Author: Rob van Kranenburg Date: To: Bricolabs Subject: [Bricolabs] Questions
Hi James, all,
What do you see as the audience?
In the first instance us, the original people on the bricolist. I heard Felipe say that he sometimes felt defeated as if we have already lost. The 'we' here are the people who believe in decentralised solutions, are weary of power and power structures and aim to save/regain/keep what Benjamin calls the aura of the work of art, singular really local and private meanings that should b e c celebrated as that which can not be uploaded as data into machines that reshape it without care, without meaning, without love.
So I think that is the primary audience: us. We are all quite powerful when we feel good, happy and see openings. When things are closed or appear to close down we get depressed and our intelligence starts to eat itself, an awful situation where we have all been.
The first duty of the guerrilla Che said is to have good shoes.
The first duty of us is to have a good brain and feel open and happy whatever else is happening on the planet. Getting down because of it won't do anyone any good.
Now I come to think of it that is our primary audience and goal to allow ourselves and our friends to see openings. Where they are that is for each of us to decide.
Secondary audiences are the makers: scientists, engineers, tinkerers that come to our spaces, meetings, events, that read our texts to get away from a notion of use and efficiency that they find to limiting but which still is the core of today's production in the model of companies, shareholders and venture capital to something like for example Steward-ownership. So to them we can be an inspiration.
Tertiary audiences are citizens, 'users' of the products, services, applications - things, rituals and practices designed by makers who work with them not for them.
What's the objective?
The objective is to keep the line - the open space/access space - open. That is the most important objective.
This is what shocked me most when I first noticed IoT or ambient intelligence. This idea of tagging every object on the planet. I wondered who writes the data in the tags but more important I realised that gradually the information on the tag about the object would become the dominant interpretation in fact it would become as important or as actual as the object itself. Then the world closes.
When I first was in meetings with the engineers I asked them if they had ever heard of animism. There are cultures who not only talk with and to objects they believe they are alive. Western culture does not promote that but I grew up with a world of affordances and connotations around objects. They could mean so many things to so many people. This poly interpretability is the key to life as we know it still.
In the world as a database the database becomes the sole provider of meaning.
That equals death.
So in my opinion the key objective is to keep this very old witching potentiality of openness alive.
I believe that this line runs in and through people. Brings me back to our audience:us. If we don't live it, nothing will.