Author: cgerrish

Unemployed philosopher

Delusions of Reference: They’re Not Talking To You

Published March 14, 2011 by cgerrish

It was the most plausible explanation for the banal content of many of the tweets flowing through the real-time stream. As Clay Shirky explained, in his book Here Comes Everybody, it’s simple, they’re not talking to you.

And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing—why would anyone put out such drivel in public. It’s simple. They’re not talking to you.

The confusion comes from the mash-up of personal communication systems and broadcast systems. It’s like mixing up the radio and the telephone. In this new hybrid medium, person-to-person, or person-to-group, messages are generally broadcast, but specifically targeted. While you can hear them if you eavesdrop, they’re not talking to you. Lacking the context, relationship and history, the 140 character revelation about what someone had for lunch appears to be pure drivel. But why should I care? You shouldn’t, they’re not talking to you. You’re just within earshot.

Shirky’s explanation seemed to make the world safe for drivel, even un-targeted drivel is an act of production rather than one of passive consumption. Saying anything at all appears to be better than consuming mass quantities in silence.

In the mash up of radio and telephone, each has taken qualities and capabilities from the other. So while we may now safely disregard random comments about lunch, we still have a creeping feeling that maybe they are talking to us. At least someone, or something, seems to know an awful lot about us. And they say they’ve put together a special message just for us.

Avitel Ronell, writes in The Telephone Book, about technology, schizophrenia and electric speech — The telephone rings and creates a debt of obligation. The sound of the bell has a sense of urgency, it asks you to get up out of your chair and pick up the receiver. Now broadcast systems seem to ring: it’s for you…

…And yet, you’re saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly. Your picking it up means the call has come through. It means more: you’re its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. You don’t know who’s calling or what you are going to called upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order. It is a question of answerability. Who answers the call of the telephone, the call of duty, and accounts for the taxes it appears to impose?

In the new radio-telephone combined medium, the Network is placing a call to you. Is that what that ringing sound is? Is that why we feel an obligation to process the overwhelming torrent of the real-time stream? The meme of floods of information engendering paralysis and unhappiness is at its zenith. Your voice mail is full and the phone keeps ringing. All the lines in the system are ringing, impatiently waiting for you to meet your obligation.

Walking down the candy aisle in a chain drugstore, the selection is immense. Are all the candy bars placing personal calls to me? What do my augmented reality goggles say? What about the people in my follow cloud, can they provide a reference for any of these candy bars? Let me check my personal data locker, have I tried and liked any of these treats before? Do I qualify for any discounts if I check in and register my location? Candy bar selection is just a matter of having the proper filters in place for the real-time stream of information that encloses the world.

In the real-time, always-on Network, there’s a simple test we can take to see if we’re operating normally and optimally in the new environment.

1. Have you ever heard voices or other sounds when no one is around?

2. Have you ever heard voices commenting on what you are thinking or doing?

3. Have you heard two or more voices talking with each other?

4. Has anyone been watching or monitoring you?

5. Have you seen things in the media that seem to refer to you or contain a special message for you?

6. Have you ever felt your thoughts were broadcast so other people could hear them?

7. Have you ever felt thoughts were being put into your head by some outside force?

You might recognize some of these test questions. They’re from the Scale For The Assessment of Positive Symptoms. The scale is designed to assess positive symptoms, principally in schizophrenia. Prior to the advent of the real-time multi-touch ubi-comp Network, positive responses to these questions may have been considered a sign of illness. Now they’re common user experiences for those operating within social network hubs.

In fact, as Jeffery Sconce notes, we may soon be given thorazine if we believe that the world isn’t broadcasting special messages just for us. What was once called a delusion of reference is the new normal.

We walk around with an entourage and the world organizes itself to flatter our egos. We are celebrities of the Network, everyone and everything wants just a moment of our time. They’ve given our thoughts and desires special attention and have a special offer to give us at just the right moment. Because, you know, it’s not advertising if its the right offer at the right time. It’s simply the fulfillment of a desire. And if it’s a desire you didn’t know you had, so much the better. The Network knows what you want before you do. Just because celebrity is now a commodity doesn’t mean that you’re any less special.

One way to manage the vast expanse of this new personalized Network is to apply Sturgeon’s law. The law simply observes that 90% of everything is crap. Even a filter that randomly deleted 90% this new wave of information would probably improve its overall quality. Since we publish everything and edit later, perhaps we’ll just hang up on nine out of ten callers and see what happens. If it’s important, I’m sure they’ll call back.

Of course we could just flip the model on its head, rather than accepting any incoming calls, I could only place outgoing calls to the things that match up with my true desires. Of course, this assumes that I am the author of my own desires, and that I know what I want.

Slavoj Žižek, in an analysis of Donald Rumsfeld, comes up with the crucial observation here:

In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

The name space of the Network seems to put everything on equal footing. Everything has a unique identifier, a phone number you can call. Everything is illuminated, everything is a known known. But in fact, the reason we can’t simply place calls to satisfy our true desires is because our desires are not perfectly illuminated. We are filled with unknown knowns. How do we place a call to fill an unconscious desire? Once we’ve checked everything off our list, how is it that there’s still a longing for something more?

We exercise a form of blindness as we categorize the Id as just another special interest group in the long tail of the Network—another keyword, another search term. While Google’s SafeSearch plays the role of the Super Ego, cordoning off the Id from children and polite company, the Network fills up with our unconscious desires. The calculated self, the simulacra derived from the patterns of our information exhaust, misses the dangerous, passionate undercurrents that flow beneath our rational conversations, negotiations and transactions. Some see the Network as a global mind, but they never speak of, or to, its unconscious.

We’ve passed from delusions of reference to personal phone calls from the Network. Yes, they really are talking to you. But like the alien characters in the science fiction film Forbidden Planet, we misunderestimate our own unconscious (beware the monsters from the id). We’ve gone from the delusional idea that the world is sending us special messages to an augmented reality where the world really is sending us special messages. We’ve undergone a strange normalization to schizophrenic reality. The unconscious writing on the world is replaced with a system printout. And yet there still seems to be a problem with the messages. They only coordinate with the gadget in us—the part that can be fully expressed with a database entry—never taking into account the darkness at the edge of town.

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Tyranny, Stealing Office Supplies and Arbitrage Among Networks

Published March 7, 2011 by cgerrish

Tools give us leverage, they augment our human capabilities. In the corporate business environment, software tools continue to increase productivity at ever growing rates. In many occupations, the employee’s primary tools consist of some type of computer, an office software suite and network connection. Much of the existence of the corporate enterprise is now inscribed in software. And for the most part, the people who manage the enterprise have little or no idea how the software works. They see better productivity and increased visibility into business processes—and that’s sufficient. The hardware and software toolset is owned by the IT department. This group knows about hardware and software, but generally, not about running a business. But they have power over the toolset and its provisioning—in essence the vehicle of augmentation and therefore leveraged productivity.

When tools are working well they disappear, we don’t think about them. Software disappears into our working lives to the extent that it works well. When it breaks or frustrates us, we see the critical dependencies that have formed and how we’ve become embedded in a system of software. The leverage we gain from augmenting our productive capabilities is critical to satisfying the demand for ever more growth from our corporations. One can do what it took many to accomplish in the past, or as it’s sometimes called revenue per unit of headcount. It could be said that for many businesses it’s only by increased leverage through networked software that productivity gains will be achieved.

Before the iPhone opened a port to the Network from anywhere with public WiFi or cellular coverage, I often wanted a personal network overlaying the corporate network. I missed the ability to pivot from one network to the other. This isn’t multitasking, but rather fast switching among different networks, electronic and otherwise. Quarantine to a single network is an unnatural state of affairs—it’s the reduction of the human to gadget or prisoner. Because of the arrival of Network access through the cellular system, the personal network now overlays the professional network—and it’s resulted in an interesting change in the balance of power.

Scott Brinker, in his Marketing Technologist blog, pulled a quote by Dave Codack, vice president of employee technology at TD Bank, from a ComputerWorld story. Codack indicated that he’d coined the phrase “the tyranny of consumerization.”

He called the process a form a tyranny because “the enterprise is not dictating technology with these devices, the revolt is coming from the end user community

Codack’s comment refers to the launch of the iPad2 and the excitement that it caused within his department and in the enterprise in general. The feature set combined with its ease of use makes the very existence of the iPad a challenge to corporate IT departments. These devices provide workers with working leverage from outside of the standard issue corporate toolkit.

Sociology professor Mark Granovetter, in his paper The Impact of Social Structure on Economic Outcomes, talks about the idea of social embeddedness of the economy. This has to do with the fact that economic action lives within the mesh of social networks, culture, politics and religion.

The notion that people often deploy resources from outside the economy to enjoy cost advantages in producing goods and services raises important questions, usually sidestepped in social theory, about how the economy interacts with other social institutions. Such deployment resembles arbitrage in using resources acquired cheaply in one setting for profit in another. As with classic arbitrage, it need not create economic profits for any particular actor, since if all are able to make the same use of non-economic resources, none has any cost advantage over any other. Yet, overall efficiency may then be improved by reducing everyone’s costs and freeing some resources for other users.

… But despite intimate connections between social networks and the modern economy, the two have not merged or become identical. Indeed, norms often develop that limit the merger of sectors. For example, when economic actors buy and sell political influence, threatening to merge political and economic institutions, this is condemned as “corruption.” Such condemnation invokes the norm that political officials are responsible to their constituents rather than to the highest bidder, and that the goals and procedures of the polity are and should be different and separate from those of the economy.

Personal consumer networks now overlay professional business networks, and the arbitrage moves from the personal and public to the corporate. We now steal office supplies from home to use at work. We’re still looking for leverage, for new ways to augment our capabilities, to get more done with less effort. And just as in the example of the merging of political and economic networks, the corporate IT department sees this as an illegitimate exercise of power and an undermining of the chain of command.

Person-to-person video calls used to be the province of science fiction. When we imagined what it would be like, we assumed it would start in the halls of government and the biggest corporations and eventually make its way to the broad consumer markets. If you’ve ever tried to use a corporate video conferencing system you’ll understand that’s not what will happen. While it looks good on paper, it’s never delivered on the promise. Corporate video conferencing is the equivalent of an operator-assisted phone call. The parties must always be connected by a representative of the corporate IT department. Compare this to the simplicity of Apple’s FaceTime—mobile video conferencing built into the device. Select, connect, talk. More office supplies taken from home and leveraged to make business work better.

How can the corporate IT department respond to the Tyranny of Consumerization? It’s too late to lock the personal network out of the corporate network. The castle walls have already been breached. And while the iPad and real-time message streams can be adopted as corporate tools, that’s only part of the arbitrage taking place. If economic growth can only be achieved through increased augmentation and leverage, the power of the personal network will have to be legitimized. But this won’t be a case of the corporate IT fish eating the personal IT fish, something else has come along to eat them both.

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Sense and Nonsense: You are not the User

Published February 28, 2011 by cgerrish

Thought I’d engage in a little dancing about architecture, a pursuit that has been compared by some to writing about music. But to get to architecture, and here I’m really referring to networked computational communications systems on whatever technical stack, I’ll make an initial move toward the user. And in particular, some thoughts about the practice of user-centered design.

Just as with the concept of ‘usability,’ the words ‘user-centered design’ now simply mean ‘good.’ As in, ‘For this project, I’m looking for a usable web site created through a user-centered design process.’ The user is the customer and the customer is always right. You might be given to think that the user is a person, a human being—someone like you and me. But you’d be wrong. Users are constructs of the system of use, they have no existence outside of the system.

The user experience (UX) world is beginning to realize that while it may seem like they’re crafting experience for humans, networked business systems don’t actually care about humans. Frankly, they don’t know what a human is. On the other hand, they have well-defined formulas to compute return on investment. If there’s ever a question between achieving a business goal and a human goal, UX designers are learning the issue will always be decided in favor the the business. In a sense, there’s not even a decision to be made.

Why then, do we hear so much about user-centered design in the world of corporate web site construction? Putting customers first seems like the right thing to do. And, of course, they do it because they care. The question is, what do they care about?

When a system refers to ‘user-centered’ design, it’s really asking for an optimization of what the system defines as a user. On its surface it sounds like a transfer of authority from the system to the user, but ‘user-centered’ simply means that friction in the transaction interface should be reduced to the point that the user’s inputs are within the range of responses the system can accept as parsable. The system isn’t actually able to respond to the what the user, as a human, wants.

In some sense, the goal of user experience (UX) design is to limit the incidents of users speaking nonsense to the system. In the old days, users could simply be rounded up and sent to re-education camps where they would study thick manuals that would instruct them on how to stop speaking nonsense to computer systems. These days the system must provide immediate feedback and a short learning curve to move the user from spouting nonsense to crafting inputs that are parsable by the system. These small corrections to the user’s behavior makes the user a more efficient gadget, as Jaron Lanier might say.

If enough users speak the same nonsense to the system, a pattern is recognized and the system is moved to assign this new nonsense to a well-defined function of the system. But, in general, it’s the system that will train the users to utter the appropriate nonsense. As David Gelernter notes in an interview with Der Spiegel about the Watson system, all human input into computerized systems is nonsense. These patterns of nonsense are assigned meanings within the system of relations of the machine. The system doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t know what words are and doesn’t know what you mean by them.

SPIEGEL: But let’s assume that we start feeding Watson with poetry instead of encyclopedias. In a few years time it might even be able to talk about emotions. Wouldn’t that be a step on the way to at least showing human-like behavior?

Gelernter: Yes. However, the gulf between human-like behavior and human behavior is gigantic. Feeding poetry into Watson as opposed to encyclopedias is not going to do any good. Feed him Keats, and he will read “My heart aches, and a drowsing numbness pains my senses.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? When a poet writes “my heart aches” it’s an image, but it originates in an actual physical feeling. You feel something in the center of your chest. Or take “a drowsing numbness pains my senses”: Watson can’t know what drowsy means because he’s never fallen asleep. He doesn’t know what pain is. He has no purchase on poetry at all. Still, he could win at Jeopardy if the category were English Romantic poets. He would probably even do much better than most human contestants at not only saying Keats wrote this but explaining the references. There’s a lot of data involved in any kind of scholarship or assertion, which a machine can do very well. But it’s a fake.

If computer systems don’t understand humans, how do humans have an influence on systems? The humans who program the systems have a big influence prior to the point where the system is embedded in a business model. The other point of influence is via the system of laws in which the computer system is embedded. For instance, there are laws about security breaches, the use of social security numbers and zip codes.

And so we come to the dancing about systems architecture. The big corporate backend systems that have been exposed to the Network weren’t conceived as occupying a connected space. It was the rise of Java, XML and web services that created the connectors to put the big iron on the Network. The fact of connection changes the system at the margins, but not in its core.

The big web systems like Google, Twitter and Facebook have built big data repositories that allow them to rent out the correlation data. Google and Twitter in particular have simplified user interaction to the point that there’s basically one action—type and submit. But the center of power remains with the data correlation store. That’s what makes the train go. Doctors are beginning to look at the big data available about their patients and wondering whether they’re treating the data or the patient. Of course, the data will survive regardless of the outcome with the patient.

Changing the balance of power may be a long time coming, and as some have noted, it will need to be baked into the architecture from the start. There are a few new approaches that begin to move in a new direction. Jeff Jonas’s G2 rig combines elements of John Poindexter’s original design for Total Information Awareness, the Privacy by Design principles and Jonas’s own previous systems that do sensemaking on big data in real time. Particularly notable is the system’s ability to course correct based on every new piece of data and to hide the human-readable facet of data through anonymizing and encryption. Other architectures move toward establishing the user as a peer (P2P), in particular Searls’s VRM, Windley’s KRL, Bit Torrent and the recently departed Selector.

A true user-centered design practice will probably have to start on the user’s side of the glass, establish the user as a peer, and not be architectural in the way we’re used to. It’s only in this environment that a possible economics will take root. It’s also here that a developer and designer would finally have standing to do user-centered design. We might hope that such a move would happen because it was right, true and good, but this kind of dance may require a platform that isn’t a platform.

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Some Simultaneous Global Standard Time Just Leaked Into My Local Zone

Published February 21, 2011 by cgerrish

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Last week the 53^rd Annual Grammy awards was broadcast live on the CBS Television Network to the central and eastern time zones of the United States. The west coast received a signal delayed by three hours. The live broadcast was woven into a thick stream of tweets on the Network that commented on every aspect of the production. By the time the delayed signal was put onto CBS’s west coast network, the show had been drained of its tension. It played itself out, but the envelopes torn open on stage contained no secrets, the performances arrived pre-parsed.

Winners revealed in real time is the compelling value of awards shows and sporting events. For the most part, professional sports has solved the problem of real time through creating broadcast networks dedicated to sports. Sports fans welcome baseball at breakfast if that’s what time-zone offsets require. It’s only global events like the World Cup or the Olympics that cause serious distortions. When we expect a program to be in prime time—wherever we are—often our only option is to watch a delayed signal. Because there’s a significant amount of gambling on the outcome of sporting events, a delayed signal isn’t really feasible. In fact, a delayed signal is the mechanism of a number of confidence games like the one called the wire.

Time has been standardized and divided up into zones that reflect the spherical quality of our globe and its relative position with regard to the sun at any given moment. Of course, it wasn’t always thus.

I hear the train a comin’
It’s rolling round the bend
And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when,
I’m stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin’ on
But that train keeps a rollin’ on down to San Antone…

The railroad train lies at the bottom of the standardization of time. When I think of trains and time, I’m pulled in many directions. The first thing I think of is the rhythm of the train marking time in popular music. Mystery Train, Casey Jones, City of New Orleans and many other songs incorporate the sound of the train moving down the track. The train often serves the role of the seaport for landlocked regions. Contemporary music pays tribute to the train in Steve Reich’s Different Trains and Philip Glass’s Train/SpaceShip section of Einstein on the Beach. And then in thinking of the physics of time, there’s the role the train plays in Einstein’s explanation of simultaneity in his theory of relativity.

But the standardization of time, in the sense of synchronizing clocks to a specific pulse, was due to the expansion of the network of train tracks and routes. Prior to the arrival of the railroad, time had a number of sources. The regular cycles of day and night, the sun and the moon, sun dials, the crops in the fields, cows in the barn, the delivery of mail, or fruit ripening on a tree—any of these could generate a sense of time, its passage and circularity.

Even with the first arrival of mechanical clocks, there was no sense that they needed to be synchronized beyond a very specific locality. The precise synchronization of time over large geographies was eventually required for the task of optimizing train traffic over massively distributed rail networks. Often the tipping point toward an agreement on synchronization would occur when two trains moving in opposite directions, occupying their own local times, attempted to occupy the same space. For the safety of the trains, the passengers and the network, time had to be synchronized on a singular pulse—and each pulse of time was given a specific name that was incremented and then applied to the next pulse.

Railway time was used to schedule a train’s circulation through the network as well as the times a train was expected to arrive and leave each station. It was here that the local time of a town and railway time came into direct conflict. No town operated on railway time, and this resulted in a lot of missed connections. Some towns would erect two town clocks, one for local time and another for railway time. Another ingenious solution was a single clock with two separate minute hands. Eventually it wasn’t just trains that had to be scheduled for circulation through the train’s network—it was everything. People, food, industry, commerce, fashion, personal mail, news and ideas all began circulating through the rail network. The pulse of the world began to synchronize with the pulse of railway time.

Electric Telegraph,

Tonbridge, October 30th, 1852,
South Eastern Railway.
General Order
GREENWICH MEAN TIME SIGNALS

The Astronomer Royal has erected Shepherd’s Electro-Magnetic Clock at the Royal Observatory, for the transmission of Greenwich Mean Time to distant places.

On and after November 1st, the needle of your Instrument will move to make the letter N precisely at . . o’clock every day.

[Different stations received time-signals at different hours.]

Abstain from using the instrument for Two Minutes before that time. Watch the arrival of the signal; and make a memorandum, for your own information, of the error of your Office Clock.

You are at liberty to allow local Clock and Watch Makers to have Greenwich time, providing such liberty shall not interfere with the Company’s service and the essential privacy of Telegraph Offices, and the business connected there with.

Engineer and Superintendent of Telegraphs

A telegraph network was installed alongside the rail network to send the time pulse out to each of the stations to better facilitate synchronization. Once the telegraph network was joined to the rail network, all the elements of our modern communications environment were in place. At this point, certain kinds of information began to migrate from the rail line to the telegraph line.

Like local time giving way to railway time, we’re seeing another standardization into a singular simultaneous global time. The delayed broadcast of the Grammy Awards was a quaint reminder of the days when television’s prime time could be optimized for distribution into discrete time zones. There used to be little danger that the simultaneity of time would leak through from one zone to the next. These days it’s the global real-time Network that defines the circulatory patterns of digital information and communication. As distance is annihilated and real-time events are piped all over the world—we all see them simultaneously—the real-time network isn’t divided into time zones.

Weather and climate is an analogous system. Local weather is now visibly part of our global climate. We track cold fronts across the world until they arrive at our door step. We watch as global warming leads to higher levels of local precipitation. Our local weather is irretrievably bound into the state of our global climate.

Live television and any other medium that covers the world in real time will have to synchronize their clocks to simultaneous global standard time. Some news programs will make a living as the viewer’s DVR, collecting clips throughout the day, standing ready to review them with you whenever you’re ready. When broadcast channels were scarce, it wasn’t possible to create a channel just for a single story unfolding in real time. Of course, if we look closely, this is what’s actually happening now, we just don’t realize it yet.

In their online publication, the Guardian newspaper has stopped writing about “tonight” and “tomorrow” in their articles because it confuses their online readers who are operating on simultaneous global time. Time no longer has a local presence the writer can point to and say “tonight,”? because the reader could be anywhere on the planet. The local time horizon no longer exists in the public stream of the real-time global network.

Global simultaneous time is continuous, it runs 24/7, just like the cable news networks. In that sense, it’s not a human form of time—after all humans have to sleep at some point. The lights go out and we lose consciousness. We enter the part of our lives where time isn’t portioned out in pre-measured pulses. When time is global, simultaneous and continuous we discover that there’s always too much to follow. Some will sit and stare at the real-time stream trying to take it all in. Others may find the shape of time in some of the old places. It’s time to make dinner. It’s time to mow the lawn. It’s a full moon tonight. Remember when sun spots caused those incredible aurora borealis? Is it time to change the oil in the car? When was the last time we went out for a drink? And what of that overflowing torrent flowing out of global simultaneous time? Perhaps we take on an attitude that was common before voice mail and answering machines, if it’s important, they’ll call back.

STEAMBOATS, VIADUCTS, AND RAILWAYS

By William Wordsworth (1833)

MOTIONS and Means, on land and sea at war

With old poetic feeling, not for this,

Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!

Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar

The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar

To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense

Of future change, that point of vision, whence

May be discovered what in soul ye are.

In spite of all that beauty may disown

In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace

Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time,

Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,

Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown

Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.

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