Looking through the fog

I’m working through lots of various ideas at the moment, and some things are starting to emerge:

  • A preference for practice over theory. “Show me”
  • A low-key interest in urban design that I’ve had for a long time
  • Investigations into geo data, sparked by douglas’ entry in the field
  • A renewed appreciation for software but when deployed for a purpose, and especially data crunching, in service of something other than business practice, day to day operations, plumb things together, … as I’ve been doing for the last few years
  • A pervasive feeling of art, music, etc, as narcissistic escape from dealing with real people and real problems. In the long run, they’re all that civilization really produces, but in the more immediate term art seems like a way to avoid the world in a personally enriching way.

NZ Election

I’m a New Zealand citizen, and I vote there. The election is coming up, and they had a televised debate between the two main party leaders, one the current prime minister and the other the new head of the National party.

To make a somewhat more informed decision, I found and replayed the debate on YouTube. After five minutes or so of the traditional media audio/ video with military-like snare paradiddles, portentous horn choruses, flag waving and the other trappings of electioneering invoking preparation for battle that seem directly imported from the US (why not bird calls, beach noises, video of Mt Cook, stuff that tells the viewer “this is NZ?”) the aggressive “moderator” starts in with questions about the government’s handling of the pandemic.

About three minutes in, the question is basically “what would you do differently with an outbreak”. Ardern makes the case for handling it exactly as she did, operating from the best information from public health science. Her opponent says she’d do it a little differently, not elevating the alert level for the country outside the afflicted city-wide area for “economic reasons”.

I shut the video off, having learned all I need to know to make my decision. The existing government will do what’s required to save the most lives, given the best information they have. The opposition is willing to risk more cases, and more deaths, so that the economy isn’t hit as hard. That completely disqualifies them from governing, imho, and I will be voting straight Labour.

I live in a country where the authorities have basically made this trade off, and we have 20% of the world’s casualties with 5% of the world’s population, and a refusal to support those afflicted beyond requiring them to get back to work if they want to stay housed and have food for their families. I’m not going to support that kind of thinking with a vote.

Polis

This is a clever idea. Forum software that runs AI over comments, finding and graphically displaying “knots” of agreement and highlighting comments that bridge across those knots; the result is to discover and show areas of consensus, rather than focus on areas of disagreement. Built by people in Seattle.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform

And the link to the software: https://pol.is/home

Medialab Prado

http://www.bollier.org/blog/medialab-prado-applying-open-source-ethic-civic-innovation

This is an organization that’s part maker-space, part poitical-science, that prototypes processes for civic life. It solicits ideas for projects, sends a call for participation; the participants get together and hammer out what an actual implementation might look like, build it, run it, document it, share it. Projects include things like: how to visualize the food chain in ways to allow people to make intelligent decisions about consumption, how to make taxis more usable. They prototyped the idea of participatory budgeting, now in use around the world.

To do this, they have several labs: a data lab, where they pursue ways of utilizing and creating open datasets, fab labs and maker spaces, to prototype and build physical objects needed for various projects, an AV lab to experiment with ways of presenting/”performing” the results of these projects in meaningful ways (beyond slides and lectures), citizen science lab, participation lab, neighborhood labs, a lab specifically for prototyping interaction between the public and government officials/elected representatives.

They’ve been on this for 10 years, supported by their city (Madrid) and a few other entities, public and private. They envisage their job as trying out processes for public-commons interactions, rather than the prevailing public-private (which means public-business) partnerships and citizens interacting in a city primarily as consumers. They see a plethora of public physical spaces (libraries, museums, …) available for this sort of interaction, but without the process infrastructure that the lab is experimenting with. In a meta sort of way, they’re now putting what they’ve learned about building this sort of organization in a MOOC, unfortunately only in Spanish for now.

I’ve taken time away from work over the past few months to contemplate my navel, thinking about what useful thing I could spend my energy on for the next few years. I thought about a makerspace/gallery for installation art and music along the lines of The Lab in SF or STEIM in Amsterdam. Following this thread led me to the Musical Electronics Library in NZ, something I have to pursue.

But Medialab-Prado seems much more interesting (if misnamed – should be “CityLab” or something). Applying the same principles to experimenting with mechanisms for civic engagement, and the process itself changes the way people interact, as the podcast points out. This is really interesting to me. Check out the podcast.

It’s interesting to contrast this with the traditional think-tank, an assemblage of industry-funded experts with very little regular-people input that generates output from thought experiments. One thing I learned from graduate school in music, that the actual process of implementing a piece results in a very different understanding of its underlying ideas than that gained from just conceiving it, and that the deeper, perhaps contradictory ideas often come from the interaction between the participants while building and performing it. Prototyping and implementation beat design.

Why is this resonating with me right now? It’s got to be partly because of the breakdown of civic life in the country I’m in, and the dawning understanding that it’s been engineered to be this way. From the place de Tocqueville describes, constructed on civic engagement (a bit pollyana-ish, to be sure), to a corporate oligarchy where everyone feels powerless. Of course, it hits all the stuff I was contemplating about makerspaces as well, and provides one answer to my nagging sense that music/art is a pretty useless and narcissistic activity, in the way the lab conceives the arts as a means to communicate new ideas.

From a reference from Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#22_September_2020_(Giving_away_control_to_Corporations) that points to a Ralph Nader article in Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/09/19/why-do-americans-give-away-so-much-control-corporations) which referenced a blog by a chap called David Bollier (http://www.bollier.org/), who has a blog post about it (reference in the first paragraph).

Climate realization sets in, and people start to move

This and this project massive migration within the US from the South and center to the Northwest and Northeast, switching on a dime when unsustainable state and federal backstops to the insurance industry stop and people can’t continuously rebuild in the same damaged places, and some areas (Louisiana, New Mexico) are projected to become literally incapable of supporting life or crops. The rapid influx of people to places like Vermont, Washington State, North Dakota will severely stress those areas’ ability to cope, too, and the places they leave will be left as home to the old, sick and poor.

Hey, Jeff, hold onto your 20 acres. It’s going to be worth a hell of a lot more soon.