Native Lands and self organizing groups (Spam Mail #41)

💩 Cool shit

Native Land Digital - A wonderful online world map showing the traditional, Indigenous land owners. Look up your address and learn what native land you are on.

AI Art Generator - A cool tool if you’re looking for some unique artwork. You can transform any photo into another art style; say turn your family photo into a Monet, or generate an image entirely from text prompts.

Personal AI - I haven’t been able to try this, being #1 on Product Hunt has forced a waitlist. Nonetheless, I don’t know how to feel about this idea. A personal AI to help store all your thoughts and memories. Cool or creepy?

Marta Verba - A portfolio site with a lot of fun, unique interaction elements.

Welcome to Metabook - A satirical take, and criticism, of the Facebook > Meta rebrand.

Website Carbon Calculator - I’m skeptical of how accurate any carbon calculator can be, but I do like the idea of measuring the carbon impact of a website. It brings tangibility to something that feels so intangible.

And finally, a Twitter thread of threads, filled with media recommendations:

💎 Word gems

Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds (Alex Komoroske)

A great slide deck exploring why large organizations often get in the way of themselves, and how an effective centralized strategy ("sight of the same moon") can allow independent teams to work and still naturally converge.

As the ability of the overall organization to build anything coherent declines, the focus on coordination goes up to counteract the chaos. This leads to a situation that is tightly coupled, loosely aligned. Doing even the smallest things becomes impossibly expensive

The Metaverse Is Already Here — It’s Minecraft (Debugger / Clive Thompson)

If Minecraft is a video game, is GTA Online one too? I’m on the fence about labelling Minecraft a metaverse, but that aside this article has a great analysis of community scale. Minecraft functions with many self-managed groups rather than a single all-for-one community like Facebook. Reddit and Discord work in similar ways too. While not perfect, there’s some real merit to avoiding the single, global community approach.

This is why these worlds work so well. If a metaverse is yours, you set the rules of engagement. You can allow open-ended activity; you can create your own property-rights systems; you can ban malign activity, or encourage malign activity. (It is why, as the scholar Seth Frey told me, Minecraft is a deeply useful tool for training oneself in self-governance.) If you don’t like one world, another beckons.

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