echovar

The Internet is, after all, an Outernet. The “Inter” refers to the interconnection of external networks by way of a common protocol. But there’s also a sense in which we imagine it as an external expression of our vast interior mental space. Sometimes this is called cyberspace, and it used to be described as the mental space we enter when talking on the telephone. Like our internal space, the Internet is mostly invisible to us, waiting to be uncovered through the focus of our attention. We commonly make sense of the Internet as an internal, private place. It’s a social space we project our thoughts into while in total isolation. The external digital artifacts that we produce in the course of our online activity have begun to function as an emulation of our internal space.

Recently emulation has gone meta. Starting long ago with the steam engine and continuing with the computer we have a set of tools capable of emulating the functionality of a whole range of other tools. The meta-level of emulation is emulating an operating system within a different operating system—emulating a platform in which emulated tools run. Internally we also emulate when we have an ambition to equal or surpass another and attempt to do so through a form of imitation. We internalize a platform on which to run the programs we admire.

There are two figures recently in the news who are engaged in forms of emulation. Just two guys you might see on public transit on the way to work.

The first is Sergey Brin. With his Google Glass project he begins to emulate Robert Downey Jr. In the film Iron Man.

The second is Jorge Mario Bergoglio. By taking the name Francis, as Pope he begins to emulate Saint Francis.

Each man is attempting to change the world. Brin with a wearable network computing device to augment human capability. Pope Francis by creating a poor church that is for the poor. Brin’s activities are well known, if not very well understood. Pope Francis’s project is perhaps more obscure—but it is also a technical response to the state of the world. It’s a strategy that could be viewed as the opposite of augmentation.

One way into understanding this idea of a “poor church for the poor” is to take a trip back to the 1960s and the poor theater of Jerzy Grotowski. Faced with the competition of television, the movies and broadway shows of increasing levels of technical sophistication, Grotowski attempted to isolate what was uniquely powerful in the theater. By stripping away everything, he arrived at a Poor Theater that focused on the actor-spectator relationship. He was a Saint Francis of the avant-garde theater.

From Jerzy Grotowski’s “Toward a Poor Theater“

What is theater? What is unique about it? What can it do that film and television cannot? Two concrete conceptualization crystallized: the poor theater, and performance as an act of transgression.

By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theater can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, “live” communion. This is an ancient theoretical truth, of course, but when rigorously tested in practice it undermines most of our usual ideas about theatre. It challenges the notion of theatre as a synthesis of disparate creative disciplines — literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, lighting, acting (under the direction of a metteur-en-scene). This “synthetic theatre” is a contemporary theatre, which we readily call the “Rich Theater” — rich in flaws.

The Rich Theatre depends on artistic kleptomania, drawing from other disciplines, constructing hybrid-spectacles, conglomerates without backbone or integrity, yet presented as an organic artwork. By multiplying assimilated elements, the Rich Theatre tries to escape the impasse presented by movies and television. Since film and TV excel in the area of mechanical functions (montage, instantaneous change of place, etc.), the Rich Theatre countered with a blatantly compensatory call of “total theatre.” The integration of borrowed mechanism (movie screens onstage, for example) means a sophisticated technical plant, permitting great mobility and dynamism. And if the stage and/or auditorium were mobile, constantly changing perspective would be possible. This is all nonsense.

No matter how much theatre expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television. Consequently, I propose poverty in theatre.

Pope Francis employs a similar strategy when he envisions a poor church that is for the poor. Ever escalating levels of finery, technology, capital and broadcast platforms don’t get him closer to his goal. It’s only through emulating the poverty of Saint Francis that he can reach the connection he’s after. Even in an era of streaming high-definition 3D video with 5.1 six channel surround sound to any screen anywhere, for the message he’s sending, the signal is stronger from a poor church.

For Brin, the Google Glasses he wears wirelessly connect to a network of industrial cloud computing installations around the world. These external data sources are able to feed information as multiple media types into the local context to provide a highest level of personal augmentation. For the moment, Brin is one of the few who can take advantage of this new technology. The connection he’s after requires strong wireless broadband coverage and connection to a series of algorithms that send him information based on his particular personal, social and location data.

If we assume that every moment of life can be optimized when we are fed the appropriate sets of contextual information on which to base our moment-to-moment decisions, then the Google Glass will deliver us to a life lead to its fullest. Confronted with a shelf in a supermarket aisle filled with hundreds of brands and formulations of shampoo, we will finally be able to select just the right brand given our hair type. At last we will be able to make the right decision when choosing between Coke, Pepsi and some fancy new gourmet cola-flavored soda. The fit between Sergey’s consumption of the world and what is available to be consumed will be perfectly optimized given the existing data set. In fact, were it to reach perfection, his participation would hardly be required at all–achieving frictionless consumption.

Both Sergey and Francis have taken steps to become jacked in to the present moment. Each set of steps has an ethical underpinning—much in the way Schumacher discusses the operation of “value” in his essay on Buddhist Economics. What we accept as valuable sets the terms of the economy we live within. The same thing is true of a path to the now.

The digital, they say, has a cost that approaches zero. Once the digital copying mechanism becomes a sunk cost, the cost per copy asymptotically swoops toward zero. This does a strange thing to value and price. The ink-on-paper media has had to come to terms with the fact that the Network is a vastly less expensive surface on which to inscribe their messages. The digital, in its short history, has yet to find its own level. It’s largely been priced as a discount to its analog counterpart. The news media is starting to understand that its identity lies in the ink rather than the paper.

The digital media can only feed on the corpse of the analog media for so long. We seem to have finally arrived at the point where digital media is beginning to establish its value, and therefore its price. Paywalls are starting to work, some digital editions are starting generate significant advertising revenue, and independent blogs are able to survive by subscription. We pay, not for more, but for less. Fewer things, better quality.

The banks of the river of news have overflowed, the medium has overheated and begun a McLuhanesque reversal. No one wants ‘all the news’. At a certain level of quantity the news can no longer be consumed and processed, it just flows through at the level of headlines. Marshal McLuhan noticed that information overload forces the information consumer into mode of pattern recognition. We now try to employ machines to process the torrent and pick out the patterns for us. But now even this pattern recognition mode has overheated. This happens the moment we aren’t satisfied by knowing something ‘like’ the news, but have no familiarity with the actual news itself. We’ve arrived at the uncanny valley of news.

In the era of so-called ‘Big Data’ even your Network identity is a pattern. You aren’t you, you’re someone ‘like’ you. The formula breaks when the pattern no longer predicts the future. The non-conformist breaks into the conversation and says just doing what the pattern predicts is behaving like a machine—and that’s boring. Take a look at this instead…

At first it just seemed to be missing. Missing in the way that you’d say a person or a thing isn’t really gone, but just misplaced for the moment. But I’m finally convinced it’s not coming back. The systems that furnish and replenish my local environment with objects have written this product out of the distribution algorithms.

When I first started shaving my face as a young man, I decided to use a shaving brush and a cake of shaving soap. I’m a fan of simple solutions. Shaving soap seemed to solve the problem of shaving lather. The product innovations in this area haven’t seemed much like real improvements. The exotic flavors, textures and delivery methods of lather and foam seem more like narratives of advertising than a solution to the problem of shaving one’s face.

Fancy shaving soaps are available in all the places you’d expect. But the one that’s gone missing is called “Williams Shaving Soap.” It’s a serviceable shave soap, you might even call it ordinary. But “Williams” was available everywhere, at all the local grocery and drug stores. It was the remaining shaving soap, it held down a humble spot on the store shelves. Its disappearance from the local stores marks a significant event in the arc of this product’s existence. The soap was created in 1840 by James B. Williams. It was the first shaving soap created for use in mugs.

It’s clearly the case that “Williams” is available for order on the Network, and it may still be available on store shelves in other parts of the country. But in San Francisco, it’s vanished. A young man today, about to make some decisions about how he might want to go about shaving his face, peering at the shelves of the supermarket, won’t notice what’s missing. If that young man were to come across a cake of “Williams”, it would be in the context of a nostalgic experience. Its circulation would have no currency, it would float on the alternate currents of wet shaving “traditionalism.” We tend to think that physical presence has become less important in the era of the Network, but if you’ve never seen something, how will you know to submit a query to look for it?

Once another generation passes and this object shifts just over the horizon, it’s only a brief distance to becoming time out of mind. Even now I only experience it as an absence on a store shelf. Wet shaving and getting up a lather has its adherents, but in the era of the shave gel and the five-blade razor, will we ever recognize how the shaving technology industry is over-serving our whiskers?

икони цени

I’ve always thought the phrase ‘full-throated endorsement’ a bit odd. It pulls human physicality into the conversation as a kind of speaking done with the whole body. The ‘throat’ is called out, but as a metonym for the speaking body situated in a political-historical-ecological space. The speaker throws herself into the words, come what may.

The phrase also has a resonance with ‘singing in full voice.’ In rehearsal, opera singers will often sing in ‘half voice’ to spare themselves for the performance. When the curtain goes up, the singer must throw himself into the music, come what may. It’s in this sense that opera is a full-throated art form, the opera itself must also sing in full voice. It must match and fill the grand space of the opera house. As new operas are produced, they give voice to the deep currents flowing through our culture. And to make their mark, they mustn’t sing in half voice.

Mounting a production of a new opera is no small task, they are literally years in the making. Here’s San Francisco Opera’s General Director David Gockley on creating “Heart of a Soldier”:

But popular subjects and heroic characters alone do not make good operas. In the end, is the music any good in its own right? In opera, music tells the story. The text provides the skeleton, music the flesh and blood. Twenty-five years after Adams’s ‘Nixon in China’ told the ‘back story’ of the Nixon/Kissinger visit to China in 1972, the opera has legs because of the composer’s brilliant score. Will ‘Heart of a Soldier’ be this successful? Who knows. The important thing is to get these pieces launched with fanfare and good attendance, and then they are on their own! For better or worse, my career as an opera producer has been punctuated with many of these launches. My work will be judged by the quality of the pieces I have midwifed, and in most cases I will be long gone before the jury renders its verdict

Reading Gockley’s note in the ‘Heart of a Soldier’ program earlier this year brought to mind Shelley’s ‘Defense of Poetry.’ Gockley clearly has the sense that these operas he midwifes are objects situated perennially in the future. We must create operas in the here-and-now, but with their initial performance we only see the tip of the shadow cast from their location in the future. Each time an opera is performed, we open that door to the future and attempt to apprehend the broadcast of new signals as they occupy and resonate with the present moment.

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the book on the temporal state of the work of art. Here’s the conclusion of his ‘Defense of Poetry”:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.

At a recent performance of Philip Glass’s opera ‘Satyagraha’ at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a door was opened and the music filled the opera house and then overflowed into the plaza outside of the building. There it received another performance through the full-throated chorus of the human microphone. The composer, Philip Glass, lead the chorus in the closing lines of the opera which come from the ‘Bhagavad Gita’:

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.”

For the longest time, the tone of our public voice has been tinged with irony. But there seems to be a change in the weather. As Tim Morton is fond of to saying, ‘the Sincerity Fish ate the Irony Fish on the bumper sticker on the back of my car.’ Somehow the full-throated voice is more in tune with sincerity. But the reason irony came to rule the day is that there’s a real danger in sincerity. As Jean Giraudoux once said:

The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

How do we tune ourselves to listen to full-throated sincerity? Heidegger addresses the issue in his translation of the poet Holderlin’s ‘Patmos’, saying:

But where danger is, grows the saving power also.

In the new operas we have given to the future, we allow both the danger and the saving power to cast their shadows. A door opens…

We have the capacity to imagine infinity. Or at least, we think we do. One way we do this is to create an imaginary machine, a kind of software that we run in our minds. The program is designed to add one to the current count. We set our imaginary machine in motion and say, “it continues to work like this, adding one, and so on.” The machine creates an infinity. At whatever point we look in on it, it’s in the process of adding one to the set of numbers. The trick of infinity isn’t in making something that’s immeasurably large, but rather it’s in creating an algorithm that doesn’t have a defined stopping point. This process defines our idea of a certain kind of growth.

Geoffrey B. West on Why Cities Keep Growing,
Corporation Always Die, and Life Gets Faster
Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporation Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

Geoffrey B. West, of the Santa Fe Institute, gave a presentation at the Long Now Foundation entitled: “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster.” The talk is filled with lots of interesting facts about statistically common features of cities and corporations. But it was the preliminary foundation of the argument that I found most interesting–in particular, the idea of sigmoidal growth patterns. This is the idea that animals begin at their smallest viable size and quickly grow to their optimal size and then stop. Living in an age with an excess of infinities, it’s a startling fact to contemplate. Most things in the universe grow to a certain size and then stop.

Here’s Stewart Brand’s summary of West’s discussion of scale and energy use:

Working with macroecologist James Brown and others, West explored the fact that living systems such as individual organisms show a shocking consistency of scalability. (The theory they elucidated has long been known in biology as Kleiber’s Law.) Animals, for example, range in size over ten orders of magnitude from a shrew to a blue whale. If you plot their metabolic rate against their mass on a log-log graph, you get an absolutely straight line. From mouse to human to elephant, each increase in size requires a proportional increase in energy to maintain it.

But the proportion is not linear. Quadrupling in size does not require a quadrupling in energy use. Only a tripling in energy use is needed. It’s sublinear; the ratio is 3/4 instead of 4/4. Humans enjoy an economy of scale over mice, as elephants do over us.

With each increase in animal size there is a slowing of the pace of life. A shrew’s heart beats 1,000 times a minute, a human’s 70 times, and an elephant heart beats only 28 times a minute. The lifespans are proportional; shrew life is intense but brief, elephant life long and contemplative. Each animal, independent of size, gets about a billion heartbeats per life.

We like to talk about exponential growth, especially when thinking about the Network. It’s as though abstract-thought machines had manifested in a mesh of connected computers growing without limit. Exponential growth is infinite, it doesn’t have an end point. While we like to use biological metaphors when discussing the Network, we seem to ignore the growth pattern of most biology. While it’s highly likely that the growth of the Network is sigmoidal in shape, we love the slightly naughty thought that it will expand geometrically ad infinitum. What we seem to be thinking of is the possibility of ungoverned growth patterns in bacteria and viruses.

“The mathematics of uncontrolled growth are frightening. A single cell of the bacterium E. coli would, under ideal circumstances, divide every twenty minutes. That is not particularly disturbing until you think about it, but the fact is that bacteria multiply geometrically: one becomes two, two become four, four become eight, and so on. In this way it can be shown that in a single day, one cell of E. coli could produce a super-colony equal in size and weight to the entire planet Earth.”

Michael Crichton
The Andromeda Strain

To the best of my knowledge, this hasn’t happened recently. According to Lynn Margulis, the last time was probably around 2.5 Billion years ago, when the earth’s atmosphere lacked sufficient oxygen to sustain humans.

Perhaps 2.5 billion years ago, a new group of photosynthetic bacteria evolved, the ancestors of today’s cyanobacteria. These advanced photosynthesizers split water to produce the hydrogen ions (H+) needed to build sugar molecules. A byproduct of this water-splitting reaction was oxygen gas. This was a catastrophic event in the history of life. Oxygen is such a reactive element that it easily destroys delicate biological structures. As the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere increased, most species of anaerobic bacteria were driven to extinction, victims of the earth’s first case of air pollution. Some survivors retreated to areas of brackish water or other oxygen-depleted habitats, where their anaerobic descendants still flourish today. A few prokaryotes became aerobic by evolving various mechanisms to detoxify oxygen. The most successful of these processes was respiration, which not only converted toxic oxygen back into harmless water molecules, but also generated large quantities of ATP.

According to the SET, the photosynthetic production of oxygen gas and the subsequent evolution of respiration set the stage for the evolution of all eukaryotic cells. This evolutionary process occurred in several separate symbiotic events. The first eukaryotic organelles to evolve were mitochondria–structures found in almost all eukaryotic cells. In Margulis’s theory, small respiring bacteria parasitized larger, anaerobic prokaryotes. Like some bacteria today (Bdellovibrio), these early parasites burrowed through the cell walls of their prey and invaded their cytoplasm. Either the host or the parasite was often killed in the process, but in a few cases the two cells established an uneasy coexistence. The mutual benefits to the partners are obvious. The respiring parasite, which actually required oxygen, would allow its host to survive in previously uninhabitable, oxygen-rich environments. Perhaps the parasite also shared with its host some of the ATP that it produced using oxygen. In exchange, the host provided sugar or other organic molecules to serve as fuel for aerobic respiration. Eventually, as often occurs with parasites, the protomitochondria lost many metabolic functions provided by the host cell. Similarly, as oxygen in the atmosphere continued to increase, the host became more and more dependent upon its pro-tomitochondria to detoxify the gas. What began as a case of opportunistic parasitism evolved into an obligatory partnership. The small respiratory bacteria eventually evolved into the mitochondria of eukaryotic cells.

The growth pattern from which we spend most of our time attempting to escape is the sinusoidal–the one that looks like a sine wave. We like the sine wave as it travels up, feeling as though it could go on forever. When it reaches its peak, we have a feeling of total mastery. And then suddenly, things begin to decay. We fall to earth as quickly as we ascended. The process begins again, but this time for our descendants. It’s this pattern that is expressed through evolution. Once Darwin’s thoughts had diffused through the atmosphere, we began to rebel. We woke from a long slumber to find we were inside a process of natural selection that would not bend to our will. Here we introduce the concept of “the fittest.” And through a simple slight-of-hand, we confuse ideas of physical fitness with the fact of just happening to fit with a particular state of the environment. It’s with this concept of “the fittest” that we stand on the bridge of evolution with our hands on the tiller. With our newly found powers, we design ecosystems that operate in both a perfect steady state and with unlimited growth. The downward slope of the sine wave is for other entities, not us.

Of course, there are many ways to frame the process of natural selection. I particularly like the phrasing of Richerson and Boyd in their 2005 work, “Not By Genes Alone.”

“…All animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with.”

Their inversion of the idea of “fitness” does a nice job of puncturing our illusion of being able to move the odds to our favor. If we’ve only been allocated roughly a billion heart beats arranged in the shape of one oscillation of a sine wave, it’s a clear blow to our sense of self esteem. The infinity inside of us doesn’t seem to jibe with these finite patterns of growth. Of course, infinities are much easier to imagine standing on the shore and gazing toward the horizon. Once we’ve seen the satellite photo of the earth, we begin to understand that our finitude, while very large, still has edges. The earth grew to its optimal size, and then stopped.

Once the earth was within the surround of the satellite, Planet Polluto was in need of the attention of the ecologist…

Marshall McLuhan
On “The Dick Cavett Show”

There’s some slang in the CB radio world, when you want to know if someone is listening, you ask if they have their ears on. As in, “How ’bout ya JB, got ya ears on?” For some reason this is the phrase that popped into my head when thinking about the possibility of an Apple-designed television set. In earlier thoughts about the future of television, my focus settled on HDMI inputs and clumsy switching between these inputs. In essence, the HDMI input becomes the inheritor of the idea of the channel.

When you look at the inputs and outputs of the big screen, the game is to dominate the primary input. Your cable or satellite programming provider doesn’t want you to ever switch to another HDMI input. If you can be that dominant, your external boxes can commandeer the control experience from the television itself. Anyone who’s hooked up a television to a cable systems has had the experience of being presented with two mutually exclusive proprietary control systems. This is the reason you can have 3 or 4 remote controls sitting on your coffee table. Each HDMI input has a separate control system and listens for control events with a separate set of ears.

Customer satisfaction surveys are a great friend to Apple. This is because customer satisfaction is usually just an accommodation to work-arounds. We’ve grown used to the way the television “works.” The work-around is the way it works, and after a while we don’t even notice the strangeness of it. And when we get that call, interrupting our dinner, asking us whether we’re happy with our television set up, we say, “sure, it’s great.” Of course, the reality is it’s a horrible mess we’ve aclimated ourselves to.

So let’s get back to that CB radio reference. Do you have your ears on? The problem with television sets is they don’t have their ears on. Or rather they’ve been trained to only listen to a single voice at a time. As a user of iOS devices, I’d like to be able to send programming to the big screen at any time via AirPlay. As things stand I can only do that when AppleTV2 is the designated input. An Apple-designed television would always be listening for AirPlay events.

As YouTube gets ready to launch a bunch of channels, I can’t help but think that “the channel” has reached the limit of its usefulness. When I ask Siri whether it’s going to snow today, I don’t need to switch the input to the Weather Channel to get an answer. When I ask my iTV whether there’s a Val Lewton movie on, I don’t want to have to know what channel it’s on. I want Siri to take care of searching my subscriptions and report back on what my options are. The effect of this would be to return control of the television to the television itself.

As things stand, Siri would have a limited domain of television programming services to search through. Although this isn’t too different from the current situation with the iPhone 4s. Eventually all television services will migrate toward television over IP. It’s happened in all other mass media, television will be no different. Even your DVR will just save pointers to stream locations in the cloud.

In an interview, Steve Jobs once said that these waves of technological innovation are slow and unfold over many years. The trick is to pick the right wave and position yourself to benefit from the natural current. We can easily say that today, Siri isn’t good enough (in the sense of an innovator’s dilemma). But it’s perfectly positioned to grow and benefit from a huge wave of cloud-based data/identity services. It’ll work the same way with iTV.

In taking note of a shift in tone, we must immediately acknowledge that it will not be the new, new thing. It’s not the hint, the vague scent, that turns out to be the key to the next Network-scale technological advance. It’s not the thing everybody must have; it’s not the ticket that wins the lottery for its owner. Nor is it the hit song that will be playing in the background of everyone’s thoughts as the Summer ends and Autumn opens before us.

The pattern is larger than this, but there were two moments that signaled a change. One of these moments was Catarina Fake’s blog post “Make Things.” In this post she describes a more humble approach to making tools for people. Her thoughts are set in the background of an overheated venture capital environment where liquidity events are plotted prior to thinking about useful products. Deployment of, and return on, capital seems to have superseded the passion to build, explore and make things. Companies become just another fungible asset class, a tool for capital’s replication and growth. Fake asks the potential entrepreneur to take a step back and ask whether capital is subordinate to, and serving a passion (as a means) or whether the passion to make things has been securitized and sold to the highest bidder (as an end).

For Fake, capital isn’t the wellspring of inspiration, instead it’s the creativity of people making things:

…I have been inspired in my work by stuff that people make. I fell in love with zines and independent radio when I was an isolated teenager living in the suburbs. Then BBSs, people’s personal web sites, Usenet, Entropy8, online zines (holy crap, the old Bitch magazine site is now a porn portal! And Maxi is squatted!), blogs, Excel, online communities, Amazon, Salon, eBay, O’Reilly books, Google, Friendster, Alamut, NQPAOFU, Metafilter, board games, Blogger, paper games, 1000 blank cards, The Mirror Project, 1000 journals, Moveable Type, 20 things, Google Maps, Flickr, Gmail, last.fm, iPhone, NaNoWriMo, McSweeney’s, Kingdom of Loathing, muxtape, vimeo, Etsy, iPad, Kickstarter …the people who make these things are my leaders.

Putting ‘cool’ before ‘capital’ is certainly a commendable reordering of priorities, but somehow it doesn’t go far enough. On one end of the spectrum, passion must fend off the temptations of subordinating itself to capital; on the other end, it faces a kind of commoditization that has forced pricing expectations toward zero.

This leads us to the second moment in this shift in tone. Jaron Lanier recently published an interview and essay called, “The Local-Global Flip.” In it he examines the Network as a local and global economic platform. When we think about making tools for people, just what kind of tools are we thinking of?

Everyone’s into Internet things, and yet we have this huge global economic trouble. If you had talked to anyone involved in it twenty years ago, everyone would have said that the ability for people to inexpensively have access to a tremendous global computation and networking facility ought to create wealth. This ought to create well being; this ought to create this incredible expansion in just people living decently, and in personal liberty. And indeed, some of that’s happened. Yet if you look at the big picture, it obviously isn’t happening enough, if it’s happening at all.

Dominance at Network scale allows the major players to generate mountains of cash by charging a small vig on every transaction and transfer of data. Not just the long tail, it’s the whole hog. It’s a big data model that requires volume and an unlimited scaling infrastructure. The promise of cloud computing is that if you actually won the lottery, your infrastructure could scale up to handle it. The reality is there’s not much room at the total-Network-dominance table. The corporations flirting with the cloud have a lot in common with McSweeny’s writer, Pat Stansik’s friend who just upgraded to a Vimeo Plus account.

Hey, I know we haven’t talked in a while but I just wanted to let you know that I upgraded to a Vimeo Plus account. It costs $59.95 a year, which might sound expensive, but after doing some research I decided that it’s a good investment. You’re probably wondering why I would spend money on something I can already do for free but trust me; this is going to be a big step in my filmmaking career.

Economist, Tyler Cowen, in his book “The Great Stagnation” notes that these Network-scale technology businesses don’t actually employ many people. Their success is picking low-hanging fruit and doesn’t translate into success for our society or our country. And Lanier observes that while the Network promises efficiency, freedom and empowerment, if you look closely you see that it isn’t actually designed to deliver on that promise.

…I’ll often get a lot of pushback and they’ll say, “No, no, no. There are all these people who are being empowered by all this stuff on the Internet that’s free”, and I’ll say, “Well, show me. Where’s all the wealth? Where’s the new middle class of people who are doing this?” They don’t exist. They just aren’t there. We’re losing the middle class, and we should be saving it. We should be strengthening it.

If we used to be a bell curve society, we’re ending up as a U-shaped society, turning into what Brazil used to be, or something like that, that’s where America is going. You can see the Apple model, and it’s not just Apple, but this notion of the elite-controlled thing serving the upper horn of the U, and you can see the Google model, which is like the seedy pawn shop and cash store kind of approach to the Internet where, “Oh, we’ll give you coupons, and we’ll sell advertising to you, and it’s free, free, free, free, free.” That attaches itself to the lower horn of the U.

The Network has the potential to make the local into the global, and it’s in this possibility that Lanier puts his finger on one of the key issues of our time. When the local player becomes global, but still plays by the rules of locality, an unsustainable economy is created.

The network effects can be so powerful that you cease being a local player. An example of this is Wal-Mart removing so many jobs from their own customers that they start to lose profitability, and suddenly upscale players, like Target, are doing better. Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet. The finance industry kept on thinking they could eject waste out into the general system, but they became the system. You become global instead of local so that the system breaks. Insurance companies in America, by trying to only insure people who didn’t need insurance, ejected risk into the general system away from themselves, but they became so big that they were no longer local players, and there wasn’t some giant vastness to absorb this risk that they’d ejected, and so therefore the system breaks. You see this again and again and again. It’s not sustainable.

And so we spin back around to Catarina Fake’s post about a humble approach to building tools for people. Are the tools we’re adding to the Network ones that allow adults to make a living, or do they just promise more non-negotiable social reputation points. The economics of these tools need to work for more than the rich or teenagers living under their parent’s roofs. Again, here’s Lanier:

There is this huge increase in efficiency, but the interesting thing is that increasing efficiency by itself doesn’t employ people. There is a difference between saving and making money when you’re unemployed. Once you’re already rich, saving money and making money is the same thing, but for people who are on the bottom or even in the middle classes, saving money doesn’t help you if you don’t have the money to save in the first place.

The choice isn’t necessarily a simple one between capital and passion, it may be necessary to put our concept of economics on completely different footing. E.F. Schumacher’s Buddhist Economics provides a framework for rethinking and de-centering our preconceptions about economics. What if we were to “make things,” create useful tools that were meaningful in the framework of Buddhist economics? How would those tools look different from the ones we make today? Here’s Schumacher:

Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from “metaphysics” or “values” as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.

It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.

Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production—and, labour, and capital—as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. We need not be surprised, therefore, that the pressure and strain of living is very much less in say, Burma, than it is in the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount of labour-saving machinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction of the amount used in the latter.

It’s a shift in the tone of the normal flow of the conversation. Things that solidly had one well-known meaning suddenly have an unsettling ambiguity. Now we ask not what we can do for the Network, but rather what the Network can do for us. For a brief moment, a slight crack is visible in the veneer of Network of bread and circuses. And no, it’s not the new new thing. It’s something else entirely. It starts by asking about who the economics of “free” really benefits.

ikoni

If you strip away all of the surface distractions and zoom in on the computing environment using your microscopic vision, you see bits moving back and forth across a wire. If you zoom back out to the macro level, you can see Hewlett Packard and Google making radical changes in strategy and multi-billion dollar bets on how the preponderance of those bits will travel.

Now step into the time machine and move back a few years. The personal computer has just become the business computer. Most of the bits are written and retrieved from local hard drives in the form of files. Files are moved via sneaker-net. Move forward a few years and files are moved over local networks and individual computers are linked together within a single location. Shared files find their way to file servers and now allow multiple users to access and add work product to these common-use files.

Concurrently, the message finds an electronic home in email. Initially email messages can only be transmitted within specific platforms. You need to be on the same network as the people you want to communicate with. Fast forward a few years and email is sent with a common protocol and the networks become a network of networks. Now you only need to know the name of the endpoint to send a message to anyone.

The growth vector of the file’s environment is the size of the hard disk. Larger hard disks in the computing device and on the local network define capacity. As time passes and more files accumulate, they require even more disk space. As computing power increases, file sizes increase as well. As more and more things are digitized, more kinds of things are stored on hard drives in digital form.

The personal computer connects to a local area network, a wide area network and a global network to create a new entity called the Network. Both message traffic and file creation are initiated through the personal computer and start to be pointed at the Network. As the speed of the Network increases, the length of the wire that file bits can workably traverse becomes global in nature. It’s at this point that the message and the file begin to converge. The functionality of the personal computer as a file processing machine begins to be sucked down the wire and reconstituted into the virtual space of the Network. Both the file and computing processes are remote controlled through a set of messages sent back and forth across the wires.

The technology dynasties that were built up around these different ways of treating bits have large investments in both the technical infrastructure and mental models of either files or messages. The roots of these patterns go deep into the corporate structures of these organizations. With the recent moves by HP and Google, we can see the can see that the message and messaging network infrastructure has finally tipped the balance away from the file. The file has become another kind of message for a signaling device pointed at a cloud messaging network. Google attempts to reach across from the cloud to gain a foothold on the device side. HP recognizes that rather than going from personal computer to signaling device, the move from personal computer to custom central computing platforms is a better fit.

It’s worth noting that the message infrastructure has backed off of its most radical formulation and returned to the competing large network platform environment. In the email messaging environment there was an impetus and energy to connect the disparate systems and endpoints so that any two endpoints could connect. The connections between the new era large messaging platforms are purely one-way, instead of the more common “read-only” capability, this is a “write-only” hook up. One has a sense of retreating from a democratic network back to a feudal system of large kingdoms.

There’s a maxim in investing that you should buy at the moment of maximum pessimism. The file, it seems, is on the ropes. The message, messaging networks and signaling devices seem to be firmly in control of the corporate agenda. That’s why it’s interesting that Apple, with its iCloud initiative, is investing in redefining the user’s relationship with the file. The file becomes non-local, it doesn’t travel across the wire, it’s simply wherever it’s needed. Or, at least, it appears that way. All the mechanics of syncing, versioning, reading and writing have been removed from the workflow. The creation device, the file and the file network may be perfectly ripe for rejuvenation as our obsession with the message reaches its peak.

Картини

Clay Shirky may have done us a disservice when, looking at the torrent of information published to the Network, he turned the problem upside down and said it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure. His comment was a response to the notion that the solution to information overload is to use professional editors to filter out items of inferior quality before they are inscribed into the Network. This approach would be consistent with the historical practices of the publishing industry; and theoretically would result in fewer items tumbling into the bin of our cognitive load. Traditional models of publication are a statement about the quality and value of a work. If everything is always published in real time—every gesture, tick and passing fancy— publication is no longer a measure of quality, but merely a recognition of the act of inscription on the surface of the Network.

The purpose of the filter is to rummage through the “everything” that has been published—and is continuously published in real time—and come up with an appropriately-sized load. That is, something less than an overload, and certainly not an under-load, but rather a load that feels just right. Shirky inaugurated the era of “filter failure” in September of 2008; in the subsequent years the volume of items published to the Network has accelerated exponentially. However, we don’t seem to have made much headway with the “filter” problem.

We have a sense of what a “filter” looks like when it works as a gatekeeper standing between all that is written and what is eventually published. The editor and publisher make judgements based on commercial prospects, artistic merit, a writer’s track record, et cetera; and then select which pieces of writing will pass through the publication process. A “filter failure” in this context is a publication event that doesn’t find an audience willing to support or engage with it.

What does a “filter” look like when everything has already been published? Isn’t the horse already out of the barn? Early in Twitter’s existence, they placed a configurable filter on the publishing nozzle of the service. A user could select a set of keywords, the filter checked through all the tweets in real-time, and then it would spray a filtered set of tweets into the regular set of subscriptions. As the volume, velocity and user-base increased, it was technically unsustainable on a real-time basis. Twitter search now consists of keyword filtering of a smaller set after the fact. A number of services have rented Twitter’s firehose of messages in an effort to affix real-time filters over the publication nozzle. None have emerged with a solution to put an end to the era of “filter failure.”

From the perspective of editorial process, affixing a filter to the real-time publication nozzle is consistent with previous editing processes. The editor/user selects keywords that narrow the field of output prior to the publication of a real-time stream. The filter that Shirky proposed operates after the fact, everything has always already been published and this filter sifts through it all and scoops up only the good stuff. Wheat is separated from chaff. In this case the timing of the filter is less important than the quality and scope of its mesh. The filter should construct a value equivalent to, or greater than, that of a pre-filtered output, by assembling interesting bits and pieces it finds laying around. Because it’s less concerned with the now of real-time, Shirky’s filter can include elements from different periods of time based on their relevance, importance and overall quality.

In some recent attempts to crack the “filter” code, the word ‘curator’ is substituted for ‘editor’ and the blend of the publication is expanded to include both domestic and foreign products. Most traditional publications are reconstituting themselves along these lines. Another approach is to draw a circle around a set of curators and writers to create a tele-publication. To maintain and grow its value, the portfolio must be actively managed, occasionally rebalanced and look for opportunities in the event stream. (Global tactical asset allocation mutual funds are often managed in this fashion.)

A filter could be constructed correctly, be technically sustainable at scale, and still be a failure. If the mesh of the filter is configured incorrectly, its output may be the correct “load” size, but its contents of inferior quality. The mechanics of filtering are only half of the equation. What should the filter filter, and who decides what that is? Some say we don’t want an editor to serve as a gatekeeper, we prefer an emergent (another word for average) publication of crowd-sourced filtering. The odd thing about a spontaneously generated crowd-constructed publication is that it usually feels like you’ve already read it. The thing about what everybody knows is that everybody already knows it.

Assuming we could produce a technically-sound filter, we would need to configure its mesh. It’s possible one could go shopping for a mesh. A filter’s mesh could be an external product selected to produce a particular kind of output. Our choices range from the hand-crafted to the automated mesh. Techmeme is a hybrid of algorithmic and hand-crafted output. Google News has recently added a hand-crafted element to their largely algorithmic output. In a sense, this isn’t very different from the way an ink-on-paper magazine works.

One of the dangers of going shopping for a mesh is that one can easily end up in an echo chamber. By selecting only agreeable elements, one’s own bias seems to be confirmed by external sources. When you mix in hard-core ideology, a strange reversal takes place. As William Burroughs once said, “you don’t sell heroin to people; you sell people to heroin.” What at first appears to be looking in a mirror and becoming more and more beautiful, is really a process of the mirror surrounding and consuming you, until you become a part of its reflection. The external ideology has hollowed you out and takes up residence in the void.

If the era of filter failure were to end, would we have filters that were an uncanny match to our thoughts and desires? Would the filter take into account our conscious and unconscious selves? Would it know what to us is a set of unknown knowns? Would we be embarrassed when the filter mixed in objects of desire of which we dare not speak? Is it merely a matter of getting in tune with our true desires and affinities? Or should the mesh of the filter bring me more than I contain? How far do we need to take this?

After all, how perfect does a filter need to be before we can consider it a success? Perhaps all that has to happen is for the feeling of being overwhelmed to go away. Maybe that just happens with time and exposure. Instead of waiting for a future paradise where filters don’t fail and our minds are constantly blown by how perfectly tuned and relevant every single thing we encounter is; perhaps we should acknowledge that the future will be a lot like the present. Sturgeon’s law will still hold and 90% of everything will still be crap, spammers will still manage to show us advertisements we don’t want to see, and sometimes we’ll still feel overwhelmed by life.

The more we search for a fine-grained solution to filter failure, the stranger the “I” for whom the filter must not fail becomes.

At first the big flood of information seems to be fascinating. It has all the formal qualities of something that should demand our attention. It’s only after we’ve sat patiently and listened to it for a while that we realize how boring it can be. Boredom with the torrent of information may be the first step toward forgiving filters their failures.

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.”

— Emmanuel Levinas (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority)

Last night without any intention on my part, the 1938 Howard Hawks film Bringing Up Baby settled into the television set. It was meant to be a brief stop on the way from this signal to that one, but somehow it stuck. The rapid-fire non-stop dialogue never left a pause, not a single moment, for me to consider moving on. And then there was the song: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby. Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant wandering through the woods singing this song at the top of their voices, looking for a fox terrier, a leopard and a dinosaur bone. When the speed of change hits a certain velocity, nothing makes as much sense as a screwball comedy.

“There’s a pitch in baseball called a screwball, which was perfected by a pitcher named Carl Hubbell back in the 1930s. It’s a pitch with a particular spin that sort of flutters and drops, goes in different directions, and behaves in very unexpected ways… Screwball comedy was unconventional, went in different directions, and behaved in unexpected ways…”

Andrew Bergman
We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films

The song was written in 1927 by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields, and finally broke through in 1928. It’s been an enduring classic of American popular song. Looking back at the list of songs Fields provided lyrics for, you can hardly believe your eyes: The Way You Look Tonight, I’m In The Mood For Love, On The Sunny Side of the Street, A Fine Romance, Big Spender and more.

The stock market crash of 1929 occurred in October of that year, which means that I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby was written in the middle of a market bubble. In the midst of a surging material world, the song stakes a claim for love and romance. Fields tells the story of overhearing the conversation of a poor black couple gazing at the stylish and expensive jewelry on offer in Tiffany’s display window. Apparently the man said “Gee honey, I can’t give you anything but love.” What might have turned into Breakfast at Tiffany’s, instead became a standard in the American songbook. Love seems to need a medium to pass from one person to another. While it might pass through diamond jewelry, wall street millions, real estate or a family crest—McHugh and Fields make the case for the impossible thing that we’ve all got plenty of, baby.

Through the cultural history DVR provided by YouTube, we can get a sense of how this song has resonated with artists and audiences over the years.

I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby
Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields

Verse

Gee, but it’s tough to be broke, kid.
It’s not a joke, kid–it’s a curse.
My luck is changing–it’s gotten
from simply rotten to something worse.
Who knows someday I will win too
I’ll begin to reach my prime.
Now that I see what our end is
All can spend is just my time.

Refrain

I can’t give you anything but love, baby.
That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby.
Dream a while, scheme a while,
You’re sure to find
Happiness and, I guess,
All those things you’ve always pined for.
Gee, it’s great to see you looking swell, baby.
Diamond bracelets Woolworth doesn’t sell, baby.
Till that lucky day you know darn well, baby,
I can’t give you anything but love.