photo credit: thealmightyprophetgitboy

One of the suspected reasons that cellphones are so dangerous is that the person on the other end of the call isn’t aware of what’s going on on your end. Unlike a person in the passenger seat, your cellphone companion doesn’t know when to shut up because traffic’s gotten complicated, or to exclaim because something’s stepped in front of the car.

The context-blind idiot yammering in your ear makes you literally stupider.

There is only so much attention to go around, and the continual act of choosing to ignore extraneous inputs is taxing. It’s more taxing in busy environments, which means that cities are distraction machines that kill your memory and weaken your willpower.

Working in a distracting environment makes it harder to focus, and harder to maintain discipline. It may well be that your urban lifestyle is the reason you are eating all of those potato chips, buying stupid tchotchkes, and failing to keep up on your Great Books reading list.

Cyberneticists have understood this for decades. Here’s Clynes and Kline on the reasoning behind their insistence that cybernetic enhancements be unconsciously managed.

If man in space, in addition to flying his vehicle, must continuously be checking on things and making adjustments merely in order to keep himself alive, he becomes a slave to the machine. The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.

Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline Cyborgs and Space [PDF] (ASTRONAUTICS, Issue 13; September, 1960)

photo credit: lsc21

Here’s Gregory Bateson putting it more succinctly, “No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.”

Consider this in the context of the current crop of gee-whiz augmented reality apps, all of which seem to be about adding animated gee-gaws and whatsits to your world. Peruse the AR category on Beyond the Beyond and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Slick demo videos imagine a world of pop-ups and data overlays, a 3D always-on firehose of information that you need, or might need, but probably don’t need. Consider this fairly pedestrian vision of people with icons floating all around their heads.

Consider the sheer amount of cognitive load given over to managing social relations in The Guy Who Worked for Money by Benjamin Rosenbaum. Here is the main character, Nera, dealing with the socially networked fallout of an outburst at a party. A friend’s just pulled her “reliability and trust” support. She’s about to lose her job.

On hUBBUB, Nera’s aggregate rating was now 358.

In her queue: messages from drive-by ratings advisors, attracted by her sharp plunge. They’d have suggestions for her; probably they’d want her to shift her friendships around, invest in relationships with other narrow-minded ideological assholes like herself. That would improve her numbers. Also in her queue: a lot of private messages from friends worried about her behavior, and a couple of random gig offers. She scrolled to the gold comments in her comment stream. They were from drunk losers who liked the idea of baby hookers, or conspiracy-theory ravings from incoherent, bitter old Thirty-three’ers.

The Guy Who Worked for Money by Benjamin Rosenbaum.

This is the opposite of a cyborg implementation. These are tools that hurt cognition, break concentration, and interrupt flow. Far from leaving us free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel, they keep us trapped to manage, to maintain, to adjust, and to fiddle. It’s my belief that as long as augmented reality continues to demand our conscious attention to gee-gaws and whatsits, it’ll remain forever trapped in the world of novelty and toys.

I look forward to the backlash generation of AR. We don’t need augmented reality, we need diminished reality. I want overlays that keep the irrelevant at bay. I want augments that take care of the robot-problems unconsciously and automatically, alerting me only in the rare case that something truly novel or problematic needs my attention.

The deep union of ourselves with our inventions is not new. If a cyborg means a being that is part biological and part technological then we humans began as cyborgs, and still are. Our ancestors first chipped stone scrapers 2.5 million years ago to give themselves claws. By about 250,000 years ago they devised crude techniques for cooking, or pre-digesting, with fire. Cooking acts as a supplemental external stomach. Once humans acquired this artificial organ it permitted them to evolve smaller teeth and smaller jaw muscles and provided more kinds of stuff to eat. Our invention altered us.

photo credit: larcher

We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have co-evolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. As we domesticated the dog (in all its breeds) from wolves and bred cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors, we, too, have been domesticated.

We have domesticated ourselves. Our teeth continue to shrink (because of cooking, our external stomach), our muscles thin out, our hair disappears. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are co-evolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology – every last knife and spear – were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology.

We have rapidly and significantly altered ourselves and at the same time altered the world. From the moment we emerged from Africa to colonize every inhabitable watershed on this planet, our inventions began to alter our nest. Sapiens’ hunting tools and techniques had far-reaching effects: Their technology enabled them to kill off key herbivores (mammoths, giant elk, etc.) whose extinctions altered the ecology of entire grassland biomes forever. Once dominant grazers were eliminated, their absence cascaded through the ecosystem, enabling the rise of new predators, new plant species, and all their competitors and allies, surfacing a modified ecosystem. Thus a few clans of hominids shifted the destiny of thousands of other species. When Sapiens gained control of fire, this powerful technology further modified the natural terrain on a massive scale. Such a tiny trick – burning grasslands, controlling it with backfires, and summoning flames to cook grains – disrupted vast regions of the continents. And of course once we altered savannahs and prairies, they altered us.

Every species in the six kingdoms, which is to say every organism alive on Earth today, from algae to zebra, is equally evolved. Despite the differences in the sophistication and development of their forms, all living species have evolved from predecessors for the same amount of time: four billion years. All have been tested daily and have managed to adapt across hundreds of millions of generations in an unbroken chain.

photo credit: Tooley

Many of these organisms have learned to build structures, and those structures have allowed the creature to extend itself beyond its tissue. The hard two-meter mound of a termite colony operates as if it were an external organ of the insects: The mound’s temperature is regulated and it is repaired after injury. The dried mud itself seems to be living. What we think of as coral – stony, treelike structures – are the apartment buildings of nearly invisible coral animals. The coral structure and coral animals behave as one. It grows, breathes. The waxy interior of a beehive or the twiggy architecture of a bird’s nest works the same way. Therefore a nest or a hive can best be considered a body built rather than grown. A shelter is animal technology, the animal extended.

The extended human is the technium. Marshall McLuhan, among others, noted that clothes are people’s extended skin, wheels extended feet, camera and telescopes extended eyes. Our technological creations are great extrapolations of the bodies that our genes build. In this way, we can think of technology as our extended body. During the industrial age it was easy to see the world this way. Steam-powered shovels, locomotives, television, and the levers and gears of engineers were a fabulous exoskeleton that turned man into superman.

A closer look reveals the flaw in this analogy: The extended costume of animals is the result of their genes. They inherit the basic blueprints of what they make. Humans don’t. The blueprints for our shells spring from our minds, which may spontaneously create something none of our ancestors ever made or even imagined. If technology is an extension of humans, it is not an extension of our genes but of our minds. Technology is therefore the extended body for ideas.

photo credit: setlasmon

We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature itself is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago and continue to garden even today. The field of our nature has never been static. We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. Our minds are being rewired by our culture. With no exaggeration and no metaphor, we are not the same people who first started to plow 10,000 years ago.

The snug interlocking system of horse and buggy, wood-fire cooking, compost gardening, and minimal industry may be perfectly fit for a human nature – of an ancient agrarian epoch. But this devotion to a traditional way of being ignores the way in which our nature – our wants, desires, fears, primeval instincts, and loftiest aspirations – is being recast by ourselves and by our inventions, and it excludes the needs of our new natures. We need new jobs in part because we are new people at our core.

We are different physical beings from our ancestors. We think differently. Our educated and literate brains work differently. We know that literacy changes how our brains work. More than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we are shaped by the accumulating wisdom, practices, traditions, and culture of all those who’ve lived before us and live with us. We are cramming our lives with ubiquitous messages, science, pervasive entertainment, travel, surplus food, abundant nutrition, and new possibilities every day. At the same time, our genes are racing to keep up with culture. And we are speeding the acceleration of those genes by several means, including medical interventions such as gene therapy. In fact, every trend of the technium – especially its increasing evolvability – points to a much more rapid change of human nature in the future. Curiously, many of the same traditionalists who deny we are changing insist that we had better not.

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented. We have used our minds to manufacture our selves and thus we humans today are the first cyborgs. We have invented ourselves. And we are not done yet.

This is one of 50 Post About Cyborgs a project commemorating the 50th anniversary of the coining of the term.

So when it comes to the version of cyborgs that you’re probably most familiar with, the chromed man-machine monsters – your Terminators, Robocops, and Ghosts in the Shell – that’s from later on. It’s not how cyborgs start out.

They start out like this.

This is the era of Timothy Leary and Hunter S. Thompson. This is the era of acid, Agent Orange, and DDT. It’s the era of Dow and DuPont. We’re talking about “better living through chemistry” and drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs.

It’s also the era of the Cold War and the Space Race. The word is coined in 1960. NASA is not yet two years old. Sputnik is not yet three. Kennedy is a year away from announcing America’s commitment to putting a man on the moon.

A lot of people were getting together and asking, “How can we survive for the long term in space?”

One solution is architectural.

Using the latest construction techniques, you can build a little bubble of earth, and plunk it down on any old alien world. We can send people off to these environments and so long as the walls don’t burst and the air doesn’t run out, they’ve got all the comforts of home.

A pair of scientists, Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, had a different idea.

“What if we could just live in space?” they asked, “What if instead of adapting the environment to ourselves, we adapted ourselves to the environment?”

To do that, they reasoned, you need a cybernetic feedback system to maintain homeostasis unconsciously. These systems need to become a part of the organism. A cybernetic organism. A Cyborg.

The key notion here is non-hereditary adaptation. Technological interventions that change the course of biological existence.

Being that it’s the 60s, these interventions are pretty much all pharmacological.

In their paper entitled Drugs, Space and Cybernetics Clynes and Kline consider a host of solutions. Drugs to keep you awake and effective for days at a time, drugs to put you to sleep for long voyages, drugs to prevent radiation poisoning, drugs to keep you strong in zero gravity. If there’s a problem, drugs will solve it.

There are a few exceptions.

At one point in the paper, they consider nuclear-powered air exchangers to replace your lungs. At another point, they consider yoga and hypnotism as methods to alter and control the metabolism.

So yes, to Clynes and Kline, the people who shop at lululemon are all cyborgs.

Yet the vision of cyborg that’s stuck has been this one.

Brains jacked into computers, bodies invaded by technology, limbs and organs amputated and replaced by machines until the resulting creature is barely recognizable as human (but still very sexy).

I want to present you with a different vision of cyborgs, one that derives in part from the work of feminist theorist Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto.

In it, she argues that we are all and have always been cyborgs, hybrid entities that combine biology, culture, and technology into a single blurry unit. Haraway wants to move away from the essentialist narratives of gender, race, and politics but in doing so, she ends up taking the rest of us along with her.

There has never been a moment when we did not integrate with tools.

Our tools define and shape us, they tell us who we are. We use them to extend our literal selves out into the world. When you get into an accident, you say “she hit me” not “her car hit me” and not “her car hit my car”.

We are embraced and enveloped by the technosphere and even if we try to escape and smash the system, we find we are part of it.

Look at these guys.

Polyester shirts. Glasses. Baseball bat. Shoes. These are entities wholly dependent on non-hereditary adaptation to survive in their environments. No matter how hard they kick the fax machine.

Visions of cyborgs are all about the relationship of technology to the body.

Let’s use some iconic 80s movies to illustrate.

There is the body-terror of the Terminator, an entity that is machine first, with a thin veneer of humanity sprayed on top. Infiltrator assassins sent by a technosphere that’s decided it doesn’t need us anymore, that behaves and looks like us long enough to get close enough to kill us.

Then there’s the body-tragedy of Robocop, a person that should be dead, kept alive and made more powerful by technology. He’s made more vulnerable too. He is wholly dependent on the infrastructure that sustains him, and his will is constrained by the programming. His techno-corporate creators have failsafes and kill switches. His humanity seems always to be just slipping out of reach.

Or consider the body-revulsion of Tron, where the dream is to leave our bodies behind entirely, to upload ourselves to cyberspace and surf the digital universe as pure mind. In this version, our bodies are disposable impediments and superfluous to our true selves.

But bodies aren’t superfluous.

For my money, the vision that gets it most right is Ripley’s exoskeleton.

When she wears it, it becomes a part of her, enhancing her power and abilities. When she needs to, she can take it off again.

Technology upgrades are faster than biology, that’s the point of non-hereditary adaptation. Who has time to go into surgery every time there is a new version of the hardware? The exoskeleton shows us the appeal of non-destructive enhancement.

Consider paralympic athletes.

When they go to competition, they don’t graft the equipment on to their bodies because, next year, there’s going to be better gear. Instead, they wear interchangeable equipment that’s suited to the moment.

We are all only ever a few material or computer science advancements away from permanently implanted enhancements becoming permanently implanted impediments.

Consider Nadya Vessey.

She’s a double-leg amputee and, when she wants to, she becomes a mermaid. This is a fully functional swimming tail, designed by WETA workshop (they did special FX for Lord of the Rings and District 9).

It’s a cosmetic enhancement more than anything else. A beautiful technical marvel of a fantasy ballgown. She’d be a fool to install it permanently. Maybe in a year or two she won’t want to be a mermaid anymore.

So when you think about cyborgs, think less of images like this. Don’t think about total loss of self, bodies encroached and erased by technology, humanity swallowed whole.

Instead think of cellphones.

Think about off-loaded memories, of constantly renewed enhancement and new abilities. But also think about insistent ringtones, and demanding interruptions, think of externally controlled access, and a reliance on a sprawling infrastructure.

We are shaped by the technologies because in integrating them, they become us. And though we can discard or upgrade them, this is no less true of our cultural selves. Who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow but those possibilities are shaped and constrained by the biology, culture and technology that is part of you.

Of all the images I’ve shown you, the true cyborg looks most like this.

Look at her, wearable vision enhancements, removable cosmetic implants.

And for all we know, veins coursing with drugs and nanoblood.

This is one of 50 Post About Cyborgs a project commemorating the 50th anniversary of the coining of the term.

September 1960. That’s 50 years ago.

To commemorate, I’ve organized a project called “50 Posts About Cyborgs”. Over the course of the month, a whole gaggle of people have agreed to put up work ruminating on the use and abuse of the term. We’ve got essays, fiction, links to great older material, comics, and even a song.

It’s gonna be great.

Keep an eye on http://50cyborgs.tumblr.com and try #50cyborgs on Twitter.

Also, I recently gave a talk called Literate Games at the Second Life Community Conference. The beginning is cut off, but there is video of it posted here.

Volume #24 contains a bunch of short fiction that I co-wrote with Liam Young and Geoff Manaugh. It’s all about nano-technology and architecture.

Finally, here’s two things I wrote for The Atlantic. One is about Amazon’s uneasy relationship with enhanced ebooks. The other is about Wired’s infamous 1997 article called Push!.

This is a pretty cool demo, and the robots are neat-looking but the part of this that’s the most interesting is the problem this is solving. Listen to how often they talk about “low self-weight” and “yielding to human operators”. The top feature of these things is that they can operate in the same area as human workers without tearing their arms off.

In other words, the top-selling feature is that they figured out how to make gentle robots.

What are they finding? Secret underground airfields!

Sunchon appears to have a “1350 meter taxiway extend[ing] from the UGF [underground facility] to a point beyond the main parking aprons. This taxiway may in fact be an auxiliary runway, allowing aircraft to be prepared for flight while concealed within the UGF and then launched with little or no warning for a strike” against South Korea.

Noah Shachtman for Danger Room Online Spies Spot North Korea’s Underground Airfields

There’s a lot going on in the article.

For one thing, there is the glorious Thunderbirds/Voltron/Power Rangers (pick according to age and nostalgia) resonance.

For another, think about profoundly weird the balance between information and analysis has shifted in this arena. Instead of carefully hoarded classified satellite imagery, we have such a surfeit of data that it’s worthwhile to just let amateurs run amok.

This kind of searching isn’t just for military surveillance either. The world’s largest beaver dam was discovered using Google Earth imagery and then further analyzed by digging through historical aerial photography of the area.

In related news, amateurs are combing through the Toronto G20 videos, looking for evidence of agents provocateurs. They think they’ve found one. I don’t know what to think.

In a recent column, CBC’s Ira Basen contrasts the protection and access granted to journalists in the past…

If I was covering a war, people were less likely to shoot at me if they knew I was a journalist. If I was captured while covering that war, the Geneva Convention stipulated that I be treated as a prisoner of war, not as a spy.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

photo credit: Carl W. Heindl

…to the confusing present…

Perhaps the best way of understanding police behaviour at this juncture is to recognize that almost everyone in that crowd had some sort of camera-equipped mobile device, which meant that, in the minds of the police, almost everyone was a potential journalist.

That meant they could either give special treatment to everyone or to no one. They chose no one.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

photo credit: Carl W. Heindl

…leading to an inescapable conclusion.

But the actions of the Toronto police during the G20 summit have exposed what is perhaps an unintended consequence of this new media reality: When everyone is a journalist, no one is a journalist.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

He ends there, before taking this line of reasoning all the way to its terrifying conclusion.

2.

In Fast Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System, authors Rodney Brooks and Anita Flynn argue for a different approach to exploring the immediate planetary neighbourhood. Rather than following the usual approach of planning expensive high quality missions which, when they fail, fail catastrophically, Brooks and Flynn argue for a scattered approach. They propose swarms of low quality cheap redundant components. The benefit is that you can lose some – even many – of them without compromising the mission’s goals.

There are major problems with planning a space mission which relies solely on one large planetary rover. If a mission is restricted to such a single large robot, there is a tremendous cost associated with losing the rover and thus a rash of conservatism will develop among the mission planners.

Rodney Brooks & Anita Flynn Fast Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System [PDF]

They propose a variety of models where cheap simple robots are launched – robots that mission planners can afford to lose. The first thing Brooks and Flynn consider is machines that relay back TV images.

3.

In the wake of the G20 protests and riots in Toronto, Torontoist collects The Fourteen Essential G20 Videos. They are a mix of shots by professional film crews and people with cellphones. Only one shows any kind of serious editing. For some of the videos, links to alternate shots of the same incident are included in the commentary. Many more are suggested in the comments.

4.

The Flickr search result for “Toronto G20” returns more than 29,000 results.

photo credit: wvs

5.

When it comes to surveillance, there are two basic problems. One is not having enough information. The other is having too much information – the unspoken fourth corner of Rumsfeld’s formulation.

The first problem is relatively easy to solve. If you don’t know enough, you can throw resources at your objective. You can develop new tech, hire new people, and deploy new methods. It’s also, from an intelligence gathering agency’s perspective, a pretty good problem to have. It means you get to go to the budget committee and ask for more money.

Having unknown knowns is a harder problem, politically. It means that buried somewhere in the apparatus is information that, if you had it to hand, would be extremely useful. But you don’t. Instead, this information has a bad habit of turning up after the fact, and you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of explaining document titles like “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.” at a hearing.

The key in this circumstance is no longer information gathering, it’s information filtering.

6.

I’ve been talking about the Toronto G20 protests because they happened recently and they’ve been on my mind. But there’s nothing special about the event. This is the mass-collaboration and content creation that we get so excited about. This is Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, Lolcats, 4Chan, YTMND, Yelp, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, SETI@HOME.

This is Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus. But a cognitive surplus implies a surplus of cognition.

7.

If SETI@HOME ever succeeds, we’re going to want to know who “found” the signs. Reporters will track down which computer processed the patch of sky where the alien signals came from. They’ll compose feature stories full of little charming details about the owner of the computer, his or her family, house, and habits. It’ll start with something like, “So-and-so doesn’t seem like an ordinary such-and-such…”

The joke will be that whoever this is will have contributed exactly as much to the effort as any of the random people whose computers determined where the aliens weren’t.

8.

Think carefully about the right that Basen claims. The right to not be shot or beaten while all around you people are being shot or beaten. This is literally the status of privileged observer. Precious observer, that must be protected because there are so few of them and they are so badly needed.

The bargain was roughly thus, “We know you are going to tell a story, and we want our side of the story to be told, so if we avoid shooting at you and yours, perhaps you’ll be less inclined to tell it badly.”

That’s ending now.

photo credit: nouspique

9.

In a network of cheap ubiquitous sensors, any given node becomes disposable. At highly documented events, the rate at which recordings are made far outstrips the rate at which we can view them. Any given photo or video can be lost but the loss is not that great. Any given observer can be beaten, arrested, even killed, and the loss is not that great. At least not that much greater than if it was any other participant.

This is the terrifying endpoint that Basen does not reach. When everyone is a journalist, not only do their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people being covered, their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people consuming their work.

Had any of the fourteen essential videos been prevented from making it to the Internet, understudies fifteen through five thousand were waiting in the wings.

10.

For all the cameras, no one appears to have recorded the arrest and beating of journalist Jesse Rosenfeld. For instance.

photo credit: ricardodiaz11

Everything about the marketing of New Songdo City feels like a crazy Paleo-Future-esque throwback to the 1950s with updated stock photography. Gale International’s Google search result tagline is, no joke, “Building Tomorrow’s Communities Today”.

The very idea of a city in a box seems to have been ported whole cloth from an era of TV dinners, robot helpers, inflatable furniture, and convenience at the touch of a button. It denies a need for contextual development, or responses to local conditions. This is the machines for living and the mass manufactured utopian nightmare that we are meant to have left behind.

The city itself is explicitly a generic anyplace.

Songdo IBD boasts the wide boulevards of Paris, a 100-acre Central Park reminiscent of New York City, a system of pocket parks similar to those in Savannah, a modern canal system inspired by Venice and convention center architecture redolent of the famed Sydney Opera House.

Songdo IBD A Master Plan Inspired by the World

It feels like the only place that isn’t mentioned is the country that the city will call home – South Korea.

It’s a project reminiscent of EA’s Spore, a game which culminates in you choosing a ‘civilization architecture’ and then then flying around the universe launching seed colonies that all grow up to look the same (local conditions are only respected in that if you build the city underwater or in a poisonous atmosphere, a dome covers the works).

It’s the architecture of glossy globalism, the glittering light side of Baudrillard’s patio. It’s the consistent dream of every major franchise and perfectly appropriate to the bland abstracted face of international business. It’s BLDGBLOG’s Thirteeth Room re-conceived on a massive scale.

You can picture a William Gibson or Douglas Coupland novel; the overstressed, underslept protagonist proceeds in a haze from city to city, complaining about how all airports and hotels look the same only to find themselves in an entire city that looks the same. Have they gone mad? They’ve never been here before, they’re certain of this. But they have been. They know every street corner, every by-way. They can direct the cab driver better than the GPS.

photo credit: lostmodern.net

What about a globe-hopping sci-fi detective novel? A case sends our hero across borders. He’s ostensibly on unfamiliar ground but he knows where the dive bar where someone very much like his regular contact will be. He can find the right chop shops and has a pretty good idea of where the dealers will be, which neighbourhood will have the right kind of corrupt cops.

The effect, useful at first, becomes maddening. Identity begins to shift and blur. He knows passwords for underworld watering holes he’s never been to. He can’t remember if the dame he’s seeing now is the same as one who hired him in the first place.

In an airport lobby, he meets someone very like himself who claims he’s investigating a crime with details that eerily match our hero’s. Is it the work of a serial killer? A copycat? They pool resources.

His GPS starts going on the fritz, and it keeps showing him in different countries. He gets into scrapes, he’s beaten to unconsciousness and when he wakes up he’s not sure what continent he’s on anymore. He stumbles through the tourist district asking if anyone can tell him. No one seems to know or care.

In a hotel he’s sure he’s been to before with staff who don’t recognize him, he confronts his partner. Who is he anyway? How does he know so much about the murders? A strange coincidence that they should just meet. His partner shows him a newspaper, another murder in another city, very much like theirs but ten years before. The first city, the pilot program. It was all hushed up.

As I write these words I am sitting in the living room. Technically, it’s a porch but the easy chair, glass of afternoon beer, and somewhat stable net signal make it feel like more of a living room than the actual living room which consists of a TV too old for words and the folded mattress where I’ve been sleeping.

Technically, the porch is outside and the living room is inside, but these kinds of distinctions become academic in a situation where all doors and windows are kept as far open as they can possibly be in the hopes of promoting a cross breeze all day and all night. The porch/living room, kitchen, and living room/bedroom may as well all be pavilions in a gazebo. Only my hosts’ bedrooms are ever really sealed and only when they’ve got overnight guests. (Not that it matters, the walls are old and thin.)

photo credit: Idiolector

Some kind of mysterious transaction just went down in the back alley. I’m not supposed to have noticed it, says Aton. Best not to notice anything around here. But it was broad daylight and how could I not hear the low growl of the engine? It sounded like a gas engine, a real guzzler. Could have been a roadtone, I know, but it sounded genuine to me. I think I even saw smoke.

Last night, we went down by the canal and lit a bonfire. It was pretty nice, though I found it hard to get into at first – too nervous about cops showing up. Samantha laughed at me, said that there was nothing to worry about. Showed me how you can rewire a temp-permit and fix the dates with the right kind of data-paste. She says people leave expired permits all over. I didn’t ask where she got the paste.

In the end it didn’t matter. No one showed up aside from more friends and friends of friends. Late into the night a group split off to go to a place called something like WARHOGS or whatever, Samantha left but I decided to stay behind. Lay in the grass with a few of the quieter folk, trying to spy stars through the clouds. Had a long inchoate debate about whether the clouds or stars were moving and if it was the stars, were they really satellites or one of the stations? I tried holding my finger still as a reference but by that point everything was too wobbly to really achieve much in the way of scientific accuracy.

I wandered home in a pleasant haze.

Did I tell you? They’ve got real records here. Like antique ones, not the cheap retro ones that you can get in any old onDemand outlet. Aton says that the old ones sounds better, even though they can’t hold as many songs. They’ve got more character, he says. They last longer. I asked about their carcindex, but he just laughed. There’s a lot of really great stuff here. Bands I’d never heard of. I’ve taken some pictures and I’ll try to assemble a collection for you sometime this week.

This morning, Sam took me up on the roof to see the stills. It’s an astounding network of tubes and tubs. I tried to follow the line from rain collectors, through to the casks on the other end. I kept getting lost in the tangle. Sam says that if I stick around long enough, she’ll show me the ropes (pipes).

Pretty much everything involved comes from the rain (don’t worry, Sam made to point out their quadruple filtration and reverse osmosis system) or the freedom garden which is run by a New Organist collective just up the street. They supply the supplies and Sam supplies the resulting booze.

They’re completely illegal of course and the patchwork of tarps and scrap material can’t possibly be hiding them from Constellation. Sam says that out here we’re barely worth bothering about so they just don’t. Aton muttered something about a million eyed-god being blind.

photo credit: Dom Dada

We talked a little about tactics last night. Aton says that the privacy war is over and that the people lost. He says that our only real remaining resort is to inefficiency. It’s like when those guys flew those planes into America. Apparently, the echelons of power already knew it was coming but they knew so much other stuff as well that the information just got drowned out on the way to a decision getting made.

Aton says that when you get pick-pocketed, they get away with it because they put pressure somewhere else on your body at the same time, so you are too busy feeling the one thing to notice the other. He says the only path to freedom is to put so much pressure on the system all over the place, that it can’t notice anything at all.

Apparently there was an old philosopher who hated the government too, who used to say “starve the beast” but Aton says that’s all passed now. You could cut half the surveillance feeds at the swipe of a pen (as if!) and we’d still have more than enough information being fed into the echelon – it wouldn’t impact things at all. So he and Sam are taking the opposite approach.

We’re going out tonight, with bags and bags of sensors and cameras that we’re going to set up and donate to the public feeds. Some of these devices are faulty in all sorts of really interesting ways. We’re going to put them up all over the place, in the least interesting places possible. We’re going to do this for weeks and weeks, just adding more and more mud to the stream.

I also heard Sam say something to Aton about the Russians renting some time on one of their botnets. I think the plan is to put those spam engines to emancipatory use, replacing sex ads with Home Sec keywords. I heard a rumour that their analysis engines are already months behind in processing. They’ll stay that way so long as we can keep the heat on to deny them future budget expansions (all the more reason to ask our brothers and sisters in the capital to redouble their lobbying efforts).

I don’t know if it’ll amount to much in the end, but it seems like the only path we’ve got left.

“Drown the beast.”

Ada

photo credit: urban_data