2006-06-01 reboot8 day 1 Michael Thomsen renaissance keynote he's moved from computers to innovation, mainly because the institutions are blind to the possibilities of technology. it's time to lift our eyes above technology and focus on the issues of blindness and of change itself renaissance gives an opportunity to raise some big questions. renaissance, big-R - humanism, individualism - science, etc rebirth of a region that was dormant for centuries. the western world now is not in the time for rebirth (maybe it needs it) maybe small-r renaissance is about: revitalisation of the known, rather than the completely new but maybe we are at the beginning of a big transition, and by focusing on renewing newspapers, tv, etc, we're delaying the big shift. communication technology: part of rise, fall of cultures, power centres eg: riding, invented is mesopotamia, then it went to egypt and was used in the creation of the empire. in summeria, riding developed slowly (over 5000 years) as did the culture. in egypt, it appeared suddenly and the culture blossomed. egypt: writing, geometry, beginning of alphabet--but failed to realise its importance, because the literate people were not interested in a more accessible writing system. they just didn't see it (blindness again). the abstract nature of the alphabet inspired abstract thought. the alphabet squashes all of language into indivisible parts--did this inspire the greeks in their view of nature, atoms, etc? digital technology is at least as powerful as the alphabet and the printing press... but the printing press had to travel from china and it took at least 300 years for the changes to kick in. if we wish to talk about renaissance, maybe we're witnessing the rebirth of oral culture (in place of mass media, because of many-to-many media): - history is negotiated, only stories - no individual - no bureaucracy, political states, single god so what happens to property, the state, religion... the big questions. # what is oral technology? # Crafter Economics ulla-maaria mutanen hobbyprincess.com thinglink.org defining craft: many people think of the "arts and crafts" movement. some people thing "craft is bad taste". there's also a trend of designers doing unique designs in the same shop as selling, "craft is cool, craft is alternative to mass production". another: "craft as play"--a knitting olympics that was grassroots run alongside the winter olymptics. "craft as movement"--people who take it really seriously. "craft as culture history". all of these, there are different types: hard, soft, personalised, corporate. in this presentation: crafters == creative makers (that publish their work online) example of a item: mutanen made Pertti the robot (fabric), with an rfid inside that causes a phone to ring a number. after posting about this on thinglink/etsy, lots more people made little robots, some to sell. classic view of market: - profit motivates exchange - ? - price determines value - demand can be purchased [<-- this is the key one for me; advertising] in this new market... - ? - comments are currency (barter is back) - the quality of links determine the value of an object - objects without links are dead objects - demand shows as recognition (not purchases) - recognition is based on recommendations But not all things are equally recommendable. Pertti can't be added on allconsuming.net. this is because pertti doesn't have a ASIN/UPC/ISBN. but these codes are useless to crafters because they cost money and are hard to get. Therefore: most of art, craft and design on the internet is *invisible*. # General Intellect - or the Renaissance of Karl Marx Adam Arvidsso machinery: main contribution is to allow the production process to become more complex. the main productive force is cooperation. "General Intellect" for Marx, a means for production that emerges from large-scale industrial capital. it is inherently socialised--the factory owner owns the machines, but not the cognitive, emotional factors that sit in the complex pattern. [i need to ask this guy for a reading list] it's membership of a social organisation that makes a worker productive. have communication technologies, information technologies expanded the concept of "general intellect" to include - in productive potential - the whole of social life? maybe IT enhances the productivity of social action by allowing more complex forms of social interaction to unfold (by analogy) what is the value of myspace that can be valorised on the market for great amounts? [i love the words here] the value rests on the new and advanced forms of social cooperation that become possible on this kind of site. implications for the way capitalism works: knowledge, sociality... these non-material things have become the items of value to work on in the knowledge economy. the production of these is happening within autonomous networks of social interactions. general intellect, as a thing which is outside the power of corporate owners, has expanded. the result? social life itself becomes an enormous social resource. capital, institutions, then change to an enormous extent. putting people in a factory by controlling the time and space of workers worked in the 20th century; now you make money by being able to valorise this mass intellectuality, productive capacity. eg, user-generated recommendation systems; proctor & gamble has included the novel uses by users in the r&d system. also: capital becomes increasingly unproductive. the big capitalists of the past would organise people to become more productive. contemporary capitalists limit their involvement. production and valorisation are becoming separated [doesn't this mean that contemporary capitalists are strip-mining culture?]. "the way you make money in this emerging ethical economy is you make a space in which the autonomous creativity of consumers can be structured or programmed so that is spontaneously creates a community or knowledge that gives you a right to the social share distributed on financial markets." [why is ethics being mentioned, where does that come?] the focus on brand now is building "brand value", which is to create a constituency around the brand--"supporting the claim to a share of the global surplus on financial markets" [i like that there's the idea of the 'surplus', independent of anything else, and the way to make money is to make a claim to a share of it that nobody else can turn down. like a nomic.] similar: claim to a share of power for politicians. implication of separation of production and valorisation: the capitalist system is becoming parasitic (increasingly marginalised) on social production. social production is driven by an ethical logic of recognition, built on the general availability of general intellect. capitalism structures itself on being able to establish a point of extraction, vampiric. taxes! [sounds like people sitting on the arcs of the network economy: power is in *protocol*, and extracting value from that. i need to read alex galloway.] we have now a regime of defending the vampiric rights of established points of capitalistic actors, eg property rights are being defended now. marx predicted that the increasing important of general intellect/social intellect would render capitalism more and more marginal, which would mean capitalism would lose its control over the production. "exchange value would no longer be use value" so there's a transition to something else... not a post-capitalist storming of the bastille, but a cancer that grows within this system slowly and reduces capitalism itself to a parasitic situation. this crisis would manifest as a crisis of value. "the labour theory of value"--values in the economy are established by the amount of labour that goes into their production. this was maybe never true, and was not true in 20th century capital. capitalism's ability to exert force over social relations lets them determine value. they were unable to set value, so the state stepped in (and the unions). even this artificial measure of value is collapsing. we see this in, eg, the price of skype, which is disproportionate to the revenue that it could generate. the price of real estate in london is not in proportion ot the use-value. brand values build on unmeasurable values. what we can see is an impending crisis of value, which is a crisis of capitalist control. summarise: - general intellect is a new force of productivity that emerges from within the new forms of social communication that are enabled by machines - this has manifested as a form of mass intellectuality - *autonomous* non-capitalised productivity emerges - capital gets marginalised, and parasitic in relation to social production - this manifests as lack of control capital has on social production - this might lead to post-capitalist means of production... but this doesn't mean anything. we don't know. could be good or bad. speaker's prediction: we have a real chance to manifest a collaborative, sharing economy. at the same time we have neo-liberalism, which is directed to prevent this new form of productivity emerging. but neo-liberalism is collapsing. iraq is the first. next china and the us will compete over scarce resources... more brutal than it is now. similar to france in C18, the state becomes repressive and conservative, financial crisis, and there's a revolution. who knows what happens after that. we're more similar to the end of the roman empire than the renaissance. end of roman empire was characterised by social development but not technological... we're the reverse. my question: why is this autonomous system ethical? answer: it's because it's built out of social, ethical building blocks, not necessarily that the entire thing is *moral*. [also, my second question, he will provide me a reading list.] # Play T L Taylor [computer crashed that meant I couldn't keep notes] - socialising within the game is about making people *players*, good players. but you often need to look outside the game for the facility to socialise. co-creative culture: players as producers and designers. emergent culture & technologies that change the game: eg, fanfic, WoW changing the interface, machima, tips, guides... these aren't just the icing on the cake, these are intrinsic to *making the game playable*. everquest isn't just a thing in a box, it's a constellation of sites, tips, game, etc, which is "everquest". there are a 1000+ ui modifications for WoW. a modded screen for WoW looks insanely complex. it changes the play itself, it doesn't just make it easier. there are arguments about the boundaries... is it cheating or not? debates within the community. questions: intellectual property; what the nature of play is. these are issues. eg... people want to sell their avatars. they feel like they own them, because of the investment. taylor spent time studying embodiment on the internet... what happens when somebody says "you don't own your body" [i wonder whether bloggers feel more embodied only because they invest more in a single thing; a person who spent the same amount of time leaving comments wouldn't feel as invested?] the in-game protest in everquest was because the players didn't like how their character class worked. the protest was: turning up and hanging out. sony threatened to suspend game accounts if people didn't go back to their own realms. "protesting in game is not a valid way to give us feedback" one of the problems: the technology doesn't support that type of gathering. but it's interesting what kind of technology we *choose* to fix. is this public space? the commodification of culture, who owns this space? book? Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture, T. L. Taylor http://www.itu.dk/~tltaylor/ # LUNCH # The Graveyard Slot (the after-lunch session) JP Rangaswami book: "The Borderless World" -- 3 trends: globalisation, disintermediation, disintimate (this was before the www, so these are broader drivers than that) written world created persistence, printing press creates reproduction, the web adds sharability. engelbart's computer... all this did was allow us to consume structured information. visicalc etc, this allowed us to *create* structured data. the web allowed consuming relatively unstructured data. wikis, blogs, etc, allow producing it too. maslow isn't good. a hierarchy of needs is taylor meets human beings. humans are not assembly line beings. this kind of view is what leads us to centralise sick people in hospitals. this is not a sensible thing to do. different model [i didn't catch from whom]: humans have drives to acquire, bond, learn, defend--but these are not sequential. three things that will hold us up: - the internet. we need net neutrality - identity. in eastern cultures, identity is a statement of "what i belong to". it is not individual. - privacy ... # OpenStreetMap Steve Coast [it strikes me that there needs to be reciprocity in order to keep the map up-to-date: i would love a handhelp map that showed OSM data, but also recorded traces whenever it was switched on and submitted the traces whenever the map was synced.] # Mobile 2.0 - Social Renaissance Marko Ahtisaari n-series phones, programmable, open, multimedia devices: "edge objects of the next generation of the internet" mobile phone subscriptions in 2006: 2.3 billion ahtisaari will be speaking a lot about the *next* 2 billion, who are very different. what was it like to first make a phonecall without standing next to a wall? that is a next thing to us. how did this bigness happen so quickly? - a phonecall was a familiar thing already - an object with a social function tied to a service - service providers subsidizing price - shift from a familiar, collective (family) object to a personal object - this now exists in a way that has become invisible the phone is one of the 3 things you carry - others being a form of payment and a method of access (keys) - [that's a great way to put it] [lots of short pauses of exactly the right length in this talk, to let things sink in] nearly 3/4 of people use a phone as a source of time. question of the audience: how many people woke up this morning because of their phone [around half. laughs]. this is the platform where there is most economies of scale, which is why features converge here. there was a moment a few years ago where the rhetoric was about there being a separate mobile internet. protocols were marketing to people, like "http: reach the world on your pc." if a phone in a social object, why do this? there's been a return to the phone as a social object. challenges: - reach - sometimes off - hackability - social primitives - simplicity - justice this is what 2.0 is. this 2.0 refers to the next 2 billion, the BRICs countries: brazil, india, china sometimes off: how do we design for this, in a world which is going to become always on. there are some odd things. people round a dinner table, peripherally somewhere else (checking their email): "most of the reason people stay in the stream of conversation is because it's so painful to come back if you tune out" [man that's good] physical hackability: - changing covers - changing menu interface - strappu - pimp your phone - scripting and sketching in software (python) - non-phone: "Used in India" from the Center For Knowledge Societies - leds are seen in lots of physical hardware hacking social primitives: - the gift - signaling - "i'm OK" - present - what am I doing/listening right now? - intention - where am I going to be, what am I going to do? a good question: "what shape does communication take when it's completely free?" a platform of 2 billion being a magnet for new features... ...but many people like the simple and the sensorial there's is no dominant design for a swiss army knife social object. challenge with mobiles: too big when they're inactive; too small when they're active. in india, "Vibrations Musical Chanting" machine. all it does is play chants, no tapes. justice: if the core of the growth is in the social interaction, then questions about fairness and justice of access is a topic of the next 10 years. shirky's question: if there is to be inequality, how is it to be arranged? # Changing Schools and Firing Minds David Smith & Ian Yorston [briefly, because I'm not taking notes in this one. there were 3 photos of classrooms - victorian and modern - at the beginning of the presentation, but the windows were on the right of the students. i'm sure r.a. mentioned that windows were always on the left, to avoid the sun casting shadows over the pages of right-handed pupils.]