Alex Wittenberg

This fact—the fact that there is being, to begin with—is “the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes,” in the splendid phrase of the writer Sarah Bakewell. But instead, it almost always passes us by. 

During Season One, Forefront experienced fundamental issues arising from an imbalance of these two forces. This manifested as:Onboarding as fast as we can vs. as much as we need to, creating substantial overhead and degrading the experience of existing contributors. This prompted us to pause onboarding before the end of S1.

A good way to test this for most tokenized communities today is to ask: if their primary communications tool (e.g. Discord) disappeared, would this community still exist?

Green, sustainable infrastructure as a form of resistance. Technical systems decoupled from the ‘authoritarian technics’ that Mumford warns us about. The embracing of the natural and the technical. This idea is where the solarpunk vision really comes into its own.

One marker that I’m seeing someone clearly is when I understand how their strengths are also their weaknesses, how their genius lives right next to their dysfunction. I know that I’m further away from clarity when I am overly excited or overly skeptical. 

Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born?

The idea of silence as a commons, as Illich described it here, suggests to a me shared space into which you and I might enter and have just as much of a chance of being heard as anyone else. Technologies that augment the human voice empower those who possess them at the expense of those who do not, setting off the escalatory dynamics that... See more