A few years ago I woke up hungover in a Vegas hotel room and wandered
down stairs to my conference, a conference cum cheerleading session
for which I had no real want or need. We had RFID(Radio Frequency
IDentification) tracking chips in our badges so managers could track
who went to what sessions. Technology was facilitating people
"management" akin to factory farmed battery hens. With these
micro-metrics available to our respective "managers" where was the
leadership, the humanity? I dumped my tracking chip early, pretended I
had lost it, and headed back to the pool to drink more silver rock
margaritas with my new buddies.
That was 2006. That person is gone, and springing forth from the
fertile scarred and charred earth, there is now a small green shoot; a
concept, an entity, a mission. We’ve decided that it is time to use
technology to facilitate humanity, not to constrain it. It is time to
enable the human mesh for the sake of all humans, plants and animals,
and not for profiteering. Accountability and humanity are lost in
organisational abstractions, out-sourcing, out-tasking and
off-shoring. Rather than pushing humans farther away, it's time to
bring us all closer together.
Time has indeed sped up. We are currently trying to shoehorn a new
"emergence supporting" fuzzy framework in to old legal cooperative
structures. It's hard to explain how once enough nodes or entities are
logically connected together, the new entity both mirrors the atomic
entities and creates a totally new previously unseen entity (the whole
being greater than the sum of its parts). This is nature, this is
interconnectedness, this is biomimicry.. or is it already just nature?
So what have we actually done? In 2009 we deployed free internet mesh
wireless networks to events that spread human awareness, including the
popular Future Summit and Trampoline events held in Melbourne,
Australia We continue to do so today, facilitating and helping those
who need it most. NodeCity also rebrokered a single internet
connection to provide wireless access across a temporary village built
for the displaced citizens of Flowerdale who had lost their homes in
the Victorian ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires this year.
We provide non-profit focused IT professional services, enterprise
computing and infrastructure to anyone who really needs it at a fair
and equitable price (if not gratis for good causes when feasible!).
It is this ability to access information, ideas, and to communicate
with vast pools of other people and systems outside of your normal
physical range which is so powerful. This is why we think NodeCity is
such an important project to commit to. The ability to organise is
amplified and accelerated, both locally and remotely. Dissemination of
information provides alternatives and increased numbers of options,
which facilitates real human potential. The main question however is,
are values transmitted in the same way as raw data? Does increased
information actually inform and provoke critical thought, improve
quality and benefit the world or does it detract from it? Maybe we are
seeing the next step in our shared evolution. We are a new type of
node based city, and we are going to answer the only way we can.
