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!"

Intent, art and the 21st century

So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared in Arts Magazine -- as a work of art -- with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit:

1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist" in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded fo him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode -- and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture... and came out the other side as Art Theory!... Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision inivisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975

The tragedy of re-reading Wolfe's short masterpiece today, 29 years after I first encountered it, is its sad failure in predicting the future of artistic taste. Back in the mid-seventies, The Man in the White Suit felt confident that the world would come to its senses by the year 2000, that artists and collectors and writers would look back on the artistic period 1945-1975 with head-shaking wonder. "What happy hours await them all!" he wrote. "With what sniggers, laughter and good-humored amazement will they look back upon the era of the Painted Word!"

Sadly, Old Tom failed to appreciate the gravity of our 20th century intellectual failures, for we remain incapable of escaping their black-hole pull. The Grand Duchy of Art Theory that Wolfe skewered wasn't some post-war aberration: it was an Event Horizon, a point-of-no-return from which a once-cohesive culture doesn't simply recover. From art to literature to political science, the intellectuals of the mid-to-late 20th century pursued abstraction for the sake of theoretical purity, rendered their fields impotent and irrelevant, and then hid the keys to understanding within an arcane codex of self-referential gibberish that only members of their self-selecting academy could hope to understand.

It is this reason more than any other -- more than mass media, more than politics, more than economics, science or religion -- that accounts for the fraying of our current culture. As I wrote in 2005:

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.

The Imagination Gap

As is often the case, things tend to come at me in ironic pairs. This week it was a video of Jeff Jarvis' introduction to the New Business Models for News conference at CUNY, followed a few hours later by a link to a December 2007 TED Talk by Kevin Kelly about the next 5,000 days (give or take 700) of the Web. And as is so typically the case, I found myself angling away from what appears to be the most reasonable and likely future.

For those of you not inclined to watch such videos, here's my short synopsis:

Jarvis: The Knight Foundation funded this exploration of what might happen if a major metropolitan newspaper vacated its monopoly and was replaced by a new media ecosystem (an eventuality I've discussed here and here). The study found evidence for a lively and profitable ecosystem including a healthy local-news blogosphere and a new-style news organization. In the spirit of this new enterprise, they've provided a freely downloadable spreadsheet for anyone who wants to tweak the numbers.

Kelly: Two years ago, when the Web was about 5,000 days old, Kelly wondered what the next 5,000 days would look like in retrospect (one of my favorite ways of exploring futurism, btw). 5,700 days ago, most futurists thought the Web was going to be "like TV, only better." He suggests that no one then would have taken seriously the development of the Web-based culture we enjoy today, with free and/or low-cost tools that would have seemed like foolish Utopianism had anyone suggested them in the early 1990s. As for the future, he sees a unifying trend toward a cloud-based "one machine," plus a number of developments that will be familiar to people steeped in quality science fiction.

Even shorter? Jarvis is pointing toward a new media economy that looks an awful lot like a steady-state extension of the old media economy, only better. Kelly is suggesting that we need to get better at imagining things that seem impossible.

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)

The Singularity (trailer)

The betrayal of the Fourth Estate

I have attempted to be discreet on the decline and fall of the media empire, mostly because I am still in it. With layoffs and furloughs announced every quarter, the consequences of being brutally honest could be dire. But I am disgusted by the complete hypocrisy of the newspaper industry, whose leaders are staking a claim to the sacred art of journalism, as if it has sole rights to it. The assertion by newspaper executives that newspapers are the torch-bearers for a community (or global) moral and ethical center would be laughable, if it were not being used to cloak the greed of corporations that have enjoyed healthy profit margins for decades, all the while failing to invest in anything other than expanding their arrogance. 

These corporations profess it is their duty to hold the world to a higher standard but conveniently overlook their failure to substantively investigate major issues and their own increasing immersion in the very organizations they profess to watchdog. Three words. Yellow cake uranium. Need more? WMDs. Economic meltdown. Climate change. Want a book? Death by Journalism.   Into the Buzzsaw.

(Note to press: You are supposed to COVER politicos not hang out with them.)

The 21st Century in Retrospect

(...joined at 21:37...)

ALLENDE: From a conceptual basis, then, what year marks the beginning of the 21st century?

WANG: I don't know that I could pick one year that encompasses the entire shift. But I think we can definitely state the exact moment that the 20th century ended.

ALLENDE: Yes?

WANG: Nov. 4, 2008, and it ended sometime between the moment Barrack Obama stepped onto the stage at Grant Park and his first words to the nation as president-elect.

ALLENDE: So it was a political shift?

WANG: Not at all. It was a shift in possibility. The 20th century was predicated on material possibility, which included a mechanistic sense of weight and inevitability. A president like Obama wasn't supposed to be possible, because people believed the message that "the system" would never allow it. Electorates, agencies, corporations -- people understood them to be flawed, but people accepted the inhumane and inefficient authority of these institutions out of an ambient belief that high levels of friction, waste and corruption were inevitable in human society.

A university for The Singularity

Warning: This TED player can be buggy.