> How to we teach and learn this knowledge?
> Personally I think it does come down to making, but needs to be a
> reflexive and knowing kind of making...
>
>
Hi Matt,
That is why the bricophone and the RFId Guardian are so important, they
embody as things their principles and can lead to new connectivity
paradigms ( big word, i know). And through them we maybe get to express
a a powerfull feeling of will to change, for without we can not express it.
I'm writing a text and I got to this:
"We have seen the end of the guerilla, as being on the move now is not
different anymore than staying in one place and securing it. At the
outer ends of this kind of opposition we find the ultimate innere
Emigration, the suicide of Menno ter Braak, four days after the Germans
invaded the Netherlands, and Ted Kaczynski, the unabomber. Menno Ter
Braak took sedatives and his brother gave him a lethal injection.
Drenched in Nietzschean phlilosophy of autonomy and ever striving to be
a homme honnête, he could – being involved in anti fascist activities
from mid-thirties, see fascist logic of life very clearly and could not
envision any way out. The Innere Emigration of intellectuals in the
thirties, retreating into ones own mental sphere, not publishing, not
speaking in public, was not only unbearable to him, he realized that it
had become ontologically impossible. The unabomber’s strategy, maiming
23 and killing 3, in trying to get his message across to both a research
community and a larger public, has caused a lot of human suffering,
landed him in jail and may a have had adverse effects in that the search
for him converged new techniques of surveillance. In the end it was his
brother that recognized his style. As a core issue in his thinking is
his distinction between small- scale technology as technology “that can
be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance” and
organization-dependent technology is technology that depends on
large-scale social organization.” According to him, there are no
significant cases of regression in small-scale technology., “but
organization-dependent technology does regress when the social
organization on which it depends breaks down. (manifesto 208) His two
major assumptions are very true, the first being that “that if the use
of a new item of technology is initially optional, it does not
necessarily remain optional, because the new technology tends to change
society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an
individual to function without using that technology..” (manifesto, 156)
The second that he foresees that the system may break down and if it
does break down “the consequences will still be very painful. But the
bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown
will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather
than later.” (manifesto, 3) If it breaks down “there may be a period of
chaos, a "time of troubles" … it would be impossible to predict what
would emerge from such a time of troubles, but at any rate the human
race would be given a new chance.”(manifesto 179)
Most importantly he did not care for socio-cultural or societal
arguments. He makes it very clear that “this is not to be a political
revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the
economic and technological basis of the present society.” (4) He
therefore advocates a “a revolution against the industrial system.” (4)
Realizing that it cannot be only stick, he needs a carrot too if he
wants followers. His positive ideal “is Nature. That is, wild nature;
those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that
are independent of human management and free of human interference and
control.” (183) And that is exactly the moment where he becomes a
historical position himself, as in 2008 there is only Next
(manipulated/user generated/enhanced) Nature left, the notion of Climate
Exchange haunting us in any metaphor or real location.
In 2000 47 percent of the worlds population lived in cities. In 2030 60
percent of the world’s population will live in an urban environment by
the year 2030. The growth will occur in less developed countries,
especially in coastal South Asia. More than fifty-eight cities will
boast populations of more than five million people. One of these cities
will be New Song Do City in Seoul, an ambient city, in which all
“information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental,
etc.) share data, and computers are to be built into the houses, streets
and office buildings.” The city itself will exemplify a digital way of
life, the "U-life." This is a city of control.
At the other end of Song Do we find cities who have imploded under
corporate robbery and tribal violence. This is a feral city:
“Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a
vital component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment
is now a vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of
both ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has
long been replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available
is that which is attained through brute power. Such cities have been
routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction
genres, where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S.
Eliot's Rat'sAlley. Yet this city would still be globally connected. It
would possess at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its
inhabitants would have access to the world's most modern communication. “
In between we find the city of trust. It is not there yet. We have to
build it. It takes off from the realization that in a networked world
small scale artisanal open content, software and hardware does not have
to remain physically local but can travel through friends across the
world. Here the two modes of opposition are exemplified by Katherine
Albrecht (privacy activist at CASPIAN and co-author of Spychips) and
Melanie Rieback (researcher at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam).
Melanie wrote the RFID virus and made an RFID Guardian - a tool that
allows you to block some tags and accept others – showing that privacy
by design is not only culturally and socially productive but business
wise fostering privacy as a unique selling point.
The RFID Guardian is a small scale tool that can help us organize our
privacy settings ourselves provided we will have an open source
infrastructure and negociated privacy policies (my settings on rfid
reader enhanced phone guide me through stores and the supermarket).
Katherine Albrecht took the lead as an expert on consumer privacy in
unearthing numerous dubious patents on RFID, and expressing her concerns
about the lack of an ethical framework in consumer tracing and tracking.
In our discussions throughout the years, we realized we both were
looking at more then a logistics operation, but a technological paradigm
shift that we felt was coming dangerously close to our souls.
To my soul. It feels as if the very space that is pregnant with meaning,
with poetry, with love, is being filled up with binaries that look at me
as a set of qualities, no longer human, as in celebrating my messiness,
the in-betweens, all these prolonged moments in which action takes not
place. Maybe the city of trust lies in these.
-
more later!
Greetings from sunny Ghent, Rob
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