This is a pretty cool demo, and the robots are neat-looking but the part of this that’s the most interesting is the problem this is solving. Listen to how often they talk about “low self-weight” and “yielding to human operators”. The top feature of these things is that they can operate in the same area as human workers without tearing their arms off.

In other words, the top-selling feature is that they figured out how to make gentle robots.

Picking up on Monday’s panoptiswarm theme here’s this wonderful story from Wired’s Danger Room about how swarms of amateurs are cataloguing installations in North Korea. (Danger Room calls them “online spies” which is a pretty heady title for people scouring satellite photos.)

What are they finding? Secret underground airfields!

Sunchon appears to have a “1350 meter taxiway extend[ing] from the UGF [underground facility] to a point beyond the main parking aprons. This taxiway may in fact be an auxiliary runway, allowing aircraft to be prepared for flight while concealed within the UGF and then launched with little or no warning for a strike” against South Korea.

Noah Shachtman for Danger Room Online Spies Spot North Korea’s Underground Airfields

There’s a lot going on in the article.

For one thing, there is the glorious Thunderbirds/Voltron/Power Rangers (pick according to age and nostalgia) resonance.

For another, think about profoundly weird the balance between information and analysis has shifted in this arena. Instead of carefully hoarded classified satellite imagery, we have such a surfeit of data that it’s worthwhile to just let amateurs run amok.

This kind of searching isn’t just for military surveillance either. The world’s largest beaver dam was discovered using Google Earth imagery and then further analyzed by digging through historical aerial photography of the area.

In related news, amateurs are combing through the Toronto G20 videos, looking for evidence of agents provocateurs. They think they’ve found one. I don’t know what to think.

1.

In a recent column, CBC’s Ira Basen contrasts the protection and access granted to journalists in the past…

If I was covering a war, people were less likely to shoot at me if they knew I was a journalist. If I was captured while covering that war, the Geneva Convention stipulated that I be treated as a prisoner of war, not as a spy.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

photo credit: Carl W. Heindl

…to the confusing present…

Perhaps the best way of understanding police behaviour at this juncture is to recognize that almost everyone in that crowd had some sort of camera-equipped mobile device, which meant that, in the minds of the police, almost everyone was a potential journalist.

That meant they could either give special treatment to everyone or to no one. They chose no one.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

photo credit: Carl W. Heindl

…leading to an inescapable conclusion.

But the actions of the Toronto police during the G20 summit have exposed what is perhaps an unintended consequence of this new media reality: When everyone is a journalist, no one is a journalist.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

He ends there, before taking this line of reasoning all the way to its terrifying conclusion.

2.

In Fast Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System, authors Rodney Brooks and Anita Flynn argue for a different approach to exploring the immediate planetary neighbourhood. Rather than following the usual approach of planning expensive high quality missions which, when they fail, fail catastrophically, Brooks and Flynn argue for a scattered approach. They propose swarms of low quality cheap redundant components. The benefit is that you can lose some – even many – of them without compromising the mission’s goals.

There are major problems with planning a space mission which relies solely on one large planetary rover. If a mission is restricted to such a single large robot, there is a tremendous cost associated with losing the rover and thus a rash of conservatism will develop among the mission planners.

Rodney Brooks & Anita Flynn Fast Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System [PDF]

They propose a variety of models where cheap simple robots are launched – robots that mission planners can afford to lose. The first thing Brooks and Flynn consider is machines that relay back TV images.

3.

In the wake of the G20 protests and riots in Toronto, Torontoist collects The Fourteen Essential G20 Videos. They are a mix of shots by professional film crews and people with cellphones. Only one shows any kind of serious editing. For some of the videos, links to alternate shots of the same incident are included in the commentary. Many more are suggested in the comments.

4.

The Flickr search result for “Toronto G20” returns more than 29,000 results.

photo credit: wvs

5.

When it comes to surveillance, there are two basic problems. One is not having enough information. The other is having too much information – the unspoken fourth corner of Rumsfeld’s formulation.

The first problem is relatively easy to solve. If you don’t know enough, you can throw resources at your objective. You can develop new tech, hire new people, and deploy new methods. It’s also, from an intelligence gathering agency’s perspective, a pretty good problem to have. It means you get to go to the budget committee and ask for more money.

Having unknown knowns is a harder problem, politically. It means that buried somewhere in the apparatus is information that, if you had it to hand, would be extremely useful. But you don’t. Instead, this information has a bad habit of turning up after the fact, and you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of explaining document titles like “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.” at a hearing.

The key in this circumstance is no longer information gathering, it’s information filtering.

6.

I’ve been talking about the Toronto G20 protests because they happened recently and they’ve been on my mind. But there’s nothing special about the event. This is the mass-collaboration and content creation that we get so excited about. This is Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, Lolcats, 4Chan, YTMND, Yelp, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, SETI@HOME.

This is Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus. But a cognitive surplus implies a surplus of cognition.

7.

If SETI@HOME ever succeeds, we’re going to want to know who “found” the signs. Reporters will track down which computer processed the patch of sky where the alien signals came from. They’ll compose feature stories full of little charming details about the owner of the computer, his or her family, house, and habits. It’ll start with something like, “So-and-so doesn’t seem like an ordinary such-and-such…”

The joke will be that whoever this is will have contributed exactly as much to the effort as any of the random people whose computers determined where the aliens weren’t.

8.

Think carefully about the right that Basen claims. The right to not be shot or beaten while all around you people are being shot or beaten. This is literally the status of privileged observer. Precious observer, that must be protected because there are so few of them and they are so badly needed.

The bargain was roughly thus, “We know you are going to tell a story, and we want our side of the story to be told, so if we avoid shooting at you and yours, perhaps you’ll be less inclined to tell it badly.”

That’s ending now.

photo credit: nouspique

9.

In a network of cheap ubiquitous sensors, any given node becomes disposable. At highly documented events, the rate at which recordings are made far outstrips the rate at which we can view them. Any given photo or video can be lost but the loss is not that great. Any given observer can be beaten, arrested, even killed, and the loss is not that great. At least not that much greater than if it was any other participant.

This is the terrifying endpoint that Basen does not reach. When everyone is a journalist, not only do their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people being covered, their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people consuming their work.

Had any of the fourteen essential videos been prevented from making it to the Internet, understudies fifteen through five thousand were waiting in the wings.

10.

For all the cameras, no one appears to have recorded the arrest and beating of journalist Jesse Rosenfeld. For instance.

Earlier this month, Cisco’s cannily constructed marketing phraseology ignited a fire in my corner of the Internet. Dozens of friends and loved ones linked to “Cisco wires ‘city in a box’ for fast-growing Asia.”

photo credit: ricardodiaz11

Everything about the marketing of New Songdo City feels like a crazy Paleo-Future-esque throwback to the 1950s with updated stock photography. Gale International’s Google search result tagline is, no joke, “Building Tomorrow’s Communities Today”.

The very idea of a city in a box seems to have been ported whole cloth from an era of TV dinners, robot helpers, inflatable furniture, and convenience at the touch of a button. It denies a need for contextual development, or responses to local conditions. This is the machines for living and the mass manufactured utopian nightmare that we are meant to have left behind.

The city itself is explicitly a generic anyplace.

Songdo IBD boasts the wide boulevards of Paris, a 100-acre Central Park reminiscent of New York City, a system of pocket parks similar to those in Savannah, a modern canal system inspired by Venice and convention center architecture redolent of the famed Sydney Opera House.

Songdo IBD A Master Plan Inspired by the World

It feels like the only place that isn’t mentioned is the country that the city will call home – South Korea.

It’s a project reminiscent of EA’s Spore, a game which culminates in you choosing a ‘civilization architecture’ and then then flying around the universe launching seed colonies that all grow up to look the same (local conditions are only respected in that if you build the city underwater or in a poisonous atmosphere, a dome covers the works).

It’s the architecture of glossy globalism, the glittering light side of Baudrillard’s patio. It’s the consistent dream of every major franchise and perfectly appropriate to the bland abstracted face of international business. It’s BLDGBLOG’s Thirteeth Room re-conceived on a massive scale.

You can picture a William Gibson or Douglas Coupland novel; the overstressed, underslept protagonist proceeds in a haze from city to city, complaining about how all airports and hotels look the same only to find themselves in an entire city that looks the same. Have they gone mad? They’ve never been here before, they’re certain of this. But they have been. They know every street corner, every by-way. They can direct the cab driver better than the GPS.

photo credit: lostmodern.net

What about a globe-hopping sci-fi detective novel? A case sends our hero across borders. He’s ostensibly on unfamiliar ground but he knows where the dive bar where someone very much like his regular contact will be. He can find the right chop shops and has a pretty good idea of where the dealers will be, which neighbourhood will have the right kind of corrupt cops.

The effect, useful at first, becomes maddening. Identity begins to shift and blur. He knows passwords for underworld watering holes he’s never been to. He can’t remember if the dame he’s seeing now is the same as one who hired him in the first place.

In an airport lobby, he meets someone very like himself who claims he’s investigating a crime with details that eerily match our hero’s. Is it the work of a serial killer? A copycat? They pool resources.

His GPS starts going on the fritz, and it keeps showing him in different countries. He gets into scrapes, he’s beaten to unconsciousness and when he wakes up he’s not sure what continent he’s on anymore. He stumbles through the tourist district asking if anyone can tell him. No one seems to know or care.

In a hotel he’s sure he’s been to before with staff who don’t recognize him, he confronts his partner. Who is he anyway? How does he know so much about the murders? A strange coincidence that they should just meet. His partner shows him a newspaper, another murder in another city, very much like theirs but ten years before. The first city, the pilot program. It was all hushed up.

Emma,

As I write these words I am sitting in the living room. Technically, it’s a porch but the easy chair, glass of afternoon beer, and somewhat stable net signal make it feel like more of a living room than the actual living room which consists of a TV too old for words and the folded mattress where I’ve been sleeping.

Technically, the porch is outside and the living room is inside, but these kinds of distinctions become academic in a situation where all doors and windows are kept as far open as they can possibly be in the hopes of promoting a cross breeze all day and all night. The porch/living room, kitchen, and living room/bedroom may as well all be pavilions in a gazebo. Only my hosts’ bedrooms are ever really sealed and only when they’ve got overnight guests. (Not that it matters, the walls are old and thin.)

photo credit: Idiolector

Some kind of mysterious transaction just went down in the back alley. I’m not supposed to have noticed it, says Aton. Best not to notice anything around here. But it was broad daylight and how could I not hear the low growl of the engine? It sounded like a gas engine, a real guzzler. Could have been a roadtone, I know, but it sounded genuine to me. I think I even saw smoke.

Last night, we went down by the canal and lit a bonfire. It was pretty nice, though I found it hard to get into at first – too nervous about cops showing up. Samantha laughed at me, said that there was nothing to worry about. Showed me how you can rewire a temp-permit and fix the dates with the right kind of data-paste. She says people leave expired permits all over. I didn’t ask where she got the paste.

In the end it didn’t matter. No one showed up aside from more friends and friends of friends. Late into the night a group split off to go to a place called something like WARHOGS or whatever, Samantha left but I decided to stay behind. Lay in the grass with a few of the quieter folk, trying to spy stars through the clouds. Had a long inchoate debate about whether the clouds or stars were moving and if it was the stars, were they really satellites or one of the stations? I tried holding my finger still as a reference but by that point everything was too wobbly to really achieve much in the way of scientific accuracy.

I wandered home in a pleasant haze.

Did I tell you? They’ve got real records here. Like antique ones, not the cheap retro ones that you can get in any old onDemand outlet. Aton says that the old ones sounds better, even though they can’t hold as many songs. They’ve got more character, he says. They last longer. I asked about their carcindex, but he just laughed. There’s a lot of really great stuff here. Bands I’d never heard of. I’ve taken some pictures and I’ll try to assemble a collection for you sometime this week.

This morning, Sam took me up on the roof to see the stills. It’s an astounding network of tubes and tubs. I tried to follow the line from rain collectors, through to the casks on the other end. I kept getting lost in the tangle. Sam says that if I stick around long enough, she’ll show me the ropes (pipes).

Pretty much everything involved comes from the rain (don’t worry, Sam made to point out their quadruple filtration and reverse osmosis system) or the freedom garden which is run by a New Organist collective just up the street. They supply the supplies and Sam supplies the resulting booze.

They’re completely illegal of course and the patchwork of tarps and scrap material can’t possibly be hiding them from Constellation. Sam says that out here we’re barely worth bothering about so they just don’t. Aton muttered something about a million eyed-god being blind.

photo credit: Dom Dada

We talked a little about tactics last night. Aton says that the privacy war is over and that the people lost. He says that our only real remaining resort is to inefficiency. It’s like when those guys flew those planes into America. Apparently, the echelons of power already knew it was coming but they knew so much other stuff as well that the information just got drowned out on the way to a decision getting made.

Aton says that when you get pick-pocketed, they get away with it because they put pressure somewhere else on your body at the same time, so you are too busy feeling the one thing to notice the other. He says the only path to freedom is to put so much pressure on the system all over the place, that it can’t notice anything at all.

Apparently there was an old philosopher who hated the government too, who used to say “starve the beast” but Aton says that’s all passed now. You could cut half the surveillance feeds at the swipe of a pen (as if!) and we’d still have more than enough information being fed into the echelon – it wouldn’t impact things at all. So he and Sam are taking the opposite approach.

We’re going out tonight, with bags and bags of sensors and cameras that we’re going to set up and donate to the public feeds. Some of these devices are faulty in all sorts of really interesting ways. We’re going to put them up all over the place, in the least interesting places possible. We’re going to do this for weeks and weeks, just adding more and more mud to the stream.

I also heard Sam say something to Aton about the Russians renting some time on one of their botnets. I think the plan is to put those spam engines to emancipatory use, replacing sex ads with Home Sec keywords. I heard a rumour that their analysis engines are already months behind in processing. They’ll stay that way so long as we can keep the heat on to deny them future budget expansions (all the more reason to ask our brothers and sisters in the capital to redouble their lobbying efforts).

I don’t know if it’ll amount to much in the end, but it seems like the only path we’ve got left.

“Drown the beast.”

Ada

photo credit: urban_data