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Hey you!
1) First off, wishing you self-love during this week ❤️. I modified my favorite COVID fox for the election. Hope it’s helpful :).
2) Podcast this week: #73 Lauren Gawne: Internet Linguistics, New Emojis, and ConLangs. Lauren is an amazing internet linguist who focuses on gestures. Three of her emojis will be in Unicode 14.0: peeking face, palm down mic drop, and palm up offering.
My biggest learning from Lauren was how internet communities use language to signal in-group dynamics. In real life we signal with clothes, speech, and location. But on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. How do you find “your people” on Twitter? With language—the words you use.
This made me think of a book I just finished: Strange Rites, New Religions for a Godless World. This book is about how old institutional religions are being replaced by new intuitional religions like techno-utopianism, social justice activism, and the intellectual dark web. (I think I’m like 50% tech, 30% SJA, 20% IDW. What about you?)
One focus of the book is the language that emerges from these communities:
Techno-utopianism: Positive-sum, the quantified self, optimizing, cuddle puddles, data-driven, steelmanning, compersion, rat, post-rat, hackers, builders
Social justice activism (SJA): woke, checking your privilege, intersectionality, BIPOC, LGBTQIAA+, they, my pronouns, antiracism, gender, lived experience, triggered, microaggression, appropriation
Intellectual dark web (IDW): red pilled, an hero, kek, incel, cancel culture, DYOR, Pepe, censorship, free speech
There are no clear boundaries between these categories. Some folks in techno-utopianism wouldn’t want to be associated with Burning Man. And SJA might want to distance from “woke”. The IDW is in a weird slippery slope place—I love some adjacent thought (~GameB) but it can also get pretty alt-right-y.
That brings me to a great report released this week from Mozilla Fellow Emmi Bevensee, The Decentralized Web of Hate. It covers how the radical right uses decentralized, permissionless, peer-to-peer technology. And, how the p2p community is stopping the radical right. I love this report because it shows how tech may be “neutral”, but the community (humans!) can combat negative uses of technology. For example:
Mastodon hardcoded anti-Gab filters.
@NeonaziWallets tracks BTC transactions of white supremacists
Secure Scuttlebutt signals their non-alt-right-ness with a queer love story on their landing page:
These are examples of libertarian paternalism-based friction, or what Emmi called “Community As Immunity”. TCP/IP provides permissionless bits transport, which has enabled a thousand flowers to bloom. (Libertarian!) However, some of those flowers are negative (alt-right). By decreasing SEO, post reach, and developer resources, we can add enough friction to stop those negative communities from continuing. (Paternalism!)
LINKS
1) A reader sent me this Twitter thread which has strong Nacirema vibes:
2) What Working At Stripe Has Been Like. I’m a sucker for Stripe content, especially from @patio11. Some of my favorite quotes:
I cannot say this enough: pick your peer group wisely because you’re giving them write access to both your conscious thoughts and your entire worldview.
Pick a peer group where ambition in the service of humanity is seen as positive and where actual progress is seen as achievable.
Silicon Valley was a place. It has become a metonymy for a community of practice. You can find outposts of Silicon Valley in Tokyo cafes, in WeWorks in Bangalore, and on the coast of Cape Town.
The returns to pushing your cadence to faster are everywhere and they compound continuously, for years. A stupendous portion of Stripe’s advantage is just consistently choosing to get more done. It’s the Charge More of management strategy; the upside is so dramatic, the cost so low, and the hit rate so high that you should just invoke it ritualistically.
[On Stripe’s biz model] I believe that Stripe likely has another trick to play, which plausibly includes a loop on top of this one, where Stripe will perhaps index on the number and success of companies which index on the number and success of their customers, where those customers are structurally equivalent to B2B SaaS companies, who index on the number and success of their customers.
That last paragraph is a bit confusing out of context. patio11 is saying that Stripe’s business model will eventually be: providing internet payment infrastructure to companies that provide infrastructure for B2B SaaS companies.
Anywho, in summary: hang with ambitious folks and bias towards action.
3) The Onion: Man Falsely Imprisoned For 24 Years Granted Permission To Serve Out Remainder Of Term In New “Wrongfully Accused” Wing
JOBS / OPPORTUNITIES
Positive Money is a UK-based non-profit focused on making the banking system more equitable. They’re hiring an Interim Executive Director.
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
Eh, I guess I’ll share some Election Week songs. Four songs about Trump:
Great Again is a pro-Trump song. tbh, I find it pretty damn catchy. It’s a good example of the new country-rap genre.
FDT (Fuck Donald Trump) is amazing, obviously.
Trumplar is by Pogo, therefore I must love it, and so I do.
Trumpsta was released in 2013. Prescient af.
Playlist of these tracks below:
Also, last week I shared some “texture music”. A reader responded with their favorite texture music album: Balam Acab’s Wander/Wonder.
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
❤️ Thanks to my generous patrons ❤️
David Hanna, Benjamin Bratton, Jessica Polka, Michael Groeneman, Haseeb Qureshi, Todd Youngblood, Jim Rutt, Zoe Harris, Yancey Strickler, Jacob Zax, David Ernst, Jonny Dubowsky, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Samuel Jonas, Andy Cochrane, Malcolm Ocean, Ryan Martens, John Lindmark, Collin Brown, Ref Lindmark, James Waugh, Mark Moore, Matt Daley, Jeff Snyder, Mike Goldin, Chris Edmonds, Peter Rogers, Darrell Duane, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, and Katie Powell.