raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again).

Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection?

In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life.

When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.

But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

The BANI framework was coined by futurist Jamais Cascio to replace the world of VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). Cascio’s argument is that, in these times of chaos, VUCA is the norm and we need new forms of “adaptive strategies.”

But there is value in the inefficiency. The success of companies embracing the Great Inefficiency in their behaviors (and P&Ls) ultimately depends on the consumer, and how they find it desirable to work, live, and entertain themselves. 

Everything done online is repeatable and can be easily documented for others to replicate using new tools that have come to market. Standing on top of giants has never been easier.

In fact, whenever something has “symbolic value” a Schelling point is likely to be involved in some way. I hope to expand on this point a bit more later.

If I have exactly as much attention as I need, then in those moments when I feel as if I don’t, the problem is not that I don’t have enough attention. It lies elsewhere. (There is an additional consideration, which is that I’ve failed to cultivate my attention, but, again, this is not a question of scarcity.) In any case, I obviously can’t make any promises, but, you may find, as I have of late, that refusing the assumption of scarcity can be surprisingly liberating.

But attention is scarce.

To speak about attention as a resource is to grant and even encourage its commodification. If attention is scarce, then a competitive attention economy flows inevitably from it. In other words, to think of attention as a resource is already to invite the possibility that it may be extracted. Perhaps this seems like the natural way of thinking about attention, but, of course, this is precisely the kind of certainty Illich invited us to question.

the activities of people when they are not motivated by thoughts of exchange

But he also worried that these outposts of more convivial social arrangements were threatened by the encroachment of formal economic structures, which were necessarily premised on the idea of scarcity. As Illich put it, he wanted to defend “alternatives to economics” not simply “economic alternatives.”

In fact, in 1980, Illich announced his intention to write a history of scarcity. That history never materialized, but a number of pieces of that larger work Illich was working toward were published in a variety of contexts.

Despite their obvious faults, the industrial age institutions Illich targeted in his scathing critiques proved to be more resilient than he anticipated, and not necessarily because they were, in fact, useful, just, and sustainable enterprises. Rather, Illich came to the conclusion that we remained locked into these inevitably self-destructive institutional structures because they were, as David Cayley explained, “anchored at a depth that ‘rabble-rousing’ could not reach, even if it were as lucid and rhetorically refined as Illich’s critiques had been.” Illich began referring to the “certainties” upon which modern institutions rested. These certainties were assumptions of which we are barely aware, assumptions which lend current institutional structures a patina of inevitability. These certainties generated the sense that people couldn’t possibly do without such tools or institutions, even if they were, in fact, relatively modern innovations.

While I remain quite sympathetic to the spirit of this line of thought, it now seems to me that the framing of the problem is itself part of the problem.

I would have had no problem at all with Howard Rheingold’s principle, cited by Goldhaber, that attention is a limited resource, so we should pay attention to where we pay attention.

In his 1997 essay, Goldhaber had anticipated some of these disturbing dynamics. “Already today,” he observed at the time, “no matter what you do, the money you receive is more and more likely to track the recognition that comes to you for doing what you do. If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you won't get noticed, and that increasingly means you won't get paid much either.”

Whoever you are, however you express yourself, you can now have a crack at the global audience.”Goldhaber goes on to argue that attention will, quite literally as I read him, become the real currency of the internet age, by which he means that it will eventually displace money. This portion of his argument seems to have missed the mark, although the entanglement of money and attention has certainly been borne out. Others will be better qualified to judge the financial aspects of Goldhaber’s vision of attention as currency. Needless to say, developments in the NFT markets suggest some interesting lines of inquiry, something Warzel explored in his most recent column. There, Warzel walks us through some of the most recent trends among those who are, in fact, earning their livelihood by transforming attention into money.

However, membership tokens aren’t just about “nUmBeR gO uP”. At a deeper level, the token is a coordination mechanism to help online communities create, capture, and redistribute value.

But the terms “member” and “owner” hit different. We are members. We are owners.

You can redeem your paper certificate for the underlying asset but you need to trust that the asset will be available and worth something when you want to redeem.

Governance. Community DAOs with valuable treasuries and hundreds of members need a way to make collective decisions. Usually, rough consensus is reached in the group chat (with emojis, ofc) and the governance vote is just a formality. But it’s fun to see who voted, how much voting power they have, and what they voted for. Also, most Community DAOs empower small, focused teams of 5 to 10 members to own specific workstreams instead of requiring a governance proposal for every smol decision.

And in this category of evolutionary change, we definitely want to be the agents of our collective destiny.

Do we actually need a full system collapse before people of creative minds and warrior courage start actually envisioning something beyond … this?

I truly and emphatically believe that a shift/return to a new/ancient nature-based spirituality is the only way we are going to move into the next phase of our evolution.

By that I mean this idea that all we need to do is count carbon and become climate-resilient and vote for the right people we’ll be saved

It’s time to finally graduate beyond the story of humankind that has been forced on us over the past 3000 years — in which we labor under the hallucination that we are distinct from, and threatened by, nature. Which leaves us with the very false perception that in order to survive we must take and master the material plane.Because, we have been taught, there is no salvational force except our human systems to transport us beyond the suffering of this dangerous realm.Which brings us back to the beginning.

Or, more critically, what our greatest poets and mystics meant when they taught that the Earth is a spiritual plane that has the potential not only to heal our deepest wounds, but also to materialize a threshold which, if we are courageous enough to cross, worthily (as the late poet John O’Donahue urged), will deliver us to a new territory, one where the world and our being are inextricably interconnected.

And we carry the scars of those stories as epigenetically-programmed determiners of our everyday, modern lives.But those stories are not the whole truth.Rather, they are that truth which the conscious ego and its master, the autonomic nervous system — which is delivered in each new human with factory settings locked on Sympathetic Response (stressed, ego-centered, fearful) — has determined as the impetus to create the climate-catastrophic society.And so the trauma at the deepest part of us… which may be driving all of our most self-destructive impulses and patterns… is the belief that we do not belong in this world.That we are strangers in a strange and dangerous land, instead of children who live in a supernatural garden.Because that is the other part of the story.

Because even though the most cosmic and salvational messaging is ringing imaginal phones all around us, we are incapable of capturing and receiving it through our wound-driven, mania-ridden, genetically-scarred corporeal selves.

So that if we want to actually change our (eco-suicidal) paradigm, then we need to understand the parts of ourselves, and our world, which are entangled with these dimensions and dependent on them to architect a new future.The cosmic consciousness says: go within and beyond.

It is time to awaken to the cosmic consciousness.

What, you may ask, is the difference between big ’N’ature and small ’n’ature. For Emerson, nature means the biosphere, and Nature (or Spirit) means the All — the physiosphere, the biosphere, and the noosphere and their domains.Quoting the transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber:“[Emerson] maintains that nature immersion and nature worship prevent the realization of Nature, or the Spirit within and beyond, which transcends all. And so he arrives at the very true conclusion: nature worshippers are the destroyers of Nature, the destroyers of Spirit; they would, he says, never look within long enough to find the true beyond…

Of course, we should all be pursuing every behavioral change that will draw us into closer alignment with the ecosystem.But for those who can hold the nuances of higher order ultimatums while acting on lower-order objectives: we are being confronted with an existential threat that demands a transpersonal solution.

Images that come to mind when thinking of 'traditional rammed earth' certainly have historically been associated with hot, arid climates. The evolution of the SIREWALL system away from those roots, however, makes it viable for any climate. In fact, the harsher the climate, the more attractive SIREWALL becomes.

Additionally, in contrast to traditional rammed earth, which is highly hydrophilic (water absorbing), SIREWALL can now be specified as hydrophobic (water repelling). This is an excellent benefit with respect to implications for rising damp, efflorescence, or freeze-thaw concerns.

Twenty-four inch walls are common for exterior walls, especially in Passive House projects.

According to the French psychologists Nicolas Guéguen and Angélique Martin, “Research has shown that mimicry…leads to greater liking of the mimicker” and helps create rapport during a social interaction.

So Nightingall suggests something called a pre-frame. It’s an idea based in the field of neurolinguistic programming, which coaches people to “reframe” the possible negative thoughts of others — ­­in essence redefining their expectations for the interaction to come. Ordinarily, we might be wary if a stranger just starts talking to us. We don’t know who they are, or what they want, or whether they’re right in the head. What a pre-frame does is reassure them that you know all this.To do it, you acknowledge out of the gate that this is a violation of a social norm. You say something like “Look, I know we’re not supposed to talk to people on the subway, but…” This demonstrates that you’re in full possession of your faculties. You’re not erratic, disturbed, or otherwise off in some way.

Nightingall suggested asking simpler and more open-ended questions. Instead of saying, “Do you think this was because you were a control freak?” just echo, or say, “Why do you think that is?” That is the opposite of what I usually do, but it’s what I must learn to do. In a good conversation, you must relinquish control. Your job is to help your partner arrive at their own conclusion and surprise you, not to ferret out whatever it is, slap a bow on it, and go, Next! There’s a powerful lesson there: If you’re interested only in things you know you’re interested in, you will never be surprised. You’ll never learn anything new, or gain a fresh perspective, or make a new friend or contact. The key to talking to strangers, it turns out, is letting go, letting them lead. Then the world opens itself to you.

statements, not questions, can be a better way to open a conversation. A question compels an answer, whereas a statement leaves it up to the other person to decide whether they want to talk. It’s not a demand; it’s an offer. You notice something about your shared surroundings, offer an observation, and leave it to the other party to respond. If they do, you respond with another statement that builds on what they said.

“Everyone is interesting, but it’s not up to them to show you — it’s up to you to discover it.”

There was joy in it, profundity, real communion. If practiced widely enough, she believed it could help repair a fracturing society. “We’re not just talking about a few individualized things,” she says. “We’re talking about a different way to live.”

Or instead of asking people at a party what they do, ask them what they’d like to do more of, or what they don’t do.

This is when mirroring kicks in; it’s a phenomenon where people naturally follow the lead of their conversational partners. If you say something generic, they will say something generic. If you say something specific, they are likely to as well.

Most of my friends think of ambition as this very structured thing. Like, I have a 30-step plan for how to take over the world. But I’ve always loved the Feynman quote about studying hard “what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” Refusing to view something as means to an end, being so devoted you’re thrust outside the usual calculus of value and optimization. That’s love: not expecting a return on your investment.

people can move in and out of these concentric circles of community based on many factors. work burdens, personal difficulties, social anxiety and pandemic induced circumstances can make interaction difficult. besides that, ignorance of these above outline circles of energy, involvement and influence can leave most people lost within communities. so someone from the outermost orbit may become a core group member.

We are indeed conflicted – torn between comparably legitimate, substantively moral demands – but this is often simply a feature of the messy moral landscape to which we’re condemned, not a sign of intrinsic moral corruption. What might count as a ‘bad intention’ on the combat model is often better understood as the manifestation of another legitimate claim to goodness, one that’s at odds with a value that we ultimately take to have a greater claim to recognition in this context or at this point in our lives. Hence doing what’s right isn’t simply or primarily a matter of silencing an evil desire – though it might be strategically useful to think of goods we can’t realise in this way – but rather a matter of figuring out what’s best now in the context of a well-lived life considered as a whole.

By habituating ourselves into these exemplary forms of normative responsiveness, we can better accommodate the different ways that the good reveals itself in our lives.

What you choose to do should be guided by your understanding of how those actions shape a life. But understanding how specific actions create a certain kind of life or character is information that we learn mainly by looking to the lives and characters of others.

Responding well to the criteria of excellence constitutive of each normative domain – being good to ourselves, to others, and to the world – demands negotiation work such that these three classes of competing goods can be accommodated in a coherent way. Hence flourishing requires us to organise our priorities – not simply in the moment, but over the course of our projects, relationships and identities.

This means that life confronts us with a fundamental and irresolvable tension. We are tasked with negotiating competing legitimate normative claims – a plurality of goods – with no recourse to an ultimate metric or higher perspective through which to eliminate conflict in answering the basic existential questions to which we’re condemned: who should I be? What should I do? To whom am I beholden? This shouldn’t prompt us to embrace nihilism, but to recognise the only form that a good life can take for normatively fragmented creatures like ourselves. Leading a good human life – what is sometimes called flourishing – requires that we continuously negotiate these three competing ways of encountering goodness. Flourishing demands achieving a fragile and shifting balance between the different normative terrains. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these domains (self-fulfilment, good relationships, and responsiveness to the demands of a shared world) but achieved in such a way that success in one domain doesn’t unduly compromise success in another.

We are indeed fragmented selves, but what divides us is not, for the most part, a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ intentions. Rather, it’s a tension between different practical frameworks for assessing better and worse options, each anchored in a different aspect of the good.

From the first-person stance, you navigate the world as an agent trying to realise your projects and satisfy your desires. From the second-person perspective, you understand yourself and the world through the lens of other people, who are a locus of projects and preferences of their own; projects and preferences that make legitimate demands on your time and attention. From the third-person stance, you understand yourself as one among many, called to fit yourself into the shared standards and rules governing a world made up of a multitude of creatures like you.

The fact that there’s a plurality of these normative perspectives means that there’s more than one way of understanding what’s best. Best for whom? For me? For you? For the many who share the world with us and the institutions that enable this sharing? No single perspective can fully encompass the others. Each shows us a different facet of the world’s irreducibly complex meaningfulness and our place in it. Each gives us access to different ways of understanding what’s important, valuable or good. Our condition of normative pluralism means that we’re supplied with different resources for answering the basic questions of agency: what should I do? What are the better or worse options in this situation? Who am I trying to be? To whom am I answerable? This moral complexity makes living a good life challenging because competing goods from these different normative categories can’t be compared on a single metric. In most cases, there is no simple answer about what to do. To negotiate life’s demands, we constantly move in and out of each perspective against a background sense that we’re answerable to the different criteria of meaning and value constitutive of each of the three perspectives.

A myth that tries to explain the things you don’t understand and gives you a sense of consolation beyond your own existence. I think that’s really good. We’re missing that. Take a mythical force like religion and talk about things like power that normal, boring, limited, rational technocratic journalism can’t. It dramatizes them beautifully. Melodrama is the next thing. The heightened sense of things as a way of jumping out of this failed rational technocratic cage that we’re in where finance says you’ve got to do this, or austerity says you have to do that. It’s so limited. It’s so dull.

We think we’re being smart. We think we can extrapolate up and down the causal chain, across multiple levels in a complex adaptive system. And perhaps some of us are truly genius enough to do so. But most of the time, I suspect that we’re just acting a part: we think we're demonstrating intelligence ... but we're simply playing with ideas at the wrong level of abstraction.

First: if you are an agent operating within the system, the amount of analysis needed to grok all the moving parts of the system is monumental — so monumental, in fact, that unless you are responsible for the entire system, you should probably second-guess any attempt to do so (ask yourself: is it really necessary to understand the whole system, given my goals? Most operators have no need to do so — beyond the rules of the levels immediately above and below their own).

So new opportunities are always being created by the system. And that, in turn, means that it’s essentially meaningless to talk about a complex adaptive system being in equilibrium: the system can never get there. It is always unfolding, always in transition. In fact, if the system ever does reach equilibrium, it isn’t just stable. It’s dead.

this business of anticipation and prediction goes far beyond issues of human foresight, or even consciousness. From bacteria on up, every living creature has an implicit prediction encoded in its genes: “In such and such an environment, the organism specified by this genetic blueprint is likely to do well.” Likewise, every creature with a brain has myriad implicit predictions encoded in what it has learned: “In situation ABC, action XYZ is likely to pay off.”

And one of the fundamental mechanisms of adaptation in any given system is this revision and recombination of the building blocks.

But regardless of how you define them, each agent finds itself in an environment produced by its interactions with the other agents in the system. It is constantly acting and reacting to what the other agents are doing. And because of that, essentially nothing in its environment is fixed.

The arguments tend to be well-articulated, intelligent analyses of macro-level trends. But I now suspect they are wasteful attempts at thinking. Like my essay about Asian startups, the arguments operate at the wrong level of abstraction — wrong, that is, for the decisions these people are to make.

Often the smell test of a company is how easily it can be dimensionally reduced. It’s like some variant of Kolmogorov complexity. How few core elements can maximally explain it? People fairly push back that companies are intrinsically messy and cannot be compressed in this way. It is often true that VCs and outsiders simplify their view of companies in ways that are easier to remember but useless in practice. The flaws in this dimensionality reduction aren’t reasons to ignore it—they are the reason it is important.

Worlding is a particular blending of the material and the semiotic that removes the boundaries between subject and environment, or perhaps between persona and topos. Worlding affords the opportunity for the cessation of habitual temporalities and modes of being.

This might actually be my biggest takeaway from the book. As I understand it, the hermeneutic circle is a process by which something can be understood more deeply by first taking it out of its original context, then associating it with fresh ideas, and finally returning it to the original context with an augmented worldview. This process can be repeated indefinitely (hence, the circle).While the academic definition might be more precise, this framing of the hermeneutic circle is most applicable to note taking and learning. The idea that a concept gains extra meaning in different contexts, and can be fed back into its original context to give new life to the whole, is a fascinating practice and I think should be applied everywhere.

Developers of design-oriented learning environments need to adopt a relaxed sense of "control." Educational designers cannot (and should not) control exactly what (or when or how) students will learn. The point is not to make a precise blueprint. Rather, practitioners of constructional design can only create "spaces" of possible activities and experiences. What we can do as constructional designers is to try to make those spaces dense with personal and epistemological connections—making it more likely for learners to find regions that are both engaging and intellectually interesting.

The first involves interaction with the physical world, the second involves the construction of virtual collaborations, the third involves collaboration on virtual constructions. What unites these three diverse environments is their attempt provide both personal and epistemological connections. Each of these kits connects to student interests and experiences, while also connecting to important intellectual ideas.

What criteria should guide the design of new construction kits and activities? The concept of learning-by-doing has been around for a long time. But the literature on the subject tends to describe specific activities and gives little attention to the general principles governing what kinds of "doing" are most conducive to learning. From our experiences, we have developed two general principles to guide the design of new construction kits and activities. These constructional-design principles involve two different types of "connections": • Personal connections. Construction kits and activities should connect to users' interests, passions, and experiences. The point is not simply to make the activities more "motivating" (though that, of course, is important). When activities involve objects and actions that are familiar, users can leverage their previous knowledge, connecting new ideas to their pre-existing intuitions. • Epistemological connections. Construction kits and activities should connect to important domains of knowledge—and, more significantly, encourage new ways of thinking (and even new ways of thinking about thinking). A well-designed construction kit makes certain ideas and ways of thinking particularly salient, so that users are likely to connect with those ideas in a very natural way, in the process of designing and creating. The challenge of constructional design—and it is a very significant challenge—is to create construction kits with both types of connections (e.g., Wilensky, 1993). Many learning materials and activities offer one type of connection, but not the other.

To guide the development of these computational construction kits, we are developing a theory of "constructional design." Whereas the traditional field of instructional design focuses on strategies and materials to help teachers instruct, our theory of constructional design focuses on strategies and materials to help students construct and learn. Constructional design is a type of meta-design: it involves the design of new tools and activities to support students in their own design activities. In short, constructional design involves designing for designers (Resnick, 1996b).

“Philosophers have been debating free will for millennia, and they have been making progress. But neuroscientists barged in like an elephant into a china shop and claimed to have solved it in one fell swoop,” Maoz says. In an attempt to get everyone on the same page, he is heading the first intensive research collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers, backed by $7 million from two private foundations, the John Templeton Foundation and the Fetzer Institute. At an inaugural conference in March, attendees discussed plans for designing philosophically informed experiments, and unanimously agreed on the need to pin down the various meanings of “free will.”

As Henry Kissinger (who, whatever you think of him, undeniably saw his fair share of large conflicts) once put it, describing his time in academia: “The battles were so fierce because the stakes were so small.” The initial stakes being fought over – some trivial object, like desirable desk space in an office or a lawn care dispute among neighbours – are like the tiny grain of sand at the centre of a pearl. Which particular grain of sand seeds the pearl isn’t important. If the conditions for pearl formation are there, sand will be found.  Ultimately, these kinds of conflicts threaten to spiral out of control because they’re not over anything; so there’s no possible resolution or compromise that can be made; at least, not concerning the object being allegedly fought over. These fights are strictly symmetric in character; Girard calls them mimetic violence.

Reference contains technical reference documentation for Hoon and other components of the system.

What simple thinking tools, akin to the Venn diagram, might be yet to be invented for 3D space for prior lack of 3D sketching paper?

‘Although the new technologies have great potential for democratic communication, there is little reason to expect the Internet to serve democratic ends if it is left to the market.’ (Herman 2000)

An ambitious system software project can inhabit one of four institutional forms: bigco, startup, academia, or community.

This suggests that categories with high replay value—like music and game platforms—are most susceptible to concentration among a few mega-hits. To create a more equitable creator ecosystem, platforms can direct users to content types where there’s greater appeal in experiencing a wide array of content.

the long tail of podcasters is left out

gadflies

MacIver

The claims that cognitive processing occurs purely in the brain in a modular fashion, and accomplishes its business by operating essentially independently from motor planning and motor execution, however, are called into question by empirical studies of embodied experience.

And then there was what Lanier calls “data dignity”; he once wrote a book about it, called Who Owns the Future? The idea is simple: What you create, or what you contribute to the digital ether, you own.

The charitable read of government today is that it’s generally reactive — literally putting out fires. Conversely, Bezos is oriented for creative, additive achievement.

Harder to get funding for counterfoil research, I suspect. But it is not hard to imagine how useful it might be. At the very least, we would do well to have in our critical toolkit the concept of a threshold beyond which the value of a tool or institution is jeopardized, beyond which, in fact, what had been good and useful becomes counter-productive and destructive. Illich allows for great deal of latitude in how such an insight might be applied. It would be possible, in his view, for tools or institutions to have what he called “an optimal, a tolerable, and a negative range.” Furthermore, he acknowledged that different societies would have different goals and ends and, thus, different ways of arriving at an appropriate techno-social configuration. “The criteria of conviviality are to be considered as guidelines,” Illich wrote, “to a continuous process by which a society’s members defend their liberty, and not as a set of prescriptions which can be mechanically applied.”But it was clear to Illich that we must acknowledge that such limits and scales exist. Written in the early 70s, Deschooling Society especially makes frequent use of an analogy to the American war effort in Vietnam. Illich refers to escalation as “the American way of doing things,” and he hardly means it as a compliment. So, for example, in the closing lines of the first chapter of Tools for Conviviality, Illich writes, “It has become fashionable to say that where science and technology have created problems, it is only more scientific understanding and better technology that can carry us past them.” He goes on: “The pooling of stores of information, the building up of a knowledge stock, the attempt to overwhelm the present problems by the production of more science is the ultimate attempt to solve a crisis by escalation.” Solving a crisis by escalation seems not to have gone out of fashion. It signals, of course, a failure of imagination, but also an institutional imperative. What can an institution possibly offer you except more of itself? For example, the one remedy for the problems it has unleashed that Facebook cannot contemplate is suspending operations. What is never questioned is the underlying ideology that connection is an unalloyed good and we always need more of it.

First, they are small and agile. Unlike committee-ridden, centralized organizations, their structures are tight and optimized for quick decision-making, which enables them to move fast. Second, the members are emotionally or operationally invested in the outcomes. There is a sense that we are all “in this together,” which gives them a personal stake in the survival of the locality as a whole. But perhaps the most significant factor in hyperlocal groups’ efficacy is that they can identify needs faster than traditional governments. They don’t learn about needs through a report, a town-hall discussion, or a dashboard. Instead, they hear directly from their neighbors. And members can see the immediate effects of their efforts, whether they work or not.

We’d like to be able to tell the difference. Just as we must seek a more fluid ground in ethics (neither pure deontology nor pure consequentialism), we need more fluid approaches for our open-ended work.

Cities are cradles. Nests made of carefully knitted infrastructure holding us up. When a city's infrastructure is exposed - a hole in the pavement, arteries under sun - we're reminded of our dependence on a deeper physical reality and our implicit vulnerability as a result. We're reminded that our cities are engineered and technical places as much as they are natural expressions of the Human and the Social, whose buildings echo ancient grouping of people at work, play, or home. What we expect from infrastructure is that it works, because when it doesn't , it isn't. We want infrastructure to seamlessly integrate with the existing world — in the ground like water rather than an accessory above. After all, infrastructure is here to support us; an expression of what may be our most endemic myth, that the world is here for us. But with every receding seam, from cable to code, comes a techno-political risk. Without edges we cannot know where we are and nor through whom we speak.

That is the strength of web annotation software – it can allow a spectrum of interaction that still gives context to reader and writer alike.