Category: philosophy

The Nature Of The Good And The Neutrality Of The ‘Check-In’ Gesture

Published May 25, 2010 by cgerrish

“Just checking in.” It’s such a neutral phrase. It doesn’t imply any engagement or transaction— the connection has been opened and tested, but no activity is required or expected. From a Unix command line, the ping serves a similar function. The social geo-location services have brought the “check in” into common parlance on the Network. The FourSquare check in can be a neutral communication— no message attached, merely a statement that I’m at such-and-such a location.

The neutrality of the “check in” gesture began to interest me as I started thinking about the explicit gesture of giving a star rating to a restaurant. While I was recently visiting New York City, I decided to try and make use of the Siri and FourSquare apps on my iPhone. I could be observed sitting on a park bench saying ‘good pizza place near here’ into my iPhone and eagerly waiting for Siri to populate a list of restaurant options. I also checked in using FourSquare from several locations around Manhattan. When Siri returned its list of ‘good pizza places’ near me, it used the services of partner web sites that let users rate restaurants and other businesses on a one to five star system. When I asked for good pizza places that translated into the restaurants with the most stars.

The interesting thing about user ratings of businesses by way of the Network is that it’s completely unnecessary for the user to actually visit, or be a customer of, the business. The rating can be entirely fictional. Unless you personally know the reviewer and the context in which the review is proffered— a good, bad or ugly review may be the result of some alternate agenda. There’s no way to determine the authenticity of an unknown, or anonymous, reviewer. Systems like eBay have tried to solve this problem using reputation systems. Newspapers have tried to solve this problem by hiring food critics who have earned the respect of the restaurant ecosystem.

So, while Siri did end up recommending a good Italian restaurant, the Chinese restaurant it recommended was below par. Both restaurants had the same star ratings and number of positive reviews. This got me thinking about the securitization of the networked social gesture. Once a gesture has even a vaguely defined monetary value there’s a motivation to game the system. If more stars equals a higher ranking on Siri’s good pizza place list, then how can a business get more stars? What’s the cost?

I ran across a tweet that summed up the dilemma of wanting a list of ‘good pizza places’ rather than simply ‘pizza places.’ I use FriendFeed as a Twitter client, and while watching the real-time stream I saw an interesting item float by. Tara Hunt retweeted a micro-message from Deanna Zandt referring to a presentation by Randy Farmer at the Web 2.0 conference on Building Web Reputation systems. Deanna’s message read: “If you show ppl their karma, they abuse it.” When reputation is assigned a tradable value, it will be traded. In this case, ‘abuse’ means traded in an unintended market.

Another example of this dilemma cropped up in a story Clay Shirky told at the Gov 2.0 summit about a day care center. The day care center had a problem with parents who arrived late to pick up their children. Wanting to nip the problem in the bud, they instituted a fine for late pick up. What had been a social contract around respecting the value of another person’s time was transformed into a new service with a set price tag. “Late pick up” became a new feature of the day care center, and those parents who could afford it welcomed the flexibility it offered them. Late pick ups tripled, the new feature was selling like hot cakes. Assigning a dollar value to the bad behavior of late pick ups changed the context from one of mutual respect to a payment for service. Interestingly, even when the fines were eliminated, the higher rate of bad behavior continued.

Now let’s tie this back to the neutral gesture of the check in. While in some respect the reporting of geolocation coordinates is a mere statement of fact— there’s also the fact that you’ve chosen to go to the place from which you’ve checked in. There’s a sense in which a neutral check in from a restaurant is a better indicator of its quality than a star rating accompanied by explicit user reviews. If a person in my geo-social network checks in from a restaurant every two weeks, or so, I’d have to assume that they liked the restaurant. The fact that they chose to go there more than once is a valuable piece of information to me. However when game mechanics are assigned to the neutral check in gesture, a separate economics is overlaid. If the game play, rather than the food, provides the motivation for selecting a restaurant, then the signal has been diluted by another agenda.

By binding the check in to the place via the geolocation technology of the device, a dependable, authentic piece of information is produced. Social purchase publishing services, like Blippy, take this to the next level. Members of this network agree to publish a audit trail of their actual purchases. By linking their credit card transaction report in real time to a publishing tool, followers know what a person is actually deciding to purchase. A pattern of purchases would indicate some positive level of satisfaction with a product or service.

The pattern revealed in these examples is that the speech of the agent cannot be trusted. So instead we look to the evidence of the transactions initiated by the agent, and we examine the chain of custody across the wire. A check in, a credit card purchase— these are the authentic raw data from which an algorithm amalgamates some probability of the good. We try to structure the interaction data such that it has the form of a falsifiable proposition. The degree to which a statement of quality can be expressed as an on or off bit defines a machine’s ability to compute with it. A statement that is overdetermined, radiating multiple meanings across multiple contexts doesn’t compute well and results in ambiguous output. The pizza place seems to occupy multiple locations simultaneously across the spectrum of good to bad.

Can speech be rehabilitated as a review gesture? I had a short conversation with Randy Farmer at the recent Internet Identity Workshop (IIW 10) about what he calls the “to: field” in networked communications. The basic idea is that all speech should be directed to some individual or group. A review transmitted to a particular social group acquires the context of the social relations within the group. Outside of that context its value is ambiguous while purporting to be clear. Farmer combines restricted social networks and falsifiable propositions in his post ‘The Cake is a Lie” to get closer to an authentic review gesture and therefore a more trustworthy reputation for a social object.

Moving through this thought experiment one can see the attempt to reduce human behavior and social relations to falsifiable, and therefore computable, statements. Just as a highly complex digital world has been built up out of ones and zeros, the search for a similar fundamental element of The Good is unfolding in laboratories, research centers and start ups across the globe. Capturing the authentic review gesture in a bottle is the new alchemy of the Network.

What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?
Nick Lowe

As I walk through
This wicked world
Searching for light in the darkness of insanity.

I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?

And each time I feel like this inside,
There’s one thing I wanna know:
What’s so funny about peace love & understanding? ohhhh
What’s so funny about peace love & understanding?

And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.

Cause each time I feel it slipping away, just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding? ohhhh
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding?

So where are the strong?
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.

Cause each time I feel it slippin away, just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding? ohhhh
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding? ohhhh
What’s so funny bout peace love & understanding?

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Assemblage: Seeing Difference

Published September 1, 2009 by cgerrish

“Deleuze’s target in Difference and Repetition is the subordination of difference to identity. Normally, difference is conceived of as an empirical relation between two terms each of which have a prior identity of their own (“x is different from y�?). In Deleuze, this primacy is inverted: identity persists, but it is now a secondary principle produced by a prior relation between differentials (dx rather than not-x). Difference is no longer an empirical relation but becomes a transcendental principle that constitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity as such (for example, it is the electric potential difference in a cloud that constitutes the sufficient reason of the phenomenon of lightning). In Deleuze’s ontology, the different is related to the different through difference itself, without any mediation by an identity.”

“Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept “leaf” is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be “leaf”—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form.”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

432.
Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?

Reverse is the movement of Tao.
Yielding is the action of Tao.
Ten thousand things in the universe are created from being.
Being is created from non-being.

On a television program last night, one of the characters was looking at a painting by Constable. He was concentrating particularly on the clouds— as he wanted to learn to paint clouds in the manner of Constable. He turned to the police detective, who was there to question him, and said: “that’s what those clouds looked like on that day.”

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Selectors: The Corpus of Identity

Published May 25, 2009 by cgerrish

gullivers_travels

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.

kidney05-full

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.

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Identity and The Orders of Simulacra

Published May 9, 2009 by cgerrish

exoskeleton_hand

A few thoughts that need to be captured before they return from whence they came. I’ve been re-reading Baudrillard’s Simulations— thinking about it in light of the possibility of Internet Identity. Online identity is already a concept that’s overloaded; it’s become a blank slate on which entrepreneurs, privacy advocates and open source geeks project their hopes, dreams and ambitions. Binding code to the soul to create a hard link posits a kind strong symbolic order that we’ve seen before in the pre-industrial era.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

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Baudrillard looks at three orders of appearance and examines them with regard to mutations of the law of value:

Counterfeit is the dominant scheme of the “classical” period, from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution
Production is the dominant scheme of the industrial era
Simulation is the reigning scheme of the current phase that is controlled by code.

In the first period an individual (an identity) is assigned a place of rank, or caste, irrevocably– class mobility is non-existent. Baudrillard calls this strong ‘symbolic order’ a ferocious hierarchy. There is a strong binding between an individual and a set of signs. The binding of identity is assigned by the circumstances of birth; Identity and signs are not arbitrary in this schema.

The industrial era puts an end to the problem of uniqueness, or the importance of the point of origin. Signs and objects are produced on a massive scale (two or n identical objects). The key phrase for me was: “In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other. And so, along with the objects, do the men that produce them.” In the industrial schema, you are what you do. Identity is useful with regard to the role it plays in production– workers are interchangeable parts in the machinery of production.

“Leibniz, that mathematical spirit, saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system that counts only the zero and the one, the very image of creation. The unity of the supreme Being, operating by binary function in nothingness, would have sufficed to bring out of it all the beings.”

– McLuhan

In the age of simulation, there is no labor involved in producing copies. In a sense, there is no original digital artifact– it is a copy at its origin. When we look to origin, we look to the code of DNA. Identity is linked to the curration of collections of simulations.

Identity is generally thought to be an inward quality of a person. Through this sketch, we can hold it up and look at it as an external binding of a system of signs, a kind of exoskeleton. And as we look at the mutations in the binding point of identity, we can see that it matches the mutations in the instantiations of value.

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