Here’s a tale of two developing countries. South Africa on the one hand, Venezuela on the other.

Each coutry’s development has been profoundly shaped by the past, and for South Africa that’s meant dealing with the painful leagacy of Apartheid. During the apartheid years, the government implemented a policy of ‘resettlement’, to force people to move to their designated ‘group areas’. Some argue that over three and a half million people were forced to resettle during this period.

The country now faces the challenge of reparing the damage but sadly, not much progress has been made. Brutal divide: fortified town plays on middle class fear of crime

The nation’s recorded rates of violent crime, though still among the world’s worst, have dropped in recent years but paradoxically the fear of being hijacked, raped and murdered has risen - and with it the obsession with security.

“We have taken a leaf or two out of the medieval past and placed it in our future. To be precise, we have stolen the concept of whole town fortification to create a crime-free state,” boasts the website of the developer, George Hazelden. Many apartment complexes and private homes across the country have more sophisticated security measures but Heritage Park is thought to be the first self-contained town entirely ringed by electric fencing.

Heritage Park, at 200 hectares (494 acres) slightly bigger than Monaco, is resolutely middle class. Of 1,500 residents, 1,495 are white. Beyond the fence are three townships, home to tens of thousands of poor black people and coloureds, the term given to those of mixed race. It is a brutal juxtaposition: inside the fence, pastel-coloured two-storey homes in Cape Dutch, English Tudor or Tuscan styles, neatly divided into seven suburbs with names like Beaulieu, Cape Heritage and Tuscana Close. Walk outside the wire and within metres you are in a sea of tin shacks and low-cost government-built houses

What a bleek picture! The reasoning and support behind the project is even more disturbing than the project itself.

Gisela Jespersen, a city councillor for the white-dominated Democratic Alliance party and a member of the planning commission, praised the town as a model for other gated developments in South Africa. She also welcomed the outreach to township dwellers and said people had to be realistic about what it could achieve. “It’s virtually impossible to integrate a community that has been divided for centuries.”

People had to be realistic about what it could achieve? Fair enough, but how being realistic translates into building a fortress is beyond me. How do you integrate communities when they’re separated by electric fencing and armed guards? This is of course only one private property development and does not reflect government policy. It does highlight a growing trend, reflecting the feelings of the people themselves…

Now Venezuela is dealing with a past that I know very little about. So comparing it to South Africa might be completely unfair. That said they both face a serious housing problem and gone about solving it in different ways. I think South Africans can a lot from Venezuela’s approach to the problem…

The discovery of oil in Venezuela in the 1920s, followed by the rapid collapse of agriculture, meant this process happened earlier and in a more complete way than in the rest of the continent.

When this wave of rural people came to the cities they found few jobs, no infrastructure and nowhere to live. There were no houses free so they built their own where they could. These were often on land owned by others. As a result, the barrios where created.

When Hugo Chavez came into government in 1998 he made promises about social housing but improvement was not rapid.

Then, on February 04, 2002 Chavez issued Presidential Decree 1,666 and the CTUs (the Urban Land Committees, known in Spanish as Comites de Tierras Urbanas) were born. The Presidential Order said that any family that could prove they had built their own home could apply to become the legal owner.

To do this they had to join with 100 to 200 other families to form a CTU. When this was done, each family could provide the details to the Technical Office for Urban Land Tenancy and Regularization (OTNRTTU) and become the owners of their own homes.

The CTUs bring up the question of property ownership from two different directions. On one hand it can be seen as another example of the Chavez government’s radical disrespect for the sanctity of private property.

The people of the barrios are taking ownership of land that technically belongs to someone else. The fear is that with social organization and a legal mandate from the government the poor will start to turn their attention outside of the barrio. They might want to expand their property at the expense of the rich, invading their pockets of wealth and security.

Similar fears in South Africa are what actually lead to the rise of gated developments. White farmers were “being attacked by black workers, with land being one of the motivating factors. Venezuela seems to have avoided those troubles.

The CTUs are about much more than property ownership, whether it is politically interpreted as privatization or as the right to a home. They are also the most widely accepted form of participatory democracy in Venezuela now.

The CTUs are about people debating, agreeing, and taking action collectively about things that directly affect every aspect of their daily lives. Self organization is the most striking thing about them.

What the Committees discuss besides land registration is up to them. Each CTU decides its own agenda collectively. Some things discussed can be quite technical and related to housing, such as clean water supply or electricity.

Other things talked about are more abstract, such as culture, education, or social production. Many CTUs have drawn up popular charters or constitutions for their barrios.

And thats the profound difference. In South Africa there’s no dialogue, no cooperation and most significantly no involvement. The private developments, like the one mentioned here, are out to satisfiy purely commercial interests and as a result only end up reinforcing the historic disparities.

In an earlier post I mentioned coming across BLDGBLOG’s concept of psychovideography…

If security firms are the new providers of our urban unconscious, a hundred thousand endless films recording twenty-fours a day, indefinitely, then we should perhaps find that the outdated methodologies of the psychogeographers have hit an impasse. The ‘geo-’ is now in the ‘video-’, as it were, and the ‘-graphy’ survives just the same. Throw in some 24-hour ‘psycho-’, and we begin to see the city through the lens of an unacknowledged avant-garde: a subset of the film industry whose advance front has taken on the guise of security.

When you live in a city with 9000 government surveilance cameras it’s really easy to relate to the idea of psychovideography. But I’ve just stumbled across another interesting look (excuse the pun) at surveilance. The Surveillance Video Entertainment Network

SVEN (Surveillance Video Entertainment Network) is a system comprised of a camera, monitor, and two computers that can be set up in public places - especially in situations where a CCTV monitor might be expected. The software consists of a custom computer vision application that tracks pedestrians and detects their characteristics, and a real-time video processing application that receives this information and uses it to generate music-video like visuals from the live camera feed. The resulting video and audio are displayed on a monitor in the public space, interrupting the standard security camera type display each time a potential rock star is detected. The idea is to humorously examine and demystify concerns about surveillance and computer systems not in terms of being watched, but in terms of how the watching is being done - and how else it might be done if other people were at the wheel..

Have a look at the video demonstrations on thier website, they look really good. This is a really great project because it’s drawing attention to practises already in place, ie behaviour profiling.

New Scientist. Smart software linked to CCTV can spot dubious behaviour

It could be the dawn of a new era in surveillance. For the first time, smart software will help CCTV operators spot any abnormal behaviour.

If the trial due to go live in two London Underground stations this week is a success, it could accelerate the adoption of the technology around the world. The software, which analyses CCTV footage, could help spot suicide attempts, overcrowding, suspect packages and trespassers. The hope is that by automating the prediction or detection of such events security staff, who often have as many as 60 cameras to monitor simultaneously, can reach the scene in time to prevent a potential tragedy

BBC. Surveillance cameras to predict behaviour

Civil rights organisation Liberty is concerned that such systems will not be properly regulated.

“It is not so much the technology but how it is used that concerns us, and how to keep the balance between protecting safety and protecting privacy,” said a spokesperson for Liberty.

“If software is going to be looking at behavioural patterns, who defines what behaviour merits further attention?” he asked.

There’s no question, surveilance is here to stay but as the technology gets more sophisticated our relationship with surveilance will change. Psychovideography and SVEN explores the changing relationship but the real question is, what changes will we have to make?

Just stumbled across a great article on south africa’s finest

Remote and still relatively secret, South Africa is turning into a healthy haven for dozens of digitally literate kids wielding laptops, antique synths and deftly programmed electronic music. This subterranean output is beginning to permeate other parts of the planet, with local electronic tunes landing up on labels based in London and NYC, generating appreciation in international journals like Wire, and being played out on wide-reaching radio stations.

With connections to the international cool music set still multiplying, and with underground kudos well and truly secure, could South Africa’s electronica elite be “the next big thing?” And might they start to find a more appreciative audience in their own country?

While they’re amongst our most promising exports - attracting plenty of attention far afield for their defiant grooves - most locals will look at you quizzically when you mention names. So, here are a few recent firsts for the electro fold, for your info…

What you waiting for? go read the rest! (You can find some of the albums mentioned in The Bin.)

Wow, this is a really incredible story…

… they tried to close the oil company in December of 2002, by locking out the workers, holding the oil resources of the nation as a whole hostage, and by having the entire IT infrastructure under their control. If the data and systems present then had been destroyed, it would have been years before another drop of oil could have been produced.

Out of 4800 managers, about 200 chose to stay behind, and together, with the help of many by then retired former managers who were less corrupt than the ones who left, the workers tried to save the oil company. But the biggest challenge was the computer infrastructure.

Management of IT was at the time contracted to SAIC, (Science Applications International Corp), which has well known political and business connections to Cheney’s office, to the U.S. DOD, and the CIA. At first, when the Venezuelan army was called out to secure the oil facilities during the lockout, the SAIC staff created videos of the troops securing the facilities in an attempt to claim they were under attack and tried to persuade the U.S. congress to give Bush war powers to seize the oil fields. When this scheme failed, the SAIC workers fled the country, but changed all the passwords and kept remote control of all of the computer servers of PDVSA. They choose not to destroy the data on them because they thought they’d be back in a few months once the government of President Chavez finally capitulated.

Much of the infrastructure of PDVSA was under Microsoft Windows-based servers, and used proprietary database software such as Microsoft SQL. The IT managers didn’t expect a bunch of oil workers to be capable of thwarting their plans. Those same oil workers, working together with local computer hackers, were able to secure control of vital computer servers, and in doing so saved the oil infrastructure.

The Venezuelan revolution is perhaps the first revolution in history saved by computer hackers and this is one of the reasons the government is so very strong on promoting the use of free software, particularly in public administration. The Venezuelan government wishes never again to have vital infrastructure held hostage or sabotaged by agents of foreign nations.

Wow, this is scary… Verizon Executive Calls for End to Google’s ‘Free Lunch’

The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”

Verizon is spending billions of dollars to construct a fiber-optic network around the country for delivering high-speed Internet and cable TV services. Executives at other telecom companies, such as AT&T Inc. chief executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr., have suggested that Google, Yahoo Inc. and other such Internet services should have to pay fees for preferred access to consumers over such lines.

And they’re not the only American telco trying to do that. BellSouth: Cyberextortion Pays Off

BellSouth’s new business model, a slightly more polite form of the kind of extortion practiced by Tony Soprano, is starting to pay off. The company says it is in negotiations with several Web sites willing to pay extra fees to BellSouth for more bandwidth than it provides to other sites.

BellSouth says that it shouldn’t have to bear the cost of providing bandwidth for big sites like Google. Instead, the sites should pay for them. But BellSouth ignores an inconvenient fact — it doesn’t bear those costs; its customers do. So BellSouth gets to double-dip.

BellSouth now says it’s talking to several sites willing to pay the extra fees. The film-download MovieLink, it claims, is in talks to fork over cash. BellSouth will also target gaming sites. It says Apple may be willing to spend five to ten cents a download for iTunes music.

This is, of course, bad news for the Internet. Bandwith is the oxygen of startups, and without it they die. Remember, there was once a day when Google was a startup, and Yahoo and other search sites ruled. Google delivered better results — and it delivered faster results. If Google had been denied bandwidth, it would have died.

But some have seen this coming are are already out trying to save the internet

Doc Searls’ Saving The Net article basically covers an emerging phenomenon in the US: the growing consolidation of regional communications networks by telephone and cable companies. And, the suggestion by an SBC executive that the telcos and cablecos are looking at selectively charging for the information packets that flow through their “pipes”. The telcos and cablecos supply in one way or another, much of the highbandwidth connections for residential customers in the US. They also own and lay out much of the fiber and hardware necassary to bring these connections into homes. There has been evidence that some of these companies engage in public disinformation campaigns to discourage municipal fiber-to-home projects, so that they can corner the market on these services.

Doc Searl is warning us that the cable and telco consolidation is very close to completion, and that once they control the only broadband “pipes” that can bring data into homes, then they will begin controlling who sends data across those “pipes”. This will effectively destroy the open nature of the internet for people in the US.

One of dubstep’s major draw cards for me has been it’s comprehensive internet presence. For a genre that’s only been around for, what? 5 years, it has many really well written blogs. The blogs give a newcomer like me an inside look at a scene that would generally be reserved for heads who have been around for a long time.

I’ve found Martin Clarke aka Blackdown (and his monthly Pitchfork article The Month in Grime/Dubstep) particularly interesting. The lastest post is a pretty good interview with Dizzie Rascal but what caught my attention was the question…

A lot of people have made the comparison between grime and baille funk and crunk coming through at the same time…

This stuff I’ve decided is the missing piece in my vision of what I’m dubbing “Shanty House.” Shanty House is the new strain of post World Music engaging in the same cultural and social dynamics that have given us Crunk and Grime in the first world and Dancehall in JA. Detractors might bemoan the need to give Favela Funk, Kwaito and Desi a brand name. However, like it or lump it these forms are always going to exist on the peripheries of most people in the west’s experience of music. If they aren’t called something specific then they’ll be less absorbable in their own right, and conversely will be viewed as an extension of World music. The concept of ‘World Music’ is inextricably intertwined with concepts of the natural, the earthen, and the rooted. However, the new wave of global urban music is mercilessly hooligan in it’s agenda, synthetic by choice and necessity, often produced in a crucible of urban existence yet more extreme, precarious and violent than that which characterises the temperature of New York, London, Berlin.

Funny that, I was thinking the same thing not too long ago. Dubstep / Grime and Kwaito have the same sort of energy, the same… I dunno, I can’t quite put my finger on it. Dubstep could really off back home, especially if the local mc got hold of it. The orginal post is dated June 2004 though. I’m definately taking my beats back home with me. So we’re starting to gather some momentum here :)

Always on Panopticon, haha! that rhymes. The “panopticon”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon, whether we like it or not is here and most people are not at all happy about it.

It’s almost invetible that massive shifts in culture are going to be met with resistance. Those shifts, however, also open doors to new amazing and opertunities. We should really be taking the time to understand what it means and then try to deal with them as best we can.

The good folks over at “worldchanging.com”:http://www.worldchanging.com have written a really interesting peice about the “Rise of the Participatory Panopticon”:http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002651.html

Soon — probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two — we’ll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing.

And we will be doing it to ourselves.

This won’t simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. Such monitoring may well exist, probably will, in fact, but it will be overwhelmed by the millions of cameras and recorders in the hands of millions of Little Brothers and Little Sisters. We will carry with us the tools of our own transparency, and many, perhaps most, will do so willingly, even happily.

I call this world the Participatory Panopticon.

The article goes on to decribe how mobiles phones are laying the foundations of this participatory panopticon. Not only do the majority of phones available now have cameras but they also have the capabilty to share pictures and video via the internet. The article paints a vivid picture of the future could look like using all this shiney new technology.

But, as “I mentioned earlier”:http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/2006/01/16/endless-filming, you don’t have to be using all the latest cutting edge technology. Now, all you need is a TV. ‘Mash’ created “ABSOtv”:http://www.asbotv.com to look alternative ways of using the ‘All Seeing Eye’

The Open CCTV broadcasting idea is quite simple. If we are able to tune into a CCTV camera at any time via a dedicated channel at home and watch whatever it is looking at; does that not create a unique opotunity for use on the other side of the television. I am talking free/open televison broadcasting.

Imagine this if you will…
A small amateur dance group or team of film students with lofty desires to show London their art, place an advertisement describing the time, date and location of their “stage.” A small well lit square of pavement directly below a publicly accessible CCTV camera.

Are you getting the picture ?

Projects like ASBOtv can give us a glimpse of the new avenue’s of expression these technologies afford. And it definately emphasizes the _participatory_ part of the Participatory Panopticon.

Following on from my “previous post”:http://thinkingmachine.blogsome.com/2006/01/31/ghosts-in-the-machine the US Military is research techology to automate the creation of “3d maps of urban battlefields”:http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18624985.800.

. IMAGINE if the first soldiers to enter an enemy city could map it street by street, recording every window and doorway of the urban battlefield in an accurate 3D model that could instantly be relayed to their comrades at base.

The concept is similar to building a virtual reality model, but the process is very different. To produce a VR model, a programmer manually combines distance measurements and 2D pictures to make a 3D model. The new technique, dubbed “virtualised reality” by creator Avideh Zakhor, is automated and much faster. Virtualised reality scans the urban landscape using lasers and digital cameras mounted on a truck or plane. A laser measures distances to objects such as lamp posts and building facades, while the digital camera takes 2D photos. Another laser calculates the movement of the truck and checks its position against data collected from the aerial laser aboard the plane.

These measurements and pictures are fed into a computer that combines them to create a photo-realistic virtual 3D model of the area

This is the really cool part:

bq. The process of creating models could be speeded up even further by developments in unmanned aerial vehicles. The US navy is developing cheap (around $2000) robotic aircraft that can operate in “swarms” to perform reconnaissance of a wide area at speed. The aircraft use cooperative software that allows the swarm to cope with some of its members being shot down.

Woah! Can you say “skynet”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet!