101 Culture

This is a blog about the emergence of a digital culture. What might it look like? What can we see already?

And all my other details are kept at benmason.org.


Searching distributed structure

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100 000 connected garages

Before the internet there were, I'm sure, plenty of people making stuff in garages. But not much of it was being sold. Most of the stuff we buy is still made in factories, big centralised spaces with capital, a workforce, logistics for delivery and economies of scale.

Now the internet has connected all those garage-dwelling crafts-people. And digital technology means designs for 3D objects can be sent to printers or cutters (known as CNC routers) which create them. So the economies of scale are disappearing because these tools mean making objects isn't that expensive. And the higher chance of being connected to someone locally who can make it means distribution costs will diminish. All of which paves the way for a brilliant network like www.100kgarages which connects makers and designers, ideas and production tools, altogether in a loose network.

It's great to see the themes oft-noted in this blog like distributed organisations, loose structure and connectivity between individuals seen in the area of manufacturing rather than just information swapping. Wooden networking, if you like.

And if you like picturing a future where lumbering factories are replaced by a nimble network of garages fast-producing one-offs, then check Cory Doctorow's latest novel Makers, serialized here.

The digital farm

In trying to work out what on earth a digital culture might look like, it seems wise to focus well away from social media, twotter and Google Valley.

So what might a farm look like in the digital age? Well after tea and chat with @FarmArtist, I got inspired about the idea of a culturally digital farm. Given previous thoughts, I'd expect a digital farm to be very collaborative, distributed in structure, somehow involve aggregation and probably not have very high walls.

And then a whole bunch of things fell together. I volunteer with Food Up Front, a south London urban food growing network. It works for local food growing much like Facebook does for socialising. I recently went to London Yields, an exhibition on the possible future of urban agriculture. Lots of concept buildings, hydroponics and roof gardens. @FarmArtist told me about Fordhall organic farm whose tenants were under threat from Muller Dairy. 8000 people collaborated to purchase the land and extend a 100 year lease to the tenants.

So if a definition of the farm is a 'workplace consisting of farm buildings and cultivated land as a unit' then what does digital culture bring to that concept? How could a farm be digital? Well it's probably just the unit that has changed. It used to be in one space. But a digital farm would likely be distributed over a wider area, farmed or funded by many and then the produce aggregated together somehow. And that reminds of that brilliant SF project, MyFarm, the 'decentralized urban farm' which sells boxes of vegetables grown in back gardens. And then in today's Springwise email there's Veggie Trader, an online marketplace for homegrown surplus food. Wonderful.

A gaggle of crafty Pirates

I couldn't help but chortle as I read Wired's report of courtroom exchanges from the current Pirate Bay case.

Pirate Bay is the largest site that indexes Bit Torrent links and three people involved in running it are currently on trial in Stockholm accused of breaking copyright law. Its traffic ranks around 109th in the world.

Just picture a hotshot proscecutor interrogating a slightly disheveled, young, geekish defendant with the intent of finding the one mastermind behind the collection of allegedly illicit hyperlinks on the site. His route in, it seems,  is to establish who is the person with ultimate responsibility over the text and images on the site.

But he fails to understand the loose structure of the community that has access to the server. "But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic," "No. Why? If someone believes a new text is needed, he just inputs it. Or if a graphic is ugly, someone makes a better one. The one who wants to do something just does it."

A Hollywood scriptwriter couldn't have so perceptively expressed the confusion created at the meeting of those that web and those that don't. And as if the latter point needed making more clearly, in referring to his own motivation for managing the server, he expresses why so much of the web exists, and why it so baffles most of us, "There is no other place I could face these technical challenges except large firms where I would be top-ridden by bosses". He does it for the love of the craft. [image from]