Category: desire

Screen and Cloud: Wrong Way Round

Published April 10, 2011 by cgerrish

Swiveling my flat screen television around and exposing the back side shows the physical limitations that currently define the new television networks. There used to be three major networks dominating the thirteen available VHF over-the-air transmission channels. The other channels were filled with snow and white noise. When the primary distribution method migrated from broadcast signal to coaxial cable, the boundaries defining a television network began to change.

When we turn the television wrong way round, we see the huge variety of potential connectors. A closer look reveals that many of them are vestigial appendages awaiting nostalgic connections from outmoded devices. It’s the HDMI connections that define the number high-definition inputs that can flow onto the big screen. Some sets have only two, but three, four and even 5 HDMI inputs are becoming much more common as the number of Networks competing for slots continues to grow. If the model of ‘three screens and a cloud’ still holds, television is evolving into the big screen, and the HDMI connector is the new channel selector.

The slots in my rig are claimed by Comcast’s high-definition cable and DVR device, a local DVD Player and an Apple TV2. The nostalgic connectors are taken by a rarely used VCR and a cable that takes input when attached to a Flip cam. I can easily imagine other households where a gaming console would claim a slot. Apple has taken a slot that might have been occupied by Google, Roku, Hulu or Microsoft. These are the players forming the new big screen networks. One would expect a fair amount of M&A activity in this area as the networks stabilize their positions.

Tracing the trajectory of these lines, one can speculate on the evolution of the big screen device. The growth of HDMI will start to crowd out the nostalgic connectors. Channel switching, at the HDMI network level, will turn into a primary capability of remote controls. Navigation within the networks will become customized and a point of competition. The concept of associating big screen programming with a numbered channel will begin to fade away.

Live and recorded programming will make up the two top level categories. Recorded programming will be findable through search and preference algorithms. Live programming will become visible through tracking a social message stream (listening for events) and appointment calendars. Some of the HDMI connected devices will start to migrate into the body of the big screens, these will be the dominant new networks.

We take the On/Off power switch on the big screen for granted. Turn the television off! I’ve turned into a couch potato, turn the damn thing off! At the other end of the spectrum—If you’re good, we’ll turn the television on for a few hours tonight. The power switch can turn the television into an inert piece of furniture. Soon the power switch won’t be a part of the remote control. Just as with desktop, tablet and mobile computing devices, the big screen will be always on—it will either be in an active, screensaver or sleep mode.

A key battle among the new networks will center on owning the period of time that the television used to be powered off. Screensavers will evolve to show weather, stock market data, sports scores, news photography and many other kinds of ambient information streams. The dormant big screen will always be ready and waiting for streams pushed to it from mobile and tablet devices via AirPlay. One can also easily imagine transferring personal video calls to the big screen for group participation. Push messages will also make their way to the big screen, perhaps to remind you that your favorite show is on in ten minutes or that the baseball team you root for just won their game with a two-out, two-strike hit in the ninth inning.

In the story of three, or now four screens, and a cloud, we tend to focus on the screens. After all it’s the screens that provide us with something to look at. But as these new networks begin to form, it may be instructive to turn the cloud the wrong way round and look at the wiring coming out of the back.

The cloud looks like a large factory. If we followed the wiring diagram from the big screen, out through the HDMI connector to the AppleTV device, over the WIFI (802.11n) signal to the home router, through the wires of the internet, in most cases we’d end up at one of these industrial cloud complexes. This is what the other end of the real-time network looks like.

Jon Stokes, writing for Ars Technica, in his analysis of Facebook’s move to open source their datacenters, makes an interesting observation:

The idea that Google and Facebook are somehow competing with one another in the datacenter space may sound odd at first, given that most people are used to thinking of Google somewhat vaguely as an ad-supported software company. But as we’re fond of pointing out, Google is essentially a maker of very capital-intensive, full-custom, warehouse-scale computers—a “hardware company,” if you will. It monetizes those datacenters by keeping as many users as possible connected to them, and by serving ads to those users. To make this strategy work, it has to hire lots of software people, who can write the Internet-scale apps (search, mainly) that keep users connected and viewing ads. Since the price of Google ads is set largely independently of Google’s cost of delivery, every dollar of efficiency that Google can wring out of one of these large computers is a dollar that goes to the bottom line. Facebook now finds itself in a similar business.

While Stokes’s topic is competition at the level of datacenters, he exposes the fundamentals of the network business model. Cloud factories are monetized by keeping as many users as possible connected to them and serving ads to those users. Each user click on an ad causes a dollar to flow through the system. A click that rents a recorded television show does the same thing.

The cloud exists to deliver popular internet-scale programming—it’s the distribution business. Just a lot of big factories nestled into the landscape, nothing much to see, it’s content that’s king. Keep your eyes on the screen. But as Stokes points out, it’s the job of “content” to keep the number of users connected to the datacenter growing so that clicks can be turned into dollars.

Once the industrial cloud complex is running at optimal capacity, the balance of power shifts. What was once a couple of kids putting on a show in the barn, or four mop tops singing love songs for teenagers, becomes big business. Really big business. It’s also the moment when the Internet business turns into show business. The dream factory is reborn. And the film and pop stars are still working for the studio—haven’t we seen this movie before?

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Delusions of Reference: They’re Not Talking To You

Published March 14, 2011 by cgerrish

It was the most plausible explanation for the banal content of many of the tweets flowing through the real-time stream. As Clay Shirky explained, in his book Here Comes Everybody, it’s simple, they’re not talking to you.

And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing—why would anyone put out such drivel in public. It’s simple. They’re not talking to you.

The confusion comes from the mash-up of personal communication systems and broadcast systems. It’s like mixing up the radio and the telephone. In this new hybrid medium, person-to-person, or person-to-group, messages are generally broadcast, but specifically targeted. While you can hear them if you eavesdrop, they’re not talking to you. Lacking the context, relationship and history, the 140 character revelation about what someone had for lunch appears to be pure drivel. But why should I care? You shouldn’t, they’re not talking to you. You’re just within earshot.

Shirky’s explanation seemed to make the world safe for drivel, even un-targeted drivel is an act of production rather than one of passive consumption. Saying anything at all appears to be better than consuming mass quantities in silence.

In the mash up of radio and telephone, each has taken qualities and capabilities from the other. So while we may now safely disregard random comments about lunch, we still have a creeping feeling that maybe they are talking to us. At least someone, or something, seems to know an awful lot about us. And they say they’ve put together a special message just for us.

Avitel Ronell, writes in The Telephone Book, about technology, schizophrenia and electric speech — The telephone rings and creates a debt of obligation. The sound of the bell has a sense of urgency, it asks you to get up out of your chair and pick up the receiver. Now broadcast systems seem to ring: it’s for you…

…And yet, you’re saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly. Your picking it up means the call has come through. It means more: you’re its beneficiary, rising to meet its demand, to pay a debt. You don’t know who’s calling or what you are going to called upon to do, and still, you are lending your ear, giving something up, receiving an order. It is a question of answerability. Who answers the call of the telephone, the call of duty, and accounts for the taxes it appears to impose?

In the new radio-telephone combined medium, the Network is placing a call to you. Is that what that ringing sound is? Is that why we feel an obligation to process the overwhelming torrent of the real-time stream? The meme of floods of information engendering paralysis and unhappiness is at its zenith. Your voice mail is full and the phone keeps ringing. All the lines in the system are ringing, impatiently waiting for you to meet your obligation.

Walking down the candy aisle in a chain drugstore, the selection is immense. Are all the candy bars placing personal calls to me? What do my augmented reality goggles say? What about the people in my follow cloud, can they provide a reference for any of these candy bars? Let me check my personal data locker, have I tried and liked any of these treats before? Do I qualify for any discounts if I check in and register my location? Candy bar selection is just a matter of having the proper filters in place for the real-time stream of information that encloses the world.

In the real-time, always-on Network, there’s a simple test we can take to see if we’re operating normally and optimally in the new environment.

1. Have you ever heard voices or other sounds when no one is around?

2. Have you ever heard voices commenting on what you are thinking or doing?

3. Have you heard two or more voices talking with each other?

4. Has anyone been watching or monitoring you?

5. Have you seen things in the media that seem to refer to you or contain a special message for you?

6. Have you ever felt your thoughts were broadcast so other people could hear them?

7. Have you ever felt thoughts were being put into your head by some outside force?

You might recognize some of these test questions. They’re from the Scale For The Assessment of Positive Symptoms. The scale is designed to assess positive symptoms, principally in schizophrenia. Prior to the advent of the real-time multi-touch ubi-comp Network, positive responses to these questions may have been considered a sign of illness. Now they’re common user experiences for those operating within social network hubs.

In fact, as Jeffery Sconce notes, we may soon be given thorazine if we believe that the world isn’t broadcasting special messages just for us. What was once called a delusion of reference is the new normal.

We walk around with an entourage and the world organizes itself to flatter our egos. We are celebrities of the Network, everyone and everything wants just a moment of our time. They’ve given our thoughts and desires special attention and have a special offer to give us at just the right moment. Because, you know, it’s not advertising if its the right offer at the right time. It’s simply the fulfillment of a desire. And if it’s a desire you didn’t know you had, so much the better. The Network knows what you want before you do. Just because celebrity is now a commodity doesn’t mean that you’re any less special.

One way to manage the vast expanse of this new personalized Network is to apply Sturgeon’s law. The law simply observes that 90% of everything is crap. Even a filter that randomly deleted 90% this new wave of information would probably improve its overall quality. Since we publish everything and edit later, perhaps we’ll just hang up on nine out of ten callers and see what happens. If it’s important, I’m sure they’ll call back.

Of course we could just flip the model on its head, rather than accepting any incoming calls, I could only place outgoing calls to the things that match up with my true desires. Of course, this assumes that I am the author of my own desires, and that I know what I want.

Slavoj Žižek, in an analysis of Donald Rumsfeld, comes up with the crucial observation here:

In March 2003, Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

The name space of the Network seems to put everything on equal footing. Everything has a unique identifier, a phone number you can call. Everything is illuminated, everything is a known known. But in fact, the reason we can’t simply place calls to satisfy our true desires is because our desires are not perfectly illuminated. We are filled with unknown knowns. How do we place a call to fill an unconscious desire? Once we’ve checked everything off our list, how is it that there’s still a longing for something more?

We exercise a form of blindness as we categorize the Id as just another special interest group in the long tail of the Network—another keyword, another search term. While Google’s SafeSearch plays the role of the Super Ego, cordoning off the Id from children and polite company, the Network fills up with our unconscious desires. The calculated self, the simulacra derived from the patterns of our information exhaust, misses the dangerous, passionate undercurrents that flow beneath our rational conversations, negotiations and transactions. Some see the Network as a global mind, but they never speak of, or to, its unconscious.

We’ve passed from delusions of reference to personal phone calls from the Network. Yes, they really are talking to you. But like the alien characters in the science fiction film Forbidden Planet, we misunderestimate our own unconscious (beware the monsters from the id). We’ve gone from the delusional idea that the world is sending us special messages to an augmented reality where the world really is sending us special messages. We’ve undergone a strange normalization to schizophrenic reality. The unconscious writing on the world is replaced with a system printout. And yet there still seems to be a problem with the messages. They only coordinate with the gadget in us—the part that can be fully expressed with a database entry—never taking into account the darkness at the edge of town.

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The Demons Aren’t In The Machine

Published February 14, 2011 by cgerrish

At university I took an intensive class on the work of Sigmund Freud by a professor who had worked training psychoanalysts. The reading list immersed us in Freud’s writings from the letters to Fliess, the early work with Breuer, all of the case studies and well into The Interpretation of Dreams and beyond. We would take anonymous dream reports from clinic patients and attempt to interpret them without context, using the tools we’d acquired. It was surprising how often we got quite close to the crux of the psychological issue.

Since that time I’ve always felt uncomfortable in casual social situations where someone wants to tell me about this strange dream they had last night. Of course, it’s always intended in an “isn’t this weird, dreams are inexplicable” kind-of-way. I’m always careful to keep my gaze on the surface of the words, while ignoring the demons screeching and flying out of the depths of the metaphors. Two distinct realities seem to occupy the same space along different dimensions.

I was reminded of this eruption of id among the everyday while reading Adam Gopnik’s assessment of the recent spate of books on the inevitability of the Network and the end of the book in a recent New Yorker magazine. The essay is called, The Information, How the Internet gets inside us. Gopnik seems to expose something completely invisible to the technorati. To those who see the Network as an entirely rational space of organized and accessible information, the demons flying round the room occupy a withdrawn dimension.

Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interaction with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.

When we talk about the Network having a bottom-up structure, generally we’re referring to the process of folksonomy as opposed to a top-down taxonomy. Or perhaps we refer to finally having the participation levels and processing power to harness an infinite number of typing monkeys to efficiently produce the works of Shakespeare at a tidy profit. However, there’s another sense in which the Network is bottom up. As Clay Shirky sometimes says, everything is published and we edit later. The bottom encompasses all of our baseness.

In Freudian terms, we publish the id and then attempt to re-establish order by adding the ego and super-ego. When Freud describes the id, he talks about contrary impulses existing side by side without canceling each other out, about a life-force without any sense of negation, a striving to bring about the satisfaction of instinctual needs only subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.

Gopnik ties this bottom-up publishing of everything into the familiar pattern of the flaming comment:

Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.

Marshall McLuhan talked about how the medium of television bypassed personal and societal censors and poured directly into the nerves.

TV goes right into the human nervous system, it goes right into the midriff. The image pours right off that tube into the nerves. It’s an inner trip, the TV viewer is stoned. It’s addictive.

Television enabled images from all over the world, in high volumes, to be moved from the outside to the inside. The Network makes the reverse movement possible. In his essay, Gopnik makes an insightful observation about the unsocial nature of our contemporary social networks:

A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet … has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud.

The social graph extends the inputs and outputs of the nervous system while bypassing the social functions that provide a level of reflection—we’ll edit later. Gopnik points out that the problem with the constant interruptions, change of focus and multitasking while we multitask isn’t one of a rational mind having to focus among a panoply of options, but rather that of a glutton alone in his room, limited to only one mouth and faced with a smorgasbord of immense proportions. In our solitude we all are individually transformed into Brecht’s Baal or Shakespeare’s Falstaff. A Network fueled by a raging pleasure principle confronts the reality of the seven deadly sins with an emphasis on gluttony.

The shattering of attention into tiny shards is the metaphor that has caught our fancy. It’s this symptom that must be the source of our pain. As our attention is shattered, so is our identity and our capacity to focus. Gopnik puts this observation into historical perspective:

The odd thing is that this complaint… is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

Of course, anyone who can walk into a library and find a book, select some toothpaste from a display in a large drugstore or find a couple of stories they’d like to read in the Sunday New York Times can probably deal with all these tiny shards of attention that we’re confronted with on the Network. Perhaps the pain has more to do with the demons we wrestle with as we jack in to the Network. And while it seems like the demons are released from the Network the moment we flick the connection on— it turns out the demons aren’t in the machine at all.

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The End Times of the Network

Published January 30, 2011 by cgerrish

I remember laying on the floor and looking up into the blue glow of the small television screen. It was the late 60s and this flickering screen created an instant and visceral connection to locations all over the real and imaginary world. It was a kind of spooky action at a distance, an entanglement with events halfway across town and halfway across the world.

People criticized Marshall McLuhan for saying that television was a two-way medium, but as a viewer it was clear that the thoughts, feelings and actions of the audience exerted a strong influence on the material flowing out of the tube. The worlds opened up by this medium seemed to be infinite, and then without warning—a parent walks into the room and flicks off the switch—the sounds and visions vanish. “Go out and play. Get out of the house.”

Imagination dead, imagine.
Samuel Beckett

In the endless arguments between so-called open and closed platforms within the Network of Networks, the charge is often hurled that such-and-such a closed platform is killing the internet. The internet by its nature is thought to be an open platform—although it’s apparently closed to closed platforms. If the open Network of Networks fills up with closed networks, then we won’t have unfettered access to any node at any time. Although it can be argued that only Google has access to all nodes, everyone else must ask Google for directions on how to get from here to there.

When we engage in this kind of talk about ‘killing the internet,’ it’s really a matter of whether the Network is more the way we like it or less the way we like it. No one imagines that the internet could actually be killed. Despite the volume and passion of the argument, no networks are ever harmed in the production of the discussion. I’m always amused by the kind of maniacal laughter engendered in the geek community by any suggestion that the Internet could be switched off. Bring up Senator Lieberman’s proposal for an internet kill switch in the company of geeks and check the response.

Imagine their surprise when Egypt recently switched off their sub-network within the internet in response to riots in the streets. I understand that Jordan and Syria also had their fingers on the switch. Tunisia’s government couldn’t withstand the protests organized via the real-time network and the army may have put the switch out of reach.

One of the lessons of Tunisia was how to use the real-time network to organize protests. The other was to shut down the real-time network if you want to disrupt the protesters. Both lessons were put to use in Egypt. There’s an assumption that the Network of Networks is so deeply intertwingled with every aspect of our lives that it can no longer be shut off. It would be like depriving a fish of water. Certainly lots of business is conducted over the internet, but in a time of national emergency, revolution and general tumult, are there geeks in Cairo upset because they can’t use FourSquare to check-in to the latest demonstration or download the Anarchist’s Cookbook to their Kindle? Anything that’s really important will be transmitted over a private network. In a Network shutdown, both sides aren’t equally in the dark.

John Perry Barlow asks whether, in light of what has happened in Egypt whether access to the Network should be considered a basic human right. Faced with an unacceptable government, the Network is an indispensable tool to foment change. It should be noted that the Network is neutral with regard to the messages it carries. A fascist uprising would benefit as much as any through the use of the real-time network.

Real-time networks work as accelerants, they contribute to the general speed up. They currently have no tools for slowing things down, correcting errors or stopping things. This makes them an excellent tool for expressing general feelings of opposition and a less than optimal tool for building new institutions to replace the old. Newspapers and magazines seem capable of both kinds of action. Perhaps this is why a free press can never be fully replaced with a real-time stream.

The moral dilemma of the open network is that it must preserve the possibility of evil.

The lessons for citizens are pretty clear, but what of the lessons for governments watching all this unfold? An internet kill switch backed by a robust private network for select services sounds like a start. Another lesson might be that the kill switch should be used sooner rather than later. Of course, avoiding situations of general revolution by fostering a healthy and happy citizenry is highly recommended. But as you look around the world, there are a large number of countries thinking about how they might implement a kill switch. Some, China, for instance, may already have such a switch in place.

As we work through this thought experiment, a number of connected issues arise. In the era of the always on and accessible broadband internet, cloud-based applications and storage seem like a rational choice. If large sub-networks of the internet can be switched off, the cloud no longer works as a global solution. If segments could be switched off within a single country, it may not be a national solution. In fact, the cloud requires a certain level of political stability to be viable in any sense. Where sometimes we might consider these kingdoms of the cloud to be challengers to the laws and boundaries of nation states, here the cloud shows that it has critical dependancies on political stability.

Synchronization, local applications and file storage show themselves to have a new value in light of the possibility of the Network being switched off. Technologies like iTunes, Evernote, Microsoft’s Mesh and Dave Winer’s approach to syncing and upstreaming local files to networked locations gain new purchase. The idea of keeping everything in the cloud now has interesting political ramifications, whereas the local master file carries some new weight.

There are two approaches to a sub-network shutdown. One is the creation of an on/off switch. Presumably once things have settled down, the plan would be to switch the Network back on. Then there’s the permanent off-switch, the switch that simply destroys the capacity altogether. An on/off switch is an expensive proposition, and of course it may be very difficult to get a majority of people to agree to it. The permanent off-switch has the flaw that it’s impossible to test. If it works, then it’s game over.

The permanent off-switch is the cousin of the doomsday machine in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Imagine a scenario where a country is under cyber-attack, rather than have their systems destroyed, they may choose to simply switch off their network. The doomsday machine would be the other defensive approach. A country lets it be known that if it is the subject of a cyber-attack it will destroy the entire Network. This would be an interesting test of the myth that the Network is robust enough to survive any such attack.

Clearly some countries could survive the end of the Network better than others, and so could more easily employ the strategy. One could imagine a terrorist group based on the theories of the UnaBomber deciding to attempt such an action. Daniel Suarez, in his book, Daemon, imagined this kind of scenario using botnets.

The seams in the Network of Networks are beginning to show as the vast differences in people, cultures, power and politics play out around the world. These differences may signal an end to the integrated synthetic Network of Networks—the Network you were given, not the one you made. It may also be an entirely unexpected way that location, or rather place, will affect your experience of the new splintered Network. Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is going to be a wickedly difficult negotiation.

Humpty Dumpty
Aimee Mann

Say you were split, you were split in fragments
And none of the pieces would talk to you
Wouldn’t you want to be who you had been
Well baby I want that too

So better take the keys and drive forever
Staying won’t put these futures back together
All the perfect drugs and superheros
Wouldn’t be enough to bring me up to zero

Baby, I bet you’ve been more than patience
Saying it’s not a catastrophe
But I’m not the girl you once put your faith in
Just someone who looks like me

So better take the keys and drive forever
Staying won’t put these futures back together
All the perfect drugs and superheros
Wouldn’t be enough to bring me up to zero

So get out while you can
Get out while you can
Baby I’m pouring quick sand
And sinking is all I have planned
So better just go

Oh, better take the keys and drive forever
Staying won’t put these futures back together
All the perfect drugs and superheros
Wouldn’t be enough to bring me up to zero

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put baby together again
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put baby together againикони

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