Linking one of my points to your essay — one of the reasons that software projects keep needing maintenance and aren't finished is because of the network and security requirements.

Text is the proposed language. The chart is that of the classic example used in BPMN docs.

Scrapscript is just like any other programming language, so not very e-mail friendly haha. Open to ideas though

If Scrapscript does networking, you can implement the IMAP protocol. If Scrapscript can read local files, you can delegate IMAP to an external tool such as isync. In both cases you need a MIME parser. Just like with any other programming languages. So in the end, my question comes down to whether Scrapscript has access to local files and to network protocols.

"do" is a bit awkward, because it's not imperative code. It's declarative, describing a process that may never be initiated. When $start also feels like it should be implicit for anything that doesn't have a different trigger. The names could be more descriptive than lowercase letters. I might be inclined to use "when {name} happens" , and "step: {name} is" to make it clearer, too. But all that should be taken with a grain of salt, because I have never been able to understand why I would want to use BPMN. All my use cases seem deeply ill-suited to it.

To connect this back to the initial intentions of re-envisioning and de-growing (local vs global, complexity-scale vs size-scale) -- i.e. active moderation/conviviality. Because operational market capitalism (i.e. the "market" knows more than a thinking-feeling human) is for the most part structurally both participatory and democratic at local scales (thus its baseline resilience and creativity). Everyone genuinely believes they're part of a team striving for something beneficial and nothing must stand in the way of that endeavour, and they throw their best selves at it. Ted Chiang, as ever, puts it well in this old article titled "Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear".

"The fears of superintelligent AI are probably genuine on the part of the doomsayers. That doesn’t mean they reflect a real threat; what they reflect is the inability of technologists to conceive of moderation as a virtue. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted. (Of course, they saw nothing wrong with this strategy when they were the ones engaging in it; it’s only the possibility that someone else might be better at it than they were that gives them cause for concern.)" 😂 (emoji mine)

To avoid harmful rent-seeking of any kind, yet put food on the table, I think the idea/tool/platform must be something that can be set free, and then used by anyone, including ourselves, to build useful things. This stands in contrast to "The White Man's Burden" approach that drives user capture -- "it is to the benefit of the users to be captured by those who've invested the best money and best design and best practice into advancing the platform, and the well deserved rewards accrue to those who capture the most users" (and so the measure becomes the goal)... [Footnote] A golden pledge in the OP: "If it's money I'll tell you how much in inflation-adjusted currency, and I'll commit to giving away anything beyond that while unencumbering any secrets it took to create it." There is a concept called "Ameeri line" that I've heard used in recent years, especially during a wonderful set of online talks from India on De-growth during the pandemic (I'll dig up the links and share if they're to be found online) -- i.e. a Richness line, rather than the Poverty line, and much like Monbiot's "Private Sufficiency" I think if there's a shared culture/vision/story of self-regulating this notion of an "Ameeri line" at the individual, family, small business, community level, perhaps we'd have a more healthy, scalable life-work platform.