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Hey you!
It’s fall 🍁 in the northern hemisphere. I roasted some acorn squash yesterday. What a delight. Hope you’ve had warm food too.
1) Two notes from RF1 fellows:
1a) First, from Igor Mikhalev, who is building Liquifi—a community-owned automated market maker (AMM) for cryptocurrency. Imagine it like Uniswap, but with less price slippage (with an on-chain hybrid between liquidity pools and order book exchanges) and a complete fair launch (100% community-owned).
Here’s a note from Igor:
The financial system is full of industrial age institutions where rent-seeking third parties maximize their returns by owning and pooling the gains (profits, data, technology). I want to contribute to a more inclusive and fair ecosystem by building an uncensorable protocol that is decentrally governed and owned.
We could use help with marketing and also with contribution of crypto assets to our liquidity pools (which will earn governance tokens).
I’m personally excited by Liquifi because it has a unique innovation (their AMM) combined with post-capitalist structures—user ownership and a fair launch. Play with the app (on testnet!) and reach out to Igor if you’d like to help out.
1b) Second, from Alex Kennedy. Alex is an animator and video producer who is creating dynamic concept films that revive our collective imagination. He’s creating a creative agency based on gift economy principles—the Once Collective.
Alex and I initially connected to explore the possibility of him animating my piece: Marriage Counseling with Capitalism. At the very least, I’m going to host a Zoom play of the piece, which will look like this:
In addition, we’re exploring actually animating the scenes, not just having still images of the characters. See below for a simple animation example that Alex whipped up:
If Alex were to animate 4+ scenes, it would take a good chunk of his time. He (and I) are curious if y’all would support this animation. So we’re doing a lightweight Kickstarter-ish test!
In the images below, do you want the bills to ripple, the water to flow, the glasses to glow, and the dancers to spin? If you’re interested in financially supporting Alex’s animation, fill out the form here. Thanks for your honest feedback!
Whether or not this specific project gets funded, I’m excited to see Alex continue to create concept films that spark our collective imaginations.
2) This week’s podcast is #72 Lydia Laurenson, The New Modality: Chilling Effects in our Media Ecosystem. Lydia wrote a Facebook post on “why national liberal media didn’t cover May 31st 2020, the most violent day in Chicago’s history” (during the George Floyd protests). Her post received 500+ comments. We dive into how cancel culture is creating a chilling effect on media, and how that hurts poor communities.
We also chat about her countercultural magazine, The New Modality. I loved my copy of Issue #1 (especially the review of metamodernism). If you’d like to contribute to Issue #2, she’s accepting submissions here. Lydia has compiled an amazing list of topics they’d like to write articles about, including: the economics of culture, emerging spiritual schools, changes in philanthropy, civic tech, envisioning the ethical gig economy, and sci-fi. Submit!
One final note: Lydia pointed me to this amazing piece from Jo Freeman—Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood. This article was written in 1976 after Jo and others had been “trashed” by their feminist community. It is cancel culture from 50 years ago. From the piece:
I have been watching for years with increasing dismay as the Movement consciously destroys anyone within it who stands out in any way.
What is "trashing," this colloquial term that expresses so much, yet explains so little? It is not disagreement; it is not conflict; it is not opposition. Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination.
The Movement seduced me by its sweet promise of sisterhood. It claimed to provide a haven from the ravages of a sexist society. It was my very need for feminism and feminists that made me vulnerable. I gave the movement the right to judge me because I trusted it. And when it judged me worthless, I accepted that judgment.
Trashing is not only destructive to the individuals involved, but serves as a very powerful tool of social control. The qualities and styles which are attacked become examples other women learn not to follow -- lest the same fate befall them.
There is, of course, a fine line between trashing and political struggle, between character assassination and legitimate objections to undesirable behavior.
Trashing involves heavy use of the verb "to be" and only a light use of the verb "to do."
Another way to determine trashing—if your defense is dismissed with an oft-hand "How can you defend her?"; if you become tainted with suspicion by attempting such a defense; if she is in fact indefensible, you should take a closer look at those making the accusations.
What are the reasons for trashing? One reason is our circumstance: While the men are distant, and the "system" too big and vague, one's "sisters" are close at hand. Attacking other feminists is easier and the results can be more quickly seen than by attacking amorphous social institutions. People are hurt; they leave. One can feel the sense of power that comes from having "done something." Trying to change an entire society is a very slow, frustrating process in which gains are incremental, rewards diffuse, and setbacks frequent.
If you’d like to learn more about trashing, see this excellent ContraPoints video on canceling.
LINKS
1) A reader responded to a link from last week on Facebook’s response to The Social Dilemma.
I hadn’t seen Facebook’s official response until you linked to it, and found it interesting that they felt such a threat from the film that they had to issue a response like this, and interesting that you feel good about their response.
I really don’t think they’ve done enough good work to counteract the damage they’ve done in their short time on earth. I’ve been reading the huge book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that has opened my thinking to the idea that the core business model of Facebook and Google is a key root of all of these problems, so any amount of “good work” that they do doesn’t really address the actual issue of concern. Here’s a review of the book that gives some quick takeaways.
“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”
So, yes, Facebook is accurate in their PDF that they are not “selling my information to anyone” or collecting my social security number, but what they are actually doing is scarier and more intrusive than that.
Here’s a New Yorker article, “Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself”, that I’ve been thinking about this week. It covers how Facebook’s attempts to be better at moderating are missing the mark.
I agree with this reader that “it’s the business model, stupid.” Advertising business models will always look to extract time and data from users. And I love the metaphor of behavioral futures markets.
Still, I generally think social media platforms have improved over the past four years. But damn, that New Yorker article above is pretty damning. The key idea in the article is that Facebook “shields” powerful accounts from Facebook’s moderation policies. If a powerless person incited violence, they’d get removed. But if a powerful person (e.g. Trump) incited violence, no action is taken.
This is the reverse of what we want. More reach should mean more responsibility of speech.
2) I’m a bit of a sucker for, uhhhh, decent political discourse. (Coherent Pluralism!) There’s a beautiful example of this in the 1min video below:
This video is great because it shows where the candidates agree and disagree. They agree on what should be—Shared Outcomes—“democracy, liberty, justice, and a peaceful transition of power.” They disagree on how to get there and what the current state is. This aligns with Pew surveys on polarization—parties agree on what the future should look like, but not on what society looks like today.
3) The Onion: NASA Announces Moon Will Be Leaving Earth’s Orbit To Take On New Position With Bigger Planet.
JOBS / OPPORTUNITIES
MetaGov is hiring a Research Engineer to work on metagovernance standards across internet communities.
Join Benjamin Bratton and 30 interdisciplinary researchers in a 5-month research program, The Terraforming. Apply here by Nov 10.
EVENTS
Weekly Bento (recurring on Sundays)
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
I am a big fan of “texture music”. Instead of emphasizing the beat, melody, or lyrics, texture music focuses on the details of the individual sounds. It’s a bit like ASMR. Or foley. Or dubstep experimentation.
For some reason, the song titles of texture artists are often long and descriptive. Here are three:
We’ve Never Met but Can We Have a Cup of Coffee or Something
Sorry For Not Answering the Phone I’m Too Busy Trying to Fly Away
Enjoy Your Worries, May You Never Have Them Again
Here’s a playlist of some great texture music:
Listen for the water droplets, vinyl scratching, dishes clinking, full snare-snap-claps, and whispering. Also—the purring at the beginning of Rich.
Please send me your songs with especially good textures 🙂.
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
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