If this does what I think it does, it will “become” the internet… especially if it can be combined with the 60 mile radius wifi thing I was on about the other day.

Not quite there yet though… New Zealand is still at the mercy of two wires… One to Aus, one to the US. We’re still at the mercy of those single points of failure. The video goes on about power and node outages… entirely benign and non-threatening, but let’s state the obvious here – we need to do this because our governments, and the corporations that are increasingly running them are neither honest nor competent enough to control the flow of information.

We specifically need free information to protect ourselves from our own institutions.

That said, the funding seems to be corporate – I instantly distrust anything “philanthropic” (we covered the morality of that one about 100 years ago… though people seem to have forgotten), and I definitely distrust anything with the word “Foundation” in the name.

Still, the internet was largely invented by the military, so what do I know. It looks like they’ve got code here – I’ll try to figure it out later… see if I can get it to go.

And looking around, I couldn’t see any – I could not see one single thing that was unique.

Then I realised I was missing the biggest thing in the room… the room. The house.

I’m quite interested in this because I think the way we (as a culture) are organising housing is seriously stupid. Why is it that it takes the average non-already-rich person most of their adult life to get a place to live? Who benefits? Banks? Fuck them. As far as I can see, the way land/housing organised is THE thing that traps us into class-systems.

We’ve got this weird situation where everything is mass-produced with powerful drivers forcing down the prices… except the one thing that we waste 1/2 our lives paying for.

So I’m interested in cheap, but cool alternatives – and there have been a load of these recently, eg:

Which I think is beautiful – although the million dollar views that it’s designed to have don’t hurt. I wonder how much it costs? I’ve gotten to be a little cynical about hotels etc that are “designed”… at least partly on account of their looking like they’re made for and by web-designers, but the prices are more than the fucking Ritz – even the capsule hotels at Gatwick in London look like they’re cheap but they use that classic sales-person weasel-pitch “from £n.99″ but they’re charging in 4 hour units, so they’re much the same price as a local hotel.

What’s needed is not (only) new design, it’s a whole new business model so people aren’t being systematically, systemically screwed.

There are a load of quite cool and possibly over-produced examples here

Something that does spring to mind as a possibility – boats. I lived on one recently and I don’t know if New Zealand is like everywhere else in the world, but the regulations and costs that turn housing into such a quagmire don’t exist for boats. There isn’t even the MOT/WOF things that cars have.

Whatever. Idly speculating. Whatever new economic system is evolving, we’ve got to sort housing so it serves us and not vice-versa.

–

Still, forget about that and check this out:

(via)

Which is a 3D printed thing the size of a… well, house, almost.

Arthur C Clarke’s laws of Prediction state:

1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There is so much technology today that is to most people just that – magic. Even something as rudimentary as a vacuum tube. It’s just a “thing” that “does something”. It’s something that always bothered me… that I didn’t know how to make Coke cans. If I was transported back in time to the 14th Century, Coke cans would be just as magic to me as the dragons and wizards and so on that were alive back then. I know (at least I think I know) that aluminium is something to do with bauxite and you extract it with electricity. That’s it. How to get it that thin, how to seal it, how to rivet the ring-pull, how to get the paint to stick… the entire thing is… well, magic.

Our entire civilisation is based upon the skills and knowledge of very few people… technocrats. The rest of us are waffling fluffers.

Still, at least you know how to make a vacuum tube now.

I read recently that Youtube is the second biggest search engine on the web (in a blog that I’ve now misplaced) by one of the funders of Twitter, who was saying that Twitter was a threat to google because it delivers more up to the minute information… a notion roundly bollocked by the hoards of commenters etc.

Twitter is a pretty good search engine for what people are talking about on any given subject right now though. Want to know what people think of IE6? Search for it on Twitter. Hating IE6 is an international language.

Facebook is an excellent search engine for people. I’ve found people that I thought I’d lost forever.

Digg/Reddit and co have fucked it up. They’re not good search engines for news.

Instructibles.com is rappidly turning into a really good site for searching for “how to build things”… and that is its destiny methinks… but it’s not quite there yet.

There are probably good sites for searching for music… MySpace? Lastfm? I imagine that the backward facing copyright analists have/will interfere with that one… I use youtube for music searches and they interfere with that all the time.

So there you go. Web 2.0 is turning into Search 2.0. Who’d a thunk it?

And in a way it makes sense, because although google is utter genius, it’s also a bit crap because (like digg, reddit etc) it’s an exercise in Rewarding Beaten-Paths. Sure the long tails are there… but if you want to find an honest review of a camera say, you have to wade through about a million pages of people trying to sell them. If you want authenticity, you need to go to Amazon (a search engine for not just things to buy, but reviews) or some other site that specialises in reviews (and there are a fair few of those, but I’ve not found them to be terribly convincing) … where the focus is small enough that the interests of long-tails are genuinely served.

It’s classic AI – and quite possibly/probably how wetware brains work… every time you click a link, you increase the likelihood that it will be clicked again. Beaten-Paths are rewarded, but beaten paths are not always right, and can be (and are) gamed.

It doesn’t always work. It’s not always fair… in fact the bigger it gets, the less likely it is to be fair. Oligarchies of Influence are formed. It’s almost like (and this is an advantage of twitter/facebook) that classic AI isn’t that good for delivering authenticity… for that you need small networks of small-degrees-of-separation of white-listed people. “People you know”, or “who know people you know” or “who no people who know people you know”, but not much beyond that. You’re not guaranteed an answer though.

Another problem – a concern I have with the way these things are shaping up, is that this system encourages monopoly. The major filtering systems of the internet are specifically, systemically architected to encourage monopoly. It’s not democratic… it’s sold as democratic, but it’s not democratic.

I’d be a lot happier (for example) with some sort of P2P version of Flickr… so once something is uploaded into the Universal mind, it doesn’t get lost… but it doesn’t have the lack of resilience inherent in monopolistic systems. We’ve already seen the drawbacks of monopoly with Youtube… embedded a video recently? Chances are it will have been pulled by WMG – and your site will now have a dead link.

I think any P2P system will need to run in parallel… a bit like the distributed SETI system… where chunks of the Universal Mind that live in precarious silos like Youtube or Flickr are automatically backed up onto individual PCs… I think there are already sites that try to backup every single youtube video onto their own servers… but this is kindof replacing one problem with… well, the same problem.

This is probably already being done, but I don’t know about it.

Here’s a picture of a penguin

Apropos of nothing.

I’m also increasingly seeing the web as (you guessed it) The Universal Mind. It’s becoming a creature in its own right, with its own patterns and behaviours, and its own emergent moralities… but more of that later.