Greg Bryant
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gregbryant.bsky.social
Greg Bryant
@gregbryant.bsky.social
Computing and Communities -- Beautiful Software; Building Beauty; Rain Magazine; Urbanology; UOregon; Tango Center; Workspot; Christopher Alexander's programmer
https://www.gregbryant.com
This is the seed and support organization that was involved in the Movement of Recovered Companies ... I don't know much more. labase.org/argentina/
Apoyamos la autogestión y el trabajo democrático - Fundación La Base
Conocé todas las últimas novedades de la Comunidad Basera!
labase.org
November 1, 2025 at 2:07 AM
Great doc about a more hopeful time in Argentina.
November 1, 2025 at 1:55 AM
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
How Socialists Solved The Housing Crisis
YouTube video by The Gravel Institute
youtu.be
July 6, 2025 at 1:29 AM
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.
July 5, 2025 at 8:42 PM
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.
February 2, 2025 at 3:04 AM
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.
November 23, 2024 at 10:20 PM
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.
November 22, 2024 at 8:20 PM
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".
November 21, 2024 at 11:14 PM
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...
November 21, 2024 at 6:39 PM
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.
November 21, 2024 at 7:56 AM
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.
November 19, 2024 at 11:20 PM
... (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
YouTube video by urbanology
www.youtube.com
November 19, 2024 at 10:11 PM
... (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.
November 19, 2024 at 10:04 PM
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.)
November 19, 2024 at 10:03 PM
:-) 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
YouTube video by urbanology
www.youtube.com
November 19, 2024 at 8:04 PM
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.
November 19, 2024 at 7:40 PM
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.
November 19, 2024 at 7:14 PM
I still feel that pen and paper enabled my most effective, enlightening, and unconventional todo lists.
November 19, 2024 at 7:06 PM