a new narrative

From James Fallows' Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media in The Atlantic this month:

“But what if the answer to a false narrative isn’t fact?,” Denton says. “Or Habermas? Maybe the answer to a flawed narrative is a different narrative. You change the story.” Which is what, he said, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have done. They don’t “fact-check” Fox News, or try to rebut it directly, or fight on its own terms. They change the story not by distorting reality—their strength is their reliance on fact—or creating a fictitious narrative, but by presenting the facts in a way that makes them register in a way they hadn’t before.

Jaron Lanier, author of Digital Maoism, was blunt when I asked him about Fox’s ability to assert a “truth” and have it echo through digital media. “We have created a technology that has wonderful potential, but that enormously increases our ability to lie to ourselves and forget it is a lie,” he told me. “We are going to need to develop new conventions and formalities to cut through the lies.” Stewart and Colbert have developed one such set of new conventions; others will emerge.

The new media is terrible for addressing problems like confirmation bias but it's a new type of narrativity and the old type had its own weaknesses. I'm optimistic about the possibilities for people who really want to know what's going on and are willing to put in the time but pessimistic about the content the average person will digest. Then again, no-news seems as attractive as confirmation biased news and that's not so unsettling.

she barely knew me yet had the audacity to call me eccentrically abstemious

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I don't mean to imply they're all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about.

Most people won't, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

The Acceleration of Addiction Paul Graham

how is the internet changing the way we think?

It's The Edge Question for 2010.

Slashdot has a related story: Tech Tools Fostering Mini Generation Gaps. "People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology".

habitat

I never intended to live by the ocean but hey, it was hard to complain when the fates threw it my way. But yes, I still live primarily in my head, externalities be damned (at least until they impose themselves on me, then I attend to them).

A couple things surprised me with the change of context. One, the mountains and the beach have a similar appeal, both push their expansiveness in a way that holds me in awe. Two, the warm glow of the internets make me feel at home. When everything is in flux around, apparently internet based community provides some stability and associated comfort (a sure sign I've spent too much of my life in front of a computer).

great article on computer security

A french hacker collected a lot of information about Twitter from Twitter employee accounts and sent it to TechCrunch. I especially liked the hacker's extreme but appropriate advice (in an apology letter translated from French):

I did not do this to profit from the information. Security is an area that fascinated me for many years and I want to do my job. In my everyday life, I help people to guard against the dangers of the Internet. I learned the basic rules .. For example: Be careful where you click the files that you download and what you type on the keyboard. Ensure that the computer is equipped with effective protection against viruses, external attacks, spam, phishing … Upgrading the operating system, software commonly used … Remember to use passwords without any similarity between them. Remember to change them regularly … Never store confidential information on the computer …

The Anatomy of the Twitter Attack (h/t Schneier)

There's a takeaway at the end of the article that's good advice too. I'm not sure this guy shares the hacker ethic but TechCrunch also has to deal with the ethical question.

starting my own company

Today I quit my job in order to start my own company. It sounds like I'll have two clients on board to begin with. I'll mostly be building web applications and helping determine internet strategies for small businesses.

I would start writing about becoming an entrepreneur but I think Paul Graham has already taken care of that.

vigilante justice from the internets

If you've gotten a call to renew your auto warranty (and don't have an auto, like me) you may know what this wsj article is talking about. I've gotten a few calls from these asshats. I don't always condone vigilante justice but ...

conversion story

A commercial database practitioner sees the light.

truth vs. falsehood

Looks like truth is still in the lead. Whew.

the perils of social networking

Schneier has a couple recent posts on the insecurity of social networking that are worth taking a look at.

Identifying People using Anonymous Social Networking Data
Social Networking Identity Theft Scams

more tools from our googly overlords

Some friends passed along a few google projects of note.

Google Powermeter helps people measure their power consumption. It isn't ready for consumers yet but looks promising (although, like many googly things, I'm conflicted about giving them so much data).

Understudy is a tool for those of us who use Apple computers to use FrontRow with NetFlix instant and Hulu.

what google knows

I showed Chris my favorite google query a few minutes ago. He thinks it lends to disproving the existence of the Illuminati (wikipedia). I think it simply proves the existence of the Illiterati. I was hoping no-one had defined the term "Illiterati" yet but as usual -- "Results 1 - 10 of about 50,500 for illiterati" google's been there.

The opposite of the Illuminati, who take pride in their high level of knowledge and learning. An Illiterati takes pride in the fact that they are ignorant and refuse to learn (adjust their paradigm) often to the severe detriment of those around them.

Urban Dictionary

xkcd blogged a few phrases that google didn't know recently (guaranteeing they'll be known now).

My consolation -- "my favorite google query" (google.com).

a good question

"What does it mean to a society when a whole generation is raised as criminals?"

preface to Remix - Lawrence Lessig

Confidential: "do not distribute"

It's still my favorite google query.

Vonnegut on the moderately gifted person

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives--maybe fifty or a hundred people at most. And evolution--or God or whatever--arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of everything and so on.

That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist."

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!"

Kurt Vonnegut - Bluebeard

I was going to say, "but Kurt, now we have the internet where even those moderately gifted exhibitionists sometimes get their five minutes of fame." But someone already beat me to it -- "There ARE a million monkeys sitting at a million keyboards, but the internet looks nothing at all like Shakespeare."

trolling and time

You'd think that the longer you'd been on the Internet, the easier it would be to spot a troll. The problem I run into is that a lot of clueless people sound like trolls. When I talk with people in the real world (tm) it's easier to tell when they're being genuine.

So, generally speaking a "win" for a troll is that they've successfully wasted time. Concern trolls have something quite different in mind but generally speaking if the troll can get you off topic and fighting with them instead of addressing the topic at hand, they've won.

As my time has been pretty limited recently, when I get in conversations where someone immediately goes off topic and doesn't understand what was said initially I recognize it as a troll. The irony here is that as I see the trolling type behavior I get irritated and that starts making me sound like a troll (especially if the initial troll was actually being genuine). Anyhow, recognizing this in myself I've decided just to let the trolls spew their nonsense and give them the down arrow (where available). It's unfortunate though because amidst the troll speak there are usually people trying to get somewhere. I actually like how reddit allows for different comment threads to take a life of their own in that regard (not that it hinders real trolls much). The tools have been making this sort of thing better but I think we still have a long way to go before the web is a nice space for conversation. Human nature being what it is, I'm not sure we'll get there.

Incidentally, it looks like Bush has managed to outlaw anonymous trolling (free speech be damned). I wonder if anyone will manage to overturn that once he leaves office or if we'll just be left with another bit of nonsense legislation. (Yes, it's good to outlaw online harassment, and no, this isn't so narrowly defined.)

Interesting psychological explanation for comment trolling ("deindividuation") on techcrunch.

ever have the feeling you're being watched?

SurveillanceSaver is a screensaver for OS X and Windows that shows live images of over 400 network surveillance cameras worldwide. A haunting live soap opera.

Download from google code.

It's actually a pretty cool screensaver, you can look at many parts of the globe all times of day and some of the cameras are pointed on marketplaces, others on pigs, computer labs, outdoors, etc. It's a live video snapshot of a bunch of different places around the world. It also tells you the Country, City and Lat/Long of each feed as they show up.

I wonder how many people who regularly visit these locations know this application exists. I haven't seen my lat/long show up yet.

we feel fine

This site wefeelfine.org is one of the cooler uses of data analysis I've seen in a long time. It gathers information on how the web is feeling (blogs primarily I think). It then presents the data to you in a really clever way. Jonathan Harris is the developer, here's his TED talk.

cognitive surplus

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

from Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

the pressing concerns

Charlie starts to identify the contemporary situation in his comment on that last post --

I've been encountering in several places recently reflections on current affairs that make me think the human situation now is truly radically different -- politically, technologically, ecologically, and epistemically (and with all that, probably morally too). It seems to me that somebody should be thinking through these changes and trying to counsel people in handling them in their lives, since clearly evolution cannot keep pace with these changes: we're monkeys playing with the internet and cruise missiles. I don't care what these latter-day counselors are called ("Philosophers"?), but I think there is a crying need for someone to get to work!

We're the sorts of animals that have these crazy concerns we need to deal with. We're pushing forward so fast we can't keep up with ourselves. We're in a "radically different" environment which is why what is required could be called a new ecological awareness.

The questions becomes,
what are the core concerns of our time?

Certainly we need to survey ordinary ecology, atmospheric science, the food situation, the oil situation. Boston pointed me to the costs and lack of benefits associated with bottled water the other day. That's enlightening.

The political situation is insane, I heard James Yee speak for a Hinckley Institute of Politics forum Thursday before last. I also heard Col. Morris Davis speak last friday at an event put on by the law school. I read the news related to these gitmo related catastrophes every day but it impacts you differently when you hear it from the people who were there. Charlie keeps up with Thomas Barnett's blog. I like Glenn Greenwald, among many others. I also peruse National Review (when I can bring myself to do it) and read George Will, I think it's important to also get an outside voice (even when it's stupid or evil, if a large number of people believe it, it's worth listening to for that reason alone). I rely on an investigative reporter friend for my local politics (he hates George Will, something about checking some of his sources). I often get depressed with politics and just shut it all off.

The internet is a subculture of its own and I'm just barely getting some grasp on what that means. I work with people all over the country as well as in Canada and Singapore. If I have an area of expertise, I guess this would be it. I've been working with the Internet since 1995. (I started with a 80386 with a 1200 baud modem and Kermit at home. "trumpet winsock" and then the Windows for Workgroups 3.11 tcp/ip stack at work. I was also maintaining a mail server running DEC Ultrix. For those of you who care.)

Charlie noted recently where we're at with artificial intelligence.

I say all that to peruse what immediately comes to mind. I think this situation is what led me to previously ask these two questions.

To those five or six people who read this blog --my very very limited audience-- what else is there to add here, to give this more meat, what am I missing?

Update: Charlie's engaging this topic at Huenemanniac.