Subversive Object

It should be mass reproducible and dirt cheap, 10¢ would be great, $1 ok.

It's a tiny speaker, very discreet.

It loops a special message over and over again.

You can't stop it until the batteries run out.

Maybe you can call it distributed broadcasting, or maybe its really shortcasting I don't know.

I want it, for er artistic purposes.

If its not feasible now it will be very soon.

Correction: Bitpass Loves Paypal

According to senior Bitpass executives, the whole Bitpass Paypal drama reported here earlier was all a simple mistake. Everything has been corrected, Bitpass and Paypal play nicely together again, as they should. Please disregard any earlier remarks and remember I'm not a journalist I just pretend to be one on the interweb sometimes.

Original text, no longer valid is below. Please also note that Josh Ellis is actually a Bitpass contractor, not employee, a fact I was not aware of at the time.

----------- no longer valid ----------------------

Just got off the phone with Josh Ellis of Bitpass and its official, Paypal has shut down Bitpass' seller account on Saturday and has given them 7 days to prove their service is not in violation of the US Patriot act as reported originally on Waxy.org.

All indications are that this is an act of fear, Paypal is striking out at Bitpass in one of the few ways its can. This is anti competitive practice in a nasty way and is getting close to an anti trust violation. Money is a dirty business even when its digital my friends.

As for the actual threat to Bitpass' functionality, its not that large. Bitpass is not reliant on Paypal, they can function just fine with people using credit cards to fill their accounts. So its just a legal drama at the moment, lets see where it leads.

-------------end no longer valid text-------------------------

as you can see this lead nowhere, mistakes were made and mistakes where fixed. Go use Bitpass, ok?

Referenced for Future Reference: 5050 Ltd

5050 Ltd makes interesting technology + fashion thing things.

[via styleborg]

Referenced for Future Reference: Neil Spiller

From the comments Beverly Tang (whose phlog is both beautiful and fascinating) sends me to Neil Spiller who teaches at The Bartlett School of Architecture, Building, Environmental Design and Planning in London. His work looks exciting and his book Digital Dreams: Architecture and the New Alchemical Technologies is now on my wish list.

Now back to work.

proce55ing

Processing 1.0 ALPHA

its a data visualizing art project. Couldn't figure out what was cool about it on a quick surf, but Casey Reas is involved so I'm bookmarking it for reference. For the now though it just seems like an unimpressive data visualization program, but I assume there is more.

[via zephoria: beautiful visualizations]

Unplug Architecture

[via beverly tang | (un)plug]

Hit the Breaks

Accelerating Change Conference 2003 has got to be the scariest name for a conference I've ever heard. Conclusive evidence that the high tech "visionaries" have lost all contact with the reality of earth? Their logo sure makes it seem that way, as does the inclusion of delusional fanatics Ray Kurzweil and K. Eric Drexler (peep Tim Oren's reaming of his vision.)

I mean seriously "Accelerating Change" who the fuck are we kidding? I'm all for using tech to change the world. But if we want to do it be best do it right. And that means careful and rigorous implementation of new tech, not an acceleration. If anything we need to slow down the rate of change, least we smash head long into a nightmarish future. Looks like a few in silicon valley still are taking hits of the VC crack pipe... At least they included the clear thinking Tim O'Reilly. Scary shit, from the people who brought you the dot com bubble. Can someone from the Bay's Whole Earth crew introduce the concept of sustainability to these fools?

[via Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Accelerating Change Conference 2003]

update: the above is probably at touch unfair, the organizing organization address some of these critiques on their site. 'We recognize that humanity's central choice in technology development is not a blind advocacy of acceleration, but a selective catalysis. Thus our more complete, implied, and ungainly title would be: "Institute for Selectively Accelerating Change."' But that's a cop out in my book, adding a word to dramatically change the meaning is not "ungainly" and the logo is patently absurd. But they obviously aren't quite as pie in the sky as they might be on first look. Still the overall critique holds, tech change alone is not going improve the world, the issues are far broader then these people want to admit...

A Blossoming

Its been a long time coming and its so close I smell it. Creative doldrums have dominated the past few years in music and style. These are dark economic times and creativity has been nursing a major hangover after partying like 1999 for most of a decade. But I see buds breaking, rhizomes reemerging above the ground. A new mutant aesthetic is on its rise. Imagine it as a building. It has history, 100 years back it was a tenement. 2 years ago it was crumbling husk of shattered brick wall. Weeds growing everywhere, graffiti covering all smooth surfaces. Today you enter through a side door, black painted steel covered in tags, stickers and stencil. You are in the back, you are in a garden. Bamboo shoots and white orchids. A small stream wanders through. The walls are covered with the original graf, throw-ups mixed with fantastic wild style pieces. You turn and head up the stairs, clear plastic meets plate glass, you are back in a dream of the future. Hi tech form and function. You reach the landing and pause, the wall is a shifting plastic, the latest of tech you presume. But the door is almost floating in it. The doorway has moldings, left over from a past life perhaps? Layers of paint are peeling of the door like a beach shack, the knob is dented copper.

You enter to a space of pure light, projections dance around you all walls, floors and ceiling, this is pure information transformed in pure beauty. Needless to say the sound system is slamming. Your eyes shift to the corner, an space between the walls you missed on the first scan, you head into it. Another staircase, heading up. The walls are covered with drawings, their are hundreds of stories on these walls, dozens of artists intertwined as they tell their tales. Perhaps you spend years deciphering them, but more likely you reach the landing and a door slides upon for you. Now the floors are hardwood. Large windows cut into exposed brick on three walls give you a view back into the street, you are still in your city. The back wall is bookshelves, the collection is of course flawless, there are comfortable chairs, you'll need to return to read. Display cases filled with scientific curiosities are scattered through the space, their is much to learn. But first you push forward rooms splattered with paint, rooms that make you think you are pac man, a fireplace someplace, a rec room, low ceilings for intimacy, high ceilings to uplift the soul. Intricate carvings contrasted with minimal simplicity. This is a meshwork, a space of cross breeding. At first perhaps you attempt to localize everything, give it a name, a place, a time. But this doesn't last long, the handcrafted weaves back and forth with the digital, the historical melds seamlessly with the hi tech.

Who created this space, a graf artist? media mogul? perhaps a woodworker, but then maybe it was a plastics designer. You look for the cracks separating the spaces, and they are not there. There must be a point where one craftsman transitions to another, but you can not put your finger on it. Could it be that this space was not created but grew instead? I suppose that means its still growing.

Nightout

Tropical Invention Paradise

Social Design Notes: Gaviotas

wow, just read it, its great stuff, hard to find a real sum up pull quote, but this is a start:

Gaviotas provided a chance to plan a tropical civilization from the ground up, instead of depending on technologies developed for northern climates. ‘When we import solutions from the US or Europe,’ said Lugari, founder of Gaviotas, ‘we also import their problems.’

The Technoarchy

Technoarchy: a form of oligarchy where society is controlled by those who use technology the best. Unlike traditional oligarchies technoarchies are generally emergent. For the most part they are not created deliberately, but rise out of the properties of the dominant technology of the time, ie the networked computers of the 21st century.

According to google it was used with a potentially similar meaning once before, in an essay I have yet to get my hands on. If anyone knows of any other prior uses, please let me know. Same goes for other words with a similar meaning.

Expect an essay in the near future.

Punk Rock Cell Phone

My Treo 300 cell/pda broke the other day. Not in any digital or electronic way, its a pure mechanical failure. Phone and pda work great still, but the flip mechanism for opening the device is straight busted. Flip open the phone and the top half is left dangling. Worst part about it is anyone with a couple weeks of high school physics could have predicted this issue, the failure is engineered right into the device. Every time you open the phone, a strong metal spring pushes the soft plastic flip top open. Hard metal pushing on soft plastic, its going to break, guaranteed. And I've only had this particular Treo 300 for 7 months.

Planned obsolescence sucks no matter how you cut it, but I've come to expect I'll be getting a new phone every 12-18 months or so. 7 seems a short for an obvious design flaw. Especially since the replacement model isn't even due out for another few months.

Anyway despite this problem I still think the Treo's are the best devices on the market. The killer app in a palm for me is email, so it needs to be a phone combo. And it needs a keyboard. The Treo is the best of that small bunch.

Anyway for reasons I'm not going to go into here, I'm keeping my current Treo till the new model comes out, rather then having insurance replace it. So that means I'm going full cyberpunk on it. A pda phone held together with wire, velcro and electrical tape. Its the new style, you hear me? All those shiny new devices need to get out like Tom Cruise, its all about the hacked up tech pappi.

Infoporn on the Rise?

The Economist has a good overview of info visualization software. Nothing really new, but as par for the Economist its very rational and well written. If you take its neoliberal tilt into account, the Economist tends to be ahead of the mainstream info curve on these things. Signs of a infoviz explosion? (bubble?) Early to say.

Has anyone out there actually played with Paul Hawken's Grokker?

[via Submunition: Economist: Grokking the Infoviz]

Growing Transit - The Bamboo Bicycle

Talk about rolling your own. I love shit like this. Stronger then steel and it grows like a weed. Looks like the bike might even be fixed gear. Hell yeah.

NYT on Micropayments

Developing Systems of Online Payment

Good to see Bitpass get some press. Expect more experiments with this system in the near future.

Living Machines

Social Design Notes: The Living Machine

More good stuff from the all to infrequently updated Social Design Notes. Very much on the Paul Hawkin, William McDonough tip.

Non Profit Product

Mitch Kapor's Weblog: Reflections on OSAF as an Organization

Mitch Kapor is the founder of Lotus a huge software company in the 80's, I believe its now part of IBM. He also co-founded the EFF. His current project is a non profit organization (OSAF) developing an open source software product. The link above details some of the motivations and philosophy behind the project.

Why do I care? Because this a serious project that attempts to break many of the economic models that underpin our society of state sponsored private corporation driven capitalism. Public traded corporations make money, non profits beg for it (or if they are lucky inherit it), and the government wedges in between sometimes making things better, sometimes accelerating problems and enforcing the spaces of power.

I know there is a better way. I think Mitch Kapor does to, and he's in a situation to really do something about it. And so far it looks like he's doing a great job. I'll be watching developments with great interest.

Cash, the Concrete and Political Abstractions: Towards a New Economy of Ideas

Harry Potter did $100 million in book sales just last weekend alone. A successful Hollywood movie does $100 million in a few weeks.

The reason that political giving does not reach these sorts of totals —in a nation of over 280 million people—is not that people don’t value the presidency—but that the conventional mechanisms for political donating don’t scale. George Bush’s money is raised through small networks of wealthy individuals who tap their friends, family, and business associates. While this network is effective up to a point, it cannot compare to the scalability of a nationwide system of theaters, retail stores, or the Internet.

- Jim Moore

That's from Moore's post linked previously. And he's entirely right. But there is another dynamic at work here as well, one that politicians and non-profits have never successfully addressed. These groups are in the business of selling abstract ideas. A politician is selling the idea that he can improve the nation, community or world. An non profit sells the idea that they can fix a particular range of problems. They are selling intangible products.

Corporations on the other hand sell tangibility. A soda you can drink, a service that effects you quickly. These are easy sells. People are willing to drop $100 million on Harry Potter because they walk of with a book in their hands, or at least in the mail.

What do you get when you give to a politician or non profit? Its hard to say, maybe a t-shirt or mug if you are lucky. And then if things work out you get the reward way down the road, when you read the paper and hear you're candidate or group is doing a good job.

Now there is a massive amount of support for political and social action in the abstract. But cash is concrete. Credit cards and the internet make it a bit less tangible, but we still feel the flow of money. Its finite and has concrete effects. The problem facing candidates is that they need to transform abstract support into cold hard cash. Right now they use a few techniques, the main being face time with the candidate (for the wealthy only). They also throw in those mugs, stickers and t-shirts. You know the ones no one really wants unless they are obsessive...

The internet solves some of the problem by making the flow of money less concrete. Its easier to part with money by clicking on a link then by handing over cash or writing a check. But it still takes motivation to click that link. And how often do you wake up and say I feel like giving some money away to a candidate?

What politicians and non profits need to do is provide a more concrete method for abstract supporters of the cause to transfer their money. Here's one potential way it could work.

Suppose you are thirsty and walking down the street. You walk into the nearest store and head to the bottled water section. The usual corporate brands are there, Crystal Geyser, Poland Spring, Arrowhead, etc. But there is also bottles of Howard Dean and George Bush water on the shelf. They are well branded and taste great. (And whoever says water has no taste is just wrong). You can give your money to some corporation or you can give your money to a political cause. What are you going to do? I'd say most people would support a cause they care for.

So someone buys a Howard Dean water, and the campaign makes 20¢. 5 million supporters buying one bottle a day equals a million dollars a day in campaign funds. $350 million a year. More then the whole presidential election is expected to cost, for all the candidates combined... And that wouldn't even put a dent in the multi-billion dollar US market for bottled water.

Now this raises a lot of issues I don't have time to get into at the moment, but the bottom line is that opening up new paths for people to express their political views could transform politics dramatically. For the better and for the worse, but more for the better. More soon.

Digital Shoplifting: Cameraphones and Secret Social Rules

Japanese bookstores desperate to stop 'digital shoplifting' with cellphones [via die puny humans]

This is pretty fucking funny. People going into stores and taking pictures of magazines, and they call it stealing? I've been pretty surprised how fast these cameraphones have taken off. And I think a lot of people are going to be surprised how much they effect society. We are about to hit a point where almost every social interchange is going to be potentially recorded and broadcast. Stopping it will require big time effort on the part of government and corporations. I don't think they'll make the effort to stop it.

You are under surveillance, live with it. David Brin's The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? explores some of the potential effects. But its a bit bland, I still haven't finished it... It's hard to say exactly what will happen, but I am pretty sure some of the unspoken mores that govern our society will break.

Monogamous marriage for one is a prime candidate for shattering. Its already worn down with our divorce rates. And what happen's when you can tell where your spouse is at any given time? Cheating is supposed to be wrong, yet our society if rife with it. It falls into a shift gray zone, and is ignored in order to maintain a system of monogamy. What happens if technology makes it virtually impossible to cheat? Does monogamy break? Or do we change our codes of behavior? Society as a whole may be heading for some cognitive dissonance. Heads up y'all.

The Revolution Will Not Be Idealized

Damn, my friend Adam Greenfield is in a dystopian mood today. He writes from Seoul, South Korea:

Show me a case where e-mail or blogs or smart mobs really and unambiguously did bring down a tyrant. Show me a situation in which even one high-school bully was put in their place with the aid of this technology, let alone the pathetic tinhorn strongmen that still ru(i)n so much of this pretty sphere... I mean on the macro scale. Is the planet as a whole detectably better-off in the wake of a decade of decentralized, low-cost-of-entry information availability? Are we better informed, less superstitious, more open-minded, more curious, stronger, less afraid? Do we make better choices?

Christ Adam, take a deep breath. I almost bought the new PDA with the "end tyranny" button, but Howard dean outbid me... Seriously though, this is important; revolutions do not solve problems, they transform problems. The French didn't just wake up one morning in the late 1700's and say "we have no king, life is perfect". Gutenberg didn't print out his first bible and then kick back and watch the world fix itself while making love to Helen of Troy. We live in an imperfect world. Perfectly imperfect some would say.

Life is good, life is bad, times are good, times are bad. You still have the power to set your own pace. And no you aren't going to end poverty by building a website or chatting on IM. But a scream in Calcutta can now be heard in East New York and that means something. Think of baseball, think of averages, improving the world is not about instant ending of tyranny, its about subtly tipping the balance. Its about crafting systems that encourage positive behavior. Its about solving problems slightly faster then you create them. And make no mistake, humans are spectacular at problem solving, but they also are quite skilled at making new messes. That's reality for you.

But if we can solve 2 problems while only creating one, we are improving the world. The results might not be as instant as Viagra, but odds are they will be far more satisfying. One step, deep breath, the world is filled with inexplicable beauty set against the nastiest tragedy and mixed into a poetic swirl. There are moments of perfection and moments of despair. Enjoy them all, its more fun then giving up...

Dinner and Drinks with the Good Dr Ellis

Met up with Josh Ellis of Zenarchery fame for dinner, drinks and wandering. He's up in the Bay to meet with his new employer and is moving here for good soon. We talked a lot about the old SF of 7 years ago when he lived here. I think he's in for some surprises given the mass exodus of the past few years.*

Josh has been mysteriously hyping up his new gig on his blog for a while, and while I'm not liable to reveal many details there is tremendous potential. Lets just say this company claims to have found one of the internet idealists' holy grails. I'm somewhat skeptical, but I do believe this particular change does have the potential to be revolutionary. More likely though it will successful and useful, but not quite as earthshaking as some cloudy eyed proponents make it out to be. Regardless its great news and exciting stuff, congratulations Josh, the bay area needs some new troublemakers.

We talked a bunch about SF rent, its ridiculously easy to find a nice space in SF right now, which makes it a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to the city. Jump in while you can kids, things are going to change. I just hope enough of the freaks pushed out by the dot com era move back. And yeah I still won't be making this place home, fear not, I'll be gone before you know it, hopefully to Barcelona.

While on the subject of places to live Josh has some crazy stories about people living in the storm drains below Los Vegas. They're 10 years old and already have a vibrant community of living in them, and a legendary Gollum like figure who is rumored to stalk down and kill strangers that come into his dark private space. Josh has written a few articles on these communities, which I need to track down and read. Sounds like a great book to me, but apparently there isn't much interest yet.

Interestingly I just started reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, which is about a world of people living beneath the streets of London. So far its quite good, although Gaiman's prose doesn't have nearly poetry of his comics. Fortunately his ideas are just as imaginative and inventive as ever.

----

*on a somewhat related note though, its good to read danah boyd's enthusiastic posts on how much she loves SF. This city will return to its former glories at some point.

Jim Moore on Lakoff and Metaphors for Politics

Jim Moore has a couple excellent posts on Lakoff's Moral Politics and the need for the Democratic Party (in America) to find a new guiding metaphor. Plus he's got some kind words for this very weblog, thanks Jim!

Lakoff has been on my mind a lot lately. I haven't been able to really push his theories in my mind to the point where I can say I fully support them, but so far they resonate pretty strongly with me. His conception of the liberal moral model for government as a family gels very well with my own liberal upbringing. And until reading Moore's posts I was mainly focusing on finding better ways to communicate Lakoff conception of the liberal moral view to the world. Now I thinking more along the lines of Moore, that we need a new moral model to guide 21st century politics.

More soon.

More on the 1imc

The International Moblogging Conference webpage has been updated with more info. Looks like lots of fun. Unfortunately my budget doesn't have a space for a trip to Tokyo at the moment, but if anyone somehow wants to fly me there give me a holla. Hell, if anyone one wants to fly me anywhere let me know. Art, talks, VJing, rollercoasters, ice cream, long walks on the beach... Whatever, SF is dead and I'm ready to roll anyplace. Should be in NYC soon but that's it for the near future. Unless you want to change that ;o

ePatriots

ePatriots is a new grassroots online campaign to raise money for the Democratic party. DailyKos is behind it and I like it so far. But note I'm not a member of the Democratic party, I just hate Bush. And I really like the way the fundraising operation is moving towards aggregating small contributions rather then focusing only on the big money. There is a real opportunity to change a bit of the political balance here, even if we are a long way from any real equality in the system. Check it out, I'll be exploring it more too.

Common Identities

The Identity Commons is founded on the premise that the only way that digital identity infrastructure can be truly trusted, is if it is owned and operated by all the people who are using it.

Its mission is the nurturing of an "open source identity operating system", if you will. User-controlled identity, privacy, security, and reputation mean that information about users belongs to them, to be used, brokered, traded, etc. in their own interests.

from The Venture Collective more info on the actual Identity Commons site. The goals sound great, but I must say there is an annoying wiff of vagueness in the air. I want more details.

Friendster Futures

Friendster just keeps on growing. Every day seems to see another social segment jump on board. And its getting a lot closer to being useful to. Not as a dating service mind you (does anyone know of someone who actually got some do to Friendster?), but as a way to connect friends and visualize social networks.

Its the way they've changed the bulletin board that really shows the way to the future. A few weeks back the Friendster bulletin board was filled with often obscene posts from people far off on the fringe of you're extended social network. And it turned people off. But today that problem is gone, and the bulletin board is suddenly an extremely potent tool.

The change? The bulletin board now only shows posts from your first degree friends, the people you have confirmed your linkage too in the system. And with that change the board suddenly has become an excellent way to exchange a level of mundane but useful information with your friends.

Imagine trying to tell your entire social network you plan to hang out at Bar X tonight, or see movie Y at 7:00. Obviously you can call a few friends, old school style, but its not going to cover much of your network. You could send out a mass email as well, but after a couple of those you are going to transform into a spammer. Better save those bulk mailings for the bigger events you want to booster. You could post to a blog too, but how many of your friends really read it daily?

The Friendster bulletin board fills a previously unoccupied space. A way to casually announce mundane events to your entire social network without working too hard, or transforming yourself into a spam farmer. Of course there is plenty of room for improvement, Friendster doesn't account for many of the subtleties of social dynamics that allow society to keep functioning. But its power as a tool seems to grow daily. There is something here and I think its quite potent. More soon.

Quality Product: ActiveWords

Need to say some positive things about ActiveWords liked the product since I first played with it, but couldn't make it work with my system. Then an extremely helpful rep named Buzz took the trouble to come to this site and post some suggestions. Lead to an email exchange that finally solved the issue. Talk about good service. I'm extremely impressed, thanks Buzz!

As for the product itself, its pretty amazing. Best way I can describe it is that is sort of like layering a command line interface invisibly over Windows. That plus some powerful scripting. A bit like hot keys after they've been exposed to massive gamma rays... Basically it reduces your need to reach for your mouse dramatically. And corrects typos. And makes looking up words on various dictionaries a snap. Not sure I'll be able to work without this app once I've fully incorporated it into my work flow.

ActiveWords, great product, nuff said.

The Dark Side of the Social

Insiteful discussion, on Don Park's Blog, about the potential dark side of social software. Shades of the suburbanization of information?

Dead Press

"the tech press is gone now. It's been routed around." -Dave Winer

[via way.nu]

Paths, Perl and God

peterme.com: Way more about paths at UC Berkeley than you'd ever want to read. The title says it all and maybe too much, its just about the right amount I wanted to read.

Larry Wall the creator of the Perl programming "glue" speaks of a more enlightened approach at another UC School:

I am told that when they built the University of California at Irvine, they did not put in any sidewalks the first year. Next year they came back and looked at where all the cow trails were in the grass and put the sidewalks there.

Perhaps its apocryphal, but its a damn good story. Its from a fascinating interview of Wall by the one and only Erik Davis. Makes me want to learn Perl really badly. Actually makes me do a 180 in my thoughts on the language, used to see it as messy in the wrong way, now its sounds like the best sort of mess around. And given how much hackers like the language it probably is messy in the right way.

I was trying to encourage what I call diagonal thinking. Traditionally computer languages try to be as orthogonal as possible, meaning their features are at all at right angles to each other, metaphorically speaking. The problem with that is that people don't solve problems that way. If I'm in one corner of a park and the restrooms are in the opposite corner of the park, I don't walk due east and then due north. I go northeast -- unless there's a pond in the way or something.

and

But that's merely a form of tribalism. What we also try to encourage are the kind of joiners who join many things. These people are like the intersection in a Venn diagram, who like to be at the intersection of two different tribes. In an actual tribal situation, these are the merchants, who go back and forth between tribes and actually produce an economy. In theological terms we call them peacemakers.

In terms of Perl language, these are the people who will not just sit there and write everything in Perl, but the people who will say: Perl is good for this part of the problem, and this other tool is good for that part of the problem, so let's hook 'em together. They see Perl both from the inside and from the outside, just like a missionary. That takes a kind of humility, not only on the part of the person, but on the language. Perl does not want to make more of itself than it is. It's willing to be the servant of other things.

Damn why aren't there more interviews like this?

"It's all about applications and functionality, not technology": Jeff Hawkins Interviewed

The Treo 300 is one of my favorite products around, this interview with Handspring's Jeff Hawkins shows why:

I'm not a technology guy. I understand technologies, but I don't really get excited about technologies. I get excited about applications. I've been cautious about Bluetooth for many years, because I ask myself what a user would do with it. It reminds me of infrared. Infrared was in a bunch of products, but no one ever used it. And we didn't put it into the Palm Pilot until we had a great application for it.

We were the first people to make infrared popular. You could beam card information from one device to another. It worked 100 percent of the time, and essentially it became the first real successful consumer application of infrared in a computing device. It's all about applications and functionality, not technology.

Repeat after me. "It's all about applications and functionality, not technology". There is a reason this guy makes such great products.

Beyond Friendster: Openness and the Future of Social Networks

Posted this at marginwalker.org, reprinting it here for your info and my archives.

There has been a lot of talk of Friendster and its kin in the network lately. The sharpest of the observations so far comes from Marginwalker's co-founder Adam Greenfield. As usual Adam's observations are right on the mark. However his conclusion throws me off a bit:

Something tells me these services won't reach their maximum potential until they can incorporate our less salutary feelings about association: the latent but powerful distinctions we make, the dislikes and fears we, however subtly, import into our presentation of self. These are precisely the shadows we may have "gone online" to escape in the first place, but they are a part of what we've always meant by "social," they serve a function evolved over a very long span of time, and I believe we ignore them at some disservice to our ambitions.

Now Adam may very well be right, but I really hope he isn't. We have the ability to use services like Friendster and its descendent's to effect profound changes on the make up of society. Instead of giving into the base discrimination (or "shadows") we incorporate into our daily life I think we should be using technology to eliminate the subtle biases that underlie our culture and selves.

Openness is a potent tool. The public emergence of homosexual culture over the past 35 years provides a telling example. Before Stonewall gays and lesbians stayed hidden from society. And as a result homophobia was able to flourish. You can be certain a lot of homophobic conversations took place in front of closet homosexuals who were too afraid to speak out. Now in 2003 the stigma of homophobia, while still present, is rapidly fading. Major presidential candidates are making gay rights a campaign issue in America, and only the far right gives a damn. Its pretty damn hard to be homophobic when you become aware of the fact that a handful of your friends happen to be gay. And at least in urban America its pretty damn hard not have a handful of gay friends.

The very openness that Adam takes offense too in Friendster, to me is an engine of social change. It forces us to reevaluate some of our hidden prejudices and calls into question some of the forces that segregate society. Now its entirely possible, as Adam seems to imply, that when faces with this sort of info, people will just look upon their friends for the worse. But I personally believe that in the long run the results would be positive. There is a mess of small discriminations that drive many of our social interactions. And when placed into larger contexts they just look silly.

Sousveillance is a term, coined by Steve Mann, which has been gaining some buzz of late. Its roughly the opposite of surveillance. Instead of a power watching over the people, sousveillance is the people watching over a power, and as a corollary watching over themselves. The openness that the architecture of Friendster creates is an integral part of a sousveillance society. And we as a culture are going to have to either learn to embrace the openness or attempt to make it go away.

This is all part of a larger emerging conflict between transparency and privacy, and we are going to dealing with the ramifications for a long time. But for the moment what I'm really interested in is how do we build better social networking technology? Adam is probably right that Friendster, LinkedIn and company are just the beginning and I agree that the ideal solution is an open source one. An open social networking standard which permits people to choose and build their own interfaces. I think some standard will inevitably be emerging in the next few years, and hopefully its not a proprietary one.

The question I have is what do we want this network to do? Is it there to cement our social networks and further our interactions within them, or is the goal to open up our social boundaries and push us towards new cultural understandings? These are delicate lines to walk. And if we build the right structures I think there is a tremendous opportunity to change society for the better. But there is a constant threat of building the opposite, tools which reinforce existing inequalities. How do we ensure we do the right thing?

Flight Risk: the Blog as Future Fiction

"...she's a flight risk."

Intriguing. Visited a few times, never been able to dig deep enough into it. I like what I see though. May be real. Probably not.

I'm all for blogs a medium (or part of a medium!) for fiction. Wrote about it a bunch in an altsense thread a while back. Good discussion. My comments are under the name abe1x or a variant thereof.

The Law Groks P2P For Once

A strong victory! File-Swap Sites Not Infringing, Judge Says. Lets hope this one holds up.

A federal judge in California ruled yesterday that the Internet's most popular music-swapping services are not responsible for copyright infringements by users...

The surprise decision... likened music-sharing services to companies that sell VCRs.

Better Input?

Mainly blogging this because I had a hard time finding it again, be easier to just search my blog. Anyway FingerWorks -iGesture NumPad is a really intriguing input device. They actually have handful based on the same principal, you use your hand as the mouse. Allows for a huge range of gesture based control too. I hate mice, don't use them and this looks like it might be better then a Wacom tablet. Only reason I don't have one is that I want to test drive this thing before investing any cash. Could be utter garbage, could be genius. Not up for the risk of going in blind right now...

O'Reilly on the Near Future

Tim O'Reilly's Inventing the Future is an excellent essay on the near future of technology. Its got a level of detail and practicality missing from most similar speculation, good stuff.

[via Based on a True Story]

Apple Buying Universal Music?

Forbes.com: Apple Wants Vivendi To Dance. I don't know what to say, could be suicide on Jobs' part, or it could be brilliance. Maybe they have the answer to digital music distribution. Maybe they just want to make sure Microsoft won't impose their own brand of DRM on everyone. Or maybe Apple just wants take a dive together with all major labels.

Its just a rumor of course. The markets are dumping Apple because of it. Personally I think its a solid bet. I've always maintained that the labels have serious value beyond their current business model. So even if the industry tanks there is value to be salvaged. And if any prominent CEO is going to know the way to do it, I'd be betting on Jobs.

Be watching this one with interest.

Lynching Information

Saw Clifford Lynch speak over at UC Berkeley on Friday, courtesy of Ethan Eismann. Recently reformed OG blogger Peter Merholz also showed up.

Lynch took way to long to get to the interesting bit of his talk, research into collaborative filtering and personalization. Talked ended just as he started getting to the juicy issues. Did get a chance to talk to him about the issues of information segregation though.

The issue was one he new about from discussions of online newspapers, but still remains unanswered. He did note that when people configure online news sources they general will select very focused interests and then balance that out with some sort of filtered general list like the top Reuters feeds. So at least part of the answer lies in picking good filters that know how the mix up the info flow the way a good newspaper does.

Another interesting (but discouraging) part of the talk was his reference to problems in getting access to large enough groups of people to test out collaborative filtering ideas. More anecdotal evidence of the inverse Metcalfe's Law?

Surf Roots

Paul Saffo's Information Surfing essay was written 14 years ago and is still remarkably insiteful. Its also the second know use of surfing in relation to dada, with McLuhan slipping an obscure reference in first.

Choice Quote:
bq. An information surfing future will be one of generalists capable of teasing knowledge and understanding out of large information flows. Information surfers will be pattern finders applying new intellectual skills and working in close concert with radically more powerful information tools.

[via Ross Mayfield + Azeem]

The Inverse Network Effect

The always insightful Clay Shirky has just released Social Software and the Politics of Groups. The underlying core: we have no antecedents for how nonlocal groups, and the technology that supports them should function. In other words there is almost no precedent for the way a group of people across the world can interact in a mailing list or chat room. And its equally difficult to design software for those interactions, as there is no precedent for thinking about the problems.

What sprang to mind immediately was Metcalfe's Law which basically states that the usefulness of a network increase exponentially with the number of users. Perhaps there is a reverse law as well. That the larger the network the difficulty in designing new software increase exponentially. How do you test software designed to let 1000 people communicate at once? Its hard enough deal with the tech issues, working with the interface and social use models is a whole other story.

The classic example being that 1 person with a telephone is useless as they have no one to call. 2 people with telephones is useful assuming they want to talk to each other. The more people

Sony Candor

Sony's CEO Unplugged drops the good dirt. Among the gems, Nobuyuki Idei mentions that he'd love to buy the Palm software unit. Then he drops this reality bomb:

The music industry has been spoiled. They have controlled the distribution of music by producing CDs, and thereby have also protected their profits. So they have resisted Internet distribution. Six years ago I asked Sony Music to start working with IBM to figure out how to offer secured distribution of their content over the Net. But nobody in Sony Music would listen. Then about six months ago, they started to panic. They have to change their mindset away from selling albums, and think about selling singles over the Internet for as cheap as possible—even 20 cents or 10 cents—and encourage file-sharing so they can also get micro-payments for these files. The music industry has to re-invent itself, we can no longer control distribution they way we used to.

100% on point, shame the music people can't see as straight as he can.

Cyberpunk Triumphant (part 2)

Venezuela losing time - literally. So Nauru is off the map and Venezuela is out of time, technology it seems is starting to eat us alive. Venezuela's lowered the frequency of the current in its electric grid, slowing down all plugged in clocks. The irony is so thick you can taste it, and its delicious. Universal time certainly has its uses, but it also puts us into lockstep with a relentless industrial rhythm. It feels good to see time lose a small battle to human nature.

Data Failure in the Offshore Future

Nauru loses contact with the world. WTF? This is some scifi shit. If William Gibson was right when he said that "the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed" then we are in for some interesting times in our over mined globally warmed over future.

There was a great article a few years back that gave the full Nauru backstory, phosphate strip mining destroyed the entire ecosystem except for a tiny ring around the coast. The island was turned into a one stop offshore banking capital. Thought it was in Wired, but I can't find it in the archives or through Google, anyone remember where it appeared?

THE Leap Forward?

This Business Week article describes a new interface designed by Jef Raskin. Raskin was the brains behind the Mac interface, quite possibly making him the most important interface designer around today. His new system THE sounds quite intriguing, but it runs on the Mac Classic OS. Where do I find one of those? Well its not to hard except the people still running OS 9 tend to have really slow internet connections...

From the looks and sounds of it, THE is sort of like layering a command line interface on top of the existing GUI. Kind of like the amazing ActiveWords. Potential, yes potential.