Yesterday, I tried out the gallery view block for photos in a weblog post. It was a pretty easy feature to use. All of the block inserts for posts are pretty easy to manage. It seemed like a good idea to share a few photos of that tone expanding new brass tremolo block I installed on my modified Fender stratocaster guitar. A total of six photographs were shared. Previously, the problem that I have run into sharing photographs on the weblog is that the links break when things are restored from a backup. My method of backup involves extracting all the content in a very large XML document. That backup does not include any media. I have some other backup service installed this time around and that should in theory allow things to go back to how they were before a restoration. It has been a long time since the weblog was completely rebuilt. Maybe the code has been getting more stable and secure over the years. 

Beyond working on a post about guitar parts, I did spend some time thinking about society in general and how things within our broader civil society frameworks are changing. That could be entirely based on all my considerations of how links were breaking in the backups of my online content. Not only did that make me wonder if the backward linkages of community in civil society were starting to break down, but also if the backward linkages in our economics supply chains were directly linked to linkages in community. Note that the last sentence did not evaluate linkages in the spokes and hubs of the community, but instead focused on linkages in the foundations of community itself. I was trying to consider more than just the direct backward economic linkages that describe supply chains and think about the parts of the community that have a similar framework. 

Moving beyond the assumption that yet another economic treatise on the nature of normative games could be used to describe the intersection of civil society and game theory will be challenging. Intellectually I’m not entirely sure where the theory fits within the broader academy. That however is a problem for later. To start that effort in question now my thoughts started to form around a certain set of arguments. Ultimately, the right words arrived to explain the concept of things being just beyond the status of yet another normative game. Within civil society a highly bimodal experience of those within the labor market and those outside of the labor market. That separation of experience is creating a group that is actively a part of civil society and actively trying to participate in a broader labor market that is breaking down in a historically unprecedented way. My thoughts have been wandering in and around that intersection of how tears in the very fabric of institutions people rely on and how recently the labor market breakdowns are creating deep ripples into our democratic foundations. Separation from both the institutions necessary to support our civil society and a breakdown of the labor market at the same time creates a profoundly problematic condition. 

Those are some deep thoughts for 06:00 hours, but they are at the forefront of my mind right now. Unlike the last time I really dug into those types of questions I have yet to formulate a path forward to share with the world. My next book could very well be about answering those questions and probably more. We live in a time right now where stability has given way to a wall of questions that are at the moment mystifying. Gradually the foundations of civil society will help bring things together. Those foundations of civil society bring people together based on communities of place, purpose, and interest that allow groups to work together creating networks of common interest. Later on today I’m going to circle back to these last two paragraphs and try to dig back into the central premise that brought these questions to the forefront of my thoughts. Something a lot deeper is waiting just below the surface and I want to spend some time thinking about that next layer of questions.    

Interrupted. Work.