[Interview] never before seen by eyes of whoever

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Vincent!

Overwhelmingly, as far as I can see, the people who create worthwhile things still do so by forming genuine, functional creative relationships, unencumbered by the bullshit of status. Including functional, creative, non-extractive commercial relationships too, crucially.

I'd love to be pointed to some of these. It's easy to see and become disgruntled by the extractive ones - remember, I've been dealing mainly with crowdfunding for over two years, which has the appalling emergent feature of being extractive to both the project and the backer.

You see something about game design in this discussion, or, a thing that's going on which, as a process, is relevant to game design? OK then. That signal from beyond the Fringe didn't make it to me, so I'm interested in what you're seeing.

Hi Gordon,

I guess my concern is about the middle ground of stuff that's maybe not self-published-focused, maybe tainted a bit by badstatustuff but not really about that, maybe with other problems (worth talking about? and maybe what the interviewer/others are asking about?); but also with value to at least some people.
...
... subtler status-y (and other) influences were involved and might be worth discussing. Like, the mere fact that people (me, quite often) were using the Forge for something other than the strait-forward self-publish mission maybe created a tension - not always problematic

That is the vaguest thing I ever read. Something had some kind of influence sometimes? Remember Doonesbury and Jerry Brown? "A verb, senator! We need a verb!"

(editing this in: whoops, it was Ted Kennedy, during the 1980 campaign)

[Christoph]

Hello

Following along intensely at home, having a hard time keeping up. Can somebody please give a definition or a synonym for extractive? It's absent from the Cambridge and WordReference dictionaries, with the Oxford and Wiktionary placing it in the context of the (mining) industry. It seems you use it in a figurative sense I'd love to pin down. For the while being it seems to mean "bloodsucking, exploitative, selfish and dastardly".

[glandis]

Ron said:

That is the vaguest thing I ever read.

I see your point. I think the problem is I'm trying to describe the space where I see something could fit without having anything (much?) personal to put in that space. I'll see if I can come up with something.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Christoph,

bloodsucking, exploitative, selfish and dastardly

Nothing wrong with that description! But Vincent and I are referring to a specific economic meaning, which is to say, getting into a situation in which people are paying you just because they're alive. You're providing nothing that requires any particular work or process on your part, they're not getting anything they couldn't have had for free or done for themselves, what they do get is either already available or deceptively unusable.

The term in this sense has been usefully applied to property concepts in modern life, such that people have to do this simply to have somewhere to live.

[Christoph]

Ok, thanks!

Since the conversation has died down somewhat, there's a question I've been dying to ask for about ten years and never had the chance! (This is of course a poor attempt at pathos, since I've known your email address all that time.) How many hours of sleep do you need per night? Not talking about how many hours your children let you have, but how many you need to be operational. Before your recent career change, you were a university teacher, prolific author distributing his own work AND the moderator of the fucking Forge (I have an inkling of how much time that consumes...) How did you manage?

[Ron Edwards]

I've been trying to think about how to answer this question, Christoph. I've found that when I list the stuff I don't do, which I see other people doing which takes up a lot of their time, then they get angry as if I'm telling them they're wasting their time, are stupid, or any number of other offended claims. I've also found that if I list a couple of personal skills which happen to help me, then they get mad because I'm putting myself above them. So there are a few details of my life that make all that diverse effort possible, but I'd rather not go into it.

Then there's the point that it ultimately didn't work, especially in terms of actual benefit to Adept Press. Fortunately I've brought that around, as for the past four months, the business has actually yielded a steady income into the family's account. It was also pretty bad in terms of my health, which has deteriorated sharply since commencing with breathing problems around 2006 if not before.

Oh yeah, don't forget, before the health thing, intensive martial arts guy including teaching ... so there's another thing in that list of stuff I was doing at once.

Not much of an answer, I'm afraid. The literal answer is six hours a night for functionality. Seven preferred; any more than that just annoys me that I lost some time that day. But since sleep deprivation was a big part of that breathing problem, it's likely that for at least five years, I'd have been lucky to achieve one solid hour of real sleep per night.

Hey, that's another interesting All About Me thing. The sleep doctor was horrified to discover what was happening to my blood oxygen levels, and the data from the sleep study indicated I was waking up literally every few seconds throughout the night. Plus I would stop breathing entirely sometimes, even while awake, just walking around, doing things, living life not breathing. Anyway, about that waking up, apparently if a normal person has this problem, they either receive help soon or they go insane - whereas I, as the doctor discovered, have the odd capacity to go into REM when awake. So I'd get barely my necessary quantum of REM, thus would not deteriorate into a shivering mass, but still be sleep-deprived in terms of fatigue and oxygen-deprived from the breathing hassles all the time. And this went on for over five years.

[Miskatonic]

I was always convinced Ron had made a DEMONIC PACT for time management skills.

(Enjoying the discussion of the non-interview.)

[Christoph]

Thanks Ron. I'm sorry to hear about these health problems, that's quite bad indeed. I hope you can overcome them.

I guess I could commit on my honour to not reacting negatively (or even not react at all) to your time-management secrets, but it's a public discussion, so I understand. At least now I know you're actually an undead, and that you'll be trolling our descendants with self-deprecating remarks about brain damage for generations to come!

[Erik Weissengruber]

The experiential background to past occasional statements about community, power, sexuality, communication, and politics became very clear.

Great read.

[Erik Weissengruber]

Has anyone ever looked at start-up or corporate culture in terms of functional/dysfunctional leadership dynamics like those that can play out in intentional communities or other intensively involving social organizations?

[glandis]

Has anyone ever looked at start-up or corporate culture in terms of functional/dysfunctional leadership dynamics like those that can play out in intentional communities or other intensively involving social organizations?

It is, I think, more concerned with other things, but - considering InSpecters in that context has some value. On a personal level - I gasp in horror and say, "only because I had to!"

[Erik Weissengruber]

Of course, Freemarket