From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Fri Jan 10 2003 - 00:28:29 MST
> I tend to agree with Max M and Reason. Since there is no central
> authorization or umbrella for transhumanity, a tendancy for a weak
> repository of info happens.
>
> ExI could easily cultivate a link-a-link directory of virtual and
> real time locations for transhumanists, seminars, university courses, etc.
Its
> data/design would be open source and easily duplicated and disbursed on
> other sites.
Which would duplicate many such things that already exist. That's not quite
what I was driving at.
> However - "all places are one place" is far to collectivist for me and I
> don't think that would work. Rather, a better freeway design than what we
> have now which are the basic net search engines. I like Kurtzweil's site
> design and I've asked Max if we can do something similar in regards to
> transhumanist areas of interest. I'll ask Amara about it as well.
I think you miss the point; my goal is not to create repositories. It's to
increase cultural links and exchange of information between comparitively
isolated communities with transhumanist memes or interests. The technologist
way of looking at this is to build better freeways AND CONVEYORS to move
information right up under the noses of people who will not go out and look
for it.
(Better search engines are not the answer for community building; relying on
human volition from the masses to build bigger and more effective
communities doesn't work. The information has to be brought to them and made
available in the places they normally visit).
Centralization or central control are not goals. You can't sell that to
webmasters. The only central point in the technical solution is a server
that replicates traffic in a convenient way, but doesn't store anything.
Repositories are distributed, just as they always were -- it's just that
they all contain overlapping information (i.e. imperfect copies of each
other). Participation is voluntary from webmasters/forum owners -- but it's
advantageous to jump in, so they should be fairly easy to convince.
Everything continues as before, except that each new niche community
directly and meaningfully adds to the overall metacommunity.
In theory, this means that we gain some fraction of the advantages of having
a much larger community, rather than many small ones. In practice, it really
remains to be seen how effective this would be. The work isn't in the tech,
it's in managing the wetware assemblages for this sort of thing.
Reason
http://www.exratio.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:35:51 MST