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I recently heard Doc Searls talk about his interest in developing a method to send money to musicians, radio progams and other forms of streaming entertainment. If you like something, you should be able to show it by putting your money where your mouth is. It’s a thought provoking idea that challenges the underlying fundamentals and economics of a well established industry.

Presumably some kind of name space would need to be developed for the recipients of payments– a URI that could be addressed from a distributed set of listening contexts. The basic idea is that the listener can set the terms of the transaction, in some ways it’s like the traditional tip jar or passing the hat. I’m not clear if the intention is to link to existing micro-payment systems or to develop new ones, but presumably there would be more than one transaction mechanism.

Much like Wikipedia and other social projects, the idea of creating a real economics for musicians based on voluntary payment has been met with skepticism. Kevin Kelly draws the boundaries of the economic system in his post 1,000 true fans. The gist of the contention is:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A “true fan” is someone who will buy everything an artist produces. Obviously to yield 1,000 true fans an artist may need ten or twenty times as many regular fans. Kelly’s post attracted a number of responses, including one Kelly noted from Jaron Lanier:

Jaron claims that he has not found a single musician that meets this definition. In other words, he claims that there are no musicians who have risen to a successful livelihood within the new media environment. None. No musician who is succeeding solely on the generatives I outline in Better Than Free. No musician born digital, and making a living in the new media.

Kelly followed up with two posts: The Case Against 1,000 True Fans and The Reality of Depending on True Fans.

Doc Searl’s proposal would shift the responsibility of developing payment modes from the artist to a payment system. This is a key friction point for artists, they’re good at making music not managing micro-payment systems. But for me, another question emerges: if I like the song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” what are my payment options?

• The Beatles
• George Harrison
• Eric Clapton, for that guitar solo
• George Martin, as producer
• Prince, for that guitar solo (RRHOF version)

Who owns which part of a performance? Can they be addressed separately? What about multiple versions of the same tune? What about cover versions? Can a performance be addressed as a complex network? Can we make it easy to pull that one thread from the cloth? Is there a viable Buddhist Economics that can emerge from this confluence of efforts?

The framing of a performance contributes to its total value. This would be true of a performance encountered somewhere on a distributed Network as well. Virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell recently played unannounced in a subway station. That venue, as opposed to a concert hall, altered the audience’s perception of the value of his performance.

Joshua Bell made $32.17 as a busker. He commented:

“Actually,” Bell said with a laugh, “that’s not so bad, considering. That’s 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn’t have to pay an agent.”

Now the Scrabble dictionary doesn’t seem to think that the word “OK” is legal. But some would argue for its acceptance. Gavin Rude, an english teacher, makes a gallant attempt in this PDF. However, given the current politcal climate around online scrabble– Kevin Marks and Brian Oberkirch could be viewed as colluding to play team scrabble through Twitter without permission from the Hasbro corporation.

I’m expecting take down notices all around.

Just a short thought experiment: picture, if you will, the kind of network graph you’d draw to represent traditional broadcast and print media. Initially a very small set of one to many one-way relationships. All downstream, very little upstream– perhaps the letters to the editor section. Desktop publishing changed the look of that graph, as did the personal video camera, lighting up more broadcast nodes on the network,  but distribution remained a challenge.

Blogs, Podcasting, YouTube and RSS changed the shape of the picture even more substantially. Distribution moved to the common platform of the web and the economics supporting a publishing node changed radically. More publishers light up on the network, but more importantly the means for two-way traffic is established as publishers talk to each other. Two-way traffic expands to a many-to-many relationships and micro-communities begin to form. All of this built on the back of HTTP.

Now think about who has real time broadcasting capability and draw a mental picture of that network graph. Think of the shape of the network, it seems to me the traditional model still dominates. Facebook, MySpace, Dogster, LinkedIn and others concentrated and increased the speed of communication transactions within communities– but they don’t generally achieve real time continuous message flow. Twitter, and more recently, Identi.ca have achieved message flow liquidity and have established themselves as primary markets.  As the XMPP protocol starts capturing the imagination and islands of Laconica instances begin appearing, more real time nodes light up on the network. It’s early days and there aren’t a lot of dots to connect.

Whether or not those dots will be allowed to be connected is currently in question. Our ability to track those XMPP streams is even more fragile still. There’s a real time web emerging and we’ve yet to imagine how it will manifest. It’s something we’ll have to talk to each other about.

The power of real time micro-communities is broader than common wisdom would suggest. Each broadcaster in a real time micro-community is connected and messages to a different circle. We misunderstand the nature and power of micro-communities if we focus on the number of connections in a particular circle. Each circle is embedded in a network of circles, but the network of circles occupies a small world. And you already know this: the whole world is connected through six degrees of separation. 

As we may think about the real time web, the image goes in and out of focus. Pieces of the dream materialize for a moment and then are withdrawn. The solid experience of Track and IM on Twitter start to reveal the contours of the possibility of discovery on the real time web– and then in the blink of an eye, they dissolve into nothingness. Twitter pulls the experience back into the darkness, and we set out as a band of gypsies attempting to recreate it from the resources we find in the commons.

“Real time” puts time itself into the frame. In a simple sense, real time means what’s happening right now. It’s the conscious moment that cleaves the past from the future. It’s the thread of our lives being pulled through the eye of a needle.

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.

We see the past through the future, as it comes rushing toward us, asking us to make a judgment about this present moment. David Byrne and Brian Eno have released some recordings called “Everything that happens will happen today.” I’d go further and say that everything that happens, happens right now. Your only opportunity to act is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to do the right thing is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to connect with another person is in the present moment. Your only opportunity to pick up the thread of the conversation is in the present moment.

As we stand at the crossroads between the past and the future, we must act, and through our actions express a judgement. Do we act in the present moment only for the present moment? Or do we think both of ourselves and our posterity as we make this gesture or that one? There’s a sense in which a person acting in the present moment for the sake of an unknown future is the essence of morality.

As we deepen the questions about the real time web, we uncover the startling fact that underneath all the layers of technology and specialized lingo, we find only ourselves. Human beings, mortals, gathering together to share our joys and sorrows, our dreams and aspirations, our humanity. As we pound out, hammer and tongs, the basic shape of our experience through the real time Network, we would do well to heed the words of that guy who said, “what if all this stuff really matters?”

Part of the ceremony of digital identity is binding identity artifacts to the person. There’s a sense in which these artifacts become real extensions of a person. They are augmentations, but the binding is very real. Think about how it feels to lose your keys, your wallet, your favorite pen. The human factors around digital identity remain an undiscovered country.

While listening to Dick Hardt talk about his Firefox plugin Sxipper to Phil Windley on Technometria, I began to think about anonymizers. These services are used to obscure a person entry point into the Network. I can see a future point where our relationship with identity becomes more sophisticated, we could use Sxipper to do three things.

• Jack into the Network anonymously
• Manage our personas and roles as we interact with various digital agents on the Network
• Keep track of common interactions and compile them into macros

Sxipper, or some similar tool, will be on your phone, on your USB fob, a key on your keychain– it becomes your entry point to the Network. There’s a sense in which this relationship is more sophisticated, but at the same time more primitive. We will be consciously donning masks to present ourselves in the social space of the Network. The Network was largely populated by publications and transaction scripts; it’s starting to be populated by people.

Imagine that world, and then imagine losing your keys. The feeling of absence, a part of you gone missing, unmasked. The vows taken in the binding ceremony have been broken.

The analogy to Harlan Ellison’s classic story isn’t there at all. But somehow the phrase fits anyway. As I think about Jessie Stay’s post about the implementation of the “in_reply_to_status_id” parameter in Twitter, and the matching of the metadata element by Identi.ca, I keep coming back to J.L. Austin’s idea of the speech act. This new parameter is a connector that enables a network of conversation. The elements of a conversation are not objects, but rather speech acts of the subject.

“What does it matter who is speaking,” someone said. “What does it matter who is speaking.”

Samuel Beckett
Stories and Texts for Nothing

The 140 character limit of the Tweet and the Dent ties the form to the SMS. The SMS is tied to the phone and the transmission of voice. It’s the writing that’s closest to speech and the performative utterance. The Tweet/Dent is the combination of the speaker and the spoken. Identity is implied. When a micro-object speaks, does it remain an object like any other object?

I blame the terrorists. The movement to create national identity cards was given fuel by the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent formation of the Department of Homeland Security. The “concept” is that by issuing government sponsored official identity documentation we would introduce a control point in the process of differentiating “us” from “them.” There is a lively debate about whether such a system could be spoofed to somehow allow “them” to acquire identity cards and pass themselves off as authentically one of “us.” There’s no question that such an identity card would create a glaring single point of failure– the program meant to get the ball rolling is called the Real ID Act.

Personal identity is the sameness of a same person in different moments in time.

A simple frame for understanding the potential problems with the proposal requires focusing on the idea of the One and the Many. (those seeking extra credit can explore Hegel vs. Locke and review the STI’s white paper on Digital identity.) Can one national root identity be made strong and authoritative enough to be the foundation for all digital identity instances? In the future, will you have a single root identity provisioned by your government? Will you co-own your identity with your government, or will they have a 51% controlling interest when it comes to anything important?

Digital Identity is a man-made thing, an artifact, that refers to a person, and is different from a person.

An alternative vision is based on user-centric ownership and assertion of identity. The claims an individual makes to establish her identity and reputation are validated by many different sources, both strong and weak. Rather than a single root, the foundation is rhizomatic, or a mesh of validated relationships and reputation. A government issued identity card can, and does, have a role in the mesh — the question is whether it should be authoritative or simply continue to contribute to the whole.

Yes, but how does an Identity Mesh help us fight the terrorists? Well, no one thing will be a silver bullet. But you could argue that assembling a complete meshed identity across multiple active relationships would be more difficult than compromising a single authoritative root identity. The conversation about personhood and identity systems is taking place in the context of Homeland Security. The unintended consequences of selecting this tactic to enhance our national security are vast. Ask George Orwell.

As we discuss how to mesh together identity across social networks there’s a shadow falling from overhead. While the concept of a metaverse doesn’t seem in the offing, we are starting to create an augmented reality through the combination of these services. Identity will be at the foundation and creating that foundation will be a political process not a technical one. In fact, the political must limit the technical if we are to preserve the inalienable rights of our democracy.

There are a number of narratives located in the words “open source.” The most dominant narrative is the story about software development and maintenance through tightly coordinated iterations via inputs from a potentially unlimited and unbounded number of interested parties. The economics of open source require the diversification of the carriers of value from the traditional modes. I’ve purposefully begun this exploration with economics rather than the concept of free access to source code.

It’s the idea of “free” that has expanded to connect up with other “free narratives” to create confusion. It’s a kind of utopian vision: free beer, free speech, free love, free software. A binary opposition is generated that pits free + generosity against price + greed. The moral elements of the equation rise to the surface when comparing alternative software solutions. There’s a utopian narrative that has attached itself to open source software and simultaneously detached itself from any rational economics. It’s a story of free beer rather than free speech, and is utopian in its original meaning of “no place.”

Chris Anderson has focused the conversation with his forthcoming book called “Free.” The emerging economic model he describes is woven from value transactions across multiple delivery and product modes– some free others at a cost. This blend results in a sustainable economic system. It’s the combined value of the whole set that matters, not the percentage of free delivery modes vs. pay delivery modes. And as we move further into the attention-gesture economy, the methods of payment will be more diversified as well. One-hundred-percent free in all modes, for all time, is simply a method of incurring debt. At some point the system has to come back into balance, either through the addition of a revenue component or bankruptcy. Hobbyist or enthusiast systems work through the attention-gesture economy, but so do services like The Google.

There are thousands of open source projects, but the ones that combine well with commercial projects are the most active and well supported. The number of active projects is actually quite small. Entrepreneurs are constantly searching for new combinations to produce excess value at viable margins. As products become more modular, value migrates to design. Apple’s operating system combines open source infrastructure with a highly-customized human interface. The combination creates superior value.

There’s a temptation to believe that all the players in a commercial market should contribute openly to the commons– that we should all come together and sing kumbaya. The fact that every new digital product will contain some form of open source module doesn’t change the competitive landscape. Companies may sing kumbaya, but they still wield the razor and the blade, and that’s as it should be.

Finishing up a few things before leaving the office on a Friday, I gathered some notes and papers together and stuck them in my briefcase. I hurried toward the elevator, the office was mostly deserted– I was running a little late. I pressed the down button to call the elevator, after a short wait the elevator arrived and I stepped in. My mind was racing, filled with the events of the day, planning the weekend, thinking about next week’s business trip to Austin. Slowly I became aware of a voice speaking out of nowhere. I was in the elevator by myself.

I recognized the voice, both the words and the sound. It was a junk phone call I’d received on my Google Grand Central account. Suddenly I realized that the elevator’s emergency phone system was getting a junk phone call from a robot. The robot was telling the elevator that it “should act now to renew the extended warranty on its car.” We now live in a world where machines are spamming each other. As the machines of the network gain more and more capabilities, I can only imagine that this kind of machine-to-machine behavior will escalate. 

As I stepped out of the elevator, I turned and suggested that it get on the national “no call” list for machines, and that extended warranties aren’t worth the money.

One of the more interesting things a micro-community can do within a social network is come to terms and through their gestures establish a value for something. One of the best descriptions I’ve read of this process was by art critic Kenneth Baker, specifically in his review of Dale Chihuly’s exhibition at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. While Baker is discussing his reaction to the show and the role of his review in the larger swirl of opinions that make up the cultural value of the work, his words equally apply to the social and political objects in our midst.

Baker’s original review of the Chihuly show was intensely negative; he even took the museum to task for mounting a show that was more ‘craft’ than ‘art.’ Chihuly is a popular glass artist and Baker’s review incited a torrent of disagreement. I found Baker’s defense of his review to be some of his best writing. Here’s how Baker set the context:

In today’s culture, people need not merely critics to tell them what art is, but also artists, curators, art historians, art dealers, collectors – and the viewers’ own education and sensibility.

In the consensus as to the art status of a piece or a body of work, each such participant has something to contribute, and each type of contribution has to be valued differently.

The interesting bit here is that no perspective is authoritative, but each view has a unique value in the equation of cultural worth. Baker’s assessment is based on the network of connections to canonical work that forms our cultural mesh:

Hence, my practice of comparing one artist’s works with those made by others. Art is made of connections – connections available to any informed observer – not just of materials and good intentions.

The several readers who faulted me for comparing Chihuly‘s work with his more serious contemporaries’ uses of glass misunderstood my purpose: I was looking for redeeming linkages between his work and art – sculpture – of canonical stature, and could find none. No one who wrote to me in his defense mentioned any either.

Most of us would prefer to believe that “art” is a quality inherent in or infused in certain things, but the history of modern art, and of its enveloping social reality, has left us in a much more complex and ambiguous position. Those who refuse to acknowledge this are the very dupes that the culture industry banks on.

Baker defines the role of the critic in our modern attention markets:

I took a caustic tone because I believe, more or less as the poet John Ciardi put it, that we are what we do with our attention.

Every newspaper critic argues that readers ought to spend their attention in some ways and not others. A critic, no matter what his field, must be an expert in the uses of attention and their rewards – in terms of pleasure, expanded insight, challenges to habit and prejudice and much more.

Today art critics also find themselves having to push back against the tendency of many museums to market their programming as entertainment, which inevitably tends toward escapist uses of attention. “Chihuly at the de Young” is a prime example of this sorry cultural drift.

And of course, whenever the value of art becomes the topic of conversation we have to discuss the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, or Duchamp’s repurposing of a urinal as a sculpture entitled Fountain:

Marcel Duchamp’s notorious “Fountain” (1917), a mass-produced plumbing fixture turned on its back, signed with a pseudonym and presented as sculpture, proclaimed a fissure between the concept of art and its unambiguous embodiment in objects.

If Duchamp’s gesture had found no resonance in the wider situation of culture, his prank would have been forgotten long ago. But the peculiar cultural condition that he diagnosed persists: We still seldom see thought and thing brought together seamlessly outside the realm of mechanical engineering. Artists’ struggles with this problem continue to produce bizarre and fantastically various results, some provocative, illuminating and pleasing, most not.

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt defined artworks as “thought things,” that is, things that materialize thought, things to be thought about and, in rare cases, things to help us think.

As we consider the “thought things” that are collaboratively filtered through our social media networks, often we imagine a democratic process where each participant in the network has an equal vote. Presumably the top vote getter is the thing that deserves and wins our attention. Baker imagines an attention market where the votes of contributors are given different values. We accomplish this to some extent by using the Friend, Follow and Track tools to create a directed social graph that filters the firehose of information pouring off the Network with each tick of the clock. These tools are coarse filters when compared with the finely-tuned mesh of the art markets. Baker’s vision of value discovery in our attention markets reveals a possible future state of our social media toolset.