Thursday July 31st 2008, 4:25 pm
Filed under: ape dynamics
FWIW, these comments from Dan Gillmor are triggering a fairly seismic shift in my relationship to Web 2.0 services and the ubiquitous advert monetization model of the digital economy. From Center for Citizen Media:
“Newspapers have at least two more huge opportunities.
“First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities’ histories than all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from using it — as they would all the time — as part of their current lives. The revenues would go up with targeted search and keyword-specific ads on those pages, I’m absolutely convinced. But an equally important result would be to strengthen local ties.
“Second, expand the conversation with the community in the one place where it’s already taking place: the editorial pages. Invert them. Make the printed pages the best-of and guide to a conversation the community can and should be having with itself. The paper can’t set the agenda, at least not by itself (nor should it), but it can highlight what people care about and help the community have a conversation that is civil and useful.”
The “internet operating system” that I’m hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn’t social networking be a system service?
This isn’t just a “moral” appeal, but strategic advice. The first provider to build a reasonably open, re-usable system service in any particular area is going to get the biggest uptake. Right now, there’s a lot of focus on low level platform subsystems like storage and computation, but I continue to believe that many of the key subsystems in this evolving OS will be data subsystems, like identity, location, payment, product catalogs, music, etc. And eventually, these subsystems will need to be reasonably open and interoperable, so that a developer can build a data-intensive application without having to own all the data his application requires. This is what John Musser calls the programmable web.
Wednesday July 30th 2008, 4:02 pm
Filed under: ape dynamics, slag
Though I expect the Mil-Biz complex will stick to their guns and continue to seek profit in their outmoded antipattern. Really, all sorts of convenient short-term economic and social engineering results are gained by popularizing a global spectre to relentlessly pursue but never quite catch. So much of global industry is far more invested in ongoing treatment of symptoms rather than finding cures and wiping out their business models. Nevertheless, it’s a positive sign when our most trusted defense analysts are standing up against such opportunistic and maladaptive.
From the RAND Report:
Abstract
How do terrorist groups end? The evidence since 1968 indicates that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a military campaign. Rather, most groups end because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they join the political process. This suggests that the United States should pursue a counterterrorism strategy against al Qa’ida that emphasizes policing and intelligence gathering rather than a “war on terrorism” approach that relies heavily on military force.
As with much of the digital world, corporate transparency is greater now than it ever has been. Witness yesterday’s Adobe Analyst Meeting - a closed door, invite-only industry event at which analysts of all stripes were treated to Adobe’s financial strategy for the year to come. Within those exclusive walls, many industry agents were typing away on laptops and mobiles but they weren’t just live-blogging or recording notes for a report or article to be edited by their gatekeepers and published later. They were also broadcasting SMS messages to the masses in real-time through Twitter, micro-blogging their instantaneous thoughts, reactions, and sub-channel conversations to thousands of vicarious third-parties.
These raw feeds are perhaps a much more accurate representation of such events - or at least constitute a valuable nuance to the conversation - but their true merit is in their subversive tunneling to freedom through the garden walls, broadcast to the masses. I was annoyed that I couldn’t attend my own company’s briefing but then I got a lot of the meat from trolling the analyst tweets. This raises numerous issues. Should the company defend the tower and let me get the info second-hand through the emotional filters and bullshit detectors of the invitees? Or is it in their interest to include me and the rest of the public so they can at least have a better bet at controlling the message? Is there value in creating such walled gardens in the first place if anyone can breech your security with a simple 140 character message? Is it cost-effective? Do companies impose checkpoints to remove potentially threatening mobile devices? Can you trust people to stick to the talking points or do you allow that the genie is out of the bottle and the natural process of selection will actually help your company do a better job? Transparency and democratized digital broadcast is crowdsourced quality control. It’s a natural feedback mechanism for regulating the evolution of ideas.
These days, if an exclusionary body refuses to share beyond the in-crowd, at least one of those insiders will probably share it with the world. Information is free and the closed companies see their brand suffer as they try in vain to crush the dissenters on a global and very public stage. Their insular reporting hierarchies inevitably ensure that the same ideas and strategies eventually become recycled again and again, and that the truth is filtered through the instinct of self-preservation. Secrecy is like evolution in a vacuum or asexual reproduction. There is little pressure for real change beyond the cold, hard truth of the quarterly earnings report.
Is it even possible to keep secrets anymore? Do you remember all the conspiracy theories you read about in college? Have you noticed that most of them have now been recorded as historical fact? Have you considered that within 10 years the majority of elected officials will have public digital paper trails stretching across the fabled Information Superhighway? And there will be bands of saavy developers eager to crunch the data from those paper trails and render them in pretty visualizations that really show just exactly how honorable/charitable/pious/two-faced/depraved your future senator really is.
Even the analysts are known, willingly opting in to the public timeline of Twitter. All of their names are published at Sage Circle for anyone to see and follow. In fact, in order to really productively use many of the new open social tools & services, the user is highly incentivised to opt-in to their own public transparency. Everyone who wants to speak with power enough to reach the masses (or at least a few handfuls of them) must embrace the open platform. And if you’re professional, you need to use your real name. Therein lies the rub: to be competitive businesses need to have their product managers, their evangelists, their analysts, idea makers and trend-setters all dialed in to the social web. Communication and sharing and an openness to take feedback from your users is becoming crucial for the corporate body to humanize and interact with the eyes of the world. Effective product development must include the people buying your product, otherwise you end up designing for imagined ghosts. Hence, the increasing migration of analysts and audiences to Twitter. Then as a company you end up with your intelligence agents working for you but writing to their audience. And you have an empowered audience that’s publicly-yet-privately back-channeling their loathing of your corporate shill right in front of them, like the now legendary and immediately ground-breaking SXSW smackdown of Tara Hunt.
Like journalists, analysts are no longer totally bound by an allegiance to their lords nor to the companies they scrutinize. They become like moonlighting Ronin. They broadcast to the world from a niche stardom and semi-famous personhood that carefully (or not-so-carefully) balances the party line and the ratings of the viewers. In the face of even limited fame and empowerment, how does company loyalty measure up to increased outsourcing and diminishing employee perks? All life, it seems, will bend towards the viewership, simultaneously revealed and true, yet inevitably influenced and state-shifted by 5 or 6 billion eyes and the inescapable quantal fact of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty. In a totally measured and watched world, is Truth just a state of observation, a sufficiently-probable collapsing of the waveform undergoing the formality of actually occuring, to paraphrase McKenna quoting Whitehead. The soul becomes visible as the mind manifests to all eyes.
Information - Truth, whether it exists fundamentally or is just a state of mind - indeed wants to be free and this fundamental law works through the human species and the technologies we extrude. We are still animals and our tools must help us adapt and thrive. This is more clear now than ever as our actions leave deeper and deeper footprints across the digital terrain we walk. We are being recorded and we are recording, capturing more and more facets of our human experiment written onto spinning platters like prayer wheels in the virtual breeze. The New Journalism will find even the most exclusive events, the narrowest niches, the darkest secrets and the most banal subcultures and capture them, radiating out to the digital world into the very Akashic Record of Our Times. Life is the new media, rich in all it’s texture, drama, subterfuge, and transcendence. As the military struggles with soldier bloggers, embedded third-party reporters, wired insurgencies, and the ever-present satt feeds waving down from far up above with just a passing glint of sunlight, the injustices and atrocities wrought by man & machine are cataloged equally alongside silly cat pictures, personal bios, frat videos, copyright violations, knowledge wiki’s, satellite imagery, and reams & reams of pornography. All acts are caught and surveyed by the one unblinking eye, like Sauron or the Illuminati or the gaze of God.
The world is getting much smaller and simultaneously incredibly huge and diverse. Global instability will be balanced by local resilience, and hierarchical corruption will struggle against networked transparency. CCTV’s will merge with YouTube & reality TV and life will reveal itself on a scale never before known. The cloud is breaking out of the browser and out of our servers spreading to mobile devices and HUD overlays, objects & artifacts. Reality will be radically augmented, participatory, and unbounded. We will fragment and unite, solve et coagula. And tweeting as we go, televising & recording the revolution for all to witness.
I haven’t been posting much lately while I’m otherwise focused on shifting my career out of quality engineering management. My head has been mostly consumed with trend analysis and research that’s appropriate to my current employer, Adobe Systems, as well as to the broader technology commons. Or perhaps more accurately, I’m trying to find a path within Adobe that resonates with my own deep interest in the prevailing and emergent technologies that are quickly wiring us all together. Or I may have to find that path elsewhere.
There’s so much incredible innovation and change happening at the dawn of the new Digital Age. I’m already surfing it constantly, finding the eddies and feeling out the edges.
Unfortunately, my current job doesn’t really care about any of this and is essentially a glorified maintenance role.
Jamai Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging.com, has a great overview of the next 30+ years and the realities of our onrushing energy collapse. A lot of what he says resonates with my own sense of things. Much of my thought lately has been towards the deployment of local stabilizing systems and the the counter-imperative to our headless globalization. Really, we as a species are at a very sobering point in our history when all of the great modern systems we’ve taken for granted are being called into question. Is our world sustainable? Will innovation and collaboration win of ideaology and greed?
Over the next forty years, we’ll see a small but measurable dieback of human population, due to starvation, disease, and war (one local nuclear war in South Asia or Middle East, scaring the hell out of everyone about nukes for another couple of generations). Much of the death will be in the advanced developing nations, such as China and India. There will be pretty significant economic slowdowns globally, and US/EU/Japan will see significant unrest. Border closings between the developed and the developing nations will likely spike, probably along with brushfire skirmishes.
The post-industrial world will see a burst of localization and “made by hand” production, but even at its worst it is more reminiscent of World War II-era restrictions than of a Mad Max-style apocalypse. In much of the developed world, limitations serve as a driver for innovation, both social and technological. It’s not a comfortable period, by any means, but the Chinese experience and the aftermath of the Middle East/South Asian nuclear exchange sobers everybody up.
Imperial overreach, economic crises, and the various global environmental and resource threats put an end to American dominance, but nobody else can step up as global hegemon. Europe is trying to deal with its own social and environmental problems, while China is struggling to avoid full-on collapse. The result isn’t so much isolationism as distractionism — the potential global players are all far too distracted by their own problems to do much overseas.
[See also this post about resilient communities by Alex Steffen for a good link roundup (I’m not really in line with his notion that localism is not enough… i think it’s the best place to start).]
If we’re heading towards a time when the average person is looking at the world through augmented reality overlays - mobile camera readers, HUD glasses, implants superimposing datas on the “real world” - how much of reality will still be shared? Will the building I see be the same as those around me? Will reality itself begin to fragment into inumerable niche channels? Is it already? What will this do to our sense of self & space? Is this any different than the existing degree of sub-genre-fication that divides our cultures through class & affiliation? How do local communities find strength amidst a rising tide of non-local belonging?
Sunday July 06th 2008, 2:07 pm
Filed under: virtual life
Here’s a relatively concise list of elements I feel are required for a truly modern immersive world experience. This list includes some basic requirements as well as those forward-looking and convergent technologies defining the new digital world. Roughly in order of importance:
Life - agents, animals, vegetation, vehicles, flocking, emergent interactions Particles - trash debris, dust, fluids, bugs & birds, all dynamic Lighting - variant & dynamic, color shifts, shading, sun/moon tracking Physics - collision, substance, weight, gravity, limits, damage Audio - locational sounds, ambiance, music, machines, voices, life
ﾠ Time - periodic day & night, false(game) time vs. real-time, sun & moon(s) Weather - wet, dry, clouds, fog, sunsets, wind, tides, waves, storms Seasons & Schedules - weather, light, plant growth/senescence, trains/buses, clothing, habits, migrations
ﾠ Affordances - findability in & across worlds/nets, location, mapping, geocaching Communication - in-world, out-world, across social nets, mobiles Identity - user metadata, visible profiles, affiliations, interests, skills, media, world stats
ﾠ Interaction - with users, agents, objects, machines, architecture, landscape Narrative - goals, needs, desires, food/money/health/tools/tech/toys Authoring - persistent in-world modding, grafitti, tagging, comments, construction, destruction
ﾠ Media - in-world & out-world news, rss/video/SMS/Twitter/datafeeds, radio/mobile/tv/web Record & Broadcast - user & world cameras, vids pushed to net broadcast, user record/publish, broadcast to in-world channels/spaces
I’m heartened to find the Metaverse Roadmap, sponsored by the Accelerating Studies Foundation. While I’ve been moaning about the shortcomings of immersive 3D technologies, they’ve been defining the template for progress. Much of their thoughts align with my own, painting an exciting future of convergence across modalities, devices, and workflows.
The emergence of a robust Metaverse will shape the development of many technological realms that presently appear non-Internet-related. In manufacturing, 3D environments offer ideal design spaces for rapid-prototyping and customized and decentralized production. In logistics and transportation, spatially-aware tags and real-time world modeling will bring new efficiencies, insights, and markets. In artificial intelligence, virtual worlds offer low-risk, transparent platforms for the development and testing of autonomous machine behaviors, many of which may be also used in the physical world. These are just a sampling of coming developments based on early stage Metaverse technologies.
In sum, for the best view of the changes ahead, we suggest thinking of the Metaverse not as virtual space but as the junction or nexus of our physical and virtual worlds.
