Loosely Assembled

Portland, OR has done a great job getting itself noticed on the global stage of cities to watch. We’ve got green cred, bike cred, creativity cred, willingness to change, social justice, activism, sustainability, livability, diy, small business, self organizing cred, etc etc etc. We can learn to take bigger steps though, to really put a stake in the ground for Portland’s future as a hub for organizations that want to make the world a better place.

Portland’s Memorial Coliseum is the ideal facility for the nation’s (world’s) premiere incubator for, and center of, critical non profit activity. Think of it as Sand Hill Road for the 501c3 set. Offices, workshops, symposiums, conferences, events, rallies, classes, and more will take place in this global center for change. Interaction with the general public on a daily basis, as well as with business and movement frontiers-people will stimulate the city of Portland like nothing else.

Incubators will get a lot of attention in the coming decade as we all search and strive and hope for new ideas and new solutions for the future. New models for business focused incubators are already in the works in places like SF. Let’s take the next big step and innovate in social entrepreneurship, and not for profit work.

‘Tis hard to say which is a more compelling, or more primary, interpretation of the notion of “Robots Mimicking Humans Mimicking Robots”, the reversible Palingram or the infinitely extended Möbius loop.

They both tell a different story about our fascination with, and relationship to, simulated humanity, machine intelligence, creator and creation. As a proposed next step, I’d personally like to see another robot manning the remote controls of this robot, perhaps creating some kind of command based feedback loop, susceptible to minute changes, enabling a kind of machine evolution of culture.

Enjoy

Physical industries have already started to think about cradle to grave design, but we in the digital design world also need to realize there are consequences and costs to the community at large if we continue to delude ourselves with myths of immortal software.

While building out the final export tools for the retiring online guest map service Frappr.com, it quickly became clear that there is something fundamentally broken about online identity. Normally we include author attribution for the various bits of information submitted by the members. These attributions are valuable inside the service as well as beyond its walls. When Google indexes our data, it’s important that the original author not only gets visible textual credit by name, but also that their profile page is linked so that viewers may discover other content this author has created or even may be able to get in touch with the author. This works pretty well if the web service remains alive. As soon as a domain vanishes, those attributions lose a lot of their value.

Most online identity is trapped within the walls of the single domain. The only identity data we have on the frappr members is their display name, a frappr.com based member profile page url and an external email address. Attributing content to these is either completely unstructured, obsolete or a breach of privacy. The only thing we could go with was the unlinked and unstructured display name, if it existed.

This dissociation shatters the community into millions of shards with little recourse for reconnection. I’ll suggest that we aren’t well equipped, metaphorically or psychologically, for this kind of disintegrating experience, as humans. If a factory town loses the factory it does disintegrate in many ways, but the low level identities of the members of that community do actually persist. While many communication and interaction channels are gone, the citizens can still gather together and work on the problem as a team. Even if many move on to other locations, they still have a tangible forwarding address that they can optionally leave behind, there are at least some options.

There have though been historical events that do effectively shatter communities into irreconcilable bits, and these do have a devastating and lasting impact. Diasporas leave the remnants without options.

The dissolution of a web based community is a kind of digital diaspora. But we can mitigate the effects of shattered communities if digital identity is organized differently, anchored outside the borders of these rapidly shifting social software domains. The communities, after all, were created by and owned by the members, not by the service. The ownership of these communities, these affiliations, these connections, should not be left to ruin just because a website can’t pay their bandwidth bills.

How can we organize digital identity differently? There are several interesting initiatives and activists currently working on this very issue from many perspectives, and in fact I’m not really qualified to try and list them here (drop some names in the comments if you think what they are doing is relevant, i’d love to follow up on related work). What seem to be the common threads amongst projects I have seen are universal login, portable social networks and personal preferences for content selection. But what this whole experience has got me interested in is more along the lines of, “where is the canonical reference point of an individual?”. Based on this question I’m going to pour some half baked ideas of my own out into the light of scrutiny to see if anything might have a chance to congeal. These ideas are presented only from a design perspective and not from a technical perspective.

Nearly everyone already has a globally unique phone number, and with mobile web access rapidly becoming the global standard, a mobile network identity may make sense for the future. Mobile network identity would require portability, just like the mobile number portability that came to the US a few years ago (moving your number from one carrier to another). A mobile network foundation also starts to make more sense if it ever develops some kind of DNS system, where your identity isn’t a number anymore, but structured text with an ordained set of namespaces. Actually the existence of a mobile DNS removes the requirement of number portability, since the DNS records could just be updated. 3G enabled netbooks are bringing mobile networks into computers, and building an identity link between your phone and your laptop could be as simple a a process as pairing a bluetooth phone to a headset.

Email addresses are also already unique and ubiquitous. They would actually be a pretty great way to standardize and decentralize, as long as there were better ways to filter/block message sending rights to email addresses. The Twitter model is compelling for it’s limitations on incoming messages (only people you follow can dm you), but it’s still a single service that may dissolve or change someday. I think the email model is interesting, but I think the email infrastructure couldn’t handle the task.

Another idea for perpetual online identity management would be something like the imdb or archive.org or wikipedia but just for people. In terms of my original problem with content authorship attribution, this model would work quite well if the archiving organization were highly stable. I doubt anyone has noticed, but in the KML exports for Frappr i do link to the most recent archive.org cached version of the website instead of the website itself.

This almost just comes down to a simple question, “When you mention a person’s name online, what do you link to?”. I would have thought that as the web evolved, it would become more and more decentralized, with most people operating their own domains. While some people do maintain their own domains, many links wrapped around someone’s name leads to a profile page of one webservice or another. Facebook’s recent support of profile page shortcuts underscores how many people use twitter, as a kind of accidental identity server. Many of you reading this will know that @fekaylius means http://twitter.com/feyalius. The domain almost becomes invisible, or synonymous with “my public online identity”.

Another idea is an identity DNS system that could track, aggregate and reroute requests to all the various services that may come and go. Think of this like one part traditional DNS and one part call forwarding. Imagine for a moment if you could enter @fekaylius into a browser address bar and it would route you to my personal blog. Then I could update my routing preferences and it would reroute to my CV. Perhaps you might even be able to send an email, SMS, or any type of IM to that identity alias, and depending on the protocol (and our relationship?) it would find it’s way to my work inbox, my desktop IM client or even as a push notification on my mobile. Google Voice seems like it may be going in this direction. The @ namespace isn’t right for this, but it’s an example using something people already understand. I also wonder if people outside of twitter have adopted this tag format? Will it be able to migrate beyond one service, it was, as you know, not a construct of the twitter service, but a construct that emerged out of the community, a grass roots vernacular. It could very well spring up again and again.

Back to the mobile phone network for a moment. There is also a possible paradigm where we carry our identity servers around with us everywhere we go, in our phones. Maybe there is no need to go this far, but the notion of really having control over your digital identity, over the routing and filtering and watching the requests with the flick of a finger is pretty compelling to me. Tying in uniquely mobile services to this idea makes it a killer app, ubiquitous location and calendar awareness, one snap mugshot updating, foaf services based on your local address book, nearby offers and people.

The last idea might be one huge database of every person in the world, past present and future. It would hold just enough data about the person to disambiguate. When mentioning someone anywhere online their id could be embedded in an identity tag. All these references would be aggregated and you could see what people were saying about this particular person. Imagine a kind of facebook, but where it’s not at all up to you what gets shared. Letting the bots take over.

In closing, perhaps the shanty town labyrinths of abandoned online identity shadows we have today will survive for another decade, but I doubt it. Things are changing, hopefully we will all be able to have a say in how our digital identities are organized in the future.

While doing a recent cleanup of my various computers, hard drives and backup disks, I realized I dedicate a lot of space to music that I don’t listen to, ever. It falls into some ambiguous category of ’someday I might want to listen to it again’, but I know that’s mythology. What do I do with it?

I’m still on the heels of a full family interstate move from Portland to Palo Alto. We spent weekend after weekend selling and giving away the accumulated sludge of life, from toys and games to computer hardware, tools, clothing, books, and movies. It’s amazing how almost every item fully transformed from trash into treasure. It was like a really slow abstracted game of synchronicity tetris.

During the subsequent digital cleanup I discovered a treasure trove of old music, from some Ciccone Youth songs I thought I’d lost, to 3 dupes of the same 3 Leg Torso album. This process was saturated with déjà vu. Some of the dusty zeros and ones are keepers others just need to go away. But where can they actually go?

The feeling of finding good homes for things that I once cared for was an important psychological process for coping with leaving a city. It engages other people, it creates an interwoven object history that confirms your presence in the community. If I just drag these folders into the trash, I get none of that. The feeling is more akin to loss, or waste guilt.

One detail that helps unload unwanted physical detritus is packaging. People would stop and gaze at the immense free piles, but until we handed them a bag or a box to put stuff in, most of them were blocked by the element of logistical surprise (we targeted people coming to the neighborhood farmers market, they either had full bags already or didn’t want to go shopping lugging an armload of loose books). With digital media I think packaging has to be taken into consideration. I’ve never seen an online free pile of stuff someone is trying to get rid of, a pile that actually deletes the file once it have been taken.

My proposal is for such a tool to arise: instead of dragging your old music to the trash, you’d be able to drag it to the free pile, which would be a publicly exposed directory (with a feed) that automatically incinerated each file as it was downloaded. You might want granular access controls so that anyone in the world could take your Van Halen records, but only friends of friends could take the Misfits.

Here is a snap of what looks like a municipal free box in Telluride, CO.

I guess another option would be to just fill up all the schwaggy thumb drives you can find with your unwanted media and go dump them into a physical free box somewhere.

Danah Boyd’s Streams of Content talk, about the flow of information through social media, is something everyone online should read.

There are several points that resonate with me, but I’ll limit this post to the quoting of a couple choice passages.

People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the “best” or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction. This isn’t inherently a good thing. Consider the food equivalent. Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they’re rare in nature. Thus, when they come around, we should grab them. In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.

When we think about centralized sources of information distribution, it’s easy to understand that power is at stake. But networked structures of consumption are also configured by power and we cannot forget that or assume that access alone is power. Power is about being able to command attention, influence others’ attention, and otherwise traffic in information. We give power to people when we give them our attention and people gain power when they bridge between different worlds and determine what information can and will flow across the network.

via @chrismessina

What secret skills do multi-taskers possess? What really, if anything, makes them/us different?

Clifford Nass gave a stimulating and uncommon talk today through Stanford’s Media X program.

Generally a research team will focus on a very narrow question, something they can own, maintain secrecy over, then release the results of extensive research in that vein, effectively positioning themselves as the topical experts of that domain. But Nass and his team seem to be taking a more open, bottom up approach to their research into the psychological underpinnings of “media multitasking”. Nass says that research isn’t generally presented publicly this early on. While they have found some profoundly surprising results in early studies, they are facing a field that is too vast for one team to lay claim to, so, he’s bringing it forward partially in response to public demand (“we need to know if multitasking is bad for our kids”), but partially to invite more and more external specialists into the sphere.

The findings they did present are quite interesting.
Basically there was this assumption that some people are more prone to, or adept at, multitasking. They went out and found a way to quantify this, and gathered a collection of these people. They also found a set of people who were not normally multitasking with media

In short, there was a prevalent idea that multi-tasking was an expression of some hidden cognitive skill (better filtering, sorting, or switching), but it turns out that people who are consuming multiple media channels at once are significantly worse at all three of these types of activities. There was no secret power, there was only an inability to filter, sort, and switch. One conclusion is that media multi-taskers are simply explorers, always on the lookout for something new, while another conclusion might be that multi-taskers are simply running away from boredom, they get bored easily and need to find respite from this. A future fMRI study will try to determine if the impulse to consume unrelated media simultaneously is an aversive (running away from boredom) or an attractive (running towards something you want) impulse, but I’m a little skeptical of this dualistic reduction. Marshall McLuhan saw media as a new extension of the human nervous system. From his perspective, I find it challenging to delineate between aversive and attractive impulses within a unified system. Perhaps with all these remote eyes and ears around the globe connected to our own minds we are transforming previously disparate channels into a new type of unified stream of awareness.

Maybe what seem like unrelated content is simply a value judgement (or a historical prejudice). Perhaps, as experimental art forms try to combine disparate sensory experiences into one cohesive piece, the multi-taskers of today are sucking in content that all relates somehow to our singular world instead of sucking in various disparate unrelated media sources. Perhaps what seem like multiple threads to us now are actually woven into a heretofore unknown type of mesmerizingly unified tapestry of the near future.

Anselm Hook has just posted a lengthy and thoughtful article on the trend and forthcoming requirements for the emerging Augmented Reality Revolution.

The article is worth reading for all sorts of reasons, and for all sorts of people, but I’m just going to comment on the bits that caught my immediate attention.

The opening section declares:
AR is going to make it possible for us to see through walls. It will remove some of the blindness that has crept up around our industrial landscape.
I wonder how this might be applied to open government, and transparency in the corporate world, will we be able to see through the walls of our local police department? Is this another potential tool for radical reality?

Will geo-based mashups finally be able to reach us out in the world?

Anselm talks about needing ways to filter the floods of future data, but I propose we should focus on getting enough well rounded data in first, otherwise we’ll be filtering against a small, platform specific, subset. One way to encourage increased data input to the AR universe (whether it’s distributed or unified) will be to recognize AR as a natural evolution of the geoweb movement, for it to benefit from the existing momentum, to explicitly be backwards compatible with the current generation of geodata. I do however expect metadata around AR items to blossom, meaning old geodata may need to do some freshening up to stay relevant.

Regarding the discussion about a universal AR platform, I imagine there may be an open data store, with viable APIs that support a multitude of creative experiences, but I also envision a closed, all in one, walled garden player that will probably be a little later to the game, but will come out swinging with an effortless interface.

I’m left with an exciting expectation of an Augmented Reality Universe, with many evolving access methods and platform standards, a possible replacement for the web as we know it.

I just heard Daniel Everett talking about the unique language and culture of this small Amazonian tribe, and it’s been churning my mind around and around. For me there are a few interesting threads to follow, and as always, I’m interested in your thoughts on where to go with this knowledge.

The Pirahã language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for “relatively small” and “relatively large”); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no “left” and “right” (only “upriver” and “downriver”); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and—most important for linguists—no recursion.

Numbers, Universal Segmentation, and Individuality
The lack of numbers and counting, while being at first utterly unimaginable, does strike some familiar conceptual chords once accepted as a potential reality. Numbers, and counting of objects, essentially rely on a conceptual framework where boundaries exist. This fish is separate from that fish. A culture, a worldview, liberated from the numeric grid, can simply see EVERYTHING as a substance, a continuous, flowing, merged, unified mass of stuff. Fish are like water, there is no need to count water, you just take what you need, and you know how much is enough. Perhaps abundance, or at least non-scarcity are prerequisites for this?

Does a lack of numbers indicate a world view with a low level of universal segmentation? If an individual fish is seen as part of a massive entity, of a substance, of a part of nature which doesn’t have naturally differentiated units, then humans might also fit right into that framework as well.

A World Without Before
Creation myths are irrelevant within a purely stable world. Asking what the world was like before the current state of things only makes sense in a world of change. Western modernism, and urbanization in general, seem to be building or offering stability (at least saturating itself with materials and references that connote this) but it might be this same (encroaching) stability that puts an end to a way of life, a culture, and a language born of the real thing.

Systemic Attribution (or Empirical Gradients) and the 4th Dimension
Apparently their verb formations include a built in way to trace back the source of the information being relayed. For example, if you said, “He went fishing”, this utterance would contain embedded information as to how you know this, if you heard it from someone else, if you saw it yourself, if you inferred it from evidence, etc.

Does this integrated (attribution oriented, and seemingly gradient) empiricism also represent a more sophisticated notion of interconnection? Is this a social reputation system?

Is there a way to consider this invisible chain of perpetual attribution as an alternative to our own 4th dimension (time)?

Delineation vs Happiness
Combine low universal segmentation with highly integrated empiricism and consider if these realities are causal contributors to their standing as one of the planet’s happiest people. In other words, do time and numbers prevent us from being happy?

This tribe is truly rejecting binary dualism!

So many more nuggets of ideas tightly woven into this talk, it’ll have to be revisited again.
Listen to the MP3.

(Via longnow.org.)

• so glad to see the snow again, just took a little ride in it to get some more chicken feed #

Thinking about what a fully remote file system might be like. Extending something like mobile me out to all the documents on one’s computer.

Instead of emailing actual files around to people, you could just send them specially keyed links to the files on your own machine, possibly brokered through the hosting entity, although self hosted would also be cool.