Overnight I was having a good old chat about hung parliaments,
coalitions, and party implosions, when in bursts Morbus Iff of
disobey.com screaming about creating a new wiki to hold absolutely
everything that he does. Well, most things.
Since this was a good idea, I told him that it was a good idea. He did
not at first think that it was a good idea, only somewhat of an
average idea, so I kept telling him that it was a good idea until he,
too, acceded to the fact that it was a good idea.
Then I showed him my super master document distilled from my crazy web
based experiments of 2009, whose TL;DR summary is that it's better to
work on collections, where you analyse shape and flow and design after
the fact, than on sites, where you bake these in to begin with.
It's a really bad idea to write things while eating rice and talking
to friends about running BIND on a Palm Pre. It was a similarly bad
idea to talk to Morbus about the wiki and "Sites beat Collections"
last night while listening to J.S. Bach, because man, talk about
synæsthesia spirals. It was like the Belousov-Khabotinsky reaction.
I told Morbus that I'd try to write a series of manifestos to explain
myself more clearly, and this was supposed to be one of them.
Unfortunately this is also the UK general election season, so I keep
getting distracted by thinking that I should probably be creating my
own political party and writing manifestos for that, just like
everybody else will be doing if we have a hung parliament.
Anyway, my idea is basically that the way that everybody produces
sites now is wrong, talking about hobbyists' sites. I'm probably just
saying this because I'm into biography as an art form at the moment,
but I think of sites more like autobiographies. The kind of things
that friends like Morbus, Noah, Joe, Lauri, and William produce is
very disparate compared to the tastes shaped by the information that
we generally consume, and the prime thing that links all this stuff
together is the person who created it and their society.
William wrote to me about just this kind of a thing a couple of months
ago, asking for a word which is better than anarchy to describe a form
of cooperative government by the people. I said holarchy, and he
immediately went off and registered holarchy.org, which currently has
some details which touch on shaping information and shaping society.
Unfortunately, holarchy.org is the last thing that William
Loughborough and I can work on, because William passed away the other
evening. He had a good innings, 84, but I did somewhat expect him to
get the century since he seemed indestructible and was getting fitter
and happier after he'd moved to Spain.
I've downloaded archives of as much of his data as possible, including
holarchy.org, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the data yet.
Since holarchy.org is so relevant to the present essay, I'll paste the
contents of the front page in here between these asterisks:
* * *
Holarchy
Vectors [link] to serve holarchy
This site is intended as a place to effect holarchy by means of
vectors directed to include all humans in their own governance.
Other domains using "holarchy" as part of their name, as well as most
(all?) of the other approaches are predicated on mapping
ideas/words/expressions to non-existent territory. By having .org in
its domain name, this site will attempt to call for action.
"New Age" terminologies would seem useless for getting our governance
modified and the notion that "anarchy" as a one-word oxymoron led to
"holarchy" and the "-archy" ain't from "hierarchy" but from a
respectable Greek idea: rule. Thus instead of the "no-ruleness" of
anarchy through the oppressive nature of hierarchy we get to "all
rule".
Easy enough to say and perhaps even grasp as an ideal, but how could
we possibly get there? Can "mind" coexist with "nature"?
Perhaps we should ask Samuel Taylor Coleridge [link]?
The main feature that will enable Universal Connectedness is summed up
in "everyone/everything/everywhere/always connected" that is being
moved forward by elements of the World Wide Web.
The ingredient that will make it all happen is the kind of trust
[link] found in "she's a stand-up person for whom I vouch."
* * *
One thing that only really occurred to me last night, speaking with
Morbus and reading what William had said, is that the community aspect
of these things is so important. You can work by yourself, but you're
always being influenced by outside factors, and your friends tend to
influence you the most. The friends that I have now tend to be the
kinds of people who sustain mutually communicable interests despite
them being on first glance very disparate. I suppose there is a sense
of glowing personality underneath all of these things which binds them
together. In a way it would be nice if personal websites could show
that, but it would be also nice if they could show the teamwork and
collaboration.
So one of the reasons why I like the idea that Morbus has for a wiki
is that he's contemplating making it be a community effort, allowing
people to add, if they're anal enough, their own kind of things to his
wiki. I suppose the limiting factor would be that they sit right with
materiel presently existing on the site, which of course you'd have a
gauge with intuition, though perhaps Morbus could draft some
guidelines.
There are many other aspects of this worth contemplating, and I'm
especially wondering how this relates to Noah's recent experiments of
trying to use only off-the-shelf services for hosting and manipulating
data.
Background Reading:
* http://www.disobey.com/node/1822
* http://groups.google.com/group/whits/t/f5131f5c12cae417
* http://groups.google.com/group/whits/t/e5844f7b7fc08bb7