Aula's Third Place for the 21st Century
I know the Aula co-op is kind of old news for those wired into the Smart Mobs idea, but I just saw the design prospectus and photos they've posted online.

The place is a co-op for members, a semi-private third place where you can go to sit together with others at the long coffee table, crash on the futons to read a book, use the meeting room and copy shop to do business, wirelessly cruise the Net, or hear music and see art in the evenings. The whole thing is held together electronically, too: the same membership card that unlocks the door also lets people on your buddy-list see that you're there in case they want to pop by to join you, etc. It's also great urban design - a vital hang-out on the busiest pedestrian intersection in Helsinki, sure, but an urban refuge as well - the kind of space that makes urban life livable.

As someone who works for himself, usually at home, I would give a kidney to have a place like this in my orbit. The next time I'm in Helsinki, I'm definitely dropping by.


- posted by Alex @ 1:02 PM

 
Back from Humboldt. Too many projects, potential projects and biz details to post much, but here are some tasty bits:

Clay Shirky is on a roll. Clay thinks about social software networks, how they grow, what they mean, how they act. Cory Doctorow took notes at his latest talk at the Supernova conference. Clay's point? That American telecommunication corporations have become for us what Minitel was for the French.

Gregory Frost's story Madonna of the Maquiladora is further proof to my mind that some of the best journalism being done these days is being published as SF:

The shack she takes you to is barely outside the fire line. The frame is held together by nails driven through bottle caps. The walls are cut up shipping cartons for Three Musketeers candy bars. No floor, only dirt. There’s an old, rust-stained mattress and a couple of beat-up suitcases. She comes up with a bottle of tequila from God knows where, apologizes for the lack of ice and glasses. Then she takes a long swig from the mouth of the bottle. Her eyes are watering as she passes it to you. You smell her then, the odor of a woman mixed in with the smoke smell, sweat and flesh and dirt. You almost want to ask her why she does this, lives this way, but you haven’t any right. ...

"It’s not north against south anymore, rich whites against poor Mexicans. That’s only a thing, a speck. It’s the whole world, Deputy. The maquiladora is the whole world now. Japan is here, Korea is here, anyone who wants to make things without being watched, without having to answer to anyone, without having to pay fairly. They’re here and everywhere else, too. Ya, basta! You understand? Enough! It’s not about NAFTA, about whose treaty promises what. Whoever’s treaty, it will be just the same. Here right now in Mexico the drug dealers are investing. They buy factories, take their money and grind their own people to make more money, clean money. This is clean, what they’re doing. And it’s no different here than anywhere else, it’s even better here than some places. It’s a new century and the countries they bleed together, and the only borders, the only fences, are made of bodies. All the pictures you’ve seen, but if you don’t see this thing in all of them, then you’re seeing nothing!"...

It’s on the dusty cowpath of a road, on foot, that they grab you. Three of them. They know who they’re looking for, and everyone else knows to stay out of it. These guys are las pandillas, the kind who’d kill someone for standing too close to them. A dozen people are all moving away, down the road, and the backward glances they give you are looks of farewell. Adios, amigo. Won’t be seeing you again. They know it and so do you. You’ve seen the photos. The thousand merciless ways people don’t come home, and you’re about to become one

More National Security idiocy: a geography student uses mapping software to create a map of America's industrial sectors and their key infrastructure (not, frankly, all that hard to do), suggesting that it can be used to help the citizenry keep pressure on the government to improve security. Now corporations and intelligence agencies want to see it classified.

"He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade -- and then they both should burn it," said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief. "The fiber-optic network is our country's nervous system."

This, of course, is stark idiocy. If an average grad student can find this information and make this map, so can lots and lots of other people. Classifying this information won't keep it out of the hands of terrorists; it'll only keep it from the eyes of the public. This is THE key coming debate on national security: not, as the Post would like to believe, the conflict between freedom and security in the flows of information, but the conflict between centralized and brittle security on the one hand, and networked and robust distributed security on the other. And, in my opinion, the longer we let folks like the NSA and CIA run the show, the more endangered we as a nation become.

(from Boing Boing)
- posted by Alex @ 10:22 AM

 
My friend Caroline said the other day, quoting someone, that the bigger the island on knowledge becomes, the faster the shoreline of wonder grows.

This forty-foot long sea blob, a previously unknown species just stretched out my shoreline of wonder like saltwater
- posted by Alex @ 5:12 PM

 
As many of you know, last winter I guest-edited an issue of Whole Earth review - what was to be their Spring issue. Unfortunately, Whole Earth has hit some hard times, and they're still trying to finish raising the money to publish that issue. As part of an appeal for subscriptions and donations, though, they've put up a selection of pieces from the issue

The issue explores the idea of the Singularity - the notion that as technology continues to accelerate, our ability to predict its consequences breaks down. There's some pretty good stuff there (if I may say): Bruce Sterling on how to avoid technological catastrophes; Cory Doctorow on why the Singularity is the Rapture of the Geeks; an interview with Jaron Lanier, etc. (they're all posted as PDFs, so depending on your connection speed they may take a moment to download).
- posted by Alex @ 8:17 PM