User:Ssstephen/Reading/Six Difficult and Inconvenient Values to Reclaim the Future with Old Media

I agree with a lot of this but I thought it would be nice to locate the points of tension for me, and try to offer alternative values to address these points.

Slow

Inefficiency and slowness as a way to escape planned obsolescence and "the relentless push toward productivity, consumption, and waste". I like this idea but I wonder if it can ever fall into the category of direct action, as opposed to protest? Is inefficiency a real strategy for an alternative way of living? Slowness absolutely, maybe its just the term inefficient that sits funny with me. Inefficient I assume means complex, having unexpected outputs, accepting unexpected inputs, flexible, adaptive, non goal-oriented, organic. This idea to me is not the opposite of "efficient" but something else, just as slow is not the opposite of fast. Opportunity for more positive definitions again, I will rename this one

Zen

ˢᵐᵃˡˡ

I like small too, but it sometimes sounds like separate to me. Maybe scalable isn't such a bad word, but not the way it is usually meant. Elastic, stretchy, squishy. Systems (networks, machines, ideas) that can adapt to and serve the people, situations and things that compose them. There's always room for one more at the table. It's ok if you need to go. Maybe this one could be called

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs

Open

"The vast majority of us will never understand how the internet works at the levels of software, hardware, and infrastructure". That's ok. Most of us will never understand dentistry, or group theory, or how to sing baqashot. Some of these things are inaccessible without training and some of these things can only be understood or advanced by larger groups instead of individuals. And some people don't want to hack their roomba, that's also ok. However I do agree with the general point so only a slight change into

Openable

Censorship and accessibility are also in this category which is a related but additional issue, also to do with control. The issue of freedom of speech is a whole can of worms that I dont have time for right now. So I'll just add in a point

Accessible

Cooperative

Cooperative is put here as an opposite to corporate, I dont think this is the first time this has come up? A corporation (according to the other wiki) is "an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity ... and recognized as such in law for certain purposes". This sounds pretty cooperative to me. And as much as we like to say corporate interests don't align with public interests, they are devices created by humans so must at least align with at least one human's interests in some way. Maybe the real issue with corporations is the idea of "limited liability". That is (again from the big wiki) that "a passive shareholder in a corporation will not be personally liable either for contractually agreed obligations of the corporation, or for torts (involuntary harms) committed by the corporation against a third party". Now this is a dangerous idea, and has led to many sad, painful, hurtful decisions being made. In fact it is straight up irresponsible. So why dont we rename this one

Accountable

If you mess up, take responsibility, tell people, we will talk through it and fix it together.

This also avoids the impractical idea that we all want to be involved in running social media platforms, or that the people who run them should be the only ones who can benefit from them. Specialisation is ok, we can still be a team.

Care

I like this term (for a general approach to life) but again am cautious of the way it is posed as an antithesis to "innovate" in the context of machines/networks. Innovate means "make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products". Which is pretty good, and even similar to the definition of care provided here. Why maintain when you can improve? Improving does not have to imply, as it currently does, throwaway consumerism, forced obsolescence, bad craftsmanship or blackboxing. For example why dont we improve on these elements themselves? This thing of "they dont make em like they used to" is bollocks, they didnt make iPhones in the 70s, thats why no one has one. Commodore 64s were still made of plastic in big factories with environmentally harmful shipping strategies. If you're drooling its probably fetishisation. But more important than any of this, I don't care about the machine. I care about the people who made it, the people who use it, the people who transport it, and maybe after that the environment and the planet it was made on, sorry for sounding anthropocentric but humans are the significant actors in this production. So just to be contentious I would like to call this one

Innovative

Failure

I'm not sure if I see anything wrong with this one. But it does make me think, when failure happens what should you do? Try again? Give up? Either can be logical steps after accepting the failure in some way, accepting in the former as in acknowledging, learning, and trying again; or accepting in the latter as in understanding, learning, and adapting goals and ways of being. Maybe this just depends on the situation. In this situation I hoped to rewrite the name of each value:

Failure