hi there!<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 2:44 AM, Patrick Anderson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:agnucius@gmail.com">agnucius@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">Geert Lovink wrote:<br>
> After that I am keen to discuss alternatives like Crabgrass<br>
<br>
</div>I wonder how we will share the hardware needed to host those kinds of<br>
Free Software...<br>
<br>
I can't seem to find any discussion of that difficult step.<br>
<br>
I have some ideas about how to approach the problem, but don't know if<br>
this is an appropriate forum for such a discussion?<br>
<br>
Even more aggressively I want to talk about how we, the users, can own<br>
and control the entire physical layer to become a Free as in Freedom<br>
ISP and cell-phone services, etc.<br>
</blockquote></div><br>this is an extremely interesting point. And, over time, it has been the center of multiple discussion.<br><br>probabily we will see a transformation. we are in a transformation. in which many things are changing including the idea of public/private, of where/how/what/howmany is your body or identity and, specifically for this discussion, how you communicate/relate to and with other people. social networks have been an important step in all of this, because they're perceived mostly as a place. and we are going even more in this direction as we can see in the slow, but steady, rise of networks such as foursquare and all the other ones that are describing human beings that are constantly connected and that are definitely adding their digital domains to their physical bodies, mutating attitudes and in a way describing ne forms of openness, ethics and relationalities in which, for example, digitally disclosing your physical location is a perfectly acceptable part of the game.<br>
<br>corporations and other forms of centralized power would love to grab a hold on these possibilities. and they probabily already are doing it: they have the servers, the networks, the designers, the masses...<br><br>but we will probabily see some suprises arising from the ethnographic scenarios which we experience. <br>
<br>We are confronting a world which is progressively more formed by poor people living in slums and constantly using mobile devices. This is a reality that is clear and undeniable. <br><br>This world will eventually find the use for other forms of networks whose base technologies are already here: meshed networks, p2p protocols, proximity (or extended-proximity) technologies, wearables, new forms of displays.<br>
<br>This ever-extending set of technlogies describes not the current networking scenario, but more a different one, in which "I" act as a service provider. A service provider whose "product" is myself: both my presence, my information and my ability of being a bridge for "you" to connect to other relations, information and data.<br>
<br>meshed networks are breakthrough in this. networks are created just-in-time and just-in-place and, difficult as it seems, there are usage scenarios in which you can possibly build entire geographical networks in this way. All built on single-person ISPs providing a service ranging on a radius around them. <br>
<br>imagine a p2p social network in which you are the provider, just as well as your "friends" are, just as well as the people whose neighborhoods you're traversing. When you're on, your piece of network exists, when you're off it doesn't: et voilą, the social network enters your body in a totally different way. A way on which entire (p2p) economies can be built, and opportunities for self-expression, autodetermination and of empowerment for what concerns the possibility of claiming one's own strategies for privacy, liberty or expression.<br>
<br>i see this as being the most significant direction for mutation right now. Both on the infrastructural and communicational levels. and one that fits perfectly in the scenario that is currently being described by digital networks on a global scale. which is the one of the favela, more than the one of a happy global network of collaborating people.<br>
<br>cheers,<br>xDxD<br>