A couple of three things came together for me and I wanted to set them down next to each other.
The first was Jon Udell’s keynote at the Kynetx Impact Conference. There was a moment when he was talking about a meeting in local government where the agenda was managed using a web-based tool. Udell talked about wanting to be able to hyperlink to agenda items, he had a blog post that was relevant to one of the issues under discussion. The idea was that a citizen attending the meeting, in person or virtually, should be able to link those two things together, and that the link should be discoverable by anyone via some kind of search. And while the linking of these two things would be useful in terms of reference, if the link simply pulled Udell’s blog post into the agenda at the relevant spot, that might be even more useful.
The reason this kind of thing probably won’t happen is the local government doesn’t want to be held responsible for things a citizen may choose to attach to their agenda items. A whole raft of legal issues are stirred up by this kind of mixing. However, while the two streams of data can’t be literally mixed, they can be virtually mixed by the user. Udell was looking at this agenda and mixing in his own blog post, creating a mental overlay. A technology like Kynetx allows the presentation of a literal overlay and could provide access to this remix to a whole group of people interested in this kind of interaction with the agenda of the meeting.
The Network provides the kind of environment where two things can be entirely separate and yet completely mixed at the same time. And the mixing together can be located in a personal or group overlay that avoids the issues of liability that the local government was concerned about.
The second item was Apple’s acquisition of Siri. While I never made the connection before, the kind of interaction that Siri gives users is very similar to what Kynetx is doing. I can ask Siri with a voice command for the best pizza places around here. Siri orchestrates a number of data services to provide me with a list of local pizza joints. Siri collects identity information on an as needed basis to provide better results. While Kynetx is a platform for assembling these kinds of orchestrations, Siri is a roll up of our most common activities – find me the best mexican restaurant; where is this movie playing? What’s the weather like in New York City; Is my flight on time?
While I haven’t hooked my credit card up to Siri yet, it does have that capability so that a transaction can be taken all the way to completion. On the other hand, Apple’s iTunes has had my credit card information for years. Once the deal closes, Siri will have acquired my credit card.
Phil Windley, in his presentation to the Kynetx conference, discussed an application that could be triggered by walking in to, or checking in to, a Borders bookstore. The Kynetx app would push a message to me telling me that an item on my Amazon wishlist was available for purchase in the store. It strikes me that Siri might do the same thing by orchestrating my personal context data, my Amazon wishlist, which I’ve registered with it, a voice-based FourSquare check-in, and Border’s local inventory information.
The third and last item is Facebook’s open graph protocol. This is an attempt to use Facebook’s distribution power through it’s massive social graph to add “semantic” metadata to the public internet name space. This is an interesting example of the idea that the closed can include the open, but the open can’t include the closed. Jon Udell’s story about local government and blog posts has the same structure. The private network can include the public network, whereas the reverse isn’t true if each is to maintain its integrity.
While there’s a large potential for mischief in letting everyone make up their own metadata, it provides more fodder for the business of indexing, filtering and validating of data/metadata. Determining the authority of metadata is the same as determining the authority of data. The ‘meta’ guarantees syntax, but not semantics or value.
By setting these events next to each other, you can begin to see that to include both private and public data in an algorithm, you’ll have to do so from the stance of the personal and private. It makes me think that privacy isn’t dead, it’s the engine of the next evolution of the Network.
The Network has been infused with humanity, with every aspect of human character— the bright possibilities and the tragic flaws.
On May 29, 1919, Arthur Stanley Eddington took some photographs of a total eclipse of the sun. Eddington had gone to Africa to conduct an experiment that might determine whether Newton’s or Einstein’s model was closer to physical reality.
During the eclipse, he took pictures of the stars in the region around the Sun. According to the theory of general relativity, stars with light rays that passed near the Sun would appear to have been slightly shifted because their light had been curved by its gravitational field. This effect is noticeable only during eclipses, since otherwise the Sun’s brightness obscures the affected stars. Eddington showed that Newtonian gravitation could be interpreted to predict half the shift predicted by Einstein.
My understanding of the physics is rather shallow, my interest is more in the metaphorics— in how the word-pictures we use to describe and think about the universe changed based on a photograph. Where the universe lined up nicely on a grid before the photograph, afterwards, space became curvaceous. Mass and gravity bent the space that light passed through. Assumed constants moved into the category of relativity.
The Network also appears to be composed of a neutral grid, its name space, through which passes what we generically call payloads of “content.” Each location has a unique identifier; the only requirement for adding a location is that its name not already be in use. You can’t stand where someone is already standing unless you displace them. No central authority examines the suitability of the node’s payload prior to its addition to the Network.
The universe of these location names is expanding at an accelerating rate. The number of addresses on the Network quickly outstripped our ability to both put them into a curated index and use, or even understand, that index. Search engines put as much of the Network as they can spider into the index and then use software algorithms to a determine a priority order of the contents of the index based on keyword queries. The search engine itself attempts to be a neutral medium through with the nodes of the Network are prioritized based on user query input.
Regardless of the query asked, the method of deriving the list of prioritized results is the same. The method and production cost for each query is identical. This kind of equal handling of Network nodes with regard to user queries is the search engine equivalent of freedom, opportunity and meritocracy for those adding and updating nodes on the Network. The algorithms operate without prejudice.
The differential value of the queries and prioritized link lists is derived through an auction process. The cost of producing each query/result set is the same—it is a commodity—but the price of buying advertising is determined by the intensity of the advertiser’s desire. The economics of the Network requires that we develop strategies for versioning digital commodities and enable pricing systems linked to desire rather than cost of production. Our discussions about “Free” have to do with cost-based pricing for digital information goods. However, it’s by overlaying a map of our desires on to the digital commodity that we start to see the contours, the curvaceousness of this space, the segments where versioning can occur.
We’ve posited that the search algorithm treats all nodes on the Network equally. And more and more, we take the Network to be a medium that can fully represent human life. In fact, through various augmented reality applications, human reality and the Network are sometimes combined into a synthetic blend (medium and message). Implicitly we also seem to be asserting a kind of isomorphism between human life and the Network. For instance, sometimes we’ll say that on the Network, we “publish everything, and filter later.” The gist of this aphorism is that where there are economics of low-or-no-cost production, there’s no need to filter for quality in advance of production and transfer to the Network. Everything can be re-produced on the Network and then sorted out later. But when we use the word “everything,” do we really mean everything?
The neutral medium of the Network allows us to disregard the payload of contents. Everything is equivalent. A comparison could be made to the medium of language— anything can be expressed. But as the Network becomes more social, we begin to see the shape of our society emerge within the graph of nodes. Sigmund Freud, in his 1913 book entitled Totem and Taboo, looks at the markers that we place on the border of what is considered socially acceptable behavior. Ostensibly, the book examines the resemblances between the mental life of savages and neurotics. (You’ll need to disregard the archaic attitudes regarding non-European cultures)
We should certainly not expect that the sexual life of these poor, naked cannibals would be moral in our sense or that their sexual instincts would be subjected to any great degree of restriction. Yet we find that they set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity the aim of avoiding incestuous sexual relations. Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.
Freud is pointing to the idea that social organization, while certainly containing positive gestures, reserves its use of laws, restrictions and mores for the negative gesture. The structure of societal organization to a large extent rests on what is excluded, what is not allowed. He finds this common characteristic in otherwise very diverse socio-cultural groups. Totems and taboos bend and structure the space that our culture passes through.
In the safesearch filters employed by search engines we can see the ego, id and superego play out their roles. When we search for transgressive content, we remove all filtering. But presumably, we do, as a member of a society, filter everything before we re-produce it on the Network. Our “unfiltered” content payloads are pre-filtered through our social contract. Part of the uncomfortableness we have with the Network is that once transgressive material is embodied in the Network, the algorithms disregard any difference between the social and the anti-social. A boundary that is plainly visible to the human— and is in fact a structural component of its identity and society, is invisible to the machine. Every node on the Network is processed identically through the algorithm.
This issue has also been raised in discussions about the possibility of artificial intelligence. In his book Mirror Worlds, David Gelernter discusses a key difference between human memory and machine memory:
Well for one thing, certain memories make you feel good. The original experience included a “feeling good” sensation, and so the tape has “feel good” recorded on it, and when you recall the memory— you feel good. And likewise, one reason you choose (or unconsciously decide) not to recall certain memories is that they have “feel bad” recorded on them, and so remembering them makes you feel bad.
But obviously, the software version of remembering has no emotional compass. To some extent, that’s good: Software won’t suppress, repress or forget some illuminating case because (say) it made a complete fool of itself when the case was first presented. Objectivity is powerful.
Objectivity is very powerful. Part of that power lies in not being subject to personal foibles and follies with regard to the handling, sorting, connecting and prioritizing of data. The dark side of that power is that the objectivity of the algorithm is not subject to social prohibitions either. They simply don’t register. To some extent technology views society and culture as a form of exception processing, a hack grafted on to the system. As the Network is enculturated, we are faced with the stark visibility of terrorism, perversity, criminality, and prejudice. On the Network, everything is just one click away. Transgression isn’t hidden in the darkness. On the Network, the light has not yet been divided from the darkness. In its neutrality there is a sort of flatness, a lack of dimensionality and perspective. There’s no chiaroscuro to provide a sense of volume, emotion, limit and mystery.
And finally here’s the link back to the starting point of this exploration. A kind of libertarian connection has been made between the neutral quality of the medium of the Network and our experience of freedom in a democratic republic. The machine-like disregard for human mores and cultural practices is held up as virtue and example for human behavior. No limits can be imposed on the payloads attached to any node of the Network. The libertarian view might be stated that the fewest number of limitations should be applied to payloads while still maintaining some semblance of society. Freud is instructive here: our society is fundamentally defined by what we exclude, by what we leave out, and by what we push out. While our society is more and more inclusive, everything is not included. Mass and gravity bend the space that light passes through.
The major debates on the Network seem to line up with the contours of this pattern. China excludes Google and Google excludes China. Pornographic applications are banished from Apple’s AppStore. Android excludes nothing. Closed is excluded by Open, Open is included by Closed. Spam wants to be included, users want to exclude spam. Anonymous commenters and trolls should be excluded. Facebook must decide what the limits of speech are within the confines of its domain. The open internet excludes nothing. Facebook has excluded the wrong thing. The open internet has a right to make your trade secrets visible. As any node on the Network becomes a potential node in Facebook’s social/semantic graph, are there nodes that should be taboo? How do we build a civil society within the neutral medium of the Network? Can a society exist in which nothing is excluded?
In the early days of the Network, it was owned and occupied by technologists and scientists. The rest of humanity was excluded. As the Network absorbs new tribes and a broader array of participants, its character and its social contract has changed. It’s a signal of a power shift, a dramatic change in the landscape. And if you happen to be standing at the crossroads of technology and the humanities, you might have a pretty good view of where we’re going.
There are natural and abstract surfaces onto which we overlay our stories. The sphere that we paint water and land masses on represents the natural shape of our small planet. For other endeavors we designate abstract work surfaces. One early example of this idea is the organizational scheme of Diderot’s encyclopedia. While subjects were laid out in alphabetical order, the book also contained conceptual maps and cross-linking to super-impose the natural shape of the history of ideas on to the abstract system of organization. This blending of the abstract and natural (GUI and NUI) that informed Diderot’s project is a theme that has returned as we build out the mobile interaction points of the Network.
The alphabet is ingrained at such an early age through the use of song, that we often feel it’s an artifact of the natural world. The fact that so many of us can recite a randomly ordered set of 26 symbols is a triumph of education and culture. The neutrality and static nature of the alphabetic sequence allows us to organize and find things across a community with little or no coordination. Although, the static nature of the alphabetic sequence is rather unforgiving. For instance, my book and CD collections are both alphabetically ordered. Or at least they were at one point in time. And although I understand why things get into a muddle, it doesn’t help me find the book that’s just flashed through my mind as I look at the shelves in front of me.
These maps, both natural and abstract, that we use to navigate our way through the world are becoming more and more significant. Especially as our ability to represent the physical world through the Network becomes more high definition. Just as with the alphabet, we’ll tend to forget that the map is not the territory. Borges’s story about the futility of a map scaled to exactly fit the territory has an important message for our digital age:
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Google spiders the Network for its search index and then presents algorithmically-processed search engine results pages in response to user queries. The larger map is not in plain view, just the slice that we request. It seems as though for any question we can imagine, Google will have some kind of an answer. The map appears to cover the territory point for point. Even the ragged edge of the real-time stream is framed in to the prioritized list of responses. The myth of completeness covers over the gap between the map and the territory, and the even the other maps and communications modes we might use within the territory.
If a tree falls in a forest in China, and there’s not a Google search result page linking to the event, does it make a sound?
Reading and writing to the maps of the Network has long been facilitated by Graphical User Interfaces. While the abstract metaphors of the GUI will never go away entirely, we’re seeing a new set of Natural User Interfaces emerge. Designing a better, simpler and clearer abstraction is giving way to finding the gestures that map to the natural contours of our everyday lived experience.
Natural interaction with high-definition representations via the Network has opened the door to what David Gelernter calls Mirror Worlds. Just as the fixed nature of the alphabet provided us with a set of coordinates on which to hang our collections of things, geo-coordinates will provide a similar framework for mirror worlds. Both Google and Microsoft have pasted together a complete base map of our entire planet from satellite photography and vector graphic drawings.
As with the search index, the base map provides us with a snapshot in time; we see the most recent pictures. The base is a series of photographs, not a real-time video stream. Even at this early phase of the mirror world we can see an overlay of real-time data and messages projected on to the base map. While we might expect the base map to move along a curve toward higher and higher fidelity and definition, it seems more likely that the valuable detail will find its home in the overlays.
The base map will be a canvas, or a skeleton, on which we will overlay meanings, views, opinions, transaction opportunities and conversations. While there will be a temptation to somehow ‘get it right.’ To present a compete and accurate representation of the territory— mapping each point, and each data point, with absolute fidelity and accuracy, it’s here where we wander off into Borges’s land of scientific exactitude and the library of babel. The base map only needs to be good enough to give us a reference point to hang our collections of things on. And, of course, realism is only one mode of expression.
The creation of overlays is the province of the mashup, the mixing of two distinct data sources in real time. Maps and twitter, apartment locations and craigslist, potholes and San Francisco streets, a place/time and photographs of a special event— all these implementations have demonstrated that geo-mashups are possible and happening continuously. But as this sea of real-time data washes across the surface of the map, we’d like a seat at the mixing board. A URL that pre-mixes two or more data sets has it’s use, but it’s a static implementation.
The framework of selectors and action cards may have the most promise here. Action cards are already engineered to work as overlays to base maps of any kind. When mixing and matching geo-location coordinates on the base map with streams of data, including identity-specific private data, is just a matter of throwing action cards from your selector on to a base map, you’ll have a natural user interface to a mirror world. And while the gap between the map and the territory will remain, as Baudrillard might say, the map begins to become a kind of territory of its own.
The transposition of the metaphor of spatial relationships to the realm of computing gave us purchase, a foothold, on things and how they might be organized. Our personal computers were envisioned as very large file cabinets. The size of the cabinet was proportional to the size of the hard drive attached to the CPU. As the primary connection for storage systems moved to remote network-attached systems, the cabinet has grown to an enormous size, but the organizational metaphor remains unchanged.
While capacities seem almost limitless in the “consumer” computing space, in the enterprise there are limits everywhere. The corporate enterprise’s limitation on the size of these file drawers has resulted in the phenomena of email jail. A stream of email is constantly coming in to your mail reader, but the size of your mailbox is finite. Once the box is full, the stream is shut off until you create space in your mailbox by deleting a sufficient number of messages.
It may have been Gmail that introduced the idea that nothing needs to be deleted ever. The stream of mail comes in: we look at it, ignore it, act on it, search for it, view it in threads— but we don’t need to manage the number of messages in a mailbox of limited dimensions. A stream flows into a larger river and then into the ocean. The world of social media has given us a variety of new streams with which to work. Oddly, none of them have the basic toolset that the Gmail stream offered right out of the gate.
As we begin to think about how to work with streams, we flip from metaphors of spatial organization to temporal schemes. The stream doesn’t empty into an ocean, but rather always remains an event embedded in the stream of time. The control set we seek comes from the world of digital audio/video. Jump to a point in the time line, fast forward, rewind, zoom in, give me the alternate audio channel, jump to a live real-time view. Largely, the metaphors we use in these thought experiments have been checked out from the library of physics. We move from space to time, but perhaps we really move to the space-time continuum. It’s here that the term fabric is introduced to describe the medium within which we swim.
At this point I’d to change the focus slightly and look at the fabric of the transaction surface of the Network. While cash money is generally acceptable at every transaction point in our daily lives, the Network doesn’t have an analog. Credit/Debit cards and PayPal seem to be the primary transaction networks through which goods can be purchased or money can change hands. If you were to imagine the set of points in physical and Network space where electronic monetary transactions are possible, you’d have a map with a rather sparse distribution.
While money itself is an abstraction of commodity, in its physical form, as bills and coins, it has not been able to make the leap from our lived physical world to our lived Network world. Cash almost defines the quality of fungibility. And while digital bits can be re-arranged to represent seemingly any form within computational space, there is no digital representation of cash that maintains its fungibility.
The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of their values, or to represent their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal, and quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money.
It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realized human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time.
-Karl Marx, Capital
Bank of America’s Keep The Change program introduced an interesting innovation into the transaction point. While it’s been lauded for its use of behavioral economics theory in spurring its customers to save more, the program’s technical implementation suggests some interesting possibilities. In general, this program has expanded the fabric of the transaction surface for routing funds to savings by giving every purchase point the ability to apply a portion of the transaction total to a designated savings account. The number of nodes on this private network through which savings can occur is radically expanded.
While currently Keep The Change limits the funds routed through this method to the difference between the purchase price and the next whole dollar, there’s no reason that any amount couldn’t be routed through this same channel. Just as we can now use ATM/Debit cards to withdraw cash along with a purchase, this program already has the primitives in place to allow deposits anywhere a card is accepted. The limitation on this model is that transactions can only occur at official nodes of the private network.
The App Store application on the iPhone has had a similar effect in expanding the fabric of the transaction surface. Historically software was purchased in shrink-wrapped boxes from a retail store or via catalog mail order. Software delivered over the wire to the desktop expanded the transaction surface tremendously. The iPhone App Store radically expands the surface, it delivers software and completes transactions wirelessly to any location with signal. Two friends meet over coffee at a local cafe. They discuss their favorite new apps. While they talk, each purchases and downloads the new apps that tickled their fancy. And an “App” might be a game, a word processor, a social media client, a news media client, a book, a song, a musical instrument, a video of a baseball game or an application that let’s them broadcast live video and audio commentary from their table in the cafe.
Jack Dorsey’s new venture Square has the potential to build on the iPhone’s platform. While the App Store has defined the model for delivering digital goods and services, and is now being widely copied, Square potentially turns every iPhone into a node on the private credit card payment network. As a purchaser, it provides enhanced identity artifacts, and as a seller it simplifies access to the private electronic payment routing system. And while the specified accounts may start with credit cards, there’s no reason that regular bank or brokerage accounts, telecom accounts, cable television, or bandwidth accounts couldn’t be endpoints in the future. There’s a real potential for another radical expansion of the transaction surface.
Each of these innovations reduces the amount of friction on the transaction surface. The obstacles between the desire and the object of desire are removed. By activating the iPhone/iPod Touch as both a product delivery/consumption channel and a node on the electronic payment routing system, the fabric of the transaction surface gains 78 million new nodes. The small screen that you carry with you replaces the fixed screen wired to a specific location. And as this surface unfolds into the world around us, more and more transactions will be routed via electronic message. This stream of data has been largely represented as a transaction log, an audit trail. Services like Square will allow the attachment of a micro-message and photo/audio/video file to each side of the transaction and ultimately the ability to route an item to the private side of your stream management client. Need the receipt, the warranty, the assembly instructions, the nearest service center? It’s all there, in your lifestream.
