Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

Culturematic

Readers of this blog will be aware of my fascination with the concept and churn of culture. I’ve just run across mention of a new book called Culturematic by anthropologist Grant McCracken. McCracken will be the guest tomorrow on the Yi-Tan weekly call.

From Amazon’s book description:

A Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine.

Once wound up and released, the Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemporary culture, to test the atmosphere, to see what life it can sustain, to see who responds and how. Culturematics start small but can scale up ferociously, bootstrapping themselves as they go.

Because they are so inexpensive, we can afford to fire off a multitude of Culturematics simultaneously. This is evolutionary strategy, iterative innovation, and rapid prototyping all at once. Culturematics are fast, cheap, and out of control. Perhaps as important, they fail early and often. They are the perfect antidote to a world where we cannot guess what’s coming next.

The Art of Conversation

John McDermott at Financial Times writes “How to have a conversation”:

What makes a good conversationalist has changed little over the years. The basics remain the same as when Cicero became the first scholar to write down some rules, which were summarised in 2006 by The Economist: “Speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.” But Cicero was lucky: he never went on a first date with someone more interested in their iPhone than his company.

Reading that, I realize I suck as a conversationalist (but wait, I shouldn’t talk about myself…) A commitment to learn and act on those principles is in order… online and off.

Later in the article, McDermott mentions “the ‘six ways to have a better conversation.’ These, according to the school, are: 1. Be curious about others; 2. Take off your mask; 3. Empathise with others; 4. Get behind the job title; 5. Use adventurous openings; 6. Have courage.”

If you take off your mask, will you disappear?

Jon L. on SXSW

I’m talking about SXSW 2012 (as well as bits about the history and relevance of the event) on the WELL. [Link]

SXSW started in 1987 as a quirky event inspired by New York City’s New
Music Seminar and festival, but I didn’t get involved until 1994, when
the event added Multimedia to the mix. I’ve been going and involved in
various ways ever since. We were encouraging the producers of
Multimedia to include Internet programming, and my recollection is that
it took 2-3 years for the Multimedia conference to become
Internet-focused. The name changed to SXSW Interactive in 1999.

Interactive was at that point smaller than Music and Film, and in the
early years of blogging and social software, it became a go-to
conference to people with that focus. I wouldn’t say it’s ever been a
digital technology conference, though there are always sessions that
are about tech. It’s more of a digital culture conference encompassing
a broad range of online scenes, activities, platforms etc.

As such, the conference/festival tends to reflect the state of the
online world in any given year. Following digital convergence, all
media are digital media. Analog has become a quaint exception. Given
that, there’s huge interest in all things interactive, and the festival
has become the largest of its kind – in fact there’s nothing quite
like it.

This year Internet has mainstreamed, broadband adoption is high, even
your 90 year old grandmother is liable to have a Facebook account –
probably to track what the kids are doing, but once you’re online
you’re drawn into any number of scenes and pursuits. Digital culture is
not just culture. Everything has digital implications.

So the interesting thing about SXSW this year was that there wasn’t
much new. As a friend was pointing out to me, it was less about hearing
about new cool stuff or jamming in innovative ways, and more about
exposure to the best of the best of technology and culture. The
conference is so huge, it attracts those people, and that creates a
special kind of energy, though not the same as the energy of the
festival when it was smaller, quirkier, more innovative.

And it’s a place where everybody shows up, so there are a lot of
people who have working and personal relationships online but never get
to see each other face to face; they can come together here and have
side meetings of some duration, get things done, have a brief but
deeper experience of each other.

Bruce Sterling at SXSW Interactive 2012

After introducing Bruce I dove into Twitter and live tweeted his talk. People told me afterward that they thought it was too cheerful – see what you think from these short bursts (I was typing faster than I could think.) Comments encouraged.

After introducing Bruce I dove into Twitter and live tweeted his talk. People told me afterward that they thought it was too cheerful – see what you think from these short bursts (I was typing faster than I could think.) Comments encouraged.

http://storify.com/jonl/bruce-sterling-at-sxsw-interactive-2012

SXSW 3/13/2012

I’ve been running around SXSW having meetings, taking notes, taking photos. Might take some time to summarize. Haven’t had time to sit still, attend to sessions, blog and tweet, and that seems to be true of various Old Hands who are here to meet specific conversations, have particular conversations, slicing the conference according to need and aspiration. For instance, I met with the brilliant and focused Amber Case to discuss cyborganics more generally and our new blog, Reality Augmented in particular. More about that in a later post.

Today, the last day of Interactive, I caught only a couple of sessions, one on Buddhism and the Internet, the other Jennifer Pahlka’s inspiring keynote about the potential for better government through digital technology. Shortly I’m introducing Bruce Sterling for his closing talk, which I’ll no doubt be tweeting live.

I used to do some live blogging and posting at these events, which is easier to do if you’re not local (which makes you a host, after all). I’m thinking it’s better to digest and sort things out before writing.

Also I’ll be holding forth about SXSW on the WELL starting March 15.

Augmented cyborgs at SXSW

Another SXSW coming up; it’ll be good to see old friends and make new connections. The Austin Chronicle asked me to write something for their SXSW Interactive issue; that led to an interesing interview with cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, a longer version of which I might post here later. When “bOING bOING” was a magazine, I was an associated editor listed as “cyborganic jivemeister,” and the magazine I published, FringeWare Review, focused quite bit on “cyborging.” Originally a science fiction term, a mashup of “cybernetic organism,” the term represents a potentially huge field of study – how humans interact with, and how human experience is enhanced by, digital technology. If you’ll be at SXSW Interactive, don’t miss Amber’s keynote Sunday, March 11, 2pm at the Austin Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 5 (#SXAmberCase). Meanwhile after the interview was done she and I kept talking, and will be working on a project together, a blog on the subject of augmented reality.

Bruce Sterling talk at ATX Hackerspace

I shot this video of Bruce at an EFF-Austin-sponsored event February 25 at ATX Hackespace. We were rallying the troops. “You will not have the Internet that you had 20 years ago, that’s not possible. But you don’t have to roll over at the site of bluster from the Internet’s increasingly desperate enemies…”

Code Across America ATX: A Civic Innovation Hackathon

ATX Codeathon

Google-funded Code for America was in Austin Saturday for a codeathon using data accessible via the city’s data portal. I dropped by the geek chic coworking facility Conjunctured, where the codeathon was happening, and hung out long enough to get a sense of the projects the ~40 coders were tackling. Those included a Bike Accident and Route Safety app, an app for finding miscellaneous stuff around town, and a “garden dating” app (to help people who want a community garden find a space). What was missing? For at least one project (Find It), there were fewer sources of data than the developers would’ve liked. I realized that it’s not enough to bring coders together to create apps – we should also be cultivating data sources. A project to build databases and facilitate citizen input would be a logical complement to the various codeathons.

Resilient Communities

Elements of Resilient Communities

Follow John Robb and pay close attention to what he has to say, because he has his finger on the pulse. He’s currently promoting the concept of resilient communities, defined here:

A resilient community is the path to a safe, prosperous, and vibrant future for us, our kids, and our neighbors — despite an increasingly chaotic world…. We take control of our future. We implement the only solution that can give us the a safe, secure, and prosperous future. We become resilient. We find ways to help local people, businesses, and municipalities to PRODUCE, and that’s and important word, more of what we rely upon…. Fortunately, we now have the technology and the insights required to produce with quality and efficiency at the local level like never before.

Third Option

At Pecha Kucha Austin last night, spent some time talking to John Kunz of Waterloo Records, an old friend from the days when I spent a lot of time haunting his store, buying piles of records, CDs and cassettes. We discussed the difficulties of operating an independent record store in a digital world. He told me about Record Store Day and “Third Option,” which is about adding an “independent record store” button to the usual Itunes and Amazon links on websites for artists and records.  Glad to see this. I was browsing the new class of high-end vinyl at Urban Outfitters the other day, and jonesing for a turntable and some record-buying budget. Really miss old-school vinyl albums, especially the great covers, which were an art form in themselves.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (AC Clarke)

My pal David Pescovitz at the Institute for the Future blogged recently about the IFTF “Multiverse of Exploration Map,” an overview of the six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade: Decrypting the Brain, Hacking Space, Massively Multiplayer Data, Sea the Future, Strange Matter, and Engineered Evolution. “Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in scientific research.” A followup post includes a video of Luigi Anzivino from The Exploratorium talking about the relationship of magic and neuroscience.

Stonehenge, music and magic

Stonehenge from the air

A scientist says that Stonehenge was inspired by “auditory illusions,” according to a story in Guardian UK. Independent researcher Steve Waller says “the layout of the stones corresponded to the regular spacing of loud and quiet sounds created by acoustic interference when two instruments played the same note continuously.”

“If these people in the past were dancing in a circle around two pipers and were experiencing the loud and soft and loud and soft regions that happen when an interference pattern is set up, they would have felt there were these massive objects arranged in a ring. It would have been this completely baffling experience, and anything that was mysterious like that in the past was considered to be magic and supernatural.

[Link]