Alright, 1 hour worth of thoughts on:

Spatial metaphors for human systems

for @threadapalooza

1/ Okay, let's start with BRIDGES!

(first that came to mind)

This is a common human system metaphor, people talking about bridging between cultures or perspectives, or communities/individuals.

2/ In fact it's the metaphor @vgr used in the prompt he gave me for @threadapalooza last year, in a thread I never

3/ The bridge metaphor is kind of an obvious one: forging some kind of translation connection between two different perspectives.

It's a kinda limited connection though. In fact, the word "translation", in the context of mathematics, means "to move across" which matches bridge

4/ So a bridge, as a metaphor, is a way to move one perspective across to another. But let's contrast that with the metaphor of "depth perception", where the two perspectives are integrated into a larger whole.

Way harder than bridging, & more

Ahh fuckit part of my @threadapalooza thread had a clear subtopic and wanted to be its own thread.

Here's the thread about "membranes" as a metaphor for groups of people.

15a/ Membranes. Monists go on about how everything is one, which is true in a sense but also have you noticed that some things are inside and some things are outside? The role of skin, or the walls of a house, or a windshield on a car, is it keeps inside in & outside out.

15b/ Membranes can be applied to groups, and we can talk about a few different kinds of membranes that you might see around a particular group of people:
- closed membrane
- closed web
- semipermeable membrane
- open network

15c/ Closed Membrane: eg a company, family or country. Maybe a way to join it, but you need an active & explicit invitation by the members, whether that’s a job application or a marriage or an immigration process. Lots of intentional community houses are also like this.

15d/ Closed Web: consider a friend group. You don't exactly need an invitation from everyone in the group to join, but you do need to make friends with *someone* in the group. Polycules (except polyfidelity) work similarly, usually.