Word comes down from the Network, @cShirky foretells the death of syndication. Of course, it was not the first time those words were spoken. The economics of syndication require the distribution of physical product in physical space. Syndicators buy a territory in which to distribute a story whose origin is elsewhere.
Visibility on the Network is near nil. You can’t see the copy next to the copy next to the copy. You can’t see the original among the copies. Except when you search for a news story. Then you can see there are thousands of copies of the same story on every major news site on the Network. What looks like value in the context of a single news site, looks like a commodity space-filler when viewed from across the breadth of the Network.
What appears to be an economy of abundance, is actually an economy of redundancy. Original reporting is rare, copies of originals are common. Here’s where we need to listen to Jeff Jonas on counting.
If you think you have five customers moving slowly on an unremarkable vector when in fact these five customers are all the same person – you might be missing the fact this customer is moving on a specific vector with meaningful velocity (e.g., becoming a much better or worse customer).
Why do I speak of this?  Well, I get a chance to see some of the most advanced sensemaking systems being created and tested around the world.  And the way I determine (in about five minutes) whether they have half-a-chance of ever delivering high value is this quick and dirty assessment: Can they count discrete objects?
Imagine, if you will, a search appliance that can count discrete objects. And not just count discrete objects, but tracks their trajectory through time. Original reporting hits the Network in real time and becomes visible through a search (track). Syndication is weighted as a retweet; Syndicators are weighted by reputation; but the creativity of original reporting would weigh the most. The point of origin regains significance.
Imagine how our experience of the contours of the Network would change. The digital makes the copy almost free, counting with a sense of trajectory, revises our sense of the economics. The scarcity of originality suddenly comes into view.
As the Network continues the process of condensing into discreet clouds, different environmental capabilities emerge and borderlines are drawn between the kingdoms. Sovereignty takes the form of providing a scalable computing infrastructure on which immigrants can homestead. The cloud kingdom must reliably provide arable land, keep the borders between the lands of neighbors and protect the cloud from external invaders. Clouds are not democracies, the Prince is not an elected position— his domain is seized and created out of the aether of the Network.
We seem to be entering the Hobbesian era of the Network, we seek the protection and benefits offered by the Sovereign clouds. As the hinterlands begin to fill up with brigands and pirates, safe transport cannot be guaranteed on the open roads of the Network. Within the borders of the cloud’s sovereign territory, the administrative privileges of the Prince allow for the removal of elements that may disturb the established order.
Once a kingdom has been firmly established, it begins to gather around it the accoutrement of culture. It engages a court architect, scientist, composer, scribe, and jester. It’s through the work of these artisans that the legacy of the kingdom will live in the hearts and minds of its subjects.
In a classical kingdom, the border is defined as the perimeter of the physical lands of the kingdom. As the size of the kingdom grows, the border becomes more difficult to defend. The recent incident with a leak of digital data puts the dilemma of the modern Prince into stark relief. As every node within the cloud potentially stands at the border, the allegiance of the sovereign’s subjects becomes an issue of the greatest importance.
Real-time computing enables the cloud kingdom to offer a privately public message stream that narrates the current state of the kingdom. The subjects of the kingdom tell the kingdom how it is in the present moment through permanent marks in a messaging system. This information is used to the benefit of the kingdom and its subjects. The real-time message stream also creates the possibility of a real-time streaming leak. The admonition to not put into an email any comments that you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing printed in your morning newspaper, will put a damper on the value of a real-time conversation.
Some would contend that the border cannot be defended, and that only a form of absolutely public transparency is suitable for use within a Network-connected digital medium. This would imply that any broader, more expressive form of speech must occur outside of the digital context. To counter this, the Prince must argue that, within his cloud, the power of his security measures will guarantee the border and the private communications of his subjects.
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
During last Sunday morning’s visit to the newsstand, I noticed a story listed on the cover of the most recent issue of the Atlantic magazine. It was the promise of finding out How The Web is Killing Truth that caused me to add the publication to my stack of Sunday morning purchases.
Sometime later I noticed a tweet by Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, that pointed to the same article online. The crux of the article concerns what happens when the crowd votes for the truth or falsity of a web page containing a news story. In particular, it deals with acts of collusion by right-wing operatives with regard to certain stories as they flowed through the Digg platform.
Digg depends on the authenticity and sincerity of its community to ‘digg’ or ‘bury’ stories based on their genuine thoughts and feelings. If the community were to break into ideological sub-communities that acted in concert to bury certain stories based on ideological principles, then the output of the platform could be systematically distorted.
For a time Digg withdrew the ‘bury’ button in response to this dilemma. The ‘bury’ button provided a tool for political activists to swiftboat opinion pieces and stories from the opposing ideological camp. Rather than a genuine expression of the crowd, the platform’s output was filtered through the prism of two ideologies fighting for shelf space at the top of a prioritized list.
Eric Schmidt’s interest in the story may have reflected his understanding of how this kind of user behavior might affect PageRank, especially as it begins to add a real-time/social component. Larry Page’s search algorithm is based on the idea that the number and quality of citations attached to a particular page should determine its rank in a list of search results. The predecessor to this concept was the reputation accorded to scholars whose academic papers were widely cited within the literature of a topic.
Google is already filtering link spam from its algorithm with varying levels of success. But if we examine the contents of the circulatory system of email, we can see where this is going. Through the use of scripted automated systems, it’s estimated that from 90 to 95% of all email can be described as spam. This process of filtering defines an interesting boundary within the flood of new content pouring into the Network. In a sense, Google must determine what is an authentic expression versus what is inauthentic. In the real-time social media world, it was thought that by switching from keyword-hyperlinks-to -pages to people-as-public-authors-of-short-hypertext-messages that users could escape spam (inauthentic hyperlinkages) through the unfollow. But once you venture outside a directed social graph into the world of keywords, topics, hashtags, ratings, comments and news you’re back into the world of entities (people or robots) you don’t know saying things that may or may not be sincere.
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
1:9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
1:10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good
And so Google saw the light, that it was good: and Google divided the light from the darkness. The good links that shed light from the bad links that dissemble and confuse. Of course, this is a very digital way of looking at language— a statement is either true or false. And with the exception of the spammers themselves, I think we can all agree that email, blog, twitter and any other kind of spam belongs on the other side of the line, over there in the darkness. When we say something is spam, we mean that it has no relevance to us and yet we, or our software agents, must process it. There is something false about spam.
The purely ideological gesture on a rating service is indistinguishable from the authentic gesture if one doesn’t have knowledge of the meta-game that is being played. Should meta-gamers be filtered from the mix? Ulterior motives dilute the data and may skew the results away from the authentic and genuine responses of the crowd/community. The question here is how do you know when someone is playing a different game than the one at hand? Especially if part of the meta-game is to appear to be playing the same game as everyone else.
The limits of my language are the limits of my world
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
When we limit our language to the purely sincere and genuine, what kind of language are we speaking? What kind of world are we spinning? Is it a world without ambiguity? Without jokes? Without irony, sarcasm or a deadpan delivery? Suddenly our world resembles the security checkpoint at the airport, no jokes please. Answer all questions sincerely and directly. Step this way into the scanning machine. Certainly when we’re trying to get somewhere quickly, we don’t want jokes and irony, we want straightforward and clear directions. It’s life as the crow flies.
There’s a sense in which human language reduces itself to fit into the cramped quarters of the machine’s language. Recently, a man named Paul Chambers lost an appeal in the United Kingdom over a hyperbolic comment he published on Twitter. Frustrated that the aiport was closed down and that he would not be able to visit a friend in Northern Ireland, Mr. Chambers threatened to blow up the airport unless they got it together. A routine Twitter search by an airport official turned up the tweet and it was submitted to the proper authorities. Mr. Chambers was convicted and has lost his appeal. Mr. Chambers was not being literal when he wrote and published that tweet. He was expressing his anger through the use of hyperbolic language. A hashtag protest has emerged under than keyword #iamspartacus. When Mr. Chambers’s supporters reproduce his original tweet word-for-word, how do they stand with respect to the law? If they add a hashtag, an LOL, or a 😉 emoticon does that tell the legal machine that the speaker is not offering a logical proposition in the form of a declarative sentence?
Imagine a filter that designated as nonsense all spam, ambiguity, irony, hyperbole, sarcasm, metaphor, metonymy, and punning. The sense we’d be left with would be expression of direct literal representation. This is unequivocally represents that. Google’s search algorithm has benefitted from the fact that, generally speaking, people don’t ironically hyperlink. But as the language of the Network becomes more real-time, more a medium through which people converse— the full range of language will come into play.
This learning, or re-learning, of what is possible with language gives us a sense of the difference between being a speaker of a language and an automated manipulator of symbols. It’s this difference that is making the giants of the Internet dance.
