Ahoy frens,

I enjoy writing to you. Good writing is like clear thinking. And whilst I rarely consider my writing to be good, it is nonetheless a delight to share my draft thoughts with you.

But this may change, come 2023. The Muse has me now, and I shall be deep in book writing land once more. I am literally grinning as I write this—just thinking of the book I am writing for you enlivens me. Oh the developmental nous, the metamodern wit and the complexity savvy I shall smuggle into this otherwise charming grimoire!

Of course, all projects are wondrous in their potential form; it’s in the translation from potentiality to actuality that comes the misery and pain—but I’ll try to enjoy each phase as I am in it.

Just briefly, before I get carried away, here’s a final heads up for the last gathering of The Rekindling this year. This time Dr Tyson Yunkaporta (author of Sand Talk) will be joining us for a fireside chat—and then we’ll go hang for a beer and a bite at our favourite local brewery for speakeasy salon vibes. I really hope you can join us. Tickets available here. Bring a friend; the more the merrier. It’s this Thursday evening.

Get your ticket

Also: did a friend forward this to you? That’s nice! You can join over 11,000 readers who subscribe to the museletter of dr fox, too.

I’ll be taking a wee break from the arena come December whilst I re-asses where my attention is best invested. If I do manifest, it will likely be in the guise of “Dr Fox, Archwizard of Ambiguity” once more. Of course, I have been claiming to be this character for quite a while—but in the past few years I have brought other aspects of myself into the mix, which has muddied magical realism of the whole affair.

If I were to look back on the topics I’ve explored with you this year—glammourie (the magic of seeming) and intellectual honesty, fellowship and scenius, overthinking our way to happiness, sabbaticals—it paints a picture that has only just now become clear to me: poor Jase has been seeking erudite friends to sensemake and be in fellowship with.🥺 He didn’t want to manifest as a Teacher because he didn’t want to imply any knowledge asymmetry—he was instead too preoccupied with his own epistemological humility virtue flex. He thus related to everyone as if they were peers; sharing his inklings, scruples, hesitations and reservations much as he would with any friend. For—to lift from the words of Terry Pratchett in Monstrous Regiment:—

[Okay I’m going to drop the 3rd person perspective, it’s weird].

The complexity practitioner and philosopher in me finds hesitation, humility and doubt to be wondrously reassuring signals of an erudite and conscientious mind—yet I have come to realise that the inverse is true for most folk. People want confidence, clarity and conviction, it seems. This has become increasingly apparent in some of the leadership off-sites I have contributed to in the past month—clients and audiences crave the Sage-on-a-Stage. They want a good intellectual spanking from an authority figure. I play this part ironically—yet it is perceived sincerely. And appreciated, too, hoho. People want their magical thinking packaged as truth, thank you very much—because who wants to see how the tricks themselves work.

And besides; I’ve got my friends to spar with—and The Rekindling is the perfect salon to do the dialectic dance amidst what is emerging.

I guess the tl;dr of this is: I’ll be having a break soon, and I’ll be coming back in mythic form (transcendent and resplendent). Much more warm and teacherly; empathetic to the limited attentional resources of the busy reader. In parallel to this I will also be conjuring more ways that we can hang together, in real time (virtually and corporeally), off-stage and sans-pretence. As such, 2023 is going to be a lot more fun.

And now, onto the musing of this museletter. No podcast; my finger is hovering over the delete button as I figure where to make a home for my musings in 2023.; and generally how I might relate to social media and the attention economy at large. I wrote about this four years ago, of course. But here we are yet again.

This brief musing involves: billionaires, the hazards of centralised power and control, and the fragmentation of our noösphere.

So. The recent debacle of the FTX crypto exchange (which was quite spectacular) has me more enthusiastic about decentralised finance than ever. Yet the space will be rough for some time yet.

I am somewhat disturbed as to what happened; yet also theoretically unsurprised and numb to it all. Centralised points of failure are a risk in any system—which is why decentralised, transparent, open-source, un-censorable and immutable public ledgers are infinitely preferable to the traditional (centralised, obfuscated, closed-source, censorable, mutable and private) financial system we have lived with for just a few decades. (For insight in this, my favourite crypto journalist Laura Shin spoke with the quite reasonable-sounding Eric Voorhees recently—I’d recommend watching the whole conversation).

As I write this the head of the exchange—SBF, the caricature who has misused billions of customer’s funds—is freely roaming about the place whilst some traditional media firms write blatant puff pieces about him. Why? Perhaps because he’s ‘the right kind of white’ (as Arthur Hayes writes). And perhaps because he has a lot of money to influence people with, too.

To suggest that I am a little skeptical about outspoken billionaires would be an understatement. Billionaires are an emergent symptom of a flawed financial system, and I’m not sure they should be venerated with quite the level of fervour we often see.

In parallel to the aftermath of the FTX collapse, we are also seeing the seemingly brazen and nonsensical ‘hardcore’ approach to leadership that Musk is bringing upon Twitter. I’m not sure I like it. Balaji—whom I don’t always agree with—makes an interesting observation as to how this might unfurl—a shift to founder-moderated communities. I worry this might translate into ideological cul de sacs, and a hastening of the meaning crisis we find ourselves in.

As someone who traverses the noösphere as a matter of profession (as a wizard), I care about our knowledge commons. I find it fascinating how knowledge is cultivated, developed and distributed—yet I’m not quite sure what this next chapter may bring.

Suffice to say: it might be time to once again consider where we make our home in the attention economy. I was never on the Wordpress train alas—but the independent web is very appealing right now. I’m also fascinated with what is unfurling with lens protocol (though it is still in its infancy, and there are many adoption obstacles yet to overcome). And discord remains an enduring haven (if you have the patience and wit to navigate it)—though I am not sure how subject the platform is to the whims of billionaires. Maybe it will get bought out and rendered terrible; who knows.

In preparing this museletter for you, I also discovered farcaster. In my cursory exploration of this, I found myself appreciating Varun Srinivasan’s reasoning of ‘Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks’. The more I look into it, the more I feel as though we may be on the cusp of something here; a new conceptual paradigm of protocols, not platforms. Perhaps someday I will relay, but in the meantime here is a decent article on social media protocols (as distinct from platforms).

I asked midjourney to conjure something related to ‘social media protocols’. The initial outputs were not great, so I added ‘frens and ferns’ into the mix, just for randomness. Why frens? It’s cute internet slang corruption of ‘friend’. Why ferns? They are fractal and unfurl, like all of us. Here’s what midjourney manifested.

I feel like it did well to capture the inevitability of communication silos whilst also acknowledging the entanglement of it all. No doubt there’s some mycelium at play here, though I don’t quite know enough about the mechanism to reliably relay the metaphor.

Writing about all of this—and coming across pattern language notions like ‘town square’—reminds me of my friend Kev McGillivray, who first taught me the basics of coding as I attempted to make my own humble website from scratch and join the independent web. (I’m so restless with regards to my virtual abode, it seems!). Kev is one of a few paragon exemplar friends I have that consistently demonstrates the qualities and virtues of a good teacher—warm, encouraging, patient, erudite, sagacious. Recently, Kev shared his Word for the year with me, and I find myself inspired once again by the concept.

All I know at this stage is that: momentum inhibits reinvention. Sometimes we need some ebb in order to find our flow. Disruption to the default grants us the perspective and distance to venture beyond it.

You’ll hear from me at least once more before the year end. But in the meantime, I’d love to see you at The Rekindling this Thursday, if you can make it. And I would encourage you to cultivate some kind of Deep Pause in your own momentum, sometime before our next solstice. A chance to take stock and to contemplate what meaningful progress might be for you, in the next chapter of your unfurling story.*

Much warmth,
jf

* The Ritual of Becoming remains free for you, if you’d like some assistance—letsgetmythical is the code. 🧡

PS: Before I go, here is a lovely piece of scientific poetry the dangerlam shared with me—The Voices of Birds and the Language of Belonging by David G Haskell; an auditory delight. Perhaps best paired with Dawn Chorus by Hidden Orchestra. 🦜