echovar

A couple of early observations about MS Mesh:

Storage space will need to be unlimited and permanent. Imagine a 7 year old starting to use Mesh today. What will their data storage, connection and organization requirements look like in 20 years? Why should anyone need to delete anything ever?

It’s early yet, but it seems like there’s a missed opportunity around changing the desktop and folders metaphor. The single stream tag and search metaphor allows every object to be tagged (or filed) in many categories at once and retrieved along many facets. As the stream of data that is pointed at the Mesh grows, the idea having to drag things to folders stops making sense.

Although not a platform, Evernote does a good job of allowing you to save things to a storage space using multiple devices. They have Web, Phone, PC and Mac clients and you can send items via email. Tagging is already in place, but it doesn’t current support standard feed protocols or SMS. And it doesn’t support both individual and group storage, or have a newslog of system activity.

The physics of personal data storage seems to come down to the atom and the wave. Are things to be stored individual objects or are they streams? The answer is that they exist as both depending on your perspective. Can you mix the metaphor? Can you put a stream in a folder?

While not strictly competing, it will be interesting to compare these two services as they go forward. Complexity and simplicity are large factors in user acceptance. The service that can be most useful to digital natives will eventually go viral. What would a digital native save? And how would they like to access it?

Technology annihilates distance. There are some good things about that and some bad. While it’s at it, I’d also like technology to do something about time. I’m reading Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” and I can’t help but want to thread some conversations together. Unfortunately, time gets in the way. I guess I’m looking for something like what Norman O. Brown created with his book “Closing Time.” Two texts rubbing up against each other, Brown put James Joyce and Giambattista Vico into conversation across time.

I keep imagining a conversation between Gregory Bateson, E.F. Schumacher, Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson. It’s the podcast I’d like to listen to on the BART train tomorrow morning. Time prevents that from happening. When will technology do something about that? Perhaps it doesn’t have to, if I listen closely enough, I can hear hear the texts in conversation.

Last night Friends of the Urban Forest held a fund raiser at Anne Sommerville’s Greens restaurant. It was a gathering of tribes and a connecting point for future action. The treehuggers and the foodies have a common agenda around environment, sustainability and engagement. Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office presented FUF executive director Kelly Quirke with a proclamation, a representative of Nancy Pelosi’s office expressed her support of the urban forestry movement, and Katrina Heron, speaking on behalf of Alice Waters, spread the word about the Slow Food Movement.

Clay Shirky’s comparison of Gin and Television as mechanisms by which pain is soothed, and a cognitive surplus created, connects with a number of things I’ve been thinking of recently. The appropriate response to Shirky’s essay is to create another essay, or perhaps a photograph, that comments and connects to it. We live in a consumer society, and thanks to folks like Ralph Nader, we have some rights as consumers. But we are coming to the end of the era where we define ourselves by what we consume. 

With the vast new set of consumption choices flowing through the network, the issue of gluttony arises. You can’t just eat everything. Human beings don’t scale, and human attention doesn’t obey Moore’s law. What happens when our total number of waking hours, and not just for today, but for the rest of our lives, can be filled with high quality “content” programmed by the best curators and editors on the planet? Fill out a profile, push a button, and the entire sequence can be put into a feed ready for your attention. As material is consumed, and new material becomes available, a constant recalculation of your feed will occur assuring that you will always have the highest quality and most appropriate “content” available. Philip K. Dick is smiling somewhere.

The assumption built into this model is that we just need more and better gin. Shirky points out that if we went on the wagon, we’d have a tremendous surplus of time on our hands. And if we look at what the digital natives are doing, we’d see that 100% consumption is boring. They want all transaction to be full duplex, read/write, consume/produce. At its origin, Tim Berners-Lee created a 2-way web, but the conversation shouldn’t be limited to the network.

If we become a nation of producers as well as consumers, won’t there even be more content to consume? Yes, but there will be no obligation to consume it all. It’s also important to remember that all conversations don’t happen with words (written or spoken). A photograph can speak to an essay, so can a melody, a video, a dance, a scribble in a notebook or a painting. With a whole new set of tools and media widely available, I see a nation returning en mass to their parlor pianos and singing a song about “gin and television” and then uploading a video of it to YouTube.

As we become both individuals and members of a group on the network, we become more tribal. Social graph is often discussed in terms of the linkages between the members of a set. But there’s a quality to the links that doesn’t seem to come through in the conversation. We argue that the word “friend” doesn’t properly signify in the context of social network websites because it merely describes a raw physical link of data sets. We need to take the thoughts further. When networks become social, it’s not the fact of a connection that makes the society, it’s the quality and intention of individual acts. How do the members of the group treat each other?

Anyone who has followed the formation of groups on the network from BBS and ListServs to NewsGroups to IRC and Chat Rooms, knows that primitive impulses surface regularly and threaten the structure of the tribe. The designation “anonymous coward” was created to encourage members to claim and assert their identity within the group, and to signal that no value or reputation accrued to the speech of the anonymous. Godwin’s Law is evidence that a conversation in a  frictionless environment veers into common patterns of primative gesture.

Identity, privacy and society have a different meaning within a tribe. We’re used to thinking of identity on an individual basis, but identity claims have to be validated by our society. Some day our tribes will have developed to the point where identity theft will be a crime against the tribe, rather than just the individual. The idea of privacy will have to take tribal membership into account.

We have a lot to learn from the power dynamics and organizational structures among members of tribes in non-western countries around the world. The word “tribe” itself is filled with a thousand stories and histories; some very dark, others powerfully progressive. The new gathering of tribes will be an extension of our ongoing experiments with decentralized democracy.

The passion of David Sanborn as a player is acknowledged even by god. In the video above, watch Clapton’s face as Sanborn goes way outside and passionate on Hendrix’s Little Wing. It’s not a question of technique, but rather something deeper that is expressed through music. Standing on the stage next to the player, or from a distance through the lens of a video, you recognize that passion when you see it.

On the April 23, 2008 edition of NewsGang, that passion surfaced again. Sanborn picked up the riff and took some long solos on the current state of the American soul. It was blues writ large. Listening to the MP3 a few days later walking the streets of downtown San Francisco, his words blended with some stanzas from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America’s naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio…

  The way the Ginsberg talks about the breath line of the poem relates directly to saxophone and the music of expression:

Ideally each line of Howl is a single breath unit. My breath is long–
that’s the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath.

The breath line poem was handed down from William Blake, through folk music, through Walt Whitman, all the way to Ginsberg and the saxophone solo. We use it to bring bodily into the world our fear of the dark potentialities of the human soul. But for Whitman and Ginsberg, America’s potential was much greater than the darkness at the edge of town. Sanborn’s solo veers into the darkness and dissonance of our possible futures, but keeps returning to the promise of the American experiment.

• NewsGang Live 04.23.08

We live in interesting times and as Ginsberg once said, “The universe is a new flower. America will be discovered.”

There’s something so perfect about this video that I’ve returned to it several times. It’s been featured in lots of main stream media, but it’s a kind of exemplar. It’s a perfect conversation between a song written by Jonathan Coulton and a dance by an actress named Emily. I’m not sure how many times the song has been heard, but Emily’s performance has been seen more than 300,000 times. It’s a conversation between two artists on a single theme. Each performance is at a very high level, each performance brings something out of the other. When the cost of the technology falls away, it’s the art, the talent and the people that shine through.

The cloud is only politically viable if it is a market auctioning services to users. To the extent that it consolidates to a single player, it will suffer from the paranoia and madness of the prisoner held for too long in solitary confinement. Our society creates our civility. It’s not the mesh, it’s the identity that uses the mesh that is key.

It finally struck me as I looked at an inbox with 4,000+ emails waiting to be deleted or filed. David Gelernter is right; and so is David Weinberger. The file folder is dead, or at any rate, it’s dead to me. I don’t want to file stuff and I don’t want to delete stuff. Gelernter sketched out the idea of Information Beams, here’s how he describes it:

I can imagine all the electronic information in my life collected into one beam, or (equivalently) one flowing stream. Every electronic document: every email, photo, draft, URL, audio, video, calendar or address note, and so on.

Combine that flowing stream with search and you have David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous.” There’s no need for a hierarchy of folders as a mnemonic. Folders on a hard drive don’t actually contain anything, they’re a visual metaphor to help organize things. It’s a metaphor we carried over from the file cabinets standing next to our desks. It’s the difference between Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail. “Tag and search” beats “file folders” for the findability of documents and artifacts. Sheer laziness will overthrow the metaphor of the folder. As the volume of the stream increases, the workers will revolt at the Sisyphean task of manually organizing the individual drops of water.

The idea of Information Beams connects to a new model for primary reporting I call the Raw Feed. The other inspiration is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody, and the story of the Mermaid parade. This model works best for covering events, but it could be extended. Take the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver, imagine if a torrent of blog posts, Twitter posts, audio files, YouTube Videos, photographs poured into a single raw feed of the event. Search, along with some collection of tags and plain text, would make the raw feed navigable. But the meaning of everything is nothing. The job of both the professional and the amateur writer would be to create legible stories and sensible collections from the raw feed. The feed itself would be part of the commons, everyone would have access to it, and all media companies would contribute to creating it. The value of a good storyteller would be revealed.

It’s just been reported that the Gesture Bank was robbed, and officials tell us that everything is gone. The complicated security measures, the armed guards, the thick metal walls, the alarms, the hidden cameras and the lasers were all overcome in this daring daylight robbery. Some form of military-grade explosives were used in the dramatic breach of this highly-secure vault. Local law enforcement officials, however, speculate the perpetrators were amateurs, “when we arrived on the scene, there were gestures everywhere. Man, they were scattered from hell to breakfast. It doesn’t look like they actually got away with much.”

Thousands of ordinary Americans had deposited their hard-earned gestures into accounts using the portable attention recording equipment supplied by the bank. The promise of fungible gestures growing tax-free in their accounts fueled dreams of early retirement and a life of leisure for many.

In recent years, the Gesture Bank had faced controversy with its compulsory attention collection proposals. A number of politicians and advertising executives believed that achieving critical mass in the gesture market was a necessary step in transitioning to the new economy. Deposit growth was falling short of projections and some felt stronger measures were required for the safety and security of our nation.

Gesture experts have been puzzled by evidence at the crime scene, it appears all the gestures that have been recovered have been uniformly sliced into 140 character strings of hypertext. The recovery has been very difficult as the gestures seem to be re-absorbed into the the network through the web, IM and SMS. The gestures that have been traced inside the network seem to have formed into a continuous stream of 140 character units; investigators provided this visualization for the media.

Gesture Bank officials are concerned that it will be impossible to identify all these gestures and connect them back up to the people who originally made them. “What people don’t seem to understand is that without a bank and accounts, there’s no way to know who made what gesture.”

Some believe that the Gesture Bank robbery was an inside job, that the unidentified suspect wasn’t working alone. There’s a growing political movement that believes gestures should not be kept in vaults, that gestures should be out in the world and circulating among the people. Highly-placed sources within the bank have reported that this new political idea was spreading like a virus at the highest levels of the organization. One member of the Board of Directors hasn’t been seen around the plush executive suite in many months. Some felt that he signaled his intentions when left this image pasted to the door of his office as a final gesture.