ambient

TechMeme, of course, is abuzz with discussion about Amazon’s new SimpleDB. Don’t know if this is a huge announcement in its own right, but it definitely demonstrates Amazon’s commitment to taking distribution, its true business objective, to the next logical, though not obvious, step.

On a side note: Business Week has a good write-up of Google 101, the company’s efforts to teach web-scale computing to the next generation of computer scientists. Makes me wish I was still a college student, in Seattle. (Go public schools!)

And finally, a gestalt moment… I’m reading a book by German Theologian Ulrich Duchrow (whom I had the pleasure to meet in San Diego) called Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital. There is this line on page 36 in regards to Hobbe’s analysis of power and society:

“Then Hobbes distinguishes natural power, such as special physical and mental abilities, and instrumental power, i.e. tools such as riches, reputation and good friends, with which one can win more power. From this he concludes ‘that the capacity of every man to get what he wants is opposed by the capacity of every other man’. In the struggle that results, power means finally the ability to command the services of other people.

Thus a power market develops, in which the power of a human being is regarded as a commodity: ‘The value, or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price: that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another’…”

So, I read that and realized: hey, I know that. It’s called cloud computing. And even a little MapReduce is thrown in there. We just did it with humans first. We call it society.

I watched a small protest march take place today in Mira Mesa. Mira Mesa is a suburban / office park wasteland. As I watched, I thought “how pointless.” There is no there there at which to protest.

This prompted three questions:

1. Do protests work anymore? Protests depend on disruption, and you need centrality (eg. a town square) in order to disrupt. Suburbs, by definition, are the opposite of centrality. I wonder if this is by design.

2. I sometimes wonder if the planners for the war in iraq actually counted on the insurgency to use as a training field for putting down urban protests. Without having been to Iraq, it’s hard to say. But my experience in other third-world countries does seem to support this hypothesis from an urban design perspective. Third world countries with no central infrastructure / town square are remarkably like the suburbs we live in today. Again, by design?

3. Does protest work in a country with lots of people, or does it all get lost in the static of every day life?

Not surprisingly, I’m nowhere near the first person to ask these questions. MIT has on their OpenCourseWare site a course entitled “Urban Design Politics.” In 2004, Jonathan Korman actually asked the exact same questions, and there is at least one book on the topic.