Author: Neil Mather

Stian Håklev posted an interesting question and on the Digital Gardeners telegram group:

I’m curious how people feel about comments and interaction? And also interactivity between digital gardens in general (like paths connecting the parks of a city? :)).

Chris has talked enthusiastically about interlinking wikis before (e.g. during the Gardens and Streams IndieWeb session), so I’m sure there’s something to it. For me, I think because I already get the interactivity goodness on my stream and my articles, it’s something I haven’t generally been that interested in for my wiki notes thus far.

Stian has some use cases for which he would like the interactivity:

I know comments have gotten a bad rep on the internet, attracting spam or trolls etc, but on the other hand I feel really frustrated when I can’t leave comments on Andy Matuschak’s notes…

I think Webmentions would work well here. You would write a comment as a post on your own site, and then this will notify Andy. He can choose to do whatever he wants with this comment (display the comment, display it as a backlink, ignore it completely, not display it at all, if he prefers). This way you can write a comment on whatever you want and the receiver chooses what to do with it.

Or another example – I just looked at Salman’s site about Deliberate rest (https://notes.salman.io/deliberate-rest), and thought that I just took some notes about attention restoration therapy from Deep Work – https://notes.reganmian.net/deep-work… Of course I could tell him here (I am :)) but that “doesn’t scale”…

Webmentions would work for this too – as just a simple ‘mention’, not necessarily a comment. Salman would be notified automatically that your note references his note. Salman could choose to display it as a backlink, if he liked.

Short-term, I am looking at adding at least page-level comments to my blog, using a Gatsby plugin and probably externally hosted comments.

Adding webmention support to receive comments could work here.

Also interested in experimenting with annotations, for example embedding Hypothes.is directly in the pages…

Kartik Prabhu has a nice article about receiving annotations on his posts via webmentions.

Long-term, I’m interesting in thinking about more structured ways of interlinking digital gardens – whether it looks more like interwiki links, blog backlinks, or something else, I’m not sure. I have some notes I’ll publish once I organize them a bit more.

I can definitely see the appeal of backlinks between wikis, but only in an abstract sense at the moment.

The utility is in the networked thought. I guess for me it comes down to whether I see the utility in all of this connectivity on specifically my evergreen notes, as opposed to my stream posts.

A web of wikis

Finished Ctrl+S. It was a page turner, no doubt. Very visual, almost more a script for a film than a novel. It’s a fast-paced adventure story with a bit of a detective/whodunnit edge.

Not particularly nuanced or thought-provoking. Cliched, but good fun. The written equivalent of watching a blockbuster, I guess.

Set in a near future, where people ‘ascend’ to a virtual reality world built on quantum computers called SPACE. For many it’s a way of escaping from a dreary actual reality.

There’s a race of artificial life creatures called Slif who have evolved within SPACE.

It’s a bit gruesome in places, with this idea of harvesting and then recreating emotions from others.

Finished “Ctrl+S”

Read It’s Time to Tax Big Tech’s Data (tribunemag.co.uk)

Big Tech is the big winner from the coronavirus crisis, raking in record profits. But their revenue comes from data we create collectively – and we should tax it for the public good.

This article argues that the data that we create should be treated as a commons, and that we should tax the firms harvesting it. Especially at a time when the firms are making even bigger profits from it, and we are most likely going to endure more austerity measures as a result of the pandemic.

I agree with the redistribution of the wealth that big tech is hoovering up, but I’d say we should be working against the enclosure of the data commons, not just letting it happen and then taxing it, no? Counter surveillance capitalism through open protocols and supporting the building of an open web.

Read Big Tech Won’t Save Us: The Case for Social Transformation over Coronavirus Surveillance by Movement for Anti-Oppressive Computing Practices (medium.com)

Surveillance technology such as contact tracing is being rolled out to track coronavirus, by delightful companies such as Palantir.

Rather than contracting profiteering disaster capitalists to roll out technologies of dubious efficacy and inherent racial biases, it would be better to invest in reforms that build social safety nets and reduce structural inequality.

Pouring funding into technology that can detect COVID infection from vocal signatures, doesn’t provide the social safety nets that allow people to take time off from work when they are ill.

Social transformation over coronavirus surveillance

I have been doing a lot of metacognition, AKA “thinking about thinking”, AKA banging on about personal wikis, lately.

I have really enjoyed reflecting on my wiki setup and how I can use it to learn and to create things. I also love a good bit of tinkering, so it’s been a lot of fun playing with org-roam and hacking on it a bit.

I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress with my tools for thought. About 2 years ago I felt like I wanted to produce more and consume less, but struggled to find a rhythm with it, perhaps partly friction in the tools, but also just not confident that I had anything useful to say. Now I’m feeling at a place where I am very well set to seek, sense and share on the things I am interested in.

So I’m feeling a hankering to get learning and writing about other things. The adventures in mental omphaloskepsis (navel-gazing, thanks Wikipedia) probably won’t stop, because I’m enjoying that immensely, but I feel like applying some of the fruits of the current deep-dive.

Back to life, back to reality

Plus, we are going through likely the defining moment of our generation, and the societal, political, economic (and likely technological) ramifications of this current point of history are likely to be pretty huge. Can’t not think about that.

While it wasn’t conscious or deliberate, I noticed that I have been avoiding much of the bigger picture discussion around coronavirus – just following enough to know what is and isn’t safe to do for me and those close to me. Interestingly, in A Text Renaissance Venkatesh Rao talks about some of these tools as being for extended universe building and escaped reality construction. Perhaps this metacognitive rabbit hole has been a subconscious way of diverting myself from what’s actually going on.

I don’t feel I have a particular burning thesis I want to share with the world right now. But I’ll try to return a bit more to writing about the various topics in my strapline (technology, politics, nature, culture) again.

Thinking about thinking about thinking