Hello Bricolabsers,
I have no idea how big the group is nor who are the members, I've just been
invited to the group by my dear friend Rob and I'm thankful for that.
I recalled recently this meme:
[image: Screenshot 2024-10-07 at 1.49.49 PM.png]
Being a sociologist by education, I found it very accurate. Of course, I'm
not against studying science and technology; en contraire, I spent a long
time trying to communicate its value and necessity to a wider audience
(first to the youngest, but also to adults). I completely agree with Carl
Sagan's statement: 'We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science
and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and
technology.' But this is also becoming true for other spheres of
reality—social, political, and philosophical concepts. This is largely why
history keeps repeating itself.
It has become obvious that we have been in an ideological crisis for some
time, that postmodernism is unraveling, and that attempts to sustain it
through neocolonialism will likely fail—but only if advancements in ICT are
not fully controlled by corporations.
I love Christina's quote:
*“I am always interested in who controls technology in any given society at
a particular time."..*
And what might also be important to consider is where the energy and
material resources necessary for technology come from. Because we won’t
achieve real change if only parts of the process are transparent. Let’s at
least be honest with ourselves and acknowledge our anarchistic
revolutionary tendencies by asking this question. These resources as we all
know, come from neocolonized, severely exploited countries far enough away
that consumers are not bothered to think about them. It's getting too
complicated.
Perhaps we can contemplate some tech degrowth strategies that align with
our values of protecting people's freedoms (which people?! - I guess all
around the globe), digital identities, and their right to resist and exist
both virtually and in this heavy, yet beautiful, material reality worth
preserving.
I'm looking forward to engaging discussions and valuable resources in the
mailing group.
Best,
Maya
On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 3:52 PM Rob van Kranenburg <kranenbu@???>
wrote:
> Good afternoon, (I resend as I am not sure if this passed, apologies if
> you receive this twice),
>
> On the matter of dream projects that may become real I have been working
> for the past decade on the idea of regaining back control/agency over the
> big tech world and that is building a full European phone, running a EU OS
> and the #Eurostack.
>
> Christina Caffara wrote:
>
> -The path to independence: given that we cannot Big Bang our way from
> today’s captured vertically integrated infrastructures to full
> independence, what are the steps and priorities to follow to get there?
>
> Actually I think that there is a way and that is embedding the Eurostack
> in a European phone. We can regulate the wallet, we can also regulate
> requirements for the phone. We have excellent chips -ASML - excellent
> security PUF - and the ability to run an European Operating System with
> apps and services on search, friends, shopping... As a dedicated and
> trusted device we can also control the supply chain fully (re: pagers) and
> vouch for the validity. The device is a focus for new EU research. We can
> embed an AI layer and hardcode the AI Act, simply running AI that is sound
> and 'vetted'.
> We can bring trillions of euros home (GAFAM is worth 7 trillion) because
> the services are in the EU cloud where analysis and feedback is placed. The
> EU cloud is the edge of 500 million phones primarily.
> At the moment we have about 17 Acts and Directives regulating data,
> information, chip, cloud, data spaces, AI, devices (CRA)..... All of these
> are run on compliance alone (and fines) A 500 million zone must have other
> tools than fines. The Acts are missing the obvious - while it is staring in
> our face - the carrier itself! Also no rocketsciennce.
> Such a framework would run Self Sovereign Identity and disposable
> identities (an identity for a service; for example if you rent a house you
> send a token to the landlord that you can pay, that is all he/she needs to
> know - if you do not pay the token unlocks a phone number). This secures
> privacy for people.
>
> We have a Telegram Group on Disposable Identities:
> Disposable Identities <https://t.me/+T6YMHcJxH4Iy5LUa>
> t.me <https://t.me/+T6YMHcJxH4Iy5LUa>
> [image: apple-touch-icon.png] <https://t.me/+T6YMHcJxH4Iy5LUa>
> <https://t.me/+T6YMHcJxH4Iy5LUa>
>
>
> The framework enablers new forms of decision making. We have to negotiate
> referenda and citizen input.
> This might sound quite Chinese. In 2010 out of their twelve top
> politicians 9 were engineers and scientists. They understood that the
> hybrid - the merging of analogue and digital - is a new ontology that needs
> decision making systems tuned to the new drivers: techne - but the mindset
> is fully OCD. From a cybernetic point of view this system is quite stable
> in the short and mid term but untenable in the longer turn.
> We can work on a more balanced system.
> Taking control on the phone also means we can renegotiate the digital turn
> that just happened top us. We need a time out to rethink what kind of a
> hybrid world that we want. That should be a European discussion that we can
> not have in the current tech set up.
>
> I am happy to say that my small book on this New forms of governance for
> your hybrid reality has been accepted by Springer, and I hope it kan
> kickstart a debate.
>
> The way can conceive our phone is as a truly trusted device that can share
> moods, run our own AI and as the primary could is the edge of 500 million
> phones we have an instant EU cloud.
>
> I see it as an example of doing extreme centralisation and extreme
> decentralisation at the same time.
>
> The Kenner
>
>
> *The kenner lives in hot spots and cold spots through disposable
> identities.*
> *We need governance for the hot spots and governance for the cold spots.*
>
> *“Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is
> familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated
> from it only through the process of repression.” - Sigmund Freud*
>
> *"The number of people seeking NHS treatment for psychotic symptoms
> including hallucinations and delusional thinking has soared in the past two
> years, new figures show....According to NHS data, referrals to mental
> health services in England for first suspected episodes of psychosis rose
> by 75% in the two years up until April 2021, amid what The Guardian
> described as “the stresses of the Covid-19 pandemic”."[1]*
>
> *"Rates of those at risk for psychotic experiences have continued to
> increase compared with pre-pandemic rates, growing from 73% at risk in 2019
> to a staggering 80% in 2023." (US figures)[2]*
>
>
> The main premise of this text is that the democratic apparatus in Western
> countries is no longer tuned to the hybrid world that this seamlessness
> puts forward. Our current conceptual toolbox is no longer equipped to
> address new challenges: “We grasp reality through concepts. When reality
> changes too quickly and dramatically, as it is happening nowadays because
> of ICTs, we are conceptually wrong-footed.” (Gligoric et al., 2017) The
> most important characteristic of ubicomp, pervasive computing, ambient
> intelligence, and IoT is its promise of seamless connectivity. We perceive
> seamlessness in the same category as ‘harmonious’ because it is without
> rupture, questions and conflict. As such it can appear as a smooth surface
> of an object, a well designed situation or service or a natural setting. As
> it sets out to disappear into the fabric of everyday life, it obscures the
> fact that infrastructural, hardware, software and interface design
> decisions were made that can not be analyzed, discussed and contested. It
> becomes next nature, the next surface on which to read, write, act and
> build on. This process underlies the main innovations of our time: the
> internet hides the fact that it created the notion of data with the tcp/ip
> protocol - it creates it -, the web hides the fact that although html won
> there were competing visions that stated that to link to something that
> potentially did not exist (Error 404) should not be possible and reciprocity
> [3] not linkability should drive this information layer, the smartphone
> hides the business model beneath it with the iphone controlling what goes
> in and what goes out through the app store and their designers and ChatGPT
> hides the fact what it has been trained on and what machine learning and AI
> algorithms it runs . It could have all been different. This is not a
> lament, saying things could have been better but a statement meant to draw
> attention to the fact that with the integration of AI we need a different
> approach.
>
>
> I believe that the day is not far off when all people will have some tool,
> call it a wallet, a router, a phone, a crypto mining device (maybe all of
> that) that runs all computation locally on that device and gives out only
> contextual, time-limited and scope-based information; a companion to assist
> you in educating yourself and others in living together on a small planet
> that is tumbling about in vast space. In fact, the 1976 novel* Woman on
> the Edge of Time *by Marge Piercy, describes this tool in her ‘utopia’ of
> a society combining local bio food and resilient communities running on
> high tech renewables and distributed ledgers provisioning services. Maybe
> it was not a utopia but just a vision? She calls the device a* kenner*. I
> want to bring her vision alive in an actionable way.
>
>
> *This time she saw that what she had taken for a watch on Luciente's wrist
> was not only that, or not that at all. He was not lifting it to his ear to
> hear it tick, but it spoke almost inaudibly. "What's that?" My kenner.
> Computer link? Actually it is a computer as well, my own memory annex
> (p52)....It ties into an encyclopedia - a knowledge computer. Also into
> transport and storage. Can serve as locator-speaker. (P 64)*
>
> *NINO: Nonsense In, Nonsense Out- that's the motto on every kenner. It
> means your theory is no better than your practice, or your body than your
> nutrition. Your encyclopedia only produces the information or
> misinformation fed to it. So on (p67)*
>
> *Allright, you have all these things on your wrist. Somewhere there is a
> big computer. How does it recognise you? " My own memory annex is in my
> computer", Lucent said. " With the transport of an encyclopedia, you just
> call for what you want." " But what about the police? What about the
> government? How do they keep track of you if you keep changing names?"Again
> a great buzz of confusion and kenner checking passed around the table, with
> half of them turning to each other instead. " This is complicated." The old
> woman, Sojourner shook her head. " Government I think I can grasp. Lucent
> can show you the government, but nobody's working there today." (p*0)*
>
> *"Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours", Lucent
> said seriously, looking with shiny black gaze, merry, alert in a way that
> cast grace notes around her words. " We have limited resources. We plan
> cooperatively. We can afford to waste...nothing. You could say our
> religion? - ideas make us see ourselves as partners with water, air, birds,
> fish, trees." " We learned a lot from societies people used to call
> primitive. Primitive technically. But socially sophisticated...We tried to
> learn from cultures that dealt well with handling conflict, promoting
> cooperation, coming of age, growing a sense of community, getting sick,
> aging, going mad, dying, - (p132)*
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ➔ The vision of Marge Piercy on computing can only be characterized as
> very advanced is we look at what was actually happening in 1976:
>
>
> ● “Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak demonstrated the first Apple
> computer at the Home Brew Computer Club in April 1976. The Apple I had 6502
> MOS (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor), 1 MHz processor, 8 kB of onboard memory,
> and 1 kB of VRAM (Video Random-Access Memory) for $666.66.
> ● Intel introduced the 8085 processor in March 1976.
> ● Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple, the Apple I computer, in
> 1976; later, Wozniak and Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computers on April
> Fools' Day.
> ● The first 5.25-inch floppy disk was invented in 1976.
> ● Zilog, Inc. introduced the Z80 eight-bit microprocessor.
> ● Microsoft introduced an improved version of BASIC.
> ● On February 3, 1976, David Bunnell published an article by Bill
> Gates complaining about software piracy in his Computer Notes Altair
> newsletter.
> ● Professor at Bowling Green State University first used the term
> "computer ethics."[4]
> ● In December 1976, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to devote all
> his time to Microsoft[5].”
>
>
> It is clear that there was no comprehensive framework at the time to
> reflect on the influence and repercussions on introducing computers into
> society. In hindsight it is easy to say that this was logical as it was
> introduced by computer scientists and engineers to gradually bring
> industrial machines and processes to individual citizens. However, Marge
> Piercy was able to imagine a world in which everyone was
> ‘person’ foreshadowing the gender and LQBTQ movement, a world full of
> mobile phones, and these mobile phones were instrumental and integrated
> into larger decision making processes as well as serving as real time
> feedback on actions, and sketches two trajectories of how the future can
> look: dystopian autocratic (the city of control) and utopian balanced (the
> city of trust). Her work is called feminist and in the 2016 Introduction to
> the reprint of the novel she calls it ‘profoundly anarchist and aimed at
> integrating people back into the natural world and eliminating power
> relationships:
>
>
> *“I am always interested in who controls technology at any given society
> at a particular time. Who decides that trolleys and passenger trains are
> obsolete but cars are all-important and our cities must be built around
> them as if they were the primary inhabitants? Who chooses which technology
> is explored?*
>
> In the 2012 *Transformational Technologies #4: Implications for an
> Expanding Threat Environment* Conference, there were several lectures,
> one of which was on the history of anarchism. The speaker went through a
> long list of bombings and attacks, only to end on one in particular to
> state that the reasons behind it were unknown and that no one knew why he
> actually threw that bomb.As I was sitting in the audience I was very
> surprised to hear this and to think that as no one on the room reacted, a
> lot of intelligence attendants felt the same. No doubt that there was no
> particular idiosyncratic reason for that attack, but that it symbolized
> some form of power structure. The real reason was a lifelong felt injustice
> for the entire political situation. This does not justify the attack, but
> it shows that law enforcement and intelligence seem to think these events
> somehow come out of the blue, whereas they evolve in a long process from
> deeply felt injustice and lack of being part of decision making
> processes. On July 1, 1910, in Tobolsk the Omsk Military Tribunal
> sentenced Sergei Vilkov to death. He was found at 9 o'clock that same
> evening, dead in his cell. “He had tied a length of rope to a ring in the
> wall tha supported his bed and while lying had slowly strangled himself to
> death.”[4] This process of radicalization can be guided towards more
> productive ends if individuals are recognized and followed up earlier in
> life.
>
>
> Current technological and socio-cultural reality could not have emerged
> nor evolved without tools from anarchist theory and praxis. These tools are
> currently not recognized. Anarchism still has a bad reputation. Yet without
> broadly educating citizens into self-organization on matters of data and
> identity (owning and using private and public keys) positive cybernetics
> will be impossible. Anarchism – “a political theory, which is skeptical of
> the justification of authority and power, especially political power”[1] is
> equated with chaos, unrest, violence, and terror[2]. Yet, without it
> blockchain, decentralization as a technical force favoring the ‘edge’ over
> the ‘cloud’, cryptocurrencies and p2p platforms, digital twins, and Proof
> of Work, Decentralization, Satoshi Nakamoto Consensus, Asset Tokenization,
> Freedom Blocks, Global Public Ledger [3], the Internet of Things,
> Industry 4.0 and Self Sovereign Identity could not have been conceived.
>
>
> As humans are equal, generic infrastructures should support all of them
> equally in their basic (food, shelter, care, education) and intellectual
> (no blockades in any information flow) needs. How simple can it be, how
> true this is and how absurd we are not living this reality now.
>
>
> The most fundamental anarchist protocol is the protocol of the internet
> itself, as it simply says: pass on the packet. It is a radically new way of
> organizing data and information. It has created industrial giants and a
> political system, but it has not yet created a fair, social and just system
> making use of all current technological resources.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> [1] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anarchism/
> [2] Lucy Parsons: “I am an anarchist. I suppose you came here, the most
> of you, to see what a real, live anarchist looked like. I suppose some of
> you expected to see me with a bomb in one hand and a flaming torch in the
> other but are disappointed in seeing neither. If such has been your ideas
> regarding an anarchist, you deserved to be disappointed. Anarchists are
> peaceable, law-abiding people. What do anarchists mean when they speak of
> anarchy? Webster gives the term two definitions chaos and the state of
> being without political rule. We cling to the latter definition. Our
> enemies hold that we believe only in the former.”
> https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1886-lucy-parsons-i-am-anarchist/
> [3] Listed in a Tweet Blockchaintiger.rvn – Joshua
> @blockchaintiger
> Aug 23
> “Ravolutoion!” $RVN Gem stone
>
> Proof of Work
> Decentralization
> Satoshi Nakamoto Consensus
> Asset Tokenization
> Freedom Blocks
> Global Public Ledger
>
> $RVN Gem stone aka #Bitcoin 3.0 is entering the first
> halving.
>
> [4] Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead, Siberian Exiles under the Tsars,
> Allen Lane, 2016, p 381.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> [1]
> https://theweek.com/news/science-health/954485/why-psychosis-is-on-the-rise
> [2] Mental Health America releases analysis of its 2023 online mental
> health screens; U.S. sees continued rise of anxiety, psychosis and ADHD risk
> https://mhanational.org/news/2023-online-mental-health-screens-analysis
>
>
> [3] Project Xanadu (/ˈzænəduː/ ZAN-ə-doo) was the first hypertext
> project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu
> have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission
> statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web
> (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with
> one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
> [4] Walter Maner, a philosopher who teaches computer science at Bowling
> Green University, is credited with coin- ing the actual term "computer
> ethics" in 1976, although he states that it is still too early to provide a
> formal definition for the term. He observes that when the computer is in-
> volved in moral problems, the problems tend to be exacer- bated and new
> ones may even be created [1]. Deborah Johnson, a philosopher at Rensselaer
> Polytechnic Institute who wrote one of the first books about computer
> ethics [2], states that the ethical problems related to computers are not
> unique. They are the same old problems of privacy, power and property, but
> they tend to occur on a much larger scale because of computers. She calls
> computer ethics a "new species of generic moral problems [1]."
>
> https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/271125.271138#:~:text=Walter%20Maner%2C%20a%20philosopher%20who,formal%20definition%20for%20the%20term
> .
> [5]
> https://www.computerhope.com/history/1976.htm#:~:text=printer%20in%201976.-,New%20computer%20products%20and%20services%20introduced%20in%201976,disk%20was%20invented%20in%201976.
>
>
> —
>
> Wishing you all a good Sunday! Rob
>
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>
::
Re: [Bricolabs] The Kenner
