Anand Pandian
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Intrigued by this web of references, and wondering what a global lexicon of economic wellbeing might look like, as a collection, via different languages and cultural traditions and benchmarks. On growth, for example, I was struck, in my dissertation fieldwork in rural south India some years ago, by the many comparisons that farmers I knew would make between growing plants and children. There does seem to be a lot of scope to concretize growth once again, and thereby restore some semantic range that has been foreclosed by a narrow economism. Maybe this is what @Niloo had in mind with her recent post?
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This sounds really interesting @nima thank you for sharing. I appreciate your concern not only for the design of the vertical farms, but also for the open source orientation. I remember reading a piece recently in The Guardian about new corporate mega-farms on a vertical basis, which would recapitulate the same problems of corporate agriculture all over again. Others may have ideas on this, but the one group I can think of that works on open source agricultural technology (and has a sharing hub for this) is the Edge Collective: https://edgecollective.io/
Happy to try to connect you if that would help. And if you’d like to share more about your own project with our EDC network in the form of a discussion, or a blog, please just let us know. We are also fans of open source infrastructure.
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Amazing, thank you @KarinIsSharing for this wealth of ideas. I’m unfamiliar with a lot of what you describe here and grateful for your sharing. Lumbung, for example, and the very idea of the intercommunal. I started a discussion thread a little while ago as a place to park different ideas of what the EDC could be, as a form, as a structure, and I would love to think more about the collective architecture that you’re describing here.
I am also intrigued by your insistence on the continued relevance of growth, even in a time when degrowth seems to have more and more salience. I find myself drawn to metaphors (and practices) of growth all the time, even as the toxicity of unfettered economic growth becomes more and more obvious. I find myself drawn increasingly to “decay” as another alter to growth. But one could work, just as well, to pluralize the registers of growth itself: social, collective, spiritual, personal, etc.
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A really interesting “taxonomy” of contemporary online social networks, via New_Public. Within this classification, the EDC would be a VSOP, a “Very Small Online Platform.”
“VSOPs are the opposite of “big room” social networks. They are social networks created for a very specific purpose, with rules, norms and affordances appropriate to that community… We believe exploring VSOPs as a way of exploring diverse systems of community governance could be good not only for the future of social media, but as a form of education in democratic citizenship. Before everyone abandons big room social networks and builds their own VSOP, it is worth noting the serious limitations of this method of social networking. It requires significant effort to scaffold healthy conversations, no matter the purpose and community being served. These networks can easily become ghost towns if they don’t meet a real need.”
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A cautionary note from Cory Doctorow, on the death spiral of for-profit platforms.
“This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle. This is why … platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things.””
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
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This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Anand Pandian.
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This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by
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Such a challenging and essential question. I was thinking about this the other day along the Jones Falls, running unexpectedly into a great blue heron, which was breathtaking, but also looking at the water striders skimming over the surface of one of the small branches of the river. Categories like “life” and “non-human” are so broad and over-general. There’s an infinity of vantage points on any situation, and therefore an infinity of “leverage points” for intervention. How to work with such deep openness feels both daunting and exciting.
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Love this! I thought a little with Münsterberg in an ethnography of filmmaking process I wrote a few years ago. If I had the language at the time, I might have conceptualized that book project as a reflection on design process. “Every dream becomes real, uncanny ghosts appear from nothing and disappear into nothing,” as he wrote in The Photoplay…