Sorry for the missing photo of the meme :(
[image: Screenshot 2024-10-07 at 1.49.49 PM.png]
On Mon, Oct 7, 2024 at 3:14 PM marija nikolic <nikolic.a.marija@???>
wrote:
> 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
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Brico mailing list
>> Website on http://www.bricolabs.net
>> Unsubscribe: https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/brico
>>
>
::
Re: [Bricolabs] The Kenner
