This is taken from a comment I made on a G+ post, in a conversation about Micropayments. Thanks Kevin G, Andrew K. 

The motivating comment was:

“Hey Kevin, you’ll have to explain Stack Exchange to us then.. cos the only people benefiting financially are the owners of Stack Exchange, the rivalous advertisers, and power-house search engines like Google. How does “virtual reputation” help me answering questions all day long? Who’s doing all the moderation of mundane duplicate questions? Are they getting “rewarded” for their effort? 

It’s a great free resource, but myself and others wouldn’t bother asking even one question there, because our question might run into more and more specific questions (we might even want to strike up a dialogue) and we don’t like “using” people for free like that.

Aren’t there any more equitable examples on the web by now?”

—

I agree wholeheartedly with Kevin that you’re not using people if their volunteering. It’s abundantly clear by now that people don’t require micropayments to add to and maintain massive, quality stigmergic media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy#Applications, and further that the attempt to include micropayments can actually derail them. People chase the money and game the system, or are annoyed by the introduction of money and abandon the system, or are simply demotivated by it.

I’ve been reading about Self Determination Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory). It talks a lot about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how extrinsic motivation crowds out instrinsic. I think Dan Pink’s theories about Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc) come from this (although they talk about Relatedness instead of Purpose, which seems a bit more social). Contributors to Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are instrinsically motivated, introduction of money would probably destroy them, *particularly* wikipedia (why do you think they’re so dead against even advertising on the site?).

I understand the problem you’re trying to solve with micropayments. You’re seeing that there’s work to be done / being done, and no one paying, and it’s potentially displacing paid work even as we speak. So extend this into the future and everyone’s pecking away at stigmergic media for free, and no one’s getting paid, and we all starve. Clearly the old jobs model isn’t translating into this environment. So we need something to replace it.

Unfortunately (fortunately), this isn’t a designed change, it’s an expression of radical human environmental change springing out of the technology. Rapidly lowering transaction costs (in the sense of Coase) approaching zero are leading to this alternate family of methods of human organisation (roughly, stigmergic and other massive technologically enabled forms) which beat out hierarchical forms and which generally seem not to be amenable to payments.

Why wouldn’t they be amenable to payments? To understand that you’ve got to understand Coase’s theory of the firm.

Coase, writing in the 30s, wanted to know why firms (ie: hierarchically organised groups, ie: at least a boss with money and subordinates with labour) would form at all in a free market. Why wouldn’t individuals just trade on the free market? It’s already a way of organising complex effort, why subvert it with a different form, a mini command economy, which is what a company is?

His answer was that transaction costs make it useful. Transaction costs are every cost to do with being able to make a transaction, which aren’t the direct transaction itself. So finding buyers/sellers, determining the right price point, moving stuff around, etc. He proposed that these costs were high enough that firms could do better, by performing a lot of related functions in houses, coordinating internally under the direction of an entrepreneur (boss). Provided that the entrepreneur was relatively good at this direction, they could beat the high transaction costs of the open market, and retain a lot more profit. This had limitations (the internal costs get higher as you get bigger), and so you get many firms.

Now we’ve got digital networks that we organise over, and transaction costs are becoming very low for information “goods”. Search at a minimum lets us discover things quickly. Distribution is ridiculously cheap per unit. But critically, they are lowered differently depending on how we organise.

The surprising thing seems to be that down in the area we’re in now, just using money at all keeps the transaction costs relatively high. If you require people to pay for information, you introduce a friction to the consumer that they usually wont tolerate. Think newspaper paywalls, or imagine a paywalled encyclopedia trying to make its way. People know there are substitutes that are cheaper (free!) and easier (no financial transactions to think about) that deem such paid resources irrelevant.

Further, down at the transaction cost levels we’re seeing, that can actually be true of the producer, too. Wikipedia lets you make an edit relatively frictionlessly. Hit edit, type, save it. Wander off. Whereas a paid service is going to require creating an account, putting in bank details, etc etc, all for micropayments which are likely going to be next to nothing anyway, ie: not worth the effort, especially as that service probably isn’t going to succeed.

And why isn’t it going to succeed? Because we all intuit the rules above, and understand that these micropayment systems aren’t viable. The service that is skewed by micropayments is going to be trumped by those that aren’t, and so it wont get traction. Without traction, the micropayment system is pointless anyway.

And on top of this is the demotivating effect of introducing money into an environment like this.

The other assumptionwich about stigmergic media, which isn’t quite right, is that people aren’t being paid. They are, they’re just not being paid with money. Instead, consumers are getting information they need. Producers are getting maybe reputation, or maybe internal autonomy/mastery/control rewards, or maybe some of both. Whatever it is, there’s a reason people participate, and keep participating. That only motivates a subset of people, of course; probably a fairly small percentage, but given that they seem to be some of the best people (hypothesis: the motivations that stigmergic media rely on are the same ones that people need to achieve excellence?), and that the number of producers and consumers are unrelated (“he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me”), that’s ok.

Now there is one excellent example of micropayments working in recent years, and that’s the Apple iPxx App Store. But to do that, stigmergic alternatives (eg: a giant store of free “apps” and equivalent) have had to be purposefully discouraged, to the point that their transaction costs are too high, by chasing out attempts to build it (punishing free apps in various ways, eg search listings), retaining strict control over the environment (thou shalt have no other appstore before myself, plus capricious enforcement), and making the web a second class citizen. And of course they’ve also brilliantly created products that disproportionately attract “payers”, people with both money and the belief that ticket price reflects actual value (so for example freebies are worthless). So they’ve been able to control all parts of the environment, *including* the consumers who are allowed into their shopping mall!

I doubt that anyone’s going to be able to pull off that combination of factors again. Like the Wall Street Journal’s paywall, Apple’s appstore is an anomaly.

I hinted above that the primary motivation for the idea of micropayments is that the old system’s breaking, so we need a new system. But I think that’s got another fundamental flaw, the idea that we’ll get one type of new system. What we’re seeing, in fact, is many niche specific local solutions slowly replacing a general solution (doing stuff for pay).

The low transaction cost solutions are heterogeneous. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow and Open Source / Free Software and the Arab Spring and #Occupy and 4Chan have some things in common, but they mostly have a lot that’s fundamentally different. You can’t apply Open Source to everything, because it’s very specific (it works to organise massively interdependent technical work which can be broken into very small pieces, and doesn’t require a high level of overall coordination/design). You can’t organise everything like a modern decentralised protest movement. You can’t (and really really shouldn’t try to) organise everything like /b/ .

So there’s not going to be one answer to this question. The real question to my mind is “Capitalism is failing, what now?” and the answer seems to be “Everything, all at once, hang on to your hat”.

But we all still need to be paid.

I think the very short term answer to that is “hello massive unemployment and depression 2.0″. That’s happening. But what societies need to be doing is something we were on track to do through the 20th century, which was derailed in the 80s, which is to shorten the working week, and to move toward a universal basic income. The latter means really just repurposing our welfare systems in most of the western world, removing the element of punishment, though in the US it means something a lot more profound and probably socially inconceivable. So the US will likely fail at this unfortunately.

Longer term, these new forms of organisation are going to begin controlling serious resources, because they work better. As they do that, new ways of distributing those resources will arise. Also, the value that abundance is better than scarcity is spreading, watch for the technology to begin providing it in more areas than just information.

Really, if you’re looking at abundance and thinking “omg, disaster”, you’re doing it wrong. Surely.

I’m not much of an external motivation guy. I hate being told what to do, and I hate being held to external deadlines.

I want to do my own thing.

But of course, when I’m free to do my own thing, what do I do? Awesome projects? A bit. Play Starcraft II? Oh yes, a lot. A lot.

Of course I look productive to the outside world, but that’s just because you can’t see all the time I squander.

And, after all these years, I’m good with that. It’s a Wild Rumpus, and it’s better than everything.

—-

Some time back, I wrote this post on intrinsic motivation: Self Motivation for Cat People. I didn’t think all that much about it at the time, but I had some positive feedback about it, and it’s come back to my mind since.

There’s more to say on it. But, the tone wasn’t quite right. “Cat people” is a bit anaemic, and “self motivation” isn’t quite right.

More recently I thought about approaching this again, and ended up slightly side tracked, writing This post is for the Wild People.

I know that doesn’t read like your standard self-help book, but it’s key, because I’m trying to describe an unusual type of person. A type I am myself. A person who is both called to create, to make, to actualise, and is often singularly unable to, due to the assumptions we make about how to Get Stuff Done in our world.

The people I’m thinking about tend to be some or all of:

• smart
• eccentric
• non-joiners
• rebellious
• unreliable
• under achievers

If you’re not this person, you know someone who is. You wonder “that person has amazing potential, why don’t they realise it? They just play games / lie around / smoke dope all day. What a waste”.

What’s really going on here, I think, is that this type of person, a Wild Person, works in a way that runs counter to the most central assumptions of our culture. Being creatures of that culture, they end up messed up, unable to quite function, struggling and self doubting and often self loathing.

But there’s no need for that. You just need to understand yourself, and go with it.

—-

The first thing to know about being Wild People, is that we are called to walk our Road of Glory. Each road is unique, is invisible to everyone else, is full of obstacles. Most problematically it is not a road, it is not predestined. It’s a road in hindsight, which we create, because we are creators.

We walk the Road of Glory with our Wild Works. What are they? They are the things we are called to make and do and discover. They show up in our minds unannounced and Will Out, and there’s nothing much to be done except to make it so.

But, they don’t show up with a plan, and let’s face it, if they did we’d set fire to it and piss on the ashes. We’re not really plan people.

So, it’s hard to know how to proceed. And there’s your first mistake. Proceed is a mistake.

We are not trying to meet a schedule, make a deadline, satisfy a KPI. We’re not trying to Proceed. We are trying to be glorious. Glorious! There’s a difference.

—-

Let’s extract the meat from the “Cat People” article. Because of course when I said Cat People I meant Wild People, I just didn’t know it yet. In any case, I outlined four basic rules of thumb for self actualising:

I’ve got some ideas to expand on here that help me.

Write it down, let it go

The picture I paint above is of many Works, most of them dormant at any moment. You let your interest take you where it will, as it will, and don’t force it if you don’t have to.

But, this can be difficult. Firstly, you can worry that you’ll forget your great ideas, and feel that you have to keep them all loaded in your head all the time, mind iterating over them, keeping them alive. Caught in a non-creative loop.

You must find a way to let them go totally dormant when they are not needed. Luckily, there’s an amazing invention, possibly the most momentous invention of all time. It’s called writing.

For Krom’s sake, write your shit down. Many people keep notebooks where they write their ideas, it’s a time honoured approach. I think they even teach people to do this in engineering. But you don’t have to be structured, you can keep records as crazily as you like, just write stuff down.

And then, I don’t know, burn them if you like. It’s up to you.

I used to write notebook after notebook full of crazy ideas for games, stories, code. And really, I hardly ever revisited them. Nowadays I’ve switched to blogs (most notably this one!) but it’s the same thing. Actually the blog is a bit cooler because you can search it, and because other people sometimes read it and talk to you about it and that’s brilliant, even when they’re telling you you’re a crock.

But none of that is the point at all.

The point is, you have to get that stuff out of your head.

Wild works, that are supposed to be in their dormant phase, will sit in your head and take up capacity you should be using for other things. They also go a bit rotten as you iterate and iterate and iterate on them. You might be surprised to know that you’re actually a kind of uplifted monkey, with a mind made of weird meat, of all things, and that it’s just not very good at what it does. Unfortunate. Why do you think we’re all such weirdoes in the first place? Anyway, you don’t have mass storage to put things away in for long periods in there, just whacky dodgy hypercompressed associative “memory” stuff that you don’t trust (because it often just makes up any old thing), and more short term kinds of memory that you also don’t trust but hey, what else are you going to work with? But Wild Works that are in there when they need to be dormant sort of rant and rave and go twisted, and don’t allow other things in.

Writing them down is really the only way to give yourself permission to fully forget them. You write it down, then you let it go, erase erase.

Getting into this habit is amazingly helpful. You get the idea out, you don’t let it go rotten. You become more inspired, as if by magic! And, when you come back and read your old writing (assuming no burning was involved), you often get inspired again, at a whole new level that you couldn’t imagine before, simply because your mind is limited and could only hold the original idea. Written down, you don’t need to load the whole thing back into your head (just the gist) and more, new things; extensions, enhancements, leaps; can fit in there too. It’s really quite excellent.

That’s what I’m doing even now.

Simplicity

Unfortunately, I do get into monomaniacal phases where I can almost literally only think about the one thing for a period of weeks. So all ideas revolve around whatever it is, I obsess, I can’t think well about other things. Some bits of that time are productive, often it’s procrastination and anguish and first person shooters. All part of the process.

That’s normal for us, btw.

So there’s a little rule I have, really a habit, and it’s this:

Don’t schedule more than one thing per day.

That’s really hard! Life is full and varied and there are a million bits of thing you have to do. But to survive the monomania, to be able to use the gaps, to be able to use those periods of hot burn, I find I just have to keep it simple simple simple.

Everything scheduled is something that will interfere with you letting your mind work as it must.

I do sometimes have more than one thing. For instance, on Tuesdays I have work, then choir in the evening. That’s a rough day for me, a write-off, but so far a necessary evil.

But generally, I let as much of my time be reactive as I possibly can.

Also, don’t schedule into the future. I have an horizon of about two weeks. Anything after that, forget it for the most part.

Here I must give massive credit to my darling wife, who handles the future schedule that I refuse to interface with, and who deals with a lot of the minutiae that I’m more or less incompetent to deal with. If I were on my own, or with someone less phenomenally competent, maybe I’d do things differently. Possibly I’d automate it as much as possible?

Interestingly, I keep trying to get into the habit of using an online calendar, google calendar, but it never sticks. I guess I’m on the maker schedule, and diaries and such are just too patchy to be maintained. What I mean is, if you live out of your daily diary, 10 things before breakfast, it’s probably really easy to maintain, but if you have a thing to schedule every other week, or every other month, then the diary just isn’t something you’ll pay enough attention to to use well, will fall into disrepair, and end up being worse than pointless (being full of wrong things).

Rambling. Anyway, simplicity. Few things, and minimal unusual scheduled things. You actually want a basically predictable life (like wake/eat/work/eat/work/eat/play/sleep).

This becomes the rhythm of your stride along the road. We walk the Road of Glory, and we need rhythm to our walk. Find your rhythm, find simplicity, let it underpin everything else.

Smash the big works

One of the worst blocks for Wild People is the Bigger than Ben Hur project. We imagine large. But we tend not to be joiners. So a lot of our work is individual.

So we bite off waaaay more than we can chew.

If I were to list out all the dormant Works I’ve got sitting around, it’s probably more than I can address in a lifetime.

Just thinking about one of these Works can paralyse you. You want it to be magnificent, Glorious. But maybe that is years of work?

Fix this by retaining the vision, but letting go of the detail.

If you’re paralysed, write down a list of the things you could do now, in a short burst (4 hours?). Pick the one that stands out (you know which one it is) and do it.

Still enthused? Repeat. That includes removing now irrelevant things from the list, and adding new things you didn’t think of before.

No longer enthused? Let it go. You’ve got the big vision, you’ve got the small next steps, you really need nothing else. Let it go.

Most of my works involve software. I’m a bit wild by nature, a bit anarchic, but I’m learning to use issue/feature list software to be this list. I just shove in everything that could be a next step. Then when I’ve got a bit of time, if I don’t feel strongly compelled by something, I pick up some dormant project’s list and just do one thing. Fix a bug. Might be 5 mins.

It’s enormously relaxing to just do 5 minutes work and achieve something. The next 9 hours on the xbox feels virtuous. That’s glory!

Conscientiousness is dangerous propaganda

Do you stress about lacking conscientiousness? Do you say you’ll do something , then you don’t follow through? Do you tell people about the play you’re going to write / app you’re going to build / thing you’re going to invent, then it never happens?

Your lack of it is a strength. Let me explain.

If you’re going to have a zillion Works, and they stretch from here to Shangri La, and you can’t possibly hope to do them all, then conscientiousness will cripple you. You’ll grind and grind and grind and in the end, well in the end I don’t know because I’m not that person.

The Road of Glory is filled with your Works, from the beginning to the end. But at the beginning the road is wide, at the end it’s a dusty goat trail. Not all the Works make it from the beginning to the end, in fact the great majority don’t.

They don’t make it because they are found wanting. They might become all boredom. Or they might have been hiding an insoluble contradiction, and be doomed from the start. Or, they might just not be as glorious as the alternatives.

Lacking conscientiousness means being able to let your Works die. It means being able to let them die regardless of public pronouncements you’ve made, obligations you feel, commitments you’ve made. If something sucks, you put it to the sword. Let it go.

When I talked about simplicity, about not scheduling, about being able to be reactive to what your mind wants when it wants it, this was the other, darker part. To be conscientious is to be continually bound by the expectations of other people, and by your expectations of their expectations, and the whole social web that binds us together, in a painful tangle. And you know that this is anathema to how you need to be. Why do you think you’re not a joiner? Why are you cagey about committing?

It’s because you know what it leads to. It leads to those needles in your mind. Stuff you *should* be doing but you’re not going to. It jabs at you. And people jab at you for it. It scratches away, scratch scratch scratch. Overcommitment happens in the blink of an eye. And then there is no Road, and no Glory, and no promise of Shangri La.

And to top it all off, you rebel against all that and screw up all the commitments anyway!

What you have to do, is don’t get into this trap. Don’t be bound by commitments where you can possibly avoid them. Don’t agree to periodic, scheduled things, except where utterly unavoidable (like paid work).

And where you do get into a bind, give yourself permission to shrug it off. This is the worst option, it wont make you any friends, but you have to be able to do it. It’s just who you are, it’s how you work.

Allow yourself to neglect works until they die. Allow yourself to slay them brutally. Allow yourself to cut them down, and let the onlookers cry out gasping.

—-

Now that’s it. The flame dims, the focus fades, slumber calls. Thank you for reading, Wild people, and may your day be Glorious!

Here’s me singing the very godly “Fantasia on Christmas Carols”, by rvw.

Life is full of contradictions.

————–

ok, now as to the claim I have never tried to find God, that isn’t true, both in a shallow sense and in a deep sense. Let me explain.

As a man who grew up in the anglosphere, of course I have been exposed to the notion of religion, and specifically Christianity. I have my share of zealots in my family, and had my share of pressure to believe. As a kid, I never really believed in any of it (although I did believe in Santa, make of that what you will). There was a stage where I tried to believe, more than anything I think to try to put myself into the shoes of friends & family who believed, to try to understand them. That wasn’t very successful, but I gave it a real go.

So that’s the shallow sense in which it isn’t true.

If there is any fundamental thread that runs through everything in my life, it’s a quest to understand. It’s probably why I do just about everything that I do. So I think about the meaning of things all the time; to the point of distraction really. It often makes me an impractical person.

Fairly early on I noticed that basically all systems of understanding that we have are ungrounded. If you follow them back to their fundamentals, they’re all built on axioms, which are by their nature unsupportable (that’s what an axiom is, after all), and they also never seem to quite enclose the domain they try to enclose. That includes all formal systems (shout out to Gödel), and then bleeds into everything else.

Specifically, and most painfully, meaning itself seems to be a kind of system, also ungrounded. At some point you must ask what meaning means, and there’s no answer. What is the wellspring of meaning?

The best answer I can find is that we are meaning finding machines in a universe otherwise devoid of it. That is, we invent it, then we find what we have invented. Sort of an empty pursuit seen in that light.

And I don’t come to that lightly. No one who holds that view does, because it leaves you dealing with the existential void. The salient question is “why should I get up in the morning?”. My best working model at the moment is “well, I seem to want to, I’m not sure why, let’s keep doing it at least until there is more information”.

You’ll often see me mention narrative, dismissively usually, and it’s in regard to this emptiness of meaning. We humans seem to be story telling machines. We find agency in things without agency, we see meaning where there is none, we tell linear stories to explain things that have no narrative thread. It seems to be how we are constructed.

As far as I can tell, we come to be like that as a result of some kind of early social intelligence arms race; the need to predict and understand social beings was so great, so important to individual survival, that we developed this brain that is biased to see social/intelligent action in everything, look for meaning everywhere.

I guess that, given an hypothesis “this was caused by a person”, a type I error (false positive) was fairly costless, but a type II error (false negative) was disastrous. That is, missing the effect of actual agency (eg; that falling rock really was from someone trying to kill you) was gene extinguishingly terminal, in a way that mistaking the wind for the action of some kind of powerful being wasn’t.

And you can see here I’m implying that systems of religious belief seem to be built in this kind of category error. If you were to propose that one specific one is not, for me it’d take extraordinary evidence to overcome the massive prior probability of this type of mistake.

And I know the temptation is to say “there are a lot of believers and they can’t all be wrong”, to which I would say yes, of course they can. A fundamental architectural bias in the human mind should lead to really large numbers of people doing the same wrong thing; it is expected.

When I look at all the things we know that are really truths about the universe (rules of physics, chemistry, maths, etc etc), I find they have a fundamental similarity, and the similarity is System. System as opposed to Narrative.

Narrative is a story, with a flow, with human meanings, with actors and agency.

System is a set of simple rules that interact to create more or less complex behaviour. The stuff we see in hard sciences, the stuff we see in maths, the stuff we see in usable philosophy. And in useful study of human societies, economics, games. It’s the mode we use to build capable technology, software.

System never has a narrative arc. System never includes agency, except where the system is modelling actual agents, and even then they are reduced to formal rules.

Where it is about the nature of the universe, System seems never to include agency, or to include us. Physics gets by without putting us at the center. And chemistry. And maths. And biology. Even economics only includes people tangentially.

True things look like system.

But not all systems are descriptions of the truth. I talked about meaning as a kind of system, but I think it’s a flawed system that lives purely in our minds, one that’s both fundamental to us as intelligences, and also strongly misleading; it makes it very, very difficult to see the world as it is.

So difficult, in fact, that it’s taken us hundreds of thousands of years to get to a point where we could construct an alternative system to help us past it. That’s logic, reason, and science.

They’re annoying ways to think, because they’re not architecture native; we’re not built to think in those ways. So we have to do it in large groups, use external processes, train at length. It’s horrible really. But they’re our best shot at getting even close to understanding some real things about the universe we find ourselves a part of, I think.

So anyway, this is the deep sense in which I say that I do in fact look for God, if I can bend that term to mean truth. The very difficult part of that search is that I find the very concept of meaning itself to be fraught, and mostly useless. So it’s a subtle path, you know?

Sometimes I feel depressed at how limited we are as intelligences. We’re in no sense general intelligences. We seem to be a grab bag of heuristics and dumb techniques for roughly approximating intelligence in a strictly limited set of situations (life on the savannah), none of which currently obtain.

—————

A bit of an addendum that didn’t appear in the G+ thread:

I didn’t address here that I talk about this stuff in an inherently narrative style. I dismiss meaning while totally immersed in the language of meaning. I’m aware of and accept that. Really we can’t escape it, it’s how our brains work. So I’m just going with it and accepting that it can cause apparent (and real!) contradictions. 

Actually I could potentially do this without resorting to narrative, but the results would look like formal mathematical and/or logical reasoning, horrifying! And honestly, too hard.

Next, my darling wife brought up the idea that most of our systems turn out to be wrong. Absolutely. I should really use the word “model” when I am talking about specific descriptions of systems that people have come up with. Models are imperfect descriptions of something real, that hopefully have some explanatory and/or predictive power. We use them while they work(ish) and throw them out when we find something better. The cool thing about science, actually, is that this is baked into its principles, and usually into the practice too.

Finally, and related, I’m fairly sure that we’re getting to a point where individual humans just wont be able to personally grok the ever more refined models of reality. I suspect that our limited minds (very limited capacity, poorly architected) just wont be capable of directly working with how it all really works. This is a job for computers and machine learning, initially directed by us, requiring us less over time, approaching zero.

That’s what computers are for, after all; they are our mental prostheses.

As a intelligent species we find ourselves with the ability to question,  but unable to answer. Unable to understand.  Mentally horribly disfigured, really. So we’re building our successors to the best of our abilities. With a lot of sweat and a bit of luck, we might build something that can actually penetrate the real mysteries of the universe – perhaps not understand, because understanding itself may turn out to be a red herring. Or at least maybe we can build something that is a little further along the path, and able to take the next steps that we cannot.

The wild people, who will not be tamed.

The world says zig, and they say zag. The many say Do! and they say No! The world says Stop! and they say Wont! Wont!

Wont! Wont!

Their way is lonely, and dark, and opposed. Yet make their way they must. For they walk the road of glory, and their feet belong only on it.

This post is for the wild people, who walk the road of glory.

The road of glory is a shining path, and a dark path.

For the many it is a path unseen, covered in brambles and snares. It has no markers, it shows no way.

But for the wild people, it is plain. It is plain and obvious in its treachery and in its greatness. It is treacherous and it is greatness in equal parts.

It is roads unique to each of the wild people, and each walks that singular road alone.

It is a lonely, and embattled road, a road of opposition, of trials, of tempest.

And yet the wild people are never truly alone.

They are never truly alone because they walk the road with, and by, their works, their wild works.

This post is for the wild people, who, by their wild works, must walk the road of glory.

It is by their wild works that they can be recognised. They walk amongst their works, they march with them. Their works sprout from their brow, fully formed, or struggle from their flesh, tearing it in their passage.

Their works are strange, and unpredictable. They are banal, or magnificient, or highly obscure, or all of these things at once.

Their wild works walk the road, as legion. They live in legion, and so they die. Many die almost as they are born. Many more die early in their journey on the road. Some struggle most of the way, but are taken oh so close to the end.

Sometimes they are taken in skirmishes with the enemy, where they are found wanting, misconceived, unworthy. Other times, it is the pestilence and famine that comes with the legion, where many lesser among them fall.

Sometimes they fall and lie and die and rot into the road, and their bones reinforce the road, and others cross over them.

Other times they fall and lie and sleep, for weeks and months and years, and then leap up with a wild shout! and run full tilt along the road once again.

The wild people walk with and amongst their works.

They herd them and tend them. They reach out amongst their wild works and seek out the great ones, helping them where they stumble, carrying them on their backs until they can make their own way again.

And the works stretch out from the beginning to the end, from china to india, from here to Shangri La.

This post is for the wild people, who, by their wild works, must walk the road of glory, from here to Shangri La.

Their wild works are legion and they stretch all along the road. Near the beginning they are uncountable, a horde, threatening to overwhelm all before them.

But the road is so very hard.

And so they march, and they fall, and their numbers thin and thin.

And as their destination comes closer, they are few, and they are staggering, stumbling. They are torn by the thorns on the bushes and they are made lame by the broken ground.

But these are strong ones.

And the wild people walk their wild road and help their wild works. They too stumble, they too are torn by the passage.

And sometimes they see their works enter Shangri La, and they rejoice. Momentarily rejoice.

But the wild people cannot enter that promised valley, not yet.

Their journey is not over. They are shepherds and their works are the sheep, and they stretch from here to Shangri La.

They are generals, and the works are their legions, and they stretch from here to Shangri La.

They are conductors, and the works are their choristers, and they stretch as legion, from here to finality, and together they sing the song of the universe.

This post is for the wild people, who, by their wild works, must walk the road of glory, from here to Shangri La, and sing the song of the universe.

For the longest time the universe was a dead thing, or maybe asleep. It was, and it slowly became more. It unfolded. Like a flower. But their was no bee for the flower.

It was a score, first in one part then in two, then more. A string section, some woodwinds, a timpani. But there was no one to know it, to read the score, to play it much less hear it.

And the dead things; physics and chemistry; they unfolded and unfolded and became, eventually, live things, in little nooks and crannies. Biology. Copying, multiplying, unaware.

And suddenly a key change.

People. Fighting, and loving, and trying desperately to understand. Narrative exploding out of system, ungrounded. Meaning in meaninglessness.

And the first wild people began the first journeys on the first roads of glory, turning themselves deaf to the protestations of the rest, and creating their first great and terrible works.

And so began the true song of the universe.

And all these roads were interwoven, all the works were mingled, all the songs were one mighty song, sung from one mighty score, that was the universe itself.

The mighty universe resonating.

It is a score that we still sing. A score with many pages yet to be sung. A score which is in fact endless.

The wild people walk their roads, ceaselessly, singing and marching and fighting, until finally they too must enter Shangri La. But more and wilder people take their place, walking wilder roads, singing and marching and fighting.

Carrying the universe on their backs, on their foreheads.

This post is for the wild people, who, by their wild works, must walk the road of glory, from here to Shangri La, and sing the endless song of the universe.

I’m sick in bed today, floored with something viral I reckon. Glands are up, headache, the room’s spinning. Sucks man. But as often happens when I’m headachy, my brain is exploding with a new idea. This one is for a combination of the concepts of “social network” and “blog”, into a lightweight public-only improvement on both.

“Nework X” is a distributed social network using the open internet to connect its members. You set up your “Stream” like you would set up a blog – you can self host it, use someone else’s hosting service, whatever. You can post with the ease of a social network (not heavyweight like a blog). You have a stream seeing stuff from all over the net, like a social network / feed reader combo. You can follow people. The public view of your “stream” is more like a blog, just showing your own stuff.

Your identity is your stream/blog’s url. It uniquely identifies you. Your identity is confirmed, security is dealt with, just by calling back to this url and asking it to confirm your actions. Clean, straightforward.

That’s all I’ve got for now. To build this would take some skilled front end javascripty goodness, but in principle the framework is actually pretty simple. Really, if you’re not trying to do the whole “social graph” thing that the facebooks of the world are doing, then this doesn’t need to be difficult!

The photos are vintage wedding photos (all creative commons, I’ll put a list up at some stage) and photos of Jodie and I at our wedding … so long ago!

Also, we recorded Sinnerman about a month ago and I notice I forgot to post it. Here it is, apologies for the uninspired vid. As you’ll see from Mist In The Mountains, I’m trying to make a better effort with the videos.

I’ve created the blog in the new look Blogger. It’s shiny! Lightweight and easy to use, too. However, it’s a bit light on features, a bit buggy here and there, and embeds terribly into Google+ . That last point is quite bizarre; aren’t these products meant to be part of the same ecosystem? Whatever

Many thanks to Gavin O’Loghlen who recorded us, and to the person who lent the hand drum to Jodie. What kind of drum is that? A brightly coloured ominous one.

Well, why not? Sounds like fun!

So, long story short, here it is.

"Evolution of Adhocracy" on "Steppin' Off The Edge"

We talk about all kinds of things around the concept of the Adhocratic World System, which I introduced in But who will collect the garbage?  . It’s pretty long, apologies in advance if you find it tl;dl . But if you can stick with it, I’d love to hear what you think of it.

Thanks Jamie for the opportunity, and for the excellent editing. I was convinced it’d be a great expanse of “duhurhuhr derp derp derp”, but he’s made me sound relatively coherent, which is no small task.

Steppin’ off the Edge is a fascinating podcast, I recommend it to everyone, have a listen!