Both of these are early steps towards things that are absolutely inevitable… I think what links them is that they’re movements towards remote exoskeletons. Like Sleep Dealer… or (taking it further) that one where Bruce Willis is all shiney… Surrogates. A brain in a jar controlling a landscape littered with toys.
The inevitability is enhanced (and made evident) by the fact that both of these are DIY projects – based on the new availability of EEG headsets, and whatever it is that has gone into that tank to get it to go – wifi (or whatever), sensors, motors etc etc. We’re not waiting for corporations to make these things for us – we want them so bad we’re making them ourselves.
I tell yer – there’s a relationship-made-in-heaven between hackers everywhere and the Chinese Shanzai geniuses. There’s a very distinct possibility of getting things to market before Western corporations have cottoned on – because the innovation doesn’t happen in corporations, it happens at the edges… the market-research isn’t done by corporations, it’s done by the blogosphere, and the Chinese can turn out copies of things at prices that are a tiny fraction of what are possible in the west. (eg: the other day my dad bought a fibre-optic lamp… it had 4 colours that you could switch between, and had it’s own rotating colour-change program. Retailing for $2(NZ). How the fuck do you make that for $2?)
Mind you – how the does the west make enough money to buy anything, if everything can be done cheaper elsewhere?
And the answer to that one I think… comes down to a serious re-think about what we actually need money for. Because we do need it – but… for all sorts of things now, we don’t… and maybe (just maybe) the primacy that we’ve given to fiat-currency, is a mistake. Maybe the whole model is a mistake. Maybe the way we’re managing scarce-resources is wrong. Well, it’s definitely wrong isn’t it? Half of us are fucking dying. That can’t be right.
There’s an interesting concept here – Basic Life Package (blip). If we can make multi-colour fibre-optic lamps for $2, we should be able to make BLiPs (covering the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs)
at a price that doesn’t… well, kill us.
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By the way, the reason the old order is being kicked on its side, is that people are fulfilling the higher levels of that pyramid by creating things themselves. There’s a lot of fuss about people distributing other people’s stuff for free… but actually people will more than happily create for free as well… only it’s not really “for free”… it’s just free of money. They’re paid in benefits described in the top 2 levels of that pyramid.
Calling it an “attention” economy, is kindof missing what it’s about – the “attention economy” is an attempt to turn “abundance economy” stuff into fiat currency… into an economy controlled by scarcity. It doesn’t really work – although I think the illusion of it working is what’s funding a lot of progress at the moment. But I think it’s a bubble. I think advertising is a bubble.
This same story is being played out over and over again, all over the world. Someone oversteps their authority – it gets online, and the world bites back.
But never mind about that.
Carve this in stone somewhere.
All authority is inherently illegitimate, and must justify its existence to the governed. If it can’t, then it should be dismantled.
It’s a fundamental principle – and by extension, any institution that needs to lie to (or censor) the people it governs, radically undermines its own moral authority… to the extent that it is no longer morally sustainable.
Moralities that are fundamental to human nature were suddenly allowed to come into play. We saw the end of slavery, the rise of science, the gradual banishment of superstition, the rise of liberal democracies, the suffragettes… on and on and on… the ripples keep spreading. The protestant revolution has never stopped.
We still live in a world with slavery, sexism, superstition, tyranny, fuckwittery of every hue – but these are on a back foot, scorned and often criminalised. Civilised countries, and people simply won’t countenance them. Not if they know about them. Not if they have access to the unspun truth.
- obedience to authority (right or wrong)
- loyalty to the group (right or wrong)
- notions of purity – often (toxically) concerned with sex and race
These are adaptations for group/tribe survival in a hostile environment where tribes are at war. Primitive shit. This would explain why so much conservative spin is based around war-metaphors. Why conservatives are so keen to paint the world as being a dangerous place – when really, it’s not a hell of a lot more dangerous than it ever was. According to Steven Pinker, a hell of a lot less dangerous in fact.
But conservative morals are not adaptations at an individual level, and outside the arena of tribe-vs-tribe fighting, they’re profoundly maladaptive for societies as well. The ancient Romans (when they still had a republic) used to appoint dictators during times of war. When the war had passed, the dictator would resign and democracy would resume. Conservative morality has “obedience to authority” as a central tenet… and when people become frightened, they become more conservative – the conservative fear-reflex. “Amber Alert” mean anything to you?. The Never-Ending War? The Never-Ending War-Metaphors?
Fortunately, the happier people are, the less conservative they tend to be (ever met a happy homophobe?). The basic human drives that surfaced as a result of the enlightenment… which came out of the radical freeing of information-control – rise directly from human nature. From simple human happiness: Basic ideas of fairness. Equality. Inclusiveness. Questioning of authority. Truth.
And the thing that drove the enlightenment – the freeing of the memosphere… is happening again, only on a massively… dimensionally greater scale than the last time round.
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So back to the rebellious beauty princess. Back to her “coach”. What happened to her? The internet happened to her. Just as the internet happened to Constable Bubbles, or the US military (again and again and again).
The internet (a radically sped-up-memosphere) (4/5s of who’s participants are happy), is profoundly hostile to authoritarianism. Witness the “spokesperson” attempting to justify the authoritarianism of the coach… and to my mind (but not my Mum’s) failing badly. The internet splits events from context. It may be permissible (or not) in a coach/student environment, but you don’t get to tell teenagers that “they won’t go far” in a context-free environment, particularly not to photogenic, and (in a wonky teenage sort of way) articulate ones – who are at least the teensiest bit media (and web) savvy. Never mind the incongruity of entering into a beauty contest, then rebelling against someone telling her how to look… the web splits events from context. We’re not just all writers now, we’re editors as well.
So: The central conflict of our age is network vs hierarchy, and the central demand that network makes of hierarchy, is “justify yourself”.
And authority don’t like it.
But we don’t care.
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All authority is inherently illegitimate. That’s why interactions between the police and the public should be videoed for public scrutiny… rather than the public being CCTVed and not the police. I’m sorry, that’s the price you pay for authority. That’s transparency.
But authority don’t like it…. that’s why the police (in the UK especially) have taken it upon themselves to extend anti-terror-powers… by making up a law that photographing in public places is illegal without permission – even though they themselves CCTV every square fucking inch with impunity. The police have made up their own law… because their assumption of authority can (and is) now subject to public scrutiny – now that every single one of us carries a video camera at all times, and we can all publish, straight to the web, straight from the camera.
Sorry, our energy will simply prevail. We ARE the wave… for better or worse… but I think for better.
On Disruptive technology. Someone else made a load of predictions, and I made all sorts of comments and said I would too… later. So now I have.
I’m totally winging it here. I’m making it up as I go… so to make that a bit easier – a brief recap of the most disruptive of disruptive technologies in the 20th century?
Cripes – that’s a big one. Maybe too big. There was TV, Aeroplanes, mechanised warfare, TV again, telephones, computers, the internet, the anti-baby-pill, the atomic bomb. Not all of these were disruptive in the classical sense, but had a huge impact. Ok. 20th century too big. Try the last 20 years.
Cellphones. And the Internet. Obviously. I mean we did have these things earlier than 20 years ago, but the effects didn’t really kick in until the 90s/00s.
And to be honest, I’m struggling a bit to think of anything outside of that – but they are (to be fair) kindof big. I think they’re probably bigger than the anti-baby pill… and that was a really big one, that no one saw coming. It basically allowed women to go out an work – to a much greater degree. And this (coupled with capitalism’s inexorable drive to make people worth less) means that once a husband could support a whole family, now it takes two… and often even that is pushing it. This has put all sorts of strains on that entirely artificial construct “the family”… on people’s expectations, and now about 1/5th of the planet is suffering from clinical depression.
Obviously there are other reasons for the depression… but… whatever it is that we’re doing now, it ain’t making us happy. See that picture above. That’s prozac. In a bit I’ll get up, make a coffee and swallow that pill.
The point? “there’s no such thing as fate, just demographics” as a Russian somewhere said. If you’re looking at disruptive technologies, then I think that focusing on things that make Western consumers go “hey, Neato!” is… dust in the wind, dude.
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So. Disruptive technologies. Big ones. Tectonic ones.
1) The anti-death pill.
I’ve got a feeling that this one might be a bit like nuke fusion – always 20 years away… because the complexities of separating out what each gene actually does, is very problematic, because no gene is “for” just one thing.
Off the back of this – the search for it, satellite technologies like limb-replacement etc… the drive towards life extension is probably going to create all sorts of discoveries (like alchemy did back in the day) and will create fairly profound questions around what it actually means to be human. I mean where would the absence of death leave the monotheist religions? (which as far as I can see, are basically death-cults – particularly Christianity). And the anti-death pill is the most compellingly viral of technologies because virtually everyone on this planet has someone who they would die for. There is absolutely no question of containing this technology once it’s invented. People will kill for it.
2) The end of scarce energy.
Biotech again. Home-made fuel-stills running off genetically engineered algae. Once the bits are in place (ie: someone’s made the algae) then it should (theoretically) be no harder to set up than making your own beer.
Biotech is a bit of a mad one because once the R&D hump is passed, the costs of replication fall precipitously. You do need wizards to get over the hump though.
In addition to this, the price of solar, and the pressures to install are falling (and rising respectively) all the time. I can remember when every calculator needed a bunch of batteries. Then Every calculator was solar. This was due to nega-watts in action… not through improvements to solar-tech, but improvements in efficiency of the calculators.
So – I think energy acquisition (you know, that thing we’ve fought all these wars over in the last 100 years) is going to be completely deflated. And it will probably be replaced by mineral acquisition… because we’re running out of stuff… there are whole swathes of minerals where the remaining stocks/sources can be counted in 1 or 2 decades. Gallium for example – we’ve got about 6 years of that one left. It’s the stuff that flat TV screens are made out of.
This is another driver for bio-tech solutions I think. The Chinese currently own about 90% of the rare-earth magnet sources. You need these for generators etc… you know, wind-farms and so on. Solar? Wouldn’t be at all surprised if there weren’t a few key-ingredients here that are running a little low either. Biotech doesn’t have a problem with this sort of thing. Well, not as much.
3) CNC
Computer-controlled micro-manufacturing in other words… the ability to download a design from the web, to a printer/cutter thing of some sort, that then makes it.
The proliferation of this tech, combined with open-source… solutions for things created by people who are actually embedded in the problem, rather than trying to make “solutions” to sell to consumers – this is also potentially a big one. I think it’s a long way out though – decades. We actually already have machines that could (reprap-like) make themselves – modern cnc/lathing machines could do it… but these are very big and expensive. There needs to be a couple of innovations (probably to do with micro-sensing feedback loops so the engineering can be sloppier) happening before this stuff proliferates to the extent where it really starts sidelining mass-production.
I always use clothes (sewing machines etc) as the example why DIY manufacturing won’t necessarily take off. That said, the robotics of sewing machines is so well established and advanced, that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this was where it started.
4) Non debt-based currencies.
Don’t know how this will happen, but there is a need for it to happen. A bad need – and if it does, it will change everything.
I mean really, there needs to be a serious re-invention of what “wealth” actually means, because our current understanding is not working. It’s not making us happy – even the people who have all the money aren’t happy… and it means we’re pouring trillions of dollars – lives, energy etc etc into “protecting ourselves from each other”.
From a design point of view it’s fucked.
Now we know a bit about design now – we experimented on various things in the 20th century, none of which worked terribly well – but something’s that was fairly clear – monolithic design is a recipe for genocide. Whatever we do needs to be made up of small, networked cells.
Ok, so that Tim Boucher, from timboucher.com was going on about disruptive technologies that are likely to turn up and I thought I’d make a few of my own. Or just sortof heckle. Or whatever.
Firstly, Tim’s were:
1) AUGMENTED REALITY
(probably not – could be good for shopping. Good for meta-tagging reality. Could raise monster privacy issues if face-recognition is linked to late-night facebook page rantings etc. Ok… maybe it will be then. Most of the apps I’ve seen so far have been “concepts” though, and a bit crap. Apart from that google one maybe – with that weird bloke with the savagely repressed hair. That’s disruptive. You could go into a shop to try something out, then buy it off ebay on the spot)
2) UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING
(absolutely – it will get into our electricity and heartbeat-rate. Like all of these things, a two-edged sword from a privacy POV)
3) FREE-FLOATING HOLOGRAMS
(probably not, but if you can use them for porn, then they might be quite popular)
4) GESTURAL & KINESTHETIC INTERFACES
(Waving Arms Around Interfaces – utter bollocks. Useful for games maybe. The main reason people like these though is like transparent screens, they turn up in sci-fi movies all the time – but they don’t do that because they’re useful but because they’re photogenic. Eyeball tracking is an interesting one though)
5) MIND-TO-COMPUTER INTERFACE
(what would this allow us to do that we don’t already do? There was that thing where people controlled revolving cubes on a screen recently… so you could theoretically control a mouse pointer or a RC plane… but… Dragon Dictate hasn’t really taken off because you can’t talk and think at the same time – when you type you can think ahead about what you’re going to say next. Being able to suck information off the web “internally” could make it a hell of a lot easier to cheat in exams though.
And a major factor in a computer’s physical size right now is the fact that human fingers are the size they are. Get rid of a keyboard and a screen and you could conceivably get away with networked smart-dust)
6) FULLY-CARTOGRAPHIC EXPERIENCE
(an extrapolation of a current tendency… but who would want it? Us I suppose. We would want it. Total recall)
7) INTER-LINKED SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS
(Already happening – there was that Australian port-surveillance system recently. I think this one is quite interesting because it allows us all to become ghosts in the machine)
8) SUPER-PROFILE
(also already happening… but I think this creates a niche that facebook used to provide but now fail to, which Diaspora aim to fill… but chances are won’t – unless they have the magic-bullet of being able to seamlessly leach off facebook’s info… it offers a niche for shared private spaces. Sorry… teenagers need them. Adults need them. We’re too complicated to have only one persona for all people. We just are)
9) PERSONALITY CLONING & SIMULATION
(really? Hadn’t thought of that one. It would be interesting to meet your clone, but… the psychological/psychiatric ramifications of saving the personalities of dead people are possibly a little too severe – prolonging the agony of loss etc. Could be useful for extending the lives of actors though. Maybe)
10) DISPOSABLE IDENTITIES
(already happening – you can get email addresses that only last a couple of hours)
11) COLLECTIVE IDENTITY SYSTEMS
(I’m not sure that this isn’t already happening to the extent that it will)
12) REMOTE PRESENCE
(yup – absolutely. Holidays from hell. Backyard spider-hunting safaris)
13) KILLER ROBOTS
(yup – already happening. Drone attacks are the only game in town when it comes to killing forn terrsts)
14) AUTONOMOUS INTELLIGENCES
(I think these are miss-imagined. People think of something like Orac of Blakes 7 – but it’s more likely to be things like smart-thermostats escaping from the hot-water-cupboard – roombas etc. I guess the dividing-line is something that uses genetic algorithms so it can deal with entirely new situations based upon experience, or trial-and-error. This raises the spectre of computer virii escaping from the network and learning how to control a roomba. Or a car. Or a killer robot)
15) UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR
(nah, everyone will learn to speak English – as well as their own languages – it’ll take a generation or so, but it will happen. To a large extent this is already the case… and it hasn’t really disrupted that much I don’t think. Not compared to the technology that’s made it happen. But… you know, we can talk to each other, but I’m not sure we’re really listening to each other yet – not really)
16) MINIFACTURING
(Oh yes. If this does what I think it’s going to do, then disruptive is too small a word)
Ok – that went on for a bit longer than I thought it would, so I’ll do a follow up post on the morrow, which will be my version of the same thing.
Ok, another weekly round-up. Slipping further and further behind. I’ve been busy. I probably need to regroup. I need a holiday. I need more work. I need to hide under the bed surrounded by lots of little animals that I’ve made out of matchboxes, with matchstick legs. I’m a maker me. The Creator. Alpha and Omega, permanently in Beta.
I didn’t know what a pick and place machine was until I saw this, and now I’m still not entirely sure. A machine for picking and placing things? I would have supposed so.
This one is special though because it comes from the the ardu-drone folk – the DIY cruise-missile-waiting-to-happen people, although personally I think the future is probably more like those hunter-seaker things of Dune… where a little quadracopter operated over the web that sits in a tree outside your house and when you come out it fires a curare dart into your neck.
I’m sortof surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen more regularly in fact – I mean there’s this guy up in Auckland, NZ who’s just built himself a 50 million dollar house – after his company went down taking with it the life-savings (and therefore old-age-pensionhood) of thousands and thousands of people. And he got away with it. The Bhopal people got away with it. Cheney got away with it. Justice is not being done – and although I’m absolutely not in favour of the death penalty, I’m Scottish – so do believe in the sanctity of personal blood-vendeta. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.
And maybe it won’t – I mean if you look at revolutions in the past – The French, The Russian – the people had to be pushed to incredible lengths before they started killing the rich – just for the sake of moral principle. Maybe we humans are a lot more docile than we imagine ourselves to be.
Violence is first and formost an act of communication though – and one that almost always backfires – you can’t perpetrate violence without legitimising and strengthening the hawk constituency on the other side.. Especially now that information is so much harder to control.
Still – watch this space. The age of assasination – an inevitable flipside to the guard-economy, and possibly one so useful that if it didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it.
This is pretty cool – it’s a way for industries to offer their (massive amounts of) waste to the ether, and have it turned into something useful… probably avoiding their own disposal costs. Industrial scale-freebies offer business opportunities… and make the whole system a whole lot more efficient.
I mean with these massive cotton-reels you could make massive cotton reel tanks and invade… who’d be easy to beat? Easier than Iraq or Afghanistan? Andorra? No… to mountainy. The Vatican? Yea – it’s a soveriegn state isn’t it. Invade the vatican with massive recycled cotton-reel tanks. You’d still lose, but that seems to happen every time anyway, and this way it wouldn’t cost you a trillion dollars.
I know journalists like to go on about how important and worthy they are, and maybe they’re right. That said, I feel an almost physical sense of relief reading the article above.
Why? Because I haven’t got some fucker trying to sell me something – I can relax and take it at face value – which you can’t with news-reporting today. News today is all about trying to grab your attention. It’s a sales job.
It would be really good to have some rationality-filter set up to de-bullshitify the news.
This is interesting – an alternative currency, yes… one that you can’t actually buy anything with yet, granted… but the architecture sounds interesting.
Which is to say, it’s entirely decentralised P2P – and they pay you (in bitcoins) for being a host. You can buy one thing with them – VOIP phone credits… so in some ways, it’s a high-tech rendering of the African thing where they send money about the place by reading cellphone top-up codes over the phone.
That’s the thing with currency – it really helps if it’s based on some “thing” that everyone uses. Corn in the old days for example. Today it’s debt, but that isn’t sustainable because the interest keeps multiplying.
Various funding mechanisms have been creating waves etc of late as well – the obvious one is kickstarter.com… with the quite probably doomed-before-it-starts Disaspora. Another one was an open-sourced laser-cutter (more on that later). There’s one that’s turned up in the EU recently as well – private (rather than crowd-sourced) funding… from people who think they can second-guess the crowd’s earthly desires better than the crowd can. Nice diagram anyway
Because if there’s one thing geeks love, it’s flow-charts.
Another rash of surveillance innovations from the Plucky Brits…
So they can spy on themselves even more than they already do, and… should they feel the need to co-invade and occupy some wog country with the Plucky Americans, they can spy on “insurgents”, or locals. Depending on who you talk to.
In addition to that is a thing in The Telegraph, a depressing tory rag, where it is suggested that brain scanners could (might, may) be used to “read people’s minds” – which is almost certainly an example of the sciencificaly challenged reporting that I was on about before – if you read between the lines it seems that it could be used as some sort of lie-detector, and I’m not sure that that is any great surprise.
In fact so irked was I by the number of “could”s in this article, that I made a word-cloud out of it to prove my point.
Effectively disproving my point. Ok. I was wrong. Whatever.
Scoff thee not… $14,500 worth of people have decided they need a laser-cutter, and have punted it at kickstarter – this includes (as far as I can gather) the possibility of punting $512 and getting a laser-kit. Is that the same thing as a $512 laser cutter*? Hard to say. $15000 is (apparently) about 1/2 what a commercial laser-cutter costs… but 50% more than what they were after.
* oh – apparently not. Extremely misleading wording there. They say further down the comments that they expect the thing to cost $2-$5k.
This one being specifically designed to replicate itself.
It’s not always the simplest/best/most-open that win though. There’s The Skype Effect – where although there are better alternatives, one offering leaps ahead on polish, marketing and then self-propelling viral hype. It helps if your website is lime-green.
Still… there seems to be a movement underway here. Would I buy a laser-cutter for $3k. Not immediately – but at some point. Probably. I’ve probably spent that much on laser-cutting in the last 12 months or so. Freedom to experiment. That’s what it’s about.
Controlled by the cloud. Although it seems like a cop-out, I’m not sure that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. It kindof makes the robot a detached limb of a larger entity than being an autonomous object in its own right.
Basically deep down inside, I’m only interested in things I can eat, fight or shag – so although I am actually a programmer myself (and spend most of my time sitting in the corner, praying no one will try to talk to me), the Software-Issue won’t be this massive saga that these things usually are.
Still – a whole bunch of stuff has happened that is worthy of comment.
A decentralised BitTorrent client from Holland by the looks. I think this is interesting because:
a) It comes from Holland.
b) It has been “awarded millions of euros in funding from the European Union”. Really? Cool… but I didn’t think creating MAFIAA proof file-sharing systems was what the EU was about really.
c) File-Sharing systems always seem to have that rabbit movie as a demo
Even though we all know that the killer-app of these systems is bypassing the hopelessly in need of reform copyright laws. The only people who come close to detailing how these laws need to be reformed is (need we say it) The Pirate Party.
We will give the public the following new rights:
The right to share files provided no money changes hands.
The right to format shift and time shift data.
The right of access to government funded data.
The right to compensation for government data loss.
The right to safely encrypt private data.
The right to apply to a court for compensation where data protection laws have been broken.
The right for constituents to force a by-election.
The right to pay only for the fraction of the claimed broadband speed that an ISP actually delivers.
The right to be a whistleblower.
The right for photographers and filmmakers to go about their business without persecution under anti-terror laws.
The right for disabled people to demand an unrestricted version of DRM protected content where that is necessary to allow them to access it.
We will reform outdated laws:
We will abolish drug patents, replacing them with subsidies.
We will reduce the length of copyright to 10 years.
We will provide exemptions to patent law for non-commercial use, personal study and academic research.
We will introduce system of compulsory patent licensing
We will reform libel law.
We will prohibit the abuse of RIPA powers.
We will remove loopholes in copyright and patent law.
We will protect the public from abuses of new technology:
We will forbid third parties from intercepting or monitoring communication traffic
We will introduce a mandatory warning label on products that include DRM.
We will introduce laws on the acceptable use of CCTV and DNA samples.
We will legislate in favour of net neutrality.
We will introduce stronger data protection laws
We will not allow government censorship of the internet
We will put into action the government’s Open Source Action Plan.
We will require the BBC to release all their content under a Creative Commons licence.
We will prevent the BBC from using DRM technology.
We will ensure better computing education in schools.
These I think provide a bench-mark for what is acceptable in terms of digital rights.
Back to Tribler – this is a step towards the holy grail of completely decentralised, encrypted file-sharing. These things also (alas) require critical-mass… so they only really become useful if a lot of people are using them.
The legal process is still appears to be rumbling on – the operators of The Pirate Bay having been found guilty… but the site is still operating, and (probably as a result of the publicity, and sympathy for the pirate-bay guys generally), the number of users has gone from 1 million to 5 million.
The technology has now moved on, so they no longer need to operate as a tracker, and is instead using different protocols. There is also a project called iPredator which offers an encrypted internet service for a monthly fee – I’m not sure how popular monthly fees will be – but I’d almost be inclined to adopt it just to tell the Evil Empire to fuck off and die.
Anyway – the rapidly changing nature of the web in the face of the hopelessly slow and unfit for purpose law-making process is why that cunt Peter Mandelson attempted (and succeeded?) in granting himself the power to make up laws on the fly. Please, someone rid me of this turbulent priest.
So many people have commented on the humourless, anally retentive and ultimately futile attempt by the “owners” of that Hitler movie to censor youtube parodies of it, that people are so sick of it, they never want to hear about it ever again.
Pretty much the only reason most people had heard of (and subsequently seen) this movie was because of these parodies, and the director himself said he found them funny and that they were a fitting extension to the films purpose… which was a type of dethroning.
Needless to say, a parody about this censorship was instantly uploaded and various sites offered instructions on how to get around the censorship.
Still – there you go. Try to censor the internet and it bites back.
Clay Shirky said that Facebook is attempting to eat the entire internet
Umair Haque said that it’s not trying to be Pagerank, it’s trying to be Digg.
The upshot appears to be a further erosion of Facebook’s already egregious regard for privacy – allowing developers to pull facebook data into their own apps, if they get users to login in using Facebook/Oauth. Facebook has 400,000,000 users. It will be hard to resist.
Still, in previous posts (2 of them) I went on about a “holy crap moment, courtesy of Google”… one was about Wave, the other… can’t remember – but they didn’t amount to much, and everybody thought they’d change the world…
… and facebook is the AOL of social apps… it is (at its core) evil. So who knows.
It’s also fundamentally dangerous and unstable having that amount of “information” going through a single company – it’s funny… the web who’s strength is (by design) based on decentralised configurations, has led to some of the biggest examples of centralisation in human history.
5) erm… that’s it. There was another thing, but danged if I can remember it now.
Still, never mind. Here’s a delta robot picking-and-placing things onto a randomly moving target
I really think that this is the future of reprappery – rather than cartesian table-based things.
This one’s been ruminating for a while… It comes in the wake of a) the Digital Economy Bill passing in the UK (I’m British) and b) the Public Acta meeting in New Zealand (I’m a Kiwi)
So.
Part 1)
This is a stupid (no, really, it is stupid) piece of legislation, partly drafted by the BPI, and corralled by the unelected Peter Mandelson (who’s had to resign in disgrace, twice, but who is back)… which among other things, grants the said Lord Mandelson, the right to make up laws on the fly.
We protested – I personally wrote two letters to my MP, as did 20,000 other people…
… because it was really important…
… and only 40 of the useless cunts bothered to turn up. It was a whipped vote – which means it was driven from the top.
So the DEbill went through. There was nothing we could do about it. Our parliamentary system failed. Again.
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All over the world (and by that, I mean the countries I know about… New Zealand, The UK, The US, Aus) confidence in democracy is being profoundly shaken. People fucking hate politicians. These are the people we elect – this shouldn’t happen.
Democracy’s role has become “Make up laws for lobbyists and pass them if no one protests”. In the UK, they’re passed regardless – MPs preferring the collateral damage of voter ire to offending the party hierarchy. A million people took to the streets in London in protest of the Iraq war. We were completely ignored. 20,000 people wrote to their MPs over the DEbill. We were completely ignored.
Confidence has been shaken in both the UK and NZ over systemic expenses scandals – where MPs pilfer the public purse – for holidays and duck-ponds etc… but the photo above is the thing that does it for me. Excuse me, but what the fuck are you people actually for?
Behind all this (and worse) though is this general sense of disenfranchisement – from teabaggers to greenies… we all feel disempowered – because really, there is no difference between the major parties.
And this is the Empire Strikes Back year for the internet – this is the year where governments in collusion with the old entertainment industry (owned now by major corporations or shell companies – the Gordon Geckos of this world) are attacking the internet (and therefore us) on every front. This is the year when we really need our elected leaders to act in our interests – instead of just fucking failing.
Here’s that picture again.
You see all those empty spaces? Those are our elected representatives. Failing.
Part 2)
So on the 8th I went to the #publicACTA meeting in Wellington. It’s purpose was to draft a set of recommendations to give to NZ ACTA negotiators. These needed to be phrased in legalese, and not be so far outside the scope of the negotiation that they be rejected out of hand.
About 100 people turned up – a selection of lawyers, geeks, tech entrepreneurs etc. People who actually understand the internet – who understand the ramifications of 2nd-party liability.
What happened was this:
1) Some people got up and made some speeches, outlining the issues.
2) we were randomly split up into (about 10) groups to brainstorm what we thought the points in the draft should be.
3) these were read out, and the most commonly raised issues were combined into a rough draft.
4) we split into groups again to re-word these issues to make them sound reasonable and legalesey
5) these were read out, and transcribed in real time (with guidance from the floor) and at about 7pm that evening the final draft was completed.
Now it seemed to me that this was a pretty good way of creating legislation – or at least proposals for it. Maybe it was because everyone there was more or less in agreement before we started – there was one guy who tried to raise the Entertainment Industry POV, but this POV is based on a willful misunderstanding – and once this was cleared up there really wasn’t anywhere else for him to go argument-wise.
This process seemed a lot better than the current system – which has become worse than useless.
Government by Referendum is a bad idea – they have it in California and it is a farce. It is a carte-blanche handing of power to whoever owns the media companies, and whoever has the most money to buy their services. Government by Referendum is basically just handing the car keys to Rupert Murdoch…. the Public ACTA process was pretty good though – I think it should be a crucial part of ALL legislation… in fact I’m not sure that politicians should be deciding policy at all. They’re not good enough at it.
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Clay Shirky pointed out that a society with a printing press is qualitatively different to one without. A society with an internet is qualitatively different to one without.
Which begs the question “how?”
How is it different?
Well… the last time around, the improvement in people’s ability to communicate with each other, resulted in them demanding democracy. It took a long time before democracy supplanted monarchy… but it happened. It also created a schism in the Church, and led to a whole raft of social reforms, ranging from Women’s Rights to the rise of science and rationalism. Rationalism and Humanism are really just extensions of Protestantism… or more accurately,Protestantism is a compromise… a key-frame along a route from (informational) tyranny to… something else. Rational Humanism I suppose.
The faster the memosphere, the more purely our organisations reflect our societal atomic structure.
The Church is thankfully no longer the (murdering, torturing) power that it was – these days power is a compromise between the state (that to a greater or lesser extent (even in tyrannies) exists as a result of public indulgence), and the corporations – who are the new globalised aristocracy – a baronial class, enslaved to a type of psychopathic mathematical formula, designed to transfer money upwards. They try to represent this formula as being a law of nature. It isn’t.
Parliamentary democracy evolved as a set of compromises between the interests of wealthy/powerful concerns and the commons. It needs to evolve again.
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Some characteristics of a wired population are
1) Secrecy is a lot harder to maintain, and The Internet comes down with great force and furious anger upon anyone who tries to censor it.
Obviously govts all over the world are trying to censor it.
The main sword that the internet weilds is exposure. People laugh at slactivists – but it’s the slactivists that push one of the only levers we have to move those in power: exposure. We will force transparency upon you.
2) The amount of engagement we (the people) have in the decisions that affect us is no longer enough.
This is partly because our govts so reliably make bad decisions – that they force upon us even though we protest… but this sense of disenfranchisement cuts across the board. Right wing nutters and europhobes feel just as disenfranchised as the rest – in fact the army of cranks who would formerly write highly disturbing letters to the papers, number highly among the new rash of people offering themselves as alternative candidates.
This isn’t democratic though – the crank (and I use that word guardedly, but from a policy POV he is) who is running in my own constituency is not particularly interested in representing the views of his constituency – he just wants to promote is own anti-EU, climate-change-denying, war-supporting, “lefty”-fearing agenda. There was no public consultancy involved in arriving at this agenda…. if there was… if he organised a #publicACTA type set of meetings he’d get:
a) a manifesto diametrically opposed to his own
b) engaged and invested supporters
c) a better manifesto.
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Here’s a short observation from Justin Carter at the ACTA thing. I’m including this because before he got up and spoke, I was ready to storm the Bastille. We don’t live in that age any more though. The way through this is not violence or confrontation, but killer frames – clarifying catalysts that dissolve and realign.
And a short observation from me:
No legislation should be considered before the metrics for gauging its success are agreed.
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.
“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.
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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.
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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.
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.
But like, what’s the background? Is that a dead (or wintering) vineyard or something? It looks like an American version of what Russia looked like when no one had painted it for 20 years. The New Frontier.
Apparently stronger than the existing ones – and has the added advantage that if it falls into the sea, it’s already a sort of massive water-wing. Just remember – these are the people who invented velcro.
Everything’s raving about this, but I think it kindof sucks
Why do I think it sucks FFS? It’s the greatest Rube-Goldberg machine ever made.
It sucks because they’re piggy-backing on Maker Culture (aka what nerds do to get attention), not by making something but by just fucking buying it. Something that’s all about tinkering about and doing something for yourself – labours of love has just become a great big spend-fest.
It worked – that video has had over 2 million views already. But like… whatever. It looks to me like cool kids with money getting attention by nicking the uncool kids… thing. What Nike (and everyone) have been doing to Black Urban culture forever. Sorry. Once the mainstream gets hold of it, it sucks.
But don’t mind me, I’m just some twat shooting his gob off from the safety of the cheap seats.
There’s a nice circularity to de-bacterialising yourself with a petri-dish.
When Etsy first turned up it looked a lot to me like a load of tedious crafty tat, but the quality of the stuff (well, some of it) on there truly gob-smacks me now.
I’m not sure how it’s happened – whether it’s the community… or competition… or what, but there seems to have been a really radical bar-raising. In London in the 90s, Camden Market went from being a couple of hundred yards of knock-off Goth stuff (and hippie-wigs), to miles and miles of really high-quality, up-market… everything.
Etsy has done the same thing in a fraction of the time – except that instead of starting out as a goth thing, it started out as a 1970s local-church craft fair. Now it’s all boutiquey and designery. Well… some of it.
That Umair Haque bloke who I’m going to slag off in the next post once said that Etsy was probably going to be The Next Google. No one knew what he was talking about. And they still don’t… but… it’s looking a whole lot more convincing than it once did. He’s not just a pretty face.
Looks like DARPA are attempting to make an “Apps Store” for military… applications. What could possibly go wrong?
Not much probably – if it introduces diversity/resilience into the mix of stuff being used – though I imagine the main reason to do it is to co-opt the collective intelligence of the great-geek-unwashed, and get them to dream up more stuff to sell to the taxpayer.
The problem isn’t imaginary enemies, or forn terrsts. The problem is the military itself. It’s destroying the country by taking about 1/2 of the tax revenues. Remember kids. Spending money on the military is like breaking windows in 19th Century France. When you need it, you need it – 50% of your tax? Come on. It’s out of control.
But forget about all that. According to the article, it’s specifically targeting Android phones. Which I find interesting.
Most Christians haven’t apparently, so it’s worth slogging through it to piss them off etc… but anyway, things I have noticed so far:
a) There are numerous references to other gods (eg: Exodus 18.11)
b) There is an incredible amount of Christian Lore that isn’t actually in it. Stories surrounding the Tower of Babel, and the Ark and whatnot. Still… that whole business surrounding Sodom and Gomorrah – did you know that the only “pure” person to escape, wound up procreating with his own daughters? It’s ok though – because (although) they were virgins at the time, he was drunk. The Bible does actually frame this as an excuse.
c) Any experienced programmer will immediately see it for what it is. Really badly written legacy code. It’s filled with bugs, contradictions, repeated code, lack of structure etc. It’s like an old version of Oscommerce or vbulletin or something. Nightmare.
If this is the source-code of the OS of the Christian Religion, no wonder it’s so fucked up. It needs more than an upgrade, or more patches (The New Testament was a patch, attempting to correct the hysterical bug-fest that is the Old Testament)… it needs a total rewrite from the ground up – starting with a a re-think of the core principles, because… well, let’s face it possums, the New Testament Patch didn’t really work. The world is still being fucked up by people employing Old-Testament morality.
d) It’s interesting from an historical perspective, but The DaVinci Code is easier to get into.
e) Don’t even think about reading anything other than The King James version. The others are for thick people.
“I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept,” Schmidt said. “There are no winners in that environment.” – Howard Schmidt
Mon Dieu, the voice of reason. Where have you been all my life?
Similar logic ought to be applied to “The War on Drugs” and the “War on Terrorism”. Whenever you hear the words “War on…” you know the originator is after one thing: Money. And manpower. And unquestioning political support. And a remit to attack the general population.
But which is kindof cool regardless. A lego sequencer.
My Brother used to make models for advertising/movies… everything from animatronic sheep to model cities, to Treebeard off LOTR to… Hellboy’s Gun…
… and something really noticeable about these things is that they only need to be used once – often only need to look good on one side. Miracles of invention happen, then they’re thrown away, or stored. The latex stuff doesn’t actually last all that long apparently.
Seems like a similar sort of effect, if not intent with a lot of this maker stuff. Someone goes to a huge amount of trouble to make something – and then… what? It’s “stored”? Because it sure as shit ain’t going to be used. Take a look at the stuff that people are making that’s getting attention – most of it will be shown off a couple of times… and then… next project. It’s an incredibly ephemeral culture. The life-span of the average Maker project is shorter than the life-span of a 20th Century pop-single – derided in the early years as “Wallpaper music”. A throwaway culture.
So much innovation is going into things who’s only purpose seems to be a) Because I can, and b) Awesome! Put it on Youtube!
I’m not complaining mind. But there is a weird strand of truth in Karl Pilkington’s assertion that “everything’s been invented… and now we’re just messing about”.
