Meet the Worldbuilders

Sæl og blessuð. I’m Hugi - I have a very hard time defining myself (excuse me, my millennial is showing) but I will try. Here are 11 facts about me.

  • I was born in Iceland, grew up in Stockholm, and lived in China for a couple of years in my very early adulthood.
  • Most of my life and work has been in co-created and participatory settings. In fact I often joke that I have no idea how to do anything else. By this point I have been a central node in participatory art projects and festivals, participatory politics, co-created placemaking, open-source software development, open networked companies and even dabbled with a co-created religion.
  • I grew up watching everything from Start Trek to Farscape, and reading everything from Stephenson to Le Guin.
  • At 15 I moved to Kiruna to attend space high-school.
  • I sometimes develop software and do data analysis.
  • As one of the co-directors of Edgeryders, I am also an admin of this platform and responsible with by fellow directors for keeping the lights on.
  • I am a recovered rational skeptic and now readily resort to both tarot and magic when the situation requires.
  • One text that has influenced me immensely is the essay (and book) Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad.
  • I studied biotechnology engineering and bioinformatics at university.
  • I co-founded and co-manage the community center Blivande in Stockholm.
  • I have kept a playlist for 20 years, adding my 10-20 most listened songs from every year. As I’m 32, this goes back to the pre-mp3 era and I had to retrofit the first few years from mixtapes I remembered when I compiled it the first time.

Up to now my biggest contribution has been proposing and fleshing out the distrikt of Avantgrid, as well as building the website and doing outreach for the project.

As an aethnographer I am mostly an incanter, with an interest in the art of the augur.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: On Hygge, ergodicity economics and Risk Bushido

5 posts were split to a new topic: On Hygge, ergodicity economics and Risk Bushido

¡Hola a todos!

I’m an undergraduate student of Aethnography; just today, I’ve got my first instruction on REDR. I’m so stoked to continue my training and learn more!

Ok, a little bit about me, I respond to the name of Arturo. I’m an earthling. Before moving to Witness, I have lived in Spain, Perú, and Sweden. Nowadays, I live in Stockholm, and I work remotely designing and building highly available distributed systems.

I hold a master’s degree in computer science, and my interests in that field are many: compilers, languages, distributed systems, network protocols, opensource software, operating systems, cryptography, cryptocurrencies, etc.
I’m quite influenced by the vibrant philosophy of writing and sharing software from the '70s. Those romantic hackers lighted up the flame of the open-source movement (GNU, Linux, etc.) and imbued my heart-mind with some hippie-ness.
I currently don’t work with open-source projects, but that philosophy has opened the door to participatory culture to me. Perhaps, that is how I ended up living in a communal house with 50 other individuals, participating in burning-man inspired events, or sharing office space with both intellectuals and artists at Blivande in Frihamen.

I have many other interests, perhaps not as developed as my career interests (I used to be a workaholic), but I’m catching up little by little. Among them, I like to sketch, draw, paint, write, or build stuff. Any creative endeavor that sparks a thought of a project interests me.

With regards to Witness, right now, I’m exploring the city, learning about it, and with this post starting to contribute to it. I haven’t planned any particular thing or action I would like to do yet. But I’m feeling for using Witness as the background and setting for future artistic projects. For instance, I’ve been fantasizing for a little while about the idea of making a short movie. Perhaps Witness becomes the setting for this short film. Let’s see where I end up.

Regardless of the outcome, I wanted to praise the work you’ve put on this and thank you for setting the Witness foundations. I’m looking forward to exploring more, learn about the districts, and perhaps contribute with some entries in the Witnesspedia.

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Welcome to Witness! I think there’s tons of cool stuff you can add here - for example, the Microgrid Collective feels like it would be right up your alley. You’ll run into them in entries all over Witness, including the Assembly and the History of Witness, but we don’t know much about them at the moment. Want to help us discover more about them?

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Welcome then, @darkturo!

That’s the spirit. I was just thinking that Sun Tzu is at the natural intersection of REDR and Risk Bushido, eh, @yudhanjaya?

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Totally. If Sun Tzu had been an economist he’d have been the godfather of the field.

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Let’s take this one step further: The Art of War is game theory, but non-ergodic. Good commanders are conservative, because they know there are no parallel universes in which to re-run the campaign with some changes: if they suffer a serious defeat in this universe, all is lost. This is also a nice intuitive example of non-ergodic thinking (which Peters, annoyingly, would call “ergodicity economic thinking”). @petussing would like it, I think. :slight_smile:

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Sun Tzu is one of my heroes - up there with Macchiavelli

My name is Frank. I am a public administration professional with a broad experience in the field of strategic policy as well as public management. Besides that I am a transitionist with a degree in leisure sciences. As kid and young adult I was brought up on a steady diet of writers like Shakespeare, Kafka, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Harris, Terry Brook and Frank Herbert.

Upon arriving in Witness, I was classified as an incanter with a strong augur drive although I can thoroughly enjoy a theors discussion, especially in the field of community-empowerment, sociology and state.

I would be willing to help people with insights from sociology, transition- and leisure sciences. Simply put, predicting what pushes people into action and how to gear energy towards sustainable change. Besides that I am wandering around in Witness’ history and present to look and describe hidden disruptive elements in each Distrikt as I believe that each new balance and order will – in the end – bring forth its own disruption.

Looking forward to work with you all.

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Welcome to Witness, Frank! There’s a lot of sociology (and narratives around transition) that we’ll need your help with. In fact, we’re just sorting out a fork right now.

You’re referring to Hygge?

He is, Frank. Early days Hygge split in a social-democratic distrikt (market economy; aggressive redistribution, with economic inequalities a top problem; and a Modern Monetary Theory approach to running public expenditure and the currency) and a full planned-economy distrikt à la Red Plenty. Problem there is: can we imagine a social and economic asset whereby people would accept top-down economic allocation, even when that allocation is not the one they desire?

This is a static-vs-dynamic problem, by the way: it is easier to imagine a planned economy that works reasonably well, and most people accept it on those grounds, than to imagine it being introduced, and being accepted before it has a chance to work reasonably well for most people most of the times.

Merhaba esteemed knowledge tourists,

I’m Eireann, a risk by way of cyber crime researcher.

It’s hard to fit in these boxes, but I see all the rest of you trying to explain your past, and it gives me courage to try.

I was a early entrant poison ivy school dropout in Psychology and Philosophy in the 90s. I tried my best, but ran out of money for education in Bush’s America. So I drifted in the ‘You can’t win’ tradition across the USA as a dishwasher and landscaper, through the rust belt and my twenties.

I got a grip and a rucksack and tried my British (European at the time) passport on for size with a move to Scotland (maybe again?) at the turn of the millenium. There I retrained in Engineering and AI, with a focus on security for energy systems. I have a deep love of distributed and highly resilient infrastructure that tempts me to be an incanter, but I am probably on the border of augur and theorist.

I am an armchair economist because studying hacking and cyber crime have forced me to be. I have not yet turned my hand to writing fiction, but I do write essays and academic papers, and once a book on cyber risk.

I will be keen to think about alternative models of infrastructure provision and economics. How can citizens run and fix and innovate their own infrastructures? Electricity, water, sanitation, telecommunications, transport…all so centralised, and often non-participatory, fragile, opaque, invisible. How could it be different, and funded differently?

In my spare time I worry about the environment, forage, work an allotment, and practice natural navigation and hiking. I’m a parent of a SEN child, and a bilingual toddler, so let’s be honest: I don’t have spare time.

I am still learning.

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Welcome, @eireann_leverett! I had no idea you were interested in economics. But yes, understanding alt-econ has become a more pressing need, lately. Are you free tomorrow, Feb 23? You might enjoy the brief-and-discussion on Mazzucato’s Mission Economy that @yudhanjaya, @petussing and I have set up.

Welcome, Eireann!

How can citizens run and fix and innovate their own infrastructures? Electricity, water, sanitation, telecommunications, transport…all so centralised, and often non-participatory, fragile, opaque, invisible. How could it be different, and funded differently?

This is a problem that both the Assembly and Avantgrid grapple with - both in different ways: one focuses on communities, and the other is more libertarian in nature. If you’re interested in highly resilient, decentralized infrastructure, that people can set up and maintain, your thoughts would be more than welcome there!

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A great place to start my flanuering then. Thanks for pointing out a good first walk.

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One thread ripe for picking in Avantgrid are the leads left by @zaunders

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My dears, is there any chance to get a paper-copy of this? Even a generic, print-on-demand Amazon KDP would be far easier for me to read from start to finish than a pdf…?

Hi OmaMorkie,

I have sent you the first paper we published on this with the link to the webinar. We won’t be putting it on paper yet, though.
For the rest, it changes so quickly that it would be old before you received it. But at one point we may publish the summary.
If you have a proposal on how to make the material easier to read on the site or the platform, please share and we will see if we can improve it somehow.