Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Quicksilver: finished

I finished Quicksilver, over some days of travel and jetlag. I admit to personal bias, have loved and studied the grand, long eighteenth century for years. and emphathizing with Stephenson's evident, and decently researched, enthusiasm for the period.
Some notes, from the other end of the book: Eliza adds a (1) female character at last. Like Daniel Waterhouse, though, she remains ultimately a bit thinly developed.
Much brutality in the book, and a great deal of scatology (for an sf or historical novel).
The two major strata of the novel support a great deal of formal and referential linking, but are nicely kept from collapsing into each other.

Last post on the road, hopefully. Infocult's flying back home.

Happy Halloween, blogosphere.

Flashgothic: The Devil's Tramping Ground

The Devil's Tramping Ground features several spooky Flash projects, including "The Devil's Tramping Ground" itself.

There's also a nice telling of a banshee story, relentless and focused, and a train story, well framed, which reminds me of how some traditional stories have appeared on the Web, using this technology's multimedia capacities. For instance, check out The Moonlit Road, which works to represent oral, mostly Southern ghost stories.

The Web is also accumulating its own horror pages, sui generis, such as "The Fall of the House of the Site of Marsha", the creepy apartment animation, and everyone's favorite flash shocker. I have some more links and images here.

(via Mark Meadows' Pause and Effect)

Matrix game weekend

The Matrix game advances incrementally, and in terms of Web presence, not plot:

Paintover offers a new image, which is being dissected.
That Paintover mob also spotted a new image , and a raft of others, along with text lexia (userid "mike", pw "sky").

UNForum found some new sites: Dina's space and blog, Missing Ethan. They're in the same domain as Nekodas, which has a new image:

All hosted by Underscore, of course.

generation RFID

Howard Rheingold asks us to "[i]magine the worldview of the generation born into a computation-pervaded world".
Thinking for a minute about how kids have accultured computers: how about a kids' computing lanuage for RFID tags, like Logo?
When will we see adults routinely surprised by tricks kids play with tags, like passing notes by them, or rewriting "grownup" RFID?
Watch for the first words of a new discourse around RFID, generationally based. It should include "mom, dad, I bet were you were growing up, you couldn't mark up anything!"

Spectacular cities, more

Following up on my first post on Thackara's cities piece: Anne Galloway draws our attention to her earlier comments on this talk. She and her post's discussants point out problems with Thackara's overstating the effects of the creative class, overrating the abolition of space meme, and suggests better balancing the mobile/static opposition.

On the spectacle: I read the piece as targeting Debord's Paris (as the Situationist focus), along with subsequent urbanisms; p2p, mobile, geolocated, smartifact technologies challenging or outflanking some of the key components of this, such as the usual bestiary of mass infotainment (advertising, news, etc.). One weakness to this approach, beyond leaving the Sit critique unchallenged, is that it skips over a section of history including pre-net alternative information networks (tape trading, zines). A second problem is the avoidance of the well-known panoptic/sousveillance field. Lastly, it's yet another urbanism which pretends the suburbs and rural areas don't exist.

Still, I can't resist dreaming about a derive using RFID tags to mark new names and descriptions for places, digitally tagging objects and places, seeding a city with pre-cached, time-sensitive notes, and moblogging a fluid narrative.

Anne has recently posted with some more thoughts and pointers on new urbanisms.

Matrix game roundup

News from the Matrix game:

Aquapolis has updated its brochureware, now showing a deck, connecting tube, and construction cam. I bet something interesting, either evident or hidden, will manifest there.

Other characters: Marcus Ormond is still out of town, apparently.

Infocult visitor zephyrin_xirdal cannily notes an eerie pop culture link.

Around the game:

I introduced more readers to this insidious game over at John Schott's excellent Ratchet Up, a splendid new media blog (written with verve and designed with energy). I'm sketching out a prosy introduction text, and will speak to this game at HUMlab.

Greetings to Jill, who helpfully points out recent papers on such immersive games.

The game's intensity might increase a bit as we lurch towards the release of Matrix: Revolutions. Let's see if its promised changes solve the problems of the second film.

Infocult travels to Sweden

I'm traveling to Sweden for the next week, to visit the excellent HUMlab, from Umea University. They conduct a variety of fascinating projects, from experiments with ActiveWorlds to developing a unique teaching and learning environment. I'll be talking about cyberculture, information, and textuality, among other things.
Infocult will continue operations steadily, hopefully.

Post-spectacular cities

"The Post-spectacular City" argues for a new urbanism, post-mass media. After running down the Situationist critique, Thackara turns to new developments: cell phones to connect people in p2p sharing fashion, both as consumers (I need to find something, I want to buy something) and producers (I'll tell you about my corner of town).
more:

The point is that the information age has been added to the industrial age. Telematic space has been added to Cartesian space. The one did not supplant the other.
And mobile phones and networks do not make the city disappear. On the contrary, they render the city itself more powerful as an interface.

Recent historical context:

We also thought we couild do without place.Nicholas Negroponte stated in Being Digital, the dotcommer's bible, that "the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place,at a specific time". Lars Lerup,dean of the architecture school at Rice University - and a dotcommer manque - proclaimed in a book approriately named Pandemonium that "bandwidth has replaced the boulevard. Five blocks west has given way to the mouseclick.After thousands of years of bricks held together by mortar, the new metropolis is toggled together by attention spans.". Brandon Hookway, 1999, PANDEMONIUM Princeton Architectural Press New York.
All that stuff was, in retrospect, piffle. But we all did it, including this speaker. He apologises, and pleads only that he is a tiny bit wiser after the event.

p2ptown, and distributed urbanism:

The reason I've jumped from the creative class, to mobile phones and networks, is this. If the post-spectacular city is about person-to-person encounter, technology can help us achieve that. The consequence can be a profound change in the ways that we operate, and live, in cities.


With networked communications we will be able to access and use everything from a car, to a portable drill, only when we need it. We won't have to own them, just know how and where to find them.


Did you know that the average power drill is used for ten minutes in its entire life? Or that most cars stand idle 90 per cent of the time? The same principle - of use, not own - can apply to the buildings, roads, squares and spaces that fill our cities.


But the killer app is access to other people. People is what makes cities different from other places. The creative city will be the city that finds ways to strip out all the transaction and infrastructure costs that make it expensive to hire people to help us do stuff...Mobile phone and wireless-enabled gadgets enable us to access people, or resources, or services - just-in-time, and just-in-place.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

EFF trusted computing paper

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published a paper on "trusted computing". Unlike most documents on this subject, which are quite decisively on one side or the other, this one takes care to be quite balanced. For example, the discussion of sealed storage is very positive, and the section on misconceptions demolishes a number of fears.
Moreover, beyond a good critique, the paper offers a solution to one problem:

A simple measure we call Owner Override could fix the problem by restoring others' inability to know for certain what software you're running -- unless you decide you would be better off if they knew. Owner Override subtly changes the nature of the security benefit provided by attestation. Currently, attestation tells remote parties whether the software on your computer has been changed. Attestation plus Owner Override would let remote parties know if the software on your computer has been changed without your knowledge. Thus, detection of illicit activity would still be practical. If, however, you had made deliberate changes on your own computer, you could conceal them, just as you can today, to prevent someone else from using your choices as a reason to discriminate against you.

Read von Lohmann's reflection, too.

Matrix game: today's updates

More on that Matrix game:

The brilliant folks at UNForum deduced the existence of an incident logs directory for Aquapolis. There you can find a text file logging the recent flooding and response, which suggests that MetaCortech's software didn't solve the problem, despite what their news site claims (click the News tab there). Instead, the old human friend did the work: "07:29:49-rec/manualoverride/beta/delos/7". Delos' Beta module seems to have been the target.

Check the whole sequence of schematics. Well-done stuff.

Steve Kaye notes that Katherine Cunningham's bio now has a second quote, besides the Bierce, also on photography:

"You don't take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it."
-Unknown

EDITED TO ADD: Unforum strikes again, pointing out new paranormal files at Little-boxes.