You wrote that “the key to keeping track of stable innovation processes across multiple generations is story.” You said—I love this quote—“that it can be more creative than a Cambrian explosion, or more destructive than a nuclear explosion. Story that maintains the continuity of creation requires a lot more work, however, and it develops over time from thousands of data sets held in relationships.”
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta
Stimpunks.org attempts to be “story that maintains the continuity of creation” with our research-storytelling and digital composition. We curate the treasures of neurodivergent and disabled cultures and weave together a community of voices and experiences.
We build on each other’s work – as good revolutionaries always do.
@ira.socol • We build on each other’s work – as good revolutionaries always do. I love what you’re building. I… • Threads
Stimpunks.org is a celebration of bricolage and pastiche assembled into story, building on other’s work and preserving it as story that maintains the continuity of creation.
Forgetting is a tool of white supremacy. It keeps us from building upon prior strategies led by our ancestors and elders. White supremacy also teaches us that we must be the first—the first to confront a particular issue or problem and therefore need to create something new instead of drawing from our rich history of revolutionary work available to us.
Memory.
Page, Cara; Woodland, Erica. Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety (p. 32). North Atlantic Books.
In the tradition of punk and disabled communities, we use bricolage and pastiche to tell our stories and preserve our histories.
bricolage = the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available.
pastiche = a work that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Pastiche celebrates the work it imitates.
Next in a punk sensibility was its love affair with pastiche. As the true postmoderns they were, punks drew freely from highbrow culture, lowbrow culture, and places in between, picking and choosing as they went, bound by no formal ideology.
In practice, however, punks consciously or unconsciously drew on previous youth cultures, with methodologies and ideologies marked by pastiche and bricolage. In other words, punks borrowed freely from previous youth cultures and dominant society, melding these elements into a new form of expression.
“We Accept You, One of Us?”: Punk Rock, Community, and Individualism in an Uncertain Era, 1974-1985
We create lily pads from the rhizome.
Autistic Rhizome
A growing and evolving network of Autistic communities with no hierarchy or dependence on another’s existence.
Each person forms an integral part and is connected by a flow of energy that not only runs through and between individuals and communities but enables new connections to form. It is a place of safety, support and deep understanding.
The Autistic rhizome creates new energy through the sharing and evolution of ideas which permeates and ripples through into wider society.
@Autistic Realms
Table of Contents
Deep Time Diligence
Tyson Yunkaporta’s conception of “Deep Time Diligence” resonates with our efforts to serve the edges and connect the rhizome.
Deep time diligence is sort of looking at all the systems and the trajectories of these things and doing catastrophic risk analysis, doing all these kinds of things, doing these things collectively. So as a group, everybody’s out there observing what’s happening in nature and what’s happening in your economic systems and communities, and we keep coming together and everybody’s bringing a different data set, and some of these overlap, some of them are contradictory. But in the aggregate, we get a sense, together, with that one big brain—the computational power of a group of people together, you know, big community together doing all this work—that, that works. That’s deep time diligence, because you start building the stories that you need and the Lore that you need and the knowledge that you need for the system as it’s shifting.
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta
That’s why myth works so well. That’s why myth is so evocative and so enduring; it’s because all these diverse ignorances come together and truth emerges from that, from all those different data sets. Because the ignorance is just that: you’ve only analyzed it from one point of view. But collectively, collective analysis—ah, that’s amazing. That’s the only way it can be done.
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta
Data is Vulnerable
Data is vulnerable. Data just disappears. All your photos in Photobucket—how long are they gonna be there for? Is someone just gonna maintain that server forever, and maintain the costs for that, and keep losing money? Nah. So the only way to store data long term, like proper long term, is in intergenerational relationships, where data is stored in narratives, intergenerational narratives. That can last for forty, fifty, sixty thousand years. That can last as long as relations are continued—that data will last
Deep Time Diligence – with Tyson Yunkaporta
Doing curation work on Stimpunks emphasizes how real this trend of information loss is. We’re continuously updating broken links, hoping they were captured in the Internet Archive so we can link to a public copy. We use the Internet Archive browser extension to tell it to save copies of pages critical to our storytelling. The amount of link rot created by the collapse of Twitter as people locked and closed their accounts was great.
The trend is accelerating with companies taking decades of archives offline.
- MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline
- Comedy Central Website Removes Archive of Video Clips, Content
Become a Citizen Archivist
We need to maintain the continuity of creation through story. We attempt that on stimpunks.org for the neurodiversity and disability communities.
Join us. Become a citizen archivist and help tell our stories across generations.
I’ve loved so much of the art, culture, criticism and reporting that I’ve seen from marginalized people in the past several years, and I’m terrified that a lot of it could be buried in this tidal wave of hate. We’re really going to need all of those stories and creations to hold onto, during the dark times to come. We’ll keep producing great art and culture no matter what, but we’ll still want to hold on to the proof of what we can accomplish when the “mainstream” culture industry gives us access to resources. And there are so many obscure, little-noticed, indie projects from the past several years that we’re going to want to revisit. This has been a fertile time, and we need to save as much of these riches as we can.
The good news? There’s something you can do to help. You can become a citizen archivist.
We Should All Be Archivists • Buttondown
As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread. We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen.
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider