Earlier this month I spoke about the history and future of Solarpunk at Human Entities Conference in Lisbon – organised by CADA in partnership with the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon.

I think it’s one of my best talks and has some new thoughts and ideas in it.

I found myself bringing up the Heavy Weather that’s coming – and how it’s going to be shit. Given the growth in popularity and interest that Solarpunk has seen in the last year or so, I thought it important to say that things aren’t going to be great in the near future. Despite its optimism, Solarpunk doesn’t shy away or ignore this reality we are en route to a better world and its going to take dirt behind our ears to get there.

You watch a re-recording of the talk, or listen to the original recording below:

The post Solarpunk Means Dreaming Green | Human Entities 2024 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

My talk below on the design of ‘Myth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds‘ is one of the best talks I’ve ever given about Worlds. And represents where my thinking on ‘Worlds Theory‘ is at present.

I’m really pleased to be sharing it, I hope you check it out!

The talk covers a lot of ground – 80 slides in 22mins lol – but the main topics include:

I hope to write a great deal this coming year about *why* my primary thesis: All techno-social systems should be seen through the lens of worlds is important. But for now, now this talk is online – a talk I’m immensely proud of – I’ll be pointing people to it whenever I’m asked the question ‘What do you do?’.

Mostly – as a result of my own failings – my research interests, consulting work and essay collection has been opaque and hard to parse. But being invited to speak to a room full of people building Techno-Social systems - that one day (they hope) will become alive and living Worlds seemed like a good place to lay out the terrain of thought I’ve been exploring.

If you find this talk of interest, or a value, please share it or get in touch!

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Myth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Worlds A Walk Though: Their History Done Quick

The talk was the first outing for some of the material from my book The Web Was a Side Quest.

If you want to read more from me on Autonomous Worlds: Check out my Wind-up worlds essay from May 2022 or my essay collection at worldrunning.guide.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Worlds A Walk Though appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Mistakonic Virtual University Press have brought Anna Greenspan’s hugely influential CCRU infused PHD thesis: Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, to print for the first time for its 22nd anniversary.

The forward was written by buddies Wassim Z. Alsindi, Max Hampshire, and Paul Seidler. Picking Greenspan’s thesis up where it left off back in 2000, they bring technical and philosophical discussion to the world of blockchains in an extended introduction.

We propose that distributed, consensus-based timekeeping technologies—incorporating the mnemotechnics of what are commonly known as blockchains, but more fittingly referred to as timechains—can be apprehended as a realized instantiation of a generative substrate for the spawning of occurrences in virtual time as a by-product of their production of Chronic order. This ‘ultimate abstract power,’ and the concomitant shift in the temporal apparatuses at our disposal, has ramifications regarding the increasingly fragmented era of patchwork modernity that now delimits the preconditions for experience itself. This fragmentation is not merely a point of analytic interest, however. In the past, radical movements with temporal secessionism at the core of their manifestos include the May Fourth movement in China, French Revolutionary Time, and the rearchitecting of time-zones by nation states to distance themselves temporally, economically, and politically from their imperial and colonial oppressors.

In honour of the book’s publication 0xSalon, it;s the first broadcast edition; discussing the thesis and themes in the book. It was strange to on a Salon call knowing that it was being recorded, but it if you haven’t seen or heard of 0xSalon the video / call below is a good introduction to the community its vibe. Something the organisers have spent a lot of time fostering and encouraging.

The post Twenty-Two Years of Transcendental Time Machines | 0xSalon appeared first on thejaymo.net.

This Saturday (8th Oct) at 3pm UK time I will be speaking on the panel (Un)Sustainable Perspectives as part of digital art festival, Patchlab Festival‘s online programming.

Here’s the panel details:

(Un)Sustainable Perspectives
Curated and hosted by Irini Mirena Papadimitriou – Creative Director of the FutureEverything.

What does a sustainable world look like? Is sustainability even possible if our capitalist society relies on fast and endless production, supply chains and extractivism? Can we build things differently or produce less? In this conversation, we explore possibilities – and impossibilities – of reframing planetary relationships and shifting our focus to interconnected ecosystems and economies. We are also reflecting on the role of art, design and technology in how these might be shaping our environmental understanding and where we go next.

Other participants include:
Nick Laessing – an artist working with environmental storytelling,
Giulia Bellinetti – researcher and cultural programmer,
Host Irini Mirena Papadimitriou from Future Everything.

The event is free and requires no registration.
If you want to watch live you can catch it here.

The post (Un)Sustainable Perspectives | Patchlab 2022 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at Incredible Machines Conference along side my New Centre co-instructor Ross McElwain from 𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔬𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔟𝔩𝔢 ⟠ 𝔬𝔟𝔧𝔢𝔠𝔱. Ross is talking about DAOs, I’ll be speaking about worlds and world models. We have 15mins.

You can register here

Here’s our talk abstract:

Movement Between Models

Decentralized Autonomous Organisations were originally imagined by cybernetics and later realized on the blockchain. An alegal organizational model ideal for coordinating both large and small groups across territorial borders, DAOs have become a design space explored notably by gamers, artists, and activists, especially in the field of governance. We foresee DAOs playing a crucial role in the passage between what might be termed hybrid realities, both on and offline. This is a natural consequence of internet-native generations’ sharp awareness of living inside political, fictional and other models, and will constitute a powerful form of critique from within.

The whole event program is two days this weekend. The conference begins at 9am ET and has some fantastic programming.

INCREDIBLE MACHINES 2022

SATURDAY OCTOBER 1

-DESIGNING THE PROBLEM, MODELING THE SOLUTION

9:00 9:10   Introduction Shaun Dacey
9:10 9:20   Introduction Mohammad Salemy
9:20 9:25   Moderator Introduction
9:25 9:40   Ross McElwain & Jay Springett
9:40 9:55   Mi You
9:55 10:10  Zenobio Almeida
10:10 10:25 Benjamin Bratton
10:25 10:55 Q&A

11:10 11:25 Ed Keller
11:25 11:40 Patricia Reed
11:40 11:55 Valentin Golev
11:55 12:10 Daniel Young
12:10 12:40 Q&A

-WHEN TO MODEL, HOW TO KNOW
13:30 13:40 Introduction by Mohammad Salemy
13:40 13:45 Moderator Introduction
13:45 14:00 Elie Ayache
14:00 14:15 Anna Longo
14:15 14:30 Franziska Aigner
14:30 14:45 Katerina Kolozova
14:45 15:15 Q&A

15:30 15:45 Jean-Pierre Caron
15:45 16:00 AA Cavia
16:00 16:15 Reza Negarestani
16:15 16:30 Cássia Siqueira
16:30 17:00 Q&A

SUNDAY OCTOBER 2

-MODELING NOVELTY, FORMING KNOWLEDGE
11:00 11:10 Introduction Mohammad Salemy
11:10 11:15 Moderator Introduction
11:15 11:30 Jason Mohaghegh
11:30 11:45 Julieta Aranda
11:45 12:00 Judy Radul
12:00 12:15 Rodolfo Sousa Ortega
12:15 12:30 Cécile Malaspina
12:30 13:00 Q&A

13:15 13:30 Erica Love & Joao Enxuto
13:30 13:45 Romulo Moraes
13:45 14:00 Stephanie Wakefield
14:00 14:15 Xenia Benivolski
14:15 14:30 Vali Mahlouji
14:30 15:00 Q & A

The post The Model Is the Message | Incredible Machines 2022 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I was on a panel at Futurecon 2021 on Saturday.

We had a really interesting conversation. I enjoyed the concept of local fiction from Pepe and Smait. Proposing ‘Borderpunk’ and ‘Visapunk’ respectively. Of course we talked about Solarpunk, Cyberpunk, our issues with ‘Hopepunk’. The possible role for sci-fi, punk etc in politics. Also aesthetics vs praxis.

Great chat, I had a wonderful time!

‘WHAT PUNK ARE YOU? Past, Present and Future Trends in Anti-capitalists Science Fiction’

SATURDAY 4th SEPTEMBER | 4th Panel 15h in Santiago | 21h in Rome | 23h in Dubai | 3h+ in Beijing

WHAT PUNK ARE YOU? Past, Present and Future Trends in Anti-capitalists Science Fiction

Fábio Fernandes (Brazil, host)
Jay Springett (UK)
Nicoletta Vallorani (Italy)
Pepe Rojo (Mexico)
Samit Basu (India)

Futurecon is now in its second year, and fast becoming an extremely important online convention in the global Science Fiction calendar. Its founders and organisers are committed to bringing together and raising up voices from outside the anglosphere. Building bridges and encouraging the formation of new communities.

This year we want to engage with even more native innovators and storytellers that make Science Fiction happen and flourish in their own language and markets. We want to build the tools that will reshape our own imagination, set up creative networks, and make room for independent voices, crafting publishing alternatives and self-sustainable connections to “decolonize the future.”

This is important work. As I said at the end of my panel, I really appreciated/thanked the participants for speaking English with me!

I caught a number of panels over the weekend and can’t wait to find the time to catch up on the others. Thanks to Franceso from www.futurefiction.org for the invite.

Future Fiction has published my writing in Italian/Translation.

The post WHAT PUNK ARE YOU? appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I went to The Stoa last night to talk about Solarpunk, Cultural Fracking & Memetic Engines.

I gave a 30min talk followed by 30mins of really thoughtful and lively Q+A. The whole hour was really fun, I enjoyed myself. I think that comes across in the recording:

August 17th, 2021

Solarpunk is an emerging movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The future is as much about today as it is tomorrow. This talk is about the de-furing impulses of mass culture, cultural fracking, atemporality, juxtaposition, futexture, and more. How can we use narrative strategies to imagine new speculative presents in order to re-future the future?

Jay Sprigett is a consultant strategist, currently specialising in the distributed web, metaverse, and world running. He works with individuals and organisations to create cohesive worlds.

In 2019 he was selected as one of WeAreEurope’s 64 Faces of Europe and is a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts. He co-founded the decentralised creative exchange guild.is and is a member of the Global Regeneration CoLab. His Solarpunk short story ‘In The Storm, A Fire’ was long listed for the BSFA 2020 Short Fiction Award.

It was really cool to be invited to The Stoa. I’d like to thank Peter for the invitation.
It’s not often that you get invited to speak on a youtube channel that you’re subscribed too. In the introduction before he hit record he mentions that he’s wanted to have me on for a long time, which I’ll admit made me blush. lol

The Stoa has recently seen appearances from friends like Other.Internet and Dougald Hine etc.

Two people have already contacted me to ask for the talk materials. If I get more requests, I’ll write it up like I did for the Rusted Chrome talk I did a few years ago.

Thanks again to Peter and The Stoa team.

The post Solarpunk: A Narrative Strategy, a Memetic Engine | The Stoa appeared first on thejaymo.net.

In an alternate reality I am at Intonal Festival in Malmo, Sweden this week.

Instead, my talk ‘The Future Is A Vibe’ will be showing on Intonal’s Youtube Channel at 15.30 CEST Saturday 19th June. 14.30pm UK time.

I’ll be in the chat during the premier if anyone wants to hang out.

I’m sad that I’m not going to get to see the friends who are playing at/running the festival, Brexited to live there. But its 2021 and is what it is I suppose.

THE FUTURE IS A VIBE

About his talk “The Future is a Vibe”, he writes:

How can we use emerging aesthetic movements like Solarpunk to shift and change culture towards a better future? How can we make life more wonderful for us right now, as well as for our descendants? The future is as much about today as it is tomorrow.

This talk is about the de-futuring impulses of mass culture around us, and what we can do to counter them. To imagine new futures we must first dislocate them from the present. Jay will offer up a toolbox of ideas that can be used to create quick speculative presents. Atemporality, juxtaposition, vibes, and more. These ‘new nows’ can inspire us to explore different and new futures. Remember folks, it’s the vibe that dislocates the present to re-future the future.

The talk is a bit experimental. It’s about scissor labels, memetic engines, ‘future texture’, vibes, and Solarpunk. It represents where I am personally right now. The only thing I don’t mention I think is citizen sci-fi.

The session was originally going to be a two way discussion with the audience, stepping them from one idea to another rather than presented as a complete polished thread or thesis.
So expect some weirdness.

I wrote up my current definition of a ‘Memetic Engine’ here.

Here’s some slides from the talk to whet ones whistle.

‘The Future Is A Vibe’ will be showing on Intonal’s Youtube Channel at 15.30 CEST Saturday 19th June. 14.30pm UK time.

The post THE FUTURE IS A VIBE | INTONAL FESTIVAL 2021 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Wednesday 17 July 2019 – Sonar+D – Barcelona

On the 30th anniversary of the www, Sónar+D 2019 looked forward to what the next three decades might hold. In this talk, hosted by We Are Europe, journalist Marta Peirano,, researcher and activist Xenia Ermoshina,“solarpunk” theorist Jay Springett, discussed how decentralisation, privacy and ecology will re-configure the use and the potential of the internet. Moderated by Ash Sarkar.

My talk was quoted by The Long Now Foundation in their report from Sonar+D.

If you regularly enjoy my writing or podcasts please consider supporting my work here.

Tales of the Next Internet

Introduction

My name is Jay Springett and I am a Writer, Theorist and Strategist and I write online at twitter, website, medium etc under the handle @thejaymo. 

I grew up in a small Brexity seaside town on the south east coast of England, close enough to see the lights of the french coast on a moonless night. At 18 I escaped for London but left the pro LGBT, anti-racist and anti-fascist DIY Hardcore Punk scene I was involved in throughout my Teen aged years behind. A formative community experience which still influences my politics to this day. 

At university I equally split my time between philosophy and music coming away with a degree with the title ‘Philosophy of the Arts’. As a consequence I still identity as a musician to my core and that informs a lot of how I think creatively.

After university as many do. I feel into an accidental career in HR tech and consulting firms lately shifting to working in tech startups doing Business Operations.

I now have a weekly podcast, write, and work freelance with firms that need to scale fast. I tend to focus on the company’s future culture, tools and processes strategy. 

Alongside this CV stuff. Outside of work I have always been adjacent to art, tech and theory worlds. 

I am (or was) perhaps best known for coining the term Stacktivism earlier this decade – a term that attempted to give form to both a critical conversation and a line of enquiry around infrastructure & the relationship we have to it. 

Drawn from a portmanteau of “The Stack” . The horizontally independent but vertically integrated set of technologies that keep us alive – combined with a critical activism towards infrastructure. This period of my life forced both myself and many others to confront the question

“Who owns the means of not dying”. 

I am also an Admin on solarpunks.net . A tumblr founded in 2012 by the American researcher-at-large and artistic troublemaker Adam Flynn after hearing of the first Anthology: Solarpunk ecological and fantastical stories in a sustainable world published in Brazilian Portuguese the same year.

Solarpunks.net is a tumblog dedicated to Solarpunk. A movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable Civilization look like, and how can we get there?” Since 2012, Solarpunk has created a multitude of spaces for indigenous sovereignties, reproductive justice, and radical queer politics. Contrasting the popular grim futures of cyberpunk with a bright green optimism.

With both these topics front of mind. For the last year or so I have been working on a project called Land As Platform. A book that combines both: platforms and the road to utopia. As well as my long standing interest in environmentalism and regenerative agriculture. 

The project seeks to explore what Platforms are in the age of planetary scale computation and what can be learned from the existence and deployment of such large scale techno social projects whilst explaining the principles of permaculture and ecological systems to a wide audience as possible.

So this is where my mind is today. The brief for this panel was to talk a bit about our work, followed by our ideas, dreams and challenges of the future internet. I’d like to talk briefly on three subjects which are quite different, but I hope will prompt some interesting discussions.

The Long View 

One of the things I’ve internalised whilst working on Land as Platform is that Humanity is extremely old. 

We are blinded as a culture by our use of the Anno Domini dating system. In 1993 Cesare Emiliani proposed a dating system that begins with the Holocene era. The geological epoch that also coincides with the earliest human experiments in infrastructure and agriculture . If we use this system then today’s date is July 17 12,019. 

It also I feel goes quite a long way to contextualising the so called quote unquote ‘Anthropocene era’ that we entering today. 

But we can go further back than 12 Thousand years. A date that would place us amongst the stones of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, a ritual site situated 20 miles from the current Syrian border 

The sculpture of The Lion Man found in a German cave in 1939 is between 35,000 and 40,000 years old. 

And as Troy Conrad Therrien points out in his 2017 essay ‘Social Soup’ 

Neanderthals were identified as the architects of a 177,000-year-old magic circle found deep inside a cave in France. No older ritual architecture is known. 

The base layer of our civilizational stack may have been inherited.”

Social Soup – Troy Conrad Therrien

It may seem strange in a talk on the next internet to bring up objects that live at such vast time depths. But it is important as there is a deficiency of long term thinking in western culture. It will be vital that we think at multigenerational time depths about everything from internet technologies, to tree planting given the challenges that humanity faces. 

Our modern world seeks to focus us towards the short term and praises quarterly growth. But in the real world, away from high frequency ledger entries and global capital flows. It takes 100-120 years for an oak tree to grow from seed to full canopy height. It takes three human generations to grow a tree.

This is real growth. And I’d like to propose that everything that occurs in the duration between the decision to plant an acorn to the trees full grown crown is short term thinking. Which places 12,150 is the medium term.

Indeed the Oak tree King of Limbs, in Britain is over 1,000 years old. It has been growing quietly in place since before the Norman Conquest. The King doesn’t much care about one iPhone model to the next. 

Millennia long scales of engagement with the world around us are almost unimaginable when contrasted with the 2 week long Agile sprints popular in the tech development world. 

And this is why I bring it up today given we are talking about the future of the internet. Given average age of an S&P 500 company is now under 20 years, down from 60 years in the 11,950s I worry that technology under capitalist logics just cannot respond to the challenges we face. 

As both the internet and open-source has gotten older, the earth has gotten more unbearable as time went by. Software engineers feel a sense of urgency to move much quicker than they should be.

It is relatively easy to talk about the short term, imagining and extrapolating the next 30 years of technological development out to 12,050, its possibilities, its dangers and the dark places that it could all lead. 

But what about the 500 year or 1000 year internet? Who ever heard of the 100 year website. This I struggle to imagine. And I imagine you do too.

I do sometimes think that perhaps all the chimes, bleeps and bloops on the starship enterprise are all still driven by MIDI. And Geordi La Forge being just as frustrated by how bad it is as musicians are today. A protocol today only at the grand old age of 38.

Zooming in from 1000 year internet view to the the media term I come to my second point.

How Does Software Make Us Feel?

It’s my belif that in the near future a much larger focus will be placed on how software makes us feel. 

A question first sparked in me a few years ago after I developed intense bouts of synesthesia as a consequence of my meditation practice. 

A trend in surveillance technologies today is to make claims about how it can measure or extrapolate human personality data. perhaps best seen in the mess around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. In addition I recently saw a company claiming to be able to measure emotional states in people based on wifi signal data. All of this of course is relative nonsense based on incorrect assumptions in psychology and statistics, anyway I digress. Because it really should be studying the problem the other way around. 

What do I mean by ‘how software makes us feel’? People sink hundreds of hours into mobile games like Candy Crush and clash of clans, as whilst playing it it makes them feel a certain way, separating temporarily from their commute or whatever else is going on in their lives. 

Some other examples are:

• Chat apps like whats app or telegram feel to me like complicated emotional tennis volleys.
• For me Music Software highlights the sweeping inevitability of the passing of time. Broken and divided artificially by bar numbers, time signatures and bpm. 
• Or the machine like algorithmic coldness of complicated resource management strategy games like Civilization or Age of Empires. 

A great deal has been written already on the gamification of metrics inside web apps like Twitter. Yes this world is full of terrible people but the software design itself makes them worse.

In the medium term future systems should adapt to us, not the other way around.

The first glimmer of hope for me can be seen in the Jobs to be done framework gaining traction in the software development world. As a framework for UX it is quite interesting as it focuses on the desires of the user. “How will using this software better my life”. 

Because at the end of the day software and the internet is a tool. You wouldn’t keep a hammer or a kettle around in your house for long if it actively made your life miserable. We shouldn’t tolerate it with software, or the internet. A technology that is increasingly more and more deeply enmeshed in our day to day lives.

More sympathetic emotional software is vital in very short term which brings me to my last point.

Enmeshment

Moore’s law seems to have slowed with further advances in silicon production bumping up against the edges of material science and physics. Unless you have the money and the space for a warehouse full of coolant systems and physicists, quantum computing isn’t coming to you any time soon.

However miniaturisation of existing technologies continue apace. In the last 10 years we have seen a revolution in this regard. Military grade technologies and now be found in all out phones.

• Proximity sensors.
• Ambient light sensors.
• Infrared.
• Blood flow and heart rate sensors.
• Camera sensors and their lenses.
• Accelerometers.
• Gyroscopes.
• And compasses. 

To name a few. 

Many of us walk around with biometric sensors that were science fiction only 15 years ago.

All these combined with looming ‘Print to chip’ technologies that remove the need to compile code signal the end of general purpose computation as we’ve known it to date. The logical end point of all this is sensors…. sensors everywhere. 

Print to chip custom silicone will increase power efficiency and reduce costs of these passive sensors immeasurably perhaps even to the point that they can be run like a victorian coper and zinc earth battery. Coinciding (I hope) with humanities grandest project. 

The regreening of the world. 

These sensors will be in every field, in every tree,and listening from every bush and canopy for sounds of returning insects and a resurgent biosphere. This however, if shepherded by evil and malicious souls, may very well produce a nightmare world 

So we are faced with a choice. Total surveillance for short term financial gain and political domination, resulting in a sort of “free range” totalitarianism for the population of the world.

Or we could think along longer and grander timescales. And if you would all permit me, I’d like to read what I consider to be the UR poem of solarpunk texts”

 All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan:

{Watch the video to see me read it. I won’t reproduce it here}

I was invited to Sonar+D as one of We Are Europes 64 Faces of Europe . If you would like to to speak at your event etc – please get in touch.

The post Tales of the Next Internet @ Sonar+D appeared first on thejaymo.net.

You may remember I spoke at Fiber Festival last year in Amsterdam.

They just released a short 8 minute mini documentary recapping the themes of the festival with interviews with the participants.

It features me talking about Platforms and Solarpunk. I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about.

The idea of terraformation was once the domain of writers and artists. We’re entering a new space race to colonise and terraform the universe. Silicon Valley companies like SpaceX, Google and Planetary Resources are in the front seat. As we edge closer towards inevitable environmental collapse these big tech companies are scrambling to colonise new habitable worlds on distant planets. By shooting a cherry-red Tesla car into space, they shape the future narrative of man in space. But what are we leaving behind on Earth? If today’s technological leaps aren’t improving our natural environments than what legacy will we inherit in worlds abroad?

Speakers
• Pippa Goldschmidt
• E.J. Swift
• Jay Springett
• Ivan Henriques
• Miha Turšič
• Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney (FoAM)
• Films: Margaux Hendriksen, Matthew C. Wilson

P.S Even after all these years I love the way my earrings look ?

The post Coded Matter(s): Terra Fiction | Stage II of Worldbuilding appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I have just updated the ‘Works‘ page on my website with all the upcoming speaking events I have this year. I want to rebuild the site at some point but I hate wordpress more than I hate how the website looks right now so it keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list.

I thought I would post an update outside of my regular weekly rhythm to include some of the confirmed highlights for me in the year ahead. I hope the 50ish of you that find me interesting enough to follow this blog find the information all in one place interesting.

Also.. I just posted something similar to LinkedIn so I just copy and pasted it here.

They are Europe

Various opportunities have presented themselves this year including inclusion in We are Europe’s – They Are Europe Program

We are Europe is the association of 8 major European events joining forces to promote, create and produce innovative cultural practices, defined by creative diversity and exchanges.

64 People are chosen every season and this year I was honoured to be included as one of them. As a result in part I now find myself on the professional speaking circuit:

Upcoming Talks (Confirmed)

Jun 19 – Solarpunk And The Great Unfolding: Building Keystones Of Continuity@Border Sessions – The Hague

Jul 19 – New Internet (Panel Discusion) @Sonar-D – Barcelona

Sept 19 – Land As Platform @Primer – Copenhagen

Oct 19 – Interspecies Solidarity (Panel Discusion) @Unsound Festival – Krakow

Oct 19 – Solarpunk: Life in the future beyond the rusted chrome of yestermorrow @Unsound Festival – Krakow

Consulting

I am also available for operational and strategy work assisting organisations, projects, & people navigate complex, high growth environments. I’ve worked extensively in blockhain & adjacent tech worlds with a focus on building and scaling sustainable and regenerative cultures, that focus on employee agency & innovate company forms.

Message me for details.

2018 Speaking Events

Oct 18 – Beyond Cyberpunk (Panel Discussion) @Unsound Festival– Krakow

Oct 18 – Public Discourse in the Age of Conspiratainment @Unsound Festival – Krakow

Sept 18 – Solarpunk – Tolhuistuin Festival @Tolhuistuin – Amsterdam

Sept 18 – Land As Platform – Coded Matter(s) #15 @Fiber Festival – Amsterdam

Sept 18 – Realty Hacking – New Frontiers World Building BA @Brakke Grond | Vlaams Cultuurhuis – Amsterdam

Aug 18 – Solarpunk as Civic Imaginary @Citizen Sci-Fi Alliance – London

Jul 18 – New Age of Cults @Acclerate Working Group #3 (#AWG3) – London

Jun 18 – Owning Digital Stuff Is Going to Get Weird @Blockhack #4 – London

May 18 – Solarpunk : A Grand Dress Rehearsal – Terra Fiction @Het Nieuwe Instituut – Rotterdam

May 18 – Deep Sensing  – 2p2 Web Berlin @Trust  -Berlin

The post Work/Life Update 2019 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Not sure i’m coping well.

People from my past popped by to say hello.

Long conversations about being a ship at sea with too many potential routes to follow.

I can make my own trade winds blow, I just need to check the stars.

Im sick of wasting time on social media i’m thinking of blocking twitter at the hosts level on my laptop.

I can’t delete twitter off my phone either because it came pre-installed.

I’d forgotten this and its made me extremely angry.

I’m not even posting. Just watching a stream of people being mad about bullshit.

I could just unfollow I suppose.

Permanently Moved

Episode 17

Fragments, collaging. I’ve been doing some eclectic reading this week across a number of subjects. Some of it is presented here.

Dipping the stacks

This article about a professional Live Streamer 

Complicating the Narratives

The Ministry

Gave two talks this week. Both went pretty well the cults one was er. interesting company.

Branding right now seems to tie my google slides together.

Pretty searchable.

I have so much unfinished stuff to sort out 🙁

Reading

Still reading NRX a basilisk in snippets on trains. I read a collection of 18C letters from a man who was on holiday in Margate. It was fantastic and really funny.

Music

Remember Kids:

The post Death to the Internet pls appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I was asked to submit a talk to a big conference over in Berlin in May to talk about Solarpunk and what it’s like to have been involved in the genre from the very beginning as an admin over on solarpunks.net​. I found out last week that it wasn’t accepted, but some other solarpunks were – I posted this to tumblr already but it won’t ever have any google juice there so x-posting here for wider archives as is my tradition.

I’m posting my talk proposal below as it’s the first time that I’ve ever really written something on Solarpunk despite being involved for so long. Some of the wording and phrasing as become important to me especially the lines about not being able to speak for other solarpunks.

“Dirt Behind Our Ears” : On Solarpunk and the Need for New Futures

500 Char Public Thesis – ~ 75 Words

Give a short and catchy idea about your main argument. This text will be used publicly once your session is accepted, so it’s worth proofreading it.

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”.

The future does not passively ‘arrive’ fully formed  from the aether, we must first meet it the way humanity has always done: though dreams, stories and song. This session will cover the story of the nascent genre of solarpunk and the communities attempts to ‘remake our present and future history’.

2000 Char Description – ~ 300 Words

Please describe what your session is about, how you want to proceed and what methods you are going to use. Be clear and check orthography and grammar. This text will be used publicly once your session is accepted, so it’s worth proofreading it.

The emerging science fictional genre and aesthetic of “solarpunk” begins with ‘Infrastructure as a form of resistance’.

In 2014 the EIA, CIA, & World Bank published a graph charting the falling cost of solar energy and titled it ‘Welcome to the Terrordome’. The upcoming 21st Century shift toward clean energy opens the future to an age of ‘innovative dissent’.

But we don’t see terror in this future. Solarpunk envisions a world where the drastic technological shift towards renewables and decentralisation empowers movements for social justice and economic liberation. It attempts to foster a socio-cultural environment which emphasises individual autonomy, consent, unity-in-diversity, with the free egalitarian distribution of power. It creates a multitude of spaces for indigenous sovereignties, reproductive justice, and radical queer politics. Of course with these principles comes polyphony, one cannot speak for other solarpunks, only be in dialogue and occasional chorus with them. Some solarpunks recognize it was a great tragedy that the alternate historical genre of steampunk was not decolonial to its core from its inception. Others call for the recognition of rights for the ‘non-human’: trees, rivers and mountains. And technologists building decentralised P2P social networks are doing so under a solarpunk banner. The genre provides a rich soil of ideas and action from which our struggles en route to a better world can grow.

This session will briefly explore the history of the genre, some of its central themes and principles and offer a present that can help us begin to see a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears.

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PHEW. yesterday i finally submitted my extract/talk proposal on the ‘geopolitics of the stacks’ for the theorizingtheweb conference that takes place in april in new york . the piece is reproduced in full below. even if i am unsuccessful, i think the piece is a useful early 2014 ‘flag in the ground’ to orient my self around this year. as this is the direction a lot of my thinking and speaking will headed this year.

please note: im not an academic! but if you have any comments or the subject interests you please do get in touch on twitter , leave a comment on here, or mail me via the contact form on my homepage:

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Colonising the Clouds. 

Infrastructure Territory and The Geopolitics of The Stacks

This paper will explore the implications of multinational technology corporations morphing into the entities that Bruce Sterling has named ‘The Stacks’ – companies that are setting out to build vertically integrated feudalisms. Building on and synthesising the work of Benjamin Bratton (UCSD), Tobias Revell (RCA/ARUP/SuperFlux), Paul Graham Raven (University of Sheffield), and Vinay Gupta (UCL ISRS) this paper will seek to explore ideas of infrastructure, corporations and nation states, territory, and the importance of societal understanding of the interrelations of all three.

It is a strange future-present we live in: corporations are people; Dogecoin exists; Google – a corporation whose mission statement to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ – recently acquired eight robotics companies and a thermostat manufacturer; and ‘The Stacks’ are emerging as digitally-dualistic geopolitical entities.

‘Institutional Memory’ is the method by which information is inherited and pass on between states, corporations and collective groups of people. Using this notion we can begin to unpack and explore the beliefs, biases, and assumptions of corporations and states towards concepts such as hierarchy, law,  and – most importantly in our case – ontologies of the internet.

The concept of a separate, distinct ‘cyberspace’, the subtle shifting of corporate discourse from ‘The Cloud’ to ‘A Cloud’, and the boastful claims of the Information Security industry all point towards the web as being understood along dualist lines by the Stacks. This stands in contrast to non digital-dualist views held by government cyber commands which sees ‘cyber’ as a theater not a territory, demonstrated in their understandings of servers on sovereign territory and the legality of cyber-espionage.

The Stacks require deep strata of data to do their business, and in order to get that data the userbase must be made legible. Following James Scott’s “Seeing Like A State”, this talk will argue for the need to “see like a stack” in order for us to better understand the approaches of these entities towards data collection, knowledge creation, and territorial definition.

The conceptual shift upwards from owning and controlling spatial territory to owning and controlling ‘informational territory’ is not new. It began with closing of the US frontier in 1893 & introduction of the telegraph interoperability bill a few years after. Today however, as these infrastructural territories are created and claimed, their owners and creators are influencing our political and economic systems at every level, from the geopolitical to the micropolitical, resulting in what Bratton calls “the ‘accidental’ de-lamination of traditional Westphalian geographies of sovereignty through the realization of other topologies”

This talk will pose the questions: Where are the nexuses of political contestation in this new landscape? Has the discourse of digital dualism been overly focussed on the individual, or is it that only now are the implications of dualism at the geopolitical level being recognised? What are the implications for politics, as nation states evaporate into the clouds, and the Stacks continue to build their own private infrastructures and extend sensing/robotic platforms into the physical world?

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#TTW14 is a conference run by the crew over on cyborgology blog at society pages. i think the work they are doing is exciting and extremely important in the current moment, and the conference is always great.  I have watched it on live stream for the last few years, and have compiled an image of all the tweeted pictures of the keynote for the last two:

The post #TTW14 abstract appeared first on thejaymo.net.