devlog

Shekhar Krishnan operates as a one-person cultural institution, and i barely had time for a nap after getting back from California, before connecting to his nexus of the cultural life of Cambridge.

Biella Coleman was giving a lecture yesterday afternoon, to a lot of sociologists and anthropologists in his department at MIT, with the snappy title of “At the Center and Margins of Liberalism: How Free and Open Source Software Hackers Destabilize Intellectual Property Law through the Novel Rearticulation of Free Speech Principles”. Here are my notes from biella’s talk. It was interesting to me to hear how hacker ethics are described by anthropologists, especially from someone who’s made a real effort to get involved in Debian culture and think about the governance practises there.

Barely time to grab a burrito, and i was off to the Urban Media reading group that Shekhar’s been organising. I’m a lot less sure on this ground, a lone geek in an environment of deep and interconnected theorists, but it’s a huge learning experience for me so far, and a bootstrap into many traditions of urban planning theory, something i think about a lot more as i find myself obsessing about transport systems more. Here are my notes from the reading material and notes from the discussion meeting itself.

I had a lot of scattered collaborative planning and design oriented reflections while i was travelling a lot in 2004/5, a lot of these wound up in a notebook which i started in Utrecht staying with Wilfried Hou Je Bek, and finished there about a year later at his crystalpunk workshop. I’ve been promising for months to turn it into a zine and put a PDF online, and i really will do that soon.