offering 4 - focus

Gather around the campfire brothers and sisters, to see what I have for you. This was week 2 of social isolation for me. Things are looking like they won’t be the same after this. It’s time to focus on what matters. Try to figure out how to support each other meanwhile, and how we can set things up for the aftermath.

Offering number 4 (!) is, in my humble opinion, the best one so far. Stick around for governance ideas for our post-apocalyptic society, new psychic powers, extreme travels, and tik tok horror.

Finally, as promised, I completed a full month of offerings, which means I get to start a mailing list and YOU get to sign up! (at the bottom of the page)

The Handbook for Radical Local Democracy

• “A handbook of new social technologies for collaborating across difference.” condenses 3 ideas that - given our present predicament - might become commonplace sooner rather than later. (embedded in the  RadXChange  movement, which is based on a book called  Radical Markets  ) In ~11 pages for each concept you get clear answers to the questions ‘Why?’ ‘What?’, ‘How?’, examples, and implementation tips.
• These ideas are
• Quadratic voting, which solves the problem that most voting systems used for official decision-making are shit. It lets voters express their wishes with more precision by starting with a pool of “voting credits” and then reallocating them to the issues that matter most to them. The twist is that speaking louder has a cost, so if you want to cast n votes on a topic, it’ll cost you n^2 credits.
• Quadratic finance, is a mechanism for financing public goods by a central matching of funds contributed by individuals. “Namely, the total funding for a proposal is the square roots of each private contribution, summed up, and then squared.” The result of this is that proposals with few contributors get little or no matching, while proposals with many contributors would get large matches in funding.

• and SALSA (Self-Assessed Licenses Sold via Auction) for pricing access to a limited resource like plots of land. You set your own price and pay tax on that, but if someone else comes along and would by your land at that price, you’ll either have to sell or pay higher taxes. This solves black markets (if licenses were sold at a fixed rate) and holdout problems (when an auction takes place once but people’s values change over time).
• In a world of rotting mechanisms and institutions, it’s heartwarming to see people working on making better social technology broadly available. We need big changes, but all of these must come from truly democratic collective decision-making, and this is a step in that direction.
• Shout-out to other projects for alternative governance like  democracy.earth  and  Moloch DAO .

The Psychonaut Field Manual

• By arch-traitor bluefluke on deviantart
• “We place no reliance on virgin or pidgeon, our method is science, our aim is religion”,  Aleister Crowley
• A beautiful visual guide for the psychonaut. To be taken with A TON OF SALT, but gave me a much needed example of how a whole contemporary (sort-of-)framework for the arcane looks like. As you might know by now (if you follow my weekly offerings ), I’ve been exploring the arcane and magic - rejecting any explanations that require a supernatural axis - for a while. This field guide is consistent with an agnostic ontology, as it seems heavily influenced by a chaos magic mindset. At the same time, it should be pointed out that I’m reading this through my own personal filter, which means I’m filling in many of the ambiguities with things that are consistent with MY models and discarding the few things that don’t quite fit.
• I was surprised by how many of the things featured I’ve been exposed to over the years:
• Belief as a tool, meta-systematic thinking: as in adopting whichever system of thinking is appropriate in a situation.

• Meditation, and the state of gnosis, a name for the moment of focus where all thought is stripped away.
• Lucid dreaming, with which I experimented as teen.
• This was the first time I’ve seen anyone else recognize that “third-eye tingling” in my forehead, but apparently it’s more common than I thought.
• Childhood experiences with my parents had me interacting with auras (spoiler, synesthesia), and astral projection but I never really could integrate them in any epistemological framework, so I kept them at arms length.
• What surprised me the most and expanded my horizons in terms of phenomenology to try in the future is something I’ll agnostically call sub-agent bending. Basically you commit some intentions (e.g. relaxing, emulating someone, remembering to ) to your subconscious through whatever processes you like and then those intentions and memes you integrated start working autonomously in the back burner. The results will (suposedly) vary depending on the intensity of the rituals you use to commit to the unconscious mind. The handbook implies you can actually eventually chat and visualize these autonomous sub-agents. Personally I’m skeptical, but I’ve never ventured deep enough into these experiments. These dynamics would shed some light on stories about visions and interactions with gods, as those would be cases of archetypal structures in the unconscious mind creatively communicating with their conscious component.
• “An egregore is a distributed [sub-agent], which uses a network of individuals as processing power” sound familiar?  Egregores  and memetic possession fit into this model of the arcane, because of course they do.
• I’ll keep exploring, but anticipate that my next breakthrough will take some time.

Travels of Ibn Battuta

• Ibn Battuta was an islamic scholar, born in Morocco, who in 25 years travelled North Africa, the Middle East, the Steppes of Crimea, India, Indonesia, China, the empire of Mali in an era where the fastest overland transport was a horse in a caravan. Also, it seems he was kind of an asshole.
• While I do own  this book , I haven’t read it yet. I have, however, been exposed to many internet retellings and youtube videos about segments of his story. Extra Credits is an underappreciated gem of youtube and they recently made a series about him:
• Ibn Battuta - The Great Traveler - Extra History  We also follow him in of the Mali Empire episodes (Mali is a great story too): https://youtu.be/YPytwp5ll9g
• I think it’s worthwhile to mention it here as his life is one of the most unbelievable adventures on record and the parts of the world he visited have long captured a meaningful portion of my aesthetics.

graph-tool

• pretty
• (This one is just for nerds, you can skip it otherwise). Graph-tool is an efficient  Python  module for manipulation and statistical analysis of  graphs  (a.k.a.  networks ) with great visualization
• Last semester I analyzed a sample of twitter in to write a  course paper  about my search for memetic tribes on twitter. I used a mix of networkX, Gephi, and matplotlib that made me want to kill myself.
• Wish I’d known about this beforehand. Now I’m using graph-tool for an expanded, web version of the paper that is taking its sweet time to get done, but it’s getting done right. Also I became acquainted with a much cleaner way to lay out large community graphs (the kind in the picture) instead of taking screenshots of  Gephi monstruosities .
• More teasers for the memetic tribes post
• Shout out to @Menander on twitter for showing me this and making the awesome  twitterverse.net

untitled COVID horror tik tok

• Gave me goosebumps. Best use of the short-vid medium I’ve seen so far, and part of a larger trend of art-videos on tik tok.  Luke Jones  made one quality piece of content that feeds on current fears and juxtaposes them with the very platform it’s on: a mobile app full of silly videos people waste time on.

Thanks for reading!