GENOMICON » state of the web/world

Thought-Bubbles about Abundance

admin — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 04:06:47 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write something about abundance for ages… things keep coming up – eg: the Chinese Suicide Factories intention to employ a million robots, about a billion people starving not because there isn’t enough food but because they don’t have enough money, land-grabs in Africa, artificial scarcity.

I think that the design of our currency – the way it is lent into existence as a scarce resource (rather than based on value-created (the corn-exchange approach)) has a bias towards forcing scarcity on everything else… because we need to “Pay Rent”… in various forms. So we create artificial scarcities – trouble is, it’s killing us. Trouble is, we’re in the midst of one, and on the brink of two more revolutions that are self-replicatory (with the infinite capacity to break scarcity)… so scarcity needs to be imposed with more and more draconian force. Scarcity is not the solution, it is the problem. The need to “Monetize” is the problem, and to some extent, it is an artificial problem.

I’m not going to get it together to write this post. Here are the notes… in thought bubbles. Take what you want and leave the rest. There is a coherent Theory Of Everything in here somewhere, but I don’t know what it is.

(that’s me in the corner)

The Damage Economy

Once upon a time, someone figured out that breaking all the windows in Paris, was not good for the economy even though it seemed to create jobs.

The glazier economy went up. The Parisian economy went down… The net value of Paris went down.

–

We live on a planet now.

P2P Everything

The Napster of Music
The Napster of Films
The Napster of Books
The Napster of Currency
The Napster of Water
The Napster of Energy
Tha Napster of Medicine
The Napster of Food
The Napster of Air
The Napster of Truth
The Napster of Violence

Jesus The Pirate

He saith unto them, How many loaves have ye ? go and see.
And when they knew, they say, Five, and two fishes.
And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies upon the green grass.
And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties.
And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all.
And they did all eat, and were filled.
And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes.
And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men.

- Mark 6:36-46

Jesus The Socialist

We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer ‘To hell with them.’ The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.

- Michael Foot

The Free Spaghetti Factory

… and things that are businesses stop being businesses… , they’re just not a business any more…

…if someone is making your business into a socially based means of peer-production, where the labourers do better job than you, and a faster job than you and a cheaper job than you, and they aren’t actually working…

…and they’re not seeking political power, they don’t try to legislate anything, they just start piling it up you know… they’ve all got information factories, they all have machines that are easily as powerful as any mainframe from the early 90s and these are just the kind of machines people abandon on the roadside… you can see people just turning on these machines in like peer to peer networks and just like… turn on the free spaghetti factory, and leave the room…

- Bruce Sterling

The defining conflict of our era is network vs hierarchy.

… and this conflict is ABOUT abundance vs scarcity.

It is our moral duty to bypass scarcity and optimise for abundance.

Freedom grows out of abundance; slavery from the control of scarcity. Nobody has a moral “right” to monetise abundance by stopping it being abundant.

The prime-driver of any disruptive (Agincourt-style) technological revolution is always to destroy scarcity.

Rent is an attempt to get more value out of the system than is put in. Something for nothing.

Money is a storable means of exchanging scarcity. That is all it is.

Everything on earth is a limited resource (and therefore (generally) part of a cycle), except sunshine. Creating economic systems optimised for scarcity compounds the suffering that this causes.

Tune in, Turn on, Drop out

The key to abundance is going off-grid, and shifting structures from hierarchical to Peer to Peer. This is not just touchy-feely hippie-shit. Guantanamo has it’s own wind-generators. The internet was invented by the military for a very specific purpose.

Civilisation (by Derreck Jensen’s definition) is unsustainable. It can’t be sustained, and it’s starting break – right now. Off-grid/P2P has very powerful (and simple) survival drivers.

The democratisation of violence

The purpose of democracy is to provide a monopoly of violence that is accountable to those that live under it. This is what democracy is for. Anything else it does is a “nice-to-have”.

Anything else we’ve tried devolves into a protection racket.

The 1st Gutenberg Shift

500 years ago it was about the abundance of information-flow.
Today, and increasingly into the future, it is about abundance of everything.

Despite the fact that we seem to be hitting peak-everything, the technological drive, once we get past this hump, is systems optimised for abundance. This is what our technology is doing. This is what it wants.

500 years ago, two institutions were forced (by force) upon us:

1) Fiat Currency
2) The Corporation

Both of these were created to reduce abundance… to create slavery.

Neofacism – The Hydra of the Apocalypse

Corporations need scarcity. This is (generally) how they work and what they do. They take something that is abundant, and repackage it into something scarce, which they sell. They will wherever possible externalise (ie: get someone else to pay) costs. Everywhere you look.

I exchanged emails with a (tory) MEP recently – who was about to enact (another) copyright-term-extension. He crowed that according to PWC, this would “create” £3.5bn in the next 10 years.

And this is what corporations are doing to the world – they are taking what is ours, and trapping us into working for them to repackage it and sell it back to us… or someone else. I’m not talking about small businesses – I’m talking about the macro-scale. What Douglas Rushkoff refers to as “names on debt”

Never before in the field of human conflict, has so much be stolen, from so many, by so few.

EMI, the last UK major record company has now been bought by a Russian Billionaire.

The Fight Of Our Lives

The fight of our lives is going to be over corporations, colluding with governments to make what should be abundant, scarce.

Corporations using the government as their enforcement arm to inflict scarcity on us.

We’re in an era where technology is creating the possibility of not just freedom of speech, but freedom of everything. This is the way it should be – it is our moral duty as described (and enacted) by… you know… Jesus Christ. The loaves-and-fishes guy. The turning-over-the-tables-of-the-money-changers guy.

It is our moral duty to dissolve scarcity and create abundance… but the planet’s political power-structures exist because they’ve cornered the market in various core-scarcities… and they are absolutely hell-bent on extending scarcity to every molecule of available space, and syllable of recordable time.

Kicking The Can Up The Street

SUVs and beef-burgers from The Amazon… that profligate consumerism-as-culture is inflicting scarcity on people from the future.

Abundance is not the same as catering to greed. Abundance is about systems-design. It’s about designing systems where “ownership” is meaningless, and control is impossible, so monopoly-rents cannot be extracted.

The Dawn of The Replicators

Replicating systems inherently create abundance.

That is why Monsanto has suicide genes.
That is why the US made it illegal for farmers to re-plant seeds in Iraq.
That is why the Copyright Cartels are attacking the internet.

The core-activity of evil is to try to destroy abundance. This is how the root of all evil manifests itself.

Coming the other way however are at least 3 technological revolutions.
1) information-systems (which is already upon us but nowhere near played out yet)
2) biotech
3) software-controlled fabrication

The copyright wars are probably only just beginning.

So?

We need to take corporations down, and take them down hard… just as we did with monarchs. Just as we did with the fascists.

They’re different people, but it’s the same hydra.

There are two axis of attack:

– build systems that create abundance.
– undermine hierarchy.

These two need not be mutually exclusive. Information leaks are probably more effective than assassination… but we need to recognise that if what corporations were doing, was being done behind a column of tanks, then we’d be fighting tooth-and-nail. As it is, they’re simply buying the same results – leaving us in the same position. We need to recognise the seriousness of the occupation that’s installing itself.

Re-evaluating Value

Value is the reversing of entropy within a localised system.

Value has a context in other words. What is valuable to one person can be damaging to another… but we live on a planet now, and to survive, that is the context within which value needs to be… evaluated.

Plants do it

In it’s simplest form, value is created by pulling down sunlight and turning it into something – sublimating it. Stored energy represents a reversal of entropy (within a localised system)

Plants do it. Animals do it by eating the plants and creating more complex organisms. Miners do it by eating the animals and plants, then digging into the ground to collect metals that can be made into stuff. People who build houses do it by taking the stuff made from plants and metals and making structures for people to live.

Rent-seekers don’t do it. Rent-seekers create micro-monopolies in the hope of getting something for nothing.

Trapping people into surrendering scarcity-tokens via monopoly rents does not create value – instead (because there is friction in the system) it actually increases the entropy in the system. Rent destroys value. Rent represents a “work once, get paid forever” model. Something for nothing.

Give everyone the dole

Fiat money is money itself loaned into existence as a scarce resource, by kings, with interest flowing back to the king. Kings invented this system.

This is bad. We should have a multiplicity of currencies – the entire system should not be under-pinned by one – especially one that is a huge ponzi scheme.

Ideally money should come into existence by people creating real, tangible, value… and this need not be coupled to scarcity.

Everyone else (including kings) should get the dole. Better that they get the dole than go around breaking windows, or imposing fiat-currency. In the long run, it’s cheaper.

Everybody should be getting richer and richer

There is no reason the value in our system should not be going up and up and up, because we get a colossal amount of energy from outside… the sun. Everything except non-cycling minerals, physical space, human-time, and physical artifacts of frozen-energy, should be abundant.

Scarcity is good for corporations (monsters of the fiat system); Scarcity is not good for people, animals, plants.

Ecosystemic Value

A rainforest is an evolved state of maximised value. It may look like chaos, but it’s not – it’s finely tuned – self tuning.

When you cut down a rainforest, there is very little left behind in the way of nutrients… the “value” is in-flow. The value is in the plants and animals up in the forest canopy… it’s not hoarded away by a bank and leaked out a little at at time using a mechanism that means more always comes back to the bank than was originally leaked. It’s alive, and every single bit of value is in-flow.

People, can reverse entropy in different ways – growing corn for example. Painting a Vermeer. Making shoes. Cleaning the streets. Creating a globe-spanning data-network. Raising a child. Making a LOL cat. Writing a song. Performing a song. Growing carrots. It’s all pulling down energy and storing it in a living system. That’s what value is… and the more of this that is “in flow” the more value there is in the system. Value is created at the point of sublimation.

So billionaires don’t make a system richer, they make it poorer. By taking value out of circulation.

Ecosystemic Systems

What we do is create ecosystems. People in this age are obsessed with creating companies – “entrepreneurship”… but the greatest entrepreneurs of this age are actually the ones creating ecosystems in which people create value for free. Twitter Facebook iPhone appstores being recent examples. The internet as an entirety does this as well – google creates value by indexing it.

Some of it naturally lends itself to scarcity-tokens, some of it doesn’t… and not all of it should, because not all of it is scarce. Anything digitisable for example, is not, can not, and should not be made scarce.

Doesn’t mean it’s not valuable, just that once digitised, it’s abundant – so cannot be part of the scarcity-economy without damaging the whole – by making the whole paranoid and bound by unenforceable laws for victimless crimes

Now – every ecosystem… from Twitter down to you as a tweet-producing individual, is dependent on a number of scarce resources… so to be sustainable, we need to be either entirely off-grid, or we need to be generating scarcity-tokens. Ideally, we need to be generating something that can be exchanged for scarcity tokens

This creates a problem for musicians, mothers, open-source software developers etc etc – because they are all creating value that doesn’t lend itself to being swapped for scarcity-tokens. Women really ought to recognise this – they do the most valuable thing in the world, which is not in itself exchangeable for value-tokens, so they’ve been given second-place in history, and in the economy.

Back to the broken windows

So – we don’t live in Paris any more – our economic systems are now global. If you break a window, you’re damaging the economy of the world… you’re increasing the entropy in the system.

Unfortunately, a HELL of a lot of our finance is down to making money out of breaking windows in other people’s countries. 50% of the US federal budget… trillions of dollars, is spent breaking windows in other people’s countries. The “jobs” argument is a fallacy. Spending on weapon-systems represents a net loss. We’ve got to stop doing this. It’s not defense. We’re attacking ourselves.

The guard economy needs to exist… because we humans are often wankers, but the guard economy needs to be prevented from becoming parasitic… because it represents a net loss to the system.

Creating fake scarcity… the extraction of monopoly rents… require a guard economy, and and add no value to the system. Fake scarcities should be actively eliminated wherever possible. People that try to create them should be reviled.

The current currency system is designed so that rich people can get richer without doing any work – and to do this, they need to create fake scarcities.

Thoughts on Stuxnet

admin — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:35:52 +0000

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Yea, so if virii can fuck infrastructure… particularly centralised infrastructure, then there’s another driver to take (your) infrastructure off-grid… or at least to decentralise and diversify.

Quite strange… how the internet that was invented to create resilience through decentralisation might just be forcing decentralisation on ALL hierarchical/monolithic systems… not just institutionally but infrastructurally as well. It’s an ecosystem that forces ecosystemisation upon everything it touches.

Which is everything

- Hugh MacLeod

Lozenging

admin — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 03:34:54 +0000

(from)

And it came to pass, when the devil was gone out, the dumb spake; and the people wondered. But some of them said, He casteth out devils through Beelzebub the chief of the devils

And so it goes. Lozenging – about 1/2 way down.

This has become a chronic displacement activity for me – checking into twitter or facebook or the rss feeds or whatever – about once every 5 minutes. I can’t read books, I can’t even watch a movie all the way through any more without stopping it and checking I haven’t missed anything on twitter. It’s like about once every 5 minutes the question arises “ok, what can I do next that is more interesting than this?” and bang – it’s twitter… and there goes 5-minutes, 10 minutes… etc.

“Displacement Activity” is a Desmond Morrisism… it’s what people do when they’re socially uncomfortable. They rummage through their bags. They light a cigarette… this was back in the 60s. Now the ultimate displacement activity is checking your cellphone…. but it’s like “displacement activity” has expanded to not only cover social discomfort, but the slightest whiff of boredom as well. We don’t allow ourselves a single second of boredom any more.

And I think boredom might be important – it gives us space to self-reflect… forces us to change down a gear, relieving us from the tyranny of rooftop-chatter. It gives us space to perceive (a landscape, the sun on your face). And I think we need to perceive. The internet (and computers generally) are relentlessly left-brain. Very yang. You can overdo yang.

So. Something I’ve been doing for about a week now, is banning myself from social apps on even-numbered days.

It’s been one of the best things I’ve done in ages. It allows consciousness of the addiction… to feel, and see from the outside how I’m being with it. And it frees time. It is incredible how much time it frees up. Instead of it being frustrating, it actually feels like a massive relief.

–

I like being in touch – I think there are benefits to it – individually maybe, societally definitely. People are talking among themselves, and when people start to talk among themselves, they put up with less shit from above.

But there are costs to this, primarily to do with our brain’s relationship to time.

Be free.

UFO shot down over Israeli Nuke Station

admin — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 04:50:33 +0000

Engine Powered Balloon apparently

This being a picture of the station I suppose – rather than a picture of the UFO itself, which is what everyone wanted to see.

The article says “The Israeli military are “if it really was an engine-powered unmanned balloon, it could have been a terrorist home-made UAV like the ones that experts have been talking about for a long time now. The fact is that, with current consumer-level remote control technology and the miniaturization of explosive and surveillance devices, UAVs could be made by anyone with internet access.”

Ah – so it still could have been an alien craft then?

Shape of things to come though – this is the first.

In other news, the Stuxnet worm has apparently done as much damage to Iran’s Nuke program as a military strike would have – putting it back by several years.

We are at war now aren’t we?

I keep wondering when we’re going to start getting physically violent – because the economic violence we’re suffering is unsustainable… well, it’s unsustainable for us. Something’s got to give – but on top of that, we’re seeing a globalisation of police-statehood. Police porta-statehood. Democratic governments all over the world are forcing the poor to carry the can for a bank failure. “Austerity”… as though it’s a moral imperative – our leaders “show strength” by taking it out on the poor…

… and as we have just seen in Canada, in Denmark theoretically democratic governments are breaking their own laws to put on a display for the benefit of the new global elite – about how tough an in control they are. Here in NZ, our illustrious PM is forcing through the biggest increase in state power (all in secret of course) that has ever been undertaken in peace time. The reason? The rugby world cup is being played here next year… the excuse is terrorism, the real reason is to crack down on would be protest.

Julian Assange just spent 9 days in solitary confinement without even being charged – over something which is clearly political – and corporations are kowtowing to the whims of right-wing, loose-cannon politicians… who’s conduct (in the case of Hillary Clinton) HAS actually been illegal – but she won’t even be charged. 9 days in solitary is punishment – it is widely regarded (by people who have experienced both physical and psychological torture), to be a type of torture – and it is torture that the US routinely dishes out.

Arch-creep Dick Cheney was just cleared by bribery charges in Nigeria – by Haliburton paying $1/4 of a billion – which as far as I can see is just another fucking bribe isn’t it? Different laws for the rich and poor. The globalised, corporatised feudalism suffered for so long by the rest of the world is coming to a town near you.

The global class war that’s been going on for decades… maybe forever, has crossed the Rubicon – and is now treating Western populations the same way that the IMF treated South/Central America during the 80s.

And meantime, a suspected remote-controlled UAV has been shot down over an Israeli Nuke Station. Welcome to the 20-teens. The war of the spaghetti monsters is on.

Of Clouds and Men. And Mice.

admin — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 03:56:04 +0000

I kindof dropped out for about 15 years… and when I dropped back in again, the internet was just starting to filter in. I worked for Auckland University in NZ who used to download and cache locally, the entire web. We had Mosaic as a browser – I don’t think it could show pictures. Pictures sent via user-groups were long strings of ascii that you had to edit together, save as .bmp and open locally.

We used to use thin-client machines linked to a mainframe for doing exam results.

My Boss (Dylan) (a star and a drinking buddy) said that “Yea, thin client seems to come and go – there’s a never-ending vacillation…”

And so it is. It’s never gone away, it’s never dominated.

So now google appears to be getting into hardware – making browsers specifically set up to handle it’s javascript-heavy code apparently not enough. And I don’t have any particular problem with that to be honest. If they can be the anti-apple, then more power to them.

Couple of problems though…

… Amazon has just demonstrated that we can’t trust the cloud. Gawker and McDonalds have just demonstrated that we can’t trust the cloud. Paypal, Visa and Mastercard have just demonstrated that we can’t trust the cloud. (did you know that the Gawker hackers put all of Gawker’s source code up on Bittorrent? LOL. That’ll fuck them up. At least when you use WordPress that isn’t an issue)

Anyway, the point of having things locally is that they’re private, and we control them.

There’s an article here about the need for an open-cloud, and various open-DNS projects are underway. Open Bittorrent (funded by the EU) is drawing closer – for windows users, it’s here… for linux… imminent. I’m currently playing with Bitcoin.org – which is a P2P currency… about a year old with about a $million dollars in circulation.

So. The Cloud. “The Cloud” is a crafty bit of reframing. What it really is is “Thin Client”. It’s back to the mainframe model.

We used to use it at Ernst & Young to deliver Microsoft Office in a totally controlled way. Everyone used to run a server version. Then laptops turned up, laying that model on its side. The point is… the point was… centralised control. That’s what thin-client is for, that’s what the cloud has always been for. It pretends not to be, but it is.

It may not seem that way to you – but it’s true. Douglas Rushkoff’s new book… Program or be Programmed… is particularly relevant.

Doug Rushkoff: 2008 Applied Brilliance Conference.mov from Applied Brilliance on Vimeo.

I listen to everything this guy says about 5 times. It takes a while to sink in… but I think what he’s trying to do with this latest thing is create a (typically gen-x paranoia) sensitivity to how we’re manipulated by the people who create the systems we use. The cloud is set up to make us feel like it’s a wonderful ever expanding resource where you can get anything you want, just by paying a bit extra. Actually it’s not. It’s a way of extracting micro-payments from you, while allowing your information to be controlled by someone else. And if you piss off the corrupt and criminal American Govt, they’ll have you silenced.

If you look at the Google offering above – the biases come singing out… once you become sensitised to spotting biases. They want you to be online all the time, permanently hooked into services they provide. They will “protect you” and have granted themselves access to update your machine without informing you. There will be an option to switch this off, but it will be on by default… it represents a society-wide possibility of the school-admins-spying-on-kids-at-home-via-their-webcams situation. Think they won’t?

This machine isn’t by users for users. It’s by a corporation with a certain set of philosophies… and it is specifically designed to draw you in those directions. It’s a shiny, friendly, trustworthy face, stuck on the front of a machine… and it may just be the most benign machine out there, but it’s still a machine. It’s not us.

The cloud needs to be P2P. How to do that, I’ve no idea. It definitely should not be controlled by corporations though.

–

Because The Cloud is a providing a necessity, masquerading as a service. “Services” should be separated from “Necessities”. Services are things like hair-dressing and pizza-delivery. Necessities are things like food, water, energy, waste-management, security/police… and information. The providers of these should at the very least, be democratically accountable. Ideally they should be P2P or individually controlled. The worst nightmares in the world happen because necessities become controlled by greedy sociopaths – and corporations are inherently greedy, and inherently sociopathic.

–

So the dichotomy “Thin Client vs Localised Power” has become a trichotomy “Thin Client vs Localised Power vs P2P”.

And Thin Client is evil. If there’s a choice, always go local and P2P.

Grass-Bandits

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 04:01:34 +0000

(from : via)

3D printed house cockups from the future. Probably.

(from)

Dude making plastic from gen-engineered plants. Algae’s the future though because you don’t need dirt. As someone in the comments said ” It seems the scientists have been taking about this sort of thing, and perhaps more importantly biodegradable plastics for quite a while but nothing ever comes of it” which you could also say about almost everything else.

View of earth from a UFO… or in this case, an FO. The person in the photie is in an Astronaut band

which is not (as far as I can gather) rocket science.

Google Voice, gets onto the iPhone (a doomed platform) and Androids can now be used as money. The smartphone revolution proceeds apace…

… but remember kiddiwinkies, that THE killer-app of the network, is the ability to bipass the legacy, scarcity economies – that will relentlessly try to turn the abundance of the web into restricted, “owned” territories. eg : 1, 2, 3 – and that’s just from today.

That is why apple doesn’t just suck, but why it’s evil and repugnant. Oh… and the Beatles are finally on iTunes – an event that took longer for the greed-heads to agree, than it took for Rock and Roll to evolve the beatles in the first place… and if (as it is) the copyright on recorded works is 50 years, all of the beatles stuff will become public domain in the next 3-10 years.

Only they’ll change the laws, because (as Dave from Blur once said) The Industry is attempting to rob society of its birthright… so as a special anniversary, I’m going to pirate the entire EMI catalogue and give it away to everyone I know. It’s owned by a fucking bank now anyway.

–

I used to know this guy (Dave Newton) (Actually I still know him) who amazed (and confused) me back in about 1987, because he didn’t listen to any music made before 1980. I was gob-smacked, because in my opinion, ALL the best music was made before 1980.

I’m beginning to see his point though – the shock of the new. I’m only really interested in new stuff now. The past is over. The past is about a petabyte of digitised files – tied up in legalistic barbed-wire, and are basically locked out of the recombinant culture (and culture IS recombinant).

Well legally anyway – so we’ll just do it fucking illegally… but the present is so much more alive than the past.

–

I seem to be going through a particularly negative phase of late.

Not sure why. Possibly because I’ve been working overtime for months now… and the vast bulk of anything I earn is spent before it even turns up… and it sure seems to turn up slow. All the projects that I’d rather be working on are being deferred in favour of never-ending bug-fixes, and the hard-ware infrastructure is falling apart at the seams.

Fucking treading water, and it’s not only November, its 1/2 way through November… so I owe a load of tax already that I can’t afford to pay. The first decade of the 21st Century has about a month and a half to go. Are we happy? Not really no… feeling entirely disenfranchised – and am… (as a consequence) looking for a fight.

Be Nice

admin — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 03:48:33 +0000

Yea, so obviously when I saw that Reddit has a “Secret Santa” thing going I was like “cool!”… because I love sending people stuff. Always have. I used to send people marbles through the post when I was a kid. I once sent this girl I fancied (Wooley-Haired-Lass) a six-ft tall inflatable carrot. It didn’t really have the desired effect, but goddamn it was sincere. She was a Russian/Arab model who worked in my local bar. We had nothing in common whatsoever, and the first time I talked to her properly (as it were) I was on acid.

Still Secret Santa… fucking cool idea.

Unfortunately, your “santa” gets to see your reddit profile, including everything you’ve said over the years – and my involvement with reddit was mainly involved vitriolic flame-wars with conservative American wankers. Turkeys voting for thanksgiving the lot of them, and a bunch of fucking idiots. I let rip… so my reddit profile makes me look like a fairly unpleasant, unhappy sort of creature… which in many ways I suppose I am… my Digg profile is worse – because the people there are even stupider…

… but no Santa. Santa doesn’t visit unless you play nicely.

So that’s a fuckup – but at least I can delete those profiles (and I have) but danged if I’m going to sign up just for this Santa thing again, because I’d have to go back to getting into conversations with people I despise.

This doesn’t happen on Twitter or Facebook. I’ve had a couple of clashes on twitter… but always go out of my way to be extra-friendly to whoever I clash with afterwards… and facebook? These people are real friends. I don’t clash with them at all. Apart from Paul, who’s politics are flat wrong, but I still like the guy and would love to have a beer with him next time I see him.

Sometimes I hear people say that “anonymity is evil… it allows people to be nasty, so should be banned”… which is obviously bollocks – the only thing that should be banned are people who can ban things… but still… there’s something to the 6 (or 3) degrees of separation thing. The unspoken social contracts that prevent us going ballistic at each other.

And… although I’m fundamentally opposed to facebook, I still use it – whereas I stopped using Digg and Reddit years ago. From time to time I still drop anonymous bombs on people’s blog-comments… but not if they’re using one of the services that hooks up to twitter – like Disqus etc.

I need to get out more.

The 90° Value-System

admin — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 03:29:48 +0000

You know what I’m sick of? I’ll tell you what I’m sick of, I’m sick of other fucking people’s opinions, that’s what I’m sick of.

Idiots.

I’m particularly sick of people saying “oooh… the internet is all about getting other people to work for free. That super-nerd who owns facebook makes his money by getting half a billion people to work for nothing”.

Even people like Douglas Rushkoff (who is a god etc) says… this sort of thing, and he of all people should know what a lot of fucking cobblers this is, having written a book about what cobblers fiat-currency is. It’s like saying “oooh the people running Glastonbury or Iron Man or whatever are making money out of the work of tens of thousands of people who turn up and make it all happen”.

Bullshit. People aren’t working for nothing… they’re not working at all, they’re playing. And they’re playing for something. They don’t get nothing out of it. Sure they don’t get $$$ out of it, but they don’t get nothing.

There is a value-system that’s operating at ninety degrees to the (fiat) money system – and it’s to do with reputational capital. It’s to do with the higher levels on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Bouncing off each other for fun. It makes us feel good. This is the reason most musicians become musicians… most artists become artists… it’s not for money, it’s to do with the 90° value-system. This is why people seed torrent files. This is why people write blogs, why they tweet, why they put photos and videos up on flickr and youtube. It’s why people write open-source software. It’s why the make scones for their neighbours.

We’re bouncing off each other for fun. It feels good. See this page? Everything that went into it from the Linux to Apache to MySQL to PHP… HTML, CSS, JS, WordPress and me…. it’s all driven by the 90° value-system. We do it to establish ourselves as nodes on the network. To Be.

The reason I’ve written this sentence is the same reason that I feed the ducks.

Which is the same reason I photoed the ducks, trimmed the photo, uploaded it here and wrote about it. It feels good…

…so fuck “monetization”, and fuck everyone who thinks it’s the only thing that matters…

…because these people are fascistifying the world. The Paranoia-Economy. The Game-Theory Economy. I had a minor tiff with someone (an entertainment industry lawyer) on twitter yesterday (about “piracy” (fake concept)), and he said “How can the investor recoup and still give away the film for free? That’s the issue.”

You know what? It’s not the issue. Fuck investors. Investors aren’t the only people that matter… in fact as they seem to think they’ve got a god given right to make more and more money just because they’re already rich, they actually matter the least.

This idea that “if you are rich you have the god-given right to extract value forever”, is a crock of shit. It’s immoral and illogical and it’s fucking up the world.

The creators of Web 2.0 systems have created memetic ecosystems in which the rest of us can play, and (some of them) have made themselves cancerously rich doing it. But at least they’ve made something. At least they’ve created some value, rather than simply getting other people to sell the future so they can afford the present.

Apart from natural disasters, the biggest problems the world faces at the moment ALL rise out of the collusion between corporations and democratic states. They arise out of the primacy given to the fiat-currency value-system – money first. Investors first. Corporations first. If anything, the 90° value-system is the salve to this… it’s the source of all of our hopes. If solutions are going to come from anywhere, this is where they’re going to come from 90° value-system. From us, doing stuff. For each other. To give ourselves significance.

Don’t knock it.

Here’s some art, made for free. Enjoy.

via

Germbulb

admin — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 01:11:15 +0000

Lightbulb filled with luciferin-producing, genetically engineered bugs.

It seems like years now (well it IS years) since Craig Venter did his TED talk about creating microbes that were going to solve the… everything-problem, and to be fair, earlier this year he did manage to boot up a completely artificial living organism. Still… I can remember Alvin Toffler going on about the genetics revolution back in the 80s – this has got to be the most slowly encroaching revolution ever.

An Are-We-There-Yet tech, if ever I saw one. A bit like flat-screen TVs. They took about 20 years to turn up as well.

More more, faster faster. I am now so addicted to coffee that I feel like having another one before I’ve even finished the first one… but then I have a fairly addictive personality. And a will of iron, which means I get to give stuff up a lot. Things I have been addicted to so far (now vanquished apart from 3 and 6), in decreasing order of damage:

1) a beautiful blue-eyed girl
2) crack
3) alcohol
4) an alcohol-nicotene cross-addiction
5) computer games
6) caffeine

and somewhere in that list… slotting in somewhere is The Internet – or is that just information? A non-stop flow of information. I am so burned-out I can hardly function. I’m trying to do about 5 freelance jobs at the same time now, as well as personal projects. I can’t concentrate on anything for more than about 10 minutes… can’t read books any more – anything longer than a paragraph has me thinking “whatever; next”. I can’t sleep without having a podcast going on in the background. All the things that used to be a normal part of life, I now have to todo-list, schedule, tear myself away from the web to do.

So when I saw this… “Screens of the Future”

In which some poor bastard wakes up and plugs in straight away (with an iPhone that has “centre-fold-mode” (fap fap)) and some poor woman not even being left in peace to brush her teeth without multi-web-tasking… it just made me feel physically tired. Weak.

So I thought I’d tell the internet about it. And then I’ll tell twitter than I’ve told the internet. Twitter will automatically tell facebook and friendfeed… and so into google.

To bear witness etc. Those that can’t do, echo.

Drifting Control

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:17:40 +0000

Two things today… which I know are connected, but I don’t know how.

1) Tank Hat

2) Emotional Recorder

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.

–

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.