01-01-2019::Sketches on computational culture .moji
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sketch (skĕch) ►
n. A hasty or undetailed drawing or painting often made as a
preliminary study. n. A brief general account or presentation;
an outline. n. A brief, light, or informal literary
composition, such as an essay or a short story.
It's been great to see all the activity around pubnix in the last
few months. I wonder how much what's happening in this space is
about modelling rather than 'fixing' into place: returning computing
efforts back to the basics of UNIX philosophy, modularity and
resource-frugality, and whether this will let us design systems
(e.g. of mediation, distribution, social connection) that we'll also
be able to scale beyond the initial pubnix communities (and those
happy to dive into the command-line). I hope that part of our
enterprise, part of this sketch, is about returning digital design
back to basics, and see where this walk backwards leads; perhaps
this leads away from surveillance, commercialisation, or other
unfortunate aspects of dominant Web technologies.
ii. low-consumption computing:
I really appreciate the focus (or indeed *need*) for low-resource
computing on the Zaibatsu server. As a need in terms of what
resources are available, this makes sense, but also this restriction
gives rise to real creativity and highly economical decision-making
around the implementation of systems and services - it makes me
think a lot about design in digital mediation and how we should
focus on this restrictive thinking more. I wonder what kinds of
designs this restriction, this attention to resource consumption,
will encourage us to explore and implement - and how there might be
the kernal of solutions here (e.g. for digital information
mediation) that could scale beyond this, and may one day *have to*
scale beyond this (I picture a world gone further off the rails than
our own, though digital networks remain, but low-energy requirements
and/or a different kind-of consumption culture means these systems
are much more lightweight, perhaps more solar, minimalist and
tactfully economical in terms of allocated resources).
Thank you to solderpunk and the other key architects of the Zaibatsu
for helping me to learn and appreciate low-resource computing in
this way.
iii. ecology/squatting/permaculture
Here in the UK, the squatting of residential buildings was made
illegal a few years back, following recent years of a dwindling
squatter scene here in London after much more widespread squatting
in the 80s and 90s. It's hard enough to come by a building that
isn't being put to use by a landlord or commercial operation in
London anyways, but this eradication of squatting as an idea or
possibility is truly sad. For years I had thought or hoped that
models of urban sustainability, permaculture and DIY technical
cultures would have emerged from the squatting scene; where material
is fair game to repurpose, re-model, re-create. With the absence of
these kinds of zones, I wonder where we're actually left to
experiment --- where can we find our sandboxes to develop new forms
that aren't form-determined by prominent social forces (e.g. State &
Capital)? The city centre is commercial, the neighborhoods are
residential and subdued. Where is the space for exploration?
Squats, by the necessity of their inhabitants, were always in some
sense 'hack' spaces, and many of the ex-squatters I know are also
the most technical people I know, having spent years having to
improvise and work out material technical solutions for electricity,
plumbing, carpentry, home-making (literally). Now that this scene
seems to have dried up, to a large extent, I feel like we're also
losing something about technical culture and education and pedagogy
in material living.
iv. server space/material space
A worry: the Web is experiencing a bit of a jolt on the part of some
of its original designers and other tinkerers. Technologies such as
the DAT protocol or SOLID - regardless of the flaws or merits of
their current application, these show the potentiality of difference
in the Web. Difference is needed. But beneath the Web, here on
port-70 and elsewhere on the indie-net, self-hosting and
non-commercial unix-based modelling are pointing towards something
much more compelling to me than efforts to 'correct' the Web. Don't
correct the Web ~ cast a new Net!
My worry is how stable this self-hosted world will be in the long
run. It's not hard to imagine ISPs and others with a commercial
stake in the Net to try and find ways to coerce and clamp down on
the indienet, right? I hope I'm wrong in worrying this, but as
server-space is necessarily material-space, and where there's
material there seems to be such a tendency for it to be made
private, owned, taken out of the public or community control.
v. the condition of the 'user' in Cloud computing:
The Cloud, described as: “… a subtle weapon that translates the body
into usable information. Despite this violence, it functions
primarily as a banal ideology that convinces us […] that identifying
ourselves is the ‘normal way of registering into the mechanism and
transmission of the state.’” (A Prehistory of the Cloud, Tung-Hui
Hu)
In regards to the creation of the computer 'user' (itself a response
to the implementation of time-sharing), this initial,
terminal-access userbase makes a great deal of sense, to me. But we
can see further that in Web technologies, this sense of the 'user'
has extended - from the personal computer, the login, the shell, to
the Cloud account, the social network individual, the identity, etc.
I daydream sometimes about what models of Web technologies might
look like were they not structured so much within the scope of this
extension of 'the user' and individual identity. This may sound a
bit spaced out, but I do wonder what the Web might look like were
it's focus not so much its users but other qualities or subjects.
vi. distribution
This is one of my primary interests: I'm grateful that the social
network brought distribution (e.g. of 'news') within something
approaching a network of trust; word of mouth more than the booming
megaphone of Fox News or the BBC. But Web-based social networks
don't just perform this function, there's a whole bunch of other
problematic dynamics there. Often I daydream: is there a way to hook
up something like RSS aggregation, news mediation
platforms/publications/e-zines and a network-of-trust (similar to
the associations of a social network) but, crucially, *not* in the
given form of the social network; instead as information
distribution networks. Something that's neither search nor social,
but perhaps somewhere in the middle..
* * *
These are just some thoughts, shared as sketches rather than bulked
out and turned into something more. Perhaps they're even more useful
as sketches.
