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In Conversation: Jaron Lanier and James Bridle On Who Owns the Future? from The School of Life on Vimeo.

There are some interesting similarities between a recent proposal commissioned by the French government and the book out by Jaron Lanier just now “Who Owns The Future?”

Last week we were on something of a tear continuously shipping things (it beats continuous integration). As Kars mentioned in the Hubbub weeknotes I was featured in the rather shiny TNW magazine about the subject of gamification. Much to my surprise this issue was filled with blabbering by Gabe Zichermann. It’s not only that we take issue with the way he approaches games, it looks like everything about the man is shameful. You can read unparalleled levels of douchebaggery over at Kevin Slavin and to my dismay even GigaOM 1 is complicit.

It seems to be not completely obvious how to host a website on heroku while at the same time also maintaining e-mail delivery. You would think that this is a very common situation and it would be well documented but unfortunately it is not.

Hi Niels & Kars,

A bunch of stuff I did last week is summarized nicely at the Hubbub weeknotes. This is going to happen more and more often, so these weeknotes may become at risk. We’ll see what happens.

I swore to myself never to go to the theater again 1 which took a lot of the pressure off. But yesterday I did go to see V. in Ballhaus Ost. The posters hanging around town piqued my interest that a group in Berlin would stage a text by Thomas Pynchon. And if anyone should break my rules, it should be me.

My small project during Swhack was to create a django version of a delegated voting system partially inspired by Liquid Feedback and the manyfold problems that system has 1. In particular that it is written on such an esoteric stack 2 that it is near impossible to get running without root on a Linux machine and let’s not even discuss the maintenance. What is even worse is that it makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to join the project and contribute to it significantly.

Besides the immense amount of things we did over at Hubbub last week, I also spent a lot of time doing various other things which sort of amazed me to be honest.

Last Monday Uber had drinks here in Berlin and took a complimentary Uber there to chat with their Berlin team. The experience was extremely comfortable but given big city traffic it wasn’t very fast 1. In cities where the cab market is unreliable and corrupt I can definitely imagine the appeal of Uber. People working on transit apps should take note, this is the way it should work.

Recess! is a correspondence series with personal ruminations on games.

Here in the Berlin office we grind by hand:

So this Saturday Jan Lehnardt and I are having a small hackathon here in Berlin in remembrance of Aaron Swartz and to in one small way continue doing the work that needs to be done on the internet, in government and especially where those two meet.

All of the books I read are to be found on Goodreads but here is my year’s overview because it is customary to do these things. I count 23 which is not too shabby but should be improved upon (always).

Recovering from flu meant a week of mostly broken days, but still got a lot done and more importantly: got better.

German friends some things need to be written but don’t take them personally. If anything, as I write below, this presents a very large opportunity for who will take it.

With most of my work focusing at Hubbub these days, the weeknotes over there (the past week) are going to form the meat of my work in the foreseeable future 1. I may need to use these weeknotes as an excuse for long form writing again and blog more here in general on loose ideas.

I got things back running again. Did a bunch of work on TORREON. Most Hubbub stuff is in a weeknote over there now that I am writing now alternating with Kars Alfrink.

I followed the last CCC from a distance reading the Twitter fallout and keeping track of the live streams while getting work done in an empty Berlin. Besides the various controversies playing out, there were some good talks. What I found to be the best of the event was “Long live the protocoletariat” by Eleanor Saitta (@dymaxion) and Smári McCarthy (@smarimc) about a topic that is very near to the things I am thinking about: institutions and networks and all of the opportunities and problems associated with them. The presentation in the first thirty minutes of this video is well worth watching. Pull quotes below are paraphrases.

A couple of weeks ago I and judging from Twitter almost everybody I knew read Quinn Norton’s Eulogy for #Occupy. Her coverage for Wired and her twitter stream had already broadcast an almost minute to minute beat of events in the movement. That account finally culminated in this retelling of the camps and the evictions crowned with a tally of the movements hopes and achievements. It is one of the journalistic highlights of 2012.

Nothing much happened during the Christmas week before, so I decided to skip that note. Most of Berlin shut down into a deep hibernation normally only witnessed in student towns.

One recap of 2012 which was an odd year what with the international move and all. Still in the second half I managed to get a lot of travel in leaving aside the almost monthly trips to Amsterdam by train. Dopplr unfortunately does not give me a total amount of kilometers travelled for 2012 anymore.

Last Monday was the last day in Berlin before the holidays so something of a push here and there to get things to go through. That night we had a vvvv workshop at the studio hosted by Joreg to teach somewhere around eight people the basics of node based graphical environments (the only other one I had used extensively before was Open DX and of course there’s Quartz Composer and Impure Quadrigram).

Ik ben even in de e-mail archieven gedoken om mijn recensie-arbeid voor de nrc.next te verzamelen. Naast wat er al op het ter-ziele-gegane Bashers staat, zal ik de rest hier posten.

I’m sitting in the train and get passed a link to a piece from Süddeutsche Zeitung about the internet and its sharing culture. This being my more-or-less favorite German newspaper, I dig into it expecting it to yield a solid piece of thought that will cause me to reflect on my online behaviour.

Last week was a week without travel or deadlines so a lot of stuff that had been lying around for too long got done.

Horribly late but here goes anyway. On Monday I briefly dropped by the Makers Loft and finally managed to see the Third Wave crew again.

At the start of the week I managed to upload a batch of trip pictures (the China section) but after things went quickly downhill.

I read Consider the Lobster as a bit of a reprieve from the book guilt Infinite Jest still casts over my night stand and as a long overdue requiem to the literary colossus DFW is. Here’s the stuff I found noteworthy:

I picked up a Monocle at Sydney airport for a long flight without laptop (along with a book) and I was a bit disappointed 1 in finding that the magazine hadn’t progressed much since I first read it years ago. It still is that strangely a-political collection of fluff pieces for the spendy class and because of the current realities of print publishing now also brimful of advertorials.

After some weeks traveling to Beijing and Australia, last week I was back in Europe, touching down in Amsterdam Tuesday morning early. I had a very nice flight in from Sydney with the only annoyance being that my laptop had broken upon arrival there. This made me spend half a day of the two I had there in the Bondi Apple Store trying to figure out what the problem was.

I’m sitting here at Beijing Airport writing these too late weeknotes on their free WiFi 1 which is an oddly implemented but still excellent service.

Last week I presented at the Berlin Ignite. I had been present at the last one and greatly enjoyed, so I looked what I could add to the mix.

Just to start a series here about ways in which German society could be organized more sensibly 1 2.

Yesterday we went to see Werner Herzog read from his own work in ‘Erroberung des Nutzlosen’ at the Volksbühne. While an impressive display of authorship my enjoyment of the performance was hampered by me having no knowledge of his movies and a recent aversion towards the theater.

Last Saturday I made it out to the penultimate day of the exhibition of the Selim Varol Collection in the me collectors room here in Berlin. I’m glad I did. This was one of the most complete and stunning collections of contemporary toys and subversive art on display anywhere.

I recently discovered the fan fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by the esteemed Eliezer Yudkowsky (I used to read his friendly AI stuff back in the day) and having never read any Harry Potter 1 I still immensely enjoyed this.

I read this pamphlet (at Gutenberg) by Thomas Paine a while back on a mountain. However short it may be it packs a massive punch and is brimful with powerful rhetoric. It also contains a rather definitive argument against monarchy. Highly recommended.

Last week I built a new version of the Pig Chase client for the final test in the stables (more on which later).

I biked over tonight to see the installation PIVOT by Jacob Kirkegaard at the leap in Berlin 1 before it finishes tomorrow.

Work on the Pigs continues though my part is sort of finished now. The rest of the team is very busy getting the thing into the stable.

I just pulled out this stuff from my weeknote into a separate post because I think it merited it.

I didn’t make it out to dConstruct which I’m a bit torn about. I’ve been to the conference some three times and this year other priorities trumped it and going to conferences in general. But the program this year was even more stellar than regular years. Seeing either Ben Hammersley, Tom Armitage or James Burke (!) present would be worth the ticket price alone without exaggerating a lot.

A massively eventful week that for me took place mostly in Amsterdam where I had tons of catching up to do after a holiday absence of I believe over two months. In between moving offices and traveling, work on kohi moved on apace. We may have something usable by a slightly wider audience somewhere in the next week.

I’ll include here Hubbub’s two reasons for celebration which were also reasons for me to celebrate and I’ll add a third in a bit. These really are the weeks when a lot of stuff is happening, being built and delivered. Not that much time for idle talk and reflection, though that too will return.