thehumansarecoming

Please forgive the complete randomness of this post. This a excerpt of an email sent to the geowankers, a mailing list for people interest in experimenting with geolocation technologies. Anslem Hook’s vision for location aware technologies…

But there is a trajectory - I hope it goes like this:

1) To be able to “see”. Super rich socially filtered static spatial data about any area of interest. To know where your friends are, where stuff is, the history of things. I call this “the old white mans internet”. It is an internet of dry dead things; Wikipedia entries and Encyclopedia Of Life and WiserEarth and all the other fact repositories…

2) To be able to “say”. To be able to issue verbs on the environment; to say “I want Pizza” and to have people who want to sell me pizza compete for the privilege - filtered against my trust network… Inverting google so that the sellers do the work would really be satisfying. And it will be satisfying to finally have an industrial voice for our industrial landscape. I see FireEagle as an example here. Folks will hook up bartering and bidding systems to this kind of thing and we’ll be able to wander around in our little lives taking gigs, helping out, getting stuff that we need - without the hassle it is now.

3) To be able to “predict”. Really we all have to start focusing on the environment - which is not just the artificial idea we call ‘nature’, but the sum of nature, and humans, and human activity and human structures. Lifemapper is just starting to play around the edges here and that is so so exciting for me at least

4) To be able to “change”. Where I’d like to optimistically see this all go is that we’re able to kind of rewrite ourselves and our landscape on large scale. There are a lot of practices we hear about around the world that seem more sane; from sharing childcare to shared gardens to local doctoring to protecting salmon runs. But we don’t seem to have the power to affect our landscape. It becomes the life quest to make any one change and that is un-affordable. It’s bizarre how much cities and places we live in seem set in stone… maybe this will change?

Anyway… see y’all at WhereCamp tomorrow!
- anselm

That is one of the most articulate expressions for the location aware technogy movement I’ve come across in a long time! A lot of it echos the core themes of the Headmap Manifesto, a sequence of text fragments dealing with the social and cultural implications of location aware devices.

I first came across the Headmap Manifesto in 2002 and it was really exciting then, it felt like we were on the brink of a whole new world. Technology has come a long way since, and many ways we are are closer to realising that idea but in others we are not. I’d like to cover some of those developments in further detail, so stay tuned!

But for now, I’ll leave you with The Biggest Drawing In The World