Food is not just a topic of conversation, it is a format. Much of human culture is based around food, it’s preparation, production, and then of course the meal itself. Conversations happen around this table, decisions are made over dinner, and every meal table has the necessary ingredients required for a future parliament. Or is it missing something?

A core question the project raises is the idea that it is possible to give democratic representation to objects. This is a practical, as well as a theoretical question. The environment and issues such as global warming clearly require action, and action in democratic societies requires democratic debate, political decision making, and eventually legislation. We therefore already include a range of voices, from scientists, to lobby groups in this process. The question raised here is not therefore as simple as can, or should we do this, but rather is there a better way of doing this?

It can be argued of course that people in the end must decide, and all this talk of “giving voice” to inanimate objects in the political process, is nothing more than mumbo-jumbo. Does it make sense to really try and give an ingredient a “voice”. What are the dangers, and absurdities for instance, of inviting people to speak for on behalf of this plant?

Through a series of events – events we are dubbing “collisions” – we will will seek answers to this question. Can we make any sense of this attempt to represent a plant, or food-stuff? Can we speak for things? The methodology is simple enough – let’s ask the question and see what people come up with? Meal time discussions will be used to record and archive the conversations, and we will be teaming up with the Festival of Mint, and FOG.FM to celebrate local food production, and give these discussions a focus.

Subscribe / stay tuned to this blog to follow the progress of this event, or send us an email at food@parliamentofthings.org. To take part in this event wherever you are, all you need to do is:

1. Cook a meal at home with locally produced produce
2. Invite friends
3. Tune into FOG.FM and listen to the radio
4. Put your event on the map

If a you feel more ambitious then consider inviting members of the public and create a “supper club” event, or perhaps hold a talk or discussion. For the more creatively inclined you could participate in the radio station by contributing play lists, take a turn as a DJ, or invite live performers for a session on the radio.

Finally, we fully expect some events may be in public venues, cafés, or turn into complete local festivals of their own. That’s what we did in Finsbury Park, London last year, and it was a hoot. Look forward to meeting more lovely people this year. Why not put your town on the map?

Dazza Greenwood (@dazzagreenwood) was particularly good on his emphasis on flexible identities – but in general a wealth of great speakers and examples of projects. Check the video archive here.

Lietaer is no light-weight. His CV includes a phD at MIT, and a stint at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of Belgium), where he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. Business Week named him “the world’s top currency trader” in 1992. You can check his bio on WikiPedia or here.

Flavours of Money
It is our view that money and votes are just two examples of token exchange games, from a palette of an infinitely more diverse range of similar games. The design of these games, profoundly influences the behaviour of players – games can be individualistic or cooperative, thoughtful or aggressive. Democratic votes, differ from hard currency in only a few minor technical aspects, a fact that you can discover for yourself if you try and code computer systems for online voting or currency transactions – yet we treat them very differently. Liquid Democracy allows votes to flow more freely through the network, and can itself be broken down into different categories of votes or recommendations – reflecting different value systems. Ricardian Contracts can be used to assign entirely new forms of value to conventional currency systems.

This is not complex stuff, this is not 3D computer graphics, or rocket science – just simple game design. There are many different flavours of money, and we do not have to be stuck with the one we’ve got.

The medium of the network is deliberately vague here. Yes, an obvious way to conceive of such a network of spaces is to use technology, the internet, video conferencing, projection, and software platforms to connect these spaces, but this is not the only way, and indeed high-tech real-time conferencing rarely works well, and is for the present a technology that would exclude rather than include the vast majority of communities in the developed and the developing world. Better, is that we consider, other modes of connectivity, using story telling, recordings, asynchronous communication, SMS, and other low-tech solutions.

“Things” are spacial, decisions are usually multidimensional and can be restricted to specific domains. It is useful, to represent these processes spatially, if only as a metaphor that makes the way we debate issues more intuitive.

It is surely no accident that the ancient and original sites of democratic debate were also those of theatre. Even today, should you chance on a live community debate on a matter of importance, you will experience first hand, the vitality of real human theatre. For my part this was what drew me first to the political sphere, having absolutely no interest in national party political politics.

Our second inspiration comes from the life long work of Augusto Boal, who sadly passed away in 2009. His work first in Forum Theatre and then finally with Legislative Theatre was always political (in it’s best sense), but never dull.

Brazilian theater director and writer Augusto Boal presenting his Theater of the Oppressed at Riverside Church in New York City.

Theatre in this physical space, political sense, is the ideal interface to Latour’s Parliament of things in the epistemological sense. Theatre is spatial, embedded .  The set of a theatre can incorporate, projection, video, sound, lighting – it is an informational space. It provides context to the debate.

Interactive, or improvised theatre, is also a debate, but more than a debate in the political sense, it captures potent ideas around the notions of expertise, skill, emotive communication, authenticity participation and engagement. It is controversial and playful. It is serious and informative. In the sense of theatrical space, the performance interface is the legal framework of the parliament. It is the written, spoken and unspoken culture of interaction in the space.

It is hard to overemphasise the importance of the design of this space, in determining who takes part, and the quality of the discussions that take place. Woody Allen said “the world is run by people who can be bothered to turn up”, and the people who are bothered to turn up, as we know, are those that feel at home with committees, bureaucracy and the written word. If we want new people to engage, then we need to design new forms of decision making space, that are inviting, human, and above all not dull.

There is no more effective way of discouraging the participation of imaginative, creative and disruptive forces than to make the style of the engagement as boring as possible. While we need a certain amount of stability in our processes, this is best achieved by making binding decisions efficiently, and not by excluding new and disruptive ideas and participants.

Voting at a Pirate Party meeting – source the Economist.

Michael Lühmann of the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research, fears that without parties to mediate between citizens and the state, small, highly motivated groups can prosper at the expense of the many – sounds like political lobbying to me? Nor do I expect he as analysed the socratic effect of “communicative ascent” on political dialogue over time…

Yet Germany is often said to be suffering from a democratic malaise, with broad-based parties like the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats all losing members. As in other western economies, voter turnout is falling, with citizens tending to mobilise outside party structures. A poll in Der Spiegel says that 83% favour more direct participation.

It all started in Sweden
The Pirate party was started in Sweden by Rickard Falkvinge in the Fall of 2005. In Sweden the Pirate Party received 7.13% of the total Swedish votes in the 2009 European Parliament elections, with Christian Engström and Amelia Andersdotter taking seats at the European Parliament. The Pirate Party is now an international movement of more than 40 regional Parties.

Not just a flash in the pan
In Germany, the Pirates secured 7.4% of the vote in Saarland, Germany’s smallest state (excluding the city-states of Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg). “They have their strongholds among young people in cities with universities, with an academic environment,” says Lothar Probst, a political scientist at the University of Bremen. “One of the amazing points in Saarland is that it only has one or two universities. The Pirates were still pretty successful in the countryside.” Their ship came in yet again on May 6 when they earned 8% of the vote in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein. Entering parliament in NRW makes them four for four.

Now if someone can translate this properly for me, as I’d like to figure out what they are saying about the use of Liquid Democracy by the Pirates….

In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else, it can be difficult, even shameful, to be an introvert.

The thought here is that a decision-making space needs to be slow, quiet and introverted, and that there is a danger, or at least a perceived danger of everything becoming loud, glitzy, technical, instant and superficial.

Democracy and the Slow Room
It is a common concern that while the wisdom of crowds and using television or the internet to make it easier to vote, they also make it less considered. If (the thinking goes), all you have to do is send in an SMS, “like” or click +1 here, to “answer” some television poll – what chance is there for a more contemplative response? Surely this is a dreadful way to express a democratic opinion?

This is an unfortunate assumption, and certainly not what is being aimed for, when we discuss democracy and debate in the Parliament of Things. Indeed it is precisely the superficial forms of public debate encouraged by television, and current political systems that inspire the project to look for richer forms of deliberation.

In particular, for many decisions we need to be able to construct slow rooms, and long tables. A slow room is a place in parliament where thoughtful, and considered processes are required before the decision can be made, while a long room is a space which is designed to debate and decide on issues that only make sense to discuss when considering very long time scales (such as environmental impact).

How such a space is designed is an art that involves the design of physical and virtual space (what we call interface design), as well a social process of creating the right culture around the decisions backed up by the technical and legal structures that embody the decision-making framework.

Liquid Democracy and Thoughtfulness
It may well be the case that what most people currently experience on the internet, is a trivialization of debate, and a chaotic over-exposure to information and opinion, but it would be a mistake to judge the future of online decision support tools on this basis. Rather the current poor state of online deliberation, should be viewed in terms of a natural historical progression:  from simple self publishing tools and mass platforms, to specialised and sophisticated spaces that are designed to support decision-making in specific niche fields and communities.

We now have had secure digital tools for online payments, and are beginning to see these on mobile platforms, and it is only when the low hanging fruit of mass engagement platforms have been fully ceded to platforms like FaceBook, Google Plus and Twitter, that we can see developers and investors taking the time and money required to create more sophisticated tools. At the same time, we as users of these systems will begin to become more demanding.

Voting is thought at the moment as a process of putting a cross on a piece of paper, or clicking a button on an online poll – but it need not be like this. There are many ways an individual can express their preference,  using richer forms of democracy voters can:

• express their support for individuals they trust, based on dialogue, long-term acquaintance, and extended conversation.
• express their support for various positions, through learning and study, and in so doing gather the support of others
• they can abstain on issues they are not interested in, and act directly on those that they are knowledgable about or passionate.

In a time where the collection of votes, and the distribution of rich documentation around a debate (let’s call this documentary), is effectively free and substantially more universal than ever before (via the internet and mobile phones), the problem can shift from the practical task of collecting trivial democratic input, to enabling individuals to express their democratic preference in richer and more engaging ways.

Doing this every 4 years used to make economic sense, but no longer:  now it is just a forced distortion on the ability of individuals to express their knowledge and political preferences with regard to how society should develop. We’ll take a look at the sort of mechanisms that we could use, and how these enable and encourage a higher quality of debate, and not just a greater quantity of button pushing – in a later post.

This article titled “Hacktivists in the frontline battle for the internet” was written by James Ball, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 20th April 2012 12.00 UTC

If there is a battle over the future shape of the internet – and society as a whole – then hacktivist groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, Wikileaks and the file-sharing site Megaupload.com are among the frontline battalions.

While the individual incidents and clashes involving these groups may seem disparate and unconnected, those at the core of online activism say all these organisations, plus relatively mainstream movements such as Occupy and the Pirate Party, are linked.

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the well-known advocacy group Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), says the over-arching motivation of such efforts, whatever tactics are used, was to shift the nature of society.

“What unites these groups is the belief that the future is not about vertical, hierarchical government, but horizontal [peer-to-peer] government,” he said. “This pits the forces of the information age against those of the industrial age, as we move from scarcity of information to abundance. The last year has established our ability to have revolutions, but not to govern in their wake – but that’s coming.

“Different groups are on a spectrum. Organisations like the EFF would be on the conservative end. Along the way is WikiLeaks and the Pirate party, with Anonymous at the more radical end.”

Though ties between the groups are often tenuous, a broadly shared ideology of a libertarian distrust of government, belief in networks of free citizens, mistrust of copyright and intellectual property laws, and a drive for self-determination appear to unite the hacktivist fringe of the internet.

Barlow believes the US government has started aggressively pursuing political hackers such as Anonymous and Lulzsec. The groups mounted attacks taking US and UK government websites offline, targeted News International, allegedly taking a tranche of emails belong to staff of the Sun, and took the full email archives of US intelligence firm Stratfor and passed them to WikiLeaks.

“The government targets Anonymous for the same reason it targets al-Qaida – because they’re the enemy. And in a way, they are. The shit is starting to hit the fan, but we haven’t started to see the effects of that yet. The internet is the most liberating tool for humanity ever invented, and also the best for surveillance. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.”

Barlow is working on a system to oppose the financial blockade imposed against WikiLeaks. In the wake of WikiLeaks’ publication of US diplomatic cables, Senator Joe Lieberman called on US companies to cut off the site. Payment providers Visa, Mastercard and Paypal acceded to the request, despite no order or request coming from government, starving the site of funding.

Barlow is planning the establishment of a foundation aimed at funding any organisations affected by corporate blockades with first amendment implications.

“We hope it makes a moral argument against these sorts of actions,” he says. “But it could also be the basis of a legal challenge. We now have private organisations with the ability to stifle free expression. These companies have no bill of rights that applies to their action – they only have terms of service.”

As a result, battles over the future of the internet are becoming increasingly politicised as opposing sides try to set the legal framework. A huge network of grassroots organisations coalesced in the US to fight the stop online piracy act (Sopa). The bill was eventually stopped in its tracks as opposition mounted, but similar efforts in the EU and elsewhere have had more success proceeding through the legislature.

On other fronts, cyber-surveillance is increasing, with the UK government proposing a law to allow the monitoring of information on emails, social network and Skype traffic on all users in real-time. To fight such efforts, hacktivists are getting political.

The best known movement of this sort is the Pirate party, which was founded in Sweden by Rickard Falkvinge in 2006 and is marginal in the UK but is building up substantial influence across the world. The party has two MEPs in the European parliament, and recently took 7.4% of the vote in recent elections in the Saarland region of Germany – and according to recent polls it is now the third biggest in the country.

The party has even briefly had a cabinet minister, Slim Amamou, a Tunisian activist who served as sports and youth minister in his country for a brief period last year before resigning in protest over web censorship imposed by Tunisia’s army.

Amelia Andersdotter, one of the party’s two MEPs, thinks authorities tend to ignore the political element of hacking attacks by groups such as Anonymous.

“Some of these hacking attacks are misconstrued. Many are clearly politically targeted, attempts to register protest at something a government or organisation is doing,” she says. “There is a lack of understanding in cyber-security. Things are seen as big and intimidating when they are often not.

“Suddenly, denial of service attacks [an attack which floods a site with fake traffic, preventing people visiting] which used to be legal in many member states, are being prosecuted. Most of these used to be for bad reasons, attacks by rivals, but now more than half are political and there are more prosecutions.”

Andersdotter’s priorities are looking into how public authorities’ security efforts are regulated and held to account, attempting to reform the EU’s intellectual property laws, and helping to spread fibre internet – faster broadband speeds – across the EU.

Others aren’t content merely to lobby politicians for a free internet. Instead, they have built tools designed to make regulating the internet an impossible task. One of the most widely used is Tor, short for “the onion router”.

Tor, when used properly, anonymises all internet traffic coming from a machine by bouncing it around dozens of other computers around the world, taking a different path each time. This means an individual will only be identifiable when he or she chooses to log into a given site.

The system is not infallible, as it can be blocked – temporarily – by authoritarian governments, but provides a huge degree of protection, whether to activists working in oppressive regimes, or to those using the internet to smuggle drugs or share child pornography.

This dilemma has not gone unnoticed by the people behind the tools.

“Criminals will always be opportunists and will see new prospects before everyone else does,” says the Tor project’s executive director, Andrew Lewman. “Old-fashioned police work still works incredibly well against such people. Almost every transaction in the UK uses EFT [card payment], there is CCTV on every street, and monitoring of online communications – but you still have trafficking and other crimes.

“The benefits of the open internet work much the same as motorways or interstates: they outweigh the costs. In the US, police opposed the building of interstate roads, saying they would help criminals circumvent the law. But the police adapted, and the benefits of highways clearly outweigh the costs.”

Lewman says the main motivating factor behind the Tor project is not to overthrow government, or even to engage in activism, but rather to give users control over how they use the internet and who is able to monitor their activity. But he is not surprised that governments are trying to regulate the internet.

“Governments are starting to realise a growing share of their GDP depends on the internet. Government like stability, not rapidly shifting ground,” he concludes.

But government could be circumvented entirely, as coders haven’t only been building ways of circumventing legal oversight: they have built a whole new stateless currency from the ground up.

The currency is known as Bitcoin, and relies on a series of mathematical algorithms to govern the amount of money in circulation and the future inflation rate. Each Bitcoin has a unique ID and transactions are recorded in public ledgers, making fraud far more difficult than most real-world currencies – but as Bitcoins aren’t backed by a government, if they’re stolen, they’re gone forever, as some early adopters found out to their cost.

At the time of writing, there are more than 8.7m Bitcoins in existence, worth a total of around $42.3m (£26.2m). The combination of a stateless currency and untraceable internet use is a powerful one, as one underground site highlights.

The Silk Road is a website only accessible in the “dark” section of Tor, meaning it can’t be viewed or traced on the general internet, and accepts only Bitcoins for payment. The site allows the buying and selling of illegal drugs, predominantly in the US, UK and Netherlands.

Its existence isn’t a secret. In 2011 two senators wrote to the US attorney general asking for action to be taken against the site, which was described as a “one-stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen”.

Action against the site, which operates in a similar manner to eBay, linking independent buyers and sellers, has so far proved impossible, and the publicity generated for the Silk Road only boosted its – and Bitcoin’s – popularity.

Promoting such enterprises is not, though, the driving motivation for most of the people behind the development of Bitcoin.

One core member of Bitcoin’s development team, Amir Taaki, explains the broad motivations of the hacktivist movement from a “hackspace” in east London – a loose members’ club designed to let people build, code and tinker as they wish. Even the space’s door is customised: it’s tailored to open when members pass their Oyster card or similar radio-frequency ID nearby, and then plays a customised greeting (one has chosen the victory theme from Final Fantasy VII, a cult 90s videogame).

The first principle of hacker culture, Taaki says that “all authority should be questioned”. He stresses this doesn’t mean governments or police are necessarily corrupt, or aren’t needed, but that the public should always be in a position to hold such authorities to account.

This leads to the second core principle: information should, generally speaking, be free. Copyright laws, patents, government secrecy and more are a huge target for the movement.

What this would mean for industries such as pharmaceuticals, where a pill may cost pennies to make but millions to research is unclear, though – and Taaki doesn’t have the answers. What he does raise is a challenge. To date, it’s the entertainment industries – Hollywood, music, television and publishers – that have felt the effects of piracy and filesharing. Developments in technology mean that may not remain the case for long.

Devices known as 3D printers are able to create real-life objects based on three-dimensional plans. The technology is expensive: a cheap commercial machine costs upwards of £10,000, but a build-it-yourself open source version has already been conceived. The RepRap can be built for just over £300. Intriguingly, a RepRap can currently produce around half the parts needed to make another one. Given enough time, the devices will likely be able to print out the parts to make a whole new 3D printer – a self-replicating machine.

It’s a technology with impressive potential, the ability to “print” virtually any item that can be conceived – tools, toys, even food – but the applications to date are fairly basic, and costly. At present, the printers can mainly make novelty items – though early, successful attempts to clone plastic Warhammer toys led to lawsuits and a predictable backlash.

A technology that could allow anyone to manufacture any item, given the right blueprints, heralds a huge storm for any company relying on old-world business models – and today’s hackers know it.

“The battle between pirates and the music or film industries is really nothing, it’s a warm-up,” Taaki says. “When this technology matures, manufacturers, agriculture businesses, technology firms, any of this could be easily replicated by almost anyone, anywhere. That’s when we’ll see the real fight – and they don’t even see it coming.”

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