Edited by Pat Kane (email)


:: How Will "Smart Mobs" Play Out? ::

That's what Business Week asked Howard Rheingold this week, the genial prime-guru of cyberculture for the last twenty years. One can only be jealous of his timing - writing a book about the idea that mobile wireless tech will create a new society, and then seeing the "flash mobs" phenomenon take off. (Though the whole phenom has deeper roots than we think).

But in terms of The Play Ethic, smart mobs are a perfect exemplar of the kind of social players that info-tech can generate. That's exactly the kind of agency and action that a liberation from work culture - which means a liberation into a different relationship between passion and technology - can bring.

Here's Howard, mixing the hard-nosed and the civic-utopian with ease:

A:What can you do when you've got a billion people walking around with computing devices connected at high speeds? I don't think we really have a clue to that. But there's huge technology potential and huge entrepreneurial potential...

The most extraordinary potential is that the people who couldn't have afforded PCs or the Internet are walking around barefoot talking on cell phones, sending text messages -- finding out about the spot labor market in their African village or which port is paying a better price for fish today. That's under the radar of the enterprises whose business is to sell to the middle classes of the world.

Q: So will the U.S. necessarily be the place where new enterprises based on this trend take root, or is it really lagging?

A: The assumption that it's going to come from Silicon Valley, or even America, may be looking in the wrong direction. This time, we may be seeing things come out of China or Brazil....If a 15-year-old in São Paolo can't invent tomorrow's Google, we will all be impoverished because of it.

:: Democrazy ::

Fascinating to muse on what politics means in the age of the smart mob and the social player. What does the polis become, when social space becomes alive with information and interactivity? My e-pal Douglas Rushkoff (cartoon) is launching a publication at the ICA on networked democracy (I will be there).

It's bound to be a great event, and a stimulating booklet. Douglas believes that the nerds, geeks and gamers have a vision of reality that puts everything "into play" - and that thus allows for a new, grass-roots, yet innovative politics to emerge. As he writes in an early version of the book:

Yes, political structures do need to be changed. But we may have to let their replacements emerge from the myriad of new relationships that begin to spawn once people are acting and communicating in the present, and on a realistic scale, instead of talking about a fictional future.
The underlying premise is still dependent on the notion of progress. Indeed, things must get better or there’s no point to any of it. But our understanding of progress must be disengaged from the false goal of “growth” or the even more dangerous ideal of “salvation,” and reconnected with the very basic metric of social justice: how many people are able to participate?

And to add to the Rheingold piece, Rushkoff also writes elsewhere how this might also help out some beleaguered telecom giants - by turning them away from content, and towards contact. Typical show-stopping quote:

It's time for the wireless industry to come to grips with the fact that no matter how sleek the phones or colorful the pictures on their little screens, nobody wants to have sex with either. They want to have sex with each other. Either help them, or get out of the way.

:: Play Times ::

The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds Conference that does what it says on the tin. And in New York too.

Brazil's different drum Nice piece on Lula, Brazil's new president, as a "radical pragmatist...Real improvisation, in music or politics, should not be mistaken for aimless noodling, and it takes great discipline and planning to be pulled off well."

Junkyard Sports The great player Bernie De Koven's bid for a new sports movement.

Yes Logo It was bound to happen: people now seen to defend their big brands against contamination by history, world, change. Displaying their gullibility - or asserting their semiotic rights?(See Virginia Postrel's latest on this).

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