Season 9. Episode 4: Knowledge Gardens: Cultivating Digital Resilience

Transcript

I just saw an article today about Gemini. I think it's on Android, but it might be on all Google platforms now. And it has access to everything. Your private messages, your DMs, every single thing you have set and typed into a Google thing, it now accesses without your permission. And there's a tiny little privacy toggle that you have to get a PhD to find to turn it off. What do you see as the biggest challenge explaining a knowledge garden? Well, for a while I I think the difficulty we were having was was one that was technical in nature. Like a lot of people really aren't interested in in the architecture of these things or interested what's going on under the hood. But framing it as a digital garden I think peaks the interest of people who otherwise

wouldn't be interested in knowledge management. >> Yeah. The again to me the sequencing we often start certainly in in crypto and what brie with with Dows like it's really a weird experience to go virtual for a year and then try like start start personal start in community uh start in the in the greenhouse in the commune there's a documentary on Netflix uh join or die that I've I've mentioned to a lot of people that I think is a it's Robert Putnham's work bowling alone uh really staggering, you know, depiction of just how we have completely lost that sort of initial sort of intuition to go

and find a community and be, you know, in a club or with people. [Music] Hello everyone and welcome to the Green Pill episode 4. Um this is Jourodal's takeover of the mic and this is our final episode and we are going to talk about knowledge gardens um full knowledge architecture systems and mind viruses and wherever else our conversation takes us. So Spencer why don't you introduce yourself because you are the newer addition to this guest hosting season here.

>> Nice. Yeah. Well I'm excited to be joining for this episode. I'm Spencer, so go by Clenomagic sometimes, a founding member of Jouroda and a steward of open civics. I'm calling in uh quite fittingly from our commune solar punk uh greenhouse office. So I'm glad to join you guys. >> So where do we want to start? Um let's start with defining knowledge gardens. Spencer, why don't you go ahead and tell us what a knowledge garden is because I think you build the most of them and you're the architect of several larger ones right now. So, give us a quick explain it to us like we're five approach um keeping in mind that hopefully there's also journalists listening to this because this is also a

antidote for journalists. >> Sure. Yeah. So, I can get some some background on what a what is meant by a knowledge garden. Uh at a very high level, it's sort of a combination of this idea of a digital garden with more of an informationheavy uh website like a a wiki or a knowledge base. And if you combine both of those concepts, you get what we're calling a knowledge garden. And for anyone who isn't familiar with digital gardens, that's sort of this um it's like a revival or renaissance of traditional blogging sensibilities where someone or some organization has their own website or corner of the internet that they curate to their own liking or to convey information that they think represents something that's important to them. Um

so it's very uh geared around care and like curation. And I think if you apply that to like more of an informationheavy context like a knowledge base, you get this kind of um sensemaking um kind of corner or sensemaking sanctuary. And I feel like that's that's like the the lens through which knowledge gardens I think will be relevant to the maybe the rest of our conversation today. >> What do you see as the biggest challenge explaining a knowledge garden to folks that either aren't in web 3 or that are completely new to um to our world? like what is what is the metaphor you use or or how do you explain it?

>> Well, for a while I I think the difficulty we were having was was one that was technical in nature. Like a lot of people really aren't interested in in the architecture of these things or interested what's going on under the hood. Um but framing it as a digital garden I think peaks people's interest piques the interest of people who otherwise wouldn't be interested in knowledge management or like uh permanent kind of knowledge infrastructure or digital public infrastructure for for knowledge as a public good. Like a lot of these things that are baked into what we're calling knowledge gardens wouldn't perhaps be that as accessible if we just framed it as knowledge management or knowledge bases or knowledge architecture. I feel like the the gardening aspect of it kind

of picks up on the the digital garden sensibility around care and curation and also I think unlocks this whole way of appreciating these things. Um that kind of puts an emphasis more on on sense making. Uh, and I feel like that's that's one of the bigger um values of a lot of this stuff is kind of building a like a it's like a kind of digital nesting thing of making sense of information that's important to you or broadcasting information that's important to you that can be useful to the sense making efforts of others. Um but yeah, I'd say that the technical the technicality of all this was a barrier for a while. But once we've started framing it as knowledge gardens, which is fairly recent. It's only in the last like year or so that that term's been thrown around. Um there's older terms

like knowledge commons and and digital gardens and knowledge bases, but the term knowledge garden seems relatively novel. >> Yeah. The the timing to me is interesting. uh and and I don't know if it's accidental uh but you know there there is this like I think appreciation or awareness of at least in the US some of the challenges with like food systems and the sort of trouble and uh brink of collapse with a lot of the small sort of rural farms. So I also just have found that like based on an awareness of why food matters and what it means to like you know curate locally and have food

sources the timing is just to me really interesting and it seems to have resonated uh maybe just because there's an awareness of like the real you know formal uh food garden and why that metaphor maps back really well to information being you know what we consume and how it shapes the world around us. So for me the timing is couldn't be better. But unfortunately I think part of that timing is just that there's awareness. We have a we have an issue when it comes to you know food and and sustainability. I think that that totally ties into this like the local first kind of local resiliency aspect of this because the digital gardens as kind of like a renaissance of blogging are in response to the internet kind of

becoming this corporatize or in shitified place or landscape that's kind of destitute of genuine content or people genuinely signaling things that are important to them. A lot of uh you know communication incentives get corrupted by various things that I'm sure we'll touch on. So this kind of like returning back to some local context um and a knowledge garden I think is like cultivating knowledge in a local first way and on the technical level much of this is like local first knowledge management um rather than relying on you know web- based software as a service run by companies that are funded by um entities that really don't care about local resilience or or local sense making and and they they should exist and they definitely play an

important role in this e ecosystem but I I think interrogating those kind of incentives is one of the the central things to knowledge gardening my opinion. >> I feel too like understanding where we stumbled into this as a DAO. I feel like this conversation started when you and Keith were working on permapress and seed protocol. Is that accurate? That's when you were down this you because you tried to pull us Eric and I and Taylor you hadn't joined us yet. This was almost two years ago. Was it two years ago? um you were pulling us into this thing and I was too busy. I'm like, I don't want to look at this. And then finally, I'm like, I think he's on to something. I might have to pay attention to this. So, walk us through how um how you stumbled into it and then how seed

protocol could play a role in expanding a knowledge garden beyond one group of people like get into the RSS streaming and all that. >> Oh, sure. I got this. This is going to be fun. So, two of the interesting things that that have been incubated by Jourod Dowo uh over the last couple years are seed protocol and uh what we're calling plausibly permanent syndication, which is kind of a tongue-in-cheek nod to RSS or like really simple syndication. And so, both of these are like peer-to-peer global um protocols essentially. some sometimes maybe ontology is a better word for for seed protocol, but these are ways of communicating and syndicating information in ways that don't rely on

like an institutional mediator. Um, and there's like the internet already consists of various layers and protocols of things that work like this. But these two in particular leverage various decentralized um infrastructure like attestations on on Ethereum or Arweave for storing content. Um, and so permarress is essentially a way of breaking up the metadata of content in a very atomic way that allows you to like granularly track how things are changed for a piece of content. You can track the provenence. You can track um attribution to these things in a way that doesn't that doesn't involve these things being stored on some central database. So that that's the basic idea.

I can get more into detail there. And then uh plausibly permanent syndication is essentially a way of using arweave as like a layer for syndicating content along the lines of RSS. So like where RSS at least in my understanding it's kind of agnostic as to whether or not the content is being stored on a centralized institutional server or something more decentralized. uh plausibly permanence indication. It's just a bit more opinionated and it's uh on layers like rweave or IPFS and then using a particular way of applying tags to uploads. And I can get into more detail about what this would look like, but essentially you can apply RSS logic to querying something like Arweave to establish a feed of content that doesn't

rely on the normal kind of institutional management of of the server. So yeah, and both of these these are examples of things that have been incubated by Jourodau over the last couple years and they tie into a lot of this knowledge gardening uh kind of cosmolocism movement that open civics is also very integral to. Um yeah, it seems like over the last two years these things have been picking up steam in our in our sphere of things >> because when you first started explaining this with charts and all the things I mean like for at least three months it just went right over my head but I knew I had to pay attention because there was something underneath there. And when you and Keith started talking about seed and then the RSS feed aspect of it, then it began to click because basically my brain is always

trying to figure out ways to replace the extractive media system that we grew up on which a lot of you know a big component of that is the wire wire services AP all that. So this allows the infrastructure to mirror the wire services, but it also mirrors biomimicry. And that's something that I don't think has been really done yet because if you do it from a knowledge garden perspective, from a community of people with a similar interest or passion and they begin creating their own knowledge gardens and then you take the infrastructure on the back end that you just described and then syndicate it, then you're connecting an entire web of people through ideas and then you can

also connect it to funding. And that is the biggest problem that we're all running into to make this transition in a post extractive, you know, postc capitalistic world >> which still needs information regardless. >> Totally. And and the on the funding issue um uh one good thing about all this too is that it's really inexpensive like it's you can make these knowledge gardens for free. You can use uh Arweave as a storage layer and you know pay to upload once and there's other a couple other storage layers that operate similarly but in a way that you're not continuing to pay some service or product on a monthly basis for like if you if you change your credit card or if you lose access to your email then that

subscription stops and the whole website goes down. like the risks of that are are like severely mitigated with a lot of the infrastructure we're talking about. So, which kind of works to the benefit of these local communities that may not have all of the the funding or the the operational kind of core team longevity to make sure that these things get the maintenance that they need. Like a lot of the stuff we're talking about here is very low maintenance, very low cost. >> What I find there's there's multiple ways to build these gardens and to tab into communities. There there's two examples that come to mind. One is all of the journalist outlets that have been closed. This morning I was scrolling through LinkedIn and the Boulder Weekly just down the road which puts out, you know, a local flyer. I don't know how often, probably once a month that's

newsprint and it has concerts and stuff going on in the community recreation. You know, most communities have these still in some capacity and they just shut it down on the fly. No one knew. So the apparently one of the owners or something they decided last week to consolidate and they basically woke up this morning to an email that it was shut down. So in my mind if we had a local knowledge garden here's here's a team of people that already know how to tell stories already have their their workflows dialed in. You put them into a knowledge garden and then you connect it to funding sources. You know, it probably have to involve family offices or some sort of philanthropic grant system to do this at scale. But then

you've got a fluid way to move people from being journalists into continuing what they do best in a communal setting. That makes sense. >> Yeah, it it seems we're starting to come full circle. Um plausibility. I love that as uh the other thing that came to mind. uh sufficiently decentralized. This is like something that came up in sort of the the Farcaster, you know, bubble and and way. But I think all of that was pointing to just a means now that the a lot of the technology has, you know, evolved to a point that is cheap and

useful and we're getting our heads around like how to composably make these things function together. Now we're all having to circle back. back. I'm like, what does it mean to translate that back to uh you know, communities are those that ultimately will be uh you know, sort of users? And it's it's fun because like uh finding those metaphors or the folks that know that there's a need and can start to put layers of of actually seeing it in action without, you know, having to be overwhelmed by the the sort of technical complexity and and what's actually happening under the hood. I just think we're at a moment where we can start to actually do that and there's there seems to be uh again that's I know that's sort of the the

hope and goal with Cosmo Localism and a lot of the momentum right now. Um I think the entire sort of Ethereum community is is realizing okay it's it's time to make this useful for very real people with real problems. Uh and so that's that's the work at hand. And and another big point that ties into what you're saying there about a lot of this stuff becoming more accessible now and like all the all the infrastructure is largely there but it's so complex most people can't be expected to engage with it directly. The other big part of this is um five coding is actually making it easier for like a a less technical stratum of people than like trained software developers like like I don't have any background in

software development but thanks to code assistants and everything I can make a user interface that allows people to interact with this stuff and keep it all under the hood. I feel like that's like there's some really interesting stuff that we're we're doing at at Open Civics with with that as well, like allowing people to use these things without needing to know that they're necessarily using them. Um, and it's also like these things can work in ways that you have some local interface that does like local file management and it interacts with these distributed systems like Arweave or App Protocol and there's like there's no institutions involved there and then you can make the software for free. It's easy to download. there's some like hurdles with like Apple developer license stuff, but there, you know, there was ways around that. So, I feel like that's the other big thing to

consider here, too, is that we now have this new realm of possibility that can give people more intuitive interfaces for using these things and not requiring them to be like directly in the weeds, the technical weeds themselves. Um, I feel like that could that can make so much of this so much more accessible for people. So, I feel like that's that's the other thing over the last six months to a year that's become a lot more tenable is like making these apps and tools for local communities. Like the the barrier like the the execution barrier is like significantly lower now to make these things.

>> Yeah. I mean, you just tapped into a really good point with AI also emerging um that that's adding a whole other layer onto this whole thing. And at the human layer, what Taylor and I work on is incorporating, you know, a a three- layered system. You've got signal, integration, and then community. And the signal is a podcast or any kind of recorded conversation. And most communities have that capability. And then you're taking that conversation and running it through AI prompts that are mining it for themes and different things you might not have noticed in conversation because I forget half the we say on these things. As soon as I press stop, it's all gone. So this allows, you know, uh, the ghost in the machine to pull things out that are

missed and then create research, create additional conversations that can be planted into other communities, but it also preserves that that knowledge and expands on that knowledge so other people can take it and make it their own. And I feel like as more people start to wrap their brain around a whole system of knowledge preservation like this, then I think more people are going to be into it because so much of our media consumption is ephemeral. It comes in, it comes out. It just disappears instantly. I produce podcasts and I barely listen to them and just listening to myself talk is terrifying. Like um so I don't want to do that. But I can read it and then I can sit and cultivate the themes and what we were really talking

about. And Spencer, you were in Denver recently for um presenting knowledge gardens to uh Taylor's event, a future of web 3. And then after we record yours, we also record another conversation about explainable AI. And in that conversation, we tapped into libraries as a resource for building both knowledge gardens, but also the protectors of the local knowledge with their own LLMs. And I feel like that's where we're going to begin to see a lot of this stuff is modular or it's, you know, one community says this is how we're going to build it because it reflects our skill set or because they haven't viodated another way to integrate with it yet. But as we begin to evolve rapidly, we're going to see all sorts of different modularities

within these knowledge commons. And that that to me is kind of the most interesting and fascinating part. Yeah, that the the or it's subtle, but like that's at least for me this weird realization that ordering matters like having the signal and whether that's a spoken conversation or an existing knowledge base like that that can't come uh later. I think often right now there's this, you know, uh impulse that's I think just driven by habits that have been developed through sort of web 2. Uh to just immediately, you know, go to the LLM of choice and like let that be the entry point. Um but

that's obviously dangerous. In fact, just I'm just digging into some of the latest uh Barack uh let's let's leave that put that to the side, but it's like that's part of the problem. Um so anyway, that that ordering matters and obviously having the gardening matters. It's why the metaphor is so powerful. You know, you're you're doing active active work in cultivating uh that relationship with these tools that are obviously powerful. So yeah, subtle but but powerful. >> Totally. Just the ordering.

>> Yeah. Yeah, the and the cultivating and and the the point Crystal you made earlier about like sitting with the information too. You made another interesting point when I was in um uh Colorado with you about uh about nesting and how while you were like nomadic for a while your your nesting impulse was more around like digital stuff then like once you settle in that impulse can like can kind of manifest a bit more externally. Um, and I feel like a lot of this stuff too with knowledge gardens is kind of kind of like digital nesting in a sensemaking way. Like the more you sit with some body of information, whether it's your own journal entries or transcripts from a podcast or uh encyclopedia entries or whatever, the more you can kind of see the connections and like kind of kind of embody the

knowledge a bit more. And I feel like that's the the integral sense making thing that to Taylor's point, we should be wary about outsourcing to to AI. A friend of mine, Ronin Tamari, had a shared a good meme about like automating sensemaking and it's sort of like having a robot lift weights for you. You know, it's it sort of like defeats the whole the whole purpose if you kind of bypass a certain like critical sensemaking stage and just get like skip ahead to the answer like in in a certain way that's like kind of missing the point. And I do feel like this kind of cultivation of knowledge and and nesting and tending to a lot of this stuff um like a it's really therapeutic, but it's also like it helps you learn things. It helps you establish context in ways that

just you know immediately getting an answer might let you like execute something more quickly, but you like you miss that whole process of learning to embody this stuff. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think too what we're what both of y'all just tapped into is if you go back in time, knowledge was passed down through oral tradition until the printing press and through indigenous cultures. So there was always a storyteller. There was always an audio version of stuff. So now in the modern world, if we're starting these conversations through the signal, then that allows the space and the time for us to wander through conversation and get really into what it is we're trying to actually say and then

preserving that oral tradition and and protecting that and then later on taking it into the LLM and into the garden and into the different components that it needs to be to grow and and to make it more useful. So, I feel like what the rabbit holes that I've been going down lately are many, but um the biomimicry aspects of this, the the traditions of this and bringing wisdom, tradition, old sacred, ancient wisdom into modern times to allow us to really look at where we are, figure out where the big problems are and how do we solve it with things like knowledge commons and and all that type of infrastructure. Yeah, I'm I'm fairly convicted these days that we will not find our way to a good place on the

other side without it. Like if if we and and you know unfortunately there are a lot of you know powerful people and companies that you know we just know are not looking back and not looking to ancient tradition as part of you know which there's this religious fervor that comes with building these you know powerful tools. Um but yeah, I'm maybe I'm getting old. I am getting old. But like part of that is a deep conviction that uh without without pulling >> that ancient wisdom through and actually respecting >> the process of oral tradition >> and then you know even through what that

represented you know with the written word and books like uh we're in we're in for a lot more trouble if we don't see that as part of the process. And fortunately we have met a lot of good people that are actively uh you know building that into other other versions of what what AI and what these collective sort of knowledge gardens can can be and what they can represent people. >> Yeah I totally agree with with your point about uh companies you know not necessarily thinking about these things and I may have shared the the incan switch essay about local first software that was like from 2019. I think I think they're the ones that kind of popularize that that term. And so they they talk about what they mean by local first. And

I think that's sort of like similar to how digital gardens are kind of like a a cultural building block or precursor to knowledge gardens like local first is that to cosmoloism. Um, and one aspect they talk about in this local first essay is that they're not against like um, you know, VCbacked corporate software as a service and people using that, you know, or like whatever kind of um, uh, web app type thing like Google Suite. These things are highly highly performant, really easy to use, much more conducive to collaboration than a lot of the the tools we're talking about here. So like they definitely have a like a a place in our kind of sensemaking technical tool stack and productivity stack. But I think that critical point they made is

that they shouldn't be like loadbearing. Like I you know you can you can have your knowledge base stored locally and then still on like on a like a less fundamental layer still use a lot of these tools um because they're just more conducive to collaboration. But I feel like what we're talking about here is like giving people the tools to like keep these things locally and then they can still use Google Docs. You can just export Google Docs to markdown and then save that in your knowledge base locally or upload that to rewe as well or upload the whole knowledge base to reweave and then it's like then you have the local first or even Cosmo local stuff and you can still use a lot of the the more corporate tools out there because like they they definitely exist. they they push a lot of technical uh uh uh

technical advancements in ways that you know kind of hobbyists working on these things really can't can't do it in a certain way but then like that that novelty shouldn't be locked up here and it shouldn't lock up people's knowledge um I don't know I feel like that there's still a bit more kind of balancing of those two sides of things and how they can work together without um essentially uh for-profit products functioning as public infrastructure. I feel like that's where a lot of these issues come from. >> Yeah, I love that just as a barometer like it is is Google loadbearing in a lot of cases and when it comes to information like for a lot of people I think you know is is Instagram loadbearing or is and I think for a lot

of people if you really reflect on it it's like yeah that's actually carrying much more weight than is is structurally sound. So, I just like that as a as a barometer. And I think we'll get into like, you know, some of what comes when when you do place too much load on uh any one platform. >> Yeah, that's where that's where Crystal's about to take us. Um, so lately I've been helping local organizations work with their privacy and security. They deal with vulnerable populations. They're asking me about how do how do we protect ourselves? And a lot of them are on Google across the board. So their entire infrastructure is on Google. And I think what we're all about to discover is that all of these

companies have worked AI into their systems and we don't really know about it yet. Like I just saw an article today about Gemini. I think it's on Android, but it might be on all Google platforms now. And it has access to everything. Your private messages, your DMs, every single thing you have set and typed into a Google thing, it now accesses without your permission. And there's a tiny little privacy toggle that you have to get a PhD to find to turn it off. And that's actually the post I read was the person like, "Here's where the toggle switch is, but hey, y'all shouldn't be using it." So, same with WhatsApp. A lot of these organizations made WhatsApp part of their core communication infrastructure. And now what they're finding is that that is their biggest vulnerability is because

that is also owned by these oligarchs. And what we're really talking about is I mean the reason why most of us are in crypto it's you know we have that cipher punk vibe. We get that web one was open source public good for the better of humanity and then it was enclosed put behind corporate walls and now we're dealing with the blowback of that which at the end of the day this is all about extraction and now it's just at full scale and it's in everything. And what journalists really need to get their brains wrapped around, and maybe they are, I don't know, not in the industry anymore, is that we need to enter and expedite into a post extractive media landscape. It is regenerative media. I

hate to use your word regenerative because it's so overused, but that is what we're building and that is what is necessary is that you have to remove the extraction because that is a huge weakness and then you're at the hands of some of the most immature manchildren ever. I was going to say something else, but I'm going to keep it a little tame for now and like fly off later, but like we're at so many organizations and so many communities and so many media outlets are now at the mercy of the whims of some very ridiculous people.

>> We were waiting. We maybe we need Eric on this one. We were like, >> "Yeah, give it >> give it a pause. The bomb might come." No, no, it's Yeah, like I I want to I want to be with with Spencer in that greenhouse right now. like there is there is this visceral draw uh into that sort of space that is representative of cultivation and uh >> yeah just like the the antidote >> uh the antidote to what if I that's maybe a term we can get into but like there's yeah there's a need for resilient antidotes right now

because we are on an edge for sure. I think everyone everyone feels it whether there's a willingness to voice it or you know really sit down and come to terms whatever that looks like uh certainly for people that are in web 3 and in tech broadly. Uh so hopefully this is at least a planting a seed uh to put it out in the world. >> Well, we also said this intersection of journalism media information production and technology. So I feel like we have been seeing the problems before most regular people I don't use regular but non-technical people see it because we can see it in our own ecosystem and then it spreads out and to get into Wikico

because we are definitely going to go there. Let's since you brought it up we'll just start there. So this book right here everybody grab a copy. Um, what is basically it's a mind virus and I have a lot of friends um in the healing world right now that on their own we have all just started going down this rabbit hole of mind viruses and I feel like if you strip away the technology and the oligarchs and the hierarchy and all of the things this is really at the core of what one of the big problems is it's very hard to identify um let me just explain what it is first. So on the back of this book, um, in its Native American meaning, Watiko is an evil cannibalistic spirit that can take over people's minds, leading to selfishness, insatiable

greed, and consumption as an end in itself, destructively turning our intrinsic creative genius against our own humanity. Revealing the presence of Watiko in our modern world behind every form of destruction our species is carrying out, both individual and collective. The author shows how this mind virus is so embedded in our psyches that it is almost undetectable and it is our blindness to it that gives watiko its power. And this was written just before algorithms were at scale. So now we have a surveillance capitalism structure that is amplifying this and then feeding it on the individual level but also on the collective level. And my thesis is that

our thesis probably is that knowledge gardens on the hyper local level if they start locally can be a vir a vaccine for this type of mind virus. And hopefully enough people are going to start building these communities gardens together so they can begin to create that antibodies against this mind virus that's in everything right now. In some ways it's sort of I think refreshing and hopeful to know that this is nothing new like and and again bringing ancient wisdom like this is you know part of Native American tradition to understand that this is part of the human condition.

>> Yep. >> And it has evolved and now we've got you know new amplification mechanisms that are problematic when you think about it through that lens. But it's also I think really it can be really uniting and and unifying in a way to say yes this is you know cultures have dealt with this these sorts of uh these sorts of problems uh you know for for millennia. Um, so I don't know there there I try to be like mostly optimistic and there's something in that that at least is uh reassuring, you know, knowing that we're entering very new territory in some ways, but also uh you know, you can look look back to know that like >> these are things ancient cultures have

dealt with uh throughout time. >> Yeah. And they have the blueprints like I I won't read this one. I won't post it though because it's a really good one. But um basically there just look at any most ancient traditions do have some sort of mind virus in their teachings and things that they dealt with. So if you take those indigenous principles and weave them into your system so that your systems are circular and holistic then that automatically helps prevent this type of a mind virus from spreading. One of the both optimistic and terrifying things is that now it is accelerating. Never in humanity have we had the ability to accelerate something so toxic. And that's what we're living through. This

accelerated transition collapse, which is what this whole guest season is about is definitely right now. I mean, that mind virus is being amplified through weaponized algorithms and the surveillance capitalistic system. as that system begins to crack, which it is cracking now, then if more of our communities have these knowledge gardens set up and have built their infrastructures and can then amplify and then we network them like Spencer was talking about with was it plausible RSS? Um, >> yeah, plausibly permanent syndication. Yeah.

So, you know, more of that gets worked into it and then things like the night foundation, these big media organizations wake up to this thing that is growing on its own organically and then shift resources to it. then that becomes a very strong network of antidote for for this cuz I can already see having been way too connected to social media for the past 15 years I can see people just checking out and just being completely over it and wanting to check out from technology completely. So I think if we have these local level options for people to come in and work with tech in a way that is driven by them and that is holistic and is designed to be a tool and not an

extractive machine then I think more people will feel their nervous systems will react less when they enter these spaces and they'll want to engage and they'll want to create that anecdote to the bulgards. >> Totally. I mean, I think all this stuff is is super important. And I think there's even a way you can kind of frame a the the coordination crisis as being downstream from like a sensemaking crisis. Like a lot of people are kind of flailing, like myself included, flailing in these global narratives that are just like washing over us every day that we really can't trust the institutions delivering the information. The information we can't even understand.

It's too complex. we have reservations around trusting experts like branding stuff in a more of a local context and taking control of that and like sitting with it and cultivating that. I feel like that's that's one one kind of aspect in this whole system that could start nudging things in a better direction. But yeah, I mean to to your point, I feel like a lot of people uh won't start thinking that way until the the more global systems start failing. Um which as you say like they're they're cracking. >> Yeah. Yeah, I I have uh there's a a great paper from a friend and and colleague, Dr. Torrance, who's uh president of a of a community college

out in Tennessee. I'll have to send this to him, but he's he's written beautifully on this idea of ripples and fissures. And I think um it's a really apt the fissures and the fractures like those are we can point to those are fairly obvious. Uh but I I love the idea of these interconnected uh networks of locally cultivated knowledge. Like those actually have powerful ripple effects. Folks don't need to be technical. They can be a local literal farmer, you know, or others in a community that Crystal, you you you've been, you know, speaking with one who like, you know, is is older and like doesn't care to engage with technology. Um, I think everybody,

you know, those folks because of that upregulation and what can happen to just uh, you know, our our psyche and our the energy that we're actually putting out into others in the world. Those those ripples actually can take effect uh, for folks that have, you know, almost no connection to the actual, you know, core technology or the information scrolling through these networks. So um yeah, I use that framework ripples and fissures quite a bit >> thanks to him. So I'll I'll I'll have to share the article here.

>> Yeah, please do. I love that. That's that's fantastic. And I think that is um one of the things I'm going to put on Jourodal and and the human layers agenda as we get closer to the end of the year when we find time is getting into like a lot of our mentors um especially those of us that that went to journalism school or that did some you know grad school work and Taylor I know you were in you know all kinds of higher ed there's a lot of brilliant professors right now that have created decades of of wisdom of their my journalism professor, one of them wrote the community journalism textbook that's taught around the country and they have they're sitting on between them and their colleagues are sitting on

giant volumes of knowledge that needs to be preserved and actually the last time I talked to them I was explaining blockchain to them like three years ago over a beer and napkin just napkin art and a dean took over our school and they didn't really get along and he was retiring anyway and she was going to shut down the server that held 12 years of community journalism from a paper in Durham that he had built with his classes. And every year the class would go into Durham, train local community members on how to tell their own stories, and they created this big beautiful digital newspaper. And the professor or the dean just wanted to shut down the server. And so when I told him, I was like, "Oh, well, blockchain solves that problem." This is before

testations existed. He was in. I didn't have to explain the tech to him. He's just like, "Yeah, I want that." So there there's a ton of knowledge that needs to be preserved and put into these types of knowledge gardens with people who can structure it and people who can tend it and then also attaching it to that explainable LLM. That is one of the missing pieces because then that makes the knowledge accessible to the next generation however they want to use it. Same with blockchain. You put it on Arweave 20 years from now. I mean, who knows how they're going to be getting information? Maybe just tapped into their eyeballs, but if it's on a blockchain, they could tap it in there and then, you know, it's great.

>> Yeah, I feel like that's that's that gets into while this distributed storage layer stuff is so important, whether it's Arweave or IPFS or probably there's probably other examples that that are even like less removed from anything web 3. Um, but like the fact that all it takes is some change of management in an institution for someone to make what to them might be some innocuous decision to just like, oh, we're not we don't need the server anymore. Let's let's put it down. Like, it's not it's not where our priorities are, then there's like years of really valuable wisdom that just aren't isn't accessible anymore or at least not not publicly accessible. Uh, and I feel like there's like that the risk of that to me is much more likely than than censorship in a lot of these cases. Like censorship is is definitely

a risk as well, but I feel like in terms of the situations in which knowledge would be made inaccessible. Most of it would seem to be accidental kind of management shifting stuff rather than like the new dean saying, "Oh, this information shouldn't be accessible." She's like, "Oh, we don't need it anymore." You know, let's let's not run the server. >> Yeah. And mostly out of a personal vendetta, we just went to this with the government. They just came in and wd everything like pretty much and just because they didn't like this whole demographic of people that think. So they just wd it and you know that's valuable expensive knowledge. That's people's life's work of research and science and billions of dollars spent on producing that. And also I mean just AWS

servers. I don't think many people realize what is it 90% or some insane number of information flows through a a a server owned by a dude that just threw a 50 what million dollar wedding in Venice. Like are you kidding me right now? That's that's the come to Jesus that we all need to have. >> Yeah. I I know academics that you know understandably there there's this like fear and isolation that that for for those that are really well-intentioned and see the same problems. I think you know that's why there's need like urgency and there is there are things to be won and lost in the very near term because I know a lot of yeah really brilliant folks that are inside and

they're like no one else really understands it. I get it. I'm kind of stuck in my ways but as opposed to having some vehicle to allow that that wisdom and what they know to sort of you know grow and become part of a broader commons. right now. I know a lot a lot of folks that are in academia that are like, "No, putting the walls up around my class. I can affect these students, you know, and and it's understandable like I I can see why that's the approach." But yeah, isolation is isolationism is not >> is not the answer. Unfortunately, there's a lot of that happen.

>> Yeah. And just the, you know, I have a lot of friends our age who are professors and they they've been listening to me ramble about tech for a decade now. And then recently they were like, "Oh, hey, I want to do this thing." And I was like, "Yeah, put it in the knowledge garden." They're like, "Put it in your knowledge garden." I'm like, "I'll put it in yours. Go start one with your colleagues. It's the the software is free and it's not complicated." So, I feel like we're going to shift into a tutorial mode here soon where we're going to have to really start explaining this at scale to people um so they can begin starting their own gardens and then connecting them all because that's when we begin to create that vaccine for the mine buyers is when this is happening at scale, not just a handful

of us doing it. >> Well, if if nothing else, folks can walk away thinking there might be a vaccine to Watika. That's an interesting idea, but it feels good. H. Where else do we want to wander? Well, you had some stuff you want to wander into, Taylor. Throw it out. I mean, we've we've touched on it. I think there there was, I guess, a a realization in the very binary and politically toxic sort of left, right, blue, red. And I again I come back I guess to realization that like this has kind of always been part of the plight of being human and whether you're

throwing out like TDS Trump derangement or like there's so much of that but I think whether you're on you know one side or the other philosophically ideologically um this is a means of at least having a base framework and now also some really powerful tools uh that starts to like let that be very secondary uh whatever that tension and disagreement might be. >> So yeah, it was there's just like political vaccination that also is needed and I think you know this idea can help with that at a time when I don't know I I haven't

seen I've only seen it getting worse. I know it's happening and there's powerful pockets of folks that are trying to change the narrative, but like from the macro, it just only seems to be getting amplified and it's we we can point to most of the most of the broligarchs to your that is the right term. Cabals and rollarchs are are what is causing it. some intentionally, some probably much less intentionally, but we've got we've got, you know, optimistic tools and people to get us through the Osire.

>> Definitely. And I think too, um, Spencer, you brought this up earlier. Um, getting that information on the very local level. Um, when I first started using Twitter and breaking news would happen, like a conflict overseas or something, I could find the local journalist on the ground who was there reporting and showing the footage before it stepped into the media outlet and went through the editorial process. So, that gave me an immediate connection to what was happening on the ground because I trusted that journalist. Either I knew them through a network or could look at their credentials and their past work and and protect and understand where they're coming from and their journalistic credibility. And when Musk bought that platform, most of them left, rightfully so. So, we lost that connection to the hyper local level of

news coverage. And I feel like that also talks about what you're just talking about there too, Taylor. Like, if you have that hyper local journalist, that goes to the parade, goes to the opening of the ice cream shop, that goes to all of the things that we all participate in, and then just reports it on that level, then that has more communal engagement. And the more that people get involved with information, gathering that way and and seeing each other's worlds and spending time together in community again in third places, the harder it is for these bolarchs to get that type of polarization through, especially if people begin to hopefully start leaving these social media platforms or having a

more balanced relationship with them. So, if they can find that connection in their communities again, and I know the pandemic really threw everybody for a loop because it shut all those spaces down and they've never recovered. And now with this economy, who knows? I mean, coffee shops are getting slower and quieter and who knows? But I feel like those third places need to resurrect and journalists also need to be on the ground in these places and have an outlet for it. And journalists might not even be the term with knowledge gardens. it might be something else um as as they evolve. >> And I I do think another aspect of this like the local kind of trust network things um to all of this. I think the other aspect is is just actually investing more in relationships with

people around you and people in your industry because I think without like a a substantive trust network like that then you are just kind of like defenseless to a bit more defenseless to pimemetic virus like if you don't have that kind of screening process of like who did I get this information from and like do I personally would I vouch for their character their judgment do I know what they're like do I know broadly what kind of incentives they're under or what their obligations are. I feel like that that is like really integral at least for me to like making sense of what a what a valid kind of recommendation or someone's relaying some information to me. if I if I have no idea who they are, I can like maybe vouch based on mutual connections, but it gets like pretty tenuous the further away trustwise you

are from a person and and that so there's there's all of that like industry-wise and then that's also why I'm interested in a lot of these uh community living projects because like you're you get to live with live in a sense of community and it like the kind of the core of your life becomes a lot more social. Uh, and I feel like I feel like that that issue like investing in some local community or some industrial community or peer group pure network that seems to be also uh pretty fundamental for a lot of these sense making efforts because like if we don't have we don't know the people that we're getting information from then it's like then yeah like we're probably going to be subject to a lot more um you know information and incentives that go

against our own interests. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think that also ties into the combination of an IRL event and a knowledge garden. Like we saw that with GO Boulder and that really kind of fascinated me. So where the relationship begins in person and then you have a group that decides to come together and continue that relationship through knowledge sharing through a garden afterwards. That way the core of it is started with that energetic transfer in in the same physical space. And so that trust is established because you've met them and spent time with them. And then the trans and then the relationship and the knowledge sharing and building can go into the virtual world with a stronger connection. I think even though we've been building virtual communities forever now or it

feels like forever um I do feel like they are stronger when they start IRL. >> Yeah. The again to me the sequencing we often uh start certainly in in crypto and what Bri with with Dows like it's really a weird experience to go virtual for a year and then try like start start personal start in community uh start in the in the greenhouse in the commune. There's a um uh documentary on Netflix uh Join or Die that I've I've mentioned to a lot of people that I think is a it's Robert Putnham's work bowling alone.

really staggering, you know, uh, depiction of just how we have completely lost that sort of initial uh, sort of intuition to go and find a community and be, you know, in a club or with people. Uh, and part of that is understandable and just reality a digitally interconnected word world. But uh they also point to just really staggering numbers that come alongside that decline of community engagement. So yeah, go go go check out Join or die if you haven't seen it. Is it is definitely pointed uh depiction of where we've landed.

>> Yeah, >> totally agree. >> Is Bowling Alone about how bowling alley served as like third places or am I thinking of something else? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it was based on his work with that what was originally that book but it's a recent sort of take uh I think it came out you know within the last couple years but it's based on that that initial frame from that book. Yeah, >> it's really good. And this gets into um sorry Spencer you don't qualify for this one. Although you might you know we had an analog childhood. My childhood was spent going to different community gathering places. Ours were on the soccer field. I mean when we were in kindergarten we went to the roller skating rink. my parents would just leave us there and you know we'd go have our community our you our entire

childhoods were based on for the most part communities and my um community professor that I was talking about earlier community journalism professor he recommended a book called the great good place and it's an anthropological it's a dense book it's by an anthropologist and he looks at the third place which Starbucks later co-opted but basically the first place is home second place is work third place is community gathering It could be at the feed store. Um I used to drive a pickup truck and if you ever pulled a pickup truck to a social place, everybody stands around the bed of the truck and talks. And you know, it could be the diner. Um everybody's at the diner counter for the day and getting their coffee and talking about what's going on. Um VFWs are a really

fascinating one. I used to when I was a photojournalist, I would go to those and get stories from veterans and they're always doing something in those spaces. Um also the Eagles Lodge. I joined an Eagle's Lodge a few years ago visiting some friends out in rural Washington state and it was an interesting town because the the town itself was about two hours north of Seattle. So they had a lot of the Seattle folks had their second homes there. So they had that not gentrification, but they had that economic friction of outsiders coming into a small town in a conservative area, but they also maintain some of that conservative infrastructure like the Eagles Lodge. And everybody from all walks of life would go there regularly because the booze was $2 a pop. You

could gamble on whatever silly games they had. There was free popcorn and somebody was always singing. Somebody was always doing something silly. It was just a place to come be together. And when you spend time with people of, you know, different demographics and different backgrounds in those types of community spaces, when you get to the voting booth, it's very difficult to vote against, you know, this person's belief because you've spent time with them and you've shared drinks and food and song with them. You're not going to vote against their well-being because you know them. And that's one of the biggest things we've lost um in this modern age is that connection. it it is like baked deep into the you know base of our brain stem like we have to come

to terms with what humans have done forever. So yeah like go just go I I think it's one of those really fun easy tests if if that's not something you typically do. I'm yeah we're older it comes a little more natural like I have I enjoy just going and plugging into or or creating those spaces. Um, but go go go and see what it does to your nervous system. Like it's not going to be comfortable necessarily to just go randomly roll into some, but like it is an easy test. Go do that. See how you feel, you know, later that day or the next morning. You'll you'll notice it. It's like it is satiating something that humans need.

>> Yeah. >> So, yeah. Easy. Actually, pretty um pretty fittingly, uh the the aristocrat who built our house actually had a bowling lane in the basement, but like for all these all this time, we've just had like all of our like bunch of furniture and luggage and everything on top of it. But we just cleared that up a couple weeks ago. We've been bowling in the basement. >> Oh my god, it's fantastic. Your house has stories. Your house needs to do a knowledge garden and you need to mine those stories. >> I'm working on it. Yeah, >> all kinds of people. Believe >> me, it's gonna be cool.

Nice. That's fantastic. Do we need to go anywhere else or are we I feel like we're kind of coming to a natural closing point. Anywhere else we want to wander, I think. >> Yeah, >> we're good. >> A quick thank you. These are always fun conversations. So, we've we've done it in person, so we're allowed. This is the right sequence. >> Yeah. Thank you guys for for having me on. I love these conversations as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for joining us and thank you to Greenpill for giving the Crusty Gen Xers and our Gen Z the mic and letting us um talk about accelerated transitions. Um you can find us at jouodal.xyz

where we have our newly formed knowledge garden growing and yeah, awesome. Thank you all so much. [Music] Hey,