Yeah.

I think CS bought one after maybe the NYC workshop. She draws a lot now.

Doodling. That’s the pen for writing on the special...?

Yeah. I don’t know how you do so many of these things.

This has been great. I wish I was spending more time in Taiwan.

Oh, I don’t, definitely.

That’s wild. I think I only learned about category theory to understand even a little bit of how code can be proofed or proven.

Sometimes, I do, I think. It feels like it can sometimes feel disorienting, especially when explaining it to others, and then being like, “What?”

I wish I had those skills. Do you ever get vertigo from that way of seeing things?

Do you see all of this and think about it in a mathematical network sort of way?

We’re actually just tubes, appendages. That’s sweet.

To who?

Then I’m not seeing someone else, I’m seeing a self. I’m seeing something that...Where was I going with that? The idea of luring people in, or making the space on the other side of a leap feel welcoming, I think, is a big part of how I imagine my organizing ...

No, I don’t feel that. Tailoring to individuals. There’s so many thoughts on mirror neurons and displaying mannerisms that mimic people, and body language that pulls people in, and helps us recognize maybe if we’re matching body language.

I feel very differently about that. That’s OK. Sometimes, I’m surprised to find areas of unalignment, which is totally OK. It’s like, we’re converged on something. We agree on so many things, but then there’s a little area where things are different. That’s always, sometimes funny to find, or to ...

No?

What about, have you spent time trying to convince friends to join in...?

I feel like I can tell people that I broke my brain by doing this weird, weird economy, living in the woods. Even just working, make a little money to back to the thing you love, feels very challenging for me. It doesn’t feel as simple as just jumping back ...

I don’t either, not attached. Resentful, that I have to care about it sometimes.

Did it not give you space to build a reputation that let you also have savings, so you could focus?

You were involved in startups at one point.

Don’t you feel you’ve also had opportunities for that that have shaped...?

I do the thing where I camp in parks in the summer, so I don’t have to pay money. I make my own guaranteed basic income, and spend a lot of time trying to think, “OK, how do I invite others into this?” This has given me so much time ...

I feel like it’s almost the projects, money is a project. Money is 400 projects. I’m excited to see 1,000 experiments with money, because I don’t think capital is, we’re not creative enough. It feels like you have different feelings around it.

I feel like I identify as an anarchist sympathizer, but not an anarchist. It’s like a tending towards, or an asymptotic sort of thing. I think it affects me differently than...My views on money, they feel more urgent.

[whispers] It’s funny, yeah.

It feels like because a certain group has a role early on, that doesn’t mean that that’s the right thing to accept later.

I guess I think about ecological succession a lot, like volcanic islands. Lava goes over, then the first species show up. They pave the way for the next species. Then you get moss, shrubs, trees, and birds.

Time, we don’t want just one sort of person who has lots of time, like tech people, who maybe tend to have done well, cashed out, or live in certain area of town. Time is cheaper for them. It costing time doesn’t make me feel good.

It feels like something being neutral or apolitical. The cost is always, someone has to maintain or do the care work, or the community maintenance, or merge forks.

Just kind of...

Open source is doing people, money and open source is doing things that are more imaginative than...

Those are maybe not, they’re the ones we think of first, but it’s maybe bad for projects. Maybe it twists motivations.

Money, though. Maybe that’s the other worry about not having structure. Everyone knows how contracts work. Everyone knows how capitalist economies work. If we’re just looking for money, and we find money, then we put it into the mechanisms that we know from the outside world work.

We’re going to work on getting more. We’re not leaving you behind, but this is, we’re supplementing the binding forces right now.

They’re our shackles as much and they’re our...[laughs] That’s worked really well, and all partners have been really happy, including I think there’s maybe a hope that there was some money that came as gift-like to the project manager.

Just be the consistency that the community often lacks when it doesn’t have contracts, money for everyone, and all the normal forces that hold together groups of people who are working together. We don’t have a lot of that, because we remove them.

There’s a lot of gratefulness when someone is paid a token amount, but a fair wage, to...

It actually works pretty beautifully, because there’s a general sense in the community that the work of holding a project together, doing the hard work, and maybe the boring work, the being a scrub master work, everyone knows that it’s really hard for an open project to do that.

We’ve had government fund a few positions in our community where you’d think there would be resentment from government money going to one person.

They’re not used to getting anything for as cheap as that. It feels like it’s a source of financial resources that has been bloated, and will be welcome. It’s funny, it feels hard to imagine not accessing it. I think maybe our government applies less pressure.

It has a giant, giant budget that when we look at it from the community, we think if we can just put a little spigot, a little knob in here, and figure out ways to thoughtfully release that money to projects that can make it go so much further, then ...

Back home, very different government, but it has a sort. It expects to pay huge amounts of money for everything, because it has essentially been captured by vendors who have encoded policy that make it very hard to pay small people.

The budget?

“Oh, this is great. You experimented. You ran a test. It worked. Let us take care of that for you, and we’ll...”

I guess we see... I shouldn’t say we. I think government essentially is like the biggest, we work great beside them. They’re supportive of the things we do. They have the capacity to actually help us with sustainability of projects.

I’m trying to think. I don’t have the same feeling about avoiding government money. I don’t know why, though. It feels important to limit influence, but it feels like it can be done in another way, at least in, you have a different relationship to government, started by a lot ...

Can the government give money into the pot, and then it gets split up and given to projects?

Could we do that? Can we just hook a Patreon up to your bank account?

Funding is so big.