Rethinking Chat - Session 1: Enter the Chat
This session is part of the Introduction to Political Technology course at Newspeak House, open to faculty and fellowship candidates only.
Why is chat THE medium of the 21st century? What could be different about it? What could we try out with our special chat page? Do you want to build an agentic communication system?
A session lead by John Evans, an expert chat developer and cooperative practitioner. He’s the creator of Spacetube, a tool that connects groups together via their internal chat systems e.g. Slack, Discord, Matrix, Whatsapp, Rocketchat, Signal. He is the lead developer for Chat Hackers, a community building Whatsapp tools for organisers.
Reading (15 mins total)
Carrington Event Telegraph transcript - The first chat was the telegraph, read a transcript from when a solar storm meant they could be used without batteries. Sending messages using ambient solar magnetism
White House 1970s chatrooms with polls - The first ever computerised chat tool was built and used during a wage price crisis in the Nixon administration
Intro to development methodologies - This is by me so you have to say you like it
Matrix introduction documentation - Matrix is the protocol that our chat app is built on, this is the basic intro
Matrix elements introduction - This is a bit further in depth
Matrix protocol specification - This is the actual specification of the protocol, this is all you need to use the api, but you have to get used to reading a specification