Welcome! This is the Living Language Labs site. As a student, I was always very busy writing things, making lots of generative art (which you can still view on my website!), various programs and much more. I was always active doing things. Most of what I did online was catalysed through Twitter, from back when Twitter was still Twitter.
Now, at 29, as I’ve spent a few years as a professional software engineer, I’m not a student anymore and my drive to create and share has wilted with time.
I’ve felt a longing to pick up where I left off almost a decade ago, and to start actively sharing my work, thoughts, ideas, experiments, book reviews, and more.
I have a vague dream of creating a space where community science, business, ecological flourishing and tech come together. In my ideal version of this space, it’s a physical space, my primary influences being dynamicland, Xerox PARC, Bell Labs and the Waag Future Lab.
In this vein, I have created a small business brand called Scrybble, which is aimed at providing software services for knowledge workers. Scrybble has a Discord, but that Discord is lacking in a real community feeling. Communities are more than just piles of people, and I believe one of the thing that makes a community a community is a shared purpose or shared vision.
While I find it difficult to envision what the Living Language Labs will eventually turn out to be, whether it will be small or big, a business or a nonprofit, just a blog or an active community, a physical space or an online space, or maybe a mix of all of the above, I am here to commit to it coming to life.
So what is the Living Language Labs about, anyway?
If there is one thing I hate more than anything, it’s throwing in the towel. The defining issues of our time revolve around climate change, living together with 7 billion people, dealing with a fast changing world, organising society and politics in the age of social media and even more.
It’s clear that there are plenty of very serious problems that we need to be dealing with, and these problems are only partially being dealt with. One of the most frustrating things I see around me, and I see this coming from people of all generations, is that people are giving up. “Oh but the big businesses are too big and evil”, “oh but politics is broken and they don’t care”, “oh but my individual actions don’t matter”, “everything is lost anyway”.
For better or for worse, I’m a born optimist (not a realist!) and I see these problems and crises as an opportunity for us to rethink everything and hopefully come up with better ideas, better systems, better tools, better media. Throwing in the towel means giving in to the worst outcome.
As a person who has dealt with severe depression, it feels to me like we as a people are dealing with an existential depression. I see this all around me, and I’m tired of it. People lack hope, and I completely understand why. Yet, us as a species have been through worse, and humans have shown to be capable of extraordinary feats before.
I am strongly and decisively of the belief that what we lack in our world is a radiating beacon of hope. And my best idea of what this kind of beacon can be is a community-oriented research lab on resiliency, climate tech, community science and media.
We can and we will cope. I don’t yet know how, but I do know that we will. The first step is to step up and say “I believe in our capacity to work together for a future worth living in”. My aim is for the Living Language Labs to grow out to be a space where we don’t just deal in hope, but come together, as citizens, friends, neighbours, professionals and visitors to collaborate and actually make this future possible; through tech, through citizen science, through art, through media, through education and beyond.
That’s a big dream!
The Living Language Labs doesn’t exist yet. It’s a vision for a community spirit. I want to make it happen, I honestly don’t have a clue about how to create a space like Xerox PARC or Bell Labs. I know that these kinds of spaces cost a lot of money to set-up, and they involve either government money or corporate money.
I’m not sure how to get there. I used to have the rather naive belief that “I’d simply get rich, and then fund it myself”. I found it to be quite difficult to “simply become rich”, so there’s a better alternative: find the right people and come up with a vision and a path together.
In my future, I’m planning to go to Wageningen University and get a master in biotechnology. And likely keep going afterward. Not necessarily because I want to end up working in biotech, but because I believe that Wageningen University is the right place with the right people. If I’m serious about making a space like this happen, what better place could I pick?
Sooo.. what’s this site?
All of that being said, for now this site is nothing more than a space for me to write, share and explore. It’s a place to dive into my curiosities, into ideas, plans, conversations, thoughts, sketches and similar.
The aim of the site is to inspire, ask questions, spread interesting knowledge and connect with other curious minds.
I’ll be writing and posting. I would like to commit to write a post every single day for the next 365 days, but I’m not 100% sure that’s the right kind of commitment just yet.
I don’t think the posts on this site need to be grand or amazing, they just need to be meaningful enough to talk about.
Let’s breathe life into the Living Language Labs.