In the paper “For a Comprehensive Citizen Appropriation of Information and its Technologies | Information Personnes / Persons Information”: http://pierrot-peladeau.net/en/archives/2196 the importance of choice is demonstrated. The concept in the paper that really made me think of Internet of Things was Social Appropriation.

social appropriation, which is the process by which people integrate innovations into their lives to empower themselves, adapting and even hijacking them from their initial control or purposes to fit their needs and interests.

The world is filled with technologies that went through a process of social appropriation, think telecommunications, the phones original purpose was to transmit concert performances into your house, sms was for diagnostic tests by engineers. These are the killer apps that are game changing. In the web world, flickr originally was set up for dating(anyone got a reference). Although the big appropriations are impressive, the smaller ones are more intrigueing

Take thimbl  http://www.thimbl.net/ This is a project based on an old computer service called finger, finger was used to check the details of a user on a computer. So you could read the .plan of  joeblogs@gamgee.uni.edu. The twist is that they want to take this decentralised service and knit it together into a web2 micro blogging application like twitter.

Image by loscuadernosdejulia via Flickr

This is my notes and everyones tweets refering to the GloNet Conference Stream at Futureeverything 2010
#futr Glonet

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sparkfun trends to no 1 in google(US) searches

Originally uploaded by Dr Brian
Might get out with a camera, but this is indicative of the day.  

A day when an audatious sparkfun pledged to give away $100000 of stock $100 at a time to “people like me”.

Still trying to get my 0.1% slice of the pie but given the timesouts, thats not likely.

Amazing events

2200+ nicks on a single irc channel (admittedly only a percentage could talk)

a n1 in google trends

#Sparkfun not trending on twitter for an hour after getting to no1 on google. Does that indicate something about the world, or twitter or google or all of the above.

Monday, Stewart Brand(of the WELL, Whole Earth Catalogue, Long Now Foundation) talked at Life about his ideas on the future and humanity. How it might be time to rethink some of the popular stances against genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, urbanization and geoengineering. He intimated that the precautionary principal had gone too far, it wasn’t precaution in the ways of fixing acid rain and banning thalidomide, but anti-progress. Yes we can’t understand all the consequences of a technology, but we can be eternally vigilant.

• GM: mentioning how GM and organic food production should not be anathema, but that green peaces stance aginst GM has been more anti-science than reasoned.
• Nuclear Energy: comparing the effects of Chernobyl and Bhopal, Bhopal was definitely the more damaging to humanity. Chernobyl is now a de-humanised reserve full of plants and animals.  Nuclear is a base load energy producer, so can be controlled as opposed to solar and wind. It is not perfect, will have to be rethought, and he showed a number of smaller, cheaper safer reactors that might be used for local energy production (or even mobile ones). Of interest was Freeman Dyson’s buriable thorium reactor, that dosent need lots of reprocessing  tthat provides steam for energy production. If the US and India and China went down this route, most of the energy needs of the worlds populations would be satisfied. How to get this uptake? Make coal more expensive. On the nuclear waste problem, it is a smaller more controllable problem than the tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Each human would probably use the energy in a coke can or less to power their life. Some of the other reactors (such as fast breeders) can consume the waste of the other reactors.  An interesting aside was that the us nuclear plants are being powered by reprocessed USSR nukes. My idea was always that nuclear power stations werent viable, because they werent scalable. Each instalation took so much money and time, and ran over budget as they need to be made ensite. The smaller ones have the advantage that they can be fabricated in factories. More playeres than just the big ones (RR, Serco, Westinghouse, Mitsubishi). It might even provide a way out for companies heavily invested in the military uses of nuclear to find another revenue stream.
• Geoengineering : Talk starts with Mt Pinatubo which released 200million tonnes of sulphur dioxide and decreased the earths temperature by 0.6C. Can humans do the same? Should we do the same.  So strange contraptions that release sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere might give us a bit of breathing space til we get C)2 under control.
• urbanization: What happens as we reach the point where there is more people in cities than outside, reclamation of natural spaces, leaving areas for more intensive farming. Why are people streaming int the city? For jobs and oportunities Slums are strange places in this, an informal economy that works even though it is por and life is hard. However, it is probaly easer than it was on the land, otherwise they would be back there. So communities are being built in these areas, people are getting together to teach their children, and that is their objective, to never stop teaching.

A lot of this talk came from the idea that the greens have got it wrong, there is no unnature, they are being too romantic, and dramatic(see the book). There is more science needed, but we have been talking about global warming since I was in high schoolin  the early 90′s, and nothing much has been done. Ozone was stabilized, but that was relativly more simple, although the replacement for fluorocarbons are intense greenhouse gasses.

SO why is this post important to me?  If it isn’t already obvious, all of the topic by Steward Brand came with the caveat empor “More science needed” . But where will this science come from? The UK, USA, or China a society directed by engineers.  It also intersects at a strange angle with Fo.AMs “Luminous Green”, bricolabs, peer based learning, citizen science, synthetic biology, P2P production: Knowledge and learning, and making…..

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It was the culmination of their research, illustrated through how known artists create a revenue stream for themselves, such as those in the Recording or Design areas. The audience had artists from the recording, DJing, Vjing and writing areas. I think I was the only one representing New Media or Fine Art(correct me if I am wrong). Reason for the underrepresentation I think is this gritty friction around fine art and money. Professor Feng Li’s(the primary investigator) standard phrase is “Imagine that you could be successful as an artist and incredibly rich”. At previous workshops, some of the participants had a visceral reaction to this, and I can understand it. However, the interviews have brought about some understanding of each side, the suit and the tshirt.

David Parrish was there to explain how they are not so incongruous. You can buy his book Tshirts and Suits, or download for free. One of the main take home points, was that a smart entrepreneur makes a device that makes money even when the inventer is asleep. The problem with the arts, is that it doesn’t make itself, and if something happens to you, the artist, the work stops.

A lot of the ideas explained in the taxonomy made by Danielly Netto could be described as making communitiy, making limited eddtions and merchandising your one offs. Radiohead’s strategies were discussed and the use of creative commons was also brought up (great!). The idea is to control your IP, and give away what you want.

This ties in nicely with something that was sent to me recently, about ideas, and whether they should be pursued. (from http://coudal.com/newsletter/recent.php)

Here are the questions, all equally important:

1. Will we be able to make money? We’re a business. We have mortgages and tuitions to pay. Plus, if we don’t make some cash once in a while, how will we feed our habit of continually screwing around?

2. When we’re done, will we be proud of the work we’ve done? Slaving for months on a project only to not want to show it to anyone when you’re finished just plain sucks. No amount of money can make that feel better.

3. Can we learn a little something new along the way? Executing the project has to make us smarter and help satisfy our curiosity, which we think is our greatest asset.

For an artist, not all of these are as important, we are not used to a work making money so concentrate more on being proud of the work and learning along the way, at least for the time being.

Which probably leads me back to Hans Abbing, and his book on Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (Amsterdam University Press, 2002)….but I will leave it there today.