Greetitle: Greenhouse description: date: 2021-07-11 tags:

• posts layout: layouts/post.njkhat resonate with me, a Product Manager at the The Maybe Useful Greenhouse is akimedia Foundatioseeds for what could one day become ideas that are vaible enough to live as standalone posts.ocating these bits of resonance together in a public place where I can relate andof ideas that resonate with me and locating these bits proximate to where I aimagine theimagine them ultimatley ely being ""plantedenoucourage enoucrage encourage me to publish more posts. ####Tools

Permanence

Permanence, memory, and place are three concepts that have been

what i might be trying to say:

1. permanence is what makes memory and reinterpreation of the past possible
2. permanence is a letting go, a letting go of control of what is perceived
3. permanence establishes cotext, makes patt

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

...a better explanation of the past can only help to better predict the future.

A finite player is trained not only to anticipate every future possibility, but to control the future, to prevent it from altering the past. This is the finite player in the mode of seriousness with its dread of unpredictable consequence.

Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. ^^Greater sign icance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a ew way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been–and therefore all that we are.

"Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already trained and rehearsed. They know what they are doing with the language before they can speak it." Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said."

The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself.

Loose

The above came to me while working with Carolyn to define the objectives for what is now mediawiki.org/Greenhouse experiment.

As we were going over the draft for the page, we paused on the bit I quoted above. There seemend to be something provocative about the pairing of "sketching" and "permanence." It was almost as if positioning them as compliments defied an implicit assumption about their mutual exclusivitity.

Empower people to sketch in public on a permanent surface.

Permanence is a defining feature of MediaWiki.

As a user of MediaWiki, pretty much everything you do with it is logged for anyone who is motivated to see.^[i]

When I first started working with MediaWiki, each edit felt high stakes to me. It was like every action I took expanded the amount of surface I needed to be able to account for and one day, be able to defenwpdate=&tagfilter=&wpfilters%5B0%5D=thanks) I have "Thanked" since February 2019._

ii. User:PPelberg_(WMF)/Greenhouse

When I first started working with

Permanence shows up in each article's edit history. Permanence also shows up

sketch in public, on a permanent surface.

There is a

Mediawiki (the platform that powers Wikipedia) promises permenance to an extent.

When I f

The line resonated

I love metaphor for its capacity to help myself and others transcend, to begin to be in new places and spaces.^[i]

I also find metaphor's power to be seductive. In this sketch, I'm going to try to bring some shape to meatphor's power and limitations so that I can use it responsibly.

Power

• Metaphor can help us to understand and, by extension, work with one particular aspect or facet of something new

Limitations

• Something new, distinct, fresh, etc. can never be fully explained, expressed, or undrestood through meta### Metaphor I love metaphor for its capacity to help myself and others transcend, to begin to be in new places and spaces.^[i]

I also find metaphor's power to be seductive. In this sketch, I'm going to try to bring some shape to meatphor's power and limitations so that I can use it responsibly.

Power

• Metaphor can help us to understand and, by extension, work with one particular aspect or facet of something new

Limitations

• Something new, distinct, fresh, etc. can never be fully explained, expressed, or undrestood through metaphor.^[iii]

Implications

• Depending too heavily on metaphor to get a handle on something fresh causes you to reproduce the basis for the metaphor
• Depending too heavily on a single metaphor will preclude you from seeing the other facets of the thing you're trying to get a handle on that the metahpor can not hold/explain

i. ...ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh. Aristotle quoted by Lakoff

ii. A metaphorical structuring of a concept, say the JOURNEY metaphor for arguments, allows us to get a handle on one aspect of the concept. Thus a metaphor works when it satisfies a purpose, namely, understanding an aspect of the concept. George Lakoff_

iii. At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remians absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word 'falcon.' To say that we have the falcon, and nothe the 'falcon,' is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself.

Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness. Marshall McLuhan