Category Archives: Culture

a community building

Culture, Technology

My head’s a swirl of different ideas right now, but here’s one that keeps coming up: libraries as resilience centers, and whether that’s a problem or a solution.

One of the attractive (to me) features of a resilience center is placing emergency supplies and aid in the same place that people will ordinarily use on a regular basis. Need to charge your phone during an outage? Go to the same community center where you take art classes or play board games. Need a meal when your kitchen isn’t safe to use? Use the kitchen at the community center where we do potlucks and movie nights. That familiarity is useful for a lot of reasons, but one that stands out to me today is that the resources get regularly used, maintained, and verified useful. I don’t know my camp stove and battery backup are in working order, because it’s been years since I used either. I do know my “Mr. Induction” hotplate works because I used it this morning.

Japan has this great infrastructure pattern called “disaster parks“, where coordination and supplies and other resilience infrastructure is built in (and under) city parks, so that when disaster strikes people can go to their nearest park for aid. Very helpful in fires or earthquakes, where buildings themselves are the danger to avoid and distance from them is a benefit. The familiarity is “go to the park”, but are any of the emergency supplies used regularly to test them? Is there a big ol’ cookout every 6 months as they rotate in new dry goods?

I go to the local library on the regular, so I do think of it as a cooling shelter or a warming shelter. (Seattle isn’t awful in either regard, but we do have our days.) Cooling the library in a resilient way makes a lot of sense, and by design it’s got great capacity for a lot of people at once. (Books like to have a big sturdy building around them.)

Are we expecting too much from a library, though? People in crisis need to eat, to marshal their resources, to go to the bathroom. Libraries don’t like this day-to-day; even the most trafficked university library generally wants you to go somewhere else to get refreshed. At most, a library dedicates a portion of the building to the less book-friendly stuff. So when people in crisis start to cross those lines, we hear about “safety concerns” at libraries or a lack of staff. (Because if you’re looking to work at a library, are you really thinking of it as a resilience center?)

So when I say a “community center”, what do we actually have that suits that purpose? Is it the library, expanded? Is it something else? (Don’t say a mall, we already showed that isn’t true.) Where do you go when you need to find community?

 

 

resilience

Culture, Engineering

This week’s airline disaster – and in particular the engineering and procedures that got everyone out of the plane alive – reminds me that I’m attracted to preparing for the worst. I’m the one on the plane who checks where the nearest exits are and what kind of flotation device is available. Not that I want the worst to happen, but I feel better knowing Plan B in case Plan A goes south.

Being prepared is also a challenge, a way to think deeply about the infrastructure I rely on even when it’s practically invisible. (Yes I am still thinking a lot about water thank you.) What would I do if the power went out? What would I notice? How would I change so I could keep doing the things I need? The answers let me design alternate systems that take effect when things go wrong, or (in the absolute best case) replacement systems that keep working despite the trouble.

So let’s talk about preppers, though. I grew up loving trips to the army surplus store. Survival gear and wilderness-focused preparation strategies are attractive because they involve stuff that feels tough and adventurous even if I can barely operate a can opener. Now, though, I reject the idea that my survival has to be set up in opposition to other people. It doesn’t just feel wrong, it completely contradicts how I’ve seen a good community operate in a time of crisis. People help each other to survive and recover.

The moment that convinced me was a multi-day power outage when I lived in San Diego. It’s the classic example of what preppers are prepping for: the city is without power, everything shuts down, no one has any of the things they need, and… well, what’s supposed to happen is chaos, looting, folks barricading themselves in their neighborhoods and trading with gold. What actually happened is folks took the day off work, emptied their fridges and freezers, went outside to be in the evening light, and had block parties. Want some ice cream? It’s just going to melt. Need to charge your phone? Here’s  a brick and a solar panel, go ahead. Need a spare flashlight? Let’s share.

It’s hard to describe the feeling in our neighborhood over those couple days. It was a time out of time. People really didn’t want it to end. Which is better than survival, isn’t it? It’s something different. It’s resilience. And it wasn’t even planned, it’s what we all fell into when there was a pause in television broadcasting.

More recently, the state of Washington has talked about resilience centers (or resilience hubs, I’ve also heard), which are places that people can go for essential things during a disaster or an outage. Each center builds up the infrastructure it needs to keep the lights on, to keep the wifi going, to keep the water running, to keep cool or keep warm. I love the idea, because it’s just as attractive a prepping opportunity but it assumes we’re going to find each other, to work together, to form community when something goes wrong. A resilience center doesn’t need an arsenal, it doesn’t need a way to bug out. It still has challenges, though, but they start to look like resilient infrastructure. How would we keep the wifi on? How much power can we produce? What does at-hand food storage look like in the long term?

So now when I prepare for the worst, I think about resilient infrastructure. How about you? What would you build? How could you share it? What helps when we all know how to do it?

Time to fix the blog

Culture, Technology

Hello again, friends.

This site is the default page on my phone, so if you were tired of looking at a headline about Twitter when you visited here, rest assured I was feeling it every single day. I actually have had a post (title only) sitting in drafts for over a year, titled “a requiem for twitter”. I won’t be writing about that today, because we’re all tired of that place.

Instead, let’s get an early start on getting a new start. It’s the day after Solstice, which is either midwinter or the start of the new year (depending on how you do calendars). Time to dust off this site and get writing again.

Do I have a topic? Nah. You get a ramble today. I have a dozen different things on my mind, and perhaps the trouble comes from waiting for them to be fully-formed. The last thing I wrote here was before all this *waves hands*, and it’s weird that all those thoughts I had since about covid, working from home, working from work again during the apocalypse… all went unremarked here.

Am I writing because of Substack? Perhaps. Catching up on Mastodon today I discovered that they’re the new Main Character, for saying out loud the quiet parts about taking white supremacy money because they’re colorblind. The hypocrisy is transparent, in a way that’s becoming too common. We’re A because we’re committed to B. We’re B because we’re committed to not being A. If we say it in GPT-approved prose it sounds good enough, right?

So am I writing because of GPT? Maybe. I’m a technology fan and I want talking computers more than folks might realize, but something about the milk-toast marketing garbage that comes out of text generators bugs me right down to the nervous system. Seriously, my spine aches and my head hurts when you include those paragraphs that GenAI spat out, like blurry JPEG artifacts in a family photo or autotune in an aria. I don’t want it. It makes me want to write something from the heart, idiosyncratic and dumb and ultimately meaningful. (Doesn’t help that my style is already too stiff. Seriously, this is an unedited first draft. Imagine thinking thoughts like this in your head. It’s like an NPR podcast in here.)

So why am I writing? To reach out to you, dear reader. This’ll pass through a thousand mechanical apparatuses to reach you, but I hope it finds you. Well. Any time it does, and especially if you can find a way to reach back, on Slack or Mastodon or Discord or a postcard or just saying hi on the street or in the hallway, then I think it’s worth the time. Time to start again.

Happy Solstice, everyone.

the 42nd monkey

Culture, Philosophy

Lee shared a thoughtful and entertaining Cracked article* by David Wong about the Monkeysphere. In short, the idea is that we can maintain less than 150 relationships (our monkeys**), so there’s no way for us to care about everyone.

Lee also shared a Derek Sivers article that hits right in the gut. As Lee pointed out, reading the two together makes it obvious that the abuses Derek talked about came from people working outside their Monkeysphere. They ended up shouting at their email, not realizing there was a person on the other end.

After reading them both, I had to ask myself: Why do I think I’m different? I do try to treat people with respect, even when “people” are an abstraction so far removed from my life that I need complex software*** to remind me how to treat them well. I also interact with lots of people over the course of the day, far more than the ~150 my Monkeysphere would allow me to care about.

First I thought there might be some notable difference between in-Monkeysphere people and out-of-Monkeysphere people. Maybe I just follow a set of rules about interacting with people (see also: enlightened self-interest), without really feeling it on the inside. Then I read a tweet from Dave Masten:

“My dad’s leukemia just took a turn for the worse. Sad.”

That hit me in the gut, too. And then I figured it out. They *are* in my Monkeysphere. All of them. Sara and Valerie are in there. Dave’s in there. You’re in there, dear reader, even if I don’t know you at all. They’re the 42nd monkey.

Here’s how it seems to work, based on whole minutes of self-examination: one of my monkeys**** is an abstract monkey. Programmers might call it a variable, mathematicians might call it an equivalence class, and politicians might call it a constituent.  When I interact with someone who isn’t in my Monkeysphere, that person becomes the 42nd Monkey for that interaction, even if it’s only a few seconds. When the time comes to deal with someone else, they become the 42nd Monkey instead.

The 42nd Monkey suffered a loss. The 42nd Monkey is working toward a deadline. She slept badly last night, and she’s just trying to wake up. He’s glad it’s Friday. She doesn’t have a lot of time, but she’s willing to talk. He wonders if all this trouble is worth it. She hopes she’ll meet someone nice tonight. He’s awkward at parties. The 42nd Monkey, in short, is a real human being.

The 42nd Monkey isn’t so different from the other monkeys in my sphere, so I try to treat him with the same respect. More importantly, I realize I’m probably outside of the 42nd Monkey’s monkeysphere, so I give her the benefit of the doubt. She’s not yelling at me to make me feel bad; it’s because her child is crying. He’s honking at my car, not its driver.

Why does this matter? Because I don’t agree with David Wong’s conclusion that “it’s also impossible for them to care about you.” (Emphasis his.) I can be your 42nd Monkey just as you are mine. It might only be for 5 seconds, but if that’s the time you’re spending with me then that’s all it takes.

* I know! Can you believe it? Not a phrase I’d ever imagine writing.
** Yes, humans aren’t monkeys, and most of the images in the Cracked article aren’t monkeys either. Step back and embrace the wider point here.
*** A digression, but here’s an example from right now: My phone is told by my calendar application to remind me when someone I’ve never met is scheduled to call, so I’ll know not to send that call to voicemail, which I ordinarily would do because their caller ID isn’t in my address book.
**** There’s probably more than one monkey, but for now let’s assume it’s one monkey. (In a vacuum[4].) That way I can name it, instead of saying “Monkeys 42 through 42 + n, where n < 108″ each time.