Funology's big sister

One of the key axioms of funology is that we are looking to drop social barriers to create experiences which are not otherwise possible. That the way to radicalize people is to create an unusually wonderful experience in the context of a party or festival and thus transform their perceptions about what is possible.

I just figured out there is an analogy for why i do workshops. I proselytize about a number of topics: funology, co-empowerment, honest seduction, memetics, polyamory, new culture, nukes and more. And in a good workshop we are looking for a vaguely similar type of barrier lowering that we get at a top ranked party. But instead of lowering social barriers we are lowering ideological ones. A good workshop hypnotizes like the best party music, it creates an experience in which you can imagine things happening and you being part of them in a way in that seemed unlikely or even impossible before the workshop. The job of the cultural revolutionary is to present powerful progressive ideas if manners so seductive that critics change their minds.

Robbery of the Week

Angie gets the prize for most clever amplification. One of my slightly uncomfortable self crafted aphorisms is "Every gift is an obligation." If you have a talent or capacity your job is to figure out how to best serve humanity with your gift and then do that. Angie heard this and tricked it out a bit. "Every great gift has a great obligation." As i was thinking about what i would do this summer, pondering doing more workshops on cultural things or organizing a canvas to stop the local reactor complex from expanding, Angie said an insightful thing. "Many people can stop reactors, very few can spark a cultural revolution." Of course, she is foolishly assuming we will have some measure of success (and there seem precious few people willing to fight reactors these days), but the logic is tight. And in the non-exclusive thinking of new culture, we will try to do it all.