BA Dissertation: Path to Forest London

This is my Bookchin influenced take on a sociable, resilient ‘forest city’. I’m aware that it’s not a whole solution at the moment. It’s a second attempt to think about a human scale integration of technology and ecology for city landscapes. The ‘best’ bits (if there are any!) are the final section and bibliography. Beware analytic philosophers, it’s not (heavily) in that tradition.

This first attempt was here https://hughbarnard.org/index.php/2018/06/19/noham-a-thought-experiment/

dissertation-final.pdf

Noham: A thought experiment

I’ll have to write a long essay (it’s somewhat pretentious to call it a dissertation) as part of my final year at Birkbeck. If the powers that be agree, I’m going to base it on this essay that I wrote in 2016, some of it has already ‘come true’, like the (in)famous William Gibson quote.

When I’ve finished it’ll probably be less like this and more like a Socratic dialogue. Comments welcome, you (probably) know where to find me, not on FB, anyway.

This is an update with a list of references at the end of the document and these are now clickable links.

noham-a-thought-experiment

Science Fiction Booklist

Just noticed that the links are to Amazon (ugh). I’ll correct this in a little while but meanwhile buy from Hive or Bookshop.org etc. I seem to have deleted my first version of this so:

Lem:
The Futurological Congress
Stanislaw Lem, a hidden gem

Sladek:
Tik-Tok
Tik-Tok a psychopathic robot

Keep the Giraffe Burning
I love the story with the 300 word Ladybird vocabulary

The Complete Roderick
probably related to Voltaire’s Candide, funny and finally sad

Bester:
The Demolished Man
First cyberpunk novel, in my opinion

The Stars My Destination
very famous but I like this less

Philip K Dick:
A hero for my generation 20 years before Blade Runner:
The Ganymede Takeover
wow, this is collectable now, not many people know about it. It would make a great film too. With him is Ray Nelson
who wrote the story that became: They Live

Roger Zelazny:
Lord of Light probably one of my all-time favourites

Walter M Miller:
A Canticle for Leibowitz
again this is forgotten now

Kurt Vonnegut:
Player Piano this book is becoming more and more relevant, I love this as well:
Cat’s Cradle

Frederick Pohl:
The Space Merchants
another set of accurate predictions
Gladiator at Law
more stuff that’s true now

Ursula LeGuin
The Left Hand of Darkness another all time favourite

Short Talk on Boycott

Here’s a short talk I gave to the Birkbeck Philosophy Society last year. I’m very happy to see the NRA thing going so well and believe that boycott is one of our remaining tools, but, possibly a very potent one. Anyway, enough already, share and enjoy! Here’s the pdf:  boycott

Platform Cooperatives and Anarchism

This is the second draft of a talk I gave on 25th November 2017 to the Anarchist Research Group in London. Currently, I’m thinking about it as a ‘living document’, so it will probably get updated in a month or two as a response to criticisms and areas of discussion that have opened up.

Thanks to everyone that has contributed, so far. I think you all know who you are.  See below for the download link to the pdf.

platform-cooperatism-and-anarchism

Version 0.9.0 Cclite now available

Note that, as of January 2020, I’m working on Cclite2 (bits and pieces on sourceforge but unusable at present) which is based on the Mojolicious framework, Postgres and oriented more towards phones (SMS and SMS embedded in a simple ‘app’, ugh). I’ve frozen anything on github because Microsoft owns it. Please freeze or leave as well.

New version of Cclite 0.9.0. ready as of 1st May 2012, a good day for it..It’s all on sourceforge. and the development Ubuntu style tree is on github
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