mtl3p

In Getting Out of the City: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space , Bell and Dourish addresses the different layering of infrastructures in any urban environments: it’s physical (topologies), historical and cultural. On top of that, ubiquitous computing adds new infrastructural layers.

Pasta&Vinegar

quote from the paper - “We are creating not a virtual but a thoroughly physical infrastructure, and we need to think about it as one that is interwoven with the existing physical structure of space.”

“infrastructural amnesia”.

I was just re-reading tracey’s post and I love that word. Infrastructural amnesia gets 1 hit (her blog) on google. None for infrastructure amnesia. Way better word than picoinfrascture ;-) (pico is way too trendy - see “pico local”). I’m not sure if it would mean amnesia about the creation and reasons of the infrastructure or amnesia about disappeared infrastructure. Probably better if it just refers to a societies collective forgetting around the subject of infrastructure.

I think that means you can claim it, T. Unless you got it from those books you’ve been reading. Probably should publish it

This is one of my favorite blogs, and I have mainly kept it to myself. It’s about the authors relationship with the Turcot Interchange area of Montreal.

One of his last posts is about our need to learn from failed philosophies/ideologies of infrastructure:

While other cities are creating a sustainable future by envisioning and developing alternative means of transportation and protecting existing as well as creating new green spaces, Montreal seems to be settling into a hopeless repetition of Modernist planning. The golf course around the airport is being dug up and the new attitude seems to be that if you throw a few shrubs on a thing it somehow gets better.

The Turcot Interchange, however, is a glorious example of Modernist planning. It is also one of Canada’s strongest icons in transportation. To level it is like turning the Eiffel Tower into a 3 storey boutique with an observation deck. And placing grass, bushes, and trees around it is simply window dressing the issues and actually promotes the insane idea that having thousands and thousands of fossil fuel burning vehicles driving into the city core everyday is somehow a good thing.

Right after reading that I was listening to the Current on CBC (link to the summary will work tomorrow) and Naomi Klein being interviewed about her latest book . She was talking about an issue we’re becoming very familiar with here in Quebec - failing infrastructure. The idea that our society creating an infrastructural crisis in order to privatize infrastructure instead of re-investing to support, repair and extend the big wave of public infrastructure we created 40-70 years ago.

I had forgotten about a text that I worked on 6 months ago about Oppidan’s goal being to advocate for an infrastructural view of the technology (including soft / virtual / cyber technology) that we’re creating and then advocating the public interest of that infrastructure. I’m looking forward to sharing it soon.

that was a blast. I gave a pretty kick-ass cultural infrastructure talk. I’ve only presented once before on infrastructure (at the Toronto Muniwireless conference) and it didn’t go anywhere near as well as that. I’m really happy that they recorded it. Tobias is a fairly critical guy and he gave me a big thumbs up and said he wanted to see my notes.

(my notes were made 30 minutes before the presentation. on the back of a few scrap pieces of paper. but I’ve been thinking through this stuff for 2-3 years with some people like Tracey).

anyways, next up…

roadtriiiiip!!

Economics of Social Media

“The idea is to fight laziness and apathy and get people involved in building their own digital homes and identities.”

good entry via steven. His version has good excerpts, so maybe check it out before you decide to read the original post. ‘Cept I would say building thier own infrastructures, not homes or identities. Once you look at it as a problem of infrastructure, you realize the problem isn’t going to be solved with everyone having their own server. It’s about having the connections between us (bridges and roads) being free and open.

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I’ve written about this a lot. Building machines that can forget. And forgetting being a good thing as opposed to a bad thing. I saw this and then Tracey also sent it to me.

‘Outlines of a world coming into existence’: pervasive computing and the ethics of forgetting

Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin

Received 18 February 2005; in revised form 26 July 2006; published online 9 March 2007

Abstract. In this paper we examine the potential of pervasive computing to create widespread sousveillance, which will complement surveillance, through the development of life-logs—sociospatial archives that document every action, every event, every conversation, and every material expression of an individual’s life. Reflecting on emerging technologies, life-log projects, and artistic critiques of sousveillance, we explore the potential social, political, and ethical implications of machines that never forget. We suggest, given that life-logs have the potential to convert exterior generated oligopticons to an interior panopticon, that an ethics of forgetting needs to be developed and built into the development of life-logging technologies. Rather than seeing forgetting as a weakness or a fallibility, we argue that it is an emancipatory process that will free pervasive computing from burdensome and pernicious disciplinary effects.

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PluginFreifunkWifidog Working on marrying friefunk and wifidog. Apparently it works, and has for a while, but I’ve never really heard much about them installed and used.

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La voix d’avenir du VoIP mobile
Interesting local (yulbiz) post on voip + wifi. Also there’s going to be a local wireless security event that might be interesting for some of my colleagues.

“All this said, i’m not so convinced that bullying will go away. More depressingly, i think that it will continue to get worse. The more we as a society focus on hyper-individualism (and free speech above respect), the more we see youth believe that they have the right to torment anyone they wish. The less youth are socialized into adult society, the worse bullying gets. The less present parents are (jail, addiction, _workaholism_), the more bullying operates as a tactic for attention. The more we emphasize that mean-spirited attacks win air time on reality TV (and are the acceptable manner of judgment for American Idol), the more we set the standard for bullying. We’re living in a culture where bullying gets tacit validation in so many ways. We adults create child bullies through our actions - perhaps we need to think about the standards we set rather than the technology? I’m regularly horrified by my professional colleagues who are at work at 7PM even though they have young children at home who will be in bed by 9PM… those children are acting out for a reason and i think it’s hypocritical to talk about the problems with technology when we don’t talk about the problems with adult presence.”

Read the rest of it

I wish we listened to people like her and John Ralston Saul. It’s not that problems are so complex, but that we’re afraid of the sitting down, thinking through them, and following the conversations towards the answers. I’m absolutely dumbfounded that we can pass a law in Montreal changing all of the “squares” in into “parks” so that we can kick people out at 11pm without having any real discussion of it and without thinking through what some of the unintended outcomes of this we think are going to result. You live on a public space, you’re going to hear music at night if you want to keep your windows open. Such is life. And these zones of less-than-surburbia are necessary for the health of the community.

Same thing with the plan to set up security cameras along St. Laurent. Are we really that short-sighted that we think this is in our best interest? Or that it’s going to really going to reduce crime in our society?

Public, somewhat less-than-100% controlled, mixed use, intergenerational-spaces are essential for a healthy community. Completely “rationalized / optimized” use of space and people (fordism) is an old concept that isn’t worth bringing forward into another generation. Let realize it and get on with it.

My man JRS talks about the recent swell of non-profits being in some ways detrimental to democracy in as much as they are ignoring the idea of making change through voting. It’s very interesting to think of ISF as being profoundly un-democratic and possibly anti-democratic in that we are trying to create change in our society through infrastructural influence. In many ways we are not seeking the informed participation or consent of our fellow citizens. But it’s just as un-democratic as any other form of philanthropy.

(that doesn’t mean that ISF functions “undemocratically” internally. it doesn’t, really, but that’s besides the point).

If you’re interested, see here for more about critical reflections on ISF because of it’s process. Just earlier posts in case you’re a new / occasional reader.

And yes, maybe one day I’ll get over the saul kick that I’m on. But it might take a while. Come back in a year or two if you don’t want to see any more JRS fanboy action. ;-)

in the mcgill daily.

This is the message I was trying to put forward in this interview. The journalist dug it.

“Community-led, not-for-profit providers are sparking a debate over whether this new form of internet should be a public utility or a commodity. ”

We tried to get Ben Crulli in this article because he is our only volunteer at McGill, but for length reasons his interview got cut. Bummer.

also, apparently, there’s an article on ISF in the Metro journal today. check it out if you take the subway.

I don’t do most of the press these days. And I haven’t for over a year. But every once in a while someone ask to talk to one of the founders, or Richard Lussier (current press contact) sometimes sends some of the anglophone media requests to me.

Tracey’s talking more about infrastructure. It’s very good that she is.

As I mentioned on her blog, I hate the idea calling communications infrastructure “cyberinfrastructure”, “second-order infrastructure”, “virtual infratructure” or anything of that ilk, and I’m even somewhat uncomfortable with “information infrastructure” - just because it differentiates from all other forms of infrastructure and therefore allows for discrimination. Not that Tracey was necessarily proposing any of those terms, just reporting on her readings. I’m working on a network neutrality project and while reading about p2p networks and overselling found the concept of overlay networks - kind of similar but from the comp eng field.

Overlay Network on wikipedia

An overlay network is a computer network which is built on top of another network. Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network. For example, many peer-to-peer networks are overlay networks because they run on top of the Internet. Dial-up Internet is an overlay upon the telephone network.

it goes on. And I don’t like it either as a framework for communications infra.

I was talking to a civil engineer the other day and she was talking about how infrastructures are ordered in their world. I forget how she divided them up but it was another totally different way of conceiving of infrastructures.

Doc Searls is trying to work through arguments about telco infrastructure (in the recent linux journal - 2 months till it’s publicly available) and how it should be considered a public utility. Great article, but slightly muddy thinking. We need help in how to start to frame and present this issue as an infrastructure issue. My presentations recently have been on that (in italy and more recently in Toronto) and it will be the subject of my next few presentations. Here’s another article by him on telecom infrastructure being like linux and there’s one other one that I have to find.

And the CWIRP people were in town a few days ago. They’re the most recent academic group studying us. I made sure to talk to them about this and encourage them to pursue this topic because I don’t necessarily have the tools and Tracey probably doesn’t have the time to focus on this. Prof. Barbara Crow has been wrestling with mobile phone policy for a couple of years with ISF’s earlier partner MDCN and it’s very easy to communicate with her about any of this stuff.

I’ve been thinking this for a while now - since oct 2005 when I came back from the london wsfii. My comments then were on the 3d web, and they extend to calendaring infrastructure to civic information infrastructure and the rest. I still believe what I said in that email to the wsfii crowd - that we have to protext *every layer* of the infrastructure. And not just the OSI layers, but all the different application layers that depend upon each other. This is why I’m a hata’ of stuff like second life and the centralization of data.

Maybe it will turn out that infrastructure isn’t the right way to push this argument - but so far i think it’s pretty hot.

Two quotes in her post that I really like - one by the report that Tracey was reading and one by Tracey.

“the tendency to build first and ask questions later, or to treat the technical “code and wires” core as the realest or most essential thing about infrastructure, and the rest as social add-on - that has too frequently defined and limited the work of infrasructural development (p.29).”

and by tracey
“Community wireless infrastructures provide an opportunity to learn by doing infrastructure”.

more later.