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garden.canalswans.net
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Wiki

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notplants 2022-07-19 21:57:27 +02:00
parent 3ae6f24788
commit d4b0c9885a
98 changed files with 2386 additions and 11 deletions
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2
src/components/Header.js
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@ -12,7 +12,9 @@ const Header = (props) => {
</div>
<div className="header-simple-bottom">
<SLink to='/about'>about</SLink>
<SLink to='/wiki'>wiki</SLink>
<SLink to='/'>index</SLink>
<SLink to='/misc'>misc</SLink>
<SLink to='/zines'>zines</SLink>
</div>
</div>

71
src/components/Wiki.js Executable file
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@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
import React from 'react'
import Link from 'gatsby-link'
import {MDXRenderer} from "gatsby-plugin-mdx";
import {MDXProvider} from "@mdx-js/react";
import SLink from "./SLink";
const PostLink = ({ post, current }) => {
var selectedClass;
if (post.frontmatter.title == current) {
selectedClass = "selected"
};
return (
<div className={selectedClass}>
<Link to={post.frontmatter.path}>
{post.frontmatter.title}
</Link>
</div>
)
}
export default class Wiki extends React.Component {
render() {
this.props.wikis.edges.sort((edge1, edge2) => edge1.node.frontmatter.title.length > edge2.node.frontmatter.title.length);
const Posts = this.props.wikis.edges
.filter(edge => !!edge.node.frontmatter.title) // You can filter your posts based on some criteria
.map(edge => <PostLink key={edge.node.id} post={edge.node} current={this.props.post.frontmatter.title} />)
var articleClass = "markdownWrapper " + this.props.post.frontmatter.style;
return (
<div>
<div className="wiki-wrapper">
<div className="topics-wrapper">{Posts}</div>
</div>
<article className={articleClass}>
<h2
style={{
marginBottom: 0,
}}
>
{this.props.post.frontmatter.title}
</h2>
<p
style={{
display: `block`,
'width': '100%',
'float': 'left',
}}
>
{this.props.post.frontmatter.author ? <span>{this.props.post.frontmatter.author} &bull;</span> : null }
</p>
{this.props.post.frontmatter.note ?
<p
style={{
display: `block`,
}}
dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{'__html': this.props.post.frontmatter.note}}
>
</p>
: null}
<section className="mdxWrapper">
<MDXProvider components={{
"SLink": SLink,
}}>
<MDXRenderer >{this.props.mdx.body}</MDXRenderer>
</MDXProvider>
</section>
</article>
</div>
)
}
}

25
src/layouts/canalswans.scss
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@ -1,3 +1,16 @@
.wiki-wrapper {
margin-bottom: 50px;
}
.topics-wrapper div {
display: inline;
margin-right: 20px;
}
.topics-wrapper div.selected a {
background-color: yellow;
}
.blackpagebreak {
width: 100%;
margin: auto;
@ -58,7 +71,7 @@ body {
margin: auto;
// max-width: 720px;
max-width: 630px;
padding-top: 75px;
padding-top: 0px;
width: 90%;
padding-bottom: 70px;
min-height: 50vh;
@ -95,7 +108,7 @@ header.simple-header {
flex-direction: row;
align-items: center;
justify-content: space-between;
width: 150px;
width: 300px;
display: flex;
a {
color: gray;
@ -189,6 +202,8 @@ body.standard a.hlink {
.toc-wrapper {
margin-bottom: 80px;
margin-top: 75px;
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
align-items: center;
@ -210,13 +225,15 @@ body.standard a.hlink {
max-width: 470px;
margin:auto;
padding-left: 20px;
margin-top: 75px;
text-align: center;
}
.aboutLinksWrapper {
display: flex;
justify-content: left;
justify-content: center;
.aboutLinks {
width: 210px;
margin-top: 50px;
margin-top: 100px;
.hlink {
margin-right: 0px;
}

3
src/layouts/moods.scss
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@ -28,6 +28,9 @@ body.standard {
a {
color: #8900ff;
}
a:hover {
background-color: yellow;
}
}
body.sponsored {

29
src/pages/about.js
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@ -6,8 +6,35 @@ import SLink from "../components/SLink";
const IndexPage = () => (
<Layout hideFooter={true}>
<div className="aboutWrapper">
{/*<p>*/}
{/* Canal Swans is a website/wiki/blog maintained by <a href="http://mfowler.info">Max Fowler</a>.*/}
{/*</p>*/}
{/*<p>*/}
{/* index contains writing and poetry.*/}
{/*</p>*/}
{/*<p>*/}
{/* zines was imagined to become a small online store for ordering*/}
{/* physical copies of zines, inspired by <a href="http://www.finnoakes.com/new-products">finn oakes' zine store</a>,*/}
{/* but currently just contains one zine.*/}
{/*</p>*/}
{/*<p>*/}
{/* wiki contains collections of notes, writing and links on various topics.*/}
{/* I wanted to collect research in a way that was more engaged than just*/}
{/* compulsively saving things to are.na channels, but was less polished*/}
{/* than one-time-published pieces of writing. a digital garden of sorts,*/}
{/* and a tribute to serendipity and special interests.*/}
{/*</p>*/}
{/*<p>*/}
{/* misc is for anything that doesn't fit.*/}
{/*</p>*/}
<p>
Canal Swans is a blog/website/publishing-platform/distribution-channel/online-retail-conglomerate maintained by <a href="http://mfowler.info">Max Fowler</a>.
garden of fragments, writing, notes
</p>
<p>
a tribute to serendipity, special interests and html
</p>
<p>
maintained by <a href="https://mfowler.info">notplants</a>
</p>
{/*<p>*/}
{/* This is a blog for sharing writing, notes, sketches and other fragments.*/}

58
src/pages/misc.js Executable file
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@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
import React from "react"
import { graphql } from "gatsby"
import { Link } from "gatsby"
import Layout from "../layouts/layout.js"
import SLink from "../components/SLink";
const PostLink = ({ post }) => (
<div>
<Link to={post.frontmatter.path}>
{post.frontmatter.title} ({post.frontmatter.date})
</Link>
</div>
)
const IndexPage = ({
data: {
allMarkdownRemark: { edges },
},
}) => {
edges.sort((edge1, edge2) => edge1.node.frontmatter.title.length > edge2.node.frontmatter.title.length)
const Posts = edges
.filter(edge => !!edge.node.frontmatter.date) // You can filter your posts based on some criteria
.map(edge => <PostLink key={edge.node.id} post={edge.node} />)
return (
<Layout hideFooter={true}>
<div className="toc-wrapper">
<p className="table-of-contents">Misc</p>
<div className="posts-wrapper">{Posts}</div>
</div>
<div className="rssWrapper">
<SLink className="hlink" to='/rss.xml'>rss</SLink>
</div>
</Layout>
)
}
export default IndexPage
export const pageQuery = graphql`
query {
allMarkdownRemark(
sort: { order: ASC, fields: [frontmatter___title] }
filter: { frontmatter: { draft: { ne: "true" }, type: { eq: "misc" } }}
)
{
edges {
node {
id
excerpt(pruneLength: 250)
frontmatter {
date(formatString: "MMMM DD, YYYY")
path
title
draft
}
}
}
}
}
`

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src/pages/wiki.js Executable file
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@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
import React from "react"
import { graphql } from "gatsby"
import { Link } from "gatsby"
import Layout from "../layouts/layout.js"
import SLink from "../components/SLink";
const PostLink = ({ post }) => (
<div>
<Link to={post.frontmatter.path}>
{post.frontmatter.title}
</Link>
</div>
)
const IndexPage = ({
data: {
allMarkdownRemark: { edges },
},
}) => {
edges.sort((edge1, edge2) => edge1.node.frontmatter.title.length > edge2.node.frontmatter.title.length)
const Posts = edges
.filter(edge => !!edge.node.frontmatter.date) // You can filter your posts based on some criteria
.map(edge => <PostLink key={edge.node.id} post={edge.node} />)
return (
<Layout hideFooter={true}>
<div className="wiki-wrapper">
<div className="topics-wrapper">{Posts}</div>
</div>
<div className="rssWrapper">
<SLink className="hlink" to='/rss.xml'>rss</SLink>
</div>
</Layout>
)
}
export default IndexPage
export const pageQuery = graphql`
query {
allMarkdownRemark(
sort: { order: ASC, fields: [frontmatter___title] }
filter: { frontmatter: { draft: { ne: "true" }, type: { eq: "wiki" } }}
)
{
edges {
node {
id
excerpt(pruneLength: 250)
frontmatter {
date(formatString: "MMMM DD, YYYY")
path
title
draft
}
}
}
}
}
`

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src/pages/writing.js Executable file
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@ -0,0 +1,65 @@
import React from "react"
import { graphql } from "gatsby"
import { Link } from "gatsby"
import Layout from "../layouts/layout.js"
import SLink from "../components/SLink";
const PostLink = ({ post }) => (
<div>
<Link to={post.frontmatter.path}>
{post.frontmatter.title}
</Link>
</div>
)
const Toc = ({ Posts }) => (
<div className="toc-wrapper">
<p className="table-of-contents">Table Of Contents</p>
<div className="posts-wrapper">{Posts}</div>
</div>
)
const IndexPage = ({
data: {
allMarkdownRemark: { edges },
},
}) => {
edges.sort((edge1, edge2) => edge1.node.frontmatter.title.length > edge2.node.frontmatter.title.length)
const Posts = edges
.filter(edge => !!edge.node.frontmatter.date) // You can filter your posts based on some criteria
.map(edge => <PostLink key={edge.node.id} post={edge.node} />)
return (
<Layout hideFooter={true}>
<div className="toc-wrapper">
<p className="table-of-contents">Table Of Contents</p>
<div className="posts-wrapper">{Posts}</div>
</div>
<div className="rssWrapper">
<SLink className="hlink" to='/rss.xml'>rss</SLink>
</div>
</Layout>
)
}
export default IndexPage
export const pageQuery = graphql`
query {
allMarkdownRemark(
sort: { order: ASC, fields: [frontmatter___title] }
filter: { frontmatter: { draft: { ne: "true" }, type: { eq: "blog" } }}
)
{
edges {
node {
id
excerpt(pruneLength: 250)
frontmatter {
date(formatString: "MMMM DD, YYYY")
path
title
draft
}
}
}
}
}
`

34
src/templates/mdx-post.js
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@ -2,10 +2,11 @@
import React from "react"
import SLink from "../components/SLink.js"
import Zine from "../components/Zine.js"
import Wiki from "../components/Wiki.js"
import { MDXRenderer } from "gatsby-plugin-mdx"
import { MDXProvider } from '@mdx-js/react'
import Layout from "../layouts/layout.js";
import {Link} from "gatsby";
import {graphql, Link} from "gatsby";
// simple template for testing
// export default function PageTemplate({ data: { mdx } }) {
@ -67,8 +68,7 @@ class MdxArticle extends React.Component {
}
}
export default function MdxTemplate({ data: { mdx }}) {
const post = mdx
export default function MdxTemplate({ data: { post, wikis } }) {
var pageType = post.frontmatter.type;
if (!pageType) {
pageType = 'blog;'
@ -86,9 +86,13 @@ export default function MdxTemplate({ data: { mdx }}) {
{(()=> {
switch (pageType) {
case 'blog':
return <MdxArticle post={post} mdx={mdx}></MdxArticle>;
return <MdxArticle post={post} mdx={post}></MdxArticle>;
case 'zine':
return <Zine zine={post.frontmatter} mdx={mdx}></Zine>
return <Zine zine={post.frontmatter} mdx={post}></Zine>
case 'wiki':
return <Wiki post={post} wikis={wikis} mdx={post}></Wiki>
case 'misc':
return <MdxArticle post={post} mdx={post}></MdxArticle>;
default:
return null;
}
@ -98,7 +102,7 @@ export default function MdxTemplate({ data: { mdx }}) {
}
export const pageQuery = graphql`
query BlogPostQuery($id: String) {
mdx(id: { eq: $id }) {
post: mdx(id: { eq: $id }) {
id
body
frontmatter {
@ -115,5 +119,23 @@ export const pageQuery = graphql`
type
}
}
wikis: allMarkdownRemark(
sort: { order: ASC, fields: [frontmatter___title] }
filter: { frontmatter: { draft: { ne: "true" }, type: { eq: "wiki" } }}
)
{
edges {
node {
id
excerpt(pruneLength: 250)
frontmatter {
date(formatString: "MMMM DD, YYYY")
path
title
draft
}
}
}
}
}
`

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static/content/blog/a-year-in-review/a-year-in-review.md Executable file
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@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
---
path: "/posts/a-year-in-review"
date: "2019-12-21T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "A Year In Review"
type: "blog"
style: "poem"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
A Year In Review
my resume
your resume
walk into a bar
creating endless output
for generations
hot showers
seemed necessary
until cold showers seemed beautiful
energy efficiency -> energy sufficiency
two nights ago I dreamed that I
was trying to get a job at a pizza restaurant
all of a sudden it all made sense
why artists work at pizza restaurants
it felt like a cosmic gift
joyfully revealing itself
feelings of relief
on the first day we were a having a meeting with the staff
and the boss was telling us
that we needed to clean and organize the restaurant
she said she wanted to add an aquarium to the main room and asked me to go find an aquarium tank
i took the train to go find the tank
somehow i took a wrong turn
i was worried i would be late
i had a stress dream about trying to find the aquarium tank store
i woke up while still trying to triangulate where the store might be
--> on the way to 2020,
with hopes of growing ecological alignment
delicious pizzas
happy solstice

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@ -0,0 +1,109 @@
---
path: "/posts/anthropology-of-blocking"
date: "2021-01-04T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Anthropology Of Blocking"
type: "blog"
image: ""
description: "documentation from the fediverse in 2021"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
*content warning: this post includes mentions of pokemon porn, possibly depicting characters who are underage (the question of their age is the source of the conflict), but the images themselves are not included*
This is a brief account of an event that occurred in the [fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse) on January 2nd of 2021.
If you haven't heard of the fediverse before, [here](link) is an article about it. In short, its a federated social network, where there are many instances (servers) and each server has its own admin(s) who decide which other instances to federate with. Users of a particular instance can see posts from their own instance, as well as other instances which their instance federates with. You can imagine it as a network of connected communities. A federation.
If you don't like your admin's federation choices (too strict, or not strict enough), or for any reason, you can also migrate your account to another server.
In a sense, federation combines "free speech" with "free listening". Anyone can create their own server and say whatever they want into the void, and at the same time no one has to listen to them (federate with them).
So with this background, now into the details of the incident.
Artalley.social is an instance with 12,600 users (pretty large for the fediverse) which describes itself like this:
> *Art Alley* is a Mastodon server for *artists and commissioners*, as well as people who just like looking at art. Share your finished pieces, works in progress, changes to your commissions status and your livestreams, or whatever else you want, really!
They also say adult art is welcome, and they have a [code of conduct](https://artalley.social/about/more).
Apparently, someone on artalley.social posted a pornographic drawing of a pokemon character who is underage.
An admin of another instance saw this image, and reached out to the admin of artalley.social to report the image.
The admin of artalley.social said that the image depicted a character who was underage according to canon, but the image was of the pokemon physically at a later age, and so was not against the rules.
In response to this, the admin of elekk.xyz decided to defederate from artalley.social, and made a post about why there were defederating.
![Screenshot from 2021-01-04 21-16-55.png](img/admin-post.png)
source: https://elekk.xyz/@whalefall/105488202284424171
This post circulated around the fediverse, and others weighed in with additional evidence of the failings of the moderators of artalley.social with a recommendation to block the instance.
e.g. this post with many screenshots [the supervillainess: You Should Defederate From artalley.social](https://sunbeam.city/web/statuses/105497156571374148)
As you can see in the posts above, the block recommendation takes a form similar to a legal argument -- with evidence/screenshots (receipts) and an explanation for why the evidence is worthy of a block.
This is a common pattern on the fediverse.
Block recommendations get shared around the network, which other instance admins may or may not follow and/or re-share.
A decentralized court by screenshot.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ a quote to pass the days ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In addition to the arguments recommending to block the instance, I also saw posts from users complaining about the block, as they would have to change instances, when to them it seemed unfair that 12k users would have to change instances because of the bad actions of one user.
For example, "ohcoolafrog", an artist I was following, posted this:
![ohcoolafrog.png](img/ohcoolafrog.png)
Currently artalley.social server appears to be down, maybe the admins took it down. So I'm not sure what happened to ohcoolafrog. Maybe I will find them again on another instance someday.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ a quote to pass the days ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The thing that inspired me to write this, was [a post](https://ondergrond.org/@dumpsterqueer/105491747322124960) from an admin of ondergrond.org, a queer instance in belgium, about their thoughts on this process.
![federation.png](img/federation.png)
My current view is that moderation would work best like this:
![moderation.png](img/moderation.png)
source: https://sunbeam.city/@notplants/105497077449053429
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ a quote to pass the days ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
To zoom out for a second, something I find beautiful about the fediverse,
is that its a place where these questions are being asked and lived out.
Whether pokemon porn should be judged by the age of the character according to canon or according to the contents of the image is not the most interesting question to me,
but how this question gets answered, becomes a case-study for a deeper set of questions about moderation and the network itself.
On centralized platforms there isn't nearly as much transparency.
When a post gets banned, it often just disappears.
When something gets shadowbanned, we may not even know its happening.
Perhaps central platforms just hide the politics of the messy reality from view.
Like so many capitalist "solutions" do.
Like the trashbin, the one-click-delivery, the polished rectangle.
Algorithms are a sweet poison.
Further Reading:
- [Center for a Stateless Society &raquo; Social-Anarchism and Parallel Economic Computation](https://c4ss.org/content/52963)
- "Algorithms are a sweet poison" is a phrase I learned from [@kawaiipunk](https://sunbeam.city/web/accounts/38480)
If you would like to join the fediverse,
[kolektive.social](https://kolektiva.social/) and [ondergrond.org](https://ondergrond.org/about) are two queer instances
that are currently open for registrations.
Or message me if you would like an invite to join [sunbeam.city](https://sunbeam.city/).

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---
path: "/posts/community-basements"
date: "2019-07-31T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Community Basements"
type: "blog"
style: "poem"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
I’ve enjoyed reading [Lukas’ Newsletter](https://tinyletter.com/gnamma), so I’ve decided to also try my hand at the form. If I accidentally also adopt his tone of voice, mimicry is a form of compliment. Before I was using my newsletter just for updates, but now I will also be using it as a place for writing. I was thinking about making multiple newsletters, but that seemed complicated. Instead I will just trust you to unsubscribe or mute if you want to, or to keep reading and hope that the topics that draw my interest might also end up being interesting to you.
The thing I wanted to write about for this first new edition of the newsletter (now called Canal Swans) is organizing a basement, but it needs a little background.
For the past year, I’ve been helping out with a community space called [Sari-Sari](http://sarisarisalon.org/). The space feels a bit like a strange living room. There is a carpet and a small stage and an open kitchen, it can comfortably hold about 30 people, but most events there have fewer people. There is an emphasis on improvisation, but not the type of improvisation that you train for, more just as a general mindset, working with what’s there. The open kitchen easily lets people walk back and forth from the carpeted area to “behind” the bar to the kitchen area — I think this lack of barrier between front and back greatly contributes to the ethos of the space. A lot of people who enter the space come up to the bar and ask “what is this place?”. It takes people different amounts of time to (un)learn that they can walk behind the bar and help cook if they want to.
At the back of the living room is a door with a taped on arrow pointing downwards to the basement. This door seems to often get used for dramatic effect by performers and dancers who mid-performance walk through the door and close it, and then at some point come back in. The stairway down leads to an old but now well-organized basement. In the old days (3 years ago), the previous collective that operated out of this space used to throw parties in the basement, but whenever there were parties, the neighbors would often make noise complaints, and so now we don’t have parties and instead use the basement as a storage space, and recently as a work space.
One of the first things I did when I started helping to re-organize the basement was to cut up a hand-made bench in the corner of the basement that had a DJ set list painted onto it from a a party that must have been years ago. Basements are a funny sort of archive. We removed the bench and put it outside in some grass in front of a nearby church — almost every day since then I’ve seen people sitting on those benches hanging out. The world works in mysterious ways.
There is a part of me that misses how Sari-Sari felt to me when I didn’t know about the basement. For me it was purely a realm for exploration, improvisation, cooking, dancing and meeting new people. Since I learned about the basement, I’ve spent more of my time thinking about what infrastructure (physical, social and financial) underlies this creative room. When I am in a darker mood I feel like I must have fulfilled my own subconscious longings and found my way into the basement because of my puritanical upbringing that needed “to understand”. In a lighter mood, like right now, it feels like nothing is ever too late and the most true way to see our own movements is with gentleness. I gravitated to the basement because I loved the space and I was asked to take responsibility for it. I got pulled into this energy, but instead of being sucked into a masochistic narrative, how can I creatively respond to the situation, to work with what’s there?
Pepe and I are putting a carpet in the basement. I would also like to perform some type of group ritual down there.
From underground,
M

173
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@ -0,0 +1,173 @@
---
path: "/posts/degrading-fabric-degrading-networks"
date: "2021-10-22T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Degrading Fabric, Degrading Networks"
author: "1955 words"
type: "blog"
style: "poem"
image: ""
description: "notes on degrading"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
__Degrading Fabric__
While looking at one of my favorite shirts, <br/>
its fabric no longer the same texture as it once was,<br/>
I wondered if there might be some type of way to wash it,<br/>
that would return it to its previous form.<br/>
But then I thought about all the shirts, pants and bags,<br/>
which I have patched, and then re-patched,<br/>
and how it seems eventually fabric disintegrates.<br/>
There have been some good patches,<br/>
that greatly extended the lifetime,<br/>
but there is no binary of broken and fixed states.<br/>
One time, while travelling,<br/>
I borrowed a needle from a friend to patch a new hole in the shin of my pants.<br/>
After sewing the patch, somewhat in a rush,<br/>
I noticed I had unintentionally sewed a folded part of the fabric that I wasn't intending to.<br/>
To try to remedy the situation, I cut the thread there,<br/>
which freed the folded fabric, but then the thread there was without a knot.<br/>
I asked my friend who I borrowed the needle from,<br/>
what they would do in this situation,<br/>
if there was some way to re-tie the cut pieces,<br/>
or restore the integrity of the thread.<br/>
They told me they would just sew another piece of thread along the broken area,<br/>
or just leave it, as it was fine for now,<br/>
and its always degrading anyway.<br/>
<br/>
*******
<br/>
Three years ago I purchased a second-hand blender on kleinanzeigen, which had a working motor, but made a horrible noise when you used it, because a part of the connector between the blade and the motor had degraded. I tried to fix it, including eventually taking the blender to a repair cafe in Kreuzberg, where three older german men looked at my blender for sometime. After the inspection and a conversation, they concluded that the blender was not repairable, without finding a new specific piece that connects the motor to the blade. This part could not be purchased separately from the blender, as far as I could tell.
Afterwards, I sometimes dreamed of finding a matching broken blender, which had the piece I needed, but had a broken motor, and I would combine the two blenders, each perfectly complementing each other, to become whole.
I held onto the blender, for another year, thinking that one day I might find its match.
Then I was moving out of my apartment, and deciding what to take with me.
I decided enough was enough, I had no more space in my boxes, and I took the blender outside and put it in the trash.
Later, as I was leaving the apartment, I thought of the blender, and felt a pang of regret.
I went back into the trash, removed the blender from the trash, and left it in the apartment, with the plan to come back for it at somepoint.
A few weeks later I came back, and my friend who was now living there had put the blender on a shelf,
with confetti and a red stuffed heart made of fabric inside of it. A small art installation. They didn't know the history of the blender, they just saw it there, and its been like that since then.
<br/>
*******
<br/>
This past summer, while staying in Vermont, it was my first time living somewhere where I was composting directly outside, into a fenced-in compost area in the woods by the house. I felt like I was feeding the microbes in the woods directly. I imagined them enjoying each scrap. It felt insane and wasteful to put any piece of biomatter into the trash, even the smallest leaf, and not into the compost where the hungry microbes could eat it. I then became briefly paranoid and wondered if I might be creating a cesspool ecological micro-niche for invasive fungi and pathogens in the compost bin which would then kill the whole forest (via the unusual environmental selective pressures from the assortment of non-local foods being composted), but after talking with the sane consult of a friend, I felt this was a possible but extremely improbable outcome.
<br/>
*******
<br/>
Three years ago, while working on Pin Daddy, a robotic machine to child-block your smartphone, which required ordering electronic parts from the internet to build, I felt dissonance while ordering the parts.
At the same time I was getting involved in sari-sari, a group oriented around dancing and cooking. I felt that I could dance and cook for a thousand years without getting bored. Every scrap used in the process could be composted.
I deleted some sentences here that seemed moralizing and unnecessary. Waste, cleanliness, clean and dirty, topics that can quickly veer into puritanism.
When I realized that fabric was always already degrading, it felt different in my hands. Writing a conclusive statement here on the many-sided emotions of ephemerality feels beyond the scope of this newsletter, and is perhaps best contemplated in silence, while looking at a leaf, holding a gogurt, or looking into a friend's eyes. The next section looks at ephemerality in regards to data, computation and networks.
<br/>
******************************************
<br/>
__Degrading Networks__
The [arweave.org](http://arweave.org) website, boldly begins:
"Store data, permanently.
Arweave enables you to store documents and applications forever."
If we needed a case-study on the relationship between religion, technology, permanence and ephemerality, this might be a good place to start.
Later on, down the page, is the next statement, that we might wonder if its stated with the same level of integrity as the first statement:
"Arweave is community owned and operated."
As well as [the claim by Mirror](https://dev.mirror.xyz/valptw8S9eZ1cvzX-JCGga2N_W2hXyurSYbOlNFj4OQ), a blogging platform built on top of arweave,
that "Identity and data is owned by users - This means your account is owned by you"
As I started to look into this, it brought up some questions.
Short sidenote: I know that I have a range of readers, some who work in crypto, some who avoid computers. Maybe I would preface this by saying, that I don't actually work in crypto. I've been interested in decentralized technology for a while, but there's lot of decentralized technology which doesn't rely on the blockchain (the technology often called crypto), which for the most part also receives less attention than crypto, in my opinion, because there are many fewer ways to get rich with it. So my work and interests are kind of crypto adjacent, but mostly around the periphery, with some interest, but also significant skepticism towards many crypto projects, many of which I think are riding a sort of crypto bubble and you can't take their public communications at face value. Specifically I've been working on a project in the scuttlebutt ecosystem, which uses cryptography in the protocol, but does not use a blockchain. Apologies to crypto folks for overly simplifying this, but in my eyes, a blockchain is a consensus.
A relevant quote [from Bob Haugen on the fediverse](https://social.coop/@bhaugen/107116634631890137):
<br/>
> The scuttlebutts consider blockchains to be "P2P versions of centralized systems":
https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/stories/design-challenge-avoid-centralization-and-singletons
>
> To participate in an Ethereum-based system, you must use the same blockchain. A cloned blockchain is stored in every full node, but each clone is the same.
>
> Vs in the fediverse, many nodes use different software and are not clones but can still federate.
<br/>
A lot my interest in scuttlebutt, the fediverse, and anarchist practices in general, orbits around the possibility that for a lot of things you don't really need a consensus. Further, the possibility that interdependence and consensus are often confused for each other, and the ways in which its possible to coexist and even collaborate and even love each other, with varying degrees of consensus. Consensus is a beautiful tool, but its not the only one.
Now back to the question of ephemeral, permanent and degrading networks. Comparing arweave, scuttlebutt, the fediverse and the old web.
Thinking beyond the obviously false claim that data on Arweave is permanent,
What happens when a cryptocurrency becomes unpopular, and people stop mining it? When nodes and validators stop running? What does this process of degradation look like and how is it experienced?
On the HTTP web, we have link rot, when links point to pages that no longer exist. And we can even end up with these sort of partial pages, like this image of a website I made in highschool for the music I made, a website which was archived by the way back machine, and which is saved their partially, but all of the links to the images and music files no longer exist, on the internet or anywhere.
![remnant](img/remnant.png)
I'm curious to learn more about this in the context of blockchains, consensus, and projects like Arweave. I am not crypto-informed enough to know yet or share an opinion, other than that I know that "permanent" is not the correct answer.
One thing I find noteworthy about Scuttlebutt, is the way that it continues to function at many levels of degradation. If some parts of the network go down, whatever parts that are still running can continue to run. Even if in the end, there were just two computers, on a local network, still running scuttlebutt software, they could continue to communicate using the scuttlebutt protocol, regardless of what is happening on the rest of the network. This property also has useful qualities, such as low-energy consumption, and usage in rural areas, disaster zones and off-grid communities
The next question is whether arweave is truly community operated, who this "community" is, and what it means to them to own your own data.
On their website I see that they have their own content moderation system (so its not completely anything goes).
They state "If you would like a piece of content found on an arweave.net gateway to be removed, please contact us and you will receive a response shortly."
In [their yellow paper](https://www.arweave.org/technology#papers), in the portion on content moderation, I see:
"During the forking process, those
nodes whose content policies have rejected the transaction ‘race’ against
those who have accepted the transaction to produce the next block. Once
such a block is produced, nodes on the other fork initiate a fork recovery pro-
cess to download the block with its transactions, verify them, then drop the
offending transactions from temporary memory. In this way, the network is
able to maintain consensus while allowing nodes to take part in a stochastic
voting process, expressing whether or not they wish specific content to be
added to the blockweave. Therefore, nodes that wish to reject said content
are not required to store that content on their non-volatile storage media."
I can't yet fully understand this sentence, so I will need to ask someone about it.
The model on Scuttlebutt and the Fediverse is "free speech and free listening", which means you are enabled to say what you want, but also no one has to listen to you or replicate your data. Last winter, I wrote another post, titled ["The Anthropology Of Blocking"](https://canalswans.commoninternet.net/posts/anthropology-of-blocking) where I look at this in more detail.
This newsletter is left as an open question, that I would like to understand how arweave compares to the scuttlebutt and fediverse models, and to what degree its content moderation policy requires consensus, or if archipelago-style interconnection without singular consensus is possible.
Degrading, <br/>
M
PS. an invitation:
I am now part of a collective that is collectively administering a solarpunk fediverse instance called http://sunbeam.city. We had a vote, and after some discussion and an amendment, the collective reached a consensus to allow users to invite new people, until we reach 200 monthly active users, and then we will turn off invitations again.
To everyone following this newsletter, I would be excited if you joined our instance. Just send me a message if you would be interested to have an account with yourhandle@sunbeam.city and I will send you an invite.
Its pretty much just like twitter, with desktop and mobile clients. I'm still more interested in scuttlebutt than the fediverse in the long-term, but I think the fediverse is more usable right now, and it feels good to me to invest energy, at the network level, into something which is at least part of the exploration of moving towards something more just and nourishing than the status quo.
![sunbeam](img/sunbeamcity3.png)

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---
path: "/posts/desert-flowers"
date: "2019-10-04T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Desert Flowers"
type: "blog"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
I spent the past month in New Mexico — in Albuqurque for a week, then 10 days at a ranch in Carrizozo, where I spent a lot of time sewing.
![](img/d1.jpeg)
For the past three years Palace has had an annual 10 day residency taking place in Poland with around 250 people. The purpose of the project this September was to develop groundwork for a new residency that will take place in Carizzozo next September, and I came along to help out. There were around 20-30 people who were with the group at different points, many from Europe and many from New Mexico. People arrived and left at different points based on their availability. This development month was funded by 15,000 dollars loaned from patrons who wanted to support the project, and the basic arrangement was that if you could pay your travel to get there, you would be provided with food and accommodation while you were there helping out. Some of the Palace organizers were also working on applying for grant funding for the future, but for the most part it was a pretty decentralized group, converging via a shared vision.
I appreciated that the organizers put out a clear open call with what dates the group would be in which locations, but leaving a lot of space for what would happen once we were there — both because it was unknown, and because they wanted to leave room for input and direction from whoever showed up and from New Mexicans we met through outreach along the way.
The first week in Albuqurque the group primarily congregated around Tortuga gallery, in a large room working on their computers. In the second two weeks we went to Pino Ranch in Carizzozo, which is the planned site for the future residency. The Pino family is interested in creating a residency at the ranch mostly because they would like see the space being used by a creative community and want to support that. As part of the exchange, Palace also offered to build structures which will be of use to the Pino family throughout the year, and to do some repairs such as fixing the roof on an old barn.
The structures that exist at the ranch are pretty minimal. It’s not some big complex, but rather one house and a lot of space with some abandoned cattle-related stuff and barbed wire fences. There is a lot of open space and not a lot of shade. Most of the build related projects we were working on there had something to do with shade. It would get really hot in the day and everyone wore big hats, and cold enough at night that I was wearing multiple layers while sleeping in my tent.
Despite being harsh conditions in a way, its also very beautiful and full of life. While I was there, I saw two tarantulas, lots of beetles, stick bugs, birds, two snakes, lizards, grasshoppers, a beautiful hare with long ears, and lots of flowers.
The main build project we ended up completing was putting in tall 4x4 wooden posts into the ground with concrete bases, which would hold up a giant patchwork of cloths we made from sewing together lots of fabric and sheets from thrift stores, to give shade to a series of wooden tables and benches we also made (I use “we” here liberally, I mostly was sewing). A banquet area so that around 50 people could eat together. I appreciated that this was the primary orienting project, creating a space for a communal meal felt like building a keystone. On the last night before breakdown, we ate dinner at the table beneath the shade structure — the table was much too large for the size of our group that was there which felt fittingly symbolic for the idea of an open community.
With so many of us there and so little shade at times I felt claustrophobic — I found relief when I identified this feeling and started calling it ranch fever. It was interesting to see the dynamics of people building together, both professional builders and people with less experience. I appreciate that the lead of the build team (Jackie) is a woman, and did a really good job deflating some of the ego and gender related energy that can emerge with Construction. We also had three performance nights along the way where different people played music, read poetry and danced, as a form of outreach, and as a way to enjoy each other. On the last performance night, I poured concrete with a friend into a tire to put up a “mobile shade” fence post, while two other friends danced around us in front of a projection. It was inspired by the day before, where in the middle of pouring concrete I had got distracted and starting dancing with Franz around the shade pole until Jackie reminded me were in the middle of something.
I feel a conclusion reaching out like it wants me to find one. I could say something about being in community through ups and downs. I could say something about dishes and communal experiments. About my attraction to non-institutional creative communities. Or about going for a run each morning, and 15 minutes away from ranch fever how silent it is out there. I have lots of memories of the textures of fabrics while sewing.
I hope that this project continues to grow and to get the chance to spend more time there next year.
In search of and with gratitude for creative community and spiky flowers,
M
![](img/d2.jpg)
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![](img/d7.jpg)
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---
path: "/posts/dreams-of-gnosis"
date: "2021-06-01T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Dreams Of Gnosis"
author: "1143 Words"
type: "blog"
image: ""
description: "a letter about sovereignty and gnosis"
note: "Multiple Contributors"
---
<div style="height:80px"></div>
Sovereignty isn’t the same as individualism or as selfishness.
Sovereignty isn't about the nature of a decision that you make, it’s about the process through which the decision was arrived at.
Body Sovereignty, means “my body my choice”. Body Sovereignty doesn’t say whether a person should or should not get an abortion, it says that they should be the one to decide.
Body Sovereignty doesn’t say wether or not two people should have sex. It says that sex should take place without coercion.
Body Sovereignty doesn’t say whether or not someone should get a vaccine, it says that each person needs to make their own decision about what goes into their body.
Someone may choose to get a vaccine because they’ve read that getting a vaccine will help protect the vulnerable, and they choose to get vaccinated not to protect themselves, but out of care for the world. Body Sovereignty doesn’t say that each person is an island.
It says someone should make that choice not because they feel they have no other choice, but because it is what they believe and choose based on their best understanding of the world. Epistemology and power are deeply entwined, and body sovereignty is an epistemology of the people. Some call it gnosis. Some call it citizen science. Ayurveda has a related term called "Pramana". Body Sovereignty doesn’t say don’t seek the opinions of experts and elders, it says you must decide for yourself who to trust.
Some people may argue that disease is so dangerous and harmful, that disease is a special case which is more important than some theoretical principle of sovereignty. That freedom and safety are an axis which we make compromises between. Other people will argue that “people are dumb” and we need experts to make decisions for them.
My view is that sovereignty is not located on this axis. It is my experience that true respect for sovereignty even when you disagree actually leads to safety and connection at a deeper level. It was also the (continued) colonial violation of indigenous sovereignty that has led to genocide and so much destruction of the earth. It was also the religious missionary violation of sovereignty that justified so much harm under the guise of salvation. Every missionary believes their cause is worth the means at the time.
The idea that even suggesting sovereignty is a good principle, may be seen as a dangerous perspective, points to the level of coercion that is accepted as normal in our society. Perhaps this is to be expected in a world where we see advertisements against our will on a regular basis, and where platforms like instagram have a business model that relies on changing people's behavior to give their attention and resources to the companies that pay them.
Coercion and manipulation are deeply rooted in our culture (advertisements, police, data tracking, prisons, dark UX), but I’m still not really sure we can dismantle the masters house with the masters tools.
I have a lot of friends who are anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, but somehow see vaccination, medicine, and the pharmaceutical companies as separate from these systems. To me this feels dissonant. As though Pfizer doesn't have more than 1.3 billion in past criminal fines. As though crisis and trauma were not the perfect opportunity for power structures to establish themselves which will long outlast their virtue.
Given the long history of connection between religion and medicine in cultures all around the world, freedom of religion, and medical freedom, seem deeply entwined. Given the inherent uncertainty of the world, even of science, even between scientists, at what point does forcing a medical perspective on someone else become a sort of religious missionary activity? And who gets to draw that line? Do we want to live in a world where white billionaires make those decisions for everyone? Even if you approve of their decisions this time, what seeds do we sew when we outsource those decisions to them? Will “experts” always have the experience of marginalized people in mind? Have they in the past?
A part of me feels these edge cases where we want to make an exception and throw sovereignty away, are actually the most important to pay extra attention to, to bring about deeper change, beyond the current news cycle.
Beyond my objections to vaccine passports, I feel like ending this letter with something else.
Whether you get vaccinated or don’t get vaccinated I will not ostracize you or look down on you. That’s your choice.
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
Below is a letter from Txanahuya Hunikuī which I read via Scuttlebutt,
and inspired many of the topics I wrote about in the writing above.
Here is a link to the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/2780811705491593/permalink/2789219701317460">original letter</a>.
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
# Letter From Txanahuya Hunikuī
Inurua Inanibanu …
Yura Baka Nai Bai …
Native Nation Hunikuī of the Yuxibu Forest of the North Region of Pindo Abya Ayala …
Yesterday and today we lost two great Native Chiefs! One from the Native Native Nation Hunikuī, another from the Native Native Nation Katukina both victims of the vaccine they got!
I mean to make it clear to all of us brothers and sisters in authority that the extermination, ethnogenocide and genocides against us Native Nations in Pindo Abya Ayala continues to be promoted by the Brazilian state and its political rulers, managers, lawmakers, corporate business, industrial rural farmers, timber extractors, oil miners, etc!
We demand justice measures against the Brazilian state and its political rulers, managers, legal legislators, and its biopiracy laboratories, colonizers, killers of the ministry, health secretary, hospitals, Sesai, Funasa, Anvisa, Disis base poles !!! Who insist on wanting to vaccinate our nations, relatives, families Native from Pindo Abya Ayala where we have already warned that we have not adhered, we do not accept vaccination in our Native Nations from Pindo Abya Ayala !!!
We are sending a copy of the same content to the Courts and operators who are experts in the laws so that the appropriate legal measures can be taken against the Brazilian state and its political governors, legal legislative managers !!!
Txanahuya Hunikuī …
Natural Judge-TOAJ representative of the North region of Pindo Abya Ayala …
Deliberative Adviser of FEPHAC …
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
# Further Links
- [Morgan Ash on Vaccine Passports, Racism and Vaccine Segregation](/morgan-ash-vaccine-passports-audio.mov) &mdash; Morgan has been working with these topics in Hudson Valley for a long time. If you want to organize with her you can contact her via [facebook](https://www.facebook.com/ATravelersGarden/).
- [A podcast about Body Sovereignty and Reproductive Health (no mention of vaccines)](https://pca.st/3ksv84jh)
- [Love Poem](/posts/love-poem)
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
Another way to phrase things perhaps, is that acknowledging, respecting and culivating the power of every human being,
to have domain over their own body,
could be a good starting point for a lot of things, small & large, even when it may seem counter-intuitive.

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---
path: "/posts/dreams-of-gnosis-toc"
date: "2021-05-20T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Dreams Of Gnosis"
author: ""
type: "blog"
image: ""
draft: "true"
description: "a poem about sovereignty and gnosis"
note: "Multiple Contributors"
---
<div style="height:120px"></div>
_Table Of Contents_
1. Body Sovereignty by Max Fowler
2. Letter from Txanahuya Hunikuī
3. Morgan Ash On Stigma
4. Love Poem
<div class="pagebreak"></div>
# Body Sovereignty
Sovereignty isn’t the same as individualism or as selfishness.
Sovereignty isn't about the nature of a decision that you make, it’s about the process through which the decision was arrived at.
Body Sovereignty, means “my body my choice”. Body Sovereignty doesn’t say whether a person should or should not get an abortion, it says that they should be the one to decide.
Body Sovereignty doesn’t say wether or not two people should have sex. It says that sex should take place without coercion.
Body Sovereignty doesn’t say whether or not someone should get a vaccine, it says that each person needs to make their own decision about what goes into their body.
Someone may choose to get a vaccine because they’ve read that getting a vaccine will help protect the vulnerable, and they choose to get vaccinated not to protect themselves, but out of care for the world. Body Sovereignty doesn’t say that each person is an island.
It says someone should make that choice not because they feel they have no other choice, but because it is what they believe and choose based on their best understanding of the world. Epistemology and power are deeply entwined, and body sovereignty is an epistemology of the people. Some call it gnosis. Some call it citizen science. Ayurveda has a related term called "Pramana". Body Sovereignty doesn’t say don’t seek the opinions of experts and elders, it says you must decide for yourself who to trust.
Some people may argue that disease is so dangerous and harmful, that disease is a special case which is more important than some theoretical principle of sovereignty. That freedom and safety are an axis which we make compromises between. Other people will argue that “people are dumb” and we need experts to make decisions for them.
My view is that sovereignty is not located on this axis. It is my experience that true respect for sovereignty even when you disagree actually leads to safety and connection at a deeper level. It was also the (continued) colonial violation of indigenous sovereignty that has led to genocide and so much destruction of the earth. It was also the religious missionary violation of sovereignty that justified so much harm under the guise of salvation. Every missionary believes their cause is worth the means at the time.
The idea that even suggesting sovereignty is a good principle, may be seen as a dangerous perspective, points to the level of coercion that is accepted as normal in our society. Perhaps this is to be expected in a world where we see advertisements against our will on a regular basis, and where platforms like instagram have a business model that relies on changing people's behavior to give their attention and resources to the companies that pay them.
Coercion and manipulation are deeply rooted in our culture (advertisements, police, data tracking, prisons, dark UX), but I’m still not really sure we can dismantle the masters house with the masters tools.
I have a lot of friends who are anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, but somehow see vaccination, medicine, and the pharmaceutical companies as exceptions from these systems. To me this feels dissonant. As though Pfizer doesn't have more than 1.3 billion in past criminal fines. As though crisis and trauma were not the perfect opportunity for power structures to establish themselves which will long outlast their virtue.
Given the long history of connection between religion and medicine in cultures all around the world, freedom of religion, and medical freedom, seem deeply entwined. Given the inherent uncertainty of the world, even of science, even between scientists, at what point does forcing a medical perspective on someone else become a sort of religious missionary activity? And who gets to draw that line? Do we want to live in a world where white billionaires make those decisions for everyone? Even if you approve of their decisions this time, what seeds do we sew when we outsource those decisions to them? Will “experts” always have the experience of marginalized people in mind? Have they in the past?
A part of me feels these edge cases where we want to make an exception and throw sovereignty away, are actually the most important to pay extra attention to, to bring about deeper change, beyond the current news cycle.
Beyond my objections to vaccine passports, I feel like ending this letter with something else.
Whether you get vaccinated or don’t get vaccinated I will not ostracize you or look down on you. That’s your choice.
<div class="pagebreak"></div>
# Letter From Txanahuya Hunikuī
Inurua Inanibanu …
Yura Baka Nai Bai …
Native Nation Hunikuī of the Yuxibu Forest of the North Region of Pindo Abya Ayala …
Yesterday and today we lost two great Native Chiefs! One from the Native Native Nation Hunikuī, another from the Native Native Nation Katukina both victims of the vaccine they got!
I mean to make it clear to all of us brothers and sisters in authority that the extermination, ethnogenocide and genocides against us Native Nations in Pindo Abya Ayala continues to be promoted by the Brazilian state and its political rulers, managers, lawmakers, corporate business, industrial rural farmers, timber extractors, oil miners, etc!
We demand justice measures against the Brazilian state and its political rulers, managers, legal legislators, and its biopiracy laboratories, colonizers, killers of the ministry, health secretary, hospitals, Sesai, Funasa, Anvisa, Disis base poles !!! Who insist on wanting to vaccinate our nations, relatives, families Native from Pindo Abya Ayala where we have already warned that we have not adhered, we do not accept vaccination in our Native Nations from Pindo Abya Ayala !!!
We are sending a copy of the same content to the Courts and operators who are experts in the laws so that the appropriate legal measures can be taken against the Brazilian state and its political governors, legal legislative managers !!!
Txanahuya Hunikuī …
Natural Judge-TOAJ representative of the North region of Pindo Abya Ayala …
Deliberative Adviser of FEPHAC …
<div class="pagebreak"></div>
# Morgan Ash On Stigma
More so of concern, maybe even than the effects of the vaccines, are what it's going to do to us as a society.
How it's going to divide people,
how it's going to create discrimination,
how it could bring back racial segregation,
because most people of color are anti-vaccine,
so when they start segregating restaurants,
which they're already starting to do here,
you're literally going to have all the white people on one side,
and the other side is going to be &mdash; it'll be mixed
but it'll be all the black people and people of color on the other side...
It's going to create a stigma,
it's going to bring back the idea that people of color are diseased
or dirty or whatever, and just knowing how ignorant people are,
that is really concerning to me,
and that is really sounding like Nazi germany to me...
And people dont' see this.
Some of my very intelligent friends,
who I've had a lot of respect for in the past,
people who really should know,
and be able to have these intelligent conversations,
based on real facts and knowledge and concerns,
and based on historical trends,
nobody wants to talk about it,
everybody just wants to do what the TV says to do,
and no one wants to have an educated conversation about any of this.
And there's a lot at stake,
both for the people who don't want to have that conversation,
and the people that do but are of the minority,
I've been going to protests, I've been talking with people,
I've been connecting with communities,
basically also trying to get resources together,
in case we literally have to go hide in the woods.
I know that sounds crazy,
but you know its happened in other countries, that things have gotten to such extreme degree,
there's no reason it can't happen here,
and my concern is its already on that path,
to becoming an extreme situation,
where you might actually have to be hiding in a basement one day,
I'm praying it doesn't come to that,
I'm hoping we can continue to hold the energy off for that,
but if we had done nothing,
I am sure at some point we would get to Nazi Germany point.
So yeah, we definitely need to be having conversations about this,
and talking to people who are pro vax,
if they want to get vaxxed, cool,
but they shouldn't be pushing that on others,
its my body,
I have to live with the consequences of whatever happens to me.
<div class="pagebreak"></div>
# Love Poem
```
what if all the software you used was made by people who loved you?
what if all the medicine you took was made by people who loved you?
one of my dreams is currently more taboo than the other, I don't always know what to do with them
```
<br/><br/><br/>
With Love,
Max

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---
path: "/posts/dreams-of-gnosis-old"
date: "2021-05-20T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Dreams Of Gnosis"
author: "Multiple Contributors"
type: "blog"
image: ""
draft: "true"
description: "a poem about sovereignty and gnosis"
note: "Multiple Contributors"
---
<div style="height:80px"></div>
Sovereignty isn’t the same as individualism or as selfishness.
Sovereignty isn't about the nature of a decision that you make, it’s about the process through which the decision was arrived at.
Body Sovereignty, means “my body my choice”. Body Sovereignty doesn’t say whether a person should or should not get an abortion, it says that they should be the one to decide.
Body Sovereignty doesn’t say wether or not two people should have sex. It says that sex should take place without coercion.
Body Sovereignty doesn’t say whether or not someone should get a vaccine, it says that each person needs to make their own decision about what goes into their body.
Someone may choose to get a vaccine because they’ve read that getting a vaccine will help protect the vulnerable, and they choose to get vaccinated not to protect themselves, but out of care for the world. Body Sovereignty doesn’t say that each person is an island.
It says someone should make that choice not because they feel they have no other choice, but because it is what they believe and choose based on their best understanding of the world. Epistemology and power are deeply entwined, and body sovereignty is an epistemology of the people. Some call it gnosis. Some call it citizen science. Ayurveda has a related term called "Pramana". Body Sovereignty doesn’t say don’t seek the opinions of experts and elders, it says you must decide for yourself who to trust.
Some people may argue that disease is so dangerous and harmful, that disease is a special case which is more important than some theoretical principle of sovereignty. That freedom and safety are an axis which we make compromises between. Other people will argue that “people are dumb” and we need experts to make decisions for them.
My view is that sovereignty is not located on this axis. It is my experience that true respect for sovereignty even when you disagree actually leads to safety and connection at a deeper level. It was also the (continued) colonial violation of indigenous sovereignty that has led to genocide and so much destruction of the earth. It was also the religious missionary violation of sovereignty that justified so much harm under the guise of salvation. Every missionary believes their cause is worth the means at the time.
The idea that even suggesting sovereignty is a good principle, may be seen as a dangerous perspective, points to the level of coercion that is accepted as normal in our society. Perhaps this is to be expected in a world where we see advertisements against our will on a regular basis, and where platforms like instagram have a business model that relies on changing people's behavior to give their attention and resources to the companies that pay them.
Coercion and manipulation are deeply rooted in our culture (advertisements, police, data tracking, prisons, dark UX), but I’m still not really sure we can dismantle the masters house with the masters tools.
I have a lot of friends who are anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, but somehow see vaccination, medicine, and the pharmaceutical companies as exceptions from these systems. To me this feels dissonant. As though Pfizer doesn't have more than 1.3 billion in past criminal fines. As though crisis and trauma were not the perfect opportunity for power structures to establish themselves which will long outlast their virtue.
Given the long history of connection between religion and medicine in cultures all around the world, freedom of religion, and medical freedom, seem deeply entwined. Given the inherent uncertainty of the world, even of science, even between scientists, at what point does forcing a medical perspective on someone else become a sort of religious missionary activity? And who gets to draw that line? Do we want to live in a world where white billionaires make those decisions for everyone? Even if you approve of their decisions this time, what seeds do we sew when we outsource those decisions to them? Will “experts” always have the experience of marginalized people in mind? Have they in the past?
A part of me feels these edge cases where we want to make an exception and throw sovereignty away, are actually the most important to pay extra attention to, to bring about deeper change, beyond the current news cycle.
Beyond my objections to vaccine passports, I feel like ending this letter with something else.
Whether you get vaccinated or don’t get vaccinated I will not ostracize you or look down on you. That’s your choice.
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
Below is a letter from Txanahuya Hunikuī which I read via Scuttlebutt,
and inspired many of the topics I wrote about in the post above.
Here is a link to the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/2780811705491593/permalink/2789219701317460">original letter</a>.
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
# Letter From Txanahuya Hunikuī
Inurua Inanibanu …
Yura Baka Nai Bai …
Native Nation Hunikuī of the Yuxibu Forest of the North Region of Pindo Abya Ayala …
Yesterday and today we lost two great Native Chiefs! One from the Native Native Nation Hunikuī, another from the Native Native Nation Katukina both victims of the vaccine they got!
I mean to make it clear to all of us brothers and sisters in authority that the extermination, ethnogenocide and genocides against us Native Nations in Pindo Abya Ayala continues to be promoted by the Brazilian state and its political rulers, managers, lawmakers, corporate business, industrial rural farmers, timber extractors, oil miners, etc!
We demand justice measures against the Brazilian state and its political rulers, managers, legal legislators, and its biopiracy laboratories, colonizers, killers of the ministry, health secretary, hospitals, Sesai, Funasa, Anvisa, Disis base poles !!! Who insist on wanting to vaccinate our nations, relatives, families Native from Pindo Abya Ayala where we have already warned that we have not adhered, we do not accept vaccination in our Native Nations from Pindo Abya Ayala !!!
We are sending a copy of the same content to the Courts and operators who are experts in the laws so that the appropriate legal measures can be taken against the Brazilian state and its political governors, legal legislative managers !!!
Txanahuya Hunikuī …
Natural Judge-TOAJ representative of the North region of Pindo Abya Ayala …
Deliberative Adviser of FEPHAC …
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
Below is a transcript of a recording from a conversation I had with Morgan Ash
about Vaccine Passports, Race and her concerns about the direction things are headed.
Morgan is a friend and has been working with these topics for a long time.
If you want to work with her you can contact her via email at morganash@gmail.com.
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
# Morgan Ash On Stigma
More so of concern, maybe even than the effects of the vaccines, are what it's going to do to us as a society.
How it's going to divide people,
how it's going to create discrimination,
how it could bring back racial segregation,
because most people of color are anti-vaccine,
so when they start segregating restaurants,
which they're already starting to do here,
you're literally going to have all the white people on one side,
and the other side is going to be &mdash; it'll be mixed
but it'll be all the black people and people of color on the other side...
It's going to create a stigma,
it's going to bring back the idea that people of color are diseased
or dirty or whatever, and just knowing how ignorant people are,
that is really concerning to me,
and that is really sounding like Nazi germany to me...
And people dont' see this.
Some of my very intelligent friends,
who I've had a lot of respect for in the past,
people who really should know,
and be able to have these intelligent conversations,
based on real facts and knowledge and concerns,
and based on historical trends,
nobody wants to talk about it,
everybody just wants to do what the TV says to do,
and no one wants to have an educated conversation about any of this.
And there's a lot at stake,
both for the people who don't want to have that conversation,
and the people that do but are of the minority,
I've been going to protests, I've been talking with people,
I've been connecting with communities,
basically also trying to get resources together,
in case we literally have to go hide in the woods.
I know that sounds crazy,
but you know its happened in other countries, that things have gotten to such extreme degree,
there's no reason it can't happen here,
and my concern is its already on that path,
to becoming an extreme situation,
where you might actually have to be hiding in a basement one day,
I'm praying it doesn't come to that,
I'm hoping we can continue to hold the energy off for that,
but if we had done nothing,
I am sure at some point we would get to Nazi Germany point.
So yeah, we definitely need to be having conversations about this,
and talking to people who are pro vax,
if they want to get vaxxed, cool,
but they shouldn't be pushing that on others,
its my body,
I have to live with the consequences of whatever happens to me.
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
Lastly, here is a short poem.
The first line of the poem is a quote from Melanie Hoff which she explores
in her class <a href="https://lovelanguages.melaniehoff.com/">Digital Love Languages</a> &mdash; a question which has begot many other questions.
<div class="blackpagebreak"></div>
# In Search Of Love Beyond Paternalism
```
what if all the software you used was made by people who loved you?
what if all the medicine you took was made by people who loved you?
one of my dreams is currently more taboo than the other,
I don't always know what to do with them
```

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path: "/posts/electronic-mail"
date: "2021-09-07T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Electronic Mail"
author: "519 words"
type: "blog"
style: "poem"
image: ""
description: "notes on electronic mail"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
Electronic Mail<br/>
message sending<br/>
delivered once, like a package<br/>
surveillance capitalism isn't compatible with social justice, in the long-term, for a number of reasons,
despite its alluring short-term convenience and the ease of forgetting its there
imagined evading surveillance capitalism as a slow non-linear transformation, that happens individually and collectively, and transforms your device into a site of magic&connection instead of control
it can start with one thing and move to others,<br/>
it doesn't need to happen all at once,<br/>
its also a form of mindfulness that can be valuable for its own sake,<br/>
hearing each keystroke as you type noticing where it goes like noticing what you put in the "trash"<br/>
"throw away" is an interesting verb, one could imagine other verbs for relating to waste<br/>
artificial intelligence is a common term. computers are often compared to living beings, but the fact they have no water in them isn't discussed enough. computers are really more similar to a rock. but this isn't necessarily a put-down. crystals are also rocks, and have long been appreciated for their capacities for harmonic resonance. enjoy imagining the computer as a strange crystal. the non-linear process described before, then can be seen in a different way.
writing into textedit offline always felt different than writing into something in the cloud. the more I make my computer an offline-first device, the more magical it seems to me. I may provide more suggestions on this in the future
this summer I did a deep-dive on deleting my gmail account and exploring other providers.<br/>
here is the report on Electronic Mail in September of 2021
top recommendations:
1. gandi.net<br/>
included in the price of a domain name are two email accounts
thus, you can have an email account with your own domain name, which is good from the standpoint of user autonomy,being able to migrate to another provider if desired, without losing your network
2. migadu.com<br/>
19 USD / year, you get an email account which you can use with your own domain
3. disroot.org<br/>
inspiring tech collective in a number of ways. I recommend looking at their website. the images of riots where there are usually cutesy graphic design in standard tech platforms is refreshing. the veneer of polish, while the rest of the world remains unseen. an internet of many disroots, instead of tech conglomerates, is a recurring image I'm drawn to
disroot comes in at #3 for now because they don't have a straightforward way to use your own domain name. I'm on the lookout for disroot-like thing that supports this
I also did a deep-dive into self-hosting email, you can read more about that here if you are interested, but its a bit of a rabbit hole. it was interesting, but not what I would recommend in general
while writing this on the train, I decided that I would try just writing a bit more fragmented and you could find what interests you instead of me
"giving up on convictions", "i am a piece of dirt (and thats ok)", dumpster diving infinite bread
I recommend the podcast <a href="https://www.indefenseofplants.com/podcast">"In Defense Of Plants"</a>
happy new moon<br/>
M

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path: "/posts/love-poem"
date: "2021-06-01T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Love Poem"
author: "Max Fowler"
type: "blog"
image: ""
draft: "true"
description: "a love poem"
note: "Multiple Contributors"
---
<div style="height:90px"></div>
what if all the software you used was made by people who loved you? <br/>
what if all the medicine you took was made by people who loved you?
one of my dreams is currently more taboo than the other, <br/>
I don't always know what to do with them
<div style="margin-top:80px;" class="blackpagebreak"></div>
The first line is a quote from Melanie Hoff from
her class <a href="https://lovelanguages.melaniehoff.com/">Digital Love Languages</a>.

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path: "/posts/misinformation"
date: "2021-11-21T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Misinformation"
author: "1225 words"
type: "blog"
image: ""
description: "misinformation rabbit holes"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
In March of 2021, the Center For Countering Digital Hate released [a report](https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen) titled “The Disinformation Dozen” which stated that 12 people, referred to as the disinformation dozen, are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. This report was cited by all sorts of news outlets over the past months, as well as by Biden. A google search of '"disinformation dozen" CCDH' yields 23,300 results.<br/>
<br/>
On August 18th of 2021, Facebook released <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/taking-action-against-vaccine-misinformation-superspreaders/">a report</a> titled "How We’re Taking Action Against Vaccine Misinformation Superspreaders”, in which they reported that this widely cited figure by the CCDH was from a non-representative sample, and "there isn't any evidence to support this claim”.<br/>
<br/>
That the major talking point about "stopping misinformation" was based on a piece of misinformation, which cannot be independently verified due to the opaque nature of Facebook’s platform, seems very telling of the moment to me.<br/>
<br/>
In an information landscape of clickbait, profit-motivated news outlets, black-box social media platforms and regulatory capture, nuanced truths are hard to come by.<br/>
<br/>
The 73% talking point, is a convenient (false) bullet point to suggest that misinformation is a simple phenomenon, and something which could be excised in a binary way with sufficient motivation. The reality is more complicated.<br/>
<br/>
Here are images of some dish towels which my sister bought me for my birthday:<br/>
![yes-no](img/yes-no.png)
On August 21st of 2021, a friend told me,
“Indigenous people make up 5% of the world's population, and are stewards of 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity.”<br/>
The next day, I decided to look up where this came from, before sharing it, and it sent me down a long research rabbit hole, of not quite finding where the 80% figure came from.<br/>
Don’t get me wrong, the sentiment behind the quote seems true to me — I found lots of research supporting that indigenous peoples have been and continue to be stewards of amazing amounts amounts of biodiversity, such as [this paper](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190731102157.htm), from the University of British Columbia from 2019, showing that the indigenous-managed lands they looked at had even greater biodiversity than "protected lands".<br/>
<br/>
I also see the 80% figure often quoted, but I haven't been able to pinpoint where the 80% figure *originally* comes from.<br/>
<br/>
With this case, I also still think its possible I might be missing something. So I’m sharing this anecdote as an interesting case of tracking down where information comes from, as well in case any one reading this is interested to also go down the rabbit hole to help explain its origin.<br/>
<br/>
If you want to help me figure this out, here is a summary of where I got to in the rabbit hole:<br/>
<br/>
1. National Geographic article from November 2018: <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-indigenous-land-stewardship-protect-biodiversity-">https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-indigenous-land-stewardship-protect-biodiversity-</a><br/>
has the subtitle "Comprising less than 5% of the world's population, indigenous people protect 80% of global biodiversity. Their role is under discussion by world leaders this week."<br/>
<br/>
In the article, if you look at where it says this, there is a broken link. I looked up the broken link in the wayback machine internet archive, and found it goes to a report from Sobrevilla, 2008 [2]<br/>
<br/>
2. If you look at <a href="https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/995271468177530126/pdf/443000WP0BOX321onservation01PUBLIC1.pdf">Sobrevilla, 2008</a>, The World Bank, The Role of Indigenous Peoples in Biodiversity Conservation, The Natural but Often Forgotten Partners, and you look at where it states this 80% fact, it cites WRI 2005:<br/>
<br/>
"Many areas inhabited by Indigenous Peoples coincide with some of the world’s remaining major concentrations of biodiversity. Traditional indigenous territories encompass up to 22 percent of the world’s land surface and they coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity (WRI 2005)"<br/>
<br/>
If you look at the bibliography of the report, you find, WRI 2005 is:<br/>
World Resources Institute (WRI) in collaboration with United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme, and World Bank. 2005. Securing Property and Resource Rights through Tenure Reform, pp.83–87 in World Resources Report 2005: The Wealth of the Poor – Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty. Washington, D.C.: WRI.<br/>
<br/>
3. If you look into that report (WRI 2005), <a href="https://www.wri.org/research/world-resources-2005-wealth-poor">https://www.wri.org/research/world-resources-2005-wealth-poor</a><br/>
<br/>
It’s not clear to me, where it says,<br/>
“Indigenous people live in lands that coincide with areas that hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity"<br/>
<br/>
The phrase “80 percent” appears six times, not in connection with this quote.<br/>
<br/>
Could Sobrevilla be making an original intepretation of [3] without explaining it, or mis-citing [3] or am I missing something?<br/>
<br/>
When I texted my family signal group chat about this, my Mom responded that she had also by chance just seen this same quote in print, in a book she was reading titled “All We Can Save”.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
___________________________________
<br/>
This past week, marked the beginning of mandatory “2G” regulations in Berlin, where unvaccinated people are no longer able to go to restaurants or cultural events with a negative corona test. I have a lot of unvaccinated friends and I’m still processing what it means to live somewhere where this is happening.<br/>
<br/>
Over time, I have changing feelings over how I can meaningfully respond to this, but I have a recurring feeling that the idea that the unvaccinated are the reason we still have to deal with covid, is more scapegoat logic that needs someone to blame than grounded in reality (vaccinated people still spread covid), and that the ability for people to decide what medications are right for them is not actually a rejection of interdependence, but interdependence expressed through a form that conflicts with years of conditioning that we need corporations, police and one-size-fits-all regulations for safety.<br/>
<br/>
Health is complicated, but outsourcing it to bureaucratic systems is not the only response to that. What exactly the nuanced truth is, and where to look to find it, doesn’t feel to me like something I can say with certainty right now. Whatever the truth is, creating a society where large segments of people are legally excluded from indoor spaces, and where everyone needs a smart phone and a QR code to go to a cultural event, doesn’t seem like the way to me.<br/>
<br/>
Rather than write at length about this, here is an essay by Charles Eisenstein on this topic. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I resonate with the sentiment, of missing the forest for the trees: <a href="https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/beyond-industrial-medicine">Beyond Industrial Medicine</a>.<br/>
<br/>
> Most critics of glyphosate are not motivated by the desire to replace it with another herbicide. Rather, glyphosate is a focal point for a critique of the entire system of industrial agriculture. If we had a system of small-scale, organic, regenerative, ecological, diversified, local agriculture, glyphosate would not be much of an issue, because it would hardly be necessary. As I amply document in my Climate book, this form of agriculture can outperform industrial agriculture in terms of yield per unit of land (although it requires more labor—more gardeners, more small farmers). So do we need to keep glyphosate or not? If we take the current system of agriculture for granted, then maybe yes. The conversation we need to be having is about the system itself. If we ignore that, then the glyphosate debate is a distraction. One might still oppose it on technical grounds, but the most powerful critique is not of the chemical itself, but of the system that requires it. The good folks at Monsanto probably take the system for granted, and cannot understand how their diligent efforts to make it work a little better are so misunderstood by environmentalists who cast them as villains.
<br/>
___________________________________
<br/>
<br/>
Thanks for going down the rabbit hole with me - I hope some of this might be interesting or add some nuance to these topics. With love,<br/>
<br/>
M

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path: "/posts/murmurations"
date: "2019-09-06T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Murmurations"
type: "blog"
author: "Max Fowler"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
This Saturday I was hoping to organize an event at Sari-Sari in support/alignment with a decentralized Extinction Rebellion action happening that day called “Paint The Streets”
![](img/murmurations1.jpg)
The idea of paint the streets is to put chalk spray paint, stickers and flyers around the city to raise awareness for the [synchronized set of XR actions](https://extinctionrebellion.us/rebels-without-borders) beginning October 7th at the same time in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Paris and New York.
Paint The Streets is one of many initiatives intended to help more people learn about the upcoming protests so that they can form affinity groups in the coming weeks and participate.
For me Paint The Streets has become an interesting exemplar of my ongoing interest in how decentralized organizing works. Images for XR stickers and flyers are available online so technically anyone could go and print these stickers out and put them up anytime, but organizing an event to do so facilitates alignment and momentum, and if lots of people participate all throughout the city at once it might have a more visible effect than individual people putting up stickers at different times.
Instead of organizing my own event, I also could have simply joined one of the pre-existing meet-ups where people were gathering for Paint The Streets, essentially being an individual contributor. I was interested in organizing an event at Sari-Sari because it seemed like a nice way to contribute to this action with friends -- to form an independent group that was also aligned with something beyond itself. Part of what's interesting about decentralization to me is that I wouldn't even need to tell the original organizer of the Paint The Streets action that I was organizing my own event -- by simply organizing the event on the same day it would be in alignment.
This idea reminds me of murmurations, as described in [Emergent Strategy](https://www.amazon.de/Emergent-Strategy-Shaping-Change-Changing/dp/1849352607/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=emergent+strategy&qid=1567724013&s=gateway&sr=8-1) by Adrienne Maree Brown:
> My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration, the way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, dance collectively through the air—to avoid predators, and it also seems, to pass time in the most beautiful way possible. When fish move in this way, they are shoaling. When bees and other insects move in this way, they are swarming. I love all the words for this activity.
>Here’s how it works in a murmuration/shoal/swarm: each creature is tuned in to its neighbors, the creatures right around it in the formation. This might be the birds on either side, or the six fish in each direction. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them — too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed, and proximity based on the information of the other creatures’ bodies.
>There is a deep trust in this: to lift because the birds around you are lifting, to live based on your collective real-time adaptations. In this way thousands of birds or fish or bees can move together, each empowered with basic rules and a vision to live. Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.
Questions about organizing and aligning with something larger than myself have been recurring for me in the past year. Particularly over the past few months as I've been going to different XR meetings in Berlin trying to learn how it works and how I could contribute.
I get the feeling that there is a subtle art to balancing independence and alignment. If you act in a completely decentralized fashion, if you go protest alone (or simply reduce your own individual consumption), you don't have much power. If you try to contribute by only following specific instructions from a centralized organizer, this may also not be the best. At some point your best contribution is to become a listener and also an organizer -- to listen to the broader patterns and also to take your own initiative, to move as a murmuration.
This struck home with me when I realized that someone I knew gave a workshop about XR at Floating University because they independently applied to give the workshop, their application was accepted, and then they ran a really beautiful workshop for around 50 people. This type of self-initiative in some ways defies the logic of top-down organizing.
I didn't end up organizing the Paint The Streets event at Sari-Sari because I decided to leave Berlin for the month of September to participate in this project in New Mexico (I just arrived back in the US today). But I wanted to share this idea, perhaps someone else will manifest it or it can manifest in a different way at a later date.
I imagine a network of communities each with their own interests, also aligning to create power together,
M

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---
path: "/posts/plurality"
date: "2021-05-03T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Plurality"
author: "Max Fowler"
type: "blog"
image: ""
draft: "true"
description: "an essay on scientism, body sovereigny, platform capitalism and plurality"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
*Scientism*
A mix of mainstream media talking points, selective cherry-picking of scientific studies, moralizing the opinions of authorities, and monotheistic discourse which shames dissenting views, which together creates a culturally re-enforcing loop of in-group and out-group, clean and dirty, righteous and damned.
Interestingly it almost exactly mirrors the patterns of the church of christianity, which built churches all around around the world, colonized people, and spread throughout the globe with missionary activity, which from their perspective did not need the consent of the people they evangelized to, because it was a righteous message and any means were worth the ends.
I’ve been reading “Of Water And The Spirit” by Malidoma Some — it contains some vivid accounts of life in a jesuit mission school in French colonized West Africa along with insight into the mission mindset, that when spreading the word of god they could do no wrong, there is no land that could not be taken, child that could not be taken from their family and forced to learn french etc. if it was for the holy purpose of spreading the divine teachings.
At first drawing the comparison between Scientism and The Church, I felt disheartened. But really, if the memetic pattern of The Church was never entirely about the divine in the first place, then perhaps it should come as no surprise that this same pattern never really went away and would resurface in a new medium.
Instead of being disheartened by this, I can draw inspiration from the story of Malidoma Some and other heretics, escaping his school in the mission, at first based on a simple intuition that something was off, and walking off alone into the jungle in search of something else based on dreams of remembering his grandfather. There has actually been a long history of heretics, to connect with and draw strength from. On the other side, I've been to the darkroom and seen that the authority of The Church and its views of righteousness didn't manage to hold everywhere...
<br/>
<br/>
*Platform Capitalism & Trust*
Criticism of scientism is not anti-science. In fact, true science, true inquiry, welcomes this criticism. Similarly, criticism of The Church is not necessarily a criticism of the divine. At the end of the day, heretics also are seeking the truth.
Part of the reason we've gotten into this place where its difficult to discern scientism from science, is that so much of our modern world is untrustworthy.
The proliferation of conspiracy theories is a direct consequence of living in a world where information we receive comes through platforms and sources which are for profit, extractive and based on ads — the information we receive through these platforms, directly and indirectly, is as a whole, not to be trusted.
A conspiracy theory is a natural response to a world where on a daily basis you interact with systems designed to mislead and extract from you. Any analysis which takes as a starting point that conspiracy theorists have some deficiency or are victim to a mind virus, and doesn’t look at the broader failings of the attention economy (and society), has a flawed starting point.
On a deeper level, you don't get people to trust you by telling them to trust you. Trust is slow to gain. The mainstream media has lost my trust. Pharmaceutical companies do not have my trust. The rich and the powerful, who would do anything with or without consent in an emergency situation, who would drop bombs, who would invade other countries, who would colonize "primitive peoples", who would harvest my data to show me ads, who would burn down the rainforests, do not have my trust.
Distrust of the powers that be and asking questions is ultimately a healthy practice (see tuskegee, see Pfizer's history of billion dollar payouts, see WMD in Iraq).
In the end, this is a hopeful perspective, as it suggests that wide scale adoption of non-extractive locally sovereign (trustworthy) infrastructure and platforms, is a long-term effective pathway to less misinformation and better health.
Not through coercion, deplatforming, or deradicalization, but by validating the origin of the distrust people feel, and instead of trying to change them, changing the world to be more trustworthy.
<br/>
<br/>
*Body Sovereignty*
Here we enter into the taboo, an emotion which heretics must become familiar with.
From my perspective, shaming and coercion for lockdowns and vaccines, and the censoring of dissenting information, is not leading to a healthier world.
I am not against vaccines, but the science of lockdowns and vaccines seems more complicated than the stories I often hear repeated. Governments have a bad history with thinking they know what's best for other people. Body sovereignty, in sex, abortions, and medicine, is a good principle. I would like to live in a world rooted in consent in all spheres.
My perspective, is that for many people right now getting a vaccine is the safest option for them, but the thesis that everyone should get vaccinated seems more speculative.
Further, I am more concerned about the normalization of seasonal boosters and progressively more and more experimental vaccines in the future, than this particular round of vaccines. The idea of a product without liability that every person is required to take every year may be too good a business opportunity for pharmaceutical companies, scientists and regulators to see clearly, and erring towards the side of "more is better" may become the norm. Vaccination and lockdown also are entwined, as the logic of this lockdown and future lockdowns may also be based on waiting for new vaccines. In the end there will always be some tradeoffs between benefits and risks, which also vary with different subpopulations, so the question of "when its worth it to wait" and "what experimental risks are worth taking" is not universally clear.
Given the complexity of variables involved, I hope that scientism can be dispelled, so that people and researchers can make decisions clearly, with Body Sovereignty as a foundational right for the times when our systems fail us.
Here again, freedom of religion becomes relevant again. Scientism, as a religion, has the danger of falling into a monotheistic complex where it sees itself as the only truth, even with questions that are truly uncertain and others hold different perspectives. Scientism may have more roots in colonialism than it realizes.
<br/>
<br/>
*References*
Here is a good discussion of why people are often vaccine hesitant particularly looking at intersections with race (and why Black people have an understandable distrust of the medical system):
https://twitter.com/ZubyMusic/status/1388407684819570689
Here are epidemiologists and scientists who are critical of the mainstream discourse:
- Kulldorf
-
Here are banned and conspiratorial accounts which talk about health freedom, which have some out there information, but also some information which is overlooked by major news outlets. Given the state of the mainstream platforms, I find I can't help but be curious about something when its banned, even if I end up interpreting it not all literally:
- alec.zeck
- https://superu.net/video/13c2426b-ca56-4dd8-8fcd-278a6269a113/
- greenmedinfo
<br/>
<br/>
*Free Speech & Free Listening*
If you choose to unfollow me or not associate with me for my beliefs that is totally your right, but for what its worth, I don't plan to write frequently on this subject. Actually I think its complicated, and can see multiple sides -- that's essentially the whole point. I'd been stuck in loops thinking about this, that were making it difficult to focus on my other work, and the fear of disowning what I felt to be true haunted me, so I needed to share something.
In truth, my work on Scuttlebutt is in part motivated by wanting to help make the world more trustworthy. When I am forced to watch an advertisement, I feel like I am the object of psychological warfare. Perhaps if I lived in a world without this level of coercion, I wouldn't have felt compelled to write this.

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---
path: "/posts/posture"
date: "2021-04-18T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Posture"
type: "blog"
image: ""
description: "a story about posture"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
<div style="height:80px"></div>
![](img/computer.JPG)
In 2017, my neck and back started hurting to the degree it was hard for me to do basic things without pain. I knew the pain was connected with using my laptop. I decided to do a yoga class to see if that could help. At the end of the month long yoga class I went into a headstand for the first time and immediately heard a crack in my neck. I wasn’t able to move my head for the next week and it took months before I was not in pain again. It didn’t turn me away from yoga, just needed to be more patient.
Since then, I’ve learned a number of different things to avoid reinjury — mostly just keep the screen at eye height — but the injury is always still somewhat there. This winter, while being very mindful to use my computer stand when working, I started getting wrist pain for the first time that prevented me from working.
Eventually I found that for me using a track pad, and computer on a stand, means no wrist pain and no neck pain. The location of the injury, the neck, seems like an obvious symbolism of the disconnection between head and body, which is also in a sense what the computer represents.
I wish that when I had first learned programming in school, someone had told me seriously to keep the screen at eye height, that you really need your neck. Along with a million other things it would have been nice to be told but you live and you learn.
I’m still learning what a healthy relationship with my computer could mean physically and emotionally. After living for a month without internet in my home, alone, during a pandemic, and then getting internet, I feel appreciative of the internet right now. I imagine periods of abstinence, balance, finding new non-extractive platforms, exploring, in variations for many years.
I’m thankful for these two pieces of wood that I cut with a jigsaw in 2018, and have been keeping my computer propped up and my neck mostly functioning since then.
<br/><br/>
![](img/jigsaw.JPG)

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---
path: "/posts/snow-on-the-lake"
date: "2021-12-21T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Solstice 2021"
author: "661 words"
type: "blog"
image: ""
description: "chain email on compassion"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
Sitting in vermont, friend just left, with sun shining on my face, <br/>
wanting to share a video that moved me, because I felt that it might also move someone else.<br/>
Identified a feeling of responsibility,<br/>
that in the sharing, I should try to do in such a way,<br/>
that I wouldn’t let the sand fall through my fingers.<br/>
I’m reminded of a performance by my friend Franz, that involved a ritual, where a handful of sand was passed around between many people. While the sand was passing around, he said something like try not to drop the sand, but some will fall, it can’t be helped.<br/>
I remember the feeling of receiving the sand and passing it to the next person,<br/>
trying to be mindful, and some sand fell, but some sand made it.<br/>
A series of different actions, at different timescales, has left me feeling at the moment,<br/>
like sometimes things do the opposite of what they intend.<br/>
Imagined a state of the union in my internal council declaring an extra Yom Kippur effective immediately due to recent events.<br/>
Laughed, imagining if this email was written on a holiday card,<br/>
with a picture of reindeer on the front.<br/>
I realized that the feeling I have about sharing the video is actually a pretty common feeling I experience when trying to talk about the divine, or express something intimate.<br/>
A concern that by trying to say anything about that which cannot be named, it will muck it up.<br/>
My most intimate moments sometimes look like sentences trailing off half-way as hearing the words come out they seem only partial.<br/>
I think of the introduction that [Xavier Dagba](https://www.instagram.com/xavier.dagba/), gave for their podcast, which seems like a helpful introduction for many things,<br/>
“Your truth versus my truth. Who has the ultimate truth. Here is what my experience has been: there are perspective that serve me so well at a certain point in time in my journey. They help me navigate a dark night of the soul. They help me drag myself out of a dark place. They help me cope as much as I needed to cope. And when I was ready to dive in deeper, that perspective needed to shift. And I needed to embody a different perspective. And in my experience, the transformation-journey, is really about in a given now-moment, embracing the perspective that resonates the most with you, and really working through that new paradigm, really working through that new perspective. Using that perspective to evolve as much as you can with that, and then when it stops serving you, embodying or embracing a new perspective that resonates better with you. So what we're going to be sharing here is only perspectives. So the invitation I have for you is, "embrace it if it works for you". Embrace it if you feel like there is resonance with your own soul when you ponder that perspective. Embrace it if this is something that allows you to feel inner peace. If it allows you to feel even more compassion for yourself, and maybe even more compassion for others around you. Embrace it if it works. And if doesn't resonate with you, then dismiss it. You're going to hear me share perspectives that worked for me at some point in time, and perspectives that I had to let go of. The invitation I have for you is: listen to your own resonance.... because I deeply believe that truth has billions of lenses, and every time a human being shares their perspective, they are offering a lense of the bigger truth.”<br/>
I imagined this email as somewhere in between a poem, a sermon, a chain email, and a stream of conscious, which seems appropriate to how I feel today.<br/>
Here is [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XinVOpdcbVc) I originally wanted to share, and here is [the podcast](https://pca.st/mnf3ag59) from Xavier, about compassion and embracing new beginnings. Maybe someone else will find them helpful too.<br/>
Happy solstice,<br/>
with love,<br/>
M<br/>

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---
path: "/posts/the-origin-of-maps"
date: "2020-01-08T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "The Origin Of Maps"
author: "Max Fowler"
type: "blog"
image: "/content/blog/the-origin-of-maps/img/map5.png"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
The origin of all maps is direct experience. Direct experience is a source of knowledge and energy which is always available and has no substitute.[^1]
What are the pathways immediately around us that lead to information being transmitted into our eyes and ears?
What effects do these structures have on us?
What agency do we have in how we relate to them?
![map5](img/map5.png)
```
Must've skipped the ship and joined the team
For a ride
A couple hours to learn the controls
And commandeer both my eyes
Hey!
```
[^2]
On November 18th of 2018
I decided that I would try to use a flip-phone for somewhere between three months and a year,
along with keeping a journal of emotions that arose for me during the process,
marking on a calendar any days where I used my smart phone,
building [a robotic machine](http://mfowler.info/work/disconnection-practices) which physically childblocks your smart phone,
and creating a collection of all the maps I drew for navigating the city while using the flip-phone.
![map2](img/map2.png)
![map3](img/map3.png)
![map4](img/map4.png)
![map1](img/map1.png)
According to the journal, on December 14th, I imagined titling this collection of activities _The Origin Of Maps_, here is my note from that day:
>12/14/18 (friday)
>thought of the title The Origin Of Maps
>a reference to direct experience, where all maps, originally, come from
>by the time we see an address inputted into Google Maps,
>there have been many layers of mediation
>The Origin Of Maps invites a return to direct experience
>using the flip phone, you have to think of who you want to text or call
>like imagining a UI based on blank screen
>the only ideas that surface are the ideas that originate from you
For me, using a flip-phone was an effort to call into question what is truly nourishing
and not passively accept the status quo.
I didn't want to do something speculative.
Even if small, I wanted to make a concrete change to my life to prioritize direct experience and rest, a form of direct action.
I considered it more as a ritual in tribute to mindfulness than an experiment with a single result.
I think many people overestimate how often a smart phone is necessary,
but it depends on what's happening in your life and I do not intend to make any universal claim.
I could tell that I exhibited certain compulsive negative habits with relationship to my smart phone,
and from VR to AI I could see that the tech industry was full of overhyped narratives.
I questioned in what ways this surveillance-funded gadget made from rare earth metals was truly serving me.
&mdash;
Here are my journal entries from the first 10 days after I decided to use a flip-phone:
>day 1 (sunday)
>picked up raspberry pi from kleinanzeigen and hung out with mylene
>missed my turn on the way to kleinanzeigen pickup,
>but used map in my bag to figure out where I had missed the turn
>(felt like my rope harness catching me from falling)
>
>day 2 (monday)
>took my iphone with me because I wanted to use a weird app
>to text a weed dealer about buying weed
>which I thought was only available on iphone
>but turns out also has desktop version
>
>day 3 (tuesday)
>took my iphone with me to studio because I was feeling like texting from the corner of the studio was nice
>was feeling unsure about the project,
>and frustrated that people were having trouble understanding how I wanted to be reached
>in the evening left studio without my smart phone
>felt rejuvenated by patty texting me updates to where the birthday party she was at was,
>even though we had been messaging before on telegram.
>she understood the system I wanted to use and laughed and told me it wasn’t that complicated
>
>day 4 (wednesday)
>left my iphone at home in the morning
>felt excited about project in general
>as a way to provide some structure and direction to my life
>to frame a period of life as research and ritual
>
>day 5 (thursday)
>felt good to only have flip-phone during the day
>and at night-time while returning to my apartment
>was excited to see what messages i had received on telegram
>
>day 6 (friday)
>using flip phone feels like gently scuba-diving away from my computer everyday
>messaging during the day, it was not so difficult making plans for the weekend
>
>day 7 (saturday)
>thought I had memorized directions, but realized I hadn’t memorized what to do after getting out of the u-bahn
>successfully navigated the final part by asking strangers on the street for directions
>
>day 8 (sunday)
>dan says “you are really making life complicated… flip-phone, veganism”
>he tells me he and a friend have been writing a song for fun with the lyrics
>“gimme me vegan ramen… fuck u…. vegan doc martens…. fuck u….
>Berghain (it used to be better)….
>Sysyphous (it used to be better)….
>About Blank (it used to be better)”
>
>day 9 (monday)
>catherine lost her computer while on vacation and spent a week without computer or phone
>she says she feels a bit feral, but in a good way. I feel like I can also feel a difference
>she is dreaming of having no laptop,
>just having her computer be in a physical location where it is used.
>or of getting a job with her hands, becoming a cook
>
>day 10 (tuesday)
>enjoyed getting coffee with Isaac, and baking a sweet potato for myself in the evening.
>not sure if this deserves to be in the journal or not, but it felt nice to buy a single sweet potato, and take it home and bake it and eat half of it for dinner (with rice and beans) and then eat the other half for breakfast the next day with eggs
<br/>
I also made a physical zine with <a href="http://cath.land">Catherine Schmidt</a> about
disconnection practices as healing practices. If you would like to read it, you can order a copy here:
--> [Disconnection Practices](https://gumroad.com/l/pgQxJ)
I wrote a bit about ups and downs I went through of wanting to “end the project” and go back to using my smart phone at different points, and how ultimately I “gave up” in May but then two days later I went back to using my dumb phone by choice and I didn’t feel as agitated anymore when it was now no longer part of an experiment but just something I was doing and could stop whenever I wanted.
I then continued to use the dumb phone for the rest of the year until November 29 of 2019, except for a period when I was in the US without a working sim card.
I particularly look back highly on the first three months where I felt a lot of excitement and newness.
I am currently using my smart phone again and I may take more time away in the future.
I especially dream of being in more situations where I am so engaged with my surroundings that my smart phone ends
up staying in my bag out of batteries for days without me noticing. Disconnection practices can be a tool to help us reconnect with our senses and find rest in the interim.
Related Resources:
- [Nap Ministry](https://www.instagram.com/thenapministry/)
- [Flight Simulator](https://flightsimulator.soft.works/)
- [Empty Day](https://emptyday.today/)
<figure class="dumbPhoneWrapper" style="{{'maxWidth':'500px', 'display': 'flex', 'margin':'auto', 'margin-top': '20px'}}">
<img src="/content/blog/the-origin-of-maps/img/dumb-phone.png" className="figureImage" style="{{'width': '100%'}}" />
<figcaption>"where are my books which dumb ass steals my books" - one of three text messages saved in drafts of used phone I bought on November 18 of 2018</figcaption>
</figure>
[^1]: As a short philosophical digression, one could argue that even our "direct" visual perception is mediated by culture and our past experience and so in some sense is also not direct. On the other hand, we all know the difference between hearing someone tell you what someone else said (a form of mediation) and hearing it directly. So like many philosophical questions, we can see that there is some ambiguity, but also like touching our nose with our finger or breathing there are lots of things we can do without knowing exactly how we do it, and we can still speak about a spectrum from more direct to less direct in a useful way. If I needed a definition of direct for this writing, it might be "without being recorded".
[^2]: Lyrics from "Alien Days" by MGMT

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---
path: "/posts/the-war-on-pathogens"
date: "2020-10-21T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "The War On Pathogens"
author: "Max Fowler"
type: "blog"
image: "/content/blog/the-war-on-pathogens/img/covid-risk.png"
description: "a collection of resources considering the ways in which corona restrictions may be causing more harm than corona in the long-term, organized into sections"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
This is a collection of resources considering the ways in which corona restrictions may be causing more harm than corona in the long-term,
organized into sections.
It includes arguments from epidemiologists at the top,
and from less accredited sources at the bottom along with an exploration of the role of conspiracy theories as myths,
a blue line denotes the separation.
It can both be true that deaths from disease are heartbreaking and that extreme reaction to disease does more harm than good. Media polarization and sensationalism accelerates discussions into binaries, which has led to simplistic models and fear-based reactions,
a continuation of previous media and cultural trends.
As much as we can imagine that its better to be safe than sorry,
this sentiment can apply equally to the harms from Corona as to harms from the unprecedented lockdown.
I hope these resources can be an offering towards more holistic perspectives on public health wherever that leads.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Sunetra Gupta</b>
If you read one thing, I recommend to read this interview, which gets at many of the epidemiological and social issues:
[An Interview With Sunetra Gupta](https://reaction.life/we-may-already-have-herd-immunity-an-interview-with-professor-sunetra-gupta/?fbclid=IwAR0ucQOKcLEDQNapy0RRFx3TQQ_VhiCANyFWZAzmRoUfHVp8BpablTZxceE)
<div class="description">
Sunetra Gupta is an Indian infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford.
She has performed research on the transmission dynamics of various infectious diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19,
and has received the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of the Royal Society.
Hearing her perspective, it should at the very least be seen that the debate around public health and Covid-19 is not as simple
as scientifically literate and illiterate.
</div>
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">The Great Barrington Declaration</b>
On October 5th, Dr. Gupta, Dr. Kulldorff and Dr. Bhattacharya jointly published The Great Barrington Declaration,
which outlines some pieces of the issue in short form:
https://gbdeclaration.org/
More from Kulldorff:<br/>
[Lockdown is a terrible experiment](https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/10/09/lockdown-is-a-terrible-experiment/)<br/>
[Herd immunity is still the key in the fight against Covid-19](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/herd-immunity-is-still-key-in-the-fight-against-covid-19)
Kulldorff points to the ways that even just from the harms from Covid alone,
general lockdown may be doing more harm than good, and the burden of lockdown is not shared equally between rich and poor.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Infection Fatality Rate</b>
This often-cited statistic carries a great deal of heterogeneity by time, place, population and definition.
This [meta-study](https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf), published on October 14th, 2020,
from the WHO website, looked at 61 studies around the world, and found that the
Covid IFR for people under 70 ranges from 0.00% to 0.31% with a crude corrected median of 0.05%, and a general population
median infection fatality rate of 0.27%.
However, for a number of reasons, I don't think infection fatality rate is actually the best statistic for thinking about risk.
This [article](https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-covid-represent-4539118e1196) looks at the risk from Corona in terms of equivalent risk from normal life at your age. It found that
whatever age you are, the risk of dying after getting Corona was roughly equivalent
to the natural risk of dying without corona in the next year at that age.
<figure style="margin-top:0px">
<img src="/content/blog/the-war-on-pathogens/img/covid-risk.png" className="figureImage" style="{{'width': '100%'}}" />
<figcaption>The mortality risk with COVID-19 superimposed on background annual risk, from <a class="caption-link" href="https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-covid-represent-4539118e1196">"How much 'normal' risk does Covid represent?"</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
Other estimates, such as by nobel-laureate Michael Levitt, have placed the equivalent risk at [one month of normal life](https://medium.com/@michael.levitt/the-excess-burden-of-death-from-coronavirus-covid-19-is-closer-to-a-month-than-to-a-year-83fca74455b4).
I speculate the true number is somewhere in between and would like to see this graph reproduced using more recent data.
Whatever the exact risk is, to me this way of looking at risk contextualizes it in a way
which feels more relevant than other metrics.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Harms From Lockdown</b>
The harms from lockdown are various and many may never be fully quantified or even known. Some are very direct, like
the [525,000 additional people projected to die in 2021](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-covid-annual-tb-deaths.html) from tuberculosis because of decreased access to care.
Other effects are more insidious &mdash; what are the long-term effects on children being taught to fear other children and physical closeness?
Here are some of the effects already being seen,
- [COVID-19 may add 525,000 to annual TB deaths](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-covid-annual-tb-deaths.html)
- [The pandemic’s financial pain is worst for Black and Latino parents, a survey finds](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/the-pandemics-financial-pain-is-worst-for-black-and-latino-parents-a-survey-finds.html)
- [The Hunger Virus: How Covid-19 Is Fuelling Hunger In A Hungry World](https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621023/mb-the-hunger-virus-090720-en.pdf)
- [The Covid-19 Pandemic Has Escalated Domestic Violence Worldwide](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackieabramian/2020/07/22/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-escalated-global-domestic-violence/#7b9ca1c5173e)
- [During June 24–30, 2020, U.S. adults reported considerably elevated adverse mental health conditions associated with COVID-19. Younger adults, racial/ethnic minorities, essential workers, and unpaid adult caregivers reported having experienced disproportionately worse mental health outcomes, increased substance use, and elevated suicidal ideation.](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm)
- [New Polio outbreak in Sudan from suspended vaccination campaigns](https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-health-middle-east-africa-united-nations-619efb65b9eeec5650f011b960a152e9)
- [COVID-19 emergency measures and the impending authoritarian pandemic](https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa064/5912724)
- [Covid-19 has led to a pandemic of plastic pollution](https://www.economist.com/international/2020/06/22/covid-19-has-led-to-a-pandemic-of-plastic-pollution)
This is just a sample, but the scale and diversity of impacts suggest this a pointer to the iceberg.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Cases, Testing & Media Coverage</b>
It would probably be a whole other book to look specifically at how the state of the media is effecting
the cultural and scientific discourse.
One small piece of this is reporting corona cases on a daily basis.
The graph below, from [Our World In Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-cases-deaths?time=2020-01-01..latest), shows the disconnection between global number of cases and deaths.
<figure>
<img src="/content/blog/the-war-on-pathogens/img/cases-and-deaths.png" className="figureImage" style="{{'width': '100%'}}" />
<figcaption>Cases plotted against deaths worldwide, from <a class="caption-link" href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-cases-deaths?time=2020-01-01..latest">Our World In Data</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>
Other sources also point to this, even including the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/10/20/world/covid-19-coronavirus-updates#a-third-surge-of-coronavirus-infections-has-now-firmly-taken-hold-across-much-of-the-united-states),
but reporting based on cases continues to center fear.
Fear-based reporting is perhaps best exemplified by the trend of reporting the number of Corona deaths in terms of multiples of 9/11,
an event which was itself perhaps the most politicized and utilized-to-incite-fear event in recent history, hardly a sane reference point.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Security Theatre</b>
Next to the harms caused by lockdown, it becomes clear that at the very least, it is not the case that
all efforts to prevent the spread of Corona are beneficial and moral, regardless of their efficacy.
If we acknowledge that the strategy/ideology of restrictions have costs, then we can at least aim
that preventative measures are informed by efficacy. In reality, many preventative measures are informed
by public perception of liablity, moralizing and germophobia, with varying levels of alignment with actual efficacy.
Some examples,
- [Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders, Fears from the summer appear to have been overblown](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/schools-arent-superspreaders/616669/)
- [Corona is not easily transmitted through surfaces](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-covid-infections-respiratory-droplets-aerosols.html?fbclid=IwAR0daSP2vCyfUlxxVtS6SGB9RVCeNPHgoxBPWoIZbUWjK0p6n9LaiPp-lyY), yet 'deep cleaning' helps people feel more at ease ([e.g. deep-cleaning new york subway](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8291771/New-York-subway-closes-time-workers-perform-deep-clean-Covid-19-lockdown.html))
Tracking hospital bed capacity (the original motivation for the initial lockdown) makes sense,
as well as building more hospital capacity, but general lockdown disconnected from hospital capacity increases harm.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Long Covid</b>
While Long Covid is a real concern (my mom experienced a form of it, having symptoms for 4 weeks after getting Covid),
next to the harms of lockdown, justifying lockdown in terms of long covid seems like a sort of shifting ground argument
and hard to universalize.
For people who work on the computer, have stable home situations and are less effected by restrictions,
they will see the tradeoffs differently.
Ultimately our assessment of risks will involve many different factors. My feeling is not that Covid isn't real,
but that a number of societal biases have effected the way that it is understood.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Root Causes</b>
The societal bias that lockdown is good for public health is an outgrowth from the colonial perspective that humans are separate from nature
and that the human body is a pure sterile space (ignoring the microbiome and that humans actually have an ecological relationship with viruses and bacteria).
This bias continues capitalist trends towards alienation from nature, each other, and our bodies, and furthers the deterioration of our health,
which truly was already in a public health crisis long before corona (from pesticides, pollution, climate change, capital-influenced healthcare, the opioid crisis, biodiversity loss, lack of access to nature, and other factors).
Perhaps if we could have had a perfect lockdown in March we could have prevented
the spread of the virus entirely. But given that didn't happen, it seems likely Covid will become endemic like other coronaviruses. There are many other new normals one could imagine instead of "the war on pathogens",
even if that would be the most profitable for pharmaceutical companies.
Recently I dislike the way that most writing online ends.
As though everything needs to be tied into a bow for jury submission.
Given that I see polarization as part of the problem,
I wasn't sure how to write about this in a way that doesn't further contribute to that cycle.
Separate from the framework of thesis-counterthesis,
I hope some pieces of this might be a source of grounding, information or perspective.
The next sections are about conspiracy theories as a form of myth.
<div class="blue-line-break"></div>
<br/><br/>
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Origin Of The Term 'Conspiracy Theory'</b>
<br/><br/>
While 'Conspiracy Theory' is often used as a term to dismiss an argument, its worthwhile to recognize the history of the term.
<br/>
For a nuanced discussion of the history and role of conspiracy theories, which acknowledges that they
can both contain truths and also mislead, I recommend this podcast:<br/>
[Microdose: Erik Davis on the Cosmic Right](https://novaramedia.com/2020/08/13/microdose-erik-davis-on-the-cosmic-right/)
I also appreciate Carl Jung's notion that even when not literally true, conspiracy theories often have some
seed of truth to them, and can be interpreted through a form of dream interpretation.
For example, if we look at the Chem Trails conspiracy theory, that the smoke trails seen behind planes
are trails of poisonous chemicals released into the air by the government to mind control the population
and control the weather &mdash; I don't literally believe this conspiracy theory,
but given the connection between air travel and climate change,
there is a sense in which the conspiracy theory is more true than the person who says the jet trails are harmless.
As a further note, I actually can't remember where I read about this Jung theory of conspiracy theories,
and its possible that I made it up, or that perhaps I dreamed about it. If anyone knows a source for this,
please send it to me, as I think about it often.
Given this perspective, I think the idea that conspiracy theories need to be censored or are the cause of
problems in the world, doesn't hold up.
I would ask first why someone is in a position where conspiracy theories are the best model
for their lived experience of reality, before trying to silence them.
Beyond that, many conspiracy theories hold truth, and some point to paradigm shifts.
Its an interesting epistemic ground, and perhaps like a Tarot reading, can be either spooky, misleading,
healing or informative, depending on how you engage with it.
With this introduction, here are some less accredited sources on this topic, to be navigated with your own
discernment to guide you.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Banned Accounts And Books</b>
[Swiss Policy Research Facts About Covid-19](https://swprs.org/facts-about-covid-19/)<br/>
[Studies On Covid Lethality](https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/)<br/>
Greenmedinfo ([instagram](https://www.instagram.com/greenmedinfo2/), [telegram](https://t.me/sayeregengmi))<br/>
Alec Zeck ([instagram](https://www.instagram.com/alec.zeck/), [telegram](https://t.me/TheWayFwrd))<br/>
[The Contagion Myth](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Contagion-Myth/Thomas-S-Cowan/9781510764620)
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Charles Eisenstein, Conspiracy Theories As Myth</b>
[The Conspiracy Myth](https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-conspiracy-myth/)<br/>
[On the racism behind criticism of hydroxychloroquine](https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-banquet-of-whiteness/)<br/>
[The Coronation](https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/)<br/>
These three pieces by Eisenstein are long but good and really go beyond the surface left vs right, lockdown vs anti-lockdown framework.
<br/><br/>
<b class="section-header">Epigraph</b><br/><br/>
<a class="epigraph" href="https://newworldwriting.net/tao-lin-meditation/">
A Poem By Tao Lin titled "Meditation"
</a>

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---
path: "/posts/wayback"
date: "2016-06-20T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Wayback"
type: "blog"
note: "test"
---
An image, captured by the wayback machine from 2009,
of a website I made in highschool containing
now defunct links to songs I recorded in my family house's
closet (also containing the internet router and cleaning supplies),
along with some
geometric broken image links from the album art I photo-shopped together from
heavily filtered images of things around my house:
[![remnant.png](img/remnant.png)](https://web.archive.org/web/20090323231502/http://www.maximusfowler.com/maximusproductions/Music.html)
My freshman and sophomore years of high school I didn’t have many friends &mdash; I spent a lot of time next to
the router making angsty electronic music. I kept a small MIDI keyboard and microphone on a fold-able table in
the closet.
I made hundreds of songs, and used iWeb (apple’s WYISWYG website maker) to make a website to ‘publish’ the
music to. I spent hours photographing my dog, and random plants and photo-shopping the images together into
album art. I put all the songs and album art onto <a href="http://maximusfowler.com">http://maximusfowler.com</a> and
didn’t share the website or music with anyone.
This last spring I looked up maximusfowler.com on the wayback machine and found three entries:
![wayback.png](img/wayback.png)
I clicked through to Music.html and found the following remnant of a page from 2009:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20090323231502/](https://web.archive.org/web/20090323231502/http://www.maximusfowler.com/maximusproductions/Music.html">https://web.archive.org/web/20090323231502/http://www.maximusfowler.com/maximusproductions/Music.html)
Scrolling through the blue letters on the dark background, thinking about echoes of a memory, of looking out
the window of my bedroom at night, and an even more distant memory of barefoot stepping on a firecracker and
crying, of diving into a lake and passing through an unexpected cold patch of water.
Perhaps these dark blue letters and empty boxes reverberate my childhood to me more deeply than if all the
pages of the site remained.

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---
path: "/posts/alen-divis"
date: "2022-05-24T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Alén Diviš"
author: ""
type: "misc"
image: ""
description: "on Alén Diviš (1900 – 1956)"
note: "Max Fowler"
---
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
![img/moon.jpg](img/moon.jpg)
one of the first websites I ever made was just a body tag with this painting by Alén Diviš (1900 – 1956) as the full background image
I remembered this and re-found the image through the wayback machine (http://web.archive.org/web/20180605075911/http://brocascoconut.com/~/)
this memory brings up a feeling that is hard to put into words
perhaps a recognition that we each contain a vast internal world with its own resonance and rhythm and timing
re-finding this makes me wish I had somewhere to post things,
that was less like a linear blog, or a feed, or a broadcast,
and more like a room or a library for others to pass through and discover new things or a new feeling each time
(this was written before I added a wiki to this site)
[//]: # (I leave this post quietly here with the hope to honor that inner world,)
[//]: # (in myself and others )

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---
path: "/posts/p4p"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "P4P"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
from [@gwil](https://gwil.garden/) on ssb at ssb:%ydpYgAf1+8iBAMSiFAbPG32ltwdVQQSJb0G7tjRGgvM=.sha256
> This is what I have been thinking about when I think of 'p4p': not just a version bump for a technology with a specific network shape; but a way of working in solidarity towards a common goal — even when we are working on different projects.
this could encompass many things,
both social and technical
this page contains some links relating to this vast topic, which takes many forms,
from pirate radio, to tech cooperatives
the grow your own food of software
green computation
sovereign hardware

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path: "/posts/alternative-epistemologies"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Alternative Epistemologies"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
alternative epistemologies

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title: "CMS & Static Site Generators"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
lichen
gatsby-mdx

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path: "/posts/disconnection-practices"
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title: "Disconnection Practices"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
origin of maps
pin daddy
are.na channel
work of laurel schwulst
ana luisa writing about accelerationism and nihilism

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---
path: "/posts/flat-earth"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Flat Earth"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
This is notes of flat-earth research.
einstein earth-movers <br/>
[download](assetts/earth-mover.pdf)
links to videos from telegram

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path: "/posts/herbalism"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Herbalism"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
fire cider recipe
ayurveda

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path: "/posts/low-energy-computation"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Trash Computers"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
low-energy computation
peachcloud
yunohost?

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path: "/posts/misc"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Misc"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
misc

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path: "/posts/mycology"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Mycology"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
This is a collection of mycology notes and research.
hyphalfusion.network
kiezpilz.de

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path: "/posts/network-art"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Network Art"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
essays by adina
highlight work by melanie, and others

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path: "/posts/neurodivergence"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Neurodivergence"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
unmasking autism: new faces of neurodiversity

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---
path: "/posts/permaculture"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Permaculture"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
First off, permaculture is not really a new style of growing invented by Bill Mollison in the 1970s,
and often when it is taught it fails to acknowledge similar indigenous ways of planting that long preceded it.
@luandro writes about this [in this post](https://viewer.scuttlebot.io/%25L2CeUyqBFdPtM%2Bsu15w81cwF21cE0DtfHT63PGelEBQ%3D.sha256).
While being aware of its limitations, I still feel drawn to learn from it,
and here are some resources I've encountered.
These two videos from a agroforest in new zealand, one from 23 years, and one from five years later:
Amazing 23-Year-Old Permaculture Food Forest - An Invitation for Wildness
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6GJFL0MD9fc
Magical 28-Year-Old Permaculture Food Forest – Growing Wild Together
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mdi_9o92XcU
untitled-farm-dream <br/>
https://www.are.na/fiona-f/untitled-farm-dream
wilmar's gaerten in berlin <br/>
https://www.instagram.com/wilmarsgaerten/

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path: "/posts/poemsforendtimes"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Poetry"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
poems for end of times

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path: "/posts/reading"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Reading"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
list of books by year

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---
path: "/posts/recipes"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Recipes"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
links to recipes

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---
path: "/posts/scuttlebutt"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Scuttlebutt"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
scuttlebutt
peachcloud
go-sbot

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---
path: "/posts/spiritual-texts"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Spiritual Texts"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
zen mind, beginner's mind
hridaya newsletters
a note on cultural appropriation

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---
path: "/posts/tools"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Tools"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
This page is a review of various tools I'm using or have tried.
<br/>
[cms & static site generators](/posts/cms)
<br/>
*operating systems*
- currently (7.19.22) using mac os on a 2013 macbook pro
- for six months, until august of 2021, I ran debian on my macbook,
until I realized there was an issue that it was running both graphics cards at once,
and was causing physical damage to my machine
when I was running debian I felt like my computer was more magical.
by the recommendation of @zon and @luandro, I'm curious to try running manjaro in the future.
<br/>
*note-taking* <br/>
I use simplenote
special syntax ... mostly ephemeral
I also journal by hand in muji notebooks.
<br/>
*backups* <br/>
I back up my computer onto a password-encrypted external hard-drive using Time Machine,
every month or so.
*yunohost* <br/>
*email* <br/>
*messaging* <br/>
- telegram
- signal
- whatsapp
- matrix

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path: "/posts/trika"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Trika Shaivism"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
A Message To My Friends About Drugs - by Shambhavi Sarasvati <br/>
https://jayakula.org/message-about-drugs/
Befriending Yourself & Others <br/>
https://jayakula.org/podcast/befriending-yourself-and-others/

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path: "/posts/web-of-links"
date: "2022-07-19T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Web Of Links"
type: "wiki"
style: "prose"
image: ""
description: ""
note: "Max Fowler"
---
links to different things

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path: "/zines/disconnection-practices"
gumroadPath: "https://gumroad.com/l/pgQxJ"
date: "2019-12-20T23:19:51.246Z"
title: "Disconnection Practices"
image: "/content/zines/disconnection-practices/img/disconnection-practices.jpeg"
images:
- "/content/zines/disconnection-practices/img/disconnection-practices.jpeg"
- "/content/zines/disconnection-practices/img/ds1.png"
- "/content/zines/disconnection-practices/img/ds2.png"
description: "a zine exploring methods of disconnecting from technology as healing practices"
author: "Max Fowler"
price: "$10.00"
type: "zine"
---
A zine exploring methods of disconnecting from technology as healing practices.
Made in collaboration with <a href="http://cath.land">Catherine Schmidt</a>.

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