I’ve been tweeting a lot more than writing lately. Here are my recent tweets on the Tehran situation, in order of posting:
- Iran SMS networks “mysteriously” fail right before elections http://bit.ly/nsjm3 (via @boingboing)
- “You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control people any longer.” (Iran & Twitter) http://tinyurl.com/kwmh7g (via @mpesce)
- Tech-enabled urbanites push for change as country folk vote for stasis, even reversion. collaborative networks win over tine
- Coordination of Tehran tech-savvy w/ international openinfo/progressive nodes shows leveling of global playing field, decline of statehood.
- Tehran: Ayatollah backs Ahmadi, police take Tehran University to shut down dissident comm nets. Power fears Change. Old fears New.
- University of Tehran held literary session on Saturday reviewing works by Woody Allen. http://bit.ly/Et7fa [Comedy, genius trumps religion.]
- @HiggsBoson23 Totally. The US must have people on the ground in Tehran working to open the comm channels.
- RT @robinsloan: #iranelection Giant photos. You are going to lose your mind: http://is.gd/12G72 [Tehran approaches civil war]
- Incredible to see instantaneous networking around control systems. No oppressor can hide their actions. Tehran: the future of Democracy.
- The events in Tehran are reinforcing the global identity of humanity in a way that directly challenges all oppressive regimes.
- What fascinates me most about Tehran is the empowerment of the tech-enabled to route around the State and reach across the globe.
- To me, the new democracy: granular representation; modernists using tech to challenge traditionalists; collectives taking power from states.
- No surprise that US elements might be encouraging/engineering the scene in Tehran. Via @NickHate: WSWS on NYT & Iran: http://bit.ly/H1s12
- Note: all Iranian candidates are pre-approved by the Ayatollah & Guardian Council. Resolution in favor of Moussavi will not bring freedom.
- Value lies in watching how empowerment of progressive voices impacts the stategies of rulership employed by the Iranian theocracy.
- Is Iranian dismissal of western media the prelude to a brutal smackdown on protests? Def not a sign of sudden openness…
- RT @m1k3y @DavidForbes: The State Department asked Twitter not to shut down yesterday. http://bit.ly/QQoyj #iranelection #awesomeabout
- RT @TEDchris: Here’s Clay Shirky on the incredible role Twitter has played in #iranelection. “This is the big one” http://on.ted.com/zabout
- “Mousavi is no liberal reformer. But the principle of freedom of speech and fair elections and the desire for reform trump that.” @cshirky
- What you should know about the Iranian Cyberwar: http://bit.ly/2b2NL (via @GreatDismal) [History in the making.]
Here’s a selection of my tweets from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past week. These are the ones I think grab the juicy nuggets from the speaker’s presentations. [In temporal order with the earliest (ie Monday eve) listed first.]
Tim O’Reilly: “We have greatness but have wasted it on so much. ”
We have an unprecedented opportunity to build a digital commonwealth. #etech
Work on something that matters to you more than money. This is a robust strategy. #etech Niall Kennedy: Energy Star rating for web apps? Thinking of clouds & programming like tuning a car for better gas mileage. #etech
Cloud computing: no reasonable expectation of privacy when data is not in your hands. Not protected by 4th amendment. #etech Alex Steffen: Problems with water supply are based in part on our lack of beavers. #etech
Social media for human rights. http://hub.witness.org #etech Gavin Starks – Your Energy Identity & Why You Should Care. see http://amee.com #etech Maureen Mclugh – Consider that technology may be evolving in ways that are not particularly interested in us. #etech Becker, Muller: We have under-estimated the costs and over-estimated the value of our economy. #etech Becker, Muller: We assume economic trade must be the primary framing of value in our lives. Why? #etech
Design Patterns for PostConsumerism: Free; Repair Culture; Reputation Scaled; Loanership Society; Virtual Production. #etech NYT: emerging platforms, text reflow, multitouch, flexy displays, smart content, sms story updates, sensors, GPS localized content. #etech Jeremy Faludi: Buildings & transport have the largest impact on climate change. Biggest bang for the buck in re-design. #etech Jeremy Faludi – Biggest contributor to species extinction & habitat loss is encroachment & byproducts from agriculture. #etech Jeremy Faludi – Best strategies to vastly reduce overpopulation: access to birth control & family planning, empowerment of women. #etech Tom Raftery: Grid 1.0 can’t manage excess power from renewables. Solution: electric cars as distributed storage. #etech
Considering the impact of pluging AMEE (@agentGav) data in ERP systems for feedback to biz about supply chain impacts. BI meets NRG ID. Mike Mathieu: Data becoming more important than code. Civic data is plentiful and largely untapped. Make civic apps! #etech Mike Mathieu: Take 10 minutes today and pick your crisis. Figure out how to create software to help. #etech
What is #SantaCruz doing to make civic data available to service builders? We want to help SC be healthier & more productive. Mark Fraunfelder: “I haven’t heard of anybody having great success with automatic chicken doors.” #etech [re-emerging technology]
Realities of energy efficiency: 1gallon of gasoline = ~1000hrs of human labor. #etech Kevin Lynch: Adobe is saving over $1M annually just by managing energy. #etech
Designing backwards: Think about the destiny of the item before thinking about he initial use. (via Brian Dougherty) #etech
RealTimeCity: physical & digital space merges, people incorporate intelligent systems, cities react in accord w/needs of pub welfare. #etech
Oh my we’re being LIDAR’d while Zoe Keating plays live cello n loops. ZOMG!!! zoe keating & live lidar is blowing my mind at #etech 1.3M points per sec! Julian Bleeker cites David A. Kirby: “Diegetic prototypes have a major rhetorical advantage over true prototypes” #etech Julian Bleeker: Stories matter when designing the future, eg. Minority Report. #etech Julian Bleeker: “Think of Philip K. Dick as a System Administrator. #etech Rebecca MacKinnon: Which side are we helping, River Crabs or Grass Mud Horses? #etech Kati London: How can we use games to game The System and how can they be used to solve civic problems? #etech Nathan Wolfe: Trying to fight pandemics only at the viral human level ignores deep socioeconomic causes of animal-human transmission. #etech Nathan Wolfe, re: viral jump from animal to human populations: “What happens in central Africa doesn’t stay in central Africa.” Nathan Wolfe: need to work with % of population w/ hi freq of direct contact with animals for early detection of viral transmission. Nathan Wolfe: Vast majority of biosphere is microscopic, mostly bacterial & viral. Humans: very small piece of life on Earth. #etech
Now more than ever, screens are competing for our attention in daily life. The distinctions between desktop PC, laptop PC, mobile, etc… are being replaced by the simple abundance and omnipresence of digital screens conveying information and mediating interaction. As LCD newsfeeds, airport terminal displays, set-top video box menus, billboards, advertisements, multi-touch screens, and augmented mobile devices, data and content are everywhere. All of it requires a lightweight and dynamic graphic layer in which to render content. Dynamic render plugins like Flash and Silverlight are very well engineered to address the requirements of these displays but it should be understood that much of the technology represents a shift away from the 2D ad/interactive paradigm primarily addressed by the Flash runtime.
Mobile augmented reality solutions require heads-up-display, alpha-channel rendering of text and graphics. Dynamic data visualization requires strong integration with back-end databases as well as messaging protocols like JSON, SOAP, and SMS. To enable rendering large datastreams in plugin runtimes like Flash & Silverlight, companies should aggressively pursue runtime adoption across mobile devices and smart phones, while defining prototypes for active camera overlays. They should optimize rendering and expand into all rich-content displays (set-top, automotive, kiosks, smart objects, and embedded systems built on the Android/Linux platform). They should optimize for dynamic rendering of large data streams, like the Nasdaq AIR application. The runtimes should be increasingly exposed to SEO and analytics retrieval so that secondary services and agents can easily be built on user workflows and data collection. And they should not neglect the 3D gaming market, but should consider how it can play a role in immersive worlds as a dynamic data layer (eg billboard adverts that can be remotely updated).
Competitive landscape: Adobe Flash (dominant market share, full turn-key solution), Microsoft (Silverlight remains the strongest competitor to Flash though it continues to play catch-up with our tech), Java (JavaFX just released but has little traction and is too late to the party), W3C (HTML5 has perhaps the largest share of hearts but is also the slowest to move), Google (might be cutting around Flash & Silverlight by pushing its interests into HTML5, Mozilla, and through Android & Chrome).
Related: Augmented reality solutions will require semantic architecture and image recognition
algorithms (identification, recognition, relation).
By my own local allegiance these are recommendations for Santa Cruz County but they’re equally applicable to many other communities.
The ability of our federal government to manage it’s domestic responsibilities is weakening every day. The fallout from the current global financial crisis will likely crush already-strained state budgets, especially for those states like California that are on the verge of bankruptcy. As our metropolitan centers reel from rising unemployment and crumbling infrastructures, the federal government will become more and more preoccupied with attending to the growing chaos in cities. Simple services like electricity, gas, water, and emergency response will come under increasing stress as budgets are no longer able to sufficiently maintain the infrastructure necessary to provide them. Add to this the very real possibility of domestic militias responding to the weakness of the state by adopting 4th generation guerrilla tactics and targeting critical services directly. Amidst growing global instability it may only be a matter of time before the next Black Swan hits and all communities are forced to fall back on self-reliance. It’s clear that state and corporate interests are not always in-line with the needs of communities and that we cannot rely solely on their support in times of crisis. Communities must take the long view and build resilient systems and solutions now.
Santa Cruz county is ideally situated to make substantial gains towards self-reliance and resiliency. The land is geographically distinct, bordered to the Northeast by the Santa Cruz mountains which run up the coast into San Mateo county. To the South, our basin gently rolls into the Salinas Valley – one of the most fertile regions on the planet. The northwest corridor is a narrow and rugged coastal channel rich in farming and solar and wind resources. And to the West lies the great and bountiful Monterey Bay. We have copious amounts of sun throughout the year, a strong rainy season, and vast water tables underneath most of the county, as well as seasonal winds and numerous rivers running off the mountains down through the basin to the sea. Our strongest natural resources are agriculture and fishing, and with careful stewardship both will continue to prosper indefinitely. Our intellectual resources are equally robust and vital, with UCSC home to many of the brightest minds and most valuable research in marine science, bioscience, and engineering.
As the eyes of the state focus increasingly on major civic centers, which will see the largest decline in wealth and stability, smaller communities like Santa Cruz will be left to manage their own resources. We will be less able to rely on the state for infrastructure and services support but, conversely, more free to pursue self-govenrance, self-reliance, and resiliency. With the decline of all state and civic budgets, there will be great economic advantages to coordinated home-grown DIY solutions to pick up the slack of state and corporate providers and re-write the power dynamic in favor of our local community.
The de-salination pilot at Long Marine Lab is an excellent example of the investments Santa Cruz County should be making in this transitional time. The victory of FLOW to re-purchase ownership of the Felton water table from CalAm is another huge step towards local resilience. The city implementation of green building codes is another step in the right direction, though it has failed to make building more affordable and less exposed to economic instabilities. More and more structures are integrating solar panels and more and more new developments are being designed with the principles of sustainability in mind. But most of these effort are limited to specific investments and are not driven by the general welfare and stability of the county as a whole. It’s time for Santa Cruz to take control of it’s future and manage it’s resources as an intentional system with the security and welfare of the community as the guiding principle.
These are some of the strategies we should be evaluating and discussing:
- Work to provide incentives, leases, and subsidies for home owners and business to add solar panels to their properties.
- Underwrite Santa Cruz credit unions for loans to small businesses that produce goods from 100% local, sustainable resources.
- Support local farmer’s by lowering their property taxes in exchange for reduced costs of food to local businesses and consumers.
- Secure more avenues for our farmers to sell goods into the local economy.
- Invest in local biodiesel providers and offer incentives for restaurants to downstream their oil waste into fuel conversion.
- Repurchase all regional water rights.
- Clean our rivers, re-populate the salmon runs, and investigate minimally intrusive hydroelectric opportunities.
- Expand de-salination efforts for the city and encourage rainwater collection for homes.
- Invest in local fabrication and light-scale manufacturing resources.
- Seriously consider light rail to San Jose and San Francisco. Seek state bonds while they’re still available.
- Work with UCSC to directly fund and incentivise research efforts towards more efficient alternative energy solutions (eg wave and kinetic; waste energy), as well as developing more effective policies and solutions for the ongoing stewardship of the Monterey Bay.
- Begin construction of wind farms on the North Coast and exposed ares of the Santa Cruz mountains.
- Integrate all local power sources into a Santa Cruz micro-grid capable of generating and storing enough energy to power the city. Excess power generation will feed back to the PG&E grid but can be locked in the event of large-scale disruptions in service, restricting power access to Santa Cruz.
- Develop free citywide wi-fi access using solar-powered routers and local servers.
- Engineer a web of sustainability resources, communication channels, and emergency information services running on local servers (Cruzio). The recent Summer fire season saw a huge increase in the use of web-based communication channels to coordinate efforts. These channels should be locally run and should be resilient to regional or national disruptions.
- Investigate alternative script and currency options in the event of a substantial decline of the US dollar and resultant inflationary threats.
- Do not enforce evictions of renters in foreclosed properties. Fight to keep people in their homes. More homeless will undermine the legitimacy of our city governors.
- Establish supported homeless camps before they’re established without oversight.
- Include network and systems-level education in high school curriculum’s with special focus on our local networks.
These are considerable investments but we would be wise to make them while we can. State and local budgets are unlikely to grow any time soon and will more likely become increasingly constrained. These near-term investments will be offset by mid-term gains, and our community will be less bound to the financial needs and whims of state and corporate providers. Sustainability and self-reliance are the most economically and socially productive investments we can make right now, before it’s too late and Santa Cruz gets dragged down by it’s national and corporate dependencies. A resilient community is a safe community. And a self-sustaining city is an economically prosperous city.
I’ve been working to alter my food habits and generally be more aware of the sustainability and resource impact of products I buy. In a nutshell, I’m trying to eat foods that are grown locally and in-season. Along this path a friend of mine gave me a copy of Michael Pollard’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemna” (buy it from your local bookstore), which examines the practices of global agri-business and how it impacts our health, the health of our environment, and the quality of our foods. It’s really fascinating and paints a highly monetized and extremely un-sustainable picture of global agriculture. Of specific interest, Pollard goes into great detail about the inordinate value and consumption of just a few corn species monohybrids. Our food economy is based in cheap overproduction of corn, fed by petroleum, then downstreamed to feedlots and bionegineered to just about every type of food imaginable. In some sense, Safeway and McDonald’s are little more than corn outlets. Indeed, his examination suggests that corn is a far more adapted and successful species than our own.
The above video is of Pollard’s recent talk at Google where he addresses the solutions to the problems posed by “Dilemna”.
This past Friday we signed a distribution deal with the Oseao Media Group. We’ll soon be distributing Subgrinden music through the likes of iTunes, Dancerecords.com, Beatport, Juno, eMusic, and many more. w00t!
The first Subgrinden release is out on high-quality 180g vinyl. Audio mastering was done by Henry at Sonic Vista Studios in Ibiza, vinyl mastering by Shane McEnhill at Heathmans, and final pressing at United. Side A is my original track, Timebomb, and side B features the Dismantled remix by Phil Smart and Jimi Polar. Both tracks should be available digitally within the next month or so.
Boreta of Glitch Mob is almost done remixing my track “Spell On Me”. I can’t wait to hear his glitchy break madness. These two tracks will likely be the next Subgrinden release.
We’re also currently working with Oseao Music Group to put together a distribution contract. More info on this as it evolves…
Meanwhile, I’ve built this site, U R Being Recorded, as my professional online face. I’m trying to get together more of my music and flesh out a portfolio of sorts so keep checking back for more tracks. This site will also present some of the more interesting projects I’m working on (the blog will have ongoing links and updates).
Anyway, I’m really excited about pushing forward into new creative frontiers. Keep in mind that Subgrinden is always looking for artists to produce, collaborate with, and/or work out remix projects.
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