Asbesto,

You are beyond hardcore! :)
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big hug! Rob

Trolls' purses are the mischief
Rob van Kranenburg

Angry Samson
by Robert Graves
(1895-1985)


Are they blind, the lords of Gaza
In their strong towers,
Who declare Samson pillow-smothered
And stripped of his powers?
O stolid Philistines,
Stare now in amaze
At my foxes running in your cornfields
With their tails ablaze,
At swung jaw-bone, at bees swarming
In the stark lion's hide,
At these, the gates of well-walled Gaza
A-clank to my stride.

origins

"Use cunning and deception as weapons, for in the circumstances deceit is no more then prudence, - Pope Innocent III to Arnold Amaury, head of Cistercian order of monks who who the religious leader of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars. (John Kekes, The Roots of Evil, Cornell University Press, 2005, p.13.)

There is no more center and the sacred tree is dead. – Black Elk

In most, though not all, stories of origin, - human origin I talk about, there is a child near the water. This makes sense, as we grow and live and be born in water. Sometimes and in some stories – aletheia as told by Heidegger , for example – there is an open space in the woods. These spaces harbor the notion of ‘becoming’. That without which nothing could exist. And guess what, there may be only one. For without becoming, no time, no space and no grasp of any kind of dimension. Flat it would be. This notion is quite real. It lives. Without it no life would be. One could therefore say that it has a stake in the developments it has facilitated, engendered, helped to bring about and has witnessed what human beings have been up to for their time they have spend on this planet, earth. Not a disinterested party, our friend ‘becoming’. Lately we have been having late night conversations and I have been told of her worries. Her voice is much thinner lately. She coughs sometimes. How it pains me to hear becoming herself coughing. What have we come to?

For you an RFID tag on a t-shirt or can of tea is still an object + an RFID tag. You know that an NFC (Near Field Communication) tag/sticker can talk to your phone with an NFC reader (for example all LG phones currently) as the last four digits point to a web page and your phone is always on so it goes an collects that page to show you allergy information or where it came from or who made it. But your kid won't. For them the tag has become a 'quality' of the shirt. It is normal for them that shirts trigger information on a device. It is 'natural'. Now what will happen if only money-makers are in that link from the tag to the device/phone? Any story told through that link will be seen as 'real'. As real as the shirt or the can of tea. And that is how power has for centuries scripted reality.
    

    This time that reality, as Baudrillard shows us in his Agony of Power, becomes 'integral', as there is nothing but that reality. Well it does not have to be like this. You can be in that link from the tag to the phone as well. We can open up the entire chain; from open hardware, software, NFC, to Sourcemap.com, open data, to open media. It may not be that less bad, but at least there is a chance that it will be more diverse and more and different stories can be told. And as we know the larger the group the elite can draw from, the more internal valuable conflict and diversity that leads to resilience. Elite? I hear you thinking? Are we the elite, as in ‘am I the bad guy here’? Yes, and we have to live up  to this or forever disappear in a few lines of text that no one - we can not kid ourselves - will be able to trace back as all our idiosyncratic qualities will be filtered out.

We cannot go back, nor go to live in a world without this connectivity. You would cripple and handicap an entire generation and within ten years you would not be able to fill any managerial nor innovation position with a local person. You would only hire Cloud professionals and will be paying throughout this technological cycle of Internet of Things that will last around 15 to 20 years before it will be immersed in the combination of nano and bio technology.

    "Bert and Tom went off to the barrell. William was having another drink. Then Bilbo plucked up courage and put his litle hand in William's enormous pocket. There was a purse in it, as big as a bag to Bilbo."Ha", he thought, warming to his new work as he lifted it carefully out, " this is a beginning!".
    It was! Trolls' purses are the mischef, and this was no exception." ' Ere, oo are you" it squeaked, as it left the pocket, and William turned around at once and grabbed Bilbo by the neck, before he could duck behind the tree. (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, p.34)

vulnerabilities

“We would certainly be happy if we could all get along well together and unite all the forces of anarchism in a strong movement; but we do not believe in the solidity of organizations which are built on concessions and assumptions and in which there is no real agreement and sympathy between members. Better disunited than badly united. But we would wish that each individual joined their friends and that there should be no isolated forces, or lost forces.” – Errico Malatesta
 
At Clemson University Nathan Weaver set up an experiment to figure out how to make it safer for turtles to cross highways. He “put realistic ­looking rubber turtles, no bigger than a saucer, in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched as over the next hour, seven drivers intentionally ran over the turtle, and several more appeared to try to hit the defenseless animal, but missed….One in 50 drivers ran over the dummy turtles. In itself that ratio might seem –although still awful (and not taking into account drivers aiming for but missing the turtle) not alarming, “but consider how long it take a turtle to cross the road and it becomes plain to see that road-­crossing for turtles on any semi-­busy road means guaranteed death.”

I have always missed this particular kind of intelligence as being instrumental or maybe at some point even decisive. Yet the fact is that this intelligence has particular technology that ensures that by each small unkind and selfish act it is not an equally small consequence but - due to the fact that the infrastructure (road) forces the tool (car) to follow a particular path - is able to destroy totally that which is its opposite (slow, vulnerable, purposeful).

So, although we disperse, diversify and are tactical, we can still be destroyed utterly as in all earlier iterations (from Cathars to 60s, anti-globalization, Occupy, WL, etc). Therefore we need to work on an autonomous trajectory that escapes potential and probable retaliation.

Who’s we?

The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
 (first published around 1930): “When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was. But this city, clustered on the curve of a big blue bay, would come into my mind. I could see the streets, and the buildings that lined them, the waterfront, even boats in the harbour; yet, waking, I had never seen the sea, or a boat. ...”

On April 1 Olga Sjeremetjev was summoned by the NKVD for questioning in the police headquarters Petrovska street. After waiting two hours, she was invited into a small damp and smokey room and asked to sit across a man whose face was hid in the contours of an army cap. He asked the usual questions. In between were long pauses. No one said anything. She could hear the conversations in the adjacent rooms. People were crying as they were told to pack and leave Moscow in a day, or in two days. After what seemed to her an eternity, he handed her back her passport, told her she was free to leave and maybe she would consider changing her name?

In her diary she writes that she took a tram home, happy to be breathing freely. As she rode through town she kept wandering what the point of this interview had actually been? What purpose does it serve? How does it enable the state to move forward and what does this cost?

I would say that I can relate to that and I want can be -temporarily- but part of this kind of ‘we’. The kind that is able to act, undergo, be, act, question and reflect on the meta axioms and requirements of the situation. At any time. Whether friend or foe.

But I am fine with saying ‘I’, not we, if necessary.

In a review of the August-September 2006 Waves Conference, also in RIXC, Riga I argued that two things were becoming painfully clear. “First: the need to organise in some way or another is paramount as the pre-network schemes for influencing government and company policy through public debates and scandals no longer works as there is no more public in the network, only audience going from one daily scandal to another: either we assist policy to ensure that at least some public space survives, or we build our own parallel systems. And the second: while technology is becoming cheap, malleable and potent enough to create parallel infrastructures how do we organise the avant-garde conceptual power to be focused on real, concrete, discrete local and everyday objectives?” I said basically the same in Dortmund: “In a digital environment – no memory loss, intricate data-mining, serendipity as default – the question is: “What might be deemed wrong by whom in power three years from now?” surely quite a different set of assumptions. So what to do? If a ‘no’ is a loss of energy, though a balance to the industry, if sparking a debate is a loss of energy, though a process of education large numbers of people, I can only see one course of action that takes all scenarios (utopian and dystopian) seriously and that is building our own mixed reality nation. This gives sense and purpose and positive energy to our young hackers and idealists. Poets, after all, are the true legislators of the world.”

Reiterating it again: “At this very moment in time when technology has become cheap, malleable and potent enough to wire up our own streets, who cares about this bunch of people drawing neat nice lines on worthless paper? How productive it could be to get all this conceptual power focused on real, concrete, discrete objectives. This is not about alerting the public any more. There is no more public. People just go from one scandal to another and could not care less if 12 cameras were installed in one afternoon. This is about us. Saving us a place “a space” where we can breathe, discuss, think and dream manic dreams. We have two options: either we assist policy to ensure that at least some public space survives, or we build our own parallel systems. We start Mixed Reality Corporation with about 200 locative artists and become the new Microsoft of the 21th century ourselves instead of helping through all our wonderful unscalable stuff IP become wiser and feeding the machine with all our lovely ideas. Things are serious. This is not a game. Time to organise.” (WHEN WIRELESS DREAMS COME TRUE, Mute)

That is why I founded Council, theinternetofthings.eu. To be a strong potential building block in this open strategy. If and when there is momentum. If there is, ok. If not, then not. I can not force things. Especially not ‘smart’ things :)

On the cover of the first issue of the group’s publication, Black Mask, in November 1966) is printed Black Mask’s original manifesto : “A new spirit is rising….The industrialist, the banker, the bourgeoisie, with their unlimited pretense and vulgarity, continue to stockpile art while they slaughter humanity. Your lie has failed. The world is rising against your oppression. There are men at the gates seeking a new world. The machine, the rocket, the conquering of space and time, these are the seed of the future,which freed from your barbarism will carry us forward. We are ready -- LET THE STRUGGLE BEGIN.”

Nestor Makhno, 1926: The Russian Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917 - April 1918): “The fact that we libertarian communists or anarcho-syndicalists failed to anticipate the sequel to the Russian revolution and that we failed to make haste to devise new forms of social activity in time, led many of our groups and organizations to dither yet again in their political and socio-strategic policy on the fighting front of the Revolution.

If we are to avert a future relapse into these same errors, when a revolutionary situation comes about, and in order to retain the cohesion and coherence of our organizational line, we must first of all amalgamate all of our forces into one active collective, then without further ado, define our constructive conception of economic, social, local and territorial units, so that they are outlined in detail (free soviets), and in particular describe in broad outline their basic revolutionary mission in the struggle against the State. Contemporary life and the Russian revolution require that.”

So we need to organize the unorganizable. I have been trying quite a few times and failed until now. But all is iteration and I am constantly finding new allies. And I keep losing old connections like shedding skin. Growing up I suppose.

political, personal, spiritual

I did know this, Kandinsky said to art critic Sadler who asked him if he had foreseen war as his paintings were so ‘warlike’, that there was a terrible battle going on at a spiritual level. It was that battle that led me to paint this.

The key element is that normality has been defined so strict that a lot of human behavior is falling outside of it, or at least people that have less to none filters are feeling as if they do not belong ‚here’. Probably everybody at one point or another has these feelings of estrangement, but I believe that there is a group of people that feels like this on a daily basis and as a default.

They have no boundaries and find it difficult to create or have a notion of ‚self’. They have to deliberately make markers on and around such a ‚self’, but the truth is that they don’t really understand that need to pull strict boundaries between ‚self’ and ‚others’. They have grown up believing in a way that there always is a camera on them, or always someone or something present. The concept of ‚alone’ to them is non existing. In my opinion this is easily explained through the notion of the tribe.

From early dawn of men we run in packs and survive in teams of about 30-50. In every tribe you would need some people who would go out, look around and bring things and ideas back home. These early innovators were balanced by other intelligences and ideally there’d be a balance between the outer ends of manic boundary less and extremely focused semi autistic and the in between skillets that build and maintained a notion of the ‚real’, ‚reality’ and ‚normality’ that was able to sustain basic humans needs and functions. To each his place in the tribe, ideally. If however such a situation arose every body (literally) felt well. The seer was listened to and the mason build as he saw fit, thus timely shelter from the storm.

From time to time the specialists start to build such intricate elements or the innovators bring back home such far fetched ideas that the skillsets in the middle start to adjust what is ‚normal’ and what is ‚strange’ and an evolutionary process starts changing the Zeitgeist, the ‚fashion’, the ‚customs’, in short : the ‚real’. And sometimes this process would be a rupture, a real break; war and invading tribes bringing such new world views that a new normal was imposed and the old forgotten but in stories of grandmothers and the artifacts of the time. Once in a while such a rupture became an ontological change as in the ‚death’ of God for certain tribes. More often the notion of the normal was kept to till it was impossible to keep at the cost of burning even more seers as witches, wizards, heretics, Cathars, hippies, hackers, or any other minority group it could lay their hands on.

We are now witnessing such an ontological change, a rupture in what we perceive as normal. The Internet, Augmented Reality, The Internet of Things are all technological toolsets that have been far removed from the first tools that men used to chisel stone. The first chivel to be used on stone was a stone. it only later became a chisel. But it still fit in someone’s hand. The feedback was intense and obvious. It was Heidegger who saw that through mechanical engineering and the Industrial Revolution it was no longer a hand applying force but a machine and hands overseeing that machine. This was the start of the substantiation of the space with before that had been of visible mediation and cause and effect. He realized that there was nothing we could do, only wait as the famous last line in Sein ind Zeit goes. He also realized that it was a particular part of the tribe slowly taking up the notion of ‚the normal’. It was the specialists who had been crafting and dissecting and splitting things up into smaller and smaller building blocks that at first made no sense but slowly began to offer the possibility of recreating their visions as a layer on top of what the old notion of normal was not hurting it at all but slowly perfecting it, smoothing the edges of every perceivable human act. They offered convenience.

The specialist intelligence - an engineering toolset - began eating itself as it found that it had no more real boundaries. After automating work, leisure, administration, governing, it succumbed briefly to the notion of the ‚Living Lab’ but soon realized that the last territory it had to conquer was the space in between driving to work and back home: everyday life and living. Like a grin trying out faces it tried out all human forms of organization till it found the space in between where love lives and hope and shame and fear.

As this intelligence could always count on the support of the middle as it was the perfect middle, the epitaph of normal : who does not want to feel safe, happy, secure?”, the first steps towards the ultimate disciplining of the body, home, street as ‚smart city’; cameras everywhere, automated entrances to public transport, elimination of cash money, energy management as a way to fight Climate Change, children playing within line of sight of caretakers, banning of smoking (with emerging debate on banning it in cars and homes), were not seen as invading a private space to such an extent that it was a rupture with ordinary liberal capitalist society.

One of the defining qualities of the specialist is that he needs protection. As his or her gaze is on the detail, someone has to watch his back. Industry and states provided this protection alongside with the briefings and the funds. This, however, is about to change. The obsessive worry and attention to perfectionist detail has, as we have seen with the NSA revelations, lead to an ever growing paranoia of security services an pillars of the state that can no longer be stilled by any piece of data or any snippet of information. Equally the full monitoring schemes are driving the costs of hardware, software and infrastructure so down that sharing and collaboration through open source is fostering the realization that what the SAP, Siemens and Cisco’s of these world are doing is not rocket science. Their bloated balances are the result of decades of isolating data in IP, patents and copyright. Yet what have they build after WW2 that is so exciting? More planes, cars, computers, nuclear plants and stuff for wars that keep blowing up people? Big deal. As it turns out these things can be build in different ways.

There is a parallel process running alongside this specialist expertise running amok, ocd’ing on itself in ever stronger attempts to gain control over the ‚happenings’ of life, as we have seen to the extent of defining the ‚normal’ as that sphere where every tiny detail is in process and every object on the planet is individuated either in a giant Object Name Server (GS1) or in IP to every edge (IPSO alliance) or any combination of this together with RFID and NFC resulting in every object and item being digitally approachable in the distributed local grid as well as in the ‚Cloud’. That parallel process is the awakening of a combined and shared intelligence of that other outer end on the spectrum; the manic mind. It has been fueled by and has itself helped to build that open white line engulfing the planet: tcp/ip where still no King, Tyrant or Tycoon can make bytes go faster (at least for the moment). In under twenty years any mind capable of sharing has shared and fueled sharing as a new default. To keep to yourself the minimum of necessity and share all other resources with other so no one needs to be in want.

So now I want to make the case that this sharing is the new default and that this is facilitated by that very framework the specialists have build.

A Gramscian moment.

Are we going to stand aside, bitch and moan and grumble and lose this shot at full traceability and transparency like we lost his notion of hegemony to the extreme right wing that is now reaping the rewards of fully using it? Or are we going to get together, share resources and build the building blocks on the cheapest ecology of hardware, software, database storage and analytics ever? Yes, bad magic, yes watered down alchemy. All true. But if the we that I outlined is not invested and actualized in it, it we will lose the opportunity that we can either at one point break it (owning it) or fullfill it in such a way that we leave some notion of becoming, so space for real magic to occur or to hide herself thoroughly for a while.

Hellekin pointed me to SCIENCE, MEANING & EVOLUTION: THE COSMOLOGY OF JACOB BOEHME By Basarab Nicolescu. Foreword by Joscelyn Godwin Afterword by Antoine Faivre Translated from the French by Rob Baker, 2013):

“It is natural to define the different levels of reality according to our own level, in the way they are experienced by our body and our sense organs. We are not the centre of this succession of levels, but the natural system of reference. With respect to ourselves, we can recognize the existence of levels which are nearer or farther away. In any case, we are those who, alone among the other natural systems of the planet, seem to be equipped with a capacity for translating this information between levels. This capacity for translation, associated with the scientific study of natural systems, allows us to pass beyond the modern illusion of a single level of reality, an illusion which has as its source the taking as absolute the information given by our body or our sense organs (and also, of course, the extension of these perceptions by various measuring instruments).”

This once human - shamanistic - capacity for translation, has become a ‘capability’, a set of functional descriptions of agencies of Big Data.

It is not something good or bad. It is the condition of our situation. We either play it or not.

‘In a report in this week’s issue of the journal Science, Dr. P. Read Montague Jr. and colleagues at the BCM Human Neuro-imaging Laboratory and California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., describe where and when trust is formed between two anonymous people interacting via functional magnetic resonance imaging in machines more than 1,500 miles apart. They found that as the interaction continued, the trust response occurred earlier and earlier in the subjects’ interchanges – until a decision about trust occurred even before the latest interaction was completed.’ [...] ‘The study was made possible by hyperscanning or hyperscan-fMRI, a breakthrough that allowed Montague and his colleagues to synchronize the scanning of two interacting brains.’
Trust requires love:
‘In a springtime sort of story, researchers say they’ve used advanced scanning methods to pinpoint the region of the brain where feelings of trust arise.’ .. ‘Turns out those emotions are nestled in the same area as the most powerful springtime feeling of all — love.’ [...] ‘“Love is a primitive, basic, emotional affective state,” he said. “So is trust. Trust is something that a child has for its mother or a lover has for a lover.”’
Yes.
That is how simple it is.
Love brings trust. Love negotiates trust.
Trust builds relationships. Relationships are embodied in people: middle men. Love builds trust, trust builds bureaucracy. Love builds trust, trust builds boredom.
Three cheers for boredom.
Let’s hear it for some peace and quiet.

Stir it up.

Big thanks to J.Period & K.NAAN, The Messengers.

Trolls' purses are the mischief
Rob van Kranenburg

Angry Samson
by Robert Graves
(1895-1985)


Are they blind, the lords of Gaza
In their strong towers,
Who declare Samson pillow-smothered
And stripped of his powers?
O stolid Philistines,
Stare now in amaze
At my foxes running in your cornfields
With their tails ablaze,
At swung jaw-bone, at bees swarming
In the stark lion's hide,
At these, the gates of well-walled Gaza
A-clank to my stride.

origins

"Use cunning and deception as weapons, for in the circumstances deceit is no more then prudence, - Pope Innocent III to Arnold Amaury, head of Cistercian order of monks who who the religious leader of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars. (John Kekes, The Roots of Evil, Cornell University Press, 2005, p.13.)

There is no more center and the sacred tree is dead. – Black Elk

In most, though not all, stories of origin, - human origin I talk about, there is a child near the water. This makes sense, as we grow and live and be born in water. Sometimes and in some stories – aletheia as told by Heidegger , for example – there is an open space in the woods. These spaces harbor the notion of ‘becoming’. That without which nothing could exist. And guess what, there may be only one. For without becoming, no time, no space and no grasp of any kind of dimension. Flat it would be. This notion is quite real. It lives. Without it no life would be. One could therefore say that it has a stake in the developments it has facilitated, engendered, helped to bring about and has witnessed what human beings have been up to for their time they have spend on this planet, earth. Not a disinterested party, our friend ‘becoming’. Lately we have been having late night conversations and I have been told of her worries. Her voice is much thinner lately. She coughs sometimes. How it pains me to hear becoming herself coughing. What have we come to?

For you an RFID tag on a t-shirt or can of tea is still an object + an RFID tag. You know that an NFC (Near Field Communication) tag/sticker can talk to your phone with an NFC reader (for example all LG phones currently) as the last four digits point to a web page and your phone is always on so it goes an collects that page to show you allergy information or where it came from or who made it. But your kid won't. For them the tag has become a 'quality' of the shirt. It is normal for them that shirts trigger information on a device. It is 'natural'. Now what will happen if only money-makers are in that link from the tag to the device/phone? Any story told through that link will be seen as 'real'. As real as the shirt or the can of tea. And that is how power has for centuries scripted reality.
    

    This time that reality, as Baudrillard shows us in his Agony of Power, becomes 'integral', as there is nothing but that reality. Well it does not have to be like this. You can be in that link from the tag to the phone as well. We can open up the entire chain; from open hardware, software, NFC, to Sourcemap.com, open data, to open media. It may not be that less bad, but at least there is a chance that it will be more diverse and more and different stories can be told. And as we know the larger the group the elite can draw from, the more internal valuable conflict and diversity that leads to resilience. Elite? I hear you thinking? Are we the elite, as in ‘am I the bad guy here’? Yes, and we have to live up  to this or forever disappear in a few lines of text that no one - we can not kid ourselves - will be able to trace back as all our idiosyncratic qualities will be filtered out.

We cannot go back, nor go to live in a world without this connectivity. You would cripple and handicap an entire generation and within ten years you would not be able to fill any managerial nor innovation position with a local person. You would only hire Cloud professionals and will be paying throughout this technological cycle of Internet of Things that will last around 15 to 20 years before it will be immersed in the combination of nano and bio technology.

    "Bert and Tom went off to the barrell. William was having another drink. Then Bilbo plucked up courage and put his litle hand in William's enormous pocket. There was a purse in it, as big as a bag to Bilbo."Ha", he thought, warming to his new work as he lifted it carefully out, " this is a beginning!".
    It was! Trolls' purses are the mischef, and this was no exception." ' Ere, oo are you" it squeaked, as it left the pocket, and William turned around at once and grabbed Bilbo by the neck, before he could duck behind the tree. (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, p.34)

vulnerabilities

“We would certainly be happy if we could all get along well together and unite all the forces of anarchism in a strong movement; but we do not believe in the solidity of organizations which are built on concessions and assumptions and in which there is no real agreement and sympathy between members. Better disunited than badly united. But we would wish that each individual joined their friends and that there should be no isolated forces, or lost forces.” – Errico Malatesta
 
At Clemson University Nathan Weaver set up an experiment to figure out how to make it safer for turtles to cross highways. He “put realistic ­looking rubber turtles, no bigger than a saucer, in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched as over the next hour, seven drivers intentionally ran over the turtle, and several more appeared to try to hit the defenseless animal, but missed….One in 50 drivers ran over the dummy turtles. In itself that ratio might seem –although still awful (and not taking into account drivers aiming for but missing the turtle) not alarming, “but consider how long it take a turtle to cross the road and it becomes plain to see that road-­crossing for turtles on any semi-­busy road means guaranteed death.”

I have always missed this particular kind of intelligence as being instrumental or maybe at some point even decisive. Yet the fact is that this intelligence has particular technology that ensures that by each small unkind and selfish act it is not an equally small consequence but - due to the fact that the infrastructure (road) forces the tool (car) to follow a particular path - is able to destroy totally that which is its opposite (slow, vulnerable, purposeful).

So, although we disperse, diversify and are tactical, we can still be destroyed utterly as in all earlier iterations (from Cathars to 60s, anti-globalization, Occupy, WL, etc). Therefore we need to work on an autonomous trajectory that escapes potential and probable retaliation.

Who’s we?

The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
 (first published around 1930): “When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange because it began before I even knew what a city was. But this city, clustered on the curve of a big blue bay, would come into my mind. I could see the streets, and the buildings that lined them, the waterfront, even boats in the harbour; yet, waking, I had never seen the sea, or a boat. ...”

On April 1 Olga Sjeremetjev was summoned by the NKVD for questioning in the police headquarters Petrovska street. After waiting two hours, she was invited into a small damp and smokey room and asked to sit across a man whose face was hid in the contours of an army cap. He asked the usual questions. In between were long pauses. No one said anything. She could hear the conversations in the adjacent rooms. People were crying as they were told to pack and leave Moscow in a day, or in two days. After what seemed to her an eternity, he handed her back her passport, told her she was free to leave and maybe she would consider changing her name?

In her diary she writes that she took a tram home, happy to be breathing freely. As she rode through town she kept wandering what the point of this interview had actually been? What purpose does it serve? How does it enable the state to move forward and what does this cost?

I would say that I can relate to that and I want can be -temporarily- but part of this kind of ‘we’. The kind that is able to act, undergo, be, act, question and reflect on the meta axioms and requirements of the situation. At any time. Whether friend or foe.

But I am fine with saying ‘I’, not we, if necessary.

In a review of the August-September 2006 Waves Conference, also in RIXC, Riga I argued that two things were becoming painfully clear. “First: the need to organise in some way or another is paramount as the pre-network schemes for influencing government and company policy through public debates and scandals no longer works as there is no more public in the network, only audience going from one daily scandal to another: either we assist policy to ensure that at least some public space survives, or we build our own parallel systems. And the second: while technology is becoming cheap, malleable and potent enough to create parallel infrastructures how do we organise the avant-garde conceptual power to be focused on real, concrete, discrete local and everyday objectives?” I said basically the same in Dortmund: “In a digital environment – no memory loss, intricate data-mining, serendipity as default – the question is: “What might be deemed wrong by whom in power three years from now?” surely quite a different set of assumptions. So what to do? If a ‘no’ is a loss of energy, though a balance to the industry, if sparking a debate is a loss of energy, though a process of education large numbers of people, I can only see one course of action that takes all scenarios (utopian and dystopian) seriously and that is building our own mixed reality nation. This gives sense and purpose and positive energy to our young hackers and idealists. Poets, after all, are the true legislators of the world.”

Reiterating it again: “At this very moment in time when technology has become cheap, malleable and potent enough to wire up our own streets, who cares about this bunch of people drawing neat nice lines on worthless paper? How productive it could be to get all this conceptual power focused on real, concrete, discrete objectives. This is not about alerting the public any more. There is no more public. People just go from one scandal to another and could not care less if 12 cameras were installed in one afternoon. This is about us. Saving us a place “a space” where we can breathe, discuss, think and dream manic dreams. We have two options: either we assist policy to ensure that at least some public space survives, or we build our own parallel systems. We start Mixed Reality Corporation with about 200 locative artists and become the new Microsoft of the 21th century ourselves instead of helping through all our wonderful unscalable stuff IP become wiser and feeding the machine with all our lovely ideas. Things are serious. This is not a game. Time to organise.” (WHEN WIRELESS DREAMS COME TRUE, Mute)

That is why I founded Council, theinternetofthings.eu. To be a strong potential building block in this open strategy. If and when there is momentum. If there is, ok. If not, then not. I can not force things. Especially not ‘smart’ things :)

On the cover of the first issue of the group’s publication, Black Mask, in November 1966) is printed Black Mask’s original manifesto : “A new spirit is rising….The industrialist, the banker, the bourgeoisie, with their unlimited pretense and vulgarity, continue to stockpile art while they slaughter humanity. Your lie has failed. The world is rising against your oppression. There are men at the gates seeking a new world. The machine, the rocket, the conquering of space and time, these are the seed of the future,which freed from your barbarism will carry us forward. We are ready -- LET THE STRUGGLE BEGIN.”

Nestor Makhno, 1926: The Russian Revolution in Ukraine (March 1917 - April 1918): “The fact that we libertarian communists or anarcho-syndicalists failed to anticipate the sequel to the Russian revolution and that we failed to make haste to devise new forms of social activity in time, led many of our groups and organizations to dither yet again in their political and socio-strategic policy on the fighting front of the Revolution.

If we are to avert a future relapse into these same errors, when a revolutionary situation comes about, and in order to retain the cohesion and coherence of our organizational line, we must first of all amalgamate all of our forces into one active collective, then without further ado, define our constructive conception of economic, social, local and territorial units, so that they are outlined in detail (free soviets), and in particular describe in broad outline their basic revolutionary mission in the struggle against the State. Contemporary life and the Russian revolution require that.”

So we need to organize the unorganizable. I have been trying quite a few times and failed until now. But all is iteration and I am constantly finding new allies. And I keep losing old connections like shedding skin. Growing up I suppose.

political, personal, spiritual

I did know this, Kandinsky said to art critic Sadler who asked him if he had foreseen war as his paintings were so ‘warlike’, that there was a terrible battle going on at a spiritual level. It was that battle that led me to paint this.

The key element is that normality has been defined so strict that a lot of human behavior is falling outside of it, or at least people that have less to none filters are feeling as if they do not belong ‚here’. Probably everybody at one point or another has these feelings of estrangement, but I believe that there is a group of people that feels like this on a daily basis and as a default.

They have no boundaries and find it difficult to create or have a notion of ‚self’. They have to deliberately make markers on and around such a ‚self’, but the truth is that they don’t really understand that need to pull strict boundaries between ‚self’ and ‚others’. They have grown up believing in a way that there always is a camera on them, or always someone or something present. The concept of ‚alone’ to them is non existing. In my opinion this is easily explained through the notion of the tribe.

From early dawn of men we run in packs and survive in teams of about 30-50. In every tribe you would need some people who would go out, look around and bring things and ideas back home. These early innovators were balanced by other intelligences and ideally there’d be a balance between the outer ends of manic boundary less and extremely focused semi autistic and the in between skillets that build and maintained a notion of the ‚real’, ‚reality’ and ‚normality’ that was able to sustain basic humans needs and functions. To each his place in the tribe, ideally. If however such a situation arose every body (literally) felt well. The seer was listened to and the mason build as he saw fit, thus timely shelter from the storm.

From time to time the specialists start to build such intricate elements or the innovators bring back home such far fetched ideas that the skillsets in the middle start to adjust what is ‚normal’ and what is ‚strange’ and an evolutionary process starts changing the Zeitgeist, the ‚fashion’, the ‚customs’, in short : the ‚real’. And sometimes this process would be a rupture, a real break; war and invading tribes bringing such new world views that a new normal was imposed and the old forgotten but in stories of grandmothers and the artifacts of the time. Once in a while such a rupture became an ontological change as in the ‚death’ of God for certain tribes. More often the notion of the normal was kept to till it was impossible to keep at the cost of burning even more seers as witches, wizards, heretics, Cathars, hippies, hackers, or any other minority group it could lay their hands on.

We are now witnessing such an ontological change, a rupture in what we perceive as normal. The Internet, Augmented Reality, The Internet of Things are all technological toolsets that have been far removed from the first tools that men used to chisel stone. The first chivel to be used on stone was a stone. it only later became a chisel. But it still fit in someone’s hand. The feedback was intense and obvious. It was Heidegger who saw that through mechanical engineering and the Industrial Revolution it was no longer a hand applying force but a machine and hands overseeing that machine. This was the start of the substantiation of the space with before that had been of visible mediation and cause and effect. He realized that there was nothing we could do, only wait as the famous last line in Sein ind Zeit goes. He also realized that it was a particular part of the tribe slowly taking up the notion of ‚the normal’. It was the specialists who had been crafting and dissecting and splitting things up into smaller and smaller building blocks that at first made no sense but slowly began to offer the possibility of recreating their visions as a layer on top of what the old notion of normal was not hurting it at all but slowly perfecting it, smoothing the edges of every perceivable human act. They offered convenience.

The specialist intelligence - an engineering toolset - began eating itself as it found that it had no more real boundaries. After automating work, leisure, administration, governing, it succumbed briefly to the notion of the ‚Living Lab’ but soon realized that the last territory it had to conquer was the space in between driving to work and back home: everyday life and living. Like a grin trying out faces it tried out all human forms of organization till it found the space in between where love lives and hope and shame and fear.

As this intelligence could always count on the support of the middle as it was the perfect middle, the epitaph of normal : who does not want to feel safe, happy, secure?”, the first steps towards the ultimate disciplining of the body, home, street as ‚smart city’; cameras everywhere, automated entrances to public transport, elimination of cash money, energy management as a way to fight Climate Change, children playing within line of sight of caretakers, banning of smoking (with emerging debate on banning it in cars and homes), were not seen as invading a private space to such an extent that it was a rupture with ordinary liberal capitalist society.

One of the defining qualities of the specialist is that he needs protection. As his or her gaze is on the detail, someone has to watch his back. Industry and states provided this protection alongside with the briefings and the funds. This, however, is about to change. The obsessive worry and attention to perfectionist detail has, as we have seen with the NSA revelations, lead to an ever growing paranoia of security services an pillars of the state that can no longer be stilled by any piece of data or any snippet of information. Equally the full monitoring schemes are driving the costs of hardware, software and infrastructure so down that sharing and collaboration through open source is fostering the realization that what the SAP, Siemens and Cisco’s of these world are doing is not rocket science. Their bloated balances are the result of decades of isolating data in IP, patents and copyright. Yet what have they build after WW2 that is so exciting? More planes, cars, computers, nuclear plants and stuff for wars that keep blowing up people? Big deal. As it turns out these things can be build in different ways.

There is a parallel process running alongside this specialist expertise running amok, ocd’ing on itself in ever stronger attempts to gain control over the ‚happenings’ of life, as we have seen to the extent of defining the ‚normal’ as that sphere where every tiny detail is in process and every object on the planet is individuated either in a giant Object Name Server (GS1) or in IP to every edge (IPSO alliance) or any combination of this together with RFID and NFC resulting in every object and item being digitally approachable in the distributed local grid as well as in the ‚Cloud’. That parallel process is the awakening of a combined and shared intelligence of that other outer end on the spectrum; the manic mind. It has been fueled by and has itself helped to build that open white line engulfing the planet: tcp/ip where still no King, Tyrant or Tycoon can make bytes go faster (at least for the moment). In under twenty years any mind capable of sharing has shared and fueled sharing as a new default. To keep to yourself the minimum of necessity and share all other resources with other so no one needs to be in want.

So now I want to make the case that this sharing is the new default and that this is facilitated by that very framework the specialists have build.

A Gramscian moment.

Are we going to stand aside, bitch and moan and grumble and lose this shot at full traceability and transparency like we lost his notion of hegemony to the extreme right wing that is now reaping the rewards of fully using it? Or are we going to get together, share resources and build the building blocks on the cheapest ecology of hardware, software, database storage and analytics ever? Yes, bad magic, yes watered down alchemy. All true. But if the we that I outlined is not invested and actualized in it, it we will lose the opportunity that we can either at one point break it (owning it) or fullfill it in such a way that we leave some notion of becoming, so space for real magic to occur or to hide herself thoroughly for a while.

Hellekin pointed me to SCIENCE, MEANING & EVOLUTION: THE COSMOLOGY OF JACOB BOEHME By Basarab Nicolescu. Foreword by Joscelyn Godwin Afterword by Antoine Faivre Translated from the French by Rob Baker, 2013):

“It is natural to define the different levels of reality according to our own level, in the way they are experienced by our body and our sense organs. We are not the centre of this succession of levels, but the natural system of reference. With respect to ourselves, we can recognize the existence of levels which are nearer or farther away. In any case, we are those who, alone among the other natural systems of the planet, seem to be equipped with a capacity for translating this information between levels. This capacity for translation, associated with the scientific study of natural systems, allows us to pass beyond the modern illusion of a single level of reality, an illusion which has as its source the taking as absolute the information given by our body or our sense organs (and also, of course, the extension of these perceptions by various measuring instruments).”

This once human - shamanistic - capacity for translation, has become a ‘capability’, a set of functional descriptions of agencies of Big Data.

It is not something good or bad. It is the condition of our situation. We either play it or not.

‘In a report in this week’s issue of the journal Science, Dr. P. Read Montague Jr. and colleagues at the BCM Human Neuro-imaging Laboratory and California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., describe where and when trust is formed between two anonymous people interacting via functional magnetic resonance imaging in machines more than 1,500 miles apart. They found that as the interaction continued, the trust response occurred earlier and earlier in the subjects’ interchanges – until a decision about trust occurred even before the latest interaction was completed.’ [...] ‘The study was made possible by hyperscanning or hyperscan-fMRI, a breakthrough that allowed Montague and his colleagues to synchronize the scanning of two interacting brains.’
Trust requires love:
‘In a springtime sort of story, researchers say they’ve used advanced scanning methods to pinpoint the region of the brain where feelings of trust arise.’ .. ‘Turns out those emotions are nestled in the same area as the most powerful springtime feeling of all — love.’ [...] ‘“Love is a primitive, basic, emotional affective state,” he said. “So is trust. Trust is something that a child has for its mother or a lover has for a lover.”’
Yes.
That is how simple it is.
Love brings trust. Love negotiates trust.
Trust builds relationships. Relationships are embodied in people: middle men. Love builds trust, trust builds bureaucracy. Love builds trust, trust builds boredom.
Three cheers for boredom.
Let’s hear it for some peace and quiet.

Stir it up.

Big thanks to J.Period & K.NAAN, The Messengers.



>> Rob, ASCII please! This is unreadable :(
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