Hope in Source

I just wonder how this can help nurture and recover people's creativity.

how do you talk about something that is outside of, or bigger than, or contains what you are?

How should we think about what it means to be created in the image of God?

Do you think this is the central theme of Christianity, or is this the central theme of Christianity right now because of the time that we live in?

in some sense, like I feel so brainwashed that like I have a hard time trying to understand the benefit.

Christianity itself could be looked at from that lens. Something that can seem kind of quaint and archaic from the outside, but from the inside it's just as fresh and alive as ever.

it also feels like fake serendipity. Because someone clearly thought very hard about what you were going to encounter as you move through this environment.

Trying to figure out what is sidewalk life online. Does that exist?

how can we make this hope compelling for this generation?

What is the equivalent to the word sin for a secular person?

there's obviously something to understand about how to live in history while living in the present that we really don't have as a possibility.

modernity is characterized by saying no, where we need to say yes. And actually there's a term for that. It's acedia, which is one of the seven deadly sins.

it's possible too that they're saying this isn't right co-labor, because you're not one of us. But I don't know. Anyway, this is one of the more finer points that I haven't worked out.

A commons is a space which is established by custom. It can not be regulated by law. The law would never be able to give sufficient details to regulate a commons.

And so this focus on how we outsource our embodied experience of the world through tools that then interrupt our senses' direct contact with the world or displace it. I've been very curious about that.

We have no affordances that suggest presence without noise.

We sort of deliberately create a sort of shifting sands that we then build on. It's kind of hilarious when you look at it from that distance.

That's where a lot of my attention I want to go. And so I wonder if I haven't documented that part enough, or if I need to have more structures to support that. Or maybe people just don't have new ideas about what to do there.

When language was evolving, it's not like someone sat down and thought like, okay, I'm going to design a form so that we can, you know, talk about things. Like all of these like notions of what language is and what it does and what it's for and how it transforms us and how we transform it, all of this comes after language.

I feel like you might be into it. Like givenness makes me think of happeningness. That something can exist because of the interaction of various processes. And then it becomes sort of more than the sum of the parts.

Advent is about putting ourselves into the story of preparation waiting that happened way before we were even born. Advent is a story of Israel preparing and waiting for the coming of Jesus, whom they may not have known until he actually came.

I wonder when we're going to start seeing burn out on digital gardening, because it's such a fun thing now, but are you responsible?

And I wonder if then transhumanism is some sort of reaction to maybe some of the more traditional religious beliefs.

To simply look at the world is not to see it. And so we need to learn to see, and part of that I think involves the learning to name the world.

And I wonder to what degree, to reflect on this from a theological perspective, if that is a function of just coming to see that this is sort of it, right? This is the one shot you get at life. And so the only thing to do is to extend it indefinitely.

I think I want to play around more with like really fine grain open source. That's where it is sort of at the line of code level or the cell level with a spreadsheet.

Do you have in the field of coding, do you have sometimes this impression that before it was better? Are you already there?

It feels like it's completely inverted, where a maintainer doesn't always have authority over their projects when something happens. You can just get this flood of people from the outside who are coming in.

What do we do with our freedom? How do we, in an era where human creative powers are so visible, where we are more and more divorced from givenness, facticity, and Nature, how do we manage that?

you can't sort of like deconstruct the church and recreate it in other spaces, which is a popular idea. Some people are like, what if you just take worship, what if you just take the community aspects? How can you recreate just community without believing in God? And I think it's really hard to explain all of the parts, how they fit together perfectly, but you can't reverse engineer any of it.

It's like, once you're on that train, you're getting a regular dose.

I think that having role models for people who've done this without any sort of crisis, right? You hear about these detox things like, Oh yeah, I'm like addictive gambler or addicted to social media. And it ruined my life.

And I'm looking for that. I haven't found that yet.

Is it done? Maintenance, what's that even going to look like? How do you maintain something that feasibly the button borders should look like they do now in five years?

All dirt is contextual. It all just depends on where we draw the boundaries.

If the thing that makes gift exchange means something to us, if we lose that direct social relationship, that's what threatens it maybe. That's what makes the economy not quite function the way we wish it would.

As conservators and archivists, we're kind of tethered to these technologies that we don't have much control over. We can't tell Firefox, don't deprecate this thing because this artwork depends on it.

the thing that we want to preserve isn't just that artifact itself, and not even just metadata, but almost the process, the culture of that project.

displaying information and being open in a strategy game is I think an interesting thing that's probably underutilized with the current moment.

Before you maintain anything, you got to maintain yourself and your health.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how we have a lot of open source projects and things that have, especially in the last 10 years, that got super popular and then just like that they were passe. But we've got all these applications, we've got all these sites using them. So there's like this sort of, the analogy I have been describing is sort of like a garbage dump.

if you want to talk about game theory, it's like an infinite game. You're like playing to not win, you're just playing to keep going forever.

I don't even know where even something as big as NPM shakes out in that.

And you might change so much that you don't want to give back in the way that you used to.

What's your leverage? He was like, Gosh, I don't know. It's like, Can you stop maintaining it for a while? Can you not respond speedily to people? He was like, Oh, God. I can't do that. I was like, If you're not willing to do that, making money is going to be very hard.

What's going to happen more and more is basically people do what they want, they get their run and then they move on. And if there's nothing beyond the run - and in some cases the run might even disappear - that just means that everyone else has to start from square one.

Knowing God versus knowing about God.

how do you know when you're dealing with an artifact versus dealing with like a living organism?

When does it make sense to encode trust versus just trying to trust people and accept that sometimes you're gonna be wrong?

how would you start a new shared habit, and then kinda like more importantly, how do you know that the habit you personally want is a good habit

It almost seems like it comes out of nowhere, but it had been silently building for a long time. And I think it happens a lot with like leadership change in open source, too.

I wonder if there is like an optimal time for a maintainer to step down or not- just in terms of like the trajectory of the life of the project.

You wanna sustain yourself but then you're like, should I limit how much that I make? I felt like that a lot when I was trying to raise money on Patreon where you feel bad that people are giving you money but you should feel free but you don't. You almost feel trapped.

I really try not to use that word unless I'm feeling lazy because it sets off so many different ideas in someone's head about what it means.

I think there's something special or interesting about not knowing and maybe never really understanding completely, but knowing it truly and that we can know, but we might not know exhaustively.

how do you know, either in a faith or open source context, when someone isn't just sort of there to do their thing and leave.

When you're too authoritarian, then people are unhappy. But then if you go too far on the other side, you find that it becomes really overwhelming to cater to the needs to lots of people who might not necessarily be that committed.

if you do that sort of self-inquiry, and you realize that this isn't bringing you the joy that you wish it did, do you think... There's two paths, right? You step away, or you change what you're doing so that it does bring back that sense of joy.