Longtermism - Post-Technology

From @biz :
We all know that social media analytics is just a hallucination for the value we’re actually adding: creating connected networks of people who are informed, engaged, and grateful. These things exist outside of social media, and will outlive social media, we’ve gotta be clear about that.

While the internet is our primary platform for creating commotion and common good today, we should imagine what unsprawling looks like in a future where advertisers have flocked away from the internet. Where, possibly, most folks attention has flocked away from the internet.

I think having strong editorial standards is the biggest most foundational step. We’re not making content, we’re making archives, art, and education. Fostering in-person action is another big one. Maybe one day we could talk about doing print?


From @corbyn :
It has become very apparent that the internet and digital technological storage is fleeting — not meant to last long. Much of the internet prior to 2015 has already experienced link-rot. This in due, partially from centralization of people flocking to a short-list of big social media sites, and in part, just the costs of time and money it takes to keep something actively hosted.

Take this forum, hosted on Digital Ocean as of this writing, is a financial liability to the organization, albeit not much at ~$8/month, but if we were to stop paying, would at this point be lost to history.

So for the long term viability of this organization to keep active past 10+ years, there needs to be serious considerations for community oriented, co-operative information storage methods of unsprawlings processes, procedures, structure and general knowledge, likely stored in paper binders, physical art or other similar tangible mediums.

Ongoing activism should also still focus heavily on in-person meet-ups, paper posters, zines etc. While of course having thoughtful care in using recycled and reused material.

In terms of technological usage, we should be actively striving toward open-source, low power, portable software and infrastructure stacks, as not to be dependant on large, closed-source corporate software that may be rug-pulled at any time.

Considerations may eventually need to be made to downgrade software and hardware to help weather a technological winter. This would allow the primary computational platform of connecting this community to continue even if new hardware is not feasible to produce or acquire.
https://100r.co/site/weathering_software_winter.html
https://permacomputing.net/

2 Likes

Love the idea to do lots of zines, mindful of using recycled materials!