1.

In a recent column, CBC’s Ira Basen contrasts the protection and access granted to journalists in the past…

If I was covering a war, people were less likely to shoot at me if they knew I was a journalist. If I was captured while covering that war, the Geneva Convention stipulated that I be treated as a prisoner of war, not as a spy.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

photo credit: Carl W. Heindl

…to the confusing present…

Perhaps the best way of understanding police behaviour at this juncture is to recognize that almost everyone in that crowd had some sort of camera-equipped mobile device, which meant that, in the minds of the police, almost everyone was a potential journalist.

That meant they could either give special treatment to everyone or to no one. They chose no one.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

photo credit: Carl W. Heindl

…leading to an inescapable conclusion.

But the actions of the Toronto police during the G20 summit have exposed what is perhaps an unintended consequence of this new media reality: When everyone is a journalist, no one is a journalist.

Ira Basen The new journalism and the G20

He ends there, before taking this line of reasoning all the way to its terrifying conclusion.

2.

In Fast Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System, authors Rodney Brooks and Anita Flynn argue for a different approach to exploring the immediate planetary neighbourhood. Rather than following the usual approach of planning expensive high quality missions which, when they fail, fail catastrophically, Brooks and Flynn argue for a scattered approach. They propose swarms of low quality cheap redundant components. The benefit is that you can lose some – even many – of them without compromising the mission’s goals.

There are major problems with planning a space mission which relies solely on one large planetary rover. If a mission is restricted to such a single large robot, there is a tremendous cost associated with losing the rover and thus a rash of conservatism will develop among the mission planners.

Rodney Brooks & Anita Flynn Fast Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System [PDF]

They propose a variety of models where cheap simple robots are launched – robots that mission planners can afford to lose. The first thing Brooks and Flynn consider is machines that relay back TV images.

3.

In the wake of the G20 protests and riots in Toronto, Torontoist collects The Fourteen Essential G20 Videos. They are a mix of shots by professional film crews and people with cellphones. Only one shows any kind of serious editing. For some of the videos, links to alternate shots of the same incident are included in the commentary. Many more are suggested in the comments.

4.

The Flickr search result for “Toronto G20” returns more than 29,000 results.

photo credit: wvs

5.

When it comes to surveillance, there are two basic problems. One is not having enough information. The other is having too much information – the unspoken fourth corner of Rumsfeld’s formulation.

The first problem is relatively easy to solve. If you don’t know enough, you can throw resources at your objective. You can develop new tech, hire new people, and deploy new methods. It’s also, from an intelligence gathering agency’s perspective, a pretty good problem to have. It means you get to go to the budget committee and ask for more money.

Having unknown knowns is a harder problem, politically. It means that buried somewhere in the apparatus is information that, if you had it to hand, would be extremely useful. But you don’t. Instead, this information has a bad habit of turning up after the fact, and you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of explaining document titles like “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.” at a hearing.

The key in this circumstance is no longer information gathering, it’s information filtering.

6.

I’ve been talking about the Toronto G20 protests because they happened recently and they’ve been on my mind. But there’s nothing special about the event. This is the mass-collaboration and content creation that we get so excited about. This is Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, Lolcats, 4Chan, YTMND, Yelp, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, SETI@HOME.

This is Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus. But a cognitive surplus implies a surplus of cognition.

7.

If SETI@HOME ever succeeds, we’re going to want to know who “found” the signs. Reporters will track down which computer processed the patch of sky where the alien signals came from. They’ll compose feature stories full of little charming details about the owner of the computer, his or her family, house, and habits. It’ll start with something like, “So-and-so doesn’t seem like an ordinary such-and-such…”

The joke will be that whoever this is will have contributed exactly as much to the effort as any of the random people whose computers determined where the aliens weren’t.

8.

Think carefully about the right that Basen claims. The right to not be shot or beaten while all around you people are being shot or beaten. This is literally the status of privileged observer. Precious observer, that must be protected because there are so few of them and they are so badly needed.

The bargain was roughly thus, “We know you are going to tell a story, and we want our side of the story to be told, so if we avoid shooting at you and yours, perhaps you’ll be less inclined to tell it badly.”

That’s ending now.

photo credit: nouspique

9.

In a network of cheap ubiquitous sensors, any given node becomes disposable. At highly documented events, the rate at which recordings are made far outstrips the rate at which we can view them. Any given photo or video can be lost but the loss is not that great. Any given observer can be beaten, arrested, even killed, and the loss is not that great. At least not that much greater than if it was any other participant.

This is the terrifying endpoint that Basen does not reach. When everyone is a journalist, not only do their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people being covered, their fates no longer warrant special attention by the people consuming their work.

Had any of the fourteen essential videos been prevented from making it to the Internet, understudies fifteen through five thousand were waiting in the wings.

10.

For all the cameras, no one appears to have recorded the arrest and beating of journalist Jesse Rosenfeld. For instance.

Toronto’s G20 artificial lake brings cottage country ambiance to a media pavilion in a militarized security zone in Canada’s largest city.

Sorry, I shouldn’t call it a lake and certainly not the #fakelake. It’s a reflecting pool.

photo credit: joesflickr

The pool will be decked out with a dock, Ontario cottage country’s signature Muskoka chair, canoes, and the recorded sound of calling loons. In the background, a 10-meter screen will show a video loop of cottage fun. According to spokesperson for Muskoka tourism, Michael Lawley, the goal is “to recreate a dock experience” for the thousands of journalists who will be in town to cover the G8 and G20 event. “We’re trying to make a memorable impression,” he said. Indeed.

It’s difficult to read about the plans for the pavilion without asking a lot of impertinent questions about whether the loons will be audible over the press conferences, whether there will be enough chairs for everyone, and what, exactly, is Muskoka tourism’s idea of cottage fun. Will they play beer commercials? Canada’s opposition parties are having a grand old time attacking the project. How could they not? It’s such an obviously terrible idea that from the outside, it’s very difficult to understand how anyone could approve the thing.

There’s a kind of mad evolutionary logic at play. Canada is hosting the G20 and G8 summits back to back and the original plan had them both happening in the Industry Minister’s home riding in a town called Huntsville (pop. 18,000). This explains how Muskoka tourism got involved.

When it became clear that the town couldn’t actually handle the thousands of dignitaries, journalists, security, and protestors, the G20 got moved to Toronto. Only 200 of the thousands of journalists will be permitted to attend the G8. The rest will have to monitor it from afar. You can imagine the frustration, the angry phone calls, and then the master of compromise who suggests, “What if we bring the Muskokas to them?”

photo credit: isafrancesca

Meanwhile, the second insane evolutionary process plays out as the weekend of meetings is encased in a protective shell, the design of which has been refined and re-refined since the embarrassing 1999 Seattle protests.

True to the spirit of globalization, the system of fences, security, and protest is nearly indistinguishable from event to event and place to place. Subtopia talks about it as a travelling stage show but it’s much weirder than that.

In a travelling stage show, the same cast puts on a performance in different venues. But almost none of the players in these events are the same. Protestors and security forces are largely drawn from the local populace. Even the special guest-starring international cast of civil servants, world leaders, and journalists rotate constantly, subjected as they are to the ravages of promotion, demotion, cabinet shuffles, and failed re-election.

This isn’t a travelling show, this is theatre companies mounting the same production all over the globe. When it comes to the performance at the fence, the one thing that remains constant is the set decoration and costume design. The same 12′ steel sheet with concrete feet snaking around the city. The same black hoodies and face bandanas. The same riot shields and batons. The same tear gas and smoke and pepper spray.

Managers at Starbucks and McDonalds would kill for a global brand this consistently implemented.

photo credit: Ducklover Bonnie

Here’s City of Sound talking about the APEC fence in 2007.

I overhear people talking of going to actually see The Fence, as if it were a new temporary attraction, and when I visited on Wednesday, many Sydneysiders were just hanging out in the “sniper-ridden ring of steel”, watching the whole circus. News sites are full of it, and Sydney has been radically altered for a few days. There is plenty to see.

City of Sound The Anti-Fun Palace

Notice that only the name of the city distinguishes it from BlogTO heading out to gawk at our instantiation.

There’s been much made of the recent start of construction on the G20 security fence in Toronto. But, lacking a good conception of its size and breadth, I decided to mosey on down to the area around the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to see what I could find out about this thing. As it turns out, I got a pretty good idea for how intense the police and security presence will be.

BlogTO Toronto’s G20 fence in photos.

In fact you could (and should) read all of City of Sound’s fantastic post about the APEC 2007 fence and apply it to the one in Toronto. (Seriously, I cannot recommend the post highly enough.)

These are mimetic structures. Their design is transmitted all over the globe, reproduced via security conferences, marketing materials, anarchist forums, and planning committees. From the perspective of the city it’s a weird malignant parasite that arrives, takes over, completes its terrible purpose, and then neatly self-disassembles.

In the midst of all this, our main university is closed, our baseball team is playing its home games in another city, our streets are ringed with steel and police and snipers, our windows are boarded up, and our most recognizable landmark has been shut down. When the city is least like itself, conference organizers hope to showcase it to the world.

So they release bland stock footage for newscasters. They make models of our famous landmarks. And they build simulacra of the cottage country where the conference should have happened, if all had gone according to plan.

photo credit: shooteng

On June 5, Newsweek’s Julia Baird published an op-ed entitled The Front Line Is Online. In her subhead, she declares that “freedom should trump privacy.”

She spends some time reliving Neda Soltan’s death and some time talking about the growing consensus that access to the Internet should be a fundamental right. What follows is some depressingly muddy thinking about how to proceed.

photo credit: killerturnip

One in seven of those who do not use the Internet think they should have the right to if they want. Yet only half of those surveyed felt the Internet was a safe place to express their opinions, and more than half thought that it should never be regulated by the government. Which may suggest that some people are willing to accept some compromises to privacy to avoid the creeping censorship that too easily follows government intervention. The basic tenet of the Internet is openness: you don’t need to forfeit all privacy, but if you want to protect it, don’t post publicly.

The debate about quitting Facebook certainly takes on a different hue when exposure, not secrecy, becomes the critical fight. In the past few weeks, both Pakistan and Bangladesh shut down Facebook in response to the group Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, because it is considered blasphemous to create images of the prophet. Facebook has been slammed by clerics in Egypt and Syria for being a gateway to adultery; and a woman was shot in Saudi Arabia after her father discovered her chatting online with a man she met on the site.

Increasingly, the idea that everyone should be able to log on, publish, upload, download, update, or tweet at will—and whim—seems vital.

Julia Baird – Newsweek The Front Line Is Online (emphasis added)

Baird sets up a false opposition between freedom and privacy, and then undermines the argument with her own evidence. The key insight missing is that privacy isn’t in conflict with freedom, it’s a component of it.

Most liberal democracies have a whole pile of rights that recognize this. It’s the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. It’s why the government can’t read our mail in most free countries. It’s why we get so upset when we learn that we’re getting wire-tapped.

When “if you want to protect it, don’t post publicly” holds sway, the woman in Baird’s last example has two choices: get shot for chatting with men or don’t talk to men at all. That’s not freedom. The thing that could have freed her from her father’s insane grip is secrecy; she lives and is free only insofar as she is able to keep her private life away from his murderous attention.

When social networks make it hard to keep your doings private, you put yourself at greater risk of discovery. We should have learned this lesson when Google Buzz exposed a woman to her abusive-ex. We should have learned this lesson when Evgeny Morozov pointed out that “once regimes used torture to get this kind of data; now it’s freely available on Facebook.” We should have learned this lesson when US activists used Twitter to wiretap themselves and megaphone it to the police.

A world where you can’t keep your list of friends hidden is a world where governments can figure out networks of dissidents. psychotic family members can find out you are talking to the wrong people, and the police know which door to kick in. Removing censorship makes posting easier – it doesn’t make it safer. Shielding from prying eyes does. That only happens with good, reliable privacy controls.

To have real freedom, we need both.

Awhile back, Ballardian ran a microfiction contest. I entered. The winners are here (I especially liked 2nd place). But say contest-winning microfiction isn’t to your taste? Maybe you’d prefer honourably-mentioned microfiction? I’ve got you covered.

He bought the wine at auction. Included, was a certificate of authenticity showing the bottle’s lineage traced backward from auction house to warehouse to boathouse. Before that, the ocean floor. It had lain there for decades, wedged in the doomed ship’s hold.

He opened the wine at home. The bottle had aged gracefully, he decided. He admired the worn label and salt-textured glass. The cork was decisively intact. People had been dancing on deck when the torpedo hit.

He drank the wine alone. Exquisite. The last of his fortune was spent tracking down Löwenbräu from the Hindenburg.

The more observant among you might realize that the idea is shamelessly stolen from this fantastic Edible Geography post.

Here is what blows me away about the latest stock market madness.

In this Newsweek article, we learn that 60% of stock market trading volume is automated. Machines are doing lightning fast trades according to complex quant-designed algorithms. The machines are needed to do this because they can make decisions faster than people and when you are dealing in fractions of a penny, speed matters. There’s a lively debate going on about whether or not these battlebots (yes, they are called that) are a good idea, but they’re not inherently bad. There are plenty of decisions better outsourced to machines. Trading could be one of them.

The point is that 60% of stock trades are being done by machines, operating according to a set of algorithms and inputs, which (I’m pretty sure) do not include natural language parsing of the news.

Yet whenever the stock market makes a move, the financial press constructs post hoc narratives that explain what’s happened as a reaction to the news of the day, as if the news is what was was motivating the trades. For example, here’s Reuters confidently explaining today’s nose-dive in terms of various events that made headlines, none of which are a computer glitch. (15 minutes later, Reuters tweeted the alternate explanation.)

This fascinates me. Most stock market trading is being done by machines, but the stories we tell ourselves are about humans responding to new information. You can’t interview an algorithm about why it made a certain choice. In the absence of that knowledge, it seems clear that the financial press just makes educated guesses and acts as if correlation is causation. It’s speculative fiction.