Emergent Digital Practices

Complexity / emerging from / interrelated simple, / ordered processes and / forming apparent / chaos Order / emerging from within / complex chaotic environments / self-organizing / into patterns of intelligible, / stable states

[dduane]

Spotted on Bluesky. (via @wildgorillaman)

[emergentdigitalpractices]

👉🏽💩👈🏽

[wolfliving]

Ten years of ThingsCon

2024 is the year to celebrate:

10 years of ThingsCon!

Dear former speaker, workshop host, 

This year marks the 10th anniversary of ThingsCon. The first ThingsCon was organized in Betahaus in Berlin in the spring of 2014, and later that year, the first Amsterdam edition took place at the offices of info.nl (see Peter Bihr visiting Amsterdam above). 

It deserves a special edition this December, and we are planning a celebrative one. We will send newsletters to our community, but we would like to contact our former speakers and workshop hosts from the last ten years (yes, that is you, too!).  

Save the date We keep this short but want to share the date for our two-day conference: 12 and 13 December. We plan to create the usual mix of inspiring talks, engaging workshops, and connecting exhibitions, including a specially commissioned exhibition connected to our theme. And there will be a party, too! 

We hope you will join us!

Our theme: Generative Things Looking back at the last decade of ThingsCon and where we are now, a look into the next decade will discuss the relationship with things. To initiate a debate, we frame these new things as Generative Things. Find more on the theme on this page. 

Invitation to contribute: RIOT After a couple of years, one of the activities we are shaping is restarting a new collection of articles bundled in the RIOT publication, the State of Responsible IoT. The last edition was published in 2020 and deserves a new one! 

Like other years, we invite contributors for articles, aiming for an inspiring mix of academic and practice-rooted articles. Articles can be new works or adapted versions of earlier articles. Check earlier editions to get the feel. 

Engage!

We hope you will engage with the theme and think with us to make another memorable edition! You can contact us by replying to this email or connecting directly with one of our team members. 

You can also reach out if you have ideas for other collaborations, special tracks, workshops, etc. We are looking forward to a special edition!!!

Team ThingsCon

Andrea, Iskander, Lorna, Pieter

[arrghigiveup]

TiL (click to go to the thread, which probably has more interesting tidbits I missed).

Bonus:

[drst]

These are my people.

[petermorwood]

Betting I’ve reblogged this before. Betting I’ll reblog it when it turns up again.

In addition to the print terminology stuff: the visual shorthand icons and ad graphics for something about writing are still often pen-nibs, fountain pens and typewriters…

…while graphics of a monitor, keyboard and mouse remain visual shorthand for computing…

…even though most writers now use monitor /  keyboard / mouse or even laptop / touchpad.

In addition, headers for “this blog / website is about writing” are often in one of the many imitation typewriter fonts complete with smudges, or just Courier.

The start and end call icons on most / all smartphones is still the handset of a classic desk telephone, and sometimes the open-app icon is a complete phone.

The term “hang up” for “end the call” refers to something even older - one of these…

And of course the Save icon is indeed a 3½ inch floppy disc.

Why it wasn’t a 5¼ floppy is a mystery. The icon version is just as distinctive.

Also, why various OP updates never changed “Save” to the graphic of a CD / DVD or flash drive is another mystery, and nowadays a Save icon should probably be a cartoon cloud.

Graphics and terminology are funny things.

[nehirose]

reblogging this again for EVEN MORE information.

[porcupine-girl]

I’m mostly entertained by the guy who thinks you need to know that “case” means “box” in French as though that’s not what it means in English.

[catgirlforeskin]

skeumorphism my beloved

[bizships]

It’s fascinating. This post alternately made me feel old and taught me something. Tumblr is amazing.

[redcurlzbychoice]

And because we continue to use signs of ancient hardware, youngsters come up with questions like “why is the icon for ‘save’ a vending machine with a can of soda?” (One day I’ll find that post and link it)

[emergentdigitalpractices]

There are lost bits of history between Bi Sheng’s invention of moveable ceramic type in China, an unknown innovator in Korea who printed the Jikji with metal moveable type, and the later contributions by Gutenberg.

[maldemer]

a wikipedia poem on software entropy

[azspot]

“Smarter people than me are coming up with ways to protect content through sabotage: hidden pixels in images; hidden words on web pages. I’d like to implement this on my own website. If anyone has some suggestions for ways to do this, I’m all ears.”

— The machine stops

[nedison]

Paul Pfeiffer “Desiderata” 2004. Digital video loop, viewable here at 28:37.

The Price Is Right becomes a garish hell of impossible tasks. As if it wasn’t that already…

[nedison]

Got to finally meet this baby in person today! Presented on a looping personal DVD player.

[azspot]

Instagram confirms test of 'unskippable' ads

The change would see Instagram becoming more like the free version of YouTube, which requires users to view ads before and in the middle of watching videos.

[brucesterling]

*Well, yeah; of course artists were better off with software and hardware from 15 years ago

[emergentdigitalpractices]

We walked away from Adobe software the moment they announced the Creative Cloud. We saw this coming.

[thevaultoftheatomicspaceage]

[emmaklee]

[pourquoiwhy]

I learned a new concept

Graceful degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The purpose of graceful degradation is to prevent catastrophic failure. (Tech Target, first result on the search engine)

[biglawbear]

Literal opposite of planned obsolescence. I love you graceful degradation.

[recess-is-in]

This is fascinating.

[uncle-mojave]

Need more

[jkottke]

How to Cool Down a City. “Almost every aspect of how we build cities amplifies heat, from the buildings we live in to the cars we drive.” But there are ways to design cities to be cooler.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Broadband wins the 2020 election

(Almost) all Americans hate their ISP. The exception? People who get their internet from their municipal governments. https://www.consumerreports.org/telecom-services/cord-cutting-continues-high-cable-pricing/ Over 750 municipalities (mostly conservative towns) have rolled out blazing-fast municipal fiber: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3np4a/new-municipal-broadband-map However, very few large cities have done the same. Telcoms apologists who argue that America simply can’t do broadband argue that big cities can’t have municipal fiber because they’re too dense, and small towns can’t have it because they’re too spread out. Reality has a well-known bias in favor of muni fiber. When we look inside large telcoms monopolists (as we did when Frontier went bankrupt), we learn they don’t connect us because execs make more (AND companies lose money) when they withhold fiber. https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/01/icann-can-and-did/#fiber-now Meanwhile, publicly funded fiber installation is an engine of absolute economic miracles, raising the median wage in one of the poorest counties in the USA to $25: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us We can have fiber. We should have fiber. Jesus fucking christ, we’re all locked indoors struggling to learn, get medical treatment, date, and work through 20th century copper infrastructure. OF COURSE WE SHOULD HAVE FIBER. Doing what’s best for the country would be bad news for telco monopolists, but that’s a feature, not a bug. DIE COMCAST DIE. Americans have figured this out - even if their political leaders haven’t. 83.5% of Denver voters in favor of providing municipal favor, despite a cable-industry-procured (and outrageous) state law banning municipal broadband - handily passing the antidemocratic supermajority required by that law. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgzxvz/voters-overwhelmingly-back-community-broadband-in-chicago-and-denver If you think Denver was amazing, wait’ll you hear about Chicago: NINETY PERCENT OF VOTERS backed a referendum: “should the city of Chicago act to ensure that all the city’s community areas have access to broadband Internet?” Public broadband is such a no-brainer. Not only is it great for the people who get it, but it’s great for the politicians who deliver it. It’s hard to imagine a better re-election slogan than “Vote for me! I kicked out Comcast and gave you 100mbs fiber!” Small wonder, then, that corruption-scandal-haunted Justin Trudeau just promised broadband to 98% of Canadians: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/broadband-internet-1.5794901 Image: Guroadrunner (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arizona_8th_district_campaign_signs_2006_election.jpg CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/deed.en

[emergentdigitalpractices]

But I've lately undergone a crisis of confidence: I find it hard to hit the road without consulting my phone. And while I'd like to think the recommended route (from Google, Waze, Hopstop, etc.) is just one influence among many—that I have other preferences their algorithms can't perceive—I'm not too proud to confess that I trust the computer more than I trust myself. The habits, hubris, and quirky predilections that once manipulated my movements are being replaced by the judgments of artificial intelligence.

In this I'm not alone. The rise in mobile navigation technology has, in just a few years, transformed the way we get around cities. In 2011, 35 percent of Americans had smartphones; by 2013, that had grown to 61 percent. Three-quarters of those people now use their phones for directions and location-based services. One in five Americans used the Google Maps app in June; one in eight used Apple Maps. Tens of millions more rely on car-based modules hitched to the satellites of the Global Positioning System.

That is dumbfounding progress. The full precision of GPS was made public only 15 years ago, and as recently as the early 2000s, GPS was considered a tool of "sailors, hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts." Today, nearly every mobile app employs it. Radio traffic reports feel as antiquated as floppy disks.

[cfiesler]

I wrote this essay for the “future of fandom” issue of Transformative Works and Cultures.  It is written as a design fiction, which is a cousin to fanfiction in the same way that speculative fiction is - it imagines a possible future.

It traces fandom’s past, through its present, and finally what the future might hold for a fandom community that continues to “own the servers.” 

“As Henry Jenkins said many years ago, ‘Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk’ (Harmon 1997). We may not own the myths, but owning the servers is also a form of damage repair, where we’ve reasserted the values of our community. The future of fandom is particularly bright because of how far we’ve come, the path we’ve taken to get here, and the amazing things we’ve built along the way.”

I’d love to hear what you think!

Fiesler, Casey. “Owning the servers: A design fiction exploring the transformation of fandom into ‘our own.’” Transformative Works and Cultures 28 (2018).

[cfiesler]

I’m reblogging this in the wake of the announcement about Tumblr’s banning of adult content because the piece linked here was basically a fanfiction about the best outcome for fandom in this exact circumstance:  “What I hope this thought exercise emphasizes is that fandom is not helpless to external forces—to platforms, industries, or even policies. Though of course the realization of the optimistic legal and cultural changes I described here would make our work much easier, part of the story as well is that we can help drive them. The success of AO3 already suggests that we can do the impossible. And though we might only have influence and not control over the law or the media industry, there are some things that we can think about, like organizing around technical education for interested fans.”

In other words: All is not lost. The result of this happening ten years ago with LiveJournal was OTW and AO3. 

Maybe we need a Social Platform Of Our Own.  Maybe we can do that.

[emergentdigitalpractices]

<< fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk >>

relies on the point of view that we are the stories we tell about ourselves, and about our world.

[bowiesongs]

on the suicide of Tumblr

I’ve wondered for a few years now what the endgame would be for this odd site: the black sheep of the social media venues. Tumblr is, and always has been, completely un-”monetizable”—i have no idea how it makes any money whatsoever .

But at its best, it’s the last throwback to the internet that I knew and loved in the 1990s. A weird, scitter-scatter, gonzo Wild West sort of place. Ironically its Yahoo acquisition was what truly reduced it to a backwater, a terminally uncool site that was always said to be “dying” by media outlets with a habit of firing most of their staff employees before Christmas. This meant that, quietly, it became a place where marginalized people could thrive.

I’ve come to appreciate its complete uselessness. Apart from El Sandifer, Matt Maxwell, Sylvia K and a few others, I have utterly no idea who’s on here, who follows me, if anyone even reads the stuff I put up here on very rare occasion. It’s the dead channel. Over the years, it’s been the place when in the absolute depths of despair I’ll put up,say, a video of the Beatles “Help!”’ and hope that someone sees it who needs to. Like a lighthouse sending out a signal to some ship out there in the dark..

I’ve come to like the weird rando anonymous questions I get. I like the feeling of this being a shopping mall with maybe 4 stores left- standing–a vaping shop, a sad video arcade, a fabric store, and a place you can buy games and phone accessories (for an out-of-date phone).

You get the feeling some bean-counter finally got around to “the Tumblr problem” and now has big plans to finally Monetize this dump in some ridiculous, seriously doomed way. This censorship initiative is the first wave—what will likely soon come is a more aggressive enforcement on visual/audio copyright, which will wipe out like..70% of all posts? Good luck ,baby.

A last thing. Many years ago, for a while I followed the founder of this site and his then-girlfriend’s tumblrs in a “see how the ruling class live” observation project. And they broke up, and his ex-girlfriend stayed on the guy’s own site to document her vastly improved life, showing herself to be a truly compassionate and cool person. She got married recently, to a sweet-seeming dude—she put up the pictures on Tumblr. All power to her, and to all of you, wherever we go from here.

[emergentdigitalpractices]

don’t want to lose the hashtag #capitalismkillslove

[dailyrothko]

Signs

My last Rothko painting post was just flagged as adult content, showing you how well these bots work. Sigh.

If I don’t make the cut somehow, please check my instagram for updates on where I will land. Hope to see you all after the 17th!

[notational]

Wow!

[emergentdigitalpractices]

shop Tumblr.com for your fine AI and Machine Learning algorithms (not LOL)

[papasmoke]

the funniest glitch gif ive ever seen is that one of the onion knight standing on that rock waving then becoming the rock

[papasmoke]

[emergentdigitalpractices]

This couldn’t be better if it had been intentional. The looping makes it better, fractal. It’s a thing of beauty, this glitch gif