“I hear a very gentle sound… With your ear down to the ground…”
Talk of the global mind tends to look primarily at intellectual and cultural endeavors, digitized and uploaded to the cloud. In this conception the hyperconnectivity of humanity provides instant access to all the data we’ve thus far gathered and to all the content we’ve thus far generated. As culture digitizes our individual selves grow closer to one another, unbound by the restraints of locality and empowered by the technologies of connectivity, integrating towards some hypothetical merger or emergence of a global mind.
But this conception neglects the emotional body of humanity, arguably far stronger and more willful than our ideations. Beneath much of the mind lies a torrent of emotional content often deeply informing (or barely restrained by) the words released to share those nameless currents. While scientific method offers perhaps the apotheosis of restraint most of what we as humans engage in and communicate is driven by psychology, not intellect.
Witness the very foundation of modern civilization: the global economy. Our economics are radically mathematic and rigorously intellectualized. Most of us have only a basic understanding of how such an enormous interconnected system of numbers actually works, let alone the few capable of articulating the obscene calculus of it’s proactive management. Our markets of commerce are left to the banking and finance wizards whose trust must be infallible to secure their credibility in such an occulted domain upon which our very lives rest.
Yet it’s clear from current events that no one has more than a tenuous grasp of what this enormous nonlinear system is doing at the moment. It’s completely out of our hands and the world’s governing bodies are scrambling to make sense of it all in time to reel it back from the precipice of total catastrophe. They try bail-outs and capital injections and various other methods only to watch the markets plunge in a downward spiral of fear and panic. The machine of global commerce is gripped in depression, tossed in the great and swelling tides of human emotion.
By nature of their abstraction and the collective faith required to sustain them, the markets are more a construct of psychology than finance. Panic and fear become self-fulfilling as investors bail-out as fast as possible when the economic indicators falter. Fight-or-flight takes over and the human animal, who so abstracted the biological imperatives of food and shelter into hedge funds and credit-deferred swaps, is seized by adrenalin and sent running in fear. The sound of chambered bullets grows across the land, hunkering down for a long struggle.
These days I can feel it even without looking at the markets. The Fear grips my gut on mornings of great decline. We’re wiring up very quickly, so caught up in the miracle of communication and content, externalizing our minds for all to witness. We get lost in the news cycle and the blogosphere, and in all the deep and meaningless experiences stuffed into increasingly ineffective syntax. We’re wired to invention and distraction, dimly aware of the currents beneath working their way through our evolution.
Underneath the global mind is the global heart, tremulous and open, more intent on externalizing the Soul than the Mind. We’re sharing our emotional bodies far more than we realize and it’s at times like these that the herd feels it. Danger is on the air. A great predator is rustling through the brush. The vibe is harshed and global. The very foundations of human behavior are shifting and rewriting themselves. This is no market correction. It is a civilization correction. The Great Work of our Age is underway, unifying Heart and Mind and all opposites, comfort and commodity be damned. If we can’t evolve willfully, then the system will evolve for us.
Hear the words of the Rastaman say:
“Babylon throne gone down, gone down.”
Just a quick note (and props, kudos, & cheers) that Douglas Rushkoff is guestblogging at Boing Boing for the next week or so. From his intro:
The current culture wars, as I understand them, are between people who look at our circumstances as pre-existing conditions, and those who see them as largely of our own making. Those in the former camp prefer to see reality as confined by the operating system of a Creator, and the human role confined to behaving within the rule sets established by Him. Those in the latter camp recognize the function of evolution, and the opportunity (if not obligation) for human beings to participate in the ongoing construction of our world and its operating systems.
This is simply awesome. I love it! I hope it gets mirrored everywhere before The Mouse buries it.
Srsly, Diznee: this is exactly what you want kids doing with your content. Make it hip and cool. Give to the commons so we want to give back. Seeing this makes me want to rent/buy the animated classic.
This weekend’s Coachella music festival found ex-Floydist, Roger Waters, banging out a full Dark Side to the massive crowds. Of special note, and in classic fashion, a large pig was deployed condemning US warmongering and offering a not-so-subtle solution (click through link for vid):
But Waters’ biggest prop was an inflatable pig the size of a school bus that emerged while he played a version of “Pigs” from 1977’s capitalism critique, “Animals.”
The pig, which was led above the crowd from lines held on the ground, displayed the words “Don’t be led to the slaughter” and a cartoon of Uncle Sam wielding two bloody cleavers. The other side read “Fear builds walls.”
The underside of the pig simply read “Obama” with a checked ballot box alongside.
To briefly elaborate on an earlier post about Second Life… And specifically, ways in which I believe a modern 3d immersive world can leverage the new wave of cloud tech and create a truly compelling experience:
I want downtown billboards streaming Twitter feeds, rich dataviz, global network traffic, weather patterns, Flickr streams, and cycling media channels. I want to Dj from Traktor directly into a virtual club. I want interactive music and video remix tools that include the world as a substrate. I want to endow my avatar with metadata callouts, grouped in trust profiles, that display my affinities, affiliations, tag cloud, LinkedIn profile, sms number, twitter id, and credit accounts as appropriate to those I meet. I want to be free to re-purpose 3D assets from 3DSM, Maya, and Sketchup into my worldspace. I want a beautiful living homeworld that gathers the populace and inspires users and developers to create their own content elsewhere on distributed servers. I want to join friends on a virtual hilltop and watch the clouds drift past, watch the sun set, and the moons rise. I want to get lost in emergent behaviors, intelligent agents, and the beauty of physical dynamics. I want to easily find friends across multiple servers, across social nets, and out into mobile, gsm, and phone networks. I want an open-standard, opt-in, cloakable virtual ID that can be searched for and found across all dominant gaming and immersive networked worldspaces - and then when I find my friend I want to be able to join them wherever they are. I want peer-to-peer drop-boxes and back-channels that can address files to dominant industry and open-source applications, then back to in-world interfaces. I want an in-world, heads-up fly-out phone/sms/notepad/web-browser overlay that’s data synched to my mobile phone. I want to stumble into sinuous plotlines that sweep me away to distant parts of the virtual world. And yes, I want an SDK that allows EA to stick the Tony Hawk trick and physics model into a nice binary that can be purchased and installed into my client so I can skate around the place. And yes, I will try to grind your avatar if you have any linear edges sticking out.
I’m totally dreaming, I know. But dreams are what the future is built upon.
I’ve been enjoying the playful edge of the bleeding digital arts scene vicariously through we make money not art for some time now, but I have to give them renewed props for their site design. Love the aesthetic!
Alterculturalist, sonic datamasher, and cat lover, Wes Unruh has posted his latest work in the Philip K. Nixon project. Logosagogo! The Hyperstition of Philip K. Nixon is a Matrix-meets-machine-elf aural memescape that slices and dices the zeitgeist like television chopped into glass & oil. Somebody in Hollywood needs to hire this guy as an SFX developer…
The great century ahead of us will be dominated by the digital democratization of the individual. For the first time in history it’s possible - even simple - to collate vast amounts of data extracted through the API’s of social networks. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace. All of these sites track and record the data communicated by millions and millions (billions?) of users. Instead of crufty old Gallup polls that attempt to extrapolate the zeitgeist of a nation based on a minuscule sample of a few thousand sources, social nets across the web yield precise and voluminous data about large populations of the global citizenry.
Twitter is a great example. Spend a few minutes on Twittervision and you get a feel for the amount of data traveling across the Twitternet. It’s pretty much a constant stream of tweets, each and evry one being logged and recorded. Now head over to Politweets and you can see the power of the Twitter API in action. Politweets grabs the Twitter stream, searches it for candidate names (eg Obama, McCain) and then posts the matching tweets to it’s output stream. On the left column you have the Blue tweets and on the right you have the Red. Of note, the Blue tweets are mostly positive notes on Obama, while the Red column is mostly negative tweets about McCain. And as of 6pm PST 3.20 Twitter is breaking the Obama passport scandal with the media scrambling to catch up.
All of the social networks mentioned above have deputized their users to generate the content and participate in a ranking selection that naturally brings the important bits to the top. Items of great interest stay on the radar longer while the fringe drifts off the chart. But everything stays in the database. Every post, comment, chat, tweet, vote, etc… It’s all there in beautiful, incorruptible binary ready for any savvy programmer to break open the public API and build a new tool to pull out trends and patterns. Obviously, this is a radical evolution of the community of conversation. What was once personal is now overtly and proudly public.
Social, cultural, and political trends can all be extracted from these vast living datastructures. Mike Elgen wrote about this yesterday in a post called Has Digg Already Picked the President? He talks about how the major social sites end up endorsing candidates just by the measure of their post demographics. For example:
…every link with significant popularity on Digg about John McCain that has an “opinion” is negative, every one about Hillary Clinton is also negative, and every one about Barack Obama is positive. The preference by the Digg community for Obama is very clear.
On MySpace, you can gauge candidate support by searching Google for mentions and counting them, as most mentions tend to be expressions of support. Searches for “John McCain” gets 56,800 Google links; “Hillary Clinton” 120,000; and “Barack Obama” 161,000.
You can see a similar trend in the wildly popular user billboards for Obama and Clinton. Hillary is almost always negative while Barack is everyone’s best friend.
Elgen goes on to wonder how well these sites reflect the actual democracy of our country. Is there parity? Are they more accurate than the mainstream media? Is the online world inherently skewed in some fashion? Then, in the most suggestive and compelling inevitability of the modern digital age, he offers:
After all, the very definition of a Web 2.0 site is one that derives its value from the actions of users. Users are voters, and if these user-voters choose a candidate, shouldn’t that candidate win democratic elections?
And this is the final crux; the salvation of our wavering and beleagured democracy. The digital paths increasingly worn by all of us as we move deeper and deeper into the datasphere are totally traceable. Transparency is growing and it won’t be long before all of the actions that a candidate engages in - the record of their public lives, their opinions, voting history, political and fiscal affiliations, campaign promises and campaign donations - will all be a matter of public record.
New media and digital democracy is empowering everyone and simultaneously laying our lives open for all eyes. We’ve never seen anything like it.
Monochrom: Austrian activist art collective.
Austria - little, strange & post-modern. Pac-Man in Wienershnitzel.
Post-modern leftists. Try to take interesting philosophical and political concepts and find a medium to present. Weapon of mass distribution.
Examples: telerobotic social network in ‘97; musical about software checking credibility for a bank; database of applied office art, bored with capitalist life; overhead cumshots; Instant blitz copyfight notices captured in movie theaters; Massive multiplayer thumb wrestling; Festival for cocktail robotics; bury people alive for 15 minutes; publish theory around brand culture; puppet film from Kiki & Booboo.
Shift from disciplinary society to a society of control. Shift in the perception of work culture. Differentiation between workers and owners has blurred. Disciplinary society has a clear distinction between workers and authority. Hence, there are clear ways to violate the boundaries and subvert authority. Now, many workers believe they are part of the management, part of the business. Therefore, they stay in line more because they do not wish to revolt against themselves.
Why is it so hard to provoke today? Why is it so hard to provoke? We are now in a society of control. No boundaries. It’s no longer Us against Them, it’s all of us against each other.
Ex: Jackass - more revolting than earlier dadaist & provocative revoutionaries but somehow acceptable. In an open society is is harder to revolt. Late Capitalism feeds on dissent as content. Ex: The Yes Men - Political activists, featured on Hustler. Why? Why is revolt popular culture? In the West, everyone criticizes the system but nothing changes. In Eastern Bloc, no-one was allowed to criticize but the system collapsed.
Georg Paul Thomann, early avant-guard Vienese activist. Didin’t actually exist. Monochrom created him and wrote a 500pg bio (Who Shot Immanence?). Set him up as official Vienese art representative in Sao Paulo biennial world art fair. Monochrom was “technical support team”. Cultivated rumors of his mythology. Created an extremely awful installation. People thought it was really cool. But Georg didn’t show. Made it even cooler cause he was so enigmatic. Artists are tradeable commodities.
LJL. Group of old Austrian artists. I have a deadline & I’m very drunk. Created an Art Lodge, like P2. Lord Jim Lodge (Joseph Conrad). Made a stupid logo. Put it on everything. Try to get memebers but if anyone asks, don’t let them in. No women allowed. Do it for a long time to make the logo famous (more famous than Coka-Cola. Created a series of oil paintings about the creation story of LJL. Last member gifted the Lord Jim Lodge to Monochrom. Monochrom organized a hostile takeover of LJL, franchise it and create spin-off start-ups. Fought Art Market for 15% profit of selling art works that contained the LJL logo (original artists had died and become famous since), had owners in panic for 2 months. Owners offered to settle out of court, but monochrom never took any money. Bought Amish hats and wnet to America and talked to people about making money on LJL. Managed to get 10 thousand Coca-Cola bottles made with the LJL logo! Decided to sell paintings of LJL history and myth. Outsourced painting to China using Coca-Cola money. Put in gallery and sold for 4500 euros each. Money is being shared with the Chinese artist.
China is copying everything, including art. Nothing is sacred in the market. Corporations own much of the cultural heritage of the planet.
Hardware is much easier to copy now. Hardware & software is blurring - ex: firmware updates.
Speed of hardware hacking is remarkable.
Why open source hardware? Contribute to the pool of knowledge; freedom to pursue software/hardware creativity; community development and quality; excitement about building things; education;
Layers:
- Hardware/mechanical diagrams: 2D models, vector, DXF or AI (KiCAD)
- Scematics & circuit diagrams: PDF, BMP, GIF, PNG
- Parts list (Bill of Materials): data sheets (x0xb0x TB303)
- Layout diagrams: physical map of parts
- Core/Firmware: on-board source code
- Software/API
Like most developers, they don’t mention the human interface layer.
Roomba has an open API. Companies that release open platforms find much greater value (and mindshare) from user mods.
Ambient Orb publishes schematics and parts list. Neuros OSD publishes schematics (semi-open but falls short).
Hardware is mostly based on patents, not copyright. Licensing: CC, GPL, BSD, MIT Chumby: programmable data portal.
Other open source hardware resources (business models): Fab@Home, Daisy MP3 player, Adafruit, Arduino open-source electronics prototyping platform. See also Make magazine & the Maker Fair.
Cool stuff: Twittering plants with Arduino - plants that call you and say they need to be watered (Twitter as SMS bridge); Open prosthetics; Minty Boost open source USB charger;
Ed note: Imagine an online repository of mechanical diagrams for DIY desktop fab/rep…
This is my favorite meme of the moment: Hillaryismomjeans. I’ve been junking out on it since Friday and can’t stop. If anybody has a script I can use to make my own user-submit billboard, please let me know.
I’ve just received my Blackspot Unswoosher boots and they are super-sweet! Dig this copy from their Shareholder Certificate:
By buying this pair of sneakers you become a voting member of The Blackspot Anticorporation. When you log onto blackspotsneakers.org you can use your unique shareholder number… and vote on the style of future sneakers, what materials to use, where to make them, how to market them and how the profits will be used. The ultimate goal? An exciting, shareholder-driven enterprise with our own co-op factories and retail outlets around the world.
