Sign up with *ZOOM* to participate in Trumpocalypse live events

Metapsychosis journal
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UPDATE 11/1: We are no longer using Crowdcast for these events. We are using Zoom instead.

To anyone who would like to join us for the Transmuting the Trumpocalypse event which begins TODAY at 6:30 pm MDT (time zone conversion):

  1. You must register for Crowdcast in order to join today’s call! If you have not done so yet, please visit this page and click the “Save My Spot” button to register. Correction: we are using Zoom now.

(If you get stuck or want to know more about Crowdcast, check out this handy help page.)

  1. Guidelines for our discourse. Please review these guidelines (which are for our forum, but also apply to our live virtual talks), as well as this primer of practices and principles for good dialogues. Thank you for helping us have an excellent conversation!

  2. The goal of these talks is to gather visionary people from diverse disciplines to dialogue on how we think about LIFE POWER, MEME POWER, and COLLECTIVE REALIZATION. We believe that good discussions can foster learning, co-operation, and praxis.

We will not be focusing on the essays, nor even really talking about Trump, so much as about power’s multidimensionality.

Summary of LIFE POWER theme for tonight’s talk:

How do we understand the power intrinsic to life forms and life systems? What is the nature of our powers of evolution, of consciousness, of empathy & life-giving acts? How much power do we have to influence our minds and bodies—and our worlds? What are some techniques for harnessing and coordinating our immanent “life power” for optimal personal, relational and communal outcomes? What are the consequences of not tapping into and working with one’s innate life power autonomously, and how does that play out in social and political levels?

See you there!

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Sorry I tried to get on the call but I had trouble with Google Chrome and the screen sharing app didn’t happen. For some reason I can never access my Gmail account on Google. I have no such problem on other browsers. My camera and mic passed the test, but if I cant use the screen share because Chrome doesn’t recognize my account, this is a big problem. So I switched to Firefox and I can see and hear but cant be seen or heard. The sound quality was broken up, too. My experience with Zoom was excellent, it was fast, easy and efficient. I never had a problem. Is there a compelling reason to change? My experience this evening was thumbs down.

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Sorry, @johnnydavis54! Thank you for trying.

We decided to try Crowdcast for Trumpocalypse because, from the demo I tried, it seemed user friendly for managing a more structured discussion and giving participants alternative ways to interact (such as proposing and voting on questions/topics)—and also an easier sign-up, with a simpler link to give out, not requiring a separate app download. But, it’s good to learn the limitations through experience.

Fyi, I’m not planning on discontinuing usage of Zoom and would plan to continue using it for the consciousness seminars, especially given that Crowdcast only allows 4 video feeds on at a time. It does break the flow to have people cycling on and off screen, rather than simply being present. A meeting with 6-7 people where the energy can freely circulate seems like the sweet spot, in my experience.

One option, if you would like to try to join us next week (and I’d be happy to provide tech support ahead of the call) is to try logging in on Firefox rather than Chrome. I actually had to switch to Firefox, myself, early in the call because my Chrome window was freezing up.

Once again, sorry for the troubles…and will factor this into future tech decisions.

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Due to the timing, I couldn’t participate, of course, but I did follow the preliminary posts getting ready for the session. If I may add just two small comments.

From what I’ve just read this morning, John and TJ also had technical difficulties as did you, Marco. I’m generally tolerant of glitches when using new apps for the first time, but I’m less so than usual with this one, Crowdcast, because it’s too Google dependent.

I stopped using Chrome (and Google search) quite some time ago because I have issues with Google tracking every search I make. I’m a bit anti-big-brother, in case you hadn’t noticed, and Google is also taking it nefarious market position to new levels by filtering out more left leaning sites from its search results, allegedly in an attempt to reduce the amount of fake news that we are exposed to in our searches (see Google’s new search protocol is restricting access to 13 leading socialist, progressive and anti-war web sites - World Socialist Web Site). This wouldn’t be the first time that Google hasn’t lived up to its motto.

Are there still no usable open-source alternatives?

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OK, I did a bit of searching, and, no, I suppose there aren’t … aaarrrggghh.

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I loathe Google and avoid Chrome. Recently got a ‘smart’ phone and was forced to enter into their nefarious orbit against my better judgment. I do try to evade them as much as possible but they dominate just about everything.

Once in a faraway land, an enlightened king warned his people not to drink the water because it was poisoned and would make them crazy. The people didn’t listen and drank the water and they went mad. The enlightened King drank the water too.

Of what use is it to be the only sane person in the world?

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Crowdcast is not based on Google, although it used to be:

However, it is still a proprietary technology (as is Zoom), which is less than ideal for our long term purposes. Cy from Crowdcast says so himself:

We always knew that you can’t build a long-term business on a platform you don’t own.

I don’t mind this, however, as long as we can download, archive, and host our video files after each meeting. That’s the thing we really need to “own” in the long run, imo.

The one promising open source video conferencing technology I’m aware of is called Jitsi:

In my initial tests of this service, however, I found it to be less than reliable, with no support options (it’s free, after all). Crowdcast support has been very good so far, when I’ve reported the above and other issues. One benefit of paying for a service is that you then become a customer, and not the “product,” as advertising-based business models (such as Google) would have us be.

I would suggest using Firefox if you’d like to steer clear of Google Chrome. Brave browser also looks promising, though I don’t have much experience with it yet.

We might also eventually consider moving to a fully open-source / self-hosted suite of tools for calendar, email, files, docs, etc. such as Sandstorm.io. But the web admin skills for setting up such a system are a bit beyond me.

I’m happy to report that our forum here is using independent, open-source tech, which is being very actively developed and is well-supported, and can be built upon and extended with new features, if we should so desire.

There are various other promising developments on the horizon in the world of open, cooperative tech. Here is one more organization I’m aware of: https://www.coops.tech/

I think it’s just a matter of building up our resources and organization and design clarity to assemble the tools we need into an integrative suite that provides a viable alternative to the behemoths of the current internet, for what we need. The Big 5 (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) will likely continue to consolidate their power and monopolize the Web, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a vigorous movement of decentralized creative alternatives. The Matrix may be ubiquitous, but it must never be allowed to become Total.

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Thanks for the info and the detailed response.

While I’m a grumbler and would prefer open source, I’m realistic enough to know that commercialization is often necessary. I have nothing against it in principle, but it’s the little things like “if you want to screen share, you to use Chrome because it’s the only extension available”. Somehow the Mozilla extension never gets developed and the Big 5 win again.

I’m also well aware of the technical, administrative, and support issues involved in trying to do anything outside the Big 5. When I was helping my daughter with her fledgling business (before the Crash crushed it), we were trying to avoid the biggies, but I spent far too much time teching and not supporting the teaching (which fortunately, my daughter handled best anyhow). I’m still very impressed with the scope of research you’ve done to outfit this platform. Kudos. It’s an arduous and often thankless task, so I’ll thank you for all the effort.

I find it frustrating, but not being a savvy developer type, I can only gripe, so please excuse me. But I feel much better now.

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An update on this. After discussing it with Caroline and feeling further into it, it really seems like a deal-killer on Crowdcast to be limited to four participants on-screen at once (in addition to other complaints). But this limitation in particular ruins the sense of co-presence as well as conversational flow. So, we’re going to switch horses in mid-stream and go back to Zoom.

Here is the updated info for anyone who would like to participate in the upcoming meetings on 11/2 and 11/9:

In the long run, if we can grow the platform, it would be wonderful, I think, to develop a custom solution on top of open-source (e.g., Jitsi) that’s really honed for our use cases and becomes a distinguishing feature.

For now, though, it seems Zoom is still our best bet…

I guess if it wasn’t really broken…ah well, live and learn. Thanks for your honest feedback!

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