iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Great doc about a more hopeful time in Argentina.

Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

Market-rate construction purposely, continually raises prices & rents. Market-rate developers, and their investors, stop building when prices stabilize. So, increasing market-rate supply does NOT make housing affordable: quite the opposite. At the same time, we're destroying livability, and nature.

Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 06/07/2025

As you've said, private development today is anti-affordability. Why invest municipal assets in that sector? Why not just do good work in an audited public sector? Why wrestle with dicey public-private partnerships, when we need public-private competition to get affordability? youtu.be/LVuCZMLeWko

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How Socialists Solved The Housing Crisis

YouTube video by The Gravel Institute

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Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 05/07/2025

You wrote: “..private developers generally build only on the expectation of rising rents” & “..it’s more reasonable to expect land use reform to lead to more housing at current rents than to significantly lower rents.” Yet you 👍 private development, with almost no regulation. Please explain further.

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Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Local self-sufficiency is an important part of an ecological civilization. The Urban Farm at the University of Oregon in Eugene has survived 50 years. Its students learn to grow food in an urban setting. Here's the project's founder, Richard Britz in 1995: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix86...

The Urban Farm - some history

YouTube video by Rain Magazine

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Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Our Kelp Forests are in serious trouble. It's the fault of humankind, of course. But some humans are doing their best to encourage the Sunflower Sea Star, the Octopus, and Sea Otters to come to the forest, to stop the sea urchins from eating it entirely.

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Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

This DeepSeek moment is NOT like Sputnik. That's a narrow nationalist perspective. This is more like the late '90s LoBoS moment (Lots of Boxes on Shelves), where small startups with free software (GNU/Linux on cheap PCs) could compete with tech giants and their impossibly expensive racked servers.

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Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Certainly. He was just speaking to his audience, computer people, trying to recruit them away from wage-slavery that serves monopoly capitalism. He didn't think computing would beat neoliberalism. He just wanted to suggest that tech workers can work in the public interest. Which is still true.

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Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

That's right. And living structure comes from everyone carefully growing their environment together, their commons, with sensitivity to each other, in harmony with nature, avoiding technocracy, wasteful extraction, and profiteering. He experimented tirelessly to figure out how to make this happen.

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Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

His point -- hackers can fight the establishment, instead of working for it, and empower communities with grassroots building tools -- was something I encouraged him to end with, in this speech. Our fault for using the word "programming" metaphorically: many mistook him to mean "take control".

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Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

So, it's not exactly what you asked for, but this essay may help you to construct a picture of what happened. It's accurate from Alexander's perspective, but a rather dry, technical conference presentation, and not the sort of thing he would have written. www.rainmagazine.com/archive/2014...

Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

The SF bay area being what it is, people often asked him if he'd been inspired by acid trips. The answer was no, never tried it. He found it an odd question. His strongest drug was an occasional evening sherry.

Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Adaptive building includes sensitivity to local materials, in this case flint & brick. This was the closest thing to a short explainer that Christopher Alexander and I filmed in 1995. www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTfl...

Adaptation - with Christopher Alexander - part one: Adapting to the Environment or "Flint & Brick"

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Yes, Gehry's a good counter-example: the epitome of self-involved starchitecture with neither soul nor functionality. Although I'm unsurprised that it was made with VR and offsite fabrication, it could have been fabbed onsite -- following exact blueprints, made from a model -- and been just as bad.

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... (continued 2). He didn't feel VR should be used in building, but he thought AR might someday be helpful, marking judgments and remembering decisions ... but only if the AR could be precise enough with a site's reality. Good buildings must grow on site. Watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8wP...

Christopher Alexander Lecture 1995 London

... (cont.) He loved to draw. But nobody can build anything good by exactly following a drawing or blueprint. We need to respect reality. Drawings, models, mockups, photos, AR, or VR on a site twin, can be used to explore a project on a real site. But they only provide hints for the real job.

Well, he was all for trying tools, but VR isn't useful for intuitive judgment of a real building unfolding, because it cuts you off from the experience. It's its own medium, so it can't help with the kind of thing you see in the video, because those judgments need to be made in person ... (cont.)

:-) The research / judgment that fed hidecs was important. So is thinking and talking about needs, patterns, scenarios, etc. But to make anything, even a todo list, I need to lay it out in a form that helps me see what's important, and adjust it until it's right. www.youtube.com/shorts/sfMpI...

Christopher Alexander: Getting things right

The proper use of paper is not straightforward. As in programming, it's important to develop a sensitivity to that 'hairball threshold', and when you start to pass it, circle the good bits, rank their importance, get new paper, and write anew. The computer can't untangle that for you.

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A corollary to this video short: protect buildings that have survived a long time. Put them in trusts or public ownership: for their history, their embodied carbon, and to keep places out of the hands of the rentier class, so they're genuinely affordable. www.youtube.com/shorts/lNsn4...

Christopher Alexander on lowering student housing rents

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Perhaps this artist is saying: the holdings of libraries and museums almost completely lack the context of living culture. What is the bread without the people, their meals, their conversations, lifestyles, agriculture, etc.? Cultural memories are in the minds of the people, not their artifacts.

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I still feel that pen and paper enabled my most effective, enlightening, and unconventional todo lists.

Greg Bryant @gregbryant.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

A new lecture by architect Christopher Alexander from 1995, now shown for the first time. 90 minutes of philosophy in action, as he wrestles with complex issues on a real building site, and with questions from an audience of mostly students. www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8wP...

Christopher Alexander Lecture 1995 London