It’s hot. Topless computing! 🥵
I was exchanging emails with Greta Goetz the other day. We were talking about a post of hers:
Bernard Stiegler wrote a lot about entropic features of the Anthropocene. … Stiegler’s response was to propose the “contributive economy” — in which everyone can be a contributor, emitting their own symbols. In his economy of contribution, people are so much more than consumers. – Value for value
I was picking up on the idea of a sort of exchange taking place as I was considering what a “contributive economy” might be in light of Marcia B.’s criticism of the commercialisation of the role-playing games hobby:
By the time I decided to join the conversation, the predominant mode of interacting with everyone else was selling PDFs on the internet. … Something we can do, on an individual and a collective basis, is to reject the predominant culture of the hobby and to strive for a community with non-commercial interactions between members. This is not to say that the issue is grounded in the culture of the hobby, but that the culture of the hobby has developed to reproduce the sorts of relationships we have with each other. – Steps to Demonetize the TTRPG Hobby
Steps to Demonetize the TTRPG Hobby
I want to talk about the reasons the idea of value-for-value makes me uncomfortable. I think that it implies the word “exchange” – and with Graeber (“Debt: The first 5000 years”) my suspicion is that exchange leads to debt and accounting and that, I suspect, leads to a world that does not run with “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” (Marx)
The word “exchange” conjures up a world of value-for-value exchanges in which those that are smarter generate more value, and also get back more value. And we already know from our current large scale experiment of hacker culture, that meritocracy does not lead to a better world. I mean, at least it’s not very corrupt, but there are side effects like being a good hacker gaining you a good position somewhere (meritocracy), and the good position gaining you visibility and clout in other areas. It’s a bit like asking pop stars for their opinions about a political topic: their abilities do not transfer, and yet our world demonstrates that humans imagine the transfer (maybe something Kahn’s book on slow and fast thinking could illuminate).
Even if we attempt to decouple all of this: when people used gamification on Stack Exchange, it sort of worked. I find many of my questions answered, there. But at the same time, people tell me that there are some who ask or answer inane and trivial questions in order to rack up points, gaming the system for side-effects. I’d say: every system of gamification is gamed… 😆
Greta framed the question as follows: what small, everyday change can we make to behaviour to support different forms of exchange?
All I have is a bunch of hazy notions, nothing really ready to go, but perhaps a start.
This too is something Marcia B. has noted in her essay:
A shift towards non-commercial material would then likely correspond to a shift towards smaller centers of activity (in this case, playing games) and reproducing those centers of activity by members interacting with and teaching each other. – Steps to Demonetize the TTRPG Hobby
Steps to Demonetize the TTRPG Hobby
Here, it’s the structure of activity that prevents scaling. But notice how new forms of the hobby do away with it: you can watch other people play on Twitch, you can watch recordings on YouTube, you can listen to other people play on podcasts. All these forms of related entertainment do scale and therefore work against what I’m arguing for. Not scaling produces a healthier environment.
So here is something we can do in our lives: to breaking scaling by refusing to implement it using technology in the software we write, by designing our games for small groups, by disregarding the needs of capitalist corporations that want things to scale because this is how they can keep profits and get rid of people.
That reminds me of the discussion where “productivity” means that we are putting ourselves out of business:
We have put ourselves out of business. … Or perhaps to see everything through the lens of business is the beginning of our problems? – 2022-07-24 Putting ourselves out of business
2022-07-24 Putting ourselves out of business
Sure, as @Sandra once said, we don’t want to go back to inefficient drudgery but in the case of a game, in the case of cooking, in the case of painting, in the case of writing, in the case of caring for plants on the balcony, where the activities are in themselves enjoyable: we don’t want to be efficient, we want to enjoy life.
The human compiler at work?! … No matter what tools we have, fancy machines or cozy traditional hand tools, the enemy is the 40h workweek. … I want to be very careful that we don’t drop our eye from the ball which is to end exploitation and create a fair and, above all else, lazy world. – Breaking Things at Work
So yeah, not all automation is bad. We don’t want machines to put us out of work in a world where we need work to survive. We don’t want machines to do things we like to do, like art. We do want machines to free us from the drudgery of survival. I’m just arguing that this doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to feed those global monopolies, those winner-takes-it-all, the big companies ruining our planet.
And in the case of rewards where “some” is good enough (like praise), we don’t need to build a system that scales so that we can get the reward from the entire globe and in all time zones. It’s fine if such mechanisms don’t scale.
In a way, IRC and other such chat networks afford this, too: even if all the interactions are logged forever (boo! hiss! bad for privacy and no repudiation of your contributions…) the structure works against the use of logs to build reputation and influence as the conversation happens within IRC clients that typically do not show log information. You cannot tell from a nick how many questions they asked, how many thank-yous they received, and so on – you might only get the nick registration date, so: “age”.
As an aside, a wiki could be even greater if you could just edit the page directly. Interestingly, while it is possible to setup Oddmuse such that it uses HTML only, with an HTML editor, and edit on a double click on the page, I’ve never actually used such a system myself. I guess I like the separation into source document (wiki text, Markdown, and so on) and result (HTML).
Sure, allowing anonymous contributions make design harder. I don’t mean to say that it would be easier to implement! We have to defend against leeching, spam, vandalism, honest mistakes. In order to do that, we need transparency, ways to collectively monitor systems, to undo damages, to revert changes, to resolve conflicts, all of that and more.
I’m sure more is required. How to build a sense of belonging, a sense of community, of meaning, a vision, a history? Traditional social skills remain as important as always. In many ways, the way we teach history skips over this aspect. I knew about Rosa Parks sitting in the bus and refusing to get up, for example: a tale of individual courage. I didn’t understand that the organisation of the Montgomery bus boycott took a lot of people, a lot of planning, a lot of organising. I don’t think I ever was taught how to do that. What a useful skill it would be. How important it is that we should all know how to do this.
Nixon intended that her arrest be a test case to allow Montgomery’s black citizens to challenge segregation on the city’s public buses. With this goal, community leaders had been waiting for the right person to be arrested, a person who would anger the black community into action, who would agree to test the segregation laws in court … – Montgomery bus boycott
So, more is required, but those are also bigger steps. The small steps we can start practising right now is the refusal to scale, a refusal to participate in exaggerated reputation building, a refusal to model our relations in terms of economic exchange.
Yet another anecdote. OK, I know what you’re thinking: when is this blog post finally going to end? Soon! I promise. The anecdote is this: in my games, there is no reward for good deeds, and there is no reward for heroic deeds, for if there is a reward, then the thing is an exchange, and if it is an exchange known to happen before committing to the deed, then it is neither good nor heroic but part of an economic exchange and thereby cheapened.
The important part is to give to the community, knowing that you might not get an immediate and fair return, but also knowing that you live in a community where you are going to get something back, eventually, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” A society where gift are given, not exchanged, and not accounted for.
OK, time to let go. 😄
#Philosophy
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Hi! We were writing at length but my emails were mostly about a permaculture approach; with any gardening metaphor, there is no expected return. It is only hoped for. An old Chinese proverb notes that the field tended to does not lead to a harvest, but the seeds that fell by the road yield a welcome shade. ...Our emails led me to want to update the post linked to here; I only got to it this morning. Busy days...
Since I am commenting, I’d also like to point to what James Clerk Maxwell said of university (i.e., a shared place of learning - which could also be an informal, digital one). He wrote, in the documentation assembled by Campbell, that part of its strength is in cross-fertilization. But I also worry about sustainability. Community “gardens” could potentially help with this, if at least as a source of co-encouragement.
– Greta 2022-08-06 16:38 UTC
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One phenomenon of the pandemic for me personally is a total loss of trust in other people and I gave often wondered: how will I rebuild that trust in other people? Gaming together, even if online, has been one of the ways to rediscover common grounds, common interests. A community garden would help as well, I think. A friend in the neighborhood is member of a vegetable co-op, planting and harvesting veggies together. Perhaps that would also be an option.
– Alex 2022-08-06 19:49 UTC
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We don’t want machines to put us out of work in a world where we need work to survive.
I’d flip that. We want to survive without work in a world where there’s machines. Our system based on an owner class and a worker class is the worst possible fit for dealing with this dilemma, as we’ve seen with the increasing wealth gaps since the start of the industrial age.
– Sandra 2022-08-08 05:06 UTC
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a total loss of trust in other people
I already distrust everyone but in a kind of patronizing way. I’d trust someone to do the right thing about as much as I’d put a toddler in the pilot’s seat of a 747. That’s how I see everyone all the time.
We've talked before about how I've been a very strong believer in Hanlon's razor.
And I still am. That was a very small course correction, not a 180˚. Maybe one time in a thousand, there’s malice, but that malice goes a long way when it comes to herding gullible people like Q followers or anti-vaxxers or big-lie–believers.
999 times of a thousand, people wanna do the right thing but can’t.
(And even then that one-in-a-thousand “malice” is just a sloppy, kinda dehumanizing shorthand for a particular mens rea formed as a cruel diamond by the soot of circumstances forced through a needle’s eye of opportunity.)
– Sandra 2022-08-08 05:32 UTC
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Speaking more generally, I think you have a very good insight on why the world went crazy, thank you for that. Contagion eroded all trust which led to big lie, covid denialism, increased climate denialism, riots, fash reaction to BLM demos, wars and invasion.
People trusted each other and didn’t have a framework for how to exist in a world where they suddenly couldn’t shake hands or other primate rituals and superstitions designed to ward off the specter of deceit.
It’s the same bad old “I don’t play with cheaters” illogic we’ve seen on boardgamegeek all these years.
Whereas I already saw y’all—speaking to humanity now, not Alex—as just rafts on a rapid river. Trying your best to do the right thing and I can’t hate missteps any more than I’d hate a clumsy kid for dropping a plate when trying to help with chores.
– Sandra 2022-08-08 05:55 UTC