The unintelligent, inexperienced and completely deluded students are out again in force, to be kettled, sheared, abused and used as fodder to provide the police with much needed overtime money.

What is interesting here is that we may be seeing the seed of the idea that all the video cameras that everyone has by default could be used for something useful, active and defensive, instead of just a child’s toy.

From BLOGDIAL, “The answer comes before the question” January 13th, 2009

Imagine this scenario. Someone somewhere sets up a Web 2.0 site that features photos of bad police and other officials, or those mysterious agent provocateurs that have been plaguing the useless demonstrations around the world. Imagine that the software behind this site (which could be connected to iPhoto 09) identifies all the bad people and exposes them to the public, nullifying all acts of political infiltration over night. Anyone setting up any sort of anti-state gathering or demonstration or action could, with a gauntlet of workers armed with iphones, vet every demonstrator as they turned up to weed out all the infiltrators, collaborators and provocateurs.

I guarantee you that this will happen, and not only that, but that someone is going to put into a copy of iPhoto 09, a huge archive of photos from demonstrations and political meetings going back decades to pick out the bad guys.

This explosion and convergence of technologies is a double edged sword, and since there are more of us than there are of them, it will be the case that all this technology and the networks that join them together will result in something totally unexpected; the tools may turn around and bite the state in the ass in an unexpected way. The very nature of networks says that this will happen; the population by virtue of its vast networked numbers can overpower any government in a scenario where the network is the power.

We are not powerless like the slaves in the Soviet Union were. We have fantastic tools, all of them free, right in our hands. Those tools, by the act of using them, change the game entirely, and the more the state pushes against the mass, the more dense and impenetrable it becomes.

This is a war that they cannot ever win.

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1517

[…]

Now look at this video, uploaded to YouTube by noshockdoc on Nov 11, 2011:

If these people had any sense, they would have already set up this web service as I described in 2009.

Using Augmented Reality ID:

They could check each ‘protestor’ against the online database of Agent Provocateurs and police officers to make sure that they had not been infiltrated.

Of course, anyone who is that smart is not interested in demonstrating in the first place, but we will leave that aside for now.

The point is, these young and very foolish people are behaving as if it is 1960 and not the end of 2011. As I have said before, again and again, the age of demonstrations is over. The shape of them, how they play out, move, surge and flow is well understood. There can be no surprises with them. Nothing comes of them, no matter how large they are, as we saw with the StopWar demonstrations before the destruction of Iraq.

The problem these people have is that if they were intelligent enough to know this, they would not be demonstrating, and would be well on the way to formulating a strategy that would actually give them what they want. Their problem, clearly, is a toxic mix of a lack of intelligence and experience.

They do not know exactly what they hope to achieve with these acts, they have no discrete goals or deliverables, they have no means of creating a new strategy because they lack the mental capacity to formulate one; in other words, they are a completely lost cause.

One thing that is coming out of this is interesting however.

Because everyone has a camera at these demonstrations, it might come to pass that the light bulb switches on over the head of some computer science student as she realises that it should be possible to create what I describe in the post above.

There are literally dozens of cameras in this clip; surely someone somewhere must be thinking that there is a use that can be put to the footage to help weed out the provocateurs. Who knows?

What we can say with a high level of certainty is that these students are going to achieve nothing by marching in the street. Everything they are planning, even if it is not known about in advance by surveillance is easily counter-able because marching and demonstrating is a ‘dead tactic’ that the State has a perfect understanding of.

All of this is a complete distraction of course; even this very post has distracted me from doing something else productive. Unless by chance it spurs the creation of the system I have been writing about.

Once again, demonstrations are ‘Yellow Ribbon Thinking’:

http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1152

they divert energy from useful acts and thinking, and prevent or delay permanent solutions from emerging. You should not participate in them; instead, you should be working only on things that have discreet goals and that has metrics that you can measure directly so that you can know if you are being successful or not.

Monopoly money could become obsolete after the makers of the 70-year old game introduced a new version where players fund property purchases using a debit card.

The Visa-branded card inserts into an electronic machine where the banker taps in cardholders’ earnings and payments.

The Telegraph gets in on the press release recycling scam. Naturally you will pay dearly for the card version!

Unfortunately if this takes off a wave of children will grow up associating cards with financial purchases rather than cash – a salami slice off the (sometimes) untraceable economy. Another step towards the fully audited life, perhaps the Home Office should come up with an immigration control game with a biometric scanner included – they could get BBQ to give them away on Blue Peter.

Whatever happened to a nice simple game of dominoes?

I got a Nintendo DS lite as a birthday present from my boyfriend, its the best toy I have ever had and I got this amazing game Electroplankton made by Toshio Iwai.

You can make irdial-music with this game, it is absolutely lovely

A friend brought this preview of a game to my attention that has blown me away and considering that I’m not really much of a games player, thats saying alot.

The basis of the game is evolution [oh yes, the ID crowd will love this!!]. You begin as a single cell lifeform, eating bits of food until you reach the stage where you can reproduce and lay an ‘egg’. At this stage you can select what direction to evolve by choosing body parts which determine what you can eat, how you can defend yourself when attacked by foes, kill your prey or increase mobility, thus opening different paths to evolve throughout the game. The game enviroment also evolves according to the choices you make. Pure emergent game play.

This really excites me as I don’t like the main stratergies of what most games are built on: you hold a gun and kill everything in sight or you organise armies on an overview level to conquer and kill everything in sight.

What I also like about this game is that it is a different mental challenge and so will create and reinforce different neural pathways in the minds of the people who play it. For too long, the vast majority of games have been about annihilation and so instill/install that the best method to respond to a situation is ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’. It is only games like The Sims, et al, that through emergent based gaming systems, that provoke a different mental response to situations. Build, sustain and evolve rather than destroy and conquer.

I’m tingling through the thought of how software programming has evolved so that games like this are now a possibility. I have been since reading Steven Johnson’s book ‘Emergence’. (thanks for that one Anthony!).

There is this 30 minute preview video with running commentary describing gameplay and possibilties of evolution, etc on video.google. The official site is here:

Did I say I was excited about this?

I had a look at a DS at the weekend, it’s not exactly a pretty object, it looks bulky and feels light and plasticy. Especially compared to a cerftain black shiny object made by evil people. If the next generation is more appealing I may be tempted