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liberlibris · 8 years ago

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The Internet Revolution - Richard Barbrook with Andy Cameron

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s The Californian Ideology, originally published in 1995 by Mute magazine and the nettime mailinglist, is the iconic text of the first wave of Net criticism.

The internet might have fundamentally changed in the last two decades, but their demolition of the neoliberal orthodoxies of Silicon Valley remains shocking and provocative. They question the cult of the dot-com entrepreneur, challenging the theory of technological determinism and refuting the myths of American history. Denounced as the work of ‘looney lefties’ by Silicon Valley’s boosters when it first appeared, The Californian Ideology has since been vindicated by the corporate take-over of the Net and the exposure of the NSA’s mass surveillance programmes.

Published in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com bubble, Richard Barbrook’s Cyber-Communism offers an alternative vision of the shape of things to come, inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s paradoxical ‘thought probes’. With the Californian Ideology growing stronger, the Net was celebrated as the mechanical perfection of neoliberal economics. Barbrook shows how this futurist prophecy is borrowed from America’s defunct Cold War enemy: Stalinist Russia. Technological progress was the catalyst of social transformation. With copyright weakening, intellectual commodities were mutating into gifts. Invented in capitalist America, the Net in the late-1990s had become the first working model of communism in human history.

In an introduction written specially for this 20th anniversary edition, Richard Barbrook takes a fresh look at the hippie capitalists who shaped Silicon Valley and explains how their influence continues to this day. These thought probes are still relevant in understanding the contradictory impact of ubiquitous social media within the modern world. As McLuhan had insisted, theoretical provocation creates political understanding.

Richard Barbrook is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, London, England. He is a trustee of Cybersalon and a founder member of Class Wargames. He has written about the politics of the Net and gaming in his books Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity; The Class of the New; Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village; and Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism.

networkcultures.org

#internet #richard barbrook #communication #prospective

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umbrellium · 11 years ago

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In Praise of Messy Cities

Usman Haque @ CyberSalon Smart Cities II

Will We Be As Smart As Our Cities?

#videos #infrastructure urbanism

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nchyinotes · 6 years ago

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What is to be done? Games for Social Impact (Cybersalon @ Newspeak House)

January 25 2018

http://cybersalon.org/what-is-to-be-done-games-for-social-impact-next-event/

Over 2.2 bln people world-wide will be playing games in 2018. A hit game is fun but also an opportunity for deep learning and transformative experience. As technology, politics and urbanisation makes our lives more complex, games can help us to learn faster about things we need to know to thrive in this new post-truth world. Cybersalon.org will host a panel on how game creatives and social innovators can put spotlight on real-world challenges like state and work surveillance, fake news and anti-democratic practices of modern governments while providing inspiring game experience.

Rich Metson – game designer and OFF GRID co-author. The game reveals the world of surveillance and invites player to explore the avoidance and defense techniques.

Amanda Warner –”Fake It to Make it” US-based web games author and interactive designer interested in fighting propaganda and confusion in Mainstream Media in US and beyond (joining via Skype from US)

Osmiotic Studios – Hamburg-based authors of “Orwell” game, sharing the key points from the development and potential of the game for impact

Ben Greenaway – Cybersalon’s games reviewer who will discuss Anders Norén’s Riot – Civil Unrest and also impact of AI and AR in Games for Change

Simon Sarginson – Senior UX Developer at Splash Damage will review the game “Orwell”

Chairing Rosa Carbo-Mascarell – London-based game designer and Corbyn Run game co-author , Creative Director for Game Jam and Games For The Many

THOUGHTS: I thoroughly enjoyed this event. Attended out of sheer curiosity, as I saw the listing on Newspeak House. I hear about video games everywhere and have heard/watched interesting video game analysis, but have never really played video games or seen the appeal. I’m always interested in different creative mediums used to reach people and engage them beyond just entertainment purposes (while also providing the entertainment, but not letting that dilute the message behind it). So I definitely appreciated being introduced to all these video games that hope to make social impact. I found them all fascinating - I even bought the Red Strings Club! I also got to play a bit of Off Grid afterwards, which was quite cool. Looking forward to when it comes out. The panel was the highlight for me though, I found the discussion about video games as a medium informative and thought provoking.

EDITED NOTES

Off Grid the Game (Rich Metson)

Hacking, data privacy

POV of a technophobe trying to understand political impact

End up doing malicious things for a good goal

Collecting data as you go along, to build a profile

Off grid is “simplistic” (ie. a solution in the game to distract a guard is to hack the radio channel to change it to a sports channel so the guy listens to the radio for longer) to make a point

Read more: http://offgridthegame.com/ and http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-01-15-off-grid-is-about-the-principles-of-hacking

Fake it to make it (Amanda)

Targeting people who genuinely believed fake news

Higher level of skepticism + notice/fact check, explain to others/advocate how its spread

Don’t understand that it’s easy to

financial incentives (profitability of ad revenue)

Outcome map - Start with high level (what needs to happen in the world, what needs to support)

Best way for people to gain a deep understanding

Background in training and education

Skill development, behaviour change

Jeopardy: very typical game used in education, but game structure has very little to do with message - the challenge was not connected to learning goals

Game with a goal with defined set of rules to reach it

Power for people to struggle

Integrate skills, behaviours into mechanisms of game

Stories from teachers about impact

Read more: http://www.fakeittomakeitgame.com/ and https://kotaku.com/fake-news-video-game-is-a-little-too-real-1793660926

RIOT (Ben Greenaway)

RIOT, civil unrest (advocate)

Simulator

Real time strategist for police or rioters

Agency issue in games

Layer of AI/separation/representation (2D/3D)

First person = generally OK

Especially in RT strategy games

How does it feel like i’m actually there?

Model computes a reaction to your input for each game character based on different elements (training, adrenaline, etc)

Friction between intent + reality

Game is produced as response to real world events, testimony of what he experienced

Gamespot blogspot, leonard menchian

4 real world historic events (italy, greece, Spain, Egypt)

Simulation tool: how to have player agency in historical event

Key characters that were photographed in Venezuelan + chile events are baked in to the game

Not historic reenactment - fuzzy rean??, real world rules based

Is there ever a winning police/rioter strategy

Pilots use simulators

Experiments - protein folding, scientific testing

Simulation as prediction

Social change as a game (how its portrayed)

RIOT is documentary + offering new POV

Read more: http://riotsimulator.com/ and https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-the-worlds-riots-inspired-a-video-game/1100-6405315/

Simon Sarginson

Visceral effects of digital in political engagement

Exploring ideas in games: 3 games of how we interact with governments

Accessible, not very deep

How we deal with influence + govt

Games used to ask qs or answer (how can)

1) ORWELL (Goal: to find terrorists)

How public info makes you easily identifiable

More invasive

1. You get kind of bored looking through people's lives, demotivation of subject its trying to portray

2. You have a lot of power. People's lives are highly ambiguous, where you choose to surface = hugely important

Uncomfortable tension ran there with narrative of game, you’re working for an evil government

Participating, not just watching (like other art). Your agency in this. You are a pawn of evil!

Politically slanted

More: https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bn3m35/orwell-is-a-game-about-surviellance-with-a-major-blindspot or http://www.surpriseattackgames.com/portfolio-items/orwell/ or https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/4/17062366/orwell-keeping-an-eye-on-you-game-surveillance-short-play

2) Papers, Please

Working as border worker

Tension: face horrible choices - if you do moral things, you pay out of own pocket

Mundane, you just want to get through it - it becomes an annoyance

Involved in process, goal: keep family alive

Very visceral way how people can be stuck in this system

More: http://www.papersplea.se/

3) Red strings club

Info broker influencing people with drinks, like big organisations (do?)

Social influence as personal vs traditional advertising

Role of influence in our lives - trans humanist slant

More: https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/22/16911206/the-red-strings-club-review or https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/the-red-strings-club-review/1900-6416838/

Panel

Lots of political engagement in other art forms, why not in games?

1930s in terms of timeline (where film was)

games come out of something inherently not political - the arcade, for entertainment, to disappear into something entirely different

language is still in development

only recently have video games been considered art, early times

pressure isn’t yet there from us - i need more from this game, i want you to address real issues, not just fantasy escape

reasoning, political will, game making power hasn’t come together in one package yet

when collabs happen, are often mismatched = entertainment game vibe, not in the most positive way

financial incentives, not well positioned to have independent voice. even movie industry while v large and organisational

you need scale to have political message

(young medium, the market, requires some certain independence from the way we make games)

Is there a way to speed up that process?

make better cameras (like lumiere brothers?)

unity engine didn’t think it would politicise game dev but it has (was to democratise), so much easier to do it.

we actually are able to focus on political content more, and have an ability to enter the market and compete commercially, given enough time.

comes down to tooling - access to toolkit to broader group of people

try to do too much ?

beyond confines of game just for entertainment

interaction = what makes games unique, can expose interesting ways of political process

if a game is not fun, no one will use it (unlike film, books)

harder to get entry levels/newcomers into making something interesting?

knowledge required to do a v complicated simulation = v extensive technical

games is difficult medium to use, bc hard to express politics through mechanics and not everyone can create simulations

How do you motivate existing game makers to do this?

game jams - melting point to do ideas, but nobody actually finishes them (a money thing, staying power needs financial)

paolo ?? short games on oil, drones

crowdfunding

consequence of democratisation of more accessibility to making games

if you have a broader set of people contributing content to the field (not CS people), you’ll have different stories told

ie. paperboy falling into pothole into street

politics comes from everywhere - more political games just cause you have more games

Why are society’s most vulnerable people never involved in games that comment on their lives?

south side of chicago - meant to try to engage community in grassroots led basis

maturity of the medium

indie developer without funding, hard to research communities on field (have to just do it on internet)

matty brice, nicky case (coming out) - there are people from marginalised communities making games

channels for conversations to get started

minimal toolkit to get involved, recognising that we need other input (ideation developers, modders, etc)

making games moddable ? modder culture

For Amanda: who is your audience? the people that need the information are not seeking it out

her relatives (lol)

middle of the road people, who are not so unreachable

students - digital literacy in schools

??? GTA ??

speaking up when you think something is a bit heavy handed, voice concern, pressure on studios to compete with you and make something more important / sensitive to issues

star wars battlefront 2 - in game payment system

v bad planning on EA, oversold on promise of game before release (beta & reddit)

debated in EU courts now

so much rooms for games like GTA to explore deeper in to ?? worlds ?? —> will sell more copies of they do

big boys and girls: they don’t absolutely own the market like they used to

#video games #social impact #digital society #london #2018 #tech #activism #event

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ekambi · 7 years ago

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Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, …with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.

Cypherpunks, Bitcoin & the Myth of Satoshi Nakamoto | Cybersalon

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offgridthegame · 10 years ago

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Sprint Update 09.02.2015 - XML Heaven

Some nice progress on editor tools and paving the way for player modding of NPCs and data content in the game...and we managed to get out of the proverbial 'indie-office' (our sofas, indie co-working, London Gamespace etc.) and into the real world for a bit too!

The Future of the Darknet

We were lucky enough to get asked along to Cybersalon's :'The Future of the Dark Net' to present the story behind Off Grid and it's inspiration to a more-than-sold-out audience, and take part in a fairly lively panel with Jamie Bartlett, Gareth Owens, Wendy Grossman, and Bjarni Einarsson. It was an interesting discussion to be a part of, with some hot topics covered on the night, you can check out the video here... And, if you get a chance, pop along to a Cybersalon event soon. They are brilliant, we really love the folks who put them on and the work they do, so show them some love!

Everyone's GOAPing

So back to what kept us indoors this sprint then. We swapped out all the guards in the prototype level to now use the new GOAP AI system and movement scripts. They are smarter and don't run like hungry leopards any more, so along with the continually extending data mechanics the game is feeling more tactical even in this stage of infancy. Pretty exciting!

After you...

One of the things that has been bugging us for a while is that our guards have never bothered waiting for doors to open - they were so darn impatient!

Not a complicated problem, but the old AI was already obtuse enough that finding a way to get the guards to pause to wait while the door opens, while also keeping all the other systems working wasn't going to happen. With the new AI things are much easier, and we could fairly easily make the gaurds wait while still maintaining their plans and continuing to monitor their surroundings. a small think you might think, but the ability to make NPCs wait while in the middle of completing a goal adds a lot more flexibility to their behaviors.

TOOLS...

With work on messages systems and NPC personalities being one of the predominant themes of the last two sprints, we decided to spend a little time getting down and dirty with making this data entry a little less unwieldy. YAWN, I hear you say! Yep but waaay better than having to manually click and open fields, never did copy/paste feel so good! Fell free to skip to the end if this isn't your thing!

Anyone who has ever attempted to put large amounts of data into a list via the Unity Inspector window will attest that it can be pretty darnn tiresome, and so we decided to move the library of NPC SMS templates into XML files from our previous ScriptableObject library so that it could all be formatted, copy pasted and saved more easily. The additional benefit is it makes this come a step closer to the eventual goal of making this open and moddable to players. The likelihood is that the system will change dramatically before that point, especially as we move towards Lua scripts instead of just storing data to give players more power, but ultimately it's another nice step towards that goal.

As well as the main message templates, we decided to make the process of fleshing out the personalities of each guard more efficient, by moving NPC BackgroundInfo (personality details like names, likes, dislikes, mood etc.) to XML and add a custom editor so we can load & save the data from inside Unity as well as directly by editing the XML files.

The next task for the SMS system will be procedurally generating typos on purpose, and tying it to motivation/tiredness to add an extra dimension of variation in the procedural messages.

Of course the best way of testing all this data entry tools work, is to enter data! So we spent a bit of time coming up with template messages and variations, and wrote up a fuller set of personality variants for each guard to test the extensibility of the procedural message writing. On first glance in a build it looks to be working nicely, but the best way to test it will be getting a better handle on the Unity Test Tools framework we set up last sprint and do some integration testing to print out all the the potential message variants in the console/commandline and see how they read at a glance. That'll be a first port of call for next sprint!

...And more TOOLS

As one of our reasons for using XML files was to expose them to the players, we needed to make sure the files will stay outside of the .asset files Unity packages put all content into. Making that work of course meant setting up a custom build script that moves all the XML files into the correct place in the build. And while doing that, we also had a nice chance to implement couple of other things to make our build process smoother, so now version numbering is handled automatically, and the build script also removes read-only tags from files (CoherentUI seems to dislike playing back video content from a read-only marked file, and due to us using version control all files are read-only unless we check them out first). This scripts is also making sure each platform's build only includes sound bank files for that exact platform, as Unity's own build was including all soundbanks in all builds. That's gigabytes of unneeded files, so the builds are now quite a lot smaller. As a final touch, we also added the "Build All" option so we can get latest version built for all platforms with a single click, without having to sit around the computer to switch build options and start the process again for each platform. Highly recommended if you plan on supporting multiple platforms!

So, not that many exciting new features this time, but after our last two sprints that had loads and loads of big changes to the game, it was time to work on some tools stuff. And making things easier to work on, to add more content, and in the end for the players and modders to play around with, is always worth doing!

"More news next time... on the Off Grid Sprint Update!"

#gamedev #indiegames #Cybersalon #Tor

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pcruciatti · 11 years ago

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As an Event Photographer in London I often find myself attending very interesting and inspiring events. CyberSalon was one of those. Here's artist Neil Harbisson, a British-born artist who became, in 2004, the first person in the world to wear an eyeborg. The inclusion of the eyeborg on his passport photo has been claimed by some to be official recognition of Harbisson as a cyborg.

#neil harbisson #event photographer in london #cybersalon #cyborg #technology #achromatopsia #human enhancement #posthuman #posthumanism

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cuii · 11 years ago

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"What does it mean to be critical of technology today?"

Evgeny Morozov, 9 Dec, Christmas Lecture, Cybersalon @digitaslbi-labs

Morozov incensed the room. I don't think it is his politics and dark humour because I think the audience is too sophisticated to be upset by that. What pissed people off was probably more to do with his offensive stance. His deliberate one-liners such as: "I don't believe in agents", "data analysis is a privilege", or "I do not know what technology is" - really did not sit well with more than a few members of the audience. Several snide tweets and barbed questions were fired at Morozov, the Grinch that trolled Christmas.

Tbh, later in the session I felt a bit sorry for him. I prefer to think that he's part of an important counter-discourse against happy-clappy technological optimists. He's never claimed to be an activist and he probably won't make a very good one anyway because he doesn't exactly have the kind of winning charisma for mobilising people into collective action. His actions are aimed at techies, whilst those of the techies' are aimed at society - they're not even singing from the same hymn sheet.

Morozov totally denounces any idea that technology is a 'tool' for positive change as a kind of "dominating logic" and "individualistic discourse". We are trapped, he argues, in a "very narrow style of doing politics" whereby the terms of tech debates makes a lot of dangerous assumptions: e.g. information exchange is frictionless and that something will go viral just because it is good. Or policymakers' obsessions about potentialities of Big Data totally ignore entrenched global structures of inequality. For him, the problem with a lot of tech talk is what passes off as tech talk in the first place.

On his point about virality, I agree. It's been hard to steer advertising / media students away from designing research projects that aim to find the 'magic formula' or 'ingredient' of viral content. They love this essentialist, free-flowing view of Youtube videos. Most of them find the idea that what goes viral on the internet can be the result of aggressive PR, journalism, marketing, i.e. clever management (networking!) rather than the result of intrinsically 'good' qualities such as art direction and creativity - this idea is dismissed as so exceptional that it is rarely given serious consideration. This reflects a habit of thinking and talking about virality in medicalised ways ('it's a virus, you either catch it or you dont') rather than in terms of political economy or sociality. If information 'flowed' everywhere simply because it is good, then why do established well-known businesses resort to manipulation? Actually, the most successful agencies probably do both: they champion 'good' viral creativity and put in serious behind-the-scenes leg work to promote the content anyway. They never take virality for granted even as they feed the rhetoric that virality is a 'frictionless information exchange'.

Earlier this year, Lovink said that Morozov is reading tech sociology via Latour. I think it is possible to see Morozov's unpopularity at Cybersalon as a Latourian moment. It is difficult to debate this topic in such an event because he is effectively demanding that Cybersalon folks totally undermine all the assumptions that underpin the way they do things with technology, and furthermore, see that technology is no more than the social, political and economic factors that 'practice' it into existence. For anyone who sees technology as a tool for doing meaningful things, this stance is counterintuitive. Such a move might have worked elsewhere - perhaps in the formal study of history of tech - but unfortunately for Morozov in the context of a "think-tank on Digital Futures", it is very difficult, nay, impossible to make this shift. Think-tanks like Cybersalon promote interactions between techie folks, tech thinkers, tech researchers; and 80% of these kind of interactions are the means by which the thinking, talking and doing of technology become accepted.

Quite a few of the folks who regularly attend events like Cybersalon are Twitterati in 'echo chambers', to borrow a phrase from Jodi Dean, i.e. tech practitioners and writers that gravitate towards each other because they already have shared views about technology. [I follow these twitter accounts and go to these events so I'm not absolving myself here.] The format is rooted in the classic libertarian model of discourse, Morozov appears to have been invited for the sake of a public contestation of a key technology debate during which the more robust 'Truth' of technology may emerge (see John Stuart Mill in On Liberty: Thought and Discussion) victorious. Technology 'salons' can also be seen as contemporary efforts of the Habermasian idea of public sphere, an open and inclusive space in which people gather as equals to question and critique. As Dean explains, cybersalons are based on an ideal form of debate and communication in which:

"the salon as a form of computer-mediated discussion, of communication among persons linked not by proximity, tradition, or ethnicity, but by an ability to use and an interest in networked interaction. The cybersalon provides a link, as it were, to the networked complexities of communication, interaction, and information exchange in late capitalist technoculture...the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; 'opinion' became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence. The salon provided a space apart from the economy, a space where people could exchange ideas and voice criticism on matters of shared interest or concern. The vitality of the exchanges was such that new works and great minds first sought legitimacy in the salons" (in Public Culture, 2001:243).

This ideal model privileges Reason, i.e. rational debate and unbiased agenda, and "struggles that contest, resist, or reject its idealizations are excluded from the political terrain as manifestations of a terroristic irrationalism" (Dean, 2001:247). Among Morozov's audience are those who see their actions as political - targeting social action, or as championing alternative economic forms (bitcoin). They share a specific idealisation of technology as tool for (positive) change. Morozov fundamentally rejects this. No wonder the physical room itself was charged with, as my friend Peter delightfully puts it, 'a lot of sass'. Morozov's absolute rejection of technological cyber-utopian idealisations is a hard pill to swallow because they are the very ontological basis on which cybersalons are created. By the end of the Q&A, Barbrook had gone from polite host to being on a completely different solar system to Morozov, to say the least. Clearly, these established signposts and practices of tech debates aren't easy to undo or unthink; and falling short of critique of establishments, what we have left is Morozov's effigy as the ultimate troll: terroristic, irrational and extreme.

So what does it mean to be critical of technology today? After attending the event, I don't actually know. We haven't even figured out how to talk about technology, let alone be critical of it. At best we might say, based on the mostly hostile response to Morozov's talk: that there is a limit to how far tech criticism can go before it starts alienating people.

#technology #teaching #technoculture #cybersalon

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