#generativity

part 8/10 of my senior thesis project !! part 7

The pieces in this series explore the different stages of psychological development that a person may go through in their life, based on Erik Erikson’s theory

STAGE 7: GENERATIVITY VS. STAGNATION (40-65 YEARS)

VIRTUE: CARE

As we grow older, we start to focus on giving back to our community and/or nurturing the next generation. We want to leave our mark and change things for the better. Contribution leads to a sense of productivity and accomplishment; by helping others grow, we also grow alongside them.

Relationships: Family, Colleagues, Community, The Younger Generation

Events: Career Developments, Raising Children, Community Work, Creating a Home

Here’s what unlisting doesn’t do: it doesn’t hide the posts you make from the people who follow you. A writer can’t make threads “collapse” for their readers by publishing an initial post and then unlisting the subsequent posts. It would be fantastic if this was the case, but it’s not.

This misunderstanding about how unlisting works is so prevalent among Mastodon users that it might just be the first urban legend of the Fediverse. There are even beginners’ guides for new Mastodon users that repeat this misunderstanding and insist that unlisting your threaded posts is a considerate thing to do.

That’s just wrong. What’s more, it’s counterproductive, because hashtags in unlisted posts are also hidden. Remember, by design, Mastodon doesn’t have a search function — instead the way you include a post in the federated discussion of a topic is by opting in with a hashtag.

Unlisting the posts in a thread won’t make your thread less intrusive for your readers — but it will rip the hashtags you include out of the public discourse, even though you’ve followed the Fediverse’s best practice for making them a part of that discourse.

Perhaps someone with the capital or technical know-how will make the technical changes needed to make unlisting work the way that everyone intuitively assumes it works (maybe this post will even contribute to that decision). But until and unless someone does, unlisting doesn’t work the way you think it does.

Really.

Mom, I remember the kind quotes you told me.

Now I will show your generativity and share them, since you cannot anymore.

My heart is forever broken, but from it’s cracks I will spread the love you gave me out to rest of the world.

I will use this depth of agony from losing you to create a better world, in your essence.

Alien Powers

Generativity always requires the ceding of control in order to receive, in exchange, the powers of an alien (or algorithmic) logic.

--Kate Compton, Causal Creators

One thing I’ve been putting a lot of thought into lately is why we use procedural generation for anything. I (obviously) think that it’s a good thing that we do, but I want to figure out the motivations for why that is.

It’s certainly not to save money or time, given that I’ve never seen evidence that it does much of either. One thing that it does do is enable us to do things that would be impossible without generativity. Elite generates galaxies because that’s the only way to do it at that vast, inhuman scale--we can quibble that not shipping the game on a million floppy disks saved the developers money, I suppose, but the real point is that it enabled them to touch the sublime of infinity.

Generativity, according to Kate Compton, is a tradeoff between absolute control and “the powers of an alien logic”. This is, I think, one reason why it has remained an enduring part of games in particular: being able to tap into this alien-ness as a creative partner means that we can make things that are impossible for humans to create otherwise.

They might be impossible because making something that large or complex is beyond practical human consideration, or because the machine’s alien perception can show us things that we would have been cognitively blind to. It’s precisely because the generator follows alien logic (even when carefully constructed by human logic) that it can create things that we humans would be unable to.

So one reason why we use generativity is precisely because it lets us harness this alien power.

part 7/10 of my senior thesis project !! part 6

The pieces in this series explore the different stages of psychological development that a person may go through in their life, based on Erik Erikson’s theory

STAGE 7: GENERATIVITY VS. STAGNATION (40-65 YEARS)

VIRTUE: CARE

As we grow older, we start to focus on giving back to our community and/or nurturing the next generation. We want to leave our mark and change things for the better. Contribution leads to a sense of productivity and accomplishment; by helping others grow, we also grow alongside them.

Relationships: Family, Colleagues, Community, The Younger Generation

Events: Career Developments, Raising Children, Community Work, Creating a Home

Here are some tips for being a better reader of Mastodon threads:

Put threads in order with one click: Posts from a thread show up out of order in your timeline, which is confusing! But clicking any of those posts will switch to a properly ordered view of the thread.

Expand every post in a thread with one click: A thread that uses content warnings will show up in your timeline as a series of one-line headers (“Long thread /1,” “Long thread /2,” … “Long thread/n”), and any graphics associated with them will be rendered as blank rectangles. This is by design. To expand all of these posts with a single click and unmask their graphics, just click the little “eye” icon in the top right corner of your screen.

Unfollow and switch to another feed: Mastodon doesn’t have algorithmic boosting. The only posts you’ll see in your home timeline are posted or boosted by people you explicitly follow. If you don’t like Mastodon threads, consider unfollowing users who post them. No one is obliged to read anyone else’s feed! This is especially good advice if the person you’ve followed offers their threads in another medium, like a blog with RSS. Just switch from following them on Mastodon to following them via RSS.

Use lists and filters: If you want to follow someone who posts threads, you can filter out those threads (provided they use consistent content warning labels), and follow thread-based accounts via a list. That way, you can read the threads when you’re in the mood for them, but they won’t show up in your main timeline

Twitter is a neat illustration of the problem with benevolent dictatorships: they work well, but fail badly. Because they are property — not protocols — they can change hands, and overnight, you get a new, malevolent dictator who wants to retool the system for extraction, rather than collaboration.

By contrast, ActivityPub-derived services like Mastodon are open protocols. Users who want new features, or changes to existing ones, can either unilaterally implement them (if they have technical skills or capital to hire technicians); or they can appeal to others to implement them.

This is clearly still a two-tier system. People with skills or capital can make the changes they want, while people lacking both have to appeal to others to take up their cause.

But whatever the defects in this system, it is still vastly superior to the way Twitter works, both pre- and post-Musk. In the pre-Musk era, users could only make changes by appealing to a largely benevolent — but thin-stretched, opaque and inconstant — dictator. In the post-Musk era, users can only make changes by appealing to a dictator who is thin-stretched, inconstant and opaque — and malevolent.

Contrast this with Mastodon and other ActivityPub-derived systems: users have the option of directly implementing the features they desire (by their own hands or by hiring technicians). But they also have a whole constellation of people to appeal to if they desire a change they can’t make on their own — anyone with the technical skills or capital to effect a change. And then there’s a third, emerging category: forming user cooperatives that pool their capital.

So yes, even if Mastodon isn’t a system that anyone can change, it’s still a system that everyone can change.