The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker (1985)
rheingold.com
rheingold.com
The challenge of course with having visions is whether or not they are relevant to the world.
My hope is to retire and be absolutely prolific without having to constrain myself by a shared engineering discipline (i.e. I'll write my own language and ship code that people will not understand without a heavy investment of time; market failure for sure, but I'll be happy because it is my art)
Perhaps not a great way to make money, but likely a good way to get a cult following!
That's why we evolved groups to overcome individual weakness. Then bigger groups to overcome group weakness. Understanding how and why groups form/evolve/break/merge etc will change how you think about what can and can't be done by yourself.
Check out Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation, and Complexity of Cooperation.
It is used in some corporations.
Labor coops are usually corporations. So are labor unions. So are consumer coops, which also apply the democratic principle with a different constituency.
Although these days the lines seems to be blurring into democracy since corporations are getting larger horizontally and vertically.
One reason is that it's much easier to capture entrepreneurial rents for a capital-managed firm. A capitalist with a grand plan can hire a lot of workers and realize his plan. In a labor coop, a majority has to agree that the plan is sound - and if it's a first-mover thing, it's hard to keep some workers from starting their own business and getting there first. Dow gives some other reasons too.
Labor coops do exist, but they're usually not startups, and some types of business are much more common than others.
The Mondragon [1] corporation organizations around these lines.
In general - as I understand it - you could view Unions and Coops as attempts to apply democratic processes to operating a business.
[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-at-Work-Cure-Capitalism/dp/...
[1] - https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/
EDIT: for clarity and link organization
Well explained here - https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25426
Nor is rationality itself necessarily an ideal end goal. In fact, this obsession with rationality (exemplified by sites like Less Wrong and in general by scientism-adherents) is itself a perfect example of my point - a group of individuals stuck in their worldview, incapable of seeing beyond the walls of their own local culture.
For all we know there are a lot of top notch dreamers sitting in the Serengeti today that are going to die there because the groups they are surrounded by can't help them in anyway.
Without the right group surrounding the individual good luck realizing dreams and changing the behavior or thinking of any other group.
And for a contrarian example, consider someone like Nietzsche. Probably in the top 5 most influential philosophers of the past ±150 years and yet he wrote most of his books alone while wandering Europe. He also published most of them at his own expense and didn't have much of a readership until near his death, at which point he had gone mad from syphilis. There was no group around him and no community helping him. Yet here we are, deeply influenced by his ideas.
The group of people scatter out from their starting point but have to remain close enough to communicate their results (or lack of) to each other. The alternative is a depth-first search that immediately heads for a likely location, but that is hard to parallelize.
Quoting from the article, Engelbart's 1963 work has these lines:
"This hypothetical writing machine permits you to use a new process for composing text. For instance, trial drafts can rapidly be composed from rearranged excerpts of old drafts, together with new words or passages which you insert by hand typing. Your first draft may represent a free outpouring of thoughts in any order, with the inspection of foregoing thoughts continuously stimulating new considerations and ideas to be entered. If the tangle of thoughts represented by the draft becomes too complex, you can compile a reordered draft quickly. It would be practical for you to accommodate more complexity in the trails of thought you might build in search of the path that suits your needs."
The year was 1963 and the first word processors such as WordPerfect, came in 1979, 16 years later, and the mouse demo only took place 5 years later. Basically, Engelbart talked about word processors in the punch card era when there was no human-computer interaction, only programmer-computer interaction, and that too, in minimal amounts.
In comparison, Turing was taken seriously by serious mathematicians of his time, although he wrote in the 1940s about the idea of stored programs, in an era where the punch cards themselves didn't exist. This might be because his central idea was purely theoretical, and only required a construction of a hypothetical machine (a Turing machine), and thus, academics could interpret it as a thought experiment. Thought experiments are and were always considered "serious".
On the other hand, when the central idea is not theoretical, but involves construction of machines, it is interpreted as philosophical or useless. I'm saying ideas that essentially rest on engineering constructions that do not yet exist, are often dismissed in the academic space, but purely theoretical ones are found to be interesting, although they also require imagination of the non-existent.
Just a theory, I may be wrong. I just got to wondering if Engelbart had presented the idea of breaking down complexity with a more theoretical framework (e.g., constructed a mathematical model for augmented memory or something like that), would he have found NSF funding sooner?
It kind of feels like an uncanny valley effect - an effort that's immediately doable isn't as interesting (perhaps because anyone could do it). But a more radical notion is more fun.
The difference, I think, between a thought experiment and a hypothetical engineering construction is that the former have solid rules. You can argue for or against it without introducing new hypotheses. A Turing Machine is literally impossible because you cannot get unbounded amounts of memory, but the "rules of the game" are given; a word processor in 1963 is (probably) possible, but that is really all you know.
For example, take your quote. How is that different from a stack of note cards, a technology common in 1963? In that it is different from a stack of note cards, can modern word processors do what he describes ("compile a reordered draft quickly", from a too-complex tangle of thoughts)?
Punchcards were used for the 1890 US census. The standard 80 column format was introduced by IBM in 1928.
IBM introduced the 80 column punched card in 1928, and that's what computers have been using until recently. Gavioli's book music is a precursor of MIDI.
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_the_Long-Di...