Ubiquitous Commons workshop at transmediale 2015, Capture All

Ubiquitous Commons
the commons in the age of ubiquitous information

Hi! we’re:
www.artisopensource.net human-ecosystems.com

where does all of this
start from?
PHASE 1 the Commons
the Ubiquitous
Commons
concepts
examples
origins
now
the data commons
what changes now?
what do we want to
do?

what has been done
so far?
PHASE 2
let’s make something
together
research
technology
let’s make concepts
discussion
prototypes

creepy VS positive
everything started for us when we realised that some of the
research and artworks we were making were at the same time
creepy and extremely positive.
they could bring to wonderful opportunities for communities and
individuals, but they could also lead to radical surveillance and
broken rights and freedoms, depending on how they were used
all by redeﬁning our public/private/intimate spheres

VersuS
we captured the real-time digital life of cities
http://www.artisopensource.net/projects/versus-the-realtime-lives-of-cities.html

1/2 hour of digital life in Turin
(green=<10 messages, red=>250 messages)

Digital Turin in Italian
(places of max concentration of social networking using italian language)

Digital Turin in Arabic
(places of max concentration of social networking using arabic language)

Digital Turin’s wishes
(places in which people expressed transformation for that place in the city, using social networks)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PRMn4upxHg
Love VS Turin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVvIGQ3Q0Jg
Riots VS Rome

Enlarge your Consciousness
http://artisopensource.net/projects/enlarge-your-consciousness.html
we picked random users from social networks, and
transformed them into human tamagotchis,on sale at 9.99$

each box contained a QR code
that would connect you to the
user’s emotions, as expressed on
social networks
just like a tamagotchi, you could
know if the user was sad, happy,
anxious, etc.
all for 9.99$

an installation allowed you to view all the users’ emotions

Incautious Porn
http://www.artisopensource.net/projects/incautious-porn.html
a company harvests people’s comments on pornographic
websites, turns them into paintings, and sells them for 50$
commodify everything

Human Ecosystems
http://human-ecosystems.com/home/
capture the real-time digital life of the city, turn it into a
source of Open Data, make a museum out of it, so that you
can experience the Relational Ecosystem of the city, build an
education process in which everyone learns how to use this
data for research, art, design, civic action, participatory
public administration, citizen self-organisation, and more

the density of a certain emotion in the city of Rome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9djF9-Ec1yI
a few seconds of relationships through social networks in Rome

Culture in the city of Rome, as seen from social networks

the TechCrunch event in Rome,
as seen from social networks,
over the MAXXI Museum

the relational ecosystem of innovators in Italy, as they
express on social networks.
Note: it is really not resilient. Everyone has relations
with a few really large operators (at the center of the
relational supernova), but there are not many peer-to-
peer relations going on

how can we use this approach in rural areas, or where people
don’t use social networks a lot?
at XYLab we have created a Rural Human Ecosystem, and we
invented P2P Ethnography!
http://www.artisopensource.net/network/artisopensource/2014/07/30/communication-knowledge-and-information-in-the-human-ecosystem-p2p-ethnography/

the Atlas of Rome is a museum exhibit in which citizens can
express their wishes and projects for their city, using social
networks and mobile phones
it is the Participatory Atlas of the Visions in the city

the Real-time museum of the city in Sao Paulo

the Real-time museum of the city in Sao Paulo
people can see the relational ecosystem of the city, and learn how to use it
(for example, it is currently being used to study the water crisis in Sao Paulo)

Real Time Cairo
has captured the revolts happening in the city during
the Arab Spring, as they manifested themselves on
social networks.
The data can be freely used for research, art, citizen’s
self organisation, journalism, and more

some of the people in the Arab Spring, in Cairo, using social networks
(there are currently about 300 times as many, in the database)

the Emotional Compass
various versions of the interface

a compass shows in which direction
emotions have been expressed around
the user
it is a novel way of navigating the city
by using a simple interface, one can
combine emotions, topics and
languages to ask questions to the city:
ex.: “where are people afraid of loosing
their job, in italian, spanish and
german?”

One Million Dreams is a database of human dreams, as they are
expressed on social networks.
How do people dreams change, over time, geographies and
communities, with the crisis, wars, news, happenings, contexts
and more?
poetic and relevant for sciences and humanities

Stakhanov
a BigData God, harvests information from social networks
about millions of people, searches for patterns in the data,
uses the patterns to make predictions about people’s
interests, emotions, locations, times, and activities.
it is the Oracle of the age of BigData

Stakhanov’s Cosmology
explains how it works, and its philosophy

we live in our Socialis Continuus, in which we are
ourselves, with our identities, relations, emotions.
we are influenced by Stacks, large corporations which
now largely control how we access the Internet, and
which also define large parts of the ways in which we
relate, are fulfilled, gain access to knowledge, etc.
the Stacks use our actions to understand who we are,
creating profiles which represent us, in the Stack
Veritas.
Algorithms process our profiles and their relations to
create other information about us, a description of
reality, in the Res Algoritmica
Stakhanov grabs all of this and searches for patterns
within it, to make predictions, which might influence us.

in our daily lives we are Hacceitas, our selves, with our
relations, identities, emotions, actions, thoughts, etc.
In the transition to our digital lives, some of this
information is transformed: we become an Imago, a
representation of ourselves
Stacks create this Imago, the representation of
ourselves in the digital domain. Thus, they are the
Artifex (the artists, creating the representation of life)
Stakhanov captures the Imago of people, and searches
for patterns in them, across time, locations, emotions
and activities. When it ﬁnds patterns, it organizes them
into a Forma.
The Forma are used to create predictions, the
Prophetia, which we come to know, and inﬂuence us.

Our Imago is represented in the Cloud, which is only
truly accessible by the Stacks and a limited number of
other, interrelated, subjects and entities, in the Caelum
Internum.
Through the APIs other entities, among which is
Stahanov, are able to access the Imago of people, with
many limitations and incompletenesses.
This is the Caelum Externum, in which the Imago is
partially available, as the Stacks keep most part of them
for themselves.

In all of this Omnia Sunt Adventores, “everyone is
a customer”.
Every person and entity is a customer for the
Stacks, with different levels of engagement.
The Hospes, are the people who dedicate
attention (Adtentio). Anyone who, for any reason,
dedicates time and attention, is already a
customer.
The Benevolens are the ones who share
information (Informatio), such as their email,
behaviour, actions.
The Cliens actually spend money ($).
The Stacks are obsessed with Clients (Clientibus
Obsesses)

where does this all come
from?

What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the
human condition from the vantage point of our newest
experiences and most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of
thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or
hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which
have become trivial and empty—seems to me among the
outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose,
therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what
we are doing.
Hannah Arendt , Prologue of “The Human Condition”, 1958.

let’s look at an example
coming from the EU

http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/onlife-initiative

The digital transition shakes established
reference frameworks in, at least, four ways:
• blurring the distinction between reality and virtuality;
• by blurring the distinctions between human, machine and nature;
• by reversing from scarcity to abundance, when it comes to
information;
• by shifting from the primacy of entities over interactions to the
primacy of interactions over entities.

transformation of
private/public/intimate space

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html?pagewanted=all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7P2ViCRObs
the Acxiom Hymn
by Vienna Teng

conscious / unconscious
(& algorithms which do weird things)
the transformation is

example!
the IoT is coming!
redeﬁning property:
who physically owns, who legally owns…
but who is the SuperUser?!?

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/leave-your-cellphone-at-home/
Jacob Appelbaum
Cell phones are tracking devices
which make phone calls.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/belkin-acknowledges-its-routers-cannot-access-the-internet-and-issues-workaround/

“the smarter one’s
things, the greater the
possibility that they’ll
be conscripted into
schemes you never
would have imagined
and might not like.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/when-everything-works-like-your-cell-phone/379820/

… but there’s
APIs!
not really… limits, and stuck in a software ecosystem…

The Internet of Someone else’s Things
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/the-internet-of-someone-elses-things/
Stacks!
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/11/the-internet-of-someone-elses-things/
So, are we doomed to a future of ﬁfth column Smart Things
that we don’t really own, talking behind our backs to an
array of soloed Stacks?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/bruce-sterling-on-why-it-stopped-making-sense-to-talk-about-the-internet-in-2012/266674/

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/18/the-internet-were-doing-it-wrong/
They don’t want much, those
Stacks. Just your identity, your
allegiance, and all of your
data. Just to be your sole
provider of messaging, media,
merchandise, and metadata.
Just to take part in as much of
your online existence as they
possibly can, and maybe to
one day mediate your every
interaction with the world
around you, online or off.

ALGORITHMS
and then, there’s

https://medium.com/message/ferguson-is-also-a-net-neutrality-issue-6d2f3db51eb0

Ferguson on Twitter Ferguson on Facebook
https://medium.com/message/ferguson-is-also-a-net-neutrality-issue-6d2f3db51eb0

http://technosociology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Zeynep-Computational-Politics-and-Engineering-the-Public.pdfhttp://technosociology.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Zeynep-Computational-Politics-and-Engineering-the-Public.pdf

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-ﬁduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering

Facebook says that it conducts not one but “over a
thousand experiments each day,” and a former Facebook
data scientist recently revealed that “experiments are run on
every user at some point.”
A 2012 study in Nature showed that a single tweak
modifying an “I voted” button on Facebook increased
turnout in the 2010 congressional elections by about
340,000 votes. That is enormous power.

The Basics from proﬁle information: * Age, country, region, city; *Family background, family names; *Education; *
Religion; * Occupation; * Hobbies; * Books, papers, magazines read; * Music preferences; * TV program preferences; *
Political opinions; * Online spending; * Brand and product interests; * Languages you understand; * Sexual preferences; *
Travel and holidays;
Aggregated social data: * Your status; * Knowledge and skills. * Home and car class; * Estimated income and wealth; *
Social position and that of friends; * Living and family situation; * Use of PC, gadgets, software etc.; * When you are at home;
* Places where you are out; * What times you are online and with what intentions; * Good and bad days; * When you’re horny.
Also to consider: * Pace of life; * Diseases and disorders; * Concentration cycle throughout the day; * Whether you are
persistent or give up quickly; * Work behavior and effort; * Private browsing during work hours; * Preferences between text,
photo and video; * Proceedings of contact; * Intensity of contact; * Attention to different relationships / friends; * Frequency
and likelihood of new relationships; * Approach to individuals and businesses; * Choice of words and attitude; * Secret
desires and fantasies; * Creativity; * Logical thinking; * Non-conscious and irrational behaviors; * Rational choices and
weight given to these; * Emotions in experiences and exposures; * Behavior in different emotions; * Degree of happiness.

http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me/
“By liking everything, I turned
Facebook into a place where
there was nothing I liked. To be
honest, I really didn’t like it. I
didn’t like what I had done.”
As for many of us, because of work, fun or
loneliness, social media platforms are mirroring
and sometimes replacing our ofﬂine human
interactions, we should stop for a second and
reﬂect why we do what we do and with who.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/08/what_happens_if_you_hide_everything_on_facebook_i_tried_it_for_a_day.html
… or the opposite

better service, AND also more spookiness

Geoffrey Hinton explains Google’s strategies

https://medium.com/backchannel/google-search-will-be-your-next-brain-5207c26e4523
Google search will be your
next brain?

At a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in
February 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook's
acquisition of WhatsApp was closely related to the Internet.org vision.

"for a group of people (about 0.04% of
users, or 1 in 2500) for a short period
(one week, in early 2012). “
"And at the end of the day, the actual
impact on people in the experiment was
the minimal amount to statistically detect
it “
"The goal of all of our research at
Facebook is to learn how to provide a
better service."

the well-connected bathroom :)

as the toothbrush’s website proudly announces, it also
“records brushing activity as
data that you can chart on
your own and share with
dental professionals.”
What happens to that data — whether it goes to these dental professionals, or your
insurance company, stays with you or is appended to your data already owned by
Facebook and Google — is a controversial question.

The digitisation of everyday life and the
rapaciousness of ﬁnancialisation risk turning
everything — genome to bedroom — into a
productive asset.
Evgeny Morozov

“like the ATM that gives you access to the
wealth locked within your genes”
Esther Dyson

one, possible, weird, future:
what happens when the
refusal to “share” becomes
tinged with as much guilt as
the refusal to save or work or
pay debts, with a veneer of
morality covering up — once
again — exploitation

70,000 data points — including how you
type and how you use your phone — already help banks decide whether
online applicants are worthy of a loan.
“all data
is credit data”

Well, if all data is credit data,
then all life — captured by
digital sensors in the world
around us — beats to the
rhythms of debt.
Evgeny Morozov

… examples could go
on and on…

one possible hypothesis, is to
think in terms of “Commons”

seeing all of this data and information as a
Common Resource Pool, and the need for a
High Quality Relational Environment to be able
to organize ourselves into managing it, together
implications? yes, plenty!
reconsidering property, privacy, work, trust… and many more

origins
some of the following examples come from here:
https://niepleuen.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/introduction-to-the-commons-and-some-deﬁnitions/

Common Pool resources
and
Institutions of Collective Action
Elinor Oström
historically originate from

land that ‘was used by several people or households
during a certain period, in distinction to land that
was used by only one person or household
throughout the whole year’
Tine De Moor
historically originate from

FRENCH REVOLUTION
NEW REGIME
ABOLISH COMMONS
t
e.g.: Belgium, 1847 turns all
common land into land
of the government
example:

COMMON LAND
PUBLIC PROPERTY 
ACCESSIBLE TO
THE PUBLIC
PUBLIC PROPERTY PRIVATE PROPERTY
and
VS
(commons disappear… as well as the rights of the commoners and the perception to self-regulate the commons)

Hobbes RATIONAL CHOICE
self interest
personal
advantage
collaboration
impossible
Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”
disproved by economist Carlisle Ford Runge, the
historian Susan Jane Buck Cox and by the
interdisciplinary study of Elinor Oström

AIR POLLUTION
AIR BECOMES “SUBCTRACTABLE”

AIR POLLUTION
AIR BECOMES “ENCLOSABLE”
for example with tradable emission rights

So “the commons” is not about common goods or
products but about the people governing,
controlling, enjoying and employing a resource
system commonly.
It’s about having guarantees for survival and a
sustainable living and protection against free-
riding and exploitation.

“Read the ﬁrst lines of the deﬁnition in the
Wikipedia, pick some elements out of this
complex phenomenon, transplant them into a
random new practice and proclaim that the new
commons have arrived.”

“community deﬁned rules”?
no,
software deﬁned rules!

in historical commons:
access was clearly deﬁned: it was open
people met and lived in the same village
high quality communication
knowledge of the intentions and context of peers
monitoring of activities easy and direct
….

necessity to move from “virtual communities” (Rheingold)
to “real communitities”

Prerequisites for ICAs as dynamic social system
Identifiability and face to face communication
Clear Definition of and agreement on the goals of collaboration
Feasibility plan and ecological constraints for goals of collaboration
A perceived and controllable fair deal through self governance
Building and sustaining trust in coping with social dilemmas
Unobstructed Access to the Means of Subsistence and/or realisation of the common goals
Scalability
Qualities of ICAs as dynamic social systems
Self governance
Experiential Learning
Community building and community sustaining
Ecological fitness and sustainability
Daniël Verhoeven

the Ubiquitous Commons
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org/

changes
(bodies, emotions, locations,
opinions, relations, health…)
data & information are different in quantitative, qualitative, philosophical,political,
biopolitical, social terms, and in terms of rights, freedoms, environment…

WHAT:
legal/technological/philosophical/
aesthetic toolkit

Commons as a Protocol
is it a good idea?
(for example inspired to Creative Commons)

“I used to work in mainstream media and with large corporations. And honestly I felt very stifled, I couldn’t do what I
wanted to do without asking for a lot of permission. What I saw with the internet was that it was a great way for people to
innovate, to think and create without asking permission, without having to wait until they are older. It was an amazingly
open thing. And for me, innovation, whether it’s political innovation or technical innovation or any kind of positive change,
is supported by this idea of the open internet.
We have various layers: very early we had the ethernet, and then we had the Internet protocol TCP/IP, and then we had the
web and now we have Creative Commons, which is very similar because it’s trying to create an open protocol that allows
things to connect without asking permission. Because in the past, you had asked permission to connect a modem to the
Internet. Then you had to ask permission before you set up a site. And now you have to ask permission before you use
somebody’s content. And the idea of Creative Commons is to make a protocol that makes it easy to connect without
asking permission. This makes it impossible for large companies and governments to control the interconnect.
The non-profit things that I do and the for-profit things that I do are very similar because the for-profit companies that I
invest in are trying to innovate in technology and social software by using the Internet. They are typically very small teams
of people who create some product. And I think these small start-ups are creating the technology and the infrastructure
that builds these open networks. And they have the DNA of the open networks. And the non-profits that I work in like
Global Voices, Witness or Mozilla, Creative Commons, they are all non-profits that help try to coordinate all the people who
are involved in trying to create this open Internet.
For me I think that the open internet is not only an important business thing, I think it’s the pillar for an open society in the
21st century.”
– Joi Ito on We Magazine

Risk:
addressing only the Common Research Pools
and not also the
High Quality Relational Environment which is needed
for ensuring that the Commons can be managed
meaningfully by and through the community

avoid:
commodiﬁcation of everything

promote:
reconsideration of property
responsibility
ethics
relationality
trust
…

privacy is also an issue
what privacy means can be changed (has changed already, actually)
but in meaningful ways

what has been done:
research
Art is Open Source (IT); Human Ecosystems (UK); the Foundation for P2P Alternatives (NL); "La Sapienza" University of Rome (IT); ISIA Design
Florence (IT); "La Statale" University of Milan (IT); Bruno Kessler Foundation (IT); il Sole24Ore (IT); LUISS University (IT); Transmediale Festival
(DE) ; Medialab Prado (ES) ; Google Cultural Institute Paris (FR); University of Edinburgh (UK); the Conference (SE); McGill University (CA); York
University (CA) ; Yale University (USA); Polytechnic University of Miami (USA); Stanford School of Business (USA); Creative Commons (USA);
Eisenhower Fellowships (USA); TED Conferences (USA) ; Open Knowledge Foundation (UK) ; Universidade Sao Paulo (BR) ; Universidade
Metodista (BR); Furtherfeld (UK); University of Seoul (KR); SESC (BR); the city administrations of Rome, Trento, Turin, Sao Paulo, Montreal,
Toronto; Anonymous.

what has been done:
technology
some prototypes, dealing with social networks and Internet of Things
objective: make solutions which allow people to decide, individually and as a community, group or
society, through high quality relations, how data/information should be used.

more info here:
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org/UbiquitousCommons_Intro_action.pdf

starting from code here:
https://github.com/sunblaze-ucb/shadowcrypt

implementing this:
a browser plugin using which users easily post encrypted data on social networks,
which can only be accessed through a decryption mechanism which is external to
the social network, on the BlockChain, where the user also speciﬁes who can access
the content, and in which ways (the user decides the license)

we “squat”, to all effect, the social
network, which becomes a repository
of encrypted data, on the cloud, and
the access mechanisms are deﬁned
by users and communities,
according to their desires, to trust
relationships, to allow for meaningful
usages, etc.

ask us for a beta version!
and/or participate!
in any way you can
currently, we are also building the legal toolkit
which is part of this ﬁrst instance
you can help out on that, too

see you soon!
Twitter: @xdxd_vs_xdxd
artisopensource.net
human-ecosystems.com
http://www.ubiquitouscommons.org

Ubiquitous Commons workshop at transmediale 2015, Capture All

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Ubiquitous Commons workshop at transmediale 2015, Capture All