The strangest thing to me about our social tools and networks is how super-limited their feature-sets and philosophies have been in human terms.
It feels like designing a house entirely around the best use of new light-switch technology. How can we reinvent the bathmat???
It's weird.
Like, there are near-infinite and vastly more interesting ways to think about social systems and cultural patterns!
And the biggest recent departure from the deadly boring norm was literally "upload a picture, but only when your phone tells you to"
Anyway, this has obviously turned into my Main Thing for a minute, which is fine, I'll get back to bones later.
I linked to it in my most recent blog post, but reading @bkeegan & co's paper alongside a deep-ish dive on Ostrom has been really fruitful.
"This Place Does What It Was Built For": Designing Digital Institutions for Participatory Change
@kissane Thank you for articulating this. Big centralized systems monopolize innovation and experimentation.
I am optimistic about mastodon and the like because of the opportunity for alternative design approaches. Why does everything have to be in a *feed*?
I've been experimenting with browser extensions that use my corpus of thousands of bookmarks as a database to explore, ala stumbleupon.
Erin Kissane
Jon (now at neuromatch.social)
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
Olamina Free
infinite love ⴳ
shiva