photo credit: lrargerich

((An incomplete idea))

Begin with the idea of seeds as dense packets of shippable information. Seeds contain (self)assembly instructions. Just add water.

Think about memes vs. genes. Memes allow an evolution that is faster than the rate of gene evolution. There is the rapid transmission, sure. But there is also the internal workings, self-reflection and modification of memes. A meme can undergo a great deal of evolution within a single entity before it gets spit back out into the world.

What would it look like if plants had access to memes? What if plants had rapid learning? They’d still need to be plants, so no moving and talking like people. Otherwise, we’ve just recreated Treebeard.

Think about machines. In some crude sense, RepRaps are plants. They build other RepRaps but they themselves don’t change or learn. The learning is instantiated in the next generation of machine that the RepRap builds. Generations can be radically (instead of gradually) different – an advantage afforded by all of the information processing that happens between generations of RepRaps.

Give plants memes and let them instantiate their learning in the (plant)conscious design of the next generation of seeds. Give them access to the ability to modify their behaviour almost as quickly as humans modify ours. Let them adapt rapidly to our rapid cultural shifts. Why should Monsanto have all the fun?

A weed appears in the Middle East with seed pods that are as satisfying to smash as a florescent tube. When smashed near the right kind of soil, chemical triggers set off a fiery light show. Youthful Tehran is overrun with the stuff.

In Paris, a species of flower predicts next season’s colours and changes its children accordingly. A bizarre symbiosis occurs as fashion designers derive inspiration from plant and plant derives inspiration from the runway. All the big houses guard their greenhouses jealously. Chanel’s radical “Agent Orange” spring line causes a scandal.

On the rootops of Detroit, a species we call shiftspice changes flavours from generation to generation. Chefs prize them, trading and collecting them the way that we trade vintages of wine. “Is that a Brightmoor late 2012?” Collector-prospector-burglars creep along the eaves with highly portable harvesting gear. Their discoveries are sold to restaurants all around the world.

In Tokyo, a kind of balcony fruit that seemed incredibly successful is learning about fads and backlash. While in Abbotswood, truce is declared as gardeners learn that updating your landscaping to the latest fashion can be something of an impossibility if the current plants don’t want to be removed.

Rumours circulate of a grass in L.A. with hallucinogenic properties and pollen spores that are activated by fire. If you hotbox with male and female angiosperm in the same bowl, the trip is said to be twice as intense.

Authorities in São Paulo engage in a futile attempt to crack down on the practice of “body pollenating” at festivals, after revellers discover a flowering vine that, in the right conditions and quantities, produces an indescribable contact-high.

From a plant’s-eye view

Steve Brill, entrepreneur, law writer, founder of Court TV and recently defunct CLEAR is trying to save journalism by reversing the trend of free news online. He gave a briefing today and while I did not hear it, @NeimanLab posted the slides here.

Let me say that I LOVE the idea of a kind of iTunes for news. It is my fondest wish that I not have a separate login and password for every friggin’ site. I’d also love to be able to pay some reasonable rate to support good journalism. Like the App Store, a unified easy payment system might free up news sites to experiment with more granular payment models. I hope they do, and I hope that they understand that the results need to be consumer-friendly and mindful of the information-firehose context of content online.

I’m not a producer of news, but as a heavy consumer, the future of journalism in the face collapse is of great interest to me. As a periodic entrepreneur, I like playing with numbers. Let’s take a look at Steve’s.

Slide 4

I had NO IDEA that my time and attention was so valuable. And all this time I’ve been GIVING it away to newspapers and magazines. Heck, I’ve been PAYING some of them for the privilege. (Hey advertisers, call me! Let’s work out something where you give me the $500 directly.) But hey, look at those online numbers. Pretty grim, huh?

Taking these figures from the Boston Globe, there are only about 20 times as many online readers as as print readers, where one needs 100 unique visitors for every lost print subscriber.

Slide 5

This is where Steve comes to the rescue. There’s an untapped demand for paying for the news! 92% of us would be willing to pay $300/yr (on average)! That sounds pretty good.

Pay close attention to the chart on the right. Steve is confusing us by playing around with medians and means. The chart tells us that 21% of us are ready to pay pay up to $600, 24% would pay that “average” $300, and 45% of us will pay NO MORE than $120. (There’s an unlabelled 10%. Presumably, they are ready to pay INFINITY dollars.)

Using a mean here is disingenuous. If we charge $25/mo. for online news, we will not see 92% of visitors subscribing. We’ll see 55%. The ones willing to pay more? We’ll have to work out some kind of premium scheme, I suppose. So let’s word it another way. 55% of consumers are willing to pay $25/mo or more. 45% are willing to pay $10/mo or less. That begins to look like a lot less money.

Why this matters comes into sharp focus when we look at…

Slide 12 & Slide 13

You’re going to want to click on those and look at the fine print. The subscription models Steve has up here assume $7-8/month per subscriber, along with some per-article users who are reading only 6 stories every month. Let me be the first to say that if you are a newspaper publisher and you imagine a world where people only want to read 6 of your articles per month, YOU ARE A BAD NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER. I recognize that the idea is that these will be longtail micropayments intended to capture revenue from drive-by readership or whatever, so let’s retreat back to the monthly subscriptions (presumably, all-you-can-eat).

Steve’s numbers in Slide 5 don’t specify whether the amount people were willing to pay was intended to be per-site-they-love or overall. Given that most households only subscribe to a single newspaper and a few magazines, I think we can assume that it’s a monthly budget for online news in general.

At $7.50 a month, we’ve wiped out the budget of 45% of our online readership. They can’t afford a second subscription. Even our 24% ‘average’ readers are subscribing to only three things. Heaven help them if they want to sample from a lot of sites. At $0.25 a story, they get to read 100 stories per month across the entire Internet.

According to Google’s RSS reader, I receive 300-400 items, scan through about 30-100 of them, and read some subset of those PER DAY, not counting links from friends/Facebook/Twitter. The Globe and Mail RSS feed alone sends me 180 stories daily (note to Globe and Mail: Guys! That’s too many!). The flood is so bad that I don’t even subscribe to other newspaper feeds. It’s easier and better to click on curated links to the best articles, as picked out by friends and trusted blogs. Steve wants me to rely on a few trusted all-I-can-eat subscriptions or limit myself to 3 articles a day (assuming I’m ‘average’).

Moving from numbers to a boring annecdote: Last week a friend sent me a link to a Financial Times article. I’d gone over my article limit for the month. I went and read something else. (the end) The brutal reality of online news and opinion is that we are inundated with ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more things to read and watch than we have time to read and watch them.

I’m sympathetic with the need to fund excellent journalism and writing, but schemes that are tone deaf to the state of online news are doomed to fail. Hoping that consumers will be willing to limit themselves to a few subscriptions per month while asking them to pay (for magazines at least) 10 times as much as they used to just isn’t reasonable.

Unless the briefing contained a lot of context and nuance that were not captured by the slides, this does not look like the solution. If Brill &co. are going to convince consumers that their new service is a good value proposition, they’ve go an uphill battle.

((Below emphasis is mine))

2007: Developer ensures islands will be safe from rising sea levels

Nakheel, which is the developer of The Palm islands and The World, says it followed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) estimation of a rise of 30cm to 50cm by 2100 when it prepared its plans for the islands. “It goes without saying that both short and long-term [sea level] rises are always considered in the design of Nakheel coastal projects,” said Dr Louay A Mohammad, a scientist with Nakheel.

“The upper end of the range is adopted by Nakheel, which is in line with International Marine and Coastal Structures Design Practices. We are therefore confident that the sustainability of our waterfront projects is ensured in the long term.” The developer, however, did not comment on the recent report from international ocean expert Stefan Rahmstorf, published in the journal Science, which said the increase was more likely to be 1.4 metres by 2100 – nearly triple the IPCC estimation.

2009: Oceans Rising Faster Than UN Forecast, Scientists Say

Ocean levels have been rising by 3.1 millimeters a year since 2000, a rate that’s predicted to grow, according to the study. The projections of sea levels rising by a meter this century compare with the 18 to 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches) forecast by the IPCC.

((Oops))

photo credit: saharsh

This is a review of a documentary.

When I first heard about the Garbage Patch in the North Pacific Gyre, I thought about Neale Stephenson’s Snow Crash. There’s this refugee raft city, cobbled together around a dead tanker that is slowly drifting counter-clockwise from Asia to the States. It’s been at sea for years, turning into this kind of Darwinian pool of only the most vicious and desperate survivors and the whole thing’s going to come ashore in California…

The second time I heard about the Gyre, I was in Montreal. A young woman had just been accepted into a graduate program and she was telling me about this continent of trash that was out there.

“It’s a whole floating island,” she said.

She wanted to do something with plastic-eating fungii for her thesis. She was going to do some research and see if she could seed the floating islands with mushrooms. See if the continent could support life, a kind of enormous artificial island. A sixth Olympic ring the size of one or more Texases.

I haven’t been in touch with her, so I don’t know what happened to her thesis project when her research inevitably discovered that her garbage island is just as fictional as Stephenson’s raft city. What’s actually out there is much, much worse.

Toxic Garbage Island

The documentary, by Vice’s VBS.tv follows a group of filmmakers who take a ride out to the Gyre on the Agalita, one of the few vessels doing research into the Gyre. It’s divided into 3 parts and at some point during the second part, I began to get impatient. When were we going to see the garbage continent?

Getting to the Gyre takes seven days by boat. For the first hour of the documentary, you are given a glimpse into each day. The crew get more and more bored and frustrated. Toward the end of part 2, the Captain explains to the filmmakers that they aren’t going get their money shot.

“Everybody says show me a picture of the Garbage. Well, it’s spread out, it’s diffuse. This is an enormous ocean. You’re not gonna find a dump, there is no trash dump down here.”

Plastic breaks down in the sun. The pieces get smaller and smaller but not nothing eats the polymers. So you end up increasingly tiny bits of plastic suspended in the water. The area the size of one or more Texases is filled with plastic garbage at various stages of breaking down. It’s plastic soup. Chunky plastic soup. Inhospitable to life, chunky, plastic soup.

Water in the Gyre is relatively stable. Before the plastic started to accumulate, biological stuff did. The micro-organisms that feed on that stuff thrived and the creatures that ate them thrived all the way up to large mammals and sea birds. A lot of creatures came to expect that the Gyre would be a buffet. They still go up there, looking for food. So you end up with this (warning: that image is disturbing as hell).

True to the captain’s word, the filmmakers never do get their money shot. But after sitting through an hour of movie voyage, when they come across a construction helmet and then a floating jar and then a tangle of net you begin to get a sense. There are bits of garbage everywhere. They are seven days out to sea, just about as far from humans and land as they can possibly be and they are picking up stuff that you’d expect to see in a poorly maintained marina. There’s a lot of it.

The Sublime

In University, talking about the sublime, we looked at Kant’s interpretation; the feeling you can get of utter smallness and powerlessness in the face of a vast universe. To experience this feeling, you need to come across events or things that reveal your weakness without threatening your existence. A safe enough distance from you that you can contemplate it but immediate enough that that you know for certain that you are powerless in the face of it.

When we used examples, we’d normally talk about stuff like watching a roaring thunderstorm from a cave. We’d compare being chased by a bear (terror, not sublime) to observing the pounding majesty of a massive waterfall (sublime). Sitting in class, ‘lo those many years ago, it never occurred to me that I’d have this feeling in the face of a floating sea of suffocating garbage.

Watching The Documentary

You can see the whole thing for free on VBS.tv.
Toxic Garbage Island Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The Monsanto House of the Future

Check out this article on Ars Technica about law prof. Patricia Akester’s study examining the effects of DRM on the legal use of copyrighted works. As you’re reading it, bear in mind that due to laws similar to the DMCA all over the world, it is often illegal to bypass DRM encryption, even if copyright law allows you to make a copy.

Why is this important?

In a storage locker in Halifax, there is a small box which theoretically contains copies of every essay I wrote in high school. These essays are stored on a stack of floppy disks. I’ll probably never read them again. For this to be otherwise, a lot of things would need to come true.

1. I figure out which Mac OS I was running (System 6?).
2. I find a copy of the OS and get it running either on old hardware (which I also find) or virtualized.
3. I find a compatible floppy drive.
4. I find a compatible copy of the word processor (WriteNow).
5. The disks have dramatically exceeded their estimated 2-year lifespan.

In contrast, consider my University essays, all of which I can still open and read. This is possible because I have been transferring the files from computer to computer over the past 12 years. There is an unbroken chain of digital pack-ratting from the MacBook I’m using now to the Pentium 166 I built in 1997.

The loss of my essays (grades 10-12) are not a big loss to society. But it serves to illustrate a problem that plagues archivists. Digital content is very easy to copy in the short term but degrades very quickly in the medium and long term. To keep digital content alive, you have to keep it moving. Kevin Kelly calls this Movage.

Anything you want moved to the future has to be given attention to keep it moving forward.

In order to preserve content against the decay of laughably short-lived media and compatibilty, archivists need to make copies – early and often. We’re not used to thinking of it that way. We’re used to thinking of preservation as a kind of stasis. We think of climate controlled rooms and white gloves and sealed vaults.

In digital, stasis is death. Stasis is the BBC’s endangered Domesday Project, trapped on laserdiscs, needing hardware that had nearly disappeared in 2002 (interestingly, they knew this was coming but the archivists failed to keep the data alive).

It is bad enough for librarians, what with the fires, earthquakes, moisture, theft, time, and other disasters eating away at the content they seek to preserve. Copyright holders have made it all the worse, by preventing the one thing going for digital – easy, short-term, perfect copies – from happening in a legal setting.

DRM schemes make it illegal for archivists to do their jobs.

1. The Photography of Chris Jordan.

   Chris Jordan takes very, very big numbers and represents them in photographs. Here’s one that he made with folded prison uniforms standing in for Americans in prison. More on his official site.

2. The 30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century.

   I found this page by accident several years ago. I end up going back to it when discussions about who’s the worst mass murdered in history come up. The section at the end with the pattern in per-capita killings? Chilling.

3. The Slow Rise of the Oceans.

   Apparently, even if all of the polar ice were to melt today, it would take up to 50 years for that water circulate throughout the world. The planet is so big, and the ocean currents are so powerful, that the water will remain trapped in a kind of slowly dispersing bulge of fluid.

4. The Problem of Storing Nuclear Waste.

   This is something that I want to come back to in some detail as a design problem. For now, take a look at this proposed monument to warn people away from the waste site (wherever it ends up). The waste is going to be dangerous for at least 10,000 years. This is the approximate length of recorded human history. How do you communicate a warning forward to people who will be at least as different from us as we are from the Babylonians?

5. That We’re Currently in an Ice Age.

   This is an interglacial period, a time of relative warmth in the midst of an ice age which is 2-3 million years old. During the past 400,000 years, warm periods like ours have tended to last 10,000 to 30,000 years. The cold has tended to last much longer. Our current (geologically brief) warm period has been happening for about 11,000 years – again, roughly the length of human history.

6. This Video.
   

   Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

((Pulled this article from the New York Times. Found it so striking that I’m going to take a page from Bruce Sterling’s blog and make comments in double parentheses.))

“Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

“Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?” ((Because they can and they are?))

“This would all sound familiar to filmmakers and musicians who fought similar battles — with varying degrees of success — over the last decade. But to authors and their publishers in the age of Kindle, it’s new and frightening territory.” ((Oh, hello books, welcome to the Internet. The marginal cost of making copies of you just dropped to zero. Guess where your price is headed.))

“For a while now, determined readers have been able to sniff out errant digital copies of titles as varied as the “Harry Potter” series and best sellers by Stephen King and John Grisham. But some publishers say the problem has ballooned in recent months as an expanding appetite for e-books has spawned a bumper crop of pirated editions on Web sites like Scribd and Wattpad, and on file-sharing services like RapidShare and MediaFire.” ((Again, that’s RapidShare, MediaFire, Scribd and Wattpad for all your pirated book needs.))

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates.” ((And everyone else!)) “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.” ((I wonder if anyone at corporate is taking the time to figure out what the ROI is on putting more bodies on the hunt.))

…

“It’s a game of Whac-a-Mole,” said Russell Davis, an author and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a trade association that helps authors pursue digital pirates. “You knock one down and five more spring up.” ((I wonder if Mr Davis realizes that he’s just succinctly explained why it is that his strategy is doomed to fail. You are playing Whac-a-Mole but with the intention of keeping those moles DOWN FOR GOOD. That’s not how the game works. It might be time to find another game.))

“Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, which invite users to upload documents like college theses and self-published novels, have been the target of industry grumbling in recent weeks, as illegal reproductions of popular titles have turned up on them. Trip Adler, chief executive of Scribd, said it was his “gut feeling” ((They don’t keep detailed stats over there at Scribd?)) that unauthorized editions represented only a small fraction of the site’s content.

“Both sites say they immediately remove illegally posted books once notified of them. The companies have also installed filters to identify copyrighted work when it is uploaded. “We are working very hard to keep unauthorized content off the site,” Mr. Adler said. ((But, you know, Whac-a-mole))

“Several publishers declined to comment on the issue, fearing the attention might inspire more theft.” ((Those sites once again: RapidShare, MediaFire, Scribd or Wattpad – Huge variety, same low price!)) “For now, electronic piracy of books does not seem as widespread as what hit the music world, when file-sharing services like Napster threatened to take down the whole industry.”

…

“Until recently, publishers believed books were relatively safe from piracy because it was so labor-intensive to scan each page to convert a book to a digital file.” ((And yet, if you care to look for it, there are scans of just about any comic book you could imagine available online. Also, have any of these guys been to Asia? Much as with DVDs it’s all pirated photocopies of books. I’d like to see an article about THAT kind of piracy.)) “What’s more, reading books on the computer was relatively unappealing compared with a printed version.”

“Now, with publishers producing more digital editions, it is potentially easier for hackers to copy files. And the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like the Kindle from Amazon or the Reader from Sony make it easier to read in digital form. Many of the unauthorized editions are uploaded as PDFs, which can be easily e-mailed to a Kindle or the Sony device.”

…

The full article is here: Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web

“The future”’s glamor, its sexiness. It’s never just one day. We don’t imagine May 20, 2050. The present is almost always the one given day.
Unless something starkly Ubertrending happens, and usually something bad. And that’s when the present feels like “the future”.
–William Gibson on twitter.

I feel like I live in the future ALL THE TIME.

My camera is a sleek flat rectangle just like in Transmetropolitan. Except that my camera is also a phone and a networked computer which contains a map of the world that knows where I am along with a growing portion all of the knowledge.

I have the Internet. Everyone has the Internet. We’re giving out laptops to children, except that this might not matter, because everyone wants a cellphone instead. What’s a cellphone? It’s the word we use to prevent our brains freaking from the fact that we all carry around personal radios, (with way more function than Star Trek communicators) that link us to a global satellite network. Like talking about wireless cable.

I just got back from 2 weeks in Thailand on business. I didn’t have working water every morning, but everyone had working miracle gizmos that we barely noticed. I got frustrated when network difficulties made it kind of choppy to talk to a teleconference of people all around the globe. For free!

The nation state is under pressure from without and within. Corruption is rampant and crushing. More and more corporations and individuals are becoming truly transnational.

Every day, people upload free video of new marvels and wonders. They’re commercializing Electric Cars!

Flying robots (ROBOTS!) are used to fight wars with shadowy terrorist organizations on the edge of law-bound civilization.

Need I mention that the world might be facing either an economic or environmental apocalypse (or both!).

We have a space station now, though it doesn’t really work very well. The Chinese have a space program. And possibly an army of hackers.

Did I mention, there were PIRATES? Not, like, fun swashbuckling pirates, but high tech, globally networked pirates.

This is not the bright gleaming future of certain kinds of science fiction, but it is the messy, complicated future of the science fiction I grew up with. It may be wrong on the details, but in tone, this is sometimes terrifyingly close to the 1980s worlds of Gibson and Sterling and that whole crowd. I think it’s telling that the crew I grew up reading are writing closer to the present these days (or even the past).

P.S. Nuclear Lighthouses.

photo credit: Midnight-digital

Two stories appeared in rapid succession today on Wired’s excellent Threat Level. In the first, Rep. Linda Sanchez defends her, possibly overbroad, anti-cyber-bullying law with the argument that it’s only aimed at hostile bloggers.

In the second, a court upholds a hacking conviction for a man who used his work computer to upload nudie shots. The hacking law was never intended to be used to turn work policy violations into crimes, but there it is.

Here’s hoping that U.S. Lawmakers are able to understand the relationship between these two stories.

photo credit: SliceofNYC

Everywhere I go, I carry a pen and a stack of 3×5 index cards held together by a binder clip. It’s a Hipster PDA 1.0, from before all those apps got installed.

On one of these cards are the words: “Entrepreneurship is alive and well at the Anarchist Book Fair”. I wrote them last spring, during a trip to Montreal. This is kind of condescending thought that runs through my head when I see idealist-ideologues try to navigate the shoals of reality.

The book fair is annual. It’s a focal point – the anarchist social event of the year. People travel from all over Canada and the U.S. to visit friends, network, run workshops, and party. The contradictions don’t seem to bother anybody.

It’s literally an anti-capitalist marketplace, crammed to the gills with people selling books, t-shirts, pins and paraphenilia. It’s a weird, vibrant mirror of a county craft fair, complete with live music, hidden bottles of booze and a snack booth (vegan, organic and sustainable, we are told). And why not? Anarchists need to eat, same as everyone else. The clothes are fashionably ragged, instead of old and faded. The patches are silkscreened with black instead of embroidered in red white and blue. There are cupcakes. When the police stop by to let the organizers know that the skinhead rally has been broken up, they get booed.

Capitalism is on the run, have you heard? The Financial Times is running a whole series on what comes next.

I wonder what the fair will feel like this year. What will the mood be? Triumphant told-you-sos? Gleeful excitement at the opportunities for effecting change? Will there be the same cold worry that the rest of us feel, that the collapse might be real and total and we might not get back up? I’ve met them. When they aren’t writing autonomous anti-oppressive zines, they work in the service industry. They don’t have severance packages, they have 2 weeks notice. And they are living paycheque to paycheque or worse. How many anarchists will look in their wallets and decide they can’t make the trip this year, due to the impending collapse of capitalism.

Does it sound like I am making fun of these contradictions? I assure you I am not. It’s these kinds of barely held tensions that keep a movement alive and dynamic. And we need a vibrant anarchism. We need one that is not caught up in internal struggles of self-definition and specialist rhetoric. Come what may, there is a lot of work that needs doing that doesn’t necessarily get done by businesses anymore. The more people offering solutions, the more likely it is that one gets found.

Who am I kidding? The answer to the Financial Times’ question is probably “more capitalism”.

The Anarchist Bookfair collective affirms and promotes values of mutual aid, direct democracy, anti-authoritarianism, autonomy and solidarity. We reiterate our opposition to capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, colonialism, statism and all other forms of oppression; we will not accept anyone to participate in the Anarchist Bookfair that perpetuates or promotes these attitudes.

-from Montreal’s Anarchist Bookfair statement of principles
photo credit: anarchosyn