mid-2012 conversation about Occupy Portland

"INTERVIEWER" = Lois Melina

"PARTICIPANT" = Josh Maurice

INTERVIEWER:  Let’s see.  Get that close to you. Um,  so I have your name and I’m not going to put that on the recording, um, how  old were you on November 17th?

PARTICIPANT:  Thirty, November 17th, OK. INTERVIEWER:  Or you can just tell me your birthday. PARTICIPANT:  March 5th, 79.

INTERVIEWER:  Um,  so tell me what, um, tell me about your involvement with Occupy Portland.  What got you involved, what kinds of actions you’ve participated in and particularly I’m interested in the encampment.

PARTICIPANT:  Uh huh, uh huh.  Um,  I first heard about the ah, the plans for there to be an Occupy Portland at the Red and Black Café one night where I, I had been, um, trying to get to a talk that was being given there about anarchist organizing strategies.   Um,  so I got there after the talk and the Q and A were finished but somebody who I had talked to a few times before at that place, I remember at, at that time told me about Occupy Portland, you know, being planned for  October 6th  and modeled sort of after Occupy Wall Street.   And, ah, I went on to the gathering on October 6th  and, ah, a couple

friends, I participated in that.  Um,  that gathering by the waterfront and then going from there to Pioneer Square and then I sort of, ah, lost the crowd, lost track of them after that until the next day when I, ah, had found out where they set up the camp previous night.   I went down and walked through

briefly and then, so that was October 7th  and set up a tent there that night and, um, I was around quite a lot the first few days and then after that I was around at least every, every night, every time at night time, every day at night time almost, until about November 8th.  My dad was visiting from Ohio  and, ah, he a little five year old girl and I, she lives here in

Portland and I take care of her and I’ve  been doing that during the day time during most of those days of the camp, right?   While her mom was at her job I was at their apartment with Nix(?), she turned five November but we  were, three of us were staying in a Motel 6 for  a few nights starting about November 8th and maybe a couple days after that, after we had, couple days into his visit that the news of the Mayor ordering the dispersal came so let’s see, since then I’ve  been doing a lot of meetings at the office at St Francis and other places.

INTERVIEWER:  Were you there on eviction night?

PARTICIPANT:  Yeah, yeah, I, ah, packed up my  tent at 11, 11:30, stood around on the sidelines, ah, watching until maybe 12:30, 1, 1:30 or  so. I

took the last bus then, back to, ah, where I was crashing and then I went back on Sunday morning and, ah, saw the few people who were still in, ah, Chapman Square and, ah,

INTERVIEWER:  Were you involved in any of the other actions? The

November 17th bank, shut down the bank?

PARTICIPANT:  Um,  not too much, just sort of in the, in the, I remember on, on eviction day, on November 13th someone was kind of distraught about all that and was thinking, saying it out “We need to just go and like occupy these corporations” and I said “Well, we’re doing that November 17th, right?” and I had one of these flyers for  occupy the banks, ah, I took notes at the GA the night before that on November 16th, the night of November 16th I was hand, writing them out by hand and I was at the Red and Black again on November 17th while a lot of that was going on, going down downtown I was typing up those notes and posting them and then I went downtown and, ah, saw some of the last parts of the police, kind of, activity and, yeah, so I was there at nights.

INTERVIEWER:  You said you, um, take care of a little girl for  someone, is that a regular job?   Or was that?

PARTICIPANT:  Yeah, no  we’ve been together since she was born. INTERVIEWER:  Oh.

PARTICIPANT:  Pretty much every, yeah, we  were all living together until she was about four and-a-half and then started living separately, um, they had an apartment downtown in the Pearl District, right across the street from

Jamison Square during the Occupy, during the Occupation and, ah, I’d been going, going there in the morning, you know, pretty early every morning to get there before her mom left for  her job but it was less of a commute when I was camping downtown, you know, it was less, rather than camping out in the van where I was sleeping on southeast side so it had a kind of, that, ah, material benefits for  me just, just by its  location.

INTERVIEWER:  Yeah, so, um, how  do you describe yourself in terms of your work  or  career, even if you’re not employed that way?

PARTICIPANT:  Um.   Um,  um, did you, did you, did you look  over any of the, ah, blog posts I wrote about, about graphical internet

INTERVIEWER:  Huh uh.

PARTICIPANT:  Stuff.

INTERVIEWER:  No, I didn’t know  that you had a blog posted about those. PARTICIPANT:    Um,   yeah, yeah, for  a few years I’ve  been

writing, writing posts  ah, my  twitter account has links to it, twitter.com/joshmaurice

PARTICIPANT:  OK.

PARTICIPANT:  It’s  right at the top of that page, a little, you know, bio, has links to the two blogs.   Um  so but there’s a, I guess if you want to talk about the connection to Occupy, possibly with that.  I’ve  been writing about online direct democracy as a way  of transcending the political situation, I don’t know, a, ah, model for  a new ah system, etc.

INTERVIEWER:  How  long have you been doing that?

PARTICIPANT:  Maybe three years or  so I’ve  been talking about, been writing things about that but

INTERVIEWER:  OK.  Um,  and are you a student?

PARTICIPANT:  Mm,  not more in a university kind of thing, no, I ah, I did undergraduate and graduate, ah, degrees at Baylor University in Waco.

INTERVIEWER:  What’s your, um, graduate degree in?

PARTICIPANT:  In MBA information systems management, management. INTERVIEWER:  OK.  Um, so tell me about your experience in the camp, what,

what did you do, how,  what was your day like, what did you notice, what did it mean to you?

PARTICIPANT:  Wow, well   ah so much happened, you know, I had been, ah, anticipating, um, some kind of ah rapid transition to a new way  of living and so there was a lot of new experiences, new experiences there but I had, um, seems on, ah, par with the, with the way  in which I had been expecting the pace of change to accelerate.   Um, yeah, I wrote a bit about that too, not a whole lot about my, about sort of a, ah, I didn’t write, I had a lot of experiences that I never wrote anything about but I wrote a little bit about on my  blogs.   After the first day and the first few days of camp.

INTERVIEWER:  Did you say that you, you experienced that change as, as rapid and that was what you expected?

PARTICIPANT:  I, ah, I, for  the preceding months, years, I’d been expecting, I have been mostly thinking about it going down online in a way, you know, much more cyber, on a much more cyber level than it seems to have with Occupy but, um, yeah, the increasing connectivity, hyper-connectivity among people, um .

INTERVIEWER:  What was that like?

PARTICIPANT:   Oh you probably, it’s  probably been described as sort of a culture clash and, you know, I have a lot of people, just so many different people gathering together.

INTERVIEWER:  But what was your experience?

PARTICIPANT:  Oh, I had a lot of um, um, have you heard anything about Dave, ah, Campbell(?) who ah, somebody over (inaudible), somebody who was writing on the ground in chalk “Dave Campbell for  Mayor” and there’s a bust of his head in one of the, ah, maybe a pub or  a pub district by Yamhill. I remember him  in the tent next to mine and one day we  were, during the encampment but a couple blocks away, half a block away, we  were walking, talking and he was telling me about the guy who’d, ah, made that bust of his head in the middle of the, of camp, out there by the art tent. Um,  let’s see,

INTERVIEWER:  So  how  did, you mentioned the hyper-connectivity among people, how  did you, um, experience that?

PARTICIPANT:  For one thing, ah, you could hear, from my  tent I could hear five, six other dramas going on all around me, you know, or  whatever was going on in those tents around me was very, porous boundaries there so boundaries of distance and, ah, walls dissolved there for a while.

INTERVIEWER:  Hm.  And what was the impact of that beyond the, kind of the superficial of it, of being able to hear anything, what?

PARTICIPANT:  Uh huh.  I mean, you know, a lot of people probably grew a lot more connected to others and relationships were formed, people grew and, ah, learned a lot.

INTERVIEWER:  Was that true for  you?

PARTICIPANT:   I’ve  probably, for  sure met, actually, you know, met and learned the name of and so on of a lot more people probably since the end of the camp, well the camp was only  five weeks and then since then

it’s  been five more months so, but I was only  there at night time for  a lot of time except for the first few days I did get to be there a lot more, so, marathon thing happened and half the camp was vacated and then re- occupied after the marathon.   I put a blog, I put a post on a website around that, when that stuff was happening.  Um,  someone, someone, someone in an article was quoted as wondering if there was too much cooperation of the cops going on for accommodating the marathon, I made a comment about ah, um, it seemed like a lot of good work’s gone into accommodating this marathon which has been going on in Portland for  40 years and um, it’s  sort of good test and demonstration of the robustness of the movement to be able to accommodate that and cooperate and, uh, and, uh, I said it could, I said that people temporarily relocating to the South Park blocks or someplace might be good reconnaissance for  possible future expansions to

that block. I didn’t see a percentage in ah getting surly with the police.   I

also, I blogged a little about a conversation I had with a guy who was counter-demonstrating for  after, well, about three, four days in to the camp where the road was blocked off, Main Street, in between the two blocks and he was out there  going “Open the street, open the street” and, ah, a bunch of people out there barricading the street were yelling back at him and the guy, Remy and I talked to him  out there for  an hour, maybe, another lady came up who was doing research for, for, for  an academic paper, Capstone paper, she was talking with us too and another guy who was kind of skeptical but very interested in kind of deep discussion of the issue, the implications came up and I thought (inaudible)

INTERVIEWER:  So  what was that conversation like in terms of, was it a different kind of engagement for  you?

PARTICIPANT:   Yeah, well  it was a very new situation that you have a street that’s been occupied by people wanting to radically change the

socio-economic system and here’s somebody out there in that context kind of alone, you know, he’s one person against all these  others yet he’s representing for  the larger system that’s in place.   Uh, the lady who was doing some academic research who was there,  she, ah, asked him  “Is there anything that you would like to change about the system?” he said “No, not really, I think it’s  actually pretty good” he was going “Well maybe the death penalty” and

INTERVIEWER:  Did you feel that that was a good use of your time, having that conversation?

PARTICIPANT:   INTERVIEWER:  Say more about that.

PARTICIPANT:  Well there was this, um, you know, distance, misunderstanding, apparently, between this person and, and so, yeah, I think, when I walked up these people were yelling at each other then he mostly just had a fairly calm conversation then for  an hour after.   In talking for  a few minutes and then somebody at the barricade yelled something at him, I think, and then he went back into the street and yelled at them for  another little while but then came back, came right back and talked to us for  another 45 – 50 minutes.

INTERVIEWER:  What do you think the outcome of that conversation was for him  or  for  the rest of you?

PARTICIPANT:  Well I don’t know, it seemed interesting enough to bring up just now  and it seemed interesting enough to blog about it so maybe different people who read the blog got different things from it whereas, I intuited that may have it would have some significance for  different people without necessarily knowing the significance but

INTERVIEWER:  Did you learn anything new? PARTICIPANT:   Sure, all this stuff, in what?

INTERVIEWER:  From that conversation, did you come away with any kind of new?

PARTICIPANT:  I got to know  this guy Remy, kind of, a lot, he was there  and he was doing probably most of the talking for  that hour but he was very involved in the camp and I’ve, you know, I’ve  been around him  a lot subsequently, um, yeah, I learned, I learned about, I was listening, also to this guy and his narrative about,  you know, his politics. He lives with his uncle or  something, or  he’s living

INTERVIEWER:  Was there anything that particularly surprised you about your experience in the camp?  That you didn’t expect?

PARTICIPANT:  Well I didn’t know  very much about what to expect, you know, at all.  I was not, until the, ah, until October 7th  I was not expecting tents, really, right?   I remember talking to somebody about it in the Powell’s(?) Coffee Shop, the Powell, a few days before and, ah, he said he’d been trying to watch the videos of the meetings, I guess the GA’s, the videos on the Occupy Portland website but he hadn’t been able to get the videos to load and he was a little suspicious about whether somebody is blocking this videos from going through but I said I had gotten  some of it to play and, ah, I’d seen a guy saying “Nothing that will be, would be

considered a structure will be allowed but bring a lot of tarps and duct tape”. But just that, just the fact that a whole lot of people were going to converge

and possibly build some kind of, you know, rudimentary shelters with tarps and duct tape was interesting enough for  me to be into it, participate and then it turned out they’re able to get tents and well, were you at the Occupy Portland occupation at all?

INTERVIEWER:  I was at the October 6 march, kind of like you, I got to Pioneer Square and stayed there for  a little while and then I didn’t continue on to the camp.   Um,  and I was at the Jamie Diamond demonstration/protest when he came to town and I was at the march over the steel bridge on November

17th but, um, I went downtown afterwards but it didn’t seem like anything was happening at the banks and, you know, I guess what happened was people went back to the waterfront and reorganized and then, but, but I went home and I didn’t hear about what was happening until later that night so I was totally surprised by that.  And I didn’t, I dropped some things off at the camp, we  dropped some food off and things but I didn’t stay at the camp or spend much time there.

PARTICIPANT:  I got a few audio recordings of November 17th.

INTERVIEWER:  Hmm.  So  it sounds like you’ve been thinking about systems change for  a long time.

PARTICIPANT:  Hm.

INTERVIEWER:  And you’re still involved with the  Occupy movement so how are you feeling about this movement relative to your earlier thoughts about systems change?

PARTICIPANT:   Well, ah, I think it could, that, ah, internet, ah, a new kind of internet interface, a vastly differently kind of internet interface could emerge and kind of catalyze rapid changes in how  we  live before much else happens with the Occupy movement or  it could take a little bit of time for  that internet thing to happen and the Occupy phenomenon could become much more interesting, even before we  get, a, um, much more interesting kind of way  of relating to the internet but I can, not parallel, you know, minds of (inaudible)

INTERVIEWER:  What keeps you involved? PARTICIPANT:  In?

INTERVIEWER:  In Occupy?

PARTICIPANT:  Occupy?  Oh, well  I know  a lot of people, you know, by them and enjoy hanging out with them.  Ah, interesting, um meetings and discussions about how  to, how  to proceed.   You know  just recently this, um,

city hall mini-occupation, city hall occupancy vigil has been getting a lot of more, well, busy.

INTERVIEWER:  So  have you gone to the General Assemblies?   Did you go to the General Assemblies when you were at the camp?

PARTICIPANT:  Yeah, pretty much whenever I could, whenever I was there in the neighborhood.

INTERVIEWER:  Um,  so what did you think of those?

PARTICIPANT:  Um,  I  I found them interesting enough to keep going, I

still go.  I went yesterday, got there near the end of it but, um, let’s see.

There was one guy who I had seen at the Red and Black that night when I found about Occupy Portland, I ran into him  a few days into the Occupation and uh and asked him  about if he had been going to the GA’s and he said no, I’m not really into the politics of it although he did later, um, get into, get involved in the GA’s and, ah, facilitate the GA’s.

INTERVIEWER:  Well speaking of politics, what’s your sense of how  things happen in Occupy?   Can you describe for  me how  things, how  things happen, who, how  things get on the agenda?   How  they get determined?

PARTICIPANT:  Right now  there’s an agenda setting meeting on 6:30 on Mondays, sets agenda for  the 7 o’clock Monday GA and I guess the 7 o’clock Thursday spokes  council.

INTERVIEWER:  So  how  do you, how  does somebody get to be, do you, can anybody just go to that?

PARTICIPANT:  Oh yeah.   And, ah,

INTERVIEWER:  Are there people that you know  will be there? I mean who are committed to being there or?

PARTICIPANT:  Umm.

INTERVIEWER:  Facilitating, for  example?

PARTICIPANT:  Not really, anybody who I would say is there more than, well, I don’t know, some of the people might be there 95% of the time, ah, there’s, ah, there’s at least probably 6, 7, 8 regular facilitators. They often express, ah, desire for  more people to get on, on that team.

INTERVIEWER:  Are there, um, were there any individuals at the camp that, you know, after a time, you found yourself gravitating to or  listening to more or  wondering what they would think about a particular thing that was being discussed?

PARTICIPANT:  Um,  it could, I would imagine, that would describe, that would describe just about anybody I was familiar with or  ah, but, I’m not thinking of any one person, really, in particular, who would, ah, fit that description.

INTERVIEWER:  So  if I were to ask you, which I guess I am, um, to describe something that happened at the camp that captures the essence of what that experience was like for  you, does anything come to mind?

PARTICIPANT:  Hm.    I’m,  I’m,  I’m,  I don’t know, what’s, I’m more kind of, more kind of mundane everyday things are coming to mind,

the fact that people shared  food and ate together and, ah, lived together and socialized without, without, ah, without there  being necessarily a competition that, that, that, ah, structured a lot of the, of the, ah, experience.

INTERVIEWER:  What do you mean by without a lot of competition to structure the experience?

PARTICIPANT:  I mean there weren’t requirements for  what to do to get food or  to get a spot to, to, ah, to camp.   Um,   not really a currency or  a hierarchy, ah, at least as, ah, as much, to as much as an extent, seemed like a significant, significantly new progress in, ah, addressing those, in trying to.

INTERVIEWER:  Do you think you were aware of that at the time, or  is that, you were?

PARTICIPANT:  Sure, sure.   I told somebody, asked me, I don’t remember exactly when or where, during the camp somebody asked me what I thought about all of this or  something I said “Well, I’ve  kind of been drinking the Kool- Aid” Yeah, yeah, people were, a lot of people were very excited about it on that kind of level, revolution, lot of talk about revolution and evolution.

INTERVIEWER:  You think it was, would you put it in those categories of revolution, evolution?

PARTICIPANT:  Um,  I, um, I was not, I didn’t have a, a, ah, much of an expectation either way as to whether the camp would continue indefinitely or be evicted as it was, you know, so as far as I knew this was potentially something that would grow into a model that remained there until it spread outwards to more and more sectors of the world and yeah, ignite, I think,

helped, which it’s  still doing, it’s  just a phase of counter-current there

(inaudible)

INTERVIEWER:  You say which it’s  still doing?

PARTICIPANT:  Still, yeah, the processes are still evolving and people are still excited and participating, um, uh huh, uh huh.

INTERVIEWER:  At any time during that encampment, in particular, um, well  first let me ask, did you have any, um, personal aha’s?

PARTICIPANT:  Huh, I’m,  (yeah?) sure I did.   (inaudible)   I mean,  you know, I met a lot of interesting people, I met, I met, I met some kids in kids camp and brought the five year old, she was four then, into there and she, she would play with them so communal family, ah, huh, way of living, um.   Um,  my, I was, I was writing about it, algorithm is my  means for, the medium that I think about most as a way  of expressing what I’ve  been thinking about wanting to express so, and that was all

through the camp too, have you heard about A camp and the

the, the, yeah, there was a lot of noise at night and so, people’s demons came out and got, lot of people got to experience the

sound of them so INTERVIEWER:  Hm.

PARTICIPANT:  

INTERVIEWER:  Can you give me an example?

PARTICIPANT:  Well there was the most common chant that’s, that’s, that, you know, Occupy night time is infamous for  is “I will f*** you”. Have you heard of that one? It’s  just something you heard all night long from A camp, the, which I didn’t realize A stood for  alcohol, exactly, but yeah,

INTERVIEWER:  Oh.

PARTICIPANT:  Apparently, it got, it got, one newspaper article said it stood for  anarchy (inaudible) but that was basic, yeah, it’s  like a little gang, too, that sort, that, would sometimes compete for  supremacy with the Peace and Safety Team on resolving disputes that, like when the disputes involved Peace and Safety people but, yeah, yeah, when [a Peace and Safety Team person] was really mad at one point about something, camping right next to them.

and so yeah, a lot of really, convergence of, a lot of super-smart people, a lot of thugs and all kinds of people for  whatever varying reasons,

didn’t have a spot that they wanted to stay in, in the larger society or preferred this kind of a spot.

INTERVIEWER:  So  before Occupy how  would you spend  your time? PARTICIPANT:  Um,  for  a few months, or  maybe a month before Occupy, ah,

Nix’s  mom started, started this job at Sock Dreams so I was

every week or  whatever,  5 days a week I would, ah, get there,  be there pretty much all day, you know, for  before she started her commute to when she got home. Um,   yeah, but the Red and Black Café, which is now  right across the street from Occupy Portland, St Francis office, I would spend some time there and use their computers, they have freely available computers there.

INTERVIEWER:  Hm.   And what’s the, um, main thing that you work  on for

Occupy now?

PARTICIPANT:  Hm.   Well I attend meetings and I, I, I kind of go between the different people, places and help out wherever I can. Um,  done a couple of panel, Occupy Portland panels, panel discussions and, ah, I’ve  been downtown at the vigil quite a lot over the past, you know, few months.

INTERVIEWER:  Um,  did you ever find yourself thinking about when you were involved in the camp, in particular, thinking about, or  maybe just after, any particular individuals or  groups, maybe historical or  non-historical, people you know  personally, that just came to mind because of what you were involved in?

PARTICIPANT:  Um.   Yes.    Yes, yes, yes, influences?

INTERVIEWER:  Just, just came to mind and found yourself thinking about them?

PARTICIPANT:  Hm.   Let’s see.  Hm.    I think sometime right around November, December, um, I, ah, I read an article about situationists and so learned about that, situationists.

INTERVIEWER:  Situationists?  I don’t know  about that.

PARTICIPANT:  It’s  around,I think the early part of the 20th Century, artistic or school, genre, into, ah, practical, ah, practical joke, maybe, kind of stuff.  I don’t know. The idea of the spectacle seems associated with situationalism.

INTERVIEWER:  Uh huh.  And

PARTICIPANT:  Mark Pesce(?) INTERVIEWER:  Go ahead.

PARTICIPANT:  Mark Pesce  linked to an article about him, about this situationalist guy whose name I forget.   Mark Pesce is somebody I’ve  been following.

INTERVIEWER:  P-E-C-H-Y? PARTICIPANT:  P-E-S-C-E.

INTERVIEWER:  Oh.  As a blog or  a Twitter? PARTICIPANT:  Um,  his Twitter name is “mpesce”. INTERVIEWER:  Um,  do you think Occupy is spectacle?

PARTICIPANT:  Possibly, I haven’t looked at very much of that and what exactly they meant by spectacle but, ah, I look  forward to the next phase

and if there’s, there’s definite possible trajectories coming into focus, I think, with the, you know, possibly with the city hall vigil, if that continues to take off, just one current physical presence.

INTERVIEWER:  Did you find yourself having any, any, um, oh, either new ideas or affirmation of your ideas, um, about your relationship to your community or  your government, um, as part of this?

PARTICIPANT:  Yeah, I mean I’ve  been talking about direct democracy for, for, for  a while and then here’s this community springs up on two square blocks of the middle of the downtown of the city and it’s  based on direct democracy, ah, yeah, I’ve  been expecting a, a evolution past, past all the hierarchy assumptions about the necessity of competition

.

INTERVIEWER:  So  what do you mean by direct democracy?

PARTICIPANT:     Just like when you’re asking can anybody walk  up to the agenda setting meeting and put something on the agenda, yeah, there’s no, there’s no, ah, real obvious hierarchy built into the structure of the, of the, ah, process.   

INTERVIEWER:  That’s interesting because I have a feeling that if there were you would be the person who would notice that.

PARTICIPANT:  Hm.

INTERVIEWER:  Because you’ve been studying it for  so long.

PARTICIPANT:  Hm.    Um,  yeah, and it’s, and it’s, it’s  just the idea of, um, well, what were we  talking about? Um.

INTERVIEWER:  Direct democracy and whether there was any real, obvious hierarchy built into the structure.

PARTICIPANT:  Yeah, and enough people, I think are, understand about it and want a truly, egalitarian, and can, enough people are also capable of, of recognizing that, it is not even much risk of this

INTERVIEWER:  It’s  not drifting into that?

PARTICIPANT:  There’s not much risk of it drifting into something like that, yeah.

INTERVIEWER:  OK.  Does it look  the way you thought it would look, direct democracy?

PARTICIPANT:  How,  in some ways, I mean I don’t, I didn’t, (inaudible) really thought about the idea of people sleeping, sleeping in sleeping bags in a square all around city hall, that’s part of the, that’s a part but I didn’t anticipate a camp in the middle of downtown either.   Um,  but there was a kind of recognition too, I think, with, with, with all the connections and happy times and good, good times that were had with people in the Occupy camp

in that sense.   Ah, fulfilling a, ah, expectation and a hope. 

NTERVIEWER:   Um,  did you do any work  for  Obama in 2008?

PARTICIPANT:  Huh uh.

INTERVIEWER:  Um,  so what do you think prompted  you to start looking at direct democracy back when you did?  Was there  any kind of event or incident or  book you read or  anything that catalyzed that for  you?

PARTICIPANT:  Um,   I was, let’s see, probably in Robert AntonWilson in about year 2002 I first read a book of his called Prometheus Rising, um, hm, I was into sort of, ah, libertarianism in college, late part of high school and early part of college I was into, ah, objectivism, Ayn Rand. I went to a couple, couple summer, summer seminars of the objectivists center, libertarianism and then Robert Anton Wilson, I think, probably, ah, purposefully tried to tailor a lot of his stuff to appeal to libertarians and, ah, and so he introduced me to a lot of ideas, I think, in Prometheus Rising.

INTERVIEWER:  Were you active, um, in the 2008 election with the libertarian candidate?

PARTICIPANT:  Oh, oh, this was back in like, (inaudible), no, I was into libertarians maybe, you know, late 90’s, early 2000’s or  so, um, and then (inaudible) Terrence McKenna, I got a lot of doses of Noam Chomsky online, audios, etc., yeah, Terrence McKenna, um and, well, you know, Timothy Leary.

INTERVIEWER:  Uh huh.  Let’s see, how  we  doing?  So  is there anything that I

didn’t ask you that you wanted to talk about or  say?

PARTICIPANT:   We did a pretty good job, I think we  had some good nuggets in there.  

INTERVIEWER:  What were the best nuggets?

PARTICIPANT:  Let’s see, I um, I don’t know, I, ah, I would, I would, um, I still tend to be very reserved with, with, with, with expressing, you know, in the verbal medium, um, I’m still very focused on the algorithm as the medium for  the, for  what I may be able to have or  maybe able to contribute, um. There is the acronym that I, you’ll  see if you look  at the blog, or  the Twitter, GGODD, the  thing that I’m saying could be activated soon, could, could, could, could manifest soon.  Global, Graphical, Online Direct Democracy.

INTERVIEWER:  Hm.   Has this experience with Occupy made you believe that, make, has it made you believe that more than you did before?   More intensely?

PARTICIPANT:  Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:  That it would happen sooner, any of those?

PARTICIPANT:  Yeah, well  I was maybe 99% sure and then I became 99 ½ % sure.

INTERVIEWER:   OK.  Thanks  a lot. PARTICIPANT:  Thanks.

INTERVIEWER:  I’m going to turn this off.

free fish tacos & jalapeno poppers. Saturday, Feb. 16th, 6ish PM

I'd invite you to hang out at City Hall where we've been occupying the sidewalk almost continuously since the beginning of December 2011.

I think the next major phase of the Occupy movement may come about this way: people informally gathering, building connections, friendships, etc., and gradually growing the community until it subsumes larger and larger portions of society, replacing trade and hierarchy with sharing and mutual aid. This is kind of what's been going on at City Hall since the vigil began. For instance, for the past few months I've been staying on the couch of a friend whom I met through Occupy around December 2011. He and I have been frequently walking from his downtown home to City Hall, hanging out "out by da curb," and recharging the boat battery that they use there.

dance party tonight - SW Madison & Park - 11:00

Happy New Epoch Eve! Some tents will be pitched starting at 11:59 p.m. tonight. People including me, other participants in the OPDX Reoccupation Working Group, and a few other people, are on board so far. With this post we are making our intentions public and inviting everybody to join and support this action. Naturally, we'd like to see at least a few hundred campers join us tonight and tomorrow. Locations discussed so far include Shemanski and Chapman.

We'll discuss this at the Occupy Spokescouncil tonight (St. Francis, 7:00), but we're not advocating having GAs or spokescouncils that pertain to these new camps. We'll peacefully inhabit space(s) in solidarity with 100% of our fellow beings, very much inspired by, infused with energy from, the recent wave of occupations, but without a central governing or decision-making body.

Please click to "join" this dance party event, and/or spread the rumor through whatever channels you're channeling :-)

https://www.facebook.com/events/256154804511444/258398704287054/

http://occupyportlandcalendar.org

josh.maurice@gmail.com

503-757-5194

another gloss on GGODD

I added this to a thread called "Musings on direct democracy and a global mind" on the "singularity" mailing list:

I've been blogging for a few years about direct democracy and global mind as vehicles for reaching AGI and Singularity (for example, this message to the incoming Obama administration in 2008: http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com/5136.html ) and I've been emphasizing the transition from textual to graphical internet interfaces as a key aspect. (See my blogs, http://jmmsynch.blogspot.com/ and http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com.)

I recently coined the acronym GGODD: graphical, global online direct democracy.

The next big step at this point seems likely to amount to an algorithm that routes/filters information in some kind of generally applicable way. I envision that your "working memory," or the current representation of your current situation, will be expressed as a series of URLs. Somehow the algorithm will calculate, from this data and from any subsequent moves (input) that you have made at your interface, an appropriate subsequent representation of your situation.

I've dubbed this hypothetical algorithm a "social graph transformation (or generation or evolution) algorithm" and it seems similar to Mark Pesce's "community entity exploration protocol," for which he hasn't released any code yet as far as I know. He has released the code for his Plexus Social Networking Protocol (http://plexus.relationalspace.org/).

See his paper from 20ish years ago, "Cyberspace" http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/www.html.

The closest I've come to modeling in a mathematically precise way this "Filter (Holy Grail)" was what I called "Algorithm Alpha" (http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com/19048.html).

With such an algorithm running at millions of interfaces, presenting people with more and more relevant data more and more quickly, the speed with which we will construct structural/graphical maps of our knowledge will accelerate and we'll soon be navigating through a kind of shared dreamspace/imagination/cyberspace.

GGODD: Graphical, Global, Online Direct Democracy

A correspondent, to whom I had mentioned GGODD in an email*, replied saying "I don't know if your email is about computers, community planning, political science..." to which I replied:

It's about all those things -- I'm thinking about algorithms for creating a new kind of worldwide web -- one that transcends textual interfaces, presenting a kaleidoscopic tableau of meaningful imagery through which we will navigate, enabling us to express many kinds of ideas vastly more efficiently, more precisely, more picturesquely. This, I anticipate, will serve as such an efficient system for planning/organizing our social/economic activities that it will quickly render obsolete the worldwide political structures currently operating. I've written several blog entries over the past few years that might flesh out the idea more, in the two blogs linked from my Twitter profile. You might also check out Mark Pesce at twitter.com/mpesce and http://nextbillionseconds.com/ .

* Here's that text from from my earlier email:
In the meantime, I'd be interested in your feedback about constructing a graphical global online direct democracy.

I've been blogging about algorithms for optimally filtering/distributing data streams online, as a key to the transition from primarily text-based to primarily image-based Internet interfaces.

notes from General Assembly last night (Nov. 16)

Jason (facilitator): We are here to have an organized discussion. Facilitators are here to help us have an organized discussion. We try to be objective, not inject our opinions. This GA is your GA. There's not such a huge group tonight that every person couldn't potentially speak. We seek consensus, but settle for 90%. Agenda for tonight is: announcements, proposals, N17, PSU, etc.

Multiple people: We want to discuss our immediate survival needs before anything else.

Facilitators: OK, how about announcements, then discuss immediate survival needs?

Multiple people: No, discuss immediate survival needs before anything else.

Facilitators: OK.

ADDRESSING IMMEDIATE NEEDS

Metal: Several of us have been getting kicked around by the police for the last 3 days [since the breakup of the Occupation]. Police rousted kids under the Hawthorne Bridge this morning. Tonight we're going to march to the Hawthorne Bridge and camp. Our Occupation camp was dispersed largely as a result of the problems resulting from the fact that we were taking care of the people otherwise left behind.

Alex: I've been living under a bridge with rats the size of my dog.

Guy: Tribal council made a decision this morning to occupy under the Hawthorne Bridge. Let's support it.

Will: I live in Dignity Village. Somebody from Occupy was just scouting out a field nearby there. There's also some other good land near where I live.

Guy: We need direct action.

Facilitator Lady: So to recap what Metal said, after this GA, people are marching to and occupying a space under the Hawthorne Bridge. There is also a Plan B, a fallback contingency plan, the details of which are not being revealed here.

Guy: I have a house you can help clean & stay in the whole winter. Talk to me or my wife Julianne. Join my Time Traveler Advice spoke.

Guy: We can occupy multiple places.

Guy: The people who are sleeping outside need numbers to keep from getting rousted.

Guy: A gal named Berry(?) went to Council. 100 people there agreed to support Occupy. 14 mayors worked together with Homeland Security to coordinate the recent Occupy evictions. Rocky Beaute Flat is being worked on to make it available to be occupied. We just need to survive a while longer until it's ready.

Facilitator Lady: Rocky Beaute Flat is at Fremont and 82nd, east side of Portland.

2 guys: That's too far away.

Guy: I represent the tribes. We support the Hawthorne Bridge occupation.

Dave: We can occupy 4 places at once. The peaceful nature of the movement is important.

Facilitator Lady: Who doesn't now have their needs addressed for tonight?

Facilitator guy: Those folks get together after the GA. Ok? Ok.

Guy: I'm homeless but for the movement to continue to make progress, let's make sure to talk about other stuff than our immediate needs.

Guy: There are three empty homes near Battleground that we can occupy.

Guy: There are people occupying under the Hawthorne Bridge, on both sides, some homeless and some not. The police are not kicking them out.

Guy: I have a bus and will help anybody move their stuff to the Hawthorne Bridge.

Guy: If we stay in small groups, we just homeless, just people sleeping in doorways. If we stick together, we're a movement.

Guy: The worst thing we can do is break into small groups. Stay together, there's strength in numbers.

COMMITTEE REPORTS

Cameron, political intervention committee: The city claims to support us, but I disagree based on their actions. I've been arrested twice for exercising my first amendment rights. I'm running for mayor and I hope you all do too. Measure 26108, public campaign finance fund, was killed. Let's bring it back. Let's use mike check when people are disrupting GAs. Talk to me if you want to be involved in an action tomorrow for N17.

Heidi, solutions committee: We're preparing legislation to take to Salem on Dec. 5.

Madelyn, community needs: Bring donations to GAs.

Coffee committee: We're out of coffee.

Alex: Occupy Wall Street just held their largest ever GA. They put out a statement asking people wishing to risk arrest to do so by sitting peacefully. Stopping stock exchange tomorrow.

DIRECT ACTIONS TOMORROW

Facilitator Lady: Tomorrow, meet at 8:00 on the east side of the Steel Bridge. Meet at 10:00 on the east side of Waterfront Park (Ankeny Plaza). From there, Occupy the Banks.

J Monkey: If you want to stay dry and warm, talk to me. We're occupying residences [foreclosure-affected]. It's legit and legal.

Guy: It takes 100 signatures to get on the ballot. I'm looking for a gallery for First Thursday, Dec. 1.

Guy: Sunday at 3:00, meet here at Pioneer Square. Last Supper, live and direct.

Guy: If you occupy US Bank tomorrow, the media will tear you apart.

A-Camp Guy: A-Camp was asked to be here. We want to protect you. We try to be nonviolent. We will be on the front lines in any conflict. I remain anonymous.

Guy: Bike Brigade from this past Sunday will swarm the banks tomorrow.

GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS

Teresa(?): Media who cover art are very interested in Occupy art. Talk to me; they want to talk to you.

Guy: A guru who was about to be killed by an adversary once said: "Strike me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

Guy: West went of Steel Bridge, 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, civil disobedience training.

Guy: I work in public education. I'm working on getting my teacher's union involved in Occupy.

Guy: Camping, occupying banks, etc. are all fine tactics. The most tactical thing we cam do is work together. So stop fooling around with each other and stop arguing.

Guy: We need to meet up in the afternoon or early evening and make a statement.

Guy: On Sunday night, somebody left a glove in my van.

PSU MARCH TODAY

Guy: Students and faculty walked out of the university, occupied someplace downtown for a while, had a good discussion, then occupied a City Hall space for a while and had another good discussion. 250 to 500 people involved. One arrest. No macings.

Guy: Where did the money donated to Occupy Portland go?

PROPOSAL ANNOUNCEMENTS

Guy: Basic rights and liberty necessitate a guarantee of a basic standard of living. We need a new social contract. We need land for all of us, a place we all can occupy. We want the movement to be the legal title owners of some piece of land.

Guy: We have wide international support. Yet some people say we need to evolve past the focus on homelessness. They don't understand that homelessness goes to the heart of the whole political point.

Lady: Let's acquire a commons to make this community movement sustainable, intentional, and permanent.

Lady Facilitator: Shall we have a soapbox discussion on safety issues for any reoccupation?

REOCCUPATION SAFETY SOAPBOX

Joseph: There has been division within the movement. I have had problems with some people. But the cops were gonna beat both my head and theirs. Let's work together, talk, hug, love everyone. Those labeled "riff raff" and the others should love and respect each other.

Lady Facilitator: We go do different places after this meeting but we're here together now.

Mario: I was arrested Sunday. I'm suing Adams, the police, and the city in federal court on 1st Amendment grounds. Add your name to the lawsuit even if you left the Occupation voluntarily but especially if you were arrested.

Guy: Occupy malls during the holidays to reach out to shoppers.

Lady Facilitator: GA tomorrow at 7:00, here.

Lady: I roughly define violence as damaging a human life.

Guy: Homes Not Jails is occupying homes, preventing them from being foreclosed.

Guy: Y'know, they shot that kid in cold blood. Greed is a disease.

Guy: We marched around Chapman Square for 13 hours the other day. We need better spin control.

Guy: I'm going to Oakland soon to join the occupation there.

Guy: I contacted the police about the plans to occupy under the Hawthorne Bridge. The police responded, "There are shelters available. I cannot sanction or permit any illegal activity. But it's up to the officers on the ground."

Guy: Let's do an initiative to give co-ops ownership of foreclosed homes.

Guy: Make the GAs shorter.

Facilitator Lady: GA here tomorrow at 7:00.

16 recommendations for occupations

The Portland Occupation was shut down this weekend, with the mayor citing safety concerns. Although political considerations beyond those concerns clearly influenced the mayor's decision, we did experience difficulties that might be ameliorated in the future, in Portland and elsewhere, by following some of these recommendations.

1) Before setting up tents, draw lines on the ground to establish walking paths throughout the encampment. This can help mollify fire departments (the fire marshall wanted paths 36 inches wide) and improve intra-camp mobility.

2) Choose a sufficiently large space to accommodate all occupants who might show up. Take into account the size of the area's homeless population in calculating this. Consider setting up multiple occupations if no single space seems big enough.

3) Have tents available for the tentless -- at least large tents in which several people can sleep, but preferably small tents for individuals to allow for privacy.

4) Showers! Maybe composting toilets.

5) Sousveillance: Webcams throughout the camp with more webcams available for people to place inside tents. Establish an expectation that privacy will not necessarily be available outside tents, but will be available inside tents.

6) Active and intense (but not pushy) outreach toward all newcomers to the camp, to help find ways in which they will enjoy participating.

7) Start meetings for committees/working groups before the occupation, even those dealing with internal camp issues.

8) Chuck the whole "99%" thing. Identifying the movement or oneself with any particular group inevitably sets up an antagonistic dynamic. Instead, formulate slogans and arguments around the concepts of horizontal organization, non-competitiveness (gift economies), direct democracy, volunteering, and freedom.

9) Consider chucking the tactics of marching, chanting, and sign-waving after a space has been occupied. These tactics seem most appropriate when the entire society is built on irrational premises and no physical space is available for working within rational parameters. Under such circumstances, the best options available may involve disrupting the workings of the irrational system, and loudly calling attention to your grievances. After a space has been occupied, energies seem more profitably directed toward the camp -- toward the sociological prototype that we hope will be copied by the rest of society.

10) Encourage as much of the general population of the surrounding area as possible to attend and participate in the general assembly (GA) meetings, spokescouncils, and/or unfacilitated open forums. I am not clear about the necessity of having a "decision-making" body after an occupation has been established. The main decisions that our GAs made during the occupation seemed to involve putting statements on the Occupy Portland website with the comment that "This is an official statement of the General Assembly." Rather than focusing on gaining approval for proposals, our energies might be more profitably directed toward improving the processes by which the meetings are conducted. Let's examine the online system that Occupy Wall Street has launched for conducting their GAs, and investigate ways of conducting inter-Occupation meetings online. For meetings in meatspace, having a large screen in front and a public-address system seem very helpful.

11) Have WiFi covering the camp, and distribute portable Internet-connected devices to everyone.

12) Maximize cooperation with police, government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, etc.

13) Launch an online Social Register to which anyone can add their names, photos, and contact info.

14) Gardens, greenhouses, fish farms, etc.

15) Alternative energy devices.

16) Nametags!

Occupy Portland: stuff that happened this week, stuff that could happen in the future

On Wednesday, one guy was yelling "open the street! open the street!" in front of the barricaded street between the two occupied park blocks. I talked with him and some other folks out there for about an hour. (The street is now open again; the police arrested 8 barricaders Thursday morning after politely allowing any barricaders who didn't want to be arrested to vacate the street.)

The General Assembly, which invites anyone to attend, speak, and vote, is pretty established as the governing body for the occupied blocks and related activities, such as marches. So we've already succeeded in establishing a foothold for direct democracy. I think most of us would like for that model to expand outward -- for all kinds of living communities, working communities, recreational spaces, etc. to be governed by the people involved rather than by pre-established hierarchies. People working in a factory could form a General Assembly and start deciding for themselves how to run the factory rather than taking orders from executives. The General Assembly model seems OK for now, and preferable to the other currently existing, hierarchical governing bodies, such as companies and governments, but I think it will inevitably quickly evolve into other models, probably online democratic systems, like I've been blogging about for years. The New Yorkers are already launching an online system for conducting their General Assemblies.

Occupy Portland

We're feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and participating in a community based on voluntarism, gifts, and direct democracy -- in other words, actual democracy, where everyone participates in setting policies.

Last night at the General Assembly, we made a decision about how to make decisions (I copied these bullet points from http://occupypdx.org/occupation/consensus-proposal-108/ where it was posted two days ago, as a proposal; last night the proposal passed and became policy.)

* After discussion of a proposal, facilitators will ask to “see the consensus of the assembly”, by asking who agrees, who disagrees, and who stands aside. These proportions will always be recognized and recorded, as the basis for further development of the proposal, and/or autonomous action by those that agree.
* If there is very strong support for a proposal, the facilitators may ask to see if there are any remaining blocking concerns. If there are not, this can be considered a “full consensus of the assembly”. This has the greatest legitimacy for action on behalf of the whole.
* When appropriate, a consensus of 90% or more of the assembly, regardless of blocks, can be considered an “agreement of the assembly”. Depending on the proportion, this has relatively less legitimacy as “speaking for the whole” and should be used cautiously with understanding that there are unresolved major concerns.

The encampment has become a fully functioning village. There are committees for peacekeeping, engineering, medical, food, sanitation, safety, media, etc. etc. It has become a living model of how to organize society without hierarchy or money, a model which can keep spreading outward indefinitely. So the "protesting" is actually turning into an honest-to-goodness worldwide nonviolent revolution :-)

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX :-)

Social Graph Transformation Algorithm (SGTA) project update

The Open Mesh Project (http://www.openmeshproject.org/) seeks to democratize the Internet on the hardware level, with nodes automatically connecting to physically nearby nodes. The SGTA project seeks to lubricate and democratize content distribution -- to mediate a broad, deep, continuous, global conversation, with nodes automatically connecting to physically and semantically nearby nodes.

Externalizing/sharing our imaginations

We seem to be undergoing a transition into a more flexible, more visual, mode of communication -- an accelerating externalization and conglomeration of our individual imaginations. The inventions of drawing and writing thousands of years ago could be considered early stages in this transition. Today, computer/Internet technology seems to be playing a key role in our psycho-techno-social-linguistic evolution. As of May 2011, we seem primed for the creation and widespread adoption of algorithms that will express/subsume/automate/sublimate the previous "linear," "verbal" modes of communication, folding knowledge from our various linguistic legacies into an intuitive, online, graphical communication/programming environment.

We have always drawn upon shared knowledge bases, shared complexes of linguistic structures, in order to speak to each other. We continuously encounter linguistic structures, witness the associations to other structures they evoke in our imaginations, and choose which of these structures we will pay immediate attention to. Now that large portions of our species' knowledge bases have been put online, it seems appropriate to expect a similar associative-imaginative process to play out on our computer screens, relieving our brains of substantial cognitive burdens and turning web browsing into an experience of navigating through continuously self-transforming, uncannily intelligent-seeming, images.

Feedback loops by which SGTAs may aid in the transition from textual to graphical internet interfaces

Algorithms that automatically transform our social graphs could conceivably be plugged into interfaces to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc., as they currently exist, without any immediate change to the look and feel of the interfaces. The only apparent difference at first would be the occasional, unbidden appearance of updates from new friends, and the occasional disappearance of others. Then, as our social graphs grow more complex, more subtly reflective of our actual interests and concerns, we will find it increasingly convenient to use our social media interfaces as our primary interfaces, or portals, to the entire Internet.

We tend to think of social graphs as methods of filtering the streams of data flowing onto our screen. But they may also soon be seen as equally powerful modes of expression. We will potentially want to include in our social graphs anything we become particularly interested in, since that will cause information related to those interests to appear on our screens and will help keep us abreast of the latest developments about those interests. Your SGTAs will include in your graphs new nodes likely to be of interest based on your previous graphs and on your input actions. As more of our work goes online, as more of our online life becomes attached to social media, and as social media filter our datastreams in more sophisticated/dynamic ways, we will be able to express more complex ideas via patterns of URLs in our social graphs.

We will naturally be interested in ways of maximizing the feedback we can receive in response to anything we say and do, and also conversely, in ways of maximizing the amount of our own feedback, our own reactions, that we can provide to whatever information we are exposed to. Using the social graph as a kind of central organizing metaphor would seem appropriate given the assumption that almost everything we do on our computers will soon be online. Your social graph, continuously evolving, will factor into the second-to-second choices your interface makes about which data to present to you. It will also provide everyone else on the Internet with up-to-the-second data about what's going on with you. Since your social graph will keep getting updated in response to your input anyway, why not use it as The Last Text-Based Data Format We'll Ever Need, allowing all other data formats, codes, etc., to be expressed "in terms of" the social graph?

In other words, some data format similar to what has become known as a social media user's "social graph" (a filter for determining which datastreams will appear on our screens) appears both necessary for future Internet interfaces and, if it evolves automatically in response to our input, sufficient as a meta-format for expressing whatever we may want to express online. "What we want to say" can merge with "what we want to see."

With so much (increasingly salient) data available, the process of reading and writing linear text will become a major constraint on the speed with which we can navigate. Out of concern both for efficiency and for aesthetics, we will seek wherever possible to communicate through images. As we see already beginning to happen in our social media feeds, which feature an avatar next to each update and expandable thumbnail photos of last night's parties, images will gain a foothold wherever possible, colonize whatever territory they can, and declare as Benjamin Netanyahu did today: "let nobody be mistaken, we are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty." There will be no going back once a particular area of knowledge has been visualized online; our interfaces will automatically search out and serve up rotating arrays of images potentially relevant to what we're doing, and we'll obviously tend to prefer dealing with images rather than text, when the choice is there.

Anything with a URL attached to it can be included in a social graph, so Wikipedia articles, Semantic Web objects, Google Images, YouTube videos, etc. will easily be assimilated into this new environment. For instance, images and videos of the Deepwater Horizon explosion will automatically appear when your interface detects that you have been hanging out around nodes that correlate strongly with that incident based on the links in your social graph and on second-order links (links in the social graphs to which your graph links), third-order links, etc. If someone on the other side of the planet is researching the same incident at the same time as you, then in a scenario of continuously transforming social graphs having become our primary tools of expression and discovery, that person's avatar might very well appear on your screen and vice versa. The more you interact with the incident, the more frequently your avatar and other images associated with you will appear on the screens of subsequent Deepwater buffs. In such ways, the browsing activity of millions of people will build up increasingly comprehensive associations between images. Eventually we will have built up ultra-efficient all-graphical routes by which we can quickly navigate to images representing just about any idea we could want to express -- from programming concepts like "if-then" relationships to something like "the grade school years of Frederic Chopin."

The mathematics of conversation (/imagination/intelligence)

Say you're having a conversation with one or more other people. You think of something to say, but you don't say it yet. Maybe you hold your thought for a fraction of a second before saying it, maybe longer, or maybe you don't say it at all. How do you decide whether and when to say it? We might list some very general considerations that would tend to push you toward or away from delivering your line. Anything you might say would tend to express something true about where you're coming from, turning your private experiences into public information. On the other hand, anything you say will interrupt the previously established flow of the conversation, potentially disrupting some delicately balanced equilibrium.

Sometimes something so appropriate or clever occurs to you that you say it almost unhesitatingly, anticipating (probably correctly) that it will contribute significantly to the quality or complexity of the discussion. Other times, you may speak less out of a sense of the salience of your words than out of a sense of the value of saying either anything at all or anything that meets certain conditions.

Could the decision of when, or whether, or to what extent to potentiate/perpetuate/actuate/deliver a given verbalization be expressed as some sort of product of a) the value/salience of the message content, and b) the value of maintaining the channel/medium/relationship through which the message is sent? Factors a) and b) could each potentially take both positive and negative values. Then, how would we quantify these two factors, as well as the process of potentiation/perpetuation/etc. in terms of social graphs?

I don't have the math worked out quite yet (except for an "alpha version" of an algorithmjoshmaurice.livejournal.com/19048.html ), and I have probably gotten kind of messianic and ahead of myself about this at times, but I still have a very strong suspicion that something like this is coming soon and will contribute significantly to extreme accelerations of communications efficiency, which will help solve economic/political/social crises, which in turn will help smooth the road toward the development of Singularity-type technologies.

Feedback

I would of course be interested in everyone's impressions of all this. Delusion, brilliance, neither, both? Any ideas for the SGTA beta version?

Josh Maurice

josh.maurice@gmail.com

http://jmmsynch.blogspot.com

http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com

http://twitter.com/joshmaurice

[1:23 PM 10-11-15: changed 'clever' to 'appropriate or clever' ~ deleted outdated contact/fundraising info]

fuzzy/crisp

We will be enhancing both the fuzziness and the crispness of our interfaces.

Fuzziness (unintended consequences)

"You lean over my meaning's edge and feel / A dizziness of the things I have not said." Trumbull Stickney

Let's think about how information about and from me, as an Internet user, will percolate through the global community of Internet users in the Internet of tomorrow. The others' screens will not just display streams of data about/from me as they do today -- my location, my manually typed updates, etc.; their interfaces will begin interpreting the information I provide and feeding those interpretations into their filters, as data helping to determine their interfaces' criteria for selecting what to display. Thus the new system will facilitate automatic communication of more unanticipated/unconscious implications of our actions, of information related in multitudes of different ways to whatever has been explicitly stated/intended.

Crispness (intended consequences)

The automatically-generated associations, whereby information that I generate percolates fuzzily outward into the rest of the Internet, will allow our interfaces to present us with kaleidoscopically transforming arrays of moving images -- constant streams of guesses as to what may interest us -- images with visually ascertainable meanings (encoded graphically rather than alpha-numerically). With so many such options constantly flashing, dancing, before our eyes, we'll enjoy an expansion of our ability to express ourselves with precision: the collective intelligence of humanity (or at least of humanity's computers) will be brought to bear in generating an optimal array of relevant images around each object that we invoke/select. When we misspell words we type, our word processors generate arrays of alternatives. We can get lists of near synonyms from thesauruses. When we type words into Google or our browser address bar, we get lists of similar items. All such functions will come under the aegis of this filter. Communication of subtle nuances of intention will be facilitated -- and writer's block likely eliminated -- through the presentation of so many options that it will become vastly easier to "say it just right," or, in fact, to say it much righter, much more interestingly, compellingly, precisely, and descriptively, than we have been capable of even in our most eloquent moments.

two Democractic administration "-nistas" in two minutes

I had been watching the video of today's episode of Democracy Now. With the episode on pause, I posted a "letter to the Obamanistas" on my other blog. Maybe a couple minutes later, I resumed the video. 30 seconds later, the guest, Robert Kuttner, used the word "Clintonistas". I just re-watched the portion of his interview that I had been watching before I paused it. Kuttner had been speaking for less than a minute and had not used the word "Clintonistas" before the pause.

roundup of the last few days/weeks

• I was in the kitchen having an extended meditation on the use of the word "credibility" in international relations rhetoric -- thinking about Chomsky's observation that nations trying to maintain "credibility" act like mob bosses who rough up delinquent extortees as an example to others... then I came to the computer and found that my poly-amor Jaye had been reading an article called The Strange Credibility of Polyamory.
  
• Three seemingly unrelated mentions of "vampire" on three consecutive days: first Jaye said that someone she knows would look like a vampire if he shaved his facial hair; the next day, our friend L. compared our daughter Nyx's dress, with a large white collar, to a vampire's; on the third day I'm pretty sure I read about someone labeling someone else a "vampire" in some national-politics context.
  
• I was thinking about Teddy Roosevelt talking about his "bully pulpit" and Timothy Leary talking about how that usage of "bully" functioned on multiple levels simultaneously... then a few minutes later I looked at the front page of a newspaper in the grocery store and read about some U.S. financial expert lamenting that the U.S. was losing its ability to use the international dominance of the dollar and/or of U.S. financial institutions as bully pulpits in influencing the behavior of foreign parties.
  
• Nyx was walking with me through the grocery store and picked some goldfish crackers from a shelf and put them in our shopping basket. We bought them and ate them -- probably the first time in her life she had eaten goldfish crackers. Later that day, at my monthly in-person meeting for my work-at-home job, somebody ate goldfish crackers at the table in the meeting room, early in the meeting before anyone else brought food to the table.
  
• After drinking a 16-ounce cup of coffee, I was imagining a scenario where I was getting hyperactive and telling people I was high on caffeine... within about a minute of that I clicked on an article link at news.google.com called "No love for the bailout: CNNMoney.com" and found a picture of a guy holding up a coffee cup with "THE BUZZ" as the name of the column.
  

Kriss Kross

I'm pretty sure this happened on the same day as the Burt Reynolds thing; if not, then the day before.

One coworker was talking about the large-screen TV screens in a bowling alley (Grand Central Bowling) where he had just celebrated his birthday. Coworker B said: "Ah so you can watch the game while you bowl?"
A: "No sports games; they were playing music videos. So you can watch Kriss Kross."
B: "Hey, I was just thinking about Kriss Kross because I was taking a walk with my daughter and I looked down and realized her pants were on backwards. That's funny, you don't think about that every day."

As I started to type this entry I had been overestimating the connections here, confusing Kriss Kross with Marky Mark and connecting Mark Wahlberg with Burt Reynolds through Boogie Nights, but still.

Burt Reynolds

I was looking at several Wikipedia pages today. On the page for Marc Summers, whom I watched host Double Dare on Nickelodeon in the late 1980's, I read about "The Tonight Show incident" in which he and fellow guest Burt Reynolds traded insults and threw their drinks at each other. I had first pulled up the Double Dare page and from there clicked to the Marc Summers page.

A few hours after that, I overheard a conversation between two co-workers, including one of the two involved in the previous post's tinnitus synchronicity.
"William Williamson. What kind of name is that?"
"I heard you talking on the phone with someone with an interesting name this morning... like a famous person's name."
"Oh yeah? I'm not good with famous people's names."
"Some older celebrity, a really generic name like, I don't know, uh... Burt Reynolds, something like that."