Last night I had the opportunity to see an aspect of the future (at least for a 54-year old guy) in operation.

The world-reknowned MUTEK electronic music festival is in full swing.  I attended Club Metropolis for MUTEK Nocturne 3 - Beats, Mashs and Remixes.

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For the occasion of the NOCTURNE 3 showcase, the Metropolis will host a massive two-room event to kick-start the weekend. In the main room, several of today’s best producers bring the spirit of fusion and sampling to the stage for an energetic showcase designed to celebrate the sampling potentials of electronic music.

Montreal turntablist Kid Koala brings his magical fingers and cartoonish imagination to the decks first, before ceding the stage to this city’s new generation of hip-hop manipulators, the hotly tipped synth crunk of Megasoid, featuring Sixtoo’s Robert Squire and Wolf Parade’s Hadji Bakara.

Modeselektor, the Berlin sensation that defies all categories except “incomparably energetic”, will take the Metropolis to new heights, as they appear alongside their longtime video-jockies Pfadfinderei for what ought to be a thrilling visual treat. Toronto’s breakcore specialist Knifehandchop brings the audience to a boil for night’s end.

In the Savoy Lounge, a handful of techno’s hottest underground names from this year will present an international smorgasbord of the genre’s bounties: San Francisco’s Dave Aju, Mexico’s Metrika, the international super-duo of Perlon’s Sammy Dee and Bruno Pronsato working as Half Hawaii, and Toronto tech-veteran Jeremy P. Caulfield.

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I’m not as avid a concert-goer and music listener as I was when I was younger, or at least I did not recognize what must be massive advances in speaker construction over the last 20 years.

There will be a lot of deaf 40 - 50 year-olds in another 20 years or so.  The sound was so loud I felt physically assaulted, the bass-driven sound waves slamming into and penetrating my body, the mids and highs giving short, sharp and hard karate-like punches to my eardrums.  I quickly began walking around on the floor of Club Metropolis with my fingers resting lightly in my ears, to mitigate the discomfort.

The atmosphere resembled a laid-back but devoted fundamentalist assembly, with a low-key hip shakin’ foot-wiggling head-back-and-forth sway to the beat(s) the de rigeur way of drifting through the crowd.  I really appreciated the vibe … gentle, respectful, intense, happy, there for the music, a grouping with a positive heartbeat.

Notwithstanding the loudness and my physical discomfort with that, I also REALLY enjoyed the adept creative stylings of the artists I watched and listened to.

I particularly grokked Kid Koala (go ahead and click, it’s a cool web site).  Here’s a YouTube clip for your enjoyment.

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Kid Koala - One of Montreal’s International DJ Vedetttes

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Tags: MUTEK, Nocturne 3, Kid Koala

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Via the NY Times.

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Senate Race in Minnesota Shows Power of Bloggers

Monica Davey

[Snip ... ]

What Mr. Franken’s circumstance has proven, though, is that no Minnesota candidate this fall can afford to ignore Mr. Brodkorb, or the rest of the state’s universe of Web sites devoted to local politics. Experts here say the abundance of these blogs is a mirror onto this state, its partisan split in recent years and its long tradition of intense political activism (by some measures, voter turnout here was the highest in the nation in 2006). That said, they are anything but Minnesota Nice.

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Thanks to Gifthub for pointing to it.

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China’s All-Seeing Eye
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

NAOMI KLEIN

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world’s attention at Tiananmen Square.

Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric.

[ Snip ... ]

What is most disconcerting about China’s surveillance state is how familiar it all feels.

When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn’t just check my passport but takes a scan of it.

"Are you making a copy?" I ask.

"No, no," he responds helpfully. "We’re just sending a copy to the police."

Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every other Net portal at a hotel — only it won’t let me access human-rights and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN International — only with strange edits and obviously censored blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that "we not only know who you are, we also know where you are." Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives "this kind of data to government authorities" — pretty much the same answer I got from the clerk at the front desk.

When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for "Fly Clear." All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security.

Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1.

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It’s not news that there is resistance and confusion about why and how to implement enterprise 2.0 technology and capabilities in today’s organizations, notwithstanding the continuous flows of information and the growing prevalence of interconnected customers and knowledge workers.

There’s a lot of chatter about bottom-up versus top-down, the collective wisdom of the organizational crowd, and various related themes.

Those of who who have been reading my blog for any length of time will know that I am not surprised.

Much of what passes for activism, around the world, is action of some sort or other against top-down driven policies and decisions and the purview of hierarchic institutions.

I don’t believe that it is necessary to tear down or explode all institutions, nor the way things are down generally in some areas of human activity, but I do believe that there needs to be much more two-way (or n-way) dialogue, and much more listening and comprehension on the part of those who occupy the positions at the top of systems and institutions.

Thus, the definition of wirearchy:  a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.

It might be the case that there would not need to be so much activism if we all lived and worked in a less manipulative, more open and fair society, rather than in societies where people are pitted against each other in order to ‘win".

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Geist lauds Net as activist tool
MATT HARTLEY

He calls it the new normal.

The Internet and the rise of Web 2.0 tools have created a new reality, one in which anyone can become an agent of change capable of affecting public opinion, Canada’s most prominent digital activist, Michael Geist, told a Toronto audience on Wednesday.

It’s a new reality that policy makers ignore at their own peril and one the Canadian government doesn’t quite understand how to respond to yet.

“Governments need to be receptive to this,” said Mr. Geist, who teaches e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa.

Mr. Geist’s keynote address to the 2008 mesh conference outlined the various ways that social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps are increasingly being used to disseminate messages of advocacy across the globe at rapid speeds.

“The potential for digital advocacy to change our policy, our political discussions, our democracy, our education and our communications, to change so many different issues that matter … we have to recognize that it’s not about “hands off the Internet,” but recognize that those kinds of features are in our hands,” he said.

Social media and the Internet are the newest and most powerful weapons in the activists’ arsenal. Protesters in Europe now use Twitter to communicate in real time with fellow supporters, while sites such as Ushahidi.com utilize Google Maps and Google Earth to catalogue violent incidents in Kenya that the local governments don’t want recorded or shown to the rest of the world.

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For all of you out there that think that Forrester’s (or Gartner’s, or Jupiter’s, etc.) assessment of a given company’s prospects is objective

Via Twitter:

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Jeremiah jowyang: Some vendors are going to be very, very mad at me, the report will indicate who is a leader. Get as mad as you want, clients come first 13 minutes ago from web

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If it’s unseemly to have posted these very nice remarks, please feel free to help me find my rightful place again darned quickly .. the comments section is in the same place as always.

It’s also important for me to state here that I really enjoyed meeting and talking with the people cited below, as well as many other people during what was a very full day.

I find people in Montreal, and the culture in Montreal and Quebec, to be very open and dynamic, and I think a lot of people can learn a lot from these people in this city.

There were also quite a lot of practitioners and consultants from France (mainly Paris) and I think most North Americans have seriously misguided perspectives about the French … from what I have seen, people like Bertrand Duperrin, Fred Cavazza, Vincent Berthelot, Xavier Aucompte and others I have met in the past (like Michel Germain) have a deep understanding of what ’s going on and they are moving pretty fast and being very effective at spreading ideas and implementing effective initiatives.

And finally, a special shout-out … mes sincere felicitations ! … to the first commenter cited below.  The last time I talked to Michelle she was Michel Blanc.  I enjoyed meeting him a couple of years ago at WebCom 2006 and had looked forward to meeting him again, but it must be said that in my experience she is easier to talk to and evidently more comfortable in her skin now that Michael has become Michelle.

And I will send some positive thought rays Michelle’s way in a few months as she moves ahead with facial feminization surgery.

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Michelle Blanc

J’ai manqué le début de la présentation de Jon parce que j’aime discuter avec des collègues dans le couloir. Mais lorsque je suis entrée dans la salle, j’ai été estomaquée par la fougue, la passion et l’à-propos de Jon. Je me suis dit que s’il y avait une présentation pour laquelle j’aurais dû être assise depuis le début, c’était bien celle-là. Il y avait tellement de contenus pertinents que je n’ai retenu que quelques punchs particulièrement bon dont :   "management by blogging around"

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Bertrand Duperrin

… puis vint ce qui fut pour moi le clou de la conférence : l’intervention de Jon Husband, assurément pour moi la plus intéressante de la journée tant sur le fond que sur la forme. Plutôt que vous la raconter, ce qui serait fort difficile en raison de sa densité, je préfère vous conseiller de vous intéresser à son blog, de rentrer en profondeur dans la notion de wirearchy, et jeter un oeil à cette présentation qu’il a pris à titre d’exemple.

J’apprécie beaucoup la lucidité de Jon sur le lien organisation / outil et le fait que le halo de l’effet web 2.0 ne l’empêche pas de rester concentré sur l’essentiel : les outils sont au service d’un mode d’organisation et l’entreprise n’est pas le web. Si quelqu’un a mis la main sur sa diapo où il met en parallèle management 2.0, Rh 2.0 et culture 2.0 je suis également acheteur !

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Vallier Lapierre

Je vais conclure avec l’intervention de Jon Husband qui est venu me chercher avec son concept de «wirearchy» qu’il oppose à celui de hiérarchie. Associant le terme à « une dynamique bi-directionnelle de pouvoir et d’autorité basée sur le savoir, la confiance, la crédibilité et la préoccupation de résultats », il jubile à l’idée que les technologies Web 2.0 et les jeunes rendent son utilisation incontournable parce qu’elle est définitiivement la mieux adaptée à notre mode de vie actuel.

Ses schémas (trop touffus pour être joués ici clairement) démontrant la dépendance des approches entreprise 2.0, gestion 2.0 et relations humaines 2.0 de leur relation directe avec la culture 2.0 émergente, sont d’une limpidité « crystal clear ». Je vous incite fortement à retourner sur le site de la conférence dans environ deux semaines lorsque les présentations y seront accessibles. Vous verrez qu’il n’oublie pas beaucup d’éléments.

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Michael Boyle

Later on I sat in on Jon Husband’s talk about the new work environment ushered in with Web 2.0. Jon is a very experienced management consultant who several years ago decided that the existing models or approaches were broken and set out in search of alternatives. Jon told a funny story about early in his career when a (more senior) colleague complained about his reading the newspaper “on company time”. At a certain point in our history, general knowledge of the environment was not seen as a competitive advantage, let alone a food-water-shelter kind of necessity. Now, however, both general and specific knowledge of the environment in which a company works has become absolutely essential. Companies seem to be struggling to confront this reality.

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Fred Cavazza

Génial, des réflexions pleines de bon sens sur l’évolution des organisations et la répartition des pouvoirs au sein de l’entreprise.

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UPDATE:  One more encouraging commentary from conference organizer Claude Malaison. Claude, merci pour les mots encourageant.

Pour moi, la surprise de la journée aura été la performance de l’ami Jon Husband.

TOUS les commentaires sont unanimes : Jon a donné une conférence pleine de substance et l’a livrée avec passion et conviction. Il a parlé d’entreprise 2.0, certes mais l’a fractionnée en management 2.0, en RH 2.0 et en Culture 2.0. Il a aussi parlé des Digital Natives et de leur impact sur la structure organisationnelle, cette structure qu’il qualifie de Wirearchy en opposition à la «Hierarchy» traditionnelle. Un grand bravo donc.

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Would the spreading of information and knowledge to which this snippet refers be possible with the Internet and easy inexpensive personal publishing ?