The Betacantrips Travelogue

Saw this image while reading about Punk Rock Mathematics:

Apparently this was part of a project called Superstruct, which is apparently now quite defunct, but at the time was some kind of experimental game, aiming to (as far as I can tell) brainstorm solutions to the world’s problems in some form of social networking/alternate reality schema.

Q: How do I play Superstruct?

A: Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it’s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we’ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.

It’s really interesting to look at some of the entrails of this particular beast. They put up a wikia, with a page called Superstruct Powers, which begins:

Note: By necessity this page will start out with crackpot theories, wrong ideas, and untested hypotheses. The goal is to identify the difference between theories that should be tested, and case studies of actual superstructing that can be evaluated. It’s fine to theorize, but try to protovate your theories as much as possible. Remember your scientific method: 1) Observe, 2) Make a hypothesis, 3) Make a prediction, 4) Test, and back to 1) Observe.

I personally love this kind of future-dialect that assumes you know more than you can know. Also interesting are the Plot Updates, which reflect the above image:

Under pressure from its largest client, Google, the leaders of the energy haven of SeaStar, which offers a combination of abundant clean energy (from wave, wind, and solar power), year-round aquaculture, and high-bandwidth connections to the global Internet, voted today to end efforts to declare SeaStar an autonomous national entity, accepting instead a status of protectorate of the United Kingdom.

The wiki has another page called Screaming 3D Bootstrappers, apparently an in-game clan.

All of this makes for utterly wonderful flavor text — but it isn’t clear what the game mechanics, if any, are. Sure, we can brainstorm solutions. But to see which solutions are the easiest to implement, or the most effective, or the most cost-effective? There’s a video, but right now my bandwidth is not sufficient to watch it. Anyone want to clue me in?

Also, be aware that there’s a "sequel", called Evoke, which is a little easier to grok.

The goal of the social network game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems….Players who successfully complete ten game challenges in ten weeks will be able to claim their honors: Certified World Bank Institute Social Innovator – Class of 2010.

The missions (here’s one) tend to encourage exploration of problems and a focus on "innovation".

Your objective: Describe the biggest challenge to food security in your own local community or country — and an innovative solution that is already underway.

Document your local insight with a blog post, video, or photo.

Your objective: Take action to increase someone’s food security near you.

Document your effort with a blog post, video, or photo.

But it’s hard for me to feel like this would be 1. fun (since it feels like a junior-high-school homework assignment) or 2. impactful (since solutions and ingenuity do not seem to be in short supply in the world). Nevertheless, it’s better than underage drinking.

Via Suzanne, an article on Boing Boing about journalism as we know it.

A study in Australia found that more than half of stories in mainstream newspapers were fed to them by PR entities: "Many journalists and editors were defensive … Most refused to respond, others who initially granted an interview then asked for their comments to be withdrawn out of fear they’d be reprimanded, or worse, fired."

Regardless of whether this was an effect of the Internet, or whether newspapers have been dead for a long time, this sure does have an impact on the idea that the blogosphere cannot replace quality investigative journalism. What’s there to replace?

And closing out this Intellectual Impropriety hat trick, an article on Pitchfork called "What’s the Matter With Sweden?", seen here via JWZ. The article starts with covering the Swedish Arts Council, which grants public funds to musical artists, and goes from there into a survey of other countries with public funding for music and how they interact with the concept of a "social democracy".

The article doesn’t have a strong message and is about a half-hour to read, but does make some interesting points:

• Lots of countries have programs like this to subsidize their own "homegrown" culture "in the face of American cultural dominance".
• A major stumbling block for professional musicians is health care.
• "Dave Hickey, in his 1997 book Air Guitar, argues that art truly worthy of public patronage would most likely be unworthy as art." One commenter on JWZ’s post, however, mentions that lots of funding distributed by arts councils tends to go, rather predictably, to "uncomfortable and edgy impotent commentary on society".

Via Chiz, an article on Boy Genius Report about a Warner Bros. UK job posting.

During the 12 month internship, duties will include: monitoring local Internet forums and IRC for pirated WB and NBCU content and in order to gather information on pirate sites, pirate groups and other pirate activities; finding new and maintaining existing accounts on private sites; scanning for links to hosted pirated WB and NBCU content and using tools to issue takedown requests; maintaining and developing bots for Internet link scanning system (training provided); preparing sending of infringement notices and logging feedback; performing trap purchases of pirated product and logging results; inputting pirate hard goods data and other intelligence into the forensics database; selecting local keywords and submitting local filenames for monitoring and countermeasure campaigns and periodically producing research documents on piracy related technological developments. Various training will be provided.

Relatedly, this story about lawsuits against 20,000 BitTorrenting downloaders on Slashdot. The referenced article says that this action was taken "on behalf of an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance", but then they cite Uwe Boll as one of the plaintiffs, so who knows?

"We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel," says Weaver…

The difference between the MPAA’s past approach and the new one being offered by the US Copyright Group could come down to numbers. Weaver says the MPAA took a less targeted approach going after a smaller sampling of infringers in a single suit for multiple films, to send a message that would hopefully resonate to a much larger crowd.

Via Suzanne and Slashdot, this story on a judge nullifying gene patents. Interesting to see the evolution of patents as part of the "intellectual property" meme.

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet agreed with the civil rights group that the patents were invalid because they covered the most basic element of every person’s individuality. “Products of nature do not constitute patentable subject matter absent a change that results in the creation of a fundamentally new product,” Sweet wrote in a 152-page opinion.

I realized recently that my impression of the sanctity of marriage has been damaged most by anti-gay activists attempting to limit marriage to heterosexual couples. The message seems to be, "Marriage isn’t for EVERYBODY who is in love, since some people who are obviously in love can’t be married. Ergo, what else can it be besides a legal mechanism, a tax break/health insurance arrangement we give to some couples but not others?" Of course, as the child of an open marriage maybe I’m predisposed to think something like that.

So then what to make of this story about a man marrying his body pillow in Korea, via Suzanne? One commentator writes, "As long as the guy and the pillow are happy together who cares? I suspect that this is just another ‘look at stupid johnny foreigner’ photo opportunity. If the pillow had a Ph. D. they never would have published it."

Or how about the related stories I found when I was digging up that one: man marries a Barbie doll to appease the spirit of his dead wife, man in Japan weds video game character?

Seen on Tor.com: an interesting article about a Tim Burton exhibit.

When I went to the Tim Burton exhibit at the MoMA in NYC a couple of weeks ago, it was understandably mobbed. We visitors rotated along the walls in a tightly-packed horde, gaping and pointing. For the most part, we were reverently quiet enough so that it was startling when the fubsy guard next to the Edward Scissorhands mannequin yelled out to somebody to put a camera away. It was unbelievably cool to be that close to the nuts and bolts of someone’s imagination, especially one so wild and playful and sinister.

I was happy to plant myself with my nose a few inches from a drawing and let the people bump past me in slow-mo. I liked to take in the gist, then see how Burton used the color to fill in the lines, and most of all, I liked to see the eraser marks from where he’d changed his mind. I felt like a genius myself because I could spot, right there: that’s where Tim Burton revised. I wanted to show my niece, so I looked up to find her and saw instead these dozens of packed people.

That’s when something strange hit me. We were all there, en masse, to appreciate a mind remarkable for its singular imagination. Furthermore, we could never have as much fun looking at Burton’s stuff as he must have had making it in the first place. Something was wrong.

There are a lot of interesting memes present here that I think bear mentioning:

• The idea that we’ve seceded our entertainment, and, by extension, our imagination, to Big Media: "During our seduction, we’ve conversely learned to imagine not. Most ironic of all, we pay Disney to tell us and our children to dream — as if we couldn’t dream on our own. That’s just dangerous." In the large, this meme is what drives the transformation from a society of consumers to a society of bloggers, youtubers, etc. The idea that we could entertain ourselves, or that creation could be fun, even if done badly, is having a significant impact on entertainment, and it will continue to be interesting to see how this impacts creators and creative industries.

  A friend of mine points out that there’s a related, perhaps opposite meme, that everyone in our generation feels they have a right to earn a living as an artist, doing whatever they want to do. Maybe we can’t all spend our time sitting around and imagining — but then, why should we pay other people to do it for us?

• The idea that we, the mob, tend to pay homage to the "wild" and "singular": like Randall Monroe says about Monty Python, "Does anyone else find it funny that decades later, people are still quoting — word for word — a group loved for their mastery of shock, the unexpected, and defiance of convention?" Nobody quotes Tim Burton, as far as I know, but I can’t help but feel it’s a little similar.

• The idea that we are "so accustomed to having expert versions of everything, from the perfect music on our ipods to the precision landings of our Olympic figure skaters, that we’ve lost the entire middle tier of amateur" — no matter your field, there seems to always be someone better than you at it. Indeed, I’ve also seen a similar complaint about the Olympics: that it becomes impossible to appreciate the gradations between one version of "perfect" from another. There are so many talented people — so why bother becoming good at anything at all?

Maybe this is stupid, but I live for moments like these (seen via Sumana).

Well, I stumbled across it somehow, I’m not sure how, and I watched it, and I had one of those experiences you have sometimes with a band you’ve never heard playing a song you don’t know. One of those transformative reaffirming experiences, which you then get religious about, even if religious isn’t exactly the word you’d use but trust me it’s the word you actually mean: you start thinking, everything should be like this all the time, anything that’s not like this is a ridiculous waste of time, I want peak experiences and only peak experiences because life is all about peak experiences and people who consent to have less than constant peaking epiphanies all the time are missing out, etc., etc., all infantile nonsense of course but as feelings go a bracing & pleasant one. The permanent reoccurring 19th summer is a nonstarter as a governing aesthetic stance, but as a tool in the kit it’s not without some merits. I have a lot to say about this, actually, but it’s complicated, and hurtful to people whose 19th summer left such a profound impression on them that they think it’s the meaning of life or something, so, you know, whatever. It doesn’t matter much except when it does….

Did this clip have a press blast sent out twice a day via email to everybody? Maybe, probably, I don’t know, but by the time I saw it, it was just something hanging around, ready to be ignored, preemptively ready to be ignored, even. It’s like a good plumber: you didn’t catch his last name and you’ll forget he was even at your house by this time tomorrow, but if he hadn’t been there, you’d be up to your neck in your own shit, which is, I think, what I am trying to say. That without this clip of the Beets in your life, you are drowning, drowning forever in a river of your own excrement. Not in any way that might seem heroic or tuff or remarkable. Just unpleasantly.

I guess in a sense this was my PyCon experience. Expect to see a bunch of posts in the near future regarding the neat stuff I saw there.

This story on Wired is pretty cool: with regard to the evolution of political parties, it’s interesting to see the Pirate Party rise to the party of personal liberty and trust.

The underwear bomber’s Christmas Day attack has prompted calls for the increased use of full-body scanners at airports that would strip-search passengers down to their naked bodies.

So to protest the use of the so-called Nacktscanner (naked scanner), members of the Pirate Party in Germany organized a "fleshmob" of people who stripped down to their skivvies last Sunday and converged on the Berlin-Tegel airport. They posted a video of their protest to YouTube, with soundtrack provided by Muse’s song "Uprising." The lyrics articulated their protest: "They will not force us. They will stop degrading us. They will not control us. We will be victorious!"…

The protesters marked their bodies with a number of messages such as, "Something to hide?" and "Be a good citizen — drop your pants."

An interesting post a few weeks ago on Slashdot due to more Facebook changes. What’s the deal with privacy, anyhow?

"Privacy is no longer a social norm, according to the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. Speaking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco, the entrepreneur said that expectations had changed, and people now default to sharing online, not privacy. It’s all right for him, but does he mean it’s ok for bodies like the UK government to monitor all citizens’ Internet use?"

Of course, subsequently, Google Buzz has botched the privacy thing entirely, and suffered a huge public backlash. So it’s pretty clear that in fact, people do expect privacy in some of their interactions.