Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty

March 4, 2015 By

Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm.

This essay attempts to place ritual in the context of evolving complex systems, and to offer an explanation for why everything is so ugly and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.

On Boundaries and Their Permeability

Boundaries are an inherent, universal feature of complex systems. Boundaries arise at all scales, defining the entities that they surround and protecting them from some kinds of outside intrusion. To be functional, boundaries must be permeable, allowing the entities to take energy and information from outside themselves. If we are looking at complex systems, we will find boundaries everywhere.

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What Is Ritual?

February 11, 2015 By

Sarah Perry  is a resident blogger visiting us from her home turf at The View from Hell.

If we should inquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a conception equally complex?

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture II

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khlysts

Khlyist ecstatic ritual

What is ritual? The religious studies scholar Ronald R. Grimes presents six pages of short definitions of ritual as an appendix to his The Craft of Ritual Studies; they make for fun reading, but also suggest a hopeless confusion surrounding a tempting and fascinating topic. William James, in his 500-page Varieties of Religious Experience, provides for us, instead of a single essence of religion, what he calls an “apperceiving mass” – plentiful examples through which the nuances of the matter will gradually reveal themselves. Since a blog post is hardly the place for such an “apperceiving mass,” I will attempt instead to define ritual within a tidy framework, keeping in mind that any such reduction will necessarily miss some of the important aspects of a major human domain. Nonetheless, I do think my simple model provides insight into the nature of ritual, and helps us to make sense of the seemingly irrational behaviors of other cultures, as well as the ways in which modern Western culture is itself a strange, ritual order.

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Refactor Camp 2015: Narrative

February 2, 2015 By

It’s Refactor Camp time again for the fourth time.  As with the last three years, the event will again be held in the Bay Area over the first weekend in March.  This year, that’s the weekend of March 7-8 in San Francisco. Click here to register.

refactorCamp2015

The theme this year is narrative. Even though this remains a small event of about <50, it looks like we will have a remarkably diverse set of takes on the theme, from narrative-themed card games and exercises with tropes  to prediction exercises and lightning talks about the role of narrative in culture and politics.  Check out the event page for more details on the content.

About 3/4 of the tickets have already been claimed by returning attendees from previous years, so if you want one of handful left over for new attendees, grab it now. Joseph Kelly is doing all the heavy lifting pulling this together, so major thanks are due to him.

We’ve been able to lower the price from $95 – $75 this year, thanks mainly to the generous in-kind support from hardware startup Plethora, who are hosting us at their futuristic manufacturing facility. We’ve avoided free venues in the past, since a highlight of the event has been uniqueness of venue and activity possibilities, but this time, we’ve managed to pull together “free” and “unique.” Plethora founder Nick Pinkston (who spoke at the first Refactor Camp in 2012 and has been a regular since) will be conducting a factory tour, showing us how Terminators, interstellar drives and hover boards are being assembled. He will also be conducting a tour of the Dogpatch industrial/waterfront neighborhood.

***

In other news, I’ll be participating in another interesting event: the Exosphere Hydra II bootcamp, in Vina del Mar, Chile, as a facilitator. I’ll be there the second half of April for two weeks, teaching a short course that I hope to make more broadly available afterwards. If you’re looking for a great venue to launch a major life change (a startup, lifestyle business, career change), this might be for you. They have a few spots left I believe (I’ll be there only for 2 weeks, but the full bootcamp is 8 weeks; runs March 16 – May 8).

Complete 2014 Roundup

December 22, 2014 By
This entry is part 8 of 17 in the series Annual Roundups

Here’s the complete roundup of the year’s posts, in chronological order. New readers this year might want to check out the 2013 roundup. If you want to do some binge reading further back into the archives, there is a page for the Rust Age (2007-12) with both curated selections and complete roundups.

We had 45 posts this year, of which 16 were by residents or guest bloggers and 29 were by me.  I wrapped up one favorite bunny trail from previous years (7) continued some favorite old themes (1, 2, 25, 30, 40) and started what looks like several new ones. There’s a saints-vs-traders bunny trail (19, 20, 21, 22?), three major Grand Unified Theory type posts (15, 29 and 32) and a bunny trail involving crash-only thinking (39, 42, 45). Very appropriately, and entirely coincidentally, post #42 was heavily Douglas Adams inspired. I can’t help but think that means something. There was an ongoing series of what I can only call a series of reflective mid-life-crisis type posts (8, 9, 14, 22, 42, 44). Finally, there were two fiction experiments (27, 28). All in all, a very creepy-crawly, divergent year.

Happy holidays!

  1. Free, as in Agent
  2. Consent of the Surveilled
  3. The Poor Usability Tell (Jordan)
  4. Technical Debt of the West (Kevin)
  5. An Information Age Glossary
  6. From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay (Kartik)
  7. The Cactus and the Weasel
  8. Demons by Candelight
  9. Immortality in the Ocean of Infinite Memories
  10. Authors and Directors (Sam)
  11. Love Your Parasites (Jordan)
  12. Ritual and the Productive Community (Ryan)
  13. The Legibility Tradeoff (Kartik)
  14. A Life with a View
  15. Product-Driven versus Customer-Driven
  16. Replaceability and the Economics of Disequilibrium (Sam)
  17. Science! and Other Off-the-Wall Études
  18. Power Gradients and Spherical Cows (Jordan)
  19. The Logic of Uberreaction
  20. Saints and Traders: The John Henry Fable Reconsidered
  21. The Deliberate Practice of Disruption
  22. The Physics of Stamp Collecting
  23. Portals and Flags
  24. A Koan is not a Riddle (Jordan)
  25. Close Encounters of the Missing Kind
  26. Structure Follows Context
  27. The Heirloom Lounge (short story)
  28. Seoul Station (part 1 of a longer story, yet to be continued)
  29. The Economics of Pricelessness
  30. The Veil of Scale
  31. The Creation and Destruction of Habits
  32. How to Fall Off the Wagon
  33. Geopolitics for Individuals (Kartik)
  34. We Have Them Surrounded in Their Tanks (Jordan)
  35. The Rhythms of Information: Flow-Pacing and Spacetime (Ryan)
  36. The Political Hangover of Prohibition (Craig Roche)
  37. The Adjacency Fallacy
  38. Playing Games to Leave Games (Sam)
  39. Crash-Only Thinking
  40. Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
  41. The Design of Crash-Only Societies (Ryan)
  42. Learning to Fly by Missing the Ground
  43. The Future of Tipping
  44. Striving, Surviving, Suffering and Slacking
  45. Learning from Crashes

Playing Games to Leave Games

October 21, 2014 By

Sam is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog at Moore’s Hand.

When I was a kid I played a lot of chess. On Saturdays my mom and I would get up early and drive an hour to a high school somewhere around Michigan. She would bring a box of old New York Times and read as I played five rounds of chess against other 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds.

The games were typically G/30 or G/45, which means each player had 30 or 45 minutes to make all their moves. If you finished your game early you would have to wait for all the other games to finish and the organizers to calculate the rankings and matchups for the next round.  That process would usually take about an hour, which doesn’t seem like a long time now but of course did at the time.

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The Rhythms of Information: Flow-Pacing and Spacetime

September 24, 2014 By

Ryan Tanaka is a blogging resident visiting us from ryan-writer.com. For every article that he writes, Ryan also improvises a live musical piece as means of organizing his ideas. (Below, or here.)

“Flow Pacing” is a phrase used in chemical, sewage, and water facilities in order to describe the treatment methods of its contents, often referring to techniques that inject/extract chemicals and materials into its flow.  Flow pacing can be a very interesting challenge for engineers, because in addition to tracking physical dimensions and working with limitations of resources, you also have to take time into consideration when dealing with its problems and potential solutions.  When the flow of content is non-stop and never ending, you don’t really have the luxury of measuring change in terms of absolutes — it must be introduced gradually, as a series of iterations or applications happening over time.

Ambient-Minimalism

If today’s improv were to be written down in musical notation, it might look something like this.

 

Chlorine injections that flow too slowly leaves the water tainted; too fast, poisonous.  But the solution is never to dump chemicals into the flow as a one-time event: the process is always ongoing, constant and never-ending, so long as the mechanism itself exists.

I think that it makes a lot of sense to think of the internet in this way, since we already tend to conceptualize information networks as though they were servicing liquids of some sort.  Information “delivery” was an oft-used phrase in technical fields in the past, but due to the increased reliability and consistency of today’s information networks, it’s more common now to conceptualize information as “flowing” from one point to another.  We have increasingly begun to see information as being fluid rather than solid, in other words.

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Roundup: January – June 2014

July 2, 2014 By

Here’s the mid-year roundup. Not counting procedural posts, we’ve had 23 essays in the first six months. The Now Reading page also been updated for the year, check it out for the current state of the ribbonfarm reading radar.

  1. Free, as in Agent
  2. Consent of the Surveilled
  3. The Poor Usability Tell (Jordan)
  4. Technical Debt of the West (Kevin)
  5. An Information Age Glossary
  6. From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay (Kartik)
  7. The Cactus and the Weasel
  8. Demons by Candelight
  9. Immortality in the Ocean of Infinite Memories
  10. Authors and Directors (Sam)
  11. Love Your Parasites (Jordan)
  12. Ritual and the Productive Community (Ryan Tanaka)
  13. The Legibility Tradeoff (Kartik)
  14. A Life with a View
  15. Product-Driven versus Customer-Driven
  16. Replaceability and the Economics of Disequilibrium (Sam)
  17. Science! and Other Off-the-Wall Études
  18. Power Gradients and Spherical Cows (Jordan)
  19. The Logic of Uberreaction
  20. Saints and Traders: The John Henry Fable Reconsidered
  21. The Deliberate Practice of Disruption
  22. The Physics of Stamp Collecting
  23. Portals and Flags

Artistic Forestry: 2014 Annual Letter

May 29, 2014 By

For the past three years I’ve been doing a sort of annual letter to shareholders/call for sponsorships a la Warren Buffet’s Sage of Omaha act, roughly around March-April. I am about two months late this year. I am just going to start calling this my annual letter from now on. I plan to make it approximately 5% more magisterially smarmy every year until people start calling me the Sage of Ribbonfarm (the name of a short-lived gag panel  that I experimented with in 2008. I had to give it up because Yurij, my off-oDesk Russian artist, suddenly dropped out of sight. I sincerely hope Putin didn’t do something to him).

So if you consider yourself even a minor shareholder in ribbonfarm (through comments, guest posts, sharing, recommendations, playing couchsurfing host to me on my travels, sponsorships or whatever you’ve been doing to help keep this show going), this letter is for you.

Each year, I also add one line to my evolving business philosophy. In 2011, the line was go where the wild thoughts are. In 2012, it was go deep, young man. In 2013, the line is grow branches and roots.  Continuing with the arboreal theme from previous years, this year, my line is  practice artistic forestry. That’s the first topic on the agenda. Here’s the rest of the agenda.

  1. Practicing artistic forestry
  2. The state of the forest, in numbers
  3. The Web, it is a-changing
  4. Bitcoin and online publishing
  5. The future of longform

Let’s get started.

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Power Gradients and Spherical Cows

May 15, 2014 By

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a comic recently explaining the argument against evolution based on the 2nd law of thermodynamics: “Life on Earth can’t get more complex because that would require energy, and the sun doesn’t exist.” The understanding of entropy is there, but conspicuously missing is the distinction between open and closed systems and the fact that increased entropy in the system does not preclude localized negentropic environments, such as those on Earth sustaining life.

This specific failure mode for thinking I call the Spherical Cow fallacy, after the classic physics joke. [Read more…]

Science! and Other Off-the-Wall Études

May 8, 2014 By

Last year,  around this time, I posted a selection of attempted aphorisms from my Facebook wall (you can follow my public posts if you want the live firehose). I thought I’d do another selection, this time focusing on a new length I am practicing: sub-300-word études (inspired by the corresponding form in music) written as single dense (but not aphoristic-dense) paragraphs. If you are mainly a long-form writer, I highly recommend this composition form to improve your game, and Facebook public posts as the best medium for practicing it. If I ever put together that writing-for-thinking course as I keep meaning to, études and aphorisms will be a major part of it.

Here is a selection of what I consider my better études over the past year. Use the date hyperlinks if you want to share a specific étude with someone.

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