rob van kranenburg
    
➔    ”A new, physically uncompromised, metaphysical initiative of unbiased integrity could unify the world. It could and probably will be provided by the utterly impersonal problem solutions of the computers. Only to their superhuman range of calculative capabilities can and may all political, scientific, and religious leaders face-savingly acquiesce.” – R. Buckminster Fuller (1969)

➔     “Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for telling stories better then they do?” – Bruce Springsteen

Building block 1: Transaction

➔    All is transaction
➔    No more Points of Sale/Points of Transaction as contextual information about you wearing that shirt is pervasive
➔    No more corruption, tax evasion, black markets
➔    All inefficiencies in political decision making processes exposed
➔    Isolation in patents, copyright and IP exposed as anti innovation
➔    No more privacy: levels of accountability on every day functions: privacies
➔    No more security, but flow and insecurity as default: build applications and services from that principle: securities

Building block 2: Team

➔     Europe and the other current Blocs become Team Cities, allegiances start from the neighboorhood.
➔    Your phone is an (EU) ID & passport, foldable screen tablet
➔    You start up applications and pay a 22 % flat fee that pays for generic open source infrastructure: sewage, roads, connectivity, startup funds for business to build on all data that has been opened up (including intelligence), health and inclusive educational programs. This flat fee replaces all current legal, government and governance systems.
➔    All else is paid in bartering services, new types of currencies: bitcoin, freecoin, energy swaps in devices and pay for use:” I want those IPV6 enabled lights on for 3 minutes, starting now please.” (and will pay 30 cents)

Professor Ten Hompel has demonstrated that in logistic praxis, the perfect warehouse is an empty warehouse.  A delicate, but programmable and detectable balance between generic rules and consistently strong local decision making produces the most productive and efficient results. Following the same successful pragmatics, the specific nature of bartering currencies, customs, systems of belief, rituals and modes of behavior are all fully operational on local levels, defying any notions of universal values and codes of conduct. These local levels can best be understood as planes of agency and action and they will consists of teams of like minded intelligences (human, animal, plant, robot) that both live physically and digitally (remote) together. The sole constant is the generic tax of 22% that is managed by algos parsed to Climate Change. All else is left to local creativities.

Building block 3: Flow

➔    Maximum flow, least friction
➔    A new ontology between humans and M2M : the best of human creativity and emotions with the best infrastructures, applications and services that will parse to our main adversary: Climate Change

In the past decade billions of euros have been invested in anti terrorism applications and services that are only accessible to a few stakeholders, yet all the dashboards are paid for by public money. In Europe 420.000 people die in traffic every 10 years. In that same time span 580.000 people have killed themselves in the Union. Under 500 people were blown up. The discrepancy in investment on real conditions and causes for mortality can not be explained by arguments that set forth ‘care for human life’.
In a full IOT all databases are open, all surveillance and control systems are opened up (as in David Brin’s City of Trust). Citizens will be delivered real time threat applications on their (EU)ID’s, alerting them to their mood and socio psychological stress levels, that biker coming from the left just now that is in your inattentional blindness zone and the banana on the pavement as you will go for your morning coffee as all data point to John throwing that away (in full knowledge that 30 euros is zipped of his wallet), but having just heard Sal is leaving him, at precisely 0812, he has more pressing things on his mind. If in Europe we open up all FP6/7/8 security, military and intelligence sensor and surveillance capabilities – paid for, after all, with tax payers money – we need no new investments in infrastructure.

If we want an inclusive society and generic infrastructures for all: roads, health care, sewage systems, education, then the only real form of control lies on device level. The passport must become a processing device. It must be hip, cool, out Apple Apple and foldable. Currently we can not prevent old dependencies (brand IP, copyright, patents, greed, growth without responsibility towards animals, plants, climate change and inclusive human care, money, our planet) to move into and occupy the gateways to the LANS and the edges of their connectivity and reach: the prosthetic devices to the Body Area Network (glasses, hearing aides), the smart meter to the LAN, the car to the Wider Area Network and the Smart City providing citizenship services. This is not a lost battle, however. We can make open source hardware on each level that is simply better then the proprietary item. With project HERMA we have started that process. (http://herma.duekin.com/)

Building block 4: Education: Coach

Sal awakens: she smells coffee. A few minutes ago her alarm clock, alerted by her restless rolling before waking, had quietly asked “coffee?” and she had mumbled “yes.” “Yes”, “no” and ‘Capuccino’ are the only words it knows.
In the early days of Internet of Things, way back in the nineties when it did not have a real name yet her dad had once told her that it only knew “yes” and “no”. She could not imagine life without the Capucinno option.
‘Oh Sally, don’t you cry. Oh Sally, don’t you cry.  A man is a man, does the best he can. Oh Sally, don’t you cry.” Unbelievable she thought, “Sweet Sally sail on by”. Her favorite song! On the hyperlocal news channel she always woke to. Always handy to know if a neighbor needed a hand, or if someone had out loaned a power drill or two. It had been her dad’s favorite too. In a way, she thought, he had given her life, after dying himself way too early, long before seeing his vision come true. Then it hit her. Planned serendipity, off course! Smiling now, she realized she always fell for this. How easy she forgot that her house and all its things played alongside her in the theater of everyday life.

She had consciously set her hyper local news wider then her team city gossip channel. Team City, that was how Europe was called now. She liked it. Everybody could feel like a player and the best thing was , they all had the same coach, Coach, all five hundred million of them. It had been a gradual process. The first coach that was introduced was the Privacy Coach. It was the first app that all EU citizens had had to install on their new EU ID, a foldable screen tablet that outblingblinged the Iphone 8 and positively zipped any Microsoft tool. It was a barter system, ID, phone, game computer all in one and the cool thing was that it recognized any member of your team within a ten kilometer radius. It also held NFC. You were asked to set your privacies settings tuned to a series of activities, services and products. The product list seemed never to end, but as most people buy 90% the same every week, after setting that once, it was basically set for years. You held your EUID to any thing you wanted to lease  no one bought anything any more, so nineties!) and it told you if that matched with your settings. Then she remembered the next thing had been the Safety Coach, Security Coach,  and Ambient Coach, all non optional.
 
The Cappuccino was good. The moment she had finished dressing, the window that had been opaque became a huge map indicating the whereabouts of her team. All of them basically worked whenever they wanted to on fine-tuning the most optimal conditions for human dolphin conversation. She remembered how the team was put together. It had been quite a tough process. She had been turned inside out. No stone left unturned. She had felt naked throughout. Vulnerable, scared. No doubt everybody felt that way. Later it occurred to her that this had happened not only to her team, but to everybody in the Union, literally everybody. It felt like being broken and being put together again with the help of like minded people, animals, plants and things. Each of these occupied an equal place in any team in Team City.

Oh how awful it had been when all their bank accounts, assets, and wealth had been put into one large team account overnight. For some this resembled the works of the early Christians who owned one house and some things, but sold all surplus in order to set up funds for the group. Others thought it was positively communist and creepy. And this sharing energy bundles, awful. If Ted in Edinburgh installed three new lamps, someone had to dim one. Or Ted had to barter something off course. Well, he was awfully good at cooking vindaloo, hmm.

Ok work! She snapped out of her curry dream and saw that her request for a second Cappuccino had been rejected. Rejected? WTF! You did ask for a severe Coaching regime this week, Miss Sal, I’m sure you will not hold it against me. Addressing the coffee machine directly – which technically speaking was not necessary – she allowed some anger to slip through as she spoke: Ah yes, my friend, I do remember now, but first give me that second cup or I’ll, I’ll fill you up with sparkling water!

Which it did. It also gradually turned on the friction on her home trainer that evening, to get even for that second cup. She pretended not to notice.

Late the night before she had set her settings for today to ‘ Not very bright today, best on my own.’ She knew that only Miranda would contact her with a setting like that. ‘ Hi Sal’. She had not expected her that early. ‘Hi Mira!’ sounding a bit too enthusiastic. Miranda off course picked up on this and ignored radically. ‘ I bet you have been reading one of those oldies, which one is it this time? 1984? Midwich Cuckoos? We?” Sighing Sal said: “ Worse, Brave New World. And you know what the worst thing is? I actually seem to like it. It is so horrible. How can I not feel sympathy with the Savage? How, I always longed be free, wild, roaming and so very very irresponsibly drunk, ever. But Mira, nowadays, I mean I have grown old, is that it?

“We are getting older Sal, that is true, but you know that Coach is made up of such a wide variety of datasets parsing the main algos for every five years, that not one generation can dominate, you know that?” I guess it is just coming too close. The wild zones are not that far off these days and they seem to be getting closer if we have to believe Ted. The entire Us of A is wild wild west again, Mexico style gang violence in nearly every town, village and city. China imploded too…” “I see”, Sal broke in, “yes, I guess you are right.” ‘I have been watching a lot of this on the broad news this week and I must have taken that with me while reading last night.” Wen, her Chinese colleague in a number of projects, Wen, she thought, how would she be? She had seemed so confident that the combination of deliberative democracy and the integrated smart city vision would provide stability. Poor Wen.
Sal? Sally, are you there?
Hey Sal you know what, those new LED’s they installed in public transport to lit unwashed hands? They finally found a way to get dirty hands to lit up in gloves!”

‘Oh, yes Miranda, sorry was drifting of a bit.” ‘Did you get your second cup today?”, smiling. I did, I did, and you, what are you up to?” ‘Actually,  a bit of history.” Very, very interesting. You wanna hear”. Oh yes Sal thought, here we go again. Off course!

Well, it is legal and history, boring usually. But this! Do you recall what dispute there was on legal arguments for ADAY? She did, sure, some of her friends had especially thought the legal arguments that were put forward for ADAY – the final installments on all EUID- were particularly troubling.

It had been clear for some time that a major update of the EU OS was planned. Prior to A-day it seemed the phone was completely redesigned and every day features and apps were added. The Idphones of the visitors and tourists from China, the USA and Africa similarly were upgraded to the highest middle ware level and would sync perfectly.

‘Yes, I’m still not sure what argument the technicians used for what some still call their ‘coup’.” ‘Can you hold a secret…for a change?” “Spill!” “Get this, you know the core of the coup was made up of IOT-A, IOT-I, IERC and Council right?”. “Yes, although IERC is news to me.” ” ‘Ok, now what you don’t know is when they presented ADAY as a reality, having upgraded all EUID of the Commission and Parliament, their legal team presented as their ultimate argument a text by, hold on now….

Then the screen went  blank.

Building block  5: A silent take over

One of the most fascinating writers on Techné,  Heidegger, can only end his ‘Sein und Zeit’ “Wir sollen nichts tun, sondern warten”. We, unfortunately, must act. The IoT community must take over, before the breakdown on all layers becomes too fragmented to parse generic infrastructures on. Although we must keep trying and keep explaining to politicians, civil servants, and intelligence that the functions they embody can no longer be parsed onto their actualizations, so that stepping aside and taking their pension is the only way that can transform their making structures into organized networks peacefully, we can not fully count on their support to do this. We can, however, supply their passports.

Cause I sing fire,
and I sing rain
- Fugees

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0307/msg00027.html

This then is the fundamental change and the design challenge that we are facing in ubicomp; the deliberate attempt of a technology to disappear as technology….Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy:, the deliberate attempt of a technology to disappear as technology, implies that designers not only produce new products but also the process procedures that gave birth to these products in these first place.

In Dreams of a Final Theory, Steven Weinberg speaks of the “spooky ability of mathematicians to anticipate structures that are relevant to the real world”. This text is about the spooky ability of designers to do just that, to anticipate structures that are relevant to the real world, however spooky the real world might become.

How hard it is to write about a world becoming strange, or new, or spooky, after the dotcom crash, after the high hopes of increasing productivity through IT, of readers and writers becoming publishers both , of liberty finally around the corner: a product to be played out in all kinds of gender, racial and cultural roles, a process to drive decision-making transparency in both offline and online processes.

Only to have woken up to the actual realization of a highly synergized performance of search engines and backend database driven visual interfaces. Postmodern theory, open source coding and multimedia channeling promised the production of a new, hybrid space, only to deliver the content convergence of media channels.

And yet, I claim that we are in the progress of witnessing the realization of such a new space. In places where computational processes disappear into the background – into everyday objects – both my reality and me as subject become contested in concrete daily situations and activities. Buildings, cars, consumer products, and people become information spaces by transmitting all kinds of data through Radio Frequency Tags that are rapidly replacing the barcode.

We are entering a land where the environment has become the interface, where we must learn anew how to make sense.

Making sense is the ability to read data as data and not noise.

A matter of life and death when dealing with the flowing reality of the earth’s core: “If we consider that the oceanic crust on which the continents are embedded is constantly being created and destroyed (by solidification and remelting) and that even continental crust is under constant erosion so that its materials are recycled into the ocean, the rocks and mountains that define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would merely represent a local slowing down of this flowing reality.” (Manuel de Landa, 1997)

Reading this local slowing down of flowing reality has never been easy, in fact it has never been possible. There was no way of reading information in the data drawn by the patterns of the seismographs. Vulcanologists could but read in particular ways that refused to turn data into reliable information. Until Bernard Chouet, a physicist – after five years of intensive study – saw patterns where no one saw patterns before, decided what was data and what was not data. He focused on a particular pattern that no one had seen before. The design challenge we are facing now is reading the flowing reality of our surface. How to store real-time information flows? How to chart them? Which are our seismographs? How do we match real-time processes with the signified that they are supposed to signify? How to find ways of deciding what is data and what is not data in the space of flows?

Mapping the research process:

According to Wickens , people generally use one of three methods to navigate towards goals: landmarks, route finding and survey knowledge. This text – mapping territory – functions on the route finding level, given you an overview of the questions that will be addressed. Landmarks, are brief descriptions of facts, occurrences, statistics, experiences. Survey knowledge allows users to build an adequate mental model of the navigational space. Such a mental model may be described as a cognitive map. A cognitive map “allows the explorer to maintain an important feature known as situation awareness”. Such navigation can not perform optimally without feedback procedures and dialogue.

Mapping territory: are we dealing we a fundamentally new situation or not?

Will ubiquitous computing enable something fundamentally new? When Cook’s ‘Endeavour’ sailed into the bay that we know now as Cape Everard on April 22 1770, touching upon Australian shore for the first time, the British saw Aborigines fishing in small canoes. Whereas the native population of Tahiti had responded with loud chanting and the Maori had thrown stones, the Aborigines, neither afraid nor curious, simply went on fishing.

Only until Cook had lowered a small boat and a small party rowed to the shore did the Aborigines react. A number of men rowing a small boat signified a raid and they responded accordingly. The Aborigines must have seen something and even if they could not see it as a ship, they must have felt the waves it produced in their canoes. However, as its form and height was so alien, so contrary to any-thing they had ever observed or produced, they chose to ignore it since they had no adequate procedures of response. In Dreamtime, the Aborigines believed they saw an island. And as islands are common, you can let them drift by, you don’t notice them, you don’t perceive them as data. They thought Cook’s boat was an island. When you see an island you do not have to look up. It will pass.

We find ourselves today in a similar situation. Our Endeauvour is the merging of digital and analogue connectivity as described by Mark Weiser in his 1991 founding text The Computer in the 21st century and Eberhardt’s and Gershenfeld’s announcement in Febuary 1999 that the Radio Frequency Tag had dropped under the penny cost. For most common users the ubiquitous computing revolution is too fundamental to be perceived at such. Some professional users believe in smooth transitions, as Tesco’s UK IT director Colin Cobain, who says that RFID tags will be used on ‘lots of products’ within five years – and perhaps sooner for higher value goods; ‘RFID will help us understand more about our products, he claims. And some professionals believe “that what we call ubiquitous computing will gradually emerge as the dominant mode of computer access over the next twenty years. Intringuingly, it is Mark Weiser who believed “that ubiquitous computing will enable nothing fundamentally new, but by making everything faster and easier to do, with less strain and mental gymnastics, it will transform what is apparently possible.” Contrary to Mark Weiser’s claim that ubiquitous computing will enable nothing fundamentally new, I believe that ubiquitous computing will enable something fundamentally new, and the main question is : to what extent is does it have designerly agency?

The disappearing computer, – launched by Future and Emerging Technologies, the European Commission’s IST Programme – is a vision of the future: “in which our everyday world of objects and places become ‘infused’ and ‘augmented’ with information processing. In this vision, computing, information processing, and computers disappear into the background, and take on the role more similar to that of electricity (it. mine) today – an invisible, pervasive medium distributed on our real world.” In such a real world, Martin Rantzer of Ericsson Foresight, claims in A future world of supersenses: “New communication senses will be needed in the future to enable people to absorb the enormous mass of information with which they are confronted.” According to him the user interfaces we use today to transmit information to our brains threaten to create a real bottleneck for new broadband services. “The boundaries of what constitutes consumer electronics and computers are getting blurred,” says Gerard J. Kleisterlee, chief executive of Royal Philips Electronics, “As we get wireless networking in the home, everything starts to talk to everything.”

In such a mediated environment – where everything is connected to everything – it is no longer clear what is being mediated, and what mediates.

Design decisions become process decisions in a mediatized environment.

Such environments – your kitchen, your living-room, our shopping malls, the streets of old villages, websites, schools, p2p networks, are new beginnings as they reformulate our sense of ourselves in places in spaces in time.

The goal of the Disappearing Computer project is augmenting the world of everyday objects and places with information processing while at the same time exploiting the affordances of real objects in the real world. Dr. Norbert Streitz, one of the key figures in the network, explains that this requires “an integrated design of real and virtual worlds and – taking the best of both – developing hybrid worlds with matching metaphors.” The disappearing computer can, according to him, be thought of as genius loci, – the spirit of the place. As ‘nature’ and ‘techné’ become hybrid spheres, people become ‘tags’, or ghosts.

What is the role and place of design in these information spaces that are mediated with computational processes that generate not data (linked to other data) – the kind of communicative process that we are familiar with – but information (linked to other information)? The design challenge lies in confronting the move from interaction as a key term to resonance as an interpretative framework. Resonance refers most aptly to the way we relate to things, people, ideas in a connected environment. Interaction presupposes an ideal setting, agency and response. But mediation -the core business of interaction – is no longer a relationship. It has become the default position. The role of design lies in making visible what is not visible as such, creating seismographs – ways of reading the flowing surface realities of both digital and analogue data – ways of reading them, as they will surely read us.

Landmarks:

“Searching for sudden “bursts” in the usage of particular words could be used to rapidly identify new trends and sort information more efficiently”, says a US computer scientist., Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University in New York. The method could be applied to weblogs to track new social trends; “For example, identifying word bursts in the hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze, or identifying word bursts within email messages sent to a company’s customer support address might help maintenance staff spot a major new problem.

Mapping territory: what kind of literacies do we need to design?

All things tend to disappear, and especially things man made. ‘Ephemeralisation’ was Buckminster Fuller’s term for describing the way that a technology becomes subsumed in the society that uses it.

The pencil, the gramophone, the telephone, the cd player, technology that was around when we grew up, is not technology to us, it is simply another layer of connectivity. Ephemeralisation is the process where technologies are being turned into functional literacies; on the level of their grammar, however, there is very little coordination in their disappearing acts. These technologies disappear as technology because we can not see them as something we have to master, to learn, to study. They seem to be a given. Their interface is so intuitive, so tailored to specific tasks, that they seem natural. In this we resemble the primitive man of Ortega y Gasset:

“…the type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch rising up in the midst of a civilised world. The world is a civilised one, its inhabitant is not: he does not see the civilisation of the world around him, but he uses it as if it were a natural force. The new man wants his motor-car, and enjoys it, but he believes that it is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree. In the depths of his soul he is unaware of the artificial, almost incredible, character of civilisation, and does not extend his enthusiasm for the instruments to the principles which make them possible.”

This unawareness of the artificial, almost incredible, character of Techné – the Aristotelian term for technique, skill – is only then broken when it fails us:

“Central London was brought to a standstill in the rush hour on July 25 2002 when 800sets of traffic lights failed at the same time — in effect locking signals on red.”

Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem rather incredible now, at the time it meant nothing less than a radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a system of thought and set of grammar; an oral literacy dependant on a functionality of internal information visualization techniques and recall, was made redundant because the techniques could be externalised.

Throughout Western civilization the history of memory externalisation runs parallel with the experienced disappearance of its artificial, man made, character. An accidental disappearance, however much intrinsic to our experience, that up till now has not
been deliberate.

This then is the fundamental change and the design challenge that we are facing in ubicomp; the deliberate attempt of a technology to disappear as technology.

It took me five years to figure out, to grasp, – understand – let me use the word resonate – these lines of Heraclitus: and I rephrase them in my own lines – “of all that which is dispersed haphazardly, the order is most beautiful.” In the Fragments you read that these lines are incomprehensible as far as the Heraclitus scholars are concerned. They can not link it as a line of verse with other words in other lines in verse. I read it and in reading I knew it to be true. Knowing that only as experience is not very productive in a society that has no non-iconic medium for transmitting these kinds of experiences. In order to make this experience productive; read: make it politically viable and socially constructive – in order to find ways of transmitting, ways of teaching experiences like this – we textualise them. We find analogies, we read initial lines as metaphor, as metonomy. I went for a walk one day in the woods near F., in theBelgian Ardennes. A beautiful walk it was, steep down, hued autumn colours, leaves fading into black. In the quiet meadow that we passed I saw autumn leaves, small twigs, pebbles sometimes – hurdled into the most beautiful of patterns by the strenght of water moving. I looked hard realizing there was indeed no other way of arranging them.

I recognized leaves as data. I recognized data as data. And I recognized the inability to find a way to come to terms with Heraclitus’ line without walking, without taking a stroll in the woods and look around you, look around you and find the strenght of streams arranging.

Landmarks:

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, notice in a citation database that misprints in references are fairly common, and that a lot of the mistakes are identical. They looked at a famous 1973 paper on the structure of two-dimensional crystals; cited in other papers 4300 times, with 196 citations containing misprints in the volume, page or year. It appeared that 45 scientists, who might well have read the paper, made an error when they cited it. Then 151 others copied their misprints without reading the original. So for at least 77 per cent of the 196 misprinted citations, no one read the paper. A group of prominent scientists announce the creation of two open-source peer-reviewed online journals on biology and medicine. They intend to bring the best papers in the public domain. Says Dr. Harold E. Varmus, chairman of the new nonprofit publisher, “Our ability to build on the old to discover the new is all based on the way we disseminate our results.”

Mapping territory:

If ubiquitous computing enables something fundamentally new, to what extent does it have designerly agency?

The status of theory in the larger field of design practice and design teaching has generally been framed in terms of relevance. For the theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, however, one of the central mysteries of science is the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. Steven Weinberg asserts: “So irrelevant is the philosophy of quantum mechanics to its use, that one begins to suspect that all the deep questions about the meaning of measurement are really empty, forced on us by our language, a language that evolved in a world governed very nearly by classical physics.”

Wigner and Weinberg are able to label the theoretical foundations of their own practice as ‘irrelevant’ because they work within a well-defined paradigm towards the development of the latest unified theory, the string theory. They know where they are heading. And whereas theoretical physicists travel backwards towards a fixed point, designers can only move forwards to territory as yet unread.

This territory, however, can be mapped.

The status of theory here lies in it’s ability to map out unexplored territory and function as a conceptual framework that distinguishes between productive and non-productive questions, determines when observations become data, and posits cognitive objectives. But it is not per se relevant. On the contrary, it concerns itself with the mechanisms of making sense on a daily basis, on a concrete level of dealing with the various experiences of reality that defy relevance.

Following up on a USA Today (August 5, 2002) piece on how new SUV interiors are being designed to be “more like living rooms.” Michael Kaplan noticed on Design-l that more and more people are leaving their SUVs in shopping center parking lots locked with the engines running (to power the air conditioners). He sees “people sitting in them using their cell phones, watching television, or working on their laptops.” He writes: “It occurred to me that the SUV, for many people, is an extension of their home, a little mobile room they can detach and live in when they are not in their fixed home. All fine and well, if these things didn’t consume so much energy, pollute the environment, take up excessive parking space, and pose danger to smaller vehicles. They should probably be taxed for the damage they do (lol). And I would think, too, that they could be designed better for what they are used for, have a solar collectors covering their huge surface area to keep the a/c running while parked.”

This story narrates this now everyday experience of being grounded when we are on the road, being at home while mobile. It also narrates the design tendencies of this increased interconnecivity of mediasystems – television, mobiles, computers – as it tries to immerse itself into very familiar objects, here the automobile. It is precisely because of the familiarity of the local space that mediasystems are added to the automobile, leaving its primary function – to make miles – intact.

Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy:, the deliberate attempt of a technology to disappear as technology, implies that designers not only produce new products but also the process procedures that gave birth to these products in these first place.

In Smile, You’re on In-Store Camera, Erik Baard describes how the web shopping process of following your customer every step of the way, might now become effectively used in an ordinary supermarket: “The algorithm looks for shapes of people and (passes) the same individual off from camera to camera by, for example, looking for a yellowcolor leaving the left side of one camera view to enter the overlapping right side of the next. ” The algorithm is tuned with pressure-sensitive carpets. Neither Identix (formerly Visionics), nor the originator of the pressure-sensitive magic carpet, MIT Media Lab researcher Joe Paradisso, thought of these ways of using their work for tracking consumers: “I was thinking of music. I never thought about this for retail at all,” said Paradisso, who has designed performance spaces where footsteps trigger bass or percussive sounds and torso, head and arm movements elicit higher, “twinkling” notes.”

Ubicomp Applications

The editors of the first volume of Visual Communication, claim that: “at the same time as the study of language and communication has become more openly oriented towards practical problems, the practice of designing visual communications has become more openly allied to research.” The working notion of research, however in current academies is deeply infested with a sterile theory-practice dichotomy that functioned in a mechanistic worldview, but is hardly productive in a ubicomp world. We face the challenge of rethinking research as a performative practice based on creatingapplications for societal benefit. There are very few ubicomp applications atthe moment that do not focus on control or surveillance issues. There is real need
for applications that empower users in dealing with uncertain situations. Of my following work in progress, Anthony D. Joseph, editor of the Pervasive Computing magazine, says it “represents an interesting combination and application of medical and computer technology”.

UBICOMP TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK FOR PEOPLE WITH OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER

Rob van Kranenburg * Resonance Design

Roger was a successful vice president of a bank, unremarkable in every respect, except one. Before starting a task, he had to pull his socks up and down five times. Exactly five. Roger (not his real name) had obsessive-compulsive disorder. Like a skipping record, OCD patients repeat an act or repeatedly think about a phrase, number, or concept. “Most of us are able to switch things off,” says Hopkins professor ofpsychiatry Rudolf Hoehn-Saric. “In obsessive-compulsive disorder, the person can’t.” (M. Hendricks, “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Adjusting His Socks,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, June 1995; www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/695web/socks.html)

In the US and Netherlands, one in 50 adults currently has OCD, and twice as many have had it at some point in their lives. OCD is a medical brain disorder that causes problems in information processing, creating a loop in the feedback procedure so that people miss the “ka-chung” that closes a car door or the click that shuts down the television. According to the Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation,

“Worries, doubts, and superstitious beliefs all are common in everyday life. However, when they become so excessive, such as hours of hand washing, or make no sense at all, such as driving around and around the block to check that an accident didn’t occur, then a diagnosis of OCD is made. In OCD, it is as though the brain gets stuck on a particularthought or urge and just can’t let go. People with OCD often say the symptoms feel like a case of mental hiccups that won’t go away. OCD is a medical brain disorder that causes problems in information processing. It is not your fault or the result of a “weak” or unstable personality.” (The Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation, www.ocfoundation.org/ocf1010a.htm)

How could ubicomp be instrumental here? Phase 1 is researching if ubicomp applications can assess if a person has a tendency for audio, visual, tactile, or other kinds of feedback that would signal the task scenario’s closure. In Phase 2, we would have to access, for example, if visual feedback on clothing or another appliance could break the chain of repetition for a person who functions on visual feedback but is dealing with an apparatus that does not provide such feedback. Working closely with psychiatrists and OCD patients, in Phase 3 we could test whether such ubiquitous computing applications could break the loop of repetition, assuming that it is the kind of feedback that is responsible for the taskloop’s nonclosure.

A group of researchers performed experiments and concluded that “the OCD group performed significantly worse than controls in the temporal ordering task despite showing normal recognition memory. Patients were also impaired in ‘feeling-of-doing’ judgments, suggesting they have a lack of self-awareness of their performance” (M.A. Jurado et al., “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): Patients are Impaired in Remembering Temporal Order and in Judging Their Own Performance,” J. Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, vol. 24, no. 3, 2002, pp. 261-269).

Based on these findings, research into ubicomp applications could focus on temporal markers and serendipitous feedback scripting into various scenarios to raise self-awareness.

The three phases just discussed are being developed within the framework of contemporary performance and theatrical practice. There we find an actualization of (and ways of dealing with) the bottleneck scenarios that information experts envision.

In this research as performative practice setting we can both acknowledge a certain group of performances as experiments in dealing with information overload, and acknowledge that implementing digital connecitivity in an analogue environment without a design for all the senses , without a concept of corporal literacy, leads to information overload. In a ubiquitous computing environment the new intelligence is extelligence, “knowledge and tools that are outside people’s heads” (Stewart and Cohen, 1997) In a ubiquitous computing environment the user has to be not only textually and visually literate, both also have corporal literacy, that is an awareness of extelligence and a working knowledge of all the senses.

The main question from a design educational point of view then concerns the kind of skills and kind of literacies that a designer needs to function. And these turn out to be those that are most foreign to an educational practice today, as this new situation needs designers that can assess emergent literacies, unforeseen uses, unintended use, and resonance – not interaction – as the key producer of causalities.

For such a designer the default position is one of uncertainty, of being able to cope with a continuous delaying of the act of closure, of an ‘end’. In the new 754i BMW sedan the iDrive, also known as the miracle knob “is designed, through a computerizedconsole, to replace more than 200 that control everything from the position of seats to aspects of the navigation of the car itself to climate, communications and entertainment systems.” In May 2002 15,000 7-series were recalled. “BMW tried to do too many things at once with this car, and they underestimated the software problem,” says Conley, ex-CEO of EPRO Corp.” Only two-thirds of hardware has been unleashed by software. There are so many predecessors and dependencies within software that it’s like spaghetti-ware. It’s not that easy to get all these little components to plug and play.” When the product and the process gets confused, pitfalls arise. What does this mean for connectivity in a business environment?

It means that there is a need for tools to master this merging of digital and analogue processes of communication and database-driven systems. As the environment becomes the interface, where is the company ydashboard, the familiar readers of situation, actions, scenarios?

Ubicomp pitfalls:

In Insourcing Information Management: Ford CIO Mary Adams makes information management a core competency and is cutting costs. How? She is bringing more IT people-and projects-inside. She recognized “that the highest return on investment comes from technology that is deeply integrated into the core operating systems, practices and processes of the company-not a strategy that puts an Internet veneer in front of things that still needto be fixed. ” Ford is bringing much of what was outsourced back inside: from having 146 different premier IT providers they are down to eight. Adams: ” Insourcing gives you more control over the quality and speed of your IT work. It’s about taking complete ownership and accountability for most IT work done at Ford and, in some ways, it’s being able to test, prove and develop in-house more cheaply than before. In that way, it reduces risk.” Insourcing is strategy that is also helping to avoid the “primaryreason for the high failure rate of the first generation of customer relationship management projects: a failure to align software capabilities with the actual needs of customers.

Pitfall: How do you know what services to insource without losing touch with emerging services and needs?

In Customer Relation Management: Gartner research director Beth Eisenfeld claims that it is “crucial to identify and quantify the processes involved in a company’s interactions with customers to see where they break down, and then to redefine them across all departments. Only then does it make sense to add technology to the mix. It ispossible — even likely — that a company may have hundreds or thousands of such processes, Eisenfeld said. But the sheer numbers should not be cause for alarm. Identifying them will enable a CRM newcomer to establish meaningful priorities.”

Pitfall: How do you map these hundreds or thousands of processes in a dynamic way?

In media convergence: Tim Fenton, Managing Editor, BBC News Interactive claims: ‘At BBC News Interactive, we believe convergence of basic production is necessary if we are to continue to increase efficiency and deliver a consistent service across all media. At the same time, we believe our audience is diverging and we are going to have to produce a greater number of better-targeted services. Reconciling these two is our greatest organisational challenge.’ This reconciliation is now attempted by the move in stealth marketing, in guerrilla marketing from using mixed media (radio, sms, billboard, television) to create user experiences to designing experiences by mediating the environment.

Pitfall: Attempting this reconciliation media convergence and audience divergence with concepts that are infused by the scarcity principle, will not be able to detect emergent literacies, needs and services.

In profiling strategies: “Federal aviation authorities and technology companies will soon begin testing a vast air security screening system designed to instantly pull together every passenger’s travel history and living arrangements, plus a wealth of other personal and demographic information.” Says Robert O’Harrow Jr. The government’s plan is to “establish a computer network linking every reservation system in the United States to private and government databases. The network would use data-mining and predictive software to profile passenger activity and intuit obscure clues about potential threats, even before (italics mine) the scheduled day of flight. Computers would apply statistical algorithms to correlate physiologic patterns with computerized data on travel routines, criminal background and credit information from “hundreds to thousands of data sources,” NASA documents say.

Pitfall: Note the extremities to which the designers will go to script serendipity into their profiling strategy: data-mining and predictive software, obscure clues, statistical algorithms, physiologic patterns, computerized data from “hundreds to thousands of data sources”.

What becomes the toplevel skill in this environment? Serendipity used to be an interpretative tool, the skill to lay bare hidden connections. Now the ability to read data as data has become the top level skill. How else are you going to make sense of the serendipity that is scripted into your profiling strategies? How do you differentiate between content and context is your content is inherently contextualized?

Mapping territory: Extelligence: buildings, cars and people become information spaces .

The ultimate aim of all creativity is the building! And the italics are original to Walter Gropius Manifesto of the Bahaus (April 1919): “Let us together desire, conceive and create the new building of the future, which will combine everything – architecture and sculpture and painting – in a single form=8A.” In a ubicomp environment, architecture will become once again the core unit of design. For something has fundamentally changed; the very nature of information itself, no longer analogue, no longer digital, and not hybrid neither: buildings, cars and people can now be defined as information spaces. Anthony Townsend, from Taub Urban Research Center, has been asked commission by the South Korean government to “turn an undeveloped parcel of land on the outskirts of Seoul into a city whose raison d’etre will be to produce and consumeproducts and services based on new digital technologies. ” The main challenge lies in the realization that “half of designing a city is going to be information spaces that accompany it because lots of people will use this to navigate around.” Townsend claims that telecommunications in a city in 2012 is going to be a lot more complex: “The most interesting thing about it will be that you won’t be able to see it all at once because all these data structures, computational devices, digital networks and cyberspaces that are built upon those components will be invisible unless you have the password or unless you are a member of the group that is permitted to see them.” In such an environment, the people themselves – human bodies- become information spaces too.

Tree major U.S. car manufacturers plan to install rfd tags in ” every tire sold in the nation”. The tags can be read on vehicles going as fast as 160 kilometers per hour from a distance of 4.5 meters. In January 2003, Gillette began attaching rfd tags to 500 million of its Mach 3 Turbo razors. Smart shelves at Wal-Mart stores “will record the removal of razors by shoppers, thereby alerting stock clerks whenever shelves need to be refilled-and effectively transforming Gillette customers into walking radio beacons.” London Underground will in all probality have about 10.000 CCTV’s by 2004 (it now has 5000). The systems architecture – MIPSA , Modular Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance Architecture – is programmed with scenarios – “such as unattended objects, too much congestion, or people loitering – and when it detects one of those, it alerts the operator through a series of flashing lights and messages.”

“To determine what is suspect, the system memorizes the features of an image that are constant, and then subtracts those to figure out what is happening. It looks at patterns of motion and their intensity. Things that are stationary for too long in a busy environment raise alarms..”

Are our current designers equipped to deal with these fundamental issues and dilemma’s, where what used to be media ethics has now become building ethics itself?

Landmarks:

In SMART MOBS, Howard Rheingold documents the role of text coordinating mass demonstrations against President Joseph Estrada in January 2001. DARPA is two-year-old $50-million Human ID at a Distance program. And while automated face recognition receives the most attention, DARPA is also funding efforts at a handful of universities to identify people through their body language. The theory is simple: in the same way that each person has a unique signature or fingerprint, each person also has a unique walk. The trick is to take this body language and translate it into numbers that a computer can recognize. One approach is to create a “movement signature” for each person.” Bemoaning “the loss of old skills is probably not the most productive way to critique the new technologies.” The greater need is to recognize that, precisely *because* of the labor-saving capabilities of our high-tech tools, the art of mastery demands greater skills and more arduous discipline than ever before.

Mapping territory: Vision

“As thousands of ordinary people buy monitoring devices and services, the unplanned result will be an immense, overlapping grid of surveillance systems, created unintentionally by the same ad-hocracy that caused the Internet to explode. Meanwhile, the computer networks on which monitoring data are stored and manipulated continue to grow faster, cheaper, smarter, and able to store information in greater volume for longer times. Ubiquitous digital surveillance will marry widespread computational power-with startling results.”

The most intriguing aspect of Bauhaus is that the most successful unit, – the unit coming ‘closest to Bauhaus intentions’, as Gropius stated, the pottery workshop – was located 25 kilometers from Weimar, in Dornburg. It was hard to reach by train, and hard to reach by car. The workshop master Max Krehan owned the workshop, so there was a business interest from the start. The relationship with Marcks , the Master of Form, was not contaminated with formalized roundtable discussions, but was a productive twoway (abstract-concrete) interrelationship.

“More important still, in terms of what Gropius hoped for the entire Bauhaus, was theway in which the pottery workshop operated in close co-operation with the local community in which it found itself. It made pots for the community and the town of Dornburg leased the workshop a plot of land which the students used for vegetables and on which, it was hoped, they would build.”So what can we learn from this? That we must not aim to define, alter or transform practices, processes, places or people. What should be aimed at to define is a vision. A vision that should be able to inspire and empower designers in their concrete experience of agency in this undesignerly new world, towards a humanistic and optimistic positive attitude in the role, function and leadership of the designer in his and her capability to make sense, to work within an uncertain framework of unforeseen consequences, unintended uses, and procedural breakdown.

Three basic ideas underlie this vision:

the dominance of a yet to be developed concept of life and living as slow becoming, as in Eugéne Minkowsky’s idea that the essence of life is not “a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.”

the dominance of a yet to be developed concept of slow money, so as to focus on the design process on the one hand and the sustainability of the design products on the other

and three a working concept of our former notion of control, as resonance.

Rob van Kranenburg, july 2003.

Notes:

-Weinberg. S. Dreams of a final theory Vintage, 1993, p. 52. From the BBC documentary, Volcano Hell: “Chouet’s methods have commanded wide respect and have been increasingly used around the world. In a dramatic demonstration last year Mexican scientists used Chouet’s method to predict an eruption of the mighty volcano Popocatpetl. Tens of thousands of people were safely evacuated just before the biggest eruption of the volcano for a thousand years. No one was hurt.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/volcanohell.shtml

Whittaker, L. A. ‘Human Navigation’, in ”Human Factors and Web Development’, in Forsythe C., Grose, E., Ratner, J., (eds.) Human factors and Web Development New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998, p. 64.

Shops reveal plans to replace barcodes, By Steve Ranger [04-09-2002]

Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the Twenty-First Century,” Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991 http://www.disappearing-computer.net/

At Big Consumer Electronics Show, the Buzz Is All About Connections January 13, 2003 By SAUL HANSELL, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/13/technology/13DIGI.html?ex=3D1043457162&ei=
=3D1&en=3D124b1e27fe81246e

Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 10:35:02 -0600 (CST) Subject: [>Htech] New Scientist: Word ‘bursts’ may reveal online trends Reply-To: transhumantech {AT} yahoogroups.com Word ‘bursts’ may reveal online trends , Will Knight.

From: Chris Hutchings [SMTP:chris.hutchings {AT} VISCOMM.CO.UK] Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 1:18 AM To: IDFORUM {AT} YORKU.CA Subject: Re: the future of…

Ortega Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses,

“The worst gridlock the capital has seen for years was caused by a computer which crashed as engineers installed software designed to give pedestrians longer to cross the roads.”. Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 09:55:35 +0100 From: Adrian Lightly adrian {AT} pigeonhold.com Subject: Gridlock as 800 London traffic lights seize

From: Premise Checker checker {AT} mail.sheergeniussoftware.com Mailing-List: list transhumantech {AT} yahoogroups.com Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2002 09:48:06 -0600 (CST) Subject: [>Htech] New Scientist: Scientists exposed as sloppy reporters Scientists exposed as sloppy reporters, by Hazel Muir.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=3Dns99993168

Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2002 17:52:10 -0600 From: Ian Pitchford ian.pitchford {AT} scientist.com To: evolutionary-psychology {AT} yahoogroups.com Subject: [evol-psych] New premise in science: Get the word out quickly, online

Doors of Perception, Meeting for Interaction Design Course Leaders, 17 November 2002, with Jo Gell, Smartlab, Brenda Laurel, Pasadena, California, Jouke Kleerebezem, Jan van Eyck Academie, Emma Westecott, The Interactive Institute, Nico Macdonald Design Agenda., Philipp Heidkamp, International School of Design, Brendon Clark, Mads Clausen Institute for Product Innovation, Alan Munro (DC Steering Committee)

Smile, You’re on In-Store Camera By Erik Baard http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,54078,00.html

Visual Communication, volume 1, number 1, February 2OO2 ISSN 1470-3572

In: Pervasive Computing, Jan-March 2003. The third work in progress discusses how ubicomp applications could help people with obsessive-compulsive disorder by providing them with additional audio, visual, or tactile feedback that helps break repetition loops. This area of research represents an interesting combination and application of medical and computer technology for societal benefit. -Anthony D. Joseph http://dsonline.computer.org/0303/f/b1wip.htm

From: Dewayne Hendricks dewayne {AT} warpspeed.com January 16, 2003 Consumer Products: When Software Bugs Bite By Debbie Gage

CRM SPECIAL REPORT: Practical CRM for the Uninitiated By Erika Morphy CRMDaily.com January 15, 2003 http://www.crmdaily.com/perl/story/20467.html

EJC News. http://www.ejc.nl/cp/courses.asp?recordID=3D496 Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, February 1, 2002

Designing the century’s first digital city, By Sandeep Junnarkar , Staff Writer, CNET News.com, September 18, 2002, 12:00 PM PT http://news.com.com/2008-1082-958461.html

From: “futurefeedforward” fff {AT} futurefeedforward.com Date: Sun Mar
23, 2003 07:27:39 PM US/Central To: bruces {AT} well.com Surveillance Nation, Technology Review, April 2003 Surveillance Nation, Technology Review, April 2003

Stand still too long and you’ll be watched New imaging software alerts surveillance-camera operators to suspect situations by monitoring patterns of motion By Kim Campbell | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1107/p17s01-stct.htm

List-Archive: http://www.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l/ Date: Sat, 18
Jan 2003 11:16:47 -0800 Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 04:10:49 +0100 From: andrew hennessey Reply-To: fsml {AT} yahoogroups.com To: fsml {AT} yahoogroups.com Subject: [fsml] Walk This Way. Walk This Way http://www.techreview.com/articles/wo_cameron042302.asp. By David Cameron April 23, 2002

To fully analyze and grasp the situation will not lead to major organizational, political, and design breakthroughs, if we are not able to fully grasp the trajectory from thing as gathering places for spaces and discussion, from ‘matters of concern’:

“A heuristic use of the term ‘thing’ has also been adopted by Bruno Latour, who, after Heidegger, has worked to transform the semantic emphasis of ‘things’ from ‘matters of concern’. Drawing on older etymologies in which ‘thing’ denoted a gathering place, a space for discussion and negotiation; Latour has rehabilitated this sense of the term as a way out of the twin cul-de- sac of constructivism and objectivity”. (Rebecca Empson in THINKING THROUGH THINGS, Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (eds). 2007. Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London and New York: Routledge. 248 pages. ISBN: 978-1-84472-071-2)

In Art and Agency, an Anthropological Theory, Alfred Gell puts emphasis “upon art as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others”. He defines volt sorcery as the “practice of inflicting harm on the prototype of an index by inflicting harm on the index, for example, sticking pins into a wax image of the prototype.” In Separating and Containing People and Things in Mongolia, Rebecca Empson writes: “… the doing involved in making things visible or invisible makes relations. In this sense vision’ becomes the tool by which relations are created”.

In a project like Hivenetworks things are made into Hive devices by the act of making them into Hive devices. The doing makes the transformation real, the performative act is critical. In this sense ‘coding’ becomes the tool by which relations are created. By removing the manufacturer’s software on the Asus WL-HDD and replacing it with the Hive firmware – “experimental Open Source software” – it becomes a different thing in more than a constructivist sense, a new object is created: “It is for this reason, for example, that the claim that when Cuban diviners say that powder is power they are speaking of a different powder (and a different power also) is not a ‘constructivist’ claim. To put it in Foucauldian terms, the point is not that the discursive claims (eg. ‘powder is power’) order reality in different ways – according to different ‘regimes of truth’ – but rather that they create new objects (e.g. powerful powder) in the very act of enunciating new concepts (eg. powerful powder)”.

HOMES

The ultimate aim of all creativity is the building! And the italics are original to Walter Gropius Manifesto of the Bahaus (April 1919): “Let us together desire, conceive and create the new building of the future, which will combine everything – architecture and sculpture and painting – in a single form….”

Building will become once again the core unit of design. For something has fundamentally changed; the very nature of information itself, no longer analogue, no longer digital, and not hybrid neither: buildings, cars and people can now be defined as information spaces.

Anthony Townsend, from Taub Urban Research Center, has been asked by the South Korean (in 2002) government to “turn an undeveloped parcel of land on the outskirts of Seoul into a city whose raison d’etre will be to produce and consume products and services based on new digital technologies.“ The main challenge lies in the realization that “half of designing a city is going to be information spaces that accompany it because lots of people will use this to navigate around.” Waiting rooms, he claims, become something of an anachronism because no one really waits anymore. Townsend claims that telecommunications in a city in 2012 is going to be a lot more complex: “The most interesting thing about it will be that you won’t be able to see it all at once because all these data structures, computational devices, digital networks and cyberspaces that are built upon those components will be invisible unless you have the password or unless you are a member of the group that is permitted to see them”. In such an environment, – a truly magic one – people themselves become information spaces. Building, cars people, and homes become information spaces that can be described in the same markup languages.” ( RVK Mapping Territory, Nettime 2003)

Where do the current U cities stand on this development?

In a ubiquitous computing environment the new intelligence is extelligence,“knowledge and tools that are outside people’s heads”. When computational processes disappear, the environment becomes the interface. In such an environment – where the computer has disappeared as visible technology – and human beings have become designable and designerly information spaces design decisions inevitably become process decisions. Are our current designers, architects, policy makers equipped to deal with these fundamental issues and dilemma’s, where what used to be media ethics has now become building ethics itself?

What happens if we network homes in streets and neighborhoods, in order to share energy, connectivity and other resources?

Wht does living together mean?

If no one waits anymore, does that mean that no one get bored anymore? Or maybe sets out to speak to a neighbor in a queue?

CITIES:

Sean Dodson: A decade ago the science fiction author David Brin published the Transparent Society. It was his tale of two cities, set 20 years in the future. Brin had a vision, or rather he had two. City Number One – The City of Control – was a city of our nightmares, torn from the darker pages of Orwell’s 1984 and Zamyatin’s We. It is a place where “myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image processors to scan for infractions against the public order – or perhaps against an established way of thought”. In this city of glass, Brin warned, citizens walk the streets aware that “any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau”.

But Brin also painted another city. This city would be as transparent as glass; here too the cameras remain, “perched on every vantage point”, but a subtle difference liberates these citizens from the aforementioned City of Control. Here the silent sentries do not signal straight back to the secret police, rather “each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town. Here, a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn. Over there, a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by the city hall fountain. A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds what way her child has wandered off. Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest his neutral professionalism lapse”.

Our two cities are tied together like an “internet of things”. They are places where the urban infrastructure is embedded with a sophisticated network of traceable items. They are places where consumer goods are assigned IP addresses, just as web pages are today. And like Brin’s Transparent Society, our future cities of glass could go one of two ways. (text from Sean Dodson in The Internet of Things, Network Notebook No 2

So ask yourself, which one would you want?

Technicism and science are consubstantial, and science no longer exists when it ceases to interest for itself alone, and it cannot so interest unless men continue to feel enthusiasm for the general principles of culture. – José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses.

In this short text I want to propose two things for IoT: an open generic value, service and organizational layer and a device. Combined, these can create enthusiasm and a vision to transcend the false opposition between ‘progressive’ Wikileaks and ‘conservative’ US State Department calls for “the development and support of web-based circumvention technology to enable users in closed societies to get around firewalls and filters in acutely hostile Internet environments.” In terms of Climate Change, running out of natural resources and exploding human birth rates, defining what is an open or closed society in human terms of flows of data is an academic exercise when more cities start to look like New Orleans, Detroit and Brisbane.

Co-moderating the first IOT-A Stakeholder workshop in Paris (October 2010) it became clear how strongly big industry and the big system integrators envisage a global generic value chain where items will be logged, tracked and traced. The extent to which this will change them as individual brands is moderately foreseen in this operation. In the Spring 2011 edition of the Situated Technologies series, Christian Nold and I argue in ‘The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World’ that this process much resembles the standardmaking of the barcode and EPC Global. The first refers to items as a batch, the second (RFID) to uniquely identifiable items. As the Internet of Things has huge societal as well as economic implications, we argue that the standard making process that will build this generic value chain should include social and cultural issues as well as logistic and system driven ones.

The second reason why we need global hard regulated standards on a simple, effective and highly integrated value chain wave strategy with as little noise, redundancy and overlap as possible is that we have as of yet no coherent academic view on the effects of radio-waves on humans, animals and plants. The Sensing Planet, and Smart City are very powerful concepts to streamline new balances between people and the planet, people and animals and plants and people and other people. They require huge sensor-beds and a large number of UHF readers as well as astronomical amounts of handheld readers in mobile devices. In the input I gave to EP Lena Kolarska Bobinska, a number of the issues I raised through Council, the thinktank I founded in december 2009 (currently 71 professionals), made it to Parliament resolution of 15 June 2010 on the Internet of Things (2009/2224(INI), (P7_TA-PROV(2010)0207) such as “Stresses the importance of studying the social, ethical and cultural implications of the Internet of Things, in the light of the potentially far-reaching transformation of civilisation that will be brought about by these technologies; takes the view, therefore, that it is important for socio-economic research and political debate on the Internet of Things to go hand in hand with technological research and its advancement,” and the request for the study of “the impact of electromagnetic fields on animals, especially birds in cities;”. In the light of the recent mass deaths of birds in different places in the world linked by some to “microwave radiation from 4G-networks” this seems to become relevant. It makes sense to have a Sensing Planet only if the very infrastructure that does the sensing becomes not an integral part of the problem.

Without significant changes in the next 5 years of EU’s Digital Agenda the billions invested so far and in FP8 will have served as investments in platforms that are either closed (FP7 and 8 Security), used for free by an integrated Chinese value layer (that has won from GS1 as the main dominant identification scheme) serve as a municipal layer of citizen services dominated by the IBM/Cisco Smart City concept, and facilitate a service layer dominated by Facebook/Google/Apple as the social networking billions will find their way into more critical functions of everyday life. Europe will be a testbed for these services with its high level of education of citizens and rich culture that can be explored. But it is clear that it will pay all the bills and make no money.

In the mid-1990′s we see the first attempts to give citizens real-time feedback on public transport in cities. The European Union had a very productive R&D scheme for academics and companies called “Intelligent Information Interfaces” which included projects like “Ambient Agoras,” “Interliving” and “Grocer.” In 1996, Philips developed a social RFID project called Living Memory (LiMe) that would “provide members of a local community with a means to capture, share and explore their collective memories” via RFID tokens that interact with screens in bars and bus stop information boards. Hardly any of these projects led to the creation of actual products. Companies could not agree on the intellectual property for the things that were developed and the timing for pervasive computing business models was off. They did not produce anything but they have learned from these projects. Today they talk about co-creation and real people. In 2003, at a time when the EU funded research projects like LiMe, Steven Kyffin of Philips stated:

USEFUL …listening to and developing technology for ordinary people sums up what we might refer to as Co-Creative design. Involving the end user in a core and proactive manner at all stages in the product or system creation process.

RELEVANT …listening to and developing technology for ordinary people is so relevant because the “ordinary…ness” is the issue.

Malta has been a member of the European Union since 2004. Like all states today it aims to be smart. It has set up Smart City Malta. The contact officer providing the expertise is from Dubai, the press contact from Cisco. The model on which it is based is…Dubai: “SmartCity Malta is a self-sustained industry township for knowledge-based companies located in the Ricasoli Estate in Malta. To be developed by SmartCity, in partnership with the Government of Malta, SmartCity Malta will be home to a vibrant knowledge-economy community anchored by leading global, regional and local companies. SmartCity Malta is set to become the leading ICT and Media cluster in the heart of the Mediterranean and the first European outpost of the global SmartCity network. With a minimum investment outlay of US $ 300 million, SmartCity Malta will transform Malta into a state-of-the-art ICT and Media business community based on the successful clusters of Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City and Dubai Knowledge Village.”

This is not serious. European citizens are getting the worst of all possible worlds. They do not have the positive effects of the huge potential and actuality of policy, product, and hardware infrastructure integration of the Chinese vision, nor the positive effects of the USA extreme no-policy-whatsoever laissez fare situation that allows the social networking sites to flourish without privacy policies, Apple to close garden and Google, IBM and CISCO to start investing in society critical infrastructure and services in purely capitalist fashion. Instead their money pays for platforms that other people make money off, their ISP’s have to comply with data privacy rules based on 19th century notions of romantic autonomous individuals, there is no VC money for European IoT startups that have to go to Asia to get funding, and worst of all: we all know this and seem to simply carry on, caught in our policy formats.

Uptake goes through devices. People run their applications on their smart-phones without investigating the algorythms that inform them. Code is law in this respect still. The device holds the key to the protocols it allows on the back end and the applications and interoperability it allows with other hardware and software. It is possible to embed social, cultural and economic value in this process. In fact that is what law is doing all the time.

Speaking on The Internet of Things at a Far Horizon workshop held on the 2nd and 3rd of December 2010 on “ Education for an ICT revolutionizing society” that was held within the Seventh Framework Foresight workprogram in the EU, I was engaged in conversation with Constantijn van Oranje-Nassau who in his introduction had spoken of the heavy rucksacks his children were taking to school. He wondered when the books could go in favour of a small computing pad. Someone uttered: Let’s buy them ipads! In the following discussions it was suggested to develop European standards for educational tablets, rather than adapting education to existing concepts and standards that have been developed by some non-European major players. Recently a Singapore pilot was run with schoolchildren reducing the weight of their bags drastically by giving them ipads. Many schools in the US and in European countries are following. Victor van Rij, leader of the Far Horizon project regarding education for ICT Society, mentions a Scottish school that in september 2010 fully changed to the ipad and points to the developments in the US: “The New York City public schools have ordered more than 2,000 iPads, for $1.3 million…More than 200 Chicago public schools applied for 23 district-financed iPad grants totaling $450,000. The Virginia Department of Education is overseeing a $150,000 iPad initiative that has replaced history and Advanced Placement biology textbooks at 11 schools.” I fear that very soon someone in Germany or the Netherlands will propose a similar idea. Apart from the fact that this would give Apple not only 30% on any educational EU app, but also some intrinsic editorial control, I see no reason why we should spend our money making Apple shareholders richer then they are already.

EU industry could build a more robust and cheap tablet. Build in close relationship with high education potentials such as India and China it could build a device that has the potential of tens of millions of open platforms for learning. Also for learning technology and programming.
Mark Belinski states:

“The iPad is magic to children. Press a button and it does everything that you want it to. The problem is that it doesn’t tell you how the magic happens. There’s a danger in teaching kids to inherently trust technology without being more critical of it. The iPad defaults in being a consumer technology, not a producer technology…. To truly learn about how to orient ourselves to the democratic society within which we live, it’s hard to believe that learning through a centralized and strict system is the best way to go. Open source software intrinsically reflects the values of our society – it is transparent, accountable, and efficient. As our government is increasingly built on this framework, from the new open data repositories to the sites themselves, as well as our corporate enterprise infrastructure. It’s crucial to teach our kids with tools that reflect this world.”

Uptake goes through devices. EU industry should make them. EU values should be embedded in them. EU infrastrucure should host them. A tablet for educational purposes across all member states is a very good start.

In the Council vision of a successful development of IoT there are regional ‘islands’ connected through generic layers on mission critical services that directly address Climate Change, Peak oil and the deep social changes we are witnessing from individuals being able to organise quickly for better: more social cohesion, balance and justice, or for worse: more gated communities, selfish waste of resources and communities of like minded social media ‘friends’. These generic layers can be steered most productively through devices. It is not inconceivable that a tablet for schoolchildren becomes a device that will serve these critical functions in a society that consists of organised networks. It can become a kind of passport. Through Near Field Communication it can serve as a bartering tool, either in money, or in ‘karweitjes’ (small jobs). It can be linked to smart energy meters in a street or neighbourhood showing you are actually taking out energy or putting some back in. It can be the new tool to pay ‘taxes’. Already Finance Departments are beginning to cater to their customers, showing them where their money is actually going. Where Does My Money Go? is “an independent non-partisan project trying to make government finances much easier to explore and understand – so you can see where every pound of your taxes gets spent.” Open Data programs have no logical end so at one particular point taxpayers will want to see all the bills and decide if they want to pay all the costs that states and organisations claim is necessary to serve primary functions. The algorithms informing the key protocols to the device can be opened up for change every five years.

This trade off between islands where developments can take place rooted in local practices (that can be even quite luddite) and a generic layer that is just, that treats resources and animals and plants as equals, can be the new iteration where activists, industry and policy can work together without compromising on their real talents.

The Internet of Things promises severe changes, yet in a age of permanent revolution the word ‘revolution’ itself becomes decadent, outmoded. Still it is the best word to describe disruptive innovation. It holds a promise of new and something different, alerts proven practices to the fact they too are historical, and in its most successful forms redefines the dreams and abundance of youth with the longing for stability and status quo.

a global revolution

In Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy he makes a distinction between the real enemy, – wirkliche feind – and the absolute enemy – absolute feind. This latter enemy is, according to him der eigene Frage als Gestalt. That which negates your own position, questions your very existence. The real enemy denotes our possibility to act, we can react to challenges and threats. The absolute enemy appears on thresholds to new realities that are being born out of revolutions, not out of easy transitions. Wir sollen nichts tun sondern warten wrote Heidegger. He foresaw the road that Techné was travelling, yet was articulating the notion of Techné itself. Can we see technology still as helpful in the current strategies for sustainability, energy infrastructures, communication protocols?

In Bandung (Indonesia) artist thinktank Common Room is working with designers hoping to develop a “talking three forest” in within five years. They hope this can develop a new relationship between people and environment. Usman Haque, the founder of Pachube, one of the defining startups in the very young field is “quite excited by a site that Mauj (an artist thinktank in Karachi) is working with, of unofficially reclaimed mangrove area, that has much potential for analysis, speculation and actual on-site workshop action; involving both social and ecological issues, environmental as well as economic.” He “would love if we could consider how some kind of citizen-oriented data collection and sense-making process could inform wider community-oriented activity.”

Throughout Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and South America, projects are being considered of pushing trials for the inclusion of RFID in banknotes in order to fight corruption and tax evasion that greatly hampers the growth of genuine public space, public institutions and generic infrastructures of energy, transport, it infrastructure and life long education. Maybe it is very simply because things can only get better in a lot of places in the world. It seems the case in our current economic situation we may have to say that in the EU things will probably get worse, not better in the terms in which we have been defining ‘better’. Yet the EU can not lead if it can not engender and muster a wave of positive interest and a genuine longing for more or better connectivity.

a mental revolution

Artists have always exploited the conditions for technological change, applications and services, from the pencil onwards. In the move towards ubiquituous computing – from the internet to the ‘internet of things’ – the poetic process of making meaning and creating experiences is no longer only productive on the level of design, but it lies at the heart of the IT architecture of the system, its standards and protocols. Distributing security – which is the key to digital systems that are focused on control – will in a pervasive computing – IoT- environment halt innovation, emerging uses and services and launch and learn scenarios. Resonance not interaction is the design principle in environments where connectivity is everywhere yet not always accessible to individual users.

IOT is a new actualization of subject-object relationships. Me and my surroundings, objects, clothes, mobility… w h a t e v e r, will have an added component, a digital potentiality that is potentially outside of ‘my’ control. Every generation builds it own add-ons to the notions of reality, to what it believes are the foundations of the real. What makes this move so different?

There is a table. On the table a glass. A glass of tea, jasmine? Jasmine tea. Hmm, good tea. I reach for the glass in a hurry, I gotta run. My hand, it feels like sweeping it off the table yet gently grasp it. I am not in a hurry at ll. I can take it in my hand and admire the engravings. I can see drops of condensed water gently not quite sliding over the edge. I am not in a hurry. I pour you a glass. I offer it to you. Here, a glass of Jasmine tea. There are a great number of ways to reach out for a glass. And now this glass is the one your grandmother gave to you on her dying bed. You put it on the table. Pour out jasmine tea. The affordances of a lifetime, the scope of a generation, as your reach out for the cup, the gesture itself becomes the reality that bridges worlds.

Let me tell you what will happen. A child will grow up and see a table. A glass on that table. She will put her mobile phone/device/cuddle next to the glass. She wants to find out what it is, what it means. She will for evermore and from the beginning of her time do this with and through mediating devices. And lo and behold, a movie starts playing on her cuddle, triggered buy the tag embedded in the glass. The movie is scripted by the jasmine tea providers who tell the stories they want to tell. Finally the real has become scriptable and the scriptable becomes the real.

a political revolution

The primary claim to data gathering, determining what is data in the first place, what the status of information is and how knowledge is to be made operational is no longer wed to universities and academic institutions. Neither is its output, the essay, the report, the document the sole format through which broadly shared notions on what is acceptable and real can be spread. Networks of professional amateurs, informed citizens and selftaught experts as well as science itself are looking for new trusted formats of transmitting data, information and knowledge. The expertise of designers and artists in designing broadly shared events, conferences, local workshops, flashmob seminars in streets and neignbourhoods, foregrounding humor, irony, passion and love, is essential.

Maybe it can be the positive solution, the logical step in the history of outsourcing memory to objects, devices and the environment, for the challenges we all face today of an ever growing individualization that might tempt citizens into breaking with existing solidarities ( among race, gender, ethnicity, age…) that are currently harnassed through the nation state. What if through the Internet of Things we can create a layer of data, open to all, through which individuals can decide for themselves what they are willing to pay for, get direct feedback from their voluntary donations, coordinate community spending that has a direct bearing to their needs through participatory budgetting, negociate with other people in other parts of the world how to use their money?

a bartering revolution

There is a broad growing consencus that current monetary systems are not working for any of the stakeholders in the long run, whether it is citizens, lenders, shareholders, investors. They might all profit maximally at one particular point in the cycle but overall loss and gain seems to even out. IOT seems to favour micropayments and transparency in transaction. We can envisage a definition of IoT identity as an ever changing mix of relations between a physical body of a person, his or her objects and a ‘smart’ environment. Monitoring mechanisms will be build into devices themselves. It is unproductive to attempt to isolate old constants in such an environment. The privacy of objects is just as relevant or irrelevant as the privacy of persons in this fluid ecology that is called ‘identity’.

an educational revolution

What is the role of a museum in a world of cloudcomputing? What is the function of making quality decisions on what to keep and what to throw away if the facebook generation does not delete anything anymore? Not on their mobiles, not on their laptops. Serious debating all over the world is taking place on the function of our current educational systems. In a world where hardware is becoming cheap one can imagine a learning situation that consists of rapid prototyping skills on the one hand and making scenarios through storytelling on the other.

a technological revolution

The first requirement for building an IOT – ambient – society is a debate with all stakeholders; citizens, small and medium enterprises, multinationals, semi government and government institutions on the granularity of experience that counts as input for the hard wired sensors that are the first line of picking up signals that count as data for the datamining, data, and not noise.

Therefore research into and quick and dirty applications of soft biometrics and innovative ways of gaining biofeedback in intuitive and non invasive ways is of paramount importance. Taking into account as much of the granularity of experience as input into our systems, may lead to not only an acceptance of ambient intelligence, but an embracing of it by people who realize that this could actually help them gain more agency – individual and collective – through getting realtime feedback on real actions and real needs.

a spiritual revolution

In Separating and containing people and things in Mongolia, Rebecca Empson writes: “… the doing involved in making things visible or invisible makes relations. In this sense ‘vision’ becomes the tool by which relations are created.”

The komuso, a wandering priest, plays a central part in the history of Japanese Shakuhachi music. From behind their wicker visors these basket-hatted men have “viewed the flow of Japanese life from the seventeenth century to the present”, as Charles P. Malm writes. The ranks of the komuso were filled with ronin: masterless samurai. In Kyoto a group of komuso called themselves the Fukeshu. Malm writes : “The Buddhist shogun government, which had smashed all Christian inspired opposition after the battle of Shimabara, was very suspicious of any form of organisation that contained these samurai whose allegiance was doubtful.” The Fukeshu secretly purchased a building that belonged to one of the larger Buddhist temples. By faking a number of papers claiming their historical origins as coming from China via a priest named Chosan, the Fukeshu tried to secure their position. They also produced a copy of a license from the first Edo Shogun, Ieyasu, giving them the exclusive right to solicit alms by means of shakuhachi playing. When a samurai became ronin he could no longer wear his double sword. So these wandering priests redesigned the shakuhachi. The flute became a formidable club as well as a musical instrument. The Fukeshu asked for official recognition of their temple. The government demanded the official document. The Fukeshu claimed it was lost. The shogun granted their request on the condition that they act as spies for the government. The Fukeshu accepted. The Fukeshu played soft melodies and overheard intimate conversations. If we read these steps backwards there always seems to be one more mask, eine maske mehr.

The final layer is nonexistent, the essence never material, the object ever empty. It is very hard to debate this. At one particular point some body decides to give meaning to some data, any data. This is an act of will. Any society entering an ontologically different frontier needs strong stories to actualize its promises through and with the people.

poor or rich; a choice

We can safely assume that the above trends will take place or grow to be effective in the coming years. Our current agency lies on a continuum with at one end a ‘poor’ and at the other a ‘rich’ potential actualization. The decision is up to us now and could not come at a worse time. For the trend is towards not taking risks but having safety and security and nothing-happening- that- is- not- in- my- to- do- list as a default for decision making. Although it is always hard to predict the future, it is a safe bet that if this happens the EU will not be able to create an overtone for itself, nor a leading role. It will be swept away by the swift and agile small networks of people who believe that a better world is possible for them and their children. Fortunately we have thinkers like Gérald Santucci who is able to inspire not only his team but a wide network of diverse experts to keep believing that it is vital to keep the old real democratic ideals alive and working in this age of new connectivities.

I would not easily say it but I think it should be widely read. I believe we are very timely with this. It could be a good start for a real praxis, however hard that is.

Situated Technologies Pamphlets 8: The Internet of People for a Post-Oil World
Spring 2011

Christian Nold and Rob van Kranenburg

The authors articulate the foundations of a future manifesto for an Internet of Things in the public interest. Nold and Kranenburg propose tangible design interventions that challenge an internet dominated by commercial tools and systems, emphasizing that people from all walks of life have to be at the table when we talk about alternate possibilities for ubiquitous computing. Through horizontally scaling grass roots efforts along with establishing social standards for governments and companies to allow cooperation, Nold and Kranenberg argue for transforming the Internet of Things into an Internet of People.

Dear,

We are writing on behalf of the International Network of Museums of the Person (Brazil, Portugal, USA and Canada) and the Center for Digital Storytelling (EUA) to invite you and/or your organization to support the International Day of Life Stories 2011. We are part of an international movement of people and organizations who believe that telling and hearing stories is an important process for the democratization of memory.

The idea of creating a date emerged from the intention of turning it into a day specially dedicated to the celebration and promotion of initiatives aimed at preserving and sharing memories and life stories of individuals, organizations and groups. Since its conception, the activities of the day resulted in positive impacts for the promotion of the individual and society.

With this purpose, we have identified in your work the same engagement to our ideal and we would like to invite you to support this initiative.

How? It’s simple, it takes developing any activity aimed at the promotion of life stories.

The letter to join the campaign is attached to this email. There you can get more information about the date. We are also sending a brief description of the two participating organizations.

Your personal support and / or your organization will be very important to strengthen our efforts in promoting the International Day for Sharing Life Stories and to legitimate partnerships and alliances. If you want to support this idea, please write to internacional@museudapessoa.net.

Ps.: The Home Page www.ausculti.org is under maintenance and we intend to make it available for posts next week. Thank you for understanding!

Cafebabel.com is looking for an author capable to shed light on the darkest political backstage through these and other cases of exile, jail or suicide.
How’s life after dictatorship?”

Volunteers? Mail Spanish editor Argemino Barro: redaccion at cafebabel.com
Spanish Editor-in-chief,
*cafebabel.com : the european magazine*
email:a.barro at cafebabel.com

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet, a comment, or a click. – http://klout.com/

Announcer enters the stage: breaking news from the house of Power: I am a Rock, I am an Island

Bystander: Can you define power?

Street cleaner: The claim of states to rightfully assign arbitrary numbers to people, animals and plants and lampposts wedded to the claim of corporations to arbitrarily assign copyright and intellectual property over simple blocks of data that were simple noise, freely booming loud to all. Power is to hold the decision to decide what is data and what is noise.
All power is temporary.

Announcer enters the stage: Well, this is the breaking news:

“Data.gov & 7 Other Sites to Shut Down
After Budgets Cut
By Marshall Kirkpatrick / March 31, 2011 2:45 PM / 30 Comments
Two years ago the incoming Obama administration launched a number of ambitious websites (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives /datagov_finally_launches_looks_nice_but_short_on_d.php) , most notably Data.gov (http://data.gov) , that were dedicated to offering public and government data to the outside world. The stated intention was to foster transparency and offer a platform for the development of new software and services. It appears those experiments may be over for now. Today the Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/03/31/budget- technopocalypse-deepens-transparency-sites-will-go-dark-in-a-few-months/) and Federal News Radio (http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=35&sid=2327798) reported that the public projects Data.gov, USASpending.gov, Apps.gov/now, IT Dashboard and paymentaccuracy.gov as well as a number of internal government sites including Performance.gov, FedSpace and many of the efforts related the FEDRamp cloud computing cybersecurity effort would be taken offline in coming weeks due to budget cuts by Congress. Perhaps things like electronic government, software platforms and public accountability were just fads, anyway.

Update:. We’re hearing from several places that there’s a potentially viable effort to save these sites and organizations. Here (http://bit.ly/i16ldO) is one perspective on that and you can also see the Sunlight Foundation’s Save the Data (http://sunlightfoundation.com/savethedata/) petition. Data.gov & 7 Other Sites to Shut Down After Budgets Cut http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/datagov_7_other_sites_… “

Chorus: So what are we looking at here?

“What we are looking at here is the decline of imperial powers which had once stretched around the globe. In these circumstances, the inquisitorial bureaucracy which we have observed, bedevilled by minutiae which by any objective standards are meaningless, seems incomprehensible. Yet the emphasis on the steady accumulation of pieces of paper betrays a mentality unable to deal with the reality before it: the reality was of an empire and society in precipitous decline: unable to face it, the inquisitorial mentality took refuge in useless documents designed the honour and nobility of the nation.

In such circumstances opinions which diverged from the chosen picture of reality were unwelcome. The truth perhaps hurts most – and provokes most anger in – those whose are increasingly distant from it. Thus in Spain in particular the broad current of European though groping towards the Enlightenment in the latter 17th century was unpalatable and had to be prevented from polluting the nation. The movement of scientific enquiry, raised on the shoulders of Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Spinoza, was a direct challenge to the inquisitorial world view. The Inquisition could sense from afar that there was an ideology which could deal it a mortal blow in a way that the conversos and the moriscis never had.

The Inquisition was right to be suspicious, for some of the more important roots of this ideology did indeed penetrate back to the very people whom the inquisitors had pursued remorselessly for so long, the conversos. The development of the scientific world view was in fact deeply connected with the waves of persecution which the Inquisition had first unleashed in Spain at the end of the 15th century, 200 years before this era of decline.” (Green, Toby. Inquisition, Reign of Fear. Pan Books, 2008, p. 257)

Bystander: Oh my, I think you are a few hundred years off! ha ha

Street sweeper: After all, it is quite logical that these programs would stop. At one point you run up against a wall when you ask for opening up databases. At that moment you will hear that this particular kind of data cannot be ‘open’ or ‘disclosed’. After two years of opening up what can be opened up according to ‘officials’ you seem to hit a glass wall. That wall is ‘state interest’. Then we ask: Hey but aren’t we the state? Ah not quite, it seems.

Just keep asking and the beast will eventually have to show itself.

Singer: (Van Morrison: paraphrasing:

You can take all that data from the USA
put it in a big brown bag for me
sail it right round these seven oceans
drop it straight into the deep blue sea

she’s as sweet as Tupelo Honey
just like honey baby from the bee

you can’t stop us on the road of freedom

and while you at it closing all your fences, stop leaving the lights on in Bradley Manning’s cell and give him a good nights sleep

then go look for the bees

they are leaving