Someone suggested my thoughts align with Chantal Mouffe and so I went down a rabbithole. Part of that, and critical thinking, is also seeing what critique exists and this quickly developed into a quagmire of who exactly has the right ideas. So I’m being a bit fast and loose here, and using the general ideas as a description of what the game is hoping to help with.
Continue reading “Chantal Mouffe and my game”Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger
I mangle the quotes to tell me story. The gist is a true reflection but it’s not the exact words.
p4 – Both “our” world and the “mirror world” – the world of the conspiracy theorists, agree that post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in many different contexts. Both groups have a (p24) skepticism of elite power. p53 – The words the mirror world use are essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to many people they clearly feel true. And the reason they feel true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.
Continue reading “Notes from Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger”Connected data, connected people
In my previous post about the end of expertise, I made the point that the root concerns of conspiracy theorists are valid. The suspicion and mistrust of powerful players are valid. That, if governments and corporations are not going to make the actual shift then we need to make that shift. Everyday people must make that shift.
Here I want to add some comments about the role of structured data in making it easier to access relevant evidence, or supporting insights, and hence, maintaining accountability.
Continue reading “Connected data, connected people”Thinking about public spheres
I am interested in how the digital world, that can dissolve geographical boundaries, can help us keep governments around the world accountable, from the bottom up.
This led me to think about what democracy actually is.
Democracy is meaningful participation
Continue reading “Thinking about public spheres”Infrastructure for appropriate scale
What do I mean with appropriate scale? It’s a “how long is a piece of string” question, but to put a number on it, things that serve about 1000 to 10,000 people at a time, so, about a neighbourhood’s worth of people.
Continue reading “Infrastructure for appropriate scale”Worldbuilding the real world: build good ruins – Part 1
Make good ruins – https://dougald.substack.com/p/held-in-the-weave
The times are urgent, let us slow down – Bayo Akomolafe.
In this conversation he says “we have to find ways of listening to the world”. I agree, but find myself both intrigued and annoyed by the twee hippie hubris – “every moment is sacred”. One reason I’ve never been to, say, Africa Burn (or Burning Man, but I’m not in the US).
I don’t want this so-called modern hell-scape where we are caught in tiny gilded cages. But I don’t want the traditional, the indigenous, the primitive either. I want a transcendent middle, I want to find a middle ground that honours the scientific method, that has the tech uber-tools and toys, while catching the wonder of connecting with the earth. My current shorthand for this is tending seedlings to a kick-ass soundtrack.
Continue reading “Worldbuilding the real world: build good ruins – Part 1”Meta-communities
I’m toying with names for this “brand” I’m creating, and maybe something around a curious little beast, or pequinha fera curiosa (PFC) in Portuguese. Fera to link with feral, but also to alliterate with FOSS. The newspaper idea I still have in the back of my head has Curvy Cavy as working title, and our virtual world project is called peduncle, with a snail-type mascot, also a curious little beast. I, too, am a curious little beast.
Continue reading “Meta-communities”The End of FLOSS as we know it?!
Just as I really get into FOSS, I’m told it’s over.
Continue reading “The End of FLOSS as we know it?!”Raw highlights from Brett Scott: Cloudmoney: Why the War for Our Wallets Is a War for Our World
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59314672-cloudmoney
p15
This is the field of politics, where we make impassioned pleas for the future we want, rather than settling on a future we deem likely.
transnational demands are harder.
p17
Metaverse = ‘planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix’?
Zandvlei, Demogarchy and Bitcoin
in draft.
I used to be on the Zandvlei Protected Areas Advisory Committee (ZPAAC) for a few years. We were a group of people, both volunteers, residents in the area, and City employees tasked with managing the estuary, or ‘vlei’ in Afrikaans, hence the name. It was heavily impacted by poor design and construction choices in the 60s, in the form of the Marina da Gama estate, primarily, but also inappropriate urban density upstream, both formal and informal (backyard dwellers upstream with insufficient service delivery, and not enough toilets). So it needed constant management – rewilding was simply not an option.
Continue reading “Zandvlei, Demogarchy and Bitcoin”