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.
@kissane This is a good blog post, I agree with you especially against, basically, tech solutionism. We can't just have the right tech, we also need the right governance model (and that's actually a bootstrapping process, we can't have the right tech without considering governance at all).
A French activist, @[email protected], wrote this French-speaking blog post: ““What do we need for XXX?” “Free software!” No, an ethical form of governance!” https://blog.imirhil.fr/2017/02/21/logiciel-libre-gouvernance-ethique.html
I'd also like to point you to https://bonfirenetworks.org @bonfire. I'm very excited about this project, it's basically a modular ActivityPub server (coded in Elixir) co-funded by one of @SocialCoop's co-funders, @mayel, built to be a common, as accessible as possible (IMHO in terms of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984)). I found your publication lacked examples of “social forms”, and Bonfire provides/will provide a few: tasks creation and assignment, an inventory system (i.e. a decentralized system to sell goods and services), an events system, etc. To be honest, Facebook promised to be amazing, and journalists bought it, because they wouldn't think about criticizing their bosses' other businesses. Well Bonfire will be what Facebook never was, and it will be a decentralized, no-strings-attached, modular platform that will let developers write any affordance they'd like. For example I'm dreaming of an ActivityPub-over-Tor federation extension, i.e. federation between standard DNS-located servers, and hidden services.
Honestly I think that the internet is about as revolutionary as the printer and that we're witnessing an exhaustion effort to prevent neokings from being beheaded. Bonfire is bringing us closer to it, hopefully not to a violent revolution, but to a dialectic (overtaking?) of the workers-bosses relationships, through collaboration and cooperatives.
Bibliography:
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984): “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste”
@oceane @bonfire @SocialCoop @mayel Merci beaucoup à tous, Océane!
I hope to write more about social forms—probably too much—in future posts, and I love the idea of @bonfire. I really do think that if we make a healthy new generation of tools, they have to begin with governance both of the tools and of the institutions be build to support all the human labor that makes them work.
@kissane @bonfire @SocialCoop @mayel @bonfire
Hi, I've just found this blog post (on the Bonfire beta 😅 via @chobeat): “Fractal Software for Fractal Futures” https://fossil-milk-962.notion.site/Fractal-Software-for-Fractal-Futures-71e515597d6b424c994cae74f3341521.
Its introduction seems to describe Emacs: steep learning curve, powerful, hackable, keeping ADHD under control, etc. It's also quite verbose: for example Irreal [1] strives to make 400-500 characters blog posts and I'm trying to follow their example whenever I can.
There's especially this part that made me think you might wish to read it:
> Anthony Stafford Beer, outstanding cyberneticians, designer of Cybersyn and pioneer of modern organizational science criticized already in the 70s how computers were used exclusively to make old, manual processes and organizations go faster, instead of adapting organizations to the potential of digital tools. Fifty years later, have we really changed our approach?
Most digital systems are engineered. Some, though, are discovered, because they are based on the laws of the physical world, on some established structure in our brain, or on our social structures. One such case seems to be Notion, a popular software that keeps growing its user base. Notion can be used for personal note-taking, small and large-scale project management, no-code development, and content publication. Some people even use it to keep ADHD under control. It’s a productivity tool, a knowledge base tool, and a publication platform. Once a user moves past its beginner learning curve, albeit steep, Notion proves to be a powerful instrument, with most of its users adopting it to fit their work needs and even in their personal life.
Erin Kissane
Océane ⏚
Paul Houle