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!"

'It's not gun power'

Earlier this week, during a Facebook discussion about assault rifles on my friend Bill Strasburg's wall, one of his pro-gun-but-civil friends replied to something I'd written with this nifty artifact of today's bizarre conservative political culture:

"Dan, When the gov't attempts to oppress you, what are you going to use to fight back? We've seen in history, multiple times, where gov'ts have murdered millions of people after they took their guns away."

The reason I like this statement so much is that it represents a core element of the post-rational fantasy world that is currently collapsing around the heads of so many (overwhelmingly white) Americans these days. Despite the fact that our Second Amendment grants us gun rights predicated on the value of a well-regulated militia, the final fallback position for today's pro-gun partisans is the argument that untrained civilians need assault rifles so that when our own government's black helicopters come for us, we'll be able to fight back. Which our Founding Fathers could have specified as their constitutional intention, yet mysteriously didn't.

It makes me wonder. How many white American men my age have based their adult gun politics on the experience of watching the original Red Dawn as teenagers in 1984 and thinking "That looks awesome! WOLVERINES!"

But here's the thing so many of these would-be insurgent guerillas simply fail to grasp, no matter how you explain it. In a world where governments possess spy satelites, drones, wiretaps, sniffers, intelligence databases equipped with Non-Obvious Relationship Analysis agents, plus all manner of convert, overt and law-enforcement firepower, your little Bushmaster looks... cute.

Remember Saddam Hussein's Revolutionary Guard? They had some of the best tanks money could buy from the old Warsaw Pact. They spent the early stages of the first Gulf War hiding those tanks, because tanks just made better targets for our aircraft, and when they finally brought them out to fight, those tanks just made better targets for the guys in my old unit.

Sure, the Iraqis were far more effective as guerrila fighters in the Second Gulf War, but not effective in the sense of "winning." Once our armed forces adopted a more evolved counter-insurgency playbook, those Iraqi "freedom fighters" (or "Islamic terrorists," depending on your politics) were eventually reduced to something approaching irrelevence. 

Which brings us to today's collapsing conservative fantasy world.

My reply to Bill's friend referenced the changing landscape of war and resistance, but concluded with this: "We do have power as citizens, and we need to use it to fight against oppression. But it's not gun power."

If the time ever comes when American citizens must choose between surrendering their liberties and resisting their government, the last thing we'll want to do is pick up assault rifles and take to the streets. Picking up an assault rifle and taking to the streets just makes you a high-resolution target. Holing up in your home with an assault rifle just isolates you for easy removal. Trying to form a group of people with assault rifles just makes you visible to communications monitoring, and then here comes the drone strike. 

Our power as citizens today is primarily based on our ability to communicate in the open and to organize -- loosely -- in full public view. It's the power of information and networked transmission that can bypass mass-media propaganda channels. It's the power of distributed networks, without identifiable nodes of control. Our own Department of Defense created the original Internet as an adaptable communications system that could survive a nuclear attack because it could find a way around whatever portions of the system the enemy destroyed. It works that way for regular people, too.

Corporate interests in the "online market" have pretty much paved over the Web idealism of 2005-07. But it's important that we remember that people power, regardless of whether one lives in a democracy or a dictatorship, is based on information, communication and clarity of purpose. 

In other words, assault rifles don't deter government oppression. People do.

Internet by the new numbers

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 Big Pool of Money experiment

At last night's meeting of the Columbia chapter of Social Media Club, I mentioned something I heard suggested in an off-hand way at the Infovalet Conference in May. What if every American paid a fee as part of his or her monthly ISP bill, and then that money were divided up among content creators?

Of course, what I found ironic about this back in May was that the people suggesting it weren't suggesting that ANYONE be able to share in this revenue. The idea was that only content creators who happened to also own printing presses and/or FCC licenses would be eligible. That's absurd on its face, which is probably why that idea hasn't gone anywhere. Try selling that politically.

But as I drove home to Charleston, I reconsidered the idea. Which is why I want you to play along in a thought experiment with me.

What if we all paid into a fund that could be distributed among EVERYONE who creates content, of any kind, that can distributed online? Bloggers, filmmakers, musicians, reporters, pornographers, comedians, ANYONE.

How would it work? How could it be administered? 

Board Certification in Social Media

(Click to see larger size)

Everyone who comes out this evening for tonight's panel discussion (6:30 p.m., Room 100, Maybank Hall, College of Charleston campus) sponsored by The Social Media Club of Charleston qualifies for one of these puppies -- YOUR VERY OWN PRINTED PROOF OF SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERTISE! And it's SUITABLE FOR FRAMING!

Can't make it? Well, you too can become BOARD CERTIFIED as a SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERT for the LOW, LOW COST of just $50. To receive your board certification certificate, send check or money order to:

Social Media Certification
c/o Dan Conover
794 Rutledge Ave.
Charleston, SC 29403

... and then click here to download a PDF version of the certificate.

Happy experting!

Why I joined the Digital Mob

For about an hour on Tuesday I pointed my browser to a proxy that refreshed an official Iranian government site every second. In doing so, I participated in a form of cyberwarfare called a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, and the ethics of that act are complex.

To me, though, my intention made the ethics simple. I wasn't opening a dialog or expressing a thought. I was throwing a rock. And no matter how evolved we become, it's important to remember that a rock through a window remains an effective way of communicating to the people inside that the people outside are displeased.

Constructive? Absolutely not. But it delivered the message that government repression could be confronted by other forces, and it did so in a language understood by bullies of all nationalities: Power.

We need to construct a better world, and we won't do that by violence. But our strength as a distributed network of people who care about justice and democracy need not always be hobbled by the finer points of discussion, no matter how valid those principles may be.

A rock isn't the message. It's a medium.

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.)

A new form of writing

We all learned to write in more or less the same way: Beginning, middle, end; Subject, predicate, object; Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Beyond consisting of three items, each of these approaches shares another common theme: Inclusion. Everything necessary to understand the point is expressed explicitly on the page.

But when you write for the Web as you'd write for print, you write too long. You waste the reader's time explaining what she already knows.

When we write for the Web, we should use the Web's strengths to our advantage. This begins with thinking a little bit deeper about how information is constructed, because the Web can offer writers the benefit of  both clarity and brevity.

This post is an example: If you already recognized the concepts I used to build my argument, you're almost done reading. If you didn't, you can follow the links and read my explanations. And if you follow each back to its beginning, you'll find some definitive statements. Referencing one definitive statement for any concept or fact is an idea software engineers call "The DRY Principle," and I believe it's important to the future of both journalism and civilization.

Learning to write this way is a bit like playing three-dimensional chess, but it also reminds me of The Glass Bead Game. Sadly, writers today lack the technological tools and display conventions that would fully support and reward the required effort. But I suspect the ideas demonstrated here could lead us toward new ways of thinking and communicating that are far better adapted to the world we now inhabit.

Notes.

Image: This post as a rough semantic outline.Click to see full-size.

2020 vision: What's next for news

"As you can see, opportunity abounds."

A client looking to invest in media asked me earlier this month for advice on what might replace failing newspapers. My response? There are plenty of interesting ideas in play, but the first meaningful test won't come until a major American city loses its only metro daily. So wait.

That's because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he's looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants.

I think that's decent investment advice, but Clay Shirky's March 13th essay on the end of the newspaper era placed some urgency on the question “What Comes Next?” And since I'm a recovering newspaperman who's been studying and writing and speaking about that question off and on for the past four years, I figured now might be a good time to stake out some useful predictions about the future of American journalism to 2020.