The Sputterly Utter

Silenced, screening + panel discussion @ #Transmediale #tm15

People in the film

• James Spione, director of the film Silenced
• Jesselyn Radack, former senior National Security Agency attorney leaked emails to expose cover-ups in relation to John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," an American citizen who was captured in Afghanistan. She now legally represents whistleblowers and works to educate the public about how whistleblowers are intimidated and suppressed.
• Thomas Drake (Twitter), formerly worked for the NSA, exposed NSA abuses of surveillance after 9/11.
• John Kiriakou, formerly Chief of CIA Counterterrorism in Pakistan, responsible for the capture of Abu Zubaydah, author of Reluctant Spy  
• Edward Snowden 

People on the panel

• Sarah Harrison, editor of Wikileaks 
• William Binney former NSA employee, helped to develop ThinThread, Winner of the Sam Adams award for integrity in Intelligence
• Jesselyn Radack
• Thomas Drake

Mentioned

• Chelsea Manning leaked classified information to WikiLeaks The material included videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, and the 2009 Granai airstrike in Afghanistan; 250,000U.S. diplomatic cables; and 500,000 Army reports that came to be known as theIraq War logs and Afghan War logs. 
• Barret Brown, linked to Anonymous 
• Jeffrey Sterling, former CIA officer 
• Thinthread 
• Dan Ellsberg is an activist and former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers. 
• Human Rights Watch 
• Amnesty International  
• Espionnage Act 
• FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act  
• The 4th Amendment, prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure 
• CIPA hearing, Classified Informations Procedure Act 
• Rule 4 allows the government to have an in-camera discussion with the judge without the defendant or his counsel getting any information about what is said
• Phil Zimmermann, safe encryption for the masses

Further Reading

• James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace 
• Friedrich Kittler, No Such Agency (German), (English) 1986, coined, “crypto-industrial complex" 
• Gilles Deleuze, Post Scriptum on the Societies of Control, 1990, (French) (English) 

Summary

Mariusz Cieśla gave many useful guidelines for proactive design, including pitfalls to avoid and cations around privacy. He emphasized solving problems for people as they appear not before or after, as relevant experiences are the most magical. He urged designers to solve user problems first, and sell stuff second, warning that many companies now are overly focused on how beacon technology and proactive design can exploit users for commerce, which risks turning users away from these experiences altogether. Indoor positioning is going to be a major key in the future of proactive design.

Mariusz emphasized the need to create dialog and value choice in proactive services because wrong assumptions are the bane of design. Don’t forget to let users tell you what they want or prefer. Mariusz recommended that everyone in your company should spend some time working in customer service, to be in intimate contact with the users.

Make sure that your proactive service is friendly, but not overly-intrusive. Your proactive design should not feel like an overly-attached creepy stalker. He warned against the pitfalls of “smart” defaults and generally being smarter than the user. Mariusz highlighted the need for one person to own the entire development process so that the back ends and front ends have the same goals.

Companies mentioned

Lifetramp (Mariusz's company)
Buddy media
Google Now
Delta Airlines
Ginger.io
Estimote
Bodymedia (part of Jawbone)
apple store iOS app
google glass

People quoted
Tony Costa, people expect proactive design.
Paul Graham, Live in the future and build what’s missing.

Summary

Adaptive design is a new paradigm which has already begun to tremendously affect how we build services and applications. As the world has filled with sensors (and will continue to do so), technology has become capable of building a much greater understanding of context. Our understanding of context has expanded beyond time, place, and situation to include human emotional state and individual personality. Our understanding of what can be used as a "sensor" to gather data about this context is expanding from GPS and accelerometers to email accounts interlinked to social networks and credit card data.

Some of the Twittering attendees of the conference were irritated that the focus of the talk was not privacy. In fact, Avi made a statement at the beginning of the talk that privacy is a big issue in relation to this topic, but that he was not going to touch upon it today. The tension between convenience and privacy right now seems to be won by convenience most of the time. I'd like to think that this could change, but I don't see any evidence of it.

Apps Mentioned

Songza
Google Now
Cover
Nest
Daily Dress
Wattbox
Tado
Fitbit
Walmart
Moves

Estimote beacons
Broadcom indoor positioning chip
Sensegon Persona-based advertising

People Quoted

Mark Weiser—ubiquitous computing
Yoram M Kalman--HCI Markers, Use observation of user behavior to diagnose illness or special needs.

Jens Martin Skibstedt explains that everyone understands that cars are killing us and that bikes are much, much better, but still people prefer to drive. Skibstedt looked at cars and bicycles from a design and lifestyle perspective to try to understand what cars have that bikes lack. Basically, cars make it possible for people to make a more nuanced statement about themselves than a bicycle does. A car has an identity. Bicycles communicate less about who you are. A car, made of hundreds of little components and pieces, is understood as a single object, while bicycles show their parts and even brand the parts independently one from another.

He showed one really great slide depicting a grid of cars all photographed from the same angle and all painted white. I would never be able to tell the name of even two bicycles standing side by side or explain what they mean as status or design objects. But every one of the white cars was both recognizable and full of meaning and connections.

Skibsedt set out to design bicycles which would overcome these shortcomings. The company is called Biomega (watch out, the website makes noise). Here's a picture of one the bikes they designed.



Notes from the talk:

We have known that cities and cars are incompatible since the 1950s. Our cities were not designed for the quantity of cars that we have in them and urban traffic will triple in the next 50 years.

Lifestyle and design are hugely important to people, despite how frivolous we may think that is. All human societies have used design and lifestyle to express themselves. It's as close as we get to mating dances. It's all about how to get laid.

Cities are not only about life but also death. Air pollution kills more than malaria.Copenhagen sees the bicycle as a solution to this problem.

Steve jobs refered to the personal computer as a bicycle of the mind, referring to the fact that a human on a bike is one of the most efficient movers in the animal kingdom. Bikes are 40% faster than cars at peak hours in the city.

Why do cars still dominate most major cities?

Lifestyle and design. Prestige. Bikes can tell you something about a person (soccer mom, courier) but has nothing to do with brand, doesn't really express who you are. There are 30 kinds of 4x4, which are all functionally similar but they represent very different lifestyles. (Hummer vs Jeep vs Land Rover)

We need to have that for bikes. It's not about function, it's about design.

These are the four areas where bicycles need to be improved to compete with cars: Visibility, Drivability, Integration, and Durability.

Visibility: Bikes basically all look the same.

Driveability: Cars are easier to deal with, less fiddly. Less complicated for the user. You don't have to wrangle a U-lock before you can get into your car. Make bikes simpler and more drivable.

Integration: When you see a car it looks like one thing, but on the bike, you see many different things. Different brands on every component. It's a multiple object.

They took inspiration from the typical Copenhagen bike, nimbus motorcycle, mountain bikes, and principles from cars.

These principles can be used for any industrial design object.

We can also do this with busses and trains, communal transport. Think of the London bus, Paris metro entrances.

How do we build a mythology around bikes like we do around cars.

Michael Schindhelm used to manage Berlin's 150 million-euro Opera budget. Then he went to Dubai and led the cultural council there. I might read his book, Dubai High. Now he is in Hong Kong helping figure out what to do with this 40-hectar hunk of undeveloped land called West Kowloon.

I learned that opera has the biggest cultural budget in Berlin. I'm not surprised.

Schindhelm explained the context of Hong Kong a bit and told us about the project, then gave us the four things he learned from this experience. This talk was partly about the role of culture in urban planning, but also about how to play that role once you understand that it exists and is needed.

My favorite thing that Schindhelm articulated is the idea that it is a mistake for a city to try to build its cultural identity as an international hub. Go Local. Be true to the identity of the city you are. For new cultural developments, appreciate the local culture and talent. Use what is there. I think that this is true not only of big urban planning projects like the ones he works on, but for anything. I felt that Krakow was doing a good job at this. Portland, Oregon the same.

Consider scale thoughtfully. Don't start too big.

Adjust speed. Take your time. Culture takes time to grow. Think about the development of talent and culture and community before the development of buildings, which are fast and easy to build in comparison.

Go Public. Talk to the citizens. Consider the human dimension.

Schindhelm explained that architecture's impact on the culture of a city should not be underestimated. Architects were among the first designers to go global. The Sydney opera house (40 years old) and Bilbao's Guggenheim are examples of cities using architecture as a kind of branding tool. This is absolutely true. The second I see the Guggenheim building I think, "Bilbao."

Architecture is the tangible part of urban planning. Culture is more intangible. It's easy to build a museum. It's harder to figure out what to put in the museum.

Hong Kong has about 7 million people. It used to be predominantly Cantonese-speaking but more are more the city is becoming Mandarin speaking now. Half of HK is a special economic zone. The metro area has a population of 53 million. The city is economically mature and it's huge and growing. China is building a train network which will bring 40 million people a year to downtown Hong Kong. Yet Hong Kong lags far behind other cities culturally, meaning that it has fewer arts venues, museums, galleries, and artists than New York or Paris.

The city is dense and expensive, but there are 40 hectares of unbuilt land called West Kowloon. 3 billion dollars has been given to cultural development for West Kowloon. 40% of Kowloon will be a park. 40% of the 60% of the land which will be built up will be for museums and culture.

Schindhelm worked on the culture master plan with Rem Koohlhaas. As part of the project, they conducted interviews over many months with 40 people in the city to hear their concerns and ideas.

Originally the plan was about consuming culture, not creation. This evolved sot that studios and rehearsal spaces and schools were added to the plan.

They also looked to the local culture for inspiration. The local flavor. Every city started as a village. HK as well. There are 800-year-old walled villages within HK. The way these walled villages form part of the city served as an inspiration to their work. They also looked at the landscaping of the surrounding countryside and the vibrant street life is an essential part of this particular city.

Cantonese and Mandarin culture had to be considered. Cantonese opera (video link) is popular but underfunded, housed in crappy venues, and has not been modernized. One goal of the project is to change this.

80 public presentations of the proposal were done before the gov't made a decision. Now the master plan development is done and the first competitions have started to design the buildings. The Cantonese opera will be the first one built.

HK has more freedom of speech than the rest of China. The city wants to become the most important center of Chinese contemporary art. The museum's exhibit will be based on the collection of Uli Sigg, who is the biggest collector of contemporary Chinese art in the world. Herzog & de Meuron from Basil will design the museum.

Priya Prakash, Changify (link is a video)

Priya Prakash used to be the design lead for the Asha device, which is a pretty cool little phone designed specifically for emerging markets. She has since left Nokia and is working on a project called Changify.

The basic idea of the project is... well, it was actually kind of complicated to understand. Neighborhood citizens use the app to take pictures of problems they see in the neighborhood (dog poop, vandalism, potholes, whatever) and discuss ideas for solutions with other regular citizens. When a solution is thought of, you can take that and create a project. Other people can like your project and contribute to it. Contributions can include money, time, space, materials, etc.

On top of that, local businesses and city councils are sold subscriptions to the service so that they can contribute money to these projects and participate in local loyalty advertising campaigns.

If you finish a project, you get points which can be used as money in the local businesses which participate.

Positioned in the same ecosystem as Kiva and Kickstarter and Indie go go

They hold events to teach people how to use the app, use a "community engagement toolkit" and put together neighborhood loyalty program around their points system with local businesses.

Goal:"Create better neighborhoods."

Inspiration for this project: Payday loans brokers The Brixton pound Victor Papanek--how to design for the real world Air BnB A Pattern Language Christopher Alexander and others talks about the city as a collection of patterns The Great Wall of China funded by lottery

This is the text of the talk I gave at the Beagle Symposium last summer.

It niggles

I listen to a lot of popular science podcasts and I read a lot of popular science books. Over the past few years, the free will topic has been popping up pretty regularly.

Being a successful human, I like the idea of free will because it means I can take credit for my successes and (more importantly) feel superior to people who fail to overcome similar or lesser handicaps and hurdles than I have.

Consequently, as I heard these stories about the mounting body of evidence against our traditional notion of free will, I mostly ignored it. It wasn't that I took a position on one side or the other, I just didn't think about it too hard. The topic kept coming back via this article or that radio show. Every one of these explained how the idea of free will was eroding and none were in defense of the idea. The free will question sat in the back of my mind stewing, until I read a short review somewhere of Sam Harris's book Free Will.

The review said two things about the book.
1. It is short.
2. It redefines how we think of free will.

"Great," I thought, "just what I need. A short book to help me redefine how I think of free will so that I can continue to believe that I have it."

Well, the book is short. And if "redefines how you think about free will," means "makes you face the fact that you seriously cannot defend its existence in any way," than the number two point is also true.

The Illusion of an Illusion

I am not going to try to convince you that free will doesn't exist. I am am going to tell you why it's not very important one way or another. I'm asking you to at least meet me at "what if free will did not exist." Still, I do think it is a good idea to quickly clarify what exactly we are talking about. Free will. The idea that at the precise moment where you do one thing or a different thing it would have been possible for you to do the thing that you did not do.

Serendipity's darling

The thing that really pissed me off about being forced to admit that free will is not real is that, frankly, I put a lot of energy into doing the right things. I make pro and con lists. I take time… but not too much time. Making good decisions is one of the main things I get paid to do at my job. I even give brilliant advice to help other people make their own excellent decisions. I love to make decisions! And I am really, really good at it.

If the real reason I am a successful maker of decisions is first that I am lucky to have been born with the right kind of brain for this activity and secondly that I've been pretty lucky in who and what I came into contact with when… if, at the core of it all, I am serendipity's darling, then I don't deserve any credit for all that agonizing hard work I do. I do it because I could not do differently. I'm no better than a person who goes through life making dumb choices or worse, a person who goes through life choosing not to make choices. I am just more or less fortunate.

No fair, right?! Luckily, it doesn't matter.

Effort

Effort is real. When you have a big decision to make, you still have to go through all the trouble. You just don't really decide whether you will or not. Either you are the kind of person at that moment who will make an effort or you are not. Maybe you are the kind of person who would prefer to be different than you are. If so, maybe you will become different because of the influences this desire brings into your life. Your success or failure to change is not your responsibility, but the effort you put into it is still effort.

Influence

Influence is real. Punishment & reward are still useful. If a society rewards what it values and punishes what it deems undesirable, isn't that enough? Is it so terrible to punish the action without despising the person?

Inspiration

Inspiration is real. What you do does matter. You just don't deserve any credit for it.

Personal responsibility

OMG! If all this is true, then personal responsibility as we know it is a hollow sham!

Correct. So what?

Personal responsibility, like many things which are not precisely real, can be felt deeply. This is good! This is one of the most fun and interesting parts of being a human: our ordinary schizophrenia. We know that it is impossible to truly communicate with one another, but we feel connection everywhere. We know that our individual lives are insignificant and ultimately without meaning, but we are filled with passion. Similarly, we know that we deserve no credit for our successes and no blame for our failures, but yet we strive and strive. This is the wonderful awful human condition.

Conclusion

Religion is not a prerequisite for a sense of morality and ethics. Free will is not a prerequisite for a sense of personal responsibility. A moral sense and a sense of personal responsibility are adaptations of the social animal. We need them because we need each other, not because there is a God and not because we have free will.

Free will doesn't exist. Who Cares?

Now that I am out of the magnetic sphere of Kenneth Goldsmith's rhetoric, I do have a couple of critical thoughts about his talk.

His criticism of the derivative and even plagiaristic quality of contemporary literature hinged in part on the Booker prize descriptions of the works. The fact that the same description applies to a contemporary coming of age story as well as Romeo and Juliet and To Kill a Mockingbird doesn't speak inherently to the evils of Literature as an art form so much as it speaks to the evils of marketing writing, which is an evil that I believe most authors submit to as a victim. Using the marketing copy written to sell a book to analyze the originality of the work is a little dose of bad faith.

Then, later, during the Q&A session, someone brought up the fact that there is not much new going on in uncreative writing since Quenau and Goldsmith exalted in the interestingness of the spiral of the same experiment being performed again and again in new technological and historical contexts. Why doesn't the same apply to conventional literature? Why doesn't this renewal spiral apply to the coming of age novel? Romeo and Juliet have a different historical and technological and political story than To Kill a Mockingbird which is different to whatever coming of age contemporary novel I'm not reading now or to Lena Dunham's Girls series. Why doesn't conventional literature benefit from the same  mechanism?

I am moved by the idea of humans acting like machines, but I am also moved by machines acting like humans. There is a pathos to how crappy they are at it.

Other than that, though, great talk. Artists, like the rest of us, are allowed their contradictions. Just because you stand up in front of an auditorium does not mean that you have to have everything figured out. I hope I get a chance to buy Kenneth a beer before he leaves Berlin!

Looking forward to this one!

Kenneth Goldmith is the founder of Ubuweb. Respondant is Florian Cramer.

The book Uncreative Writing is available from Amazon.

Googlism introduction is very cute.

In Germany there are only 2 programs for creative writing. In the US there are 375 graduate programs for creative writing. The notion of creative writing has been controversial. Linked to realisms of various forms (Tolstoy, Balzac and still contemporary Western mainstream lit).

Brian Geis said, "Writing is 50 years behind painting" and that was 50 years ago! Joyce wrote Finnegan's wake in the 20th century, but did it really change anything?

Pluto is a figment of the modernist imagination, its stint as a planet coincides nicely with the span of what we consider modernism. There was no post modernism for literature.

When alphanumeric language becomes digital, text becomes material material. The demonstration of dumping text into images and altering them is impressive. Code is language. All media is now created from "words." This was not true back when Pluto was a planet.

Words aren't used in digital world to convey emotion, but more as a brick. Digitized language is more fluid and multi-useful than pre-digital language. The web is a writing machine. Most of that is machines talking to other machines.

The internet of things will bring more machines online than humans. This will be another data explosion on the web. Armies of refrigeraors and dishwashers are steps away from literary production readable only be other machines. Invisible to human eyes and bypassing humans all together. Robopoetics. (Literary Future, Books).

Why not start writing drone poetry for our future robot overlords now?

On the web, text is not read. It is skimmed, archived, liked, shared... Archiving is digital quilting. It is folk art. Collecting is creating. Writing on an electronic platform is inseparable from archiving.

The mp3 requires everyone to become a librarian. Copying, organizing, backing up. Listening to music has become exhausting.

The writer is producer, editor, publisher and distributor. The whirr of a hard drive is the palpable evidence of the creation of literature.

The discovery and re-distribution of an object is more important now than the object itself (This is starting to make me feel guilty now!) The new writing is pointing.

He tells us about downloading Schwarz's document cache from the pirate bay. The documents are a mess, poorly scanned, useless old old science papers. So what was Schwarz doing, really? The act of moving the information is more important than the content. He lacked the filtering. Why?

In the future, the best writers will be the best filterers.

Some examples of the new writing. Conceptual, uncreative writing. Automated writing. Taking Oulipo farther with the natural tools of the digital reality. "This is all done by hand, it is very beautiful" says Goldsmith of a piece he is showing. But how funny to have that instinct when standing before us to convince us of the beauty of the future of digital automated literature.

A lot of these are available as print on demand books. Interesting that the printing part seems to be important. Why would that be so?

What is wrong with creative writing? Research into the Booker prize. In 2011 the 6 shortlisted books were not very creative. We don't think of them as uncreative or plagiarized, even though they are undeniably derivative. Half of them have the surprise arrival of a letter as an element. Four of 6 have a murder in them. The exact same description for one of these coming of age novels was used to describe exactly tons of other previous coming of age stories. What is original and what is creative? There is more creativity in non literature than in literature.

Maybe the best authors of the future will be programmers of language.

Finally managed to get out to the HKW and am ready to listen to my first panel of the festival.

Moderator Rose White
With: Francesco WARBEAR Macarone Palmieri Staphanie Rothenberg Jeff Crouse Isaac Leung 
Stephanie and Jeff will perform as part of the Laborors of Love.

Stephanie Rothenberg's presentation: There were 97 billion dollars in porn revenue in 2006 but the porn industry has gone into a major decline since then. 4cam, YouPorn, etc even regualr social media is used by sex workers to promote their work. Porn is looking for a new business model. Jeff and Stephanie had a sweatshop in real life and in second life. The virtual sweatshop made real Double Happpiness brand jeans. More info behind this link. Another new business model starting up at the same time was the Mechanical Turk by Amazon. HIT=Human Intelligence task, which is the Amazon terminology. Artificial artificial intelligence is when something looks automated but is not. Labors of love--why not stimulate the economy while stimulating yourself?

Presentation by Jeff Crouse The Labors of Love site is launching here at the festival. This is an interface for sending your sexual fantasies to Mechanical Turk for the making of videos. So, mechanical turk workers find videos and the site automatically montages them together. You can then see a map of where people are looking at your request and the status of it. The whole process takes 40-60 minutes. They are interested in what kind of creative license the Mechanical Turk worker takes. Mechanical Turk has a ten-minute limit for completing a task. (This moderator says um a lot.)

Francesco too many names presentation This is a hip dude. Pluto is a queer entity. It's identity makes us uncomfortable. How do we know that Pluto wants to be identified? Barbara Degenevieve did "the hot bods of queer porn." Her manifesto goes like so: Porn is made to get people off. This requires objectification. Embrace the need to fetishize and be fetishized. What is netporn? by Katrien Jacobs is a media studies professor and netporn conference organizer. Netporn is defined as an interzone. Altporn. DIY ethics. Alternative channesl, etc. An authenitc body is uncontrolled, unprofessional, etc. Real Core--Sergio Messina. Real Core was born in photo-based discussion groups in the early 90s. Happy, authentic porn. Mostly at home, mostly normal people in normal life. The feeling of trespassing into someone's privacy is part of the thrill. But really, authenticity is a product. Authenticity is fake.

Isaac Leung presentation Isaac researched sex machines. He showed an interview with an artist whose name I didn't catch. "Americans are inventors..." of fucking machines. He looked at three kinds of machines. Garage culture fucking machines is one kind. Many of them are not even used, the pleasure is a lot in the building of it. Second type is Teledildonics, which is a mediated sex via phone and internet. Often takes more than one real human. For example, connecting a dido to a videogame controller, Thrill Hammer, Sex Machine Cams, essage, oh my bot. Third type = sex robots. First Androids in Nuremberg makes complicated sex robots.

PLEASURE VS DISCIPLINE Michel Foucoult Chastity devices have evolved into sex toys.

What do we really know about dying? He began to study the Near-death experience. It was similar to Raymond Moody's description. Lack of pain, calm, out of body experience or not, and a tunnel with a light at the end. Loving compassionate supportive. Sometimes a review of your life with comprehension of its meaning. A being of light. A garden full of dead relatives. You come to a border and you know that if you cross you don't return. Some are sent back. Some go back on their own. Heart attack victims were chosen to study, so that the people being studied could be compared. If you compare near death from suicide and heart attack, you don't have similar brain states. Can there be consciousness without brain function? Run with the data, even if it contradicts the current model. Collected over 1500 stories about what happens when you die. Premonitions. Deathbed visions. Every culture has them. You are visited by a dead relative. Negotiation of death date. Helping us look forward to death. Deathbed coincidences are when the dead person comes to someone they care about after dying to say they are ok. watches and clocks stop. Animals react. There is light at death. Compassionate light. Have a good death. Relax into the death process. Make sure that you do not die in a hospital. Die at home or hospice. See your grandchildren. Teach people, even children, not to be afraid of death. Prepare for death. Not only your paperwork but your relationships. Discuss death. Don't be afraid. The idea that because many people experience something similar at death does not mean that your mom and your dog are going to really come usher you into the afterlife where you will wander around picking daisies for eternity, but all the same I do like the idea (leaving the afterlife and ghosts completely out of it) that the experience of Death itself might be rather pleasant.

Always wanted to be cool. Tried to analyze what makes something culturally relevant and why he is not. He eventually gave up trying to find the next big thing and started doing what he liked. But then came back to the idea of studying it. It's idiotic, but fascinating Define cool: n. the acquired relevance in the contemporary culture of a particular demographic. Studied cool people. Started by approaching the cool people he knew. Asked cool people how it felt to be cool. Interviewed them for 6 months. 1. Cool people will talk openly about being cool, but not on record. 2. Cool people have a following and are codependent with their following. 3. Cool people make it look effortless, but they work hard at it. 4. Cool makes you lonely. 5. People embody a persona. They play a character and they end up losing their real selves. Cool people are projections from us. We project on to them what we desire. We get comfort from being inferior to them. What you need to be cool 1. Must be appointed by someone else. 2. Cool comes from the fringes of mainstream. It starts against status quo then becomes the status quo. 3. Cool is temporary. You cannot stay cool forever. Eventually you have to let go. Cool is not constant 4. Cool is a product of effort. Where is cool culure going? Why is it important? What is the biological relevance and importance of cool?

Travel as a conduit to getting out of a stalled spot? Wanted to travel but not to be a drop out or to change his profession. He researched the rules of the Journeyman and translated the rules to his profession and to his time. Must bring work equipmant. Only two sets of clothes, but wanted 7 days of clothes without washing. Work for board and lodging. He added on all continents and within 2 years. He had no money. Moved into a tiny room to save money. In 2010 he paid off his debt and went to Shanghai with 500 euros. Did 16 jobs and all continents. His stories about culture problems are entertaining. Dancing is illegal in Bangalore! Seriously?! But Indians I know LOVE to dance. That is nutty. The last rule of the Journeyman is to report your insights. That is what he is doing today. Living without possessions is a relief. It simplifies things. You learn that you don't need stuff. It's all about the people. The best city in the world is useless without great people. It's not where you go, it's who you travel with. But great cities are made of and by people. Don't follow the expected patterns. We should not all follow the same rules. You have to push yourself to be able to find your rules.

Her father told her when she was 5 that her destiny was to be a champion swimmer. At 12 she wanted to be an Olympic champion swimmer. There is a small group of humans who do long distance swimming. At 30, she decided to swim 100 miles in the open ocean. The world record at the time was 58 miles. They looked for a place to do it. They found Cuba. Great symbolic and real border. Havana to Key West. She had swum so far from the Bahamas. When she retired, she feared losing the feeling of passion that sports brings. Sports gives you measurable success to commit toward. 42 hours to swim from Cuba to Florida, in rough water. 103 miles. Sharks. Jellyfish. The gulf stream. It's treacherous. She didn't make it the first time she tried. She swam her 100 miles from the Bahamas. The Cuba failure stewed in the back of her mind. She became a journalist. When she turned 60, she felt much closer to the end than to the beginning or even to the middle. 60 is a big deal. She examined her life. Asked, "Have I been living with passion and commitment every day." She did not swim a stroke for 30 years when she retired. At 60, she started training again. She clandestinely trained again for the Cuba swim. The box jellyfish now inhabit the Florida Straits. It's tiny, but it will kill you. She has people who dive around while she swims and scare off sharks. YIKES. 51 hours of swimming. Training alone is 20-hour-long swims. Holy shit. Sensory deprivation is part of swimming. Her description of how you think and the things your brain does while you swim this distance is kind of blowing my mind. She says she will probably never make it from Cuba to Florida, but she will never stop trying.

Just because you are good at what you do does not mean that it makes you happy. Starship Millenium Project 3-year multimedia cruise, publishing documentation of the trip every day. Expensive slow internet. They had a flying dinghy. Beautiful photos! He had never had an experience of cross-ocean sailing and he felt really uncomfortable at first. What he learned is that comfort zones expand. 2.5 years living on a boat is equal to 20 years of marriage. Having nothing makes you free. But having nothing is uncomfortable. He decided to go live in Cape Town. He bought a house. Wanted to go back into nature. He had a great time in Southern Africa and started to take pictures. But then he ran out of money. So, he decided to become a photographer. Luckily, his first book of photos was very successful. Everyone's comfort zone is different. He went to Canada to photograph walruses. He met Joe, an Inuit. He had a boat. The boat was not in good shape. He started to feel uncomfortable. He does not like danger, so being on that boat in a storm was not a good idea. Calculated Risks only. Going out of your comfort zone is not about facing danger. I want to go to see this lava lake in Etheopia. He's been taking people to remote places aroudn the world. Disorienting places. It makes people cry. The experience of nature on this scale is humbling, it makes you feel how you are pat of evolution. After people go to these places, they get PIN code syndrome. They can't remember their PIN codes. Many people make dramatic life changes after this.

Borders in music are defined by words. We have to redefine the terms. Delete three words: Classical Pop Crossover They force us to think in ways we otherwise would not. Classical music makes us think of the past, but does classical somehow end? Young composers are trapped by the term classical. Young composers don't know these borders. Classical composers do not live in an aquarium like they used to. They listen to everythig. They go nightclubbing. They don't need the idea of crossover anymore. They are already out of the aquarium. This term was helpful when composers needed a word for that, but this is past. Let the young composers in. Stop letting the IDEA of what classical music is prevent the new generation from being heard.

Real local knowledge is rarely googleable. He says Google is only usable in 5% of human languages, but that is not a good statistic. What matters is what percentage of the human population is left uncovered. Languages spoken by larger numbers of people are more impactful. Technology alone does not give you access to knowledge. You also need language to share information. How can we overcome this barrier? How do we connect the languages? The concept is to create 36 million language pairs to pass knowledge from one culture to another. Wikipedia has 80k language pairs by linking articles in different languages on the same topic Google offers 4k language pairs by automatic translation. I wish he would talk a bit more about the mechanics of this dream. I've not been convinced that this is quite possible. Possible or not, it is certainly a worthwhile effort.

Pictures of Sudan. Ugh, it looks bad in the media. Anwar lives in another Sudan. Borders that need to be crossed in Sudan: Education. Access to information Languages Over 70 languages plus dialects in Sudan. Arabic is the dominant language. Even in South Sudan, they communicate across languages with a form of Arabic. He did his CS PhD in Korea. WE have a culture of sharing in the tech world. He tells about the TED Open Translation Project. This makes the content more shareable. He translated a talk to Arabic. Since 2003 he has discovered so much via TED, as have many of us. So, this talk is kind of an advertisement for TED itself... a mise en abime... could we call it recursive? Why not use TED to promote aspects of TED? Still feels kind of funny. JD Schramm's talk was one that he translated. How to prevent people from trying again to commit suicide after they attempt it once. He tells about how his contact with TED made him grow personally by overcoming his own homophobia. Very funny. Crossing inner borders. Now he asks himself as a translator if he should translate the phrase where the man refers to his husband into Arabic because of how homosexulity in particular is so taboo in Sudanese culture. He felt it was important to share with everyone the lesson he learned. The essence of his mission is to share knowledge.

Questioning the idea that public spaces should be for sale. Civic vandalism to challenge the billboard's legitimacy as an advertising medium. No opt out, etc etc etc. They did 36 installations in 5 cities in 5 days. What is the boundary between art and activism? They tried to expose the mechanics of the advertising industry. Why is there so much advertising in our public space? A common defense is that advertising is information and it is a benign service. Peer into the origins of the advertising industry. Freud's nephew wrote a book called propoganda where he basically laid out the mechanics of modern advertising. Edward Bernays. People must be trained to desire rather than to need. Paul Mazer, Lehman Brothers. Yeah. That is gross. How does society tell stories about itself? Advertising exploits genuine meaningful human experience by linking them to products. Advertising helps shape culture and we mustn't naively think that it is a mirror... well of course. Every part of culture is simultaneously a mirror and an influencer. That's life. Studies show that most people in Europe think advertising sucks and that it puts stupid pressure on young people in particular to conform to social tribes through consumerism. Conceptions of beauty problem also. Talking about the Dove chubby models ad. They are basically saying that it is not possible for advertising to be ethical. It is simply and plainly incompatible. This is true. The impact of consumer culture on our planet is also impossibe to sustain. Sao Palo went after visual pollution. Removed public advertising and legalized street art. Amazing. 70 pre cent of Sao Palo residents back it fully. We should be promoting alternatives to public space advertising. We should think of ourselves as citizens not consumers. Advetising is ro reviled it's almost fun to try to defend it, but I have to admit that I despise the co-opting of civic space in this way.

Marrakesh is a place of inspiration. Create a place for people to think about te future in a context that is already rich, confusing, and inspiring. Marrakesh is a place of peaceuful coexistance of opposites They renovated an old Medina with no electric tools. As a woman, she was erased by the culture of Marrakesh. The workers would not even look at her. She tried to find a way to make herself visible and the first step was to stop believing that she could come to another culture and teach them something instead of learning. She became fascinated with the crafts and trades that are disappearing in Africa and realized that Europe loves this kind of handcraft. So she created a plan to bring the two worlds together. Sell vintage products to raise money. Found craft schools. Make new stuff. Sell it in Europe. Fund community projects. It is difficult sometimes for a native person to see the value in their own culture. It took her a long time to build trust and to bring the craftsmen to see the dream. It took a year and a half. Very interesting when cultures collide productively. They gave the village a microcredit for building the school. They had over 100 women apply for the school. There were only 20 spaces. The villagers had no trouble sifting through the applicants. The first product was an ipad case. Protecting a modern device with a nearly dying craft form has a poetic character. Ethics are not a USP. Social brands have to be built the same as consumer brands. Her mission is to make social sexy. After a year, they have done several projects in the village with the business revenue. Next they will tackle illiteracy among women in the village and area. "tradition is not to preserve the ashes, but to pass on the flame" --Thomas More