Category: tribes

The Web’s Altamont

Published December 7, 2010 by cgerrish

There’s little point in asking whether the leaks are pro or con: the bell has been rung, the horse is out of the barn, the cat is out of the bag. Once the bits in question have been linked to the Network they exist everywhere at once. The inside is out. Its effect is much like that of ice nine.

The event signals a change. The Network is now pressing up against every utterance, every written or encoded communication. The membrane between the Network and our conversations has become paper thin. Here we begin to have conversations as though we live in a surveillance state. We look for the remaining shadows, the out-of-the-way corner, the crevice where we’re out of earshot of the Network.

We had a sense that the Network was a neutral medium, open and free to all comers. No one knew you were a dog, and you didn’t need much at all to publish to the whole web of the world. But there’s a difference between the ability to publish and the absolute transparency implied by the leak. No doubt there’s someone somewhere who feels they have a right to secrets you’ve been keeping to yourself.

Some bits have been flipped, what was confidential within a trusted circle is now in general circulation. The opaque is now transparent. But something more than that happened. The disclosure was an exercise of power, it had a real impact in the world. It was a military exercise, a wall has been breached, a boundary overcome. The force of those bits being flipped was felt like a punch in the face. Power was awakened and has been loosed upon the Network. Active countermeasures are an effective means of defending a breached border. We have been ushered out of the garden, and now are filled with the knowledge of good and evil. Power travels along many paths, not all of them in the bright sunlight.

The concert at Yasgur’s farm near Woodstock was held from August 15 – 18, 1969. About 4 months later, the Altamont Speedway Free Concert was held on December 6th, 1969.

The theory is that the targeted system can be paralyzed by causing trusted internal message circulation to be severely limited. The power of the Network can be used to cause a hardening of the arteries. When no member of the system can trust any other, the system ceases to function unless it embraces absolute transparency. Of course any system that attacks another system with this method is subject to the same treatment. And although we might say this new method of disclosure is without a home in a nation state, that doesn’t mean it lives entirely in the ether of the Network— it has plenty of earthly bounds and connections. The structure of the Network will provide a limited amount of protection, or rather it provides camouflage for both armies. It should be remembered, there’s a substantial difference between winning an argument and winning.

The dilemma is that to preserve a ‘free and open’ Network, we must preserve the possibility of evil. And where we once thought the walled garden was an uncalled for limitation on our freedoms, we may soon be seeking its protection.

New Speedway Boogie
Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia

Now I don’t know but I been told
it’s hard to run with the weight of gold
Other hand I heard it said
it’s just as hard with the weight of lead

Who can deny? Who can deny?
it’s not just a change in style
One step done and another begun
in I wonder how many miles?

Spent a little time on the mountain
Spent a little time on the hill
Things went down we don’t understand
but I think in time we will

Now I don’t know but I been told
in the heat of the sun a man died of cold
Do we keep on coming or stand and wait
with the sun so dark and the hour so late?

You can’t overlook the lack Jack
of any other highway to ride
It’s got no signs or dividing lines
and very few rules to guide

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The Echoing Green

Published November 25, 2010 by cgerrish

Thanksgiving day calls for a little poetry. Here’s one from William Blake’s “The Songs of Innocence”:

William Blake : The Echoing Green

The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies.
The merry bells ring
To welcome the spring.
The skylark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around,
To the bells’ cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the echoing green.

Old John with white hair
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say:
‘Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys,
In our youth-time were seen
On the echoing green.’

Till the little ones weary
No more can be merry;
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mother
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest;
And sport no more seen
On the darkening green.

Allen Ginsberg set Blake’s poem to music, and I often hear Ginsberg’s voice as I sit reading silently.

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Recursion In Movie Reviews: The Social Network

Published October 10, 2010 by cgerrish

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It’s rare that a film outside of the science fiction genre draws reviews from the technology community. However David Fincher’s film The Social Network hits very close to home, and so we saw an outpouring of movie reviews on blogs normally dedicated to the politics and economics of technology. One common thread of these reviews is the opinion that film has failed to capture the reality of the real person, Mark Zuckerberg, his company, Facebook and the larger trend of social media. This from a group who have no trouble accepting that people can dodge laser beams, that explosions in space make loud noises and that space craft should naturally have an aerodynamic design.

It’s almost as though, in the instance of the film, The Social Network, this group of very intelligent people don’t understand what a movie is. The demand that it be a singular and accurate representation of the reality of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is an intriguing re-enactment. In the opening sequence of the film, the Zuckerberg character, played by Jesse Eisenberg, has a rapid-fire Aaron Sorkin style argument with his girlfriend Erica Albright, played by Rooney Mara. Zuckerberg has a singular interpretation of university life that admits no possibility of alternative views. This leads to the break up that sets the whole story in motion. In their reviews, the technology community takes the role of Zuckerberg, with the movie itself taking the role of Erica. The movie is lectured for not adhering to the facts, not conforming to reality, for focusing on the people rather than the technology.

In computer science, things work much better when a object or event has a singular meaning. Two things stand on either side of an equals sign and all is well the the world. This means that, and nothing more. When an excess of meaning spills out of that equation, it’s the cause of bugs, errors and crashes. In the film, the inventor of the platform for the social network, is unable to understand the overdetermined nature of social relations. He doesn’t participate in the network he’s enabled, just as he’s unable to participate in the life of Erica, the girl he’s attracted to.

Non-technologists saw different parallels in the Zuckerberg character. Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, saw Zuckerberg as Alberich in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Alberich forsakes love for a magic ring that gives him access to limitless power. David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times saw Zuckerberg as the Ethan Edwards character in John Ford’s The Searchers. Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, is a rough man who, through violence, creates the possibility of community and family (social life) in the old west. But at the end of the film, Ethan is still filled with violence, and cannot join the community he made possible. He leaves the reunited family to gather round the hearth, as he strides out back into the wild desert.

In an interview about the film, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, talked about how the story is constructed to unfold through conflicting points of view. Other articles have been written about the idea that depending on what perspective you bring to the film, you’ll see the characters in an entirely different light. There’s a conflict of interpretations between the generations, the sexes and the divide between technologist and regular people. And depending on one’s point of view, a conflict of interpretation is a sign of a bug, error or crash— or it’s a well spring of hermeneutic interpretation. Zuckerberg connects to Alberich and to Ethan Edwards, and tells us something about power, community and life on the edges of a frontier. Unlike Ethan Edwards, Zuckerberg makes a gesture toward joining the community he made possible with his friend request to Erica at the end of the film.

It was Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon that introduced us to the complex idea that an event could exist in multiple states through the conflicting stories of the participants. Fincher and Sorkin’s The Social Network tries to reach that multi-valent, overdetermined state. Time will tell whether they’ve managed to make a lasting statement. But it’s perfectly clear that a singular, accurate retelling of the story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook would have been tossed out with yesterday’s newspapers.

The poverty of the technology community is revealed in its inability to understand that the power of movies is not in their technology, but rather in the power of their storytelling.

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The Big Screen, Social Applications and The Battleground of the Living Room

Published September 20, 2010 by cgerrish

If “devices” are the entry point to the Network, and the market is settling in to the three screens and a cloud model, all eyes are now on the big screen. The one that occupies the room in your house that used to be called the “living room.” The pattern for the little screen, the telephone, has been set by the iPhone. The middle sized screen is the process of being split between the laptop and the iPad. But the big screen has resisted the Network, the technology industry is already filled with notable failures in this area. Even so, the battle for the living room is billed as the next big convergence event on the Network.

A screen is connected to the Network when being connected is more valuable than remaining separate. We saw this with personal computers and mobile telephones. Cable television, DVD players and DVRs have increased the amount of possible video content an individual can consume through the big screen to practically infinite proportions. If the Network adds more, infinity + infinity, does it really add value? The proposition behind GoogleTV seems to be the insertion of a search-based navigation scheme over the video/audio content accessible through the big screen.

As with the world wide web, findability through a Yahoo-style index gives way to a search-based random access model. Clearly the tools for browsing the program schedule are in need of improvement. The remote channel changer is a crippled and distorted input device, but adding a QWERTY keyboard and mouse will just make the problem worse. Google has shown that getting in between the user and any possible content she wants to access is a pretty good business model. The injection of search into the living room as a gateway to the user’s video experience creates a new advertising surface at the border of the content that traditionally garners our attention. The whole audience is collected prior to releasing it into any particular show.

Before we continue, it might be worth taking a moment to figure out what’s being fought over. There was a time when television dominated the news and entertainment landscape. Huge amounts of attention were concentrated into the prime time hours. But as Horace Deidu of Asymco points out, the living room isn’t about the devices in the physical space of the living room — it’s about the “…time and attention of the audience. The time spent consuming televised content is what’s at stake.” He further points out that the old monolithic audiences have been thoroughly disrupted and splintered by both cable and the Network. The business model of the living room has always been selling sponsored or subscription video content. But that business has been largely hollowed out, there’s really nothing worth fighting for. If there’s something there, it’ll have to be something new.

Steve Jobs, in a recent presentation, said that Apple had made some changes to AppleTV based on user feedback. Apple’s perspective on the living room is noticeably different from the accepted wisdom. They say that users want Hollywood movies and television shows in HD — and they’d like to pay for them. Users don’t want their television turned into a computer, and they don’t want to manage and sync data on hard drives. In essence it’s the new Apple Channel, the linear television programming schedule of cable television splintered into a random access model at the cost of .99¢ per high-definition show. A solid vote in favor of the stream over the enclosure/download model. And when live real-time streams can be routed through this channel, it’ll represent another fundamental change to the environment.

When we say there are three screens and a cloud, there’s an assumption that the interaction model for all three screens will be very similar. The cloud will stream the same essential computing experience to all three venues. However, Jobs and Apple are saying that the big screen is different than the other two. Sometimes this is described as the difference between “lean in” and “lean back” interactions. But it’s a little more than that: the big screen is big so that it can be social— so that family, friends or business associates can gather around it. The interaction environment encourages social applications rather than personal application software. The big screen isn’t a personal computer, it’s a social computer. This is probably what Marshall McLuhan was thinking about when he called the television experience “tribal.” Rather than changing the character of the big screen experience, Apple is attempting to operate within its established interaction modes.

Switching from one channel to another used to be the basic mode of navigation on the television. The advent of the VCR/DVD player changed that. Suddenly there was a higher level of switching involved in operating a television, from the broadcast/cable input to the playback device input. The cable industry has successfully reabsorbed some aspects of the other devices with DVRs and onDemand viewing. But to watch a DVD from your personal collection, or from Netflix, you’ll still need to change the channel to a new input device. AppleTV also requires the user to change the input channel. And it’s at this level, changing the input channel, that the contours of the battleground come in to focus. The viewer will enable and select the Comcast Channel, the Apple Channel, the Google Channel, the Game Console Channel or the locally attached-device channel. Netflix has an interesting position in all of this, their service is distributed through a number of the non-cable input channels. Netflix collects its subscription directly from the customer, whereas HBO and Showtime bundle their subscriptions into the cable company’s monthly bill. This small difference exposes an interesting asymmetry and may provide a catalyst for change in the market.

Because we’ve carried a lot of assumptions along with us into the big screen network computing space, there hasn’t been a lot of new thought about interaction or what kind of software applications make sense. Perhaps we’re too close to it; old technologies tend to become invisible. In general the software solutions aim to solve the problem of what happens in the time between watching slideshows, videos, television shows and movies (both live stream and onDemand). How does the viewer find things, save things, determine whether something is any good or not. A firm like Apple, one that makes all three of the screen devices, can think about distributing the problem among the devices with a technology like AirPlay. Just as a screen connects to the Network when it’s more valuable to be connected than to be separate, each of the three screens will begin to connect to the others when the value of connection exceeds that of remaining separate.

It should be noted that just as the evolution of the big screen is playing out in living rooms around the world, the same thing will happen in the conference rooms of the enterprise. One can easily see the projected Powerpoint presentation replaced with a presentation streamed directly from an iPad/iPhone via AirPlay to an AppleTV-connected big screen.

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