November 2008
First Akvo Video - What is Akvopedia?
First video from my new collaboration with Akvo, an open source water charity, working on getting ultra low cost videos made which explain their operations and make Akvo more transparent. This is 30 minutes from Mark on Akvopedia which is an open water technology resource. For commentary and making of, see The Akvo Blog. We’re going to be doing a lot more of these in the next few weeks. Enjoy!
I am now in London
Rapid move to take a gig with AKVO (everybody’s favorite water appropriate tech outfit!) helping out with a number of things, including video.
So… game on. Who do I need to be meeting?! 
Bruce Sterling on cameras with inbuilt crypto
Sterling has an excellent bit about “information munitions” - little cameras with cryptographic signatures and GPS to verify time and place an image was created at, and audit trails on image modification.
It’s interesting that, even without all that, a camera phone can still rock the world.
I left this comment on Worldchanging years ago, and I distinctly remember the concept, but I’m totally unable to find where The Chairman talked about it. There’s a Viridian Note which discusses the idea, but I could swear that there’s a Sterling rant where he discusses dropping thousands of cameras with forensic features into war zones as human rights monitoring tools. Cascio discussed an “earth witness” phone too at one point, but that wasn’t it.
Anybody with a mind like a steel trap or access to insane search skills able to find it? It might have been in a video or audio talk by Sterling which would explain why it isn’t indexed. Can We Find it?
International Renewable Energy Agency
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) will integrate regional clean energy progress into a coordinated, global effort. It will provide political recommendations, and identify funding for renewable technologies. Moreover, IRENA will seek to even the playing field for countries that have had difficulty affording investment in renewable energy. To this end, the agency will fund its budget with contributions by member-countries on a sliding scale with unindustrialized countries paying less.
This is what I mean by “getting the international level right.”
I am a citizen of the planet, my president is Kwan Yin…
Really, really good and interesting song.
Just a little cheesy, but really nails a sense of the re-opening of the future.
I’m packing for London. I have a feeling that I’m going to be doing a lot more traveling in the next couple of years than in the last few, so I’m sort of assembling “standard kit” as I go, figuring out what I need from the rats next of cables and odd converters. Things which don’t charge off USB pain me, and these days the cables are bigger than the electronics.
It’s strange packing against 40 Kg. I wish I had a scale (I may well pick one up) but it’s more the sense of fitting through the eye of a needle. Fortunately or unfortunately I no longer travel with tent and water filter and walkie talkies. It’s the suit and the extra batteries, the mobile studio basically. There’s a few hundred bucks of expensive audio gear that’s probably just too big and heavy to make the cut, I suppose I’ll post it.
The hard part was that brief period where I travelled with both sets of gear. It’s been a few years now.
Two laptops, a terabyte of storage, two cameras, two microphones, cabling, chargers, batteries… a few years from now it’s going to be vastly different, smaller, more integrated devices, terabytes everywhere, probably things like phased array microphones… in the future, every device will be a video output device. Editing will be more and more the critical point: how little time can you make delivering your message take.
There’s probably a rule there: every time you half the length, you multiply the potential audience by 10. I suspect that’s about right.
So right now I’m trying to figure out how to simplify my message by another factor of two or four. I’ve spent a couple of years getting the depth in place - there’s now four or six hours of video and a dozen or so papers and long articles which flesh out the deep theoretical models - enough for a book, enough for people who care to dig through and understand my chain of thought about the world much as I understand it.
Now what I have to do is simplify it for people who just want to do it.
That’s a shift from a basically academic and reflective model to a model of active propagation: not teasing out what is right, but trying to inspire people to change their behavior in helpful ways.
Active persuasion.
The fundamental vision of the movement is shared to at least the same degree as the vision of the original free software movers and shakers. Shared enough to get the job done. Enough is held common to enable mass collaboration.
That wasn’t obvious to me until I spent some time talking to people at Global Swadeshi and it became apparent that we all spoke the same language and had come to broadly similar conclusions. And now, implementation.
Arr. London this weekend or early next week.
Estimated time of stay: two months minimum.
Will likely be back in Iceland after that.
Gay marriage and neo-phobia: Keith Olbermann on Proposition 8
I think one thing that’s being missed here is that Mormons feel exactly this way about polygamy in many cases. If a man loves a woman, and another woman, and another woman, why are they not free to marry?
If it is about love…
I really do understand the practical problems with polygamy in a Mormon context may be mainly issues of power, culture and status - that these are not marriages between equals, perhaps. I’m not going to speak to that here, that is a complex matter in conventional one-on-one hetro-sexual marriages too for some people. I feel, however, that once you decide that love is the issue, it is impossible to argue that two people can love in a way that three cannot and be absolutely sure of the statement in all cases. Muslims, too, who may have multiple spouses in their home country but are not free to marry multiple times here, may well feel oppressed by the status quo.
Everybody acts as if the LDS has no understanding of the plight of gay people. How could they possibly take this stand against the rights of others to marry as they will. I think, though, they may understand all too well what it is like to have society’s version of marriage pushed on you and there may be more than a little of “well, if they can have their exception to the rules, why cannot we have ours?”
Suppose both groups get what they want, and we now have a definition of marriage which permits a group of any size (3 can love, but 4 cannot?) with any mix of genders. We have now expanded marriage in a way which could easily generate permutations which are more at home in science fiction, like line marriages.
I want you to understand that for people who’s parents, grand parents and great-grand parents married, one upon another, with presumed and never questioned perfect faithfulness, in a model passed down from time immemorial at least in this one culture, the idea of a group of sixty marrying over a period of a hundred years, and calling it marriage, and having the same status in society and in relationship to the government… this idea is a little daunting. In fact, it is like a cultural earthquake, shaking the assumptions about what is real and unreal, and about marriage as an act connoting a shared home, children and perhaps even white picket fences.
They fear it. They fear the change, the loss of a system which is known. They imagine their sons and daughters with funny same-gender ornaments on their wedding cakes, shattering patterns of life which have become mythic. This fear breeds anger, and resentment, and hatred.
Some people find rules comforting. They like to know that tomorrow and yesterday will be similar because they were OK yesterday, and if tomorrow and yesterday are similar, that probably means they will be OK tomorrow too. This is a reasonable neo-phobia which may well be adaptive at a species level.
Others, however, are wired to seed boundaries and edges, to push into tomorrow’s territory and claim it as their own.
Here is my proposed solution.
I believe America should establish four separate categories of marriage:
* one-on-one hetrosexual
* one-on-one same sex
* polygamy / polyandry (shared spouse)
* polyamorous (any combination of men/women)
Those who wish to privilege the older, common form of marriage may do so. Those who wish to lean into evolution’s edge may do so. Marriages are recognized as being typed, and there is space for special case legal forms to evolve to handle tricky cases which may take years to come up in case law to be examined, like disposal of property in partial dissolution of a polyamorous marriage.
The simple step of leaving the conventional form of marriage alone, but placing it alongside new forms which reflect the perfectly reasonable desires of those who love in other ways seems to resolve most of the sticking points in the current situation. The old can be left unchanged as long as enough room is made for the new beside it.
This struggle has been going on since the 1960s, and really through all time in one form or another. It’s not my struggle: I’ve tended towards a very conventional serial monogamy, but I fully support those who want more choices in their life, and equal support from their society in those novel choices.
CheapID - Rights Respecting Biometrics
Links to the paper, the Drupal implementation, and so on.
Great maps showing the 2004 -> 2008 shift county by county
These maps of county-by-county shifts are really amazing.
The interesting conclusion - the south moved significantly to the Republican end, even in 2008. That should worry people.
Palin 2012: Pulling the Dragon’s Teeth
In a lot of ways, the new year begins now. With a McCain / Palin presidency, the general atmosphere right now would be panic, horror, fleeing - a draft, total loss of faith in America and possibly in democracy (it would have taken massive fraud, for starters) and so on. Right now, the people feel they have spoken, and that somebody they believe in is in charge.
There’s two sets of problems we face, however. The first are the real, serious and non-partisan problems of America. The country is going broke because of the actions of generations, not just a few rich assholes with banks. The historical trend away from manufacturing, towards virtual wealth, towards mortgaging the future, the ecological situation, the need for sweeping updates in the basic institutions of the society… all that stuff is very real and presents massive challenges. We can all agree that much of the current crisis was caused by pointing the boat the wrong way in a storm, but the storm is real and ongoing.
The second set of problems are Bush-II-era damage. To the constitution. To faith in the goodness of America. To society itself. The absolute botches in financial deregulation and massive government spending on, frankly, all the wrong things. You know the story here as well as I do.
What America has is better leadership in an historic crisis. To say this crisis was created by the outgoing administration is a mistake: they mishandled the ongoing crisis, but they did not create the patterns of shifting economic activity which are making American-style borrow-and-spend economies untenable. They did not make the housing bubble. Invading Iraq may well have been madness, but 9/11 still happened, and the long and slow encounter between western secularism and Islam has been getting increasingly complicated and fraught for generations.
The President cannot make it all better. I’m going to repeat that.
The President cannot make it all better. And it’s not all the fault of the admittedly-incompetent outgoing regime.
There is no amount of government action or intervention which is going to fix all of this. There is no plan from the top down which will balance the books while simultaneously giving every American everything they (feel they) are entitled to. The dreamworld of a continually richer tomorrow, of maintaining the wealth disparity which was created in the 1950s when the US has the lion’s share of global manufacturing and was the only industrial power who’s territory was not ravaged by war… that time is gone now.
Obama cannot return us to 1998, before the chickens came home to roost. To expect him to do so is to set him up for failure.
What the new Democratic administration can do is controlled descent. They can, hopefully, get the plane on to the runway on the last dregs of fuel with one engine shot off, rather than the McCain/Palin team, which would likely have “landed” the plane into a sheer cliff face. But when stuff has been so far out of alignment, built on cooked books for generations, when expectations and reality have been divergent for untold decades… the Democratic party cannot make the American dream work again.
No one can.
I’ve talked elsewhere about the need to replace the American Dream with a Global Reality. Here’s what I mean by that.
1> No more screwing around burning planetary resources on futile wars while tens of millions of people lack food, toilets and other basic essentials. It’s obscene for the “civilized” nations of the developed world to keep up this farce. The cold war is over, get over it.
2> Environment. NOW! Or we’re going to face a scenario which makes the financial crisis look like the very least of our unpaid debts coming due. Nanosolar, Konarka and algal turf scrubbers are top rank national security type activities, not hippies. We need to wise up on this in a hurry.
3> International relations. Fifty years, maybe four or five Bad Presidents. Who’s on the list, that’s a matter of choice. But US democracy is too fragile, to unstable, and too prone to put whack jobs in the white house for us to globally consider the US as a Sole Superpower a reasonable or safe option. Fortunately the synchronicity of a need for hedging political bets globally coinciding with the US’s inability to maintain that Sole Superpower status has offered a simple and clear path to the future: multilateral alliances, including nations like China and Russia, to maintain the global equilibrium of the future. If the US continue s to go it alone, the next Cowboy President (Palin 2012) could well destroy the world, and we need to have everybody get oriented to that reality: a bad president in the US should not wreck the planet, and it’s in the US’s interests to enter into the agreements which would balance US power internationally now, because that’s also what relieves the enormous global security load the US is currently carrying.
It is a multi-lateral future. It cannot be otherwise.
Does this reflect flaws in democracy? No, not really. It’s an artifact of the precise implementation of US democracy - first past the post in an age of extremely split, factionalized and mutually-counterbalancing political interests. Plus the resurgence of an almost medieval theology.
But it does mean that building a multilateral global order as a hedge against President Palin or a similar debacle in 2012 or 2016 is a critical order of business for the current US administration. To re-tie the hands of future presidents, away from the Imperial Power Switch cannot be done only from within America. Regional security alliances, treaties, pushing of security to the edges, to networks of smaller players, even (god forbid) to the UN in some cases is a necessary hedge. We have seen the danger of the unitary executive, and it is not clear that anybody knows how to harden US democracy against it (ban signing statements? remake the supreme court with people with spines?)
The challenge is how to hedge against American political instability while at the same time preserving America’s leadership in setting the moral tone at an international level in individual human rights. We need that vision, of the Founding Fathers, and of some previous administrations as a light to the world. But it can no longer be accompanied by an unchallenged Big Stick at a military level without endangering both the US and the rest of the world. The temptation is simply too much to be left in one pair of hands, and we do not know how far the next swing to the right will be in the States.
This is, without a doubt, a hell of a thing to say, but I’ve said it: the US needs to build international alliances to counterbalance US power, to restrain the actions of future presidents who may abuse the unitary executive power established by Bush and supported by the Supreme Court and various other spineless US political entities that have been failing into provide an effective internal counterbalance.
A sad day, but Palin 2012 is no joke.