This morning is the first time I’ve been out of the house in 10 days (Covid) so I went for a walk, grabbed a coffee.
The sheer wonderful sensory overload of it all! The birdsong, sure, and the cold air on the skin. By the time I sat on the bench outside the coffee shop I was noticing the wisps of steam from buildings in the distance, my visual field having that uncentred fractal depth of a Burtynsky photograph, and the changing soundscape around me of bikes and people walking by on the phone; and the sugar and soft give, biting into the cannelle and the bitterness of the coffee.
The everyday anew.
Chatting with the barista I found similarly fresh, and I find myself thinking now about community and that our sense of sociality, togetherness, is as much of a sense as any of the others, conversational interaction no different from sound waves or photons.
I went back and read John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace from 1996. Here’s the gist:
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. …
I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. …
Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. …
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. …
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. …
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Punchy!
Yes punchy even for 1996, but I remember feeling pretty much like that too in the mid 90s.
BUT it turned out that cyberspace is in fact tethered to matter, and therefore to geography, and therefore to government, in two ways: one, our bodies; two, the physical infrastructure of the internet.
And it turns out that what got built very much resembles what humans collectively build in the early 21st century. We built a city. Like London, the internet is mostly privatised public space; with a small number of grand semi-public institutions propped up by traditional mainly; law and order maintained by psychologically panoptic surveillance rather than civility or community policing, and even then there’s a non-trivial black economy and there’s a bunch of crime so you need to have your wits about you; significant class differences encoded in the architecture.
Is the internet what we would have built in 1950? 2050? Probably not. It represents our time.
So of course I dug this out because there are similarly punchy statements about the independence of the new internet, this time from the incumbent corporations and financial systems. I’m talking about crypto and web3 of course – it’s decentralised, it’s self-governing, it’s not (or shouldn’t be) subject to existing regulation, and so on.
And maybe that’s a mistake? Instead of declaring or assuming independence, focus on the kind of society we can build with these new technologies, and the way the trajectory of our society can be inflected and toward what values, taking as a starting point that it will of course be enmeshed with the existing real world.
After posting about Soviet (community services) vs Western (household automation) approaches to laundry earlier this week, I learnt about The Washing Machine Project (thanks @cadars):
70% of the world’s population lacks access to an electric washing machine.
Handwashing clothes sounds like a simple task but for many women around the world, it poses a significant obstacle to their wellbeing and livelihood.
By providing displaced and low-income communities with an accessible, off-grid washing solution, our mission is to empower women with the time to take charge over their lives.
This has caught my imagination as a general algorithm for progress: identify the cheapest way to create surplus hours for the largest number of people; do that; repeat.
Because there are other ways of lifting up communities around the world – public health initiatives, access to the internet for education and jobs, etc.
But there’s something really direct about about a focus on surplus hours. Which can be gained from reducing domestic labour (like this project) or by working on health (reducing family care overhead; extending lives). Same same, underneath it all. And hours in the day is what you need to do anything else; time is the ultimate constraint.
The metric for intervention includes cost, so you would look at: hours gained per million dollars spent. Economic utilitarianism (is that what we would call this?) is a blunt instrument but it would be fascinating to see different approaches stacked up.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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This morning is the first time I’ve been out of the house in 10 days (Covid) so I went for a walk, grabbed a coffee.
The sheer wonderful sensory overload of it all! The birdsong, sure, and the cold air on the skin. By the time I sat on the bench outside the coffee shop I was noticing the wisps of steam from buildings in the distance, my visual field having that uncentred fractal depth of a Burtynsky photograph, and the changing soundscape around me of bikes and people walking by on the phone; and the sugar and soft give, biting into the cannelle and the bitterness of the coffee.
The everyday anew.
Chatting with the barista I found similarly fresh, and I find myself thinking now about community and that our sense of sociality, togetherness, is as much of a sense as any of the others, conversational interaction no different from sound waves or photons.
I went back and read John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace from 1996. Here’s the gist:
Punchy!
Yes punchy even for 1996, but I remember feeling pretty much like that too in the mid 90s.
BUT it turned out that cyberspace is in fact tethered to matter, and therefore to geography, and therefore to government, in two ways: one, our bodies; two, the physical infrastructure of the internet.
And it turns out that what got built very much resembles what humans collectively build in the early 21st century. We built a city. Like London, the internet is mostly privatised public space; with a small number of grand semi-public institutions propped up by traditional mainly; law and order maintained by psychologically panoptic surveillance rather than civility or community policing, and even then there’s a non-trivial black economy and there’s a bunch of crime so you need to have your wits about you; significant class differences encoded in the architecture.
Is the internet what we would have built in 1950? 2050? Probably not. It represents our time.
So of course I dug this out because there are similarly punchy statements about the independence of the new internet, this time from the incumbent corporations and financial systems. I’m talking about crypto and web3 of course – it’s decentralised, it’s self-governing, it’s not (or shouldn’t be) subject to existing regulation, and so on.
And maybe that’s a mistake? Instead of declaring or assuming independence, focus on the kind of society we can build with these new technologies, and the way the trajectory of our society can be inflected and toward what values, taking as a starting point that it will of course be enmeshed with the existing real world.
After posting about Soviet (community services) vs Western (household automation) approaches to laundry earlier this week, I learnt about The Washing Machine Project (thanks @cadars):
This has caught my imagination as a general algorithm for progress: identify the cheapest way to create surplus hours for the largest number of people; do that; repeat.
Because there are other ways of lifting up communities around the world – public health initiatives, access to the internet for education and jobs, etc.
But there’s something really direct about about a focus on surplus hours. Which can be gained from reducing domestic labour (like this project) or by working on health (reducing family care overhead; extending lives). Same same, underneath it all. And hours in the day is what you need to do anything else; time is the ultimate constraint.
The metric for intervention includes cost, so you would look at: hours gained per million dollars spent. Economic utilitarianism (is that what we would call this?) is a blunt instrument but it would be fascinating to see different approaches stacked up.
On with the day! Gm as the kids say.