180: Important Metaviews Update

May 16, 2025

Your participation is always required

Hello friends, enemies, and algorithms, we interrupt our normal programming with an update on what we’ve got going on, and our expectations of you as part of our larger media social contract.

The growing season is well underway on the farm and there are projects and animals screaming for attention. One of the more pleasurable are the almost daily walks with the goats.

Participating in the Metaviews goat walks are currently the pinnacle of what we’ve got on offer, but it is not yet accessible to all members.

Participation is nonetheless our ultimate mission. We research, write, and agitate in the hopes that you will engage and help make Metaviews work for you.

This is the promise and potential of an open source intelligence agency as we conceived it back in 2010. For a throwback to our earliest days, there’s this discussion with Metaviews member Ken Chase on cryptocurrency from 2011:

We Need You!

Our collective intelligence is only as strong and diverse as our members, and this is why we implore or members to participate!

Like the issues you like. Comment on the issues that make you think, or as a means of impacting future issues. Share issues as a measure of mobilizing our knowledge and impacting public narratives.

We offer radical visions of the present and the future yet we can only entertain their possibility through collective action. Which is why Metaviews does not have an audience, rather we have a combination of constituency and cadre.

If this kind of talk hasn’t caused you to rage quit or recoil in horror, then please find ways to participate in our network.

For more up to date and random content consider applying to join the Metaviews Signal group chat, where Ken from the video above, and many other Metaviews OGs spend time. Message Jesse on Signal to request admission.

Another way to participate is to come on our podcast! You can apply via a modest two step process. Step one, watch an episode or two to get the flow of the show. Step two, propose a date and time via this calendly link.

The podcast episodes are generally one on one spontaneous conversations, but they’ve also been a place to share one of our key open source applications: salons.

Upcoming Metaviews Salon on Ontologies

We started Metaviews with the salon as a key tool in our box of methods and tricks, running them throughout the 2010s as an in-person experience, often with food and libations. In the early 2020s we started running online salons, such as this one:

We found these salons to be both enjoyable and effective, and made an attempt to spin them out under a different brand:

For a range of reasons however, that didn’t work out. Yet the salon as a kind of media method that depends upon participation has tremendous potential.

This is why we’re organizing a Metaviews salon on the subject of Ontologies (thank you Russell for reminding us it should be plural).

We’re currently thinking we’ll schedule it during the first week of June, at 12noon eastern time, which will allow for participation from our European friends as well as our comrades on the North American west coast.

We want you to join us, so what we’re asking is if there’s a day that that week that you absolutely want or cannot do so we can find a day that works for as many as possible. Email us via metaviews at gmail.com to express interest and preferences.

Replies to newsletters are not always received and are rarely responded to. Comments however directly influence the direction of Metaviews.

Speaking of which, we’ve received multiple negative responses to our writing on Israel and Gaza, as a result expect more writing on Israel and Gaza. 😝

Finally we’re entertaining the possibility of potentially co-organizing an event in Madrid. If this may be of interest to you, check out the latest Metaviews episode: