@@ -16,9 +16,7 @@ His use of that term brings to mind Ivan Illich, whose “Tools for Conviviality
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1717From a present standpoint, we could understand both Illich and Felsenstein’s texts as calls for human-scale technology. Simplicity is a central ingredient of this prescription; it’s hard to feel much ownership over something that one can’t use, manipulate, or maintain without deferring to an external expert every time something needs tinkering under the hood. In the decades since these treatises’ publication, personal computing has become totally commonplace, yet, with the elaboration of social networking and Cambrian Explosion of communication tools brought about by Web 2.0, it feels increasingly, and noticeably, less convivial.
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19−Why did this trajectory – and not one of “personal computing leagues” and ad-hoc hac
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21−king, of the nature Felsenstein and his _Mondo _co-conspirators so passionately envisioned – take hold? My hypothesis is that, as [Rich Hickey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4&ab_channel=StrangeLoopConference) lays out, simplicity actually demands a lot of _work_. In a culture of convenience, the concerted and enthusiastic effort necessary to achieve real agency over our tools can, paradoxically, come across as prohibitively hard. Yet conflating accessibility with frictionlessness works to our collective detriment. The technologies capable of fostering conviviality _ask something of us_: engagement, patience, the will to understand. In our offline social lives, these are accepted as necessary labors of love: intimacy without investment is an impossible, irresponsible fantasy. To invoke the oft-quoted Simone Weil, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
19+Why did this trajectory – and not one of “personal computing leagues” and ad-hoc hacking, of the nature Felsenstein and his _Mondo_ co-conspirators so passionately envisioned – take hold? My hypothesis is that, as [Rich Hickey](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4&ab_channel=StrangeLoopConference) lays out, simplicity actually demands a lot of _work_. In a culture of convenience, the concerted and enthusiastic effort necessary to achieve real agency over our tools can, paradoxically, come across as prohibitively hard. Yet conflating accessibility with frictionlessness works to our collective detriment. The technologies capable of fostering conviviality _ask something of us_: engagement, patience, the will to understand. In our offline social lives, these are accepted as necessary labors of love: intimacy without investment is an impossible, irresponsible fantasy. To invoke the oft-quoted Simone Weil, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
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2321And as we well know, in the present mediatic environment – tellingly termed the “attention economy” – the dynamics of directing our focus online are deeply broken. Is it any surprise that, on the platforms that have pioneered a business model out of stealing and selling that attention, community and conviviality feel so hard to come by? Effort, labor, and understanding are fundamental to relationships online and off. But the spaces where we’re meant to share these qualities online disingenuously sell us (or, rather, do they _buy us?_) with promises of ease that amount to empty calories, or worse.
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@@ -26,4 +24,4 @@ By removing friction from the equation (think: Log In With Facebook), they wall
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2725If we want to create technologies that are conducive to meaningful community, where “engagement” is not just a quantitative metric or empty piece of advertising parlance, then, we need to re-orient our values beyond “ease of use”. Like the relationships that we build within them, our platforms should yield satisfaction precisely because they’re non-trivial; they command effort, which is another way of saying they require engagement with the world. Attention; generosity. In step with these values, I’m inspired to ask: what would a convivial social network look and feel like? Human-scale, peer-to-peer, open-source, and non-extractive are all descriptors that come to mind. You can probably anticipate where I’m going with this: a network with many of these merits exists today, ready to be used, tinkered with, and built on top of, and if you’re reading this, you’re probably familiar with it.
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29−Getting started on Urbit takes some work: investment in address space; effort to acquire a planet; possibly even bearing with some confusion during the booting process if you, like me, are an armchair network theorist who often shies away from the technical. But these costs are up-front, not black-boxed out of sight or hidden in an epic-length user agreement. Once it’s up and running, it even feels, dare I say, easy, though the healthy extension of my comfort zone that getting onto the network entailed – especially when I joined in November, a few months shy of the L2 rollout – sticks in my mind. It reminds me of the dynamics that have strengthened my closest relationships online and off: the ability to navigate challenges together and find a connection strengthened, not diminished, by our shared time spent swimming around in that vulnerable space of learning. By re-materializing a little bit of the friction of computing, not _gatekeeping_ but commanding effortful engagement, Urbit has created a platform that is purpose-built for conviviality.
27+Getting started on Urbit takes some work: investment in address space; effort to acquire a planet; possibly even bearing with some confusion during the booting process if you, like me, are an armchair network theorist who often shies away from the technical. But these costs are up-front, not black-boxed out of sight or hidden in an epic-length user agreement. Once it’s up and running, it even feels, dare I say, easy, though the healthy extension of my comfort zone that getting onto the network entailed – especially when I joined in November, a few months shy of the [L2 rollout](https://urbit.org/using/id/layer-2-for-planets) – sticks in my mind. It reminds me of the dynamics that have strengthened my closest relationships online and off: the ability to navigate challenges together and find a connection strengthened, not diminished, by our shared time spent swimming around in that vulnerable space of learning. By re-materializing a little bit of the friction of computing, not _gatekeeping_ but commanding effortful engagement, Urbit has created a platform that is purpose-built for conviviality.