Was the game Ökolopoly an influence on him? It was a 'cybernetic environment game (kybernetik unweltspiel)' from West Germany where players run a country and strive to hold off economic, social and ecological collapse. It was released as a board game (beautiful, if I may so so, owning a copy) in the early 1980s and then the true, apparently fully realised DOS videogame followed later. It always seemed like a simple Sim City to me.
This is something I wanted to get into after vising Alhambra, which really is the "mirror of paradise" that it purported to be. You say that the complex designs are done by hand, but given how mathematical they are it left me wondering if there is a thriving scene of computer-generated patterns?
Because silence is a common good, like clean air. It's everyone's. When people fill it with their noise they effectively privatize it for the duration. When they shout on speakerphone or play their music or blare sound from their apps it's especially selfish.
I've switched to a CAT S22 Android builder's flip phone, and my usage has dropped significantly. The screen is so small and fiddly that it makes me feel sick using it for extended periods - exactly what you want from an adictive substance like a smart phone. Having to physically open it to use it, and then waiting 5 seconds before it lights up, creates a psychic barrier to just 'quickly checking for updates'. The camera is like an early 2000s cheap digicam - just about good enough for documenting things but it hardly beckons you to want to photograph your life constantly for social media. It's a PITA to use and that's why it's perfect for everyday use.
> sharing biometric data through pre-loaded health and wellness apps.
I've been thinking about finally getting a smartwatch to keep tabs on my sleep and encourage me to do more exercise, like jogging for a certain amount of time or something. Suggestions for privacy respecting, ideally FOSS solutions?
This is definitely why I hate git. It really is possible to lose your work by doing a a bad reset (and really the vocabulary of hard, soft and mixed resets is a blatant cop out from coming up with meaningful terms). Or by checking out another branch and not committing or stagsing all your files - yes I know this is a no no but it's trivially easy to do and git would be better if it just had to get them back. If only there was just a 'revert whatever I just did to git' even if what I did was destructive. Or better, if only navigating my git history was as easy as an undo tree in Emacs. Every change seems frought and so for me and probably a lot of others it becomes easily very stressful.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96kolopoly
https://archive.org/details/oekolopoly_202509
Further question, how much did he read about cyberneticş beyond Gaia Theory? Was he influenced by Norbert Wiener?