GENOMICON

It feels trite and clichéd to be writing about this, but kindof lacking somehow to be thinking about anything else. It’s all happening. Now.

By the time I saw this photograph it was already an icon – mere hours after it had been taken it was already everywhere – I first saw it on the front page of Reddit. It moves fast.

So what have we? Another colour revolution, though unlike the others – far less likely to go so smoothly. It’s up against classical, and well organised fascism with a theocratic base – rather than the threadbare carcass of a crumbling empire. It’s more likely to go the way of the Saffron one in Myanmar – or some clumsy ill-fitting compromise like Zimbabwe.

The notable thing about this though is that it’s being watched by people all over the planet, in English, in real time – mostly via Twitter. It’s fairly unique in this respect – whether this is going to set a trend for future events remains to be seen – the twittosphere has failed to show the same concern over Palestine, or any other flagrant abuse of power for that matter.

Twitter is getting information out to the world – and maybe contributing to flash-mobbery within Iran itself.

Although the Iranian authorities seem desperate to shut down all communication with the outside world, I’m not sure how much difference it actually makes – all this exposure. I guess if you have a platform based upon lies, it makes the lies untenable, so the platform feels less secure… but in real terms, large numbers of people making their icons green… What would the Evil Beards make of that? Maybe that’s the key to it – insecurity based on not really knowing what’s going on. Other than that, it’s hard to imagine them taking it seriously.

The whole tone of the twittersphere is a little too self-congratulatory for my tastes though. No one from any Western country, especially the US/UK has any right to feel the slightest shred of self-satisfaction on the subject of Iran. Our countries toppled a democratically elected government back in the 50s. We created this fuckup.

I think the “#cnnfail” business where the twittersphere is crediting itself with driving the news agenda is quite possibly bullshit as well. The mainstream media may have been a little slower on the uptake than the twittosphere, but they will be – they need to get reporters on the ground. They need to be filming stuff. They can’t just publish any old bollocks and get away with it… well, not so flagrantly.

Here’s a screen grab of #iranelection. How much of this is news? Useful information? 140-Chr chain-letters?

The twittosphere is not a news-service, it’s a meme-pool.

Whether this can offer a serious or credible replacement for paid and dedicated reporting is debateble. It hears what it wants to hear – it repeats what it likes the sound of. Truth does not necessarily confer competitive memetic advantage.

As far as I can see, The Iranian Twitter Revolution is being driven by a fairly small handful of people who are actually within Iran, and a fair few of these accounts were created purely for this purpose. They could be anyone. You could stage a fake revolution with about 10 people. The govt’s attempts to shut down web media are probably less effective than polluting the meme-pool with twitterers of their own – although maybe not… the signal-to-noise ratio is already pretty unbreathable. Someone even posted links to a Celine Dione song on Youtube, twittering something about children – in capital letters obviously. (seriously, check this screengrab out. That’s political discourse?)

I’m also slightly perturbed that people have fixated on Iran rather than any other conflict. Everyone already knows that Ahmadinejad is a bad guy. American Nazis are falling over themselves to accuse their saner opposites of being slow on the uptake, others calling for Obama to “do something” (suddenly it’s all about America again). Liberals are quite rightly showing a keen interest because Ahmadinejad’s faction are the opposite of everything they stand for. They’re right-wing, religious-fundamentalist, conservatives.

Ahmadinejad is an easy target. The Memosphere is emotionally primed to go to war against him.

It’s a great big pile-on, largely about display – similar in some ways to the Princess Di flower-fest. I’m betting that 1/2 the people “participating” couldn’t actually point to Iran on the map. It’s participatory entertainment – with massive amounts of self-satisfaction from people who have nothing at stake, nothing risked, and who’s countries are almost entirely responsible for creating this fuckup in the first place.

So is this the future of democracy? I doubt it. Memospheres don’t do news, they do rumours and feel-good factoids – and it’s rare for goodies and baddies to be so easily delineated. I’m guessing that sooner or later, someone’s going to try this on in somewhere like Venezuela, and it’s not going to work. Egypt? Pakistan? Anywhere in the whole of Africa with the exception of Zimbabwe? It’s hard to imagine. The Memosphere is fickle – witness the Anoymous spat with Scientology, which seems to have passed now. Power to the People. Yea? Which people?

One thing that this has done though – the Iranians are no longer our enemies. The brain-dead Bush-Era drumbeats for war now seem unthinkable.

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edit : although on reflection, maybe this is all just a filtering problem, and I’m confusing twitter with hashtags.

I drew that. Nice innit. I might get it printed on a t-shirt.

It comes from Myoats, which is a site where people can make their own designs using a flash-driven mono-tonal kaleidoscope machine. People can then comment, vote on their favourites, yadda yadda, yawn. No one ever votes for mine – they just gang together and vote for their mate’s ones, and then everyone just votes for the one that’s already popular. Idiots.

Mind you, some of these are fairly impressive.

But they’re not as good as mine. They all look like wolf t-shirts.

So anyway, another software memosphere, and lets face it, if you’re building a new app, and it’s not a memosphere, then you’re doomed.

What’s interesting about this though – it’s an aesthetic algorithm (though strangely, most of the favorites above have escaped its constraints). It only allows colour palettes that work… it anti-aliases nicely, it does symmetry nicely… it basically hand-holds, allowing people to produce something that looks pretty good without them having to spend years learning their craft.

And that I think is the killer app in the coming Mass Customisation revolution – the killer apps of the hardware revolution will be (ironically) software – allowing people to create things that look great, without them having to be classically trained designers. This is what Microsoft did in the last century – they basically put a printing press on the desk of every secretary in the world and gave her/him/it the ability to use it without knowing anything about it.

The money to be made in any revolution isn’t in the physical “products” of the revolution, but massifying the tools that the revolution uses. Bringing it to the people.

Right now CAD is too difficult. I’ve been playing with Inkscape recently. It’s great. It’s too difficult. What will happen, is that something like Spore, will turn up which allow people to easily create designs that look good, and which can then be plugged into some sort of manufacturing process – whether it’s a send-off thing like Ponoko, or a desktop machine.

Through this end of the telescope, the words of wisdom above seem so bleedin obvious, that there’s hardly any point saying them. Still… as far as I’m aware, the software and processes I’m talking about do not yet exist.

I’m definitely some sort of genius. Just like everyone else.

So much will have been written about this in the time that it takes to write this sentence it’s hardly worth bothering – to dog-paddle amid the tsunamis of hype…

… but in case you hadn’t heard, and because the purpose of this here web-address is to keep track of things, Google started talking about Wave today.

(complete guide here)

It’s one of those things that deals with such basic interactions, that the full effects of it aren’t that predictable – the real-time collaboration on the same page for example.

In a nutshell though, it makes any conversation (be it via email, blog comments, etc) into an embeddable object. The ramifications of that are huge. Conversation on the web at the moment is a mess. Everything’s everywhere – if this takes off – and I suspect it will, because the viral aspects of it are Skype-like, then it will not only create and destroy whole rafts of businesses overnight, it could well wind up changing the way we interact with each other.

If it does link your email identity to your comments-on-blogs identity… then every comment you leave on every participating service will be traceable back to you – all your comments will become a single body of work. It may well lessen the anonymous arsehole factor – which is a shame, because I rather enjoy being an arsehole sometimes, still, there you go.

Google (and in fact the entire internet) is, as far as I can gather, not a million miles-away from being a giant artificial intelligence machine. Possibly the greatest ramifications of this are in this area – if so, what does it mean? Far, far smarter linking between conversations I think. The Universal Mind may be about to have an IQ leap.

If it catches on, and I think it will. I think this will be a bit of a game-changer.

This is cool

I’m not sure if it is what I think it is, because I’m an ignoramus* but what it looks like to me – what it looks like it could be (almost) is a way for people to make their own music videos.

It provides a palette, a brush and a simple mechanical hand-holder (you fly sideways across the page) basically turning you into a human scribble-bot, loosely choreographed in time to some music. When the song is finished, you can send it to your friends.

It’s similar in some ways to what MGMT did a while back – but they alas are controlled by a major record company, who’s head is firmly stuck up the arse of the 20th century – so they block video embedding and ban youtube (et al) copies. The idiocy of these people is utterly dumbfounding – these are the same people who pay millions in payola “Independent Promotors” to get something on the radio, then persecute/prosecute people who are actually trying to help them, for free, in a medium far more powerful.

Check it out. I’ve gone out of my way to break the law to help you people. I think this song is excellent and I’m advertising on your behalf, for free, at cost to myself.

Your record company doesn’t deserve to be in business. Sack them.

So anyway – back to the slinky inky thing – I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that this is the future of music promotion – giving people the software tools to make cool videos of their own… but it’s a fairly good tactic I think. I mean people are going to do it anyway – I found this the other day:

Which is a video that someone’s made of Catpower’s cover of a Velvet Underground song.

It utterly gob-smacks me that there are about 300 variations of this on youtube – and this is a pretty obscure song.

And it’s illegal (although Matador Records don’t contribute to the RIAA and I know because I ask them, because I boycott all companies associated with the RIAA) – it’s illegal, and people are doing it in droves anyway, in this huge act of civil disobedience which would be Ghandi-like if it actually mattered that much, and if the people involved were even thinking about the political aspects rather than simply expressing themselves.

Simple amateur creativity is the biggest act of civil disobedience going on in the world today?

It’s a nice thought.

Still. The Velvet Underground.

It’s been said that they never sold any records, but everyone who heard them picked up a guitar. It does my head in that they’re from the 60s, and not even the late 60s – and in a funny kind of way they represent a prototype (of some sort) of what’s happening now – what Clay Shirkey describes as an open invitation to participate, as in “I could do that too”. They taught the world to sing, by the age of 21. They broke every mould and taught people how to write songs from the pieces – listen to the song-structure in that first catpower video. It’s a tacit freeing of all successive artistic progeny from the constraints of conformity. You don’t need verses, you don’t need choruses, it doesn’t have to rhyme, it doesn’t have to be radio-friendly… and most importantly…

… it doesn’t even have to be terribly good.

And that in a nutshell is the genius of it.

I’m almost tempted to make a website of home-made videos of songs that are covers of Velvet Underground songs – 2 generations of replication etc – by both artist and medium.

But I won’t. I’ll just break the law by embedding this:

It’s not even a video… but getting back to the initial point about writing systems that allow people to create and propagate their own videos – like the inky thing at the beginning could almost be… really, the whole internet is one giant system for doing just that.

ps: Initial inspiration courtesy of atomicshed :twitter.

pps: it’s also projectable onto walls:

pps *

Someone who can speak many languages : Multilingual
Someone who can speak two languages : Bilingual
Someone who can only speak one language : English.

C’est moi.

I think this is an amazingly good idea.

“littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together. With a growing number of available modules, littleBits aims to move electronics from late stages of the design process to its earliest ones, and from the hands of experts, to those of artists, makers and designers.”

(via)

I’ve spent ages wracking my brains trying to figure out how to plug components together without soldering or breadboards… Magnets! – and the polarity is set up so you can’t get the wires round the wrong way.

Speaking of Automata, here’s a kit where you can make your own:

I love this stuff.

There’s a whole site for automatons here:

and needless to say there are hundreds of them on youtube.

“I could do that” is the spirit of the age – or one of them at least. It’s what sets us apart from our TV-watching cultural ancestry.

There’s something a bit spooky about these things

Reminds me of Czech stop-motion cult-bloke, Jan Švankmajer who made Alice and Wonderland and Faust among others.

I think this is a fantastic idea

3D printed joints that turn old pens into lego-esque constructor kits… there are all sorts – from ball and socket, to side-by-side wall building to geodesic dome building.

I think eventually these would be better mass-produced via some sort of injection moulding, but as a basic concept they’re spot on – especially as old pens are tubes, which offers scope for mechanisation, wiring etc.

This is not an entirely new idea – I had a set of connectors for drinking straws a bit like this when I was a kid – and Look and Learn Magazine had “build things out of old pens” competitions back in the 70s. This particular project takes this to a whole new level though… and as so many people are now making robot, it potentially has a much wider relevance.

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As an aside, the site that this comes from is also a classic case of a breach of Emergent Morality #3 – which is concerned with naming and addressing content. They’ve wrapped everything up in a flash file which means that the people who love the idea enough to evangelise about it (and work on their behalf for free) are effectively hobbled. I actually had to sit there and take screen grabs of the flash animation to create the image above. I couldn’t be bothered re-typing their text for them. This is still effectively neutered. You can’t search it, and it’s difficult to cite.

But the image above is a now a linkable resource. I’ve spent about 1/2 an hour working for them for free to increase the visibility of their project – and allow others who also think this is an inspiring project to propagate the idea.

This is illegal, and according to the old-economy morality, evil.

But the entire old-economy is itself evil, and I think this idea is brilliant, so I’m doing what I know is morally right. I’m sharing it.

This is what we do.

My reptile brain holds the following pieces of information about google

• Good search innit? You can find anything
• Didn’t they buy a wifi station or something?
• Their server farms use 5% of the earth’s electricity

I know they’re useful, big… and over there somewhere —->

Actually they’re everywhere. They’re the face of the internet . That old maxim “anything too big to fail is too big to exist” certainly holds true with Google. This is what the end of the world looks like:

Google have integrated themselves far more tightly with the fabric/structure of the internet than Microsoft have done with desktop PCs – it’s become a part of our brain-architecture. The same way that cellphones mean we don’t need to remember phone numbers any more, we’ve gotten kindof used to the idea that we can find a pretty good shot at the answer to any question, pretty much all the time.

But anyway, the reptile part of my brain still thinks of Google as a text box in the middle of a page… so every once in a while I come across something that makes me go “Holy crap, they can do that?” – and there have been a couple recently

1) Similar Image Search.

(clocks)

Can this do facial recognition (which has serious social/privacy ramifications)? Maybe not, but it’s step on the way. Maybe. I’m not sure how they’re doing this… it isn’t purely image-similarity… if you look at rep-rap similar images you tend to get a lot of pictures of Charles Darwin (the name of the orginal Reprap being Darwin) so there’s something other than pattern recognition going on there. Still… it’s fairly impressive

(Jennifer Connollys)

I mean this one isn’t just returning images of Conifer Jennily – it’s getting those, but also focusing on the mood of the picture (only movies) – so there’s also Blade-Runner, Train-Spotting, Star-Wars, Phenomena (which has Jennifer Connolly, but she’s not in the photo) and Alien vs Predator (the page title being Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem: ‘Predator Arrival’)… and the first JC photo is from Reqium for a Dream (hence the Trainspotting link: Heroin)… so in addition to image-recognition smarts, there’s also word-linking smarts. And they’re smart smarts.

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2) And the other thing is this O3D:

A 3D rendering plugin for browsers… which would be even more impressive if I could get the fucking thing to work, but my graphics card (on a 1 year old Toshiba Laptop) isn’t supported, so that’s that. What this is, is a memosphere. And Every Single Web 2.0 App That Ever Succeeded Was A Memosphere.

So anyway – looking at these caused me to look into what else google are doing in the app-space – there’s a hell of a lot… they seem to be able to do all this stuff by stealth. I mean the video above is on Youtube that they own – which in its 4 years of existence has become the second biggest search engine on the web… and I think it is (semi) single-handedly changing the way people watch television. That’s ~ 200,000,000,000 (us: pop~ 300,000,000) brain-hours a year, that’s now doing something slightly/profoundly different.

Google. Privately owned. Can you imagine it working if it was publicly owned? Nope. Can you imagine it working if it’s decisions came under the democratic control of its stake-holders? Nope. Is it a law unto itself, and can do whatever it wants without fear of some sort of embarrassing backlash? Nope. Not yet anyway.

Still, I can remember when Yahoo was “the only” search engine, and now they seem to be constantly under threat of being bought by Microsoft.

Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky, man.

http://idealist.blinkr.net/

I think this is interesting because it’s a kind of ecosystem (not dissimilar to the entire internet in some ways) for “products” that compete on their ability to get attention rather than be sold. This makes for weirder and more interesting things.

Although, alas… (and ain’t that always the way?) you could be forgiven that design agencies are using it for free advertising.