My attitudes toward music have changed drastically in the past few years, in several ways. It’s become so easy to obtain digital music, and squeezing it onto mobile devices so convenient over physical media, that I’ve bought more music, been exposed to more music, and seen more live shows in the past few years than I ever used to. Everyone seems to be in the same boat.

It’s set me thinking though, is my MP3 folder really a collection anymore? There are a great many things that have been passed to me by others, and my MP3 library has become unwieldy. I bought a 160GB ipod to keep it on, and yet it now seems far too large. Like a Dunbar number for community relationships, beyond a certain point, music collections surpass our ability to maintain, understand and cherish what we have. They’re no longer collections, but Gormenghast-like ruins full of neglected subfolders, forgotten artists, and never listened to back catalogues.

Collections en masse have become incomprehensible, and playlists wear out their welcome fast. A few friends have been knocking an idea around: To periodically archive MP3s, keeping only a current rotation of recently bought stuff and highly valued artists intentionally pulled out of the archive. I don’t miss CDs at all, but I do miss the time when I could look down the rack, not see a single stranger and hum every song on each album.

As well as working for Pixel-Lab, I occasionally do bits for Mudlark, who held a launch event in Birmingham last Friday.

It sparked off a lot of thoughts about communications, which I’ve written up for them here.

There were a few definitions given of the term post-digital, including Matt defining it as “a state in which we are more concerned with being human than being digital” and Russell Davies encapsulating it nicely for me: “We’re moving past digital infatuation and analogue nostalgia”.

I started typing a response to this comment, but it became a post.

But is there such a thing as a wrong opinion ?
Onto your point, when everything is connected, doesn’t culture become a common denominator as it is accessible to everyone ?

As I have access to this globalized world that reaches from one point of the globe to any other, if I were to not use it, to not know even a little fraction of culture as an entity, wouldn’t I be less cultured ?
And therefore, if culture can be quantified, uncultured does exist does it not ?

I think people can be more or less enculturated, in terms of exposure and how ingrained their cultural habits are, but all of these people have culture of some kind. Culture, to me, is something that happens though mimetic and complimentary behaviours whenever a social species congregates:

Culture is a bunch of chimpanzees smashing the skull of a stranger then eating it’s brain. It’s the same species using sticks to fish termites out of nests. It’s congenial grooming. It’s good manners, it’s bad manners; genes apart it’s everything about a social species. It’s in the nature of all media and messages, regardless of their content.

The behaviours and habits picked up through enculturation continue to affect people’s outlook and behaviour even once isolated. Even a hermit will have remnants of whatever culture they came from.

Enculturation is the process of picking up the ruleset of a given culture, deacculturation the process of separating one’s unconscious from such rules. Often this only seems possible through immersion in a subculture that marks its differences with extremes of dress, behaviour, and ritual, i.e. punk, straight edge, nationalist, hunt saboteur, freemason, etc., and I suspect the result is almost always a hybrid rather than something completely new. I severely doubt the ability of anyone to achieve the state of blank slate, nor have at least a few habits picked up from those around them in the past or present.

I think the only people that could actually be uncultured are newborns, and extreme cases on the fringes of human experience such as children that get abused by being put into solitary confinement. Terrible as it is, that has happened to some kids, and they’re usually related in discussion to feral children as they show some of the same developmental quirks and problems (such as inability to develop speech beyond a certain age). Even feral children, if raised by social animals, pick up the behaviour and thus culture of the species that raises them.

I think putting culture on a pedestal as behaviour to aspire to is nonsense; culture as abstract process is morally inert, though the specific rules of a given culture may not be. Some of the cultures and subcultures I’ve been in idolise sick, abhorrent and sometimes counter-productive behaviour. This doesn’t make the people within those groups uncultured, even if they’re wrong. Put rapists together and the result would be rape culture (For instance, at prisons in some parts of the world, rape of female prisoners by guards and turning of blind eyes by other guards constitutes a culture of rape by my definitions).

Uncultured tends to be a word thrown around as an insult, which has little bearing on feral or abused humans. I think the word stinks of elitism and assumptions about moral superiority. When it’s thrown at someone, it implies that the thrower thinks themself and their social context better, and their culture superior to that of the target.

I think this is wrong. In most cases, cultural differences are harmless and have no moral or even intellectual dimension. They’re most often trivial habits and differences that people nonetheless use as foundations for some particularly arrogant judgments of those who are different. I don’t think harmless behaviour is any basis to judge how good, bad or worthy a human being is.

While my comfort is greater around those who are similar, I try my hardest not to commingle this with judgment of others. “Uncultured” is usually the sound of one culture criticising another with little to no justification.

There is no such thing as an uncultured person, there are merely differences in culture. Never has this been more true than in a globalised, networked world.

I made these, and finished them for the Epilog competition Instructables are running. They’re controlled by an arduino mini reading a rotary potentiometer to determine how many of them to switch on:

I’m still very much a newbie with both a soldering iron and a compiler, but I’m finding both more comprehensible than I expected. How to build + code are over at Instructables. The open source code and hardware along with many recycled components make this feel super-ethical compared to most projects, like it should induce some kind of amplified eco-smugness (but it doesn’t because there’s a fair bit of PVC in it).

If you really like these, there’s a wallpaper size photo over at Flickr too:

(This is written for Russell Davies’ Lyddle End 2050 project. The photos are all of models I made for it, and you can also see them as a set on Flickr).

We’ve lived through a lot of futures and most of them, we didn’t see coming. We’ve imagined many more, and I have a lot of affection for those visions, so Lyddle End 2050 was both amusing and exciting when I first heard of it. While scrolling down pages of schmaltzy English village architecture, several decades of absorbed science fiction blurted out of me in shorthand.

A lonely house on a hill, brutally cut up to accommodate a flyover, with self replicating robots spilling from the windows and marching off into the countryside. A church up to the eaves in water, bioengineered tentacles coming out of the windows and parishioners cowering on the roof with a huge and mildly ironic “S.O.S.” cobbled together from driftwood. A tank tracked building industry fabricator, munching bricks off a 20th century house and extruding a new one behind. A plastic dome covering a building, signposted “Lyddle End Heritage Museum”. Buildings extended upwards into shanty town high rises. “BNP OUT” graffiti on the front of a house, with a flying car parked outside and doused in paint stripper.

I was polluted with too many futures to pick one. I didn’t want to make the open source, creative commons, fabbed up Shangri La that I’m hoping for. Dystopianism is also an easy cliche. The number of tropes floating around got me thinking about futures in general, the way we predict, and that these visions are popularised more by the terror or succor they contain than by their likelihood or accuracy.

Imagined futures are like the mumblings of a brain damaged Janus. Just as our present contains assumptions about the future, our visions incorporate massive yet sometimes hard to see traces of the time in which they originate. None of them are pure, they all receive scads of cultural contamination from their originators. This contamination is difficult to spot in our own visions; there are things we just assume will carry on. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s seldom I see something and think “I must blog this immediately”, but this post at Fabbaloo is provoking me to smile, and giving me that intense, floaty sense of futurism becoming the present.

I’m also going to break my normal blogging code and quote nearly the whole thing:

Yes, 3D printing has produced pre-fab replacement homes for “needy hermit crabs”. It’s actually not a laughing matter, as hermit crabs habitually reside in leftover shells from other creatures, discarding and replacing them as the crab grows in size. The problem these days is that there aren’t a lot of new shells being produced as many species are having issues in a time of climate change.

Enter Elizabeth Demaray, who began the “Hands Up” project to “meet the needs of natural life forms”. She selected the hermit crabs, as they are undergoing a severe housing shortage. The design has an excellent space to weight ratio, making it entirely suitable for our little crabby friends.

Designed using rapid prototyping techniques, the bio-degradable plastic will outlast the crab, but not degrade the environment.

I’m seeing so many things that would have been unthinkable or unpragmatic in the recent past. This one is so full of current issues *and* whimsy that it’s like a project spawned by Charles Stross and Michel Gondry. It’s a high tech version of feeding the ducks:

“Mummy, can we make shells for the hermit crabs?”

I’ve been noticing more and more the keen divide between my life led online and my life led in meatspace, and am getting interested in ways to close the gap, especially in public.

I had some laptop stickers printed saying “Hello there. Yes you. Just because I’m using a laptop at this table, that doesn’t mean you can’t sit here too.”

One of my friends owns a tea room with free wifi, and occasionally you can go in and find a sea of tables, each occupied by one person with a laptop. This of course follows from some very natural human behaviour: people tend to distribute themselves evenly in public spaces such as buses, cafes, and urinals.

However, I find when a screen is sucking me in, it generally doesn’t matter if there’s a stranger next to or opposite me. I might as well share the table if I’m not waiting for someone in particular.

I find I’ve been spending less time on the internet recently; I get fed up of only seeing the world around the bezel of a macbook, and in two weeks off work over Christmas I hardly touched it. I’ve also been a lot more conscious that the time I spend online should create value, as Merlin Mann writes about at length here. I want my time spent on the internet to be better than just entertaining, I want the things I create to be my best, and I want my online life to be enmeshed with my real life rather than a separate existence, an escape, or a distraction from anything.

I also put various social networks and services along with my usernames on the back of the laptop, using a dymo embosser. I left the more intimate ones off because it kind of repulses me when people I hardly know and will probably never see again add me there (I was guilty of this, until I understood that doing it was fundamentally creating noise for others. Collecting mechanics can really be insidious). Like the custom sticker, I don’t really expect these to have much effect on anything, but I still like to have them there. I also think it looks better than the usual sticker encrusted mess people make of laptop lids, and it’s an attempt to do something more explicitly functional as well as aesthetic with the idea.

It’s about time I cleaned this blog up a bit. I look back on it and have a few questions: Why on earth did I pick func-auton.net as the URL?* Why weren’t post titles also permalinks? Why was a blog that had a few good posts once but was quickly turned into a massive, fluff filled ad-farm still in the “worth reading” part of the sidebar?

I don’t know, but I’ve made a few changes. The biggest is that I’ve registed a better domain name: www.functional-autonomy.net/blog now works. I’ll maintain the func-auton.net URL just because people have linked here with it, but the new URL is going to last a lot longer.

I’ve also tweaked the template to be a little more usable, updated the links to other places you can find me online, trimmed the categories a little, and linked some new and more worthwhile sites up in the sidebar.

The sites I’ve added give a heavy bias towards games. When I started this blog I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to make my career in games. Now I have no doubt, and in the past few years have met and read many more interesting games bloggers.

Tom Armitage understands the massive deficit of criticism that games have right now, and is trying to rectify it to the extent he can. His Delicious stream is pulled into the blog and includes commentary.

Kim Pallister talks about games, technology and business. Grounded and eminently readable.

Jane Pinckard is fucking clever and has good taste.

James Wallis is into video games, pen and paper games, board games, all kinds of games. He has a deep understanding of their history, writes, designs and publishes his own, and also did this fantastic talk for us at Playful last year. Spaaace has 3 A’s, apparently because it’s a triple-A company :)

*Answer: I had a train to catch.

It’s an odd climate in which to coin such a post title, but a few things I’ve observed have been rattling around recently.

The ongoing economic crisis seems to drive people to more conservative tactics, which aren’t necessarily safe (i.e. retreating to currency in the name of liquidity doesn’t seem like a very sure bet…). The fall of UK retailer Woolworths seemed like a strangely obsessive thing for MCVUK to keep reporting on, until I understood that also meant distributor EUK had gone down and may drag some major publishers and high street retailers down with it. Noone knows at present how far that cascade will go, but things could look very different in a year.

The past few months have been incredible; I never expected anything to get close to the Jehovah’s Witness belief in Armageddon I was raised with and later renounced, but this financial crisis is exactly the kind of disaster porn they get off on. Really, a $50 billion Ponzi scheme? Banks still playing hide the toxic debt? Bailouts for the hard line laissez-fair? I’ve been watching with rising incredulity, fascination and a tiny dash of schnadenfreude for over a year but feel unqualified to commentate. My favorite quote on the lot, from a friend: “I’ve seen an unusually high number of bankers with broken legs on the Docklands Light Rail recently”. I guess they’re jumping out of windows…

Today, I see this list, linked by John Robb.

Any form of crisis seems to drive a conservative response by means of insecurity. For instance, as a single young man with an unusual degree of philsophical detachment and inquisitiveness, I tend to be very liberal about my sex life (up to and including monogamous commitment). However, almost inevitable social/sexual crises drive me from wanting/accommodating more flexible, negotiable models of relationships to more traditional ones. Seeing that list on Amazon, I wonder if present circumstances resound so deep as to cause sections of society to largely renounce products of pop culture where they haven’t before?

(In which the author/typist apologises in a roundabout way for posting less nowadays)

I need more time to sit and think about this, but Jane Pinckard has posted something very good, though preliminary, about emergent trends in entertainment.

There’s definitely something to this:

Facebook status updates are absolutely brilliant ways for expressing an immediate state, and allowing someone else to browse the “immediate states” of friends. Entertainment will increasingly make use of these styles of communication in the backbone of the product itself.

With twitter now a more frequent thing for me than my own blog, I’m seeing a lot of power in this. Facebook allowing comments on status updates is also a great move, offering utility that Twitter distinctly lacks, with @replies being difficult for third parties to follow. Bruce Sterling also spoke about this, most prominently by forecasting what was repeated, and railed against, as the “death of blogs”:

Blogs are a transitional medium built on a highly unstable platform. They won’t suddenly vanish by legislative fiat, but they’re gonna fade into the background like bulletin-board-systems, ARCHIE and USENET.

(Bruce too has a beady, design-centric cultural eye on Twitter).

As means of expression with a much lower cognitive load than wordpress come into being, of course people will move to them instead, rather than writing lengthy missives. Though I’ll keep Functional Autonomy active, pointing to interesting stuff and occasionally writing essays, I’m finding that migration to easier platforms includes me too. You can find me on Twitter, Delicious, LinkedIn, the Idle Thumbs Forums, and Facebook, though if I’ve not met you I probably won’t add you at the latter.

(CC image of scores of cell phones at a concert by DeaPeaJay)

For the first 10% of GTA IV, I had a backseat driver. “Go left here!”, “You missed the turn!”, “No not that way”. The most annoying thing about this particular backseat driver was that it was always right, even in times of crisis. It led me from one waypoint to the next flawlessly, but I nonetheless started to resent it. I was told what to do, and I followed. Pining for freedom, I found it in the options menu.

Aesthetically I was overawed by GTA IV, but mechanically there was really something missing until I turned the GPS line off. Until then I’d been vague about the way neighborhoods were laid out, just a visitor passing through. I didn’t need to look at things, remember them, chain them together, because if I ever returned I’d be guided there and out again. I could just look at the tiny radar in the corner of the screen and be led from cutscenes to fights. Missions became tedious; in previous GTA games, had I really enjoyed doing all of this driving to get from one mission to another? Yes, I had enjoyed it very much.

Once I’d banished the GPS line from my radar, the city came to life. I began to understand it as an entity, know its passages, the character of each area and the ways they related. Shortcuts the GPS couldn’t show me became burned into my memory along with the locations of weapon shops and vehicles. I was navigating the city with my wits, building a mental map and feeling the same competency the other games had built up in me.

After chipping away at it for 2 months, I hit 100% and haven’t been back. For most of those 80 hours, I felt like a native, but for the first few I was a perpetual tourist, outsourcing my thinking and memory to a gadget.

CC Image: GPS sucks in Manhattan, by alex.lines

Some friends and I once invented a game while working together in a night club. It’s called One-Behindmanship, and basically turns good door etiquette into a competitive game. By being the last of a group through a door without anyone realising, you earn gloating rights. “After you” is a perfect way to telegraph and cause a stalemate, and we did it all the time by accident at first, but pretty soon we’d devised all kinds of cunning tricks to distract people.

I want to make more games like this: Mundane ones that take a common personal or social experience and turn it into an opportunity for people to amuse themselves and each other. For now, One-Behindmanship has been long overdue some tweaks, and the revised website is up here.

One-Behindmanship is also now the official game of Playful, since my employer, Pixel-Lab, is running the event next week :)

(CC image by mad paul)

“I think that people have learned that money is not made in banks. It is made by real people working hard at real jobs. Actually, deep down we knew that all along. We just have to learn it again.”

– Asbjorn Jonsson, third-generation Icelandic fisherman

source

Irresponsible people tied the shoelaces of many societies in the name of optimisation and enrichment, and it fell flat on its face this year. Charlie Brooker is also very good :

All of it was a dream. All that crap we bought, all the bottled water and Blu-Ray players and designer shoes and iPod Shuffles and patio heaters; all the jobs we had; all the catchphrases we memorised and the stupid things we thought. Everything we did for the past 10 years – none of it really felt real, did it? Time to snap out of it. Time to grow our own vegetables and learn hand-to-hand combat with staves. And time, perhaps, to really start living.

John Robb remains a good source on resilient communities, which I find more interesting and enriching than his previous work. Open Source warfare is fascinating, but much like watching Wall St. for the past few weeks, it has an air of disaster porn and apocaphilia about it too.

(About time I cleaned this place up and started posting again, eh?)

I am currently at Barcamp Brighton 3. I am kind of rubbish at werewolf; last time I was too quiet, this barcamp I’m too lairy. Keep getting hung/eaten.

In the morning, I will be running a session entitled “Crowdsourced haircut”. Wish me luck…