Monday, December 08. 2008
On October 28th Rob van Kranenburg’s book The Internet of Things A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID will be launched (5:00 pm, Waag Society, Amsterdam) A pdf download is already available at the Institute for Network Cultures website.
The main point of Kranenburg’s essay is that:
Cities across the world are about to enter the next phase of their development. A near invisible network of radio frequency identification tags (RFID) is being deployed on almost every type of consumer item. These tiny, traceable chips, which can be scanned wirelessly, are being produced in their billions and are capable of being connected to the internet in an instant. This so-called ‘Ambient intelligence’ promises to create a global network of physical objects every bit as pervasive and ubiquitous as the worldwide web itself. Some are already calling this controversial network the ‘internet of things’, describing it as either the ultimate convenience in supply-chain management, or the ultimate tool in our future surveillance. This network has the power to reshape our cities and yet it is being built with little public knowledge of consent.
Kranenburg makes a range of interesting points with regard to the internet of things that he would like to see discussed. I’ll highlight two of those here:
- Dependency & Agency
Ubicomp makes citizens ever more dependent on large and complex software networks. Ubicomp or ambient intelligence technologies aim to disappear into the background. Yet that also means that its affordances might become invisible: what else can be done with the technologies, apart from running the scripts and algorithms that it was designed to do?
The result will be dumb interfaces that hide all keys to the technology that drives it. Consequently it will keep citizens from being able not only to fix it when it is broken but to build on it, to play with it, to remake, remodel, and reuse it for their own ends. I believe this being able to negotiate stuff, stuff that is axiomatic thinking embodied, is called creativity.
Kranenburg compares these emerging systems with modern cars. Up to a decade or two ago, it wasn’t too hard to fix one’s own car if something had broken down, or to tinker with and and tune it yourself. Nowadays you have bring it to a certified dealer who has the right licences and know-how to tinker with its software. This shift has a larger cultural consequence:
If as a citizen you can no longer fix your own car – which is a quite recent phenomenon - because it is software driven, you have lost more then your ability to fix your own car, you have lost the very belief in a situation in which there are no professional garages, no just in time logistics, no independent mechanics, no small initiatives.
So, what we need, according to Kranenburg is not closed and complex systems of proprietary software, but rather we should start off with ‘small-scale open content, software and hardware - made for and used by artisans’ that does not ‘have to remain physically local
but can travel through friends across the world.’ He refers to a project called Bricolabs as an example of this approach.
- Fear and Trust
Kranenburg points out that the emergence of ‘the internet of things’ is often part of a discourse about fear and control. On the one hand, new technologies are used by the state to monitor activities of things and humans. In this scenario, every action of everything and everyone can be tracked and stored in databases. He calls this scenario ‘the city of control’. This also means, he reminds us, that ‘there is no forgetting: no memory loss’:
Consequently you should not say: “I’m not doing anything wrong, so why should I worry about smart
cameras with 3D coordinates reading my face, or this RFID/M2M/NFC infrastructure? No, you should worry about whom will deem what wrong in three years from now, as from the moment of going live all movement will irrespective of man, machine or animal) be logged, stored and data mined.
Instead he argues for a City of Trust, in the introduction of the book described as:
on the surface [the City of Trust] looks very similar to the City of Control. But here the citizens have been given much more control: Here pervasive systems have been embedded, but offered as an option rather than as a default. You leave your laptop on the train, no problem: with the ‘internet of Things’ can locate it on a search engine, even arrange for it to be delivered back to your door.
In this scenario it is not the state (or project developer or other central institution) that uses the technologies for central control, but rather citizens themselves have taken up the technologies to organize their own lives. This means that citizens/users/consumers should also be given control about the technologies, not only should they be more transparent and easy to tinker with, they should also provide the option to shift between different modes of privacy:
[we should be] moving from privacy to privacies, which acknowledge that in a hybrid environment we leave different traces and might want to build temporary personalities around these traces, not exposing our entire personality all the time.
-----
Via The Mobile City
Personal comment:
Un autre livre, une autre ressources concernant l'"ubiquitous computing", l'"internet of things", etc. C'est un peu le nouveau "buzz word" ces temps dans l'univers des media arts/design. Une ressource à mettre toutefois en réserve en vue de Globale Surveillance.
James Boyle’s new book The Public Domain is now available. Boyle, a founding board member of Creative Commons, and current Chair of the CC Board, is a professor at Duke University School of Law and a seminal thinker in the field of information property rights and law. The following excerpt from James Boyle’s Preface to The Public Domain sets out issues that make this book a fundamental resource for understanding and advancing the smart mobby future of ideas:
For a set of reasons that I will explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”12 Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, property’s various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone.
Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as “the environment” rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment.
We have to “invent” the public domain before we can save it. . . .
-----
Via Smart Mobs
Personal comment:
La question du "domaine public" abordée par un des fondateurs de Creative Commons. Même si ici le sujet paraît abordé d'un point de vue plutôt juridique (les oeuvres "tombées" dans le domaine public, les oeuvres libres de droits, la propriété intellectuelle, le copyright, etc.), c 'est une question qui nous intéresse depuis plusieurs années par rapport à l'espace public. L'extension de l'analyse du réel ("reality mining", tracking, monitoring, surveillance, etc.) mite et mine progressivement l'espace public. Celui-ci, analysé par des technologies souvent propriétaires produit des données dont on ne connait pas l'exploitation, par qui, pourquoi?
Probablement que ce livre développe des thèmes intéressants par rapport à la question général du domaine public.
A lire éventuellement dans le contexte de Globale Surveillance, projet en cours avec Eric Sadin.
The atmosphere at last week's Megacities conference in Delft was subdued. I don't suppose my own talk, which ploughed a similar path to the Debt, Diesel and Dämmerung narrative I mentioned yesterday, helped lighten the mood very much.
Spirits were low because it is becoming clear that mega solutions of any kind - whether or not they are desirable - will be extremely hard to sell, let alone launch, for the forseeable future. Given that our host venue, TU Delft, is Europe's degree zero for mega-solutions, glum faces were to be expected.
So it was especially cheering when, the next day, Martien de Vletter (its Dutch co-publisher) gave me the brand new catalogue of an inspiring exhibition has just opened at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Actions: What You Can Do With the City.
The show features 99 actions that have the potential to trigger positive change in contemporary cities. The seemingly common activities, that feature walking, playing, recycling, and gardening, show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city - and challenge fellow residents to participate.
The project website includes projects by a diverse group of "human motors of change". They include architects, engineers, university professors, students, children, pastors, artists, skateboarders, cyclists, root eaters, pedestrians, municipal employees.
The 99 actions touch on the production of food, and possibilities of urban agriculture; the creation of public spaces to strengthen community interactions; recycling of abandoned buildings for new purposes; the use of the urban fabric as a terrain for play such as soccer, climbing, skateboarding, or parkour; alternate uses of roads for walking, or of rail lines as park space.
Actions is curated by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, with Lev Bratishenko, Meredith Carruthers, Daria Der Kaloustian, and Peter Sealy. The catalogue, which I warmly commend, contains case studies and short texts on most of the featured interventions.
-----
Via The Doors of Perception (John Thackara)
|