But, commercio-technical though the sessions were, some not-so-conventional spots managed to emerge:

* Electric Sheep. A project by Scott Draves, it's a distributed screensaver project, along the lines of SETI@home , but without the mission to hunt for extraterrestrials (or anything else.) Electric Sheep's mission is to generate psychedelic graphic animations, and users collectively vote for their favorites, which then are allowed to increasingly reproduce. A-Life computer art projects are of course nothing new, but Draves' perspective - practical Darwinism applied to grooviness - is refreshing in its honesty about doing nothing serious and important - it's A-Life just for kicks.

* Networked Objects. Tom Igoe's presentation of some of his New York University students' networked physical computing projects, including the E-mail Clock (time marches on as the kilobytes fill your inbox), The Protest Button (Floodnet style DOS attacks for street protesters - push a physical button instead of clicking at your web browser) and the Sensing Bed (feel your partner in bed when s/he is away - reminiscent of the infamous FuckU-FuckMe.)

And, somehow an appropriate swan song, this talk during the last session of the conference:
* CarBot. It's a car PC - not a new idea, admits Los-Angeles based Damien Stolarz, its creator. But Stolarz takes an approach rarely seen since the dot-com euporhia days, when tech startups believed they could make money doing just about anything. Stolarz unabashedly designs Carbot (price point still a mystery) for the gadget-head who has everything, and doesn't worry about "what do you need *that* for?" - assuming instead that the uses will emerge. So the CarBot has functions like reading your e-mail (and spam) in an exotic female voice with a British accent (It makes spam much more enjoyable, according to Stolarz.) Of course, CarBot is still a commercial product, whose purpose is to make money, and whose inital target group is presumably the financially well-off. But there's more to it than that: Carbot says a few things about the culture that spawned it. Its mission is to provide a bittersweet sort of entertainment in their rolling homes to Los Angelinos, who unfortunately often spend more waking hours in the car than in their house or apartment. But it also harkens back to the paradoxically consumerist-yet-not-so-commercial tech culture of the dot-com boom... when, despite (or because of) all the venture capitalists and materialist excess at its core, tech culture seemed to have enough breathing room to actually be a culture, not just an industry.

So O'Reilly hasn't provided an American answer to the CCC conference, of course, and it's unrealistic to expect that a corporation would. I still wonder though, if non-corporate US tech culture could ever produce such a thing. Or if enough non-corporate US tech culture still exists to do so - if it ever did. And if someday soon, we'll be able to ride our Segways to our cars.