Technology empowers, for both good and bad. A broad history of “attack” technologies shows trends of empowerment, as individuals wield ever more destructive power. The natural endgame is a nuclear bomb in everybody’s back pocket, or a bio-printer that can drop a species. And then what? Is society even possible when the most extreme individual can kill everyone else? Is totalitarian control the only way to prevent human devastation, or are there other possibilities? And how realistic are these scenarios, anyway? In this class, we’ll discuss technologies like cyber, bio, nanotech, artificial intelligence, and autonomous drones; security technologies and policies for catastrophic risk; and more. Is the reason we’ve never met any extraterrestrials that natural selection dictates that any species achieving a sufficiently advanced technology level inevitably exterminates itself?
The group will be convened by Bruce Schneier and is open to students and non-students. They are aiming for a particiaption group of around 16-20 people. If you are interested and in the Harvard area, then the page has details on how to register your interest in participation.
I am not in the area sadly, but very interested in the topic and what outcomes and possible future projects and papers may come from such a study group so I have proposed to host a parallel group in London.
We will aim to hold meetings around the same time, or at least the same day, so that when we have finished, some of our notes, thoughts and outcomes will be available online for the US group to look at.
I expect that we will have a different approach and our participants will be from different groups. I am currently a research fellow at Central Saint Martins school of Art and Design, working in the Design Against Crime research unit. My critical approach to this will bring different inputs than say someone from UCL or Imperial (who hopefully would also take part).
As with the Harvard group, this will be open to students, academics and non-students / academics.
If you are interested in taking part, then email me mark@geekyoto.com with some details on your background and why you would like to take part by August 20th, 2015.
The dates for the US study group are:
14 September
28 September
5 October
19 October
2 November
16 November
In the evening, (5pm – 7pm). We will be aiming to stay close to these dates as well, though actual date, times and venue are to be confirmed. It will be held in central London.
A picture may often be worth a thousand words, but behind each picture is at least a story of a thousand words or more.
1:1000 is an occasional event where we invite one or two image makers to come and talk about one of their pictures.
To create a coherent narrative about the picture, its origin, its creation and its life afterwards can be quite a piece of work, so we will carefully select and support the image makers asked to take part.
If you are interested in attending the first 1:1000, in London then please sign up here, and we will get in touch with you once we have a date and location firmed up. Your support at this stage will help 1:1000 happen.
It seems slightly odd to write this now, we have yet to hold the first UnParty UnConference but it has been raised in response to the last post, why not deal with Global Politics and thus global citizenship with these UnConference meetings.
To which my initial response is why not, people should and will bring the policies, ideas and issues that affect them, the things that concern them. If that is about an issue that is local then that is fine as it is engaging them and they are participating.
If the issues that concerns the people at the UnConference are issues around climate change or international arms trading then they can bring these concerns to the table.
Everything is recorded digitally and everyone can contribute and discuss online.
So, we could tag everything local or hyperlocal through to global.
When I started LazyGov I thought, a space to share ideas about what government is, what it should do, policy, regulation etc. I was told by some that ideas are what we have plenty off, it was tools and ‘projects’ that we needed.
I would suggest that whilst we may have plenty of ideas what we do not have is the breadth of possible discussion, in an inclusive way as possible. At least, we have some amazing tools online to do clever things and eventually everyone will be online, eventually.
LazyGov only worked if you had your own weblog, James’s OpenPolitics manifesto only works once you understand how Git/GitHub works, we need better interfaces into the digital space we are creating to record, shape and disseminate these ideas on policy and issues and governance.
The simplest interface to this digital world is talking.
Returning back to the global point that was the start of this response, I would expect within an UnConference that ideas would be raised that addressed local issues and some would be global in scope.
The trick is to look at each from both ends, to examine a local issue and pick out the points that can be abstracted to a global guidance and within a global idea look at the issues that would allow its local implementation.
If we reduce things down to rules (algorithms for global governance) then problems will arise, instead if we work along the idea of case law, case studies, examination and recording. One size does not fit all.
Of course there is nothing to stop someone running an UnParty UnConference and suggesting that for that meeting they look at Global Ideas.
Have you heard Mark Thomas’ The Manifesto? Its been on Radio 4. The set up is simple, Mark visits various parts of the country and people are invited to submit their ideas to join the Peoples Manifesto. Some are very funny, some are a bit odd and others are very interesting. Mark will do research on some of the ideas, asking experts for their opinion etc.
You might also have seen a project by James Smith (@floppy) The Open Politics Manifesto hosted over on GitHub. Using the tools developers use to record, edit and ‘discuss’ manifesto ideas.
Yes, you do need a GitHub account and know how to use it a bit, James has written notes on how to participate but it can be seen as a hurdle.
Of course, participation in the Mark Thomas project is also limited, in fact I am not sure if it is still running,
Years ago I started a site called LazyGov.org, which was based on the code that was written by Ben Hammersley to run a site he owned called LazyWeb.org, which in turn was based on an idea by Matt Jones. The idea was simple, using trackback you could post something on your weblog and it would get reflected on the lazyweb/gov page, linking to your post.
Again it was a digital tool when, in reality the number of us online was still low. It is not totally inclusive.
So the next intervention I propose is to hold an UnParty UnConference, or a lot of them all over the country and as often as needed.
Basically,
Find A Venue
Tell people about it
Get policy ideas recorded online for discussion
Someone to facilitate the meeting
Hold the meeting, discuss and record
The only rule should be that you need to be non-partisan. This is not ideology lead, it should be a space to discuss ideas rationally and calmly. Use the tools of deliberation, debate, research. Encourage people to go out and find and present the facts to support or not an idea, be willing to compromise.
Once your meeting is over, record and share the conversations online, update the policy ideas.
Yes, there are plenty of steps to take next, from ideas though to action. This is just a stepping stone.
I have used that name before but we have been starting to give it some focus. In recent weeks I have been speaking with Hub Westminster. They have an idea to create a go-to entity for companies, government departments, charities whomever to approach when they have a problem and they want to get some different thinking on it.
Of course, they could approach existing agencies, open up rounds of pitches or any number of other avenues to get new ideas and thinking into their patterns. Recently though there has been a vogue for the Hack Day or Hackathon.
The hack day though is already a possibly flawed and damaged product. What had started as way to get together a group of coders and work together on a problem for a short, time boxed period. Now, you can find hackathons or similar most weekends, across the world and for all kinds of ‘problems’. Whilst great fun us had at many of them and I am sure individuals get benefits from attending, new connections in their network etc. Overall they do not appear to contribute back into the community.
This is not the fault of anyone, just an observation of the structure as it is now.
What does come next? To examine this we need to understand what outcome we want because maybe there isn’t a next at all. Maybe the few of us who are frustrated by Hack events should just avoid them.
So, what do I want to see happen?
1. Attendance of other disciplines. Extend the reach and participation of these events, get product designers, industrial designer along as well, for example.
2. More focused problem definition. What is the goal of the event? To develop a block of code, to create a flow of information?
3. Document! Write everything up, share it so that it can be built upon.
and that leads to
4. Build on code.
Now this does change the whole dynamic, its not an event where you turn up, get some free food and some company where you can knock together something to show at the end of the time.
What we have here is more of a process, starting with a vague problem, honing this down into something more defined or maybe a set of more defined problems to be examined and then setting some people at those problems, within a support infrastructure of facilitation and documentation.
This is closer to what Hub Westminster want, to be able to take to these entities that have problems a new path to generating possible solutions.
So where does emergAgency fit into all of this? Well my pitch was to hold regular monthly events where the theme was plucked from the news, what was interesting, big that month. The actual theme would only be set a week before the day/evening of the event.
It isn’t a hackday, it is what I have described as a ‘pop-up think tank’ where an issue can be examined that the outcomes from that event, they are the next steps that feed into the later ‘hack/development/prototyping’ events.
Beyond that back when I was last using the moniker emergAgency I was thinking more around a pop-up agency to examine a problem. Take the problem space you have been approached with, put together a pool of talent to examine it and prepare possible solutions.
Which leads me onto another thing, there are lots of groups of people who get together to work on ideas, chat, network, create and learn from each other. This vast resource is something that can (and often is) put to good use in approaching problems.
What would be interesting would be some kind of point of contact, some assigned and recognised group/board who can bring in these larger, vague problems and help direct them to the groups, people who might be best placed to help solve them.
They would act as custodians of an ever growing repository of problems and directions for solutions.
It could act as a route for innovation, new ideas that would hopefully come out of this ‘process’ that could become self sustainable, new companies, new products or services. Some owned by exisiting organisations, others new start-ups.
Some of the ideas may just linger in the repository until the right people and team come along and can see how to take that initial idea to the next stage.
By being open, yes clear on attribution then this can become a route for the creation of new ideas as well as new opportunities.
All groups and people who sign up to the ‘foundation’ would get to vote for the panel who work at the top of the filter, the ones getting in and distributing the problems. The foundation should also support the events, discussions and hacks. A continuity of repository, supplying facilitation and documentation support.
It is this infrastructure that stops the current model of hackathons from being an ongoing source of new innovation, of contributing to knowledge.
So, this is just a set of vague ideas. Sign up at the emergAgencymailing list and lets shape these ideas into something that new.
this weekend just past (19th & 20th November 2011) Rewired State hosted a Hackday For Honda at The Guardian and I got to go along as one of the devs.
It was possibly the scariest hackday to do as what to build, what did Honda and their agency Amplify expect? It was a tricky event but the amazing Rewired State team did pull it off and some amazing ideas got built. You must check them out.
I planned to work with Chris Thorpe (@jaggeree) and originally we planned something on behavioural change but…
You turn up, you think differently, a hard week and you want to try something else. Art became our theme quite quickly and in fact, just making something that could be called art.
So we did.
Under the group name ‘This Is Our Algorithm’ we produced three pieces of art, pieces that had thought and ideas behind them, that should be provoking but playful.
‘The Watchful State’
At last I started my CCTV mapping project, if you have spoken to me in the last ten or more years you will know I have been interested in the idea of mapping our surveillance infrastructure. Over the weekend I started a project to actually start to realise that idea, albeit slowly.
I had discussed the fact that rolling up to a large surveillance installation with a camera and starting to snap would in fact interest the police. But what if the image of the installation was recorded with pencil and paper, or charcoal or even water colours.
The final triptych consists of:
A map made using http://walking-papers.org/ (This is Michal Migurski awesome tool that makes a paper map of anywhere, but you add details to the map, then scan it back in and help add detail to Open Street Map)
A photograph of the CCTV installation in question and a pencil and charcoal drawing or sketch of the street scene.
The other pieces were Karma,
Karma
and a Dream with a Dream
All three pieces dealt with algorithms, code and control. They were as much about some strange desire we have to codify up our lives into possibly complex but ultimately meaningless algorithms, trying to reduce complexity to a point beyond understandable simplicity to end at a nihilistic pointlessness.
Reality is complex, understanding reality is hard.
That’s what makes it fun!
So we intend to make more art. We will tell you more about it all at This Is Our Algorithm.
UPDATE: 23/11/2011
You have to go and read Chris’ thoughts on the event and learn more about Dream with a Dream. He’s right, I miss it already too and want to build another chain. Possible Christmas decoration project if nothing else.
Somethin’ Else make radio. In fact they do a lot of things, online, apps, radio etc. but one exciting thing that they are doing soon is a day of pilots for ‘Playful Radio’. July 7th they will broadcast over the internet a number of pilots, ideas for interactive, playful radio / audio content.
One of my ideas is in that list.
I have to admit that the idea when I put finger to keyboard, in my mind felt rather slight, it was in fact based on something that I had wanted to do around the election and was in fact much more of a visual art focus than this.
Inspired by the rather excellent ‘The Story‘ from earlier this year I wanted to do something around politics and playfulness. I still do, a day about playing games and making satire and exploring political ideas and processes in a way that is engaging to the many of people who would not in fact be interested in paying attention before.
We can step back further, before The Story even, to art. Here I have been thinking about the art of Peter Kennard, who now works with Cat Picton-Phillipps and they produce work, under the name kennardphillipps like this:
Tony Blair takes a picture of himself with a phone in front of a burning oil pipeline in Iraq - Photomontage
Peter Kennard has been doing this politically charged photomontage work for years, in the 70’s and 80’s he produced numerous works for CND.
One of his most famous is ‘The Haywain‘ where he took John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain (1821) and placed upon it the image of 3 nuclear missiles.
For me this is still a powerful image, the pastoral view of England with American missiles in it.
When Banksy started doing his ‘Santa’s Ghetto’ pop-up shops in London, this image of Tony Blair in front of a burning oil pipeline was a best seller.
It is not just Peter Kennard, a whole new generation of artists, many of them street artists are mixing politics in with their often playful images. The work of Banksy of course, but also collectives like Static.
Static produced a rather interesting ‘games’ series of prints around 2008. The three prints are ‘Right Hand Red’, ‘Fortunes Fated’ and ‘Corridor of Uncertainty’. They each have a distinctive style and each is about politics, protest and games. RHR features riot police and a game of Twister, FF Nixon and Kennedy face off over a Wheel of Fortune and in COU a game of Urban Cricket is played in an urban wasteland with riot vans watching.
They have continued to produce work that is based in politics and satire that is also playful and unique.
Now I have always enjoyed my politics delivered with a touch of anger, satire, creative spins etc. As I think I have mentioned in a blog post before, beyond my comic reading of Starlord and 200AD, when ‘Crisis’ came out I latched onto it and lapped up every instalment of ‘Third World War’.
And recently in my investigation into games and play it does not take long to find this same spark in this creative area either. Political simulations have been played for years. Some of the most popular video games are in fact of this type, Civilization and SimCity. There are also card/board games that allow you to play the Cold War or the Nixon/Kennedy election and most recently a small company in Cambridge started producing a board game about the ‘War on Terror’. It includes a black balaclava with the word ‘Evil’ on it. When your country is selected by the spinner as part of the Aix of Evil, you don the balaclava. Its probably a highly accurate simulation of the actual model used to decide who does form a part of this particular Axis.
On election night I wanted to fill a room with artists, to watch the coverage as it came in and produce art works, mashups through the night about the election, the reporting of the election, what was the world that was starting the following morning. Peter Kennard often describes himself as an ‘Unofficial War Artist’ then this would be a group of ‘Unofficial Election Artists’ responding to the nights events.
It did not happen, but the idea of mixing and remixing as an approach to examining politics and news as a playful prism still stuck in my head. So when I got an email mentioning that Somethin Else were looking for ideas, I sent something over.
All very visual, how does this work on radio?
So the idea was this, to take the interactive stream of twitter, find the stories and satirise them on the radio show, play with them. I tried to describe what I wanted, it needs to be The Daily Show meets Blue Jam, on the radio. The idea itself was not much more, as I thought about what I wanted to do I could not get away from thinking visually about the photomontages and mashups I have spoken about above.
But Somethin’ Else know about Radio and I got an email saying that they wanted to try the idea out.
Its amazing how popular comedy and panel shows about current affairs are. Its astounding that people would actually say that they did not watch the news, they watched ‘The Daily Show’ to get their information on what was happening in the world. Maybe it is something reassuring, if these people can write a joke about it, it can’t be ‘that’ bad. The world carries on. Forgetting, of course that comedy can often be so cruel.
I know that I cannot watch news progammes without thinking about ‘The Day Today’ and ‘Brass Eye’ the television shows by Chris Morris that tore apart how new and current affairs are communicated by modern media. Of course it was Chris Morris who also produced ‘Blue Jam’ something a lot more surreal and frankly odd. By latching onto Blue Jam as the nexus point with Chris Morris I want to say that we are trying to come up with something that is a bit different, not just Brass Eye on the radio.
Chris Morris has spoken about why his current film about Islamic Terrorists is not done in the style of Brass Eye, it was something he has done, about the language of television news, he did not need to re-tread that. We don’t either.
Of course maybe we will be lost in the sea of programmes about the news and I list these as shows that have influenced my when thinking about what this playful radio experiment could be.
My Inspirations:
‘The Now Show’, ‘PM’, ‘Broadcasting House’, ‘Mock The Week’, ‘Have I Got News For You’,’Russell Howards Good News’, ‘Spitting Image’, ‘Yes Minister’, ‘Yes Prime Minister’, ‘The Thick Of It’, ‘The Daily Show’, ‘Brass Eye’, ‘The Day Today’.
I hope that you will listen in on the 7th and give us your feedback, I hope that it works and it is something fun and worth listening too. When I have the links, I’ll post them here and on twitter. When I have more news on the presenter I’ll post that too.
In the meantime, if you think you spot a story that might be interesting, or could be funny, or just odd or important then let me know, on twitter: @marksimpkins
Vinay Gupta [Hexayurt Project http://www.hexayurt.com] and myself [http://www.geekyoto.com] recently kick started the London chapter of the CrisisCommons project [http://www.crisiscommons.org] and helped initiate a series of workshops, Crisis Camp Haiti – London.
Already there is a dedicated group co-ordinating with the US crisis camps and central CrisisCommons teams and making sure that the work done at these workshops is useful and vital to the whole aid / emergency and redevelopment work that is going into Haiti.
We have a space over at the London Knowledge Labs [http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&Itemid=27&agid=233&year=2010&month=01&day=23] for the next few Saturdays and have started contributing to the Relief Web project
(in fact for a report on what has happened at the first workshop look at this wiki page [http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Crisis_Camp_London_Ongoing]).
Of course, we still need more help. If you can do something then please get in touch.
* The wiki is here: http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Crisis_Camp_London
* Join the Google Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/crisis-camp-london/subscribe
* Follow and use this tag on twitter http://twitter.com/search?q=%23crisiscampldn #crisiscampldn
* Follow this Twitter list http://twitter.com/georgeweyman/crisis-camp-london/
* and the Twitter account @crisiscampLDN
* Ning group http://crisiscampldn.ning.com/ and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=265208869243
Crisis Commons London is going to exist beyond the events in Haiti because things will happen again, if you can take part, help out in some way (and help is needed not just in the area of code but in everything) then please do take the time to stand up and help.
Thanks
mark
Further reading:
Hexayurt Country [http://hexayurt.com/hexayurt_country/]
Architecture For Humanity – Haiti Quake: A Plan for Reconstruction [http://architectureforhumanity.org/updates/2010-01-17-haiti-quake-a-plan-for-reconstruction]
The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust by Greg Palast [http://www.gregpalast.com/the-right-testicle-of-hell-history-of-a-haitian-holocaust/]
Follow the news at [http://haiti.com/] and Demotix [http://www.demotix.com/haiti-earthquake]
Vinay Gupta [Hexayurt Project] and myself recently kick started the London chapter of the CrisisCommons project and helped initiate a series of workshops, Crisis Camp Haiti – London.
Already there is a dedicated group co-ordinating with the US crisis camps and central CrisisCommons teams and making sure that the work done at these workshops is useful and vital to the whole aid / emergency and redevelopment work that is going into Haiti.
We have a space over at the London Knowledge Labs for the next few Saturdays and have started contributing to the Relief Web project
(in fact for a report on what has happened at the first workshop look at this wiki page).
Of course, we still need more help. If you can do something then please get in touch.
Crisis Commons London is going to exist beyond the events in Haiti because things will happen again, if you can take part, help out in some way (and help is needed not just in the area of code but in everything) then please do take the time to stand up and help.
In July 1968, New Worlds magazine asked this very question:
New Worlds July 1968 Cover. Issues #182
Now is the time to pose the question again, back in 1968 science fiction writers took that challenge and produced some of the bleakest yet compelling dystopian and catastrophe based works ever written.
Now some of those same writers throw up their hands as they cannot imagine worse than the world is putting forwards right now.
Just a note, though it has been quiet at gk HQ in fact we have been rather busy.
Just this last weekend, we ran the first Africa Gathering, here in London as the launch of the geekyoto global briefings. It was an amazing day and we will have more reports here and over at the AG website.
We are also planning some more events but I did want to say that the next geekyoto conference is provisionally booked for August 15th, back at Conway Hall.
The theme this year is:
‘What Is The Exact Nature of The Catastrophe?’
Yes, there will be more information soon and tickets released.
