In the corner of an attic room in one of Britain’s oldest factories a small group are engaged in the assembly of a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic. They – it – all of us – are there for Laptops and Looms, a gathering of people whose crafts cross the warp of the digital networked world with the weft of making and holding real stuff.

It’s a privilege to be here. Projects are shown, stories shared, frustrations vented. This is the place to be if you’ve ever wondered how to:

• get funding for projects not considered “digital enough”
• break out from the category of hand-craft without entering the globalised game of mass-scale manufacture
• create a connected object that will still be beautiful when the Internet is switched off
• avoid queuing at the Post Office
• make a local car.

The inspired move of holding Laptops and Looms in a world heritage site dares us to draw parallels with the makers, hackers and inventors of the past. We are at once nostalgic for the noble, human-scale labour of the weaver’s cottage and awestruck by the all-consuming manufactories that supplanted it.

The nearby city of Derby has just hit the reset button on its Silk Mill industrial museum, mothballed for two years while they work out what to do with it. Rolls Royce aero engines rub shoulders with Midlands railway memorabilia on the site of a silk mill with a claim to be the world’s first factory.

Like Derby itself, the museum needs to find a way to build upon these layers of history, or be crushed by the weight of them. Water wheels, millstones, silk frames, steam locomotives, jet engines  – they all go round in circles.

Skimming stones on the river at Matlock Baths, someone mentions how the beautiful Derwent Valley reminds him of Tintern Abbey. And I realise that to understand where we are now, 30 years on from the last great Tory recession, we need to twist the dial back another whole turn, to the age of the English monasteries.

Abbeys such as Fountains, Rievaulx and Kirkstall began humbly enough, as offshoots of the French Cistercian movement. Their needs were simple: tranquility, running water and some land for agriculture. But over time they grew, soaring higher, sucking in labour, expanding their estates, diversifying their industries and dominating their localities. Imagine the noise, imagine the power! Until a greedy monarch who would brook no opposition made a grab for their riches and sent the monks packing.

England’s monasteries were washed away in a freshwater confluence of printing presses and Protestant ideology. The clergy who had used the Latin tongue to obscure the word of God were cut down to size, disintermediated by the Bible in English. They still had a role, but no longer a monopoly on the invention of new meanings.

In the shadow of the Gothic ruins, sometimes literally from their rubble, arose smaller vernacular working class dwellings, cottage industries. Among the cottage-dwellers’ most prized possessions was the family Bible, not as grand and illuminated as the monks’ Latin one, but there, accessible to anyone who could read.

To our modern eyes, there was much wrong with the cottage industries: patriarchal, piecework-driven and still at the mercy of merchants higher up the pyramid. But economically this seems closest to the model to which some laptops-and-loomers aspire, (dread phrase) a “lifestyle business” bigger than a hobby but smaller than a factory.

It was 200 years before Britain’s gorges would see the rise of new monsters: water wheels and spinning frames and looms and five storey factories. Something in the cottage industries had got out of kilter. With the invention of the flying shuttle, home-spinning could no longer feed the weaver’s demand for thread. The forces of industrialisation seemed unstoppable, pressed home by a new ideology, Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the productivity gains from de-humanising division of labour. The pattern was repeated elsewhere in Europe with local variations: Revolutionary France threw out its monks and turned the Abbey of Fontenay directly into a paper-mill.

By then the ruined abbeys had lost their admonishing power; some became romantic ornaments in the faux-wild gardens of the aristocracy. Gothic became the go-to architectural style of the sentimental idealist. I’m still a sucker for it today.

There were warnings, of course. Just six years after William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”  we got William Blake’s “And did those feet in ancient time”. But still the dark Satanic mills grew. They outgrew the valleys and by means of canals and steam engines dispensed with the need for water power. They swept aside the Arts and Crafts objections of Ruskin and Morris, who fought in vain to revive a labour theory of value.

Until one day some time in the second half of the 20th Century, the tide turned. And here we are today picking our way through the rockpools of the anthropocene for glinting sea-glass, smooth abraded shards of blue pottery and rounded red brick stones. Look closely in those rockpools – the railway arches, hidden yards and edge-of-town industrial parks – and you’ll see that Britain is still teeming with productive life, but on a smaller scale, more niche than before. No longer the workshop of the world.

What comes after the dissolution of Britain’s factories?

That 3d printer in the corner could hold some answers. Despite its current immaturity, 3d printing seems an emblematic technology – perhaps as powerful as the vernacular Bible. It may never be the cheapest way to make stuff, nor turn out the finest work. But it speaks powerfully of the democratisation of making, now within reach of anyone who can use a graphics programme or write a little code. Factories still have a role, but no longer a monopoly on the invention of meanings.

These things move slowly. A straw poll in the pub reveals that many of us already come from the second generation of geeks in our families. Some of us are raising the third. A child who grows up with a laptop and a 3d printer knows she can make a future spinning software, hardware, and the services that bind the two.

This time around the abbeys and the factories should stand equally as inspirations and warnings.

Their makers’ inventiveness and determination have left us a rich seam of narrative capital. And for all the current Western angst over the rise of Chinese manufacturing, the Victorians were nothing if not outward-looking. Leeds’ engineers willingly gave a leg-up to Germany’s Krupp Brothers and motorcycle pioneer Gottleib Daimler.

Yet the overbearing influence and precipitous declines of monasteries and mills should make us wary of future aggrandisements. Want to know how that last bit pans out? Please check back on this blog in August 2211.

Thanks to Russell, Toby, Greg and everyone else who made Laptops and Looms happen. And thanks to you, dear reader, for making it to the end of this ramble. As a reward, check out Paul Miller’s proper take-out from Laptops and Looms. He has a numbered list and everything.

The depths of winter, two weeks off to take stock of where we are and where we’re going, a chance to catch up with family and friends. We travelled through blizzards, cooked and ate good food, lit fires, drank wine, fiddled with MP3 play-lists, time-shifted TV, and made one (thankfully minor) visit to Accident and Emergency. We – friends, family, all – talked about our lives in early Twenteenage Britain: public sector insecurity, the choice of good schools, distant relatives, our new phones and other devices. The confection that follows is made from the left-overs.

Our current preoccupations seem to boil down to two resources, both of which are unequally distributed within families, communities, our nation and world at large. To understand these resources is to see where opportunities and conflicts lie, to look for unlikely allies and unexpected lines of agreement.

The first of the two resources is disposable time – the uncommitted minutes and hours in which we make our own choices.

The clichéd “cash rich, time poor” professional classes are not alone in their want of this resource. The pressure on the “squeezed middle” is as much a temporal crunch as a financial one. As Ed Miliband said: “If you are holding down two jobs, working fourteen hour days, worrying about childcare, anxious about elderly relatives, how can you find the time for anything else? … Until we address the conditions that mean that people’s lives are dominated by long hours, then the big society will always remain a fiction.”

Time wealth ebbs and flows as we move through life-stages, and is at least partially subjective – there are huge variations in people’s estimations of their own and others’ busy-ness. But, whether acknowledged or not, the debate over fairness and equality – over social security, pensions and the division of unpaid labour within families – must be as much about time and energy as it is about money.

The second resource, sometimes a skill, but as often a learned attitude, is tech mastery, a belief that computers, the internet and mobile phones exist to help us achieve our goals, not to enslave or bewilder us.

Tech mastery is the toolkit to take control in the modern world, to “program or be programmed.” Good technology products and services increase the mastery of their users; poor ones sap it. That tech mastery tends to rise and fall with age, and to be more concentrated among men than women, says more about the biases of tech implementation than about the innate abilities or preferences of those demographic groups.

I believe 2011 will be a year when people get angry about bad usability and the failure of the new media to meet the needs of all but a narrow section of society. As the web becomes more mobile and more, genuinely, worldwide, it has to do better at empowering all its users, young and old, rich and poor, not all of whom have the latest device designed in California.

When free tech culture meets the law it’s more than a matter of understanding the “what.” There’s also the “why”.

One person’s innocent checking of their mobile phone is another’s gross intrusion into quality time.

We also find some opportunities…

What services could bridge the gaps between the generations and social groups by drawing on what they have in common?

How could two groups of people make the most of their complementary resources?

To square this circle, we need to pay attention to the different characteristics demanded at each point, and find ways to spread the wealth more equally. Something like…

Right now, at the start of 2011, I have many more questions than answers about disposable time and tech mastery inequalities. But I reckon we’ll see a lot more of these themes before the year is out.

A desire to put some theoretical acro props under my vague unease with the determinist narrative of so much of our technology discourse has led me to the writing of the French anthropologist Bruno Latour. His work on the social construction of science, an ethnography of the R&D lab, has a special resonance for me, a humanities graduate who finds himself colleague to a legion of French engineers.

I’m stumbling intermittently through Catherine Porter’s translation of Latour’s 1991 work “We have never been modern“, as a prelude to David Edgerton’s “The Shock of the Old“. At times it feels a bit like eating up the broccoli before allowing myself desert, but the rich, buttery morsels like the following make it all worthwhile.

The story so far.

Latour argues that modernity, from Civil War England onwards, managed its contradictions by placing boundaries between nature and society. Thomas Hobbes, writer of the Leviathan, was taken up as a founder of political philosophy while Robert Boyle, he of the air pumps, was channelled as a natural philosopher and pioneer of scientific method. In truth both men speculated on both politics and science, but this inconsistency was whitewashed by their modern successors seeking only the pure narrative of one or the other.

And so we are today in a world still riven by CP Snow’s two cultures, where right-wing bloggers can grab acres of media coverage against climate scientists by finding just the tiniest trace of political “contamination” on the lab’s email servers.

But I wonder if the disconnection and reconnection of nature and society is also a useful way to understand some of the ideas I’m expecting to hear today at dConstruct, a conference at the cutting edge of technology and media convergence.

The 19 years since Latour published “Nous n’avons jamais été moderne” roughly spans my working life so far. I’ve witnessed the amazing things that can happen when you expose the humanities-soaked world of newspapers, books and TV to the attentions of software engineers and computer scientists. The results have been delightful and depressing, often both at the same time. Who knew back then that floaty copywriters would have to cohabit – for better or for worse – with the number-crunchers of search engine optimisation?

This fusing of the worlds of media and technology is only just beginning, and the next step is evident in the hand-held touch-sensitive, context-aware marvel of creation that is the latest smartphone.

Hitherto we have seen the the world of human-created information, the texts of the ancients and the tussles of our own times, through the pure window of the newspaper, the book, the TV, the PC screen. But the smartphone is a game-changer, like Robert Boyle’s air pump. With its bundle of sensors, of location, of proximity, and in the future no doubt heat, light, pressure and humidity it becomes a mini-lab through which we measure our world as we interact with it.

All manner of things could be possible once these facts of nature start to mix with the artifacts of society. My Foursquare checkins form a pattern of places created by me, joined with those of my friends to co-create something bigger and more valuable. My view of reality through the camera of the phone can be augmented with information. We will all be the scientists, as well as the political commentators, of our own lives. This is the role of naturalism in my “Mobile Gothic” meander.

To recycle Latour on Robert Boyle’s account of his air pump experiments:

“Here in Boyle’s text we witness the intervention of a new actor recognised by the new [modern] Constitution: inert bodies, incapable of will and bias but capable of showing, signing, writing and scribbling on laboratory instuments before trustworthy witnesses. These nonhumans, lacking souls but endowed with meaning, are even more reliable than ordinary mortals, to whom will is attributed but who lack the capacity to indicate phenomena in a reliable way. According to the Constitution, in case of doubt, humans are better off appealing to nonhumans. Endowed with their new semiotic powers, the latter contribute to a new form of text, the experimental science article, a hybrid of the age-old style of biblical exegesis – which has previously been applied only to the Scriptures and classical texts – and the new instrument that produces new inscriptions. From this point on, witnesses will pursue their discussions in its enclosed space, discussions about the meaningful behavious or nonhumans. The old hermeneutics will persist, but it will add to its parchments the shaky signature of scientific instruments.”

I don’t yet know where I stand in this picture. Am I the experimenter, his audience, or the chick in the jar?

An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768

Ten years ago this month the Sunday Times published an article by Douglas Adams called “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”. You can read it here.

Some starting observations:

1. It’s a tragedy that Adams died, aged 49, in 2001, depriving us of more great literature in the vein of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, of genuinely innovative new media projects such as H2G2, and of the witty, insightful commentary we find in the Sunday Times column.
2. Adams’ insights have stood the test of time.  Everything he wrote at the end of the Nineties stands true as we near the start of the Tens.
3. We still haven’t stopped worrying.

Adams from 1999:

… there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists (yes, Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘wwwDOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on…

2009: John Humphrys is still huffing and puffing [Update 3/9/09 - further proof provided!], and…

you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

The moral panic continues, now transferred to social networking and camera phones.

And Douglas Adams hit the nail of the head in his taking to task of the term “interactive”:

the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

The same fallacy persists, now transferred from the term “interactive” to “social“.

Ten years ago, Douglas Adams identifed a few problems.

• “Only a minute proportion of the world’s population is so far connected” – this one’s well on the way to being fixed, as much by the spread of internet-capable mobile devices as by desktop or laptop PCs.
• It was still “technology,” defined as “‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs.” – has the internet in 2009 reached the same level of  everyday acceptance as chairs? Almost, I think, though the legs still fall off with disappointing regularity.

The biggest problem, wrote Adams, is that “we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it”. Invoking Steve Pinker’s The Language Instinct (read this too, if you haven’t already), he argued that it would take the next generation of children born into the world of the web to become really fluent. And for me that’s been the most amazing part. Reflecting the other day on Tom Armitage’s augmented reality post to the Schulze and Webb blog, I realised that I see that development in my own children’s engagement with technology.

• At birth a child may assume that anything is possible: a handheld projector holds no special amazement for my three-year-old.
• Through childhood we are trained, with toys among other things, to limit our expectations about how objects should behave. My six-year-old, who has been trained by the Wii, waves other remote controls about in a vain attempt to use gestures.
• My nine-year-old, more worldliwise, mocks him for it.

We arrive in the world Internet-enabled and AR-ready, it’s just that present-day technology beats it out of us. I work for the day when this is no longer the case.

Last words to Douglas Adams, as true today as in 1999:

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

Update 3/9/09: Debate about Twitter on the Today programme, and Kevin Anderson takes up the theme.

At the time I tried to keep my personal pontification to a minimum. It’s hard for men to address this topic without sounding patronising. Anyway, on the day itself many others were making the case for higher visibility of women in technology far more eloquently than I ever can.

But this post from Paul Walsh, trailing a Techcrunch Europe panel on the subject of women and start-ups, prompted me to speak up more directly. In Paul’s opinion:

… the books of males vs females doesn’t need to be balanced in favour of more females. Why? Well, because there are plenty of females in tech and those that aren’t, don’t want to be. Ok, so there might be a small percent who would like to be in tech, but don’t make it. But can’t the same be said for any industry?

Are we trying to balance the books to encourage more males to become nurses?

To which I reply the following (originally posted as a comment on Paul’s blog):

Of course there are some very talented and successful women in our industry. That’s not in doubt. It’s not so much that there are too few women in the tech sectors as that there are too many men! Look around you at most tech conferences and you’ll see mainly male audiences listening mainly to other men.

This is not just bad because women are missing out on opportunities (though I believe some are) but also because, in the words of David Ogilvy, “diversity is the mother of invention.” We are all missing out on the creativity and customer-centricity that a more diverse culture would engender. Think, for example, of how long the games industry remained stuck on the demands of a small power user niche while the needs of the much bigger casual user segments went unmet. What other business opportunities might be there for the taking right now?

The nursing analogy is an interesting one. Why not doctors, one might ask, and how much by nature, how much by nurture? (And yes, I do think men should be encouraged to consider nursing as a career!) Either way, if, as I think [Paul is] suggesting, there are deeply engrained differences between men and women then there’s a clear imperative for us to capitalise on those differences.

That means taking active steps such as ensuring that girls can see strong female role models in our industry, as it seems they might in medicine. It means making work more compatible with family life (from which men also stand to benefit). It means changing our business culture so women’s voices can be heard, and their contributions recognised and rewarded equally with those of men.

The conversation will be more profitable as a result.

… the departure board has 404ed…

… the giant TV screen is somebody’s Windows desktop…

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

Since posting my three broken technology pictures, I’ve been suffering the blogger’s equivalent of what the French call “l’esprit de l’escalier,” and for which German has the deeply satisfying word “Treppenwitz”.

If I’d paused just a little longer before hitting the publish button, I’d have added a discussion of the optimistic message contained in every one of those man-behind-the-curtain snapshots.

I’d have waxed lyrical on how in every case the authorities’ intentions to constrain processing power to a single task – the kiosk, the departure board, the TV screen – were subverted by its very malfunctioning, revealing the endless possibilities implicit in this most malleable and interconnected technology.

If only I’d waited a while, I’d have told the story of how my seven-year-old son, on seeing an unattended till terminal in Ikea, grabs the mouse and tries to log on to Adventure Quest.

I’d have invoked the situationist May 68 slogan “sous les pavés, la plage” – “beneath the paving stones, the beach” – which speaks of the unconstrained liberty that lurks just below the locked-down surface of our civilisation.

And I’d have ended in an overblown flourish and a bold font: beneath the pixels, the silicon!

Probably just as well I didn’t.

… the departure board has 404ed…

… the giant TV screen is somebody’s Windows desktop…

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!