Who rules the cyber?

In my last post I wrote about some earnest, well-meaning, but kind of lame efforts of the San Francisco startup scene to do something to fix politics. This was formally nonpartisan, but obviously leaning towards the left.

Today, let՚s look at what the other side is doing:

• They conducted a masterful Facebook ad campaign
  
• They՚re using Mechanical Turk to recruit an army of low-paid workers to churn out a torrent of bullshit
  
• They are building a public black list of supposedly left-wing academics, with a page where anyone can nominate a new victim.
  
• They are using memes and chaos magick in the service of Trump and alt.right shittery in general.

I am beginning to suspect that despite the overwhelming support of Clinton among hip people, smart people, tech people, and educated people, it is the other side that has the deeper appreciation of how the new computational media work and how to use them effectively.

Certainly the people involved seem to think so, and the fact that they won the election works in favor of that opinion.

Engineers of Human Souls

You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly…. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.
       – Mark Zuckerberg

This quote from a few years back still amazes me today. If we take it at face value, it implies that some of the fundamental laws and conditions of human existence are being blithely reworked by what are basically naive kids. The kids happen to run a billion dollar corporation, but does Zuckerberg’s technological and business prowess give him a license to not only pontificate about the nature of human identity, but radically alter it? Apparently it does.

Zuckerberg’s childish ideas about how humans work is going to affect hundreds of millions of people and how they interact with each other. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you will be forced to give up whatever multiple personas you like to keep on hand for different occasions, and just Be Yourself. In a way, maybe it’s a relief. No more playing roles, you are just you. As Zuckerbergs’s line about “lack of integrity” implies, only the morally flawed would want to hide their true face from the public eye.

Well, fortunately a lot of this is the usual cloud of hot air that hangs over Silicon Valley. Facebook and other social media certainly put a twist on social life and interaction, but do they reach into the deepest recesses of the human mind and change the way we are? I’m not sure. I don’t think Facebook has changed me that much, but I’m old. It may be a different story for those growing up in this media environment. I’m built out of books and bad 1960s television shows; my children are constructing themselves from multiplayer gaming worlds and the like. They will be different.

I do not mind so much that technology changes how we interact with each other and thus how we construct ourselves; that has been happening all the time, every new media technology (print, newspapers, radio, telephone) does that. If the Internet wires us together in a new way, that is OK, it’s not like the particular conditions of the previous social matrix were something especially sacred.

What does bother me is how we are doing this in such an undemocratic, centralized, and corporate fashion. The Internet was designed to be open, free form, and democratic. The web followed those principles and displaced the corporate walled gardens of an earlier era (AOL and Compuserve). Now we seem ready to give all that up and cede control of the very fabric of our lives to Zuckerberg’s walled garden / panopticon because that is where everybody else is, with barely a whimper of protest. It would be bad enough if social media were merely an entertainment playground, but it's builders seem to think it is part of the infrastructure of the new human soul, and they may be right.

[previously] [post title reference]

Enclosure

Does anybody else find it weird that there should be an academic citation style tied to the offerings of a single company? To me, it seems like a minor but telling episode in the continual erosion of the commons, or more precisely the cultural secession of control of the means of communication to private enterprises.

Minor, in that who really cares about citation styles, especially in light of all the far more significant ways in which corporations have ate away at academia. Telling, in that it means that “tweet” has become part of the general machinery of communication, a generic term like Kleenex or Xerox (or Google) that just happens to be owned by a corporation.

We have accepted tweeting into our lives, just as we have Facebooking and all the other similar platforms for social life. In Twitter’s case, I sort of implicitly trust the company not to do anything too stupid, not to change the rules too drastically (this is in part helped by their radically simplified model). With Facebook, it’s quite the opposite, we are resigned to them changing the rules all the time, knowing that we will grumble and complain and a very few folks will loudly resign from the FB world, and everyone else will go on.

I myself tweeted last year:

sɹəʌɐɹ⊥, əʞıW (mtraven). “Oh please, if FB can "sabotage what it means to be human" then your humanity wasn't much good in the first place. http://t.co/YHwjbn1Y” 30 May 2012, 4:00 p.m. Tweet.

FB won’t make us less human, because human is a very expansive idea, there are many ways to be human. But it does threaten to change human culture in ways we don’t quite understand. It seems roughly analogous to what happens when privately owned shopping malls displace genuine public urban street life – you get something cleaner, more managed, more pleasant in many ways, but also sterile, depoliticized, and subtly or not-so-subtly oriented towards getting you separated from your cash.

Academia is supposed to be an island somewhat isolated from commercial pressures and fads of the moment, the part of society that is able to consider both the long term and the common good. If it was stronger and functioning properly, it would have come up a better way to refer to chunks of social media conversation, something that was more general and more archival.

In this case, they fucked up even the job of setting a standard for Twitter, since they didn’t include the URL or unique id that would have actually made reference possible. This makes me think that there were no technical people involved in this, and it is a case of some poor humanist grudgingly forced to acknowledge a new reality. They would have done better to embrace it more fully.

Announcing the BOOCK

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are the hot new thing in education. Today, I’d like to introduce the next step beyond the MOOC: the BOOCK. A BOOCK is a Basic Object Offering Content And Knowledge.

Like MOOCs, BOOCKs provide a vast array of knowledge in an readily accessible way at very low cost. Unlike MOOCs, BOOCKs offer real-time random access and are accessible to those without internet connections. Unlike MOOCs, a BOOCK once obtained will remain your physical property forever. BOOCKs have a long and distinguished history; their format has been refined for hundreds of years; they may be stored indefinitely on shelves with no additional backup; and they have institutional support in the form of editors and publishers. BOOCKs require no power and are thus perfectly usable in third-world villages, wilderness trips, and post-collapse hellscapes.

We expect BOOCKs to revolutionize education. Whereas in the recent past, students were faced with online courses with annoying, poorly recorded videos, stupid “Now Johnny” question-and-answer interfaces, and toxic levels of hype; now students have virtually unlimited access to knowledge at their own pace.

Many BOOCKs are already available at local stores; those still stuck in the internet age can also find them online if you must.

Orality, Literacy, Privacy, Identity

The ongoing JournaList fracas recalled one of my recent themes, namely, the differing faces we use in different areas of life and how the net threatens to collapse them.

For those not yet saturated in this story, it's roughly this: a group of left-leaning journalists, academics, and politicos had a private email list where they discussed matters of interest. Right-wing operatives managed to get access to the list and are leaking bits out of it that they think are embarrassing. Both sides are accusing the other of ethics violations -- the right is accusing the members of having improperly cozy relations between the press and the people they are covering, and the members are accusing the right of violating their privacy. At least one person has lost their job as a result.

I'm not going to comment on the politics or ethics because that's being done to death elsewhere. Rather, let me dust off my media theorist hat and talk a bit about the nature of online talk. Roughly, this whole brouhaha seems to stem from the fact that email lists (and other forms of electronic communication like Twitter) are somewhere in-between and share characteristics of both oral and literate communications modes. Obviously, they are superficially more like written language than speech, being composed of visual inscriptions rather than sound. And like written communication and unlike speech, they persist indefinitely and can easily escape their original contexts, as the JournoLists discovered. But they are also oral in that they have an immediate quality to them, they are uttered in near-real-time to particular audiences; they are "hot", and tend to be more agonistic than written communication.

The members of JournoList obviously treated the list as an ongoing bull session among like-minded colleagues and friends. And that is a context in which people say things that they wouldn't write into a published article. Contrary to the rightists screaming hypocricy, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this perfectly normal behavior, except that they journos misunderstood the technology, or were not able to accurately predict all the ramifications from their loose talk, like having stray remarks republished by hostile operatives four years later. Some of them said rather nasty things about Rush Limbaugh, for instance.

Here's an interesting attempt to define, as one of the main components of "technological literacy", an appreciation for the utter lack of private spaces for oral-style communication in the modern Internet:

Say you are an employer evaluating college students for a job. Perusing one candidate'™s Facebook profile, you notice the student belongs to a group called "I Pee My Pants When I'm Drunk." What is your first thought?

It should not be that this student is unemployable for being an intemperate drinker, said Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas -- though that it might mean that, too. Mainly, though, it should suggest something else -- something that might be more relevant to the student's qualifications.

"œWhat it tells me," Zvacek said, "‚Âœis that the student is technologically illiterate."

It seems to me that the current state of affairs must be some sort of unstable non-equilibrium. Oral cultures have been around for 10000 years or so, (small) written cultures for a couple of thousand. That's time for rules and conventions to stabilize, but the oral-written hybrid of network communication hasn't had time for that, especially since new variants of it are being constantly invented. Someday it will be understood what is allowed to be said where; there will be techniques for walling off particular kinds of communication so they don't leak out. If I had to put on futurist goggles to go with the media theorist hat, I'm guessing it will be common to have multiple unlinked identities for different purposes. Like I'm doing here. And as here, the identities won't be separated by some kind of cryptographically-secure firewall; rather, they will be more like social conventions, so that what you say in one role can't be held against you in another one.

[the title is a reference to Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word which everyone should read.]

The state of mind of the mind of the state

A couple of clowns who look like minor characters in a low-budget comedy movie:




managed to pull a prank on ACORN (formerly one of the most effective groups around for politically mobilizing people of ordinary means) that triggered the established powers coming down on them like a ton of bricks, including the House passing an unconstitutional bill of attainder directed against them. They are now on the verge of bankruptcy:

Acorn’s contributions have dried up, its national staff has been cut by more than three-quarters, services for the poor have been suspended, and chapters have closed or reorganized under other names, even though a district attorney found that Acorn employees in Brooklyn did nothing illegal and a federal judge ruled that Congress acted unconstitutionally in cutting off funding as punishment.

The NYT's public editor does not quite apologize for their key role in the ratfucking of ACORN, but does go so far as to call the story "fascinating".

But the good news is, Congress is probably going to pass a Health Care Reform Bill! That requires the citizenry to purchase the products of a corrupt and useless industry! The sad thing is that the passage of this deeply flawed bill actually is good news within the degraded state of our polity.

I've been thinking lately about social cognition or "the mind of society" -- how societies think. How government, media and other institutions form an infrastructure for cognition and decision-making for society as a whole. This is an enormous topic, but for the purposes of this post the answer is "not very well".

Twittering about twitter

I have a love/hate relationship with social media -- Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, blogs, del.icio.us, etc. On the one hand, they take up endless time, and the information quality and density is generally much less than one gets from traditional media, such as books and journals. On the other hand, just because scholarly journals exist doesn't mean I shouldn't spend time chattering with friends and acquaintances -- in other words, the proper thing to compare Twitter to is, say, an ongoing cafe conversation, not publishing. On the other other hand, Twitter and Facebook are a pale simulacrum of actual face-to-face social interaction. On the other other other hand, so is letter-writing and that technology spawned a great deal of worthwhile instances.

It's a brave new universe and it's still in progress; the rules for formats and genres and etiquette are being explored and seem to change on a daily basis. Worlds are colliding. As a certified Doctor of Media I feel obliged to at least keep track of what's going on and participate a bit, even if it is part of the ruination of intellectual life. I don't really think it is -- or, rather, it is wrecking some parts of the universe of discourse (newspapers, most obviously) and enabling a great many others, and we are a couple of decades away, at least. from seeing how things will ultimately shake out.

One example: I have various services that gate my blog posts onto Twitter and Facebook, and gate Twitter posts onto Facebook. The directionality is significant -- I'd never do it the other way around. Identity is uncomfortable -- the blog is pseudonymous, Facebook is under my real name, Twitter is a bit of both. The mtraven alias was supposed to be decoupled from my real identity so I wouldn't have to worry about professional implications of anything I said here, but eventually I couldn't be bothered to maintain the wall of separation and have been more or less letting it decay or actively undermining it. I can barely be bothered to maintain one persona let alone several.

Aside from the identity discomfort, the flowing-together of these different media also causes other slight irritations -- call it genre discomfor. Something that makes a good blog post doesn't necessarily make a good tweet. For instance, tweets seem more ephemeral than Facebook posts, since the latter have a more explicit mechanism for replying and can become the locus of a conversation. But I undermine the casual nature of Twitter by connecting the two together.

One way to frame thinking about these technologies is to change from thinking of them as a medium to thinking of them as infrastructure. Twitter, for instance, as a medium is kind of stupid -- what possible good can come of a 140-characte limit (on the other hand, haiku). But as an infrastructure -- a utility that supports the controllable multicasting of short messages -- it enables all kinds of unexpected things. My most practical use of Twitter is the Caltrain feed, which allows riders to send reports of train delays, outages, and accidents (which happen with alarming frequency). I have this feed piped to my phone so I typically get better reports of what's going on than the conductors do. I enjoy the mild irony of using this cutting-edge 21st century technology to monitor and improve the utility of the largely broken 19th century technology of railroads.

Google Wave is another new technology that seems really crappy as a medium (if you've used it you know what I mean; if not and you want an invitation let me know), but has great promise as infrastructure. In this case the infrastructure supports the standardization of collaborative applications, ie, it makes it easy to create apps that work like Google Documents do (through the web real-time collaborative editing of documents).

Hm, on further thought there are many subtly different ways to treat these things:

• medium
• infrastructure
• platform
• ecosystem
• community
  
• standard

For any web technology, these are different and related aspects of the elephant. They all fit together -- standards are useless without a community that is interested in using them; standards once established becomes a platform on which other things are built. Things that start out as new media seem compelled by market forces to become platforms. Etc.

Facebook, for instance, had no appeal for me until some actual people I wanted to communicate with pulled me in (community). Twitter on theo ther hand is more interesting (to me) because of its API. Because it's so trivial, it is developing an interesting ecosystem of clients (like Brizzly and dozens of others), and tools that put different spins on the date such as Twibes and Tweememe. I just learned about a new, interesting, scary part of the Twitter ecosystem a site that lets you add sponsored links:

Ad.ly automatically inserts one tweet from an advertiser that you approve into your feed every other day.

Here's my own (pretty trivial) contribution to the Twitter ecosystem -- Twitlines, a client that uses a scrollable timeline. The idea is to create an ambient view This was done mostly as an experiment to test out how quickly I could deploy a web app in the new universe of platform services (answer -- very quickly, but tweaking it into shape was starting taking too much time so I am forcing myself to release it to the wild). More interesting variations to come, I hope.


The profusion of multiple standards and platforms is a symptom of the youthful stage of the Internet. It's pretty healthy, if annoying, to have so many different growth points.

Oh well, this post has turned into the opposite of a tweet, which is necessarily pithy and pointed. If I have a point, it's that these media are going to be the nervous system of the planetary collective mind, like it or not, and radically shape whatever civilization we might have in the future, just as the printing press shaped the Enlightenment. So it won't do to dismiss them as trivial, even though 99% of the contents may be just that.

Social Media Notes

The blogosphere and new media are another war zone, we have to be relevant there.

-- head of the IDF Press Team, via

This ain't no disco! The Air Force has "Rules of Engagement" for blogging. The mind boggles. It looks as if they copied these from somewhere else, the block on dealing with "Unhappy Customers" is a bit off. They also have a Twitter feed.

Speaking of Twitter, I'm playing with it more lately thanks to a plethora of different intefaces, including TweetDeck, an Emacs interface!, Twitterrific on the iPhone. Nothing like being able to do something useless four different ways! I set up TweetDeck to collect all tweets containing "gaza", which seem to be about 10 a minute or so. Also "supervolcano", so I will be notified quickly if the world comes to an end. Plus I'm following Al Jazeera's Gaza feed and one put out by the Israelis. I still don't see the point. 140 character utterances can't help but be either grunts or at best fingerpointing via a URL to something interesting. People are actually arguing over Gaza in this format, which seems purpose-built to ensure that such conversations are going to be even more unproductive than they usually are.

I've gated this blog onto Twitter via TwitterFeed. This makes me feel peculiar in terms of identity management; the twitter version of mtraven has more connections to my real-world identity than this blog. Oh well, we'll see how it goes.

Of all the Social Media foo stuff I've seen, FriendFeed seems the most interesting and contentful. It brings in actual content items from just past the edge of your own network (ie, stuff friends of friends have posted).

Meanwhile, David Gelertner has proposals for using technology to create "parent-chosen, cloud-resident learning tracks" sounds just right to me, I've been talking about stuff like this for awhile, mostly to myself, but maybe it will happen.