echovar

I often think of human-computer interaction (HCI) as the intersection of a language filled with ambiguity with a language purged of ambiguity. When we talk about the advance of the semantic web and microformats, I get this image of our language growing an exoskeleton. The code marking up our language attempts to disambiguate it, drain it of its natural state of overdetermination.

In his book, Muse in the Machine, Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought, David Gelernter talks about how we think at various levels of focus. At high levels of focus we think most like a machine, we are goal directed and push ambiguity to the margins. We are solving problems and making connections within a highly reduced set of possibilities. At low levels of focus we think poetically, with dream imagery, making impossible connections. Any truly creative process involves both modes of thinking. As our language grows an exoskeleton, will we push our humanity and our poetry to the margins? Will we lose our sense of touch?

Meaning is perhaps both the illusion of a perfectly clear language combined with the deep ambiguity of life and truth. Language is both within you and without you.

We were talking – about the space between us all

And the people – who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth – then it’s far too late – when they pass away

And the time will come when you see we’re all one,and life flows on within you and without you

Consuming the multicast, looking for traces of import, and then switching and focusing. Lyndon Johnson was famous for watching all three television networks at once during news broadcasts. But he didn’t consume each stream in its entirety, he was looking for cues to dig out the segments that mattered. He assembled his own narrative from this highly engaged viewing activity.

Politicians need to keep their finger on the pulse to be successful. Elvis Presley also watched all three networks at the same time. He was looking for cues to crack a different kind of code. He scanned the frequencies searching for the scent of cultural information, then quickly switched and focused.

This model was taken to the extreme in the film The Man Who Fell To Earth. David Bowie played a space alien who absorbed the local culture through a raw feed of all available broadcast channels.

The television remote control made switching simpler, but unless you could visually monitor each of the frequencies, you might miss the sign that signaled the necessity of a switch of focus. Cable television allowed the number of channels and networks to explode. Scanning the frequencies is no longer a job that can done by an individual. The Internet multiplied the possible number of channels into the millions.

Originally it was the VCR, and later the DVR and YouTube that made filtering and copying these valuable moments into a buffer for ready Network access a simple affair. Scanning the raw feed pouring off the network is now done through social media filters, perhaps most effectively by Twitter through communities of interest. A tweet containing a hyperlink is the most compact channel switcher, the most efficient pointer to items of interest.

These pointers we share through the Twitter feed point to locations in the cloud. We click and activate on-demand content that streams in to our computers. Today we think about the text, video and audio we access as a substitution for traditional broadcast and print media. But almost anything that can be expressed as software can be on the other side of that hyperlink. Here we are only limited by our imaginations.

Photography is about capturing light and its reflections. The digital camera, because of its ease of use, has become a repository for our memories. Because most users of digital cameras simply point and shoot, never changing the defaults, they deface their memories at the moment of capture. The subtle play of light across a scene is obliterated by a blinding flash. All light, all reflection is mechanically equalized. Our shadows are banished. When we view the past through the proxy of digital imagery, the scene, the real moment as it entered our eyes, is flooded with illumination– and then, we blink, spots dancing in front of our eyes, the world around us slowly returns to its normal shadowy state. It’s that microsecond, the one that didn’t exist, that is captured for eternity.

Science has been under assault lately. Political actions have cut off the air supply. Media relay filters have put science and non-science on a level playing field and given equal access to each– all the while maintaining the appearance of “objectivity.”

I attended a member preview of a revolutionary act today. The California Academy of Sciences, located in Golden Gate Park, will officially open this coming Saturday. At the preview, thousands greeted a presentation of scientific learning.

Science has been underground, hiding from those who might do it harm. There were a couple of things that were important takeaways.

Children love science. The faces and voices of children filled the halls. A thousand scientists were created today.

Science is now about context and ecosystems. It’s about the connections within a network. The cheese doesn’t stand alone.

Everything is connected and everything evolves. Two of the primary shows feature: Evolution in Madagascar and the Galapagos Islands; and Climate Change and how animals will have to adapt. Science and simultaneously a form of political science.

Science comes out of the darkness and gloriously into the light. Let us each keep a candle lit to provide enough light for our children to experience the wonder of the scientific world.

Notice

Due to the level of alert throughout
our nation regarding terrorist activity,
picture taking is prohibited in all areas
of this parking facility.
If at anytime you should see a person
or persons taking pictures
please report this immediately
to the security or management personnel
we thank you for your cooperation in this
matter.

The Management
Union Square Garage

Sometimes it takes a few days for the dust to settle, for all the threads to become untangled, and for the bright lines of an event to emerge. BearHug Camp defined the silhouettes of two alternate futures.

To paraphrase a politician’s recent comment, the fundamentals of microblogging are sound. The 140 character standard message length seems safe for the moment. But one senses there’s an uncomfortable feeling about the randomness of that specific constraint and its origin in SMS. Access to APIs and the ecosystem of multiple end clients providing and discovering unique new value propositions filtered from the fire hose of the full microblogging stream is pretty stable. But there’s a fear that access may be cut off, or that the economics of API access may change radically. System stability has improved measurably, but is still below acceptable major league standards. Real time messaging and track are still on the critical list, either absent or cobbled together as a pencil sketch (everything works for a small N).

Convergence on a unified microblogging standard is key to the foundation of a larger ecosystem, what Dave Winer calls a coral reef. Currently that convergence owes its existence to the mirroring of Twitter’s feature set. The distribution of power within the political economy of the system leaves this as the only avenue for progress. An open standard that departed from Twitter wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

The first possible future belongs to Twitter. It’s a future where scaling a real time microblogging messaging system with track is key to success. The transition of the economic model of API access from free to one with some kind of usage tax will lay the foundation for a potentially dominant business model. As long as the tax is low enough and the volume high enough, Twitter will prosper and the friction they’ve introduced won’t slow down viral growth.

Oblique Strategy: Think Garden instead of Architecture

The second possible future belongs to a distributed network of players. The big scale required by Twitter’s architecture is redistributed to multiple players with different roles and responsibilities within a networked system. It’s not Identi.ca that competes with Twitter, but an ecosystem of sites that cooperate to provide the identical feature/function set along with a fertile ground for new innovation. But there’s a fly in the ointment, there is no ecosystem. Currently there are only unscalable instances of Laconi.ca that don’t connect to each other very well. In order for there to be viral growth in the Open Microblogging ecosystem the individual nodes actually need to form a network of connections. Today they don’t. The nodes aren’t nodes so they can’t grow as a network. Many aren’t competing against One.

There are couple of things missing from this garden:

• Name resolution across Open Microblogging nodes
• Inter-node real time public and direct messaging
• Full network real time track (Aggregate XMPP Firehose)
• Multiple clients for multiple devices

To the extent that these items aren’t at the top of the Open Microblogging project priority list, Identi.ca/Laconi.ca and Open Microblogging stand on the brink of an abyss. The “growth” of disconnected nodes is the illusion of growth. In a few weeks Twitter will turn on all services, introduce a small tax and the game could well be over. The acolytes of Open Source believe they will win the war because they have a structural advantage that over time will prevail. The metaphor that was used was “flipping the iceberg.” Except for the fact that there is no structural advantage and they don’t have a critical mass of users, nor a method to virally attract them. They’re living in a separate reality, their watches have stopped and their eyes aren’t on the prize.

BearHug camp showed us all the shape of the playing field, that the game was underway, and the ball was pointedly handed to the key players. Can they keep their eyes on the prize? From the opening gun, this game is being played in sudden death. The next move is crucial.

Om Malik interviewed my old boss Bill Hambrecht about the state of the economy and the future of the IPO in Silicon Valley. Watch the whole thing. Hambrecht has worked on transparency in the pricing of securities for many years. His ideas about using a modified dutch auction to price initial public offerings are still revolutionary.

Hambrecht’s explanation of the subprime mortgage crisis is one of the clearest I’ve heard. Mortgage backed securities are traded in a dealer-to-dealer market without transparent and continuous pricing. Stocks are priced through a continuous auction on the stock exchanges. When a company has to voluntarily mark down the value of these mortgage-backed securities, they hesitate. When they’re finally forced to mark an asset down, there’s a big jump down in value. That change in value wrecks the balance sheet. Interestingly, it’s not a business or revenue issue– it’s a price/value of assets problem. Hambrecht’s solution has always been to allow the market to discover the appropriate price and make the process transparent.

Hambrecht thinks the consolidation of the bulge bracket investment banks means that big iBanks will only be doing big deals. Their cost structures will dictate a move toward the mega deal. The ground is being prepared for a new crop of boutique investment banks to bring the new crop of small companies public. My favorite quote in the interview? “It’s like 1968 all over again.”

I recently planted a new Japanese maple tree in my back garden. The new one replaced an old one that had died a suspicious death. Over the last few seasons its growth had slowed to a crawl. It had always put on a fine display of maple leaves that turned bright orange-red in the Autumn. When they fell to the ground, the leaves scattered across the green grass making beautiful patterns.

This Spring the maple tree barely sprouted leaves; clearly something wasn’t right. We consulted with our gardener and we took some measures to try and bring the tree back to health. In the end, the battle was lost. A preliminary post-mortem concluded that a gopher had eaten the roots of the tree and therefore it was unable to take in water and nourishment from the soil.

A month or so passed and the Japanese maple turned into a stark and brittle wooden sculpture. Slowly, bit by bit, the life was drained from it. My wife and I drove down to Half Moon Bay to a large nursery to pick out a replacement tree to be planted to celebrate my birthday. After a few stops, and auditioning a number of trees, we found a perfectly formed Japanese Maple — an Emperor I variety.

When we planted the new tree, the mystery of the previous tree’s death was revealed. The gopher was exonerated by a more thorough investigation. The large Italian cyprus tree nearby, a tree planted in the 1920s, had strangled the maple. It was murder. The cyprus sends out shallow roots in a fine dense mesh. The roots of the large tree surrounded, enclosed, and cut off the water supply of the smaller maple. The Japanese maple has woody roots that are meant to grow deep. They never had a chance.

This war of the root systems had been going on underground all along, invisible to us. We suddenly discovered that our garden is also a kind of battlefield. We were about to plant a new tree and place it in harm’s way. We realized that we couldn’t do what we’d done before. If we simply went ahead and planted the tree, it would meet the same fate as its predecessor. It was the end of the era of naive tree planting.

Our gardner came up with a solution. The new Japanese maple came in a large 10 gallon plastic container. The plan was to cut the bottom from the container and plant the tree along with the container. The container’s plastic sides would serve as a barrier which would protect the new roots from the Cyprus root’s smothering embrace. This new arrangement gave the maple’s roots the chance to grow deep into the open soil below.

As we plant new trees, and start new ventures, sometimes we aren’t attuned to the political currents flowing just below the surface. Our naive first attempt at tree planting assumed we were entering a neutral and nurturing space. Who could take exception to the addition of a beautiful tree to our garden? We won’t know for some time whether the strong move by the federal government of our garden will have effectively given the new maple tree the chance to grow and prosper. But so far, so good.

This morning MSNBC aired a minimally edited replay of their broadcast from the morning of September 11, 2001. I remember watching those images on that morning. I remember worrying about my colleagues who would be arriving at our New York office in the World Trade Center. I’d visited them a few months before, spending all day in the building– from early morning to early evening.

At the time, on that morning seven years ago, I viewed the images with disbelief, as in a dream. Now as I view them again, the emotions are still strong, but I see them with clear eyes. On the day of the actual event, I didn’t think we lived in a world where such a thing could happen; today I know such a thing has happened.

Prometheus, in eternal punishment, is chained to a rock, where his liver is eaten daily by a vulture, only to be regenerated, due to his immortality, by night.

But my topic is not the possibility of terrorist acts, but rather the replaying of memories and something Nietzsche called ressentiment, or the spirit of revenge. When we act out of the spirit of revenge, filled with the pain of the moment, we act out of weakness. In our digital age, if everything is recorded, can we ever forget the past? Will we be like Prometheus bound to a rock, our wounds forever raw? Will all human motivation be reduced to acting from the spirit of revenge, as no perceived slight or hurt ever fades from memory? The digital doesn’t fade, it’s on or off. The challenge to overcome the spirit of revenge grows larger as memory is displaced into our digital systems and networks. The digital is immortal and can be replayed endlessly at the click of a mouse.

I think perhaps we forget the meaning and power of forgetting. Manu Bazzano in his book “Buddha is Dead” discusses the modes of forgetting:

“There is forgetting and forgetting. We subconsciously remove from our memory unpleasant experiences, and we tend to ‘forget’ by sheer inertia. On a super-conscious level, however, we keep our consciousness fresh and vibrant by actively ‘forgetting.’ The noble person knows how to forget, not solely out of compassion (‘forgive and forget’), but also because there can be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness. Life would drag on, forever unresolved, a life that ‘cannot have done with anything,’ a life of ressentiment, a sick life.”

In our digital age, with perfect replays, can we learn to digest and properly metabolize events and turn them into experience? When we act and create from experience, we’ve listened, reflected and responded. We’ve created something new to fill the present moment. To truly embrace change, we must not look back in anger, but walk purposefully into the future.

Tom Waits sums it up nicely “What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” Vendors like to say things like “we’re users too.” But when they speak as vendors first and users second, they aren’t engaging in the real conversation. No matter how cool the rhythm track and the doubled sax, the words tell the story.

Waits does a formidable impression, and remember, no salesmen will visit your home.