PUBLIC MARKS with search destroy

Many people in africa only access the web on a phone. Combine this with Opera Mini which compresses traffic by up to 90% and you have a viable and affordable way to access the internet, perhaps for the first time.

If implemented as planned, all current GPS receivers will no longer operate correctly in areas covered by their system, which include the overwhelming majority of the US population.

To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

A few hours ago I was upgrading our continuous integration setup when a configuration error caused it to run against our production environment rather than our testing environment.

Before every run of our test suite we destroy then re-create the database so that we have a known, clean starting point. This also allows us to continuously integrate topic branches with potentially different database schemas. Due to the configuration error GitHub's production database was destroyed then re-created. Not good.

karl says:

June 3, 2010 at 10:50 pm

Sustainable Web Development can mean many things. I agree with most of the point made here. But it also depends on the layer you are looking at. You are looking at the business layer and makes your points valid for almost any kind of business. These are not specific to the Web.

For developing a sustainable Web, people have to understand the Web first (Information space driven by HTTP and URI). That is a big challenge. hmm Big nope. Huge ;)

Sustainable means creating an ecosystem which has an equilibrium, that you do not destroy at each iteration. My 2010 hated word goes to « refonte » in RFPs. It explains a lot why people do not get the Web and why we do not have a sustainable Web.

I’m still in thinking to try to come up with a good document on how to explain a sustainable Web. Maybe a beer would be better with Olivier, Sylvain and you. ;)

Paper is a hell of a medium. You can shape it, recycle it, repurpose it, you can even eat it. You can't erase it, you can only destroy it. It's made from plants, and you can make it in your kitchen sink.

karlcow said...

Fascinating and very interesting. I may add another law to your experiment, though it would have to be repeated again to see if it's working.

Law 3: A fractal pattern encourages participation.

A fractal pattern is simple enough that the gratification is direct. One can draw a small shape which already makes sense to the person. (I have participated!). But because of the self-structure of fractal pattern, one is participating to a bigger scheme. Sense of collective achievement with grand goals.

Once the structure is big enough, it becomes visible, organized and then it is an object of power, which in return is its weakness. (Colonial states versus Guerrilla/Terrorism). Wikipedia becomes so big that it fights for copyright or have editors censoring content.

Though I kind of disagree with the conclusion of blogs versus wikis. Blogs are indeed easier to maintain but would it be because wikis are not really object of the commons, aka, there is still someone owning the object, it is a property of someone in the end.

I wonder also if there is a density rule in action. A tribe in a large forest with free will to move as they please versus a piece of land with a lot of people. There is very little destruction when the space is infinite. Take the drawing above and imagine a space which is infinite (possible in digital space), would participant try to destroy the work of others or just go further away to do their own drawing?

May 20, 2009 1:50 PM

The nature of corporations as they grow is to become glacial and bureaucratic because no one trusts anyone. You spend half the day reporting on what you do so execs higher up can keep an eye on you because they believe that some how, you're out to destroy the company. And probably, some number of employees are. Or at the very least, not working up to their potential. Here's an idea, do some careful hiring and recruiting, hire people who are excellent at their jobs AND have some moral fiber, and set them loose to do what you hired them for. No one gets hired to fill out status reports, but that's mostly what we all end up doing. So the good people leave for greener, entrepreneurial pastures, and the people happy about status reports stay, get promoted and the whole thing perpetuates itself until you have Yahoo, GM or any other number of glacial bureauracracies.

the only value of valleywag hides in the comments.

What struck me was that locative media practitioners often refer back to the situationists as some kind of ancestors, as if they’re working in the same vein. …

But that, to me, seems to be where the similarities end. As alive-and-kicking situationist muse Jacqueline de Jong pointed out during the evening, the situationists wanted one thing above all else: to destroy and disrupt our cushy society. They were sick of it, vowing never to work a day in their lives. They probably would have laughed if they had seen that their ideas had been cherry-picked for ripe concepts. The derive, the detournement. All simple concepts that they purposefully packaged in complex and artistc jargon. And we fell for it.