https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/18/the-exhausted-raccoons-of-the-resistance-are-running-an-antifarsonist-self-care-workshop

Hooray! Now I know who antifa really is!

Good Hidden Brain this morning about the interaction between the amoral universe and our ideas of right and wrong. Occurs to me that this is why we personify the former as deities, so we can attribute agency to them rather than powerlessness.

While I’ve heard about and read opinions about it, I’ve never actually read the document. It’s quite enlightening.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282

This is a clever idea. Forum software that runs AI over comments, finding and graphically displaying “knots” of agreement and highlighting comments that bridge across those knots; the result is to discover and show areas of consensus, rather than focus on areas of disagreement. Built by people in Seattle.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform

And the link to the software: https://pol.is/home

“Senate votes to approve whomever Trump nominates to speed the process”. Vote first, nominate later. Much more efficient.

Further to the last post: this is pretty cool. I like how they re-housed some of these circuits in old VHS plastic boxes: brilliant! and easy!

https://mel.myturn.com/library/

http://www.bollier.org/blog/medialab-prado-applying-open-source-ethic-civic-innovation

This is an organization that’s part maker-space, part poitical-science, that prototypes processes for civic life. It solicits ideas for projects, sends a call for participation; the participants get together and hammer out what an actual implementation might look like, build it, run it, document it, share it. Projects include things like: how to visualize the food chain in ways to allow people to make intelligent decisions about consumption, how to make taxis more usable. They prototyped the idea of participatory budgeting, now in use around the world.

To do this, they have several labs: a data lab, where they pursue ways of utilizing and creating open datasets, fab labs and maker spaces, to prototype and build physical objects needed for various projects, an AV lab to experiment with ways of presenting/”performing” the results of these projects in meaningful ways (beyond slides and lectures), citizen science lab, participation lab, neighborhood labs, a lab specifically for prototyping interaction between the public and government officials/elected representatives.

They’ve been on this for 10 years, supported by their city (Madrid) and a few other entities, public and private. They envisage their job as trying out processes for public-commons interactions, rather than the prevailing public-private (which means public-business) partnerships and citizens interacting in a city primarily as consumers. They see a plethora of public physical spaces (libraries, museums, …) available for this sort of interaction, but without the process infrastructure that the lab is experimenting with. In a meta sort of way, they’re now putting what they’ve learned about building this sort of organization in a MOOC, unfortunately only in Spanish for now.

I’ve taken time away from work over the past few months to contemplate my navel, thinking about what useful thing I could spend my energy on for the next few years. I thought about a makerspace/gallery for installation art and music along the lines of The Lab in SF or STEIM in Amsterdam. Following this thread led me to the Musical Electronics Library in NZ, something I have to pursue.

But Medialab-Prado seems much more interesting (if misnamed – should be “CityLab” or something). Applying the same principles to experimenting with mechanisms for civic engagement, and the process itself changes the way people interact, as the podcast points out. This is really interesting to me. Check out the podcast.

It’s interesting to contrast this with the traditional think-tank, an assemblage of industry-funded experts with very little regular-people input that generates output from thought experiments. One thing I learned from graduate school in music, that the actual process of implementing a piece results in a very different understanding of its underlying ideas than that gained from just conceiving it, and that the deeper, perhaps contradictory ideas often come from the interaction between the participants while building and performing it. Prototyping and implementation beat design.

Why is this resonating with me right now? It’s got to be partly because of the breakdown of civic life in the country I’m in, and the dawning understanding that it’s been engineered to be this way. From the place de Tocqueville describes, constructed on civic engagement (a bit pollyana-ish, to be sure), to a corporate oligarchy where everyone feels powerless. Of course, it hits all the stuff I was contemplating about makerspaces as well, and provides one answer to my nagging sense that music/art is a pretty useless and narcissistic activity, in the way the lab conceives the arts as a means to communicate new ideas.

From a reference from Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#22_September_2020_(Giving_away_control_to_Corporations) that points to a Ralph Nader article in Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/09/19/why-do-americans-give-away-so-much-control-corporations) which referenced a blog by a chap called David Bollier (http://www.bollier.org/), who has a blog post about it (reference in the first paragraph).

This and this project massive migration within the US from the South and center to the Northwest and Northeast, switching on a dime when unsustainable state and federal backstops to the insurance industry stop and people can’t continuously rebuild in the same damaged places, and some areas (Louisiana, New Mexico) are projected to become literally incapable of supporting life or crops. The rapid influx of people to places like Vermont, Washington State, North Dakota will severely stress those areas’ ability to cope, too, and the places they leave will be left as home to the old, sick and poor.

Hey, Jeff, hold onto your 20 acres. It’s going to be worth a hell of a lot more soon.

https://quillette.com/2020/09/13/the-failure-of-fusionism/

The basic point: Schumpter-ist “creative destruction”, around which ideas of the free market work, imply risk for the regular guy. Companies rise and fall, entrepreneurs try and fail and try something else, the system continually and auto-magically adjusts to divert resources to where they’re needed (and takes them away from where they’re less productive). This is inherently a risky setup for the regular guy; no guarantees, no security.

On the other hand, the conservative outlook, which prizes stability and the tried-and-true. The article describes the adoption of a “Fusion-ism” by the right-wing political parties around the globe, which was constructed from a reaction against the top-down economies of the Communist states leading to a wholesale adoption of free markets (Thatcher, Reagan) married to a social outlook that prized maintenance of the status quo. But the social status quo is the first to go when liberal economics is embraced wholesale (globalization, zero-hour contracts, automation, …) so the marriage is increasingly untenable. Conservatism reverts to type when it ditches the economics and devotes all its energy to preserving things in aspic, or reverting to some idealized long-ago.

Seems obvious when you look at it. The more risk a given experiment takes, the less likely that the experiment will be performed. Isn’t the solution to mitigate the risk, while embracing the freedom? As individuals, we feel more in a position to take economic risks when we have a solid economic platform from which to move. If we are living on the edge, we’re going to be as risk-averse as possible. Therefore, as a society, if we want to encourage the flowering of the new that happens when people try things, shouldn’t we be putting in place good safety nets that provide everyone with a solid platform from which to experiment? The less sufficient the safety net, the more risk-averse everyone will become and the more mired in the present and the past the society will remain. Isn’t that why countries like the Scandahoovian nations, New Zealand, Germany and so on are where the American Dream is living now?