Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
*I'm not sure that the "new power" in "Understanding New Power" is
actually "power" at all, if power is defined as the ability to get
something done that you actually want to do.

*The chart in that article's bothersome.  I kind of dig Wikipedia,
Patagonia, Occupy, Kickstarter and Etsy, but if you put 'em all
together they couldn't run a dog pound.

*I know I'm becoming a gray eminence cracker-barrel philosopher here
in my later years, but it's not like one actually pursues that job. 
It's more like what happens to writers if you have the good grace
not to die.   If it comes to influencing people by changing their
world views, I'm pretty sure that DEAD writers are more powerful
writers than living ones.  Real power-struggles over writers are all
about who gets into the canon and who gets taught in the schools.
  

    
*If you want to see a sci-fi writer who put down the ol' keyboard
and actually got some "power," check this guy out.  Fedor Berezin,
former paperback novelist and current Defense Minister of the
People's Republic of Donetsk, if rebel Donetsk is still calling
itself this week, and if Fedor is still alive.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/sets/72157646170611889/

*I wanted Fedor to write some sci-fi for me, and I struggled hard to
pull it off, but I couldn't get it to work.  I heard from him a
couple of times, but he's under intenrnational sanctions and seems
to be a hard guy to reach.  I look at Fedor's grisly situation from
here in the perspective of Belgrade, and I don't know whether to
laugh or cry.  That's a pretty common everyday response here in
Belgrade, actually.

*I show up here at the WELL SoTW every year, and never once have I
taken it over in an armed putsch.  Not yet, anyway.  I hope
everybody's appreciative.
  

    
ditto
  

    
aagrh, my ditto was in response to bruce's #151
am noi acuqainted with fedor
  

    
I thought you were dittoing the armed takeover thing. I'm having a
vision of you and <bruces> in camouflage, storming the server,
wherever that might live these days. Fond memories of the old bunker
at Gate 5 Road...

 
  

    
From a somewhat more practical perspective, it looks like 2015 will be the
year our air conditioning vents get smart:

https://www.ecoventsystems.com/

http://www.keenhome.io/

It sounds like Keen Home is even partnering with shapeways, so you could,
say, 3d print a one-off personalized vent cover for every room.  Eyeballing
the Keen one, it looks like the battery is usb-rechargable, which is pretty
clever.
  

    
More via email from Stefan Jones:

Jon's analysis of that Madame Secretary reminds me of this Talking
Heads Song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9a1JQi7G3k

To Love, add A Job.

* * *

Man. Roombas.

On one hand, I'm not an early adopter. I spend my days with my arm
metaphorically up to its elbow stuck up in horribly complex
video-on-demand server systems, but I'm not liable to rush out to
Fry's for the latest gadget.

On the other, my house has expanses of carpet liable to be covered
with fur and grit a good part of the year.

On the other, other hand, the source of that fur and grit is a
Belgian sheepdog with a high prey drive. I'm not sure what she'd
make of this thing bumbling around the place.

And then there's the carpeted stairs. Keeping them clean is the
hardest vacuuming chore. But the thought of a Roomba with legs is
both cute and kind of terrifying.
  

    
For me, fiction is what tells us how we should expect other people to behave
in times of conflict. Fiction that depicts a world where, when the lights go
out, your neighbors come over to kill and eat you, create a world where,
when the lights go out, you arm up and shoot your neighbor at first sight.

This is masterfully documented in Solnit's PARADISE BUILT IN HELL, with its
application of the idea of "elite panic" to the murderous pre-emptive
strikes of rich, white people in NOLA during Katrina, the creation of an ad-
hoc prison camp by FEMA, the unchecked violence from Blackwater mercs on-
site, and the one-sided, lying narrative from CNN and other press outlets
about the (fictional) looting, Superdome rapes, etc.

Fiction that tells you the story of your neighbors coming to your rescue in
times of extremis means that when you heard the sirens, you reach for a
covered dish, not a shotgun.

A utopia isn't a story about people who don't have problems (because those
people live in a dynamic world -- whatever they're doing to avoid problems
will need to change when the outside world changes). It's a story about
people who are good when they are afflicted by problems.
  

    
*Well, Cory, Lugansk and Donetsk are both big, grown-up cities, and
when they reached for the guns instead of the casserole dishes, they
didn't grab any of those sissy, survivor-type, zombie-killing
handguns beloved in Hollywood flicks.  No.  Ukrainian sci-fi nerds
and motorcycle hoods and car-wash attendants threw on a bunch of
random camou garb, and they rushed out and they grabbed
surface-to-air missile systems, rocket batteries, mortars and
colossal Cold War ex-USSR artillery with muzzles big enough to stuff
a cow in.

*Here in the Balkan Wars, people actually went out and cut the
throats of the neighbors.  Because, you know: neighbors.  In Fedor
Berezin's  civil war in "NovoRussia", it was about lurking in
basements with walkie-talkies, and trying to trick to other guy into
walking into staked-out artillery grids.   Ukraine's a big country
with some big, hefty, military explosions.  Even Malaysian airliners
peaceably cruising way overhead aren't safe.

*This is my Belgrade black humor talking.  I'm never gonna
assimilate in Belgrade society, but I've been around long enough
that I understand why awful stuff is funny.  This is, like, a
contemporary poster of a Belgrade theatrical comedy.  I totally get
it about this attitude now.  It's chucklesome.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/15658448984/
  

    
*I agree with Jeff that the idea of 3DPrinting, or just digitally
fabricating, bespoke stuff for homes is an interesting prospect.   
There are all kinds of Rem Koolhaas "junkspace" nooks and crannies
in homes where you can't place anything useful because it's not
built to standard measurements. 

*For instance, the plumbing under the sink is full of odd knobs,
elbows and leaky joints.  It solves a manufacturing problem, of
keeping standard pipe and parts in stock, but it doesn't solve the
hydrodynamic problem of getting water out of the local sink and into
the local sewer with an efficient flow.  I can imagine a situation
where you take a simple snapshot under your sink, and some big-math
cloud like Wolfram Alpha figures that out in a jiffy, then generates
a printable shape to contain running water.  

*Bespoke printed plumbing sounds kind of far-fetched, but if you
lived in a house with sinks that never clogged or smelled, you would
certainly notice a sink that was cloggy and smelly.  The old way
would seem archaic and offensive, even possibly dangerous to health.
  

    

*On Stefan's subject of Roombas, dogs and stairs, I'd be very
pro-Roomba in that situation.  Not because I'm keen to do the IRobot
outfit a favor, but because people with pet allergies really swear
by Roombas.  Owners of big hairy pets seem to be the gizmo's
number-one and most loyal clientele.

*There are a variety of Roombas, and Roomba clones and knock-offs
now.  Some are much better with shag carpets than others.  The most
famous Roomba competitor to appear lately is the new Dyson robot
vacuum that runs around photographing the house and navigating with 
robot vision.  Naturally the post-Snowdenites consider it a
potential surveillance device.

*None of these gizmos will ever fall down the stairs.  They figured
that out ages ago.  They scrupulously avoid stairs, so you'll have
to clean the stairs yourself.   Dogs get used to them quickly. 
There are entire video archives of cats casually riding around on
household Roombas. 

*I myself got used to the Roomba -- I literally don't notice it. 
Whenever it bumps into my ankles I just absently shove it aside.

*A Roomba is lightweight and delicate and needs a lot of maintenance
-- mechanically, it's more like a model airplane than a mop.  Oddly,
the best way to clean it is to vacuum it.  It's pretty simple to
empty it, disassemble it and clean all the necessary parts, though
it takes a while and is messy.  If it is not maintained, it will jam
on snarls of hair and fiber that wrap its rotor-brush.

*The Roomba series is the oldest commercially successful domestic
robot, and some Roomba boss once made the interesting comment that a
high-tech, impressive "robot that vacuums" will fail, but a "vacuum
that robots" can be sold through standard vacuum-cleaner channels. 
It will therefore will actually show up inside real-world people's
homes.

*I'm thinking that home automation will likely evolve in that
direction in this decade.  We'll never have a humanoid Rosie the
Robot that operates the household tools created for humans. 
Instead, we'll see household tools with some limited robotic apps
grafted onto them, and they'll be run by wireless broadband.  
Wherever motors already exist in the household, they'll become
motors with connectivity, sensors and actuators.  

*I think all the major players have that figured out now.  They know
that the "Internet of Things" isn't about the "Internet" or
"Things".  What they really want from the "IoT" is a new "CCCP,"
some big, general, epic "cybernetic consortium for the control of
property." 

*Persuading consumers to buy into that prospect really isn't the
main issue.  It more about stealthily installing new capacities
everywhere in the value chain, and then seeing who gets disrupted,
who cashes in, who grabs power and who can make themselves
irreplaceable.  It's the competitive logic of  Amazon, Facebook,
Google, Apple and Microsoft being exported into everything around
us.
  

    
Then there's hacking Roombas for play:
http://news.cnet.com/Roomba-takes-Frogger-to-the-asphalt-jungle/2100-1043_3-60
49922.html

For every embedded robot, there's a Fried or Torrone IoT/maker sort
of hacker considering the possibilities. In fact, the hacker joy of
the future may shift from breaking into systems, to repurposing
workerbots. You'll have to put your Roomba on a leash.

Interesting that the Roomba Frogger hack was 8 years ago. I'm sure
we're farther down this path than we realize, and surprising IoT
hasn't arrived in a bigger way as a commercial technology. I'm
hearing that inventor entrepreneurs with IoT strategies are having
to move to Silicon Valley, because they can't get funding elsewhere
... whereas Silicon Valley likes to fund ahead of the perceived
curve.

IoT is definitely on the VC radar:
http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/14/the-thing-that-will-make-or-break-the-intern
et-of-things-isnt-a-thing/

And it's got a caucus:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/internet-of-things-theres-now-a-us-
congressional-committee-for-that/
  

    
Sent yesterday via email from Dean Loomis:

Today's incident with what was apparently a false alarm about
ammonia fumes in the ISS causing Houston to order evacuation from
part of the ISS prompts me to ask a more classic SF-related
question, whether manned missions by SpaceX, Orbital Sciences et al.
can escape NASA's helicopter-mom syndrome.   Is a base on the moon
far enough away to allow astronauts to manage their own lives
without minute-by-minute micromanagement from the earth?

p.s. my house is not Roomba-compatible.  I had one for awhile and
got rid of it because it was too tall to be able to reach under the
1960-era toe kick gaps beneath the kitchen cabinets, and it kept
getting snagged on the ethernet cables running along the baseboards.
  

    
In other news, billionaire rocket scientist and electric car manufacturer
donates 10 million dollars to keep AI from destroying human race:

http://futureoflife.org/misc/AI
  

    

I wonder why 3D printing has caught Silicon Valley so flat footed? 
  

    
Having a 3d printer, even an expensive one, doesn't create any more
engineering/design skills than Photoshop creats photography and visual
design skills.

3d printing is SLOW.  Hours and hours slow.  Oh, and you made a
mistake, so you need to wait more hours and hours.   A fast print on
my reprap is ~30 minutes and the printout is no larger than a
quarter.  Printing out a bracket that would hold my iPhone 5s could
easily take 3 or 4 hours.

The things you print aren't very high quality, they're effectively
prototypes for using "real" fabrication technology like injection
molding or casting.  

Over at Techshop they have MakerBot printers but there are caps on how
long you an use one, making 2 hours about the longest you can use the
printer.

Right now I'm working on a 3d model of a switch for an expensive
clothing iron that is no longer manufactured.  It's going to take me
an hour or two to finish the 3d model, then another couple of hours to
print switches and test them in the iron.  They aren't strong enough
for any long-term use, so after I have the model nailed I'll have the
real one made over at Shapeways.

So figure 8 hours of my time, a $1500 printer, and a $50 bill from
Shapeways to replace a switch that cost $20 +shipping a few years ago
when this iron was still manufactured.
  

    
Via email from our friend George Mokray:

Just found this year's State of the World conversation and have read
only the first page but here are some comments:
The debate between Piketty and Stiglitz is important.  What I've
observed is that there is an internationalization of prime real
estate.  From what I've read, at least one high end neighborhood in
London has been bought up by mostly Russian pluto/kleptocrats who
spend a month a year in their palatial homes.  That kills the
neighborhood.  Here, where I live, I saw a Boston Globe article a
couple of years ago about Chinese pluto/kleptocrats buying up houses
in Newton and Wellesley, again for part-time living and, more
recently, there's one Chinese billionaire buying up Harvard Square
properties left, right, and center.  If Stiglitz is right, this is
worth looking more deeply at.  When I bring it up to my local
development friends, they say there's nothing we can do about it
anyway, the market will solve the problem, and we need more
affordable housing so let's concentrate on that.  Hmmm.

Another thing about the built environment I don't see being looked
at is the gathering trend of zero net energy, zero net emissions,
zero carbon buildings that is going on.  Both the EU and California
will be phasing in zero net energy building codes starting in 2017. 
The technology is available now to build anything from skyscrapers
to affordable single family homes as zero net energy.  They produce
all the energy they need onsite and sometimes more than what they
need.  I've seen some examples which produce 3 times what they
consume on an annual basis.  Depending upon whom you ask, buildings
use 30-40% of the energy we presently generate for the grid.  Nobody
I've seen in the energy policy community has yet to address what
happens when we don't need the big power plants we have now to
produce that energy.  What happens when that 30-40% goes away? 
Another interesting question, at least for me.

Lastly, homelessness and empty houses.  The Daily Show a few days
ago reported on the Utah experience of giving housing to the
homeless and reducing their homeless population by about 75% in five
years.  That publicity may give the idea some national traction. 
Some people in LA are trying to do a similar thing in LA but using
Obamacare money because they are addressing the problem as a public
health issue.  There are way more empty houses than there are
homeless in the USA today.  One figure claims 7 times more houses
than homeless.  That's insane on the face of it.  Occupy is still
active in some parts of the country fighting evictions and doing
neighborhood reclamation with sweat equity while reporter Chris
Faraone is doing a series of articles on the militarized evictions
that are occurring in the Pacific Northwest, SWAT teams kicking
people out of their homes.  The contradictions are stark but our
attention is not anywhere near them because a) who cares about
homeless people and b) evictions are so 2009.  Still these realities
are not going away.
  

    
Some of the people responsible for creating the original Roomba design
left iRobot years ago, and went off looking for another market space
that would better support iterative design => market => redesign cycles,
so they could gradually build on the basic idea, tweaking it and adding
functionality incrementally.

They settled on agriculture, and are now known as Harvest Automation...
http://www.harvestai.com
  

    

*Oh my lord, this amazingly comprehensive "threat landscape" of
everything that could possibly go wrong with "internet
infrastructure" would gray the hair of any sane human being.  It's
really scary.  Plus, it's got lots of big, spidery-looking, infoviz
charts.

https://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/risk-management/evolving-threat-environ
ment/iitl

*However, one of the reasons it's so scary is that somebody's paying
focussed attention.  Imagine if some detail-obsessed security geek
composed the "threat landscape of the internal combustion engine."
He'd never get it done.  He'd have to hire so many threat-assessment
guys that they'd spend all their time in internal bureaucracy.
  

    

*Well, @jet is certainly right about the many practical drawbacks of
contemporary 3DPrinting.  It's never going to work out in the
sweeping, conceptual, handwavey fashion of "wow, print anything you
want."  That's like the old days of Apple desktop laser printers,
when they would sell 'em to gullible authors with the pretext that
you could "publish anything that you want."  I mean, yeah, you can,
sorta, but…

*Hobby 3DPrinting also reminds me of ham radio.  Hobby 3DPrinting
stuff is for a dedicated cadre of patient, tinkery guys who are way
into 3DPrinting per se.  Makers do make some stuff, like Etsy
crafters and light manufacturing, but true-blue Makers really like
to make stuff for makers so they can make stuff to make.  I don't
dismiss that; it's metaphysically endearing, actually.  It's like
writers theorizing about literary theory, so you can improve your
theory theorization theorizing.
  

    

*Here's a prototypical recent example from the circles of David
Cuartielles in Spain; this ingenious couple of Estonian Makers,
Varvara and Mar, uses a 3DPrinter to print a yarn-knitting machine.

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_au/blog/now-you-can-3d-print-your-own-di
y-knitting-machine

*So, okay, why "print" a "knitter."  Why?  Why not just buy a
yarn-knitting machine off the shelf?  Or, with even more economic
rationality, why not just buy a long, formless, functionally
meaningless tube of loosely machine-knitted yarn?  

*But this overlooks the Maker achievement here:  they successfully
installed software-driven patterns into material substances that had
no software-driven patterns.  

*What you REALLY ought to do is fire up that knitter, knit the
fabric tube, and then install a reverse knitter at the end of the
tube that UN-KNITS THE FABRIC at the same speed!    Then you'd have
a nifty conceptual-art project that was all about displaying
software "process."  Then you wouldn't have to worry about selling
anything, or waiting around for it to actually "finish."  You could
open-source it, and then some other fanatic would show up and say
"hey look I can drop stitches and create 8Bit graphics in the yarn
flow!"
  

    

*These cranky paradoxes in tech development don't embarrass me.  I
mean, yeah, I know they're goofy, counterproductive, frustrating,
dangerous, toxic and even frankly evil at times, but it's like
watching 'em make law and sausage.  Everybody warns you not to watch
those two processes in detail, because you'll supposedly lose all
respect for law and all appetite for sausage.  But that's how we
actually get law and sausage.  Are we supposed to pretend that the
stork brings the law, or we find sausage under the cabbages?  Those
are facts of life.

*Whose dewy naiveté are we protecting here?  Yeah, the 3DPrint scene
is a complicated cranky mess that is riddled with hype and illusion,
and the best efforts are often not repaid; the whole shebang may
suddenly vanish some day like unpassed laws or stale sausage.  But
I'm okay with that; yeah, I'm a critic, but I won't turn up my nose
at it because it might dent my ideals.  I will engage with it, as
it, in fact, exists.  I even sympathize.
  

    
I love the three-armed Delta repraps that print ceramic paste. 
They're never going to replace making dinner ware the old fashioned
way.  I can't help but think it's only a matter of time before
someone refines something that was otherwise lashed together with
rubber bands, duct tape, and Kinects that will change everything
like some sort of mini maker singularity. I imagine this is where 3d
printing will shine in the short term.  Altergaze has a kickstarted
VR cell phone housing that seems to exploit advances in cell phone
technology to bring VR to the masses.  What I find even more
exciting is they propose a crowd-manufacturing scheme that puts a
thousand idle 3d printers to work making virtual reality rigs.  They
seem to have encapsulated the promise additive manufacturing offers
of inverting manufacturing models. http://www.altergaze.com/

I'm also interested in the idea that, as it is an emergent industry,
it's hard to predict where it will settle culturally.  Sure, I'm
making handles for my widget, but someone else, who has a whole
different set of concerns, might find one useful in fashioning a
prosthesis to replace their leg. 
  

    
Always clever Dave Winer created a "listicle" for the "newclues"
published a few days ago by Doc Searls and David Weinberger. You
know how so many sites create lists that are chunked into a bunch of
slides that you click through? That's a listicle, and I sometimes
find it annoying, but it's probably good for web-addled adhd
comprehension. The listicle is here: http://listicle.io/cluetrain/ 
David Weinberger notes
(http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2015/01/14/install-your-own-listicle/) that Dave made it easy for anybody to make one of these things (http://scripting.com/2015/01/13/listicleOListicle.html).

Learning to make these things for yourself is what Doug Rushkoff
might call a "program or be programmed" strategy; Winer talks about
"freedom-building software."
(http://scripting.com/2015/01/12/straightTalk.html)

I like the concept of an IndieWebCamp and want to make one happen
here in Austin. https://indiewebcamp.com/ IndieWebCamp proponents
recognized that the corporations are increasingly taking control of
our web-based activities and turning us into products, sold to
advertisers via various channels developed by the stacks that have
grown, evolved, and prospered via the Internet, which has been
altered by their evolution, from a platform for peer production,
culture jamming, DIY ferment, many-to-many sharing to a more
top-down platform for media, increasingly littered with video
streams, making it more like cable television. Those of us who
evangelized for the Internet early on were also speaking against the
cable-ization of the environment, concerned that it would curb peer
to peer activity, divert it to vacant alleys and side-streets while
the slick, polished corporate content machines were leveraging fast
lanes exclusive to them. The net neutrality argument is about this.

In fact we're somewhere in the middle at this point, and pushing
IndieWeb could help us empower users, at least those who are open to
it, and sustain the Internet described in newclues, "of us, by us,
and for us." I hope I don't sound like one of Austin's neighborhood
activists, decrying the city's transformation by progressive growth.
As a Buddhist I know that nothing is permanent, no form persists.

We can evolve without giving up our freedom, but we have to work for
it, even fight for it. There should be an IndieWeb and there should
be plenty of room for the Internet to be the Internet. I want to
support people in learning to build their own stuff, without
depending on platforms that may give them a way to do cool stuff,
but that exploit their energy and creativity. I have nothing against
Facebook, in fact I'm in there other day, but I don't want that to
be my only option. And if it is, it's my own damn fault. I already
built my own standalone blog and know how to use it... resorting to
Facebook posts via blog posts has been path of least resistance
laziness on my part.

Speaking of 3D printers - I haven't been fascinated by them, just as
the Arduino kit I bought still sits unused because it wasn't a
priority for me. But I really love the fact that people are finding
ways to make their own weirdly interesting stuff. I love that Limor
and Phil transformed a Roomba into a frog. I love that Tantek Celik
and my pal Amber Case are taking time to organize IndieWebCamp,
CyborgCamp, various environments where we can develop our own cranky
DIY expertise and refine it into something real.
  

    
3d printing certainly has a place in design and ideation, but I think
the analogy of "selling laser printers to authors" is also quite true.

The "we can print everything" idea is an interesting concept but it's
not going to happen with oshw printers like the Reprap.  I have two
oshw printers, a MendelMax and a MakerBot, and compring them to
commercial 3d printers is a bit like comparing a go-kart to a 50'
semi.

One of the commercial 3d printers I've used was the size of a
refrigerator and was located next to a lye bath kept at 160F.  The lye
bath is for removing the structure needed to do a complicated 3d
print.  Hands up, who want's a lye bath in their house, or even their
garage?  Oh, and that printer cost over $200,000 and ran on 220VAC
like a stove or clothes dryer.  The largest thing it could print was
around 8" square, so you won't be printing furniture.  It doesn't use
food-safe plastic so no plates or utensils.

There's one area that I think would seriouly benefit from 3d printing
-- jewelry.  Once 3d printers are affordable and safe, say the same as
a sewing machine, artists will be have a new set of tools for making
jewelry and decoration for the body and home.

We're still at the early edge of the curve, but it looks like it will
be an interesting curve: <http://design-milk.com/3d-printed-jewelry/>.