As social networks emerge as the dominant framework for message traffic on the Network, the question of “monetization” is repeated again and again like a drum beat. There seems to be an expectation that someone will figure out how to bind the advertising subsidized broadcast/print model on to the message flow and/or the social graph itself. In order to persist, these social networks, at some point, will need to generate free cash flow (capital).
Money (capital) is the currency of the industrial age– in a sense, it is the equivalent of Democritus’s atom.
The atomists held that there are smallest indivisible bodies from which everything else is composed, and that these move about in an infinite void space.
A tribal and feudal hierarchy of the traditional kind collapses quickly when it meets any hot medium of the mechanical, uniform, and repetitive kind. The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any other form of specialist speed-up of exchange and information, will serve to fragment a tribal structure. Similarly, a very much greater speed-up, such as occurs with electricity, may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement such as took place with the introduction of radio in Europe, and is now tending to happen as a result of TV in America. Specialist technologies detribalize. The non-specialist electric technology retribalizes.
As we stand along the frontier of a new kind of retribalization, we look at the currency in our pockets and wonder what the exchange rate might be. Celebrities and the rich enter the social networks hoping the dollar capital they’ve accumulated can be exchanged for social capital. The metaphor of “capital” has replaced the metaphor the “atom.”
They (the !Kung) have an intricate system of banking their social relationships and calling on them when times get rough. The system is maintained through gift giving, storytelling and visiting. It works like insurance does in our culture. …The Bushmen used storytelling to keep feelings for distant persons alive. The gifts are their way of telling the receiver, “I’ve held you in my heart.” Over the years, I saw this repeated many, many times. It would turn out that the !Kung spent as much as three months a year visiting “exchange partners,” and this was the key to their survival.
The social relationship was a reminder to the exchange partner that they had a kind of contract to call on each other in times of need. Wiessner believes that the invention of social networks– the storing of relationships for a time when you need them– is what facilitated the eventual migration of humans from Africa to the rest of the world.
Cory Doctorow posited Whuffie as a replacement for capital. In trying to think and speak about the kind of exchange and storing of tribal relationship value, we rely heavily on the language of capital, currency, purchase and banking. These are the atomic elements of our industrial age framework for understanding. The Gesture Bank was the first effort to formalize this set of ideas in the nomenclature of the previous era. These tentative efforts at articulation should be thought of as what McLuhan called a probe. They are by design incomplete and present gaps and interfaces that invite participation. Gillmor moves the ball forward with his exploration of dynamic links. Arrington probes the purchase that retweet will attain. The probe continues its mission.
There’s a poetic enterprise that must be undertaken as well. New metaphors, stories and music must be forged to tell ourselves the story of what is happening to us. Not in the future, but right now. McLuhan was also eloquent on this:
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
The 8th Internet Identity Workshop came to a close last Wednesday afternoon. Although, one could easily make the case the workshop is continuous with the semi-annual events simply marking a swarm of activity that enables the network of both people and technologies to become increasingly connected and interoperable. At any rate, the swarm has temporarily dispersed.
One of my tasks at the workshop was to think through what we mean when we say “identity.” When we talk about “internet identity“– we produce this floating signifier and hurl it in the general direction of a swarm of streams of activity. The signifier in question seems to have landed in a hall of mirrors. However, an infinite loop is not always an indicator of error or system deadlock. Douglas Hofstadter, for one, embraces this hall of mirrors and posits that identity in its essence is a strange loop:
Like Godel’s logical statements, the brain also exists on at least two levels: a deterministic level of atoms and neurons, and a higher level of large mental structures we call symbols. One of these symbols, perhaps the central one which relates to all others in our minds, is the strange loop we call “I”. By the time we reach adulthood, Hofstadter writes, “I” is an endless hall of mirrors, encompassing everything that has ever happened to us, vast numbers of counterfactual replays of important episodes in our lives, invented memories and expectations.
One of the tricks of language is that we can form anything into a proposition–“Identity is ______”. Realism and Surrealism have the same underlying structure, any two things can be stuck together in the form used by a logical proposition. When we speak of internet identity, we’re talking about a family of related issues and technologies– and like any family tree, it has many branches, along with an odd cousin here or there. Yet, we seem to think we’re talking about something in particular.
The task of Internet identity seems to be an attempt to “solve the problem” of the fragmentation of identity as it manifests throughout the Network. We appear to live a fragmentary existence– pieces of you, pieces of me, lodge in various corners of the Network. And these scraps of data exist unconnected, they are potentially network nodes; but currently they don’t have the capacity for connection. The substance of their security model is their quarantine.
If we take a closer look at these fragmented selves scattered across the Network; we see a picture of actions, of gestures— made across that mesh of connections. A book was purchased here, a birthday present for a friend over there, a bank account ledger viewed on this date, and a social network stream sampled at that time. Each of these transactions have to be bound to you in some way– a username and a password on your side, a set of database entries on the server side, and a cookie to tie the two together. Imagine each of these fragments as an organ without a body, functioning with a specific purpose but unconnected to a general organizing principle.
There’s an old joke in the philosophy of identity, it goes like this:
To do is to be
— Socrates
To be is to do
— Sartre
Do be do be do
— Sinatra
We’d like to be able to abstract “identity” from any particular transaction to create a transcendental identity. An identity separate from action, an identity that can be attached to no action or any action. When we speak in this way, we think of the “I” as something that can exist apart from the world, apart from the rough and tumble of our everyday concerns. We posit an “I” that can choose when and if it connects to the world. ‘User-centered’ identity systems tend to operate with this idea of the “I.” This is identity as a technical problem that can be solved by a higher level of indirection.
Before we get too far down that road to an identity abstraction layer, we might ask whether there can be meaningful identity outside of agency. Socrates, Sartre and Sinatra all associate being and doing. If we take a step back and look at the identity artifacts that we’ve collected, they all enable an action. My driver’s license enables me to legally drive a car. It also allows me to prove that I’m over 18 or 21. My credit card allows me to time shift capital from the future to the present. My passport enables international travel. My username and password at Amazon allows me to buy books and other sundry items.
If we continue to unpack this notion, we find that it’s a kind of practical identity we’re talking about. In these transactions and database records, we’re uninterested in who you are as a soul. We’re interested in current accountability and the risk characteristics of a transaction with a particular individual as it projects into future time. In this we stand with Locke’s understanding of identity: he thought the personal identity relation was, in effect, an accountability relation. Agency is accountable agency– meaning responsibility from this “now” moment to the next “now” moment for the collection of fragmentary organs without a body floating around the Network.
OpenID begins its life as a transcendental identity, potentially it exists as an unafiliated (user-centered) identity artifact within an identity meta-system. But as we begin to look at the uptake of OpenID and the usability of its workflow, we find something different. On the revised login screen, OpenID is covered over by the big commercial brands on the Network. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Financial Institutions have provided us identity artifacts based on an action we’ve taken– each of these identity relations have enabled some capability. We have no interest in operating at a new identity abstraction layer, we prefer to use an existing relation as the pivot point for identity across multiple relying parties. OpenID disappears from the conversation and we’re interested in where we can use our Google ID or Twitter ID– we want to know which identity is the most powerful and will allow access to most of the services we generally access from the Network. Google’s identity has purchase in its cloud and the apps built within its cloud. Alliances (or conquests) between clouds will extend the authority of a particular identity. While we started with a “user-centered” system, with this model we seem to have reverted to a version of the feudal identity system we already inhabit.
Let’s return to the corpus of identity, the body that might contain these organs floating within the Network. Is there a possibility that a digital body can be instantiated outside the custody of the dominant clouds? Samuel Weber opened up this question about the constitution of the digital body by exploring the work of Brecht and Benjamin:
I will close by asserting simply that the digitality of the digital, which, as Negroponte as suggestively asserted, replaces atoms by bits, in an analogous manner points us towards the ever-present necessity of reconstituting those bits and pieces into some sort of body or reality, be it virtual. The power of the media today lies both in the technologies of dismemberment (of the analogical) and the possibilities of reconfiguration that ensue. No digitality however will ever fully relieve us of the task of reconfiguring the analogical, a task in which bodies, as the site of citable gestures, pointing elsewhere, will always have a singular role to play. Not the least of these bodies , nor simply metaphorical, is that political body known as the people. Only when the body of the demos is recognized as the analogical alibi of an irreducibly heterogeneous digitality, will the question of digital democracy will be approachable. And it is the history of theatrocracy that will have set the stage for this approach.
The connector that establishes identity (session or statefulness) in the traditional web application model is the cookie. It’s the little bit of text that binds you to the data. At the IIW, Craig Burton posited that the Selector will be the next historical marker in the evolution of the Network. His whitepaper detailing the transition from cookies to selectors is available as a PDF. In addition to a rich form of identity management, the selector and information card model enables something called action cards. And this is where we get back to the corpus of identity, an action card enables a capability on the Network. It’s not transcendental identity– the card, combined with a ruleset and datasource makes a concrete benefit available. In this model, the selector works with our cultural practices for analog identity rather than against them. Identity is a side effect of an enablement– to do and to be (in that order) are linked through the selector. (Sinatra sang ‘do be do be do’ not ‘be do be do be’).
Creating a digital identity without a digital body might have been a reasonable approach prior to the emergence of the Network. Just as we think of freedom as “freedom to” or “freedom from”– identity is identity for some purpose. The action card has opened a pathway, the capacity for a practical connection that will yield a networked identity with a superior security and privacy model. At the moment when the digital body acts, that’s when it requires an identity.
On a recent road trip through the wine country of Northern California, I passed through Petaluma, Calistoga and Healdsburg. In the small downtown areas of these cities you’ll find large bank buildings. Sometimes more than one, but often just a single building anchoring the business district. The architecture of the bank is meant to convey stability, tradition, security and trustworthiness. The neo-classical design of these buildings is a strong gesture in favor of the rational and measured over the emotional and spontaneous. Their monumental scale signals that they were constructed with great effort and forethought– and that they will perdure through the vagaries of time.
The bank building in Petaluma is now occupied by an Antiques collective. By the looks of it, it’s been that way for a long time. Even the bank’s vault itself is just another room in which collectibles are displayed. The bank building in Calistoga is now a shoe store. Healdsburg’s bank building houses an art gallery. The symbolic nature of the architecture remains, but it is unconnected to the commercial enterprise now in residence.
There was a time when we brought our paper currency to a bank for safekeeping. The thick metal walls of the safe provided a fortress to protect the excess capital we’d created with our labors. The architecture of banks has changed, they seem to have morphed into a combination of a fast food restaurant and a self-service gas station. Banks no longer function as protectors of capital, their value now is as fast connectors, or routers, of capital through the Network. Capital streams are routed in from various sources; capital streams are routed out to selected payment endpoints. Banks also have a DVR function, time shifting capital streams through loans or investments.
As capital continues its migration to the Network, the need for a physical edifice containing customer facing bank operations begins to disappear. The bank only needs to be securely available in its full capacity wherever the Network is available. Just as you can now withdraw paper money from any commercial endpoint, you will be able to deposit money as well. The Network always tends to move toward a two-way interaction. The first screen of your iPhone is the new prime real estate, the new town square.
Lifestreaming data pours off of the routing transactions we make throughout the day– generally this has been a private gesture stream reserved for our eyes only. The shape and presence of that stream, its user interface if you will, will emerge as a new ecosystem. Rather than a flat record of alpha-numeric transaction routing codes, it will be an dynamic network of active commercial nodes– a stream of information/interaction points.
The thickness of the bank vault is replaced by the connectivity of the Network as a primary metaphor. Banks, telecom companies, internet providers, and credit card companies are all in the same business now. In this new landscape, in what must you trust to select a provider?
A small thought experiment: The video above was made on May 18, 1960 and features Marshall McLuhan. The subject is ‘literary man’ and ‘electronic man.’ It’s a description of the transition from the solitary world of the book to the tribal world of electronic media. Watch the video above and substitute the words “RSS” for “Book” and “Tw*tter” for “Electronic Media.” Think about the message in the characteristics of these two kinds of media.
Of course any reference to McLuhan’s work in public is a risk.
What are we doing when we use RSS? Are we solitary or social? Can we share using the electronic method– by hyperlink? Or do we share like we do with a book, by making a copy, or loaning the book itself. While the RSS feed has a location in the Network’s name space, the item we’d like to share must be xeroxed, put in an envelope and mailed.
When McLuhan talks about his idea that the ‘Medium is the Message‘ he immediately refers to the qualities of space as they relate to our senses. Think about how RSS and Tw*tter manifest in the space of the Network. If the value of a node in a Network is its capacity for connection to other nodes, then what is the value of RSS in light of the social web? In what sense can RSS be said to take advantage of a network effect?
It must have been a strange experience to be Marshall McLuhan in 1960. The world was compelled to listen, held rapt, but unable to grasp his meaning. They knew there was something there, but it seemed continually just over the horizon.
