Alchemical Musings

Finally! We've Been Too Patient

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 12:42:35 +0000

The long-anticipated anthology of mad poems, stories and research is finally out. The book is split between personal mental health narratives and research, a powerfully balanced approach for contending with these issues.

I contributed to two (going on three) chapters of this book - a lightly modified version of the first chapter of my dissertation appears, as well as excerpts from Mindful Occupation, which I helped produce, write and edit.

Pick up a copy at your local bookstore https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781623173616 !

Coding Mental

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 22:38:23 +0000

Last weekend I traveled to the lovely city of New Haven for a mental health hackathon hosted by Hack Mental Health Care. I was very pleasantly surprised by the experience, which proved interesting, fun and invigorating (with a few healthy dashes of disappointment and horror). I was mostly expecting undergraduate participants with ideas for mood tracking apps, but the event drew over 200 people, and was quite diverse. In addition to programmers, designers, product folks and business people showed up. Genders were closely balanced and minorities were represented. Crucially, over 30% of the participants had clinical or lived experience. The event also featured a therapy dog, yoga sessions and a guided mediation. Peer voices and ethics were featured in some of the talks, although due to time constraints, project design was complete and implementation was already underway. And, kudos on the Code of Conduct… next year I would also love to see consent-based photography and sponsored childcare. The organizers worked hard to prompt the participants in advance with these challenges:

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 Rise of Surveillance Psychiatry and the Mad Underground

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 19:56:20 +0000

This past year I have been working on turning my dissertation into a trade book. I am making steady but slow progress; print remains an important but slooooow media. My concerns around preventative psychiatric diagnosis and treatment motivated and propelled my dissertation, and they form the backdrop of my ethnographic study of the mad movement. My book will engage with these threats more directly and position them alongside the demands of the Mad Underground. The ideas of groups such as the Institute for the Development of Human Arts and NYC Icarus offer us some hope of diffusing the menacing time-bomb of surveillance psychiatry before it explodes. In the past few weeks, a few stories broke and I feel compelled to write about them in the context of my research:

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:

keeping calm

Sat, 08 Aug 2015 15:59:30 +0000

This blog has been a ghost-town for a while, but it’s not for my lack of textual output. All of my writing energy has been been devoted to the single minded purpose of my trying to complete my dissertation. I’m currently trying to complete a full draft by Labor day, in preparation for a Fall defense and and a 4pm, Oct 16th deposit. Revisions are brutal and it’s a race to the finish. If anyone wants to check it out, or help me refine this before I submit it just drop me a line. Here is my working abstract: Dangerous Gifts: Towards a new wave of mad resistance

I <3 compliance!

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 23:28:46 +0000

Last month I bought an amazing gadget that is easily my most favorite of the decade. Before last month, I was barely aware this product category existed until I browsed the “Home Audio” section at PC Richards while looking for a replacement vacuum cleaner. I noticed that many of the receivers had ethernet jacks and also supported wi-fi, bluetooth, hdmi and USB. They boasted compatibility with internet audio streaming services, home media libraries, as well as any bluetooth-enabled media collection. Brought to all of us thanks to Free and Open Source Software. The Onkyo TX-NR626 looks almost identical to a stereo receiver you could have bought from Onkyo in the 80s and 90s. In fact, the chases is the same, save for a few extra buttons, and the form factors of the inputs/outputs in the back. A 95W per channel, supporting 7.2 channels, this sucker packs a meaner punch than my UWS apartment (or, more accurately, my neighbors) can stomach. But don’t let it’s outer shell fool you. But, the guts of this gadget have been updated for the 21st century, with flair.

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.

The sheriff and the pretty woman

Sun, 28 Sep 2014 16:33:30 +0000

I just read a provocative essay in the Atlantic that draws a connecting thread between many of today’s top news stories. What do the ISIS beheadings, the NFL domestic abuse scandals, the Fergeson riots and nude celebrities all have in common? Pics or didn’t happen: The new crisis of the connected camera describes the emergence of the “networked lens” and the ethical questions this new(ish) medium raises. I’ve been writing and thinking about these themes for years under the heading of The End of Forgetting. The Atlantic piece explicitly separates the bulk of NSA surveillance from this analysis “This is not all to say every issue today is a networked lens issue. NSA surveillance as a whole isn’t, I think. But the agency’s mass-facial recognition is.” This whole discussion reminded of a pet theory of mine that I’ve never written up, but seems more relevant than ever. What would the NSA do with a time machine? Not one of those fanciful machines that transports matter through time, but the more plausible wormcam variety that only transmits information through time. I described this capability in my post on yottabytes, wormcams and whistleblowers, but never elaborated an early example of this kind of power in action. Consider this question–Who protects the president against character assassinations? I am pretty sure it’s not his secret service detail, and I seriously doubt his PR team is up to the task. As far as I can tell Michelle is one of Obama’s last lines of defense against a humiliating scandal that would destroy what remains of his disappointing presidency. If JFK were alive today you wouldn’t need a magic bullet to take him out. Hacking into his (or better yet Marilyn’s) Snapchat account would end his political career. Just ask Anthony Wiener. How clear a picture can metadata paint? In the Atlantic piece, Robinson Meyer quotes Susan Suntag, who once argued that “While there appears to be nothing that photography can’t devour, whatever can’t be photographed becomes less important.” To this I would add the caveat that (meta)data in the right hands can be used to paint a vivid picture, and ruin someone’s image as readily as an HD photo. Let’s travel back in time to winter ‘08. Elliot Spitzer was one year into his first term as governor of New York after a earning a reputation as a fearless prosecutor of Wall Street’s white-collar criminals. He certainly had many enemies, from slimy CEOs to dirty politicians. But not too many people remember what Elliot was working on the night before he ordered out in DC. Exhibit A is posted on web for anyone curious enough to search: Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime, By Eliot Spitzer. Thursday, February 14, 2008 To summarize, Spitzer’s Op-Ed in the Washington posts describes how 49 State Attorney Generals had identified the threat of predatory lending years before the sub-mortgage crisis and he accuses the Bush administration of intervening to prevent any regulation of the banks. He blames the Bush administration, by name and all the way to the top, for the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the worst recession in a generation. And two weeks later he was assassinated. At least, his political career was summarily killed and he resigned from office in disgrace. As an aside, I find it curious that Spitzer’s Op-Ed was published on Valentine’s Day. I sometimes wonder if he seized the occasion of his Op-Ed publication to combine work and play, as many busy professionals might. Was Spitzer in love with Ashley Dupré? How exactly did they originally meet? While the scope of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping and surveillance programs was only speculation in Feb ‘08, they were fully operational at this time and I believe that Spitzer may have been one of the first causalities of the NSA’s metadata time machine. Spitzer was taken down by telephone metadata – Client 9’s calls to the DC Madam was they key to the case that eventually led to the release of phone transcripts which included unnecessary graphic detail, like his preference for protecting his feet from the cold during sex and his shunning of all other forms of protection. These images were etched in the minds of the public and were as decisive as the images of Wiener’s junk. I personally had a conversation with a developer from White Oak Technologies (now renamed Novetta) who coyly described his firm’s involvement in the Spitzer case. Founded before this newfangled craze of facebook-era indirection through venture capital funds, White Oak was a good old fashioned intelligence front, a data mining and analysis company that worked exclusively on government contracts. The developer I spoke with described how his firm got the contract on Spitzer and how they had been hired to dig up some damning dirt. In retrospect, it’s now easier for me to imagine the kinds of data they were mining. The Snowden revelations provide evidence of warrantless phone wiretapping as well as the collection of data from numerous internet providers through the PRISM program. While Obama has deceptively maintained that metadata is innocuous, Spitzer’s character assassination a potent example of the power of this kind of data. What would you do with a time machine that let you peer into anyone’s past?

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.

too sexy for my phone

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 22:12:18 +0000

The other week I thought I lost my phone and I visited a local Best Buy to find out what a temporary substitute would cost me. I asked the salesperson for the dumbest phone they had, and was struck by its feature/price ratio. Thankfully, my phone turned up, but I was reminded of the power of Moore and his law. The phone I looked at was a BLU Tank, which you can find online for ~$25 (it retails for $32.99) . This phone is so dumb that it has an FM Radio, can capture images, audio, and video, has 2 sim card slots, and a replaceable battery. There is no built-in browser, but it does comes with facebook and twitter apps. It even comes in different colors! Not only would this phone make fabulous burner, but it really got me thinking. Imagine if you wrapped that phone in metal - aluminum, silver, gold? You could probably sell it for twice the price. Easy. What about a wood case - maple, oak, teak? Double again? But, if you really wanted to make some serious money you would have to put the right initials on there. Maybe G for Gucci, or LV for Louise Vuitton? It really hit home that as tech becomes ubiquitous, it’s becoming fashion. Products like Google Glass are starting to make this more obvious, but companies like Crated are taking this a step further by designing unobtrusive, intelligent wearables as well as focusing on improvements to the manufacturing process. If only we could figure out how to tap the vanity of the 1% and redirect wealth back to the rest of us.

Hippocratic hypocrisy

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 01:47:39 +0000

When I graduated from Teachers College in ‘07, I donned the goofy ceremonial robes and walked with my classmates at the university-wide commencement. I distinctly remember my astonishment when I heard the medical graduates recite the Hippocratic oath, right there, for all of us to witness. I remember thinking to myself that other professionals should be required to recite oaths too, as lawyers, teachers, journalists, and others all have the power to do great harm, but I suppose that medicine still occupies a unique place, as the power to heal is synonymous with the power to kill. I have arrived at a point in my dissertation research where I am now convinced that the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex is in violation of the Hippocratic oath. I realize that this is a heavy accusation to make, but I now believe that the field has gone beyond simple, or even gross negligence, and has crossed the line into willful harm.

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 :-)

DSM-5 vs. NIMH: kill-shots and social constructs

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:25:32 +0000

Last month the DSM-5 finally launched at the American Psychiatric Association conference. After 13 years and multiple delays, you can now pre-order your copy at Amazon (list price: $150), or just leave a helpful comment. The DSM-5 had been surrounded by controversy, and not just by the usual suspects. Allen Frances, the chairman of the DSM-IV task force, just published a scathing critique of the processes and outcomes of the DSM-5 efforts: Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. Frances has been sounding the alarm about DSM-5 for over a year, raising concerns over the current committee’s secretive methods, conflicts of interest, expansive diagnostic inflation, and the reduction in reliability (the odds of two doctors agreeing on a diagnosis) that DSM-5. Over 50 Mental Health organizations and almost 15k people signed a petition demanding reform of the DMS-5 drafts. Although this scale of controversy would be scandalous in many fields, the APA barely flinched. The DSM-5 task force moved some of the most troubling diagnoses into the appendix, renamed a few others, skipped a round of efficacy trials to meet their deadline, and otherwise proceeded with business as usual. I have to say my jaw dropped when I learned that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and it’s $1.5B/year of funding, was “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories[!]”. The official NIMH announcement, Transforming Diagnosis, posted by their director Thomas Insel on April 29th, was picked up by a wide range of science media (NYTimes, Koplewicz @ The Huffington Post, Chris Lane @ Psychology Today, Psych Central) with headlines such as “NIMH Withdraws Support for DSM-5” and analysis that this was a “kill-shot” for DSM-5. What struck me as most shocking was that the NIMH basically came out and said that the the Mental Illnesses defined in the DSM are social constructs - “the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.” Ironically, the anti-psychiatrist’s arguments have prevailed, although for the wrong reasons. As I interpret this statement, NIMH isn’t denying the existence of mental illness, just our current ability to agree on its nature and manifestations. But, yes, the current definitions are social constructs and continue to defy attempts at validity. Ha! But, before anyone gets too excited, what the NIMH proposes may turn out to be scarier than the system in place. This research is representative of the direction that the NIMH is heading: Suicidal behavior is a disease. Here, disorders will be sliced and diced into their constituent elements, which conform more readily to the instruments and models that scientists (neurobiologists and geneticists) already have at their disposal. I’ve been convinced for a while that within the next 5-10 years the Pharma-Industrial complex was going to invest enough research money to find a definitive neuro-imaging/molecular/genetic/biochemical marker for mental illness (that is, once the marker cast a wide enough net). However, I wasn’t expecting them to turn the tables and redefine mental illness according to what they could already test. Pretty sneaky. The saddest part of this whole debacle is that instead of seizing this moment of crisis as an occasion to bring together disparate stakeholders - from patients, to consumers, to survivors, to advocates, to caregivers across a range of backgrounds - and work together to develop a new language and paradigm for understanding human suffering and emotional crisis, the NIMH has doubled down on scientific authority. Soon they will be short-circuiting all debate by pointing at pretty false-color pictures and lab results. There will always be a value judgement when evaluating the boundaries of normal experience/behavior, and no scientific instrument will ever be able to tell us when someone’s experience/behavior is deviant, without human interpretation. As the disability right’s movement says: Nothing about us, without us. Somehow, for all of the NIMH’s noble intentions, I have a bad feeling that the treatment side of mental health care is poised to become more oppressive. We’ll likely continue to see the growth of anti-psychotics for everyone, and the pre-cog, pathologizing of risk through predictive and preventative care that will explosively expand the diagnostic reach. This conversation just took a sharp turn past the rhetoric of the last few decades. I hope the psychiatric resistance is following along closely, and updating their arguments accordingly.

Digital Communications in Theory and Practice

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:28:38 +0000

My doctoral program has an innovative alternative to traditional comprehensive exams. Instead of reading 80+ books and spending a few days filling blue-books with essays, we can choose to 1. Publish a paper to a peer-reviewed academic journal, 2. Present a paper at an academic conference, and 3. Develop a syllabus. I just defended my comps and am now officially ABD (wahoo!). I hope to trade in those letters for a different 3, but in the meantime, here is the work I submitted to complete my MPhil:

The Joker's Detonators

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:40:14 +0000

This weekend I participated in a wonderful academic experiment - a conference hosted by the Rutgers Media/Comm program called Extending Play. Thanks to everyone who was involved in making it happen! The conference invited participants to play with traditional academic conferences, in form and content, and to a large extent, they succeeded. I had a stupid busy weekend, and couldn’t attend as much of this event as I wanted to, but I was there all day on Saturday, and the keynote conversations were refreshingly engaging, and many of the panelists pushed the boundaries of conventional conference formats. I’m hoping to circle back and write more reflections about the parts of the conference I attended, but in this post, I want to share my presentation. (It was a difficult presentation for me to make, given the tragedy in Boston last week… but, I think it was appropriate). What impacts might Free and Open Source technologies have on networked insurgency tactics? How might 3D-printing, open source drones, open source rocket guidance software, and arduinos transform urban guerrilla warfare and pose a serious threat to (inter)national security? While these technologies are typically used for hobbies and play in the western world, their weaponization is an discussion whose ethical urgency needs to be taken up by communities of practice. The tactics of networked insurgents are evolving at the speed of the internet, and FLOSS communities need to start thinking about strategies to anticipate, and prevent the weaponization of their software. Is the weaponization of FLOSS software intended in Stallman’s software freedoms? While a minority of free software licenses attempt to prevent violent applications of their software, how should the average software developer think about their responsibilities towards the potential uses of their creations?

Ultra-Paradox

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 21:18:12 +0000

The Israeli elections are over, and it looks like Netanyahu’s “reelection campaign” wasn’t as successful as the last one he staged 4 years ago. A few months ago, in November ‘12, I had just returned from visiting Palestine/Israel when the IDF launched an attack against Gaza. Although Palestinian rockets raining down on Israel are nothing new, the new extended range of the Qassam rockets allowed the Gazans to attack new targets. I listened in disbelief as I learned that a few of the missiles hit Jerusalem suburbs. As far as I am aware, the last time Jerusalem was bombed from the air was in 1967, by the Jordanians. And, I’m pretty certain the Old City was off limits. I mean, can you imagine the reactions if one of those Qassams scratched the holy dome of the rock? Or, Jesus’ tomb, which is down the block? The only way I have been able to understand these attacks is like an act of self-cutting—driven by utter desperation, isolation, and hopelessness. From what I could tell, our Gazan (Brethren|Terrorists|Freedom Fighters) were basically lobbing missiles north, without the ability to aim. Humanity has been targeting projectiles for thousands of years, without the assistant of computers. Heck, the study of mechanics and the discovery of the parabolic equation was largely driven by military applications. For example, if you could calculate the rocket’s fuel, the wind speed, and the launch angle, you might be able to more accurately target a rocket. Or, even simpler—have some friends on the ground near the impact site tweet the lat/long coordinates of impact, and then adjust your next shot accordingly. But, we’re living in the 21st century, and the CTOs in silicon valley are playing with toy rockets controlled by open source missile guidance systems, like Altus Metrum. The weaponization of open source is democratizing access to the world’s most advanced killing platforms. The Gazan militants are likely aware of these techniques, but if they aren’t, a lack of education is surely to blame. Education is a casualty of the occupation, alongside connectivity, mobility, access to water, fuel, electricity, etc. The Gazan militants are labeled terrorists since they kill civilian targets. But, if they can’t aim, they are hardly targeting civilians. The nuttiest part of this equation, is that if you tried to help them learn how to target their weapons, so they could aim at military targets instead of civilian ones, you would be accused of aiding and abetting terrorism. So, you can’t teach them how to not hit civilians. You can’t help them overcome terrorism.

RIP Aaron. You are not alone

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 01:03:38 +0000

The corner of the internet that I hang around in has been mourning all weekend with tributes, eulogies, and heartfelt sharing about the untimely death of Aaron Swartz. I don’t remember meeting Aaron personally, but I have heard him speak, am friends with many of his friends, and was very aware of his work and activism. I am furious and sad to hear that he took his own life. I have lost a few friends and relatives to suicide, and years ago wrestled with some of these demons myself. Honestly, I am not sure how I feel about politicizing this moment. There are strong arguments on both sides. Being persecuted by the state is horribly stressful and isolating, and I also feel strongly about many of issues that Aaron advocated for. But, I am concerned about responses that reduce and simplify Aaron’s complex decision. This post about suicide reporting on the internet raises the concern that sensational reporting causes an increase in suicides in the wake of the coverage. What I want to contribute to this conversation is an important message to any geeks, hackers, or activists that are struggling with isolation, alienation, depression, or even suicidal thoughts. You are not alone. And, sometimes it takes alot of courage to decide to stay alive. For the past 10 years, radical mental health groups like The Icarus Project have been developing support materials for activists that provide alternative ways of thinking and talking about mental health. Take a peek at their forums, publications, podcasts, documentaries, and more. They have really helped so many people rewrite their own narratives, and connect with others struggling with similar emotions. In the past year or two especially, I have seen more and more geeks/hackers who are attempting to organize around these issues, eliminate stigma, and provide peer-support outside of the mainstream psychiatric paradigm. Geeks, hackers, and activists are especially suspicious of authority, and habitually question systems of power. They are justifiably mistrustful of psychiatry, but need a place to turn to for support. I don’t know the state of all of these projects, but they seem like a good place to pick up the conversation for how can we take better care of each other and provide kind of compassionate support we all need so horrible tragedies like Aaron’s, Ilya’s and countless others can be averted in the future.

Rainbows have nothing to hide

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 01:47:14 +0000

On my recent journey to the West Bank I learned about a wonderful Muslim holiday called Eid al-Adha. Eid is a 4 day, family-focused holiday, celebrated with gift-giving and great feasting. The holiday commemorates the binding and non-sacrafice of Ishmael (since, in the Koran, it was Ishmael not Issac who was bound), and the Covenant between Abraham and the Lord. When I learned about Eid, two questions came to mind:

Quetzalcoatl and Back Again

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 03:01:07 +0000

It’s nice to be on the spring side of the winter solstice. Farewell, Apocalypse. Nice try. What a year. In 2012 I occupied — Wall Street, Mental Health, the American Psychiatric Association, and my dissertation. I catalyzed the production and distribution of Mindful Occupation, and helped organize the Icarus Project’s NYC 10 year anniversary event and art show. And, I was privileged to visit the great Mediterranean capitals — Cairo, Istanbul, Athens, Jerusalem, and Ramallah. All while holding down a full-time job. Some were not concerned that the world would end on 12/21, but instead, were horrified at the prospect that humanity will continue hurdling forward, business as usual. As many on our planet yearn for unity and the Most Great Peace, and there are hints we might be learning to direct, harness, and measure our collective intentions. But, as mystics have long understood, our collective choices will decide if we converge on a global state of war or peace. All of my travels this year were transformative and intense, but my October trip to the West Bank was really the culmination of my hero’s journeys. I travelled there for the final stage of the project we began 2 years ago, trying to help Palestinian educators develop their capacity to improve their teaching excellence (Towards the (educational) liberation of Palestine, Dispatches from Cairo: The Raw Data, If I forget you, O Palestine…). I travelled with my friend and colleague, Mark Phillipson. Together we delivered a keynote speech at the Palestine Technical University — Kadoorie, in TulKarm, and taught workshops on cutting edge, video-based, teacher training and assessment techniques. The PTUK team officially opened the Multimedia and Educational Resources Center (MERC), and were raring to go. The MERC center is an impressive accomplishment, but I also experienced great sadness and disappointment at the unsustainability of the development grant. Just as we were finally getting some traction, the funding was finished. I understood that unsustainability is a common failure of projects like this, but the firsthand experience felt worse than any theoretical critique. My boss/advisor/mentor, Frank Moretti, was unable to make the trip this Fall, but recorded a video introduction to our keynote that set the stage for the rest of my trip. The introduction started out cordial and friendly, but 3/4 of the way through, Frank lobbed a handgranade was starker and sterner than any Mayan prophesy. He warns that unless educators incorporate the twin themes of environmental catastrophe and nuclear war into every stage of curriculum we are headed for a “collective calamity”: This warning framed the rest of my trip, and the rest of the year. I’m still unpacking the fallout.

scaling inefficiencies

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:22:55 +0000

Last week I attended an amazing reading and film series group that felt more like a graduate seminar than a meetup. Cáfe de Cleyre has been gathering for 3+ hours weekly, for the past 3 months, and exploring the theme of Direct Action in theory and practice. I attended their ninth gathering where the the group explored mental health as direct action. They screened Crooked Beauty and read excerpts of Mindful Occupation and other Icarus Project publications. The topic was organized independently of anyone directly involved with the Mindful Occupation project, and this was a refreshing reminder of the power of media. I learned that the CdC is run by two primary facilitators, who keep the operation running, and each week’s topic is facilitated by two more people who volunteer to run that week’s conversation. The night I joined, over 25 people attended, and I was very impressed with participant’s commitment and the level of discourse. The evening’s discussion was inspirational, but in this post I want to focus on the group’s format. On the surface, Cafe de Cleyre looks alot like a traditional reading group. However, as I was reflecting on the organizing involved to bring this many people together—on an ad-hoc basis—I realized that digital communications play a large role in making assemblies like these possible. As I understand, group attendance varies significantly, week to week, as participants join for the discussions they are interested in. In years past, it was possible to organize a reading group around a particular theme, but the ad-hoc, on-demand spontaneity of this series would be much harder to maintain prior to social networking. For sure, it happened, but the internet has greatly facilitated this. I bring up this point in direct relation to the conversations swirling in educational technology around MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Columbia University is actively experimenting in this area now, and there are great debates of what MOOCs are, and what, if any, value do they offer. While access is not an end if of itself, I agree with Anya Kamenetz that, access to knowledge is generally a good thing. To be sure, granting more dominance to already powerful voices threatens diversity, but that is one of the reasons that the evaluation of MOOCs needs to be tempered by genre. Many of the conversations about MOOCs also stress the efficiencies of scaling. As a programmer, ’efficiency’ is often my euphemism for ’lazy’ (in the best sense), but it is important to point out that scaling isn’t the only way we could decide to leverage technology for learning. I am reminded of another extreme example of this – May First/People link has recently launched a mentored training program called the People of Color Techie Training Program “for activists of color to become professional-level, politically progressive and movement involved technologists”. May First is using communications technology to connect remotely with geographically dispersed learners, but in just about every sense, they are using technology to scale down - supporting 1-on-1 direct encounters, instead of the mass broadcast of lectures to 180k students. Not all progress is driven by maximizing efficiency, and some of the most interesting educational moments happen at the smallest scales.

Hide your kids

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:37:17 +0000

It’s back to school season, and if you’ve glanced up from your smartphone while walking the streets of New York City, you are sure to have noticed a new campaign that is sweeping the city’s billboards and phone booths.

Children’s Mental Health MATTERS

Where Science Meets Hope for Children’s Mental Health

Who could possibly object to children’s health and well being? The Child Mind Institute, whose “Billboard is now at Penn Station!” is a recently founded non-profit “committed to finding more effective treatments for childhood psychiatric and learning disorders, building the science of healthy brain development, and empowering children and their families with help, hope, and answers.". According to their website, they don’t accept funding directly from pharmaceutical companies. Anyone want to help me start cross-checking Pharma’s ties to their staff and board? In a gushing profile of the organization and its founder, Dr. Harold Koplewicz, the New York Times reported last summer that they are awash in millions of dollars of funding, have 14 clinicians on staff, and a former editor of the New York magazine is editing their website. Koplewicz is also the go-to doc for helping celebrities and the 1% “manage” their children. The story glosses over Koplewicz’s messy departure from NYU to start the Child Mind Institute. “[Koplewicz’s] main mission in life, he contended, is to remove any stigma from mental illness among children and teenagers, make it merely something to be managed and overcome as it was with dyslexia or attention deficit disorder before it.” In his critique of Marcia Angell’s two-part series in the New York Review of Books on the epidemic of mental illness Koplewicz stakes out his position clearly: “In the meantime, we have patients, in our case children and adolescents, who desperately need help. These children may be out of control, overwhelmed by anxiety, dangerously aggressive, disorganized in their communication, floundering in school. We need to help them. Medications, often along with behavioral therapy, can have a transformative effect.” These are the symptoms that Koplewicz wants concerned parents to be vigilant about patrolling: Child Mind Institute Symptom Checker. To me, Koplewicz reads like a raving megalomaniac, and his devotion and conviction are more frightening than the fictitious evil masterminds he claims are posited by Psychiatry’s critics. I get the sense that he genuinely believes his own spin. He worships at the alter of “objectivity”—“We would like to see objective research catch up with the clinical realities but can’t wait until that happens. Furthermore, falling back on pure non-pharmacological treatment is not the better alternative, since these treatments have rarely undergone objective evaluation."—and the Child Mind Institute is outfitted with “the latest in brain imaging technology”. Koplewicz wields a formidable rhetoric, but is almost a caricature of the scientific realists in the Science Wars. This post raises more questions than it answers. Who is funding the Child Mind Institute? Why now? How can organizations developing compassionate languages to describe mental diversity and difference, like The Icarus Project, respond to these campaigns? What roles do “objectivity” and “risk aversion” have in shaping the dynamics of this controversy? Should anything be stigmatized? UPDATE 4/22/2013: I tweeted about this ages ago, but realized that the following tidbit never made it into this post. If you visit the wonderful Drug Industry Document Archive and search for ‘Koplewicz’, you will find that he was one of the co-authors on the now infamous Paxil 329 study that cost Glaxo Smith Klein $3 BILLION in settlements in 2012. The Paxil 329 study tried to cover up the finding that not only does Paxil not work in children, but that it makes them more suicidal than a sugar pill did. The Dept of Justice found the study to be misleading and fraudulent. I am pretty sure that the study was ghost written, but I think that makes his credibility even worse. See also: Bossewitch, Jonah (2011). Pediatric Bipolar and the Media of Madness “Drugs and Media: New Perspectives On Communication Consumption and Consciousness”, eds. MacDougall, R. C., New York : Continuum: 2011 Special thanks to Dyan Neary for helping out on this post.

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!

#OccupyAPA: Mad Power, Mad Pride, Mad Action

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:01:59 +0000

Last weekend I went down to Philly to Occupy the American Psychiatric Association’s yearly conference (#OccupyAPA). I joined the protests on Saturday, attended the APA on Sunday, and participated in the Radical Caucus, hosted by a group of psychiatrists attending the conference on Sunday night. The weekend was overflowing with information and emotion, and I when I finishing unpacking it all I might just have a dissertation (or, at least a fat chapter). This year’s APA was especially controversial since the DSM5 is scheduled to be published in 2013. Over a decade in production, and already delayed more than once, the DSM5 is, in a word, disastrous. Many psychiatrists, including the lead author of DMS-IV, have spoken out vehemently against both the processes and outcomes of DSM5. [CALL TO ACTION: The final round of public comments on DSM5 is now open, until June 15th, 2012.] The controversies around DSM-5 coupled with the energy of Occupy Wall Street, brought activists and the media out in force. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a front page story on the protests (Former patients protest psychiatric convention), New Scientist covered the protests alongside their DSM coverage (Label jars not people), The Grey Lady covered and opined the DSM disaster (though not the protests), the BBC was filming, NPR was recording, and at least 2 documentary film crews (Cause of Death: Unknown), and a multitude of citizen journalists captured and reported on the actions. Saturday morning kicked off at Quaker Friend’s Center, with a powerful lineup of psychiatric survivors firing up the protesters with speeches, songs, and changes. Hundreds of protestors marched through the streets of Philly to the main convention center, many wearing psychopharmacomania t-shirts, and holding creatively maladjusted signs. The protest culminated in a label rip, staged outside of the main convention center (The Alchemist makes an appearance at 2:25, warning that psychiatry is a threat to itself and to others).: The Icarus Project represented, and we were thrilled to distribute physical copies of the eagerly anticipated Mindful Occupation to protestors, psychiatrists, and the media. The protests were a rush, but for me, the surprise thrill was gaining admission to the APA conference itself on Sunday. I attended a few talks and a poster session, irrefutably detailing and confirming my research and predictions. Then I hit paydirt. The vendor exhibition hall. HOLY FUCK. Highlights included: Future Blockbuster? Anti-psychotic action in 3D: A live psychiatrist, hired by AstraZeneka, delivering their powerpoint presentation (she only squirmed a little when I asked her if this was the drug that killed 3-year old Rebecca Reilly): and devices that only psychiatry can dream up uses for: The Radical Caucus deserves a follow-up post of of its own. For starters, Brad Lewis’ brilliant breakdown seamlessly applies the hard-fought lessons of academic theory to the trenches of emotionally-loaded, real-life conflict. I have much more to say about this meeting, but first I need to track down who swallowed the comment that I posted in response to Brad’s post ;-). For now, I’ll leave you with a teaser for next year’s APA: “Pursuing Wellness Across the Lifespan” - I guess that covers kids, the elderly, vets, prisoners, pregnant women, and whoever else is ensnared by DSM-5’s diagnostic nets (including the appendix).

Towards the (educational) liberation of Palestine

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 23:30:25 +0000

“Education is the unfinished business of the revolution.” – Malak Zaalouk, Director of the Middle East Institute of Higher Education On my recent trip to Cairo I spent a week at the American University of Cairo participating in a week-long professional development conference for Palestinian educators. The conference included educators from five different Palestinian universities—many of whom were meeting for the first time in Cairo, despite working and living in the same city. The experience brought me back to last summer’s visit to Palestine, which I wrote about here. Interacting with my Palestinian colleagues in a (relatively) free country was stimulating and engaging, but I was haunted by thoughts of the oppressive conditions back home they would soon return to. The conference was organized around establishing centers for academic excellence with a focus on the role of new media in supporting teaching and learning. My Columbia cohorts and I presented a keynote on Media Analysis and Social Pedagogy (Frank’s intro, Part 1, Part 2), and throughout the week we discussed the interplay between technical and pedagogical innovation. The elephant in the room was the desperate condition of basic telecommunications infrastructure in Palestine**—it’s difficult building a curriculum around blogs or wikis when Palestinian connectivity in the West Bank is notoriously unreliable—even when it works, it’s slower than dial-up. The real tragedy is this digital divide is artificially manufactured and brutally enforced. Last summer I had a better connection over complementary wifi on an Israeli Egged bus than at the Palestinian University PTUK. When I visited Palestine I experienced the reality of the occupation first hand. I have written about how so many aspects of life—fuel, electricity, food, water, mobility, connectivity—**are regulated and controlled. As I learned last summer, the Israeli government forbids Palestinian telecom from developing 3G networks, prevents the Palestinian Authority from laying fiber between cities or connecting directly to the Mediterranean backbone, and businesses have a very difficult time importing routers. At the same time, the Palestinian activists who are trying to develop free municipal wifi in Ramallah are being thwarted, but not by the Israeli government. They are facing staunch opposition from Palestinian Telecom corporations. I have come to realize that the forces of the Occupation are on a collision course with Capitalism. There is simply too much damn money to be made on data plans and broadband. I also believe the Israeli government has read The Net Delusion, and are arrogant enough to think that they can control the situation by surveilling it. The IDF is agressively targeting media networks. Ultimately, I think they will allow this infrastructure to be built, making it all-but-inevitable that better ICT infrastructure is coming to Palestine. The questions are: What will the Palestinians do with it when it arrives? Can government surviellance contain the power redistribution that networked organizing tantalizingly promises? One of the key themes of our keynote at AUC was the importance of developing meaningful superstructures on top of technical infrastructure. At the conference we explored ways in which educational technology could be combined with teaching strategies to support peer-to-peer learning, the flattening of traditional classroom hierarchies, the displacement of conventional teacher-student power relations, and authentic learning activities. Of course, educational technology alone won’t bring these outcomes. In many situations educational technology serves to perpetuate and reinforce the status quo. These cultures of practice could spread further and faster if the Palestinians learn from our blunders, and create Freedom in their Cloud. As this infrastructure is imagined and built , there is an opportunity to leap-frog over our mistakes and develop an distributed network architecture, instead of the centralized architecture we have fallen for. Imagine a Palestinian mesh-based cloud, running peer-to-peer social networking services. Such a vision is not a pipe dream, in the age of the Freedom Box, Mondonet, and Diaspora. Short of fulfilling this dream entirely, it would be tremendous for Palestinian educators to develop their own, local, free/libre, educational software services instead of relying exclusively on free-of-charge centralized corporate solutions—like Google, Facebook, and Twitter—that render their students into products. Over the week of the conference, as I learned more about the situation at my colleague’s universities, I realized that few of the eleven universities in the West Bank would have the necessary resources to adequately support a new-media teaching and learning center. A well functioning center needs to staff systems administrators, programmers, designers, and video specialists to support the needs of the educational technologists, and in turn, the faculty and students. However, while no single university could support a center like this, I began to wonder how the Palestinian universities might coordinate and pool their resources. Establishing an single independent institution (likely a technical NGO) that services all of the Universities in Palestine, and perhaps even all of the schools in Palestine, might be the next obvious step in the educational capacity-building project that I have been involved with. I have encountered a similar model elsewhere. Groundwire (formerly One NorthWest) is a US non-profit that was launched with the intention of exclusively servicing environmental organizations in the Pacific North-West. A similar kind of organization could be established in Palestine to service the educational sector with educational technology solutions. An institution like this could function of a hub, mediating interactions between different Palestinian Universities, sharing successes and failures, while continually building local institutional knowledge. Unlike the One Laptop Per Child project, this effort would be conceived from the start with training, support, and local engagement. It’s all about developing cultures of practice, and sustainable models for the deployment of infrastructure and superstructure. Will the immanent Palestinian networks lead to greater freedom? Maybe. Perhaps with enough will, determination, and work. The iron is hot.

Jonah and the Cetacea

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:10:12 +0000

I recently returned from an amazing trip to Cairo, with a 36-hour stopover in Istanbul on the way home. While there, I learned something wonderful about the meaning of my name that continues to make me smile. While I am not a strict Nominative Determinist, I do take Plato’s Cratylus dialogue more seriously than most. I love learning new names, and often ask people what their names mean. Perhaps this fascination stems from the fact that my ambivalent parents gave me 5 (!) names, not including my surname, and my godfather gave me one more after I injured my back. I have spent a great deal of time contemplating names and attempting to integrate mine into a coherent identity. Growing up I was always the only ‘Jonah’ I knew. In the 90’s the name gained popularity, but I still reflexively turn everytime I hear it (I can only imagine that Johns and Michaels learn to tune these out). The Old Testament’s Book of Jonah is a fabulous story. I’ve studied it closely and continue to find gems of wisdom and mystical insights. I have always appreciated that Jonah was: 1) One of the few (only?) prophets in the Old Testament sent to help the gentiles. 2) One of the only prophets in the Old Testament that anyone ever listened to! In the closing coda, a mysterious “gourd” casts a shadow over Jonah’s mind (what kind of plant was this magical qiyqayown?), leading him to a transcendental experience in the desert where he learned to appreciate the universal nature of humanity. Great stuff - succinct, but it packs a punch. For a while I have known that Jonah the prophet was called Yunus (????) in the Qur’an. Jonah’s story in the Qur’an is quite similar to the Old Testament, though much shorter (in the Qur’an Jonah is close friends with Jinns ;-)). In Hebrew Jonah (??????) means ‘dove’. Noah sent out 3 Jonahs to see if the flood waters had receded. But, to the best of my knowledge, Yunus does not mean anything special in Arabic. In Istanbul I learned that in Turkish, Yunus means dolphin. What a trip. In the past, in order to read the story of Jonah literally, I used to have to postulate UFOs or Yellow Submarines. I wasn’t quite as skeptical as this critic, but the story never added up on the plane of mundane reality. What if Jonah was saved by a dolphin(s)? Instead of being swallowed by a ‘Big Fish’, he could have been engulfed by a pod of dolphins. Sailors being saved by dolphins was a common motif in the ancient world. For example, Telemachus, son of Ulysses, was saved by dolphins, and to this day, we continue to confirm reports of humans saved by dolphins. Doves and Dolphins. What a name.

Dispatches from Cairo: The Raw Data

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:01:35 +0000

I just returned from a whirlwind eduventure at the American University of Cairo (AUC). My trip included a detour through Ancient Egypt and a 36-hour decompression-stop in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, but our main purpose was to participate in a week-long professional development conference for Palestinian Educators: Challenges and Practices of Pedagogy and Instructional Technology: Professional Development Exchange for Palestinian Educators The AUC conference was a continuation of the project that brought me to Palestine this past summer, and was creatively imagined and improvised by my mentor/advisor/boss, Frank Moretti. I am still processing and synthesizing my experiences, and I plan for this to be the first in a series of posts detailing what I learned on this trip. For now, I will just capture the raw materials and highlights. For starters, the conference was covered by both the AUC News and CCNMTL’s blog. AUC’s Center for Learning and Teaching hosted an incredible conference - the talks were provocative and well balanced, and the food was fabulous! They even captured the entire event and posted the video and slides here. Our hosts were hospitable and generous beyond words, and we are forever grateful to Aziza Ellozy and her staff for making us feel at home. Our plenary keynote, featuring my colleague, Mark Phillipson, and my doctoral cohorts, Travis Mushett, Madiha Tahir, and Charles Berret is viewable here: #celebrity #violence #resistance: Media Analysis and Social Pedagogies

Last Call

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 01:44:04 +0000

Our Kickstarter campaign to fund the publication of Mindful Occupation: Rising up Without Burning Out is in full swing. We have made our financial goal (w00t!), and all additional funds raised will go towards additional printings. Thanks to everyone who contributed and helped spread the word. Let’s finish this campaign with a bang. Please share widely: http://kck.st/yAmbya

A guide for participants in the occupy movement to strengthen our psychic, soulful and heartfelt contributions. #mutualaid #peersupport

Promissory Notes

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:34:39 +0000

My friend Dr. Rasmus Nielson sends me the best leads. Or, the worst ones, considering they are irresistible calls to action. He sent me this one days before it was due, and I scrambled to pull-off this abstract over the weekend. Below is the call for papers, and my response. Now all I need to do is deliver on the promissory note I just wrote sometime in the next 3 months. Thanks Rasmus. ;-)

Yelling it like it is

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:00:42 +0000

Adrianne Jeffries is a journalist on the tech beat who just published a pretty hot story in The Observer detailing how banks are mining social networking data to calculate credit scores. The article, As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit, describes how startups like Credit Karma and Lenddo are convinced that deadbeats flock together, and are harvesting our data-exhaust and feeding it into FICO scores. Having friends who default on their loans may soon negatively impact your credit worthiness. Following standard journalistic convention, Jeffries contacted privacy experts for their take on the issue. She reached out to Eben Moglen, a Columbia Law professor, social justice advocate, and director of the Software Freedom Law Center. Although Moglen is a vocal defender of personal privacy and liberty, he refused to provide her with the ease-to digest soundbite she came looking for. Instead, he takes Jeffreies to task for her hypocrisy, accuses her of contributing to the problem she claims she wants to fix, and for failing to fulfill her responsibilities as a professional journalist. Jeffries is stunned by this reaction, and published the complete transcript of her interview with Moglen, even though she did not use any quotes from him in her story. As I read the transcript of Moglen eviscerating professional journalism, I initially cringed in empathy for the journalist on the receiving end of Moglen’s brilliant tirade. Why would Moglen treat a journalist this way instead of giving her the harmless pull-quote she came looking for? The easy answer is that Moglen had a bad day, is a fool, or a jerk. However, in my experience, Moglen’s communications are usually purposeful and deliberate (although ’tender’ is not the first adjective I would associate with him :-) ). I think it is worth giving him the benefit of the doubt, and speculating on possible deliberate motivations for this response. Was Moglen trying out a new media strategy? Was this a calculated publicity stunt? A performative critique of journalistic conventions? How effective was it, for both Jefferie’s career and Moglen’s message? I think this incident deserves a close study, as it raises and reveals many important meta-questions about the shifting roles of journalism and activism, in addition to exposing the sad disarray of the nascent privacy movement. On the substantive issues covered in the story, Jeffries did a pretty good job researching the specifics and the underlying issues, and the piece is smart, witty, and provocative – with decent odds of capturing the attention of a few passing of eyeballs. The story conforms to the standards of the genre, and she quotes CEOs, venture capitalists, and a activist/public intellectual, Doug Rushkoff. The trouble is that over the years there have been countless stories detailing the pressing dangers of corporate surveillance, and the public does not seem to care (many have been covered on this blog, including a story about medication compliance factoring into FICO scores). After decades of trying to educate and advocate journalists and the public about these issues, I can easily imagine Moglen losing patience for the ineffectual conventions of mainstream journalism. U.S. journalists continue to water down their responsibility for truth-telling, speaking truth to power, and taking responsibility for being agents of change. The stilted genre of fair-and-balanced soundbites is even more absurd in the digital age when stories can be supported by providing long-form context and elaboration. Instead of pandering to the decontextualized soundbite, Moglen responded in a manner that demands all-or-nothing coverage. Similar to Emily Bell’s analysis of #occupywallstreet’s success, where the protester’s refusal to conform to soundbites and slogans helped them gain mainstream media cycles, Moglen’s response to Jeffries rejected the soundbite and resulted in her publication of their complete interview. For all we know Moglen has responded this way to other journalists, and this is just the first time the interview has been published. But, I think that activists should consider this response and weigh its relative benefits. Would the privacy movement have gained more any more credibility if Moglen had produced an easily digestible soundbite? Perhaps, although privacy has proven itself to be such a complex issue that another round of he-said/she-said warnings/reassurances are unlikely to truly educate or persuade. I think the real challenge posed my Moglen’s response speaks to journalism’s failure to embrace the possibilities of hypertext, and grow beyond the conventions that dead-tree publishing imposed. Why don’t stories regularly include links to the expert interviews, in their entirety? Or, if the interview is sloppy or inaccurate, links to the experts relevant work. Moglen has spoken on numerous occasions warning about the dangers of corporate surveillance, an Jeffries easily could have quoted Molgen in her article, and referred readers to talks like Freedom in the Cloud or Navigating the Age of Democratized Media. Her interviews with him should have started with these talks as a baseline, not require him to rehash privacy 101 for the umpteenth time. The comments to the interview are also rich with perspectives on the responsibilities of journalists, though not many commentators engage in the critique of journalism that Moglen advances. Jeffries herself often engages, defending her response on the grounds that “The reporter’s responsibility is to report the truth. I’m not an activist or an advocate”, and branding Moglen a “digital vegan”. The polar extremes portrayed in this exchange indicate just how desperately the privacy movement needs to develop more nuanced models of strategic agency, as “going off the grid”, or giving up and “promiscuously broadcasting” are the only choices most people think are available to them. My research on the The End of Forgetting outlines alternatives that expand our range of choices and might help advance the terms of this debate beyond - unplugging vs. sticking our heads in the sand.

Mindful Occupation: Part II

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:29:26 +0000

In a previous post, I described my initial involvement with #occupymentalhealth and birth of our forthcoming zine Mindful Occupation: Rising Up Without Burning Out. I alluded to the heated debates that emerged around our work on this zine and my direct participation in the local NYC ‘Support’ working group. It was through these deliberative processes and exchanges that I rediscovered the promise Occupy’s discursive ‘public space’. As a researcher of the radical mental health movement, I recognized a unique opportunity in Liberty Park to explore the rhetoric around mental health, in context. I was hopeful that the activists involved in supporting the health and safety of the #OWS community would be critical of mainstream corporate medical models, and would be very receptive to alternative perspectives and language. The discussions that ensued were provocative and transformative, and the experiences have helped me crystallize future directions in my research. As the occupiers settled into Liberty Park the task of self-governance grew in scale, with complexity that rivaled running a small town. Dozens of working groups sprung up to meet the challenge of non-hierarchical, self-governance – many committed to modeling the kind of society they dreamt of living in, rather than replicating existing broken forms. The working groups took responsibility for the protester’s basic human needs - food, shelter, sanitation, safety, spirituality - as well as organizing, maintaining, and sustaining the occupation, over the short/medium/long term. A number of working groups took up the challenge of maintaining the heath and well-being of the protesters, and in New York City these groups organized themselves into the Safety Cluster. The Safety Cluster included people committed to mediation, non-violent communication, security and deescalation, as well as people committed to anti-oppression and reducing sexual harassment (the Safer Spaces working group). Additionally, there was a working group calling itself ‘Support’ that had been operating as a subgroup of the Medic working group. The Support group was comprised primarily of mental health professionals - social workers, chaplains, psychiatrists, and a few non-traditional emotional support practitioners. Together, the safety cluster developed protocols for handling interpersonal conflicts in the park, and organized nightly “community watch” shifts, where members of the community organized to support protesters, and identify and defuse conflict. While some of my fellow collaborators on the Mindful Occupation zine felt more comfortable working with the Safer Spaces working group, I realized that the best education happens outside of our comfort zones. Tension and conflict are inherent properties of activism, as activists attempt to question and dislodge accepted norms. Initially, I thought that this particular group of mental health professionals would be very receptive to questioning psychiatry’s mainstream medical models. These individuals were volunteering their time and energy at #OWS. As it turned out, although I found many sympathizers and allies among the Support group, I was stunned by the systemic efforts to silence and marginalize voices from outside the mainstream. While many of the Support volunteers were fully engaged in critiquing social and economic injustice in the world at large, few seemed prepared to apply a self-reflective critique of their entrenched beliefs and professional norms. Through countless interminable meetings and mailings, I witnessed efforts to exclude the voices of those without formal expertise and training. Voices outside of the mainstream had difficulty getting their issues on the meeting agenda and were actively excluded from some events and conversations. I remained committed to working with the Support group, although I did not always feel welcome. Within the Support group, proposals were raised for the “community watch” volunteers to wear identifying badges which included their profession (e.g. social worker, chaplain, psychiatrist) and license number, and for an active recruitment of more psychiatrists to patrol Liberty park. Some of the medics insisted on “clearing” all of their patients medically, before turning them over to social and emotional support. Sounds reasonable until you begin to question what’s medical, and more importantly, what’s not? A head trauma might be medical, but what about a chemical imbalance? If all conditions are ‘medical’, then all authority around health and well being has been effectively ceded to a narrow range of medical specialists. In subtler ways, i believe that some of the work in this group contributed to an atmosphere of fear and control in the park. Support’s role-plays often focused on the most violent scenarios, invoking the stereotype of the knife-wielding psychotic, and priming those on community watch to bring this anxiety with them throughout their encounters in the park. While the violence and sexual harassment in the park were unfortunately very real, some of the efforts to prevent these behaviors may have exacerbated them. I witnessed that the providers of mental health services, with rare exceptions, found it incredibly difficult to listen to the recipients of their services. To ask and solicit opinions and stories, and incorporate their experience and judgment into the congress of their decision making. I developed fresh insights into radical mental health through these encounters, that opened my eyes to much of what I had grown to take for granted. I learned that radical mental health has less to do with any particular dogmatic position – around hospitalization, medication, coercion, or diagnoses – and everything to do with authority and knowledge production. I learned that it is hard to find a proposition more radical than the disability rights mantra - Nothing about us without us! #OccupyAuthority

Mindful Occupation: Part I

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:59:32 +0000

On September 17th 2011, sleeping giants stirred as the perception of social and and economic injustice in the US finally crossed a critical threshold. And the people spoke. During the first week or two of the Occupation of Zuccotti park I was following along closely, but not yet fully engaged or plugged in. The movement erupted at the beginning of the semester, just as a good friend and I were embarking on a study of digital activism and collective action in the 21st Century. #Occupy quickly became both a primary source and case study as we scrambled to track the tools and tactics that were rapidly deployed. Within days the movement launched multiple web platforms, was taking online donations, was broadcasting a 24-hour streaming video, and started publishing a broadsheet newspaper. Protesters were sharing and exchanging citizen-generated-multimedia-speech using services distributed across the internet, and organizing themselves and their expressions around shared tags. The mainstream media disgraced itself as one of the first (genuine) networked-grassroots movement redefined activism by breeding wikis and folksonomies, with Blue Stockings and Indymedia. Public Space: The Final Frontier The protester’s literal occupation of space quickly went metaphorical, as everything from yoga to religion were soon “occupied.” At one point I came across a call to #occupypsychiatry, although no one seemed to know exactly what that meant. By that point many activist groups had descended on the park, and were tabling, distributing pamphlets, and competing to get their messages out while the media’s spotlight was shining brightly in their vicinity. In the early days of the occupation, while the weather was still mild, Zuccotti was a cross between a party and a seminar. Epic discussions around substantive issues sprung from every flagstone, and the best of Zuccotti suggested what a university could and should be. The occupiers rediscovered public space, and honest-to-goodness publics were formed. It occurred to me that, far more important than any message that #occupy might broadcast were the internal dialogues and communications between and among activists. Especially in these early, fragile stages, teach-ins and skill shares helped forge the alliances and friendships that would propel the movement through the winter and beyond. One of the nights in the park I found myself in a conversation with someone from the sanitation working group, and was struck by the humility of someone focusing their energy on sustaining the community instead of clamoring to be heard by the rest of the world. Through some of the mad pride networks I am connected to, I started hearing stories about protester burnout and emotional crisis at the occupations. Frayed Edges Given the exacerbating conditions - lack of sleep, poor nutrition, exposure to the elements, and don’t forget the police brutality - it is unsurprising there were many frayed edges amongst the protesters. Although the movement had scorned resolving conflicts by turning to the criminal justice system, it had not formed an analogous consensus about resolving emotional crises by turning to the psychiatric system. Around the country reports of forced hospitalization (and medication) emerged, and people kept reaching out for materials that offered alternative perspectives towards handling emotional trauma and navigating crises. Over the summer I had been been working towards setting up on-demand publishing solutions for some of The Icarus Project’s publications. I had spent months trying to track down original indesign files, fonts, and assets, in order to recreate these publications according to the specifications the ondemand publishers mandated. In early October I attended the provocative Mobility Shifts conferences on digital learning, and attended a workshop on the Booki software that explained the practice of book sprints. Booki is essentially a wiki platform that was designed to support collaborative book authoring. The application supports chapters, tables of contents, and pagination, and pumps-out ebooks and print-ready pdfs. [In the course of this project I have learned a lot about digital publishing and the future of open zines, but I’ll save those thoughts for another post.] Another good friend of mine was also in the midst of working on an #Occupy pamphlet, The 99%’s Guide to the Current Clusterf#*k, and that night something clicked. I imagined working together with radical mental health activist to remix a zine (aka pamphlet) that would present alternative perspectives on activism and mental health. I got really excited about a concrete way to contribute to the occupation. I bounced the idea off of some friends and we were all really jazzed about the project. That night, Mindful Occupation: Rising up Without Burning Out was conceived. [to be continued]

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!

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:

If I forget you, O Palestine...

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 23:58:29 +0000

I just returned from the eduventure of a lifetime in Palestine and Israel. I travelled to the Palestine Technical University of Kadoorie to consult on a World Bank funded project to help enhance technology education. The details of this project are inspiring and provocative, but before discussing educational technology, media literacy, and capacity building I need to talk about my direct experience of The Occupation. As I anticipated before the trip, my understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was transformed by my first-person experience of the occupation. Within an hour crossing the Kalandia checkpoint into Ramallah, I began to experience a harshness that is almost impossible to capture in a snapshot. Superficially, life in Palestine seems almost normal. Everyone we met was warm and friendly, and I did not encounter extreme third-world poverty. However, during my visit I learned how virtually every aspect of ordinary Palestinian life is occupied. Electricity, fuel, mobility, connectivity, information, and water are all tightly rationed and controlled by Israel. Before the trip I had heard about the checkpoints, but it is difficult to capture the feelings of intimidation and harassment until you are stuck in checkpoint-traffic watching a Palestinian adolescent being handcuffed and manhandled on the side of the road. I began to feel the harsh gaze of the guard towers, and the spit-in-the-face of the Israeli flags, waving arrogantly. The most shocking reality I learned about is the Palestinian water situation. Many Palestinians only have running water a few days a week. One quick way to tell the Arab homes apart from the settler’s homes is that the Arab homes have big black water tanks on their roofs to capture water while it is running. In contrast, the settlers homes have water 24x7, and many have swimming pools and lush lawns. I kept thinking of this iconic image: and its visually gripping corollaries: Comparisons between the occupation and South African apartheid are common, but on this trip I began to relate the struggle to Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and racial profiling and injustice that continue to oppress US minorities. I also learned about the regulation of information flows. On an Egged bus in Israel, I had a better connection over free wifi than anywhere in Palestine, including the universities. Palestinian telcom companies are currently forbidden from rolling out 3G networks, building new communication lines between cities is notoriously difficult, someone I met was not allowed to import routers, and Palestine cannot connect directly to the Mediterranean backbone. [Incidentally, a local group of activists is trying to set up free wifi in Ramallah, but they are being thwarted by Palestinian telcoms!] Like their physical borders, all Internet traffic into and out of Palestine must cross through Israel first. Serendipitously, Richard Stallman was visiting Palestine while I was there! Unfortunately, I missed his lectures, but I met up with a few people who saw him speak, and they reported that his message of freedom and liberation resonated strongly with his audience. I also connected with ma3bar.org - a society for Arab free and open source software, and ArabEyes – an Arabic-FLOSS translation project . I developed fresh insights into the role of free software in resistance and activism – especially as I appreciated the strength of the human networks that power free software, and the relative safety of engaging in this kind of organising (as opposed to being tagged by the authorities as an peace activist). More about this in future posts. Scholarship such as Eyal Wiezman’s Hollow Land and Helga Souri’s work attempt to describe the Palestinian experience of the occupation, but the situation is so complex and hyper-mediated I recommend that anyone who wants to learn more should visit the West Bank themselves (special thanks to Dalia Otham for the conversations and introducing me to this work). Anyone with the smallest compassionate bone in their body will undoubtedly sympathize with with the Palestinian cause. There is so much more to write. The specifics of our educational technology workshops, travelling and working with my advisor and a fabulous team from TC , the hospitality of our hosts at PTUK, the amazing sweet deserts, my tour of the graffiti on the Palestinian side of the wall, the culture shock of leaving the West Bank and visiting my sister (and my four amazing nephews and brother-in-law) on a zionist kibbutz, the Israeli friends and family I connected with across the ideological spectrum, my visit to Sheva Chaya’s mystical glass blowing studio/gallery, diving an underwater museum in Caesarea, whitewater rafting down the Jordan with my nephews, and Mushon’s personal guided tour (complete with analysis!) of the incredible housing protests erupting across Israel. To be continued…

Crossing the line

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 12:01:37 +0000

This week I am heading to the West Bank for work (!?!): Enhancing Technology Education in Palestinian Universities (etep). I will be spending a week at Palestinian Universities participating in capacity building workshops around educational technology. The University I am visiting is preparing to set up a group like CCNMTL and we are going to consult and share our experiences around these efforts. I am anxious and excited about the trip. I have visited Israel numerous times in my life, but have never crossed the green line. My knowledge of the situation on the ground has been hyper-mediated, and witnessing the it in person will likely be transformative. I am doubtful that my first-person accounts will lend much more credibility or persuasiveness to future debates, but I anticipate that my own understanding and assurance will grow. There are times and places for protests and flytillas, but I am hopeful that collaborating around shared objectives, working together on projects, and introducing radical pedagogical interventions will have a significant impact on promoting peace over the long-term.

Mobility Shifts: teaching & learning w/ video

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 23:41:06 +0000

Michael Preston and I have co-authored a chapter— Teaching and Learning with Video Annotations —for the recently released anthology, Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy. This chapter recapitulates the history of multimedia annotation projects at CCNMTL, focusing especially on the pedagogies and learning outcomes that have motivated much of my work at CCNMTL work over the years. We discuss curricular activities which have stimulated the development of our VITAL and MediaThread multimedia analysis environments. Learning Through Digital Media was edited by New School Professor Trebor Scholz in preparation for the upcoming Mobility Shifts: An International Future of Learning Summit (Call for Workshops: submissions due by July 1). The peer-reviewed book contains a series of practical applications of digital media to formal and informal learning situations, with a focus on teaching techniques across a range of services and tools. The “ambition of this collection is to discover how to use digital media for learning on campus and off. It offers a rich selection of methodologies, social practices, and hands-on assignments by leading educators who acknowledge the opportunities created by the confluence of mobile technologies, the World Wide Web, film, video games, TV, comics, and software while also acknowledging recurring challenges.” Trebor throws a great conference. Mobility Shifts is part of a bi-annual conference series on Digital Politics. The conference topic ‘09 was digital labor, and in ‘13 it will be about digital activism. Trebor is truly a performance artist when it comes to organizing conferences. He works really hard to get people talking to each other before the conference starts, so that when people arrive they are already in the middle of a conversation. For the Internet as Playground and Factory he produced a series of short videos introducing participants to each other (mine is here). This year he published a peer-reviewed anthology, available in a variety of formats, including hardcopy, PDF, ebook, and web-based. Learning Through Digital Media was published in March 2011 by the Institute of Distributed Creativity under a creative-commons license (CC-BY).

Pick a corpus, any corpus

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 01:53:59 +0000

A few weeks ago I participated in a brainstorming session exploring the kinds of academic research projects the WikiLeaks archives might generate. Beyond the substantive specifics of the leaked cables, the media coverage of Cablegate, and their impact on geopoltics, a central concern we recognised is the challenge of transforming torrents of qualitative data into narratives, arguments, and evidence . The impact that technology is having on what’s knowable and how we go about knowing is a theme I have been chewing on for years – one that goes well beyond journalism, and cuts across the social sciences, law, education, etc. There is an urgency to this problem since the tools and techniques involved in these analyses are unevenly distributed. High-end corporate law firms, marketing agencies, and political parties are all embracing new approaches to making sense of petabytes. Unfortunately, impact law firms, social scientists, and journalists often don’t even know these tools exist, never mind how to use them. Part of what I call the organizational digital divide. During our brainstorming I formulated a new twist on a possible research agenda. I realized how daunting it has become to evaluate and calibrate the emerging suites of digital instruments. There are many digital tools emerging that can be used to analyze large troves of data, but it is difficult to determine what each tool is best at, and if it does its job well. One good way to benchmark our digital instruments is to select a standard corpus, and spend lots of time researching and studying that corpus until the corpus is fairly well understood. Similar to the role that the Brown Corpus played in computational linguistics, data miners need a training ground we can test, hone, and sharpen our digital implements. If we bring a new tool to bear on a well understood archive, we can evaluate its performance relative to our prior understanding. Currently Wikipedia serves as the de-facto benchmark for many digital tools, though, since its a moving target, it is probably not the best choice for calibration. In many respects the selection of this kind of corpus can be arbitrary, though it needs to be adequately sophisticated, and we might as well pick something that is meaningful and interesting. The Wikileaks documents are an excellent contender for training the next generation digital instruments and data miners. The AP is hard at work on new approaches for visualizing the Iraq War logs, and just last week there was a meetup for hacks and hackers working on the wikileaks documents Data Science & Data Journalism . It is easy to see how Knight funded projects like DocumentCloud converge on this problem as well. Ultimately, I think these efforts should move in the direction of interactive storytelling, not merely an passive extraction of meaning. We need tools that enable collaborative meaning-making around conceptual space similar to what Ushahidi has done for geographic space.

That way madness lies

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 01:11:27 +0000

Bossewitch, J. (2010). Pediatric Bipolar and the Media of Madness. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry, 12(3), 254-268. doi: 10.1891/1559-4343.12.3.254 I am finally published in a peer-reviewed journal! Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry (available for purchase here - but my cut is exactly 0%). I wasn’t expecting much, and it’s mildly anti-climactic, but I have heard from a few people I never would have communicated with otherwise, and worked really hard to polish up this paper. Anyway, now its traditionally citable, which still means something (for the next few years, at least). This paper is at least 2 years in the making. It began when Rasmus Nielsen forwarded me a call for papers about drugs as a form of media for NCA ‘09, and I participated in a panel organised by Robert MacDougall (my slides). Around the same time as NCA, I also attended ICSPP and had the pleasure of meeting James Tucker and Peter Breggin. This meeting eventually led to my submission to EHPP - a journal that typically publishes articles by and for psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. I was thrilled to help bring a dash of media and communications theory/research to that audience. Special thanks to Annie Robinson, Sascha Scatter, Bonfire Madigan, Brad Lewis, Biella Coleman, Philip Dawdy, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Julia Sonnevend, Ben Peters, and the Icarus Project for ideas, inspiration, and edits. I have also reworked the main arguments in this essay into a chapter in the upcoming: Drugs & Media: New Perspectives on Communication, Consumption and Consciousness (edited by Robert C. MacDougall). I even worked on a McLuhanesque Tetrad around Prodromal diganoses (a.k.a. Psychotic Risk Syndrome). Unfortunately, I was unable to convince Springer to go open access with my paper, but I tried and was able to deposit an open-access pre-print in the Columbia institutional repository, and also have a pre-print available here. If enough people make noise about open access, I hope the editors and publishers will eventually start to get the idea. The issues raised in this paper are beginning to percolate into the mainstream. Last month Harpers published a (flawed) long piece on predictive diagnoses: Which way madness lies: Can psychosis be prevented? Wired just ran a great piece on the backlash against DSM5, especially Psychotic Risk Syndrome, by one of the DSM IV contributors: Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness. A good friend of mine from the Journalism school also just produced an investigative short-documentary on antipsychotics use among foster home children that just aired this weekend on PBS: The Watch List: The medication of foster children. Finally, Crooked Beauty is coming to town next month for the 3rd annual Reelabilities Film Fest - c’mon out to the launch party or one of the screenings: Thursday 02/03/2011 1:00pm JCC of Mid-Westchester Friday 02/04/2011 1:30pm Bellevue Hospital Center Friday 02/04/2011 6:00pm New York City College of Technology Saturday 02/05/2011 7:00pm The JCC in Manhattan Monday 02/07/2011 6:30pm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Tuesday 02/08/2011 7:00pm JCC of Staten Island It’s going to be a great year.

Memory Leaks

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 01:37:23 +0000

WWIII - A TV guerrilla war with no division between civil and military fronts.

Marshall McLuhan *

As you enjoy the Wikileaks reality show circus, please remember to support to the Bradley Manning defense fund. This week’s drama has been riveting and surreal. For years I have been describing the era we are embarking on as the End of Forgetting, and imagining the repercussions of this transformation on the fabric of social life. But my relationship with this saga goes well beyond the theoretical and is much more personal. In December 2006*—post-Diebold memos and, synchronously, within weeks prior to Wikileaks’ launch—I began researching the ZyprexaKills campaign (slides), a whistleblowing action implicating the drug company Eli Lilly which soon became the EFF’s first wiki case. That case was a significant milestone in life. The experience was a crash course in First Amendment Law, exposed me to the hybrid dynamics of new and traditional media, prepared me for epocal epistemic shifts, and confirmed the power of my information flow models. On the ZyprexaKills case no one wanted to be forgotten more than the anonymous John Doe, and Eli Lilly undoubtedly wishes the world would forget that they marketed Zyprexa off-label to children and the elderly, even though their executives knew Zyprexa causes diabetes. Which brings us to today. I am amazed at the wide speculation across the mainstream press around Assange’s motives when his own writings are widely available. Apparently, we are still transitioning to the age of Scientific Journalism Assange dreams about. Bloggers and tweeters have finally helped mainstream news outlets pick up the story–as Todd Gitlin writes, we should “Credit him with a theory”. The potential fallout of the leaks goes well beyond the substantive contents of any particular document. To understand the potential impact of this communication its important to consider the different types of messages conveyed to various receivers. Some commentators, like Umberto Eco, have taken up the message of the medium itself—What do leaks of this type communicate? Beyond any specific cable or document, what messages do the leaks send, and to whom? I don’t think the Wikileaks collaborators have much faith in the US political processes. Like the Tea Party, I imagine they aim to usurp the agenda and change the language of the conversation itself. I doubt they are overly preoccupied with any particular exchange. Some have alleged a preventative coup against Hillary, but I think we need to read this in a more global context. Beyond the narrow lens of partisan, or even geo-politics, there cultural and ideological battles are raging. Wikileaks’ actions model and embody the maturing, politically conscious, hacker ethic—*and their actions alter people’s conception of the real and the possible. Their actions are floating and actualizing crucial thought experiments just in time for the showdowns around net neutrality, kill switches, and the future of journalism and the Internet. All the more reason why They have to try to make an example here. Is the US Govt already caught in a chinese finger trap? Whatever the outcome, at least its different. Last week’s media-policy talks at the Columbia J-school (Wu/John and Copps) articulated the historic challenges we face at this critical juncture in order to avoid the fate of all previous media revolutions. At this point I’m willing to try just about anything that might snap us out of the repetition compulsion of the 20th century. But, I like backgammon better than chess ;-) BTW - I love that my fact that my idea for this post’s image had already been drawn, and was discoverable within 10 second search. Long live the open, neutral, unkill-switchable, World Wide Web! Ongoing collection of my favorite Wikileaks coverage here.

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…

Water pressure

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:08:27 +0000

Happy blog action day! Last year I highlighted some of my previous posts on climate change, and its frightening how far we’ve regressed since last October. The best segue I can make between climate change and water is the amazing film Sun Come Up . Its (one of) the first to document climate refugees, giving pacific islanders a platform and a voice to share the story of their sinking homes, soon to be swallowed by the oceans. I think that powerful human narratives like these are the most likely to influence our deeply ingrained habits of mind. Riding these waves, I meant to catch On Coal River this week at IFC’s Stranger Than Fiction series this past Tuesday, but I missed it and will have to wait for it to circle back again. In the meantime I’m wondering about seismic cultural shifts - I don’t really believe in sharp historical discontinuities, but some changes look quick in retrospect, even if they don’t feel quick as they are happening. This summer I attended an Evolver spore on the Spirit of Water. Although it covers almost three-quarters of the planet and fills nearly 70% of our own bodies, this precious and seemingly boundless substance is becoming increasingly scarce? Food and Water Watch was tabling, and the movie Flow seems to have made some impact, but the prospect of water shortages and wars is dismal and depressing. Irrespective of the clinical repeatability Dr. Emoto’s experiments (as featured in What the Bleep), his work on water, consciousness, and intent is quite beautiful and inspiring. Its the note, and the drop, I choose to complete these free associations: Imagine the structures we could construct by focusing and harnessing our collective intension.

Collaborative Futures, 2nd Ed.

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 23:34:37 +0000

The Collaborative Futures book is back for another edition and is smarter, sharper, and more insightful than ever. Last spring I was fortunate to become involved in an amazing experiment in composition and collaboration. A friend and colleague of mine, Mushon Zer-Aviv locked himself up in a hotel room with 4 other collaborators and came out 5 days later with a the first edition of Collaborative Futures. Many conversations and an intensive editing sprint later (with a fresh team of collaborators), yields a much more comprehensive and finished work. While the original team was in Berlin, I sent Mushon a copy of my essay on the history of version control systems - Versioning Dissonance. In this essay I discuss the significance of the distributed version control phenomenon, and speculate on the crossover of these collaborative modalities from software to other forms of production. An excerpt from my essay underlies the chapter on Multiplicity and Social Coding. I didn’t make it out to Germany, nor did I communicate synchronously with the sprinters. :-( However, through my friendships and participation in the larger NYC free software/culture, collective communications campus, and Eyebeam communities, I was a participant in an ongoing conversation around these important themes. This book is a really cool accomplishment on multiple levels. It’s creation myth is legendary, the content is compelling, and its a technical triumph. The first edition was admittedly a bit choppy and also neglected to address some critical perspectives that were introduced into the new edition. I am really happy with these substantive improvements, as well as the fabulous new cover art, web site, and distribution formats. Special thanks to everyone involved in this project for inviting me along for the ride.

Now Playing: Nothing but the whole truth

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:56:16 +0000

I recently learned about a fascinating trend in litigation that is quietly transforming courtroom testimony, and is spreading fast and far - video depositions. I talked with a consultant who helps attorneys process video depositions. In the courtroom, attorneys are juxtaposing live testimony with segments from depositions. Video clips of witnesses reinforcing (or contradicting) themselves are far more powerful than merely reading back the transcript. The courtroom has always been about performance, but these videos have taken this to a new level, as savvy lawyers manipulate appearances and emotions. Increasingly all depositions are being recorded, just as they are transcribed. Apart from the ways that courtroom proceedings are being transformed, I am also intrigued by the software that is undoubtedly in development to support these operations. In addition to conventional A/V support, working effectively with hundreds of hours of video involves archiving, indexing, distributing, editing, and clipping. At about a day or two of testimony per witness, and dozens of witnesses per trial, the numbers add up pretty quickly. As cases accumulate, and multiple associates begin working with and analyzing video, law firms will quickly recognize the desirability of networked, collaborative, video annotation environments. Some large firms (and their vendors) may have already begun developing solutions. However, the consultant that I spoke with was storing video locally on a laptop hardrive and tracking it with an Access database, so opportunities are knocking. Without a doubt many of the tools that will be highlighted at the upcoming Open Video Conferene (OpenCast, Kaltura, and CCNMTL’s Mediathread come to mind) have overlapping feature and requirements. Once again the organizational digital divide looms, and I am deeply concerned that only the high end corporate law firms will be able to invest in the competencies and capacities to make this work. Meanwhile, the impact law firms (along with journalists and social scientists), will be playing catch up, handicapped by this powerful new differential. I wonder how quickly this practice will spread? Oyez, Oyez, Oyez!

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?

Pick a world... any world...

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:32:37 +0000

Last week I attended the second half of the US Social Forum - not exactly a conference, but more of a convergence or a process, where 20,000 people gathered in Detroit to build coalitions, alliances, and movements. The World Social Forum began as a response to the World Economic Forum - Why should the power elite be the only ones planning humanity’s future?!? The USSF web site and the People’s Media Center (made possible by some righteous radical techies, the Design Action Collective, riseup.net, and May First/People Link) should give you a flavor of what the event was all about. But, be aware that the streaming video and social media barely scratches the surface of the experience. The forum is organized around 2-hour long workshops, and over 100, 4-hour long People’s Movement Assembly’s. The sessions were in depth and quite intensive. The format is designed to encourage small group interactions and for people to connect and get to know each other. The assemblies were geared around crafting resolutions and actions - I attended parts of the transformative justice and healing PMA, and it was really well facilitated. During the closing ceremony the assemblies synthesized their resolutions, scheduled actions, and asked for commitments of solidarity around their issues. I don’t think that this forum represents the Left’s answer to the Tea Party, but I did gain a much better appreciation for the scope of issues comprising The Agenda(s). And, considering that anyone passionate about an issue was welcome to participate, the assemblies offered an authentic glimpse into everyone’s priorities. It felt like a determined effort to take things into account, and put them in order. Here are some of the resolutions that emerged from the Progressive Techie Congress Principles and the Transformative Justice and Healing assembly. Collective Liberation and Radical Mental Health The main draw for me to the conference were the Icarus Project workshops and the convergence of Icaristas, in person. We took over and transformed a house in a Detroit suburb, and mad dreaming and plotting ensued. The place was quickly transformed into a safe space for people to brilliantly navigate the madness of the forums, and it was quite amazing to spend quality time, face to face, with friends and allies. I gravitated to the heath tracks, taking up issue of self-care, mutual aid, and wellness. I also caught some great music, ate some amazing homemade food (and not bombs), visited some incredible collective living spaces, and was pretty inspired by everyone who cared and showed up. This Icarus workshop I attended (there was another that I missed, plus a screening of Crooked Beauty) was eagerly anticipated and well attended - the participants were open and receptive to the core messages, and there was a palpable desire to embrace these issues locally. The session leaders shared their personal stories and modeled peer-support as we broke into groups (photos, highlight reel to be posted shortly). People shared details of their individual and organizational neuro-diversity and how dysfunctional feedback loops undermine many organizing efforts. The relationship between personal and collective liberation emerged from the workshop and will travel far beyond Detroit’s (shrinking) city limits. Detroit is pretty beat up - we stayed two blocks away from a refinery that belched flames into the night sky - but there are some wonderful people and projects that were really cool to experience. It’s also the only city I have ever been to that has a monument to organized labor. If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution - Emma Goldman, Radical Feminist

The Case of the Missing See-Saws

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:09:26 +0000

[ed: They past few months I was commissioned to explore a series of rabbit/fox/worm holes, collecting inter-dimensional tales along the way. Now that I have returned home, some typing is long overdue]. A few months ago I started wonder when and why children’s playgrounds have became so darn safe. Its no secret that litigation (both the fear and the reality) has slowly been transforming playgrounds into rubber rooms for decades. In his analysis of Junk Playgrounds, Roy Koslovsky has advanced the argument that the activities children are immersed in are models of the kinds of citizens we want them to become. (see Adventure Playground and Postwar Reconstructions in Designing Modern Childhoods). What might children learn from (supervised) danger and what are they missing when we they are excessively insulated and protected? Without exposure to some risk, how are children supposed to learn to evaluate and take chances, the consequences of their actions, and the Golden Rule - what goes around comes around? If we don’t provide them with the space to develop and exert their agency and will, are these lessons lost? Can they be adequately taught through simulation? Against this backdrop, I followed up a lead from a reliable informant (my Dad) and began visiting local playgrounds. I first ventured out on a snow day back in February. The playgrounds were appropriately locked down that day, since apparently the last place we want kids playing in the snow is under controlled supervision. But children weren’t the only thing missing form the playgrounds… I also noticed something else - or, more accurately - didn’t notice something else. I visited half a dozen playgounds and I didn’t see a single See-Saw! Since then I have been informally asking around and I am pretty sure the last public see saw on the island of Manhattan is in a park on 84th and Riverside. There are still a few See-Saws left in the South Bronx and the suburbs, but in NYC they are an endangered species. This got me wondering - What do children learn from See-Saws? Without conducting any formal research, but after a few good conversations, I hypothesized this answer - On the physical plane: balance, gravity, and equilibrium. On the social plane: cooperation, friendship and trust. Heck, the see-saw is the only activity in the playground where kids are necessarily looking each other in the eyes. If you betray someone on the see saw, playground rules. You will learn that what goes around comes around even without the merry go round (those disappeared before my time - now that toy was dangerous). And if you don’t eventually learn your lesson on the See-Saw, you might find yourself without friends within a few years. What kinds of effects might we expect from restricting children to hamster tubes which overlooking simulated danger? Perhaps none. Or, perhaps these attitudes are contributing to the fear, anxiety, restlessness and behavioral disorders being reported and diagnosed in children at alarming rates. They came first for the merry go rounds, then they came for the see saws, soon they’ll come for the swings! If only we could figure out who the capital ‘T’ They are….

Humane Communications over Human Networks

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 23:51:36 +0000

Today I attended a barcamp-style CrisisCamp in NYC where volunteers from around the world gathered physically and virtually to brainstorm, organize, coordinate, and work to help alleviate the suffering in Haiti (CNN CrisisCamp coverage). When people talk about crowdsourcing relief to this disaster, CrisisCamps around the country helped assemble the the sources (and faces) in these mysterious crowds. Self-Organized Collaborative Production and Action It was amazing to see these strangers converge, congregating around the familiar communication modalities of wikis, mailing lists, irc, and now twitter and google wave. While these torrential rivers of information are overwhelming, some subcultures are developing strategies for managing and synthesizing these flows. A main organizing hub is http://crisiscommons.org/ , and the hashtags #cchaiti and #haiti are being used to ’tag’ disparate social media around these efforts. Today’s NYC event drew over a dozen people, techies, community organizers, students, Hatians, UN reps, librarians, union workers, journalists, and beyond. I have been closely following ushahidi/swiftapp project, and their http://haiti.ushahidi.comcollaborative filtering curation strategy is in full swing. Open Street Maps is proving to be an essential piece of infrastructure around mapping data, and the New York Public Library has rescheduled the launch of their amazing new map rectifying tool to help make sense of Hatian geography - shockingly, there are very few maps of Haiti, and their collection might significantly help when overlaid on satellite imagery. This can assist relief workers who need to know what neighborhoods are called, and which buildings were where, etc. If you are familiar with Hatian geography, you can help rectify maps here. The Sahana Disaster Management Project is also looking for python developers to help scale their software. Strategic Communication Flows Strategically, I was struck by the asymmetry of information flows. Many of the efforts seemed to focused on collecting Hatian data, and representing it to Americans and NGOs working on the ground in Haiti. But, not too many Hatians have iphones… There seems to be very little focus on creating flows of information back into Haiti - information from the outside world directed to Haitians, or, on creating infrastructure for Hatians to communicate with each other. Beyond that, I am not aware of any coordinated efforts to establish non-corporate-mediated, 2-or-more-way channels of information between Hatians and Hatians in the diaspora. I was reminded of the recent Iranian uprising. A wonderful moment of microblogging glory, although few Americans appreciated how the Iranians were able to receive lifelines of information from outside of Iran (like where to find proxy servers), and were also using the platform to communicate with each other, within Iran. I was struck by what an important role traditional mass broadcast media might play in a crisis situation. People on the ground need information, desperately. They need to know which symbols indicate that a house has already been searched, where the next food/water/medicine drop will be, and that the biscuits are good, and not expired. They also need entertainment, and news - à la Good Morning Vietnam. And messages of consolation, emotional support, solidarity, and even song and laughter. Maybe even Bryant Park style movie nights. Hybrid Networks Electricity and ISPs are largely down. There are trickles of bandwidth available, and some Hatians have made it onto facebook and cellphones. So, what could a hybrid, analog-digital network look like? Low-power FM? High-speed copy machines? Blackboards? It’s actually not that hard to imagine a hybrid network, composed of people, FM radio, blackboards, printing presses, portable video projectors, cell phones, SMS, and Internet. Really, whatever is available. The Earth Institute and UNICEF Innovation has been deploying RapidSMS on the ground in Africa, and they are working in villages where a single cell phone operator brokers vital information to a blackboard in the town square, transforming a cell phone into a mass broadcast device. Reminiscent of the Wall Newspapers in communist russia. And if there were a low power FM Radio station set up, the DJ could presumably retransmit messages coming in over the Internet or the cell phones (kinda the reverse of the activist who retransmitted police scanner transmissions over Twitter at the G20 summit protests). Hatians would know that if they needed to get a message out to a loved one in Haiti, they could get to the radio station and it might be transmitted, back into local community. Messages would travel over human and technological networks, routed intelligently by humans where technology leaves off. What would the programming on this radio station look like? They could have hourly news and announcements, read out community messages submitted by listeners, convey messages of condolences and support from the outside world, play music, pray, talk radio, “call in” shows, anything really. Most importantly, this radio would be locally produced, with the local community deciding what to play. There was a precedent for local radio, KAMP, in the astrodome stadium after Katrina. The station was set up with the help of the fantastic Prometheus Radio Project volunteers, though authorities tried to shut down the “pirate” lifeline. Turning Messages in Bottles into Skywriting Today I met someone who is working with local Haitian communities in NYC. We are both very concerned with CNN dominated the coverage, frittering away their 24/7 news coverage on looping segments, and circling like vultures waiting for violence to erupt. We have to understand the danger of a single story. We were both very interested in creating alternate channels of communication for Hatians to speak for themselves, and engage in dialogue with their relatives in the diaspora. Here is one project we could run over the kind of hybrid analog-digital/human-machine sneakernet described above. Hatians could send video messages in a bottle. The community here could gather to watch and reply to those videos. Say the videos and the replies were limited to 3 minutes each. The original message and the reply could be bundled and sent back to Haiti - not unlike sending a letter before the postage service - you would give it to someone heading to the recipient’s town. Initially, a few flip cameras on the ground in Haiti, with the video transmitted home over the Internet, or even back to the states by sending the memory cards home with a courier. Eventually, when bandwidth begins to open up, we might be able to imagine a live, synchronous, stream. But, before then, we can imagine ansynchronous video messages being sent back and forth, between Haiti an Haitian communities in the diaspora. On the Hatian end, the replies could be projected and played back to groups gathered around projectors at night. On our end, distribution is trivial, but the message might easily get to the precise person it was intended for through community social networks. A Haitian could send a video message in a bottle to Brooklyn, and it would not take long for their relatives to know they were safe. Replies could include message of hope, compassion, and support. Most importantly, independent lines of communications could be opened. As a secondary benefit, if the messages were disseminated publicly (say, on you tube), secondary waves of help could create journalistic highlights, extract crucial data to feed the informatics systems (sourced to the originating testimony), and we could start hearing each others voices. At the moment, our aid feels like we are tossing a homeless person a few dollars while averting our gaze, when what they really need is for us to look them in the eye, recognize their humanity, and have a conversation with them. We are electronically strip searching the people of Haiti, when (forgive the Avatar reference) we need to see each other. Theory and Practice A few closing thoughts to this already rambling post. I attended the event for many reasons including:

When Lessig was in Disneyland...

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 01:01:29 +0000

I had a fun idea for a new Free Culture campaign last spring, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about it until now. LET MY CULTURE GO!
\

Walt Disney: Let my cartoons go!
Jack Valenti: Let my music go!
Rupert Murdoch: Let my news go!
Steve Jobs: Let my iPhone go!
Jeff Bezos: Let my Kindle go!
etc, etc.

I know it would be more consistent to substitute ‘our’ for ‘my’, but I really want to evoke the biblical/mythological imagery around freedom and liberation, while simultaneously calling these CEOs out for the pharoahs/slavemasters that they are (we used to have another term for 360 deals…). The campaign simultaneously inverts the framing of copying as piracy, and takes up the mantle of liberators. As Nina Paley rigorously demonstrates, there are many parallels between the struggles against Human Property and Intellectual Property. Just as we once thought it was morally acceptable to own humans, can we imagine a future where the ownership of ideas is viewed with similar disgust and incredulity? What are the best ways to remind people that Copying is Not Theft? Anyway, the signal to noise ratio is quite high, and it will definitely fit on bumper stickers and T-Shirts… Any graphic designers want to donate some skillz?

Selling shovels to News diggers

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:35:28 +0000

I had a fun idea tonight (patent pending) that occurred to me after reading about the Newspaper’s accelerating collapse, the Talking Point Memo’s membership experiment, and the recent report on reconstructing journalism. I can’t recall ever reading about or debating my new journalistic business model, and I’m not sure if its crazy, brilliant, or evil. Has anyone ever thought about charging newsreaders to express themselves? Micropayments for comments, not content? Seriously, how wild would that be. Pay to comment. Maybe pay to vote, rate, like/dislike. You could even sell different priced foods for people to throw at the journalists (and at other users), provoking foodfights in the newsroom. People would pay to mad men themselves, if you allow them to customize their avatars so they could rant in style. Now, I recognize it might sound like a step backwards, or slightly anti-democratic, but not long ago there was no commenting at all. And folks can pick themselves up and have a conversation anywhere on the Internet if they want to. But, you are offering the readers the spotlight of attention… kinda like, advertising! The dating sites have finely tuned the market dynamics of charging users to communicate. Would these comment stamps reduce or increase the spam? Maybe the scales are all wrong - it’s probably something like 1% of readers that ever participate, but if fashion (and flickr and Second Life) is any indication, people dispose plenty of their income expressing themselves in public. So, Mr. Murdoch, tear down this firewall. Everyone knows the real money comes from the souvenir and concession stands. It’s better than free.

Reconstruction time again

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:19:09 +0000

This week the j-school was abuzz with the conversation successfully provoked by the publication of a detailed comprehensive report, complete with recommendations, on how to save the endangered species of professional journalists. One of the report’s two primary authors is my professor Michael Schudson, a thoughtful scholar and a great teacher who is eminently approachable for advice. My friend Dr. C.W. Anderson was the research assistant on the project, and I know he worked pretty hard to make this happen, though he didn’t go on a world tour with the authors. The report was solid and it managed to gain alot of attention and stir up a bit of a ruckus. The recommendations seemed reasonable to me, though not quite as radical as I would have hoped… I have been involved in quite a few conversations around the future of journalism this year, and while there has been a great deal of conversation around how the forms of organization around journalistic production are changing, there has been very little talk about how what’s being produced is changing too. I am reminded of Bob Stein’s predictions about the Future of the Book. One of his central riffs is his epiphany that the digital book is much less about ebooks and multimedia, and much more about a shift away from the book as a static, finished, complete, object. He imagines a new emergent form in perpetual beta, with multiple authors, and around which revisions, annotations, and communities form. Any of his talks that from the last few years probably picks up on this theme. While many journalists are talking about producing articles using new media forms, the discussions remind me a bit of the early days of cinema, when they used to film plays. I’m imaging a shift in journalism towards interactive storytelling, cumulative aggregation, and distributed collaboration. We have begun to see hints of experiments along these lines in projects like Times Topics, Swiftapp, and Mapping Controversies, but this NPR project profiled last year in CJR really hits the mark: So Cool: How an economic weather map changed the climate. I think these strategies might easily apply to prose, not just data, interactive graphics, and maps. Comparing journalism with education, will journalism only use new media to create the equivalent of a jazzed up, one-way, lecture? What does interactive story telling even look like? How will we teach the next generation of journalists to create works that are designed to be picked up, re-appropriated, and re-mixed? With these ideas in mind, I would have loved to see some recommendations in this report designed in anticipation of this future, not merely to prop up yesterday’s decaying models. The patchwork of the future can be best supported by encouraging greater transparency, open licensing, and a culture of collaboration. What about encouraging open licensing mandates to this foundation support? Mandate the sharing of primary sources? Teach journalists of the future to share, and to learn from their readers? These aren’t all policy recommendations, but I think they need to be thought through and woven into this conversation. PS - While the future of journalism may be difficult to discern, the future of newspaper suddenly seems pretty clear ;-)

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:39:27 +0000

In honor of Blog Action Day I’m posting a round of my favorite posts relating to climate change and sustainable development.

At work, we are also working closely with the Earth Institute, including setting up the learning environment used in the new masters program in Development Practice. I have been collecting some fun links on the program’s community site. tck, tck, tck….

The Interdisciplinary Kissing Problem

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:06:30 +0000

Last week I participated in the architecture school’s visualization seminar and was treated to a mind-blowing presentation by Tony Jebara, a Columbia Computer Scientist. Jebara is a young associate professor who researches machine learning, graphs, and visualizations, and is also the chief scientist at CitySense.com. His lab “develops novel algorithms that use data to model complex real-world phenomena and to make accurate predictions about them.” They also work on improving the readability of massive volumes of multi-dimensional data, and are currently focusing on making sense of networks of people and places (take a wild guess who else is interested in their work). CitySense is an application that runs on mobile devices and from their location data…

Interview: Christopher Mackie on Knight's Hyperlocal Gambit

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:10:20 +0000

Last week I reflected on the Everyblock.com acquisition. Since then, Knight’s journalism program director has blogged about their perspective on the sale, and some great conversations have continued. I have also had a wonderful opportunity to discuss the purchase with Christopher Mackie, a program officer at the Mellon Foundation. Chris is the Associate Program Officer in the Research in Information Technology program and is closely involved in Mellon-funded software initiatives. Here are some excerpts from our conversation: JB: Thanks so much for taking the time to share some of your thoughts on the recent purchase of Everyblock. As you know, Everyblock is a foundation sponsored, open-source journalism startup that was recently acquired by msnbc.com. Even though the Knight Foundation mandated that all the software they funded was released under an open (GPLv3) license, the future openness of this application is now uncertain. As an important funder of many valuable open source software projects I am wondering if you could share your reactions to this news? How do you feel about the outcome? Did the deal take you by surprise? CM: Hi Jonah – good to talk with you! Before we start, let me be clear about a couple of things. First, I don’t speak for the Mellon Foundation on this, so all I can share are my own views. Second, I’m by no means the most knowledgeable person around when it comes to intellectual property issues. In fact, I can find several people who know more than I do without even leaving the building at Mellon. What I do have is a particular perspective on IP issues that has been developed in large part from my work with our information technology program. I hope that my perspective is useful, but I wouldn’t want anyone confusing it with either an official Mellon perspective or some sort of consensus view among experts. As far as I can tell, consensus only exists among IP experts on issues that no one cares about. That said, as I follow the conversation, what appears to be happening with Everyblock is that a number of people are seeing for the first time some issues that have been seen before in other parts of the software space. In the process of thinking through the implications of those developments, they’re reinventing old arguments, most of which are insufficiently nuanced to be valid. Eventually, they’ll work it out, but right now, many people are still looking for too-simplistic answers. JB: This moment is such a great learning opportunity to teach grantmakers and journalists some really important lessons about Intellectual Property, and the complexities of Open Source software, community, and culture - is there anything specific you think we can learn from this transaction? CM: Rather than try to parse the many issues individually, let me just suggest a couple of basic principles that I use when I’m trying to advise projects on licensing issues: First, “the context is more important than the license.” The debate over BSD/GPL tends to take place at a very abstract, ideological level. This is the wrong level: when it comes to licensing, I believe that you really need to get down and grub in the dirt. Licensing decisions are almost always made better when they’re made in a carefully contextualized fashion. The single most important contextual dimension I know concerns the “organizational complexity” of the product. That’s my own, made-up term to describe the need to integrate your project with other organizational systems, human and software. Organizationally complex software requires significant adaptation or customization in most installations – which implies the need for significant vendor involvement in many installations. A good example of an organizationally complex system is something like a financial system, which tends to have to connect to all sorts of other software and to interact with all sorts of human workflows. Good examples of organizationally simple software are things like a Web browser or a word processor, which ought to work out-of-the-box without any customization or integration. If you have an organizationally complex product, BSD licenses tend to work better than GPL. Why? BSD licenses don’t scare off the vendors who have to poke around the insides of the product in order to support it, and who worry that their private IP may be compromised by an accidental contact with a GPL’d product’s innards. I’ve seen the arguments about whether this is actually a valid concern, by the way, and I’m not particularly invested in learning the right answer, if there even is one. As long as vendors believe or fear it to be true – and many do – then it might as well be true. Without vendors, it’s hard for an organizationally complex project to thrive, so BSD tends to win out in those sorts of projects. A second dimension concerns the degree of “market power” held by the users. Market power depends on the ability of users to recognize themselves as having shared interests and then to act on those shared interests. A user community that has market power can issue a credible threat to punish a misbehaving vendor; one lacking market power, cannot. This often isn’t a simple determination; for instance, consider Mozilla. At the core of the Mozilla community, as with most open source communities, is an intense, dedicated group that sees itself as having shared interests and clearly has the will to punish someone who attempts to misuse the Mozilla IP. But do they have the ability? After all, they’re only a tiny fraction of all Mozilla users. The rest are a widely distributed, diffuse group that would never imagine themselves as having much in the way of common purpose, beyond the desire to have a free Web browser. Which constituency matters more in calculating market power? It almost certainly depends on the context. Some people object to the phrase “market power,” preferring terms like “strength of community” or “trust.” I’m not too worried about what one calls it, but I will say this: once you get past the rhetoric, it mostly boils down to the community’s ability to deliver a credible threat to punish a malfeasant vendor. If the user community ceases to value the project enough to want to defend it against vendor malfeasance, or ceases to be able to act together effectively to deliver that defense, then, however much they value the project individually, it is unlikely to stay open no matter the license. There are other dimensions to think about, too; for instance, a project having multiple vendors is safer than one with only a single vendor, or none, because non-colluding vendors tend to act in ways that keep each other well-behaved. But those are the biggest two, in my experience so far. Earlier, you brought up the Sakai and OpenCast projects, both of which have been funded by us (and by other foundations, such as the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as well). I believe that these two characteristics are why Sakai and OpenCast, as well as other community source projects, are able to use BSD-style licenses (they actually use the Educational Community License, or ECL, which is almost-but-not-quite the Apache license). Community source software projects produce organizationally complex products deployed by a coherent community of institutions willing and able to exercise market power if needed. For instance, the community of higher education institutions seems to have no trouble understanding their common interest in keeping Sakai’s IP open, even if they’re not Sakai users themselves–and as a group, they seem to have the will and ability to punish vendors that attempt to misbehave. Most vendors sell more than one product into these institutions, so they stand to lose more than they can gain from bad behavior on any single project like Sakai. The result: there is virtually no evidence of significant vendor malfeasance in any of the community source projects, despite the use of a license that in theory allows any vendor to close the code at any time. The closest you can find is the Blackboard patent dispute—which is a challenge to the ownership of the IP, not its licensing, and in which Blackboard has been careful to steer clear of any direct threat to the Sakai community. But would every vendor’s good behavior continue if the community stopped caring about Sakai? I seriously doubt it. On the other hand, if you have a product which is organizationally simple, as well as having a relatively powerless user community, then get thee to the GPL, because the temptations to steal and close the code just become too great for some vendors to resist. We’ve seen some examples of that, recently, too. Still, don’t believe that the GPL will protect you if your community cannot or will not. If the community is weak enough, nothing can really protect you. Second, “IP ownership trumps IP licensing.” Some of the commentators on Everyblock that I have read so far are circling around this point, but none has yet followed the logic all the way. All the debate over licensing tends to obscure the reality that final power lies in ownership, not licensing. For a surprising number of situations, licensing is little more than a red herring. If I own the code, I can issue you a GPL, someone else a BSD, and yet another license to a third party–take a look at the Mozilla licensing scheme sometime, for an example. If I’m also responsible for updating the code, I can change the license to all of you at any time simply by issuing a new version. Sure, you can still use the old version under the old license, but if I really want to make it tough for you to keep using the old version, there are ways. Finally, as you’re seeing with Everyblock, when someone owns the code privately, there’s nothing that prevents someone else from buying the code – often by buying the firm itself – and changing the licensing terms. I have no insight into MSNBC’s plans for Everyblock. Maybe they’ll close the code; maybe not. Maybe they’ll keep something open but close the commercial services they build on top of it – I don’t know. As your commentators have noted, no one seems to know – and that’s part of the problem with privately owned but open-licensed code. You just never know. That’s one reason why I tend to be wary about the “commercial OSS” model, no matter what license it uses. In many commercial OSS projects that I’ve seen, even the GPL is effectively just a cover for what is to all intents and purposes a closed code-base, because the owner/vendor is the only entity on earth that has any realistic likelihood of supporting or extending or developing the code further. Ask someone in the MySQL community how protected they feel by their license – or ask the people using Zimbra how they expected to fare if Microsoft bought Yahoo. It’s not about whether the current owner is good, bad, or ugly; it’s about the fact that you can never know whether it will be the same owner tomorrow. That’s a lot of uncertainty on which to base a mission-critical technology choice. JB: So, given the diverse range of contexts you describe, what specific strategies have you deployed to mitigate these risks? CM: Good question – and it’s important to emphasize the word “mitigate,” because there are no guarantees and there’s no such thing as absolute effectiveness. One thing we do in our program is to use IP agreements (a contract with the owner of the code to be developed) that require any transfer of ownership to be to an entity which must also agree to the terms of our IP agreement. In a sense, we make the ownership viral, whether or not the license is viral. That’s not a perfect solution, but it appears to be working for us so far. It also helps that we make our grants to non-profit organizations, which can’t be bought the same way you can buy a private or publicly held firm. When for-profits are involved in our grants, which sometimes happens when grantees decide to contract with for-profit developers, my program (Mellon’s Program in Research in Information Technology) has always required that the non-profit be the IP owner. We are not alone in this; for instance, when several major technology corporations—all for-profits—decided to share and protect some of their own intellectual property in an open environment, they didn’t trust it to a for-profit, but instead created the Eclipse Foundation, a non-profit that owns the Eclipse Project IP. Ditto the Mozilla Foundation. Still, it bears repeating that just putting your IP into a non-profit mindlessly doesn’t eliminate the risk, because it matters how the non-profit is structured and governed: nothing says a non-profit can’t be malfeasant, too, if in somewhat different ways. JB: Do you think that the Knight Foundation was swindled? Did they get outfoxed by msnbc.com, or do you think they are happy with this outcome? CM: I have no knowledge about what the Knight Foundation intended – has anybody bothered to ask them? [ed note: this conversation took place before Knight made a public statement] I think it would be foolish simply to assume that the grant makers have been outfoxed by this development: it may have been exactly what they wanted, or just a risk they decided beforehand that it was worthwhile to run. Keep in mind, too, that MSNBC hasn’t said or done anything about closing the code so far. Even if the Knight Foundation did want perpetual openness and the strategy wasn’t perfect, there’s still a chance that they’ll get what they wanted. All that’s really happened here is that the sense of security held by at least some members of the Everyblock community has been shaken by the purchase news. But it was always a false sense of security; at this moment, as far as I can tell, nothing objective about the openness of the project has actually changed. JB: Do you have any closing thoughts about this deal, or what you think grantmakers and open source advocates can learn from it? CM: If Everyblock serves to help some members of the openness community to get past their ideological blinders and recognize that IP ownership and licensing decisions are subtle challenges with relatively few simple, definitive answers, it will have done some good. After all, even the best source code is relatively ephemeral, but we can hope that such wisdom will last forever. JB: Thanks so much for your time and wisdom. I know alot of people who were quite surprised by this turn of events, and it feels like we all need a crash course in IP law /and/ sociology to navigate the intricacies of this political economy. Even veteran lawyers and free software evangelists are often confused by many of these complexities. I really hope that this case and your analysis will better inform future work of this type. Good luck keeping it open (and real)! CM: Thanks very much. I hope what I had to say is useful.

Mad Men, Women, and Children

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:53:45 +0000

This season Fox premiered a new television series called Mental (this post has nothing to do w/ AMC’s fabulous Mad Men):

a medical mystery drama featuring Dr. Jack Gallagher, a radically unorthodox psychiatrist who becomes Director of Mental Health Services at a Los Angeles hospital where he takes on patients battling unknown, misunderstood and often misdiagnosed psychiatric conditions. Dr. Gallagher delves inside their minds to gain a true understanding of who his patients are, allowing him to uncover what might be the key to their long-term recovery.

Freedom of the (hyperlocal) Press?

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:54:34 +0000

Heh. I enjoy a nice long weekend off, and a few of my worlds collided while I was away… This weekend msnbc.com snatched up the Knight Foundation funded everyblock.com project, and now a bunch of people I know - from journalism, free software, law, and software development are all talking about the ethics and implications of choosing different Free/Open Source licenses for grant funded projects and experiments in sustainable journalism ;-) The Knight Foundation has been funding innovation in technology and journalism for a few years, and lately has been mandating open licenses for all the code and content they sponsor. Knight is not alone. Mellon, Hewlitt, OSI, NSF, NIH, and other grantmakers have all begun to encourage that the IP they fund be as open as possible (to varying degrees). Seems obvious. If you want to maximize your philanthropic ROI, make sure that the future can extract the full potential of the work you fund - not be shackled, stifled, or duped by the misapplication of intellectual property. I continue to be hopeful that pressure from funders might represent a tipping point for openness. Many organizations need bunches of carrots to overcome their knee-jerk institutional momentum to horde - even if sharing costs them nothing (in dollars, labor, or resources, although sometimes transparency can take its toll on egos). But is all openness created equal? No way am I going to attempt to recreate the great BSD-GPL wars in this post, but I will say that it stings every time I hear someone accuse the GPL of being viral (are vaccines viral?). I also wince every time I see a vibrant open source community make an argument against the GPL - I have seen this happen around Sakai, OpenCast, and even lately around around Plone and its plugins. [From my perspective, its the purportedly unencumbered communities that are really viral, as they continue to ratchet down GPL communities to lowest common denominator licenses, by whining about how they can’t use GPL code (which they can, provided they share-alike). But don’t take my word for it - ask Zed why he (A/L)GPLs.] To me, first and foremost, the GPL signals trust. As I understand it, this legal instrument has helped enable institutions and individuals, large and small, to trust each other, without fear of being stabbed in the back or being taken for a sucker. In the end, the GPL is just a license, and while it has been increasingly taken more seriously, enforcement is never fun (except for lawyers, I guess). Eben Moglen is the founder of the The Software Freedom Law Center and also the author of GPL, but their firm can’t officially shill for the GPL. They care enough about freedom to continue to help any open software communities in need, but I sometimes wonder how they manage to bite their tongues and not scream We told you so or We warned you. Some of these same communities who have scorned the GPL have had to turn to the SFLC to bail them out when they got attacked by patent sharks. Perhaps the Everyblock story will serve as a cautionary tale, and people will learn to start taking the SFLC’s legal advice seriously. I believe that history will show that it was the GPL that ultimately averted Microsoft’s monopoly - no license could have accomplished this without the boundless energy and will of the open source developers, but the GPL was the pentagram restraining a very bad actor. But not everyone sees the world this way, and there are other valid perspectives. In conversations I have had with Jacob Kaplan-Moss (who co-founded Django, alongside Everyblock’s Adrian Holovaty) Jacob voiced a strong conviction that transparency, openness, and sharing are better ways to develop software, and that those values ought/need not be legally mandated. He prefers to participate in a community where those values are understood and shared. Some might call his perspective slightly naive (while others might trace some of these attitudes to the roots of Django and the proprietary journalistic corporation that birthed it), but James Vasile makes a very similar point:

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”

O.V. High

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:09:54 +0000

I have to thank my friend and colleague Clayfox for comparing (positively) the vibe at this weekend’s fabulous Open Video Conference to High School. The optimism, diversity, and composition of the crowd was really inspiring. In some ways, this conference might as well have been called the “Independent Media” conference, but of course, if it was, the right people wouldn’t have attended. Somehow they managed to attract people involved with every layer of the stack needed to create independent media. Subcultures representing hardware, html5, metadata, content, law, production, funders and more were all represented. To make independent new media, you either need to understand all of these details, or know someone who does. I don’t think I have ever been in a room with this particular blend of expertise and interests before. The networking was great, and my office was closely involved in making the education stuff at this conference happen (I have a great job). At the conference we announced the liberation of a great piece of software - VITAL is free! Run, VITAL, Run. The highlight of the talks had to be Amy Goodman’s inspiring speech. I had seen her introduce Chomsky last week, and was left a little bummed out by his talk since it was blow after blow of what’s broken in the world, with very little vision, and no call to action. You don’t hear too many female preachers, but Goodman has really mastered an hypnotic cadence - speeding up to fit in alot of ideas, but slowing down for emphasis. Her soundbytes are eminently tweetable (twitter essentially replaced irc at this conference, and there was an incredibly active backchannel around the #openvideo tag/frequency/channel). Benkler also opened with fresh material - he has clearly been thinking about journalism in the wake of this year’s collapses (and maybe even our CDPC conference?). It is amusing to think that between Benkler and Moglen (and his metaphorical corollary to Faraday’s law), it might be the sociologically-inclined lawyers who arrive at a theory of creativity (instead of the cognitive scientists). And Zittrain covered for the missing Clay Shirky, and pulled of a funny and intelligent talk. Many other highlights which I hope to curate once the video is all posted and I have a chance to decompress. I know I should have gone to more talks that I didn’t belong at, but I kept getting pulled in to great conversations… Kudos to the organizers for pulling off a small miracle. I’ve been to many conferences that cost hundreds of dollars to attend, and don’t even offer lunch. They managed to pull off a beautiful space, food, and even video djs and an open bar. I wonder to what degree freeculture’s networked proximity to techies and lawyers simplifies some of the logistical nightmares that often plague organizers. It just sems like they are able to organize with relative ease, as the communications media and social capital are intuitive and readily available. Good thing for everyone they are using their super-powers for the greater good ;-) In terms of the longer term, they were consciously trying to create something bigger than a one time event. I was impressed at the purposeful scaffolding of the infrastructure meant to sustain this conversation now that conference is over. Many gatherings only figure out at the event that they want to keep talking afterwards. THe OVC crew did a great job of setting up, and using a wiki, and some sensibly divided mailing lists to seed a healthy after-party.

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. ;-)

Connecting the Dots

Sat, 09 May 2009 11:49:50 +0000

What happens when the Swine Virus breeds with the Avian Flu? Pigs Fly, of course. Welcome to the end of time. I’m off to collect a few debts. This latest data point is the most recent in a string of bizarre crimes that I have been tracking in my capacity as a double agent (in the Kierkegaardian sense). Consider these events from last year’s news:

The Aqua Teen Hunger Force Mooninite Bomb Scare in Boston
The Rat poison in the Cat and Dog Food triggering an FDA recall (it only affected wet food)
And, the E-Coli in the Spinach resulting in CNN journalists looking directly into the camera and instructing kids not to eat their green leafy vegetables.

Given everything I know about reality, there is only one man who is sinister and brilliant enough to execute this sequence of terrorist punchlines… Good riddance to the age of Biblical Myth. Welcome to the Age of Marvel and DC. Now, if only I could figure out which organization this intentionality emerged from.

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.

Mobile Student Labor

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:03:16 +0000

At the beginning of the semester I shopped a class offered in the Columbia CS Dept on mobile computing. Sadly, I didn’t have time to take the class this semester, but I suppose I can follow along Standford’s version free of charge. Prof. Nieh was personable, animated, and bright, but the first day of class made me realize the impact CCNMTL has had on me. I doubt I would have made these observations/connections as an undergrad. First, I was a bit sad that the curriculum did not include even a spoonful of social/cultural context. The only books on the reading list were SDKs. A little Rhiengold, Shirky, or Zittrain, judiciously applied, could go a long way. Second, Nieh announced that the entire semester would be organized around projects. That’s a great way to learn, but he also imagined a competition, with the possibility of a venture capitalist evaluating the projects at the end of the semester. Now, although I am presenting at the Left Forum this weekend, I have nothing against turning a profit (after all, I’m an Alchemist). But, would it really be too heavy handed to require that students at the university organize their production around the Public Good (and maybe become mobily active)? What about the needs of the university? Or even, an Open Source project? 60-80 Columbia CS students (w/ some Masters students) - that’s alot of creative labor power. And, there is a dire need for applications like this, around the world, and across campus (SIPA, The Earth Institute, Teachers College, the J-School, the libraries are all groups on campus that are investigating mobile apps). Even if students are required to create something for the public good, at least giving them that option might expose them to a possibility they hadn’t considered. To Prof. Nieh’s credit, he invited me to submit an application idea to the class forum, though I am not sure if any of the students actually followed up on these suggestions. As I wrote in my email, while VC’s won’t likely chase the students down to invest in these kinds of apps, they might be surprised by the overlapping technical requirements across sectors. And foundations are definitely very interested in innovations in this area right now too. I am under no delusion that most undergrads could actually complete a useful application in a semester, but a few might. And the opportunity to make a hyper-local useful application (find a book in the library stacks, anyone?) seems promising. And its getting so easy.

Semantic Connections

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:07:26 +0000

It’s been almost 2 months since I participated in the intense and spectacular conference/discussion/seminar on the Changing Dynamics of Public Controversies (CDPC). Since then, numerous municipal dailies have declared bankruptcy, and the question of the future of journalism has gone mainstream - with urgency. (f o u r print-media-collapse stories on the front page of yesterday’s business section of the nytimes!). Here are a few of the better analyses that have been buzzing around inside the halls of the Columbia J-School:

Pathological Soothsayers

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:30:42 +0000

A recent post at Furious Seasons on the spooky future of psychiatry prompted me to dig a little deeper into the origins of prodromal diagnoses. A prodrome is “a symptom or group of symptoms that appears shortly before an acute attack of illness. The term comes from a Greek word that means “running ahead of."” A spooky emerging trend in clinical psychiatry is the appropriation of this concept under the paradigm of “early intervention in psychosis” for “at risk” patients. Psychiatrists are preventively diagnosing mental illness and treating people prior to them exhibiting any behavioral symptoms.

Disorganized thinking

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:04:07 +0000

As I’ve claimed previously, Big Pharma’s crimes and cover-ups will soon make Big Tobacco’s scandals look like jaywalking. AstraZeneca’s Seroquel trial began last week, and the industry’s criminal antics surrounding anti-psychotics are coming into better focus. Documents introduced as evidence are confirming that, like Eli Lilly with Zyprexa(Kills), AstraZeneca knowingly downplayed the fatal side-effects of their toxic pills. They covered up the fact that Seroquel causes diabetes and massive weight gain, and have been gaming the drug approval process to expand the diagnostic reach of their drugs. In a move which hits new lows, even for Pharma, documents introduced into evidence reveal sex scandals and conflicts of interest in the approval of Seroquel for treating depression, the burying of unfavourable studies, and deeper insight into the pathological cognitive dissonance underlying Pharma’s logic. Get ’em while they’re hot! 43_Exhibit 15.pdf

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.

The Tweets of War

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:58:11 +0000

The current tragedy unfolding in the Middle East right now deserves a more powerful and direct response than I am prepared to deliver. The media coverage is very difficult to sift through and judge, as the reporting has been marinated in propaganda campaigns more sophisticated than anything I have personally experienced. Many people I talk to seem to be unwittingly “on message”, faithfully echoing the sound bites they have been fed on a steady basis. I am connected to people with very deep convictions about this issue. I know this is a divisive wedge issue, but I am not sure how many social networks contain the extremes it feels like mine does. I have not found it productive to weigh in on the questions of morality and entitlement, but I have come across a few pieces that I think do a good job discussing the long term strategic stakes, from a more detached and rational perspective. I feel like I can more successfully engage staunch supporters of Israel by challenging the long term wisdom of these attacks, not their justification. Proportionality And Terror Even Israeli newspapers and human rights groups are far more nuanced, vocal and divided than the homogenized dichotomy I am subjected to in the US. At times like these, I also return to read the wise Kabbalistic reflections of the Meru Foundation’s Stan Tenen and his series Making Peace with Geometry (and the recent How Mother Nature Keeps the Peace). Meanwhile, this is all occurring in an environment awash in participatory media, and I am trying to track the online tactics emerging around this showdown. This is a decent run-down on the cyber-debate the gaza conflict has precipitated. However, beyond the viral video games (newsgaming as the new political cartoon? Raid Gaza!), facebook status updates (qussam count, support gaza), interactive visual propoganda, and virtual protests (which I predicted last year), there is something different happening that is really worth noting. Computer users are installing software on their computers to donate their computing power to attacking the opposing side’s infrastructure. Conceptually, this is a bit like donating your computer cycles to search for aliens with Seti@Home, except for destructive purposes. Technically, you are installing a trojan on your own computer, so that it can be taken over on demand to join a botnet army of other zombie computers and launch a Denial of Service attack. (And, there really is no way to verify the actions or intensions of these combatants. For all we know, the russian mafia might be working both sides of the conflict to capture credit card numbers.) Denial of Service attacks are pretty serious. If the infrastructure you are attacking runs mission critical services, like hospitals, airports, traffic lights, or whatever, suddenly you might actually be participating directly in the destruction, not just debating about it. It’s scary and important to recognize the dark side of collaboration - the side that leads to lynchings and mob justice. I have to wonder whether the constant visceral immersion in this carnage has anything to do with its spillover beyond the Mediterranean - NYC police officers have even been injured in this conflict. Imagine. Update (11/28/09): I have learned that the World Flag image I used in this post was created by the world flag project “to raise awareness and funding for non-profits and individuals working in the areas of education, world health, human rights, and the environment.” I had chosen this flag since during these internet campaigns it is common for people to declare their allegiance to one side or another with a national flag, but I was unaware there was an organized project behind this fabulous image.

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.

Hot off the Collaborative Digital Press

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:50:39 +0000

At long last! Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom has finally been published. An anthology of peer-reviewed essays on teaching and learning with wikis, the first two chapters in the book are written by myself, my coworkers, and my friends. Mark Phillipson contributed “Wikis in the Classroom: A Taxonomy,” and Myself, John Frankfurt, and Alex Gail Shermansong teamed up with Professor Robin Kelley, our faculty partner on the Social Justice Wiki, to write “Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaborations.” Over 3 years since the Call For Papers, and a long and arduous review process, the hard copy of this book is now available for purchase from the University of Michigan Press and at Amazon, and will soon be available to explore free of charge at the Digital Culture Books website. It think they may have grown the trees before killing them for the paper. The half-life of the subject matter certainly warranted a more rapid turnaround, but I guess that’s the sound of dying media letting out its last wheeze. I am also disappointed that the hard copy managed to publish the wrong, older version of my diagram. So, for my first erratum, here is the figure that should have been printed: Social Software Value Space. Gripe, gripe, gripe. Actually, I am thrilled this came together, and think the book looks great and will stand the test of time. I’m also happy the digital version of the book will be available for free, though I am not certain the book made it out under a Creative Commons license. A huge thanks to our editors (Robert E. Cummings and Matt Barton, whom I have yet to meet in person) for persevering and making this happen.

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.

Giving Chickens Microphones

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:09:09 +0000

By now you may have heard of the innovative citizen-driven election monitoring system, Twitter Voter Report (they are getting great press cycles, with purportedly more to come). I actually wrote up and submitted the post that appears on infosthetics.com, a wonderful blog that tracks innovations in data visualization. This projects represents a really innovative use of Twitter as a “just-add-water” (gratis, but not truly free) infrastructure for distributed structured-data collection. It reminded me of a free platform a group at UNICEF is building to collect distributed structured-data in the third world (for places w/out easy access to the internet, but with cellular connectivity) - RapidSMS. Imagine how many millions of dollars the government would have spent to build a cell-phone enabled election monitoring system (that likely wouldn’t work). Instead, a group of volunteer activists, weaned on the open-source, do-it-yourself culture of code jams, shared repositories, and issue trackers, decided less than a month ago that they could build this themselves on a shoestring. This is definitely a big deal, and relates closely to a new tier of participatory media which I began to describe at my talk at CCNMTL’s New Media in Education conference this month. It also has everything in the world to do with the TagMaps tool I wrote about last November in my post Crowded Wisdom. Systems are coming online which are helping us synthesize vast volumes of tiny fragments of information into meaningful knowledge. Twitter Vote Report allows anyone to report voter suppression, and problems with specific voting machines, but it support tracking wait times, which will be aggregated and mapped on the website.

Domestically Spooked

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:04:33 +0000

This Fall I am taking a great class on Transparency & Democracy (syllabus) taught by Prof. Michael Schudson. We are talking about the history of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and trying to puzzle out what sorts of cultural forces accounted for an indisputable rise in transparency and openness in American society. We are taking a fascinating journey through the history of social movements in the 60s and 70s and reading about the Free Speech movement, SDS, the feminist movement, the gay liberation movement, and tabloid talk shows. This summer I had also heard a great presentation by Phil Lapsley at the Last HOPE conference on The Hackers View of FOIA. I learned a great deal of practical information about how to properly file a FOIA request, a few fun FOIA hacks (hint: an agency’s FOIA logs are FOIA’able), and about www.getmyfbifile.com (the NSA has their own easy to use FOIA form). The main value of Get My FBI file are the office addresses it contains. Although requesting your intelligence files may put an end to any of your delusions that you were important enough to have a file about you, I decided to take the plunge. In my case, I imagined I might not have the security clearance to see my own file - I’m one of those “disposable spooks” whose very existence will always be fervently denied. As it turned out, my ego didn’t even get brushed, never mind bruised. The NSA has now officially responded that they can “neither confirm nor deny” any intelligence records. In fact, I think I received a boilerplate response letter, which sure makes it sound like the NSA is engaged in widespread domestic spying. So, judge for yourselves and get involved and support the EFF! The spirit of FOIA wants information to be free - Does the NSA answer to anyone for any of its activities anymore?

Prophetic Fulfillment

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:22:53 +0000

It is virtually uncontested that the McCain campaign has attempted to divisively identify Obama as the Anti-Christ through a systematic campaign of allusions and coded associations. This innuendo was largely missed by people who don’t believe in the literal reading of Revelations, but the sophisticated tactics make it unlikely the multitude of associations were coincidental. “The One” advertisement alludes to the cover art and even the title fonts of the popular “Left Behind” series, and there are numerous biblical associations as well. But, what confuses me is that by the logic of fundamentalist Christianity, if Obama really were “The One”, wouldn’t they be obliged to vote for him to fulfil prophesy and usher in the rapture? Isn’t this the logic behind the Christian right’s support for Israel? Kinda reminds me of seating Jesus on a white donkey, but really, whatever it takes to bring about a change we can all believe in…

Free Energy Redux

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:53:18 +0000

No, this post isn’t about the LHC creating black holes, time machines, or perpetual motion - its an update on my ~2 year old post on Free Energy - where I reflected on what the environmental movement might learn from the free software movement… Looks like environmental labelling, one of the ideas I discussed, is actually starting to happen in the UK: What is your dinner doing to the climate? Synchronously, this week I am reading an excellent treatment of the rise of transparency as a form of (meta)-regulation for my seminar on Transparency and Democracy Democracy by Disclosure: The Rise of Technopopulism Now I finally have the theoretical apparatus to completely obfuscate my ideas ;-) BTW - Happy Software Freedom Day!

Open Letter to the FDA

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:18:11 +0000

To: Sandy Walsh <sandy.walsh@fda.hhs.gov> Cc: World Subject: Establishing the Validity of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder Dear Miss Walsh, I am a professional educator, software architect, and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. I am outraged that the FDA is abusing its power and violating the public trust by supporting the corporate interests of the pharmaceutical lobby. The drug companies are shamefully maneuvering to expand the market for the multi-billion dollar a year anti-psychotic industry by extending the diagnostic criteria of the purported mental illnesses their toxic pills are prescribed to treat. The FDA has recently taken the unprecedented action of effectively legislating the existence of a disease, a disease whose existence is denied by many experts on both mind and body. The diagnosis of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder does not exist in the DSM IV, is not recognized by public or private insurance companies, and is the subject of intense debate between psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and therapists. When did the FDA become authorized to construct/validate new diagnoses or decide who is mentally ill? I have been closely following the heated controversy surrounding the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder in children since the tragic death of Rebecca Riley. Rebecca was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder at 2 years old, and was killed when she was 4 by an overdose of anti-psychotics. This past year, Frontline aired The Medicated Child, a provocative investigation of the widespread experiment being conducted on the innocent children of America. I beg you to watch this documentary before making any more decisions about the existence of this alleged disorder. The piece demonstrates how our children are being chemically swaddled, and how these drugs are being systematically deployed as instruments of discipline and control. The public has a right to full disclosure on this important matter of public health! I am shocked that you have still not issued a statement explaining your position on Pediatric Bipolar Disorder - What behavioural symptoms constitute this alleged disease, and how were these criteria arrived at? What is the progression of this illness and what are the mechanisms are involved in its treatment? Who was consulted in the validation of this disease, and have their research findings been vetted by a disinterested scientific community? The FDA’s complicit involvement in a mass experiment on an entire generation of American children demands transparent accounting. It is absolutely imperative that the FDA shine some light on its backroom dealings with the Big Pharma. Sincerely, Jonah Bossewitch

Lost in Controversy

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:19:49 +0000

This summer, Bruno Latour was our tour guide - leading the way, not out of The Cave, but beyond the entire Cave System. Along the journey I also learned about a very interesting pedagogical technique intended to take engineering students on a similar journey. Students at Sciences-Politique and Ecole des Mines in Paris, as well as at MIT in Boston are learning to map techno-scientific controversies according to a method which embodies Actor-Network-Theory (without all of the heavy theoretical jargon). Past projects can be found at the Mapping Controversies web site, and Bruno Latour himself explains the project and its aspirations in this video. Many of the possibilities explored in these new media projects are related to a broader question I have been interested lately concerning the impact that technology is having on epistemology itself. How is technology and new media changing what is knowable and how we go about knowing? I wrote an essay last Spring, The Bionic Social Scientist: Human Sciences and Emerging Ways of Knowing, which begins to explore these questions, and it is wonderful to see more examples of these ideas materializing around us. The Mapping Controversies pedagogy involves teams of students taking on the role of statistician, investigative journalist, scientist, and webmaster, working to research and represent a controversy. They discover (and depict) that concepts themselves vary depending upon who is speaking about them, and attempt to map these relations and progressions over time. I can imagine this technique displacing the traditional 5 ‘W’s of journalism - The venerable Who, What, When, Where, & Why needs to b upgraded to a multi-dimensional, post-modern, reality. What varies and depends upon who, where, and when, and without the kinds of research and representations that the Mapping Controversies project is pioneering, we will never adequately capture the multiplicities of whys. I don’t know if these kinds of representations are intermediate forms of research, or if one day they will be part of the final production delivered as news to readers, but it is an important question to begin to grapple with. Right now, the Mapping Controversies sites are somewhat anti-social - they are fixed, one-way communications, but from the introductory video, they hope to change this soon. At the moment, each map is also a unique work of art. While it is premature to confine anyone yet to the paradigmatic blinders of conformity, I also think it is imperative for us to begin to imagine and develop a visual vocabulary that we can re/use when representing these kinds of relations. In the field of information visualization, researchers are beginning to catalog Information Design Patterns that maps like this could build upon. Of course, riffs and variations from these patterns are welcome, where significant and meaningful, but a common starting point will improve the communicativity of these maps. As these patterns solidify, the corresponding implementation patterns can grow along with these efforts, as tools like Ben Fry’s Processing Framework (recently ported from java to javascript, which is much more web friendly, and used extensively in the MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit), will begin to institutionalize the knowledge learned in constructing these maps. And, of course, all of the code and content used to create these projects should be free and open, so the world can learn and improve on their foundations.

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.

Location, location, location (and timing)

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:30:29 +0000

A few weeks back I attended a symposium (The Focus on Locus) at the Columbia Business school on the coming tusnami of location based services. For some reason I mistakenly believed the day might include discussions and demonstrations of visualizations and mapping UIs, but it was actually more about the other end of the equation - how every device on the planet will soon be aware of its own location, and the sorts of privacy, policy, and commercial implications of this emerging reality. Henning Schulzrinne, the chair of the CS dept kicked of the day from 1000m up by pointing out that, nowadays, just about every device on the planet knows what time it is (non-trivial when you consider the standards, protocols, and apis that needed to be resolved for this to happen so smoothly everywhere), and reminded us that less than 10 years ago you still needed to set the time on your cell phone. Knowing the time has become completely transparent on many electronic and networked devices, and has become part of the fabric of the digital age. We search for emails, pictures, documents and more based on timestamps - they are so common it is even hard to imagine computing without them. Extrapolate a few years out, and the dimensional quartet of space-time will be reunited once more. Everything will know where it is, and not just geo coordinates - devices will know the street block they are on, the room they occupy in relation to floor plans, etc etc. Henning is even working on the standards and protocols to facilitate this ubiquity. Once you say this out load it becomes obvious - many of the systems that we use to figure out where we are rely on knowing when you are to do so. This dates back to the solution to the Royal Academy’s Longitude X-Prize, all the way up to the triangulation used by modern GPS. Location based services have also finally creeped out the 99% of the people who don’t seem to grok the privacy issues posed by the tracks our digital footprints leave behind. Perhaps its more visceral, immediate, and concrete, but people are buggin. In a very surreal moment, I realized that many of the privacy concerns raised at the Columbia Business School symposium were very similar to the privacy conversations happening at the hacker conference (the Last HOPE) I attended the week afterwards. (yeah yeah - the groups are both stereotypically libertarian, but would you have predicted the similarity?) Refreshingly, some of the models and thought experiments I have been developing in relation to my End of Forgetting work held up really well throughout both conferences. The information flux model remains relatively unique, and continues to suggest alternate ways of retying the gordian knot of that is strapping us to the petabyte age. It’s always fun attending a meeting like this and trying to maintian a critical perspective - paying attention to the omissions, the assumptions, and even the construction of the instruments (like the standards which might be used to indicate the privacy levels of data). Speak now or forever hold your place.

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):

Speaking in Tongues

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:03:37 +0000

Have I ever mentioned how cool these newfangled series of tubes are sometimes? I just found out that an essay of mine was translated into Italian, which is now the second essay I have written to be translated into a language I don’t even speak. Appropriately, a major theme of the essay was the economics of peer production, and the professor I wrote it for was actually from Italy, so perhaps it resonated strongly with the Italians. The first was translated into Greek, which is beginning to make me wonder if it might be time for a nice trip out to the Mediterranean. If any of my friends speak Greek or Italian, I would love to hear how these translations turned out ;-) Costruire la libertà: gli sviluppatori di software libero tra lavoro e gioco (Fabricating Freedom: Free Software Developers at Work and Play) ? ?????????? ZyprexaKills: ??????? ???????? ??? ?? ???? ??? ????????????? ???????????? (The ZyprexaKills Campaign: Peer Production and the Frontiers of Radical Pedagogy) Libre Lungamente in Tensione!

The End of Digirati Philosophizing

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:50:46 +0000

Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired published a provocative essay last week that really caught me off-guard: The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete I have been writing lately about the effects that technology is having on epistemology, namely, what is knowable and how we go about knowing. But, I’ve arrived at very different conclusions than Anderson. I think that our methods for gathering evidence to support a hypothesis is changing - radically - but I certainly do not think that the scientific method (or attitude or stance, as Piet Hut sometimes puts it) is obsolete. Evolving, for sure, but I hope not in the direction that Anderson claims. Intriguingly, Kevin Kelly - who originally launched Wired, wrote an essay on the future of science that I think is much more thoughtful and prescient. A cursory examination of the comments posted on his essay make me wonder if he hasn’t floated a straw man argument, just to be provocative. But after a few conversations with friends and colleges this week, I believe there is something important and scary in his perspective. My thinking here is greatly informed by a book I am reading this summer by Bruno Latour - The Politics of Nature. In this book, Latour struggles to reconcile the perennial tensions between nature and democracy, science and politics, facts and values, and ultimately, objectivity and subjectivity. He critiques the veneration of facts as the penultimate authority - reminding us to always consider who gathered those facts and why. His argument is far more nuanced and complex, but I really see its re-enactment in the veneration of data Anderson naively concedes. We must acknowledge that data itself is nothing more than a mediation with reality - and we shouldn’t confuse data with reality itself. There are many good rebuttals appearing in the comments, but none that I have read point out that Anderson’s characterization denies the politics of instrumentation and data collection - the concepts and constructs that underlie the data, never mind the importance of stories and explanations in our politics and justifications. This understanding is basic to the psychology of perception as well as the philosophy of science - there is no observation without pre-existing concepts and constructs - the buckets of data we are collecting (and, at least for now, some data is not being collected) are being stored according to organizational schemes - schemes created by humans. Data isn’t sacred, and its folly to regard it as such. We need our models and the explicit self-awareness that we created them within a particular historical context and theoretical paradigm. In the wise words of my mentor/advisor, Frank Moretti:

Tigers and Teachers

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:24:31 +0000

Last week I went back to ‘ol Nassau and attended the annual New Media Consortium conference, held this year at my alma mater. The conference was very engaging, especially since I don’t think I have ever attended an event geared specifically towards the kind of work we do at CCNMTL. Typically, whether its developer, librarian, technorati, activist, or academically oriented, our work shares aspects with other attendees, but usually not a similar overarching mission. I was reminded how special our organization’s niche is - we should take pride in our projects and values. I also gained a better understanding of how privileged our situation is. While no two university’s I have ever encountered share the same organizational structure, many now support groups whose primary mission is helping the faculty use new media & technology purposefully. I was astounded at the constraints, and corresponding resourcefulness, these groups exhibit. Most of them have a much smaller staff than ours, and very few actually develop custom software. A Wordpress or Mediawiki plugin is about as complicated as many of them can attempt. And yet, they forge ahead, scraping together whatever tools they can wrap their minds around - and in the era of mashups, the possibilities are growing daily. It is interesting to contrast this resourcefulness with corporate, and even non-profit, technical efforts I have been involved with. Many of these groups have gourmet taste in technology, and initiatives are often paralyzed until the right tools are developed. The educators show how far a healthy culture of use can go in trumping system constraints. Overall, many groups are still working with the faculty to get beyond the allure of the media, and demand a greater educational return than “mere” excitement and motivation. Critical engagement must go beyond supplemental materials, as it is decidely difficult to follow through on the promise of a demonstrated educational value. There were many projects that clearly helped the students feel good about their learning, but it is incredibly hard to design a curriculum where these new media objects become a central component in a student’s analysis. In our work we try, and occasionally succeed, to help push the faculty to design assignments where the new media elements are an integral part of the critical analysis - where the learners deeply engage with the media, and bring these elements into play as evidence in support of an argument. These aspirations place the bar quite high, and often require faculty to develop an radically new teaching style. Additionally, none of us learned this way, though we all seem to be convinced these new styles are superior to the ways we were taught. Consequently, there is a great deal of experimentation and research involved in educational technology. It was really great having these kinds of conversations all weekend long - sharing and exchanging perspectives with the others grappling with similar concerns. Some of the highlights I learned about included:

Magic potions, strange trips, and healing plants

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:19:51 +0000

Last week I paid tribute to Albert Hoffman at an event hosted by Reality Sandwich. I have been following the site for a while, and really enjoyed the screenings and the conversation (led by John Perry Barlow and Daniel Pinchbeck). I was a bit startled to encounter a perspective that I hadn’t thought about for a while. There were psychedelic enthusiasts who faithfully imagined the world being a better place if we all took a little trip (slight caricature, but bear with me). After a few years working on the Icarus Project and immersed in academia I found this attitude slightly jarring. Talk about technological determinism - our salvation in the form of an external molecule? I happen to think that a bit of psychedelic experimentation might certainly help make the world a better place, but for one thing, if society were truly tolerant of freaks and drugs, we wouldn’t need them so badly in first place. For another, psychedelics are arguably more available now than ever before, and they haven’t (yet) catalysed the transformation imagined. But what really bugged me is how this counter-cultural rhetoric would play directly into the hands of Big Pharma. Their message for years is that happiness can be found at the bottom of a pill bottle. Try to vividly imagine what these drugs would look like in their hands - the clinical administration of extracted active ingredients, outside of the usual cultural sacred context. This wouldn’t accelerate the evolution of consciousness, just the flow of capital into Pharma’s coffers. I also found it interesting to trace the genealogy of LSD back to psychiatry. To be completely fair, Reality Sandwich’s message isn’t so simple, but I do feel its important to imagine how these messages might be appropriated. I’ll leave you with one of the shorts from Post Modern Times: Consciousness is the Key

No more pencils...

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:06:33 +0000

Well, summer vacation is finally upon me - now I only need to work fulltime. My first year in my PhD program I found myself thinking alot about methods. Not all that surprising, given that one day I will have to defend my methods along with my ideas, but a pretty abstract space to be preoccupied with, nonetheless. This spring I wrote a paper about all the techniques that the Social Sciences really need to be borrowing from industry and the hard sciences:

Mirror, Mirror On the Screen

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:15:30 +0000

It’s been a few weeks since I first started experimenting with the Play As Being practice, and ventured into Second Life. I continue to appreciate the performative brilliance of utilizing Second Life as a means to study the nature of consciousness, being, and reality. I am starting to imagine a metaphysical syllabus that incorporates virtual world immersion as an instrument for laying bare the everyday assumptions we make about consensual reality. While I am learning something about myself as I project my identity into my avatar (its almost impossible not to, as veteran SL’ers will attest), I am also learning more about this world, and its seductive attraction. Lots of Second Lifers believe that Second Life is just as real as Real Life (which, for mystics might just mean that both are illusory), but I lean more towards the cautious opinion that Second Life is a mirror, albeit one with a great deal of depth. Mirrors are quite magical and wonderful (7 years of altered luck, and all that). They can be used to see far and deep – think reflecting telescopes or the michaelson-morely experiments – but they have also trapped a fair share of narcissuses in their alluring reflections. So does SL represent the vanity of vanities? Maybe not, but considering that the energy consumption of a typical SL avatar now exceeds the energy consumption of an average real world brazillian, it is important that folks consider their time in SL well spent. One upside of my recent journeys is that I now appreciate the research going on in this area much better. Here are two pieces from the Chronicle of Higher Ed reporting on research going on at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interactions Lab:

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?

Feeling the Sqeeze

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:15:22 +0000

Contrary to some of the disappointment chatter slithering around the blab-o-sphere, I had a phenomenal time at PyCon ‘08. While it is obvious that the conference (not the language ;-) ) had some scaling problems this year, I am confident that our community is self-reflective and humble enough to constructively digest this feedback and heal itself. This year’s conference had over 1k attendees (up from last year’s ~400), including 270+ sprinters who coded throughout the following week. The attendance, as well as the sponsorship exceeded all expectations, and there was a bit of awkwardness around the feeling that attendees captive attention was for sale. I thought the keynotes were solid, though a clearer system for indicating sponsorship will help next year. Lighting talks, usually my hands-down favorite, were a bit of a disaster - sponsors (many with nothing more to contribute than a hiring announcement) were promised priority and on Saturday some attendees were bumped off the schedule. I would also have appreciated a really inspirational keynote speaker, as well as additional efforts to raise awareness around the range of social justice issues our craft impacts. For me, this conference provided an opportunity to cut through traditional hierarchical communication channels and interact directly with senior developers across a wide variety of sectors. I spoke to people working in leading organizations servicing education, libraries, non-profits, journalism, scientific computing, desktop computing, mobile computing, embedded computing, enterprise consulting, interactive marketing, entertainment, defence, gaming, and many more. I spoke to systems administrators, language designers, programmers, architects, computer scientists, project managers, educators, and entrepreneurs. And all of this diversity was united by the common programming language we all use and love - Python. Python, the language, is itself open-source, and many projects written using python are free and open as well. The language, and its surrounding ecology has a distinct personality, and some of its normative values (at least its aesthetic ones) are captured in these principles, known as The Zen of Python. Approaching this conference from the sociological vantage point of a freshman doctoral student in communications, I certainly paid more attention to the reinforcement of cultural practices at this gathering than I used to. Many of the talks actively encouraged respect, sharing, playing nicely, and coding responsibly. In some cases these topics were the topic of the talk, not even the subtext. But the best part certainly had to be catching up with old friends and making new ones. For those of you that don’t know developers well, our craft involves the invention of the prototypical abstractions, the perpetual refinement of analytical distinctions, and the endless quest for their elegant synthesis. It only takes the slightest verbal nudge to shift the conversation to a metaphysical or theological domain, brining to bear the full brunt of these analytical methods on age-old questions. Maybe its just the developers I hang out with, but they are unquestionably a wise and philosophically-minded bunch. They also tend to love technology, python or otherwise, and are an incredible source to tap into for discussing and speculating emerging trends - from storage to cloud computing, from the browser wars to singularities, this crowd has knowledgeable opinions on them all. And as for the future of Python… well, I know that every year for the past ten have been the year of the linux desktop, but Python is incredibly positioned right now. There aren’t really that many contenders poised to displace Java, like Java displaced C/C++ (or Cobol, in the enterprise), but Python is going strong. From Sun’s and Microsoft’s very serious commitments to jython and IronPython, to Google and NASA’s commitment to Python, to MIT’s recent selection of Python as the language that CS 101 is taught in (and a robust educational community w/in the Python world) , we better figure this conf scaling thing out quickly, because next year is sure to be even bigger.

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.

Fabricating Freedom

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 22:16:52 +0000

Originally posted on theploneblog.org Free Software Developers at Work and Play I haven’t posted much here lately, but I have been writing. I recently finished my first semester as a doctoral student in Columbia’s school of journalism and one of the papers I completed draws directly on my experiences in the Plone Community. A few years ago I remember being struck at how different open source development was from what I (and presumably others) imagined it to be. I kept pitching human interest stories to journalists, ones that might emphasize the playfulness, the sprinting, and the organizational experimentation, but got very few nibbles. So, I finally wrote some of this up myself before it all fades from memory: Fabricating Freedom: Free Software Developers at Work and Play The paper was for 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 Hannah Arendt and closed with Yochai Benkler and danah boyd. The piece I wrote is personal and anecdotal, but reflects on all that our community has taught me about free software, free culture, organizing, consensus building and the day to day politics of software development. enjoy.

A panel of prophets?

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:53:16 +0000

Last Thursday I participated in a panel at an event entitled “The Future of Digital Media: Predictions for 2008.” The event was recorded and will soon be posted, but in the meantime here is a page about the event with more details and some pictures. The even was hosted by Ember Media, held at The Armory and featured their CEO Clayton Banks keynoting some predictions for the coming year. The predictions didn’t contain too many shockers (though I have blogged 1.5 years ago here about where I think the set-top box is headed - hint: straight into your pocket, and Clayton’s legislative prediction about a minimum, symmetrical bandwidth goal is something I find hard to imagine in a country where we can’t get network neutrality, municipal wi-fi, or even rural connectivity right). After the keynote, Clayton asked myself and my fellow panellists - Kay Madati, VP of Community Connect, and Alan Stern, Editor CenterNetworks - a series of smart questions. It’s been a little while since I’ve hung out with this many entrepreneurs and it was refreshing. I definitely appreciated the opportunities to discuss privacy, the politics of bandwidth, and economics of sharing and test the theoretical chops I have been sharpening in grad school. Reflecting on the evening, I was a bit frustrated at what seemed like a get-rich-quick entitlement that some of the questions implied. At one point I wanted to shout - 9 out of 10 restaurants in NYC fail - why do you think your digital media company deserves anything different? Micropayments?!? I remember hearing that elusive siren song back in ‘99 at MaMaMedia… and smarter folks than I agree that free is a stable strategy… in fact, when copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Try concentrating on creating real value in the world, and trust me, the wealth will follow. But, I suppose not all of us have incorporated alchemical wisdom into our daily lives. Thanks to everyone who was involved in organizing this event - it was a great success!

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.

Nostalgia Train

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:58:12 +0000

Yesterday I took a ride on the the S train - not the shuttle, the special. The MTA conducted a vintage run of some 1930s trains this month, including many of the original advertisements and maps. Amazingly, these trains were not replaced until the late 70s… I must have ridden on some of these as a child. I definitely remember the lights flickering on and off and the wicker seats. More pictures here.

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.

Pedagogical Sofware

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 01:09:32 +0000

Literally. See my post on The Plone Blog: Plone University

Plone University

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:21:06 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org Open source software as pedagogical scaffolding, and F/OSS ecologies as a dialogical knowledge communities. This is a fun post recognizing the role of open source software and breaking routines in learning new programming patterns and paradigms. 7 Reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails

Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it’s “do exactly as I say” paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines. I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby. But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now!

Creep-Ola

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:13:04 +0000

Last Saturday night I was at a bar downtown for a friend’s birthday. I decided to pick out a few songs (no, I didn’t use the obnoxious “play now” feature). After selecting my songs, the Rock-Ola internet jukebox asked me if I wanted to take a quiz. It asked me for my gender and age bracket, and then asked me what issue I thought was the most important one in the 2008 presidential elections (I think the choices were the environment, ending the Iraq war, health care, social security, & What Election?). I was mildly surprised that this machine was collecting this kind of data, until I realized that they must be attempting to correlate musical taste with political leanings (they knew the songs I chose). This could come in quite handy when trying to directly target political advertising, or even redistricting. I couldn’t easily figure out who owns Rock-Ola, or where this information is going, but I hope to figure it out soon. The “right” playlist might one day qualify you for suspicious behavior?

Promiscuous Laptops

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:56:17 +0000

So, I published another post on OLPCNews today: Sharing and Not-Sharing Alike User Generated Content I am trying to figure out the best way to aggregate my own work, and am a little stumped. On the one hand, I don’t want to duplicate content, but on the other, I am skeptical of the long term prospects of some of the sites I have contributed to. Guess that’s what happens when you don’t own your own data. Anyway, I am starting to at least keep a running list of links to this kind of stuff. I know these aren’t all traditional “publications”, but it is important that people start regarding some of these kinds of contributions along these lines.

Parasitic Conditions

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:44:31 +0000

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. – E.B. White

I don’t want to spoil the punchline of this Onion story, Woman Overjoyed By Giant Uterine Parasite, but let’s just say that there is nothing like the power of irony to drive a stake through the distinction between empirical observations and value judgements. This is really the best argument I have come across to explain what’s wrong with the psychiatric medical model. It’s not that mental conditions aren’t correlated with changes in biochemistry or neural brain state. Its the value judgment that is implied in labeling the phenomena an illness. And this little Onion article does a great job of conveying that. It’s got me wondering what other naturally occurring conditions can be explained/judged in more than one way?

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.

Treating customers like cavepeople

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 20:31:34 +0000

The state of health coverage in the U.S. is absolutely appalling. Consider the recent incident involving Blue Cross/Blue Sheild that my friend at Interprete has had to endure, at great expense of her time and patience - Blue Cross, Blue Shield Chronicles. The notion that a latent condition is a preexisting one is preposterous - it’s like saying you were fated to have this condition, so it was pre-existing. The citizen journalism angle to this story is interesting too. It is quite remarkable how powerful google alerts can be in the hands of a PR rep or an investigative journalist, and how a mouse can roar in a way that demands a response (let’s hope that we can help insure a positive one). Subversive tactics which emply tools like Google alerts and ad-words style targeted advertising potentially refute Sunstein’s argument in republic.com about disjoint sets of users in cyberspace. His argument basically discounts the ability to spam for your cause and the value in tracking all communications around a particular issue or theme and confronting opposing viewpoints where they occur.

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.

OLPC Field Repair

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:41:02 +0000

At last month’s incredible Teach Think Play Conference I was fortunate enough to borrow an OLPC laptop from a good friend. As usual, the tangible green machine was a Pop Star (though in this educator crowd, most were not familiar with the project), garnering interest and attention wherever it travels. Sadly, the machine I had borrowed had some serious power issues, and I could not demo Sugar - the linux-based, free operating system developed specifically for the OLPC - to any of the attendees. Since my employer CCNMTL is a participant in the OLPC developer program (thusfar we have only received a raw motherboard, not a complete laptop), I decided to attempt a field repair of the OLPC in the vain hope I might be able to swap boards and get the unit running again. I discovered that the OLPC hardware (at least at this stage) is not quite as easy to disassemble as one would hope - you really need more of a clean room than a Third-World repair shop to work on this model. Still, a few iconic cues directing disassembly, like on a Thinkpad or Apple, would go a long way. Amazingly, there were no moving parts! In any case, I visually documented the disassembly process, but I don’t think I am going to be able to put humpty dumpty back together again any time soon. I guess I owe my friend $100 (well, now $150), since that is the list price of the OLPC.

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!

The Organizational Digital Divide

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 01:51:11 +0000

An emerging breed of collaboration tools, born and incubated in the free software world, is radically improving the ways that people work together. These aren’t just toys for techies anymore. Just as the word processor became an essential tool for every writer to master, the network is the new medium that advocates and activists need to embrace in order to be effective. Organizations who fail to recognize this opportunity will waste valuable resources wrestling with the torrents of information they are responsible for managing. How many groups continue to collaborate on press releases or grant proposals by sending around multiple versions of word documents? How many organizations share a single email account to manage constituent relations and their common contact information? How many emails must be exchanged for a small group of people to schedule a meeting? The “writeable web” has spawned a new generation of networked, web-based authoring environments that can significantly increase an organization’s ability to realize its goals. These environments are not a panacea – at best, they will catalyze and facilitate an improvement in communication and processes. While technology alone will not guarantee a change in a group’s culture, it can play an instrumental role raising the self-awareness around an organization’s processes, and in turn, help improve them. These alternatives have the potential to help fulfill some of the Internet’s early promise by significantly improving the efficiency and productivity of non-profits, NGO’s and activist groups alike. Such tools can dramatically improve the management of knowledge, communities, and projects, and enable coordination and collaboration across thousands of participants. They are rapidly being adopted by corporations eager to move beyond the e?mail inbox as the primary task management and collaboration platform. Organizations of all shapes and sizes need to evaluate and embrace these technologies, or risk falling behind in differential efficiency, victims of an organizational digital divide. A simple mailing list combined with a wiki can thoroughly transform workflow and hierarchy within an organization. But this is just the start. Project management tools, collaboration platforms, and content management systems are transforming the functionality of intranets. By better balancing flows of communication and power, these collaboration tookits can boost an organization’s productivity, and increase the return on a philanthropic investment. With the proper tuning and training , web-based collaboration tools can help an organization achieve important strategic objectives such as transparency, accountability, and sustainability. Like the telegraph and the railroad in their time, the Internet has been heralded as the promoter of equality, freedom, and democracy. And like the technologies that preceded it, its impact will ultimately derive from the ways we choose to use it. We need to be more deliberate in our choices of communication technologies, since these tools shape the dynamics of the connections between us. Software has gone social, but it’s not just for socializing. There is important and hard work to be accomplished and we need to be using technology intelligently so that we can communicate and act more purposefully and efficiently. [I originally wrote this piece for an op-ed assignment in a class on Media and Rights in Development]

Asymmetric Competition and the CMS

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:06:21 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org

Beyond the CMS - What are Plone’s greatest future competitors? I recently encountered O’Reilly’s asymmetrical competition meme and think its a good jumping off point to discuss the differences between Plone’s perceived and actual competition. First, let’s catch up to where we are today:

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

The opensource CMS horserace has seemingly settled on a few players, and without provoking any religious wars, I continue to be impressed with the richness and maturity of all of these projects. But here in the educational sector there are rumblings which I think will spread beyond our corner. In our world ‘C’ stands for Course, not ‘Content’, and the big players are Blackboard (which swallowed WebCT), Sakai and Moodle. Here too, competition may come from surprising corners, as the game itself changes beneath us.

Second Life Political Rallies?

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:17:53 +0000

Given the Alchemist’s recent trackrecord of predictions, I am going to pass along another prediction that we came up with at lunch the other day. The ‘08 presidential campaign will witness political rallies, and probably counter-protests, inside of second life (for activists who don’t have a first life?) We also wondered if the recent moves to restrict people’s right to assemble publicly in New York City (see Assemble for Rights) might carry over into cyberspace. No more than 50 avatars per server? I’m not sure if even Gonzales would have the gumption to distort our constitutional right to assembly, but like with his recent frightening attack on habeas corpus, the constitution only states that “Congress shall make no law.. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” - so executive orders or judicial rulings might be fair game?

First they ignore you...

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 20:02:03 +0000

then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Nature has reported that American Association of Publishers (AAP) has hired a seasoned PR veteran to fight against open access scientific articles Journal Publishers Hire PR ‘Pit Bull’ to Attack Open Access I guess they are starting to take this “threat” (or rather, eventuality) rather seriously.

"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.

Zyprexa Memos Released Using Tor

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 11:16:01 +0000

Freeculturenyu.org is covering an unfolding story laced with greed and deciept in the pharmaceutical industry. The freeculture angle here is that Lilly will predictably try to control this information by abusing copyright laws. However, there is another important angle to this story relating to the relationship between anonymity and free speech, especially in a world of omniscient surveillance. Tor users must remember to install both Tor and Privoxy (instructions). There is also a firefox plugin, torbutton, which makes using Tor a bit easier. From freenetproject.org’s philosophy section

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:

Free Laptops

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:39:10 +0000

In keeping with the Alchemist’s recent “free” disambuguation theme, here is my latest installment on the OLPC project:

Free Laptops: Creating, Producing and Sharing a Revolution

In this essay/story I leave wise ‘ol Plato behind, and tried for a straight up, journalistic take on the project. Except there is no such thing as objectivity in journalism, so in this piece is explicitly infused with subjectivity and ideology. Conversations with Ian Bicking helped convince me that believing in this project is a ultimately a matter of faith, in which case our optimism or cynicism go a long way towards shaping reality. And our perceptions are often shaped by media, so lets start advocating for this project instead of kicking it in the shins.This is one reason I am starting to think that olpcnews should seriously ease up on the project, stop taking cheap swipes and jibes, and start offering more constructive criticism, or even better, apply for some grants so they can fix the project as they see fit. Happy Holidays!

Free Energy

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:04:17 +0000

Free as in ‘Free of pollutants’, ‘free of politics’, and ‘conducive to human freedom’, not ‘free as in fusion’ or ‘free as in beer’. On Wednesday night I saw Jeffery Sachs present at the CSSR series. I have seen him talk before, but he is a great orator, so it is a pleasure to listen to reruns. Besides, Gia’s situation continues to deteriorate at such an alarming rate that everytime he speaks I learn how things have gotten worse. I have been wondering for a while how technology and new media could play a role in saving the world, and I posed this question to Jeff after the talk:

Honest Software

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:13:23 +0000

Originally publihsed on theploneblog.org How hybrid economies help keep software honest. Last week’s Plone Conference was truly phenomenal - provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!). One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen’s keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don’t ordinarily interact. Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors - Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings). In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration. But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees - a piece of general purpose software called ‘Plone’. It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the “commercial economy” and the “second economy” (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community. I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production. Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations - to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this “productivity arbitrage”, and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects. It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task. As Rheingold said “There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.” - Is Plone’s ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

Plato and the Laptop

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:43:52 +0000

Well, midterms have come and gone, and somehow I managed to complete my two papers on time, somewhere between San Francisco and PloneCon in Seattle. In my class on the Social Impact of Mass Media I was really impressed with Peter’s Speaking into the Air, and wanted to revisit the Phaedrus. While reading it I was making connections to read-only/read-write culture, and wanted to explore that connection to Plato’s analysis of writing. Also, his conversation has everything in the world to do with my thinking on the effects of Technology on Epistomology itself, and Memory in particular. Still, when I sat down to write the paper, I kept getting drawn back into conversations around OLPC, until I realized that’s exactly what I should be writing about! Plato and the Laptop: Prescribing Educational Technology for Society’s Ills

He is the Law

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 01:52:54 +0000

While we continue to arm the robots at an alarming rate, the real transition of power and control is far more subtle and insidious. Humanity is ceding power to the machines, but not at gunpoint. Rather, we are relinquishing our will to the machines through the kinds of bureaucratic machinery Max Weber and Terry Gilliam would have a hard time imagining. I am talking about the reification of bureaucracy in the form of software - the rules that we all live by are being carved into stone, or more accurately, etched in silicon. Code == Law? Some industries have already made this transition. From the sympathetic bartenders unable to extend happy hour a moment past 7pm, to the tele-tellers who inform the customer that “the system” will not allow them to exercise any judgment or compassion, some systems are already being governed by the machines. But this is just the start. In the corporate world, IBM is banking on the tight relationship between software and processes. I recently attended a talk presented by their VP of Services, Stu Feldman, and he relayed an anecdote about certain contracts in the financial sector which are no longer governed by legal documents. The final word on maturation and vesting is expressed in a crufty old C program… Considering some of these deals are worth billions, the impact is suddenly more significant than an overpriced cocktail or an unwaied late fee. The starkest example of this trend to date, is the recent announcement by the chinese government that software issue judgments in criminal cases. While they justify this system on the grounds that it will help eliminate the effects of corruption and bribery, reality’s reassemblance to pulp science fiction is growing by the day.

One Python Per Child

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 22:04:18 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org The $100 laptop project has chosen Python as the primary development language for The Laptop. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an olpc developer board, and have spent a little time learning about the platform and project. While there are a few issues I have with the project, it is really an thrilling moment in educational technology and after holding the hardware in my own hands I actually believe this vision might truly manifest. The main reason I am writing about this in the Plone blog is I have learned that the olpc’s application development language of choice is Python!

peer-to-peer pressure

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:42:25 +0000

I had an interesting conversation with Brian Taptich, the VP of Business Development at bittorrent.com and gained an insight into the machinations of the industry. I learned that “Big Media” only now appreciates how good they had it back in Napster days, when every file download was logged and tracked through the central Napster server. Now that they are starting down the barrel of true peer-to-peer networking (which bittorrent – the protocol, not the company – affords), they have the perspective to appreciate in hindsight the benefits that omni-present surveillence provides for them. You could even speculate that bittorrent.com’s value proposition is to turn the bittorrent protocol, back into Napster. If they become the central clearinghouse of bittorrent seeds, they can (and will) keep records of all of the network activity. What files are being exchanged, and who is exchanging them. In bittorrent, the seeds are the servers, and technically these seeds can be distributed all across the Internet. I was really surprised to learn that Brian was actually aware of an obscure branch of Austrian code for the PloneMultimedia product which auto-generates bittorrent seeds (which we helped merge into the trunk at the Big Apple Sprint). Apparently, The Lawyers were getting all antsy about the existence of tools which make seeding all too easy. Right now, it takes a degree of technical know how to create these ad-hoc bittorrent servers, but once the auto-generation tools make it out to the premier blog, wiki, and CMS platforms, there won’t be much stopping them. The delicate balance between the overly concentrated power of centralized services vs. their practical usefulness is a theme I began to explore in my post on Serenity. I have also imagined other contexts (e.g. Creative Commons licensing) where simply landing an important feature in the top dozen authoring tools could really shift the scales in terms of adoption. I continue to actively wonder what features could be introduced to these tools to promote equality, democracy, and social justice. Someone should tell the lawyers that the cat’s head has already wriggled out of the bag, and when she gets out she is going to teach her peers the same trick.

One Lost-identity Per Child

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 00:28:56 +0000

I attended wikimania this past weekend, and was encouraged by the philosophers present take a critical stance towards the euphoria surrounding the 21st century agendas - Will Science, Technology, and Rationality necessarily make the world a better place? Didn’t we make the same mistake last century? This led me to a scary thought regarding the One Laptop Per Child project, which I am generally very excited and optimistic about. The team seems to be asking all the right questions and taking all the right ideological positions with regards to the importance of viewing this project as an educational one (not a tech one), structuring the venture as a non-profit, and deeply understanding the value of free software and free culture. But there is another freedom at stake here - one I have explored in the past (permanent records) - the freedom to remain anonymous, which is the keystone supporting personal privacy, which I am beginning to believe ought to be a basic human right. I started thinking about how these laptops could easily become the instruments for an international id program, and for all the reasons that people are concerned about this, OLPC should seriously consider shipping with tools that support anonymous network activity. Tools like TOR, which regrettably the EFF has just had to cut funding for… If you think this is important, perhaps you might want to chime in, and let laptop people know.

Meet the Robots

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 00:13:06 +0000

Over Memorial Day weekend I attended Fleet week, and made a few new friends. They happen to be robots, of the autonomous flying variety. These little gadges come in a wide range of sizes, from wasp not much bigger than two hands all the way up to the predator, which is now armed with hellfire missiles. For the time being, these robots are unarmed, but are all equipped with survaillance cameras. This explosion in optical feeds helps explain the urgency behind programs like Carnegie Mellon’s Informedia project (Is Anyone Watching Grandma?). These craft already realize Ender’s Game scenarios, with hs dropouts controling live ammunition in the Iraqi theater of combat from the safety of a bunker in New Mexico. But even without carrying missiles themselves, these robots have become part of the weapons system. A soldier explained to me how the targeting systems for the large guns on the decks of US ships are now wired to the data feeds coming from the remote drones. With the click of a lightpen, what the plane sees is targeted from the ship’s guns, damage assesed and trajectories corrected. Killer robots are a topic I have been thinking about for a while, but it was truly amazing to see these devices in person. In many respects this hardware is identical to the remote control airplanes from the ’50s. The only major new advancement is the software controling them. Here is the model that Bush is planning on deploying to patrol the Mexican border. How long before local law enforcement gets a few of these to play with? How many do they need before the start assigning them to track individual suspects?

Personal Media

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 00:12:43 +0000

A recent visit to the new 5th avenue Apple store made me realize that the war for the living room console is effectivlely moot. For years manufacturers have been vying to create the hybrid computer/tv, destined for the position formely occupied by the VCR. What I realized was that this compititiion is a bit like the telcom companies fighting over landlines, while everyone else went out and got themselves a cell phone. Portable media players, combined with docking stations mean that I can have my music, movies, games, pictures, etc on my person, at all times. Inconvinient to carry your xbox, ps3, or mac mini in your car, to your office, or to your friends house. It’s all too easy to forget to factor in Moore and his law.

Held together with Glureed

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 23:22:39 +0000

I am bummed at the failure of politicians and the media to connect the issue of Net Neutrality to the issue of China’s internet censorship. The issue of internet censorship in China led to congressional hearings where:

“The House International Relations subcommittee’s top Democrat, Tom Lantos, told representatives of the companies that they had accumulated great wealth and power, “but apparently very little social responsibility”. “Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.” (bbc news)

New York State of Plone

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 22:01:45 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org Preliminary report on the Big Apple Sprint July fourth has come and gone, but the fireworks set off at last week’s sprint are still visible. The sprinters arrived at Columbia University bright and early, Wednesday morning. (note to all future sprint organizers: tell the caterers to skip the decaf and double the regular order). About ~13-15 sprinters were present, but we also coordinated remote sprints with Austria (+5 hours ahead) and Utah (-2 hours behind) meaning we were basically sprinting around the clock. We all used the freely available, plone-based, OpenPlans service to manage our collaboration and everyone found the software to be extremely reliable and easy to use. The sprint began with introductions and detailed demos of the tools and products people had been working on and were most proud of. Sprints are difficult to plan in advance since the skills and interests of the attendees are not decided until the final roster shows up. A diverse range of interests were represented, but common themes rapidly emerged

Death and Taxonomies

Wed, 31 May 2006 21:41:42 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org A forray into drupal 4.7’s taxonomy system and what Plone can learn from it. I have been moonlighting on a Drupal project and paying close attention to their taxonomy system. Drupal’s taxonomy/category/tagging system was completely revamped for their 4.6->4.7 release - a release close to a full year in the making, analogous to the Plone 2.0->2.1 “minor” point release. The site I have been working on, theicarusproject.net has a very rich collection of content, and one of the primary motivations for the migration is to get a better handle on the classification system - noboday can find anything on the current site. They were committed to Drupal long before I arrived, so I dug in with the hope of learning something from the contrast. PHP bashing aside, there are alot of interesting things happening in Drupal land. I hope to follow up this post with a few more cross-pollinating nuggets, but for now I will focus on their taxonomy system. Taxonomies in Drupal are considered the heart of the system, and the essential modules ship with the core and cannot be disabled. Most URLs in Drupal are effectively queries, much like our smart folders (actually, for anything aside from anti-chronological display order you need to install the Views module) but the display results are all instances of content with matching vocabulary terms. The absence of folders and containment initially confuses many administrators, and renders breadcrumbs largely useless, but does allow for the creation of sophisticated information architectures. Taxonomies are managed top-down, not bottom-up, and have a separate administrative interface for their creation and management. Once the taxonomy vocabularies are created, specific terms can be added to these vocabularies without having to create content associated with those terms (in contrast to a bottom-up category system, like the mediawiki). Category Management - Vocabulary Listings: Druapl supports multiple vocabularies, which can each be associated with one or more content types. Vocabularies can be flat, one level deep, or N-levels deep (hierarchical). They can be fixed or free form (meaning content authors can make up new categories upon content creation). The core tagging system does not support the creation of tags per-user, per-object - only per-object. Category Management - Add a Vocab: Category Management - Add/Edit a Term: The Drupal taxonomy system is very powerful, but its power is very open ended and does not necessarily lead users towards a uniform experience. The confusion around categories and taxonomies is best exemplified by the category module meant to consolidate and simplify taxonomy and navigation, but there is no consensus on its incorporation into the core. A large number of modules are built around taxonomies. Core Drupal supports roles, but no groups (organic groups is a popular access delegatoin solution, but it is incompatible with other access restriction modules - so you have to choose one), and does not have a notion of containment (ie folders). So, for example, one way to restrict editing access is by enabling the taxonomy access module. Another useful module is the taxonomy browser which allows for advanced search against unions/intersections of vocab terms. Category Browser: Once vocabularies are created, and terms added, content can be associated with these terms: Working on this site really drove home the value in separating the navigation axis (section) from the thematic axis (keywords), and separating these dimensions was easy to accomplish with the taxonomy/category tools built into drupal. In particular, once the scheme was developed, managing vocabulary lists (even hierarchical ones) is intuitive, albeit slightly clunky. I further chose to introduce a free-form tagging dimension for member contributed posts which may or may not fit into the fixed taxonomy. This is similar to myspace and facebook allowing for free-form hobbies and interests, and banking on a large enough user base that there will be overlap and potentially interesting intersections. The system still does not allow for the intuitive modeling of a many-to-many relationship, which I continue to think is the litmus test which will mark of a truly powerful taxonomy UI. There is still quite a bit of programmer know how involved in setting up this system so that it operates the way that content administrators expect, and arguably there are too many degrees of freedom introduced by such a general purpose modeling capability (if you think about it, a tagging system can essentially allow web administrators to model relationships which used to require programming custom applications against an rdbms). Nonetheless, Drupal’s taxonomy/category/vocabulary system definitely captures a few use cases more elegantly than Plone’s current core does. But perhaps the real lesson is the importance of not mixing navigation space and content space, which can be kept separate in Plone, but is all too easy to conflate (in Drupal too!). Note: most things I describe in this case study could have been accomplished within core Plone - I think the most interesting things here are the administrative UI for multiple vocabulary management, the different types of vocabularies, and how central they are in the construction of a Drupal site.

Turtle Totems

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 23:35:00 +0000

Seymour Papert , the inventor of Logo, spoke at Teachers College on Monday April 10th. I was lucky enough to hear him talk in a standing-room-only event. My former employer, Idit Caperton studied with Papert, and MaMaMedia incorporated many of the principles he advocated. His ideas, once stated, are remarkably simple and obvious–usually a mark of the good ones. He thinks we are teaching mathematics ass-backwards, and that we ought to introduce it the way it came about in the history of humanity - engineering first. This approach will create and foster the demand for mathematics. Pyramids, navigation, astronomy, all drove the development of mathematics - and robotics and programming can provoke and instigate the need for mathematical abstraction in education. Sounds about right. Interestingly, his experiments have led to anecdotal accounts of a reversal of the gender discrepancy in science/math. He claims with an engineering first approach, girls actually quickly excel beyond the boys, venturing beyond speed and destruction to the mastery of a much wider variety of skills with the systems. He also demonstrated, in 10 minutes flat, how logo can be used to teach 2nd graders the notion of a mathematical theorem (in creating any closed shape, the turtle will rotate through a full 360 degrees - repeat N {fd 10 rt 360/N}) as well as how to introduce calculus (through the idea of the limit). He made the point that once a second grader is arguing – “that’s not a circle, its lots and lots of short lines”, you have already won… If logo has a failing, its that it does not provide the necessary scaffolding for teachers other than Papert to effectively teach with it. I have been exposed to logo in the past, but never really understood its appeal until Seymour started turtling. Interestingly, Logo is far from irrelevant. Mark Shuttleworth’s ClassroomCoders curriculum imagines a logo->squeak->python pipeline for educating the programmers of the future… Seymour is also heavily involved in the $100 laptop project, a project which many consider to be one of the most important educational initiatives currently underway.

soft metamedia?

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 23:34:00 +0000

April 7th I heard Lev Manovich talk at Pra tt. I am a big fan of Manovich’s written work, and the Language of New Media was instrumental in my analysis of tagging. Friday night Manovich showed us ideas in progress, and bravely admitted that they were not completely formed. He talked about describing the evolution of media in evolutionary terms. As in, the next logical progression after getting all our media digitized (i.e., simulating physical processes w/in the digital environment) is the breeding and hybridization of the media. He is claiming that some of what we are now seeing in ‘moving graphics’ or ‘design cinema’ is actually a new form of media, distinct from what came before it. And he is interested in identifying the trunks and branches of this media evolution. Plaid Itsu was a film he used as an example of a completely new form. Whereas multimedia was the assembly of multiple forms of media adjacent to each other, metamedia is the combination of these forms into a new unified whole. He pointed out the live action photography, combined with traditional design aesthetics, combined with graphics, etc etc. Not sure I bought it, but it was an interesting assertion. The best question from the audience alluded to a longstanding disconnect between media and communication theorists. Manovich is looking exclusively at the end product of the media being created, and not examining the cultural and social conditions that lead to its creation. There may be mileage from this rarefied approach, as some patterns are discernible, but it does seem to be lacking the depth to explain the creative dynamics and underlying motivations. After the talk, I began to this relate his line of reasoning to Arthur Young’s theory of process: The Theory of Evolutionary Process as a Unifying Paradigm Theory of Process Poster (too bad this isn’t really visible online) Which I first became exposed to through the work of the Meru Foundation: letter matrix It seems to me that the evolutionary forces that Manovich is documenting conform to the trans-disciplinary evolutionary process that Young articulated. For what its worth, the hybridization of media that Manovich claims we failed to predict, was foretold back in this book on the MIT Media Lab, published in 1988.

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.

There is no folder

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 21:34:55 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org Do not try to bend the folder – that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. Then you will see that it is not the folder that bends–it is only yourself. Tagging seems to have spurred a growing amount of research on categories and classification. A recent paper by Clay Shirky, entitled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags directly challenges the desktop metaphor which currently underlies much of Plone’s UI. To be sure, it is certainly possible to model the connections that Shirky describes using topics, smart folders, and a disciplined use of keywords, but the metaphor is critical for designing and intuitive system, all the way down to the icon. I have recently been working a bit with Drupal, and their handling of this problem is worth checking out. The core taxonomy module, combined with its corresponding menuing systems (menu, sitemenu, taxonomy menu) provide a great deal of flexibility in this regard. Organization is going organic.

Saints in the Church of Writely?

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:24:00 +0000

Two months back I saw Richard Stallman talk at a NYC Gnubies event and I asked him a question that I have been thinking alot about lately – Would a Saint in the Church of Emacs use gmail? To me the question revolves around the growing threat that 3rd party webservices poses to the freedoms that free software is designed to protect. In O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0 he argues that software is transitioning from an artifact to a service, and that data is becoming the new “intel inside”. In an age when applications have become commodities, could the freedom of my data (in an open format) be interchangeable with the freedom of software? I recently listened to the Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Mircosystems pose a similar question in his talk, The Zen of Free. He talks about the importance of Open Software implementing Open Standards, which is close to the idea I have been advocating, but doesn’t quite go far enough. Using free (as in beer) third party web services is very tempting, but I am worrying more and more about the traditional freedoms that free software protects against - vendor lock-in, proprietary data formats, and freedom to modify policy according to application specific requirements. I would be less antsy about using web 2.0 apps if I had some assurance that I could get my data back out without screenscraping a bunch of html pages. Even services with APIs like flickr and delicious create vulnerabilities, as I was loathe to discover last week. Delicious provides a programmers api, but its api only exposes methods which operate on a single user. Thus, if you want to export a collection of links that have all been tagged with a particular tag, (reasonable if you are engaged with a community in distributed research) you are back to screenscraping! These considerations and more advocate for the need for free (as in speech) versions of many of these services. There are certainly some side-effects of running a centralized service that are inherent in it being centralized, but many communities are making use of these “public” services because of their convenience, and the ease with which they can be “mashed up.” Which brings me back to the design that we have been thinking alot about at work lately. Anders and I presented a talk at pycon demonstrating some of these ideas. Anders did a great job writing our talk up here: Tasty Lightning Crucially, it is imperative not to conflate our advocacy for building components that expose themselves as webservices with building apps against third-party web services. The design we describe resembles a traditional mash-up, except the components involved are locally controlled as opposed to relying upon external, corporate services. For all the usual f/oss reasons it can be important to “own” and run your own services. But this argument also has everything in the world to do with Ulises In Defense of the Digital Divide as Paralogy essay. In this essay Ulises grapples with Lyotard’s critique of new media under the logic of capitalism which has “established commodification and efficiency as the ultimate measures of the value of knowledge.” he continues:

The Me Generation

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 21:38:27 +0000

isomorphic surprises: stickies, tasty, and the importance of user contributed content I have been thinking alot about tagging lately, especially how a complete tagging system - comprised of user-item-tag triplets, is isomorphic to rdf’s subject-predicate-object triplets. It is amusing to think about how egocentric Web 2.0 is - The subject is always me. Web 2.0 might be made of people, but not just any people - Just the most important one in the world. Today I had a fun time trying to explain to people on irc the power and importance of user contributed content annotations within plone. Crucially, user content annotations are per-user, per-object, and in many cases a single user might want to annotate a particular object with more than one annotation. Interesting annotations can come in many flavors. There are free form notes, fine grained annotations (anchored to particular phrases - think msword trackback - or geometrical coordinates on the target - nice for image annotations), keyword annotations (aka - tags), etc ect. There many problems that can be solved with custom per user content annotations, including quiz and poll results, per student answer submission, and lately we have been working on allowing users to clip audio and video by annotating start and end times on media objects. It is important not to confuse per-user tagging with DC:Subject - the dc metadata is shared across all users (like categories in the wikipedia) and in that sense, is global. While we are on the topic of tags, it is useful to talk about the vocabulary that drives the tagging. Vocabularies can be fixed or free, individual or collaborative, and personal or shared. All of these variations are interesting in different cntexts, and have to do with whether or not I see your tags, or if we each are developing our own ontologies. In educational technology annotations are a big part of the problems we are trying to solve, but there are tons of use cases in the world at large. Additionally, a high performance, robust tagging engine can power personal content organization, like gmail’s labels. Which brings me to the products we have been developing at CCNMTL. We have been using PloneStickies, a general purpose content annotation framework, in production for over a year now. Built using AT References, it allows us to create per-user AT objects connected to the target object. AT Schema Annotations won’t do the trick here since, like DC:Subject, these annotations are instance-wide. Z3 annotations might work, but by building AT derived stickies, we pick up search, workflow, permissions, and the richness of AT. This allows us to quickly and easily develop custom stickies, like the StickyClip. PloneStickies has a ways to go, but the basics work great. It is not yet super useful out of the box, since the portlet it ships with only allows users to attach a single free form StickyNote to the target object. But it is great to develop applications with. It ships with with some super snazzy css stickies, complete with colored/resizable/title-barred/drop-shadowed/roll-upable/transparent-when-dragging notes, which can preserve their own x-y position and state across sessions and never fall off your screen. It now supports attaching multiple stickies to a target, but does not yet provide a mechanism for the target object to place the stickies itself. At first we thought we could implement a Plone tagging solution using this framework - just create a StickyTags made out of keyword fields, and voilà - plonr. Trouble was, since tagging is such a symmetrical model, its tough to build an efficient zodb implementation (for me, at least) that can handle all the querrying we wanted to do. Enter the tasty microapp and the PloneTasty proxy (about 90% done). Tasty is a stateful (sqlobject) turbogears component that exposes a REST api, ships with its own snazzy ajax tagging client, and can be used across frameworks, languages, and platforms. We are even hoping it can help make the world a better place. So StickyTags (which doesn’t exist) and PloneTasty are two implementations of the same concept, with StickyTags being the AT/zodb implementation and PloneTasty/tasty the new microapp design (mashup architecture?) we have been working on and are pretty psyched about. And if you act now, you get the knife set and the lint remover too, for just 3 easy installments.

Faster, Better, Cheaper

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 21:29:17 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org In this episode, Sean Kelly at NASA compares j2ee, rails, zope/plone, turbogears, django… cue the laughtrack Okay, this is a long one, but it rivals any comparison matrix: better-web-app Plone comes out shining, although arguably it compares apples to pomellas. Someone with the chops should really cut this baby up into chapters, cause its a win for dynamic languages over j2ee, and python, and Plone to boot. (spoiler: he uses the zmi for “hello world” and ArchGenXML for the time tracking app).

Out of Context

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 01:19:00 +0000

Today I saw Ted Selker present a talk on “Context-Aware Computing: Understanding and Responding to Human Intention” His perspective on inventions resonated strongly with my recent thinking on social interfaces and software as architecture, and in turn, ideology. Ted is helping to create a world where intelligence is everywhere, transparently. People joke about toaster oven’s with IP addresses, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. A few of the examples really stuck out though - intelligent doors that give different people different messages about the availability of the inhabitant, tools that help people manage their relationships better (e.g. themail, clustering and color coding emails, rather than putting them in buckets), and a great little anecdote about doctors who don’t wash their hands before examinations. In this last case, a hospital approached the lab asking for some high tech solution to insure that doctors washed before procedures. They used to have human supervisors (union, I’m sure) standing by the sink, and were envisioning some sort of rfid-cybercop-surveillance solution. Instead, Ted and his team designed an electronic doorstop. The examination room door would not close until the doctors washed their hands for at least 20 seconds. Ted has a background in cog-sci and is acutely aware (the whole media lab seems to be) of the ways in which technology is becoming a leading art, and ways in which behavior can influence worldview. I wish this understanding was more widespread. A few other thoughts - Ted’s characterization of inventing as adventure movie, moving “at the speed of physics” reminded me alot of extreme programming - release early, release often, embrace change, favor improvisation over the paralysis that comes with the heft of over-engineering and over-designing. Many of his UI strategies seemed to draw heavily from techniques I first learned about reading The Art of Memory (also echoed in research suggesting larger screens improve efficiency). Also notable is how this approach of transparent, cognitive prosthesis contrasts with the UI the informedia group presented. Their Visual Query Interface presents the user with sliders allowing them to interact with the system to fine tune the strictness of the computer’s judgment. This mixed mode of interaction seems to differ fundamentally from the approach the contextual computing team is taking.

all work, all play

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 01:54:00 +0000

Last Friday CCNMTL hosted a mini-conference on New Media and Education (pics). Me and my colleague Dan Beeby co-presented a marathon series of workshops on Sakai and Web Services. We repeated each of our two 35 minute talks 3 times over the day (2x3 talks == a very long day), and I can’t wait for the video’s to be published so I can see the rest of the conference ;-) The first talk unfolded into a conversation about Course/Content Mgmt systems, open/community source ecologies, and the purposeful use of tools w/in those environments. The second talk covered rss, blogging, delicious, flickr, odeo, and the balance between push and pull. The participants were attentive and engaged, and I although the pace was brutal, I really enjoyed working on these presentations. The funny thing about giving 6 talks in one day, is that by the third talk in, I couldn’t remember if I had used a particular phrase two slides back, or two hours back… Luckily, Dan and I knew the material cold, had a good rapport, and were very comfortable swapping lines and improvising. The only glitch was due to flickr not refreshing their feed for over 24 hours… can’t expect much more from an external service (more on that in a future post). The slides got a little mangled on the html export, but here they are: An Instructors Guide to Sakai & Courseworks Remodeled. Dan has a great touch in photoshop, so careful what sorts of pictures you leave laying around his desk.

A red guitar, 3 chords, and the truth

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 01:41:00 +0000

This weekend I participated in the NYC free culture summit and learned a few refreshing radical activism tricks from the class of ‘06. In stark contrast to the scholarly focus group I attended last week, this group explicitly understands that they need to create social spaces for like-minded activists to congregate, learn, and plot. The tools of the revolution were revealed in the speed geeking session - Once someone in the 21st century finds the truth, all they need is a mailing list, a blog, a wiki, irc, and rss (with a dash of delicious and flickr, to taste). Remarkable how quickly and easily people with real communication needs figure out how to use this suite of tools, understand which is good for what and when. Highlights included a Riot Folk performance, a talk by Siva (“Space. Hope. Imagination. Potential.”), a talk by the Creative Commons gang, and suprise appearance by Cory Doctorow . The most fun had to be not-protesting (you need a license to protest) outside of Time Sqaure’s Virgin Megastore, and reverse shoplifting DRM info into the stacks of damaged cds. The revolution might not be televised, but it could very well end up on flickr.

His Master's Voice

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 00:52:00 +0000

I recently read that Guglielmo Marconi envisioned the radio being used primarily for 2-way communications, and Alexandar Graham Bell imagined the telephone being used to broadcast concerts to large audiences. Whether or not this is true, it’s interesting to wonder if the inventors of technology are really the best at predicting its eventual usage. Today I attended a focus group organized by the Marconi Society and EPIC which focused on the next generation of scholarly tools, and the future of research and the journal. Most people in the room were completely overwhelmed by the amount of information they were supposed to track, and many thought that better filtering tools would help. People also talked about the real problem of knowledge quality and credibility, and some sort of map for navigating the various layers of information in the world. What I kept hearing in people’s remarks was that people really need spaces, not maps. Researchers need virtual watering holes to gather around. The quest for knowledge is not a search for data, it is arrived at through dialectic. Communities of like minded researches will naturally perform the task of filtering, highlighting, and vetting important information. It will take AI a long long time to accomplish the comparable task with advanced search and filtering portals…. Seems to me like the Marconi Society should consider funding the development of a specialized distribution of a well established CMS, perhaps modeled on drupal’s CivicSpace, or Shuttleworth’s SchoolTool. CivicSpace is basically a drupal bundled and configured with some modules that are geared towards operating an NGO. SchoolTool a Zope3 app designed for operating a small-mid size k12 school. The work might also benefit from considering the social software design patterns we worked on in Ulises’ course this past fall. I also met some really cool people, doing really interesting and socially important work with technology.

Closing Thoughts on MSTU 5510

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 23:54:00 +0000

Ulises recently asked us to summarize our thoughts for the semester in our blogs. Considering that this blog was started for this class, I was surprised by my own initial resentment at being asked to post something so specific here. During the course of the semester, this forum has become a place for me to speak, not to answer. Even when I was posting assignments for class, they were items and issues which I selected and chose. This initial emotional reaction indicates how engaging these tools can become, and helped me answer some of the questions on Uilses’ list. Its been great fun! Best of luck to everyone, and see you on Tuesday.

Happy Holidays!

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 01:50:00 +0000

The semester is almost over, and that means its time for me to compose some thoughts. As usual, this opens more questions than it answers, but I’m pretty happy about how it turned out. Collecting Knowledge: Narrative Tapestries and Database Substrates “An examination of Web 2.0 using Manovich’s Language of New Media, and an interpretation of folksonomies within the context of the narrative-database dichotomy. This inquiry looks at tagging as a mechanism for constructing narratives from databases, and relates narratives to knowledge construction and representation. Educational curricular activities involving tagging will also be considered.” Special thanks to Prof. John Broughton, John Frankfurt, Michael Preston, and Alexander Sherman for helping me develop these ideas.

Pimp my dilapidated, third-world, ambulance

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:39:00 +0000

On Tuesday November 29th I attended a presentation of The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffery Sachs in Africa (watch it here). Angelina couldn’t make it, but Sachs (author of The End of Poverty) is a rock star in his own right, and it was the first time I have ever seen him talk. He is an energetic and inspirational leader, who still believes we have the power to make the world a better place, and is actively working on operationalizing this vision. Some may be skeptical about MTV’s pro-social initiative, think.mtv.com, but whatever their corporate parent’s intentions, it has the potential to do some real good. Notable moments included Dr. Sachs using the phrases “Open-Source politics” and the “wikipedia of foreign policy” to refer to an emerging form of democratic self-determination. It was also great when an audience member questioned an mtv vp on sending a pimp team over to kenya to help them fix the village’s only ambulance.

Plone in an Elevator

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 21:26:34 +0000

Originally published on theploneblog.org How hybrid economies help keep software honest. Last week’s Plone Conference was truly phenomenal - provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!). One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen’s keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don’t ordinarily interact. Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors - Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings). In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration. But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees - a piece of general purpose software called ‘Plone’. It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the “commercial economy” and the “second economy” (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community. I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production. Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations - to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this “productivity arbitrage”, and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects. It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task. As Rheingold said “There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.” - Is Plone’s ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

Plone's Value Proposition

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:19:03 +0000

Originally posted at theploneblog.org The theory underlying Plone’s personal-ad campaign. At the marketing workshop in Vienna, one of the exercises we conducted was an informal poll of the personality traits and cultural values that people associate with the plone community. Motivating this exercise was an exploration of the recent Plone personal ad, which came out of the New Orleans Symposium. This anthropomorphizing of Plone was meant to embody the idea that software has a personality, and that since writing code is form of creative expression, the values of the author will inevitably be expressed in its features. So, for example, I will be suprised the day that Adobe easily allows for the assignment of Creative Commons licenses to content created using their tools, but no one is surprised by the fact that the Mediawiki wiki-engine deafualts to this license. If you accept this position, then selecting the right CMS is more than a matter checking off features on a matix. It becomes essential that the vendor’s values are consistent with the client’s mission. In the case of an open source project, the “vendor” is really an entire ecology, comprised of of the community, the software, and the processes and structures which bind them together. Here are some of the values that members of the Plone community currently associate with this project:

"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)!

New York's Darker History

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 00:21:00 +0000

This weekend I attended the masterfully produced Slavery in New York exhibit at the New York Historical Society. The exhibit was deeply moving, and vividly and viscerally captured a portrait of African American history I was not fully aware of previously. I left the exhibit with a new understanding of how the 400 year long institution of slavery was a tragedy fully on par with the Nazi Holacaust. I will save a discussion of the show’s content for another time, but for now I want to focus on the amazing use of educational technology woven throughout the exhibit. From start to finish, the show effectively incorporated video, interactive kiosks, and innovative displays which pushed the boundaries of some of the best work I have seen in this field. The use of screens is a topic that is on my mind from my studies of Lev Manovich this semester, and this exhibit incorporated many cutting edge treatments of the screen. To start with, at the beginning of the exhibit, the visitor is confronted with video commentary of the reactions of past visitors, and at the end of the exhibit a self-service video booth allowed visitors to record their own commentary. I have never seen a self-service video booth like this incorporated into an museum exhibition, and it was very powerful and impressive. Beyond that, their ability to transport the visitor to the reality of the past was greatly enhanced by their translation of historical abstractions to modern day interfaces. In particular, I am thinking of the classified ads advertising slaves for sale and offering rewards for runaways, the presentation of the slave ship logs, and most strikingly, the presentation of the slave economy in a bloomberg-style terminal. The cold economics of slavery were driven home by the scrolling marquee listing the numbers of Negros arriving on incoming ships, and the fluctuating going rates of various skills. The incorporation of video throughout the exhibit, from overhearing the conversation of slaves gathered around a well (in a brilliant interface), to the dialogue between the portraits of ornately framed talking heads, to the interactive choose-your-own-adventure kiosks was incredibly well done, and offered accessibility and deep learning even to the fragmented attentions of the postmodern era. I highly recommend visiting this exhibition, as the web site barely begins to do it justice.

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

Fraternal Nearness

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:19:00 +0000

In his post Social agency and the intersection of communities and networks, Ulises Mejias expounds on the differences between communities and networks, and relates these concepts to the possibility of ontological nearness. The placement of communities within this continuum can be understood more clearly by the immediacy, intensity and intimacy of the interactions. This conceptual apparatus is helpful for me to being to explain a phenomena that I have been thinking about for a while now. Part of the question can be though about as: What motivates the open source developer? Why would someone who works full time, often writing code professionally, choose to volunteer their nights and weekends to the continued production of more code? I think this question is an important one for the educational community, since if we could identify this source of motivation, we might be able to “bottle it” and recreate it within the classroom. My experiences with the Plone community has given me some insight into this question, and I think that the phenomena of Open Source projects would benefit from an analysis using the ideas proposed in Mejias’ draft. While many people imagine that open source communities are purely virtual (the non-possibility of a virtual community notwithstanding) , it is important to recognize the ways in which these networks of individual developers become communities. Open Source projects typically use a variety of Social Software tools to communicate - email and mailing lists, web sites, forums, discussion boards, blogs, and irc, to name a few. They also often hold face-to-face conferences, and some projects even regularly arrange sprints (also). Anecdotally, I found it fascinating to observe a progression in intimacy, to the point where some people’s day jobs are just what they do between conferences and sprints. It is no secret that sprints and conferences help make these communities function, cementing interactions over mailing lists and irc. But an interesting comparison that I would like to propose, which I think can also be described according to the dimensions proposed by Schutz, is the similarity between an Open Source community and a college Fraternity. [Disclaimer: I was never in a college fraternity, so this analysis is partially speculative] Fraternities (and I suppose professional guilds and/or unions which they might be related to) are an example of an extended network/community which is disappearing from the modern urban reality. Some people find these kinds of connections in religious congregations, but otherwise many of us have lost the extended networks of people we know, but not intimately or closely. Like fraternities, Open Source projects typically have a steep gender imbalance, members often go by aliases or nicknames, develop internal languages, acronyms, and lore. The “project” or “organization” becomes an independent object of importance that members become loyal to, and devote their time and resources to supporting. Eric Raymond has written a bit on the motivations and structure of the hacker community. I have also heard alternate accounts of developer motivation, beyond status and recognition, that have to do with escape from “reality” and immersion in an environment that the developer completely controls. There are many potent sociological, ethnographic, and anthropological research questions that this touches on, many under active research (e.g. Effective work practices for Free and Open Source Software development, or wikipedia’s research pages). In summary, I think that Mejias’ framework is very useful, but would benefit greatly from more examples which exercise the ideas. Perhaps we can work these categories into our ssa wiki.

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:

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.

Is anyone watching grandma?

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 19:43:00 +0000

On Friday I had a chance to meet with a group of Artificial Intelligence researchers at Carnegie-Melon university. They demonstrated a working technology, Informedia, which I would have guessed was at least 3-5 years off. What was most incredible about this demonstration was the vivid observation of the trenches in which the information war is being waged. Like any power, technology can bend towards good or evil, and as this post points out, Social Software can be understood as the purposeful use of technology for the public good. The surveillance possibilities that machine based processing of video and film affords is mind-boggling and horrifying (for more on this angle, see my bioport papers or the Permanent Records presentation). At the same time, the kinds of research, machine based assistance, and even the ways in which this kind of technology would change journalism, could all be harnessed for the public good. Is transparency, openness, and free culture our best bet for steering and harnessing these powers productively?

Adventures in Wien

Thu, 22 Sep 2005 22:03:00 +0000

I apologize for this study blog’s late start - I just returned from the Plone conference in Vienna, and the internet availability was spottier than it should have been. At the conference I presented a talk which relates closely to the topic of this seminar, entitled Platonic Wikis and Subversive Social Interfaces. People seemed very interested in the subject, and a common response was that these ideas were obvious when stated, but people were very happy to hear them concisely articulated and formulated. I will be posting my slides up on the conference site, but in the meantime, here is a working link to them: html ppt Photos and links from the conference should start appearing under plonecon2005 over the next few days. I will be catching up with ss05, blog postings, and sleep this weekend.

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].

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