DreamSong Invitation #2
Description
Hello David,
thank you for your Video about the InterBrain but also the other ones from your channel.
Please consider the following as inspiration or invitation for collaboration instead of something else in a negative way.
The influence of linear Media is strong. People like Ted Nelson insisting on their vision of transclusion are hinting towards something very important. If you watch some of his xanadu demos, I can somehow feel how he was aiming for something related to what you want to create here. As coincidences go, just a few days ago I read about the difference between - sign - and - symbol -, how carl jung saw it. I think its an interesting question - How to represent a Symbol with its relationship to openness on the computer?
You mention git Repositories as means to store artefacts. There could be many stories told about the (merkle)tree datastructures and how to build things upon it. Some of these stories would relate to IPFS(DAT) and others maybe to the RChain Blockchain. Seeing how Technical concepts failed, again and again because of "human" problems. Its so interesting to see how people are always concerned about - technical - scaling and not - human - scaling.
It seems many people have tried to solve this problem programmatically.
I also want to take the time and talk about ethereum. That is the human side of ethereum, as much as I can from an outsider perspective.
Although Ethereum arguably started out as a rather technical focused project it soon became clear that it certainly is about the people.
Vinay gupta said here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6_30eKQeN8
"to get effective collaboration, people need to either shared experiences or shared expectations"
Charles Hoskinson was for a very brief time part of ethereum. Then he split ways to follow his ideas into the cardano project. How much personal suffering are we trying to keep up with to achieve - scalability?
https://web.archive.org/web/20221205081428/hoskinsoncharles.blogspot.com/
Gavin Wood also founding member of ethereum went to "solve" the "blockchain" problem with his polkadot project. In the beginning he gave talks where he was talking about how these blockchain systems should be aleagal - apolitical (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdgQI6CA4-E) . I think it shows how isolated he was in his thinking at that time. No time for Heidegger - Frage zur Technik? But these days he seems to be also talking about his troublesome childhood, besides still pushing to finally "scale" polkadot.
I'm somewhat optimistic about Vitalik Buterin he talks about his values. To me this seems to be a kind of attempt to dream talk within his tribe, for some details see his d/acc post https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/01/05/dacc2.html
It warms my heart that he also talks to people like Sadhguru.
Another thing that is related to ethereum is kernel community. The big picture beyond its syllabus is also quite related to the DreamSong practice. Kernel seeks to inquire what could better money look like, and it helps to ask better questions https://read.kernel.community/en/learn/module-2/better-questions/ .
Why do you want to implement github as publisher? Of course github is now a very popular social network amongst programmers but lets not forget what microsoft did with github - profit oriented training of AI without the consent of the human programmers who created the code. Bret Victor spent a lot of time on designing computers for humans. His latest Project is called Dynamicland. In his search for a more humane computing medium I think he and his collaborators tried to invent a new computing culture.
Quote: "Realtalk is not made of source code. Open source is not open to most people."
https://dynamicland.org/2024/Is_Realtalk_open_source/
In his own way he tries to offer a solution through engineering but also social norms to address our current problems(fragmentation). He also calls his vision communal computing. You can find some views on private vs public here for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PixPSNRDNMU.
Alan Kay worked also on many interesting projects but I think funding was also always an issue. One of his projects was the STEPS Project it had many interesting ideas. One of them was the goal to to decrease the cognitive complexity of software by creating a System that would allow to have an Operating System and Office like Software in less than 10000 lines of code. Especially the graphics solution looked very promising here we can see how it played out:
damelang/nile#3
The researcher had to make a decision about his income. He could not have imagined that collective crowdfunding could give him the income he needed to sustain his family. The initial goal of smalltalk to have a system where the separation between Operating System and Application is gone I do think is very worthwhile. And rethinking interaction patterns around software seems to be connected to that(producer/consumer/apps etc...). In that sense Dynamicland has pushed the boundary quite far (less then 20 LoC for presentation software vs power point millions LoC)
So funding is always an issue. I hope that the circles project ( aboutcircles.com ) and cycles (cycles.money) project help to make OpenSource technology more sustainable. I do think tryting to create new cultures as Bret Victor tries it is an important ways. I feel so reminded of the guilds in dune. But here it gets difficult to explain things in text and we would need your symbol language to have a better understanding.
Urbit solved important technical problems, it is beautiful in many aspects but went astray in many others...
I am also optimistic to see your approach as an attempt to improve communication rather then these other projects I mentioned which got lost in grandiosity. An Approach more focused on an ecology of practices seems reasonable to me. John Vervaeke has these nice practices while having a strong root in propositional knowledge the practice of creating a more tangible representation of your own meta knowledge does not seem so far off from what you are trying to do.
One more cautionary tale about scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAeUsWlWaiI
Tyson Yunkaporta remarks here :
"you know this this this civilization needs things to be able to scale and really nothing good can scale"
"it looks like blockchain 2.0 is and even 3.0 coming down the track is getting a lot more interesting and so out of that you're getting a lot of um you know the p2p movement and a thousand different things idea of ideas of holochain which is not really supported by the tech yet but just the idea of hollow chain and the ideas that are coming around you know peer-to-peer networks and you know people sort of going ah stuff servers we don't need servers we can have our computers talking to each other and then from there going hang on we don't need the computers to talk to each other we can talk to each other"
I remember vaguely the world wise web effort from weco.io. What were your experiences using the glass bead game there?
Just talk to each other is a nice segway into the last parts I wanted to mention. Recently I wanted to start collaborating in better ways with a friend. I have my zettelkasten since a long time now and he likes to use Mindmaps. , but I found some hints on how this collaboration could look like. So I came across the project group muni.town and they are working on something called roomy (see https://muni.town for details).
If your idea is to go from a PKM like obsidian to more collaborative ways. They try to use chat as a collaborative way and go from there to more permanent or PKM like means(categories/wikis). In their blogs you may find already a lot of "gardening" related language or posts like that about - community gardening, which I felt were related to the vision gardening you mention.
You talked about a technological arms race in your Interbrain Video, if we see technology as means to reflect ourselves then we can see our ambitions and desires reflected in it too. In crypto/blockchain space there are people praising its ability to provide transparency and then there are people insisting how good it is as a means to provide privacy. If we look close enough we can find the archetypes in our technology and thus in ourselves. I think we can see the balancing act you mention, not only in technology but also in the development of ourselves. Realizing that balancing ourselves will lead to better technology could be a useful idea. But I guess that's what we are seeing right here right now. Although some people may have started to use PKM tools to be more productive or for other reasons, eventually and if we embrace it more openly it can lead us to other people. Going from PKM to vision gardening is a invitation in this sense.