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Folklore Institute

nCHANT's inaugural issue explores digital gardens as autonomous spaces for expression beyond platform capitalism. Features research with Trust community, essays on fractal structures, self-hosting guides, and philosophical dialogues

nCHANT's inaugural issue explores digital gardens as autonomous spaces for expression beyond platform capitalism. Features research with Trust community, essays on fractal structures, self-hosting guides, and philosophical dialogues

https://reincantamento-publishing.metalabel.com/nchant01

I think potentially a realisation that the foundational meaning of our society feels hollow, and the search for aesthetic is a fundamentally one of nostalgia: these aesthetics remind us of a time when we had more meaning

But this is of course a false hope. Aesthetics of the past came because there was meaning, and each aesthetic Meant something; each detail. I was in China recently and was touched by how every detail Means something. 
By contrast this current obsession is aesthetic for aesthetics sake. Maybe the pursuit of aesthetic could become a foundational value in its own right.

Note that Ritual = Hierarchy

A decentralised world will require new kinds of meaning making 

https://www.noemamag.com/the-call-of-ritual

Inner Library consulting, workshops, and case studies

Last year, I started a consultancy through which I write, as well as advise on organizational design, memory, and strategy. 

Through this work, I’ve developed workshop formats that help organizations explore how they'll evolve over time.

Syndicate

READ THE RESEARCH PIECE BY @keikreutler ↓

https://syndicate.io/blog/research-piece-electric-cooperatives

New essay:
The case against conversational interfaces

• Natural language is a bottleneck
• The "pass me the butter" test
• AI as augmentation

↓
https://julian.digital/2025/03/27/the-case-against-conversational-interfaces/

This sounds exhausting to me. But I know I’m an introvert and would much prefer to have my tea inside my house with no one else around in the mornings. https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simple-idea-transformed

In an age wherein people are increasingly isolated from meaningful irl connection, “stooping” as a deliberate and simple act of community building by drinking morning coffee on the stoop

is there a channel or group on farcaster interested in internet culture/theory research type stuff? 

could be fun to start a reading group like the do not research folks 

https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/do-not-research-reading-group-v2024

Researcher at MIT Media Lab | Creating futures | https://cyrus.website/info

Farcaster

I am re-reading Eugen Wei's "Status as a Service (StaaS)". One of the most insightful pieces on social networks I've ever read. This paragraph currently stands out as I read through this great blog post. 

"What ties many of these explanations together is social capital theory, and how we analyze social networks should include a study of a social network's accumulation of social capital assets and the nature and structure of its status games. In other words, how do such companies capitalize, either consciously or not, on the fact that people are status-seeking monkeys, always trying to seek more of it in the most efficient way possible?"  

What makes @farcaster interesting are the multitude of social capital assets and status games to accumulate those assets. 

https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

The core principle of status as a service is that social media platforms make you do work to earn status, and this is how they grow. 

But isn’t this falling apart?

The essay mentions Prisma: a photo filter app that was too easy, and the tech too good. 

Hello TikTok? In both cases, the emphasis is not on any one user, but how tech can turn mediocre inputs into top tier outputs.

Indeed, vertical videos platforms are full of automated faceless videos which don’t take much work (hello @fun)

The best content is still handmade, but is the correlation from work to status still there? 

Modern social media platforms succeeded despite disconnecting visible work from success. 
With this link broken, how can social media still be about status?

building reel.farm and farcasterstudio.com

“We wanted to build a haven for creative people to find each other, trusting that, if we built a safe and solid framework, the outcomes would be varied, diverse, and always changing — an expression of the community from which they emerge.”

“We wanted to build a haven for creative people to find each other, trusting that, if we built a safe and solid framework, the outcomes would be varied, diverse, and always changing — an expression of the community from which they emerge.”

https://garden3d.substack.com/p/a-space-that-holds

Exploring the In-Screen Gaze https://open.substack.com/pub/pixlpa/p/the-in-screen-gaze?r=tmyr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

"On-screen art is enjoyed IRL and in-screen art is meant to be appreciated inside of the computer. While the traditional painter presents a window into a virtual scene, the in-screen artist places images within a virtual world that the audience also occupies, and assumes that the viewer is also inside of that space."

We Can’t Understand AI Using our Existing Vocabulary — via Builderberg

This position paper argues that, in order to understand AI, we cannot rely on our existing vocabulary of human words. Instead, we should strive to develop neologisms: new words that represent precise human concepts that we want to teach machines, or machine concepts that we need to learn.

We Can’t Understand AI Using our Existing Vocabulary — via Builderberg

This position paper argues that, in order to understand AI, we cannot rely on our existing vocabulary of human words. Instead, we should strive to develop neologisms: new words that represent precise human concepts that we want to teach machines, or machine concepts that we need to learn.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.07586

With our obsession with optionality, it is worthwhile to ask — would you have rather had clarity than option?

With our obsession with optionality, it is worthwhile to ask — would you have rather had clarity than option?

https://www.metropolitanreview.org/p/would-you-rather-have-married-young

If the native media of web2 was “the feed,” we have yet to create the native media of web3. 

Smart contracts and AI agents are part of the story, but what comes next is more like swarm intelligence navigating a cryptographically addressable web.

Discuss. 

https://x.com/hxrts/status/1897621408244728109?s=46&t=u8pItK-nu0TdtOG8jcLETA

I think we really ignore how much of what it is possible for an individual to think is bounded by their network position 

To be able to think differently (higher signal or aberration in relation to the normal network noise) often requires engaging with different networks of thought, not just consuming novel ideas

AI as the engine, humans as the steering wheel:

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/02/28/aihumans.html