China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand and Turkey create space agency, China World Daily, Shenzhen, China.JPG, originally uploaded by gruntzooki.
The tragedy of the commons is a myth.
There is a vast conspiracy enacted by those who would steal the common off the goose.
A giant distributed clan of supervillainy: the free-riders.
They are sent across the globe and beyond – into our fictions and our factions to ensure that the tragedy plays out as prophesised.
They cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be bought (as they are freeriders) – the only way they can be stopped is by applying a sharp pinch to their left elbow and when they turn around on their hard heels, giving them an extremely disapproving, disappointed look.
Start now.
I missed quite a lot of Picnic, mainly due to getting together with the Dopplr team for a rare physical pow-wow – but I did manage to spend a good chunk of the Friday in the Internet of Things special session.
Speakers included Rafi Haladjian of Violet/Nabaztag fame and David Orban of Widetag/OpenSpime, and there were demos from Tikitag, and Pachube (Usman Haque‘s excellent new venture).
Sat in the audience was God-Emperor of Spime, Bruce Sterling which lent it an extra something. I managed to snag a Tikitag start kit, which I hope to have a play with this week – I’ll post some unboxing pics when I have chance.
It was one of those sessions where the palpable sense of the scenius is the thing, rather than the content so much (although there was a lot of good stuff in there too) – I came away with renewed enthusiasm for ‘practical ubicomp’ and all things spime-y.
I wasn’t sure whether the talks where being video’d, so I managed to record two of the speakers on my N95, so the quality of the audio isn’t particularly great.
So, with that disclaimer, here are the presentations by Matt Cottam of Tellart and Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM.
I never new that changing my URL would cause so much frustration to some people. Sorry, some people.
For those who have asked, “Moleitau” is Cantonese slang for nonsense, which I discovered in a 2006 IHT article:
“…a Cantonese genre called “moleitau,” verbal nonsense comedy that relies on quality writing of rapid-fire dialogue, witty ripostes and punning, exemplifies the form even while expanding it to include ribald repartee, broad and low-brow humor, anachronistic gags and biting satire of every social convention and custom.”
And ‘magical nihilism’ is at one level just a pun, and at the same time, an anti-belief belief system that makes me happy and wonderous and curious. Which is what I’d like this place to be.
“We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurance of monstrous proportions.”
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, p298
Welcome again to Magical Nihilism.
What’s going on here then?
What’s happened to Blackbeltjones?
Well, it’s like this. He had to go away, to a farm in the country. But he’s really happy, running around with all the other domain-names from the late 1990’s in the sunshine and tall corn.
This is Magical Nihilism.
Dumb sign, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.
Been asked to work on the nominations for designs of the year again at the Design Museum, which is very nice.
But it leads me back to this hoary old question – how should interactive work best be shown in a museum or gallery context? Should it be shown at all?
We will always be beaten on price, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.
Good marketing, especially in the current economic context!
Given to me by my Paul Peter Piech as I left for the Welsh School of Architecture in 1990.
My Dad found it and gave it back to me last time I went home to Porthcawl. Honoured that he chose to sign it “Uncle Paul” – he was a great friend to my father and a great influence on me.
From Paul’s Obituary by Lottie Hoare from The Independent, 1996:
“Some remarkable individuals keep on believing, throughout their lives, that the world could change for the better. The artist and printer Paul Peter Piech was one such man. He was born in Brooklyn in 1920, the son of Ukrainian immigrants looking for a new way of life in America. From their tough example Piech learnt both to work hard and to speak out when it mattered. His books and posters confront the viewer with the need for global responsibility and co-operation. One piece borrows the words of John Donne, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”
It goes on to describe the way he worked – which I remember well. Prolific doesn’t begin to describe it. He spent most of his time in his studio working, but he often visited my dad in his framing workshop, or the printers where I worked. He would come in to get enlargements on the photocopier, copies from books – art, design, philosophy, politics, and he would always explain to me what he was doing with them, even though I was just a spotty 15 year-old printer’s devil.
“Piech did not crave the perfect studio. He was happy to work in garages. In his series of suburban homes, in Middlesex, Herefordshire and Wales, he would spend evenings cutting his lettering direct on to the lino, whilst keeping one eye on Coronation Street. It was a family joke that Christmas Day ended at 10 in the morning. Once the presents were open Piech went back to his proofs.
His fellow printer and writer Kenneth Hardacre once described the urgency of Piech’s output as that of “a man whose need to communicate his faith and his fears was so pressing that it often appeared to be impatient with the very means he had chosen for expressing that need”.
The Etech ’09 call for proposals/papers has been out for a week or so, and it’s theme/focus is “Living, Reinvented: The Tech of Abundance and Constraints”, which makes me doubly-excited to be participating this year on the program committee along with some y’know, actual smart people: Mike Walsh, Annalee Newitz, Natalie Jeremijenko, Matt Webb, Nat Torkington, David Pescovitz, Timo Hannay and Kati London.
Over the years I’ve given Etech a fair bit of Tony-Stark/Warren-Ellis-inspired ribbing, so now it’s time for me to put-up-or-shut-up and find some “genuine outbreaks of the future” – so, if you know of anyone (including yourself) nudging up the future slider on the reality EQ, please encourage them to submit something as soon as…
The full CFP can be found here, and some of the themes I’ll be particularly looking forward to seeing the proposals for are:
I have a feeling the key to this is going to be a distributed, active hunt in territories unfamiliar – so if you have a friend who’s a grad student doing weird things in a lab somewhere, and architect or an engineer sketching strange bio-mimetic structures on pub beer-mats; or anyone outside of the usual O’Reillysphere that you know who’s doing something exciting, do encourage them to take a look at the CfP.
Let’s make Tony proud…
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P.s.: I’ve taken Matt Fraction‘s “Tony was right” slightly out-of-context here, via the ever-lovin’ Ryan Freitas.
Carrot harvest (1 of 4), originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.
Aside from Dopplr…
Petafloptimism 