Charlotte Fang

Posted on May 05, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

The New Lower Bound of Network Spirituality: Remilia’s New Internet as Reference Implementation for a Bottom-Up Patchwork [gp]

[ Guest post by @minds0n. ]

A.K.A. How Remilia's New Internet will shape the protocols of social forms for the next century

Particularly looking at the chat/forum/exocortex, Remco's remilia-net converges at a rather similar end-vision to urbit's, though, in true channer fashion, places focus on tapping into the pulse of culture.

Realtime chat (which featured in the interactive digital opening of Remilia’s debut show “I Long For Network Spirituality”) was already an end-game evolution of interactivity within text communications (keystrokes sent directly, creating perfect virtual replica), text animations & games, typing style & speed, temporarily typed text, all experimented w/ immediately. The important part however is the fact that community can be maintained by a surprisingly low number of actors, so long as someone types, and another reads, there is dynamic engagement. Maintaining baseline activity like this even in tiny groups fosters a healthy long-term.

Long term vision is evident throughout their proof of concepts, and analysis over the benefits and shortcomings of previous iterations. The spontaneous think-tank has waited long enough to dissolve research and development into one, no need to rush in with lazy & complex answers.

Ultimately success relies on just how much the exocortex "intertwingles" with the chat/forum. This is one of the largest pitfalls of the modern popular media forms: discord isn't a good wiki, twitter isn't a good permanent store, 4chan's true evolution is now due. We can unite them.

If wildly successful, the transient realtime chat, group forum, and personal exocortex will unite in perfect harmony to collapse the hermeneutic circle. All copers will immediately vanish into the hellfire, and we will truly come to understand the egregore. If successful, Remilia's New Internet is a VPL-Enabled blueprint for any actor/collective to contribute to, fork, extend, and/or modify. A primitive foundation for the hacker, allowing rapid iteration. Remilia's New Internet truly begins development on release, reference handy.

Aside: "why not build Remilia's New Internet on urbit?", it seems that the unrestrainable desire for the avant-collective to evolve social forms has led to a faster, clearnet solution first. Urbit is the future, but Remilia is Now, urbit will be fast enough at some point anyways. In truth, both will win as they converge upon network spirituality from disparate ends. Urbit from building a fundamental trust network, Remco through radical design experimentation in preparation. Remilia-net doesn't even have to live to succeed, only its protocols & vision do.

But it will live, and it'll be the new mode of posting. If not, we'll fork it & try again if it's close enough. It's inspiration & vision is simply too powerful to go away: grammar-agnostic vim bootlegs, transient tracker instances for collaborative composition, realtime vector canvas, threads as pop-up p2p video-sync channels, all backed up into your exo-cortex as R&D or artistic expression, exported as anything from latex manifestos to albums. Probably none of this is presently in the works, but with an elegant basis a la remco, it could be.

I'm excited to see what the open beta brings, the new internet has been wished for by many at this point, but no attempt (to my knowledge) had been a financially-fueled, well studied attempt for a diverse, but focused community. the patchwork may just be in the patch itself.