Kind: Notes

Enjoying the London Design Festival this weekend. I like design, although I prefer that which is applied to social purposes, not so much the purely aesthetic or the luxurious. The Creative Unions exhibition at Central St Martins is a little bit more political, and the PlasticScene is about creative uses of waste plastic.
I’m looking forward to the (re?)development of a universal but distributed set of systems and protocols that lets me find and communicate with peers and friends, without me needing to ‘be’ on any particular platform or to invest into any particular medium.

I like communities but I don’t particularly like platforms, as the medium too often dictates the message and the way of being. To edit a thought because it doesn’t fit into a database, and to lose a friend, in a cyber space with no geography, because they moved to another neighbourhood, well that’s a strange thing.

I just wanna exchange information, man. I don’t want an account.

Mark Greif’s Against Exercise is a hoot. “The haste to live one’s mortal life diminishes. The temptation toward perpetual preservation grows. We preserve the living corpse in an optimal state, not so we may do something with it, but for its own good feelings of eternal fitness, confidence, and safety. We hoard our capital to earn interest, and subsist each day on crusts of bread. But no one will inherit our good health after we’ve gone. The hours of life maintenance vanish with the person.”
I’m enjoying Doughnut Economics so far. Kate Raworth suggests the new economy needs to be a mix of the market, the household, the state, and the commons. Rather than the current paradigm that suggests the market can handle everything.