Back by popular demand: the Minimal Compact

Ever since v-2.org went down for the count, I get a fair number of requests to repost this minifesto on “open-source constitutions for post-national entitites,” from 2003. It’s goofy, it’s naïve, it’s grandiose and pompous…and I present it to you now exactly as I wrote it then. Enjoy!

0. Introduction, purpose and scope

In recognition of the apparent inability of nation states to adequately address and provide for human goals and desires in the twenty-first century, and anticipating that if anything this situation will only worsen, it is desirable to begin thinking about alternatives to this obsolescing structure.

Of interest are alternatives that are designed from the beginning to

- Ensure the greatest freedom for the greatest number, without simultaneously abridging the freedoms of others.

- Permit individuals with common goals and beliefs to act in their own interest at the global level and with all the privileges afforded nation states, even when those individuals are separated by distance.

- Provide robust resistance to attempts to concentrate power, and other abuses of same.

This paper is intended to sketch, however schematically, just such an alternative.

A basic distinction needs to be made immediately: that between “freedom from” and “freedom to.” “Freedom to” is a positive assertion of rights. The individual may be free to work, to not work, free to speak, free to believe or to not believe…free to steal, free to rape, free to murder.

As Locke made most clear, liberty conceived solely in terms of “freedom to” will always result in an atomic society where some human beings exploit the freedom afforded them to oppress others. This is unacceptable in any human community, and potentially suicidal when allowed to play out at the global scale.

Further, and more pragmatically, it is my belief that explicit provisions of “freedom to” can never be comprehensive, since the total range of human situations can never be anticipated in any written constitution, no matter how flexible or how frequently updated.

The minimal compact is only interested in “freedom from,” proceeding from the belief that it is quite sufficient to guarantee an explicit refuge from all forms of compulsion to provide for human happiness. Liberty when construed as “freedom from” has the important advantage of tending to organize a commons, a space where mutual, overlapping, conflicting or unilateral interests may be negotiated. Accordingly, “though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence.”

(This negative definition will prove unacceptable to many libertarians, for whom only an absolute guarantee under law of personal freedom is acceptable. Of course, as we shall see, Compact communities motivated by libertarian beliefs could very easily offer a “distribution” supplementing the core articles with locally-binding provisions intended to further enhance the individual’s prerogatives. They are quite welcome to do so, as long as such articles do not abridge the core agreement.)

The question then becomes, what kinds of constitutional structures are appropriate to furthering the stated aims in an internetworked, interdependent age? What sorts of arrangements of power between humans can account for the deep variation in beliefs and assumptions among the six billion of us who share this planet, while still providing for a common jurisprudence? What measures can be taken that enhance the common security without unduly infringing on the sovereignty of the individual?

I believe that a useful model for the desired structure can be found in the open-source or “free” software movement . This mode (and ethos) of development provides several fertile metaphors, not least the basic, deeply appealing idea of a voluntary global community empowered and explicitly authorized to reverse-engineer, learn from, improve and use-validate its own tools and products.

Given the open-source software movement’s self-evident success in spurring the spontaneous cooperation of a widely dispersed community, in an impressively short period of time, without recourse to conventional incentives, it has to be taken seriously as a potential source of organizing principles for other realms of human endeavor. (An added attraction is that open-source software is generally held to be superior in utility, adaptability and robustness to proprietary alternatives.)

Of particular interest in the present context is the concept of a “codebase,” a core of universally-recognized and accepted instructions maintained on a public registry, and a “distribution,” which offers a praxis for supporting locally differing, self-contained (but essentially interoperable) variations on the single codebase.

Taking these concepts as model, the agreement under contemplation in this paper, the minimal compact, proposes a post-national, virtual state: a hyperlocal polity whose constitution is conceived as codebase. Such a constitution would specify a minimum number of articles to which all signatories subscribe, allowing an instantiation of the state to form anywhere and anywhen one or more signatories is present.

Instantiations are free to supplement the core agreement with an arbitrary number of articles appropriate to local contexts, and are further invited to submit such innovations to a central (but distributed) registry for prospective enactment by other signatory communities, or potentially adoption into the core framework.

Provided thusly, the state could manifest in and adapt to widely separated locations and contexts, much as anyone can produce, package and release distributions of “free” software, so long as the distribution itself offers in turn the same provisions for free licensure.

While I personally have deep social-democratic, Buddhist, feminist and environmental leanings, the minimal compact as presented makes no provision for any of these beliefs. It enshrines no particular viewpoint.

These articles would guarantee the signatory certain inalienable and unabridgeable rights, prescribe certain modes for resolution of the inevitable conflicts between signatories - and no more. They would remain explicitly mute as to questions of a community’s internal organization, ethical or moral norms, modes of resource allocation, ethnic or linguistic composition, and so on. The articles merely suffice to establish an arena for individuals and communities to pursue their ends in ways that are maximally mutually beneficial.

Lastly, while it should be noted that the minimal compact is not an “Internet state” proper, it has certain natural affinities with the logic and original underlying ethos of the Internet, and would be effectively impossible without access to the cheap, reliable, global communication it affords.

0.1 Version notes

Inasmuch as I am neither a historian nor a constitutional-law scholar, I have deliberately limited the ambit and scope of this version of this document - and even so, I fear that it reads like an overly ambitious first-year law student’s essay. It is in the nature of a request for comments.

Please note that this version does not specify the actual content of the prospective compact, in the recognition that any such content must arise from a deep and ongoing collaborative process to have any legitimacy.

1.0 The minimal compact: aims and goals

The French and American Revolutions, with their motivating beliefs inscribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) and the Bill of Rights (1789, ratified 1791) resident in the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed the consent of the human citizen as the ultimate source of all constitutional legitimacy.

The minimal compact (when instantiated, “Compact”) exists to reinscribe and extend this logic.

The Declaration understood sovereignty to “[reside] essentially in the nation,” but located the source of legitimacy in the consent of the governed. From the present vantage point, this seems to be an artifact of a social and technical milieu which required layers of representation and mediation between citizen and deliberative body in order to function efficiently. Believing purely representative democracy to be not merely a suboptimal compromise but an unwarranted infringement on the prerogatives of the citizen, the Compact intends to disintermediate, and accordingly understands sovereignty to vest in the individual human person, within limits as defined herein.

Let there be no mistake: this is in spirit essentially a post-Enlightenment, High Modernist project, with necessary adaptions to a world which is understood to be neither stable, nor perfectly knowable. Implicit in this document is a belief that human beings can at least contingently agree on the meaning and importance of concepts such as “freedom” and “rights.”

1.0 Why minimal?

As a practical matter, it is unlikely that effective percentages of the planetary citizenry could be persuaded to adopt any framework that spoke to anything other than an essential core of agreed principle. (As things stand, it is already easy to caricature this project as guilelessly utopian.)

Accordingly, the minimal compact framework has been designed to address only those issues absolutely necessary to guarantee individual sovereignty and support communities of sovereign individuals.

Equally, simple, unambiguous statements in natural language make for clear decisions. Whether these are the “right” or the best decisions can only be determined in the light of lived experience.

2.0 Why post-national?

The current perception of nation states as essentially moribund stems from a variety of heterogeneous sources, not least of which is personal experience. At the very least, it is inarguable that the nation state is the subject of increasing centrifugal tensions - power devolving both upward (toward transnational and global agreements), outward (toward hyperlocal media such as CNN, nongovernmental organizations) and downward (toward regional, local, metropolitan, watershed, ethnic and other constituencies, as well as various forms of “direct democracy”).

This tension is expressed acutely in Albertsen and Diken’s paper “Mobility, Justification and the City.” Albertsen and Diken define power as inherently mobile “action at a distance,” while understanding politics to hinge on a “hopelessly local” reliance on concentration, reflection and dialogue. Following this recognition, they diagnose an “increasing gap between power and politics”: the inherent mobility of power in a networked age appears to be inimical to the civic and communal virtues that politics depends on vitally.

The immanent polity: Portable citizenship for a mobile age

Partially, this is due to the survival of the historical identification of polity and territory into an age in which the binding makes little practical sense. The historian Eric Hobsbawm usefully defines a nation-state as “a bounded territory with its own autonomous institutions”; our present interest is in decoupling allegiance from territoriality, finding physical location to be a remarkably poor predictor of a person’s deepest beliefs and motivations.

As Marxists have always understood, a truck driver from Atlanta may well have more in common with a truck driver from Antwerp than either has with a psychologist or a graphic designer of their respective nationalities.

This is less an issue of class, however, than of interest and affinity; as well, the crude Marxian analysis utterly misses the fact that people are far “thicker” than a job title can ever suggest: extraordinary complexes of tastes, experiences, predilections, prejudices, and preferences.

The minimal compact is intended to allow for the formation of polities organized around whatever axis (or axes) of affinity the individual finds most definitive, rather than sintering people selected by a common accident of birth into a notional community. It is anticipated that the formation of such polities would go some way toward resolving the contradiction identified by Albertsen and Diken (following Virilio, Bauman and others), in that the Compact’s common framework for the resolution of political questions has been endowed with the same quality of escape enjoyed by power itself.

The rights and responsibilities of citizenship are thus made portable, set free to follow their holder wherever he or she may venture or settle in the physical world.

Subsume, not supplant

Realistically, any hope for usefully widespread adoption of the contemplated framework resides in the ability of elites privileged by status quo ante arrangements to perceive an enlightened self-interest in a world governed by Compact. To this end, it is recommended that a great deal of thought be given to the problem of how to reformulate nation states as Compact states.

In a similar manner to those nationalists of various European origins who feel able to maintain an autonomous national and linguistic identity as citizens of the European Union, adherents to one or another national identity should be made to feel that many essential elements of their Greekness or Americanness or Chineseness would survive under the aegis of a minimal compact.

3.0 Why open-source?

As has been mentioned, the open-source or “free” software movement represents an intriguing nexus of ideas about the constitution of arbitrarily distal individuals into a community, and features of emergent cooperation and self-correction among the members of that community. Seeing how and why these innovations may be relevant to the political realm requires a more detailed analysis of the movement’s provisions.

Open-source software is effectively a grant of intellectual property to the public domain, with certain licensure provisions designed to ensure that the insights literally encoded in it remain public and available for free use and reuse. Here, for example, is gnu.org’s natural-language definition of “free” software:

Free software…refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that
the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for
this.

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms. Thus, you should be free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission.

You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way…

In order for these freedoms to be real, they must be irrevocable as long as you do nothing wrong; if the developer of the software has the power to revoke the license, without your doing anything to give cause, the software is not free.

Key to this understanding is that users are free to make any desired modification to the code at all, except those that restrict the freedoms enunciated in the license. From version 2 of GNU General Public License, June 1991:

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights…

This guarantee of free self-replication in perpetuity gives open-source software several important advantages that packaged, proprietary software does not share. By lowering the barriers to entry associated with proprietary code - notably, cost and technical controls on reproduction - open-source code is “released into the wild,” made available for use and testing by a highly-motivated international community of largely self-educated programmers, each pursuing their own end.

A free software advocate named Rob Bos put it this way, in February 1999:

Open source programs are tried and proven, they are constantly pressed from every direction to do specific tasks, and do them well; and for the simple reason that they are written to work, not simply to sell copies. Free software doesn’t just work better, it works orders of magnitude better. Open sourcing an application gives the source code to a large number of developers, instead of a small, tight group. Free software projects have a pool of developers and an effective budget multiple times higher than an equivalent proprietary development project, and will, given all other equal things, advance at a rate many times faster because of their access to an much larger development team. Peer review of code isn’t just a pipe dream, it is an essential means to writing superior applications, no matter where they are written.

What would this logic look like, if extended to the documents that organize governance of human polities? Would conceiving of a given state’s constitution as analogous to a distribution of open-sourced software help resolve any of the issues that beset the nation state? (This is the original question that inspired the concept of a minimal compact.)

Some features of states with “open-source” constitutions are foreseeable. Such a state is:

- Flexible, adaptive and extensible: Given an inviolable core agreement of principles, a mechanism to supplement this body of understanding, and a registrar to maintain the current version, the state is free to adapt to local circumstances. In areas where the Compact is mute, there can be no puzzling over (nor recourse to) the “framers’ intention.”

Human communities are free to build their jurisprudence upon Compact principles, and are encouraged not merely to innovate but to refer these innovations to the registrar for prospective adoption in a future version of the Compact. Ultimately, it is hoped, “modules” governing various features of state policy could be promulgated in such a way, such that a given state could be quickly characterized as a “core plus 1a2d3b” or “1b2d3c” polity.

- Infinitely reproducible and nonlocal: Much in the way “ad-hoc” wireless networks arise and subside as needed, a sovereign Compact state appears wherever and whenever one or more Compact signatories appears. Law is thus freed from dependence on national or statutory borders; no longer does jurisdiction or venue override the rights afforded an individual.

- Interoperable and mutual: Compact states constitute a “metapolity,” a hyperstate within which interaction is intended to be as nearly frictionless as possible. No matter what their other features, states recognizing the Compact by definition uphold the provisions specifying free flows of people, ideas and information.

In order to preserve the rights afforded Compact members, as well as the economic advantages that flow as a consequence of membership in the ultimate free-trade zone (hopefully, sufficiently strong incentive), all signatories are enjoined to extend this full range of core freedoms to all other signatories.

- Highly robust: As open-source software is constantly tested and validated by its community of users, and suboptimal code reformulated, so the Compact is continually acid-tested by its signatories. By setting local communities free to innovate by the thousandfold; by providing for the incorporation of provisions that have been found to enhance the viability of signatory communities, promote wider-spread adoption, or otherwise further Compact goals into the core agreement; and by similarly providing for the deletion of provisions that tend to work against such goals, this framework searches the space of possible constitutional forms more efficiently than comparable political arrangements.

Interestingly, when taken together, all the above also implies that the Compact metapolity is effectively indestructible, at least from without, at any level below that of literal extinction. With no national targets to strike at, no particular real estate or symbolic center, for strategic purposes the Compact is a state with “no there there.” As Deleuze and Guattari said of their figure of the rhizome:

You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed…may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.

That the Internet, also, famously “routes around failure” in just such a manner only buttresses the contention that communities self-consciously constituted in this way are harnessing usefully robust organizing principles.

4.0 A minimal compact

It is left to future discussions to determine the exact shape and nature of a minimal compact such as the one proposed herein. However, in pursuit of the goals outlined in section 1 above, the following provisions seem essential:

- Signing the Compact must always be understood to be a purely voluntary act.
- Each signatory is recognized as sovereign by all other signatories, granted the full range of powers traditionally accorded states (“…to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do”) except as such conflict with other provisions.
- Other national citizenships or other affiliations may be maintained, without limitation. No such affiliation should be nullified by the act of signing the Compact, at least not as concerns the Compact community itself. (The other institutions affected may well have their own opinions.)
- At risk of the forfeiture of their Compact citizenship, no signatory may enforce any rule, regulation or policy that abrogates or nullifies any of the provisions of the Compact.
- No signatory to the Compact may take any measure to abridge the freedoms of any other signatory in good standing, to include without limit life, liberty, association, belief, and expression.

Also left undetermined by this document are the necessary provisions for modification of the core Compact by all signatories, for maintenance of the central registry, for forfeiture of citizenship, and for the resolution of other critical questions (e.g., may only natural human persons be signatories?).

Those interested in helping to formulate and test these provisions are asked to contact the author at the address listed on the cover page.

6.0 Conclusion: Democracy for the rest of us.

All of the above is offered in the hope that that the times are once again propitious for attempts to extend the ambit of our personal freedoms - this time, in ways that establish a more robust, more permanent foundation for these freedoms on an essential respect for other members of the human community.

Steve Mann’s concept of sousveillance (“watchful vigilance from underneath”) provides one welcome model for renegotiating the terms of control, but it does not go far enough. The minimal compact goes yet one step further, with its implicit faith that the ordinary human being is capable of assuming the burden for self-determination the nation state paternalistically denies us.

We can take back an appropriate measure of control over the circumstances that literally govern our lives - we the uncredentialed, the nonexpert. We can teach ourselves what we need to learn, share whatever knowledge we glean, build on the insights of the others engaged in the same efforts. Just as the novice programmer is invited to learn from, understand, and improve upon - to “hack” - open-source software, the minimal compact invites us to demystify and reengineer government at the most intimate and immediate level. We can hack democracy.

It is my great hope that this paper is received as it is intended: in the spirit of the movement that inspired it, it is the free contribution of a self-educated, motivated amateur. It is not intended to be anything but a beginning, and it is certainly not a “bulletproof” or definitive statement of any of the principles proposed within.

Although I am indebted to Joshua Ellis, Anne Galloway, Joi Ito, Nurri Kim, Fabio Sergio, Robin Skyler, and all the various authors and sources cited for their contributions and suggestions, the viewpoints and opinions contained herein are the author’s alone, as are any errors in interpretation, in fact or understanding.

Mission time: D+14,471

Solitude is an inescapable quality of the serious endeavor of writing, something I realize now that I simultaneously missed and did not miss in the slightest.

In order to get anything done, I find that I have to lever myself up and out of my usual routines and rededicate myself to the mission, solely. This generally means trooping off to the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room, one of the city’s greatest spaces, and a splendid aid to contemplation in and of itself. And there I sit, immersed in nothing but the job and its paraphernalia, for as long as I can stand it.

“Stand it,” because I don’t, by nature, have amazing powers of concentration. This is ordinarily something I self-medicate with massive doses of caffeine. But coffee isn’t an option in the Library. And since a limited attention span is a pretty implacable thing, and given that there’s not a whole hell of a lot to distract me from the screen in front of me, I inevitably get a lot of unfocused thinking done, too.

Mostly this is of the staring-off-into-space variety. If there’s any theme at all to this musing, it’s time, time and its passage. And this is how I come to realize that I’m coming up on fifteen thousand days in.

There’s no particular significance to this number, mind you. It’s just that the image of a master lifeclock is kind of an idée fixe for me. (In the shitty, never-to-be-published SF novel I wrote in the early 90s, one of the characters had a glowing ELAPSED LIFE TIME tattoo on her bicep, subdermal LEDs powered by turbines in the arteries beneath.) And running such calculations is an ideal way to burn cycles while I’m waiting to bank up enough patience to again deal with Lefebvre, or whatever.

Digit counters falling. (Accompanied in the imagination by a flat, muffled click, as if the operations of the universe ran on a circa-’72 woodtone Sony clock radio.) Time and aloneness. Unreturned messages and the cavernous space of the Reading Room. When you finally get your hands on this book, that’s what will be lying underneath every word on the page.

Ravintola Tour ‘08!

(= my single favorite word in the Finnish language, meaning “restaurant.” Roll the “r” a touch for proper effect.)

So I’m back from London and Helsinki, having had a lightning good time, some top-notch food, and a brace of amazing conversations. Oh, and also an impromptu introduction to Tampere, courtesy of a two-hour air traffic controllers’ strike.

Someday very soon I’ll be able to spill the beans about what this is all about. In the meantime: too great to do Café Aalto with Jan and Keiko, Torni’s Ateljee Bar with Arabella and her boy, Andrew Edmunds and Fernandez & Wells with Chris Heathcote and Akseli Anttila, and the Blue Posts with a major chunk of the London crew. I pronounce myself very well fed.

Minor thread

So, again - and I know I say this as if I’ve just figured it out for the first time, but I believe that this is something always worth reinscribing - one of the magnificent things about living in one of Earth’s great cities is that there’s something on just about every single night of the week, no matter what or how obscure your taste.

Any serious metropolitan area is such an almighty catchment basin for talent and interest that the odds of finding something you’ll like are in your favor, and this is true even if your predilections run to “difficult” media. I really cherish spaces dedicated to such minor tastes, which always share a certain common otaku vibe, no matter how institutionally serious they are, no matter what city they happen to be rooted in.

In New York, this means venues like Printed Matter, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives, or the late, much-lamented Tonic at the more institutional end of the scale, and sundry others still more grassrootsy and nomadic.

The space we went to last night was definitely one of the latter. Issue Project Room, relocated in the relatively recent past to a former factory building in lovely Gowanus, is basically a single blind room deeper and taller than it is wide, roofed with craquelured old beams, provisioned with a grid of suspended speakers, and lit (for performance, anyway) solely by flickering candlelight: the ideal environment for an evening of immersive minimal music.

This is head music, to be honest. What you would have seen, had you poked your head through Issue’s front door around quarter to midnight, was thirty-odd people sitting or lying on the floor, journeying inside themselves with nary a booty shaking. This is clearly not to everybody’s liking on a Saturday Friday night, but it suited us to a T.

My own clear favorite of the three acts on the bill was Brooklynite James Elliott, performing under the name Ateleia. If you can imagine a region of sound roughly described by a less evil Scorn, a heavier My Bloody Valentine, and a Growing with actual beats, well, somewhere in there is where you’ll find Ateleia.

All of which implies, correctly, that Elliot’s music is something that you really have to experience live to get the full impact; as with Growing, we snapped up the discs he had on offer, and found on getting home that even a decent sound system did the music no justice. (Both technically and because I do try to be a good neighbor, I just couldn’t push things Heavy enough.)

It’s being able to act on that imperative to witness the live and unmediated performance that makes me so grateful to live in a place that supports spaces like Issue - and, of course, so acutely concerned that the economics of real estate are making it more and more difficult for places like this to survive in New York. They’re the true laboratories, playgrounds and test sites of creativity - and any city deserving of the name had damn well better make sure it can provide for them, lest it become a net consumer of culture, rather than a producer.

Jane Says/Gates to the city

There are few things more wonderful in life than walking down the front steps of the New York Public Library, out into the bustle of rush-hour Fifth Avenue and what remains unseasonably warm weather, having just read this:

When I get home after work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo. This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s; this is the time when teen-agers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG’s; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know around Hudson Street will go by.

That’s Jane Jacobs, it hardly needs to be said, whose Death and Life of Great American Cities I am subjecting to a particularly close re-reading as part of my City Is Here research.

This is very much a description of a certain place at a certain time; I can’t help but note the orthographic (”drug store”, “fruit stand,” “teen-agers,” all now collapsed in standard usage) and material (“bottletops,” “butcher’s,” “slips”) tells. Right down to the fire engines, this is also the world of the Bank Street Readers I grew up on.

But in its basic lineaments it’s also, still, recognizably our world, and the place I entered as I passed by the sentinel lions. Oh, what a beautiful city.

The kind of program a city is

I’m not, in general, a “wisdom of crowds” guy. For every gorgeously elegant distributed search of possibility space you can name, I could cite one or more irrational, mindbendingly stupid, or merely time- and resource-wasteful clusterfucks. (And when I hear the word “crowdsourcing,” well…that’s when I reach for my revolver.)

Nevertheless, given both a crisply circumscribed problem and the right kind of community, the approach can and does work; Ask MetaFilter seems to do pretty well, for example, under the right circumstances. Given that you guys are nothing if not knowledgeable, then, and that what I have on tap is a pretty specific question, I thought I might give the following a try - as a way to do an end-run around my own blindspots and prejudices, if nothing else.

I ask you: what do you feel are the most significant contemporary developments in urban informatics? The most resonant projects, the most powerful interventions, the scariest precedents?

Cast as wide a net as you please in answering. I surely have my own answers, and of course I’ll be laying them on the table, in abundant detail. But I want this book to be multivocal, as much so as any real city, and it cannot be that if the sole things covered in its pages are the projects, plans and personalities that coincide with my own prior suppositions.

To cite just one example, my (and the book’s) vision of the “digital urban” has surprisingly little overlap with that pursued here. Yet the book won’t be worth very much if it doesn’t address and engage that perspective too. So go wild. I need to know what you’re imagining when you hear the words “urban computing.”

Reversion to form

Heh - I had a good long run of actual posts with content in them, so you can’t complain too much about this one.

I’ll be in London and Helsinki next week, like the shadow cast by thunder. I’ll have a tightly compressed agenda, a lot on my mind, but ever so certainly the desire to spend some time with local peeps in both places. Ping me for link-up details.

Now accepting actual pre-orders

In the wake of your enthusiastic support for the project, this is just a post to announce that we’re now accepting pre-order deposits for The City Is Here For You To Use via PayPal.

Nurri and I would like to thank you for the inspiration, the energy, the offers of help and the incredibly kind comments. I can’t tell you how much we’re looking forward to making this dream a reality.

iPhone: Over the fear and into the Yes

This next piece will demonstrate to the satisfaction of all that Speedbird is so not the place to come for breaking technical news. I imagine the iPhone-enthusiast and gadget sites informed their audiences about this development weeks ago, if not months.

Nevertheless, I also imagine that there’s relatively little overlap between that audience and those of you that frequent this site, so hopefully this will prove as revelatory to you as it was to me. Next to the book project announcement, this is the thing that’s really been topping my glee levels off these last few days.

Kazys Varnelis and I met up for lunch at Veselka day before yesterday. Now Veselka is warm and homey, but it’s also a pretty efficient place; maybe six minutes passed between the moment he ordered his pierogis and their arrival. And it was inside that interval - with a minute or two to spare, yet - that he not merely showed me how to open up my iPhone, but had helped me load it up with all kinds of useful applications.

To unlock the phone, all I had to do was enter a URL in Safari, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click a single link.

That was it, the whole process I had been dreading for the last five months. Done.

All I could think was, “What was I so afraid of?” I had succumbed to the New Apple’s FUD about “bricking” my phone, been hamstrung by the deep-seated fear that I might botch something in the course of the unlocking that would render it inert and leave me with a $500 paperweight. On some level, too, I was worried that my unlocked iPhone would look and act all open-sourcy, that its elegant interaction design would be overwritten with some poorly-resolved kludge.

I needn’t have fretted, on either count. Trust me, non-technical me: there’s nothing to botch here. It either Just Works or it doesn’t (and it won’t, sadly, if you’ve updated to the very latest iPhone firmware - sorry, Greg). If something goes wrong, you simply restore the firmware, and you’re no worse off than you were before. I’d even argue that the look and feel is improved over the status quo ante - and since the jailbreak patches the operating system vulnerability that it exploited in the first place, your phone is demonstrably more secure as well.

What I now hold in my hands is the iPhone I’ve wanted from the jump. There’s a certain giddy delight in loading it up with stuff, a kick I haven’t gotten from any mobile device since the days of the Palm III.

In practical terms, you’ll probably want to install the BSD subsystem and Summerboard UI framework before doing anything else. But then, ZOMG, you’re free to browse at the extensive and growing buffet of applications on offer. My own favorites so far are NYC Crosswalk - you give it a Manhattan address, it returns you the cross streets - and the brilliant Navizon, a software-only “GPS” that gives the iPhone the locative abilities it’s cried out for from the get-go. You’ll have your own. That’s the point.

Download statistics for the jailbreak are available, and Kazys makes the excellent point that they paint a very interesting picture:

Hundreds of thousands (and just possibly over a million) users have jailbroken their phones, downloading programs onto them. [S]omething like one in six went a step further to unlock them to use non-AT&T SIMs. For comparison’s sake, Apple only sold 4 million iPhones…If Apple opens up the iPhone enough and if Navizon allows hooks into their system from other applications, then the era of mass locative media will be upon us very rapidly in 2008.

I think that’s exactly right. Way back before any of us mortals had gotten our hands on one, I described the iPhone as “the first true everyware device” - and I was, of course, badly mistaken, because Steve, for reasons known only to himself, did not want that. Apple made decisions that kept the iPhone from being any such thing. Now those decisions have been unmade.

Just in case it wasn’t obvious, I’m but-thoroughly stoked by this - huge thanks to Kazys, and even bigger props to the community of iPhone hackers that figured out how to make thwarting Apple Apple-simple. I really do encourage those of you who own iPhones to give this a try, especially if you travel overseas. It takes something that was already excellent and a genuine pleasure to use, and improves it. You have nothing to lose but your chains…and disproportionately huge AT&T bills waiting for you on your return.

New day rising

1. The vent

A long and long-suppressed howl of frustration. Feel free to skip ahead to part 2 below, or not.

I’m not sure any author is ever completely satisfied with his or her publisher. With my own two ears, I’ve heard folks who’d realized projects with houses I can still only dream of - Penguin, Vintage, MIT Press - issue the selfsame complaints about sloppy copy-editing and limp marketing those of us a notch or three down the ladder make.

Nevertheless, I’ve always regretted publishing Everyware, a think piece if ever there was one, with an imprint primarily known for how-to manuals for aspiring Web developers and Photoshop jockeys. It was a mistake, and it was my own; I was both overeager and insufficiently confident in my book’s merits. And as we’ll see, I paid for it.

In all fairness, the acquisition editor I worked with warned me that this particular publisher “just might not be right for the book” from the get-go. He was correct, and I should have listened to him. The process which eventually, and somewhat unbelievably, resulted in Everyware’s appearance was strewn with tense and unpleasant negotiations, over issues I never even imagined cropping up. In each case, the publisher’s way of doing things struck me as being inflexible, short-sighted and injurious to the book’s prospects.

Some few of these were justified, no doubt, by a certain mean sort of bean-counting pragmatism (”We can’t use Akzidenz Grotesk on your cover, because we don’t own it and don’t want to budget two or three hundred bucks on getting it”). These calls saddened me, but I reminded myself that, after all, I wasn’t personally exposed to what everyone assured me were the brutal economics of getting books into print.

Some betrayed a profound misunderstanding of the way title awareness and buzz-building now work: “We can’t let you offer free PDFs of the book for download on your site, because that will cannibalize sales”; “We can’t let people Search Inside This Book on Amazon because…well…because we just don’t do that.” These decisions gutted me, because these measures seemed not merely like such self-evidently low-hanging fruit - truly missed opportunities for low- or even zero-cost publicity - but simply the right thing to do.

And some were just bizarre, unaccountable, unnecessary slaps in the face (”We don’t have room for an author bio,” “…an author photo,” “…a bibliography”). Particularly distressing, given my concern for the symbolism involved: until fixed in the second pressing, none of the ten living female human beings mentioned by name in the text appeared anywhere in the index. (I never did get the bibliography I argued for, and which would have helped the book’s credibility immeasurably.)

Oh, and then there was the initial design for the book cover, so inappropriate for the book that I’m not even going to post it here. Mail me if you really need to see it.

You know me: it’s not like I don’t have strongly pronounced and abundantly publicly-expressed preferences in design. One of the very first things I hoped for my book was that it would look great in someone’s hand as they walked down the street with it, or slapped onto a coffeehouse table - if not like these examples, then at least the way the volumes of Semiotext(e)’s Foreign Agents series did when I was in college. What was offered failed, abysmally, on all counts.

Worst of all, Everyware was supposed to be an AIGA book! I suppose it was naïve of me to expect that a cover designed for such a thing might, y’know, be able to hold its own as a contender in the annual contests for best-designed book covers held by that institution - but even so, I was shocked by the “approved direction” I was sent. Eventually, after much wailing & gnashing of teeth, the infamy was écrased, and ultimately replaced with the clumsy rework of a concept Nurri and I, neither of whom is by any stretch of the imagination a designer, had come up with, and executed more competently ourselves to begin with.

I have no doubt that my freely-expressed frustration with all this made me “difficult” to work with, the kind of high-maintenance prima donna nobody in a shop with a well-oiled production process wants to be stuck managing. If I’m really feeling charitable, I’ll grant, too, that it’s hard to take a first-time author’s demands seriously. They have no track record, can offer nothing external against which to gauge their insistence that the work is world-historically important, maaaan, and deserves to be treated as such. I bet many a first-timer feels this way, and I was surely among them.

You know what, though? A lot of what gummed up Everyware’s journey toward publication didn’t have anything to do with my being obstreperous. It was just half-stepping, and prima facie ridiculous excuses for mediocrity or outright incompetence. If I didn’t deserve better personally, the book sure did.

And since I try, at least, to live by the principle that you don’t bellyache about something unless you’re prepared to do better yourself, in my own terms there’s only one conceivable response to all of this. Can you smell what I’m brewing?

2. The commitment

My father has never really been one for paternal guidance in the Norman Rockwell mode, but he has at least always taught me that if you want something done right, you do it yourself. My extended, happy marination in punk rock and zine culture long ago led me to the same conclusion, albeit for different reasons. And now I’m finally convinced that the contemporary economics of production and distribution make such an effort feasible.

To be blunt, my experience with Everyware doesn’t hurt this calculus in the slightest, either. It’s rated highly by readers, I’ve always been delighted by the generous critical reception it’s enjoyed, and in the wake of its perfectly respectable sales record I am thoroughly confident that I’ll be able to sell the threshold thousand copies any serious effort at self-sustaining publishing requires.

The times, in short, appear propitious for total-control types like me.

Therefore, be it resolved: inspired by the luminous example of Edward Tufte’s Graphics Press, as well as that of our good friends at Chin Music, we’re going to try a little experiment. We’re going to publish my next book, The City Is Here For You To Use, ourselves.

And if any aspect of it sucks - from the illustrations to the paper weight to the customer service - you know who to hold accountable. It ships to my standards, or not at all.

Format.
The City Is Here For You To Use: Urban form and experience in the age of ubiquitous computing will be offered both as a premium, professionally printed and bound book, and as a free downloadable version in PDF, available concurrently.

Brief synopsis.
As you probably know if you’ve been hanging out here for awhile, The City Is Here For You To Use takes everything explored in Everyware as a given, and a point of departure. It assumes that emergent technologies like RFID, mesh networking and shape-memory actuators - all of which are explained for the non-technically-inclined reader - will simply be part of how cities will be made from now on, and seeks to understand what impact they’re likely to have on metropolitan form and experience.

You can think of it as a substantially expanded investigation into many of the themes and concerns raised in our pamphlet Urban Computing and its Discontents, notably:

- How will our understanding of the city change when touchless payment infrastructures, “intelligent” access-control systems and dynamic advertisements are the stuff of everyday urban life?
- How might we use these new technologies to create liveable, humane, sustainable and vibrant places?
- Will we be able to do so while managing the inevitable new orders of frustration and inconvenience they’ll occasion - to say nothing of their unsettling, inherent potential for panoptical surveillance and regulation?

Through interviews, case studies, analysis and illustration, The City Is Here makes the case that these technologies can help us rediscover public space, then suggests how we might use them to reclaim that space as a common good and a resource for all.

Threading between kneejerk Luddism and blithe techno-utopianism, and forgoing all but the necessary minimum of technical jargon, I intend The City Is Here For You To Use to be an eminently accessible overview of a subject with implications for literally anyone who lives in the cities of the developed world, or plans to. I can promise that architects, designers, urban planners, and anyone interested more generally in understanding how the emergence of ubiquitous and ambient informatics will shape urban communities, physically and experientially, will find plenty to sink their teeth into.

Features.
The book will be professionally offset printed on multiple high-quality paper stocks, featuring graphics and illustrations especially commissioned for this edition. Properly indexed and with a full bibliography and list of resources, just as you would expect. You may expect a restrained use of color.

Editions.
The first pressing will be offered as a signed and numbered limited edition. Further pressings may follow, depending on demand, but will not be so embellished.

Reuse.
Both book and PDF will be offered under Creative Commons license. You will be able to share and recontextualize material from The City Is Here however you want, provided only that your use is noncommercial and extends the same provisions to those further downstream.

“Open source.”
To the maximum degree possible, everything learned in the design, production and distribution of The City Is Here will be shared on this site. We’ll furnish you with detailed information on the vendors, materials, methods, and procedures we employ, constituting a kit of parts for you to take and use as you will.

Timeline, price and ordering.
Nurri and I need to spec the format, size and paper, and go get some bids. (You’ll see, we’ll invite you along.) Until these are in hand, I can’t specify either final page count or the size of the initial pressing, and therefore can’t make a useful estimate of what we’ll need to charge for the book.

Once these values have been determined and we’ve settled on an appropriate price - and believe me, I’ll let you know - The City Is Here can be pre-ordered by making a $10.00 deposit via PayPal. Production will not proceed until one hundred pre-orders have been received.

As of now, I anticipate - underline “anticipate” - having a book in your hands one year from today, on the first of January 2009. In the unlikely event that one hundred pre-orders are not received in the next six months, we’ll scrap the print portion of the project and all deposits will be fully refunded, minus whatever transaction processing fees are assessed by PayPal. (The text will still be made available as a Creative Commons-licensed PDF in this event. Should this happen, we’ll ask you to contribute whatever you feel the download is worth to you, on the Radiohead model. Just so everyone’s clear, that includes “nothing.” We obviously hope you get more than that out of it, though.)

So here we go. A new adventure for a new year. Let’s see where this takes us.

Do me a favor? Email me, or leave a note in comments, if you intend to pre-order The City Is Here For You To Use. This will help us considerably with our planning. Consider it a pre-preorder. : . )