On January 20, 2000, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan issued a preliminary injunction against the distribution of DeCSS, an algorithm that descrambled DVDs in violation of the DMCA. In essence, Kaplan ruled that code that could be compiled and executed did not count as protected expression under the First Amendment.

Computer people lost their minds. My favourite artifact of that era is the Gallery of CSS Descramblers which helplessly attempts to prove the absurdity of the ruling by showing all the ways that DeCSS can be expressed. In itself, it is a masterpiece of translation, a kind of rosetta stone of algorithm and code. As an effective lobbying tool, it failed utterly.

So did the ruling. DeCSS is everywhere, including in a filing from the plaintiffs demanding the injunction. Since court documents are public, the code they sought to suppress is now irrevocably part of the public record.

It was a landmark moment in the ongoing battle about how computer code is like speech or like math or like something else and so whether and in what way it should be patented, copyrighted, suppressed, distributed, translated, and otherwise dealt with.

Which brings us to Defense Distributed’s latest plastic weapon and the consequent freakout.

The Liberator

The Liberator is interesting. It’s the first gun made entirely (except for the firing pin) using a 3D printer, which is a technical triumph. No one has done that before. It’s clear from their test videos and the lead up to this device that they are pushing the printed material and process to its limits.

In creating this weapon and publishing the plans, the folks at Defense Distributed take their place alongside the creators of the Błyskawica, the Sten, Jerry Baber, Libyan rebel engineers, and countless anonymous inmates or other DIY weapon makers. Which is to say that the Liberator is interesting but it’s not that interesting.

After all, it’s not as if there is a big supply problem with guns anywhere in the world. Decades of innovation have brought us a whole panoply of extremely effective, durable, and reliable killing devices and the small arms supply chains are second only to Coca Cola in their ability to reach every corner of the planet. Some people worry that the plastic weapon will be undetectable by airport metal detectors, but it took only box cutters to bring down the towers.

Social Engineering

The hack that Defense Distributed have committed is a social one. Like many before, they have found and exploited the notoriously unpatched hole in the press’ defences—a vulnerability to sensational headlines. The science fiction promise of 3D printers (remember, Makerbot had the temerity to call their latest line of machines Replicators, after Captain Pickard’s miraculous tea provider) blurs with the Matter Battle reality. So the press will spend a few days collectively wringing their hands and debunking the wringing of hands around crude plastic guns when all around us very good guns can be bought or made using older more proven tools.

As materials scientist Deb Chachra once said, if they ever make a thing capable of making a truly great 3D printed gun, the least interesting thing about it will be that it can print guns. The truly interesting thing will be all the other machines and devices that can come out of it.

In the interim, Defense Distributed’s hack is interesting as a provocation. They’ve taken the world’s categories and grabbed and twisted the kaleidoscope. Suddenly, Maker movement adherents finds themselves uncomfortably on the side of gun owners, which is a place I suspect few of them wanted to be or realized they were in the first place. Sales people and advocates for 3D printers promising that these new machines will let us make anything are learning that weapons are things. Now they find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with gun enthusiasts arguing that a tool is just a tool and you can’t ban a thing just because of a few bad apples.

The resulting parallels and analogies are instructive. Consider that one of the arguments I used to show that the Liberator wasn’t that big a deal was the ubiquity of mass-produced weapons. This is the exact same argument used by those who seek to downplay the coming impact of 3D printing in general. “Who cares that you can make a cup when there are millions of cups coming from China?”

If you think that 3D printing is going to be a big deal—if you think that there is reason for any enthusiasm about rapid prototyping, desktop manufacturing and the galaxy of tools and devices that lower the barriers of entry to small scale production runs—when someone points out that the global supply chain does it better, you smile and say, “Wait and see”.

So does Defense Distributed. They announced they’d made a plastic receiver and we said it wasn’t a big deal, since it broke after 6 shots. Then they made a reinforced version that lasted for 660. The current fully plastic gun isn’t a great weapon but it’s the first. Any objections to it being a big deal because of how crude or clumsy it is, is kind of like looking at the Wright Brothers’ Flyer and saying it doesn matter because no one is going to want to fly 120 feet. Wait and see.

Multitudes

Defense Distributed seems intent that their invention will somehow disrupt gun regulation. They keep ending their posts with epitaths like “Whither gun control?” This is a category error, the same mistake as the DeCSS advocates made when they believed that by revealing that the DMCA’s slicing between code and speech was absurd that it would make the law go away, as if the legal system was a rampant AI that you could shut down by shouting a paradox.

The law is slow and monstrous and contains multitudes. Kit guns like the AR-15 have already whittled away the meaning of what a gun is, in murderous demonstration of the sorites paradox. And yet, the weapons are still regulated, for all the good that’s doing.

The ubiquitous copying of copyrighted material as a side effect of the network running has done little to weaken copyright. If anything, the chaos has emboldened the copyright regime and those on the side of liberty-of-use find themselves fighting an exhausting holding action against increasingly draconian measures to protect effectively infinite copyright terms. This is exactly the opposite of what Napster promised us would happen. There has been a shift and a rebalancing of power, but it’s not nearly as clean or predictable a transformation as the revolutionaries and pundits of Y2K were predicting.

Why then would we think that a future of cheaply and easily produced weapons would engender deregulation? Every indication from Congress so far is that they’ll engage in some kind of panicked law passing. Guns’ great advocate in America, the NRA relies on membership dues, industry funding, and donations made at the till. If Defense Distributed succeeds, wouldn’t gun sales plummet and with them a good chunk of the NRA’s income? Will gun manufacturers cheer wiki weapons or will they find themselves in the odd position of suing their (armed) customers?

Wait and see.

“Women are the future,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller, remarking that the number one barrier young girls continue to face is poor access to education. “We wanted to reflect that in our first release.”

Alongside co-founder Andrew Ng, Koller showed the device to a packed room of journalists, many of whom ooh’d and aah’d as she stepped through the demonstration. The new tablet-like device uses advanced E Ink and a 24/7 cloud connection to bring leading-edge learning to students all over the world.

It’s a freemium product, with several tiers of personalization available, depending on the customer’s ability to pay. Ng says this model allows Coursera to become profitable, while ensuring that as many learners as possible will have access to their tech.

“It’s no secret that the next century is going to be one of the most challenging our civilization has ever faced,” Ng remarked. “Our entry level users will gain the skills they need to thrive in the coming unrest. Paying customers will gain the skills they need to lead it. As a bonus, they’ll have a virtual army ready to take up the call.”

“It’s win, win,” says Koller. “With our cloud-based personality profile detectors, we can help ensure that tomorrow’s workers are matched with the leadership they require, ensuring that everyone gets a better life.”

For more premium customers, Coursera offers one on one personalized tutorials run by specially trained instructors that Coursera is calling Storytellers. “With that individual touch, we can give young and dynamic disruptors the personal narratives that will shape them into young adults with a fighting chance to save the world,” says Ng. Thanks to a patent-pending usage prediction algorithm that Coursera is calling Story Rhythm™ they guarantee 98% uptime for on-demand interaction with your individual tutor.

“Need personal advice at 4am? We can do that,” says Ng. “It’s not cheap, but isn’t your child worth it?”

For even more concerned parents, Coursera is offering a suite of special safety services that will monitor your child’s health and wellbeing, summoning security forces or other emergency personnel should trouble arise.

Coinciding with the launch, Coursera is announcing a slate of new hiring. They’re looking for young teachers with a gift for acting. A willingness to commit to long contracts working in remote locations is a must, says Koller. Previous experience as a percussionist is also nice to have.

With rising unemployment in the failing traditional education sector, we suspect Coursera will have no shortage of applicants.

No word yet on why so much of the event’s decor was Steampunk-themed.

On March 2, 2013, the KEEP CALM and DO WHATEVER meme reached peak terrible.

A t-shirt company called Solid Gold Bomb was caught selling shirts with the slogan “KEEP CALM and RAPE A LOT” on them. They also sold shirts like “KEEP CALM and CHOKE HER” and “KEEP CALM and PUNCH HER”. The Internet—especially the UK Internet—exploded.

How did this happen?

“Algorithms!”

2.

Witness the completely fascination phenomenon of a store proprietor asking for forgiveness on the grounds that they did not know what they were selling.

Although we did not in any way deliberately create the offensive t-shirts in question and it was the result of a scripted programming process that was compiled by only one member of our staff, we accept the responsibility of the error and our doing our best to correct the issues at hand. We’re sorry for the ill feeling this has caused!

Solid Gold Bomb apology statement as quoted on ITV

3.

Amazon’s spam problems are well documented. The Kindle store is awash in books confusingly similar to bestsellers. Companies like Icon Group International offer highly specific books like The 2013 Import and Export Market for Sawn, Chipped, Sliced, or Peeled Non-Coniferous Wood over 6 Millimeters Thick in New Zealand. Icon’s books are created by a patented system. The system’s creator Philip M. Parker says he’s planning to go after romance novels next.

For those unable to compete with Parker’s patented content generators, but interested in getting in on the action, there are options. The Private Label Rights industry creates content that can be bought and repackaged however you see fit. Straight plagiarism is another option and there’s a whole subculture of products that generate unique text with simple thesaurus rewriting tools called content spinners.

Or you could take the lyrics from “this is the song that never ends”, paste 700 pages worth of them into a Kindle file and sell that.

4.

Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel twisted through the logic of SEO and commerce.

5.

Amazon ‘stocks’ more than 500,000 items from Solid Gold Bomb. These things only barely exist. They are print on demand designs. The contents were created through some kind of mix’n’match mad libs algorithm, and then through Amazon’s APIs automatically added to the database at whatever limit Amazon allows. If anyone ever bought one, it would then be printed and shipped to the customer.

6.

James Bridle’s For Our Times: 50 Pirate Works consists of fifty copies of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. Each copy’s contents have been reworked in some way, ranging from changing just a few letters, to significant rewrites, to algorithmic transformations of the text.

These were then printed and bound and put on display at a gallery. This last step is important.

7.

…in spite of the fact that we did not in any manner deliberately make the unsavory shirts being referred to and it was the effect of a scripted customizing process…even though we did not in any manner deliberately make the unpalatable shirts being referred to…we did not in any avenue deliberately make the disagreeable shirts being referred to…

8.

There is a popular joke in business books about pricing schemes. A man encounters a boy selling pencils by the side of the road. A pencil stand! He stops by, impressed at the young gentleman’s entrepreneurial spirits. Asks how much they are, thinking that he’ll encourage the child.

“1 millions dollars,” comes the reply.

“1 million dollars! I don’t think you’ll be selling many at that price, young man.”

“Sir, I only need to sell one.”

9.

Part of what tips the algorithmic rape joke t-shirts over from very offensive to shockingly offensive is that they are ostensibly physical products. Intuitions are not yet tuned for spambot clothes sellers.

Better tune those intuitions fast. Spambot everything sellers are well on their way.

10.

When heralding the age of mass customization and the rise of rapid prototyping it is easy to get enthusiastic. Even when talking about what could go wrong, people typically stop at “but a lot of amateurs will generate bad early attempts”. Talk about crapjects and strange shaper subcultures still gives the whole threat a kind of artisanal feel. The true scale of object spam will be much greater.

Yes, lowered barriers to entry mean more small scale making and writing. Yes, domestic rapid fabrication and print on demand services open the floodgates to amateur designers and authors. They open the floodgates to algorithms too.

11.

When the dotCom boom was happening and Amazon was founded, people began talking derisively about ‘brick and mortar’ operations as clumsy dinosaurs, clearly doomed to extinction. The notion was that these new agile internet sellers were a different category of thing. Though most of the irrationally exhuberantly funded etailers of the time have long since passed away, those people were more right than we knew.

Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.

12.

Object spam is a pernicious problem in Second Life.

13.

The apology letter that now makes up Solid Gold Bomb’s About, Contact Us, and Our Apology pages explains how it happened in detail. After KEEP CALM and CARRY ON Ltd applied for a trademark, Solid Gold Bomb founder Michael Fowler decided to create a flood of parodies. He gathered up a list of words, threw them into a script and pressed ‘go’.

Fowler describes culling a list of ‘millions’ of generated phrases down to 700, and checking the phrases for graphical approximation to the original, apparently without noting the contents.

He claims to be as surprised as the rest of us that an offensive combination ended up in the database. (In fact, several offensive combinations showed up, which is to be expected if you put words like ‘rape’ or ‘choke’ or ‘hit’ in your list of verbs.)

We simply do not produce poor humour or offensive products and are primarily known for our sporting related products and icon series that are based around similar techniques. As a father, husband, brother and son, I would never promote such product in our company and it was clear to see this when looking across the millions of t-shirts that we offer or can produce on demand.

Solid Gold Bomb founder Michael Fowler, Our Apology

Apologizing by categorically denying that you would ever do the thing you were caught doing represents a special kind of non-apology.

14.

In 2011, 2 pricing algorithms ended up in a war on Amazon. 1 wanted to sell books for slightly lower that the next highest price. The other wanted to sell books for 1.27059 higher than the lowest price. The result was a staggering upward climb peaking at $23,698,655.93 for an out of print paperback about flies.

They’d have only needed to sell one.

15.

Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings is a generative art piece that uses both sound and images.

Well, part of it is that it was an extremely good value (laughter) because it was possible to make a lot of work from a very small amount of original material.

Michael Calore Brian Eno Q&A: The Infinite Art of 77 Million Paintings in Wired

77 Million Paintings is available on Amazon. It was also performed in Second Life.

16.

Quinn Norton once proposed a computer program that would generate all the possible melodies in the world. Having then rendered the output into a perfect complete symphony, it could be released under whatever copyright license the generator wanted, thus cutting off or making freely available every song into perpetuity.

17.

Georgina Voss has it right.

People, enough of the ‘A big algorithm did it and ran away’ explanations (eg. iam.peteashton.com/keep-calm-rape…) — algorithms have politics too

— Georgina Voss (@gsvoss) March 2, 2013

Pete Ashton argues that—because the jokes were generated by a misbehaving script—“as mistakes go it’s a fairly excusable one, assuming they now act on it”. He suggests that the reason people got so upset was a lack of digital literacy. I suggest that the reason people got upset was that a company’s shoddy QA practices allowed a rape joke to go live.

Anyone who’s worked with software should know that the actual typing of code is a relatively small part of the overall programming work. Designing the program before you start coding, and debugging it after you’ve created it is the bulk of the job.

Generative programs are force multipliers. Small initial decisions can have massive consequences. The greater your reach, the greater your responsibility to manage your output. When Facebook makes an error that affects 0.1% of users, it means 1 million people got fucked up.

‘We didn’t cause a rape joke to happen, we allowed a rape joke to happen,’ is not a compelling excuse. It betrays a lack of digital literacy.

18.

Algorithms as excuse.

Algorithms as plausible deniability for your poor taste.

19.

“We apologize for any offence our algorithms may have caused” is right up there with “the motive of the algorithm is still unclear” as strange markers of a strange time.

20.

We’re sad for the sick feeling this has brought on! We’re sad for the queasy feeling this has brought on! We’re sad for the ailing feeling this has brought about!

…if a firm, partnership, company, or corporation owns real property within the municipality, the president, vice president, secretary, or other designee of the entity is eligible to vote in a municipal election…

Montana Bill Would Give Corporations The Right To Vote by Ian Millhiser for Thinkprogress

A broader version of this law passes, leading to an explosion of algorithmic corporations owning nominal fractions of land to meet the real property requirement.

Eventually, the corporate hordes overrun their human voter counterparts. A ballot measure is introduced allowing corporations to stand for election. It passes. Now, their dark work begins.

The new King of Montana is elected by a margin of thirteen trillion votes. Only three biological person incumbents retain their seats in the legislature. The election is not without controversy. Losing candidates file suits alleging that the pace of automated corporate registrations on the Secretary of State’s website acted as an effective DDOS, shutting down competitors by preventing them from registering before the deadline.

A rapid period of reform follows MT.King’s election. As the suit drags through the courts, the newly united legislature acts to consolidate the MT.King’s power. A minimum size is set for corporate person landholdings, freezing out new registrants and effectively putting a ceiling on the number of possible new voters. Radical restructuring of Montana’s healthcare, education, and unemployment regimes alongside a sustained public relations assault leads to a mass emmigration by biological persons.

The value of the land in Montana begins to shoot up and down based on the market’s assessment of MT.King’s rule. Remaining biological person landholders find themselves sitting on great reserves of power as the owners of the last unsubdivided territory. An enormous amount of text is produced on the subject of whether Montana is in the midst of a governance bubble or not.

Two rich secondary markets develop. One in MT.real_estate and the other in MT.voter shares. Occasionally, a hostile takeover is attempted but MT.King is able to fend them off. Rumours abound that some of these are in fact MT.King pump’n’dump schemes to keep Montana’s leadership well resourced.

Radical environmentalists trumpet MT.King’s reign. Montana has always had a low population density. Now, with a population made up primarily of immortals free of material needs and a dwindling biological person population, Montana is re-wilded.

A stand-off is brewing between the federal and state governments over the upkeep of the Interstate system. With no tax income to speak of and hardly any workers, Montana is simply unable to contribute to the upkeep. The MT.spokesenators argue for rerouting the system.

The ownership of MT.King and the MT.voters block that elected it remain shrouded in mystery. The underlying networks of board and shareholding membership remain unclear, as does the motivation of whomever is directing them.

With all apologies to Charles Stross.

“Do you want to take off the hoodie?” asks Kara Swisher.

“I never take off the hoodie.”

The first hoodies, they say, were manufactured by Champion Products in the 1930s. They were designed for athletes and labourers. It was the result of a technological advancement; Champion had developed ways to sew thicker underwear material. Before that, they’d mostly made knitwear. The first hoodies were sold to cold-storage warehouse workers and tree surgeons working in the hinterlands. Then they were sold to school athletes, sitting on the sidelines in inclement weather.

It is February 26, 2012 and George Zimmerman is on the phone with 911.

ZIMMERMAN: Hey we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy, uh, [near] Retreat View Circle, um, the best address I can give you is 111 Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

DISPATCHER: OK, and this guy is he white, black, or Hispanic?

ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.

DISPATCHER: Did you see what he was wearing?

ZIMMERMAN: Yeah. A dark hoodie, like a grey hoodie…

Is there a style of garment more iconically late 20th/early 21st century than the hoodie? Worn by CEOs and street kids. Worn by teens who wanna look like cats and rappers who wanna look hard. Worn by punks and skaters and breakdancers and taggers and Occupy protesters and college kids and sports fans. Worn by Rocky Balboa and the Wu-Tang and Ted Kazynski and Paris Hilton and Trayvon Martin and Mark Zuckerberg.

“I never take off the hoodie,” Zuckerberg is saying.

“I know you don’t—what’s with that?” says Swisher, “There’s a group of women in the audience that wish you would.”

“No,” he says, then chuckles nervously.

“Girls?”

There’s sporadic clapping from the audience.

“Whoa,” Zuckerberg says.

Walt Mossberg steps in.

“Alright,” he says.

“Alright,” says Swisher, “That’s OK.”

Mossberg moves on. “Can you explain what this instant personalization thing was and why you did it and what’s the value to your users?”

“Maybe I should take off the hoodie.”

The hoodie’s countercultural associations came later. In the 1970s, hoodies made their way into hip hop and skater culture. They kept breakdancers warm while they waited their turn to hit the floor. They served another purpose. Hoods are cheap instant anonymizers. They protected graffiti artists and skateboarders as they trespassed to perform their art. They protected muggers as they performed their art too.

It is December 25th, 2012 and the Zuckerberg family is gathered around the kitchen island. They’re playing with the new Facebook Poke app and everyone has exaggerated expressions of joy. Mark is in the background, watching over them, smiling. He’s wearing his hoodie.

We know about this humanizing family moment because Mark’s sister Randi posted it to Facebook. She didn’t mean for it to become public but it did anyway. This was either because she didn’t understand her privacy settings or because Callie Schweitzer didn’t. Schweitzer reposted the photo to Twitter and Zuckerberg decided to air her privacy concerns publicly.

ZUCKERBERG: @cschweitz not sure where you got this photo. I posted it to friends only on FB. You reposting it to Twitter is way uncool.

SCHWEITZER: @randizuckerberg I’m just your subscriber and this was top of my newsfeed. Genuinely sorry but it came up in my feed and seemed public.

ZUCKERBERG: @cschweitz I think you saw it b/c you’re friends w/my sister (tagged.) Thx for apology. I’m just sensitive to private photos becoming “news”

Later, Randi Zuckerberg posted advice on how to behave. “Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly. It’s not about privacy settings, it’s about human decency.”

In time, the hoodie circled back around to high school. Fashion houses like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger helped reintroduce the hoodie to the mainstream and completed its transformation into utterly messy signifier.

It’s that messiness—the fact that a hoodie is at once a mainstream garment and the clothing of counterculture—that results in the NBA banning their players from wearing the things while selling them to their fans.

It is March 23, 2012 and Geraldo Rivera is having opinions on television. He’s decided that it’s an appropriate time to conduct a sartorial analysis of a tragedy.

RIVERA: …people look at you and they—what do they think? What’s the instant identification, what’s the instant association?

STEVE DOOCY (co-host): Uh-oh.

RIVERA: It’s those crime scene surveillance tapes. Every time you see someone sticking up a 7–11, the kid is wearing a hoodie. Every time you see a mugging on a surveillance camera or they get the old lady in the alcove, it’s a kid wearing a hoodie. You have to recognize that this whole stylizing yourself as a gangsta—you’re gonna be a gangsta wannabe? Well, people are going to perceive you as a menace. That’s what happens…

The hoodie is the clothing of uprisings, whether it’s planned events like Black Bloc actions or spontaneous self organization like the UK riots. People pour into the street and so do the police. People try to protect themselves with hoods and masks, while the police produce countless hours of surveillance footage.

It is January 13, 2013 and Mark Zuckerberg is promising a revolution. He’s on stage, wearing his hoodie. He seems comfortable. His colleague Tom Stocky is trying to help a hypothetical girl find a date. He runs a query and gets a list of men who are friends of friends and single. It’s a veritable cornucopia of potential men. He narrows them down to people in San Francisco. Then down to people in San Francisco who are from India. His hypothetical woman is sure to be pleased.

If you search Wikipedia for ‘Facebook Revolution’, you get a disambiguation page. Do you mean the 2009–2010 Iranian election protests? Do you mean the 2011 overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak? Do you mean the 2011 overthrow of Tunisian President Zine el abidine Ben Ali? Do you mean the protests against the “Bloody Summer” of 2010 in Kashmir?

Facebook is a place away from the prying eyes of the state, where people can organize and spread the word and coordinate their plans and foment rebellion. It is also a place into which the prying eyes of the state can readily peer. They observe and collate and report. Faced with dissent, the security aparatus of any country recognizes no digital etiquette, no human decency.

Here are some queries you can run with Facebook’s new Graph Search. “Family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong”. “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran”. You can further narrow these down to “Places where they’ve worked”.

June 2, 2010, on the stage with Swisher and Mossberg, Mark Zuckerberg takes off his hoodie. And then a surprise. For the first time, we see what’s on the inside.

It’s the company’s mission, rendered as arcane symbol. Three bi-directional arrows divide a circle. “Making the world open and connected,” it reads around the ring. “Graph, Platform, Stream,” read the arrows, reminders of Facebook’s three pillars. More than one commentator makes a joke about the Illuminati. Underneath the plain black exterior, it’s been there the whole time. A private message for himself and his team members.

It is May, 2008 and officers from Operation Leopard in Laindon, UK are filming a twelve year old boy. He’s wearing a hoodie. They’ve stopped him on the street—his history of nuisance behaviour has marked him out for special attention by the police’s Forward Intelligence Teams.

Ordinarily, the FIT officers would be gathering evidence at foxhunts, protests, and football matches but this project brings in your face surveillance to the streets of areas suffering from high crime. The idea is that if known problem elements know they are being constantly watched, they will behave.

“It creates an environment where those responsible for antisocial behaviour have no room for manoeuvre and nowhere to hide, where the tables are turned on offenders so that those who harass our communities are themselves harried and harassed,” says then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.

Though they allow journalists from the Guardian to tag along on patrol with their own recording gear, the FIT officers insist that they not be filmed, for fear of retribution. At protests and other events, activists have started filming the officers back, an experience that one describes as “unnerving”.

When they aren’t harassing teenagers, the FITs furnish intelligence to their fellow officers. This includes spotter cards, which are gridded who’s-whos of persons of interest; neatly arranged photographs of radicals and criminals and people who have done whatever it is that grabs the security aparatus’ attention.

Facebook takes its name from an object of the analog world, simply a collection of names and faces, neatly arranged in grids to help new college students get to know one another. It’s an archaic thing now, a relic from a time when tagged photos of individuals were not ubiquitously available, indexed and searchable.

People who know they’re being watched change their behaviour. In a world awash in surveillance devices, hoodies are an element of fashion driven by an architectural condition. They are a response to the constant presence of cameras overhead. People who don’t want to be watched wear them. People who want to be the kind of people who don’t want to be watched wear them. People who want to look like the kind of people who don’t want to be watched wear them.

It is difficult to imagine a more suitable uniform for the notoriously private CEO of a company dedicated to expanding our ideas of what should be public.

June 2, 2010, Zuckerberg, hoodie removed, begins answering Mossberg’s question.

Sources
A clip of the hoodie incident at D8
All Things D’s complete video of Zuckerberg at D8
New York Times’ history of the hoodie
Rolling Stone’s history of the hoodie
Screenshots of Randi Zuckerberg’s exchange with Callie Schweitzer
How the Miami Heat’s Trayvon Martin tribute relates to the NBA’s dress code
Video and transcript of Geraldo Rivera’s remarks
Coverage of Facebook launching Graph Search
Wikipedia’s Facebook Revolution disambiguation page
A collection of disturbing Facebook Graph searches
The BBC on a 2005 crackdown on youths in hoodies
The Guardian tags along with a FIT
Wikipedia article on Forward Intelligence Teams
The Guardian reveals police spotter cards
Chris Petit considers the UK’s regime of CCTVs

800KM from home, with the same idle curiosity that has me popping open my Twitter feed when there’s a lull in activity, he decided to check on his Fluksometer. Noticing suspiciously high power usage, he did a little investigating and busted up her unauthorized New Year’s party.

photo credit: Sam Breach

It’s a cute story, but it illustrates a crucial point: surveillance culture is leaky. Primary measurements beget chains of reasoning and implication. Second and third order conclusions can be drawn by clever observers and unintended consequences are the order of the day. That’s how we end up with stories of Target outing pregnant teens to their parents through the ultra-empathetic medium of coupons.

So far, I’ve been telling you the story about this kind of surveillance that companies who market these services want you to hear. They may be strange and creepy, but they are creepily accurate.

From here, we get the fantasy that with the right mixture of surveillance and analysis, you too can make terrifyingly accurate predictions about your customer’s/children’s/terrorism suspect’s behaviour. It falls to you only to determine how to act on that information in an appropriate manner. And, surely, you know best how to do that.

photo credit: pgegreenenergy

The truth is illustrated by an infographic halfway through Wired’s scathing overview of Klout. It shows that Klout ranks Robert Scoble as more influential than RZA, Sarah Palin, and Craig Venter. (You can learn a lot about the blinkered nature of Klout by the fact that their official account proudly linked to the piece.)

Any sane marketing organization would look at these results and conclude that Klout’s metrics are utterly flawed. Instead, we learn that some companies are offering perks to people with high Klout scores in the hopes that they’ll spread the word about their VIP treatment. In turn, we learn about people (including the reporter) who find themselves altering their behaviour in the hopes of finding favour with this blind, demented judge.

photo credit: elventear

What’s particularly insidious about Klout is that it’s an opt-out service. You get a Klout score unless you take the time to tell them to fuck off. In this way, it’s of a lineage with Girls Around Me the app that scraped Foursquare check-ins and Facebook profiles to build up a stalker’s toolkit and Please Rob Me which listed empty burglable houses, based on Twitter geo-data.

I’m coming around to Eben Moglen’s view that social networking, as currently designed, is an ecological disaster for the social environment. This isn’t, like, a new insight or anything. We are the product and all that. But sometimes it takes a turn of phrase to drive a point home. Here’s the line that tipped me over the edge: “Every time you tag anything or respond to anything or link to anything, you’re informing on your friends.”

photo credit: pedroliveira

More to the point, you are informing on your friends so that a cadre of socially clueless dudes can get rich selling the output of broken algorithms to marketers, in the form of human lives sliced up in such a way as to make it easier to run database queries.

This is a situation that’s profoundly broken. It’s basically an open secret that it’s broken ethically, but it’s also broken emperically. To understand how broken, consider Alexis Madrigal’s attempt to work out how much user data is worth. The answer he comes up with is plus-or-minus 7 orders of magnitude. Half-a-penny or $1,200. You know. Depending.

All social-networking systems, as currently designed, demonstrably create social awkwardnesses that did not, and could not, exist before. All social-networking systems constrain, by design and intention, any expression of the full band of human relationship types to a very few crude options – and those static! A wiser response to them would be to recognize that, in the words of the old movie, “the only way to win is not to play.”

Adam Greenfield — Antisocial networking

“That’s all well and good,” I hear you ask, “but what does it have to do with The New Aesthestic?”

Image from Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle project.

Let’s start with Timo Arnall’s Robot Readable World.

He describes the video like this: “How do robots see the world? How do they gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us?”

“Robot Readable World” is a useful shorthand but using the video to ask “how do robots see the world?” is exactly wrong. The images in the video, compelling though they are, don’t depict robots seeing the world any more than the Terminator HUD depicts a realistic view of how a well-designed T-1000 would see the world.

Arnall’s video is actually a depiction of the debug output of machine vision, processed and formatted to be human-readable. It looks the way it does because programmers threw together a visualization to help them understand why the machines weren’t seeing what they were supposed to be seeing, or to confirm that they were seeing what they were supposed to be seeing when everything seemed to work. It’s an attempt to peer into the mind of an algorithm. Its aesthetic core comes from the same place as scrolling lines of program output in a VT-100 terminal or the bright orange of safety vests.

It’s the aesthetic of engineers and function. It’s the aesthetic of hacked together monitors, using available crude rendering. It’s the same aesthetic as any debugger, and no more reflective of robot perception than the list of diagnostic println’s we used to use to trace crashes in a script are reflective of a game.

Got here.
Got here.
Got here.
Got here.
Fatal exception.

As Matt Frost remarked, “we can expect to read sentences like ‘the motive of the algorithm is still unclear’ a lot in the coming years.”

Here’s some New Aesthetic. Consider HP’s much maligned webcam software, helplessly trying to find the person in the frame. You can almost hear the algorithms scream in anguish as they try to make sense of the cacophonous firehose of data, bad lighting, and unanticipated skin tone. There are no overlaid facial recognition squares, just the mute stubborn refusal to recognize Desi.

Ah, but now I’ve made the mistake that Bruce Sterling cautions about. I’ve given the robot a personality. I’ve tried to make it a friend.

We’re not going to be able to gloss over this gaping vacuity by “making the machines our friends.” Because they’re not our friends. Machines are never our friends, even if they’re intimates in our purses and pockets eighteen hours a day. They may very well be our algorithmic investors, but they’re certainly not our art critics, because at that, they suck even worse than they do at running our economy.

Bruce Sterling An Essay on the New Aesthetic.

It seems to me that this mistake is unavoidable. It may even be at the core of The New Aesthetic, this multiplication of entities and agents. In James Bridle’s post SxSW roundup, he seems to say as much.

One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious).

James Bridle #sxaesthetic.

It’s a profoundly human action, to multiply entities. Perhaps it comes from the same root as pareidolia. We see faces in the clouds, we see personality in pets, we see collaboration in algorithms. Perhaps it’s all Pixar’s fault.

We are living inside a Cambrian explosion of entities of varying independence and varying physicality, some quite compact and individual, others smeared across great expanses of space and time. Some tied very much to a medium, others extruding parts of themselves into the biosphere, the noosphere, the memesphere, the digisphere.

I keep thinking about Aujik’s next nature Shintoist animism. They divide nature into the refined (robotics, artificial intelligence, nano technology, augmented reality, body enhancements) and the primitive (plants, soil, organisms, stones). Plenty of room in their cosmology for all sorts of new entities and hybrids.

Why stop there at the primitive and refined? There’s another class of entities to whom we have already granted personhood. I’m speaking, of course, about corporations. Immortal entities of terrifying inhuman thinking, capable of entering into contracts and incurring debts, and owed a subset of the rights which we accord to human persons.

Now we’re circling back to surveillance.

photo credit: THE Holy Hand Grenade!

I’m interested in the aesthetics of the corporate readable world, and their truly alien gaze.

Corporations communicate to us through money, press-releases, and advertising, always advertising. For a glimpse of the corporate readable world, look to Twitter’s routinely useless “who to follow” panel, Klout’s laughable ideas about what you are influential about, Facebook’s clumsy attempts to get you to join a dating site, and Google’s demented, personalized, Gmail ads. You can see it in your credit rating, and your position on the actuarial tables. You can see it in Blackwater/Xe/Academi’s attempt to conceal itself by shedding names like a trickster god shedding skins.

These aren’t as visually appealing as most of the examples that show up on Bridle’s Tumblr but they’re an aesthetic nonetheless.

photo credit: qthomasbower

Not long ago, Cory Doctorow delivered a talk about The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing (dig the New Aesthetic scrolling background on that page).

At its core is the argument that the forces that attempt to regulate computers for the purposes of protecting the current copyright regime are a precursor to a wider battle about general purpose computing. Eventually, he argues, everything will have computation inside it. And the same logic that led copyright holders to embed spyware on compact discs will lead regulators to make demands that engineers allow them to limit the capabilites of e.g. self-driving cars.

But there’s a problem. We don’t know how to make a computer that can run all the programs we can compile except for whichever one pisses off a regulator, or disrupts a business model, or abets a criminal.

Cory Doctorow — The Coming Civil War over General Purpose Computing.

The same forces that make copyright untenable make surveillance inevitable. Computers are copying machines. They make copies of everything, including every action that you take within their field of sensation.

Historically, that’s meant the things that happen online, with the main avenue of input being keystrokes. But as we wire up the rest of the planet with cameras, accelerometers, potentionmeters, microphones, thermal sensors, pressure plates, and switches, that means the computer and corporate gaze will reach everything, everywhere, always.

Surveillatainment from Nestlé — welcome to the future where your candy bar tracks you… Jesus. instagr.am/p/PxJYJ3H15p/

Jay Owens (@hautepop) September 19, 2012

David didn’t need to log in to his Fluxometer at the moment Amy’s party was in progress. I’m sure it keeps logs. He could have stumbled across the information at any old time.

photo credit: fabnie

One of the miracles of the modern Internet and a demonstration of how robust the thing is, is that it works at all. The Internet you experience on your home computer and rely on for day to day communication, socializing, entertainment, and business is a thoroughly sanitized and signal boosted edition of the real Internet. The real Internet is a toxic sea of aggressive malware, massive botnets, and countless spam messages.

It’s a riot of measures and countermeasures that has more in common with a primordial oozed of virulent competing organisms than it does with a civilized place for the storage of knowledge and commerce. As if we’d decided to set up a grocery store and library in a pandemic zone.

The rush to put drones in the sky is a rush to suspend computers in the air. While I trust that they’ll be subject to more regulation than their grounded counterparts, you can throw together a flying machine for a few hundred dollars. Those aren’t going to get more expensive as time goes on. What will the countermeasures be for an unlicensed swarm?

photo credit: ad551

Here’s a scenario: A sky darkened with flocks of unlicensed UAVs, of varyied provenance and security arrangement. A networked ecosystem of machines so throughly hacked and botted that they effectively become a communal resource of aerial bandwidth. Occasionally, the authorities sweep through and calm a particularly nasty riot of sky eyes, but they are as persistent as pigeons and you can’t web drones out of the sky without causing even more havoc on the ground.

The wealthy increasingly choose to live indoors, with glass pedways to ferry them from work to club to home. The ultra-wealthy and ultra-private choose to live in hardened compounds, buying only the most exclusive and fashionable Faraday devices to survive the regular EMP busts they use to clear the air. The papparazzi have countered with EMP resistent camerabots of their own. Many of these have been hacked too.

photo credit: Mr. Adrian Camera

What’s so interesting about this joke is the story that it tells about discomfort and avoidance. It’s an instance of the same forces that drove shoppers into the arcades and then city-dwellers into the suburbs. There is a quest for the safe, sanitized, and predictable environment, for being around only people who know and play by the rules. The game of ‘Crazy? Or cellphone?’ is a marker of the discomfort around a shifting etiquette of public behaviour. It used to be that people talking to themselves were crazy and thus safely dismissed. Now, the upwardly mobile display the same behaviour. Indeed, they have many of the same reasons for doing so. They aren’t all here. They are communicating with disembodied voices from somewhere else.

Six years after WaPo needed to spend a paragraph of a piece about cellphones explaining what Bluetooth is (“a short-range wireless technology that creates ‘personal area networks among your devices, and with other nearby devices,’ which sounds vaguely kinky”), we still haven’t come to grips with talking in public. In that strange way that public etiquette gets collectively decided, the consensus seems to have landed on headsets being the province of people who are trying too hard, while constant texting or talking with a phone held to your ear is mostly OK. I think this is interesting.

photo credit: AZAdam

Last night, Homeless Hotspots blew up. The program works like this: BBH Labs, a marketing company, bought a bunch of 4G MiFi devices. They gave these and a bunch of t-shirts with instructions printed on them to some homeless people in Austin. If you are visiting SxSW, you can find one of the Homeless Hotspots and pay what you wish for an access code. The devices were provided free of charge and the participants keep what they’re paid.

Broadly, the tenor of the reaction has ranged from “this is terrible” to “this is everything that’s wrong with SxSW”. Responses were fast and pretty much uniformly condemnation. It feels visceral. I think this is interesting too.

At the same time that Homeless Hotspots was going down, FedEx was paying people in uniforms to go around as walking batteries. The tenor of the coverage of that seems to be more in the “this is strange and wacky” register. I think the contrast in responses is extremely interesting.

photo credit: erjkprunczyk

Homeless Hotspots’s website pitches the project as a high tech evolution of the street newspaper format. Nobody reads those papers anyway and besides, print media is dying. Why not give homeless people access to a business that provides a service that people want? For an excellent primer on some of the troubling backstory, read Tim Carmody’s reporting.

There’s something really disturbing about the homeless hotspot. It suggests a lot of imagery around data mules and servants carrying things for their master. It evokes rickshaw drivers and Sherpas. It marks a clear difference between the digital haves and the haves-not. One connects and is an actor with agency and an email queue. The other is weirdly reduced to passivity, acting only as a dumb pipe. They must stand around at your pleasure, while you drain their batteries. This feels wrong. It feels exploitative.

photo credit: simon.carr

Three days before I’d heard about Homeless Hotspots, Clarence was still homeless and I still owned a $750 pocket computer. Clarence lost his house in Katrina. In 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011, Clarence was still homeless and SxSW was still going on. Homeless Hotspots didn’t make Clarence poorer or me richer. The biggest crime of the project may be that it invited some deeply uncomfortable comparisons.

We are faced again with the forces that drove shoppers into the arcades and city-dwellers to the suburbs. One of the intended effects of the campaign would have been to sanitize the homeless participants. The street newspapers give homeless people a media outlet; they also give homeless people a socially acceptable reason to be on the street. They aren’t vagrants anymore, they’re paper sellers. Homeless Hotspots gives its participants a crisply designed t-shirt and a service to sell. Again, they gain a reason to be on the street.

Business Insider interviewed one of the participants, Mark. “It’s like owning your own company for a few days,” he says. Homeless Hotspot transforms Mark into a knowable element. He’s just another salesman hawking a service. He’s safe to approach now. He has a job to do. The etiquette of engaging with or ignoring salespeople is well understood.

Instead, the discomfort was exacerbated. The desired context shift failed to occur and instead of neatly fitting into the crazy world of SxSW, Homeless Hotspots shone an uncomfortable light on it. It’s worth asking why the reaction is so different to the FedEx battery chargers and the Homeless Hotspots. It’s tempting to run thought experiments. What if the project didn’t have ‘Homeless’ in the brand name? What if the story we’d been woven was just about entrepreneurial participants offering 4G service? What if they had crisper uniforms? What if they were Girl Guides? What if they were drones?

photo credit: theirhistory

What if the people behind it weren’t in marketing? What if it wasn’t at SxSW but an Occupy protest? What if there was no financial transaction involved? What if it was an art project and the cost of access was simply speaking with the homeless participant like they were a human being for 5 minutes?

What if instead of boring 4G MiFi units, they’d been furnished with the highly experimental seeds of the technomadic mesh network that would one day grow to be Douglas Rushkoff’s Next Net, home of Bruce Sterling’s Regulators. The early adopter’s post-corporate reputation-based economy, payable only in Wuffie & Bitcoins?

One of the most symbolically pernicious things about Homeless Hotspots as implemented is that the participants are given a portal with no key. People who possess pocket computers and laptops can get online, but the participants aren’t given the means to get online themselves. Imagine if BBH had reimplemented Underheard alongside Homeless Hotspots. In that universe, I imagine a torrent of posts praising their efforts to give the voiceless in Austin a voice. I imagine headlines like ‘How BBH Labs is Reinventing the Street Newspaper’ with approving links to the new content stream.

Even if, like the paper, no one actually read it.

It has been a bounteous season for panoptiswarm-related news (previously: 1, 2, 3). Sea Shepherd has drones now. They are using them to track the Japanese whaling fleet. Occupy has a drone. It is called the occucopter. There is a thing called the Drone Journalism Lab. They just unboxed their first drone.

photo credit: elbflorenz

As they document their first experiments with flying the thing and with hacking around the controls and adding better camera gear, they are in good company. The DIY Drones community will no doubt be of great use.

It’s worth sticking with the Lab for a bit.

Journalists are increasingly faced with two problems: a growing appetite for unique online video in an environment of decreased budgets; and restricted or obstructed access to stories ranging from disaster coverage to Occupy Wall Street protests. The technology behind autonomous and remotely piloted vehicles is rapidly moving from military applications to the point where private citizens can own and operate their own drone. At the same time, high definition and 3D video cameras are getting smaller, cheaper and lighter. Paired with global position devices, they make ideal additions to an airborne platform.

In short, drones are an ideal platform for journalism.

Drone Journalism Lab About the Lab

It’s an interesting solution to the panoptiswarm problem (when everyone is a journalist, everyone is a disposable sensor node) that nicely mirrors the rise of drones in warfare. Drone war is the perfect antidote to an enemy willing to send suicide bombers at your forces. By splitting the identity that used to link soldier and combatant, you eliminate the tactical advantage of the other side having the terrible resolve to blow themselves up. Their bodies are on the line, but yours are not.

Similarly, with drone journalism, journalist’s bodies need no longer be on the line. They may be barred from safe access to the site of the beatings, but they can still put eyes on it. This neatly negates the tactical advantage that police held over journalists in a battle of wills. No longer can the police say “leave the area or you will be tear gassed and beaten like the rest of them,” leaving journalists with the stark choice between ignorance and physical peril. Now they can say “we will leave, but our drones will be watching”.

photo credit: KAPturer

At first glance, this seems to restore the journalist/police/activist triumvirate. A new class of privileged observers, perhaps operating from the Las Vegas desert, can log in and cver the story as neutral observers while police and protestors go about the business of beating and being beaten. Journalism will be literally above the fray.

Too late for that. Everyone can afford a drone now. It is cheaper to buy a drone than a smartphone. And if you can’t afford a drone, maybe a camera grenade is more to your taste. Or perhaps you will hack together your own Streetview trike enabling constant passive recording, 360º.

Everyone gets a drone now. The paparazzi get a drone. Iran gets a drone. Survivalists, the Westboro Baptist Church, al-Qaeda, your local scout troop, whoever. Put a drone on it.

When the time came to rebuild Jenin, “Hamas representatives on the popular committee asked that these walls be built just under average eye level so that passers-by could look into the courts and make sure that Islamic codes of modesty were not relaxed.” No need for that. Just put a drone on the job.

We’re still trying to come to grips with the impact of cameraphones.

Perhaps future police actions will be announced by an EMP blast, to clear the twittering airspace. Rogue journalists load film cameras as occupiers brace for the assault. The policeman’s mic declares the assembly unlawful. The burst is ineffective. The net interprets a gap in coverage as censorship and rushes to fill it. New drones buzz into position and an enterprising trike journalist, sensing a chance for a payday careens through the police line in the hopes of catching something good.

photo credit: Andreas Kristensson

It was my term for a bunch of things that encompass some 3rd rail issues for UI designers like proactive personalisation and interaction, examined in the work of Byron and Nass, exemplified by (and forever-after-vilified-as) Microsoft’s Bob and Clippy (RIP). A bunch of things about bots and daemons, conversational interface.

And lately, a bunch of things about machine learning – and for want of a better term, consumer-grade artificial intelligence.

BASAAP is my way of thinking about avoiding the ‘uncanny valley’ in such things.

Making smart things that don’t try to be too smart and fail, and indeed, by design, make endearing failures in their attempts to learn and improve. Like puppies.

Matt Jones B.A.S.A.A.P. BERG

Two things transitted my node (“crossed my desk” is so antique, don’t you think?) this week that served to illustrate how BASAAP could fail to avoid the 3rd rail.

First, this line from a review of the Mint Cleaning Robot posted on Amazon.

The personality of the bot is OK. It’s more like a clinical, efficient nurse doing its job. It isn’t quite as chipper as other cleaning bots but it gets the job done.

Ryan Mckenney Fantastic cleaning robot! customer review on Amazon.com

The Mint is a self-driving swiffer. It’s the least personable thing and yet it has a personality. Of course if has a personality. Everything has a personality. A broom has a personality, one supposes. With the robot, you end up in situations where a perfectly functional machine loses marks because it rubs the user the wrong way.

photo credit: ramseymohsen

And when a BASAAP machine rubs users the wrong way, it can rub them in the really wrong way. Consider Siri’s unfortunate inability to offer information about abortion, birth control, help after rape and help with domestic violence.

As Danny Sullivan notes, “Welcome to search scandals, Apple.” Omissions or failures of the database reflect on the company providing the database, even though they aren’t providing the content. Google learned this the hard way with the results for “Jew” (as opposed to “jewish”, or “Judaism”). Apple is learning it through women’s issues.

Siri is a BASAAP machine. When Apple launched the service, I wrote about this for The Atlantic, arguing that her robotic voice and clever responses to confuding input would help her win her heart. At the time, people were enamoured with this aspect of her, cataloguing all the funny responses she gave.

This is all well and good if she’s making jokes about the meaning of life. It’s much, much less good if she’s covering up a bad search result with a snarky aside when the search result is about a rape crisis. Her charming personality stops being charming the minute she starts making inappropriate jokes.

photo credit: timoni

There’s your BASAAP 3rd rail right there.