Futurism, Google, and Careers

A lot of people have talked about what Google's purchases and recent direction mean. A lot of people have come up with things that make some amount of business sense, but personally I think that Google is run by people who believe in "the singularity".

Well, whatever the reason, Google's proposed product lines sound like a bad scifi movie: "Starting as a simple search tool, over the next thirty years Googdyne released universal translators, always-on augmented reality, self-driving cars, and military robots."

Whatever Google's vision of the future actually is, it's clear that they have one glaring gap in their plans: technology requires cultural infrastructure, and they're radically underestimating how much. For example, Google Glass is a pretty impressive technical feat, but it is basically useless in today's world. The only value it has is first-person video, and that's pretty limited.

It's easy to imagine a world where people use augmented reality quite frequently. In fact, that world makes more sense than this world. But the culture isn't there. People don't have any expectation or interest in that kind of thing, and it'll take a long time before we can drum any up.

It could be that they plan to sidestep this by making things so insanely useful that nobody can bear not using them - for example, decent web search. But I think they're underestimating that, too. They did it once, by luck, and now they seem to think they can do it on purpose. Well, good luck: cultural tech use weighs a lot more and hits a lot harder than most people think.

For example, the concept of a "career" - hell, the concept of a "middle class" - is something that only exists due to cultural use of technology.

This is one reason why I get annoyed whenever anyone says something like "is technology stealing jobs?"

The only reason jobs like that exist is technology. The issue is that the jobs it initially created, it is making easier and easier. In turn, that makes them require fewer people and people who work at a higher level. That's the way technology has always worked: make something possible, then make it progressively easier. In this case, "jobs".

Perhaps there will always be more jobs available to create, but that's a theory that falls flat in our current culture. We've attached ourselves to a specific point on the tech curve and are culturally out of position to deal with it changing.

Anyone who wants to invent the future needs to examine the present. The world is changing in a lot of ways, but humans are not.

You can give humans augmented reality, but if they can't use it to live their life, it's not going to get used. You can give people robots, but if it doesn't put a roof over their head it's not culturally relevant. Hell, you can give them life-saving vaccines and they'll get upset about it.

Self-driving cars, though... that's a keeper.

Droning Misconceptions

When Amazon announced their drone delivery experiments, my Twitter stream filled with people who made incredibly misinformed comments. So, uh, I made this FAQ about basic stuff so that nobody ever has to make uninformed judgments ever again. There, that's that problem solved.

I guess it's not a FAQ so much as a FMUSS (Frequently Made Uninformed Snarky Statement).

Q) Amazon is doing drone delivery!

A) Well, technically they're looking into Quad Copter Remote Operated Vehicle delivery systems, which is technically not... well, okay, the word "drone" is damaged beyond resurrection, so sure, they're drones.

It's uncertain that the technology exists to do this just yet. Personally, I don't think it's ready. But, yes, Amazon's apparently looking into it.

Q) They should just pay people to deliver!

A) This is wrong in two ways. First off, they are paying people. These are not fully automated, they're semi-automated ROVs. An operator can probably fly several at once, but they're still going to have to pay pilots. And mechanics. Fucking tons of mechanics.

Secondly, humans literally cannot deliver in this manner. There are no humans that can fly through the air to deliver a single package. The closest we might be able to do is motorcycle deliveries, which are dangerous and slow in comparison.

Q) They're going to fire all their delivery staff!

A) This is a short-range small-parcel delivery service. Quad copters cannot go far, nor can they carry heavy loads. This cannot replace their ordinary shipping.

Eventually, it might. Automated/ROV trucks are on the horizon. You can get upset then.

Q) Free Amazon stuff if you're a good shot, HUR HUR HUR

A) This was the one that made me quit Twitter for the night. That anyone retweeted it boggles my mind, because it's so badly thought out it makes no sense.

First off, these are deliveries in an urban area. Are you planning to fire a rifle in the middle of a city? HUR HUR HUR

Second off, these are short-range deliveries, meaning that another drone will be by to see what happened to the first drone before the cops could even arrive.

Third off, they have ground-facing cameras, and will almost certainly be able to see muzzle flashes. Even if you took one down, they'd probably know exactly where you shot from.

Fourth off, these are unscheduled deliveries. I'm unsure how you'd be ready to shoot one.

Fifth off, they have on-board GPS and constantly-streaming audio video. Unless you knock those systems off-line, they'll certainly be able to see anyone who comes by to visit their downed drone.

Sixth off, if you want to be a moronic criminal, just rob houses. You're less likely to get caught and the payoff is far greater.

Q) Amazon is evil! They shouldn't do this!

A) Yup, they are evil. But, uh, that has nothing to do with using drones.

If ROV tech is ready to hit prime time, then it's going to hit prime time. Amazon might be the first adopter, but it hardly matters who does it first because everyone will follow. It's like smart phones - it took a while for the technology to arrive, but when it did, smart phones became dominant in a flash.

Personally, I don't think the tech is ready, yet. I think the tech is only at the level of murdering civilians at $10,000,000 a hit, which is not Amazon's typical business model. But it'll be interesting to see Amazon's experiments.

The Nature of Fans

It's been a while since I felt anything future-shocky. Culture is complicated, and even as science marches forward, culture hangs back and just kind of faffs around. But I did see something future-shocky this week. In a very early stage. Darius built a meme machine.

Meme machines have been around for a while, of course. Most of them are pretty basic, and their output is not what you'd consider "usable". If you use them or iterate them long enough you can get something useful out of it, but the percentage is low and the longevity is poor. A good example of this would be the objection engine, which produces the same kinds of output as Darius' bot, but with a different focus.

Both are "fan meme" engines. But Darius' engine operates 100% automatically. Just plug in a video with some subtitle tracks, and out pops animated gifs tagged properly. The sort of things fans make on their own, all the time. While the individual gifs aren't always good, they are tagged and ready to roll. In fact, you could even largely automate the distribution of them!

People are always considering the line between humans and "robots" - more accurately, humans and automation. They are always worried that robots are going to steal their jobs - or Mexicans are going to steal their jobs, or Polish people are going to steal their jobs, or women are going to steal their jobs, or gay people are going to... well, they worry about their jobs a lot. Out of all of those options, machines are the only one that actually steals jobs - as in, reduces the number of jobs required to perform a task.

That's because, put simply, automation makes it easier for a human to complete a task. Automation very rarely if ever reduces the number of humans involved to zero... but it does steadily divide the number of humans required for any given task.

As to the political/economic side of that argument... well, this isn't the essay for that argument, but let's just make it clear that I'm a bit of a technophile and there are an infinite variety of tasks to be done.

Most people think of physical labor when they think of robots replacing them. But the truth is more interesting: automation is predominately nonphysical. There's more software automation than physical human labor automation. I mean, every single computer on the face of the planet is literally automation. It is automation from the ground up.

We already use that automation for virtually every aspect of our personal lives. Our bus fares are automated. Our mail is automated. Our research is automated. Our entertainment is automated.

We have this weird line drawn in our head where our opinions are not automated. We hold that beliefs are somehow 100% human and cannot be automated.

Well, that's wrong.

As Darius shows, it's actually not that hard to stick an automatic thumb into the human mind.

Like any kind of automation, it's not that the human is written out. It's that the task of believing, of being a fanboy... is being augmented. Fewer humans can accomplish more of the "fanboy" task. The fanboy robot does not replace humans, but it augments them such that vastly more task can be done. Not every gif is worthy of use, but a human can easily go through 100 gifs and choose the best few. It takes no expertise. And, in fact, it actually makes that person MORE of a fan than they probably were before, because they are partaking in an act of creation, no matter how indirect.

So... what I'm trying to say is:

Everyone who creates a TV show should probably pay Darius to do this for them. It won't create fans out of thin air, but it does allow the fans to produce vastly more "fan culture". It allows your fans to be more effective.

We're not at the stage where the "fan culture" task is maxed out. I think we'll see it evolve a few more times before we get to the point where humans are "fired" from being fans because there's too much fan labor and not enough fan tasks that need doing.

But, hey, I look forward to that future. It sounds amazing.

World of Creating

I've been thinking about people creating things.

The first thing I thought about was that 3D printers might not have a "killer app". They may become popular for the same reason Wikipedia is popular. You don't say "what are the things I can look up that make Wikipedia worthwhile", you say "this is interesting, I'll look it up!" It's a culture of looking things up.

3D printers may be the same way. Not "what can I make that makes this worthwhile", but "this is interesting, I'll make it!" A culture of making things.

After that, I wandered back into my love of augmented reality. With the advent of more and more tech to immerse people into digital realities, we are seeing augmented reality slooooowly unfurl. But there's no "killer app". "What awesome thing can you do in AR that makes it worth wearing clumsy glasses all the time?"

Well, maybe that's the wrong approach. Instead, we might think "this is interesting! I'll create it!"

Imagine a culture where everyone can create digital and real goods as easily as they look something up on Wikipedia.

Let's say you need to keep the sunshine off your kitchen counter's candy stock. Instead of building one out of coat hangers and paper, instead of buying one, you create one yourself.

How do you do that?

Well, you "mold" it with your hands, right there on the counter. Create a plane by squishing your hands together, then grab the edge and pull it forward to create a support, automatically mirrored to the other side. Paint it and dust it with colors. Then hit print.

In your basement, the plastic sun cover gets printed out in the next hour or so. You can go down and grab it yourself, or maybe there's a house robot that will grab it and put it where you initially sculpted it.

I give this not as an example of a killer app. I give this as an example of how you might do something day to day. In the same way that someone giving an example of looking up "soy" on Wikipedia is not giving you the "killer lookup" - they are just giving you an example of a world at your fingertips.

The ability to create and mold digital objects in real space has a huge number of potential applications, all of which are a little hard to see, in the same way it was hard to see that Wikipedia was going to be the incredible resource it is.

Can you imagine getting up each morning and finding your house's ceiling is a different sky each day, depending on where your friends are and what they are doing? Can you imagine a world where your RSS/social network feeds are embodied as entities in real space, ones you can wave away or grab if you want more? A world where if you're curious about water filters, you build a few and play with them? A world you can orchestrate?

A world where creating something is often easier than looking up existing versions?

GITS and Anonymous

I think this essay covers topics most geeks are pretty familiar with, but I can't remember actually reading an essay on these topics before. So here it is: the essay about self-organizing "hacktivists", futurism, and Ghost in the Shell.

Like most geeks, you've probably mused about the faint echoes in your mind between what you saw in Ghost in the Shell and what you've heard about Anonymous. I'm going to try to draw the line between them.

I will be using the term "meme" colloquially. Don't think about what a meme is too hard, that's not the point of this essay.

...

In Ghost in the Shell, arguably the most interesting plot line is the "laughing man" plot line. I call it "the plot line", but it's actually just one line in a theme that shows up many times in various GITS series and incarnations.

The basic idea is that people are not so distinct as they seem. They are easily manipulated into doing things either consciously or unconsciously. Obviously, this is not a unique insight. However, the spin GITS puts on it is interesting: the creation of a 'deep' internet allows this to happen with such fluid speed that the unconscious and semi-conscious actions of the participants can form a 'life form' with its own 'will'.

As an example, in one GITS plot line, people begin to do things for no discernible reason, but they all act towards a single aim. The people involved have no idea what they are doing, nor do they have any knowledge of the secret aim. They have been programmed - not by invasive surgery or brainwashing, but by the unending tides of memes they have been exposed to on their immersive internet. The memes are somewhat directed, but also have a life of their own, since the directives of the original source emerged from the nature of the memes, and are therefore echoed by the participants.

In another plot, one man serves as a hub, allowing participants to enter his personal brain/computer. While there, their sense of self is weakened and they can participate in projects such as sharing memories and computing whether P = NP. They can also be programmed to act in certain ways while outside his personal brain/computer.

This sort of thing is hardly GITS-unique. GITS may have been a popular and compelling example, but there are literally millions of science fiction stories with this same fundamental set of ideas. For example, it is a common conceit to have a VR MMORPG which goes crazy and begins to use/screw up/damage the participant's minds. This is super common in Japanese stories, perhaps because they usually cling to a spirit/body duality, but it also happens in Western stories. Finder did a particularly interesting job of it, for example.

I guess you could say it smacks of an "ascension" ideology. The idea that we can overcome our humanity and, well, go to heaven or whatever. However, I am specifically thinking of it in mechanistic terms. That is, I'm not posing some mythical energy state we can merge into, and I'm not relying on the concept of a spirit or soul. Just people who might become something different than what they currently are, within the limits of physics and biology.

...

Which brings me around to the other end of this rope: Anonymous.

Anonymous and the various similar groups operate in a way that was impossible without the internet. Decentralized, the theory is that any given Anonymous operation can take place with no leader, or perhaps with only a transient leader given a fairly minor role.

In a real sense, the "leader" of an Anonymous operation is largely a memetic broadcaster. Aside from posting specific meeting times if necessary, their job is to yell about whatever they feel is happening that needs to be smashed. And if enough other voices pick up the shout, it becomes an action.

The nature of the memes they broadcast is such that if another person is "infected", they will act in the interests of the original broadcaster. Not because of brainwashing or coercion, but because they will draw the same conclusions.

For example, Anonymous moved against the Church of Scientology. They did not do this because someone wanted to and convinced everyone else to go along. They did it because most people who heard what Scientology was doing reached the same conclusion: the church must be punished. This created a pocket of action, a group of people who, despite their anonymity, all wanted the same thing.

This is a very powerful tool. If there were leaders, not only would the targets be able to strike back, but the followers would also judge which actions they should join based on the leader. This would limit them - "oh, that leader believes things I don't agree with, this action can't have any merit..."

In many ways, this is a very close mirror of the GITS idea, although without the CG bling. This is a group of people who suppress their identities and sequester the majority of their personality and opinion off in a corner so that they can work together with other people doing the same thing very fluidly.

In a very real manner, the Laughing Man is fact. A science fiction concept that is not just possible, but is happening in the real world at this very moment.

To be honest, I would call them "Laughing Man Groups" if I wanted to give them a distinct category. That's the level of similarity I see here, even though Anonymous is only a tiny seedling of the concept.

...

What about the rest? What about where this is going? What about the next step? What about the fact that a lot of the stuff that these Laughing Man Groups are doing is horrible?

Well, a lot of the science fiction around this concept is based on the idea of subverting someone's brain. Forcing them to act. And I doubt that'll happen any time soon. But it doesn't have to: simple cooperation is more than powerful enough.

And as for horribleness, please remember that these are just groups of people. The jerks and assholes are over-represented at the moment because jerks and assholes tend to be the ones that delve into the darker parts of the internet where this kind of organizing is happening. When it becomes common, I can see it being used for a lot more positive aims.

I can see the methods of transmitting memes and forming task participation becoming a lot slicker. I can see people cooperating almost instantly, trusting their connections have a good reason for their requests. I can see people starting to get very good at prioritizing memes as to which ones are more important, not simply more offensive.

I can also see corporations and governments attempting to form or subvert these kinds of environments, which could be interesting.

Can I see something like a VR game which takes place inside the designer's head?

Well, now we're talking about a serious leap in technology.

Everything I've described in the past few paragraphs could happen with today's technology. Anything more is probably science fiction.

For now.

Shift shift shift

As I was chatting with somebody, I realized that something I think is obvious apparently isn't obvious at all. So I'll mention it:

We're in the middle of a shift, a technology shift that is changing the way everyone does everything.

The "computer" is such a young technology. It took thousands of years for humanity to really feel the effects of the plow. Hell, the book is barely a teenage technology. How the computer is today has absolutely nothing to do with how the computer will end up being. They may look vaguely similar and sound vaguely similar when described, but it'll be like the difference between when books were hand-copied by scribes and when they could be printed cheaply enough that commoners could read them.

We've always pointed out that computers have changed society as much as the plow, as much as the printing press. But apparently some of us seem to think that it's past tense, as if how society is now is the final result of the changes computers can create.

*Bzzt* wrong. No surprise, if you actually think a bit: computers have a long way to go, and we are going to go that distance with them.

A lot of the devices and hubbub we are seeing are the emergence of computers as a complex ecosystem instead of as largely independent little worlds. E-book readers and cell phones rely heavily on other computers and communication to servers in order to do everything they do.

We (well, I) get upset about this perceived slavery to an outside force. In truth, it's just basic ecology. The fundamental pattern is unavoidable: we will be in a future where computation and content needs to be thought of as ecosystems rather than a standalone libraries. I would like us to create ecosystems that are more robust and less repressive, but even I cannot deny that ecosystems are coming: individual devices will become less and less distinct from the mass of computation floating around you.

We like to talk about embedding computers in our clothes and all sorts of other classic "future tech" stuff. But the truth is that those sorts of ideas are fluff. Maybe they happen, maybe they don't. Either way, the heart of our growing and changing societies is all about the blurring of the lines between devices.

Other changes?

Lots, I'm sure, but none I feel as confident about.

Adaptive Social Inclusion Networks

I'm a bit of a hermit, but if I go too long without hanging out with friends, I get a little buggy. As I've gotten older, it's gotten harder to hang out with friends. I think this is probably true of everyone: as people get older, their social circles seem to stagnate. Perhaps this is just because many people get married, and living with their spouse is a fair amount of social interaction.

Well, regardless of the reason, it got me thinking. If I wanted to hang out in college, I just popped down to the lounge and there were always people around. Even if I didn't know any of them, it was always easy to just pick out a geek and start up a conversation. Now that I'm over thirty, I don't do that any more. A) I'm not on a college campus, and B) most people my age aren't randomly hanging around hoping to get talked to.

When it comes to socializing, there are a lot of subtle challenges, largely falling into three groups.

The first problem is the age segregation culture. In American culture, we seem to have decided that the only people who can hang out together are people within a few years of age. This wasn't really a noticeable problem when I was young, because as long as you're in school, you're in a place where there are loads of people your own age in close proximity all the time. Now, I don't have anything against people my own age, but there's no incubator for my current age bracket. The density is too low.

This age segregation is a huge problem. I think it's probably one of the worst parts of American culture, and it spells demise for any circle of friends. Without a continuous stream of fresh blood, any group will wither away as the years pass.

Even though I'm perfectly happy to ignore any cultural norm that irks me, this age seg issue is a real barrier to people like me, who aren't really very social.

The second category of issues for social groups is pre-existing social mixing groups. For example, I can go to a skeptic's meeting, or a cartoonist's con, or any number of other existing groups. Generally, these groups break down the age segregation barrier somewhat, depending on their nature. The skeptic's meeting has a wide age range, but something like an anime convention is going to be mostly young people.

Social groups like this have existed pretty much forever. Any given church is an example. By joining a social group, you can get your socialization even if your best friends move away. And if you like your social groups to actually accomplish something, you can simply join one that accomplishes something.

However, these pre-existing groups are as much a curse as a blessing. They have two serious flaws.

One is that they have a defined set of parameters. Most of these groups meet on specific days at specific times for specific reasons. They don't really "hang out". Meetings are not my idea of socialization: there are too many people and too much noise. In order to manufacture a less aggressive setting, you have to make friends with people and manually arrange to meet them at some other time, a process which gets steadily harder as the age bracket gets older. This same problem is exacerbated by the fact that the organizers of a group want to feel like they are doing something, and tend to fill every minute of meeting time with stuff.

The other flaw with pre-existing groups is that they lag behind the times. These groups don't really use the internet very well.

Even if the group is really new, it is still a defined group. You can come participate, we plan for an event this Tuesday! How oldschool: it's almost certainly possible to enhance this kind of situation using a more adaptive scheduler that weaves together micro-meetings. Of course, that would feel very weird, culturally speaking. We're too used to these oldschool groups, which is why we keep doing them that way.

The third major set of issues is the internet.

It's very easy to make friends on the internet, and hang out with random people on the internet. However, I feel that this is not a good substitute for face time. Maybe when I have 3D wall projectors that make it feel like they're in the same room with me, yeah. But for now, face time is hundreds of times more effective at filling my need to hang out.

The internet is a great organizer, but it is a poor taskmaster. While I can build a social tool that creates micro-meetups, if nobody goes, then it's a big waste of time.

This problem is made a hundred times worse by the nature of the internet itself, which actively discourages leaving your home. If you think NEETs are only in Japan, you are kidding yourself. Hell, the term NEET is originally a UK term.

Even people who are gainfully employed often spend most of their free time on the internet.

There's nothing inherently bad about this, but I think it's good to get out of the house. Hell, I use the internet for productive results, and I still would like to hang out with friends. I guess I sound like someone's mom, but spending face time with people is very valuable: you don't have to stop using the internet, but you should at least talk to your friends in person from time to time.

....

All this extensive chattering has been leading up to this thought exercise: can we create an Adaptive Social Inclusion Network? An ASIN fills one particular role: it gets people who have a hard time socializing to hang out.

In order for an ASIN to properly function, it needs:

1) No age barriers. It should welcome a wide variety of ages, preferably all ages. Not just on paper, but by the fundamental way it works.

2) No lifestyle barriers. It should welcome a wide variety of people living different kinds of lives. Someone who has only a few free hours a week, someone who just popped over from Indonesia to tour the area, someone who has loads of free time but spends the rest of it playing WoW...

3) No viewpoint barriers. It should welcome as many different kinds of people as possible. "Variety is the spice of life" is especially true when you're talking about socializing. If you're not irritated at a friend's stupidity at least once a month, you probably haven't really got any friends.

4) Fresh blood. It should actively welcome new members and strangers.

5) Adaptive meetups. It should schedule little mini-meetings to have random groups of 4-10 do something fun. For example, watching a terrible movie, or learning how to draw. This requires some amount of scheduling knowledge on the part of the software, to try and guess who will be available for what, where, and when. It also requires you to have a variety of mini-meeting subjects to keep people interested.

6) Taskmastering. You need to be able to pull in hermits. This is probably the most difficult, because it really can't be done with software. You need a real human to interact with the hermits to badger them into coming not just to the main meetings, but to the mini-meetings. This doesn't have to be aggressive: an email written by a real person would probably do the trick for anyone active enough to actually join the ASIN in the first place. A kind of karma system for people who email other people would probably work.

7) Acknowledging multiple kinds of social needs. People socialize in different ways. For example, I can't stand parties: if there's more than half a dozen people, I get a tremendous headache. Also, I prefer to talk about cool things and maybe work on small projects together, rather than just watch a movie. I'm happier sketching out a comic book with someone than playing poker with them.

a) Attention needs to be paid to people who are at a meeting or mini-meeting and not enjoying themselves. They don't necessarily need to be forced to enjoy the meeting, but you should at least change their category so they are invited to meetings that are more their speed/with people they are likely to get along with.

b) Self-improvement is a valuable goal that some people will want to pursue. It's worth mentioning this specifically, because it has to be handled gently. When people hear "self-improvement" they hear something desperate, but the truth is that most people want to improve themselves, and having friends of the right sorts is often the best way to go about it.

c) Cooperative tasks and "pester-helping" are also worth mentioning. There are many people who are working on something cool as a hobby or self-employment task. Having friends that pester them about it means it's far more likely to get done. If you stop working on a game and your buddy comes up, face to face, and asks you when the next stage will be done... you'll probably start programming again.

d) Sex and romance are always touchy subjects. I don't have any real opinion on them in this context, except to say that there probably needs to be a pretty strict policy about it. Do whatever you want on your own time, but if you're at a mini-meet, don't cross the line. Whatever that line was defined to be.

e) "Ally clusters": most people are very strongly influenced by their friends. A way to massage who hangs out with who would go a long way towards keeping people happy and productive, if that's what they want to be. This might be impossible, though: the software would need to be brilliantly designed to understand things so deeply.

...

So, that's the sort of thing I've been thinking about recently.

Chaos Marketplace

I've been thinking about the idea of a next-generation economy. I don't really mean some kind of fancy revolution where we use unique keys as currency. I don't really mean anything built to replace the fundamental economies that make sure we have access to water and expensive coffee.

However, I think there's a place for a new economy, enabled by more powerful technology.

This has been running around my head for ages, ever since I saw Kickstarter. If you don't know what Kickstarter is, stop reading this and go there. Don't bother coming back to read this until you've funded some projects. I doubt it'll make any sense unless you understand that there is a hell of a lot of money available for small projects, self-funded by random members of the community. It is not uncommon to see projects get double or even triple the funding they ask for.

But, to me, Kickstarter is kind of... a first step. I feel like the idea can go further, especially if you combine it with other modern "opportunity media" concepts such as Twitter and Groupon.

See, Kickstarter's stated intention is to get you enough funding to get your project "off the ground". Get you "started".

There's obviously more money in the community than that.

A community like Kickstarter's can probably be easily adapted to being the primary source of funding throughout the lifespan of the project. (In fact, that seems to already be happening in Kickstarter's projects, if you look around a bit.)

IE, you don't need to really launch your project into the outside economy. Your project can, in fact, be sustained by the community itself. You'll still want to integrate into the outside economy as much as possible, obviously. If you're writing a book, you'll certainly want to sell it to anyone who wants to buy it. But it's become clear that there's enough cash in the community that you could probably get away with zero Amazon sales as long as there is community support.

I'm trying to make it clear that there's more money in these kinds of communities than most people really understand. I'm not saying that these communities should form walled-off economies and try to be self-sufficient. I'm trying to say that these communities can be used as an extremely strong and stable foundation for a project, radically reducing the risk and decreasing the amount of business acumen you need to succeed in modest projects.

Furthermore, with only a little bit of thought, it becomes possible to create a structure allowing people to help each other. If you have a lot of experience and business acumen, then maybe you'll do better helping non-business people with their projects. Instead of them having to search out through Craigslist or Monster or whatever, they just go to your profile page and read up on all the projects you've already helped with. Then there's some kind of helper function which makes it painless to negotiate some kind of simple (royalty-based, perhaps) payment structure that can be relied on not to screw either party over, especially with the might of the community to help fix any misunderstandings and negotiate settlements when things go screwball.

When I look at what these final projects look like, I see a few things that are similar to Kickstarter projects today: movies, books, and so on. But Kickstarter as it is now fails on the more long-term projects such as housing and farms and such. Oh, it funds the seed, sure, but after that... good luck!

The next-generation system allows interested people to track the project as it continues, add in funding as they see fit, subscribe to something if there is something of value being released, and in general keep up with things. This radically improves the community's ability to keep worthwhile projects alive, and creates an economy of personal responsibility and reliability that is quite distinct from the cost-savings consumer culture of our normal economy.

This would hopefully create a niche economy where a large community of reasonably well-off and/or hard-working people can support each other in medium- or long-term projects without being subject to the complexities of government grants, marketing to the masses, or just plain bad luck.

Hmmm... I would love to see that.

Shadow Puppets

I came up with this idea while trying to invent a hacker game setting, and I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. So here's the deal:

Imagine that in the future, we have software that can analyze audio and video (and writing and pictures). By analyzing the media, the software can program a virtual entity with a personality and appearance very similar to the writer/actor/whoever is in the media you passed it.

The virtual entity is quite advanced. Assuming you have a good computer and the most recent pseudo-AI drivers, the virtual entity is almost indistinguishable from the original, at least in the context of media. The gaps in the seed media are overcome by careful guessing. That mean the virtual entity can act very reasonably even in situations not covered by the seed media.

In the game world I designed, problems arose when people began creating virtual entities of politicians and releasing very convincing fake videos of them saying or doing things they never did or said. It came to a head with a bevy of fake-porn cases in which the real versions of the virtual porn stars launched a whole lot of lawsuits for everything from character defamation to abuse.

The courts came up with a rather novel solution. Which, I guess, is the most fantastical part of this setting. It's called the "virtual volition" rule.

Basically, the courts ruled that everyone had the right to personal privacy. The programs were considered to breach that privacy by simulating that person's behavior and body in a way they did not approve. This was considered fundamentally different than drawing cartoons or even photoshopping lewd pictures because of the extremely high fidelity and accuracy of the virtual entities.

The misused virtual entities were labeled "shadow puppets" - programs that looked so much like specific real world individuals that they violated the privacy of those real world individuals. Shadow puppets became illegal. Later, the definition expanded to include virtual entities in breach of copyright, such as one fed on Mickey Mouse cartoons that looks and acts like Mickey Mouse.

Of course, it's impossible to ban a piece of software like this. Legal, open source software could be fed with publicly available media to produce a high-fidelity shadow puppet. Still, don't get caught: it's considered abuse or assault on the person being simulated.

Legal virtual entities abounded. Many simply were unrealistic, or a mishmash of media that didn't attempt to simulate any one person. Others were specific people or cartoons or whatever, but had very strict limits and would refuse to "fill in" the gaps and act beyond the "volition lock". IE, you couldn't convince your official Steven Fry virtual entity to strip down and sing show tunes.

In the game world, it had tons of ramifications and made the world a very complex place.

Anyway, there's not really any point to this essay. It's just a random interesting thing I thought I'd mention.

Connectivity

I was watching this archived webcast today. It gets contentious about halfway in, but I like that, it makes me want to write about the subject. This is a borderline rant, I guess, but I hope you enjoy it.

A lot of the conversations we have about the nature of technology stresses, well, stress. Just as an easy example, the author of that webcast specifically calls it "panic architecture" which, like many other terms, is coined to make a point rather than be useful.

Assuming you don't want to listen to the hour of webcast, I'll cover the bits I touch on. In this case, "panic architecture" is used to refer to the theoretical stimulus overload from tweets and emails and IMs all popping up at you all the time.

I can't help but turn down this kind of shallow analysis. Not only is there no real evidence to support it, but there's also no sign that these clumsy first-generation implementations are the only ones we're going to see.

We've developed tools to let us share with everyone, everywhere, instantly. We're now using tools that let us "hear" without having to be listening.

Every kind of "panic architecture" interaction is actually asynchronous. That is, the computer tells you that there's a new message, and you can get around to reading it whenever you like. Some pieces of software are worse than others - Twitter is only barely asynchronous, since if you wait more than an hour or so, you'll have a backlog too deep to sift through. So you lose a lot of data down the tubes if you wait.

I guess you could say that's a high-pressure environment, but not really. The only reason it's high-pressure is because you've tricked yourself into thinking it's important to view everything, and view it fast. Trying to make sure you don't miss any tweets is sort of like trying to make absolutely sure you see every single person who passes by the Starbucks. It's not a sensible reaction.

If we feel stressed by these "always on" tools, it's because we've tricked ourselves into viewing them in the wrong way. Part of that might be pure neurochemistry, but I think it's mostly a cultural maladaptation which will fade in time as we get used to the technology and learn, as a populace, that it's okay to let the river flow by without trying to drink it all.

Also, there is another generation of tools past these "hear without listening" tools.

Phone calls extend our ears so we can talk over long distances. But that's only this very instant. So we use emails, RSS and the like to extend our memory: we can think about something long after it has been said.

And now we're going to get a new breed of tool: one which extends our thinking about something across vast distances. Already, we're seeing it. We don't get all our emails: we get only the emails our outboard brain doesn't discard as spam. Many of us have dozens of rules about which emails are further flagged and sorted. This lets us determine whether something needs to be read soon, or whether it can be put off until we feel vaguely curious.

In the future, more intelligent tools will have a system for cuing things up. If it's important, it tells you immediately. If it's interesting but not important, it'll bother you with a quick line and link every few days. If it's something good for you that you can't seem to sit down and get through, it'll keep pestering you.

Essentially, this new breed of tool is a computerized version of the thing in our brains that says "hey, the roof is leaking, maybe we should fix that before it rains again."

Right now, we often try to deal with a true deluge of information right against our brains. I agree that this is not really a very good idea. At the very least, it sets a very low upper limit to the amount of things we can consider. By creating smart tools to deal with that deluge for us, we can consider terabytes of information every hour.

I need to stress that this isn't some fantasy tale of strong AI. We already do this to a great extent by using RSS feeds - we sign up for the news outlets we like, whether they're brand names or individuals with blogs. We use them as our roof-is-leaking engines. I'm simply pointing forward and saying "there's gonna be more of this." For example: Priority Inbox

It is true that humans sometimes feel lost and confused by advances. But this is nothing new. People felt lost and confused when the king changed, or weirdos with funny accents started settling in their alluvial plains. Change makes people feel stressed out, regardless of whether it's technology or culture or any other source.

So, yes, a lot of people feel stressed out by the "constant bombardment" of our "always on" culture. Except that it's not constant bombardment, it's not always on, and the tools for dealing with it gracefully are evolving as we speak. As always, we adapt to our situations and find out the best way to take advantage of the opportunities we are offered.

To me, the real "panic architecture" is the way soft sciences and media outlets continuously scream about dangers that never arrive, dangers that were never even dangers. It interferes with adult's acceptance of change when you scream that every change is a disaster. Kids don't give a shit - a kid will use Twitter and Facebook even if their parents think it is pure poison. But adults have to work to learn these tools, to integrate them into their life even a little bit, and panicking about them just makes the task that much more difficult.

I don't, by the way, think that the webcast I mentioned at the beginning is an example of that kind of panicky statement. I don't know enough about the author to say anything about her, and at worst, the webcast itself is kind of ambivalent on the subject. It's just a handy turn of phrase to steal her words and make another point with them.

There are actually a lot of other things I want to argue about that were covered in that webcast, but this is long enough already.

(By the way, I'm going to coin a term in opposition to the normal way of coining a term. "Roof-is-leaking engines", or RILEs: that's a term that could be useful, but it isn't very good at making a point. )

Ad Hockery

Being a geek, I love thinking about the next technologies that may make a splash. One technology whose time is slowly approaching is wide-range ad hoc networks.

We're nearing a point where ad hoc networks among personal devices will become very common. You're probably already using wireless keyboards and connecting your phones to wifi networks - both of which are examples of a nascent, budding ad hockery between our various devices. Your thumb drive is only an inch away from not needing to be plugged in. Your DS is only an inch away from being able to interact with people playing the same game on their phones.

In addition, the technology has reached a level where individual people can create/deploy large numbers of ad hoc wireless nodes. Hell, we're maybe a year away from being able to print them on our home fabricators, aside from a few generic parts like batteries.

It seems to me that, even though nothing has really started moving yet, this is about to explode. Especially when net neutrality fails and the EU passes its internet censorship bill.

A lot of people want to fight against governments and corporations screwing up the internet, but I'm more interested in what comes next. It seems far more likely that geeks can come up with a new technology that slowly replaces the internet, and far less likely that geeks can oppose all the money on the planet working against them. So, I'm betting on ad hoc networks.

What I see initially is ad hoc networks largely limited to your personal devices - your computer recognizing your phone, and your lights detecting your iPad, for example. Already happens to a large extent: every time someone turns on the 360, my computer tells me I should share my media with them. If my DS is near another DS playing the same game, it often pops up and offers trades. I simply predict more of it.

I see this network expanding to allow approved foreign devices. Your friend's phone automatically connects to your phone and tags your friend's location when he's in walking range. Hold up your phone, and you see markers where your friends are. This voluntary sharing requires fewer privacy breaches since A) your friend is only reporting his position to you, not to a central network, B) your friend is free to obscure or hide his presence in any way he sees fit (or lie), C) you do not have to report your position to him.

This kind of connectivity will rapidly grow into a painfully insecure ad hoc network that supports your game playing habits, connects you to random passerbyes because you signed up for the same dating service, pops up today's menu from the restaurant you're passing, and trades computational data about traffic patterns.

At this point, the ad hoc network will shoulder more and more of the bandwidth that a user tends to use. Not because it's good at it, but because it's available. A lot of products will come out that rely heavily on short-range ad hockery or extending ad hoc networks to wider areas. Ad hoc networks will begin to integrate with internet connections, such that a phone browsing the internet might connect to a node through an ad hoc network instead of relying on a 3G connection.

The nature of ad hoc networks of this size strongly favors individuals and open source products. Even if a corporation or government seeds an ad hoc network with a few thousand nodes, it's unlikely they'll keep up the project, and it's also likely they'll have misimplemented something (on purpose or on accident). Individuals are likely to deploy their own devices (either stationary or carried) to take advantage of better technologies, better implementations, and higher security. In addition, owning a reliable ad hoc node will probably give good karma and interesting tidbits of information.

Once a baseline ad hoc network reaches a certain level, it essentially replaces the internet. It may use many of the same data backbones for ease of long-range high-bandwidth transmission, but even if you are surfing "the internet", you are surfing through a largely anonymous connection via an untracked route. Similarly, you probably won't be surfing that obsolete old thing any more: a large ad hoc network will support applications and data presentations we will have a hard time imagining. But they'll be just as much part of our day as the internet is today.

(There are some REALLY wacky things you can do with large ad hoc networks, especially ones with moving pieces. But that's definitely a whole other article. Lets just say that the most straightforward few of them are augmented reality.)

Anyway, I've spun a tale of large ad hoc networks springing up in the relatively near future. Let's say... five years from now, it'll be obvious they're starting, and in ten years they'll be a major part of many lives.

As predictions go, I'm pretty comfortable with it. There are a lot of barriers in the way, but most of those barriers go away instantly if individuals can manufacture low-energy wireless relays in their spare time, or buy open hardware versions on the cheap.

I just can't imagine the internet remaining as it is today. It's so... seventies. And the only route I see away from the internet involves massive ad hockery.

Fortunately, if there's one thing we geeks are good at, it's ad hockery.

The Future of Tweeting

_{I was going to call this "the Social Network", until I realized there's a movie out now by that name. This post talks about potential descendants of Twitter and the like.}

I just had a conversation with a friend, where we talked about the difficulties of actually finding the right things in this world full of stuff. As a quote:

"They understand they want a cube that's two inches to an edge and blue, but they don't know what that cube is called, or what its manufacturer would market it as. They know they want a material that is liquid at room temperature and has a viscosity somewhere between water and grapefruit juice, but they don't know who would make such a thing, or what market its currently being sold for."

This is something that does crop up fairly regularly in both large and small cases. For example, I met a man who needed a "poster-quality technical illustration", but didn't know the terminology, so he was searching for "data visualization" and other keywords that kept leading him down dead ends.

My response to my friend was "I think a descendant of Twitter will solve this problem."

His response was "I don't think this is one of those problems that social networking or its derivatives is going to help with. We're not searching based on who knows who, or even who knows what, or even for people at all (expect to say we're searching for the person who makes the thing we want.) We're searching for an object, process, or intellectual property that meets certain parameters."

My response was "I'll write a blog post!" and his response was "facepalm". And now you are up to speed.

The future of everything is the social network.

First thing first, the term "social network" is being radically misused. Facebook is not a social network, it's a web site that enables social networks. Twitter is not a social network, it's a web site and API that enables social networks. So, when I say "social network", I don't mean "Twitter". I mean the underlying mass of connections between the participants on various social networking sites, and all the context those connections contain.

Right now, social networks are seen as just that - social. But that's just how the current generation is marketed. In reality, a social network is about connections that you know how much to trust. The people you follow on Twitter, you follow because you value their input at some level. Maybe you follow Gibson because you trust his judgment, maybe because he throws out interesting links, maybe because you hate him but you want to track what he says. The point is, you understand how much he can be trusted on what subject.

(As it turns out, Gibson is mostly a retweeter, so most people that follow him are using him as a source for filtered links. But we trust his filter to do as we expect it to, letting through certain kinds of links and not others.)

Things go the other direction, too. If you look at the Freakonomics blog or Warren Ellis, you'll find that these people use their readers as a vast resource. They constantly ask for information - what's a good band, give us quotes from 1930, send me your pictures, what do you think of this analysis... people with a lot of readers tend to be very interactive with those readers. If Freakonomics people had posted "I need this kind of data visualization..." they wouldn't have needed to search for the right match for days: some of their readers would have instantly known what they were asking for, and they would be hooked up inside hours.

It's not that these people trust their readers. I'm sure a lot of their readers send in crap, and I'm sure they get a lot of spam. But they have a lot of really great readers specifically because their readership trusts them (in specific ways) and therefore wants to impress them/participate.

That's the state of the world today.

It's not really that much of a jump to imagine the next generation of software will help with this sort of thing, will be more useful for the kinds of meaningful interactions that really make social networking worthwhile. Of course, you'll still be able to hear that Anne just ate a sandwich, if you want. Those interactions have value, too.

The other half of this is that I don't think it's much of a jump to imagine companies (or people within companies) using social networking software to figure out exactly what they're looking for and a good source of it.

Social networks have been used for thousands or even tens of thousands of years for precisely this purpose. The purchasing manager wants to buy Ye Old Paste, so he asks his friends if they know a good paste maker, maybe someone who'll hook them up at a discount. It continues today - my company regularly get requests from people who want to know more about what specific panels they should buy, even though we don't sell or install them. It's because they know us, and we know these guys...

It's the exact same as Facebook or Twitter, except without the technical assistance of a piece of software.

Sure, if your social network fails (or is hopelessly inadequate) you fall back on reading advertising or Google-combing. But those are techniques I would like to render obsolete. If we can radically expand social networking software to the point where it allows people to talk to each other in a businesslike way without feeling the stigma of "found it on the internet", we may very well end up making that desperate and blind search for an answer a thing of the past.

Actually, I've already hired people via Twitter, so I can't imagine it'll be long coming.

Wickerwork

I've been thinking about the internet. And things that aren't the internet.

Specifically, I've been thinking about safety nets.

In the past, humans have innovated many kinds of safety nets to make sure that they can survive a temporary misfortune. For example, brotherhoods, fraternities, and "secret societies" such as Freemasons largely served the purpose of binding working men together such that they could ride out any personal storms with the support of the group. Many such societies explicitly spelled out the support they would offer, while others (such as the Freemasons) didn't. But either way, you could expect some support if you broke your leg and couldn't work for a few weeks.

Religions serve this purpose as well, although their membership tends to be more diverse so their social support structure is also more diverse. It's no coincidence that both religion and fraternities do better when the economy is faltering: that's when people need stability and support.

There are loads of other structures to help the "in" group. It can be argued that in societies with extensive family structures (such as a stereotypical Italian or Greek family), those family structures serve much of the same role as a fraternity would, in terms of supporting the members that need it and kicking the lazy ones when they need it.

As a secular humanist, I worry about secular support structures. Religion isn't secular. Secret societies are rarely secular, and don't fit into current culture. Familial support structures are fine, but we aren't a familial nation, so they also do not fit into our culture. There are secular groups you can join, but they're more like hobby groups or political activist groups.

What I want is something that can let me help people out when I'm flush, and rely on people like me when I'm not. Charities don't fit the bill for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is that they aren't a support network, they're a charity. More importantly, I'm talking about helping specific people, not some vague assurance that I'm helping "people", somewhere.

Well, I was funding yet another Kickstarter program when it occurred to me that I was looking at the new support framework.

I do spend a fair amount of money on line, and I spend it on people. Sure, I normally get stuff for my money, but it's more about promoting the growth of these people. As an example, I recently bought a $5 pre-order of a game which will theoretically be $30+ when released. This did not make me happy. I wasn't after a deal: I would have been happier paying $30.

Does this make me unique?

I don't think so. I think it's the fundamental difference between interacting with people and interacting with corporations.

Kickstarter and other similar things are about interacting with people, not companies.

What if something like Kickstarter was crossed with something like Facebook? A place that wasn't simply a social network, but a "this is what I'm working on now, look!" site. I call it "Wickerwork".

Describing Wickerwork won't work if you're not familiar with Kickstarter, or underestimate how much money flows through Kickstarter. Wickerwork is fundamentally Kickstarter, but instead of being project-centric, it's person-centric.

Every few days (or faster), you would update your status. This is the state of the art project we're working on, thanks for funding us. The next project is this one here, get on it if you want us to do it. Etc, etc.

If you break a leg and can't work any more, you can post about that - "oh, no, I broke my leg and can't work the farm! Help!" People will donate, or come down to help, or maybe even create a special offer of their stuff with the proceeds going to you.

The problem with this approach normally is that I don't know you and don't care about you. There's very little interest in helping a random stranger. I have to be aware of you. I don't have to be your buddy, but I have to know you.

Right now we propagate help messages through Twitter or Facebook or whatever, and they're crap at it. I don't know you, your Facebook page is pointless, etc, etc.

Something like Kickstarter is a unique opportunity to know people because you have a historical record of how they work. This lady is a local grower who has had three funded projects, she makes these cute videos about her gardens, she provides local food and seems nice... and she's not just begging for money, she's offering an optional "high-price" version of her normal service, asking for extra hands, has a friend who is selling stuff to help her (as well as accepting donations if you just want to give, of course). In this situation, even if I don't know this lady, I can know her. In just a few minutes, she can establish herself as a person very clearly.

This is a unique advantage of Kickstarter (or, I guess, any project-themed system). Projects are a powerful way to get to know someone. Their favorite music, their profile pic, their thoughts on things like social networking, that's not going to be important to me until they've established themselves as someone who actually exists. And that's easiest done by saying, "I'm the guy who made this documentary" or "I'm the lady with this farm".

It also offers an additional resource in that you can offer further project-related rewards instead of simply begging for money. "Emergency sale of documentary DVDs to pay for my kid's hospital bill!"

Also, because it keeps a record, it will be clear how often you need this kind of help. One problem with simply giving aide is that the incentives are bad, and you can theoretically start to rely on the aide rather than using the aide to get back on your feet. Either way, you could see it quite clearly in their project history.

Now, the problem with Wickerwork is that in order to be involved, you have to be doing Kickstarter-style projects with fair regularity. Saying, "I'm the girl who used to do that local farm thing, but now I work at Dairy Queen full time", that's not going to have the same draw.

This is a huge drawback. Most people don't do Kickstarter-style projects.

Well, the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe they should.

Maybe it would be a much more interesting place if people spent some of their hobby time doing a small escrow-funded project. Think about your hobbies. Could any be adapted to a small, funded project?

Most of them would probably benefit from becoming a small, funded project. The pressure would be just enough to actually finish the things you start.

For example, if you've got a musical hobby, you've probably dreamed of releasing a single, or an album. But chances are you've done neither, or if you have done one, they sank without a blip. Imagine if it had been a "I need $100 to fund recording my single! Maybe it's no good, maybe it's awesome, let's find out!"

Once you released the single, you would have a guaranteed audience, because they spent money on you already. No vanishing without a blip. And you would be driven to finish it, because otherwise you would have to return the $100 plus an extra $10 due to Amazon's fees.

That's what Wickerwork would be about. A continuous boil of small transactions and projects to knit people together quietly and closely.

Some people might be thinking "Nobody would fund that project, this guy's hopelessly optimistic!"

That's the same sort of thought that thinks Wikipedia cannot possibly work. Well, Wikipedia works, and surfing to Kickstarter clearly shows people will fund those sorts of projects.

What do you think?

More on Omnipresent Anonymity

You may remember I wrote this essay on a scifi setting. Since then I haven't been able to get it out of my head, so I'm going to write more on it in a less sci-fi sense.

We publish loads and loads of information to the internet. Common practice is to shake your finger at anyone who posts personal information to the internet.

But it's just impossible to not post personal information to the internet and still participate. There is a fragile layer of anonymity between your anonymous accounts and you. This gets even more fragile if your anonymous accounts are used to communicate with real-life friends, such as a facebook user who calls himself a random string of characters. You don't even have to know the communications: you just have to know that they happen.

Most geeks promote privacy awareness. Go into the options, set everything to private. Hide hide hide!

There are three problems with this. 1) It only takes a few "open" nodes to de-anonymize ("dean") an entire network, and given the lack of incentive, people are likely to remain open. 2) Going "quiet" and hiding away your info cripples the functionality of a social network. 3) It's becoming ever easier to mine even tiny leaks of data. Whether a friend accidentally mentions your name, or someone backtracks your IP address, your anonymity is not guaranteed no matter how "hidden" you try to be.

As our social use of the internet grows ever denser, it will become almost impossible to live your life without posting photos and video of yourself to the internet in the same way that we use email today. It's theoretically possible that some of that might be private, but if even a fraction of it is public, a huge portion of those connected can be deaned (de-anonymized). It's going to get worse and worse as our real social networks become increasingly reflected in our software social networks.

In my opinion, privacy advocates are really grasping at the last fragments of How Things Were. Right now, it's basically possible to keep hiding. I don't know for sure that all of my friends have various anonymous accounts, but they almost certainly do. I know I do. Right now, that's fine: there are very few programs automatically trawling the internet trying to make these connections. There aren't very many things actively trying to dean the internet.

But it's getting easier and easier, both in terms of available data to analyze and in terms of algorithms to do the analysis. It's important that privacy advocates realize that the idea of promoting anonymity from the user side is going to be basically impossible.

So, the problem needs to be turned on its head. The problem isn't "how do you keep users from posting private data", the problem is "how do you keep private data from being abused".

An analogy I liked is the one about public meatspaces. If you and a friend are chatting in public, you might talk about his medical condition. If a stranger then rushed up to try to sell him homeopathic lies targeted at his medical condition, nobody would ever think your friend was the one who was weird: it would be the spy that was weird. If he did it a lot, the police would take him in for being a public nuisance.

So if I'm talking to you on the internet and we mention your medical condition, Google offers us homeopathic lies instantly and automatically, and probably logs that targeted ad for reuse later. Your medical insurer two years from now, if they find that conversation somehow, might deny you coverage based on the fact that you had a "pre-existing condition". There are already rumors of insurers canceling treatment based on social media - such as the depressed person whose treatment was discontinued because she was seen smiling in a picture on one of her friend's social network pages.

Even if it was possible, it's inhuman and dangerous to make us responsible for staying absolutely silent, absolutely hidden. Humans are social beings, the internet is a social medium. Being abused by corporations and repressed by governments is nothing new. We don't generally say, "well, you shouldn't have said that you disagreed with the government!" We generally say, "hey, the government shouldn't be persecuting you just because you said something!"

This is the same situation. Obviously, being force-fed stupifyingly bad ads is not the same thing as being rounded up and blacklisted in McCarthy's Big Red Book, but both stem from the same problem of people outside a conversation listening in and taking action based on what they hear. Conversations that were never intended to include them and certainly were never intended to be definitive, permanent, public statements.

So, there are two basic responses to this.

One is to revamp the underlying architecture to make everything incredibly privacy-aware by default. I think this is a good idea, but I also think it's pretty much impossible, since a social network is inclusive by nature. As social networking becomes the primary use of the internet, it seems unlikely that we're going to create a new network that specifically damages that function. Still, we could do better than we're doing right now.

The other option is to do what we always do: legislate it.

It can be legislated from two sides. One side, probably the easier side, is to restrict contact between entities and use of data gathered on-line. You are allowed to gather data. You can dean the network, find that XRSOXGAL8727 is Jenny Smith. But you aren't allowed to use that information for anything. No targeted ads. No redirecting links. Only when a user explicitly allows this sort of thing is it allowed. Steep fines if you break that rule.

There are a few problems with this. One is that spam is basically impossible to track down. Every day I get spammed with fairly well-targeted spam: my interests are pretty transparent, so spammers target me pretty specifically. A lot of this spam comes from anonymous sources, people I could never track down, people the government would have to spend a fair amount of time tracking down. Still, that's okay, because I'm not trying to stop anonymous spammers. I'm trying to stop Google.

Another problem is that it might be difficult to draw the line between someone who is actually trying to socially contact you and a spammer. For example, if you post about squids and I send you a link to an interesting squid article, I'm not trying to spam you, I honestly think you'll find it interesting. I think that line can be drawn fairly easily - number of entreaties per day per organization or somesuch - but it is an issue that has to be kept in mind.

Also, there is the problem of UNTARGETED spam. When I visit a science site, there are sciency ads. This is not because they know who I am, it's because it's a science site. However, I can forsee a lot of cases going to court that stumble over this distinction. Personally, I would prefer to make it illegal for them to spam me without my permission, targeted or not. But I understand that's an extreme view.

Anyhow, we also have another kind of legislative option: to make it illegal to dean data. To make it illegal to trawl the internet gathering data, tying it together, figuring out who is where, doing what. To make it illegal to watch you as you travel.

Now, this second option is the one I chose for my sci-fi setting, so I sat down to think. In my sci-fi setting, you can tell someone has deaned data because data has a structure, and high-context (non-anonymous) data has a very specific structure, even if it has been reduced to nothing but lists of foreign keys. Because the backbone has largely been replaced by a mesh network of freely available personal wireless routers, a lot of private individuals scan passing traffic for this pattern and report it to the cops if found. This can net them a tidy profit.

If a corporation is suspected of using illegally deaned data, they can also be investigated using a similar pattern-finding tool. This leaves their data private: the feds never see the actual data. This has led to a (so-far fruitless) search for a way to store high-context data without the signature pattern.

That future is a bit dystopian under the covers, and I don't think that method would work in reality. But then I got to thinking:

The problem is caused because there is so much easily-searchable information. However, searching the information causes more easily-searched information.

While the corporations are busily deaning your data, using your private messages to sell you useless crap, you could be busily deaning their data.

This isn't very possible on the current brand of internet. But what if the "next, more privacy-conscious" iteration of things actually tracks patterns of requests instead of simply tracking user connectivity? What if, by fundamental design, it was The Completely Transparent Thing? Instead of privacy, it has anti-privacy. Well, within any given persona: you could still have your anonymous account.

Now, if your anonymous account and your real account are both pinged, you'll know. You can track down the ping-er. Which may also be an anonymous account. It will be immediately obvious if it was chance, or if it was an auto-deaner, or if it was your would-be boss trying to find out if you have a juicy personal life. By attempting to dean you, they effectively dean themselves.

This is not really a good solution, because that level of monitoring reveals way more than you want to have revealed. The time you visited a link blind and found yourself staring at something horrible. The fact that you checked so-and-so's page 80 times in one hour. And, of course, the muddy propagation problems where the SocialReader9 bot visits your page, reads the details, and then gives it to others without you knowing.

I don't think there is a solution, really. Not with current technologies. But I was tickled by the "balance of power" option, where someone attempting to gather information on you incidentally exposes more information about themselves.

I wonder if it could be made to work somehow...

Anyhow, it's a problem that can't be addressed by simply telling people not to put their personal information on-line.

Seedlings

Because I feel like it, I'll post a little bit from an earlier speculative tabletop scifi RPG I wrote. In the previous post I explained how a game had funky laws about privacy and information, and in this post I'll talk about how the game before that had weird ideas about what an "information economy" really is.

The game was written by me when I was trying to figure out what the "killer app" for 3D printers would be. The final result had very little do with the question, but it might still be interesting.

Unlike the last game I talked about, this game (named 'Seedlings') was not about information for information's sake. Instead, it was about information that can be turned into something real. For example, the file embodying a chair: feed it into a 3D printer, and you get a chair. The file embodying a flower: print the DNA into a seeder, and you end up with that flower.

The difficulty was in the game mechanics. Most RPGs are about killing and looting. The inherently constructive nature of the game made that impossible. Killing someone and stealing their computer is weak compared to getting the file they used to print their computer, at which point you can print an unlimited number yourself.

The core idea is turning information into physical objects, but there's no recurring play in that. Once you've printed something out, you have it. Even if you posit that it breaks, you're still able to print up an identical one. Without some kind of ridiculous conceit, once you've printed something, you have it, done.

The same problem exists with real 3D printers. You just don't need to print that much stuff. The stuff you use new every day is largely food and packaging. The first can't be printed, the second makes no sense to print. If you do need to print something (such as a book shelf or a new iPhone case), you print it and you're done. There's no "rolling ball" to chase, like there is with our never-ending stream of lattes.

Every way I pushed the rule set I ran into trouble. I couldn't find any core mechanic that would sustain an entire RPG. I thought about making it a game about investigation, but those never fly. I thought about making it some kind of strategy/people-management game, but those are poorly suited for paper.

The only thing I could think of in the end was DNA. If instead of using fabricators, I used DNA, I could put in time delays.

Sure, you can print out anything you want, but it will take days or weeks to grow to full size.

This started getting really weird as I pushed it further and further. I drew sketches of the sorts of places you would encounter.

For example, you're walking through suburbia, and everyone's back yard is full of multicolored plants. One mom says to another, "oh, yeah, Jimmie tore up his pants, so I put them in the compost. The denim plants are in bloom, anyway, so I just had him pull new pants off the vine..."

The villainous Doctor Imevil is hidden away on a mountainside. He's growing a new base, and you can see the photovoltaic ferns blooming on his roof. To keep it from giving him away, he's carefully seeded the whole mountainside with them, pretending it's an uncontrolled propagation of a known product, blaming the original researchers who designed the plant.

The 'last mile' is covered by silk-thin tendrils of roots growing from house to house... to tap a phone, you would plant a "tap-plant" and wait for its roots to find the transmission roots.

Although classic pollution is not as much a problem as it was, the sky at night glitters with microscopic organisms battling it out as the city releases swarms of hunter-killer germs to counter today's diseases, brought in on the winds or the planes. These diseases don't affect the populace - the hunter-killers are extremely effective - but you will sometimes find the sidewalk covered in a glittering puddle. You don't want to know what caused the puddle, but you can be sure it's not contagious. Sure, there's no reason for it to glitter, but I take some license.

And, of course, living clothes, adaptive streets, and semi-intelligent plant life.

These don't directly turn into gameplay, but I find that strong imagery really helps me get a feel for the game. Unfortunately, the final rule set ended up being a combination of a strategy game and a detective game, so blah.

Still, the point is that I can't really think of a "killer app" for a 3D printer. The only things I can think of all revolve around evading the law or living in places where there are no stores. But I can think of a million killer apps for "living" 3D printers.

Now if only I could figure out how to make it into a game worth playing.

Funny Laws of the New Century

Every few months I try to write a scifi RPG (tabletop) using fairly realistic reactions to theoretical advancements. Basically, I try to write some speculative fiction in game form. I never publish or anything, but the one I created last month has some interesting characteristics, so I thought I'd share a few of the details.

The tabletop game is codenamed "anonymesh", and revolves around the idea of a massive, dense network of interconnected wireless nodes. Extremely low-energy computers combined with cheap solar cells make running a wireless node quite literally free, and so most people use "meshnet" instead of the centralized backbone internet. This leads to a lot of really interesting characteristics, and as you might expect, the players all play hackers.

The interesting bits are endless, but one of the most interesting things that popped out of this universe was the idea of "deanning". Basically, I tried to think of the weirdest, cleverest laws I could, and some of the privacy laws that emerged were very strange.

For example, you can take a picture of main street and post it on line without getting anyone's permission, without blurring faces, without any of that, because the people in the picture are anonymous.

What isn't legal is running face-scanning technology across that image to identify who these people are. This is de-anonymizing the data, or "deanning" it. Technically, while the deanning is illegal, it can't be enforced. Instead, only the propagation of deanned data is illegal. (More specifically, the propagation of any non-anonymous data without permission, regardless of whether it's been deanned or was never anonymized in the first place.) Data is considered non-anonymous if it reveals more of the person's personal information than the person expected to people they didn't intend. This is an objective statement, but a huge and growing number of guidelines exist in the courts to support it.

This has a huge number of implications, especially since propagation includes "feeding into data mining programs for purposes unrelated to the initial data".

So if you buy a bagel, the bagel shop can remember you bought a bagel. But they can't use the fact that you bought a bagel for non-you-buying-bagel purposes. They can't email you ads, they can't use your preferences in analysis of what bagels are best, they certainly can't sell your debit card info to another company. Not unless the data is properly anonymized. So they can say that their Washington Ave store sold a poppy seed bagel at 10:45 AM, but not who bought it.

It's pretty easy for anyone to save up a lot of vaguely related data and then dean it using basic pattern recognition tools. For example, if you record main street 24/7, you can easily start matching up individuals and determining their habits. Combined with a simple web trawl, you may be able to identify a significant number of people and their exact schedules.

This is illegal, but how would you enforce it? Especially since it's so easy to do with the mesh network: ten thousand man-in-the-middle attacks per message. Just save every bit of recognizable traffic. Analyze encryptions: you'll have gigabytes of data from the same source spooling by day after day, cracking it is just a matter of time and effort.

Well, the truth is that things get deanned all the time. You don't even have to run a thieving wifi router to get enough data to dean. You can dean from an internet search.

But using this information generally leaves a pretty clear trail. The same algorithms that can dean anonymous data can detect when a project or statement contains references to less-than-anonymous data. Individuals rarely have to worry about this in the same way pirates rarely worry about it. But companies have to worry, and have to be scrupulous.

This is especially dangerous to them because many of the wifi routers they depend on are run by untrusted sources who would love nothing better than to forward their illegal data to the police for a reward. It's not illegal to copy the information transferred through their router, not illegal to decrypt it, either, due to some anti-terrorism laws passed by the panicky government.

It's also not illegal to hack into devices, although it is illegal to use those hacked devices in an illegal manner (including data theft). This means that if you do dean data, you want to make sure you do it on an offline-only machine that can't be hacked remotely. Otherwise a hacker might forward that data to the police for that reward, get you thrown in jail.

Those are some of the basic rules, which actually make for a surprisingly interesting hacker game dynamic. There are a few things that may not occur to you at first read, though. Here are a few of those things:

Your friends can talk about you. This is called "implicit permission to dean". Where this permission ends is a rough concept and depends on what the individual has released publicly in the past.

Things you publish "publicly" that aren't intended for public use - for example, your mood on LiveJournal - are considered non-public data. The end user is not expected to always know exactly how every piece of software works, and therefore it is not the user that is held accountable, but the software and those that propagate the information for their own purposes.

So-called "shadow puppets" can be made. These are VR/AR avatars built out of real data fed to them. For example, feed your shadow puppet all the president's videos and speeches, and you have a shadow puppet that looks, talks, and acts like the president. This is almost always a dean even if you do it on public and non-anonymous data, because the shadow puppet can be made to act in a manner normally considered to be private and personal. For example, you can make your president puppet strip naked and dance the watusi. You can also release simulations of the president saying things he normally wouldn't say.

The law hasn't caught up to that extent, yet. Sometimes the infringements are allowed as parody, and sometimes the shadow puppet is waved off as not breaching privacy, but people are starting to crack down on the matter ever since a parody site began releasing pixel-perfect variants of Fox News shows.

"Virtual characters" have some very complex rights ever since the supreme court came down on the side of Disney to find that a shadow puppet of Mickey was not only a violation of trademark, but also a violation of "expected privacy on behalf of Mickey Mouse".

Anyway, the actual game is significantly more detailed (it's actually a bit too detailed for a tabletop game), but the laws about anonymizing and deanning were interesting enough I thought I'd talk about them on their own.

Talkative Technology

_{Ugh, wake up on Sunday morning and there's Warren Ellis, posting at the top of his game. I haven't even had coffee yet.}

Here's an interesting article for you about ubiquitous computing. Apparently, there was an interesting convention on the other side of the planet. Fortunately, Mr. Nova gives us a summary.

I tend to focus on the software side of things, so when I think of ubiquitous computing, I have a specific vision: the hardware fades away and we're left with ubiquitous transparent interfaces. The thought exercise is how being "virtualized" or "made smart" can make things in your life easier and better to use.

The classic example is a toaster. We have a toaster in the office. It is almost unusable because it is "too smart". Instead of letting you set a heat level, a timer, and then press a button, it requires you to select an exact type of thing you want to toast ("bagel", for example) and a number of slices. Of course, the list of things you can toast is too long to be easy, but too short to actually include the things you're likely to want to toast, and the idea of "slices" is insufficient for that all-important browness level. So you end up guessing: is toasting this cut-open croissant more like toasting a single slice of bagel, or more like toasting two slices of bread?

Whatever you choose, the toaster is a bad design. It looks nice, very Star Trek, very chrome, but it actually does its job worse than a toaster with two dials and a button.

I can't really think of a toaster that's significantly better than two dials and a button. There's not much need for a toaster that's smarter than that. The next step would be a toaster that could fetch the bread, butter it, and toast it up while you're still figuring out whether your pants are on frontwards or not. That's not something that can be virtualized, and your toaster will never get there by simply being smarter.

But there are things in your life that can be made better if they are smarter.

Almost all of them are, for me, methods of putting yourself into a community without needing to actually be there. As an example, I wouldn't at all mind if my stereo played songs recommended by my friends (or even respected strangers). Sure, the music tastes sweeter hunted down track by track, but I seem to spend most of my time hunting down ridiculous futurism articles instead.

How about a picture frame which fades between images that your friends have recommended, or even to newly taken pictures from their photo galleries? Or displays a virtual world where you all "live"?

This just starts to touch on the idea of passive integration into some kind of community. It will be a while after that when we start to see more aggressive integration. This is because A) we haven't come to the stage where an on-line community is as strong as a real community and B) it'll take us that long to figure out the privacy concerns.

Still, think about all the more aggressive options.

For example, your notebook that you scribble little notes in. What if there's a "public notes" section which works a bit like Buzz, except it's got a tablet interface for doodles and scribbles as well? Doodles and scribbles are a lot more interesting for everyone involved, and I find that half-formed ideas often offer more potential than the final idea, simply because they can go a dozen different ways while the final idea can only go one. I call this "idea aji", which I won't bother to explain.

This notebook idea has no place in our current lives. There's just no mechanic for it. Even if we had a notebook capable of doing that (which we do, actually, but let's pretend we don't), there's no mechanic in our on-line life for this kind of sharing. It looks like Twitter on the surface, but it's very different underneath.

There are dozens more examples. For example, my piano keyboard would be a lot more entertaining if it could connect to faraway piano keyboards and allow us to play distant duets. My kitchen would be a lot more useful if the various cabinet doors were screens for recipes and labels. My clothes would be more entertaining if they could arbitrarily change their patterns, especially if you lost a bet.

And it'd all be a lot more useful if I could "flip" windows from one screen to another across the hall, or in my pocket, or across the city.

Really, ubiquitous computing isn't about ubiquitous computing at all. It's about ubiquitous interfacing. The problem is that, at the moment, we don't have the community infrastructure to allow for that interfacing

Even if all the technology was cheap, even if all the software existed, we still wouldn't be ready, socially, to use it.

So the question then becomes "which baby steps get taken first?"

The more immediate question is "why am I posting stuff like this before coffee?"

Piracy and Economy and Ethics

The recent debacle of over-protected games has made the situation even more clear. The old ways are on their last legs. If people are refusing to buy your game because it is easier to steal it, there's something wrong with your business model. Especially if those people are a major part of your target audience.

A government's laws are basically unimportant and unenforceable when it comes to this sort of thing. Sure, there's always froth, always some poor innocent grandma or seven-year-old getting crushed on the public stage, but you're more likely to get hit by lightning than charged with piracy. This is true no matter what kind of piracy you engage in, aside from fairly obvious exceptions such as actual, physical hijacking of naval vessels.

I don't pirate because I find I (A) want to support people who produce things I like and (B) have enough money to do so. The only times I am tempted to pirate is when a game I want to play has ridiculous anti-piracy measures. Once pirated, I don't have to worry about the piracy protection. Which is an indication as to the hopeless nature of the fight.

However, I haven't pirated in quite a long time. I generally find there are plenty of games I want to play, so I just go get a different one. (This is actually pretty severe. I went to Bioshock 1's opening party, got myself "adam" shots from models in bloody nurse outfits, the whole affair. I did not buy (or pirate) Bioshock 2. Because of its "protection".)

My "morality" of not pirating is not some kind of fundamental morality. In this situation, there is no fundamental morality. There's a reality, and it is our nature as humans to adapt to the reality, and then backwards-reason excuses for ourselves. Anyone who proclaims that piracy is wrong, or anyone who angrily claims pirate protection is oppressive, they're both reasoning backwards to reach that point.

The truth is that the cost of data duplication is so low that it's more or less free. So you think that someone has the right to steal music, or pirate games, or whatever, that's irrelevant. Same with thinking that the people who produced it have a right to gate it. Also irrelevant. Both of those are reasons provided by your clever backwards-thinking brain in response to older experiences in an older reality.

Welcome to today.

As time progresses, our morality will shift to a data-centric view. Because data is cheap to duplicate and extremely hard to contain, we are going to drift towards a "data is free" mentality. Your kids (or grandkids, I don't know how old you are) will look back on the idea that game companies charged for distributing games with awe. Sort of like you looking back on the laws intended to protect scribes from the printing press. How could anyone have tried to stop or slow down the printing press? Sure, you feel for the scribes, but you can't save them.

It's the same situation here.

Right now, most of our morality still derives from rationalizing our old behaviors in our economy of stuff. In an economy of stuff, stealing something is bad because it makes that something not available to the person who owns it. The idea of patents and copyrights was perhaps the first major reference to data economies, but that was in a very different time with very different characteristics. We have formed our morality around them, but it isn't a fundamental morality. Our current era works differently, and we'll watch as our morality swings to favor reality.

How far this will go or what will result is hard to say. Some people believe it will be the death of art, games, music, and so on. These people are really dumb. It may be the end of the reign of pop music and EA, but games and music will continue on without any problems. Hell, people will make them for free even if they can't figure out a way to profit from it. (Although I think there are plenty of ways to profit.)

Other people think it will be the death of money. This seems equally unlikely. Our data economy still exists in the "cracks" of our fundamental economy, the one that sells us power and lattes and other physical things. It may be that in the fullness of time these things will become so easy to produce that they will not be worth much money, but until then, we'll always need cash.

All I can say for sure is that it means the death of copyright and patents as we know them. It may take twenty more years, but eventually people will begin to think that distributing data is a fundamental right, like being allowed to walk down main street. They will begin to think this because we will rationalize the fact that we do distribute data willy-nilly. Our moralities arise from our world, they are not some magic set of rules handed down from on high.

Please note this also applies to DNA, and our ability to manipulate it.