Apologies.

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction." --EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

Lately, our newsletters have been sent out with strange formatting errors. We are aware of this and have addressed the problem. We strive to provide the best content and make it easy to digest and readable. We sometimes fail, but we often deal with issues at the code level (in this case, the HTML was buggy based on user error on a new platform). Thanks for your patience and for hanging with us during our embryonic stage.

It's worth a short note to discuss why we have issues like this; they strike at the heart of our identity and our core values at Singular XQ. We do not use for-profit platforms for data, leads, or content publishing when we can help it. Our roadmap involves using only self-hosted, bespoke, and open-source partner-developed:

On On-premises Cloud Storage
Content Management System
Learning Management System
Customized, Small Language Models
Database
Customer Relationship Management Platform

Building these things is not as expensive as one would expect; we intend to stay small and lean. These things only become unwieldy and costly when your goal is rapid growth and scale. For example, our first language model will likely involve only a single terabyte of data or less. We aren't trying to solve every problem for all the people of the globe because we have no interest in gathering their data or extracting shadow labor from them. It is labor intensive, however, and if we spend our time building in this stage of our development, we cannot spend time creating a mission impact. Mission impact will allow us to apply for and win the kind of no-strings grants and donors we are slowly building relationships with and attracting.

In the meantime, wherever possible, we are choosing to partner with service providers who are also small, on the newer side, and open-source. We make some compromises for efficiency, and we use social media platforms to find people who want to help the cause, but the goal is to be as open-source and independent as possible. It's the only way that we can stick to our values, which are:

1) Transparency
2) Collaboration
3) Inclusion
4) Non-coercion
5) Egalitarian Meritocracy

These values are messy, sometimes inefficient, slower, more absorbing, and demanding.

And they always make us appear out of step with how things "should" be done. I've patiently listened to prospective supporters and partners lecture me on how I'm doing this wrong. I get it. I get how it looks.

It is quite messy.

I opened with a quote from EF Schumacher, another uncool and out-of-step person. Here is another quote about this messiness precisely as we understand it.

"The system of production that is rational from the point of view of the producer can be irrational from the point of view of the consumer and the environment. The task of our times is to design production systems that are both economically and ecologically rational."

He understood this process is messy.

He wrote this in 1973.

Some people can see the signals on the horizon.

Thanks for your support.
Stay Curious,

JP

Another way to help: We've partnered with bookshop.org, an online bookshop curating the books our members like reading and sharing. You can do all your book shopping on bookshop.org, and you can also select Singular XQ there as an independent bookseller you'd like to support. A small portion of the books you buy there will help us. Do you have a book about emerging technology and the social and cultural impacts of tech innovation you'd like to share, discuss, or suggest? We want to hear from you.