Let’s start from the components:
Wetware: used to describe the elements equivalent to hardware and software found in a person
Craft: an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill. Not a science, but not an art like we consider it now. In the direction of techne.
Wetwarecraft aims to be is a collection of tools, ideas, techniques discovered in the process of realizing we are aware, sentient beings, subject to what happened to us. We are ourselves a process. What we do, what we experience, shapes us.
We are are engaged in social, mental, and body activities, and they change us, they even partly make who we are. This way, we can look at social, mental, and body activities as technologies, that we use, and that at the same time have an effect on us.
In the physical world, if we apply the correct technique, something happens. We follow a recipe, and we get food, give or take mistakes. We follow a certain process, and we write some software. We ride bicycles, and we had to learn to do it.
When the techniques involve ourselves as component and leverages, we are at the same time the users, and the ingredients, and part of what the techniques affect and change.
We can get involved in things that change us. Up to a point.
We all experienced not being in the mood of doing something, starting anyway, and after a while being into it. What we are changes. We are different after learning a language.
Actors and performers and athletes all have ways to get in the flow: they know they can change their state, from where they are, from where they need to be to perform.
The same happens, slower, to all of us, engagement by engagement.
This is my contribution to collecting bits of the story of this process.
It involves AI, and how we use technology, and what working with thinking machines can tell about us, even if they are very stupid machines at the moment.
It is about body practices, spiritual practices, mental models, relational practices, and everything else involved in this thing called living, and how we can support each other, learn from each other, and realize we are doing this together.
It is about the art, craft, and dance of being a squishy machine.
And having fun with it.
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