a traumatic event in the first ten pages of the book, and then making all relationships between characters in the book post-traumatic.
But Chambers (and KSR) are only examples: it's a general trend.
@acousticmirror@counterapparatus@adamgreenfield i mean, cozy fic (which chambers is writing, regardless of genre) is best viewed (IMO) as a modulatory modality. makes sense that there'd be a turn in that direction over the past few years, given all the VUCA.
#Industrialmusic heads and others who would know: check out this very strange edit war on Wikipedia, revolving around the assertion that a Guadeloupean-French singer contributed to the first #ThrobbingGristle single, “United/Zyklon B Zombie.” This, to put it mildly, is news to me, and I know the history of this band fairly well. Does anyone know the story behind this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1127251549
Not yet 17, I disobeyed my parents and drove to the police barricades at the far end of Osage Avenue after nightfall, as close as I could get to the bombing – I needed to see it with my own two eyes. The overwhelming memory I carried away with me, though, was olfactory, and not visual: I promise you that nobody within a five-mile radius of West Philadelphia that night will ever quite be able to get the smell of that murder out of their nostrils. It’s 38 years gone by and it feels like yesterday.
In the wake of BLM, I feel like we may finally be getting a little better about remembering MOVE. There was a long, long time there where you’d mention it to people, and unless they’d spent time in Philly themselves, you’d invariably draw a blank. These past few years, though it was and remains incredible to me that an American police force’s murder by incendiary of six adults and five children could ever have been so completely erased, people finally seem to know what I’m talking about.
@adamgreenfield I will never forget that day. Even though the media was trying to portray them as a dangerous cult, all I could think was: they BOMBED their own city? Their own people?