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

Toronto’s G20 artificial lake brings cottage country ambiance to a media pavilion in a militarized security zone in Canada’s largest city.

Sorry, I shouldn’t call it a lake and certainly not the #fakelake. It’s a reflecting pool.

photo credit: joesflickr

The pool will be decked out with a dock, Ontario cottage country’s signature Muskoka chair, canoes, and the recorded sound of calling loons. In the background, a 10-meter screen will show a video loop of cottage fun. According to spokesperson for Muskoka tourism, Michael Lawley, the goal is “to recreate a dock experience” for the thousands of journalists who will be in town to cover the G8 and G20 event. “We’re trying to make a memorable impression,” he said. Indeed.

It’s difficult to read about the plans for the pavilion without asking a lot of impertinent questions about whether the loons will be audible over the press conferences, whether there will be enough chairs for everyone, and what, exactly, is Muskoka tourism’s idea of cottage fun. Will they play beer commercials? Canada’s opposition parties are having a grand old time attacking the project. How could they not? It’s such an obviously terrible idea that from the outside, it’s very difficult to understand how anyone could approve the thing.

There’s a kind of mad evolutionary logic at play. Canada is hosting the G20 and G8 summits back to back and the original plan had them both happening in the Industry Minister’s home riding in a town called Huntsville (pop. 18,000). This explains how Muskoka tourism got involved.

When it became clear that the town couldn’t actually handle the thousands of dignitaries, journalists, security, and protestors, the G20 got moved to Toronto. Only 200 of the thousands of journalists will be permitted to attend the G8. The rest will have to monitor it from afar. You can imagine the frustration, the angry phone calls, and then the master of compromise who suggests, “What if we bring the Muskokas to them?”

photo credit: isafrancesca

Meanwhile, the second insane evolutionary process plays out as the weekend of meetings is encased in a protective shell, the design of which has been refined and re-refined since the embarrassing 1999 Seattle protests.

True to the spirit of globalization, the system of fences, security, and protest is nearly indistinguishable from event to event and place to place. Subtopia talks about it as a travelling stage show but it’s much weirder than that.

In a travelling stage show, the same cast puts on a performance in different venues. But almost none of the players in these events are the same. Protestors and security forces are largely drawn from the local populace. Even the special guest-starring international cast of civil servants, world leaders, and journalists rotate constantly, subjected as they are to the ravages of promotion, demotion, cabinet shuffles, and failed re-election.

This isn’t a travelling show, this is theatre companies mounting the same production all over the globe. When it comes to the performance at the fence, the one thing that remains constant is the set decoration and costume design. The same 12′ steel sheet with concrete feet snaking around the city. The same black hoodies and face bandanas. The same riot shields and batons. The same tear gas and smoke and pepper spray.

Managers at Starbucks and McDonalds would kill for a global brand this consistently implemented.

photo credit: Ducklover Bonnie

Here’s City of Sound talking about the APEC fence in 2007.

I overhear people talking of going to actually see The Fence, as if it were a new temporary attraction, and when I visited on Wednesday, many Sydneysiders were just hanging out in the “sniper-ridden ring of steel”, watching the whole circus. News sites are full of it, and Sydney has been radically altered for a few days. There is plenty to see.

City of Sound The Anti-Fun Palace

Notice that only the name of the city distinguishes it from BlogTO heading out to gawk at our instantiation.

There’s been much made of the recent start of construction on the G20 security fence in Toronto. But, lacking a good conception of its size and breadth, I decided to mosey on down to the area around the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to see what I could find out about this thing. As it turns out, I got a pretty good idea for how intense the police and security presence will be.

BlogTO Toronto’s G20 fence in photos.

In fact you could (and should) read all of City of Sound’s fantastic post about the APEC 2007 fence and apply it to the one in Toronto. (Seriously, I cannot recommend the post highly enough.)

These are mimetic structures. Their design is transmitted all over the globe, reproduced via security conferences, marketing materials, anarchist forums, and planning committees. From the perspective of the city it’s a weird malignant parasite that arrives, takes over, completes its terrible purpose, and then neatly self-disassembles.

In the midst of all this, our main university is closed, our baseball team is playing its home games in another city, our streets are ringed with steel and police and snipers, our windows are boarded up, and our most recognizable landmark has been shut down. When the city is least like itself, conference organizers hope to showcase it to the world.

So they release bland stock footage for newscasters. They make models of our famous landmarks. And they build simulacra of the cottage country where the conference should have happened, if all had gone according to plan.

photo credit: shooteng

Mammoth blog has published the guest post I wrote for them as part of the Mammoth Book Club. It’s about traffic jams, freedom, and, yes, cyborgs.

The chapter they asked me to write about contains one of the most striking passages I’ve read all year. It goes like this:

Over time, the traffic cop was slowly transformed: his hands took on white gloves for visibility; his voice was replaced by a whistle; and eventually, he was elevated in a tower and communicated with the traffic via signs or coloured lights. The police officer slowly vanished, his body evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. His hands were replaced by standardized, colored signals. His eyes were replaced by sensing actuators, such as microphones, pressure sensors, electromagnets, or video cameras. All that was left was to replace his brain.

Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Steven Rowell – Blocking All Lanes – The Infrastructural City p.106

If that doesn’t give you chills, then perhaps you are reading the wrong website?

The full post is here.

Two other things

First, it didn’t fit into the essay, but I want to build on one of the side notes. I have a minor fascination with city-driving car ads aimed at 20somethings. You know the kind: they are living life’s ups and downs, they are going to parties, there is never any traffic. In particular, I love this Scion ad that wants you to associate parkour with owning a car. The essay flowed away from examining this in more detail, but one of the most interesting things about cars is the interaction between their mythology of freedom and reality of tightly regimented movement.

I’m not just thinking about the stop and go signals of downtown gridlock (though the completely obvious contrast between the far ranging movements of Scion’s free runners and the constrained-to-the-road path of the vehicles is perfectly pertinent). I’m talking about the massive architectural network devoted to creating an environment where cars can roam.

For freedom machines, our vehicles are extremely sensitive. They like surfaces of a certain smoothness and within a range of grades. They hate a great variety of weather conditions. They can’t go far at all without needing to refuel. From a wider perspective, the freedom of the car compared to the herded imprisonment of public transit, airplanes, or rail seems pretty marginal. It’s all one dimensional ribbons of connectivity strung across a vast two dimensional plane.

I’ve talked about this theme in the past, the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs.

Second, I would be completely remiss if I didn’t thank August C. Bourré for pointing me to a number of excellent papers relating to this stuff. The final third of the essay was completely reworked based on material he sent my way.

Go read the guest post.

On June 5, Newsweek’s Julia Baird published an op-ed entitled The Front Line Is Online. In her subhead, she declares that “freedom should trump privacy.”

She spends some time reliving Neda Soltan’s death and some time talking about the growing consensus that access to the Internet should be a fundamental right. What follows is some depressingly muddy thinking about how to proceed.

photo credit: killerturnip

One in seven of those who do not use the Internet think they should have the right to if they want. Yet only half of those surveyed felt the Internet was a safe place to express their opinions, and more than half thought that it should never be regulated by the government. Which may suggest that some people are willing to accept some compromises to privacy to avoid the creeping censorship that too easily follows government intervention. The basic tenet of the Internet is openness: you don’t need to forfeit all privacy, but if you want to protect it, don’t post publicly.

The debate about quitting Facebook certainly takes on a different hue when exposure, not secrecy, becomes the critical fight. In the past few weeks, both Pakistan and Bangladesh shut down Facebook in response to the group Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, because it is considered blasphemous to create images of the prophet. Facebook has been slammed by clerics in Egypt and Syria for being a gateway to adultery; and a woman was shot in Saudi Arabia after her father discovered her chatting online with a man she met on the site.

Increasingly, the idea that everyone should be able to log on, publish, upload, download, update, or tweet at will—and whim—seems vital.

Julia Baird – Newsweek The Front Line Is Online (emphasis added)

Baird sets up a false opposition between freedom and privacy, and then undermines the argument with her own evidence. The key insight missing is that privacy isn’t in conflict with freedom, it’s a component of it.

Most liberal democracies have a whole pile of rights that recognize this. It’s the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. It’s why the government can’t read our mail in most free countries. It’s why we get so upset when we learn that we’re getting wire-tapped.

When “if you want to protect it, don’t post publicly” holds sway, the woman in Baird’s last example has two choices: get shot for chatting with men or don’t talk to men at all. That’s not freedom. The thing that could have freed her from her father’s insane grip is secrecy; she lives and is free only insofar as she is able to keep her private life away from his murderous attention.

When social networks make it hard to keep your doings private, you put yourself at greater risk of discovery. We should have learned this lesson when Google Buzz exposed a woman to her abusive-ex. We should have learned this lesson when Evgeny Morozov pointed out that “once regimes used torture to get this kind of data; now it’s freely available on Facebook.” We should have learned this lesson when US activists used Twitter to wiretap themselves and megaphone it to the police.

A world where you can’t keep your list of friends hidden is a world where governments can figure out networks of dissidents. psychotic family members can find out you are talking to the wrong people, and the police know which door to kick in. Removing censorship makes posting easier – it doesn’t make it safer. Shielding from prying eyes does. That only happens with good, reliable privacy controls.

To have real freedom, we need both.

As I begin writing this, I’m sitting in a room that consists of an old mattress, some empty shelves and a closet stuffed with boxes – my bedroom on the eve of a move. I finished (and started) packing yesterday. This is a feat that probably makes me unrecognizable to friends who showed up on my doorstep 5 or 10 years ago to find me franticly dumping drawers into garbage bags on moving day.

Lately, I have this ritual when I move – I read Bruce Sterling’s Last Viridian Note. I’m treating it like a devotional text for the comfortably mobile. It helps me refocus my attention on my material conditions, giving me the right kind of steely-eyed attitude when it comes time to ask, “Do I really want to pack this?”

photo credit: robokow

An Extended Excerpt

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbours. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Bruce Sterling The Last Viridian Note

Sterling wrote this in late 2008, which was probably exactly when I needed to hear it (I’ve moved 3 times since then which is why I can claim the re-readings are a ritual).

Accidental Simplification

In 2007, I was engaged to be married. We shared an apartment in Toronto that was brimming with stuff, most of it in boxes. After she moved up, her parents had kindly filled a truck with everything she owned and driven it from Nova Scotia. This act of kindness turned out to be a blow from which our material living conditions never recovered.

I already had a bad habit of moving unopened boxes from apartment to apartment; with her stuff added in, it became overwhelming. Both of us worked long hours, both of us meant to get around to sorting through our stuff but progress was slow to non-existent. We lived among boxes. Boxes became furniture. Boxes shaped our pathways through the space.

When we broke up, I’d just gotten back from a 2 week trip to Montreal. I had a suitcase with clothes and a backpack with my laptop and gear. She met me at the station, we went home, she explained her decision, and I walked back out the door carrying the same luggage.

I stayed on the road for 3 months, visiting friends across the country, living out of the suitcase and backpack. I could barely remember what was in the apartment. When the lease expired, I packed it all up, gave away what I could bear, and put the rest in storage. I moved to Ottawa. I was 6 months in to my 2 week trip when I read The Last Viridian Note.

It resonated.

2 Years Later

I tell you all of this not to herald a sudden shift from cyborgs to feelings on this website but to establish some context and qualifications for this next bit. I’ve tried to varying degrees of success to follow the advice that made sense in Sterling’s sermon. I’m very glad to have gone through the exercise. I’ve learned from the experience.

I found that a surprising amount of what you own is hard to get rid of, but easy to live without. I remember very clearly in 2008 agonizing over what to toss and what to put into storage. Today, I’m paying for a locker with only the dimmest memory of what’s in there. I don’t remember at all what I gave away, though I remember very clearly being wracked with indecision about whether I should get rid of whatever it was.

This condition does not seem to have a cure. On the day of the move itself, I set aside two bags of clothes to donate. Included in this pile were some very nice jackets that I had never worn (they were hand-me-overs) and could not foresee myself ever wanting to wear. Yet as we finished for the day aside from a last stop at the drop-off box, I hesitated. What if? What if one day I wanted a jacket like that? They were perfectly good jackets. It took real mental effort to stay the course. Sterling warns that the process will be painful and he’s not wrong.

The sermon focuses very much on the individual. It’s a program for how you might clean up and de-clutter your own life. One area that’s left aside is how this attitude fits into a slightly larger context (he skips straight to the largest context – the condition of the planet). It’s reasonable to ask: how might this approach scale?

Over the past two years I’ve learned over and over how much the highly mobile rely on the stationary for support. I’ve benefitted from countless roommates and hosts who already owned the things needed to maintain a working household. Dishes, for example. If I have been able to move without filling a van, it is because I have lived with people who needed a truck. If I hadn’t had friends, I’d have needed hotels.

(One of my favourite interviews of all time has Joey Comeau and Ryan North discussing this exact thing. Read it here.)

Community Goods

When I was in university, I went to a school that was walking distance from the house that we’d lived in since I was 2. The basement was full of stuff. Quite a few of my friends were from away, and my parents’ basement became this warehouse of resources for the whole community. Need something sawed? We had that. Need extension cords and a hose? We had that too. Need 16mm film of a wedding from the 50s, along with a working projector for your play? Yup.

This basement of miscellany sustained the material needs of about 20 university students for various projects. When my parents moved out and got rid of everything (to their great relief), a resource was lost. There is a value to having things to hand. I only need one of my friends to have a bike repair stand, but boy am I glad that he does.

There is a whole category of objects like this that don’t quite fit into the Beautiful things / Emotionally important things / Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function / Everything else rubric that Sterling details. One of his criteria for “everything else” is stuff that you haven’t touched in a year. These are very likely things you can toss, but some of them only make sense to toss in a certain context.

There are items that have some critical density of need that is not one per person, but one per household, one per block, or one per neighbourhood. They might be items that you use less than once per year but that your neighbourhood would use in aggregate once every few weeks. This is a coordination problem. I can give away my extension ladder, if you promise to keep yours or vice versa, but between the two of us, we do want a ladder. (This problem is extra persistent with roommates and is how I’ve managed to go 2 years without owning dishes or living room furniture. How many toasters does a household need? Probably 1. Mine has 3.)

Designing Neighbours

In tightly knit communities, these objects can get where they’re needed through informal lending networks. But how to get them into the hands of our glocally situated young professionals who have more connections across the continent then in a 5 block radius?

We might take some inspiration from the smooth rental experience of Zipcars. The cars are just around. You don’t need to plan ahead, you just need to see if one’s available (it probably is). There aren’t forms to fill out in triplicate, heck, you don’t even need to talk to anyone. You can just go and pick it up as if it was yours and put it back when you’re done.

We might also take some inspiration from DIY bike collectives such as Toronto’s Bike Pirates. They have all the tools, even the ones that you need once per bike’s lifetime. You drop in, do some work, leave a donation, and go on your way.

Toy Libraries also show some promise. Many toys expire long before they go bad. They become boring. They are grown out of. Libraries keep them in circulation and out of people’s basements.

With the rise of cheap sensors and cheap ID tags, it’s not hard to imagine lending libraries for all kinds of specialized tools and objects. Think about how much stuff you would get rid of if you felt like you could just grab another one any old time. No need to stop at simple tools, much of what was useful about my parents’ basement was dross that was occasionally extremely useful. Imagine whole emporiums of wonder and miscellany. Think about how much you’d enjoy browsing these places, every shelf stuffed with the intriguing scraps of a project idea.

Hold on! Now we’ve just outsourced the curation and maintenance of our occasionally useful junk to some hapless individual or organization. How do you make a set up like that sustainable? Is it run for profit? Can networks of data tags make the system seamless enough that the curation duties can be distributed across the userbase, much as they are in a regular neighbourhood? These are real design problems that want useable solutions.