Q: How much of the sterility of modern airport terminals and air travel in general can be attributed to the hypochondriac aviator Howard Hughes? A: None. Howard Hughes may have had a less than healthy approach to the issue of hygiene, but the sterility of airports is not a germ-theoretical one. Any time spent sitting on the floor is sure to convince the intrepid traveler of this. Rather it is a cultural sterility born in part from an urge to project a 1950's feel of jetsetter's class and distinction, and partly as a failed attempt to normalize the experience of airports across the world, cussioning travelers from culture shock while not discriminating. Indeed, they have succeeded in creating a type of space which is equally alien to everybody. Almost. Comparing airports around the world you see that the little things are always the ones that get you in the end. The tiny nuances, like the languages of the signs and the distance between the check-in desk and the gate. Some seem to needl

Q: How much of the sterility of modern airport terminals and air travel in general can be attributed to the hypochondriac aviator Howard Hughes?

A: None.

Howard Hughes may have had a less than healthy approach to the issue of hygiene, but the sterility of airports is not a germ-theoretical one. Any time spent sitting on the floor is sure to convince the intrepid traveler of this.

Rather it is a cultural sterility born in part from an urge to project a 1950′s feel of jetsetter’s class and distinction, and partly as a failed attempt to normalize the experience of airports across the world, cussioning travelers from culture shock while not discriminating. Indeed, they have succeeded in creating a type of space which is equally alien to everybody. Almost.

Comparing airports around the world you see that the little things are always the ones that get you in the end. The tiny nuances, like the languages of the signs and the distance between the check-in desk and the gate. Some seem to needlessly lengthen this distance in order to
put more shops, less thinly hiding the fact that the modern airport is just a shopping mall with very good public transport.

But this cultural sterility has origins that can be found by staring at the multilingual signs at the airports, the multitude of languages subtly hinting that there is more to the sterility that meets the eye. ”Uitgang”, “Ausgang”. “Útgangur”, “Utgang”.

Rasmus Christian Rask was a Danish linguist who spent a large portion of his life going around the world trying to convince people to reform
their languages. His failure in Denmark is testified by the language itself today; but Danish at least is somewhat unified. In the Netherlands, where his failure was more abject, you can still see and hear massive differences in the language depending on which town you’re in. I have joked that the Dutch language comprises of English grammar, German vocabulary, Danish pronunciation and bad spelling, but that humorous observation hardly scratches the surface. Dutch is so poxy with dialects that the people of Groningen and the people of Limburg are almost mutually unintelligable. Almost.

The oddest part of Dutch came to me recently when listening to a song by the Frisian band Twarres. The song was on YouTube, sung in Frisian
but subtitled in Hollandish. Both languages are Dutch. Almost. As I listened to the Frisian melody that had until then been impenetrable to me, following along with the subtitles, I realized suddenly: Frisian is more similar to Danish than it is to other variants of Dutch I’ve encountered.

Rask never made it to Slovenia, a country where this reaches such extremes that the people in the foothills of Triglav or on the Adriatic shoreline at Trieste are incapable of communicating with their brethren around the Hungarian border without an intermediary dialect, a linguistic form rapidly developing in the larger cities such as Ljubljana, no doubt helped by the availability of rapid transit and broadcasting technologies.

Some languages and some cultures appear to be more readily normalizable. English is a bastard. The lingua franca is often the lowest common denominator, the simplest common form of communication that has the amount of expressiveness needed for the exchange.

Like airports. Almost.

What is the grammar of an airport? Can it be formulated simply, written out in Backus-Naur form, or described in terms of the Chomsky model? If we were to use the pumping lemma on an Airport, what would the result be?

Cleanliness of language and sterility of airports, LaPorte might have argued, stems from the same desire. “Non olet”, he wrote. We reject stinkiness, impurity, imperfection. We reject a lack of sanitation - insanity, perhaps.

Perhaps not.

The trend towards sanitation of all things may have started in France in 1549, but even in the time of Christopher Columbus, when there was no formal distinction between the romance languages of the time, there were a few people pondering on the technical implications of using standardization as a form of crowd control. In particular, Antonio de Nebrija, a Spanyard, approached the queen of Spain with a very similar proposition as Rask had. Only where Rask wanted to unify the people through grammar, Nebrija proposed to divide them. When asked by Isabelle I of Castile why she would be interested in a book about the grammar of the language, he is said to have replied “Majesty, the language is the instrument of the empire”.

Could it be that the same tool could be used to unite and divide us? Much like airports provide us with the ability to come together, it
also allows us to be more apart? Does language do this? It does.

Sitting last night at a dinner party in Barcelona where half the people present where Italian, I tried to follow the conversation as
best I could, but the fluid traversal from Spanish to Italian with perhaps the occasional stopover in Catalan left me swimming for
context. English was used for my benefit some of the time.

But all the while during this I did not feel segregated from the other people by way of a language barrier. The thinking and feeling and acting united us in the way that I was not united with anybody at the airport, except one.

Before boarding, handing over my ticket and ID card for inspection, the guy checking it said, “hm. Transnational republic?” This is after I used the same ID to check in, not just here, but more or less everywhere for the last couple of months. “Is this real?” he asked.

“It’s an art project,” I replied. “You’re welcome to reject it as a form of identification, but almost nobody ever does. I’ve been around Europe using this, no questions asked.” I handed him my drivers license, and I think he got the joke. “I’m going to have to research this,” he said as he ushered me onto the gangway.

Humans are incredibly good at building walls, barriers, using them to set people apart, divide and conquer. Whether it’s borders or language barriers, information management and instruments of empire, whether it’s sterility of environment or sterility of thought, some people are hellbent on disuniting us by using our own insanity – our lack of sanitation – against us. We are unclean, thus we are unworthy of self-determination.

I don’t agree with this design for human existence. I reject sanity insofar as it divides us. I shall speak in pidgins and defy borders. I shall tear down walls and dance on their rubble, like they did in Berlin at the beginning of this era. Come, join me! We shall not ask whether the walls are physical or metaphorical, we shall only ask if they are warranted, and unless they serve to hold up a roof, the answer will undoubtedly be no.

[Inspired in part by conversations over the last week with Dougald Hine.]

Those who have read my previous two posts may think I have some beef with the AVMSD, or, if they read the last three, they might think I have a problem with the European Union. Both assumptions would be true, but I'd like to try my hand at putting this into a larger context. My work for the past several years has had many different forms and facets but one overarching theme: the individual's right to self-governance and, as a prerequisite to that, the right to information. This realm of activity has many fronts, many facets, many complexities, some of which are plain as day while others lurk in the shadows. At the base of it all, I'm what a friend of mine first described to me as a "decentralization fundamentalist" - I believe that any decentralized system will be superior to an otherwise equivalent centralized system. The reasons for this are many. Centralization puts strain on certain nodes in a system while decentralization shares the load. This can be seen by analyzing the Internet or a geodesic dom

Those who have read my previous two posts may think I have some beef with the AVMSD, or, if they read the last three, they might think I have a problem with the European Union. Both assumptions would be true, but I’d like to try my hand at putting this into a larger context.

My work for the past several years has had many different forms and facets but one overarching theme: the individual’s right to self-governance and, as a prerequisite to that, the right to information. This realm of activity has many fronts, many facets, many complexities, some of which are plain as day while others lurk in the shadows.

At the base of it all, I’m what a friend of mine first described to me as a “decentralization fundamentalist” – I believe that any decentralized system will be superior to an otherwise equivalent centralized system. The reasons for this are many. Centralization puts strain on certain nodes in a system while decentralization shares the load. This can be seen by analyzing the Internet or a geodesic dome, and comparing them to the Prime Minister’s office or a skyscraper. The threat model for decentralized systems is also much more manageable. If a head of state gets assassinated or there’s a run on a bank, the system goes into shock. It is impossible to yield as much shock to a decentralized system simply because the authority is better distributed – each node mattering less in the grand scheme of things means that the larger system is more resilient.

So there’s a strong sustainability aspect to this. Not in the happy hippie tree-hugging sense, although that definitely does come into play, but more in the lower level survivalist sense. We try to avoid positive feedback loops (exponential growth) because we know it’ll eventually end up killing us. It’s often very hard to determine whether we’re stuck in such a growth or decline cycle because long-term vision is difficult without data. We only really figured that out in the late 1700′s around most of the world, although there are some time series datasets that go back farther – for example population statistics going back to around the 1500′s when the term “statistics” was invented to describe “figures of the state”; many of these are old eye-witness accounts or studies while many others are modern day reconstructions based on artifacts.

It’s a pretty scary moment when you come to the understanding that the long now probably isn’t going to be very long. When I went through that, in late 2006, I started to try and learn personal survival first, try to acquire the knowledge needed to bootstrap society if it were to disappear overnight. That goal I largely failed, although I’ve managed to learn a thing or two, because I also started to understand that my own survival only guarantees limited resilience. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road illustrates pretty well what that looks like.

No. Survival is a much larger scale problem. If you’ve played Conway’s Game of Life you’ll know that certain patterns are recurrent, some are viral, but most are unstable and end up petering out into nothing. We need to guarantee some kind of larger scale survival. The only viable Nash equilibrium of this game is the one where we don’t all end up being liquid contributions to the next dominant life form’s Peak Oil problem.

Understanding all of this, I started to ally myself with the brightest minds I could find, the clearest thinkers, the folks who were willing to share in my optimism that humanity could move beyond this. I found amazing people who were willing to stop pretending everything was okay and move on to explore the ideas that could maximize human potential while minimizing the amount of damage we would do to ourselves, each other, and our environment.

But throughout this, we’ve been banging into walls. The prerequisite to individual self-governance, which itself is a prerequisite to sustainable survival, is, as I said before, our ability to create, receive, transmit, store and alter information. We need to be able to learn, we need to be able to use our cultural heritage and build on it, we need to be able to share our findings with each other and transform them into meaningful action.

But we have seen so many things that prevent that.

We have seen that intellectual property law has been since its inception a device for scarcifying knowledge, complicating trade and benefiting industries, and we know that the concept of intellectual property has run aground. All aspects of intellectual property law must be entirely reconsidered, whether it be copyright, patents or trademarks.

We have seen that state censorship and its big brother, corporate censorship, have been protected at a fundamental level by law makers for centuries. We have seen their laws been used to cripple the fourth estate, limit the propagation of the truth, and benefit the interests of those who can control the laws through corruption and material wealth.

We have seen privacy sacrificed on the altar of security. The ability of a person to retain her personal information and have agency over it, to not have the limits of her privacy dictated by governments, corporate entities, or other individuals, has been cut off by a lack of transparency in information systems and invasions in the form of ubiquitous surveillence, unneccessary tracking and information collection, and sloppy identity management.

We have seen the spectre of insecurity whimsically applied to any given situation. People lacking requisite information are fed poorly researched and shoddily justified stories about how their security is allegedly protected by various measures, but the actual protection ranges from useless to patently absurd. These theatrics have been employed to frighten people into submission, limit their freedoms, and control their actions.

We have seen this, and many other things that trouble us. And what is worse, I and most of my co-conspirators in this perhaps vain attempt to fix what’s wrong with this world are citizens of an emerging supernation which appears to be bent on continuing this disasterous trend and following it to its illogical conclusion, a state sponsored infocalypse, the information dark ages.

As information technology expands into every branch of human activity, and the European Union, just like any other geopolitical entity, struggles to present a comprehensive and enlightened view of how information should be goverened and regulated, I feel that there is no wisdom in applying traditional political values to information, nor do I believe that attempting to mediate the fundamental truths of how information works into channels carved by special interests hundreds of years ago will in any way suffice.

The EU is particularly in my gunsights because it is large, it is powerful, and it is largely opaque. It’s also in my garden, regulating my actions, and it’s about to gobble up the place that’s been my home for the last two decades as part of its empirical expansionist process. There are other problems too – the US is a mess, China is a looming threat, Russia is all kinds of crazy, but at the end of the day I am but one of many, and this node has decided to try and keep the field clear so others can act. Focusing on the EU is a sensible thing to do, for now. At some point that may change, and then I shall adapt.

To be honest, I’d be much happier doing tech. I’d love to be at Marcin’s farm helping build fantastic open source agricultural devices, or at Cloughjordan with Vinay mapping out infrastructure. There are few things that appeal to me as much as starting a company and putting one of my crazy plans into action – there’s plenty of them, many good, a few great, some just plain weird. But while the situation is as it is, somebody’s got to play bouncer.

As for my personal resilience, to be honest, I’m pretty tired. Almost everybody I work with, everybody who relies on me, has been let down at some point. Part of it is that I take on too much. Juggling handgrenades is a fine thing to do, but juggle too many for long enough and you’re eventually going to drop some. Not that it matters, really, they’re on timer fuses anyway.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been trying to clear up my task list, which has several years worth of unfinished obligations. Many have been dropped, but I feel that what’s left is very important. I can’t do it all, not by myself, but handing off projects to others isn’t something that I’ve been very good at in the past – part of it is an arrogant failure to understand the capacity of other good people, but a greater part of it is that most of the people who I’d feel comfortable entrusting these tasks to are already so busy with their own equally important tasks that it’s unrealistic.

The objective here isn’t to wallow in self-pity though; it’s not useful. The objective is to try and tie together why all of this stuff looks like it’s made of the same stuff from where I’m sitting: information rights, human rights, currencies, democracy, sustainability, technology,… they’re all part of the same weave.

At the core of it all is authority. Authority is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, it can merely be moved between individuals and changed in form. It’s expressions vary wildly, as do the relational constraints, but all in all it all comes down to the regulatory mechanisms that keep us in check. The things that make people toil in a factory instead of sitting in the sun. The things that make people show up to vote when they’d rather be reading. The things that govern our every action, however subtly.

The good news is that I’m still optimistic. Christian Siefkes asked me after a talk I gave in Oslo a couple of months ago whether I had become a pessimist. I can’t remember what my response was, but it had to do with realism as a precursor to optimism and analysis being prerequisite for action. I’d like to take a few weeks off, hide out somewhere with no uplink and no worries, but that’s an unattainable luxury at the moment. In the meantime, I’m optimistic, and there’s a good reason for that optimism – because as bleak as things are, we’ve never had this much fun.

Come have fun too, won’t you?

I've been trying to avoid writing overly self-referential posts until I get back on track, but it's worthwhile to start playing out the cards and making it known what I'm up to. My current major project is starting a company. Ambit is in the process of being legally founded by myself and my two associates, Ómar Yasin and Herbert Snorrason. We've got a ton of projects but no funding, although we expect to launch our first product by mid-August if everything goes according to our very elaborate plan. I'll post details as they appear, but you can also keep hitting refresh on http://www.ambit.is until it starts to have content, if that's the kind of thing that excites you. Of course, I never do just one thing. Having focus and direction is reserved for sensible people - I follow excitement wherever it goes. I'm still active in organizing the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. It's been very calm of late as we're waiting for the proposal to pass through the general affairs committee at parliament, but n

I’ve been trying to avoid writing overly self-referential posts until I get back on track, but it’s worthwhile to start playing out the cards and making it known what I’m up to.

My current major project is starting a company. Ambit is in the process of being legally founded by myself and my two associates, Ómar Yasin and Herbert Snorrason. We’ve got a ton of projects but no funding, although we expect to launch our first product by mid-August if everything goes according to our very elaborate plan. I’ll post details as they appear, but you can also keep hitting refresh on http://www.ambit.is until it starts to have content, if that’s the kind of thing that excites you.

Of course, I never do just one thing. Having focus and direction is reserved for sensible people – I follow excitement wherever it goes.

• I’m still active in organizing the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. It’s been very calm of late as we’re waiting for the proposal to pass through the general affairs committee at parliament, but now that we’re expecting to see it emerge soon there’s stuff coming out. Most of my time spent on this project for the last two months has been being interviewed by virtually every news organization in the world, from Korean Broadcasting System to Le Monde, from Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service to New York Times.
• IMMI wouldn’t exist if FSFÍ, the Icelandic Digital Freedoms Society, didn’t exist. I’m still on it’s board and amongst our major projects at the moment are copyright reform (specifically related to our most recent argument against the adoption of IPRED in Iceland), press freedoms (via IMMI), and other typical digital rights issues. You know the drill.
• Another thing that kindof-sortof came out of FSFÍ is the Reykjavík Hackerspace, Hakkavélin, which we are currently in the process of setting up. We’ve moved in to a 2500m² warehouse near the harbor run by the Idea House, and will be sharing the space with dozens of startup companies, freelancers and artists. So far we’ve hosted an Arduino hackathon, see earlier post.
• Iceland is still a mess. The financial collapse of 2008 was only the beginning, and since then structural failures have been exposed in virtually every aspect of the country’s governance model. Iceland isn’t the only country to be in this situation, by far, but it is the only country I’ve seen where there’s been widespread admittance of this fact and people have gotten past their anger to a point where they’re ready to start doing something. For this reason, I am involved in half a dozen grassroots movements here, discussing changes in everything from constitution to industrial model, from democracy method to currency.

Of course, this means I haven’t been able to put enough effort into my various other projects, and for this I am sorry. Fab Lab stuff has been on the sidelines for a bit, even the Afghanistan Lab, which I try to squeeze a few hours in here and there to work on.

The nice thing about starting a company is that it means that if all goes well I’ll have extra spending cash somewhere down the line, and we might even be able to hire more people to work on some of the really exciting stuff so that it gets done anyway. We’re currently in the process of finding funding to keep ourselves going for the first year or so, but we’re trying not to loose track of the important goal, delivering products.

Anyway. That’s what’s on. See me and raise me one, ye scurvy basterds!