Ars Electronica: The Public Square, Squared

Ars Electronica: The Public Square, Squared

The Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria Next month Isaac Mao and I are headed back to Linz, Austria for this year’s symposium, titled “The Public Square, Squared.” I’m thrilled with the list of speakers and can’t wait to learn from...
The Digital Suburbs

The Digital Suburbs

Today is the first day since leaving Los Angeles that I’ve been able to breathe. All the other mornings I was awoken by the sound of the alarm clock or the discomfort of jet lag. But not today: I woke slowly, ate breakfast slowly, read the paper leisurely,...
April Showers (of too much information)

April Showers (of too much information)

I spent most of the past week reading around 200 pages of academic papers about transparency, accountability, and governance in a cabin in Mexico’s Sierra del Tigre mountain range. No tweeps tweeting; only birds chirping and the wind rustling through the pine...
Summary of Cloud Intelligence Symposium

Summary of Cloud Intelligence Symposium

This week I’m trying to put some ending punctuation on all the fragments of projects I’ve left scattered over the past couple months before setting my sights toward new projects for November and December. I received a lot of kind and charitable feedback...
[Ars Electronica] Digital Communities Forum

[Ars Electronica] Digital Communities Forum

On Monday I had the pleasure of introducing the three winners of this year’s Prix Ars Electronica in the digital communities category and moderating a forum in which they shared their experiences as communities that have formed around a particular purpose. Video...
My Cloud Intelligence Talk at Ars Electronica

My Cloud Intelligence Talk at Ars Electronica

A video of my talk is available here. My slides are on SlideShare. What follows is a hyperlinked text of the notes in my slides. Darkness is our natural state. During the 200,000 years of human existence our species has only known electric light for .06% of that time....
An Outsider's Guide to Linz

An Outsider's Guide to Linz

The festival energy has arrived to Linz. The Bruckernerhaus is full of monitors, art installations, and computers. The Ars Electronica Center is filling up with laptop-toting digital nomads from all over Europe and beyond. And the Twitter stream for #ars09 is starting...
Techno-utopianism and Techno-skepticism

Techno-utopianism and Techno-skepticism

We rented a scooter, my sister and I, and decided to ride the damn thing all the way from Candidasa on one side of Bali to Ubud, almost all the way on the other. On the way my lower back began to ache and, to my eternal frustration, my sister was determined to knock...