blog (January, 2007)
computing as an environment
My current work is more preoccupied with understanding computing as an environment than seeing it as a tool or a set of techniques. When computational intelligence becomes embedded in (or distributed throughout) the built environment, the basis of architecture and urbanism is radically altered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the major cities today. Looking at the impact of mobile and pervasive computing on architecture and urbanism involves rethinking received categories of public/private, individual/mass, interior/exterior, attention/distraction, virtual/actual.
-- Mark Shepard, Interview with Mark Shepard (we make money not art)
tools for cultural production
The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds.
[...]
Which kind of population seems more likely to become actively engaged in civic affairs — a population of passive consumers, sitting slackjawed in their darkened rooms, soaking in mass-manufactured culture that is broadcast by a few to an audience of many, or a world of creators who might be misinformed or ill-intentioned, but in any case are actively engaged in producing as well as consuming cultural products?
-- Howard Rheingold, The tools of cultural production are in the hands of teens, in his answer to the Edge World Question Center 2007 question, What Are You Optimistic About?
wisdom of crowds vs experts
[...] 'all of us know more than any of us' (including the professionals) and that self-experimentation combined with information-sharing with millions of other self-experimenters could lead to a much healthier population at much lower cost than the dysfunctional system we have now. This is another example of the Wisdom of Crowds [link mine].
[...]
While self-experimentation may lack objectivity [...] it has the unarguable advantage of taking into account individual variability (our bodies and minds are all different), and the personal engagement of the 'patient' must inevitably improve its efficacy. [...] It is only learned helplessness, and the outrageous prohibition of self-experimentation [...] that diminished self-experimentation from the principal means by which we accepted responsibility for our own health, to "inadvisable", "rash", and "irresponsible" behaviour. We now defer to 'professionals' to tell us what's good for us, at huge and arguably unnecessary cost to the 'health care system', our self-reliance, our independence, and our sense of personal responsibility.
-- Dave Pollard, Self-Experimentation: For More Than Just Diets (How to Save the World)
Experts certainly have a role, but they can hijack the agenda and deprive the whole process of legitimacy just because they have so much knowledge. So one of the problems with democracy that we have in the world right now is that people just don't think it achieves anything for them - that's why you get participation declining so dramatically in many Western democracies. [...] The experts have to provide the information that allows lay people to make informed decisions, without taking over the process.
-- Thomas Homer-Dixon, Worldchanging Interview: Thomas Homer-Dixon (Worldchanging.com)
leveraging the web in democratic politics
A crowd can become smart mainly because it is a collection of individuals, who're different, who have different knowledge, different resources, different viewpoints, and somehow a synergy emerges in what they do. Their different pieces complement each other, and something bigger becomes possible. It isn't that there's any great wisdom in averaging what a lot of people think. A vote by majority is pretty dumb. Lots of people applying their unique skills to working together - that can be really big.
-- Flemming Funch, The Dumbness of Crowds (Ming the Mechanic)
But most efforts at such teledemocracy so far, such as [...] www.vote.com, or even [...] www.moveon.org, are simply new versions of the public opinion poll. Billing themselves as the next phase in a truly populist and articulated body politic, the sites amount to little more than an opportunity for politicians to glean the gist of a few more uninformed, knee-jerk reactions to the issue of the day. Vote.com, as the name suggests, reduces representative democracy to just another marketing survey. Even if it is just the framework for a much more substantial future version, it is based on a fundamentally flawed vision of push-button politics.
-- Douglas Rushkoff, Open Source Democracy (txt / pdf)
that sweet spot
[...] getting back to that sweet spot where you wake up in the morning, work on an idea you had the night before, and (hopefully) have some results to reflect on at the end of the day...
-- Mark Shepard, Interview with Mark Shepard (we make money not art)
software engineering unlike other engineering
software engineering is not like other engineering
the only kind of software we ever build is unproven, experimental software
When you build a bridge, road, or house, for example, you can safely study hundreds of very similar examples.
The only new software development projects undertaken are those that havent been done before or those whose predecessors are not publicly available. This business reality, more than any other factor, is what makes software development so hard and risky, which makes attention to process so important.
-- Jeff Atwood, It's Never Been Built Before (Coding Horror)
trace your food's past
Asked twice in one day last week why I'm vegetarian, I found that my usual answer -- that I want to be a little more responsible -- might come off as presumptuous. So I'm thinking of adding because I'm lazy to it, to balance it out.
The only (rare) prayer I'll say alone before eating is to contemplate the lifespan of each thing I'm about to consume. Garlic, bean, rice: imagine seeds being spread, fertilizers applied, guy in overalls on tractor, machines grinding and packaging and loading and delivering.
More unknowns and unpleasantries with an animal on the plate (what was it fed, and where did that come from?) stretch contemplation duration while the food cools. I'm a hungry fool.
I'm lazy, and I want to be closer to the source.
take responsibility for [your] food -- no matter what it is -- by tracking its path back to the sun. If you can face the path of your food in full knowledge and be at ease with it, then happy eating!
-- Kevin Kelly, [Review of] The Omnivore's Dilemma (Cool Tools)
Web Standards elevator pitch
A thick and slick one-liner for the Why? to designing with web standards:
The semantic value of your markup should align with the semantic value of your content.
-- Craig Cook, How to Grok Web Standards (A LIST Apart)
Re: actionability
Dave Pollard posits some ideas regarding actionability as the most important attribute of knowledge:
[...] most bloggers and blog readers, for example, are looking in the 'echo chamber' for confirmation of what they already believe [...]
[...] confirmation seems to be more an excuse for inaction (‘if we all agree, surely someone else is likely to do something about it’) than a provocation to action.
[...] we talk because we have to do something but are at a loss as to what to do, so we just go on chattering in endless circles, a dance that accomplishes nothing.
I’m beginning to wonder if language isn’t actually an impediment to learning and an impediment to change, forcing us to ‘abstract’ everything we perceive and think before we can understand what it ‘means’. Our instincts seem much quicker and more adept at this than our conscious minds.
-- Dave Pollard, Too Much Talk, Not Enough Action: But What To Do?
Dave wants to quiet down the chatter in both directions... My New Years Resolution Intention is to stick my neck out a bit further; shift consumption/production balance: too much reading, listening, watching, and passive learning and connecting; too little doing, sharing, collaborating, debating, showing.
...hmmOops: I made a similar declaration a few New Year's ago.
free as in loaves and fish
Now we live in a different world. For the first time, all the basic knowledge, all the refined physics, all the deep mathematics, everything of beauty in music, in the visual arts, in literature, all of the video arts of the 20th Century, all can be given to everybody everywhere at essentially no additional cost beyond the cost required to make the first copy.
And so we face, in the 21st Century, a very basic moral question: If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay?
-- Eben Moglen, in speech, Software and Community in the Early 21st Century, presented at Plone Conference 2006
Seen at WorldChanging.com : Software and Community in the Early 21st Century.