Excellent… and ready for this series to be a book!
Two thoughts:
(1) An extension of the “you’re the sum of your 5 people” quote is that it increasingly applies to parasocial relationships. In your model, you could view this as the content that the “real” people in your life are curating. But when you spend enough time with the authors of that content — maybe especially in “living” formats — they themselves become part of your cocoon.
(2) A few excerpts in this reminded me of Christopher Alexander’s Timeless Way of Building. The aliveness of your gallery, and your cocoon, is dependent on the scaffolding and collection of alive patterns therein.
I do include parasocial relationships. This post is a bit gesturing in its feel but I do have parasocial relationships in mind when I mention "books, blogs" as part of the milieu. I think it is a very interesting and underappreciated phenomena.
And thinking about the cocoon as something designed with Alexander styled aliveness, wholeness, etc--very interesting prompt.
“We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone. […] We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them”
As for Alexander, I can only concur, and I would add that Alexander’s fifteen properties from “The Nature of Order” and the dancing with the cocoon are a great fit when thinking about our cocoons as systems. As I wrote a while ago (shameless plug, I know ☺️):
“I think that the 15 fundamental properties in itself are kind of a high-level pattern language — one that can be applied when we ‘dance with systems’”.
It is not a shameless plug if it provides additional context for people who want to go deeper - then it is called being considerate. It looked interesting! I'll read it later.
I agree that these things are all intertwined, what I'm talking about about social milieus, and Alexander, and systems thinking, and (in reference to another comment) Engelbart-styled augmentation.
My sense of self includes my phone, connected to the internet, and all the apps I use. Sometimes I bring up this thought experiment of what would you rather give up: your phone or your left hand? The fact that it's even a hard choice makes the point that your phone is a part of you in the same way that your hands are a part of you or your clothes are a part of you. This view makes it especially silly to not let kids use technology when they take tests, for example. It's not as pretty as in the movies but we're basically already cyborgs. It's like we're in an iron man suit when we are using our technology. Bret Victor and dynamicland point out that one of the few places where we can't bring our technology is into interpersonal conversations like at the dinner table with family. I think this is why there are some of the worst arguments when you're at the dinner table with your relatives. It's like two people who are used to being in iron man suits now having to take those suits off and become regular monkeys. You can't use all the regular tools, looking things up, linking to things, etc. And of course, many of these tools are actually other people and communities. In some sense it's weird that I think of them as tools instead of a social context like you do. But I definitely do think of Twitter as a tool first. Anyways that was pretty rambly but hopefully somewhat legible :)
There is an only partly conscious parallel between the way I talk here and a sort of Engelbartian technology as human augmentation idea. So those things are deeply entwined, and separating perhaps rather artificial. Though I do notice that I don't feel that my tools are so much a part of me as people and specific authors. My notetaking system is. Twitter is a tiny bit (but thinking about that as a tool first feels wrong to me, Twitter the tool is pretty terrible in many ways, but certain subgraphs makes it valuable). Def my email. LLMs increasingly. But I've always had a somewhat distant relationship to technology--never owning a smartphone etc.
But that cultural ideal that you should keep tech out of interpersonal relationships, that doesn't apply in my cultural context. My family is always flinging out phones to look up facts when we talk, and that goes back a long way, how grandma would always rush out to get encyclopedias and map books at christmas if we talked about something. Very enjoyable.
Lovely piece, and as it so happens I've been thinking about the relationship between reading, writing, and friendship ... about how one manifests themselves as a writer such that they find "friends," which may be the cocoon you refer to. It's been a devil of a piece to write, which I find I can quantify by the number of times Sara turns it back to me with substantive suggestions for revision. On one recent edit, she was kind enough to number my paragraphs for reordering in the way that she thought would create a clearer story. Of course she was write. Anyway, you'll find it amusing that I mention you in it, and another of your readers, David Roberts, as both of you informed my thinking. It's a fruitful little community we find here, isn't it?
It is true that writing has become the main vehicle through which I shape my milieu. And I'm also so excited about how . . . how to put it. Well: when I started out, like when I wrote about it in "A blog post is a very long . .. " I was thinking about it as something that was about me. But then I get to this point where I feel that no, this is much larger than me. It is thousands of people spinning new cocoons at the same time, partly overlapping. And I have had people make friends through my blog, somehow, which is . . . what to call it? It feels like a part of my cocoon becomes a place where others can spend a little time and use as a home. And I guess that that is what we are all doing in a sense: by tending our corner of the graph we create spaces for others too, sometimes complete strangers. I had someone in India email me to say him and some people he just got to now at university had an impromptu seminar on one of my essays. So I was there, in a sense, but it was like this bigger cocooning going on that I was only a phantom part of. Or something. I'm rambling.
Excellent… and ready for this series to be a book!
Two thoughts:
(1) An extension of the “you’re the sum of your 5 people” quote is that it increasingly applies to parasocial relationships. In your model, you could view this as the content that the “real” people in your life are curating. But when you spend enough time with the authors of that content — maybe especially in “living” formats — they themselves become part of your cocoon.
(2) A few excerpts in this reminded me of Christopher Alexander’s Timeless Way of Building. The aliveness of your gallery, and your cocoon, is dependent on the scaffolding and collection of alive patterns therein.
I do include parasocial relationships. This post is a bit gesturing in its feel but I do have parasocial relationships in mind when I mention "books, blogs" as part of the milieu. I think it is a very interesting and underappreciated phenomena.
And thinking about the cocoon as something designed with Alexander styled aliveness, wholeness, etc--very interesting prompt.
The part on “dancing with your cocoon” struck a chord and reminded me of Donella Meadows “Dancing with Systems” (https://thesystemsthinker.com/dancing-with-systems/):
“We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone. […] We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them”
As for Alexander, I can only concur, and I would add that Alexander’s fifteen properties from “The Nature of Order” and the dancing with the cocoon are a great fit when thinking about our cocoons as systems. As I wrote a while ago (shameless plug, I know ☺️):
“I think that the 15 fundamental properties in itself are kind of a high-level pattern language — one that can be applied when we ‘dance with systems’”.
(from https://mycvs.org/2020/07/12/of-patterns-and-dancing-architecting-ecosystems-and-bureaucracies/)
It is not a shameless plug if it provides additional context for people who want to go deeper - then it is called being considerate. It looked interesting! I'll read it later.
I agree that these things are all intertwined, what I'm talking about about social milieus, and Alexander, and systems thinking, and (in reference to another comment) Engelbart-styled augmentation.
My sense of self includes my phone, connected to the internet, and all the apps I use. Sometimes I bring up this thought experiment of what would you rather give up: your phone or your left hand? The fact that it's even a hard choice makes the point that your phone is a part of you in the same way that your hands are a part of you or your clothes are a part of you. This view makes it especially silly to not let kids use technology when they take tests, for example. It's not as pretty as in the movies but we're basically already cyborgs. It's like we're in an iron man suit when we are using our technology. Bret Victor and dynamicland point out that one of the few places where we can't bring our technology is into interpersonal conversations like at the dinner table with family. I think this is why there are some of the worst arguments when you're at the dinner table with your relatives. It's like two people who are used to being in iron man suits now having to take those suits off and become regular monkeys. You can't use all the regular tools, looking things up, linking to things, etc. And of course, many of these tools are actually other people and communities. In some sense it's weird that I think of them as tools instead of a social context like you do. But I definitely do think of Twitter as a tool first. Anyways that was pretty rambly but hopefully somewhat legible :)
There is an only partly conscious parallel between the way I talk here and a sort of Engelbartian technology as human augmentation idea. So those things are deeply entwined, and separating perhaps rather artificial. Though I do notice that I don't feel that my tools are so much a part of me as people and specific authors. My notetaking system is. Twitter is a tiny bit (but thinking about that as a tool first feels wrong to me, Twitter the tool is pretty terrible in many ways, but certain subgraphs makes it valuable). Def my email. LLMs increasingly. But I've always had a somewhat distant relationship to technology--never owning a smartphone etc.
But that cultural ideal that you should keep tech out of interpersonal relationships, that doesn't apply in my cultural context. My family is always flinging out phones to look up facts when we talk, and that goes back a long way, how grandma would always rush out to get encyclopedias and map books at christmas if we talked about something. Very enjoyable.
Lovely piece, and as it so happens I've been thinking about the relationship between reading, writing, and friendship ... about how one manifests themselves as a writer such that they find "friends," which may be the cocoon you refer to. It's been a devil of a piece to write, which I find I can quantify by the number of times Sara turns it back to me with substantive suggestions for revision. On one recent edit, she was kind enough to number my paragraphs for reordering in the way that she thought would create a clearer story. Of course she was write. Anyway, you'll find it amusing that I mention you in it, and another of your readers, David Roberts, as both of you informed my thinking. It's a fruitful little community we find here, isn't it?
Send it to me when Sara is happy with it!
It is true that writing has become the main vehicle through which I shape my milieu. And I'm also so excited about how . . . how to put it. Well: when I started out, like when I wrote about it in "A blog post is a very long . .. " I was thinking about it as something that was about me. But then I get to this point where I feel that no, this is much larger than me. It is thousands of people spinning new cocoons at the same time, partly overlapping. And I have had people make friends through my blog, somehow, which is . . . what to call it? It feels like a part of my cocoon becomes a place where others can spend a little time and use as a home. And I guess that that is what we are all doing in a sense: by tending our corner of the graph we create spaces for others too, sometimes complete strangers. I had someone in India email me to say him and some people he just got to now at university had an impromptu seminar on one of my essays. So I was there, in a sense, but it was like this bigger cocooning going on that I was only a phantom part of. Or something. I'm rambling.
Oh and Henrik, I'm just preparing my piece for publication on Sunday and I find that I used the word "cocoon!"