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Articulating your values and long game: principles, sustainability, and a durable practice

L5Voice 6h P · Community, scenes & practice 9 atoms

Learning objectives

learner can treat free/open-source tools as an ethical stance about craft and collective ownership, and reason about the tension in algorave's open-access politics with sustaining unpaid developers
learner can apply commons/data-love economics — sharing digital work grows rather than depletes its value — and the standard that a guiding principle must be specific enough to divide actions into right and wrong
learner can locate their own trajectory among the craftsman / problem-solver / principle-fighter career paths and accept the long unrecognised development arc as normal

Capstone — one whole task that evidences the objectives

Write a personal manifesto for your live-coding practice: state 2–3 specific, actionable guiding principles (each dividing the world into right/wrong actions), your stance on free tools and the commons, how you'll navigate the open-access-vs-sustaining-developers tension, and which career path you're choosing — with a realistic view of the long arc ahead.

Prerequisite modules

Every live coder eventually faces the questions this module makes explicit: why perform in a free-software scene where the tools cost nothing and the people who build them go unpaid, and what am I actually in this for over the next fifteen years? The whole task is a personal manifesto — not a mood board, but a document with teeth: principles specific enough to rule actions in or out, a worked position on the commons, and an honest choice of career path. In practice this is the document that decides whether you keep showing up to algoraves after the novelty fades, whether you contribute patches back to TidalCycles or Hydra, and how you answer promoters, collaborators, and yourself.

Start supported: draft one candidate principle and test it against the specificity standard — can it divide any concrete situation into right or wrong, the way “no person should be trapped in a mode” can? Most first drafts fail as vague aspirations; iterate until yours discriminates. Next, write your commons position, using the data-love economics of sharing and the ethical framing of free tools as craft and collective ownership, then stress-test it against the unresolved algorave tension between open access and unpaid maintainers. Finally, place yourself among the craftsman, problem-solver, and principle-fighter paths, calibrated by the long-arc reality that decades of unrecognised work is normal, not failure.

The required atoms gate the capstone: without them the manifesto’s principles, commons stance, tension analysis, and path choice collapse into slogans. The supporting atoms — political-act framing, DIY access in lower-resource scenes, FOSS as feminist praxis — deepen and personalise the stance you take, but the manifesto stands without citing them.