On a side note, The Colony is a reaction to the 'common wisdom' of mainstream society, where mass media and large cooperations are not operating in the interest of the public good and actively damage the wellbeing of their customers in the relentless pursuit of personal profit through psychological exploitation. The Colony exists within this mainstream, but is being architected as a bubble that can interface with it while preserving its own wisdom.
Much advice in the productivity space is about how to work within the rules of the mainstream society, optimizing for one's strengths while minimizes weaknesses. For neurodivergent people, this world order requires a lot of effort to follow arbitrary and often nonsensical conventions for the sake of success based on macro views regarding what 'success' is. To us, this is pretty dumb. While we like money and the freedom it gives us, we don't like the ethical compromises and lack of accountability that 'successful people' elevated by the media seem to have. This kind of power dynamic only serves people who are in power and want to stay in power through the management of perception rather than the creation of genuine positive social impact that empowers and connects us so we can collectively live better and do more on a continuing basis. We want to grow the pie for the sake of everyone, not capture our part of it so we can proportionally larger. Stupid.
Our colony is small, an experiment in architecting and building a social space that provides both a space to thrive and the machinery to capture our neurodivergent outputs in a form that can be traded with mainstream society. On the macro level, this is the group mission to help each other with our various expeditions and package what we discover for ourselves and a marketplace. On the micro level, this is providing the philosophy and culture of how a neurodivergent-aware space can provide support through difficult and uncertain work. There are different metrics for productivity in this space that we can model and support with our own methods, which I think is largely ignored by mainstream productivity.
Sri's role is that of founder of this particular colony, and she is making space and defining the civic structures that will help others find this place and know what they are joining. Ideally they will know our cultural aspirations and the reasons we pursue it, and find detailed manuals and materials contributed by everyone here for shared benefit. The idea is to grow the pie, and provide a place where people succeed through establishing positive and productive relationships with other divergent / diverse peoples so we all can collectively thrive.
The Public Square is the main social interaction space of the Colony. It is the lively marketplace and resource center, where individuals can catch up on what's new and share their ideas and recruit for expeditions. Individuals can establish their own shop or service presences within the context of the Public Square, which itself exists in the context of The Colony's bylaws.
The Bazaar is the fun part of the marketplace, where we can experiment with identity and offerings of a transient nature. It is a place for oddities and one-of-a-kind deals where you might not get what you expected, but that's part of the appeal.
Notes from Around
February 16, 2023 with @masukomi
@dsri question: do the people you're sharing with need to be aware of those associations and conceptual models underlying the final product? I think mostly folks don't care, but you can link the few who do to the longer thinky piece the product emerged from. No?
Good question.I could shrinkwrap three good ideas with an idealized simple case study and that would be generate excitement. This is also antithetical to how I approach the world, which is already full of shallow understanding and oversimplified representations. I have based my work on the exploration of my fundamental personal truths and have tried to find ways of experimentally validating them, and while this is not a path to easy commercial appeal it's the nut I want to crack.
That said, doing what you suggest is not counter to that mission. Simplified works can be the breadcrumbs that lead back to these fundamentals. I guess the distinction I'm making is that while the mechanics of simplified content are similar, the driving intent behind it for me NOT to make solutions easy for people to consume. Instead, it's to equip ourselves so we can build our own answers on a more solid foundation of understanding.
It's just important to me to do it that way.
@dsri let me restate that from another perspective & insert some suppositions: You, an autistic person, are frustrated by the shallow bullshittery of the allistic world, and have been trying to give them meaningful 💩. The allistic world has responded by saying "don't make me think"
I have always scoped my target "people" as very small. Maybe 1-2% of people in the world will get and appreciate what I'm doing on a mutually satisfying level.
Not everyone is at the same place on their journey, so the reason I want to package "value" is to help those people like me who were stuck in some way because (1) they didn't have other people who 'got' them and/or (2) they didn't have role models available to see their uniqueness as not isolating weirdness.
February 19, 2023
Was looking-up what parasocial relationships as they seemed related to what I am doing for The Colony. I started with this [article]OK starting point.
I think I see the beacons analogy as being one for attracting parasocial relationships through signaling like-mindedness and potential collaboration in the future. However, with it comes a measure of responsibility for one's own safety and establishment of boundaries. As an AMAB person this instinct is much weaker but as an increasingly-out transfeminine enby the concern is becoming stronger. That said, I have formed so many wonderful friendships that started as parasocial ones, so I see that this value outweighs the concerns. I seem to have deployed a kind of parasocial presence that chases away the toxic types for some reason. It might just be luck, though.