Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

I'll give you a brief sample of my curatorial thinking here.  As the
in-house design critic for the house of the future, I like to think
historically.  As you've probably gathered if you've been reading
the WELL SoTW for years on end, historically is how I think about
everything.

So let's imagine I'm Henry Dreyfuss, protean industrial designer of
the 20th century.  I've literally designed the proverbial "flying
car" -- that scheme failed because it always does, but I'm second to
none in advanced industrial design chops.  

I'm a butler between heavy mass industry and the American consumer. 
I'm the lubricant, I'm the varnish-on-barbarism.  I'm an industrial
designer and so (1) I make stuff look good.  And (2) I choose proper
materials and processes so it doesn't fall apart like junk.  And (3)
it needs the right price-point, the cost is a big issue.  For my
criterion (4) it needs to be maintainable during its product
life-span, and for (5) it should efficiently serve some actual
useful need that real people actually have.  And in conclusion (6)
it would be nice if my designer industrial product was safe to use,
safe to be around, and didn't poison or kill anybody.

So, now it's 2015.  I put on my snap-brim Henry Dreyfuss hat of the
1940s and I enter the Internet-of-Things home, with my paper
checklist on my clipboard.

(1) Do  Maker chairs assembled from laser-cut plywood modules and
perforated packing straps actually "look good"?  Sort of.

(2) Do 3DPrinted doorknobs fused together by rapid-prototype
machines hold up under realistic daily use conditions for real
doorknobs?  Nope.

(3)  Is this cheap?  Yeah, open source is notoriously "cheap," even
"free" as in free kitten, free speech, free beer.  But it's cheap
because it disguises labor costs by fragmenting them into small
off-the-books actions united by the network. Besides, we're
Italians!   We sell fancy fumiture to Yankees, Arabs, and Russians! 
When they want "cheap," they go to Ikea.

(4)  Does any electronic thing within a smart home have the solid
lifespan of, say, a wooden joist up in the roof?  Isn't this really
just the logic of the Apple iPhone or Google Android -- faster,
better, more personal, throw the old one away -- seeping into other
domestic objects, and infecting them with their vices?

(5)  Let's be practical.  What do I really gain by having my
refrigerator "talk" to something?  Any Arduino thing can ping out a
data-burst and "talk" to any gizmo on the planet for peanuts.  Where
is the humane need for that?

(6)  Hackers!  ZOMG, aieee!! Hackers and spies!  Hackers and spies,
pedophiles, terrorists, the mafia, drug dealers, ad-men!  They're
all over the smart home, they're in the flower-box now, it's like a
TWILIGHT ZONE episode!

*So, that's one possible way to critically frame it.  The judge -- a
guy your grandfather's age -- solves the problem by appealing to the
cultural authority of a guy his own grandfather's age.   People like
that, it's comforting in some ways, it has continuity, stability,
tradition. WWHDD, What Would Henry Dreyfuss Do?  

But that's not the only approach.
  

    
> You seem to be saying: Don't rock the boat by letting 
> women have any power because maybe women might not be perfect!

I'm not clear how you could read that into my post?

I didn't suggest that women shouldn't "have any power," though I
suspect we can all agree that "women might not be perfect." As <evy>
says, women are not any worse than men. Women should have as much
money and power (and rights) as men. However I questioned whether
giving women *more* power and money would inherently make the world
a better place. And it really was a question, not an assertion.

(Bruce slipped in with a couple of posts, including a response to
Paulina.)
  

    
The future of governance is interestingly difficult. We've been
exploring it here in Austin via a loosely coordinated future salon,
guided through a couple of sessions by Jake Dunagan of the Institute
for the Future's Governance Futures Lab, using a speculative design
methodology they've evolved. 

Here's a reference: http://www.iftf.org/govfutures/

"The mission of the Governance Futures Lab is to reimagine and
experiment with the basic architectures and processes of governance.
We believe it is necessary to experiment with new systems and new
rules to govern life on our planet. We have powerful tools to
connect, organize and coordinate human behavior."

We used the toolkit found here:
http://reconcon.govfutures.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IFTF_GovFuturesLab_A
nInventorsToolkit.pdf

It's a set of cards to guide a process of investigation and
deliberation with four general steps: investigate, re-think, design,
and prototype.

We had breakout groups at our second session. Here's the report I
filed on the work of the group I was part of:

We started out talking about TRUST

We came up with these values:
* Respect for the future; not foreclosing options for the future.
* Common good
* Dynamic balance between liberty and community
* Responsibility to the future and the community (what
sustainability is about.)
Effective governance that is sensitive to participatory process.

We had no luck coming up with metrics for success as the clock was
ticking, so we moved on to territory. We fell into a conversation
about water management and governance as urgent issues related to
geography, and Jake guided us by pointing out that in Hawaii, there
a group chose to organize politically by watershed.

Build a foundational framework: we talked about the area over the
Edwards Aquifer as a specific geographical area. There are complex
interests and governance mechanisms for the aquifer. "There's water
schemes all over the place." We realized that water politics would
drive general politics.

What's the best way to regulate and distribute water. By need? Who
defines need.

We talked about governance by instability vs governance with an
assumption of stability and permanence (nodding to Steve Smaha,
who'd brought up the relevance of impermanence to governance.)

Population is a related issues: more people would draw more water
from the water table. Should we cap the population? How would we do
that? Would we nuke homeless people? Who and how many would you
accept in a given area, if you were to restrict population? (Or do
we look first to other restrictions, i.e. more of what we have now,
restrictions on watering grass etc.)

We want to continue to maintain Barton Springs. Julia: "we have to
maintain green space to maintain springs."

Design: We need a design that will not subsidize the behaviors we
don't want. Urban density is more efficient.

As we discussed creating our preamble, we got away from the
discussion of water specifically, though that discussion had
informed our thinking.

Preamble: "Because democracy is impractical and the two-party
system, with primaries, has failed, we ant to build a new system
that will honor expertise as well as participation. Our proposal is
to create a parliamentary body for governance, where participation
in parliament depends on a threshold of supporters. A desire to
serve with the parliamentary body is grounds for disqualification.
You must be nominated against your will."
  

    
Our high-level takeaway was a sense how difficult effective
governance can be. We were focused on the local watershed, and we
realized that there were a substantial number of stakeholders and
governing entities with competing interests and priorities. A real
can of worms, how to sort it out? Who has what authority? A real
value of the exercise was that we started to get our heads around
the daunting complexity of governance, even in this local and
limited sphere.
  

    
*I was asked to comment on:

http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/204/The-2004-Bruce-Sterling-State-
of-page02.html#post32

*It's heck to live long enough that you have to reminisce about old
predictions, but we're currently somewhere between scenario C,"Cold
War II" and E, "Greater Afghanistan."
  

    
Nice analysis here of the "Apple of China," Xiaomi, attempting to
become a Chinese Stack.  Their eager fans helping them out from the
sheer joy of being crowd-centric fanboys, that's quite interesting.

http://stratechery.com/2015/xiaomis-ambition/
  

    
*For those who are fans of time catching up with science fiction
writers, this is me, quite some time ago, testifying in the US
Congress about the state of telecommunications in 2015.

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/1.4_lifeonthenet_pr.html

*It sounded pretty freaky at the time, about as weird as Congressmen
paid to listen to me could handle, but as a forecast, it's pretty
tame by the existent reality of 2015.
  

    
Re: 52 -- thanks for the response.

Would women having more money and more power make things better? Well, more
ability to create your own live, having a little more money in your pocket,
having more autonomy and agency, and having the power to socially and
politically work in your own interest -- um, call me crazy, but I think most
people would say, yep that would make my life better -- and if there were a
lot of those people who don't have that now, and they got that at least for
those people, they would be happier, freer, likely more creative, so I would
say -- it would make the world a better place -- and if only for those oh,
49-51% of the people -- not bad.
  

    
From http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/478/Bruce-Sterling-Cory-Doctorow-J
on-page03.html#post53
> Our proposal is to create a parliamentary body for governance, 
> where participation in parliament depends on a threshold of 
> supporters.

This reminds me of something that's been sitting in my WEB directory,
gathering dust, for a very long time:

http://www.well.com/user/satyr/755/proxy.html

"The basic idea of representation by proxy is that the individual 
would be free to choose from a wide range of candidates 
and to select one whose views closely correspond to their own, 
and that the voting power of representatives would be proportional 
to the number of proxies held by each."
  

    
This just in, from the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto:

New Clues
http://cluetrain.com/newclues/
  

    
*The Pope met Angelina Jolie.  He's a surprising guy, this Pope.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/08/us-people-pope-jolie-idUSKBN0KH1CM20
150108

*I wonder why Brad Pitt didn't bother to show up for the audience. 
I mean, they are married, that's almost sort of Catholic if you
squint hard.
  

    

Someone had to watch the kids.
  

    
*For genuine thirty-year WELLbeing old-timers, here's your chance to
read a communal compilation that looks like CoEvolution Quarterly
without the Buddhism and LSD.

http://www.shareable.net/sharing-cities-toolkit
  

    
<evy>, I think I misread the intention of your earlier comment. I
think we agree! I hope to write something longer about power and how
it's distributed before we're done.

<satyr>: Doc Searls and David Weinberger are wise; would that more
people could hear their wisdom. We should spread that URL far and
wide.

I love this: "If we had a solution, we wouldn't be bothering you
with all these damn clues." Indeed.

I want to go on record admitting my own ignorance.  I don't know how
to fix the economy or make a better distribution of power. I don't
know how to make hatred and polarization evaporate. I don't know how
to end wars or stop terrorists. I don't know what to do about
climate change. I don't know how to make democracy work (in fact,
I'm dubious that it can work, depending how you define it). 

I do know that much of what I read online every day is farmed
content, and weeds proliferate. 

I do get, as Doc and David say, that "the Internet is nothing and
has no purpose." That makes me think of Buddhist teaching about
emptiness, and my ongoing struggle to sustain the insight that there
is no-thing between my ears. 

Quoting the last lines of "newclues":

If we have focused on the role of the People of the Net  — you and
us — in the Internet's fall from grace, that's because we still have
the faith we came in with.

We, the People of the Net, cannot fathom how much we can do together
because we are far from finished inventing how to be together.

The Internet has liberated an ancient force — the gravity drawing us
together.

* The gravity of connection is love.
* Long live the open Internet.
* Long may we have our Internet to love.
  

    
*Some nice telephoto shots of the super-isolated, Stone-Age
Sentinelese here.  I don't give 'em good odds of staying off the
grid much longer, even if they've managed it for sixty thousand
years.

http://magazine.good.is/articles/isolated-sentinelese-people
  

    
io9.com has a feature on science stories that will make the news in
2015:
http://io9.com/these-are-the-science-stories-that-will-be-making-news-16782089
28

Several space stories, including a couple about SpaceX. I'm already
packing to ride that Mars transport system.
  

    
Sent by Stefan Jones via email:

I've been looking over @bruces' Casa Jasmina pictures. Man, Bruce,
Cory, and Gibson couldn't have collaboratively imagined a better
setting for a post industrial tech-mashup place. I hope it features
a drone that hovers around offering tetanus boosters to visitors, at
least during construction.

On good days, I think we're getting better at making environments
for ourselves. I remember, as a kid, enthusing over spaceship-pod
prefab homes that appeared in magazines. Now, reading about those
weird sports makes me feel glad that boxes with pointy roofs are
still around. Especially after reading Brand's _How Buildings
Learn._ Humble classically designed buildings allow for resuse and
adaptation and correcting mistakes.

I remember reading, in the SF Chron maybe 15 years back, an article
about a visit with an elderly woman still living in the
self-cleaning home her inventor husband had built in the 1960s (?).
The kind of one-off innovation  _Popular Mechanix_ might devote a
page of pictures and gushing copy to. The old lady would, by
appointment and payment, run the house through a cleaning cycle,
which involved shower heads turning on and drenching everything,
followed by blasts of hot air. Man, I'm so glad we dodged that kind
of house. Imagine limiting your furniture choices to things that are
waterproof and easily drained.
  

    


one last explication of what i was trying to point out: it's the 'how was it
made/with what feedstocks/under what labor and environmental conditions/how
was it transported/how much water and energy went into its production.'

i still remember a wonderful comment you made bruce on some viridian posting
about oil being wasted for energy when it is going to be needed for
feedstocks for pharmaceuticals and other made things.

stuff, particularly electronic stuff, has to be made from something --- and
often, nasty somethings (flame retardants! pvc! ook!)

i would just love it if some electrofuturist would begin to have the mindset
of the sustainable ag/permaculture folks: what are the inputs/where to do
they come from/what are their effects on the ecosystem (however defined) as
a whole/etc.

see so old-school silicon valley toxics coalition and 'imperial san
francisco'.


(back to my hideyhole and good luck with casa jasmina).
  

    


Well, that older industrial areas of Torino  are indeed rather
toxic, especially the very large, very abandoned
shipping-and-handling barns next to the older railroads.  It's just
brown-fields and gray-fields galore.  That's why it's a sacrifice
zone for contemporary technical speculation.   The Torino Fab Lab
gets their eldritch factory colossus from the city for what's
basically a peppercorn rent.

I'm with Stefan about the majesty of Brand's HOW BUILDINGS LEARN,
except that the oldest buildings are never the wisest ones.  In
Italy, the oldest buildings aren't living things that can learn. 
They're physical constructions harshly beset with entropy, they're
disasters of physics.  Even the strongest stone, the best-baked
brick. must corrode, pit, crack, crumble, disintegrate with time.  

Sometimes the Roman roads are still in amazing condition, but they
exist deep underground: the planet's iiving topsoil has risen around
them.  The earth's  very surface is unstable, especially in Italy. 
Even if a building learned as much as Socrates, it would still be
mortal.

So, in this  brief domestic electronics project for Arduino, we're
not building some Ruskinian temple to absolute spiritual values. 
Nope, it's a left-over, repurposed building where we can learn, and
even the stuff we do learn there will become obsolete really fast. 
It'll be like trying to live inside a working laser-printer.

But, that's how things really are in the new domestic Italian
landscape, and since we've made that bed, it's incumbent on us to
try to lie in that bed with some grace.   Italians are actually
quite good at this work.  They're entirely used to the issue.  The
aesthetic clash between stackable molded designer chairs and moldy
Baroque cathedrals doesn't bother them even a bit. 

I've learned a lot from the Italians in that regard.   They have
civilized me.   I can write about the ancient world with some ease
now, because I dwell in Julia Augusta Taurinorum, a walled
road-fortress founded in 27 BC.  The material culture of Taurinorum
really interests me: they're not spooky, remote "Ancient Romans,"
they're a modest, practical, industrious people in a pretty corner
of the world; our civilized neighbors, just not quite like we are.

Augusta Taurinorum left a lot of pollution, too, mind you.  Their
busted crockery, demolished Roman construction debris, useless
burned-up stuff, worn-out domestic bric-a-brac, their own interred
bones.  Quite unhealthy lifestyles: it was nothing to them to die
worn out at 45, toothless, bent, arthritic, and malnourished.  The
modern Turinese, sure, they live in an old,  much-polluted town, and
they're also enduring a Depression, but it's incredible how healthy
they are.   Their lifespans are second-to-none on the planet.  They
live practically forever, especially the women: there are stately
gals of 95 swanning around in the cafes with prosecco and
cigarettes.  

 Even my own health is great in Torino.   If I adopt to their way of
life,  there will likely be rather more future for me to personally
see.
  

    
(As I wrote this, it felt like a logical flow; hoping I don't appear
to be rambling...)

Avant Green architect Pliny Fisk
(http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/1995-07-07/533739/) once told
me that, to build a truly sustainable, healthy, zero-energy
building, you would ideally have complete knowledge of the
environment, down to the DNA of every insect living there. The
science of site analysis and building design could get there, though
it's an expensive proposition.

We too seldom think enough about overhead or context. I was just
reading
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue
.html) about the biological cost of decision-making:

"Willpower turned out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor.
It really was a form of mental energy that could be exhausted. The
experiments confirmed the 19th-century notion of willpower being
like a muscle that was fatigued with use, a force that could be
conserved by avoiding temptation."

Somehow this occurred to me in thinking about building site context,
thinking of the overhead of site placement that we normally don't
consider. There's so much that humans haven't considered, though
we're thinking beings, and we generally don't see consideration and
thinking as having a limit or a cost. 

Some would rather not think too hard or know too much. We see a
rejection of science and cultural progressivism in some reactionary
parts of contemporary culture. Fundamentalist and traditionalist
reactions so prominent in today's world are a reaction to the human
overhead required by accelerating change
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change), which manifests
as a visceral fear of change.

Thinking people are dismissive of reactionary culture, but we should
probably try to understand it and address it with therapy, rather
than engage in culture wars.

Charlie Hebdo wasn't attacked by "muslims," but, as Christopher
Dickey noted in a discussion on NPR yesterday, it was attacked by
three ignorant, reactionary assholes with guns. Terrorism is not
necessarily a conspiracy at scale, though we do have movements like
ISIS and Al Qaeda, to name a couple. We have to be careful not to
interpret the actions of disturbed individuals as acts of war.
Dickey went on to note that, of the billion plus Muslims in the
world today, only a tiny fraction are militant fundamentalists.
  

    
Correction re. the Charlie Hebdo attack: two assholes with guns,
evidently with a driver. The suspects are Islamist brothers, Cherif
and Said Kouachi. Apparently they do have Al Qaeda connections (Said
was apparently trained by Al Qaeda). 

JADP Dept.:

As of 2011, there were 7.7 million Muslims in France (~11% of the
population)  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_France). 

Muslims in France and Worldwide have condemned the attack:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/07/muslims-respond-charlie-hebdo_n_64297
10.html
  

    
A question via email from Halleluja:

Bruce, do you see as inevitable (or desirable) a democratization of
ubiquitous surveillance? Since I read your thought experiment about
Google acquiring the NSA I've tried to see beyond my own
hand-wringing over erosion of privacy. In Tomorrow Now you wrote
about the corrosive effects of powerful spooks working in the
shadows. What might be desirable about everyone having access to
everyone's data everywhere? "Privacy" seems like water in a sieve
now; could universal sunlight mitigate the corrosive effects of
unequal access to data? How weird might it be to have such intimate
knowledge of one another in real time? What stabilizing effects
might evolve from such a situation?
  

    <scribbled by satyr Fri 9 Jan 15 09:58>
  

    
Thought I had breaking news.  Turns out it was more than three
months old.
  

    
The problem with the idea of "democratized surveillance" is that it doesn't
advance any kind of theory about how existing power imbalances will be
remediated -- not exacerbated -- by it.

As we saw with the Eric Gartner case, the existence of evidence -- while a
necessary precondition for justice -- is no guarantee of justice in and of
itself.

As an increasingly small number of people hold increasingly large amounts of
wealth -- and thus influence over legislation, norms, media and
infrastructure -- the normalization of everyone spying on everyone else is
likely to advantage that cohort even further (in the absence of a
complementary larger program explicitly aimed at advancing wider causes of
justice and equality.

Most of the reason we don't spy on each other right now is normative, not
technological or legal. It's not technically challenging or legally risky to
sit at your window with a telescope, staring into your neighbors' bedrooms.
The reason most of us don't do this is because of a wide consensus that
people who do that kind of thing are creepy assholes.

Fronting surveillance "from below" as a legitimate action in and of itself
will weaken that "creepy asshole" perception. It's one thing to say, "People
who whip out phones and record police brutality are on the side of
righteousness." It's another to say, "I'm gonna record everyone I see, put a
streaming cam on my front door pointing at the sidewalk, etc, because I want
to protect myself."

The ACLU wrote an excellent, nuanced statement about police bodycams:

https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/police-body-mounted-cameras-
right-policies-place-win-all

{tl,dr: you need policies as well as cameras}

And I wrote this:

http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/11/urban-surveillance-security-
biz-21cities_cx_cd_0611futurecity.html