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Penny M's avatar

Finally, something that correctly ties the OTW's genesis to freaking Fanlib and Astolat's "What if we...owned the servers?" moment instead of claiming it was all about Strikethrough. (I was there, Gandolf.) In some regards, the rise of AO3 played its own part in eroding the gift economy and feeling of fandom as a community. Instead of dozens of fragmented fandom archives made using Automated Archive or just hand-coded HTML, all loosely connected by web rings, with individual fans more closely tied to the infrastructure and each other, you had one big central location that made posting works easy.

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Clinton Ignatov's avatar

The core is “the deepest frame in the call stack of the mind”. This is a pretty bad metaphor on Ziz's part. The call stack exists in the CPU—it functions during the dynamic execution of the program.

Imagine you're reading Wikipedia. You start by reading about one topic, then click a link, then click another, then start branching off, opening tabs. If you were diligent, you'd read every last tab you had opened, closing them to go back to the last one. Eventually, you'd read your way back down "the stack" to the first article you started on, and finish reading that one *last*.

The deepest frame of the call-stack is the first loop booted, and the last loop finished before shut-down.

So this isn't just about a static hierarchy, like layers of an onion. It's about agency choosing next actions, entering into higher levels of temporary *activity*, then returning back down low again.

So how does this dynamic stack build itself up, and wind itself down? Once over life? Each time you wake up? If the core rapidly changes its mind, it basically severs a connection to everything else higher-up, leaving it stranded in memory. This makes sense for, say, abandoning responsibilities by doing something radical on the low-end of your execution stack (suicide attempt, running away without notice, etc.)

The stack of loops we might posit compromise our "stack" don't just exist in our head. They exist in co-relation with our society and with our environment. The loops of checking your mail every day, starting a new "play my bills" loop for every bill you find, turning to the next envelope, finishing the mail, etc.—these are a relation to the outer world.

I don't see this metaphor applying as a theory of mind at all. It makes no sense as a description of inner-psychology: unless you are depressed and need a million hoops in your brain to jump through before you climb out of bed: something like a prospective anticipation of commitments to come instead of actually living through those commitments. It's more practically a theory of embodied social being.

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