Sandbox S01E02

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Stories of time sharing

Sandbox S01E02.ex

The logistics of crunching and domination

The nesting of collectivist thinking within cybernetic systems

Demo Unix-like machines

  • ssh in several Unix-like systems
  • whoaim in mobile Unix-like technology

Community Memory (Notes for now, will put an extract from PhD eventually)

  • small pilot network in the San Francisco Bay area, 3 public terminals for common database, ability to add new information, used beyond expectations with great creativity, developed by Resource One Inc. a non-profit corporation and one of few public service computer center, ADD -> new entry + keywords for indexing, FIND -> search keywords (using AND OR NOT), users taught each others how to use the system, used by students + musicians + chess players + car pool organisation + good tips for restaurant + unexpected things like poems, graphics, not uncommon for people using the terminal in groups or hacing to queue for using it, 150 searches + 30 new addition per day (Ken Colstad and Efrem Lipkin. 1975. Community memory: a public information network. SIGCAS Comput. Soc. 6, 4 (December 1975), 6-7.)
  • system is "inescapably political" and the politics of this system "are concerned with people's power", anyone can access the system that Rossman considers as the ultimate participatory democracy without central authority and of public utility, "in this system no person or group can monopolize or otherwise control people's access to information. Information-power is fully decentralized . No editing, no censoring; no central authority to determine who shall know what in what way." (personal note: that's a bit platonic, these are terminals, the database is elsewhere, and the software encodes social dynamics), "users of the system must take own responsibility for their own judgements about its data, supported by whatever judgements other people offer to them through the system" (note: liberalism at work here in its approach to individualism and free market, and also how the author opposes CM to "authoritarian/centralized" information systems), CM is an example of an unregulated and unmediated system that focuses solely on the information instead of facilitating its exchange in the context of specific niches (notes: cybernetics again!) and make the author want to rename CM to Community Information, "If the tool is multi-purpose, and free to the uses people invent, they will invent in response to their needs and desires" opposing the use emerging from free play to the use of centralised systems , (Michael Rossman. 1975. Implications of community memory. SIGCAS Comput. Soc. 6, 4 (December 1975), 7-10.)
  • CM merges impulses from radical 1960s with the hacker ethic (in ref to Levy's Hacker ethics), founders of CM include Lee Felsenstein who was linked to the Free Speech Movement and was a son a district organiser of the Philadelphia Communist Party, the latter lives with what could be seen as contradiction as engineer and political activist, links to Unix is natural through the common hatred for large centralised proprietary mainframes amongst both CS academics and computer liberationists (in Rosenzweig words) who were interested in the community potential of computers as a vector of freedom, decentralisation, democracy and liberation. (Wizards, Bureaucrats, Warriors, and Hackers: Writing the History of the Internet, Roy Rosenzweig, The American Historical Review, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Dec., 1998), pp. 1530-1552)

Rebooting Community Memory

  • two possibilities: division of labour withing a centralised production model, or decentralised ecosystems sharing some code and agreeing on interoperability.
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