This is my slowly disintegrating computer. It’s bursting apart into gadgets and modules, each one good for what it does, but none a full experience. Sometimes when I go out, I carry the screen and the speakers but not the keyboard. Other times, I don’t bother with the speakers but want the keyboard and the screen.

The far side of this seems so obvious that it feels inevitable: Computers made of ad hoc clusters of devices that are as interchangeable and compatible as an ad hoc cluster of pens, pencils, scrap paper, and notebooks. I see stacks of thinscreens as cheap and shareable as office supplies. Bits of computers as semi-communal possessions, the way that re-useable shopping bags or tupperware containers are.

It’s the latest neologism in economic theory, a combination of precarious and proletariat, defining the desideratum of the new model disaster capitalism in which employees are transformed into spare parts, to be used as needed, then discarded.

The precariat has long existed at the margins of the economy in the pieceworkers, temps, and flextimers who scrambled for fleeting employment. But now it’s growing, as jobs once given to full-time employees are instead parsed out to contracting firms, which slice off a hefty portion of worker pay, and as jobs are reduced to temporary “just in time” positions and workers are hired for brief spans as “independent contractors.”

But instead of hovering over disaster and conflict areas, how about urban and rural dead spaces or in even more remote locales? And instead of drones and toy airplanes, you conscript pigeons, starlings and other flying weeds into a wi-fi network of cyborg fauna?

This network needn’t be online all the time. The birds, after all, need some rest. So you simply let them loose, say, during rush hour to temporarily augment the network.

One imagines urban homesteaders converting a water tank into an aviary for their robo-starlings, next to their urban apiaries, urban chicken coops and urban farming tool shed. When they need to communicate with other urban homesteaders, either nearby or in another Detroit-like ruin pornscape, they only need to open the hatch. It’s an artisanal wi-fi for networked off-grid living.

In order to lessen e-waste, each starling is equipped with a homing beacon, which will signal home should the animal die in flight. The homesteader simply has to trace the electronic beeps to collect the carcass and its outfittings. In the meantime, the beacon will be powered by the decaying organic matter.

The Internet continues to change people’s lives, and lets them connect in new ways, often quicker than companies and governments can respond. Ben Hammersley explained that people with similar interests, cultures and beliefs have more in common than people who live near to each other – what we’ve known as countries – or with our families, and the Internet means they can self-organise. Officials are used to hierarchies (“take the leader out”) not unstructured networks or sheets of people that can instantly reconfigure and change everything from tactics to what they believe in, as we’ve seen with the various protests about tax evasion and student fees in the UK. Ben posited that Governments should spend more time understanding the web – should there be British ambassadors for Wal-Mart and Google rather than the Seychelles? Which has more impact on the UK?

Caroline Lucas, Green Party leader and MP for Brighton Pavilion, called yesterday for Freedom Of Information (FOI) legislation to be extended to banks, telecoms operators and other large corporations providing key services to the public.

In her speech to the Green Party spring conference in Cardiff, Lucas said: “We depend on these corporations in just the same way as we depend on schools or hospitals to deliver our services. When they fail, we all suffer – so they must be opened up to public scrutiny. That’s why I am proposing that the current FOI act be extended to cover major corporations.”

All in all: fun times. Expect them to get weirder. I mean, aggrieved optical illusion creators don’t have anything like the political and legislative clout of other potential 3D printing complexifiers. Imagine what happens when some magistrate in Alabama decides that Thingiverse is liable for hosting 3D models of sex toys (illegal in AL) and issues a bench warrant for Bre Pettis’s arrest. Or when someone from Shapeways shows up at CES in Vegas, only to discover that the state Drug Enforcement Agency has issued a warrant on the basis of a bong design available at Shapeways, violating the state’s strict anti-drug-paraphenalia laws. Or someone from i.materialise gets an EU extradition request from Germany because someone’s printed a detailed, historically accurate toy soldier with a swastika armband, violating Germany’s strict laws against Nazi paraphernalia.

And just wait until someone creates a printer that can reproduce patented pharmaceutical compounds or Monsanto’s patented life-forms! Now there are a couple of villains with a lot of resources to throw at making the whole Internet’s life miserable in order to squeeze an extra 0.05% into the quarter’s bottom line.

The Internet per se looks more and more like a net loss to capitalism.

* How do you think social media will affect the development of virtual currencies?

Technologies always diverge, economies always converge. Facebook credits will become an international currency as important (or more important?) than the dollar, euro, or yen.

* Do you think Facebook is ultimately worth its multi-billion-dollar valuation? Groupon?

Yes to Facebook — when you surreptitiously take over Earth’s economy and telecommunications system simultaneously, that’s worth something. Groupon… maybe. What we don’t know yet about Groupon is whether competitors can unseat it. It’s too late to unseat Facebook.