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Category: digital

Swear to tell the truth

Published June 30, 2008 by cgerrish

I attest

I work in the financial services industry and have securities licenses that require continuing education. I recently completed an annual compliance training and at the end of the web-based session, in order to receive credit, I had to click on a button that said: “I attest.” This is the first time I’d encountered that verb on a button.

A definition of to attest goes like this:

to bear witness to; certify; declare to be correct, true, or genuine; declare the truth of, in words or writing, esp. affirm in an official capacity: to attest the truth of a statement.

John Hancock\'s signature

When I click a button that says “I attest,” I’m not agreeing to a contract as with the clicking of “I agree,” I’m certifying and bearing witness that some set of statements is true. To me, this is something that seemed beyond the capability of the click of a button to convey. Bearing witness seems to suggest physical presence, a meeting of eyes and understanding. When I click a button there’s just me and the computer, the click sends some data across the Network. In this case, the data was an attestation of the truth.

Swearing to tell the truth

Bearing witness has historically required a verbal pledge or a wet signature on a document. The idea of the electronic signature has been around for years with little or no traction. Everyone thinks it’s a good idea, and it would help tremendously with the workflow of business documents, but no one actually owns a usable electronic signature. The question of the signature is really a question about identity and presence. What does it mean to attest to something as an authenticated user of a particular system?

When I attest to the truth of some set of statements, generally I do so before the whole world by making a mark (my signature) that affirms my identity and expresses my claim. Or in the presence of proper authorities, I raise my hand and verbally assert the truth of the statements to follow. Can I do that by clicking on a button on a web page?

As the live web gets closer and closer, as solutions for identity on the Network start to solidify, I can’t imagine that clicking a button that says “I attest” will be sufficient. Bearing witness requires presence and connection in real time. Of course, understanding what it means to speak the truth, to swear to tell the truth, is another matter altogether.

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Mark Lucovsky and Jason Calacanis suggest National Heathcare as a Web Service

Published June 28, 2008 by cgerrish

Red Cross

Shuffling through my notes, I found a post that slipped through the cracks. It references a Gillmor Gang from earlier in the month, Mark Lucovsky of Google was a guest on the show:

The conversation was wide ranging and focused on Lucovsky’s current role at Google and his former role at Microsoft. Jason Calacanis shifted the discussion on to the general ecosystem of online business infrastructure. He’s in the middle of making some decisions about the growth path for Mahalo and sees the cost of these services dropping rapidly.

Calacanis’s political point was that the virtualization of fundamental web infrastructure lowers the cost of business creativity and therefore will be a major economic driver– and may pull us out of this recession. Lucovsky commented that he didn’t see a consolidation of infrastructure providers, but rather an environment where each of the big online companies provided the thing that they do best as an API or service.

In a comment on Microsoft’s Live Mesh, Lucovsky asserted that the complexity of the problem required a seasoned professional like Ray Ozzie. He’s made the requisite number of mistakes to take on a project of that level of difficulty. Lucovsky goes onto say that there’s a difference between this kind of creativity and the frothy sort of Web 2.0 stuff that comes across our screens every day via TechCrunch.

Assuming that business creativity in this ecosystem is not the sole province of the young and the rich, there are a couple of pieces missing. This picks up the thread of a conversation that happened about a year ago about age and business creativity. It was a conversation that unleashed a lot of passion. Here are a couple of links back into that conversation space:

Creativity in any space is tied to risk taking. The young assume immortality and therefore have a high tolerance for risk, time allows for recovery from failure. The rich also can recover from failure through the buffer of money. As we all know, time is money and conversely money is time — and time heals all wounds.

If, as Calacanis asserts, it’s all about ideas in this new era of cloud-based infrastructure, then implicit in that is the notion that the services that sustain the human side of that equation take a similar form. National healthcare and a decent retirement system would reduce certain aspects of risk and open the field to a broader range of individuals: people who’ve lived a little and made the requisite number of mistakes to create at a deeper level.

A new era of a meritocracy of ideas in the technology businesses is deeply intertwined with the political questions that sustain the humans that do that work. In our conversations about the path of technology, these background processes need to brought to the surface– if there is to be change we can believe in.

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Lucia di Lammermoor: Simulcasting Performance

Published June 21, 2008 by cgerrish

Lucia di lammermoor at AT&T Park

It was an usually hot day, but as the sun began to set, thousands gathered at AT&T park for a live simulcast of San Francisco Opera’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor. The opera’s melodramatic story line of competing clans, forbidden love, passion and grand tragedy was perfect for this gigantic venue. The story is filled with big emotions, grand gestures and high drama. I haven’t seen any crowd counts, but they easily could have doubled last year’s attendance of 15,000. 

The crowd at the ballpark was fully engaged in the story, and after particularly thrilling arias heartily applauded and shouted along with the audience at the War Memorial Opera House. Director Graham Vick and Natalie Dessay have created a Lucia that is memorable and sure to become a classic. In the midst of the intense and furious emotions of Edgardo and Enrico, Lucia’s descent into insanity is played in a lower key– the effect is shattering. The sound-image of Dessay, as Lucia, amidst the blood-red heather of the moor, gripped by visions, singing a duet to the haunting sounds of a glass harmonica is unforgettable.

David Gockley’s vision of bringing opera back to the people is a good one, both for SF Opera and our city’s culture. Live opera has become a rare experience, but it’s an art form that has so much to offer to people across the spectrum. Touring Opera companies came to San Francisco along with the gold rush, and San Francisco Opera was founded in 1923 by Gaetano Merola. Our city has a long and celebrated history with Opera.

In the end, it’s about the music, the performances, the drama, the singing. Does the passion and electricity generated up on the stage make the leap across the fourth wall to connect with the audience? Even in that large venue, the knowledge that you’re watching a live performance makes all the difference. On one balmy night in June at the old ballpark, the audience connected via simulcast, and walked away smiling.

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Descartes, Skepticism & the UnNetworked Personal Computer

Published June 15, 2008 by cgerrish


Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes published his Discourse on the Method in 1637. In order to create a solid foundation for the natural sciences, Descartes employed a radical skepticism. He stripped away every piece of the world around him until he was left with his doubt, his thought and a single existence. This was expressed as: “Dubito, cogito ergo sum, I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. The thinking, doubting ego was all that was left as a certainty, a monologue echoing through the darkness. When I visualize that moment I think of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, or of much of his later work, Imagination Dead, Imagine, for example.

It wasn’t until I listened to a Philosophy Bites podcast with Barry Smith on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein that I understood the willful solipsism of Descartes’ approach. Wittgenstein’s critique is simple and beautiful, the tools of doubt and thought are social. Language is social, there is no such thing as a private language. If there can be no private language, Descartes simply became a hermit. He believed he cut every tie, but the knife was borrowed from society. Billie Whitelaw demonstrates, in Beckett’s Not I, even as we are alone in the darkness; we frantically reach out to the world.

The first commercial personal computer wasn’t part of a network. There’s a sense in which it was an instantiation of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. The software product and hardware peripheral ecosystem that developed around it reflected this disconnected state. And while from a technical point of view it was unconnected, from the human side it was always already connected to the Network. The conception that the computer was ever alone, disconnected in the darkness; computing, crunching numbers, writing to a hard disk in its own private Idaho was false at its point of origin. In the beginning, there was sneakernet.

Sneaker Net

The beginning of this train of thought began not with Descartes, but with Microsoft. The first era of Microsoft was created to supply products to the unNetworked computer. If you examine the products that provide the dominant share of revenue, Windows and Office, they don’t require the Network for purchase or use. Microsoft’s thought is deeply rooted in the image of the solitary computer. Wittgenstein once defined philosophy as the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Microsoft is in the middle of a titanic struggle with the bewitchment of its intelligence. If there is to be a Ray Ozzie era of Microsoft, it will signal the shift from the solipsistic computer to the Network, the creation of roots and rhizomes spreading into the Network, and the establishment of revenue streams that are fundamentally of the Network. Microsoft’s current set of competitors are already living off the Network, the brain trust at Microsoft has had a large margin for error, but the door is closing.

There’s a wonderful story that Barry Smith tells about a conversation between Elizabeth Anscombe and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Anscombe says to Wittgenstein that she can understand why people thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Wittgenstein thinks for a moment, and says “and why is that?” Anscombe continues, “Well it looks that way.” Wittgenstein smiles and says, “And how would it look if the Earth revolved around the Sun?”

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