Program or be programmed quote by Douglas Rushkoff

I’ve just finished Program or be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff. It’s a relatively short read (approx 150 pages) and tries to explain the need for understanding technology and creating (with) technology instead of just using it. I’m a advocate for programming literacy striving towards making people aware of the influence of technology on our society, so I just had to read what Rushkoff has to say about this.

At first I was not so impressed. The first chapters mostly felt like filler content. Actually I can’t even remember the main arguments brought forward in those chapters. However the last chapter really made up for this lack of content in the first chapters. I think the quote below sums this up nicely:

“For the person who understands code, the whole world reveals itself as a series of decisions made by planners and designers for how the rest of us should live. Not just computers, but everything from the way streets are organized in a town to the way election rules (are tilted for a purpose vote for any three candidates) begin to look like what they are: sets of rules developed to promote certain outcomes. Once the biases become apparent, anything becomes possible. The world and its many arbitrary systems can be hacked.”

Source: Program or be programmed

Auteursrechtgesprek zondag 18 april

Voor diegene die interesse hebben in cultuur en auteursrecht is er morgen een vertoning van RIP, a remix manifesto in het Louis Hartlooper Complex in Utrecht.

Na afloop is er een gesprek/discussie over auteursrecht en muziekcultuur. Hierbij zal ik Paul Keller (Creative Commons Nederland) vervangen als moderator. Verdere deelnemers aan dit gesprek zijn Pitto (DJ, winnaar Grote Prijs van Nederland in de categorie dance), Joost Gerritsen (De Gier | Stam & Advocaten) en Mirko Tobias Schaefer (faculteit Geesteswetenschappen UU). Meer info is hier te vinden: http://www.xpertcmkb.nl/?p=1527

The future is here: RepRap – a 3D replication printer for personal use -

“If RepRap is succesfull a number of changes may well happen in society. The principal one of them will be that we have the distribution of the
manufacture of goods. At the moment economics scale it means that it is sensible for goods to be manufactured in factories and then to be shipped to the individual people who wish to have these goods using a complicated transport system. If RepRap takes off and increases its abilities by evolution to manufacture more and more products, then people having these machines in their homes will be no longer a need, or no longer such a big need for factories to make the goods they want. When they want something it will simply be a question of downloading it from the web, in the way they currently do with music, a film or anything else. That downloaded file would then allow them to manufacture whatever object is was they wanted in their own home.[...]”

Check the embedded movie below by RepRap.org from which I took this quote (starts around 5:14) by Adrian Bowyer from. The RepRap raises a lot of interesting questions, such as is personal fabrication another nail in the coffin of intellectual property? Looking forward to this publication: “The Intellectual Property Implications Of Low-Cost 3D Printing by Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe.” which as far as I can see will be available online here, the 15th of April.

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