DRAFT of 3 examples of “working” contemporary alternatives and their malcontent’s.

The Village Butty
A lovely project provided originally by a hard-working individual with small funding and continuing energy. The need, boaters need a warm dry open common place, if their unique contemporary “village” culture is to survive the long term slow and grinding pushing out of CRT and local councils, not to menturn the self inflicted internal sabotage of its own often mad dispoleing crews.

The village butty is a re-booting/rebrinding of the older james's butty for hiar, the early project had burned out then faded due to the the off balance of money making outreach and community value boater use. In the end it alienated both and with a waning of good will and no money coming in the butty was going to be sold. A new younger more energetic crew came in to save the day, with a real crowed funding outreach, boater community lead, the butty was saved.

But the is a denial/unknowing of the need to balance/manage community that is pushing this out of balance to the money making side (fair anufe the failer of this side of the balance was the resion for the need for the reboot). But if this understandable swing reaction is not brought back into balance then the good will of the community side of sustainability  balance will be lost and with out this it becomes harder to keep a boat working on the water, aspesheraly in such a small place as London. The boater community provides the couler and direct practical support when needed, as well as its own headaches ;)

This needs a community hart-hart gathering to unblock the constipation that is currently blocking the shit from coming out, a bit of composting will need to be preprepared for this gathering for the resulting smell not to drive people away.

The London Hackspace
One of the few continuing/ongoing “secessess” of alt-DIY organising in the UK. It is not only a fantastic place full of interesting, competent and active people, its organised in a way/model for how grassroots could be expanded out to fill in more social spaces.

Was originally set-up and run by a competent invisible affinity group as the space grew this became an opaque affinity group, with suseass and increasing membership this opaque group became visibly dysfunctional due to dilution and burn out of the original core crew. Affinity organising, while still core, was submerged into bureaucracy, hard rules and angry trolls hitting each other with them filled the online spaces and left the real world space dulled and filled with low level broken.

The space continues and a big smoky flare up and resulting gathering helped to resolve the surface issues, but the underlining fractures have not been addressed to truly sustain the project, lets hope it survives the move to the next premisses and continues to grow and mutate.

The Hive Dalston
This one started well but fell into an ideological clash that became hidden in a smoke screen of personalty politics. The lack of any clear vision made it impossible to resolve as the underlining tensions were blocked from being spoken. One side pushed the other aside and took over sole running of the project, it became a ideologically driven shadow of what it needed to be, in this it moved to being part of the problem rather than part of the solution, making it hard to continue to support the project in any way.

This is not beyond rescue, and the balance between (selfish/stupid) evil and (open/growing) good is still in the air. One solution, a moment of evil, a bit of power politics would put this project back on track, light and dark need each other, some times the devil is right.

Conclusion

To move all these projects on we need to reknit the broken bones of the past.

Why did the thousands of open internet projects fail? despite the mager state, foundation, NGO funding. The were early successful atavist tech projects, all proved to be pointless or withered with success. In all cases I would argue that the underlining failer was one of ideology, almost all projects worked against the dominate ideology of the net and web it self. Just as the dotcons bumed and bust repeatedly, traditional media was hopeless in till a new generation came along who had a inclining of the underlining working of the new tech ideology.

The few open projects that worked with in the ideology of the web were swamped by the pushing of the funding of the main streaming of the web/internet. Am arguing here that the majority of people making a living in the open web/internet world are core to the problem not the solution, I could name hundreds of projected with the word open/radical in um who actively destroyed “open”.

A tiny minority created a world expanding technology based on the ideology and practices of trust based Anercisam. This exploded into the existing tech/communication worlds, pushing aside, pushing over, all the “better” 20th century vertical (ideology) tech already in place. Open became dominant for a while and this open was “locked in” because of a strong idealogical thread through out the standards and structures the internet/web, the very “chaos” of the open web protected it from the “vertical” (20th century) lockines of corporates such as Microsoft etal.

Nothing last for ever, a new generation came along who merged the “open” back into the “closed” cant rearly blame them, they were children of Thatcher and Rangion.  Am amazed to have lived though the time of the open web, the world really did feel very different for a time. Who are the heroes and who the villeins, this history is unwritten yet, better get to it.

This is my realistic/pessimistic view of were we are at for a little more dreamy/optimistic view LINK

 

Would like to test some bits from banggood for cheap offgride life. If you would like to push me a donation on the button on the left would help to make this happen.

Here are 2 potentially useful pieces of off grid kit

12000mAh 12V Car Jump Starter Car and laptop/USB Power Supply Battery

In theory this should charge off a portable solar panel, and run a laptop and any USB device. Almost all of these will fail to charge off 12-14v needing 16-19v to charge properly, this one says it will charge off a boat/car (12-14v) so good to test if this is true so I can recommend it as a backup winter boat/summer travel power source.

Nitecore MH20 CREE XM-L2 U2 1000LM USB Smallest LED Flashlight 18650

This would not only make a good flash light for dark nights on the tow-path it would make a good anti mugging device to scar away undesirables 1000 lumen is blighting bright. The current touch i use for this is only 70 lumen which works fine. This charges by USB so easy plug and forget no battery’s to replace.  Will it work? Hands on testing is the only way to tell.

If you would like to support reviewing these products and many others click the donate link on the side bar

BBC Worldwide have taken down from YouTube a video I made 7 years ago at the time of the first bombing of Gaza. It features the late Tony Benn's magnificent indignation at the BBC's refusal to show the Gaza charitable appeal.  Takedowns of news clips, especially a blacking out of the video in all countries, are unusual these days. Most copyright disputes on YouTube are now settled by leaving the video up, banning adverts by the poster and/or reserving to the copyright holder the right to put ads themselves. The video is available again, if only temporarily, while I dispute the claim.

Here is my dispute:

"The subject of the video is to criticise the censorship of a charitable appeal by the same broadcaster that has made the copyright complaint. This is a legitimate and fair exercise of free speech, and satisfies the conditions for fair use. The video is not monetized, and therefore non-commercial, it is from a factual work (a news broadcast), and the amount used is only sufficient to show the indignation of the guest of the show in question at the censorship of the material. The ability of BBC Worldwide to profit from the sale of this 7-year-old news broadcast of an interview with a now deceased politician must be very small, and in any case is not impeded by the clip's being cut into this video critique. It would be perfectly appropriate for BBC Worldwide to exercise its right to prevent the monetising of the video, which in any case we as producers have never done, but to take it down is an attack on free speech. Prior approval of the copyright holder for a usage which so clearly criticises that same copyright holder would clearly be impossible to obtain, and therefore the principle of fair use has been applied for this non--commercial work, for which there many precedents, not only deriving from the statutes governing YouTube, but also from UK case law regarding the public's interest in critical material."

I have won such copyright disputes before. The US legisIation permits re-mixing for critical purposes - it's fairly well established. Might there be some other motivation for the takedown? Could it be Benn's comment: "Let me be clear about this. People will DIE because of what the BBC has done"? Other BBC news clips on YouTube (unedited, without any critique, so straightforward "steals") have been left unmolested, including one of the same clip I have used. Is the BBC's problem precisely that their clip is contextualised, edited together with the aid appeal they censored, plus a devastating orphan's story from Gaza?

Watch this space.

Here are two views on this subject:

We have Phil Windley who thinks the open internet was a historical fluke http://www.windley.com/archives/2016/02/decentralization_is_hard_maybe_too_hard.shtml here he is talking about the very real view that the internet is finished, that the commons have been enclosed by the dotcon silos and what remains outside are terminally withered and dieing.

Then Dave Winer http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/26/0936.html who argues that the open web comes in waves and what Phil Windley is arguing is but the drawing back of the water before the next wave of open washes in.

My point of view is that both are right, the open internet was a historical “mistake” and with Winer that the are a few waves left, the storm is not over yet. The is a logic to the digitisation of everything and the web was a living example of this let loss, it was a tsunamis that crashed over every part of our cultures and the storm is not over yet.

The commons opened up by the early web are enclosed by dotcons, but their sea defences are low and weak and the digitisation storm still rages.