There will be no laughter. No enjoyment of any kind. As Laurie Anderson once said, “sit bolt upright in your straight-backed chair, and button that top button,” the words, images and videos assembled on this page are for the purpose of either commentary, criticism or education. Please keep this in mind as you “read.”
Good evening. Welcome to Difficult Music Hour.
The spot on your dial for that relentless and
impenetrable sound of difficult music [music, music, music]
So sit bolt upright in that straight-backed chair,
button that top button
and get set for some difficult music:
Ooola.
Sequences of letters, especially in the form of typography, have the wonderful quality of hiding their origins. We dip our hand into the cloth bag, pull out some scrabble tiles and fashion words which we string together into original sentences. The audience’s attention is misdirected, and we magically produce language out of thin air. Images and sounds, on the other hand, betray their origins— collaged or remixed, we recognize the original context. It’s a snippet of this song, a clip from that movie, or a fragment of a rather famous photograph.
Even text has taken on the attributes of recorded media. Printed sequences of words become an image of text. An image that can be matched to other images to determine whether a particular flow of words actually manifested ex nihilo or was, in fact, a photocopy of previously recorded material. Mike Masnick asks whether King Lear could be written under current legal conditions— its sources are legendary. As the digital swallows all other media, we can see, with eventualities like Google Wave, text will be recorded as it is typed— with instant universal playback at our finger tips.
I remember you typing that letter to me. I watched as the characters filled in one by one— moving across my screen. You mispelled the word “ambidextrous” and the spell checker caught it in real time. The rhythm of the typing was hypnotic. I play it back often, just to watch the letters dance.
If images, video and sound were to be embedded in the substance of a stream of thought, could the thinker be sued for copyright infringement? And could that stream really be called thought? If there is such a thing as post-literate thought, and it has a beat you can dance to— what would distinguish it from music? But the more important question is: is it really necessary to keep music/video/images out of thought? It’s a question first seriously addressed in the conflicts of Byzantium between the iconoclasts and the iconodules.
Kurt Weibers, in his Marshall McLuhan Remix, takes some of these issues head on. The project is presented in three parts and is well worth your time. Although please keep in mind that these videos are for your edification only, any enjoyment, finger snapping or inappropriate context switching could put Mr. Weibers in legal trouble. So, button your top button, and press to play…
An interesting coda to Mr. Weibers’s production is the revelation of his correspondence with YouTube over the use of samples from a song recorded by the Talking Heads, called “Take Me To The River.” The epilogue [3/3] of the work was blocked by YouTube, and Mr. Weibers disputed the action based on the definitions of fair use in the copyright act. YouTube responded quickly and unblocked the video.
These questions are not simple ones. While it’s true that the remix is the medium of our time, the issues permeating the economics of the transition are very serious. When the value of music was thought to be price one could charge to see a performance, signing a recording contract that paid a small fixed fee for the session seemed to make sense. We have yet to discover the economics of the remix, but discover them we must.
Writing, when it is professional, is constructed like sculpture. Whereas speech, is the medium of real time. What writing is has been formed by the technical practices developed around typography and printing. The idea of real-time writing is a contradiction, it violates the standards of professional production. Professional writing must operate within the limitations of the medium of print.
Imagine a communications medium that could only be produced at best once a day, or once a week or a month. Or in many cases, only one time, ever. And once its product had been produced, the capacity to change it did not exist. The physical qualities of the medium of ink, type and paper dictate the professional qualities of the writing process. The alphabetic sequences to be published must be perfect, or as complete as humanly possible. Ink, painted on type, and pressed onto paper is a bell that can’t be unrung. A mistake is a stain on the permanent record.
From the perspective of the ink-stained wretch, faster news cycles mean a lowering of standards. There isn’t time enough to be professional. And the concept of real time is the equivalent of broadcasting false information. Real time is attacked as having no accountability, no standards, no credibility and no real value. The permanence with which ink is fixed to paper is a metaphor for the assurance with which the signifiers are bound to the signifieds.
The history of real-time writing is also connected to the technical limitations of particular communications media. The telegraph enabled a kind of real-time writing. Messages could be encoded and sent back and forth instantaneously across a wire. Because of its scarcity as a resource, it was rarely used as a medium for casual conversation. Although one can imagine the professional operators of the equipment occasionally sending personal messages to each other in real time. This medium, once it became technologically boring, evolved into instant messenger conversations across the Network.
To understand the epochal change writing is experiencing, one must look to the changes in the quality of the medium through which writing is transmitted. The professionals of the previous medium prefer to move the discussion toward standards and practices, as though hypertext and the Network were another kind of printing press. But this is just a red herring, an attempt to frame the challenges of new medium within the strictures of the old medium.
The moment that the time and cost of changing one letter in an alphabetic sequence to any other letter approached zero, the medium was fundamentally changed. Adding, modifying and deleting text are not only possible, they are fundamental to real-time writing. Hyperlinking and comments open up the space even more. And these changes extend not just to production methods, but to the culture, standards and practices of writing. It is a transvaluation of all values. And of course, the practitioners of the previous medium will claim it’s the absence of values, the abandonment of the commitment to truth.
Real-time writing has the quality of a transparent on-going investigation, new facts can, and do, change the story. It’s a time-bound performance, with a beginning, middle and end. A melody is laid down and explored through improvisations and variations on the theme. Print has no duration, time matters with hypertext on the Network. In the previous regime, information was excluded to meet the deadlines proscribed by the technical requirements of the print medium. If new information arrived after the deadline, that was just too bad. In real-time writing, that same process would be called suppression, and the new information would emerge through other dynamic publication endpoints. The capacity to incorporate new information, and to listen to comments for new perspectives, fundamentally changes what counts as professionalism. Cable television news networks, when they engage in on-going coverage of a live event, operate within the value system of this new medium. Although, they can no longer restrict their inputs to a selection of their own correspondents and a few newswires.
Mastering the live mix (remix) of the real-time performance— of writing the new hyper-text, has many points in common with role of the MC in hip-hop music:
…Rapping, also referred to as MCing or emceeing, is a vocal style in which the performer speaks rhythmically and in rhyme, generally to a beat. Beats are traditionally generated from portions of other songs by a DJ, or sampled from portions of other songs by a producer, though synthesizers, drum machines, and live bands are also used, especially in newer music. Rappers may perform poetry which they have written ahead of time, or improvise rhymes on the spot with or without a beat. Though rap is usually an integral component of hip hop music, DJs sometimes perform and record alone, and many instrumental acts are also defined as hip hop.
As a story plays out across the Network, as new information is uncovered, the inputs are routed through the mixing board of the writer’s keyboard. A writer must now listen to how the whole jam is sounding— the writer is a player down in the groove with other players. As we learn to write through a real-time medium, we’ll need to look to the values, standards and practices of live performance. But these performances aren’t necessarily the traditional one-to-many events unfolding within a proscenium. We’ll need to dig into the performance theories of Richard Schechner and the Happenings of Allan Kaprow; revive the thoughts of Michael Kirby and The Art of Time, and the work of Fluxus. The journey from text on a page to hypertext on the Network is not a small adjustment to a business model; it’s a transvaluation of all values.
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 question is posed regarding the current status of the signifier “Open” as deployed in the dialog about the technological infrastructure that underpins the world around us. “Open” is a battle cry, a sledgehammer, a cause, a stance, a secret weapon, a manifesto, a politics, and a call for transparency. The warriors of “Open” sit around the campfire and tell stories of the historic battle, it was 10 minutes to midnight and “Closed” had almost succeeded in its diabolical mission of total hegemony. Given that small slice of daylight to maneuver, these brave warriors were able to push back the night. No official end of hostilities were ever declared, and so we’ve settled into an era of a restless armistice, eternal vigilance, and the dull gray skies of a cold war.
We like to think in binary oppositions, so “Open” takes its place across the aisle from “Closed.” In its driest form we try to drain the blood and passion from these opposing forces and create logical truth tables appropriately filled in with the tokens “true” and “false.” At the other end of the spectrum, we paint a mask on the face our opposition and call them by the name “enemy.”
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
“Open” and “Closed” are perceived as mutually exclusive possible futures; and any resolution to the conflict would require the elimination of one or the other. From “Open’s” perspective “Closed” must disavow its nature, and pledge allegiance to “Open” and its attendant laws and moral codes. “Closed” learned that the price of total victory was much too high, but to disavow its nature and allow the plunder of its assets was unacceptable as well.
There’s a natural tendency to attempt to preserve the ecosystem of a binary opposition, and an economy and political structure grows up around it to maintain a stable state. But there’s another kind of thing that happens when a thesis and antithesis engage in a dialectical interaction. Hegel called this aufhebung, which is generally translated as sublation.
In Hegel, the term Aufhebung has the apparently contradictory implications of both preserving and changing (the German verb aufheben means both “to cancel” and “to keep”). The tension between these senses suits what Hegel is trying to talk about. In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept. Sublation is the motor by which the dialectic functions.
The background music to this conflict has been the growth of the Network. That music has now pushed itself to the foreground. It’s fundamentally changed both the terrain of the conflict and the meaning of each side. In a network, the question isn’t: are you now, or have you ever been “Closed?” The question is: can you connect to other nodes and exchange information with them? The heterogeneous nature of the Network has already been established– value and the capacity to connect are now inextricably linked.
The emergence of XML has served as a Rosetta Stone for the Network. A story that could have unfolded like the Tower of Babel or the Confusion of Tongues, instead has evolved a mechanism to enable trade between countries of different faith, language and culture. So now one might ask, if “Closed” can connect and trade information with any instance of “Open,” along with any other kind of “Closed” — do those terms retain the same purchase within this new context?
Translation carries with it the risk of misunderstanding– and so, some long for a return to paradise, a time before the confusion of tongues.
…prior to the building of the Tower of Babel, humanity spoke a single language, either identical to or derived from the “Adamic language” spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise. In the confusion of tongues, this language was split into seventy or seventy-two dialects, depending on tradition.
But time is an arrow, and it points toward the future. Despite the evidence of our DVRs, we cannot pause and rewind it. Paradise cannot be regained within the sojourn of this mortal coil.
If thesis and antithesis have formed a synthesis, their common truths reconciled, and a new proposition has emerged: What is the nature of this new networked landscape in which find ourselves? We seem to have stepped across the divide between a Ptolemaic vision to a Copernican one, a decentering has dropped us in a terrain inhabited by a diverse population with many forms of life (or perhaps, simply opened our eyes). We begin to understand how networks are ecosystems, ecosystems are networks, and our future panarchic.
The new questions that surface around comparative value have to do with the establishment and deployment of identity artifacts, the capacity to connect and trade bits of information, the cost, speed and latency of the transaction, the transparency of public channels and the security of private channels. And across this new topography, the filters that can catch the high-order bits in their mesh from a diverse set of streams will fill the social function of what used to be called newspapers.
Coda:
As we learn to fish in these new waters, a new ecosystem will emerge and begin to mature. Some will cast a net across the whole ocean. Others will go fishing where the fish are. Despite the divergent methods, I have an inkling that the size of the catch will be roughly similar.
