GRAVITY THIRTY ONE -- Friday, October 16, 1992

This will be part two of three. Three notes in one day. I'm on-line as I
write this, and will stay that way till I've sent off the last. It's quite likely that when I hang up, I won't be able to get back on the system.

So then: the plan. Let's assume there's some gravity to my technological ideas. Let's say that the information representation, manipulation, and communication scheme I've begun to describe in these notes has enough merit to warrant the ear of the public. Let's say it's the real thing.

How to pull it off? We start with the creativists. As an ad agency brat
I've learned that there are thousands of wanna-be creative types keeping "real" jobs who dream about having the freedom to create on their own terms. There's so many of us, and collectively we're a vastly influential bunch. It's the writers, painters, graphic designers, filmmakers, musicians, software developers, philosophers, and poets who shape the image of this world, who affect real and lasting influence on our collective direction. For the most part they've been doing it on someone else's dime. Instead of sending a message like "Create Now!", they're saying "Buy Potato Chips!", so as a result we're all buying a lot of potato chips, and slowly slowly slowly losing the will and the patience to interact with any insight.

First, we establish ThoughtShops of creativists. Two software products will make this possible. The first is ThoughtShop, which as I've said is like a super-smart bulletin board. It's a multi-platform product, which means that it'll run in the MS-DOS, OS/2, Unix, Amiga, and Macintosh environments. I've designed ThoughtShop and Gravity to be platform independent, so this will be a less formidable task than it seems. ThoughtShop turns a computer into an information franchise, a center of exchange, a community of ideas.

Then there's Mu, which is the product you need to connect to a ThoughtShop. With Mu you create text, image, sound, and system items. It's a word processor, an illustration program, a desktop publisher, a multi-track MIDI composer, a sound writing, a relational database, and a communications program all rolled into one. This may sound like some kind of fantasy until you realize that I intend to provide minimum functionality for all of these tasks. Mu lets you create, review, and communicate Gravity items in simple offline ways. When connected to a ThoughtShop, your Mu package will get smarter. It'll be able to do more. Mu is your personal agent and when
connected to a ThoughtShop it melds with the larger ground and in doing so gains all of the abilities of that ThoughtShop.

So we set up at least nine ThoughtShops around the country, each concerned with a different area of creative pursuit, each with a particular brand of information to peddle, and connect them. Connect the ThoughtShops into one seamless common ground and call it Mu. Get people communicating on the new medium. Get them using Gravity to create new information items: poems, pictures, songs, systems. Items for sale, you understand. Built into the software is the ability to sell your works to the public.

All of this begins on a word-of-mouth basis. Find a few fed-up and
furious creative types across the country and get them to run ThoughtShops.

At the same time, start having meetings. Gather together to talk about
things that matter, using the Nine Principles as ballast, much in the
way several thousand groups use AA's Twelve Steps.

Learn Well from what a few men back in 1935 put together. With no advertising, Alcoholics Anonymous became the largest non-profit organization in the world, larger than the Red Cross or the Peace Corps, all because of a few helpful hints and an obvious need. There's no formal organization in AA. Each group is autonomous. All by word of mouth, it became a runaway success, a vastly influential force in millions of people's lives.

But the Twelve Steps deal with addictions. They're useful only to the
afflicted. They're a tried-and-true solution but remain in most minds an
extreme path for extreme people.

But let's look at this social phenomenom and apply it to creative people. There's plenty of creativists out there, and lots of us have troubles dealing with the everyday grind. We feel things intensely, and must overcome many barriers to remain true to our tasks. It's quite a fight to find the freedom to follow your insight. I'd say without question
there's a real need for creativists to meet and discuss our lives and our art, to gather from each other the strength to continue, to help each other feel less alone and more alive. I for one would feel much more at ease to know there's a place I could go to speak of the joy and sorrow in making things, a place to give and get strength.

So we start small. Use the network of ThoughtShops to connect these local groups. Build up a base of inspired information, and allow the spirit of these groups to spread. Publish a monthly magazine named "Immuexa" that tells of the Principles, the groups, the network, and its offerings.

Then... when there's sufficient gravity to Gravity, and enough of the
right people are involved... we do one single uncharacteristic thing.