Recently, we were discussing what interests us, on Community Wiki. I started writing a few words, and more words came, so here’s a stream of consciousness answer…
I like to play role-playing games and I’m interested in mapping programs that generate maps, and programs that allow me to modify maps without being an artist. I’d also like to be an artist. I’d love to be good at ink wash painting. I’d love to play a simple instrument like the recorder. I’m also interested in programs that generate texts to use for play, often driven by random tables because I think the neural networks currently en vogue don’t scale for single person endeavours. As a programmer at the office, I’m interested in why we keep writing software that I can barely understand. What drives this complexity? What drives customer wish-lists? What drives developer fashions? Why is capitalism the root of all evil? As a programmer at home, I’m interested in how I can write programs that are easy for me to come back to in a year, in two years, in five years. How to write programs that attract somebody else to help me out. How to talk about my programs such that other people see what’s great about them, such that they use them, and contribute towards them, but sharing my values regarding complexity and longevity. How to make sure that my works survive me. How social media works: what kinds of messages make people feel good. How to learn – and how to teach others – not to be a reply guy, not to be sea-lioning, how to decolonise my writing, the intricacies of muting, blocking, archiving and expiry – I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the idea of record keepers, a blog post that I keep linking! And thus, the design of social media, the filter algorithms that make them addictive, that encourage bubble formation, the drift towards stupidity online (national socialism, Proud Boys, Tea Party, involuntary celibacy, anti-vaccination, ur-fascism, and so on)… the link from these things to politics is important for our future and yet another symptom of our inability to deal with systemic problems such as global warming. I’m interested in all these political topics not because I want to discuss the actual topics but because I feel I need to better understand them as symptoms of underlying social, political, or even economic issues. And in a way I wonder how we can talk about all these things with our friends, our class mates, our family – our community.
Anyway, of all of these things, I don’t really see too much online. I wish Community Wiki would be the place, I guess. As you can see, I’m actually not all that interested in wikis except as a communication tool that encourages collaboration, mutual ownership. Wiki is praxis. Wiki is – or can be – an illustration of simple software design, of simple user interface design. I also don’t care too much about the web other than that it serves as an example of surveillance capitalism, of compounding complexity, of regulatory capture (of the W3C), of monopoly formation (of the browser market), or about Gemini other than that it serves as a counter to all of this. For me, Gemini is praxis. It is the actual doing, the making of a point.
But other than that, there’s also the personal. The love of my life, pictures of flowers, of nature, of hikes… My social media feed @kensanata has plenty of pictures, tidbits of my personal life, which serves as a grounding, as an opportunity to connect on an emotional level (I hope!), and that is also important. Where does that fit in, in the context of community building?
Also, the lingering suspicion that people who have many friends, party; where as people who do not, write about community building.
#Life