Ribbonfarm Studio is a Substack-based publication on technology, culture, and systems thinking in the Ribbonfarm tradition.
HN commenters cite it for pieces linking the AI panic and the meaning crisis, the Waldenponding essay, and the weird-versus-normal culture war.
> https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding
> Premise: FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency.
> What the "unplug for self-care" crowd doesn't get is that you are part of a Giant Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC) computing the future. The level and latency at which you consume information and act on it determines your "job" in the social computer. Your shitposting and FOMO are functional.
> The reason the unplugging doesn't work for most people is not that the Evil Platform Companies are trying to hack your attention and turn you into a helpless addict (though they are) but because you rationally realize you need a job in the GSCITC.
I stopped reading shortly after as the article did indeed rely on the above premises, and I find those premises absurd.
I work in cloud software, I live in Western Europe, a large chunk of my friends are an international/academic crowd. Nevertheless, of the happiest and/or successful and/or admirable people I've met, barely any of them use social media to an appreciable extent. They might share a cool tattoo from Instagram or belong to a Facebook group for their hobbies or post their latest hike on Relive, but that's about it.
None of them, as far as I know,…
Agree and it's hard to find cohesive takes which stitch together all these events in a way that make sense, i.e. the analysis includes enough tech-awareness to believe it.
The only stuff I've found which felt in the ballpark of spot-on were:
1) https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-great-weirding
This was a fascinating series of essays that generally walks through why, after "Harambe" in 2016 or whenever, things seemed to have gone off the rails towards something new.
2) Cypherpunk movement's source docs. If I could bold, underline, and highlight this, I would. I have never read any group of literature/essays, especially with publishing dates in the 1990s, that more felt like a post-mortem on the 2014->2021 craziness than cypherpunk docs. I had actually wondered for a while where this core movement went, but the quick answer I've come to is cryptocurrency/e2e messaging projects absorbed a lot of it, and then the the writing often took a turn for the crazy/non-PC in the final 10 yards. But, they so accurately diagnose the growth of virtual communities and their pseudo-governmental influence, digital economy developments and all the second order effects, and so on and so on. If you're looking for people who really saw what was coming, this is the group. One of the good reads: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~wex/panoptic-paper.html
Giving up or blocking social media is much less interesting than being self-aware and looking for ways to get your social media dopamine from things that feel genuinely constructive or interesting. I found “Against Waldenponding” (https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding) to be, if not 100% correct and credible, at least a very novel and persuasive argument that you probably owe it to yourself to be on social media more, not less, and its up to you to not be stupid about it.
My personal guidelines (not rules) for Being Online have evolved to something like this:
1. Make things, and talk about the things you make.
2. Contribute ideas that, as far as you can see, would be missing from the world if you specifically didn’t offer them.
3. Spend a lot of time reading other people.
4. Throw points at people you agree with. Upvotes and twitter likes are free. Use dollars, too.
5. If you can’t think of anything to say, go make something tangible worth talking about.
6. Keep your feed weighted towards people who seem to follow these guidelines.
7. Be aware that, absent any truly original ideas, anything you would post with the motive of “being right online” is usually basic and shitty. Filter outbound material with prejudice.
Well, the thing about the long-term philosophical dialogue generally is that it moves extremely slowly - and the discussion of technology isn't an exception. The concepts are well-grounded and thoroughly debated but they resist change. One could argue that, like the Catholic Church, philosophers are still on the fence about Galileo and this Ribbonfarm article [1] gives an interesting discussion how the rise of instrumental sensing was taken by philosophy (not well).
This situation that a lot of thinkers of science and technology wind-up doing what you describe Wolfram as doing ("Concepts are slammed together by private intuitive leaps") - some better, some worse. The work of Alfred Korzybski or the framework of original "cybernetics" are some of my favorites. But none of these has been rolled-back into the mainstream of philosophy and so science and technology continue their way and philosophy continues its way. Wolfram is only the latest example of this.
[1] https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/one-tenth-of-a-second
(Hello,
git rebase ‘d into this account are [the personality behind] vinnyvichy and once&future spectral_vinnys, who have been vitiated)
Seems like Braverman in the wikipage, as well as Arnold Kling, are in the Guardian* cluster? I think that could be a rather better dichotomy for our present context than left/right. NYT in your earlier example, is fully in the Guardian camp., e.g… Dan Williams is (considerably?) harder to classify.
[& pls do compare The Grey Lady with The Grauniad/les grognards]
https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-new-systems-of-survival
082349872349872’s local tactics, are defo Commerce?
I profess a liking for Venkatesh’s Professional Weirdos, btw, let me hear your thoughts?
Update: ”Saints have a Jungian shadow of Trader going” in the ribbonfarmed
[with the Trader, by reciprocity, having a Jungian shadow of Saint]
Updated update: Wojak as reigning local guardian spirit.
Further Compare:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck_(1979_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojtek_(bear)
FYI vgr of Ribbonfarm has a significant body of work expanding on the OODA loop, including a book "Tempo".
https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-use-and-misuse-of-the-ooda-loop
If I were to summarize it to a 5 year old I'd use the analogy of rhythm games like taiko drum master. Once you make a mistake your timing is thrown completely off and everything going forward is wrong unless you can get your timing back. OODA is way of thinking about things to help you "get into the rhythm" of a situation faster than an opponent.