🎎 the role and potential of curation, community & lo-fi;ambient content amidst accelerating attention & experience economies

#essay #🌿
note

the contents of the writing below are currently haphazard, disjointed and all over the place. please proceed at your own risk. (or don't. feel free to come back later when it'll be hopefully updated and improved.)

we'll talk about shared brains, third spaces, communities - as shown by folks in the cozy web/indie web/slow web...

🌀 third spaces / vibecafe.xyz / energy management & resources allocation article:

what it helps with the most:
don't start from scratch -> shared/pre-determined context: music, visuals, language, etc...

⭐️ make distinctions around collective intelligence [spaces / tools / systems] clear, visible, explicit - accessible & persistent.

-> shared values + visible resources + mapped ways to create value = enable collaboration

[high-value/high-return activities - trust networks (DAOs/coops) - circular economies]

🚨 issue/challenge: coordination.

enabling it:

💭 subconscious:
TfT / web3 / XR -> semantic, distributed, spatial web

trust/knowledge networks.

knowledge structures -> lists, trees, grids, networks (graphs)

—————-

my curation can be of the utmost value if:

in my writing, i can share/clearly state the insights/learnings i gathered by inhabiting these diverse archetypes/domains of knowledge.

e.g.: present my CEP+N at each article.
-> design nerds: daniel, rieki, vassão, etc
-> builder nerds: sephist, dgardens, etc
-> art: fablab, mdc, domestika, rap geek...

context:

my experience of the COVID-19 pandemics was 1 year longer than everyone else. when it struck, i was already on my 11th month isolated from the world.

i was going through some deep emotional healing processes, and found that my only way to cope was to read, meditate, research and ritualize. essentially, for ~3 years, i spent 95% of my time alone, in my room, learning about myself and the world, and rediscovering what moved me.

and this time in physical isolation made reflect and research a lot on the themes of belonging, the internet, community building and memetic tribes, especially related to the state and the potential of our information ecology and online communities.

in 2023, my life has been pretty much the opposite. going to ecovillages, farms, slums, courses, retreats and all sorts of cultural, local community events in são paulo, brazil.

in this article, i aim to share my findings, curation and perspectives on the future of communities and the internet - and subjacent themes, such as the metaverse, trust networks and a lot more.

i bring special attention to intentional online communities and third spaces as cultural attractors. they're places that can feel more like home than at home or at work.

and how all of this is deeply related to the realizations i had aboutenergy management during this time in isolation.

intro

the dilemma of every artist/creator - personal vs economic incentives

the magic that is unlocked in community

resonance, possibility.

cherished and encouraged to be your most unique self.

decentralization of resources -> 16x population, 100x resource consumption.

market intelligence, trends, foresight.

creator, curator & experience economies
unique potentials and challenges of in-person vs virtual communities

if there's something that persisted even after a lot of western influence and colonization (for its lights and shadows) in the global south culture is that we're a lot more communitarian. everyone is friends, everyone is family.

communities like MoL and instituto amuta recognize this and are deliberately studying and practicing culture-building in more intentional, conscious and regenerative ways.

technology-enabled communities

every technology has values embedded in it.

sari captures my feelings well when she says:

and for deeper perspectives and practical examples of highly intentional and transformative technologies, check out this podcast episode on building collective intelligence tools for human alignment with nicholas brigham from goodly labs.

i will dive into the deep implications of this, but i'll start with the aspects of the creator/experience economy that most people are familiar with.

CEP+N

creator communities, online courses, institutional communities

mighty networks, discord, telegram/whatsapp

lofi girl, the jazz hop café, - ambient content.

(they're in fact virtual spaces)

esports orgs, game guilds, real-life collectives

-> RPGs / MMOs / neopets / LoL...

M3 - virtual hackerspace & community

[hackerspace]

[XR book]

the stoa - community-driven spaces -> next instance:
vibecafe.xyz

leveraging tools like gather to enable communities to be synchronous yet flexible, whisper/chatGPT to generate transcripts/blog posts/mindmaps, capsule.video to do shorts + other tools to promote connection, add serendipity and augment conversations (infranodus, etc).

others:

gaoa.network / intentional society / etc...

metaverse folks (VRchat)
-> bluesky example.

creator economy folks, metalabel, DAOs as groups of friends with a treasury

RADAR - future in sync

shared brains (knowledge commons), nature of social media

ultimately, sari captures it well here:

main references:
other orgs building tools:
decentralized social media initiatives:

for an even deeper understanding, beyond distributed cognition, we can also have augmented intelligence with AI agents, visualizations, and more.

moving castles is a pioneer work on this field, people/acquaintances/moritz bierling also shares a rich conceptual understanding of the space, which influenced my own understanding and experimentation with secondary minds.