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.
I imagine The colony as a place where those who thrive around a shared creative energy with other like-minded folks would want to set up shop and work together. I'd like this place to have a culture of sharing knowledge and experience in such a way that we collectively build a destination for creative collaboration and commerce.
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.
Thoughts Related to The Colony and Community
Autistic Awareness of Audience
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.
Parasocial Relationships
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.
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.
Offering and Receiving Help is the Foundation of Cimmunity?
October 10, 2023
Asking for and offering help is the foundation of any community. The work of leadership is to facilitate the greater vision and demonstrate how that is done.
I can separate The Mission from Sri Identity. That makes it easier to talk about in terms of benefits, vision, and cultural values.
November 19, 2023
Elements of Colony Values
The Core Mission
An enclave where people like to share personal experience and stories in a supportive, tolerant:
- marketplace
- forum
- exploratory center
Citizen Values
Essentially the tribe...
- self-empowered - describe
- positive-minded -
- aspirational -
- conscientious -
- generous -
- curious -
- kind -
Cultural Values
- assumed: everyone has their own reasons and logic
- seek understanding before judgment
- look for common interests and overlapping goals, and build from there
- communicate your differences are experiences to compare, not your opinion as challenge
- acknowledge that what is hard for someone is hard; there is no grounds for judging what is less or more hard for someone that is not you
- it's a basic human right to pursue one's own formula for success, recognizing that the formula is different for everyone given how different everyone's life experiences are
- redirect your conversational platform to others people the the conversational space to add their stories and thoughts to be inclusive of all
- show people they are seen, and affirm that they were heard by building on what they have provided and said
- seek balance in how much you contribute with how much you receive for a healthy relationship with the community
- promise only what time and resources you are comfortable and committed to providing to others.
- take based on your need, contribute back as you can
- judge the project or problem, not the people participating in it. we assume everyone is doing their sincere best with good will, and that there are many ways to approach a problem.
- create safety for people to experience with us, and be explicit about it by example and light-hearted engagement
- be clear in scope of your expectations; if you don't know, it's okay to say you don't know and talk it through
- it's ok to say you don't know; put the question back into the group and see what other people think
A Story about Cat, Girl, and Sri
Jan 15, 2024
Hmm, I think Cat and Girl also need someone to look up to. Or I have to imbue them with something. Or maybe I will have all of us fantasize about what we will do when we build the colony, each in our own way...
Cat would become a cheesemonger he says, and build his shop overlooking the sea.
Girl would build an observatory with a big telescope and open a Stars Cafe there. It with be a place that exudes the history of scientific inquiry but be a place for researchers to congregate and share their ideas with tea and good crispy snacks.
Sri doesn’t know what she wants to build for herself. She can only think of what to build what other people might be willing to pay for...
But she remembers that she liked the idea of having a shop that sold magical tools in cool boxes, each carefully fit to the person seeking the tool. She would talk to customers about their wishes and then find or craft the exact right tool as best she could. The custom work is expensive, but she tries to offer cheaper options that are still good and have great boxes.
She would like her shop to be near the telescope so she would build nearby. Cat feels left out so he says that he’d build his cheese shop next door too.