Air on Alchemical Musings

Silencing the infernal internal combustion engine

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:24:20 +0000

A few years ago I visited my family in Florida for the holiday season. My sister and her family also flew in, and to their credit, her children were more interested in a family vacation to see the marine hospital in Clearwater than they were in Disney World (this is the home of Winter and Hope, the real life dolphins with prosthetic tails who starred in Dolphin Tale). While I was there I took my first ride ever on a Wave Runner (Yamaha’s Jet Ski) and had a revelation. The ride was exhilarating. I did 54 mph in the bay. Apart from a gorgeous co-pilot, the only thing that would have improved the experience would be to eliminate the roar of the internal combustion engine. Silent jet skis. I’ve sailed a few times and the experience is divine. It feels like flying, even though motorboats travel much faster. Technically, the sail’s propulsion operates on the same principle as a wing. But what I remember most was the quiet. Quiet enough to play music, have a conversation and hear the waves. That same trip I also test drove a Tesla Model S for the first time. Pure power. You could be stopped at red light, in the left-most lane of a five lane road, and still make a right turn. You would be two car lengths ahead of all the other cars before they even start moving. Driving a Tesla feels like playing a game of tetris - the car is so powerful and the handling so accurate that I could put myself anywhere on the road. I began to dream of an electric jet ski. The thing about an electric jet ski is that it need not merely be a toy for the rich. It could also be the center of a campaign to catalyze adoption of electric vehicles. Consider for a moment - Who are Tesla’s main competitors? It’s not the Prius, or the BMW i models, or the Volt… it’s the internal combustion engine! And, with decades of marketing creating Pavlovian conditioning between the hum and the thrum of an internal combustion engine and sex and power, it’s going to be a tough nut to crack. How does the middle class learn what’s trending with power elite? Through the media, to be sure. And, on vacation ???????????? Picture the scene. Vacationers arrive at the docks greeted by solar panels charging a new line of electric jet skis. They will be skeptical about their safety, power and sex appeal. Electric batteries in the water? We’ve been powering electric boats and submarines for over a century. Plus, how did we ever become convinced that detonating a bomb between our legs a few hundred times a minute while sitting on top of gallons of flammable fluid was safe? If the electric jet ski is anything like the Tesla Model S, power and sex appeal will speak for themselves. One short ride and they will be signing up to purchase an electric vehicle as soon as they return home from vacation. Doubtful I’m going to get to this idea in this lifetime, but I would love to see it happen.

The case of the missing Barnes paintings

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 17:27:59 +0000

Dr. Albert Barnes was a chemist who made a fortune at the turn of the 20th century developing a treatment for infant blindness. He became interested in art and befriended the painter William Glackens. The two began collecting modern paintings in Paris in 1911, and Barnes eventually developed a private collection of paintings that today is valued at $50-60 Billion. Amazingly, he collected the works of the masters before they were masters, almost the equivalent of buying the Mona Lisa off Da Vinci in a dark Venice alley for twenty bucks. While he never got his hands on Mona, he amassed a world class collection of Renoirs, Picassos, Matisses, Modiglianis, Van Googhs, and more. Barnes was a quirky character. He hated the establishment, and couldn’t stand museums, high society or the 1%. He had this crazy idea that art was best appreciated by living with it, as opposed to viewing it in crowds for three second doses. He kept his collection of paintings in his home in the Philadelphia suburbs, and opened a school where people could learn about art while surrounded by it. He hung his paintings thematically, and each wall was a unique montage, what came to be known as an ensemble. He was constantly rearranging these works, and he rooms were often developed as a part of a curriculum – there were rooms featuring colorwork, brushwork, nudes – and, since he owned them, I imagine he occasional pulled down a Van Gough from the wall and let his students feel it to teach them about brushwork. He had an idiosyncratic sense of humor, and would often position large wooden chairs beneath paintings of big-bottomed subjects. Barnes was quite cantankerous, and he was picky about who he admitted to see the collection. He once rejected someone from seeing the collection and signed the letter as his dog. He was also close friends with John Dewey, and invited Bertrand Russel to teach at his foundation. A few biographies have been penned about him, and The Devil and Dr. Barnes recounts many of the battles he engaged in during his life. He was married for decades, but (spoiler alert) he died childless in 1951. During his lifetime he created the Barnes Foundation, and his will left crystal clear instructions that his collection was bequeathed to the foundation and should never leave his home. The documentary film The Art of the Steal tells the story of the greatest heist of the 20th century. According to the filmmakers, the City of Philadelphia and private foundations conspired to effectively eminent domain the collection. It took them a few decades, but they were eventually able to make the case that the environmental conditions of the Barnes home were jeopardizing the paintings. The proposed creating a brand new building in the middle of downtown Philly modeled after the wing of the Barnes estate that held his collections. They promised to preserve the unique curatorial layout of his rooms, recreating them within the new building. In 2012 the Barnes collection was moved to it’s new home in downtown Philly. The website describes the collection as:

Audio experiments and the rise of Scuttlebutt

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 18:51:10 +0000

by Jonah Bossewitch and Rob Garfield

While chipping away at my dissertation this summer I found myself faced with the daunting task of transcribing about a dozen hours of video. I desperately wanted to believe that, in 2014, transcription was a machine’s task, so I took a minor detour through the state of the (consumer) art in voice recognition. One of my computers runs OSX which includes Dictation (since Mavericks), the same voice recognition software that powers Siri. Following these instructions I used the Soundflower kernel extensions to send the audio output from Audacity into Dictation’s input. Dictation did such an awful job understanding my video that I actually found it easier to transcribe the videos manually rather than edit Dictation’s vomit. I found some decent software called ExpressScribe to assist in the manual transcription. ExpressScribe makes it easy to control the playback speed, and can be configured to play a segment, automatically pause, and then rewind the video to moments before it paused. The pro version can be rigged up to foot petal controls, but I was able to do my transcription using the crippleware. This summer I visited my friend Rob’s country house, affectionately dubbed Snowbound and located on the transcendental Baptist Pond, NH. Rob was gracious enough to invite me up for a writing retreat, though we managed to fit in some canoeing, hiking, cooking and drinking. We also gave birth to one of the most creative constructive procrastinations of my dissertation*—Scuttlebutt. After all that time playing with transcription tools we began to wonder if OSX could understand itself. For years, OSX has been able to turn text to speech, and even ships with dozens of voices, with names like Vicky and Alex. What would happen if we fed OSX’s text-to-speech into it’s own Dictation software? Originally we thought Scuttlebutt might analogize and highlight the way that we humans misunderstand, mishear and misremember, in particular, the lightning quick messages that we receive on a daily basis through personal interaction, social media and email—*often deeply changing the message, generalizing it, and recontextualizing it. Although voice recognition software begs us to “train” it, we thought we might have better results interacting with its infant state. We needed a reliable benchmark and settled on the first chapter of Genesis. We were curious if the voice recognition software would improve, with successive iterations of feeding it it’s own output back to itself using text-to-voice. There was one way to find out.

peddling platforms

Sun, 02 Feb 2014 00:57:38 +0000

New York City’s bike share program is flourishing, and I recently signed up for a membership even though I live outside the range of any Citibike stations. I find it convenient and fun to use the bikes to cross town, as well as zip from place to place when I am downtown. Since my first ride on the Parisian Vélib’, I’ve become a huge fan of bike shares, and have enjoyed rides in Paris, DC, Denver, Miami, and Toronto. The other month I had a great conversation with a local bike shop owner about the new program, and he conveyed the anxiety that many bike shops are feeling around Citibike. Understandably, many are concerned that the bike share will cut into their rental and retail sales, although I think it is likely that an increase in biking will generate more interest and awareness, and generally increase the demand for bikes and bike services. Our discussion helped me recognize was how the city bike shares can be viewed as a platform for innovation, in the same sense that the iPod/iPhone is platform. And, just as the iphone-as-platform enabled a large ecology third-party hardware and software businesses, bike shares present an analogous opportunity to creative entrepreneurs. Platforms can support entire ecosystem, and city bike shares provide an opportunity to build a new ecosystem around them. Cases and Chargers Let’s start with the hardware. I don’t need an MBA to understand that the real money in retail is made by selling accessories. For the iPhone this includes cases, cables, and a range of other devices, but retailers like Amazon and Best Buy have invested in incredibly complex systems to track the relations between products and their compatible accessories. Consider this. What New Yorker wants to be mistaken for a tourist while riding their Citibike? What they need is a way to (fashionably) express themselves, and make the generic bike their own. Starting with an appropriate pannier bag, Citibikers need an easy way to transport their helmet, gloves, music, and personal belongings. Bike shops currently have entire walls devoted to these kinds of accessories. With some focused curation bike shops can begin assembling “MyCitiBike” kits that are segmented and suitable for the demographics of their customers, no custom manufacturing required. Bags and accessories are just the start. Helmets should be as ubiquitous as umbrellas—inexpensive ones sold by street vendors, and maybe more durable ones available in vending machines, for a refundable deposit. You would just need to bring your own liner, which you could conveniently stash in your pannier bag. Turn on the lights Consider the explosive proliferation of bike lights that are poised to transform New York City into Black Rock City. Bike lights are being sold in increasingly dizzying arrays of frequencies and patterns, but the arms race for visibility and attention may soon devolve into visual noise and distraction as the density of bikers grows. Imagine you are a biker who wants to communicate your intentions to a motor vehicle. During the day, there is a system of hand signals for signaling your intent. But currently are are’t any well established standards for bike lights, other than white in the front and red in the back. Some of the standards that could help are obvious—more red when I’m braking, and left and right blinkers when I’m turning. Others, like wireless control of helmet mounted lights, still need to be worked out. Some European bike manufacturers have begun introducing signaling innovations, but without standards these efforts will likely stall. Standards can emerge from the top-down, by mandate or regulation, or the bottom-up, by convention and adoption. I believe that bike share fleets present a powerful opportunity to innovate on bike safety and standards in a way that could lead the rest of the market. Admittedly, it would be difficult to convince municipalities to devote the resources to underwrite these features. However, I dream of a day when stakeholders such as Transportation Alternatives and Critical Mass work with the Mayor’s office to hold Citibank’s feet to the fire. Instead of just a marketing campaign designed to whitewash their reputation, the Citibike program could be used to spearhead safety initiatives, such as lighting standards and open APIs, that could eventually make their way across the rest of the biking industry. Computational Cycles The iPhone has the app store, and bikeshare apps could be just as expansive. From quantifying yourself for fitness and health, to turning the city into one big arcade game, the possibilities are really wide open. It’s easy to imagine apps which bring traditional “pedal-for-charity” campaigns into 21st century, as well as casual team games like capture the flag or even frogger. Some of these games could be powered by apps that run on smartphones, or fitness trackers (e.g. fitbit), but once again, the bike-share platform offers an opportunity to standardize data formats and open apis for ride tracking. RiderState is an early example of a competitive social game for bikers, but more will surely follow.

Makers, Burners and Pedagogy Transformers

Sun, 29 Sep 2013 16:28:06 +0000

Last Thursday, I managed to further integrate my personal/professional/hobbiest identitites, and me and two of my esteemed colleagues (Therese and Jon) presented Burning Man and Hacker/Maker Spaces at the weekly CCNMTL staff meeting.

The rosetta stone for our talk was Fred Turner’s seminal paper Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production (published by New Media and Society, the same journal that published my and Aram’s paper on The End of Forgetting (preprint)), which Turner also presented at Google, where his talk was recorded. We tried to connect Burning Man to a central question in education – the question of transference. Do skills learned under simulated conditions transfer over to real world settings? We started out with the grand question, “What Educates?”, and tried to narrow that down to the question of how we can view commons-based peer-production in an educational context? What can Burning Man, and crucially, the Maker Spaces that make Burning Man possible, teach educators about teaching and learning?

Dear Frank,

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 01:21:56 +0000

I remember the first time we met. It was my third and final interview for my current job at CCNMTL back in Spring ‘04. I was initially anxious, but you immediately made be feel welcome and comfortable. [Over the years I came to appreciate your gift for authentically connecting with just about anyone, often within 30 seconds of meeting them. You dispatched with superficial niceties and blazed trails directly to people’s souls. You bridged intellect and emotion, without a hint of pomp or circumstance, projecting sensitivity and respect to everyone you encountered. Age, class, race, gender - not so much that these dimensions were irrelevant, but you always managed to connect with the individual. You actually listened. And learned.] During that interview I remember walking into your office, encircled floor to ceiling with books. You asked me about my undergraduate senior thesis, a topic I hadn’t revisited in almost a decade, and then proceeded to pull Julian Jaynes off the shelf. You showed me your photo with Allen Ginsberg, and then asked me if I recognized the person in another grainy b/w photo. When I correctly identified Wittgenstein I was pretty confident I had landed the job. But, more importantly, I had found a new mentor. We didn’t interact very often my first summer at CCNMTL. I worked in Butler library, under Maurice’s supervision, and you were keeping summer hours, at your office in Lewisohn. When Fall rolled around I was eager to enroll in classes, and begin my graduate journeys, but I was nervous about signing up for a course with my boss. You never made me feel like a subordinate, but I was scarred from my relationship with management at previous jobs, and wasn’t sure what it would be like for us to enter into a student-teacher relationship. I hadn’t quite figured out that that was the only kind of relationship that you knew how to cultivate, although our roles were constantly revolving and inverting, as you shared your wisdom, and facilitated growth in every exchange. You brought out the best in everyone around you, rarely content to talk about people or events - always rushing or passing your way into the realm of the Forms. As I reflected when Robbie retired, I chose to enroll in your legendary Readings seminar after one of your students (I think it was Joost van Dreunen) made the case that your syllabus was your text on social/cultural/critical/communications/media theory. That year was invigorating. I remember rediscovering the joys of school, as I learned to reclaim spaces of intellectual exploration and play, and translate them into action. On the surface, our seminars resembled office meetings, but the luxury of non-directed (not to be confused with non-purposeful) conversation, which was a privilege I needed to readjust to. Together we figured out ways to weave together disparate threads of my life - work, hobbies, play, passions - somehow, I learned to integrate these (often inconsistent) vectors into a unified construct. A self, I suppose. But, it was my self, not one you imposed on me. It never felt like you pushed your agendas or ideologies on me - rather, you always wanted to help me discover what I really want to think about and work on. And I know that I’m not the only one that believes this - this was your way. I often wish you had written more, although your autobiographical text is a multi-volume, multi-dimentional, multimedia masterpiece. Sometimes I wonder how seriously you took Socrates’ critique of writing, along with his commitment to be a midwife for ideas. Did you lose count of the number of dissertations you helped deliver? One under-studied paper that you published, “Who controls the canon? A classicist in conversation with cultural conservatives,” (Moretti (1993), Teachers College Record, 95, pp. 113-126) captures many of the paradoxes you embodied and worked through. A radical classicist, a skeptical optimist, a scientific artist, a philosophical craftsman, an institutional revolutionary. Somehow, you integrated these roles with a career trajectory that not even the most advanced detectors in the Large Hadron Collider could trace. I watched you start countless conversations with a Greek or Latin etymology, charming the academics, administrators, and funders alike in a display of the continuing power of the Western cannon. You constantly reminded us of the classical education that many of our favorite thinkers received, and insisted we read them against that backdrop. But, more importantly, a reminder of how radical these thinkers all were in their own time, and how likely they themselves would be protesting the ossification of the cannon, if they were around today. These lessons will live on through one of the last projects you initiated, Decolonizing the Cannon, which a number of us are committed to follow through with. After 25+ years of reading Homer every fall, it will take us a lifetime to reconstruct the lesson plans you left behind. In the 9 years that I’ve known you we’ve been to hell and back. We’ve studied together, traveled together, worked together, gotten sick and healed together, but all the while kept our senses of humor. I’ve read many beautiful eulogies about you, but in this letter I want to emphasize your enduring sense of humor. You were a funny man. LMAO funny. Slapstick funny. Dada surrealist funny. Hashish funny. Plenty of the humor was dark, and perhaps, as your student Ruthie suggested to me recently, your humor helped shield you from the brutal injustices that you perceived and experienced all around us. But you were also sometimes a klutz, in an absentminded-professor sense, and a disorganized mess. A creative mess, but a mess. But, I have to say, that even when you were operating on scripted autopilot, you were way better than most people at their best. There wasn’t much you enjoyed more than being called out for your lapses in attention, and my glimpses of your inner monologue were often hysterical. I think that your analysis of power led you to conclude the the world was simply absurd. We all witnessed you acting on this with gravitas and determination, but in the minutia of our micro-interactions, there was always a wide smile and a belly laugh. I don’t think any of us will ever forget the sound of your laugh. (Or, your bark. Man, did you love to throw down and argue. But, that’s another post.) After I started taking classes with you, it didn’t take me long to realize that that the secret to understanding what you were talking about was knowing what you were reading that week. You would basically have one conversation all week long, no matter who you were talking to. I imagine it was bewildering to many of my coworkers when you brought up false-needs, or commodification at our weekly staff meetings, but if people paid close attention, they could almost observe the wheels spinning all week long, as you lived the theorists you were teaching through the practice of our projects. I often explained to people the incestuous nature of my work/school commitments by comparing my situation to a graduate student in the natural sciences. They might spend 40-60 hours a week in a lab, and working for you was about as close as I could imagine to working in a communications lab. I often wondered how many of my cohorts managed to keep up on developments in new media (and many of them certainly did) without the ambient immersion in a practice that exercised and embodied the theories we were reading. When summer vacation rolled around, you never quit. I remember how you used to talk about the stretch of time between Sept-May as one long sprint (as long as I’ve known you, you’ve taught at least 2-2 + advising phd students + multiple committees at TC and the J-School, on top of your administrative responsibilities as executive director at CCNMTL and a senior officer in the libraries) , but you didn’t exactly slow down in the summer either. Or, perhaps I should say that you did slow down, but you never stopped teaching and learning. For at least 3 or 4 summers I participated in “slow reading groups” with you and a few of your dedicated students. We didn’t get any credit for these sessions, and you didn’t get paid. We would sit in your office, and go around the table reading a book out loud, pausing whenever we needed clarification. And, we often needed clarification. You were convinced that no one was reading anything closely anymore, and that the hundreds of pages that were assigned in courses each week were flying by without students or teachers taking the time to slow down and absorb them. The second summer we tried this we read Latour’s Politics of Nature, a text we all internalized and will never forget. You had such a funny relationship with technology. You loved gadgets, but were constantly thwarted and befuddled by them. I wonder how many laptops and phones you lost or broke in the years we have known each other. You never stopped learning, but were suspicious of every new tool that showed up, and the more hype around the tool, the more you growled defensively at it. But often, after months of critiquing and berating something, you would come around and start appreciating it. While some of my coworkers/cohorts seem to have chips on their shoulders about the ineffectual futility of technological interventions, you had an optimistic will that allowed you to wield technology like you wielded the classics. Opportunistically, and instrumentally, in the service of social justice. That was your gig. Relentlessly. Sometimes I wonder if you felt like you had painted yourself into a corner with all of your critiques – like when you whispered quietly to me that you wanted to learn how to use Second Life, without blowing your critical cover. Last week I ran into an ex-girlfriend that I hadn’t seen in over 10 years. It was nice to reconnect, and in the course of our conversation I realized that we hadn’t spoken since I had started working and studying at Columbia. I was an entirely different person back then, one I barely recognized. Perhaps people return to graduate school in order to change, but true transformations require a relinquishing of your old identity and ego, without a clear idea of what might emerge on the other end. The Judaic tradition has a teaching that anyone who teaches you the alphabet is considered a parent. You literally taught me the alphabet, as we revisited the alphabet as a revolutionary communications technology (via Eric Havelock), and you taught me many other alphabets and languages that gave me access to entire new worlds. You also invited me into your home, and made me feel like I was part of your family. Most of all, you modeled and embodied an honesty, integrity, and sheer force of will that I am blessed to have intersected. Safe travels, Frank, and enjoy your vacation. Love, /J

Yottabytes, wormcams and whistleblowers

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 22:45:38 +0000

If you haven’t yet heard about the details of the NSA’s spying program, catch yourself up with the timeline so this post doesn’t sound entirely bonkers. For years I’ve been pondering the scope and implications of what Aram Sinnreich and I call The End of Forgetting, and even prior to Edward Snowden’s revelations, I have recently noticed a few dramatic activations of massive distributed memory banks. In recent months, there have been a few instances where we have literally peered back in time, reconstructing the past based on comprehensive (relevant) records. In the sciences, the collection of records prior to having a specific question is sometimes called “triple-blind”. And, as we know, the dragnet-style collection of records has extended far beyond the lab. If software does one thing well its the collection/storage/retrieval of records; And, software is everywhere. This story about the reconstruction of February’s meteor path based on dashboard-cam footage reassembled inside Google Earth was pretty stunning: Also, was it me, or did the reconstruction of the crowd scenes leading up to the Boston bombings feel a bit like the the distorted phone messages from the past that the Scientists reconstructed in 12 Monkeys??? Mainstream physicists have postulated a viable form of 2-way time travel based on wormholes. In this scenario, one end of a wormhole is accelerated into the future, allowing those in the future to travel back to the point where the wormhole was opened, but crucially, no farther back in the past. The point when this wormhole is created is known as Year Zero. In the past, I have discussed physically travelling through time (Pyramid Schemes), including how critical detailed records of your destination is to plotting flippin’ pinpoint coordinates. But in this post I’m content to explore the metaphor of the Wormcam, a science-fiction device I first saw used in Arthur C. Clarke’s Light of Other Days. The wormcam is a wormhole that only allows light to travel through it. In this book, wormholes are first able to bridge any two points in space, and soon thereafter, any two points in time. Most people learn to correctly assume that they have at least one wormcam fixed on them all the time. I’m not really big on sharp discontinuities in history, and I’m not particularly fixated on determining when precisely Year Zero fell/will fall. But, its increasingly clear to me that The End of Forgetting signifies the singularity, more-so than AI, Mo-Bio, and Nano-Tech combined. There won’t be a single moment when prior and after people won’t understand each other, but the period we are living through right now has those characteristics. And PRISM is just the start. If you haven’t heard of the British series Black Mirror, stop reading this post right now and go watch S01E03 The Entire History of You. Really, that episode alone should lay to rest the question of why someone who doesn’t break the law should care about the End of Forgetting. Of course, the precipice we are standing on does not only provide us with a view of the past. While the past doesn’t determine the future, power is determined to wield the past as a means of stacking the odds. The media is currently preoccupied with data mining, and forensic analysis. But, the real money is about about turning the wormcams to the future, using predictive behavioral modeling. The NSA only needs to be 100% correct to stop terrorists, but corporations only need to be a few percentage points better to sell more burgers or prevent your friends from changing mobile carriers, and politicians often only need a few more points to win an election or gerrymander a district. A friend of mine at TC published a paper about predicting who will drop out of high school dropouts by third-grade, based primarily on their grades and absentee records. And, that’s before we turn to pre-crime or pathologizing risk. In Snowden’s own words, “they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with.” (7:33) Just remember, if all that exists is the present, then the past must be as malleable as the future. That is, unless we digitally ossify them :-)

Pyramid Schemes

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 21:24:15 +0000

A few months back I visited Cairo and cracked the mysteries of the Pyramids. Or, more accurately, cracked open some exciting new lines of inquiry. I was visiting Egypt for work, but had some time for sight-seeing along the way. I had visited Egypt about 20 years ago (!) but had largely skipped Cairo, and we’ve both changed a bit since then. The day after we arrived in Cairo we visited the Egyptian Museum. When Frank and I visited Israel we discussed how national museums are often used to assert a national ideology by anchoring it within a particular historical narrative. Striking insight, especially since Mubarak had recently commissioned his son to begin construction of a new national museum that was in progress when we visited (mid-revolution). The current national museum dates back to British colonial times, and feels like a warehouse. It is filled with countless riches, but it’s really almost impossible to navigate without a guide. I thought it was notable that the museum makes no mention of the Bible or the Exodus, even if it is to point out that there is no historical record of the events described (except for one possible mention of the Israelites, but even that is downplayed). We had a wonderful tour guide taking us through the museum, and as we travelled through history I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were missing something important in our interpretation of these artifacts. The patron saint of my PhD program, James Carey, draws an important analytic distinction between communication as ritual, and communication as transmission. While there is no sharp line between these two modalities of communication, it is often helpful to distinguish between the two. So, for example, many of us read the paper ever day as a ritual, more like taking a bath than receiving information. When we reached Tutankhamun’s treasures it hit me like a ton of limestone bricks. Through their burial rituals, the Egyptians were trying to transmit information, but we were largely interpreting their rites and artifacts as ritual. Having read works like Serpent in the Sky, I have an inkling as to how structures like the Temple of Luxor (and Solomon’s temple, for that matter) were attempts to represent their society’s entire cosmology. What if the Egyptian burial rituals were an attempt to transmit the state of the art of Egyptian knowledge? All of it—astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy/religion/metaphysics? The first obvious question is the identity of the senders and receivers. If we take their myths at face value, the soul of the king would soon return to the his mummy. Perhaps he might need a refresher course in Egyptian cosmology after the journey? Cliff notes, at least? Or, perhaps these burial chambers were intended as time capsules. Messages intended for future generations? Future civilizations? Or, maybe just future generations of Egyptians (their civilization lasted thousands of years). Perhaps these attempts to capture the totality of Egyptian knowledge were like pissing contests between the priests. How succinctly and elegantly could they represent Egyptian knowledge? This was my frame of mind during my stay in Cairo and the questions I was mulling over as we visited the pyramids of Giza later that week. Co(s)mic Interlude Did you ever hear the one about the pyramids as time machines? It goes something like this: The pyramids are constructed out of tons of limestone bricks. The molecule that makes up Limestone has two energy states. It’s lower energy state is its equilibrium. However, the molecule can also be excited into its higher energy state. Supposedly, this state could be induced by an acoustic wave at the correct resonant frequency. In the pyramids, this was achieved by a chorus of priests chanting at the appropriate frequencies. During initiation rites, an initiate stood in the burial chamber of the pyramid while the priests chanted. This excited the limestone molecules. At a precise moment, the priests all stopped chanting, allowing the limestone molecules to collapse back into their lower energy state. This produced a wave of energy, all focused on the burial chamber. The initiate fell into a trance, whereupon they dreamed they travelled to the future. They remained in this trance indefinitely… that is, until they heard this story! Ha. Get it? Space-Time Bouys The pyramids are massive. Beyond human scale. They made me wonder… For a while I’ve believed that time travel really must have really picked up on this planet around the invention of photography. For a fairly mundane reason. Your calibrations need to be flippin’ pinpoint. Time traveling can be though of as tele-transporting, through space-time. So, you need to be able to safely and reliably target your destination coordinates.The last thing you want to do when teleporting is materialize in the middle of a rock or a tree or worse. Photographs, when combined with the exact date and time of their exposure, provide such coordinates to future chrono-naughts looking for a safe journey. In the presence of the pyramids it dawned on me that there is another solution to this safety equation: Hold your spatial coordinates fixed! This would work best if you could build a structure that would be around for thousands of years, so you could be sure your point of arrival/departure would be around on both ends of your trip. The pyramid’s burial chambers pretty much fit this bill (modulo the irregularities of the earth’s orbit, the motion of our galaxy, etc. Quantum entanglement to the rescue?). Could the pyramids satisfy these constraints? Maybe. This hypothesis could go a long way towards explaining the “curse of the mummies”. Could King Tut’s burial chamber be one of the last operational teleportation chambers? 3D printers designed to reconstruct information beamed from somewhen else (after all, the necessary atoms are sure to be in place for the reconstruction)? Or, would the Egyptian pyramids merely decorative cribs of the original Atlantean devices, and were never fully operational? All this suggests that Moses was a sleeper agent who infiltrated the Egyptian priesthood to liberate their most well-guarded secrets. Of course, the evidence of his handiwork is mapped out clearly in the blueprints of the tabernacle. In Dec 2012 our sun will align with the black hole at the center of the milky way (or, will it?). A pretty good spatial-temporal landmark, if I were navigating. Whenever.

Forthcoming: The End of Forgetting

Thu, 24 May 2012 22:28:24 +0000

In Spring ‘05 I took a class with Eben Moglen on the privacy, anonymity, and surveillance beat. The experience changed my life and with tons of support from my teachers and cohorts, I have been working on these ideas ever since. A few years ago I joined forces with Prof. Aram Sinnreich, after a great conversation at a free culture salon. Together we reframed and refined the work, and co-presented it at Media in Transition 6 in Spring ‘09. We rinsed, lathered, and repeated our revisions, and just learned that our paper, The end of forgetting: Strategic agency beyond the Panopticon will be published in an upcoming issue of New Media & Society. Damn. Scholarly communication is slow, but occasionally fulfilling. Aram will also be presenting our work at this year’s International Communications Association conference. Sadly, I can’t make it, but if you are near Phoenix this weekend, stop by Camelback A at noon on Sunday!

The People's Drones

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:29:49 +0000

In May ‘06 I visited New York’s annual Fleet Week and personally met a few drones who were sleeping below the flight deck of a U.S. warship. In the 5 years since, “unmanned aerial vehicles” have reproduced explosively, and are rapidly changing the parameters of war and American foreign policy. Glenn Greenwald describes the “Drone Mentality” that renders victims invisible and enables risk-free aggression and violence. Public anti-drone outcries are spreading, though media coverage of the effects of U.S. drone attacks is glaringly absent. My friend Madiha Tahir has been reporting and researching these attacks in Pakistan and the accounts she has gathered are quite horrifying. But the U.S military isn’t the only outfit with access to these technologies. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (!) is using a drone to capture footage (and who knows what else), and Polish protesters in Warsaw used a drone to capture footage of riot police attacking them. Last year some hobbyists buzzed the Statue of Liberty with an unmanned aerial vehicle, and didn’t even get fined. Drone technology is advancing very rapidly, though to the average observer the technology might not look that much different from 70’s-era remote control planes. Most of the advancements are happening in software, which is invisible to the casual observer, and also more difficult to prevent from proliferating. If you haven’t seen any of the amazing footage of quadcopters in action, take a peek. These machines are much simpler to pilot and steer than a helicopter, and are quite inexpensive. There are quad-rotor open-source hardware/software projects, like the aeroquad (complete kits $1.5k), and the high-end is quite affordable (< $10k) for news companies and local police departments. At the moment, the regulations around flying these drones is ambiguous. But the FAA is currently reviewing regulations, and a government agency predicts there will be over 15,000 civilian drones operating in U.S. airspace by 2018. Drones are already in use patrolling the US/Mexican border, and the Department of Homeland Security is helping local law enforcement agencies obtain them. When I saw the video of the Polish protesters (via @MutualArising), I began wondering why local news companies were still flying manned traffic and news copters, and then I ran across the story (via @jonathanstray) about Murdoch’s drones. From my limited research, I believe that non-commercial hobbyists are allowed to fly these vehicles below 400ft. I propose that Occupy Wall Street should fly drones at every protest, to counter Mayor Bloomberg’s egregious attempts to suppress journalistic coverage of the protests. It seems clear that a robotic arms-race is underway, and my friend Peter Asaro, a robo-ethicist who serves on the international committee for robot arms control (icrac), worries about an arms race where everyone from drug cartels to the paparazzi all begin abusing drones. I remember Eben Moglen predicting that it won’t be long before every self-respecting dictator has full regiment of killer robots. Unlike human police, robots aren’t likely to hesitate when ordered to fire upon civilians. The right to bear robots? I am not convinced that drone-control is the best response to the asymmetrical power drones deliver (at least when it comes to surveillance drones, not armed drones). I think they best way to counterbalance this power is with open-source drones. The people’s drones. Update: As per @MutualArising’s comment below, OccupyDrones has taken off!

Parabolic Intentions

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:01:42 +0000

Mystical traditions depict a singularity in consciousness occurring when all of humanity is united in the same state of mind. Our choices will determine if we will arrive at this state by achieving global peace, or take a detour through the another World War. In the limit, our shared reflective awareness is a possible consequence of globalization and has been linked to the promise of world peace. Meanwhile, Princeton University’s all-but-unheard of Noosphere project has begun tracking meaningful correlations in random data that suggest an awakening of global consciousness. The project has distributed physical networked “eggs” which generate a steady stream of random numbers. Upon the occurrence of events of global significance the streams suddenly become a lot less random (actually immediately before these events, but that’s another mystery). Unprepared to even postulate the mechanism for the correlations they have established, the project minimally suggests that our collective intentions and emotions have the power to influence and affect our physical reality. A wise mentor of mine thinks we might be able to accelerate this transformation if we all took the simple step of pausing, contemplating, and reflecting every day at noon. Similar to the Play As Being practice I sampled a while back, the personal potency of such a discipline is dramatic. Noon is a convenient time to sync up, but the coarseness time zones introduces a margin of error. Imagine if large numbers of people welcomed the sun every morning - a wave of transcendence would (en)circle the globe. Some kind of psychic beacon? The idea that our technologies mirror our realities is common, though contemplating our reflection within these mirrors is less so. Our global communications system is not only the planet’s nervous system, but through computation and representation, it is becoming a 2-way mirror into our collective psyche. In the past I have appreciated how distributed research has given way to tools which help aggregate many snowflakes of data into a meaningful snowbank. Flickr and Delicious taught us how to conduct distributed research on photos and hyperlinks, but Twitter has helped popularize aggregation around arbitrary structured data. We are monitoring elections, and each other’s sexual habits. And the data doesn’t even need to be particularly well structured, as this research on the pulse of the nation’s mood demonstrates. Now that we have glimpsed own collective moods, can we design the biofeedback loops for us to become collectively-aware (in addition to self-aware)? To put this another way, could be learn to actually control the coordinated output of the Noosphere eggs, instead of merely tracking their correlations with our global state. If we could collectively broadcast one syllable into the universe, what would it be?

Shekhinah Power

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:42:21 +0000

Is it possible that our ancestors harnessed the power of electricity? It’s logically possible that electric motors pre-dated steam engines, and tantalizing writings combined with circumstantial evidence suggest that the ancients understood more than static electricity and simple batteries. This question is yet another reformulation of the regard we hold for the wisdom of the ancients, and if their models and perspectives might offer anything meaningful to today’s scientists and philosophers. Even the alternative researchers who investigate these claims often feel the need to invoke atlanteans, martians, or time travelers as the deus ex machina to explain their origin. A recent constellation of events and ideas (MiT6, Intentional Energy, Faith’s Transmission) in my life has brought me back to this question. If the ancients had developed a theory of everything, how might they have encoded this message for transmission into the future? Would their theory of everything incorporate/integrate subjectivity and consciousness, unlike our generation’s leading contenders? The following free association provides a glimpse at what a message like that could look like.

Faith's Transmission

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:17:14 +0000

Well, its been 2 months since I participated in MIT’s Media in Transition (MiT6), but the event is still vividly fresh in my mind. The conference was really amazing. It attracted a really diverse mix of theorists and practitioners, academics and professionals, and folks from many walks of life. This conference I tried to go to talks where I “didn’t belong” - hoping to learn from disciplines I don’t regularly encounter. It was a great strategy, as I often gravitate towards talks that I know something about, wanting to hear the presenter’s take on it, but venturing beyond my usual horizons was much more fun. Aram Sinnreich and I presented a paper on Strategic Agency in an Age of Limitless Information (abstract, slides), and I am really happy with how things turned out. Hopefully, we’ll work on polishing this paper up to submit to a journal soon, though I don’t really know where we should submit yet. The videos for the main plenary events are now up and I am looking forward to clipping the little hand grenades I remember throwing during Q&A. This panel on Archives and History (my question starts @ 1:35:15) wasn’t the only conversation about archiving, but it was fairly representative of the perspectives. It’s too bad MIT World does not provide me with a mechanism to address a point of time in their videos (like our recently liberated VITAL tool allows), so you’ll have to advance the playhead manually to hear me out. It’s basically a riff on - Why Archive? - The beauty of the Sand Mandala and the effort required to actually delete something…. The conversations were very similar to some that we had back in May ‘07 at the Open Content conference, but not I think I can finally articulate what’s been bugging me about these conversations. With the help of Ben and John Durham Peters (we shared a bus ride to/from the conf), I realized that archiving can be thought about as a transmission, for anyone, into the future. I also realized that ordinarily, when we look to the past, we use history to help us understand ourselves better. The presumption that future generations will actually care about us for our own sake, strikes me as narcissistic (narcissism and new media has surfaced on this blog before). I imagine they will want to use the messages that we send them to help themselves, understand themselves better. So, to archive purposefully the question becomes - how can we best help the future? To the archivists who claim we don’t have any idea what questions the future will be asking, so we better save it all - I think I know what the future will be trying to understand about us. They will likely be trying to figure out what on earth was distracting us while we let the planet die! We were busy devoting our resources to saving every last copy of American Idol and Big Brother while Gia screamed in agony for help. So, how can we increase the signal-to-noise ration of the messages we send into the future? Without somehow reducing the message to the critically problematic golden record on the voyager spaceship, or its successors? I guess the Long Now Foundation is thinking along these lines, and I have always envied David Vakoch’s job title (Director of Interstellar Message Composition)… The conference helped me realize that Vakoch and the Long Now have a really similar task - but I don’t know how many archivists conceive of their task as Intergenerational Message Composition. Perhaps we need to spend even more time curating? Indicating in our archives why we think they were worth saving? And what’s the most important message we can send into the future? Not like it matters much longer, as I really do believe we are embarking on The End of Forgetting (see our conf paper for more details). Shifting frames for a moment, what if the ancients had a really important message to send us? Their Theory of Everything, or the equivalent of E=MC^2. How would they have attempted to transmit it? When I discussed these ideas w/ my friend Rasmus he recommended I start up a consulting firm specializing in Future Relations. ;-)

The year of the hybrid?

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:50:58 +0000

Economies, not cars. Last night I saw Larry Lessig present “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy” as a part of Evan Korth’s amazing Computers and Society speaker series. The talk was an improved iteration on the talk I saw him present at Wikimania ‘06, but it was much tighter - concentrated, but not too dense. He included a few new examples and anecdotes, collapsed earlier presentations into compact sub-segments, and has incorporated Benkler’s hybrid economies (articulated in The Wealth of Networks) into the Read-Only->Read/Write->Hybrid progression. It really is a pleasure listening to a world-class orator (he has argued cases in front of the supreme court) deliver an argument, and I was trying to pay attention to his rhetorical style, and the ways he has honed the structure of his argument over time. First, a small bone - For a while, Lessig has been making a bold and provocative assertion that text has become the Latin of our time, and audio and video are the vulgar. Arguments over the correctness of tense aside, I sure wish he would start using the word ‘vernacular’ instead of ‘vulgar’. ‘Vulgar’ makes the argument sound, well, a bit elitist to me, and when I repeat this claim, I remix it to ‘vernacular’. More important than quibbling over this choice of words I was a little thrown off by the direction that Lessig wants to take IP reform. Last night he spent a bit of time outlining a scheme that hinges on the analytic distinction between professionals and amateurs. I think he may have been trying to appeal to an intuitive sense of fairness, or perhaps pragmatics, over how professional creators work might be protected by IP while amateurs should be free to create w/out regulation or restriction. I thought it was downright odd that in one breath he was persuading us that we live in a hybrid world, and in the next trying to maintain the line between amateurs and professionals. The line between professionals and amateurs is clearly blurring, as the difficulties in applying shield laws to journalists attests. Nowadays, who exactly is The Press, whose freedoms may never be abridged according to the First Amendment? I am really unclear about the definition of a creative professional in a hybrid economy. Would we need to introduce licenses to certify creative professionals? Even in the example of the baby video with Prince music playing in the background, would the situation change if the mother was making money off of google ad-words aside the video? To me, if you take Benkler’s argument to heart, in a networked world many everyday interactions will be commodified, and favors will turn into transactions. We’ll all become some hybrid of amateur and professional. This doesn’t sound all good to me, as I am not sure I want to live in a world where everything has an exchange value… This paper by Nigel Thrift, Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification, paints a grimmer picture than Benkler does about the sophisticated ways that knowledge workers are being exploited in the hybrid world we are hurtling towards.

Bruno vs. The Cavemen

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:35:09 +0000

This summer I was part of an amazing reading group where we slowed to a crawl and closely read Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature. When I say we read the book, I mean we literally went around the table and read the book out loud, stopping to discuss difficult passages until we were confident we understood them. I haven’t taken to the time to read a book this closely in ages, and the experience reinforced the age old addage about finding the universe in a grain of sand. Reading a book that deals with such deep eternal themes, written by a brilliant theoretician who has himself synthesized and integrated an incredible amount of history, philosophy, and literature, was like glimpsing the entire cannon through Latour’s eyes, and well worth the effort. In this work, Latour performs a root canal on a form of conceptual dualism that has haunted Western thought for millennium. The book revolves around a perplexing circumstance in world we have constructed for ourselves - How did we end up in a world where one set of propositions (usually known as facts) are authoritative, unassailable, and incontrovertible and another set of propositions (usually known as values) are the kinds things we are allowed to argue about? Apart from the challenge of figuring out which of these flawed categories a particular proposition belongs to, the artificial separation between the tasks of constructing the common world and constructing the common good shuts down all possibility of discourse - before we even get a chance to try to arrive at consensus! The institutionalization of facts and values are so inextricably intertwined that it is folly to erect barriers between these two enterprises. Latour illustrates his perspective with examples from controversies in the sciences (especially Environmentalism and Political Ecology), but it is trivial to transpose his argument to the great debates between objectivity and subjectivity in Journalism, and the ways that certain kinds of propositions (‘data’ in many conversations about technology, and ‘revelation’ in conversations about religion) are invoked as trump cards to shut down all debate. Medical “science”, especially psychiatry and brain science are horrendous perpetrators of these offenses right now, and the consequences are anything but theoretical. The Onion provides my favorite example illustrating the confusion between facts and values. Latour’s proposed strategy for re-imagining the mexican standoff between nature/culture, science/democracy, facts/values, objectivity/subjectivity, necessity/freedom, etc is to re-tie a metaphysical Gordian knot as an epistemological one. He would like us to consider an dynamically expanding collective of players/concepts, composed of humans and non-humans (the non-humans have spokespeople, whose assertions are speech acts - qualified by the same kinds of language we use to indicate our confidence in any speech act). Revisiting and reinterpreting Plato’s metaphor of Cave, Latour traces the West’s tendency to cleanly divide smooth facts from messy values to the flawed idea of aspiring to leave the Cave to grasp/glimpse/experience the Truth. Even if this were attainable, the sojourners would still need to return back into the cave, to mediate and relate their experience to those still trapped within. Instead of aspiring to leave the cave, we need to transcend the entire Cave system. It isn’t completely fair to criticize a book for what it’s missing (no single book can be all things), but it would be great to expand this line of analysis in the future and elaborate on the role of mediation in the current and imagined collective. It seems pretty clear to me that for Latour, the ‘Sciences’ encompass the entire enterprise of Science, including the scientists, the funders, the corporations, the educators, and the scientific journalists. But, there is little in the book that unpacks these relations. A broader criticism sets an argument that John Durham Peter’s advanced in Speaking into the Air, against Latour’s conception of the Collective. Peter’s argues that we often view communication as salvation, when in fact alot of discourse never leads to consensus, and there are perspectives that are mutually incommensurate and irreconcilable. I may be naive to think the Collective that Latour dreams of is a realistic aspiration, though I sure would love to live to participate in it. I also want to explore the connections between this work and the Death of Environmentalism essay I encountered last year. I think Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ argument is a vivid and direct application of the theory Latour argues in The Politics of Nature. Ulises Mejias’ work on Networked Proximity is another work which might be fascinating to juxtapose with the dynamically expanding collective (which, can be thought about as a network). Ulises’ notions of the para-nodal might be crucial to consider when the collective invokes the power to take things into account.

Passing Virtual Cars

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:06:07 +0000

I’ve got a wonderful summer backlog of posts piling up, but I really want to try to keep these posts short(er) and sweet, so I’ll try to compose staccato. My explorations into virtual worlds have taken a turn for the surreal lately, as I have made a few new close friends who have been graciously teaching me how they play. I feel like I might be coming ridiculously late to the conversation (I don’t often play video games), but my experiences have given me new pause about the raging debate over the potential influence of sex and violence in games/media on people (not just youth). I have learned first-hand how Second Life encourages people to articulate their fantasies in intricate detail - trying on new fashions, tattoos, piercings, behaviours, and lifestyles. From a few conversations, I am also pretty sure that much of this identity-play sometimes sticks, and often crosses back over into real life. The whole process is spookily reminiscent of the “manifesting principle,” described in magickal/mystical systems like Chaos Magick (e.g. Carol’s Liber Kaos) and even Kabballah (The Three Abrahamic Covenants and The Car Passing Trick):

The Zen of Life^2

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:02:17 +0000

I suppose it was only a matter of time before I experienced something within Second Life that caught my interest. Though I work on and study social software, I haven’t been particularly giddy about metaverses (multiplayer, persistent, 3D immersive environments) for a variety of reasons - perhaps tracing back to the fact that I haven’t really enjoyed playing too many computer games. As a free software developer I have participated in quite a few post-geographic projects where communication is managed quite effictively in 2D. While I recognize the value of ‘presence’ and synchronous communications, I doubted that an avatar added much additional value to a communicative experience. This semester I am personally participating in a digital studio, where we have held some meetings inside Adobe’s Connect, but have found the experience cumbersome, adding little value over irc (or, at least, VOIP + text, like in skype). I usually dread video conferenced meetings, though its sometimes worthwhile to share a browser. At work, we helped set up a Global Classroom for the Earth Institute, which has been receiving rave reviews, but is mostly just a shared video experience (with a few live events). Prior to this week, I have visited second life on a handful of occasions as a guest, but mostly just been reading about it, watching videos, and hovering over other people’s shoulders while they play. All this changed this week, after a chance encounter with a professor, Piet Hut, whose work I encountered years ago as an undergrad. His dialogue with Bas Van Fraassen on The Elements of Reality really helped me crystallize my thinking on a range of philosophical questions, and the perspective explored in this conversation may serve as an effective bridge between ancient and modern metaphysics. Prof. Hut is an astrophysicist at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (which now, more than ever, reminds me of the village) , and he takes phenomenology and mysticism pretty seriously. His interdisciplinary research is really all over the map and I dig his philosophies of science. His writing is usually clear and free of jargon. I have not been keeping up with his work, but when I saw his name on the schedule at the CSSR Neuroscience and Free Will conference, I decided to crash his talk (and I figured there would be coffee and snacks). In his talk he mentioned some of his latest work inside of virtual worlds, including new ways of conceptualizing (scientific) simulations and research. I was quite receptive to this topic, since I have been thinking a whole lot about how Technology is transforming Epistemology, which I have started writing about here, and hope to expand upon at the end of this semester (um… that’s in a few weeks!). His latest project though is another trip entirely - (or, perhaps identical, from the inside-out ;-)). The project, Play As Being is described and tracked on that blog, and is a bit tough to explain in words - you sorta have to try it to understand/believe it. So, I kinda had an enlightening experience inside of SL. I learned about the potentialities of virtual worlds as phenomenological laboratories. While I was there last night I was attentive to my minds restlessness (how weird is it that after 45 minutes I was compelled to stand my avatar up and stretch my “legs”?) and learned a few new RL practices. I brought the lessons back to meatspace today, and was much more mindful of my body and breathing. I’m not on the full 1% time-tax rhythm, but I am working on picking out mnemonic bells so I can introduce a bit more discipline into the flow of my experience. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been that surprised at the cognitive value of a 3D experience. I mean, I’ve read about The Loci Method in books like The Art of Memory. But the idea of using the environment as a Zen training studio really blew me away. I imagine you really need the right group for the experience to work, but I am quite impressed by this particular purposeful use of this instrument. It took a really good teacher(s), but I have a much better appreciation for effectively using SL as a space to practice mindfulness and contemplate Being. Has anyone else heard of things like this happening w/in SL?

A round trip ticket, out of this world

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:52:40 +0000

Since I am total flosstitute I do lots of my work on the beautiful OS X desktop, though the servers I administer are all linux, and on my new thinkpad laptop I finally bit the bullet and wiped the windows partition (it came with vista, so there wasn’t much deliberation). My only encounters with windows nowadays are through virtualization, so I feel like I have that demon safely caged. One of the things I love about the mac are the little easter eggs you can find if you hunt around long enough (or more likely accidentally stumble upon). One of these black-ops is the music visualization software that comes with iTunes (at least on OS X). I seem to recall something about a Christian fundamentalist writing it originally, right before joining the navy and serving on a submarine crew. Thing is, he couldn’t get this piece of software out of his head, and winded up leaving the military to work on this software full time. I think Madonna used to use early prototypes at her private parties, and one way or another he started working at Apple, apparently on the iTunes team. (this is all from memory, and I couldn’t find a source, in case anyone has heard this story also). In any case, I occasionally remember to check in on this tool, and it’s gotten better with ever release of OS X. I think last year I discovered that if you run it in full screen mode it seems to use a much improved rendering engine, and maybe even a different algorithm. None of this prepared me for the experience that I had Tuesday night. A few months back I learned about a wicked cool piece of software on Alexander Limi (the Plone founder’s) blog. The software is called nocturne, and is pretty friggin cool on its own. It’s not much more than a simple set of macros that invert the hues of your display - to either black and white, inverted color hues, or even submarine red. It’s really nice if you want to use your computer at the end of the day, but don’t want to deal with all the energy of a full backlight. So anyway, I had this kooky idea (no drugs involved!) to turn on the iTunes music visualizer with nocturne in night mode, and I simply could not believe my senses. I was witnessing the audioloom - an idea I had begun to think about a few years back that originated with the simple question - can synesthesia be learned? I became very interested in the natural relationships between color and sound, noticing that both seem to come in octaves (think of the color wheel - a venn diagram defining 3 singles, 3 doubles, 1 triple, and the background, making 7+1… just like the western musical scale!). I even remember what sparked this question. I was playing with a new set of Christmas lights, the kind with a remote control that makes the lights dance in different patterns. The important part of this experiment was leaving the lights ordered neatly in the box, instead of making a tangled mess. With this arrangement, when I played music, I could swear that the photons were dancing to the beat ;-) In any case, I was intrigued by the possibility that there might be a fundamental ontological relationship between sound and color, but even with this foray into metaphysics, I thought there might be a natural mapping between these two types of sense data, one that might be empirically determinable. I did some research on synesthesia, and read a great book called The Man Who Tasted Shapes. My idea began to take shape as a multi-phase project. Phase I was this screensaver on steroids, but Phase II is a musical instrument that plays light instead of sound. As with all fun ideas, there is nothing new under the sun, and many philosophers/inventors ranging from Aristotle to Newton to Benjamin Franklin have taken a crack at this problem (timeline), but the idea was ahead of its time… Until now. So, back to Nocturne’s night mode. When I went full screen with non-monotone inverted hues, I swear to god it felt like I was entering a wormhole. Right out of that scene in Carl Sagan’s Contact, except without the extraneous seat that the stupid humans built. I was transfixed, and will freely admit that on this first trip I spent a solid 2 hours staring at the screen and listening to my favorite tunes. Every time a song would end, I would wonder what another of my favorites would look like. I think the difference between day mode and night mode is that the visualizer outputs mostly dark. By inverting the hues, the screen explodes with backlit energy. Enough to keep your eyes working overtime. It was kinda like watching TV, except that instead of being hypnotizing, it was mesmerizing. I mean, I was grooving on my favorite music, but my eyes weren’t jealous of my ears - everyone had their work cut out for them. Unlike TV, the audioloom experience requires active processing, as your brain frantically struggles to find patters in the sequences and segues. Since I don’t think the shapes and transitions are computed deterministically, there is an element of Art combined with the engineering mathematics displayed on the screen. It made me wonder if this feeling would normally have required 10 years of devoted study in an ashram to replicate before this technology came along. One way or another, the experience was transcendental, and I just hope I haven’t stumbled upon the Videodrome, or the mysterious plot device in Infinite Jest… In any case, I plan to continue my experiments and keep you posted with updates. It is quite a relief that I might not actually need to implement this invention one day. Just goes to show, ideas kept secret, go stale.

Solstice Special

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 01:11:53 +0000

I haven’t posted much here lately, but I have been writing. I just finished my first semester as a doctoral student in the Journalism school and completed a flurry of term papers. These two are from my pro-seminar with Michael Schudson, a class meant to introduce us to the history of the field and the faculty in the program. Our final assignment was to identify gaps in the field, which is a tough one, as all non-existence proofs are – especially in an interdisciplinary field, there will always be a fringe element occupying the gap. People in the class interpreted the assignment in two ways – some chose to identify gaps, while other actually went out and tried to fill some. I took the opportunity to begin to pre-emptively answer the question I am sure to be challenged with in the years ahead - the ever-daunting methodolgical quetsion – what on earth am I doing and how am I am doing it? Out of Thin Air: Metaphor, Imagination, and Design in Communication Studies (and this was the midterm paper which got me thinking in this direction Transcending Tradition: America and the Philosophers of Communication). I also took a wonderful class this semester at the New School taught by Paolo Carpignano (The Political Economy of Media - here is the syllabus). The class was all about the shifting relations between fabrication and communication, or more colloquially, work and play. We opened with Marx and Arendt and closed with Benkler and boyd. I took the opportunity to capture some of my experiences working on the Plone project before they fade from memory. Fabricating Freedom: Free Software Developers at Work and Play I am really glad to be done with the semester and am looking forward to a few weeks of “just” working full time!

Crowded Wisdom

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:19:05 +0000

This week I saw a presentation given by a member of the Yahoo!/Berkeley research team. At the talk, Dr. Naaman demoed this unassuming tool that his group has been working on: TagMaps (live demo, description) I am really glad I went to the talk, since the demo helped me understand how sophisticated this tool really is. I had a definite ah-ha moment learning about all the new flavors of semantic information soon to be mined from the massive amounts of memories we are collectively recording. During the talk I was reminded of this recent essay on Evolution and the Wisdom of the Crowds which explains how counter-intuitive these emergent properties are to our everyday experience. But, this seemingly teleological construction of semantic knowledge naturally emerges from a rich enough system, as the flickr research demonstrates. To clarify what you are looking at here, no humans tuned or trained the system to teach it which are the significant landmarks in these regions. The representation is computed using the aggregate processing of many, many tags. These tags are starting to provide enough information to disambiguate different senses of a word (based on the adjacent tags that are also present). Patterns are also discernible from the spatial-temporal information on these photos, and yearly events (e.g. BYOBW) have been detected and recognized by the system. Formerly unanswerable questions, like “What are the boundaries of the Lower East Side?”, now have a fuzzy answer of a sort, in the form of collective voting. While the UI work here is neat, it pales in comparison to this Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo presented at TED this year (though it does beat the pants of the current UI of pink dots on a map which forces you to paginate over all the matching pictures in batches of 20). The widget is even available as web service which you can feed your own data into. But, the real work here is going on behind the scenes. It’s being published and presented in CS contexts, just in case anyone thought this “social media” stuff was for just for kids. How flickr helps us make sense of the world: context and content in community-contributed media collections There is certainly lots to digest here. It’s one thing for an algorithm to decide on the most representative photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge essentially based on popularity (though its a shame that avat-garde art photos will be automatically marginalized through this technique), but its quite another to imagine other important areas of discourse being regressed to the mean - its an odd sort of leveling effect that is likely another manifestation of Jaron Laniers’ Digital Maoism. The presenter did note that social media designers do need to anticipate feedback effects, as when they launch a new tool and users adjust to the new conditions and modify their behavior accordingly (or begin to “game” the system to take advantage of it). We are a long way from 1960’s AI and its conviction that the world is best modeled and represented as a series of explicit propositions.

Emergent Intentionality

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:55:49 +0000

Or, My Fancy Rationale for Indulging in Conspiracy Theories. New Scientist just ran a story on The Lure of Conspiracy Theory. They claim that:

Conspiracy theories can have a valuable role in society. We need people to think “outside the box”, even if there is usually more sense to be found inside the box. The close scrutiny of evidence and the dogged pursuit of alternative explanations are key features of investigative journalism and critical scientific thinking. Conspiracy theorists can sometimes be the little guys who bring the big guys to account - including multinational companies and governments.

We are all dying, sick, and crazy

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:18:05 +0000

My visits to the Informedia lab have consistently generated futuristic ideas (and corresponding posts), and my trip this spring was no exception. This time I was thinking alot about what kinds of schemas will be employed after their prototype moves beyond watching grandma? When this kind of a system is inevitably rigged up to a school or a prison, or fed raw streams from live surveillance cameras? My money is on the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, an instrument that is arguably becoming the de-facto catalog for the full range of human behavior and experience. In some respects, this progression parallels the notion that nobody dies of old age anymore - they die of heart failure, cancer, or other diseases. And, as the title of this post cheerily states, we are all dying, we are all sick, and we are all crazy. As crazy as it sounds, the DSM is poised to become the lens through which we interpret all of human behavior. Given its breadth of coverage, I challenge anyone to find me a normal, healthy individual. It’s ambition reminds me of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, except in our generation, the full range of human experience has been radically pathologized. BTW - the folks who brought us Sexual Orientation Disorder are hard at work on V 5.0 of this catalog - and there is a call out for diagnosis suggestions.

Can you keep a dark secret?

Sat, 19 May 2007 18:44:46 +0000

The Alchemist in me feels compelled to respond to the excellent documentary that aired on PBS the other week entitled Newton’s Dark Secret. The film profiled Sir Issac Newton’s fascination with the ancient art/science/craft of Alchemy. Many of the experts interviewed regarded Newton’s Alchemical experiments to be shameful, perhaps reflecting more on our modern epistemic prejudices than on Newton. Contemporary experts seem threatened by the prospect than anybody in historical times understood things about the world that we don’t. Beyond the shame of taking Alchemy seriously, they also considered Newton’s alchemy to be his greatest failure. Failure?!? During the period Newton was practicing alchemy he wrote the Principica Mathematica, and also catapulted his way into the power elite - he became knighted, was appointed the head of the Royal Society, and earned power, prestige and wealth beyond his wildest dreams. To this day one of the most respected chairs in physics still bears his name. From this perspective, his alchemical pursuits seem quite successful. Smashingly successful if you consider this blogs tagline “Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi” - Our gold is not ordinary gold. The Alchemists understood metaphor, and it was essential to their theory and practice. Why do most modern thinkers insist upon interpreting the craft so literally? My girlfriend shared a Bahá’í quote on a related subject.

"Wait until pictures start getting indexed."

Tue, 26 Dec 2006 01:35:42 +0000

Well, I called it: In in class I took with Eben Moglen I predicted in a class discussion that pictures on the internet would soon be indexed: Re: video cameras (Feb. 11, 2005) Many people in the class were skeptical… Well, here it is, less than two years later: Face Search Engine Raises Privacy Concerns Of course, there are standard objections to the two primary critiques of surviellance “paranioa”.

If I am not breaking the law, why should I care?
There is so much informatoin being gathered, who could possibly sort through it all?

The responses to these objections should be well rehersed.

Wonderful Things

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:45:26 +0000

Monday night I went to the ITP’s end-of-semester show. A friend of mine is in the program and I went to check out the scene. ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, is part of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. ITP has been around since ‘79, and lies somewhere concetually between the MIT Media Lab and Mary Flanagan. When I visited the MIT Media Lab this summer I began to understand how it was really operating as a pooled R & D lab for corporate interests (with plenty of military funding). I got the vibe that ITP is coming from a different place with different priorities, but I don’t really know the full back story. Here are some of the highlights of the many many projects I saw the other night:

Another New Kind of Science?

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 23:25:00 +0000

Last weekend’s Cultural Studies conference reminded me of a viscous cycle that many humanities-oriented researchers are being subjected to. Disciplines such as educational research, ethnography, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology etc have effectively been colonized by the methodology of the social sciences and they are being forced to play a numbers game which they may not be suited for. Many projects striving for credibility are subjected to the tyranny of statistics - forced to transform their qualitative information (interviews, transcripts, first person accounts) into quantitative information through the process of coding. This reduction forces the data into buckets and creates a significant degree of signal loss, all in the name of a few percentages and pie-charts. Perhaps we have lost sight of the motivation for this reduction - the substantiation of a recognizable, narrative account of a phenomena, supporting an argument. Arguably, the purpose of the number crunching is to provide supporting evidence for a demonstrable narrative. Modern visualization techniques may be able to provide one without all the hassle. True, this is not always the only reason that qualitative is transformed into quantitative data, but advanced visualization techniques may provide a hybrid form that is more palatable to many of the researchers active in this area, and is still a credible methodology. It seems as if many people are being forced into coding and quantification, when they aren’t thrilled to be doing so. But the signal loss that coding is responsible for, all in the name of measuring, might be unnecessary if people think about using data visualization tools, that comprehensibly present the data, in all of its richness and complexity, as opposed to boiling it down to chi-squared confidence levels (and does this false precision actually make any difference? Does a result of 0.44 vs. 0.53 tell significantly different stories?) In a thought provoking post on the future of science, Kelly enumerates many of the ways new computing paradigms and interactive forms of communications might transform science. The device that I am proposing here might lead to some of the outcomes Kelly proposes. For a better idea of the kinds of visualization tools I am imagining, consider some of the visualization work on large email corpora coming out of the M.I.T. media lab, or the history flow tool for analyzing wiki collaborations, but even the humble tag cloud could be adapted for these purposes, as the power of words and visualizing the state of the union demonstrate. Crucially, tools analogous to Plone’s haystack Product (built on top of the free libots auto-classification/summarizer library) might help do for social science research what auto-sequencing techniques have done for biology (when I was a kid, gene sequences needed to be painstakingly discovered “manually”). The law firms that need to process thousands of documents in discovery and the commercial vendors developing the next generation of email clients are already hip to this problem - when will the sciences catch up? For any of this to happen the current academic structure needs to be challenged. The power of journals is already under attack, but professors who already have tenure can take the lead here and pave the road for their students to follow.

Permanent Records

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:13:00 +0000

Today I presented last year’s bioport Part II paper to the 2nd annual Cultural Studies conference at Teachers College. Permanent Records: Personal, Cultural, and Social Implications of Pervasive Omniscient Surveillance I think the distilled version of this model if far more digestible and accessible than the papers. One of my co-panelists is doing some really interesting work with urban youth in the bronx, and gathering incredible interview materials about the perceptions of surveillance by these youth, and their forms of resistance. These stories might help convey the violence of a surveillance society. The conference format was a bit disappointing. I can barely believe academics still read their papers to each other at conferences - there are so many things that Open Source does right, including, knowing how to throw a great conference. Even the variety of presentation formats is an idea that needs to spread - BOFs, lighting talks, presentations and posters all create different spaces and dynamics for interactions between participants. The traditional model is so intimidating that it seems like many people are discouraged from participating. More importantly, the social justice issues and governance models that are being explored by F/OSS projects are really important for the Cultural/Critical studies folks to be considering. It is also shocking how disconnected they are from the freeculture movement, and its theoretical roots. Arguably, the freeculture movement is a shadow struggle, mirroring the struggles for sustainability, and against globalization and the logic of capitalism being conducted in the physical world. But, it may also represent the actual ground on which that struggle is being conducted.

"Michael, are you sure you want to do that?"

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 01:04:00 +0000

Pull over Kitt - you’ve just been lapped. On Monday November 14th I attended a presentation by Sebastian Thrun, an AI researcher at Stanford U. whose team recently won the Darpa Grand Challenge. The idea behind the Grand Challenge is to accomplish something that seems impossible, along the lines of crossing the Atlantic, the X-prize, etc. Darpa had previously funded cars that drive themselves, but after numerous failures decided to turn the task into a contest and see how far teams would get in a competitive setting. Last year none of the entrants managed to finish the course, but this year 5 finished, 4 within the alloted time. The difference between last year and this year was primarily improvements in software, not hardware. In fact, once the software has been developed, outfitting a car with the necessary equipment to drive itself (the perceptual apparatus - laser, radar, and video guidance, the gps, the inertial motion systems, the general purpose computing servers, and the fly-by-wire control systems), were estimated by Sebastian to cost the robots are already here (some of them killer)!

Wikibases and the Collaboration Index

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:19:00 +0000

On October 27th I attended a University Seminar presented by Mark Phillipson. The seminar was lively and well attended, and Mark managed to connect the culture of wikis with their open source roots. Sometime soon I plan on elaborating on ways in which software, as a form of creative expression, inevitably expresses the values of the creators in the form of features. But right now I want to focus on the taxonomy of educational wiki implementations that Mark has identified since he began working with them. Here is how Mark divides up the space of educational wikis

Serenity Lost

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 01:06:00 +0000

Nothing like a little pulp sci-fi to resonate with a class on emerging tech. I saw Serenity tonight (skip this post until you have seen it, unless you aren’t planning to at all) and was amused at how a central plot line revolved around some information that has been covered up by the authorities, and the struggle to disseminate that message. The simplicity of a single message whose content can change the world, and a single distribution channel from which to broadcast it from is amusing, but poignant. I mean, if you could broadcast one message to the world, what would it be? Are these folksonomies helping in filtering and distributing this information, or are we just ending up on our same disconnected islands of information we started from. I am thinking of the disjoint sets of books that liberals and conservatives read, but there must be many other examples - perhaps the entire blogosphere falls into this category. One thing I have realized as I begin to rely more and more on my rss client, is that once I am lost inside of it, if you aren’t syndicating a feed, you don’t exist. I am quite aware that a full-blown information war is currently underway. The existence (and adoption) of Flickr allow me laugh at the Bush administrations attempts to prevent the publication of Katrina’s casualties, but how did this story get swallowed up? If bittorrent didn’t exist (or was outlawed) and we could not reclaim the “lost” bandwidth of individual broadband subscribers, large file transfers and exchanges would probably have to be mediated through centralized bandwidth providers like akamai or cisco. But this is not quite as simple as centralized vs. decentralized publishing models, since that is only half the equation. The information retrieval needs to happen on the other end, or else you’re screaming into an abyss. I was once lucky enough to find myself in a conversation with the author of citeulike. I casually inquired as to whether he was planning on releasing the engine which powers his site under an open license. He replied that he would, but that it would be a bad idea. citeulike is supposed to be a service, not a product. Its value is actually diluted the more there are that are running. Part of flickr or delicious’ power are in their popularity. They are much more effective the more users they have, leaving us once again in a paradoxical quandary, where we need a decentralized, centralized service. Too many flickrs, and they are all rendered weaker, and too few, and we are back in a situation where our information is in danger of being homogenized, controlled, and filtered.