coops and governance

gave a very casual talk this week at a month-long retreat i’ve been at in the adirondack mountains :-) my friend wes and i hosted a “crypto double feature” where i talked about distributed coops and they covered rsa cryptography.

have been thinking a lot about how crypto and blockchain tech can be used for community building and organizing, specifically for facilitating the distribution of wealth, supporting creative and activist communities, and redefining the way we govern social systems and resource sharing.

particular topics of interest include: distributed coops (discos), universal basic income in blockchain networks (who watches the watchmen?), commons-based peer production (cbpp), and cities and governance.

here are the slides below:

a very huge thank you to my friend kadallah for introducing me to discos (distributed cooperative organizations) and for all their deep insights and inspirations and our many conversations on distributed communities and worker-coops for artists and activists!

special shoutouts as well to friends ryan, bert, wes, ember, and joe for being sounding boards throughout this month as i talk endlessly on this topic :-)

on a more technical note — i’ve been reading more recently on zero knowledge proofs and zksnarks/zkstarks. thank you to ember for their casual talk + discussion on zkp’s (my notes here)!

hypnopompia -- published fiction story w/ kernel mag

hypnopompia

— a story about dreams, brainwaves, music, and relationships.

i recently published a speculative fiction story with kernel magazine! i wrote most of the story during a writing retreat with the reboot writer studio in asheville, north carolina.

many thanks to saffron huang, jamie wang, jasmine sun, andrew yoon, and many more in the community + friends for all the support and feedback. read it online here or buy the print mag here :-)

sleep, dreams, and brain waves

gave a casual talk on sleep, dreams, and brain waves! to a qualia interest group through interact. some topics covered:

  • brain wave frequencies and brain states

    • delta, theta, alpha, smr, beta, gamma

  • sleep and dreams

    • sleep stages, rem sleep, sleep and eeg

    • liminal dream states: hypnagogia, hypnopompia, sleep paralysis

    • theories of dreaming

    • lucid dreaming

    • oneirogens, aka dream herbs

  • neurofeedback

    • history and applications

  • binaural beats

    • hearing theory, frequency theory

    • brain wave entrainment

    • solfeggio tones

  • visual reconstruction of dreams

here are the slides:

i’ve been on a real neuroscience + neurofeedback + brain waves kick this year and have been really interested in getting into dream research! i read dream researcher allan hobson’s dream life: an experimental memoir and currently reading jennifer dumpert’s liminal dreaming: exploring consciousness at the edges of sleep. i also wrote a speculative fiction short story earlier this year exploring dream therapy, neurofeedback, binaural beats, and music, to be published later this summer :-) excited to share it once it’s out!

i’ve been particularly interested in:

  • neurofeedback + eeg + music

  • therapeutic applications of lucid dreaming

  • dream generation and reconstruction

  • autoencoders for brain states and dreams

if any of these topics interest you, please get in touch! i would love to collaborate or chat more about any of these explorations :-)