Link Latte #18 : Of The Earth

Once upon a time, a spaceship (or the earthling in it) took this photie… and apparently global consciousness evolved as a result.

I don’t know if that’s true. Could be. Could be bollocks – I would have though that with the internet now more or less available more or less everywhere, that some similar sort of thing would happen – that one to one links between people so rich and fat they can hardly move and people who’s lives are gratuitously harsh are made… because there comes a point (there must surely?) where charity goes from being a $30 punt on Karma to an utterly un-resistable human imperative. If you look someone in the eyes… if you see a picture of their mum and dad or their cat… you don’t have a choice but to… help.

Or not. People have lived alongside slaves forever, and there’s more slavery going on today than there ever has been in the past – and a million shades of grey between. In the end, all struggles are class struggles.

Anyway, back to the earth… these links kindof rotate around the earth. Kindof not.

1) Doomsday Ark

“If the human species should be destroyed on Earth, our future may reside on the Moon if plans.being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon by the European Space Agency are carried through. The Ark will contain the essentials of life and human civilization, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war. Or people just becoming stupider and stupider until they can no longer tie their own shoelaces or feed themselves any more”

Reminds me of this for some reason:

2) Bloke To Send Android Into Space

Android in this case being his cellphone rather than his Ken Doll… which is cool because it’s (already) funded via Kickstarter – which in turn is crap because it’s American-only… an in turn cool because the shots are not called by paranoid suits. He’s going to send it up using weather balloons I think, and it will take photographs of things when it’s up there – which is exactly what I would do, if I was up there, only I wouldn’t use a cellphone – unless that’s all I had.

3) Seedcamp goes to Africa

Which is k-for cool because I’m not that interested in eye-candy for western fan-boy jackdaws. Anything really revolutionary is probably going to arise as a response to “market forces” in places where the market doesn’t revolve around people who can afford $20,000 for a car.

Seedcamp is an EU incubator. What would be really cool would be a non-US version of Kickstarter – although it would be interesting to see if The Crowd could filter out the inevitable fraud. My guess is that it could.

Something that turned up over the Kiva Furore – they said they set the thing up and fraud set in almost immediately – so they reorganised around already-on-the-ground micro-banks… in the process deceiving the donors into thinking that their donations made the difference between a project happening or not. Actually all the “stories” in Kiva are all already funded.

4) Share Stuff with your Neighbours

And build stronger communities – although how this differs from file-sharing I don’t know. Every time you share something a kitten dies.

The basic gist of this is a list of stuff that’s kindof surplus to requirements – it reminds me a bit of that… um… um… Deviceknit in which people list stuff that they have lying about and other people list ways of cobbling it all together to do useful stuff.

This in turn reminds me of the geek-box where people send boxes of junk to each other through the post.

5) IKNOgrid

IKNOgrid from INTEGRA renewable energies on Vimeo.

“IKNOgrid è un Sistema “SMART GRID” che permette di poter monitorare a distanza e istante per istante il corretto funzionamento e la reale produzione di un qualsiasi impianto ad energia rinnovabile, segnalando in tempo reale eventuali anomalie, difficilmente rilevabili anche manualmente.”

6) Julian Assange

The Man’s a God. Every time I read something by or about him, he impresses me more. I always wanted (right from when I was a small, delinquent child) to be the next Martin Luther. It’s not going to be me – or even one person… it’s going to be a whole load of people – and one of them is Julian Assange.

The Feds have been trying to arrest him apparently. Fuck that. The forces of anti-bubbledom are abroad

Fascism is already here – it’s just diluted… this is what we’re up against… creeping, privatised authoritarianism. All Authority is inherently illegitimate, and bears the burden of proof – it must prove it’s legitimacy, to those that it would govern. If it can’t do this, then it must be dismantled.

We need to fight back, and we need to fight back hard. We’re all Spartaci now – and exposure is the one of the best weapons we have.

Lights on; Rats out.

7) Ridley Scott to crowdsource documentary via YouTube

He’s been flirting with this sort of thing for a while I think – there was that blade-runnery thing. Purefold – which could be a cynical corporate attempt to mine public ideas, or something else. I wish him luck – he’s done some excellent stuff.

Tempting though it is, I’m not sure if I’ll submit any of my own day… It’ll get ignored. It always does. Maybe I’ll make an alternative version which takes the piss. I mean the official version is going to be all “worthy” and TED-like isn’t it?

8) Deviant Globalisation. Listen to this. It’s brilliant.

9) Air Multiplier Fans

Brilliant. Nothing to do with anything.