 This is OGM's weekly check and call for December, Thursday, December 16th, 2021. We are getting close, very close to the end of 2021, which alongside 2020 will be years that are remembered in infamy kind of. And it's nice to see you all. Hey, John, hey, Gil. Hello, Jerry. Excellent. I'm really here. There you are, poof. And there you've gone. That's amazing. How you can appear in vanish, it's crazy. It's para-physics. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or pata-physics, if anybody knows Howard Reingold. Or pata-physics. Yeah, exactly. Let's see if I've got anything on pata-physics. Yeah, pata-physics has an entry. I don't know Howard Reingold. Yeah, I don't know. What's the context? So we were talking about the strange physics of Gil's ability to appear in vanish in a moment. And that led us to pata-physics, which... Do we need to find, Jerry, please? Pardon? Pat, I've just put a link in the chat. It has a Wikipedia page, of course. Okay. Of course. Of course. Let me just see. What's today, OGM? I don't, for some reason. You what? I don't have a Wikipedia page. Oh, well, you should, for God's sake. I did, they took it down. They thought it was self-promotional or something like that. They thought I wrote it. Or it might also be the notability criterion, which you should hop right over. That's weird. So that means other people besides you should work on it. We should, huh. Do you have a link to the dead page? Do you mind putting that in the chat? We can see if anybody in OGM wants to go like... Yeah, I'll see if I can find it. Do CPR on it? Cool. And so I get poem of the day from poetry.com. And today's, this morning's poem was by Belle Hooks, who just passed away. And I'm inclined to actually read it to us because it's beautiful and a little sad. So I'm not sure I'm gonna make it through properly. But let me just offer a link and then I'll read the poem. It's called Appalachian Elegy, sections one through six. And I will take guidance on whether you like, you all like Appalachian or Appalachian or some other pronunciation. But I'm good with Appalachian. So let me read this as a way of starting today's call. Appalachian Elegy, sections one through six by Belle Hooks. And if all of you could mute, that would be helpful. Hear them cry, the long dead, the long gone, speak to us from beyond the grave. Guide us that we may learn all the ways to hold tender this land. Hard clay direct, rock upon rock, charred earth. In time, strong green growth will rise here. Trees back to life, native flowers pushing the fragrance of hope, the promise of resurrection. Such then is beauty surrendered against all hope. You are here again, turning slowly, nature is chameleon. All life change and changing again, awakening hearts steady moving from unnamed loss into fierce deep grief that can bear all burdens, even the long passage into a shadowy dark where no light enters. Night moves through the thick dark, a heavy silence outside near the front window, a black bear stamps down plants pushing back brush, fleeing manmade confinement, roaming unfettered, confident. Any place can become home, strutting down a steep hill as though freedom is all in the now, no past, no present. Earthworks, thick brown mud clinging, pulling a body down, a herd wounded earth cry, bequeath to me the hope ancestral rights to turn the ground over, to shovel and sift until history, rewritten, resurrected, returns to its rightful owners, a past to claim. Yet another stone lifted to throw against the enemy, making way for new endings, random seeds spreading over the hillside wild roses, come by fierce wind and hard rain, unleashed furies here in this touched wood, a dirge, a lamentation for earth to live again, earth that is all at once a grave, a resting place, a bed of new beginnings, avalanche of splendor. Small horses ride me, carry my dreams of prairies and frontiers where once the first people roamed, claimed union with the earth. No right to own or possess, no sense of territory, all boundaries placed by unseen ones. Here I will give you thunder, shatter your hearts with rain, let snow soothe you, make your healing water clear, sweet, a sacred spring, where the thirsty may drink animals all. Listen, little sister, angels make their hope here in these hills, follow me, I will guide you, careful now, no trespass, I will guide you word for word, mouth for mouth, all the holy ones embracing us, all our kin making home here, renegade, marooned, lawless fugitives, grace these mountains. We have earth to bind us, the covenant between us can never be broken, vows to live and let live. Beautiful, thank you. Thank you. I find myself wishing I had read more Bell Hooks and there's no reason to stop now, but she was an extraordinary poet and thinker. She will stop. Inhuman being. Yeah, exactly. About halfway through A Night Woman and it's a very tough thing to take in. It really gives me an amazing appreciation for the strength of the African American community and what they suffered, especially the women and she's just an amazing feminist writer. I figure I really need to be reading more black feminist writers to get out of my conditioning of being a middle-aged white guy and she opens up some amazing horizons in this book that just, and it's gut-wrenching and it's like, I can't believe people did this, we did this to these people. And that's what this whole thing about, we're not gonna teach this stuff in schools because we don't want kids to know. Yeah, and there's tremendous backlash against that right now under the umbrella of critical race theory, but it's really, I think, pushback against what you just said. It's amazing. So I have in my brain a non-white guy canon, which I would love any and all contributions to. I think Ken, you had- No, I see, yeah, I put that on, that was an answer to somebody's query on Facebook, wasn't it? They wanted books about non-white men and women. Exactly, so I'll put a link to this in the chat as well, but I've got a bunch of different books here from different people and probably I should add an entire woman. Yeah, that one was good. And I see you've got Healing Wisdom of Africa, also Melodoma of Somae passed last week. Yeah. I don't know if you heard that or not. No, I did not know that. Yeah, just, I'm on Michael Mead's mailing list and he's got a podcast honoring Melodoma. I think he died on the 9th. Wow, so here's Melodoma of Somae and his book, The Healing Wisdom of Africa is really cool. What's the gate for the non-white guy canon? What do you mean the gate? What earned something, a place on that? It's books mostly written by non-white guys, sometimes written by white guys, books that offer access and perspective on other people's lives. And the pain they go through and often what's caused by the white guys. Non-white and or non-guy. Yeah, exactly. And again, my favorite saying about this general topic is the privilege of privilege is not noticing the privilege. By which I think the implication is that here's the privilege of privilege is not noticing the privilege. And the implication of that is that white guys ought to spend a lot of time trying to immerse themselves in other people's shoes and live those perspectives in some way. So any and all guidance on this, opinions on this, disagreement with this, completely welcome. I'll stop the screen chair now. So when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression, which sort of is a nice summation of the pushback we're seeing. Totally and in sympathy with people who feel like white replacement or whatever else and also just not the white replacement people but other white folk who are protesting right now. I think to them, in particular to white men, a lot of progress, and I'll put that in air quotes, feels like loss. It just feels like loss. Loss of status, loss of privilege, loss of attention, loss of possibilities in the future, loss of, loss of, loss of. And they're not seeing this often as gain, as gain for society, as gain for possibilities, as gain, like everything feels like loss. And I'm reminded here that my mom toward the end of her life saw everything as loss. At one point, she couldn't drive her car. And at one point, we had to downsize her. And at one point, at what point she was not allowed to smoke anymore because they wouldn't replace her hip unless she'd stopped smoking for 30 days before surgery because it turns out that smoking gives you a 5% higher chance of complications after surgery and et cetera. But everything felt like loss, right? And I think that there's an opportunity here to change those scripts in some way that's interesting and maybe pretty deep. So this is not the topic I had broadcast yesterday for us to talk about, but it's a, I think it's an important topic for us to touch. Stuart, did you want to jump in? How'd she guess? I can just, I'm a reasonably good face reader. And you have that, I'm about to say something, kind of look, I mean, it's kind of there. So jump in. Thank you. Well, I'm sorry I missed the beginning of the conversation and what the specific prompt was but I can fill in the blanks, I think. When you start to look at this whole milieu with a broader perspective and think of it in terms of 1619 and think about slavery and how people have been oppressed and we're still living in some ways in a de facto segregated world though we've made lots of movement forward there's still a lot of people that are just holding on to that paradigm. One of the things that pops up for me immediately is I couldn't grasp why and how 75 million people voted for Donald Trump. I just couldn't grasp it. And then when I read the book Cast, which equates the US culture with Germany and India, I got it, it was all about racism and it's about people's need, especially white men's need to be better than someone else as a way of enhancing their own status. And so there it is. And my kind of inquiry is always, so how is it that we can get individuals to embrace and change their thinking? Otherwise we're gonna have more and more attacks on the US Capitol because of people's level of general frustration and not being able to accept that there are a lot of people of different races that are just as smart, just as accomplished, just as concerned about the same things that white people are concerned about. And I don't wanna distract from what you just said because it's really important, but I will add that. I don't know that everybody voted for Trump, not everybody, but I don't know that the majority of people voting for Trump were voting because racism, although it's gigantic. I just posted a link to a playlist of videos that I posted about dealing with Trump. And one of the things I believe there is that many people voted for Trump because they thought our system is screwed, the system is rigged, and we need to push a fire ship into the system. And if that fire ship and his family and everybody else make a lot of money breaking the system, that's okay with us because the system is so far gone that I don't see a good future for my kids or whatever else. And there's racism is sort of next to that and overlapping a lot, but I think that was just a huge, huge force. And in fact, some people who would have voted for Bernie went over and voted for Trump because Bernie was like, the system is broken, we need to really sort of fix it. And that's just my own belief system there. Yeah, I mean, I don't just to finish that thought, I don't disagree with that, but when I try to do just some calculations, some gross calculation, X number of people who were one issue voters who voted because of abortion or who voted because of somebody, the reasons that you mentioned, and you start to chunk that in, there was still a big number I think that were just racists. I agree. And Trump's election was like running a magnet over the beach and like racists just stood up and said, here I am. And it's like quite amazing. And one of the weird silver linings of the Trump administration and Trump's presence in life is that he has caused America's subtle, often hidden and ignored racism to just pop right to the surface and go, hey, we are right here and look how grim this is. And for people of color, they're like, dude, this has always been this way, you're just not seeing it. So there's this visibility. It's as if somebody sprayed the invisible thing with purple, fluorescent color and said, hey, look, look, this is right over here. Sorry, Gil, for thanks for being patient. You're muted. No worries, Jerry. I think what you said is absolutely true. It's kind of disclosing to what's already there and nobody talks about the crazy uncle and the attic. But to me, it's a real oversimplification to tie Trump to racism purely. And a couple of things on that and then I want to come back to just, well, the prior conversation about racism. Couple of things to keep in mind, 75 million people voted for Trump, 75, 76 million people voted for Hillary or 77 or whatever it is and about 150 million people who were eligible to vote didn't vote. I think it's a really important stat on this election. And it speaks to both the, you know, the Dems failure to turn out another million or two people which would have swung the election and also the disaffection in the country overall. The Bernie phenomena was really interesting because it wasn't that Bernie voters went over Trump. It said Bernie and Trump were to some extent speaking to the same constituency. They were both addressing the disaffected working class in the United States in the way that Hillary and others weren't doing. And there was resonance there. And for Bernie, it was mostly about economics, not about race and people, you know, people who you might call racist would have voted for Bernie had. He probably did in the primaries. We may have, may well have in the general. And I emphasize that because it feels to me that it gives a lot more opening than the purely racism interpretation. While you access and build coalitions across differences and perspectives. So I think that there's that the, there was a piece, I mentioned it yesterday and my call, can you have heard this? But I've got to find where it is a really eloquent piece maybe in the Atlantic from a conservative, a traditionally conservative Republican. Not a Rockefeller, like really conservative conservative Republican who's disaffected with the libertarian crazies in his party, but also presented a surprisingly reasonable argument for Trump and Trumpism. I say surprisingly reasonable, it was not, it wasn't easy for me to dismiss it. I could disagree with it, but I couldn't dismiss it as nuts. It's like, oh, here's an interesting point of view. Let's look at that. So there's, for me, that gives a lot more fluidity in the American political landscape. So I want to say that back to the pervasive, ugly, underbelly, I'm continually shocked. I mean, I didn't grow up ignorant of this stuff. When I was a civil rights kid in the 60s and et cetera, I'm continually shocked at how deep and how ugly this is in this country. Even though I know I'm just like blown away again and again at that. And people talk about the possibility of civil war. It's been civil war since the civil war in black communities, including large-scale massacres and the rest of it. But the thing about white men needing somebody to look down to, that may be innate and that may also be generated. There was, in the middle 18th century, there was a thing called Bacon's Rebellion in the United States, which was a white and black working class rebellion against landowners. It's not much talked about, but one of the responses from that was a cranking up of racism as an intentional strategy to keep that unity from ever happening again. So there may be a latent human tendency to disparage the other, but there's also a way that it becomes useful to protect privilege in very active ways. The, I just wanted to add that was the other thing. So, you know, Stuart, to what you said, I've been feeling a lot lately. I've been thinking a lot about what I'm calling the battle for the story of the world. For me, it was one way of making sense that I've written right now. And I grew up, you know, I was a kid in the 1950s in America and white communities on the East Coast. My only contact with black people was a young woman who was like a, not made, but what we would now call au pair, I guess. So, you know, it's a very insulated world, but there was a story in that world and the story now is very different. And you know, Stuart, you said people don't change. People do change. The gen, you know, the attitudes in this country around race are to a large degree very different than when I grew up. The degree of contact, the degree of mixing, you know, my nieces just do not see skin color in the way that I do. It's just not there in their, it's not they make different interpretations about it. They don't even notice it in the way that I still notice it but have different interpretations than my dad did who had different interpretations than the people he worked with. Some of what I think is happening is people trying not liking the story we're in and wanting to flee back to the other one. And normally narrative shift in a multi-dimensional cultural process and here we're having people trying to enforce the narrative shift by saying, you cannot teach our kids these things that actually happened. You know, denial of history takes us back to 1984 and all that. And just a side note there, Rebecca Solnit's new book Orwell's Roses added to your read list. It's a very... Orwell's Roses? Orwell's Roses. Solnit is just a remarkable, remarkable. I have not, I did not know she had this book out. There's, it just came out. There's a dialogue with her and Heather Cox Richardson, the historian. Also, if people don't know her, you wanna check her out. She does pretty much a daily debrief. Subscribe to her, yeah. Subscribe to her newsletter. So they have a dialogue. And one of the things that Solnit says is that it's called Orwell's Roses because for all of his focus on, you know, the trials, the travails of the working class and the darkness of the, you know, the impending future that we now seem to be moving into, he was an avid gardener. And he found great joy in gardening and roses and so forth. And he would be attacked by people on the left who said that flowers are bourgeois. That's amazing. Just, well, amazing, but not surprising people left at that time. And anyhow, so just a vote for the multi-dimensionality of human beings. Yeah, yeah, thanks Gil. I'm taking too long on the platform, I apologize. That's all right. It was, I love what you're saying. It's a question from Phillip. How do you read the views and learnings by Robert Reich? I love him. Reich is another prolific treasure. He's writing long pieces almost every day. I'm sure to answer, I largely subscribe to his perspective. Thanks, before I go to... For those who haven't seen it, have a look. He's writing, he's become a multimedia artist. He does short films, he does cartoons. He's working in many different dimensions in ways that are very accessible and I think deserves a wider audience. Yeah, and he's very accessible and also loves to pun about how short he is. He's like... How does the map look like, Jerry? If you put up Robert Reich. I will show you right now. In fact, I just turned to Robert Reich. I see some multi-artists. And there we are. And I don't have him under a multi-artist, but I have him under the Clinton administration, the Carter administration, teaching at Brandeis, an economist, writes, co-founded the American Prospect, I think. And then here are some of his books and some articles by and about him. But including, for example, videos like this, The System Who Rigged It, How He Fixed It, right? And in which he says, the real conflict is between democracy and oligarchy. And I don't remember having put this in my brain, but there it is. The brain has a mind of its own. Doesn't it? Which I like. I'm a big fan of this thing running off on its own. And before turning to Eric and Klaus, I wanted to add a link to... So we're doing Weaving the World. I'm a little bumpy and slow in standing it up, but I've got four interviews recorded that'll turn into the first four episodes of Weaving the World, a podcast to try to Weave the World. And I'm looking to book now some mapping sessions, some composting sessions we're calling in about these calls. But one of these first four episodes will be this call that I did with Daryl Davis, who is one of my heroes. And what I've just put in the chat is a link to the Unlisted video because this is the raw video. And I intend to put an intro and an outro on it and make it look and smell like a podcast. But it's wonderful. And he's the jazz musician who has a garage full of Ku Klux Klan robes. And the conversation was lovely. Learned stuff about his background that was quite amazing and on from there. So let's go Eric and Klaus. Yeah, hi. So for people who came in, we've been talking about a different topic and I'm just gonna give my two cents. So I was surfing Jerry's brain yesterday and I found the TED Talks by April and Kate Rayworth. So I watched those two. April was giving her introduction to Flux and to the background. And I think that her perspective is very useful if you're looking to help people deal with the changes that we're facing or different attitudes that we're trying to promote. So at Kate Rayworth is doughnut economics and I'm not getting it all yet, but it seems to make sense. There's other economic models. I got that book Thrive. So I was flipping through it, various authors commenting. It's just an interest of mine. Now, I grew up in Canarsie in Brooklyn and before I was born in 1970, there were issues of busing interracials in the schools. So there's a book out there named Canarsie. Now, when I was around 30, I decided on my own just to sponsor a child in Africa through Save the Children. And that experience opened me up a totally different way of thinking. A little girl, eight years old, lived in poverty in Malawi where they have overcrowded schools. And so, I mean, my money was pooled with other donors to help the communities that they were serving and their goals to help them become independent. But just opening up a new perspective to their traditions, how they go through some kind of initiation ceremony at a certain age and change their name. And this girl had lost her mother, but she had like four siblings. So very interesting perspective. And let's see. I just made notes as I was thinking here. You bet, you bet. I do have some notes when we get to the topic we wanna discuss, but... We're gonna head back to. Yeah, okay. Yeah, sure, I'll stop for now. Thanks, Eric. Mr. Mager. Yeah, I wanted to bring in some perspective from my somewhat different quarantine. I mean, I grew up in Germany, I was born 1949. And my generation is like deeply traumatized to have learned what happens, you know? And because after the war, the ally forced the Germans to podcast on TV these incredible footage is that the Nazis had filmed. So I was unsupervised as a little boy because my parents had a restaurant. So they only like one TV channel, I think they played on two, right, black and white. And so I watched people lined up and moved to have the arm dress and then it was a big hole and got shot in the head and fell into this mass grave. And I mean, just incredible, incredible image that are really, I mean, searing yourself, searing themselves into your mind. And then you understand how these experiments get done, right, on inferior races. So the truth is when inferior race, the gypsies, you know, these marginalized communities and the justification to do these incredible things came out of that. But then when I retired back into the US come from working overseas, we did my wife and I went all the RV and we traveled across the United States. And I wanted to see all the historic impressions, you know, how did the United States really get formed? So you go to the Alamo and as a European, you think this is historic site, I mean, give me a break, but then you read the story on why this is such a historic site. And then you understand, you know, that Napoleon appointed his brother to be the king of Spain and told him to get the hell out of Texas. So the Spaniards withdrew from Texas. So you see the deep penetration of Europeans, you know, into this American life. So this mess started with the Europeans immigrating into this country and unimpeded, you know, where plundering and raping. And, you know, you go down, you travel to South America and you see the story of how the Spaniards came into Peru, you know, and dealing with the incursions. I mean, unbelievable cruelties, right? The unspeakable atrocities they were conducting there. But then I traveled to China and started working in China. And I remember I was in Inner Mongolia negotiating a COVID alliance agreement with a dairy company there. And the contract that I had, the director of marketing was my working partner. And we are in Mongolia, in Inner Mongolia. So I asked his assistant when they're telling us their life stories and I asked, so Mr. Sunso, so he is Mongolian because he was born and raised in this Mongolian city. And she just lost it. He's Han Chinese, right? I mean, the idea that someone in this position could be Mongolian was just, it was an insult, right? I mean, I had inadvertently insulted them by asking whether he is Mongolian instead of Han Chinese. So you look at the Chinese that deeply raises people, incredibly, you know, that superiority idea of the Han Chinese against the Uyghurs, against the Tibetans, against the Mongolians, against that is completely race-based. Then you go to Turkey and you see how they're treating the Kurds, right? So this idea of racial superiority, I think originates with tribal memories, right? Coming through historic events where tribes would seek advantage over other tribes and so on. So it's a deep-seated issue that is embedded in our culture, in our species, I would argue. I mean, I have the weirdest experiences, I mean, I felt like a king going to China. I was one guy, I hired 1,800 people opening up Hong Kong, Disneyland. I was the only Westerner, right? I mean, my chef was Swiss. The two of us were the only expats, the rest were all Chinese. And then when I traveled into China and around the area, you never knew whether you were being created because you worked for Disney or whether there's this white guy, you know, he's German, he's American training. So it was a very strange experience to have this sense of being valued for something other than your work just because you're a white guy with this kind of background. So it's a universal condition, you know? And in America, we better shut up criticizing the Chinese for anybody really, because my God, I mean, we have issues here that we're unwilling to solve. I'm just saying, this is, I mean, you go to Myanmar, you know, and then they're eradicating their Muslim population now. So there is this tribal instinct that we haven't been able to get behind us yet. That's sort of my life experience. Yeah, Stuart. Yeah, just quickly, a couple of thoughts. I was out for a walk before I got on the call this morning and I saw a flock of birds. And it triggered thinking about why birds of similar ilk fly together in formation. And so it's just an example of how programmed we are to be attracted to and congregate with like people. That being said, as humans with some degree of consciousness and awareness and capacity for reflection, I think that the growth step, the learning step is to realize the knee-jerk reaction we have about being attracted to like kind and to steps beyond that. I was designing a webinar this week and working with a colleague on the design of it. And then we thought about two other people to invite in to be on this panel. And I looked at that and I said, because the American Bar Association who like to have diversity in their panels, it's almost a requirement. And I said to these about these two new people, oh, but they're both white. Yeah, they're one of each gender, but they're both white. And then I realized, oh, the colleague that I'm working with Phyllis happens to be black. And I just said to myself, my goodness, am I making progress here? Did I not see her as a black person that I just see her as a competent individual? And what I wanted to say about Robert Reich, I think one of the things that he kind of is so aware of is that to some degree, some great degree, it's a class and income disparity, not so much a racial disparity. Thanks. Thank you all for this conversation. We were 36 minutes into the hour and weren't intending to go in this direction, but Bill Hooks died and here we are. So thank you for that. And I would love to head toward the topic Eric had suggested and a couple of us on the call here were on the Friday lunch at the archive where I was the guest. And I was just hoping that maybe we could sort of check in together to put the issue on the table because part of this question, most of you are probably familiar with the Internet Archive. It is one of the modern marvels of the world as far as I can tell, in my own pantheon, Brewster Kale, its founder will be seen as the Ben Franklin of our era because Ben Franklin started public libraries and a bunch of other kinds of stuff. And Brewster has that same exact instinct and has created like massive interesting things and has performed kind of business jiu-jitsu to make these things stay alive and get lift and all that and it's just amazing to me. So the question at hand, I'll just start it and then pass it to you, Eric, if you don't mind. The question is, what sorts of synergies or connections could there be between the archives work and OGM? And that's part of what I talked about. I sort of presented both my own work in 24 years of feeding this brain thing, but then the birth of OGM and the goals of OGM and the dynamics of OGM and we kind of left at the end of the conversation this open question about how might we collaborate? What could we do together? So I'll just pause there and pass it to Eric. Hey, thank you. So this morning I thought of four questions I'm going to paste in the chat to help the people who need some structure. So I just pasted them in now. And I'm going to give a little intro. So for me, I first learned that the Internet Archive was more than the Wayback Machine from Jason Scott. He did a presentation for Kansas Fest, which is an annual event for the Apple II community. And then I explored the archive. A lot of Apple software is on there and you could run it within the browser and then there's a lot of music. And then I used it to find some research materials when I was looking at Ted Nelson's work and Jeff Raskin's work. And then I found Open Library and I read a book online. So there was a project through Kansas Fest to have Ted Nelson's junk mail scanned. So it was amazing is that Ted collected material where you send in a reader service card and they send you a lot of stuff from a company. And he did this for about 30 years and you have some amazing print material. So there was a project proposed by Kay Savits and what he did was he organized volunteers to scan materials. And then I contributed to that. So I donated and it was completely funded by donations and now it's up there. It's a Ted Nelson junk mail collection. So when it came down to looking how I wanted to use the archive. So I contacted Jason Scott and he told me some specific things like for documents he wants a zip file of TIFF files and scan it at 600 DPI. And then for software there are certain tags you could add so that it runs in an online emulator. And then I sent them a box of my old floppy disks and then he did a Twitch stream showing how he's archiving all those disks and then he returned them to me. And then I found that I could use the archive for my podcasts. I had MP3s of an internet radio show that I did in 2009. And then there's another person who I helped with a radio show and that person's passed away but his stuff is on the archive. And I found that I could help a nonprofit doing weekly recordings to archive them. And since I'm using some storage and bandwidth I donate to the archive every year. And let's see. And then I found like some CD-ROMs I had which had podcasts from 2004. So I sent them to so Jason set up an SFTP account for me and I was able to upload them. And then he did a deduplication and published the collection. And then Jason does these Twitch streams so I was able to ask some questions like about archiving VHS tapes. So what I'm really desiring are a few things. So like some utilities so people can check if an item they own is in the archive. I know that there's an ISBN lookup for open library so you could see if any books that you have are in the library and maybe just some improvements in the user experience to help people find answers to their questions about the archive. And maybe some initiative to help people who are downsizing to figure out what they can donate to the archive and where they could drop it off. I don't know if there's any initiatives to have some local drop off points for media that can get to the archive. And then maybe there's some creative projects to build awareness of what's available in the archive. So in terms of OGM some things I see possible are archiving audio video materials that would be outside of any commercial platform like YouTube or Facebook. Sharing of work currently being done and plans for the future with the archive people and just some informal connections with people who share common interests maybe some special interest groups with the people we talk to. And I'll leave it there. Thanks Eric. Anybody thoughts, comments? Mark I want to pass you the floor in a second to also offer your perspective but I want to wait for a second. Any thoughts or comments I want Eric just said? If not go ahead Mark let's build on that. Boy Eric that was a lot of things and I usually write things down. I did not at the moment. Starting backwards boy thank you. Thank you for your donation. We have raised $9 million this donation season. Thanks for your support and our donation season isn't over. We've close to reached our goal for the and we have a great team who works on outreach and connecting with libraries, connecting with people, connecting with the world of people who want to make the internet a safe place to live. A non-creepy place, a place that we deserve to have as a resource for humanity. That's why I'm there. That's why a lot of us are there. And it's not a perfect place by any stretch of the imagination. I won't talk that much about how my job is really stressful, which is UX, user experience. How do we support people who are blind, who have disabilities, who are different in terms of their cognition, autistic people, and their response to different colors and different ways of having energy or high energy or low energy. And basically I fix bugs and I'm really good at finding problems and I find more problems than I can fix. So enough about me. Eric, we have boxes sent to us every day that arrive by FedEx and UPS that contain books for us to scan. I'm talking personally with a number of different people in their 80s who basically want to put their life's work up on the archive. And the best advice that I get when I talk to people above me is tell them to use the upload button. The upload button is always there on the home page and every other page. I may not agree with that as a programmer and somebody who it's difficult to use. People naturally don't understand what metadata is. Boy, somebody could really rewrite the upload instructions and help people with the metadata. And we've talked about this as the people who are responsible for designing and implementing that feature. I've been in there three years. We've talked about it for three years. It hasn't really gotten that much better. Please, John Kelly has his hand up. I don't know if he has a question for me or a comment, but I wanted to note, Eric, that I didn't get to everything you said. You said a lot. And I'm going to listen to the recording and write it down. And hey, I'm informal. I'm not the formal Internet Archive person. Jerry knows would be Mark Graham, certainly Brewster-Kale. And there are other folks who are happy to listen. Over to John. Before passing the mic to John, I just wanted to put two things in the conversation. One is that a standard fair for the Friday lunches at the archive, and it happened this last Friday, was a fellow who was standing in a physical warehouse full of books, just glowing, because there were shrinkwrap pallets of books behind him that didn't work, of books that are not in the archive yet that had been donated to the archive. It's not a small crowd. So what you see a lot, sorry Gil, I'm going to mute you for a second. So you see collections coming in, physical collections. And then at the archive, sort of around the corner in the next building, there are scanners and people scanning, and there's the automation, and there's like microphone scanning, and all kinds of really sophisticated stuff to try to make faithful copies of those works when they come in. And then offsite, and I remember passing, pretty sure it was the archive thing, my mom used to live in Point Richmond across the bay from San Francisco. And occasionally I would drive by a warehouse that was basically where a lot of books that had been scanned were being sent and stored. So there's like all these interesting sequences, never mind the copies of the archive that are mirrored around the world and all that. So that's one thing I want to say. And then the second thing was, I'm hoping to tune this conversation a little bit toward, might there be an OGM-y layer that plays in or around the archive? Might we be able to help the archive, not just be the stored record of stuff in different places, but also opinions, conversations, logics, other sorts of things that are sort of the funny little layer of fungus that we're really interested in here. And that might be a good moment to pass to John because John and Doug and Vivek Kaltiasing have been working on something that is an idea of attaching some things to news items, sort of kind of not metadata, but links to going deeper for news items, a way of contextualizing news items. And I might have misrepresented that, but with that, over to you in the booth, John. Okay. Thank you, Jerry. And thank you, Mark and Eric for all those ideas. I'm a little bit torn because, I mean, the Internet Archive is doing all these things. And just like Jerry said, you see something like that going on. You say, wow, this is valuable. I'm really glad this is happening. If I had lots of money, I would donate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And at the same time, there's this other thing that says, well, what's the particular nuance that might be missing? And what's the particular skill set that OGM could bring to an effort? And what else is going on in the world of sensemaking that we ought to pay attention to? So there are a couple of different sources here. There was the Aspen Institute has an RFP out due January 10 for ways to combat misinformation, disinformation, lots of work going on there. Good work, bad work, crazy work. It's all, it's huge going all the time. Doug had earlier in a different context come up with this idea that one of the problems with headline news or 24 hour news is you get this, this is what's happening and then you don't get the context. And even if you are the kind of thinker who would ask just instinctively, what's the context of that? What else is going on there? Would not necessarily be able to bring it up. So what if someone did some of that work for you in a non presumptuous way? What if someone said, well, here's the article that came out today, but here's the article that came out last week about the same topic. And here's the article that came out perhaps sometime in the last, you know, what week to months range. And here's the longer piece. Here's the thought piece that appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker somewhere. And here's a book about this topic or that would inform this topic. And maybe here's a movie that you'd want to look at. And all that is this kind of sense making stack that backs up the chosen current Today News article. So that's the idea in a nutshell. And I think there's a couple of really interesting spins from this idea. One, it would be worth doing. It would be worth having. I don't personally, I don't think Aspen Institute is going to go for this because it's not glitzy. It's not techie. It doesn't use software. Because as conceived, it's kind of like a couple of humans like us divide up the work. We take an article. We say, OK, what's the one from last week? What's the one? How about a book? We have a little discussion, blah, blah, blah. And then we publish the stack for the current article. OK, that's a possibility. Do we brand that as an OGM thing? Maybe if it's helpful. I was playing with the idea this morning. I was getting this idea that how they have these contests and they have the long list and the short list for the book prize and all these kind of things. And you could even get a, we're never going to get to the level of the Nobel. But there's a whole trail of speculation about what's going to get into the, what's going to be linked? Who's going to win the Nobel in physics? I mean, that's a big question. A lot of people are interested. A minor, minor sports trivia question is what's going to be in the stack behind this article that says Facebook did X. And just by the way, there's a something on Clubhouse called Tech News Around the World and Tyler Kohn, I think his name is, does exactly this kind of speculation. He, here's the news today. Here's what the guy who wrote that article didn't pay attention to. Here's why that's not good journalism. I mean, that's just a big part of Tech News Around the World. So these are all just, these are ideas and resources. Let's consider them fertilizer and generate new ideas. From them and see where it goes. Thanks, John. And I'm just realizing that Jamie Joyce would be lovely to have in this conversation with the Library of Society and things like that. I was about to say the same thing. Yeah, thank you. Doug, did you want to jump in and lay around top of that? Unmute myself here. Well, like any idea, it's got lots of details that are important. But the key is that you come to a screen and it's got columns and rows. Each column starts with a hot news item from the day. And they're probably a maximum of six, so it takes some discretion. In the column on the spreadsheet underneath the topic is, well, the topic, of course, is a link to an article. So there's no problem with copyright because it's just a link. Doug, so John shared the spreadsheet with me. I've got it open in a tab. May I, do I have permission to share it into the? Sure. Yeah. Good. So while you're talking, everybody can see what you're talking about. Okay. So the key thing is the column, starting with today's story, then in the cell underneath is a link to yesterday's story about the same topic. Then under that, a link to maybe the very first story about this topic underneath that is a link to a magazine article which spells out in more detail what the issues are. Notice the intent here is not to be complete. It's to be suggestive with things that anybody who's concerned with this top story would want to know. And in particular, it was designed to be a resource to congressional researchers and to journalists. When a story gets old, it moves over to the far left as an archive which is chronological of all the things that have ever been a story. So anyway, I think you probably get the idea. It's very simple. We did an experiment with trying to fill out a column and it takes about 20 minutes from the top article down to a relevant book. So that's the idea. Thanks, Doug. Anyone with thought would you like this, use this? Should somebody do this? Would this be helpful? Anyone? Is the top story of the day the news item itself or is the top story covering that news item in the New York Times or the Washington Post or Reuters or how do you handle multiple interpretations like that? Well, the first thing is not to give the illusion that you're being comprehensive. You're being suggestive. People who are concerned about this topic could learn from this column. And the top is the name of the story and a link to it. That's it. So is that link... Who chooses where that link goes? Because that link could go to Newsmax. It could go to the New York Times. It could go to Reuters. And that matters a huge amount in whether somebody's even going to look at it. It does. And there's no hint here that this is comprehensive or that there's an algorithm that's making a numerical judgment about it. This is good stuff. You're making an editorial judgment. So are you going to always go to the Times or are you going to rotate it? Or what's how are you deciding that? I'd vote for rotation, but let's have other ideas. Yeah, it'd be rotation but not mechanical. It would be what seems to be the best story about this. So there's nothing stopping someone from inventing a news service and recruiting 12 people to test this out for a week and turning something out. Like news services abound. I have a huge collection of different kinds of news services that are in my brain. And this is a relatively simple experiment to try manually, just to do the sneaker net, basically style, give it a whirl. And then I think the point of view question, like which articles are cited and who would read what is really interesting. But then there's another piece here, which is like I'm getting this feeling that we're kind of navigating up down around. And for example, a long, long, long time ago in the early days of the InnerTubes, I had this wish list item for press releases. I was like, why are press releases so frickin' stupid? Why don't press releases have a link to the product being talked about and a link to previous press releases and a link to the history of that product? And like why aren't press releases actually linky and useful? And they're not. They're still to this day, I get press releases that are plain text and it's just like seriously people. Are you trying not to be helpful on purpose? Because you delete them. They're not interesting or useful. Now good writers make linky text and give you context and why I wrote this paragraph and so forth. So here we're sort of talking about context around an article. And it seems to me like one of the links here is let's link up to the timeline. And it's almost I'm getting this feeling of a paratrooper sort of linking up to the wire before you jump out of the plane, jump out of the airplane. But the timeline is what happened yesterday and all of that. But it's just kind of a timeline of a mess of articles. And then you need to pick what was the previous article. Do you mean the previous article by this writer, the previous article in this publication about this topic? Like previous article is equally as controversial as what you started with. Then there's this whole idea about take me to the broader focus on the context of this topic. And then you might curate a couple of really great, I think that's what you mean by magazine articles, which is like, hey, here's somebody who actually said, this is the bigger picture folks. But the bigger picture looks different depending on which politics and which perspective you're looking in on it. So maybe comparing those bigger pictures is interesting, I don't know. But it seems like one is linked up to the timeline of the info torrent. Another is linked out to the context of the bigger picture. And those are the, to me, those are the gestures is timeline, context, and something else. So that we can, and then maybe a link to, hey, here's a frothy discussion going on right now on a Discord server or on a conversational forum someplace about this topic. If you'd like to jump in or something like that. And then back to how might OGM sort of fit this and so forth. And then here's a mind map that three people have created that might be really useful to you in mapping the issues around this topic or a debate proposition with arguments pro and con or any number of other visualizations of that context. So those, all those things come to mind around this. Over to you, Michael. Yeah, I was just going to say we were talking a little bit in the chat. I think Gil, I can't remember if it was, I think Gil was saying, you know, he was, he was missing Pete on this call and, and then also known Chomsky and I think that we all, you know, have this wish that I think John and Doug, what, what you were talking about seems great. It does have the challenge of the necessary editorial staff that needs to be chosen to do that thing and who is it and how do we find that person and we're waiting for that person or people as opposed to with a group like OGM and many, many, many more people saying, I don't know, you were Jerry in the chat mentioning the knitting books. Well, you know, somewhere out there, I mean, I actually know a few of them. There are people who are lifelong knitters and really know their shit and have a historical context and for them to pick through this like book dump and say, yes, and this and, you know, that's all that person might feel moved to do, but they are contributing to this knowledge sharing like valuation of all the stuff that's in the Internet archive and likewise articles as they come in. Yeah, somebody's going to say, yeah, this, this really relates to this Newsmax article or leave a comment that has a perspective that's straight out of Newsmax, but, you know, to add that metadata to as many objects as people are interested in adding it to and then be able to filter based on it is so much richer a resource than the, I love the Internet archive and the problem I have with it from an interface point of view is it really is digging in the stacks and there's not, you know, the way to take advantage of the people of like mind or mind more advanced than yours on a subject you don't know about who've come before you and poured through those stacks and said, hey, look here, look here. You know, that collective interface is something that could be built very incrementally and folks like us and folks not like us importantly, you know, are people who could do that. And so creating the means for that seems critical. Mark's waving and I'm really curious about... Mark, go ahead, Jimbin. Please, the best way you can help the archive is by use cases and what you want to do. I had some conversations yesterday about my career. I used to be a consultant. I would in enterprises from small companies to large companies, Microsoft and AT&T. And my satisfaction and work was solving problems for people and the joy I got was people go, wow, you solved this for us. You saved us, you know, 10 hours a day. You understood our problem. You created a solution. Boom, it was there. As a product person now in the team where there's millions of people who are using this, I don't talk to people. I hate that. I'm trying to figure out how to change that, what to do. And we had a meeting about basically how to improve the internet archive where we're basically talking about, okay, what kind of graph directed random or maybe, you know, Jack Park brought up the notion of topic graphs. And, okay, do we wish to basically have outside curators come and say, you know what, here's a basic ontology. Basic ontology. Here's how science connects to literature. And here's, you know, books over here in literature. Here's books over here in science. And basically have a crowd sourced. And that would be viewed also people say, you know, you like this book, you might like that book, which is a little more unstructured, structured versus unstructured kind of thing. Anyway, the point is what do you want to do and raise your voice and contact us. That is what we're looking for in terms of the next, you know, how does the internet archive become the internet's library? How do we reach the uses? I'm sorry, reach the great amount of stuff that is stored there. And hopefully we'll be stored there, you know, forever for free if we can project that fox. Keep it going. Whatever forever is these days. Yeah, thank you, Michael. Yeah, thank you. Ken, then Leif and John. So the thing that really caught my attention was one of the last things Michael said, and it goes to what, you know, when I think about what OGM is. And when I came, OGM came out of inside Jerry's brain. And, you know, this whole idea of historical context that Jerry's got an amazing ability to provide context for people on things that they're simply ignorant of. And so, you know, the archive has amazing, vast capacity as Gil just put in the chat, you know, and how could we develop an OGM or OGME layer of pointing people towards context. I want to know about this. What can you tell me that I need to have as background so I can make good decisions? And to me, I know very little about the technical metadata storage and stuff, but I do know about how to create conversations for people of, you know, if you want to know something, you want to talk to some people who've got background on this so you can figure out, you know, where you want to direct your attention. And so I'm really curious what it would look like for OGM and, you know, that archive to partner in creating such a thing. But would that actually look like in terms of practical stuff? I love that. One way to try to apply some shorthand to what you said and what's kind of in the air here is how do we help people save time to improve their perspective? I don't know if that's the right language or simple enough language, but it's directionally okay. So I think that's a really interesting issue here because Michael, you said it's like combing the stacks. Absolutely. And the stacks, like one of the things we miss from not visiting libraries and even bookstores anymore is like, you're looking for this kind of book, but look what's over here, right? It's the serendipity of what got shelved next to what. And there's actually an art project, the Society for Missed Sheld Books or something like that, which intentionally moves books around inside of bookstores and libraries. I'll look them up, but it's a cute hack on increasing serendipity on our lives or whatever else. But so how do we get to that perspective? And also, I like nothing better than somebody who knows some domain really well, pointing me toward where to look, what to do, and giving me three sentences that shift how I see. And those three sentences can be very contagious and can be very important because they might shift entirely my perception of the field or whatever else. And so who you get them from and what those sentences are matters a great deal because it really, the framing is huge. It just changes the way you see things a lot. And so this is an important task not to be handled lightly because of the power of framing and storytelling and all of those things as well. And then I'll add one last thing, which is I keep coming back to how unique my experience of feeding the brain for 24 years is because I'm not starting from scratch ever on any topic anymore. Every now and then I hit something where, gosh, I've got nothing. But most anything, whether it's the wood wide web or cocktail mixes or the Trobriand Islanders gift rings and all that exists already as a thing in my brain. And when something new floats along that refers to them, I merely connected to it. And so I have this rich history that is static and getting better, I think. I don't detect it getting worse, which is like one of my worries early on was that this thing would just turn into a fuzzball that was undistinguishable and unmanageable. And it has not, at least not for me. But I'm always cooking into history. So earlier, when I said zooming back out, what is the context for the thing you're talking about? That's kind of what I mean. And it's an experience very few people have. We're so used to drowning in the info torrent and not having a good memory that we're like, gosh, here comes another new story. The best I can do is go back a story and up a story and left a story. I think we can do much, much better if we have some shared contexts. But then the worry is, whose shared context do we want to point into, right? And is it the one that I agrees with my point of view so that I reinforce my tunnel vision or whatever? Is it a broadening one? Or is that explicitly in the user interface? Hey, here's a broad context that agrees with your point of view, we think. Here's a broad context, a really nice synthesis that disagrees with your point of view. Would you like to go look at that? That's really interesting to me. Mark, do you want to jump in before I go to Leif and John? Yeah, one slight thing is the folks at the embassy, Zarina Agnew and other folks had a hand signal notion. This I want to make a comment directly on what the other person said, and this is like start a new conversation. Anyway, to comment, Jerry, one of the things in what I do is basically there's kind of like an independence of mind. And I am not the type of evangelist that says everybody should create their own note taking system and basically use it to guide an inquiry into the world because that type of being an inquiring person might be the lifestyle that some people are pointing to. But it does seem to me like there's a certain kind of independence or somehow that maybe you and I have disconnected ourselves from standard media in some way because we basically are weaving this context. And I find that to be kind of an ineffable kind of value that I'm trying to figure out how to engage other people in doing the kind of behavior change that leads to what you and I have done. Can you say that once more in a slightly different way? Just pick any other path in because I think I understand you and I think I agree with you. I just want to re-understand it or try to broaden it because I'm not quite sure. I had difficulty articulating it. The sense that I have spent time encountering the words of others certainly, listening deeply, which is a side effect of this, but also in some kind of way thinking for myself and exploring, I have an interest in what Klaus has said and I'll go follow that. And what Jack has said and what Ken has said. And it's only a beginning for my own weaving Thank you, Eric. But it basically encourages a kind of independence of mine that maybe was already there. I really don't know. Does anyone else want to... And the C's mean what? Comment as opposed to a new topic. Exactly linking to the last thing. Okay, good because I'm not... This is a new gesture for me on this call. I only learned it in Mark a minute ago. Comment. Awesome one. Thank you. Anyone else want to rephrase, reframe, or deepen the thing that Mark just put in the conversation before I go to Les and John? Take a swing at this. Okay, there being no takers, let's go to Les. Thank you. I really appreciate this. And I'm a newcomer to the conversation. But I just wanted to make a few remarks here. I really appreciate it, Jerry. Thank you for inviting me. The bridge might be that the archive could be the bridge between the OGM and the future. A lot of the dialogue and chat has been about actually archive of the history. Archive of yesterday, but how do we develop the archives of tomorrow? And I do think that with your mapping, Jerry, you're on the threshold, but there is another twist to it, which I learned when I was a professor in Hong Kong that the Chinese way of thinking is very different from what all of us in this chat is thinking. Unless you have trained to think in Chinese dimensions. And that is that we see knowledge as an object. So the library is actually a collection of objects, but the internet is something much larger. It's a collection of relationships. And these relationships might be extremely interesting to map out like Jerry is doing, but also to look for the sense making it in it or the wisdom in it. So how could we go to the wisdom dimension of OGM and the archives? I have not the solution yet, but I do think that you have started on a very interesting navigational journey. And together we can probably learn to cross the Atlantic in a very different dimension that we did many centuries ago. Yeah, thank you, life. You're reminding me a little bit. My mind wandered a little bit over to last week we talked about Buckley versus Baldwin, the Oxford debate. And I went and listened to a little bit of it afterward. And, you know, Buckley's 15 minute argument was that, hey look, Baldwin is famous and is getting a lot of attention. He's proof that there's no discrimination or whatever. He doesn't say it that blankly, but what I'm trying to say is in that debate, Buckley's argument is the weakest beer. It's like, holy crap, what a crappy argument. And Baldwin is eloquent, poetic, and full of fire. Just absolutely full of fire presenting things that are deep and ought to be referenced really often as, hey, if you'd like a good argument for why racism is rampant in the US, just go look at this, right? Just go look at this and look at these arguments which you can connect up to other arguments and so forth. And for me, the web, a well curated web of these kinds of things should be really compelling because it should connect back to root works that are worth reading. It should concentrate and distill and focus the energy. It should collimate the energy of lots of people with similar sorts of opinions about really important subjects in a way that's accessible. It should let us kind of marinate in these important points of view in a way that helps us use them to change society. And we don't have that. Like, we're not there. We're drowning in the infotour. To me, the reality of today is we are all drowning in the infotour and every year somebody invents something new. Oh good, now it's TikTok and Clubhouse which doesn't really have a memory. Oops. And we have more torrent to deal with and more things to check every day as we do the sweep of somebody trying to message me on one of these damned media and less context and less wisdom, right? And this quest for wisdom is quixotic but I think really important. And, Leif, I think you mean to chat that to everybody because you just DM'd me weaving for wisdom but you DM'd only me by mistake. Let's go John and then Doug and then we're getting close to our 90 minutes. Hey, so I'm going to start, whoops, oh shit. That was a great start, though. We're going to start with a tweet from Joshua Bach. If you, he's probably in the brain and if you don't know who he is, he's worth following. He has what I would call a touch of earned arrogance in that he's brilliant, you know. And you just give a little bit of a tone of, and now the tweet has gone off my page and I can't. Oh no. But the gist of it is this. The problem with social media is that we have a symphony orchestra, a wrestling match and a kindergarten all trying to speak from the same stage at the same time. And, you know, I was a lot right away. I laughed as soon as I read it. I said, yeah, yeah, that's what we're talking about here. That's kind of the problem. Now let's loop it back and bring in a couple of points including the last point from Leif about Internet Archive and OGM in the future. I'm just, I'm still going to kind of do turbo versions of the Doug's idea of the columns. And I want to add in Jerry's amplifications of it, you know, in terms of the richness of different points of view, the richness of media. And I want to acknowledge the work but also the potential for subjectivity that comes when you say, okay, well, who's deciding, blah, blah, who's doing the map? Who's doing the topic map of this thing? And will there ever be enough people who will want to do that? So I'm imagining a piece of software actually. And it's not, it may be artificially intelligent but really it's not, it's more like this. There are a bunch of eligible gatekeepers to a matrix, like the kind of matrix we're talking about. And an issue comes up and anyone can step forward and say, as an eligible gatekeeper, I'm going to work on this, meaning I'm going to try to produce the link, the valuable link that will fill in and go into the matrix. And there's different criteria for different kinds of links. I mean, the criteria for the story from last week, that's real easy, that's simple, you know. As it gets more complex, the criteria are more complicated. So, you know, a couple of eligible folks, us, other people, you know, get together and say, you know, this might work as a topic map. It's going to take some amount of time. It's going to take an hour, a half day, maybe a day to figure out if it comes together. So we put up a little marker. We say we're working on it. And what the software does is it says, are you done? Is it publishable? If it is, it gets, it gets ascended and put into the matrix. You know, you might work on it for a day and say, you know what, this doesn't work. It's not, it's not quite making it, you know. And, you know, there's different kinds of criteria for coherence and usefulness. But I can imagine software augmented help in deciding that kind of thing. So then as you look across the matrix, you know, some things would be thinly referenced. Here's the article from last week. Here's the long story from the New Yorker. Here's the thing from Reuters. Other things would be more thickly referenced. They would say, well, you know, there's a lot else going on here. Here's a topic map. Here's a game. Here's a thing you can do with it, you know. And it would flesh out in an uneven fashion. And I think the unevenness is a reflection of the real underlying complexity that might not be evident when you first look at the issue. So I'm still thinking about how that works as a social system and whether or not it can be software augmented, even at the level of just having the software do the consensus mechanism. And just one last thought is you could have that kind of, the consensus mechanism could be, I agree with this. I support this. I agree with this. I don't agree with it, but I think it's adding to the discussion or I really think this is not helpful, you know. And if you might say that your criteria for getting it into the matrix is, I got to have two or three people who say, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And a couple of other people who say, it's helpful. And maybe no more than one person who says, I think, you know, this is actually hurtful, you know. I like that. And maybe as you post contributions into that medium, you earn NFT tokens. Yes. Instead of playing stupid oxy infinity. Right. Absolutely. Cool. Doug, you look like in profile there for a moment, you look very beautiful. The floor is yours. The profile thing is interesting as you two things. First, for me, the problem with the internet archive that's like so many efforts is it's a lot easier to put stuff in than to know how to get it out. Putting it in is kind of like dead storage. Getting it out is bringing it back to life. And boy, is that hard to figure out how to do. So that's just a meta comment. On the proposal about the columns, I don't want to turn it into something which gets measured in order to figure out what's in it. It's a human thing and it's a learning environment and it makes no pretense to being comprehensive. Two stories, for example, like the top story might be what's up with China American tensions. Underneath is the best article from yesterday that we can find. Underneath that is a good magazine article about it. Underneath that is a good book about it. It's a learning environment. It teaches people how to think contextually. It's not trying to be comprehensive. It's not trying to come up with some kind of algorithm that fills in the space. It's human beings and it's just totally clear about that as a certain amount of humility. And my guess is that with time it would get better. Doug, thank you. It's interesting. You're reminding me also that I like novels about cities and I traveled for the first time to Istanbul pre-pandemic and I was like, what can I read to tell me something about Istanbul? So I wound up reading the Janissary Tree which is just fictional history about the Janissaries who got wiped out at one point because the Pasha in charge realized that they had too much power, etc, etc. And there's a whole sort of mystery novel plot set back in that era. And it was really nice because I got there and I could look at some of the guard gates or the monitor gates in the city and think of them very differently and see them differently and so forth. But wouldn't it be cool if some of the background that we could access was more neutral and more about fiction? And like, hey, here's somebody's take on that era and you can go inhabit that era for a while if you wanted to go back through this. And I guess the rifts on this are probably endless because this is kind of a holographic entity as we start looking at it. Well, it raises an interesting question. If you're going to go to a country where you've never been, if you read a novel about that country, I would propose you know more about that country going there than if you read news stories about it. Or a lonely planet. April has a lonely planet addiction. We have a large stack of them and she loves to travel and she can actually dissect a lonely planet in seconds. It's like watching a sushi chef break down a fish. It's like the lonely planet arrives and it is underlined and marked up and where to go is set within minutes. It's astonishing, actually. Mr. Caranza and then Michael and then Julian. And then we... So, Mark, you did want to talk. You just took your hand down, which is great. So let's go, Mark, Michael, Julian, and then let's wrap the call. Very quick infrastructure comments. Basically, the Zoom that the Internet Archive has is a, I guess, a corporate level high Zoom. It makes five different... Recordings. Recordings of the Zoom call. Is there a gallery view? Yes, there's a gallery view. There's a... Beaker view with presentation. Exactly, speaker view. There's a different presentation view, which is black until a screen is shared. And... Forget that one. Basically, my question is, you know, since it's sort of a private meeting until you make your presentation, do we need to basically get an agreement before it goes out for editing that this part won't be shown? We could also snip it. Everything before I start talking would be fine. I'm interested really in sharing out the part of the session where we talked about OGM and the archive. Different way of saying what I just said. Yes. Okay. So, second thing is, there's a group, SF Memex. We've been meeting over 10 years and we have a meet up this Saturday. And I'm wondering whether it's... You know, I'm trying to integrate with Zoom and invite people to talk. Nobody's volunteered to talk yet. It's hurting cats and, you know, I'll get better at it after the next one. But basically, should I announce it in a small thing in OGM or just in the big, you know, town hall? Your choice. Either the Google group or town hall manamos channel or the calls manamos channel where we are right now or all three, if you feel like it. So, you get the word out. That'd be great. What time is it? Oh, thanks. Off to Michael. It's two to five Pacific time. Two to five this Saturday. Saturday on this Saturday. All are welcome looking for people to present about, you know, what they do. You know, what do you do? How do you do it? What have you learned? Is the three questions of the quantified self which are pretty good for, you know, not having a sales, you know, presentation. You know, you should buy this because blah, blah, blah. What personally do you do? Off to Michael. Thanks. Sounds awesome. Thank you. Michael. Sounds very cool. I was just going to say to John what you were saying about the sort of, well, if a few people agree and, you know, no one objects and that kind of metric for presentation or, you know, sort of, I would say filterability in a way because what you're suggesting, I think, assumes the existence of some kind of algorithm that notices that and decides for you that this is visible and published because it doesn't have any objections and two people endorse it as opposed to allowing each user to say, I want to see some raw stuff. I know that's what I'm doing and that's okay. And that's, those are my search criteria and I might find some stuff that I object to but I want to cast a wide net and, you know, surface a weak signal say that isn't somebody's consensus yet. And then other times you really want, there's an information overload and you really want to see only things that 10 people have endorsed and, you know, nobody is objected to but to have those levers be in the user's hand seems really like a cool thing and a tough thing. Mm-hmm, love that. Julian. So I wanted to bring up and listening to descriptions of systems where there is the ability for filtering, for example, as Michael was saying or curating, as other people have been talking about, but introducing a human element into the system then that system leads rapidly to Facebook. We need to separate the technology of the system from the human frailties of the system and try to build a technology which can make sure that those frailties don't overwhelm the system. And as a bad example, I would bring up the U.S. Constitution which 230 years ago sounded like it was pretty solid but in the last five years we've seen just how frail and how easy it is to break that. So we've really got a couple of questions and I would say there's just as much, there's a huge challenge in determining how do you do your knowledge of management and access, but there's also just as much of a challenge and how do you make sure it's bomb proof against people who want to break it? Bomb proof is hard, as we're seeing. Bomb proof is really hard. And there's this arms race between the breakers and the fixers. So go ahead, Michael. Sorry, I just want to respond to what Julian was saying because I think he's absolutely right and I just want to make clear that the Facebook problem I think needs to be addressed in two ways. I mean, the Facebook problem is partly the lack of discernment. A, the algorithm is black box. You're not controlling the filters. The discernment over what likes are worth to you in different contexts is very important so that you can dial down the noise or dial up the noise depending on what you're looking for. And that you're not seeing things you didn't ask for because it can't... I mean, an attention-supported model is intrinsically, you know, show somebody something they're going to click on. And that's not how I want to get my information. And I would argue that kind of nobody should want that. And I don't think too many people actually do. They're not looking for sweets and candy in their diet. They're looking for tasty stuff and to have some intention and control over what they do. And if you didn't have an ad-supported or attention-supported model, I don't think it would work the same way. I mean, I'm not being polyanna. Like, it would all be solved if there weren't any ads. But, you know, I think you can build for... You can build a user-influenced information network that avoids a lot of the pitfalls that the existing ad-supported, free social media have. And Michael, I think the last half decade of social media have proven your points amply. Yeah. Thank you, everybody. This has been really rich, really interesting. Really appreciate it. Lots to think about. I just want to say it out loud because I meant to say this like a quarter of the way in. When Stacy joined, she tipped the gender balance ever so gently. And otherwise, it's all white guys in this room. We need to fix that. So please invite your friends who are not of our demographic. Let's do better. But thank you all for being... But also, I think our conversation was really valuable. I love the way we approach these different topics. So thank you for that. That's an informal representative of the Internet Archive. Thank you for thinking about that. And boy, we're here to serve. Tell us what you need and be imaginative. Don't need to be gentle. There's an opportunity that is rare. Hence the motto of the Archive to serve man. The motto is... It's a cookbook. Universal access to all human knowledge. That's better. That's so much better than to serve man. Thanks, everybody. An episode is in the Archive, right? Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, I hope so. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Have a great week. See you on the tubes.