Having spent much of the last decade addicted to it, I have officially left Quora.

 

Full story here : http://exquora.thoughtstorms.info/

Expect to see me use the time to get back into ThoughtStorms and more blogging / writing in my own spaces.

This part of town. My corner of the internet.

It's basically becoming a derelict wasteland. It's falling to pieces. Neglected. The flows of life, of information, of "voice" have moved elsewhere.

I've successfully avoided the clutches of Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp. Only to be similarly addicted to Quora. And increasingly dependent on Telegram for actual social stuff.

I have online existence. But not "here".

And I'm not only talking about this blog : Composing.

I'm talking about many of my online presences.

I'm talking about ThoughtStorms wiki, which has retreated from an open forum for debate. Via the idea of the Smallest Federated Wiki to a closed, but federal. To now an entirely personal closed thinking space. Perhaps inevitably, given the increasingly hostility to be found online. But is now full of outdated, half-baked, deprecated ideas.


I'm talking about my so called home-page which is now three years out-of-date.

I'm talking about the presentations of my projects which are languishing on public but unvisited static pages. Because, again, these aren't part of the flows  of life.

I am no longer living "publicly", putting what I do online. I don't even know if I want to be living "publicly" in such a way today.

Or to put it another way. I fragment over various places online and IRL. And each fragment has freedom to be what it wants. Unconstrained by the other fragments. How much do I want to try to reunite and reintegrate my fragmented personality? Or do I enjoy the small sense of "privacy" that remains when I allow these fragments to have independent lives of their own? Is becoming the "dividual" the only way to avoid being signed, sealed and delivered into the hands of the machine learning mind controllers today?

But how do you even "live" in a world where "existence" is increasingly tied to participating in the right flows?

Don't ask me. I have no fucking idea.

But ... what I do know is that it's a mess around here. So ... it's time to knock down a lot of stuff and build something new.

So ... in the next few months, I'm going to blow up this blog : Composing. I'm going to be blowing up Synaesmedia. And, perhaps most shockingly, I'm going to be blowing up ThoughtStorms Wiki. And a bunch of other sites.

None of that means that everything is going away entirely. 

What's still valuable will come back in some form.

But I'm going to make big changes. I'm going to break links. (Who cares about broken links?) I'm going to break names (what do my names even mean? Alchemy Islands? Gbloink? Mind Traffic Control? Why are they stuck with the crumbling signifieds they're currently pointing to?) I'm going to break online libraries. (Is anyone really using the ThoughtStorms libraries? If so, pay close attention to what's happening in the online repos)

I just over a year, I want to have achieved a thorough clearing out of the junk and cruft from my online life. And be focused on fewer, more live and dynamic, channels, better suited to today's internet and my current interests.

OWL Screenshots

Over on SmartDisorganized.

Mind Traffic Geometry

I've finally taken the plunge and moved Smart Disorganized, my geek blog, off Blogger and onto a WordPress on my own server. The new URL is http://sdi.thoughtstorms.info/ (naturally it's moving in with Project ThoughtStorms.)

It's all part of the constant refactoring of my online-life.

Project ThoughtStorms

Over on SmartDisorganized you can read how I've become enamoured of Ward Cunningham's new wiki.

Ward is, of course, the guy who invented the original wiki and is someone renowned for being extremely insightful in a low key kind of a way. With his new project, the Smallest Federated Wiki he's reinventing wiki for an age of mobile devices and rich browsers. Where each of us has our own wiki (as we have our own blog) but want to to share data between them, through a voluntary "pull" pattern closer to distributed source control managers such as git. And a world where we want wiki to act as a dashboard to an array of servers, sensors and data-streams.

This is an exciting, forward-looking vision of wiki, and I've completely re-oriented my thinking around it. I've now ported ThoughtStorms wiki across to the new engine, bringing it into the federation. I'll be doing the same with my other wikis. And I've decided that this is now the future of SdiDesk. I'll be writing converters for SdiDesk pages and SFW-plugins to handle the network diagramming etc. aspects.

This is exciting. Even seeing ThoughtStorms in the new format (where drag-and-drop refactoring is extremely easy) inspires me to start tidying it up with re-writes, purges of dead-links and other outdated material. That's not going to happen overnight, it happens at the organic rate of wiki's life, death, composting and rebirth, but this spring ThoughtStorms is definitely recovering from its recent hibernation. And I hope we'll soon see SdiDesk throwing up new shoots.

BTW : having troubles with ThoughtStorms at the moment. You can still see it, but I can't update it.

Basically, it looks like some bots were creating user accounts even though they were blocked from updating pages. And so filled my file quota. I'm trying to fix it, but seem to have managed to break something. I won't break it further so you can still read the pages. But I need to do something about this.

I can't remember when I wrote it, but it was back in the early days of ThoughtStorms.

The crucial tests will be NOT the total amount of wealth in the US economy, but some measure of it's distribution and use. A small minority of super-wealthy owners of businesses which employ workers elsewhere in the world is not the next big thing. In fact, you shouldn't mistake ownership for the next big thing. If people start pointing at ownership as an example of the next growth sector for the US, then they've given up all pretense that this is anything other than a straight fight between capital and labour, and they just hope to sucker you into thinking you're part of the owning class.

I was writing about the tendency of people to say : "don't worry about jobs being lost to technology or off-shoring, we'll be on to the next big thing"

Now I believe that there will be a next-big thing. And the U.S. and Europe will be off to it. Of course I do. But I did think that there was a danger that the capitalist class would try to sell us the idea that "onwership" or trading on the stock market etc. would be the replacement. And I diagnosed this as a capitalist scam.

I was reminded of this, reading today's hot story : Simon Johnson's The Quiet Coup. Here's the interesting observation.

[The] American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital — a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

As knots are fashionable today, a reminder of ThoughtStorms:WikiIsLikeFoldedProtein