metaverse – Page 3

5 September 20235 September 2023

The end of expertise: two routes with similar roots

.The idea for my metaverse project, peduncle, was born during the extreme drought in Cape Town around 2016, when a city of more than 4 million people were about to run out of water. It was a combination of climate change and mismanagement, but how we as scientists and engineers responded to it was, to me, equally inadequate than the people in power.

This threw me into an identity crisis about myself as a scientist and engineer – an “expert”. Someone shared Lesley Green’s article and I realised what I am dealing with inside myself is part of a bigger crisis: “the end of expertise”.

5 September 20235 September 2023

Worldbuilding the real world: build good ruins – Part 2

Part 1 is here: https://indiebio.co.za/worldbuilding-the-real-world-build-good-ruins-part-1/

The first part concluded that we need to build from the bottom, that top-down, expert-led action is not enough anymore, that community work of everyday is the resilience we need to thrive in these interesting times.

When we pursue bottom up design and implementation, these still need to be guided by common principles that comes from a higher view – so yes, there is still space for urban planners, government, but it becomes more of a conversation. How can we imagine and visualise this, as a global community of communities? Metarkitex talks about public space in the digital world, and asks do these public spaces exist online? Are they accessible and welcoming to everyone?

Public space developed to a space where people can go without aim or arrangement

This post continues with clips from an interview with Vandana Shiva and Dougald Hine.

14 August 202313 November 2023

Write-up, research outline try 2.

Here I’ve been trying to write a story with the headings, understandable to everyday people, assuming that the body will have the meaty academic content.

We are in crisis, and we need to act with some urgency.

There are two ways to act in crisis, and these are currently in tension.

The first way is to rely on traditional expertise, which is a “command and control strategy”, it is top-down. Experts say things and the rest of us do the things.

The second way is to do it ourselves, as a community, we just get in and do it.

10 August 202313 November 2023

Research outline

I am starting formal research about the community aspect of peduncle. Something about the end of expertise in a context of managing urban resources in a sociology of risk. I felt stuck so I wrote all the little things that I consider important on sticky notes and tried to group them. This is a first pass at the story that emerges.

Core values: curiosity, ethic of care, end of expertise, scenius (genius of scenes), interfaces, spaces between (outside and within), plurality?

10 June 202310 June 2023

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.

26 May 20234 September 2023

Highlighting good posts to show what I mean when I say “metaverse”

I’m not getting around to write the good blogs, so for now here’s a link dump on things I think would work well in a metaverse context.

30 March 202311 April 2023

Earth sciences and the metaverse

I don’t know why it took me as long as it did to figure out that it’s not really the geospatial layer per se I am interested in, but the multitudes of earth science layers on top of that. Doh. Geospatial is, to my mind, attempting to use technology to see what various aspects of the world looks like, but it’s a bit static. It looks at what is. I want to see what moves, and how they play together, what changes. My current thinking is maybe this is called earth sciences? This means I must revisit everything! Which is fine, I was so stuck that this will be inspiring. 🙂

9 March 20235 September 2023

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.

8 March 202311 March 2023

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.

18 February 20238 March 2023

World-building the real world part 2b: The … other … why: Changing the default civilisation.

I am so tired of being powerless. Of having my agency crumpled up and thrown back in my face. Of having this futile fight against badly run countries and corporates.

I feel that the whole notion of “a country” with physical borders is outdated. Why get screwed over just because of where or what colour you were born? We have the internet. Surely we can do better. So if we don’t need countries, and we don’t want corporates, what other sort of grouping would work? Can we go live in the metaverse?