2024-04-16: Lurkers, Rewilding, Naps
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did At Work
1. Communicated, I hope
Spent what might — had you been creepily watching me last night, pecking out words and delete them for hours in my silly Apple Vision Pro🄽 helmet — have looked like far too long a time, crafting two messages to two people online. Honestly, I feel like I’ve spent three decades building up to these posts. Both were conversations with folks in our ecosystem who were frustrated and looking for action on their painful losses in STFIL🄽, and turning to the Foundation to help. Avoiding unproductive and draining flame wars online is so hard, having a real conversation is harder, and keeping boundaries is the hardest. I tried to convey some of the more counterintuitive aspects of a decentralised, peer-to-peer world, as well as challenging some of the (understandable) misinfo that was propagating, without sounding dismissive or spoiling for a fight. It’s so scary to hit post on these long messages — did I convey anything? Am I just going to make things worse? I think it’s helped so far.
2. Thought about Slack
We use Slack and Notion at work, but we don’t use them super-well. It’s ok, I think most organizations don’t have the time or the context to know how to grow a tool into a godsend, or wrap an organizational structure around its software. But of course, it drives me and Stef Magdalinski🄽 absolutely buggy. We planned to devote some quality time with Matt Zimmermann🄽, Parth Shah🄽, and Baldy🄽 last year, but Events Intervened. Anyway, we’re back on our bullshit, sketching out what our usage should be like.
Of course, in an idea world, we would be using moldable software🄽 built on the Filecoin stack, with permissions that worked with a decentralized ecosystem instead of these siloed corporate oubliettes. But hey, early days of better world.
3. Slept
It was the best moment in my working career (and this is a worky update) when I got a couch in my office at EFF. Just closing the door and lying there. Now I work remotely, naps are amazing. As you could probably tell from the timestamp on my last email/post, I was up pretty late last night, and so to be able to just hide under the covers and regroup during the day makes me DRUNK with power; power naps.
TIL
- “The Lurkers Support me in Email”, the noted Internet ballad (sung to the tune to “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”), devoted to the idea that when people are fighting online, one party will inevitably claim that everyone not speaking up secretly supports them, was written by noted feminist sci-fi writer Jo Walton! I had no idea! To my celebrate my discovery, here are two AI-generated ballads on that theme, one with Jo’s lyrics, one new.
Links Du Jour
- The Nativifier, a tool to turn websites into native, distributable apps.
- We Need to Rewild The Internet, by Maria Farrell🄽 and my fellow Filecoin-ecosystemer, Robin Berjon🄽.