Chicken @[503649395:2048:John Rinaldi] wrote a book. Here's an excerpt about Ephemerisle. He's going to have a book party on Oct 1--see below for details.
"OK, I wrote a book. It's kinda complicated to sum up in a FB post, but I included Ephemerisle in it and thought I should share it here with you. Here is one of the places I talk about it. You might agree with my take on the event. You might now. It's my dissertation, so we're supposed to argue about it. I'm making some grand points here, which isn't really my style but I'm sick of waiting for one of you smart guys to write this shit. So I wrote it. You should buy my book. You buy it by coming to my Book Release party at 111 Minna Gallery on Oct 1st. It's $20 to get in and you get a book.
Ephemerisle
Maybe you don’t believe me that festival culture is hungry for experimenting with governance and constitution writing. Well. That’s because you haven’t gone to the aquatic shitshow known as Ephemerisle. They’ve got it bad. A leaderless collective of people pointing at each other screaming “He’s in charge!” No one want central power or liability. But boy does everyone want their say. And what they are saying is pretty interesting. But the way they’re saying it is actually totally fascinating and worthy of paying attention to. You’ve never seen a more ham-handed attempt at open source government. It’s just baffling that it works. But it does. Barely. Because their intention is to experiment, not to succeed. And they totally give 100%. And fail. It’s an Engineered Disperfection™. And it’s fucking funny and messy and confounding and beautiful.
It was originally supposed to be a gradual experiment in learning how to build ocean-worthy platforms that people could live on in glorious wild freedom, a weird libertarian techno-fantasy bankrolled by Peter Theil, one of the clowns at the Republican National Convention who told us we need to make Donald Trump president…
… Thanks, Peter! You’re a real humanitarian! And now, for the rest of your life, you get to be remembered as a guy who lined up to push Donald Trump! How’s that gonna feel when people are still talking about it in 20 years, and it finally hits you that this is going right into your obituary, right after the thing about PayPal that no one is going to talk about, and just before the thing about Facebook that is going to be completely overshadowed…
... but hey, most of the best things in life stopped being what they were "supposed" to be, and now hundreds of people are renting houseboats (totally dominating and disrupting the houseboat-rental economy of the Sacramento River Delta) and getting their crazy sailor-y friends to bring their sailboats out and giving free shaky catamaran rides to gleeful revelers. Then there is the handful of people who arted up their boats into sort of back-streets-of Burning-Man-at-3a.m. sort of sad/glorious floating light and music parties (except unlike the relatively harmless boring backstreet theme camps at Burning Man, you could fall and drown or get crushed between boats or, more important, get trapped on a party with no boat to get back in), and they rented (or stole?) some giant chemical dump barge and then built an absurd "party barge" with kindergarten carpentry that actually is making the rusted old giant chemical waste barge LESS safe than when they got it, AND they are indeed making painted EDM dance floors in the water (glossy painted plywood on inflated inner tubes which, when they eventually shatter, and they will, is going to drown people) with janky floaty walkways that hang off of leaking inner tubes—and everyone with a boat who is a little bit off, or unusual, or broken, in northern California is coming on out to… float. And ride around and bump into each other and climb on each others’ boats and eat each others’ food and maybe mangle each others’ limbs. And now the moon is up and the places we are standing and talking and getting high and boogieing down and cooking and laughing and all that are all just floating around and hey jump on my boat I'll take you over to that other boat and then you are stuck on that other boat... and every moment you are inches or at best feet away from water and the safety and security of the very ground under your feet depends on the anchoring and knot-tying capacities of a lot of some very dedicated partiers whose conversations sound like a bingo game where the card reads "polyamory" "meow mix" "bitcoin" "lifehack" "paleo" "drug legalization"... but they haven't lost sight of the whole political science fiction dream that got them trapping themselves willingly in this impossible-to-escape Tijuana of a Waterworld.....
Am I making it sound as great as it is? I hope so... so I ask you: what could make a party of constant life-threatening hazards better except having to have deep druggy conversations about consent before you are allowed to risk falling off their shoddy carpentry...??
Well. It’s like this. You see, certain islands make you sign a waiver and a form that clearly states what consent is. Like, straight up, a guy tells you to your face that if you would like to touch someone you have to look them in the eye and ask if you can. All I could think about was how cynical I was that my default feeling was to think, "Criminals don’t obey laws.” Or, “This doesn’t apply to me. I’m not going to touch anyone.” But it does apply to me. Because this is their island and if I want to come on it I have to sign the waiver and listen to the guy in fun fur pants and a rainbow wig tell me to keep my dirty mitts OFF. And they want to be able to say that they gave everyone the same spiel. That everyone signed the waiver that is totally not legally binding in the state of California. Sorry. Other islands have different ideologies or rules. Of course it’s hard to know them. They’re not really written down anywhere. I told you it was a shit show.
Ephemerisle can not scale. It can’t get bigger. It can’t be monetized. It’s in the middle of the delta next to a shipping lane. There would be no way to set up a gate and collect money. They pay for things with fundraising sites and donations. No central organizing structure. Another leaderless collective populist art gathering. They’re popping up all over. It’s hands down the most dangerous thing I’ve ever been to. It’s a miracle that shit doesn’t get hard and go sideways. But ya know, in that risk is the very ore of the human condition. Or something.
This is something I picked up from the Ephemerisle page:
“Trust is earned, not freely given out to ostensible strangers. Without a 'constitution' that stipulates 'rules' of engagement, chaos and natural disequilibrium will occur. The rules (especially as it relates to consent) are railguards set up to dissuade 'bad actors' will ruining a good time by all.”(sic)
So some islands at Ephemerisle are becoming their own, brief, constitutional systems. Written out, established, and voluntarily accepted by everyone who steps foot on that sovereign territory. They’re doing this. This is happening. And what I’ve seen, over the years, is people taking parts of each other’s constitutional styles and stealing them, while other parts they are staying far away from. So that while there are endless unique constitutions, and some of them are really bizarre, maybe next year a few islands will agree on a common document. So Ephemerisle is developing elements of a common constitution, all on its own, without even trying. I wonder how many other events are doing the same thing using the miracle of parallel evolution? The mind reels…
Pirate utopias
While we’re talking about Ephemerisle, it’s worth pointing out: pirate utopias probably existed. Pirate utopias are kind of like Ephemerisle and also not like Ephemerisle: they’re when people drop out of society and get a boat and raid and pillage and do all the nasty piratey stuff. Be hearty seamen.
Not like Ephemerisle.
But then they go back to their secret island in the Caribbean. Where they argue politics and experiment with different models of organizing their secret island governments. They were probably polyamorous and very likely followed the “paleo” diet.
See? Like Ephemerisle!
Can you image the council meetings? On a Caribbean island paradise with a group of dropout pirates? History is impoverished that there was no Boswell there. I’ll bet they came up with some cool shit.
I wonder if any of those people from any of those places ever ended up back in society. And if that happened, if any of them continued their interest in governmental forms. And if they did, is it possible that those ideas ended up being adopted in the places they settled in and were they copied by others to end up here with us in our American charter? Or by the miracle of parallel evolution they were the first people to call for a global constitution? If today I’m singing the same song does that somehow make me kinda a pirate? God I hope so!
Pirates building utopia, what can be better than that?
Burning Man
Burning Man came so close to being the art revolution we need. So close. So painfully close.
You should imagine me with an empty bottle of bourbon in my hand and three days of stubble as I type this.
So close.
But when the time came for Larry to write a constitution for a new kind of art movement and create the civil society around it, he wrote the “Ten Principles” instead.
(sad trombone sound)
A long time ago, I presented him with an argument for 3 things that our community needed: voting, membership and a constitution. I’ve been debating with Larry about this for twenty years. (twenty years!)
To be fair, Burning Man’s gotten really successful since he wrote those Ten Principles in 2004. The event’s just gotten bigger, and more famous, with more ticket sales, and more expensive tickets, and a big bunch of people donating money. Hey, they even bought real estate!
Sound familiar?
Let’s assume that, for the purposes of this book, that their view of civics is one of empowerment for the citizens. Let’s also assume that they see their event as occupying sovereign space where they would like liberties and freedoms to blossom and help their citizens create that magic environment that summons the duende. Let’s assume that their intentions are good. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Before synchronized eye rolling turns into synchronized face palming, let’s examine Larry’s Ten Principles, listed here, and consider them afresh.... (to read the rest, you must own the book!)
https://www.facebook.com/events/1727978934135754/
"OK, I wrote a book. It's kinda complicated to sum up in a FB post, but I included Ephemerisle in it and thought I should share it here with you. Here is one of the places I talk about it. You might agree with my take on the event. You might now. It's my dissertation, so we're supposed to argue about it. I'm making some grand points here, which isn't really my style but I'm sick of waiting for one of you smart guys to write this shit. So I wrote it. You should buy my book. You buy it by coming to my Book Release party at 111 Minna Gallery on Oct 1st. It's $20 to get in and you get a book.
Ephemerisle
Maybe you don’t believe me that festival culture is hungry for experimenting with governance and constitution writing. Well. That’s because you haven’t gone to the aquatic shitshow known as Ephemerisle. They’ve got it bad. A leaderless collective of people pointing at each other screaming “He’s in charge!” No one want central power or liability. But boy does everyone want their say. And what they are saying is pretty interesting. But the way they’re saying it is actually totally fascinating and worthy of paying attention to. You’ve never seen a more ham-handed attempt at open source government. It’s just baffling that it works. But it does. Barely. Because their intention is to experiment, not to succeed. And they totally give 100%. And fail. It’s an Engineered Disperfection™. And it’s fucking funny and messy and confounding and beautiful.
It was originally supposed to be a gradual experiment in learning how to build ocean-worthy platforms that people could live on in glorious wild freedom, a weird libertarian techno-fantasy bankrolled by Peter Theil, one of the clowns at the Republican National Convention who told us we need to make Donald Trump president…
… Thanks, Peter! You’re a real humanitarian! And now, for the rest of your life, you get to be remembered as a guy who lined up to push Donald Trump! How’s that gonna feel when people are still talking about it in 20 years, and it finally hits you that this is going right into your obituary, right after the thing about PayPal that no one is going to talk about, and just before the thing about Facebook that is going to be completely overshadowed…
... but hey, most of the best things in life stopped being what they were "supposed" to be, and now hundreds of people are renting houseboats (totally dominating and disrupting the houseboat-rental economy of the Sacramento River Delta) and getting their crazy sailor-y friends to bring their sailboats out and giving free shaky catamaran rides to gleeful revelers. Then there is the handful of people who arted up their boats into sort of back-streets-of Burning-Man-at-3a.m. sort of sad/glorious floating light and music parties (except unlike the relatively harmless boring backstreet theme camps at Burning Man, you could fall and drown or get crushed between boats or, more important, get trapped on a party with no boat to get back in), and they rented (or stole?) some giant chemical dump barge and then built an absurd "party barge" with kindergarten carpentry that actually is making the rusted old giant chemical waste barge LESS safe than when they got it, AND they are indeed making painted EDM dance floors in the water (glossy painted plywood on inflated inner tubes which, when they eventually shatter, and they will, is going to drown people) with janky floaty walkways that hang off of leaking inner tubes—and everyone with a boat who is a little bit off, or unusual, or broken, in northern California is coming on out to… float. And ride around and bump into each other and climb on each others’ boats and eat each others’ food and maybe mangle each others’ limbs. And now the moon is up and the places we are standing and talking and getting high and boogieing down and cooking and laughing and all that are all just floating around and hey jump on my boat I'll take you over to that other boat and then you are stuck on that other boat... and every moment you are inches or at best feet away from water and the safety and security of the very ground under your feet depends on the anchoring and knot-tying capacities of a lot of some very dedicated partiers whose conversations sound like a bingo game where the card reads "polyamory" "meow mix" "bitcoin" "lifehack" "paleo" "drug legalization"... but they haven't lost sight of the whole political science fiction dream that got them trapping themselves willingly in this impossible-to-escape Tijuana of a Waterworld.....
Am I making it sound as great as it is? I hope so... so I ask you: what could make a party of constant life-threatening hazards better except having to have deep druggy conversations about consent before you are allowed to risk falling off their shoddy carpentry...??
Well. It’s like this. You see, certain islands make you sign a waiver and a form that clearly states what consent is. Like, straight up, a guy tells you to your face that if you would like to touch someone you have to look them in the eye and ask if you can. All I could think about was how cynical I was that my default feeling was to think, "Criminals don’t obey laws.” Or, “This doesn’t apply to me. I’m not going to touch anyone.” But it does apply to me. Because this is their island and if I want to come on it I have to sign the waiver and listen to the guy in fun fur pants and a rainbow wig tell me to keep my dirty mitts OFF. And they want to be able to say that they gave everyone the same spiel. That everyone signed the waiver that is totally not legally binding in the state of California. Sorry. Other islands have different ideologies or rules. Of course it’s hard to know them. They’re not really written down anywhere. I told you it was a shit show.
Ephemerisle can not scale. It can’t get bigger. It can’t be monetized. It’s in the middle of the delta next to a shipping lane. There would be no way to set up a gate and collect money. They pay for things with fundraising sites and donations. No central organizing structure. Another leaderless collective populist art gathering. They’re popping up all over. It’s hands down the most dangerous thing I’ve ever been to. It’s a miracle that shit doesn’t get hard and go sideways. But ya know, in that risk is the very ore of the human condition. Or something.
This is something I picked up from the Ephemerisle page:
“Trust is earned, not freely given out to ostensible strangers. Without a 'constitution' that stipulates 'rules' of engagement, chaos and natural disequilibrium will occur. The rules (especially as it relates to consent) are railguards set up to dissuade 'bad actors' will ruining a good time by all.”(sic)
So some islands at Ephemerisle are becoming their own, brief, constitutional systems. Written out, established, and voluntarily accepted by everyone who steps foot on that sovereign territory. They’re doing this. This is happening. And what I’ve seen, over the years, is people taking parts of each other’s constitutional styles and stealing them, while other parts they are staying far away from. So that while there are endless unique constitutions, and some of them are really bizarre, maybe next year a few islands will agree on a common document. So Ephemerisle is developing elements of a common constitution, all on its own, without even trying. I wonder how many other events are doing the same thing using the miracle of parallel evolution? The mind reels…
Pirate utopias
While we’re talking about Ephemerisle, it’s worth pointing out: pirate utopias probably existed. Pirate utopias are kind of like Ephemerisle and also not like Ephemerisle: they’re when people drop out of society and get a boat and raid and pillage and do all the nasty piratey stuff. Be hearty seamen.
Not like Ephemerisle.
But then they go back to their secret island in the Caribbean. Where they argue politics and experiment with different models of organizing their secret island governments. They were probably polyamorous and very likely followed the “paleo” diet.
See? Like Ephemerisle!
Can you image the council meetings? On a Caribbean island paradise with a group of dropout pirates? History is impoverished that there was no Boswell there. I’ll bet they came up with some cool shit.
I wonder if any of those people from any of those places ever ended up back in society. And if that happened, if any of them continued their interest in governmental forms. And if they did, is it possible that those ideas ended up being adopted in the places they settled in and were they copied by others to end up here with us in our American charter? Or by the miracle of parallel evolution they were the first people to call for a global constitution? If today I’m singing the same song does that somehow make me kinda a pirate? God I hope so!
Pirates building utopia, what can be better than that?
Burning Man
Burning Man came so close to being the art revolution we need. So close. So painfully close.
You should imagine me with an empty bottle of bourbon in my hand and three days of stubble as I type this.
So close.
But when the time came for Larry to write a constitution for a new kind of art movement and create the civil society around it, he wrote the “Ten Principles” instead.
(sad trombone sound)
A long time ago, I presented him with an argument for 3 things that our community needed: voting, membership and a constitution. I’ve been debating with Larry about this for twenty years. (twenty years!)
To be fair, Burning Man’s gotten really successful since he wrote those Ten Principles in 2004. The event’s just gotten bigger, and more famous, with more ticket sales, and more expensive tickets, and a big bunch of people donating money. Hey, they even bought real estate!
Sound familiar?
Let’s assume that, for the purposes of this book, that their view of civics is one of empowerment for the citizens. Let’s also assume that they see their event as occupying sovereign space where they would like liberties and freedoms to blossom and help their citizens create that magic environment that summons the duende. Let’s assume that their intentions are good. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Before synchronized eye rolling turns into synchronized face palming, let’s examine Larry’s Ten Principles, listed here, and consider them afresh.... (to read the rest, you must own the book!)
https://www.facebook.com/events/1727978934135754/