01-01-2019::Sketches on computational culture .moji =========================================================== 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. hasty::undetailed::brief::light::informal::preliminary Some sketches: i. pubnix beyond pubnix: 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. ~ moji. #sketch #technology #digitality #computationalculture