‘The stack’ – The chain of interconnected activities and technologies of current and historical significance that spread far beyond the individual.

I think there are many people beginning to have/shape a conversation around the stack: From Jo Guldi the author of Roads to Power: Britain Invents the Infrastructure State , Timo Arnall in his No to NoUI piece, Benjamin Bratton and his geopolitics of the cloud and theoretical languge of ‘the stack’, artist/Critical Engineer Julian Oliver (Eyeo2012 talk is very good) & course my good friend Vinay Gupta.

> who owns the means of not dying?

> who controls the stack?

> is infrastructure neutral?

> what are the dilemmas of radical texts on Amazon in relation to capitalist realism while sat under a Tumblr image hosted on Amazon ?

On Sunday I gave a talk at ‘Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working: Digital Culture, Digital Work, Digital Insurrection’ hosted by Autoitaliasoutheast - the panel session was on New Luddism.

I used my time to introduce the concept of #stacktivism a term that i think allows us to form & give shape to the conversation around infrastructure & our relationship we have to it. I do not seek to define it, merely give shape to an idea.

The concept is early days & in its infancy: I hope my talk embedded below is a useful primer/introduction to this enquiry.

Join in the conversation here :: Stacktivism.com

( stacktivism.tumblr.com + @stacktivism )

Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working is a series of talks, workshops, texts and online contributions from key voices – artists, activists, technologists and writers – examining how digital technology is changing our political selves.

i will be speaking on the first sunday evening of the #ILIW13 event at a talk on ‘New Luddism’.

The details of the talk can be found below ::

Who benefits from and is in charge of new technology? What could a life with less rather than more technological innovation be like?

Taking ideas of traditional Luddism as a point for departure, Dougald Hine, Dave King (Luddites200) and Jay Springett will join Huw Lemmey to discuss the possibilities for engaging with new technologies and what our relationships to these technologies have become now that it is increasingly difficult to truly “switch off”.

Dougald Hine  is a writer and social thinker who has been responsible for creating a series of organisations, including the School of Everything, the civic ideas agency Spacemakers, and the Dark Mountain Project,  a cultural forum for investigating the converging crises of climate change, resource scarcity and economic instability.

Luddites200 is an ad hoc group of admirers of the Luddites, radical historians and activists on issues connected to technology.   The group is developing a neo-Luddite politics of technology for the 21st century.  Dave King is a former scientist who has been writing and campaigning on the politics of genetics and reproductive technologies since 1990.

Jay Springett - Jay Springett is a Musician, Photographer, Philosopher, and Luddite. He is concerned primarily with humans, technology, infrastructure, and the unseen intersection points of how these things keep us alive. He specializes in small one-man projects that other people can get involved with. Jay is a member of EdgeRyders (a distributed thinktank incubated by the Council of Europe), co-designer of the visual language of SCIM (Simple Critical Infrastrcuture Maps) -resiliencemaps.org and is a contributer to the Hexayurt Project an open hardware disaster relief shelter. He also co-curates The Thought Menu: a nomadic talks series, and is passionate about DIY culture.

Huw Lemmey is an artist and writer whose work focuses on digital political culture and post-internet art. He is involved in running the Limazulu project space and has co-ordinated the Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working project with Auto Italia.

@dougald / @luddites200 / @thejaymo / @spitzenprodukte

You can get tickets from the eventbrite page here

Saturday 20th – The Thought Menu #5 :: On Making

Yup, we are doing another thought menu!

We have partnered with the great Makerhood.com for Thought Menu #5 and will be putting on an hour of classic thought menu at their event Making Uncovered.

Making Uncovered is an exciting festival of making, art and craft. It’s free to attend, and everyone is welcome – drop in at any time. We have a great collection of speakers for the evening, and really hope you can make it down!

speakers include :: Kelly Angood , Anish Mohammed, Raphael Hefti & Tom Grimsey

Full details can be found at the Making Uncovered site here or you can sign up to the Thought Menu News Letter for details about the event and get info on future events.

You can book your free ticket here.

Exciting times!

x

on thursday i was luckly enough to give a talk at london’s worst artist-run space lima zulu‘s fourth #LZPKBYOBRSVP pecha-kucha night.

topics on the night included bootstrapping, northern ireland prison protests, max stirner, and my talk ‘Cheap Gadgets in the hands of EVERYBODY’. i had a great time, and it was good to see lots of friends i havent seen AFK in too long.

the talk wasn’t recorded. but for posterity before i forget, i just sat down and gave the pecha kucha in one take to my laptop and empty flat. i embedded it at the bottom of this post. a big thanks to huw for inviting me to talk

:: edgeryders ::

edgeryders is a crowd sourced think tank focusing particularly on european youth & the precarieat. i was lucky enough in june to be invited to the ‘living on the edge’ conference (#lote) at the council of europe in strasbourg. this was an amazing experience and probably one of the highlights of the year. i met hundreds of engaged & inspiring young people from all over the continent facing challenges both similar & different from my own. in all honesty my ‘blown mind’ is still living with the fallout from that event. i posted my post event thoughts on it at the time.

sadly due to work commitments i missed #lote2 at the european parliament in brussels this past november. it’s my understanding that projects dreamed up at the initial #lote unconference began to form and coalesce. i am particularly interested in the unmonastery & the hacking the 2014 elections projects.

edgeryders was an incredible opportunity. i met some amazing people, but perhaps more importantly: made some really good new friends. above all, if the coe was to give just one reason to justify why it spent its money on the project – it would have to be that it invested in the social capital of hundreds of exceedingly capable individuals from all across the eu.

:: the thought menu ::

the thought menu is a nomadic talks series and was/is the product of a conversation had over drinks in sunny strasbourg at #lote. my co-conspirators were the ever capable and beautiful human beings: gaia marcus & ben vickers

the first four thought menu talks were held at lima zulu project space in august during the two weekends of the olympics. you can read an overview of what went down in the post event newsletter here. thinking now; the theme for this year perhaps has been ‘people’ – some of the people (audience and speakers) i met whilst running the thought menu are also incredible & inspiring people. it has been a pleasure to make their acquaintance – my life is richer for it.

unfortunately: we have all had huge attacks of life during the last period of 2012. the plan as it currently stands is to start the thought menu as a regular event in 2013. we are still looking for venues and speakers. if you fancy giving a talk or lending a hand – please e-mail us here :: thethoughtmenu@gmail.com 

:: growstuff.org ::

another thing that has its roots for me in/from edgeryders. i wrote a post called why isnt there an app for that?? . at some point during the year i saw a tweet mentioning the project from the awesome mr @pozorvlak and i got involved in growstuff.

growstuff is a community of food gardeners working together to build an open source platform to track, share, and discuss edible gardens and sustainable lifestyles. the contributors to this project are a great bunch of people and its been cool to make @skuds acquaintance. i am a big fan of the community rules and the distributed development process, both are due to her passion for community inclusion. the coders have been very patient with me, and i have learnt a little bit of ruby and sysadmin stuff already – learning to code is definitely something i want work on in earnest in 2013.

:: resiliencemaps.org / scim ::

all that time ago, learning about simple critical infrastructure mapping changed the way i think about politics and wider society. the problem however is that vinay’s design skills leave much to be desired. as such: my housemate and i sat down in the evening over a short period this year and designed a visual language. without the nounproject this would have been impossible.

i’m really pleased with how the whole thing turned out, and at some point next year i’ll work on getting them in to a copy of scim as a document. i think it might be a good excuse to try out sourcefabric’s booktype.

:: surviveth.is zine ::

i made a stab at doing something with surviveth.is . i put together a little document, which explains scim using the diagrams above plus @gelada‘s and how to build a hexayurt in one handy one page zine.

i’ve been talking to @jumplogic about sorting out some of the hexayurt documentation in 2013. hopefully we can pull some stuff together before the pre-burning man build season.

- some personal stuff -

:: i bought no new clothes ::

i always try and have a year long project that can be achieved with very little effort. (see here) and this year was to buy no new clothes.

it has actually been a really useful & illuminating experience. but by god do i need some new underwear.. :/ the year long anti-project has taught me a lot about the value of well made clothes. and more importantly has completely changed the way i operate in shops – you walk in to a clothes shop & simply just see past everything.

one of the observations i will take away from this is the oxford shirts i bought for work (in 2011) have lasted excellently. although after 18 months of daily use they are looking a little tired. i think i’m going to put this long life down to the fact i had them fitted at a tailors way back when i got them. clothes off the rack are designed to fit everybody & therefore fits no-one. the extra expense of getting clothes fitted once you have bought them vastly outweighs the costs of wearing ill-fitting clothes. this is something i plan on taking to heart. on the same note. my brogues i have invested in over the last few years are still going strong. i enjoy the ritual of polishing and maintaining them, there are very few objects in my life that require such long term attention. plus taking them to the cobblers in town and having the heel or occasional sole replaced is still more cost effective than buying a new pair, even if you factor in the initial outlay costs 3-4 years on.

i have given at least 4 bags of clothes to charity and i still am in a position where i haven’t worn some of the clothes i have in my room (mainly jumpers as it hasn’t been cold enough to bust out the grandpa knitwear). it has been good to unclutter slightly, and i’m thinking of doing discardia in 2013.

i must say the ability to recognise the quality of stitching and materials in the clothes you are wearing became more important as the year went on. an awareness of your ‘things’ is important, and means that you can catch things before they begin to break down.

which leads me on to -

:: i learned to sew ::

as embarrassing as it sounds, and despite dating an accomplished corsetier for 3.5 years in my early 20′s i’ve never been able to sew/stitch. put a button back on yeah – but not actually you know ‘fix’ anything. no longer!

this year i have learned to fix split seams (damn cycling thighs in skinny jeans and full pockets) fix rips, fix pockets & sew up holes etc. still figuring out what to do with holes in knees of jeans.

youtube has been an invaluable resource in helping me learn what kind of stitch was appropriate for what needed fixing. i guess in olden days you would learn from people in your family by watching. also, the value of picking up a needle and thread (and knowing what to do with them) when you first notice something going awry with your clothes is a skill i will keep with me for the rest of my life.

as a side note i’ve become interested in the idea of shirt making. i’m thinking of experimenting in 2013. not sure how or in what way but it’s on my mind.

:: learnt to lock pick ::

whilst we are on the subject of new skills, i also learnt to single pick locks this year. i can pretty much conquer most padlocks now pretty quickly. but have managed to beat only one door lock with security pins. i’m thinking of getting some ‘practice locks’ next year and putting together a lock board to continue learning/practising. new skill for 2013 has yet to be decided.

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i have also been on a whole bunch of adventures this year: down to Newquay for a week on a second date, went to cambridge for the first time ever and spent a weekend in a fancy hotel in Birmingham which was pretty cool too. plus adventures with the slightly odd wizard i know have been also interesting to say the least.

@nathanjurgenson no. Auto tune is to melody what pixels are to images. The snap to grid mentality. #newaesthetic

@thejaymo no, digital music is to digital photography. much of both reject the snap-to-grid mentality

—
  (@nathanjurgenson) December 04, 2012

@thejaymo agree the sigur ros record has the textured feel of vinatgeness, but doesnt strike me as the contrived faux-vintage of instagram

—
  (@nathanjurgenson) December 04, 2012

@nathanjurgenson wow for the first time I disagree with you 100% on something. I have a blog now. I will have to elaborate.

—
Jay Springett (@thejaymo) December 04, 2012

comparing auto-tune to instagram is problematic for me as the two are associated with different mediums and the two are not completly analogous. so we can only really speak in aesthetic subjective terms.

by ragesoss (own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via wikimedia commons

there is an important difference between the way an instagram filter is applied to a digital entity vs they way autotune is. instagram filters, process, alters, and re-express the whole of the digital object in a new form. auto tune however is applied (in general) to a melody line – a digital element or subset of the whole audio work. in production terms an instagram filter is more like an EQ – this (to me) is an important distinction.

auto tune essentially causes a melodic line to be digitally broken down, processed into its constituent frequencies, and re-expressed as data points on a fixed musical scale (but as my good friend @gutbuck3t pointed out to me on gchat the other night, what it’s actually doing of course is removing the frequencies between the notes). thus the re-expressed melody has a ‘pixelated’ quality. to the listener superficially at least, autoune feels like a ‘snap to grid’ was applied. and even more so when applied to human speech, it reveals the natural melody of speech.

it is exactly this quality i mean when I say a auto tuned melody line ‘sounds’ a lot like a pixel ‘looks’.

auto tune is a process filter that processes audio captured at a much higher resolution and mapping it to a scale. the same way older 8-bit/16-bit images captured at a much higher resolution look pixelated.

:: pixles vs waves –  ‘seeing’ music ::

of course talking about auto-tune in terms of pixels is unusual and perhaps unhelpful as digital audio is more commonly expressed as a wave form. i remember my first experience of ‘seeing’ music this way. back in the day with winamp. later, with audio tools at school/university they became familiar and garageband was there installed like a second nature on my friends macs.  recently and ubiqutously (I would argue) with sound cloud’s wave forms

the waveform like the pixel is now beginning to #newaestheticly find its way into mainstream culture ::

the waveform is a base constituent part of all digital audio, the same way the pixel is a fundamental part of a digital image. this must be remembered by the viewer/listener at all times. the music you are hearing if digitally produced is constituted of many wave forms and images many pixels.

:: but can auto-tune said to be creative? ::

personally? yes – in the same way that overtone compositional works explored by stockhausen or the constrained writing of georges perec are creative explorations within artificially applied restrictions  - however the inherent creativity of auto-tune it must always be remembered lies not with the artist or the producer, but with the programer. which leads me very nicely to my next point:

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there is of course a contradictory element that i touched on before. it is the question of resolution. a waveform is made up of constituent frequencies in bits and bytes and an image is made up of pixels, bits and bytes. in which case i agree with nathans point ‘digital music is to digital photography. much of both reject the snap-to-grid mentality’ as ultimately its just all the same ‘malleable digital stuff’.

meet baxter – the robot with common sense who’s younger siblings will probably make 100m chinese workers unemployed.

he might look a bit stupid & slow now, and im also not sure about his emoticon flat screen face and the look in his eyes… but im also not so sure about what happens when we plug a human prosthesis like the bebionic3 into its ‘hands’?

i mean seriously, the guy above with one of these hands can pick up/crack eggs and shit. i see no reason why these would not be industrially produced to work in factory conditions soon.

-0-

the labour movement in china has gathered a lot of pace in the last 18 months. it hasn’t been very well reported or been very visible in the mainstream media here in the UK. but strikes are happening. and some of the are pretty damn large: 4000 sanyo works, 6000 shoe workers, 4000 foxconn workers strike After iPhone 5 Starts Brawls (Updated).

As a consequence it seems foxconn has ordered a fuck ton of robots:

1 MILLION ROBOTS TO REPLACE 1 MILLION HUMAN JOBS AT FOXCONN? FIRST ROBOTS HAVE ARRIVED

“According to a translated page from the Chinese site Techweb, each robot costs between $20,000 to $25,000, which is over three times the average salary of one worker. However, amid international pressure, Foxconn continues to increase worker salaries with a 25 percent bump occurring earlier this year.”

:: programable robots are now cheaper than human beings ::

and within a few short years will be just as capable in handling the intricate tasks of electrical construction.

so my question i guess is – what then?

• what then for china and its huge swathes of newly employed and then subsequently unemployed workers?
• what then for the GM and the US auto industry already struggling to maintain its jobs and compete against the cheap labour in the east?
• will manufactuing return to europe and other ‘western’ countries it off shored decades ago? – of the costs of electrical goods made in china, almost ⅓ is now transport.

manufacturing might just end up coming back – but the jobs definitely arn’t.

i’m think im going to write a much longer post on global justice and supply chain oppression at some point. and what i think it means for the worker’s struggle vs neoliberalism’s mantra of jobs.jobs.jobs with regard to the full automation of manufacturing.

but for now, what could these future jobs.jobs.jobs be? my best guess, is either like george jetsons:

or

its destitution and poverty for everybody

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do you know how cheap it is to put a satellite in space?

i didn’t know until it was mentioned the other week on the gweek podcast:

its.dirt.cheap

$8,000 for a 0.75-kg tubesat
or
$12k to $19k for the more familiar 10 x 10cm cubesat

PLUS this includes the cost of putting them into space. and through http://interorbital.com/ you can pay for them by paypal…

this.is.a.big.deal

this year alone 3 cubesats that have been kickstarted:
the skycube,
ardusat,
kicksat – this is a project that really excites me. its a cool launch platform for little spacecraft called ‘sprite’ – which if combined with the autonomous drone flocking technology that’s being developed – you could do cool things.

with these things getting so cheap: i’m wondering if somebody will do infrastructure:

i.e. you use some kind of Space Wifi to get to a node, and it rebroadcasts to the ground. or message is sent up into space and replicated and held by the satellites on their own clustered mesh, and then sent back down to earth when you want to retrieve it – maybe it would work a bit like bittorrent?

bandwidth is a huge problem – what kind of speeds do you get connecting to a tiny aduino satellite in space essentially over HAM radio frequencies? how can you improve this? ::  a router on a weather balloon? moving the internet on and up to autonomous mesh networks of drones bridging the gap between near space and the ground?

one problem is that they don’t last very long, they fall back to earth and burn up after a short period. but with the price dropping why wouldn’t you just send more up into the mesh?

but if they were there, and you had access to them, what would you do with them?

-0-
cryptographic keys in space are the killer app:

it generates a keypair from random cosmic background noise, then it broadcasts your public key back to you, the NSA cannot get them back, after that you would only need the spacenode for authentication moving forward.

fuck. i’m pretty sure this is a doable project now if we had the cash!!

and/or

i’d put my bitcoin wallet in space – not so much as an offshore bank account, but an ‘off planet’ one.

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who has the cash AND is interested in laundering money and communicating privately ?

drug cartels. (EDIT: and revolutionaries)

10 years ago, if anyone had told you either of the following two facts about 2012 what would you have thought?

1. commercial space launches are here, indeed only today the space x cargo module docked with the ISS, and the list of private spaceflight companies with products in testing and development is extensive.

2. drug cartels have enough money/invested technology, that they build their own GOD DAMN SUBMARINES AND TANKS….

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lets put our futurism hats on just for a moment shall we?

in the near future as the cost of putting things in space gets even cheaper and multinationals make the transition to transnationals, i’m pretty sure they will all have their own space programs. think Monsanto moving apocalypse GM/Biotech to test labs in space – if shit fucks up, you send it on a one way course to the sun.

copenhagen suborbitals are already moving forward with their open source space rocket so the plans and specifications of building a space rocket will be out there for all + we as the general public will have more comprehensive understanding of doing things in space. combine this with advances in Aduino chips and other picosat technologies and autonomous open source drone mesh research:

why can’t drug cartels have their own space programs too?

:: click the image to embiggen ::

Image

GeoEye‘s annual high resolution picture of Burning Man from the sky, taken on Friday 31st August 2012.
Image: © GeoEye – GeoEye Satellite Image

Pls credit @thejaymo for the eyeball time ;)

A VERY conservative count :: 739 hexayurts

Note: I counted this map twice and took the lower count.

As far as i can see there were 739 hexayurt shaped structures (with the familiar 3point shine/shade/shadow on the roof) on the playa this year. There are quite a few smaller rectangular shaped structures that are next to / or near hexayurt encampments which may be H2 or H4’s. These were not included in the count as i was uncomfortable making the call, as they may be just shiny tents.

Methodology

I used the 30pt star stamp tool and marked each structure on the map in a new layer on the image.
Unlike last year, where i went around the camp in concentric circles.
this year i split the camp into the 16 quadrants of the camp and worked the count from the centre outwards in each one.

After that i did go round the camp in concentric circles to make sure i hadn’t missed any on the previous passes.

((Also for those that are wondering how i counted the yurts directly under the clouds, i overlayed a resized transparency of the image taken on the 30th (this is the image that is available on the geoeye website)unfortunately due to it being taken from a slightly different direction than this image, things don’t line up *exactly* and i had to keep moving it around by a few pixels or more to make sure everything lined up in whatever section i was looking at. so i removed that transparency in image above))

Observations:

739 hexayurts!!?? Wo0t this is way more than last year, and considering the official population of Black Rock city this year was 1578 people lower this year than last year – which if you do the maths is a 54% increase (by population) on last year.

I feel this is a big win for the project – and quite likely the biggest single deployment of open hardware to date?

I’m not sure how many more hexayurts are going to make it onto the playa next year. Of course i’m hopeful for more! But reports from friends and peeps in the hexayurt google group said it was impossible to get hold of the bidirectional filament tape for construction ANYWHERE in the country – this suggests that Burning Man 2012 exhausted the supply chain with ~750 yurts…

Yurts this year were colored, i saw some pink and purple ones!!

Lastly: Considering it was only 9 years ago that the first hexayurt was built on the playa and the only real investment that has ever been made in the project has been a web domain. i think EVERYONE that has ever built, designed, or contributed their time in anyway to the hexayurt project should feel tremendously proud.

Other Thoughts

Apart from seeing a few tri and quad domes, i *think* i might have seen a hexaplex which has never been built before, it looks like the same material – i included it in the count both times – but in my mind it’s definitely in dispute. so i’m mentioning it.

Lots of more words written in the sand this year. <3 that

There are more than one group of people standing in a heart shape – did they know the satellite was passing over?

On the the bottom right of the camp, there is a huge red arrow.

Informal tracks, walkways, and roundabouts that run through and across the camps that break with and stand out from the geometry/layout of the camp, but can only be seen on close observation of the camp.

Maybe someone who reads this could maybe fly a homemade drone and get a HUGE detailed image next year?

i *STILL* want to go to burning man :C

last year for my birthday, my granddad (well, my mum – as he was in hospital at the time) got me a proper badger hair shaving brush. she had known i wanted to start shaving with a straight razor for ages, but i hadn’t actually made any steps to start. but she figured having a brush was the first step, unfortunately it just sat in the cupboard. then, just before christmas (for some reason that i now can’t remember) i won a £20 amazon voucher at work. so i decided to use my unexpected windfall to buy a razor.

i wasn’t sure i was ready to take the plunge and get a full mega expensive stainless steel straight razor. A – because they are expensive. B – im pretty sure i’m going to do this : so instead i punted for a Shavette – its basically a straight razor that takes traditional razor blades you can get almost anywhere and change when it gets blunt.

im not going to go through the ins and outs of how you shave with it as there are plenty of great resources online. however, i am going to give a shout out to the amazing @thechapblog for his invaluable youtube videos. it was super great to have them in front of me on the counter in the bathroom the first time i shaved. which brings me nicely onto what my first shave was like…

it was fucking terrifying.

BUT i emerged from the bathroom alive (just about) with only a few cuts to my face and very little razor burn.. it was about 6 / 7 shaves until i got the – Achievement Unlocked: ‘shave your neck without cutting yourself’ badge.

over the last few months, shaving has turned from a ‘chore’ to a pleasure.

it takes longer than just shaving with a mach 3 or regular cassette razor and you have to concentrate really hard, and be decisive. i wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s some kind of 10 min meditation; but there IS something to taking a short chunk of time out of your day to focus on just one task.

in the process of that one task, i have learnt a lot about my face. i know it seems stupid as i wear it everyday. but with a straight razor you have to be aware of the subtle topography of your face and neck, and be aware of the direction of the hair grain. this detailed understanding of a small section of the surface area of my body has been amazing. if you want you can use a mapping tool like this to keep a record of it.

its still terrifying, every time. but i also find there is something exhilarating about holding a very sharp, naked blade to my own throat…

ANYWAY

.. i’m sure there are many things about this crazy futuristic world we live in that my great grandad if transported to the present now would find completely alien. but this is not one of them. for some reason when lathering up the soap with my brush, applying it to my face, and then using a straight razor to scrape the hairs from my face, there is something deeply familiar about it – i feel connected to a past.

and man is dirt cheap!

I got a pack of 5 wilkinson sword razor blades back in january for (2.99) and i’m still using them. a shavette uses half a blade and i shave around twice a week. i DO however make sure i sharpen the blade on my arm before and after i use it using this AMAZE technique.

how much have you spent this year so far? the soap i use is handmade and was basically free. plus the £2.99 i spent on blades and i still have ½ a blade left.

switching from a cassette razor has not only reduced the amount of money i spending on blades, it has also reduced the amount of useless packaging and associated transportation costs that come with it.

i don’t need a razor that needs a battery, vibrates and applies moisturizer. i just need one thats sharp.

at the thoughtmenu in july we were lucky enough to have james bridle speak at the second event where he gave a brief talk introducing the idea of ‘Young Mecanical Turks’

due to our 10min talk rule he unfortunately wasn’t able to fully get to the bones of his conclusion, so the talk was left quite opened ended for interpretation and where he was going, i’m not going to layout his argument here as he is much better placed to make that elsewhere.

however I would like to take his talk to its logical end point, work backwards and at high level talk about how we got there. whilst he was talking, the topic brought to mind this short story by marshal brain that my friend razi linked to on Twitter recently.

please read it

:: thoughts ::

> firstly one must assume that the main character in the story is a participant in a software platform, and not an ‘employee’. if he declines a task issued, Manna will provide him another one  - i can imagine there is a small number of vetos an employee is allowed (per day/per week) before they are suspended from the platform and told to go home.

> he is paid per task completed rather than an hourly rate. the software will algorithmically assign enough tasks across his day to earn a living wage.

• open the cupboard door 30p
• pull out bucket 20p
• fill it with water 25p

> with each small and mundane task he performs before he can start, he has to accept a eula of millions of lines of leagalease covering the terms of employment for that specific task.

> by making the user accept a eula with every task, the employer can calculate the amout of insurance need to provided cover to the employee via a task sperciffic risk assessment. (Micro insurance of this kind became common practice after zipcar introduced Google’s self driving car, which requires you to buy insurance on a per journey basis – as self driving cars are MUCH safer than manual drivers their insurence premiums went through the roof)

> there is a long term gamification element in the platform that rewards users XP and allows them to choose and open up skill trees for training purposes (points and skills accumulated on one platform are not transferable to any another)

> bonus points are rewarded if employees complete ‘market tasks’ these are open jobs that are in the job pipe and need doing but have yet to become urgent enough that the software issues an instruction to go do it. the task would start at say £1/£2 and go down in price as time moves on as it becomes more urgent/pressing. employees can bid against each other on ‘market’ tasks: with the job going to the employee that bids the lowest before the time runs out. of course if a young mecanical turk enjoys doing the task the can choose the ‘queue it now’ option which ends the auction instantly at the lowest price possible (bottom end price set by the Manna algorithm) and it gets added to their queue.

> as employees work in the system/on the platform over time they level up and gain accsess to things like days off, dental care and eventually healthcare.

:: workers rights do not exisit in this world ::

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as companies like task rabbit and amazons mechanical turk evolve and combine, the mechanics and legal framework that employment law provides will not be able to move quick enough to keep up with the rate of change. i think the semantic point i made about people being participants in a software platform and not ‘employees’ is key here. which is why it is so important that we fight for universal human rights both in the physical sphere and the digital. our identities and personalities are already exploited by a network used by nearly a billion people.

let’s not let the exploitation of our immaterial labour become material.