Oh, you just had.
You said there’s a RadicalxChange board meeting?
Who knows, really. That’s what I figure out over the course of the process. The process itself becomes an attempt to figure out the way that those things relate and what the right balance is. I think this international angle does sound really interesting to me. Do you think your ...
You know, it’s possible. It’s very hard to, I try to figure out as little in advance as possible, because then what’s the point of reporting the story. If I had an idea, all these ideas in advance, why bother? These things are only interesting if there’s an open-ended element ...
I think that I’m certainly interested in which Pol.is is involved, I think for all sorts of obvious reasons. Especially given that we’re all so saturated with the narrative about social media and divisiveness and outrage. I think there is naturally a big appetite for what does it mean to…
Yeah.
There’s something that maybe then there’s the Taiwan element, instead of being focused on everything that happened in Taiwan between say 2014 and 2018, instead of retelling that story, you just use that as the example of here is what a mature or stable version.
The combination of those two things might actually be interesting, because I like what you said about what will it mean for this stuff to be displaced from an origin that already feels like a mature project with real popular legitimacy and how to begin introducing that these processes into ...
As long as you have something that has the feeling of movement, that’s enough. There really probably needs to be one component that feels like something is moving.
That then maybe given that the current Pol.is experiments underway do have a relatively faster time frame, maybe there’s a narrative through line that’s about the experiment in Louisville, for example. The conversations that Digital Future Society or whatever is more about like forward-looking, speculating about what this stuff starts ...
One possibility, narratively, and of course I’m just speculating, is that we end up, I go with you to one of these conferences where it’s really the beginning of talking about something, as you said, in a new social context with different actors.
That’s a good question. Stuff that I work on tends to take anywhere from about a minimum of three months through there are times that I’ve spent a year on a story. In this particular case for a variety of extra-diegetic reasons, which is to say totally exogenous to this ...
Granted, I understand that, for the most part, this stuff does not happen quickly. I would hope that there would be room for some follow through that went beyond something like a board meet-up.
One hope’s always that something real will unfold. The eventual story doesn’t feel like a static image of a moment in time of people talking about things, but that rather there’s at least some interval in which something happens.
Yeah. Does doing something along these lines sound interesting, worthwhile, and worth your time?
I’m not sure we even have to decide between those two options.
It’s an interesting idea. We’d have to talk more about exactly how that would work. I would be game for that. I don’t know how WIRED would feel about it. My guess is that they would be interested in that as some component of it, maybe not the whole thing, ...
…to find consensus questions?
We would essentially use Pol.is to do…
I know, but…
It’s a really interesting experiment. What I will say is it’s hard to imagine WIRED deciding to commit any resources to that. [laughs] If we had a way to use existing infrastructure to…
