a picture book on the complexities of "pulling in the same general direction"
from "Designing Freedom" (1973)

The thing about theory and practice is that
in theory they're the same,
and in practice they're different.

@Wtebbens @smallcircles @bengo @benpate @EUCommission @nlnet

I want to quote someone I know well, who just posted in a reply and found that pixelfed did not carry over any mentions..

pixelfed

Pixelfed (pixelfed.social)

Totally we can!

Especially in our creative commons that fediverse spans up between people, we have breathing space for fresh ideas to bubble up and cross-pollinate, real human-to-human discourse to brighten the mind, and plentiful delightful hobby and work stimulation. Maker's activities that inspire us.

Fediverse culture is a cauldron of blossoming Humankind and Human Creation. Still young and fragile.

Also it is true Innovation Space, field lab for humane and harmonious technologies. It's what drew me here, and why I wanna stay.

Repeat after me: Fedi is innovation space!

I say that in particular to @EUCommission now. Too often I've heard voices from biz or gov areas say "Free software? Fediverse? Pff.. all amateur hour".

It's also where innovation is most crisp and fresh. Seeds for the flowers of new society. Social innovation with tech support. Human operated, human-made.

Fund the full society supply line.

Harvard study: Open source has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars

Open source software is worth trillions to the economy. However, researchers warn that companies contribute too little to the development of open source tools.

iX Magazin (www.heise.de)

And it requires active listening.

How do we mobilise people at the same time in the same direction? So we overcome network effects.

Playfulness, a shared goal and vocabulary, a group of committed people / orgs, a commons sustainability model. And some initial funding and shared resources to get the ball rolling. Critical connections.

Can we get that off the ground together?

One follow-up I must add, with an Urgent platitude attached.

The purpose of innercircles simple life philosophy is not just to imagine a post-hypercapitalist society, but actually transition towards it such that it becomes the prevailing system and without it getting corrupted along the way.

We have libraries full of books that dictate how we should do this, and we throw these at each other's head at any occasion to implicitly say "been there, done that, your idea is old". As argued its the practice and experience that counts. Social experience matters.

I took hypercapitalism, capitalism-run-amok, as root cause for most society-level wicked problems, like Climate change.

As root-cause analyses go, and emergent design evolves, today I use a deeper cause in my applied research: people listening to each other, or rather the inability thereof.

Though actually it is the same root cause, just one level lower on SX Pyramid of Perspective ...

This concludes my morning rant on getting cold.

Hope I didn't trigger the paradox by my walls of Dragon's tales or else --> runs away.

I am but a simple dreamer, talking sci-fi worlds

Sci-Fi Labs Federated Worldbuilding

(This crazy idea was first posted to Lemmy, Fediverse Futures community, and followed-up on Fediverse Town) (I create this in Vision category, but has a strong relation to #community building if we like the idea…) …

Discuss Social Coding (discuss.coding.social)

Experience means "doing", but doing smartly and strategically. Deliberately. Sustainably. Mindful. And with Playfulness at heart. Be open-minded, creative, allowing yourself think out of the box. Core principles of commons participation..

https://coding.social/blog/reimagine-social/#core-principles

Dare to dream, dare to play. FInd where you are intrinsically motivated to contribute, in alignment to your dreams, interests and passions.

Be relaxed and unforced, free in your approach on where to add these 2 cents, timeless knowing that 2 cents is all you have, but all the time, while spending them.

Dare to act.

The core principles and the further elaboration of them in SX elaboration, make SX an utter pragmatic solution development approach. Anchored in the here and now, and what anyone can do today. Just value progress, that's all. And follow your dreams.

You see how much text I used to explain stuff in all toots above, right?

That's the main problem I face today. Where I myself bump against the Paradox of Emergence. Emergence is mysterious and magical, and only comes at scale. Requires massive prolonged proactive participation, where wicked problems are involved.

How to explain a golden dragon to others, that sits ready and waiting, but having only 2 cents at any time to convince others of its glorious value? Enough that they become invested to add their 🪙🪙 too. How to get more than 2 cts of time and attention that busy pragmatic people are willing to spend and deeply listen?

Explanation on unbounded scope is total failure mode of realizing grand visions.

I bumped into this when trying to explain to @nlnet the vision of just a single 'dragon scale', https://solidground.work, for NGI0 funding.

Beauty of SX is that it doesn't need to be learned or taught. SX only requires experiencing it.

That's the pathway to solutions.

Dare to dream. Have personal dreams and know how they relate to others.

Dare to play. Actually do share dreams with others, and try to relate them. Cross-pollinate ideas to find actionable steps towards dream realization. Make things more than the sum of their parts, 2 + 2 = 5 cents.

https://coding.social/blog/shared-ownership/#how-do-we-ignite-the-commons

Rinse, repeat, scale, sustain. And emergent potential balloons exponentially. It is clear to see that a united commons will set the dragon roaring, revealing itself, breathing golden fire of progress.

Technology paternalism, I think, is more general phenomenon of the blinders we all wear in modern society. Dogma's and biases deeply engrained in ourself, part of everday life. It forces us all in like straitjacket roles, to be experts in narrow fields.

Best we can do, yet unnatural, artificial wrong breakdown, top-down again.

Holistic grassroots evolution and natural sustainable growth, is the path.

I got reactions to my blog post along the lines of "vision won't work, how are you proposing we enforce this?" and followed by sentiments like "W3C if flawed, corporate and does not have authority to dictate the vision" assuming that I implied to leave vision in the hands of W3C to enforce it by protocol design.

No. The insight is that the vision is wholly emergent, from the collective personal dreams from all of the participants in the fediverse commons. And that its realization, materializing the dragon, can only be the aggregated 2 cents of value by each and every participant over time, and their interest, the synergies of our collaboration, coordination and cocreation.

It is possible to envision the future of social networking. Every person can do this for themself and tell about it to others. Share their dreams. And act accordingly in micro activities towards it. Only Process counts, however small.

Mindfulness core principle of SX.

All any person has at ANY one time, the value they hold in their hands to invest in a solution, is always but these small 2 cents to contribute hopefully as wisely as they are able to..

Like the 🪙🪙 from me this morning in these 1,000 char toots. Depicting a Vision on unbounded scope, an emergent "Golden Dragon" that might lead us to a peopleverse.

The urgent platitude in my next article reads as follows:

> "Only when we dare to dream can we realize a vision"

And this relates directly - to dive down into more concrete matters now - to the Grassroots evolution blog, where it talks about the importance to have a "shared (technology) vision" for the fediverse and what constitutes The Future of Social Networking. And why we must Reimagine Social first.

Grassroots fediverse evolution

Social dynamics in the grassroots fediverse ecosystem and laisséz-faire practices led to divergence from power and promise of the ActivityPub protocol. Grassroots standards and the ActivityPub API initiative can get us back on track.

Social coding commons (coding.social)

In a company a CEO can enforce a vision. Via centralized top-down investment with more than 2 cents. In grassroots commons this is impossible. You can't "herd cats".

SX is emergent evolutionary design on the basis of often fully emergent forces, as building blocks for solutions that are cocreated for having positive societal impact, called the solution's imprint. The imprint is designed for. The impact is the Need.

Innercircles + SX follow a quite unorthodox approach in today's pragmatic matter-of-fact "Quick, show me the money and value" elevator-pitch world.

Those on the problem side, the bad actors ask that out of greed. But on solution side its because of the urgency to solve wicked problems. This haste, via the Paradox of Emergence, makes it LESS likely to make real Progress towards the true Solution.

The solution requires depicting a Vision to follow, where the path is unclear, scope and scale are vast, potentially even boundless.

Unbounded scope is the fundament of SX. Scope, direction, solution-orientation, all that happens all depends on proactive participants at any one time. In commons.

Tangential.

As an aside to the discussion, I just found a weird quirk in mastodon or AP protocol (distinction unclear) that the toot above contains a quote post that isn't in the toot's text. It was at the start, when I pasted in the URL of the post to quote, but I deleted it again. However, the quote remained, and now it no longer removable when editing.

On with my musings. And bring subject matter back to paternalism in tech, I hope..

@bengo @strypey @benpate @EUCommission @nlnet

I mention in my blog post "Grassroots fediverse evolution" the underpinning philosophy to SX is a simple life philosophy based on basic universal wisdoms and truths, called innercircles, that's on my Hobby track for 11 years now.

I recently dubbed them Urgent platitutes, and made it a SX concept. They are thought provokers. Wisdoms we all know, yet overlook and trample upon in our rushed daily life's rat race. Innercircles tagline is:

> "Simple solutions still exist"

Eternal teaser: https://innercircles.community

ANY wicked problem has a simple solution if you know the emergent forces that are at play. And any knowledge, wisdom, common sense, and life experience we need to do that already exists.

The ONLY thing remaining then, to solve the big problems of our time, is to get people to fall in line together to forge the path to the solution.

That of course is *extremely* hard, and where SX innercircles philosophy gets truly fascinating.

@bengo @strypey @benpate @EUCommission @nlnet

In the blog post I'm writing now the Paradox of Emergence is introduced. The huge problem in tackling wicked problems is to make clear the role of the individual in it, how they contribute in making it worse or better. And also makes it incredibly hard to motivate people to come along on the adventure quest towards the solution.

Because the holistic solution is the "Golden Dragon" that sits entirely in emergent space, as Potential only, until many people collectively give it wings, and it materializes.

How can you convince people to Invest in a magic dragon that doesn't exist yet? Take Climate Change. Wicked problem, yet the solution is simple, and starts like:

"If we all did our part, gave our 2 cent, then.."

The paradox is that you people don't see the value of their investment based on the promised vision of the outcome. While in hindsight, after the wicked problem was solved it is often painfully obvious, simple solution.

Online is an extension to our life offline, thus we're building OUR society as a Wild West now. And it shows.

SX adopts the concept of a peopleverse to imagine the seemless integration of online and offline worlds, on the basis of unobtrusive, humane and harmonious technology that serves people in their daily needs and day-to-day activities. It is merely a concept, to help direct thinking.

The intrinsic values of Humanity and Freedom are building blocks and toolkit of SX. And philosophical underpinning is required, to help offer people to make a mindset shift. SX, I sometimes say "adds the missing social layers to the techstack", but SX's call to "Reimagine social" is much more than that.

The way we build tech and 'dump' it in society is UTTERLY weird, and unresponsible. And all-pervasive. The norm.

Introducing the mindset shift, constitutes a wicked problem. One that SX focuses on solving, using itself as the approach. Self servicing.

Thanks, Ben. Highly interesting article, that I should really bring to social coding note-taking forum as subject for closer study.

The article mentions "dark patterns" which years ago I suggested to IETF the more inclusive term "deception patterns" for. From there "deceptive design" became a known term. But deception implies intent. Though I don't know if I would adopt the word paternalism in SX methodology, even as anti-pattern name, it is related to a deep insight that drives SX applied research..

Namely the observation that we, humankind, *severely* underestimate what it means to be "social" online. Bit like: "After the telephone, with the internet we now have an extra line to connect remotely via text".

While what we're actually doing and with tech people firmly in the lead, is building completely societies, and with hardly ANY rules at that. It's the Wild West.

And furthermore that we're mostly fully myopic to how all this works.

Clearly that's a matter of opinion : P

> [GUI] has at times been done in a paternalistic way ... normal folks don’t always agree where the line is

There's a strong parallel here to public health messaging. Should it be verbose and let people make up our own minds? Or should it be skewed towards whatever nudges people to do what the majority of doctors currently endorse?

@benpate @smallcircles @EUCommission @nlnet

CG/WG Proposal Stages

Discussion of potential CG and WG charters

charters (swicg.github.io)

I think the big step would be, I think this FEP is relevant to this task force's work, I want to submit it as a proposal, etc.

Same, absolutely, and don't get me wrong, I'll read the article and give it some serious thought. At which point any takes I share will likely be much more in context ; )

@benpate @smallcircles @EUCommission @nlnet

Right. So we could name the problem more accurately as power inequality, or corporatism, or somesuch. I don't want to get too hung up on terminology, but I can't help thinking "paternalism" is an unhelpful word here. It reminds me of the attitudes of Command Line Warriors who think providing graphical interfaces is "paternalism".

@benpate @smallcircles @EUCommission @nlnet