“We prioritize shipping, no matter the costs” the Raid Guild member leading the info session said. There were about fifty little dot points on the Miro board, representing as many listeners. Participants could interact with the board in various ways, pulling pins onto a world map to show where they were located, ask questions on virtual sticky notes, and at the end, vote via a sliding bar on if there had been too much or too little interactivity.

Lately, I’ve felt the need to ship more of my own content, to slide my life a bit more towards interactive. Below will be a bit about the [Raid Guild], and a bit about re-learning python.

Raid Guild

“Becoming a Raid Guild Member isn’t easy,” the speaker said. “Most of you won’t be selected.”

There was no way to buy Raid Guild Tokens from any exchange. They are only given to actual members, and function (as I understand it) like proportional shares in the company like stocks, except governed by equitable, decentralized smart contracts.

They are freelance mercenaries expert at remote coordination, distributing the spoils according to algorithm. Gamification of management. People asking how they get assigned to teams, what is their role. Guild members tell them to be patient, to learn and start working on something.

In their onboarding documents they have the criteria by which the new cohort will be selected. One of them is the ability to “understand projects and work streams without any brief, training or orientation from other members.”

Challenge accepted.

Dancing Rabbit (preview)

At the ecovillage, there was an academic paper left out in the common room, by some other clipboards and random reading. It was on selective processes for ecological communities, the interplay or formal and informal mechanisms of encouraging those who belong, and discouraging those who don’t.

There is a power to being able to man the gates, to lift the portcullis of acceptance into a group.

With both the Raid Guild and Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, the criteria and methods are transparent. Which makes the knife all the sharper. You can’t write off your rejection to favoritism or misunderstanding. They see you, and don’t want you, and that is hard.

With ecovillages and DAOs, however, if you aren’t a good fit for that one in particular, they can be a bridge to one for which you are more suited. They are a node in a network, a neuron in a synaptic web. An algorithm where, if you throw yourself in, you are sure to be sorted.

Python

A friend of mine, in concert with another, called my bluff about learning python. They enrolled in a online MIT course through EdX.

The time I spend learning python, I’m splitting equally between skimming the course material, and revisiting old python projects that can be found in my github repository.

Rather than watching the videos (I’m a reader, not a viewer) I download the transcripts as text files. One of the python scripts I was developing is called Poemify, and it takes any text file and turns it into a poem, dividing up the lines and words and then randomly selecting and arranging them to resemble poetry.

It’s not that I’m too advanced for the content of the course, just that I’m temperamentally unsuited to learn in traditionally structured, non-interactive way. They seem designed not to teach you things, but to create the marketable illusion that you will be taught things, padding out and puffing up meagre content for the sake of pretense and pretension.

Discord

Having been either a student, freelancer, or menial employee most of my life, I am arriving late in life to the tools of management and productivity, the meme-pools of the more gainfully employed.

Discord is where I really figured it out, by accident. The different channels (some hidden or locked) reflect organizational structure, managerial flows. People clock in, clock out, like they would for a normal job, but on their own schedule. It is the gamification of work, and the professionalization of gaming.

I noticed that their “State of the Guild” hasn’t been updated for over a year. I put put a proposal up on HackerMD for putting together a team to update it.

That’s one idea. Here are some others:

Game Master. I pitched a DnD campaign that would serve as synch-up/stand-up meetings. Productivity could be gamified, along the lines already existing in the guild. Online role playing sessions would help get remote collaborators on the same page.
NFTs for Derivative rights. Yesterday, I became the writing guildmaster for a discord devoted to Spindle, an Algorand Standard Asset, or token on the Algo blockchain. The founder is looking for ways to have creators rewarded for their work by minting and selling NFTs. I could try to do a design sprint for what a fiction marketplace on the blockchain might look like.
Funding Autonomous Engines. Like the fae, or fairy. Benevolent spirits. Rather than competing for bounties directly, they could volunteer for tips, contributing documentation to other projects.

Roadmap

I tend to start a lot of different projects, start moving in many different directions, scouting possible futures. This type of behavior isn’t selected for in traditional employment, where you are expected to have a narrowly defined role in a particular corporate enterprise, and devote all of your working hours performing that role, and no other.

A happy medium exists between a normal job and the diffuse projects I’m devoting myself to presently. An incomplete list includes, starting with the two mentioned above

Becoming a member of Raid Guild or a similar DAO (based on creativity, work, and knowledge rather than mere investment or marketing)
Participate in a build-a-thon with a team of developers
Learn python both through course material and experimentation
Document my quest using mark-down native tools.