kickscondor
@sphygmus @chameleon @h0p3 I am going to find some more time over the weekend to write more - the letters that you are all writing right now have unfolded new faces and expressions in me - digifaces! I have had a thought tho… I’m envisioning something - what if we did a groupchat for a certain range of time?
kickscondor
And we can field questions to the group, answer them in hypertext - and when we’re done, I’ll make something out of it. Yes, we sort of do this already, but I’m thinking that having a beginning and an ending and a title maybe - could be interesting. Ahh, I’m explaining too much - it is just an attempt to branch off on the ‘hyperconversations’ game.
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Unifying part of the hyperconversation into one place is cool. I'm curious to know if we should synchronize or branch off in how we might represent what could be a unified groupchat document like this one. It's not just how we play our instruments in the orchestra, but also how we end up remixing and modeling what is recorded, right?
sphygmus
hehe, I don't think there are any conventions here at all! 😊 So we get to thread our own way through the tapestry.
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I agree we are making our own sets of conventions here, and I think it's awesome that we have the freedom to weave the tapestry from our ends to a significant degree.
Your mentions of "unified/synchronized/branched" makes me think both of writing collaboratively in a git repository, branching off and editing and merging and so forth; it also makes me think of something like etherpad or a shared google doc, with all sorts of realtime possibilities and copy pasty mergy smashy version tracking author possibilities. which may not be the direction, but are possibilities?
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Aye! That is where muh brain is going. We're doing something like that, but I don't see how to automate it effectively enough.I'm spitballin' here, and I'm way out of my league. Beyond many kinds of social conventions, we have to agree to some kinds of technical conventions to encode and decode our work to (or sacrifice our autonomy in constructing in our preferred conventions). Lots of what makes our hypertext 'just work' is that we are all using TW (similarly for my ability to use some insane acronym like irwartfrr with you folks). There are good reasons to seek radical diversity here, and there are good reasons to seek one protocol or structure. I don't know how to cycle between the two well enough. That's okay. Maybe we'll find some low-hanging fruit.
kickscondor
One of the surprising parts of the chat so far has been that personal 1-to-1 conversations have emerged and seem to coalesce naturally into the rest of the chat!! I expected that we would throw out prompts and everyone would respond as a group, like you’d see when a band gets interviewed by a magazine, then we would move on to the next batch of prompts.
But this is almost like a forum with a bunch of panelists who field questions, then discuss between each other - except that side conversations can happen simultaneously, which would be impossibly noisy in real life. (This is a real problem: a panel is not only limited by time, but if a certain set of panelists takes the conversation in a new direction, there is often no chance - or desire, probably - to return to the original question with a new set of panelists.)
I’m also very heartened that there is so much longform writing occuring. I wasn’t sure how everyone would feel comfortable responding. And, if the chat is to happen naturally, it shouldn’t be needlessly gimmicky. We don’t want to just use hypertext like we’re pressing vinyl records. It should be used because it is worthwhile. But it’s like a dream - conversing over a broad time span, low-key, exploring each other’s side thoughts, ducking in and out of those newly found corridors - and I feel like I am getting to know everyone better. I’m bracing myself for a downside here.
kickscondor
h0p3’s recent review of a bunch of his previous chats at the end of January (here and here, for instance) is amazing. It’s such a subtle thing - but these kinds of chats would be thought of as ‘ephemeral’ on any other blog or wiki. But what he’s doing is prepping them for longevity. I wonder what he feels he was able to shake out of them by running through them again. (It’s impressive how long his notes are - it shows how deep his feelings run for all of these people, I think.)
I especially like his notes on his quite short chat with Sphygmus. In a way, these notes form an extended ‘thank you’ for reporting some technical issues. It’s cool that she knows his process that well - she’s actually reported some things to me as well. Gah, I have a real soft spot (like the soft spot in an infant’s developing skull - in fact, it’s in the same place!) for observant people.
sphygmus
love this idea, and awe :) it makes my heart warm. let's experiment and see where it goes! also excited at the thought of collaborating on words & seeing what you make out of them.
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I’m excited to learn how to write in this format. I’d prefer to think inside this tiddler, but it takes a while for a message to settle sometimes, so please wait until I have a timestamp and ‘draft’ lock is dropped before quoting me.
kickscondor
Just to set you at ease, nothing will be finalized until the chat is over. So I won’t begin wrapping it up until everyone has pulled their stuff out of ‘draft’. Yes, this gives you a chance to edit yourself and mess with old chats - I’m not sure what you all think about the ethic of that - but I’m great with that, we can accomplish more if we trust each other.
As for quoting you while you’re drafting - since we’re all drafting, too, it seems fair game, right? As long as we source YOUR final quotes from YOUR finalized wiki, right? And if certain quotes don’t add up, we’ll footnote it and maybe it’ll add to the fun of the sprawl.
kickscondor
Many of the ‘features’ of hyperconversations (drafting in public, heavy footnotes, branching discussion, more-is-more) seem to be attempts to break through possible communication problems by providing an excess of communication to draw from or to replicate the kinds of real-life annotations (body language, grunts, pointing at things) that we give in-person conversation. When someone is drafting a letter publicly and recants some words - or an emotional sentence evolves from reflexive disgust or confusion to a sentence of rationality - you catch a peek at the mind, much like you might in the corner of someone’s eye.
So, since hyperconversations continue to push toward an attempt at a ‘transparent’ view of someone’s side of a conversation or an early revelation at their motivesI’ve gotten this sense during some of my hyper-Cs that we all lay our cards down face-up on the table (as best you can I guess) and then work backwards from there. - I’m going to lay out some of my intentions for doing this chat and everyone can fix me from there.
One of my main goals from the start is to see what editing and human curation can bring to a chat (or threaded discussion). While formulating Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002), I noticed that one of the prevailing notions of the book was that blogging improved on journalism (and presumably op-eds) by simply removing editors and publishers from the process and letting the audience decide what is good.
But this reasoning does not hold up - blogging doesn’t simply make everyone’s writing better. (It would be harder, right? New medium?) Sure, it may produce more public writing, with some very high quality at the top end - but someone still has to weed through it all - and that’s a tough job that most people don’t want or know how to do in their spare time!It’s also terribly ironic to me that, given the constant lauding of blogging as ascendant in We’ve Got Blog, they still chose to edit and curate an anthology of blogposts.
I have a hunch that there could be some remaining value in weeding through a hypertext conversation and polishing it, as a service to readers. I don’t see myself removing any of it - I think the job could be to simply highlight parts of it into a running conversation, moving the rest out of view, but still accessible. I don’t think all readers will appreciate this - some will want (and deserve) the raw text. But I think having an initially truncated version to read can help the reader get into it a bit easier and help them decide if they want the full dump.
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You are picking out what is salient, right? You are instrumentally reducing and abstracting for the sake of something. You are modeling what you perceive with some purpose in mind. Like my mind, to some dok, my wiki allows me to re-use my data to understand what is salient in the world (including myself). Unlike my mind, to some dok, my public wiki allows almost anyone to re-use my data to understand what is salient in the world (including myself).Which is the hardly the claim it's terribly useful to most people.
What is the gfwiwcgws of thinking, experiencing, modeling, including PSM as just an aspect? Why do I want to know the truth about myself and the world? What is understanding good for? Well, that's exactly what I'm trying to find and explain (which is hardly to say I'm good at it). Hopefully, it is part of the most meaningful search for meaning available to at least me.
One of the reasons I'm a real piece of work to have in Sunday School with ya (in a way, you are asking me to engage in Prompted Introspection) is that at least 50% of the time the answer is Jesus (DUUHHHNNNN! Can't top that shit), and that's analogously what I answer like a jackass. Imagine having a math test where you know the answer to every problem is 42 (that's the kind of math test I would give if I taught math, lol...that's basically what I do when I give tests in symbolic logic), but the whole point of the test was showing your work (by doing the work, something is earned, habituated, and written into me; it is a profound exercise of autonomy). I keep almost mindlessly answering: 42 or 42ness, which is almost vacuously true, but I'm still not showing my work well enough to you. I'm trying, lol. You have every right to ask me to continue to pragmatize my answer in my philosophical dojo (and vv).
Once again, thank you for listening to a madman ramble.
/hands-you-a-bucket-of-rotten-tomatoes. Do what needs to be done, homie.
XD.
kickscondor
I think this is probably your most useful analogy to helping me comprehend self-modeling. (Trying to show 42ness.) This goes in the final.
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Sprawling as usualI'm grateful for the gorgeous meta-analysis thus far. You knew I would though. You're a wizard interpreter (I'm beyond jelly). I swear, I could leave 3 tiny random appearing scratches plus a footnote, and you'd realize at least half of what it was meant to say or even the [implicit reasons or tacit agreements] for why it was said to some non-trivial dok. Of course, I don't even have to say this to you, quasi-telepath, but I need my son to be able to understand this. I'm grateful that you are Making It Explicit with me.; I don't want to dump directly into @: hypertext 2020.So far, it looks like a microcosm to me, a shared focal point, or a shared neuron with a clearer ground zero for where our interpretations attempt to meld and branch off. I'm not convinced I ought.
Perhaps this is an example of the broader principle in action. I signaled a preference about drafting while drafting, and it was overridden quite reasonably, with an explanation and justification to boot.
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You have my trust, Root User. The people outside of @: hypertext 2020 (for example, the people who may read this a decade from now) do not, or at least not nearly to the same dok. Being public, and being who I am, I have my work cut out for me to justifiably withstand the possibility of intense scrutiny.Questions a PSM must ask themselves: what am I willing to die for? What am I willing to be persecuted for? Sometimes, that's just what faith is, and those {axioms} are part of what we are really made of.
One of the reasons I feel I have some license to draft and why I'm partially comfortable with you quoting my drafts is that I do my best to keep snapshots. There's something to hold onto there for rigorous interpretation. This is also part of why I offer a real-time sync and minutely diff. While I'm pretty awful at providing context, there's still a curve in there to think about. I anticipate that someone can ask, "Hey, you changed your mind; why would you do that?". I don't always have control over my guts (I often have to puke them up and think about them), but I do have some control over how I'm going to reason about my feelings and what I'm going to do about them. You have the chance to reason about whether or not I'm trying to do the best I can with my pile of puke.
kickscondor
Hahah! We’re all standing around examining each other’s sick. I like this interpretation. I think that if people could begin with this image, use it as the basis for their consensus, they can admirably proceed with the dialectic. There’s a lot less picking things apart if you cut the whole conversation some slack. (But I’m also glad that you asked me to clarify - and that you dug into the response - sure, why not? It’s all doodoo - but still worth rooting in, on the chance of some swallowed gems…)
I realize I may be quoting a draft quoting a draft here. XD. They aren't easy lines to draw, no doubt. As I said, I'm still feeling out the fitting conventions here. I'm hesitant to directly quote drafts, but I agree it is necessary sometimes. I suppose it can be useful to cite a draft as such where appropriate (your guess is as good as mine). I also think linking to the source can sometimes iron out these wrinkles.
I'm okay that it isn't finalized in some sense. Syntax and some metadata considerations aren't big deals to me. I hope we'll come back and re-interpret the sequence yet again (still seems like a continuation of the original sequence). I do try to leave content untouched eventually. My CDR logs tend to be relaxed. After a weekly audit (during Family Time), and even moreso after a Monthly Audit, I'd like to think that part of the clay has somewhat hardened. Sometimes I add Retroactive Footnotes, and other times I simply link to it and keep building.
Commitment is a process, hardly one I've understood and mastered well enough.
chameleon
Could this be our structure? Haha. I like to dive right in there.
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I like that structure, and I'm curious to see how it should grow. My followup suggestion is tentative, especially because it doesn't point well enough (probably either requiring an extension in TW5 or transclusions, but I'm fine searching even if it might be visually simpler to have the kinds of trees we see in a Reddit-like forum). I'm happy to follow whatever conventions are most suitable here.
chameleon
I must confess I haven't been keeping up too well with Sphygmus' wiki. I really need to get on top of that. Sorry.
sphygmus
there's no need to be on top of my wiki, and no apologies necessary! it's a pile; not as big as @h0p3's, yet, but still one. My daily writing is either the most interesting or the least interesting, depending on who the readers is, while everything from art/work downwards in my Root list is more, or less, messy subject matter tiddlers.
You'll likely mostly get JIBBA-JABBA from yours truly. Also very sorry ;) I'm not a very interesting person in live or semi-live chat, or if I don't have a springboard to work from. Nevertheless, I look forward to chatting with you all.
chameleon
date +'%Y-%0m-%0d %H:%M %Z' btw.
Oh, also, you all deserve better tags, lol.
sphygmus
thanks for the date snippet! makes it ezpz. the fun thing about hyper text is that this doesn't have to be our final format — it can be as mushy as we want it to be!
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I'm curious to see how far our @: hypertext 2020 and related hypertexts might diverge. In addition to a kaleidescope of perspectives, there's almost a telephone game component to it.
chameleon
I think h0p3 is trustworthy with maintaining the page, so I'll use this for my "send"s from now on, lol.
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This is fun. =)
sphygmus
oh yay, I love you fellow wiki folks starting the format for me — so easy to export a .tid from your wiki and import it into mine! 😊
sphygmus
this also makes me want to develop my who-styles more; @h0p3 feels lonely there, being the only piece that's #stylish.dies at the thought of more font load XP
kickscondor
Tentative title for the chat.
HYPERTEXT 2020
Where is an EXPERT WIKIER supposed to go in the next decade? But yeah - just rip into what is going to be hot techs and paradigms for expert public self-modelers in this future timeline.
If we get @sphygmus on, I’ll do a mic check and then we can start. Hope I’m not jumping the gun - just pitched this idea today…
sphygmus
expert public self-modelers, oh my! and is that the first prompt — where to go in the next decade? no gun jumping here, I think it's all fizzy excitement. mic check at will!
kickscondor
Whoa whoa - how bout let’s back up to ‘public self-modeling’? (Seems like we’ve had an adequate mic check.) For yourself, personally - is this an adequate shorthand? Or do you think of yourself in any other terms that can help someone understand your work?
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Adequate shorthand for what? There are limits to how much anyone (also me) can understand my work. It's a hard problem to know how to help anyone better understand it.I'm convinced it is not easy to understand what counts as the standard of the good of understanding. PSM is a strong aspect of the gem. I wish I knew how to better generalize in a few words what I'm doing in my work ("it's h0p3's wiki" is kinda lame). How does one pick out what is most salient?
What do you think is an adequate shorthand for what we are each doing?
kickscondor
An adequate shorthand to describe you, your wiki, your work there. I feel like the phrase was an attempt to wrap all of that up into a shorter name so that you can refer to it briefly - and perhaps so people can understand from a glimpse. Or even so you can understand or remind yourself of what you are doing.
So, my first question is just to look at the phrase again. Seems like a good starting point. Is it that to you? Where does it function today?
As additional material - ‘public self-modeling’ is a phrase that chameleon has had fun with and I’m not sure to what extent it is a meme for her or if it is quite serious or what. On the other hand, Sphygmus has said a few months ago (referencing this word) that her wiki is “not an attempt to answer the question of who I am.” So, I guess I also wonder if “self-modeling” is a quest to answer who you are or if it is something else."
chameleon
All things are memes, all things are serious. I mock that which I care about, sometimes, because that's how I know I can really care.
Well, I think I'm just irony poisoned by too much time on social media and chans and that's made me prone to joking about things I'm serious about, or taking a mocking tone at all times. To me PSM-ing is serious work, I just like to laugh at myself on occasion. I didn't write Lol chameleon just for a lark.
To maybe echo a sentiment from your last letter, kicksy-kun, the whole internet thing is a fun little giggle ;)
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As a habitual wall-of-texting sprawler, I feel some of the claustrophobifying tweet-syndrome creeping into me here.Space for babbling, thank the maker. I feel like I'm back in school trying to ugly-compress a 12-page paper into 6. Some people may find it is impolite to take up too much space in groupchats (3 or more ppl). How can I fit and attach a sincere version of myself correctly to this thing in order to fairly meet the needs of the people in the group? I'm grateful hypertext offers the opportunity to hide a barrage of elements in various orders, offering kind of executive summary narrative doorways a user can autonomously open, reveal, iterate over, wander, track, and search. The fuller model drips down into the footnotes, reveal-widgets, searchable phrasing, and linkmaps. You can't hold the whole rabbithole at once, so what trails do you need right now? However poorly, I'm thinking about how to compress what I'm going to say,It helps to accurately guess sequences which are reader might likely traverse, and I have to think about the possibility that my hypertext as a whole will be broken (beyond my own stupidity), taken out of context, and only a bare initial face or limited semblance of the quote will make it. picking which threads to drop before it explodes, trying to find the fitting conventions which minimize handwork while improving automaticityI'm giddy+nauseous at the thought of how to maximize a hypertexter's autonomy and expressivity while still packaging it up for a securely scaled mesh. for my loved ones,Feel free to tell me to change my conventions or be quieter. and weighing how I should cleanly represent an overlapping splattered heap into a forensic-worthy stack.My brother, JRE, has told me it is difficult to follow, so I'm doing a terrible job.
kickscondor
You can fully expound - that could be a virtue of this style of chat. You could footnote off into a new tiddler, if you need. Or you can simply link in an old one if it represents your answer still well enough. Carry on. (And on.)
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Instead of the PSM question, I think the better starting question is: why do you have wikis like yours on the web, what are they for? Well, what is anything for? To pick out what is salient. That's what I'm practicing in this wiki (like an arrogant fool, surely). Awful as it is: Root is still the best representation of what I'm doing in this wiki. Even in shambles: {About}, {Principles}, Lifetime Projects, and Readme point to what I'm doing in this wiki and why as well as I know how (though it's barely readable, I realize). I have to iterate and grow them, and even my chronological linking to them tells a story (ITS). Of course, I think we each have a different path to take here to some dok, and mine merits profound ridicule, lol.
kickscondor
To me, it’s the same - I act as conduit for discovering wonderful things. To me, wonderful things and wonderful people make life worth living. (How do I know if it’s ‘wonderful’? — Because it makes my life worth living.) (To prevent you from asking me to clarify - it ends there - an instinctive feeling of simply ‘this is worth it to me’.)
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The process of clarifying who we are, including what is valuable to us,Socrates goes up to the counter. “What would you like?” asks the barista. “What would you recommend?” asks Socrates. “I would go with the pumpkin spice latte,” says the barista. “Why?” asks Socrates. “It’s seasonal,” she answers. “But why exactly is a seasonal drink better than a non-seasonal drink?” “Well,” said the barista, “I guess it helps to connect you to the rhythm of the changing seasons.” “But do you do other things to connect yourself to that rhythm?” asked Socrates. “Like wear seasonal clothing? Or read seasonal books? If not, how come it’s only drinks that are seasonal?” “I’m not sure,” says the barista. “Think about it,” says Socrates, and leaves without getting anything. appears to be at least part of the treadmill of generating our models, and they ought to be. Our brains are constantly modeling the world (including ourselves); there'd be no intentional consciousness without it.
kickscondor
I may think something is wonderful in the ‘now’ but that could change. (I try to resist that, though - and to always be grateful for the things I’ve loved from the past. This helps me to guarantee that I will always love philosopher.life!)
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I'm confused, and I am certainly missing crucial lego pieces here. Thank you for crafting this. I would beg for clarification, but I do not wish you to waste your breath on me when it may be more important for you to simply breathe.
But I can’t always nab (in the instant) why I love something.
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I would argue this is true to some dok at any level in any of our contexts (for both love and like). I beg you forgive me for being so high-pressure, dark, heavy, and straight-up mean in wrestling for cognitive articulations of this. I am often a poor judge of what you are capable of achieving in your circumstances (again, I am a poor modeler), and you should feel free to hold me accountable for failing to be fittingly hedged-conservative here (and elsewhere).
And I feel that even attempting to can be foolhardy.
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I can agree that sometimes it can be foolhardy, and not just in the sense that the odds of succeeding are sometimes low, nor simply because it can be imprudent at times, but also because it can be wrong to pursue in some contexts. There is a give and a take here, and we must take breaks from cognitive grinds to maintain our sanity. I'm absurd in this space.
In the moment, I can usually only assemble a tiny LEGO flower of an impression.
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Your words echo through time to me. I do not know what you mean well enough. Sir David Hume speaks of impressions and passions. He thinks there are only impressions, but I think you make a very Kantian move in claiming to assemble the impression, to impose your modeling on it. I also think it speaks to a recognition of having at least a tiny amount of power in autonomously shaping what you perceive of the thing-in-itself.
I'm egregious here. I ask questions that are impossible to answer all day. I do not mean to hinder your cultivation of flowers and impressions in a way that is not useful to you.
And it often seems better to hold off and try to assemble something more. Although: flowers are dainty and beautiful in their own right and I can still later surround them with LEGO cabbages and LEGO motorcycles and minotaurs and to build the fine scenery that I mean to.
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This is a hard problem. I have no idea what to say about it. I don't think the work ever ends, but you need to take breaks, dally, diffuse, bask, and live in the moment, too. How to pick that out wisely is a virtue far beyond me.
And I also think that my LEGO flower (in this case) would be the phrase, “I love it because it makes my life worth living.” And to avoid the rational dissection of it is to grant it real life for the moment.
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I appreciate that. I'm trying to demonstrate to you that I get that, kickscondor. I'm a dumb hammer, and everything is a nail to me. Perhaps you will have to help me wield me, Dasein. I don't know how to be instrumental enough to you. I am often the wrong tool for flower-making, but sometimes I come in handy for pinning them and arranging the LEGO vases.
Even the rational parts of who we are must learn to respect the irrational parts of who we are, and vice versa. I don't know how to fittingly pull back enough to know W5H to pull back and cognize about what I'm feeling, nor how to fittingly curl up enough to know W5H to curl up and escape what I'm thinking. There is an ethic to bridging what Heidegger calls the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand. I am obviously profoundly convinced that cognition is an indispensable half of the Self-Dialectic. I take you to be saying the same.
(Of course, I’m not opposed to the conversation with Socrates, I would have it in an instant. “Because drinks are more seasonal to me,” I say to him. “Drinks can’t be more seasonal,” he says, “because they have no seasons.” I say, “Oh yes, they do. They hover right above the liquid…”)
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Your anecdote sounds like thinking and feeling to me. I can't say for sure. The subjectivity of existence, how it feels, and how it appears to me: to my best knowledge, these are real attributes of my relationship to the other and hence the thing-in-itself. It is difficult to not feel what you are feeling in the moment (arguably impossible in most cases), and it is likewise difficult to think about what you are feeling (arguably extremely painful in most cases).
Dissociation, perhaps functionally embedded in every living fiction to some dok, is morally obligated and perfectly rational in many kinds of cases. Likewise, after sufficient reason, sometimes one's feelings are the sole reason of justification available to us, the remaining definition.
I told you once that my wife is deathly allergic to morphine; the painkiller took her life after she was burned alive. She could not have morphine for her agony (nor for the years of pain and grief that followed). Anesthetics and painkillers, at least phenomenologically, do some kind of dissociative work in blocking out part of reality. After killing and reviving her (itself a trauma), there were no partial measures they could give the 13yo girl. Complete dissociation was the only medicine available. Ketamine, mountains of it from what I can tell; it permanently altered her. Even though she can barely remember it, all she can remember of 1989 is pain and skin grafts. She has spent a lifetime feeling and reasoning about the dichotomy between the meaninglessness and the meaning of suffering.
It's here that The Other is always fundamentally autistic. Lastly, I think it's a matter of stop and go progress. I hope you wisely enjoy the reality of your seasonal drink and bouquets of fiery flowers.
I agree even the possibility of wonderful people (and other things in virtue of them) are fundamental to what makes life worth living.
What makes a person wonderful "to me" is not necessarily what makes a person wonderful. Likewise, what makes life worth living "to me" and what makes it objectively worth living are not identical; I can only hope to try to wisely close the gap. I agree that sentiments of "this is worth it to me" are a fundamental part of the objective calculation of what actually makes it worth it. One can be wrong about what makes life worth living though, which is why continued clarification is necessary; we are obligated to attempt to improve our understanding of what makes life worth living and what counts as "wonderful."I suggest wonderful things can obtain even if there's no one there to think they are wonderful.
Even though I agree your instinct, intuition, and sentiment (and their development or inspiration) are necessary, that doesn't make them sufficiently justified.The 'because I said so' parental cliche is not a strong argument. The ultimate reasons 'why' aren't competely inherent to any particular agent's point of view. There can be a difference between what you want and what you should want. Godwin's Law: what makes Hitler's sentiments about what matters (including what makes his life worth living) objectively wrong in some cases? Is it simply because he doesn't value what I value? Why should we be prevented from asking him to clarify not just what it means for him to say "this is worth it to me," but also "why should it be worth it to him?" We are hitting the paradox of tolerance here, and we have to think about how to justify intolerance. At the very least, it requires democratically mapping and weighing all of our instincts (though that itself is seeking objective evaluation). Part of the issue is that we don't obviously have a moral right to be just any version of ourselves. We don't own ourselves all the way down, including our epistemic justifications. We actually owe things to others (duties and rights correspond, and ownership is defined by clusters of those relationships), though that may be what you are trying to get at in living for "wonderful people" here. First-personally, justice is at least fairness in negotiating between what is valuable "to me" (whatever the self is) and "to others."
Some people think of philosophy as a form of therapy. There is a kind of peace which one might achieve by no longer asking "why" or stoically minimizing desires. Some might go so far as to say the only solution is to dissolve the belief there was a problem at all.
Lastly, the brain has evolved to be a probabilistic inference machine that seeks energy-efficient modeling (those specimens tend to be more likely to survive).Interestingly, the experience of time may be related to the amount of energy necessary to compute what is novel, and on a view like Heidegger's, we're trying to escape thinking about the world, as though the evolutionary pursuit of energy-efficiency pushes consciousness to seek eliminating itself. One energy-efficient filter, inference, or instinct about value is to say it matters because I say it matters, and leave it at that. Conversely, one could be chemically addicted to continually trying to ask and answer "why."
sphygmus
I'm not sure "public self-modeler" is immediately understandable to the average person you might pick off the street, and I don't consciously think of myself in those specific words.
chameleon
I'm pretty sure expert PSM is from me, lol: Expert Wikier. kicks even quoted it on the first post about me over there! It's based on the /prog/ expert programmer copypasta. I really had to bend over backwards to get TiddlyWiki stuff in there!
I do think it might be useful as a general blanket term for the DNA that h0p3's wiki, chameleon's wiki, and my wiki have each mutated from.
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We are a ragtag beautiful group of nomads self-modeling and penpalling in the public sphere. To the best of our knowledge, we honestly attempt to be ourselves to the extent we are objectively permitted. We care about our own lives and relationships enough to make art of them. Who are the diamonds and redpills among us? Let we fff construct and deconstruct ourselves as we wish others would in reflective equilibrium to ours. Decentralize the means of dialectical production all the way down in Humanity's 4DID. Let us build Beautiful, Right, and thus Good identities together in every order, category, and dok.
kickscondor
to make it easy to know others—read many and try to develop the skill of ‘feeling’ for who they are, acknowledging their tones and colors.
There are people I’ve known my whole life who are still a mystery, whose relationship still feels tentative—I question whether depth can be. Perhaps there is only commitment.
A person changing changes the ‘depth’. When a singer’s voice or style changes, we have to start liking them from the place where they last were. But a singer who sang me a great song once—well, I could be devoted forever in sheer gratitude.
kickscondor
It’s as if you’ve spread a giant sheet of graph paper before you on the floor—and have begun to box and triangulate your aspects, to map out yourself. And, to anyone watching (and why would they watch? well, hell, if I saw someone mapping out on a giant self-o-graph in the campus quad, I think I’d stop to see) they’ll see the places where they map onto you, or where their points go near or interweave. You have your own handwriting and flourishes of decorative arrows and bullets. And those discoveries made in the mundane and detailed, knotty parts of the graph could be surprising—these lines are all pathways of experience. Who knows which are the most vaunted.
[E]xplore long-term questions... Try not to overthink what “doing research” means. You’re just a person, learning in public, about a topic that other people find interesting.
Re-imagining The PhD
The analogy of laying out graph paper and working on a map to what I'm doing in my wiki resonates strongly with me. Bits of myself on this mountain here, bits of myself in that valley there: of course I think about this a lot in relation to Placeness and Embodiment. If we sometimes emulate the physical world in a mental mind palace to enhance our memory, this wiki feels like it might be my mental states laid out in some sort of "physical" space.
On the one hand, there are my journal logs. On the other hand, there are my subject matter logs. Keeping multiple wikis or multiple web pages for different subjects appears to be one approach that people take: maybe the most common approach? Perhaps it's confusing to stumble upon a website where everything is mashed together — the mundane details of what I ate yesterday right alongside finished letters, notes on projects, and my drafting of this response.
Artisan, craftsperson, geographer — I think h0p3 essentially sums up an overall desire in his introduction.would that I had the skill at recognizing and translating people so well for them! In the conceptual/formal realm of my school's art department: artists find a problem or question interesting and do research on it; find different ways of approaching it; think up experiments and run them; develop a structured or intuitive process; and so forth. Art becomes the science of approaching creation as conceptual exploration.
In some sense this is the problem with writing an artist statement — ugh, I didn't like the school assignment to write an artist statement. (Now I want to go find whatever I wrastled up and submitted for it.) How can I write an artist statement when I don't even know what I'm doing myself? I haven't pinned it down or figured it out — just wandering, and I'm not sure it means anything to anyone.
Perhaps it's about feeling — when the wind is warm but just a little sharp, and blows that feeling of longing straight through your bones — if one empathizes with that feeling, resonates with it, then perhaps they'll feel themselves in a little bit of my wiki as well.
kickscondor
(First off - great quotes! The low-key Nadia quote is unexpected, but very refreshing.)
I actually think your wiki is an ‘artist statement’ without needing to explicitly state that - and I think that’s why h0p3 could capture your essence so clearly. Maybe he inferred it from all the pieces?
sphygmus
I feel like my wiki is where I get to throw all my sick at the wall and see what sticks, you know? Just dump it all in here and then later, whenever I feel like it, I can use it to research myself and connect the dots to form some larger picture (hopefully). It's wonderful to be able to easily check on what I wrote on this exact same day last year, to see what was going on inside my head. Repeating myself here — it's more dynamic and alive than the text that's currently locked inside my paper journals.
kickscondor
Yeah, I see myself more as a conduit. I really get into finding people and connecting people (and saying hi to them). I don’t have a desire to preserve myself or to catalog myself. But having the dialetic does make some of that worthwhile. And maybe I do model myself in other ways: in pixels, in code, in colors flickering.
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I can appreciate the conduit metaphor. I like to think you add weight in how things are picked out and transferred, maybe more like a neuron (which is arguably a conduit of sorts).
I mean - you’ve all influenced me a lot and I find myself mimicking some of your conventions. This leads me to think that part of PSM-ing helps a human function day-to-day. (Talking through, remembering, clarifying thoughts.)
kickscondor
I wish I understood better whether ‘modeling’ meant a self-‘styling’, self-‘bending’, self-‘constructing’ vs just trying to represent yourself as you are, ‘the plain picture’ in Bob Dylan’s meaning. Maybe it’s all of it, somewhere between, or simply not possible. Are we modeling fictional characters or not? Does it matter?
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I don't think these questions just matter to me; I think they matter more objectively. Maybe you are asking: what is the "self"? I don't have a satisfactory answer. We face infinigresses here; in a sense, it can't be satisfied by us, it can only be sought.Some things are more essential to who one is than others, some more salient than others, but the entire map of one's dialectical identity stretches across at least the lightcone from one's conception. The wiki is particularly useful in re-using (including finding) parts and piecing together an enriched model of oneself.
kickscondor
I’m having a very difficult time replying to this (and the remarks that follow it.) Not because it’s not well-written or because I don’t agree - simply because I want to expand on it, but haven’t the language to do it.
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No doubt; we are way, way outside of my comfort zone, too. I'm grateful for your ack, and I hope to live up to it. Unfortunately, there is no complete language available to us, and we can only make do with what we have. As you do, I'm trying to give you my best understanding (I'm sorry that my puke smells this bad, and you thought I smelled bad on the outside). It's a leap.
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Against all odds I hope:
Resiliently write or erase space and time;
openly wander or race the wind and water.
May all those who need courage to seek peace persevere.
It is necessary to construct and bring flowers to war;
never forget what you are fighting for.
I don't know what you are saying nearly well enough, and I don't know how much time I have. You are going to need to continue calmly weaving the music so I can find you in the static. Now, I blindly race. We're both going to need to breathe deeply, but for different reasons. You must counsel me otherwise, sir. Tell me to remove my hokey hand or my trite eyes, and I will.
Maybe you need to define fiction further for me. It may come in dok. It seems like the relationship between author intentions and reader interpretations may define fiction in context. This is not an area I understand nearly well enough.
Insofar as imaginary characters pop up in our phenomenology, we are modeling imaginary characters who are a part of who we are. Humor, irony, counterfactuals, hypothetical reasoning, rhetoric, and imagination all seem to have fictional elements to them; all of those are part of my modeling. Even proofs in classical logic rely upon the absurd, particularly in [subproofs, stages, or layers], to eventually point us to the truth. In some cases, we are forced to model things we don't mean in order to model the things we do. We also might think of choice as modeling who we could be, generating a set of fictional characters, and selecting from them. I'm open to the claim models always have something fictional about them insofar as we pretend they are the things-in-themselves. Bohr's model or Newtonian physics might be fictions in a sense, but they act as intuition pumps and provide the initial kernel material over which we can iterate and bootstrap a more accurate model too.
Do I think the "self" is a fiction? It depends. We can be wrong about who we are because there is an objective "who we are."How you define yourself is not who you are, but only a part of it. Who we think we are (including our own modeling of the world) might be fictional in some sense, but the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are is not fictional (though it seems even that gap is built into "who we are"). Who we are can only be understood through dialectics with others, and at least sometimes that occurs through dialectics with imagined characters. Of course, certainty cannot be achieved,If justified certainty is the absolute standard for knowledge, then we cannot know if we are modeling fictional characters. and any time you posit a limit, you posit something beyond it. and what is beyond that limit is sometimes only something which fiction can initially explore
kickscondor
If I sought after your model, I couldn’t achieve it ‘now’, in an instant. It would become assembled over time, as if it was a gigantic LEGO castle.
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I agree there is something crucial about "now." The relationship between one's immediate lived conscious experience and one's 4DID is not one I understand well enough (nor can I, I would argue). They are each necessary for the other's significance. I cannot decouple that dependency. They appear both inseparable and distinct. What it means for one to empathize with The Other is the task of the autonomous self. Can we change ourselves long-term? Yes; it stands to reason, though: there are sacrificially violent costs at times (and in both directions). The infinigresses of desire satisfaction and suffering sometimes only beget more suffering in some cases. I'm a grotesque and foolish monster here, and I am sorry.
I agree that I cannot, either (fff by definition); we can only get closer to increasingly fit models of the thing-in-itself. Part of the problem is that we cannot hold a hyperobject in our focus all at once (and, generally, the term is reserved for being well beyond the extreme limits of one's focus), which is why we are lossy empirical creatures. While I do not have certain proof: I suggest it is also why we must iteratively diffuse and lose focus of it as a means to improving our focus over time (it reminds me of falling asleep and waking up again, packing and unpacking, faith in continuity and change, my ignorance of limits, and the meaning beyond the bottom of proofs).
But what I wonder is: are the old models relevant to the ‘now’ model?
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Yes, to varying dok. The truth matters objectively, though it doesn't always matter to the subject so clearly, distinctly, directly, or completely (and, there is a difference between description and prescription here). Relevant in what way? There are many cases in which directly trying to model the past in the present is not the fitting use of one's ray of intentionality (nor to various parts which comprise or give rise to it). That doesn't make the old completely irrelevant to the new or the now, though it may sometimes feel that way.
Can I render all models useless in an instant?
Perhaps, in modeling, I look back and see the model of me - and suddenly want nothing to do with it.
Or perhaps it’s more light-hearted than that - it’s time for a drastic change. Or I’m just embarassed - that seems likely!
I’m not suggesting that the models are flawed - to all the people I know who have gone through the death of many family members at once, this model becomes quite precious. For the memories it holds, but also because you don’t want to lose who you are through the process. You rely on the history of yourself to help you not lose yourself to an internally destructive force that wants to kill you.
But then - there are things from ourselves that we can’t take with us always. Ideas become outdated, of course. And then, like losing someone who we’ve had plans with, who suddenly is gone, any of our plans or projects might not survive in the present.
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I'm sorry. I can sit here quietly, babble nervously, or search for a way to take your mind off it. You pick. I don't want to directly nitpick here without you telling me to do so. This place is radioactive. At the very least, I hope it does not cause cancer, and beyond my dreams, I hope a good mutation emerges. Even if I'm not bleeding out, I am lost in the desert here.
This also relates to the discussion about clarifying ‘wonderful’.
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Indeed, it does. I appreciate your willingness to attempt to clarify this for me. This must have been a very costly thing to say; it feels like an exceptionally heavy meteorite to me. I hope you will one day forgive me for failing to be the surgical listener and virtuous interlocutor you need.
█▓▒▒░░░░ h0p3 ░░░░▒▒▓█
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Fuck, dude. Yeah, plain as day, you found the words just fine. I am listening, despite the fact that I'm a retarded brute. Ignore my broken thoughts, feeling, or questions for clarification at will, please. Like a donkey of a Donqui, I'm racing in and out to find a working model for you. I have no talent for weaving the necessary bandages, but I will try. I wish I knew how to graft my own skin onto your wounds. I don't know how to bear what cannot be fixed well enough either.
I am convinced that Self-Dialectics are hard problems. Even in the pursuit of peace in both now and otherwise, you will sometimes be at war with yourself or yourselves, in various parts and dok. I'm fundamentally unqualified to speak about many aspects of what it means for that to be precious, and I'm certain of that. You obviously know that well beyond what either of us can articulate.
I also have so little room to talk about what I take to be an internally destructive force (a part, a process) that wants to kill, sever, or be free of an outer whole. I'm not qualified, and I don't know anyone who is. Even as a feeling and raw desire, how does one reconstructively respond to deconstruction irwartfrr? No doubt, there is a time and a place in which one must forego attempting to reason with unreason. But, you are correct, it requires a memory, data, a model, to have the material with which to be constructive in handling and processing that force. You obviously know that well beyond what either of us can articulate.
Do I think you live in a unique hell sometimes? Yeah, always. This is a deep part of the ocean; if you deem it necessary, you may need to breathe from my tank before we can reach the surface (sorry about my filthy mouthpiece and sharply disgusting air). I wish I knew how to be calm in that chaos. I am the wrong person for you, kicks. You require healing so far beyond me, that I'm terrified I'm pointlessly hurting you in just asking to listen to you (let alone talking with you about it).
I don't know well enough what it means for parts of us to die, nor W5H to engage or accept it wisely enough. What does it mean to cooperate, negotiate, and work with this destructive force? I do not know.
Yes, it matters who we are, especially since what matters about who we are can't be solely defined by us. It matters W5H we attempt to represent ourselves, and fiction matters at least with respect to how it serves reality. If I recognize it as such, I try to ask myself, "What is this fiction for?" The purpose of fiction is part of its meaning.
chameleon
I started the wiki out of writer's block on my blog, and it quickly grew into something I actually had fun working on. But what it's for is an interesting question.
The subtitle is "things chameleon knows" and I feel like that encapsulates it. To me this is a website to throw my ideas to the wall and see what sticks. It's obviously not every last thing I know, but it covers a broad spectrum of my interests and ideas.
kickscondor
Yes, this seems like ‘self-modeling’. Keep going. Why do it publicly?
chameleon
kickscondor
@sphygmus With h0p3, I think I am more curious about the ‘self-modeling’ part of the phrase - but with you I definitely wonder more about the ‘public’ part. It sounds like you’re looking for kindred spirits.
kickscondor
But you also keep a lot of things private - and you do explain this from a curatorial angle:
How do you decide what to reveal and what to make public? (I ask because I haven’t resolved this for myself either - whereas I think h0p3 has made this line very easy for himself.)This also seems very pertinent to the question of ‘public self-modeling’, since h0p3 begins defining this phrase by exhorting people to ‘deprivatize’ themselves.Perhaps it’s confusing to stumble upon a website where everything is mashed together — the mundane details of what I ate yesterday right alongside finished letters, notes on projects, and my drafting of this response.
sphygmus
“I don't know, I don't want to talk as much. (...) It's nicer to think dear, pretty thoughts and keep them in one's heart, like treasures. I don't like to have them laughed at or wondered over.”
— Anne of Green Gables
sphygmus
yes, I think so! I certainly don't think I started off looking for them — I started off just wanting to participate on at least slightly more even ground when writing letters to h0p3, and well, now I have web-mention-receiving set up and I'm participating in this conversation with the group, so. Kindred spiritsh0p3 gets me, in the constant question asking and digging and writing and — let's drag out every detail of our feet and compare the wrinkles! (this is just a generalization; whatever formal moves I may have in my writing, h0p3 is the actual academic philosopher here.) I feel like you're fascinated watching the dissection occurring and transforming — from h0p3 on his own to my wandering in and setting up another pile, to all the other wikis that have joined in their own ways — wondering and asking questions and participating in your own way, but perhaps less invested in the fountain of gore in-and-of-itself! And all of this is great — and thank goodness we're all together on the internet and can take a step backwards for a little breather when it all gets too nutty! it is. :)
Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.
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I'm not handing you simply some polished product; I'm handing you the chain of [evidence, custody, and contexts], as soup to nuts as I can (the residue buried timelapsed-art is also a product). I think it's also deeply concerned with method, finding ways to cooperate in this radically hard problem, and learning how to autonomously construct our own processes, including fairly calculating a model of The End.
kickscondor
This is a great point! I forget that you are already employing a lot of self-editing and self-curating. (And what you do with us - making a tiddler for Sphygmus that curates her, in a way.) So this is starting to lead into my next prompt, what you refer to here as ‘the chain’ (but which I also think of as hypertext ‘layers’)… let me think how to articulate this and I’ll get back to you. ‘Soup to nuts’ is one way of putting it, but it’s imprecise, it’s not just a linear progression toward ‘the end’ - or it doesn’t have to be, I guess.
sphygmus
So, while we're here, talking in this sort of meta-space of conversation —
sphygmus
I just - I keep trying to figure out what the point behind social media is, or why we should use it, if we should use it at all...what purpose is it serving us?
though - the question of "what good is social media to our society and humankind in general?" is not the same as the question "what good is social media to me?" the latter is really what's subjectively important to me, right? what are my feelings about it? does it make me feel good, or inspired, or dragged down? etc.
I think right now, it feels like information overload. at least the consumption part. Especially since school started, I'm about at my maximum info processing capability right now.
anyway I suppose there's some things to feel through here. because I don't need to have my feelings all figured out before I take action - that's the imperfect action. and there's 100% fear there, both the fear that someone will interact with me, and that nobody will, at the same time.
sphygmus
emptying out my links from my phone into my wiki made me feel information overload; but it seems to be linked to lacking a meaningful paradigm through which to make sense of the information? I see my wiki as helping with that - were I to go through my old journals, I think the search for salience would help transition it from feeling overwhelming to good/right/meaningful. With my wiki I'm starting to trace my steps through hyperspace and write down my thoughts as I go - not just sponging info but taking an active role in thinking about it? like - almost prioritizing writing down my thoughts, rather than reading the most links.
...Because we all can read the same thing and we'll all get different things out of it and connect it to our individual experiences and - fuck. yes. this is the solution to the "information overload," right?! to encourage people in building their own meaningful structures out of all the material around us?! this feels so right. and being able to hop into someone else's meanings and read them and then link them into your own - networks of individual meanings?
kickscondor
p. 12. “For everyone, the great task of the future will not be to gain access to more information, but to develop avenues to information that genuinely enhances our understanding, and to screen out the rest.” (Yes, ok, here we go. I think we can all agree with this. And this makes me think of the ‘layers’ I mentioned in Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002) - layers of reading, layers of writing. Social media is too raw - it’s all random snippets of text, no summaries. I need high-level views of the information, then the ability to zoom into the details. A ‘layer’ is a level of detail - and it includes both a measure of polish and quality, as well as a measure of intimacy with the topic or person.)
I wonder about directories, linking, "browsing the internet" and so forth. This is mainly directed at kicks, but I'd love to hear the whole group's thoughts as well.
Kicks, do you ever deal with information overload? Like, you're browsing and surfing and discovering personal websites and interesting articles and now you've got 10, 15, 20 tabs100s?!??! open and they all seem like cool rabbit holes and you're not quite sure where to go next? Or what it all means anymore? (maybe that's just me.)
kickscondor
I have experienced this in the past - and I still experience this with books. Although I’m not sure it’s the same. What I experience is gah, I’m not spending enough time reading all the things I want to read, finding all the things I want to discover, given how much there is!! And I assume that’s what people mean when they say ‘information overload’. (Your image of so many tabs.)
Is it actually ‘overload’? Or is it that there is infinite information (and there was a century ago) and you’re feeling some inability to approach it?
kickscondor
Which, in my case, has usually been about losing my discipline for a time span.
But I am spending the right amount of time reading online right now - and I have a very long list to work through that is in a sensible order. (I no longer have tabs open - I do have a link list, so that has helped.) I am not spending enough time reading books.
If I spend enough hours each week, I feel like I am at least methodically working through the infinite mass and I feel healthy.
sphygmus
Does curation help? Like — you're specifically looking for cool people doing cool things in obscurity and you want to let us folks in your corner of the world know — so does the endless array of cool people doing cool things feel overwhelming or invigorating or? (I get the sense it might be the opposite, that you feel like it's hard to find cool people doing cool things. correct me here!)
sphygmus
This is also what helped get me into h0p3 (and you and chamy, because you follow the same conventions): because you clearly mark dated, temporary notes vs longer, central nodes or essays. So it is very easy to know where to ‘start’. Which is appreciated when I am discovering someone and want to move from the polished stuff down to the day-to-day stuff. How much time do you spend hiking down rabbit holes? When do you know when to stop? Do you have dedicated sessions to browsing, where you just wander and earmark links for later? What makes you earmark a site to share — just that it makes you go "cool!" or is there something else? How much time do you spend digging around in a site before you give it the yay or nay? Is there a sort of qualitative "this site meets x qualities I'm looking for" or is it much more subjective than that?
kickscondor
I do wish I was aware of more black writers. I know there is a tendency to do this out of guilt or political activism. But I simply feel like black writers have an unusual angle. I think this is why black artists are popular in mainstream culture - subconsciously we know that they are outliers and can show us what it means to be human in a totally unexpected way. I mean I am definitely interested in anyone out there, regardless of their race - but among Americans, I think black artists have shown that they are always on the avant garde of cultural movements.
So, at the same time, it is difficult to find certain subcultures that you may want to find. (I would also love to find a really sweet fitness goth blog. Especially if it was a .onion site.)
sphygmus
are you casting wide nets or deep nets? and does this relate to the connection vs depth you mentioned in your letter? this is where fraidycat comes in, I think — to keep an eye on a large net of people without ingesting everything they create. How do you avoid FOMO with what they're creating? deal with knowing there's so much out there that it's impossible to keep up with everything and read all the great classics? (again, does curation help with that feeling?)
yeah! and not just browsing, I'm also curious about how all this relates to articles you read, newsletters you're subscribed to — how much of it do you keep up with? how much of it do you let go of?
sphygmus
re-watching your most recent fraidycat video, perhaps that's just my answer — a simple overview you use to keep tabs on people (but then I still wonder about depth; where do you dig in?).
kickscondor
When I do find someone that I really really REAALLY connect with - then I greedily spam that link wherever I can - in my notes, into Fraidycat, I recite it in my mind. I am so afraid of losing it. And it means that I begin to visit that site very frequently, to try to read everything that I can. When I found Ton’s blog, it was like that. And I was very appreciative that I could tell which posts were ephemeral and which were polished, finalized essays.
kickscondor
It’s so cool to me that you care to ask me a question like this! That, alone, makes me feel like there are plenty of ‘cool people doing cool things’. Even if it was just you and me - that would be enough.
No, I feel like there are many more cool people than I can possibly be aware of. I worry sometimes that I have no sensibility. I honestly find something amazing in almost everyone I discover. If they are working in hypertext, it feels like I can count on it. And yeah – it’s invigorating.
sphygmus
I know I've been drawn to people who appear to be on a mission because I'm unconsciously hunting for what I perceive them to have — maybe by learning enough from them I learn what piece is missing from me, maybe if I absorb enough of their work the spark will rub off and I'll have a mission too.
It's hard to imagine being someone who's not hunting for a mission in others but who has found and is pursuing the answer to the point where it spills out so much and attracts others who were where I used to be.
I'm at the point where writing those paragraphs feels almost like that's just a story I'm still telling myself; that I'm on the brink of knowing and doing — like I'm telling myself I don't know where I'm going and another part of me is giving me a massive side-eye like yo, really? just stop fibbing because you feel afraid, because of maybe and what if and but I could fail.
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I would argue that everyone here is wrestling with the values and vulnerabilities of being human and doing human work with each other so publically. Unlike me, you all are nice and kind people (even your vitriol is generally hilarious),Also, I don't think you want to see me in yoga pants (the ass was not delectably fat), but upon possible request: http://hwikiea2zykn5hdkmf4srti5gglqv5gspqt37opxnhtjdvureonvjoyd.onion/. so it's hard to fathom that you would have profound enemies. We're all going to have people who don't like us, and while I think the odds of your persecution are low, they do exist. Right now, even out in the open, it's hard for anyone to figure out what we are doing here.Even seasoned computer users generally can't or won't take the time to dig and piece it together. It's expensive. Of course, I can't say I really know what we're doing here well enough either. Perhaps there's some security through obscurity, atm. Call me paranoid,You know where I think the world is headed. You know I'm fucking crazy too. but I think there's a non-trivial chance I will face actionable hatred.Mind you, I don't think all hatred is wrong. In this case, I'm not talking about simply facing antagonizing memetic jabs, evil eyes, getting-in-your-face punking, trolling, mean-mugging, shittalking, mocking, sarcastic faceslapping, etc. There are already people who try to break into my accounts and phish me,And, if you are reading this: <3 and I recognize it might get worse.
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I am still surprised and honored that you join me in this absurd FTO venture of being a PSM. At the very least, it's rad (though I think far more than that). I'm grateful for the lightness and wandering of our discussion.I don't wish to derail it. y so srs? As always, I am the worst; I only think about happy things ;P. I'm sorry to ask, but I have some uncomfortable, buzzkill, scaremonger questions;It's my moral obligation to pushback, even against my own point of view. maybe it's best we pass over them (I leave that up to you).
How much risk do we each face?
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Why is this PSM work worth the risk to you?
sphygmus
My answer might change if the risk was immediately impacting me. If I ever
stop writing in this wiki, perhaps I've come face to face with danger that has
forced me to stop publishing it for my own safety. Depending on what that
might be, I hope I've got enough supplies around to locally self-host my wiki
on my computer. (xavier, I'll use you as a server if I have to. (<insert
afternoon researching home servers/NAS>))
This question is more oriented at the public angle of the self-modelling, right? As my animal-brain doesn't feel any risk presently, it's worth it to engage in this hyperconversation with you and kicks and chamy. When I have felt risk (real or not), I tend to retreat from the public side, feel it out more. I'm not letting go of this wiki, though, or my journals, or the random text files on my desktop. I've heard artists describe it being impossible for them to not draw or doodle or sketch — I feel that with my writing; I pause at times but I don't think I could actually go cold-turkey from writing for an extended period of time. Writing is something I have to do. Its publicity is just a side effect of writing letters to h0p3 in a wiki.
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Are you prepared to face people threatening you, breaking into your accounts, physically endangering you, and so forth?
sphygmus
I've hardened my private wiki server to the best of my ability, but someone could probably get into it if they were really trying. It should be pretty separate from important offline accounts, though, so I don't know what good that would do them.
Threats... well, depends on the threats, I suppose? I never frequented the chans or chatrooms or any of the other ways people are exposed to internet dickery; probably the worst experience I've had with other people online would be dumb or otherwise annoying responses to my occasional reddit posts. I assume this means I don't have the thick skin developed by y'all who frequented those spaces.
I'm in no way prepared for physical endangerment, whether the source of that
violence is my wiki or some other aspect of my online life. I often feel
endangered by people I don't know from AD when I'm driving down the highway,
though, so the likelihood of physical violence being triggered by <
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How would you feel if a decade from now a million people started combing through and deepreading your wiki?
sphygmus
I think that depends on how my wiki has grown in a decade! Perhaps by then I've done something to address the question that gwern poses: "what on this massive highly-interlinked website might I want to start reading?"
I probably wouldn't know that a million people were deepreading my wiki at first. Is there discussion happening about it? Where is the discussion happening? Unless it gets mentioned by us hypertexters, I might miss it (although if it happened in places that send web mentions, I would receive and notice those).
I expect I would feel overwhelmed and scared at first, then curious to see what people were saying and why they were reading my wiki and what parts of my wiki they were reading, offended at what appears to me as misinterpretations, thrilled at seeing people making new and unexpected connections.
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Call it a pile all you want (lmao), but your wiki is a work of art that could virally explode any day (I'm not saying it will, but it could).
It's fast, mobile-friendly, intuitively well-structured, approachable, personable, legible, and gorgeous. Instead of being obfuscated and having an offputting barrier to entry, you make a clean entrance for everyone.
sphygmus
Thank you! This is part of why I enjoy engaging with you all like this — so often I'm embedded in what I'm doing that I can't get the perspective to see what I'm doing from a distance. You reflect that back to me and provide me a fresh look. (see also)
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Are you concerned about your association with an insane person like me?
sphygmus
Maybe I should be more concerned than I actually am. Your version of insanity and paranoia is familiar to me, so I've already been resigned to being on one mysterious entity's list or another for a while.
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Maybe you should be. I know of at least one person who speaks with me who is a virulent white supremacist who thinks we should kill, punish, or enslave anyone who isn't a cis, white, straight, American male. He can see you! He and his family interact with scores of communities who read The Daily Stormer (and so forth). He literally hates you without even knowing you, chameleon. He lives in driving distance of both of us.
sphygmus
I often walk past a truck in the parking garage at work with a thin blue line sticker on its rear windshield. Who else at my workplace harbors beliefs similar to the person you mention? I'm probably more in danger from the locals around me than from people who know you.
Even you kicks, low-profile as you are in some respects, many people find you perplexing, and I know some who straight-up don't like you just because you are weird (I take it to be my job to vouch and reason with them about the value of otherness and uniqueness).
What do you want my wiki and RGM to become to protect you?
chameleon
Keep my real name in your meat-memory and your meat-memory alone, along with anything that can reasonably lead to me or my loved ones' real name, location, place of work, etc. being discovered by a motivated individual.
sphygmus
I don't have a good answer to this question. From my perspective, you've already taken the steps that make me feel more protected, and I don't know what else there is to do!
chameleon
Minimal, imo. I've been friends with much more dangerous individuals than the types that are likely to stumble across my wiki; and the wiki isn't really connected to my irl identity anyways apart from some vague gesturings towards locations, and even then I'm likely to just be lost in the crowd. The worst that will happen is that people will point and laugh, and I can take that.
chameleon
And hey, at the risk of sounding edgy, I can defend myself. Your white supremacist buddy, if he can even find me (he can't) will be enjoying a bullet in his dome if he ever comes near me.
Besides that, I'm not terribly interesting and thus wouldn't make a very good target. The narcissistic focus of the wiki betrays the fact that I'm actually rather boring and milquetoast; I'm barely even politically active besides doing my civic duty of voting.
sphygmus
It varies for all of us, I'm sure. This wiki is 100% vulnerable to doxxing. Elsewhere, my life leaks everywhere, and I fail to contain it. I'm trying to be better about compartmentalizing different arenas from each other, using multiple usernames where before I used one username everywhere. But I don't want to kid myself either — the tracking corporations have fingerprinted my browser and my browsing patterns and probably collect enough data know when I hit a web page even when I've traveled across the country. At this point, after being on the internet for 13 years (exactly half my life right now), I can't go back and start fresh again with no fingerprint, so I can only aim to do my best (and fail at even that).
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Anyway, aside, one thing I like about our hyperconversation, including this more focused groupchat-style: it feels like I'm sitting in the same room with you all rabbitholing where we please, often well beyond the surface.
sphygmus
I'd like to propose this question as our next point of conversation:
"what on this massive highly-interlinked website might I want to start reading?"
chameleon
Where do you start? Root? The tag list?
chameleon
What are you looking for?
Can I provide it?
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I think that's the real issue. We get to be librarians about ourselves for others. It's a human that picks it out at least sometimes, even if assisted by some crucial cataloging strategies and search tools. I'm convinced we serve up who we are to others in a way they can wander on their own, but we also serve as a live-ish helpdesk to our own PSMs. A librarian has to interview the user to understand what they need or want. You provide some one-size-fits-all approaches, and then you are well-positioned to work on the exceptions.
I don't know. Inspired by kicks' and h0p3's comments, I wrote ReadMe. Maybe that'll provide some direction. Maybe it'll just confuse the travelers even more.
kicks, I think you already address this in your FILE_ID pop-up — would you say more about how you thought about what to put there?
kickscondor
Well, that file is kind of my personal website, but it’s hidden inside of a little square. I like my site to be disorienting to happen upon, because I think it demands a bit of curiosity as an admission fee. (I think you do this too with your KEEP OUT notebook. It has lips on it, which soften the sting.)
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Yup! =). You are inviting, and your price is gentle. You reward degrees of curiosity. It generates valuable chatter, imho; some connections being stronger than others. I think you initiate the T42T handshake in making it available, but the funnel or steps for cooperation usefully bounces trolls, MOPs, vampires, and those who aren't interested in a fair commitment. In contrast, there's often a darker vertigo factor and blood sacrifice to speak with me at length (beyond pleasantries). I appreciate your lightness in this regard.
kickscondor
But I’m so big on directories - it occured to me that I could evolve the ‘pinned post’ into something like a mini-directory. h0p3’s ‘root’ page is much more detailed - it’s five pages in one - and each page is terrifically long. I just tried to think about what a mini-directory or cover page would look like.
I also like to hide it because talking about myself is very uncomfortable. I feel very insignificant - but I like it that way - to have to feel that my own ideas or personality or opinions are very valuable - that would be too much to handle. I’d rather have little ideas and wrong ideas of my own - and just be a random person living life and no need to size up what I’m saying against the great ideas of history - no need to establish some track record of being right or upstanding.Although I do get caught up in the allure of cultural commentary and trying to articulate a perspective that, in the moment, might feel ‘right’ - I only hope these are taken as good fun and not as objective truth.
So sometimes I think about getting rid of it - it seems like an advertisement for myself. But I hold out hope that I can make it a mini-directory and eliminate the self-promotional aspects. (On the other hand, I want to encourage other people to self-promote, so I don’t know why I see it as so shameful to write that way - when I like for other people to do it.)
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I often feel like your goal is to help people feel comfortable being themselves, celebrating being human, and cutting through some of the attitudes which have arisen in the market dynamics of the commodified web.
sphygmus
This is something I did a little bit in the very first iteration of //sphygm.us that I published — sort of an index page that linked to projects — but not something that really exists on my site right now. h0p3, your Root seems to serve this purpose in a brief way right now? Chamy, it looks like you address this in a way with linked tags in your Root.
Are there things us wikis could be doing to better serve readers? Is it important for us to attempt to provide something like this for readers? Should it look like Gwern's index, or is there a more wiki-native solution that might be more ideal?
kickscondor
I don’t know - the thing I’ve really enjoyed about your public wikis is that I’ve had to learn your conventions before getting into them. I think you require something from your readers - and I think that sets up a really healthy relationship that the rest of the Internet has struggled with. It’s not their place; it’s yours. And that’s abundantly clear. But when I became comfortable in your wiki, you may have trusted that I had done sufficient work to be worth interacting with.
kickscondor
But then again, I like funneling and there would be no cone without the point. Yours is a static image - but it’s also the colored tags to the side. I think you set the right mood for what it is you’re doing. Sometimes I wish I was structured more like a wiki - but stylistically I’m trying to evoke a turn of the century blog - and aesthetic is important to me, because it surrounds everything else. It accomplishes something that can’t be expressed or done any other way.
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Reading this wiki is far too much work. Surely, there are so many more pleasant things to do with your life. Why start at all? Lol.
kickscondor
Yeah, ok - let’s get into this. What has really inspired me about all of your wikis - and some of the newer personal websites I’ve run into - is this layering of the hypertext. h0p3 has the ‘about’ page, people might have a timeline or a ‘now’ page on their site, even Twitter with its ‘pinned post’ - you don’t just have to have a blog that drops you into chronological posts.
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Of course, I do not have a practical answer which is satisfactory for this one. I would like to know how to give a simple, linear, and almost cut-and-dry answer to that question in the various contexts that matter. I'm particularly awful at determining which doorways are most valuable for a given person+time or even the average person. Additionally, what I consider most salient about the site is likely not what most people do, and we can all be wrong for various reasons about that.
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Sometimes, I think that question is really intending to ask instead: Who do you want your readers to be? I am open to the possibility that machine-assisted reading of this wiki (beyond the fact that it's already a digital medium) will be necessary. Crazy as it sounds, I remain open to the possibility that a non-human intelligence will read it as well. Why do you want them to read it? I think there's a difference between what someone would want to read and what they ought; I'm interested in the former only in virtue of the latter. Reason #23490834 this wiki will not be read by almost anyone.
There are some places that tend to be more relevant than others. Readme is something every new reader should read, but the issue of where best to "start" is something that anyone can reasonably ask, including me on any given day (and, that is what I take myself to be doing, WINTCIS). While I grant there is a set of correct (or ranked in terms of relevance) answers in a given context (or maxim), I can't say I know how to put my finger on it well enough. If I did, I would have solved some fundamental problems in moral philosophy.
Like any particular perspective in the world, a site ought not treat everything equally in all cases. The goal, on average, I take it, is to pick out in relief what matters most instead of flattening it. That is a crazy hard problem.
kickscondor
I’m starting to think of it as funneling, having layers of hypertext that become progressively more personal, or which become more detailed, or perhaps even more (or less) ephemeral as you go through the layers.
kickscondor
I think part of this is an evolution of the fragmentation that has happened in social networks. People may use Twitter for a certain self-image or community, then Facebook or a blog for another mode, and people have become very accustomed to using each network as a separate outlet. And there’s a nice advantage to this - because you can address groups differently and not expose certain groups to overly personal material or control the image you project in each network.
In a similar way, I see this with Nadia Eghbal’s site - she has a newsletter for offering a monthly summary of her work, or there is the blog where you can read essays when they are published, and then she has a raw notes page that isn’t tied to any notification system (like RSS even), so you have to go out of your way to visit the page to catch anything new. So rather than having separate networks, there are different avenues to how you can approach her work.
Your wikis accomplish these layers using titling conventions. Usually ephemeral stuff is marked with a date, letters marked with ‘@’, permanent content is plainly titled. But this is also related to your front page material - you all know where to hide on your wikis the more personal material that you post and how to surface the things that are more central to your dialogue with the rest of us. (Sphygmus’ page coloring is a very interesting approach here.)
So I think of this as a kind of inverted funnel - where you have these entry points to your wiki - might be an ‘about’ page or it might be one of your sidebar directories or some intermediate topical page - and pages are situated somewhere in this conical area, perhaps you are even aware of how far a page might be from the doorway when you post it. Or which series of doorways reach it.
kickscondor
(I’m wondering what you think about this concept - what I’ve got wrong or if I’m characterizing your process correctly.)
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It's difficult for me to know what it is like for the reader. I work for that linearity, layering, funneling, and hierarchy. I see structures which emerge or jut out of the ball of chaos. My assumption is that a wanderer is forced into exploring and seeing themselves positioned relative to roads they've been down, and that gets tricky with such a non-linear ball.
sphygmus
The inverted funnel is also a fun metaphor because hey, it kinda looks like an iceberg! And our wikis are kinda like icebergs, with the daily logs all deep and underneath, and misc bits in the sidebar sticking out of the surface of the water.
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Some kinds of things, by their very nature, are difficult to uncover, reveal, or
give a clean structure to (and that can never be completely accomplished by the
fff). The question is so striking to me because I'm trying to ask and
answer that question about the world itself inside this wiki (including this
wiki). What on this massive highly-interlinked website internet in the
world might I want to start reading investigating and thinking about? This
wiki is as generalized a model as I can make it; I take your question to imply:
what is worth reading out in the world? At least in part, what's relevant in
this site as it relates to what is outside the site? That must sound like woo,
hogwash, a complete fucking non-answer.
Feel free to argue I take my work and myself far too
seriously too. I wish I could give you a
better one, but that is very much what this site-vessel's metamodern structure
is pointing toward through the pomo flooding chaotic sea of meanings.
This is a place where I must show and not just tell.
While the wiki is a pile, I am proud of why it's a pile in this respect.
Arguably, there's a way in which I do a decent job of demonstrating how hard
it is to answer that philosophical question in a generalized fashion (it's
downright a Continental Analytic hybrid, a mix of technical definitions and
structures with the wandering subjectivity narrative, as qualitative and
quantitative as I can make it). In addition, I don't think I'm preserving
an entire universe, but I do see myself as
trying to preserve an evolving set of perspectives, and there's an
infinigress to being meta about or having yet another functional
perspective on other perspectives (even versions of oneself).
Even Wikipedia, a somewhat homogeneous appearing site, in a sense, ends up being something the reader must search (and not everything on Wikipedia is equally valuable). I don't see a reason to think my own wiki shouldn't be similar beyond a set of entrances that attempt to describe my protocols and overall approach. Root, Readme, and the sidebar are the best starting places I know of (hence why they are essentially the front page); I use them too. You have to bring prior intentional material (and the more consciously aware of it you are the better) to the table to figure out what to make of the wiki in the right order.
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I have a range of people who have taken a look, and I usually end up pointing to at least slightly different parts of my wiki, WINTCIS. One thing I refrain from doing much at all is marking for others what I think is relevant for them in this pile (though this is slowly changing over time, I would argue). I tend to do so in direct conversation where we both have skin in the game. I prefer we pick out the salience for us (and perhaps beyond) together. It is likely the case that a reader is best served by writing with me. You need to ride me like a sherpa-donkey on the pukevat wasteland pile of a telic cannon. Assuming you trust me (and likely even if you didn't), at some point, live interaction with The Other is the most energy-efficient empirical method; eventually, passively reading for the same information is far more expensive both in terms of how much must be read and how much must be simulated.
I hope in time to eventually have a much cleaner hierarchical/tree answer (though, I suggest it will always be a steep climb in some areas). I don't know well enough what it will look like way down the instrumental road.
chameleon
The iceberg/inverted funnel idea is lovely. My wiki is a dungeon in the depths already, but that it goes so into the deep you may never return... that's a scary thought, but fits the aesthetic!
When I first came across h0p3's wiki, I had intense vertigo. I knew there was more there than I could ever read. I got scared. I fell back on twitter memes. I hunted for reactionary sentiments so I could turn away. The abyss stared back. I'm very glad he wrote me, and that I was able to reply. I'm very glad I have the wiki. I'm a different person now, a better person for it, in my opinion. I like to think I'm one of the good ones™.
sphygmus
When doing my audits recently I've been thinking of it in terms of linking, and distance from discovery (kind of like 6 Degrees of Sphygmus). Some tiddlers are only linked to by one or two others and are more distant from the surface in that way. The tiddlers with one or maybe two links are actually more hidden than the "real" orphans — at least those get their own section.
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Yeah, that has to be one of the most interesting issues in reasoning about the wiki structure. What's really important may pop up there. How should things cluster together? What does it mean to efficiently find what is relevant? The bigger the wiki gets, the more I'm forced to use the search tools, and the less I can navigate it like a directory. Eventually, even I will likely be forced to use more dynamic tooling to navigate ad hoc directory structures in my own wiki with the kin-based Locator.
sphygmus
My on this day tiddler also surfaces them without context other than the particular day they were created, so the more distantly linked tiddlers might appear there. The older my dated entries are, the more links they're buried behind (log collection > yearly audit > monthly audit > dailies), while the topical tiddlers are pretty high up (either linked directly in my sidebar or one layer below).
chameleon
hm. Some of my tiddlers, too, are buried by time. I use the search bar when writing a previously. Even I'm starting to forget what I have buried in here. Ultimately, it does provide a good resource. I've more than once forgotten some minutiæ, gone back through the logs, and found it again.
sphygmus
I think I like that this means the older journal entries will "fade" in terms of linking layers. People have to be at least somewhat nosy to poke around in the older daily logs. (unless they're looking at on this day ofc.)
kickscondor
I think the biggest discovery that I’ve made with ‘funneling’ is to have my /all unfiltered pagecontaining the raw edits, essays, links and so on and then to have a main pageexpressly made of things I want to broadcast on the surface, on the home page.. To describe it in TiddlyWiki terms, it’s as if I’ve taken my ‘recent’ sidebar and curated it on the home page. And, rather than using titling conventions to do it, I use metadata - so that some entries are marked ‘hidden’ or ‘draft’ and that keeps them off the home page.
chameleon
Kicks, I forget where, but I made the distinction before: tiddlers VS articles VS journals. Tiddlers are the superset, and articles are subject to the Development Levels. Journal entries are fleeting things. They will be lost in time if not tagged, but they're still there beneath the surface.
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I think almost everyone agrees with you here. I don't think it's an easy problem. Like, if the story of our lives is really just ephemeral, if re-using our data doesn't matter, then why write them down (or, rather, why keep them and catalog them, why search through them?)? I re-use some percentage of my journal entries in different ways (beyond Know Thyself), and I don't know which ones are going to be important up front. What's good log-keeping in computing? I don't know.
I like your developmental levels. Perhaps when (if, who am I kidding? ;P) I get to The Remodeling again, I'll work toward that in a field. There's something to it. If tiddlers are atoms, I want to know what kinds of project molecules should be assigned development levels and so forth (beyond what I have in Hub). I have no idea what I'm doing on this front, as usual. =)
chameleon
I've used these terms a bit hap-hazardly but I think now I can define them more clearly.
A tiddler is the raw page unit on tiddlywiki. This is a tiddler. Root is a tiddler. 2019.09.27 - Islandpunk is a tiddler.
An article is a non-journal tiddler that uses the Development Levels system. So The Last Waifuist is an article, but 2019.12.10 - roguelikes and OSR is not.
A journal entry is tagged Journal and begins with a date in the usual format (YYYY.MM.DD on my wiki). So 2019.10.28 - chame writes a half-decent progression!? is a journal entry, h0p3 is not.
The distinction can be thought of thusly: "tiddler" is like "book"; "article" is like "novel" or "encyclopedia"; "journal entry" is like "diary". A novel is a book, a diary is a book, but a novel is not a diary.
kickscondor
I think there is something about ‘now’ which I think is important. We can’t satisfy the modeling of ourselves in a moment (‘now’), but we can try to develop something over time.
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From what I can tell, there is a fuzzy sliver of time in the pregnant present; it doesn't vanish into a single point. We can take developmental ticktock steps (though I know not how small nor what it means to divide them) toward something in the "now," and there, insofar as those tiny timeslices and gunky fragments yet afford us choice (sometimes we are only an observer), there is an opportunity for fitting satisfaction in context. I think it's terrifying, often absurd.
kickscondor
Ok, thank you - the answers about ‘funneling’ or ‘iceberging’ or ‘shitpiling’ or whatever you want to call it are all really interesting. I really like chame’s take on drafting as another layer. I hadn’t considered that kind of granularity at all.
I guess we can start to wind the discussion down.
sphygmus
As we're winding up the discussion here: I think it's important to not slide by the potential for each of us as individuals to experience feelings of being scared or left out or noticed or ignored or exposed — simply, feelings in general. Said feelings arise in many social contexts (not just this one), and the medium of "hypertext"/"hyperconversation" is far from a perfect solution to our social frictions and triggers.
All of this reminds me of a redditor's comment about h0p3's wiki:
[O]f course your voluminous wiki is 100% a facade in the sense that you've curated every entry, every word, the aesthetic, the diction and prose. The images and colors.
They are all a performance, like our outfits and mannerisms. We are presenting ourselves as characters to the world.
What you're not including is how similar to the rest of us you are. You too fart and ache like us.
a reply to h0p3's commentwhere I wish I could link to a specific section of internal text
which is fascinating to me because h0p3 is very explicit about including his farts and aches in his wiki! (For example!)
sphygmus
And of course the worry in this quote has been brought up in @: hypertext 2020> Are we modeling fictional characters or not? Does it matter? and in the letters kicks & h0p3 have written, and almost certainly elsewhere in our threads as well.please correct me if it's not the same worry at all!
From my perspective, this worry about "projecting a facade" or "putting on a mask" is a worry about our extended lack of phenomenological contact with the qualia of others. That is, in a face-to-face conversation I have the experience of seeing and participating in another person's outward expressions of emotion (laughing, frowning, body language, tone of voice). The true connection between the other's internal state and their external emotions aside, I still experience a sense of physical, embodied, and emotional feedback which leads me to believe I am experiencing a true expression of their internal state.
sphygmus
The internet, our websites, and our conversations over/through them completely remove and de-sync this feedback, and that disconnect triggers our unconscious to start worrying about whether we are actually receiving the truth of others' internal states.this also gets brought into discussions of trolling and online bullying — a lack of feeling the consequences of one's actions in a social context, etc.
kickscondor
Yeah.Meaning: so good. I’m not at all against video or multimedia communication - I got into Snapchat for awhile. I just want to find the strength in hypertext writing. It seems hasty to me to give up after 20 years in (10 for most people). We have a lot to learn about reading and writing online.And may not be able to - so I understand anyone who wants to bail on it.
I think there’s a yearning for the return of text. Video and audio now dominate - and have serious issues, too. I think part of this comes from so much of human history being tied up in text - perhaps this lends a ‘sacred’ feeling to text - but it’s also that it isn’t as tied up with physical performance and is able to be ingested internally in a way. I’m seeing more people writing about what they’re reading and challenging themselves to read more - it’s still seen as a virtue in people’s minds.
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I'm learning to appreciate connecting with lots of methods. I'm grateful that you reason about the limits of this particular practice in a semi-purist fashion with us. I still take writing to be critical to (and arguably the hardest part of) relationships. Usually, I encounter the opposite problem: why would anyone pay attention to what I have to say on my wiki (and write back) when they can use more immediately gratifying mediums with lower barriers to entry that are considered (by social norm) to be more ephemeral (though, I find this word baffling), low-key, and non-committal? I don't think most people who might read as closely as you often do would want to remain so remote (not the right word, but I don't know the right one) either, so you are somewhat like a control testing group perspective to stand out against the other relationships I have which are mixed.We have very few exceptions to communicating over anything other than our sites. Sometimes I think we are like two scientists mutualistically studying different problems together over a series of tubes. What we have doesn't match the consistent revelatory and self-modeling work which Sphygmus and chameleon engage in; they are more strongly integrated into my daily life. I adore that writing is the centerpiece for our communication,In a way, we've overshot the golden mean toward the much rarer side of vice. It's fascinating. but diversity in expression is still valuable. My assumption is that if and when you want to connect further, you will. Until then, I think it's good to enjoy what we have.
I guess I feel like asking all of you: looking at self-modeling as a type of permanent serialization format, where you’re attempting to prematurely get frozen (cryogenically), what medium(s) would be your chosen form of carbonite?
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I'm assuming the metaphor isn't meant to be taken too strongly here, and you can correct me if I'm wrong about that.You know me, I'm nitpicky: why should I think I am attempting to prematurely get frozen? I agree I'm trying to learn how to create immutable aspects of objects irwartfrr, not prematurely though. Serializationtm still doesn't describe it correctly. The wiki is still my chosen medium, but it captures, enables, or replicates a lot of mediums and methods. Long-form writing is also still the pinnacle to me, although I have a harder time knowing what doesn't count as long-form in here. I capture a lot of stories and thoughts in this horcrux-pensieve. Sometimes, larger, evolving, emerging, or meta stories about those timeslices arise.
If we are going sci-fi for mediums, at least for the foreseeable future, it's not clear that ML will become energy-efficient enough to do anything more than augment this medium; there are, however, possible mediums which are significantly better for self-modeling. To be clear, however, I'm not looking directly for those methods which are best at self-modeling given unlimited resources without deontic constraints. One of my preferences is to use a self-owned medium which the average joe can replicate to some extent, WINTCIS. In terms of infrastructure, text is energy-efficient, flexible, easier to compute over, cheap to store in decentralized fashions, and something which even the poor kid in India could achieve on their shitty Android phone (though, obviously, that is still severely limited).It reminds me of Apollo 13, where we have to ask what the folks up in space have available to them right now.
kickscondor
Yeah.Meaning: you’re saying great stuff - my actual response to your writing was to be dumbfounded by how solid it was and to have no good reaction - which means I’ve had to patiently walk around the neighborhood endlessly, attempting to summon a measly worthwhile thought. I think this was a big part of my early letters to h0p3. Like: a total doubt that written communication could work. But it turned out to be really fun and rewarding - partially because it was so difficult and fraught with peril. So I find myself wanting to avoid corporeality with you all because I want to see how far this can go.Hah, and maybe we’re at the end!
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I'm slow to say we connect to someone's qualiatm directly,Even the conditions for experiencing qualia aren't something we can be certain about. but we can probably get closer to it. It's an empirical process, hence your reasonable doubt. We are blackboxes (even to ourselves to some extent), and that trusting trust problem cannot be solved all the way down. There's a faith in The Other problem which is never eliminated.
While I will agree it exists, I don't know what that perfect (for the fff) solution entails, nor can I provide a perfect method for finding a solution (even accounting for our limitations). Communicating in-person often doesn't provide enough distance, and, likewise, communicating entirely remotely is usually too much distance. I agree we are wired for in-person encounters. There are significant privacy trade-offs here.
The best solutions I've found are mixing communications channels. You'll find I aim to be formal or thorough in my letter-writing, but if you catch me at 3am in IMing, I'm looser and more likely to shoot-the-shit. There comes a point in some of my relationships where voice is necessary; we simply can't communicate fast enough in writing. But, even my in-person encounters are fantastically augmented by having a wiki. I need them all to connect. Maybe conditions for feeling authenticity in connection are likely to vary on per person basis too.
The Discord server may help us build more bridges. You can also call me whenever you want Sphygmus; I've never asked if I could call you because I'm already a creeper, lol. Kicks knows he can whenever he wants to, and chameleon has muh info now as well. I'm hoping to hear your voices (I need to walk while I talk).
So, does it matter whether we're receiving that feedback or not? How much is it hardwired into our bodies to expect certain qualia and feel off balance without it? What ways do we adjust for it over hypermedia? Could you make an argument for the rise of forms like video/snapchat/tiktok as one attempt to solve the qualia feedback problem?
Breaking it down in this way also highlights the overlap between our offline and online interactions. A common worry online might be "is this person scamming or catfishing me?" but the same worry can very much be had offline, where, despite my unconscious belief of the feedback I'm receiving from another person, I might also worry if they're scamming me. Perhaps similar worries will have similar solutions? (And T42T enters the arena.)
I don't have any specific conclusions or questions for individuals! I just wanted to highlight a dimension we hadn't directly discussed yet.
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My encounters with someone in-person do not leave me clean images that I can study later over the years; I'll only ever have fading and distorted impressions. It's true that this problem doesn't actually disappear when I have an external image to look at either, but some aspects are mitigated. Conversely, real-time communications do not give much compute time for cognitively finding collisions for deception.
kickscondor
I think the last thing I want to ask about touches on the ‘culture wars’ and the surrounding online warfare that we find ourselves in.
kickscondor
Specifically: the ingroup/outgroup dynamics that plague the Internet, the trolls and activists that stoke the fire, and the norms that are being established around how one should talk and write publicly.
This is already a topic in the discussion - the personal/private distinction we’ve discussed indicates where we stand in defending ourselves, the topic of doorways into our icebergs is somewhat about who to invite and how to set the right note - and h0p3 just went into how the funnel can ‘bounce’ trolls and vampires. (Which troubles me, because I like to meet trolls and vampires, too. For sure I’d love to meet vampires! I’m not sure I want them to bounce as much as to rattle around inside.)
chameleon
Part of the solipsistic nature of the wiki is that trolls don't really have much of an effect on it. I don't visit that side of the internet and I'd prefer to keep it that way. It's in public, but I could easily lock it down by using basic authentication or cryptography or whatever.
I'd like to pre-emptively avoid lumping in "activists" with those types of people. My very existence is political in today's hyperpartisan world, and many of those "activists" are at least attempting to make the world a better place, even if I don't agree with their approach (not by half). The only "activists" I'd shit on are those that appropriate the language of activism to perpetuate bigotry, i.e. TERFs and other second-wavers.
Outside of just, y'know, ignoring them and focusing on my wiki, I exist in a true cozyweb too. 2dl has a gatekeeping system, and beyond that I exist in PMs and the like which (except with h0p3) generally stay private messages. I've thought about starting a group chat, or even private mailing list. I appreciate the notion of staying under wraps. I love that "dark forest" analogy.
kickscondor
Yeah, ok, I need to fill that in a bit. I’m not making a judgement here. I’m not putting them all in a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ category. There are good and bad trolls, good and bad activists.I will say that I imagine that, like a craft or role, there are probably true experts and the rest of us are just playing, probably destructively. I think that’s the thing about trolls and activists. You have to have quality moves as well as real message. That’s asking a lot! I think it’s this thought, of ‘minions’ that operate in the ‘troll’ and ‘activist’ roles, that really make me think to group them together. (Although sometimes I wonder if centuries from now we’ll look back and see the pursuit for humor as being far more virtuous and generous than the pursuit for political ground. Maybe slightly - eh probably not.)Also, could activists be more effective as trolls? While throwing a shoe is activism, I think I have to score it in the troll camp.
My grouping here is more a matter of directionality or something. Hypertext 2010 was an effort in isolation - or solipsism, as you say - impossible to intrude upon (without hacking it) - so quite unsuitable for a troll or activist, whose fuel requires targets, people to trigger or people to sway. We don’t really have those directional targets. I mean I’m cool if people join us, but it’s not essential.
In fact, I think, for me, the directionality is inverted. I’m here to read. I’m not trying to own or gather up a bunch of Winnie Lims. I just want to read what she’s got and see what happens.Like it’s a catalyst? Like it’s an unknown substance? What happens if I put THIS in the tank? Maybe I want to be owned and gathered. No, that’s not it - I mean perhaps in the moment of reading, I’m happy to be destroyed by it - but I’ve got my own thing I’m doing, it’s just going to be less dramatic. The directionality is just: I want to collect some of these cool stickers you’re offering. It’s like the pleasant capitalism that happens at the level of coins rather than cash.
It’s possible that ‘hypertext 2020’ continues to be hermetic, ‘staying under wraps’. But, no, I think that while trying to articulate this directionality, I want that inverted movement. Perhaps it’s like a vacuum tube where the pressure got too hot. So now a hole broke and everything is getting sucked inside. It’s a nice breeze. Time to break some glass.
Agreed on the mainstream - just on principle. My back is turned.
So this topic might kill the discussion - I feel like it’s more enjoyable to just allude to the conflict rather than to take it on - not that no one’s talking about it, it’s like everyone is talking about it all of the time. And I think it goes without saying that the shape of our ‘cozyweb’ is due to these forces.
I guess my question is: to what degree do you feel the four of us are being shaped by the culture? Or are we attempting to reshape it in miniature? Because ‘hypertext 2020’ isn’t really a complete discussion without some vision for how our smaller landscape could function. We have some good ideas for how the craft of hypertext might progress in 2020. How can it possibly work culturally?
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Those are big questions.
Outgrouping cannot be escaped online or offine, it can only be shaped. There are no neutral parties or people devoid of ideology (even if a person may describe themselves as such). Even attempting to avoid or calmly stand outside of cultural war is an act of cultural warfare (though it may be the justified move in some cases).
chameleon
As much as possible, I want to negate, even escape, the ~culture~. I don't like
the mainstream 2010s-now-2020s internet. I hate twitter, I hate facebook, I
hate 99% of youtube, I hate instagram, and <s>i hate everyone that posts
there.</s>
If I had my way, we'd all forget the irony-poisoned, toxic, proprietary-software cultural shit-show of today and use the infrastructure we have to replicate and expand on what was good about the past. I want to see an internet which is just about weird, funny shit again. I want communities which are about sharing our love of something, not shitting on what someone else likes, or gatekeeping each other for having insufficiently patrician taste. I want an end to harassment; to reactionary bullying; to corporate shills and #influencers. I want the internet to be fun again.
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If I understand correctly, a cozyweb is a dialectical body designed with infrastructural outgrouping. To varying dok, it tends to shield itself from the public and provides its users various control mechanisms for avoiding conflict with most of the world (which is not the claim this is always justified). Parts of what I'm engaged in here isn't toward the cozyweb because it's too public (vulnerable and compromised even with pseudonymity), however, the funnels do limit the probabilities of how the public might engage or react to it.
Cultures are the dialectically ordered spheres of belief and desire of agents. Beyond curiosity, I don't think there is anything particularly special about them at first glance; lots of creatures have them. Ours are interesting because we can be responsible for them (which I wouldn't say about, for example, a bee culture).
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Hence, I am a culturalist; not all cultures of persons are morally equal. At the very least, some are permissible and some are not in various circumstances.
I don't know the degree to which each of us are shaped by "the culture" (which I presume to be the set of all cultures on the planet), and it's not easy to pick out what consists in "shaping." Someone can hold a gun to my head and say "jump or I shoot," and I'm still capable of choosing not to jump (even if I'm not politically free to do otherwise); that kind of freedom is what allows us to intervene upon how culture shapes us to some dok. We can react differently and choose not to assent. Unless we're thinking about a causally isolated agent with beliefs and desires (and perhaps not even then, depending on the nature of the agent), culture always shapes an agent to some dok. Some influences are more direct or efficacious than others, and our responsibilities vary.
How does it work culturally (as a description) is a different matter than how it ought to work (as a prescription). Are the beliefs and desires of a culture justified? I have doubts that we'll have a practice which is justifiable and contagious at the same time. I am not convinced our work here will likely be of any serious consequence at large, so the attempt is a Hail Mary pass (one I'm obligated to attempt). There is work to do in improving the odds of success though.
hyperconversation := a conversation integratively built upon explicit referential linking to at least one hyperobject
See here.
Development Levels (from chame's wiki)
no level - for meta-pages, scratchpads and random stuff.
level zero - article is perfect.
level one - done, but may be tweaked in minor ways.
level two - mostly done, final draft, structure is sound.
level three - in progress, half-finished, structure can be done.
level four - barely started, a skeleton or sketch.
level five - not yet started, just a title or blurb.
Original URL is here.
END OF CHAT