Douglas Rushkoff's Blog, page 35

Rushkoff to Google: Don't Give Up on the Humans

I gave a talk at Google last November while touring for Program or Be Programmed, and after losing the video file they finally found it again and put it up. My main message to them, which occurs in a mysteriously glitched segment at the opening, was: Don't Give Up on the Humans.

It was a very strange experience for me – being in the belly of the borg itself, a true corporation in its own right, but a place that feels almost idealistic when I compare it with what I've experienced of Facebook.

Rushkoff on Broadway

I'm about to hole up to write another book and spend more time with family. But before I do, I thought it might be nice to punctuate the last few years of writing and thinking with one last and big event in New York City.

The Center for Communications – Cencom – has come forward to sponsor"An Evening with Douglas Rushkoff", a part-talk and part-interview with me conducted by Newsweek's Jeremy McCarter. We'll focus on Program or Be Programmed and Life Inc, the promise and perils of technology, the way markets and networks interact, and whether society as we know it is capable of negotiating the terrain ahead.

This event is FREE, but you are supposed to register to reserve a seat. I can't imagine selling out an entire former movie theater, but if a few college teachers assign the event for their students, it could fill up pretty fast.

So please come. It's early in the evening, so I'll do my best to stay around afterwards for some signing and celebrating.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011, from 6:30 to 8:00 pm
NYIT Auditorium on Broadway
1871 Broadway (61st and 62nd St.)

Sainthood in the Church Of Earthalujah

You are cordially invited to my canonization. This one should be fun. Sunday evening in NYC.

Douglas Rushkoff Gets Sainted At This Week's Church Of Earthalujah!

In our Church we don't kill our saints first. This week, The Church of Earthalujah will beatify author activist genius Douglas Rushkoff, who will be in attendance. Doug's been telling us everything we need to know about corporations, technology, the media and our own imaginations for as long as we can remember and we're honored to canonize him into Fabulous Sainthood. Earthalujah!

The Church of Earthalujah

Every Sunday, 7:30pm
Theatre 80
80 St. Mark's Place
New York City

Tickets $10, no one turned away

Join the Order of Digital Mysteries!

Command for Librarians in a Digital Age

The indie publication of Program or Be Programmed meant no reviews in the traditional publishing press journals (Kirkus, PW) but Library Journal has become a real friend to the book and its ideas. Here's an interview they just did with me about how librarians should adapt to the needs of digital readers, and non-readers.

Q&A with Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist and Author of Program or Be Programmed
Interview by Josh Hadro and Barbara Genco Feb 23, 2011

Ever feel like you're a dandelion tuft on the Internet winds, floating in and out of Facebook and Twitter feeds to wherever those links might take you? Not to worry, just chalk up those hours on handhelds and laptops as time well spent—we're current, we're engaged, and we're savvy to the ways of life on the web. But savvy this: what if we're completely oblivious to the way the digital environment is actually shaping us as we attempt to take it all in?

That's what worries media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff, the thought that we're being caught unawares by software of our own design, that we may end up abdicating our agency as the reins on everyday technology slip from our grasp.

If this all sounds a bit dire, it is—in his new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Rushkoff says the stakes are as high as they come: "Before, failing meant surrendering our agency to a new elite. In a digital age, failure could mean relinquishing our nascent collective agency to the machines themselves. The Process appears to have already begun."

So, how to stake a claim for individuality and expression against the digital crush of homogeneity? And how do libraries figure into humanity's stand? LJ recently caught up with Rushkoff and asked.

LJ: You wrote, "every Google Search is-at least for most of us-a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere, requesting something from an opaque black box." Much of what you describe in the book is a part of what librarians have been discussing in terms of information literacy for years. But the amount of library instruction most people receive in school and college pales in comparison to the conditioning they're subject to in the rest of Internet culture. How do you break others out of the search box mold, so to speak?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, I think it's almost always pointless to try to "break out" where technology and behavior are concerned. Better to push through. My strategy would be to teach more about the search they're actually doing. How does Boolean search work, how does Google's algorithm work, and how is this kind of data mining biased? What sorts of results are possible, and what sorts are not? What is being hidden from view? What would be lost if everyone in the world could only find things out this way?

Those kinds of questions put the search box in the role of the authority, rather than the librarian or the teacher. You have to remember that the kids you're working with now have been raised in a world with these technologies as given circumstances. They are more than primed to play the revolutionary. Be on their side in challenging the all-high-authority of search results.

LJ: And what's the librarian's role in that education, given the limited amount of contact they have with the public (not to mention that it's also self-selected contact)?

DR: Tricky, especially when so many libraries are themselves being threatened with replacement by databases. The librarian has to remember that the stacks are both a real reference system and a metaphor for a way of organizing human thought. The first function is practical, while the second is theoretical, even spiritual. If I were a librarian and had any time at all with students, I'd be less concerned with teaching them the intricacies of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature (is that still around?) than offering them an immersive library experience. They need to be grounded in a single experience of wonder, enabled by the ability to make connections in physical space between resources.

So I'd give them an assignment like finding a single resource in any way they choose-computer search, Google, whatever. Something they really want to see or know about. And when they go to the shelf to get that thing, they have to look at everything else on that shelf and the one either above or below it. Just look at what's there.

Nine out of ten of those kids will end up finding something else they really want to read, that they didn't even know existed.

And when they come back, have a conversation about what was next to the book they wanted. Stuff they thought belonged there, or not? Was there any logic to what was next to the book? Whose logic was it?

LJ: What prompted these "ten commands"? Is there one "command" in particular that librarians might begin with?

DR: What prompted them was the realization that we are undergoing a shift as profound as the shift from oral to the literate society. Digital media are that different, and biased just as deeply. Just as the shift in the Axial age required us to contend with law, monotheism, ethics, accountability, and so on, the shift in the digital age will require us to contend with new sorts of collaboration, socialization, permanence, loss of privacy, change in our notions of individuality, and so on. The people of the Axial shift got Ten Commandments to help them contend with a world bound by written rules-laws. So I thought we all deserved ten commands to help us gain command over a world bound by programs.

As for where to start, I put them in order. Time seemed like the initial command to learn to use. But if there's a single most important concept to get, it's command #10, Program or Be Programmed. Just as the invention of language meant learning to speak as well as listen, and the invention of text meant learning to write as well as read, the invention of programming really does require some facility with programs if we want to maintain a modicum of agency in the new terrain.

We have to be able to look at a program or website and know what it does. Who made it? Who is the customer? Who does it serve? How does it work? If we don't know what the programs we use are for, we can't expect to know whether we are using them or they are using us.

LJ: Can you envision a future in which people have taken up the call to be less passive, and are more intentional in their relationships with technology? What does that look like? How does the library fit into that future?

DR: Well, it's the same as a future in which humanity take up the call to be less passive and more intentional in their relationships with reality. Dewey foresaw a society in which people would be able to participate actively in democracy and other social institutions. Lippman thought that was a pipe dream. The jury is still out.

Egyptians decided to become more active. Others decide to become more passive.

Librarians can help people to understand what they're choosing, and that it's a choice. It might be that we live in a civilization that chooses to stay passive-but we can at least help people understand that this is a choice, too. We are actively choosing to stay passive. I think librarians can also create an atmosphere of reassurance that permits people to experiment more. If we know you're there collecting the results of what happens, holding down the fort, preventing the sum total of human knowledge from being lost, then the rest of us can venture out onto new territory without fear of not being able to find our way back.

That's really more the librarians' role in society than in an individual's life, but it is just as important. You provide the foundation, the memory, the map home.

LJ: Where do ebooks fit as part of the conditioning idea of software you explore in your book? Are we confusing the container for the content?

DR: Containers do change. Scrolls became books, and now books are becoming ebooks. What ebooks do is force us to reconsider the length constrictions of printing-press era bound volumes. Did they end up this length for any reason other than form factor?

Ebooks aren't primarily software, they are content. Where the idea of media biases comes in is more in the selection of device and interface. What is the real difference, if any, between reading on a Nook, a Kindle, or an iPad? How do the various buying options and online stores influence what we read and the way we do it? Do the shortened selections being made available for little bits of money have anything to do with the way we really want to engage with content? Or is the entirety of literature about to conform to the latest model of publishing business plan put out by media conglomerates looking for a growth industry? All in a decade?

LJ: Are you an ebook reader yourself? Do you borrow ebooks from the library? If so, where do you hold a library card?

DR: I haven't done the ebook thing yet. I have too many regular books to read. The closest I get is when people send galleys as PDFs which I have to read on the computer. I am still not convinced the ereaders are good for the environment, and I won't be until I see people buy one and keep it for a while before getting the next one.

I have a few library cards. I teach every couple of years in order to keep one from NYU or New School. I have a local one, too, but I haven't achieved the same level of database access with it as I can get through NYU. And I'm not sure how far beyond our own county system I can go with interlibrary loan.

But I'm not a typical library user. I am writing non-fiction books and need weird stuff that nobody has looked at in a long time. I end up traveling to libraries, sometime.

My daughter is into our library, and has been making inter-library requests since she was four. She loves it when the librarian actually has a book waiting behind the counter with her name on it, that people procured for her. Even if it's just the Sound of Music companion.

LJ: As an observer of digital publishing and an author yourself, what's your take on the current state of affairs between libraries and publishers around ebook publishing? Is there a danger to libraries from this retail focus on direct-to-consumer ebook distribution and sales?

DR: I think you guys will be fine, especially if publishers go for these ebook borrowing services I've seen popping up. I want more libraries to buy my Program or Be Programmed book, but it was published by an independent (ORbooks) and most don't know how to even purchase it. It's possible that some of the ebook networks will make it available, though, through one of those systems where one person at a time is allowed to borrow and access the book in the library's system.

I think that's all good, and public libraries have to serve their primary public purpose-which is to make reading material available to the public for free. Once all this e-stuff is taken care of and a standard e-borrowing solution emerges, you can go back to the more fun work of maintaining a collection and building a community around high-touch reading experiences.

ABC (Australia) Radio Interview – Program or Be Programmed

I recently had a conversation with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Antony Funnell about Program or Be Programed. The resulting package is a nice summation of the book's key points.

You can listen to the 15 minute interview at ABC's Website, or read the transcript below:

Antony Funnell: Hello, Antony Funnell here, welcome to the program.

Today, a conversation with influential media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, who's newly-released book is called Program, or be Programmed.

Douglas Rushkoff: The basic premise of it is that if people understood how to use the technologies on offer, they would get a lot more out of them and be much less likely to be used by them. Technologies that we're using are embedded with purposes, you know, those are called programs, and if you're not aware of that programming and capable of programming yourself, then you're not really participating in this media. There are people who are participating in this media. A lot of them don't really have your best interests at heart.

Antony Funnell: Douglas Rushkoff, our first guest on today's Future Tense. Also, amid the predictions of a rise in natural disasters, Ian Townsend questions whether the safeguards we're putting in place will actually make us more vulnerable in times to come. And Professor David Karoly on crowd-sourcing the weather.

David Karoly: What has been done with the climateprediction.net project so far is to run more than 100,000 different climate model simulations for more than 160 years each. So it's really harnessing background time on volunteers who want to participate in this citizen science project.

Antony Funnell: David Karoly, from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, coming up later.

Now, Douglas Rushkoff – we had him on the program last in 2009 and to be quite frank we were looking for an excuse to have him back. The release of his new book has given us that opportunity.

Mr Rushkoff is a leading media theorist, as I said earlier. He's also a documentary maker and he teaches media studies at New York University and the New School University. In his latest offering he argues that many of us have become too unquestioning in the way we use and view technology. And he now says that it's time for some re-education – a new approach to the way our children interact with modern media.

Douglas Rushkoff.

Douglas Rushkoff: I'm advocating that we raise people with some knowledge of programming, the same way we think of it as important for kids to know basic math and long division and those sorts of things. I think kids should also understand the very basics of programming, so that when they operate a computer, they don't think of it like a TV set, they don't think of the computer in terms of what it's come packaged with, but they think of the computer also as a blank slate. It's just like introducing kids to reading and writing, you know, you show them books, but you also give them blank pieces of paper where they can write their own words. Now I feel like those few schools that do teach computers, teach kids not really computers, they teach them Microsoft Office, which is great for creating the office worker of the 1990s, but not for creating the people who are going to build the 21st century.

Antony Funnell: Now you make the point in your writing that, Well that's not happening in countries like the United States or Britain or Australia, it is happening in some countries isn't it, India and China for instance?

Douglas Rushkoff: Yes, that's happening in India and China and even better, in South Korea. I mean I'm not here to say their education systems are better than ours, but they are teaching programming in these places and not in most Western countries. And the US military is very concerned at this point that within a generation, we'll lose a cyber technological superiority, you know, that we won't have enough programmers to do the kinds of crypto protection required in a world where everyone is learning programming.

And I mean, with any case when a technology becomes inaccessible to the user, you have to ask Well is it becoming inaccessible because it makes it better somehow? And maybe you can argue that having computers in cars that you can't really fix yourself, makes them better on some level. And that's an argument that people should have, who understand about cars and how they work and whether it's good or bad for us as consumers. But people don't generally have the kind of awareness even with computers, and our computers have gotten much more – well they've gotten much easier to use on a certain level, but much harder to program, much harder to get back there and actually use the computer to its fullest. In other words, to alter it. You know, if you look at the difference between a Dos machine and an iPad, you know a DOS machine was a machine that basically you had to program to use, and you were in there with the program. And an iPad basically is Steve telling you how this device should be utilised, and if you try to change it or use it in a way that he wasn't thinking, you're going to hit up against a wall that he's put there.

Antony Funnell: So is some of it a sleight-of-hand by those who control our technology? I mean do they give us enough to do by ourselves that we feel like we're in more control than we actually are?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well they give us control over certain kinds of things. I mean you get many, many choices with these technologies, but very often those choices are limited in ways that you don't quite realise at first. It's like walking down the supermarket aisle and they've got 100 different detergents for you to use on your laundry, you know, all made by 30 companies and all containing the same phosphates and other ingredients. There's one strategy there with 100 different bottles on it, you know. And I think the same thing when I watch people put the radio buttons on Facebook to say you know, what gender they are and what movies they write, as if these are the real colours that we could use to depict ourselves to the world around us.

Antony Funnell: So what would the world be like if people heeded your message?

Douglas Rushkoff: The world would be absolute utopia.

Antony Funnell: I thought you might say that!

Douglas Rushkoff: I known that since I was two, if we just all did as I said it would be fine. A world in which people understood programming and looked at the world through the lens of people who understand programming. You know, right now we're Industrial Age people, we understand cause and effect and this plus this equals that. But we don't really understand the world as a set of programs. We don't think critically about government and traffic and health care and all these things, as formula, as paradigms, as programs that have been implemented by people with certain agendas at certain moments of history, and then they may not really work for us now, that they need to go back and fix them and re-work them, and reprogram them.

And I feel like a society of people who knew about programming, not just as a technological skill, I mean not everyone's an engineer, but even just as a liberal art, you know, as the landscape on which human activity is taking place, which it is, that human society is happening on an operating system. And if we don't understand the basic operating principles of that landscape, and I feel like we're really incapable of orienting ourselves our directing our flight. But I think we could. I think if we knew this, we would have a society of people who experience a heck of a lot more agency than people have maybe forever.

Antony Funnell: Media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff, speaking to us today via Skype.

Now the subtitle of Mr Rushkoff's book, Program or be Programmed is Ten Commands for a Digital Age, so let's find out about those.

Douglas Rushkoff: There are ten commands, not commandments. In other words that these are supposed to be things that you do, that you use, not just orders from God to the population. I mean it's meant to serve a similar purpose to the Ten Commandments, which I see as society with a new medium, with text now, negotiating a path to a very different world. I mean these commands are meant to help people negotiate a path through this next world, through this digital world.

Antony Funnell: And take more ownership, more individual ownership?

Douglas Rushkoff: Right. More individual, more personal ownership and to be able to strike balances between the sort of the biological organism and this new networked being that we're forging together. So one of them is just 'Do not be always on'. I looked at the basic bias of digital technology towards an asynchronous approach to time. It's embedded in the way software works, it doesn't really live in time, like people, it lives as a sequence, a line of code will wait until the input comes and it'll wait for a minute, it'll wait a day, it'll wait a year, until you give it the next piece, it doesn't really care.

The strength of early computing and early networking was when people went kind of with that bias, the great early bulletin board conversations on the internet, were kind of like chess by mail. You know, you'd look at the conversation with a 2400 bit modem. You would download it to your computer and read it, then you would decide over it a day or two how you were going to respond, and then you'd type a paragraph and then upload to the server and then wait and see what the other person said.

So on the net, you've ended up with more time to do things, and the ability to do things like email in your own time, rather than like with a telephone call or some light conversation where you had to be witty in a moment.

But then we take this great asynchronous technology and we attach it to our bodies in such a way that it vibrates with every tweet that comes in, as if now there's this thing that's supposedly happening in real time, that we have to catch up with. And it fries people's nervous systems, I mean people get something called Phantom Vibration Syndrome, where they think their cell phone's vibrating in their thigh, even though it's not even on their person. You know, that's not the symptom of an appropriate adaptation to technology, it's a maladaptation.

Antony Funnell: Another one of the commands that you detail (and we'll put the list up on our website) but another one that interested me was the idea of 'Do not sell your friends'. Explain that to us.

Douglas Rushkoff: Yes well I was thinking a lot about Facebook, and how there's a line kind of between the social world and this commercial world that is getting harder and harder for people to draw. I mean 'do not sell your friends' really comes from the idea that the net is a social medium, it's always been a social medium, and that's been the way that it's thrown off everything that's come its way, you know, originally it was supposed to be a kind of a Defence Department thing for scientists to talk to each other, and they used it to talk to each other about Star Trek and recipes, so the Defence Department said 'We don't even want this thing.' They gave it to AT&T who didn't want it either, so it became this kind of public utility.

And finally business comes in, they're going to make it about this big .com boom and that comes for a while, and then no-one wants to buy that stuff, and that whole thing goes away too because the net is a social medium. And now we get this stuff called social media which is supposedly of the marketers understand it's a social medium, and what are they doing? They're trying to basically get us to sell our friendships, to sell our network identity, to sell the map of our relationships.

Now it goes so far as on Facebook now. They're watching comments so that if you say something about ..Starbuck's today, it becomes a sponsored story, you know, they advertised using your post as the content of the ad. You know, what does that do to your behaviour when you're thinking, 'Well if I say something good here?' you know, what are you doing? In the end, what you're doing is selling your social graph, you're selling your relationships, whether you're using one of those Zynga games that goes through your address book to get everybody else to play, or whether you're even a company taking all the people that have signed the for its Twitter feed and using them as a mailing list. That's selling on you friendship, that's not socialising, that's marketing.

Antony Funnell: Now as I say, we'll put the list of the Ten Commands on our site, or the link to those commands. Just a final question before I let you go, I mean as somebody who's been looking and thinking about the way our world has changed and the impact of online and digital technology on our world, for quite some time, for decades, are you surprised that we have turned out the way we have? That we have these problems that you identify?

Douglas Rushkoff: I'm surprised by the fact that just going online and using computers for the first time didn't change people on a fundamental level. You know, for me it was a lightning experience, you know, 'Oh my gosh, this is a read-write universe.' And it changed the way I looked at everything. You know, I started to see my world as an open source proposition, and I see people go online and I guess because they're so embedded inside within certain programs, 'Oh I use this for eBay' or 'I use this for this', they don't quite see it, they don't quite see the possibility for nothing short of a leap in human evolution. The thing that surprised me is with computers becoming as pervasive as I imagine in my wildest dreams, I'm amazed that we're not even 1% towards where I thought that many viewer computers would have taken us.

Antony Funnell: And yet I mean a couple of years ago that idea of digital natives, that idea that the coming generation would somehow instinctively know the potential of the internet, of digital technology. I mean, as I say, that hasn't worked that way, has it? I mean yes, they know to use it, but they don't know how to achieve its potential, how to use it to achieve its potential.

Douglas Rushkoff: Yes it was funny. I mean I was the first I guess, but many other more sort of optimistic media theorists and cyber theorists really thought that kids as digital natives, would understand these technologies better than we do, because we're just digital immigrants. Now you look at the experience of any immigrant family and it's the kids who learn the language, and really move around like natives and the adults are kind of stuck behind not knowing what to do and really easy to fall.

And if you look at all the research, it turns out that kids are much worse at distinguishing between a valid and an invalid source of information online. They fall for scams, they understand the interfaces less, they understand the biases of these website a lot less than adults do. And it seems I guess that because they were raised in a world with computers as just a given circumstance, that these things were just here. They tend to look at the things on computers as pre-existing conditions. You know, the way things are. Rather than as creations of people and businesses with agendas.

Antony Funnell: Well Douglas Rushkoff, thank you very much for talking with us.

Douglas Rushkoff: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Antony Funnell: And the book is called Program or be Programmed. And what about that term, 'Phantom Vibration Syndrome'? Never heard that one before. That's going straight to the Future Tense online glossary.

Program or Be Programmed: Audio Book!

It's finally done. The Program or Be Programmed Audio book, unabridged, read by me, and released by BetterListen.com

Program or Be Programmed Study Guide

We just completed the Program or Be Programmed Study Guide, available here or via orbooks.com along with academic discounts for classes. The guide is accessible enough for high school students and casual book groups, but its discussion topics go deep enough for grad school, or anyone interested in thinking deeply about media and technology.

The Evolution Will Be Socialized

Just posted on Shareable:

From the actions of the Egyptian government to the policies of Facebook, the monopolies of central banks to the corporatization of the Internet, we are witnessing the potential of a peer-to-peer networking become overshadowed by the hierarchies of the status quo. It's time for us to gather and see what is still possible on the net, and what, if anything, can be built to replace it.

I have had a vague misgiving about the direction the net's been going for, well, maybe 15 years. But until recently, it was more like the feeling when another Starbucks opens on the block, a Wal-Mart moves into town, or a bank forecloses unnecessarily on that cool local bookstore to make room for another bank.

Lately, however, what's wrong with the net has become quite crystalized for me. It started with the corporate-government banishment of Wikileaks last year, and reached a peak with Egypt shutting off its networks to stave off revolution. The Obama administration seeking the ability to do pretty much the same thing in the US, Facebook's "sponsored stories," and the pending loss of net neutrality don't help, either.

Here on Shareable, and then again in an OpEd for CNN.com, I suggested we "fork" the Internet – that we accept the fact that the net is built on a fundamentally hierarchical architecture, surrender it to the corporations who run it, and consider building something else for ourselves. The Internet as built will always be subject to top-down government control and domination by the biggest corporations. They administrate the indexes and own the conduit. It has choke points – technological, legal, and commercial. They can turn it off and shut us out. A p2p network protected only by laws – that exists but for the grace of those in charge – is not a p2p network. It is a hierarchical network allowing itself to be used in a p2p fashion, when convenient to those currently in charge.

If we have a dream of how social media could restore peer-to-peer commerce, culture, and government, and if the current Internet is too tightly controlled to allow for it, why not build the kind of network and mechanisms to realize it?

I received literally thousands of emails in response. Some people simply wanted to know if it was really true – could a government really just "turn off" the net? Yes. It's true. Others wrote to let me know there's no alternative; there's no such thing as an unstoppable network. Even if we use ham radio or wifi "mesh" networks to connect to each other, they can always be jammed by governments. True, but by that logic the authorities also can prevent us from speaking to one another by shooting us. At least the tyrant would be in the position of attacking the people's network, instead of simply turning off the network he already controls.

Finally, though, the vast majority of emails came from people who wanted to get started actually building a new net, developing p2p currency, or figuring out how to promote deep democracy through social media. What should they do? Where should they go? And those kinds of questions can't be answered in an email, an essay or a column. It's not something you click on. These challenges can only be answered over time by people actively collaborating on solutions.

That's why – with some encouragement from a few great organizations including Shareable – I've decided to convene a summit called Contact. Contact will seek to explore and realize the greater promise of social media to promote new forms of culture, commerce, collective action, and creativity. I'm inviting technologists, artists, activists, businesspeople, funders, and other stakeholders in the networked future, to come together to hatch new ideas, connect with new collaborators, and forge an ongoing community for innovating social media and beyond. Some of them, like Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, Paul Hartzog and Sam Rose at the Forward Foundation, have been working on these questions for a while. Others come from NGOs and even corporations looking to support and become part of whatever is next, rather than spending money resisting it.

From the development of a new non-hierarchical Internet to the implementation of alternative e-currencies, the prototyping of open source democracy to experiments in collective cultural expression, Contact will seek to initiate mechanisms that realize the true promise of the networking revolution.

The first summit, to be held October 20, 2011 as a MeetupEverywhere and centered at the historic Angel Orensanz Center in New York City, will be a participatory festival for ideas and action, consisting primarily of meetings convened by attendees. Featured participants will deliver brief "provocations" on stage, sharing the greatest challenges they are facing in their particular fields. But their primary contribution to the day will be to join in the meetings convened by other participants, sharing their experience, insight, and even connections to help bring these ideas into reality.

If it's not the only thing of its kind in the world, so much the better. Let's connect, conceive, and conspire. Contact isn't a way of competing with those efforts, but supporting them.

Topics I'm opening for discussion include:

TECHNOLOGY
Can we build an alternative Internet that can't be turned off?
Alternatives to top-down registries and corporate-controlled access
BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS
New net-based currencies and transaction networks
Net-enabled Local Activism and Job Creation
CULTURE
Arts networking initiatives
Decentralized social networking platforms
GOVERNMENT
Proxy voting to expert friends
open source democracy
"Filter Bubbles" and how to prevent them
MEANING
What Factors Facilitate Collective Intelligence?
The Reclamation of Public Space

But please feel invited to bring your own. I may be initiating this thing, but I am by no means in charge.

At the epicenter of CONTACT will be the Bazaar – a free-form marketplace of ideas, demos, haggling, and ad-hoc connections. If you have visited the Akihabara, Tokyo's ultra-vibrant open-air electronics market, or the under-the-highway open-air jade market of Kowloon, or even the Burning Man festival, you understand the power of combining commerce, physical location, and serendipity. A decidedly unstructured counterpart to the convened meetings, solo provocations, and the MeetUpEverywheres, the Bazaar will bring p2p to life, encouraging introductions, brokering, deal-making, food-tasting, and propositions of every kind. It is where the social, business, political, and spiritual agendas merge into one big human agenda.

Contact will hope to revive the spirit of optimism and infinite possibility of the early cyber-era, folding the edges of this culture back to the middle. Social media has come to be understood as little more than a marketing opportunity. We see it as quite possibly the catalyst for the next stage of human evolution and, at the very least, a way to restore p2p value exchange and decentralized innovation to the realms of culture, commerce and government.

Content was never king. Contact is. Please join us, and find the others. More about Contact, for now, at contactcon.com/contact/. Wiki, forums, Meetups will all be reachable from there as well.

Venessa Miemis reviews Program or Be Programmed

A compelling review of Program or Be Programmed, from Venessa Miemis of Emergent By Design. The best summary of the most important ideas, by someone who has been thinking deeply about this stuff.

Thanks to digital technologies and networked activity, we're living through a global transition that is redefining how culture and commerce operate. We're presented with the opportunity to be active participants in this process, steering ourselves into new modes of civilization, verse being just passive spectators. But if we don't understand the biases of the tools and mediums we're using, we'll risk being slaves instead of masters.

This is not the first time this has happened, but it may be the most significant one so far. Every media revolution has given the people a sneak peek of the control panel of civilization, and a chance to view the world through a new lens. When humans developed language, we were able to pass on knowledge and experiences, and allow for progress. We could both listen and speak.

When we developed alphabets and literacy, we were able to create laws and accountability, and a new kind of authority. Of course, it was the elites that knew how to read these symbols – the masses could just gather in the town square and listen.

With the invention of the printing press, a society of readers developed. But the elites still controlled the means of production, the access to the presses themselves. We've seen the same patterns with broadcast radio and television. We don't create, we watch and consume.

Now with the digital revolution, we can finally be the writers, sharing our thoughts and opinions with each other through blogs, photos, and social networks. But we're still a step behind from the "elites" – those that do the programming, write the software, design the interfaces, own the pipes, and understand that the way the tools are designed will influence and shape our real world thoughts and behaviors when using them.

And so here we are today, viewing the potential backwards: fetishizing the tools themselves and wondering how to advertise on and monetize from social networks, instead of putting humanity first, and focusing on how a connected society can open new possibilities for the way we work, create and exchange value, engage with one another, collaborate, and evolve socially and spiritually.

more…

Venessa Meimis reviews Program or Be Programmed

A compelling review of Program or Be Programmed, from Venessa Meimis of Emergent By Design. The best summary of the most important ideas, by someone who has been thinking deeply about this stuff.

Thanks to digital technologies and networked activity, we're living through a global transition that is redefining how culture and commerce operate. We're presented with the opportunity to be active participants in this process, steering ourselves into new modes of civilization, verse being just passive spectators. But if we don't understand the biases of the tools and mediums we're using, we'll risk being slaves instead of masters.

This is not the first time this has happened, but it may be the most significant one so far. Every media revolution has given the people a sneak peek of the control panel of civilization, and a chance to view the world through a new lens. When humans developed language, we were able to pass on knowledge and experiences, and allow for progress. We could both listen and speak.

When we developed alphabets and literacy, we were able to create laws and accountability, and a new kind of authority. Of course, it was the elites that knew how to read these symbols – the masses could just gather in the town square and listen.

With the invention of the printing press, a society of readers developed. But the elites still controlled the means of production, the access to the presses themselves. We've seen the same patterns with broadcast radio and television. We don't create, we watch and consume.

Now with the digital revolution, we can finally be the writers, sharing our thoughts and opinions with each other through blogs, photos, and social networks. But we're still a step behind from the "elites" – those that do the programming, write the software, design the interfaces, own the pipes, and understand that the way the tools are designed will influence and shape our real world thoughts and behaviors when using them.

And so here we are today, viewing the potential backwards: fetishizing the tools themselves and wondering how to advertise on and monetize from social networks, instead of putting humanity first, and focusing on how a connected society can open new possibilities for the way we work, create and exchange value, engage with one another, collaborate, and evolve socially and spiritually.

more…