A Networked World

Gotta love the Swedes

From OilPrice.com comes this delicious headline, "Sweden has Run out of Rubbish for Waste-to-Energy Industry"

As a result of overzealous recycling, the nation of 9.5 million citizens must now import rubbish from other countries in order to feed its waste-to-energy incineration power plants. Each year the Scandinavian country imports 80,000 tonnes of garbage, mostly from Norway, to fuel homes and businesses.

via oilprice.com

While at one level its amusing and we can admire the Swedes' intelligence and ability to stick with an idea, it raises a problem that I have been harping on about for a long time. Right now we have a lot of people trying to figure out how to turn the vast amounts of waste we create into something useful, from insulation and other building materials to methane and other forms of energy.

In the medium term, however, that is a dead-end strategy because the waste stream itself is dependent on excessive, unsustainable consumption. As the Global Financial Crisis continues to roll out and become an increasingly economic one, our ability to generate waste streams will diminish; we will buy less stuff and that we do buy will have less packaging and we will throw out less of it.

Anyone trying to create a busines based on that waste is NOT an environmentalist nor have they thought through the whole process, they are every bit as invested in our failing waste-producing economy as the worst waste creator, literally.

Its a good way to start cleaning up the environmental damage that landfill is doing, but its also creating an even more concetratedly toxic material in the contaminated ash that is being shipped back to Norway. If all the Norwegians do is bury the stuff, they are lining up for an even worse problem down the track. At the very least it needs to be baked into building materials in a form that wont leach the heavy metals etc, or vitrified.

And then there's the energy budget. Right now its trucks burning diesel carting this stuff back and forth, they are talking about shipping stuff to and from the Italy, Romania and the Baltic states, much, much more diesel and then the energy costs of making the ash safe. I'm betting that quite soon we will reach a point where burning the diesel to make electricity will be financially better than moving the waste, so the only net benefit will be environmental, and that will be limited. If the sending nation has to pay dfor the transport they will very quickly decide that trading even more of their environmental standards will not only be preferable, it will be the only affordable option.

We are now in the phase of the process where we will reach the limits of every economic and energy strategy very quickly. This is just more evidence that the Club of Rome was right, we have reached the limits to growth and now we are trying to stave off the collapse instead of reorganising ourselves around the new reality.

Hell, we aren't even starting the public conversation about that.

In the hands of parasites and thieves

We expect the Americans to try and steal everything that is not nailed down, its the normal process of the empire to appropriate everything. But to find a New Zealand government ministry assisting the theft is a bloody disgrace.

A rural library in Horowhenua says a United States company has hijacked the computer system it invented and taken the trademark on its Maori name.

The Horowhenua Library Trust devised a software system called Koha 12 years ago to manage catalogues and lending information.

The system is free and widely used by other libraries, churches, schools and corporations around the world.

However, the trust's head of libraries, Joann Ransom, says the American company LibLimehas been granted provisional rights to the name Koha by the Ministry of Economic Development.

She says LibLime is trying to adapt the Koha system for its own private client base.

"We did something really good and we gave it away to the world and it's been a glorious thing globally for 12 years. And now this American corporate wants to take it," she says.

Ms Ransom says she is astounded an international company could trademark a Maori word.

The library has three months to object to the decision and Ms Ransom says it has little money to pay for a legal case.

via www.radionz.co.nz

We live in a world where only those things that are done for profit may be done and that anything being done without a desire for profit can be treated as optional until some way can be found to profit from it.

Those who have assets that are not being used for profit can have those assets expropriated for the benefit of anyone who seeks to profit from those assets. 

Theft of IP, theft of living treasure in the form of the Maori language within which Koha is a significant cultural factor, theft of the value that has been created by a great product that enables libraries all over the world to conduct their business without paying excruciating fortunes to commercial interests.

And there is the crime that Koha has committed. Because we have now reached that stage where any task done for free is defined as theft of profits from someone trying to profit from that activity and that must be stopped.

The people in MED who have sanctioned this are complicit in the crime and at the very least need to be hauled into the street,tarred and feathered and dumped in Wellington harbour then charged with polluting the environment.

I will also give good odds that someone will, once the deal is done, get "head hunted" by an affiliate company for a nice lucrative job. No crass, brown-paper-bag-full-of-cash corruption is needed in this corrupted system, just a nod and a wink.

Actions needed.

1. Internet NZ needs to step into this and fund the case against this theft
2. Tweet it, FB it, letter to the editor it, and for Kiwis 3 days out from an election, kick some pollieass.

What a disgrace.

#NetHui Lessig on fire

I've been a huge fan of Larry lessig since I first found the net back in 1995. So when he was booked for NetHui I was a lot more determined to turn up on the Friday than I would otherwise have been.

While I expected most of what he had to say, albeit updated, the last 10 minutes were seriously unexpected.

I never expected to hear a guy with such a huge reputation who comes from the heart of the online world to stand up in Auckland and beg us to help rescue his nation from its evolving disaster driven by systemic corruption. Watch it.

#NetHui and Digital Literacy

At last week's excellent NetHui, run by Internet NZ, I was asked to plug in 5 minutes worth on Digital Literacy. As usual, I tried to give it a bit of a spin. (starts at 41.12 and runs 6 minutes - the cut [poor sync] is Download Nethui_digital-literacy)

Here's the full version that probably takes a bit more than 5 minutes.

As one of the other presenters suggested, Digital Literacy means different things to different people and I want to pick up on some points raised by Mike Dickison and maybe be push them out a little, perhaps just shove them off the cliff.

For me digital literacy includes knowing when to take one of these and stick it in your mouth.

The reason for this is simple; in Miami Beach on Memorial Day this year, a bunch of out-of-control cops pumped over 100 shots into a private car in a public place, killing an unarmed black man inside (now there's a surprise) and wounded some bystanders.

A young man called Narces Benoit saw what was happening and whipped out his cellphone to record the scene. One of the cops noticed what he was doing, broke off his shooting gallery duties and came charging at Benoit, waving his gun and screaming at him to get out of his car and hand over the cellphone, which he did.

The cop them smashed the cellphone under his boot and arrested Benoit. Nevertheless, within a few hours, the video of the event was going viral on Youtube because, when he saw the cop rushing at him, Benoit had the presence of mind to take out of the phone his digital media storage card and put it in his mouth.

The difference between Benoit and the cop is what I call Digital Literacy.

A few months ago in the Australian Navy, a female recruit was having a sexual relationship with another recruit. The guy in question thought it would be terribly cool to capture the "action" with his webcam and broadcast it to his mates. She was not happy and complained to her commander about the breach of trust and privacy. He essentially told her not to be a spoilsport and swept the matter under the rug.

The young woman became even less happy and shared her experience on facebook. Within days her commander and his boss and his boss and HIS boss were all publicly on the mat, caps in hand, staring at their shoes and explaining HOW they were going to solve the problem of their appalling leadership.

The difference between the young woman and the Australian Navy is what I call Digital Literacy.

About the same time, footballer Ryan Giggs was having an affair with model Imogen Thomas and when it was discovered he sought the help of the UK Supreme Court which obligingly issued a "super injunction" forbidding the publication of the facts.

Within hours, over 70,000 Twitter users had turned the super injunction into a legal fiction.

The difference between the Supreme Court and Ryan Giggs fan base is what I call Digital Literacy.

And all over the Middle east and North Africa this year, people have risen up, trying to throw off a generation of oppression, corruption and violence against them. Now we have had revolutions for a long time, but in the past they have needed a core of intellectual, philosophical and operational leadership, surrounded by a cadre of activists willing to take the message into the community.

Those roles are now being taken over by the whole community using social media tools. It is that takeover and the loss of the privileged position of leadership that I call Digital Literacy.

In Christchurch's major earthquakes, at risk of their lives and while their buildings and their city crumbled around them people grabbed their cellphones and videoed the event as a way to record their own experience to share with others and possibly to provide evidence of what happened to them if they didn't make it out.

That too I call Digital Literacy.

Literacy of any kind is not just being able to read and write the words, it is understanding the meaning, the significance and the context of the communication, then knowing how to manipulate them.

The best example I can think of is the advent of film to entertainment. The first films were little more than stage plays with a camera placed in front of them to record the action. But it wasn't long before we saw the appearance of film literacy, using the unique language of the cinema to tell the story in its own way. The language includes backgorund music, closeups, tracking and pan shots, framing and the million other ways to use a camera that are not available to stage plays.

So we cannot expect that Digital Literacy will look in any but the most superficial ways, like hard copy literacy. In fact, by my definition Digital Literacy is happening all around us, all the time, with increasing frequency.

For 20 years we have talked about the ICT Revolution, blithely ignoring the fact that all revolutions break stuff, and the thing they break first and most irreparably, is the status quo, to expect the revolutionaries to restore the powers of the old guard is nonsense.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too often, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

Our problem is that digital illiteracy is rife in Government, business, education, health, justice and the NFP sectior, very often among those who are pushing hardest for solutions.

The real digital literacy challenge that we have is to shift the old guard into actual digital literacy so that our organisations, which have real, and vital, work to do, can engage with, communicate with, work with an increasingly digitally literate community; so that they can swim in that literacy instead of drowning in it as they are doing right now.

MY problem is that I   have no idea how the hell we are going to do that.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too oftten, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

The real Wikileaks secrets

Most of what we have seen from the Wikileaks cables is mere confirmation of what we suspected all along, mostly that our politicians and other leaders routinely lie to us about what they are doing and, especially, why they are doing it.

In some cases that leads to dead people as have illegal or unwinnable wars such as in Iraq and Afghanistan and it is seriously rich to have people with buckets of blood on their hands lecturing Wikileaks about the possibility that people may be compromised.

There is a difference between those who cause harm inadvertently while trying to out a criminal and those who commit the crimes in the first place. Ask any cop who has accidentally killed someone who walked into the line of fire at the wrong moment, for example.

But the real secret that is causing so much panic is not the diplomatic chitchat and scandal, schadenfreude-inducing though that may be; what is causing all the sturm und drang is the meta message that is coming down the line and will get much liuder and much clearer as the commercial and banking data comes out.

That message is this, the game is rigged. Like this, for instance

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – A WikiLeaks cable indicates that BHP Billiton tried to sabotage a proposed investment by China's Chinalco in rival Rio Tinto, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“The cables sent from Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan's chief of staff to US officials describe how BHP "played its cards with consummate skill" in lobbying the government to delay a decision on a deal between Rio Tinto and Chinalco,” the ABC report said.

In February 2009, Chinalco agreed to invest $19,5-billion in Rio Tinto and its operations to obtain an 18% stake in the world's third-biggest mining company, which at the time was battling to shift debt.

But Rio broke off the deal in June, opting instead for a big rights issue and a since-scrapped iron-ore joint venture in Australia with BHP.

The Chinalco agreement had followed an earlier failed hostile takeover bid by BHP Billiton for Rio Tinto.    

All of the players involved knew what was going on, not one of them lacks the resources to know what the others are actually doing behind the scenes, the only people who must not find out that the pollies and the captains of industry are rigging the game is us.

As long as we can be convinced that we have to play the capitalist (or communist or theocratic) game and that there are rules which, if followed, can lead to "success" we will keep doing our best and blaming ourselves for any failures.

But once we see clearly that the whole game is rigged by those who have been playing longest, we will first withdraw our participation and, when they try to enforce play, out will come the torches and pitchforks.

THAT is what is getting so many panties in a bunch in the capitals of the world.

Is Google building a 3D map?

OK, maybe its not, but I think somebody is.

For the last couple of nights, around 11PM (NZDST), while sloshing in my spa pool, I have spotted 3 satellites flying in exactly the same formation in a circumpolar orbit.

Two of them side by side in the lead, I would guess about 10 miles apart and a third following about 40 miles behind (I may be out by a factor of 10 given the other variables) in an isoceles triangle. Seeing them all in the same formation on two different nights argues for deliberate, to maintain that relationship for more than a few seconds they have to be in exactly the same orbit and exactly parallel tracks.

Any ideas?

Towards the new normal

Whenever I'm with Steve barnett, he's usually drinking and I'm the designated driver. Mostly because he and my wife are members of a wine club and when they go on high-class pub crawls (or winery tours) and I of the cardboard palate drive the people mover. When he talks about business he reminds me a lot of Johnnie Moore and Rob Paterson; and me. Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey... confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

[...] I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually, if Steve thinks its only NZ managers, he's dreaming. The managerial class is global, its largely responsible for the problem and will cling to its paycheque till the collapsing businesses they parasitise crumble in their hands.

[...] Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

I think he's optimistic here.

In the new normal, we have so little idea of what will work that the idea of goals and strategies may be a waste of time as well. As our energy and financial resources are decimated we will gain new appreciations of those resources that are left.

I think there might be some new parameters that will have more power in the future.

• We will demand much higher value returns for any of those irrecoverable resources that we expend, especially if we hand them to someone else.
  
• We will increasingly trade time for goods and services. Where we have invested a lot througout my lifetime in "saving time" we will now "spend" or invest, that time ratrher than use a resource like energy.
• Things will slow down in some areas such as travel and material flows
• Information shipping will speed up as we reduce even further the documentary exchanges and rely more on electronics (saving paper, energy etc)
• Discretionary spending will evaporate and the industries based on them will disappear. If we spend more time waiting, travelling or producing things we will have less liesure time and less money to spend in it.
• Energy and material flows at a personal, community and business level will become a critical part if every economic model and activity.
• The idea of waste will disappear, we will be much more conscious that we can't 'afford" it any more. The idea that we should pay for packaging, then pay to have it taken away and pay again in opportunity costs merely to have a wrapper will become laughable, if not criminal
• Product design, durability, ease of use and fitness for purpose will become absolute criteria for everything
• We will all need to try many, small actions that may or may not succeed. We will need to be deadly honest about the outcomes and rethink those that fail while iterating those that seem to succeed.
• We will need to acknowledge that, at a time of paradigm shift, nothing will be reliable for quite a long time; what worked yesterday may not work again tomorrow. That is why small, iterative actions will be the only safe ones, there will be no more going large.
  
• Your turn. What other geenral rules do you think might fit here and does this make any sense at all?

I'm planning some renovations to my house - we have been since we moved in 2 years ago - and the other night I was using Google Sketchup (a brilliant bit of software) to turn the 2D plan into a 3D model so we could try stuff out.

I put in a work bench for building things and a wet area for wine making and a pot still for recovering essential oils from the flowers and herbs and plenty of space for creating stuff and storing it and for tools and consumables like glues and screws and so forth.

And then I stood back and realised that I am making not just a workshop a small artisanal factory that would fit in the 19th century or earlier. I'm doing it because it is the logical outcome of thinking about local production andtrying to close the energy and material flow loops as tightly as possible.

When i build stuff, I use screws not nails so that everything can be dismantled and used again in something else. More rules.

• Low energy dismantle-ability
• Repurposing all manner of manufactures
  
• Building things that can be applied to new uses
• Shared spaces, shared tools, shared skills
  

What else?

eDay, because every machine eventually dies

Among my tasks is to co-ordinate the Auckland sites for eDay - Cleaning up New Zealand's eWaste!

Recycling electronic waste (e-waste) enables the recovery and reuse of valuable materials and ensures toxic materials are not buried in our landfills - so it's better for our environment.

eDay is a cars-only drive-through recycling event which gives you the opportunity to recycle old computers or mobile phones in an environmentally sustainable way.

Over 16,550 cars dropped off 87,056 items during eDay 2008. A total of 946 tonnes of e-waste was diverted from our landfills. This year we hope to divert over 1,000 tonnes of e-waste from New Zealand landfills.

eDay 2009 is to be held on Saturday 12th September 2009.

If your old machine is sputtering and collapsing, here's your chance to unload it in an environmentally acceptable way. Oh, and if you have half a day spare, we could do with some more volunteers

The linearity problem

Yet another great link from Johnnie that triggers something. No straight lines

I enjoyed Alan Moore's slideshare from Reboot Britain, No Straight Lines. It's worth taking a good look.

Al kicks off with a very funny story about a train journey and an iPod that I won't spoil by summarising. And goes into a passionate diatribe against the limits of linear thinking.

Its not just the lack of linearity that we need to accept, its the lack of sequence. Also not wanting to screw up the joke.

But we almost never learn anything in a stepwise, linear fashion. We grab bits of it passing by, and fiddle with our understanding of them, and sometimes for a long time we "just don't get it" because even when we have all the bits they are like a jigsaw puzzle in a bag, the picture is there but we can't 'see" it.

And some people never do. Especially, paradoxically, those who are best at stuff like computer programming where sequence and excruciating detail is critical. Then one day, apparently without any relevant input, we "get" it.

And I suspect that is where, god help me, real innovation occurs. Someone has most of the bits, but can't make them fit so they create a bit, a new bit that didn't exist before but which connects the thing in an entirely different way

And because the world is NOT a jigsaw puzzle, what happens is that the new bit makes all the old bits fit together in different ways as well. Which is why change can be so disorienting.

We recognise that many of the old bits are there but they are somehow distorted in ways we don't understand. So the response of those who were comfortable with the old ways things worked try to pretend that the old bits still work in the old ways, that its just their perception that is wonky; because to accept that the whole world is wonky is just too much of a challenge.

We are, in effect, betrayed by the proximity to familiarity that wouldn't happen if we, say, suddenly moved to Tanzania and had to learn Swahili to survive. When we shift our entire domain we recognise its foreignness, but when that shift happens around us it takes time to adjust to that suspiciously familiar but actually completely different reality.

That seems to me the problem with peak Oil, with Climate change, with the end of western financial capitalism, it all still LOOKS the same, or closely enough to fool us into believing that we don't have to change anything to deal with the problem.

Wrong.

And one more point about non-linearity, it entails outputs that are grossly inconsistent with the inputs and apparently disconnected from them.

Embedding the payment option

One of the challenges of Micropayments has always been that the transaction costs quickly exceed the transaction value, and that makes great sense for the transaction processor and is totally stupid for everyone else. I've never understood why Telcos, which have solved the micropayment problem years ago didn't put their transaction management services online for everyone and make a bundle.

Well, actually, that's not true, I know why they didn't, it meant losing control of the thing that mattered most to them, the services on the network. As soon as they encourage others to use their payments systems they implicitly encourage others to create services that the Telcos don't own and THAT was anathema.

So, once again, they get trumped. PayPal’s New ‘Open’ Payment Platform Gets Microsoft’s Endorsement

PayPal has ... it’s got its eyes on the newly booming apps and cloud computing market.

The eBay-owned company is opening up its platform to third-party developers this fall, so that everyone from individual app-makers, to social gaming companies and software startups will be able to plug global payment options into their applications from the start.

That means users in different countries, with different currencies, and even on different devices (including mobile phones and set-top boxes) will be able to start paying for apps and services as quickly and securely as they’re used to doing on the desktop.

And during the kickoff of a developer training session for the new “PayPal X” platform, it got an endorsement from arguably one of the most powerful companies in software development today: Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), which announced that it will be supporting PayPal X in its own cloud-computing platform, Windows Azure.

If they can enable us all to embed a payment option such as 'flick earl 20c for an interesting post" or "that YouTube video was worth 10c" and if they can make it simple enough for bunnies like me to USE, they will be on to something really interesting.
Video version