So long Ribbonfarm!

Ribbonfarm retiring is another such ending in a time rife with them. I can’t overstate how influential it has been on my (our) thinking and practice. Tremendously impressive to think all of that was thought up by one person (who I still haven’t met).

It’d be impossible to summarise all the themes, intersections and other tidbits that I got out of Ribbonfarm. I can say how it begun: I was lying on the river-shore in Avignon in 2012 and I had a large part of the blog’s back catalog in my Instapaper and there I read the entire thing while listening to the crickets.

Moving out of Rue de la Teinturiers. I will miss the racket.

A government that’s certain to win

I’m not that negative about the Dominic Cummings job ad, because:

  • Unlike a lot of people in governments everywhere, he seems to have a clue what he is doing.
  • That a person who’s winning would quote Boyd is not a coincidence.
  • Using a blog in this way (or Trump tweeting like he does) is the direct e-government that everybody has always been asking for. Not so fun now that we have it, is it?
  • Governments and institutions are breaking or already are broken in this age. They do need large scale overhaul.
    This is even worse in Germany where the institutions are bigger and the ahistorical denial of reality is immense. It’s going to be really ugly when they go down.
  • A city like Berlin, that can’t get anything done to save its life, would probably be massively improved by this approach. Our local government here can’t find its own asshole without help from McKinsey. Please somebody do this for Berlin.

Recess! 13 – Game Design as a Nihilistic Endeavour

I have a current shtick that says that game designers harbour no illusions about human reality. Designing and testing a game on people reveal the murky depths of human nature in a way few other pursuits do. Take even the simplest game with the possibility of deception and it will often devolve into the horrible treatment of one player for the advantage of another.

I’ve been enjoying reading Venkatesh Rao’s ‘The Gervais Principle’ a lot. Because I think it also sheds a lot of light on the human condition. He just published the final installment ‘Children of an Absent God’ and I was more than pleasantly surprised to read a lot of game design thinking in it and quite a bit of speculative realism as well.

Take this passage which calls game design a power literacy:

So the process of ripping away masks of social reality and getting behind them ultimately turns into a routine skill for the Sociopath: game design. Once you do it a few times, it becomes second nature, a sort of basic power literacy. An understanding of the processes by which the fictions of social reality are constructed, and growing skill at wrangling those processes.

I don’t know if I’ve read that definition of game design before (and I’ve read quite a few): ‘an understanding of the processes by which the fictions of social reality are constructed and […] skill at wrangling those processes.’ The interesting differentiator I think then is whether the participants in those social realities are willing or unwilling ones.

After that there follows a de-centering of the uniqueness of human experience which is very similar to what we’ve been reading in new materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology:

Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe.

It is nice to see the philosophy I have been reading for the past year being operationalized into a thinking that can be applied to personal power dynamics. But to tie back into Kars’s statement of assumptions, here’s one:

Game design is an endeavour that from nihilism creates something of meaning.

Week 283: Pigs, other animals, cities and the internet

A delayed picture in picture from me presenting in Helsinki:
Dutch E-culture days Alper Cugun | 2

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.

https://twitter.com/dannie/status/235373465295798273

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

Tents are popular

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.

Like what I remember from Dolores (also everybody here speaks Spanish)

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.

Ten Billion by Katie Mitchell and Stephen Emmott

In the performance “Ten Billion” at La Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon Stephen Emmott, a scientist, performed a soliloquy about the state of the world and the environment. He took a message we already have known since the Club of Rome and rehashed that in front of a theater audience over the course of ninety minutes.

photo.JPG

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.