farming
An information service society
Auditory Hallucinations from Offworld Megafarms
Quaker Square Inn
The modernist architect Le Corbusier was an admirer of American grain elevators, suggesting that their regularity and modularity could serve as a model for other kinds of buildings. At least one later architect took the suggestion seriously. The Quaker Square Inn in Akron, Ohio, occupies the shell of a former elevator. If you're in town for the night, you can rent a round room in one of the silos.
Introduction to Permaculture
A Book by Bill MollisonThe conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
In Search of Organic Software
An Article by Pirijan KetheswaranTwo different kinds of farms can grow vegetables. One is a factory farm built for scale, and the other takes the time to grow more expensive but healthier plants without pesticides.
Will everyone appreciate the difference? Of course not, but the latter plants are labelled ‘organic’ to give us the information and the choice, so that those of us who do care can make better decisions.
So maybe we should have ‘organic’ software as well, made by companies that:
- Are not funded in such a way where the primary obligation of the company is to 🎡 chase funding rounds or get acquired (so bootstrapping, crowdfunding, grants, and angel investment are okay)
- Have a clear pricing page
- Disclose their sources of funding and sources of revenue
The Sheaves
A Poem by Edwin Arlington RobinsonWhere long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.So in a land where all days are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay—
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.Data Farming
A Research PaperMiners seek valuable nuggets of ore buried in the earth, but have no control over what is out there or how hard it is to extract the nuggets from their surroundings. ... Similarly, data miners seek to uncover valuable nuggets of information buried within massive amounts of data.
Farmers cultivate the land to maximize their yield. They manipulate the environment to their advantage using irrigation, pest control, crop rotation, fertilizer, and more. Small-scale designed experiments let them determine whether these treatments are effective. Similarly, data farmers manipulate simulation models to their advantage, using large-scale designed experimentation to grow data from their models in a manner that easily lets them extract useful information.
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.
A fly in the spider's web
We're very good at talking about immersive experiences, personalized content, growth hacking, responsive strategy, user centered design, social media activation, retargeting, CMS and user experience. But behind all this jargon lurks the uncomfortable idea that we might be accomplices in the destruction of a platform that was meant to empower and bring people together; the possibility that we are instead building a machine that surveils, subverts, manipulates, overwhelms and exploits people.
It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead — a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.
If you run a website
If you run a website and you put official share buttons on your website, use intrusive analytics platforms, serve ads through a third-party ad network or use pervasive cookies to share and sell data on your users, you're contributing to a user-hostile web. You're using free and open-source tools created by thousands of collaborators around the world, over an open web and in the spirit of sharing, to subvert users.
I chose out
What I'm against is the centralization of services; Facebook and Google are virtually everywhere today. Through share buttons, free services, mobile applications, login gateways and analytics, they are able to be present on virtually every website you visit. This gives them immense power and control. They get to unilaterally make decisions that affect our collective behavior, our expectations and our well-being. You're either with them or out. Well, I chose out.
You see, the web wasn't meant to be a gated community.
What do we want the web to be?
Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? Free, in the spirit of CERN’s decision in 1993 or the open source tools it's built on? Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption, where people become eyeballs, targets and profiles? Where companies use your data to control your behaviour and which enables a surveillance society—what do we want?