Work-in-progress. Might change the format.
2022-06-28 journal
- iffybooks' zines are great. Discovered via the permacomputing wiki, which I discovered via alex's capsule.
- Sucks to be in a country without protection for basic rights. Liberal democracies justify their regimes by promising to protect basic rights, even when a majority wants to strip them from a minority. I wonder if support for liberalism will decline in the coming months and years.
2022-05-16 lab6 zine is great
The lab6 zine is wonderful. I'm curious what individual or collective drives it.
The most recent issue (02) leads with an article titled "A Gemini-PDF polyglot". The issue itself is valid gemtext and a valid PDF. Cool trick.
2022-02-07 "new riff on LLCs"
À propos Moloch DAO, there's a reasonably measured piece in The Atlantic on Web3. It includes this bit:
"Decentralized autonomous organizations—described by some as an internet community or a group chat with a shared bank account—are perhaps the most interesting application of blockchain technology, but I still struggle to see how they aren’t just a new riff on LLCs. Many of them also seem chaotic."
Beware the FOMO Bullies of Technology by Charlie Warzel
2022-01-05 Notes on Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (№ 1 of N)
Black studies is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution on its edge; its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth. [from Stolen Life]
Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. [from Stolen Life]
Moten and Harney are known for their unapologetic criticism of the contemporary university. Moten addresses this in a few places, including in a 2018 interview with Mark Anthony Neal (at 30 minutes)[1], where he dates the beginnings of the "liquidation of the [United States?] university as an intellectual institution" to the 1980s. The university's technocratic coercion, in particular, draws their ire. ("Technocratic coercion" might be a good synonym for one of the key things they unequivocally oppose, what they label elsewhere "policy".) They also ask why it's so difficult to have enlightening discussions in a place ostensibly designed to facilitate them. (The interview at the end of The Undercommons book explores this idea.)
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFTkoZTFd1k
Instead we should, Moten says, "renew our habits of assembly" (in the words of Manolo Callahan). Moten suggests we engage in study, an (intentionally?) ill-defined open-ended speculative practice (conceptually, perhaps the opposite of "policy"?).
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Pieces from Stolen Life are quoted in David Wallace's 2018 New Yorker piece on Moten.
2021-12-14 Notes
Things like flounder
For future reference. Here's Alex's list of sites like flounder:
Big list of small web services
The significant ones to me (right now) are flounder, bearblog, and ichi.city. plan.cat also looks good. I think I care most about the re-use of older, established technologies. The service should also make it easy to avoid the web browser. (Why do I like bearblog then? I suppose I like the clarity of the framing of the service.)
The finger services seem like they need a separate discussion. Here I'm just thinking about things that are like flounder.online -- i.e., offering gemlog or blog space.
I do like that ichi.city lets you create an account without approval. I do not like that it uses a non-foss service to facilitate this.
Miscellaneous
Looked at a few seconds of this Jenny Odell talk. Looks good.
Jenny Odell: Technologies of Seeing
Amfora in the browser. Very nice. Finally a use for JavaScript. (I'm assuming this uses wasm.) I wonder how this works. (Can one do sftp in the browser?)
Tildes looks good. Found via an odd search.
2021-12-01 When there's no funding for valuable scientific research...
Read a bit of advice for PhD students yesterday that got me thinking. Here are the pieces of advice:
1. Find people you like to work with and prioritize who you are working with as much as what you are working on
2. Work on things you care about, even if it isn't typical or what you think others expect
3. Try to find places to work where funding aligns with what you like or want to do
An important bit of information here is that this advice is from a biostatistician. Research in biostatistics frequently receives funding from governments, corporations, and foundations.
I'm more interested in the third piece of advice. It recommends finding places to work that support research you find valuable. For me, this piece of advice begs the question: what if you can't find such a place? What if the research you want to do isn't funded much at all?
Governments historically funded research that helped the military or industry in some way. To a certain extent, this is still the case. Medical research gets funded, at least in part, because domestic drug companies and hospitals are an important part of the economy.
The problem is most obvious if your research will hurt the domestic economy or the interests of political or financial elites. For example, in the United States it's comparatively difficult to get funding documenting the harms of coal mining or the physical and psychological harms generated by the tech industry. It's far, far easier to get support for research that helps the military or hospitals in some way.
I wish the advice offered by this biostatistician were addressed to a wider audience.
2021-11-20 Uses of Moloch DAOs
Discovered the Moloch DAO via a recent online conference.
Read the whitepaper and the official documentation after watching the first two talks from the conference if you want to understand why this is so interesting. (Ignore anything not about Moloch DAO Version 1; there are many imitators and clones with similar names.)
Two things to keep in mind during your reading. Moloch DAO is punk, or at least it was at one point. Also, a Moloch DAO is a kind of corporate entity, like an LLC or C-Corp. But the first Moloch DAO is, unfortunately, called "Moloch DAO". It's as if the first LLC was called "LLC". Super confusing. Going forward I'll use 𝕄𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕔𝕙 𝔻𝔸𝕆 to refer to the first Moloch DAO.
The following assumes you've read the Moloch DAO Whitepaper and understand the difference between a Moloch DAO (Version 1) and the 𝕄𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕔𝕙 𝔻𝔸𝕆.
A Moloch DAO, as the whitepaper suggests, is a method of solving a specific coordination failure that results in the underinvestment in public goods. The underinvestment in public goods phenomenon is very well understood because it happens all the time. In fact, it's all certain kinds of economists talk about. Roads are the classic example of a public good which tends not receive sufficient investment absent some kind of coordinating mechanism like a state (which can tax and spend). The 𝕄𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕔𝕙 𝔻𝔸𝕆 is set up to invest in the "roads" of the Ethereum blockchain. Members stand to benefit collectively because they hold lots of ETH. So it all works out extremely well.
Indeed, it's really tidy. To recast what they're doing using the road analog, you'd have to have a set of people that somehow have an asset which increases in value the more people use the road (assuming it's been built). The road is still a public good. Lots of other people get to use the road, not just the 𝕄𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕔𝕙 𝔻𝔸𝕆 folks. The 𝕄𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕔𝕙 𝔻𝔸𝕆 members do stand to benefit individually if lots of people use the road. This is not too different from what happens in the brick-and-mortar world. There, a state builds the road. And the state ends up benefiting from the road on the back-end because people use the road to make more economic activity happen and the state gets a cut of that via taxes. The 𝕄𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕔𝕙 𝔻𝔸𝕆 is seeing like a state, in a certain sense.
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I'm interested in other settings where spinning up a Moloch DAO could solve collective action problems. I'm sure you can think of some.
It's helpful, I think, to compare the utility of a group setting up a Moloch DAO to the utility of a group setting up a collective hosted on OpenCollective (or a nonprofit with a bank account). Setting up a Moloch DAO gives you something more like an open-ended Kickstarter. If the amount of money raised is enough to fund the project, it's funded (after a vote). People can withdraw their money at any time.
OpenCollective does not offer this kind of feature at all. Moreover, any tech-savvy person can participate in a Moloch DAO. It's not limited to people living in OECD countries with a bank account or credit card.
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Addendum (2022-06-28): Obviously a Moloch DAO needs to have some way of holding an asset that doesn't fluctuate wildly. If it can only hold ETH or BTC, it's not going to be useful.
2021-08-15
Here are some thoughts about tinylog.
Learning more about the "journal" or "tinylog" format. An example is alex's journal.gmi on flounder.online. (Update(2021-08-21): Actually, these things are slightly different.)
alex's flounder.online journal
The flounder.online gemfeed documentation mentions the format in passing, suggesting that the format is suitable for microblogging. Found a more lengthy discussion of a similar format ("tinylog" or "tiny log") on bacardi55's site.
flounder gemfeed documentation
On the topic of microblogging using gemini, there appears to be a mature gemini-based Mastodon/Birdsite replacement called Station. At the very least, Station is a superb illustration of gemini's use of TLS client certificates for authentication.
2021-07-30
Here are some quick notes on "Politics Surrounded", a chapter in the book "The Undercommons : Fugitive Planning & Black Study".
Introduces the idea of the surround, a privileged form of social collectively. The surround is defined indirectly and negatively. It is certainly not a group consisting of one or more individuals.
- "The surround antagonises the laager in its midst while disturbing the facts on the ground with some outlaw planning."
- "Our task is the self-defense of the surround in the face of repeated, targeted dispossessions through the settler's armed incursion."
References
- Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. ISBN:978-1-57027-267-7
See also
Introduction to Moten's work from 2018
klemperer.flounder.online/