2 days ago, @SarahAMcManus tweeted an idea I'd had of a Star Wars fanfic where the Jedi council is Tantric (nondual, wild, sexually-integrated) instead of Sutric (renunciate, ascetic, celibate), etc Just over 24h later, @Timber_22 starts laying out a sketch of how this might go
Upward spirals of ideas and why quote tweets enable convergence
14 tweets · April 2020 · 106 likes · 7 retweets · read on Twitter
See a second chain, which begins here, and is largely actually a reinterpretation of the exoteric meanings of the sutric version (which of course IS a chunk of the basis of tantra)
This whole thing feels like such a lovely example of this kind of upward spiral positive feedback in the space of ideas, that Joanna Macy writes about on p99 of Mutual Causality. I mean, I had lots of examples already, but more are always welcome.
In the shower today, I was thinking about various projects I might take on, and I found something clicking into place like:
If we can find ways to plug our can't-not-do energy together into coherent wholes, amazing stuff will happen... ...not just effortlessly, but with *negative* amounts of effort! 🤯
For a long time I was getting myself to write using Beeminder, and while that worked & produced some brilliant pieces, it was *pushing*, rather than removing obstacles. Both Roam & Twitter remove obstacles, creating a positive feedback loop where writing begets more writing!
This thread itself is part of the positive feedback loop that happened from my Star Wars Tantra Jedi idea getting released & Tim building on it. In the process, I had an internal positive loop, writing a whole thread about the showerthought above.
But before I even got either of those threads published I got distracted by other tweets. Then over in this convo w @QiaochuYuan re evolution of twitter... I went to quote one of the above tweets in this thread... ...only to realize it was still in drafts
QTs (Quote Tweets) allow for a kind of CONVERGENCE that otherwise isn't possible. With almost all other media, things only diverge: chat, threads, tree-shaped nested replies, comments You can never pull it back together.
Twitter has a lot of room for improvement here too, to be clear. The convergence is still very sparse—only one QT at a time, no easy way to explicitly juxtapose 2+, to show parallel or paradox. Here's a hacky example of me doing it with screenshots
My notes on designing such a feature into a convo platform: roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmo… If you're designing such a thing, consider yourself welcome—encouraged!—to incorporate my ideas! Credit is appreciated & moreover helps amplify the feedback loop!
Further discussion of the huge impact a single tweet can have 👇
I now have a blog post outlining a proposal for multi-quote-tweet / MultiQT—I think it'll be totally game-changing: malcolmocean.com/2021/11/twitte…
also QC has a thread about this here, which he came up with in parallel: