Justin Pickard

Network Dystopias

Architecture student Keiichi Matsuda’s AR concept video triggered memories of a short vignette posted on a forum by a pseudonymous stranger, back in 2008. Taken together, we get something like Bladerunner with a 2000s sensibility -

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“Nobody has a job. Everybody has a set of contracts. Some keep you in the same place for eight hours with the same coworkers five days a week, but it isn’t a job. A job requires benefits. A job requires taxes be paid by an employer. As a subcontracting entity you’re paid to pay your own taxes, to waive your own minimum wage requirements, your own working time directives. You are management. You don’t rent, you pay fractional reserve interest on a 99-year heritable lease entity that sublets your front room as storage space to a distributed shop. Every Saturday you pack boxes in your hall to tell other people how they can make a fortune out of the new economic climate by packing boxes in their hall. There are more guns in the world than there are people who can read properly. You ride a bus to the building that is your ‘office’. It used to be a hotel, when people could afford to go to other countries that weren’t over the road. You need a passport stamp to visit your mother. You don’t need a passport stamp to visit your father. You have six identity cards. You broke your leg in school and as a result can’t join a library. If there was still a library open near you you couldn’t even go in it. Instead you just can’t login.

Every morning when you get onto the number 27 you sit in the window and watch the UAVs circle over the shanty town in the park. You have extensive scarring on your left shoulder where the man next to you was extrajudicially assassinated when you used to get the number 26. Your ex-boyfriend left a camera in your shower, and you only found out when his ex sued for a share of the earnings, naming you as a witness. Your best friend Jane and you have a tradition. Every new year you buy another lock for her front door, fit it beside the others, then drink vodka until you vomit blood. You fight, and don’t talk again until christmas …”

- erithromycin, ‘Re: Cyberpunk in 2008‘, RPG.net, 28/06/2008

Goldsmiths: Autumn’s Final Fortnight

Really need to get this post finished before heading back up to London for the ice-encrusted start of Spring Term. So, here’s a compressed summary of Weeks Eleven (30/11 – 4/12) and Twelve (7/12 – 11/12).

photo credit: jfpickard

Notes, as ever, under the cut.

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Peer production, no hippy lovefest

“Paying attention to the last ten years means we need to realize that nonproprietary, distributed production is not the poor relation of traditional proprietary, hierarchically organized production. This is no hippy lovefest. It is the business method on which IBM has staked billions of dollars; the method of cultural production that generates much of the information each of us uses every day. It is just as deserving of respect and the solicitude of policy makers as the more familiar methods pursued by the film studios and proprietary software companies. Losses due to sharing that failed because of artificially erected legal barriers are every bit as real as losses that come about because of illicit copying. Yet our attention goes entirely to the latter.”

- Prof. James Boyle, The Public Domain

(via @mathpunk)

More Accurate

“We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassains patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.”

- Randall Munroe, xkcd

Lottery of the Sea (2006)

Spent a significant chunk of my Saturday afternoon watching Allan Sekula’s documentary The Lottery of the Sea (2006). Here’s the blurb:

“Iconoclast photographer and documentarian Allan Sekula unfolds a series of variations shot in the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Japan and other maritime countries around two of his major obsessions: globalization and the sea. In this rumination on the sea as a “primordial source of sublimity,” Sekula explores a matrix of narratives – Greek myths, American movies, and stories of longshoremen, lost sailors and displaced populations – and rejects on the globalizing effects of Adam Smith’s notion of the seafaring life as a form of gambling.”

At 179 minutes, it’s a bit of an endurance test, with the unashamedly grim and grubby worms-eye-view of global capitalism thudding regularly, as a hammer pummelling you into submission. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad documentary, because it isn’t. And if it was, that wouldn’t be the point. Sekula’s VO work is lyrical and seductive. There are some really striking sequences, particularly those focusing on the Panama Canal and the Prestige oil spill. The politics is a bit heavy-handed, but there’s an interesting contrast between the diffuse “affective politics” of the anti-globalisation movement and the more overtly class-based syndicalism of the dock workers.

It does hang together well, with the pieces least relevant to the narrative trajectory being interesting enough to warrant inclusion on their own merit. More importantly, it’s a powerful antidote to the digitality of most media coverage of globalisation (the BBC Box being a rare exception, but still – by its very nature – hitched to the digital) … focusing instead on the gunk of the oil spills, the metallic bulk of the shipping containers.

Overall, it’s a gruelling and unevenly paced documentary, but with enough interest to sustain a viewing. Doesn’t require much active brain work, but will leave you with questions and images – a beached squid dragging itself back to the water // a domestic servant, behind glass, moving to the drumbeats of the anti-globalisation protesters in the streets outside // bored-looking junior Panamanian government personnel, overseeing the endless rubber stamping of paperwork for flags of convenience …

Why #WeLoveTheBBC – Digital Revolution

A near-perfect marriage of medium and message, the upcoming BBC documentary Digital Revolution (working title) is everything I could ask of a public broadcaster. Indeed, if I owned a television, this alone would justify my license fee for the next five three years.

They’ve given me a platform to rant and rail against Baroness Susan Greenfield; made their interview rushes available for people to download, embed, and remix; and actually seem to be listening to the comments and suggestions they’ve recieved.

This clip – in which web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee turns the camera on his interviewer, Aleks Krotoski – is one of my favorite videos of the year:

Two people sharing a passion – it’s intimate, authentic, and utterly of-the-moment. So zeitgeisty it hurts your teeth. And I love it.

(Admittedly, this video is an off-the-cuff clip from Tim, rather than an official output of the documentary, but the BBC enabled this meeting of minds – so my point on the BBC being awesome stands.)

Neo-Schumpeterian Fiction: Perez vs. Doctorow

The above is a slide lifted from Growth After the Financial Crisis, a fantastic lecture from Venezuelan techno-economist Carlota Perez at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Audio available here. Surprisingly accessible, with moments of pure clarity, it comes highly recommended …

“there is *always* over-investment in infrastructure, and that’s one of the reasons for the bubbles …”

Shaking the unpleasant memories of bone dry theories of international political economy ingested then regurgitated as part of my undergrad degree (mostly about tulips), Perez’s is an approach which excites me.

Although I haven’t (yet) read her book, the core thesis of her work seems to rest on the relationships and interlinking of technology, institutional structures, innovation and speculative finance in a way that – gasp! – actually seems to explain things.

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The Lighter Side of Seasteading

From what I can make out, Open_Sailing = seasteading + SEHIs + Oekonux + Driving Over Lemons, with the scary libertarians replaced by something like the old-school, Victorian scientific expedition.

In other words, a more palatable brand of seasteading from the Sundance generation – far more likely to win round the sympathies of venture altruists, social entrepreneurs, and the general public.  There’s a full presentation (opens pdf), with some useful stuff that resonates with quantum governance, stigmergy, open source infrastructure, aquaculture, and all that Superstruct-y goodness. A welcome departure from the global guerillas & Somali pirates, and a potent booster shot for those looking to top-up their optimism.

So raise the kite and steer us westward – to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and beyond!

The Limitless Threat

I’ve restructured one of my undergraduate dissertations as a hypertext, mixed in some video footage and CC-licensed images, and thrown it up as its own site.

‘Containing the Uncontainable: Guantánamo Bay and the Limitless Threat‘ – it’s about terrorism, geography, theology, aesthetics and the apocalypse.  It might be a bit dense, and I admit to have been a bit overkeen on the subheading front, but there’s definitely some good stuff in there.

Zero History

TwiliteMinotaur, on William Gibson’s next novel:

“The future” is and always was a map of a fake territory. It is entertainment. However, without any map at all we become paralyzed, so even a fake map can provide initial direction, even if it is rarely ultimately the right direction. Thus “futures” survive. Willy Lee rockets boldly charted out intergalactic federation before a nation came together and reached upwards. Cyberjockeys first jacked across a new world’s neon constellations, created new myths to sail by, tentative models to take to the money people. The future promised Star Wars, I-Robots, and Cybertopia – we got decaying red stars, automation, and Google.

But now we are seduced by ever sexier futures and dwindling soundbite-sized “now”, all whilst history is regooded — the signified is stripped from signifiers, packed into a brochure and McDonaldized. We become blind to history and its non-linearity. Thus our pattern seeking mind fabricates theories, draws whatever lines it can on the last two data points: this quarter’s report, this season’s pants, this election cycle’s buzz issue, the last 140 characters, today’s housing price index.