The turn above from Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße into Schönhauser Allee yesterday around 19:15 is where I almost got hit by a woman driving a black car with license plates LDS HS 179. Shaken but not too shaken I pursued them up the street to demonstrate my discontent and to write down the plate number.

I should have seen that they weren’t going to stop though they usually do but this was rather unexpected during a leisurely evening ride where absolutely nothing should have gone wrong.

Police will be contacted on Monday and then we’ll see how far this can be pursued.

I’m in the process of moving over, getting my things in order and doing all of my other work, but I do believe that we have struck upon a mix here that has all of the right kinds of volatile creativity with a solid dash of make.

I don’t know what will come out of it yet, but that is the nature of a lab like this. My main source of inspiration is the Open Coop model as pioneered in Amsterdam North where independent entities team up and create new structures from their intellectual and physical overhead. There has been talk about all kinds of ideas already but we all know ideas are bullshit. The challenge will be to narrow things down and figure what we want to do. I do think that we are heading into the right direction. Onwards and upwards.

Télescope already was nice:

But with the addition of Loustic, French coffee can finally be taken seriously again:

Most of these places seem to be run by English speaking expatriates and they are also mostly frequented by the same. This was something I also noticed at my coworking space in La Cantine. It seems that foreigners are a necessary mediator to introduce new things —digital or coffee— into French culture.

That Tuesday I worked at KANT and all of the people there presented roughly what they’re doing at the agency we sublease at Panorama3000.

I was thinking of writing a screensaver that does the live OSM viewer ‘Show me the way’, but it turns out there’s a way easier solution by plugging that URL into the WebView Screensaver.

That Wednesday I did a quick ignite for UIKonf on Beestenbende’s design aspects and the next day I was at Heimathafen Neukölln at 06:00 to help them with setup and registration. I managed to catch a bit of the conference and based on the content on stage and reactions in the room, it looks like it was a resounding success.

The next day I spent working at the office for most of the day, but in the evening I dropped by the UIKode hackathon to show the iOS project I had picked up again that week. More on that to be announced here soon.

Yesterday night I went to the Volksbühne to see Krieg und Frieden, five hours of 19th century Russian war drama, by the Centraltheater Leipzig as part of the Theatertreffen. I had been listening to its soundtrack by Apparat for the past months. It used to be freely available on Soundcloud and is out now on Spotify.

The excellent music and the fact that the intendant of Leipzig, Sebastian Hartmann, had made some interesting statements about the state of German theater heightened my anticipation for this play.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one drawn in by the presence of a world renowned electronic musician. The  room was noticeably younger than for instance the Haus der Berliner Festspiele the day before but unfortunately it didn’t stay that way. As soon as people around me figured out that this wasn’t going to be an Apparat concert, that in fact the bits of music were going to be interrupted by long and boring German theater, many of them left.

The music was good. So good in fact that the play suffered by comparison.

What was wrong with the play? I would give it an A for effort because that had gone into it. But still all of that effort could not improve the poor writing and dramaturgy. We got subjected to literal hours of exposition. Actors enter, they declaim happenings in the 19th century, they expect this to have an affective effect on us and then they leave. Repeat. Sometimes they do this in chorus form which makes it even worse.

The absence of gripping monologues or almost any sharp dialogue did not help the energy level of the play. I felt like I was being beat into drowsiness that was occasionally relieved by the music.

Qualitatively there were lots of good things in this bad play. The acting when it was allowed was actually really good. There were a couple of scenes that managed to be evocative and memorable. The tilting platform was used brilliantly and added interesting dynamic variations to the scenes. It looks like there are two hours of very solid theater hidden away in these five. If only the director’s creativity had been restrained a bit and his darlings been massacred by somebody.

After the main play, a third part was tacked on which should have been scrapped. The actors go into a meta-treatment and engage in extensive amateur-philosophizing. This was the part where I got my much needed bit of sleep (the room was a third empty by then). The electronic lighting and animation at the very end were added in a way that didn’t match anything in the piece. One wonders at the deliberation that went into that if any.

German theater need not be stuck in the past as proven by Ostermeier. Russian classics need not be enacted in a boring fashion as proven by van Hove. That makes the creation of this mix with its good music, quality acting, terrible indulgence and dramaturgical chaos a choice. A choice that should have been made differently.

On Thursday I managed to set aside a bit of time to go to the local multiplayer picknick at Amaze. The Amaze Indie Connect is the most fun event of the Berlin game scene and it always gets lots of very cool people to come out. Just sitting at the same table as Terry Cavanagh and Michael Brough left me a bit star-struck:

@amazefest #dgt13 #AMaze2013 Thanks 2 all for that wonderful time. I wish u a successful year and hope seeing u 2014 back in Berlin.

— Thorsten S Wiedemann (@ST0RN0) April 28, 2013

It was also nice to see lots of old friends who I manage to see a couple of times a year. My highlight of Amaze was to be able to play Samurai Gunn. This game isn’t available yet and the video I’m going to post below does not nearly do it justice. It is one of the most gripping multiplayer combat games I’ve played to date.

On Friday I had breakfast at the Sheperditchi and then on Saturday it was off to Paris for CHI for the designing gamification workshop run by Sebastian Deterding.

I spent a full day with the team on Tuesday working on KAIGARA:

I drank very awesome coffee that Angelo had brought back from his road trip along the west coast of the USA:

We celebrated shipping some projects that night with Kars and Simon and the next day I was back at Hubbub for another day of work. That night it was off to the Open State offices in Amsterdam for a bit of envisioning with our new managing director. A very solid and constructive session, well catered by our in-house team of Bite Me:

My work setup at the brilliant Koko:

The Thursday I spent working at the Open Coop and preparing my Python programming course I gave on the now defunct Gidsy.

Friday I took the train back to Berlin and it was confirmed to me again that train companies are stupid. If I take a different train to Berlin I need to pay the difference in distance even if I start and end in the same place:

And Saturday I also managed squeeze out a long overdue Recess!.

So lots of stuff and more to follow.

These are present in phrases such as:

‘Hij kon het niet meer handelen.’ – “He couldn’t handle that anymore.”
‘Ik loop hier onwijs te struggelen.’ – “I’m struggling like a fiend here.”
‘Dat gaat niet happenen.’ – “It’s not going to happen.”
‘Hard hosselen.’ – “Hustlin’ hard.” (special case)

There are a couple of things to pay attention to.

Firstly Dutch people pronounce almost all of the English words they use as if they were Dutch. You can oppose this with Germans using words such as ‘clever’ or ‘teenager’ with the (more or less) proper pronunciation. In Dutch we will say ‘fuck’ a lot, but we won’t pronounce it \ˈfək\ but more like \ˈfɵk\. It’s a subtle difference, but especially on the ‘u’ vowels it is very audible.

This same mechanism is at play here, the imported verbs are pronounced as if they were Dutch, but the familiarity between the languages goes even further. The English words are conjugated into faux Dutch infinitives to make them fit into the Dutch sentences. I don’t know if there is a word for this use of loan words with conjugations.

‘Hard hosselen’ is a special case because there the English word ‘hustle’ has been assimilated even further so that it is hardly recognizable anymore.

Talking in this fashion is very poor form but also very convenient which makes us use these kinds of phrases all the more. If you have more (or more extreme) examples or can shed some linguistic light on this, please put it in the comments.

That week also involved a one-day trip to Munich to present on the work we did for a client there. More on that on the Hubbub blog in due course.

Thursday I worked at the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering next door. I really love how Oranienstraße is coming together as a creative technological hub of import in Berlin.

The rest of the week was used developing Ripple Effect and with maintenance on GidsGame.nl.

Something that does give me a lot of meaning recently but which you probably cannot call a game are my Moves stats. Definitions are not important and neither are buzzwords. Moves hits the ‘quantified self’ buzzword and foregoes the ‘gamification’ one but still numbers and feedback are key to the experience. Its prescriptive restraint is tasteful and it tracks all the bike rides I could not be bothered with. Automatic and good enough turns out to be near perfect.

I’ll be looking for more meaningful ways to play games in my day to day life in the near future but for now there’s more work than play in my life. With the Berlin summer upon us, if I play anything, I’ll be looking to do it outside. I’ve been meaning to learn cricket, but I’m open to other suggestions too.

German lessons continued even with one of our participants being back in the Netherlands:

Sun was enjoyed at last after the gruelling Berlin winter we had to endure:

And my laptop crashed again during the week and this time because I had already performed all backups and come to terms with the mortality of the device, this time the decision was quickly made to buy a new laptop. This is something I should have done a year ago.

And I’m noticing that Berlin police are very helpful if you’re cyclist. One example:

Harman put Heidegger, McLuhan and Clement Greenberg through a comparison and treated their views on the surface of things and their essence. Greenberg sounded to have been thrown in to make a connection to the art world.

Given that being can only show itself on the surface, I started to wonder whether a object based approach to ANT borrowing from programming might not be a useful analogy? The links between objects are along API surfaces that can be made to interact with each other under certain circumstances. The trajectory of an object is its internal state. A state that is in a black box that we cannot access except through the API it exposes. We may be able to open the black box but that could have unintended consequences such as breakage or discovery.

A final example that Harman gave was about writing about something such as wine. He said that by putting it into a machine, you could get a definite analysis of the wine, but lose its essence. To me it seems that a wine writer, writes about wine for humans and a machine writes about wine for machines. Presupposing that the human’s point of view is the only one that is valid, devolves to the anthropocentrism that we had just left behind us. Of course, wine to a robot is something else than wine is to us, and robots may have electromagnetic pleasures that we in turn cannot fathom, but translations can always be made however much they lose of the ‘essence’ of the object (as translations always do).

Harman’s response dives back into qualia, something which I had hoped to avoid:

@alper Not according to Dennett in his essay “Quining Qualia.” There,wine writing is mocked as not providing anything valuable for humans.

— GrahamHarman (@DrZamalek) April 10, 2013

And because of the lecture I found this book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies and I’m looking forward to reading the interview with Manuel DeLanda that is in there.

Provenance

The main improvement over a physical currency, is that with a digital currency you can in fact track all transactions. This is in fact a feature of bitcoin with its global transaction register.

The problem with that is that most transactions are done anonymously so you can see that money went from A to B but you don’t know who A and B are nor why it moved. This makes bitcoins very attractive to people selling illicit wares.

Now comes the challenge:

1. I don’t want to live in a failed narco-state (and I don’t think many others do either).
2. In principle I am for a currency where every transaction is public and traceable but I am not for the increase in state power that this will entail.

So there is probably some more crypto-trickery necessary to be able to get a currency where you can prove that: it wasn’t used for certain types of transactions, or that certain taxes were indeed paid in previous transactions.

Volatility

I used to think that bitcoin would not be viable because the market and individual actors are too easily compromised. The checks and balances are so weak that any computer exploit means you lose all your money. Right now I think that is in fact a feature not a bug.

Bitcoin was envisioned as an exchange currency and if you use it as such all of these problems go away. Whenever you need to buy something online, you convert some money into bitcoins at the day’s rate and do your business.

So it is in fact not necessary to store large amounts of bitcoins for a prolonged amount of time except if you want to speculate. All others would buy bitcoins as necessary and sell them when they don’t need them and this would increase the liquidity of the currency.

I did post the answer to the most frequently asked question I get, which is how you actually pronounce my name:

And in between stuff I dropped in on this book presentation at c-base, which was pretty weird:

And I had a strange encounter with Berlin police who it seems cannot look around them.

Furthermore I did some account maintenance for Open State, getting things in order for our new CEO who arrives next week.

It required no creativity, no imagination and only the most basic second-rate intellect.

It would be true to say that in the last years of Western civilization it contributed to a general mood of depression bordering on masochism.

Happiness is an intense, all-consuming feeling of joyous fulfillment akin to inebriation, rapture or ecstasy.

The girls who arrived at Big Sur were, for the most part, stupid little WASP bitches, at least half of whom were virgins.

Young, good-looking, famous, desired by women and envied by men, rock stars had risen to the summit of the social order.

In truth, he had always thought of Americans as idiots.

By the end of the first day, it was apparent that Catherine’s personality had aspects of the witch, but also of the lioness, which usually pointed to a career in sales management.

He doesn’t know it yet, but the infinity of childhood is brief.

The vibrations drove the snake wild and it would throw itself against the glass until it knocked itself unconscious.

What had to be endured, he would endure.

She was forty-five years old and her vulva was scrawny and sagged slightly, but she was still a very beautiful woman.

All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust—and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that.

The ambulance drove off in a howl of sirens. So ended Bruno’s first love.

Though unimpressed by the philosopher’s work, she was struck by his ugliness, which almost amounted to a handicap;

I tell you, I saw women with their legs wide open, wet and up for it, spending the whole evening masturbating because no one would fuck them.

If ever a country were loathsome, that country, specifically, was Brazil.

Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.

All around him human beings were living, breathing, striving for pleasure or trying to develop their personal potential.

Was she masturbating while listening to Brahms?

customarily, after a number of hours, some of them would go into a trance—or pretend to.

He was the first of his generation to see beyond the ridiculous, contradictory and outmoded superstitions it adopted to the fact that New Age thought appealed to a very real suffering symptomatic of psychological, ontological and social breakdown.

He sometimes managed to coax a tit-job out of a girl, but as far as Bruno was concerned there were not nearly enough to go around.

He found in mathematics a happiness both serene and intense.

The broadcast, which lasted three or four hours, probably represents the culmination of the first stage of the great Western technological dream.

Children suffer the world that adults create for them and try their best to adapt to it; in time, usually, they will replicate it.

It has been surprising to note the meekness, resignation, perhaps even secret relief with which humans have consented to their own passing

I love that kid more than anything, but I’ve never even been able to accept his existence.

He wasn’t unhappy; the medication was working, and all desire was dead in him.

He had a sudden premonition that all his life would be like this moment. Emotion would pass him by, sometimes very close.

They would come to be rivals—which was the natural relationship between men. They would be like animals fighting in a cage; and the cage was time.

Their egotism knows no bounds—such is the nature of the individual.

Physical violence, the most perfect manifestation of individuation, was about to reappear.

He felt as though what was between his legs was a piece of oozing, putrefying meat devoured by worms.

Without beauty a girl is unhappy because she has missed her chance to be loved.

His eyes were wide open, but his expression was not one of grief, nor of any recognizable human emotion. His face was filled with abject, animal fear.

Cohen had no illusions about the depths to which the human animal could sink when not constrained by law.

She lost her virginity at the age of thirteen—a remarkable achievement given the time and place.

Oh, there are little moments of depression, of sadness or doubt, but they’re easily dealt with using advances in antidepressants and tranquilizers.

From the point of view of the good of the species, they were a couple of aging human beings of middling genetic value.

Ultimately, a society governed by the pure principles of universal morality could last until the end of the world.

Huxley, he would always remember, had seemed detached about the prospect of his own death, though perhaps he was simply numbed or drugged.

In the midst of nature’s barbarity, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity.

After a couple of years of working, sexual desire wanes and people turn their attention to gourmet food and wine.

Metaphysical mutations—that is to say radical, global transformations in the values to which the majority subscribe—are rare in the history of humanity.

The couple quickly realized that the burden of caring for a small child was incompatible with their ideal of personal freedom

This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned its belief in love.

Despite the nights they spent together, each remained trapped in individual consciousness and separate flesh

Now and then the wind dies away and the silence is almost total, broken only by cries of pleasure.

Thirty years later he could not come to any other conclusion: women were indisputably better than men. They were gentler, more affectionate, loving and compassionate; they were less prone to violence, selfishness, cruelty or self-centeredness. Moreover, they were more rational, intelligent and hardworking.

Week 313 was spent in the Netherlands with a somewhat hectic visit. I spent a lot of time at the Hubbub studio and at the Open Coop.

And of course the inevitable five (!) visits to the Village who were serving only Coffee Collective coffees when I was there:

And that Friday was Free Bassel Day in remembrance of our friend who is still imprisoned in a Syrian prison:

And then it was an ICE back to Berlin already:

I did manage to get some good writing in those two weeks. First one piece about why levying a tax on data is not a bad idea at all: Taxing data is not crazy. And the week after that about Jaron Lanier who is a crazy person with some interesting ideas: Who owns the future?

TORREON should be about finished by now. And last Friday we also forcibly launched the German incarnation of Politwoops now with an accompanying Twitter account because the SPD chancellor candidate posted something he shouldn’t have.

Also I’m doing another bout of programming education for non-programmers in Amsterdam next week with a course and a meetup. More on that in a bit.

And I finished my Recess! post.

This week I bought Ultratron and played that a bit. It looks like a solid 2D shooter like I haven’t played in ages. Before that I played bunches of Ridiculous Fishing and Spelunky which Darius Kazemi has kindly translated into HTML5 for us non-Windows users. And that’s only this week. I’m playing so many games right now. The amount of new games being released is also huge. Truly we live in a ludic age.

How different this is from back in the day when I would spend days grinding levels and gold in Final Fantasy on the NES or map out the dungeons of Faria. There simply wasn’t that much to play back then so we made do with what we had. I hear there are still people with such singular dedication to a game, but I can’t imagine it.

How different it is even from my tastes of a couple of years ago where I would play the occasional game but also see over 60 movies a year and a couple of dozen plays. That has changed and not just because of my move to Berlin.

Good games are not only abundant these days, they are cheaper than passive media, easier to get and more engaging. Things that are not interactive have a terribly hard time getting and keeping my attention unless they’re very good or very short. Some stupid people would bemoan the change of our media consumption patterns and imagine that we are losing something essential. I don’t agree. I think we are better off with these more systemically complex and often also more social experiences.

So games replace previous media only once for each person and after they’ve done that they replace each other. I play many games briefly but intensively and then never again (Plague for instance) or sometimes I never manage to get into them at all (I played all of 30 minutes of Swords and Sworcercy). And then new games arrive and it turns out to be hard to get back into the swing, let alone the story of a game you played a week ago. Nothing seems to stick.

Making digital games that we can play over the course of years seems hard. Purely digital forms are too easy to forget and often limited in many ways. Long lasting games need to create widespread alliances in both the physical and the social world so we will keep re-encountering them in different contexts. Minecraft, Joust and Angry Birds come to mind off-hand. That suggests that cracking this question is the way to becoming successful, or is it the other way around?

Alper

A new large scale German drama series has been making the rounds on Twitter this week called ‘Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter’ and it is interesting though flawed. I haven’t seen a production with these production values on German television before and I think we should see more of it.

The series is somewhat schmaltzy (see the screen capture above of bullet casings landing in slow motion on a group portrait) but that is to be expected from a mainstream production.

What I found problematic is the sharp division drawn between the group of five main characters and the other actors in wartime Germany. The main characters are idealized figures who are supposed to symbolize their generation and its moral choices during the war. These choices mostly center on the small evils of oversight, looking away, following orders and opportunism. The real capital letter evils are perpetrated by others, mostly those of another generation, whose appearance and motivations are far more sinister.

I know there are several opinions about this (but I am not alone if I read all the critiques in German papers), but this portrayal to me seems to exceptionalize evil which is probably not the best idea. A more naturalistic and flat treatment of the systems of the war would have been immensely more difficult but also immensely better.

Update: Now that I’ve seen the last episode I would like to discourage anybody from watching this series. Any suspense and pace that was in the first episode was gone by the end. Moreover the writing and drama was absurdly poor by then. I know that properly ending stories is hard, but how a modern dramaturg and script writer signed off on this clusterfuck is beyond me. If this was the last hope for German public broadcasting to be relevant then that hope is in vain and the entire institution should be burnt down as quickly as possible.

In Conversation: Jaron Lanier and James Bridle On Who Owns the Future? from The School of Life on Vimeo.

I have just watched the above conversation between Jaron Lanier and James Bridle in Conway Hall organized by the School of Life. The event was to mark the occasion of Lanier’s new book “Who Owns The Future?” (Guardian review) and the conversation focused on some interesting ideas from it. I will probably not read the book itself, but I think the things said in the video above can be taken by themselves and though they are provocative they do not motivate me to give Lanier any money.

The main issue is that Lanier signals some interesting problems (He’s not alone. Om Malik just posted this about Data Darwinism), he makes some terrible comparisons and posits solutions that are wholly unconvincing.

Problems

Laniers big idea is that those with the biggest computers on the network (and the largest collection of brains to program those computers) are in danger of becoming the rentiers of big data. They will be able to out-compute everybody else and figure out what Gibson called the ‘order flow’ in his Blue Ant trilogy: the best set of actions given the circumstances.

That is an interesting if not exactly novel idea. It serves as a jumping off point into some outright crazy ideas about intellectual property. Lanier compares the contraction created by the current austerity measures with what is happening in the music industry. This is a ridiculous comparison. Even if it did hold, then whatever is happening is an overdue correction to a situation that was unsustainably overleveraged.

In the same vein he waves around the scarecrow that ‘the economy will shrink’. A notion that will undoubtedly play well with the same audience that is inclined to buy his book. Rhetoric about shrinking economies is almost always a phantom. Economic shrinkage may very well be in our near future and does not necessarily need to be a bad thing.

Lanier’s point that people are forced into an informal economy is valid but it speaks more to the failure of social systems than anything else. The social democratic contract that may be inconceivable for Americans is working quite well in Europe. It may need updating both for changing demographics and the digital age, but I don’t think many people here would trade it for what Lanier is peddling. Like I mentioned in my data tax post, we don’t have the problem of musicians who can’t pay their medical bills.

Solutions

The proposed solutions are even more problematic (though if you’re so inclined you might term them ‘thought provoking’).

Lanier seems overly influenced by the music industry and by the concept of private copyright. I would assert that the music industry with its track record is not something worth emulating. The sky is not falling in the music industry. They are facing a long overdue re-evaluation of their social contract because their carrier of value has lost its excludability. There are still lost of people making music and thriving.

Lanier seems to roughly comprehend how a just society should work: ‘For society to be democratic, income needs to be distributed in a way that is roughly a bell curve.’ but at the same time he seems to be confused how it should be implemented: ‘Socialism needs to be off the table in the information age.’

The bidirectional reference networks that Lanier proposes that preserve the context and provenance of data sound fantastic. There are however real reasons why we are doing the ‘profoundly dumb thing we are doing’ instead. His network sounds awfully similar to the idea of the semantic web, where everything online will work perfectly if only we would do it The Right Way (which we of course never will).

His solution to ‘Become as aware as possible of how you fit in other people’s computation schemes.’ is a good idea. It is the same algorithmic literacy pointed to in work by Kevin Slavin, Douglas Rushkoff and James Bridle himself.

I’m afraid that Lanier’s rhetoric of a ‘more honest accounting’ will play particularly well in Germany where similar words are already being used to take Google to court. Germany passed a Leistungsschutzrecht (ancillary copyright for publishers) because they figured out that large American companies were making outlandish amounts of money based on the work of large German publishing houses.

The conversation of a fair distribution of wealth in a power-law based networked economy is one we need to have. I doubt though if this particular book is a good starting point for such a conversation. Lanier’s cultural foundations point us towards a solution that is at best unrealistic and tries to extrapolate the problematic private notion of copyright to society as a whole.

The data tax I wrote about yesterday is an approach from a more public point of view. That would focus more on personal data and the revenue generated from such a tax would go into government so it would be subject to democratic controls. Ideas that won’t fly well with Lanier’s Silicon Valley crowd, but maybe that’s all the better.

Both analyses signal the dominance of corporate actors in a big data world and both suggest new methods of taxation as a potential solution to the problem. An article over at Forbes explains the commission’s proposal by Nicolas Colin and makes a lot of sense.

The French report has been received with predictable knee-jerk responses across the tech world. It is true that governments have not been very good at regulating the internet. But not regulating the internet is not a solution. We could hope for representation that is competent when it comes to the digital world.

The companies that create the internet should not cry foul. They have a track record of evading taxes more than contributing their fair share back to society.

I’ll tackle Lanier’s position in another post. I just watched the conversation he had with James Bridle in Conway Hall and noticed some errors in Lanier’s ideas: they require a fully functional semantic web, they seem overly informed by private copyright practice and complementarily they take a weak government for granted.

How you would enforce such a law is another question entirely, but it cannot go further off the mark than how large companies manage to evade taxes right now. It may in fact be a lot fairer to tax data at the point of collection/use.

If you don’t bother to read the article above, I can sum it up in two key points below:

Data is hazardous waste material and as such its production and storage should be discouraged (the CO2 tax was given as an example in the Forbes article). Cory Doctorow compared personal data breaches to nuclear disasters, because the fallout is so tremendously hard to contain and control. Whoever collects large amounts of personal data treats the privacy damage caused by breaches as an externality. As such the storage of such data should be discouraged with a tax.

Data is capital and should be taxed as all capital is. Storage, mining and arbitrage using data can generate revenue for sophisticated market actors (those that Lanier terms as those with ‘the biggest computer on the network’). Data is a value adding asset that generates wealth and more data for those who already have it. If we don’t want a situation where a small group of people get richer at the expense of everybody else, we should tax it.

So data is both capital and hazardous. We tax many things with either of those properties so we should definitely tax something that has both.

I booked my trip and accommodation in Paris. I’m quite looking forward to see that city again.

On Tuesday we had a big office lunch along with the people from Schnelle Bunte Bilder.

Wednesday we had our weekly German language class.

And that night I worked late to finish TORREON. A small project that took up way too much time as all small projects do.

That same night I helped a kid in the Netherlands do his maths homework. I think it is standard practice for kids in the Netherlands to share pictures of their homework issues on social media. This time I got caught by one and managed to help the kid out decomposing square roots.

@alper er zit een jongen in mijn klas die alper heet en hij helpt me altijd dus ik linkte voor de grap @ alper zonder te weten dat ik 1-2

— 㞥 (@_rmi) March 5, 2013

@alper echt geholpen zou worden door iemand

— 㞥 (@_rmi) March 5, 2013

Niels managed to hit another high with his contribution to Recess!. I think it may be about time to create a single serving website for tat serial.

Reading is something I still manage to do quite a lot though I have given up reading articles in Instapaper and have been reading a solid streak of books again. Some friends didn’t agree and they think the solution to this problem lies in craft beer.

On Friday morning we had a meeting with the breakfast gang. My blurb for TNW magazine was published on the open web.

And we closed off the week with a nice game of Citadels.

To my shame it took me until Friday night to write my second installment of Recess!

I also got in touch with the government of Tempelhof-Schöneberg to procure all building permits for the area which had some disappointing results. More on that later.

We got a DNSimple account because that’s the way that heroku allows naked domains to function. DNSimple sets up the ALIAS record for you rather easily, but what it doesn’t do is warn you if you have both MX and CNAME records on something. What happens is that the CNAME record always takes precedence as a redirect so your e-mails are then routed to proxy.heroku.com. Something that is undesirably and that DNSimple should warn against.

What turns out to be the best solution is to set ALIAS records for both your apex domain and your subdomains (as proposed here). This way you don’t need a CNAME record anymore that can interfere with other settings. Heroku in their documentation advise you to use a CNAME record, so I’m going to ask them if there are any problems with using an ALIAS for all web routing.

The other option would be to purchase another plan for Zerigo which seems to be heroku’s preferred solution for this issue right now. Again this is rather poorly documented and we would have liked to be informed about that before we chose for the DNSimple option.

Update: Heroku replied with the following.

Great question. The ALIAS record, created by DNSimple, is basically a bunch of magic that does a combination of what CNAMEs and A Records do, but does it behind the scenes. You can read more about the ALIAS records here: http://blog.dnsimple.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-alias-that-works/

That said, DNSimple would likely be better quipped to answer a question like this. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t use ALIAS records in place of CNAMEs. There might be a slight difference in performance between the two, but I’m not certain enough about that to say for sure.

After which I asked the same question over at DNSimple on their blog. That comment is awaiting moderation and an answer but I’ll post that here as soon as it appears.

Je kon hem al spelen, maar Proteus van Ed Key is nu eindelijk officieel uit. Proteus is de naam van het willekeurig gegenereerde eiland opgebouwd uit impressionistische pixel-graphics waar je heen gaat. Aangekomen op het strand zie je op het eerste gezicht alleen wat bomen maar als je verder loopt kom je gaandeweg dieren en ook andere dingen tegen zoals torens, standbeelden en stenen. Je aanwezigheid beïnvloedt het eiland. Dat zie je niet alleen, je hoort het vooral in de muziek (gecomponeerd door David Kanaga) en de geluiden die allebei reageren op wat je doet.

Proteus bevat geen echte doelen. Er is geen prestatiedruk en je hoeft je niet bezig te houden met wat je nu ook alweer moet doen zoals in andere spellen. Je loopt gewoon over een eiland en dat alleen al is een bijzonder prettige ervaring.

Tijdens dat lopen is er ook genoeg te doen. Keer op keer ondernam ik een tocht die ik halverwege afbrak omdat ik een groepje dieren achterna ging of naar een adembenemend uitzicht wilde kijken. En elke keer als er een dag of een seizoen voorbij is, verandert Proteus en zijn er weer nieuwe dingen te zien en te doen.

De doelloosheid en eindeloze variëteit van Proteus maken dat je niet uitgekeken raakt. Je kunt er keer op keer terug blijven komen. Proteus is dan ook niet zozeer een spel als wel een serene plek waar je altijd heen kunt.

I’m checking in with you guys straight from what used to be Cold War Berlin. Berlin is still in a state of conflict, mostly because of growing pains and a lack of a coherent identity (today they started demolishing the last bit of that wall to make place for luxury apartments). An interesting example of that conflict on the streets is the civil disobedience and destruction themed game Camover. The idea is generally that people with balaclavas go around destroy security cameras and documenting the fact to gain points. Now as if that wasn’t controversial enough, an activist associated with it suggested to extend the game to ‘data goggles’ and destroy those of people recording your visage.

Data goggles obviously means Google Glass. Last week we had a brief discussion on twitter about why Glass would or would not be an obvious device to play games on. Say what you will about the video or just compare it to the Microsoft vision of internet connected fridges.

@kaeru @peterbihr It may turn out like the Move controller, a nifty gadget with a couple of interesting games.

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) February 21, 2013

I’m well aware of the standard arguments against AR. Kars was quick to point them out. These are very valid, but it is still an experience that can be put to a variety of uses. Just look at the Move controller’s whose limited in- and outputs enable a game as interesting as Joust of which the depths have not been exhausted yet. Similarly the hardware affordances of Glass should yield at least one interesting game.

What is the most annoying part of Joust is finding enough controllers to play it with. If Glass reaches the Android like ubiquity that Google is obviously aiming for, we can expect a very rich ecosystem to arise around this. These games will be mostly very boring, poor conversions or techno-wankery such as for instance Ingress but we should not rule out that there may be one or two good ones to pop up as well. I’ll take something that’s half as fun to play as Zumbie looks to be.

Straight up game development of course is not the most interesting thing that such a platform offers. The changes in our social interaction that such hardware engenders will probably be the most interesting hooks to build interesting playful interactions into. So the loony activist above was not that far off the mark, but let us try to be a bit more constructive.

- Alper

I’m part of an expensive drinking club. #ironbloggerberlin

— Michelle Thorne (@thornet) February 18, 2013

The week was off to a smashing smart with the irregular Iron Blogger Berlin drinks. For some people it is an expensive drinking club, for me with my iron blogging resolve it is more an expensed drinking club.

Berlin weather has been crazy last week. Also again we did tons of stuff for Hubbub, see it over there on Week 183.

Over at Open State we are still recruiting a managing director to take over operations and lead us up onto the next level of open government and civic innovation. If you are reading this and you are inclined towards getting things done and civic responsibility, do get in touch with us:

To help us do that work you can still apply to this managing director position over at @hackdeoverheid (Dutch): republic.nl/vacature/2013/…

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) February 21, 2013

I was preparing to write a book about the way we’ve come to work for a while now, but as most books go this was not really happening. So I decided to convert it to a format that is easier to get started on and write it as a series of blog posts right here.

At the end of the week we threw together an impromptu Friday’s at Seven here in the neighborhood to end the week and tap into the scenius that is coalescing. We’ll definitely do that again and try out various other event formats to see which is the most fun in the long run.

And Saturday I finally finished Infinite Jest after having received the hardcopy version of it over four years ago. I was quite happy with that if only because I now have time again to read other things (just started the Quantum Thief).

Anyway, I tried to dial into a conference call while there was a massive demonstration happening over at Wienerstraße #Lausitzer8. Having the riot police and the anarchists play tag below your window creates something of a racket:

This corner of Kreuzberg is becoming more and more interesting and I’m running into people randomly in various lunch places. Last week I had the pleasure to meet both Chris Eidhof (who we should see more of in this part of town) and Jannis Leidel.

Niels posted the second Recess! which was as awesome as I’d expected it to be.

On Thursday I went to the TPB AFK screening in c-base which was organized by Michelle Thorne after a conversation in a cafe here. I look forward to meeting lots more interesting people around the area and conspiring to do awesome things with them.

I wrote up the watersnake app I wrote over here. Expect to see us meddle more into these kind of systems from a game design point of view.

And on the weekend I played two new board games (Cosmic Encounter and King of Tokyo) and had dinner with Tim de Gier and the Dekker brothers.

German reinterpretations of English works are often problematic because of the language and culture ravine that lies between. That’s no different here. I often had the feeling that the people treating it or doing it don’t really understand the text and they’re just doing something. Just reading a text by Pynchon is no mean feat, let alone creating an adaptation to the stage.

The dramatic performances are more convincing than what I’ve seen in the larger venues here in Berlin. There is also a camera that shows us parts of the stage that are occluded. The bar and party area, the living room quarters with the Killroy curtain hanging in front of it. A refreshing addition especially because videography is anathema in traditional German theater.

The piece takes its time. Probably stemming from the misconception that things that have a long duration are profound. This can be true, but three hours is just in between a bearable evening play and the dramatic marathon that imbibes special meaning to the ordeal. It is amazing however that such theatric effort can be bought for €13, a steal whichever way you look at it.

After the first hour of trying to follow what was happening in various parts of the stage I had the realization that made everything fall into place. Instead of trying to follow the story I just thought back to The Invisibles, the legendary psychedelic graphic novel of disparate threads bound together by a crazed vision. After that I could just let the subsequent hours wash over me. Which raises the question: has there been an The Invisibles play yet? King Mob on the stage would kick Molière’s ass.

If you want to see over three hours of risky disjunctive theater, you should definitely go.

In this interview about Liquid Democracy you can read quite clearly how the technical mandate drives the direction of the project. Something that may not be very desirable if you think of it as a democracy-centric issue and not a technology-centric one.

So to see how hard it would be to write something similar in vanilla django. It’s easy to hate on django but you can find tons of people who can work on this in just about every major city, the framework and the documentation are mature and many parts of the framework can be called excellent.

I thought putting something together that at its core implements a delegated voting engine should be doable in an afternoon and it was. What took the most time was playing around with the settings of the testrunner which I hadn’t really used before. So the watersnake app in this project does majority voting on single proposals with support for delegation.  To see it work you have to run the tests, but building this out into a full fledged (web) app that can be deployed to heroku with a single command is technically trivial (and also time consuming).

This wasn’t a stretch to implement right now because I’m also doing some other projects which border on collaborative writing/decision making/filtering. As always, technology is neither the problem or the solution, but certain technical systems grant different socio-technical affordances than others. I will probably not work on this unless there is a clear demand, but I thought it would be useful to debunk the idea that building such a system needs to be difficult or complex.

Tuesday I went to the Netzpolitische Abend here in c-base where Janneke Slöetjes of Bits of Freedom was one of the speakers. It was great fun catching up with what they’ve been busy with and the activist’s life.

And on Saturday Jan Lehnardt and I organized the first Swhack Berlin, a commemorative hackathon to do the things that we would normally only talk about. A round-up of the things we did is still forthcoming, but everybody is super-busy of course. It was a lot of fun and I was pleasantly surprised even by the 10+ people who showed up and got busy. We’ll do another one sometime in the near future.

Wednesday we got a new person to join us over here at Praxis: the elusive iksi who seems to be rather more connected to my Dutch friends than I had foreseen.

The rest of the week Kars Alfrink was here in Berlin for copresent sprints on all the running projects and you’ll read more about all that stuff in last week’s Hubbub weeknotes.

I did bang out a Re:publica submission, kick started a hackathon (there’s a separate post on that) and started a neighborhood initiative.

Dear Kars and Niels,

I finally bought Proteus yesterday and though I really wanted to like it, I only half succeeded. It truly is a beautiful looking game but I do care a great deal about goals in the games I play (otherwise I probably would have loved Glitch too). Proteus has even fewer goals than Dear Esther. I can chase a few animals but other than that there isn’t much else to do on the island than to look at the spectacular sunsets.

My issue with that is that I think I should go outside and experience real nature instead of a procedurally generated facsimile on my screen, however beautiful it may be. Am I being a stick in the mud? The Kleistpark around the corner here is rather plain but this afternoon I did spot a fat bird between the branches.

Last week I was looking for a quick game to unwind in between work. Luftrausers would fit the bill, but that isn’t available yet on my system. I’m more or less done with Hundreds by now. I am playing Galcon now on the iPhone and sort of enjoying that. So my first Recess stays at the surface and is about that age old: tell me what to play.

Alper

We have done a lot of what we used to call ‘civic hacking’ in the past, a phrase that has been used so often by now that I’m slightly sickened when using it. But there is still a lot to be done and both resistance against the movement and co-optation are growing. In Germany, where I live now, things are still in a pre-dormant state. The internet is in a rather sorry state here and people are good at complaining but less so at changing things.

Saturday’s hackathon is meant to focus efforts and do random stuff. The stuff you normally never get around to doing because of the day-to-day business. I have some rather unorthodox ideas to change things but I could use some help. So join us!

The Sandman: Endless Nights Gaiman, Neil
Getting around to finishing all of the Sandman. Somewhat indulgent but still a very well done multi-mythology.

The Invisibles Omnibus Morrison, Grant
A hugely important graphic novel. Also mind expanding in all the good ways that are necessary for a broad view of the world.

Pump Six and Other Stories Bacigalupi, Paolo
More Bacigalupi. Even more please.

Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play Scott, James C.
A short and proper introduction to anarchism, sociology, political science and history by James Scott. One of the most important scholars for our current age of odd and corrupt governance. 

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays Wallace, David Foster
Slowly getting around to reading everything by DFW. I might even finish Infinite Jest this year.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet Mitchell, David
Read during two intercontintental flights. Not the best of literature but still a tour de force by David Mitchell who makes everything look easy.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Thompson, Hunter S.
Another long overdue classic. Mind stretching.

Kill Decision Suarez, Daniel
A light but important technothriller featuring drone warfare.

Sprakeloos Lanoye, Tom
Too indulgent as is to be expected of Lanoye’s novels. We’re better off if he writes theater.

The Little Prince Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de
Another long overdue book. Read in French.

Common Sense Paine, Thomas
Highly readable and very stimulating. They don’t write ‘em like that anymore.

1Q84 Murakami, Haruki
Murakami is another of my indulgences however mixed his later books are becoming.

Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive Schneier, Bruce
A highly necessary game theoretical analysis of society’s processes.

Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing Bogost, Ian
The best introduction to OOO you could find anywhere.

Prince of Networks: Bruno LaTour and Metaphysics Harman, Graham
A very good introduction to Latour and the current speculative realistic vein in philosophy.

Koorddansen in de Kaukasus: Reis door Ruslands onbeheersbare achtertuin Koens, Olaf
Spectacular portrait of this inaccessible edge of Europe.

Essays in Love: A Novel Botton, Alain de
Forgettable.

To the Lighthouse Woolf, Virginia
Long overdue but a brilliant book.

Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames Bogost, Ian
It turns out that reading How to do things with videogames is the better choice.

The Windup Girl Bacigalupi, Paolo
Highly necessary future climate dystopia. Bacigalupian is definitely going to be a thing. Large parts of the world are already living it.

Beginning Iphone 3 Development: Exploring the Iphone SDK Mark, Dave
The book that got me into iPhone development (and did it quite well).

The Art of Travel Botton, Alain de
Entertaining.

Zendegi Egan, Greg
Some interesting ideas, but still not the hard Egan sci-fi one would want.

TORREON is more or less finished with the client accepting the work into their own repository now.

Tuesday we had an board meeting with Open State. I added my thoughts to Emma Mulqueeny’s post about social entrepreneurship and the long game. We are struggling with the same issues but optimistic.

I had a meeting over at Netzpolitik for our upcoming joint venture with Open State as well.

I wrote this blog post about real thinkers anywhere on the continent: “Who still thinks in Germany?”

Finally I had a nice coffee with recent Berlin arrival Jurriaan who I think is a great addition to the local tech scene.

On Saturday I dropped by the extra Apps and the City hackday and turned my python hack into a javascript version for better distribution and graphical presentation. The javascript community disappointed me because there wasn’t a graph based A* solver available anywhere, so I was forced to write my own version using the Wikipedia pseudocode and underscore.js. That now lives on Github. It still needs a bunch of work.

Further I also updated my Thinkup installation to the most recent beta and my Dreamhost account to a VPS but still haven’t gotten it to work properly. I’m hoping that outage does not take too long.

I had my misgivings about what passes for intellectualism in Germany both in the newspapers and in the public debate. Germans pride themselves on being a country of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) but traces of both are thin on the ground.

I wondered about this a bit more after the Nexus Conference in Amsterdam last year which staged thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Rory Stewart, Roger Scruton, Evgeny Morozov. My Dutch friends who attended exclaimed: ‘Where are the thinkers of this calibre in the Netherlands?’ Suffice it to say there aren’t any. Nobody really expect Dutch people to be the source of great thoughts, so no loss there.

But when I then asked for contemporary German thinkers, who are read widely abroad, my friends on Twitter came up with this very thin list:

Contemporary German thinkers people came up with yesterday: Sloterdijk, Jelinek, Roche, Grass

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) December 16, 2012

I would say that Grass, Sloterdijk and Jelinek can just barely be called contemporary (the same with Habermas) and Roche hardly an intellectual.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one to notice it. Slavoj Žižek, however repugnant I find the man, mentions in a recent Salon interview:

That said, I quite admire the United States and Canada. In some ways, they are better than Europe now. France and Germany, for instance, are currently in a very low state intellectually — especially Germany. Nothing interesting is happening there. Yet it surprises me how intellectually alive The United States and Canada are. Let me give you an example: Hegelian studies. If Europeans want to understand Hegel, they go to Toronto or Chicago or Pittsburgh.

This may be a bit hard to stomach if you’re German, it isn’t too bad for aspiring thinkers. In a country where the point of everything is drowned out in a sea of pompous verbosity, opportunities abound for those with a fresh perspective and proper delivery.

I published my piece about the Protocoletariat. I hope to be able to do more stuff in that field and tie in my professional endeavours in games, open government and computer science.

I can very much recommend following both @Dymaxion and @justinpickard for the interesting anarcho-futurist trends their interactions hint at.

@dymaxion – *fixed grin*

— Justin Pickard (@justinpickard) January 20, 2013

I had a more than welcome catchup with Martin Spindler.

Then I started the procedures to finish the administrative year here in Germany and on to the next one.

I updated my Thinkup which proved to be something of a mixed bag now forcing me to upgrade my hosting package.

Wednesday I had my first class of my language course at the Goethe Institute which proved to be a bit too easy for my taste (which is probably always the case if you already know a bunch of languages). The practice will be good for me in any case and I hope to apply the practical parts more and more in German professional life.

Having started everything in Berlin —to my chagrin— on Thursday I went to Amsterdam for the Open State board dinner and some other odds and ends that needed seeing to. That day I also fasted for my friend Bassel who is jailed in Syria just for being a free software activist.

The board dinner that night at the new restaurant my brother runs Fa. Speijkervet was a lot of fun. There are a lot of changes coming up and almost all of them are for the better.

Friday I hung out at Koko in Amsterdam. A nice new coffee place run by two girls who are totally into coffee and fashion. A big recommendation if you want to escape the hectic Amsterdam city center. After I did our meeting at De Gids (again see the Hubbub weeknote), we did a run of the town with Kars and Alexander Zeh.

Saturday I learned about the suicide of Aaron Swartz an immensely respected figure in freedom and/of information. He was one of the rare people both whose software I used and whose thoughts resonated with me. He got so much done in that short time he was here that  his passing places a big burden on the rest of us to continue that work.

I then ended my theater going life by seeing the final Mightysociety show in Frascati. More on that when there is time.

Sunday was another Hubbub workday —yes we have a lot to do— with ample visits to the Village which is really an even funner place then than it is during the week.

In ‘The Binding of Isaac’ wil Isaacs godsdienstwaanzinnige moeder hem opofferen zoals in het gelijknamige bijbelverhaal. Jij moet Isaac helpen ontsnappen in een hellegang onder zijn eigen huis. Een apart thema en off-beat humor zoals we eerder ook zagen in Super Meat Boy van dezelfde maker.

Je loopt met Isaac van kamer naar kamer, tranen schietend op duivelse vliegen, bewegend vlees en andere monsters. Zodra alles dood is kun je door met de buit die je verzamelt. Ga je zelf dood, dan begin je opnieuw. Behendig spelen en de juiste keuzes maken zijn zaak om te winnen van Isaacs demonen. De niveau’s zijn elke keer anders en symboliseren de afdaling in Isaacs nachtmerries.

Het is een spel van extreme contrasten. De tekenstijl is kinderlijk maar druipt van het bloed. De verwijzingen naar de bijbel worden afgewisseld met referenties naar games. Dat ligt wat zwaar op de hand voor een spel dat blijft steken bij hele simpele satire. Toch is ‘The Binding of Isaac’ wél erg leuk. Er valt veel te verkennen, de moeilijkheid neemt subtiel toe en de drempel om nog een keer te spelen ligt lekker laag.

I have been to CCC once and didn’t feel the need to go again. I have been long disheartened by the odd turn that political consciousness has taken within that particular technological crowd. The combination of information/privacy fundamentalism with a total disdain for normal users is something which is normal in the open source world but not something I can support.

It is refreshing then to hear two people at CCC who pursue an agenda that I think is important in a manner that make sense and is constructive. Briefly the things from the talk that I found noteworthy.

They treat the various levels of obscurity and disfunctionality built into Liquid Feedback but on the whole they do agree that it is a functional system that needs some bug fixing.

Liquid Feedback seems to have been sparked by a blog post some years ago is a good example of the primate of the developer. Because of limitations in development capacity, whoever builds these things builds the definitive version. It remains definitive until somebody builds a better one (or if the problem goes away). We don’t get the option of more consideration, or better design or any of the other things we would want. We get whatever time a volunteer can spare to hack something together that works. This also makes that often we are in local optima because there already is an implementation that is perceived to be ‘good enough’.

People who have the time to solve problems don’t have problems. Those with real problems are too busy coping with their problems to be able to solve them generically. —Smári McCarthy

“Don’t confuse math problems with human problems.” —Eleanor Saitta

An interesting next step is their demand of more thorough thinking from those aspiring to politics. They warn against an information politics that says: ‘We just want our current way of living without the bad things.’ I agree —and many others with me— that idealism needs a clear and functional vision of an alternative world with an implementation plan to get there.

What then follows is a comparison between institutions and networks. I think it is very interesting to think about the importance of these two and why they have such trouble to deal with each other. What we are doing at Hack de Overheid is one attempt at bridging a network with a bunch of Dutch institutions. We should come up with more translator services and adapter structures to make the two work together.

They then treat the protocolization of institutions. How an institution can be decomposed in process and substance. How the symbolic language that an institution accepts can be codified as an automaton and then be translated into a peer to peer communications protocol. One problem of such a protocol is that it lacks institutional memory and tacit knowledge. Networks consist of nodes that adhere to the protocol (by definition) and are in effect interchangeable which means they don’t have to remember over the whole.

Memory and knowledge are essential for the proper functioning of all organizations and that functionality needs to be coded in some way into the networked version. I’m reading James C. Scott right now and he talks at length about the high modernist folly of laying down ‘thin and brittle’ structures that do not work. Such structures have not been tested or used enough and lack the pliability and adaptations that are necessary for proper functioning.

Saitta and McCarthy propose to build institutions that only do long-term memory and let the process execution be handled by the network.

They then identify the open problems that still need work:

1. Mapping the complexity classes and executive processes of institutions
2. A language for protocolization of executive processes
3. A decentralized but collectivized and compellable taxation protocol for an anonymous crypto currency
4. Better tools for network-instution interactions
5. A concept of network jurisprudence and mercy

The complexity theoretical treatment of social institutions is something that rather tickles my fancy. On university we never got to solve anything but the most theoretical of problems during those courses. I recently found some complexity theoretical treatments of games (“Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard”) and I look forward to even broader applications.

To stay in the vein of games, the problems stated in 1. and 2. are things that have a lot in common with what we do when we build games. The design of games consists of many similar information theoretical problems. Games may also be good staging grounds if you want to replace the nation state. The first thing that comes to mind to model these interactions is Joris Dormans’s Machinations, a finite state machine modeling tool.

Anyway it looks like there are tons of important and interesting problems still to be solved to which we as game practitioners might be able to contribute as well.

There are philosophical problems that we need to solve but they need to be directed towards the real world. —Eleanor Saitta

After the talk there follow a series of somewhat odd questions. The replies fortunately more than make up for it:

You need to have a sufficiently complete philosophical understanding of why your ideas make sense and how they are coherent and how they encompass [agriculture]. Otherwise your [privacy] arguments are going to fall flat. —Smári McCarthy

Instead we should build alternate structures. We are going to build this thing over here and it’s a much better way to run things. That can sort of infect into the world and obsolete other things. —Eleanor Saitta

That last one should be the golden test of activism: are you just complaining or are you doing something to actually make things better? If not, why not?

Oddly such a comprehensive account has not been available for Europe. We have had camps near the financial districts too, not to mention a massive amount of political conflict in the Mediterranean countries. All these things are tied up in the monstrous Union we have wrought to hold each other in a technocratic stranglehold. We are interrelated, however difficult it may be to tell from the national coverage alone.

Our working theory was that most European journalists don’t have the stones to endure what Norton has gone through, to really be ‘in, but not of, Occupy’, to cover something beyond the confines of the nine-to-five job. To be sure I checked with her:

@alper mainly the guardian. i never found anything for the continent.

— Quinn Norton (@quinnnorton) January 3, 2013

This means that not one journalist conversant in English/German/French/Spanish on this continent figured out that there may have been a story here worth pursuing? That not one newsroom freed up the resources necessary for somebody to cover this? If that is the case, then may all our newspapers shrivel up and turn to dust because there is nothing worth saving here.

Update: The Times shows their most popular articles of 2012 and journalism isn’t anywhere to be found.

Everything only got into gear again on by Thursday when I got my copy of Gun Machine (and finished it two days after) and caught up studio flows with Hubbub Utrecht. I did my work on TORREON and had lunch with the vvvv guys.

Friday it was more TORREON going on through the weekend and some consulting on KAIGARA.

I also caught up with some talks at the CCC this year (along with all of the other issues the event had this year). Best of show is this one by Eleanor Saitta and Smári McCarthy about the advantages and disadvantages of networks and institutions:

Here’s the video for @smarimc and my talk at #29c3, “Long Live the Protocoletariat!”: bit.ly/UNvLtI

— Eleanor Saitta (@Dymaxion) January 5, 2013

A short week that one too, but more to come.

“Where is my Heart?” is een platform-puzzelspel van Deense sensatie Die Gute Fabrik. Je bestuurt om beurten één van drie ontheemde monsters die in het bos de weg naar huis proberen te vinden. De monsters zijn charmant geanimeerd, het bos is getekend in wondermooie pixel-art en de soundtrack bestaat uit frisse 8-bit muziek. Dat is allemaal bijzaak. Waar het om gaat is de buitengewoon originele manier van spelen.

Je ziet van elk level alleen een stel kaders zoals een strip, maar deze zijn totaal uit hun verband gerukt. Je hebt geen flauw idee wat je door elk kader van het level ziet en wat de relatie met de rest is. Loop of spring je een kader uit, dan kom je vaak heel ergens anders terecht dan je verwacht. Visueel gedesoriënteerd ben je in elk level op zoek naar de relatie tussen je waarnemingen en de achterliggende werkelijkheid. Die vind je het makkelijkst door al spelend je hersens te dwingen de juiste verbindingen te leggen.

Onderweg gebruik je de speciale vaardigheden van Bat King en Antler Ancestor (onzichtbare dingen zien, dubbel springen) maar Rainbow Spirit steelt de show. Hij kan de kaders van een level herschikken en kiezen in welke hij landt. Dat zet alles op zijn kop en de eerste keer dat ik het deed viel ik bijna van mijn stoel.

“Where is my Heart?” is een zeldzaam moeilijk spel wat daardoor hier en daar eentonig dreigt te worden. De verzorgde uitvoering trekt je daar gelukkig doorheen en uiteindelijk duurt het niet heel lang voor de monsters weer thuis zijn en jij thuis met een voldaan gevoel naar de aftiteling kijkt.

Yesterday I learned that the German mail service has a special rate for mailing books because if you use normal package rates, shipping books becomes prohibitively difficult for more purposes. So there’s a special tariff for the “Büchersendung” and it is incredibly cheap: €1,00 for a half kilo book or €1,65 to ship a kilogram of paper anywhere you would like within Germany.

To be eligible for that rate you need to adhere to a very strict list of guidelines one of which is that you are not allowed to add any personal writing (i.e. a letter) to the package. You are allowed to add things such as advertisements and/or invoices. See here the updated (per 1-1-2013) list that aren’t allowed:

Adressierte schriftliche Mitteilungen (Briefe) sind weiterhin nicht zugelassen, z.B.:
individuelle Brieftexte aller Art, ob handschriftlich oder gedruckt,
Texte mit Anrede (z.B. “Sehr geehrter Kunde”),
Texte mit Höflichkeitsformel (z.B. “Mit freundlichen Grüßen”),
persönliche Mitteilungen (z.B. “Rest folgt”).

What struck me is how revealing this artifact is about German society.

The fact that there would be a special rate for books tells about the value attributed to books and the knowledge that is contained in them. Special facilities such as the Büchersendung needed to be created so even the more remote parts of the country could be connected to the book —which is to say knowledge— economy.

The fact that there are employees of the mail service who sample the shipments and check whether the criteria have been met —books have to be mailed in resealable envelopes— tells how resistent such institutions here are even to this day and how seriously they take their job. Comparing this to the Netherlands where such a system does not exist: such a rule would first not be enforced anymore and then when abuse became rampant it would be abolished.

And with that the fact that this institutional vestige still exists is a reminder of how many historic rights that serve no real purpose anymore still are upheld in Germany because there can always be found a vocal group of people somewhere who want to maintain it and are willing to spend the effort to campaign for it. I don’t know if that is the case with the Büchersendung right now but I’m quite sure it will be with us for quite some time still.

Het langverwachte “Botanicula” van Amanita Design is uit en het is nog mooier dan de vorige spellen (Samorost, Machinarium etc.) van deze studio. De jaren werk die erin zitten zijn af te zien en te horen aan dit spel dat verbaast door zijn pure schoonheid.

In Botanicula speel je vijf botanische wezens die de boom waar ze leven moeten redden van duistere spinnen die alles dood maken. Dit loopt uiteindelijk —natuurlijk— goed af.

Het flinterdunne verhaal is een excuus om mooie dingen te laten zien. Elk scherm is een botanische aquarel waarin van alles dwarrelt, deint of iets anders schattigs doet als reactie op jou. Amanita meet zich hiermee met de groten uit de animatiewereld en brengt het daar goed vanaf.

Zo prachtig als het is uitgevoerd, zo simpel is het spel. Je verzamelt zaadjes en klikt dieren aan op de boom om weer andere wezens te helpen die je verder brengen. Niet heel ingewikkeld maar makkelijker gezegd dan gedaan. Soms is ook na zoeken de bedoeling niet helemaal duidelijk en er zitten minigames in die in verhouding met de rest van het spel te moeilijk zijn.

Dit maakt dat het spel niet heel diepgaand is maar een paar uur plezier heb je er zeker wel van. Botanicula is zo’n kinderboek dat je als volwassene ook kunt kopen en wie ermee aan de slag gaat maakt dan ook niet zoveel meer uit.

The funny thing is that I visited a lot of capitals of countries that I hadn’t visited before even though I may have visited the country.

To Madrid in February: I had been to Spain often but never visited either Madrid or Barcelona.

To Athens in June: I had not ever been to Greece at all, so this was all new. A lot more fun than Madrid by the way.

To Paris in July: I’d been to France a couple of times but never to Paris yet.

To Helsinki in July: Another new capital and country, a visit which was very enjoyable both because of the company and because of the immense livability of the city.

To Beijing in October: A long overdue visit to China which was even more elucidating than it was enjoyable.

Not to (Canberra) in October: Though I did visit both Melbourne and Sydney which don’t count.

To Moscow in December: A nice combination of business and personal visits and a welcome confrontation with the weirdness of Russia.

Which makes my visited countries map look like this:

I messed around a bit with it and managed to produce this bit of media art. It is very interesting to have the power of DirectX9 under your fingers without having to program at all, though the whole fact of non-programming feels a bit strange to me.

Also there was this bit about the journalistic climate in the Netherlands:

@wol Journalisten worden op een bepaalde manier behandeld mede door de verandering van het klimaat en de daling van de gemiddelde kwaliteit.

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) December 17, 2012

I would recommend anybody interfacing with journalists to be wholly guarded and keep clearly in mind what’s in it for them in the interaction. The way it is played by most actors, it hasn’t been about the uncovering of the truth for a long time.

Tuesday was my travel day to Amsterdam where I wrote a bunch of stuff in the train and had an Open State board meeting that evening.

I spent most of Wednesday in Utrecht at the Hubbub studio. That night I had dinner with Tim de Gier, Loeki Westerveld and Justus Bruns partially by plan, partially by coincidence.

Thursday was also spent at Hubbub discussing business and getting work done. That night I had drinks with Kars and Lieke in a smashing new Utrecht establishment.

On Friday I met Edo van Royen at Studyflow, had lunch with Peter Robinett, coffee with Justus Bruns, dropped by at my accountant, had a beer with Thijs Niks and then drinks at the Open Coop with Lex and Alexander. Having said that: these visits to the Netherlands always tend to devolve into a flurry of errands that barely leave any time to think. That is going to change for the next one.

Inside a Star-filled Sky van Jason Rohrer op 13 juli 2011

The Cat and the Coup van Peter Brinson op 19 augustus 2011

Phone Story van Molleindustria op 10 november 2011

Er volgen dan nog de recensies voor the Binding of Isaac, Where Is My Heart? en Botanicula die wel in de krant maar nooit op Bashers zijn verschenen en wat ik daarna nog weet te schrijven.

The real result is a lot less positive. It ends on this note:

Wir müssen nichts mehr erfinden, denn Google und Facebook lehren uns, dass neue Ideen leicht zu haben sind. Es könnte sogar sein, dass fügsame, gelehrige Kopisten jetzt erfolgreicher sind als diejenigen, die innovativ sind.

Some old dude quotes selectively and writes about a subjective divide between digital and analog like you would find in the eighties. And it quotes an interview with Geert Lovink from 2007 that superficially treats ‘blogging’.

The piece opines that because of connectivity we will not be able to pay attention to what is important or come up with original thoughts ourselves. But it turns out that the Süddeutsche has fallen prey to that disease itself. Here as almost everywhere, German writing about the internet follows a predictable course that fails to illuminate.

I did some more work on the small secret project. Also going forward with work on TORREON.

Chris Eidhof dropped by briefly at Praxis and told me about his plans to organize an iOS conference in Berlin.

I’m thinking about organizing an (English-speaking) iOS conference in Berlin.Would you be interested? Sign up: iosinberlin.launchrock.com

— Chris Eidhof (@chriseidhof) December 11, 2012

I bit the bullet and got myself a monthly ticket for the U-Bahn along with a ticket for my bike. This has made a huge different in getting around the city. Many trips which would take half an hour by bike are a lot easier now and especially with the snow the combination of transit+bike makes a lot more stuff possible.

I enrolled in a conversational German course at the Goethe Institute to up my German to a professional level. We are going to get a new collaborator over at Praxis. And I went to my first ever CrossFit training session on the recommendation by Mustafa Isik.

I finally bit the bullet and changed my T-Mobile Netherlands plan to something a bit more minimal because I don’t spend much more than a week a month in the Netherlands anyway. On Thursday I sent a new proposal for TORREON. I did more stuff on REYNOSA.

I got the funny (for Berlin’s reputation, see this Times piece) sticker for the new play Sommergäste by the Schaubühne written by Maxim Gorki. The previous play by that same director, Eugen Onegin, was absurdly boring so hopes for this adaptation of a Russian master should not be too high. Another Schaubühne play we almost went to, The Black Rider ((Really, the massive misguided stones necessary to translate Burroughs into German…)), seems to be by all accounts also really rather terrible.

Theater is a hopeless moribund discipline but Fabian Hinrichs may prove a notable exception in Berlin this week (which I’ll be missing because of travel to Amsterdam).

This week was also the week of the brilliant eulogy for occupy by Quinn Norton. Intentional or not, it confirmed my cynicism about the movement. What little sparks of brilliance and hope were to be found in the USA versions were almost totally absent from the Dutch camps. Around the studio here in Kreuzberg there are still some remnants of the movement active:

Friday I started initial work on TORREON and after that I went to the VVVV 10th anniversary event over at Letters are my friends.

Twitter announced the general availability of your own tweets for download in archive form. I had done some preliminary work on this when this option was available to Europeans and now ThinkUp is busy building a full-fledged importer.

Sunday morning I finished reading The Invisibles, a brilliant mind bending comic by Grant Morrison. It may not seem like it is relevant to my work, but it very much is in a multitude of strange ways.

On Monday morning I flew to Moscow to participate in a panel at the Moscow Urban Forum. A gathering of experts on the subject of the city and policy who would shed some light on the development of a megacity such as Moscow. On the day I flew in, I got an opportunity to stroll a bit through the city.

I was impressed by the incredible amount of traffic that didn’t leave a lot of room for a person on foot. An experience I haven’t had since Beirut. And as underwhelmed as I was by the Red Square itself, the church at the end (Saint Basil’s Cathedral) was jarring in its familiarity. It had made a heavy impression on me when I was a small child and television commentary on the Soviet Union would feature it as a backdrop. An experience to finally see it in real life.

Surprisingly the one coffee chain in Moscow I visited Кофеин (Caffeine, I’m guessing) served a very smooth coffee and Foursquare is rather positive about the other chain (Кофемания) too.

That night I had a long overdue couple of drinks with Olaf Koens, an old friend who works as a Dutch correspondent in Moscow and writes a smashing travel book as well. A native guide is really recommended to ease acclimatization into Moscow. Without Olaf my impression of the city may have been a different one. As the night progressed we almost naturally wound up at Жан-Жак (Jean Jacques). A pleasant surprise as I had wanted to visit it ever since I read the piece about Russia’s New Decembrists last year.

One more thing we in the Netherlands and Germany especially could learn from Moscow: there is open WiFi almost everywhere. No bullshit passwords to mess with, just open.

On Tuesday I was in a panel to present our extra-governmental/developer approach to open data which we have built up with Hack de Overheid over the past years. It is a complex story to tell and to translate across the cultural divide to practitioners over there, but I think the things we have achieved speak for themselves. Right now we are slowly figuring what parts of our practice can be exported and what parts are too specific for the Dutch case.

There are the answers to the obvious questions (‘Should you charge for data?’, ‘In what format should you supply data?’ etc.) that we have mostly figured out already but that seem to be difficult to explain and supply as shortcuts. And after that there are the very subtle nuances of what data means, what it says about the world, what it excludes and how you can create a process that guarantees maximal inclusion and all of its benefits. Answering those issues requires a far more in depth look at everything, a look for which there is hardly any market or audience unfortunately.

The next day before flying out I managed to get my first ice skating of the season in at Gorki Park.

And then as a bit of infrastructure enthusiasm I went on a lightning tour of the various Moscow underground stations which are regularly quite stunning. The Russian metro system seems to be mostly at capacity with trains arriving every couple of minutes, covering the full length of the platform and many of which being jam-packed during peak hours. Fortunately if ever the city wants to create a tram/light-rail system to complement its public transportation, there is ample space still at street level.

I got some more work in and then after a two hour drive to the airport I was in a plane back to Berlin. I had gained three hours of time with which I managed to visit the Game Developers meetup in Berlin.

Then it was back full speed on development for SAKE and I visited the new offices of the esteemed Peter Bihr and Matt Patterson, just two doors down the street from where I’m at now. It is brilliant to further increase the concentration of internet nous in the same couple of streets.

I took the opportunity to relax a bit on Friday and have lunch with Igor Schwarzmann and then we presented our current release version of SAKE to the Gids. I was telepresent at that meeting which is a fun but also odd way to end a Friday, I must say.

As a side note: if you’re reading this you are probably a good candidate to be in the advice commission for the Dutch subsidy fund (Stimuleringsfonds) for either e-culture or architecture. What these commissions can use more than anything is a solid group of practitioners advising on proposals and people who set the bar high.

Sake started up in earnest and team participation started to ramp up. Just now I piped the git commits into our communal chatroom, something I should have done a lot earlier because it so nicely shows the active heartbeat of a project.

I installed two applications I had been holding out on. I’m trying to backup my files to Amazon Glacier using arq but Berlin bandwidths are not very conducive to sending 192GB to the internet. Also I installed Flux to modulate my screen temperature into something a bit warmer for these cold winter days.

I think this bears sharing regularly:

TimBL’s RDF temple priests still mad as hell about @hixie coming up with a better alternative to RDFa in a weekend lists.w3.org/Archives/Publi…

— mattur (@mattur) November 25, 2012

The rest of the week sake kept up. On Tuesday I picked up my visa from the Russian consulate for the trip to Moscow. I’m on the plane back to Berlin as I’m typing this.

Wednesday I had a coffee with Niels van der Linden, a Dutch national who’s living in Istanbul and is active in the startup scene over there. Lots of interesting parallels and things to learn from each other in that one. We had a nice lunch with Praxis and then I went to the Iron Blogger Berlin meetup.

A sizable part of the week was spent finalizing paperwork both for my German bookkeeper and for various institutions back in the Netherlands. After making my rounds through the city I dropped by at the ÖPNV hackday Apps and the City at Supermarkt.

I couldn’t hack as much as I wanted because I needed to send my slides to Moscow for the following week, but once I finished those I still managed to get two small things in:

Firstly I uploaded the sample file of the various POIs for Berlin’s S-Bahn stations to Google Fusion Tables to be able to get a quick feel for the data. What’s in it, what’s not and how accurate it is.

Sadly, there is a full dataset available with the points for all stations in Berlin, but that is geocoded in some obscure German datum and therefore cannot be readily loaded into Fusion Tables. Ready usability is key for many hackday datasets, even if other participants had more time to do a possible conversion than I did. For a data provider: you show knowledge of the outside world by supplying GPS.

The issue to be solved with this dataset would be: finding your ideal way around a station for a transfer or your ideal exit for your final destination and based on that information to chain back and guide you into the optimal carriage of the underground train.

The first approach, to brute force the problem by tabulating all possible entries and exits, turned out to quickly balloon into something horribly large. After some thinking I thought up a graph representation of a subway station and demonstrated with a proof of concept “Stationsrouter” that you can route through that using the well-known A* algorithm.

This can be easily extended for for instance wheelchair access by using a weighted graph and setting the weights of stairs to infinity for those users. I posted the algorithm and a rough graph coding online, I need to find the time to make the interface more attractive (probably by porting it to Javascript) and to transcode a couple more stations. To figure out where an arriving train lands on a platform and therefore which graph segment that corresponds to wouldn’t be too difficult.

On Friday I was supposed to take an introductory German language course, but the hackday shenanigans made sure I missed that early appointment. Trying to reschedule something for the new year to level up my Deutsch. We did a capacity planning session with Hubbub and I ended the afternoon by watching a bit of TEDxAmsterdam waiting for the new talk by Kevin Slavin.

On Sunday I met with Peter Bihr, Matt Patterson and Daniela Augenstein to talk about open government in Berlin and then the next day it was off to Moscow!

I spent the first three days of the week wrapped up mostly in visa procedures because I’ll be participating in the Moscow Urban Forum next week. I did manage to have some good chats in between, but attention was too scattered to get anything solid done (also this being the first week back from a reasonably long trip). Lunch with Fabian Mürmann, a board meeting for Open State.

I did discover a very nice coffee place around the corner and went there for just about every day since (I think this is love).

Add to that two visits to the dentist as well on subsequent days and I was more or less done.

Friday was the first day where I could finally catchup with most things. I dropped by Gidsy and had lunch with Matt Patterson and then lunch again with my office mates. And the evening I prepped a session for the students from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences to tell them more or less everything I could about data visualization in 90 slides.

And on Sunday I finished my first book by James C. Scott which was fantastic (more on which later) and managed to finally get a secret little project underway that had been lying for far too long.

forked dorsally over the knee of a morbidly obese cellphone retailer

It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies

The impression is that of a very expensive thoroughbred being led onto the track under a silk blanket.

butane gas to be pumped via PVC into her lower colon and set afire on expulsion, resulting in a 3.5-foot anal blowtorch

wherein a starlet’s vagina and rectum are simultaneously accessed by two woodmen

a straight-on deep-focus view of a dilated and wood-ready orifice.

with everybody seemingly teetering right on the edge of coitus all the time

send everyone tumbling into a tangled mass of limbs and orifices

alliteration and anatomically mixed metaphor Schwartz’s

moments of near-Periclean eloquence

“I want to thank my mother, who spread her legs and made all this possible.”

the other famous phallocrats

the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.

seem less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.

It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.

the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.

That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.

Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it.

the bland condescension with which he performs the two occult keystrokes that unfreeze your screen is both elitist and situationally valid

a three-week Emergency Remedial Usage and Grammar Unit, during which my demeanor is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users

The kids end up scared, both of me and for me.

way the beloved English of their youth is being trashed in the decadent present

can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition.”

it seems indisputable that we put some extra interpretive burden on the recipient when we fail to honor certain conventions.

People really do judge one another according to their use of language.

both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,”

like most dogmatists they’ve been extremely stupid about the rhetoric they used and the audience they were addressing.

This reviewer’s own humble opinion is that some of the cultural and political realities of American life are themselves racially insensitive and elitist and offensive and unfair, and that pussyfooting around these realities with euphemistic doublespeak is not only hypocritical but toxic to the project of ever really changing them.

Standard Written English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English” because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people.

PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact—in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself—of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo

censorship always serves the status quo.)

that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people’s sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

it’s tempting to think AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.

which was indeed a rhetorical boner.

His argumentative strategy is totally brilliant and totally sneaky, and part of both qualities is that it usually doesn’t seem like there’s even an argument going on at all.

Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.

that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel

the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality.
me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither.

the most complicated stuff also tended to be the most interesting

politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their truth or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability.

the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.

And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks—that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world.

So who wouldn’t yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt?

coffee that tastes like hot water with a brown crayon in it

By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thingas not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

who knows she’s average and just wants a decent, noncynical life for herself and her family

But if you’re subjected to great salesmen and sales pitches and marketing concepts for long enough—like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let’s say—it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn’t give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself

The answer depends on how gray-area-tolerant you are about sincerity vs. marketing, or sincerity plus marketing, or leadership plus the packaging and selling of same
whether he’s truly “for real” now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours.

but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way — hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all.

There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other

I do read and enjoy (in an odd way) Tyler Brûlé’s Fast Lane column in FT and it looks like Monocle itself is larded with his signature phraseology. A distillation from a single issue:

a country’s ability to [X] says volumes about its identity

The forthcoming generation needs help to be globally competitive

Infrastructure is lagging behind

To his nearby weekend retreat

A far cry from the polished décor and white-gloved service elsewhere in the area

Diplomacy and negotiations don’t just happen in airless meeting rooms

Like all good campaigns it flatters the consumer

The alcohol induced violence that often comes with bars and clubs

Prompting eager entrepreneurs to roll in while the paint is barely dry

The company is eyeing its prospects overseas

The diligent start at the helm of

The name never fails to raise a smile among [X]

[X] is not known for its subtle advertising campaigns

And has bureaux in London, New York and Beijing

Has caused a stir on several occasions

We’re all familiar with the trajectory

The problems are being discussed but significant government-sponsored solutions are yet to emerge.

with help from an expert panel of architects

has been developed by passionate fundraising

[X] feels like a resort

analogue ways of staying in touch are still the most popular

it’s a problem that needs to be addressed by the government, not just enterprising individuals

The architects tried hard to infuse a sense of warmth and comfort.

we need an attitude change

Buyers were successful businessmen with good taste

it must be the most laidback event in the design calendar

it’s remarkable that so little priority is given to the emotional impact of the interiors

the clever spatial design and careful choice of high-spec domestic furniture

The hope is that this is a model to be rolled out

it has also sparked a longing for restaurants where home-cooked, uncomplicated food is served in familiar settings

The Genius there was less than helpful. Determining that it was my hard drive, he tried without avail to erase it and then load up a new version of the OS. I am more or less pleased that he wasn’t successful in doing that. In Amsterdam I tried another couple of things but finally handed it in at Maccare.nl who without touching it said ‘it was probably the cable’ and the very same day had replaced it for me. Since the Genius hadn’t even managed to erase my disk, I could incredulously resume working from where I was a week ago.

Not having a laptop I did manage to finish The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoete and a Monocle on the flights from Sydney to Guangzhou to Amsterdam and the layover.

Niels van Hoorn from Brainsley provided support (as well as many many friends online) in the form of tools and a place to hangout while I tried swapping fresh hard drives in and out. The following day I handed my laptop in and while it was being fixed, I worked the day in Utrecht where using Chrome’s sign-in feature, I could resume most of my old work on an old Hubbub Macbook. It turns out the cloud is not a lie at all.

Thursday morning I got my Macbook Pro back and spent most of the day working at Brainsley’s offices which are small but rather cozy. I dropped by the Open Coop to chat with Lex and pick up my Open State business cards. And that night I met up with some old friends who work now mostly as hired guns in the Amsterdam startup scene for cocktails at the famed Door 74.

Friday I dropped by the Village (again!) and then got onto the train to Berlin where I am typing this right now.

Last week was mostly spent with a scattered brain working on my ignite an various proposals. We had a studio meeting at Praxis to discuss recent developments and issues.

Thursday night I gave the Ignite to a packed Supermarkt Berlin. Thanks everybody for attending and listen to me rave about games for five minutes. Also fantastic to meet everybody in Berlin who I hadn’t caught up with for ages.

On Friday I finished off most of my paperwork before the trip. That night we went to see Werner Herzog read with the studio.

The next morning I got up at seven to see the market build up and watch the GSL Code S final together with Mustafa Işık and a colleague of his. You are either mildly serious about watching this or you are not. I’d already set up and tested the GOM Player before. That’s the bit of KPop you see above.

It was rather exhilarating to see a GSL event streamed live and I’m glad my light season ticket entitled me to view it. I’ve recently gotten into Star Craft because of Frank Lantz’s excellent “Drinking Man’s Guide to Watching Star Craft” and am greatly enjoying it as a highly complex, dense and therefore less boring alternative to most spectator sports.

I threw most of the thinking in the studios for the past 1-2 years on the floor with post-its and distilled the pertinent threads from that. As it happens ‘New Games for New Cities’ was the title of a presentation Kars gave some time ago to which I had contributed but had forgotten about.

Leafing through the older presentations, it is good to see that the thinking has evolved over the years. The old points still hold, but time and experience has refined our opinions and forced us to refocus here and there.

Putting the presentation together was a fair amount of work (and not something I was particularly looking forward to the week before a holiday) but all of the positive responses were more than worth it. I can highly recommend Ignite for the mix of topics it touches on, the fun and light delivery and the varied and open crowd it attracts.

With some heavy German, Herzog reads his diary notes from the production of Fitzcarraldo (trailer below), a massive undertaking to make a movie of a massive undertaking. The whole protracted shooting in the jungle sounds a lot like how Apocalypse Now was made.

The passages Herzog reads are gripping and contain lots of absurdities and events that happen when you are shooting a motion picture in the jungle (also rather reminiscent of También la Lluvia) as well as reflections on the nature of being and emotional turmoil.

The evening is turned into theater by adding evocative background projections of jungle scenes (nice!) and music by a jazz improvisation duo, a Sardinian choir of men and a Senegalese singer. They interject protracted bits of singing in between Herzog’s reading turning the whole thing into something like a Werner Herzog mixtape.

The music is where I lost it. Firstly: I keep forgetting how much I loathe jazz improvisation until its too late and I’m already in the middle of one. It may be fun to do, but I don’t see improvisations go anywhere dramatically. Added to that the music doesn’t fit well with Herzog’s reading. This created a lot of dissonance for me that forced me to interpret all of the musical intermezzi as kitsch. Funnily after Herzog was done reading —during the encore— the music was far more enjoyable.

This is probably a must-see (another probably sold out show tonight) if you’re into Herzog and/or improvisational jazz and/or world music. I couldn’t check those boxes but still enjoyed seeing the man read.

Most of the fun is in the sheer completionism of certain walls and cabinets. Acquiring everything past the point of simple fun. Add to that trying to recognize what everything is about, what the references and twists in the various works are.

What adds to the power of a well done private collection such as this one is its lack of fear. It doesn’t need to be backed up artistically, there’s no curator hedging their bets or trying to cultivate relations, it isn’t afraid not to be taken for full and in short: it isn’t uptight (modern art take note).

Brief weeknotes for last week: closed off Pig Chase with the prototype test in the stables. I got to start building a playable prototype for sake, more on that later.

A large part of the rest of the week I spent in various states of bureaucracy trying to get everything in order to be able to request a visa for China. I think I’ve spent about as much time getting the requested papers as I will be in Beijing proper.

During the off hours of this week I started a small project to check the Dutch laws into github over at Staten Generaal (write-up).

Some nice responses to that:

@alper is een held!!! Hij doet wat ik dacht na het zien van hetzelfde filmpje. Super: bit.ly/SJwHKO (en eerder bit.ly/SJwN4U )

— Stephan Okhuijsen (@steeph) October 6, 2012

Alle Nederlandse wetten in Github—@alper is een held, olé olé hackdeoverheid.nl/alle-nederland…

— Thijs Niks (@ThijsNiks) October 6, 2012

Wetten als software voor de maatschappij.. Alle Nederlandse wetten in Github – bit.ly/SCdqAU/ cc @alper

— Open Data Nederland (@Opendatanl) October 6, 2012

Heel cool dit “@thijsniks: Alle Nederlandse wetten in Github—@alper is een held, olé olé hackdeoverheid.nl/alle-nederland…”

— Alexander Klöpping (@AlexanderNL) October 6, 2012

But the real work has only just begun and we need to figure where the project should actually go to.

The Beestenbende project page went online, an iPhone game I coded: http://whatsthehubbub.nl/projects/beestenbende/

And I got added to the Praxis Berlin website which is the web presence of my current studio.

And I spent quite a bit of the weekend at the JSConf parties. It was fun to meet lots of people I hadn’t seen in quite a while and the conference was quite excellently organized.

In science our powers wax by the year.

I don’t want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.

Star Wars was the only universe in which the answer actually was that you were supposed to cut yourself off completely from negative emotions

everyone in the wizarding world is completely stupid.

That your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality

“If you have not dealt with journalists before, take it from me that the world gets a little brighter every time one dies.”

But then human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending.

and so it might not have occurred to you that to respect the truth, and seek it all the days of your life, could also be an act of grace.

So why would anyone possibly think any thought so silly as that death is a good thing? Because you’re afraid of it, because you don’t really want to die, and that thought hurts so much inside you that you have to rationalize it away, do something to numb the pain, so you won’t have to think about it -

I’m certainly becoming a bit frustrated with… whatever’s going wrong in people’s heads.

The Earth was what made the stars significant, made them more than uncontrolled fusion reactions, because it was Earth that would someday colonize the galaxy, and fulfill the promise of the night sky.

As though there’s something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness, not right away, but it seems to follow wherever science goes.

That was what it meant to be used by a friend, that they would want the use to make you stronger instead of weaker.

I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.

A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong.

Or rather, cheating is what the losers call technique

He’d been struck, even then, by an essential emptiness in the indignation of politicians – though he hadn’t had the words to describe it, at that age – a sense that they were trying to score cheap points by hitting at the same safe target as everyone else.

How very sad, how very hollow the indignation, of those who refuse to say that money and life can ever be compared, when all they’re doing is forbidding the strategy that saves the most people, for the sake of pretentious moral grandstanding…

Hogwarts students don’t actually know enough cognitive science to take responsibility for how their own minds work.

And you have already witnessed, I wager, that their fondness vanished like dust in the wind once it was no longer in their interest to associate with you…

And now it’s waiting until new chapters arrive, a pleasure and torture at the same time.

When we switched to the euro in the Netherlands I hardly ever remember seeing the one and two cent coins. I think they were there in the beginning, but popular consensus soon decided that those were too small money amounts to justify bothering with and dispensed with them. They are still legal tender so occasionally you will be given change in those coins at some odd shop in the outback. Everybody knows though that people who do that are douchebags.

Here in Germany these coins still abound for some mysterious reason. Everybody hands them out and their tiny copper presence clutters pants pockets and wallets everywhere. Maybe you can buy beer in some remote part of Germany for 3 cents and that’s why it is imperative that these coins remain in circulation. I honestly don’t know.

These coins should be abolished. I am positive that doing so will simplify at least one interaction per day per person in Germany.

First, Because it tends to the decrease and reproach of all religion whatever, and is of the utmost danger to society to make it a party in political disputes.

And the very publishing it proves, that either, ye do not believe what ye profess, or have not virtue enough to practise what ye believe.

We fight neither for revenge nor conquest; neither from pride nor passion; we are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder.

that either the doctrine cannot be refuted, or, that the party in favour of it are too numerous to be opposed.

No going to law with nations; cannon are the barristers of Crowns; and the sword, not of justice, but of war, decides the suit.

I have frequently amused myself both in public and private companies, with silently remarking, the specious errors of those who speak without reflecting.

To unite the sinews of commerce and defense is sound policy; for when our strength and our riches play into each other’s hand, we need fear no external enemy.

For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law OUGHT to be King; and there ought to be no other.

where a republican government, by being formed on more natural principles, would negotiate the mistake.

England consults the good of THIS country, no farther than it answers her OWN purpose.

In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet

there is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

This is my favorite:

Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who CANNOT see; prejudiced men, who WILL NOT see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the European world than it deserves;

The first king of England, of the present line (William the Conqueror) was a Frenchman, and half the Peers of England are descendants from the same country; therefore, by the same method of reasoning, England ought to be governed by France.

we forget the narrow limits of three hundred and sixty miles (the extent of England)

But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families; wherefore the assertion, if true, turns to her reproach;

her motive was INTEREST not ATTACHMENT; that she did not protect us from OUR ENEMIES on OUR ACCOUNT, but from HER ENEMIES on HER OWN ACCOUNT, from those who had no quarrel with us on any OTHER ACCOUNT, and who will always be our enemies on the SAME ACCOUNT

Spent some time writing proposals. Setup my own personal tent at: https://alper.tent.is/ for whatever good that may be.

I also managed to catch the last day of PIVOT at leap and wrote something brief about it.

Also because it was the end of the month I finally moved all of my stuff out at the old office. Friday night there was another digital salon at the HIIG offices. I don’t think people like us are the target audience of these events. The discussion focused mostly on the incredibly mundane aspects of digital technology.

@netzreport #digsal Architect says that digital technologies will not change the design of buildings.

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) September 28, 2012

@netzreport Now discussing home automation as an application for the digital city of the future. #digsal

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) September 28, 2012

Friday night was also the opening of work by Casey Reas at [DAM] Berlin. And after that a birthday party at Panke which for me felt like a more accessible/steampunk version of cbase. Anyway.

I started doing some game design of myself. And built an election game using Game-o-Matic: The Emile Game.

Monday I was given a Clever coffee maker and a Hario grinder to be able to make slow coffees at the office. Thanks Kars and Lea for being so attentive. I also made a start moving my books over but more and more having a professional physical library is feeling like a huge dead weight.

I would like to have these books in digital form but I’m sure as hell not going to pay for them all again at ebook markups. No way in hell. Bittorrent seems like a better option.

We’re very proud of Beestende being a game that actually does what it promises and we submitted it to the Dutch Game Awards.

A trailer for a reality show that I participated in about a year ago was released under the title Heetsel. Doing anything for tv or tv-like media feels intensely surreal and judging from the final edit that surreality is conveyed quite well by the delivered product.

I published the video and brief write-up of my NEXT Berlin talk about love and gamification over at Hubbub.

On Wednesday I did random administrative stuff and prepped my visit to Munich the next day.

On Friday I had coffee with Chris Eidhof at the new Barn which is a stunning large venue with a roaster and a very large coffee desk. The coffee is the same quality we’re used to but it’s policies are a bit more restrictive. I won’t talk about the online tumult caused by this, but I hope they can sort it out quickly and then focus again on what they do best: brewing awesome coffee.

And finally I had a cup with Mustafa at the Five Elephant. Mustafa is an all-star programmer who has recently moved to Berlin to build a startup. Another too little publicized —soon to be— success story in the local scene.

At some point you get to meet all your Twitter followers in RL: Geeking out with fellow dev@ Five Elephant instagr.am/p/P2AlOlgIMT/

— Mustafa K. Isik (@codesurgeon) September 21, 2012

You can read what the author wrote and see his or my pictures. It is a very nicely done curved projection from the Fernsehturm with recorded sound from the pivot mechanics of that same tower. Impressive and imposing.

What struck me most was that the whole thing seems to move so very slowly, deceptively so. When you allow yourself to get engrossed with one part of the video, one part of Berlin before you know it you have lost track of where you were and the entire thing has moved on. So much of Berlin to see in there.

Tomorrow it’s off to the opening of the Casey Reas show at DAM.

On Tuesday I dropped by Open Tech School to do a bit of Python coaching. The entire week I spent a great many hours on kohi getting both the iPhone client and the django server into usable shape. It has advanced to the point where I am using it regularly on the go and it works without too many hickups.

I also wrote the new services overview for Monster Swell. A realign had been in order for a while now.

On Friday Dirk van Oosterbosch dropped by Praxis. A good Amsterdam friend and a notorious hardware hacker.

Also the German net community wants to do something about the Leistungsschutzrecht which is a truly ridiculous piece of legislation. My response to their petition:

@saschalobo Das deutsche Netz ist schon kaput und den Verlagen möchte ich gerne schaden.

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) September 13, 2012

I was already in the Hague Saturday when the event that prompted my visit happened: we held Apps voor Democratie, a Hack de Overheid hackathon in the Dutch parliament building on invitation by the chairwoman Gerdi Verbeet of our parliament. For this event they also for the first time opened most parliamentary proceedings.

I cannot stress how nice it was to be welcomed into the highest institution of the Netherlands and then hear that institution say that they realize now that openness with their data is the way to go. The atmosphere of the entire day was incredibly positive and uplifting. This event has been a world premier and has set a high bar. But don’t let that stop ups from doing even better.

Nooit eerder ter wereld vond een #hackaton plaats in een parlement, #tweedekamer heeft de primeur. Goed zeg! #appdemocratie

— Lisa Vermeer (@Lisadichtbij) September 8, 2012

#appdemocratie klinkt als een mooi evenement. In de Tweede Kamer praten developers met politici over open data en maken ze apps ermee.

— Alexander Klöpping (@AlexanderNL) September 8, 2012

When the theme ‘Playing with the Future’ was announced I was already thinking that Paul Virilio should feature in it. Can somebody confirm to me whether he has been referenced at all? Too often designers put their belief wholesale into the notion of progress and a heavy-weight counterpoint to that thinking would be more or less essential.

And best of all was hearing from a distance about Tom Armitage’s presentation which seemed to be really good and focuses on the same things we do in our practice: play and making.

You guys all just missed out. @infovore killed it. Trust in Play. playing is making

— James Governor (@monkchips) September 7, 2012

As fellow game makers that very notion is at the heart of many of the things we do and it is a talk I will definitely be catching on the conference recordings which are already online.

On Tuesday I took the train to Amsterdam and landed at our Amsterdam offices to catchup with Lex Slaghuis and friends about the current state of Open State and upcoming events.

Tuesday was also my sixth twitterversary:

@alper! Twitter Happy Birthday. 6 years since the day of registration #numbers

— Calculate (@clclt) September 4, 2012

Wednesday I had planned to give a programming lesson. I dropped by at Johan Schaap‘s offices to prepare some stuff and also managed to finally make it to the Stadsbranderij Noord (in our office building) where Kees Kraakman has been brewing the finest coffees of Amsterdam for the past couple of months.

I pulled something together based on my presentation at the last Hack de Overheid and the tutoring I’ve been doing in Berlin at Open Tech School. The event I made on Gidsy for that sold out pretty quickly and Peer Reach (thanks Zlatan!) offered to let me use their offices, so that came together rather rapidly. On a side note: big data and semantics related startups seem to be statistically overrepresented in Amsterdam right now.

The evening itself went by in a flurry of code and learning. I decided to use Javascript because that runs in everybody’s browsers and there is a readily available graphical environment to work with: Processing.js. There were quite some snags, but everybody managed to work through the exercises and claimed to have learned a lot.

Vanavond gaat @alper aan programmeren voor beginners doen via @gidsynews Eens kijken of het Blom-proof is

— erwin blom (@erwblo) September 5, 2012

Was leuke avond met @alper over de eenvoud van programmeren.

— erwin blom (@erwblo) September 5, 2012

Mocht je twijfelen over een beginnerscursus programmeren bij @alper: Doen! Heel veel Eureka-momentjes binnen 2 uur.

— Jerry Vermanen (@JerryVermanen) September 5, 2012

thanks for the programming class @alper, inspiring it was say i must!

— Jeroen (@Kooistra) September 5, 2012

I really enjoyed giving the class and I mostly wanted to know how much interest there would be for something like that in Amsterdam. Seeing as it sold out rather quickly and that everybody I mention this to says that they too would like to participate, it seems that interest is about as high as in other European countries, but that nobody is doing something yet. I’m strongly considering pursuing this further and create something more sustainable. If that is something you would be interested in, get in touch with me.

Thursday was spent in Utrecht where the awesome people of the Village smothered me with great coffee and merchandise. Always a pleasure to hang out in their store and see their enterprise maturing. Kars and I spent the day discussing strategies past and future for Hubbub and we managed to get the entire team together to celebrate the delivery of Beestenbende with a glass of champagne.

That same night I had the pleasure to catchup with most of the rest of Amsterdam’s hackers at the Hackers and Founders meetup.

On Friday I caught up with my agent Tessa Sterkenburg of the Next Speaker about digital things and where the current attention of the market is focused. It seems that our thinking is —as always— a bit ahead of the curve which may make it somewhat difficult to market, but we would not want to be anywhere else.

I quickly visited the Humans next door who are working on their own very nice health tracking app. Then it was another visit to the Open Coop, a visit to my accountant, some work at my old office and then off to the Hague to celebrate the graduation of up and coming GIS engineer Simeon Nedkov.

Then on Saturday we were in the Hague to do a hackathon in Dutch parliament. More on that in a separate post. And Sunday it was back in the train to Berlin.

I also booked my ticket to Australia for the end of October. I’m flying in on Melbourne via Beijing and flying out of Sydney some three weeks later. I always thought I had to see the economic miracle of China for myself, so I’ll be stopping over there for a couple of days before going on serious surfing/hiking/diving in Oz.

I also launched an activity on Gidsy to teach programming to absolute beginners which —I am glad to say— has been fully booked by now. Strangely enough this is a topic that is massively underrepresented in the Netherlands while in other countries there are groups popping up left and right. I hope to play some part in spreading knowledge of programming, but I cannot do this by myself and it should spread out to be a wider movement.

Thursday afternoon I spent two and a half hours outputting two and a half thousand words for the book I’m planning to write on the future of client based creative work. I believe this is a topic that does not get enough attention or love from the people who are active in this conversation. There are still a lot of people who have not made the transition from client work into product work and that kind of work will probably always exist. I think it is time to redeem working for clients and show a way to do it that maintains both dignity and fun.

That same night I went to the iOS meetup in Berlin and presented a sneak peek of Beestenbende to my colleagues iOS programmers. I was glad to see that our app was well received by those present.

And Friday finally we had a full on integration of the Pig Chase game running remotely from the Berlin studio to Utrecht. That was a pretty difficult nut to crack and very nice to finally have working. You don’t see a lot of games doing stuff with real-time video and remote real-time action because it’s pretty damn difficult. Fortunately that is our recipe for broad succes: pick difficult problems and solve them properly.

Then I dropped by at my friends over at HIIG where they were taping yet another radio show about the internet:

And finally I rode with the Berlin Critical Mass on Friday night. Quite the experience and I’ll be looking to repeat that soon again.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon tutoring Python as part of the Open Tech School workshop to get people into programming. That was very fun and utterly draining.

Then after spending the day teaching people to program with a dangerously low blood sugar level I moved over most of my stuff from Adalbertstraße to Oranienstraße proper. Notifications of address changes and invitations for office warming drinks are forthcoming.

Then for the rest of the weekend I did a lot of nothing during the day and lots of programming during the night which resulted in the first private release of kohi. Get in touch with me if you want to be a part of the initial group of users and I’ll include you as soon as we have something more substantial to share.

On Tuesday I attended the django meetup organized by my good friends from Gidsy. It’s always a pleasure to touch base with the current technological state of the art and best practices in web development, though I am not a web developer pur sang anymore.

On Wednesday I dropped by at the Campus Party venue which at the vast Tempelhof area was as impressive as expected and spent the rest of the time preparing my workshop.

On Thursday evening I presented the points of view we have on the topic as the last entry on a full Free Software Stage. The idea is that programmers and other makers can use their skills to make things and by doing so create a free world (necessary for free software).

The best way to complain is to make things. #cpeurope #civic #hacking @alper

— Karsten Kneese (@karstenkneese) August 23, 2012

@alper is giving an inspiring talk on hackers making the world better by coding not talking. twitter.com/FrauLea/status…

— FrauLea (@FrauLea) August 23, 2012

A picture by Gulius Caesar:

On Friday it was back to the Campus Party to see the presentation by the Rails Girls Berlin. On the whole Campus Party was a great event with so much interesting stuff happening (a bit too much at times), but with also a lot of odd kinks in the organization which are neatly summarized over at Silicon Allee.

And after that to see a bunch of pro gaming going on at the arena where I saw a bunch of interesting Star Craft II cast by Kaelaris and witnessed my first bit of League of Legends. Witnessing the high level sc2 players up close and seeing their actual APM is rather bizarre.

I have already been watching a bit of sc2 by Husky after which Frank Lantz started writing his Drinking Man’s Guide to Watching Starcraft, which I can recommend to everybody wanting to get into the sport.

Some of my writing got some renewed attention. The play Ten Billion was picked up by a Dutch daily and my review got a wholly forgettable comment, which did force me to clarify some points myself. But I’m afraid that most of the abstract thought I’m riffing off these days from Ribbonfarm does not translate well to the continental European context both in terms of culture and complexity.

“@alper: “The fact that people are human may very well be the inconvenient truth of the environmentalists.” — bit.ly/NAkyGX”

— Dannie Jost (@dannie) August 14, 2012

I also finished my piece about the BMW Guggenheim Lab that took place in Berlin this summer. The event was well done, the program had something for everybody and some of the web components I got to play with were really nice. Though there was still a lack of real engagement and therefore a lack of real change.

ci·ty·jerk (noun, portmanteau of city and circlejerk): high modernist gathering of architects and designers talking about urban experiences from which they are wholly detached

Lots of work this week on Pig Chase getting the iPad client version to work for initial prototyping.

I visited the Berlin Google offices to attend a lecture by Ben Scott about the potential of the internet. An absurdly self-serving piece of rhetoric that briefly summarized said: Germans are stupid to be wary of the internet and it is in fact holding them back. If they manage to trust the web and open up to its promise, everything will be fine and dandy.

Friday I had beers over at Praxis which will be my new offices from September onwards.

I’m also working on a proposal and subsequent script for a privacy based Nordic LARP. It’s going to be interesting and uncompromising and I could use help.

Last Monday was the end of the holiday with a leisurely train ride from Munich to Berlin during which I managed to chew through a lot of e-mails and revise a bunch of maths.

The rest of the week was spent mostly working through e-mails, meetings and social calls. Netzpolitik celebrated their birthday in C-Base with some nice drinks.

And rather quickly Kars Alfrink arrived in Berlin for the Play Publik festival. You’ll notice some similarities between my personal weeknotes and the general Hubbub weeknotes for last week.

Virtueel Platform published the videos of our talks in Helsinki, so there you have me talking about open data:

With our Hubbub strength over at the Berlin studio doubled on Wednesday we finished saba. After that it was straight on working on buta all the while playing games at the festival.

On Friday I had another additional studio guest with Sebastian Deterding. That was also the day that I experienced the beautiful Our Broken Voice at Ostbahnhof.

The rest of the weekend was spent working on buta and playing games at Play Publik with nary a moment’s rest in between. It was nice to be finally able to play Starry Heavens by Eric Zimmerman. I and a lot of people had a lot of fun with Hit Me.

The final day there was a presentation by Kevin Slavin and we closed off the event with a massive game of Charge of the Rubber Ball Brigade. There are many awesome pictures online over at Facebook (which is a shame).

In een anderhalve maand lang durend programma haalt BMW ongeveer elke spreker uit het TED/nieuwe media/architectuur-circuit naar de locatie. Er worden presentaties gegeven, gesprekken geïnitiëerd en workshops gedaan. Dit alles in een keet op een leeg stuk grond met wat schermen, krijtborden en post-its. De standaard-ingrediënten van co-creatie. Het woord ‘lab’ zelf is een excuus voor grote bedrijven om iets onafs te kunnen presenteren. ‘Het is geen zooitje, het is een lab.’

Aanvankelijk wilde de organisatie het Lab op de Spree-oever in Kreuzberg neer zetten. Dat bleek —zoals zoveel in Berlijn— omstreden. Lokale autonomen waren bang dat het lab de gentrificatie verder zou versnellen en dreigden met geweld. In overleg met de stad week BMW toen uit naar het toeristische Pfefferbergcomplex in Prenzlauerberg, een deel van de stad dat niet verder gentrificeren kan.

BMW die stedenbouwkunde predikt is een beetje als McDonald’s die de Olympische Spelen sponsort. Het kan maar het heeft iets potsierlijks. Berlijn kan een gesprek over zichzelf op dit moment goed gebruiken. Het goedkope paradijs waar ze bekend om stond is grotendeels weg, huurhuizen worden in rap tempo geliberaliseerd, panden verkocht aan speculanten die hun geld niet meer op de beurs kwijt kunnen en de lege plekken die over zijn opgevuld met bouw- en supermarkten. Het stadsbestuur is te druk met zichzelf en talrijke schandalen om een coherente visie over de stad te vormen dus moeten anderen het maar doen.

BMW weet dat helaas niet te leveren. De professionele forumbezoekers op het lab hebben andere belangen dan de Turkse dames op Kotti die protesteren voor sociale huren. De belangen van alle betrokkenen zijn te groot om de gesprekken relevant te maken. Het resultaat ziet er gelikt uit maar de angel is er bij voorbaat al uit. Jammer, want in deze stad waar mensen elkaar aan het verdringen zijn zou wat meer Jane Jacobs geen kwaad kunnen.

The last two weeks, after the brief trip to present in Helsinki were mostly spent on holiday in Avignon and the Alps (with some short stops in La Ciotat and Finale Ligure).

Fun was had. Relaxation not so much, but nevertheless, normal service has continued here again this week.

Gentse Feesten is probably my favorite city festival / large scale celebration around. It manages to string together a wildly varied program in a nice city in a convivial atmosphere. It is nice to see how a festival can offer something for many ages and tastes and be an all round positive experience.

This visit was marred a bit by the rainfall plaguing most of Northern Europe this summer which put something of a damper on visitor numbers, but even in the pouring rain, many stages drew crowds and the after hours celebrations on the Vlasmarkt were as special as promised.

During my stay in Ghent there was so much rain, I managed to do some work on kohi in the hotel room. This being a self-commissioned project, it can hardly be named work in any of the regular meanings of the word.

Tuesday I travelled onwards to my AirBnB in Paris in the area of Porte de Saint Ouen. A neighborhood far away enough from the city center to be cheap and colorful (a bit like Delfshaven), but just inside the Péripherique boundary so not too threatening.

On Wednesday in Paris I went to La Gaîté Lyrique where a Joust tournament was due to take place. We had a lot of fun playing for an hour or so with all comers. I was going to visit la Gaîté anyway to see the games by Eric Zimmerman and Babycastles and as a nice addition I got to play Fez on one of the consoles they had on display.

La Gaîté Lyrique has as their tagline: ‘Révolutions Numérique’ which translates to Numerical Revolutions and nicely symbolizes the time we are living in right now. The venue hosts a number of events based in art, games, music and net culture that seem to be perfectly in tune with the Zeitgeist but also have the production values to appeal to a large audience. I wish a reboot of the Dutch electronic culture venues may approach this level.

On Thursday I did some preparations for my presentation in Helsinki at the end of the week in some beautiful but horribly expensive Paris cafés like Les Arts et Metiers and in the evening I met Peter Robinett and his sister at the University of Chicago’s Paris Center. There we listened to a lecture on Baudelaire and the bourgeois experience of the city in the 19th century.

I will also be giving a small workshop on Civic Hacking at the Campus Party where I will be sharing all the tricks we used with Hack de Overheid in the Netherlands and which we hope to deploy across Europe to make government more accessible and accountable using the internet.

Friday I flew to Helsinki for my first time over there. Helsinki is a lovely city though a bit empty in July and the Pavilion for the World Design Capital is a beautiful venue.

Also the video report of our last hackathon in the Smart Project Space in Amsterdam was posted:

Saturday we attended the presentations on Transmedia storytelling with again a great report by Jasper Koning on VPRO’s Netherlands From Above project and on Sunday we presented for the social cities program.

I’ve seen four pieces here of which three turned out to be very poor. Yesterday I walked out of both plays that I had for that day, of which the first was boring as fuck and the second piss poor (see the Guardian about La Mouette) and without English surtitles. This from a festival that deems itself an international theater festival, where international means the rest of the world is allowed to cater to a French audience.

I think I am allowed to judge theater because I have seen a ton of theater (most of which poor) and critically I am rather close to one of the Netherlands’ leading theater critics. Added to that my media consumption is not that of the geriatric theater audience. My current point of view increasingly is that things that are not interactive are more or less broken.

The discipline of theater is changing, but not quickly enough. The current European funding cuts will be good in so far as they expedite change. There are some things things that still work in plays:

• Large scale plays by some well-known European auteur-directors (Luk Perceval, Kornél Mundruczó, Johan Simons, Theu Boermans, Gisèle Vienne) who break new ground and stage interesting treatments of old and new plays and draw large audiences. Figuring out who these are at any point in time is the difficult part. I have been pleased with what I’ve seen and heard of the names above.
• Performances such as musical theater, opera, dance or regular theater with music integrated add a much needed liveliness and reduce boredom for audiences that are used to sophisticated media mixes. Most music will have an effect, but here too you see famous electronic musicians combine with the directors above: Sun O))) with Gisèle Vienne, Ben Frost with Falk Richter, Junkie XL with Ivo van Hove.
• Mixed media is underused in almost all plays, but when done well it achieves dramatic parity with the actors. Projections are only one form and much more work needs to be done still in this area. Traditional directors are however very squeamish when it comes to time-based media and computerization of stagecraft.

I will be far more reticent in visiting theater from now on. I have enough to do not to spend my money to rid myself of free time.

Yesterday night then finally, I saw Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns at the Festival d’Avignon in the courtyard of a French Lycée. A play treating the world financial crisis based on a recent text by Elfride Jelinek. This is a topic whose absurdity and scale are still baffling and which has not seemed to reach a reasonable conclusion, even though everybody thought things would change (read this interview of an employee of a ratings agency by Joris Luyendijk).

Instead of a headlong approach that bored us to death (like Ten Billion), yesterday’s ensemble was very well aware of the challenges brought forth by such a complex theme and a vague but terse text by Jelinek. We were encouraged by Nicolas Stemann to step in and out during the play to get a drink at the bar in the garden. That made the entire ordeal of three and a half hours rather bearable.

The play progressed through all the stages we have gone through with the financial system. The naiveté, the promises made, the excuses, the horror at capital evaporating, the shamelessness and reach-arounds, the hope of a united Europe, the anger, so much anger.

The actors perform pornographic routines, confidence tricks, laments and lullabies. They tell us that we didn’t have a lot of money but that it did make them so happy when it burned. That our insecurity is their security. That they don’t know what to make from the flesh of our children. Shall they turn it into sausages? That the money may come back but that it will be too small to recognize. That it may come back to somebody else. That the most important part of making money is believing. That we need to keep the faith. We have to believe. That that is what is important about money.

We, the audience, have to sing that we are all so very individual. We sing that the rest of us is the bank. There is more music. Post-rock instrumental soundscapes combine with chorals lyricizing about the state of our finances. Gainsbourg’s song turned into: J’achète. Non, je n’achète rien. Heal the banks, make them a better place, for you and for me and the entire European race. That may be the best summary of the play: it is an elongated Ne me quitte pas for the capital that has forsaken us.

At the beginning along with introductions we are given a countdown very similar to the progress indicators in ebooks. It starts at 99 and shows the number of pages left in the script. This was a very useful aid to pace visits to the bar with. At the end of it those who have sticked around —with some pride for having accomplished that— have witnessed a tour de force that makes twisted sense of the capitalist experience.

The stories initially do carry some novelty and absurdity and are performed adequately. After a while unfortunately they become repetitious and there isn’t a lot funny about them (though the easily excitable French audience seemed to disagree). Half an hour before the end I concluded that this was the tritest thing I’d seen on stage in years without any hope for salvation. That was €22 and an hour of free time wasted.

Standing in a reproduction of a contemporary scientist’s office, Emmott did a reasonable Al Gore impersonation. He monotoned a large barrage of numbers supplemented by custom projections with moving graphics and graphs. The entire thing was put together to a high standard but that did not prevent it from devolving into a standard university lecture. Emmott stood there saying mostly: “Look at me. Aren’t my numbers big!?”

The performer started by disclaiming that he is not an actor but a scientist. That needn’t be a big problem. For this kind of non-fiction presentation having actual knowledge about the topic is much more valuable than any kind of acting skills you could bring to the table. The piece then only came alive in those moments where Emmott made some off the cuff remarks or recounted a personal experience. Techniques from page zero of Presentation Zen that weren’t used (intentionally?).

Targeting this kind of broad audience, it turns out it is altogether too easy to fall into the trap of patronization. ‘We may not have heard’ some things, discounting that we may have and simply reached different conclusions about them. I’m not detracting from the truth or importance of the message presented. In the Q&A afterwards some people influenced by Russian propaganda in fact disagreed. This is a message that bears repeating, but for those that already know it, this play does not offer anything new. Scaremongering does not seem the best way to get people to act where earlier scaremongering has failed.

I have been thinking about the possibilities of collapse and thrivability myself recently and I came upon this model by Venkatesh Rao that I think very effectively captures many of the things we are trying to do with society. Faced with uncertainty, the most rational outcome is to create social/economic structures that feed on that uncertainty to become more resilient. I agree with Emmott that many of the global systems currently are too fragile, but that is a solvable problem.

Emmott himself discussed the two solutions in the top quadrants: behaviour change (the Spore narrative) and technological progress (the Hydra narrative). He dismissed both rather summarily. So the play consists of presenting an audience somewhat convincingly with a well-known fact and then not giving them an actionable solution. All this in the hope that people will be so disconcerted that they will become wholesale activists when they get home.

This seems something of a leap of faith to me stemming from a partial understanding of the underlying problems. Emmott said that he did not know why people faced with these insurmountable truths do nothing. Current thinking on cognitive theory, communications and behavioural economics quite competently explains this behaviour. If you ignore that, you may well throw up your hands into the air and reach the conclusion Emmott reaches (the Dark Euphoria narrative): that anything we attempt right now will either not work or be too late.

I’m an optimist myself out of necessity, but not a ‘rational optimist’ as described by Emmott. I count on the pools of irrational illegibility both in the world’s systems and future developments to work together cushioned by social measures and capitalist balancing of supply and demand. When talking about Hydras we are not talking about purely technological solutions (that are indeed easy to dismiss), but about a complex set of systems in media, politics, science, technology and the arts that work together in blind concert to deal with system problems. It may not be pleasant, but it is too early for despair.

Also it was announced that we will be presenting in Helsinki on the Dutch E-Culture Days (here’s a summary).

Tuesday afternoon we met up with some fellow digital urbanites at the HIIG to discuss research avenues for data in the city. As practitioners we all do not have much time to busy ourselves with formal research, but it is good to update those that do with some of our actual concerns from the field.

The authority of the HIIG may be a useful instrument in reconstructing our governance models in the light of digitization. They are failing on almost every level because of the inherent complexities of network technology. We need to educate scholars, policy makers and pretty much everybody.

Also my NEXT Berlin talk recording was published. A fun event where I tried together love and games by frantically pointing at things while stepping just shy of innuendo.

Friday I put the final touches on Beestenbende (see these weeknotes over at Hubbub) and visited some sessions at the Guggenheim Lab about real estate politics.

Then the last day of last week it was time to pack up everything and embark on a somewhat long trip. First stop: Ghent.

Thus, according to Read, a fundamental problem for capitalism is how to maintain a supply of workers who are (a) flexible, creative, and motivated at the same time they are (b) manageable, controllable, and predictable. That seems to explain social media’s underlying ideological function. Not only do social media provide a basis for neoliberal subjectivity, affording us hands-on experience of neoliberal prerogatives and pleasures: branding ourselves, proving our flexibility, maneuvering ourselves into less precarious places in always-reconfiguring networks, and so on; they also serve to contain that subjectivity and neutralize it.

This week I put in quite some work on kohi doing full stack development both on the iPhone client and on the backend.

On Tuesday I had lunch at Gidsy. Any visit to the Makers Loft is fun but I go up there infrequently enough that every time I visit, the company has grown leaps and bounds. I also had a good time meeting up with Rainer Kohlberger, a good Berlin friend.

I did some final work on Beestenbende and made arrangements to visit Helsinki next week to present on an event organized by Virtueel Platform for its World Design Capital program.

At last we also are doing internal work at Open State / Hack de Overheid both on the design front and on strategy to prepare us for a next phase that will entail considerable growth as well as maturation for the foundation.

And not something that we did, but still nice to hear that KiesBeter.nl has started publishing data. Ton Zijlstra and I gave a workshop there last year to show them the potential of open data and after the required time to process these things internally, it has happened.

And that Friday it was off to Wartin with a whole bunch of awesome Berlin people on a weekend organized by the kind people of Third Wave. We had our fill of good conversations, nature and late night werewolf.

More work on Beestenbende which had a push to finish everything on the deck. I had talks with Netzpolitik and Invisible Playground.

I briefly visited an event by Platoon about the interplays between gentrification and graffiti which was about as absurd as it sounds.

I published my notes on the Greek situation.

I received my copy of Chouinard’s new book ‘The Responsible Company’:

Very much looking forward to reading that and applying it here.

Sunday I did a bunch of work on the kohi prototype.
kohi prototype

OCR’d it says:

Dear Mr. Çugun,

I would like to thank you for your message to Mrs. Kroes. She has asked me to respond to you on her behalf.

I fully share your views that educating our children to become computationally literate is an important topic which should be taken into account in our educational systems. We are indeed aware of the recent debate in the UK, and the studies and discourse papers published on suggesting reforms so as to give a higher prominence to information and communication technology (ICT) in the school curriculum, including programming skills.

As part of the Digital Agenda for Europe, we have been promoting the vision of Every European Digital and the mainstreaming of ICT int he national education systems as a catalyst of innovation and modernisation of education. There are good examples in Europe in this regard, but still much needs to be done before we would see our children widely taught and working wit the new technologies in every course. This would in itself provide a good level of ICT skills to our pupils.

For the future, ICT and learning are high on te Digital Agenda, and we are committed to contributing to educating our European youngsters with the ICT skills they need to succeed in the 21st century.

Yours sincerely,
Khalil Rouhana

We have a long way to go, but we need to push this in every way possible.

Also if you haven’t read it yet, Maurits Martijn has written a very good interview (in Dutch) with Neelie Kroes in a recent Vrij Nederland.

That was also the week that I upgraded my Things client to to the Things Cloud Beta. I think I’m not supposed to say anything about it, but let me just say: ++. I have started moving large parts of my workload to Asana, so it remains to be seen if native apps like these continue to be a good fit for what is an inherently collaborative effort.

In Athens I crashed the local hackers event at the Colab Workspace Athens where the Ruby group were discussing the organization of the next Euroku. And another day I found the O.M.G. event, short for Overclocking, Modding and Gaming where lots of people gathered to play Call of Duty 4.

I wrote up a longer report of my experiences in Greece last week.

Athens Terrace Life

The temperature of 32-36C during the entire week was a good reason to spend all my time outdoors in the shade. Athens, being accustomed to this weather, has ample options to choose from to spend your time, from garden patios, terraces all over the place, drink and food stands and lots and lots of iced cappucini and espressi.

Interestingly almost every restaurant, café and terrace in the city has WiFi. One place near the hotel where we went regularly, Ambrosia, excused themselves for not having it saying ‘they were old.’ Given the proliferation of internet, I hardly saw any laptops in the various cafés neither during the day or night time. I’m guessing the WiFi is being used by smart phone users to supplement their limited data plans.

Oddly during the so-called economic crisis, almost everything at terraces was still pretty expensive (Amsterdam prices). Iced coffees went for €4 and cocktails from €9 upwards also beers were definitely not cheap. I didn’t see a lack of visitors either. Many of the very upmarket establishment where I was rubbing shoulders with the Athens 1% were bustling. Those that have managed to set aside enough savings (wherever they got the money) look to be casually riding out the current storm. I have no idea how those who are less well off are weathering this.

A lot of real estate around town looked to be for let with “Enoikiazetai” plastered on too many buildings to count. This seems to stem from a similar price locking where property owners will not cut their prices even though the market cannot support it.

Strolling around the city I saw parties and preparations happening everywhere. A party would consist of a DJ, a couple of speakers, electricity tapped from a nearby distributing box and a couple of coolers filled with beer. The best of these was one evening in a derelict construction site where in a gallery space artists were at work and downstairs a rave was taking place. Tons of people were drinking and partying on the street. At least crises are good for parties.

The Theater Festival

I dropped by the theater festival after the opening night to have a drink. This festival like so many others was located on the location of evaporated industry. Where there once were jobs, there now are cultural venues. The Peiraeus 260 complex was a rather successful example of this development. High profile theater festivals such as this one are almost exclusively frequented by a kind of elite who have an old-fashioned and status sensitive cultural taste. I briefly skimmed the program, but I could not find anything I wanted to spend my time on.

On that opening night, the location served Berlin beer, locally brewed but with a proper bear logo on it. All of the Schaubühne shows at this festival (and at the previous one in Athens a couple of weeks ago) had sold out even on the night that Germany was playing Greece in the EC. Greek people even were boastfully demonstrating their German language skills at anybody they could find. It looked to me as if the ruling class of Athens —fully aware where their money comes from— was cozying up to their new German masters.

This all is a bit surreal if you read reports about Greek ressentiment against Germans. We did not see anything of the sort here. If anything, in parts of Greek society Germany seems to be an aspirational value.

The Engaged

At the port of Peiraeus I saw a banner by SYRIZA claiming that the necessary changes in Greece have been made. I hope they don’t believe it themselves.

Then at the local Ruby programmers meetup they were discussing organization of the next Euroku, a rather large event in this scene. And like anywhere in the world programmers are in such short supply that they cannot lift their heads for the amount of work on their plate. This is good for them, but that same short supply means that they will not be able to change a lot.

Near the end of my stay I found Exarcheia square which seems to be the focus of the counter-cultural movement. No riots to be found, just a bunch of banners obscuring the square and a collection of nice cafés and restaurants that are a bit less glossy than those in city center. Probably the place where normal Athenians hang out. At night a large group of people gathered on the square. Music from a DJ and banners professing sympathy for Turkish anarchists accompanied the revelers who were mostly occupied trying to deplete the beer supply of the local drink stand.

Whatever you may think of it, the protestors, the politicians, the programmers are all busy doing things. At least they do not spend their days idling on terraces sipping pricy beverages.

The End

My final impression is that of a country locked in a strange kind of socio-economical stasis, very much resigned to the current situation and deeply divided on many levels. Change looks to be far away either going to require a long time or the breaking of a great many things. However difficult the Greek relationship with Europe may be, it has been the source of a lot of the local prosperity.

On my last day there I had my wallet pick-pocketed from me while returning from the beach. This is a common enough occurrence in the tourist centers of the mediterranean. Fortunately I suffered no worse damage than having to replace a stack of plastic, having no money on me to donate to the Greek cause.

On Monday I got back into work after the couple of days in Copenhagen. I also discovered that the talk I gave in Rotterdam “Designing in the Face of Defeat” about the New Aesthetic has been recorded and you can watch it above.

I spent the entire day working on saba and then rushed over to the A.Maze Indie Meetup. It’s always good to see the usual suspects and the games they’ve been working on.

On Tuesday we kicked off the implementation stage for the Playing with Pigs project. In the evening I dropped by at the Upfront UG in the same building as where I work.

On Wednesday I started adding sound to saba. It is amazing how transformative an addition sound effects are to a game. That night at the Maker’s Loft we saw the Netherlands losing from Germany, which was made a little less painful by doing it in the company of a lot of Berlin friends.

On Thursday I took the train to Amsterdam and ran into Wilg and Timan who demoed me the custom heigth maps they are doing for Snowciety. If you’re into winter sports, you should definitely check out their app which looks excellent.

Friday I spent at our Hack de Overheid offices at the Open Coop where I spent the day preparing my lesson in programming for beginners I would give at our hackathon.

That hackathon was the main reason I came back to the Netherlands. We did the annual spring hackathon we do with Hack de Overheid to promote open data, civic applications and be a place where people can go to connect over these causes. The event was a resounding success thanks to the help we got in organizing it and all the people who showed up. The great Michelle Thorn gave a great keynote where she made some good analogous to help structure the activistic work we are doing. A great help to all of us to see the bigger picture and keep firmly in mind the goals we are aiming for.

So much data was opened up again and so many ideas to improve the Netherlands were shared and built upon. The institutions giving away their data is such a stark difference from the attitude I have witnessed in Germany these past months. It is as though both countries are in different world: one in the modern, sharing world where developer mindshare and providing excellent services to your citizens is foremost, and the other in a traditional authoritarian nightmare where permission needs to be asked for everything and is rarely granted by the autocrats. It is probably clear which is which. More information about the hackathon and its follow-ups will be on our blog soon.

My workshop on learning to program was received well, even with the ridiculously short 45 minutes we had to explain algorithmic thinking and rudimentary programming. It can be done. With a bit more time, we could have had everybody do something for themselves too to hammer home the concepts. I will be posting the slides soon and organizing follow-up events in Berlin and Amsterdam to get more people programming. If you are interested, let me know here or on twitter.

Finally we saw the opening of the swinging garden in front of our office, which when the sun is out has turned into a right little piece of heaven. Amsterdam North is seeing a positive development with a speed that I could not have imagined a couple of years ago. It’s affordable, spacious and friendly, totally the opposite to what is normal in city across the water.

Where London’s Boris Bikes provide a digital readout of station occupancy in Copenhagen you need to walk around and see which (if any) station still has a bike in it. Late afternoon this turns up empty most of the time because it seems many tourists get one and then camp on their bike for the rest of the day or their stay.

As in any bicycle heavy city, spots for parking your bike are always scarce and underused bike share parking will be quickly appropriated.

After seven or eight empty stations (which when empty are rather hard to spot too) I finally found a somewhat functioning bike to take a tour of the city with. The map affixed to the bike shows the region with bikes and where you can take them (within the lakes and Christianshavn roughly). The bike itself is rather nice and can be made to perform adequately.

Some people also lock the bikes either short term or long term similarly to what happened to the Dutch attempt at White Bicycles for everybody to use pioneered by the Provos. Without accountability enforced by security measures it turns out any such material sharing system quickly falls prey to the tragedy of the commons. I am right now reading Bruce Schneier’s “Liars and Outliers” which treats exactly these kind of dilemma’s between individual benefit and social benefit and how to create systems which create globally optimal outcomes to support our complex societies.

But even more striking is the following paragraph that positions this change as one of the factors that influences the change of population within certain cities:

When the Millennial generation’s desire for more public transit and walkable neighborhoods clashes with political/policy gridlock, the result is skyrocketing real estate prices in the nation’s few non-car-centric cities. This can have a powerful displacement effect on lower-income residents. The more walkable a neighborhood, the more expensive it is. (Consider Manhattan, San Francisco, the District of Columbia, large swaths of Brooklyn, and Center City Philadelphia, among others.) This forces low-income and immigrant communities into the suburbs where, paradoxically, those least able to afford a car may be forced to get one. — GOOD

Public transport here of course is complementary with walkable neighborhoods but also with a lively urban fabric with enough cultural, leisurely and other things to do within easy reach. In short people who can afford it want to live in the nice parts of the city (and who can blame them). This proces has already happened in Amsterdam and is now taking place in Berlin (see the previous piece on the protests) somewhat more violently.

Theoretically political/policy gridlock is fixable, but I’m bearish on political change in Europe and Germany where all our attention is directed towards the maladies plaguing the continent and the political system is historically autocratic and unresponsive.

Preparations for our Hack de Overheid hackathon are entering their last weeks and things are speeding up. If you want a nice day of civic hacking with friendly people and good food and drinks, I’ll say head on over to our signup page.

Getting some work done and then it was off to Copenhagen with the Tuesday night train. Travelling that way with your own bedroom, going to sleep in one city and waking up in another is by far the most relaxing way to go (except when the train has a two hour delay before your 00:32 departure).

I visited Copenhagen for the European Data Forum to see what the data driven discussions were about on the European level. We got informed about a lot of European programs, a lot of talk about Linked Data and not very much pertaining to the stuff we do from day to day. Some friends from the open data movement were present and the event was quite informative all in all.

The focus on Linked Data in many of the participants is heartening and understandable but ultimately it is a doomed approach. I got into an argument about this during lunch with some developers. There are problems on two levels. On the low level, Linked Data does not solve any actual problems for developers but it does cause many for them because of lack of tooling, learning curves, interoperability costs etc. This is both a problem in proposition and marketing but it is not seen as such by the Linked Data community. Until that is recognized, adoption of Linked Data technologies will remain as dismal as it is right now.

On the higher level, the fact that there is so little interoperation and so much problems standardizing and getting things to work together may be symptoms of the fact that the models of the world being aimed for are too complicated. Engineers will always mistake the map for the territory, but it is curious that they would be able to sell that many other people on it. The engineers’ answer to the fact that things do not work yet is of course: that they need more time/money/resources thrown at the problem. The fact that the cost/benefit ratios have gone completely skewed is not being noticed because it is in no one’s best interest to do so.

Fortunately people on the ground doing real work in open data, such as us and the Open Knowledge Foundation, are encountering these problems and fixing them because in the real world we have no other choice. Rufus Pollock presented about the folly of perfect models and APIs and he’s right on both counts (I presented about this myself before).

Government agencies that can’t release their data on a website properly, are probably not ever going to have APIs that are usable or stable enough for anybody to build something serious on. They would better dump the data and have the developers with a vested interest build their own APIs or whatever they need. Similarly Rufus argued against overmodeling againts a room of European funded academics. I’m not very hopeful but some of it may have changed some hearts and minds.

The same day Berlin celebrated its own open data day, which I unfortunately had to miss. I hear that a lot of people showed up which is good because a lot of work is still to be done in that field. A list has been started to discuss open data in public transit, which should be a high priority. After having gone around Copenhagen for a couple of days with its Google Transit support, not having such a transit facility in a city is such an annoyance and cause of opportunity cost that it should be counted as a criminal offense on part of the transit operators.

After two days of talking about data I also visited the Metropolis Lab at the Overgaden art institute where they were having talks about developing the creative city. It was a nice and cozy event, pretty much the complete opposite of the previous one I had visited where artists, architects and festival curators were discussing their work. Given the description of the event I had expected a bit more about games and other procedural media/systems.

I did see Tor Lindstrand present about architecture and I must say that was an awesome experience.

The rest of the time in Copenhagen I spent eating and drinking quality things. Coming back to Berlin that was one of the most important differences I noticed, the fact that food and drinks in Copenhagen were about three times as expensive but also at least twice as good than I had in Berlin.

The other is that the opulence and organization of a Nordic capital is a stark difference to what we are used to in Berlin. It is nice being in a city that is not destitute for a while though Copenhagen may be too polished to live in for any amount of time.

I also browsed the Avignon festival website which I will be visiting in July and came across this item on the programme by Sévérine Chavrier who is staging a play “Plage ultime” inspired by the works of J.G. Ballard. I will be arriving just too late to see that, but I do wish that more theater makers would take note. My current experience indicates that France is doing well in theater innovation (Gisèle Vienne is another name to watch out for) and Kornél Mundruczó is also showing a work “Disgrace” at Avignon (who I saw before in Rotterdam).

And then it was back to Berlin on Friday night.

End of the week we also got surprised by the all new Foursquare, with a major update to both the mobile client and the website.

I have to say that I absolutely love the new engagement that this view allows. The main timeline that you now see, though noisy can stand up to the best that either Facebook or Path or Instagram have to offer and that showdown is clearly the direction that Foursquare is headed. Engagement around pictures, likes and comments is high and this update may very well increase that.

I have been a bit annoyed by some changes, but then again I may very well be too much of a power user while they are going for a mass market appeal. For most users what they have changed is an improvement.

For some others like myself and Tantek Çelik, the lack of a local friends view is a bit of an annoyance, especially if —like me— most of your friends live somewhere else. I quite like knowing what everybody in Amsterdam has been up to, but it does not have to be front and center to my experience because I can’t act on it (except in virtual ways).

For most users this is unlikely to be an issue because all of their friends will be in the same city anyway. Because I thought complaining is only going to fix that much, I made a single serving view of foursquare with only the people within a 50k radius: Old Fashioned Checkins.

This was very easy to do because of Foursquare’s excellent developer APIs and support. Another feature missing from the mobile client right now is being able to explore for venues that you have not visited yet. If I look around my house now, I almost only get to see places that I have already been to. Not much serendipity in that. These are undoubtedly things that are going to be improved upon on future updates, but this has been one of the first changes in foursquare that has been so jarring.

Then the rest of the week work to finish saba has continued apace as well.

I must say I’m quite impressed by the clarity and breadth of thought that Harman and many of the philosophers in that current express. This interview (my excerpts from it) with him contained some insights and phrases that I had not seen expressed before.

More generally speaking whether it is Harman or Bogost or DeLanda or any of the others, it is particularly nice to be reading the current philosophers of our age who right now are relevant, alive and online. This last bout of reading has finally made me reach the long overdue realization that philosophy need not be a dead pursuit nor that writings on philosophy need to be obtuse.

So here are my notes from the book which is filled with brilliance:

the engineer must /negotiate/ with the mountain at every stage of the project, testing to see where the rock resists and where it yields, and is quite often surprised by the behaviour of the rock.

it is impossible to derive one thing instantly from another without the needed labour

Actors become more real by making larger parts of the cosmos vibrate in harmony with their goals, or by taking detours in their goals to capitalize on the force of nearby actants.

It is never the actant in naked purity that possesses force, but only the actant involved in its ramshackle associations with others, which collapse if these associations are not lovingly maintained.

Harmony is a result, not a guiding principle.

Systems are assembled at great pains, one actant at a time, and loopholes always remain.

To see something ‘directly’ means following a lengthy chain of transformations from one medium into another and on into another.

Their main difference is that Plato’s metaphysics seeks reality at a layer deeper than all articulation by qualities, while Latour thinks there is no reality outside such articulations.

Yet they are allowed to enter only by virtue of their effect on other things, since Latour holds that there is never anything more to them than this.

The question is only whether we grant sufficient reality to objects when we say that a thing is not just /known/ by what it ‘modifies, transforms, perturbs or creates’, but that it actually is nothing more than these effects. If the pragmatism of knowledge becomes a pragmatism of ontology, the very reality of things will be defined as their bundle of effects on other things.

Latour does not mind defining an actor by what it affects, but he does not allow an actor to borrow its effects in advance. Payment in real time is demanded at every stage of the translation.

If not for this basic asymmetry between an actor’s components and its alliances, we would have a purely holistic cosmos. Everything would be defined to an equal degree by the actors above it as below it, and there would be no place in reality not defined utterly by its context.

Monisms are too pious and sugary in their holism, dualisms too static in their trench warfare, and triads too smug in their happy endings. But fourfold structures allow for tension no less than plurality, and hence we find Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, Scotus Eriugena, Francis Bacon, Vico, Kant, Greimas, McLuhan, and others chopping the world into four.

Instead of an objective nature filled with genuine realities and a subjective cultural sphere filled with fabricated fictions, there is a single plane of actors that encompasses neutrinos, stars, palm trees, rivers, cats, armies, nations, superheroes, unicorns and square circles. All objects are treated in the same way. Latour justifies this with his broad conception of an actor as anything that has an effect on other things. […] Latour adds that if all entities are equally real, all are not equally /strong/. Fictional characters and myths have weaker legions of allies testifying to their existence than do lumps of coal. Hence, we can democratize the world of actors and still avoid the free-for-all of social construction.

In this sense, an object is a sort of invisible railway junction between its own pieces and its outer effects. An object is /weird/—it is never replaceable by any sum total of qualities or effects. It is a real thing apart from all foreign relations with the world, and apart from all domestic relations with its own pieces.

I’ve been working on a personal transit app that has a different take on things than most apps. That has taken quite some time and attention but it is progressing rapidly. The state of open transit data around the world, however, is still disappointing.

I finished the Prince of Networks and published my notes here as wel as excerpts from an interview with Harman.

On the other hand I am also putting the final touches on the game we’re making for saba. That is coming along rapidly and we should be able to submit that to the App Store in the near future. It looks like I’m becoming something of an iOS programmer.

On Wednesday I visited the encampment near my office protesting the liberalization of rents and wrote some thoughts about that. Similar protests are going on where I live.

I also have gotten quite busy arranging stuff for our upcoming Hack de Overheid in Amsterdam on June 16th. I will be holding a workshop demystifying programming for people who don’t know how to program yet. You are very welcome to join us if also want to get your feet wet with code, data journalism or open data.

I also briefly wrote up the launch of Politwoops in the USA with help from our friends from Sunlight.

My bicycle got a second brake which is a requirement in the highly responsible Germany. Talking about bicycles, I started a Tumblr to document the miserably state of cycle paths in Berlin.

Then it was also off to the Campus Party Housewarming Party and the day after the mediaboard of the region organized a Gamersnet summer meeting in a videogame arcade lounge. The Berlin gaming scene is still rather nascent but there may be some potential here. The city is still too artist heavy and engineer thin which will need to change for more stuff to be built.

On Friday everything continued apace with a special anniversary visit to the local Cafe CK who are providing us with the only drinkable coffee within a literal mile.

The coming week it’s off to Copenhagen for a brief visit to the European Data Forum (open data) and to the Metropolis Laboratory (urban games).

And like it or not, Apple and Amazon are stirring up more interest, even among intellectuals, than most academic critiques of capitalism. Is that just because we are all a bunch of brainwashed idiots locked in on our own trivial conveniences? Hardly. It’s because these companies are also doing something exciting that addresses where consciousness really is today, and which it didn’t know that it wanted. Did I know in advance that my brain would catch fire as soon as I had a smartphone and a tablet computer? Not at all. I initially thought both of these things were consumerist pseudo-needs, just like the academic Left still does. But I was wrong, and so were they. To have the right electronic device in your hands can sharpen your brain as much as the discovery of an important new author.

Life has to be optimistic, or it becomes merely reactive. And I really fear that the Left is becoming the permanent homeland of the critics and the grumblers.

It is frankly a failure of imagination to try to explain away 1989 by griping about how Central Europe was simply recuperated into a banal consumer capitalism and nothing changed, or that at least political discourse mattered behind the Iron Curtain before ’89, and so forth.

And just goes on and on. The entire thing is worth reading and positions Harman as one of the more notable thinkers and philosophers we have right now.

It seems that the occupy style encampment has become quite a popular way of making a point. The crop of professional protesters and squatters that congregate around these camps are not very inviting towards deeper engagement. If you have no deep interest in the issues at hand, you might go over and read a couple of the pamphlets, but probably not much more.

The creative workers I know who like myself work and/or live in Kreuzberg are not very concerned with the issues plaguing these people. Most of them are in fact in direct competition with these people whose home rents are being spiked and liberalized. As soon as the renters are moved out, their houses are very rapidly turned around, sold on the overheated Berlin real-estate market to investors and then rented out at several times inflated prices.

This agrees with my personal experience that rents in Kreuzberg are on the rise and not at all slowly (they may be the only thing in Germany that indeed does change rapidly). The urban tides are shifting and most of these people have no footholds to stay in what was their home for the past decades. Those that know how and why things are changing closely guard that knowledge. The housing corporations have refused talks with afflicted renters and their organizations. In Germany knowledge translates quite directly into power and those that possess it are usually not very squeamish about employing it for personal gain.

Update: Just to support some of the writing here with this quote I came upon from Tagesspiegel (via Slow Travel Berlin):

“It is not the fault of foreign artists or party tourists; they too would prefer to pay less rent. It is caused by the mass sell-off of publicly-owned apartments, combined with the deregulation of rent prices.” —Joel Alas

I met the great people from Campus Party who are going to hold an event in Berlin at the end of August. More to follow in the light of hacking, programming and opening up the things that should be open.

Tuesday Eric Zimerman and Nathalie Pozzie gave a lecture at the Universität der Kunsten as an introduction to their residency here. It is very nice to have them over for the summer and I’m curious what will come out of it.

Work is revving up for the next Hack de Overheid event on June 16th which is going to be a lot of fun. Wednesday we saw Ignite Berlin which had a very nice line-up of talks.

Thursday I met Julianne from Social Media Week Berlin and went to the School of Data meetup by the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Friday I met up with Chris Eidhof, fellow Dutchman and iOS developer here in Berlin. Always a pleasure, and then it was off to the massive Karneval der Kulturen street festival.

On monday the protocol of the meeting we had in the Berlin parliament about open transit data was published. It contains all the proceedings and slides.

On Tuesday I went to Hilversum to give a workshop on journalistic data visualization over there. It’s always fun to give these and it’s going to be even more fun to see the results coming out of it.

After that I bounced over to Utrecht to relax a bit in the Village. It had been too long ago and it’s still the best coffee store in the Netherlands. After that I went to Hubbub headquarters for some future planning with Kars Alfrink.

On Wednesday we had a lot of stuff to do with the (Open State) foundation (more on which later). That same evening we had a board meeting.

On Thursday I had a nice lunch with Tim de Gier and finished my next game review for the paper.

This is the view from the Amsterdam office. Pure luxury for that city.

Also I had to buy the new book “Koorddansen in de Kaukasus” by Olaf Koens about his adventures in the Caucasus. It is a fast paced collection of stories in this very bizarre part of the world.

I also managed to visit the newly opened EYE movie institute on the IJ shore. A beautiful building with a stunning view, heralding in a new era for this part of Amsterdam.

Next it was the train back to Berlin and prototypes for some new applications.