Week 3 - Response 2 - Slow & Feral

Feral robots - I find an instant personal connection to ideas of public and sharing -- this leads to the describing of proboscis, in what sounds great - with the likes of public, sharing, knowledge, memories and then it stumbles into “our” with it’s description of various devices. This at first seems almost like a proprietary claim but with further reading it feels more like the articles embracing the community that has developed a set of great tools. What I find frustrating about this text and others like it is the alienization of the public from the public, that is to say that there is anything else than public authoring. What is ever truly public and what isn’t private? The only activities that unite us under the flag of public are really the human physical and biological musts of life and everything else un-arguably falls into a private, no matter how big, realm. But let’s say that robotics does become truly public, from the CEO of financial firms to the fry cook at McDonalds -- what then? Does democratization cause no harms? Overall the publishers design and intent of the article certainly provokes comment and debate, but I don’t know if it’s any more or less useful than the public sharing of robotics and authoring.

Slow Design - What I see missing from a lot of this weeks text is a connection to the very people that activist and tactical art proposes to save from huge corporations and evil sub-governments - that is to say that it speaks to very finite audiences of technological, aesthetic, urban studies, and typically an affluent educated class and by affluent I would refer to people without the time, capacity or desire to engage in even a beginning conversation to start to understand what it means to care about “reveal” and “expand” when their hopes and desires are already crushed on a regular basis. On both of these texts I feel that they both read as clubs I have to join, another thing I would have to maintain or a password for my firefox to have to remember --