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!
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…?
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.
Hello. My name is Rohan Jayasekera and I am an incanter by trade and an augur by aspiration. I have little patience with theors, but have been known to enjoy their company. My main interest is in the function of what is conventionally regarded as media across Witness, its role in the formulation of contractural solutions to the media’s disputed contribution to wider society, its financing, and a study of emerging critical aethnography across the media sector.
I’m imagining a bid by Scanlonites to bypass the problems of Medium and the State Machine by creating a social media network as a direct Virtual alternative to the Actual Medium. If it was in direct competition, should a virtual version of Medium earn recognition as a minor districkt? Interested in how technological innovation’s ideas are sometimes expressed in the language of architecture, town planning and geography, and how a virtual state/nation might come into existence and then thrive (or not).
I’m writing a Wikipedia style account of it now, possibly for posting to Witnesspedia.
How free are we allowed to be with the ‘history’ of Witness. What’s ‘Canon’ and what not?
Hi, Rohan. Good question. We haven’t done a lot of thinking around the media in Witness right now, and I’d welcome thinking around it across all distrikts!
Regarding canon: every Distrikt have, at a macro level, an economy that is generally pretty canon. The rest is usually a matter of argument. So within the bounds of each different economy, what could happen? What might social media look like? I’d say that’s all wide-open space. What have you got?
This is for everyone thinking about ergodicity, which I had never heard of before pitching up here.
Kindly take my non-ergodic perspective that you will all ergodicially like this blog on the subject and laugh out loud at one of its key lines of evidence (“Five out of six russian roulette players recommend it as a fun & profitable game”). I did at least, but I am not speaking for the rest of you, which is the lesson, I guess.
I am enough of a nerd that I was slightly annoyed at the imprecision. It contains a confusion between Russian roulette players and Russian roulette games. Five out of six games are indeed won, but the proportion of players that can recommend it is 5/6 if, and only if, each player plays exactly one game in the course of her life. If that were not the case, and the funny statement would be correct, Russian roulette would be ergodic.
Greetings, one and all! I am Simon Grant, already known to several Edgeryders, with a looooong history of interdisciplinary and inter-perspectival work. Right now, a couple of things on my mind…
Linking up non-institutional research networks. We probably all have our complaints about established academia – I certainly do, as a long-term recovering “academic” – but it is fairly clear to me that the way to transcend institutional academia is to provide a viable, widespread, peer-to-peer alternative. Happy to talk about this.
Knowledge Commons. This is closely related. I see the need for commoning practices which care for a sense of quality and intellectual rigour that is more fluid than that in the establishment world, and even more powerful, not less so. Worth contextualising this immediately, to say that intellectual rigour can only be achieved, in my view, alongside emotional responsibility and maturity, and not (as some intellectual traditions seem to tacitly imply) by abandoning the emotions and in particular the heart, and the perspective of love.
At the practical technical level, none of the currently available wiki software that I have seen does what is needed to support this knowledge commons. I’m not a software developer myself, but understand enough of it and have dabbled enough with code to be able to have meaningful conversations about how this might be done.
People here are more than welcome to connect. I find it helpful to start with one-to-one conversations, to relate world views and perspectives, and to see what we can offer each other, as well as the greater collective.
My name is Jo, and I’m a fiction writer, poet, game designer, editor, and humanities researcher, whose relevant interests include workplace democracy, governing the commons, decoloniality, transformative justice, and money and metrics. I think I’d like to be a theor but I’ve got a lot of incanter-type emails in my inbox.
Here are two worldbuilding-type experiments of mine:
Hey
I’m Nobody, and I am extremely out of my depth. I’ve never done anything like this before, I feel like I’m not supposed to be here and I haven’t even done my GCSEs yet. Make of that what you will.
Although I’m still a teenager, I’m an aspiring theor and often stare blankly into the void (who knows what I’m thinking) or bore my friends with bizzare ramblings. My favourite philosopher is Franz Kafka and my favourite book is The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. I’d really recommend it!
I love philosophy, ethics, fiction and music and I play guitar. My favourite colours are blue and grey.
I’m definitely running out of things to say, probably because I’m inexperienced and unskilled compared to everyone else here. Hopefully I can still help with this a bit because it’s a really awesome project!
(part of me is screaming “back out and leave this to people who actually know what they’re doing”. I’m not paying any attention it as per usual)
Well… welcome to the club, @Nobody. We are all way out of our depth, as we aspire to understanding and even engineering system change when all Very Serious People claim that There Is No Alternative.
But hey, this is not so much about a bunch of people being particularly good at anything, it’s more about some work that needs doing.
