9 Key Activations from Activate 09

I was invited to a new event run by the Guardian yesterday, Activate09 (see the program here). It was probably the best conference I've been to in the UK to date* - TED quality with a bit more of a British "not being quite so serious about it all" air. I have made notes, but to be honest others have done a great job of covering it live (check the Twitterstream) and have already blogged copious notes, so I'm going to talk about my highlights, and specifically 9 Key Activations - things that I intend to look into in more detail:

1. Kate Lockhart - How can ICT help Failed States?

Kate was part of team sent to establish order from chaos after the Taliban was ousted from Afghanistan. It was interesting from a Collapsonomics point of view in that they found the UN, World Bank etc had no models with which to start building a state from nothing. Not only that, it seems these organisations are a bit corrupted internally - for examples with mobile phone access the UN tried to sell Ericcson, their "partner". They also found many circular problems eg security needs taxes, which needs security. Sadly, in the end warlords/criminals took over as foreign aid donors wouldn't pay for commercial infrastructure, security, and higher education to prime many of these circular pumps.

She noted that there are about 40 - 100 failed states globally, depending on your definition of "failed" and they have written a book on fixing failed states.

Can technology be used? Most failed states are offline and off-grid - what do you use ICT for? The highest impact is in:

- Market pricing
- telemedicine
- education

And how do we ensure they don't make our mistakes - she hypothesized a blend of design & market forces, and transparent accountabilty. Put budgets online!

2. Arianna Huffington - Digital Media is the only way to expose vested interests.

Arianna (of the Huffington Post) wondered how to clean up vested interests across globe and how does Tech help? Shinig light in dark places is the answer. The Sunlight Foundation was mentioned, putting government data online - but noted that data is not enough, you need to get the User Interface s right to get great data dusplay and get viral analysis tools up (she mentioned an example where a video pans around a room at a hearing and identifies each lobbyist and how much they have paid)

She feel that New Media has major role in fixing society, - eg the banks still in control despite the bailout owing to lobbying. Also she noted that "under the radar" smear campaigns get blanked on the net - Obama would not be president without the Internet for this reason, she argued. She felt new media was better able to deal with fixing the corruption of the b=vested interests as mainstream media suffer from ADD, whereas online media suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder and will carry on picking at the sores long after the mainstream have moved on. (I'm not sure - the mainstream blogosphere seems very similar to mainstream media to me).

3. Nick Bostrom - Existential risks, or how many ways Homo Sapiens can top itself.

Lest we forget, the Dinosaurs had one! Also, 75000 years ago the Toba eruption left c500 reproducing women from whom we all descend, and other homo.x's became extinct. When he looks at great human calamities (wars, massacres etc) - none are very big in scheme of things. We need a cocktail of stuff to finish us off, or a bloody great meteorite.

He then looked at the "what you have to believe" in 3 scenarios of the future Human Condition:

- Only way is up- a posthuman condition, and The Singularity?
- Disaster - we collapse and die or go back to earlier phase
- Cyclical pattern of ups and downs - but its hard to get this right without one downcycle knocking us off

No real conclusions except that you have to believe some hard stuff for the negative conditions to kill us - after all, we only need 500 wombs with a view to survival. Good news, I think....

4. Steve Papa (Endeca) - the Internet as a means of production in the hands of many and its impact of civilisation.

But he noted it could go to the fewer as vested interests will try and nudge it this way. Some points:

- Attention is scarce, (typically consumed by trivia) in abundant information worlds
- Economies of scale are different in Info Age – scale only really helps marketing and selling
- Absolute Power corrupts (Great men are nearly always bad men) - Unscrupulous pursuit of wealth eg TARP lobbying using taxpayer money to screw taxpayers, Google requires you to pay not to show competitors.

As he noted, in the First Industrial Revolution actually power/wealth got sucked up to top, US had to bust them all up in the early 1900’s. The Question for today is: Where is the Adam Smith & Teddy Roosevelt for the 21st century?


5. Matt Locke - Ch4 - - Coping with "Peak Attention"

Quoted Matt Webb saying in 2008 that we’ve hit “peak attention” – now need coping strategies. The Web is experienced as streams of content managed through a few key portals (Google, Facebook etc) – key is increasingly to get attention, which is the limited resource.

He also looked at teens organising campaigns for good eg vs knife/gun culture – “Swords into ploughshares” – “Knife into key”. Claimed that get more value outside what you control, and that "data becomes stories" (cf back to Huffington's Viral Data" - but how do you measure all this?

6. Umair Haque - Zombienomics and what ICT 2.0 can do

Umair talked about why this crash is different and why what comes next will be different too. Whats different? Everything is hyper-connected, new economics apply. (The historians among you may know that the pre-WW1 world was more connected trade-wise than at anytime until the 1980's again, so it may be deja vu......)

We are currently seeing the end of the Zombieconomy – can’t innovate or create value – its flatlined – dominated by the focus of its resources on producing cr*p (eg 6 bladed razor rather than 5). His view is that “(Linear) Strategy is Obsolete” – 20th century capitalism is not fit for 21st century world. On verge of shifting to new form of capitalism.

What wasn't clear to me (and I spoke to Umair afterwards) is how this all gets shifted given the compelling evidence that the vested interests keep their hands on the levers without fairly robust effort (Roosevelt or Lenin)

7. Tom Steinberg, “this new media revolution is not the revolution you’re looking for”

Practical thoughts - noted the difference between real and digital protestors:

"do you know the difference between the fall of the berlin wall and the twitter revolution in iran? The wall fell."

Very pertinent after the whole "turn your avatar green" thing on Twitter. Weak tell or what.

Also made a call for action, Amazon didn’t change the publishing industry by wringing its hands and filling acres of newsprint about industry travails - It just starting doing things better.

So, what actions could nudge politics and society the right way?

- the next generation of public servants could refuse to comply with current norms and conventions.
- change in computing usage which makes it harder to keep secrets (somewaqg noted the best way to do that was to give all state servants USB sticks to leave on trains ).
- some sort of law that introduces new ways of distributing and allocating power under the radar - radical social media?

8. Sugata Mitra - things to do with a hole in the wall

Amazing talk - essentially put a hole in the wall, stick a computer in it, and let kids rip with it. Amazing results:

- kids don’t need to be taught how to use computers, or even the language: “you gave us a machine that worked in English, so we taught ourselves English”
- sharing a computer was more effective for learning than having one each, as it forced discussion and learning
- This was amazing - put DNA theory on a computer in English in Indian rural village - 2 onths later, Indian kids had gone a huge wat to understanding subject and language. Came about as kids competed for status of knowing the most.

If thats what you can do with one hole in the wall......

9. Bradley Horowitz and the Darwinian Internet

Two key points:

- There is no master plan for the internet. It’s made up of billions of contributions, evolves more like an ant colony than anything else (Is Eugene Marais' "The Soul of the White Ant thus the best Internet book?)
* Ideas (or ‘memes’) are being selected for in natural selection, and great number of web 2.0 startups have not survived. Darwin did not say the fittest survived, he said the most adaptable survive.

We need to keep this in mind - start-ups are a primordial soup from which successful companies evolve. How do we enrich the soup?

Well done the Guardian team......looking forward to Activate10

*Update - MediaFutures, which I attended 2 days later, was pretty damn good too - and I spoke at that one so it must've been good too