📷Day 20: disruption #mbsept

Sometimes you have to protest to stop the disruption.

“Let’s dream new blueprints for the world we want to live in.” 💬

A demonstrator at a Sydney climate change protest holds up a hand-written sign that reads: Let's dream new blueprints for the world we want to live in.

📷 Day 19: edge #mbsept

Clear edges at Adelaide’s Himeji Garden.

A close-up shot of parallel lines raked in the gravel of a Japanese dry garden in Adelaide.

Is domain-hosting a viable social media business model?

Since July 2023 BlueSky has apparently learned from Manton Reece and micro.blog that you can run a sustainable and open social media network with a domain-hosting business model.

Almost learned. There’s a way to go yet, with a big missing owning your content piece.

Meanwhile, micro.blog cross-posts automatically to BlueSky, so the #Interverse1 is gradually becoming a reality. 😍

“You can automatically cross-post your microblog posts to Medium, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr, Bluesky, Nostr, and Pixelfed.” Source

I’m not using BlueSky myself. I really loved Paul Frazee’s work on BeakerBrowser, and it’s great he’s working on BlueSky. That’s very nearly enough to sign me up, but the venture capital vibe still puts me right off. I mean, ultimately it’s all just for the venture fund returns isn’t it?

I’m very happy just owning my content, and sharing it with you myself, with a little help from micro.blog and Mastodon. So thanks for reading, wherever you read.


  1. an emerging network of federated networks, all interoperable, thereby marginalising the walled garden silos of monopolistic data-extracting megacorps. HT: Paulo Amoroso ↩︎

📷 Day 18: fabric #mbsept

Fab 1970s wallpaper at The Foundations, Portland NSW.

📷 Day 17: “intense” #mbsept

Can you make your autobiography out of hashtags?

A yellow stencil on a road surface reads: #hashtag Image credit[^1]

The hashtags of a cyberneticist

In 1963 Ross Ashby, the British cyberneticist and inventor of the automatic homeostat, engraved a tiny schnapps glass with a list of things his wife liked. He called this gift A Cup of Happiness from Ross to Rosebud.

When I read the tiny spiral writing engraved on that glass it seemed like a very personal version of the hashtags by which, sixty years later, people on Mastodon or other social networking sites introduce themselves. But they are also a rather touching distillation of the couple’s life together.

Since reading this, I’ve been over-thinking what hashtags I might use for this purpose, and Ross Ashby’s attempt has inspired me. Not that my hashtags would be anything like these, but their bourgeois English everyday intimacy does have a certain kind of charm. As a historical document the list fairly oozes ‘mid-century anti-modern’! Here are the items, in full:

Jill ~ Pottery ~ Sally ~ TR2 ~ Ruth ~ Arranging flowers ~ Preserved ginger ~ ITMA ~ Shaffers ~ Steven ~ Dinard ~ Tennis ~ Mark ~ May Hill ~ John ~ Merrow Down ~ Richard ~ Lobster ~ Bread making ~ Michael ~ Clive Brook ~ Bear Lake ~ Chas. B Cochran ~ Auctions ~ Wood fires ~ Stratford ~ Terry’s ~ Gardening ~ Cookham ~ Tiddles ~ Repertory ~ Swimming ~ Bingen ~ Green Ridges ~ Sand castles ~ Ewhurst ~ Nov. 1926 ~ Cheltenham ~ Monday Night at Eight ~ Ouray ~ Delphiniums ~ Windon House ~ North Devon ~ Eau de Cologne ~ Dressmaking ~ Rhossilli ~ Tea ~ Palo Alto ~ Hot baths ~ Take it from here ~ Earrings ~ Cornwall ~ Geraniums ~ Painswick ~ Bear Grass ~ Oeufs Mournay ~ Furs ~ Vanilla slice ~ Crème de Menthe ~ Gt. Smith Street. Source

There are several different ways of reading this list. You can highlight interests:

Pottery, arranging flowers, tennis, bread making, gardening, swimming

Or you can name favourite places and houses:

Shaffers, Dinard, May Hill, Merrow Down, Bear Lake, Stratford, Cookham, Bingham, Ewhurst, Cheltenham, Ouray, North Devon, Rhossilli, Palo Alto, Cornwall, Painswick, Terry’s, Green Ridges (the house they built)

You can remember favourite people:

Jill, Sally, Ruth, Steven, Mark, John, Richard, Michael,

Or shows:

ITMA, Monday Night at Eight, Take it from Here, Chas. B Cochran (impressario of Cole Porter and Noel Coward musicals)

Or favourite foods:

Preserved ginger, lobster, tea, oeufs mornay, vanilla slice, creme de menthe

Or beloved objects:

TR2 (the Ashbys' sports car), wood fires, sand castles, delphiniums, eau de cologne, hot baths, earrings, geraniums, bear grass, furs

Or special moments:

Nov. 1926, Gt Smith Street (the place in central London where the couple first met)

According to the Ross Ashby information site, Tiddles was their cat. The rest we have to work out for ourselves.

What do your own hashtags say about you?

If you think about your own list of hashtags, I wonder which personal ones you left out, since the Internet doesn’t need to know everything about us (read: has already categorised us to the minutest detail).

For example, web developer Jeremy Keith has a ‘bedroll’ list on his website of people who have visited his house in Brighton. Who else does this?! Hashtags may be quite generic, but in combination they can tell a unique story.

Cybernetics revisited

Clearly no mention of Ross Ashby can go without reference to cybernetics, which is seemingly back in fashion. As the AI revolution takes off there’s a renewed interest in revisiting the aims of the earlier cyberneticians, and to some extent their methods. A new School of Cybernetics has recently opened at the Australian National University (part-funded by Microsoft, Meta and others), with a public exhibition that took place until 2 December 2022. The school is led by Prof Genevieve Bell, a former vice president of Intel.

The claim is:

“We focus on systems – rather than specific technologies, or disciplines—as the unit of analysis. Cybernetics offers a way of transcending boundaries, of thinking in systems and ensuring that humans, technology and the physical environment are in the frame as technology advances and transforms the world around us. It is a way to imagine humans steering technical systems safely through the world.”

And there’s plenty more on what they’re calling ‘the new cybernetics’.

I can’t help thinking: there’s a lot of politics in who gets to do the steering. The culture of Microsoft and Meta is powerfully to resist being steered, at every possible opportunity, law-suit by law-suit for eternity. Cyberneticist Stafford Beer’s support for the socialist Allende government of Chile is probably not a model they’re all that interested in. But if you are interested in what might have been, you could do worse than listen to Evgeny Morozov’s podcast, The Santiago Boys. I’ve found it fascinating.

📷 Day 16: oof! #mbsept

📷 Day 15: red #mbsept
The bottlebrush trees at the front of our house are just coming into bloom.

📷 Day 14| statue #mbsept

Food for thought.

An ancient Greek marble statue of a woman regards a museum sign with a quote from Plato's Republic, which reads: Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.

As 9/11 is commemorated again it’s worth reflecting on why some people are wary of US foreign policy. This 9/11 is also the 50th anniversary of the Nixon/Kissinger coup in Chile.
If you think human rights is all ‘liberal crap’, as Nixon did, that right there is why we remain wary.

¡Nunca más!” 💬

📷 Day 13| glowing #mbsept

Sydney Airport at dusk.

A photograph of the nose of a jet plane parked at an airport gate. In the background, the sun sets in an orange sky behind city apartment blocks.

📷 Day 12 | panic #mbsept

A graffiti art skull painted on a brick building on a headland, with the ocean in the background.

📷 Day 11 | retrospect #mbsept

Two workers are pulling down old event posters off a billboard.

📷 Day 10 | cycle #mbsept

I’d like to put an end to these signs. Bike paths should go on forever! 🚲

A blue and white road sign marks the end of a bicycle path.

📷 Day 9 | language #mbsept

There are more than 150 of these signs in Wales.

A painted sign on a wall reads: Cofiwch Dryweryn, commemorating the flooding of a Welsh valley community to provide a water supply for England.

A note on the craft of note-writing

An fairly new article from Brazil caught my eye, on note-writing as an intellectual craft. It highlights the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s note-making process (he put his many linked notes in a Zettelkasten - an index box).

Cruz, Robson Nascimento da Cruz, and Junio Rezende. “Note-writing as an intellectual craft: Niklas Luhmann and academic writing as a process.” Pro-Posições 34 (2023).
<doi.org/10.1590/1…>
https://www.scielo.br/j/pp/a/L7gmq6W7bvzgn984hSJ94

Abstract: "Despite numerous indications that academic writing is a means toward intellectual discovery and not just a representation of thought, in Brazil, it is seen more as a product of studies and subjects than an integral part of university education. This article presents note-taking, an apparently simple and supposedly archaic activity, as a way through which academic writing is eminently oriented towards constructing an authorial thought. To this end, we discuss recent findings in the historiography of writing that show note-taking as an essential practice in the development of modern intellectuality. We also present an emblematic case, in the 20th century, of the fruitful use of a note-taking system created by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Finally, we point out that the value of note-taking goes beyond mere historical curiosity, constituting an additional tool for a daily life in which satisfaction and a sense of intellectual development are at the center of academic life."

📷 Day 8 | yonder #mbsept

A sign in the Art Gallery of South Australia.

A sign quotes the artist Yayoi Kusama: Forget yourself. Become one with eternity. Become part of your environment.

📷 Day 7 | panorama #mbsept

Can’t believe it’s been a week already. Good memories of this beach in Wales.

A panoramic photo of a beach at low tide. The sky is reflected in the wet sand. In the centre of the picture stands a flag to indicate where it's safe to swim, but the tide is obviously too far out for swimming.

If you live your life in chunks, what size should they be?

Life tends to be lived in chunks. Hours, days, weeks, months, seasons, years - these are familiar if slightly artificial concepts. But what’s the best-sized chunk of life to focus on? Some would advise living in the moment, by which they don’t really mean the 86,400 seconds that are available in a single day. They effectively mean no chunks at all (or infinite chunks, perhaps).

Reading an article on why you should divide your life into semesters reminded me that I’ve already come across this idea in the shape of the book The Twelve Week Year. I actually bought The Twelve Week Year for Writers, which I’ve skimmed but haven’t read properly yet. I’d like to have a structure to my year that’s more than just “get through it”. But I’m daunted by the thought of needing something concrete to show for my time spent on earth. What did you achieve in your chosen chunk of life? This question won’t be answered by heartbeats or breaths, by sunsets or swims. It would be OK maybe if it could be answered with dollars, but that’s not really acceptable either. It’s too soulless. The question, what did you achieve? needs actual achievements. It needs productivity of the sort I’m not very available for.

@visakanv says “the meandering mind is a feature not a bug”. Why can’t I accept this? Perhaps because I keep putting myself in situations where the meandering mind is a bug not a feature?

I can just about manage to write a short note like this. And then another one… and so on. Austin Kleon calls this “Sisyphus mowing the lawn”. And indeed, I’m happy writing my short notes. If I can’t manage to organise my life into semesters, perhaps I can organise it into atomic notes - the shortest possible viable writing session.

I saw on the zettelkasten.de forum that some members log their note-making productivity on a 10-day rolling tally. One person has written 16 notes in ten days, another has written 33.

They are inspired, as am I, by Sonke Ahrens' exhortation to work as is nothing counts other than writing (well, some of them are).

"If writing is the medium of research and studying nothing else than research, then there is no reason not to work as if nothing else counts than writing.
Focusing on writing as if nothing else counts does not necessarily mean you should do everything else less well, but it certainly makes you do everything else differently.
Even if you decide never to write a single line of a manuscript, you will improve your reading, thinking and other intellectual skills just by doing everything as if nothing counts other than writing."

I’d like to know what kinds of time you find yourself dividing your life into. Do you mainly live in days, or mainly in hours, or perhaps weeks? Do you instead devote yourself to living in the moment? If so, which moment?

#reading

Yes, Esperanto is idealistic - not that there's anything wrong with that

The child who learns Esperanto learns about a world without borders, where every country is home.

Yes, Esperanto is idealistic…

The Prague Manifesto of the 1996 World Esperanto Congress promoted seven objectives, goals or principles of the Esperanto movement.

It positioned Esperanto as a movement for:

  • global education
  • effective language learning
  • multilingualism
  • equal treatment regardless of language - language rights
  • language diversity; and
  • human emancipation

…and what’s wrong with idealism?

Even without knowing any Esperanto, I applaud these aims. They’re idealistic and so am I. But if the aim is human emancipation, is it possible that the language itself is just a MacGuffin? Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as they’d say on Seinfeld.

On the other hand, perhaps it is still possible to imagine not only a different language, but a different kind of language - one that by its very existence helps promote the kind of values outlined by the Prague Manifesto.

If you’re an Esperanto speaker, or if you speak another ‘international auxillary language’, I’d like to know what you think.