Architects once aligned themselves with the future, fusing their visions to political ideals and ambitions for a bolder tomorrow, but where is our contemporary vision coming from? Who is imagining tomorrow and what will be the drivers? Does our apparent anxiety in the future point towards a confusing set of messages and a lack of political will to invest in it? Is our future suffering from a lack of faith and leadership in the present? Can we regain it?
WIRED magazine with RIBA Building Futures host a multi-disciplinary evening fusing film, architecture and debate to reveal our ambitions for tomorrow. Chaired by Ben Hammersley and including contributions from François Penz, Reader in Architecture and the Moving Image at the University of Cambridge and Eric Parry, founder and Co-Director of Eric Parry Architects with Sean Griffiths, Director and Co-Founder of Fashion Architecture Taste Ltd and Emily Campbell, Head of Design at RSA.
The other day I said on Twitter that the December issue of WIRED UK was the best magazine I’d ever seen. Well, it’s out in the shops properly today, and manic self-promotion aside (I mean, I was the deputy editor of that issue, commissioned the front section, wrote much of that, and wrote all of one feature and bits of another) I stand by the hyperbole – if the art department don’t win awards for it, for one, I’ll get deeply stroppy. If you’ve not read WIRED UK yet, get this issue – with the yellow, Gorillaz-drawn cover – and settle down for a treat. There’s a free poster, too.
The feature I wrote, from which the picture (by Søren Solkær Starbird) above is nicked, was a long time in the mix: I followed a team from IDEO as they worked on the problems of urban rage. It was a great project to work on – the piece is good, and I now have a fetish for Post-Its and Sharpies like you wouldn’t believe.
Meanwhile, the horribly young and talented Mic Wright makes his WIRED debut this month with the story of the Polaroid revival. He writes here about what happened to him afterwards. Their loss, our gain, I say.
Incidentally, the picture was taken on my iPhone, and edited with the Tilt Shift App, uploaded to Flickr from the Mobile Fotos app, and posted to this blog from Flickr. Small pieces loosely joined, as we used to say.
Like the US, the UK government is opening its data. The closed beta of hmg.gov.uk/data has been up for a few days, civil servants are gathering spreadsheets are fast as they’re told to, and there will be iPhone apps to reconfigure the NHS via Twitter in a matter of weeks, I’m sure.
I kid. It’s nice to see TBL finally finding a place for his RDF/Semantic Web stuff that’s both big enough to be cool, and with a closed enough ontology to actually possibly work. It’s also nice to see the release of creative energy that’s coming out of the hack days – Young Rewired State, especially, was extraordinary. (Although how long hack days will continue after it becomes apparent that the auditionware approach doesn’t really work for the auditionees, is anyone’s guess. Rather like moving your newspaper to awesomely expensive offices, and then getting The Crowd to do your work for free in the same year. They might tire very quickly.)
Anyway, I’ve spent quite a bit of time speaking to civil servants about this (both journalistically and as a guide – I wrote some books on semantic-webbish stuff a few years ago, and can boil triples down to wonk-speak if asked nicely) and while the technological stuff is all very exciting, everyone I’ve spoken to is deeply worried about the social effects of the grand project. It’s there that the geeks and the wonks just don’t see eye to eye. One thinks the other is being bureaucratically obstructive, the other thinks the one is horribly naive. The whimper from Westminster is that it’d be all very nice if we were starting the country from scratch – but that the culture just isn’t ready for open data. No one, they complain, is thinking about this out loud.
So, following Mirowski, we might say that ‘government 2.0′ is the final realisation of neo-liberalism. No auditors, no experts, no objective knowledge, no sense of the common good, just maximum freedom for individuals to form opinions and privately process information. As David Weinberger says in triumphant Hayekian style, “transparency is the new objectivity.” In some instances, consumer perspectives may form the basis of action – demanding change if they’re a prominent journalist or campaigner, selecting a different service supplier if they’re a fortunate lay-person, or just mouthing off on facebook if they’re not so lucky. But siding with perspective over expertise cannot be the basis for legitimacy. Allowing people to express their frustration or disappointment, but without offering dialogue or improvement at the end of it, removes the security offered by expertise, but without offering anything in its place. Auditors act as the critics of experts, but they do so from some position of expertise; they damage legitimacy, but partly so as to then rebuild it. By contrast, a state laid bare to only the audit of general public dissatisfaction is surely heading towards a legitimacy crisis.
Readers of, say, Ben Goldacre’s on the Sunday Express’s reporting of science could well be sympathetic to this. As too can anyone who giggles at Intelligent Design, or homeopathy, or the Daily Mail. Like the misreporting of medical news, a misinterpretation of government data could have horrendous results. A media scare that causes a few hundred girls to not have a vaccine, say, will eventually kill some of them. By its very nature, government data could be equally as far-reaching if mis-used. The risks are outweighed, perhaps, by the potential benefits – but the inevitable misinterpretation is something that few but the government statistician corps appear to be taking seriously.
Even Larry Lessig, who continues as the Liberal Internet’s Intellectual Of Choice, is worried, as he writes in The New Republic:
And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The ‘naked transparency movement,’ as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.
Me, I’m rather enamoured by a remark made to me the other day by a German, in Germany, well versed in international shenanigans:
“You’re releasing all of your governmental data? The Chinese will be all over that.“
