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The Cage

The Cage ran at middays on Monday on 4ZZZ for a year. It’s premise was that we lock you in until you answer the question. Every interview began with the statement ‘The Crimes Act of Queensland 1908 dictates that we cannot lock you in for more than eight hours and only four of those hours may be spent under interrogation. Do you understand?” We also randomly fired three questions from our library of placement questions which placed the interview subject in the moral landscape for the listener.

The questions were things like, Do you think abortion should be legalised, do you think climate chaos is caused by human burning of fossil fuels … . The show had an active website, facebook page and twitter feed. The show incorporated the Generator news at the top of the hour, and regular segments from The Cross.

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Greens

As a journalist, I had always avoided carrying the membership card of any political party, or other lobby group on the basis of maintaining objectivity. While editing energy Daily in 2003, I realised that individual journalists can only gain influence as far as media proprietors let them and that independence might protect your job inside the media, but it will not protect the truth. That apparent anomaly occurs because the principle is not practiced by those with power.

I moved to the northern rivers region of NSW because it has a strong Greens vote (then 10%), high rainfall and rich volcanic soil. It is one of the few places in Australia likely to get wetter under climate change. I ran for federal parliament in 2007, raising the vote by 7 percent and mounting a largely grass roots, social media campaign.

I served on various committees at a state level and became deeply embroiled in the Green politics which has recently (2017) raised its ugly head again. I ran for federal election four times, once against Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2013. I maintained active involvement in The Greens until 2016, resigning as convenor of the Qld Campaign Committee, and South Brisbane Greens, member of the management committee and the State Delegate Council.

The Prime Minister affects boredom as Ebbs wows the crowd

The basis on which I joined the Greens was to “shine my light where it was darkest”. Fourteen years later, I have recognised that while that principle has some virtue, it is also important to allow your best light to shine. I have returned to coding, and to Griffith University to rediscover those throughlines that resonate most for me personally and where I can have the greatest impact.

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One Stop Green Shop

An ecommerce venture, designed to provide a retail platform for the many cottage industries, inventors and entrepreneurs on the northern NSW Coast who had little business and ecommerce experience and limited access to markets in the city.

It suffered from being a second (or sixth) string project when my focus was on radio, politics and comedy but battled on to become the Byron Green Building Centre of which I still own five percent.

In terms of technology and ecommerce, it did not do anything particularly innovative, though we did find a work around to some problems with sharing of postage and delivery information.

It did, however, reinforce my determination to build systems that aggregate and share content across disparate platforms and provide a commerce framework that allows networks of collaboration instead of the hub and spoke affiliate model created by the likes of Amazon, freelancer.com, ebay, et al.

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Seeking Throughlines Through Storylines

The Storylines interface is an exploration as well as a presentation tool. It was developed to reveal and discover throughlines as much as to present them. The reason for this is that I had never sat down and made a list of my projects, let alone examined them for throughlines or thought about identifying established creative that may have explored those same throughlines.

To this end, I started by recording the media, the topics and various other metadata about the projects I have created during my highly varied career, in an attempt to determine a pattern and any meaningful throughlines that might emerge.

The Prime Minister affects boredom as Ebbs wows the crowd

As I did this a number of throughlines did emerge, I have done a lot of advocacy in environmental politics, in print, on radio and through the political party The Greens. A large number of established creatives have similar foci, I have selected Ted Nace and Al Gore as they are remarkable for their transition from writing about technology to climate activism in Ted Nace case, and from politics to activism in Al Gore’s case. On reflection, I should have also considered broadcaster and writer Philip Adams who I admired as a teenager, interviewed as a luddite for PC Week and have maintained correspondence with over the intervening decades. His friend Barry Jones, was president of the ALP for many years, Australia’s first Minister for Science and author of many books on the importance of science in politics.

While I may have reached this conclusion using tools other than the still fledgling Storylines interface, it was building and testing this tool that revealed the links to those influences on my work.

I have also spent a good deal of my life coding systems designed to categorise data using n-dimensional cubes and metadata tagging. This started with my first coding projects, designing a program to generate crossword puzzles, or jigsaw puzzles with more than one solution. This focus sharpened through the development of my software tools to extract census data (which is stored in an n-dimensional cube with each census question as an independent dimension) as three or four dimensional data sets for analysis by statisticians at the Institute of Multicultural Affairs. I then explored metadata tagging as an alternative to database retrieval, inspired by the Australian data management system called The Corporate Retriever. The outcome of that work was a decision by Sean Howard to invest in the then emerging technology of text searching and the launch of the software package ISYS. All that work culminated in the development of the Metadex, a system for indexing metadata, designed to complement the early web search engines and create a distributed framework for sharing metadata and discovering meaning on the web in a more contextual manner than text searching allows.

The Storylines interface itself has a deep relationship to that work, being primarily driven by the categorisation system of WordPress. I see the Storylines interface as being an alternative way to retrieve data from the billions of WordPress websites around the world. This is part of a long term project. I developed a content management system (CMS) known as Proton in the mid nineties to demonstrate Metadex, because there were no CMS available at the time. My first attempt, UConstruct, was built before Microsoft had a database to web scripting language and was written to my specs, by a friend in C++. I built Proton from the ground up in Cold Fusion, and then ported it to Microsoft ASP. I saw Metadex as providing a FAT table for the internet and forming the basis on which a series of net based apps could be built. The developer of Cold Fusion, Jeremy Allaire visited us in Ultimo and took some of those ideas to Adobe as the basis of the CS framework for connecting Adobe applications across the cloud. Adobe purchased Allaire shortly afterwards.

I am still searching for other technologists and computer scientists who have worked in that space, though, in hindsight, if I had done that research twenty years ago the trajectory of my career may have been remarkably different.

I have been introduced to the work of Christopher Alexander by David Harris, Creative Media Theories, Griffith University, which I have found totally inspirational and suspect may provide an overarching framework to give a meaningful and moral anchor to this work. That ties together two philosophical frameworks I have been pondering over the last three decades.

The first is that the network we are building is an organism in which humans are simply nodes. In the same way that our biochemistry is rich with the historical components of other lifeforms including colonies of organisms that have become organs in our body, so will the systems that we build now become components of a larger organism. To me it seems foolish to argue about whether automated supermarket checkouts threaten human job security when the system is not being built to serve the interests of individual humans. The systems of the spy agencies that monitor our phone calls and text messages, and the big data centres that monitor every purchase and trip we make are simply the beginnings of the nervous system of that larger entity. What exercises my mind about this fact is that we approach the singularity with almost no thought about the role of ethics and morality in its development. In determining where to study my masters I wrote to QUT requesting the facility to study that topic specifically as a PhD subject. On hearing Alexander’s 2009 address to computer scientists I wept with joy that there are other people considering these same topics.

The second is that I long ago tired of the simplistic arguments of the antitheists that religion is illogical and unscientific and therefor the enemy of rational debate. While I fully acknowledge that religion has evolved from a search for meaning into a tool of the state that is more effective at managing populations than oppression by brute force, that does not diminish its role as a rich and dense storehouse of cultural meaning and a reference point for morality. My project The Cross was commenced in 2015 to deal specifically with this topic, though it has languished for want of attention due to a lack of time. I hope that Christopher Alexander’s 2016 work, Making the Garden, explores similar themes and will offer me a way into dealing with this topic more richly and powerfully than I have been able to so far.

Finally, I would like to comment on my most recent work, CHIME, which is currently a sound piece, manifesto and short mime performance on the theme Text is dead, long live Chime. This has grown out of a study of the IBM Selectric typewriter and will lead to more experimental work using bells as a media for social interaction and play. The theoretical underpinning of this work is the thought experiment, what if we took away Text as the universal interface between computer applications and started somewhere else. At the moment it is simply a fanciful idea to spawn further work and thinking and has proved remarkably fruitful. I do not have any polemical issue with text as the basis of computer interfaces but as will all assumptions I think it worth challenging and examining. As well as exploring the creative performance possibilities this approach offers I would like to examine the role of text in the light of Christopher Alexander’s challenge for computer scientists to think through the morals and meaning of the code we build.

In the interim, I will continue to build on the Storylines interface as presented here, as a means of finding connections and meaning in my projects as well as content generally.

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An Inconvenient Truth

… from Al Gore’s website: “Director Davis Guggenheim eloquently weaves the science of global warming with former Vice President Al Gore’s personal history and lifelong commitment to reversing the effects of global climate change in the most talked-about documentary of the year.

“An audience and critical favorite, An Inconvenient Truth makes the compelling case that global warming is real, man-made, and its effects will be cataclysmic if we don’t act now. Gore presents a wide array of facts and information in a thoughtful and compelling way: often humorous, frequently emotional, and always fascinating. In the end, An Inconvenient Truth accomplishes what all great films should: it leaves the viewer shaken, involved and inspired.”

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Al Gore

Former Vice President of the United States, Al Gore comes from a wealthy political dynasty and has been a global advocate for action on Climate Change. His film Inconvenient Truth, spawned a global climate movement and an army of climate change speakers who he personally trained.

His latest book and film, An Inconvenient Sequel deals with the diminishing capacity of the political process to engage in rational debate and decision making. It follows on from The Assault on Reason, “a call to rebuild the vitality of American democracy by restoring the nation’s information ecosystem so that we can start making good decisions again”.

US Presidential candidate in the 2000 election, Al Gore lost to George W Bush in a narrowly contested result. After decades as a US Senator and two terms as Bill Clinton’s Vice President he resigned his political positions to found The Climate Reality Project, The Deep Space Climate Observatory and Generation Investment Management.

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A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander’s best known book, A Pattern Language sets out the 253 individual components of good design identified by Alexander and his students over 20 years of research.

The foundation of most of Alexander’s work, the principles of object-oriented programming and the programming patterns movement, this work has influenced the development of computer science significantly.

In a 2009 lecture, Alexander challenged computer scientists to apply the fundamental principle behind his work, that good design has a moral foundation, to their work. In that speech he said that his research into the influence of his work on computer science revealed to him that this basic principle has been overlooked.

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Christopher Alexander

Architect, writer and philosopher, Christopher Alexander has taken a bottom up approach to design, identifying what makes individual components of a design good, and building from that a series of patterns that lead to good architectural design. His best known work A Pattern Language was written in 1977 and compiled thousands of these patterns as the basis for future work.

His work has influenced Computer Science, especially object oriented programming, the design patterns movement and the extreme programming movement.  His work was influential in the development of the Wiki, SimCity and its immensely popular spin-of The Sims. His works Notes on the Synthesis of Form, and the Nature of Order underpin significant developments in computer science but Alexander himself has applied them more broadly to investigate religious and philosphical questions from a new basis.

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Advocacy Environment Landscape Power Print Ted Nace

Climate Hope

Subtitled On the Front Lines of the Fight against Coal Ted Nace’ book is a personal account of his activist journey as well as an account of the battle between coal funded climate sceptical think tanks and the scientific and environmental community.

 

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Ted Nace

Ted is a publisher and environmental activist who made his money through publication of technical books in his company Peachpit Press and then his reputation as an activist for his work Corporate Gangs of America.

He has since focused on activism around Coal.

The history of Peachpit Press is well described in the introduction to one of its many publications, Photoshop CS for Windows.