How Do We Reboot a Spirit of Cooperation & Collaboration? A Little Help, Please!
Miles Fidelman
Hi Folks,
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. ... Yeats
It strikes me that we - We The People, Americans, Humanity - need an Attitude Adjustment. We need to relearn how to think & work together for mutual support & benefit. My best efforts have been to little effect. I'd welcome some suggestions, some support, some participation. Herding cats is one thing, but one can only tilt at windmills for so long.
We've networked ourselves together. 6 Billion of us have the power to be anywhere & everywhere, all at once. To think & work together on a global scale. To think globally focus our resources to act locally. So what do we do? We share cat pictures, watch porn, flood the world with spam, and troll each other with political polemics. We've become the Borg, we're living in the Matrix, and 3-D Printing Westworld around us. Our planet is dying, our infrastructure is crumbling, monsters rise from the id of our collective consciousness, and we hand the nuclear codes to a "Reality" TV star, with a penchant for firing people & stirring up WWE style mayhem.
Is there some way back to Life Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness, E Pluribus Unum, Truth Justice & the American Way? Or forward to Prosperity & Long Life in Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, Being All that We Can Be, Being Excellent to Each Other & Partying On?
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At least some of us, here, were involved w/ FreeNets and the early days of Community Memory, bulletin boards, FidoNet, community networks - attempts to build an American Public Telecommunications Network of FreeNets, and an Association for Community Media for cable access channels. All of that was lost when FaceBook & Social Media & NextDoor & local websites hosted by big ate the world.
My work at the Center for Civic Networking - and now with Civic.Net and ThisOldNeighborhood.Net - is an attempt to recreate a network of public spaces on the Internet - an Internet or Syndicate of Neighborhood Networks & Civic Forums - but there are not a lot of Neighborhood Networks or Civic Forums to integrate.
It seems like folks don't want to talk with each other anymore. The polarizers, and propagandists, and market segmentationists have done their work all too well. People don't come to town meeting or condo meetings. Everyone wants to be a rockstar and a solopreneur, rather than part of a team, or a community. Folks flock to the latest personality or fad, a virtual event with a politician or media personality - but actually sit down to think and work together, to mutual benefit - not so much. Folks will march for this cause or that, work for politicians, buy snake-oil. Some will go to Cons and LARPs, and build a city in the dessert at Burning Man; some will show up for Hackathons, Service Days, Habitat-for-Humanity Builds, rush off to map crises or jump into fires, but collaborate - think & plan & work together for mutual support & benefit - not so much. We're oh so much better at shouting slogans at each other - than at looking for ways we can work together to mutual benefit.
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I've been doing my damndest to recruit volunteers to organize local civic networks and community forums- to use platforms they already have to bring people together (the way WBUR in Boston has organized CitySpace as a venue for events & programs that bring people together. Or the Whole Earth Catalog & the WELL, back in the day. Or what MainVest tried to do as a crowdsourcing vehicle for main street businesses - until their bank failed).
I haven't been getting a lot of traction. I've got a bunch of followers on LinkedIn, a bunch of (mostly non-paying) subscribers to my blogs - but practically nobody speaks up - either to talk about what they're doing and seeking collaboration for, or even to ask folks to join with them to work on local pressing common problems. And all the media types who HAVE large audiences, are moving to Substack, spouting the same-old same-old, and inviting people to attend their lectures, webinars, have coffee with them, send them money - but offering nothing to help people work with each other. All talk, no action.
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It seems like the old line is true - you can lead folks to water, but you can't make them drink.
Whatever happened to the Spirit of America? What will it take to wake people up? To motivate people to respond to a clear & present danger the way they did following the first Earth Day?
Please... Speak up. With serious suggestions & proposals. Save the pontification for other threads.
Thanks,
Miles
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why. ... unknown
Miles Fidelman
I've been thinking a lot about USENET - though I've been thinking about
using IPFS as a backbone. Replication, write-only communications,
eventually consistent.
The real issue, though isn't platform, as process - I think we need
something like the RFC process, and a structured collection of
workgroups - a model that harkens back to the committees of
correspondence of revolutionary times.
Anybody here interested in working through a top-level design for what
would be an update to our Civil Body Politic? I'm starting to noodle on
a white paper or RFC. Anybody up for a few brainstorming sessions,
and/or review & comment in a few weeks?
Miles
Andras Kornai wrote:
> Hi Miles,
>
> I believe in the coming days censorship-resilient communication and data storage facilities will be important for all the people you are trying to address, in fact I believe this to be the first order of business. Government sites forcibly shut down (or what is worse, altered), news stopped (or what is worse, poisoned by disinformation) are the new normal, and there is no reason to believe the Internet Archive, or even Wikipedia, are safe.
>
> Therefore I propose re-activating large swaths of usenet (as opposed to all kinds of semi-centralized or fully centralized social media sites) to address the communication problem. This is low tech (push comes to shove, can be run over phone lines) and worked well until google started to gobble it up. As a concerned citizen, I am happy to take out a $100/year subscription with one of the few remaining providers, but need help becoming a redistribution site. (I propose to redistribute for free.)
>
> There are several hurdles: creating a well-configurable setup, adding facilities for limiting the bandwidth devoted to this, maybe encryption, randomization of transmission times, and advertising the service to non-paying participants. With or without tor?
>
> Ideas, help, criticism welcome
> Andras
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Miles Fidelman
Seems to me we need something more like the green committees that cropped up after Earth Day - and proceeded to start cleaning up rivers, launch recycling problems. Perhaps a coalition of organizations - like the ways VOADs organize service organizations to respond to disasters, or United Ways help Habitat for Humanity put together housing builds - or Live Aid & Farm Aid. Hence the notion of a "Civic Internet" that brings lots of different folks together to collaborate.
In a sense, the way the Internet Flag Day focused the attention of lots of different groups, and types of groups, on getting everthing ready for the cutover.
In a sense, the challenge seems to be one of how do we get back to working together, to mutual benefit - rather than every individual & organization trying to be the one ring to rule them all.
A lot of us lived through the Internet - from Licklider's original memo to today's hive of minds. We found a way to work together to wire the world. What can we learn from the process? How can we rekindle the spirit of collaboration?
Miles
Franklin, Dan wrote:
There is a lot of organizing happening.
Are you aware of "50501" - the big rallies at the capitals of all 50 states? Or the work of reconstituted Indivisible chapters (a new one just formed for Melrose and Wakefield)? These chapters meet in person or on Zoom to plan out protests and mass calls to Congress. The many guides to protesting, and discussions of what matters? The rally on Valentine's Day on the Boston Common?
Or the fact that the Capital switchboards are getting so many calls that they're overloaded?
People are acting and organizing. Find your local Indivisible chapter, or start one if there isn't one already.
Dan Franklin
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Miles Fidelman
USENET, the Blogosphere, the Podiverse - those are some examples of cross-connection. For that matter, WikiPedia, OpenStreetMap, GitHub, the old MMDF - for that matter, XCAL - before Google decided to break calendaring.
The IETF datatracker is a pretty good step toward something that supports town meeting style democracy and ad hoc collaboration, at scale.
David Kovar wrote:
On Feb 9, 2025 at 2:24:48 PM, "Franklin, Dan" <dfra...@dan-franklin.com> wrote:
What about Mastodon? Fully federated, anyone can set up a server?
Dan Franklin
fd422117782d%40dan-franklin.com.
Many people I know have landed on BlueSky.
-David
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