Lately, I have this ritual when I move – I read Bruce Sterling’s Last Viridian Note. I’m treating it like a devotional text for the comfortably mobile. It helps me refocus my attention on my material conditions, giving me the right kind of steely-eyed attitude when it comes time to ask, “Do I really want to pack this?”

photo credit: robokow

An Extended Excerpt

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbours. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Bruce Sterling The Last Viridian Note

Sterling wrote this in late 2008, which was probably exactly when I needed to hear it (I’ve moved 3 times since then which is why I can claim the re-readings are a ritual).

Accidental Simplification

In 2007, I was engaged to be married. We shared an apartment in Toronto that was brimming with stuff, most of it in boxes. After she moved up, her parents had kindly filled a truck with everything she owned and driven it from Nova Scotia. This act of kindness turned out to be a blow from which our material living conditions never recovered.

I already had a bad habit of moving unopened boxes from apartment to apartment; with her stuff added in, it became overwhelming. Both of us worked long hours, both of us meant to get around to sorting through our stuff but progress was slow to non-existent. We lived among boxes. Boxes became furniture. Boxes shaped our pathways through the space.

When we broke up, I’d just gotten back from a 2 week trip to Montreal. I had a suitcase with clothes and a backpack with my laptop and gear. She met me at the station, we went home, she explained her decision, and I walked back out the door carrying the same luggage.

I stayed on the road for 3 months, visiting friends across the country, living out of the suitcase and backpack. I could barely remember what was in the apartment. When the lease expired, I packed it all up, gave away what I could bear, and put the rest in storage. I moved to Ottawa. I was 6 months in to my 2 week trip when I read The Last Viridian Note.

It resonated.

2 Years Later

I tell you all of this not to herald a sudden shift from cyborgs to feelings on this website but to establish some context and qualifications for this next bit. I’ve tried to varying degrees of success to follow the advice that made sense in Sterling’s sermon. I’m very glad to have gone through the exercise. I’ve learned from the experience.

I found that a surprising amount of what you own is hard to get rid of, but easy to live without. I remember very clearly in 2008 agonizing over what to toss and what to put into storage. Today, I’m paying for a locker with only the dimmest memory of what’s in there. I don’t remember at all what I gave away, though I remember very clearly being wracked with indecision about whether I should get rid of whatever it was.

This condition does not seem to have a cure. On the day of the move itself, I set aside two bags of clothes to donate. Included in this pile were some very nice jackets that I had never worn (they were hand-me-overs) and could not foresee myself ever wanting to wear. Yet as we finished for the day aside from a last stop at the drop-off box, I hesitated. What if? What if one day I wanted a jacket like that? They were perfectly good jackets. It took real mental effort to stay the course. Sterling warns that the process will be painful and he’s not wrong.

The sermon focuses very much on the individual. It’s a program for how you might clean up and de-clutter your own life. One area that’s left aside is how this attitude fits into a slightly larger context (he skips straight to the largest context – the condition of the planet). It’s reasonable to ask: how might this approach scale?

Over the past two years I’ve learned over and over how much the highly mobile rely on the stationary for support. I’ve benefitted from countless roommates and hosts who already owned the things needed to maintain a working household. Dishes, for example. If I have been able to move without filling a van, it is because I have lived with people who needed a truck. If I hadn’t had friends, I’d have needed hotels.

(One of my favourite interviews of all time has Joey Comeau and Ryan North discussing this exact thing. Read it here.)

Community Goods

When I was in university, I went to a school that was walking distance from the house that we’d lived in since I was 2. The basement was full of stuff. Quite a few of my friends were from away, and my parents’ basement became this warehouse of resources for the whole community. Need something sawed? We had that. Need extension cords and a hose? We had that too. Need 16mm film of a wedding from the 50s, along with a working projector for your play? Yup.

This basement of miscellany sustained the material needs of about 20 university students for various projects. When my parents moved out and got rid of everything (to their great relief), a resource was lost. There is a value to having things to hand. I only need one of my friends to have a bike repair stand, but boy am I glad that he does.

There is a whole category of objects like this that don’t quite fit into the Beautiful things / Emotionally important things / Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function / Everything else rubric that Sterling details. One of his criteria for “everything else” is stuff that you haven’t touched in a year. These are very likely things you can toss, but some of them only make sense to toss in a certain context.

There are items that have some critical density of need that is not one per person, but one per household, one per block, or one per neighbourhood. They might be items that you use less than once per year but that your neighbourhood would use in aggregate once every few weeks. This is a coordination problem. I can give away my extension ladder, if you promise to keep yours or vice versa, but between the two of us, we do want a ladder. (This problem is extra persistent with roommates and is how I’ve managed to go 2 years without owning dishes or living room furniture. How many toasters does a household need? Probably 1. Mine has 3.)

Designing Neighbours

In tightly knit communities, these objects can get where they’re needed through informal lending networks. But how to get them into the hands of our glocally situated young professionals who have more connections across the continent then in a 5 block radius?

We might take some inspiration from the smooth rental experience of Zipcars. The cars are just around. You don’t need to plan ahead, you just need to see if one’s available (it probably is). There aren’t forms to fill out in triplicate, heck, you don’t even need to talk to anyone. You can just go and pick it up as if it was yours and put it back when you’re done.

We might also take some inspiration from DIY bike collectives such as Toronto’s Bike Pirates. They have all the tools, even the ones that you need once per bike’s lifetime. You drop in, do some work, leave a donation, and go on your way.

Toy Libraries also show some promise. Many toys expire long before they go bad. They become boring. They are grown out of. Libraries keep them in circulation and out of people’s basements.

With the rise of cheap sensors and cheap ID tags, it’s not hard to imagine lending libraries for all kinds of specialized tools and objects. Think about how much stuff you would get rid of if you felt like you could just grab another one any old time. No need to stop at simple tools, much of what was useful about my parents’ basement was dross that was occasionally extremely useful. Imagine whole emporiums of wonder and miscellany. Think about how much you’d enjoy browsing these places, every shelf stuffed with the intriguing scraps of a project idea.

Hold on! Now we’ve just outsourced the curation and maintenance of our occasionally useful junk to some hapless individual or organization. How do you make a set up like that sustainable? Is it run for profit? Can networks of data tags make the system seamless enough that the curation duties can be distributed across the userbase, much as they are in a regular neighbourhood? These are real design problems that want useable solutions.

photo credit: tozzer

Tabloid Science

Why do I say sensationalist? Adam Rothstein of the Interdome explains it best.

William Gibson used the term “Tabloid Science” the other day on Twitter, and this couldn’t be a better example (unless it also threatened to increase global warming, discover aliens, and involved robots becoming self-aware).

This story is, as I understand it, about a guy who figured out how to transmit a computer virus using RFID. And yet, we have this all-star headline, reposted everywhere from the BBC to Slashdot. It’s reminiscent of the back pages of popular science magazines (“enslave ants to grow all your woman-attractive pheromones, now only $2.99!”) except this is now science reporting, on the Internet: a domain supposedly rational and free of all that “headline” crap.

Adam Rothstein, private correspondence

From the perspective of the systems being compromised, there is no difference between an RFID attacker that’s moving around the world inside someone’s skin or on top of it. There’s no benefit to doing the implant part of the procedure except that it gets you headlines. Which, I guess, is a pretty big benefit.

There’s something hilariously hair-splitting about how a variation in placement of just a few millimeters – fundamentally cosmetic – makes all the difference in coverage. Malware RFID has been around for years. Here’s the BBC covering it in 2006.

We might be better off conceiving of Dr Gasson’s move as a sort of performance art intervention in the mediasphere.

Under my skin

The tone of coverage speaks directly to the conception of the self. Because the chip is under his skin, the BBC calls it a human infected with a computer virus (though couched in scare quotes) rather than a human wearing a device infected with a computer virus. Slashdot goes further.

Why? I have a much deeper and more integrated relationship with my smartphone than Gasson has with a chip that stays in his body for a few days. It’s like saying that someone with cheap earrings is the first human to rust.

Indeed, the chip as worn by Gasson is substantially less useful than if he’d just stuffed it in his pocket (aside from the “getting media coverage” utility, which we must not dismiss). For one thing, the one in his pocket can be thrown down the sewer when security notices him.

It reminds me of the perennial prediction that cellphone implants are imminent. No they aren’t. Cellphone contracts last 2-3 years and new phones come out even more frequently. Say what you will about the stuff that’s carried on you instead of in you, but at least it’s modular.

For it to be worth accepting implants, they have to offer significant benefits that carry-able items don’t. Medical prosthetics are one obvious category of this kind of thing (though even most of these are things that you wear). Devices or interfaces that give you new senses might be another.

Kevin Warwick’s Project Cyborg 2.0 is relevant here. Implants connected to his nerves allowed him to control a robot arm remotely and to exchange sensations with his wife wirelessly through a rig she also had implanted.

Further intervention

Moving away from hard realities of the current achievement, let’s take for granted for a moment that there will be abilities and senses worth having surgery for. Let’s allow for people with networked nervous systems, reaching far out beyond themselves to a whole host of new conveniences for the modern consumer. I’m thinking about flexible ego boundaries and an artist who replicates Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0, 1974 for the cyborg era.

In Rhythm 0, 2014 (2024?) the artist turns off her firewalls and publishes her personal IP and secret key. She is almost immediately compromised by the sea of ambient malware that’s just part of the background Internet. The participant/audience of the performance swoop in and begin a battle to take over and clean her system, while others attempt to reroute it for themselves.

The artist’s body goes haywire. She sometimes shouts the names of consumer pharmaceuticals along with other gibberish. She begins to develop a fever as all of her microcontrollers run at full tilt, generating dangerous amounts of heat. After an hour, her assistant intervenes. Her firmware must be wiped and restored. A great debate erupts in the art world about whether this is a success or a failure of the piece.

The debate is part of the performance.

I leave you with these words from Simon Bostock who pointed me to the BBC article in the first place.

I’m pretty sure the best depiction of flexible ego boundaries I’ve read is Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, which, if you can get over the fact it’s a space opera about pirates using enforced-autism as a method of slavery and a war between a race of giant spiders, shows how we’ll probably accrete layers of tech and cyborg accoutrements until we all become reefs.

If we’re going to manage our future selves we’ll all have to get a grasp on what topology means.

Simon Bostock, private correpondence

It’s 30 minutes long, entertaining, and worth watching but in case you are pressed for time, here’s a summary:

• Ultra-casual games like FarmVille, Webkinz, Mafia Wars and Club Penguin took the industry by surprise and are making enormous amounts of money.
• Brian Reynolds should make a slot machine where if you win you get real money and if you lose, you get FarmVille money.
• People are starved for authenticity and links with the real world.
• Foursquare and other mobile apps seems like the next big thing.
• Sensors are becoming cheaper and cheaper and are heading towards ubiquity. (Spimes!)
• You think point programs and loyalty cards are a thing now? Wait until game designers get their hands on this stuff.
• Some examples where game designers have redesigned systems with a gaming bent (turning grades from scores into experience levels).
• An extended bit of design fiction where Schell imagines every action tracked and scored and how that might change our behaviour.

Prior art for a universal scoring system.

First thing: we already have a universal points system. It’s called money. Indeed, just about every example that Schell mentioned in his talk were systems by which we’d get points from corporations and governments that we could convert into money, discounts or tax credits, all of which are just money.

So what we’re actually talking about here is a ubiquitous micropayment system, which tracks your behaviour and rewards you accordingly. He’s talking about turning things into games by attaching a reward scheme to them.

Here’s the thing about Mafia Wars, FarmVille and all the rest. They’re objectively terrible games. They are incredibly tedious, repetitive activities gussied up with adorable (or lukewarmly bad-ass) graphics. There is little to no skill or strategy involved and the main path to advancement is to show up and click on things.

Indeed, the main profit centre for for FarmVille is giving players methods by which they can avoid playing the terrible game. You can either pay money to buy points that you can exchange for things that allow you avoid playing the terrible game, or you can look at advertisements you wouldn’t otherwise look at in order to get points that you can spend on things that allow you to avoid playing the terrible game.*

The lesson of these games is that a well-made reward scheme will get people to do all kinds of tedious fucking things. This really isn’t an exciting revelation. All those gambling addiction ads you see? Those are a consequence of the fact that a variable reward schedule will get some people to sit in front of a glowing box and press a single button over and over again until they run out of money. Casinos have this down to a science.**

Unbelievably comprehensive surveillance.

Back to the “ubiquitous” of Schell’s ubiquitous point scheme.

In computer games, the way that we can give you scores, points and achievements for the things that you do is that we know exactly what your avatar is doing at all times. Indeed the bulk of all hacking and cheating in games consists of giving the game bad information about where you are and what you are up to.

So what Schell is envisioning is a ubiquitous, perpetual, highly efficient surveillance society. Efficient to a degree that it orders of magnitude more effective than the worst fears about 1984. Is this plausible?

Well, on the one hand, people are already voluntarily giving out their locations to anyone who asks and voluntarily wear tracking devices so they can exchange bragging rights. On the other hand sometimes people are extremely reluctant to share. It’s a highly nuanced question, with very complex results.

If you can play it, you can cheat at it.

Let’s assume for a second that the right alchemy of incentives, fun, fad, and reassuring privacy policy can be found, and most of us choose to play. A lot of us are going to cheat.

We already do. We made the Game Genie a best-seller so that we could break our single player games. Every set of patch notes for every multiplayer game ever made includes changes made to close loopholes and code exploits that allow cheaters to teleport, fly, fire with perfect aim, and on and on. This is a constant battle waged over games where the gold, points, and scores have no real-world value whatsoever.

That’s just at the code level. There’s a social problem too. You can, right now, hire someone in China to play your game for you. These kinds of things are much, much harder to police and it’ll be much, much worse with real world games giving real world rewards.

Foursquare got their first taste of this when users started checking in from home. Their fix promptly ran afoul of mistaking legit check-ins for cheats. What happens when getting Foursquare points is valuable enough that it’s worth lending your phone or account login to a friend who bikes around the city collecting points for everyone in your crew? People will do it, that’s what happens. Did you hear about the US Dollar Coins exploit that gave infinite frequent flier miles? Ever considered cheating at Nike+? Here’s a guide for you.***

There are a lot of tools in the designer’s box.

The lesson here is one that economists have know for ages. Changing the incentive structure will change the way that people behave but it will rarely be in the way that you envision. People will poke at the problem and some of them will find the most efficient way to tackle it, and then they’ll post a strategy guide.

All that said, I’m pretty enthusiastic about turning the best parts of game design to the problems of the world. The promise of ubiquitous sensors that Schell mentions is that it will offer many new ways to make the invisible visible, to nudge us towards better habits and better behaviour. After all, what gets measured gets done, right?

But the emphasis in Schell’s talk on scoring systems – the bluntest, worst hammer in the game design toolbox – is the wrong approach. We already knew that we could get you to do things you didn’t want to do by offering a reward. It’s why we’re paying you to show up at work all the time.

I’m much, much more interested in using game design techniques to make the activities themselves more fun, engaging, and valuable. Instead of replicating FarmVille’s success at papering over a terrible gameplay experience with an effective reward scheme, what if we tried to replicate the successful mechanics of genuinely good games? Jonathan Blow examined this question much more eloquently in 2007.

Notes

*One might think that an easier way to avoid playing FarmVille would by to simply stop playing it. Well, I have a theory about that.

***We’ve hardly even started with the spime games and there are proto spime game hacking tools.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately.

photo credit: loungerie

I spend a great deal of time consuming the seeds of the future. I watch TED talks and Seminars about Long Term Thinking and I skim WIRED and Icon and I have RSS feeds out the wazoo of visionaries and cranks and journalists, repackaging their glimpses of the world to come. It’s easy to feel like an outsider, like I’m just on the edge of perception, getting it all third and fourth hand from bloggers re-linking to the online edition of an interview with someone who talked to a bunch of people who have some ideas about the future.

It’s easy to feel like a visionary, too. No matter where you are, there is someone further down the chain, who has not heard the news. Did you know that there are still people who are kind of skeptical about Wikipedia? Not in the healthy “I check the references before making rash decisions” kind of way. But in the fundamental “what do you mean, anyone can edit it?” way.

I met dozens of them last summer at a workshop for teachers interested in introducing technology to the classroom. These were the ones who had bothered to take some time out of their weekends to come and hear us tell them what was coming. Who knows how many of their colleagues there are out there, overworked, underpaid and no time or intention of even trying to sort this stuff out.

As I write this, I’m looking at a guy across the aisle, sitting down with a book wrapped in the kind of loose amateur-looking dust-jacket covering that screams “local library”. The chapter he’s just started has a heading that goes Where Do I Find Blogs To Read?

Think about what needed to happen for this to be the case. He needed to know enough about the Internet to know that there were blogs. He needed to be uncomfortable enough with the whole thing to decide that going to the library and finding a book on the topic was the way to go. The book is probably hopelessly out of date. The time distance from research to writing to publishing to library-acquisition to check-out is not kind to computer books. Yet, this is still how a lot of people try to come to grips with the world. If they even have access to books.

When my friends go to the library it’s for the free Wi-Fi and an excuse to get out of the home-office.

Chris Anderson of WIRED has a chart he likes to show of the media hype for new technology. It charts the rise and fall and rise again from announcement to excitement to disappointment to the slow rise to ubiquity, as the thing gets used in ways that no one expected.

What’s happening in that dip? For the technologies that make it, it’s the slow spread through all of the places that aren’t especially newsworthy, or interesting. It’s slowly seeping out to all of the people who have too many other things on their minds to keep up with every fancy new development.

This is the status quo. Unevenly distributed innovation, pockets of solved problems, and seas of that same problem, waiting to be solved. Repeating other people’s successes isn’t really glamourous. It doesn’t get you on the front page of TIME. But it’s where the lasting work gets accomplished.

So, to Gibson and Sterling’s aphorism, I add the following: We need to back-port the future.

There’s a lot of back-porting work to be done.

It concerns this hilarious opinion piece to which Jay Rosen linked on Twitter. Douglas Rushkoff is afraid that journalism (and by extension all content creation) can’t survive what he sees as Google’s parasitism and sees in Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch a glimmer of hope. There is so much wrong with the argument.

Hope you enjoy it. I promise that Monday will be about lanyards and augmented reality.))

((Update: Check out this much more nuanced discussion of the value of visitors to a newspaper’s site. There are circumstances where it makes sense to be searchable by engines and circumstances where it doesn’t. Steve Yelvington adds a lot to the discussion.))

All quotes from The New Good Guys by Douglas Rushkoff. Published on the Daily Beast and indexed by Google.

Suddenly Murdoch and Microsoft are on the right side against the Google[sic]. Douglas Rushkoff says the two oft-despised companies are the best hope to defeat the Evil Empire.

((Note that this is an article about two competing business models. One involves making your content as available as possible and earning an income from or around traffic. The other involves limiting availablity of your content and earning premium income from a smaller group. That Rushkoff manages to twist this into an End Times battle between good and evil is endemic to his muddled thinking.))

Discussions between Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for a structure where the former’s search engine (Bing) would pay for exclusive rights to the latter’s content (Wall Street Journal, Fox, etc.) has proven instantly upsetting to the self-appointed defenders of a “free” Internet. The simple reason: it might just work.

((Rushkoff might be mistaking ridicule for anger. The reaction I’ve seen has been a mix of “I don’t think this will work”, “I’d like to see them try”, and “this might have something to do with the Myspace deal“. My personal favourite was Gawker’s ‘after’ shots of Google News without News Corp..))

Defying the logic that everything is more valuable the higher it climbs on Google’s search rankings, Rupert Murdoch is making good on his threat to pull out

((Rushkoff meant to say “is loudly talking about his threat to pull out”))

of Google searchability, altogether. Instead, he wants to be paid for his properties to show up in search results. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may be desperate enough for a competitive advantage against Google to take Murdoch up on the deal, and offer it to other media companies with content people really want to find.

((Man, this is really gripping war-for-the-soul-of-the-Internet stuff.))

Of course, the information-wants-to-be-free troops are already up in arms. Some welcome what they see as the extinction of both evil empires in an ill-conceived death grip that will push Fox News and the Wall Street Journal off the mainstream map. Others see it as a last-gasp effort by “old media” to resist the unstoppable, Google-driven evolution of an entirely free content universe. They see searchability by Google as equivalent to participation in democratic society—and any resistance to offering up one’s content to exploitation by Google Inc. as resistance to the natural openness of interactive media and bottom-up civilization.

((I’d like to meet these people. They seem entertaining.))

As an early cyberpunk, I see their point—as well as the confused logic informing it. Greedy monopolists

((one of whom was Murdoch))

controlled media for a long time, and formed huge conglomerates with interests beyond providing people with the content they needed.

((Does Rushkoff think that now that Google exists, this has changed?))

Media companies moved into the business of delivering eyeballs to sponsors, instead of content to readers. Recording companies bilked the artists who created the music. Taking content for free seems justified when it is being taken from big bad companies. And making content ourselves, as well as distributing it freely to one another, is now correctly understood as a basic human right.

((Oh, there’s the problem. Rushkoff is confusing piracy and publishing. When cyberpunk Rushkoff was using Napster to complete his Metallica collection, that was piracy and a fight against the big bad evil corporations. When I read a complete article on the WSJ for free through Google it’s because they made it available. The bizarro moral code here is fantastic. Unauthorized copying from large companies was OK because it hurts someone else and they probably cheated. Authorized reading is not OK because Google…forced…what?))

But we can’t confuse our actual right to make and distribute content freely with Google’s perceived right to freely exploit the content everyone makes.

((No one, least of all Google, is claiming that Google has that right. Google has explained over and over how Murdoch could delist News Corp. properties from the search engine if he was serious.))

Google is not in this for the fun of it; they make money off their searches. By making our content available to Google, we make Google’s searches more valuable. If we don’t feel our content is being made more valuable in the exchange, then we don’t have to accept this searchability as some precondition of Internet citizenship.

((Which is why all good search engines offer a method to turn off indexability. Robots.txt – It will solve your alleged problems.™))

However much we all might like free content in the short term, it is unsustainable in the long term.

((“It isn’t free to make, you know” finger waggling is my favourite all-purpose argument. It shows up everywhere!))

When nobody is paying for content, that content stops being created.

((It must drive Rushkoff bananas to be making the same argument that the record companies were making when cyberpunk Rushkoff was loading up Limewire))

If money can’t be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can’t do it anymore.

((First they came for the music but I did not speak because I wasn’t a musician and anyway, evil corporate masters were bilking the artists. Then they came for the movies but I did not speak because Hollywood is destroying America. Then they came for the journalists…))

Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the New York Times and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.

((Home taping is killing music! VCRs will destroy movies! Napster will destroy music! The gramophone will destroy music! etc. (poor music)))

Advertising is certainly one option.

((Keeping score? Media companies delivering eyeballs to advertisers: Not OK in olden times. OK in current times, except that Google is hijacking those eyes.))

But when Google becomes the meta-frame around all the content in everyone else’s publications, then Google’s ads are the only ones that really matter. Google’s ads are the ones that show up when we are searching for content, and open to suggestion. That’s the Internet equivalent of the moment we are flipping through the magazine — not the time we are spending when we deep inside an article and oblivious to the extraneous information beckoning from beyond its borders. Once we have clicked on the article and are brought to the interior of the publication on offer, we go into content mode—reading, rather than searching for relevant information, including ads.

Since the search engine is now extracting the ad revenue that used to go to the content provider, it makes sense that the search engine should pay some of that forward.

((Sure, that’s one business model and with a little luck, we’ll get to see it in action if the Bing/News Corp. deal is more than just talk. But make no mistake, this is not a moral issue.

There’s another business model, which is to aggressively bring in as much traffic as possible, and make money from that. In that world, Google is free advertising for your publication. It’s lead generation. Guess what happens when you do a Google search for “Wall Street Journal”. You get an ad for the paper. The WSJ is paying Google for traffic while claiming that Google traffic isn’t valuable.

We’re still sorting out how to pay for good journalism and it’s not by any means clear that allowing your content to be indexed by search engines and displaying that content for free to everyone is the right answer. But regurgitating Murdoch’s argument without acknowledging that there is an easy remedy is irresponsible if not disengenuous.))

It is much too easy to look at this as two, crusty old monopolies battling against the young defender of open systems and human freedoms. I reflexively

((oh, there’s your problem))

hate to be on Murdoch or Microsoft’s side on pretty much any issue. But these waning media giants—along with Hearst, NBC, Bertelsmann, and even the New York Times—may just have enough power left between them to challenge the continuing, inexorable drive to make all content immediately open to exploitation, disconnected from its creators.

((Again, there’s that pesky piracy vs. publishing distinction. The content is available in search engines because everyone has chosen to make it available. It’s very easy to remove.))

Our labor is not free. Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what’s happening on the free Internet is more akin to the “crowdsourcing” of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them—only the search engines that parse their articles. Why must everything we create or do be presumed free for everyone to use, in any context, and open to comments

((..what?))

from anyone in the world? Searching me, and what I create, should be a privilege enjoyed by those to whom I offer it—not a right bestowed onto every person, company, and government on the planet.

((Rushkoff is silent on the issue of non-Google entities linking to his work. Presumably he thinks that Rosen owes him a dollar for the Twitter link. Given that I linked, used, and commented without checking with Rushkoff, I have no idea how much I owe.))

Openness of this sort is not freedom. It’s the forced relinquishing of everything we do to the hive, and to Google. We end up with fewer new ideas, less original content,

((Photocopiers will kill publishing!))

and more links, copies and regurgitations of yesterday’s ideas. The people and companies who index ideas end up getting the money, while the people who actually have ideas and waste their time creating content end up broke.

So until we develop peer-to-peer currencies or come up with some other idea,

((Yes, perhaps one day someone might create a list of ideas for subsidizing the news. I sure hope to live long enough to see that day.))

we must pit the corporations who would exploit us against one another. By surrendering to just one publicly held company—no matter how little evil it says it wants to do—we doom ourselves to working for free.

((This is undeniably true. No one who has their content indexed in Google has managed to find a way to make a living at it.))

Earlier last month, Jason Kottke posted a story about how Lego has become single use. It’s the sort of golden-era thinking that I promised myself I wouldn’t fall in to, but I ended up nodding along. Yeah, Lego’s too corporate. Lego sold out!

Except that it hasn’t.

Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket shook me out of my false nostalgia with the Tao of Lego. Despite opening by agreeing with Jason, Robin put together a post crammed to the gills with links to amazing repurposing of the supposedly single-use bricks. Want an example?

Here’s another. As near as I can tell, those legs are made of Bionicle parts, the least Lego-like Lego I can imagine.

Click through to Robin’s post for more. There’s an astonishing array of clever construction on display.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the notion that we are playing with “other people’s imagination” these days also falls flat. When I was a kid, there was no Star Wars Lego. But there was space Lego and there were translucent antennae. My brother and I pretty quickly figured out that those things looked a lot like light-sabers. So our little guys had light-sabers.

Childhood imagination is always a combination of other people’s and your own stories. Heck, so is adult imagination. You didn’t think that William Gibson invented Levi’s 501s did you?

This left the final complaint, the idea that it’s hard to find basic bricks. The good news is that this isn’t true either. I got inspired by Robin’s post and a stunning set of structures made by architects using only white bricks. So I went shopping for Lego. The cheapest $/brick kit that I could find was the widely available Builders of Tomorrow basic brick set. Every toy store that I checked had some.

I bought a pile of the standard bricks and – as an experiment – this Star Wars kit to see how ridiculous the pieces were. On the box, it appears to be made of all-kinds of single-use bits. Building it told a different story. The feet of the walker turn out to be the same part as the bodies of the Droids. Some of the joints are re-purposed guns. There are dozens of little clever things so that as you follow the instructions, there is moment after moment of discovery. “Oh, I can do THAT with that part?”

The assumption that the new sets represent a step away from the spirit of Lego says more about the poverty of imagination in those of us sitting on the sidelines than it does about Lego itself. Which is a great relief.

More Amazing Lego

• Solaris 8 Station Tour. This was recently featured on Boing Boing.
• Building Utopolis. Amazing city by a Montreal artist.
• A gallery of Lego monsters. What can you do with Lego tentacles? Turns out, a lot.
• Flickr’s Lego Microscale Pool I am rapidly falling in love with these little Lego Haiku.

photo credit: tripleman

Over at Inventing Green, Alexis Madrigal looks at the adoption of air-conditioners. He talks about how the rise of electrical cooling seems to have lead to a crash in regional building techniques.

“Of course, the use of air conditioning allowed homeowners to enjoy a new degree of comfort, but a goodly portion of the residential air-conditioning load simply replaced the comfort once provided — at little environmental cost — by good design,” Rome writes.

The whole thing put me in mind of three incidents that highlight the critical importance of a regional context in usable architecture.

1. Done Well

   A few years ago I went on a tour of the then under-construction Earth Rangers Wildlife Center in Ontario. It’s a very green building, LEED gold rating and all that. They were showing us the tech and how liquid running through the building kept it cool and how tall ceilings moved hot air away from employees and on and on about how they were keeping the temperature down. This is Canada, where the main problem, you’d think, is keeping warm. Judging by my utility bills, it certainly is.

   One of the students asked the project manager about that and he looked genuinely surprised. Heating was an afterthought, a solved problem – you just needed to keep the place insulated. And then he went back to explaining all the clever cooling solutions.

2. Done Badly

   I remember visiting my parents when they were house-sitting on Salt Spring Island. The proud owners had their home custom built, using a design from California. The result was an unusable disaster.

   Everything about the house had clearly been intended to keep a desert home pleasantly shaded. An overabundance of sunlight is not a problem in heavily-treed, often cloudy, British Columbia. They had to keep the indoor lights on pretty much all day long. Even so, the house felt dank, dark and dismal.

3. Done Badly, Then Fixed

   In Halifax, I used to deliver the paper to the Killam Library. The Killam had originally been designed with some warmer climate in mind (all my stories are about how miserable the weather gets in Canada, I’m realizing). Touches such as an always-dry stream bed that ran from outside the building under the edge into the open air atrium and then into the lobby itself, indicated an architect who imagined a place where water did not freeze for a good chunk of the year.

   During the winter, that open-air atrium became a terrifying safety hazard. Take a look at this photo. Surrounded on all sides by warmed glass, the whole thing became a chimney. The heating pushed an enormous volume of air out the top and sucked gale force winds through the pictured entry-way.

   In the late 90s, Dalhousie fixed the problem, sealing the top of the atrium with glass. The result was a fully usable (safe) courtyard where students now congregate.

So much depends on thoughtful design.

]]> http://quietbabylon.com/2009/three-stories-about-regional-architecture/feed/ 7 http://quietbabylon.com/2009/steve-brills-news-cartel-a-consumers-perspective/ http://quietbabylon.com/2009/steve-brills-news-cartel-a-consumers-perspective/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:26:46 +0000 Tim Maly http://www.quietbabylon.com/?p=486 Steve Brill, entrepreneur, law writer, founder of Court TV and recently defunct CLEAR is trying to save journalism by reversing the trend of free news online. He gave a briefing today and while I did not hear it, @NeimanLab posted the slides here.

Let me say that I LOVE the idea of a kind of iTunes for news. It is my fondest wish that I not have a separate login and password for every friggin’ site. I’d also love to be able to pay some reasonable rate to support good journalism. Like the App Store, a unified easy payment system might free up news sites to experiment with more granular payment models. I hope they do, and I hope that they understand that the results need to be consumer-friendly and mindful of the information-firehose context of content online.

I’m not a producer of news, but as a heavy consumer, the future of journalism in the face collapse is of great interest to me. As a periodic entrepreneur, I like playing with numbers. Let’s take a look at Steve’s.

Slide 4



I had NO IDEA that my time and attention was so valuable. And all this time I’ve been GIVING it away to newspapers and magazines. Heck, I’ve been PAYING some of them for the privilege. (Hey advertisers, call me! Let’s work out something where you give me the $500 directly.) But hey, look at those online numbers. Pretty grim, huh?

Taking these figures from the Boston Globe, there are only about 20 times as many online readers as as print readers, where one needs 100 unique visitors for every lost print subscriber.

Slide 5



This is where Steve comes to the rescue. There’s an untapped demand for paying for the news! 92% of us would be willing to pay $300/yr (on average)! That sounds pretty good.

Pay close attention to the chart on the right. Steve is confusing us by playing around with medians and means. The chart tells us that 21% of us are ready to pay pay up to $600, 24% would pay that “average” $300, and 45% of us will pay NO MORE than $120. (There’s an unlabelled 10%. Presumably, they are ready to pay INFINITY dollars.)

Using a mean here is disingenuous. If we charge $25/mo. for online news, we will not see 92% of visitors subscribing. We’ll see 55%. The ones willing to pay more? We’ll have to work out some kind of premium scheme, I suppose. So let’s word it another way. 55% of consumers are willing to pay $25/mo or more. 45% are willing to pay $10/mo or less. That begins to look like a lot less money.

Why this matters comes into sharp focus when we look at…

Slide 12 & Slide 13



You’re going to want to click on those and look at the fine print. The subscription models Steve has up here assume $7-8/month per subscriber, along with some per-article users who are reading only 6 stories every month. Let me be the first to say that if you are a newspaper publisher and you imagine a world where people only want to read 6 of your articles per month, YOU ARE A BAD NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER. I recognize that the idea is that these will be longtail micropayments intended to capture revenue from drive-by readership or whatever, so let’s retreat back to the monthly subscriptions (presumably, all-you-can-eat).

Steve’s numbers in Slide 5 don’t specify whether the amount people were willing to pay was intended to be per-site-they-love or overall. Given that most households only subscribe to a single newspaper and a few magazines, I think we can assume that it’s a monthly budget for online news in general.

At $7.50 a month, we’ve wiped out the budget of 45% of our online readership. They can’t afford a second subscription. Even our 24% ‘average’ readers are subscribing to only three things. Heaven help them if they want to sample from a lot of sites. At $0.25 a story, they get to read 100 stories per month across the entire Internet.

According to Google’s RSS reader, I receive 300-400 items, scan through about 30-100 of them, and read some subset of those PER DAY, not counting links from friends/Facebook/Twitter. The Globe and Mail RSS feed alone sends me 180 stories daily (note to Globe and Mail: Guys! That’s too many!). The flood is so bad that I don’t even subscribe to other newspaper feeds. It’s easier and better to click on curated links to the best articles, as picked out by friends and trusted blogs. Steve wants me to rely on a few trusted all-I-can-eat subscriptions or limit myself to 3 articles a day (assuming I’m ‘average’).

Moving from numbers to a boring annecdote: Last week a friend sent me a link to a Financial Times article. I’d gone over my article limit for the month. I went and read something else. (the end) The brutal reality of online news and opinion is that we are inundated with ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more things to read and watch than we have time to read and watch them.

I’m sympathetic with the need to fund excellent journalism and writing, but schemes that are tone deaf to the state of online news are doomed to fail. Hoping that consumers will be willing to limit themselves to a few subscriptions per month while asking them to pay (for magazines at least) 10 times as much as they used to just isn’t reasonable.

Unless the briefing contained a lot of context and nuance that were not captured by the slides, this does not look like the solution. If Brill &co. are going to convince consumers that their new service is a good value proposition, they’ve go an uphill battle.

]]> http://quietbabylon.com/2009/steve-brills-news-cartel-a-consumers-perspective/feed/ 0 http://quietbabylon.com/2009/drm-the-fight-against-posterity/ http://quietbabylon.com/2009/drm-the-fight-against-posterity/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:25:35 +0000 Tim Maly http://www.quietbabylon.com/?p=456 Check out this article on Ars Technica about law prof. Patricia Akester’s study examining the effects of DRM on the legal use of copyrighted works. As you’re reading it, bear in mind that due to laws similar to the DMCA all over the world, it is often illegal to bypass DRM encryption, even if copyright law allows you to make a copy.

Why is this important?

In a storage locker in Halifax, there is a small box which theoretically contains copies of every essay I wrote in high school. These essays are stored on a stack of floppy disks. I’ll probably never read them again. For this to be otherwise, a lot of things would need to come true.

1. I figure out which Mac OS I was running (System 6?).
2. I find a copy of the OS and get it running either on old hardware (which I also find) or virtualized.
3. I find a compatible floppy drive.
4. I find a compatible copy of the word processor (WriteNow).
5. The disks have dramatically exceeded their estimated 2-year lifespan.

In contrast, consider my University essays, all of which I can still open and read. This is possible because I have been transferring the files from computer to computer over the past 12 years. There is an unbroken chain of digital pack-ratting from the MacBook I’m using now to the Pentium 166 I built in 1997.

The loss of my essays (grades 10-12) are not a big loss to society. But it serves to illustrate a problem that plagues archivists. Digital content is very easy to copy in the short term but degrades very quickly in the medium and long term. To keep digital content alive, you have to keep it moving. Kevin Kelly calls this Movage.

Anything you want moved to the future has to be given attention to keep it moving forward.

In order to preserve content against the decay of laughably short-lived media and compatibilty, archivists need to make copies – early and often. We’re not used to thinking of it that way. We’re used to thinking of preservation as a kind of stasis. We think of climate controlled rooms and white gloves and sealed vaults.

In digital, stasis is death. Stasis is the BBC’s endangered Domesday Project, trapped on laserdiscs, needing hardware that had nearly disappeared in 2002 (interestingly, they knew this was coming but the archivists failed to keep the data alive).

It is bad enough for librarians, what with the fires, earthquakes, moisture, theft, time, and other disasters eating away at the content they seek to preserve. Copyright holders have made it all the worse, by preventing the one thing going for digital – easy, short-term, perfect copies – from happening in a legal setting.

DRM schemes make it illegal for archivists to do their jobs.

]]> http://quietbabylon.com/2009/drm-the-fight-against-posterity/feed/ 0 http://quietbabylon.com/2009/clinging-to-the-edge-of-history/ http://quietbabylon.com/2009/clinging-to-the-edge-of-history/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:31:38 +0000 Tim Maly http://www.quietbabylon.com/?p=347 Everywhere I go, I carry a pen and a stack of 3×5 index cards held together by a binder clip. It’s a Hipster PDA 1.0, from before all those apps got installed.

On one of these cards are the words: “Entrepreneurship is alive and well at the Anarchist Book Fair”. I wrote them last spring, during a trip to Montreal. This is kind of condescending thought that runs through my head when I see idealist-ideologues try to navigate the shoals of reality.

The book fair is annual. It’s a focal point – the anarchist social event of the year. People travel from all over Canada and the U.S. to visit friends, network, run workshops, and party. The contradictions don’t seem to bother anybody.

It’s literally an anti-capitalist marketplace, crammed to the gills with people selling books, t-shirts, pins and paraphenilia. It’s a weird, vibrant mirror of a county craft fair, complete with live music, hidden bottles of booze and a snack booth (vegan, organic and sustainable, we are told). And why not? Anarchists need to eat, same as everyone else. The clothes are fashionably ragged, instead of old and faded. The patches are silkscreened with black instead of embroidered in red white and blue. There are cupcakes. When the police stop by to let the organizers know that the skinhead rally has been broken up, they get booed.

Capitalism is on the run, have you heard? The Financial Times is running a whole series on what comes next.

I wonder what the fair will feel like this year. What will the mood be? Triumphant told-you-sos? Gleeful excitement at the opportunities for effecting change? Will there be the same cold worry that the rest of us feel, that the collapse might be real and total and we might not get back up? I’ve met them. When they aren’t writing autonomous anti-oppressive zines, they work in the service industry. They don’t have severance packages, they have 2 weeks notice. And they are living paycheque to paycheque or worse. How many anarchists will look in their wallets and decide they can’t make the trip this year, due to the impending collapse of capitalism.

Does it sound like I am making fun of these contradictions? I assure you I am not. It’s these kinds of barely held tensions that keep a movement alive and dynamic. And we need a vibrant anarchism. We need one that is not caught up in internal struggles of self-definition and specialist rhetoric. Come what may, there is a lot of work that needs doing that doesn’t necessarily get done by businesses anymore. The more people offering solutions, the more likely it is that one gets found.

Who am I kidding? The answer to the Financial Times’ question is probably “more capitalism”.

The Anarchist Bookfair collective affirms and promotes values of mutual aid, direct democracy, anti-authoritarianism, autonomy and solidarity. We reiterate our opposition to capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, heterosexism, racism, colonialism, statism and all other forms of oppression; we will not accept anyone to participate in the Anarchist Bookfair that perpetuates or promotes these attitudes.

-from Montreal’s Anarchist Bookfair statement of principles
photo credit: anarchosyn

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