Category: identity

The Time of Pattern Recognition

Published August 28, 2011 by cgerrish

When is it that the pattern is recognized? Was it at that first moment, the moment when the first element emerged from future possibility into present possibility? How might I recognize this element all on its own—without the links that make it part of the larger pattern?

Perhaps it’s the pattern that must first make its impression, such that the newly appearing element has a sensible place to stand. Having the pattern in mind, I wait for the last element to find its place and complete the pattern in its wholeness.

But having seen a pattern only once, I can’t yet say that it’s a pattern. It’s only having seen the pattern at least a second time, that I can look back in retrospect and say, this first instance was the earliest example of the pattern. That’s where it all started.

If we’re looking for the moment the pattern—as pattern, emerges, it’s never with its first appearance, but at a minimum with its second. A third appearance might supply some needed confirmation, a signal that it’s really a pattern and not merely a set of twins.

The time of pattern recognition seems to be backward looking, out toward the horizon of memory. These floating historical elements are gathered up and crystalized into a pattern, a new object for the present moment. And, of course, the pattern itself may become a part of another pattern, and so on.

Once we have the pattern in hand, can we project a future time of patterns? Could a single new event trigger the recognition of a pattern? To create certainty, the event would have to travel with an attached message that said, “save me, I’m always part of this pattern you’re interested in. I have a purpose (telos) that may not be apparent by just looking at me, but this message you’re reading vouches for my higher purpose. I am a part of a significant pattern. Recognize me.” What do we do to the thing when we pre-pattern its existence? In some ways, isn’t this the only way we can possibly recognize anything? A thing that wasn’t part of a pre-existing pattern might simply appear as noise to us.

Rather than demanding certainty, we might assign probabilities. A newly arrived element might have a calculated probability that it belongs to a certain pattern. We might provisionally treat it as though it does, until sufficient evidence accumulates. When the confirming evidence presents itself, we bring out the rubber stamp and certify that it’s a member of some particular pattern. Or perhaps we determine that it’s actually a member of a different pattern, or no recognizable pattern, and so we treat it accordingly.

As we think of the time of the pattern, we also might consider the time of the element. Is the element, once lodged firmly into a pattern, permanently defined by the pattern? Does the pattern exhaust all of the possibility of the element? Could the element change in such a way that it was no longer part of a particular pattern that had claimed it? Is a pattern a fixed constellation, or are the elements brimming with energy and possibility? Could they, at any moment, break off and find another pattern of which to be a part? Could the pattern itself suddenly change its requirements, excluding some heretofore members in good standing, and including others formerly considered outsiders?

We’ve been thinking of patterns as something a human recognizes in the stream of events surrounding it. What happens when the work of recognition is displaced to a machine built to recognize patterns and then take certain actions upon their identification? I might dream up a list of patterns and stuff them in the top of the machine, and then tell the machine very specifically what I’d like to have happen each time a pattern is recognized. The machine automatically churns through large quantities of material and digs up elements that fit into one of the specified patterns.

Imagine that we tell the machine to simply observe the flow of events around us and to detect emergent patterns. In this example, the machine isn’t working with patterns we consciously select, but instead with patterns we actually enact. Certainly this would provide us with a more real set of patterns, and it would save us the trouble of dreaming up patterns and feeding them into the machine. The patterns and their recognition would be entirely automated. This would allow anyone owning such a machine to simply turn it on and let the benefits of automatic pattern recognition accumulate over time.

One can image additional modules for the machine. There may be patterns I enact that I have no awareness of. Some of these patterns may be having a negative effect on my overall well being. A special sub-system that identified these patterns and integrated them back into my conscious awareness might be called psychiatric plugin. Or perhaps, I’m enacting a pattern that could be used to identify me as a target for certain kinds of advertising offers. The cost of the machine could be subsidized by auctioning these pattern matches to the highest bidder. There might be a module that pays me when I enact a certain set of patterns. Of course, the machine couldn’t reveal the substance of the patterns to me as this might encourage me to pretend to enact rather than really enact. We might call this a Skinner-box module.

$fractal_pattern$

If there’s an economics to information flow, it’s based on the production and consumption of patterns of bits. It might not even matter what the pattern consists of, if the cost of the transaction wrapper is sufficiently small, any pattern can serve as an economic vehicle. And once this has occurred, the value of the pattern is separated from its economy. All patterns, regardless of value, can have an economy in this model.

Philip Roth, writing some time ago about the state of literature behind the Iron Curtain, noted that when nothing is allowed, everything becomes important. And conversely, when everything is allowed, nothing is important. Having established that you can buy or sell anything, we find ourselves standing around without a measuring stick, asking whether it’s any good or not.

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Identity is Written by the Victors

Published August 10, 2011 by cgerrish

We think of the phrase “history is written by the victors” as being for the most part historical. When we look back at those other people whose history was written for them, we mourn the injustice of it all. Those whose stories were whispered in the shadows, at the margins of the dominant society, barely register as people at all. We only learn these stories well after the fact. We reconstruct them as we would a dinosaur from a footprint recovered from an archeological dig.

When I think of @IdentityWoman’s dispute with Google and their Google+ platform, I can’t help but notice that identity too, is written by the victors. In the battle for the Network, Google can only be considered one of the victors. On their platform, they can set the rules for what counts as a who. We obscure the hard edges of the platform by calling it a cloud, but it’s a centralized system with a set of hard and fast rules.

The “real” name is the identifier that can be bound to the flesh and blood of a human. It’s the “I” who is responsible for the debts and transactions initiated by the soul that is embodied as a particular being. The “consumer” is another way of describing this “I.” But is the “I” who vouches for the reality of a name, the “I” who then narrates the life of the “I” who lives that life? Is that “I” only the “I” who buys and spends? While the system can try to insist that the “I” use a “real” name, I can only hear the voice of Arthur Rimbaud saying “I is another…”

Extract from the Voyant Letter
Arthur Rimbaud
1871

‘Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who could judge it? The Critics! The Romantics! Who prove so clearly that the singer is so seldom the work, that’s to say the idea sung and intended by the singer.

For I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.

If the old imbeciles hadn’t discovered only the false significance of Self, we wouldn’t have to now sweep away those millions of skeletons which have been piling up the products of their one-eyed intellect since time immemorial, and claiming themselves to be their authors!

In Greece, as I say, verse and lyre took rhythm from Action. Afterwards, music and rhyme are a game, a pastime. The study of the past charms the curious: many of them delight in reviving these antiquities: – that’s up to them. The universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally: men gathered a part of these fruits of the mind: they acted them out, they wrote books by means of them: so it progressed, men not working on themselves, either not being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil-servants – writers: author; creator, poet: that man has never existed!

The first study for the man that wants to be a poet is true complete knowledge of himself: he looks for his soul; examines it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must develop it! That seems simple: a natural development takes place in every brain: so many egoists proclaim themselves authors: there are plenty of others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! – But the soul must be made monstrous: after the fashion of the comprachicos, yes! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.

I say one must be a seer (voyant), make oneself a seer.

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Searching for The Atom of Meaning

Published July 25, 2011 by cgerrish

If we begin by looking for the atom of meaning, we tend toward looking at the word. After all, when there’s something we don’t understand, we isolate the word causing the problem and look it up in the dictionary. If we look a little further, we see the dictionary is filled with a sampling of phrases that expand on and provide context for the word. The meaning is located in the phrases, not in the isolated word. We might look at the dictionary as a book filled with phrases that can be located using words. The atom of meaning turns out to be a molecule.

When we put a single word into a search engine, it can only reply with the context that most people bring to that word. Alternately, if we supply a phrase to the search engine, we’ve given the machine much more to work with. We’ve supplied facets to the search keyword. In 2001, the average number of keywords in a search query was 2.5. Recently, the number has approached 4 words per query. The phrase provides a better return than the word.

As amazing as search engine results can sometimes be, the major search engines seemed to have achieved a level of parity based on implementation of the citation algorithm on a large corpus of data. In a blind taste test of search engines, all branding removed, the top few pages of results tend to look pretty similar. But when you add brand back on to the carbonated and flavored sugar water, people display very strong preferences. While we may think search results can be infinitely improved within the current methodology, it seems we may have come up against a limit. At this point, it’s the brand that convinces us there’s an unlimited frontier ahead of us–even when there’s not. And one can hardly call improved methods for filtering out spam a frontier.

If, like Google, you’ve set a goal of providing answers before the user even asks a question, you can’t get there using legacy methods. Here, we’re presented with a fork in the road. In one direction lies the Semantic web, with its “ontologies” that claim to provide canonical meanings for these words and phrases. Of course, in order to be universal, semantics and “ontologies” must be available to everyone. They haven’t been constructed to provide a competitive advantage in the marketplace. In the other direction we find the real-time stream and online identity systems of social media. Google seems to have placed a bet on the second approach. Fresh ingredients are required to whip up this new dish: at least one additional domain of data, preferably a real-time stream; and an online identity system to tie them together. Correlation of correlation data from multiple pools threaded through a Network identity—that gives you an approach that starts to transform an answer appropriate for someone like you, to an answer appropriate only for you.

When speaking about additional data domains, we should make it clear there are two kinds: the private and the public. In searching for a new corpus of data, Google could simply read your G-mail and the content of your Google docs, correlate them through your identity and then use that information to improve your search results. In fact, when you loaded the search query page, it could be pre-populated with information related to your recent correspondence and work product. They could even make the claim that since it’s only a robot reading the private domain data, this technique should be allowed. After all, The robot is programmed to not to tell the humans what it knows.

Using private data invites a kind of complexity that resides outside the realm of algorithms. The correlation algorithm detects no difference between private and public data, but people are very sensitive to the distinction. As Google has learned, flipping a bit to turn private data into public data has real consequences in the lives of the people who (systems that) generated the data. Thus we see the launch of Google+, the public real-time social stream that Google needs to to move their search product to the next level.

You could look at Google+ as a stand-alone competitor to Facebook and Twitter in the social media space, but that would be looking at things backwards. Google is looking to enhance and protect their primary revenue stream. To do that they need another public data pool to coordinate with their search index. Google’s general product set is starting to focus on this kind of cross data pool correlation. The closure of Google Labs is an additional signal of the narrowing of product efforts to support the primary revenue-producing line of business.

You might ask why Google couldn’t simply partner with another company to get access to an additional pool of data? Google sells targeted advertising space within a search results stream. Basically, that puts them in the same business as Facebook and Twitter. But in addition, Google doesn’t partner well with other firms. On the one hand, they’re too big and on the other, they prefer to do things their way. They’ve created Google versions of all the hardware and software they might need to use. Google has its own mail, document processing, browser, maps, operating systems, laptops, tablets and handsets.

Using this frame to analyze the competitive field you can see how Google has brazenly attacked their competitors at the top of the technology world. By moving in on the primary revenue streams of Apple and Microsoft, they indicated that they’ve built a barrier to entry with search that cannot be breached. Google didn’t think their primary revenue stream could be counter-attacked. That is, until they realized that the quality of search results had stopped improving by noticeable increments. And as the transition from stationary to mobile computing accelerated, the kind of search results they’ve been peddling are becoming less relevant. Failure to launch a successful social network isn’t really an option for Google.

Both Apple and Microsoft have experienced humbling events in their corporate history. They’ve learned they don’t need to be dominant on every frequency. This has allowed both companies find partners with complementary business models to create things they couldn’t do on their own. For the iPhone, Apple partnered with AT&T; and for the forthcoming version 5 devices they’ve created a partnership with Twitter. Microsoft has an investment in, and partnership with, Facebook. It seems clear that Bing will be combined with Facebook’s social graph and real-time status stream to move their search product to the next level. The Skype integration into Facebook is another example of partnership. It’s also likely that rather than trying to replicate Facebook’s social platform in the Enterprise space, Microsoft will simply partner with Facebook to bring a version of their platform inside the firewall.

In his recent talk at the Paley Center for Media, Roger McNamee declared social media over as avenue for new venture investing. He notes that there are fewer than 8 to 10 players that matter, and going forward there will be consolidation rather than expansion. In his opinion, social media isn’t an industry, but potentially, it’s a feature of almost everything. In his view, it’s time to move on to greener pastures.

When the social media music stopped, Apple and Microsoft found partners. Google has had to create a partner from scratch. This is a key moment for Google. Oddly, the company that has lead the charge for the Open Web is the only player going it alone.

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Mind The Gap: You Are As You Are Eaten

Published July 10, 2011 by cgerrish

As happens so often these days, it was a phrase that passed by quickly in the stream of messages, but somehow stuck in the mind. Most of the messages flow by leaving the lightest impression. Other fragments have sharp and jagged edges and they tend to get caught on the walls of thought. They stay there forming an irritant until you can get your hands on them and disentangle them from the mesh. This time, it was a short broadcast from Doc Searls that went like this:

“The time has come to choose your species. If you’re just what you own, you’re veal.”

These phrases linked to longer developments of the idea in the posts: “Let’s All Be Spotted Hawks” and “A Sense Of Bewronging.” In the spotted hawks post, Searls contrasts a video in which people are defined by what they own and the way Walt Whitman defined and talked about himself in his long poem “Song of Myself.” The key bits being Whitman’s expression of the infinite Kantian interior:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then. I contradict myself.
I am large. I contain multitudes.”

I’m not defined by what I own, the inside of me is as big as all of the big, mysterious outdoors. The other post addressed the issue of who can process big data and why that matters when you’re the one emitting the data exhaust. What does it mean when you can no longer read your own tea leaves, but require the mediation services of fortune teller with access to real-time sense making algorithms that operate across multiple big data archives? How can we possibly make an unaided decision? Without computer-based augmentation, our puny human decision is bound to be suboptimal. When we take a close look at our desires, do we see a desire for a machine that knows our desires better than we do? Here’s Searls’s take:

“Sorry, but no. My Web is not their Web. I’m tired of being shown. I’m tired of “experiences” that are “delivered to me. I’m tired of bad guesswork—or any guesswork. I don’t want “scarily accurate” guesses about me and what I might want.

What I crave is independence, and better ways of engaging—ones that are mine and not just theirs. Ones that work across multiple services in consistent ways. Ones that let me change my data with all these services at once, if I want to.

I want liberation from the commercial Web’s two-decade old design flaws. I don’t care how much a company uses first person possessive pronouns on my behalf. They are not me, they do not know me, and I do not want them pretending to be me, or shoving their tentacles into my pockets, or what their robots think is my brain. Enough, already.”

It was the word “veal” that supplied the jagged edge to Searls’s message. In a sense, “veal” is the right answer to a slightly different but related question. If we start with “You are what you own” and move backwards in time, past Walt Whitman. We could end up with “You are what you consume” or as it was more commonly stated “You are what you eat.”

Inevitably, these days, this brought Timothy Morton into the conversation. Specifically his essay “Beautiful Soul Syndrome.” Big data and technology is being applied to a Romantic era conception of the consumer:

Now this mention of plate glass is not accidental, because plate glass is a physical byproduct of a quintessentially Romantic production, the production of the consumerist. No the consumer, but the consumerist, that is, someone who is aware that she or he is a consumer, someone for whom the object of consumption defines their identity, along the lines of that great Romantic phrase, invented once by the gourmand Brillat-Saverin and once again by Feurerbach, “You are what you eat.” Now this phrase implies that the subject is caught in a dialectic of desire with an object with which it is never fully identical, just as Wile E. Coyote never catches up with Roadrunner in the cartoon. If Wile E. Coyote ever did catch Roadrunner, he would eat Roadrunner, at which point Roadrunner would cease to be Roadrunner and would become Wile E. Coyote. There is in effect, then a radical ontological separation between subject and object. And yet and at the same time, consumerism implies a performative identity that can be collapsed into its object, so we can talk of vegetarians, hip hop fans, opium eaters, and so on.

The plate-glass shop window of the Romantic era is transformed in the contemporary commercial Web into the idea of three screens and a cloud. The shop window is now the small screen in your pocket and is called mobile e-commerce. Searls’s use of the word “Veal” implies that when we buy into the value of computerized personalization based on algorithmic interpretations of our data exhaust, we’re abandoning the expansive Whitman-esque view of the self and instead chowing down on the self as a calf constrained in the industrial process of producing veal. The word “veal” is meant to provoke a reaction of disgust. It ties a form of mechanized cruelty to a sanitary, abstracted computerized process.

Again, here’s Timothy Morton on consumerism:

Romantic consumerism can go one step higher than the Kantian aesthetic purposelessness of window-shopping, when it decided to refrain from consumerism as such. This is the attitude of the boycotter, who emerges as a type in the proto-feminism of the Bluestocking circle in the 1780s and 1790s, and which Percy and Mary Shelley, and many others, continued. The specific product boycotted was sugar, which was sentimentally described as the crystallized blood of slaves. By describing it thus, the boycotter turned the object of pleasure into an object of disgust. In order to have good taste you have to know how to feel appropriate disgust, how to turn your nose up at something. So the zero degree performance of taste would be spitting something disgusting out, or vomiting. So the height of good taste performativity is abstaining from sugar, and spice if your are one of the Shelleys, who held correctly that spice was a product of colonialism. (Their vegetarianism was thus not only anti-cruelty, but also anti-flavor.)

Oddly, there seems to be a direct correlation between the quest for sugar and spices to give flavor to our food and the quest to squeeze the flavorful bits and patterns out of the big data emitted by crowds of internet users. But instead of real spices, we have synthetic spices. It’s like the relationship between laughter and the laugh track added to television comedy. The algorithms that have been constituted as our selves try out all the possible permutations in advance and deliver a small selection set for us to consume. The jokes are provably funny, the laughter pre-laughed and all that’s left for us to do is click “ok.”

Morton might call this the automation of consumerism-ism:

In brief, Romantic consumerism is window-shopping, which is hugely enabled by plate glass, or as we now do, browsing on the internet, not consuming anything but wondering what we would be like if we did. Now in the Romantic period this kind of reflexive consumerism was limited to a few avant-garde types: the Romantics themselves. To this extent Wordsworth and De Quincy are only superficially different. Wordsworth figured out that he could stroll forever in the mountains; De Quincy figured out that you didn’t need mountains, if you could consume a drug that gave you the feeling of strolling in the mountains (sublime contemplative calm, and so on). Nowadays we are all De Quinceys, all flaneurs in the shopping mall of life.

Searls’s complaint about the “guess work” of these personalization systems points to the gap between a computer simulation of a consumer who wonders what it would be like to consume this item or that, and the person who wonders. And at the point where the personalizations become “scarily accurate”? we enter the uncanny valley. Who are we when an algorithm consistently makes choices that are more typical of what we might do than we do?

It comes down to whether one thinks that the gap between canned laughter and laughter can be closed, whether the uncanny valley can be crossed and that it’s the promised land that we’ll find on the other side. Or as we loop back to replay the tunes of the Romantics with cloud-based algorithms, will we find ourselves lodged within the thought experiments of Mary Shelley. Her novel “Frankenstein” gives us a different and disturbing glimpse of what may lie on the other side of the uncanny valley.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!–Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.

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