shower in the dark

What does technology want?

2011-01-31T15:17:00.000-08:00

The following is a review of technology philosopher Kevin Kelly’s latest book, What Technology Wants, which he added to the list of reviews book's website. If you live in the Northeast and/or admire him as much as I do, join the Business Innovation Factory for a conversation with Kelly on February 10th.

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I've been following Kevin Kelly’s work for a long time, and his thoughts for his next book about the meaning of technology since he started chronicling them in 2004. So it was with much anticipation and a good amount of context that I, and many others, received the book that finally emerged, What Technology Wants. In this ambitious endeavor to elucidate the intention of technology, Kelly contextualizes the evolution of technology within the evolution of life and consciousness. It is strangely beautiful poetry for technophiles and technophobes alike; instead of contrasting or conflating life and technology, he tells a convincing tale in which they are two thrusts of a self-organizing and increasingly self-conscious universe. But as exhibited by the notes I scribbled on almost every one of the book’s 406 pages, my critiques are many. What follows are five pointed questions and, based on the fifth one, a more extended critique of the book. In this critique, I make claims as audacious as Kelly’s, but unlike him, without duly defending them, and I willingly leave myself open to criticism. I struggled with my reaction to this book and wholeheartedly encourage your comments. Here goes, starting with five questions:

1) How does Kelly situate technology ontologically? Where does technology ‘sit’ relative to culture, humanity, life, consciousness, and other phenomena? Is it a seventh kingdom of life (p. 49), ontologically on par with animals, plants, etc., or is it a force “like gravity…[which] is embedded in the fabric of matter and energy” (p. 273), and therefore permeates all kingdoms of life? Or is it somehow both? Alternatively, if “we are continuous with the machines we create” (p. 188), is technology part of the animal kingdom, or further, part of the human species? And how does Kelly see this ontology changing as technology evolves into a more autonomous, self-aware force?

2) What Technology Wants is about technology in the aggregate. So important is this point that Kelly coins a term to refer to the entire sphere of technology: the technium. He goes on to characterize the technium in absolute terms, for example claiming that it is inherently prolife and diversity-enhancing (pp. 196, 352). But given the differences between individual technologies, is characterizing the entire sphere of technology in absolute terms meaningful enough? In other words, given the massively different social implications of a hammer versus a nuclear bomb versus the Internet, is it meaningful to put all technologies into one big pile in order to elucidate what ‘it’ wants? Absolute terms are certainly significant, but in order to meaningfully characterize any complex phenomenon, I think relative measures must also be taken into account. When characterizing an economy, we look at total wealth (an absolute measure) along with wealth distribution (a relative one); similarly, when characterizing the technium, I think total biophilia, diversity-enhancement, and other absolute measures along with the distribution of biophilia, etc. must be accounted for. If Kelly is interested in change through time, how this distribution is trending must also be factored in.

3) Kelly prefers a decentralized system of color photography processing to a centralized one, and a peer-to-peer radio broadcast system to a heavily government-regulated one, and promotes transparent labeling of chemical products (p. 257). The characteristics he associates with a convivial manifestation of technology include cooperation, transparency, decentralization, flexibility, redundancy, and efficiency (p. 264). Such inclinations imply a particular political orientation, but why is Kelly not explicit about his politics? Does he a) not want to be painted as a liberal, idealistic techno-hippie?, b) believe that convivial technologies can emerge from and thrive in non-convivial social contexts (oppositely defined), or c) other?

4) Given that What Technology Wants makes bold claims about the nature of technology and is being read far beyond academic circles, what do academics in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) think of the book? Specifically, what does Langdon Winner, who Kelly cites admirably throughout the book, think of it? If you’ve already read this far and have any connection to Winner, one of my two favorite philosophers of technology, then a) you’re amazing, and b) please ask him to write a review. Or better yet, please ask him to have a public conversation with Kelly, which would make for a fascinating encounter between my two favorite philosophers of technology.

5) Years ago, renowned mycologist Paul Stamets began noticing that mushrooms which cured similar diseases grew in similar conditions. Applying this observation, he started knowing where to look for mushrooms that cured specific diseases. Applying it further, he started being able to create conditions conducive to growing mushrooms that cured specific diseases, effectively growing cures. Without wanting to risk social determinism (the false notion that social context alone determines technology), I pose an honest question: similar to Stamets, can we deliberately create the social conditions conducive to growing less harmful, and au contraire convivial technologies? (Who are “we” and how do we determine what is “less harmful”? Wince, I know, that is another question – or rather the question – taken up below.) Put more simply, if our process of technological development matched the character of technology we sought, what technologies would we be creating? I won’t say the following statement applies wholesale, at least not yet, but I’d venture to imagine that such technologies would have unintended benefits.

Based on this fifth question, following is an attempt to synthesize my critique of the book.

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Ultimately, I wonder whether Kelly ascribes too much power to technology as an inevitable force in its own right, and not enough power to us to create the conditions in which technology emerges.

A basic premise of What Technology Wants is that technology cannot be stopped, only postponed. Therefore, Kelly argues, “our role as humans…is to coax technology along the paths it naturally wants to go” (p. 269). To me, this smells too much like Thomas Friedman’s take on our relationship with globalization: inaccurate and overly passive. I’m inclined towards a more explicitly active relationship with globalization, and with technology – an active terraforming of its path rather than a seemingly passive coaxing along the path it chooses.

Kelly claims a) we can’t predict what a given technology’s harms will be, and therefore b) nor can we prevent them (p. 244). On the contrary, I believe both a) and b) are possible, and increasingly so within an actionable time frame. Technology critic Langdon Winner, who as mentioned above Kelly cites throughout the book, discusses how technologies can have social implications that can be known before they are used or even built. He describes the approximately 200 low-hanging overpasses on Long Island, deliberately designed by master builder Robert Moses to prevent buses, therefore public transit, and therefore poor people and blacks, from accessing Jones Beach, Moses’ acclaimed public park. He describes technologies that require extremely hierarchical forms of social organization to be built and operated, such as cotton factories, railways, and nuclear energy plants. The difficulty with such technologies in democratic societies, Winner writes, is ensuring that the forms of social organization they require to be built and operated not ‘bleed’ into the polity as a whole. I’m painfully simplifying Winner’s sophisticated discussion of how technologies can 'have politics' for purposes of this post. Still, in all of these cases, the social harms of technologies can be predicted a priori, based purely on the social context of their development. And if harms can be predicted, they can be prevented. Knowing that an overtly racist builder will build overpasses that institutionalize racism can prompt the hiring of a builder who prioritizes social equality, or better yet, the use of an equal-opportunity participatory design process. Knowing that nuclear technology requires an extremely centralized social system while solar doesn’t require any system in particular, but is compatible with a diversity of them, can help guide energy choices in a democratic society. Contrary to Kelly, I believe that under some circumstances, we can not only use the social context of technological development to predict and prevent a technology’s social harms, but furthermore deliberatively design the social context in order to cultivate social benefits.

Potentially plausible, but what about non-social harms? How would examining the social context of technological development enable us to predict or prevent health and environmental implications? Happily for us, we create hard distinctions between health, social, and environmental, but our bodies, societies, and ecosystems don’t. There are distinct levels in complex adaptive systems, but there’s feedback between them. Hazardous nuclear waste is an “unintended consequence” of producing nuclear energy, but so-called unintended consequences are simply symptoms of a deeper-rooted, more systemic problem. Let me offer two anecdotes. First, the reason global dumping grounds exist is because some countries have disproportionately more power than others. Powerful countries are able to create an abundance of toxic waste because they can dump it in weak countries. Extreme social inequality is therefore detrimental to the environment as humans need it in order to thrive. Linger on that for a moment: Social inequality manifests itself as environmental degradation. This is something any environmental justice advocate can tell you. Think back to nuclear energy. Is it possible that nuclear waste is not unrelated to, i.e. not a symptom of the extreme social centralization required to produce it?

A second anecdote: In his TED talk, Dan Barber tells the story of how historically, Foie Gras was a naturally-occurring seasonal food, discovered accidentally by Israelite slaves in Egypt. During the Fall, ducks naturally gorged on dry leaves in order to prepare for the Winter, enlarging their livers and making them a delicacy. It was because the Pharaoh wanted to eat this delicacy year-round and demanded that the slaves figure out how to make it available that spawned the inhumane practice of force-feeding of grain to ducks, and ultimately the maligned Foie Gras industry we know today. But in 2007, the winner of the Coup de Coeur (essentially the French Olympics for food) turned out to be a Spanish farmer who produced his Foie Gras naturally, allowing his ducks to eat as they pleased during the Fall and producing Foie Gras from their free-roaming, happily-eating livers. It is at once both obvious and miraculous that animal welfare should taste delicious on our taste buds. What’s more, allowing ducks to eat happily means organically growing a biodiversity of plants, so sustainability tastes delicious too. Again, let it linger for a moment that inhumane treatment of animals evolved in the context of slavery, and that their humane treatment manifests itself as deliciousness. But deliciousness would not be accurately described as an unintended benefit of duck happiness; it is a sister symptom of a systems solution manifesting itself at multiple levels of organization – from our taste buds to the local ecosystem. Bringing these anecdotes together, not only can we predict and prevent social harms of technologies, but by organizing ourselves in such a way that maximizes our collective well-being – fostering equitability and heeding our taste buds – we create the conditions conducive to the emergence of technologies that similarly maximize well-being, at all levels of organization. Kelly prefers a decentralized system of color photography processing to a centralized one, and a peer-to-peer radio broadcast system to a heavily government-regulated one because of their improved technological features. Could improved technological features be a symptom of decentralized social organization, and if so, why not start with the decentralization that manifests itself as technological improvements? In Wendell Berry’s terms, this might be considered a solving for pattern approach to technological development. In Kelly’s terms, it suggests building convivial technologies by organizing ourselves in a way that is itself convivial, i.e. cooperative and decentralized.

But taken to the extreme, this implies social determinism. It implies that all technology should be appropriate technology, and that all technological development must be convivial in order for the technologies built to be convivial, thus rendering un-convivial most technologies in existence today, including the ones I’m using to develop and communicate these very ideas. But I’m not a social determinist, nor socialist, nor a communist. (In fact, I’m a promiscuous pragmatic pluralist, scroll down for a brief elaboration). I recognize the value of non-classlessness – too much and too little social inequality are detrimental to economic growth and technological development, albeit in different ways. This extreme is not what I’m arguing; in fact, my claim is even bolder. Kelly acknowledges “industrialization was dirty, ugly, and dumb,” and brilliantly asks “whether this ugliness is a necessary stage of the technium’s growth (p. 323). I think it was necessary but is no longer. We’ve already created nuclear energy and DDT and other technologies that required severely undemocratic forms of social organization, and I believe we’re arriving at a juncture in spacetime in which feedback loops are tighter and faster, so that instead of manifesting themselves 7 generations later, implications – social and otherwise – manifest themselves within the timeframe of actionability, evolving us towards a more socially responsible process of technological development. And, bringing it back home, I believe this is due to our co-evolution with technology. Let me explain.

Kelly believes technology is permeating everything it creates with sentience, effectively becoming the universes’ mechanism for self-awareness. Perform the thought experiment: As the universe becomes self-aware, what will it know? It is information, communication, and transportation technologies, among others, that enabled the story of deliciously sustainable Foie Gras to get from Spain to TED to me to you, all within the matter of a few years, so it could be acted upon. More broadly, it is Zagat and Yelp and Urbanspoon that speed up the informational feedback loops enabling it to be known that sustainably grown food tastes better, and thus enabling the gourmet food industry to adapt to this information, effectively subsidizing the production and consumption of sustainable food and sustainable food systems. Even further, it is social network analysis tools that enable people to see the structure of their social networks, and I predict will cultivate the capacity for sociofeedback, the social equivalent to biofeedback, i.e. the ability to adaptively shift the structure of our social networks by virtue of being conscious of them (which I referred to in a previous Smart Mobs post, and will soon dedicate an entire post to). Sociofeedback would allow people to, for example, form an internal hierarchical social structure for purposes of producing nuclear energy, without it bleeding into the external polity, because they’d be able to consciously shift to other social structures for other purposes, such as citizenry. And due to collective awareness of nuclear’s ramifications at all levels of organization, producing nuclear would be understood as a deliberate choice, perhaps a temporary tactic under emergency circumstances or as part of a broader strategy to increase the ratio of renewables to non. It is with apologetic irreverence yet undying optimism that I propose we can not only a) predict and b) prevent a technology’s harms, but increasingly do so within an actionable timeframe, thanks to technologies produced by an un-convivial industrialization that are now integrating themselves into the inherently convivial complex adaptive system that is life.

Mega online clothing retailer Zappos is structured to maximize employee happiness, because its CEO discovered that employee happiness correlates directly with customer satisfaction, and in turn the company’s bottom line. I suspect that 200 years ago, had a mega-retailer structured itself to maximize employee happiness, it would have swiftly gone bankrupt. I understand this is the case for many, if not most businesses today, but is it not again obvious/miraculous or at least meaningful that in the case of a meta-retailer like Zappos, socially responsible labor practices correlate with financial returns? Or, as the Gini coefficient shows, that a base level of economic equality is necessary to economic growth? In fact, writing about his upcoming book on the evolution of capitalism, Christopher Meyer posits that “business [will] take ownership of the impacts they now call ‘externalities.’” The new capitalists will internalize externalities not for altruistic reasons, but because doing so is actually becoming good for business. As technology makes the universe more self-aware, accelerating the feedback loops that make these kinds of correlations explicit, and evolving our complex adaptive system – or as Kelly might say, evolving evolvability itself – we’ll adaptively shift from passing externalities onto other people at other cash registers 7 generations later to engaging in a more convivial mode of production and consumption, and in turn, a more convivial mode of technological development.

How would such a convivial mode of technological development be mandated, or even encouraged by public policy? Not quite with the Precautionary Principle, which as Kelly criticizes, maximizes safety to the detriment of other values, like progress. Also not quite with Kelly’s Proactionary Principle, whereby we “shape technology’s expression by…riding it with both arms around its neck” (p. 262), as if struggling to tame a wild horse. Very simply, I suggest we get the Office of Technology Assessment, first, revived, and second, talking to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. Some interdepartmental coordination could go a long way towards integrating technological development with other societal goals, and therefore fostering a convivial mode of technological development that, in turn, developed convivial technologies.

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“So what does technology want?” All the way on page 269 of his treatise, Kelly offers a seemingly straightforward answer: “Technology wants what we want – the same long list of merits we crave.” But, what do we want? Ah, finally we arrive at the “we” question. After wading through a thicket of mental trials and tribulations, ‘riding technology with both arms around its neck’ presents itself as an exercise in democracy, an exercise in deciding who “we” are and what we want. Reading Kelly’s words in this light seems to affirm the importance of social context – could ‘coaxing technology along the paths it naturally wants to go’ mean creating the social context conducive to manifesting our will? Might he actually concur that by organizing ourselves in such a way that maximizes our collective wellbeing, we create the conditions conducive to the emergence of technologies that similarly maximize our wellbeing, at all levels of organization? If I understand Kelly correctly, his response to the seminal question of this book is that if technology wants what we want, then we must get what we want in order for technology itself to be satisfied.

Kelly bases his argument that technology wants what we want, and is inherently a force of good, on its maximization of our freedom. “Technology is acquiring its own autonomy and will increasingly maximize its own agenda, but this agenda includes – as its foremost consequence – maximizing of possibilities for us” (p. 352). This emphasis on freedom interestingly echoes America’s Founding Fathers’ emphasis on the same virtue, but meaningfully leaves out the corresponding virtue they acknowledged: justice. Kelly nowhere speaks of justice; the characteristics he attributes to convivial technology do not include justice or equality or anything to temper freedom. Furthermore, he feels that nothing need be done about the ‘digital divide’ – the rich should subsidize technology evolution for the poor, as this is an ideal state of affairs. But if liberty without justice is chaos, and justice without liberty is tyranny, and if technology wants what we want, then – within the crudely-defined context of democratic societies, in which all of our wants are supposed to be accounted for – technology wants liberty and justice for all. Even after 406 pages, I confess to not knowing to what extent Kelly would agree with me on this conclusion: technology manifests what it wants, i.e. what we want, to the extent that we manifest what we want, including in our development and therefore co-evolution with technology. Coming full circle, hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to ask him at the Business Innovation Factory’s conversation with Kevin Kelly on February 10th.

What a Dose of Techno-Optimism Tastes Like

2010-06-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

[In May of 2010, filmmaker and founding producer/host for Current TV Jason Silva messaged me to solicit my feedback on his Vanity Fair article, Why We Could All Use a Heavy Dose of Techno-Optimism. The following blog post, is my frighteningly long response.]

Jason - I'm honored that you thought to share this with me. You are a beautiful writer and a beautiful person, and I can't wait to watch your film. But I fear I may not have been the ideal person to ask for feedback from (unless you were looking for someone to challenge you) because I have a very nuanced relationship with technology, not unlike Kevin Kelly's. I've lived in an Earthship, worked on a biodynamic farm, and believe that the big bang was Love; meanwhile I majored in Science, Technology, and Society, subscribe to WIRED, and currently work as a social media strategist. I'm neither old-fashioned nor new-fashioned, technophobic nor technophilic, but so open-minded that I'm even open to being close-minded (sometimes). It might make more sense to say that I'm buddies with Howard Rheingold and consider myself a promiscuous pragmatic pluralist (abbreviated as ppp). All of that said, let me offer a few observations:

"Somewhere down the line, however, these two worlds [of art and science] became disjointed." – If you'd like to do justice to the 'disjointing' of art and science, and of components of complex systems in general (whether ontological or otherwise), you might find writings on the paradigm shift from reductionism to holism helpful, like Fritjof Capra's The Turning Point (old but remarkably still relevant). It’s not clear whether you’re suggesting this, but I don't think we are (or should) move towards a complete blurring of the boundary between art and science, but instead towards the ability to shift between a hard and soft (and blurringly non-existent) boundary, depending on the circumstances. This is precisely the view Rita King takes towards the distinction between real and virtual. The generalized version of this view, which is a tenet of ppp, is that in pursuit of holism, we need not destroy the boundaries between things that are “connected” and turn the world to sausage, but develop the ability shift between multiple typologies of the same phenomenon (academic disciplines, the body, etc. etc. etc.) at will. Put more simply, it's the fact that we've cultivated art and science as different ingredients for so long that allows us now to combine and uncombine them with such brilliant effects.

"We're the first technology-creating species." – This tugs uncomfortably at my heart, given my longtime fascination with Biomimicry, innovation inspired by nature. If you're going to make this claim, you must a) clearly define what technology is, and b) explain why other species' technological innovations (many of which we mimic) don't qualify. Unless you decide to define technology as an exclusively human endeavor, which of course would make your job infinitely easier. Sorry to be so logical about it. Regardless, I think you'd actually enjoy reading about Biomimicry and using it to contextualize the evolution of technology within the evolution of not only humans, but of life and consciousness.

"If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well. Certainly there are challenges ahead, but there's also profound potential for greatness. The Large Hadron Collider is only the latest example of mankind's magnificent undertakings." – I wholeheartedly agree that the process of life moves towards increased complexity, ever-evolving new scales of organization, but what does that have to do with the Hadron Collider? (That we needed to evolve a new scale of human organization in order to build it?) As an aside, my personal curiosity is about what happens when different scales of organization start interacting with each other, e.g. when individuals start interacting with meta-individuals.

But my main point..."We must not be afraid to push boundaries; instead we should leverage our science and our technology, together with our creativity and our curiosity, to solve the world's problems." – Forgive me, but the problems you point to in this article are not the world's problems; they're the so-called "problems" of elites who value progress and innovation over all else. I know I sound technophobic, but I'm a Libra and I smell a lil’ technophilia so naturally I attempt to balance out the scale. I share your enthusiasm for these "limitless, mind-boggling possibilities," but I also crave triage: given a world of finite resources, how to allocate them equitably? Or further, how to allocate them in such a way that kickstarts a positive feedback loop, perpetually generating more resources in benefit of all? It's not that I don't feel as passionate as you about technological innovation; it's that I feel passionate about a different kind of technological innovation, namely that which cultivates meaningful and equitable thriving, that which produces unintended benefits, that which allows us to enjoy our way to sustenance and sustainability, like this play pump. And like appropriate technologies, which need not be small-scale or unsophisticated.

Ultimately, my fascination with technological innovation is tempered by the fact that only a few of us are 'Turning into Gods' and we may not necessarily become benevolent ones. I agree with William Gibson that future is already here, just not evenly distributed, but I don't see enough functioning, playful, beautiful mechanisms for distribution. I think my vision of an ideal future differs from yours, and that although it includes God-like play at the intersection of art and science, I haven't seen a compelling theory of change for how the innovations you describe feed our journey (though I'm certainly open to one). Which doesn't necessarily mean we need to define the ideal future first and then judge all technological innovations according to it, but simply that we engage in a process of technological innovation that itself manifests our ideal. A simpler way to think about this is by asking: if our process of technological innovation were democratic, participatory, and joyous, what technologies would we be creating? I don't know but I’d Love to find out.

the integratron: a rejuvenation machine

2009-04-25T06:33:00.001-07:00

[I actually wrote this post for another blog, and they turned it down because it was too woo-woo, so I'm posting it here instead. even if it is woo-woo, just imagine the possibility that, electricity can be used to rejuvenate our cells - as if they were re-chargeable batteries. at the very least, it makes for some beautiful conceptual art.]

In the Mojave Desert in 1953, former aircraft mechanic and flight inspector George Van Tassel claimed to have been contacted telepathically and later visited by aliens from Venus, who taught him a technique for rejuvenating human cell tissues. (In other words, Venusians taught Van Tassel how to make cells travel backwards in time.) What resulted was the Integratron, a dome-shaped structure Van Tassel built out of plywood and fiberglass in Landers, California, which was intended to be a "rejuvenation machine." According to the Integratron's website, "during the 25-year period that Van Tassel developed the Integratron, (1954-1978), he called it "a time machine, a rejuvenation machine and an anti-gravity device." Today the Integratron stands mightily, a bright white dome in a dry desert landscape, its rejuvenating effects attracting visitors from scientists studying the electrostatic/electromagnetic design and spiritual groups practicing meditation and healing to corporate teams generating new ideas and authors looking to dissolve writer's block. (I'm actually sitting inside the Integratron as I write.)

According to Van Tassel, the Integratron's ability to rejuvenate cells is based on two principles. The first principle is a combination of the sacred geometry of domes and the fact that the structure is built above what is believed to be a natural "energy vortex," which enables the Integratron's dome shape to concentrate the energy of the vortex. The second principle, perhaps more relevant to Long Viewers, relates to Van Tassel’s studies of Antigravity, Human Cell Rejuvenation and Time Travel. It takes the notion that humans are electrical in nature, and theorizes the possibility of recharging human cells with a powerful negative ion field. In the words of Wikipedians, "it is believed that, though each individual has his unique personal 'wavelength,' the multiple wavelengths of energy put out by 'focusing and concentrating devices' such as the Integratron will find a 'resonance' with the individual's basic harmonic frequency and 're-charge' his cellular structure, as if he were a battery." I'm not aware of other developments in the use of electricity to rejuvenate human cells, but presumably the likes of Ray Kurzweil are aware of this possibility, if not actively advancing it.

If you visit the Integratron, you can take a guided tour, enjoy a Sound Bath (be "bathed" in sound produced by quartz crystal singing bowls), or even rent the place out for your own private purposes. There are also "special events," and it looks like there’s one coming up in June of 09 – send them an email to stay tuned. And of course, there's a Facebook group, fittingly called I went to the Integratron and good things happened.

PS. As you might have guessed, I'm not actually sitting inside the Integratron right now, but if you're ever interested making the trip, feel free to get in touch: misstephanie.gerson@gmail.com.

medium-function disaggregation

2009-04-12T19:13:00.000-07:00

[apparently the only way to comment on Clay Shirky's blog is to backtrack. so here goes a comment on his post about Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.]

"Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

So it goes with cars. (What we need isn't cars [*cough*, the auto industry], but transportation.) And with global government. (What we need isn't a global government, but global governance.)

For lack of a sexier term, I call this phenomenon medium-function disaggregation, and I consider it part of the ongoing trajectory that media and their functions go through. It's when a medium becomes less effective at satisfying the function it was originally intended for – in a relative sense (because more effective alternatives have emerged), and/or in an absolute one. The medium effectively goes through an identity crisis, as its raison d'etre is challenged, and the function becomes more liquid, able to inhabit other/new media. And our attention shifts to the meta-level, i.e. to a higher level of organization, from the level of the medium to the level of the function:

"When we shift our attention from 'save newspapers' to 'save society', the imperative changes from 'preserve the current institutions' to 'do whatever works.' And what works today isn't the same as what used to work."

Government, cars, and newspapers are undergoing a temporary disaggregation of medium and function. This is a season, i.e. the same seasons recur, albeit differently in different years. Medium-function disaggregation: 'tis the season for experimentation.

fair trade tele-coffee carrotmob

2009-04-03T11:50:00.000-07:00

I wanna do a tele-coffee carrotmob around the world to demonstrate the demand for (and subsidize the supply of) Fair Trade coffee. This would be somewhat of a combination of my Valentine's Day experiment in social tele-intimacy, likemind, and carrotmob, and it would go down within the confines of an international coffeehouse chain with enough leverage to single-handedly increase the market share of Fair Trade. Considering that it's actively soliciting rescue plans and fancies itself as being socially responsible, this might be ideal for Starbucks. Essentially: on a given day, likeminds enjoy a cup of Fair Trade while videochatting from Starbucks to Starbucks around the world. We could even sing a song together and different peoples in different places could keep the song going all day long (sure it would drive the baristas nuts but it would make for a gorgeous screencast, thus gorgeous marketing collateral, and we're definitely overdue for another We-Are-The-World"/From-A-Distance inspirational song thingie). Anyways, seeing as Starbucks is heading into the territory of 'value meals,' it might even give participants a deal on their coffee + whatever else that day.

Random note: I gave this idea to a place-based advertising company named Danoo during a job interview with them last year. They Loved it and then never returned my emails, phone calls, nothing. Beware-y of them.

dancing with what IS

2009-03-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

In describing the emergence of geotility, Faris Yakov writes, "increasingly, when any spatially aware device is part of the flow, geotility is mandatory: making something useful for where you are right then...And yes it is scary. But as Kevin Kelly points out, the cost of personalisation is transparency." I agree. And transparency may also be the cost of collectivization. Geotility apps must know your whereabouts and preferences and who your friends are and what kinds of books you like and and and in order to give you valuable information. For example, your route to work could be 10 mins faster, or if you took a different route you'd bump into an old friend, or the bookstore on your way home is having an event that matches your Amazon profile. But geotility apps are gonna have to know our collective demographics and/or communicate with each other in order to provide us with collectively valuable information. I imagine traffic moving like a school of fish. I imagine that when people and places perpetually communicate, we'll increasingly be at the right place at the right time. I imagine an enhanced ability to collectively improvise. Which is kinda scary and technophilic but kinda magical and even primal. Like birds and bees and other sensorful beings, we’ll be that much more able (again) to dance with each other and our place. To dance with what IS. Same season, different year?

deep into the long tail

2009-03-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

According to the Yucatec Maya, Gods made people out of corn. And as I learned while making tortillas in the Yucatan a few years ago, the Yucatecs know how to make lots of things out of corn too. Meanwhile, Iron Chef is all about getting versatile with one ingredient. If flying them into the studio is too costly, Iron Chef could subsidize the cost of videochatting/lifecasting/otherwise inexpensively hacking Yucatec chefs onto the show. And considering their textile design and weaving skills, the same could go for Project Runway. Seemingly unrealistic, but the point is: if these shows are digging deep into the long tail of chefs/designers/whatever, why not dig even deeper and support the littlest guys? At the least, get some free publicity for what's being micro-financed.

brand cliques

2009-03-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

So I started noticing brand cliques a few years ago. You know, cliques of companies that cross-promote/subsidize/whatever their products/services. United Airlines gives you miles if you pay with Visa. Solar City gives you a better deal if you participate in Community Supported Agriculture. That kinda thing. As brands develop strategic relationships with each other (United with Visa) and competing brands develop functionally comparable relationships to each other (United with Visa, American with MasterCard), it becomes possible to envision ecosystems of products/services, replete with different forms of symbiosis – mutualism, parasitism, and commensalism. And it becomes possible to envision value-based ecosystems of products/services – for example, since I mentioned Solar City and CSAs, based on the value of environmental sustainability. In fact, this is especially relevant for sustainability, which requires the kind of systems change that would be enabled by ecosystems of sustainable products/services. So come on Solar City, CSAs, City CarShare, etcetera, etcetera: make friends.

the (refreshingly shifting) role of the smagency

2009-03-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

[I'm actually referring to the (refreshingly shifting) role of the agency in providing social media services, but I just wanted to write the word "smagency." And I originally blogged the posted on Clear Night Sky, the blog of a smagency called Clear Ink.]

I don't usually post about other people's posts, but this was just too good to pass up. Especially because it directly implicates the work I was doing while at Clear Ink, an online marketing agency, in the fall of 08: developing its social media services. The post I'm talking about is From The Head of Zeus Jones (quite literally), and although it was written back in October, I (re?)discovered it today and attribute it with utmost blogworthiness. Indeed, it discusses the role of the marketing agency in providing social media services:

"If, as I believe, the adoption of social media by all companies is inevitable, what role does the communications agency fulfill?...Clients may not need help talking to their customers but that doesn’t mean they don’t need help. After the channels of communication are established and after the pleasantries have been exchanged, customers will want something to talk to companies about. The best things to talk about are things that the company is doing to make their products, services or experiences better. It seems to me that there’s still a lot of demand for help in improving our clients’ core services and making them more marketable. For applying marketing thinking to operations. Personally I find it’s actually far more rewarding to do this kind of work because you’re actually collaborating with your clients on things that are lasting and have unquestioned (rather than questionable) value within their organisations."

This last bit is why I added "refreshingly shifting" in the subject line - shifting from working with clients on things that have questionable value to things things that have lasting/unquestioned value and actually improve their core services (ooh! actual product development!) sounds, well, refreshing. But this means CI might have to change its approach to providing social media services; at least, as I articulated them. Helping companies implement a blog and produce content for it is part of the story, yes, but only in the beginning. Helping companies improve their products, so that they actually have something to blog about, will have to be part of the story too. If you're still intrigued, check the entire post.

shabbataoke

2009-03-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

Ok, it's a terrible name but an awesome idea: karaoke for Shabbat songs, with that little ball bouncing over which words to sing and real bar/bat-mitzvah videos (maybe your own!) as the background. Which would make learning Shabbat songs oh-so fun for kids and adults. I want.

your search did not match any documents

2009-02-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

Famous types spend lots of money fashioning their online presence and controlling the rank of organic search results for their names. But I think the converse could make for a pretty fabulous publicity stunt: temporarily abolishing their names from the interwebs altogether. Take Rudolf Steiner, the late Austrian philosopher and founder of Biodynamic Agriculture, among many many other things. Knowing he was nearing the end of his life, he started giving up to four lectures a day on his teachings. Also knowing he was nearing the end of his life, people listened and documented them. But it was after the end of his life, so these stories tend to go, that sales of his work surged. Now take Ken Wilber, the American philosopher and founder of the Integral Institute, among many many other things. Imagine if Wilber hinted he was departing from this world, spoke/wrote furiously for a stint, and then vanished from the web. Not a trace of him to be found by a Google spider.* Granted this would take some seriously expensive hackery. But it might inspire a premature surge in sales of his work, if not attract publicity. This is semi-similar to how Tupac was thought to have imitated Machiavelli in faking his own death, and would return in time, but in the digital universe. And why it's more interesting to me than simply faking one’s death, I'm not sure. I think I like the idea of digital disappearance; of anti-publicity as publicity.

*Update: I just learned from a developer friend that this is kinda impossible because of internet archives, i.e. only recent traces would disappear but anything older would hang out in [relative] perpetuity. Shucks. But I still like the idea, so please just consider it conceptual art.

feel the mouseclick

2009-02-11T15:03:00.000-08:00

New media artists these days are too obsessed with interactivity. Lemme rephrase more academically: in Gartner's hype cycle, I'd say interactivity is hanging out at the peak of inflated expectations. But don't you guys get it? Unless you're in a sensory deprivation chamber, everything is interactive. I know I'm brattily spouting at an unidentified crowd of self-proclaimed interactive artists, but I nevertheless predict a backlash against/spoofing of interactivity ('feel the mouse under your fingers, listen to that click-click of the keyboard...'). And I nevertheless encourage interactivity to move along the trajectory of things, from being a binary (yes/no) or spectral (more/less) concept to a typological one. If everything is interactive, what type of interactive is it? Is the interaction meaningful, desirable, fascinating, new? Otherwise I'm just not very impressed if your art, per Wikipedians, "involves the spectator in some [ambiguous] way."

pole dancing to the people

2009-02-10T12:19:00.000-08:00

One of the many fantastic things about pole dancing is that there are poles all over the city. I wanna get my pole dancing ladies to dress monochromatically (white? red?), each take a pole on a major city street (Market in SF?), and have us filmed from a low-flying helicopter while dancing. Public performance art therapy at its sexiest.

jewish wedding gifts restaurant yum come eat

2009-02-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

Even the advent of wedding registries cannot curb the gifting of unattractive Judaica and tableware with names of brides and grooms curvily engraved. And it all ends up tucked away in hard-to-reach cabinets, basements, attics, or – oy gevalt! – shelves of the local Goodwill. The solution: Jewish diners. They could even be chain, wholly dedicated to giving bad Jewish wedding presents a venue in which to happily come out of the closet. Eat blintzes and kugel on a silver platter engraved with "Shira and Daniel Weissman," drink manishevitz from their fourth (and therefore donated) set of Kiddush cups, and do so by the candlelight of their similarly engraved candelabra. Sure it would be upsetting to find yourself eating off of a gift you gave, and awkward to be eating with its recipient when it happened, but by that point, having your gift accepted by the Jewish Wedding Gifts Restaurant Yum Come Eat (name suggestions most welcome) would be a source of pride.

fun with videochat

2009-02-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

Throughout my adventures in tele-intimacy, which include so close yet so far away and this might be a Love story, I've thought of much fun to be had with videochat. And in the spirit of using my blog as a personal learning journal since nobody reads it (except you! hi.), I might as well make a list:

1) Make a film that's actually a screencast of two people videochatting back-to-back. The two people rotate in a circle and periodically move closer/farther away from each other, perhaps while singing a beautiful song (kinda like this but more beautiful), perhaps while in a beautiful place (outside?), perhaps as a music/dance video. Make audio and visual reverb. Make it stunning.

2) Stick someone in a videochat mushpot. Place him/her alone in a room, surrounded by videochatting laptops. This could be someone who is lonely, far away, in jail, in an assisted living facility, or a performance artist.

3) Let two laptops share a romantic moment together. Stick them alone in a room while videochatting with different people, enabling those people to kinda videochat (though this is really for the laptops). Spy on the laptops and take pictures like the one below.

4) Videochat with an avatar, as described here.

5) Semi-videochat with a political candidate, as described here.

activating the hypothetical

2008-12-21T16:35:00.000-08:00

Applications have been emerging that enable us to activate the hypothetical. For example, Fundable lets people pledge payments for new ventures, and once enough pledges are collected, translates them into payments that are sent to the venture's organizer. The venture simply hangs out in a hypothetical space until it either expires or has enough backing to actualize itself. Similarly, [insert name of app I can't seem to remember] enables people to pledge their willingness to participate in a political demonstration around some issue, and once enough pledges have been made, notifies pledgers that it's time to hit the streets. Again, the demonstration hangs out in the hypothetical until it has a critical mass of demonstrators. (And indeed there's great potential for activating the hypothetical, perhaps anonymously, in politics.)

So, I wanna nuance this a little bit. Take social events. Why we go to one event instead of another is largely based on who else is going – are any of my friends gonna be there? What's the male/female ratio? This makes social calendaring awesome, because you can see who is (and isn't) going, and it makes the 'Maybe Attending' option even awesomer, because you can see who's sitting on the fence. But the fence is so ambiguous and there are so many folks sitting on it, that it doesn't really help you make a decision either way. Here's where some nuancing could add value. Instead of RSVPing with a mere maybe, give the system some conditions for saying yes, e.g. you'll attend if at least 8 of your FB friends are also attending, or if the ratio of male/female is between 0.9-1.1. If conditions are satisfied, the system changes your RSVP to “Attending,” notifies you of the change, and accounts for its effect on other peoples’ conditions. The mass of maybes goes from being a dead sea to an active solution, with yeses precipitating out.

Applied to new ventures and political demonstrations and elsewhere, just imagine what might be sitting in solution, and what could precipitate out...

"I got a Crush.... on the entire Obama administration."

2008-12-20T12:27:00.000-08:00

Considering its inability to appreciate the brilliance of my previous slogans, I can hardly believe I'm still making an attempt with this crowd. Call it determination, call it stubbornness, but I have my eyes on that $400 prize + $100 worth of, um, t-shirts.

branded utility as public service

2008-12-20T12:14:00.000-08:00

Barbarian Benjamin Palmer and Anomalous Johny Vulkan define their concept of branded utility as "brands being genuinely useful to their customers, employees, suppliers and the people they touch." Although this concept his been around for a few years, surely I'm not the only one who'd venture to say that its reality is old-school, e.g. the proverbial friendship with your oh-so-useful shoemaker. (Ok maybe there's no proverb about being friends with your shoemaker, but what about your horse's shoemaker? I.e. your blacksmith?)

Anyways. What I really wanted to say about branded utility was not how actually historic I think it is, but how obvious/ingenious it is as a purveyor of public services. Essentially, if the utilities brands provide are services traditionally provided by governments, like education or healthcare, branded utility starts resembling the provision of public services. Brands already sponsor stuff in order to have their names plastered all over it, but what if brands were integral players in the public service landscape? Sounds scary and ludicrous, I know, but many so-considered public services - like healthcare, education, and even military - are already offered by private actors. So I find it somehow obvious/ingenious that your friend the shoemaker, big poppa Nike with lots of money/resources, could provide you with health services to cultivate your loyalty and help you keep running in his shoes for a long long time.

subsidizing Love with mouseclicks

2008-12-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

As too many of my recent posts indicate, I've been making Threadless T submissions, thinking I'd swiftly take the $500 prize that accompanies a winning t-shirt slogan. (Sad but true: Threadless has dominated this shower in the dark as of late, and I'll now return to blogging about topics of greater sophistication like ping pong songs.) I thought some of my slogans were pretty fantastic. "If you think I'm cute, you should see my dog." Fantastic, right? Wrong. At least, according to the Threadless crowd, which as I've come to learn, is a damn tough one. Or a damn tasteless one. Or something, but anyways. Meanwhile, I'm madly in Love with someone who lives very very far away. It costs lots of money to see each other. Like $500. [Light bulb sound effect!] So why not submit a slogan that says, "I voted on this shirt so that Nathaniel could visit Stephanie," blast it out to our friends, and defeat (i.e. become) the Threadless crowd! Which is what we did. And we made a Facebook event for it and got adorable scribblings on the wall and people downvoted other slogans and suggested creating aliases to vote multiple times on ours and even those who didn't attend the event voted for it (note: there was nothing to attend).

Too late into this whole thing, I realized we didn't do it right. We should have submitted a stand-alone awesome slogan that wouldn't have smelled fishy to Threadless (Who are Nathaniel and Stephanie? What's up with all these first-time accounts voting for this slogan?), and would have gotten votes regardless. What started as an impossibility became a possibility, but we should have treated it as such from the beginning. Hmph. Polls closed. And the verdict was...........a rockin 82%!!!!!!! Which means, well, we don't actually know what it means. Because, says Threadless, "we look at the top 300 designs every couple of weeks and pick out around 10 designs that we want to print based off of the designs score, comments, and the number of i'd buy it's. Ultimately the decision of which shirts get printed are left up to us." Every couple of weeks? Ultimately the decision is up to Threadless? How absurdly anticlimactic. At the very least, threadless should fork over the $500 for driving so much new traffic to their site.

But hear hear, imaginary audience: if executed wisely, this could be (as one voter/attendee/friend put it) "the stuff of legends." And if you go for it, lemme know. We can cut a massive vote-swapping deal.

human flower chain

2008-12-10T22:40:00.000-08:00

At any given moment, all city intersections have at least one crosswalk available for walking, if not four (like 4th and Folsom in SF), or even more (a la Shibuya Crossing, above). That means you could hang out in a street intersection perpetually, because there’s always somewhere safe to hang – as long as you keep migrating to the available crosswalk. And crosswalks are connected to each other by sidewalks, also safe places to hang. Imagine a flower chain of people, holding hands through an entire city from sidewalk to crosswalk to sidewalk. Now take a bird’s eye view, and watching sidewalkers and crosswalkers fluctuate like swinging doors. I wonder if there are enough homeless people in SF to make a human flower chain from the Presidio to Hunter’s Point. But even the scaled-down version of a perpetual street hang at the 4th and Folsom intersection would be dandy.

craig's middlemen

2008-11-16T10:26:00.000-08:00

The beauty of direct seller-to-buyer services, like the 'for sale' section on Craig’s List, is that they eliminate the middlemen, enabling sellers to get the entire cut. But they therefore require sellers to do all the work. And believe you me, it takes work to sell stuff on Craig's List: you gotta respond to a flood of emails/phone calls, be around when prospective buyers want to come by and check out the bike, re-post the ad every couple of days as it expires, etc. Economists tells us scarcity creates demand, and scarcity is a matter of context, so why not re-introduce the middlefolk in the context where they're lacking with a Craig’s List selling service? Pay a small fee, and they'll sell your stuff for you. Sounds like a ridiculous perversion of Craig's dream, but I bet there'd be a demand for it.

"if you think I'm cute, you should see my dog."

2008-11-16T10:11:00.000-08:00

That's Threadless #4. And #5:

"If you think I'm cute, you should see my cat."

There's actually a story here. When my sister and I were even littler than we are now, my mom had us wear t-shirts that said: "If you think I'm cute, you should see my mom." (Still so true.) But I'm betting that the way to peeps' hearts is through their pets. If that's the case, vote here.

"first came the universe, then came the university to explain it."

2008-11-10T21:07:00.000-08:00

Get out the vote for Threadless T number 3!

"what are you doing right now?"

2008-11-10T20:56:00.001-08:00

Threadless #2 pays homage to Twitter and Facebook status updates, and a question special enough to warrant submitting to Threadless for printing a t-shirt. So special, in fact, that someone had already submitted it. Boo. My next (and actual) submission forthcoming.

"it's not that I dropped out of Harvard, I never even went there."

2008-11-09T10:23:00.000-08:00

My first ever Threadless T. I've been racking up ideas for too long, and I'm finally submitting them. Submissions will be posted here, so you (my imaginary audience) can vote on them. It might be obvious, but just in case: this first one is joking about how dropping out of Harvard is almost becoming a virtue, an indicator of future success, something to brag about. It specifically references Harvard-dropouts Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, but pays broader tribute to other fantastically successful college-dropouts, like Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Ok fine, and Eminem. So as part of your pitch, you'd tell the VC, “it's not that I dropped out of Harvard, I never even went there.” A surefire way to get your startup funded. I was pretty amused, but it didn't do super well with the Threadless crowd. Heh.

New submissions will be posted on Sundays. (Another one coming tonight.) Vote here!

ping pong song

2008-10-19T22:50:00.001-07:00

Dropping a shitload of ping pong balls on a resonant floor and waiting for mayhem to become total stillness would make a nice soundtrack for a dance, intense scene in a movie, or layer in a musical composition.

feeding tweets to the text-hungry

2008-10-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

There's a whole heap of things that feed on short snippets of somehow-interesting text: fortune cookies, teabag tags, bumper stickers, Threadless T's, Better Place's 10-word minifestos, etc. Meanwhile, Twitter relentlessly spits out snippets that are 140 characters or less. (Not that all tweets are interesting, but some of them are designated as favorites.) So why not feed the latter to the former, i.e. use somehow-interesting tweets as fortune cookies, etc.? Create a feed of just favorite tweets, and you'll have a bunch of awesome slogans for Threadless T's.

functional condoms

2008-10-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

In the past x years, we’ve seen a y% growth in the consumption of functional foods, which Wikipedia defines as foods with “health-promoting and/or disease-preventing property beyond the basic nutritional function of supplying nutrients.” So how about functional condoms, which help you lose weight, supply your daily dosage of anti-oxidants, and/or ward off that nasty flu while giving head? Yea but whotf gives head while the condom is on? Listen - if there’s a market for flavored condoms, there’s just might be a market for functional ones.

script your etiquette

2008-10-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

While visiting my Lover-at-the-time in New York this past January, I took him to the Veselka Diner for a performance by the Foundry Theatre called Etiquette. It’s a performance for 2 audience members, in which the 2 audience members are the performers. We sat at a table for two on which were placed numerous props, and were given a set of headphones that gave us instructions. I was told to knock over the chess piece, and he was told to bring tears to his eyes with the liquid dispenser; he was told to write something on the piece of paper, and I was told to take the note and put it in my back pocket (…only to rediscover it days later, presumably part of the intention). It turned out he was an old man in Paris and I was a prostitute and I don’t remember the rest of the story but essentially we had a very personal, albeit scripted, interaction. And I think this could be applicable to couples therapy: script the interaction you need to have but are not having, and then have it.

dining in while eating out

2008-09-07T21:16:00.001-07:00

I'm considering transplanting myself from San Francisco to New York, but if eating out here is already pinching my wallet, eating out in there is gonna be worse. Even though my friends and I can make delicious food ourselves, eating out is somehow more social, exciting – it is, after all, eating out. So how about a kitchen-bar-thingie where you bring your own ingredients, pay a minimal fee to use a high-quality kitchen, and make your own food communally, with access to a bar? You'd get the best of both worlds: pay less for delicious food and enjoy the eating out experience. Live music would be pretty awesome too.

wine tags

2008-09-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

A buddy named Noah Brier started something called brand tags, an application that lets people tag brands with words. What results are tag clouds for brands, i.e. an ingeniously simple way to gauge how consumers feel about different brands. Ever since I started using del.icio.us, I've wanted to do this kind of thing for, well, everything: political candidate tags, musical band tags, and of course, TCHOcolate tags. But a pretty great application could be wine labels, which oftentimes feel irrelevant to the point of satire and are written by only a handful of wine connoisseurs. No offense, they certainly know their wine, but how much more meaningful might wine labels be if they were crowdsourced to consumers via a wine tagging app? A tag cloud as a wine label might not only be meaningful, but beautiful.

mixed-world videoconference

2008-02-10T17:39:00.001-08:00

It shouldn’t be too difficult to cook something up that lets a person videoconference with an avatar. With improvements in virtual body language, a person chatting with an avatar might actually look pretty great. Consider how fun/dangerous it would be for kids to talk directly to SpongeBob, not to mention the marketing potential for animated characters in general.

space by the minute

2008-02-10T17:31:00.000-08:00

Throughout a 24-hour cycle, furnished urban spaces alternate between vacant and occupied. Meanwhile, urban centers are becoming denser and space is in high demand. So it may become sensible to start renting out space not only by the month or year, but by the hour or minute; kinda like City CarShare. Take telecommuting, which has risen x% in the past x number of years. A database of vacant office space by the hour would cut rent costs for companies with telecommuters, besides being a more efficient use of space.

This might be especially interesting/infeasible if applied to homelessness. It would help homeless people perpetually migrate from one semi-furnished urban space to another, creating a distributed home throughout the city. If nothing else, at any given moment there are probably more vacant parked cars in San Francisco than there are homeless people. But if cityfolk aren’t comfortable with a municipal let-the-homeless-sleep-in-your-car night, there are more (semi-)public venues, e.g. movie theaters between flicks or the tactile dome between birthday parties. Sure we could build funny-looking contraptions, or we could just let the homeless occupy furnished spaces that are already available. Of course this pig would never fly and even if it did, it's just a band-aid. But band-aids are a part of the trajectory, so more people might as well enjoy the view of the bay from an otherwise empty AT&T Park while we're on route to preventative health. (Plus, the sight of homeless people hanging out in AT&T Park would make quite a compelling view in itself.)

Flying pigs aside, space by the smaller-increment-of-time is coming, because the legos are here and all we have to do is make them smaller.

2008-02-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

if a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it ...

2008-02-10T17:27:00.000-08:00

…it doesn’t really matter because we’re still talking about it. And laughing at us is what made the tree fall over in the first place.

So Close Yet So Far Away

2008-02-10T16:36:00.000-08:00

“Why talk/twitter/whatever with your long-distance Loved one when you can share some romantic chocolate with them? Announcing So Close Yet So Far Away, a Valentine's Day experiment in tele-intimacy. Tables for two: you across from your date via your laptop. Using videoconference, you two can sit face-to-face and enjoy some luscious chocolate. Together. We provide the chocolate, network connection, and romantic ambiance; you’re responsible for yourself, your partner, and your laptops.”

These words were my invitation to So Close Yet So Far Away, an experiment in tele-intimacy that I organized at UC Berkeley. And an experiment in tele-intimacy it was! Experiment in the sense that it was an initial trial; intimate because the people were few. But it was this smaller-scale setting that allowed it to be experimental. Different people engaged with different media in different ways: some used video and others purely audio; some iChatted and others videoSkyped; some videoSkyped together while sitting across the table from each another; some iChatted with one person on one laptop while videoSkyping with another person on another laptop (video-cheating?); some set their laptops screen-to-screen, allowing their tele-dates to tele-tele-date; some took photos and others video captured; some ate truffles and others ate dates. But we all sat together and communicated with each other and each other’s others. And I even landed a spot in WIRED. So although there are certainly kinks to iron out, I look forward to further exploring the potential of social tele-intimacy. In fact, I aspire to translate it into a career. Check the Facebook profile and comment below for further details...

Another hint of what this might taste like:

fireside videochat

2008-02-10T16:24:00.000-08:00

Videochat with your political candidate of choice...or at least, feel like you are. Pre-script the candidate’s side of the conversation and then perform the other side Karaoke-style, à la Continuouscity. Just by chatting with candidates and then watching the conversation, even if pre-scripted, you might feel you know them better, and be that much more willing to vote for them. That is, until you find clips online of them the exact same conversation with thousands of other constituents. But I guess that’s what politicking’s about.

cosmology cake

2008-02-10T16:23:00.000-08:00

There are lots of Libras and Monkeys besides you. But there aren’t as many Libran Monkeys. And even fewer Libran Monkeys who are ruled by Oyá. If you pile different cosmologies atop each other like a layered cake – sign in horoscopic astrology over animal in Chinese astrology over Orisha in Candomblé, among others – you may learn something new. I bet there's already a Facebook widget for it.

making your first tele-impression

2008-02-10T16:21:00.000-08:00

For online daters who value efficiency, why not meet for a tele-drink first? You can check each other out via videoconference, and decide if increasing the bandwidth is worthwhile.

videoconference x bluetooth x touchscreen

2008-02-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

Playing the mashup game with these ingredients at a dance club would let you talk to the person you’re tele-dancing with by touching them on the screen.

distribution of resilience

2008-02-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

Assume that (our understanding of) the changeability of information in Wikipedia has undergone the trajectory of categories. In other words, it has undergone a trajectory from binary (something either is/isn't information, so all entries are equally subject to change) to spectral (some information is more x [insert metric, e.g. politically charged] than other information, so some entries are more subject to change than others) to typological (there are different types of information, so entries for different types of information have different subjectivities to change). If subjectivity to change sounds too subjective, use the word resilience, then check the history of an entry, and track how often changes have been made. The entry for science has been resilient for a while whereas that for social network has undergone lots of change recently.

The broader question is: how to categorize information into different types? And more specifically: what typology would emerge if information were categorized according to its resilience in Wikipedia? One possibility is information hierarchy, which splits the enchilada into data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Considering that data is used to generate information, which is used to create knowledge, and so on, wisdom may be the least likely to change. But Wikipedia is only about information. Hmm. Another possibility is Funtowicz & Ravetz’s post-normal science, which splits it up into applied science, professional consultancy, and post-normal science (see image). But again, Wikipedia is about information; not science. (I’m aware that I’m littering this post with Wikipedia links, but if you don’t know the difference between information and science, check the talk pages of both entries in Wikipedia.) Still, these two typologies may be illuminating. Re information hierarchy, could information be categorized into concentric types? And re post-normal science, F&R’s axes of choice are decision stakes and systems uncertainty for science; what would be the relevant axes for information?

Wikipedia has been criticized for advertising itself as the encyclopedia anyone can edit, yet being increasingly resilient to editage; I’d argue that only certain types of information are increasingly resilient. At the net level, there’s a trade-off between editability/dynamism and quality/governance. But if you look at the distribution of resilience across all entries, there certainly is one.

Plus, their resilience to change itself changes through time. The entry for science was malleable, but as Wikipedia's governance system emerged, it has become more resilient, to the point of having been on lockdown at a few points along the way...

carbon-neutral cybersex

2008-02-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

The Green Islands Project in Second Life enables virtual landowners to offset the carbon costs of running their sims via renewable energy credits. Translate that into a green cyber-brothel offering carbon-neutral cybersex. Because if you could make cybersex a mechanism for addressing climate change, that would be pretty absurd/spectacular.

covert crowdsourcing

2008-02-10T15:36:00.001-08:00

Productive work is increasingly getting rolled into captchas and games. For example, reCaptchas, the next generation of captchas, present two skewed words bisected by a line, both of which were taken from the Internet Archive's project to scan public-domain books. “One word is known to the computer; the other couldn't be read by the Archive's scanners, so when you type it in you're doing a tiny bit of work for the project” (Wired, 06.25.07).

But captchas/games-cum-productivity could get hairy. What if private actors start disguising work as captchas/games in a feat of covert crowdsourcing? What if, in order to pay our bills online, we must unknowingly do work for Wells Fargo; work that their employees were once paid for? When productive work is performed unknowingly, where does economic value go? And might this sci-fi paranoia spawn some kinda ‘Captcha Code of Conduct’?

trajectory of categories

2007-12-12T16:33:00.000-08:00

I’m doing a little experiment with Wikipedia. More on that later. In this post, lemme introduce a quick theory on the evolution of our understanding and use of emerging technologies. In the future, I'll superimpose it onto Gartner’s hype cycle, but for now, a brief description:

The manner in which we understand and use emerging technologies undergoes a trajectory of categories, from binary --> spectrum --> typology --> promiscuous pragmatic pluralism. Take hyperlinks for example. Search engines currently look for whether or not a site has links (binary: yes or no). But there's increasing talk of link strength (spectrum: weaker <--> stronger). And a semantic web would require search engines to understand the type of link between pages (typology: different types). Applied to links between people, Facebook, with its “How do you know [insert name]?” feature, is attempting to elaborate a "social graph"* based on the type of link between people. Other examples are hanging out in the comments.

Ultimately, as we climb the slope of enlightenment towards the plateau of productivity in Gartner’s hype cycle, it won’t be that a typological approach is inherently better than a binary one, but a matter of when to use which type of categorization (promiscuous pragmatic pluralism). Humanifesto on ppp to come...

*Fight for the survival of "social graph" on Wikipedia. It automatically re-directs to "social network," which is why I had to create an entry for social graphs in the plural. If you talk and discuss, Wikipedians might let it be. But if you wait too long, it might just be left gathering dust in history. Yes, this is part of my experiment with Wikipedia that I'll someday post about.

kisscasting and dancecasting

2007-11-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

Remember the beginning of the Brady Bunch, where everyone in the family gets their own little square on a grid? I wanna be able to find all the live streaming videos of people doing x, e.g. kissing or grocery-store-shopping, and make a similar grid. You might feel more inspired while cleaning the toilet. And dancecasting would make a fantastic screensaver.

I used to make rhythms out of emails.

2007-11-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

I'd do a search for emails I sent you and you sent me, note the dates, speed up the timing, loop it, and make a crude rhythm out of our emails. But now we can get precise. And fancy. Like Fernanda Viegas and Carolin Horn do with email visualization, or what Aaron Koblin does with data sonification. So, email sonification, or visualization for that matter...why? Just for the beauty of music composed from the rhythm of our communication? That too. But also for the emergent patterns that say something about our relationship. Roughly: you and I as senders are represented by different notes, changes in subject lines are represented by changes in pitch. Back and forth and back and forth, looping the whole thing over and over. There are moments that sound like ping pong. And others that feel like a desert. Why am I always the last to send an email right before we hit a desert? And why do deserts always precede ping pongs? Could we guess what was going on at that particular moment in our correspondence just by listening to it? Mmm.

Now imagine incorporating all media of communication. An orchestra!

I was just wondering.

2007-11-06T09:42:00.000-08:00

I s t h i s n e t a r t ?

we the value chain

2007-11-06T09:35:00.000-08:00

When we interact with objects, we interact with the people who participated in their production all the way down the value chain, from manufacturing, processing, packaging, retail, and distribution to maintenance, consumption, and (if you regularly interact with people in the future) disposal. Socially responsible consumers like to know who these people are, especially those hanging out upstream. Meanwhile, objects can tell stories via barcodes, RFID's, geotags, etc. Which means that objects can tell stories about the people participating in their production, and these stories can be crowdsourced from these people themselves. This might add a little sentimentality/creepiness to shopping at garage sales and second-hand stores, but when you swipe your cell over the toilet seat at a night club and see a photo of Maria who has to clean your mess on her 3am shift, you might be less likely to make that mess in the first place. Sorry to be so graphic, but etcetera...

To: [let google find it]

2007-11-06T09:33:00.000-08:00

Make the "To:" line in gmail into a google search box. That way, if you wanna email someone who's not in your contacts, you can google their address. Or if you're 'feeling lucky,' google can suggest their address, the way it already does for URL's in the latest version of Firefox.

mob flashdancing down the Wal-mart isle

2007-11-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

I heard that Wal-marts film a bird's eye views of their customers. I imagine the footage is sped up and analyzed to detect patterns useful for Wal-mart's 'zero inventory' strategy. (If what we buy and when we buy it can be algorithmicized, then Wal-mart can reduce its inventory to near-zero.) But this also makes Wal-mart vulnerable to the way we move. Hmmm. And flash mob + dance = some kinda mob flashdance. So how about a mob of us flashdance down the wrong Wal-mart isle looking for the wrong product at the wrong time? It probably wouldn't bring them to their knees, begging us to consume-as-usual so as not to confuse their inventory strategy, but it would at least be entertaining for whoever's behind the camera. And it would make for a fantastic Carrotmob video:

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

(Yes, that's me in the brown hat lathering myself with paper money on the floor of the supermarket isle.)

I used to think aliens were just us in the future.

2007-11-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

And that our future selves had learned to travel through time. But when we traveled backwards, our current selves didn't recognize our future ones, so we called ourselves aliens. And now it's happening. Virtual worlds are approximating David Brin's Transparent Society. Etcetera etcetera.

feed aggregators for e-petitions

2007-11-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

One-stop shopping for the e-activist in you.

recycle the cloud

2007-10-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

We all hear the story about how going paperless is greener, saves trees, etc. We also hear the story about how electronic isn't necessarily greener because our computers use energy, etc. Blah blah blah, the stories go, but it's ultimately a matter of trade-offs. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook, and other gargantuan server farmers give us ever-bigger quantities of space that we fill ever-less-important shit. So we migrate from paper to our drives to the cloud. Ah yes, the innocuous-sounding white, floaty, cloud. But just because the server farms aren't in our backyards doesn't mean they're not using lots and lots energy. So, I declare, recycle the data cloud! Crude possibilities:

>>Ritualistic webmail inbox cleansing parties.

>>Ritualistic burnings of unused alts in virtual worlds.

>>Recycler-magician-performers who transform your virtual shit first into something beautiful and then back into empty space.

>>If anti-file-swapping bots can recognize a song traveling through the network, can’t they recognize duplicates of other data, destroy them, and use pointers instead?

>>If authors just tagged their digital files with expiration dates, e.g. in the metadata.

virtual mergers and acquisitions

2007-10-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

Virtual worlds almost never die, writes Castronova). But that doesn’t mean they can’t merge and acquire, especially as demographics change. Will Club Penguin merge with Webkinz or will penguins eat stuffed animals? Or will either of them soon be wearing mini-skirts and staying out past curfew?

AI for EI

2007-10-16T19:12:00.000-07:00

According to the World Institute for Development Economics Research, too much economic inequality (above a Gini coefficient of .40) negatively impacts growth, due to incentive traps, erosion of social cohesion, social conflicts, and uncertain property rights, while to much equality (below a Gini coefficient of .25) negatively impacts growth due to incentive traps, free-riding, labor shirking, and high supervision costs (2001). But even if we accept this, who wants to be on the bottom rung of a so-considered optimal distribution of wealth? Well says Edward Castronova, “how do you make a world in which everyone is in the top 10 percent? The answer: AI.” Sounds absurd. But would the economy know the difference?

real photos of cybersex

2007-10-16T19:08:00.000-07:00

Sounds gross. But aren’t you curious? At least a little? Google image searching wasn’t too fruitful. (Do cyberLovers get come on the keyboard? Actually, do they use the mouse-keyboard setup, or are there interfaces designed specifically for this purpose?) Some curator would certainly commission this series. Definitely that one in Me, You, and Everyone we Know.

pattern widget

2007-10-16T19:06:00.000-07:00

Information about our everyday lives is increasingly digitized via social network sites, social calendaring, blogs, twitters, etc. So how about some kinda widget that digs through the information and finds recurring patterns? A widget that identifies correlations between the activities we do, social interactions we have, emotions we feel, foods we eat, and colors we wear, among other things. Patterns in when we fight with our Lovers (correlated with wearing yellow?), feel most creative (correlated with playing badminton?), experience bad gas (correlated with eating dairy?).

Now expand the scale to include the micro and the macro. Let the widget identify correlations between the social interactions we have, colors we wear, local weather, global economic news, and the stars. President Reagan consulted an astrologer for patterns between politics and celestial movements. We could concoct a widget for patterns between much much more, which would help us not only identify patterns, but engage with and potentially create them. Like dancers and musicians.

hold on a sec, I’m having an orgasm

2007-10-16T19:05:00.000-07:00

A man I salsa danced with the other night was wearing a bluetooth. But what the title of this post suggests would be extreme multi-tasking.

the modern wrath of Tartarus

2007-10-16T19:03:00.002-07:00

The mountain of shit known as our inbox feels like the modern-day Sisyphus myth. Except that our fate is worse. Not only can we never thoroughly plow through all those emails, but we receive them faster than we can reply. Which means that the mountain up which that boulder must be pushed just keeps getting taller and taller. If only our email clients had video game mode, with bomb-detonating SFX for every delete, we'd have some moral support around here, if not a little fun. Instead of "you've got mail!" it could be...

virtual avatar as 3D mirror

2007-10-16T18:58:00.000-07:00

Imagine being able to walk up to yourself, and analyze your beauty from 360+ degrees with zoom capabilities to ensure that every strand of hair is perfectly in place, identify which angles are best for photographs, and have consultants help you with your posture. I’m thinking politicians and wealthy cougars.

the mashup game

2007-08-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

Experiment with what can be mashed up using the ingredients below. Consider which ones compliment each other in a single dish. Or don't, and mash 'em up anyway. Which is probably not too far from the methodology of some start-ups and co-evolution:

3D virtual world
Social networking
Calendaring
Mobility
Cellular communication
E-mail
IM
GPS
Audio recording
Voice activation
Chat room
WiFi
Bluetooth
Bluetooth file transfer
Authoring tools/software programs
Video playing (for watching TV shows and films)
Music playing (for listening to music)
Online gaming
Online community
Short message service (SMS)
Multimedia messaging service (MMS)
Memory/data storage
Open source
Camera (photography)
Camera (film)
Blogging
Tethering
Cut, copy, and paste
Livecasting
Presence applications
Wiki
Tagging (social bookmarking, geotagging, etc.)
Linkbacks (linkbacks, pingbacks, refbacks, etc.)
Hyperlocality
Podcasting
User generated
Data aggregation (of news, tags, etc.)
Multi-media sharing (of images, video, podcasts, games, etc.)
Language translation
Hair dryer
Washing machine
Nail filer

Existing examples:
- 3D virtual world + social networking + online community + media sharing = Kaneva
- 3D virtual world + wiki + data aggregation + text transfer (e.g. using SMS, MMS, IM, Email) = SL wikipedia ring
- most of the ingredients above = iPhone

Other possibilities:
- voice activation + language translation = a tourist's dream
- a tourists’ dream + GPS + WiFi + camera (photography) + camera (film) + wiki + hyperlocality = a tourist's fantasy
- concept-mapping software + citation manager + tagging = the possibility of adding concepts to an evolving concept map and citing them simply in the act of making notes in the margins
- hyperlinked list of people to call, text, email on a much-more-than-a-phone thingie = performing the list of communication items without having to go back and forth between the list and the items

*Note: ingredients above are not necessarily mutually exclusive (where does one end and another begin?) or presented in their smallest units (there are sub-ingredients within cellular communication).

mixed-world therapy

2007-08-28T10:26:00.000-07:00

Use a world other than this one for expressing your anger. Keep both worlds separate until your anger has diffused, then remove the boundary between them. And call me in the morning.

farmers, fisherwomen, and financial analysts

2007-08-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

Investors increasingly seek data on the fiscal impacts of environmental factors. And unlike many environmental scientists, environmentally-concerned investors don’t have epistemological hang-ups. I.e. they don’t care how the knowledge is known as long as it works. The day Generation Investment Management LLP hires farmers and fisherwomen and ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge’ becomes a valuable asset will be a very interesting one.

make your own wine...label

2007-08-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

In the vein of allowing customers do the work (and pay for it), à la O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 design pattern of users adding value, give drinkers the chance to design wine labels. Make a label that's a blank stamped postcard, addressed back to the wine distributor. That is, a label that's blank until the best design wins. Call it a label competition, post all submissions online, and let the customers vote. Then throw in some free wine for the finalists and shower winners with fame. Depending upon how much is left in the bottle when the labels are 'designed,' postcards sent back will be at least entertaining, if not label-worthy.

pimp my rental car

2007-08-26T16:45:00.000-07:00

Music is already piped into venues with captive audiences, like hold buttons and elevators. What prime real estate for music promotion. Imagine: leaving you on hold forever could become something customer service reps don't need to apologize for, and muzak could become a non-derogatory term.

And how about rental cars? Sure, you bring music wherever you go. But you also like finding new music and getting a flavor of the local music when you travel. So if the car you rented on your vacation in Rio de Janeiro had a surprise in the CD player that was carefully selected to suit your fancy based on everything that had been internet-stalked about you, you might listen. And given the opportunity, you might go to an upcoming concert, make a purchase, tra la la.

The point being: people on hold, in waiting rooms, on elevators, in rental cars, etc. are generally available to listen, which is a potentially exploitable situation.

shabbat take-out

2007-08-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

For the young Jewish mom who wants freshly-baked Challah and a different Kugel recipe, but doesn’t have the time or live-in help to make them. It could even come with the Torah portion of the week, ideas for sermons (or if she prefers, "dialogues"), and transliterated Shabbat songs. I’m thinking Manhattan. (Oh and Greg, I Love that we both independently came up with this idea but your name for it is infinitely more awesome: the Shabbox.)

deploy massage

2007-08-26T16:37:00.000-07:00

The reasons we end up lying on our backs on a table in a dark room with someone else's hands manipulating our naked bodies are either very very malignant or very very benign. E.g. to be massaged or to be tortured. So why not just deploy massage?

from ‘see you in the next world’ to ‘see you in another one’

2007-07-24T14:52:00.001-07:00

From ‘I’m not in Love with you, I’m in Love with your avatar’ to ‘I’m not in Love with you in this world, I’m in Love with you in another one.’

social network site x graph-based interface x time

2007-07-24T14:49:00.001-07:00

To literally see how the webs of relationships between people change. Take a graph-based interface of a social network, like Facebook's 'friend wheel' or TouchGraph's Facebook browser. Add the dimension of time in a way similar to this. And you get a graph-based visualization of how social networks change through time. Plus, if you moved from a binary to a spectral or typological understanding of connections between 'friends' (elaborated here), you'd likely discover some patterns.

design principles: web 2.0 & permaculture

2007-07-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

Tim O’Reilly’s 8 Web 2.0 design patterns:

1. The Long Tail – Small sites make up the bulk of the internet's content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet's the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

2. Data is the Next Intel Inside – Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.

3. Users Add Value – The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don't restrict your "architecture of participation" to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application.

4. Network Effects by Default – Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application.

5. Some Rights Reserved – Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design for "hackability" and "remixability."

6. The Perpetual Beta – When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services. Therefore: Don't package up new features into monolithic releases, but instead add them on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features.

7. Cooperate, Don't Control – Web 2.0 applications are built of a network of cooperating data services. Therefore: Offer web services interfaces and content syndication, and re-use the data services of others. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems.

8. Software Above the Level of a Single Device – The PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected. Therefore: Design your application from the get-go to integrate services across handheld devices, PCs, and internet servers.

--
David Holmgren’s 12 Permaculture design principles (paraphrased):

1. observe and interact – engage in continuous observation and reciprocal interaction with the design subject

2. catch and store energy – use existing wealth to make long-term investments in natural capital

3. obtain a yield – use captured and stored energy to maintain the system and capture more energy, i.e. to obtain a yield

4. apply self-regulation and accept feedback – use positive and negative feedbacks to design systems that are more self-regulating, thus reducing the workload

5. use and value renewable resources and services – in business terms, use income over capital assets

6. produce no waste – design systems to make use of all outputs so that no waste is produced, à la Bill Mollison’s ‘it’s not an excess of snails but a deficiency of ducks’

7. design from patterns to details – use patterns in nature and society to understand what is seen, and use patterns from one context/scale to design in another

8. integrate rather than segregate – place elements in such a way that each serves the needs and accepts the products of the others; each element performs many functions and each function is supported by multiple elements

9. use small and slow solutions – design systems to perform functions at the smallest scale that is practical and energy-efficient for that function

10. use and value diversity – incorporate diversity to enhance resilience

11. use edges and value the marginal – recognize and conserve the value of edges, the marginal and invisible aspects of a system, and actively expand them to increase system productivity and stability

12. creatively use and respond to change – design to change in a deliberate and co-operative way, and respond to unforeseen and uncontrollable change creatively

--
I’ll try making some sense. (But we make sense like we make pie: we just make it.) Using O’Reilly’s patterns as the basic recipe, and embellishing it with Holmgren’s principles:

1. The Long Tail – reaching out to edges of the entire web and not just the center as Holmgren’s 11th principle of using edges and valuing the marginal (easy as pie)

2. Data is the Next Intel Inside – seeking to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data as an aggressive variation on Holmgren’s 2nd of catching and storing energy mixed with his 3rd of obtaining a yield (data as a yield of energy?)

3. Users Add Value – involving users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value as Holmgren’s 5th of using and valuing renewable resources and services, and 8th of integrating rather than segregating (user integration as a renewable resource/service?)

4. Network Effects by Default – setting inclusive defaults as Holmgren’s 2nd, 3rd, 8th, and 11th principles, with a dash of his 6th of producing no waste (confusion of flavors, including escargot)

5. Some Rights Reserved – designing for hackability and remixability as Holmgren’s 4th of applying self-regulation and accepting feedback, and 8th of integrating rather than segregating (design self-regulating applications by making their elements/functions hackable and remixable)

6. The Perpetual Beta – not packaging features into monolithic releases but adding them on a regular basis as Holmgren’s 12th of creatively using and responding to change, with a counterintuitive sprinkle of his 9th of using small and slow solutions (the perpetual beta as small-scale design for change)

7. Cooperate, Don't Control – supporting lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems as Holmgren’s 8th of integrating rather than segregating (cooperation as integration, segregation as control)

8. Software Above the Level of a Single Device – designing applications to integrate services across handheld devices as (yet again) Holmgren’s 8th of integrating rather than segregating (devices as elements that perform multiple functions and/or functions supported by multiple elements)

--
Which leaves the question of how to incorporate:

1. observe and interact
7. design from patterns to details
10. use and value diversity

into Web 2.0. Or 3.0. Or Webs. So…when can we start up the Macy Conferences again?

twittering our way to prosperity

2007-07-24T14:10:00.001-07:00

Prosper facilitates direct people-to-people lending. Twitter facilitates direct people-to-people social networking and microblogging. Mash them up for direct lender-to-borrower social networking and microblogging. Add Kiva for networking and microblogging between developed-country lenders and developing-country borrowers. So Ms. Lender can see that in the course of taking a yoga class, going to the farmer's market, having lunch with a friend, and picking up the kids from soccer practice, Ms. Borrower has walked to the stream to wash clothes and walked back. Yes, this is crudely stereotypified. And yes, if only Ms. Borrower could twitter in the first place. But it may have something to do with the singularity.

alien diplomacy

2007-07-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

Wag the Dog x Children of Men x Aliens = alien diplomacy. Forget about troop surges and never-ending negotiations. Just deploy UFOs and aliens. That’ll stop things at least for long enough to think about more existential matters, like our place in the universe.

social calendaring x RSS

2007-07-19T14:10:00.001-07:00

Instead of subscribing to event listings on your own or having to copy & paste events into a social calendar, just have the listings that you and your friends subscribe to automatically feed into one collective calendar. Then you can compare options and smartly mob the best one.

if you're scared that “virtual reality” is replacing “real reality”

2007-07-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

...(and you know who you are), don't be. Sure, if you zoom in real close, some of us may go through a virtual dark age for a sec. But if you zoom out again, all this virtual stuff will just make us (re-)enamored with the real thing. Because we could have never made it this good. We'll wander reality as if it were virtuality, and wonder how in the world that designer made the dog bark just as the wind brushed my neck while the light changed and the smell of that woman’s cigarette permeated my olfactory jurisdiction. Experience a busy street intersection. And imagine trying to design it. The question is not whether we'll choose virtuality or reality. But the age-old one of who is the we that gets to choose what.

where does MySpace end and Wikipedia begin?

2007-07-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

Wherever we want. You can just as easily post your MySpace page on Wikipedia and voilà: you're in “the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet." (Yes, this happens all the time, but I'm not pointing any hrefs here.) So it would be kinda cute to have a button that automatically booted a Wikipedia page onto MySpace. Kinda cute but kinda dangerous.

can you please spare a cell phone call?

2007-07-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

Carrying only plastic is such a comforting excuse for not acquiescing to panhandlers. But with mobile financial services, money can be transferred between cell phones. 'No change to spare? All good, just put your friend on hold for a sec and transfer it directly to my cell.'

a revolution for the revolution

2007-07-19T13:59:00.000-07:00

Dance, Dance, Revolution as the interface for telecommuting to the sweatshop.

virtual terraforming

2007-02-09T11:00:00.000-08:00

According to network topology, the topology of any directed network – such as the internet – consists of four continents: 1) a central 'core,' whose sites are highly interconnected, 2) an 'in' region, whose sites link to the central core, 3) an 'out' region, whose sites are linked to from the core, and 4) 'tendrils' and 'disconnected islands,' whose sites aren't linked to/from the core, or are completely disconnected from the rest of the internet.

This topology affects how we surf the web. The continents give some surfing spots more gravitational pull than others. And the uni-directionality of links creates swells, for example from the ‘in’ to the ‘core’ and from the ‘core’ to the ‘out.’

Imagine if a smart mob of netizens inhabiting the 'in' continent broke their hrefs to a particular site in the ‘core,’ and re-directed them towards a ‘disconnected island,’ effectively bringing the ‘core’ site ‘in’ and the ‘island’ ashore. Or if linkbacks and reverselinks were deployed to create bi-directionality and alter the swells of internet topology (yes, this is my self-reflexive way of landing my blog on Greg Niemeyer's website).

So what? Think about what search engines do and don’t find. Think about the power law distribution of website traffic. Think about news, political campaigns, e-commerce. And think about more at the website of network topologist named Albert-Lazslo Barabasi.

Then taste a hint of virtual terraforming in the Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG), where you can use lightposts to choreograph web surfs and link previously unlinked web pages together. Imagine if the web, as terraformed by PMOGers, were search-able with Google's search algorithm. How might search results differ between GOOG and PMOG? Imagine if treasures and mines could be deployed not only on web pages, but in the links between them. What might it say about a page if all the links that pointed to it were laced with mines? It starts to sound something like semantic web-weaving.

Although it can either network or notwork, hyperlinking becomes political. And it's this politically-motivated hyperlinking for purposes of shaping internet topology that I call virtual terraforming. Though you could also call it cyber-landscaping or other things. (Note that this is closely related but not the same as Google bombing/Googlewashing.) A revolution in virtual terraforming feels nigh as linking undergoes the trajectory of categorization. They're even talking about it here on Wikipedia.