֍ Folklore_0x ::: Drip

The End of Peak TV? “Television has turned into a hyperspecialized Model T assembly line where everyone does one particular tiny job,” says Schur. “You focus really hard on screwing this bolt into this piece of metal, and that’s all you do. And as a result, nobody’s learning how to make a whole car. The battle now is to figure out which patches we can put on the process so that in five or ten years, people will still know how to make TV.” https://www.vulture.com/2023/06/streaming-industry-netflix-max-disney-hulu-apple-tv-prime-video-peacock-paramount.html

DAO Time A thoughtful inquiry and follow-up from our reading on Seasons earlier Collected as a Writing NFT for our Archive. https://zine.zora.co/nathan-schneider-nonlinear-time

MEME INFLUENCER Stories of undercover influence in dark social spaces. Campaigns of awareness shaping the vector of a community’s Promise https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/joshua-citarella-how-to-plant-a-meme

Ants, Ants, Ants Learning from ecology https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/born-a-minim#dest-3

Spatial Interfaces From 2019, looking at conversations on how spatial aware software and 3D objects can enhance our experiences Thank you @joshnutt for the curation today. https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialinterfaces/

INTERVENTIONS How do we intervene today in misinformation campaigns? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01388-6

Collaborative Publishing Over the past few months, I’ve had the privilege to collaborate with the Foster, SeedClub and Metalabel teams to produce a digital and physical Zine. In it, I’ll have published one of the essays I’ve been thinking about for over a year, finally written down: Community Unchained: The New Media of Belonging Thank you to so many folklore members who provided feedback and helped me sharpen the ideas in the essay. If you’d like to collect, here’s the link; https://foster.metalabel.app/several-people-are-typing Link to announcement: https://twitter.com/0xfoster/status/1666135557225820198

DARK SOCIAL (2022) "This is the new dark social – rich, vibrant conversations that are out of the public eye, out of reach to marketers at scale, out of the ability for us to monetize them and for anyone to effectively monitor them without expending massive resources to do so. Whether it’s a group chat on Snapchat, a Telegram channel, an OnlyFans community… the reality is that our audiences (and us, if we’re honest) are tired of every conversational space being invaded by marketing." www.christopherspenn.com/2022/08/almost-timely-news-14-august-2022-velvet-rope-communities-and-dark-social/

PLATFORMS During the research program, we've been exploring the definition of platforms and how they relate to protocols. This presentation is excellent. The author will also be doing a lecture tomorrow, live-streamed on YouTube. Other lectures are also available there, which are fascinating and excellent. Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cY95dRixFho0pMIlrEFcGL_XKVy9vnE4NGOD6TQMj50/view#slide=id.ge22ee69ee7_0_1807 Summer of Protocols YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@summerofprotocols

3 types of value from Community Thank you to @k_bc0 for sharing this article —————— Social value: Social value is established when members have mutual-focus attention (e.g. back-and-forth conversations), which brings a shared emotional environment for members to feel safe to continue contributing (Collins, 2004) Intellectual value is defined by the quality of the content and the co-creation of knowledge resulting from community interactions (Seraj, 2012). Professionals and enthusiasts generate intellectual value collectively through their enriched knowledge and trustworthy content with an organized structure and quality (Seraj, 2012). Knowledge is often the core source of all exchanges in value co-creation (Vargo et al., 2008). In a crowdsourcing community, intellectual value, as a form of value-in-context and value-in-use, may directly translate to value-in-exchange when the improved designs are sold. Cultural value is defined as the product of a specific culture that includes an online community’s communal values, norms, rules, and regulations (Seraj, 2012). Cultural value can be observed through the members’ communication style that uses analogies and personifications and volunteering members who moderate discussions and form a self- governing culture. Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) argued that communities share three characteristics that resemble the culture later described by Seraj (2012) as a consciousness of kind, traditions, rituals, and moral responsibility. Intellectual value is what helps people grow. But that can't exists without first doing the "mundane" saying hello and welcoming others (social value). Chung, T., Kim, K., & Shin, E. (2021). Together we create value: A study of a crowdsourcing community. _Internet Research_, _31_(3), 911–930. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-01-2020-0047

Collective Intelligence Probably the best video debunking dozens of myths regarding how animals coordinate in swarms, and potentially pointing to how we act / react online together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWHYFoFRY34

KIND GAMES “We propose a fresh approach. Kind games are multiplayer games intentionally designed to emphasize prosocial behavior (players helping one another).“ https://polarisgamedesign.com/2022/kind-games-designing-for-prosocial-multiplayer/

Token Voting Problems from 2018 “This is where I believe a lot of broken models originate, when designing something that token holders will like, and not something that protects the actual users of a protocol.” https://medium.com/@deaneigenmann/against-community-governance-326dc82b27d3

Network changes vs. content changes. A reread from November: “This overfocus on the substance makes us miss opportunities to examine the structure — and, in turn, to address the polarization, factional behavior and harmful dynamics that it sows.” https://www.noemamag.com/how-online-mobs-act-like-flocks-of-birds

On Productivity, and Challenging our Idols https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/waste-your-time-your-life-may-depend

Slouching Towards Utopia “…the market is an immensely powerful engine of social progress, but it has a logic all its own, quite distinct from human conceptions of fairness and justice, and if people go too far in defying the market’s logic they will lose the great bounty it provides. The Polanyian response is: yeh, that’s not gonna work. People believe they have other rights besides those accruing to the ownership of valuable property, and if those rights are trampled they will surely push back.” https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-slouching-towards-utopia

L U X U R Y “The signal this sends to predators is essentially: “I’m so fit that I can afford to expend valuable energy to show you how strong and robust I am compared with the other gazelles.” The predators then direct their attention to less lively and energetic targets. So for humans, top hats and designer handbags are costly signals of economic capacities; for gazelles, stotting is a costly signal of physical capacities.” https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/status-symbols-and-the-struggle-for

Tiktok's enshittification Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

A journey to summon Ark, The Folklore Mind. Ark is short for Archive, also known as Archie or Archibald (for now). Over time, we will work to make Ark a Daemon (autonomous agent) that works alongside us and preserves Folklore’s collective memory. To begin, it will be a chatbot available to paid members which will “know” what we’ve read. Then, it will learn to listen to our forum conversations, and finally, to participate. Read more: https://folklore.mirror.xyz/OiCZVCw4LcIDck_2KLufkFtaWDL_zP3plpTNXaD3Saw

Neighbourhoods - insights from Jane Jacobs “the most important component of vitality is an abundant street life. Neighborhoods that are designed to encourage people to use the streets, or to watch what goes on in them, make desirable quarters for residence, work, and play.” https://www.commentary.org/articles/herbert-gans/the-death-life-of-great-american-cities-by-jane-jacobs/