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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

>In the short term, additional spaces will be started by people who have contributed significantly to an existing space and have internalized the culture and its values

there's something ominous, weird, and sort of damning about being protective of your "culture and values" in this way and to this extent. If Dynamicland offered a truly novel computing paradigm, it should be one that is accessible by other cultures. If it offers a valuable culture and worthwhile values, those values should be viral on their merits. They should be broadcast, rather than kept closely guarded.

If you have to carefully indoctrinate new users into your culture in order to protect it and keep out the Others who might ruin your culture with wrongthink, maybe what you actually have is a cult.

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I think he's afraid, and rightly so, of it getting adopted without being understood but then getting more popular than the original idea and drowning it out. It's the same reason people speak against introducing Douglas Engelbart as the "inventor of the mouse" when he was so much more than that. Look at Scratch. I think it's a pretty objectively a bad way to introduce programming systems to children, especially over something like Logo, but it is incredibly popular. And I'm not referring to the so-called visual aspect of it. I think it's just fundamentally a very uninteresting permutation and medium of teaching.

Yes-ish, I somewhat agree with your critique. I think it's a temporary measure though.

It is very America-centric and that's very sad to me.

I think Bret is a bit hesitant to share the stuff before people understand what it is, to prevent the same problem that happened when Jobs visited PARC and walked away with the idea of "we need to build computers with the desktop metaphor", without understanding at all that it was always meant to be about authoring and sharing, not about the visual metaphors.

Regardless, I hope to see more actual standalone instances/offshoots of dynamicland.

> to prevent the same problem that happened when Jobs visited PARC and walked away with the idea of "we need to build computers with the desktop metaphor", without understanding at all that it was always meant to be about authoring and sharing, not about the visual metaphors

Can you expand on this, or share some links so I can learn about it? I've not heard the story framed like this before. I'm interested to learn "what we missed out on" as a result of "visual metaphors" becoming overemphasised in the public mind.

I think you're missing that this is as much a social technology as a computing technology. Immediate analogy would be stuff like the 'open space' model adopted from anarchist organising into design thinking. Which unfortunately lost its function in the transition. Moving from being a way of generating and consolidating multiple perspectives / ideas / intentions, into a way of generating engagement without influence on a projects direction.

It doesn't seem like the effort here is to keep out any group, but rather to maintain a cohesive structure to the technical and group work aspects of it. Social technologies can be as brittle as they are useful, and abstracting / commodifying them can often make them work in a way that directly undermines their creators intentions.

> there's something [...] about being protective of your "culture and values" in this way and to this extent

Yes, AND it may also be because it's kind of innovation in the open, before it's really ready or that all the critical angles are fixed, and they might not want spoil specifics they would like to make flourish and present to the whole world, and see them ... let's say half-assed, or misunderstood enough that it does not "jell".

In the end, it will be embraced in some way. But it's understandable that they have a specific idea in mind.

See it as a trailer for a movie where post-prod is not yet fully done, perhaps.

Ideas are fragile, etc. There's a point at which you want feedback, but not before you've built enough for people to see the vision. Depending on your audience, you may need to build more or less to get to that point.

Still, they've been working on this for yeeeears.

This is how most hacker spaces and fab-labs and even community gardens I know operate.

Rule 0: "Behave in a way that lets us not need to make additional rules" and things like that.

And I can doubly see it, if you have something ~new, and I could very well see that this is the thing that works if and only if you play along.

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