Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
I’m under the weather in LA attending IndieWeb Summit remotely today. There’s some good documentation, but ping me if you need help getting into the chat, finding streaming video, or accessing resources.
https://indieweb.org/2019
https://indieweb.org/IndieWebCamps/Attendance
https://chat.indieweb.org/indieweb/
Jeannie McGeehan (jeannie.digital)In my effort to become more involved in the IndieWed community I created indieweb.life and indieweb.social. A lot of the information out there is either out-of-date or is written so far above the head of the complete novice. A lot of it is geared towards developers and webmasters. I wanted to create a place and space where a person with only a cursory knowledge could come and get simple, easy instructions and places to go for further guidance. I wanted to create a simple “get started” site with some simple up-to-date links and instructions on indieweb.life for people looking to get started with WordPress and the IndieWeb. I also created the open Mastodon instance at indieweb.social for anyone who would like to join an instance focused on supporters and participants of the IndieWeb movement. I would really like it if some of the more experienced veterans would be willing to critique the site and maybe contribute or syndicate some content that would help new seekers. Also, if anyone would be willing to be an admin on indieweb.social then we can get listed on joinmastodon.org.
Welcome to the gang!
If it helps to have some company, I seem to recall Christophe Duchamp running a Mastodon instance for French-speaking IndieWeb users which he’s been documenting.
I know there are a handful of us interested in better documenting some IndieWeb pathways for those who are less technical. For a while I’ve been hacking away at some pieces particularly for WordPress at https://indieweb.org/User:Boffosocko.com/wordpress-draft. I’m sure you’ll run into many of the others as well.
César Hidalgo has a radical suggestion for fixing our broken political system: automate it! In this provocative talk, he outlines a bold idea to bypass politicians by empowering citizens to create personalized AI representatives that participate directly in democratic decisions. Explore a new way to make collective decisions and expand your understanding of democracy.
“It’s not a communication problem, it’s a cognitive bandwidth problem.”—César Hidalgo
He’s definitely right about the second part, but it’s also a communication problem because most of political speech is nuanced toward the side of untruths and covering up facts and potential outcomes to represent the outcome the speaker wants. There’s also far too much of our leaders saying “Do as I say (and attempt to legislate) and not as I do.” Examples include things like legislators working to actively take away things like abortion or condemn those who are LGBTQ when they actively do those things for themselves or their families or live out those lifestyles in secret.
“One of the reasons why we use Democracy so little may be because Democracy has a very bad user interface and if we improve the user interface of democracy we might be able to use it more.”—César Hidalgo
This is an interesting idea, but definitely has many pitfalls with respect to how we know AI systems currently work. We’d definitely need to start small with simpler problems and build our way up to the more complex. However, even then, I’m not so sure that the complexity issues could ultimately be overcome. On it’s face it sounds like he’s relying too much on the old “clockwork” viewpoint of phyiscs, though I know that obviously isn’t (or couldn’t be) his personal viewpoint. There’s a lot more pathways for this to become a weapon of math destruction currently than the utopian tool he’s envisioning.
What will be your future in open education? It will likely not be written inside a fortune cookie, but you can make sure you get the fortune you want.
Use the PhotoFunia Fortune Cookie Generator to produce the one you would like to see happen for yourself.
Borrowed from the Mural UDG Daily Opener 17
Here’s what I found in my fortune cookie:
Photo made using PhotoFunia
Not only is it digitized analog, it’s an amazing open resource of music history. The Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project has over 150,000 digitized 78rpm discs
The Internet Archive's collection of digitized 78rpm records is well past 150,000! All playable immediately in your browser. https://t.co/BwlWuj1NHg
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) June 18, 2019
Also, there's now a full run-down of how we digitize and provide metadata: https://t.co/wNVSiX4HAH
AND we are looking for more! pic.twitter.com/w7OX8Cf8frBrowse the collection, and look for a title the represents how you feel about Ontario Extend, or a colleague’s work. Tweet it out so we can all listen to the digital record spin.
Yes, Extend, You Are My Sunshine.
While looking forward to IndieWeb Summit this weekend, I take a listen back at the past courtesy of the Ontario Extend and the Great 78 Project at the Internet Archive.
