I'm posting this in the wintertime, still February. I thought I'd share something relatively upbeat, with a festival atmosphere.
When I think about the positive connotations of an asylum, I think of festivals and celebrations. Maybe the dress code is a little crazy. I've never been to Burning Man proper, but I've been to satellite events happening elsewhere, attended by some of the same people. I'm sure that's another source of the vibe I'm attempting to somehow capture.
The party archetype connects to Dionysus, to Bachninalia, in Western Civ. The stereotype suggests Roman excess, drunken orgies, like in Fellini's Satyricon. That's one extreme. Somewhere in that mix we get the more sober engineers, the event planners and producers, charged with keeping people safe and responding to emergencies. Actually I'm conflating roles. Think of theme parks, and family fun.
Do refugee camps share cartoons with the kids? Do they feature circus tents? How about theaters? When you're looking for ways to manage crowds, have them settle down, the usual solution is entertainment, which is oft times informational. Film festivals. Documentaries.
In my Coffee Shops Network business planning, we encourage people boning up, becoming informed, studying, which could mean watching lots of Youtubes. Because then it's your job, in proportion to your level of performance in gaming (think "language games") to commit funds (your winnings) towards various programs, some in progress, some storyboarded. To the extent our clientele is well informed, they're more likely to commit their winnings wisely.
When you help fund a program, you'll be in some cases looking forward to jumping into the action. I commit to a somewhat science fictional Trucker Exchange Program, in some dimensions an outgrowth of my Business Mobile (BizMo) fleet fantasy. We do location scouting in our bizmo caravans, sometimes with bigger trucks to follow, heavy equipment, in order to construct a new campus location. In some cases, we'll provision by helicopter, per Fuller's visions in Shelter magazine (4D Timelock etc.). My science fiction revisits many familiar themes, already prevalent before I joined the scene.
Where shall we put the new experimental prototype community of tomorrow? Are we learning about an ecology? Are we in Antarctica? In the Amazon? Will airstrips be involved?
