Meeting Notes 2020 01 07

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Introductions[edit]

  • Zach - chief narrative officer - DefinitelyReal.com ARC (alt reality cinema)
  • Matt - lotsa diff’t stuff, got a grant for buying electronics for NB!
  • Gwen - she/her - grant writing help?
  • Naomi - I like to take meeting notes
  • Andy/Lemons - moderator, I like running the meeting! Bring more clowns
  • Steve - member, work in physics, ds, music
  • Jeremy - like to hack electronics, sewing, fixing things
  • Victor - software but also run a fundraiser, Comedy Show! Next one is Feb 1
  • Daniel - programming and ML, first time here
  • Anna - Python, first time here
  • Christine - she/her - middle school teacher, hang out w/ Corey
  • Corey - him/this/that - build robots, teach ppl to build, excited to hear from Zach
  • Milo - haven’t been here in a while. Do homework.
  • Relay - he/him. Like to play with OSsoftware.
  • Galen - she/they. Artist. Would like to learn woodworking skills.
  • Jared - he/him. 2nd time here. Metalworking, welding, electronics.

Announcements & Events[edit]

  • Feb 1 fundraiser. RVSP. 8pm Comedy Show!!! (“Really fucking funny” — Lemons)
  • Matt - bike party in the East Bay. This Friday. Meet at Richmond BART 7pm. Tries to roll out at 8pm. Tries to end so you can get back on a BART train at night.

Excellence[edit]

  • Do-ocracy: do whatever, just be excellent when you do!
  • Most things you can do by organizing with people around you. Small-C consensus items.
  • AHP

Philanthropist[edit]

  • Someone who is someone who comes into well regard w/ people in the space. — Relay
  • They donate $$ to the space. — Relay
  • If they can’t donate $$ we appreciate your time and effort! — Matt
  • You’re expected to know how to close the place up and make sure no one who just came in here their first day is lingering around when you close up. — Relay
  • For Phil and Membership at NB, giving $ is only one aspect. More importantly, are you a person who’s been here a bunch and understand the culture?
  • “Would we give that person 24 hour access”

Nobody up for Philanthropist this week.[edit]

Membership[edit]

Nobody in the binder up for Membership this week.

Treasurer’s Report[edit]

Tyler sez:  $151,586.61 in the bank. And approximately $10k in crypto.

Fundraising[edit]

  • No Starch Press grant came through (not paid yet).
  • Several ppl have gotten grants, e.g.
  • If you want to discuss the electronics-buying grant w/ Matt, come to Circuit Hacking Monday!
  • NB stays above water b/c of the Overwhelming Goodness of the Smurf Village. Donations!! —Andy

Consensus[edit]

  • MEMBERS get the ability to Block a big-C consensus item. This is why we are careful with —Steve

Discussions[edit]

  • Abandoned VPS instances R found some abandoned Linode and Digital Ocean VPS instances — get on #rack or contact @r if you know anything.
  • DefinitelyReal ARC — Call for Proposals ($100k in art grants available) Zach Fish is an artist and producer here to talk about a major multifaceted internet-based narrative project called Definitely Real and how YOU can get involved!
  • Zach shows a 10-min video as an intro to the content and subject matter.
    • Motivations:
      • INFORM about security, privacy, safety on the internet.
      • Show all the sides of arguments - “astroturf dialogue”
      • Not JUST demonstrate that things are messed-up right now (we know that!)

Eva: Do you have lawyers, EFF like?

Zach: Yes!

Steve: This hasn’t started yet…?

Zach: Michael threw a screening of the 1st ep of the series. Most of it is done, some eps are still being created. But it hasn’t started yet.

Steve: No one’s supposed to know though right?

Zach: Maybe it would be great if it “leaked!” Then we’d have the opportunity to DENY that it is fake!! 😄

Galen: for the peripheral work, how will it be tied to the 11-day story of Zander and David?

Zach: core narrative is internally produced. Collab narrative == ppl in this room, art grants. Peripheral == regular humans on the internet.

Galen: Ah so collaborative narrative.

Zach: The least-integrated range, things are heavily integrated with our themes. Like someone could write a series of blog posts about deep fakes, and use one or two of our series videos as examples. We’re not here to fool people, we’re here to engage ppl w/ misinformation. Higher-end, lots of things: somebody pitched a School for Crisis Actors. We’re not gonna really make a school. It’s an ad campaign and a website. And maybe we’ll make it seem like the characters could have gone to that school. All of that is fake, none of that points to anything that is real, unlike the blog posts which are basically real.

Galen: have you considered the health and safety implications of copycats or ppl who are not involved who m might be negatively impacted.

Zach: yes. Every day. Think about it all the time. As a design factor… this is happening. I’m learning about this b/c of what is already happening on the internet. We’re not telling the story to make these people look good; by the end of the story the audience will have developed some distaste for the main characters. Definitely don’t want to create like a recipe book for trolling. And I don’t know that bringing attn to the dangers of deep fakes makes it any worse. By telling people “here be tigers!” I don’t think I’m telling people how to be tigers.

Galen: Your kids look pretty young, like ppl using TikTok right now. Maybe those kids will be inspired to do jackass kinds of things.

Zach: Yeah, this is a problem. This is the balance of art that shines light on hard issues. I don’t have The Answer but I’m definitely thinking about these things.

Galen: Example coming to mind about this: I learned about a flash mob group. Flash mob found this band on MySpace. This time we’re going to hire 100s of people to learn their song and come to their show and sing all their songs and they couldn’t believe their ears and eyes. And it ruined their lives. They thought they were the butt of a joke and that they’d never experienced that For Real in their entire lives.

Zach: difference between prank and participatory art piece. Art has an audience; pranks have victims.

Zach: Good design means we think about the audience.

Galen: but this is the Big Playground, the internet is everyone. How can you think about everyone?

Zach: Well. We’re trying to. 🙂

Q: Someone is making money off this? Where does the money go?

Zach: There will be investors being paid back. Art grants promised. Different art projects get different “points” for profit-sharing later.

Q: Entirely shared by the point system?

Zach: Including video sales and ancillary spinoffs — proven concepts are what get pitched (e.g. Netflix shows) — but yes, if any of the art projects succeed they will get money from that.

Lemons: how much should I say the average size of an art grant is?

Zach: range up to $10k, the bulk should be in the $500 average area.

Lemons: Anonymization — look at something called NoiseTor …

R: uh I think that got shut down

Naomi: Well THAT could be a great project

Q: How about OXFORD ANALYTICA

Zach: You’re a shoo-in. Yes.

Lemons: What about projects to do performances in the real world?

Zach: Yeah, meatspace art, so, this project has a large-scale target. So anything you do in RealSpace needs to be done with an eye towards it becoming digital and going viral. We have a viral video PERSON! Like “I have this idea, how can I make it go viral”, we could HELP you blow it up. We will try to get it seen by 100k+ people. The audience is the internet. Art-on-art action is always the right idea.

Rebecca: how do I know if I am encountering something as a member of the audience what is part of this project?

Zach: It will not be clear during the course of the project. At the end we’re going to pull the curtain up, as a full disclosure and a way to deactivate the project.

Eva: One of the big problems w/ intellectual property is that fair uses are protected… parody is protected but satire is not.

Zach: EVERYTHING is going to go through a lawyer. We’re not going to make fake statements about real people (unless we find ppl who want us to say fake things about them — we’re looking for celebrities to do this, in fact). But Cambridge Analytica can come at me!!

Galen: How will you judge the success of each contribution? How will that success impact your goals?

Zach: Not sure if I have exact goals. Depending on $$ we give, we will have different expectations. Marketing might define certain numbers and metrics for success. The qualitative assessment Is did we make a good piece? Did people notice we made a piece? If they don’t notice, maybe that’s ok, but if people have the conversation we intended, that’s the success case for me. The project ends right before the election! So just being a part of that discussion is important to me.

Relay: if someone creates a lot of content but don’t know it’s fake, will you give them money?

Zach: Right, so If someone makes a successful blog referencing our material, will we pay them? Gosh I want to say Yes we will, but will I know about that person? Can I connect with that person? I think we won’t know about that kind of thing until the close of the project. But yeah it’s a great thought.

Zach: one project we’re really doing is called Mothers Against Bullying. And even though it’s part of the project it’s also a real thing with real mothers talking about how to stop bullying! We might not even take that down after the project is over.

Lemons: What about projects that are purely tools you can use. E.g. lots of hackers here, so maybe we want to download all of Wikipedia and use it to generate new Wikipedia articles. Those are the

Zach: YES but I would be looking for “the life giving sword” if you will, the projects that illuminate the problem and/or provide capabilities to fight that problem. So someone is making a Chrome extension that highlights all the “lies” on the internet. So you get it and then it turns out it just highlights things randomly. 😄 I don’t know what the point of a misinformation generator would be, but we can technologically play with the concept of misinformation itself.

Eva: “White Hat Disinformation”

Zach: omg that’s amazing. Thank you. YES, weird satirical misinformation projects.

Eva: It’s Yes Men.

Steve: […]

Zach: So you are suggesting an AI that detects content written by AIs?

Steve: Yes

Zach: YES! This is absolutely on target. And your AI-detecting-AI could “Go Rogue” and accuse everything of being an AI! I just found this story about two Russian bots that have been arguing with each other endlessly.

Galen: Do you know if it’s legal to make a deep fake of a person?

Zach: I mean we’re already doing it… I can deep fake someone satirically and get away with it. Someone used Mr Bean on a sexy video and probably won’t get in trouble for that. Obama deep fake happened.

Eva: “Deep Fake The Poor”

Corey: How about fake politicians in videos?

Naomi: You could fake some politicians running for office in the town the characters live in.

Zach: I’d be all about it if someone wanted to run for fake mayor of Emmeton.

Galen: Is Jan 31st a firm date? [for the RFP]

Zach: Uahghg you don’t have to be done the art project, just write some words about it!

Zach: OK SO… The next time you can hear me talk about this is next week on a webinar [insert date]. Check it out here: https://definitelyreal.com/creators


End of Meeting[edit]

UNMEETING TIME


FINANCE (Brief Update - full detail when Tyler gets back in town)

  • 2019 Total Balance +/-
  • January $ 190,788.85 ----- 914.27
  • February $ 185,544.13 ----- (5,244.72)
  • March $ 177,545.49 ----- (7,998.64)
  • April $ 173,861.58 ----- (3,683.91)
  • May $ 175,765.69 ----- 1,904.11
  • June $ 170,961.14 ----- (4,804.55)
  • July $ 160,191.21 ----- (10,769.93)
  • August $ 171,794.18 ----- 11,602.97
  • September $ 165,739.21 ----- (6,054.97)
  • October $ 172,961.99 ----- 7,222.78
  • November $ 171,716.57 ----- (1,245.42)
  • December $ 151,586.51 ----- (20,130.06)

Note to financials:

  • Recently I sent out $11,812 (July) and $10,992 (December) to reimburse Roguelike Celebrations. The payment made in July should have been made in 2018, but was super delayed.
  • Some big ticket items went out in December - Laser cutter repair, tax prep fees, general insurance, DNO Insurance, and the $10,992 to Roguelike.

January - June includes $20,474 of spend on Krebs consulting

Synopis: We need more money.


annouuncments - We got some grants from no starch press - We have some services running being paid for by credit card which is expiring. - Not sure if this is supporting any valuable services. Check with rack to confirm.