aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
Baratunde Thurston — How to Be a Social Creative | The On Being Project
onbeing.org
How to Citizen: “To citizen” is to show up. We just assume there’s something for us to do, and we don’t always know what that is, but we have an orientation toward, “Put me in. I don’t have to lead, but I have to be a part of the thing.”
Number two: “To citizen” is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet around you. We have inherited a story of separation of all these things, and they’re actually all one. The quantum physicist will tell you that really in a short sentence. So that myth busted.
“To citizen” is to understand power and all the different ways we have it. Eric Lou, I call him one of our founding guests, founder of Citizen University. He says: power is just the ability to get somebody to do what you want them to do.” And we have different ways of doing that. Physical force is obvious. Money, especially in this society, is pretty obvious. Ideas, sharing them. You’re very powerful, Krista. Putting our attention on something, we give power to what we give attention to, and we can choose, within default settings and design incentives, but we have the power to choose what we give our power to with our attention.
Fourth of four of these principles is: “To citizen” is to value the collective. We do all these things out of a sense of collective self-interest, not just personal, individual self-interest. Valerie Kaur was our very first guest for How To Citizen.
The math is simple: more people are consuming more of everything than ever before, but there are very few hits of real scale. That means that many of us spend our time in niches, not in the center.
Variety and the long tail
American Architect Keller Easterling is well known for her book Extrastatecraft (2014), which looked at the power of infrastructural space and how this defines the operating system of the modern world. Her most recent text, Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World (2021) looks at the spaces between things, systems, and actors as an
... See moreJesse McKee • From Polycrisis to the Smart Commons
“Vibes are like the sun: we know that they exist, but we can't ever look at them directly. Concepts like community, mentorship, love, happiness, culture, education, progress, and paradigms are similarly resistant to hard definitions. Like the sun, we can feel their warmth, see them skittering around the periphery of our vision...but most of us know
... See moreAgain, we’re early in this evolution, but if I had to bet, I would put money on the internet growing from here via an ecosystem of small apps, maybe even personalized apps fed by our AI models, over the emergence of new huge centralized platforms. Of course, that creates the opportunity for centralization to emerge at the discovery layer.
It’s
... See morePacky McCormick • Decentralization
Do ideas really occur in chains, or is the lineal structure imposed on them by scholars and philosophers? How is the world of logic, which eschews “circular argument” related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than the expectation? (G. Bateson, 2002, p.18)
