He’d lugged his case back and forth, up and down that long dusty road. It’d become a lot lighter once some of the atoms were exchanged for bits. But for a long time various sequences of atoms were still used to encase the bits. Every few years, they’d come out with new model of the arrangement of atoms. Some better way to get at the bits and play them with greater fidelity. To a guy lugging a case around, that meant everytime a new model came out, the case got lighter.
It had pretty much been a transport and titling business. Bits encased in atoms moved from “here” to “there,” the title of ownership was transferred from the seller to the buyer for a monetary recompense.
When the real estate prices in the cloud got cheap enough, the bit warehouses were moved there. The old atom-based bit cases were dispensed with altogether. That’s when the business really changed. There were no more separate bit containers to lug around. The bits just flowed directly into the players and were stored there. There was still a “here” and a “there,” and the title still transferred– so the fundamentals remained the same.
These new cloud warehouses were able to store a lot more inventory– certainly much more than could be stored on a customer’s bit player. For a while, there was a pretty good business in selling players with larger and larger bit storage containers. But the same low prices that motivated the bit sellers to move their warehouses to the cloud began to attract their customers as well. Customers started renting container storage units in the cloud and storing excess bits there. In response to this the bit players stopped growing larger bit storage containers and started playing bits directly from the storage warehouse.
This was another change in direction for the bit business. The idea of “here” and “there” was disappearing from the equation. Even the idea of moving bits from the seller’s warehouse to the buyer’s warehouse didn’t quite make sense. To the customer’s bit player, all these warehouses were the same. The bit salesman’s business was now just keeping track of who had bought access to which bits in the warehouse. Shoe leather virtualized into a voice over the wire.
Of course some customers still wanted local delivery of bits. Usually they were interested in chopping up the bits, recombining them with other bits to make new sequences. These new bit sequences were then shipped off to the warehouse, ready for redistribution.
While there are plenty of things that can’t be turned into bits, anything that can be, will be. The image of the lonely bit salesman pounding the pavement, moving bits from “here” to “there” with shoe leather and a big sample case is now the stuff of memoir, museums and fiction.
“But almost everyone agrees that no one can make sense out of more than 10% of what McLuhan says..”
It occured to me that the linear quality of time shouldn’t be an obstacle to a good interview. And there are some questions I needed to ask McLuhan. There’s a sense in which questions and answers can address each other across time. This connected up to Jeff Jonas’s thinking on Perpetual Analytics or what he describes as real-time situational analytics– the idea of changing the time context of a database from polling to data streams. In his blog post, Sequence Neutrality in Information Systems, Jonas asks the question: “What if the question being asked today is not a smart question until next Thursday?”
In reading McLuhan’s work from 1964, I got the sense that he was providing answers to questions that his contemporaries could not yet formulate. Jonas posits a data ground where data finds data, and relevance will find the user. McLuhan’s answers seemed to be seeking out my questions.
echovar: The transition from visual space to acoustic space seems to be a key to understanding– among other things in your work, the oft-quoted fragment “the medium is the message.” Can you discuss the idea of acoustic space and what makes it different?
McLuhan: The new environment of simultaneous and diversified information creates acoustic man. He is surrounded by sound– from behind, from the side, from above. His environment is made up of information in all kinds of simultaneous forms, and he puts on this electrical environment as we put on our clothes, or as the fish puts on water.
Acoustic space is created by our ability to hear from all directions at once. Electric information arrives from all quarters at once. Thus, in effect, acoustic environments were created by the telegraph and began to show up in the press as mosaics of juxtaposed and discontinuous items all under one dateline. Acoustic space is all touch and interplay, all resonance and sympathy. Acoustic space is like the relationship of mother and child, which is audile-tactile, sound and touch. The cooing and handling and touching– this is the kind of world the electric media put around us. The electric media are a mom-and-child or rock-and-roll relationship.
The acoustic or simultaneous space in which we now live is like a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margins are nowhere. Acoustic space cannot be cut up into pieces, as visual space can. It is both compressed and indivisible.
echovar: As your thinking matured, you migrated from the long form essay to the probe– the fragment and the aphorism. In the age of Twitter, we sometimes feel that depth is sacrificed to brevity. Can you address how depth is preserved in the compression of your thought?
McLuhan: In the work of Harold Innis, each sentence is a compressed monograph. He includes a small library on each page, and often incorporates a small library of references on the same page in addition. Most writers are occupied in providing accounts of the contents of philosophy, science, libraries, empires and religions. Innis invites us instead to consider the formalities of power exerted by these structures in their mutual interaction. He approaches each of these forms of organized power as exercising a particular kind of force upon each of the other components in the complex. By bouncing the unknown form against known forms, he discovered the nature of the new or little known form.
I call this method a probe. The probe is a means or method of perceiving. It resists any single point of view; it’s a better form than expository prose for examining our time because it works by gaps and interfaces. For instruction, use incomplete knowledge so people can fill things in– they can round it out and fill it in with their own experiences. There’s no participation in just telling: that’s simply for consumers– they sit there and swallow it, or not. These probes might easily be tweets:
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
“The only cool PR is provided by one’s enemies. They toil incessantly and for free.”
“Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another.”
“A frontier is not a neighborhood. It is a gap, a ferment, an interface.”
echovar: What is the shape of the digital body in the globally networked village?
McLuhan: During the mechanical ages we extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as the planet is concerned.
My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
Any medium presents a figure whose ground is always hidden or subliminal. In the case of TV, as of the telephone or radio, the subliminal ground could be called the disincarnate or disembodied user. This is to say that when you are “on the telephone” or “on the air,” you do not have a physical body. In these media, the sender is sent and is instaneously present everywhere. The disembodied user extends to all those who are recipients of electric information. It is these people who constitute the mass audience, because mass is a factor of speed rather than quantity, although popular speech permits the term mass to be uses with large publics. Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not physical quantity.
echovar: Talk about the role of time– clock time and real time in the new media landscape.
McLuhan: As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe. By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.
The point of the matter of speed-up by wheel, road, and paper is the extension of power in an ever more homogeneous and uniform space. Thus, the real potential of the Roman technology was not realized until printing had given road and wheel a much greater speed than that of the Roman vortex. Yet the speed-up of the electronic age is as disrupting for literate, lineal, and Western man as the Roman paper routes were for tribal villagers. Our speed-up today is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.
When you hear the word “progress,” you know you are dealing with a nineteenth-century mind. Progress literally stopped with electricity because you now have everything at once. You don’t move on from one thing at a time to the next thing. There is no more history; it’s all here. There isn’t any part of the past that isn’t with us, thanks to electricity. But it’s not thanks to print, it’s not thanks to photography, it’s thanks to electricity. Speed, huge speed-up, means there’s no more past. Now, there is no more history.
echovar: We seem to have a hard time coming to terms with our new media/social landscape. Why is it so difficult to perceive and talk about the environment we inhabit?
McLuhan: It is very hard to get a man in the print belt of culture to recognize that the form of print is itself cutural and deeply biased. The fish knows nothing of water.
Our typical response to disruptive new technology is to recreate the old environment instead of heeding the new opportunities of the new environment. Failure to notice the new opportunities is also failure to understand the new powers.
Nobody yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present.
The environment is always “invisibile” and its contents is always the old technology. The guy who is going to use a superhighway thinks he is the same man who used the dirt road it replaced… He doesn’t notice that the highway has changed his relation to his family and his fellows.
In television (and computers), images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (The fish knows nothing of water)
{McLuhan’s mosaic of answers culled from: Understanding Media, The Book of Probes and On McLuhan: Forward Through the Rearview Mirror.}
As social networks emerge as the dominant framework for message traffic on the Network, the question of “monetization” is repeated again and again like a drum beat. There seems to be an expectation that someone will figure out how to bind the advertising subsidized broadcast/print model on to the message flow and/or the social graph itself. In order to persist, these social networks, at some point, will need to generate free cash flow (capital).
Money (capital) is the currency of the industrial age– in a sense, it is the equivalent of Democritus’s atom.
The atomists held that there are smallest indivisible bodies from which everything else is composed, and that these move about in an infinite void space.
A tribal and feudal hierarchy of the traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any other form of specialist speed-up of exchange and information, will serve to fragment a tribal structure. Similarly, a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The non-specialist electric technology retribalizes.
As we stand along the frontier of a new kind of retribalization, we look at the currency in our pockets and wonder what the exchange rate might be. Celebrities and the rich enter the social networks hoping the dollar capital they’ve accumulated can be exchanged for social capital. The metaphor of “capital” has replaced the metaphor the “atom.”
They (the !Kung) have an intricate system of banking their social relationships and calling on them when times get rough. The system is maintained through gift giving, storytelling and visiting. It works like insurance does in our culture. …The Bushmen used storytelling to keep feelings for distant persons alive. The gifts are their way of telling the receiver, “I’ve held you in my heart.” Over the years, I saw this repeated many, many times. It would turn out that the !Kung spent as much as three months a year visiting “exchange partners,” and this was the key to their survival.
The social relationship was a reminder to the exchange partner that they had a kind of contract to call on each other in times of need. Wiessner believes that the invention of social networks– the storing of relationships for a time when you need them– is what facilitated the eventual migration of humans from Africa to the rest of the world.
Cory Doctorow posited Whuffie as a replacement for capital. In trying to think and speak about the kind of exchange and storing of tribal relationship value, we rely heavily on the language of capital, currency, purchase and banking. These are the atomic elements of our industrial age framework for understanding. The Gesture Bank was the first effort to formalize this set of ideas in the nomenclature of the previous era. These tentative efforts at articulation should be thought of as what McLuhan called a probe. They are by design incomplete and present gaps and interfaces that invite participation. Gillmor moves the ball forward with his exploration of dynamic links. Arrington probes the purchase that retweet will attain. The probe continues its mission.
There’s a poetic enterprise that must be undertaken as well. New metaphors, stories and music must be forged to tell ourselves the story of what is happening to us. Not in the future, but right now. McLuhan was also eloquent on this:
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
The 8th Internet Identity Workshop came to a close last Wednesday afternoon. Although, one could easily make the case the workshop is continuous with the semi-annual events simply marking a swarm of activity that enables the network of both people and technologies to become increasingly connected and interoperable. At any rate, the swarm has temporarily dispersed.
One of my tasks at the workshop was to think through what we mean when we say “identity.” When we talk about “internet identity“– we produce this floating signifier and hurl it in the general direction of a swarm of streams of activity. The signifier in question seems to have landed in a hall of mirrors. However, an infinite loop is not always an indicator of error or system deadlock. Douglas Hofstadter, for one, embraces this hall of mirrors and posits that identity in its essence is a strange loop:
Like Godel’s logical statements, the brain also exists on at least two levels: a deterministic level of atoms and neurons, and a higher level of large mental structures we call symbols. One of these symbols, perhaps the central one which relates to all others in our minds, is the strange loop we call “I”. By the time we reach adulthood, Hofstadter writes, “I” is an endless hall of mirrors, encompassing everything that has ever happened to us, vast numbers of counterfactual replays of important episodes in our lives, invented memories and expectations.
One of the tricks of language is that we can form anything into a proposition–”Identity is ______”. Realism and Surrealism have the same underlying structure, any two things can be stuck together in the form used by a logical proposition. When we speak of internet identity, we’re talking about a family of related issues and technologies– and like any family tree, it has many branches, along with an odd cousin here or there. Yet, we seem to think we’re talking about something in particular.
The task of Internet identity seems to be an attempt to “solve the problem” of the fragmentation of identity as it manifests throughout the Network. We appear to live a fragmentary existence– pieces of you, pieces of me, lodge in various corners of the Network. And these scraps of data exist unconnected, they are potentially network nodes; but currently they don’t have the capacity for connection. The substance of their security model is their quarantine.
If we take a closer look at these fragmented selves scattered across the Network; we see a picture of actions, of gestures– made across that mesh of connections. A book was purchased here, a birthday present for a friend over there, a bank account ledger viewed on this date, and a social network stream sampled at that time. Each of these transactions have to be bound to you in some way– a username and a password on your side, a set of database entries on the server side, and a cookie to tie the two together. Imagine each of these fragments as an organ without a body, functioning with a specific purpose but unconnected to a general organizing principle.
There’s an old joke in the philosophy of identity, it goes like this:
To do is to be
– Socrates
To be is to do
– Sartre
Do be do be do
– Sinatra
We’d like to be able to abstract “identity” from any particular transaction to create a transcendental identity. An identity separate from action, an identity that can be attached to no action or any action. When we speak in this way, we think of the “I” as something that can exist apart from the world, apart from the rough and tumble of our everyday concerns. We posit an “I” that can choose when and if it connects to the world. ‘User-centered’ identity systems tend to operate with this idea of the “I.” This is identity as a technical problem that can be solved by a higher level of indirection.
Before we get too far down that road to an identity abstraction layer, we might ask whether there can be meaningful identity outside of agency. Socrates, Sartre and Sinatra all associate being and doing. If we take a step back and look at the identity artifacts that we’ve collected, they all enable an action. My driver’s license enables me to legally drive a car. It also allows me to prove that I’m over 18 or 21. My credit card allows me to time shift capital from the future to the present. My passport enables international travel. My username and password at Amazon allows me to buy books and other sundry items.
If we continue to unpack this notion, we find that it’s a kind of practical identity we’re talking about. In these transactions and database records, we’re uninterested in who you are as a soul. We’re interested in current accountability and the risk characteristics of a transaction with a particular individual as it projects into future time. In this we stand with Locke’s understanding of identity: he thought the personal identity relation was, in effect, an accountability relation. Agency is accountable agency– meaning responsibility from this “now” moment to the next “now” moment for the collection of fragmentary organs without a body floating around the Network.
OpenID begins its life as a transcendental identity, potentially it exists as an unafiliated (user-centered) identity artifact within an identity meta-system. But as we begin to look at the uptake of OpenID and the usability of its workflow, we find something different. On the revised login screen, OpenID is covered over by the big commercial brands on the Network. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Financial Institutions have provided us identity artifacts based on an action we’ve taken– each of these identity relations have enabled some capability. We have no interest in operating at a new identity abstraction layer, we prefer to use an existing relation as the pivot point for identity across multiple relying parties. OpenID disappears from the conversation and we’re interested in where we can use our Google ID or Twitter ID– we want to know which identity is the most powerful and will allow access to most of the services we generally access from the Network. Google’s identity has purchase in its cloud and the apps built within its cloud. Alliances (or conquests) between clouds will extend the authority of a particular identity. While we started with a “user-centered” system, with this model we seem to have reverted to a version of the feudal identity system we already inhabit.
Let’s return to the corpus of identity, the body that might contain these organs floating within the Network. Is there a possibility that a digital body can be instantiated outside the custody of the dominant clouds? Samuel Weber opened up this question about the constitution of the digital body by exploring the work of Brecht and Benjamin:
I will close by asserting simply that the digitality of the digital, which, as Negroponte as suggestively asserted, replaces atoms by bits, in an analogous manner points us towards the ever-present necessity of reconstituting those bits and pieces into some sort of body or reality, be it virtual. The power of the media today lies both in the technologies of dismemberment (of the analogical) and the possibilities of reconfiguration that ensue. No digitality however will ever fully relieve us of the task of reconfiguring the analogical, a task in which bodies, as the site of citable gestures, pointing elsewhere, will always have a singular role to play. Not the least of these bodies , nor simply metaphorical, is that political body known as the people. Only when the body of the demos is recognized as the analogical alibi of an irreducibly heterogeneous digitality, will the question of digital democracy will be approachable. And it is the history of theatrocracy that will have set the stage for this approach.
The connector that establishes identity (session or statefulness) in the traditional web application model is the cookie. It’s the little bit of text that binds you to the data. At the IIW, Craig Burton posited that the Selector will be the next historical marker in the evolution of the Network. His whitepaper detailing the transition from cookies to selectors is available as a PDF. In addition to a rich form of identity management, the selector and information card model enables something called action cards. And this is where we get back to the corpus of identity, an action card enables a capability on the Network. It’s not transcendental identity– the card, combined with a ruleset and datasource makes a concrete benefit available. In this model, the selector works with our cultural practices for analog identity rather than against them. Identity is a side effect of an enablement– to do and to be (in that order) are linked through the selector. (Sinatra sang ‘do be do be do’ not ‘be do be do be’).
Creating a digital identity without a digital body might have been a reasonable approach prior to the emergence of the Network. Just as we think of freedom as “freedom to” or “freedom from”– identity is identity for some purpose. The action card has opened a pathway, the capacity for a practical connection that will yield a networked identity with a superior security and privacy model. At the moment when the digital body acts, that’s when it requires an identity.
The Edifice of the Bank: Connecting Streams of Capital
On a recent road trip through the wine country of Northern California, I passed through Petaluma, Calistoga and Healdsburg. In the small downtown areas of these cities you’ll find large bank buildings. Sometimes more than one, but often just a single building anchoring the business district. The architecture of the bank is meant to convey stability, tradition, security and trustworthiness. The neo-classical design of these buildings is a strong gesture in favor of the rational and measured over the emotional and spontaneous. Their monumental scale signals that they were constructed with great effort and forethought– and that they will perdure through the vagaries of time.
The bank building in Petaluma is now occupied by an Antiques collective. By the looks of it, it’s been that way for a long time. Even the bank’s vault itself is just another room in which collectibles are displayed. The bank building in Calistoga is now a shoe store. Healdsburg’s bank building houses an art gallery. The symbolic nature of the architecture remains, but it is unconnected to the commercial enterprise now in residence.
There was a time when we brought our paper currency to a bank for safekeeping. The thick metal walls of the safe provided a fortress to protect the excess capital we’d created with our labors. The architecture of banks has changed, they seem to have morphed into a combination of a fast food restaurant and a self-service gas station. Banks no longer function as protectors of capital, their value now is as fast connectors, or routers, of capital through the Network. Capital streams are routed in from various sources; capital streams are routed out to selected payment endpoints. Banks also have a DVR function, time shifting capital streams through loans or investments.
As capital continues its migration to the Network, the need for a physical edifice containing customer facing bank operations begins to disappear. The bank only needs to be securely available in its full capacity wherever the Network is available. Just as you can now withdraw paper money from any commercial endpoint, you will be able to deposit money as well. The Network always tends to move toward a two-way interaction. The first screen of your iPhone is the new prime real estate, the new town square.
Lifestreaming data pours off of the routing transactions we make throughout the day– generally this has been a private gesture stream reserved for our eyes only. The shape and presence of that stream, its user interface if you will, will emerge as a new ecosystem. Rather than a flat record of alpha-numeric transaction routing codes, it will be an dynamic network of active commercial nodes– a stream of information/interaction points.
The thickness of the bank vault is replaced by the connectivity of the Network as a primary metaphor. Banks, telecom companies, internet providers, and credit card companies are all in the same business now. In this new landscape, in what must you trust to select a provider?
A small thought experiment: The video above was made on May 18, 1960 and features Marshall McLuhan. The subject is ‘literary man’ and ‘electronic man.’ It’s a description of the transition from the solitary world of the book to the tribal world of electronic media. Watch the video above and substitute the words “RSS” for “Book” and “Tw*tter” for “Electronic Media.” Think about the message in the characteristics of these two kinds of media.
Of course any reference to McLuhan’s work in public is a risk.
What are we doing when we use RSS? Are we solitary or social? Can we share using the electronic method– by hyperlink? Or do we share like we do with a book, by making a copy, or loaning the book itself. While the RSS feed has a location in the Network’s name space, the item we’d like to share must be xeroxed, put in an envelope and mailed.
When McLuhan talks about his idea that the ‘Medium is the Message‘ he immediately refers to the qualities of space as they relate to our senses. Think about how RSS and Tw*tter manifest in the space of the Network. If the value of a node in a Network is its capacity for connection to other nodes, then what is the value of RSS in light of the social web? In what sense can RSS be said to take advantage of a network effect?
It must have been a strange experience to be Marshall McLuhan in 1960. The world was compelled to listen, held rapt, but unable to grasp his meaning. They knew there was something there, but it seemed continually just over the horizon.
A few thoughts that need to be captured before they return from whence they came. I’ve been re-reading Baudrillard’s Simulations– thinking about it in light of the possibility of Internet Identity. Online identity is already a concept that’s overloaded; it’s become a blank slate on which entrepreneurs, privacy advocates and open source geeks project their hopes, dreams and ambitions. Binding code to the soul to create a hard link posits a kind strong symbolic order that we’ve seen before in the pre-industrial era.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Baudrillard looks at three orders of appearance and examines them with regard to mutations of the law of value:
Counterfeit is the dominant scheme of the “classical” period, from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution
Production is the dominant scheme of the industrial era
Simulation is the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by code.
In the first period an individual (an identity) is assigned a place of rank, or caste, irrevocably– class mobility is non-existent. Baudrillard calls this strong ‘symbolic order’ a ferocious hierarchy. There is a strong binding between an individual and a set of signs. The binding of identity is assigned by the circumstances of birth; Identity and signs are not arbitrary in this schema.
The industrial era puts an end to the problem of uniqueness, or the importance of the point of origin. Signs and objects are produced on a massive scale (two or n identical objects). The key phrase for me was: “In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other. And so, along with the objects, do the men that produce them.” In the industrial schema, you are what you do. Identity is useful with regard to the role it plays in production– workers are interchangeable parts in the machinery of production.
“Leibniz, that mathematical spirit, saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system that counts only the zero and the one, the very image of creation. The unity of the supreme Being, operating by binary function in nothingness, would have sufficed to bring out of it all the beings.”
In the age of simulation, there is no labor involved in producing copies. In a sense, there is no original digital artifact– it is a copy at its origin. When we look to origin, we look to the code of DNA. Identity is linked to the curration of collections of simulations.
Identity is generally thought to be an inward quality of a person. Through this sketch, we can hold it up and look at it as an external binding of a system of signs, a kind of exoskeleton. And as we look at the mutations in the binding point of identity, we can see that it matches the mutations in the instantiations of value.
Forms of Life: Stream Culture, the Finite and the Infinite
Thinking, for a moment, about a particularly difficult human-computer interface problem with a dynamic set of requirements… which I suppose is any problem of this kind. The problem itself points the limitations of representation; as the solution forms, life moves on. The problem can also be expressed in terms of data and databases– the only data that exists in a database is the data that’s entered; and it doesn’t change unless energy is expended to change it. It’s a snapshot of a moment. Certain problems like Search are amenable to employing robots for the gathering of data. But what we think we’re doing when we search for something continues to change.
There’s a little book by James P. Carse that I return to now and again. It’s called Finite and Infinite Games, I’ve reproduced the entire first chapter below:
There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
We play a series of finite and infinite games in the pursuit of the infinite game of continuing the play. The rather large portfolio carved out by interaction and human factors designers plays along this edge– the finitude of the designed object against the infinity of its use within a form of life. William Gibson expressed it simply as: “the street has its own use for things…” The street is a particularly rough game whose object is primarily to continue the play.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the book Philosophical Grammar describes how the fundamentals of an interaction (a finite game) relate to its expression in a system of representation. It’s a succinct story about how the front-end relates to the back-end of a certain kind of web application.
Let us imagine that chess had been invented not as a board game, but as a game to be played with numbers and letters on paper, so that no one had ever imagined a board with 64 squares in connection with it. And now suppose someone made the discovery that the game corresponded exactly to a game which could be played on a board in such and such a way. This discovery would have been a great simplification of the game (people who would earlier have found it too difficult could now play it). But it is clear that this new illustration of the rules of the game would be nothing more than a new, more easily surveyable symbolism, which in other respects would be on the same level as the written game. Compare with this the talk about physics nowadays not working with mechanical models but “only with symbols”.
Imagine what the Network would look like if it were only composed of finite games. Now imagine a Network in real time composed of both finite and infinite games. In building an application for this Network, would you use the same techniques with an infinite game as you would for a finite game? How would they differ?
Here’s another fragment from Carse:
Although the rules of an infinite game change by agreement at any point in the course of play, it does not follow that any rule will do. It is not in this sense that the game is infinite.
The rules are always designed to deal with specific threats to the continuation of play. Infinite players use the rules to regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being forced against their play into the game itself.
The rule-making capacity of infinite players is often challenged by the impingement of powerful boundaries against their play– such as physical exhaustion, or the loss of material resources, or the hostility of nonplayers, or death.
The task is to design rules that will allow the players to continue the game by taking these limits into play– even when death is one of the limits. It is in this sense that the game is infinite.
This is equivalent to saying that no limitations may be imposed against infinite play. Since limits are taken into play, the play itself cannot be limited.
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
There’s a sense in which the hyperlink allows the infinite to be contained within the finite. Or rather, it extends the finite into the infinite. In an open Network, hypertext links to hypertext, which links to hypertext. And by the word “text” we refer to all media types. The “hyper” in “hypertext” means the referent is not present, but directions to its location are ready to hand. (The signs within a language work this way, although sometimes the directions can be ambiguous and aren’t always legible.)
The hyperlink embedded in a static document system originally opened this door. But the static document is giving way to the dynamic document and a series of hypertext fragments populating a stream of information and thought objects moving in real time. Described as a kind of stream culture, our tool set to engage with the possible set of streams is remarkably absent. Somewhere a stream is emitting the information we need to know, but can’t find with our standard set of queries. Instead we gather around to argue whether or not it’s actually a stream we’re standing in, and whether our feet are actually wet.
In thinking about building a tool for the stream culture, will the techniques developed for use in finite games be sufficient? — or will we need to crack open a bottle of new wine?
“Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”
71. Your tired notions of “the market� make our eyes glaze over. We don’t recognize ourselves in your projections—perhaps because we know we’re already elsewhere.
In prehistoric times, there were three networks that locked down the channels of attention. These focused audiences provided a large target to whom they could sell the equipment required to enact the American dream. It was a dream pre-dreamed for us by professionals experienced in the business of dreaming dreams.
When the audiences began wandering off, spending their attention on dreams not listed in the handbook– the new imagery was incorporated. The channel had one direction so it seemed as though the dream manufacturers had tuned in to the spirit of the times. New images appeared in the dreams, although something wasn’t quite right.
When you control a uni-directional channel, you can overplay your hand. But, of course, the channel doesn’t really only go one way. And what can be co-opted by one set of players, can result in subliminal blow back on another frequency.
Tw*tter has distracted a sizable section of the audience from the crumbling remnants of the prehistoric attention focusing machines. The new channels are now being flooded with celebrities to refocus the audience’s attention. The analysts and consultants are conspiring to brew up a formula that can painlessly transport the brands to the new medium with their self-dreamed power and status intact. It doesn’t do to tell the powerful that the basis of their power is dissolving without providing an escape route to the next peak poking through the clouds.
The brands have sent their robots to follow me on Tw*tter. They’ve analyzed my tweets and have determined that I’m a customer– or potentially could be one. They’re listening to my broadcasts and sifting through them to build a profile to create an automated relationship. The polarity of the channel has been reversed. The brand subscribes to me– but I’ve yet to set the terms of that subscription. I can choose to reciprocate and subscribe– or I can block a brand that gets out of hand. The brand has its legacy communications channel that can be correlated with the new channel. They’re hoping this new combination will be more powerful than ever.
We are what we do with our attention.
- John Ciardi
The cognitive surplus of our attention has been held spellbound for decades. Ten years ago, when Doc Searls said “we know we’re already elsewhere,” he paired that with the reaction “our eyes glaze over.” In other words, we withdraw from the world with which we’re confronted. In the ten years since, we now listen to Clay Shirky say, “any dream that ships without a mouse, ships broken.”
