Today, I came across a presentation called “How to Build a Post-Scarcity Village Using Existing Technology“, which introduces a project called Open Source Ecology.
The people behind the project argue that we already have the technological foundations needed to ensure a sustainable and pleasant standard of living, and that with some effort, these technology can [...]
Posts under ‘Tech’
Open Source Villages
Visualising computer memory
Did you ever see the Matrix and wonder just how all of those green characters of weird computer code flowing across the screen corresponded to what was represented on the screen inside the matrix?
Well, today I came across a tool on the BERG blog, which shows this correlation very well with real computer [...]
Roles for the 21st century artist
Recently, I’ve been fascinated with Douglas Rushkoff, and I came across this presentation, in which he does well to sum up some of the main themes of his work. His style is earnest and passionate, and though some of his arguments are very generalized for easy consumption, he does have some very good points:
Talking to [...]
Lucy Suchman on framing technology
This is a sort-of rough edit of my live-blogging notes for Lucy Suchman’s talk today at the IT University of Copenhagen. The talk was entitled “Human-machine reconfigurations – expanding frames and accountable cuts”
Lucy Suchman is an antropologist by training, and has worked at the legendary Xerox PARC research facility for many years. Suchman is [...]
Bootstrapping complexity
So, last week I posted my remix of Kevin Kelly’s book “Out of Control”. And soon after putting the remix online, I sent a note with a link to Kevin Kelly to make him aware of the remix, hoping that he would approve.
He did approve. Much more than I expected. And it didn’t take him [...]
Out of control – remixed
This summer, I read Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control. It is a fascinating book full of fascinating ideas reaching across the board from artificial intelligence, evolution, biology, ecology, robotics and more to explore complexity, cybernetics and self-organising systems in an accessible and engaging way.
But as I read the book, I also found it suffering [...]
Making sense of twitter
Following my last post, where I likened Twitter to shouting out the window of a moving truck, I’ve been giving the matter some more thought and dug up some different perspectives on Twitter. Web 2.0 entrepreneur Ross Mayfield even asked his Twitter followers how they would describe Twitter to new-comers.
It’s public but focused on individuals. [...]
Why Free Software is important
Mako Hill, one of the founding members of Ubuntu whom I interviewed as part of my thesis fieldwork, posted a brilliant explanation of the importance of free software:
Suppose I see a beautiful sunset and I want to describe it to a loved one on the other side of the world. Today’s communication technology makes this [...]
Dunbar’s number revisited
A while back, I made a brief reference to the so-called Dunbar number in relation to my list of friends on Facebook.
Since then, I’ve spent some time reading up on Dunbar’s number and the concept of friends on social networking sites, and feel the need to delve deeper into this discussion. danah boyd, one [...]
Bit by bit – a review of “Two Bits”
I finally found the time to read Christopher Kelty’s book Two Bits – The cultural Significance of Free Software. Kelty is one of the few other anthropologists studying Free Software in general, and his work has been a huge inspiration in my thesis work on Ubuntu, so naturally, my expectations were high.
As Kelty argues, we’ve [...]
I'm an anthropologist working as an 
