hi Fabi,

> http://catarse.me/en/tecnoxamanismo
>
super, done.

I raised the issue of animism at Ubicomp 2002 in a discussion with researchers and nobody understood that. That fact and my experience at an earlier Conference in Jonschoping on Intelligent Information Interfaces (i3) - where a speaker said that in ten years time everyone would have a Bluetooth ring and point at a tree when walking in the woods and a screen would pop up! and you would get information about that tree and I looked around and everyone seemed to be happy with that - led to my work in the past fourteen years of building Council - theinternetofthings.eu - as a way of gaining agency and becoming an influence in the actual building of it. As you know, this is happening and happening fast. I am working in an FP7 EU project with the key stakeholders and advise Conferences worldwide on going more towards internet of neighborhoods then smart cities. So far I know we are choosing between Scylla and Aribdis. I see no way of going back towards non wireless or non- IP connectivity. So we can either try to help to build an inclusive smart city for everyone or lay back and do nothing and then it will be a world of 500 smart cities and Mad Max in between. I have come to believe that this monitoring of items, resources and proceses will lead to incredible transparency, less to zero corruption, energy management and stop waisting of food (50%) and water. But I realize these last arguments resemble Cisco’s a lot.

Ten years ago I wrote:

"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.In what respect will it alter our notion of the self as a more or
less stable identity?Will it not provoke an identity building on the ability to change roles in communication environments?
What kind of privacies lay hidden in our new connectivities? In a mediated environment - where everything is connected to everything - it is no longer clear what is being mediated, and what mediates.’

So yes it is extremely important how we approach these questions of magic, agency, a scripted serendipity (internet of things second hand ‚magic’) in a database reality of ‚Google Now’ and whether it will be possible at all for the younger generations to approach any non-tagged or non-micro-processored object thereby losing the very notion that that object itself resonates and ‚is’ or ‚acts’, being removed thus twice from what we have until perceived as reality. We also have to find a way to compensate for that loss and investigate what can be gained and what can be won in such a world,

Wishing everyone a good Sunday! Rob