Showing IndieAuth and Micropub at HWCLondon!
Kind: Notes
Long weekend in Lancashire, visiting family, exploring Lancaster (where I’ll be moving to in September!), and attending bits and pieces of the Full of Noises festival in Barrow-in-Furness.
Heck. The third and final part of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is grim, bleak and depressing.
Biased data sets in law enforcement.
“The problem is that crime statistics do not reflect the crimes actually occurring; rather, they provide a picture of the state’s response to crime.”
“The data on which we train technology ‘uncritically ingests yesterday’s mistakes’, as James Bridle puts it, encoding the barbarianism of the past into the future.”
(Future Histories)
In the frame of digital urban planning, I think this quote from Jane Jacobs (discovered via Future Histories) is very IndieWeb.
“What a wonderful challenge there is! Rarely has the citizen had such a chance to reshape the city, and to make it the kind of city that she likes and that others will too. If this means leaving room for the incongruous, or the vulgar or the strange, that is part of the challenge, not the problem. Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”
Says O’Shea:
“We need to protect space in our minds for the vulgar and the strange, for the unpredictable experiences of living free from the influence of commercialism. Like the flâneur or flâneuse, we should aim to cultivate curiosity through this liberated lens.”
Lizzie O’Shea is using urban planning as an analogy for thinking about how we could design our digital spaces. Riffing off Freud’s thoughts about the mind as a city, and Jane Jacob’s work on cities and planning.
I’m liking this, I was thinking about it recently, with an online presence being like a person’s home on the web. Taking it up a layer you think about digital urban planning, how these homes (and other things) fit together to make a city. I like it as a frame. (Probably because I’ve been living in a big city the last 10 years.)
Good bit in Future Histories about the Marine Police Office, the oldest police force in England. Set up in cahoots with the merchants, to enforce wage labour paid by time and stamp out the labourers taking stock from the employers.
“The origins and functions of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class.” — Alex Vitale
Today’s words of the day are:
– thistledown
and
– blackberries
I had not heard of this…
“The industry is also adopting various forms of biometric profiling, including using keystroke patterns. How we type is marked by minute differences, which can create a biometric profile of individuals…” (from Future Histories)
I guess I’m lucky that for me it can be filed under ‘disturbing curiosity’ rather than ‘legitimate concern’. But. Honestly. What a mess we’re in that this is actually a thing.
Really enjoying Lizzie O’Shea’s “Future Histories” so far. It’s really nicely written, and weaves together current social, political and economic technological quandaries with a reading of relevant ideas from history. I really like the historical perspective – it gives a nice handle with which to grapple with these problems.
Like a lot of books I’ve read lately though, so far it’s heavy on the diagnosis, and light on the actual treatment. But I’m only at the beginning so I hope it will flesh out with some concrete action as I go along.
“We need social movements that collaborate—in workplaces, schools, community spaces and the streets—to demand that the development of technology be brought under more democratic forms of power rather than corporations or the state.”
True enough. Although I am unaware of what form it would take. Who is in these social movements? To whom are the demands made? What are they exactly?
“As the planet slides further toward a potential future of catastrophic climate change, and as society glorifies billionaires while billions languish in poverty, digital technology could be a tool for arresting capitalism’s death drive and radically transforming the prospects of humanity. But this requires that we politically organize to demand something different.”
Totally agree with the sentiment. But who is we? What organizational form should we take? What is the demand we should be making?