Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

quick question - what's our URL at this discussion, for sharing with the
world?
  

    
*Yum, Jon, 22nd Century pre-agricultural insect scrounging in a
post-market anarchist freehold!  You heard that first here on the
WELL SoTW, ladies and gentlemen!
  

    
*Yum, Jon, 22nd Century pre-agricultural insect scrounging in a
post-market anarchist freehold!  You heard that here first on the
WELL SoTW, ladies and gentlemen!

Lest it sound like I'm merely cursing the darkness of the bank-ster
meritocrats rather than lighting a candle, check this out.  Me and
the mrs. are gonna open, and fully outfit an Internet-of-Things
House of the Future apartment inside the Torino Fab Lab.  Yes,  in
2015.  With all mod Arduino cons!  We've got designers, Makers, and
the Fab Lab has almost kind of got the funding!

You want to see what 100-percent actual Turinese industrial decline
looks like?  Check out the Fab Lab upstairs bat-cave here, a chunk
of dead factory that hasn't been renovated or even properly aired
out since the 1970s.  This year, as part of a two-year project,
we're gonna physically drag this derelict space toward the #22C by
main force of arms.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/sets/72157647536440143/

*Demo or die, as they like the say at the MIT Media Lab.   
Actually, what its current director Joi Ito likes to say is "Deploy
or Die."  With a project like "Casa Jasmina,"  that is the victory
condition.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/04/joi-ito-deploy-or-die.html
  

    
I can't wait to visit. We'll bring the kid.
  

    
Yeah, in the unlikely event of my retirement, I'd hope to graze the
pastures around the Arduino House.

This reminds me of the DIY Home of the Future, ca. 2007:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007375.html

I'm happy to reproduce here:

Creating a futurist showcase is a great way to stumble onto new
concepts; one that we're playing with is ambient intelligence,
defined in Wikipedia as "electronic environments that are sensitive
and responsive to the presence of people." It's kind of like
ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp -- the integration of information
processing into everyday things... cars, toasters, wall,
refrigerators, dust -- which I discussed with Adam Greenfield,
author of Everyware: The Dawing Age of Ubiquitous Computingin our
Worldchanging interview last year. Ubicomp and ambient intelligence
are both about processors embedded all around us; the difference is
that ambient intelligence describes an environment, while ubicomp is
about an "internet of things."

Imagine sensitive nanobots among particles of dust, working in
aggregate to facilitate smart-room responses. At our Maker Faire
installation, we want to suggest this sort of future. The DIY aspect
is that you can construct a reality of your own making, making your
home less a set of walls created by others than a malleable
infrastructure that can be shaped according to your tastes and
desires: a wall that could be a composite of images from anywhere,
about anything; a fine-tuned environmental program that adjusts heat
and humidity according to your moods; a "smell wall" that can emit
odors, even pheromones; a biofeedback room where you can reach
technology-mediated mental and physical states; a Second Life sort
of visual interface that is pervasive throughout.

Second Life is part of the picture because it points to the
potential for a graphical operating system and interface for the
virtual home of tomorrow, in which immerseive environments are coded
for large high def display throughout the living space, creating a
bridge between our everyday lives and something like television, but
one that you experience irather than merely watch. This sort of home
life is already percolating: there are gamers in my family who own
massive high-def television sets that fill the room with the game
experience. We're imagining that and more. For instance, at Maker
Faire, we're going to show "Healing Rhythms" by Wild Divine, a
"whole body wellness system" that combines meditative exercises with
biofeedback hardware and sensors. A future high def ambient system
like this could be used to create a meditation wall custom-synced to
biorhythms, possibly including light and sound technology to help
tune specific brainwaves. (This is for wellness, arguably not so
much for spiritual voyages; I'm not convinced computer-generated
environments would be effective in breaking the cycle of birth and
death.)

Of course there's a down side: a world where some significant part
of your everyday reality is computer-mediated and media-infused
contains infinite real estate for advertising. That aspect of
commercial television will be leaking into everything -- a
phenomenon visualized persuasively in the movie Minority Report.
You'll want to have a popup blocker embedded in your brain.

How likely is it that all this will come about? Ambient intelligence
and the computer-mediated DIY environment of the future are
suggested by current trends, but more extreme visions, like Minority
Report's ad-saturated extended mall environment, might drive people
away, and therefore fail. I want to believe there's a limit to our
tolerance for marketing messages; consider the Eisenbergs'
conjectures, supported by research, that heavy-handed ad-saturated
marketing just doesn't work. That said, it's a near-truism that
while we seldom get the future we predict, we always get the future
we choose.

At Maker Faire, my team will not be giving much weight to the down
side in our vision of the home of the future; we prefer to focus on
the use of digital technology to change, hopefully enhance, what it
means to be human. Some of us who've been cyborging like crazy for
almost two decades now are already creeping up on the digital future
and the promise of a technological singularity, whatever that might
be. I've been skeptical of some visions of singularity. But thinking
about future environments, watching change accelerate, it's hard to
avoid a supposition that we're on the verge...but just what we're on
the verge of is quite open to speculation.
  

    
*Looks like some jihadis in Paris just blew away a French satirical
magazine, "Charlie Hebdo," using rocket-propelled grenades.  Twitter
suggests the multiple attackers are still at large and driving
around Paris armed to the teeth.
  

    
Part 2 of the DIY Home of the Future:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007468.html

You might not think this would be the ideal context for a futurist
showcase, but we saw the creative chaos of the first couple of Maker
Faires in California, and knew the guys at Make would be receptive.
Sure enough, Dale Dougherty, publisher of Make Magazine and the lead
on Maker Faire, totally got our high-level concept: we were inspired
by the famous "Futurama" exhibit and ride at the 1939-40 World's
Fair in New York, which took visitors on a tour of the world 20
years into the future. While this Futurama featured visions of
suburbia and superhighways, our effort for Maker Faire would be the
"DIY Home of the Future," a concept that worked well as a
representation of the convergent future, and as a manifestation of
several converging paths in Derek's recent thinking. We saw our
effort, while not quite so grand as the World's Fair exhibit, as the
first of many -- allowing time to pave the way to our vision of
Tomorrowland.

In his research for various companies and projects, Derek has
gathered material about different aspects of the home of the future,
from which he has derived three general attributes:

Immersive. 
The home of the future is a platform for both ambient and focused
converged media. According to Derek, the key elements are "seamless
, multi-sensory engagement and the opportunity to shar,,
collaborate, connect, explore and grow. Immersive environments, use
augmented reality to take such experiences to new highs, by enabling
the user to extend the "Self" and his /her personal potential. It
allows us to achieve deeper understanding of our sub- and
unconscious through emotional and cognitive interfaces to reach what
we call the "Sense Event" - a harmony of our sensory energy with
total engagement."

Responsive. 
One possible future is personified in SARAH (Self Actuated
Residential Automated Habitat), the smart house of the future on the
SciFi Channel's "Eureka." SARAH is a responsive home – in fact,
she's quirky, and she talks back... but she's also aligned with
Derek's vision of the responsive home as "one in which the living
space is sensitive to one's needs, personalized to the user's
requirements, anticipatory of the behavior and responsive to the
person's presence, in order to improve one's quality of life,
overall." It "leverages ambient intelligence and socially- and
context-aware smart sensors in order to optimize and augment the
living conditions and environment."

Reconfigurable. 
The reconfigurable home "consists of walls and devices that respond
to sound, light, touch, footsteps, smell, phone calls, mp3 players
and even distant remotely connected spaces. Both the physical and
the ambient elements can be changed by means of sensor and actuator
systems, spatial robots, LEDs, sound and other integrated
networks.... New architectural experiments are investigating how one
might construct an interactive environment that builds up an
internal representation of its occupants through a network of
autonomous but communicative sensors, so that the home may better
represent the user's emotional, physical and cognitive state."

For Maker Faire, we focused on immersive media. Front and center we
placed Brian Park's Flogiston Chair, which was designed "based on
the idea that you didn't need a body in cyberspace, just a presence,
so the chair was a place to leave your body" (it was featured in the
film "Lawnmower Man"), with a curved rear projection screen for
gaming. We projected a high definition, high-intensity Xbox game as
part of the demonstration. In addition, David Demaris, the wizard
who did much of the actual production work, brought in a massive
screen and combined ambient music with visuals that could be
manipulated by moving one's hands over sensors -- a kind of visual
theremin.

To give a sense of the potential for interaction between the digital
environment and mind/body, we ran a demonstration of Wild Divine's
"Healing Rhythms" biofeedback software, a system that includes
several guided meditations with audiovisual environments that you
manipulate by controlling your own physiology, with heart rate and
skin response sensors attached to your fingers.

The DIY aspect of this rests partly in the control you, as the
occupant, have over configuring digital systems as well as physical
architecture, and partly in the sense that you can (re)invent
yourself as you reconfigure your environment.

Our DIY House of the Future isn't too far out from current reality.
There's already a proliferation of large screen, high-definition
displays in the consumer electronics market -- and they're getting
cheaper -- so whole-wall displays aren't hard to imagine. Embedded
sensor networks are the wave of the very near future. The immersive
game environment Derek and I suggested would be relatively easy to
build and market, and it drew enthusiastic crowds at Maker Faire (it
helped to have game play in the mix).
  

    
The terrorists that attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices were serious
- quote from police: "It was a commando with Kalasnikov and pump
action ...they went in there to kill."

Wikipedia's on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_shooting_at_Charlie_Hebdo

Live udpates via The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/jan/07/shooting-paris-satirical-mag
azine-charlie-hebdo

Another battle in the culture wars... fundamentalists (not just
Muslims) justify violence in defense of the bridge to paradise.
Telling those guys that they're delusional doesn't have much of an
effect; making light of their delusion is outright dangerous.
  

    
So here's the question: will the right-wingers who hated these cartoonists
yesterday suddenly declare themselves to be true-blue defenders of left-wing
parody magazines, in the mold of all those Sodom-on-the-Hudson NYC haters
who were overnight I <3 NY partisans on 9/12, declaring the imperative to
Kill Someone to avenge the city they'd have cheerfully wiped off the map of
America the day before?
  

    
*Well, it's a hot issue right now because it's a fresh atrocity, but
no, of course it won't have any effect on rightists being right or
leftists being left.  People will be shocked but they just read a
confirmation of their own world-view in stuff like that.

*Lots of journalists get killed.  It's a little unusual to get mowed
down at work by a death squad on the soil of a NATO power, but lots
of journalists get killed.  Year after year,

https://www.cpj.org/killed/2014/

In point of fact we were having a similar discussion during the SOTW
last year.  Are journalists still necessary, was the issue, and the
response was that if people were still killing them then they must
be serving some function.
  

    
Yes, but satirists...

maybe it's due to my own distant past life of performing satire
during the Reaganiferous Period, or maybe it's the extra rights
carved out in the arena of intellectual property in US law, but
dammit, is nothing sacred? Murdering the jesters. Damn.
  
  

    

bruce, in the spirit of yr much late-lamented viridian list, a big question
about yr lab demo italian hi-style house:

what are the cradle-to-cradle issues with all the electronics + geegaws? are
they going to made from ground local olive pits?
i.e what are the toxics/carbon footprint involved in manufacture of these?
last i heard, microprocessors are like sausage are like laws: you dont wanna
know how they are made.

presumably the hi-styyle house be powered in some earth-muffiny microgrid
way?

(ducking)
  

    
Holy war on cartoonists is very 21st century, I think. But I'm
having a post-structural resistance to any kind of useful analysis
of the proliferation of acts like this. 

Dan Gillmor counseled against drawing conclusions about the
instigators, actors, and potentially movements associated with this
latest bit of mayhem - no rush to judgement. 

What will they be writing about this in 2020?
  

    

a short URL for the world-viewable version of this topic, by the way, is:

<http://tinyurl.com/sotw2015>
  

    


and a reminder that non-members can participate in this discussion by
tweeting to @theWELL or emailing inkwell at well dot com.
  

    
*A semi-employed French fish salesman, his brother, and a high
school student.  Our world won't soon run out of terrorists of that
caliber.
  

    
They were more effective than their day jobs would suggest.
  

    

Hey, Bruce.

From Joe Crawford on Twitter:

(@artlung)

@TheWELL For Bruce Sterling - would you care to comment on your post-9/11
musings from 2004 SOTW?

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

    
Yeah, not all-- but often journalists who are murdered are in war zones.

Point of Information:  was it a man or a woman who named that "self-
actualized habitat" a woman's name? That's like something out of the
previous century.

In fact, I would argue the way to make the greatest change in the state of
the world is to get more money and power in the hands of women.
Technological fixes aren't going to have the same impact, that's for
certain, though they could certainly be part of the toolkit.
  

    
> was it a man or a woman

"Casa Jasmina" is named for one of its prime movers, Jasmina
Tesanovic. She's a 21st century activist journalist diy maven. She's
also married to Mr. Sterling.

When you say shifting more money and power to women would make a
change, I assume you mean a change for the better? They say that
power corrupts - are women incorruptible? Our would we be shifting
the corruption, as well?

Some believe that a more democratic distribution of power would be a
fix, and I tend to lean that way. We'd all do well to support the
P2P Foundation (http://p2pfoundation.net/) and follow Michel
Bauwens. Consider stream 3 in the "aims" section of the P2P
Foundation home page:

"... recreating political voice and power, through bottom up
Assemblies of the Commons and Chamber of the Commons that put
forward social charters, AND through 'top-down' progressive
coalitions (through existing politics and parties) coalitions around
the commons , i.e. 'the politics and policies of the commons', that
continue our efforts to implement Commons Transition Plans."
  

    
I may be wrong but I think evy was referring to "SARAH."
  

    
Yep.  I meant, SARAH.

And, yep, I meant "change" -- I know a lot of women and I don't think
they're any worse than men, IMHO.
  

    
 >When you say shifting more money and power to women would make a
  change, I assume you mean a change for the better? They say that
  power corrupts - are women incorruptible? Our would we be shifting
  the corruption, as well?


Just had to see that again.

I mean, seriously!? You seem to be saying: Don't rock the boat by letting 
women have any power because maybe women might not be perfect! Keep them 
in their place or else things might get worse!

God forbid women should even be mentioned in this topic, I get that part, 
but still.
  

    
And also, will no one answer Paulina's question (#37)? Or are we not 
supposed to ask questions here? 
  

    

Well, @loris Paulina, figuring out what possible toxins might flow
into an "open source house of the future" is quite  an interesting
tangle of issues.   I'm pretty sure there's a book in it.  I wrote a
design-critic pamphlet last year, called "The Epic Struggle of the
Internet of Things," but that was just an ideological warm-up.

First, "Casa Jasmina" is a hack lab.  We've got sponsors because
they want to see what we can do with it.  Since it's an Arduino
co-project with  Toolbox (the local Turinese design co-working
space), our area of central interest is basically Italian home
automation.   Yesterday's home automation systems are turning into 
tomorrow's Internet-of-Things Home, with its wireless broadband,
data protocols, battery-powered gizmos on the walls and ceilings,
screen prompts, chirpy thermostats, creepy vidcams over the toilet,
all that.  We ourselves don't know what we'll do.  If we knew the
outcome, it wouldn't be research.

Second, it will be a Turinese guest apartment, because Arduino, the
Fab Lab, and Toolbox Co-Working rather need one so as to briefly
house passing celebrities, allies, clients, whomever.   We must try
hard not to electrocute the guests, choke them with off-gassed
toxins, maim them with over-elaborate 3DPrinted plastic
folding-chairs, set fire to them while they sleep, and so many other
lively possibilities…  There are some basic hotelier
safety-and-comfort issues here.

Third, it's a showplace.  It's a public demonstration project.  The
Maker scene  is quite lively in Italy because of Italy's long
traditions of small-scale craft production.  Arduino is open-source
electronic craft production outfit which is global in some ways, but
also very "Make in Italy."  We're trying to figure out what regional
Italian digital craft manufacturing looks like in the near future. 
It makes sense to do it locally because  Torino is Italy's most
industrial city.  There's heaps of "Make in Italy,"  and like any
creative effusion it varies in quality.  Somebody has to curate it. 
Somebody has to figure out what's "best," and what "best" means.  

So, that's me.  That is my basic role in the effort.  I'm the
Curator.  I don't design stuff, I don't build stuff, I'm not a
Maker, least of all do I make furniture…  But I am pretty much
always the oldest guy in the room nowadays, when it comes to
innovative efforts of this kind.  I've always been a critic.   The
house of the future's arriving, day by day.  So what's good about it
and what's not so good about it?