Brian Kerr

Today is the one-year anniversary of µcoworking / microcoworking. It’s a thing that happens at certain intervals. Here’s the original invitation:

Microcoworking calendar for folks in and around Ann Arbor. If you have work to do, but not a place to work, you are invited to join us whenever and wherever there is something on the calendar. You may also add time to the calendar, just make sure to be there.

Over time, this got burned down to:

You are invited to microcowork (e.g. work together, or alone but in the presence of others) at any of the times and locations on the calendar.

People have been sitting around in cafes or on benches or in other folks’ conference rooms or the like bitterly fighting off structuration and incubation and all that control addict bullshit for longer than a year. But/and before during and after that flickering timespan when “coworking” meant anything to anybody, y’all have wanted this fire in the Delta City.

But today, after a year of Wednesdays, observe. A nice thing about µcoworking, as opposed to other non-membership-based non-organizations, is that you can drift towards and away from it without distress. There’s nothing at the center besides a calendar and a cup of coffee. You come and you go.

Limited peripheral participation (read: ripeness) is all.

(tags: coffee cybernetics fire invitations microcoworking network notwork time year)

From nothing to more than nothing.
Move from zero to one.

Move.

(tags: activities animal control cybernetics machine more-than motion nothing oblique one strategies systems zefrank zero)

Try something tomorrow that you haven’t done today, temporarily and for the activity’s own sake. Don’t eat. Don’t sleep, and work on your favorite project vigorously through the night. Disable Verdana and browse the web.

Find a limit and push it gently.

(tags: cybernetics invitations self)

What I noticed from Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work in The New Yorker for March 17, 2008:

Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life, our interactions with cards and hoops and things. He opens a door by pointing to a window.

(tags: cards conjecture cybernetics doors hoops imagination interaction magic magician observation opening perception representation routinized theories of the world things visual windows)

From Community and Privacy by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, partying like it’s 1965:

Until one stops using popular or generalized words to describe specific objects and events, one will continue to be deceived by the associations with them and will fail to arrive at the essential functional aspect of things and places that is the planner’s actual concern in problem — analysis and design.

(tags: analysis arrival aspects concerns cybernetics design essence events failure function functional aspect objects places things words)

Site launched; go urgently.

(tags: collective cybernetics fire narratives psyops)

Go urgently and listen and listen and listen, because whatever problem you’re solving or relationship you’re negotiating or light you’re bringing into the world, it’s just an interpretation of something someone else did recently, but before you were born.

Thanks @danklyn for the recommendation(s).

(tags: ambient bang-on-a-can cybernetics design eno media music narratives nothing-is-written)