[Reader-list] on pervasive computing and rfid and distributing insecurity (from talk at sarai)

[Rob van Kranenburg]

The Ubicomp World.

"Software and methods alone cannot make a company innovative - the 
organization needs to be ready. Yet the study shows that it is mainly 
their Idea Management activity which sets the most innovative 
companies apart."

"In the 1920s, the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company 
tried to discover by experiment what changes in working conditions 
would improve the productivity of their workers.  They found that any 
change made while the workers knew that a study was going on 
increased productivity.  More lighting helped, but so did less 
lighting.  The fact that people change their behavior when they know 
they are being studied is now called the Hawthorne effect."

In Dreams of a Final Theory, Steven Weinberg speaks of the "spooky 
ability of mathematicians to anticipate structures that are relevant 
to the real world".  Now we can talk about the spooky ability of 
designers to do just  that, to anticipate structures that are 
relevant to the real world, however spooky the real world might 
become. The challenge we are facing  is reading the flowing reality 
of our  surface. How to store real-time information flows? How to 
chart them? Which are our seismographs? How do we match real-time 
processes with the signified that they are supposed to signify? How 
to find ways of deciding what is data and what is not data in the 
space of flows?

The disappearing computer,  - launched by Future and Emerging 
Technologies, the European Commission's IST Programme - is a vision 
of the future: "in which our everyday world of objects and places 
become 'infused' and 'augmented' with information processing. In this 
vision, computing, information processing, and computers disappear 
into the background, and take on the role more similar to that of 
electricity  (it. mine) today - an invisible, pervasive medium 
distributed on our real world."

In such a real world, Martin Rantzer of Ericsson Foresight, claims in 
A future world of supersenses: "New communication senses will be 
needed in the future to enable people to absorb the enormous mass of 
information with which they are confronted." According to him the 
user interfaces we use today to transmit information to our brains 
threaten to create a real bottleneck for new broadband services. "The 
boundaries of what constitutes consumer electronics and computers are 
getting blurred," says Gerard J. Kleisterlee, chief executive of 
Royal Philips Electronics, "As we get wireless networking in the 
home, everything starts to talk to everything."  In such a mediated 
environment - where everything is connected to everything -  it is no 
longer clear what is being mediated, and what mediates. Strategic 
decisions become process decisions in a mediatized environment.

What does this mean for your connectivity in your business 
environment? It means that you need tools to master this merging of 
digital and analogue processes of communication and database-driven 
datasystems. It means that the environment becomes the interface. 
Where is your dashboard then? Where are your familiar readers of 
situation, actions, scenarios? The methods, and the concepts that 
function in an analogue environment are determined by the principle 
of scarcity. In a ubicomp environment, scarcity is no longer an 
organizational principle.
1. We see a move from using mixed media (radio, sms, billboard, 
television) to create user experiences to designing experiences by 
mediating the environment.

2.  We see a move from interaction as a key term to resonance. That 
refers most aptly to the way we relate to things, people, ideas in a 
connected environment.

3. We see a move towards ubiquitous and pervasive computing 
(ubicomp). Computers will be in the fabric of our everyday artefacts. 
And unlike today's computer artefacts, they will be connected. 
Digital connectivity is one of the central themes of Ubicomp.

4. We see a move from the barcode to the (Radio Frequency) tag. By 
mediating - wiring- the environment the lone product is online (when 
read by a RFID reader, for example).

In such an environment the new intelligence is extelligence, 
"knowledge and tools that are outside people's heads" (Stewart and 
Cohen, 1997)

In Problems now are:

Businessmodels, lack of.
Didactics, convincing models of transference and fostering feelings of agency.
States of emergencies vs. current/normal/common sense notions. How to 
trade off between unmodified optimism (seamlessness) and unmodified 
pessimism.
E-Sense: In a ubicomp world of e-sense what is the working definition 
of human and the human social world?
Distributing Insecurity: How to investigate the notion of 
'distributing insecurity' with programmers and data profilers.

in Terms:

Disambiguiate (a situation) the step towards a common terminology as 
a community knows the ambiguities, then agrees to disambiguiate for 
the sake of discussion.
Sonarizing (an object/situation): might also be extended to social 
and cultural situations; you fire a large number of probes and see 
what and how it is returned.
Grid. Acceptable and productive to coders (programmers), noders 
(information managers), linkers (interaction deseigners), networkers 
(policy makers).

From  Privacy to Privacies


In: The internet of things  I claim:

"Others think there is middle ground between the privacy advocates 
and the desires of big business. Academics such as Rob van 
Kranenburg, from the St Joost Academy in the Netherlands, are trying 
to bridge that gap. "Perhaps in a network society we will have to 
give up the ghost of 19th-century notions of privacy, which is a very 
basic concept tied to an individual," explains van Kranenburg.

"If you want to move in this networked environment, maybe you have to 
give something up. But what we need is a proper public debate on 
this, before the infrastructure is in place," he says"

Ubicomp/RFID will create a new situation in information relationships 
between data, products, situations (people and settings= 
shopping/travelingŠ) What will this do to our conceptions of privacy?

Following up on a USA Today (August 5, 2002) piece on how new SUV 
interiors are being designed to be "more like living rooms."  Michael 
Kaplan noticed on Design-l that more and more people are leaving 
their SUVs in shopping center parking lots locked with the engines 
running (to power the air conditioners). He sees  "people sitting in 
them using their cell phones, watching television, or working on 
their laptops." He writes:  "It occurred to me that the SUV, for many 
people, is an extension of their home, a little mobile room they can 
detach and live in when they are not in their fixed home. All fine 
and well, if these things didn't consume so much energy, pollute the 
environment, take up excessive parking space, and pose danger to 
smaller vehicles. They should probably be taxed for the damage they 
do (lol). And I would think, too, that they could be designed better 
for what they are used for, have a solar collectors covering their 
huge surface area to keep the a/c running while parked."

This story narrates this now everyday experience of being grounded 
when we are on the road, being at home while mobile.  It exemplifies 
the design tendencies of this increased interconnecivity of 
mediasystems - television, mobiles, computers - as it tries to 
immerse itself into very familiar objects, here the automobile. It is 
precisely because of the familiarity of the local space that 
mediasystems are added to the automobile, leaving its primary 
function - to make miles - intact.

In much the same way the notion of privacy is used in the transition 
we are witnessing towards a deeply merged analogue and digital 
environment, in a ubicomp world. Privacy is regarded as a more or 
less stable concept with intrinsic qualities tied to the individual. 
It is assumed that new connectivities (RIFD, Face Recognition 
Software, Ubicomp) can or should be added to the existing notion of 
privacy as a fundamentally individual right and notion.

We must investigate the possibility that ubicomp generates 
authentically new situations and experiences in which an analogue 
notion of privacy is no longer tenable. In  a mediated environment - 
where everything is connected to everything -  it is no longer clear 
what is being mediated, and what mediates.

What is the autonomy of the individual in such an environment? It has 
autonomies, not autonomy. It acquires privacies, not privacy.

In a ubicomp environment buildings, cars and people can be defined as 
information spaces.

Anthony Townsend, from Taub Urban Research Center, has been asked 
commission by the South Korean government to "turn an undeveloped 
parcel of land on the outskirts of Seoul into a city whose raison 
d'etre will be to produce and consume products and services based on 
new digital technologies. " The main challenge lies in the 
realization that "half of designing a city is going to be information 
spaces that accompany it because lots of people will use this to 
navigate around." Townsend claims that telecommunications in a city 
in 2012 is going to be a lot more complex: "The most interesting 
thing about it will be that you won't be able to see it all at once 
because all these data structures, computational devices, digital 
networks and cyberspaces that are built upon those components will be 
invisible unless you have the password or unless you are a member of 
the group that is permitted to see them."  In such an environment, 
the people themselves - human bodies- become information spaces too.

The current defensively argued implementation model is necessarily faulty:
In an attempt to achieve a harmony between a town center and a 
distribution network, officials of the Wal-Mart Corporation announced 
in March 2003 the opening of Walton Township, guaranteeing its 
residents a literally bottomless supply of consumer goods, for a flat 
all-in monthly fee.  According to Valerie Femble-Grieg, who designed 
it, the key to Walton is "a literal superimposition of municipal and 
retail channels."  In an effort to control 'leakage,' the export of 
flat-fee goods outside the Township by community subscribers, 
Wal-Mart plans to institute a pervasive inventory control system 
consisting of miniature radio-frequency tags broadcasting unique 
product and batch ID numbers."  The tree major U.S. car manufacturers 
plan to install rfd tags in " every tire sold in the nation". The 
tags can be read on vehicles going as fast as 160 kilometers per hour 
from a distance of 4.5 meters.  In January 2003, Gillette began 
attaching rfd tags to 500 million of its Mach 3 Turbo razors. Smart 
shelves at Wal-Mart stores "will record the removal of razors by 
shoppers, thereby alerting stock clerks whenever shelves need to be 
refilled-and effectively transforming Gillette customers into walking 
radio beacons."

CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and 
Numbering) said anyone can download revealing documents labeled 
"confidential" from the home page of the MIT Auto-ID Center web site 
in two mouse clicks. The Auto-ID Center was the organization 
entrusted with developing a global Internet infrastructure for radio 
frequency identification (RFID). Their plans are to tag all the 
objects manufactured on the planet with RFID chips and track them via 
the Internet.

"Among the "confidential" documents available on the web site are 
slide shows discussing the need to "pacify" citizens who might 
question the wisdom of the Center's stated goal to tag and track 
every item on the planet [ 
http://www.autoidcenter.com/media/communications.pdf ], along with 
findings that 78% of surveyed consumers feel RFID is negative for 
privacy and 61% fear its health consequences  [ 
http://www.autoidcenter.org/media/pk-fh.pdf ].
PR firm Fleischman-Hillard's confidential "Managing External 
Communications" suggests a variety of strategies to help the Auto-ID 
Center "drive adoption" and "neutralize opposition," including the 
possibility of renaming the tracking devices "green tags." It also 
lists by name several key lawmakers, privacy advocates, and others 
whom it hopes to "bring into the Center's 'inner circle'"  [ 
http://www.autoidcenter.com/media/external_comm.pdf ].
Despite the overwhelming evidence of negative consumer attitudes 
toward RFID technology revealed in its internal documents, the 
Auto-ID Center hopes that consumers will be "apathetic" and "resign 
themselves to the inevitability of it" instead of acting on their 
concerns  [ 
http://www.autoidcenter.com/publishedresearch/cam-autoid-eb002.pdf 
]." 

Yet, where is the main problem located? Because there are two sides 
to each coin:

At the level of code distributed computing also provides open source 
initiatives.
At the level of node indivituated logistics also provides user 
centered design, (dis)ability tracking,
At the level of link the merging of digital and analogue connectivity 
opens up realms for play, repose, reflection, research.
At the level of network , that is where the main problem is. We must 
propose a vision that goes against: a policy directed towards more 
control, security, safety, non-risk directed; from distributing 
security to distributing insecurity. From the concept of privacy as a 
sole individuated relatively stable relationship, to negociable 
privacies.

Why will RFID / Smart Cards/ Biosensors be a success? Why is RFID 
inevitable as techné?

Because of a convergence at four crucial levels:

Code: distributed computing, non-central, pull technology (reader)
Node: logistics need to individuate
Link: merging of analogue and digital connectivity
Network: a policy directed towards more control, security, safety, 
non-risk directed.

Challenge:

From the concept of privacy as a sole individuated relatively stable 
relationship, to negociable privacies:

Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The 
Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem 
rather incredible now, at the time it meant nothing less than a 
radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a 
system of thought and set of grammar; an oral literacy dependant on a 
functionality of internal information visualization techniques and 
recall, was made redundant because the techniques could be 
externalised. Throughout Western civilization the history of memory 
externalisation runs parallel with the experienced disappearance of 
its artificial, man made, character. An accidental disappearance, 
however much intrinsic to our experience, that up till now has not 
been deliberate. This then is the fundamental change and the design 
challenge that we are facing in ubicomp; the deliberate attempt of a 
technology to disappear as technology.
In what respect will it alter our notion of the self as a more or 
less stable identity?
Will it not provoke an identity building on the ability to change 
roles in communication environments?

What kind of privacies lay hidden in our new  connectivities?


  Research possibilities

1. Unintended consequences:

a. Japan's 'digital shoplifting' plague
"Japanese bookstores are set to launch a national campaign to stop
so-called 'digital shoplifting' by customers using the latest camera-
equipped mobile phones. The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association 
calls the practice 'information theft' and wants it stopped.

It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women would not 
think twice about doing. They might spot a new hairstyle or a new 
dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their 
friends think - so they take a quick snap with their mobile phone 
camera and send everybody a picture. But the publishers of those 
magazines feel they are being cheated out of valuable sales.

Together with Japan's phone companies, they are issuing stern posters 
which warn shoppers to be careful of their 'magazine manners'. But 
the success of this new campaign is open to question. Japan's 
bookshop owners have already said their staff cannot tell the 
difference between customers taking pictures and those simply 
chatting on their phones."

b.
In Smile, You're on In-Store Camera, Erik Baard describes how the web 
shopping process of following your customer every step of the way, 
might now become effectively used in an ordinary supermarket: "The 
algorithm looks for shapes of people and (passes) the same individual 
off from camera to camera by, for example, looking for a yellowcolor 
leaving the left side of one camera view to enter the overlapping 
right side of the next. " The algorithm is tuned with 
pressure-sensitive carpets. Neither Identix (formerly Visionics), nor 
the originator of the pressure-sensitive magic carpet, MIT Media Lab 
researcher Joe Paradisso, thought of these ways of using their work 
for tracking consumers: "I was thinking of music. I never thought 
about this for retail at all," said Paradisso, who has designed 
performance spaces where footsteps trigger bass or percussive sounds 
and torso, head and arm movements elicit higher, "twinkling" notes."

Searching for sudden "bursts" in the usage of particular words could 
be used to rapidly identify new trends and sort information more 
efficiently, says a US computer scientist., Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell 
University in New York. The method could be applied to weblogs to 
track new social trends; "For example, identifying word bursts in the 
hundreds of thousands of personal diaries now on the web could help 
advertisers quickly spot an emerging craze, or  identifying word 
bursts within email messages sent to a company's customer support 
address might help maintenance staff spot a major new problem.


c. Radar analogy

"It will be interesting to witness (if not anticipate) the range of 
unintended consequences and side effects from the widespread 
introduction of RFID, and resulting measures and countermeasures.  By 
way of analogous example, here's a piece from Scientific American by 
a friend, Wendy Grossman, on how the construction of cellular 
telephone networks have produced opportunities for passive radar 
("celldar," really) systems:

The law of unintended consequences: build a cellular-phone network 
and get a sophisticated surveillance system along with it. At least 
that is what may happen in the U.K., thanks to England's contract 
research and development firm Roke Manor Research and aeronautics 
company BAe Systems. The two are working on a way of using the radio 
waves broadcast by the world's mobile-phone base stations as the 
transmission element of a radar system. They call it Celldar.  Radar 
works by transmitting radio pulses (or pings) and listening for an 
echo. Measuring the Doppler shift of the echo can give an object's 
distance and speed. Celldar proposes to take advantage of U.K. base 
stations, which transmit radio waves from known locations in a known 
microwave frequency band. Instead of erecting a radar transmitter, a 
Celldar operator would only need to set up passive receivers that can 
measure the cellular-network radio waves reflected from nearby 
objects and process the data. Because they would not transmit, 
Celldar receivers can, according to BAe Systems, be smaller and more 
mobile than traditional systems--and undetectable. Celldar operators 
would not require the cooperation of the cell-phone-network 
operators, either.... 

We should see this sort of thing with RFID as well, i.e., areas where 
there are numerous readers will be pulsing with RF, and a passive 
collector could monitor physical space just like a radar, noting 
disturbances in the baseline RF fields.""

2. Push technology:

a. Hypertag

Media ethics has now become building ethics. Building ethics has 
become media ethics.
"It's all about linking wireless devices to content," Jonathan 
Morgan, CEO of Hypertag ,added.

"Point and click your mobile phone at a poster in London movie 
theaters this July and you'll be able to directly access the movie's 
Web page. Due to be launched in 20 cinemas in mid-July, the Hypertag 
technology will enable mobile-phone and PDA users one-click access to 
Web pages by pointing and clicking at advertising posters.

"The real-world equivalent of hyperlinks, the small battery-powered 
electronic tags use infrared signals to send Web links to mobile 
phones. Developed by the Cambridge, U.K.-based company 
<http://www.hypertag.com/>Hypertag, these smart tags can be 
discreetly attached to any information display surface, such as 
advertising panels, billboards or walls, enabling any mobile-phone 
user with an infrared port or Bluetooth to access digital content by 
downloading a small software application."

b. FBI - LEO

"The FBI will be better able to communicate terrorism alerts and 
other sensitive material to state and local police agencies through a 
national law enforcement alert system slated to debut later this 
year, according to FBI and police officials. The new system, using 
push technology, will be available through the Law Enforcement Online 
(LEO) network, said Roger Morrison, chief of the FBI's National Joint 
Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), who mentioned the new system during a 
July 1 conference on information sharing in Philadelphia.  "It's 
actually almost fully developed now. We're waiting to do some testing 
on it still," Morrison said in an interview July 3.  The new system's 
users will be able to send out messages as well as receive them, 
Morrison said. "Of course, ours will override [a message] if we have 
a major one" to send, he said. "It uses push technology."  Push 
technology allows a user to receive data sent automatically at 
prearranged regular intervals, as is done with Internet news updates. 
"We've been telling them what we think we need," he said, and the FBI 
has met with police chiefs and sheriffs' groups "telling us what they 
are doing to try and accommodate our needs."" 

3. Systems are doing it for themselves; distributing insecurity.

Intrusion detection needs to be looked at as a process and not as a 
product. IDSes are systems that support the process. The products 
support the process.

"One of the biggest problems in IDS world is false positives and too 
many alerts. To avoid these false positives, IDSes are  implementing 
protocol intelligence. That means, IDSes need to maintain some sort 
of state information on per connection basis. If you take HTTP as an 
example, this state information involves  storing URL and in case of 
TCP connections, data packet buffering OR pure data buffering, if the 
packets come out of order (people refer to this as TCP streaming or 
TCP reassembly). In case of IP, packets need to be buffered for IP 
reassembly. So, lot of state information need to be maintained at 
different levels. Assume that on per HTTP connection, if 500 bytes of 
state information is maintained, for 10000 simultaneous connections, 
you require 5 Mbytes of memory."

In an unmodified ubicomped world, in a ubiworld, we will be in a 
state of perpetual OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). Embedded 
systems will be doing mostly a check upon themselves to see if they 
are in 'on' mode and allright. Distribution insecurity both in the 
still analogue and in embedded systems, seems the proper way.

In a ubicomped world all is forever emerging and in flux, you do not 
want 50% of your systems memory used for constantly checking upon 
itself.

So we move from our current operational programming rules - to 
distribute security  - towards organizational principles that are 
guided by the principle of distributing insecurity.

4. Identity Theft (suggested by Steve Portigal).

In 2001 86,000 identity thefts were reported.  The number doubled in 
2002. An official of the Michigan State Police points out that many 
former violent criminals are now using the Internet for identity 
theft:

"They are switching over to white-collar crime because it's more 
lucrative and they know they will get less time.  Identity theft is 
not necessarily a sophisticated crime." 


and


Creative minds in Europe - employment, economy and multi-culturalism 
in hybrid multi-media work.



Der Jungfer Europa ist verlobt mit dem schönen Geniusse der Freiheit, 
sie liegen einander im Arm, Sie schwelgen im ersten Kusse. - 
Heinrich.Heine

In 1999 consumer spending on leisure and services surpassed spending on
material goods for the first time, having been only half as big 30 
years ago.- Charles Leadbeater

Safety as the default position

As foreign minister to the Republican French government , the poet 
Lamartine instructs representatives of France abroad how to talk 
about the new situation:

"In 1792 the ideas of France and Europe were not prepared to conceive 
and to accept the great harmony of nations among themselves for the 
benefit of the human race. The views of the century, then drawing to 
its close, were confined to the heads of a few philosophers. But at 
the present day philosophy is popular. Fifty years of the freedom of 
thought, speech, and writing, have produced their results. Books, 
journals, and tribunes, have accomplished the apostolic mission of 
European intelligence. Reason, dawning everywhere over the frontiers 
of nations, has given birth to that great intellectual commonwealth, 
which will be the achievement of the French revolution, and the 
constitution of international fraternity throughout the globe."

European poets and politicians have always been aware of the 
modularites of implementating ideas. Alphonse de Lamartine's keyword, 
of which he never tires, is peace:

"The people and the revolution are one and the same. When they 
entered upon the revolution, the people brought with them their new 
wants of labour, industry, instruction, agriculture, commerce, 
morality, welfare, property, cheap living, navigation, and 
civilisation. All these are the wants of peace. The people and peace 
are but one word."

Now, in 2004 too the people bring with them their new wants of 
labour, industry, instruction, agriculture, commerce, morality, 
welfare, property, cheap living, navigation, and civilisation.

Little has changed in human needs in 300 years in living alone and 
living together in families, communities, regions, nations and united 
nations.

But the keyword has. It is not peace that seems to drive us. We too 
have "Fifty years of the freedom of thought, speech, and writing," 
after WW II engulfed Europe. But what has it produced? Have "books, 
journals, and the internet accomplished that apostolic mission of 
European intelligence, reason?"

No. It has produced fear.

One March afternoon in 2004 students from St Joost Arts Academy, 
Breda set off for Oisterwijck, a lovely quiet provincial town. They 
were dressed in white suits, suits that made them look like weird 
medics, the kind of people who come to clean out your chicken farm 
after some horrible disease. Not the kind of people you would trust, 
at least that is what we thought. Some had sticks to point at 
dangerous things. Such as the sky. Don't you trust it with all that 
satellite debris. Better watch out. Some had stickers that made icons 
of dangerous things. In a red triangle the dangerous object was 
represented in words: watch out an umbrella, watch out a window, 
watch out a  tree. You can bump into these things, you know. You 
better watch out. Be careful. Hey!

The idea of this performance like intervention was to draw feedback 
of the kind that would get the joke, that would be aimed at the 
experienced top down disciplining design process going on. What 
happened instead was far more interesting but also far more 
disturbing. Whenever they were approached with a question like what 
kind of organization are you from, they'd reply: the government. We 
are the Watch Out Team, a new government sponsored initiative. At the 
market where they dished out watch out umbrella stickers to grateful 
umbrella holders I overheard a daughter telling her mother:  "They 
should have done this much sooner!"

We never realized how deep a ravine between this huge longing, this 
ocean of belief and the lack of credibility. As De Certeau argues; so 
much belief, so little credibility. We saw it played out in front of 
us. We did not look like clinical scary government spooks, no we were 
potential saviours, safeguarding the people, the public from harm in 
every which way.

The new library in Rotterdam has cut her bookshelves in halves, 
transferring the old serene experience of wandering among books 
hoping for this serendipitous moment into a full contact zone of 
wandering bodies, their backs aching. An open zone where every action 
is transparent, every person visible, every meeting among human 
bodies watched by surveillance cameras.

This is how Dante describes in The Convivio the need for process over 
product, for aiming to script the defining characteristics of a 
situation, that what makes it into a setting where interaction and 
resonance can take place-  rather then scripting the interactions and 
resonance in a given setting.

"Having said how there exist in my native tongue these two 
characteristics which have made me its friend--that is, nearness to 
myself and goodness proper to it--I will tell how friendship, through 
benefits and harmony of purpose, and through a sense of benevolence 
born of long familiarity, is strengthened and increased. I say first 
that for myself I have received from it the gift of very great 
benefits. For we know that among all benefits the greatest is the one 
that is most precious to him who receives it; and nothing is so 
precious as the thing for the sake of which all other things are 
desired; and all other things are desired for the perfection of him 
who desires them."

"and nothing is so precious as the thing for the sake of which all 
other things are desired; and all other things are desired for the 
perfection of him who desires them."

What is this thing for the sake of which all other things are desired?

This thing is not a thing, but a process, it is feeling safe, at 
ease; well-being. Feeling safe has to do with the ability to deal 
with unsafety and insecurity, to have a corporeal experience of 
agency. It has very little to do with being safe. For how  long will 
it last? That is what people won't stop worrying about.

The current dangers of this cultural/political axiom to highlight 
safety/insecurity as if there could ever be a safe default position, 
only leads to more fear, more distrust, more anger as incidents will 
inevitably happen and you will take the blame for not having been 
able to prevent them.

Aiming for the safe default is the current US policy. The US 
Department of Homeland Security recently  established a National 
Incident Management System Integration Center. They claim that 
"Responders will be able to focus more on response, instead of 
organizing the response."

For Pennsylviana read France. For Texas read Germany. For South 
Dakato read Spain. For Virgiania read Estonia:

"Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell announced his plan for the 
disbursement of more than $110 million in federal homeland security 
funds awarded to the commonwealth.  Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently 
announced that 433 Texas jurisdictions will receive more than $20.7 
million in federal funds for programs to improve local homeland 
security efforts through increased intelligence, warning 
communication and facility security. Public Safety Secretary Tom 
Dravland announced recently that the DHS Office for Domestic 
Preparedness has notified South Dakota of $20 million in Homeland 
Security grants for state and local jurisdictions in 2004.  Virginia 
Gov. Mark R. Warner recently announced localities will receive more 
than $9 million for local law enforcement terrorism prevention 
initiatives." 

The European challenge lies in marketing from a high level downwards 
the idea of distributing insecurity, realizing there is no safe 
default, but that uncertainty is the default position.

The fear policy goes directly against the call for more and more 
innovation, innovation needs a risk friendly environment. If you 
scare your population, very few risks will be taken.

The mobile industries 3G & 4G presentations highlight a person 
surrounded by power stations that connect nodes that should  give 
this person more agency. The security industries presentations 
highlight exactly the same but in their case the agency lies in the 
nodes, not in the person. For both the systems logic is the same: to 
distribute yourself, your data- into the environment. The key themes, 
the cultural and political views that shape the environment are 
insecurity, unsafety, and fear.

Who is going to distribute themselves into such an environment? An 
environment that you are being reminded constantly of that is unsafe, 
and insecure?

What does it feel like to grow up in such an environment?

  Strategy and tactics in a networked world

When Cook's Endeavour sailed into the bay that we know now as Cape 
Everard on April 22 1770, touching upon Australian shore for the 
first time, the British saw Aboriginals fishing in small canoes. 
Whereas the native
population of Tahiti had responded with loud chanting and the Maori had
thrown stones, the Aboriginals, neither afraid nor curious, simply went on
fishing (Hughes:1986).

That afternoon two heterogeneous discourses met.

Only until Cook had lowered a small boat and a small party rowed to the
shore did the Aboriginals react. A number of men rowing in a small boat
was a practice they could interpret: to them it signified a raid and they
responded accordingly. Undoubtedly the Aboriginals must have `seen'
something and even if they could not see it as a ship, they must have felt
the waves it produced in their canoes. However, as its form and height was
so alien, so contrary to anything they had ever observed or produced, they
simply chose to ignore it since they had no procedures of response for
something they could not work with..

De Certeau (1984:171) argues that it is the operation of encoding, which
is articulated on signifiers, that produces meaning. This extraordinary
story perfectly narrates the steps that are required in this operation of
encoding; what is essential in this reflexive process is a procedure of
translation.

Making sense or producing meaning always requires the possession of
procedures of translation.

Ways of seeing:  transgenerations: digikids and the first and second 
generation internet

To visit the final degree show of the Royal College of Art is to witness
not just raw creativity but a source of future jobs, exports and 
earnings.- Charles Leadbeater

In the  Dutch policy document 'van I naar E-cultuur' the transition 
towards a culture that is characterized and determined by digital 
processes is described as e-culture:

"E-culture is not just 'something to do with  computers.' The 
cultural implications of digitalisation are far greater than  the 
mere instrumental exploitation of technical opportunities. E-culture 
is all about a new, digital dimension; a new and - until recently - 
undreamt-of medium with which existing culture must seek to interact 
and in which new culture is being generated. But e-culture is also 
more than just a new medium. Digital technologies and the Internet 
are opening the door to new forms of expression, changing the roles 
played by cultural institutions, and placing the audience and user 
increasingly centre stage.* 

These new forms of expression, changing roles of institutions, these 
new mobile media make their mark on every aspect of our culture, 
mostly on our educational systems, ways of disseminating data, and 
ways of teaching. Concretely this means that we see a shift in the 
Netherlands towards hybrid it/multimedia departments. These new 
courses - Communication, Media & Design - are very successful in the 
numbers of students that they draw. In all, with six different 
institutions there are about 2000- 2500 students that do  not go to 
the classical IT, interaction design or multimedia courses at the 
Arts Academies.

For the past three years I have been teaching theory at one such 
particular CMD in Breda , one day a week, mainly to get an idea of 
the kind of students that will form our it/media backbone in the next 
decade. The first observation is the difference in  the nature of the 
visible manifestations of politics. There is no new Waag Society 
(www.waag.org) or V2 (www.v2.nl) in sight, nor emerging. De Waag and 
V2 are our Dutch most successful labs. In less than 15 years they 
have grown into academic nodes on the SURFNET network, the Dutch 
academic network. This is unprecedented. Never before has a group of 
autonomous, critical individuals been able to get their ideas, 
narrative, theories and projects accepted as credible in terms of the 
existing academic discourse in such a short time span. How was this 
possible? Because of the liberal climate in the eighties and early 
nineties in the Netherlands that did allow for bottom-up creative 
initiatives. De Waag grew out of the non profit Digital City that was 
supposed to last for six weeks, the first Digital City in Amsterdam 
in 1993. Young idealists, hackers, 'hippies from hell' as they are 
called in Ine Poppe's documentary, provided free email and started 
the digital revolution with their internet provider xs4all. We are 
only eleven years later and the analogue world is becoming more 
hybrid as we speak with digital connectivity. Xs4all has become a 
part of corporate KPN. V2 was the name of a squat building in Den 
Bosch, the Director Alex Adriaansens was there in 1981. He is still 
Director now in 2004. V2 participates in numerous European networks, 
is focussing on their own kind of R&D that is rapidly drawing 
attention from the regular and corporate research labs, hosts its own 
V2 publishing and V2 Archive. The young people that started these 
digital connectivities in spaces and actual places were concerned for 
more then their own particular work, products or living, their 
concern was for the public domain; xs4all.

This is no longer a concern for my students in 2004. No Logo, culture 
jamming, public domain, open source networks stem from political 
strategies of a 80s and 90s generation for which the idea of politics 
is very much influencd by Gramscian notions on hegemony. Gramsci's 
notes on hegemony in his prison writings are spread out throughout 
his text, deeply imbedded not infrequently within concrete historial 
situations and events as his was no disinterested academic exercise 
but a genuine attempt to understand the elements of a triumphant 
Italian fascism.  We would however, not misrepresent him if we take 
his notion of hegemony to mean that in between forced consent and 
active dissent we find passive consent, that cultural change precedes 
political change, and that changes must connect to an audience that 
is ready to respond. As Gramsci notes, "the supremacy of a social 
group manifests itself in two ways, as 'domination' and as 
'intellectual and moral leadership'. A social group dominates 
antagonistic groups, which it tends to 'liquidate', or to subjugate 
perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A 
social group can, and indeed must, already exercise 'leadership' 
[hegemony] before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of 
the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it 
subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it 
holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to 'lead' as well. 

This idea of politics of scheming tactically (in time) to reach a 
particular location by an overall strategy (place) informed politics 
before and during the first decade of the internet. For the digikids, 
young people who have grown up with digital technology and 
connectivity, the network is not something to either reach for or 
fight off. It simply is. Because of this network default of a flat 
web structural surface of things, the very idea of strategy as it is 
intrinsically tied to the idea of place, makes no sense for why 
should you scheme towards reaching a particular place, when that 
place might not be there tomorrow? Or might be somewhere else? 'Just' 
a node in the network.

This situation much resembles the Aboriginal response to Captain 
Cook's Endeauvour. They simply could not see each other, even if they 
were right in front of each other, in full view. For the past three 
years I have been wondering why the clear individual talent that I 
spot in my CMD students does not show itself when they are in class, 
either in groups of twenty, thirty or fifty. An awful lot of 
communication is going on in this group, but it is of the communal 
kind. It is either text messaging one on one, or chatting one on one, 
or phoning, or emailing, one on one. In class there is a silent 
agreement that is cool to seem uninterested, to not voice that 
poignant comment or that  brilliant remark. Interestingly enough, for 
them the situation is the same, but in reverse. Christiaan Fruneaux, 
a young programmer in the Balie, an important centre for cultural and 
political debate (www.balie.nl) in Amsterdam writes to me that 'we', 
the young culturally active generation is experiencing a complete 
lack of inspiration, enthusiasm, self irony and joy in the current 
political and cultural sector, that is- basically, in me:

"Actually, that goes for the entire 'grown up' world. People are 
building on coarse, outdated, old-fashioned social-political 18th and 
19th  discourses and turn their backs of the rest of the post MTV 
world. In contrast, we find in our personal lives the exact opposite. 
A lot of young, energetic and above all creative people are engaged 
in a broad range of cultural and political activities from a 
comfortable, chaotic, global, culturally diverse, subjective, 
digital post 'Jackass and Pimp my Car' self challenging en inspiring 
worldview."

It is clear that we can not see each other's work, cannot recognize 
each other's position as a political position.

A worst case scenario: disintegration

From the Netherlands to many many netherlands in twelve steps:

1. The Netherlands has no coin of its own, it has euros.
2. Most legal jurisdiction and law comes from European law and growing.
3  What is a nation state that cannot define itself in its own legal 
and monetary terms?
4. A state that cannot define itself legally needs an ironclad mental 
model that embraces all and everyone in the Netherlands.
5. This inclusive mental model is under heavy pressure.
6. The digital network turns civilians into  professional amateurs. 
We see a growth of informal networks operating in between a formal 
policy level and an idiosyncratic everyday life.
7. The nation state tends to privatise and outsource tasks and obligations.
8. Individual core needs can be privately dealt with; medication 
through internet, medical care globally available.
9. So we wait now for the first village that refuses to pay its taxes 
to the Netherlands. Why should they pay for all these Creole cities 
where over fifty percent of the young people are from different 
backgrounds and descent, allochtoon is the word goes in Dutch?.
10. What happens when a thousand people refuse to pay their taxes to 
what for them is no longer a friendly nation state? Who is going to 
lock them up in the end?
11. There is no room in the Netherlands to put 1000 people into 
prison. The nation state loses its final argument as a state as it 
can not make good on its monopoly of violence.
12. Resulting in: the new middle ages.

Why should this scenario be unrealistioc? All its axiomaric 
requirements are met: the network has empowered and is empowering 
individual citizens to such an extent that they can start managing 
their private lives for themselves, while Europe as an idea, as a 
story is still to abstract for citizens to outsource their newly 
gained perceived autonomy to.

And our young designers? Our new media generation?

Why should they care about the polis, an ambient agora? Or about accessforall?
What does their government do for them but telling them not to do 
this and that and be careful, hey watch out!
What do they owe their nation states?

Culture and economy: creative industries

Our sons and daughters will not hew, forge, mine, plough or weld.They 
will serve, design, advise, create, compose, analyse, judge and 
write. - Charles Leadbeater

The future of this country is not call-centres - but its creativity, 
said Tony Hall. All of us are on a crusade to make a difference to 
people's skills. 

Above I argued that our current intellectual climate both stimulates 
top-down creative industrial initiatives and highlights unsafety and 
insecurity as the best strategy to confront a public environment. 
This is a recipe for long-term economic disaster. If we agree that it 
is foremost the creative minds that companies need to keep at hand- 
that programming and management maybe outsourced to India or China - 
then we will have to face up to the fact that such creative young 
minds are no longer there for companies to keep.

As a result of aiming for the safe default, the key themes and 
cultural and political views that are shaping our environment at the 
moment are fear, insecurity, and lack of safety. And this undermines 
other messages the public is getting. For instance, in communicating 
with the public mobile industries use the image of a person 
surrounded by power stations, with connecting nodes that give the 
person "agency"/ power. Security industries use exactly the same 
image, but in their case the "agency" lies with the nodes rather than 
the person. Yet in both cases the underlying idea is the same: you 
need to distribute yourself - or your data - into the environment. 
Pervasive computing, location based services, RFID are the necessary 
are logical next step in connectivity. From the pencil onwards 
technology has been about distributing data in an environment. But 
who is going to distribute themselves into an environment that is, as 
you are constantly being reminded, unsafe?

The fear policy goes directly against the call for more and more 
innovation, innovation needs a risk friendly environment. If you 
scare your population, very few risks will be taken.

And interestingly enough, all the axiomatic requirements of a good 
case scenario are present as well. Never before have the demands of 
economy and creative practices of making run so parallel.

  "Culture is moving to the heart of the way we make our living, how 
we learn, take leisure and express our identities", Charles 
Leadbeater writes:

"In the UK the creative industries as a whole account for more than 
5% of GDP. They have been growing at twice the rate of the economy as 
a whole over the last decade. Compared with 1991 there are 60% more 
artists, 55% more musicians, 40% more actors and more than 400% more 
people working in digital media. Our music and computer games 
industries, for example, earn as much in exports as our steel and 
textile industries."

"Creative and cultural industries do not matter just because they are 
a large and growing part of the economy. They matter because they 
also provide benefits to the rest of the economy and society.They 
have a multiplier effect. We increasingly live in an economy in which 
value comes from those who have ideas and who can apply them 
commercially through manufacturing and services. Competitiveness 
depends on having assets that your competitors cannot copy, buy or 
imitate.The most important of those assets resides in us: our 
creativity to devise novel products, services, experiences and 
processes. Our sons and daughters will not hew, forge,mine, plough or 
weld.They will serve, design, advise, create, compose, analyse, judge 
and write.Their skills will be applied to all industries and 
services, not just the high-tech. "

This latter is an important prerequisite towards an inclusive 
creative industry. Two third of the Dutch population and rising takes 
their secondary education at vmbo level, lower technical schools. 
Embracing a Creole Europe can will be skill based, or it will not be.

An ethical sense in an ambient environment: Innovation, technology and ethics.

In the philosophy of Aristoteles there are three domains of knowledge 
with three corresponding states of knowing; Theoria, Techné and 
Praxis.  Theoria with its domain of knowledge epistéme, is for the 
Greek gods, mortals can never reach this state of knowing. But they 
can strive for it. In Theoria and epistéme we recognize our concepts 
theory and epistemology. In Techné with its domain of knowledge 
poèsis we find technology and poetry. The original meaning of the 
word 'technology' was concerned with know-how or method, and it is 
with the Great Exhibition of 1851 that the word becomes synonomous 
with machines.

It is therefore all the more interesting that the domain of knowledge 
which belonged to Praxis: phronesis has dropped out completely, not 
only in our language but also in our thought and ways of thinking. 
Phronesis, that knowledge that any one of us uses daily in the 
practice of living his everyday existence, is no longer recognized as 
an important domain of knowledge with a modern linguistic equivalent.

'Ephemeralisation' was Buckminster Fuller's term for describing the 
way that a technology becomes subsumed in the society that uses it. 
The pencil, the gramophone, the telephone, the cd player, technology 
that was around when we grew up, is not technology to us, it is 
simply another layer of connectivity.  Ephemeralisation is the 
process where technologies are being turned into functional 
literacies; on the level of their grammar, however, there is very 
little coordination in their disappearing acts. These technologies 
disappear as technology because we cannot see them as something we 
have to master, to learn, to study. They seem to be a given. Their 
interface is so intuitive, so tailored to specific tasks, that they 
seem natural. In this we resemble the primitive man of Ortega y 
Gasset:

"Š.the  type of man dominant to-day is a primitive one, a Naturmensch 
rising up in the midst of a civilised world. The world is a civilised 
one, its inhabitant is not: he does not see the civilisation of the 
world around him, but he uses it as if it were a natural force. The 
new man wants his motor-car, and enjoys it, but he believes that it 
is the spontaneous fruit of an Edenic tree. In the depths of his soul 
he is unaware of the artificial, almost incredible, character of 
civilisation, and does not extend his enthusiasm for the instruments 
to the principles which make them possible."

This unawareness of the artificial, almost incredible, character of 
Techné - the Aristotelian term for technique, skill - is only then 
broken when it fails us:

"Central London was brought to a standstill in the rush hour on July 
25 2002 when 800 sets of traffic lights failed at the same time -- in 
effect locking signals on red."

Every new set of techniques brings forth its own literacy: The 
Aristotelian protests against introducing pencil writing, may seem 
rather incredible now, at the time it meant nothing less than a 
radical change in the structures of power distribution. Overnight, a 
system of thought and set of grammar; an oral literacy dependant on a 
functionality of internal information visualization techniques and 
recall, was made redundant because the techniques could be 
externalised. Throughout Western civilization the history of memory 
externalisation runs parallel with the experienced disappearance of 
its artificial, man made, character. An accidental disappearance, 
however much intrinsic to our experience, that up till now has not 
been deliberate:

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave 
themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are 
indistinguishable from it."

In Evolution, Alienation and Gossip, The role of mobile 
telecommunications in the 21st century, Kate Fox claims:

"The space-age technology of mobile phones has allowed us to return 
to the more natural and humane communication patterns of 
pre-industrial society, when we lived in small, stable communities, 
and enjoyed frequent 'grooming talk' with a tightly integrated social 
network."

According to her about two thirds of our conversation time is 
entirely devoted to social topics: "discussions of personal 
relationships and experiences; who is doing what with whom; who is 
'in' and who is 'out' and why; how to deal with difficult social 
situations; the behaviour and relationships of friends, family and 
celebrities; our own problems with lovers, family, friends, 
colleagues and neighbours; the minutiae of everyday social life - in 
a word, gossip"

This underlines the importance of the notion of enaction that Varela 
outlines in his study Ethical Know-How', Action, Wisdom and Cognition:

"enaction as the ability to negociate embodied, everyday living in a 
world that is inseperable from our sensory-motor capacities"

For him this notion is the key to understand ethics in our everyday 
life. He wonders if the traditional way of setting up a cognitive set 
of ethical principles and axioms; you should do this, you should not 
do thatŠis actually indicative of the way people behave when 
confronted with difficult decisions. What do you do, he asks, when 
you enter your office and you see your colleague tied up in a what 
appears to be embarrassing telephone conversation? Would you not be 
very quiet and try to sneak out of the room unnoticed? Was that not 
an ethical decision that you made? And were you not immediately 
convinced that is was an embarrassing situation? Varela then wonders 
if we posses a kind of ethical sense. A sense to negociate encounters 
on a daily level.

A networked, hybrid, world needs a notion of understanding, what does 
it mean when understanding takes places or happens. When is a design 
successful? What are the criteria for its succesfull diseappearing 
into the local flow?  What happens if you understand? When do you 
feel responsible for the implications of your understanding? When do 
you feel responsible enough to act? 

When do you feel responsible for territory that is not yours in 
ownership? When do you feel responsible for a public domain?
When do you feel responsible at all?

Needed: vision

One of the most intriguing aspects of Bauhaus is that the most 
successful unit, - the unit coming 'closest to Bauhaus intentions', 
as Gropius stated, the pottery workshop - was located 25 kilometers 
from Weimar, in Dornburg. It was hard to reach by train, and hard to 
reach by car. The workshop master Max Krehan owned the workshop, so 
there was a business interest from the start. The relationship with 
Marcks , the Master of Form, was not contaminated with formalized 
roundtable discussions, but was a productive twoway 
(abstract-concrete) interrelationship. 

"More important still, in terms of what Gropius hoped for the entire 
Bauhaus, was the way in which the pottery workshop operated in close 
co-operation with the local community in which it found itself. It 
made pots for the community and the town of Dornburg leased the 
workshop a plot of land which the students used for vegetables and on 
which, it was hoped, they would build."

So what can we learn from this? That we must not aim to define, alter 
or transform practices, processes, places or people. The aim should 
be to define a vision. A vision that should be able to inspire and 
empower young people in their concrete experience of agency in this 
seemingly undesignerly new world, towards a humanistic and optimistic 
positive attitude in the role, function and leadership of the 
creative individual in his and her capability to make sense, to work 
within an uncertain framework of unforeseen consequences, unintended 
uses, and procedural breakdown.

Four basic ideas underlie this vision: a concept of life and living 
as slow becoming, as in Eugène Minkowsky's idea that the essence of 
life is not " a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of 
participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of 
time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space." , a concept of 
slow money, to focus on the design process and sustainability of 
products and services, a working concept of our notion of control as  
resonance. and distributing insecurity as the European default.

And five: exemplary behaviour of the older generation; but that off 
course goes without saying


-- 

http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/
http://blogger.xs4all.nl/kranenbu/

VP mobile:  0031 (0) 641930235
0032  472 40 63 72 got stolen and is offline.



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