Presenting the final transcription, the longest excerpt from Bruce Sterling’s closing speech at SXSW, which takes us into the third chunk of it’s rough recording.

I hope it moves you, like it moved me.

[After much deserved ripping on the Catholic Church..]

The population sits on the couch and plays video games. Terrified.

The US.. come back from Europe, hanging out in the US.. first thing you see in the US is obese people. It’s calamitous. And they weren’t like that in 1975… but imagine if the Statue Of Liberty looked like that? You came in to New York Harbor, Staten Island.. the Statue of Liberty was clocking in at around 350 pounds. Maybe she had a Wii exercise bat instead of a torch. It brings out one’s inner Bill Hicks, ladies and gentlemen. God bless the guy, where ever he is, if he was looking down at Texas right now he would not be a happy man. He’d be scolding you worse than me.

So, you know, it’s pretty bad and it’s sleazy and it’s kind of frozen and crazy and we all know that and we pay no attention to it and kinda hope it just goes away on its own. That’s the one attitude Americans fully share with Italians now and that’s what worries me. What worries me is the response to things that really require courage and focused effort and Passionate Virtuosity to carry out.  Like, say, earthquake rescue.

Just go read what happened to L’Aquila. The small, beautiful, medieval town that was leveled by an Italian earthquake. Italians, they know what earthquakes are, they know what volcanoes are, they even know what tsunamis are.. the one massive horror the Japanese have named for everybody else, ’cause they get more of it than everybody else. At least they know what to do when it happens. L’Aquila happened, nothing much went on.. TV appearances.. cheer leading.. the place is still a wreck.

And for us it was that BP offshore oil mess. Freaking nothing happened. Government did nothing. They were not capable of doing it. They pretended to be able to do something. Suppose it had been ten times worse? You think there’s another government somewhere, that was gonna help people from the consequences of an industrial catastrophe like that? So clearly outlined, and there’s nuclear things happening in Japan.. they’re in there working around the clock. Who would save us from a BP?

They’re incapable of rapid, decisive action. The world sometimes demands that of people. You can’t sit on the couch eating chips and maneuvering, verbally, all the time. Like a Gothic Mansion, like a Vampire Geyser, instead of a President.

There’s infinite wars on Abstract Nouns. Wikileaks and Facebook, which freaking didn’t even exist as entities maybe 5 years ago, they’ve got more political clout on the planet right now than the State Department and the Pentagon combined! It’s a weird situation and it’s not something to applaud [as they audience starts applauding and quickly stops] but everybody knows it. They’re all reading the State Dept cables going “this is awful.. I can’t believe they’re so helpless.. why does no one listen to them? They have no class” The calamity. It’s like Gothic torpor in a coffin of earth.

So what? They pretend to govern, we pretend to obey. Italians do that now.. Americans do that now.. Soviets used to do that.. that’s what they were great at, maintaining the pretense that it was alright.

Who’s the real.. who are the real victims of a decaying status quo? Who suffers when your society is incapable of focused action or intentional innovation? It’s young people. It’s people under 25 who are the victims of a decaying status quo. It’s a Gerontocracy. The demographics are easy to predict. Nobody ever looks at them, because nobody ever wants to get old. One of the main reasons these guys can’t do anything, they’re too damn old, ladies and gentlemen.

Berlusconi and his crowd are people in their 70s and they’ve got the younger people outnumbered. The reason Egypt won, is it’s a huge number of kids.. they were just able to outnumber and beat up the cops in the street.. they threw Mubarak out because they had the numbers game on him. That’s not what happened in the Developed World. They are.. the people under 25.. unemployed people.. you know ‘em, you may be them.. they’re a minority, they’re a disenfranchised minority now. AND I WANT TO FORMALLY DECLARE MY PASSIONATE SOLIDARITY WITH THE MILLENNIALS! Boomers, SHUT THE HELL UP!

…

What’s left of our Civil Rights that you campaigned for? The one thing you might brag about, death of Totalitarianism and national governments. All national governments are weak now, yours is weak.. everyone else’s is weak for [the] same reasons. That’s alright, Totalitarianism.. seeing that off is a great achievement.  1989, your high water mark. Get the heck out of the way. Pack it in Boomers!

What you should be studying right now? Collaborative Consumption. Technomadism. De-materialize people. Vanish! Let it go, give it away. Share it or stop it. Stop clinging to your entitlements. You’re like some kind of Dickensian, Gothic creatures now.  You’re turning in to Miss Havisham, with a wedding cake covered with spiders.

You’re top-heavy with age. You’ve got the votes and the money, you’ve got no conscience. Get out of the way. Over the long term your attitude is fatal. You must support younger people. Who is going to feed you? Who is going to supply those entitlements? What medical care will you have? What pension? What security?

Precarious employment for people who’s excess wealth is supposed to be underwriting your security? It’s built on sand! You are not looking in the longer term there. You are sucking the blood of your children! You’re like those Twilight guys. This Edward, 110 year old character, still hanging out in High School. Hitting on this moody, Mormon High School chick. There’s a reason why that’s the fable of your times, it’s like you.

Get the fuck away!

You need to take power, Millennials. I’ll vote for ya. I’ll do it! I’m groovy. I’ll sleep on the floor with ya. I’ll live out of a backpack. I’ll be precarious. Proud and pleased to do it, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to adulthood.

You know what you guys need? A global youth movement, good old fashioned style. You need a general strike. They’re not gonna employ you, get the hell away from them. See if they can wash their own dishes, flip their own burgers.

Move to Austin. Leave wherever you are, move to Austin. Take over the town.. take over regional governments. Just withdraw from places that are top heavy with the elderly people, they can’t stop ya. Make friends with the Army and the Cops.. you are the Army and the Cops! You’re not gonna see any 60 year old guys who are in the Army and Cops, they’re not gonna hit you with sticks. They’re all guys your own age, beating you up in order to disadvantage themselves.

And don’t listen to any grey-haired professors explaining why change is impossible. This is an era of Organized Deception, where it takes tremendous effort just to speak factually about simple consequences of our real life. The incompetence of the Powers That Be hangs over your future life like a shroud…

Days of Rage, baby!

Continuing my transcription of Bruce Sterling’s excellent SXSW closing speech. Here are excerpts 2 and a bit:

[Discussion of Craig Venter's visit to SXSW, Drew Endy's work with igen and how it's funded by Exxon Mobil's 600 million donation brings us to..]

He [Drew Endy] makes no bones about global warming. He went to great pains to point that out, that his techniques may in fact suck carbon out of the air and, you know, avert or at least delay a colossal calamity.. that Exxon Mobil has just spent three decades lying to us about it, all the time. These guys are the personification of corporate evil in the world today.. Exxon Mobil, I mean if anybody’s board of directors belongs in prison for Crimes against Humanity, it’s these guys. They didn’t force us to put a tiger in our tank. But the tiger they unleashed with these emissions ate Brisbane this year. They’re not the only malefactors, they’re just the best politically connected and he’s making them pay weregild for that.

It’s an allegiance between these malefactors and this visionary. Now the blood of drowned and parched and starving people is gonna be on the hands of those guys in that organization and their fellow travelers on K Street and around Washington, DC. It’s just a fact, nobody can say it out loud. Here,  yeah. In every area where they control the means of expression, hell no.

Just look at HB Gary, if you want an example of the kind of guys… You’re hackers, OK, you don’t care about this, but I bet you care plenty about Wikileaks and Anonymous… These guys are sitting there with heaps of sock-puppets attacking free expression for their corporate masters, and denying global warming by the way, because that’s what pays these cyberwar mercanaries.

Now, if we had it together, the population would give the guy [Endy] 600 million dollars. We’d be in the streets demanding that he be funded… we’d watch him like a rockstar, everywhere he went. We’d know about his girlfriend, his boyfriend, whatever. We’d just be on top of this, because we had it together as a society to recognise our best interests and carry it out politically.

If Texans understood this, they’d be in the street for wind power right now. Oil’s at $325 a barrel and two nuclear power plants just caught fire. And people do freaking nothing about it! You could go out there and make your relatives in West Texas rich over this; Texas has fantastic wind power. Nobody gets out of their seat to do a damn thing about it. Where is the popular pressure for this? Why aren’t social-networks abuzz with this?

Why don’t you take to the streets and paralyse Austin, Madison, Wisconsin-style? ‘Cause that’s your sister city and they’re coming for you, ladies and gentleman. They’re coming for you, get ready!

…

I was in this place, it happened to be Google’s corporate headquarters, their lobby headquarters in Washington, watching people.. exquisitely well informed, brilliantly educated, Washington mandarins. People from industry and government, as if there’s a difference any more. And they were discussing, you know, the potential implications of this thing. Their air of utter helplessness and detachment was shocking to me. I mean, really, 15 year old kids from Cairo could have kicked these guys to the curb.. they could’ve taken their lunch money. That’s how ineffectual they were. And god help them if that building caught fire; they would issue a whitepaper.. before the exacuation. So, that’s pretty bad..

Since there isn’t a decent recording online, and as a gift to the Future, I’ve started the process of transcribing key chunks of Bruce Sterling’s closing speech at SXSW, which I’ll post over the coming days, as I complete them. This is taken from this rough recording and maybe a better recording will surface soon, but here you go for now, because he’s saying a lot of stuff here that needs to be said:

It’s very difficult to talk about politics, because all the political language has been rendered toxic. It’s just decades of Culture War now.. reduced all the nouns and verbs to rubble so, you know, it’s either ‘blood sucking bankster[?] moguls’ or ‘socialists punishing success’ and everybody in politics has learned how to deploy this kind of polarising ‘brand management.’ Culture War there is just all over the place.. [The] US has a very bad case of this, but not the worst case in the world, ’cause I’ve seen it worse and we’re gonna get into that.

So I’d like to talk about politics from the point of view of the Design Critic, really.. ’cause I am a Design Critic.. generally I criticise stuff that doesn’t exist yet, that’s kind of a metier for me, as someone that’s a Futurist science-fiction writer. Of course I’m interested in things that have one foot in fantasy and maybe a toe in reality, stuff like Augmented Reality, Generative Art, Design Fiction. Are they good or bad? Are they interesting or boring? Are they cool ideas? I spend a lot of time accumulating cool ideas. I’m a zealot for this. If you want cool ideas, like cool, political ideas.. techno-political [ideas], here you go, World Changing 2.0 is just out.

It’s great, it’s got thousands of ideas. They’re pre-sorted, almost kind of practical, cool out there, fabulous, well illustrated, beautifully designed, nifty keen.. an endless parade of ‘em. But from the point of view of a critic, like a culture critic, are they really good ideas? It’s not enough that there are huge numbers of them. Cause that’s just kind of a sci-fi notebook approach. What you really need to have critical success it’s pretty simple and it’s Passionate Virtuosity.

It took me a long time, I had to read a bunch of boring critical stuff to figure that out, but that’s really what it’s about in the Arts or Design. And what does that mean? Well first you gotta find someone who really cares about what he’s doing and he’s capable of higher than average performance (she is), and that would be Passionate. Then they’ve gotta be really, really capable of doing it, they’ve mastered the minutiate of it, just on top of their game, performance wise, and that’s Virtuosity.

So typically in a writer’s career, any creative person really, you’ve got the opening period where they’re super passionate, full of burning things to do, sometimes they actually set fire to stuff.. wild rebels.. eager, hard charging, youth fervour there. Then at the end of their career they’re very much masters of their field, but they don’t really feel like doing much. They’ve found their favourite easy chair, they like to make wise-cracks about younger people.. and somewhere in the middle there, is Passionate Virtusoity. Where they still really want to do it, and they’ve got some kind of burning energy and motivation and they’re also really great at it..this are the works that are the peak of their whatever.

[Bruce holds up WorldChanging 2.0] So the ideas in this thing kind of lack Virtuosity, ’cause they’re speculative. They’re not gone into in great detail. So though there’s a lot of passion in the book, it lacks people who have been able to pick it up and deploy it. Now, if these ideas and approaches and tools in this book were actually deployed in our society, our society would improve radically and it would be better by almost every metric. But we’re not getting there because we don’t have the political will and we also don’t have the organisational skill and also we’ve just got a series of problems that are poorly recognised.

The passage of time turns Cyberpunks into Design Professors, or in the case of my pal Rudy Rucker, a Mathematics Professor, and we end up practicing a lot of Attention Philanthropy; bring attention to stuff as critics rather than creatives. Teaching in design school, rather than designing stuff, so forth and so on. Politically in our society, we don’t have any Passionate Virtuosity. If you look at it objectively, as a political situation, it’d be the polar opposite of Passionate Virtuosity. If there was a term for that, it’d be Disgusted Incompetence. It’d be a good term for what’s going on..

French street artist JR presents the evolution of his art projects here in this recording of his TED Prize wish:

There’s a serious amount of ThereIsNoThey‘ness to his work and I hope his new insideoutproject is even more successful in achieving these goals.

Here’s Adam Greenfield‘s excellent, thought-provoking keynote at the recent Cognitive Cities conference in Berlin – On Public Objects: Connected Things And Civic Responsibilities In The Networked City

Related:

• Incidental Media vs Invasive Advertising

Here’s a selection of short clips from TechCrunch TV’s Andrew Keen interview with The Chairman, Bruce Sterling, at this year’s SXSW.

Watch the full selection on Tech Crunch: part1 & part2.

via Technoccult & @doingitwrong.

Mr Matthew Plymale, student of Computer Engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, has sent in a most interesting submission:

Background: Engineering is evolving to acknowledge several facts: that engineers have multi-disciplinary skills, that those skills can benefit people already working in other fields, that engineers place great emphasis on the integrity of their professional practice on a global scale, that engineers have ethical and social responsibilities for their creations, and that engineers can be agents of change. These changes are causing engineers (and engineering education) to look beyond the textbook, to the world outside, and causing them to make themselves available for potentially radical projects without corporate interest or backing.

Engineers can build it for you

There has always been an unspoken battle of ideas between scientists and engineers. From the scientist’s perspective, the scientist comes up with the theoretical and experimental foundations for technology, while the engineer simply turns that work into money. From the engineer’s perspective, the scientist thinks about doing great things, but it takes an engineer to do them. The scientist prides himself in making things make sense. the engineer prides himself in making things work. Part of the animosity stems from the fact that scientists tend to work at universities, and engineers tend to work in corporations or consulting firms.

Recently, there has been a push in engineering education to impose the desire upon the engineer to expand beyond his specific field, and make connections. Economics can be modeled by artificial agents; The risk of a medical device to malfunction can be modeled with numerical methods; Start-ups can benefit from engineering processes to quickly get organized. The drive to make those connections used to come from entrepreneurs who could stand to make a buck from marketing that knowledge. Increasingly, we see engineers taking their knowledge on the road, to build networks, stir people to action and enable change. Unfortunately, engineers tend to be a quiet bunch, preferring to bow out of policy-making and protest-organizing.

We left it to the hobby-makers and high-tinkerers to come up with innovative gadgets use and languages to speak with. But what we used to relegate to the weekend project is now becoming sorely needed. While it seems the desire for change and tools to enact that change is stronger than ever, the change agents of today don’t seem to know how to get there. They are experimenting with different methods, some radical and some subtle. Engineers can no longer isolate themselves from the quickening pace outside.

The engineer does not necessarily care how you feel about a topic. He wants to know what you need.

“I need a global communication grid.”  ”Done.”

“I need something to protect me from Big Brother” ”Take this, now they can’t track you”

“I need some cyborg wings” ”Do you prefer a matte or gloss finish?”

Part of the problem is that engineers do not advertise themselves very well. The same technology I use to build a multiplayer game can be used to send encrypted messages to and from oppressed dissidents. I have to take responsibility for the fact that my creations have a broader impact, whether good or bad. I am ready to take on that responsibility (it is written into our code), and until now, I thought other people would ask me to build those tools. Maybe the best approach is to build it and send it out into the world, and hope it is picked up by the people who need it?

If you find yourself with a challenge involving politics, economics, medicine, AND human rights, maybe you should ask an engineer. Because we can build it for you.

* Title Credit goes to Phillip K. Dick (author of “We can build you” and “We can remember it for you wholesale”)

I like this. I like this a lot! I am very fond of the work being done by Geeks Without Bounds for the same reasons. Thank you, Matthew.

The following video is Google’s soon to be ex-CEO, Eric Schmidt, presenting to IFA 2010 a vision to create an ‘age of Augmented Humanity’; it also features demos of then new GoogleTV and various new automagical apps for Android. It goes for an hour, if that’s too long, there’s the cliff-notes version over on GIGAOM.

Now I love Accelerando and other such SF novels as much as the next post-cyberpunk, so the idea of my own personal AGI has its appeal. And so long as we don’t up with the world’s most annoying Microsoft Paperclip, I’m cool with that. BUT.. there’s a few holes in this vision, at least the way I see it.

Primarily, that it’s based on a nice smooth vision of the future, projected from an ideal yesterday.

Foremost being that these automagical apps they’re demoing seem to be designed to solve middle class problems. And, if you’re paying attention, the middle class is vanishing. Which leaves the over-educated and/or under/un-employed on one side and the global elite on the other. Neither of which need help buying shoes while visiting Berlin (the example given for Conversation Mode of Google Translate.) The Favela Chic (as Sterling calls them; soon to be, if not already, us) will gladly take the free OSs and services, but won’t be clicking on ads. Nor will the Global Elite (see: The Rise of the New Global Elite, if you haven’t already). If they want translation services, they’ll hire a human with 100% accuracy.

And it’s advertising that Google are and shall continue to use to monetize their system. Maybe I’m the only one that find the ads before popular YouTube clips (and nearly every other video streaming service) highly annoying.. a tax, no less, that I refuse to pay. Just as I never click on the ads that appear in search results or gmail, I don’t even see them. But then I don’t use loyalty cards either, and all of these things are apparently popular. For the moment.

So, point number two. The mythical always on high-speed network, the various flavours of delicious mobile and wired broadband. Which it is. Mostly. In cities (where we’re told the population will continue to centre themselves in). In what we used to call the first-world. Which have largely been under-invested in infrastructure thanks to widespread implementation of economic rationalism. So that a tiny, weany little thing called the weather breaks it. Snowed under, cables freeze and snap. Floods shut off power stations. Hurricanes and tornadoes etc etc. Life in the 21C. All the supercomputers are still there in the Cloud, but inaccessible.. useless. Also, there’s the little thing of being in a country that decides to just shut off the internet. That too.

So, think a few years ahead. You’ve all read about the potential of biocomputing and have been pirating tv shows and movies for years (partly because they have the advertising already chopped out of them) thanks to.. what’s that? Peer to Peer technologies. What if the Favela Chic-types figure out how to homebrew, say in 5years, in DIYbio labs, their own supercomputers and seed their own clouds? Google.. you say? I remember them.

Even this year we could see open-source phones that can create and communicate across their own mesh network; it’s not hard to do this with the Android platform, and the openmoko project also has a lot of potential. There’s a reason WalMart busted ass to be the first help out the victims of Katrina. That because there’s no reason that leaderless, self-organising groups couldn’t themselves pour into the next city or area that is the next victim of heavy weather, with just this tech to distribute, donated from hackerspaces local and abroad. Because everyone’s connected now; if they don’t know someone directly affected, they know someone that knows someones that is.

Now, I’ll jump back into this from another angle, in another post, shortly, but suffice to say: a top-down, device to network to cloud computer and back again, automagical friendly (not in any way censored.. oh no, heaven forbid) solution looks awful nice yesterday; but in today’s world, which is just a preview of tomorrow’s.. it’s already looking like wishful thinking. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but these are increasingly dramatic times.

Third and finally, do we really want to merge with the Googleplex? To become Google’borgs? Because that’s what this ‘Age of Augmented Humanity’ amounts to. Now, believe me, I’m all for the continued co-evolution between man and his tools, BUT.. I’m also, clearly, emphasising the importance of questioning and critiquing this.  And doing it ourselves, with full control.

Fundamentally, it comes down to two questions: how much trust will you place in an Algorithm? and how much is your data really worth? To be continued..

The LIFT 11 conference just concluded in Geneva, Switzerland. I’ve picked the two most interesting talks to post here, but there’s many others of course, and please feel free to post your favourites in the comments.

Hasan Elahi: Giving away your privacy to escape the US terrorist watch list

Hasan will tell us his incredible story: he was suspected of terrorism by the FBI by mistake, and ended up living totally in public to protect himself from surveillance. His talk will show how forfeiting your privacy can in fact become a new form of protection of your identity.

Hasan concludes his talk by saying that if we all did what he does the intelligence community would be overwhelmed with information. Wrong; the NSA and others like it already do this. How? Algorithms running on incredibly powerful computer systems. Arguably a new lifeform, perhaps evolving to become the dominant one, if we believe the Singularitarians. Or is that already the case and we just haven’t realised it yet?

Kevin Slavin: Those algorithms that govern our lives

Digital technologies and on-line platforms are essential to the way we work and live. Interestingly, they are defined by algorithms which are not neutral. Kevin will discuss how they define new social norms and how our culture is affected by the possibilities embedded in the software we use.

Making these machines, the group explains, is 8 times cheaper than buying them from manufacturers, on average. And in a world where resources might be scarcer than we anticipate more quickly than we anticipate, their ambitious project could prove to be a vital one. They’re publishing the full schematics and diagrams on their Wiki, so anyone can use them once shit goes Mad Max. If the internet still works, that is. OK, maybe you should print them out now just to be safe.

Via Gizmodo.

In the film Plastic Bag, the title character spends a lifetime (or more) on a quest for a creator not even aware of his existence. A stunning short by Ramin Bahrani, director of Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo, Plastic Bag is both a postmodern spiritual pilgrimage and an ecological fable.

Via Next Nature.

Railroad cars carrying some 123 tons of nuclear waste glow red-hot in an infrared picture taken in Valognes (map), France, in November and released by Greenpeace International as part of an antinuclear-power campaign that included arranging protests that delayed the train’s progress.

The train is hauling a so-called CASTOR convoy, named after the type of container carried: Cask for Storage and Transport Of Radioactive material. These trademarked casks have been used since 1995 to transport nuclear waste from German power plants to France for reprocessing, then back to Germany for storage.

“High-level waste is in fact hot,” said nuclear energy and proliferation expert Matthew Bunn. “It doesn’t mean anything in particular in terms of how dangerous it is.”

From nationalgeographic.

In these seemingly dire times, optimism can be a revolutionary act.

Here’s two quick doses:

• Dose 1: Charles Stross’s Reasons to be Cheerful:
  

  There’s been enormous progress in genomics; we’re now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand. While the anticipated firehose of genome-based treatments hasn’t materialized, we now know why it hasn’t materialized, and it’s possible to start filling in the gaps in the map. Turns out that sequencing the human genome was merely the start. (It’s not a blueprint; it’s not even an algorithm for generating a human being. Rather, it’s like a snapshot of the static data structures embedded in an executing process. Debug that.) My bet is that we’re going to have to wait another decade. Then things are going to start to get very strange in medicine.

• Dose 2: a fan-made promo clip for NASA:

  

This is the full text of A Biopunk Manifesto (an update of A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto), as delivered by Meredith Patterson at the UCLA Outlaw Biology Symposium, January 29th-30th, 2010.

Scientific literacy is necessary for a functioning society in the modern age. Scientific literacy is not science education. A person educated in science can understand science; a scientifically literate person can *do* science. Scientific literacy empowers everyone who possesses it to be active contributors to their own health care, the quality of their food, water, and air, their very interactions with their own bodies and the complex world around them.

Society has made dramatic progress in the last hundred years toward the promotion of education, but at the same time, the prevalence of citizen science has fallen. Who are the twentieth-century equivalents of Benjamin Franklin, Edward Jenner, Marie Curie or Thomas Edison? Perhaps Steve Wozniak, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard or Linus Torvalds — but the scope of their work is far narrower than that of the natural philosophers who preceded them. Citizen science has suffered from a troubling decline in diversity, and it is this diversity that biohackers seek to reclaim. We reject the popular perception that science is only done in million-dollar university, government, or corporate labs; we assert that the right of freedom of inquiry, to do research and pursue understanding under one’s own direction, is as fundamental a right as that of free speech or freedom of religion. We have no quarrel with Big Science; we merely recall that Small Science has always been just as critical to the development of the body of human knowledge, and we refuse to see it extinguished.

Research requires tools, and free inquiry requires that access to tools be unfettered. As engineers, we are developing low-cost laboratory equipment and off-the-shelf protocols that are accessible to the average citizen. As political actors, we support open journals, open collaboration, and free access to publicly-funded research, and we oppose laws that would criminalize the possession of research equipment or the private pursuit of inquiry.

Perhaps it seems strange that scientists and engineers would seek to involve themselves in the political world — but biohackers have, by necessity, committed themselves to doing so. The lawmakers who wish to curtail individual freedom of inquiry do so out of ignorance and its evil twin, fear — the natural prey and the natural predator of scientific investigation, respectively. If we can prevail against the former, we will dispel the latter. As biohackers it is our responsibility to act as emissaries of science, creating new scientists out of everyone we meet. We must communicate not only the value of our research, but the value of our methodology and motivation, if we are to drive ignorance and fear back into the darkness once and for all.

We the biopunks are dedicated to putting the tools of scientific investigation into the hands of anyone who wants them. We are building an infrastructure of methodology, of communication, of automation, and of publicly available knowledge.

Biopunks experiment. We have questions, and we don’t see the point in waiting around for someone else to answer them. Armed with curiosity and the scientific method, we formulate and test hypotheses in order to find answers to the questions that keep us awake at night. We publish our protocols and equipment designs, and share our bench experience, so that our fellow biopunks may learn from and expand on our methods, as well as reproducing one another’s experiments to confirm validity. To paraphrase Eric Hughes, “Our work is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of our research topics.” We are building on the work of the Cypherpunks who came before us to ensure that a widely dispersed research community cannot be shut down.

Biopunks deplore restrictions on independent research, for the right to arrive independently at an understanding of the world around oneself is a fundamental human right. Curiosity knows no ethnic, gender, age, or socioeconomic boundaries, but the opportunity to satisfy that curiosity all too often turns on economic opportunity, and we aim to break down that barrier. A thirteen-year-old kid in South Central Los Angeles has just as much of a right to investigate the world as does a university professor. If thermocyclers are too expensive to give one to every interested person, then we’ll design cheaper ones and teach people how to build them.

Biopunks take responsibility for their research. We keep in mind that our subjects of interest are living organisms worthy of respect and good treatment, and we are acutely aware that our research has the potential to affect those around us. But we reject outright the admonishments of the precautionary principle, which is nothing more than a paternalistic attempt to silence researchers by inspiring fear of the unknown. When we work, it is with the betterment of the community in mind — and that includes our community, your community, and the communities of people that we may never meet. We welcome your questions, and we desire nothing more than to empower you to discover the answers to them yourselves.

The biopunks are actively engaged in making the world a place that everyone can understand. Come, let us research together.

via biopunk | TheGeneHackMan

Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act we become a party to injustice. Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded into servility. Most witnessed acts of injustice are associated with bad governance, since when governance is good, unanswered injustice is rare. By the progressive diminution of a people’s character, the impact of reported, but unanswered injustice is far greater than it may initially seem. Modern communications states through their scale, homogeneity and excesses provide their populace with an unprecedented deluge of witnessed, but seemingly unanswerable injustices.  –Julian Assange

I’ve been putting off laying out my thoughts on Wikileaks, because, honestly; the situation evolves so often that It’s hard to really assay from a high altitude.  First of all, I believe it is absolutely imperative that, if you want to really have an idea of Assange’s likely agenda and why Wikileaks is releasing “unimportant things”…

…though be sure my blood boils every time I hear someone call something like the US warning Germany to not pursue the CIA kidnapping and torture of an innocent German citizen “unimportant” or “gossip”…

…and why the paranoid over-reaction of the US and their allies – especially their corporate allies is probably part of that agenda as well — then you need to read this: “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance”.    After that, you’ll probably want to just go ahead and read Aaron Bady’s excellent breakdown of those essays.  I really feel that these documents are they key to actually exploring the Wikileaks phenomenon with any accuracy.

The short version is that yes, Assange does seem to want to use Wikileaks’ form of journalism as a weapon.

Y’see, they say journalism is the art of controlling your environment, but that’s all wrong. I can’t control anything with this typewriter, all this is, is a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world… – Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan

He is, by his own admission, using journalism as a tool to create systems disruption in conspiratorial forms of government in the style of 4G Warfare.  His conspiracies are not those of the Alex Jones and David Icke type, but the simple banal ones that drive what passes for government in many parts of the world.  The shameless collusion of corporate interests and governments, the systems and structures that rule by secrecy – quite often because the truth of how they move in the world would be horrifying to the people that they claim to represent or govern.   The goal, aside from exposing real crimes, is to disrupt the systems by which those conspiracies do business.  This is why the diplomatic cables leaked contain a high degree of innocuous fluff as well as seemingly TMZ-worthy gossip – not because those particular factoids in and of themselves have value, but because the availability of them causes systems disruption.

Or, as Bady put it:

In this sense, most of the media commentary on the latest round of leaks has totally missed the point. After all, why are diplomatic cables being leaked? These leaks are not specifically about the war(s) at all, and most seem to simply be a broad swath of the everyday normal secrets that a security state keeps from all but its most trusted hundreds of thousands of people who have the right clearance. Which is the point: Assange is completely right that our government has conspiratorial functions. What else would you call the fact that a small percentage of our governing class governs and acts in our name according to information which is freely shared amongst them but which cannot be shared amongst their constituency? And we all probably knew that this was more or less the case; anyone who was surprised that our embassies are doing dirty, secretive, and disingenuous political work as a matter of course is naïve. But Assange is not trying to produce a journalistic scandal which will then provoke red-faced government reforms or something, precisely because no one is all that scandalized by such things any more. Instead, he is trying to strangle the links that make the conspiracy possible, to expose the necessary porousness of the American state’s conspiratorial network in hopes that the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.

And, as anyone can see from the news, so far the reaction of Wikileaks’ targets has been just that.  The US discusses new interpretations of the Espionage Act to cover more forms of journalism, introduces the information-protecting SHEILD act and bullies private companies to cease their tacit support of Wikileaks.  Meanwhile, credit card companies react to the leaking that they were in collusion with the US government in international affairs by removing avenues of fiscal support for Wikileaks and… colluding in government affairs!  The over-reaction and internalized self-inflicted systems disruption is the point.   In the face of the threat of real transparency, systems that thrive on secrecy will make their natures known and also make their own ability to operate more difficult.   It is, sadly, very similar to the reaction that Al Queada was attempting to – and did – provoke with their 9/11 attacks and the failed and threatened attempts thereafter.

However, wanting to provoke disruption in the kind of systems that interpret transparency/lack-of-secrecy/public action/journalism as some kind of damage or a threat to their existence isn’t Terrorism, unlike Al Queada’s own take on 4G war.   And if it is, then I find myself in the strange position of finding myself and most of the people I know and love, suddenly cast as terrorists.

No lives have been lost due to Wikilleaks (though the life of whistleblower Bradley Manning certainly hangs in the balance) and contrary to what a lot of media-wonks have stated they have redacted information with the cooperation of several newspapers – but not the US government whose aid they’ve solicited, repeatedly.  If anything the greatest flaw in Assange’s master plan is Assange himself — both in his highly questionable actions regarding Swedish rape charges but also in his apparent bouts of unchecked ego and the cult of personality that has formed up around him.   To quote anarchist writer Magpie:

The second reason I’m fine with Assange having been arrested is that no revolutionary organization should be so top-down structured that removing the head destroys the body. I can’t believe I would have to even worry about that in the internet era, when dealing with tech-savvy folks. Decentralization is clearly the only useful way to run an organization that will run into conflict with the state or capitalism. When I heard Assange was arrested, I was sad, but I figured it wouldn’t really affect Wikileaks at all. If Wikileaks is/was something worth supporting, it will function just as smoothly without its founder.

Assange, to the detriment of Wikileaks, has become a cause célèbre to the kind of folks who can’t wait to jump into a cult of personality with very little information, while Bradley Manning – the man who put the bullet in the gun for Assange and Company to aim at the world – sits in solitary confinement in a military prison with the very real specter of capital crimes and lethal injection hanging over his head.  Suddenly half the story of wikileaks has become the story of how various celebrities make fools of themselves when faced with the idea that someone they champion is also wanted for questioning regarding rape.

What good has wikileaks done?  It’s shown that government transparency is possible even if it’s not wanted.  They’ve shown that a small group of volunteers can fight a war against the most powerful forces on earth without ever firing a shot or raising a fist in violence.  They’ve given the tools to do the same to many, many other people and organizations.  They’ve forced governments and their allied entities to once again show their true nature and to damage their own ability to act.  They’ve given any number of people who “know” their masters do horrible crimes in their name more solid proof of those crimes and their weight in human lives, as well as the tools to actually do something about them.  They, like so many other journalists and whistleblowers before them, have put an actual price tag on the futures we’ve sold for a slick AT&T phone and no health care.

There are many problems with Assange’s master plan, however much I support it in theory.  It makes the (logical) assumption that the degradation of signal within a conspiracy to act, and its inability to function with anything resembling efficiency will be interpreted by the systems around it as damage.  What he’s not taking into account is the ability of these same systems  to spin “damage” as “efficiency and security”.  Look at the recent TSA regs, or almost any bit of Homeland Security legislation since the Patriot Act.  Look at the banking industry failure.  Look at how the “Transparency President” has upheld the Patriot Act and strengthened wiretap laws.  America in particular has a deeply ingrained tendency – thanks to the very systems Assange seeks to break down – to interpret cultural, societal, and infrastructural damage as “progress” and “security.”  His view of systems as wanting to embrace radical transparency fails on contact with the current state of the human element much in the way that  Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to get Facebook users to embrace personal transparency have.

The irony there is that Assange, himself, exemplifies the tendencies that allow this to happen.  We, as people, tend to like Leaders.  Just as Assange, the current “leader” of a “leaderless network” has become the focus for a cult of personality that has made it easy for the Heihachi cybercrime ring to hijack Anonymous in his name, call down celebrity support that muddles the issue with rampant fan-worship and rape apologisim, and for detractors to write the whole event off as the machinations of a terrorist rapist – the American Culture of Fear allows ex-comedians, Australian billionaires, ex-war heroes, religious pundits, Muslim-hating IRA supporting Representatives, Secretaries of State, supposedly progressive Presidents, and charismatic soccer moms from Alaska to reassure vast swathes of people that institutional damage is not damage, or censorship – it’s normal and good.

The real problem is that the rest of the “work” of Wikileaks relies on us.  It relies on the concept of Wikileaks – no matter the name – still existing when their current directors are in obscurity or holes in the ground and Assange is just a punchline on next-month’s late night TV.  If people don’t act on what they reveal, or don’t continue to campaign for transparency, then Wikileaks will just be a 3 minute blip on some “I Love the Oughts” retrospective show and their sacrifices – especially Manning’s, a soldier who knowingly put his life on the line for an ideal – will be for naught.

(Via Atom Jack)

[Posted without attribution.  If you know the source of this image or are the rights-holder, please feel free to contact me.]

Check out this inspiring short documentary about the rebirth of Detroit, filmed by Johnny Knoxville.

Just a sample of the work of Zevs.

via Street Art Utopia.

Technabob is reporting that Russia is going to build a pod to knock old space satellites out of orbit. That’s lovely. The old orbiters should burn up in the atmosphere or splash down in the middle of the ocean. However, what’s going to stop the pod if it goes after the wrong satellite?