Tech a la carte

A new antitrinitarian technognosticism.

“Oblique Strategies” is Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s deck of 100+ cards, each with a sentence of gnomic advice. They inspired Roxy Music, David Bowie, Talking Heads and Devo. My favorite? “Be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever not done before.”

Why that one? Because it challenges us to imagine how something that we perceive as unitary and indivisible might be decomposed into smaller units. It’s a challenge to the notion that one must “take the bad with the good.” What if we could just get rid of “the bad?”

Back in 1998, John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier proposed the “Street Performer Protocol” as a means of funding nonrivalrous, nonexcludable projects — that is, things that can be infinitely reproduced at effectively no cost, and whose reproduction can’t be easily prevented: things like software and digital books, music, and videos.

https://www.schneier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/paper-street-performer.pdf

As the name implies, the Street Performer Protocol is inspired by the tactics of street performers like magicians, jugglers and acrobats, whose work is nonrivalrous (lots of people can watch the performance without impacting others’ viewing) and nonexcludable (performers can’t limit the audience to people who’ll put…