nag-ing by Volksfürsorge

wireless.JPG

Berlin this morning in a wireless spot.



For already quite a while there has been a meme on the net, which is referring to a certain form of working via online connections. Given the various possibilities of hooking into the net, like from cafes or other hot spots means that there is no need for a fixed workplace. There had also been some terms for this like neo-nomad or in german digitale Bohème.

The meme made it even into BBC. In this article by Bill Thompson, where – among others – he annotates:

“Neo-nomads and digital bedouins sound very exciting, but we mustn’t forget that this will only ever be a viable way of working for a small, skilled and privileged minority of people.”

Its not only me who is skeptical. Extrapolating the possibilities of crowdsourcing and looking at current trends of online markets like e.g. this and at the current state of international trade unions it seems we are more in the waiting line for a new superglobal slave market of what I would rather call “neo-madnags”.

Looking at this it may be a question of survival of how one can modularize and delegate the workflow like e.g. for programming, which reminds me of an sort of ongoing experiment of Cornelia Sollfrank in this direction namely the socalled netart generator (another nag..:)) which automatically produces e.g. images like the generator from 2004, supported by Deutsche Volksfürsorge (is it just a joke?-here the funny image I got this morning on a first hit )) or e.g. the 2005 generator of html pages using linguistic markov chains (see also wikipedia).

One Response to “nag-ing by Volksfürsorge”

  1. marketplace aficionado Says:

    Incidentally I found it a bit far fetched to see an image generator, like the one by Cornelia Sollfrank, as something which is a contribution to the question of “how one can modularize and delegate the workflow like e.g. for programming” but then I stumbled upon your comment about the novel “Snow Crash” and as a matter of fact Neil Stephenson seemed to have tried to program an image generator for publishing show crash as a graphic novel. That is Wikipedia writes:

    Stephenson originally planned Snow Crash as a computer-generated graphic novel in collaboration with artist Tony Sheeder.[2] In the author’s acknowledgments (multiple editions) Stephenson recalls: “it became clear that the only way to make the Mac do the things we needed was to write a lot of custom image-processing software. I have probably spent more hours coding during the production of this work than I did actually writing it, even though it eventually turned away from the original graphic concept…”

    I don’t know though whether Stephenson’s programming idea would have affected the looks of the avatars of the rave club Black Sun, which you mentioned in your d-room post.

    Anyways since I saw you participating in some math-physics discussion about scheduling processes, did you make any progress to ensure the survival of neo-madnags? Did you ever hear of DAO’s ?

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