Give LCS another play some time; it's fun, but also feels like work, just like DF. Disciplines the mind, I suspect.
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you; we've had a number of unexpected successes in the last two weeks that have required my attention.
Regarding Project PM, I have pasted a more concise explanation of how the media network will work below; remember that we are also building up a governing network to further advance our technocratic agenda, thus far composed of about 120 people, most recently the head of theoretical physics at Case Western.
Meanwhile, we are now being offered funding. A lot of funding. I had originally intended on doing this with no money whatsoever, but anyway the funding is meant for something else that I will be put in partial charge of and which I will explain to you further when I have more info. Again, very preliminary. Whether or not this particular source of funding comes through - and I think it will - I will be receiving something on the order of a quarter million dollars from another source probably within a year, in which case I would be inclined to purchase a portion of your time to help us solve certain problems that I am inclined to believe that you are equipped to solve.
I apologize for being cryptic at the moment, but things are more fun that way. At any rate, here is the basic schematic; feel free to call or write with any questions.
***
Information flow is fundamental to the success of every manner of human collaboration. Nonetheless, the processes by which information is gathered, handled, transferred, and acted upon receive far less attention than is warranted. The purpose of Project PM is to change this dynamic by developing new techniques with which to more efficiently conduct information.
Because the great preponderance of information crucial to the success of a representative government is transferred through the media, Project PM focuses primarily on media reform. Our first and foremost effort has been to establish a distributed media cartel made up of bloggers as well as journalists who work at least in part through online media. Rather than simply assembling this group of exceptional media professionals into an online outlet similar to those currently in existence, we are instead organizing our participants into a network which itself operates under a unique schematic designed to take best advantage of the internet as a medium while simultaneously avoiding the drawbacks common to even the best online communities.
In order to seed the network, we have recruited around two dozen bloggers and journalists whom we have identified as particularly competent and intellectually honest. Each of these individuals is encouraged to bring other bloggers into the network based on their own judgment; these new participants are then connected to the blogger who has brought them in and may likewise bring others into the network,and so on . As such, the network grows perpetually while maintaining a high average quality in terms of its participants, as is explained further below.
Upon the launch of our network, each of the initial bloggers will be connected to each other via a widget which is embedded on their respective blogs, as well as connected to those whom theyve recruited. When a particular individual composes a piece of work that he considers to be of particular merit, the individual pushes a single button which causes the article in question to be sent to all of the bloggers to whom he is connected. Each of those bloggers in turn then decides whether or not they agree that the article is worthy of greater attention; if so, they push the button and thereby send it along to every blogger to whom they themselves are connected. Thus it is that information deemed worthy of attention by some great number of erudite and honest individuals from a variety of backgrounds will tend to perpetuate through the system and gain a larger audience than they might otherwise receive.
As the network expands by way of the process described above, it is inevitable that there will be failures of judgement on the part of participants when choosing additional bloggers to bring into the network. Let us say that Blogger X, who is rather competent, brings in Blogger Y, who is only moderately so, and who in turn brings in Blogger Z, who is a giant douchebag. Blogger Z begins composing and pushing forward posts to the effect that Barack Obama was born in Tehran or that ethanol subsidies are awesome or some such thing but these posts only initially go to Blogger Y and whatever horrid bloggers Blogger Z has brought in himself, assuming he has brough in any. Blogger Y may or may not be inclined to push forward these nonsense posts, but Blogger X will almost certainly delete them immediately and is quite likely to disolve his connection to Blogger Y for displaying such poor judgement. Thus it is that the system is defended from deterioration by the high competence of the initial round of bloggers and consequently comparable competence of those brought in gradually afterwards, coupled with the nature of the schematic itself. No supervision is necessary for the network to expand while maintaining a high level of quality.
A few other characteristics bear noting. Any participant may connect to any other participant who agrees to the connection, no matter where each participant resides in the network, and thus the network is likely to evolve from the shape of a pyramid to that of a web, which is advantageous in terms of ensuring that good information does not become overly regionalized. All participants are equal regardless of the order in which they joined. Participants are free to bring on as many other bloggers as they would like, although they will find that it is to their own advantage to be selective in this regard.
The system is capped off with another widget distinct from that used by the bloggers the reader widget, a downloadable application which displays those posts which have been pushed forward a certain number of times (as set by the individual reader). The end result should be the best system of news and information filtration that has ever existed.
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 4:48 AM, Tarn Adams
<tarn.adams@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks again for taking the time to respond to these questions. For some
> reason I can't get a response back from the gaming mags to save my life
I'm not sure you'll do well in mainstream American print gaming mags.
We've pretty much never made it into them (maybe once?), though we do
well elsewhere and online. I'm not sure if it has to do with the
close links between content and ads and so on, or what, since I only
hear the occasional story from the periphery about how it works.
> Also, I mentioned to you my eccentric project a while back, Project PM. I
> don't know how closely you follow these things, but my friend and project
> participant Michael Hastings seems to have just fucked up all kinds of shit
> with his new Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal, who's now been summoned to
> Washington.
Yeah, I first read that on HP and then heard a telephone interview
with him on Rachel Maddow, and of course it has been ongoing after
that. It seems like a pretty intense scoop, and that he really just
needed to let the guy keep talking.
> He also blurbed my book and I'm doing a piece on the background
> to all this for Vanity Fair today, so we're going to be in a much better
> position to act on our agenda pretty soon with the additional notoriety. If
> you're still interested in discussing our project further at some point, let
> me know
I read the Africa page a few weeks ago and the last long email you
wrote and had been trying to find time to think and reply
intelligently, but it has been difficult. I think that since I'm not
involved at a practical level with this sort of activity I'd be sort
of wasting your time asking for basic explanations when you are going
to be way ahead of me on things.
As I understand it, the network would need to be decentralized, so
that people that were interested in, say, cooking or sports, wouldn't
be able to co-opt any shared resources once they got in on the edges
and started linking in all their friends and pushing recipes or match
write-ups down the line. When you said the widget shows items that
have been "pushed forward a certain number of times" it made me think
there was some more centralized counting going on, so that the top
pushed items became more universally available without having to make
the entire journey from one person to another. At that point, you'd
need to account for side networks latching on that outgrow the
original (including a competing sub-network of the left-out
conservative bloggers, once one gets linked in on the fringe) --
something that I imagine would be a danger if you are trying to write
a novel, high-quality system for passing around important news (which
isn't going to be limited to political news once you have irrelevant
contributors). I'm behind on Facebook and tweets and that kind of
thing, so I suppose the ways around this might be obvious to people
that are with the times, he he he. That's my paranoid first reaction,
anyway, based on the experience of my forum getting a little gummed
up. Maybe if the blogger network were named something that somebody
thinking about cooking or sports didn't want to see every time they
open up the widget, he he he. Starting with a dozen people, this
obviously isn't going to be a problem right away, but if the
registration/linking system is uncontrolled, you'll eventually get
whoever linked or whatever pushed and any mechanism not respecting the
locality of the direct links could become troubled.
If it doesn't have shared resources though, and whatever side networks
that form are just living off by themselves and not jamming up the
network, then the overall concept would need to distinguish itself
from email buddy lists -- I guess it might be enough to emulate buddy
lists with more purpose and more conveniently to achieve the project
goals of getting information passed around quickly, but in a
completely decentralized system I'm not seeing the crucial difference
and it makes me feel like I'm misunderstanding something about how it
works, unless the project is more about getting these kinds of themed
buddy lists organized in some standardized and easy to use way.
> Anyway, I suck at that game. [LCS]
Yeah, I only spent a few month-long sessions with it separated by
periods of inactivity, if I remember, so it never really gelled as a
balanced game. The continuing fan-written LCS is probably more
winnable without cheap tactics, but it's my understanding that it's
more "gamey" in a way, so I can't really say how it plays or anything
about the atmosphere.
Tarn
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302