Cybersalon Top 15 – watched/read events from 2021

Covid lockdown and Brexit restrictions provided us with strong impetus to seek international collaborations, stay connected with our partners in Europe, Russia, USA (Hawaii, NY) and many other global locations to create new digital rights campaigns. We used the lockdown to make music together online, write new sci-fi stories about Near Futures and continue our Techno-Cultures & Internet Histories interviews. Here a quick summary of the top events:

JANUARY

• Arts Birthday – AlgoRave global Jan Jam

After a really bad 2020 health-wise (Richard got a horrid Covid and wrestled with the virus for most of the year), we decided that virtual events were the way to go in 2021.

To celebrate Richard’s return to health in January we threw Zoom “Arts Birthday” party, with a world-wide celebrations of DJs, techno and hip hop music organised by Stefan Lutschinger (Middlesex University).  Contributing techno musicians were Hypnaton (Sasha Fedushkin from Music Wave school from Moscow), DJ Dilly Rowe from Parsons School, New York, a Polish trumpet hip-hop band Global Rebel, Longstuff (John Horsley, London), Simon Sarginson (Cybersalon), Austrian Sound Artist collective and Alex McLean from AlgoRave to create original pieces for the event. Fabulous recording and we are lined up to represent UK again in 2022 on this global live music event.

Here the music and interviews and a fabulous review by Irina Shtreis 

• Hack your body for health and money – health was clearly going to be high on the agenda in 2021 and we collaborated with leading body hackers to examine how injected sensors can help to detect early body changes as well as act as your wallet confirming your identity.  You can read about our “body-as-a-wallet” experiences here – shout out to Ghiseleine Boddington (Body-Data-Space) who originally put us on a body hacking journey!

Are we ready for in-hand injections of sensors?

MARCH

• Death of Business –can we use Open Data  to stop local pub closures?

In March the concern was Job-maggedon as Brexit/Covid were decimating the industry.

We wanted to scrutinise the actual Business Deaths numbers across UK on an Open Data Hackathon organised by James Moulding and Hanna O’Rourke with support from Ed Saperia (Newspeak House), with open data community and supported by ONS gurus (thank you!)

We found out that it was the pubs that suffered most, with business deaths in this much loved category concentrating around South East but affecting all areas of UK. How to get good data out of ONS and other Open Data sources read here

Key data sources and how we worked with ONS (useful for those that need to get a quick and dirty extracts) blog here

• Internet and Music – a pioneer’s view

After 30 years Jon Bains, an Internet pioneer, reveals rare materials from just pre-Net music zines of early 90ties and how those music zines impacted designs/values of the first wave of websites made by early Web Agencies like “Obsolete” or “Cyberia Web”. To get the feel for those early days of the Internet click here – Eva’s Interview with Jon and their chat about Cyberia Café times in mid 90’s

After the interview, Jon was inspired to put the zines into a new, beautiful book about the stories and histories of the zines which you can order here

APRIL

• Future of Health

As Covid continued it’s attack, we investigated new ways of health forecasting , exploring what creative sci-fi writers and health experts can jointly contribute  to solving current health crisis. We kicked off a year -long research program “Horizon Scanning by Cybersalon” collaborating with sci-fi short stories writers. Prof Lucy Hooberman (Warwick University) , dr Christine Aicardi (King’s College) acted as experts, briefing invited writers on the key emerging questions.

The tales are read by the authors here (Britta Schulte, Stephen Oram, Jule Owen and Ben Greenaway) – video from the discussions

Highlights and key takeaways including growing health privacy concerns here

Stories can be read here

• How to save our High Streets?

As ongoing Covid and deepening Brexit tax challenges were hitting the High Streets hard, with closures and losses of hundreds of thousands of retail jobs, in June we invited sci-fi writers and retail experts to brainstorm on how can we re-use the public space and create new jobs. 

The stories that followed uncover the anxiety about rapid shift to ecommerce helping retailers to have a free run on our personal data, as cash is fading away replacing by digital money and regulations are far behind the market. High Street experts Prof Rachel Armstrong (Newcastle University), Paul Wilson (Catapult UK), Pryia Prakash (Design for Social Change) worked with four sci-fi writers: Jane Norris, Stephen Oram, Goerge Jacobs and Vaughan Stanger. You can hear the readings of the stories and a discussion how the cities future will unfold here

The writers explored also the question of how can we learn from our pre-consumer past and turn consumerisms into buying better and wiser?

• The problem with too much stuff v Clubbing Naked in the Metaverse

How can we get people who buy fashion and brands that produce it work together, for example to extend life of garments. Should we move to fully digital fashion to stop polluting the Earth with fast fashion? Tech London Advocates (Remote Work group) organised a panel with leading eco-brand IdaYourBrand.com and fashion sustainability expert Nicola Millison – top tips here and key takeaways here – thanks to Wael Elazab for write up and @TLA_RW for organising

• Top Co-Working places in London

As Covid relented and we made a return to offices, over the summer our team was busy reviewing the new crop of work venues, some of them are a good value for money. As always, caveat emptor as Wi-Fi is in some of them is not what you would expect in 2021 https://cybersalon.org/the-best-co-working-spaces-in-london-autum-2021/

This review was a follow-up on our first piece from the early Co-Working days back in 2015. What has changed? The coffee has got better, hipsters get almond milk as standard in most co-working spaces but wifi /Internet connection still sucks

SEPTEMBER

• The Last of Us – what is the Future of Communities

Since we migrated to Hybrid Work, many people noted they are increasingly lonely and feeling ‘disaggregated’. What will be the future of communities now your work colleagues are often 2 times zones away? 

“Future of Communities” was the third part of Horizon Scanning program in September 2021. Prof Rachel Armstrong, Yen Ooi (SciFi writer) and Ed Saperia (Dean of Newspeak House) led the discussions on the impact of hybrid/remote work on our social life. Our sci-fi writers Wendy Grossman, Jesse Rowell, Liam Hogan and Stephen Oram noted that hyper invasive local surveillance, using deep fakes to maintain control over neighbourhood (The Valens Program)  and being forced to chose your tribe are only some of the negative aspect of future being lived mostly online.  Get ready for the future and listen to Stories and key takeaways here  and here.

• Future of Money

Will you pay your bills in Eths or Hackney dollar in Near Future? Cybersalon has form in financial forecast, having invited Jon Matonis to our fin-tech events all the way back in 2013. As Jon predicted then, by  November 2021 inflation pushed to record levels and fuelled increase in price of bitcoins. NFTs are mainstreaming and people are collecting graphics of Bored Apes. 

But access to capital is harder than ever, only ever goes to the ones that belong. In Episode 4 of Horizon Scanning, our writers Eva Pascoe, Stephen Oram, Sophie Spearham and Paul Currion explored how crypto helps democratising access to funding, what would be the ethics of Accountants when financial surveillance will monitor 100% of your transactions, will we have multiple types of money to go with different communities and geolocations, and are financial reparations  for past sins a class issue? 

Listen to the stories and expert discussion with David Birch (author of Beyond Babylon Beyond Bitcoin), Jana Hlistova (The Purse Podcast) and Caron Lyon (NFT for actors).

Video here – stories “The Summoned” by E Pascoe at 14.38min, “The Accountant” by Sophie Sparham at 22.54min, “The Money Talk” by Paul Currion at 34.20 min  and “Failing Fathers” by S Oram at 41.23 min.

Key takeaways – by not democratising access to capital, we are missing on exciting innovation, as good ideas come from all walks of life. We say thanks but no thanks to AI-led financial surveillance

• Internet History

“Virtual Futures” conferences (Warwick University) – the myth, the history, the facts. From humble beginnings of Internet counterculture, this event was one of the key ignition points for online music, cyberfeminism and our everlasting love for cyborgs. 

Over 25 years later, Eva Pascoe and one of original VF collaborators Ben Greenaway dive in to explore the old and new tensions between digital and analogue worlds, with law and concepts of acceptable behaviour diverging today even more than in 1995. Also for the music nerds, good stories how Real Audio made it to UK shores, Pirate Radio in London and how musicians build the foundations of today’s internet infrastructure. 

OCTOBER

• Vort3x has landed!

Our new tech Events Listing/digital rights campaigns/cybersecurity research Monthly Review has arrived, expertly edited by Wendy Grossman– we always discover events too late, miss deadlines for great jobs or digital art residencies appliations, so to help all in keeping on top of the opportunities, we launched a monthly review of the key events, research pieces and jobs that we think you need to know about. 

Vortex launched in mid October. Your feedback was that you liked the updates on Events, particularly on which key conferences went online and which are still face-to-face. Despite all the metaverse hype, we miss real reunions and physical tech events.  Send updates on your events/jobs/research posts and we will include in the mid January edition

• How to fight the giant social media platforms? 

Tips for contesting online giants, guilty of taking your data, owning your photos and identity.

It has been 6 years since Cybersalon Digital Bill of Right campaign launched in Houses of Parliament – just before Cambridge Analytica scandal. Dr Richard Barbook and Eva Pascoe discuss digital campaigning, share lessons learned and list the next campaigns for 2022.  If Cybersalon’s Digi Bill made it into law in 2015, CA would have never got their dirty paws on our FB data. An opportunity missed. The key question for 2022 is :   are social media platforms  the right companies/moral authority to censor us? Should Twitter have the right to ban Trump? 

• We read a lot this year, but the Top Book of 2021 that every digital campaigner is definitely : “Hashtag Activism” – see insightful review by Wendy Grossman

DECEMBER

•  How can Cybernetics 2.0 help with Covid and Climate Change fight?

Cybersalon Xmas Lecture 2021 with Raul Espejo (Cybersalon pioneer, Chile 1972, now author of Cybernetic Democracy) , Newspeak House, Dec 8th  

We were delighted and excited to welcome Raul, pioneer of Cybersalon in Newspeak. From control/top down to democratic/bottom up managing techniques, his new Cybernetics 2.0 offer a glimpse of a “viable” fluid system where many voices and feedback is listened to, absorbed and embedded in decision making to recognise everyone’s input. 

Raul talked about broadcast era, when politicians were speaking on TV but not getting any feedback in pre-Internet era. Now we speak on Twitter with millions of messages, on FB/Reddit/Discords but politicians have no way of listening , no way of interpreting what we are saying to them. We have arrived at a new Asymmetric Communications but from an opposite direction.  Also in the lecture, is the difference between Socialism and Capitalism just in quality of logistics? Do we still need Nation States? A real winter treat for all fans of cybernetics!

Here is to new campaigns for our online privacy in 2022 – the year when FB will grow even more powerful luring everyone into

 Metaverse, sucking in even more of your personal data. We will be here keeping a watch on dataholic tech giants, and keeping the fight for Digital Rights and Digital Skills for us all.

Happy New year to you all, big thank you to all our members, collaborators, writers, DJs, game makers, academic partners from Europe, Asia, Africa, Canada and USA. You know who you are, we are thankful for your support, creativity and resourcefulness and looking forward to many new collaborations. 

Thanks to our supportive sponsors, Patchworks Cloud Integrator, Hydro66.com (hydro-powered data centre), TheRetailPractice.com, Digital Liberties Coop, Newspeak House, Nesta, Middlesex University and Westminster University. Follow us on Twitter @cybrsalon and for resources/contact info go to Cybersalon.org