FAQ for the ERE2 Subforum

The "other" ERE. Societal aspects of the ERE philosophy. Emergent change-making, scale-effects,...
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AxelHeyst
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FAQ for the ERE2 Subforum

Post by AxelHeyst »

@mathiverse and @slevin et all did a great job making a 'welcome to the forum' permasticky.

I wonder if a FAQ for this sub would be useful? After all the recent discussions, I found it helpful for my own sanity to organize some of my thoughts that came out of them. The discussions got pretty scattered through different threads.

Similar to the New Users thread, if anyone wants to grab this text and edit/riff on it, go ahead.

V1:

Welcome to the ERE2 subforum! This is a unique little snowflake of a subforum, so I thought it would be worth writing an introduction and guide to this place.

What is ERE2?
It is multiplayer ERE. It's what happens when some critical mass of people come together and individual WoGs interrelate with each other. You might think of it as a WoG of WoGs. Here is this thread explaining ERE2 in more depth.

So wait, does ERE2 exist somewhere?
The short answer is no. There are probably lots of projects out there that are similar to, or come close to, what we mean when we talk about ERE2, but nothing explicit yet.

So ERE2 is just an idea right now?
Short answer is yes. Insofar as every once in a while a few forumites meet up and do more than just chat, you might think of those as little ERE2 sparks.

Why does ERE2 need a name or a label?
Because we're nerds. And because the first decade plus of ERE1 was all about individuals getting their household systems up and running, it seemed we needed some label to know when we're talking about this multiplayer ERE concept.
  • ERE1 means Early Retirement Extreme. This video is a great introduction.
  • ERE2 means Emergent Renaissance Ecology. This video is a great introduction.
We started using ERE1/2 because ERE became ambiguous, and it's a lot of work to type the full names out. It's just shorthand to point at one of those two unpackings of ERE.

This is an explanation of the emergence/genesis of ERE2.

Can only ERE1 people play?
No, others can play. There are multiple possible way to get to postconsumer praxis. ERE1 describes one route. This thread discusses multiple 'roads' to postconsumer praxis In fact, one of the goals of ERE2 is to figure out how to find and play well with diverse kinds of people. So, ERE2 is not an exclusive club for ERE1 people only. This is a great post unpacking this more.

Do you have to be WL7 to participate in an IRL ERE2 experiment?
No. Anyone can participate, even people who've never heard of ERE or FIRE or systems thinking or anything else.

Do you have to be WL7 to participate in ERE2 discussions?
If you aren't in the neighborhood of WL6, it's probably going to be difficult to figure out what is going on in the ERE2 discussions. This is because ERE2 theory has a lot to do with thinking through systems of systems.

That said, insofar as ERE2 is an idea that seeks to include and/or play well with diverse kinds of people, it is not a requirement to have ticked every box on the standard FIRE ERE1 checklist. In fact, the more diverse perspectives we have in the ERE2 discussions, the better. If we only have people with approximately similar life experiences in these discussions, what we come up with will certainly be narrow and constrained.

Informed, respectful, good-faith participation by anyone is welcome. By 'informed' I mean you've taken some time to read up on ERE2 threads and some of the frameworks we use, if you choose to reference them. Respectful is hopefully obvious. By good-faith I mean you aren't entering the discussion with an agenda of proving an opinion or point about how you think ERE2 is all screwy.

I read through some of the threads in here and it's confusing. You use a lot of terms I'm not familiar with. Can you explain?
Check out our abbreviations page on the wiki, it gives brief explanations and points to more resources for a lot of the frameworks we use to discuss ERE2.

Why don't you guys just DO ERE2 instead of sit around talking about it?
The theory vs practice thread is probably relevant to this question. The short answer is that this subforum is mostly about trying to figure out what ERE2 even is, because there are so few/no examples in the real world of this idea.

Many people have tried spinning up multiplayer games along similar lines to ERE2 throughout history. Most of them have extremely high failure rates. The people interested in talking about ERE2 want to know why, and are trying to put in some effort up front to solve for these issues.

I'm really not interested in ERE2. This sounds weird. I don't want to have anything to do with it - I just want to play ERE on singleplayer mode.
That's totally fine. You're welcome to hang out and participate in the rest of the forum forever without ever coming back to this sub. We'll see you there.

I have some concerns and criticisms about the ERE2 idea, and I'd like to voice them. Are you guys going to be jerks about it?
No. We welcome informed criticism, that's a huge part of this subforum. Just be respectful, and if your criticism boils down to "tl;dr, have opinion anyway," please don't bother. Best case scenario, we'll just ignore it.

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