BEK video from BEK kolektiv on Vimeo

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By creating opportunities for exchange, mutual action and sharing, A4C not only operates as a platform but attempts to create a new commons, a synthesis between arts and political engagement.

A4C intends to explore the  interstitial spaces between power and communities, traditional arts system and society, states and territories. We pursue documentation as artistic practice.

In an historical phase of what Antonio Gramsci named “interregnum” whereas we know what we leave but do not know what we will find, A4C is a space for collective search, experimentation, creation of what post-colonial philosopher Homi Babha named ” a third space”, that transcends traditional definitions of arts and politics. Particular attention will be devoted to building bridges and opportunities for collective work, exchange and dialogue between European and Latin American artists and activists.

Our first steps have moved along the issue of migrations and war, starting with the participation at the Nationless Pavillion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, to the pop-up exhibition “From the shores of Tripoli to the hills of Moctezuma” in Rome-based gallery Ex-Elettrofonica,  to continue with “Dispacci-Dispatches” an exploration in the history of Italian colonial wars in Libya by means of displacements and re-enactment of historical chronicles and documents read in various locations of the Quartiere Africano (African quarter) in Rome, built to celebrate fascist colonies in Africa.

SHOWREEL A4C #ArtsForTheCommons from Rosa Jijon on Vimeo.

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Jordan Greenhall: There have been a lot of conversations about Bitcoin over the years. Is it a currency or an equity or a commodity? Is it a store of value? Is it a “settlement mechanism”? Is it not money at all, but merely an example of a decentralized application on the Blockchain? The short answer is: none of the above.

Bitcoin is a self-organizing collective intelligence. As such, what it becomes is entirely a function of what it can do — that is, it is a function of the capacity of its collective intelligence to overcome the challenges that it encounters in its environment.

In some sense, we’ve seen this sort of thing many times. Every “movement” or “scenius” (to use Brian Eno’s ingenious term for “collective genius”) is a form of self-organizing collective intelligence. The Punk Rock movement, skateboarding, Ruby on Rails. What makes Bitcoin important is that it represents a new mutation in self-organizing collective intelligence.

In order to explain what I mean by this, I’m first going to have to spend a few minutes laying out what I mean by self-organizing collective intelligence.

The Development of Self Organizing Collective Intelligences (SOCI)

The basic dynamics of a SOCI is as follows. It begins as some sort of attractor — some aesthetic sensibility or yearning — that is able to grab the attention and energy of some group of people. Generally one that is very vague and abstract. Some idea or notion that only makes sense to a relatively small group.

But, and this is the key move, when those people apply their attention and energy to the SOCI, this makes it more real, easier for more people to grasp and to find interesting and valuable. Therefore, more attractive to more people and their attention and energy.

Thus begins the generative loop: as the SOCI becomes more real and attracts more people it begins to encounter challenges. Maybe Impressionism is being rejected by the status quo and it needs to find some way to display itself. Maybe hand-coded HTML is too burdensome and clumsy and this SOCI needs to get easier to use.

If the SOCI has enough capacity within its collective intelligence to resolve the challenge, it “levels up” and expands its ability to attract more attention and energy. If not, then it becomes somewhat bounded (at least for the present) and begins to find the limit of “what it is”.

Different SOCI will resolve challenges through different mechanisms. Some will form relatively centralized nodes (ICANN, Rolling Stone Magazine) that will accelerate problem solving in certain areas — but at the cost of losing some of the generativity and flexibility of decentralization. Others will mutate and proliferate exploring their niche like a slime mold (Protestantism and electronic music might be a good examples here).

As the SOCI develops, the choices that it makes — the solutions that it crafts — become part of its core architecture. “Frozen accidents” in its development, these begin to shape and define its future paths, slowly accreting structure and topography as the SOCI moves from its vague, open and highly creative infancy through adolescence and finally into its mature, effective, but much less creative adulthood.

In the end, the development of a SOCI is defined by the challenges it faces, its capacity to surmount those challenges, and the consequences of its solutions on its own further development.

Bitcoin as a Self Organizing Collective Intelligences (SOCI)

Bitcoin is a SOCI. And its future will be determined precisely by the dynamic tension between the problems it faces and its capacity to solve those problems.

Over the years, Bitcoin has worked its way through a complicated childhood. It was able to attract the attention and energy of a core of developers who built software that made it possible for less technical folks to participate and apply their energy. It has been able to create online exchanges and marketplaces and then survive the collapse and redesign and collapse and redesign of these pieces of its architecture.

As it did this, it expanded its “reality” and attracted the attention and energy of more “professional” entrepreneurs and venture capitalists — whose work significantly expanded Bitcoin’s capacity (and birthed an offshoot in the form of the “blockchain” SOCI).

Over the past year and a half it has struggled mightily with its most recent challenge: governance. For most of its developmental history, Bitcoin has been defined by two different governance mechanisms. The vast majority of the work has been highly decentralized — activities like wallet construction and exchange building that is entirely done “at the edge” and with little to no governance outside of simple architectural boundaries. The remainder of the work has been handled through an ad hoc oligarchy of the “Core Developers” who have been broadly able to maintain a highly technocratic coherence.

This loose governance mechanism broke down as the collective intelligence couldn’t achieve coherence on purely technical grounds: two paths emerged that each presented valid, compelling and incompatible attraction to different sensemaking elements of the collective intelligence. The result was the exploration of what might be a fundamental feature of this kind of SOCI’s governance — a “hard fork” where doctrinal and values differences are physically formalized into two separate code bases.

So now we wait. Will the “hard fork” be the next level up for the Bitcoin SOCI and lead to an expansion of its ability to attract more intelligence? Or is this the hill that Bitcoin can’t climb and the beginning of its senescence?

Bitcoin as a new form of self-organizing collective intelligence

Lets step back and consider what the Bitcoin SOCI has already done.

Beginning with essentially no backing and no resources Bitcoin has been able to organically attract attention and energy to grow into something that includes dozens of exchanges in something like 40 different countries and a computational infrastructure that processes an astounding 14 Million PetaFLOPS.

And it has done this while innovating directly against one of the most fundamental components of our current social fabric: money. The beaches are littered with the bodies of well funded efforts to step into this space and, indeed, even a major victory like PayPal required the improbably combined genius of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Luke Nosek, Reid Hoffman and the rest of the much gloried PayPal Mafia simply to carve out a “nice” niche in online payments.

And the Bitcoin SOCI has done this in merely seven short years.

This is no ordinary SOCI. The deep importance of Bitcoin is that it represents the first example of an entirely new SOCI organism in our landscape. One that clearly represents a new kind of power and capability. In fact, one that might relate to our legacy forms of collective intelligence in the same way that Homo Sapiens related to Homo Neanderthalensis.

What is the essence of this new form of collective intelligence that represents so much potential? My guess is that this can really only be answered with the benefit of hindsight. But I’ll venture a guess:

1) It is intrinsically global. More to the point, it is geographically unconstrained, and, therefore able to take advantage of any attention and energy anywhere in the world.

2) It is intrinsically virtual. In other words, it is able to connect with resources anywhere with minimal lag and at minimal cost.

These two features combine to mean that in principle this new form of SOCI can attract and utilize the total collective intelligence of the human species almost instantly. While in practice this level of concentrated collective intelligence isn’t likely to happen the potential of tapping into and connecting precisely the girl in Phuket and the team in Slovenia when where and how they are needed is flat out revolutionary.

And, most importantly,

3) It solves motivation, reward and collective action problems through an architecture that is responsive to nuanced and changing value landscapes without being bottlenecked by concentrated (and, therefore, intelligence reducing) decision-makers.

This is a dense and important point that needs to be unpacked.

Consider digital SOCI like, say, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. While these collective intelligences are both global and virtual, their ability to connect with, motivate and apply the attention and energy of their communities is either very narrow (you can contribute to the Instagram SOCI by uploading photos, liking and commenting them, but little more) or bottlenecked by a relatively small team of people who have exclusive power to adapt the architecture (like when the Facebook team added the ability to upload videos).

Bitcoin-like SOCI use the technical capabilities of the blockchain, crypto-tokens and smart-contracts to provide a motivational architecture that can be highly adaptive to the real needs of the SOCI without bottlenecking through some concentrated control structure. As these techniques mature, they provide this new class of SOCI with an “executive function” that has little to no agency risk and can scale without creating a bottleneck on the SOCI.

To get a better sense of what I mean here, consider Bitcoin as an extremely early prototype of how this kind of motivational architecture can work. By linking “run hashing software” with “be the source of coin creation”, Bitcoin created an invitation to value contribution at an architectural level. Anyone who could understand and act on the invitation could participate without any human agents getting in the way to bottleneck the process.

And by carefully wiring up difficulty and scarcity, Bitcoins became at least potentially appreciating assets — motivating anyone who could appreciate and act on this invitation to figure out how they could best give their value to the Bitcoin SOCI in exchange for increasingly valuable coins.

While rough and coarse-grained, this approach worked. It was flat out brilliant in incentivizing the construction and rollout of mining infrastructure, and as mentioned has delivered on a tremendous amount of creative activity.

Of course, the Bitcoin approach has known issues. High volatility, a dependence on risk seeking speculation, too much concentration in the hands of early adopters, coarse-grained focus on mining, etc. Arguably, these design elements limit the effectiveness of the SOCI to attract and deploy collective intelligence and, therefore, its overall potential.

With regard to the Bitcoin SOCI in particular, the future is uncertain. Will it overcome its governance challenges and emerge on the other side with still more collective intelligence? I honestly have no idea, I suspect it will, but these moments are always deeply uncertain.

If it does, however, it will come out the other end much stronger than it has been so far. Governance is a major challenge. If Bitcoin survives this current crisis, my bet is that the collective intelligence will focus its efforts on governance much like it has on past crises like the Mt. Gox collapse — and the result will be a much, much more capable SOCI.

The Future of Self Organizing Collective Intelligences

Regardless of the specific result of the Bitcoin experiment, we are clearly in the middle of a new era. As I discussed in The Future of Organization, a lot of smart people are currently hard at work understanding, generalizing and optimizing the deep code of these new forms of collective intelligence.

The limitations of Bitcoin’s approach to motivation and collective action are well understood and new technical layers like Ethereum’s smart contracts and Backfeed’s distributed governance system magnify the potential intelligence of this kind of SOCI at least as much as the neocortex magnified the intelligence of the mammalian brain.

I really wish the reality and importance of this new frontier were more broadly understood. My sense is that over just the next five years this new form of SOCI will go through its gestation, birthing and childhood development stages. The result will be a form of collective intelligence that is so much more capable than anything in the current environment that it will sweep away even the most powerful contemporary collective intelligences (in particular both corporations and nation states) in establishing itself as the new dominant form of collective intelligence on the Earth.

And whoever gets there first will “win” in a fashion that is rarely seen in history.

The post Lets get this straight, Bitcoin is an experiment in self-organizing collective intelligence appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Future architecture should look for ways of living (al)together, as all power structures and capitalist formations push us more and more away from each other. Merve Bedir talks with Future Architecture about her work, including the project Bostan: A Garden for All which she presented at the 2015 Idea Camp and for which she’d received an R&D grant.

Merve Bedir is an architect and researcher. Her research and practice is about urban transformation, migration and forced displacement and architecture education.

For more information on Bedir’s idea for Botan: A Garden for all, see here:

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Hacker communities are no different. From the social and techno justice conglomerate known as Anonymous to the state-sponsored espionage groups, to the ransom-ware syndicates, hackers exhibit a broad range of ethics.

But combine the hacker ethic with the ideal of the commons and it is easy to envision a creating society. Technic, aka Technologia Incognita, is such a society.  Their collective embraces a hacker ethic complementary to the emerging commons ideal.

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Extracted from: http://techinc.nl/node/1

About Techinc

Technologia Incognita is a hackerspace in Amsterdam.

We are a collective of people who creates a space where people can meet each other, exchange ideas, learn learn, work and have fun together, we try to run and organise this space as a collective from a DIY-perspective.

Our group at the moment consists mostly of IT profesionals, freelancers, consultants, artists, students with some overlap other fields aswell. “Hacking” for us is a passion, a hobby and a dream. Our current interests seem to focus on computer hard-&software, fabrics&clothing, electronics, security&privacy, hacktivism, physical production such as 3d-printing and DIY in general. Most projects get documented on our here: Projects Wikipage

We have a vereniging as a legal body with a small board of around 7 members who handle the regular bureaucracy and around 80-90 members who organise, run and pay for the space in general.

Extracted from: http://techinc.nl/

A hackerspace is a place where people with a technically creative spirit gather to work on projects or to talk. During this open day, it is possible to see some examples of hacking projects and see what happens in a hackerspace.

Some examples of activities are:
* Learning how websites, networks and other computer-based systems can be vulnerable to attackers and what can be done about this.
* Programming electronics and microcontrollers like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi microcomputer. Hackers can show you how these can be used to build CNC milling, laser cutters, 3D printers, home automation, clocks, pick&place machines or autonomous robots.
* The use of 3D printers, for example to develop a jaw prosthesis, keys to copied from a picture, or a broken part to replace a household appliance.
* Discuss the use of personal data by companies or the government and the effects of this on our privacy and other aspects of society.
* There are also different presentations in hackerspaces of individual projects carried out in there.

Hackers find ethics an important subject, and distinguish themselves from cyber criminals by a strong sense of ethical behavior. During the open-hackerspaces-day it will be explained how hackers contribute to a better world by looking with fresh eyes to society, technology and organizations, and how they share their knowledge with the community. Additionally hackerspaces are also places where people are welcome who just make beautiful things and can find common space, tools, like-minded and can find inspiration. This can be in many forms from jigsaws to artisan smiths, to biohacking, or to molecular cooking.

Photo by Jaime_GC

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