The #EndSARS protests in Nigeria have galvanised a new generation of Nigerians and I am hopeful for the potential to harness the energies unleashed during the period to begin the difficult process of creating something different as we craft a new future for ourselves.

What I left unsaid in the podcast episode is the fact that part of building alternative futures starts with being able to imagine them. Through art, films, plays, books, music. Stories. We must begin imagining bright futures that are collective not individual. We must provide alternatives to the collective dystopias that have become so easy to imagine and believe in. We must find bright futures that we can believe in ourselves.

At Newtype, the direction that I have decided to follow is Solarpunk. Solarpunk appeals to me primarily because it is so amorphous, it supports a multitude of interpretations. I will be sharing a lot of the output of Newtype in this vein - along with some proposals for experiments not just in Nigeria, but all over the world - in the coming weeks, and I look forward to engaging in these things with all of you.

Links

Feminist Coalition (Instagram); Feminist Coalition (Twitter); Feminist Coalition (website)

Papa Omotayo on Instagram

Atedo Peterside interview on Arise TV - Nigerian businessman speaking about young people mobilising for the elections in 2023. He focuses on political activism and activity.

Dutch Design Week Talks: Connected Living - I also participated in a talk hosted by Seetal Solanki’s Ma-tt-er earlier this week called Material Therapists. It was a spot of fun, design related work in the midst of all this chaos. Do check it out!

What I am reading/watching/playing/listening to

Nassim Taleb - “Small is Beautiful - but Also Less Fragile” - Nassim Taleb speaks on “antifragility” at NYU. Great talk, have a notebook and pen handy!

Defining Sovereignty with Jordan Greenhall - I might have shared this topic before, but I think it is worth reiterating. This is a very short snippet explaining his version of sovereignty in particular, but the whole podcast is worth listening to.

Re_ It Takes A Future to Fight a Future with Scott Smith & Susan Cox Smith - Great talk with the couple behind the book “How to Future”. Part of the Re_ festival hosted by the Department of Dreams.

Re_ What is a constitute with Pat Kane - Another great talk from the Re_ Festival. I love this concept of a “constitute” as compared to “institute”. I have been trying to develop something similar under the concept of the “manifold” and other organisational investigations in collaboration with Carmen Ho and hopefully more people soon.

Please stay safe wherever you are in the world and remember to take care of yourself.

image via

Just a heads up that the newsletter that went out earlier somehow had the audio recording clipped at thirteen minutes. This is the full recording of the episode.

So sorry about that!

Hello all! I hope your week went well and you are having a pleasant enough Sunday at the moment?

This edition is probably the first time I have tried to communicate something I am actively working on, so I hope it doesn’t come across too disjointed or confusing as these thoughts and ideas are definitely still emerging and coalescing into patterns for me, albeit, based on existing structures from prior research I have been engaging with over the last five years or so.

The idea of manifolds as I am using them under Newtype practice is one that will be featuring a lot from now on, so I hope this serves as an introduction into my thought process around them at the beginning. Building using techniques inspired by indigenous oral traditions and building upon the play framework - embarking on a more deliberate and explicit exploration of games and game design. It’s been a lot of fun to be honest.

When we speak about futures and alternative practices, I don’t think a lot of us spend much time speaking about how these futures and practices feel to engage with. This is fun. It feels like this is the sort of world I want to live in and bring up a child in. One where play, fiction, slow maintenance and consideration of the planet, opening oneself up to the complexity and generative chaos of the universe is a given…it’s a really great feeling.

One other thing I have been experimenting with a lot lately is Airtable. If you checked out my list of apps and software, you would have only seen a super basic way of using it. It has all sorts of interesting functionality and they just launched some features that look interesting around enabling more low barrier-to-entry software development. I am firmly in an information organisation and management headspace, so if anybody has recommendations similar to this, do let me know!

Links

Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality by Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland (I don’t know if I am allowed to share the PDF freely via this sort of channel, but if anyone is interested in the doc, hit me up!) - Thanks to Carmen for pointing this out in the first place

Deep Wealth by Art Brock and Eric Harris-Braun

What I am reading/watching/playing/listening to

Annabel Scheme by Robin Sloan (this one is interesting as it came out of a newspaper serial that he made available online after a crowdfunding campaign to enable people who couldn’t pay for it to gain access. I am just starting it so can’t comment on the actual content yet, but so far so good. He also has a very cool newsletter). // Web, Book

Among Us (I generally enjoy social deception games where out of a group of people a minority are bad actors trying to mess up the big plan. Lots of deception, laughter and distrust usually result. This is a very cool digital version of this and there are a whole host of YouTube videos showing people playing to give you a feel for what it is like. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!) // Game

Upstream Colour (I plan to do a watch and read through Shane Carruth’s films and screenplays over the coming week, starting with Upstream Colour, next is the amazing screenplay for his canceled film project A Topiary. Bonus point - A Topiary is a huge inspiration for the work I am doing with units and unit operations) // Film, Screenplay

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Hello all!

In this week’s episode I talk about inertia, catalysts and self-organisation. A lot of it is orbiting around complexity and emergent order, themes that I find exceedingly fascinating. I will probably do a more in-depth thing on how this all links into the system ethics I am trying to work out for myself and Newtype, but suffice to say that I think our civilisation’s current penchant for reducing or attempting to shut out the amount of complexity in the world is not a good thing.

A way of seeing life (an evolving system that can make more of itself - NASA) that I have been long aligned with is as a response to entropy. It is why emergence, evolution and the sort of play that gives rise to living systems, matters so much to me.

To see messiness and inefficiency as a bad thing the way we do these days is something that I think has been very instrumental to getting us as a species into the various troubles we are dealing with today. Embracing complexity and ambiguity historically seems to align better with the way things apparently are. The sooner we get good at doing this, the better.

Links

The project I have been working on with Yemi Awosile is going live tomorrow at 1pm WAT/BST and I am pretty excited about it all. Do follow our various accounts on Instagram - Newtype and Yemi’s to know when the project website goes live and to stay up-to-date on the follow-up online sessions we plan to co-host soon.

How Complex Wholes Emerge From Simple Parts (Quanta Magazine)

Metacurrency (by Art Brock)

Are You an Anarchist? (via Patrick Tanguay’s newsletter)

What I am reading/watching/playing/listening to

Lovecraft Country // TV

Shigeo Sekito - the word II (thanks Seetal!) // Music

Susumu Hirasawa Playlist // Music

Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust // Animation, Film

Rules of Emergence (Quanta Magazine. Bonus points for having “alchemist” in the article & title!)

Ahead of the Curve: The SpaceChem Postmortem (talk on game design by Zach Barth. Also has my current favourite definition of design - as a noun - that I have seen) // Video

Capitalism’s New Clothes (thanks Carmen!)

Defying Crackdowns, QAnon Continues its Relentless Global Spread (self-organisation gone wrong)

Hello all, and welcome to another edition of the newsletter! I decided to add something different to this episode and I hope you enjoy it! I don’t want to spoil what it is, but suffice to say that I will be better prepared next time I decide to do it and can make it more in line with the oral traditions inspiring this podcast.

Cryptic!

The title of this newsletter/podcast is inspired by the idea of how on the way to a world of diversity and weirdness we will more than likely have to pass through one of absurdity and playfulness, and possibly, be all the better for it!

I recently got a laptop (after something like five years of not using one) and a Windows one at that (add possibly another decade to the previous five) and it has been an interesting experience acclimating to the new work environment. I still use my smartphone and iPad for a lot of work and communication, but I have created a Dropbox folder that I use to exchange files between my mobile devices and the PC. If anyone is interested in my setup and which apps and so on I am using on each one (along with my reasoning), you can check out this Airtable I am putting together (will be updated throughout the week!).

The other information you will find on that doc is connected to the slow steps I am making towards disconnecting from various services run by the big surveillance capitalist companies (Google, Facebook et al) and while complete disconnection proves to be way tougher than one initially thinks it would be, I am content with the changes I have been able to and plan to make.

Links

Zaria Art Society

Black Mountain College

Bauhaus

Scale by Geoffrey West

What I am reading/watching/playing/listening to

Wiktopher by Rekka Bellum -  “…is a eco-fiction story published online. The story follows two characters, Lupin and Eka, as they navigate the barren lands of the Soronan Desert, seeking food, company and supplies while living day-to-day.” (if that doesn’t get you to click, I don’t know what else will…maybe the gorgeous illustrations that accompany it? The writer and her partner also live on a sailboat sailing around the world. I am low-key obsessed with them and high key jealous!) // Web

New Scientist article on Incan khipu (side note: I really dislike the actual title of the article as to me it comes across as patronising, but the content is good) // Web

An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty‑First Century short story by Peter Watts // Web

Opus Magnum (beautiful puzzle game by Zachtronics maker of wonderful puzzle games. You will learn a LOT about the programming mindset and systems thinking by playing any one of their games). // Game

Shenzhen Solitaire (as I am back on Windows, a solitaire game seemed apt. This is a gorgeous one also by the aforementioned Zachtronics - also available on Max OSX!) // Game

Hello all and welcome to the second episode of the oral series of The Newtype Vocab.

This episode turned out a bit harder than I thought it would be to do. But it looks like second guessing whether I need to do another run through of the recording is something I will just have to get used to for now. Hopefully, this is still engaging for you all out there and something interesting comes out of this!

In the recording, I mention a project I have been working on for a while called Hyperculture - the name for which only came about in the last few weeks - with a few people. Stay tuned to Hyperculture.site where we should have the first stage of the project - a virtual exhibition put together with a grant from the British Council and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in December last year in collaboration with the awesome Yemi Awosile (see a link to her website below).

The project is a branch of the “clothing” bit of the - “A maintenance practice focused on wisdom ecologies of food, shelter, clothing and being.” Newtype overview and is something that I am looking forward to working on for years to come.

It feels strange realising that this project is more than likely going to take a few years to reach what I guess I would consider some form of “maturity”, but I look forward to sharing with you all the various stages of growth as we hit them. I go into a bit more detail about it in the oral section of the newsletter, but please keep an eye on the Newtype Instagram account and Yemi’s Instagram as well for not only more information on when the Hyperculture website will be going live, but also information about an Instagram Live talk we have scheduled to discuss the project in more detail.

Links

Yemi Awosile - Website

What I am reading/watching/playing/listening to

Times Are Urgent, So Let Us Slow Down - Bayo Akomolafe (I am mildly obsessed with Bayo Akomolafe and his Emergence Network. This is one of the shorter interviews with him and I encourage you to rummage around YouTube for some of his other lectures) // Video

Teardrop by Massive Attack with Elizabeth Fraser - (Live performance) // Video

Video games and the future of education (talk by Jonathan Blow) // Video

Emergence Magazine - Excellent website and podcast // Web

Light by M. John Harrison (I decided to dig into his catalogue as his name has been cropping up in all the places I tend to wander around for years now. I read his Viriconium series of stories almost two decades ago now and plan to re-read them once I am done with the Kefahuchi Trilogy of which “Light” is book one) // Book

Hello all.

It has been quite a while since the last edition of the newsletter! I hope you are all doing well wherever in the world you are? Things seem to still be in flux, but I hope that in the future, we will be able to look back on 2020 with the sort of shared camaraderie that makes it possible to reminisce about bizarre and unpleasant situations.

I apologise for the amount of time it has taken me to decide on what I wanted to do with the format of the newsletter itself, and the topics I was hoping to cover.

For reasons that will hopefully make sense when you listen(!) to the episode attached to this newsletter, I have decided to switch mediums altogether for subsequent editions and move from the written word, to the spoken word. I am still sorting out my setup for future recordings, but I hope you find this as refreshing a change to listen to as I do to produce it.

Please let me know what you think about the new format and any other thoughts you may have.

A lot has happened otherwise that I thought might be easier to summarise in text form though!

The Virtua Playgrounds 2 event went pretty well, even if I do say so myself. The contributions from all the participants in the Mass Village experiment on Discord were very inspiring and showed so much care, attention and vulnerability. And the follow-up conversations were very cool as well.

After that, I hosted a roleplaying session on Discord that ran for the better part of a week, developed in collaboration with Carmen Ho, Lyall Sprong and Philip Fagbeyiro. It was called “A Pilgrimage for Chrysalids” and was centred around a pilgrimage up a mountain to visit various sites that had various multimedia experiences created by the four of us and by the various participants.

Again, so much was shared that was unexpected, surprising and inspiring and I am hoping to be able to do one more before the end of the year that will be open to more people. It was also the first foray into the shared universe that I am creating with various collaborators for Newtype. A Speculative Fiction (SF) universe that is centred on imagining an alternative now that could act as inspiration for rethinking how Newtype approaches projects and systems.

Links

Virtua Playgrounds 2 Recording. (Heads up! 3 hours long)

Play, Player, Playground. Shaman, Fabulist, Fictionaut. (My presentation from the Virtua Playgrounds 2 session)

Ron Eglash - The Fractals at the Heart of African Designs

How Indigenous Thinking Can Change the World (States of Change Learning Festival chat with Tyson Yunkaporta)

Bonnitta Roy (Medium blog)

Newtype Character Creation Form (If you are interested in checking it out and creating your own Newtype alter-ego!)

What I am reading/watching/listening to

Undone (Amazon Prime) // TV series

Hiroshi Yoshimura Soundscape 1 (1986) (Thanks Seetal!) // Music

The Rain Formerly Known as Purple | Risk of Rain 2 Original Soundtrack (2020) (I am enjoying the entire album, but this track in particular…mmmmmmph) // Music

Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta // Book