Editor’s note: With cold weather in the U.S. affecting even Florida, where frozen iguanas are dropping from trees and strawberry crops are in peril, this is a moment to evaluate the sustainability of current energy needs. Below, Bruce Sullivan talks about building new houses with less energy impact; for more on this subject, watch Dan Nocera present an idea for personalized energy at PopTech 2009, and find out about proposed “cash-for-caulkers” incentives for home weatherization the White House is considering.

In a typical year, millions of houses are built. Each house will last 50 to 100 years. Today each new house encumbers society with a debt of energy required to operate it over its life. The vast majority of houses built today are old-fashioned energy hogs, and each one is a missed opportunity.

Energy visionaries have set their sights on homes that create more than they consume. In ten to twenty years, every new building could be a “zero-energy building,” Or “net zero.” The technology exists today, all we lack is the proper motivation.

Zero Energy Habitat for Humanity home in Wheatridge, CO, a collaboration between Habitat for Humanity and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

A zero-energy building is one that creates more energy than it consumes over the course of a year. In order to achieve this feat, a zero-energy building will be small, efficient and grid-connected. Here are some key attributes:

· Smart design is the key. Homes must be designed for their climates and sited to take maximum advantage of nature’s gifts of sun, wind, water and light. Designs must make the highest and best use of material.

· Small homes use less energy. All modern needs (and many of our desires) can be accommodated in 400 to 500 square feet per person.

· Highly efficient structures that incorporate super-insulation and air-tight shells will not need central heating systems. Insulation uses no energy and never wears out .

· Renewable energy generation, such as photovoltaic (solar electric) panels or wind generators , will be essential. These systems must be connected to the utility grid. They will generate more energy than the building needs on summer days, but will require some energy from external sources at night and during winter.

The challenge is no longer technical. The equipment and know-how exist today. What we need is a commitment to this destination and a clear roadmap showing how to get there.

One big obstacle for designers and builders is that they don’t have a good way to estimate the efficiency of their projects during design. A number of proposals are now under review to establish a building efficiency metric and labeling system. One of these is the Energy Performance Score, which is simply an estimate of how much energy a building would use each year. A typical new home may have an EPS around 120. An “efficient” home might be 50, while a zero-energy home would be, well… 0. You can see that we have a long way to go from our current practice to reach zero energy.

Since on-site renewable energy generation may not be possible for all building sites, ultimately some homes would have to generate excess energy. And despite our yearning for decentralization, we will always need a utility grid with central power generation.

Enterprising young designers from around the world put net zero principles into practice every year for the Solar Decathlon, a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Twenty teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

Zero-energy doesn’t have to be expensive. Many Habitat for Humanity chapters around the U.S. build very efficient homes. In Bend, Oregon, where I work, the local Habitat projects use small size, high efficiency and solar energy to achieve EPS ratings as low as 23. With annual energy bills of only a few hundred dollars, this is truly affordable housing. From there, it’s just a small step to true zero energy.

As widely discussed by privacy advocates and blogs, Facebook recently changed some of its privacy settings. Users are no longer able to limit the viewing of their profile photos, home towns, and friends lists to only approved friends. Those are all public now by default. Moreover, Facebook’s new default settings “recommend” that dynamic content such as status messages and photos be made public.

While the blogosphere still closely scrutinizes these changes and is aghast at Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘privacy is over’ claims made at the Crunchies awards (he didn’t actually say it verbatim but his statements more or less implied it), I have to admit I was surprised that all this stirred such an uproar.

Facebook is only reacting to a larger social trend as it strives to become an asymmetrical and therefore a more growth-enabled network (or communications platform) – like Twitter. Privacy, at least a more traditional notion thereof, is the collateral damage of this strategic agenda.

With the value of reciprocity (narrowcasting) succumbing to the prospect of exponentiality (broadcasting), privacy is no longer commercially exploitable. “No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of ‘free,’” writes social networking researcher danah boyd in a blog post in which she otherwise harshly criticizes Facebook’s move. The age of privacy as we know it might be over indeed. Is it worth fighting for?

Privacy (from the Latin ‘privatus,’ according to Wikipedia: “separated from the rest, deprived of something, especially office, participation in the government”), the “right to be let alone,” is considered a human right in most parts of the world, in spite of all cultural relativism. Historically speaking, privacy has undergone a remarkable evolution. Aristotle distinguished between the public sphere of politics and political activity, the polis, and the private or domestic sphere of the family, the oaks. If a citizen of Athens was a private man, then it meant he was stripped of any political office and therefore considered “inferior.” Later, in the enlightened civil societies of Europe, however, privacy became a hallmark of the bourgeoisie, a hard-earned privilege that marked the delineation between upper and working classes. The latter had work – if they were fortunate – the former “had a life,” because they could afford it. This life tended to be private, by definition.

In the emerging information economies of the 20th century, various theories described privacy as control over information about oneself (Parent, 1983), while others defended it as a broader concept crucial for human dignity (Bloustein, 1964), or emphasized the social aspect of it with regards to enabling intimacy (Gerstein, 1978; Inness, 1992).

Throughout their historical mutations, the public and private spheres needed one another like yin and yang. Having a life was a private act, but only if it was publicly earned and respected. This dialectic relationship will always remain. There is no privacy without publicy and vice versa. And yet, while privacy may never go away as a philosophical counterweight to publicy, today it is publicy that counts as the new privilege of the digital upper class. Privacy has been marginalized to the fringes of a society whose modus operandi is based on the very public mechanisms of social sharing. In the digital era, a private life does not exist. Google ergo sum.

The search engine’s recent public stance against the Chinese government, threatening to shut down all its China operations after Gmail accounts of Chinese activists had been hacked, highlights this new power structure and the evolving value of privacy in our ever-connected world. When the privacy of Google’s users was violated, the company decided to respond with a public statement, mounting public pressure to press on an essentially private matter. Good for a company that does not want be evil, many people applauded, but it bore a certain irony that Google acted as de facto digital state with its own foreign policy. Isn’t Google, after all, built on the very principle of making private data public? Isn’t it because of Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” that we have come to terms with the fact that our online lives and afterlives will never be private again and will be perpetually archived in the very public cloud?

In the case of Google vs. China, what was bemoaned as the loss of privacy was in fact the lack of publicy. Privacy is the most precious asset in more or less closed societies in which trust is a scarce resource and true publics don’t exist. But as we live our lives in the openness of the web, isn’t it publicy that we need to enable and protect? An ideal publicy that is so transparent and democratic that it doesn’t need privacy as refuge?

It’s complicated. Stowe Boyd has declared this to be the “Decade of Publicy,” in which he expects “the superimposition of publicy on top of, and partly obscuring, privacy:”

Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent. (…) It’s as if we are gaining the ability to see into the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the social spectrum when we are online, and in some contexts we are dropping out yellows or reds. To those tied to the visible color spectrum we are habituated to, this new sort of vision will be ‘irreal.’ But ultraviolet has always existed: we just couldn’t see it before. (…) This will be a fracturing of the premises of privacy, and a slow rejection of the metaphors of shared space. The principles of publicy are derived from the intersection of infinite publics and our shared experience of time online, through media like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The innate capability we have to shift in a heartbeat from a given public, and our corresponding persona, to another, is now being accelerated by streaming social tools. This will be the decade when publicy displaces privacy, online and off.

As we struggle to maintain the traditional, monolithic privacy-publicy dichotomy, perhaps we must start using a different terminology altogether and embrace a new concept: sociality. In a hyper-individualized society, sociality is becoming the main object of desire for individuals. Or as Markus Albers puts it in his forthcoming book about what he coins the Meconomy:

The Meconomy does not entail a purely egoistic philosophy. On the contrary, it promotes a new culture of empathy and social engagement. As we increasingly decide for ourselves how, where, and with whom we work, the search for meaning gains more importance. The trend to combine economical with social engagement grows stronger. We want to do good, be happy, and make money. In the old patriarchal, hierarchical, and inflexible working world, these aims were often mutually exclusive. In the Meconomy, their combination is almost a precondition for success.”

The semantic coincidence is telling. “Me” desires “Meaning.” As much as publicy needs privacy and vice versa, the “Meconomy” needs the “Meaning Economy” – as its co-evolutionary, symbiotic partner. With meaning emerging as the core currency of all market interactions (because it is ultimately what consumers buy; and friends, fans, and followers buy into), people, organizations, and brands that provide meaning will be the power players of the new Me(aning) Economy – brands like Apple, conferences like TED, contests like the Olympic Games, sports clubs like FC Barcelona, media organizations like NPR, non-profits like UNICEF, and, yes, politicians like Obama.

Sociality may succeed privacy because it is a critical precondition for meaning. To be meaningful, meaning needs to be shared, and sharing can only occur in open social settings. Open social settings, however, by definition, compromise privacy, in all its four textbook modes (solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve). Meaning means giving things a name, making sense of “Black Swans,” unexpected events. In other words: Only an event that becomes a story (which still is the most powerful social media of all times, a true evergreen on the social web!) is meaningful.

Thus, it makes sense to replace the strict privacy-publicy opposition with a multi-layered continuum along progressive levels of sociality. Sociality may turn out to be a much better variable for describing and regulating our digital lives. The question then no longer is how private we can be, but how social we want to be. Instead of privacy settings, we should speak of sociality settings: The maximum number of friends we want to have; and through which channels we want to ‘socialize’ our contents etc. Privacy understood as sociality (as an enabling and not a defensive right) grants us the ability to control who knows what about us and who has access to us, and thereby allows us to vary our social interactions with different people so that we can control our various social relationships at different levels of intimacy.

This new sociality is most visibly manifest in online social networks. It is worth noting that these not only mirror the mechanisms of offline social interactions but actually provide users with more control over their privacy (or sociality) than they would ever have in the physical world. On Facebook and other networks, you can pick and choose the people you want to meet and share ‘presence’ with; in a restaurant, bar, and other public spaces, you can’t. Exclusivity in the real world needs to be earned, whereas online it is a given.

Bill Thompson pledges we should embrace the new liberties that come with this new radical transparency:

The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by ‘personality,’ how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted – in all senses – disclosure. I’ll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human.

All this openly shared user data represents not only an enourmous amount of social capital but also a huge collective leap of faith. Whether the big digital platforms and ecosystems will honor this trust to maintain civic publics or if they will choose to exploit it for (private) economic reasons, at any price, will be one of the defining moments of this young decade and the most impactful decision it will have to make. Control (as the catalyst of privacy) is good, but trust (as the catalyst of sociality) is better. We can afford to lose our privacy, but we will not survive the loss of sociality.

[image: Geekologie]

As we’re nearing the end of a year and the end of a decade, it’s time to look back and ahead.

Photo: Gardard Eide Einarssons’s installation on the Louisiana Museum photographed by Finn Broendum.

With at least three formative events in this young 21st century (9/11, the Tsunami, and the Great Recession) providing some sort of apocalyptic arch and instilling a profound sense of anxiety, it is no wonder that former visionaries are gathering at conferences asking “Where did the future go?” But, at the end of the day, the end of all days didn’t occur, and as the New York Magazine points out in its comprehensive review of the “Aughts”: “The Times is still published every day. There are more bicyclists on the streets than sanity would dictate.” Plus, we got Barack Obama, Mad Men, the iPhone, Twitter, and Foursquare…. and and and….

In the last days of a restless decade, we can lean back and enjoy again, with cautious relief, a modicum of optimism. When even the newsletter of management consultancy Arthur D. Little – not necessarily known for being conducive to enthusiasm – arrives in your inbox with the bold subject line “The Future of the Future,” it indeed seems to indicate that, yes, the future has a future again.

Therefore it feels appropriate to end this year, this decade, with a super-list on the future curated by super-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (and first presented in his lecture at the “Where do we go from here?” symposium at the Louisiana Museum during the UN climate conference in Copenhagen):

"The future will be….

(List compiled by Hans Ulrich Obrist; via @Andrian Kreye/sueddeutsche.de)

The future will be chrome. Rirkrit Tiravanija

The future will be curved. Olafur Eliasson

The future will be in the name of the future. Anri Sala

The future will be so subjective. Tino Sehgal

The future will be bouclette. Douglas Gordon

The future will be curious. Nico Dockx

The future will be obsolete. Tacita Dean

The future will be asymmetric. Pedro Reyes

The future will be a slap in the face. Cao Fei

The future will be delayed. Loris Greaud

The future does not exist but in snapshots. Philippe Parreno

The future will be tropical. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Future? …you must be mistaken Trisha Donnelly

The future will be overgrown and decayed. Simryn Gill

The future will be tense. John Baldessari

A future fuelled by human waste. Matthew Barney

The future is going nowhere without us. Paul Chan

The future is now – the future is it. Doug Aitken

The future is one night, just look up. Tomas Saraceno

The future will be a remake… Didier Fiuza Faustino

The future is what we construct from what we remember of the past – the present is the time of instantaneous revelation. Lawrence Weiner

The future is this place at a different time. Bruce Sterling

The future will be widely reproduced and distributed. Cory Doctorow

The future will be whatever we make it. Jacque Fresco

The future will involve splendour and poverty. Arto Lindsay

The future is uncertain because it will be what we make it. Immanuel Wallerstein

The future is waiting – the future will be self-organized. Raqs Media Collective

Dum Spero/ While I breathe, I hope. Nancy Spero

This is not the future. Jordan Wolfson

The future is a dog/ l’avenir c’est la femme. Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron

On its way; it was here yesterday. Hreinn Friðfinnsson

The future will be an armchair strategist, the future will be like no snow on the broken bridge. Yang Fudong

The future always flies under the radar. Martha Rosler

Suture that future. Peter Doig

‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow’ (Shakespeare). Richard Hamilton

The future is overrated. Cerith Wyn Evans

futuro = $B!g(B Hector Zamorra The future is a large pharmacy with a memory deficit. David Askevold

The future will be bamboo. Tay Kheng Soon

The future will be ousss. Koo Jeong-A

The future will be…grains, particles & bits. The future will be…ripples, waves & flow. The future will be…mix, swarms, multitudes. The future will be…the future we deserve but with some surprises, if only some of us take notice. Vito Acconci

In the future…the earth as a weapon… Allora & Calzadilla

The future is our excuse. Joseph Grigely and Amy Vogel

The future will be repeated. Marlene Dumas

Ok, ok I’ll tell you about the future; but I am very busy right now; give me a couple of days more to finish some things and I’ll get back to you. Jimmie Durham

Future is instant. Yung Ho Chang

‘The future is not.’ Zaha Hadid

The future is private. Anton Vidokle

The future will be layered and inconsistent. Liam Gillick

The future is a piano wire in a pussy powering something important. Matthew Ronay

In the future perhaps there will be no past. Daniel Birnbaum

The future was. Julieta Aranda

The future is menace. Carolee Schneemann

The future is a forget-me-not. Molly Nesbit

The future is an knowing exchange of glances. Sarah Morris

The future: Scratching on things I could disavow. Walid Raad

The future is our own wishful thinking. Liu Ding

Le futur est un étoilement. Edouard Glissant

The future is now. Maurizio Cattelan

The future has a silver lining. Thomas Demand

The future is now and here. Yona Friedman

is a fax best to use as facsimile G&G FAX is: THE FUTURE? SEE YOU THERE! AS ARTISTS WE WANT TO HELP TO FORM OUR TOMORROWS. WE HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED IN THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. ITS GOING TO BE MARVELLOUS. LONG LIVE THE FUTURE WITH LOTS OF LOVE ALWAYS AND ALWAYS. Gilbert & George

The future is without you. Damien Hirst

The future is a season. Pierre Huyghe

The future is a poster. M/M

We have repeated the future out of existence. Tom McCarthy

The future has two large beautiful eyes. Jonas Mekas

less, few tours in my future. Stefano Boeri

Future is what it is. Huang Yong Ping

The future is the very few years we have remaining before all time becomes one time. Grant Morrison

FUTURE MUST BE HERE TODAY. Jan Kaplicky

Future is more freedom. Jia Zhangke

My art is very free, I don’t know what to do in the future. But I am positive. Xu Zhen

The future is inside. Shumon Basar, Markus Miessen, Åbäke

NO FUTURE – PUNK IS NOT DEATH ! Thomas Hirschhorn

The future will be grim if we don’t do something about it. Morgan Fisher

The future is reflexive and coming together. Olafur Eliasson

The future is listening. Shilpa Gupta

The future lies in the unknown. Ann Lislegaard

Nothing stinks, only thinking made it so. Sissel Tolaas

What the future is, you only know next morning. Die Zukunft kann man nur ueber Nacht definieren. Peter Sloterdijk

The future is a disease. Peter Weibel

Upon the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city of Berlin has launched a remarkable “living” online memorial: the Berlin Twitter Wall.

Using the hashtag #fotw, people can share their thoughts on the Fall of the Berlin Wall and tell the world “which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place.” The Web site scrolls messages along a backdrop of the East Side Gallery, a famous stretch of the wall still standing and painted with murals. By clicking "stop" and "play", older tweets are shown. A click on the cameras up on the wall displays a selection of the domino-artwork that fell in a symbolic act on November 9th 2009 at the "Fest der Freiheit" (festival of freedom) at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

I love how the Berlin Twitter Wall intersects history and real-time action, memory and instant gratification, gravitas with graffiti, concrete architecture and virtual realm – and make all of that open and social.