Mashup and Revolutionary Cultural Appropriation

The term "mashup" hearkens back to "grunge." My parents would understand the term about as much as I understand Linear A. Those creating the culture often display an understandable embarassment when the term is invoked. Mashup has a certain cache in the present moment, appearing on the covers of magazines and in lifestyle pieces on television news. The concepts mashup employs are of course nothing terribly new. Take a song which has become a cultural in-joke (say. "Ghostbusters" by Ray Parker, Jr.) and lay it over a fierce beat and a raunchy bass line. Alternately, mix-up two old classics, say Jay-Z and the Beatles as in the case of DJ Dangermouse Such cut-up and resplice techniques appear in hip-hop, house, and dub reggae. The cut-up technique, when applied to music, queers the standard pattern of musical creation. Who writes a mashup? The artist having their song nicked? The sonic alchemist whose modus operandi is solve et coagula? Both? Neither? Hip-hop learned the hard way how cut-up techniques threaten the music industry. In the 80s artists fought (with varying degrees of success) lawsuits accusing plagiarism. Mashup represents an even graver threat to the music industry's hegemony over pop music. While many pooh pooh the idea that music can act as a revolutionary force I advance the case that mashup is perhaps the most subversive genre of music to emerge since NWA taught me how to gangsta lean. While hip-hop, house and dub appropriate material, mashup has almost no clear author. The mashup artist does not create per se. Rather, they appropriate material, give it a new juxtaposition from which something authentically new emerges. This deeply undermines the music industry's reliance on stars. When the star system is undercut, the entire method of production and distribution is undermined. The most threatening aspect of the mashup alchemist's work is the logical conclusion of the end of the star system and its relation to production and distribution. Namely, the enormous control that the recording industry holds over culture and subcultures gets broken up in the face of anonymous artistic outlaws creating chaos from cash.

While not possessing the downright evil of the energy or pharm industries, the recording industry presents massive obstacles to cultural liberation. The music industry- perhaps more successfully than any other industry except athletic footwear or jeans- has marketed itself not as product, but as lifestyle. Think back to high school and how music determined identity, clothing, friends and pastimes. Mods and rockers rioted over what were essentially music-derived lifestyle choices. While haircuts and clothing represent the most obvious expressions of subcultural identity, the driving force is music with kids plunking down between $12 and $20 for each disc. A semi-recent market survey indicates that "urban youth" (i.e. black and brown people between the ages of 12 and 35) spent a staggering $70.4M in 2000 alone. How many of these kids from the poorest segment of society are now spending their hard earned lettuce on useful things like dope and comics? Still, the music industry is driven by youth tastes (particularly those "urban youths") and it is not uncommon to meet a teenager who blows their entire meagre paycheck every week on CDs and records. Sony and the rest of the RIAA have pitched their product as must-haves for any hip youth worth their oversized jeans. In this sense they can be likened more to drug dealers than music salesmen. While the product they peddle isn't junk, it certainly seems as necessary from a status perspective. The further removed one is from concrete jungle, the harder it is to remember that status is not merely a sense of pride one feels. It determines one's place in the pecking order, something which carries dire consequences for youth from the projects to the mall.

A breath of fresh air came in the late 90s with Napster, the founder of which is now a billionaire- at least on paper. The RIAA fought a several years battle against even the thought of MP3s as a viable format. Over five years later they slowly realized the war had been lost. Getting the punters to shell out a buck a track finally seemed better than missing the boat entirely. Even then the industry continued rubbing egg on its own face, taking old ladies to court for their 14 year old granddaughter downloading a Britney Spears track to sing along with in the mirror. Most of the RIAA's mounted up to thousands of dollars. Public opinion remained staunchly with grandmothers and tech-savvy folk who refused to pay. Many of us still remember erstwhile thrash lords Metallica pathetically telling the world how "file sharing is totally UNcool maaaaaaaaaaaaan..." It did little more than further tarnish their image. The genesis of iTunes and the lawsuits the RIAA handed out almost felt like nuclear brinksmanship. Paranoid college students (likely [gasp] stoned on drugs) asked each other in hushed tones if that copy of Metal Machine Music they downloaded freshman year was going to be their undoing.

Meanwhile people like Alec Empire showed us how a suburban white boy with a computer and some (likely pirated) software could be his own kind of gangsta, recycling beats from Prodigy with vocal samples from Wu Tang Clan. Mashup took the concept of "jacking for beats" (to quote O'Shea Jackson) one step further. Mashups often take their material from far more mainstream sources than breakcore. While breakcore often lifts riffs, samples and beats from a track, mashup often takes the entire track or at least significant parts. I recommend that everyone reading this article stop now, hop on yr favorite program for downloading music (a legal, RIAA-affiliated one OF COURSE) and pick up the White Album of mashup, The Action Packed Mentalist Brings You the Fucking Jams, a release from electronic music's favorite smart ass, kid606. On the surface, the album is little more than the juxtaposition of mainstream hip-hop and r&b, Detroit ghetto tek, riot grrrl, and the odd pop song. However there's clearly more there. On just about any P2P program if you search for "kid606" this album is the one that will come up. The album was released by an ostensibly Kiwi company because of its dubious legality. The samples (particularly those from mainstream hip-hop and r&b) can almost not be called samples. kid typically uses the entire song. What's more the songs are better with his new beats and bass lines and easily obtainable for free.

Beyond just putting beats together that make yr ass shake, kid606 engages in full on magic! on the record. Where Burroughs outlined techniques for tape recorders, kid606 uses mashup for magic!al attack. Missy Eliot's "copywritten so don't copy me" morphs first into "don't copy me" and then into "copy me" over and over again. The artist taunts the star with her own words, showing how easily they can be transformed once taken out of the studio. There seems little reason to believe that kid606's intent was not to cost Missy Eliot money, particularly when one considers his overall schtick (some slogans: "kid606 can kiss my black ass", "to know me is to hate on me" with song titles like "it will take millions in plastic surgery to make me black")- i.e. being the kind of asshole no one wants coming after them. He wields the magic!al sword like a scalpel, cutting off just a bud of his enemies art and using it like a shotgun, blowing holes in their image and their art. In short, kid606 has posited himself as more of a thug than Missy's boyfriends. His theft takes place not in a convenience store, supermarket or even a bank. Rather kid606 steals music in a semi-legal way and then uses it to attack the source. The similarly repeated phrase "just study a tape of NWA" shows that, despite his public persona, kid606 has a vested interest in creation, as well as attack. He points the way forward for kids sitting around their parents basement, tired of slick pop, rap superstars, "punk", and whatever else the recording industry has decided they must have this week. Generic, rehashed beats are ripe for magic!al attack on the part of a rising generation of sorcerers who think that the industry that tells them Missy Eliot is better now that she's lost weight is full of shit. Mashup, particularly when remixing hits which would generally cost one upwards of $20, seems born of frustration against an exploitative industry trying to give them garbage for gold.

Mashup- whether or conscious or not- utilizes the best magic!al techniques to come out of the Burroughsian / TOPY current. Mashup seems little more than the magic!al technologies of cut-up (and related techniques) applied in an unconscious and populist way. Mashup magi don't need to read TOPY transmissions or Word Virus to know what they're doing. In this sense, we have as much to learn from them as they do from us. Quite simply any kid with a computer can make a mashup with the proper program. Now all we need to do is let them know the power they hold in their hands. And then the fabric of reality will begin to be radically rewritten by every kid bored on a Saturday afternoon.

Liberating Capital, You and Me.

In a way I am a capitalist in the most extreme sense. I believe capital should be as free as possible to do what it wants to do. Before you brandish me, please understand I am not a corporatist, Randian, or some kind of right-wing Extropian. I don't believe in the current system of corporate control. True capitalism would be free of such crazy and corrupt constraints. I'll be blunt; Ayn Rand had it all wrong. Most extropians and libertarians as well. They hijacked the idea and took it hostage. But it's hostage status is about to end.

HERE IS MY VISION OF WHERE THINGS ARE ACTUALLY GOING

The Internet is already pervasive. Already people are paying exorbitant amounts of money to buy virtual things and places in virtual games. Many of these games are using virtual currency within the game. It has become so valuable to some people that they are now buying OTHER things besides game stuff. For example, people have exchanged thousands of earned game money into "real" dollars and vice versa. How long until out of control decentralized p2p currencies proliferate? Not long I suspect. Meanwhile, the Internet itself is becoming more liberated and decentralized, more p2p applications are flourishing, open source in every stripe and every possible application is being developed. Wikipedia is offering all of its knowledge for free. Google, Yahoo and at some point many, many others will be offering the entire worlds knowledge found in books (tens of millions of them) online. And this is just the beginning. Within 10 years, the Internet will have allowed almost everything we know and are to become digitized. This includes money, which as I pointed out above, HAS ALREADY STARTED.

Please keep in mind, that while all this is happening, alternative energy continues to get cheaper and more pervasive, nanomaterials and soon nanofabs will start cropping up everywhere, totally disrupting the corporate supply chain, making people ever more autonomous, which further feeds on itself the mobility of people, things, ideas, money, everything. Further driving prices down.

Capitalism, regardless of what the top corporations want, is ultimately about creating more capital - more, more and still more without end. Economic growth in every way. It's about creating a world without limits. A world with limits, limits capital. Capital like life, like information, like you, desperately wants to be free. And it will do whatever it has to become that way. The reason is that the degree to which any player in the system operates with that philosophy, and competes in the marketplace that way, will win. Again, wikipedia vs. Britannica, Linux vs. windows., etc. Decentralized marketplaces out compete centralized ones. We should have learned that when the west beat the Soviet Union, just because such a centrally controlled economy is not sustainable. It’s stupid and vunerable to corruption and control. The same thing has happed here now. They are trying to create a corporate controlled state economy, in which very specific corporations have all the control over everyone and everything else on the planet - total world domination. The problem with this plan is that it has all the same weaknesses as the old soviet system. It's basically replacing the soviet party with the corporate party. Our CEO's become more like their leaders - fat cats. The parallels are striking. That is the ultimate irony of what is unfolding on the world stage today. It can't last and is not sutainable. Capitalism and communism are both being transcended by capital itself. Capital liberated from capitalism. I know I'm contradicting myself here, but basically what I'm saying is we have no words or models for whats coming next. IT IS THAT REVOLUTIONARY!! It’s an entirely new p2p, decentralized system - one so powerful, decentralized and free beyond anything that has existed before, that nothing will stand a chance of stopping it. It is so revolutionary, that our poor conditioned brains may have a really hard time getting our minds around it. But it is completely logical once you think about it. In fact, corporations have been trying very hard to make sure you don't understand it. But now's your chance to wake up from your sleep, and see that economic liberation is at hand.

As everything gets cheaper and cheaper with advancing technology, it will become highly profitable for a company to start paying people to do anything they want. Now its important to understand what I mean by company. Companies of today are a dying breed, their current crazy system is about to collapse. Instead, companies will continue to exist, except they will become totally amorphous, totally transparent to the economy itself. So streamlined, that they will become indistinguisable from everything else. Please read my Leisure society article to understand how this actually will work. Anyway, in exchange for people paid to do whatever they want, people have only two things they have to do in return. Share any ideas they have about how to make the world a better place, including an agreed upon amount of money they might make off of it back to the company. A symbiotic relationship. Those companies elsewhere on the globe, who insist on not paying people, will have to resort to selling their products to only those already rich enough to afford it, as most everyone else will be unemployed as a result of rapidly increasing automation. Meanwhile, the other companies are taking all the untapped genius of the marketplace, by making customers loyal to their products in exchange for any help they can give. The amount of creativity, ingenuity that will come from this will be extraordinary. Parties will crop up, new entertainment venues, pleasure centers, vacation resorts, gaming ideas. Trust me when people have all that free time, they will begin a new renaissance of creativity like we have never seen before. There will only be so much sex, pot and TV that the average person will engage in. Most people will start doing other things, when they realize that it will get really boring, especially knowing there is WAY more happening in the world and will want to be a part of the fun, than sit around and be a slug all day. Besides, the ability of neuro-enhancement is already reaching a point, where pleasure, or at least the elimination of depression is easy. I truly believe that Burning Man is trailblazing this type of global leisure society.

Sure, the generous company might be taking risks with any one person, but it's the numbers their counting on. Besides, having a poor customer who can't afford to buy any of their stuff in this extremely connected world will in the end hurt and drag down their bottom line. Helping everyone will be in everyone's best interest. It is now, but people haven't quite figured that out yet. The prevailing paradigm being promoted by them is "you must work HARD to get money". "If you aren't working hard, you're a cheat, a lazy bum, a parasite" or whatever other lame name they have to come up with to keep you enslaved. Quite simply, their thinking is archaic, backward, Puritanical, illogical. And capitilism has no patience for backward thinking - it rewards the most forward thinking. The decentralized technologies that are coming rapidly, as well as the totally novel and radically liberating economic landscape that is approaching, breaks all the rules. Those who are generous will make the most money, period. Greedy types will wither away into nothing. Generosity will be magnified by the network, and will be repaid in greater levels of generosity. This is the true Gift Economy that you keep hearing about. Its not some pipe dream, its in fact what is actually happening as we speak. All the basic foundations are being laid now. And guess what, almost everyone, including corporations are becoming part of this new game, whether they like it or not. Everyone adds and is adding to the network, especially and including the third world, sharing ideas, and the network itself and all of its millions of open-source engineers continues to extend and empower it beyond anything we can imagine.

The Internet is not some static thing, it is the enabler, which keeps getting more enabled to enable more, in a bootstrapping feedback loop. Just think, the web itself was an experimental application running on one guys machine just 13 years ago. Now it is everywhere. It has become so pervasive we hardly even question it anymore. Well the web is only the beginning; there are now thousands of new applications being created right now that are extending it in ways we have barely begun to understand. Music was liberated by Napster, then gnutella, then bittorrent, now Exeem. Movies are next, followed by just about every type of patent and copyright. "Aye, the sky is falling, rampant piracy is robbing us!” But who is really robbing whom here? Corporations robbed it from the public domain. So the marketplace of people, capital and technological progress itself is taking it back into balance. Will the legal system have any power to stop this onslaught? Nope. If it did, then why are all the p2p applications still running at record bandwidths? Beginning to see the picture now? They can't stop it. The genie is out of the bottle. Since everything is becoming digitized, and everything digitized is becoming FREE, then everything becomes free. Capital (i.e. money) then becomes almost meaningless. Simple and logical right? Anything that can't be digitized will become of marginal cost, easily paid for by your continued positive presence in the world. If you still don't get it, it's all right, it's your brain's way of dealing with the shock of believing it was impossible, utopian, etc. So be kind to yourself, pick your jaw up off the floor from the shockingly good news, take a breather, relax, come back in a few days, read this again, and you'll probably get it the second time around. Personally, I've gone over this all a hundred times and I'm still gettting my mind around it. It's perfectly ok, we've all been thru hell and back under a lifetime of wage slavery and corporate-tv brainwashing. So believing something this fucking great and optimistic is just way to hard to believe right now. I understand! But it's true. You'll feel whole lots better when you finally realize it. I know I did. :)

References:

Coding Our Way to Liberation
Capital, Power and Ecology: Reasons for Optimism
The Coming Leisure Society

Related Links:

Ripple: Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Currency and Payment System

The Internet is Dead: Long Live the Internet!

I know I've started a bit of a shitstorm with my optimistic posts. I really do understand, and feel the pain you might be feeling with the current state of the world. I'm not afraid to tell you that I have had many restless nights and stressful, and even tear-filled moments, at how despairing it can become. But I am at a point now, that optimism is the most productive and healthy option. So be good to yourself and give it a whirl. As Chris Arkenberg once told me, we really are in the final war between the forces of history that have kept humanity down throughout the ages, and the forces of liberation that are finally breaking free. This war is not about weapons of mass destruction or political will, it's a war of thoughts and ideas - yours, mine, everyones. As long as people continue to believe them, things won't change. So here's letting you in on a little secret - they can't win if you don't believe them. For example, they can't maintain martial law, so all they can hope to do is keep in you line with fear and lies.

So listen up, this time, we the people, are finally going to win. It will not be some stale victory, but a lasting and permanent one. One thing is for sure, we will be very damn grateful once we are there. The only sad truth I can say is as MCP2012 mentioned in a recent comment, the transition from now to then, could very well cost lives, many, many lives. But here is some more good news that I came across today that continues to give me hope that things are moving our way.

xMax sparks low power wireless revolution :

This new wireless technology is totally disruptive. To understand just how revolutionary this technology is, and will be around the world, consider how bad the current internet is going to be if Doc Searle's greatest worries come to pass. He believes, and rightfully so, that the telcos and cable companies, who own almost all the internet pipes in the US, are attempting as we speak to control everything that flows through them. What this means for you and me, is no more free and democratic internet. If they have their way, the internet will become a top-down pyramid of locked DRM content from them to you the paying schmuck and criminal they think you are. If they manage to get their way, say goodbye to everything you ever loved about the internet and its liberating power.

But there are many things that will never allow this draconian, dark age future to come to pass. The first is the nature of capital itself which will continue to reward ANYONE who trys to create something better. If the telco's want to lock it down, first hundreds, then thousands of smaller companies will come into play to make a new internet, Google has already bought up thousands of miles of "dark fiber" for reasons unknown. But if their recent actions are any indication, they could very well be positioning themselves to become the savior of the US internet in the advent of a telco lockdown. They are already offering free Wi-fi in several places. Unfortunately Google has already used their muscle power in equally un-free-market ways. For example, they had the city of Mountain View give them a monopoly on free wi-fi access. Totally bullshit, but that's the story. But alas, that brings us to another more promising possibility:

xMax technology can change everything all over again. It gives the power of the network to everyone. It will allow anyone with $100 to set up their own very long range (up to 20 miles) wireless ISP. And because the power is so low, it falls outside the range of FCC regulation. Of course, they could try to regulate it, but then they open up a pandora's box of major public backlashes, not to mention that to regulate low power wireless like xMax, means that now wireless airplanes, remote controls, and garage doors now fall into this regulatory scheme as well. Not to mention the already pervasive wi-fi that is already out there.

With a technology like xMax saturating the marketplace, you're looking at the ability of every computer becoming a node on the network. This type of network is also know as a mesh-network. With every computer equipped with one of these xMax transcievers, what are the telco's going to do? At this point, it will become completely obvious, even to your average consumer just how unfriendly and downright customer hostile the telco's are. Who needs cell phones, cable TV and commercial Clear Channel radio, when everyone can download, transmit and communicate anyway they want, whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want from small, cheap and out of control, very powerful, long range xMax-like devices?

And even if the worst case scenario comes to pass, and the Telco's manage to lock the internet down in the US, what about the rest of the world? All it takes is a small conglomerate of free networks somewhere to give them a strong competivie edge over those parts that lock it down, that in the information economy, those maintaining those lockdowns will do sp at their own peril. Capital favors liberty.

Links:

xG Technologies

Collapsing Upwards

Hi everyone. Yep, it's been a long time since I wrote anything for Future Hi or anywhere else for that matter. I've been so busy with more practical matters that finding the time to express my thoughts publicly has not been possible.

Indictments and Political Scandal

As you may have heard, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff was indicted on five felony counts. In those moments where I take politics seriously, this could be a big deal and make me happy, but it doesn't. It's quite possible these indictments are only the beginning of seeing this criminal adminstration fall from power as much as it deserves to. Regardless of the probability of that, it all doesn't matter. The damage has already been done. America's reputation has been shattered, the deficts are soaring, dramatic increases in police state powers have been essentially cemented into law , etc., yada, yada, ad nauseum. Basically, the entire political game is a dead end for you, me and humanity. I can't possibly think how any reform, no matter how sweeping will make much of a difference. Politics is dead, lets move on.

Post-Politics:

If we hope to have a future, we need to start thinking post-politically. Some people, might have a problem with that whole concept. They think that has long as individual interact with each other, there will be politics. This is not true. As Timothy Leary made a strong case for, politics is rooted in power struggles within the contraints of a planetary 2-dimensional surface. Iain Banks makes the most compelling case I've ever read. As long as we remain on a planet, there is limited space in which we can travel. Any direction we decide to go in, we will inevitable end up back where we started. All corners of the globe have in some way been explored, colonized, utilized, cordoned off, walled, fenced, enclosed, patented, owned, copyrighted, raped and plundered. There is no wild and free frontier left, no place left to explore or to escape to. Sure, there are some places more free than others, but the differences are often trivial. For most people on the planet, life is hard, brutish and short. For those of us lucky enough to be in the developed world, the walls are closing in, fast. But,

End of Hierarchies and Traditional Power Structures:

Don't loose hope folks, because things are a accelerat'n! The current system with all its corruption, greed and shear stupidity and incompetence can't last much longer. Not only from an environmental and sustainable point of view, but because there is rapid, but still deep current change underway. It's all around us, and it's happening without anyone noticing much. It's not some big monolithic light from the sky change that we are archetypically expecting, but a much more subtle and profound change happening that we won't notice until its already happened. These changes are all around us. Humanity is waking up. People are becoming more aware, we are taking all of these tools and technologies for granted. The network is growing, and will continue to grow. Meanwhile, what we actually see with our traditional conditioning is more laws, copyrights, restrictions and so on. It's all an illusion folks. They only exist if you believe they exist. Most, if not all of these new laws are almost entirely uneforceable. The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to network intelligence, peer to peer technologies, free internet, sustainable energy systems, etc.

Power of the Network:

Here is an example of some of the stuff that the power of the network is producing by motivated programmers:

Netsukuku the Anarchical Parallel Internet (Internet)

Developed by the Freaknet, Netsukuku is a new p2p routing system, which will be utilised to build a worldwide distributed, anonymous and anarchical network, separated from the Internet, without the support of any servers, ISPs or authority controls. In a p2p network every node acts as a router, therefore in order to solve the problem of computing and storing the routes for 2^128 nodes, Netsukuku makes use of a new meta-algorithm, which exploits the chaos to avoid cpu consumption and fractals to keep the map of the whole net constantly under the size of 2Kb. Netsukuku includes also the Abnormal Netsukuku Domain Name Anarchy, a non hierarchical and decentralised system of hostnames management which replaces the DNS. It runs on GNU/Linux.

On the alternative energy front:

don't even know where to begin. Breakthroughs in this area are happening almost daily. If you've been reading blogs like World Changing, you'll see that there is so much going on with alternative energy now, that it is now impossible to keep up with the overwhelming rapid pace of global conversion to post-peak-oil alternatives.

Canda Proposing 30 GW wind farm in far north

On the space migration front:

Spaceship One and Two, and then Space Ship Three hold so much promise. There are only the beginning, but they are the first genuine steps of humanity getting off of the planet. With the advent of mass produced nanotubes, we could soon see the commercial construction of several space elevators. Space elevators mean price to space in the hundreds of dollars. Hundreds to change your life forever. What does this mean for the space game? It means that almost everyone who wants to go will go. When you have millions, billions of people who can now afford to go to space, there will be the infrastructure to support it. Every enterprising, capitalizing individual or group will make sure of that. Because the profit potential of this will be enormous beyond all comprehension. To give you an idea, imagine what the total World Gross Product is today. It will triple within the first 5 years of a sub-$1000 price to orbit, and after that it will continue to grow at a conservative 20% a year. Imagine the total economy of humanity growing by 20% a year. You are not rich now? You will be, and so will everyone else. Nothing will ever be the same after this.

I can already hear people, saying, "But what about molecular nanotechnology?". Yes! What's amazing about the above figures is all of that is possible without molecular nanotech. It only requires some master of nanomaterial construction. Once nanotech assemblers hit the scence, things will really take off.

On the longevity front:

If you make it the next 20 years, you're going to live damn near forever. So you might as well accept it. :)

So, what's in store in the next 20 years and beyond

Have fun! Now for me, back to the work at hand. :)

All About Power, and the Three Ways to Topple It

Thanks to Bird on the Moon, I came across this rare and brilliant piece that expresses all that I try to, only much better. The article is by Dave Pollard. Below I've tried to excerpt some of the most salient points:

Part 1: All About Power, and the Three Ways to Topple It (Part 1):

Most of what has been written about change -- by political theorists as well as business gurus -- is about revolutionary change. It is about creating a sense of popular urgency for change. Writers on social and business innovation, by contrast, are (perhaps subconsciously) writing about change that incapacitates. Clay Christensen speaks candidly about 'disruptive innovation', the kind that catches successful businesses off guard, just like a virus or undetected parasite, and brings it to its knees. A huge amount of money and energy is being spent these days -- on so-called 'anti-terrorist' programs, on physical and computer security, on fighting file-sharing, on patenting anything even vaguely innovative to prevent a competitor bringing it to market, on the search for vaccines and cures for AIDS, BSE, Avian Flu etc., on anti-fraud measures like Sarbanes-Oxley -- all designed to fight incapacitating, rather than popular, revolutionary, enemies. Actions that are aimed to incapacitate are called guerrilla (meaning 'little war') actions. Since the Vietnam war debacle in the 1960s the very term has struck fear in the hearts of the power elite, because they know that, in today's heavily concentrated, centralized, interconnected, 'grid-locked' society, this is where they are most vulnerable, most powerless to defend themselves.

and introduce 'innovations' that make our world a better place to live. The focus will be on new technology, new infrastructure, new models and new processes that replace the vulnerable ones that are the causes of so many of today's global problems -- and ensuring that these replacements are Open Source, and stay in the hands of all the world's people.

Part Two - Free Information, Freedom from the Grid, and Peer-to-Peer Bio-Innovation:

In a brilliant and famous Wired interview with Freeman Dyson by Stewart Brand, Dyson identifies "a return to village culture" as the most important opportunity of the 21st century, driven by three technologies: global access to free information, local energy self-sufficiency, and biotech, which together could "gentrify" (bring affluence, population stability and ecological awareness to) the villages. Dyson predicts the "collapse of the market economy" will bring about this opportunity, in 'rising from the ashes' style. He's a great believer in technology, and impatient with and pessimistic about our political and economic systems, but he has faith in human ingenuity, and the power of multiple, coordinated small-scale experiments.

The first part of this guerrilla undermining of the corporatist-controlled 'market' economy -- the 'making free' of information -- is already underway. The war for free information between corporatists and people is occurring on multiple fronts: The attempt by large corporations to patent everything so it cannot be used by the people without paying an exorbitant and prohibitive fee; the attempt by large corporations to ban file-sharing without first paying extortion to the intellectual property 'owner' (little of which actually goes to the artist); the attempt to make more of the information on the Internet 'pay for itself'. But the people are winning this guerrilla war.

Related Entries

The Coming Liesure Society
Counter Culture 2.0
Left Brain Revenge, Right Brain Liberation, Leisure Society

Peak Oil: Open Forum

Is this our future?

or this?

or something else altogether different?

Peak Oil is getting more and more attention these days. Most people either think that Peak Oil is decades away so we have nothing to worry about, or it is now upon us, or soon will be, and that society as we know it will collapse. Most of the latter think progress will not continue and we will not be able to transition to an alternative energy economy. They say most people, at least in the developed world, will die and those that are left will be living like the Amish; making do with what scraps they can find (Think The Postman). Do you agree, disagree? Why?

Some people say that we must transition to a hydrogen economy. Our pals over at World Changing, just posted an overview of the hydrogen economy, with some good links. I have become more skeptical of the hydrogen economy, in light of some of its proponents saying we may have to depend on centralized nuclear power to make it feasible. For me, that is two strikes against it - nuclear (with all of its waste), and centralized (controlled by elites). My opinion is that the more decentralized and ecologically sustainable our energy infrastructure is, the more democratic, and politically and environmentally stable our world would be. I'm hoping we can transition to an alternative energy infrastructure before it's too late.

Is it too late for a Design Science Revolution?

Do you think that we will transition past Peak Oil into a transhumanist future? How? Or is the future going to look like the Amish in rural Pennsylvania? Do you think that this whole question is the wrong question? Is Peak Oil a myth?

My main reason for starting this open forum is to hear from people who can provide a third point of view - one that acknowledges the peak oil problem, while providing a way out that does not consist of going back 200 years and living like the Amish.

Let the conversation begin.

Burning Man 2004: Moving Past the Singularity

I just arrived back from Burning Man fully transformed. I suspect it will take me several months to fully digest this most awesome experience... maybe just in time for next year. It was wonderful to finally give warm embraces to people I've known only online.

As the Official Burning Man Website says, this event is notoriously indescribable. When I was there it becomes quickly obvious that no amount of eloquent speech or series of pictures could ever do it justice. Quite simply, Burning Man has to be experienced. It is Utopia. One of the things that struck me about every 30 minutes or so as I wandered the playa is, "I can't believe this exists, it is beyond description". I would look out to the horizon in nearly every direction to find this immense amount of novelty. During the day, art installations of various kinds were scattered about - some within a few hundred yards, others some one or two miles away, as if a mirage. Certain structures like the Temple were over 100 feet tall and were noticeable from almost any distance. Nighttime was equally amazing, when many more art pieces come alive to join the spectacle. Nearly everywhere I went, looking in front of me and in every direction, there was some kind of dynamic activity. It's not the dense activity of an urban city with its rules and boundaries, but a vast unbounded playa stretching for miles in every direction, filled with light, fire plumes, neon floating caravans with distant yet pleasant volumes of lounge-techno music, and thousands of glow sticks representing and protecting people as they walked and rode their bikes across the playa. So imagine seeing thousands of these various colors randomly crisscrossing the desert, stretching for several square miles in every direction. The sense of freedom, joy, excitement and possibility filled my every cell. I danced and moved and rode my bike hither and thither for hours on end, stopping at different installations, spending time in distant planetarium, and then traveling further out into the playa, which this year represented the heavens. As I traveled further from the Esplanade (the main arced avenue), the further out into "outerspace" I was going. At about a mile and half beyond the Esplanade, I encountered an illuminated and pulsating star with alien creature blowing in the night winds. I took several photos of it, but my camera is very old and doesn't work well at night, so here is a day shot.

On a typical day I would spend some 14-15 hours wandering the interacting with the art and enjoying immensely the company of fellow burners, hanging out at center camp for some hot chai, dance for awhile at Solarhenge, and back to camp to hang out with friends at Prometheatrics. I was introduced to this wonderful bunch through Mark Pesce, who unfortunately was unable to attend this year.

I spent a couple of lazy afternoons hanging out at The Brane, home of the 2nd Annual Palenque Norte lectures. When I first came into the tent I met Carey Thompson whose Galactivation Art is so beautiful. About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction. Perhaps it was my own state of mind at the time (he he), but his words struck a deep chord, ringing true like few things do for me these days. His message was hopeful, positive and inspiring. LVX23's words ring true too when he says that out on the playa we are expanding the mythos or morphogenetic field of modern humanity. Burning Man is pioneering the cutting edge of possibility - not a counter to culture, but front-runners scouting out the frontier of what is possible. This might sound overly grandiose, but the feeling on the playa of genuine fast-forward evolution is palpable.

I feel like I could write a book on my experiences, like it's been every other year I've been. Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all. I missed the last few years, and feel very sad now that the event has come to an end. I'm so looking forward to next year, and I'm just bursting at the seams with new creative ideas to make happen for next year’s event. With all the walking and riding bikes I did this year, and coming across so many wandering, tired people, we are planning on creating a playa taxi service for next year, which we're thinking of calling Trip N' Taxi. Great way to meet new people, and a lot easier to get around. It’s merely a single idea of many. Several members of Prometheatrics and I schemed a few more ideas, which will have to remain hush-hush for now. If you're interested in creating and collaborating on some art installation for next year, please get in touch with me at psiphius at yahoo.com

One last thing, LVX23 mentioned this year there was not enough deeply sublime art as last year. I found out today that a lot of regular artists skipped this year’s event because they're too involved politically with the coming election. From what I've heard the numbers are large enough that an impact on the playa art would be felt, and so it was. Having missed the last three years I didn't notice it and was instead just so grateful to be here again, and in turn was even more enthusiastically participatory and social this year, and even more inspired to make more art for next year.

Hope to see more of ya on the playa next year!

Stay tuned for more pics - I'm working on an entire section of photos.

This guy was towering over me and must have been 6'6.

Agile Learning

By Erica Tesla

I went down to UNO this morning to get what is not the first (nor the last, I'm sure) form I'll have to fill out to get myself and my husband back on the Path of Higher Education. The paperwork required simply to gain permission to learn is astounding.

Now, I've heard it said that college isn't actually about learning at all--it's all about your threshold for dealing with bull and bureacracy. If that's true, so long as your tolerance for those things increases during your time in college, you have learned something.

But an increased tolerance for bureaucracy, though it may be a goal now, will probably not be an advantage in the future.

The heart of the singularity, in my understanding, is the point at which nothing stands still. Memes burn in the fire of change and those who are able move on; that's what it's about. The singularity is the point at which agility surpasses its status as an advantage and becomes a survival skill, a necessity. In a future that moves at the speed of light, who will have time for all of this paperwork?

What scares me about the current higher education process is actually the length of commitment, and the proactive nature of the learning process employed. Deciding to go to college typically means devoting yourself for at least four years to a field that more narrowly defines your knowledge base and skill set, while admittedly (hopefully) deepening both.

But the model in which specialization occurs proactively isn't of much use if you have no idea what you'll need to know to enjoy a productive life, or even to survive, tomorrow.

I think that the solution is a more agile form of learning. The most agile form of learning occurs when a person first attains a broad base of widely applicable knowledge and the skills with which to both attain new knowledge and to make the best use of that which they already have. After that initial learning--largely "learning how to learn"--they can take an adaptive, reactive approach to specialized knowledges and tasks. This is even more agile when paired with hands-on-experience--a person can be productive in the current learning field while learning about it.

I think that college, along with the rest of the current educational model, is neither the most efficient way to learn, nor the best--at best, for now, it may be a good route to a higher paycheck. But is that enough? Can the very slow process of learning through the current educational model survive a world that's speeding up?

RFID's and Democratic Capitalism

This is fantastic news. I was thinking that this would take at least 5 or more years before we would see any substantial power shift of RFID's towards the customer, but according to this article, the power of RFID could soon become widely available to you and me, thanks to Phillips.

To understand why this is a very good thing for democracy and greater prosperity for the world generally, please read my posts over the last 18 months, specifically these:

Participatory Capitalism and The Coming Leisure Society.

From the story:

They aim to do this by putting an RFID reader in every mobile phone, so that users could look at the contents of a tag simply by holding their phone up against it.

The phone reads the tag and sends the code back to www.cheapskate.com, say, which runs a quick comparison search.

Back comes a message that the selfsame garments are on sale in BHS round the corner at half the price.

When I first heard of RFID's and their potential dark side I was a bit disturbed. A 'Minority Report' world is not what I want to be a part of. Of course there are lots of ways to subvert RFID's from tracking you, with something as simple as underground product swapping, or junkyard diving. There are however some major benefits to customers and to capitalism generally that RFID's would make possible.

The first of these, would be that every EPC # could be cross-indexed with decentralized online p2p databases that match each EPC# with a corruptions index. By having your own RFID reader in the form of a PDA or cell phone as Phillips is now proposing, we could match our purchasing habits to those companies who most adhere to our own ethical values. This could be made easy by constantly updated web-of-trust system that matches your values closest to those you trust.

RFID readers in the hands of the people will empower customer choice, creating a decentralized bottoms-up defined marketplace. I think such a transparent participatory market is long overdue, and I can't see how this would be possible without wide-scale use of RFID's.

Will Social Software bring us Global Mind & Unity?

The more I use social software like Orkut, the more I realize how its potential is only just begun. Before too long, a set of open-source p2p social software standards will emerge that bring all its participants increasingly closer together. Ming has a piece where he writes:

To imagine a world where we all had a high level of telepathy is an excellent starting point for a lot of revolutionary possibilities. Lies would no longer have any manipulative value if everybody could see right through them and know the truth without bias. You'd have to really do good things to be seen as doing something valuable. Duh. Same with hypocritical morals. You can't get away with applying different rules to others than what you live by. If you're a smuck, everybody will know it.

And you'd help others do what they want to do when it is easy for you to do so. If you happened to know your neighbor also needs a bag of sugar from the market and that he's currently busy, you can just bring it for him, instead of you both having to go. If you're done with that book you're reading, you can just toss it to a guy on the street who also want to read it, rather than taking it home and hide it in the garage.

This is where the power of the network is taking us despite attempts to curtail it. So the next question is, once we are so intimately connected, how profoundly would our sense of individuality be changed? Would it diminish it, expand it or transcend it altogether? Probably all three. I certainly know that my sense of self has expanded since joining social networks, as it has allowed me to feel an increased sense of connectness and intimacy with people all over the globe who share common ideals and goals. Just sensing that increased level of connection has inspired me to contribute more to the group, to the world, and in turn my sense of self has expanded to fill the task. So that seems to be the paradox, my sense of self has expanded the more I become intermeshed with others, but being part of a group also has deeper influence on myself as an individual than if I was alone.

The borg this is not. Suppressing the individual for the "greater good" harms that greater good, precisely because that individual's unique maximum potential contribution has been crushed. The promise of the decentralized p2p social network however is that it empowers the individual to connect with others who will maximize thier purpose and goals, while simulatenously connecteing others for the maximum benefit of themselves, which is by definition an optimized ad-hoc hive mind, all its member maximally acting in concert. Highly liquid and intimate social networks are synergetically more powerful than both an individualist libertarian paradise and a communal hive mind combined. The best of both structures is maintained without any of the apparent drawbacks.