The workhorse Mac Pro likely bit it last weekend, halting mid-sentence, as I was crafting some nuclear energy policy (just kidding: I was yakking with an informed lobbyist on Facebook). Had to hard reboot, but she never came back.
Fortunately, I was surrounded by acres of wildflowers and getting tractor skills, plus had an iPad for telecoms, so no time for a self pity party. My plan is to take my time casting about for solutions, without feeling overly pressured. Laptops die. I have backups. Maybe I should write a grant proposal, and or try to get by on a Pi.
Regarding social media (telecoms), I’ve picked up the pace on X a bit, looking back on 2024 and imagining a DreamTeam. I parodied the Russiagate genre by having free tier AI do a wonderful Bernie and Tulsi meme, as Superman and Wonder Woman. As hackneyed as it gets, and also so nostalgic, as neither is even running for president this year.
I also mocked State dot gov for trying to make RT sound more sinister than it is. Unable to compete on a level playing field, Cowardly Capitalism (scan blogs) is trying to re-enact the Hua Wei model and simply ban the competition. Pretty wimpy, but that’s President Blinken for ya, now out of favor in Poland they tell me (the list keeps growing).
I cleaned out some of my old FSI posts, which I can always refresh when the time comes. FSI is one of the Mighty Networks (that’s the hosting platform — very iPhone compatible). Then I use Synergeo a lot, for promotional materials. Example 1. Example 2.
I alerted the FSI via forum posting (vs in a group) that the most up to date summary of my thinkings and doings, with respect to the Bucky stuff at least, was archived at TTBC. This is where I overlap with BFI members a lot (I was made a lifelong member with the Synergetics Explorer Award, amidst ceremony).
If you’re not familiar with all these acronyms, I suggest a blog search, from the box upper left. Use the right margin navigation widget to jump to my other blogs. Field Structure Institute and TrimTab Book Club are both entangled with BFI, for which I was webmaster in the 1990s, in cahoots with Kiyoshi.
Having archived my thoughts on working with Disney / Pixar, and summarized the Lithuania chapter, I retired from TTBC as the protocol there is to keep it apolitical, and in this particular season that’s not in the cards for me. I’m called to grapple with various political powers that be, were, or are still in the pipeline. That means I’m back to small group comms. I use Telegram a lot.
Some might wonder if I stay in contact with Princeton alums and is there anything to the idea that Ivy Leaguers have a rule the world complex? Yes, I stay in touch with some classmates, including at a recent picnic in the park (local Princeton Club chapter). But I wouldn’t say there’s any world domination tone to it. We’re all over the map.
Where you might still encounter “world domination” talk is in the world of free and open source engineering, where copyleft commies still reign supreme. If you go back in time quite a ways you’ll find a bemused mass media discovering geekdom’s memes, “global dom” being one of them.
The full meme comes with a lot of penguin pictures (March of the Penguins had been big) i.e. Linux iconography. That was the David and Goliath myth of the day: Linux and open source were gonna rule the world, displacing the slower, dumber giants, not agile enough to keep up.
So how did that go?
Well, it’s a long story. The short version is the giants swallowed a lot of the open source philosophy (PayPal: “InnerSource”), not to mention source code, making Big Tech more dot commie. But the language of capitalism is still what’s macho among tech bros. They see the business sense in copyleft, which is padding the bottom line. Imagine paying IBM prices for all that stuff.
The equilibrium we’ve achieved might be imagined as a skyscraper or any tall office tower. As you rise or descend in the elevator, you find some floors are public and open, whereas others are authorized personnel only, with not all personnel authorized on closed off floors. Developers tend to get authorized access to a smattering of proprietary floors, work there and in the public spaces, contributing to both.
Most economists speak of “the commons” thinking of an old fashioned grazing area near a town, where anyone could park their sheep or whatever. Not closed off, not like BLM land, not proprietary. In geekdom, the gold has a different character in being infinitely copiable so long as electricity and storage is made available. My School of Tomorrow repo goes out over the wire to any point on earth, firewalls notwithstanding.
That being said, my curriculum writing is needle in a haystack stuff, spread by word of mouth vs by high pressure advertising. Pressurizing the content is more a job for downline repackagers and resellers of our open source content, MIT license a lot of it. We use Python a lot and you know how liberal that license is. I’m a copyleft king in my kingdom, practicing Potlatch Economics (tagline: “there’s more where that came from”).
The copyleft movement is more an outgrowth of academic protocols than any flavor of Marxism. We already had those concepts of “fair use” and “public domain” whereby scholars are allowed to excerpt and cite X, without financially supporting X. Why would I want to pay a school to which I’m philosophically opposed? If they’re pumping out memes, affecting change in the public spaces, then as a member of the public, I have a right to investigate. Greg Palast is one of my heroes.
