It was an article in the New York Times about online backup of files from a local hard drive that provided a glimpse of the larger migration in progress all around us. The great migration of data from the earth to the sky; from the hard drive to the cloud. When all your local files have duplicate copies in the cloud, their backups– could you really say which was the original and which was the copy?
The Network and the digital fundamentally changes the way we think about a thing. Things are singular, they occupy a specific set of spacial coordinates along the arc of time. In a given moment, in a slice of time, the thing occupies a single point in space. Often we prefer to stop the flow of time when we consider the qualities of the thing.
The digital thing, living on the Network, cannot assume its existence. It is not extension of matter in space, but rather bits in a particular pattern in a volatile memory system. The digital thing has a biological impulse, it must exist in multiple exact copies because each copy is so fragile. Continued existence necessitates this strategy.
The digital thing is not singular, it is a multiplicity by nature. When a unique digital thing is created on a local system, it wants to be duplicated to increase its chance of survival. All duplication is not created equal, duplication to the cloud actually increases a thing’s chance of survival. Interestingly, the pre-produced purchased digital thing, an MP3 of a song for instance, always already exists in the cloud. It doesn’t need to be duplicated and transferred, it only needs to be matched.
Once a digital thing has assured its multiplicity and persistence through time through a migration to the cloud, its next imperative is presence via a connected device. The digital thing wants to seep back out of the cloud into any and every device that can portray it. Sync-ing, versioning, caching, duplicating– these are some of the biological actions of the digital thing.
There are a few companies building pieces of this ecosystem for the digital thing. Ray Ozzie, with Mesh, probably has the most complete vision. One can imagine business models revolving around encryption. When the identity of a digital thing is masked through encryption, its persistence is financed through subscription. When the data is in the open, an attention/gesture economy guarantees persistence. Other models will certainly surface.
For those digital things that are publicly visible through the Network, the next biological imperative is to attract pointers, hyperlinks. The more pointers a digital thing can attract the greater its chance of survival. Like a physical thing, an unseen, unspoken digital thing has a very shadowy existence.
The digital thing seeks to live as a multiplicity within a networked mesh with the ability to manifest its presence through as many attached devices as possible. To attract pointers, a highly efficient system for producing hyperlinks must co-exist with the network of things. Network meshed objects need search, track, microblogging (Tw*tter) and RSS to produce links– and links are always to some thing.
Pointers are digital things as well, they’re just moving through a faster stream. Their velocity gives them a fundamentally different character. Think of Einstein’s ideas around the relationship between matter, energy, light and velocity.
The primitives for this ecosystem exist today. Its outlines can be seen dimly through the pointers flowing through the stream. How does such an ecosystem manifest in the full presence of its being? Like a memory or a learned skill, it is created through neural pathways– it is only through human attention and focused energy. It’s not what we wish or hope, but rather what we do. Acting on partial information within a barely visible system is an act of faith. But like the man said, “there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.”
My office supplies coffee, tea and hot chocolate to its employees. There’s filtered cold water and hot water for the tea and chocolate. Coffee requires at bit more work. Someone has to make a pot of coffee which includes putting a filter into the machine and then loading 1 1/2 portions of ground coffee from pre-measured packages. Through experimentation and oral history, I have learned that 1 package of coffee is too weak, and 2 packages of coffee are too strong.
Office coffee is perpetually bad. There many reasons for this. Often the coffee will sit in the pot cooking away for hour after hour– the flavor boiled out of it. Even when cut with milk it’s barely drinkable, an acidic brown liquid. Good office coffee requires social cooperation of a fairly high level. Reasonably good raw materials must be provided. And then the key, there must be a willing group of people dedicated to making and then maintaining the freshness of the brew.
If you think about it, the social contract around the quality of good office coffee requires an effort equal to that of a business like Peets or Starbucks. A single person is unlikely to make that effort; social cooperation is necessary.
The quality of office coffee produced in this manner is a leading economic indicator. We’ll leave to the side for the moment the idea of subsidized office coffee. When the cost of social cooperation to yield a good cup of coffee is sufficiently below the cost of buying a good cup of java– people switch. Labor replaces capital. The better and fresher the office coffee, the worse the surrounding general economy. As the economy improves, the quality and freshness of office coffee will start to deteriorate, and alternatives will start to seem economically feasible. Capital replaces labor (the general replaces the specific).
In a good economy, there are those who will cling to office coffee as a matter of principle. But as the general quality of office coffee will tell you, this is an utopian ideal. Of course “office coffee” is just a variable, we could just as easily be talking about enterprise software.
Take Me To The River: Where Did I Put That Remote?
We live in an age of rivers and streams. As the internet becomes the live web, it’s an increasingly large set of streaming data– images, video, text and sound. We’re back to the infinite number of cable channels that we surf between and among. These streams move at different speeds and are made up of objects/items of different sizes.
Television is the new internet. The Network swallowed the old television network whole. Of course, that was after the DVR permanently changed broadcasting’s relationship with time. Now even live broadcasts can be paused and reversed. The DVR started with one tuner, and moved to two tuners, so two shows could be recorded at the same time. YouTube added an infinite number of tuners.
The remote control is the user interface for the DVR/TV. It switches between channels, scrolls through recordings, searches by title, and controls the flow. These controls are starting to find their way into the live web. Both election.twitter.com and real time friendfeed have added the pause button to stop and start the stream.
Martin Heidegger returned to the ancient Greek idea of aletheia to think about the idea of truth. Here’s a brief explanation:
…aletheia is the truth that first appears when something is seen or revealed. It is to take out of hiddenness to uncover. It is not something that is connected with that which appears. Allowing something to appear is then the first act of truth; for example, one must give attention to something before it can be a candidate for any further understanding, for any understanding of space it must first somehow appear. Untruth, then, is something concealed or disguised.
Contained in aletheia is the river Lethe , one of several rivers in Hades– it literally means forgetfulness or concealment. Aletheia is discovery, uncovering truth that is hidden from view. We can search the past, the stream that has passed us by; or we can track the stream as it first appears. Our tools and interfaces to manage these rivers and streams are primitive. We barely even have a working remote control. Our toolkits are designed to manage documents, we need tools to manage and create streams.
It was a comment by Aron Michalski on a post-debate NewsGang Live: Obama was like Miles Davis, it was the notes he didn’t play that made the difference. Somehow that’s the image that has stayed with me. It’s not a frame that will gain wide usage, but I find it useful to measure the currents of both politics and technology. Leaving space for the silence, leaving space for the other players to fill in. Not responding to every theme sounded with a long personal improvisation, but sometimes just letting them finish. Letting the silence respond– opening a space for the next theme to be introduced. Perhaps we’re seeing a kind of post-Bebop public political conversation, it may be a new birth of cool. Lowering the temperature of the debate, moving from a hot sound to a cool sound.
And it’s not just a lowering of the temperature, it’s a move to modal jazz and away from being tied down to the chord changes. Wikipedia discusses the new direction of a modal approach:
An understanding of modal jazz requires knowledge of musical modes. In bebop as well as in hard bop, musicians used chords to provide the background for their solos. A song would start out with a theme, which would introduce the chords used for the solos. These chords would be repeated throughout the whole song, while the soloists would play new, improvised themes over the repeated chord progression. By the 1950s, improvising over chords had become such a dominant part of jazz, that sidemen at recording dates were sometimes given nothing more than a list of chords to play from. Creating innovative solos became exceedingly difficult.
In the later 1950s, spurred by the experiments of composer and bandleader George Russell, musicians began using a modal approach. They chose not to write their songs using chords, but instead used modal scales. This meant that the bassist, for instance, did not have to ‘walk’ from one important note of a chord to that of another – as long as he or she stayed in the scale being used and accentuated the right notes within the scale, he could go virtually everywhere. The pianist, to give another example, would not have to play the same chords or variations of the chords, but could do anything, as long as he or she stayed within the scale being used. The overall result was more freedom of expression.
In fact, the way that a soloist creates a solo changed dramatically with the advent of modal jazz. Before, the goal of a soloist was to play a solo that fit into a set of chords. However, with modal jazz, a soloist must create a melody in one scale (typically), which could be potentially boring for the listener. Therefore, the goal of the musician was now to make the melody as interesting as possible. Modal jazz was, in essence, a return to melody.
The addition of flexibility created a return to melody. It seems to be a change that is seeping into the general environment. I’d equate melody with pragmatism.
The conservative George Will recently stated that the next president will need to attend to the words of Everett Dirksen of Illinois:
“I am a man of principle, and one of my principles is flexibility.”
As we move in to these difficult economic times, we’ll need to improvise, not on the well-worn chord changes, but within the new modes that we find ourselves. It’s that cool temperament that will be able to reach out and find the melody of our times.
Unringing The Bell: Traction, ReTraction and Zero-Response Time
The page in the newspaper that prints corrections and retractions is one of the most insincere parts of a publication. It’s the old unringing the bell problem. Once a statement is published, there’s no real way to unpublish it. The original image, or in this case the peel of the bell, is the one that continues to resonate in our public discourse.
A common technique in political (and commercial) campaigns is to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about an opponent. One hears the attack ad, but not the rebuttal. This tactic is based on the idea that the retractions morally cancel out the original attack, and therefore they’re allowable. The negative attack gains traction before it is retracted.
The tactic works because of the built in delay– time elapses before a response can occur. The delay exists because of the technical requirements around the production of news, it’s what we call the news cycle. Interestingly, companies create the same kind of delay when they engage in a formal process of constructing replies to conversations in the market.
In the Live Network, there is zero delay. Response is immediate. The model of the news cycle collapses to the simple conversation. You say something; I say something back. You say something, interest swarms around and responds. The bell rings, but a thousand bells ring in response. Think of the sound of change ringing– Change we can believe in.
Lately I’ve been thinking about identity as a composite. There was a point where I was convinced by the reversal of poles – switching from the system-based identity to the user-centered identity. An individual has many roles and she can reveal whichever identity attributes that are necessary for a particular transaction. We think of these fragments of identity as the pieces that make up the whole. But another way to look at it is to think of identity of a composite of wholes. Some elements match exactly, but live in a different name space. It’s probably not a complete list, or maybe it’s too long, but here’s an an initial take on the modes of identity. Each one could be consider a whole identity.
Anonymous
Citizen
City
State
Nation
Journalist
Politician
Social
Public
Private / Restricted
Artist/Writer
Personal
Medical
Legal
Financial
Consumer
Public
Private / Restricted / VRM
Business
Employer
Employee
Contractor
Proprietor
If identity is composite, should there be a single control point? If there were to be a single point of access to the management of this identity, authentication would have to be both multi-factor and multi-band.
Should we put all our eggs in one basket? With investment portfolios we preach diversification– we seek assets that don’t correlate in changing markets. It’s called covariance, we don’t want everything to go up or down at the same time. If we can’t risk a single control point, then we need to move to multiple control points. And in fact, even the ownership of identity is in question. We hear a lot about “my data” and “my identity,” but there is no data or identity outside the Network. The idea of multiple control points means more than I control my identity from multiple credential sets, it means I share control of my identity with other entities. The power and political economy of an identity is distributed throughout a network of relations. We don’t live in a frictionless plane, we live as mortals, among mortals, in this world that unfolds around us in the stream of time.
Many years ago, when I was in the public relations business, the news cycles were much longer. I would read 4 or 5 newspapers a day– morning and evening editions. You could easily watch the set of stories being reported change over the days. Some stories had legs, others came and went, filling out the rest of the paper. Seasonal and evergreen stories came around each year like clockwork. We also had a news clipping service that tracked our clients’ names. A room full of people read the paper each day and clipped out the stories put them in an envelope and mailed them to us. Looking at the patterns of syndication, you could see how stories spread from one newspaper to another. That way of making sense of the stories we tell each other is no longer an efficient method to yield the storyline of our culture.
Sunday is a great news day. The newspapers are filled to the brim– I still like to read at least three; and the morning political talk shows are filled with news maker interviews and analysis. While I still filter through a large stack of newsprint to find the most interesting clips of the day, my methods have had to evolve. By the way, here are a few pointers from this morning:
The digital record of our history is piling up around us, providing an inexhaustible supply of frozen transcripts to hold over our heads and point at. So much is gathered into the digital archive, how can we make sense of it now? How do we turn it into a story we can understand?
I now depend on a variety of filters to snag the best bits, the most important clips from Sunday’s output and drop pointers to them into the Tw*tter stream. I want the best clips, no matter what their source. The publication I read is jam session assembled every day by a circle of freelance editors I’ve discovered on the Network.
The new models of journalism work on this same basis. Both The Huffington Post and Tina Brown’s new vehicle, The Daily Beast, break down the walls separating a particular publication from the rest of the Network. It’s the pointers that are valuable, not the walls around the garden of a publication. More and more we’re seeing those hyperlinks pointing to both professional and amateur sources; both inside and outside of a publication; both inside and outside this country. The sense of the space of a publication has profoundly changed.
The sense of time has changed as well. The old news cycles were based on the physical processes required to write, edit, typeset, print and deliver a newspaper. The new cycles are based on both the new technologies and the fact that life unfolds in real time. It is continuous, it always has been. Access to the raw real time feed is important, but it’s in the clips and stories that we memorialize our lives. It’s the pointer I send you, and the one you send me, that helps me make sense of what just happened.
