2011 was the end of a 5 year contract of an 560 m2 office space producing a revenue of almost 100.000 euro per year and costing me around 15.000 to 30.000 a year. After paying all my dues, that was a book I happily closed.

From one long term Freelancing contract from May 2010 until June 2011 at Reed Elsevier, I rolled into another for Ohra in September 2011. This crossed out my sabbatical / several plans I had for that second half of 2011, including:

1. HotForestGreen – Finishing the framework for Real Time Systems based on earlier developments for the Roomware Socket Server
2. Writing a book/dissertation on Design Patterns – (Almost, that is) Using the experience and acknowledging my need to really get into a deep understanding of Design Patterns, starting with the 23 as documented by the Gang of Four
3. Giving some workshops on Design Patterns – Once the dissertation would be done: to test the quality of my work and see if I had succeeded on getting things right, clear and simple.
4. Android, ARM powered boards and Interactive spaces – Using Android machines, low cost mini-computers running an ARM-CPU and several solutions like the IOIO board, Pololu Wixels. Arduino, XBee and simple electronics to build Interactive Spaces
5. Research related to Interactive Screens – Including resistive Touch, Capacitive Touch and Surface Acoustic Wave. How usable are they in real life? Can you build touch-solutions which are low-cost, rugged and good enough quality to build into – for instance – tables at a cafe?

But with the crisis still overshadowing reality, I decided to say “yes” to that other gig: Ohra.

So: in August I started looking for options to have a temporal residence in the city of Arnhem, where the main office is and in the evening hours I continued and started prototyping on the hardware that is needed and used for Touch screens.

One of them being a “23 inch Android Touch screen” I hacked together in an evening based on a proof of concept made by someone else. While that Proof of Concept ran on a x86 processor, I decided to see if I could hack an existing Resistive Touch tablet to run on a big screen. The post made Hackaday and received over 3000 page views in the first days after that.

As my first contract with Ohra was until half of December, we planned a holiday for 3 weeks at the Canary Islands from half of December until the first week in Januari. And I planned to write my book / dissertation on Design Patterns in that period, or finish the HotForestGreen framework for first release.

In October I was approached for an interview on HotForestGreen by Postscapes. See this post-that-was-the-interview here. It also appeared on Postscapes. In November I was approached by an agent for a publishing house comparable to O’Reilly (but not O’Reilly, to be clear), to maybe write a book on Android and the Android ADK / Android Open Accessory Development kit.

In December and the first week of Janauri I wrote around 250 pages on Design Patters, Software Development and Refactoring: around 80% of the “dissertation” as I intended it to be.

2012, three pivotal personal projects

1.  The Design Patterns and Refactoring eBook – If there is one place to plant my professional flag as a coder, it is this book. Apart from the self-study, the intent of this book is to offer a simple, practical and clear explanation of Design Patterns. If I succeed, the book will not only be valuable for me, but also for others in my field.
2. HotForestGreen – HotForestGreen (see here) is the “internet of things” framework intended to make development of Real Time Systems really stupid simple.
3. Android, ARM-devices, Touch screens: Interactive Spaces – All related and all related to the HotForestGreen framework. Writing code is nice, but being on the front of a new development that is going to be as big as the rise of Internet is even nicer. I intend – and have intended for the past 3 years – to be one of the new and relevant voices on this new thing: to break it open. To allow others to thrive and build businesses around it. To offer the tools and the experience. To give power to the people.

2012, five things to do (professionally)

Unfortunately the unstable financial period we called “crisis” in 2008, is expected to continue until 2013. Meaning that it will be still hard to get new gigs and that the payment per hour will be about 70% of the price levels in 2007 / 2008.

1. Earning more money – The main goal is to continue repair the damages of the period 2006-2011. The goal is 8 months of full-time contracts and gigs. And so a lot of nice projects will have to wait even more for completion.
2. Teaching Design Patterns and Refactoring – The goal with the book and the underlying experience is to give some courses. One place to do that is at one or more places where you enroll for one week and get a full-time crash-course into one subject. Design Patterns and Refactoring in my case.
3. Finishing HotForestGreen – To me and what I intend to do in the future, HotForestGreen – my framework for Real Time Systems, including Interactive Spaces – is one of the most important parts going at this moment.
4. Finding the right people to build the groundwork for the Interactive Spaces movement – Which includes cool people, nice people, cool and nice people, inspiration, brainstorms, inspiring brainwaves with cool and nice people, cool projects, working together, building commercial applications and commercial solutions, earning money, writing blog posts, prototyping, doing more prototyping, writing a lot more blog posts (and/or chapters for a book) earning more money and spreading the knowledge, tools and experience to the people at large
5. Establishing a new basis for “home” - My life is becoming that of a traveling artist. I live in Italy, Arnhem, Amsterdam and wherever I have my laptop. “Home” has become a dynamic entity. This also means that whatever was taken for granted, is no longer that: including the spontaneous meeting with friends and taking part of new things and workshops, simply because I can. One possible part is to buy a house as a kind of solid anchor. Another is to re-invent myself as a professional. Where many commercial gigs at this point fix me to one place which is not always my first choice, the new thing is to make the places of my choice the places where I work, will work, will work together and earn my money and travel and work and live with the one I love. So that “home” will include places like New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, the Canary Islands, Los Angeles, Tokyo and wherever we want to be.

Some final notes

While one part of me likes to be part of the things happening at big events related to the web and other things, another part does not. “To get to meet Robert Scoble” (or any other famous person on the web) and “to do another Google” is simply a thing that is nice for others.

First: My thing is to create. I have ideas about how things can be different. And I like to make those things happen. Second: I lose my interest once things are done. There is no challenge for me in maintenance. Third is: I like to be with people and work with people who operate in that same field. The ones who invent. The ones that make it happen. Not to gain some short term fame, but because they love to build, to create, to change things that are there.

Today I watched a brief video here on the new bill they try to pass in the US.

The line in the video that triggered me is this at 4 minutes in the video:

Ordinary users can go to jail for five years for posting any copyrighted work – even just singing a pop song

Europe, under IP dictatorship

One of the main topics is Copyright, violation of human rights in the name of copyright and how the near future of Europe is crippled by the US lobby for copyright protection.

The bottom line is: anything not produced within the walled garden of copyright holders is sued to death and people live in a society where you – as a citizen – are no longer safe.

Lawgirl

One of the protogonists (Lawgirl for now) is a lawyer in Europe, who’s job is just that: sue the crap out of companies. From being a lawyer I decided later – after writing to have her be a project manager for the lawyers who sue the shit out of you when you “infringe” copyright.

Her role and the role of her story is to plunge you head first and fast forward through future history.

Elements in the story

Elements used in the story are:

1. Any creative kind of work and any reproduction of creative work in the public space can lead to a lawsuit or a simple letter.
2. In most cases, for most people, the simple letter is used, offering a bailout of a substantial amount of money (let’s say 800 euro) or you being sued for infringements with possible costs on your side – if the other party wins – over (again let’s say at least) 4000 euro: the cost of their lawyer and the lawsuit itself
3. Any independent creative company is sued to death. Simply because whatever they create is a derived work of something else of which they hold no copyright
4. Any company holding any copyright is suing the shit out of any other company holding other copyrights until some balance is reached: the new type of cold war

Since the future in the US did not decide to wait for my set of stories to be finished, I decided to put the first two parts of one of the main stories online, here.

Cold War paranoia-times return

One of the fears I use and work out in this story is the one where the US will get the European Union to implement their bullshit as well. One of the possible results is the kind of society where you can get arrested, put into jail or simply become bankrupted simply because you whistled a song. The grim kind of paranoia, fearloaded world we already saw in 1984 and any story based on the fear in the time of the Cold War between the USSR and the United States of America.

Rough first draft

It is a rough unedited first draft of about 8.000 words, written in a non-stop flow on March 27  so you will find stuff I would have normally have removed or re-written in later drafts.

As I did not- and do not have time for that, you will have to do with whatever came out that day. Just skip the crappy parts I would say.

Anyway: have fun.

Limiter – the lawgirl’s story

(CL) Peter Kaptein, March 27, 2011

[1]

I was eight when I saw a man gesturing empty handed under the red brick arch of the de Galle metro station. He was like the drunkards you sometimes saw: brains so damaged that ghosts from memories and hallucinations merged into the reality they perceived. The main difference was that this man was carefully groomed and dressed in Armani.

My father just shrugged when I looked up passed his arm, tugging my hand in the gesture.

That year more and more people followed, until it became commonplace.

The shrug my father gave was one of: “Yeah, whatever”. His job was to serve people in one of the little cafes in the center of Paris. His dream once was to become an engineer, but his determination and discipline never reached the levels where he could make that breakthrough. He had seen the salespeople and businesspeople before, on the terraces and streets, talking in thin air empty handed.

That year many things died. Mobile phones. Creative freedom. The last shards of opportunity for my father to do what he had studied for. Other things found a solid inception: the new copyright laws, new companies specializing in the persecution of people, artists and companies suspect of copyright- and patent infringement.

Other things got heavily damaged. The European Union. Socialism. Political tolerance. Personal freedom.

That year was the year of the third financial crunch in twenty years, counted from the year 2000 and it tore the things that made the European community a place of freedom to pieces.

It lasted one more year before the whole of Europe sold its soul to the United States.

My mother worked at a law firm at that time. She was one of the interns doing all the basic paperwork like basic contracts, requests for [law suits] and so on. The payment she received was about ten euro per hour at that time. Work for which the client would be charged between 120 to 160 euro.

It was her who told me that the age of creativity was dead and if I wanted to go anywhere in life in Europe, I should study law. And so I did.

I: “liked computers” as my teacher stated in my school report at that time. Where other kids went outside to play I could spend hours creating stuff: 3D worlds, drawings, fantasy creatures, dinosaurs, code, software driving my Lego. It was more important to me than the meaningless social games my peers played: “Who is the most popular?” “Who has the most friends online?” “Who got most photos voted up this week?” “Who got mentioned on the front page?” of some social network.

It was also something I avoided.

My mother told me six  things, which she then printed out for me:

1. Never expose your real identity online
2. Never trust anyone
3. Never download anything
4. Never put any of your creations online
5. Always shield yourself
6. Build a dossier

Underneath that list were two pictures of two kids. One was Jonas Briel, from England who was sued for copyright infringement for putting a self-made drawing of Pikachu on his facebook account. The other was the twelve years old Catharine Evens who was kidnapped and found dead seven days later, her body ravaged and cut up by the rapist that had used all the data he had found on her to build up a trust relationship that had made her as easy to pluck as ripe fruit from a tree. The rapist was never found.

I found these two kids when I was preparing a presentation for school. The title was: “Why you should not be on a social network” and was mainly meant to scare the piss out of my peers, who I thought to be morons.

It got me voted: “Most weird kid in the class” with a crappy photo of me underneath. It drew the attention of an eighteen year old guy I had never seen before, who suddenly approached me because “he could see I was a lonely” and “he had been a lonely kid too”. I made a photo of his face and marked it: “bad” in the cloud before he could turn away and that was the last I saw of him. If anything would happen to me, my personal data cloud would reveal his face and the data and time we had first met. Something a child rapist does not hunger for.

When I did some research on him afterward, based on face-recognition, I found some interesting stuff on him. Not incriminating, but enough to mark him as a suspect.

While I grew older, the stronghold of right wing politics grew. The US imported more laws to Europe. European companies yielded one by one under the increasing financial pressure of patent infringement lawsuits. The church clawed its way back out of the grave to toxicate the cities it had lost grip on for decades. Public schools lost more and more funding. Private schools became unaccessable for kids of parents who had normal jobs. The devil and witchcraft entered culture again as something “real” instead of the stuff that was amusing as a disposable concept for a movie.

Via new laws VPNs and encrypted connections became illegal, unless they were provided by “trusted partners” who were companies that willfully granted full access to all their data and all their users in audits made by the US government.

When I was thirteen, the Internet was no longer a place where you could create your own thing. Schooling was something you did yourself, as teachers were in most cases clueless people who failed in any other account.

When I was fifteen, I knew I liked girls more than boys. I had tried boys first, but never had felt that excited as when I kissed my first girl. It was almost an accident as we were both still high on some kind of drug and wasted in the night, walking home from a party at a friends place. Our holding hands subletly had become soft squeezing while walking and from that we started the kissing.

It was like I had sniffed another load of PPHG, which was the shit at that time, but than induced by my body itself, touching everything in me with this incredible tingle of sensuality.

It never went further than that with her. But something that had been a vague longing I had denied for a long time now had become a hunger, a craving. I wanted to suck pussy. I wanted to be sucked. I wanted to touch the soft skin of girls, bury my fingers deep inside of them, make them come over and over again, make myself come. It did not take me long before I started cruising the places where gay- and bi-sexual girls came and the first two years I was on a high of scoring girl after girl after girl. It was like being in love with everyone and nobody in particular.

When I was sixteen, I met the woman who changed everything that was me.

[2]   

It was when autumn changed the light that fell through the yellow and orange leaves of the trees in the square of San Pompidou. It was after school when she approached me.

“I am happy to see you here,” she said.

I gestured to clarify that our conversation would be recorded, something that had slowly found its way into social interactions in the past years, and she nodded.

“Stop pretending you are someone else,” she said with that simple expression that I only know from my own people, an expression of a very subtle shrug that is killed almost before it is started and a facial expression that is almost like a fools mask, used to mock when used in a stronger form.

It made her message short and clear. It made clear that it was an observation and not a judgment.

Instead of switching in defense, I sat back and let her words sink in.

She lit a cigarette.

“If you become like the other girls, you will deny your smarts and you will build a very dull and boring life. With whatever you do, you will reach your limit at 25. After that it is just waiting for your kids to grow up, your careerline to flatten out and waiting for your own death.”

She blew smoke over the empty square.

“Take risks. Leave this piss ass village. Go to Paris. Travel Europe.”

She pointed at me with her cigarette between her fingers.

“Write that down: Take risks, go to Paris, travel Europe. Add Berlin, London, New York and Amsterdam. Here is why: you are different. You are a creative. In another time you would have been a painter or a writer. In this time you are either an employee of Disney or sued for copyright infringement. Both will kill you. ”

I wrote it down: risks, Paris, Europe, Berlin, Amsterdam.
I had never seen her as serious as that moment. It was like one facade had slid away and another face had come out from underneath.

She was short, one meter and fifty centimeters, fifty seven years old. She was called: “the weirdo” as she never conformed to whatever was displayed in- or done by the other teachers. Her classes included biology and physics. Once she was involved in several start-ups and done some impressive crazy things, but the crunch in 2017 had ended that. And shortly after that her father fell ill, what had drawn her back here.

So: yeah, I listened. And I wrote down.

“What is it that you want to do?” she asked when I opened my eyes.

“Law,” I said.

“Law,” she repeated and smiled as she tracked my data. “Like your mother.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

My mother worked for a new firm since three years, located between Paris and this little piss ass village. Trying to become a partner as is the usual usual in many firms.

“Not in a firm,” I said.

“Wise,” she said. “Why law?”

“As you said: being creative makes you end up at Disney or being sued for copyright infringement.”

She nodded.

“And I decided that it is better to be on the side that holds power.”

“You really believe that,” she said. It was not a question.

I nodded and stuck my hand out. Silently she offered me another cigarette. I lit it.

We smoked in silence.

“My father never really made a good choice for himself,” I said after killing my cigarette, “and is still waiting people coffee. My mother will have to waste her evenings and weekends for cases that are shit and bullshit for another ten years. And if she did not burn out by then, she might become a partner.”

“And you?”

“I do not know yet. I have not found my niche yet.”

“Go to Africa too,” she said. “There is some fascinating shit going on there.”

And – after seeing Paris, Amsterdam and London – so I did.

[3]

Where Europe sold everything they could sell to save whatever was left after the big sellout before that, Africa went through the black hole and emerged in a completely new universe.

What happened was China. What happened was Nigeria.

Since the 1990’s China had slowly been building up influence in Africa, establishing trade routes, buying land, buying governments, putting down plants and R&D centers, getting access to natural resources like oil and gas. Getting access to the biggest source of ready-to-harvest solar energy on earth: the Sahara.

Unfortunately for China, China collapsed. Or lapsed.

Patiently waiting for any opportunity, the dark side of Nigeria took over. Trafficking drugs, playing global rip-off schemes for decades – including credit card fraud, the hyping and harvesting of penny-stocks a lot of money and power was available in the hand of a handful of very powerful and ruthless clans and families.

With all the riches and all the power available on native soil, these families stretched out and absorbed what could be absorbed. And started to step up their game.

With a global market paralyzed by the third credit crunch, anyone who would enter now with something truly new could become the next Shell, Unilever, IBM, Microsoft, Google. Owning a market with legal companies could engross more reach, profit and power than drugs or credit card fraud.

Ripping off patents that were lying dormant in public vaults, unhindered by any form of law enforcement and with claws even deeper into any type of trade, lobby and criminal organizations they started moving technologies beyond the artificial limits that were in place.

People died. Judges, juries, political men, military advisors. In their home lands. In their home towns. Assassinated on the street, killed at home, overdosed on drugs, murders covered up as suicides. Others “more lucky” only lost credibility by dirt from the past washing up in the present, or were pressured through their peers. And even when there was nothing: with everything open on social networks, it is not hard to doctor profiles and inject data, material, footage that is incriminating. Like: key people showing up in home-made child porn videos. Associations with criminals, whores and illegal activities.

The bottom line message was: “Piss off now, or you will regret it tomorrow”.

On the surface, Nigeria remained to be a democracy.
This was two years ago. People slowly learned their lessons. You can not fight death itself. No actions were taken.

It was not in my intention to go to Nigeria. But at that point in time it was the most stable country in Africa. And stuff was happening there.

My flight landed in Lagos.

Three things struck me when I entered the airport:

1. The colors.
2. The energy
3. The newness of everything

It was as if electricity buzzed in the air. It was as if I stepped from a grey and sickened world into one of light: where the blinds where pulled back and the sun enlightened everything.

The buildings around the airport were no older than five years and showed uses of materials I had never seen until I did the virtual tour some months before.

It felt like coming home.

It was something very small. A very tiny glint of a spark. But it felt like home.

It was happening here.

Were I not been traveling through Europe, I might have missed the hints. I might have missed the tendrils of almost invisible energy that floated in the air, ready to be taken, ready to be tapped into.

Still a student and deep in debt due to the awesomeness of the European Educational System I had arranged a place for myself at the home of a Nigerian girl living in Lagos. Using the free public transport I moved into the city where the smartness of this country revealed itself more and more.

It is like you take a system apart and redesign it according to new rules. Each cycle of this redesign is aimed at simplifying things. Making it shorter, simpler easier to understand and use.

Everything that did not make sense had been slowly cut out.

It did not take much time before it hit me. I had been here before, exploring the city in depth. But being here – with my senses wide open – was so much more. All of the ride to my sleeping place I was crying.

Imagine a city where smart people come together. Where the aim of the game is to establish a win/win situation, no matter what you do or try. Imagine a craving to become better, in a laid back way. Because you can, not because you have to. A natural flow of improvement. This is what I tasted. This is what I expected, this is what I felt.

From entering the airport, the bus, the streets, a café. None of the inward bound attention. None of the mistrust that had become part of my society. None of the: “mind your own business and do not call for me, so I can mind mine”.

For the first time I noticed how tense I was.

As I tried to relax my muscles, I felt tension in my belly muscles popping loose, like bonds being cut, releasing blockage after blockage.

I cried like a little girl, snot running out of my nose, absorbed by a handkerchief kindly offered by a stranger who did what was required before minding her own business again. My muffled: “thank you,” was met with a simple smile.

Hands helped me out of the bus, making sure I would not trip as my vision was still blurred by the flow of my tears and when the bus drove away I just stood there for a while, until my tears were dried.

One of the bases for the current Nigeria was a simple game by a girl who was nineteen when she created it; almost twelve years ago. Inspired by a comic book series based on: “Pay it forward” and reading books on game-theory and karmic theory she had designed a simple social mobile game that followed a set of simple rules, making the benefits and repercussions of your actions in the game more visible. When you did anything in the game, the ripples of cause and effect would be mapped and whatever came back to you would be traceable on the initial action that had triggered the chain of actions, presenting you scores and tables. The colors were black and orange, where black stood for the dark, the cold, a lack of energy, a life fill of worries and where orange stood for sun, warmth, gold, enrichment, a life without worries.

Briefly summarized: shitty actions within the social game resulted in most cases in a large list of shitty results on the “black” side. Positive actions resulted in most cases in a large list of nice results on the “orange” side.

The aim was to grow the list on the golden side: resulting in an easier and carefree life.

When kids started to implement these rules in real life and saw their lives change for the better, it became a huge hit.

The girl who opened was not my host. As face recognition raced through online repositories of public photos and background-data was collected from whatever source available, I took her hand and answered her smile.

The palm of her hand was cool and dry, a pleasant experience against my skin. Her eyes were shiny and bright. Eyelashes long and curled up, skull shaven with tiny curls of bleached hair covering her black scalp.

“Hi,” she said and beckoned me in.

The smell of coffee with cardamom shifted the air and a simple cooker was on a small fire.

“You want one?” she asked when she saw my gaze shift.

I nodded.

“Yes, please.”

She touched my cheek with her cool hand while her eyes darted to look at my face.

My crying was all over my red and puffy eyes. I knew she had seen, but she simply nodded.

She was tall and slender as a girl could be and two years my senior. Her sociogram unfolded before my eyes when I closed them, showing all the relationships my software had found on public sites.

She was gay, like me.

She studied. Electronics and Informatica. Her projects were amazing. A crossover between art and applied technologies. I fast-forwarded through the photos and 3D projections.

“I like your projects,” I said when I sat down.

“Thank you,” she said.

She was cute. Very cute.

She put down a glass and filled it with water. I drank it down like there was no tomorrow and poured water from the bottle for the next filling.

She lived two houses down the block, third floor. A small apartment for one person.

Some of the photos were made there.

“You are the first girl I meet who is from France,” she said.

“We do not travel much,” I said. “And if we do, we stick to the north of Africa. Further down does not have the best of reputations where I come from.”

I guess I can skip the rest. She had it all worked out. Knowing that I would come, she had done some profiling and found some nice matches that might make it work between the two of us. She liked white girls. It was spot on.

The second day I slept at her place and when I subscribed for a year on the Lagos University of Law we did some trading and found a new apartment big enough for the both of us and her projects. One year became three. In the second we separated and I when I finished my studies, which combined universities from Europe with the one in Lagos I went back to Europe.

[4]

In the meantime, Europe went ablaze with fear for what was going on in Africa. Using the push they had gained in years of silent work behind the scenes of established institutes, augmented people were allowed to enter Europe. But when the press got hold on the story all shit broke lose.

You remember the weeks and months of fear-mongering on every online spot that bothered.

Where we were still stuck to boxes we carried in our pockets, more and more African people entering Europe showed up on scanners with strains through their bodies of modified tissue that housed very advanced technology.

It started with business people, but in the years that followed, more and more “normal” people would have the same lines showing up in their bones.

We all know the stories of augmented people, enhanced, with processing power embedded in their bodies, brains enhanced by drugs and supported by extra systems. Always online, but connected in a deeper way than you and I ever experienced.

Post humans.

Everyone who cared was waiting for it to happen, with now dead people like Ray Kurtzweil as some of the first. But nobody had expected it to come from Africa. China, yes. Japan, maybe. The United States of America – no doubt. South America? Possibly. But a backwash sundried region like Africa? Not until five years ago.

It was no secret at all. The first research results were published five years prior to that. But the legal battles fought had always been about patents and the fuss created by that had obfuscated any real information hidden in plain sight. It was a smart doctoring of publicity.

Africa had dived into the black hole and emerged on the other side, in a new universe. Hesitant, bumbling as people started to find new balances, but there.

I applied for treatment. It is a very simple procedure. They inject the base crystal in your bones. From there parts of your bones are transformed into something that is not quite electronic and has pure and raw processing power to be used by any software that you inject.

That – however – is not the real game changer. What is, is the mesh-network of quantum-entangled particles that make for a network that has no dependencies on any existing infrastructure.

The people have become their own information network.

It cut Nigeria loose from any and all dependencies to any power in the world.

To land that point: any information that you and I can read, find and access online goes through an infrastructure that is monitored and controlled by a small group of companies. Each of these companies is part of a bigger structure with a lot of political interests and dependencies.

When the population gets restless, information is doctored and groomed to soothe the people at large. When you specifically become a problem, you are cut off.

When you are outside of that system, you become untouchable. More than location, information and an information infrastructure is a means of survival. You can take over Nigeria, but when the people disperse you still have to deal with individuals who are faster, smarter and better informed than you are.

I applied and was refused. I am not born in Africa and for many reasons they withhold the technology. One reason is – in my words – that the Western continents, including Europe, Russia and The United States of America, are still quite retarded in their cultural development. It would be like giving a gun to a fucked up kid. If he does not blow out his own brains to begin with, others will very likely be severely harmed instead.

It made me depressed the first week. Then I was simply angry with anything and everything. And sad and in heavy denial. Then just sad and angry and angry and in denial.

I discussed this with the girl I was living with at that moment. What she said in a flat tone was this:

“It does not mean we are better.”

“Nigeria is no paradise. In some ways it is just as controlled as Europe is. In many ways people are still used and abused. We have just entered a higher level of sophistication or refinement in how we execute it.”

She outlaid the structure of her country from a game-theory point of view.

Overlaying the charts with Europe, there were only slight differences in the scores.

Only where it hit economy and internal development the African countries that were connected showed great peaks spiking upwards like dragged by rockets to the sky. It was where we could have been if Europe and the United States would not have been stuck in paralyzing and useless wars of intellectual property.

Moving up north and moving down south, the development had simply been frozen where it reached countries that were still dominated by Western values.

Knowing something is one thing. Having it experienced can change you. And I changed. I changed a lot. Whatever I could upgrade I upgraded. I set out a path to make these upgrades possible. And I looked at my possibilities returning to Europe and staying here in Africa.

I had smelled what was possible and I wanted to reach that level as closely as possible.

That is where I found the guts to become what I could not become until that: an agent of defense that attacks its own host system.

And in the years that followed I started to build my niche.

Legal warfare in Europe has all became about killing all creativity and innovation that does not happen within the pearly gates of United States owned companies. Countries like the United States, China, Russia and india have become like crack addicted pimps, grazing in any money possible to pay for the increasingly expensive addiction of flowing money to bottomless pits of greed and waste. Europe is nothing more than one of their grazing grounds for crack whores: to be exploited until rendered worthless. Treated with the least of all possible respect and getting weaker every day as all life is slowly sucked out due to drug use, bad diet and the resulting malnutrition.

As a lawyer in the field of intellectual property, your task is either to kill whatever fresh and green comes up outside your own garden or to protect whatever is grown from being killed before it reaches its estimated value. What remains in general are brown fields of death and dying crops and a few fat pigs who feasted on what used to be.  If you have a problem with the fact that you are reaping the benefits of hitching a ride on the legal machines which are cutting up anything that was the country and the continent of your parents, tough luck, fuck you, grew up or fuck off and go do something else.

[5]

As a kid I read Gunnm. My mother had collected the first series of nine by Glénat and I lived the story of the robot / girl Gally that kicked ass. Each volume had a different theme starting with “Angel of..”. And If I had to choose one for myself, it would be “extinction”. I then played the games and in between I dreamed to be like her.

I worked my social profile, spiked it with the required details where needed and made sure it read the messages of single minded determination, quality and brains. I worked my matching profiles to sort out the largest and most aggressive law firms and ran simulations to see where they might bring me.

That was the biggest part of my work to get in. It took me five days to get it right.

Within seconds after I made my availability clear I started to be approached by search bots who would be man in the middle for the first screenings. Three days later I set my signature under the contract with LL and D.

That weekend I returned home to my parents.

With everything patented, including crops and the processes of making wine and cheese, there are no local products anymore. The few that tried to hang on gave up when their bank accounts were blocked and the only alternative to go down in shame was to produce stuff for other countries. So we celebrated with wine and cheese from the supermarket. What my mother could see was me working for a big ass company and reeling in shitloads of money so I could pay of my debts and would be independent. She was the practical one.

My father felt betrayed. It was not so much in his words or his actions, but in the pained looks he had when he though nobody paid attention.

It was good to feel them, to touch them, to hug them.

When night fell, me and my father were sitting on the small patio, just warm enough to do without a blanket.

The house hummed silently around us, eagerly releasing information and statistics when I wanted it. Me: being one on the trusted list. Father had upgraded it recently with more sensors to refine the energy-distribution so that the energy footprint of the house was reduced with an extra 5%.

Added some extra modifications and a single cow in a treadmill would be able to power that fucking home.

He lit my cigar, then lit his. The flames died as we puffed and the tips glowed deep red in the dark of night.

“You do not seem happy,” I said.

“You go right to one of the most aggressive company there is,” he said. “They have no mercy. I have looked at their stats and they really go for the kill.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why? I never took you for a gun for hire. I always thought you would do something with your creative side.”

I let the smoke circulate in my mouth, then puffed it out.

“For that I am born in the wrong country,” I said. “It is something I want to do. I can not do anything to stop it. I can not do anything to get out of it.”

“So you join.”

“Yes.”

He was not pleased with that answer. At all.

I showed him the stats.

“I go in for five years. Then I step back and see what I want next.”

“Africa did change you. Your mother was right. What happened?”

He was a sweet man. Always has been. After he realized that his future was in catering and accepted the results of his choices, he mellowed down.

I sat silent as I smoked my cigar, legs pulled up in the lazy chair. So much like the younger girl I was.

“I saw the future.”

“And?”

“There is a third option, so I no longer feel troubled.”

We imported the American dream right after the Second World War. It is the dream that: “you can be whatever you want to be”.  It came with stories of small people who became gloriously successful, who built empires like never before.

It is tempting, building something from nothing and be wealthy before you reach the age of thirty. It was marketing. It is still here. Throughout Europe new companies are raised with people believing that they can make it. Using licenses on existing solutions new products are invented and developed. When you make it, you are bought. When you do not, you go broke. When you are stupid or do not do your homework, you infringe patents.

If you are unlucky, patents are exclusive and blocked.

Where patents started as a way to share inventions and to allow you to license your production to other companies without losing your market, they became weapons to claim ground and block any development in that direction by any other party.

It is this second option that fucked up the market. Any real innovation in Europe died when we sold out to the US: medicines, electronics, software, biotechnology, genetics.

To understand my work, understand how the game is played.

There is nothing you can develop without at least touching three or four patents that have never been used. To make sure at least something happens, innovation is stimulated by programs on universities and via contests which draw smart people to their working grounds. With a limited amount of funding projects are started which can either grow out into a huge money maker – at least so it seems – or into a set of potential law suits.

In reality most of that money goes into covering all the debts that have been stacking up during the startup-period. When the startup is tainted by law suits from competing companies, the value of the startup is reduced to closely nothing. The people who took the risks, the owners of the startup, usually end with little more than what they started with.

They are lucky if they  get out without too many losses.

In the other case, researchers work for US owned companies and – being employees – whatever they develop automatically becomes the ownership of the company.

End of the line the whole scheme is a cheap form of R&D with no risks involved for the companies that sponsored the project. And anything that could be mind blowing is stillborn as none of the involved parties is interested in something that is really disruptive.

This is all still kind of harmless. Where it hits is that whatever is produced in Europe never is our ownership. It automatically becomes American, Chinese, Russian or Japanese. The circle becomes as follows:

1. We invent it
2. Someone else gets ownership over the intellectual property
3. Someone else, somewhere else produces it –as we are not allowed to do that
4. Once it is ready for sales, it gets imported again
5. We buy the stuff and pay for the right to use our own inventions, transport and production cost

Still this seems quite harmless.

Economy 101 teaches us that this is how the global market works.

The big problem is that we can never go back to where we were. Producing anything that is more than a steam engine would lead to legal claims that could cripple this continent.

Bottom line is that we are dependent like crack whores on a set of countries incapable of proper financial self-management, and addicted to heroine themselves. Once no money is left to burn and everyone is sucked dry, the stash dries up and we all fall down.

The next big crisis is predicted to happen between five to ten years. And since we completely sold out to the American model of Intellectual Property, we might go down hard this time.

Anyway. As long as I pretend not to also have this point of view, my work is fine.

[6]

My first assignment was a twenty man company in Paris. They had been beaten up by three different law firms already, threatening them with all they legally had. And so here I was, sponsored by one of their bigger investors, with a fluffed up resume provided by my firm, to make me look like I could pull it off for them. And since I had the hotline and an entire staff of drones in their home offices, I probably could.

They simply needed a sympathetic human face in the office of their client.

I myself was nothing more than a smart sound board of their investor. My freedom was close to zero. My main job was to report the situation of the client to the home office, translate whatever the home office threw at me to the client and make sure that the client did not fuck up by doing something stupid.

To keep myself out of any line of liability my main line after every summary to home office was: “What do you advice?”

If I had any ideas of my own, I parked them in some limbo and only retrieved them when someone at home office requested for my opinion.

It could have been done by an intern, where it not that it is easy to make mistakes by misreading and misinterpreting the information that you get. And a few simple mistakes can easily build up to a million euro loss. So paying me until the issue was solved was always cheaper than the possible alternative.

I was placed there after three months of intensive simulations and two weeks of holiday on Fuerte Ventura to celebrate my passing. It had been like a military bootcamp, drilling your mind until you could run the legal equivalent of 10 kilometers with a heavy backpack over a terrain full of hills and still shoot five bulls-eye with five bullets and your rifle when you arrived at Mark Bravo and dropped down in position.

My value to clients was now 300 euro per hour.

My income after taxes: 56 euro per hour. Which was the double of Average Joe working on whatever law firm for five years. Not bad for someone entering the market.

I arrived by bike, which I dropped in the parking lot. I re-arranged my outfit, which dealt with creases and sweat. I checked my make-up to assure my skin looked silky-smooth and entered the backdoor after the door had recognized my biometric signature.

From soberness, the smell of rubber and the dust of grey concrete I stepped into a world of marble, wood, golden lining and ceramic flooring covered with soft sand colored carpet.

The boy behind the desk was blond and imported from Holland. His French slightly colored by the limitations of her verbal heritage of a different language with a different use of her breath, mouth and tongue.

He still studied. This was one of his jobs. I discarded most of the info I got on him, except his name.

This was old school corporate: “we have money and traditional values” bullshit.

I waited.

When Alexander arrived I stood up and shook his hand. He seemed uncomfortable. Especially at my age.

“Do not worry,” I said. “Whatever is going on, the office is backing me up. And I did not pass their audit by just being pretty.”

Yes: it was my first assignment. Yes: I was nervous. And yes: I pretend to be a smartass when not at ease. After the third I no longer felt the need to defend myself.

We went upstairs and to the back, where the decorators probably had decided to go home as the walls no longer had this marble / gold / fake old colonial houses type of finish. Instead it was sober and straight to the point.

This was his domain.

“I might need you at the plant as well,” he said. “You drive?”

I nodded.

“It is outside Paris.”

I said “OK.”

Then we went down to business.

The letters he had received were the standard cease and desist –  pay or we kill you – type of letters. Vague, unclear and unspecific. Made to drive you up to costs. Made to make you make mistakes. Made to make you offer the unforeseen weak spot of the belly when you think they are aiming at the chest.

At the end of the morning we had a standard reply, in the line of: “Piss off. We are not aware of any infringement of anything. If think you have something concrete on us, then show us. Otherwise we start a counter-claim for hindering and harassment.” But then in nice, neat and legally fluffed up type of wordings and sentences covered with sugar and honey and closing with a loving: “with kind regards”.

We ran several simulations, scrutinizing the befores and afters and running their first, second and third line of patents against whatever was going on in this company.

No clear matches were met, that were not already paid for in legal licenses.

“Either they have nothing on you, or there is a hidden trump card somewhere,” I told Alexander at the end of the day.

“I asked the home office for advice and they gave a ‘good to go’ to the letter. The alternative is that we burn an extra 100.000 euro to cross-match the forth and fifth line of patents they have. Which is something home office and your sponsor did not advice for now.”

With that we closed the day.

“Come to the plant tomorrow,” is what Alexander sent me later. “Change of plan led to change of schedule.”

Home Office advised: “OK,” so the next morning I got out of bed at 07:00 to take a cab that brought me to the plant in 30 minutes air time.

I arrived with 10 minutes to play.

Without the receptionist, Alexander dropped out of the office immediately. “I will show you around,” he said, starting to walk without pause.

I followed.

It was some setup to store energy more efficiently. Made specifically for the solar plants in the Sahara. I had briefly studied the official documents and did not get anything of it. Bottom line was: solar energy was used to separate seawater into hydrogen, oxygen and some other components and oxygen and hydrogen were stored in their pure form for later use. Since we still had not cracked Tesla’s dream of instant and lossless wireless transportation of energy, doing it this way to get it form “S” (Sahara) to “E” (Europe) made some sense.

It was nice to see the plant where prototypes were tested and real people working on it. It also bored me after a few minutes. Had seen the movie, the animations, the simulations, the photos and read the blog post by that one guy who was really funny.

In the end Alexander lost about half a million to some vague claims, as a fuck-off and get off my back kind of settlement where both parties bound themselves to the standard: “we will respect what is written here, leave each other in piece and pretend this never happened to anyone who might ask”.

It was added to his debt.

If you ever wondered if there is justice in my line of work: there is none. There is just law. The bully usually gets something of what he wanted when he started pestering you in the first place. Like your lunch money. But taken it from the bright side, thanks to our intervention: at least it was not your bike.

At the Home Office we evaluated the project. All recordings were analyzed (measured from the moment I stepped into their office and started my work to the moment I closed the day) and run through alternative simulators for alternative scenarios.

All in all I did not bad.

I landed the firm some extra thousands that I could have missed if I would have been less alert. I also kept the “rip-off your client” levels within the green limits.

Five of these in a row and I would get my banana. If I did extra well, I would also get my orange and some raisins to boot.

[7]

Almost eighteen months after my first assignment for Alexander it was time to pick up my legal sniper rifle and brush the dust from my copy of: “How to be a Legal Assassin”. I had received my first license to kill. The targets were a set of four companies out of a portfolio of sixteen.

Home Office allowed only a limited set of ways to take out a target. All thoroughly researched for legal repercussions, effectivity and cost / benefit.

Most of them focus on driving up the cost on the other side, to such levels that they either have to budge or bust. Others take the very structure of the opponents company under fire and are meant to kill and destroy.

I chose that second set. No threats. Have a gun? Be prepared to use it.

I discussed with Home Office. Went through strategies. Run simulations, found their weak spots, set up the drones that would pound on their structure until it would collapse on at least three different places. The damage too great to repair before all went down.

This is the list of questions I used:

1. Do they have any debts?
2. Did they make mistakes in contracts that can be used against them?
3. Is there any lead to child-pornography or illegal downloads or distribution of copyrighted material?
4. Did anyone in the company something illegal in the past?
5. Did they make procedural mistakes when registering domain names?
6. Do they have enemies waiting to enter and wreak havoc when the walls fall down?
7. Did they make any mistakes when they created their legal entities?
8. Did they infringe any intellectual property?

Item number one is the low hanging fruit if you find the right tree to pluck it from. Item number eight takes most effort and resources as the judgment might be quick, but it takes a lot of effort to prove you are right and they are fucked the legal repercussions take a lot of time. It is kind of a last resort. Anything in between is faster and cheaper as you go up the list from eight to one.

In most cases you can save over 50% of costs if you do it well, increasing the margins due to costs not made and making the client happy as you did not go over budget.

Some companies plant evidence. Fabricate material. It might be a quick short term ride, but it will fuck you up on the long run as law firms tend to attack each other from time to time as well.

Usually I score 3 out of eight and do not get below item 6. People are sloppy. And when they start, they usually save on everything that is still far beyond the horizon. After that, patches are added and holes remain that can be used by me. In most cases starting a case for infringement of IP is not required, even though that is usually where the request starts.

As I said: there is no justice in my line of work. Just law.

I took two months to prepare the fall of the four. Three went down in a satisfactory cloud of smoke before the third month was over. The fourth got away with an amputated leg. I had to call for assistance to land the final kill shot two months later.

All in all not a bad result.

We offer psychological  guidance and trauma coaching afterwards to the victims of the companies that received the kill shots, via services that we and other offices sponsored.

Home Office had established after years and years of experience in the older days that suicides of the people whose companies and dreams were ruined had a negative effect on our own morale, as we tended to sympathize with the victims.

Yeah: duh! Unless you are a cold blooded psychopath, you will get affected by the deaths of other people caused by the work you did. Even if you have never met these people and it is not directly your fault that the person affected could not deal with his fate.

It is in our wiring.

What also helped were new laws, marking suicide as murder.

[Here ends about 8000 words of rough draft. Another 4000 at least is to be written]

I was on a party held by Boris (from “The Next Web”) and asked for some advice on what to do for my next startup. This time there were no zombies or warzones in my dream, and the sun was shining, so stuff was quite OK.

His advice was to take “this object”, picked up from some table at random and turning out to be a red handled bottle-opener and: “trade it for other things until you get a house”.

In the dream I refused to do so, refused to take the advice Boris gave me and walked off.

After I awoke (or at least thought I was awake) I contemplated the dream.

Five pointers from my contemplation

1. To sell stuff, you need to go out, meet people and sell – There is no escaping this. Sitting in my hidden laboratory and write blogposts which are read by 5 people per day is not going to pull it off
2. To do stuff other than what your focus should be, is a waste of time – I guess that is why I said no to the well meant advice. If you want to do: “A” then to do: “B” to “get better at A” is a diversion and a waste of time unless “B” is applied on “A” and delivers extra result.
3. Limitations? Too hard to do? You need to overcome your own bullshit -  Any time you stop doing something you wanted and you started, it is in most cases due to your own bullshit excuses. This “you” includes me. I have excused and given up my way out of a lot of things I could have done.
4. Stick to what you do: it will take time – The Next Web (the blog) itself has taken 3 years from 2008 to 2011 to grow to one of the top ten technology blogs and is recently more and more quoted in the one I read: “Engadget”. They could have done many other things apart from doing what others were doing as well: blogging about stuff others blog about as well. But sticking to their guns paid off.
5. I do not take advice I think is irrelevant – This makes me many things. Including: hard to deal with and: following my own path.

Mixing and matching

There is a balance in what you force yourself to do, what you like to do and what you expect out of your own life. This balance can be put into three platitudes:

1. Do what you say/say what you do – A simple rule of no bullshit. If you are going to work on a list of 10 items, you will finish that list of 10 items. Not 9, not 6, not 5 but 10.
2. Run your own tempo - Do not overstretch, but also do not be lazy. There is no use in burning up before you reach the finish. There is also no use in walking, if you can run, as it will only take longer before you reach your goal.
3. Only change your plan when needed – There are many people with many different opinions and it is easy to get side-tracked or to start doubting yourself. As long as you can afford it and as long as your dream is not fueled by schizophrenia or some other mental instability, stick to your plan.

Three things that might make you give up

1. An Android application to log your daily consumption – For a specific target audience and possibly with two or three spin-off products for people who are on a diet
2. HotForestGreen – A framework for real time event handling over multiple devices. Also shortly called an “Internet of Things framework”
3. XYZ - Which is under a Non Disclosure agreement and thus I can not talk about it.

Bootstrapping = moving into “Startup mode”

All three projects are bootstrapped and have no external investors. There are several reasons for that:

1. Control – When people invest with the expectation of a Return on Investment, something needs to be there in exchange. For most online services this “something” is user generated data. Then – since you work with other peoples money – there might also be pressure from your investors to move into a specific direction.
2. Time – I am not in a hurry: “to be the first”. I learned to choose a more stable and long term stand point from my past failures.
3. Dedication – The services and products themselves will prove to be worth my future attention.

This means that the only money I can spend is from my own reserves. And these reserves are limited (there is no secret or magical source of money dripping new money into my life).

5 things to do when moving into startup mode

Here is the short:

1. Cut costs – A simple one on paper, but very hard to do in reality. Looking at the yearly totals might help to be really rigorous on places you otherwise would be more forgiving: “yeah, but my monthly donations to ‘better homes for cats and dogs’ is just 20 euro”, where there might be 5 other similar causes you do the same thing for.
2. Define budgets – Know how much you need as a minimum to pay all your bills (after cutting all unnecessary costs). Know how much additional costs you have to support the minimals of your standard of living and your startup. Set that as your base line.
3. Cut obligations – Everything you do that does not support building on your startup has to be considered a waste of your time. As you can only spend that time once.
4. Plan ahead / set deadlines – Make sure you know what to do and what to expect (of which one thing is you running out of your reserves) beforehand. Set deadlines stating when what should be finished. They help to keep you on track.
5. Have a “plan B” – Things can go wrong. Things can turn out different from what you projected and expected. A “plan B” is your financial contingency plan to reel in new money without creating debts.

1: Cutting cost

I do not like to write this post for some reasons, one being that posts like this are usually bullshit. Mine included. But anyway.

What Apple does good

1. Holistic design – Apple designs both the hardware and the OS that runs on it and tries to make the total experience as pleasing and good as possible.
2. Balance of hardware specifications – The combination of elements make sense. From screen resolution to the processor, to the amount of memory. Try and match it with any standard issue HP, Sony or Asus computer and they all fail to get the complete package right. Most systems come with 1344 x 768 resolution where 1600 x 900 makes more sense. Most systems are 3 centimeters thick. Or more. Most weight close to- or over 3 kilos.
3. Marketing and loyalty – Apple is almost a religion. It does not matter if most arguments pro or contra Mac are valid. It is simply a very strong brand.

What they did wrong in the past

Looking at the differences, there are more commonalities than anything else. All mammals have the same basic “construction rules” applied, including the number of fingers and toes and the build up of reproductive organs. Where there are slight differences due to specialization and evolutionary digression they all seem to be based on the same template.

Even the horse has four fingers (merged together and provided with one big toe-nail we call “hoof”) and a rudimentary thumb.

Compare us to insects or boneless creatures like slugs and the octopus and you will find complete different rules. Still: why are most land animals mammals and all mammals so similar? What happened to creatures with three fingers? Creatures with four arms? Creatures combining the legs of goats with a torso similar to humans?

What if they were once there, but humanity simply killed almost everything else in a previous era of civilization? With over 100.000 years of existence, our species might have seen earlier periods of some sort of higher technological development. And whatever ignorance there was, might have led to the disasters that left us with just our biological peers.

What if all fairy tales and all stories on gods and magic hold some grain of truth, distorted by millennia of ignorance? (This is not a new element, but like murder mysteries, you can twist it any way you like to make it taste fresh.)

Traction to finalize a novel

I have one story which has seen two attempts to become a novel. Mainly because I love the main character and her relationships.

The main character is born eyeless, a suicide poet and a nobody who’s only wish at that point of time is to go home to her father.

In the first installment I followed much the lines of Dhalgren: being a story of travel, meetings and discovery. The second installment introduced an additional element based on the question: “What if the dragons return, but are not dragons but any magical creature, and actually shape shifters? And what if they can not be killed by humans, but still their bones are found and show signs of killing and are stored in the basements of several musea?”

The second attempt plays in an alternative present. Where the world is suddenly rich with the returned species.

As a stand alone concept this was not enough to give the story enough momentum to be finished. Apart from a gimmick that might be applied in a different way but is not really new, there are not enough hooks to this current world to make a difference. There was not enough to develop the story int anything more but the average. And so I got bored and gave up on the story.

But what if the magical creatures were not the only ones killed and eradicated by humans? What if there was an entire range of other species just as alien and just as belonging to this world as we and they do and did?

What if there are cover ups to hide a deeper truth? (Required for the suspension of disbelief: “If bones are found of unknown species, why did we not know about this already?”)

What new element this take adds

Most stories that make an impact to me are the ones that take this world and something seemingly mundane and turn it into something that shifts your mind. Simply because it has always been around and you never paid any real attention to its strangeness until somebody pointed it out to you.

The gimmick-story now has an element that hooks directly into the mundane – and makes that mundane the proof of large scale murder of entire species.

It also gives me the hooks to make the first connections between the shape-shifters, their return and this world they returned to.

Current background stories to follow: a summary

1. The shape shifters, the dragons have returned – Why? Why did they go? And why are they back?
2. We have killed them in the past – Why? What happened. And how where we able if they are close to immortal?
3. They disappeared – Again: why? Was it us or for some other reason?
4. They are not the only species killed – It appears we killed everything except the ones in the sea an.d the ones related to our own mammelian template.
5. There is some cover up – By whom? Why? How far back?
6. What happened to our own civilizations? – How many where there? How far stretching? Why are there no traces apart from the distorted stories in fables?
7. How does the killing of so many other species hook back to our own fables and the retrurn of the shape shifters? – Are they here to prevent? To judge? To live together?

Variety of species

The title: “Variety of species” came with the new point of view. And I think I will stick with it.

Closing a 5 year period of: “working for the money” and moving into a new period of craft and creation my blog posts are becoming more relevant as instruments of promotion.

Mainly to reach my peers: the people I want to work with, create with, create for. The people I might meet, the people I should meet, the people I do not know yet, but who think and move in similar lines as I do. The companies that do cool things.

My blog posts have improved over the last 4 years, but are still not where they can be. Simply because I have not been taking the time to sharpen my mind.

This is going to change.

My blog posts are part of my work.

Iliad

Compared to the average blog: “I saw this amazing thing, did something and here is a link” with the length of 100 to 600 words, my writings are like the iliad. Long. Excruciating.

Summaries

On the other hand, compared to what is present inside my mind, they are just summaries. Compressed forms. In many cases boiled down to short texts and lists with bullet points with short subtexts to allow for speed reading.

Even then most of my posts count around 2000 to 3000 words.

2 to 4 hours per post

My average time per 2000 word post is 2 to 4 hours. It depends mostly on how much time I spend on re-reading and editing and if there are images included. 2 hours is hardly with any editing. 4 hours is usually 50% of re-reading and editing the crappy parts. Producing images easily adds 15 minutes to 30 minutes per image.

This makes my average production 1000 words per hour and 16.6 words per minute.

Length an issue?

I do not believe in any of the following assumptions:

1. Dead – Blogging is dead/old/outdated (for one assuming that things like Twitter and Facebook are the “new blogging”)
2. Short – A blog post should be short, otherwise people will not read it
3. People do not read – long stuff on the internet

It is mainly populist bullshit based on a very narrow point of view.

Six things I think matter in blog posts

Tools for the trade – a shortlist

1. Quick scans – I started more and more to structure my text to support quick scans. This means that any reader should be able to get a general idea of the value of the congtent by just browsing through the article.
2. White space – White space eases the mind. It makes online text seem more digestible instead of: “a lot of work”.
3. To the point - Each sentence has to be clear. Each sentence has to matter. Fluff is deadly.
4. Personal – I think it helps a lot to see the person and personality behind the post to help a reader connect. Who are you? Why do you care about it? Are you able to make me care?
5. Short – Even when you write a lot, the separate parts should be relatively short.
6. Easy to digest – Too much nerd-speak kills. Make sure the writing is clear and easy for the mind.
7. Compartmentalized - Break up text into clear short topics which can be read individually.
8. Lists and bullet points – Lists and bullet points allow to cut out fluff. They also cut out overhead in the brain, as lists and summaries are presented as such.
9. Impulse - Make sure each sentence projects forward: invites to read the next one. And the next one. And the next one.
10. Focal points – Anything that draws the eye and important to allow people to do quick scans. I use three:
1. Headers – Quick scan this entire text. The first you will focus on are the headers. They already tell part of the story.
2. Lists – Lists are easy to digest (when done properly). They also indicate summaries.
3. Boldface abstracts – Look at this specific list you are reading. Each text after a bullet point starts with an abstract of the content (like: “Boldface abstracts”).
11. Clear start – The start of each post has to clearly advertise what the reader can find inside. What works best I think for now, is:
1. A short statement of intention – Why this post? What is the intention? What is your take? Why do you care?
2. A short summary of what comes next – What can the reader expect to find?
12. Clear focus – Deviation is deadly. If I start telling about my pony and lose myself in: “how bunnies are nice as well”, I lose readers.
13. Clear ending – Whatever is written should be summarized in a conclusion in the end, with you making clear what your point was. If you can not, you very likely wrote some unfocused fluff, following too many leads, and the reader will not be able to do so either.
14. Editing – Editing is comprised of several parts:
1. Re-reading – With the eye of a fool. Pretend you have no clue what the article is about. Get stuck on sentences that do not work and parts that are unclear.
2. Re-writing – Using the findings of your re-reading. Making stuff clear.
3. Re-structuring – It might be that some topics have to be torn into two ore more parts. Others to be moved, to add more clarity.
4. Adding – Sometimes what is there is not enough and needs more clarification.
5. Removing – Something stuff is creating dead space. Information you thought was important when writing but with no clear added value related to your topic.
6. Spell checking – This is the last of your worries, unless you really suck at it. The quality of your work is in all the things stated before: understandable, clear, engaging text.
15. Promotion – If your blog post is relevant for a greater group of people, it is good to promote it. If not, you are just spamming and wasting peoples time. I usually do it by posting links on places where people ask questions on topics I found (partial) answers to. This leads to an average of 10 to 60 page steady views per day on a post that otherwise would have 2 to 10 per month.

Are fluff posts bad?

Fluff is the soft stuff inside your pillow. It is the soft stuff that has no shape and no consistancy.

Fluff posts are not always bad. They help shape ideas when they are still raw. I usually call them “Research”. But they are mainly written for myself. To fall back on later, to see what and how I thought 2 years ago.

In some cases they are even more to the point than later work – once all the other fluff is removed – as they are based on the very first raw ideas.

Concluding

There is a lot of learning to do for me to reach a higher level of writing and a bigger audience. The biggest resistance I feel is the extra work it will deliver.

To properly edit a posts takes me at least the same time as it takes to write it. And in some cases I think I do not have that time. And in those cases I just post them as it is more important to have them posted than to have them perfect.

The reason why blog posts are important for my work is my field: independent research & development. I create new things. I create variations on a existing theme to open new possibilities not used before.

I need my audience to read my posts. I need them to follow my work. As the alternative is obscurity: the basement inventor of awesomeness nobody knew about.

The better my stories become, the more people I will reach. And the more people I reach, the bigger the chance that what I do gains the relevance I think my work deserves.

In the past years research has been done to look at the effect of new technology and the Internet on kids.

One of the results measured is that people seem to be able to focus less on tasks that require a longer attention span: “because of the internet”.

It is seen as a “big threat” as it is “rewiring the brain” and (from this article in the “Daily mail”):

The neuroscientist believes technology may be behind the ‘alarming’ rise in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and the growth in the use of anti-hyperactivity drug Ritalin.

The Oxford University expert believes constant computer and internet use may be ‘rewiring the brain’, shortening attention spans, encouraging instant gratification and causing a loss of empathy.

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University in Massachusetts, said brain circuits honed by reading books and thinking about their contents could be lost as people spend more time on computers.

I do not buy this

I do not buy the theory as a whole. I think that we simply do not live in the same world as 20 and 40 years ago, from where a lot of our more “modern” morals and ideas about human nature stem.

I think this issue of distraction and lack of attention span is nothing new and pre-dates Internet with at least 50.000 to 1.000.000 years (if you add our genetic mammalian parents to the equation). People are not getting more stupid or more deficit as time progresses due to internet.

Why I write this post

The idea that Internet is destroying our youths brain seems to become a very persistent urban legend. It might have happened sometimes somewhere, everyone is talking about it and when we want to see the hard evidence, the rumor fades out… for a while.

It is also very stigmatizing. Like: “Negroes have a natural advantage in music making and dancing”.

What I think is the real issue

We simply are finding find out that the world is a better place than we imagined, with more awesome challenges than we can imagine or offered in our jobs and with a lot of people somewhere else who simply are more fun and more interesting than the ones that surround us in our close proximity.

As a consequence we just want better stuff, more interesting people, more impulses and more meaning in our work to compete with the fun stuff we can find online and the stuff we might be able to do instead.

And most of our old school models on reality, work and education are not offering this.

Blame cultural evolution

It is a logical cultural development and a logical cultural evolution. Due to the recent awesomeness of things and the instant access to exciting thoughts, old-school reality is simply… boring.

Why watch a 1980 movie with people you do not like in a story still going nowhere 30 minutes after it started when you can watch one instead that is clear, smart, focused and fun to watch? Why read a boring book written 100 years ago when there is so much other stuff that is written better, more relevant and more contemporary 2 years ago? Why listening to a boring conversation when you can play Angry Birds? Why do grey and boring stuff in a grey and boring job when the world out there can offer so much more color and fun?

Why go to school when most of the information can be found online: when you really need it?

Why read this blog?

The current 20-something generation seems to be in the middle of this. And seems to (partially) get it. And will hopefully create a smarter, faster, more humanly interesting reality while living their lives.

Eating dry, factory produced bread for lunch – because our parents did so before – simply is not acceptable anymore. In anything.

Our standards need to be revised

It is us, the old farts, with our old-school companies, old school education, old people and our old school thinking based on pre-abundance and slow-change times who are not getting the fact that the world has changed.

This new society is switching one gear up while “we”, who helped establish this, are slowly falling behind: wondering what the fuck has happened to the world around us.

One way to put it is this: writers like Charles Dickens and Jules Verne and composers like Bach and Beethoven are no longer a relevant part of our culture. They have been surpassed.

You can no longer show up in sweaters fashionable in 1991. You can no longer use approaches to things that were in fashion 20 years ago. You can no longer expect that what was relevant for you is relevant or interesting for the new generations. The world has moved on. To ignore progress is a mistake.

To believe our kids suffer from ‘attention deficit disorder’ when we bore them to death is ignoring the new reality we are shaping all the time.

And for those who believe that this new generation will be screen bound and communicating via text only: the new reality they are shaping will definitely be more social and more socially interactive than we know now. It is not them, but us, the older generations who will fall behind into more and more forms of social isolation we even never knew existed.

It is already happening without us knowing it.

So what about the deeper stuff on: “attention span disorder”?

See below.

The economics of doing things

We have an internal mechanism / wiring that measures the short term economics of things we do. It is very likely based on:

1. Sensory/emotional feedback – Is it fun? Does it please me?
2. Fast and weighted economical calculations of patterns – Allowing us to project if a thing we are doing or will be doing is rewarding.

This reward is short term and very primary. It does not involve abstract thinking. It is all aimed at fun and self-satisfaction. And it can be very destructive if there is no personal discipline to counter the actions you might take.

How short term and destructive it can be: not paying the bills, taking drugs and not putting the garbage outside gives a much greater satisfaction on the short term than doing it. On the long term you end up with a mess and without a home.

Boredom

I think – as stated before in some way – that the main issue is not “the internet” but how we deal with boredom.

When I look at my own behavior:

1. Branching out when bored – When I do something boring, or a thing that keeps me waiting, I tend to branch out to other things. I tend to go for short bursts like Twitter or reading an article on Engadged.
2. Completely immersed when interested – When the stuff interest me, like building a new framework or solving some kind of interesting challenge I completely immerse. I can forget about food, sleep, e-mail, going to the toilet. I simply do not care about what else is going on until I am done.

Interlude – Reading “Infinite jest”

I am – for instance – not able to finish the highly acclaimed (see for instance the endorsements under the synopsis here) “Infinite Jest” for the very same reason: boredom. It takes a lot of effort to continue reading what is kind of an “SF” novel that really has nothing to offer me but vague blandness in the first 100 pages that I managed to read. And since I have over 100 other books and things which are more fun and of which 10 are more mind blowing – and thus more rewarding on the short term – to read, I simply give up.

It is not that I do not like to read. Or that I only read short stuff like Twitter. It is simply that the economics of reading: “Infinite Jest” turns out to be negative in my case: Too much effort for not enough personal reward.

Were it – on the other side – that “Infinite Jest” was my only book to read next to the dictionary, in the middle of the desert and without Internet: the economy changes and I would finish it. And very likely like it.

Immediate availability and short term satisfaction

1. Economics of time and result – When I have another side project and I know I can not do anything of relevance to it, due to time constraints, I skip that option and do something else. Simpler put: it does not pay off to do “that other thing”as it does not lead to satisfactory results.
2. Snack time! Immediate result – Reading an article, wasting time on something fun is satisfactory. It has good short term economics for my system. I enjoy it. Simpler put: eating a candy bar gives much more/better short term result to my system than eating 200 grams of cooked broccoli.
3. We did not have this type of merge in the past – The “internet distractions” of the past are: crossword puzzles, television, newspapers and comic books. They all provide a similar type of satisfaction. Short, fast, economical. But in another physical location – if you want to avoid the temptation. With computers and internet, distractive media is right around the corner, anywhere you are online.
4. It is nothing new – So what has changed? Mainly that we do not have a mindset and rule set incorporated to separate our fun & games from other things. Companies do it by blocking facebook and twitter. And they are right. Unfortunately, blocking the entire internet has negative consequences as a lot of services offered decrease the “time to result”.

Personal discipline and fun

The only two ways to stay productive are discipline and fun.

Closing

To state that “the internet is changing us” is a load of crap.

What has changed is the access to- and availability of stuff that distracts us from boredom.

Since we are sitting right on top of the stuff we need, and accessing it is just typing in some keywords in Google, we need to change something in our approach to do the stuff that bores us.

On the other side, the new generations are already re-shaping the world by not fitting in the old models anymore. And I have a lot of faith in these “distracted” “”hyperactive” “deficit” “risk taking” new generation. As they resemble me more than the people who think they have a problem.

To create all kinds of support, like subsidies and life-lines – is creating an environment where you are pampered and where you carry no personal risks or responsibilities. It is an environment where you can step in, try and step out – after wasting someone else’s money – saying: “Meh, entrepreneurship never really was my thing anyway”.

Here are five things I think the Dutch (and European) Government can do to support and stimulate the Dutch startup culture.

1. Make the BV (Dutch Inc) a friendlier Legal Entity for startups - Cut the: “CEO and Owner Income tax”. Make it possible to create a “Commercial Holding” that does business, protects the owners from personal bankruptcy when things collapse and which can have share-holders. This “Commercial Holding” – by default – has no-one on the payroll.
2. Continue to invest in education – Stop cutting money on education like is happening now. Education is the brain-food for any country. Cutting money on education will lead to smart people leaving the Netherlands, as there is nothing of interest left. And smart people with smart ideas is one of the few assets the Netherlands has to offer from its own soil, apart from: milk, meat, fruit, vegetables, flower bulbs and gas.
3. Do a series of supportive campaigns on entrepreneurship - Endorsing invention, startups and investing personal smartness and brains into development of innovative new things. Focus on fun, creation and sense of reality (starting costs money, building something involves risk). Even though the individual campaigns will very likely suck ass, the commercials will have a positive long term effect.
4. Kick out any foreign Intellectual Property Lobby – Abuse of rules around Intellectual Property is one of the biggest threats of this age. It is the new battlefield and the new place where wars are waged. Trolling and killing any emerging innovative startup is very easy by sending Cease and Desist letters and starting a Intellectual Property Lawsuit. It is completely unavoidable that any new invention or innovative service will breach at least one or two existing patents in someones Corporate Basement Patent War collection.
5. Stimulate innovation via government funded “Creative Commons” Patents - Patents are by default to stimulate innovation. But not all innovation involved millions of euros in R&D that has to be earned back. So invest our tax-money in the registration process of European Patents fore Dutch innovations. I think there should be a initial fee to be invested by the person who wants to register that patent, to avoid patent-request-spam. This fee should cover something like 80% of the initial research needed to verify the validity of the patent request. Give the initial money back to the innovator if the Patent gets approved, under the condition that the patent can be used by anyone, free of any licence.

Why? And where do I come from?

I have been building several new things in the past decades that might or might not have been “innovative” and might or might not have led to a healthy company.

I have invested my own money in several of my own startups and I have done a lot of damage control when things when into another direction than planned or imagined.

I have been observing the occasional Patent Wars between different parties like Nokia, Apple and Google to understand that “stimulating innovation” has become: “planting a flag on a specific strategic territory, asking a toll to anyone who wants to pass and beating the shit out of anyone who dares to refuse”.

Entrepreneurship and the government

All entrepreneurs I know go through several phases in their lives where there is no money, no security and no clear outlook for the future. If you can not stand that kind of life and that kind of insecurity, you simply should do something else than raise a company.

I do not believe the government should do anything else than update the rules for the current need of entrepreneurship. Facilitate where needed.

The moment you – as a government – start to take away risks, you become like the protective parent holding the kids hand until very late. Part of entrepreneurship is taking risks and falling flat on your face. It is how you learn.

What I do think the government is responsible for is the following:

1. Making sure there is proper chance for education – As that is how you can train your brain and yourself to avoid the stupid things. Like wasting money on  a guaranteed failure.
2. Making sure there is a proper climate for failure – One of the worst things for entrepreneurship is to have all your possibilities cut away when you fail the first or second time. It is like falling from your bike the first round and then never be allowed to try again. This proper climate includes the freedom to learn, fail, grow and have access to information that helps you avoid taking the kinds of risks that gets you killed.

Innovation

For countries like the Netherlands, with hardly anything to offer on the international market but smart people, smart companies and smart trade, pissing away innovation is like having blood steadily trickling away from an open wound.

Patents

Patents are costly, as they are registered per country and each for the research needed before registration you pay between 2000 to 5000 euro (on estimate).

In this period of time, Patents are used more and more to wage war. They no longer simply serve to: “stimulate innovation by publishing the idea for others to use and trade under specific terms and payments”.

Looking at the commercial interests around Patents, getting a Return on Investment (by Licensing the use of a Patented Solution to others) is only one of the interests involved. The other is a guarantee that an invention can be used to create Increasing Value Due To Improvement.

In some (and I believe many) cases a “Creative Commons” Patent, will be just as beneficial as a Patent with a License of Use. Especially when Innovation is done for the greater good.

1. Ideas are protected, but can not be used as weapons to kick the shit out of you by legal action.
2. Progress can be made, based on the inventions of others and ideas can be published openly without losing business.

With the Patent Wars going on, not registering a patent can be deadly for your startup, as someone else might jump into the gap you leave and do it for you.

It is beneficial for a government to stimulate innovation within its own borders, as innovation can lead to new business and more status on the international market when done successful. So it is also beneficial for that government to assure that the ideas and innovations done by companies inside the country it governs are protected.

As Patents are invented to “Stimulate Innovation” and as Innovation is – in my eyes – of great relevance for any country doing business, the government can do the following:

1. Advertise and stimulate the request for “Creative Commons” Patents – For companies and startups who:
1. Need the protection by Patents to safeguard their business – For instance: against Patent Trolls registering their unprotected invention when they become commercially successful
2. Can not protect their idea – For instance because it can not be hidden by obscurity or it is easy to reverse-engineer the solution
3. Can not afford to pay for a normal Patent – As this is a very costly process per country.
2. Put a “Money back when successful” rule into place – For each successful step in registering a “Create Commons” Patent, you get your money back, so that you can invest that in the next step. This process should be automated.

The “Commercial Holding”

There is currently no such thing as a: “Low Cost BV” to do business from. One of the basic assumptions done by the tax-office is that you as the “CEO and Owner” are on the payroll and that you will pay yourself a salary according to your role. This salary is something like 60.000 to 80.000 euro per year. The Taxes on those wages are around 20.000 euro per year.

So unless you have a good bookkeeper, who is giving the tax-office a yearly statement stating that you received zero- to hardly any salary, you will pay 20.000 euros to the Tax Office without even earning a euro into that BV.

A “Commercial Holding” is a BV without anyone on the payroll, but making a revenue due to business. The big difference with the current BV is, that it does away with the automatic assumption that the “CEO and Owner” is on the payroll and will only pay taxes on the profit made out of revenue.

In some cases, the “CEO and Owner” simply is NOT on the payroll.

There is talk about lowering the entry-level investment. Currently that is 18.000 euro. The Entry-level investment is the starting-capital of the BV. It is there to cover for expenses and should be kept as a “war budget” when things go less than expected. However: you can take that money from the bank the moment the BV is registered, so it is not “lost forever”.

The “Commercial Holding” is primarily a “Low Cost BV”. It should cut all the running costs that come with a normal BV. And when run in “skeleton mode” should only pay taxes over Profit.

The background and protagonist is a dystopian Europe somewhere around 2060 or 2070 where copyright- and patent-lobbies have won and creativity is rewarded with lawsuits. Africa is the new shit, where everything, including post-humanism, is happening. China and the US are mere side-characters.

The stories all shed a different light on Europe and what wrecked it in the story-universe.

“Returning the favor” plays with the concept of reciprocity of bad things and game-theory on a global scale. Karma in the “eye for an eye” kind of way.

Right and un-edited from my typing a few minutes ago:

Returning the favor

1.

The sky is full of sensors and devices, floating like seagulls on upwinds from thermodynamic movements of warm air. Tapping in was like the hunting of wolves or the ganging up of hooligans. While five or six homed in on the target, the rest flocked around to watch the surroundings, bark warnings and create diversions.

Tapping in is like expanding your consciousness to the size of a city. It is like accessing the eye of god, as he imagined it as a kid.

The streets have ears and eyes and the principle is the same. There always is some kind of backdoor, some kind of wireless hub, some line running through public space to hook into. And so the city opened up  to him, like a kid running on innocence, eagerly spilling all that it had.

Three basic processes run in his bones: one to scan faces of people he was looking for, one to map their patterns and connections and one to erase his own presence. He was the invisible man. The black ghost moving through the city, seen but unregistered and immediately forgotten.

The reference to the “bones” is the strings of computing power embedded in the structure of his skeleton. It has a controlled grow and in the stores the process is compared to as controlled bone cancer and crystals. They might be strings of quantum-computers, but I leave that in the middle to avoid the mistake you find in old SF where computers span buildings and run on miniaturized vacuum tubes. The only thing relevant is the – compared to current standards – almost unlimited computing power embedded in the body itself as a semi-organic crystalline structure.

The stories are written next to each other, to fill in the gaps and to explore and enrich the universe in which they play.