Few days ago the SF Chronicle had a Sunday cover story about “neo-nomads” and shared workspaces. The “coworking” wiki and google group have been unusually active too.

What’s this mean for Plan Resonate? Right now, not much. The space on Alabama street isn’t open to the public. Sharing the space was a good experiment. There may be more of it in the future, possibly in a new location. Interim, I’ve decided to deflate the jumpy castle that we had set up in the courtyard.

Pretty interesting to see the Chron using nomadic language. Several years ago it seemed like there was a viable management strategy in the nomadic model. Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation has several attractive elements to it. It’s possible to adapt their rhizome model too, and I’ve seriously studied and experimented with how that might work for Plan Resonate. The results have been inconclusive.

Maybe nomadic thought works better as a fashion statement than as an intellectual framework? I’m not sure, and I’m sure not the first to suggest it. You can now amaze your anthro buddies by ordering this utterly conclusive D&G t-shirt at cafe press.

Selection from D&G’s “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980):

“Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, they are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as “monadic” but are instead nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invariant; rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance.”

Some of it might be applicable – it’s very much open to your interpretation. At least it’s an interesting example of the intersection of pop culture and academia. Whether or not you think it’s trash, D&G still have a powerful brand. How many of their contemporaries have created as much of a cultural impact?
[tags]shared workspace, nomads, jumpy castle[/tags]