Freewriting 6/4/21
by: Dave Gorum
- type: Freewrite Journal
- near: Kristen and Jon
- loc: Playa La Mision
I think perhaps being in the repo as much as we have is making me jumpy. Getting my hacking feet back under me. The wild pile of info and not feeling like I can organize it or make heads or tails of the interconnected nature of things in text makes me flip out. The nice thing is how comfortable Jon, Kristen, and CJ are with this kind of work. I’ve been doing the bare minimum with the styling and formatting of my ten posts. Slowly easing into things. Allowing myself to not overdo it. To simply try and engage. My instinct is this approach will give me material to rejigger, to connect up, to shape. I found myself with a lot bad habits on this front toward the end of my building career. Trying to do too much all at once in a frenzy. Slowing down, working on intentionality, trusting the process, trusting my peers.
Talked to Jon and Kristen some about evolving the work style I used primarily for the past 20 years. I framed it as moving from solo, fast, intense, idiosyncratic heavy lifting to a collaborative, slower, messier, emergent style. Which is only partially true. My work with Jason was extremely collaborative. We shared a mind and a great deal of trust. Very often, especially early days it was great fun. Where it broke down for me was believing the collaboration was more individualistic than otherwise. Fame, credit, even in small doses can be toxic to a mind overly concerned with such things. Especially one unable to work with its insecurity. Some wisdoms come hard.
A pitch is showing up (just sorta piecing together a potential reality here). A concept where builder folks with a puddle of money offer some monthly gift of that money to prop up a building space. Where craft-minded builders can come of their own accord and play with each other. A path of volunteerism because it’s the most fun to do, then communal covering of the continuation of the effort by offering a basic creative income. Terms of the game. Similar to tenure in academia? Other such models? Small scale experiments? Term limits? Further engagement in collaborative profit and redistribution methods. Shared staking on a future. Set stable return on capital tied to labor? Downsides there. Decentralized studio governance. Max return on financial investor-peer contributions. The ideal for builders is helping in whatever means to keep the dream building itself. Offering a financial gift should grant the gift giver access to community of play as a peer and the ability for other peers to participate. How should the culture appreciate the generosity? Definitely not in a pay to play sense. Further understanding of debt and obligation necessary. Social design.
The aspirational person is generous in service to the continuation of play but also eager to engage in play as a peer without the trappings of credit and praise. This humility takes work to develop and can only do so with a healthy culture. Methods for social norming around centered, healthy generosity can emerge through the enactment of play. Pitfalls on either side of this generosity will require rebalancing as play continues through various eras of the game. Unchecked insecurity can produce ill-effects in the collaborative. Most obvious now are various types of expectations of return on generosity. Either in status, power, attention, or other scarcity. A lot more to understand here. Might be an upper end on the scale of such systems, but the aspiration is depth at scale. Forkable models eager to share learnings as an underpinning of practice can go a long way with this kind of thing.
Can try to take a run at ebook annotations on the iPad with the 5000 years of debt book. We’re adding an annotation layer to buzzard and I’d like the practice. Getting more and more comfortable sharing my building understanding. Finding it very scary fun. The value in easily accessed, clear methods of shared learning cannot be understated. Developing social norms around the good faith collaborative learning and publishing endeavor is an essential part of this value. The tooling must underpin an ethos. A sort of moral engine. Learning as a distributed mind. Tooling to aide this process-practice. A playful environment suitable to the vulnerability necessary for the growth of understanding. Technology mediated communication mechanisms to offset the difficulty of coordination. A type of psychotech studio.
Rough Relational OS UI idea: Default recording of the data of relational information session. Open any interfaces and record what was open at what page or time stamp with any app. Okay, so left panel is the media (page, section, time stamp). Right panel is annotation (text, image, video, audio). Let the OS keep track of where you are. If that’s a given (a big given) then what does that environment afford? Some first order design fiction to play with this concept. Expand. Glimmers of flows here.