Last Wednesday I was at a gathering by the Institue for Internet and Society here in Berlin in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk called “Berliner Gespräche” about how the internet influences society.
I just read the double interview in Amsterdam Weekly with Johannes van Dam and Undercover Glutton. It is a lovely interview and their combined knowledge of food is certainly impressive. What I am a bit less impressed with is their knowledge of metropolitan cuisine. At one point in the interview van Dam extolls the culinary variety in Amsterdam and there I must take offense. I have traversed the city far and wide and I have come up empty more often than not for many a dish. Eventually I gave up and moved to warmer culinary climes.
Last week we got the DSL at home to work (in two tries). It feels good to have that after something of a month of bureaucracy and false starts to deal with.
I’m reading up on German tax and trade rules because I’m going to incorporate here this month and most of the things I read do not make me very happy. They look like they are more suited to a 19th century gentry than to creative workers in the multipolar 21st.
Talking to two young theater makers yesterday, I remarked that the majority of the Dutch plays I see don’t deliver the relevant and socially engaged experiences I would want them to. To which they asked why I still bothered going to the theater, a question I hear regularly from those in the more modern performing arts. They themselves hardly ever go and they make participatory theater, not the stage dramas that first come to mind. That is a response I get more often: that theater is boring, irrelevant and really ‘Why would anybody want to go?’
When I just got into Germany we managed to pin point something I had noticed before. It is striking how conservative people in Germany are when it comes to the internet and especially people who work in cultural positions. Compared to that, the Netherlands of the past five years has gone through a rather tumultuous revolution.
In the beginning of the week I spotted an interesting dataset on Sargasso, requested to play with it and got the following visual published the next day (our write-up).
I think most of the thinking around The Filter Bubble comes from people who are not very procedurally literate to begin with. That is to say they are not very adept at understanding the rules that govern interactive systems nor are they well equipped at reconfiguring them to suit their ends. I touch on this because the same tired argument was parroted in this Zeit interview with Miriam Meckel, a leading German communication scientist 1. It starts off with some very sensible sentiments but then it quickly derails on the topic of algorithms and concludes on several sidelines.
I have been in Berlin for a couple of hectic days now and I’m trying to come to terms with my surroundings. I have got a new working theory to use for the foreseeable future. Let’s see how well this holds up:
Another week and another change at the office. One thing that does define the Open Coop is that everything is in a constant state of flux adding jitter so none of us remain stuck in a local optimum. The global optimum we are shooting for in and around our location in North is rather ridiculous but best not shared in public.
I’m incredibly proud of the team and events coming together in our organization of the biggest Hack de Overheid feature yet. Looking back on the past year, it has been an incredible ride with the various Apps for… competitions and no small amount of personal and professional changes.
That moment where you’re texting somebody for the first time and the Send button turns blue. The expectations conveyed with that small indicator about the time to response as well as the type of person on the other side.
Going on with Apps voor Nederland and culiacan (which is almost done by now). Also did a brief intermediate scripting and rendering moving text for a TA theater piece.
This summer I shot a roll of color film I had lying around using my trusty Yashica D medium-format camera. The subjects were passers-by in our Amsterdam office. The results were better than expected.
I was at an event organized by ARCAM tonight concerning co-operative housing projects which are already very popular in Berlin but are rapidly expanding to other cities. Amsterdam is busy launching its own initiative and Michael LaFond from Berlin presented their experiences with this way of building.
I was at a meeting this weekend by the Pop-up City and the documentary displayed about urban development fits into a wider recent trend where people kick the creative class and blame them for society’s ills. Usually the dreaded specter of gentrification is pulled out to show how apathetic and different and outright bad the Creative Class 1 are.
I thought this piece: “Amazon and the reintermediation of the spectacle” my Michael Smethurst was well worth reading. Here are some choice excerpts, but these are mainly for me. You should read the entire thing.
So this was announced: A Netherlands wide apps competition called Apps voor Nederland was announced by several ministries today at PICNIC. Minister for the interior Donner delivered a video message as well.
The weekend before last we were on a fortress (part of the defense works of Amsterdam) to spend a day on hacking civic data for Apps for Noord-Holland.
Another long form weeknote, history recapping brought by the fantastic Memolane service which aggregates my various media chronologically so I can quickly write this overview.
I think it’s time to archive the hagiography that was on my About page. I apologize if you were duped or offended by it. Anyway, you should know better than to take any piece of text containing the phrase ‘thought leader’ seriously.
A bunch of work on finalizing Code 4, work on culiacan continues steadily nearing a launch sometime soon, and kicking off ideation and sketches for tlalnepantla.
Monday I went off exploring a fort for an upcoming Hack de Overheid event. The industrial scenery and weather at the sea locks of IJmuiden was positively apocalyptic that day.