Xark!

If the NSA freaks you out & you still use Google, you are an idiot

A few years ago, back when I was devoting much of my energy to developing semantic journalism products that seriously interested absolutely no one in the newspaper industry, there was one thought that could jolt me right out of any nice nap: The other word for the new media business model I was describing was "surveillance."

Because here's the thing: Collecting information is easy, traditional, and essentially inconsequential. Connecting information, however, is the radical act that will either empower or destroy us.

So back in 2010-11, when I was arguing in public that we should consider the atomic unit of journalism to be the fact, not the story, and the rest of the industry was furiously busy not noticing anything I said,, the worry that consumed much of my going-to-sleep time wasn't whether I'd find investors, but whether my hypothetical machine -- Fintann -- would wind up turning into Frankenstein's monster. 

The lesson that should be learned by anyone who spends any amount of time staring into the abyss of 21st century networked informatics is that information is not power. Garden variety information is just static. Only connected, useful and predictive information is power. And the richer you make it, the more authoritative and complete your hyper-connected data archive grows, the more absolute your power becomes. Fintann didn't get built, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. From what I've seen of newspaper executives, I don't know that giving them that kind of power would have a civic good.

So when I hear people arguing about The New York Times editorial stance on Edward Snowden, or read civic-minded freakouts about the National Security Agency violating the civil liberties of "ordinary Americans," I turn away in frustration. 

Sure, we need to be concerned about the power we give to government. Duh. Glad we're finally having that conversation. 

But the public media freakout over NSA data collection misses the primary point of those systems entirely: The NSA's email metadata campaign is designed to efficiently collect and then discard information. Not because the NSA is a civic-minded agency that wants to protect our theoretical privacy, but because your personal email isn't the target of the fucking machine. Your mundane metadata is the shit that NSA machine operators have to shovel in order to find covert organizations.

Granted, at any moment, any one of us could become a target of that machine. But if you're focused solely on the abstract possibility of abuse, you're likely missing the big-picture understanding of what that NSA machine was engineered to do in the first place.

The NSA sucks in massive amounts of metadata because it's searching for a subtle signal (some indication of covert terrorist communication) in a vast sea of static (like me emailing a fantasy football trade offer to my buddy). Got it? The system isn't designed to care about you and your private data. It's designed to efficiently eliminate anything it determines to be not-bad-guy. 

Now, compare that mission to the private informatic projects being conducted by Google, or Facebook, or Target, or Amazon, or your local grocery store's rewards card. Because Target isn't looking for terrorists. It's looking for every last dollar it can squeeze out of you. 

Google knows where you are, what you search for, what you bought. It knows what porn you stream, what political rhetoric you consume, and -- through G+ -- it can compare that knowledge to your social graph. Facebook is doing the same thing, in increasingly annoying ways. Target uses informatics and inference, based on massive data sets compiled from your shopping and mine, to spot women who've just learned that they're pregnant, and to send those women special offers and coupons for expectant mothers. 

Why does Kroger give you a break on the price of orange juice for using its rewards card? Because those marginal discounts you recieve are nothing compared to the value of your data to a company that's trying to sell you and those like you more and more stuff. 

And there's nothing wrong with that. In some ways it's nice to have people and companies that anticipate my needs, remember my birthday, treat me like a trusted and valued member of a community. 

Until the inevitable day when there is something wrong with it. 

Today we're worried about an NSA program that looks big and scary, but really isn't . But the day is coming when corporate control over our information will produce a civil liberties crisis that will make our NSA worries look quaint by comparison That day will come because that day must come, because in the same way that atomic fission was neither good nor bad, smart, unregulated, authoritative networks are neither good nor bad.

The problem with humans isn't that we're inheriently good or bad, it's that eventually some greedy asshole turns everything we learn into a weapon.

So if you're talking about the NSA in the context of 20th century notions of privacy, stop. And if you're making a big wailing deal about government intrusion via the collection of our metadata, prove you're not a nut and devote at least 75 percent of that outrage toward the larger threat: The private, unregulated, unreported, unseen world of corporate Big Data.  

I am convinced that connected information is ultimately going to be a boon to humanity, and that it's entirely within our power to write rules for the collection, use and control of the "public" information we all contribute to the commons. But to prevent that power from turning on us, we simply must start a conversation that relates to the actual threats, conveyed in the context of their actual potential for abuse. 

Of course, that's not going to happen. But every now and then I like to shout important things into the void, just to heard that echo that says "Forget about him! He doesn't know what he's talking about!"

2012: Google gives birth to the bottom-up Semantic Economy

Back in 2009, while contracted to work on a doomed content-repository project, a flash of insight struck me: The problem with grand visions of the Semantic Web was that they all assumed a top-down structure. One wickedly clever set of rules to wrangle every fact. A global ontology.

It didn't make sense. Global ontologies are like Soviet Central Planning. Rules are meant to be broken. And top-down systems are crashing and burning everywhere you look.

Plus there was another un-fixable problem: Everyone with money to spend on these projects wanted machines to do the yeoman work. Because machines are cheap.

Think about that for just a moment. We're talking about organizing the sum total and nuance of human knowledge, but the entire world assumes somehow that this is a job for machines. That the best way to understand the complex, pattern-based output of human intelligence and language is to assign computers to decode it after the fact.

People think that makes sense because they think computers are magic, not machines. Meanwhile, in the real world, Text Mining Engines aspire to 75 percent accuracy. That's why our content-repository project failed. The client's product specifications couldn't be satisfied via the vendor's pathetic 75 percent accuracy rate.

So one night I asked myself: Could you reach the goal if you flipped the script on every core assumption? Not top-down, but bottom-up? Not machine intelligence, but human intelligence, assisted by machines? Not one "global graph" but many interconnected "directories of meaning" based on capturing machine-readable statements of fact during the production of human-readable articles?

And of course, the answer is yes, you can do all these things, and you can do them profitably, so long as you follow two simple rules: 1. Build tools that make it easy to publish directories of meaning; and 2. Give users the power to make their directories cooperate with other directories.

Once you do that, the need to create perfect top-down rules for knowledge disappears, because you'll have harnessed the power of emergent properties. If you build a good directory, others will want to use it.

What's so hard about that?

But people didn't get it. Most still don't, for lots of reasons -- including our very human inability to hear anything new without forcing it to fit into old assumptions.

They're about to start getting it, though, because now Google gets it.

The search giant has constructed a bottom-up directory of meaning. The company calls the product "the knowledge graph" and the service Semantic Search. Being Google, the company still sees the problem as a data-recovery challenge, but that doesn't matter. Once such directories exist, a semantic economy based on the value of machine-readable definitions is born. Once we begin feeding that market, information becomes a public commodity. And once we give people the power to define the meaning of their own words, and then to share those meanings in a mutually beneficial way, we'll have tapped into the same emergent property that generated Wikipedia.

It's not that complex. It doesn't require any exotic programs. But it does take vision, discipline and the tiny bit courage required to buck the status quo.

My essays on the topic (Semantic Journalism topic).

An FAQ for my semantic journalism essay

Since several readers yesterday seem to struggle with some of the big-picture concepts in my essay about standards-based journalism in a semantic economy, I'm taking this opportunity to build a better cognitive bucket for all this information I'm shoveling your way. And it seems like the big problem is understanding what RDF is and how it might work in this context.

Rather than doing this in essay form, I'm going to try it as an FAQ.

Standards-based journalism in a semantic economy

Abstract: This 2,600-word essay describes how a news-media industry equipped with semantic tools could develop a standards-based certification program for journalism. Certification would be by non-governmental bodies similar to the ISO, and would focus on information processing and coding standards rather than on matters of ethics. The effect of such a standard would enable interoperability between semantic directories, which would allow for the creation of software that compares facts and checks the accuracy of statements.It is the second in a series of essays about semantic media. Since some readers had difficulty imagining the system, I've added an FAQ for these ideas, and added descriptions to the links listed at the end.

There's nothing exciting or romantic about standards. Personally, I find them tedious.

There, I've said it.

But there's no happy and profitable future for journalism without professional standards, and for that future we should be willing to sweat a little tedium. If my conclusions are correct, then our emerging information-based global economy will require interchangeable, robust data in the same way that our current economy requires that every finely threaded quarter-inch screw must have 28 threads per inch, machined to precisely the same height and pitch and thread-axis angle, regardless of whether the screw is manufactured in the People's Republic of China or Alpharetta, Ga.

Manufacturers of products that require screws need to know not only that the fasteners they buy are machined to precise dimensions and specifications, but that the tolerance of the machining and the durability of the materials fall within known quality standards. This generic uniformity makes it possible for manufacturers around the world to compete primarily on cost, and it works because manufacturers voluntarily abide by standards that were published and certified by international bodies.

If we are to benefit from a global semantic economy, then the information that fuels its industries and drives its markets must be structured, coded, stored, published and quality-certified to international standards. This is a foreseeable future (one among many), because we now possess the tools and techniques required to build the first platform that would make semantic markup of narrative documents a profitable, persistent revenue stream across the publishing industry. So long as the value of these resources continues to expand, we can expect to see voluntary participation in these activities, with resulting increases in productivity and organization.

Imagining the Semantic Economy

Abstract: This 3,000-word essay proposes and describes an economy based on exchanges of intelligently structured data; argues that the path to that economy will not be imposed from above but will emerge like a crystal lattice in a super-saturated solution; explains why a Semantic Content Management System for the publishing industry could be the profitable catalyst for this development; discusses the outline of such a system.

Clay Shirky blew up the grand vision of The Semantic Web in 2003, which is probably why serious people aren't particularly alert to the possibility of a semantic revolution building in response to current conditions. That's probably because the general perspective on semantic architecture is that it must be grandiose and top-down. I believe the route to our semantic future comes from the opposite direction, and I've tried to make that case by imagining and describing a publishing system that would create information structures that could spread because the publishing system would make those structures profitable.

But the widespread inability to imagine the benefits of such tools points to a more fundamental lack of understanding, and it occurred to me recently that maybe it's time to address it.

It's the Semantic Economy, Stupid.

How blessed are you?

New Charleston

Defensive ornamentation, East Bay Street, Charleston (Dan Conover photo)

Because Charleston was founded in the 17th century at the southern tip of a north-south peninsula, power and class here have always run on something of a north-south axis. So in the 1970s, when the area around the navy base incorporated as North Charleston, the name spoke as much about the new city's blue-collar identity as it did about its relative location.

Well, I think it's time we imposed a new axis on Charleston. Not North and South, but Old and New. 

Charleston, for all its considerable charms, remains a backward-looking city. Not "backwards," as in unsophisticated or unintelligent, but more enamored of its past than its present. So while the city officially recognizes the value of its "creative cluster," its "tech sector" and its "knowledge-based industries," Charleston's institutions, typically dominated by the same old families and traditions, remain wary -- if not openly hostile -- toward new ideas and new people.

Since that anti-outsider bias tends to limit opportunity, Charleston has developed a reputation as a place where who you know is more important than what you know. It's why so many talented people here seem to direct their energies toward celebrity instead of substance.

Once upon a time I wanted to change that. Now I believe we should let eccentric, odd Old Charleston be whatever it wants to be. I thank Old Charleston for preserving this beautiful city, and aren't we stronger when we value and preserve indigenous cultures?

Instead, I want to encourage Charleston's outsiders to start appreciating their own significance. The prosperity of the Lowcountry depends on the energy, creativity and spirit of people who moved here "from off," and once we start acting on that knowledge it simply won't matter whether Old Charleston recognizes this truth.

New Charleston doesn't have to beat Old Charleston. It simply has to stop looking to Old Charleston for permission.

What are we waiting for?

Go to a New Charleston event -- Kulture Klash, Pecha Kucha, BarCampCHS, a TweetUp or an SMCCHS happy hour -- and look around. Hundreds, thousands of musicians, writers, artists, designers, art directors, photographers, programmers, Web-heads, researchers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, chefs, dancers, filmmakers, actors and big-thinkers live here. How many are "from off?" Most.

Yet I still meet people who tell me different versions of the same story. Instead of being encouraged in their new ventures, they are visited by members of the local establishment who always deliver the same message. Get back in line. There's some kind of old-boy system here, and it wants to pick the winners of every contest in advance. I don't understand it, but there it is.

My question is, so what? Yes, these people have some money. Yes the city has various programs and perks it can dole out to the favored few. Yes, the local paper acts an unofficial enforcer of Old Charleston orthodoxy. Again: So what?

We don't need mass media to spread the word. We don't need membership in exclusive social clubs to meet interesting people. And the sophisticated tool users here can do more with less money in less time and with less formal organization than Old Charleston can even imagine.

It isn't as if they're offering us an alternative. You're never going to be accepted into the Old Charleston clubs, so why bother conforming to their rules? What have you got to lose by ignoring them?

When we stop fighting and cajoling Old Charleston, we can invest all that energy into building a healthy New Charleston. A separate culture that reflects the values of the people who came here by choice. A culture that's more egalitarian, educated, productive and open.

This change doesn't require government loans or angel investors. Just start small. Cooperate. Do business with each other -- and with the thousands of like-minded Lowcountry natives who are our good friends and collaborators. Support each other. Work together.

Opposing an existing power structure gets us nowhere. Building our own power structure, with our own open networks and values, is progress.

In conclusion...

You don't undo an old habit. You have to create new habits, and to make them stick you have to reinforce those new patterns until the old ones silt over.

That's how we're going to make progress. And the funny thing is, Old Charleston won't even notice it.

It will simply benefit from it, along with the rest of us. Now go forth, join ranks, and start inventing a new city.

(BarCampCHS photo via Ken Hawkins on Flickr)

BarCamp Charleston: Geoff's video

Geoff Marshall has been a good friend since we met back in the early Lowcountry Blogs days. I helped him get a job at The Post and Courier and in the early days of the paper's web video push it was pretty much just the two of us, wandering around with cameras, figuring out technical tricks, comparing notes, and each of us trying to develop personal styles of storytelling.

It didn't take time much time for him to begin establishing a style that I thought was not only distinctly his, but very, very good.

Geoff covered BarCamp Charleston this weekend and just posted his video. I think it's excellent in all sorts of ways.

And it makes me feel a bit nostalgic. He's leaving Charleston in a few days with a one-way ticket back to London, his true home. So in a way, this #BarCampCHS video is his parting gift to the Lowcountry. It shows not only how far the tech community has come, but also how sophisticated Geoff has become.

Thanks, mate.

BarCamp Charleston!

It's Saturday, Oct. 24th. Be there. Aloha.

Opening to change

Like a lot of people in the 1990s, Netscape opened the Web to me. I kinda became Netscape obsessed, doodling that Netscape logo on pads during daily editors meetings. But when Netscape became Communicator and faded away, the romance went out of browser software for me.

Fast-forward to roughly 2003. My friend Richard Green, who ran tech for the newsroom, called me into his office to show me the new browser he wanted to install on my computer as a test. Like everyone else in the mainstream world I'd been using Microsoft Internet Explorer (and a bunch of other MS products) for years by then. It didn't excite me like Netscape once did, but that didn't matter. Web browsing was no longer novel. It was something you did, and IE was the utilitarian tool you used to do it.

So when Richard told me Firefox was a better product, my first response wasn't "Great! A better browser might make me happier!" It was "Why is this tech-obsessed geek picking on ME?"