ambient

Highly recommended read at the O’Reilly Radar blog on technocratic elitism and the failure of the privileged to care for those marginalized by our economy and society.

We spend a lot of time thinking up new ways to talk to each other and connect with one another, but we don’t spend much time on thinking up new ways (maybe we don’t need “new ways”) to connect with people who are underprivileged.

Also, great article from the Economist on the philanthropy of ICQ founder Yossi Vardi.

The World with Lisa Mullins broadcasted the gut-wrenching story of a doctor who is trying to help victims of rape in the Congo (and rape, as bad as it is in most circumstances, does not come close to describing what is happening in this case). It’s one of those stories that instills doubt about the future of the entire human race.

It’s one of those stories that makes people - religious and non-religious alike - wonder why God, if there is one, doesn’t do anything about this sort of thing. I’ve heard all sorts of explanations and attempts to answer this question throughout my life, but the best one I’ve heard so far comes from Alyosha, the main character in The Brothers Karamazov.

Alyosha came from probably one of the worst families in literary history (and an obvious symbol for the human race) and after witnessing all the worst things that people could do to one another, he (himself deeply spiritual) came to one conclusion: he was responsible for it all.

He was a good man despite his family background, and yet he, and everybody else in the world who cared about goodness and life, was responsible for all of the bad things that people did to one another. It’s only the good people in this world who can and will ever stop the horrors that people inflict on one another.

The lesson is clear. When we ask “Where was God?” the response echoes back: “Where were you?”

TechMeme, of course, is abuzz with discussion about Amazon’s new SimpleDB. Don’t know if this is a huge announcement in its own right, but it definitely demonstrates Amazon’s commitment to taking distribution, its true business objective, to the next logical, though not obvious, step.

On a side note: Business Week has a good write-up of Google 101, the company’s efforts to teach web-scale computing to the next generation of computer scientists. Makes me wish I was still a college student, in Seattle. (Go public schools!)

And finally, a gestalt moment… I’m reading a book by German Theologian Ulrich Duchrow (whom I had the pleasure to meet in San Diego) called Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital. There is this line on page 36 in regards to Hobbe’s analysis of power and society:

“Then Hobbes distinguishes natural power, such as special physical and mental abilities, and instrumental power, i.e. tools such as riches, reputation and good friends, with which one can win more power. From this he concludes ‘that the capacity of every man to get what he wants is opposed by the capacity of every other man’. In the struggle that results, power means finally the ability to command the services of other people.

Thus a power market develops, in which the power of a human being is regarded as a commodity: ‘The value, or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price: that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another’…”

So, I read that and realized: hey, I know that. It’s called cloud computing. And even a little MapReduce is thrown in there. We just did it with humans first. We call it society.

Blogs aren’t that interesting anymore. Actually, it’s more accurate from a marketing perspective to say that blogs have become or are quickly becoming mainstream.

I feel rather lucky to have followed the earliest bloggers. I myself am an early adopter of the medium though none of my blogs were ever “successful” as success is commonly measured. They did, however, give me a chance to practice my writing and communicate with my friends and family through important times. For those reasons, I will likely always have a blog of some sort and for now it lives here, and this one isn’t going anywhere. I just don’t write here nearly as often as I used to on Sacking Rome.

Several trends are beginning to interest me. One, with the mainstreaming of blogs we are seeing new levels of text commodification. It’s almost as if the excitement around text itself, or at least prose, has fizzled out in favor of new mediums such as on demand video, games, music, and social networks.

There does appear, however, to be one new entrant on the text frontier. It’s what I call spasmodic, terse broadcasts of useless information that somehow matters a great deal. Twitter exemplifies this service. My description of this service is not to say that the medium itself is useless or not important. On the contrary, I was absolutely blown away by what the service represented - nothing short of the closest thing to global telepathy in a network-based emulation of spritual connectivity that we have right now. It is precisely the mundane nature of the messages on Twitter that makes it such a fascinating application.

But I digress. Back to the new mediums. (I use the Anglicized plural of medium here to distinguish the word from the loaded term “media” and to demonstrate fealty to McLuhan’s assertion that the “medium is the message.”)

Marshal McLuhan was more prophetic than he would have ever realized when he made his two most interesting, in my opinion, observations.

The first is that with the commodification / mainstreaming of text has come the next evolution of the human societal mind: post-text, or post-literacy, as he calls it. He says of this evolution

“we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.”

So, he’s not entirely optimistic about this transformation but the new post-literate culture that he envisioned can be seen coming to life in our video games, social networks like Facebook with its viral fetishes and, offline, a renewed resurgence in religious fundamentalism and xenophobia.

The second is really an offshot of the first and it is that the dominant medium of society (or even any individual) shapes the cognitive channels of the mind (whether collective or individual). For the last 500 years of Western culture, text has been the dominant medium.

It is mind-boggling how quickly that dominance is being dismantled by Generation-Y and the stragglers of Generation-X. It’s very possible that Generation-X will be the last American literate generation. That is not to say that future generations won’t be able to read and write. What it means is that that ability will no longer be the defining characteristic of intelligence, education, or incentivized behavior in society. Thus, new patterns of thought will emerge in the next 20 years that are utterly alien to all previous generations still alive.

Mike Arrington writes about the ugly place that Silicon Valley has (once again) become now that stupid loads of venture capital have been flooding in for the last two years or so.

Ugliness / greed aside, this particular bubble (if it is one) is interesting. One could look at boom / bust cycles as a matter of exuberance vs. boredom. The last time it all came crashing down, I personally believe, is that people just got bored. Sure, all of the petfood.com stories turned the entire era into a joke but there was, as we must acknowledge, an incredible amount of innovation that occurred. Then all the money went away and the engineers got back to what they do best.

In the following years, innovative services like Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and, of course, Google were developed. Much of the innovation that we hear about today happened during the downturn years between 2001-2004. If this cycle is indeed nearing an end, I wonder how long it can possibly last. We are just on the cusp of what will be an entirely new generation of technology-driven innovation and services — everything from scalable, interesting virtual reality to major, disruptive (at last) in human-computer interfaces — and it makes me seriously doubt that this next downturn will last long at all.

We are also faced with a set of serious crises - namely, the effects of global climate change and disgusting food / farming practices - in the next 10-20 years. Say what you will, and I certainly have, of that capitalist optimism (some would say delusion) in the face of adversity there is something about crisis that brings out a lot of talent and enthusiasm for making things better.

Finally, back in the internet / tech realm - a lot of the core technologies we rely on today are getting a little long in the tooth. Consider email. Does anyone think that we will be messaging one another using the same tired old protocols and client interfaces 20 years from now? It’s past time for revolutionary thinking about how we do not just email but web servers, operating systems, HCI, and data management.

Here’s to the next downturn.

Thomas Friedman gets a well-deserved smack on the ass from Dave Winer today.

Serialization of the imagination to a non-volatile archive is the human species attempting to preserve itself from an evolutionary standpoint. This was the first leap in the process of evolution from a purely physical adaptation path to one that is virtual.

To the conscious mind, void is the greatest evil. Hard drive failure is catastrophic. Religion was the first attempt at a backup & recovery mechanism (called the afterlife) for the human consciousness.

As soon as consciousness was born - represented as the result of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that serpentine ontology - death became intolerable because it was known.

Death, as defined as a natural process of life, put nature at odds for the first time with a species that nature herself had nurtured (perhaps ‘forged’ is a better word). Only the conscious mind can perceive death and what it means. Thus the quest for immortality was born.

Since that time, the human future has always been a post-human future. For this reason, technology and the promises it offers will become the religion of the 21st century.

I was speaking with some colleagues yesterday about the differences in adoption rates of advanced mobile technology in the U.S. vs. other industrialized nations, specifically Japan.

To me, it comes down to this: it’s not about data prices, network speed, hardware, or killer apps (or the lack thereof). It’s a mindset. In the U.S., no matter how many gadgets we attach to our phones, at the end of the day, we view phones as either just phones or as smaller computers.

In Japan, it’s different. First of all, a camera on a phone is not a camera. It’s a third eye. It’s not just used to take crappy pictures. It can be used as a bar code reader, a text translation tool (really!), a scanner, and whatever else somebody comes up with as an application for the firmware in the device. GPS? Yeah, they’ve had that, oh, for about five years now. Paying for stuff with your phone? At least three years, maybe four.

But it’s not about the apps in Japan either. Mobile techonology is perceived differently. It’s part of the social fabric.

The point is not that Japan comes up with better applications. It’s that the Japanese think of mobiles differently. It’s not a phone, or even a computer. It’s an interface, a fetish in the anthropological sense, in which the web becomes an ambient, context-aware, spirit guide through the world in which the Japanese people have constructed for themselves.

Until Americans move beyond the idea of technology, and especially computers, as just machines that we to whiche we tie ourselves the kind of paradigm-busting adoption (and the apps that follow that adoption) we see in Japan and elsewhere will never happen here. What we have now is just not inspiring to enough people.

I know it’s a sad statement when I discover an author because they have died, but this is the case with Jean Baudrillard, who passed away at the age of 77.

Timing aside, ideas and books do seem to fall into my lap at a time that is almost always relevant to my current interests. As I research the work of this man, I’ve been fascinated by the connection between his philosophy and how closely it relates to my own research topics (although he obviously got there first and is way smarter.)

What is intriguing is how much cross-disciplinary applicability there is between his work and those industries that are dominating the headlines in the high-tech world: virtual reality, web 2.0 and social networking. Alongside the ubiquitous optimism that comes with these fields are the revolutionary changes that are occurring in journalism, entertainment, and the academy.

His followers would find it ironic that I learned the most about him via Wikipedia, at least biographically. However, I felt that the description of his arguments and the following criticism was not so helpful. Indeed, the short bio on the BBC story managed in a few short sentences to capture the more interesting nuances of his philosophy, namely that:

He gained notoriety for his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and again a decade later for describing the 9/11 attacks as a “dark fantasy”.

Baudrillard focused his work on how our consciousness interacts with reality and fantasy, creating from them a copy world he called hyper-reality.

He said that mass media led to hyper-reality becoming a dominant force in today’s world - an argument taken to a provocative extreme in his statement that the 1991 Gulf War primarily took place on a symbolic level.

If this is an accurate portrayal (I should be writing this after I’ve read the man’s books but, what the hell, I’m probably proving his point by not), then his ideas are worth discussion.

There is little doubt that the controversy surrounding his statements that the first Gulf War did not exist and that 9/11 was the culmination of America’s dark fantasy gained him notoriety, but it seems clear that he was not denying the historical reality of those events.

It is their significance that he is interested in, and he seems to claim that the mythological significance that these events have in our society is a constructed one, and it is weaker than what used to pass for significance. The reason for this is because our society, so heavily saturated with the layered interlinking references of mass media and pop culture, that the images these sources evoke have lost their own original meaning without mass media and pop culture to prop that meaning up. How much meaning these elements originally had, according to Baudrillard, would be interesting to discern because the answer could potentially place him more in the camp of conservatives than in the camp of post-modernism. My guess, however, is that he would not have allowed that sort of inconsistency to survive in his work.

Hyperreality is probably the prevailing psychological phenomenon of our society and times and, boy, is it a gold mine. Coming back to my original reason for interest in his work, and some of the things I alluded to in my previous post, is that we are a culture comfortable with obsessed with our constructed realities and the mythology that comes with those fantasies because it’s the closest thing we have to meaning. How else do you survive, mentally and emotionally, in a Wal-Martian, flickering-fluorescent-lit landscape such as ours?

To use his example of 9/11 (this is not intended as a rant - it just happens to be a very convenient and potent case), if one reads the literature of those most galvanized by those attacks, it should come as no surprise that they immediately called for what has come to be known as the War on Terror.

Works like those of Tom Clancy were prophetic in a way that we may not understand until we at least acknowledge the possibility of 9/11 being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Politics aside, this would be a tremendous development in the study of both political science and history.

So, in 9/11 all of the building blocks were there to develop a leviathan political fantasy into a dynamic policy and war machine that continues to consume resources and divide the nation. This political fantasy is a narrative that asserts itself against those who deny its existence. Powerful stuff.

Daniel Rourke had some interesting things to say about all this just over a year ago.

Both GigaOm and TechCrunch are abuzz today with news about Ning 2.0, the recently revamped tool to allow anyone to ‘build a MySpace.’ Other players in this space include the recently acquired five across and peopleaggregator.

These feel like someone is giving me the fuselage of a plane and telling me to fly. Pinning down what makes high-growth social networks valuable could probably be someone’s dissertation, but it’s not the availability of features like pictures and video widgets. It may indeed be the aggregate of all of these features, but somehow I doubt that this can be turned into a valuable community just by spewing it out in little bits.

I’m no expert here, but in my estimation there are three social networks that are really successful. They are by no means as highly trafficked as MySpace, but they are also different from MySpace in that they actually encourage offline interaction. The first, with which I have the most familiarity is CouchSurfing.com. Its goal is simple - provide a place online for people looking for a place to crash to connect.

We traveled around the world two years ago and we met amazing people through this site. Here in San Diego, we host people all the time. Sure, it has some of the basic features that social networks these days use but, comparatively speaking, it is a low-tech, even campy, website. But I now have friends that I communicate with on a regular basis in Turkey, New Zealand, all over Europe. And these are people that I’ve shared meals with and met their folks.

Next up is Craigslist. Born out of the ideas originating with The Well, I don’t think many people have truly taken the time to understand how revolutionary Craigslist really is. My buddy Austin told me the best story I have yet heard about Craigslist. He posted some items for sale once when he was moving. A lady came to look at his stuff and they ended up in an hour long conversation about life and forgiveness.

Finally, Meetup.com is the site that I never use but highly respect. Their approach to building a place for local, grassroots campaigns does not need to be elaborated on here but, again, it meets and exceeds my criteria for successful online communities: it encourages offline interaction and views itself as the facilitator of community, not the community itself.

You think the collective jack-off session we call MySpace will ever result in those kinds of stories, with any kind of statistical regularity? I don’t think so. Instead we get this. I’ve been able to connect with old friends through MySpace, and I know it’s great for indy bands, but in terms of pound for pound community value-add, it just doesn’t stack up, IMHO.

As an entrepreneur, I would be much more proud of having built Craigslist or CouchSurfing, despite the fact that MySpace was sold for half a billion dollars and the others were not / will not be. If I had to identify one changing trend in our society it would be that a growing, and increasingly important minority values true community over economy. And I’m with them.