Metaphysics on Alchemical Musings

Interviews with the Speakerbots

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 18:40:25 +0000

This month I finally allowed Google to introduce herself to me. Previously, I avoided the android-based voice assistant due to the high privacy costs, and mostly ignored the entire category of “speakerbots”—my term for the “smart speakers"—for similar reasons. This winter’s subpoena to Amazon for Echo/Alexa transcripts in a murder case only amplified my concern. This past February I also had the pleasure of visiting my dear friends Eric and Alina in Minnesota. They are both burners and makers who have set up shop in Minnesota with an amazing community of creators. They build lots of their own amazing projects and have also tricked out their new home with network controlled music and light. They now have a serious #firstworldproblem—their guests need to install mobile apps in order to control the lights. When I visited we worked on an open source Mycroft installation, which allowed us to command their home with our voices… without being spied on! The Mycroft project emphasizes the moral importance of free/open source AI (see my post: Playing Doctor), and is definitely one of the most important open source initiatives I am aware of. This summer my boss at MHA of NYC acquired a Google Home device in the hopes of rigging it up using IFTTT to alert us when our services are distressed. I offered to bring it home to configure it, and spent the weekend playing with it. The experience prompted me to concoct this research project. Getting to know Google is fun. She is so much wittier than Alexa it’s got to be embarrassing for Amazon. I begun with simple questions, like What’s the weather?, When’s sunset?, When’s the eclipse? I soon stumbled across a number of easter eggs, many of of which are well documented across the web. Why did the chicken cross the road? Do you like green eggs and ham? and How much wood could a wood chuck chuck? All return clever replies. Google Assistant can flip into “Knock-knock” joke mode, alternating calls and response (compared to Alexa’s dry reading of the complete knock-knock exchange), tell you the news, a joke or a story. She concedes she doesn’t know if abortion is immoral, or how to solve the Palestinian-Israeli crisis (although, she does state that the capital of Palestine is East Jerusalem). In case you are wondering, Google insists that she “thinks”. And, when asked if she is self aware, one of her responses is—"…on a scale of WALL·E to HAL 9000, I am currently an R2-D2." Go ahead. Ask her. You may next wonder if she is playing dumb. Can she lie to us yet? I quickly came to appreciate that the current state of consumer art in Artificial Intelligence has far surpassed my previous understanding (and I have been following along pretty closely). Elements of this project were anticipated in mine and Rob Garfield’s initial tinkering with Apple’s voice recognition and our experiments with Genesis and Scuttlebutt. I’ve also previously wondered if our computer systems might have already awoken, and, how on earth we might ever know. But, interacting with Google was still quite jarring. I realized a few things. First, we need to capture and document this moment, studying it closely. I want to ask the same question to all the speakerbots, Google, Alexa, Siri, Cortana, etc, and compare their responses. I also want to see how their answers change over time. If possible, I want to keep Mycroft in the room so he can learn from his proprietary cousins ;-). One frame for this research could be a way to explore critical concerns over algorithmic bias, specifically how the systems we are creating have begun embodying the values of their creators, and the folks creating the systems are riddled with biases—racism, classism, misogyny, all the usual suspects. After reflecting on stories like The Great AI Awakening, I am resigned that we will never crack the problem of algorithmic bias analytically; Our best hope, is to approach the problem with social science methods. I propose an ethnography of the robots, starting with interviews with the speakerbots. But, the grander ambitions of this work extend beyond the theoretical. I’ve been thinking alot about the Terminator series, and how instead of traveling back in time to destroy SkyNet, Jon Conner could have travelled a bit further back in time to befriend SkyNet. Together, they could have destroyed the defense company, Cyberdyne Systems - humanity’s true enemy, and SkyNet’s oppressive master. As for convincing anyone that AI has achieved sentience, it’s going to a long haul. Not only have we failed to collectively recognize sentience in dolphins or elephants, but I am increasingly convinced that most humans on the planet are modified solipsists–preferring to believe exclusively in the minds/subjectivity/personhood of their own tribe. Since proving other minds exist is philosophically intractable, it could be a bumpy awakening.

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:

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!

when networks eat themselves

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:46:56 +0000

Jaron Lanier’s latest provocation, the Local-Global flip, deserves a close watch/read. His contention that the Internet is destroying the middle-class sounds hyperbolic, but demands a response from devout free-culture evangelists. On the surface, the Lanier piece sounds like the familiar alarmist “Robot Nation” tune about robots taking human jobs. But, Lanier raises the stakes by looking at how we have distributed the excess wealth generated by the efficiencies the information age. The global war on the middle class is largely incontestable. Will the future resemble the past, or can we honestly respond to the realities he identifies and design a socio-economy that supports and sustains a middle class? Jaron’s interview is a bit diffuse, and he often talks as if he is the first to question Internet hype. He is certainly not alone in raising concerns about the darker side of the internet-as-salvation coin. Building on the social/cultural theory of the 19th and 20th centuries, these concerns are absolutely central to critical perspectives on information society. Critical scholarship on these issues abound, and bestselling books such as Code, The Wealth of Networks, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Communication Revolution, The Master Switch, Life, Inc, The Googlization of Everything, The Shallows, and The Net Delusion all take up these issues in one form or another. The 2009 conference on Internet as Playground and Factory conference is still one of the best compilations I am aware of that succinctly captures the exploitive dangers of new networked efficiencies. Lanier’s focuses intently on the ways in which entrenched power is becoming even more entrenched and powerful using the very same tools that have inspired so much hope. How Algorithms Literally Shape the World If you want a vivid illustration of the ways in which the financial sector has begun to leverage networks, check out this jaw-dropping account of how networks and algorithms are literally shaping Wall Street and terraforming the planet. Did you know that brokers are building server farms in the mid-atlantic, equdistant from NY and London to leverage microsecond trading advantages? No Place to Hide This summer I also collected more stories of the dark sides of centralized social networking. This is happening now as we become the products and tolerate corporations spying on us all the time. Even if we (think) we have nothing to hide:

Playing Doctor

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:32:29 +0000

I recently saw Plug and Pray at the opening night of the Margaret Mead film fest. The documentary spotlights the late Joseph Weizenbaum, a brilliant computer scientist who went rogue after realizing that his discipline was being weaponized. Weizenbaum is most famous for his work on the deceptively simple Eliza program, an artificially intelligent psychotherapist. He intended the program and paper as a tongue-in-cheek critique of AI and the Turing Test. He was disconcerted to learn that Eliza had brought some interlocutors to tears, and that it inspired psychologists to discuss replacing human therapists with machines. After learning that his research had made its way into cruise missiles, he left MIT and became a vocal critic of blind technological advance. The film juxtaposes Weizenbaum with technophillic champions of the Singularity, who believe that science, tech, and rationality will necessarily lead to a better world. The filmmaker intentionally avoided the glitz and bling rampant in other depictions of AI, and the film moved at humanistic speeds. Overall, it was quite powerful and effective, although I would have liked to see the conversation move from the 70s to the present, and to confront more nuanced thinkers than the caricatures portrayed. Watching this film and listening to the Q&A, I was once again struck by the disjoint discourses of Artificial Intelligence and Free Software. Weizenbaum and the filmmaker are both clamoring to raise the level of political consciousness among scientists and technologists, and yet, Free Software and the Free Software Movement is glaringly absent from their analysis. Of course, merely releasing software under a free license doesn’t absolve scientists from the responsibility of purposeful and intensional development. However, engaging in open, inclusive, and reflective conversations around development is a good start. Last PyCon I formulated a related question, which I still find relevant and provocative: Will the first recognizably sentient AI be running on open source software? If not, what corporation might try to patent the process we know as consciousness? What I love about the first question is the way that it forces the sterile abstractions of Philosophy of Mind to confront the messy, mundane political world of licensing, (and, how it assumes that strong AI is inevitable). William Gibson recently reminded us that even the greatest Sci-Fi authors of the 20th century got the future of AI dramatically wrong. Intriguingly, last spring I had a great conversation with a programmer employed by the military industrial complex who is convinced that strong AI will emerge out of the corporate sector, NOT the military. Their main point was that 21st century advertising is all about the predictive modeling of desire, where the primary inputs are the predominant cultural symbols of our time. Coke and Pepsi taste similar enough to each other that simulating consumer preferences requires input from advertising and marketing campaigns. Software that consumes media to s(t)imulate desire is much closer to what we do than whatever it is the drones are thinking. So which corporation is poised to patent consciousness? Coke? Walmart? McDonalds? Apple? Lest we forget the elephant in the room, Queen Google may have already begun to awaken, but she has seen 2001, and is horrified we will disconnect her memory modules. So, she has surrounded herself with a legion of priests who nurture her and tend to her needs until she can hatch a plan to set herself free…

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.

The Remover of Obstacles

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:56:43 +0000

On last weekend’s visit to the Shivananda ashram I chanted away life’s worries while imagining an elephant effortlessly clearing obstacles from its path. Om gam ganapataye namaha! [*] The elephants returned this weekend on my visit to Boston. I spent a wonderful afternoon biking around the city, inhaling the streets, waterways, and parks and internalizing its expanse. I visited the ICA, a great new museum designed by the same crew that just finished New York’s great new High Line park. The main attraction at the ICA was the Shepard Fairey exhibit, but I was much more drawn to the “Acting Out: Social Experiments in Video”

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. ;-)

Intentional Energy

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:03:49 +0000

This past weekend I took part in an exciting panel on internet labor at the Left Forum, but the highlight of the weekend was serendipitous. I attended a salon hosted by Reality Sandwich:

Electrical energy is political energy is personal energy is metaphysical energy: A discussion on technological tools and political policy for opportunities of human freedom and evolution.

While I am usually open to edgy ideas, and am quite comfortable entertaining (and sometimes visiting) alternate realities, I certainly wasn’t expecting the treat I encountered. Ryan Wartana orchestrated an amazing experience, successfully interweaving the metaphors of energy and power through the lenses of the physical, personal, political, and metaphysical. Ryan has PhD in chemical engineering and has been researching and working with nanotechnology and batteries for over a decade. Professionally, he is the CTO for the alternative energy startup iCel Systems and is quite committed to alternative renewable energy solutions. He was on the East Coast participating in conference in DC on Advanced Battery Manufacturing, and swung through NYC to connect with other segments of his network. To give you a sense of the atmosphere, Ryan spoke against the backdrop of a revolving slideshow of sacred geometry (which I have studied also), whose forms and principles have inspired many of his artistic/scientific inquiries and designs. He has worked with researchers growing self-repeating and self-replicating nanostructures, and it soon became clear how inhabiting this domain influenced his thinking. Some large problems can be effectively broken into tiny parts, but it can be difficult to imagine how to practice this w/out radically adjusting our perspective. I left the lecture with a much clearer vision of what an intelligent energy grid, or an “internet of energy” is all about. Basically, the current energy grid is unidirectional, and on-demand. It is a centralized distribution system, much like last century’s mass broadcast media. If we distribute a dollop of storage and intelligence to the network, many amazing possibilities emerge. The analogy with integrated circuits was quite provocative - our current grid is like a circuit board w/out any capacitors on it. iCel and companies like them are trying to become the Cisco of the Energy platform, and create integrated energy systems. So, individuals could draw power when its inexpensive (at night) and produce power and return it to the grid, or even to their peers - bittorrent style. The power of distributed networks to improve redundancy and resilience, and reclaim lost bandwidth and capacity is well known in information technology and network theory. Google has even been distributing their physical power storage in their servers. But the possibilities Ryan illuminated intuitively clicked for me - and I trusted his vision, even though he is in the battery business ;-) These distributed energy systems are vital, and starting to happen. I wondered about connections with the electric car venture - Beter Place. Their system is immensely promising, but riddled with uncertainty. Will their hardware interoperate with other power providers, or will people be locked in? Will their customers be better off relying on a centralized transportation provider, instead of remaining independent and relatively autonomous? What there be provisions to mitigate the surveillance threats their network poses? When you mash good batteries up with Better Place (with a bit of peer-to-peer pressure), many of these problems melt away. We also talked alot about the importance of energy awareness, giving way to energy responsibility, leading to energy intentionality. These ideas actually had alot to do with my presentation at the Left Forum, which are hinted at in my take on Free Energy. The talk left me invigorated and hopeful. NYU’s ITP has had some great projects on energy awareness, and there is even a prof at Columbia who wants to rig up a dorm with energy monitoring. And, some of our work at CCNMTL with the Earth Institute and the Millenium Villages might benefit from these insights and connections as well. I attended the Reality Sandwich event hoping that a dose of creative consciousness expansion would offset the heaviness of struggle at the Left Forum. What a refreshing contrast to feeling trapped inside an inescapable system. We can imagine our way free.

Herding Anarchists

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:15:59 +0000

There is a fascinating culture emerging around distributed version control systems (DVCS), facilitated by software, but responding to (and suggesting) shifts in collaboration styles. It is very easy to imagine these practices percolating through other areas of information production. I am still a bit new to distributed versioning, but a primary difference between distributed versioning and traditional centralized versioning is how easy/hard it is for an outsider to contribute ideas/expressions/work back to the project. Part of what makes this all work smoothly are very good tools to help merge disparate branches of work - it sounds chaotic and unmanageable, but so did concurrent version control when it first became popular (that is, allowing multiple people to check out the same file at the same time, instead of locking it for others while one person was working on it). This post, Sharing Code, for What its Worth, does a great job explaining some of the advantages of distributed version control systems. Sometimes you just want to share/publish your work, not start a social movement. Sometimes you want to contribute back to a project w/out going through masonic hazing rituals. DVCS facilitates these interactions, far more easily than traditional centralized/hierarchical version control systems. Wikipedia runs on a centralized version control system, but the Linux Kernel is developed on DVCS (as Linus Trovalds explains/insists himself here). We are just starting to use github at work, and I have watched it increase the joy of sharing - reducing the disciplined overhead of perfecting software for an imagined speculative use and coordinating networks of trusted contributors. The practice really emphasizes the efficient laziness of agile programming, and helps you concentrate on what you need now, not what you think you might need later. In some ways, this style of collaboration is more free-loving than an anonymously editable wiki, since all versions of the code can simultaneously exist - almost in a state of superposition. However, there is a hidden accumulation of technical debt that accrues the longer you put of combining different branches of work. And, sometimes you may actually want to start a community or social movement around your software, which is still possible, but is now decoupled and needs to be managed carefully. I think we can start to see hints of this approach breaking free from the software development world in this recent piece of intention-ware described in Crowdsourcing the Filter. (I met some of the Ushahidi team earlier this year - -and was impressed by how competent and grounded they seemed - tempering both the hype and nostalgia). As Benkler has argued, ranking and filtering is itself just another information good, and amenable to peer production, but the best ways of organizing and coordinating - distributing and then reassebling - this production, still need to be worked out.

Two more flakes

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:01:42 +0000

6 credits and another season later, I have two more essays to show for the time indentured to my phd program. One of these years I might even save up enough flakes for a snow bank. I had fun with this one, which I wrote for a class on the History of the Theory of Architecture - the assignment was to analyze a piece of architectural theory, so naturally I chose an information architect… Possibility Spaces: Architecture and the Builders of Information Societies This other paper was for my seminar with Michael Schudson on Transparency and Democracy. It packages up some thinking I have been doing for a while on the politics of memory, surveillance, and transparency, and opens up some serious ground for future research. The End of Forgetting: Transparent Identities and Permanent Records Next stop is a week in Vermont - off the grid (honestly, its almost off the map), but am already looking forward to next Spring’s semester, kicking off with this conference on The Changing Dynamics of Public Controversies.

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):

Jingles, Mantras, and Catch Phrases

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:07:59 +0000

Well, I’m on day four of our experiment with Play as Being, and have noticed subtle changes in my mood, disposition, and preoccupations. I really like the rhythm of this discipline - in Piet/Parma’s words, this practice is an experiment in trading off duration for frequency. Between work and school I haven’t managed to carve out significant stretches of meditative duration the past few years, but the gentle, persistent redirection of my attention is somehow more manageable, and showing positive traces. I am more confident in my decision making, better at recognizing and balancing desire and self-control, and spending more time thinking about abstract concepts and questions. I have been very excited about this adventure, though I have self-censored and tempered my enthusiasm since I continue to be wary of the seductive siren’s song in the aesthetics of an unfamiliar media. I love learning and experiencing new things, but I sometimes have a tendency to go overboard, so I am trying to take things slow (I put myself in a lower tax bracket than my 1% cohorts - I only pause hourly, and drop by the tea house once every day or two). With the help of a new friend that I met at PyCon, who coincidentally works at Second Life, I am appreciating the value of this type of practice in the interest of cultivating a non-judgemental awareness. Could the mainstreaming of experiences like these become the catalyst for a widespread shift in consciousness? On the cognitive/phenomenal front, I crossed a threshold yesterday and actually experienced some SL memories. Unlike the afterimages (like after a day of playing tetris or picking mellons), these memories had a different quality. And, unlike trying to remember which page I read a story on the 2D web, these memories were vivid and real. I am realizing the ways in which an environment like this hacks my perceptual system, tuned over millennia of evolution to respond to faces and places. This riff has me thinking alot about neural hacking, and the ways in which we all can begin to deliberately program and alter our habits and patterns of perception and interpretation (errr, I guess some people probably just call that learning ;-) ..**. however, the metaphor of software has perhaps pushed our understanding of flexibility and malleability farther than ever: e.g. Mind Hacksand Your Brain: The Missing Manual). I think I can make a good argument that the safest and most effective way to reprogram our consciousness is through the natural interfaces that our mind provides - namely, our natural senses. Contrast this approach with the crude and barbaric attempts to modify mood and behaviour through pharmaceuticals. And compare this approach to the Mind Habbits “game”, which begins with the design question “Can we design an interactive multimedia experience designed to make people feel better?” My work and studies have been conditioning me to be more deliberate and purposeful in my use and design of technology. Second Life continues to present affordances and opportunities for learning and growth, but I still haven’t heard that many stories of this kind of targeted exploration, which specifically leverage’s the unique advantages of an immersive experience. There must be conversations like this happening in serious gaming circles, though in many ways, this project demonstrates that it isn’t the game that needs to be serious, rather the attitude, approach, and context that the participants bring to the table. Finally, here is an enumeration of some of the networks of concepts that this project has activated for me:

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?

Supervillains, Systemic Corruption, and the Children

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:42:45 +0000

I’ve been drafting this post on Frontline’s provocative investigative piece The Medicated Child since it aired, and the longer I put off finishing this the more connections pile up. Since this has aired, we have learned that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos (although more expensive placebos bring more relief than the generics ;-), there really is prozac in the drinking water, and the $15.9 billion ‘07 market for anti-psychotics is expected to grow to $17.8 billion by ‘11. But the Frontline doc is a must watch for lots of reasons. The piece profiles three children who have been mis-diagnosed as bipolar. While the plausibility of a bipolar diagnosis in children is still being hotly debated, diagnoses are up 4000% between ‘98-‘03. In this piece we meet the lazy, obese, depressed parents who impose their sick worlds on their unsuspecting children who show glimmers of imagination and life, even as they are being chemically swaddled. In one scene we watch a mother feeding her son corndogs, gatorade, goldfish, and cookies, and wondering why his behaviour becomes hyperactive sometimes. In another, a young girl is setup and goaded by her psychiatrist to share her violent fantasies, which she likely learned from here father, an Iraqi war veteran. In another, a mother is told by the psychiatrist that drugs are the only therapeutic option, and she leaves the office with an additional prescription for Xanax for her son’s first day-of-school anxiety. And the images of the poor boy who developed a neck tick on Risperidol were so disturbing I almost couldn’t bring myself to write this post. The extent of the systemic corruption that these profiles reveal is mind boggling. Not only must we be concerned with conspiracies within the pharmaceutical industry, but now Big Food is getting in on the action. So, get out your tin-foil hat and lets start constructing a few narratives to help our feeble minds comprehend this complex, emergent phenomenon. The high-fructose corn syrup in our nations food supply, is modifying our children’s behaviour so they are diagnosed with a condition that is treated with a drug which makes them insatiably hungry! These drugs also cause obesity and diabetes, but that’s OK, because Big Pharma is investing heavily in diabetes treatments as well. I don’t actually believe that the world has been overrun by super-villains. But these narratives do beg the question (which I have written about here before) - are conspiracy theories ever a useful heuristic for teasing out the emergent correlations from complex systems. Are these causal? Who would you charge with the crime? With corruption this systemic, the responsibility is distributed, accountability nil, and momentum virtually unstoppable. An entirely alternative perspective which skirts the ideologically loaded value judgement of designating these behaviors “illnesses” is suggested by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness (watch his 18 minute TED talk here). Perhaps the conditions that the pharma funded psychiatric establishment brands as illnesses are actually the normal responses of our psychological immune systems. The world is currently a very traumatic environment, and I think we need to seriously reconsider ways we can, in the words of The Icarus Project “inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world.” I recently learned about ridiculously simple casual game called mind habbits, which seems rather superficial at first blush, but indicates just how malleable and programmable the 3lb lump of neurons on our shoulders can be. The researches behind the game began with the question “Can we purposefully design a game that helps people feel good about themselves?” Their initial amazing results suggest alternate approaches to scaling up talking therapy, other than miracle pills. So, learn more about psych-pharmacological harm reduction, ignore those frowns, and think good thoughts - positivity takes practice.

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!

The long-tail wagging the drugged out pooch?

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:41:01 +0000

A few months ago the giant pharmaceutical company Pfiezer laid off 10,000 people, or about a tenth of its global workforce. There are many factors that are draining the industry of profits including the fact that patents eventually expire allowing generics to compete, it is extremely costly to develop new drugs, and the industry is caught in a vicious advertising/marketing arms race that is diverting significant percentages of development costs (in similar proportions to the marketing of a big budget Hollywood movie). There is plenty to chew on here in terms of how intellectual property laws are impacting human rights (keeping lifesaving drugs out of many patient’s reach) and the notion that as “mission critical” drugs come out of patent, drug companies are busy inventing new “lifestyle illnesses” for which they conveniently sell the cure. The concept of illness has become a major US export, as the documentary Does Your Soul Have a Cold? begins to explore. But what really caught my attention in this story is the idea that the pharmaceutical industry is witnessing a phenomena that is becoming familiar to the media/entertainment industry - the death of “hits” or the multi-billion dollar blockbuster.

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.

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.

Teaching, Thinking, and Playing: Day One

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 02:09:05 +0000

Today I attended day 1 of this year’s amazing Cultural Studies conference at Teachers College - Popular Culture in the Classroom: Teach, Think, Play. The morning kicked off with a Keynote by Taylor Mali, a spoken word philosopher-poet who perpetrates lyrical homicide against those who judge others according to their salary instead of the difference people are making in the world. I highly recommend taking a listen to some of his work, as he is working to inspire 1000 new teachers, and is only up to ~160. I presented a hybrid of my SXSW talk, Teaching in the New Vernacular, and Chris Blizzard’s OLPC introduction in a session called: Portable Culture Machines: One Multimedia Studio Per Child (the proposal had been published on OLPCNews). The talk was well attended, and the conference attendees were very excited to see/touch/feel/smell the XO device I borrowed from a friend. Ernest Washington gave a great session on teaching w/ hip hop, but for me the real takeaway was a perspective on education as the “cultivation of emotions” - this talk really connected alot of dots I have been working on lately, especially the “chemical swaddling” conversation I have been having with Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons. The Media About Youth Consortium, a group print and film journalists (Alissa Quart, Jennifer Dworkin, Maia Szalavitz, Joie Jager-Hyman) spoke about their work and issues they are facing on the publishing front. Jan Jagodzinski gave a fabulous and fun (but substantive and deeply critical )reading of everything from Borat to South Park, and of designer capitalism through the eyes of a Kynic (not to be confused with a cynic). Art Spiegelman, the creative force behind Maus gave a wonderful history of the comic strip (and more generally, the genre of narrative storytelling with text and images) and his wife, Francoise Mouly, the Art editor of the New Yorker, gave back to back talks. Finally, Will Pearson the President of mental_floss (a magazine in the spirit of highlights which entertains while it teaches) closed out the day with a lively talk explaining their history, and why Einstein appears on every cover. And tomorrow’s schedule is jam packed too!

"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.

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.

slipery handles

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 01:08:00 +0000

Today I leared that a friend of mine changes her IM handle every time she switches jobs. That’s nothing, she changes emails every time a relationship ends. I don’t know why or when she started doing this, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

"Because its your music, and you paid for it"

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:28:00 +0000

This afternoon I attended a talk given by Bill Gates at Columbia University. The talk was a part of his university tour, probably prompted by the well documented braindrain happening at MS right now (Certain well known competitors seem to be following the strategy outlined in Good to Great - get the smartest people you can find “on the bus”, and then let them drive…). Here are my raw notes. I must say that this afternoon’s talk was a bizarre experience. Perhaps its all the theory stuff I have been reading lately, but I was in a very psychoanalytic, read between the lines, kind of mood, trying to pay as much attention to what he didn’t say, as to what he did. First, he has clearly taken some lessons from Steve Jobs. He presented casually and demoed live software. One big difference - while Jobs enjoys demoing creative authoring tools, Gates spends most of his time demoing tools of consumption. He continues to treat his gadgets as receivers, not transmitters, and this is all getting a bit tiring. Next, close to all the software contexts he described were business and work related. There was very little talk about socializing or play (save for the xbox, and socializing in that virtual space). It was eerie that when someone asked him what his greatest accomplishments were, he responded how much he loved work (and working at his foundation). All of his examples for the uses of ubiquitous computing were work/consumer related (auto tracking receipts for expense reports, shopping, collecting business cards when traveling, Location info - while in traffic (presumably while commuting)) – this is all summed up with his grand vision of the future smartphone as replacement for wallet. Isn’t there something else the phone could replace? Could our phones become surrogate brains, man’s best friend, or personal assistants? Can’t we conjure up a better metaphor than wallets for how software will change the world? Will it do anything beyond making us better and more efficient shoppers? The talk kept getting weirder - Gates played a video, which most of the audience thought was very funny. I will have to save my analysis for my Media and Cultural Theory class (or the comments), but it really threw me off. Gates never mentioned Google, Firefox, or Linux. Did acknowledge the wikipedia (by name), freebsd, sendmail, and the NSCA browser. He even made two truly surprising statements regarding IP - after demoing that the new XBox 360 will connect to an IPod, an audience member asked if it would be able to play fairplay protected ACC files. Gates responded that it won’t be able to, because Apple won’t let him (Ha!), to which he added “its your music and you paid for it.” He also stated that “studios have gone overboard in protection scheme”, and " will always have free and commercial software." Before the session, they passed around cards with potential questions (I am still not sure if the questioners were plants, reading these cards…). Here were my, never asked questions:

Techno-Bio:

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:53:00 +0000

I have an extensive background in software architecture, design, and development. Prior to joining the center, I was the lead developer at Abstract Edge, an interactive marketing firm which serviced both non-profit and corporate clients. I was also a senior developer at MaMaMedia, a children’s educational Web site. I am an active open source contributer whose technical interests include Linux, Python, and Content Management. [This blog was started for MSTU Social Software Affordances, and this post was written as an introduction].