This oil painting was done a long time ago and I was never really happy with it. A few days ago, I took it off my pile of useless junk art and started adding to it. Today, I finished the layer of cell-like red shapes covering the entire thing. To say that I'm happy with it might be overly generous. It is finished, though. And I wish I could have managed to take a higher quality picture of it. Here's a closeup of one of the painting's more interesting sections.
Today a cluster headache woke me up. It was very minor, lasting only about fifteen minutes, and I was able to get back to sleep. It rained this afternoon. I walked about a mile in it and became totally soaked. Then I got home and the power went out for an hour or two. Fortunately, there was still enough daylight left to paint by.
Curiously, I found the rain and the power outage almost relaxing. With no real work to do, I spent the day in sort of an in between space in my thinking. My fortieth birthday is coming up fast and I've been trying to picture my life over the next few years. I'm sure I'll do a bunch of writing and probably some art, but beyond that, I can't really picture it.
A big part of what I want to do in the coming years involves telling stories about how technology empowers people to make the world more free and equitable. The writing I do in the crypto space satisfies this desire to some extent. So does writing my sci fi novels. But there's a part of me that wants to do something bigger.
In my early twenties, I was involved with the intentional community movement. Living in crowded cooperative houses and visiting communes, I discovered that communal living in the US had two great failings. The first was economic. The second was social. These days, I consider both of these failings to be technological. The intentional communities I learned about and participated in relied upon economic and social technologies that produced undesirable outcomes.
Crypto and blockchain tech could change this equation in an economic sense. And rumors have begun to circulate about new intentional communities forming out of the crypto economy. I'd love to write about these projects as they develop. I'll be paying particular attention to the social technologies they employ.
I've participated in anarchist communities where critical issues were never addressed because endless meandering talk accompanied every little decision. I've also seen communes that used travelers as slaves in agricultural operations. And then there are all the situations where individuals or small groups set up mini capitalistic aristocracies and call them cooperatives. These anarchist, communist, and capitalist social systems fail to produce optimal outcomes, especially for those of low rank within them.
The online community Eden is testing out the idea of fractal democracy, which is basically a way create hierarchies as needed with special elections. The outcomes this produces have yet to be determined. But it is definitely an area to watch.
