GENOMICON

So here it is 8/8 Year of Our Lord, 2010.

I’m hitting something of a psychic impasse here – not sure if it’s down to being interested in making movies now – so spending time on that… or trying to do 7 freelance jobs at the same time… or… dunno. I’ve been doing this here blog for about 2 years (I think) now – started off making a couple of posts a day. Am now lucky if I make one a week.

The blog I was writing before this – I suddenly just went “Fait Accomplit” and stopped doing it.

Another thing is that I wrote my own RSS client which basically aggregates all of my feeds into a thing that looks like Opera’s rendition of RSS… but it pulls in videos and images as well… basically presents a (beautiful) magazine of stuff that I’m interested in. It sits on my local machine… I’m the only one that sees it. But… having done that, re-blogging stuff now seems a bit echo-machiney. Unless I’m adding or interpreting, I don’t really feel like there’s a lot of point – my initial breathless excitement having waned a little.

I think I’d like to see some big movements – or focus on tectonics, rather than the flotsam and jetsam that rides on the top. I’m also a little tired of “Inspirational Speaking” being the new rock and roll. I think someone (not me) should go through all the TED videos and compare the Standing-Ovation-Quotient with the And-Then-Fuck-All-Happened Quotient. Because I’m getting a fairly strong sense that there are a lot of standing ovations – for what should be world-changing shit… and nothing’s happening. I’m sick of this whole aspirational self-help-book vibe. Someone on twitter a couple of days back said “Money is a random coincidental by-product of doing what you love“. Oh yeah. People love that stuff. Pity it’s bullshit.

Another thing is that I’m losing interest in the Nerdosphere. The Geekosphere. There aren’t any women in it. There are one or two, but… nowhere near enough. Most of my main drinking-buddies have been women. I don’t share this nerdoid-stepford-wife take on women that a lot of the geekosphere seems to have. I miss the perception and social-cunning.

Maybe I’m just burnt-out. It’s been on the cards for a while.

So… where to from here?

Dunno. Regroup.

Yes it is… and probably more than TV did. And now we’ve got both.

(via)

It’s probably not interference – I mean your brain is shaped by what you do – weeding the garden for 50 years would give you certain sensitivities / habits etc… and I think the Catholic Church probably ought to admit that sexual abstinence probably isn’t a good idea. It probably isn’t interference, rather a part of how brains work… adapt etc.

These are physical changes – your brain’s software is hardware. Wetware. Neurons are physical things.

That Douglas Coupland wrote a book a while back called jPod – which was about programmer geeks etc – and it went on about Autism quite a lot… I can’t remember whether he thought that programming caused autism or autistic people are attracted to programming… but he was spot on. He reckoned this was why geeks generally don’t like being hugged – it’s just too much information – it’s like someone yelling in your ear with a loud-haler.

Personally, I’m finding salad problematic – and these days have to ask that it’s all separated out into its individual components – it’s just chaos other wise. It does my head in. I don’t even like looking at it.

I haven’t been able to read a book in years… I hardly ever get through a movie without checking my emails or various info-feeds. I have supernatural powers of focus – if it’s programming… and I have the attention-span of some sort of scatty cartoon field-mouse the rest of the time.

That Rands dude wrote this thing a while back called The Nerd Handbook – which is worth reading. It’s absolutely (again) spot on – especially the bit about “Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head.”

100%. There’s something about programming, or maybe the web in general that causes a kind of hyper-focus… particularly if you’re juggling a load of different feeds and tasks at the same time. The word “whatever” isn’t (for us) a teenage attitude problem, it’s like a reflexive protection amulet. It takes a microsecond to flick up and deflect stray incoming information.

Is it healthy? Probably not. The web is a ferociously left-brained type of machine. It’s very Yang. That’s why geeks are addicted to coffee. It’s Yang as well.

I think I need to be stricter with my computer-free days… every time I try it, I wait up until midnight… checking the time, checking the time, checking the time… until I can log in again and catch up. I’ve tried meditating. That was good – but it’s about as likely to happen as physical excercise, which I also don’t do.

Still… Pizza for tea. That’s something to look forward to. Dominos have started doing Garlic Prawn flavour. Marvelous.

So a couple of weeks ago, I got drunk and had a fracas with Umair Haque on twitter, in which I said:

All of your b-models are vague bollocks . Face it dude, you’re pretty much only good at criticsing the obvious.

and he replied

those aren’t my b-models. they’re everybody else’s. you just called about 100 smart people idiots. now crawl back into your hole.

Now Hemingway always used to say to me “always keep a promise sober, that you made drunk”. So I do.

A word about Umair.

I stumbled across his blog thing a couple of years back (at the height of the Bush insanity) and was so impressed that I sat down and read the whole thing from start to finish. I’ve never done that with a blog before or since. He had an amazingly prescient, articulate and refreshing take on what was going on.

Something you notice though is that… in the comments, people were (increasingly) asking “So what do we do about this? Tell us master, what must we do?” – and no answer was forthcoming.

So I think what Umair has done (see Bruce Sterling talk from a couple of days back). He’s taken the Richard Feynman 2.0 approach to problem solving – which is basically to crowd-source it.

And maybe this is the best approach… but what’s it come back with?

Looks to me like a series of manifestos with names like “Wisdom Manifesto“, “The Awesomeness Manifesto”

“Awesomeness”? What is this? Bill and Ted? Please.

The content of these manifestos looks to me like a touchy-feely feel-good fest for this emergent tribe of “Smart People”. Or Umair’s Army of Textarea Sycophants. Whatever. The content of these manifestos looks to me as much to do with what the audience want to hear, than what will actually wind up being used. Everything is memetics – but the memosphere for Umair’s “Solutions” is different from the memosphere where any solution will need to take hold.

–

It’s not that easy.

Umair like my other greatest fan, Douglas Rushkoff has this truly inspiring talent at pointing out what’s wrong, but when it comes to creating solutions…? Meep.

All that comes back is a selection of anecdotes that people have tried which have sortof worked… but which aren’t (as you may have noticed) exactly spreading like Islam in the Desert.

Because I think… ideas can be smart (ie: well adapted) – but people? Some of the stupidest people I know are smart people.

There seems to be this repeating pattern of someone writing a book that becomes famous, based on a single “smart” idea – the author acquires the laurels of Smartdom, and then they have to write another book.

And it kindof sucks. A bit.

So you start to get an inkling that maybe this person isn’t quite as smart as was once supposed – and really the difference between the Rock-Stars of Smart, and the less exalted tiers of suffering humanity comes down to… luck.

Everything is memetics. Any “solution” to our problems won’t emerge from “smart people” figuring them out on behalf of the stupid, they’ll precipitate out on their own, as adaptations to changing conditions – and they’ll be as easy for an illiterate living in a bullet-holed breeze-block shell in Turano to figure out, as some Ivy League Professor, and his flock.

In fact my guess is that it will be the Turano-dwellers who figure it out first.

–

Because I think Smart People are over-rated. You hear a lot about them: “Smart People”. It’s become the TEDoid-memosphere’s stamp of quality. Smart People are the Intel-Inside.

Check this out.

Those are smart people. I know who almost all of those people are. That whole thing fills me with a deep sense of foreboding – because although these people are all famous multi-millionaires/billionaires etc etc, I don’t have a lot of faith in Smart People. I have more faith in Local Knowledge.

Experience. The well-spring of human existence. You will learn more from getting drunk and going out on a crack-bender with a homeless Iraq-war veteran than you will by networking with smart people. I know this because I’ve done both, and I know enough to know that I know fuck-all – and in a lot of really important ways, I’m less smart than the homeless crack-addict vet.

Smart people thinking up smart solutions for the rest of us. You see that photo at the top? That’s a 12 year old kid who’s made a shelter for homeless people – because he’s never actually sat drunk on a shop-front in Parkway in Camden, and found out that if you’re begging there, some cunt with a Stanley knife comes by and collects “tax” from you.

Maybe the new boss will be better than the old boss. Maybe these Empires of Intelligence will see us all… able to… “live”. But I have my doubts, because (as Vinay Gupta points out) The Internet isn’t democracy, it’s meritocratic feudalism. Once again, the people who are making decisions, are sheltered from the consequences of what they decide. As Vinay (kindof) says: “you really need to live in a Hexayurt for a year” etc – and none of these smart people are living in hexayurts.

That’s part of the reason I like Bruce Sterling I think. He moved to The Favela – if that’s what Belgrade was back in the day – and he’s got a wonderful habit of not telling people what they want to hear. I love him for his lack of hope.

So um… give me local knowledge any day.

TED

I don’t buy it. Not any more – back in the days of Bush, when the air was clogged solid with stupidity it seemed like a breath of fresh air… but now…

I don’t buy it. I think the title on the video below says it all “1000 remarkable people gather in Monteray, California” (breathless crescendo / roll of drums)

Really? That’s not only a party to which I’m not invited, it’s also a party where I would feel like a total cunt even attending… to think of myself as a “remarkable person”. Oooh. Aren’t I special. If only I can persuade other special people I’m special then we can all hang about have self-satisfied, special conversations.

Fuck that. I’d rather hang out with people with interesting angles on self-hatred than puffed up tossers being intelligent.

Still… I am/was quite interested in what people had to say – so once got as far as the entry form to attend one of these events – but then found that they only wanted “remarkable” people to attend… and you had to detail why you were so remarkable. All of a sudden I wanted nothing to do with it.

So anyway, enough about that. I thought this was quite interesting

apart from the fact that it’s

a) TED – which to me seems like some sort of uber-touchy-feely-smug-fest where remarkable people can give standing ovations to other remarkable people and…

b) … they all go home, and a year later, fuck all has happened.

c) It’s Microsoft, and nobody cares about Microsoft

d) Because there seems to be this new genre of Science Fiction – now that bringing your product to market before the bugs are fixed is no longer competitive… it’s “Product Concept” which may or may not be a mockup, may or may not work… whatever… it doesn’t really matter, because the only thing that DOES matter, is the flash of INSPIRATIONAL attention in the eternal here and now. 2 weeks later everyone will have moved on to something else.

e) Still, thanks for the embed – I couldn’t find it on youtube etc.

f) and he seems like a nice bloke. I mean most people are etc..

No – I found this interesting because if you tried to do this in a shopping mall anywhere in the UK, the privately-owned police would immediately arrest you. They’re allowed to do that now. They can issue on the spot fines apparently.

It would be interesting though – all those millions of CCTV cameras… I mean a lot of them are paid for with our taxes… why should we have access to the feeds? It’s not like CCTV cameras actually reduce crime anyway – they’re a total waste of time and money, although I suppose they do give the police something to do. Keep them out of trouble etc. Keep them off the streets.

You could actually fly around in the system like the Australian CCTV Doom stitchup from a couple of weeks back. We could all be ghosts in the machine – swimming through Victoria Railway Station like lost sperm, all disconnected, alone, and… impotent. Omnipresent Impotence. God in is own image. Isn’t that what you wanted? To be? Not to be?

I’m also interested in this from the point of view of the increasingly immersive quality of entertainment… and this vacillation between reality and fantasy – in not just entertainment, but also war. And sex.

For some reason it makes me think of sleep-paralysis… floating around in this environment that is indistinguishable from reality but you can never get past the surface. And the slightly disturbing notion that reality itself is just a surface.

Look up from the screen now.

What you see out there is an insane blizzard of electrons and quarks… photons, photons, photons… forces and waves – and almost all of which is empty space, but your brain takes the sensory input, filters it and gives you a model that allows you to negotiate it.

But really, you’re seeing the model. You’re sitting there in a room inside your own head.

There once was a neologism (what do you call old neologisms?) “See-Throughs”… being big office buildings that have failed to fill with the sorts of creatures that inhabit such terraria. You can see from one side to the other… no desks or filing cabinets or spider plants etc.

I’ve been noticing a number of Web 2.0 equivalents of late… or Web 3.0 maybe… the long (is it long yet?) anticipated “Internet of Things”, for which I’m seeing a lot of gushing enthusiasm but precious little in the way of a Killer App. Well, not for we jaded, prozac-stuffing westerners anyway.

So.

Exhibit 1) www.moq7.com

Someone’s invented a better clothes-peg generating a buzz of enthusiasm from those who monitor such things, as to how this thing would be tooled?

What interested me though was the site it came from… www.moq7.com, professing to be a discount pre-seller of next-generation products… the idea being that you submit a bit of money into escrow, and if a threshold is past where it’s actually worth making the thing, they will.

Which is a great idea – a friend of mine has been proposing this as a music-industry model for years. I think it’s a goer… only it ain’t going.

Not sure how long this site has been up – since 2008 presumably… I can remember there being a bit of a buzz over it a while back over the launch of a money-clip made out of money… and while I’m all in favour of art for art’s sake, lets have an Emperor’s New Clothes moment here shall we? Selling magnets taped to bank notes? Come on. That’s taking the piss. Honestly, what problem is being solved here? What value is being created?

Maybe I should put some of my stuff up on it.. see what happens… but to be fair, although I’ve been playing with Ponoko for quite a while now, apart with the possible exception of Golden Mean Calipers, I haven’t made anything that I’d actually call useful.

So maybe that’s the answer to the recent query (from someone I can no longer find), “What’s the biggest barrier to mass customisation?”. It’s simply that we can’t think of anything to make. We solved most of our manufacturing problems ages ago… and yea, being able to design then print a working whistle (albeit one that looks like it’s been chiseled out of wax) might be an impressive proof-of-concept, we (as a species) solved the whistle problem a long, long time ago… this is also “evidence of concept” that we’re not exactly setting the world on fire here with Stuff That People Actually Need.

Exhibit 2) www.cloudfab.com

Which looks like comparison shopping for digital-fabbing plants… which I think may be in the same arena as what Ponoko are aiming to do – by making their software available to anyone with a laser-cutting shop. Outsourcing manufacture to the cloud as it were. Makes sense – if you’re dealing with physical stuff, then simply “knowing what’s available, and where to get it” seems to be 9/10ths of the law. It makes double sense if like the Makerbot lot, you’re getting your customers to make Makerbot parts for you.

There’s quite a nice roundup of the various technologies available here, though not a lot on location/who’s going to do the work etc.

Exhibit 3) www.shopster.com/… which looks like a site where you can sell other people’s products… or have yours sold by other people. I might have a go at this one actually because I find it a lot easier to make things than to sell them… the only catch-ette being, I’m a software guy which means I’m location-agnostic. If I start making physical things then I’m tied to a specific address. Unless I get someone else to do it of course. That would be ok. Make themselves useful etc.

So anyway… this could be a goer as well, but the “featured” sellers department leaves me feeling a certain un-put-my-finger-on-able unease. It reminds me of the electrical-gear shops in Tottenham Court Road in London where everything seems to be for sale and although all the shops are different, they have this distinct vibe of being run by a massive cartel of excited and shifty Indian pirates. One of the “featured shops” (for example) has a sideline in Gadget Models. Another one sells spy-gear.

Which kindof clashes with the Web 2.0 at-the-front vibe, but there you go.

Exhibit 4) Open Structures

This looks quite cool actually – or has potential at least. It looks like an attempt to create a cross between Lego and Ikea… standardised parts and connectors that people can use to build whatever they like, so long as it’s made entirely out of right-angles. The site has only been up for a month or so, and the first post in their blog is still in Latin (bless)… and I think it should stay that way. It’s like a “hello world” moment, and a backhanded testament to Cicero who originally wrote the thing… “lorem ipsum” being a musing on ethics… all very heavy and meaningful etc… now famous for precisely the opposite reason – it’s meaningless.

Anyway, Open Structures has a bit where you can upload your own components and share them etc… a small handful there already, most of them not for sale, but there you go.

I think this might be a way forward – out of the situation we have at the moment where there’s mass-customisation potential, but people aren’t really using it that much. Building blocks are good. If everything was made out of building blocks we wouldn’t have landfill sites filled with old “consumer-durables”… or “consumer-utterly-undefuckingstructables” as they will come to be known, 500,000 years from now when they still haven’t biodegraded.

–

So anyway… random thoughts, apropos of very little again… but circling around feelings of doubt about the “crowd-sourced-manufacturing-revolution” that is all the rage at the moment… because the BIG problem with it, is that we (jaded, prozac-stuffing westerners) have kindof satisfied our “product-acquiring” needs.

So the anticipated shift from “buying stuff” to “spending even more $$$ than it would to buy stuff, making it ourselves” isn’t exactly setting the world on fire. Really, home-fabbing is another way of acquiring stuff… and the acquisition of stuff, although it may be our raison d’être as prescribed by mainstream (ie: marketing) culture, ain’t really doing it for us is it.

Bionic Eye: Augmented iPhone Awesomeness in App Store gusheth Gadget Lab at Wired.

Is that impressive? I guess it is.

Begin’ your pardon, but me being a harbinger of doubt and doom… isn’t this an app for turning the interesting bits of town into the incredibly fucking boring bits? that look the same in any town, anywhere on the planet?

How about an app that doesn’t add big-chain franchise advertising, but erases it… not just from virtual reality, but from actual reality as well? A sort of Augmented Reality, Ad-Block Plus.

Since when did you need an application to help you see a fucking McDonalds sign? There’s nowhere in the world you can go to get away from the fucking things.

So… Augmented reality. That talk by Bruce Sterling was all inspiring and all, but I’ve yet to see anything that goes anything beyond eye-candy and advertising… and believe me, we do not need more advertising… particularly not for global blandishment brands.

Early days I guess.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!–Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress–to assist the work,
Which then was going forward in her name!

- William Wordsworth on The French Revolution

–

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

Hunter. S. Thompson on The Cultural Revolution

–

I don’t sleep. Not normally. I might miss something… on the internet.

So what I do is I watch documentaries until I’m no longer conscious – and I’ve been learning about The English Revolution recently… during/in the wake of which there was a flourishing of fringe-sects, eg:

Adamites, Anabaptists, Barrowists, Behmenists, Brownists, Diggers, Enthusiasts, Familists, Fifth Monarchists, Grindletonians, Muggletonians, Puritans, Philadelphians, Ranters, Sabbatarians, Seekers, Socinians

The Diggers were the prototype of today’s Urban Agriculture movement. The Ranters characterised (for propaganda purposes or not) as out of control, sexually abandoned hedonists – a portrayal of which can be seen in the marathon slightly tarty movie “The Devil’s Whore”.

Anything was possible.

They were crushed. You can immediately recognise them though – revolution in the air, and suddenly everything is possible… bliss it is… before the microcosm of human-nature recreates The Possible in its own image… and reality descends; Ego and Desire, hand in hand…. and often worse than before. Oliver Cromwell had powers more extreme than the Kings he got rid of. The French Revolution became a bloodbath… 1969 became 1985.

So anyway. There’s a preamble. Where are we now?

Web 2.0. Anything is possible. Everything is possible… and sure things are a-changing, but just because the medium of human communication has changed, and is knocking the “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways” sideways, human-nature is also reasserting itself, here and there.

I watched in horrified, disappointed, fascination as Factor-E farm imploded into acrimony and weirdness back in August. Seems to be going strong again now, and the evidence has been deleted – but I know what I saw, and I’ve seen it before. Autocracy. Reminds me of a boss I had once – he thought he was a hippie but he was really a control-freak. The same old human failings reflect out in the wider organisation.

There has been a similar (as far as I can make out) schism in the Freecycle movement in the last month or so with the UK branch separating from the US branch – with the British rebelling against autocracy of their colonial masters across the Atlantic.

Digg is controlled by a handful of power-users, Reddit has become so self-referential that 60% of what hits the front page is just Redittors talking about themselves, Wikipedia participation is falling… with 60%? Of new edits being revoked by what appears to be a controlling clique.

And so on.

Maybe these are growing pains… maybe we’re just learning how to organise ourselves – but I think we’ve been here many many times before. I think that the initial gushing optimism of 2.0 is coalescing into macrocosmic reflections of human-nature, and some of it is ugly.

Still… the sunlight of consciousness etc:

This insight is absolutely vital – to counteract this:

The trap: 1
The trap: 2
The trap: 3

Control-Systems vs Platforms is another axis of Hierarchy vs Network… and the the social patterns that coalesce out of the network are not necessarily, inherently democratic. We need to learn how not to fuck things up. Please.

Or not

How doth thou annoyest me? Let me count the ways:

www.Budtrap.com, My oh my – another one of those things that looks like a satire on pre-crash, dot.com optimism-over-reach. One of those ones that has absolutely every web 2.0 cliche packed into a space the size of a… well, a web-site… and with an underlying “product” that has about the same intrinsic value as the paper that the price-tag is written on. But it’s beautifully designed, and holy fuck, how much have they spent on marketing?

Check the word cloud from one of the pages : it reads like a brand-exploration brainstorming-session:

It’s a thing for wrapping your cellphone headphones up with.

There’s a top half and a bottom half. When you buy one, you get one top and five bottoms (A Bit Like Hotdog/Bun Package Mismatch Syndrome) – and the idea is you then give away 4 of the bottom halves to people from the “community” that send out requests on twitter. Or Facebook. It’s viral see? It brings people together in a new and fun ways!. And they also give $1 of the $5 to charity!

The model is the tried and true Web 2.0 tiered setup – free basic; paid premium – but applied to physical things (albeit a physical thing where the production costs are likely to be fairly low)

It’s something that needed to be tried out somewhere sooner or later, and it needed to be tried on something fairly small… so I can’t begrudge them that. It’s a good thing to be experimenting with – it’s just that all that shiny-happy effervescence gets up my cynical celtic nose, and this whole notion that people should get all evangalistic about a “product” seems somewhere south of authentic to me.

Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe this is what people are actually like now… and it’s not all a symptom of a bubble of some sort. I hate all this joiny-inny stuff. I’m a paranoid recluse.

There’s this other thing they (apparently) do that I can’t quite get my head around either – what they call “Packing Parties” which sounds like an 18-25 Vacation version of stuffing envelopes.

I’m kindof torn on this one – on the one hand, it would be good to make work a lot more fun and adaptable than it currently is. About 60% of people (who live in the west and who have jobs) hate their jobs. This is bad. We really ought to fix this… and if Packing Parties is a way to do it, well and good.

On the other hand it also sounds like cheap labour to me, with no employer responsibility whatsoever – and maybe that’s good with young startups where everyone is a shareholder… but it ain’t no way to run a society. But what do I know? I’m a freelancer – I’ve spent the last 10 years working in startups, with no rights or corporate responsibility to or from me either. I’m not exactly practising what I preach.

So there you go. Nothing personal etc, and I get a feeling that part of the marketing “attitude” of these guys is to court “debate”… so maybe they won’t mind me saying “I can’t quite decide if this is bullshit or not”. I hope not.

Bruce Sterling talking about ideas surrounding the fact that the web as we know it, is built upon finance that is falling apart.

From Webstock in New Zealand, which I didn’t go to because it cost like a $1000.

Brought to you by Vimeo, who may or may not be in profit – but Youtube is on track to lose $470 million this year, according to Credit Suisse who are leaving them in the shade by losing $5.2 billion in a single quarter.

I think we’re going to see some fairly major players go under – one of the things that bothers me about youtube and flickr et al – all these major silos of the collective-memories of the humanity. They’re inherently unstable. The Pirate Bay fronting onto Bittorrent is an inherently more trustworthy platform than any of the “business” backed entities.

Something that happened the last time round… The Reformation, Protestantism (and I’ve only just noticed that this word is built on “protest”)… distaste (to put it mildly) with the corrupt, centrally-controlled-flow-of-information-infrastructure of The Papal Church… bubbled and simmered and fermented – until it was taken up as a cause by an existing (but troubled) power-structure to extremely dramatic effect. Henry VIII. Doable because there is power in people.

This time round? I’m still kindof waiting for it to happen. The Pirate Bay was found guilty by the Corporate Courts (lets not pretend they’re anything else) but won a seat in the EU elections. The Pirate Bay weren’t technically doing anything that Google weren’t also doing… but I don’t think Google are the power structure that are going to take up the flag of the “new” side of this schism and go to war under it. Maybe no one will. Maybe it will be China, or India. Or the whole of South America.

Here’s the rationale : Intellectual Property is a choke on cultural vitality. Culture is Vicarious Lamarkianism. Nobody has any moral right to build upon all the culture that has gone before, then stop people building any further. It’s evil.

Yea well, whatever, never mind. We (notice that word) need infrastructure that isn’t controlled by AT&T. We need a youtube that doesn’t lose 470 million dollars a year. Fuck it, we need banks that aren’t costing us trillions to keep afloat. We need (I suspect) peer to peer everything.

Otherwise known as the blogosphere – that parallel universe where someone only has to draw a picture of something for it to become real, re-published across the net as a world-saving fait accompli.

Ooh. Beads. Shiney.

I don’t know why I find this so annoying. Really I should like it – it’s people being creative etc, throwing wonderful ideas into the soup. It’s an explosion of creativity and democratised publishing, it generally starts with designers (and design blogs) who are pretty inspirational…

… but somewhere in the process I can’t help but feel it turns into snake oil. The purpose of it goes from creativity to clamorous, panting attention seeking – tricking people into thinking they can actually buy this stuff somewhere. They always take pains to skirt around the fact that what they’re presenting is actually just a drawing of something.

The greeny blogs are the worst – they’ve created this whole diorama of world-saving consumerism, and none of it’s fucking real. To pick a random example (and I won’t provide a link because I’m sure they’re nice people, and I have no particular desire to piss on anyone’s chips). There are currently 10 articles on the front page – and they look wonderful. They are:

1) a drawing of a solar powered market – that doesn’t actually exist
2) a drawing of a bamboo prefab house – that doesn’t actually exist
3) a drawing of a university data centre – that doesn’t actually exist
4) some people aiming to build a solar powered bike – doesn’t actually exist
5) researchers aiming to power cars with cottonseed oil – doesn’t actually exist
6) an energy efficient computer power supply. It exists!
7) a drawing of a green office block – that doesn’t actually exist
8 ) a lovely looking design for a green vehicle – that doesn’t actually exist
9) a test flight by a 747 using 50/50 biofuel / jet fuel. It exists!
10) an energy efficient house in Australia, who’s roof has been extended, and looks a bit like an eyelid, though I personally would have called it an “eve” not dissimilar to what any other house in the entire country has. This exists too, but like, so what?

Maybe they’re not supposed to exist – maybe it’s purely about design and I’m completely wrong, and I’m a cunt and I should shut the fuck up… but the pattern here is spread across the web. It’s kindof like a liberals version of Fox News ending their headlines with a question mark. There simply isn’t enough news to report so they make stuff up – or in this case, report upon the “aspirational” flagship projects of designers and architects, treating them as though they’ve actually made it all the way to actually, actual, real, reality.

C’mon. It’s living in a bubble. We need shit that’s real. Drawing pictures of wishful thinking doesn’t cut it.

So on that note… here are a load of kinetic chargers, some of which are real, some of which aren’t… and lets face it, it’s not always easy to tell the difference… and really, I’m not complaining about these because they look quite cool as well, and I am quite conflicted about the whole thing.

Maybe it acts as a sort of – market research – designs that create a buzz are merged into tomorrow’s DNA. Who knows. Something about it doesn’t feel right though.

–

Still. Whatever:

(from)

Laundry balls. You put them in your clothes drier and the constant motion charges the battery inside. They look cool. These would be worth having no matter what they did. The Linking site is about “form over function” as well, so no complaints there etc – other than that they publish things that other sites then assume to be reality.

Bullet shaped charger thing – you wear a bunch of them bandolera style. This one is from the site I was bitching about before, and to be fair it has apparently made it to prototype stage.

This one from Gizmag is actually real – a bit of a stretch at nine inches though.

This one’s pretty neat – for dancing apparently. I wonder if they could make one for sitting around the house in your underpants. I mean theoretically it would be more efficient to just dangle a couple of electrodes into a fermented brew of beer (which is already fermented) and pizza, and cut out the middleman. Still, I like it.

A designer security tag that replenishes your energy at the same time as you drain someone else’s with your never ending talking. This one is cool as well, and does (or doesn’t) come in a variety of fashion colours.

Here’s another one, a little less glam… any more real?

from… let me see, let me see… ah ” M2E will announce the development of an external charger later this month” – not quite real at the time of writing (last year) then… The originating site seems to have no mention of this gadget – but maybe that’s not their thing. They seem quite preoccupied with military stuff.

Eric Von Hippel having done a fair amount of research has found that around 80% of innovation is user driven – ie: people playing with actual physical things. He also says that about 3/4 of non-user-innovated products that make it to production, fail.

I hate to think of the number of products that never actually get made at all, but instead are just vapor-ware in the attention economy.