Recently I encountered the perfect punchline for my ongoing exploration of technology: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. The timing was perfect, since I’ve been looking for an organizing idea to describe how I understand technology.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

Looking back over the technology-related posts in my archives over the last five years, this technology-is-nature theme pops out clearly, as both a descriptive and normative theme. I don’t mean that in the sense of naive visions of bucolic bliss (though that is certainly an attractive technology design aesthetic) but in the sense of technology as a manifestation of the same deeper lawfulness that creates forests-and-bears nature. Technology at its best allows for the fullest expression of that lawfulness, without narrow human concerns getting in the way.

I will explain the title in a minute but first, here is my technology sequence of 14 posts written over the last five years. The organizing narrative for the sequence comes from this technology-is-nature idea that informs my thinking, whether I am pondering landfills or rusty ships.

[Read more…]

When I made up the tagline, experiments in refactored perception, back in 2007, I had no idea how deeply that line would come to define the essence of ribbonfarm. So in this first post in my planned month-long retrospective on five years in the game, I decided to look back on the evolution and gradual deepening of the idea of refactoring perceptions.

(2017 update: you can now buy this collection as a Kindle ebook)

I’ve never attempted an overt characterization of what the phrase means, but over the years, I’ve explored it fairly systematically. This sequence of posts should help you appreciate what I mean by the phrase. I’ve arranged the sequence as a set of fairly natural stages. There is some commentary at the end. Here you go:

[Read more…]

First off, a big thank you to all those who have signed up to sponsor ribbonfarm in 2012 so far. The total has already hit $2550, about 25% more than last year’s total. This has opened up many more interesting possibilities for activities online and offline, compared to last year. Stay tuned for more on that front.

Here is the roundup of new posts since January. The last roundup can be found here, and from there, if you so desire, you can backtrack through the entire history of this blog, roundup-by-roundup, through approximately 300 posts. I wouldn’t recommend doing that, since there’s more crud in the archives than I like to admit, and because a better option is brewing.

1. 2012 Reading List, January – June
2. Seeking Density in the Gonzo Theater
3. The World is Small and Life is Long
4. Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures
5. How to Name Things
6. The Greater Ribbonfarm Cultural Region
7. Refactor Camp 2012: Generativity and Captivity
8. Glimpses of a Cryptic God
9. Just Add Water
10. Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law
11. Reviewing Refactor Camp 2012
12. Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch?
13. How Do You Run Away from Home?
14. Lawyer Mind, Judge Mind
15. Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet
16. Go Deep, Young Man: 2012 Call for Sponsorships
17. Rediscovering Literacy
18. Welcome to the Future Nauseous
19. Discussion Note: Sartre’s Nausea vs. Future Nausea (guest post)

Not counting administrative/meta posts and the sole guest post, I’ve managed 13 real posts so far this year. There has also been plenty of excellent discussion. I am pretty happy with these dozen posts, since a lot of themes that have been evolving over several years appear to be cohering in interesting ways. This was one of the reasons I was able to draw a conceptual map of ribbonfarm and its neighborhood (item 6) and write several pieces that I think capture the learnings from the writing/thinking process I’ve been developing (2, 5, 9 and 16).

Speaking of cohering themes, I am posting this regular biannual round-up a month earlier than usual. This is because I am planning something a little special for June, in the run-up to the fifth anniversary of this blog on July 4th (I started the blog on July 4th 2007).

In June, there will be no new content. Instead, I plan to go back through five years worth of archives and create 4-5 themed summaries of all the good posts, along with some (hopefully helpful) commentary.

For the significant number of people who have started reading this blog relatively recently, this should be helpful, since I back-link extensively through my older stuff (though I only rarely do true series posts, my posts generally make more sense in the context of older ones). Since many new readers attempt to read through the entire archives (otherwise known as the Ribbonfarm Absurdity Marathon), I am hoping to cut down the time necessary for this brave catch-up attempt by somewhere between 50 to 70%. This will probably mean some tough elimination decisions.

It is going to be pretty challenging to partition over 300 posts, averaging 2000-3000 words, with a ton of  cross-referencing, into 4-5 decoupled and linearly sequenced series, but it’s about time. This blog is becoming too much of an illegible slum even for my own slobby, unshaven tastes, so a few guided tours wouldn’t hurt. It won’t be pretty, but I hope machetes will no longer be necessary once I am done.

For those in the US, here’s wishing you a Happy Memorial Day and a good start to your summer.

It’s that time of the year again. Last year, sponsorships amounted to about $2000 (not counting  the “buy me a coffee” micro-payments, which added another $400). This year, they’ve already crossed the $500 mark without me doing a call.

Sponsorship and “coffee” money represent a fairly small fraction of my income, but on a dumb-money to smart-money spectrum, it is the smartest money I make.  I’d trade two dollars of any other kind of income for a dollar of sponsorship income any day. The “smart” in the smart money is the unadultrated goodwill it carries. Though there are no strings attached, I feel a strong urge to reinvest sponsorship income back into the blog and related activities rather than using it to pay the bills. In a way, the money comes with the opposite of a moral hazard attached.

So if you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and sponsor away.

When I did the call last year, I shared a line (the only line, actually) from my fledgling business philosophy: go where the wild thoughts are.

This year, I’ve added another line: go deep, young man.  At 37, I think I get to call myself young man for at least another three years.

Read on for more, if you are interested in my evolving philosophy of blogging. If you are a blogger yourself, chances are you won’t learn much. I am increasingly realizing that my approach to blogging says more about me than about blogging. If you’re not a blogger, this is your annual peek behind the scenes.

[Read more…]

There is a fascinating set of ideas that has been swirling around in the global zeitgeist for the past decade, around the quote that will keep Donald Rumsfeld in the history books long after his political career is forgotten. I am referring, of course, to the famous unknown-unknowns quote from 2002. Here it is:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.

Rumsfeld put his finger on a major itch that set off widespread scratching. This scratching, which is about the collective human condition in the face of fundamental uncertainties, shows no sign of slowing down a decade later. But the conversation has taken an interesting turn that I want to call out.

Out of all this scratching, four broad narratives have emerged that can be arranged on a 2×2 with analytic/synthetic on one axis and optimistic/pessimistic on the other.  Three are rehashes of older narratives. But the fourth — the Hydra narrative — is new. I have labeled it the Hydra narrative after Taleb’s metaphor in his explanation of anti-fragility: you cut one head off, two emerge in its place (his book on the subject is due out in October).

The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it. Geoffrey West’s ideas about superlinearity are the empirical part of an attempt to construct an existence proof showing that such systems are actually possible.

My own favorite starting point for thinking about these things, as some of you would have guessed, is James Scott’s idea of illegibility, which is poised diplomatically at the origin, equally amenable to being incorporated in any of the narratives. It is equally capable of informing either skepticism or faith in any of the narratives, and can be employed towards both analysis and synthesis.

I haven’t made up my mind about the question in the title of the post, but am on alert for new ideas relating to it, from Taleb and others.  So this is something of an early-warning post.

[Read more…]

I’ve been procrastinating on this post for a couple of weeks, wondering what the heck to say about my first attempt at a serious Ribbonfarm event: Refactor Camp 2012, on March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo.

Throughout 2011, I did a whole lot of physical-world stuff, meeting people all over the country, sleeping on couches and in spare bedrooms, and organizing a handful of field trips (I think I met at least a hundred people, if not more). But Refactor Camp felt different somehow.

Every interesting thing in my life has been the result of scratching at some weird itch. Every screwed-up thing has been the result of ignoring such itches and attempting to follow some mature-sounding social script instead.

Last year, through my travels and field trips,  I was intrigued to discover that itch-scratchers are disproportionately represented in the readership here on Ribbonfarm. Which is how many of us ended up on the Sausalito docks listening to Sam Penrose talking about outlaw living on houseboats. Or how I ended up inside the storm drains under Las Vegas with Laura Wood.

Reflecting on all this led me to wonder: What would happen if you put a bunch of itchy-scratchy types in a room together? Let’s find out.

I am pleased to announce that on Saturday March 3rd, at the San Francisco Zoo, between 10 AM and 3 PM, along with a few itchy-scratchy co-conspirators, I will be hosting and partially sponsoring the first ever barcamp related to the themes of this blog: Refactor Camp 2012.

All itchy-scratchy types are invited. Use the promotional code EARLYBIRD to register before 10 PM, Thursday Feb 16th, and get $10 off the $40 general registration. You can get one of the limited student reservations if you are a registered student somewhere ($10), or one of the sponsor tickets ($100) if you want to help cover the costs, since I am subsidizing it a bit. Our meeting space is limited to about 40 people max.

The event will run from 10 AM to 3 PM, in one of the meeting rooms at the zoo (with WiFi), and will include lunch, all-day coffee and admission to the zoo.

So sign up now. And then come back and continue reading to find out why a zoo, why the theme is “generativity and captivity” and what any of this has to do with scratching itches and refactoring perceptions.

[Read more…]

I finally managed to check an item off my to-do list that’s been bugging me for months. There is now a a glossary of terms from Tempo on this site.  You can always get to it directly via a link on the top menu.

It’s one of those annoying little housekeeping tasks that was tedious to do, but now that I am done, it should prove very helpful. In the past, I’ve limited my use of terms from the book in blog posts to avoid losing people through either confusion or repetition. Now I can just link to the definitions. If you write about anything related to the book and need a convenient reference, feel free to link to the specific definition.

I hope to refine and extend the glossary and do longer encyclopedia style entries on some of them, linking off the short entry. While the glossary is mostly for Tempo-specific neologisms, I also have a few borrowed concepts that I use a lot. I plan to judiciously add more of those. There is a good chance that the second edition of the book will actually start with an expanded glossary, representing space I want to explore. I’ll probably do a post on every major new concept I incorporate into the second edition.

Please let me know if I missed any key concepts from the book, or if you have suggestions for borrowed terms that pass the “sufficiently close” test. If it doesn’t pass, I may still link to an external reference on an under-construction references page.

Now that I have this out of the way, I plan to do more posts building explicitly on concepts in the book. Specific requests are welcome.

Hopefully the glossary should be enough for me to not lose readers who haven’t read/finished the book and keep the blog posts stand-alone.