For our Patreon supporters, there's a new bonus episode of the FoC podcast where we try… really, we do try… to talk about the new Dynamicland archive website, and the cool stuff on it. But, it's just damned hard to take all of this new material without considering a bunch of bigger picture questions about society, and visions of the future, and what it means to be "open" about your work. So hard.

I got to go to Boston today. I listened to this episode while going to Boston today. Ya’ll circled a really fascinating bit of sci-fi for a bit at the start that I found interesting: • Jimmy brought up Kantian ethics, and testing a things ethical-ness by universalizing it • A few moments later Ivan brought up grey goo/computational dust, etc. — I think I understood that this was brought up not because computational dust is the goal of Dynamicland itself, but that, in a world where we may have it one day, the … something … I wanna be a bit vague with that part … which Dynamicland has to contribute will inform how that dynamic substrate is used/interacted with. Assuming my understanding of Ivan’s point is right, I think we get to an interesting, if maybe over wrought, point from sci-fi here: What are the consequences of universal, ubiquitous computation, as offered by computational dust, etc.? …which is maybe part of why, to Lu’s point, so many folks thinking about Dynamicland get tripped up by the “open” bits of Dyanmicland (which I’d suggest are sort of proxy for the ethics of the culture it is proposing) — I don’t have a profound or useful insight beyond that. I’m trying to point out that the work at Dynamicland seems to so closely link the ethical system with…for want of a better word…“the product” of Dynamicland that conversations about one sort of have to include, or at least engage with the other.

Yes, you understood my point correctly. I do not think it's the goal of Dynamicland. It's also not likely we'll ever get smart dust. But, the closer we get to smart dust — eg: more everyday objects have computers and networking in them — the more we deserve something like Dynamicland, rather than the server-centric, product-centric, e-waste hell that we currently get from smarthome appliances.

Is that, maybe, because of how exclusive it feels? At a really high level they’ve built the coolest club house tree house in the world for “folks like us” and, as far as I understand, we’re almost all universally excluded from it…which is sort of saddening

All they're doing is flipping the exclusionary inside-out: swapping out they way current tech excludes and isolates in physical colocation (people glued to screens) but at the expense of appearing exclusive from the outside.

With Dynamicland, I try appreciate their flag posting as much as I can: at worst an effort to avoid "isn't this just" analogization, at best an attempt to escape the gravitational attraction of current best practice.

Um. What? Please expand

> The way we all say "Love what they're doing. Can't say that enough. Big fan. … … Here's a 30 minute tirade about this annoying thing they do". Feels like the way the left eats itself. Narcissism of minor differences, and all that. I am a big fan of the tech they are building. I think it is super exciting. But I’m not a big fan of their worldview. At least as much as I can understand it. This is part of the hard bit. Because what they share is so wide ranging and fragmented, it is easy for people to arrive at a different picture of what dynamicland wants. This is why I wanted us to read https://dynamicland.org/2022/Radical_Decentralization.pdf What I read here is a radically communitarian picture. One in which one’s access to things is mediated through that community. One in which one’s quality of access is dependent on that community. > Every community learns to be designers of their own computational worlds Sounds great when you imagine enlightened people. But sounds terrifying when you consider the kinds of communities people actually find themselves in. In my view, this is why they choose to operate the way they do. They believe their concrete, physical, local community matters more. I think to just get hyped on their cool tech and not consider the world they want to craft or to only consider the upsides of the world they want to craft is to not engage with dynamicland seriously. This isn’t a nitpick about some ui element or design or minor differences in opinion. To me these are rather fundamental questions about who we want to have access to computing. Something at the core of dynamiclands mission and a flaw in their perspective that I don’t think they adequately address or appreciate. I’d love to just be hyped about their tech. It is super cool. But sadly they don’t share enough for me to really geek out on those details.

I think that ultimately to Bret and Co the tech doesn't matter, what the research is about is how computing could feel if it was as accessible and usable as pencil and paper

Just to be clear, when I say tech, I don't just mean the code. The affordance of the interface, the interaction design, and the human machine interface stuff all that is wrapped up in tech, even if it isn't code. (A pencil is technology for example).

@Jimmy Miller if you really want to play with the ideas, folk.computer comes closest. I've been able to replicate a lot of the early demos (with almost the same code, translating Lua into TCL)

> Feels like the way the left eats itself. Narcissism of minor differences, and all that. After a few weeks the thing I appreciate most about the 2024 Dynamicland update is the gestalt sense I got of how Bret Victor works, how the whole lab he started works and what it's like to work with him. A feedback loop of sketching out prototypes, talking about them over email, archiving them for new prototypes and email threads to allude to. Very inspiring. To me right now the little criticisms have faded from memory, and this is the big thing I remember. (This thought occurred to me while browsing @Medet Ahmetson's Miro board)