Google Health API

UK gets scarier and scarier : Student arrested for downloading a book.

(I wonder when, at some point, the UK will become less free than Brazil - a country still recovering from a fascist military dictatorship.)

Gonna be checking these Brazilian multi-touch / projector aficionados too.

http://www.youtube.com/user/nannibrandao

http://www.youtube.com/user/tangivel

iTouchMedia some kind of Chinese multi-touch / projector manufacturer?

Wow! Stack of new post-Johnny Chung Lee webcam + light-pen inputs and interactive projectors.

Another project blog to watch.

Yeah, regular readers probably know that I've been obsessing about a new generation of alternative input devices for a while.

Interestingly they've become the only thing that matters for the console games market.

Meanwhile vision recognition research is helping to turn everything into an input device.

The world continues to become enchanted.

(Hat-tip Exmosis)

More brilliance from Google.

Forget that they've taken over the world technically.

Now they're grabbing a slice of the hip art / fashion / culture world too. Google is becoming a branded brand which as Naomi Klein warns is always a zero-sum game to see who controls the memetic territory. Google as cuter Abzorbaloff swallowing whatever artistic talent it touches?

Especially shrewd is that some artists are contributing widgets (clocks, calendars) just as if they were adding their signature to a designer Swatch. Google know what they're doing here. Maybe branded widgets are the next ring-tones? (Especially once they're on Orkut or anywhere else OpenSocial.)

Make no mistake, this is a shot across Apple's bows. Google want to be cool. They have the smarts, and therefore the money. Now they're gonna try to take the sex.

(Aside - not a million miles away from my "skin hotmail" suggestion for Microsoft, is it?)

Update : themes are pretty sophisticated actually.

Beautiful painted Russian house.

More designery stuff : game exhibition and playful cities.

Orgy of consumerist eye-candy and "coolness".

Damn, it's hard to remain unaffected.

Umair pushes back on a comment I wrote to him the other day.

I think this is one of the grand, defining debates of our times ... with the discovery of "the edge" or "peer" or the "bazaar" model of production, those of us who believe in it, still need to orient our political attitudes with respect to it.

Do we remain sceptics, believing that, whatever its virtues, peer is just a tool, hostage to the foibles of human choice? Or do we believe it is, if not a law, then at least a pattern of the system dynamics of economies, as near to a historical inevitability as we may hope for in our times?

Wow! Fafblog is back!!!!

Bow before Giblets!

Introduction to Health Commons

As I'm a well-known hater of America's freedoms, I have no hesitation in urging people to Vote Republican, this fall.

Sadly, I'm not quite such a hater of freedom in the UK, so not sure exactly who to suggest you vote for to avoid this. Liberal Democrat I guess.

Eustonism is two.

K-Punk on "Hauntology"

Multi-touch Missile Command!

On seeing this, perhaps it would be cool to have two players either end of a M$ Surface, firing hundreds of colourful missile trails at each other. Could be kind of beautiful.x

LiveScribe at JavaOne

hat-tip Darius ... couple of interesting links on food prices.

Oil prices driving people to public transport.

For people not watching my other blog. I'm currently rolling out a new software service on top of the Google Application Engine.


Mind Traffic Control, I've described as "task-flow management for the Twitter generation". To understand why, and find out more, you can follow on Smart Disorganized.

Hmmm ... oil at $200 dollars?

Scare story or the inevitable over-peak kicking in?

Don't know if this is true, but it's a great anti-copyright story if it is.

Indian Geeks stay home.

Hat-tip Rup3rt : economist podcast on alt.money.

(No idea if it's good or not, yet. But will give it a go soon.)

PS : note this is another classic OPTIMAES blog posting ... but OPTIMAES blog is still impounded by Google as an alleged spam-blog ... after 6 months. WTF?

(Why am I trusting these people with my cool GAE application I'm working on?)

Sad to see M$ wheedling their way into the OLPC.

Stallman responds.

Update : Following arguments on OLPC News

Diesel Tweetie

Bard and Soderqvist interviewed on French blog TV!

UN continues it's campaign against biofuels.

Aaahrrgrgh! BldgBlog ... every time I dare go near it it overwhelms me ...

Space as a Symphony of Turning off Sounds

Game / Space

OK ... time to go back to ignoring it again ...

And note that I'm stupidly adding Airship World to my blogroll ... another wannaread blog

Fools!

John Robb links a scary graph of the increase in the cost of rice over the last 5 years.

Just say No! to Boris.

Thinking about Pi-Calculus and corporations as automata

Hat-tip Berkan. A great article on cyclic crises etc.

Money quote :

the real growth of the world economy sets long term limits on what kind of return is, on average, feasible. I cannot help feeling that the periodic asset bubbles that we have experienced in various forms reflect an unreasonable pressure in the financial sector to promise returns that in the aggregate cannot be achieved. These promises keep being made, however, and the assets bubbles keep being
encouraged, because the incentive structures that exist inside the financial sector are asymmetric. Managers reap great personal benefits from short term-profits but pay very little personal penalty when the bubble bursts. Moreover because asset bubble bursts affect the entire economy, there is always irresistible political pressure to socialize the losses when they become too threatening.

Dubstep Rave :-)

There's a new Portishead album. Haven't heard it yet, but the obviously cool thing for them to do would be to get lots of dubstep remix action going on, invite Kode9, Space Ape etc. Maybe the way Massive Attack had the Mad Professor do a remix album back in the day.

Update: Got it (or some alleged preview, thanks SoulSeek) Not much sign of dubstep, sadly. Some quite radical sounds and musical arrangements which nevertheless soon become "normal" given the context. Not sure this is Portishead's fault. As Radiohead proved, being a megastar makes whatever you do mainstream.

Quite post-rock, howly in places. Interesting, but totally lost the souly / hip-hop aspect of the first album. Folk-rock-blues wins.

Update 2 : Dead Can Dance, Cocteaus in there too.

UN calls for revolution in food production.

Good Clay Shirky interview with thinking from his latest book.

Hat-tip Rup3rt, Manda Bala the (banned?) documentary about Brazilian corruption is now on BitTorrent.

I seem to remember Joseph_Weizenbaum worrying about this in Computer Power and Human Reason.

Now it's happening ....

Something *very* ethically ... icky ... about it.

Another digital pen

Further warnings that increase in food prices will cause mass hunger.

What are *you* doing to help produce more food and avert this?

Dismal story

Scribe on BBCWii

Remember when I said

keep Googling the term "Chumby Facebook news-feed" for a while until the obvious happens.

?

Thought I'd try it today.

Update : Chumby Social Network following widgets

William Lind flirts with Bush == Hitler thinking. But seems to reject it.

Update : Just noticed this piece is from 2005 ... still interesting but not so much news. ( He ... that's Seitz's fault ;-)

IMF selling some of its gold reserve.

More on Ward Cunningham's Bacteria inspired computing

Update : compare roBlocks

Tempting as it is, Stowe Boyd's "edgelings" is an example of the kind of utopianism that netocracy-theory wants to steer you away from.

Is there a neural basis for predicate logic?

(Hat-tip Ben Trem)

Just had a thought. Has my recent discussion of Fitna turned me / revealed me to be Eustonian?

I honestly don't know. Readers, how does it sound?

Only just discovered that Ward Cunningham (father of wiki) does cool hardware hacking.

With protocols based on bacterial signalling.

Emily Chang on new user-interfaces. (iPod and OLPC)

Visa to IPO? Whatever happened to chaordic organization?

Meanwhile UK banking system chasing Muslim money. Wonder how they stop it being repackaged in securitization scams?

This kind of thing is getting so old. But something just occurred to me.

The irony here is that one of Winer's avowed reasons for getting into blogging was to have somewhere to put the record straight (when he was frustrated with the tech. journalism about Mac software in the 90s, when he gave up giving quotes to journalists etc.) But the blogging "river" format actually allows such definitive positioning statements to scroll off into history and get lost. That's why despite 11 years of Scripting News people still don't seem to know what he says and thinks about RSS etc.

Wikipedia, in contrast, has a single static page which is fiercely contested - partly because it's considered to be authoritative. But mainly because it's a well labeled single static page that Google (and so the world) knows how to find.

My advice to Dave would be to take a leaf out of Andrea Dworkin's book and have one static FAQ on Scripting News, prominently linked and discoverable (while flattering, "Who is Phil Jones?" doesn't quite make it from the Information Architecture angle) which just states his claims about RSS / podcasting etc. Keep it up to date when there are new misunderstandings, but generally allow it to accumulate the links and "authority" which currently goes to Wikipedia.

At the moment, Dave's responses to his critics are scattered, intertwingled with ephemeral issues, over dozens of blog posts and comments. No wonder people are still so vague about this.

OK ... I succumb ... Shel Israel interviews a frog about Facebook.

Cool, Darius found Huaylash Wanka music on YouTube,

TDAXP is right. Everyone should watch Fitna.

He's also right about one of the reasons :

Watch it, because people who kill over cartoons don’t want you to.

I caught it via his blog, but disturbingly, to underline Dan's point, it has gone from LiveLeak today.

Simplistic, biased and allegedly inaccurate as it may be, Fitna is something that a society and culture which values freedom needs to be able to keep in circulation; available to anyone who chooses to see it when they want. And the internet is meant to be our technological guarantee of that ideal. Right now it seems that a lot of governments and individual organizations are running scared. Who, really, wants to be associated with and host the damned thing and put their citizens and employees and businesses in danger?

You may have to resort to Bittorrent to watch it, as though it were an illegal download.

And that is a great failure of our politics, society and courage.

Of course, the Western governments (and ambitious politicians like Geert Wilders) have helped pump this fear of the "islamo-fascist" bogeyman to such an extent that any threat, however idle, is given credence enough to cowe us into submission. To such a degree that the bravado of the rightists looks (almost) appealing in comparison. That's undoubtedly part of the twisted dynamics at work here. The rightists pump the fear to make their own defiance look heroic; living out a fantasy ideology that mirrors the islamicists' own. And, in doing so, they lionize and embolden those who they claim to oppose.

Nevertheless, the underlying reality is troubling; there is a case to be answered rather than dismissed. It really appears that we face a constituency that rejects the basic values of an open society within which people can express themselves, argue for their different opinions, live their preferences, without fear of violent reprisal.

It's unlikely that LiveLeak were spooked by their own shadows. Somebody must have felt justified to make the (seemingly inevitable) threatening call or email or web-posting. As though it were the most natural thing in the world to issue death-threats when you feel your religion or culture is being criticized.

That banal normality - we would have been surprised if the threat hadn't come - is the true measure of the hole we're in. We no longer live in a world of specific causes and effects, but a condition of implacable enmity between value-systems; where fundamentalist Muslims are organized to interpret every cultural complaint against Islam as an attack, an opportunity to be offended, a call to action and counter-attack.

And we do not know what to do about it.

I have always been, and remain, an opponent of the "war on terror" and of the West's attempt at militarizing the problem. Such an approach, in lolspeak, is "full of fail" : it has given Osama the war he wanted and rallied a large part of the Muslim world against us. (Had there been even an iota of success from this doomed warmonger's strategy, then Wilders' film and its warnings would have been unnecessary and meaningless. The European Muslim community's own immune system would be suppressing the crazies.)

I feel little more sympathy for the far-right's attempts to stop Muslim immigration into Europe and send Muslims home. (Although I accept that this is not so disastrously counter-productive as bombing the middle-east - and may even have slight pragmatic benefit in keeping the peace.) It is a sign of utter defeat, saying, effectively, that our liberal values, the examples we offer in our rich and vibrant societies to immigrant Muslims are inadequate counter-attractions to a dead-weight fundamentalism.

But if not that, what other solutions do we have? Particularly we leftists and liberals? We can understand a far more complex web of causes, effects, social and historical forces, but such theories are little use unless they also can lead towards solutions.

Because it is hard to see that Wilders is not right in this : there is a problem. There is a struggle for the hearts and minds of Muslims in Europe. And we are not winning it. The most liberal of countries encounters rising homophobia, misogyny and attacks on freedom of expression which ought to be unthinkable. Of course, the rightist Wilder exploits this in his propaganda, to win our sympathy. But the underlying events are no less ugly for that. We can't judge the message by the messenger. And can't ignore the problem because it's difficult.

Ultimately, you should watch Fitna because you will be disturbed by it. Unless you have already simply taken sides in the "clash of civilizations", you dread what that phrase imports and want to resist its coming. Fitna should renew your sense of urgency.

Update : Fitna is still on Google Video. Catch is ASAP.

I'm surprisingly charmed by recentish UK hip-hop.

Curiously "patriotic", though.

Bonus video : Lily Allen singing Keene.

Moto Labs look interesting.

More details of US corporate welfare, and current US meltdown.

The really interesting questions, of course, are those that follow.

Suppose the US government is sending a signal to Wall Street that it will bail it out, despite its irresponsibility?

Some will probably argue that this is how it should be. That it's a price worth paying to avoid economic catastrophe. The markets don't panic, things go on as usual.

Well, if so, will such people then also accept that capitalism *is* dependent on government as lender of final resort? That the whole system is a kind of Keynsianism of forced "tax-and-lend" rather than "tax-and-spend"? (Except without the egalitarian pretensions of good-old-fashioned-Keynsianism) Markets and governments "symbiotic" rather than opposing principles?

Will the true libertarians peel-off in revulsion at the whole corrupt system?

Will people just get *used* to it?

Will, in fact, the international money markets "punish" this behaviour by getting out of the dollar?

What, really, this late in the day, can anyone say?

US justifications for Iraq war were built on evidence of an accused thief on the run from the Iraqi government? Who was distrusted by the senior CIA and UN inspectors. But the US government went ahead anyway, starting an unneccessary war which killed ... well let's remind ourselves again :








+ over 4000 US service personel at the alleged cost of 3 trillion dollars.

Oh yeah, but we all have "fatigue" from this kind of story. We all know that the Republican machine is corrupt, dishonest, cynical, hate-spewing, mass-murdering and yet somehow utterly incompetent at anything except fooling the American public into voting for it. Somehow people just keep on ignoring this.

Hmmm ... I'm disappointed with Bebo.

I joined them hoping for a non Murdoch-owned MySpace clone to host my musical life. But now I find they seem to have restricted access to my music to members only. So that's pointless. Everyone else in the world *does* use MySpace, but I refuse.

Anyone know of anything similar which a) doesn't restrict my music to its members and b) isn't owned by a mass murderer?

LOL! Apparently airhead world financial system has too short an attention span for an economic melt-down.

Yeah, right!

Printed Flesh

Wow! Persian music videos are the best!

Happy Nowruz

Hat-tip Dariush

any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice

should be written on the neocons' tomb

Hey! I like Visualizing Economics.

(Would have posted this on the OPTIMAES blog if Google hadn't impounded it :-( )

Dennis Howlett notes RockYou thinks its worth twice as much as Bear Stearns

Whether this is fantasy, the tech. economy simply lagging behind everyone else's reality or a real change in what's considered valuable, we'll find out.

Geometry of musical chords via the interesting looking LearnNodes.

Big Dog.

Scary!

You don't understand Twitter!

That's OK. It's kind of weird and hard to get your head round. And if you aren't using Twitter, absolutely there is no way you're going to understand it. It looks ridiculous; the most pointless thing ever,

But the hype is justified. Twitter is unlike anything else out there. A kind of Flow Internet version of del.icio.us. The most successful example of Zby's "social routing" I've seen. The nearest thing to plugging yourself live into massively parallel hive-mind.

Update : Big Scribe post on Twitter today.

I'm fascinated by El Cosmico ... the perfect synthesis of new-age and capitalism, hippie-theme hotel, idealism and cynicism, art and commerce, redneck authenticity and sophisticate kitsch, Buddhas and baseball. Pure Americana.

Check out the merchandize.

Hat-tip Kaunda. Fascinating piece on Global Universities and knowledge workers.

I dunno, this week any old tosh sounds cool with Robo-branding from Fruity Loops speech synthesizers. (witness : Branded 2)

I'm so enthused by this I'm actually forking out 99 dollars for a copy of Fruity Loops. I'm sure I'll be bored by the whole Robo-voice thing before they even process my credit card (which amazingly seems to take *days*). But a pirate copy of Fruity has been my mainstay composition tool for about the last 7 years. So if anyone deserves me buying their software, it's these guys.

Which reminds me, I have a follow up post planned on intellectual property. But not tonight ... tired.

Wiimotes hacked to see laser-pointers.

Flyer
Originally uploaded by interstar

Tomorrow night I'm DJing at a party at the Clube da Imprensa under the somewhat quotidian name : "Phill". (Note the double L)

Bit pedestrian compared to all the "Gangster"s and "She-men", eh?

Basically, I never gave the organizers of the first party I played at any sort of nome-de-disc and so they printed up the flier with this mis-spelling of my real name. Now I guess it's going to follow me around, and if I change it no-one will know it's the same person, will they :-)

Frankly I can't think of anything better at the moment, anyway.

Which is a shame, because I do rather like the way that all the Niche producers have robotic voices saying things like "T2 Productions" or guys with northern accents saying "Mikey B On Productions" all the way through the track. In an age of sampling and audio downloading the only way to guarantee your attention is to watermark / brand ruthlessly everywhere. It's cool to have a logo. It makes you feel somehow important.

So I spent 10 minutes playing with the the new Fruity Loops voice synthesizer saying "Synaesmedia Productions". The Synaesmedia brand flails around, never really attaching itself to anything properly, but it can have some fun there for a while. However, the track went all "Super Radio FM". Not at all niche or bassline house. Just sort of old-skool, easy listening house with the bright but miasmic glowing melody line smothering everything else.

Well, it's 2AM in the morning ... so I guess late-nite is what I'm feeling. Even though I have no idea what I'm actually going to play tomorrow and I should be preparing my playlist etc. Expect it to sound nothing like this, though :

Synaesmedia Logomarca

Alright ... me too :-)

RIP Gary Gygax.

Actually I don't think I really did play Dungeons and Dragons all that much. But I loved creating my own worlds.

BIG touch screens and shadow input.

Enso is now open-source. :-)

Update : Virgin Maria! and it's all Python too.

Not happy that the OPTIMAES blog is still getting categorized by Google as a spam blog. What's going on here? How long exactly is it meant to take them to review the cases of misclassification?

Heh heh ... trying to download some more bassline house / niche I'm coming across some recent happy-hardcore with "northern" garagey style rapping on it. And some interesting sounds that I'd normally associate with grime. Is it possible that up in Lancashire somewhere the whole thing is going to mutate into some kind of happy bassline-core hard-niche sound full of frenetic beats, luscious melodies and shouty speeded up voices? :-)

Roll on, I say. Distinctly reminiscent of The Prodigy when they were still good (ie. before the second album.)

Microsoft's Crystal Ball ?

In light of my current dalliance with Erlang and that recent post on setting up pipelines in a functional stylee (in Python), this comparison of process-based concurrency in Erlang and Stackless Python is very cool.

Talented Friend Watch #9 : Oli Sharpe reinventing programming as we know it with Semantic Programming


(I'm going to follow and write more about this over on Smart Disorganized, which is increasingly my "powerful programming language" blog. That's partly because I'm seeing a lot of overlap between the values of powerful programming languages and tools for Smart Disorganized Individuals in general. Both need to support powerful abstractions, (and the creation of new ones), while remaining very fluid and expressive and easy to use.

Semantic Programming promises to be powerful ... I'm pushing Oli for more details, but I hope it will be easy too.

Scribe wants to Haggle.

Wheat prices on the up

Update : FT slide-show from last year . (hat-tip rup3rt)

Live Together, Die Alone

When I first heard about Joe Holmburg's illness I immediately started trying to find practical responses.

Suddenly my online world looked spectacularly inadequate to handle this. I went looking for peer-to-peer computing projects that looked likely to do some good. And eventually, I found the World Community Grid and particularly the Help Conquer Cancer project.

Well, maybe that's worth a shot. I've donated a few hours of computer time to it since then - but far too little. Even though I plan to keep up with it.

I wondered what all this social networking could do. There is The Joe Holmberg Appreciation Society Which is a nice idea and I hope was instrumental in organizing something.

But, really, are we trying hard enough to look after ourselves?

Are we putting the undoubted co-ordinating power of the web to work fighting disease? Are we using the new sense of "autonomy" that we get as netocratic "dividuals" to take responsibility for our health?

There are, of course, some companies promising to help us. But can we trust them? Is the market the right way to organize this? Is the government? Is a blogosphere?

Those questions haunt me. But let me self-indulgently digress for a second.

A few months or so ago I went with some friends to a kind of party that is called a "sarau" here in Brazil. A party based on the guests reading poetry, singing or performing some other kind of entertainment for each other. I go, and, in a sense admire this. But, late-20th century anglo-saxon that I am, I can't exactly enjoy it. I don't feel comfortable. I don't sing.

Not because my voice is particularly terrible. At least, no worse than some of my friends who sing away quite lustily. My usual excuse : that I can never remember the lyrics. But at this party, we had a laptop hooked up to the internet, and any lyric you could imagine was easily available.

But I still couldn't sing. And I had a strange insight into why not.

None of the songs I like are social.

The songwriters I like, that I call my "favourites" : Momus, Current 93 etc. are obscurantist, sly, cynical, an elitist in-joke. Not the kind of thing that can be innocently shared, or entered into as a group. And I realize this is my experience of music in general. I grew up in the UK in the 80s. I listened to John Peel on the radio in the evenings. I collected exotic recordings which I listened to alone in my bedroom, and occassionally swapped with like-minded afficionados through the medium of "mix-tapes". As an adult I programmed computers to produce music to amuse myself, caring little about any other audience. I shared Indie Rock Pete's plaintive motto : "Nothing is any good if other people like it.

What does music have to do with other people?

But how can that experience be compared to, or even considered as part of the same universe as the sarau where everyone sings their party piece?

Or carnival? Where everyone goes out to sing together in the street.

Or the incredibly rich popular tradition in Brazil which has dozens of styles of music, from different regions, played during specific festivals throughout the year, localized but where the whole city takes part?

Recently I wrote about Jacques Attali's "Noise" and in particular, I wrote approvingly about the mode of "composing". My mood was celebratory, interpreting "composing" as an era of small-pieces of autonomous self-expression loosely joined by "sampling" or reference or quotation or linking. Music made to the ideals of an isolated English teenager in the 80s with a hoard of cassettes, an 8-bit sampler and "tracker" software on his home computer. I celebrated because I saw in "composing" the exit from an era of mass-production and the capitalist market, a music that could herald the wider break-down of such oppressive social and economic institutions.

In this I was explicitly influenced by netocracy theory and so, I now realize, indirectly by Deleuze and Guattari who see the world as composed of "desiring machines" and we, people, as nexuses in impersonal flows of desire. In this tradition, unleashing the flows of desire and breaking free from constraining institutions is utopian. (Or at least, the only way to lead an "anti-fascist" life.) Bard and Soderqvist cast the elite netocratic class as enthusiastic Deleuzians, and flows of desire are reinterpreted as manoeuvrable network connections. But their dividual is also fragmented and mercurial.

But there's another way to read this. That the lonely teenagers listening to their personal hoard of recordings in their bedrooms herald a quasi-autistic world; a netocracy of the worst sort. A netocracy where we cut ourselves off entirely from each other, shielding ourselves with a technology that only lets filtered, software mediated, connections through. Where Facebook et al have succeeded in enclosing and privatising our friendships and routinely rent them back to us (rent in the sense of making us look at adverts while we engage in them). The isolation we mistakenly believe is autonomy and self-management and escape from overbearing institutions (as we carry our protective musical shells around in our MP3 players) is really the absence of connection, the flight from responsibility and the destruction of the shared tastes and traditions that hold communities together.

In such a world there's no place for the sarau, for a year clocked by samba at carnival and forro at the juninho party.

Put that way, "composing" sounds rather horrible. Opportunistic appropriation is a very meagre way of interacting compared to being a member of a band. Neighbourhood as "pilfery". Squabbling sea-birds always robbing pebbles from each other's nests.

Of course, the other world, the world of shared festival is actually the primitive mode that Attali would call "sacrificing" ... where music exists to mask the violence of everyday life. And, true enough, for all the apparent community you might read into carnival, Brazil is riven by class differences and prejudices to a degree that the 20th century English kids would find hard to imagine (except through reading 18th century literature). Violence in the "communities" is high - between rival gangs and between gangs and police it is astronomical. Nowhere in Brazil escapes the shadow of violence. Nor the fear which keeps the middle-classes in their fortified houses and condominiums. John Robb's post-nation-state world of global guerrillas and "armed suburbs" sems closer to reality in Brazil than his US and certainly more than my UK. (Or is that so? You don't feel that a gang of teenagers in Brazil is more dangerous than in the UK. In Brazil, violence is forgotten or ignored easily. In the UK, moody kids glower menacingly from under their hoodies (allegedly))

So which kind of music prevails? The nation state, "project man", (the mode (roughly) that Attali calls "representing" in that music is intended to represent the harmony of society) is in decline. Are we reverting to medieval "sacrificing" or going forward to "composing". And is composing a true, post-modern, post-capitalist utopia where our economic activity is (roughly again) "look around at cool stuff and spontaneously re-appropriate it to make something of your own that's cooler" (the peer-production economy of free-software, blogging, scratch video and sampling, Facebook, and free-improvisation) Or is that a happy facade, the reality for a few elite netocrats while the rest descend into the drudgery and banality of the consumtariat?

One can, perhaps, gain a new insight here : In netocracy, the netocrats "steal" the social links from the consumtariat.

While the netocrats are busily managing their portfolio of links, the technology that trickles down from them pollutes the social space. Slide and RockYou are destroying my friendships! People who I was rather glad to meet up with and find out about every couple of years are now nothing but virtual conduits for an endless stream of meaningless polls about 10 things I have no interest in and would never do but somehow have to put in order of which I'd be more likely to, just to find that I'm only 73% similar to my erstwhile friend.

The flip-side of the coin of "everyone can have their own little media empire", is that "everyone is as ignorable as a media celebrity we don't care about" On the internet it doesn't matter that X was a guy who I quite liked to go to the pub with a few years ago. Now he's just another blog that isn't interesting enough to read.

The end-game ... we consumtariat stick our white earbuds into our ears and filter out the community. We are "composing" with instruments handed down to us by the elite. (As Attali warned) And so we are isolated.

When people die, it's often written that their loved ones and family were by their side. I realized, long ago, that I don't want to die surrounded by friends and family. What on earth would you talk about?

Are you expected to make light chat about what they plan to get up to once you (and the boring bureaucracy of the funeral) are out of the way? Are they just gonna sit round looking gloomy?

No, long ago, I figured that I'd like to die alone, but listening to music. Only music is soothing and mentally engaging enough (without being taxing) to cushion the sheer terror of waiting for it to happen. I could almost be relaxed waiting for death ... if I have control over the sound-track.

And yet, now I worry, is this not, perhaps the final end-game logic of isolation? This is the state to which netocracy reduces all of us. By making social connections a means to an end rather than an end in themselves, a tool rather than the condition within which we live, we have stripped them of all real significance or value. They have become dead. We have become dead. Out capacity to participate has been eroded even as we gained a capacity to curate.

Or is this getting overly morbid and pessimistic?

An old joke seems apposite at this point : Someone dug up Mozart's grave, and found the corpse busily erasing the marks from pieces of scored manuscript paper. "What are you doing?" they asked. "Why?", said Mozart, "I'm decomposing". :-)

And so, rambling on, more new years resolutions.

6) I'm not planning on dying yet. And nor should you. But what should you do instead?

My first enthusiastic announcement of OPTIMAES was once billed as "Phil vs. Capitalism : Round 1" - nothing wrong with a bit of ambition. Now I think hackers (of both the technical and social kinds) should be looking into how to use their art to tackle the big issues. One thing I want to think about this year is what can a society moving into a netocratic / spime era (ie. with ubiquitous connectivity and computing power) do to confront death : to take on the big scary diseases : cancers, AIDs, malaria, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart disease etc. We really *aren't* trying hard enough, are we? Compared to all the other fripperies we waste our time and money on.

7) I'm reading Deleuze and Guatari's Anti-Oedipus at the moment. I will finish it.

8) I'm back to writing simulations, currently of competitive network formation (more on this soon). In Erlang! And Erlang, it turns out, is very very cool. It's a little bit ugly to my eyes; I wish it could have been a bit cleaner (in the Python / Haskell direction). But nevertheless, it is very concise. I've managed to write my whole agent framework in about 150 lines (compared to about a 800 to do something similar in OPTIMAES in Python; although that was, admittedly, when I was still writing Python as if it was Java). My evolution into a functional programmer is continuing apace.

9) Perhaps most importantly - I'm looking for participatory, social, music in my life. I was wrong to think this was about "Brazilian" music. What's really important is the other understanding of composing that Attali gives (it was me who goes astray into digital sampling and name-dropping) - the "hippie" spontaneous communitarian, improvisatory, free-jazz, jamming, lick-swapping "composing". The sarau and singalong around the camp-fire. This is, after all, the way to stay in touch. To stay alive. However embarrassing it sometimes seems. ;-)

I notice I've been link-blogging a lot recently ... and not in Twitter.

Don't think Twitter is for link-blogging ... these links are still something to present, not merely mention in conversation. Twitter is conversation. My blog is "performance".

John Robb and Nir Rosen debunk Bush's "surge".

The fall of suburbia

Diplo does Cumbia

Update : and rolled the Mad Decent blog.

Canned lambda-calculus

Castro wins.

RIP : Alain Robbe-Grillet

Awesome ... Cardiacs videos on YouTube.

Start with Tarred and Feathered and go further if you dare.

Playing loud music in public may be anti-social, but isn't it also an attempt to be social?

Note : this is pre-response to a longer post I'm writing but haven't posted yet. When I do, read it, then get in your Tardis and come back and read this. :-)

Thanks to Vicky from Manchester, I'm on a mad "Niche" or "Bassline House" tip at the moment, trying to download anything I can find.

I don't read Reynolds enough. He was on the case some time ago.

World financial crisis .... so it goes.