Tim Wu and John Perry Barlow

Yesterday I turned from supporter of the Open Rights Group into an admirer, by attending ORGCon 2013 – their 3rd annual conference – with a most admirable programme of workshops and exquisitely well chosen keynote speakers:

Tim Wu – author of The MasterSwitch – to open and set the scope who pointed out how important ‘amateurs’ are for important inventions in humanity’s history, i.e. radio broadcasting. So I’m in excellent company!

And then the most admirable John Perry Barlow – an internet guru with a big difference – to close, talking about ‘reality distortion fields’. I really love this term! While he seems to refer to it to describe the gap between mainstream and online media, it is crucially significant for me, as ‘science’ has also contributed to a distortion of reality.

One of my favourite quotes has long been:

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Who cares that I found ‘metrology’ to be the missing link? And new mathematical spaces and transformations as the basis for my prototype? In my intellectual odyssey, I have certainly understood how physics is NOT capably of describing ‘reality’ in both micro- and macro-scale. Physics builds on mathematics which relies on computing. But who makes connections across the disciplines?

In this TED talk, John Perry Barlow talks about the right to know which was also yesterday’s title and which my Smart Knowledge Portals should contribute to:

Here he talks about ‘openness’ and says: “Love forgives Everything” and cites Franz Kafka:

You need not leave your room; remain sitting at your table and listen;you need not even listen, simply wait;you need not even listen, just learn to become quiet and still and solitary;the world will freely offer itself to you, unmasked; it has no choice;it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Besides being moved to tears by him on several occasions, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting

• Anna Fielder from Privacy International
• LibDem Julian Huppert MP who contributed to talking about the Snoopers’ Charter which got nearly 200,000 signatures on 38 Degrees
• Duncan Campbell who pinpointed to ‘secrecy‘ as the means for suppressing human rights – as we’ve been observing most painfully
• Tom Loosemore presenting the Government’s Digital Service
• Simon Phipps of the Open Source Initiative explaining that ‘free’ means ‘permissionless’ for open and free software evangelists
• re-meeting IT Project Manger and Analyst Cher Davey and re-discovering Visual DNA as the employer of a free thinking software developer.

I just wish that lawyers understood the difference between the boredom of their ‘verbiage’, compared with the effectiveness of ‘functionality’.

But that would require multi-disciplinary thinking which isn’t on the general curriculum…

The day was planned to end in The Globe – a pub with the quaintest of outside space upstairs. A most wonderful journalist took this photo and I felt understood across my broad spectrum of interests. What a dot on the ‘i’ of a great day – while Alex Jones and Tony Gosling closed the gap between mainstream media and the online world – regarding the meeting of the Bilderberg group in Watford.

Related articles

• Practical Step to Protect Your Digital Rights (meshedinsights.com)
• Notes from on #ORGCon 2013 (libertarianhome.co.uk)
• SECRECY: the Cloak of Criminality? Who can do what about it? (victims-unite.net)
• Bilderberg 2013, the world’s most secretive conference: live (telegraph.co.uk)
• ORGCon 2013 – the UK’s only digital rights conference, this year with John Perry Barlow and Tim Wu! (boingboing.net)
• Obama “Welcomes” the Debate His Secrecy Makes Impossible (fdlaction.firedoglake.com)
• Bilderberg 2013: Secret Summit for World Domination…Live (aftermathnews.wordpress.com)
• How Capitalism Is Turning The Internet Against Democracy, And How To Turn It Back by Guy Aitchison (zcommunications.org)
• How Secrecy Stops Debate on Secrecy (lissakr11humane.com)
• Open Rights Group press release on the PRISM project (tom-watson.co.uk)