Node Club Tarot Readings

My first thought on this is that I’ll try and use the nodes drawn to inspire [[prefigurative]] visions of the future. Little microsnippets of [[speculative fiction]].

Reading #1

I drew:[[galaksija]] / [[timechain]] / [[2021]] / [[Ask]] / [[Cimbalom Street Musicians]] / [[arcosanti]].

This is my understanding of what the things are:

• [[galaksija]]. A homebuild computer from yugoslavia in the 1980s.
• [[timechain]]. "Time is your most valuable currency". timechain.com looks like some cryptocurrency grift, but time as currency I like.
• [[2021]]. The year 2021.
• [[Ask]]. The act of asking something.
• [[Cimbalom Street Musicians]]. Pretty awesome sounding music played on a hammered dulcimer. I had never seen such instruments before.
• [[arcosanti]]. An experimental town related to [[Arcology]].

OK… so a rough sketch:

The year is [[2021]], as imagined by a science fiction writer from 1921.

A future [[solarpunk]] vertical city. An arcology. Like [[Metropolis]] if it was not-Moloch. The citizens love cimbalom. As you walk through the city, it is your soundtrack, like the [[zither]] from [[The Third Man]].

The main currency of the city is [[timebanking]]. (It makes me think a little of Time in [[The Quantum Thief]].)

Everyone has a [[Galaksija]], a [[convivial tool]] that people can freely adapt for their own purposes.

The Galaksija’s are networked together in to the Galaksija Brain. The city is [[participatory]] and [[municipalist]], and city-wide decisions are made by [[Ask]]ing the citizens through the Galaksija Brain.

Reading #2

I drew: [[ideology requires consensus thinking]] / [[radio equipment wishlist]] / [[Anti-authoritarian networking]] / [[maintain]] / [[ways to run code]] / [[Repairability standard]]

• [[ideology requires consensus thinking]]. It is hard to escape hegemony.
• [[radio equipment wishlist]]. A mostly empty node, but within a few clicks you are in the land of [[amateur radio]].
• [[Anti-authoritarian networking]]. Designing a network such that it avoids implicit imbalances of authority. See also [[Authority in networks]].
• [[maintain]]. The act of maintenance. I will probably riff on [[Hail the maintainers]] here.
• [[ways to run code]]. Compilication and interpretation.
• [[Repairability standard]]. The attempt to produce a standard means of describing how repairable something is.

What may be a thread here?

Maintaining a network of repairable radios in an anti-authoritarian topology. Perhaps with the distrubution of anti-consensus samizdat software across the airwaves, a la the code broadcasts in [[Socialism’s DIY Computer]]. Interpreted by the receiver.

Reading #3