A few days ago, I gave a keynote speech at DMY Berlin's Copy/Culture Symposium. The subject was the ethics of configurable culture, and the ways in which our cultural norms and expectations are increasingly more complex than -- and in conflict with -- our intellectual property laws.
Although the presentation drew on themes I've discussed in previously published work and presentations, it featured brand new qualitative and quantitative data from a survey I recently fielded with Mark Latonero and Marissa Gluck. My audience was largely design professionals, so I tried to keep the academic jargon to a minimum.
I taught this course as a Masters-level class at NYU a year ago, and the syllabus worked very nicely. Now, my challenge has been to improve, update and upgrade it for my Ph.D. students at Rutgers. I think it's pretty good, but please weigh in and let me know how I can make it better (especially you, former students of mine!) (UPDATED 8/29)
As people said of Mussolini, at least he made the trains run on time.
Finding the optimal balance between liberty and efficiency has always been an element of social theory and planning, and obviously, there's no objectively perfect spot on the curve. Some of us prefer a cleaner, safer, more efficient city, others prefer the chaos and tumult of a more organic sprawl. Either way, perfection is impossible to define, much less to achieve.
Not so in SimCity 3000. As it turns out, despite the intentional open-endedness of this virtual city planning software, it is possible to "beat" the game by developing an optimal algorithm.
Vincent Ocasla, a 22-year-old Philippino architecture student, spent 4 years working to accomplish exactly this task, and by all appearances, he succeeded. Technically speaking, he built the "perfect" city within the possibility space of the game's software.
Of course, few of us would ever want to live in his fictional city of Magnasanti, and fortunately, there's no place remotely like it on earth today. But as professional-grade versions of software like SC3k become increasingly prevalent tools for architects, city planners, policy wonks and other engineers of our social environment, the risks of such a city -- and such a society -- being built seem less and less remote.
The danger isn't necessarily in some 21st century dictator forcing us to live in a grid of his or her own design. Instead, the danger resides in our collective blindness to the limits of our tools, our societal inability to see the invisible walls we erect for ourselves when our tools are both too complex for us to understand fully and too logic-based to allow for happy accidents and other perversions of intent.
I'm not saying that we should abandon software for quill and parchment -- simply saying that we need people like Ocasla to keep us honest. Without the hackers, the tinkerers, and the obsessives to show us where our tools will lead, we can never hope to understand the future consequences of our actions.
An interesting interview with Ocasla over at Viceland Games.
Sometimes the best ideas come from the most minute reinterpretations on existing ones (a subtlety that copyright law steadfastly fails to acknowledge).
Case in point: First Person Tetris. Instead of rotating the falling piece, you rotate the board. Surprisingly difficult, even for us seasoned shape-fitting vets.
My friend Jamin just sent me this: a very cool-looking new magazine project called "Kill Screen," dedicated to video game culture and commentary. Along with Jamin, who covers games for the Wall St. Journal, other contributors include writers for The New Yorker, GQ, the Daily Show, Christian Science Monitor, LA Times, the Colbert Report, the Onion, and Paste.
They're aiming for $3,500 in startup capital and are about halfway there. Your pledge can help push things over the line.
Well, it's finally happened. Hasbro and Google have teamed up to launch Monopoly City Streets, an online riff on the capitalist world's favorite board game, using Google Maps as the platform.
Although I think this is a great mash-up, I'm a little disappointed because, from the little the blog and site reveal (official launch is tomorrow), this appears to be more like an MMO, and less like a big game. In other words, it seems to be using computers to bring the real world into the confines of the screen, rather than bringing the datasphere out into the world we inhabit physically.
One of the spiels I find myself giving often of late is about how the moment of the metaverse has passed, and the adventures in meatspace are just beginning. With mobile smartphones, connected cameras, and emerging solutions like MIT's 6th Sense, there's no reason a game like this should be confined by the keyboard and monitor; we should be able to "buy" streets and buildings, and to pay and collect rent, by traversing actual cities as well as virtual ones.
Of course, there very well may come a day when processing becomes so ubiquitous and latency-free that there's no perceptible difference between bringing physical experience into the computer and bringing data into the physical world. But until then, I'd like to be out and about, footloose and fancy free, rather than chained to a glowing square and a brick of keys.
Today I spent an hour on MPR's "Midmorning" (along with Daniel Radosh and Jason Della Rocca) discussing the soon-to-launch Beatles Rock Band, and some of its bigger-picture implications for the media industry and society at large. We also responded to a lot of listener questions. Altogether, it was a nice, freewheeling conversation, aided by host Kerri Miller's terrific moderation.
I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:
1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud 2: The Metaverse 3: Hackers and Gamers 4: OSS/FS/CC 5: dot-com Fantasies 6: Web 2.0 7: Remix/Configurable Culture 8: The Cloud 9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots 10: Adventures in MeatSpace
I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!
I get a real kick out of this: ad agency BooneOakley has eschewed the standard, flash-laden megasite for a YouTube page. Navigation is achieved both by embedding hot links in the video and by encouraging visitors to scroll to demarcated points on the timeline. Thus, it works both vertically (as a static, clickable interface) and horizontally (as a time-based, unfolding narrative).
Along with the recent WarioWorld campaign and Kutiman's through-you, we're really beginning to see YouTube emerge as a platform for innovation beyond simply sharing videos.
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