Remind me: have we talked much, here, about my notion of the “convivial stack”? This is the idea that, to the greatest extent possible, community governance, the built environment and the technological surround should *all, simultaneously* be designed so that they are open, participatory and actively invitational; modular, user-modifiable and extensible; and reward experimentation?
Right. I can't make much sense of these threads already! I find microblog style social media pretty hopeless for any detailed discussion (though great for finding the people you want to talk to in the first place - I like Margaret Wheatley's description of network -> community of practice https://margaretwheatley.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/KosmosJournal-WheatleyFrieze-SS15.pdf).
@adamgreenfield > It’s a shame the creators of [WikiHouse] turned out to be so intent on centralizing & monetizing it
Funding is much more of a limitation in hardware than software, because the tools can't be downloaded, and prototypes have to be manufactured rather than just compiled. WikiHouse was a cute concept, but coming from a permaculture background, I always wondered whether a more general house building knowledge platform might have been better.
@bonfire@neil@smallcircles@dajb It may, admittedly, inhere in my possibly misleading use of the word “stack,” but I feel like that’s too narrow an interpretation. What I have in mind is a logic that extends from the assembly as a forum for collective self-determination through advanced DIY construction systems like WikiHouse. (It’s a shame the creators of the latter turned out to be so intent on centralizing & monetizing it – we badly need some such scheme.)
@adamgreenfield Yes! You mentioned convivial stacks before and your concern about the appeal of that particular framing. But it definitely appeals to me.
I'd like to participate in these conversations. I'm currently writing something around 'reclaiming the stacks' / ecosocialist ICT, and reviewing existing tilts in this direction.
But please do let me know if the convivial stack is a vision that appeals to you, if you are aware of any of the conversations happening that would underwrite the emergence of a program along these lines, if you yourself have participated in such a conversation, or, indeed, would like to. I’d love to have a better idea of where these negotiations are happening, and who’s currently undertaking any such thing. Give me a shout if you feel like this is you!
What bothers me about this framing is that there’s no constituency for it – at least, no constituency that knows it’s a constituency. It’s a big project, with lots of (at times quite literal) moving parts, and cannot even begin without people in all of these communities taking the initiative to make points of connection – interfaces – with other communities working in parallel. The coordinating of that sort of effort generally requires some kind of banner or empty signifier to rally around.
There are so many of the necessary pieces on the table, waiting only for us to assemble them. And though you know I hesitate to overgeneralize from my own position and particularity, what I can tell you from personal experience is that getting stuck into the details in this way is a specific for the alienation and deselfing inflicted on us by the everyday late-capitalist lifeworld. We can be more whole as individuals when we work together toward the creation of systems that sustain us all.
The systems that underwrite our survival on the planet need to be engineered such that we can meaningfully intervene in their operation and improvement, at all ages; that they invite that intervention, and are robust enough that they do not fail in the face of experimentation; that they account for and explain their own functioning; and that they organize non-exclusive communities of practice around them that are more than formally open.
A convivial stack requires deep and ongoing conversation between people who think of themselves as working in FLOSS, in open-source hardware, in open construction and building systems, in open agriculture, in distributed power systems, and in participatory politics (to the degree that they’re not already, and I’m aware that some of these links already exist). I believe that full agency over the circumstances of our lives requires that we first comprehend, quite literally, how the world is built.