Hi,
I hope this can also be part of a kind of broad umbrella for the book
http://www.liftconference.com/lift-france-09
salut! Rob
Basically my argument is:
There is a Kings road: through EU policy trying to bring the most pressing
needs into the infrastructure: not control but innovation driven, design
for serendipity (Expect More consortium for Fp7 in which I'm
participating), end user programming, privacies... This seems to be
working for the EU. Gerald Santucci (head of RFID unit) is embracing
critical perspectives and calls for designers, artists and philosophers to
be a key part of the IOT.
But although the technical and the IOT savvy people at that level also
realize that web20 has already set the beginning for change not only of
formats and content but models of organisation (and eventually states,
institutions, law...
see:
http://joiningthedots.tv/main.aspx?level=&content=761772201985&search=us+now
i'm not convinced at this moment that the politicians who do not
understand it are willing to give up their
top down agency. What we will then see if a ephemerilization of national
boundaties and institutions, only to end up with super EU structure build
just like the old model of representative democracy.
And that is not what IOT can be and is pushing for: namely to become a
real organizational structure that can allocate funds through
participatory budgeting and local debate.
Therefore there is also a By road: that is making open source hardware
kits that are interoperable with the commercial stuff and bypassing all
the old problems of patents, copyright, ownership etc which is as obsolete
as most products the once so trusted banks sold to their customers.
These kits should be able to plug in to and become an integral part of IOT
which, like the internet may look really messy from the outside but is
governed by only a few simple rules and protocols (tcp/ip/REST/html). One
of the key issues is the description of objects at the lowest level. RDF
(Resource Description Framework) may become really important if coupled
with PML (Physical Markup Language) that is "PML Core is used to describe
data directly generated by the Auto-ID infrastructure e.g., RFID readers,
aggregation sensors, temperature sensors" xml.coverpages.org/pml-ons.html
As Usman showes with Pachube it is no longer key relevant if a space is
real, virtual, in between or potential.
"In such an environment, - a truly magic one - people themselves become
information spaces. Building, cars and people become information spaces."
I wrote in "Towards Designerly Agency in a Ubicomp World, In: Tales of the
Disappearing Computer", Kameas A., Streitz, N. (eds), CTI Press, 2003,
pp. 119-127.
So we are in a situation the italian thinker Antonio Gramsci described as
Ceasarism:
"Ceasarism can be said to express a situation in which the forces in
conflict balance each other in a
catastrophic manner: But Ceasarism "does not in all cases have the same
historical significance. There can be both progressive and reactionary
forms of Ceasarism; the exact significance of each form can, in the last
analysis, be reconstructed only through concrete history, and not by means
of any sociological rule of thumb. Ceasarism is progressive when its
intervention helps the progressive force to triumph, albeit with its
victory tempered by certain compromise and limitations. It is reactionary
when its intervention helps the reactionary force to triumph, in this case
too with certain compromises and limitations, which have however, a
different value, extent and significance than in the former."
Whose Gramsci? Right-wing Gramscism, van Kranenburg, International Gramsci
Society Newsletter
Number 9 (March, 1999): 14-18
This means that objectively we can still at this moment in time all work
on a infrastructure that will empower citizens, small business and new
models of organizing difference and allocating resources.
At least that is my naive opinion. It is what I want to believe. If I
don't believe it and if I don't think we can work towards it, I see a very
bleak future full of violence and civil war.
Because it is inevitable that the vertical institutions will break under
the weight of the internet based decision possibilities of ever growing
groups of people organizing themselves on all kinds of specific topics.
The organizational structure of taxes and fines, one man one vote every
four years, can not harnass that kind of change. The scandals we are
witnessing today of simple people becoming powerfull and having no moral
scruples or strong inner faith, no notion of sacrifice or of serving
somebody, are secondary but will hasten the downfall.
As people are not ready for anarchy, having not been educated into it, it
is no option now to fuel the fire without proposing a viable alternative
for a general public, currently in Europe being five hundred million, 500
million.
It is in the long run inevitable as a social structure of educated
individuals choosing how to live together with whom they want in freedom.
And it has to be won. So we need to educate people into living it. We
shall overcome one day, no doubt about that. May take just a little
while. In the meantime I strongly believe we never had so much power and
agency. It is time for the makers now to come up with a plan to make us
strong and focussed.
