Greg Cassel

^ That's certainly not meant as a defense of capitalism, but could (under the right conditions) defuse some arguments against economic intervention, during this transitional time when we're still under the yoke of nation-states and multinational corporations.

As money tends (deeply & grossly) to make more money, applying counterbalances (such as a wealth tax) wouldn't necessarily prevent high-performing persons or projects from amassing exceptional economic power. It would simply achieve the so-often-acclaimed ideal of leveling the playing field.

The world's scary these days, but it'd be scarier if I thought that these politically and economically dominant forces were anything other than feverish imaginings.

Tbh no matter how dire the circumstances, the term "solidarity" makes me cringe unless there's clear understanding of how to avoid the emergence of tyranny and groupthink.

^ those scalability issues are the same re: valuable/treasured/prized collaboration in general, whether inside of brutal bureaucracies or tyrannies of structurelessness. scalability is chief technical concern of inclusiveorg.net

of course, there are potential scalability issues re: inclusively developing open, modular, composable, interoperable software tools . while multiple active approaches are viable (& perhaps inevitable), increasingly valued work will attract attention & conflicts of interest

most of them are probably already scared about losing their jobs to AI, a valid fear which is more than enough reason to think beyond their current economic niche

^ few people in software development (even via indirect corporate relations) would want to consider point #2 because it's really scary for people who haven't lost their jobs yet

Two elephants in the digital room:
1. protocols > software
2. software IS valuable, but we'll need only a tiny fraction of active dev work once we focus on open, modular, composable, interoperable tools instead of building artificially scarce silos & platforms

We judge toxic people when we can't imagine the many steps which transform good or neutral beings into sources of great suffering.

The trick is to transcend personal judgment without slipping into toxic positivity or passivity.

Contributor Covenant | A Code of Conduct for Digital Communities The most widely adopted code of conduct in open source.

The team behind the new Contributor Covenant builder tool faced a challenge: how to make adoption easy, without making it thoughtless. So we slowed adoption to the speed of trust, with prompts for communities to customize their reporting & enforcement policies.

More at www.contributor-covenant.org

Life started looking a lot different when I realized that none of our large-scale systems are sustainable. That realization has been a slow, deep, inexorable current in my thought and action for many years.

I kinda think the way people use ChatGPT is sort of aspirational because it seems to emulate the way rich people have sycophants lying to them all the time until they lose touch with reality and also their entire minds

Contributor Covenant | A Code of Conduct for Digital Communities The most widely adopted code of conduct in open source.

Congratulations go to IBM as the first official adopter of Contributor Covenant 3.0!

See more featured adopters & explore what's new with the premier code of conduct for digital communities at www.contributor-covenant.org

#opensource #EthicalSource #ContributorCovenant #CodesOfConduct

I don't want to personally "own" anything beyond that which anarchists would deem to be personal property, but I want to be a respected partner in all collaboration and the governance of resulting products. I think this is a reasonable position for everyone to adopt, and we'd be stronger together.

Against the Grain by James C Scott review – the beginning of elites, tax, slavery We used to think moving on from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle meant improvement. Not any more, argues this excellent study of the earliest states

This short book review is now my official story regarding the emergence of bureaucracy. www.theguardian.com/books/2017/n...

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can...

@inkandswitch.com 's "Malleable Software" essay is an excellent tangent for the sociotechnical risk which I described above. It's *very* tangential in most ways, but all IMO related to escaping the same typical silos and traps. www.inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

I'm so grateful to be part of Contributor Covenant's increasingly collaborative evolution. Hoping that many communities upgrade to CC 3.0. 🍀

Panel 1: genie says 3 rules no wishing for death, no falling in love, no bring back dead people Panel 2 person says I want Reeses cups to moan when I take their littles panties off Panel 3 genie sez, there are 4 rules

Okay time for fun.

Go into your photo roll or whatever, and post the first image that makes you laugh literally out loud.

Here's mine.

Everything's happening way too fucking fast, sometimes through false urgency but often through brutally manufactured urgency which becomes all too true for the countless victims of domination culture.

We seem to have forgotten that identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of people — ripples on the surface of the ocean of the soul, shimmering but shallow, pervious to every windsweep, irrelevant to the depths.

I'm not interested in business models which are based on indefinitely creating and maintaining false scarcities. LMK though if you want to discuss exit to community, or just get straight to transcending capitalism.

What Would Happen If the World Suddenly Went Vegetarian? Eliminating meat from our diets would bring a bounty of benefits to both our own health and the planet’s – but it could also harm millions of people.

This is excellent, despite poor captioning. Animal factory farming is unspeakably obscene, and I'd focus on divesting it if we weren't so distracted by other dire issues. However, caring about all species is deeply synergistic with developing justice among humans. getpocket.com/explore/item...

France to recognise Palestinian state at UN general assembly, Macron says French president announced decision on X, saying he hoped it would bring ‘lasting peace’ to Middle East

👀...

Software can create & enhance key organizational functions, but even open source software is effectively a silo (and potentially a trap) unless it's so modular, readable & maintainable that any number of projects could feasibly fork or adopt its codebase.

Deeply generic open source tools & techniques can foster deeply and precisely cosmolocalized activities. In fact, they're *necessary* for the development of scalably interoperable cosmolocalism.

I love to consider others' speculative fiction, sometimes even celebrating and discussing it, as long as they don't insist that I reify it.

Before my surgery my anesthetist offered to knock me out with gas or a boat paddle…

It was an ether/oar situation.

Inclusive Organizing Disclaimer Inclusive Organizing (IO) Disclaimer The following disclaimer applies to all Inclusive Organizing (IO) modules, and everything else: People use language to create memorable models and maps of lived e...

I've updated the IO Disclaimer for the first time, really, since quickly drafting and publishing it in a mood of arguably false or misguided urgency in 2023. It feels kind of poetic now. Perhaps one day, it won't even matter whether I do or don't identify as "poet". docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Inclusive Organizing Disclaimer Inclusive Organizing (IO) Disclaimer The following disclaimer applies to all Inclusive Organizing (IO) modules, and everything else: People use language to create memorable models and maps of lived e...

I've updated the IO Disclaimer for the first time, really, since quickly drafting and publishing it in a mood of arguably false or misguided urgency in 2023. It feels kind of poetic now. Perhaps one day, it won't even matter whether I do or don't identify as "poet". docs.google.com/document/d/1...