Last week - had a nice couple of days in Brighton thinking about Immaterial things.
A couple of reckons:
The proper cleverness of the AHO/BERG/Immaterials gang is that they seem to be saying this new stuff is invisble, that makes it hard to work with as a material, let's try and visualise it so we can understand it.
Almost everyone else seems to be saying this new stuff is invisible IT MUST BE A CONSPIRACY.
Right now, with a lot of genuine conspiracy floating around, we should make an effort not to default to Air Loom nuttiness every time someone finds a new use for the electromagnetic spectrum or decides to bury a pipe.
You remember that nice programme on Radio Two - Sing Something Simple - they had all those old timey tunes? That's beamed into our homes on mysterious rays that most people don't understand and that have demonstrably, certainly been used for evil purposes, it's called radio, it's invisible, that's OK.
A year or so ago grey water started spouting, intermittently and unpredictably, from plugholes in the kitchens of a number of flats in our building. Plumbers were called and over a number of weeks denied the existance of the problem, confessed themselves unable to solve it and explained that 60 years of ad hoc plumbing in each flat had rendered the whole system incomprehensible. Then, when they finally obtained the plumbing equivalent of 'root', they discovered that someone had poured the entire contents of a substantial aquarium down a toilet. This had, unsurprisingly, messed with the delicate and contingent balance of pressures and flows within our pipes. That someone does not understand our invisible infrastructure. Our plumbing is incomprehensible. These are not new problems.
There doesn't have to be a binary choice between hiding networks and revealing networks to be evil and hegemonic. We could decide to materialise technology infrastructure and demonstrate that it is marvellous, powerful and useful. Maybe that would encourage people to try and make their own things with it rather than just run away.
