Nadia Eghbal on Idea machines. Tech as a system of values, and not just an industry, is heavily driven by its subcultures and their ideologies. Where do these ideologies come from, and how do they influence what’s accomplished? cf Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress, Theory of Change (more)

Stewart Brand: We are as gods and might as well get good at it. Part of the Whole Earth manifesto. (more)

NetGuru site of stories by Steven Johnson, a tribute to innovators who set the foundations on which we build vital solutions for the modern world. Their inventions make the world run, but their stories remain hidden. Until now. Hidden Heroes uncovers unexpected connections between great human stories and technologies and ideas that are widespread public phenomena today. https://hiddenheroes.netguru.com/

book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais on choosing team patterns for your organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. ASIN:B07NSF94PC (more)

I've been in various discussions over the years about how to either create or do-better-at group-forming for support groups, collaborations, scenes, hubs/nexus, movement, or innovation, huge invention to solve grand challenges, or progress and evolution via collective intelligence and collective action... (more)

Nadia Eghbal: Out of the valley There are stories of all-powerful gods, and those of gods who are flawed. Lazy gods, reluctant gods, petulant gods, hedonistic gods who indulge themselves in the spoilings of the celestial rather than attending to earthly matters below: these stories call to us, because they remind us of ourselves. (more)

The Backward-Looking Futurism of Stewart Brand. In a new documentary about his life, We Are As Gods, the famous tech prophet looks to his—and Earth’s—past. (more)

On January 6 (Jan6), 2021, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., was stormed during a riot and violent attack against the U.S. Congress. A mob of supporters of President Donald Trump attempted to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election by disrupting the joint session of Congress assembled to count electoral votes to formalize Joe Biden's victory.[2] The Capitol complex was locked down and lawmakers and staff were evacuated while rioters occupied and vandalized the building for several hours.[25] More than 140 people were injured in the storming. Five people died either shortly before, during, or after the event.[26] Called to action by Trump,[27] thousands[28] of his supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 5 and 6 in support of his false claim that the 2020 election had been "stolen" from him,[29][30] and to demand that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Biden's victory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol (more)

Open Source Hardware Micro Controller. Arduino (/ɑːrˈdwiːnoʊ/) is an Italian open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardware products are licensed under a CC BY-SA license, while the software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL),[1] permitting the manufacture of Arduino boards and software distribution by anyone. Arduino boards are available commercially from the official website or through authorized distributors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino (more)

Alexis Ohanian 2013 book: ReddIt, SOPA, etc. http://withouttheirpermission.com/ ISBN:1455520020 (more)

Neal Stephenson book, ISBN:978-0-06-197796-1 (more)

Joshua Davila (The Blockchain Socialist): OTNS: The Rise of Coordi-Nations (Phase 2 has begun). Last month Primavera and I spent about two weeks at Zuzalu in Montenegro with a team of people from Blockchaingov and elsewhere to concretely define our network state alternative of Coordi-Nations. (more)

I Don't Want to Join a Co-Op - I want a Network Enlightenment, but I'm wary of strong ties. (more)

can be hard cost (Credit Card fees, legal fees for contracts, etc.), also other fixed costs (Shipping And Handling) (more)

"Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech", by Mike Masnick. For many years now, I’ve talked about why so many of the problems that face the current internet could be understood by looking at how we moved from an internet dominated by open protocols to one dominated by central platforms — and I continue to note that many of those problems could be solved by moving back to open protocols (with some modern additions). I first raised this idea nearly five years ago, when people were first debating how internet platforms should moderate toxic speech. It came up again last summer in the context of the various fights over “deplatforming” certain individuals. I mentioned it, yet again, earlier this year in noting that this would be the most effective way to truly create competition and “break up” the big internet platforms. I’ve hinted that I was working on a longer paper about this, and I’m happy to note that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University has now published that essay, entitled: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. (more)

Dan Hon: s17e04: You don’t want an intelligent assistant; Protocols, Not Platforms (more)

Erlend Sogge Heggen: Age of Coordination. This is a meandering piece! It's a mashup of ideas revolving around interoperability that will be a lot easier to understand if you've already read Web of the People and Assembling Community OS. (more)

Gordon Brander: Layered protocols. Following up on The Internet is Modular, and Compositional Components, Emergent Protocols, a few more thoughts on modularity, this time on layering: (more)

Profile of the Brown University Semiotics program that Steven Johnson was in. Ferdinand De Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906-11... "I was dazzled by this hope," wrote RolandBarthes, author of the ground-breaking book "Mythologies" (1957), "to give my denunciation of the self-proclaimed petit-bourgeois myths the means of developing scientifically; this means was semiology."... And though the works of semioticians were only part of a larger syllabus of recent literary and film theory, the phrase "Brown semiotics" began to take on a larger signification, one that involved expensive black clothes and European cigarettes and a certain kind of hyper-intelligent ideological refusenik." Semiotics . . . was like a Conspiracy Theory to beat all conspiracy theories," Ira Glass remembers. "It wasn't just that authority figures of various sorts did things that were questionable . . .. It's that language itself was actually a system designed to keep you in your place, which when, you know, you're 19 or 20 is pretty much exactly what you're ready to hear.".. The "problematic" with semiotics was that by becoming a means of interrogating the ideological assumptions of bourgeois pleasure, semiotics itself became a form of bourgeois pleasure. "It was like an exclusive, self-contained puzzle for super-smart, super-rich kids," recalls novelist Samantha Gillison, a Brown Classics concentrator in the 1980s... Recalling those heady days, Scholes smiles and quotes the philosopher John Wisdom: "Every day, and in every way, we're getting meta and meta.".. Steven Johnson found he had developed a prose style that sounded like he was translating himself "from the French." Meanwhile Glass, was in anguish about how to convert the theoretical "open text" he had postulated in his undergraduate thesis into something that could actually make it on the radio. "I have to say it took years to wash it away," says Glass...

Steven Johnson recommends A Symphony In The Brain by Jim Robbins during a talk about his Mind Wide Open. (NeuroScience, biofeedback)