 So there we are. So this is the fellowship of the link call for Wednesday, August 16, 2023. Welcome. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I guess we talked a bit about some interactions. But I guess I don't know if Peter is going to join us. No idea if Pete will be here. And Pete and I talked a little bit last week. And one of the things that sort of crossed our path was seeing if we could have you explain Agora to us differently better. So we understand sort of how it fits other kinds of things or how it's different from other kinds of things or stuff like that. Because we don't have it fixed in our heads quite well yet. That happens a lot. Well, yes, I mean, I would be glad to do that. And it's great to be here because I think we have been developing the concept in different directions, sometimes converging and experimenting with things. So yeah, we could do that anytime. Actually, I mean, it's also like a heavy overloading in our space, also as a result of experimentation and changes. And yes, it seems like a great idea to just have a checkpoint and maybe try to present a more coherent narrative of what it is and what it could be. That'd be great if you thought that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've got Aram. Yeah, Aram. Aram is still making his way here somehow. Yeah, always. There we go. Aram, can you hear us? Is Jitsi giving more of us trouble more of the time? I feel like it is. Can you hear me now, right? No, where are you finding out? OK, yeah. I'll get my camera on a second. I just need to finish up a conversation. Yeah, I mean, it's still better than Big Mule Button in the space of like an open-source video conferencing in my particular taste. And then Google Meet, we don't like because? Well, I like it. Yeah, because it's a Google property. And how do you record calls in Meet? That's not built in, is it? You have to pay for it. I mean, it's fine. I guess we pay for stuff sometimes. But I believe we should make it, we will meet, should make it a bit, put in mind, we'll meet hot from it on. We should make it easier to be able to say like, because you know, like you can record and say like, oh, and look this, pay five bucks, no. It's a bit more involved. Oh, interesting. You have to basically go and be in Workspace or what? Yeah, you need to have a Workspace account and like have their IQ. So yeah. Yeah, this reminds me we should fix that. So maybe tomorrow. Well, whoever's in charge of Google's communication software is not the best software to designer. Well, I know that people are very great. This is the thing. I mean, I don't want to be like, they are too much, but this is where like you talk about any other person pretty much and you are like, this person is great. But then somehow the results I can get behind this assertion is very unclear sometimes. Yeah, you know, it's like, yeah, it takes you, yeah. But maybe tomorrow it starts. Who knows? I don't know. I think what winds up happening maybe is that executives fight over these things and then those fights don't turn into good design because they're political, not logical or something like that. I don't know. Yeah, I think it happens to companies in general, like CTO or something like that. But you know, the Mitori, I mean, I'm biased, but the Mitori is essentially quite good, I think. And I'm not saying these things. Yeah, not really. So yeah, but I think GC for now, yes, it makes sense. Yeah, yeah, it's good. And so any other topics in your head for fellowship kind of topics? Well, I mean, I have some like, precisely, I would have related, I'm surprised. But so I yield, so what else is there out there? Adam is finishing up a conversation. So I think he'll also join us in a sec. He just said he had a call to finish up. And V, I'd love to know what your passion is or anything you'd like to talk about. Yeah, I like federated stuff. I was building federated social systems back in 2010. So I have a pretty long history of that kind of stuff. Awesome, awesome. And where are you located on the planet? I mean, I'm in Portland, Oregon. Oh, right, so you're my neighbor. Oh, where are you located at? I'm in the Pearl, 14th and Lovejoy. Oh, so yeah, I'm downtown. We're literally like probably blocking each other. Yeah, exactly, we could walk. That's very funny. So today is the last day of our heat wave, probably. Oh yeah, that's been, wow, that's been something. Not as bad as 2021, the heat dome. That was kind of crazy. This one just feels like an average day in Phoenix. And I did not move to Phoenix on purpose, so I'm not crazy about really hot weather. But the heat dome was crazy. The heat dome, I remember it being 116 outside. And I would step outside and it felt like you were stepping into a convection oven. You would just suddenly get like a blast of heat off the pavement. Hey, Michael. All right, V and I just realized that we are neighbors in Portland. And V is a collaborator of Falancians in the Agora project. Yes, sure. Aram is finishing up a call and will be with us shortly. How are you? I'm OK. Yeah. Are you in Brooklyn right now? I'm in Putnam Valley. Oh. All the New York valleys sound picturesque, just when you say their names. I know, I know, just the colonialist quaint. I am on the confiscated lands of the Woffingers. And they're all gone. And we white folk have it all to ourselves. Sorry. I have to bring up the other guy. It is your remember, for sure. What's that? It is having, I will think the remember, yes. Yes. Remind us of, yeah. I was trying to hold some conversations around identity recently. Not trying. We had a good conversation. But I find there's sort of two different angles on this. One angle is that wokeness and identity politics seem to be the flame that the far right is fueling in order to get its base activated and wake things up. And there's a tremendous hatred of wokeness that DeSantis exemplifies perfectly that is carrying over to the left. I was a couple of months ago, I was at a weekend thing surrounded by mostly progressive people. Whoa, I don't know what that was. It wasn't me, I don't think. No, it was me. It was the machine that goes ping. Yeah, yeah. No, it was me getting attacked. That was really like a wake you up kind of ping. That was amazing. That's all it is for that. That's all right. So there's the whole woke. And I was surprised at how polluted the term woke had become for progressives, which worried me. Because to me, it's just like, hey. And I facilitated a conversation a couple of months ago, a separate conversation where I said, like, woke is just being aware that other people have suffered huge injustices and maybe trying to do something about it. But it's just like recognizing that that even happened to other people. Woke is not their attempt to take over society and diminish like white culture, any of that kind of crap. That got freighted onto it because it's such a dangerous idea. And then the definition of woke that, I mean, if you think about the previous definition of woke, it's just like being awake, paying attention, perceiving what's going on. Oh, that happened. Oh, that person is not equally privileged to me or that person used to live on this land or whatever it is. It's not like, it doesn't even say you're supposed to act on it, it just says you're supposed to be awake to it and aware. And so it seems like the counterargument needs to be characterized as a sleepless or blindedness or something like that. I mean, there's no counterpart to what we can call the people on the right who are refusing to acknowledge the things that one should be awake to, aware of. Yep. Yeah. I mean, I think the thing is right, like there is a very successful methodology that's being employed here that has been employed more than once before, which is the conservative media movement has the capability to redefine words and do so successfully. And we saw it happen with the word liberal, like back in the Bush era. And now they have successfully done it with woke. Like the point that we're even having a discussion on the concept of wokeness shows that they've taken a thing that is a known definition and turned it into an entirely different definition. I'm not sure how known it was. I don't think enough people were aware of the simple basic definition so that when it got repurposed and turned back on itself, it was there to be done. Well, I think the people who used it and needed it knew what it was. Yes, but that was a small group. Right, it's the same thing with, right, but that was fine. It's the same thing with like critical race theory. It's a fairly obscure piece of terminology from legal academia that was just recreated into something else entirely. It is one of the reasons why like, I got so interested in the context center project that I'm working on to begin with to bring it back to our organizing things, right? Like the idea of providing sources about a thing and then also providing timelines about a thing allows you to try and revert. In theory, my hope is, allows you to reverse context class, right? That's the goal. I think like in a lot of ways, when we talk about what we're trying to do within the fellowship of the link, right? Like the idea of providing that linking process and having it informative and shared and providing basis for understanding similar terms or the same term shared amongst people is like conceptually the idea of reversing context class. And like, I don't even necessarily agree with like context claps in the more broad sense it's used, but like, basically, without going to get to the definition of context claps, because I think we all have like a basic understanding of what people mean when they say context. Well, do we, maybe assuming we do is part of what produces it. This is true. Yeah, I mean, but you put it very well and I think, thank you for reminding me of that concept, which I had no doubt about, but like, I was thinking about how to, if we start the call, maybe talking a bit about, trying to reframe or like maybe explore what I bring up the hour often and what the hour is about in the end. And I think it's very, very, pretty much this that you said. So essentially like a set of, not even tools, I mean, tools in practice, but at this core, maybe a protocol, a set of conventions for tackling this, essentially, and for federating ideas, maybe, and definitions, or reducing friction. So, we can identify, intersection, intersections in your like a convergence and also the points in which we don't converge, which are even, I will think about this, but very often here, I love these calls, but we share so much, this interesting, like leaking things in, maybe federating in some time pushing back against like, war gardens, for example, there's different directions, but we share a lot. I always think, what are the things we don't agree on? Right? Yeah, yeah. And to some extent, maybe, I mean, they're both very interesting, clearly. One is like, one is, yeah, go ahead. Thanks, something, so two different questions that are maybe related. One, how might we prevent context collapse and the kinds of stuff that we're talking about here? Like, I'm interested in these things, maybe Aram, exactly, as you are. Like, what do you do to prevent that from happening so that we can actually have reasonable discourse and so forth? And then, Flancy, into your question right now, hey, what are some useful ways of exploring our boundary spaces so that we can understand where we do disagree and in what ways? And I'm really interested in the space between us as a place to put what we know and what we believe so that we can compare notes. So that, you know, so the Agara and Mem and the brain and Kumu can all be sort of visible together as some kind of representation of what we believe because I think that's important and that might just be me. Go, Pili. This conversation reminds me of, I don't know if you all are familiar with like dialectics and I feel like the Agara could be a place where like synthesis, antithesis and then, I mean, thesis, antithesis, and in synthesis, we have opposite opposing views and in the truth is somewhere in the middle of those views. That's great. We're nice to meet you. Yeah. So like a Hegelian dialectic, it's sort of what you're describing, I think. And I don't know much about Hegel. Couldn't describe him to anybody, but there's lots of people who are big fans of that method. So that could be a good thing. And I think there's some tools that try to do that. There's tools in the world that there's certainly a whole series of debate format tools. There's a thing called argumentation theory that was developed by a professor at Northwestern, I think named Stephen Tolman and which he's gotten. Here's a claim, here are arguments pro and con and there's a way of modeling an argument. And I don't know the relationship between Hegelian dialectic and argumentation theory. That would be a really interesting question to ask GPT, for example. It would. I mean, I think, yeah, it would. I think like the easy answers that they are opposed, like the idea of dialectics is that you take opposing ideas and unify them into some sort of single like conceit that you can deal with. It's to collapse the binaries that come out of like something like debate or I don't know argumentation theory at all, but what it sounds like, which is an argument. Well, argumentation theory is more about the structure of the argument in the sense. So, huh, it's pretty interesting. No, it isn't. Did you pay for the five minute argument? Exactly, I'm glad somebody got my reference. Yeah. So, I mean, and here's where like, I guess through the time we've been discussing, you know, approaches to what we want to do together. Also, what is it exactly what we want to do together and so on and beyond having these very utility conversations, you know? And I guess I keep going back to this, this key term, right? Like, maybe like this idea of defining a shared vocabulary and share tools, share concept precisely. I'm more generally like a way to resolve what we all mean when we say X. That to me seems to be like the, the requisite I guess for a community to sort of work, maybe like longer term, but I don't know. I think most communities do it maybe informally and maybe one of the policies behind the aura as it could be not as it is now, you know, limited is that, you know, a community that agreed on a commons to work within by default, not exclusively, but by default, will have some competitive advantage to put it some way. That will reduce friction, yes. So it feels just instinctively to me like most communities or groups that are semi-functional aren't as explicit about the things you just said. They work much more messily. They don't agree on terms or figure out their discourse on terms. They don't map out the commons and think explicitly about how to feed the commons. They're just messing around, trying to figure out legislation or rules or what project to do next or whatever. And along the way, they have like grinding problems because they misunderstand each other and they sort of sort them out and then set them aside. And I think it's rare to find a community that has more clarity about the things you just said so that the things you just offered feel to me like potential tools for resolving those problems. Like, hey, let's learn what a commons is. Let's learn how commons are governed. Let's learn which commons we touch and then let's figure out how we want to act about those commons together, which is one of my huge arguments against libertarianism because it feels to me like the thing libertarianism forgets and doesn't seem to understand how to do these managed commons. Like libertarianism just wants to split them up, make them all privately owned and then maximize profit off of them somehow. I don't know. Yeah, include them as a solution. Yeah. So, go ahead. Oh no, I was just gonna say, I think like the thing is that communities thrive when there is a degree of gray area in their definitions because it allows people to join together for its common cause without having to match explicit definitions. The problems occur when the gray area in the definition grows too large and then people are talking about fundamentally different things. That makes sense to me. One of the interesting things I've noticed is through usage of the agra is that since every person has their own little entry essentially underneath the definition, you can kind of see just by looking at it like who has a green ideas and who has opposing ideas without necessarily having any conversation between those ideas. Interesting. And I'm not sure without seeing how that operationalizes an agra, what exactly you mean but I have a general idea. Well, actually with like urban dictionary. Sure. So it's similar to urban dictionary is where you'll have like an entry and then how like on urban dictionary each user has their own definition. And then you can see on that definition what each user's entry is and you can compare and contrast that. It's very similar. It's more of an academic context rather than like an urban dictionary kind of context. But like the concept I feel is to me personally it's pretty similar. I like that. That was a really nice analogy. Thank you. So I'm trying to write a short essay about your back. Trying to write a short essay about how technology affects citizenship or being good citizens together. And I got myself tangled up in my shorts because I have so many negative things to say. And the goal of this short essay is to be kind of positive. So this conversation is actually helping me think through some of it. So thank you for that. Yeah. I think the thing is like this gets back to sort of what we are trying to do in some ways, right? I think the thing has become that to the point of like how we define things and like the idea of something like urban dictionary, right? Like in search, when you use search as we conceive it Google search for an answer you get a libertarian concept of finding an answer which is different things compete to be the best answer as defined by a bunch of signals that Google has decided. And then one of them is on top and that is the answer. But I think what we're talking about is that it's not like that's not how thought or like getting answers works really, right? There's more than one answer to the question and you need to be able to understand them like as a group. Makes great sense. Aviv, like you have your hand up? So yeah, this stream makes me think of one thing we're working on that's in progress with the agro that's not really fleshed out yet completely is contextual ranking. So you rank something personally that you think is in the agro is like more relevant to your context and then that will federate to your social network to your friends or whatever and it will affect their ranking. So when they look at it, it's in context of your personal social network rather than some global like corporate viewpoint of like what is relevant in that context. And I'm trying to remember this idea of cultural or community loc proximity or having its own set of contexts I could have said it rings a very faint bell from either research or apps that I've seen in the past where somebody was trying to figure out how to do some of that, but I'm not remembering it right now. And some text analysis that compares different communities use of the same terms and shows how they're different would be really useful and would highlight the kind of spin and word jujitsu that Arami were talking about earlier and David from it's one of the world's experts in how do you take over words? He's been a Republican strategist for like three decades at least. So sorry, I lost a lot of context precisely because of this hiccup, but I guess going back to this idea about, so what, yeah, I really like how you put it Adam on the libertarian concept of search and this individualistic approach, sort of like like a zero sound game, like competition for like scarce clicks and so on. I guess it's very interesting. I guess to put it further, like we offer that possibility of like, you know, say ranking, which is community owned. I think that's definitely very promising. It's also promising for like things like a Fediverse, you know, like activity paving so flexible. I don't know if it's flexible enough, but you know, you can imagine, and this is where like I'm sort of frustrated that the Fediverse seems adverse to search and crawling by default quite a bit. But like, you know, it just seems like an amazing platform for trying different precisely, it's like it's very difficult to search again in a social context and so on. I guess I wonder also which other alternative we have. I guess I'm thinking, you know, like the, so I guess what I dream when I search is like, and this is what I've been, you know, we've been trying to like sometimes prototype with our eyes seeing first, always Wikipedia, because I love Wikipedia. So, you know, if there's Wikipedia article, I never essentially, I never know, I don't want it to be up top. So this is why it's always up top of the hour. And the same for any sites, you know, you could say, a community will say, and I think Kaggy search also does this as a commercial offering is like you can pin sites. So they will always show up top and they have something really on. You know, like essentially we can replicate that as a community and the community aspect that I think makes it so that, you know, all these customizations we have, we can share and they can compose, right? The idea being that we can, maybe I can see, I will be happy to like search the web and see it as any of you sees it. Sort of like opting into like a conscious filter power to some extent that is very explicit and you know, easy to opt out of and so on, but I'm potentially useful. Yeah. Go ahead, Michael. Just gonna say, I mean, this is, and Jerry, you were sort of asking the question of like, where you've heard this, this is the, in a way, I mean, I think the trust network model of, you know, contextualizing everything that you see consensually by, you know, there's a liquid democracy, a potential liquid democracy aspect to it too, that you, you know, delegate your filtering on such and such a subject to the aggregate of these people you know and trust and it's different for a different subject. And so to the extent that you're creating a filter bubble, it's very conscious. And if your default is uncolored by somebody else's algorithm, I mean, seems to me the place that you want to start. I mean, I know that, you know, Brad de Graff's efforts right now around green check. I don't know if you know Brad or if you're familiar with that. I know you do, Jerry. But yeah, I know there are other people kind of working on that, but I mean, owning your social graph and wouldn't that be nice? And being able to, you know, denote your trust in other people on certain subjects for yourself allows, you know, allows to make things like that happen and really, really helping them. Let me link to Brad. Yeah, thank you. Because the green check stuff I don't know much about. Thank you. And this, another direction I'll discuss with Samuel, he's not here today, so I will just drop this thing or perhaps this something he could bring up is the, you know, the wiki search. Nothing like searching wiki, but like, you know, wiki like tools as a complementary to search. So imagine, you know, like the same as having Wikipedia at the top of the results, having like a wiki, you know, comment on some queries again shared by a community. This is sort of like, of course, again, going in the direction of what the hour is going to explore, which is, you know, seeing first what your friends or community has written about something before they move on to the greater well. Yeah, interesting. It's just to rewind for a sec. I have not heard the term liquid democracy before. Oh, it's a great one. It's a great one. So our friend, hold on, David Bovil was part of a liquid democracy kind of movement in Germany back some years ago. So he would know a lot about it. I think there's, there are other terms. I'm trying, I know that Colorado is doing an experiment with, it's sort of delegated authority. And I think there are other terms for it. Well, there are tons, yeah. There's basically sort of delegative methods of democracy. There's also proxy proxying in democracy. There's a bunch of other things. I've always really liked the idea that if I find somebody I trust in some domain, I could proxy my vote or at least my opinion over toward them, that would be fantastic. And I don't know how far liquid democracy has gotten. I mean, honestly, it's sort of the, it's really putting some traction on the urge that results in the retweet or re-post in the post Twitter era, that rather than just saying, yeah, what he or she said, you know, you can give your vote to that person on that subject and up their plow. And if you could actually do that in legislative contexts, be kind of amazing. Literally, I think Colorado is doing some stuff with that and the notion that you can prioritize issues such that rather than saying red, blue, and all that comes along with it, there's more of a, well, environmental issues are my primary concern. And I go this way on those subjects and then I feel less strongly about whatever hot button issue. And it also helps get things away from circling back to the, what Aaron was talking about, about how woke and weaponized and how death panels and all the other things that the world, you know, that getting things out of the hot button and flash point issues that divide you on one side or the other because those things become a lot of a priority. Like it's like, I don't think anybody would say, you know, I care more about, you know, I care more about the rights of transgendered people than I do about the price of groceries for my kids education or whether we're in a war or not, but. Which is the kind of mentions as well. Yeah. Yeah, I think like, if I may, I think like part of the curse of American politics is that it attempts to demand a hierarchy of priorities where most people do not form a hierarchy of priorities. They form like a mesh of priorities. Well, it's a system that we're trying to describe but the voting technologies or methods don't support system thinking. So you wind up trying to squish them down and you wind up trying to take an analytic framework where you separate one issue from the other, when the issues are very deeply intertwangled. Yeah, it's especially because like the brokenness of American politics in terms of the parties do not evenly represent actual political positions. We only have two parties and they're not actual, like political parties. They represent groupings of interests. And so like, as a result, you are driven into hierarchy of ideology because you realize that in your mesh of ideology, that mesh does not graph well onto one party or the other. And so therefore you must pick the hierarchy to decide which of the mesh of ideas is the one you use to decide who to vote for. But I mean, Aaron, I'm curious, do you think that it's like it behooves Republicans to make, to center wokeness and elevate it in the campaign hierarchy to an extent that would go beyond where anyone would put it in their real hierarchy? Maybe I misinterested you, but I thought I heard you saying it's sort of asking people to make a hierarchy when I think people would make a hierarchy that wouldn't put that very high, but it's being centered by someone else. And likewise, Democrats are wisely centering abortion on the Supreme Court and, you know, things. Right, I think it's not quite that. The political parties in the media go out of their way to center particular ideas as the top ideas within their hierarchy of ideology. And then you must match your highest hierarchy of ideology, idea priority to their hierarchy of idea priority, right? So if the Republican party creates a situation in which they present their hierarchy of ideas as wokeness being of the highest priority, then you have to look at your priority of ideas and say, okay, where is this on my hierarchy? And does it matter to me enough that I would vote for it or against it? And that allows them to divide the populace, right? Because it doesn't matter if most of the population would actually agree with most of the things that Republicans who are against wokeness are about, if they can manufacture a concept of wokeness and say, this is a thing you should be angry about, it doesn't even matter what the definition is, right? All they have to do is manufacture an item, put it on your hierarchy and hike it up the hierarchy high enough that you would then vote for them about it, right? There is no, the important thing to note about like wokeness in politics right now is there is no policy, right? Like there is no policy position for being anti-woke, it's just like, it's just really a byword for where Republicans contextualize a smaller government, right? That's what they are trying to, yeah, I know that doesn't sound like it, right? But how does anti-wokeness reveal itself in policy decisions? The answer is by shutting down government support for things that people want, right? Or programs that people want or support for DEI in corporate settings or any sort of interference with what the executive of corporations want to do that is perceived by the Republican party as somehow coming from some other stakeholder, right? The idea is to remove support for trans rights, it's to remove healthcare, it's to remove support for women's rights, all of this becomes bundled under wokeness. And people might not realize that that is really what they are voting for but the anti-wokeness policy position is remove government from the capacity to support societal change, right? And societal change requires government support to occur. So if I may, I'm gonna bundle a couple of things here because I've been taking notes in the chat. First, whoever yells louder shifts the stack for their people, the people who are listening to them. And unfortunately shifts the stack also in public discourse because the press responds. And so you see this happening all the time. And then does everybody know what DARVO means? Let me put a link in for DARVO. DARVO is an incredibly useful term. It means basically turn the abuse back on the abuser or rather the abuser turning the abuse back on that victim. DARVO is incredibly important. So when Fani Willis convict, indicts 19 people including Giuliani and the next day Giuliani says, this is a travesty. This is the end of democracy. This is the overthrow of government as we know it. You could take all the words that he just said and say, oh right, that is exactly what you and your colleagues are busy conspiring to do against the US. So they've taken the accusation and flipped it so that it in fact is the people trying to pursue justice who are committing that crime. And DARVO is one of the many different techniques for winning these discourses in public spears. DARVO is one of the things that makes it incredibly hard to police, govern, control, shape, reign in. Any of these kinds of galloping out of control kinds of spears, breaks of discourse. So DARVO is really good that way. And then I don't know that this is a smaller government thing. I think that what happened is Woke has become a very nice proxy for racism, homophobia, and a whole bunch of programs that the far conservative right just wants to run, which turn into more legislation. They're busy passing laws to restrict our rights and women's rights and everybody's rights. This is not less government. This is in fact government poking its nose into people's households, which is what I thought conservatives were not into so much. Right, it's the politics of... Yeah, so when I say small government, I mean the withdrawal of government from the support of social endeavors, which is different from them attempting to restrict social endeavors. That is still minimizing social endeavors. Yeah, so the withdrawal of affirmative action, for example. Right, right. And this is always what Republicans meant by small government all the way back to the Southern strategy, right? Like the idea is that when they say small government, what they mean is that the government withdraws its support for societal change. Thus the definition of conservative applying to the conservative party, right? It's the recall back to older values. But I think it's interesting to see, so Darvo conceptually is then, it's interesting to see it applied there because when you apply that strategy to politics, that's just the description of fascist politics, right? Like that's how fascist politics works because you must both minimize your opposition and paint them as an enormous threat, right? Which is how you get this idea that like in Republican politics, the claim that gay people are an incredible minority, but also there's nothing more important than oppressing them or the same with trans people, right? Like that is signature like fascist behavior. Yep, I'm really struck. I was in Berlin after the fall of the wall or at some point in the past and I walked into a part of town where there were banners hanging from light posts and the banner that I remember on one side it had a chess piece and then on the other side, it said in 1934, 33, Germany passed the law saying, Jews could not be members of chess clubs. And I'm like, that's exactly what happens. It's like the chess lobby is really small and isn't gonna like try to endanger its life to protect Jewish members of the chess club, but then you just crank the volume up, right? You start some place where there's no constituency and then say, look, we've already got a law and now we're just gonna make it apply to everybody. Thanks for the link to the or fascism essay. I didn't have it in my brain, but I had mention of it, but now I get to go read it and digest yet another piece of clever text. Ah, I'm drowning. I am drowning. It is very useful. It is a very useful processing tool, that essay. I am drowning in really good essays and videos and other sorts of things, which I faithfully try to dissolve and digest into my brain, et cetera, et cetera. That is a big reason why I don't get to the stuff that I'm supposed to be doing. Reading cloud. Let's put it on the list. My proposal, and I hear things like, let's start with a reading cloud. So we all read a, you know. Yeah, well, so my proposal like that is I call it five minute universities. Have you heard me talk about this? So we did a one OGM call like this. The idea is there's a bunch of stuff that some of us really care about and other people don't know very much about. So you get five minutes to explain whatever you know about this thing you really care about. And then we get five minutes to ask you questions. And then we bounce to the next one. So people volunteer to do a five minute university. It only goes 10 minutes. The session only goes 10 minutes long. If you wanna keep talking, grab that person at lunch or make a Zoom date with them or whatever else. And so I'll point to some in my, you know, they've got catalog in my brain. And I've posted a couple of these that are unfortunately a little longer than five minutes. I think I ran about eight minutes on the ones that I really like. But the idea is to make them very compact and to try to compress what you really got from it. And my favorite one, and this is my YouTube video that's gotten the most views, is about Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, back in 1944. I love how your cat is climbing up the couch there, Flansian, super cool. And a bunch of people, what other people get from The Great Transformation is different from what I got from The Great Transformation. And so I'd recorded a video about that. And I hope it's useful, but I get a lot of really nice comments in the comments section still to this day about, hey, thank you so much for doing this. So, if we help each other digest things and then just post them openly into the comments so that other people can get them, not just us on this little, little ditzy call, that wins. Because then that builds. If everybody, and then back to what Vee was saying sort of earlier in the call, my difference of opinion about The Great Transformation and yours, Flansian, or Vee's can be seen and then we can talk about that and tease out and together like how that might work. That's kind of cool. Yeah, if we were to slice up this call, if we were to actually look back on our assets in these calls and call out and quickly curate the segments where we say stuff worth remembering, that would be pretty cool. I would love it. How's that? I sort of assume we are all doing this individually in our various note systems. And the real thing we need is a way to unify our note systems, which is why we regularly talk about. Yeah. So this is, I mean, this is a fraction, but this, by the way, is in the Aguara of the link. Excellent. So this is a link Aguara. I just loaded the page for Felicia of the link in the Aguara of the link. And it usually almost hangs my browser. So it may hang your browser as well. You need to give it a while just because of the amount of stuff it loads, which I think is kind of cool. But of course, another way I think bugs are cool, but bugs are potential. Chaos. Yeah. So essentially, this is everything we have of the Felicia of the link in Relate. It's still like loading. It's like jumping around eventually it will converge. It's like a lot. And this we have a mass over, you know, well, this year and a half, I think. I think the Aguara of Flansom even have a bit more just because, you know, this Aguara of the link has some fewer possibilities. But just like touring it, you know, I mean to say. So it starts with like, you know, this is just like a node on Felicia of the link. The first one is actually a comment, a one-off comment on John Perry Barlow, which we made a song called and I just wrote down the name in a different node. So it showed up separate. So it always starts with John Perry Barlow, which I sort of like. Then we have like my own notes on what it is and, you know, the founding document that the Arameo Samuel shared with me when he invited me here before I met all of you. And he will start Relate. This is the page of Relate on the Felicia of the link. And then we have like the actual notes in a few ways. So this is actually the notes we have been taking. This is actually the notes from today, already live, of course, and what we have so far. It has a few goodies on top of the regular note-taking. Every time you mention an Aguara link or any link that we think it's Aguara like, it will just be transcluded for Ter Nielson. So for example, like we mentioned, liquid democracy, so liquid democracy just shows up. For example, this sub node on liquid democracy, you can click pull all and all the social media activity about liquid democracy just gets automatically transcluded. So it's sort of like, yes, so you can go recursive, but just like scrolling, we have a lot here. We discussed IPFS at some point. Here it is. We have different documents transcluded. We have a dog drop when Dan Whaley was here. And essentially you can scroll quite a lot. And like I said, like go, here we have like some spreadsheet. Actually, the original spreadsheet for the chart on tools is that just like, for me at least a nice reminder on, maybe we can follow up on that and maybe see where Matthew and Matthew and Pete were working on that one last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, like essentially, if nothing else, it's sort of like a, it looks like a list or like a website, but it's more like a tree. Right, it's like a kaleidoscope of nodes that folds in on itself whenever it needs to. Exactly, exactly. So yeah, I mean, this is just something to play with if you want, and you know, of course, you say like, as we are all also taking notes about these topics and so on, we can just add to this order of the link if you want, whatever else should be here, whichever other repository, you know, we can ingest. So then essentially, you know, we can keep it growing. And at least this is as an index or a potentially a search engine for everything related to the fellowship. Very cool, thank you. So what happens if you put a link to that page inside of our notes? The world collapses. Well, actually, I think I added a prediction or I have to do for that, but it may just recurse infinitely. Oh, there is information, thank you. I will know it now. So, it's kind of fun because it feels like we straight a bunch at the start at the top of the call, we were like going off in lots of different directions and we came right back to the thing we care about and the thing where we're each sort of working on, which is lovely. Yeah, it makes sense. What about doing the five minute, you call it a five minute university approach within the goals? You can like maybe... Yeah, we just have to pick topics and figure out what kinds of things we want to do five minute use about and then get volunteers who say, yeah, I'll do that one. Or we'll come up with topics that they'd like to do. Yeah. Easy enough to do. And so, a piece of it is five minute universities about other people's media. So, the one I just shared is about Polanyi's book. And it'd be interesting to do a five minute university on the Ur-Fascism essay by Echo, for example. But another way to do it is just take some idea you have about something you'd like to see done in the world and do a five minute university about that. Something that doesn't exist yet. That would be cool too. It'd be a more of a five minute proposal. Or something like that. But we could sort of mix those in. We did an OGM call where we had three or four. I think we had four five minute universities in the hour. And that was plenty. Like three was a, sorry, in the 90 minute slot. And three provoked very nice conversation for the rest of the 90 minutes. So, trying to do a full hour of six of them because the slots each take 10 minutes is probably too intense. Makes sense, cool. Do you have like a write-up of the concept somewhere? Yes, I will share it right here. I put up a wiki on my massive wiki page, I think. Let me just check to see if that link works. And I have it linked next to LightingTalks, of course. Yeah, here we go. Yeah, and it's actually in the hour there. Thank you, Jerry. Oh, good. There we go. So, this is how it looks there. Yeah, perfect. That was the page I wrote up to try to describe this before we did the OGM call on it. And here is the OGM call. Here is a brain link to the OGM call where we did the five-minute universities. Jerry, because you probably know the answer to this question, where does highfalutin come from? I actually don't know. That's a great question. Opus are pretentious. Many alternative spellings. Where's the etymology? Highfalutin? Yeah, highfalutin. Etymology is disputed. One theory is that it comes from the Yiddish word, hefalutin, which means extravagant language or nonsense. Another theory is that it comes from highflone. It originated as Yiddish slang in the early 19th century. It may have come from highfalutin or highflying. None of those are that satisfying. Highflying doesn't make sense to me, but maybe that's what makes it a foliage etymology. And there's a real one. Yeah. Grammarist has a nice page on it, which I'm gonna add to my brain now. I like that. I mean, it flies better with me as a kind of mispronunciation of a Yiddish word. Right. And it does. I mean, because it sounds a little it sounds a little like hillbilly, hillbilly. You know, if you put an apostrophe after that end, it sounds like it could be, you know, some kind of Americanism hillbilly talk, which doesn't really parse. I don't know. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. No word to obscure for us to chase down. That's interesting. I did not know it was a one word. I always assumed it was high and then like spelled high and thenfalutin. Now that you mentioned it, I'd never heard of any lowfalutin going on. You know, no. Or just plainfalutin. I have a collection of words that only exist in their opposite. Jennifer, too, has my posit list.