Ars Electronica festival aims to fix a broken world

Ars Electronica is a digital media and art festival currently going on in Linz, Austria. The 31st annual event will conclude this Saturday, September 11. Since its debut over thirty years ago, it's been a creative forum for design, art and technology. Last year, there were all kinds of strange items, including a do-it-yourself-kit that converts urine into fertilizer for your houseplants. This past weekend, Deutsche Welle's Sruthi Pinnamaneni went to Ars and came back to tell us what eyebrow-raising ideas she came across.

Deutsche Welle: So, Sruthi, what going on at this year's Ars festival?

Sruthi Pinnamaneni: Hey Cyrus. I didn't quite find something that stacks up to that pee converter that you found last year. This year's festival seems to have taken a turn towards the tamer side. The theme was 'Repair,' and the curators tried to bring together a number of artists, scientists and business people to fix what has been broken in the world: the economy, the environment, our society.

That's quite a modest goal for a week-long festival.

Definitely. And it took place in an appropriately apocalyptic space. This year's venue is the Tabakfabrik, an abandoned tobacco processing plant whose hulking complex was built in the 30s by German and Austrian architects. It's a symphony in Communist brown and turquoise blue, and is full of holes and widening cracks - which made it the perfect repair ground for Jan Vormann. He's a street artist and sculpture student from Berlin, whose hobby it is to cover the missing tiles and cracks on the surfaces of buildings using: Lego blocks.

Are you serious – Lego blocks?

Serious. Jan has left his trail of Lego corrections in Berlin, Tel Aviv, New York and several other cities.

When I found him at Ars, he was crouched near a spot with missing tiles, carefully fitting Lego blocks over the open area. He told me about his inspiration, which strangely enough comes from old, rustic Italy.

Here's how Vormann explained it to me.

Jan Vormann uses Lego blocks to patch up cracks and crumbling corners

Jan Vormann: The idea was in Bocignan in an Italy, it was a beautiful city, where the needs were stronger than the aesthetic. The people used to build with the stone that they had. They fixed old Roman walls with brick and plaster. It is all mixed up like patchwork. The idea was. This is a possibility to do something outside without coming in conflict with the law because of this positive repair aspect.

Hang on, so this guy is actually repairing bits of wall with Legos? Are they strong enough to withstand big, modern walls?

Let me explain something – the Legos are purely visual surface repairs. Almost like a patch sewn onto a pair of jeans. They don't actually hold up anything.

Oh, ok. I was going to say. Still though, it sounds pretty cool. After all, when you use Lego blocks for example - then the repair becomes part of the story of whatever it is that's broken.

Right, that's exactly the point.

Now, the repair theme at Ars extended beyond the physical world, and into the online world. In fact, there was something at Ars where programmers and panelists were not asking for a repair - rather they were screaming that the thing be thrown out and an all-new replacement found.

OK, so what was it?

Facebook.

Facebook? What's wrong with Facebook?

What's wrong with Facebook? C'mon. Lots of people worldwide - especially where you are in Germany - have plenty of questions about its privacy policy, and they want to know how the company is sharing their data.

So to find out more, I spoke to Maxwell Salzberg, who along with three fellow New York University students, created what they say could be a secure, personally controlled, open-source version of the social network. It's called Diaspora.

Right, I've been hearing a lot of discussion online about Diaspora in the last few months. Back in April, they put out a call for funding on a website that helps people find money for projects. They asked for $10,000 (7,800 euros) and in no time, they raised more than $200,000 (156,000 euros). Heck, even Mark Zuckerberg himself, the founder of Facebook, donated some money.

Right, and that initial $10,000 was supposed to be enough money to sustain them on Ramen noodles and pizza while they coded through the summer. They still seem shocked at how much they raised with so little effort.

Salzberg explained to me why they decided to pour their student energy into Diaspora:

Maxwell Salzberg is one of the founders of Diaspora, a new open-source alternative to Facebook

Maxwell Salzberg: Facebook is this weird thing. You give up so much for something that's ultimately not some sort of technological marvel. It has no notion of your privacy and they have shown again and again that they are willing to change your defaults and their goal is to make the Internet more open, whether you actually want that or not. It's weird that we're in a place where there's no good alternative. If you're willing to be a tin-foil hat and you want to be on a social network, there's nowhere to go, even for geeks and hackers, which is just an anomaly of technology because there's usually a glut of any idea.

I like that "tin-foil hat" label. But how does Diaspora work? Say I'm a tin-foil hat but I also want to be part of an online community -- why would Diaspora be a better option than other social networks? I mean, why should I trust Diaspora over Facebook, or any other social network?

Social networks like Facebook direct all your data to a central hub that they own. The idea behind Diaspora is that users install their own "seeds." The Diaspora guys chose the word "seed" because it's cuter and less scary than "server," but essentially this means users will have their own server where they fully control what information they share with other users.

This seed is combined with the idea of group functionality, which means that when you add friends to your network, you must choose what group or "context" they belong to.

In a way it's simple. The Diaspora model is a radical shift from what we’ve become used to with social networks. Facebook, for instance, works on a service-agreement model where it says you can use its community-sharing platform, but in exchange for that, it can put its hands into your data. Diaspora, on the other hand, does not want to host people's data; rather, it would push you to host your own data or engage in a hosting agreement with a party of your choice. In other words, users would opt for a relationship similar to the one with their electricity company--the company provides a service (in this case, hosting) but cannot touch the data or see what users do with it. It’s a blackbox model.

And how would they make money? Do they charge a monthly fee like the electricity company? Am I going to have to pay for Diaspora?

Good question. At this stage, they are not sure. But on September 15th - that's next Wednesday - they will release the source code for Diaspora. And that will begin the long process of testing the concepts and adding functionality. They are a ways away from challenging the big boys.

Ok, I'm definitely going to poke around on Diaspora when it comes out. Thanks a lot for sharing this year's Ars Electronica with us, Sruthi!

Anytime, Cyrus.

Author: Sruthi Pinnameneni
Editor: Cyrus Farivar