Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 215

The menace of sharing, threat to the American Dream

*I expect to see lots more of these share-debunking pieces showing up. It’s like listening to the great and good complaining about Snowden, now that Snowden’s refusing to vanish, and also not becoming a drunk or a Guantanamo captive.

*Read the fine print at the end, and you’ll see that the author is a Bloomberg apparatchik, which seems a little odd for his righteous, class-envy, union-power line of attack here. Thomas Friedman didn’t invent collaborative consumption. What’s the author really worried about? Income inequality? In New York City? Could it be hotel-rent taxes in New York City that really bother him?

*Sharing fans like to talk about “sharing cities,” which implies the existence of antisharing cities. Maybe we’ll see a few of those this year, as the “smart city” rhetoric starts loaning and borrowing apples off the street cart.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-strauss/welcome-to-the-sharing-economy_b_4516707.html

“Your opportunity to be a “micro-entrepreneur”: By cleaning other people’s homes or renting out your spare room.

“Thomas Friedman, and others, have recently extolled the virtues of the sharing economy (see “Welcome to the Sharing Economy,” or “How to Monetize Your Closet”). At the risk of bragging, my immigrant parents were clearly trendsetters in this area. They typically rented or borrowed spare rooms (rather than stay at motels/hotels, or in a regular apartment), cars, clothing, shoes or pretty much anything they couldn’t afford to own themselves — which was just about everything. They also pioneered as “micro-entrepreneurs,” always willing to do an odd job for cash. Of course, this was in the late 1930s, when my poor and uneducated immigrant parents were just one step short of becoming homeless. The 21st century sharing economy isn’t being embraced because people want “lightweight (asset-free) living.” It’s usually embraced for the same reasons it was embraced in the 1920s-1930s. For many people, there’s not any other choice.

“Airbnb is the archetype of this trend. Its service allows people with a spare room to use it as an ad hoc “bed and breakfast.” It rents these rooms to complete strangers, who in turn get to stay with complete strangers. What a delightful and desirable use of one’s home!

“Mr. Friedman writes enthusiastically about a future where we will typically: rent out our power tools, give each other rides, and provide cleaning services — all via Internet-based platforms such as Airbnb. We’ll achieve a brave new world where each of us will be (in Mr. Friedman’s words) a “micro-entrepreneur.” That’s kind of like being a real entrepreneur, except you won’t have: a regular salary, paid vacations, employer-provided health insurance, or a chance of getting rich from an IPO. Being a “micro-entrepreneur” in this brave new world seems instead just a euphemism for being an employee, except with reduced compensation, job security, benefits and protections.

“I suspect Mr. Friedman, who makes $40,000/speech, isn’t an active and regular user of Airbnb. He’s not likely to want to stay with random strangers when he travels, nor have random strangers stay at his home. Similarly, I doubt any of his family members would welcome the opportunity to become “micro-entrepreneurs” by cleaning other people’s homes.

“I’m not criticizing the entrepreneurs who’ve spearheaded creation of this new and improved sharing economy. (((Uh — why NOT? Aren’t they the source of the problem?))) By building two-way feedback loops (both buyers and sellers rate each other), they’ve improved the experience for everyone, and lowered search/transactions costs. For VCs or entrepreneurs creating a marketplace/platform in this space (e.g., the next Airbnb), this could be an exciting and profitable opportunity. But let’s not delude ourselves about some of the underlying economic forces driving this trend….”

       

William Dean Howells on ruin porn

*He’s right. There’s an element of envy and “vulgar pride” in it.

“The truth is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else, wounds one’s vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner’s rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it, when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It is this which makes us such friends of the past and such critics of the present, and enables us to enjoy the adversity of others without a pang of the jealousy which their prosperity excites.”

       

Koert of Next Nature issuing an actual design manifesto

*Really? Wow.

http://www.nextnature.net/2014/01/innovative-nostalgia-design-the-future-by-referring-to-the-past/

(…)

“Believe me, I should know. Although I myself studied computer science and art, I’ve been teaching for about ten years at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Now, I can tell you that people at a Technical University really know a lot about technology. There are buildings in which they make nanostructures for solar panels, buildings where heart valves are grown from tissue, buildings where inscription algorithms are developed. All of which is wonderful.

“But let’s be honest, (((this is gonna be good))) design at a Technical University will always remain an unwanted child. Physicists, chemists and mathematicians have an unjust and persistent tendency to look down on the lack of exactness in the design field. Instead of explaining that good design is so complex that it cannot just be summed up in a simple formula, and that the more exact professions might learn something from this as their own material becomes more complex, the designers on campus – who, incidentally, prefer to call themselves design researchers – display compensatory behavior by talking about their profession in very exact and analytical terms. That translates into a great many analyses and user tests, which are subsequently published in unfathomable articles. Is that useful? Perhaps. Is it design? No.

“A thriving design practice at a Technical University remains awkward. The analytical qualities are exceptional, but we are barely able to simply make good designs. And we are totally incapable of actually designing. Virtually everything designed by the students on design courses at the Dutch Technical Universities looks like it came from a Star Wars film. You know, like those 3D printed objects with too many LED lights and exaggerated superfluous forms that mostly appear to scream: ‘Look! I’ve been designed!’, and in which an inadequately developed sense of form is shouted down by naive enthusiasm.

“Now I don’t want to blame the students, it’s because of the teachers: sensitivity to form is nowhere to be found among the teaching staff. Myself included, because I remember all too well from my time at art college that my purely aesthetic design skills are mediocre at best. But then in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And so, it is possible that our technological environment will be designed by a bunch of would-be designers or technical engineers with more good intentions than talent for design. And the rest of the design world just looks on and puts another pan of sprouts on to boil….”

       

Aral Balkan — 2014, the Rise of Indie Tech

*That would be interesting. Except for the word “redecentralizing,” which is a pretty awful word even by Web Semantics standards.

http://aralbalkan.com/notes/2014-the-rise-of-indie-tech/

“2013 was a most exciting year for technology. We learned that the systems we have today, including the Web, are broken. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know without a doubt that we live in a global surveillance state. The scale of this surveillance is fuelled by the corporate surveillance carried out by companies like Google and Facebook. These are companies whose business models depend on their knowing anything and everything about us, because it is this information — this data — that they make their money from. This corporate surveillance is, in turn, exploited by the various intelligence agencies of the world, including the NSA and GCHQ in a global dragnet that has left our privacy in tatters and which threatens the very future of our fundamental human rights and civil liberties.

“However, all is not lost.

“If, like Quartz, you have not noticed any exciting new technology in 2013, it must be either because you were living under a rock or following the mainstream tech press, and thus, by proxy, living under a rock. You see, the mainstream tech press, blinded by their razor-sharp focus on discovering the next venture-capital-backed-free-service-to-perpetuate-the-corporate-surveillance-state, missed the kindling of the Indie Tech movement almost entirely. (A notable exception is Wired, who wrote a piece on the fledging Indie Web movement.)

“You might have missed, for example, that hundreds of the brightest minds in the tech industry gathered in Portland (((where else))) at The Realtime Conference in October to deliver a manifesto — nay a novel and a theatrical production, complete with marching band and actors — against closed silos. If so, you might have missed the declaration of independence of the web. (But don’t feel too badly about it, so did the entirety of the tech press — the event wasn’t covered by a single mainstream tech publication.) If you did miss it, the videos are available online, including my opening keynote, embedded above, which was met with a standing ovation; an important validation for what I believe is an important message.

“If you thought that 2013 was deplete of exciting technological advances, you must also have missed the excellent work that the Indie Web community was doing. And, also, the introduction of a plethora of indie projects like Hoodie, Sovereign, Mailpile, ownCloud, and Cozy, alongside successful kick-starters like Lima (née Plug) and arkOS. All of which are efforts to redecentralise the web….”

       

Augmented Reality: Sekai Camera

*The race is not always to the swift.

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China China China NSA NSA NSA hack hack hack

*I hate to open the New Year with this ongoing dismal thing, but come on, that is hard to bear.

*There must be somebody in the NSA now who is like: “Hey wait! We don’t actually build the spyware INSIDE THE FACTORY. We wait till they ship it, and then we pounce on it covertly and build spyware in it, and replace all the original wrappings. Far less state-supported, and much more haxxorly!”

*If there’s anything that would irritate one about the hacker frame of mind, it would be stuff like that. That quibbling, ingenious, hey-gotcha, slipped through the keyhole thing that has been inherent to crackerdom since day one. Has there ever been a case anywhere where any hacker, in uniform or out of it, found a trifling, legalistic hole like that, and then said, “I could do that — but I won’t, because it’s unworthy of me? It’s just sleazy — immorally low — it would make me look bad — I have too much self-respect?”

*Gentlemen don’t steam open other people’s mail, eh, NSA? Gee whiz, you guys.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/nsa-cisco-huawei-china/

(…)

“Plummer and Huawei have long complained that when the U.S. House Intelligence Committee released a report in October 2012 condemning the use of Huawei gear in telephone and data networks, it failed to provide any evidence that the Chinese government had compromised the company’s hardware. Adam Segal, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Center for Foreign Relations, makes the same point. And now we have evidence — Der Spiegel cites leaked NSA documents — that the U.S. government has compromised gear on a massive scale.

” “Do I see the irony? Certainly the Chinese will,” Segal says, noting that the Chinese government and the Chinese press have complained of U.S hypocrisy ever since former government contractor Edward Snowden first started to reveal NSA surveillance practices last summer. “The Chinese government has been hammering home what they call the U.S.’s ulterior motives for criticizing China, and there’s been a steady drumbeat of stories in the Chinese press about backdoors in the products of U.S. companies. They’ve been going after Cisco in particular.”

“To be sure, the exploits discussed by Der Spiegel are a little different from the sort of attacks Congress envisioned during its long campaign against Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese manufacturer. As Segal and others note, Congress mostly complained that the Chinese government could collaborate with people inside the two companies to plant backdoors in their gear, with lawmakers pointing out that Huawei’s CEO was once an officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, the military arm of the country’s Communist party. Der Spiegel, by contrast, says the NSA is exploiting hardware without help from anyone inside the Ciscos and the Huaweis, focusing instead on compromising network gear with clever hacks or intercepting the hardware as it’s shipped to customers….”

       

His year with Google Glass

*That’s pretty good reportage there.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/12/glasshole/?mbid=nl_wired_12312013

(…)

“For much of 2013, I wore the future across my brow, a true Glasshole peering uncertainly into the post-screen world. I’m not out here all alone, at least not for long. The future is coming to your face too. And your wrist. Hell, it might even be in your clothes. You’re going to be wearing the future all over yourself, and soon. When it comes to wearable computing, it’s no longer a question of if it happens, only when and why and can you get in front of it to stop it with a ball-pein hammer? (Answers: Soon. Because it is incredibly convenient. Probably not.) In a few years, we might all be Glassholes. But in 2013, maybe for the last time, I was in dubiously exclusive face-computing company.

“Here’s what I learned….”

       

William Dean Howells in Pompeii

*Here Howells compares the events of his lifespan to the ages of buried Pompeii — a place Howells visited twice, at an interval of 43 years.

*”The exile of Richard Croker,” he says. Richard Croker was once a Tammany Hall machine politician in New York. Croker was a famous political villain of the period, and Howells had good reason to loathe him, but, well, even bad reputations don’t last.

*Goodbye, 2013; you were eventful, but now you are one with the ages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_...

“If there had been anything to do after lunch except go to the train, we could not have done it, we were so spent with our two hours’ walk through Pompeii, though the gray day had been rather invigorating. Certainly it was not so exhausting as that white-hot day forty-three years before when I had broiled over the same ground under the blazing sun of a Pompeian November. Yet the difference in the muscles and emotions of twenty-seven as against those of seventy told in favor of the white-hot day; and, besides that, in the time that had elapsed a much greater burden of antiquity had been added to the city than had accumulated in its history between the year 79 and the year 1864.

“During most of those centuries Pompeii had been dreamlessly sleeping under its ashes, but in the ensuing less than half a century it had wakefully, however unwillingly, witnessed such events as the failure of secession and the abolition of slavery, the unification of Italy and Germany, the fall of the Second Empire, the liberation of Cuba, and the acquisition of the Philippines, the exile of Richard Croker, the destruction of the Boer Republic, the rise and spread of the trusts, the purification of municipal politics, the invention of wireless telegraphy, and the general adoption of automobiling.

“These things, and others like them, had perhaps not aged Pompeii so much as they had aged me, but their subjective effect was the same, and upon the whole I was not altogether sorry to have added scarcely a new impression of the place to those I had been carrying for more than a generation. Quantitatively there were plenty of new impressions to be had; impressions of more roofs, gardens, columns, houses, temples, walls, frescos; but qualitatively the Greater Pompeii was now not different from the lesser which I remembered so well.”

       

Too Long; Didn’t Read William Dean Howells

*Here at the tag end of 2013 AD, I’m still poring over the work of William Dean Howells, in my ivied, literary fashion. Here Howells, writing as a man of 70 some time in the early 1900s, describes his impression of encountering ancient Roman ruins in contemporary Rome, and trying to imagine Rome in its youth.

*It’s odd to see Howells suddenly give in to his inner serpent-worshipper, but, well, that’s the cycle of the seasons for you. Happy New Year.

*****************************************

“Distance on it is best, and distance in time as well as space. If you can believe the stucco reconstruction opposite the Forum gate, ruin has been even kinder to the Palatine than to the Forum, with which it was equally ugly when in repair, if taken in the altogether, however beautiful in detail.

“As you see it in that reproduction, it is a horror, and a very vulgar horror, such a horror as only unlimited wealth and uncontrolled power can produce. If you will think of individualism gone mad, and each successive personality crushing out and oversloughing some other, without that regard for proportion and propriety which only the sense of a superior collective right can inspire, you will imagine the Palatine.

“Mount Morris, at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other, would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have been like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris, even allowing for the natural growth of the landscape in two thousand years, could show no such prospect twenty centuries hence as we got that morning from a bit of wilding garden near the Convent of San Bonaventura, on the brow of the Palatine.

“Some snowy tops pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon, and across the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and stumbled to their legs again. The Baths of Caracalla bulked up in rugged, monstrous fragments, and then in the foreground, filling the whole eye, the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome sank round it. The Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling with the broken syllables of its demolition to impart a sense of its past, and at our feet in that bit of garden where the roses were blooming and the plum-trees were blowing and the birds were singing, there stretched itself in the grass a fallen pillar wreathed with the folds of a marble serpent, the emblem of the oldest worship under the sun, as I was proud to remember without present help. It was the same immemorial, universal faith which the Mound Builders of our own West symbolized in the huge earthen serpents they shaped uncounted ages before the red savages came to wonder at them, and doubtless it had been welcomed by Rome in her large, loose, cynical toleration, together with cults which, like that of Isis and Osiris, were fads of yesterday beside it. Somehow it gave the humanest touch in the complex impression of the overhistoried scene. It made one feel very old, yet very young—old with the age and young with the youth of the world—and very much at home.”

       

Grabbing the bot-net hacker’s car and apartment.

*What do his car and apartment have to do with it? They’re really gonna grab the guy’s home and transportation because he wrote malware?

*Yep. You bet they are. Even in Slovenia. This is gonna be a big, coming trend in computer crime enforcement in the years ahead. “You think you’re gonna live in virtuality, crook? We’re gonna take the roof over your head and the clothes off your back, sell it, and keep the proceeds ourselves!”

–Mariposa Botnet Mastermind Gets Five-Year Prison Sentence
(December 24, 2013)
A court in Slovenia has sentenced Matjaz Skorjanc to five years in
prison for creating and distributing malware known as ButterFly Flooder
that was used to create the Mariposa botnet. Authorities arrested
Skorjanc in 2010 following a two-year investigation. He has also been
ordered to pay a 4,000 euro (US $5,500) fine and surrender a car and
apartment. (((
million computers worldwide.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-...

(((Well, this may be a boost to the shareables business, anyway. If you’re in that, you might want to watch out for mild-mannered Slovenian geeks who sit quietly and type all day. Especially if they’re really into Bitcoins.)))