GENOMICON

This is a phenomena that I’ve noticed a couple of times… there’s a community of people who are engaged in an activity… they bumble along, then suddenly – in a very short period of time, they get to be really good at it – so much so, that it transforms the culture (or at least the discourse), rendering the previous culture almost unrecogniseable.

Now this may just be an error of observation on my part… I just don’t notice things improving until they hit a WTF threshold. I’m not sure though – I suspect there’s something else going on. It’s almost like a 100th Monkey thing… where there’s a sudden explosive change… started by a few individuals, then within a couple of memetic iterations, everyone is doing it.

I first noticed this in Camden Market in the 1990s. It went from being a tatty little place selling goth scarves etc to a hive of boutiquey type places. Money got involved. It’s seems to be a fairly common thing with markets in fact – where visual attention rules… Etsy is another prime example. It went from “crafts” to “boutiques” very quickly.

The whole effect seems to be a combination of

1) Competition for attention.
2) No “IP” – ie: ideas are free to propagate without state constriction.
3) “Seed Geniuses” who make the first quantum leap – people with vision and… ability.

This effect has become quite noticeable in a bunch of different spheres online, some notable examples being:

1) Lego

(from)

This also demonstrates a leap in video quality… anamorphic, dolly-shots, well lit etc. This particular example also include Process… which seems to be a crucial part of memetic virility – playing on the “I could do that” factor. The first time I felt “WTF” over lego creations was lego rubics-cube solvers… and now? The Incredible has become quite common.

2) Rube Goldberg Machines

Started out as marbles on wires, now there are dozens of examples like this:

The “related videos” in the youtube side-bar have lots of other examples… back to Lego

3) Origami

(via)

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These are just examples that have taken me a bit by surprise – because I’ve seen the “before / after” situation… there are doubtless countless others… I suspect quite strongly that Kickstarter is starting to show a similar effect… though this is more to do with polish of presentation than really world-beating ideas.

Worth comparing and contrasting though – quirky.com (where the “IP” is poisoned by default), and kickstarter.com – where there’s a tendency to open-source. Kickstarter is on an entirely different planet, in terms of both capability and money. I’m still a little wary of it becoming the facebook of crowd-funding… but I’ve also noticed the odd site here and there offering pre-sales outside the kickstarter environment… and I’ve “invested”. eg:

the biolite stove

the incredible WAAI thing

But anyway… Quantum Quality Leap… these days I’m keeping 1/2 an eye out for other places where this might crop up… obvious suspects being microcopters, or 3D printing. There’s also a massive drift (noticeable in kickstarter) towards creating building-blocks for The Internet Of Things… this is happening even faster than the wave of really cheap 3D printer kits that started about 6 months ago.

This is cool

It’s a plugin onto Mechanical Turk from MS word… which allows (for a small fee) you to get a whole load of people to help with grammar, style etc etc in word-processing.

No word on the speed of it – and I don’t use MS products anyway, so that’s me out of the loop… but still… excellent.

I must take a closer look at Mechanical Turk actually.

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On a tangentially related note, the attempt at crowd-sourcing story, “Purefold” has admitted failure… and is no more. I was contributing (kindof) for a while… the only reason I joined friendfeed in fact. So what went wrong?

I don’t think writing is that much of a collaborative process to be honest. I know they have teams writing comedies in the US… but… I’m guessing that these coalesce into a chemistry between a few key people… and it’s more like agile/dual programming than anything that resembles art-work by distributed committee.

I also got a bad taste from Purefold toadying attitude to “brands” who in my opinion are facile manipulative cunts who don’t deserve to live. I don’t like brands, and I don’t like any of the thinking that goes into them. They are the heart and soul of inauthenticity… so behind the Purefold thing, was this nagging sense that the real purpose of this was to make someone else money. Someone who I didn’t like.

So… it kindof turned into a brain-dump of interesting things that we’d found on the web… and that was as far as it got… but I think a lot of us already had outlets for that – this blog for example… and in the end I was using it to send people back here.

Dunno – I’m an introvert. I’m not a team-player, ESPECIALLY when it comes to creative stuff. Sure I’ve played in bands for… decades on and off, but a band is a fairly strange creature… populated by fairly strange creatures… who dress strangely, and have strange and chaotic lifestyles… but there’s this sensitivity that connects them. Bands are absolutely about listening to other people, at a very deep level. It don’t work otherwise.

In the end everything to do with information always comes back to memetics, just as everything in biology comes back to natural-selection. With Purefold, the memetic… payoff wasn’t dynamic enough. The fact that the first 4 letters of memetic are ME ME is a cute coincidence, worth dwelling on for like… a second or something.

Wiki | Kickstarter

I’ve watched this video a couple of times (ok, once) and I’m still not really sure what it’s about – something to do with democratising biotech. I found the advert quite irritating to be honest, but I find everything quite irritating so don’t worry about that. It’s interesting from a number of different directions, because…

a) it’s about democratising biotech, and that is kindof vital for the survival of humanity I think and

b) they talk about safety, and I’ve argued with these people, and they don’t even know what the issues are and

c) It’s on Kickstarter…. and it’s maxed it’s funding – $35000 with 239 people – an average of around $150 each… though I’m guessing there’s some fairly big numbers in there so the median will probably be a whole lot lower. This is ostensibly crowd-sourced funding… but 239 people isn’t really a crowd. It doesn’t take much to do a lot.

I have a feeling that the Biocuriosity people are fairly hyper-connected/active networkers though – 239 is still probably more than I could do. I’d get about 4 – So it ain’t money for nothing I don’t think. Still… it looks like a working model to me. I’ve been looking for “ways for people to get paid” for a while now… we still need a way to pay people after the fact – people who make things that are no longer sold as physical goods. Musicians, film-makers writers etc. I still want a way to send Trixie something for this:

But in some meaningful way – not as a random donation… something concrete… like buying her groceries for a week or getting her a set of guitar strings or something. And although it’s less important (to me) I’d still like to get something back… whether it be some physical thing through the post or reputation capital maybe. Dunno. Money is still locked-in to the notion of “exchange”, and it feels kindof weak just sending it into the ether. Still… there’s probably enough stuff in the post at the moment. If she has a million fans then the whole thing could get a bit eco-angry. And what are we buying in the end? Identity?

There’s got to be a way through this.

Back to reality, I’d say cottage industries are the way to go… based on this graphic

But there are issues of scalability – but… maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe it’s ok for a musician to employ neighbours, friends, fans blah blah to act as mail-order-fulfillment nodes. Maybe it doesn’t have to mega corporation doing it all – with the inevitable consequence that it becomes a parasitic gate-keeper. Maybe there is a way of networking the distribution of… stuff.

I’m not sure why, but this reminds me of Renaissance Florence (I was there you know) – even the wealthy families – the bankers and merchants and so on, still had little shops built into the gate-house-bits of their houses. Selling basic sundries – everyone had a cottage-industry-retail business going on the side.

See… if a load of… “enthusiasts” get together to design a car, the last thing they come up with is a teapot. What they produce instead is something specifically designed to fight other cars… and they call it The Rally Fighter.

(via)

Local Motors, who crowd-source (to an extent) the designs of their output have put together something… and for about $2 million dollars (which is peanuts apparently) made a machine that people will actually want… although by “people” they mean the American Off-Road Rally Market… who can afford $50,000.

I’ve gone on about Local Motors before… once raving uncontrollably about what a great idea it is, once raving uncontrollably about what a terrible idea it is.

These days… undecided… but it’s probably a good thing, because I’m gradually coming to the very definite conclusion that the biggest problem that humanity has is top-down control… and while 2 million/50,000 still looks pretty expensive to me, it does mean that you don’t need to be a corporation the size of GM to do it… and it’s companies like GM and their deliberate sabotage of renewables that have created a large number of the problems we face today – whether they be wars in oily countries, or a sky gone so oily that the ice-caps are melting

Someone pointed out recently that the only types of electric vehicles that seem to get designed are teapots, or supercars. I wonder… if cars are evolving into two different sexes? Not that women necessarily only like teapot cars mind… but… I have noticed that they quite like cars that look like bugs or little (big) animals.

Anyway. The car above is definitely a bloke car… a 15 year-old bloke car – which is to say, it’s designed to impress other boys, rather than women.

Phoooaaar

This is fantastic… potentially, maybe, I think.

It’s like a distributed, mechanical-turk-style application where people can spend a few idle minutes, hours (whatever) doing some small bit of voluntary work… via iPhone

It sucks because it’s via iPhone. Everything else about it is great.

There are a couple of reasons why I find this so interesting….

1) In my experience, people are really reluctant to hand over money, but will volunteer time. Lots of it. I can’t quite figure this one, but it seems to be what happens. Asking for donations (in my experience) is a total waste of time compared to “could anyone help me with”… some actual bit of work

2) I think we need to get away from debt-based currency. Back in the late middle-ages, they had grain/corn-exchanges – grain being a commodity that absolutely everyone needed and used. I don’t think such a thing exists today. I’ve come across a guy trying to design a system based around energy… joules instead of dollars – but he’s so verbose that I can’t figure out what he’s on about. And so it won’t work.

Micro-volunteering offers the distinct possibility of exchanging labour for labour… in an arena which isn’t automatically a zero-sum game. A bit like the Japanese granny-care setup that Douglas Rushkoff occasionally goes on about. This isn’t what this app is set up to do, but it has potential.

3) I think there is huge, powerful potential in one-to-one communication from the walled-world, to the outside.

I think that conscious attention… the knowledge that it’s there, the act of giving it, is going to be a LOT more powerful than simply punting money at charities once a month etc. Eventually, something is going to do to the big global charities, what P2P did to the RIAA et al – and I think that is going to be a real world-changer.

Theoretically, the mechanisms for this already exist – but there’s something about working together that really pulls people together. Social apps doing nothing but chattering doesn’t have quite the same effect.

And I don’t think it’s a one way street. The West is suffering from chronic existential problems and depression. I think value is going to flow both ways. Big time.

And I think this app is an example of how it could start… just someone sitting at a bus stop helping out with a bit of translation… giving some advice, saying “hi, what’s the weather like where you are?”

4) This is also a mechanism that would support the Crowd-Sourced Eco-Monitoring that I was on about earlier. I think there are fairly huge benefits to this as well.

Acorn Hats! Marvelous

From Halfland – Shelley Noble who appears to be making an entire stop-motion movie out of… stuff. It looks amazing – and you can send in your own fish to make cameo appearances etc.

The Great Work if ever there was one. One of my favorite hobbies is going to film school for no particular reason (I go to film schools a lot). The most I’ve ever managed to pull off is a little 10 minute thing – and the amount of work that went into that was daunting to say the least. Taking on a whole feature-length movie (where you’re creating an entire world from scratch) leaves me feeling slightly faint.

There seems to be a bit of this going on at the moment – open-sourcery of film-making I mean. It’ll be interesting when things start hitting the screen.

I have this nagging doubt about Movies 2.0 though. Having spent about a decade on a stage, standing (with spindly legs) between a Statocaster and a load of massive amplifiers, I’m a believer in chemistry….

…in music. There’s something about music where the sum is almost always greater than the parts – and the parts don’t even need to like each other, or be playing the same song (in their minds). You often need the clash of personalities for it to work.

This (almost) never happens in painting. Writing?… sometimes (the smaller the group the better). Serial-killing?… yup, often happens in pairs; Movies?…

… movies need a lot of people. Robert Rodriguez may have been able to get away with 3 back in the day, but… generally, movies need a lot of spare hands. This isn’t the same thing as crowd-sourcing though. Although movies need a lot of people, you still need insane geniuses driving it, otherwise artwork-by-committee syndrome kicks in, and/or nothing gets done. Another thing I’ve noticed (and this may well be down to the politics of the business) with most of my favorite films the director is also the writer.

I’m not sure that movie making as we currently know it is a democratic process really – in fact I suspect it might be the LEAST democratic process that (in The West at least) we allow.

Web 2.0 it ain’t. There are strong drives (and incentives) though towards… turning this avalanche of innovation and expression that’s currently blossoming all over the place into some sort of conduit for stories which have more cultural/narrative value than a billion people ranting at webcams. It’s starting to happen I think… people are trying things.

The reason all this has come tumbling out is that I’ve been trying to get my head around the Purefold thing.

It’s… err…. “Purefold is the first product conceived by Ag8 and developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s newly launched entertainment division Free Scott. Purefold is an open media franchise designed for brands, platforms, filmmakers, product developers and communities to collaboratively imagine our near future.”

There’s a video on the link above, which explains it a bit more, but every time I go back, I get more confused about what it actually (once you get past all the brand-speak) “is”. As far as I can tell (through these cynical eyes) right now it’s a Friendfeed group (which covers similar ground to this here blog) which is skimmed by the production company for ideas/scripts or whatever to make product-placement films out of… which are fed back to the subscribers, taking the role of focus-groups.

Personally I think it will work… which is to say, it will work in the way that all this crowd-sourced creativity works, and that is, a small number of insane geniuses float to the top – and the crowd-sourcing of focus-groupery has a much greater chance of picking winners than Hollywood normally does – partly because it’s a type of focus-groupery that also contains its own built-in viral evangelising (which is cheating). The focus group becomes the sales team.

yea, ok. I couldn’t resist it either : ) from Christina Spangler, via Shelley

I quite like the idea of a whole world being created as well – not just a set/setting for a story, but a world in which multiple stories can unfold/interweave. This was the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw Shelley’s thing. If you’ve got all these characters, all this scenery, all this material – it seems a shame to limit it to one story. It’s an extension in some way to the increasing immersiveness trend we’re seeing in films… swimming closer and closer to video games.

I mean why should all the Harry Potter stories be about Harry Potter? (the little git) There’s a whole world to play with there.

So anyway, there it is. A handful of thoughts, thrown like straw up into the wind.

Or Why You Will Never Make In On Your Own.

So anyway, I’ve been sitting on this idea of electricity-monitoring for about 10 years now, and thought I had it all figured out…

… and a conversation turned up on the open-manufacturing list recently which led to the Internet 0 thing, which is now 5 years old and appears not to have set the world on fire, or at least not yet.

And I always thought that the killer-app for electricity-monitoring would be being able to control your house from the web. This would be the bribe that would get it through the door – and I missed completely the REAL killer-app, which is that with wified home-automation, you don’t need to have wired-in light-switches – which radically reduces the amount of building effort/cost/expertise etc. The driver isn’t novelty-seeking consumerism, it’s the building trade.

Ten years of thinking about this, and I missed what someone with a different perspective saw immediately. This is why crowd-sourced imagination is a killer-app at a higher level. It doesn’t matter if you’re Einstein or Newton or Da-Vinci… you simply cannot compete with imagination coming from a multiplicity of different perspectives.

How does the saying go? 1 point of perspective is worth 80 points of IQ?

Crowd-sourcing doesn’t work for everything, but it’s very good for perspective… and therefore very good for imagination.

Metacycle is a site where people can upload ideas for repurposing old consumables – they feature (and seem to have the same logos as) the Pen-Connectors in the last post – which is a genius idea if you ask me, especially if you could thread wires through the connectors.

(via)

There have been a couple of sites like this of late – forums for “new ideas” which look suspiciously like they’re about to devolve into just-another-design-company-spam location. I think the “design challenges” bit is a great idea – kindof like “what are 20 other potential uses for a paper-clip”. The amount of information about each idea/design seems to be a bit sparse though.

It also reminds me a bit (because of the recycling angle) of that utterly brilliant Indian site which has hundreds of DIY toys/Experiments etc.

Firstly check this out…

A Ferrari Modulo Pininfarina from 1970 – a pinnacle of the art – absolutely beautiful bit of paleo-futurism which makes me think of Clockwork Orange for some reason.

It makes me feel all futuristic and nostalgic at the same time.

Still. That was yesterday.

A while back I went on gushingly about Local Motors – a car-manufacturer that’s adopted the Threadless Approach, and got punters to design their own cars… a couple of days ago, Eric Hunting (who’s a genius) from the Open-Manufacturing group had this to say about it:

Normally I would jump at this topic, but after looking at this site
I’m afraid I couldn’t do it without my rage getting out of control.
I’m unfortunately afflicted with an Eero Saarinen sort of aesthetic
sensibility. Unnecessary design and decoration tends to piss me off
and cause me to start trance-channeling James Lileks.

Someone needs to tell these folks that making toys is for elves…

Which made me fall about laughing. He’s completely right and I was completely wrong – I hope he doesn’t mind me re-printing this. I did ask but he didn’t reply, so I fall back on my defecto behaviour which is somewhere between asking permission and asking forgiveness.

So there you go kids. You hadn’t figured on that had you? That crowd-sourced design IS actually going to make the world look like MySpace rather than Ikea.

The future’s so bright I have to wear shades.

Still… Phoooaaarrr…

AND it’s got bench-seats in the front so your supermodel girlfriend can drape herself all over you and interfere with your driving causing you to ding it on something that looks like this

while you’re trying to find the exit to the Walmart carpark.

This is possibly quite a neat idea

It’s a kindof consumer-union for would be solar-buyers. They get to buy in bulk and advise on local conditions / best setups etc.

I’m quite interested in the retrofitting of green-tech into urban environments – and this could well be a good way of going… because as far as I can see, our various governments are utterly in thrall to the existing systems. Which suck.