Notices by Adam Greenfield (adamgreenfield@social.coop), page 4

I can easily imagine that there are a large number of individuals and communities with exactly the need for affordable, reliable, off-grid, multi-way communication this project proposes to offer them, but who would never know it from the description on that page. And, again, this is not to single out this project – as a matter of fact, the more some proposition diverges from the things people are used to, the simpler and more straightforward its explanatory copy needs to be.

Where agencies like the Red Cross distributed generic aid packages impersonally, and in a manner that inscribed a vertical savior/saved relation between people, the Occupy Sandy approach started with a natural conversation. (There were other salient differences in approach, too, as you’ll see in the book, but this is the one I want to drill into today.) When OS volunteers met someone who’d been displaced or otherwise injured by the storm, they started by simply asking: “How are you doing?”

They didn’t assume that people needed help. They didn’t arrogate to themselves the task of deciding what form that help should take. They didn’t impose themselves on the situation like a savior come down from above. They inquired – that I saw, with surprising gentleness and attention to the right moment – if the people they met needed anything. The power of this pivot cannot be underestimated. To put it in somewhat technical terms, it transformed the subject of care from passive recipient into

an active, agential co-creator of their own safety. And many of the people who’d experienced this did in fact go on to join the Occupy Sandy effort themselves, as volunteers. This is the key to that effort’s widely-noted effectiveness, or one of them, anyway. This is what allowed people who were very possibly undergoing the worst moments of their lives, in objective terms, to experience them instead as woven through with a sense of purpose, power and possibility.

And this, I believe, speaks to a real deficit in what are otherwise some of the most inspiring intellectual projects of the past half-century or so: those loosely clustered around the ideas of “open” and “openness.”

However unwise it may be to present such a broad diversity of projects and aims with such brutal schematicity, I think it’s fair to say that most “open” projects – whether Wikipedia or the open-source hardware community or even many nominally “participatory” political formations – are merely open to newcomers in a formal sense. And very often, as I’ve seen & heard directly & for myself, the convenors of some such project wonder why there doesn’t seem to be the community uptake they’d hoped for.

I do not mean this as a judgment upon these projects or their initiators and maintainers – just the opposite, in fact: as I say, they are some of the most inspiring developments of my adult lifetime, and involve some of the best people I’ve ever met. But neither can we pretend that there aren’t very severe challenge gradients in place, that prevent all but a relatively small minority of people from availing themselves of the offer of openness.

You know what this challenge gradient consists of, because we speak about these things all the time hereabouts. Folks are exhausted by the necessity of earning a living under the conditions of late capitalism. Their time is already spoken for: they are bound in a web of obligations to people who need them. They may physically be unable to access the project space, or find it uncomfortably homogenous when they get there. They may feel othered, from the moment they walk (or roll) through the door.

They may not speak the dominant language in the space fluently, or feel anxiety at the thought of doing so. All of these situations, and many more, function as real, material barriers to participation. There is, in short, what @inquiline refers to as “the burden of participation,” and that burden is distributed unequally among the bodies who compose the participatory project. Again: you know this.

But if we want to make good on the (very considerable) promise of nominally “open,” participatory institutions, we have to do the work that Occupy Sandy did seemingly effortlessly: the work of meeting people where they are, in dignity and respect for the whole human being. We need, in other words, to transform our open institutions into *invitational* institutions.

I do not suggest this will be easy, or unvexed by any of the complications that invariably attend human sociality & collective endeavor. But it’s not optional, either. In fact, a large part of the reasoning behind bothering to articulate the idea of the #pragma in the first place is to unlock the invitationality of the Lifehouse as a space & an idea. Each local hub has to be free to vary in its presentation and affects, in order to feel authentically like the effort of the people who make it up.

Anyway, you can read more about invitationality, and the other qualities that I think made Occupy Sandy so successful and such an excellent example, in the book. And I hope you’ll let me know about examples of this quality that you yourself have experienced, and maybe together we can try to identify some of the principles at work so we can put them to use elsewhere. See you next Sunday for another thread on the #Lifehouse, and how I see it working to support us in the time of troubles we face!

I don’t mean to single it out, because there are many others like it, but this is a fantastic example of a technical project whose virtues probably seem completely self-explanatory to its developers, which could really benefit from taking the extra step from formal openness to full invitationality. https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction/

@nyrath 😳

@sofiav hello cat

Not that he was perfect, or anything of the sort, but I cannot express the joy it gives me to see Stafford Beer’s watchword “the purpose of a system is what it does” at long last pass into common usage, especially among folks with no obvious reason to know who Stafford Beer was. It’s been a vital analytical tool for me this past quarter-century, in all kinds of circumstances. #POSIWID

@phantasus Well, yes.

@marnanel NB! Name of primordial bluesman chosen at random off the top of my head. Son House did not actually trade away his rights for a few bucks, that I know of. I apologize for being misleading!

@ChristineMalec The best way I can describe it is by analogy to the image processing technique known as HDR, or high dynamic range: everything in the image is just a little too intense, unnaturally bright and so on. With the free versions of the software, as well, there are frequently even more obvious signs: figures with extra or missing fingers or limbs, text that looks like alien hieroglyphics, etc. Hope that’s helpful.

I’m going to make explicit something I’ve been practicing for a while now: I will not boost posts that contain machine learning- (“AI”) generated images, as surely as I will not boost those without alt text, and I encourage you not to do so either.