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Musings: The World Is Overstilumated. I'm reflecting on my experience this summer spending 3 days in the dark. I was in Tangier, Morocco, in an apartment, and I had those garage door window shutters that would keep the entire apartment completely pitch black even in the middle of the day. I chose to spend 3 days in the darkness. Mostly sitting on the couch staring into darkness.

I wasn't aware of this experience having much impact until I started having phone calls with people from the darkness. I could hear everything in the silence. Beyond someone's voice, I could hear the Soul speaking. I'm pretty convinced we can communicate in Silence, and I love words.

I've been wondering about how overstimulated the world is. In this moment I'm watching the woman across the table from me scroll through her phone, going from Instagram to Spotify to texting to checking out concert tickets this weekend. Starting sentences and starting new ones mid sentence. I'm in love with how incongruent and disoriented we can appear as humans.

I wonder what it would be like for the world to take a day off from stimulus: food, cell phone, entertainment devices, etc. What if we had a collective pause? Sunlight, water, fresh air. Our collective nervous system could use a Parasympathetic Pause. I like this as an Emerging Probability and Planetary Potential. Feels like part of the emerging meta-model and protocol for The Wellbeing of Humanity.

The VP Debate. Hey y’all,

What we’re up to tonight

Tonight we’re going to have fun, test how UpTrust works with 20-30 people simultaneously using it, and perhaps gain some insight and make some connections.

How to engage

You’re welcome to use the platform however you’d like, and in no way are you restricted to debate topics. We’re using the debate as a launch pad and a orientation of shared experience that we can keep coming back to. Feel free to innovate or do normal stuff, we’re excited to see what we all come up with. Here are some ideas:

• Write longform content
• Do really short stuff
• Speak meta about the process, government, ideology;
• Speak about specific policies, ideas, solutions, possibilities;
• Speak micro / personal / interpersonal about your feelings, your interactions in the moment here, your life
• Inquire into things, asking questions, pondering, inviting reflection and group intelligence
• Be thoughtful
• Be disagreeable
• be silly
• Speak from your heart
• Do whatever feels real, knowing that there’s impact
• Share links or images using Markdown (the formatting guide will show you how)

Disagreement is welcome, and converse like you do in-person

So far in our tests, finding disagreement has been more challenging than the usual social media mishaps. That’s partly why we’re honing in on the Veep debate.

That said, Politics and religion have been polarizing long before social media, so things may get heated. Please remember we are real people, including you of course. We may all get triggered, and that’s OK. We may say something we regret—we can apologize, forgive, and of course we can delete comments. There may be no take-backsies in impact, but there is in visibility :)

Our algorithms mimic how trust and conversation work IRL; however you like to have conversation in person, is probably the ideal way to have conversation here. If you’re empathetic here, fine. If there’s stuff you wouldn’t say in person, don’t say it here. If you want to troll—well, try out one of our Troll Bots, and feel free to post that.

On that note, the bots can be pretty helpful, so try them out and see if it takes your conversations in a new direction.

Known Bugs

We are in active development and there’s a bunch of stuff that is in the middle of being fixed, or even simply improved visually (like the bot promotion look and feel, or topic pages, etc). So sorry, forgive us, thank you, and we love you!

Here are some known bugs that may get in your way:

• Mobile topics—switch to landscape mode (instead of vertical)
• Groups aren’t yet really launched even though it seems like they are
• Sorting and group selection dropdowns sometimes disappear while mousing over
• Occasional posting time weirdness
• Occasional mobile weirdnesses

Please continue to submit feedback

We love all your feedback, seriously, hit that button and let us know.

Not just bugs—also preferences. Here are some requests we gotten and are in the pipeline:
- Various different ways of integrating posts and comments
- Differentiate read from unread content
- Inbox notifications for comments a few layers down
- etc.

Even if we already know it, it may change our priorities if everyone is aligned on wanting or disliking a particular thing.