kiwano

Optimizing for Conviviality: Gifts (Part One: Cultivating Generosity)

kiwano — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 01:37:34 GMT

Over Christmas, the topic of gifts naturally came to my mind as something that there’s quite a bit to say about. Of course it’s taken me a while to set aside enough time to write these thoughts up (in fits and spurts, here and there — further complicated by the that this topic has proven large enough to need to be split into two posts). An upside to this is that the thought of gifts should once again have divorced itself from anxieties around the sense of obligation that seems to be attached to Christmas gifts. That’s not really the sort of gift I’d like to focus on, preferring to look at day-to-day gifts that may be small, intangible, and further removed from the scope of commerce.

By removed from the scope of commerce, I mean to start by looking at gifts as an economic activity, and what I mean by this is to make a bit of a rough classification. If a person sets out to provide something of value to another person without seeking to receive something of value in return, then that’s a gift. If the goal is for both people to provide things of comparable value to each other, then that’s a transaction. There’s a third option that’s harder to name, in which someone seeks to get something of value without trying to provide value; there’s a strong temptation to call it theft, but theft carries the weight of a judgement that I don’t think is right to apply to dumpster-diving and other scavenging activities, or to simply accepting a gift.

What I mean to suggest here is that one of the ways to optimize for conviviality is to try and skew one’s own economic activities away from transactions, and towards gifts.

There are a few reasons for this: the first being simply that gifts feel good, both to receive and to give; there’s also the way it ties in to a sense of abundance or scarcity (a topic which I suspect deserves its own post in the future); and finally there’s the enormous amount of effort that goes into maintaining a deeply imperfect system of trying to balance what is given and what is received in the transaction economy (by which I mean pretty much the entire financial sector — I’m guessing that the cost of keeping score is also a topic that could fill an entire post).

One thing that I don’t mean to suggest is that it’s a good idea to abandon transactions entirely in favour of gifts. As a long term strategy, it would be nice to work towards having an economic reality where this sort of thing is realistic. On a more practical and short-term level, not only is it good to take smaller steps in the direction of more gifts and fewer transactions, but it’s also worth remembering that there’s a lot of grey area between pure gifts and pure transactions: things like giving someone a really good deal in a transaction, or doing (extra) chores in a communal setting. So not only is it good to replace something that seems like an outright system of transactions with an outright system of gifts, it’s also good to nudge some activities from something that’s more towards the transaction end of the grey area, a little more towards the gift end.

So this leaves the ever-tricky question: how do I do that? There’s an obvious temptation to look at our own needs for food and shelter, get into a mindset of “but I don’t know that I could meet those needs with the gifts that people give me”, and get sucked right into the trap of trying to figure out how to receive gifts.

The only approach to this trap that I can make any sense of is an indirect approach: supposing that I want to receive more gifts, then I should try to live in a world where more gifts are being given; if I want to live in a world where more gifts are given, I should create that world by giving more gifts.

Where this is still a trap is that I could be giving “gifts” which I still believe deep down are some sort of transaction with society at large. After enough giving I may start to wonder why I haven’t yet gotten my end of the (nonexistent) deal, and get frustrated both with giving “gifts”, and with society for treating them as the actual gifts that I was pretending they were.

Fortunately, there’s a neat little details that makes this much easier: absent any anxiety about scarcity that might follow from giving too much, having a gift appreciated is one of the most enjoyable experiences we can possibly have. It doesn’t have to be an extravagant gift, or one that’s difficult to give, it just has to be appreciated.

I’m going to share two anecdotes around the joy of giving a gift and having it appreciated. The first returns to Christmas, and includes a practice that readers who celebrate Christmas (or really any holiday which revolves around gift-giving) might want to adopt if they don’t already.

When I was growing up, my father was quite adamant that Christmas gifts should be opened one at a time, and everyone watch the gift being opened (at least in our house; when we were celebrating Christmas at the homes of other relatives, we opened gifts in the manner that they saw fit). What this meant was that no one ever had to miss seeing someone’s reaction to the initial discovery of what their gift was, whether because they were too busy opening a gift that they’d been given, or because more than one of their gifts was being opened at the same time. This provided a concrete experience of the joy of giving that I’m seeking to describe.

The other anecdote describes another tangible experience that I distinctly remember (it’s an experience that solidly outs me as an affluent Westerner, which I hope lends credibility to my claims in earlier posts that affluent Westerners have a particularly dire need for more conviviality). It took place the first time I went to Burning Man. One relevant feature of the setting for this particular anecdote is that people entering Burning Man are required to demonstrate that they have the means to survive the week relatively independently, in order to be admitted to the event. The other

feature is that there’s a massive surplus of everything, and all of it is given away as gifts (as commerce is forbidden at the event).

This context is important to my saying that the single most enjoyable experience that I had during that entire week was giving a gift that was clearly appreciated. The opportunities to eat delicious food that other people were giving away, to ogle art, play with bizarre and large toys, to dance, drink, take drugs, have sex, or any of the other things that people usually seek to do with their money (and attempt — sometimes successfully — to exercise discipline to avoid doing too much of); these opportunities were literally inexhaustible (it’s commonly, correctly observed that there are multiples, if not orders of magnitude, more things to see and do in that week than there is time to see and do them all). I certainly took advantage of many of the opportunities that best matched my tastes and desires, but none of those experiences could hold a candle to the simple act of giving away a bag of chocolate chips to complete strangers who, if I’ve seen them in the six and a half years since, didn’t recognize me, nor I them.

And yes, it was just a bag of chocolate chips, and it was to a large group of people. See, it being my first time, I knew there was a culture of giving gifts, but had little to no idea what to give apart from vague suggestions that it didn’t have to be big, fancy, or expensive. Being a chocoholic, I decided that chocolate was the way to go, and brought chocolate chips to give away. One afternoon, once I was settled in enough, I set out to give away these chocolate chips, and wandered around offering them to people. In some respects, this wasn’t a great time to give them away, as we were out in the high desert, in the midday summer sun. Being hot, dry, and maybe vaguely thirsty really doesn’t put one in the mood for chocolate chips. In one important other respect, it was an excellent time; after I’d given up on finding anyone who wanted any chocolate chips and started to walk back to my camp, I came across a camp that was giving away ice cream (which was far more appropriate to the physical environment). There was a line-up of people waiting to get some ice cream, and just past the front of that line, there was a stream of people who’d just been given an ice cream cone, and might want chocolate chips on them. Needless to say, most of them did indeed want chocolate chips on their ice cream, and as I made my offer, I could see each of them squeal in delight, their eyes alight, as they went from thinking “sweet, I just got an ice cream cone” to “oh my god, I just got a mini-sundae”. I got to be thanked by the people giving away the ice cream for making their gift even better.

It probably helped that the baseline requirement that everyone have their survival needs met for the week effectively erased any concern that I might be creating a situation of scarcity by giving away my chocolate chips. It certainly shaped my understanding of the experience that it was anonymous enough for me to absolutely no expectation that anyone give me anything back (which I might worry about having disappointed). Basically, the things that strike me as complicating and confounding the joy of generosity were notably absent. There was just the act of giving, and the observation of how unimaginably good it felt.

This also raises a subtle point that a sincere expression of gratitude for a gift received is one of the best things that to give someone (and if you try this and notice the recipient of your gratitude reacting to that gratitude, that might in turn allow you to experience the joy of giving your gratitude, and if they notice that joy — well let’s just say that gratitude freely and sincerely (not necessarily verbally) given can create a joyous (if brief) little feedback loop.

At this point, we should return to the point of how to create more opportunities to experience gifts (and gratitude) by giving more gifts. However this seems like a good place to break for the next post, which will be dedicated to the subtopic of finding abundance.

Some optimizations for conviviality (and a little more “why”)

kiwano — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 01:16:58 GMT

I’m pretty sure that I had intended to write this post in August. I got about half of it done then, but didn’t finish it. I could come up with many reasons why I didn’t finish posting it then, but can’t imagine any of them being particularly meaningful. The only thing I can really think of to say on that topic is obvious: I didn’t make this post in August; I am making it now. Also a point that may not be obvious now, but should be soon (and may serve as something of an excuse, though I intend it more as a caution): this post is long.

Returning to August, I mentioned that optimizing for conviviality is a thing that I was happy to notice myself doing, and then posted further to elaborate a bit on why it seems like a good thing for other people to try doing too.

I haven’t yet given any sort of indication as to what things in my life seem to be optimizations in this direction, but before I do that, I’d like to briefly to return to the question of why we should optimize for conviviality (and perhaps answer the question as to why I’ve resumed making these posts, instead of just abandoning them after a few months of inactivity).

Since the last time I posted, I came across one of a long thread of commentaries on artificial intelligence. The general pattern is that the first artificial intelligence that is smarter than humans will probably need to be equipped with something that it is programmed to do — a goal or sense of what is good — and that we need to be extremely careful with what this goal is. The general term of the property that it is safe for a hyperintelligent AI to have is “friendliness”. While this is meant in a technical sense (that sort of imposes a friend or foe dichotomy on potential AIs), I think that the similarities between this technical friendliness, and the condition of human relationships that we commonly describe as friendliness is strong enough to justify continuing with this point (and not just to justify used of the same word for both concepts).

With other goals, the prospects for humanity can be (and often are) described as being, at best, being driven to extinction through habitat loss, as we have done to so many other species, by a single-minded

machine (or collection of machines) basically hell-bent on maximizing the number of, say, paperclips in existence.

Having worked professionally on systems automating the achievement of a simple goal, such as my employer’s profit (or more typically, my employer’s client’s profit), based on statistical analysis of all the data that could be collected in pursuit of that goal, I am concerned about the current state of the world, and the AIs it is likely to create.

Roughly speaking, my experience with machine intelligences so far is that they tend to mimic the goals of the system in which they are created. An AI created by a capitalist organization is likely to try and make as much wealth or profit as it possibly can. (It’s not unreasonable to consider capitalism itself to be a non-autonomous, not-really-hyperintelligent AI running this exact optimization right now — it would certainly explain our environmental crisis.)

So if we’re to avoid the existential threat posed by a hyperintelligent AI optimized for something terrible — or even just thoughtless — by developing an AI which pursues friendliness instead, a useful strategy in this direction is to change our society to seek friendliness as a fundamental goal: in other words, to optimize for conviviality.

That’s a pretty terrifying threat to contemplate, but I have ogood news: the actual topic of this post is how to optimize for conviviality. From here on in, I’m going to be talking about concrete steps I’ve personally taken to steer my life in this direction. If we steer enough lives in this direction, then we will have steered society in this direction, and we will be doing something to hold off this terrible threat. On top of that, after reading about the things that I’ve found to be helpful, you can (and should) make comments describing the things that you’ve found to be helpful, so we all have even more ideas for steps we could take.

Continuing at not quite getting to the meat of this post, I have even better news: these are optimizations for conviviality — for structuring our social relations as much as possible on friendship. I’m not suggesting more bamboo shoots under our fingernails, or more crippling guilt; I’m suggesting more friendship. It’s probably something that you’re already doing, and this is more of an opportunity to think about how to do it more and to share those ideas.

So let’s get on with things; the list of things that I’m mentioning, is bound to be incomplete. That’s ok. We have lots of room for comments, and absolutely no need for the options covered to be exhaustive, just inspiring.

There is a bit of a catch: the first items on my list generally fit a pattern of choosing conviviality over ease. At the heart of it, if we’re optimizing for conviviality, then we’re not optimizing for ease, for wealth, for comfort, or for numerous other things. So in this case, I had a choice between doing something easy, and doing something with my friends (possibly friends I had yet to make), and I chose friends. Fortunately, I’m very pleased to report that I have never regretted this decision for a moment: when I’ve faced challenges, or even done familiar work alongside my friends, it has never felt hard so much as it’s felt like a deepening of the friendship.

The first of these examples is deciding to live on a sailboat. Compared to living in an apartment (which I was doing before), living on a sailboat is not easy. There are myriad challenges and perils that people who stay ashore wouldn’t even imagine. My boat has a mast, and in order to apply a cover to the boat and secure it against the elements in the winter, the mast needs to be removed in the fall, and reinstalled in the spring. This is a job that (on my boat) requires the use of a crane, and takes four people to do safely. So I ask my friends to help. These are usually (but not always) the same friends who I do most of my sailing with, so there’s usually not much of a risk of coming up short-handed. As far as the crane, that’s one of the facilities provided by my yacht club.

Speaking of which, for all the people who don’t live on their boats in the winter (and for me to take my boat out of the water for a week each spring to clean and repaint its bottom) the club has a remarkable system for launching and hauling boats, which I’ve heard described (within the club) as being “like the way the ancient Romans launched and hauled boats, but where they used draught animals, we have a diesel winch, and where they used slaves, we have members.” Briefly, the horizontal movement of boats in this system involves pushing (or sometimes pulling) them around on greased skids with plain old muscle power.

It takes towo weekends of 10-hour days each Spring to launch all the boats, and another two similar weekends in the Fall to haul them out, and we’re all expected to be there the entire time to help with pushing and pulling (how well various people live up to this expectation is a different story, but the work gets done, and no one really slacks off enough to generate ill will around the club).

What’s really interesting about the boat storage processes is how they basically define the character of the club. Of all of the club’s events, launch and haul-out, are hands-down the best attended of the bunch (it helps that they’re compulsory). Not only do we get the chance to strike up conversations with other members who we might never cross paths with otherwise, but there’s a built-in trust when we strike up those conversations: this other person is out here in the cold rain (it’s almost always cold and rainy when we launch and haul the boats — if the weather were nice, wouldn’t we

want our boats to still/already be in the water and ready to sail?), giving up their weekend and working hard to get this job done that we all benefit from; I already know they’re a good person.

Of course keeping my boat in the water all winter includes me in another slightly different community: there’s a little bit of collective effort (though mostly in pooling resources around weatherproofing supplies), but mostly there are shared hardships, and shared laundry and washroom facilities at which to talk about them. There’s something that feels fundamentally human and real about passing through the laundry room on the way back from taking a shower, seeing a neighbour, and striking up a conversation about the storm last week and what broke on each of our boats, and what we heard (or saw)

broke elsewhere around the marina.

In the moment, these hardships are uncomfortable, and maybe even a bit dangerous, but once they’re over, the cease to be hardships, and become stories to bond over. I would gladly trade (and continue to put myself in a position to trade) the occasional night of poor sleep in a storm, and the occasional moments retying my boat in my bathrobe and slippers to the end of an icy, bucking dock (while muttering to myself about how it was foolish of me not to put on a lifejacket first) for the opportunity to reminisce with my neighbours about what a terrible storm we had.

Now two aspects of the whole liveaboard thing tend to fit into some broader patterns that I find are also good optimizations for conviviality: joining (or holding) work parties, and sharing tools.

For the case of sharing tools, among other less formal arrangements with friends, I belong to a makerspace. This is basically a shared workshop with some pretty substantial shop tools and other equipment. I certainly don’t have room on the boat for an industrial sewing machine, or a big old CNC milling machine, and a lot of my shopmates don’t have room in their homes either (never mind any of us having the disposable cash to buy any of these things, or the spare time or maintenance budget to keep them running — or industrial zoning and 3-phase power for that matter).

Of course the makerspace isn’t a strictly economic arrangement. It’s not just a matter of paying dues and having access to the machinery. We have to trust each other not to wreck the machines, cause serious injuries, burn the building down, etc., and we need to maintain the space and machines, and perform some basic administration. Roughly speaking, to make the space work, we need not just to operate on economic terms, but to be a functioning community. And in participating in that community, I’ve been invited to join in a whole bunch of interesting projects, and met a bunch of really interesting people, several of whom I can proudly and confidently refer to as friends (in fact I met the monk at whose monastery I started writing this series, at my makerspace).

Incidentally, another friend I met at the makerspace (in fact one of the founders of the space) recently purchased a parcel of land with a house and a barn on it, and started hosting an assortment of work parties to make it into a viable community resource (e.g. renovating the barn so that its upper level could function as useful sleeping quarters for a large number of people in the Winter). Although he has the additional status that comes with founding that space (and the security that his

name on the deed to the property provides in making sure that he won’t be ousted by infighting like he was at a different space he founded), he’s made his intentions very clear that he set up the space as another effort in building community, and that it is a community space. So really, that’s an optimization for conviviality that he’s done more than me.

That said, I’ve also met friends at those work parties who I discovered to also be interested in hunting, invited them hunting with me, and we now have an incredible hunt camp between me and them and our other friends (some of whom were already hunting with me). As an added bonus, because so many of us camping together basically met each other at work parties, no one has the slightest doubt that

everyone in the camp is good to pull their weight, and we can just do our respective bits to make the camp go without any anxiety that we’re being exploited, even if we contribute way more than is necessary. As a result, we all contribute way more than is necessary, and just end up with an incredibly functional and relatively comfortable hunt camp as a result.

Chasing that to another related point, be generous with your friends. I’m not saying to be generous only with your friends (in fact generosity with strangers can be a great way to make new friends) but definitely be generous with your friends. If they’re short on money, give them money (or lend it to them, and then promptly forget that you did so; if they don’t repay you, then you forgot that you ever lent them money, and if they do, it’s like a whole new gift from them to you, and you

can pledge to yourself that you’ll do something else nice for them later).

There are some theories on early economics that suggest that the most fundamental and primitive economic unit is actually the sense of owing a favour to a friend or fellow community member, and that community cohesion is built and maintained by a tendency for these gifts to create a sense of gratitude in the recipient that is more valuable than the cost perceived by giver. Generosity is really a topic for a post of its own, so I’m going to leave it here.

Also in the realm of basic or primitive cohesion, stay in touch with your family. I don’t mean this to be an unpleasant thought to people who are estranged from (certain members of) their families (often for good reasons), though I recognize that this is sometimes the case. If you suspect that this applies to you, just skip over the next two paragraphs so you don’t have to feel any worse about your family than you already do.

Outside of those cases, and excepting spouses and in-laws, every relationship between two family members is basically as long as the younger of the two have been alive. I’ve known my sister for her entire life (which isn’t quite 3 years shorter than my own life), and my daughter for her entire life, and my parents have known me for my entire life.

There’s something about the permanence of those relationships that I suspect is somehow instructive on maintaining friendships and other community ties. Back in August, I went to a family reunion organized around descendants of great-great-grandparents on my mother’s side. Although it’s an annual event, I

hadn’t been in something like 14 years. In spite of my lengthy absence, my relationships with my cousins basically picked right back up as though I hadn’t been away for nearly a decade and a half (well apart from the fact that we had a bit of catching up to do at the beginning of our conversations). I can’t quite articulate a good description of it, but there’s a part of me that just senses that there’s a remarkable power in the ability of people to be able to relate to each other in this way. I also intend to dig into that at some point in the future.

My final optimization in this post is naturally one that’s somewhat ill-suited for a blog post: actually physically be around people. There’s been enough written on the degradation of civility on the internet when people can’t see the hurt or joy that their words cause in the faces of the people they’re directed to, enough written on the effectiveness of touch (whether handshakes, hands on shouders, hugs, or whatever else) as a form of bonding, or on moods and pheromones and the limbic system and hunches — generally speaking a lot of writing on so many subtle interactions that often escape conscious detection when we interact with people by being in the same space as them.

I don’t want to say that participating in community over the internet or by letters, or over the phone, is somehow false or wrong. In fact I’d propose that all of these means of long-distance, large-group, or otherwise slightly distant contact are an excellent way of sustaining friendships and other relationships between opportunities to spend time together in person (or while holding the intention to eventually meet in person). Not only that, but I intend to write a bit more on how there is some historical evidence that a significant part of the cultural input that went into the creation of the internet, specifically intended to develop it as a tool for conviviality, and that the ability it provides to make and sustain connection probably make it an essential piece of infrastructure for the emergence of a new convivial social order. That all said, there’s a peculiar reality to a relationship that involves periodically occupying the same physical space, and we need to preserve that.

That’s about it for what I have to say (for now) about what I’ve been up to in this area. Please comment with your own optimizations, or to ask me more about my own. Also if you think that something rings true here, please share it with your friends (or family) — let them know that you suspect the bonds of friendship you share with them maybe have the potential to save the world.

Why Optimize for Conviviality?

kiwano — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 03:19:58 GMT

Having boldly claimed in my last post that I believe optimizing for conviviality to be a good thing, I clearly have a duty to back that claim up. The evidence that I find most convincing is that I generally tend to feel very content with the parts of my life that have developed from this optimization — but since that might simply be a quirk of my personality or my circumstances, I’m going to make an attempt at an argument that such a quirk is relatively widely shared (and maybe even more than a quirk).

The heart of this argument has two basic parts: the first being that humans have social needs that can be as compelling as our physical needs; the second is that our principal economic system in the industrialized West is not very good at meeting these needs — in fact sometimes it even hinders us. (I’d like to note that I say “principal economic system” in recognition of the fact that there are subcultures, countercultures, and other communities operating their own internal economies within our broader society, some of which do much better at meeting our social needs — others not so much).

There’s also something of an additional argument that social health can help meet one’s material needs better than material wealth can help meet one’s social needs. Succinctly, it’s a lot easier to borrow money from a friend than it is to buy friendship. Obviously there are limits to this argument: people don’t really want friends who we believe are only friendly for economic reasons. In fact, I’m inclined to avoid this particular line of argument, because it’s very easy to miss the point with it; someone who pursues friendships out of a desire to have these friendships satisfy their material needs will probably find that neither their material needs nor their social needs end up being met.

Returning to the first part of the core argument I remember some of the seeds of the idea for this series of blog posts getting planted in my head a little while back, while reading The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, by Bruce K. Alexander.

Prof. Alexander is probably most famous for his “Rat Park” experiment. This experiment was motivated by the addiction experiments in which rats in cages who were given an opportunity to consume morphine would rather do that than do the things the needed to stay alive, like eating. The original explanation for the caged rat experiments was that morphine is so powerfully addictive that its addictive impulses can override survival instincts.

The Rat Park Experiment tested an alternate theory to explain the caged rats’ behaviour: that they were so miserable in the laboratory cages, they were turning to the morphine as a coping mechanism. So Rat Park was constructed as a sort of ideal rat habitat, in which the rats had an environment that could be explored, other rats to interact with, and all the sorts of things that were known to make rats happy — also morphine. As it turned out, not only did rats placed into Rat Park not become addicted to morphine, but even rats in Rat Park that had been pre-addicted to morphine, would stop taking the morphine even though it was readily available.

Naturally, this result was viewed as a confirmation of Prof. Alexander’s theory that the rats were miserable, and after conducting an assortment of experiments in Rat Park, he turned his studies towards identifying the sort of human circumstances that functioned like the rats’ cages, to keep addicts miserable enough to become and remain addicted. Based on these studies, he wrote:

Human beings are not psychologically self-sufficient. From early childhood until old age, individuals in every culture devote themselves to establishing and maintaining a place in their society. In a contemporary manner, society’s subgroups and institutions, starting with the family, open their doors to maturing individuals at appropriate stages of development. These subgroups give as much latitude as they can to individuals’ unique preferences and needs for autonomy, but always within limits that allow each subgroup to carry out its essential economic and social functions. Following Erik Erikson, this complex, ever-changing state of interdependence is called “psychosocial integration” in this book.

When reading a few paragraphs further on that:

Erik Erikson and Karl Polanyi were not alone in recognising the necessity of integrating social belonging and individual autonomy for the achievement of human wholeness. This central fact of human nature has been recognised by countless other great thinkers as well, notably Plato, Charles Darwin, Peter Kropotkin, Alfred Adler, and Erich Fromm. The importance of this fact is acknowledged by many comtemporary social scientists who use a great variety of alternate names for psychosocial integration, such as `belonging’, `community’, `wholeness’, `social cohesion’, or simply `culture’. Most of these terms could be used interchangeably with “psychosocial integration”.

I thought of Ivan Illich’s conviviality as something that if not an alternate name, is at least a strongly related concept. (As a bit of an aside, Erich Fromm appears to have collaborated some with Ivan Illich, which shows us a bit of a thread connecting conviviality and psychosocial integration. As another aside, around the quoted paragraph, Alexander notes an apparent connection between psychosocial integration, and many conceptions of “soul”, but then sets the term aside as potentially harmful to the book’s scientific credibility.)

Another similarity between Alexander and Illich, is that they were both strongly critical of the impact modern society has on our social relations (tying in to the second part of my core argument): Illich having been broadly critical of making institutions out of activities, while Alexander focused on the institution seeming to wield the most power in society at the time of his critique: the free market (Illich was writing during the Cold War, so the dominance of the market wasn’t quite so established).

Both critiques speak to a tendency of our economic systems and their institutions, to strip people of their informal relationships, and reduce them to alienated economic actors. In Illich’s model, the resulting ongoing generation of new desires by an institutional society is compared to the punishments of Sisyphus and of Tantalus, and described as “not just evil — it can only be spoken of as Hell.” Alexander, not being a priest, instead identifies a loss of pyschosocial integration as strongly correlated to — and a likely cause of — higher rates of addiction and suicide.

While I don’t want to claim that wealth and conviviality are the only things we can seek in our decision-making, most people will readily acknowledge that it’s prudent to save some extra wealth in case of hardship. If I don’t do enough to maintain my material wealth, then there’s very real danger that some sort of economic shock could strip me of my cherished possessions, leave me homeless, or cause me to go hungry for a while. Likewise, if my ties to my family, my friends, and my community in general aren’t strong enough to withstand some sort of interpersonal shock (like certain types of death, the loss of a social space, or some sort of scandal), then the danger is just as real that this sort of shock could suck out my soul and kill me.

Even absent the general contentment that conviviality brings me, I want less to have my soul sucked out, than to have a bailiff kick me out of my home. In addition to that, society seems to be engineered to steer me towards accumulating material wealth than towards social health, so I optimize for conviviality.

Optimizing for Conviviality

kiwano — Sun, 31 Jul 2016 19:59:40 GMT

A few months ago, while chatting with my friend Steven about the heuristics and algorithms people apply to our lives, it occured to me that a heuristic that I’d been applying (not necessarily strictly or perfectly) to my own life for the past several years could be summarized as “optimize for conviviality.” Working from the idea that this is a pretty good heuristic to be applying in one’s life, I started toying with the idea of maybe writing about it a bit on the internet.

Now (not counting a bit of delay in actually posting this) I’m visiting Steven at his monastery (I may write later about monasteries in the context of conviviality), and part of the structure here is a scheduled Vow Day. From what I understand of the explanations I’ve received, on Vow Day, the work periods are spent on self-directed tasks that the person doing them feels to be the most effective way they can be of service to the world. (Steven, having previously worked at Google, described it to me quite succinctly as “monastic 20% time.”)

Since I generally find myself much happier when more of my interactions are convivial, and additionally feel a subtle but pervasive pressure towards less-convivial social interactions, I expect that other people may benefit from increasing the conviviality in their own lives — and also that this benefit may spread to the people around them. All that considered, actually sitting down to write this seems like an appropriate use of my Vow Day.

Now that my motivations for writing this have been addressed, it’s almost certainly useful to clarify what I mean by “conviviality”. In using this word, I mean it in a sense close to the meaning given by Ivan Illich: “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons” and deeply connected to an Aquinian notion of austerity identified as “[marking] the foundation of friendship”. (These quotes and references are pretty much directly lifted from Illich’s book Tools for Conviviality.)

There is another sense of “conviviality” that I don’t want to entirely exclude: the sense of being cheerful, lively, friendly, and enjoyable. Rather I just consider it as being somewhat incomplete. If instead of directly seeking friendship and good cheer, we seek social relations that bring us together in ways where we recognize and support each other’s autonomy and creativity, my own experience suggests that friendship and good cheer follow as a natural consequence.

In the interest of keeping my posts on this topic brief enough to be easily digested (and to restrain myself from going too far off on rants or wild tangents), I think that I’ll hold off on digging into the Why or How of this particular optimization for now, saving them instead for future posts. There’s certainly enough depth to the topic to make at least a few additional posts (I have notes already), and little point in trying to do everything all at once.

Installation art.

kiwano — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 17:00:46 GMT

Back in the winter, I finally put in an application to have the 5 cubes project at this year’s Nuit Blanche. Since it was accepted as an independent submission, and since Nuit Blanche barely more than 2 months away, I launched a kickstarter yesterday to raise money for the last of the materials.

Please visit it, share it with anyone you think might be interested (and encourage them to share it too!), and hopefully even contribute.

Thanks.

Migration.

kiwano — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 20:13:04 GMT

I have once again made the migration from my winter mooring to my summer mooring, and made sure that my address on my website is up-to-date.

Unusual public post.

kiwano — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 23:04:18 GMT

Normally, any post I make here that isn’t essentially notice of a change of address or relationship status or anything of that sort, is kept relatively private. I’m going to make an exception of this post, because I feel pretty strongly that the public debate on the Snowden leaks about NSA activities is hamstrung by ideologies, and missing some very important points.

It’s worth noting that ideologically, I tend to lean towards free societies with accountable, transparent governments, and all those nice things, and away from activities that superficially emphasize security. This leaning is not strictly idealistic though, as I’ve seen a rather strong correlation in the past century between freer countries, and dominant countries (both militarily and economically), and strongly suspect that the dominance is a consequence of the freedom.

Looked at this way, erosion of civil rights in the name of security is not merely ideologically questionable, it is severely counterproductive. And in this light, I’ve spent a decent chunk of the past few months wondering how the recently disclosed NSA surveillance program is counterproductive, rather than merely ideologically questionable.

The answer that eventually came to me was pretty straightforward: the described data stores are an enormously valuable target for the enemies of the United States to attack. This would of course be an attack with the intention to make use of it, not to deny the NSA use of it. Imagine what the MSS, the FSB, or various organized crime cartels (e.g. drug cartels) could do with that data.

It’s really not much of a strech to see foreign and criminal powers using NSA-gathered data to e.g. blackmail American politicians, military officers, business leaders, or scientists into acting against the interests of their country. It’s no more of a stretch to see them doing social network analyses on the data to find out who in their organizations are likely to be American agents, and to purge said agents (or use them as avenues for disinformation, or…).

I also find it deeply distressing that the main argument that gets put forward for these programs being allowed to continue is roughly “we’re not after you, good citizen; you can trust us”. It distresses me because it is, on its face, a pretty emotionally compelling argument. I have a sister who’s a military officer, and an aunt (my godmother, no less) who’s a retired spy. These are both people whom I trust deeply, and it borders on being personally offensive to hear a suggestion that they’d handle access to such data with anything less than the utmost professionalism and respect.

By extension, it seems easy to infer that an overwhelming majority of the agents who can access PRISM and related data stores are similarly honourable and professional. I say “seems easy” because I’ve already made a sampling error. My sister and my aunt are people whom I’ve known my entire life (well roughly 3 years less than my entire life for my sister, since she’s a younger sister); I’m drawing my sample entirely from a pool of people whom I trust. Foreign spies, organized criminals, and other undesirables who may gain access to our data, simply aren’t people who I would know (or know as such).

Based on that, I can’t rightly assume that such people don’t exist. Nor can I assume that such people will be perfectly (or near-perfectly) denied access to the data in question. Security systems fail, just like every other sort of system. They’ve failed in the past, and they’ll fail again. Because of this fact, it’s incumbent upon those who rely on these systems to try and minimize the damage that gets done when they fail.

On top of all that, it’s very much worth considering that the system in question has already failed (if partially). Edward Snowden has run off with God only knows what, and is now in Russia. He probably had his hard drive mirrored and a keylogger installed on his computer during his first shower on Russian soil (if not sooner).

The obvious mitigant for failures of this nature is simply to aggressively remove any data on Americans, or American allies from the databases in question, and to establish similarly aggressive filters to prevent such data from ever getting into said databases. Given that the data in question has no legitimate value to American interests, and an enormous potential value to adversaries, there is simply no reason to keep it around–unless it’s a honeypot.

Moving.

kiwano — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:44:52 GMT

Last Thursday (Oct 18), I moved the boat from my summer mooring to my winter mooring. My website has now been updated to reflect this change.

Address change.

kiwano — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:06:45 GMT

I have moved the boat back from the winter mooring to the summer mooring. The address on my website has been updated to reflect this change.

Administrivia.

kiwano — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:28:33 GMT

In keeping with this statement on my website, nearly all the posts on kiwano.melon.org, and the recently-mirror-ish livejournal are either restricted to logged-in kiwano.melon.org users (OpenIDs are accepted), or friends-locked.

Already having this system in place, it's not been much additional effort to have a few filter groups in which I can really geek out on some topics without boring the hell out of everyone else who doesn't share an interest in those topics (not that I get around to that much). I recently added/forked a few topics, so I'm reposting the list (publicly even) to allow you to request inclusion on a filter (or exclusion from a filter) and as a general notice that these access controls are in place. Anyhow, the topic filters I currently have are:

Bicycles

Burning Man

Guns

Magick and the Occult

Mathematics, Science, and Technology

Queer

Sailing

Address change.

kiwano — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 14:53:57 GMT

I have moved the boat from the summer mooring to the winter mooring (well within a couple of slips; the summer occupant of the winter mooring is having engine trouble, and was still there when I arrived). The address on my website has been updated to reflect this change.

Spring

kiwano — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:55:25 GMT

Once again, I have moved back to the island (yesterday morning). My website has been updated to reflect my change of address.

Back on the island.

kiwano — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:33:56 GMT

Just brought the boat back to the island. My basic information page has been updated to reflect this change in address.

melon.org outage

kiwano — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:59:52 GMT

Due to a disk failure in an already degraded RAID array, the main melon.org server: ambrosia.melon.org went down at roughly 1914 EST (-0500) last night, and all the contents of /home were lost.

The server was brought back into operation at 0103 this morning, and the following websites, largely unaffected by the data loss, were running again: www.anarreshealth.ca, rolling.melon.org, kiwano.melon.org, winter.melon.org, and fleshy.melon.org (except that the images linked to from rolling.melon.org are actually on unripe.melon.org).
Mail service also resumed, and no mail was lost.
By 0230, unripe.melon.org was restored from backup (with the exception of the images which are still being restored from backup as this is being written).
The sudden interruption in service caused a (very) slight, but not automatically repairable error in the database server, which was repaired by 0304.
The gallery2 site, shiny.melon.org was storing all its images in /home, and they remain to be re-uploaded from their original sources (in at least one case, this is a blessing in disguise).

User directories (and outside sites) have typically been the user's responsibility to back up. My own user directory is being restored from backup right now (and includes the images still missing from rolling.melon.org). Additionally, for the bulk of mp3s, videos, etc. in the affected filesystem, The Pirate Bay is being used as a backup, since it requires much less effort than heading out of town to get my CDs/DVDs out of storage, and re-ripping them.

In other news, bringing the server down to install a replacement disk also provided an opportunity to switch to a vserver-enabled kernel. I've got a few spare IP addresses, and I'm doing some contract work that involves vservers, so if you've got an excuse for me to hone my vserver skills a little, I'd love to hear about it.

melon.org mail misbehaving

kiwano — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 20:03:02 GMT

Something appears to be going wrong with melon.org's MTA, and this appears to have been the case since June 30. Efforts are being made to fix it.

melon.org update

kiwano — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:51:52 GMT

Since the upstream provider for ambrosia.melon.org had an outage today, the server was moved into the hosting facility during the existing downtime. It is now back up, and DNS updates should all be fully propagated by midnight tonight (EDT, i.e. UTC-0400).

Roughly scheduled downtime.

kiwano — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:45:46 GMT

The rackmountable case for ambrosia.melon.org having arrived, there will be some downtime, probably tomorrow or Friday evening, as the guts of the machine are moved into their new body.

There will also be some donwtime in the next couple of weeks as this body is moved to a proper hosting facility.

Website update

kiwano — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 18:11:20 GMT

The basic personal information and biographical information pages on my website have been updated to reflect the successful defense of my thesis, completion of my doctoral program, and subsequent change in occupation to postdoc.

I have a date.

kiwano — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 21:34:45 GMT

I just got the announcement of my departmental thesis defense, which will be on Fri. Jun 22, at 3pm (this date had been mentioned to me a couple of days ago, but the announcement was held off to make sure that one of my committee members hadn't gone and bungled his schedule; this announcement serves to confirm that such bungling did not happen).

Of course, reading the announcement, I noticed a typo in my abstract; I'm sure I'll have to fix that before handing the beast in.

Also, in the mail today, was the offer letter for the postdoc I'll be taking in Sept.

Migration

kiwano — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 18:04:53 GMT

I have moved Candy Cane back to her Summer mooring. My website has been updated to reflect this.

Outage

kiwano — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 20:30:24 GMT

The portion of the city in which the melon.org server operates has been experiencing a severe brownout (there's enough electricity to run the furnace fan, and a few compact fluorescent light bulbs, but no more) since the ice storm on Thursday night/Friday. Consequently, the server is down for want of electricity. The electric company is not providing estimates as to when power will be restored. Efforts to find an alternative location for the server, until power is restored, have been unsuccessful so far.

server repaired

kiwano — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:30:04 GMT

websited and email hosted at melon.org is working again.

melon.org outage

kiwano — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 01:05:55 GMT

Due to failing storage hardware (probably a dying disk controller) the melon.org server has been brought down to minimize data loss. Repairs are planned for this evening. The server will also be physically moved during this outage, cancelling the downtime scheduled on Thursday for the move. Websites and email hosted on the server will be unavailable while repairs are in progress.

A upgrade path is being implemented to replace (or make redundant) aging components. Any overdue upgrades/replacements should be completed by September, allowing the server to run more reliably again.

Scheduled maintenance

kiwano — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:29:08 GMT

ambrosia.melon.org will be down for maintenance tomorrow (Wed., Oct. 3) morning between 9am and 3pm EDT to have its disks all rearranged and the OS completely reinstalled. Actual downtime is expected to be a few hours, as I don't have a spare server to pick up the slack while this happens.

More downtime

kiwano — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 20:52:13 GMT

ambrosia.melon.org will be down for a short while in the next week or so while some new disk is installed and set up. Owing to the busy schedule of my *ahem* colo provider (i.e. dancer_flight's closet) *cough*, I can't say for sure when this downtime will happen, but it'll probably be in the evening and last a couple of hours. During this time melon.org websites will be down and mail to melon.org addresses will be delayed.

There may also be a few brief (<5min) outages leading up to the upgrade.