Say My Name
A year against aggregation & the Genius Collective
This year I’m resolving to do a couple things. The first is to build a major addition to my humble edifice of digital skills. The second is to use those skills to drill down into every subject I discuss and provide the best free data I can find. In that way, Stoic Observations is going to be like ditch medicine. I’m going to rely less on hearsay, yet while writing with my usual style and informed by my four poles of reason, humility, humor and discovery, I’m taking less for granted.
The first way I expect this to manifest, and the reason I call it out, is because I’m truly sick and tired of the way we Americans categorize each other in the public square. I hate the stickiness of our demography. I want us to find better ways to identify ourselves. I want us to recognize each other by name and by those specific ranges of character traits and virtues that matter most. There is inherently some subjectivity involved in this, but I want to see how it works as I take it further.
Most all of you who have subscribed recognize how I talk about the Rulers, Geniuses and Peasants of America. That will continue. This is a functional framework. It’s based on what people actually do, not what their ideology or religion or prejudices say they are likely to do. And I know that I’m leaning out over my skis in this regard, but by gum, I’m going to use the same tools as every certified social scientist, pollster and campaign consultant in America. And I’m going to get the data whenever I can.
If you don’t know Cremiuex, he’s my role-model. I get angry when I cannot follow him deep into the weeds. That ends.
Also I appreciate what Substack has done over their upgrade. I will be posting to Bluesky regularly. Still, relatively speaking X/Twitter is an order of magnitude more serious and credible, but then again maybe I’m not following the right crowd over there yet. Either way, I’m going to start working with X threads, which at the moment are impenetrable. I need some tools.
I have talked to some people about my Circle Protocol, and I have seen a way towards simplifying it and building something I can get out this year. But it means I’m going to have to learn something about building an app on iPhone. So I may find myself outsourcing to Mechanical Turk or something.
The Circle Protocol is enabled by what I understand to be the capabilities of OAuth2. But basically it is a personalized way of organizing your contacts into circles of trust. If I do it well, I may be able to get folks up to their Dunbar number in PGP security. That’s all I’ll say for now, the magic will be in the interface.
My pal Marc and I have taken up a project that involves people who take books seriously and a discovery service that helps us recognize our reading peers. Right now we are sizing things up to determine how many would be the minimum statistically users would make the app useful. In general, this is part of an overall aim to create more human curated rich metadata in this big old web of ours - free of algorithms and data brokers, and because of that maybe free of money and riches. But I generate ideas and concepts more than I generate money, no disrespect to my beloved paying subscribers.
These are practical steps towards establishing a Genius Collective or something like that. Several years ago my daughter asked me to describe a perfect job. I thought about it for a while and concluded that I wanted to design and build Batcaves for every Bruce Wayne. Basically build out everything that I wanted for myself in the perfect digitally augmented office. It was this notion that got me back into my audiophile dreams which I resolved for myself a couple years ago with the Jazz Corner. So that’s the update. I will keep spreading myself thin with my overactive curiosity. Thanks for tuning in. Interesting times ahead, because yeah I’m running AIs here at home and learning that stuff too.
Sounds interesting. Enjoy the engagement over at Bluesky!