Cobb

AI - A New Dimension

For me it started in 1982, four years after I graduated from highschool, I engineered my return to college. With that, I worked up my ability and willingness to read thick books. And so as a new 21 year old freshman at Cal State Northridge, my head was led by several fat books outside of the Computer Science curriculum. "Goedel, Escher, Bach" was the first. I didn't understand half of it, but I understood the Incompleteness Theorem. "Turing's Man" was the second book, who was that mysterious genius? Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" was book that excited me about work in the industry and its spirit of go big or go home was to set the pace for the insane startup work ethic of Silicon Valley years later. "Megatrends" validated that my obsession with computing had a future, but the book that made the largest impression on me was the legendary collection of essays "The Mind's I".

It was Dennett and Hofstadter who captured my imagination. What is thinking? What can think? The distinction between hardware and software became clear in my mind and I was all about the software. Even years after I was done with school, I still didn't understand hardware and so was captivated by the vision of 'Tron'. And still it was about the programs. In those days, hardware was the constriction. It was all slow and clunky and claustrophobic. Thinking the great thoughts had to take place in larger realms. That is why, I think, six years later my introduction to H.L. Mencken, the bigger world was that of the generation of political ideas, the analysis of history and the combat of philosophy. So I decided for myself to write for people in both essays and in programs. Both were realms of persuasion but the compute platform was more narrow and disciplined. It appealed to a smaller audience, and of course it was an expensive medium. In fact, the compute world was hostile to using too many text strings. Now this is no longer the case. Back in 1987 when my full time employment began at Xerox, my theme song was IGY by Donald Fagen. The lyric went - "Trust machines to make big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision." I was that fellow.

The fellowship however was weird, and I probably shrunk my balls by straddling so many fences. I was told that I could be in business or computing but not both, not to mention my politics and philosophy. So it is very pleasant, if not entirely rewarding, to have more compute accepted as the medium for politics and philosophy. But the hybrid medium is not quite disciplined enough. That is the audience that I seek to satisfy, those who are entirely disappointed in what social media has become - a ribald public square that obeys no orthodox parliamentary procedure. When I first conceived of 'X Republic' years ago, parliamentary procedure was the first thing on my mind. 

Now politics is not so entirely important to me, so much as understanding the semantics of thought itself. But we're clearly going to have to crawl out of the semiotic swamp of populist politics and fake news to get beyond where we are today. And that's going to require some unmediated chaos to make itself popular in the public imagination. It needs the intent of millions to communicate in a new way, something that satisfies both the limbic and the cortical impulses of mankind.  

So I am in the process of attempting to get some support for what life has had me thinking. The compute universe is large enough. We can do in text, animation and live action what logic dictates. And ultimately we can do it interactively. The question now is how we use AI to provide the right gating that will help us overcome our evolutionary boundaries in the cortical and limbic schemas when their representations are chock full of overloaded types.  It is in that vein of thought that the following article sparked inclusion here:

Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet

I started with the raw list of the 175 biases and added them all to a spreadsheet, then took another pass removing duplicates, and grouping similar biases (like bizarreness effect and humor effect) or complementary biases (like optimism bias and pessimism bias). The list came down to about 20 unique biased mental strategies that we use for very specific reasons.

I made several different attempts to try to group these 20 or so at a higher level, and eventually landed on grouping them by the general mental problem that they were attempting to address. Every cognitive bias is there for a reason — primarily to save our brains time or energy. If you look at them by the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.

The Cognitive Bias Codex is one of the most exciting maps around. I haven't seen anything so delicious since the publication last year of the Memetic Tribes of Culture Wars 2.0. You can get that map Download Memetic Tribes - Memetic Tribes. 

MyBrilliantShit.com

I just thought of a remarkable thing. In light of what the Facebook experience has become for a lot of people, imagine what the other side of your own input would be.

That is to say, imagine that your N Facebook friends were opt-in customers to MyBrilliantShit.com and you were subject to privacy regulations and contact rules, etc. Every time you said something on Facebook, you would be spamming those customers. Every time they like your pictures, complaints, aphorisms, and advice they are staying opted-in.

But one dislike and you lose them for good. They opt-out of MyBrilliantShit.com and you will likely never hear from them again. This is a technical description of 'friend' and it is a liberal application of marketing and privacy rules that are programmed into Facebook defining the relationship between you and your 'friends'.

I am coming up with new concepts for this relationship definition based on the idea of 'circles of trust' but other bases as well. But my point today is that as much as you might hate Facebook's political / fake news blasts that you are subject to, you have it way better than actual online marketers.

Also tangential to this, I thought about the difference between working for a company selling a solution and a small group coming up with a solution when I changed careers in 2001.

When you are selling a solution, you are responsible for telling large numbers of different people the same thing slightly adjusted. It is one kind of information relationship. When you are building a solution, you work with the same people and are responsible for telling many different things to the small group. Something to keep in mind wrt rules for communication.

How to Beat the Trolls

Right now I'm sitting in my comfortable leather chair listening to the new Bad Plus + Joshua Redmond album on my Jambox. The music is good, really good. I know it's good because I have good taste in music, and I'm bored of music that doesn't have such melodic density and rhythmic sophistication. I don't need Reddit to tell me that it would be good, but I might have found out if I went there. I know enough Jazz to be a decent critic, and if there were 50000 ranked jazz critics in America I'd be in that number. If you wanted to get the consensus of the top 100 jazz critics on this particular album, you'll never find it on Reddit.

How do you rank a jazz critic? 

Well one thing you don't do is rank them by novelty or popularity. You have to read them and listen to the music they listen to and engage in a decent discussion with them. It's something that can be done on the internet, but it is not the kind of process that is supported by the lame, one-dimensional chat systems that are the majority of webchat systems that exist. 

If you've ever graded term papers, you have an idea of how that process works. Let's call it peer review. I don't consider myself an expert or formally familiar with academic peer review processes, but I do know something about decision making systems. I've been involved with building such systems for nearly 30 years now. I do know that you won't get the 100 top jazz critics on Reddit doing peer review because those rare jazz critics, experts as they would be, would not have the stomach for dealing with trolls. In short, trolls are not the peers of experts, and most every webchat forum on the internet assumes that we all are peers or that we want to be peers. 

This wasn't always the case. Once upon a time on the internet there was a phenomenon called blogging. You may have heard of it. The best blogs were group blogs and the best individual blogs had blogrolls or belonged to blog leagues. We called it the blogosphere and we had a great system called 'trackback' that allowed us, for moments of insight to attach our ideas and remarks to other blogs which might be outside of our designated blogrolls or blog leagues. The most important thing about how these blogs worked was that we allowed authors to choose their own peers. The second important thing about the blogosphere was that authors retained the right to ban commenters. These are controls that were vital to maintaining the willingness of people who knew what they were talking about to engage with the anonymous public.

If you were a commenter at Little Green Footballs, you would never bother to try to comment at Fire Dog Lake, and vice versa. There were Red and Blue blogospheres and each kept the other in mind, yet stayed out of each other's hair. As apart as they remained, they easily found a way to stick to the same range of topics. 

Now we know that blogs have failed to retain popularity in the wake of the signing of major bloggers to larger, more mainstream publications as well as the creation of megasites like Huffington Post. Surely Facebook has taken a lot of comment traffic away from traditional blog/salons like Cafe Utne. Surely Reddit has eaten away at Salon's readership. Slate gave up on comments altogether, so it seems. All of these places have their own character and temperament. Authors, editors and commenters all have their levels of patience with each other. So it comes as no surprise that megasites that have aggregated all of the previously more well-situated commenters and their eyeballs into their virtual streets are going to have more muggings in their virtual alleys. So long as the people who run these sites refuse to use their panoptic powers to block miscreants, they will suffer.

If you ask me, it takes a lot of nerve to suggest that a site with 50,000 members is stifling free speech by getting rid of 1000 trolls. It's not as if the internet is suddenly going to miss an argument about any subject when there are literally hundreds of online publications and hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. Yet today we hear that 'the trolls are winning'.

Now I know that some fraction of America wants to know, since I'm standing up on my hind legs and saying so, that I would probably still be on USENET's Soc.Culture.African.American if the blogosphere hadn't emerged and given me the control I need as an author to kill trolls dead. I say so as black American blogger who has won the award for best black blog, and as a host at Cafe Utne, a well known commenter at Slate and Salon, and as a member of the legendary online community the WELL. I've dealt with trolls from day one.

Here's how to get rid of them in one word: Discriminate.

One. Personna Non Grata.
If you give people the opportunity to boot people they don't like, then those people will be booted. Simple. A community is not a community if membership means nothing. Good fences make good neighbors, and since we're human beings, sometimes we have to call the cops. The best cops are the people themselves. Let commenters vote other commenters off the site. Make it a topic. Let people vote.  

Two. Charge money. 
I have yet to see any website that asks for everybody's two cents in the comment sections do so much as charge two cents. I can use a credit card or Apple Pay or PayPal  to buy an order of french fries at McDonalds, and McDonald's believe it or not gets billions of french fries sold. If I can troll people for free and lose no money for doing so, why not?

Three. Scribbling
Losing money is easy. Some people will actually find it worth it to pay a membership fee if they get to troll at will, get kicked off and troll again. So erase the content of the troll. Poof. Online graffiti should be erased.  

Four. Houses.
If your webchat is big enough to have a wide enough diversity of opinion such that people will get on each other's nerves. Let people self-select themselves into houses of like-minds and temperaments. If people want, therefore, to be in the Nazi house, then let them have that house which is read-write for members and read-only for non-members. Nozi comments stay in the Nazi house which can be ignored by anybody who chooses. The Nazi house can have it's own standards and can PNG anyone who isn't pure Arayan. 

You cannot wish for a better public. They're going to be who they are. Let people say what they will say and make a real community, not some unpoliced anarchic 'public square'. It's awfully presumptuous to think that discrimination against trolls results in the suppression of the free flow of ideas in an open society. All you have to ask yourself is one thing, is a troll your peer?

Wonking in the Agoras

Wonking in the Agoras

---

Framers Wonk and Polish. 

Hunting & Gathering
i find it difficult to imagine being able to Wonk alone although many might be
drawn to it. since Credibility is established by the Weight of Arguments, one
would expect some slick purveyor to be able to spin something nebulous into
getting lots of approval. 

but the way the voting process works, things should be weighted in favor of
Partisans working in cooperation, thus Wonking should favor those able to
deliver votes and those able to respond to disagreement with their
Arguments. this drama should play itself out in the Agoras. 

the concepts that stick in my head are the PeanutGallery and the YakPool.
these are roughly equivalent - hell they are equivalent i just can't tell which
name i like better. the point is that they would be the equivalent of what all
webchat is today - unmoderated, free-for-all flame-baiting masses of blather
trying unsuccessfully to gain concensus. 

however, it is often in the fray where provocation works best. an original idea
will stand out every once in a while and people will say 'hey - what he said'.
so it is this grass roots thrash (MoshPit - that's the other name i had for it)
where consensus starts. WarpandWoof. OK how about if we have several
free-for-all Agoras (WarpAndWoof, MoshPit, YakPool, PeanutGallery). There
any thread may generate Gravity (yeah) and Citizens, especially those
unattached to any Partisan group, can generate Facts & Premises, construct
Arguments and have them attached to Issues. 

But in order to attach an Argument to an Issue there must be some level of
consensus. so let's set an arbitrary threshold of 5 for Attachment. i think
that the threshold for Attachment should be relatively low, or it should vary
depending on how many Arguments are already Attached to an Issue -either
Pro or Con. (let's not forget TalkingPoints/amicus briefs). 

OK so Arguments generated from the GrassRoots (the collective free-for-all
Agoras) are Floated by individual Citizens. I'm in the YakPool talking current
events and the subject of discussion is Clinton's sexuality, I post something
and an option on my Reply Message Form is a checkbox to Float this as an
Argument/Premise/Fact. I can Float any previous comment I own. 

In come the Citizens who are a-Wonking. Thread by thread they can take a
quick survey of Floated comments. A comment floats for a week. It can Fly
or it can Sink. These are then constructed and Attached to Issues. That's
(part of) Wonking.

Polishing

The other part of Wonking (beside the Hunting and Gathering described in
post 7) is Polishing. it seems to me that an Argument must have its own
integrity before it can be Attached, because once Attached to an Issue it is
subject to WeighIn. There may certainly be some gems which just work
straight outta beta, but most would probably need some spell-checking etc. 

So the well supported Argument should stand to be Polished a bit all at the
behest of the Citizen who originally Floated it. certain Premises and Facts
should be associated with the Argument, or they can be considered
'axiomatic' - a kind of take it or leave it Argument. Onced Polished, an
Argument still belongs to the originator, but there may be some quid pro quo
negotiated in the Polishing. 

So the Polished Argument is given an official number and Version and
submitted for Attachment to an Issue. It is likely that all those who show an
interest in the Issue will have a say in Argument Attachment. the trick is that
with non-controversial Issues how the unpopular Pro or Con might get
attached (oh wait, there's a lower threshold if there are few significant
Arguments). 

The Attached (Polished) Argument is then ready for WeighIn and announced
somehow. Citizens may then WeighIn on the Argument and its relative
Significance to the Issue is calculated relative to the
Weight(Agreement,Reputation,Intensity) it receives from Citizens as
compared to other Attached Arguments.

 

One Step Closer to War TV: LRA Crisis Tracker

For some time now, I've been promoting neoconservative ideas about geopolitical grand strategy with concepts such as The Last ID,  Least Favored Nation, Global Felonies and WarTV. 

WarTV

When you show some idiot cracking his nuts from a fall off a skateboard onto a handrail, you generally have to have a disclaimer 'dont try this at home'. When you show somebody's head smacking the pavement after having been shot with an automatic rifle, the warning is superfluous. Slapstick is what it is, and so is brutality. If we showed enough of War TV, our regular instincts would jump in and we would not need the editorial so much. 

Just the other week, a girl fight in a McDonalds had the chatting classes afire with a thousand opinions, clustered into three categories. But wasn't that a waste of bandwidth, or testimony to how civilized we actually are over here in the States? I tend to believe the latter and I do so by keeping our mortality stats in mind.

War TV. It will be coming.

I've also jumped on other bandwagons like Gapminder. The point is that I think it will be inevitable that the next generation of geopolitics can and will be crowdsourced by our bourgie tastes. The important question will be Who Is Your Leviathan? But I'll finish that essay in the future.

In the meanwhile the meme of Kony 2012 is yet another instance of the American instinct towards bourgeois neoconservative intervention. One of these neat tools that helped this lightning movement along is the LRA Crisis Tracker. Check it out. Oh and it wasn't invented by Vivek Kundra. 

I should also bring to your attention that this is structured data (experts talking about something) which is what I do for a living. Facebook and Twitter are unstructured data (nobody in particular talking about everything), which is what makes today's billionaires.

Hack The Vote

I got this from the VWRC this morning captioned "Irony". And now I finally get it. The Left typically says that using a picture ID for voting is discriminatory and on the slippery slope to the sorts of dirty tricks of the Jim Crow South. But here when there is a vote required to make a union labor decision, specifically one involving Boeing who has been in hot water with the Democrats over their new open shop factory, ID is required. 

My position is that ID should be required, and that Americans should vote more often in more convenient and secure ways. I'm for electronic voting. The thing is, I find it very difficult to believe that electronic voting cannot be secured. 

One of these days, I would love to be involved in a project aimed at revolutionizing democratic processes via IT, and this is one of the first steps. Let us vote often, let the results be distributed and open sourced. Let the code for voting be open sourced. Anyway, this is what I want Anonymous and lulz to do. AntiSec too. BTW, I just listened in on an AntiSec message the other day, and so far they sound like people with the best grasp of liberty. I don't doubt there are members of the other groups who may be as enlightened, but perhaps they are taking a silent backseat on this OWS flyer. 

So tell me. What would it take to make a secure electronic voting system on the Internet? Make it as secure as credit cards and as open as SourceForge. I should probably go check Larry Lessig on this too. 

References:

• The Last ID
• I Am Not Your Friend
• The Political Conceit

 

 

I Am Not Your Friend

My cousin Star lives in a high rise apartment building in Manhattan. She's a commercial real estate broker, five foot ten and stunning. The first thing you notice when you walk into her pad is the large painting she made in the style of Basquiat, and secondly if the blinds aren't drawn, the New York skyline. I hung out with her for a week and learned a lot about her, and our family that I never knew. What I appreciate about her is that she is excruciatingly honest and not shy about anything. Of course she has a marvelous sense of taste and an engaging personality, but there are many things about us that are radically different. What I love about her is hard to define, but it's stronger than ever. 

This essay is about identity and some of the ideas I will take when I start looking at the right way to implement identity management. So the first reference you might want to consider is The Last ID.

--

It took Star all of three days to get to the point at which she was comfortable enough with me to perform two very annoying acts. The first was to force me to watch Loose Change, the hiphop video / obiter dicta comspiracy tape about who was actually behind the 9/11 attacks on America. I didn't realize that my cousin was a Truther and it took many hours for me to discover this, as close as we are. All the while we were watching this video that she had obviously not watched herself in many years, she kept voicing impatient concern that this might not be the proper version of the documentary. So while she is fundamentally on the Truther side of the equation, perhaps what she recalls being more convinced by something other than the exhibit in question. The second annoying act was for her to read, given my birthdate, my full horoscope and assert with confidence that it was quite accurate. In fact it was. 

I could go on about other evidence I have to support my prejudicial notions about the practicality of Star which is hindered by such poisonous superstition, but she's more than good people, she's family. And today, all of that evidence is none of your gluten-free business. In a town where advertisements for Moving & Storage have taglines (I am not making this up) "Rick Perry: That voice in your head is not God", she fits right in. 

--

I don't fit right in anywhere. So when I think of social media, as I often do, and in response to many such questions I reply "I don't have any friends."  So when I consider what's missing from social media and identity management it is the extent to which it does not identify the importance of certain of your traits with any bidirectional weight. 

If I cared as much about 9/11 today as I did when I was reading 'The Man Who Warned America' or 'The Looming Tower', I would have found my sojourn in NYC unbearable. As it stood, as I was referencing my iPad during the movie, I had a hard time recalling the name of that first book. If I had known somebody who died there that day, as Star did, the significance of the 'Truth' would be greater to me. So how could I adjust my affinity to such a 'friend' and still actually love her? It's easy to do in real life, but not done at all online. Star didn't even know what a Truther is, so it would not be something she would put in her profile for me to accept or reject in the first place. 

--

The context for what I'm attempting to describe as an affinity system goes under the label 'WWID' for What Would I Do? And the first thing that I say about it is that it is a self-generated 'purity test' whose results you own and then selectively publish. 

As oldheads on the internet know, one of the first viral documents was the Armory Purity Test. I took it about 22 years ago - that's an old document by internet standards. Well, it actually precedes the WWW; it was  on USENET. (USENET seemed so huge back in the day). So if you bother to take the test, you will recognize peculiarities about the set of questions. But what if everybody were the author and everybody were the test takers and all of the results could be stored in a document under your control? This would be the beginning of WWID, except of course that there would be literally hundreds of such tests and many thousands of questions brought to bear. One could imagine, based upon the matter of 9/11 one such test with 500 questions.

I propose a system of such generalizable tests with each individual question indexed and tagged and then correlated into bunches. These bunches over time may vary but the more popular questions will tend to be central in them. People will then take these bunches of tests at their leisure, answering one or some fraction of all of the questions and have their answers under their secure control. Then for the purposes of affinity, the user of the system may publish results under an anonymous avatar linked to their Last ID in order to make matches.

Tests may be generated for any purpose. They may be job appliations, consumer preference surveys, political push tests, religious fidelity tests, entrance exams, special knowledge competency tests, psychological profiles, intelligence tests or medical diagnostics. Anywhere there is a question with an answer that in some way can be used to identify some personal trait of an individual, this system can be employed. 

--

I am not your friend. But there is probably some subject upon which we could communicate a great deal for a couple of hours. I am trying to avoid short painful conversations, and engage long fruitful discussions. This tool would help a great deal more than Meetup + Facebook. 

Logan, Rosen, Dowd, Mubarak & What The Internet Truly Is

Stowe Boyd reacts appropriately to Maureed Dowd's tut-tutting of the Internet in the wake of the firing of Nir Rosen. If you're a bit late to the controversy, here's the nut. Lara Logan, an American reporter, was sexually assaulted by several men shouting 'Jew! Jew! Jew!' in Cairo during the anti-government demonstrations over two weeks ago. Much has been made on the Right on how this story never garnered so much coverage as that about the Latin bimbo in the NFL locker room several months ago. I agree. It is just another Left romance with Revolution that the MSM covers shallowly without much consideration for the deep, ugly and opportunistic forces at work. Dowd wrote that Rosen said:

On Tuesday, he [Nir Rosen] merrily tweeted about the sexual assault of Logan: “Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger.”

He suggested she was trying to “outdo Anderson” Cooper (roughed up in Cairo earlier), adding that “it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too.”

Boyd summarizes:

There is buried network of spurious arguments underneath all the comfortable hatred of incivility, here. There is an assumption that the web is supposed to be a force for good, and only good. Who says? And secondly, that those that use the web are in some way a collective entity, a global society with shared beliefs, including various democratic ideals. These unstated assertions are deeply and profoundly wrong, but taken as a given in anti-web circles.

Dead right. This is the same kind of silly optimism that began in the very early days of computer moderated communications. At the time, I was interested in anti-racist activism, and it was considered a gross violation of netiquette (remember that?) to mention race at all.

Perhaps one should consider something of the economic argument. Although it's difficult to imagine today that the Web might be expensive, at one time it was a much more scarce resource. If you weren't doing good with it, or doing something terribly scientific or brilliant, you didn't belong on the web. So there were certain notions of privilege associated with participating in 'cyberspace'.

Matters of privilege are in conflict with matters of meritocracy and the hacker ethic represents meritocracy better than the liberal ethic of creating institutions for the betterment of society. Institutions come with rules and barriers and, of course,ethics. In this case of Nir Rosen's speech, 'netiquette' has been defied as well as the very notion of what the Internet 'ought' to be used for. And it is that same liberal ethic that prompted Al Gore to suggest he was part of that force that created the 'institution' that is the Internet. But the internet by its very nature is more of a creation of merit and it defies the narrow defintions appropriate to a 'liberal institution'.

Misunderstanding of the Internet as a liberal or public institution is the mistake that both Dowd and Mubarak make. The Chinese government makes the same mistake.  To consider it an instituion for a purpose assumes that it has a proper use, and is according to that proper use, subject to external reform, control or of removal. People don't use the Internet as a right or as a privlege. They use it because they *can*. Not because they are allowed to or granted some permission to. But because they can afford to and they want to. Not because they need to as a member of the public and thus require government license and sanction. Internet usage is an expression of individual will, not of collective membership or of citizenship. It has become too cheap to be constrained as if it were a scarce commodity. It has become too complex to be regulated as a commons. Dowd and Mubarak would like to express some rule of order that supercedes the meritocracy of access, and this is where they run afoul of reality. To support the firing of Nir Rosen, is tantamount to shutting down the Internet. Both are gratuitous assaults on free speech and both eminate from the totalitarian impulse that is always the temptation in controlling the ethics or the purse strings of liberal or public institutions.

The Internet itself, now draped in the jewelry of 'social media' has become a fetish. People all over the MSM, obsessed as they are with what they don't understand about computer mediated communications, keep saying that Twitter and Facebook, Twitter and Facebook are making the difference. Twitter and Facebook. But these are manifestations of what people want - they are expressions of will, quantified in dollars, eyeballs, Oscar nominations and other neat statistics that are easy to digest. At the bottom is the awesome force of people's desire to communicate freely with each other, 24/7. It is only the defense of those people's rights to free speech that matters. Everything else comes with it. 

A Bit of History: Black CMC

(From the archives - 2003)

 

A BIT OF HISTORY, BLACK CMC

Over with the Afrofuturists, I've been going through a number of raisons d'etre and mapping out black cyberspace. Here follows materials from the archives...

The full transcript of this forum can be found at Drylongso.

Phase One:
When I first got on computer networks to communicate with other folks, there were very few black women or men online on at all. This had mostly to do with the fact that I was emailing on the Xerox internal network in the mid 80s long before there was a public Internet. So, I started my online discussions at a time when the builders of the networks frowned heavily on any non-technical discussion. Matters of netiquette were taken very seriously. That didn't stop me from having black oriented political and social discussions in the Xerox corporate intranet.

Since I had been fairly prominent in college as a national officer with NSBE, I felt that on the Xerox network I was continuing the discussions about the fate and future of blacks in Corporate America from a business and technical angle. It was certainly a male dominated world, but it existed primarily as a support network. Nobody took any social discussions seriously. The very idea of men and women meeting each other socially online was simply not done. Besides, most of us already knew each other. We assumed that white folks were listening in, and the biggest controversies had to do with airing dirty laundry.

Phase Two:
A literacy project got me involved with open mike poetry in Los Angeles around 1990. Some of that got political, and it occurred to me that any black organization that would publish a newsletter would be a candidate for their own website. It was in this spirit a few years later that I created my first website with the idea in mind that many black organizations would follow suit. It was not to be. Everything associated with the information superhighway was considered elitist, and there was a sort of anxiety about it being another example of what white folks purposely did to leave black folks behind. So between black men and women there was no issue because most were not participating.

SCAA
There was a golden age of black conversation on the net that took place between 1993 and 1996. For the most part, however, gender issues were deeply subordinated to racial and political issues. The core of the group of participants there came to know each other well enough to distinguish gender issues from personality issues. Nevertheless, there were always new folks coming into discussions, who would take communications issue and extrapolate them to "the problem with us." As a compiler of the FAQ for the SCAA group in 1995, gender issues simply weren't high on anyone's priority list. What was much more important was maintenance of the space free and clear of racist "drive-by" conduct. SCAA finally fell to a barrage of racists and serves no useful purpose today, diehards not withstanding.

Salon Table Talk
At Salon, we got into issues of identity and gender a lot deeper. One notable conversation there was specifically about hiding race and gender in cyberspace. Having been hardened by the experience of SCAA, it was clear to me, as the Internet was getting popular with non-technical folks, that certain mythologies were being promoted. I don't believe any of the black veterans of the SCAA wars would easily swallow the cliché on the Internet that "nobody knows you're a dog." We knew all too well that being black was more than just skin color--that identity was a crucial part of the way you saw and thus discussed things online. If anything, the anonymity of text enhanced the differences and conflicts as well as the contrasts and synergies. But it certainly did not obviate them. Cyberspace made you more of what you are; only the things you really felt passionate about would come through in a memorable way. So when this subject was breached at Salon's Table Talk, I really took a hard line against masking.

I never wanted to get into a trap with "authenticity," partially because spoofing identity was part of the fun of some cyberspace haunts. I think the nature of MUDs and IRC lend them particularly to this. But I never considered these places for the kinds of discussions I wished to have vis-à-vis black cultural production, criticism or political talk. Instead they were social adventures. I did have an online life as a girl named "Sindeetha" at a game site called "Sissyfight," which was very popular for a short time.

Black Planet, NetNoir
I have spent only a limited amount of time in black on black social forums where the primary activity is socializing and flirting. They simply came into being too late in my life to be of any use.

Conclusions
In general I would say that black folks' expectations for the type of interactions in which gender issues are significant came to the Internet some time after I did. In the early days, people simply didn't expect anything. People didn't expect black folks to *be* online, much less socialize there with any seriousness. Even when I had dreams of millions of black folks online, I didn't expect or desire a dating service.

I think it must be said that the contributions of black cultural production or academic quality materials has been disappointing and too little too late for me. It is in that area that I wish such matters could be handled better. I blame black professors and professionals for following the dollar instead of contributing to community. Those who are intelligent and capable of delivering evolutionary content to the web don't bother and/or take a cynical attitude towards the entire enterprise. Those who have been trained to speak about such social issues only do so to be paid, and their default in the online world leaves it to lay-people to struggle with issues to which the answers already exist. Consequently, I don't really look for much. Yet. I can admit to having exceptional expectations. That I'm not satisfied in no way suggests that a plurality of black folks can't be. I've always been the explorer looking to carve out new frontiers. Let's see what happens next.

Mike Bowen - Summer 2003

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Becoming more real over the years in cyberspace-a distinction between expectations and reality. From: Mike Bowen

I perceive that people have come to appear more real to each other over the years in cyberspace. The convention of masking, originally established by techies, and the inability of the medium to use long names and pictures, has given way to more highly interactive virtual communities with highly stylized artifacts. I would think that BlackPlanet is a very good case in point. When content management software became available at no cost, the texture of online communities changed. Suddenly people who were very opaque in IRC using an abbreviated name and spurting short comments intermittently had the chance to put some style into a permanent website which added a dimension to their chat. With IRC, as soon as you stopped typing, you disappeared. With a website, you became permanent. Furthermore, with a website, you could attach pictures of yourself, artwork, favorite quotes and longer texts about yourself.

Additionally, people became more real in cyberspace because they volunteer information about their own circle of communicants and interests. Back in the days of Usenet before free website authoring became possible, individuals would put their �sig� at the end of each post. I have never seen a sig with a list of friends. Websites always list things that people might find interesting. So people could then be judged not only by what they say on one particular day, but by the online company they keep. Sure, you could tell something about a man who quotes Shakespeare, but he could become more complex if his best friend quotes Muddy Waters and less so if his friend also quotes Shakespeare.

Despite all of this, serious dislocations occur. The more real the cyber presentation is, the less likely one is to question your interpretation of it, and therefore the more likely you are to be shocked if you misinterpret all that you see. The problem is that as real as this cyber presentation feels and as much communication as it allows, it is not community. It still lacks the nuance we have with personal relationships offline. Whatever is established online is always and can never be more than an artificial community. We can no more have a relationship with people online than we do with movie stars or rock idols. Every communication is a presentation, and every presentation is interpreted. What exacerbates this problem is the reality of connecting with a wider variety and larger number of individuals online than offline.

Before establishing my persona of �boohab� I wrote:

 

Everything I do in computer-mediated communications (CMC) is an experiment in blackness as a post-modern concept. I am futzing with identity in cyberspace and trying to figure out what happens to your race when people cannot see you, hear you or smell you. (hee haw). Everybody knows that you have some freedom in CMC to choose who you be. If I choose to be black, how would I express it? If I choose to be white, how? Why? What can I say in CMC that I would never say face to face? What silences are overcome w/ respect to racial issues, which are created?

 

Everyone who represents consciously in a gender-specific way in cyberspace must reckon with its sensory deprivation. It�s not enough to simply write �I am female� because this is not how people perceive femininity offline. And so presenting oneself simply as female has issues not unlike presenting oneself as anything for which the imaginations of your audience cannot easily adopt. If you are attempting to be an instructive figure as well, the challenge is even more severe.

I recently got into a bit of trouble addressing someone who called herself �thuqmami�. I was looking around for black content in the blogosphere and found a registry site called blogs of color. It turned out that it was undergoing construction, but 9 out of 10 links I found were dead. I considered it an embarrassment and said so. I was certainly passing judgment from the perspective of an upper-middle class middle-aged father from the old school, but I ended up being corrected. There actually is a difference between a �thuq� and a �thug�. Thuqmami actually inherited the name and the site from someone else. After a time, we came to understand each other, but it took more than a few emails.

Goddess� remarks brought to mind something that I did see very often, which was the flaming of younger more naive persons, especially women but all newbies , who were trying to express themselves artistically without any understanding or consideration of the conventions of online conversation. I seem to recall this happening often. One spot that I used to hang out in was Caf� Los Negroes. It was chocked full of people who felt it was their appointed duty to put a personal spin on everything that happened. So it was as much a billboard for certain characters to rant on with inside humor as it was a public hangout. Anyone who felt it important to creatively express their blackness was suddenly held to very rigorous, if arbitrary standards. A certain smallish clique of members would give each other affirmations on their own style of speak and observations, and others who came in fresh, especially those considered unorthodox would get the virtual equivalent of a cold shoulder. I recall that this seemed rather cruel for some.

So I think the reality of cyberspace is that black folks feel as though the kinds of relationships they have in real life will be the same kind that they have online and are sometimes surprised and/or ill equipped to deal with the real individuality of people they do meet. People seeking affirmation of their personal lives and relationships are just as often as not given a cold reception or condescended to for opening up their feelings online. It�s very easy for people to turn you off and decide not to care. I think it is a mistake for black folks to assume that all black oriented content online is expressly for them and people like them. They must recognize that the monolith is shattered. This ability of cyberspace to create connections ends up introducing people to each other with widely differing perspectives on what it means to be black, the negative experience of a failure to create community only reinforces the stereotype of black disunity. Considering how important the idea of unity has been, it is not surprising that black folks may tend to be more disappointed with online experiences than others.

Cyberspace is capable of establishing a type of communications that you wouldn�t be able to sustain in person and that is good. Cyberspace fails to maintain the quality and nuance of multi-sensory communication of community and flattens experience into the strictly literary and visual; this is destructive of the expectation of a beloved community. The distinction between advanced connectedness, which the Internet delivers, and real community, which it does not, is the difference between our expectations and reality.

Mike Bowen - Summer 2003

 

 

Tea Party Transparency

Knowledge is the only commodity that needs redistributing.
-- Tea Party Patriots

A thoughtful reader has forwarded information to me regarding a Tea Party related movement in support of government transparency. Sounds very good to me:

A casual comment from my left-leaning, independent fiancé made me realize one of the missteps of the Republican Party, and I think we would do well to take it to heart. We were debating the merits of government sponsored, nationalized healthcare and he said, regarding the conservative claim that there are free market solutions, “Well, I just haven’t actually seen any other solutions being discussed [besides a socialistic approach].” In that moment I realized the GOP’s problem. We always talk about how the Democrats are socialists, or their plans are socialistic, and we talk about how and why those are bad things. However, we never actually get anything off the ground and in the people’s faces, providing our own, alternative solutions to problems. I do not remember our GOP leadership actually presenting viable solutions that we, the conservative base, could believe in and share with others. If they exist, they are buried somewhere, inaccessible to the masses.

I'm not saying alternative solutions that still mean big government, but rather solutions that real, everyday citizens could enact, without the government.

I believe we should have a "Solution Revolution." No more flowery language, no more rhetoric. GOP Solutions are straight-forward, real, alternative solutions to the problems we face. We need to sit down and actually create SOLUTIONS that are based in OUR principles like the free market, fiscal conservatism, individual freedom and liberty, self-responsibility, and the importance of family. 

It's called the Sunshine Standard. I love their slogan. I've been affiliated with various sunshine initiatives for a year or so, and while I haven't had much of an opportunity to do as much as I would have liked with open source data, I expect to be doing more in the future as I work with tools & resources like Gapminder, Infochimps and open source BI projects. 

The New Latin

There are days like today when I believe that I should belong to a secret society. Last evening as I worked with my son to study for his AP US History class we talked about the Anti-Masonics, the Whigs, Andrew Jackson and a bunch of other stuff I never learned in high school. In fact, I did not have an American History class at all in high school. That was the 70s for you. 

My buddy Lee was out here on the weekend, and he's the one guy I know who retains something ineffable despite his academic achievement. Regularness? He's been recognized as one of America's top young scientists (young <= 46) and as such was regaled with a presentation of the state of the art of what we know at the National Academy of the Sciences. They've got a nice conference center down in Irvine. I perused the presentations out in the lobby as the last session was breaking up but decided not to take any photos. His was about machine learning. I remember very little about the others, but here's something he explained to me of one of the subjects discussed.

You have taste buds in your stomach and intestines. They are the same kinds of taste buds that are on your tongue, and their function is to serve as an early warning system. Imagine that you're drinking a diet soda. It tastes sweet and so you like it. When exactly should your body start producing insulin to deal with all that sugar you are tasting? Insulin stops the use of fat in the body as an energy source, so when insulin is present the body will depend on the sugars and carbs you eat. The taste buds in the mouth would signal too soon, but the taste buds in the gut would signal right on time. Except what you're drinking in that Fresca is not sugar, so you've got all this insulin ready and no sugar to process. For the sake of the pleasure in your mouth, you're freaking out your body. Diet sodas are worse than water. That should be obvious, but now you have another reason.

When I developed the ideas around XRepublic, and now for the Lorite Interrogator, I had some very specific things in mind concerning the melioration of knowledge via computer mediated communications.  The term "CMC" penned by Howard Rheingold is so influential and central to my thought process that I named my son so that his initials would be CMC Bowen. It worked out that we had ancestors other than Cobb for the second C. One of the biggest problems is the level of patience the learned have for the unlearned, because while there are thousands who know what the millions do not, only hundreds are willing and able to teach. One of my solutions is to maintain separate 'houses' for debate, and that may or may not work - we'll have to see in practice. Despite the existence of such houses, there would be transparency. For example, I have just declared Nulan personna-non-grata in this house, but in the act of doing so I also asked for him to trackback to our common subjects, and I presume that I would remain on his blogroll. Obviously I can't stop anyone from going over to his own house, and I would encourage that. MIT has some of this kind of transparency in its OCW, but I imagine Yale does not.  It is the transparency of CMC that has allowed more to learn indirectly from various universities and learned individuals than would ordinarily be admitted through physical gates. This is, indeed how you have come to know that the stomach has taste buds - Lee as a top scientist invited to the private gated affair shared with me and I shared with you. But the many were not and will never be invited to The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering. 

In the prior post 'Vox Populi', the ancient aphorism rings true, that is if you know the whole thing: And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. It exactly what I say about the Denizens of Sherwood Forest. It should be what people say about the Tea Party. It is the proper warning against populism. Then again on occasion, it is wise to trust the revulsion of the masses against the corruption of the few. But looking in the other direction there are often things the millions feel that the thousands do and only hudreds can communicate. These are the edge conditions of mass communication and they have not been solved to my satisfaction. 

When I am pessimistic about this problem, as I generally am when I consider American politics in its current state, I seek to take shelter from a public and public debate I find debased. I would much rather listen to and hang out with my friend Lee. We talked exactly zero about politics. Lee shares a certain epistemological modesty. If there is something true to be said about geeks, it is that they accept the isolation their interests and arcane knowledge bring. Geeks seek the company of other geeks, happy to find a confidant or someone else who gets it. This is reward enough for the dissonances from the millions. Nerds, on the other hand, seek revenge. In a social apocalypse, what happens to destroyed nerds and geeks? Their presentations are photographed but who has the patience to teach Morlocks? I search for the signs of the mood towards cloistered knowledge, the arrogance of nerds, the desperation of geeks and the madness of crowds. 

Computer literacy is something very different in CMC. It is the ability to sniff out the good content from the zettabytes of spew. It is in its own way the New Latin, a way of recognizing the style of a website of value, of tracking one's way towards the company of the hundreds from both directions. It is a facility with the many tools of the internet. 

An XRepublic-ish Note

In other news, I have indefinitely postponed my venture to develop a multitouch interface for business intelligence. Instead I will focus on learning the suites of open source tools and figure things out from there. Now that has been taken off my plate, it will free up time I had set aside for learning what has now become iOS, and it makes me regret the moola I spent on my MacBook Pro instead of two Mac Minis for the homestead.

Be that as it may, the new availability of time raises once again the spectre of XRepublic, my sorta-kinda life defining technical project. To that end I will slightly alter the way I write here at Cobb, letting certain aspects of XR be tried out here.

XRepublic is that thing that the blogosphere has yet to accomplish which is to give instant polling to millions and create a large virtual parliament in which people make collaborative statements. It is like a Wikipedia of common opinion and belief, always in the act of creation - such that every fully formed opinion gets linked to its assumptions and arguments.

I have always conceptualized XRepublic as something driven by people directly, following the Well's dictum that 'you own your own words'. But I did have a space for representation. IE the creation of a virtual Booker T Washington or Michel Foucault by a scholar. But what has emerged in the rise of social networking is the fact that many people simply cut and paste words that are better than their own.

I am finding this quite useful even in my own blogging, and so will continue to increase the percentages of borrowed vs original content. I have begun to do so in comments, and will continue in that vein.

The Political Conceit

I think I've finally put my finger on what it is that has turned me off of politics, and I mean about 10 minutes ago. It is the conceit that your vote, in the context of a democracy of 300 million, is actually meaningful. And the greater conceit is that your opposition to the mendacity of the mediating bodies of democracy is meaningful. I think they are not, and I suspect this is something lawyers know but the rest of us do not. 

Anyone who follows American politics knows that the Left is seduced by and then compromised by the Democrats and the Right is seduced by and then compromised by the Republicans. Real people think that few on the other side have the courage of their convictions, except for the bodacious ones they hate. More often than not, however, those bodacious ones are not elected. But since talking points are best generated by talking heads and the blogosphere is the best public place to hash it out, a great deal of real thinking actually gets done in this democracy. The problem is that, while our government is responsive to the voice of the people, its only marginally responsive to the most thoughtful of those people. And so you have a situation in which the government is always a day late and a dollar short, the Democrats are pushing and the Republicans are pulling, and the smart people and the smart money are largely on the sidelines duking it out in various virtual salons - except for the ones rich and powerful enough to have a real seat at the real tables of power in Washington.

It's not a bottom up process nor a tops down process. It's a middle outward process. The smart margins influence the middle which changes the conventional wisdom and then various interpretations are radiated the poles. It's hacked into partisan language and then raked over the coals of compromise and horse trading. What comes out is political sausage with all the intellectual nutrients you need to survive, which you can certainly live on if you don't know any better. 

Take this Tea Party thing as an example. You cannot plan a Tea Party any more than any scandal today is a truly a  'gate'. Students of history know that the political destruction of Richard Nixon came from his coverup of the break in at the Watergate Hotel. In the odious media shorthand, it became known as 'Watergate' and perhaps the only new tragedy that has merited it's own name since then is '9/11'.  But all this shorthand serves the purpose of communication to the masses which is what the majority of the broadcast media has been fouling up since the end of Paley's CBS News, with a slight hiatus for the early CNN. My point is that nothing new fits the old clothes - it all becomes costume drama. 

I'm not the sort who wishes ideas floated through the ether fully formed into the public consciousness devoid of spin, inaccuracy, false analogy, hype or partisan bodewash. I understand through my reckoning of information theory that there is a thermodynamic component. It takes energy and time to radiate a pristine message, and I know that most of us have different sorts of interpretive hardware and software as our brains and minds.  But I know that this massive game of political 'telephone' introduces all kinds of distortion which makes for such a stochastic mess that it's a safer bet to follow the money than the message. 

I am of the firm opinion that we have yet to devise any mechanism suitable for accurately gauging public opinion on political matters of any gravity and sophistication. We are in a democratic Stone Age. The feedback loop is horrendous. But it serves as an adequate franchise. People understand enough to be placated, unless and until it rises to the level of oh.. say a miscarriage. Ask that woman about healthcare policy. She will have a million things to say of which 7 become real talking points. Seven talking points on obstetrics cannot and will not be traced through the media to anyone's satisfaction. The media does not have time for that, and you can't Google it. You have to be a specialist and all those specialties are not navigable. Not today. There is no collaborative framework. So it is all about buying and selling influence. 

That is the reality of a national political information feedback loop in a country our size. Billions of arguments are flying back and forth on the web and we do not process the bulk of them through any responsible democratic process. 

I know all of this. I've been knowing all of this for over a decade. I've designed a collaborative framework that addresses it, and maybe it's time to dust it off and turn it around in my head again. But that's another matter. My point is that, given what I've been talking about with respect to Peasant Theory, that much of what passes for political discussion might as well be sports talk. Not because people aren't knowledgeable and the very idea of democracy is wrong, but because no matter what you know and what you say in politics, as with sports, you're not the coach. You kinda sorta elect the assistant coach once every other year or so. That has almost no impact on the daily game, no matter how passionate and conceited you get.

So tangential to a 'Tea Party' movement, I get Roger Simon lambasting David Brooks for mischaracterizing the motivation of the Tea Party activists. That's all any pundit can do. The grass roots is not integrated. Washington *is* insider stuff. Statehouses *are* hermetic. And we all live with it, but we don't really acknowledge it until we get our issue. Nobody with their issue is satisfied until money changes hands and that is the tractable first order function of policy. We out here writing paragraphs... 

I do happen to think that writing my paragraphs is more significant than casting my vote. That's because writers are in control of the conversation. My vote is a proxy - I give license to legislators, or committees that have some vague approximation of my political demography or whatever abstracts they use. (Income level probly) and they go off and do what they think they have a mandate to do, but that feedback loop is broken. Nobody can claim that our proxies are not responsive - Scalia made that point very well and the Europeans actually shutup about it in the video I posted last month. American politics does follow the will of the people, but it is just accurate enough to be called responsive - it does not capture the expertise of the people.

What I look forward to will be the political equivalent of Open Source, and I am convinced that it must eventually come to be. The idea is too powerful and the technology and framework is at hand. Until then, I scoff. 

The Lorite Interrogator

OK, I know I'm a geek, but most of the time I forget it because most of the time I don't have any other geeks to talk to, I get impatient and then I put on my conversational skin - which can be quite charming given enough bourbon. This evening in Columbus where it's 19 freaking degrees, I am hovelled up in my hotel room with Neal Stephenson's latest book and feeling geeky for the time being.

NS reminds me rather of the reasons I've always thought that the coolest job in the world would be to be a philosophy professor at Harvard. I've never told that to you have I? It's because I forgot and it's somewhat incongruous with my blogging skin. Be that as it may, I have been reminded that one of the things I've always wanted to build or see built was what I am now calling a 'Lorite Interrogator', which is essentially a factotum with an attitude, perhaps one of slight exasperation....

Since this afternoon I have been thinking of a way to come up with a cool name for the program that would express the Lorite Interrogation, and the answer that came to mind was unsatisfactory. That name was Fidel - which is, as everyone knows, the name of the Lurch-like but incredibly brainy assistant (who actually called himself a factotum) for Jack Nicholson's devlish character in 'The Witches of Eastwick'. Nor could I find an appropriate anagram for 'factotum' or 'lorite factotum' or 'bowen factotum'. But after this frustration I realized that I was making a mistake that a Lorite would point out to me.

Lorites, as you should know, are those people whose knowlege of philosophy and the history of philosophy would be sufficiently complete to give them the conceit of being able to prove that anyone's 'new' ideas were actually old ideas. And so a Lorite Interrogator would ask you several hundred questions and figure out if you were reasonably consistent in what you actually believe to be true about the world. A suitably advanced Lorite Interrogator could devine this accurately without asking so many questions, or by taking a sampling of your writing sufficient enough to nail you within a reasonable distance to some previously understood weltanschauung.

Such an algorithm, bot or facility in a system would be terribly useful in setting the odds for democratically elected candidates amongst populations of reasonably consistent thinkers. As such it would be rather valuable, and an interesting way to hack elections of sufficiently small size. At the very least, it would give candidates an edge. I had something of this in mind when considering the prospects for XRepublic, which is itself a rather old idea I came up with a decade ago, at least, I guess.

I've been considering learning Java for a variety of reasons. My current job may put me in a geeky enough position, long term, to accomplish that. I don't think that a Lorite Interrogator has ever been built, but it could start off as an expert system. Then again, I'm just happy about the idea itself. Now back to the book...

Tagging: Taxonomy Solved

I don't talk much about XRepublic these days. It's still a great idea but I don't exactly know enough about how to get it made. I don't have the time or the money and I don't see how I can get it at the moment. But I do recall a problem that I had with the entire system that required me to think about how to create the right way of categorizing the interest groups, resolutions and debates. Now, I think the answer is clear thanks to a presentation made by Clay Shirky (from the good old panix.com days) at Long Now.

Short answer. Tagging is a 'degenerate' form of categorization. It uses the power of social thinking about information. What millions of people think of something is a better way of getting to it than what a few experts think of a thing. The experts might be right, but the way people think about something changes over time and you need to follow that path.

The Mystery of the Referenceable Blogger

Very much like my Mystery of the Black Blogger problem, Robin Hanson wonders aloud if the 'sphere will go towards a model of referential integrity like that of academic publishing or of popular unattributable flavorful communitarian model like that of popular journalism. I say the latter is inevitable, because people don't necessarily care about the truth and authenticity as they do about being relatively informed. If you can get the gist without footnotes, you will.

But, if social norms allow academics to ignore blog posts, by not citing clearly relevant and influential blog posts just because they are blog posts, then blog writers will have little incentive to offer insightful comments that can be fit easily into an academic network of cited insights.  Blog writers will instead have the incentives of newspaper columnists, to provide an engaging style with little expectation of originality or cumulative expert influence.  Such blog writers might well cite each other, but more as a way to create an engaging multi-character show for their readers. 

So can we create an academic blog world, where blog posts get academic credit?  If someone gets a Nobel prize for developing an idea that was first explained in someone else's carefully written but short blog post, will that blog author be celebrated, or will he be ignored as the sort of distraction that academics can't be expected to pay attention to?  A lot will depend on whether blogs can organize themselves into networks of specialists, so that it is feasible for someone working on a particular topic to find the careful serious blog posts related to their topic.  This is obviously harder to do for many small blog posts than for fewer larger papers or books.  But it is not obviously impossible, and this is the blog world I hope to live in.

Aside from the fundamental conflict between the credentialed and the well-informed, there is the problem of incentives. Academic teaching is something of a subscription model of information dissemination. The great value in teaching is found in the efficiencies of f2f interaction and variant explanations that are readily available to a good teacher. Replicating this online would take way too much effort, and online is not a good place to try although video transcripts of seminars can be pretty damned illuminating.  But there is also the economy of valuation of teaching materials based upon the publication business.  Sure there's MIT's Open Courseware, but it is the exception that proves the rule. Nobody publishes academic quality materials for free.

I would absolutely love for Google to put Lexis-Nexis out of business, but that's going to take a generation of IP holders to die and some serious changes in copyright law and convention. I am a huge champion of their efforts to digitize the libraries of the world. This has been a dream of computer scientists from day one, and it is one that will not die. We have to reorient valuation of learning paradigms towards human interaction and let the world of media be cheap. I think that this will ultimately happen, someday.

There is great value in peer-reviewed materials. This is the kind of credentialing that the academic community can and should teach the blogging world. There are tools that can be easily built, but nobody is really interested right now except weirdos like me who have no money or time, which could establish this kind of rating and ranking. The brief explanation is that right now we in the 'sphere are oriented around a long tail of popularity rather than one of credibility or usability. We don't have market enablers of cred, and that's what we need. Now there may be something new in Ice Rocket, Technorati or Google Blog search that I have missed, but right now for the overwhelming majority of Internet content all we know are Hits and Stars. Two dimensions ain't enough.

And so we instantiate our own peer networks which are the aggregations of the biases of our in-groups. These become ossified over time. When's the last time you changed your blogroll? At one time I had close to three times the link traffic to Cobb as I do now. The market does not move swiftly enough to be accurate, and again, there are only a small set of ratings criteria.

Now I've identified and solved this problem, in fact I did it years ago. Who's going to fund that out here in web-land? (That link will be available Friday, in the meantime try this)

Times vs Bush

In an unsigned editorial, the NYTimes pats itself on the back and says the President is living in a fantasy world. Amazing.

As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.

In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the real world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index that generals use to track developments shows an inexorable slide toward chaos. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.

There's nuance for you. But since when has a dialectic been a bad thing for society? Clearly the Times has picked sides. I haven't much weighed in on this whole Conservatives vs NYT thing, and I still think it's beneath me, but I understand where defenders of the President are coming from. But I think the broader picture is MSM vs Blogosphere and I'm satisfied with that codependent rivalry as it stands. Nobody needs to assist the Right in getting its messages out there so, really I'm not concerned.

What concerns me are the issues of collaboration, resolution and rectification. Neither the 'sphere nor the MSM do a decent job of leveraging the literate population towards those ends. I hope to be part of that process going forward, and I expect that my professional background will be of a great deal of assistance in that regard. Stay tuned, I've got my Ruby working.

   

Getting Started

I'm going to keep a small journal as a subpart of the blog to keep myself up to date on what I'm building and writing. Tonight I reinstalled MySql 5.0 (seems like I've done this before) on my main home computer. I installed it as a service and hope it doesn't hog much memory. I've got SQLyog hooked up and that works, so I can see what it does nicely.

I also got Rails installed I think. Just ran the gem package and left it at that. So far so good. That's enough for tonight.

Bloggers on Charlie Rose

Last night on Charlie Rose was a fairly interesting roundtable on blogging and the effect on media. If I could have only been there. But perhaps I can if I trackback. What was completely missing from the discussion were any technical aspects of why blogging is useful. It's not just the 'interactivity of the internet' it is the function that blog software provides to shape the behavior of people at keyboards. With only a passing reference to Technorati, Andrew Sullivan glossed over the possibilities of innovation and the moment was lost.

Secondly, and perhaps predictably, most of the focus was on the conflict between MSM and the 'sphere. While they were right to note that the blogosphere is growing at the expense of political magazines and television, I don't think enough focus was given to democracy itself. Perhaps they remain convinced of the Diebold scandal's ability to scare people away from digital democracy, but the real power is going to be getting people to vote early and often.

It is more than campaign finance reform that this medium is capable of achieving. It is the very process of governing - the nuts and bolts of taking minutes and calling the question. The core aspects of deliberation.

If I could be famous for anything, I would like it to be for XRepublic. If I had a million dollars, I could retire and start working on it. Every year I promise to do a little bit more work on it and every year I push it only few inches further. And yet year after year it seems that the world is ready for what I believe to be my best idea whose realization eludes me. I need encouragement, and programming assistance. XRepublic can be the revolution that the blogosphere needs to take it to the next level.

I would hope that those of you who might feel that the blogosphere is the realization, should read on in my (scanty but substantially inspired) XRepublic & Digital Democracy section. This is the destiny we seek.

Blogswarm Triumphant

It has been official for almost 20 hours now. Eason Jordan lies under the tornado house, his little feet slowly curling into balls. Who now wears the ruby slippers? The blogosphere does not, we cannot. We have too many feet. We are like swarming sentinels in search of The One. A new One will appear, and he will beware.

Here's the way I see it. There are actually hundreds of good ideas, millions perhaps. But as we look backward in time, there have only been a few to circulate them. The blogosphere is the energized part of the international web of ideas and it is expressing its ability to circulate more than the current generation of media can. This is a greater power and a more sophisticated one than even the Cluetrain signers considered. But it is not necessarily a force for good, it is simply a force to be reckoned with. Today, that force has momentarily become arrowlike, pointing in the direction of Eason.

The Blogosphere is set to become a more deliberative medium. The right advances in the toolset will objectify all these deliberations. Then, the true power of the blogosphere will become evident. It won't be the blogosphere - it will be something else. This is the beginning of a real revolution.

Doug Schuler & e-Liberate

Add one more pioneer to the stew.

Motivated by a desire to help make online discussions more productive -- particularly among civil society groups who are striving to create more "civic intelligence" in our society -- Doug Schuler proposed in his 1996 book New Community Networks that Roberts Rules of Order could be used as a basis for online deliberation. Roberts Rules of Order was developed by Henry Robert in the late 1800s to describe an orderly process for people meeting together face-to-face to make decisions fairly. One of the most important criterion was that although every attendee would have opportunities to make his or her ideas heard the minority could not prevent the majority from making decisions. Robert labored over his "rules" for 30 years and they are now in daily use by tens of thousands of deliberative bodies worldwide. One of the interesting things that we have learned about Roberts Rules is that the process seems to scale up: small groups of 5 or so can use as can groups numbering in the hundreds.

I told you this was a great idea.

My angle differs in that it seeks to overcome specific temporal and spacial boundaries assumed by Robert as well as work on multiple levels of sophistication. An XRepublic can thus generate resolutions of varying complexity on similar topics in different time frames - it doesn't seek to force every quorum to develop a comprehensive resolution for larger majorities, rather to generate specific resolutions for specific constituencies which are related one to the other. One of the things I am trying to achieve is a balance of simplicity and completeness such that the language necessary might be more rule-based. This way one can review the effectiveness of amendment with regard to enforcement.

For example if one constituency leaves out clauses which specify "you cannot murder by poisoning with mercury" in a murder law, and it doesn't have a mercury poisoning, then the resolution is safe enough. Why add to its complexity in anticipation of a sophistication that doesn't exist in the constituency?

The Wisdom of Crowds

Note in passing the following commentary vis a vis the potential for facilitation of collaborative judgements in XR. Drezner recommends James Suroweicki.

What was missing from the intelligence community, though, was any real means of aggregating not just information but also judgments. In other words, there was no mechanism to tap into the collective wisdom of National Security Agency nerds, CIA spooks, and FBI agents. There was decentralization but no aggregation and therefore no organization. [Senator] Richard Shelby's solution to the problem -- creating a truly central intelligence agency -- would solve the organization problem, and would make it easier for at least one agency to be in charge of all the information. But it would also forgo all of the enefits -- diversity, llocal knowledge, independence -- that decentralization brings. Shelby was right that information needed to be shared. But he assumed that someone -- or a small group of someones -- needed to be at the center, sifting through the information, figuring out what was important and what was not. But everything we know about cognition suggests that a small group of people, no matter how intelligent, simply will not be smrter than the larger group.... Centralization is not the answer. But aggregation is.

This is absolutely correct. I'll be passing it on to the folks at Deme.

Quaker Decisions

Paul Kingston writes about an alternative way of deliberation which is fascinating.

The prototype I've been into is an attempt to provide a web space for business meetings on the Quaker model. You may well know that this is characterised by not (ever) using voting, and by trying to avoid individuals developing personal positions. In a Quaker business meeting all those present are trying to "perceive the will of God" in the matter before the meeting. So the challenge is to enable people's contributions to float free (a contribution, not a position) and to support the process by which the clerk of the meeting produces a minute, and that minute is refined towards agreement. The Quaker model of business meeting has characteristic advantages (and disadvantages) compared to what I might call the conflict model (state position/negotiate position/win the vote)- particularly, the ability of the meeting to turn on its heel and adopt a very unexpected position (since no-one has built up emotional investment in earlier positions). I've heard it suggested by people with more direct experience than I have that the Quaker model is closer to what happens in succesful boardrooms (at least, some succesful boardrooms) than the conflict model.

I think this is brilliant, and I've not considered such things in relation to XR. While I am generically familiar with various 'national' ways of business decision making, this is a new angle. I haven't been able to locate the international business style guide for some time now, so I'll briefly mention them from off the top of my head.

Germany
Germans look to a senior expert to architect a solution. Prestige is accorded to those who can closely follow within the strict discipline of an organization or methodology established this 'thought leader'. Dissent is not encouraged. This is what make Germans excellent engineers.

Japan
Japanese work in harmony according to plans that are driven by concensus. What is most important is the sanctity of the agreement. Anyone can object. Nothing goes forward until all are satisfied. Once written the plan cannot be altered.

France
French define the model of conflict. Every idea is battled until the strongest survives. Every nit can be a point of contention.

America
The American model focuses on the pitch, the resources and the goal. People are assembled and organized any way possible to reach the target. If personalities conflict then they are reorganized or replaced. Decision making is cyclical and may evolve at any time during a project.

China
Chinese work in the context of what assembled people and their relationships can do. In contrast to the American model, the team is most important and relationships between team members are settled before any work is begun. If there are conflict then it changes the goal.

These are very broad brushes of how various cultures organize to accomplish work. As I said there is more real research in this area but I cannot remember where I found it.

Deme

Art McGee forwarded me a paper on Deme that I deem to be pretty interesting, if only because it formalizes much of what I've been thinking about when I think about using internet technology to the ends of deliberative collaboration. It's interesting that they come at it from the angle of the underprivileged. But now that it's happening at Stanford, I suppose it can be said to be truly happening. Todd Davies is the man driving this interesting vehicle. I've written him to get in touch with whatever he's doing. He's right, of course.

I'm going to, when I figure out how to get by with a little less sleep on a nightly basis, figure out how to integrate this new finding into my thought process as well as possibly collaborate with the authors. As for today, I'm making ends in the trenches and paying off debt. As you know, I am the father of an old neglected but brilliant theoretical child called XRepublic which has not been nourished recently.

In the meantime, I suppose I should be reading Habermas.

Rushkoff: Open Source Democracy

Douglas Rushkoff weighs in. From the intro.

The emergence of the interactive mediaspace may offer a new model for cooperation. Although it may have disappointed many in the technology industry, the rise of interactive media, the birth of a new medium, the battle to control it and the downfall of the first victorious camp, taught us a lot about the relationship of ideas to the media through which they are disseminated. Those who witnessed, or better, have participated in the development of the interactive mediaspace have a very new understanding of the way that cultural narratives are developed, monopolised and challenged. And this knowledge extends, by allegory and experience, to areas far beyond digital culture, to the broader challenges of our time.

Also names to note in the Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Tom Bentley and everyone at Demos for the opportunity to extend this inquiry to a new community of thinkers. Thanks also to my editorial assistant, Brooke Belisle, and to colleagues including Andrew Shapiro, Steven Johnson, Ted Byfield, Richard Barbrook, David Bennahum, Red Burns, Eugenie Furniss and Lance Strate.

I'm looking forward to hearing from these folks in the future. These are precisely the kinds of questions I'm asking about here.

Cleaning Out My (XR) Closet

I have begun to clean up the XR demo which has a bunch of broken links. As well, I will be creating and updating more of the background and design docs in the site.

I've moved it around so many times that it has gotten away from me, and somehow Dreamweaver didn't do its job.

Additionally, I am reviewing ways in which I believe XR will and will not work in the context of how the blogosphere works. This will be of use to help explain what it will feel like and how it will operate in comparison to the blogosphere. To that end here is a reprinted comment of mine.

I think that blogs are a great place for individuals to clarify their own thinking and are natural aggregators for like minds. The Bear Flag League, which is kind of a unique and unexpected result of political blogging can be thought of as a partisan group of conservative Californians.

It is the creation of partisan groups that is a big part of XRepublic. One aspect of the system (which I was just discussing with a collaborator) is the notion of affinity searches. If you were on the wonk path, you would likely perform affinity searches to help you create partisan groups.

XR depends a lot on the willingness of wonks to do their work of gathering people to their cause. It is not clear that the blogosphere does any such thing despite the existence of the Bear Flag League and observable preferences in blogrolls. (Conservatives almost always have Instapundit, Volokh & LGF, Liberals almost always have Atrios, TPM & Yglesias) Whereas the blogosphere encourages the wonky to talk a lot, XR would encourage them to link a lot.

The use of trackback which encourages me somewhat.

But I am fairly certain that getting some of the top bloggers involved in XR would assure its success, even if its just rehashing of comments already made. There are certain documents that stand on their own.

I happen to think that writers like DenBeste, DeLong or Orcinus who tend towards the exhaustive, would fare very well as crafters of artifacts that would be long-lived and well referenced in an XRepublic. I also think that the more sophisticated reputation management system would be attractive to the egos of the blogosphere.

At the very least, even those who do not participate on a regular basis would find it useful to have some of their verbiage RSS'd into various XR artifacts, and I can definitely see bloggers having a sidebar of their blog with links to resolutions which include their works as referents.

Both XR and the blogosphere compliment each other. I hope I can exploit their synergy.

Thanks to Ward Bell for keeping me on my toes not just recently, but for many years.

e-Voting, Diebold and Collaborative Policy Creation

The Diebold electronic voting 'scandal' is yet another issue that I haven't taken quite seriously. One of the reasons is that I think voting is overrated and policy creation is underrated. My angle on the e-ization of democratic processes has everything to do with the deliberative process and not the tallies. Studious observers of the political scene have undoubtedly noted the horseracing aspects of political commentary which has left principled analysis in the lurch.

On the bright side, the rise of the fisk, in the toolset of amateur political bloviation is a very good, if sometimes nauseating thing. The interjection of hyperbole at least shows we have a passionate pulse for critically directed mental activity beyond handicapping. The problem is that while nobody seems to be spared from the distraction of the endless posturing of right and left, I can only really cite Begging To Differ as a joint blog dedicated to present views from both sides of the one dimensional spectrum. Everybody is a critic, few synthesize.

The tools of blogdom and the entire internet are not designed for, and therefore not well-suited for synthesis and collaborative consensus-building. This is the aim of XRepublic, as I have not often enough brought to the attention of myself and my readers. However I may be in a position to further the aims of the XRepublic project this year if my fortunes go as planned. Indeed, I have found an alternative way of getting development done.

So I am saying publicly that I will pursue this with a bit more vigor this year because I am convinced that the blogosphere possesses the right combination of talent and energy to make the content work. I am also convinced that Six Apart are the people who can make it happen, and it is my intent to develop the system in the context of the MT blog & what I understand of RSS. So let me email MT and get on it.

The point is not the voting system we have today. It is pitifully outdated, and we will have to let oldfolks die. I'm talking to people today who are gamers, who have no qualms about representing themselves online; people for whom online reputation and peer systems are second nature. They will make this happen, and to hell with the boomers who get off dissing the young whippersnappers.

As for security. I honestly believe that it is a tempest in a teacup.

I have not been convinced that the nation's ATM banking network has ever been compromised in any significant way. In fact, I would argue that part of the great vulnerability of electronic voting is that it wouldn't take place often enough. A single wealthy donor could assure that votes get Counterpane levels of security. And if that is not the level of security afforded international interbank transfers, then such schemes could be adopted as well. I'm never going to find out where stolen plutonuim, hijacked IPOs and diverted gold transfers at national central banks have gone. Neither are you. Nevertheless, we can establish at least that level of trust in electronic voting. It is not a question of technology. Again, an open alternative will be open-sourced together, it is just a matter of time.

In the meantime we should develop the means and wherewithal to open up policy making to distributed deliberative bodies. This is a crucial direction in establishing a functioning self-determination. I cannot emphasize how important this is, which is why I am so very conflicted about my desire to develop it in an open way. I can only assume that someone familiar and patient with making fortunes can explain the compromises necessary vis a vis licensing and Creative Commons. A system like XRepublic, designed to advance us beyond the meatspace machinations of Roberts Rules of Order, is both a necessity and a boon to the world of collaborative decision-making. Its potential ought to be available to masses...Eh. I should be able to figure out something at least as clever as a record company producer.

In the meantime, if you or anyone you know can assist in this project, I'm all ears. I'm not interested in reviewing any theoretical literature. I already know what Scott Reents has said and built. I think my solution just needs to be built, and then we'll move on from there. The vision is crystalline in my head, I only need my demiurge.

XR Dynamic Footnote

This reference by Drezner via Pejman should be useful in expressing the value of an XR system. For my readers who don't know, XRepublic is my big project.

The XRepublic can be thought of as a virtual parliament and it is from that perspective, using the terminology and technology of web-based online conferencing, that it was originally conceived. It is designed from the ground up to take advantage of Internet technology in order to make the kinds of deliberative processes currently found in governments, universities, intelligence organizations and other deliberative bodies available to a distributed group of people connected by networked computers.

Tanking Down Big Media One Peg At A Time

Kieran Healy takes a swing at Gregg Easterbrook over at Crooked Timber.

As some folks have noted the blogosphere is a catalyst in changing the balance of power in the wider 'memepool'. As the most broad, deep and visible avatar of the chatting class, the blogosphere with its interesting divisions of labor, has the capacity to take down stars of traditional media, politics and just about every other intellectual activity. Note that this is a function of the entire sphere and not necessarily the work of one or two individuals. I claim that the emergent behavior of the network of political and cultural bloggers are making their impact felt as a whole.

The most notable tool of the blogosphere is the 'fisk', named after outspoken journalist Robert Fisk who was often the target of 'anti-idiotarian' rants and other verbal puncturing. A fisking represents the evolution of the flamewar. It is smarter, it is more detailed and it is more effective.

Since the blogosphere is open and news travels fast through it, people are likely to criticize certain controversial or popular positions from many angles. The blogosphere supports the highly focused interest of partisans of all stripes and once a higher order blogger in its ecosystem latches onto a topic, it quickly brings out almost all angles of opinion.

The fisk represents the level of interactivity and detail orientation I have been hoping to find within computer mediated communications for some time. That the blogosphere demonstrates this proves several things. The first and most important is that collaboration is a necessary part of the effect and impact of blog writing.

Provocation is a necessary component of this activity. Someone of a particularly partisan bent can speak out on a particular issue in such a way that it provokes a reaction. Thus a critical mass of bloggers and their commenters.

Indemnity
One of the features of this emergent behavior involves a kind of indemnification accorded to certain bloggers once they reach a certain status. It can either be an indemnification of link mass or of credibility. Often they are both. Once an issue to be debated reaches one of the indemnified bloggers

Sometimes the issue needs only a brief glossing over or a reference to other bloggers at an indmnified site. This doesn't detract from the value of the indemnified blogger because even these small inputs sustain interest and add fractal detail to the overall debate.

The New Democracy

I just stumbled across this student government website. This is awesome and very encouraging.

Political Multidimensionality

It has been a while since I've heard a good new idea. Here are some principles, fuzzily stated that are at the core of good thinking.

Imagine the standard Nolan Chart, but pretend at first that only economic liberties are at issue, that only that left-right spectrum counts. You can use the standard Downsian analysis to predict (under first-past-the-post, winner-take=all) a pair of dominant coalitions (parties) situated just far enough from the median to deter third party entrants. Call those points at which the parties form the consensus points. Now, drop that second axis, personal liberties, into play. Depending on the distribution of voter preferences in this new 2-D opinion-space, the consensus points shift, not only up and down, but also along the original left-right axis. You can drop a third line representing some other issue (foreign policy, abortion, etc.) and repeat the shift in 3-D space, and in principle on into N-dimensional space for N issues. (Each of "economic" and "personal" freedom are conflations of positions on a range of sub-dimensions, which could be represented as separate dimensions as they grew salient.)

My point exactly.

Freedom Isn't Free

..and democracy has a price.

All us Californians have been inundated with the factoid that D. Issa, the San Diego Republican spent over one and a half million dollars of his own money to finance the signature drive for the gubernatorial recall. We've also heard from the Secretary of State of California that this special election will cost about 36 million to actually hold.

36 million? I didn't know elections were that expensive. But apparently, Accenture did and that's why it bought the struggling Election.com. Any time you want to nurse a big headache, think about how much elections actually cost.

Right now, election.com is primarily handling stockholder proxy elections but I can see how the election business can become big business. And importantly how a pricing model for features and functions in an election system can bump up the price.

Freedom Isn't Free

..and democracy has a price.

All us Californians have been inundated with the factoid that D. Issa, the San Diego Republican spent over one and a half million dollars of his own money to finance the signature drive for the gubernatorial recall. We've also heard from the Secretary of State of California that this special election will cost about 36 million to actually hold.

36 million? I didn't know elections were that expensive. But apparently, Accenture did and that's why it bought the struggling Election.com. Any time you want to nurse a big headache, think about how much elections actually cost.

Right now, election.com is primarily handling stockholder proxy elections but I can see how the election business can become big business. And importantly how a pricing model for features and functions in an election system can bump up the price.

Internet Guided Voting

What Eugene Volokh suggests in these 22 paragraphs are some interesting thoughts on online voting. I'll engage him for a moment.

I don't like the idea in that his system, as proposed, tightly aligns the automated process of guidance to the actual vote. I think the vote should be a pure expression of will. The idea that an automated system could actually capture every nuance of decision making is flawed. The entire thing can be spoofed, not to mention subverted. But the fundamental flaw is what happens to interest group standing and the consequent effect of omissions and conflicts in the system's likelihood of setting up limited choices.

Contrast Guided Voting (GV) to XRepublic. It is fair to view GV as a watered down version of an XRepublic, whose function is more oriented toward the more wonkish work of deliberation and crafting of resolutions. In XR the processes and outputs are dynamic, with GV the processes are deterministic. Linking them to voting makes the outputs deterministic as well.

It is this particular aspect that bothers me the most because at bottom there will always be a bottleneck in the capacity of the system. At issue is the mechanism used to determine which selection of interest groups merit inclusion in the weighting algorithm of GV. At the heart of the GV system are will be some affinity scoring algorithm that maps voter opinion through the lens of interest groups onto ballot choices. There are a couple places this gets dicey.

The first area for contention would be in weighting the scores. This is what I call the interest group conflict problem. Let's say a thumb (binary choice) is requested on 2nd Amendment question in the form of a gun control ballot initiative. On all the points of the language of a proposal behind the ballot initiative, the NRA scores .89 certainty for a NO. On all the points of the Gun Nuts of South Texas also scores an .89 certainty for NO. Some representative of the GNST, upon hearing this claims to be a .92. It is a matter of pride for their partisans to be stauncher supporters of gun rights than their rival organization, the NRA. Who arbitrates? How long? Where is the science? Who certifies it?

The second issue is that of omission. What incentive do maintaners of the system have to include 'redundant' or 'superfluous' interest groups? What standing is required to become legitimized as an interest group? This problem is rather obvious so I won't elaborate.

The third is an issue of horseracing tripwires. In this case, the system programmers, in programming the system's affinity matrix notice some interesting sets. By estimating the number of voters who have generally announced their affinities in other elections for the NRA and GNST interest groups, they will be able, by dint of their knowledge of the affinity matrices, to project with certainty the outcomes of elections. This knowledge will get into the hands of campaigners and can be used strategically to undercut democracy in a must cruel way. I can think of no clearer example of this than the current recall election in California. Who would have thought that for a mere $1.7 million dollars, approximately 1.02 per signature that a recall measure could force a vote of confidence (which incidently costs the State of California $32 million simply to launch). The point is not the expense but the increased determinacy of tripwires in elections that only require narrow activism to force public change.

It may be that within the scope of the decision space of any one election, a limited set of influencing interest groups will provide sufficient diversity to allow voters more than enough 'free will' as determined by the affinity algorithms. But this is something that needs to be watched very closely. I would strongly suggest that any such system be decoupled from actual voting and tried on the simple merits of guidance.

Kali, H20 and Rotisseries

I've been having a rather intense discussion with Kali Tal who is somewhat legendary for being annoyingly right when it comes to gender and racial issues. I am pleased to call her a friend, as much as one can have friends that meet once in 10 years and have periodic talks on the net, but I understand how being on the dummy end of a debate with her feels. I also know what it feels like to be inspired by someone as tireless and fiercely intellectual as she. It's more of the latter which is why I am proud of our association. Part of this discussion was about what is the best way to communicate via internet technologies. She brought up a stellar point. To wit:

Styles of discourse are not natural. They differ from culture to culture, and are a product of socialization. Socialization takes place through institutions--the family, schools, religious traditions, etc. Men and women are socialized to different styles of discourse in this culture (again, I refer you to the voluminous and oft-duplicated research on this question). When women adopt male discursive strategies, they're punished for it (again, see the research on conversational patterns and the disruption caused by women embracing "male" speech patterns, and see both my posts [and other women's posts] to this list). The mechanisms of punishment are engaged automatically, without deliberate or conscious effort on the part of the men in the conversation because that is simply the "normal" reaction to female speech that challenges the status quo. That's the very definition of institutionalized oppression--when enforcement mechanisms become diffuse, naturalized, and automatic, so that no individual needs to take responsibility for keeping another in her place. It just "happens."

I too have long been interested in what silences are created and destroyed when dealing with racial issues in cyberspace - why cyberspace is supposed to be a deracinated place where 'intellectual discourse floats disembodied'. For a time, my entire reason for posting into cyberspace was an experiment in 'post-modern blackness', and so I learned a great deal about what is real and what is not in this communications medium.

Since Kali and I are still in the midst of this discussion, you can imagine my delight when Art McGee found H20, which is precisely the sort of thing that might mitigate against our despairing that the internet might not yeild the kind of environment for real discovery and collaboration between parties whose styles of communication are at odds. H20 offers this wisdom:

The Rotisserie implements an innovative approach to online discussion that encourages measured, thoughtful discourse in a way that that traditional threaded messaging systems do not. The basic concept of the threaded messaging board is to enable broadcast-to-broadcast communication among a group of people, meaning that every participant in the conversation receives every post from every other participant. This mode of discussion inevitably leads to the domination of the discussion by a few very verbal participants and silence by the lurking majority. The Rotisserie breaks this mode by assigning every post within the conversation to another, specific participant for response. The resulting conversation guarantees that every post will be responded to by at least one other participant and that every participant must respond directly to the post of another participant.

This is a stellar idea and a very different way of conceptualizing a solution to this complex problem. It seeks to avoid conflict through enforcement of rules that determine when it is appropriate for contributors to speak which is predictable and orderly. This is completely different than the way I had envisioned managing speech restrictions which, quite frankly, is more oppositional.

Bozo filtering.
This is the first There is one level of peer review. If a particular individual becomes worrisome, he can be filtered in such a way that his comments do not appear to the filtering party. This is done on an individual by individual basis as is widely recognized in major contemporary Web Conferencing systmes.

Censure
If a person proves himself to be a bozo of sufficient dimensions, then within a house, this citizen can be Censured. Censure involves a vote of Citizens. Censure is a very strong punishment requiring the consent of 20 citizens of a house. These 20 citizens must be members of atleast 2 unaffiliated Partisan Groups. The result of Censure is that his speaking privileges (ability to write statments) are suspended for a period of 30 days. Any individual who is Censured cannot be Censured again for 60 days after regaining speaking priviliges in the House.

PNG
PNG is a bit more serious. It means that a person is essentially expelled from a House. He becomes Personna Non Grata in that House. He may remain active in another house, but the PNG remains permanently on his record. In order to PNG an individual citizen, 25 House members must concur that he be expelled from that House. PNG however requires a 'standing writ'. This means that those Citizens who PNG'd him must remain active in that house for as long as the PNG stands. The standing writ is established by the active status of 10 of the original Citizens who voted for PNG.

In defense of my method, I think it gives participants more control and responsibility for the tone of discourse, but as Kali notes, if there are culturally irreconcilable differences below the conscious level of the participants, it doesn't seem likely that simply lopping off the heads of offenders helps. It might create more silence than it overcomes.

In any case, as work on systems such as these progresses, I believe we are going to find a new world of computer mediated deliberation which will be more productive ways of making decisions across broader populations than our world has ever seen.

23 Million Clues

The creators of MoveOn.org should be encouraged to see that 23 million people have called to register their telephone numbers on an telemarketing opt-out list. Politicians should also take note. This is the future of democracy - it will move as quickly as markets.

Whatever reasons Congress has given to change the rules for opt-in vs opt-out as the default for electronic marketing have now been slapped around.

23 Million Clues

The creators of MoveOn.org should be encouraged to see that 23 million people have called to register their telephone numbers on an telemarketing opt-out list. Politicians should also take note. This is the future of democracy - it will move as quickly as markets.

Whatever reasons Congress has given to change the rules for opt-in vs opt-out as the default for electronic marketing have now been slapped around.

Sunglasses in the Auranet

This afternoon I took the kids ice skating at the top of Palos Verdes. While I still have my buddha working, there are times when older sensibilities take over, when I'm dressing, for example. I wore my A&F snowboard pants (not really thick at all). But to over compensate for the fact that I know that in such environments, I should wear no labels whatsoever, I wore a sheer RL Polo Sport shirt that says so right on the front. And furthermore, I wore that black Kangol skull cap my wife bought me for Christmas. Hedging my overcompensation, I brought along my black fleece with the zipper neck and no labels. Nevertheless I decided against the slightly worn cap with some obscure reference to yachting or golf. Needless to say, I was awash in mixed signals, then again, I'm quite a code-switcher. I also came armed with small talk. Get down to business quickly and get back out again is the rule. I think I ended up talking too much to one guy and not enough to another. Whatever. This is paragraph #1.

In paragraph 2, I relate a somewhat obscurely related fact, which is the matter of sunglasses on eBay. Some of you may know that if you have some difficulty registering, or are a newbie, or have changed your identity in the past 30 days, you will have a probationary thingy attached to your account in the form of a pair of sunglasses. This indicates to potential buyers of whatever it is you are trying to sell at eBay, that you may not be whom you appear to be and that only minimal information is available about you. Nice concept.

Here in paragraph three, I attempt to be a bit more serious and come to the real point of the discussion which is to reflect about some of my first thoughts about that which Howard Rheingold has provoked me into thinking. I have been unassiduous in my completion of his Smart Mobs, but yesterday somewhere just past page 176 he mentioned Auranet. Auranet is a 12 foot 'personal space' in which smart items located on your person will automagically coordinate and negotiate this and that information about you to similarly equipped persons at some point in the future.

Like what?

I'm married. Do I keep a copy of my kids photos, or do I protect those from all strangers? I've got a lot of money in the bank, which credit card do I expose - do I set a profile for when I'm slumming? I'm horny and on the make, do I set to beergoggle mode, and what if She is the Right One? How much do I go about wearing on my sleeve? Which labels do I select from my electronic closet? What's in your wallet?

In answer to the question of what we should be asking ourselves now that we are in the golden era of bigger and more pervasive is better of course, I suggest the following. This has always been the great warning I have held, which is to beware of perfect simalcra. As Marshall Blonsky instructs, very little of what we process as real information is actually authentic, and we are not protected. The news and information and knowledge we present in the future, about ourselves, about the world, about any and everything will come without a metadata guarantee. We will be so intent on getting the crap through the goose of the electronic global mind, that we won't pay much attention to its provenance. Instead we will rely upon systems of reputation to give us credibility, and these systems of reputation will be content agnostic. It will be more important to us to trust people and systems to connect with us than it will be that everything they tell us always be verifyable. Half the point of establishing a trusted friend is not having to second-guess everything they tell us. The problem, of course is that crap will get under the radar.

I'm thinking about this crap factor as I prepare myself to review the resignation letter I have recieved from trusted sources several degrees of separation from the originator. But I know that this letter has not got a PGP signature attached, and never would. I am not the original target of this letter, so I cannot know that it's not a fake, nor can I know if it is generally undoctored if it isn't a complete fabrication. And though I am likely to trust the folks that sent it to me, and having generally reconciled its existence to the fact that I have seen it coming from multiple directions of trust does not change the fact that the entire artifact may be a fabrication.

Which brings me to a point about modifying the architecture of the XRepublic to accomodate the blogosphere. What would it take to completely defraud the blogosphere? How difficult or easy would it be to get the top blogsources commenting about X knowing that X would inevitably lead to certain conclusions being drawn by rational people? I'm suggesting that such a thing, if not practical now, could be done with a sophistication heretofore unknown. I am suggesting that the margin for error is significant. I'm saying that anything can ultimately be hoaxed. I'm also saying that we'll be used to that.

This is the context for the discussion of sunglasses in the Auranet.

Maybe I don't want you to know that I'm married. Or maybe I just brought my kids to the ice skating rink and stood around taking digital pictures like an idiot because I was really spying on Mr. D who I just happen to know would be there today. Maybe I'm just shy and not from around here and don't really want to talk to anyone today. One never knows, does one?

The more we depend on our electronic auras to present ourselves, even as we get more and more sophisticated with our labels and social signifyers, people will remain as opaque as they wish to be, and sometimes inadvertantly more than they want to be. I raise the flag because we may lose the skill. Just as some of us smalltalk well, others of us are completely awkward. We depend on some electronic Cyrano to express ourselves, and wind up incapable. We will literally be at a loss for words from processing so many digital signals and icons. Who hasn't been tongue tied? Who hasn't found the perfect personal ad and found ourselves practicing dozens of times what message to leave on Her answering machine, only to sputter like an idiot. Maybe she had Caller ID and I am screened for life.

Which brings me to the second to last paragraph, which was The Last Castle on television last night. Robert Redford spoke to a dyslexic corporal sharing the same bighouse prison yard. The corporal was 2 years into a 7 year bid. He had been in the service 13 years, and committed a crime that took 15 minutes. Redford suggested that he was more Marine than anything else. This is easy for a certain type of human to do face to face...

Today, I'm very concerned about my privacy. I want to wear sunglasses and I don't want to submit to mind-cavity searches by the authorities. In that, I am like many of my peers in the information technology business.  We may come to regret that. We never know when we may have to run down the street screaming for assistance like Griffin Dunne in After Hours.

Power Law Distributions

I'm somewhat skeptical of this, but it makes for a fine theory.

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Reflections on the Blogosphere

starting today, every blogger and his mama are going to be talking about the shuttle disaster. you will read through a million blogs before you find out more about what actually happened to cause the explosion. you certainly will have a wealth of tangential information (if you can call that wealth), but the core truth of the matter will become distributed like light through a house of glass and mirrors after an earthquake. take away one shard/blog and what do you have? an imperceptible loss of value. add another million shard/blogs and what do you have, very little more light.

now the analogy breaks down because these blogshards are more like transducers of light with their own power supply than inert glass, so they add their own light which may amplify, distort, color and block out the original source. but they do so without any coordination or direction. they merely zoom in on a few reliable sources of light, link and then do their translating/transducing business. what you get is a marvel of emergent behavior, but it is still incomprehensible. you cannot ask anything of the blogosphere and get a coherent answer. for that, your best bet is to go back to the source and make your own interpretation from that.

now that i've used the word 'coherent' in the context of light...

what if you could smartly coordinate all these blogshards in such a way that they continually reflect upon their collective reflections and transductions? what if you made it impossible for light to escape the blogosphere until it had reached a certain threshold of uniformity? what if you designed a chamber in which all the little mirrors with all their own sources of power focused issue by issue until they had a resolution? and finally what if you looked not at the reflection business but the resolved light? you would be blinded by the power of that light because you would be staring into a laser!

building that chamber is my aim. until that time, i view the blogosphere as a house of broken mirrors reflecting the news of the day every which way. very nice for the connoisseur of the eclectic, but practically useless for seekers of verified knowledge.

Affero

This is the closest thing I've seen to the kind of reputation management I envision for Sleeves. I'll investigate further. It looks very good.

Millions of individuals turn to the Internet to provide or receive support via discussion style mailing lists and forums in health, travel, technology and others. With Affero, those who receive support within these forums or through private discussions can now say "thanks" quickly and easily through ratings, comments and donations to the causes an expert that provides support selects

Post-Knowledge-Industrial Society

Once upon a time in Europe, only monks could read and write. I'd say the process is fairly commodified now.

One of the things we forget about the star trek universe is that the development of anti-matter power generators and replicator technology fairly destroyed the concept of material prosperity. Material prosperity is infinite and ubiquitous in that world. If we develop technologies that destroy knowledge scarcity, what will that world be like?

I believe a number of problems that we are having are consequences of the fact that we are destroying knowledge scarcity faster than we can invent new forms of value. I'm slightly shifting my worldview in order to accommodate this idea.

The knowledge industry is coming out of its infancy. Right now, we are the equivalent of serfs just seeing the dawn of the industrial era. We live in knowledge squalor. Only a few of us even get information. Knowledge transfer is a very tedious, time consuming, expensive and labor-intensive process. We make a fetish of human intelligence because of the pride we take in overcoming barriers to learning, but learning is just a natural part of human existence, like growth. Yet our intellectual health is stunted because of our feral knowledge environment. We have yet to master the tools that will surround us with the proper environment, we have yet to develop the discipline to stay away from unhealthy knowledge.

We are still like foragers with cast iron constitutions. We still experiment with wild ideas and have yet to grasp the unadorned nutritional value of the information we consume. As we evolve our mental cuisine we will come to understand such things.

Our media industry recognizes the fundamentally unquenchable desire for mental stimulation. We know that deprivation of human contact and mental stimulation is the greatest torture. So the industry feeds us massive amounts and we never get enough. We have shown little capacity to reject more and more, we become obese with information.

quant jockeying

it has been a week or two that i've been immersed in the blogoverse and i think it's time to introduce all 12 of my readers who didn't already know that i'm rather interested in applying computer technology to this mushy thing called democracy.

i'm not the first nor will i be the last to try something like this, but i cannot tell you how encouraged i am by the progress made by the blogoverse. in fact, i think that the world is actually ready for the next step, which is the x-republic.

so i'm going to dave winer and see what he says. i think he'll understand and get it immediately, the question is whether or not he's willing to share credit. well, here goes suicide.