GENOMICON

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

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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

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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.

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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.

Mike Rea’s a genius

He makes astounding things for Stephen Hawking out of wood etc.

And he’s definitely the sort of guy I’d want on my side in a fight etc

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I’ve been feeling a bit let down of late by the… err… imaginativity of people. I won’t go into immediate detail as to why – I think possibly because of the stuff being produced by the new online hardware memosystems – I mean there are one or two bits of excellence but on the whole… really, is that the best we can do? I think we need a big win.

It seems to me that for quite some time, the killer app of open-technology will be “open-technology” even though the stuff being openly-technologised is at about the same level as spice-racks and wooden spatulas being made by 13 year old woodworking students. Weirdly, the most profound advances are being made at the low-tech end of things rather than the high-tech.

I’m totally in love with the idea of repraps – they’re at at least 50% of the reason why I started this blog, and I hang on the reprappers every word… but I still haven’t seen them produce anything useful, apart from other repraps.

Maybe this is how it starts… but as far as I can see, it’s not crowd-sourcing – it’s being driven by a small handful of really clever and determined people.

Still… art will save us. Seeing stuff like Mike’s wooden miracles and sense of humour kindof restores if not my faith, then my back-handed fondness for human potential.

From tiny, mad acorns etc.

This is pretty impressive

as is this online Powerpoint variant

Both of these use the HTML5 Canvas tag, and a lot of very cool javascript… and quite a lot of very well put together and HTML and a lot of very well put together UI.

Maybe I’m feeling old… maybe I come from a Web rather than an App background – but both of these raise the bar in non-flash web-appness way beyond what the likes of us Web 1.0 / Web 2.0 code-veterans ever imagined we’d have to achieve. Simply getting the css in toolbars at the top to x-browser render would take… I don’t know? Days? Weeks? Maybe these are built up from building blocks that would make this sort of thing easier… and I guess at some point they will be. A Visual Basic for JS.

Still… the fact remains, I don’t think you can do this without a team of developers, including people doing nothing but usability/interface-design and some fairly good funding. I think the boot-strap days are long gone. They’ve been given a new lease of life with twitter and facebook apps… little stories of little fortunes made overnight, but they’re all… I don’t know, parasite apps? They exist at the indulgence of the app that creates the environment.

Recently I bailed out of another equity-only deal because, once again a well-funded competitor turned up with about 15 staff, 5 of which were paid developers working full time on what I was required to do on my own, in my spare time.

This is the 3rd time this has happened.

A while back I was working on a web-monitoring app… then www.pingdom.com turned up, funded by the guy who owned and then sold the biggest ISP in Sweden. A couple of years later this turned up, when I’d just written a little accountancy app. Xero is funded by one of the Trademe.co.nz people – which sold for $750,000,000.

There’s this talk by Steven Levitt about Why Crack Dealers Still Live At Home.

Which describes the hierarchy of crack distribution… in which the people at the top are the same people that have been there for the last couple of generations – although there’s this mythology that “Anyone Can Make It”. Actually, there’s a hell of a lot of people working for free or next to nothing in the hope of “Making It”.

This is the way that the entertainment biz has always been and it’s the way that web entrepreneurialism works as well I think – though at least you wind up with fairly bankable skills, so it isn’t exactly the same.

I think every 5 or so years, a new “Blair-Witch-Project” of software (the latest being Twitter) will turn up and keep alive the myth that anyone can bootstrap a success story (the founders will then go on the lecture circuit telling people “it could be you!”)… but these are absolutely the exception. There are simply too many well-organised, well-funded, well-connected, well-followed people with software shops already having your bright idea… and if they’re not having it, once they see you doing it, they can just step in and build a proper version.

Recently someone on the PHP-NZ mailing list came out and said “most of the people here have worked on projects they know are going to fail”, and he was roundly attacked and vilified, but I don’t think he was wrong.

I think maybe (just maybe) this might be why DIY hardware/wetware is attracting more attention. There’s more of a chance to get on (or off) at the bottom.

We saw this thing about this kid who made a nuke fusion reactor in his basement… from about a year ago etc:

And I was lapsing in and out of consciousness and so on, and apparently there’s a whole community of people making home made fusion reactors (that people with huge budgets have been trying to make for about 1/2 a century etc) and maybe the can and maybe the can’t or maybe they’re doing something else entirely… but me, having been immersed in a culture (of intense debate) entirely detached from any kind of objective reality for all these years… (you know, Free-Market Fundamentalists, Climate-Change-Deniers etc, conservatives. Always conservatives) and having had the whole golden mirage turn to free-falling-cardboard in front of our eyes… while the “debate” still rages… puppets still dancing after the music has stopped and the audience have gone…

… I just got this vision of these people talking and arguing and dreaming and reasoning… like perpetual-motion-machine makers thinking they can positive-think their way past the laws of thermodynamics. Tinkering and bickering… inspired by things that almost work and not deterred by things that don’t.

And then I got this vision of lots and lots of subcultures of gold-spinners – networks, who are never going to spin any gold, but it is nevertheless the driving force for what amounts to some sort of social cohesion.

And it just seemed… meaningful… to me.

Boo.com. Remember that? The last bubble? Solutions to problems that people don’t actually have. Enthusiasm. Possibility. Positive thinking. All you need is a good idea and a lot of energy!!!

This was (according to them that know) the moment that Web 2.0 died… or at least jumped the shark.

Not for me though – for me the shark jumping moment was this image on Bruce Sterling’s blog

To me it looked like it was taking the piss… like she was thinking “Oh great. A web dweeb. Can I go now?”.

But it’s not. It’s serious – it’s got talking bananas and a logo in beta and twitter mashups and TED name-dropping and an “our team” of friendly quirky people…. Choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers… etc etc…

It’s a Web 2.0 site. It’s got every single thing that might be associated with web 2.0 but with substance so thin, you can almost see through it to the brick wall at the back of the theatre. Someone’s seen that irritating movie with that kid who sees ghosts and got so carried away with enthusiasm! and energy! and positive thinking! that they’ve made a whole “startup” out of it!!!

Well… ok, it’s just a game. It’s just a bit of fun. Happy Shiney People trying to change the world for the better.

I think it’s over. And you know what? I’m kindof relieved.

There comes a point of course where innovation becomes embalmed in plastic, and it’s time to move on.

Maybe.

I mean these are neat and all, and some of them are autonomous and some aren’t, and they’re as cheap as chips (about 20 packets of chips) etc – but there’s something about something being mass-produced at this level that tends to suggest that the cool kids have gone elsewhere.

There are some videos on the site showing how they walk – and they actually walk quite well, which is rare for these things – in fact I think the crab is a variant of a Theo Janssen machine. I think this type of mass-production though is a bit like what Forest Higgs may have been on about when was going on about having the wrong model for evolution.

So imagine that you were working on this secret project where you were making a robot that could walk (using a Theo Janssen mechanism) and avoided obstacles and headed towards light etc… and then you found that you could get them for $19.99 at your local toyshop and for $5 on the internet if you bought them in bulk.

50% the fun is doing it yourself of course, but the other 95% is doing something that no one’s done before.

Not that I want to be negative of course – if the Hexabug folk come across this… if you want to do something really cool, make something that can be hacked… or have things plugged into… so people can use your systems as a platform that they can then build their own stuff upon. The main thing that’s driving all this DIY robotics… is the DIY.