3quarksdaily

Curating Creativity

by Jalees Rehman

"For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency."

                                                Jorge Luis Borges, "Library of Babel"

 

The British-Australian art curator Nick Waterlow was tragically murdered on November 9, 2009 in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. His untimely death shocked the Australian art community, not only because of the gruesome nature of his death – Waterlow was stabbed alongside his daughter by his mentally ill son – but also because his death represented a major blow to the burgeoning Australian art community. He was a highly regarded art curator, who had served as a director of the Sydney Biennale and international art exhibitions and was also an art ambassador who brought together artists and audiences from all over the world.

After his untimely death, his partner Juliet Darling discovered some notes that Waterlow had jotted down shortly before his untimely death to characterize what defines and motivates a good art curator and he gave them the eerily prescient title “A Curator’s Last Will and Testament”:

1. Passion

2. An eye of discernment

3. An empty vessel

4. An ability to be uncertain

5. Belief in the necessity of art and artists

6. A medium— bringing a passionate and informed understanding of works of art to an audience in ways that will stimulate, inspire, question

7. Making possible the altering of perception.

Waterlow’s notes help dismantle the cliché of stuffy old curators walking around in museums who ensure that their collections remain unblemished and instead portray the curator as a passionate person who is motivated by a desire to inspire artists and audiences alike.

The Evolving Roles of Curators

The traditional role of the curator was closely related to the Latin origins of the word, “curare” refers to “to take care of”, “to nurse” or “to look after”. Curators of museums or art collections were primarily in charge of preserving, overseeing, archiving and cataloging the artifacts that were placed under their guardianship. As outlined in “Thinking Contemporary Curating” by Terry Smith, the latter half of 20th century witnessed the emergence of new roles for art curators, both private curators and those formally employed as curators by museum or art collections. Curators not only organized art exhibitions but were given an increasing degree of freedom in terms of choosing the artists and themes of the exhibitions and creating innovative opportunities for artists to interact with their audiences. The art exhibition itself became a form of art, a collage of art assembled by the curators in a unique manner.

Curatorial roles can be broadly divided into three domains:

1) Custodial – perhaps most in line with traditional curating in which the curator primarily maintains or preserves art collections

2) Navigatory – a role which has traditionally focused on archiving and cataloging pieces of art so that audiences can readily access art

3) Discerning – the responsibility of a curator to decide which artists and themes to include and feature, using the “eye of discernment” described by Nick Waterlow

Creativity and Curating

The diverse roles of curators are characterized by an inherent tension. Curators are charged with conserving and maintaining art (and by extension, culture) in their custodial roles, but they also seek out new forms of art and experiment with novel ways to exhibit art in their electoral roles. Terry Smith’s “Thinking Contemporary Curating” shows how the boundaries between curator and artist are becoming blurry, because exhibiting art itself requires an artistic and creative effort. Others feel that the curators or exhibition makers need to be conscious of their primary role as facilitators and that they should not “compete” with the artists whose works they are exhibiting. This raises the question of whether the process of curating art is actually creative.

It is difficult to find a universal and generally accepted definition of what constitutes creativity because it is such a subjective concept, but the definition provided by Jonathan Plucker and colleagues in their paper “Why Isn’t Creativity More Important to Educational Psychologists? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Future Directions in Creativity Research” is an excellent starting point:

“Creativity is the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context.”

Using this definition, assembling an art exhibition is indeed creative – it generates a “perceptible product” which is both novel and useful to the audiences that attend the exhibition as well as to the artists who are being provided new opportunities to showcase their work. The aptitude, process and environment that go into the assembly and design of an art exhibition differ among all curators, so that each art exhibition reflects the creative signature of a unique curator.

Ubiquity of Curators

The formal title “curator” is commonly used for art curators or museum curators, but curatorial activity – in its custodial, navigatory and discerning roles – is not limited to these professions. Librarians, for example, have routinely acted as curators of books. Their traditional focus has been directed towards their custodial and navigatory roles, cataloging and preserving books, and helping readers navigate through the vast jungle of published books.

Unlike the key role that art curators play in organizing art exhibitions, librarians are not the primary organizers of author readings, book fairs or other literary events, which are instead primarily organized by literary magazines, literary agents, publishers or independent bookstores. It remains to be seen whether the literary world will also witness the emergence of librarians as curators of such literary events, similar to what has occurred in the art world. Our local public library occasionally organizes a “Big Read” event for which librarians select a specific book and recommend that the whole community read the book. The librarians then lead book discussions with members of the community and also offer additional reading materials that relate to the selected book. Such events do not have the magnitude of an art exhibition, but they are innovative means by which librarians interact with the community and inspire readers.

One of the most significant curatorial contributions in German literary history was the collection of fairy-tales and folk-tales by the Brothers Grimm (Brüder Grimm or Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Readers may not always realize how much intellectual effort went into assembling the fairy-tales, many of which co-existed in various permutations depending on the region of where the respective tales were being narrated. I own a copy of the German language edition of the “Children's and Household Tales” (Kinder- und Hausmärchen) which contains all their original annotations. These annotations allow the reader to peek behind the scenes and see the breadth of their curatorial efforts, especially their “eye of discernment”. For example, the version of Snow-White that the Brothers Grimm chose for their final edition contains the infamous scene in which the evil Queen asks her mirror, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, Who is the prettiest in all the land?” She naturally expects the mirror to say that the Queen is the prettiest, because she just finished feasting on what she presumed were Snow-White’s liver and lungs and is convinced that Snow-White is dead. According to the notes of the Brothers Grimm, there was a different version of the Snow-White tale in which the Queen does not ask a mirror, but instead asks Snow-White’s talking pet dog, which is cowering under a bench after Snow-White’s disappearance and happens to be called “Spiegel” (German for “Mirror”)! I am eternally grateful for the curatorial efforts of the Brothers Grimm because I love the symbolism of the Queen speaking to a mirror and because I do not have to agonize over understanding why Snow-White named her pet dog “Mirror” or expect a Disneyesque movie with the title “Woof Woof” instead of “Mirror Mirror”.

Internet Curators

The internet is now providing us access to an unprecedented and overwhelming amount of information. Every year, millions of articles, blog posts, images and videos are being published online. Older texts, images and videos that were previously published in more traditional formats are also being made available for online consumption. The book “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” by James Gleick is quite correct in using expressions such as “information glut” or “deluge” to describe how we are drowning in information. Gleick also aptly uses the allegory of the “Library of Babel”, a brilliant short story written by Jorge Luis Borges about an imaginary library consisting of hexagonal rooms that is finite in size but contains an unfathomably large number of books, all possible permutations of sequences of letters. Most of these books are pure gibberish, because they are random sequences of letters, but amidst billions of such books, one is bound to find at least a handful with some coherent phrases. Borges' story also mentions a mythical “Book-Man”, a god-like librarian who has seen the ultimate cipher to the library, a book which is the compendium of all other books. Borges originally wrote the story in 1941, long before the internet era, but the phrase "For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency" rings even more true today when we think of the information available on the web.

This overwhelming and disorienting torrent of digital information has given rise to a new group of curators, internet or web curators, who primarily focus on the navigatory and discerning roles of curatorship. Curatorial websites or blogs such as 3quarksdaily, Brainpickings or Longreads comb through mountains of online information and try to select a handful of links to articles, essays, poems, short stories, videos, images or books which they deem to be the most interesting, provocative or inspiring for their readers. They disseminate these links to their readers and followers by posting excerpts or quotes on their respective websites or by using social media networks such as Twitter. The custodial role of preserving online information is not really the focus of internet curators; instead, internet curators are primarily engaged in navigatory and discerning roles. In addition to the emergence of professional internet curatorship through such websites or blogs, a number of individuals have also begun to function as volunteer internet curators and help manage digital information.

Analogous to art curatorship, internet curatorship also requires a significant creative effort. Each internet curator uses individual criteria to create their own collage of information and themes they focus on. Even when internet curators have thematic overlaps, they may still decide to feature or disseminate very different types of information, because the individuals engaged in curatorship have very distinct tastes and subjective curatorial criteria. One curator’s chaff is another curator’s wheat.

Formal Education and Training in Internet Curation

There are no formal training programs that train people to become internet curators. Most popular internet curators usually have a broad range of interests ranging from the humanities, arts and sciences to literature and politics. They use their own experience and expertise in these areas to help them select the best links that they then pass on to their readers or followers. Some internet curators are open to suggestions from their readers, thus crowd-sourcing their curatorial activity, others routinely browse selected websites or social media feeds of individuals which they deem to be the most interesting, others may plug in their favorite words to scour the web for intriguing new articles.

Internet curation will become even more important in the next decades as the amount of information we amass will likely continue to grow exponentially. Not just individuals, but even corporations and governments will need internet curators who can sift through information and distilling it down to manageable levels, without losing critical content. In light of this anticipated need for internet curators, one should ask the question whether it is time to envision formal training programs that help prepare people for future jobs as internet curators. Internet curation is both an art and a science – the art of the curatorial process is to creatively assemble information in a manner that attracts and inspires readers while the science of internet curation involves using search algorithms that do not just rely on subjective and arbitrary criteria but systematically interrogate vast amounts of information that are now globally available. A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree program in Internet Curation could conceivably train students in the art and science of internet curation.

Q-Credit

In scientific manuscripts, it is common for scientists to cite the preceding work of colleagues. Other colleagues who provide valuable tools, such as plasmids for molecular biology experiments, are cited in the “Acknowledgements” section of a manuscript. Colleagues whose input substantially contributed to the manuscript or the scientific work are included as co-authors. Current academic etiquette does not necessarily acknowledge the curatorial efforts of scientists who may have nudged their colleagues into a certain research direction by forwarding an important paper that they might have otherwise ignored.

Especially in world in which meaningful information is becoming one of our most valuable commodities, it might be time to start acknowledging the flux of information that shapes our thinking and our creativity. We are beginning to recognize the importance of people who are links in the information chain and help separate out meaningful information from the “senseless cacophony”. Perhaps we should therefore also acknowledge all the sources of information, not only those who generated it but also those who manage the information or guide us towards the information. Such a curatorial credit or Q-credit could be added to the end of an article. It would not only acknowledge the intellectual efforts of the information curators, but it could also serve as a curation map which would inspire readers to look at the individual elements in the information chain. The readers would be able to consult the nodes or elements that were part of the information chain (instead of just relying on lone cited references) and choose to take alternate curation paths.

I will try to illustrate a Q-credit using the example of Abbas Raza who pointed me towards a 3quarksdaily discussion of “Orientalism” and an essay by the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami. Even though I had previously read Edward Said’s book “Orientalism”, the profound insights in Bilgrami’s essay made me re-read Edward Said’s book. The Q-credit could be acknowledged as follows:

Q-Credit: Abbas Raza --> The 2008 3Quarksdaily Forum on Occidentalism -->  “Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment” by Akeel Bilgrami published 2008 on 3Quarksdaily.com and 2006 in Critical Inquiry --> Bilgrami identifies five broad themes in Edward Said’sOrientalism

The acknowledgement of information flux is already part of the Twitter netiquette. The German theologian Barbara Mack uses her Twitter handle @faraway67 to curate important new articles about history, science, music, photography, linguistics and literature. She sees the role of web curators similar to that of music conductors, who do not compose original pieces of music but instead enable the access of an audience to the original creative work. She says that “web curation is a relatively new field of dealing with information and good curation is an act of creativity which requires dedication and a keen sense for content.” She agrees that curators should indeed be given credit, “not only out of courtesy but to acknowledge their efforts of taking upon the challenge of bringing the vast information the web provides into a handy form for their followers to enjoy.”

Twitter curators such as Barbara Mack use abbreviations such as h/t (hat-tip) or RT (retweet) followed by a Twitter handle to acknowledge their sources. Contemporary Twitter netiquette suggests that if curated links of use to followers, these should acknowledge the curators' efforts before tweeting them on.

One challenge that is intrinsic to Twitter (but may in an analogous fashion apply to other social media networks as well) is that each tweet can only contain 140 characters, which presently makes it very difficult to acknowledge the comprehensive curatorial information flux. If I decide to tweet on an interesting article about the philosophy of science, which I found in the Twitter feed of person X, the space limitations may make it impossible for me to give credit to all the preceding members of the information chain which had directed X’s attention to that specific article. The Q-credit system may thus be best suited for acknowledgements at the end of blog posts or articles, but not for social media messaging with strict space limitations.

The Future of Internet Curation

The area of internet curation is still in its infancy and it is very difficult to predict how it will evolve. Managing online information will become increasingly important. Even though such managerial roles may not necessarily carry the title “internet curator”, there is little doubt that managing online information in a meaningful manner is one of the biggest challenges that we will face in the 21st century. I am quite optimistic that we will be able to address this challenge, but the first hurdle is to recognize it.

Image Credit: The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593)

Selected Q-Credits:

            1. “The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity” (2010) by James C. Kaufman and Robert J. Sternberg --> Chapter 3 “Assessment of Creativity” by Jonathan A. Plucker and Matthew C. Makel --> “Why Isn’t Creativity More Important to Educational Psychologists? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Future Directions in Creativity Research” (2004) by Jonathan A. Plucker et al. in EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 39(2), 83–96

            2. “Thinking Contemporary Curating” (2012) by Terry Smith --> Information about Nick Waterlow and still image from “A Curator’s Last Will and Testament”

            3. Book review of “The Information” at Brainpickings -->  “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” (2011) by James Gleick --> “Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges as an allegory for the information glut 

A Universal History of Online Iniquity

by James McGirk

“BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.” It was a horrid thought, but Shashank Tripathi’s (i.e. Comfortablysmug’s) infamous Hurricane Sandy tweet had panache.

Tripathi mimicked the style of a breaking news tweet perfectly. The image of water sluicing into the New York Stock Exchange was too good to be true. An irresistible nugget of news distilling the potent emotions stirred by the storm: Sorrow for afflicted New Yorkers, fear for the future, the thrill of seeing history unspool in real time, and a dose of snickering glee at the idea of cuff-linked financiers wading through filthy water.

The cruelty and incendiary media appeal of Tripathi’s tweet was reminiscent of another notorious prank: the attack on the Epilepsy Foundation. On March 22, 2008, a horde of eBaum’s World users (a community devoted to online humor) logged onto the Epilepsy Foundation’s online forums, and plastered its pages with blinking graphics.

As despicable as deliberately triggering thousands of epileptic fits or enflaming a vulnerable community during a catastrophe may be, consider how hard it is to shock a contemporary audience with a piece of art or literature. As subversive texts go, these are arguably genuine artistic achievements, thrilling to witness in real time or read about afterwards.

It’s an aesthetic experience Sherrod DeGrippo, an information security expert who founded two of the world’s preeminent repositories of Internet drama, Encyclopedia Dramatica and OhInternet.com, compares to watching reality television. “I think that a lot of what is attractive about Internet drama is the combination of schadenfreude and superiority people feel when looking at it,” says DeGrippo. “Reality TV inspires a lot of the same feelings. The viewer thinks of himself as superior, but when examined, the viewer is obsessively voyeuristic.”

When Tripathi’s identity was revealed, he certainly looked like a real-life Omarosa or Wendy Pepper. Here was a hedge fund analyst who wrote a sex diary for New York Magazine reminiscent of Preppie Murderer Robert Chambers and managed a Republican campaign, spending his free time trying to rile people up during Hurricane Sandy: a despicable man, and deliciously so.

Tripathi apologized for his barrage of misleading tweets. Most of the delinquent denizens of eBaum’s World did not, however. Their anti-social behavior was unapologetically deliberate. They were—to use the correct Internet jargon—trolling.

“Trolling is a lot like graffiti,” writes essayist and Internet grey eminence Paul Graham (he founded Y Combinator). “Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.”

Graffiti is an apt metaphor. It began as a diffuse, sub-literary phenomenon, and grew to become a permanent part of the global urban experience. To make the leap from anonymous malcontents scratching their names on the walls of Roman prisons to a graffiti “artist” like Jean-Michel Basquiat took millennia and a series of technological leaps and daring appropriations.

Christopher “moot” Poole created 4chan in 2003, an online image board that would become, according to NYU digital culture and folklore scholar Dr. Whitney Phillips, a “specially demarcated troll space.” There, tens of thousands of anonymous users interact in real time and together create a flood of never-ending nudity and subversive humor. It was the trolling equivalent of the cheap, portable spray-paint can.

“Pretty much all the people you encounter [on 4chan’s /b/ board] are trolls,” says Dr. Phillips. Ethical issues are cast aside. “Everyone (or almost everyone) is aware of the game and consents to playing.” But when 4chan’s users flock together for the Internet equivalent of a Viking raid they forget that “outside these specially demarcated troll spaces, people are NOT aware of the trolling game and therefore are NOT afforded the opportunity to consent. Trolls don't give targets the opportunity to say no, in fact tend to be triggered when they encounter resistance (the common trolling aphorism "your resistance only makes my penis harder" speaks volumes).”

Media attention is like sloshing gasoline on a fire. In a forthcoming academic article, Philips argues that: “trolls and mainstream media outlets, specifically Fox News, are locked in a cybernetic feedback loop predicted upon spectacle.”

Not only does media attention encourage trolls, it infuses their historical moments with images and vocabulary. “Trolls are cultural scavengers, fashioning amusement from that which already exists,” says Dr. Phillips. She describes a 4chan user who successfully trolled Oprah Winfrey’s online message board by posing as a pedophile. Oprah actually read his post aloud on the air:

“Let me read you something posted on our message boards,” she gravely began, “from somebody who claims to be a member of a known pedophile network: He said he does not forgive. He does not forget. His group has over 9000 penises and they’re all... raping... children.”

It was a trolling triumph. The message incorporated recognizable 4chan memes (the official slogan of Anonymous—an online hacktivist collective closely affiliated with 4chan—is: We are anonymous, We are Legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget, Expect us; while “over 9,000,” is one of the board’s most popular memes; as is anything having to do with pedophilia.) And a clip containing Oprah’s words was spliced with images of various troll memes and circulated.

There is no history on 4chan; nothing is archived. Any image, link, or message posted to the board will soon slip off the board’s front page and vanish unless users continue to “bump” the post or recycle its content.

If 4chan were the only “specially demarcated troll space,” whatever culture was created on it might never stabilize into something more significant. Moments like the Oprah’s trolling would be lost as soon as 4chan turned its attention elsewhere. So in 2004, 4chan and their Internet ilk began to use Sherrod DeGrippo’s Encyclopedia Dramatica as an archive for Internet drama they had witnessed online and that they created.

“The site started as a joke,” says DeGrippo. “A friend had placed an article on Wikipedia, only to have it swiftly deleted. So I threw a quick instance of Mediawiki up on my own server and put the article there. It was intended to just have the one article, but people started adding more and more.”

A Mediawiki (the software that Wikipedia uses) lets users simultaneously create and edit content online. This added another dimension to the experience of Internet drama.

“[Contributors to Encyclopedia Dramatica would] view and then create derivative works off of things they claimed to despise or mock,” explains DeGrippo. “Then those new, created artifacts began to take a life of their own and make a story of their own.”

Because items don’t vanish into the ether as soon as they are forgotten about, Encyclopedia Dramatica evolved into something more akin to a wild garden than the primordial ooze of 4chan’s /b/.

There is actually something resembling a coherent voice to the site. “For me, the voice of a lot of ED's content came from a sysop who went by the name of OldDirtyBtard,” says DeGrippo. “He was a British guy living in LA and a friend, very jovial. I preferred to assume everything written was in his accent, he killed himself in 2010.”

The Encyclopedia Dramatica page dedicated to OldDirtyBtard (Sean Carasov, a one-time Beastie Boys tour manager) contains a strange and touching tribute. There is a copy of his suicide note. A video of his memorial that sadly does not include “the first time in history that got rickrolled by a bagpipe player,” photographs of the man’s tattoos, and a link to his exploits under another moniker that he used to harass the Church of Scientology with (and who allegedly poisoned a feral cat he had tamed).

DeGrippo relinquished control of Encyclopedia Dramatica in 2011 (a mirror of the site continues to be updated and now includes a very unflattering page dedicated to DeGrippo). She has made a second repository, OhInternet, with a more advanced interface that tries to avoid the bloody and obscene “shock” content that infests Encyclopedia Dramatica.

What binds a community like Encyclopedia Dramatica together? “I think people just do things on the Internet until they're not fun anymore,” says DeGrippo. “I ran ED for 7 years, the user base and readership changed on a continuum. People would disappear and come back all the time. I think that's what is appealing about a lot of Internet communities, you can leave them, or they can change, but ultimately it's the same people in the same places.”

Clearly Shashank Tripathi craved community. He left hundreds of comments on the New York Magazine’s website and broadcast more than 67,000 tweets to his followers. His Hurricane Sandy tweet may have had panache, but like any clichéd villain, all he really wanted was for someone to pay him attention.

The Thirty-Third Internet Connection in New Delhi

by James McGirk

I never had a problem with Alaskan Senator Ted Steven’s oft-mocked remark about the Internet being a series of tubes. I saw it with my own eyes (metaphorically speaking) as a teenager growing up in New Delhi. The Internet was a feed of information that trickled in drip by drip, slowly increasing as we switched our faucets and eventually tapped into the municipal supply. My father was a foreign correspondent, which meant he had to send stories back home to be published. When we left “on assignment” to India he was issued with a bag of sophisticated telecommunications equipment. We plugged it in and became early adopters. 

Our first modem looked like a cross between a swimming cap, a spider, and a rubber truncheon. There were two cups that stretched over the mouthpiece and receiver of a standard analogue telephone. One contained a microphone and the other a speaker. The modem would whistle and hiss signals into the phone, and listen for responses. It was a crude but robust system, the only thing capable of working on lines that were filled with crackling static and echoes, and may well have been tapped. Entire sentences would be garbled by line noise, or more insidiously the changes could be almost invisible. A pound sterling inserted where a dollar sign once stood. 

Dad’s squealing octopus of a modem might have made things easier for everyone else, but it tossed a sabot into the gears of my imagination. Before we had left, he had taken me on a tour of his office and the printing press below. Communications made sense to me afterward. The newspaper was like a factory: an office space above filled with glowing amber terminals and stuttering typewriters and piles of important paper being fed to the machines below. The presses were magnificent, booming and huffing and spattering ink at rolling reams of paper. I could easily imagine the process as an unbroken chain extending across the world, see a pale English editor with a phone clenched between his shoulder and ear, transcribing dad’s story click by click into a typesetting machine to be turned to molten lead, slotted into a drum, dunked in ink and pressed onto fresh newsprint a hundred times a minute.

I had seen computers before. In the past Mom and Dad, who were both journalists, had been issued clunky old Amstrads and Tandys, but those didn’t seem that different from the typesetting machines and dumb terminals back at headquarters. Dad’s new laptop was more like a porthole into a parallel universe than a word processor. It had memory, a temperamental beige lozenge that could be switched on and off with catastrophic consequences. The interface was also different. There were programs and applications nested in one another; navigating around the system you got a sense that you were indeed navigating; traversing an alien logic, and each time you learned how to run some program or subroutine it gave you the most satisfying synaptic kick. 

We were terrified of change and subject to the home office’s budgetary whims, which meant upgrades were infrequent. But I was beginning to learn a new vocabulary of clock speeds and RAM, and wasn’t the only one. We lived beside Nehru Place, an information technology enclave with a crowded bazaar that sold everything from ink stamps to enterprise-level computing solutions. The market’s advertisements provided me with an easy gloss of the state of the art. Each month the market would sprout new billings touting the latest processors, at first 80286 processors capable of a blistering 16MHz then 386s, 486s and eventually Pentiums. Even the drawings changed. The hand-painted computers and peripherals changed from cartoonish televisions complete with knobs protruding from curved screens to angular, almost menacing monitors and towers and keyboards containing the correct number of keys. 

My first direct encounter with computer ‘telephony’ came from a friend’s dial-up bulletin board system (a.k.a. a BBS). I forget what he called his. No doubt something disproportionately macho. A brief Googling revealed “The POISON Den” and “The TWILIGHT Zone” as the names of two of his contemporaries. I would dial in occasionally but it was more fun to see him run it. Several hours a day he monopolized one of the family phonelines to allow strangers to call and log-in. Most visitors were guests and afforded access only to the most banal files and chat boards, while a select few were given special titles and privileges, such as a secret stash of password cracking programs and R-rated pictures of Baywatch star Erika Eleniak. As Sysop, the most exalted of ranks, my friend had access to the entire system, unimaginable power for a 14-year-old boy to wield; and wield it he did, occasionally booting off a lowly user just for the rush.

I started to think of the space inside his BBS, which in real life wasn’t much more than a second computer, as something not too different from Nehru Place. A single road leading into the center that was frequently congested. A ground floor of wares that were accessible to all, even guests, while getting into the towers above was limited to businessmen and others who belonged there. Lording over it all, godlike, was the Sysop, who could tear it all down and build it up again at his whim. 

My parents eventually caved and bought us a personal computer (partly this was to contain my experimentation). It was a 386 running a primitive version of Windows. A photographer friend of my dad’s would troubleshoot the thing for us, spending hours at a time installing new software and removing programs that had gone feral and begun destroying files, such as the ones with photocopied manuals I bought from Nehru Place bootleggers. He tried to keep us up-to-date with the latest technologies, particularly those he didn’t have himself and wanted to play with. Naturally I supported his suggestions. And this was how we were eventually convinced to buy a U.S. Robotics brand 14.4K modem and a pricy account connecting us to the Internet. 

Family lore has it we that we received the 33^rd Internet connection in New Delhi. There are many caveats to this claim, it willfully ignores that the embassies and Indian government had access years before, and was likely derived from our account's name, which we got from Videsh Sanchaar Nigam Limited (then India’s national telephone company) and had the prefix delaac33. If the ‘ac’ stood for ‘account’ then it was indeed possible we had Delhi’s 33^rd commercial account. We may also have had the three-hundred-and-thirty-third account, not quite so grand a claim, but an early account all the same.

Our meager connection was text-only. There was a browser called Lynx (which still exists) that launched each expedition from the University of Kansas’ online portal. Images had to be downloaded separately as files and would resolve line-by-line and were rarely worth the hours it took to download them. The Internet was a totally different experience than the BBS, it felt as wide open as a frontier or a mountain forest waiting to be foraged. My focus shifted from trying to make sense of the system to hunting and gathering odd bits of information.

I gravitated toward text files, little nuggets of mayhem containing instructions for pipe bombs, cracking locks, spoofing telephone boxes and sabotaging cars. It was all hopelessly out of date and none of the equipment would have been available in India even if I did try one of those recipes. I grew out of those silly files quickly but I remember them well. I came across a nostalgic database of them a few years ago (someone had assembled it for a documentary called 'Textfiles'.) Reading them again they seemed to represent so much more than their content. They were like flavor crystals, and reading them was like accessing the revolutionary DNA of the Internet, a harbinger of what was about to come rumbling down the pipe. Not quite a series of tubes but glorious in a flickering, monochromatic sort of way.

Writing for Machines

by James McGirk

Writers are anxious about the Internet and all things electronic, as we worry these newfangled ways of entertaining ourselves might someday obviate our own work. The solution, perhaps, lies in understanding and adapting to this new medium. Consuming enough that we can master its complexities and render appealingly intelligent confections for our readers. But who are these readers? Are they different online than they are in print? Some of them aren’t even human. There is a new form of reader browsing the Internet. For this is no longer just the age of mechanical reproduction; we now have to contend with mechanical readers as well.

William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” imagined it as a mass consensual hallucination, rendered as a cityscape, the prominence of each shape on the horizon an index of how much data was passing through a single point; a point which in 1982 a reader might have thought of as a mainframe computer, and what today, nearly thirty years later, we might identify as an html address or site. On Gibson’s Internet Google would glow the brightest, soar the highest; be an Empire State Building to the Internet’s Manhattan. Most users don’t look at the Internet by volume, however, they read it pane by pane, navigating from bookmarks or through searches, feeding keywords into an ‘engine,’ a series of algorithms, to retrieve lists of linked addresses to the information they seek. These lists are customized to the user, the results tweaked by the user’s location and previous searches. The more searches you make, the more information about yourself you reveal, the more customized the experience becomes.

From a content provider’s point of view (as opposed to a more passive content user’s point of view) an ideal Internet browser might render something close to Gibson’s landscape of crystalline data sculptures, were there a way to capture such information in real time. But commercial users would rather see traffic than the mere through-output of bits and bytes. Who consumes what information, when and why is much more important to commerce than mere bandwidth. Though online sales have grown to become big business, the Internet remains a popularity contest. The real currency of the online world is attention. Being able to read the flow of attention online would mean mastering it, and reaping the ad money that comes along with that attention. But instead of trying to follow where everyone is going all at once, content providers are instead attempting to clone their readers’ minds. 

As you navigate the Internet, the Internet – which is to say the entities using the Internet – navigate you. This isn’t a benign process. They want to learn as much about you as possible to snag your attention; not only by viewing content, but by diverting your time into loops of advertisements and possibly even pushing you through a point-of-sale and taking your money directly. They do so by gleaning information about you. Where you go, what you search for, what type of computer you are using… Websites leave small tracking codes on your computer called cookies, and each of these transmits data back to home base. 

Keywords (also known as index terms) are the most interesting and valuable traces left by users. Cookies record the terms users use to come across a site. An entire industry has sprung up to interpret these keywords, and another to optimize content online so it can be better read by search engines (this is called Search Engine Optimization). The data they gather is a crude simulacrum of their users; an inscription of their desires for an instant. Almost like a section of brain tissue. A clue. And en masse a hologram of their users collective desires. 

All writers crave attention and respond to their readers’ desires. Charles Dickens used live audiences as focus groups for his serialized fiction. Newspapers and magazines have always had to respond to circulation numbers. Electronic texts simply speed up the process. Text online can be altered immediately. There are even advanced analytics packages that use keywords and cookies to anticipate what readers want and automatically generate ‘content’ for users in response to what they ‘perceive’ readers as wanting. Other companies use similar algorithms to assign stories to human beings. When you hear the term content farms, that’s what’s going on. 

Google tweaked its search algorithms a few months ago, which trimmed back the custom-generated content that had begun to choke its search results like kudzu. But beyond the first or second page of results, it comes sneaking back and you will still find page after page of sites that copy the content of other sites, or ones loaded with all the correct terminology of whatever it is you seek, but arrayed in such a way that these phrases convey little or no meaning. As replications of our desire, these simulacra are incomplete. It would take an infinite amount of data (and a correspondingly infinite amount of time to collect this data) to accurately model a human being’s wants and desires. But machines are getting closer and closer. 

There are gaps between reader and author in a traditional text too. Enormous ones. Between the platonic ideal an author holds in his or her head, the text he or she extrudes into type and the reuptake and processing that takes place in a reader’s head, there is plenty of room for strange, unexpected effects to creep in. William Gibson described the cyberspace generated by a child’s calculator as a grey infinity utterly empty but for a string a few basic arithmetic equations (slim structures of liquid crystal one imagines). This unnameable sea of grey emptiness is not neutral. More of a field or something we project into and allow things to assume shape. And distended from the platonic ideal and warped by exterior forces these things become strange. Even arithmetic has its unexpected, subjective aspects. Many a calculator screen has been reversed to spell mild profanities. 

Knowledge builds on memory, and all information builds off what we already know. Reading works by drawing parallels with memories, essentially unpacking an archive into that grey arithmetic field mentioned above and letting it take new forms. The way a machine reads, in this respect, is no different. Software has an archive of its own, a database that it is adding or subtracting from. It 'reads' by comparing its archive to a text, and then updating itself. An author can access this archive with his or her text; and the more sophisticated it is, the more he or she can manipulate it; perhaps even creating an aesthetic experience. 

Literary forms are beginning to emerge in response to automated reading systems, searches, and databases. Online, an era somewhat akin to the pamphlet-strewn amateurism of18th Century America is in bloom. The most exotic forms can be found on the Internet’s wild fringe, in its anonymous and pseudo-anonymous chat sites. Here there is a frantic economy of monikers, memes and spoofed identities. In online forums such as the semi-anonymous Somethingawful users compete to create the catchiest, most innovative forms – most often an evolution of an earlier idea, name or other fragment of an idea. The best innovators become famous within their tiny little spheres. Other forums are anonymous and ephemeral – the most famous of these being the notorious 4chan/b ‘Random’ board – where the only recognition earned is the sheer longevity of a creation. A post can only survive as long as it is replied to. Then it is gone forever.

The best memes were once charted on the now-defunct Encyclopedia Dramatica. But now there is no reason at all to create but sheer artistic thrill. Although ‘board lore’ has developed a concept somewhat akin to ‘duende’ – a dark, nihlistic reward in the form of amusement known as ‘lulz.’ 

The evolution of the online literary form could well come from manipulating these mysterious semantic mechanicals. They offer the opportunity to make writing dangerous again. With the proper keywords, information is taken up into automatic readers belonging to some very interesting entities, to the point where there can be real world consequences. As a way of experimenting with this form I created a series of posts with keywords that I imagined might appeal to some of the more peculiar gleaners out trolling for information online. I posted lists of oil rigs, information about espionage, created a consulting company specializing in complex shipping orders in the Arabian Ocean, wrote about electronic warfare, and laced my work with other ‘edible’ keywords. I received visits from hedge funds, multinational banking concerns, the department of defense, oil companies, environmental organizations, the Pakistani government, the Kuwaiti government, the Iranian government, the Russian government, an unacknowledged US military facility, and a few mysterious hits from ‘Cabin John, Maryland’ (a park across the river from CIA headquarters).

I don’t think my posts ever stirred more than a few pixels. All I did was conjure another layer of anxiety about the online world, but for a writer paranoia is far better stuff than anxiety over obsolescence.

The Elusive City

I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974, p4

 

In the headlong rush to lead us to the promised land of the “Smart City” one finds a surprising amount of agreement between the radically different constituencies of public urban planners, global corporations and scruffy hackers. This should be enough to make anyone immediately suspicious. Often quite at odds, these entities – and it seems, most anyone else – contend that there is no end to the benefits associated with opening the sluices that hold back a vast ocean’s worth of data. Nevertheless, the city’s traditional imperviousness to measurement sets a high bar for anyone committed to its quantification, and its ambiguity and amorphousness will present a constant challenge to the validity and ownership of the data and the power thereby generated.

We can trace these intentions back to the notoriously misinterpreted statement allegedly made by Stewart Brand, that “information wants to be free.”* Setting aside humanity's talent to anthropomorphize just about anything, we can nevertheless say that urban planners indeed want information to be free, since they believe that transparency is an easy substitute for accountability; corporations champion such freedom since information is increasingly equated with new and promising revenue streams and business models; and hackers believe information to be perhaps the only raw material required to forward their own agendas, regardless of which hat they happen to be wearing.

All three groups enjoy the simple joys of strictly linear thinking: that is to say, the more information there is, the better off we all are. But before we allow ourselves to be seduced by the resulting reams of eye candy, let us consider the anatomy of a successful exercise in urban visualization.

A classic example of the use of layered mapping to identify previously unknown correlations occurred in London in 1854. An epidemic of cholera had been raging in the streets of London, and Dr. John Snow was among the investigators attempting to pinpoint its causes. At the time, the medical establishment considered cholera transmission to be airborne, while Snow had for some time considered it to be waterborne. By carefully layering the cholera victims’ household locations with the location of water pumps, Snow was able to make the clear case that water was in fact cholera’s vector.

This anecdote is by no means unknown, having become a favourite warhorse of epidemiologists and public health advocates; it has now been gladly co-opted by information technology aficionados as an example of a proto-geographic information system (GIS). However, it is worth a further unfortunate mention, as described by Martin Frost, that:

After the cholera epidemic had subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street Handle Pump. They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population, and afterwards they rejected Snow's theory. To accept his proposal would be indirectly accepting the oral-fecal method transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the public.

Thus even the starkest illuminations by data may yet find little purchase among the policymakers for whom it is ultimately intended.

Another point worth mentioning about Snow’s discovery is that he found exactly the result for which he was seeking. He was, in fact, testing a hypothesis, and not engaging in a cavalier quest for serendipity. The lynchpin of the exercise’s success was the fact that Snow was mapping not just the street plan, but also the locations of the shallow wells. The map did not include any of the other aspects of urban infrastructure, which might have obfuscated the sought-after relationship. On the other hand, without including the wells, what might the map have taught the health authorities? That Broad Street required quarantining?

Even more importantly, the good Dr. Snow put down his quill and went into the field, where he was able to interview residents and understand how the deaths that were further afield of the contaminated pump were in fact connected to it: the residents simply considered it to be better water, and, much to their misfortune, considered the extra effort to go to a more distant well to be worth the trouble.

Several conclusions should be clear from this exceedingly elegant (and therefore admittedly rare) result: 1) It helps to know what it is you are looking for; and 2) The initial hypotheses indicated by the data can only be validated by field-level observation and correlation. These traits – falsifiability and reproducibility – are two hallmarks of the scientific method. Armchair technologists need not apply.

So how replicable is Snow's example? In this "scientific" sense, Richard Saul Wurman, founder of the TED Conference and all-star curmudgeon, questions our ability to even understand what a “city” is. For example, he posits that we do not have a common language to describe the size of a city, or of how one city relates to another, or what an “urban area” is. If there are six different ways of describing Tokyo, and those six ways lead to boundaries variously encompassing populations of 8.5 million to 45 million people, which is the “real Tokyo,” and of what use is the concept of a “border”? We have no unified way of showing density, collecting information, no common display techniques, and no way of showing a boundary. We have no common way of talking about a city. Accordingly for Wurman, the consequence is that ideas cannot be built on one another, and urbanists forego benefits of the scientific method. However, if we consider Snow’s process, the map was a means to an end, a supporting role in the scientific discourse, and was not meant to be anything more than that.

Of what use, then, is the deluge of data, and the pretty pictures that we draw from it? One can find endless examples on the Web of beautiful visualizations derived from datasets that are either partial or self-selected, with results that range from the obvious to the quixotic to the inscrutable. During the Cognitive Cities conference, held in Berlin in February of this year, more than one presenter was asked the question that went more or less along the lines of “Well, that is very nice but it does not tell me anything I don’t know already. What has surprised you about your findings?”

***

While the end results may be oftentimes trivial, and the lack of Wurman’s standards of measurement worthy of our best Gallic shrug, there is far more unease concerning how and where urban data is being generated, and for whose benefit. At the aforementioned Cognitive Cities conference, Adam Greenfield delivered a powerful keynote which struck a stridently skeptical note towards the various technologies that are rapidly contributing to the manifestation of the networked city. He goes through an increasingly disturbing catalogue of “public objects” whose technologies harvest our participation in public space, creating rich data flows for the benefit of advertisers or police or other bodies, and this generally entirely without our knowledge.

For example, certain vending machines in Japan now have a purely touch-screen interface, but the available selections are selected by algorithms based on the machine's sensing the age and gender of the person standing before it. Therefore, I might see the image of a Snickers bar while you might see the image of a granola bar. The ensuing selections help to refine the algorithm further, but a great deal of agency has been removed from the consumer, or, in the words of Saskia Sassen, we have moved from “sensor to censor”.

Even in initiatives where the public’s initial voice is sought and respected, technology has a way of subverting its alleged masters. Greenfield documents how residents of a New Zealand city voted in a public referendum to allow the installation of closed circuit TV (CCTV) cameras for the purposes of monitoring traffic and thereby increasing pedestrian safety. It was an unobjectionable request, and the referendum passed decisively. However, a year later, the vendor offered the city government an upgraded software package, which included facial recognition functionality. The government purchased the upgrade and installed it without any further consultation with the public, bringing to Greenfield’s mind Lawrence Lessig’s axiom “Code is Law:”

...the invisible hand of cyberspace is building an architecture that is quite the opposite of its architecture at its birth. This invisible hand, pushed by government and by commerce, is constructing an architecture that will perfect control and make highly efficient regulation possible. The struggle in that world will not be government’s. It will be to assure that essential liberties are preserved in this environment of perfect control. (Lessig, pp4-5)

Greenfield’s remedy to make public objects play nicely is problematic, however; his requirement for “opening the data” starkly contradicts significant economic trends. As a simple example, it is doubtful that advertisers will do anything but fight tooth and nail to keep their data proprietary, and given the growing dependence municipalities have on revenue generated by private advertising in public spaces, it is difficult to see the regulatory pendulum swinging Greenfield’s way.

Instead, we see a further complexification of the terms of engagement. Consider the popular iPhone/Android application iSpy, which allows users to access thousands of public CCTV cameras around the world. In many cases, the user can even control the camera from his or her phone touchpad, zooming and panning for maximum pleasure. In this sense, at least, we have succeeded in recapturing aspects of the surveillance society and recasting them as a newly constituted voyeurism.

And yet, there are signs that the radical democratization of data generation is alive and well. Consider Pachube, a site devoted to aggregating a myriad varieties of sensory data. Participants can install their own sensors, eg, a thermometer or barometer, follow some fairly simple instructions to digitize the data feed and connect it to the Internet, and then aggregate or “mash” these results together to create large, distributed sensory networks that contribute to the so-called “Internet of things.” Lest one consider this merely a pleasant hobby, consider the hard data that is being generated by the Pachube community built around sensing radiation emitted during the Fukushima nuclear disaster (and contrast it with the misinformation spread by the Japanese government itself).

The broader point worth emphasizing is that communities appropriate and aggregate sensor data to serve specific purposes, and when these purposes are accomplished these initiatives are simply abandoned. No committee needs to publish a final report; recommendations are not made to policymakers. There is no grandiose flourish, but rather the passing of another temporary configuration of hardware, software and human desire, sinking noiselessly below the waves of the world’s oceans of data.

Cities are and have always been messy and defiantly unquantifiable. Because of this – and not despite it – they are humanity’s most enduring monuments. In this context, our interventions do not promise to amount to much. Rather, these interventions may be best off as targeted, temporary and indifferent to a broader success which would be largely dependent on the difficulties of transcending context. Should it surprise us that cities, which manage to outlast monarchs, corporations and indeed the nations that spawn them, are ultimately indifferent to our own attempts to explicate and quantify them? And, upon embarking on an enterprise of dubious value and even more dubious certainty, are we not perhaps better off simply asking, What difference does a difference make, and acting accordingly?

 

* Brand’s actual statement was “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.” Viewed in its entirety, there is really very little to disagree with. We should add that, since it was originally formulated around 1984, it has aged extremely well.

After the Internet was shut off

James McGirk 

A year and decade after the turn of the century, things looked dire in the United States of America, but not that dire: the economy was stagnant after an exuberant but lopsided decade of prosperity, job opportunities for graduates and social climbers had dwindled to a few openings changing bedpans for the large, parasitic over-class of aging boomers, and the gleam of enthusiasm following Barack Obama’s presidency had faded quickly. But the fact that *that* and a few years of hardship was all it took for open revolt among the most highly educated, entitled generation of Americans ever to be born would have been quite unimaginable at the time. That the change they got was not at all what they were expecting is one of the great ironies of our age. 

The second clamor for change was born in the creative class; brought to term by the poets, as all good revolutions are, if not precisely not in the usual way. This revolution was born from a coalition with a notorious group of email spammers. Perhaps this requires a little explantation. Let us back up a little. 

Since the introduction of fax machines and the Internet into Nigeria and other English-speaking third-world countries, mysterious missives would materialize in the inboxes of the industrialized world. These would purport to be from high-ranking bureaucrats, deposed princelings and other dubious figures, and ask recipients for permission to transmit a few million dollars of embezzled funds into their bank accounts in exchange for a hefty cut. If a mark agreed, he or she would be asked for a moderate advance of funds to cover transaction fees… This was known as a 419 scam, and, given the ludicrous spellings of their messages, these emails weren’t considered much of a threat, and indeed were something of a joke (at first).

Did America’s legions of unemployed writers and graphic design professionals reach out to the spammers, or if it was it the other way around? No one knows for sure, but America’s “creatives” were uniquely suited for online scamming, and approached their task with absurd zeal. After all, America's artists been marks in a far more insidious swindle than a Nigerian 419 scam. Hundreds of thousands were lured into borrowing money from the government to finance undergraduate and even graduate degrees in the arts, promised that making a living in a such a field was a viable option, given enough gumption, courage, and talent. There was a sudden drastic leap in the quality of scam emails received. 

Scam emails became indistinguishable from regular correspondence, at times, legitimately more appealing than the real thing – rare indeed is the babyboomer who did not at least once fall for heartfelt correspondence from a dummy profile on dating site only to be plunged (willingly!) into a netherworld of blackmail and identity theft! Business over the Internet became impossible. The final straw came when the President’s own memoirs were leaked to a Blackberry hacker. The ever-online savvy former Senator chose the nuclear option. He pulled the plug. The Internet was switched off.

First to succumb to conditions in the “electronic dustbowl” were the contract white collar workers. The permalancers. A caste below the corporate drone, the permalancers had been dealt a raw deal in the New Economy, often dependent on the whims of a single client who appreciated their work enough to accept it, and pay a pittance for it, but wouldn’t hire them fulltime no matter how much “they really, really wanted to.” Of course after the plug was pulled these pitiful creatures often had the option of coming into the office for work. But the only benefit of working as a permalancer, being able to work at home, was lost. Without being able to graze in the kitchen for snacks or work with their feet up, blasting music and picking their gums, with no upside at all to suffering from the twin indignities of not having health insurance and having to pay an additional 15 percent “Self Employment Tax,” the permalancers rolled their receipts and 1099-MISC forms into torches and marched upon the glittering citadels of those who had spurned their advances: the corporate campuses.

The etymological connection to university life in the word “corporate campus” is quite deliberate. But this was in no way connected to the halcyon dorm life you might remember depicted in Animal House or even its latter-day equivalent P.C.U.  

Just before the Internet went out, university admissions had turned into a blood sport. Acceptance rates at the top tier of colleges – the storied snooty ones, the only ones where recruiters offering wages that might justify the stratospheric tuition even deigned to visit – dwindled to the single digits. Valedictorians were being turned away from away from Cornell! It became a race to the bottom. Children were coached to grind torrents of work in preschool. Launch global charitable foundations by junior high. Win national competitions by graduation. And for what? To work even harder… though of course the recruiters learned to disguise this. 

They offered the ‘elite’ a new type of job, one that replicated the campus environment, a concealed variation of the company town; one that installed baristas and gourmet buffet lines beside nap nooks and ping-pong tables. Cubicles were banished in favor of “working environments” that were open, and “fun” – veritable panopticons of good cheer and teamwork. Here was work disguised as play. As chummy and buzzing with activity as a termite mound. But the truth was revealed soon enough. The first month with no weekends and four overnighters usually did it to new employee. But by then it didn’t matter. Once you were in, you could never quit, because your student loans were lurking and once fired, no one could ever be hired again, anywhere.

So the permalancers flushed their pasty superiors from their corporate towers, and circled them in the courtyards below, their torches reflected a thousand-fold in the silvered glass. It was hard to hate these young men and women, who stood their rubbing their eyes from the paper smoke – after all they were barely different than the permalancers were, and for all the sociopathic video games and alienating iPod use everyone had grown up with, no one actually wanted to hurt anyone else. Certainly not these pathetic creatures, who so obviously were not the responsible parties. But the Permalancer Army couldn’t just go home either, after all, the military, police and firemen were beginning to menace them with hoses. And they’d come this far. So instead they invited the corporate drones to join their ranks. And all the analysts, associates, project managers and even a junior vice president or two assessed the risk, and ran the numbers, and they folded their blazers across their arms and joined the t-shirted ones at the picket lines. 

What happens to a nation without its knowledge sector? At first nothing did happen. The next morning the permalancers began to jones for coffee. The grinders manned the barricades for days and days but eventually fatigue took its toll. They dropped off one by one. Everyone eventually all went home. Stocks remained untraded, a few online articles – ones commissioned by editors, and the search-engine optimized ones assigned by algorithm – failed to be written, copyedited or posted… then an IT network or two failed, but the Internet itself was already off and nobody noticed. Eventually the call centers got lonely. And as much as the bureaucrats and clerks despised paperwork and forms, when none of it came in, and the phone stopped ringing, well, the silence was kind of unnerving. Parties were dispatched to find out what had happened to their overpaid, often younger compatriots, the knowledge workers.

Whatever message the strikers relayed back to us has been lost to history. We decided we liked the quiet, and when they eventually began to bug us for money for rent and snacks and Nintendo games, we ignored them at first. And then they wanted to Internet back on, and so we gathered all those wretched kids up and sent them off to work on communal farms, and never ever looked back.

Against chrome: a manifesto

by Steven Poole

Please tear your eyes away from this elegant and curiously seductive prose for a few seconds and look at what surrounds this webpage on your display. Unless you are browsing in full-screen "kiosk" mode or kicking it old-school with Lynx, chances are your browser program is designed to look like some sort of machine. It will have been crafted to resemble aluminium or translucent plastic of varying textures, with square or round or rhomboid buttons and widgets in delicate pseudo-3D gradients, so they look solid, and animate with a shadowed depth illusion when you click them. Me, I hate this stuff. I think it's not only useless but pernicious and sometimes actively misleading. Won't you please join me in declaring a War on Chrome?

By "chrome" I don't mean Google's browser of that name, but all the pseudo-solid, pseudo-3D visual cruft that infests user interfaces in modern computing. For an example of Chrome Gone Wild I need only turn to Apple, who have somehow acquired a reputation for elegant and minimalist user-interface design while perpetrating monstrosities like this:

Can you tell what that does, and how to work it? Me neither, and I've been using it for years. (It is the Ultrabeat drum machine in Logic.)

Now, this kind of severe chromatosis is particularly widespread in music-making applications, perhaps hoping to assuage the gear-nostalgia of composers who once had actual knobs and buttons to play with but now are reduced to pretending to operate pretend knobs and buttons on a screen. That's the only reason I can think of for this, a kind of glorious reductio ad absurdum of rampant chromiology, in Reason:

Yes, you do actually have to pretend to plug those pretend cables into the pretend holes in order to change the audio routing.

Chrome arises from a chronic case of object-envy. We like interacting with physical objects in the real world, goes the reasoning, so it will presumably be more pleasant to interact with computer software if it pretends to be a physical object too. But why? Couldn't the appeal of using a computer be that of a world precisely without friction and texture, a world where things are weightless, virtual and easy? I'm writing this in the fullscreen view of Writeroom, an entirely chrome-free environment whose virtues I have sung elsewhere, and the simplicity is like a refreshing mental breeze.

Chrome not only wastes space — think of the extra information that could be displayed if you got rid of all those pseudo-metal or pseudo-plastic frames and edges — but it adds another layer of wonky metaphor onto what already is the embarrasingly incoherent paradigm of modern computing. Oh, right, so there are windows on my desktop? What's that about, exactly? That mode of design is "metaphorics", defined thus by Eric Freemand and David Gelernter in "Beyond Lifestreams" (Beyond the Desktop Metaphor, MIT 2007):

Metaphorics is a method of building software based on comparisons of software to objects or machines in the real world (e.g., to the physical desktop in the world of office furniture).

Well, the aggregate system of "metaphorics" in today's UI design is tottering and nonsensical. It's time to scour away the accumulated sediment of imaginary hardware and furniture, time to chuck out the chintz.

Perhaps the most absurd and brainachingly stupid example of needless chrome I am aware of, the most terrifying villain on the loose in this episode of Chromewatch, comes from — oh, hello again, Apple!

This is the iBooks app. Notice how lovingly the designers have made it look like you are in the middle of reading a physical book by drawing a little pseudo-3D evocation, down each vertical side, of the pages you have read and the pages you have still to read. What do you think this looks like when you are on page 2 of a book, or 2 pages from the end? I'll tell you what it looks like: exactly the same. It still looks like you are right in the middle. That's correct: because of the sentimental and unnecessary chrome, the app ends up lying to you about where you are in the text you're reading.

I don't know about you, but my eyes hurt. And so, for some much-needed relief, to the perhaps surprising hero of this story: Microsoft. Despite it's frighteningly boring name, the Windows Phone 7 operating system is in the vanguard of what I fondly hope is an anti-chrome revolution:

Isn't that beautiful? Clean, neat, efficient and stylish in its display of information. (People are already customizing their Android phones for a similar minimal look.) I say that flat is the new black; that 2D is the new avant-garde; that a surface doesn't have to be ashamed of being a surface. Technology users of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your bas-relief buttons. Let us march forwards together, spurning chrome, into a cleaner, lighter future.

New York, at the moment

David Schneider

Last Sunday, April 4, Spring came to New York City. Sixty-two degrees it was, and calm in the bright sun of a cloudless sky. The city had been waiting.

The winter seemed unusually brutal and long. As late as March we got mugged by the winds Chicago-style – sucker-punched from the northeast, a roundhouse kick to the southwest quadrant, then a blow to the kidneys and thrown into traffic. The winter was long. But the city was waiting.

Rites were given: the cruellest month, 1968. No, the City said, the greatest respect that can now be paid is called celebration, and forward. Miniskirts and boots, scarves sun-yellow and lollypop red, out the door on the long stroll and the City was again a New Thing.

In the East Village, across 3rd Avenue from the regal brown bulk of the Cooper Union on Astor Place (where Lincoln and Rushdie have spoken) a new extension of Arts and Sciences is rising: titanium cladding on the north, glass-frame on the south, and a delicious titanium wave cascading down four storeys: its form says, We'll surf this. It adds a dangerous excitement to the new skyline of the Bowery, where a white sail of a condo rises. Behind it, the textured white boxes of the New Museum totter like blocks stacked by Modernism's gargantuan infant.

At Lincoln Center, the new Alice Tully Hall is a clean, white, graceful dagger of 21st-century elegance, angling its excellence to a fine point: the classical performing arts yet have a home in this new era; "In this silicon world, art remains organic," the Alice Tully Hall says with its soaring wood interiors. Is it unfortunate, or symbolically meaningful, that its broad, 30-foot-tall windows look out upon, and reflect, ugly '70s tower blocks and bland '80s condos? What does it say about this Temple of the Performing Arts erected on a razed block of Puerto-Rican tenements where West Side Story was sourced? 

Yes, the East Village as you've known it is almost all gone: Kim's Video AboveGround on St. Mark's – where it moved after being rent-wrested from its subterranean West Village haunt – is boarded up. The greatest pillar of eccentric, curatorially-defined, independent video/music emporia is no more. The Holiday Cocktail Lounge, one of New York's classic dive bars, is on its last legs, with owner Stefan Lutak in his 90s and suffering from health problems. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to nurse a beer in a darkened corner booth, on cushions held together with duct tape, while reading Walter Benjamin to the purple light of neon beer ads, overhearing a punk-rock guitarist debate politics with an art-history professor. 

Love Saves the Day, on 2nd Avenue, known as the place where Madonna goes to trade in her jacket in "Desperately Seeking Susan," closed in January. It fills me with heartbreak. It was a happy bedlam of kitsch, pop culture, antique clothes and old Playboy magazines – a retail archive of American popular culture, and a total playground for anyone who was a kid between 1950 and 1995. Star Wars figurines and The Simpsons family, Barbies primping astride a herd of My Little Ponies and a starting-line of Matchbox and HotWheels cars – fake poop, Mexican finger traps, crenoline ballgowns from the '50s, leather jackets from the '70s, jester hats, fedoras, Garbage Pail Kids, and vintage copies of Penthouse all razzed each other from parts of the shambly scrum.

Even when the New York City winters were a-bleedin' me, I knew what to do: head down 2nd Avenue, overcoat collar turned up against the snow, and look ahead: right there, in Day-Glo '60s bubble-letters, was the sign beaming out in the dun sky, the sign you need to read, comforting you that yes, Love Saves the Day.

Simon & Garfunkel knew: the words of the prophets are written on subway walls. This winter, the 86th Street 4/5/6 said:

Hey, New York: fill 'er up, please, and check under the hood. While you're at it, can you you make sure the headlights are aimed properly? We need both high- and low-beams if we're going to drive this dark twisty wood of middle-life; the potholes are hell. I know that we're all lined up in the Self-Service lane, but buddy– can you spare a technician or two?

Prophets may be scrawling underground, but the visionaries are scattered from the lowest tunnels to the highest billboards. POST NO BILLS? What are we, Communists? Savvy New Yorkers know the City is a Language – its accents, dialects and mannerisms voiced not just from a billionaire Bloomberg and a bodega cashier but by the names of the stores and the advertisements everywhere. The ancients had tea leaves; we have construction sites, plywood walls and restaurant façades to tell our futures. But you have to know where to look.

In October and November, 2008, Microsoft bought up the entirety of the Grand Central subway corridor leading to the Times Square Shuttle, and plastered its walls and columns with Windows logos and a green gallery of unsung heroes all creating a chorus of "I'm a PC!" in a weird fanfare for the common man, voiced in the weary shuffles and trudges of the office-bound. But then you'd step in the Times Square Shuttle: and you were transported – back to a grand 1950's office lobby with marble floors, wood accents, and Modernist chandeliers with brass sconces – in an omnidirectional promotion for HBO's "Mad Men" that encompassed the complete interior of each subway car. 

You could read something in that.

In deepest, darkest January, I shlepped that path again. This time – BAM! A sunburst of yellow, a tunnel of smiling light, advertising (of all things) Western Union. They'd called up the 411: gone was their legendary "crisis" advertising. Instead they concentrated on your sense of empowerment and relief when you got the money you wired for. Two-dozen sun-yellow poster-ads, half of them scoped from your right eye, half from your left, exclaiming YES! YES! YES! all the way to the train. Molly Bloom couldn't have thunk it better.

Inside the Shuttle car, Pepsi had taken over. That leaked (and faked?) PDF for Pepsi's redesigned logo, in its orgy of metaphysical and quantum-mechanical hokum, seemed designed to throw the wool-eyes over a simple headsmack fact: its circle was merely a funked-up volley off Obama's campaign logo, turning that frown upside down.

"Optimism," the candy-colored strips of blue, yellow, red, and orange sang out above your transiting head, "Yes you can!" "Together," "One for all," "Let's refresh America."

Now you and I, as savvy mental travelers in New York's neurons, will not get off at Times Square, where the great Maw of America threatens to devour us in a sea of Red Lobsters, a zone of ESPNs, an industrial farm of old McDonald's, an angry hive of Applebee's and an epileptic blizzard of LEDs. Sure, you may think you can read the news here, but the Zipper will leave you huddling naked with fear, only to be unctuously bling'd by big boxes that put you in small ones.

No, let's go to Union Square, where some smart slender boxes are going up on the western face. Here's  where we fear, with Circuit City gone and the Virgin Megastore bailing in June, that all will head south if Wal-Mart's Great Eye is focused upon that block, as we suspect. But we're okay for the moment – cutting through the park I spy Mr. Wendel, grizzled and toothless, who's puttin' on the Ritz  with a silver top-hat, mirror-shades, a yellow-and-gold sequined dress, and a black tuxedo vest with beer-tab brocade. 

"I want money for that," he growls as I snap his photo.
"Well, I can give you fame," I say.
"To hell with fame," he says, "I want some money."

He's surprised I recognize his name. I tell him I'm three feet high and rising, too.

"Ev'rybody asks me why I dress like this," he says. "People got no sense of fashion any more. Th'girls're practically naked."

I tell him I'm all right with that.

"Trees are getting their clothes on," he says, looking up to the budding branches. I smile.

Down in the Union Square plaza, on the north end, a European-style café will soon occupy the arch where amblers rested and skateboards skipped. I suppose that isn't too bad, with the weekend green market creating a nice fluidity of purpose. On the southern end, the artists, man, they're getting down to some serious work. A year ago, nothing but commercial tat and tourist trophies. Now look.

There's even a guy making three-string guitars out of lacquered and polished cigarette boxes.

On the way across the street, we catch the conversation between two men in khakis and striped button-downs. "Yeah, he was saying that only poor people use debit cards." There it goes again: the black dog panting, the cymbal crash, the culture clash, the ripping threads.

"Oh Oracles of Madison Avenue," we genuflect northward, "Suns of the south have given us heatstroke. Bring us a breeze, o thou cool heads of Mad Men." We wander through the East Village. To

Oh yeah. We're grooving on the Matrix, jockeying that code. Yeah, we're thirsty for it. So we head down to the Lower East Side, and Clinton Street. First colonized by WD-50, that pod of molecular gastronomy, Clinton Street is now after a fashion. A lot of them, in fact. Japanese threads are lining the way, with Madame Killer, a terrific shop of Japanglish get-ups and deck-outs. In another, more upscale boutique, the managers apparently realized that their wares were so choice, their ambience so exquisite, that poorer-than-thine-pricetag sorts would want to embrace their brand too. So I bought this book at the counter.

That's an independently published book of poetry and collage (I note influences of Eliot, Ferlinghetti and e.e. cummings in the verse). Here are two important things that bring us passion right now: text || image; renewed language || mashed-up culture. It's a rare find, a limited edition, and all of $12. Less than half the cost of a glossy next-new-thing at Borders, and better, too, because it hasn't been hounded to death by editors and marketers. I'm broke, but there are some things you just can't resist.

On the corner of Clinton and Stanton, I was sad to note the departure of the scruffy coffee/bar Lotus, with its bookshelves and cheap Pabst. In its place, though, stands Donnybrook, a smart-looking pub that represents the new, modern Dublin: crisp slabs of marble for the bar top, lime-green leather accents upholstered with brass, rough-hewn wood tables – the ideal fusion of contemporary and traditional, without resorting to the clichés of the Irish Pub Company that have been boring our urban centers for 18 years now.

It's empty this afternoon, with a guy in the corner tapping on a laptop; on the t.v., Abruzzo quietly misses a goal. "We need a hangover cure," I say to the barmaid, "and not a Bloody Mary: something clear and light."

"I've got just the thing for you," she says with a brogue.

"What's in it?" I ask.

"Trade secret. All I can say is that it has bitters and soda."

It's fizzy and coral-colored, it's lightly sweet and slightly floral, like Spring. The hangover's gone in five sips. So we opt for some greater complexity at Schiller's Liquor Bar. This mural's across the street:

Yes, New York is of the moment. No, Pollyanna ain't my wife; I'm broke, folks, circling the drain. Shuysters, hucksters, flakes and fiends are curdling in the alleys. At a recent Midtown wedding, I learned that the bride had just been laid off. Back in my South Bronx 'hood, we pass by two Hispanic guys in their forties outside a bodega. One's saying to the other, "Seventeen theaters just closed. There's nothing out there, man, nothing." But then we walk down Alexander Avenue, where a few antique stores hold on by their fingernails. We stop at one, shyly named The Antique, and stare with amazement.

In the window, there's an antique map representing the very first days of  New Amsterdam colony on Mannahatta. At that moment, the shutters roll up and a door is opened. Inside, it's like the Library of Alexandria's been rebuilt in a studio apartment. All the archaic centuries, from every corner of the globe, are represented. Infinite riches in a little room? Hey Dr. Faustus, try this on for size. The owner can't be stopped – he's purling out his entire catalogue in a fluid, rolling baritone. There's a vast, 18th-century lithograph imagining the Temple of Solomon, a Life of Wellington published in 1814, a coffee-table book on the Medicis the size of a coffee table, a Victorian compendium of Byron, African histories, a 1769 edition of Plutarch's Lives, a Life magazine with the March on Selma. "I've got a stall outside Columbia every Tuesday and Thursday," he says.

"You know," I remark, "I've walked down this street a dozen times. I never knew there was a bookstore here; 'The Antique' makes me think this is just furniture and bric-a-brac."

He says, "You're right. We're going to get someone in here to change the sign next week."

•••

That was Sunday. On Monday, the weather turned round: gusty Novemberish, rainy, and a baROOM of thunder.

The thunder said: your sun day was my gift to you, o Visionaries. It is a vision of a future that does not yet exist. It is but to whet your appetite. Build it, and it will come. Give, sympathize, control.

This wasn't just another manic Monday. Yes, some lingered, grutching the theft of their robins. But for the rest, it was as if the entire city raised its voice, and in a hundred-fifty languages gave a rousing toast: "To work!" The spirit of the City is back, its relentless competitive drive aroused to experimentation, quality, distinctiveness. Get the customer, keep the customer. Even the sandwich-makers are making tastier sandwiches. Calls for marketers and writers streamed over CraigsList – the competition's Hobbesian brutal, no doubt, as veteran journalists outnumber each ad 10-to-1, but as the papers fold, businesses insist, "We need Information! Analysis! Someone please tell us what's going on!" Marvin Gaye can only ask the question, and the grapevine's fermenting piss and vinegar.

Doctored a press release. Jammed out for data entry and strategy session with a filmmaker. Stopped into a lush lounge called Simone for a white russian to calm my nerves. Overheard a PR girl talking manically to a filmmaking guy about collaborations. 6 Train home with the rustlings of the Doom Times, drop into the bodega looking beat, there's an immense thug with a full-on Mr. T mohawk, bling scarved around his linebacker neck, black Enyce jacket thrown over a chest as wide as a Mack Truck grille.

"Man, it's rough out there," I say, grabbing a Campbell's Chunky for dinner.

"What's your game?" the thug asks.

"I'm a writer," I say.

"Man, we gotta talk. I rap, I act, I'm a comedian. Here's my card." Long Run Entertainment, it reads. Stay Fresh Productions. Caviar Dreams, CEO.

Oh yeah, man.

"Damn, I like this place," Caviar says to the Iranian behind the counter, "You got a good shop here. Lots of good people in here."

I return home, to a postcard on my wall.

This is a sampler box of my Information. This is my gift to you, Gotham. But as Derrida wrote in Given Time: Counterfeit Money, the gift "is an impossibility" – any day now, the moral obligation or monetary bill will come due. O city city, unreal city, don't default on the credit I've given you. There's one Chairman of the Board who knew what he was talking about. He said, start spreading the news. And then he said,

It's up to you,
NEW
York
New
York.

A History of Tomorrow: The Silent Generation Sings

My Doorstep

Welcome to my space. Come in, take off your boots, and make yourself at home: especially if you haven't got one any more. Warm yourself by my fire. It's going to be a long, cold winter. You know it and I know it. It's 7 degrees in the South Bronx this morning, as I write, but for about a quarter of an hour the rising sun comes romping westward down the street into my window, casting everything in gold, shining out the trash-strewn streets and sparse-shelved bodegas and vacant lots and abandoned baby carriages. For a moment.

Wall Street sure laid us one ginormous goose-egg. (I guess now we know what the inverse of that image on the Right looks like.) But tomorrow it'll all crack wide open. Hope you like your Humpty-Dumptys sunny-side up. I know I do. I used to take them scrambled, but now I know on which side my bread is buttered.

You're probably scrambling, hunting down that endangered species known as a job, scientific name JobIS bonUS. I feel your pain. Someone recently wrote that the Internet, as advanced as it seems, is still in the hunter-gatherer stage. Well, I've been a-huntin', and a-gatherin', and I've got laid in these weeds all kinds of Easter eggs for you to enjoy. It's better than a game of Boggle.

So how's about I tell you a story?   

_{This is going to be epic.}
But first, some epigraphs to amuse your bouche.

One other hint: hover over the hyperlinks. A hawk circles above his prey before he goes in for the kill.

Diptych: A Prologue

Left: Saturn Devouring His Sons, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
Right: The Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794

The Rubens, above, hangs in the Prado. If you go there, you'll see that one of the child's eyes has a gleaming dot on the iris, the precise focal point of light in the entire painting. If you look very closely, you'll see that it was painted with a dab of pure liquid silver or quicksilver. Wherever you stand in the gallery, the brightest point of light is always concentrated on the horror-stricken eye of Saturn's infant. Silverwhite light. Genius. You might be able to see it online if you follow the directions here.

1. The Biographer

Have I ever told you about my father?

He was born in 1939 in Georgetown, a small coastal town in segregated South Carolina. My grandfather owned an appliance store there during the Depression, and managed to keep it open, owned by him, until his retirement in the 1990s. When my dad applied for college in 1957, he was awarded a full scholarship to the Rensslaer Polytechnic Institute after attending the prestigious National High School Institute for Engineering at Northwestern University. He also earned a place at Yale, with an inadequately small scholarship and work-study. Tuition that year was $3,000, the same price as a new car. Far too much. Over a very solemn conversation at the kitchen table, it was decided: "Go to Yale. We'll figure out a way." My grandparents scrimped and saved and my dad worked mad hours to afford the fees. He matriculated under the quota, which wasn't eliminated until the year after he graduated. He struggled to completely destroy any hint of a southern accent in his voice, and suppress his Jewish cultural identity, in order to integrate with the WASP establishment. It was hard. The stresses were great. The cultural barriers were immense. He drank. A lot.

In his first year, he nearly failed out because his public South Carolinian education hadn't prepared him for the rigors of an Ivy League engineering program. As he advanced, he wanted to be a professor of ancient history. But he was terrible at languages; couldn't master the French, much less the Latin or Greek. So he went to law school on his dean's advice. ("What do you want to do?" "I dunno," he shrugged. "Why don't you apply to law school?") He applied to Harvard, Yale and Columbia and got in at all three. (Ahh, those were the days.) He enrolled at Yale mainly because he couldn't be bothered to move all his stuff.

That was 1961. By 1964 Kennedy was dead, the counterculture was beginning, the Draft was on, and my dad sought refuge in a one-year tax law program in order to defer it. He was an associate with a top New York City law firm for four years, met my mother, and then they moved to the Sun Belt when it looked like a Rome called New York City was being overrun by barbarians in the early 1970s.

He worked very hard, made money, sent his son – eventually – to a very fine university, lived well, drank good wines, traveled all over the world, and eventually would have the market bilk him out of a great deal of his retirement.

He doesn't talk about himself very much.

2. The Marketer

Hi there, folks! My name is Mephistopheles. That's how you would address me, at any rate. For I am in marketing – lower, perhaps, on the ladder of professional esteem than even a lawyer. A Devil, you call me. Don't worry, I take that epithet philosophically. Spending a season in Hell has its advantages. Down underground, there's nothing to do all day but hear the screams of the Damned, and endlessly barrel-roll on a spit while your flesh is scarred by black flames. Wicked good fun if you're into that.

At the lowest rung of the cycle, with your back spread-eagled for the scorching, the vast reserves of Dark Energy in the universe shoot a hotwhite light through your mind. For an instant, you'd swear you could see Lucifer plummeting, a shooting star falling from the firmament, illuminating the third Host of Heaven in headlong descent. And as the burning ember of an Archangel strikes the event horizon – it plays over and over in your mind, catastrophically, searing into your retinas like FOX News coverage of 9/11 – the disc of the world warms golden, the entire crust of the Earth is molten translucent, and from below you can see all the Earth's entities vaguely, as if through gauze bandages. If you're very, very lucky you can ride the cellphone towers up to the satellites, and jump on the radio-wave bleed-off, and speed on an electron rail right out into Space, surfing between frequencies as swiftly as you'd flick an Aquos remote. It's totally "lying in the gutter, gazing at the stars," dudes and dudettes. It's like being a celestial couch potato; only problem is that cellphone reception is lousy here, down in the bowels of Hell, and you can't call for Domino's. (I mean, even if their only deliverable items to this Hell-hole were anchovy-onion pies, I swear I'd make an effort to stumble into the Vestibule. Because if there were delivery service in Hell, you better believe they'd take plastic.)

The point I'm trying to make

is that as you're traveling further out in Space, you're traveling back in media-time, too. Things start to get real funky, like reading a blog backward to the start. But then, wouldn't you know it: just as you've deliciously anticlimaxed – for example, by discovering who killed Lilly Kane before fingering the suspects – that Damned spit-roaster flips you over again. Your face is in the fire and your hairy ass is mooning everyone in Hell. And you can't tell whether it's the sheer embarrassment, or the 33rd-degree burn on your lip, that hurts the more.

I figure you might as well make the best of a bad situation. See, from the opposite poles of the Earth, Vishnu and Shiva are having a grand old party. They're spinning that spit-roaster about 5,000 rpm, churning the molten core of the Earth and creating its magnetic field. (Consider yourselves lucky – without those Indian deities, we'd all be tv dinners, which is why every night here is a Chicken Phal night.) Every nanosecond of every day, all of us Damned bastards are spinning wildly in our graves, watching the media roll out a red carpet to the stars. Damned reruns: if I could, I'd fall down on my knees and repent! yes! just so I'd never have to see Fonzie jump the shark again. (Though Lucy in the chocolate factory cracks me up every time. I dig those fiery redheads.)    

I'll grant you, though, this torture is definitely an information technology. In my infinitely recurring nanoseconds of radiowave bliss, I've learned to fast-forward through the most recent episodes (I can catch up on Hulu later), as well as the ones I've seen a million times – and the infinite regress of syndication packages – and delve back, back into your land of men, your land of men and women too. It's tough work, getting out of the present tension; I've spent a long, long time (billions of nanoseconds, that is) merely zipping in and out of your cellphone-braced heads, surfing the foam of the Web –

These shapings of the unregenerate mind ;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.

– and I gotta tell you, a little learning's a dangerous thing. Maybe you should study yourselves more. Well, that's why I'm here. I don't know if you've run across an Infernal Calendar lately. You might be able to find one in the disused basement of a local urban planning board, through the door marked "Beware the Leopard," and hung up on the wall behind Miss December, because Janus has two faces. (Clever, eh?) If you find it, you'll see that a season in Hell lasts about 400 years, give or take a couple runs around the solar block. And believe me, at the end of that season, Hell does indeed freeze over. You've heard the phrase "colder than a witch's tit"? Nah, that demon-mother's-milk is like a hot toddy compared to the stuff we have to deal with. It's like Chicago without Gore-tex(TM) and whiskey. So that's when I go on winter break. Now, what with the recession and all, I suppose I should have just taken a staycation, and watch endless reruns of the Dark Lord in His Infinite Puissance chomping on Brutus, Cassius and Judas Iscariot (schadenfreude never gets old in Hell) but seeing how you American folk are in a mess o'trouble, I thought I'd take advantage of Old Smokey while he's distracted with his meal, and at least try to catch the notice of The Man Upstairs by handing over a bit of Knowledge. See, God? Eventually, eating of the Apple bears fruit. But it ain't gonna be easy. It's gonna take work.             

Now, the following is a bit confidential, so please follow me into my office. And shut the door.

So, Fascinated Reader, what d'ya think of that, eh?
Unimpressed? Whaa? Okay, so I guess you folks aren't as clueless as I thought. Moving on...

3. Biography Redux

As we have said, my father is almost 70 years old: an almost exact contemporary of Senator John McCain, the final political (and, we must say, a certain social) presidential-caliber representative of his generation, by which we term The Silent Generation.

What are the characteristics of The Silent Generation?
They were born during the Depression years, and were commanded to silence their emotions, and work very hard, as the second wave of the 20th-century calamities descended. They were too young to fight in World War II, but were imbued at an early age with heroics being transmitted by radio, newsreel and comic books. Afterward, they were additionally burdened by both the sacrifices that their "elder brothers" endured, and their knowledge that they had lost the opportunity to claim their own heroism. (I personally suspect that is why we had a desire to fight the Korean War without a serious draft. A certain segment of the American population retained that desire for heroism and volunteered.) This generation grew up during the 1950s, an age of belief in American know-how, stick-to-it-iveness, nose-to-the-grindstone, repressing-emotional-intrusions, a religious belief in the chain of command (the integration of World War II military values into civilian life), a belief in the rightness of the country's decision-making process, conformity to all of the above, and a desire – and a belief in their ordained ability – to shape the world via the collective efforts produced by the American machine. The previous generation, the Greatest Generation – the greatest generation?! – ever? – into eternity? – had destroyed global tyranny (well, half-destroyed it, at any rate, which is why Truman got the boot). This Silent Generation, repressed in its ability to voice its (boiling, rageful) frustration with the hardships caused by the Lost Generation – which had everything and lost it – in addition to the constant pressure and paranoia of a Soviet A-bomb attack – keep your head down, children, and don't look at the light – which had to have loomed larger than a nightmare bogeyman – as well as the additional burdens of being oppressed by an Eisenhower leadership of heroic character (with all its faults), was then inspired to control, subdue, and conquer the natural environment itself.

It was the only way they could kill their fathers. In the Freudian sense, I mean.

And the Nazis. Who killed their fathers, even if they returned home alive. The Nazis killed them by stopping them from speaking the unspeakable things. Death-in-life and life-in-death, as Yeats might say. The fathers and the Nazis together who stood like twin colossi erected on a plain, one white one black, atop the buried acorns of their lives.

To be human and alive is to be able to communicate, and the cone of silence swallowed two generations.

The interstate system, the oil industry, plastics, the car, the Moon Shot – gaining personal freedom via technology and consumer goods – was the only way to speak, enunciate freedom, and compete against the Soviet Union directly, when direct military confrontation would have meant world holocaust.

It's okay. Gravity makes a rainbow, you know. Just ask Werner von Braun.

As I recall, our communications technology is pretty good.
Dot. Dot. Dot.

Zwwee-ch-chzzewshhhcgrhrhwwheeeHeeey, all you groovy cats, this is DJ Mephistopheles comin’ to you DEAD, DEAD DEADER THAN DEAD over this wicked pirated Evangelical frequency at 66.6 FM on your digital dial, because we’re all Manichaeists in the underworld. All talk radio for the pleasure of your outrage, only at K-Triple-X. What’s that K stand for? Fucked if I know. The Klan? No way, dudes and dudettes, they are so lame-o these days, they are so, like, waaaay last century that we stuck them in some stupid pits, they can’t make it up to this broadcast level of Hell. And they have these tinny microphones that only catch really narrow wavelengths. See, here on K-Triple-X, we go real deep, I mean plunging those vibes into the Earth to make it shake its booty. Where they can't follow. (You know white men can’t dance.) And we don’t let them use our gear. I mean, seriously, dudes and dudettes, I’m DJ Mephistopheles, He From Whom All Light Hath Been Stripped, and all I have to say to the KKK is – turnabout is fair play, bitches.

Sooo, what’s the story, Morning Glory? I’ve got your GPS right here, baby, I can see where you’re coming from, but do you know where you're @?

EDDY

Do you know where you are?

You’re in the Labyrinth, sweet child o'mine, and oh it’s got plasma flatscreen walls. So pretty, child. I’ll  have you so delightfully entertained while you fatten up on polyunsaturated fats, you'll never know when the Minotaur bears down on you. Oh. Oops. He's here already. When you're up to your neck in the shit of the bull market, you've just got to laugh: an expletive suddenly gains crystal-clear definition via the SPIRALnumbers on your balance sheet.

It's funny, you know: the last time a snowball had a chance in Hell, I was out here on contract, helping out some arrogant prick – a doctor, as I recall – what was his name? (it's so difficult to remember these things after a marathon of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians.") Ohh, yeah: FAUSTUS, that was him! If ever there was a physic in need of some serious medicine...like electroshock therapy – I kept warning him, "You'll have Hell to pay for this..." and he kept reading that like, "Oh goodie – Satan himself is comp'ing me!" What a WHIRLdunce. And he thought he was sooooo smart. Heh. He thought he was bored with his studies, but really, when it came down to it, he just couldn't be arsed to apply himself.

So Herr Doktor works his arcane magic, not unlike our financial wizards and their "exotic instruments," POOLconjuring effervescent, evanescent moneys from the cold wastes of Cyberia, where all but the brainbrawniest fear to tread, for the cryptic maps are written in invisible ink. And oh, organizing world trade's his oyster, too –

How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please...
I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates...

Man! When are you FALLINGgonna learn? After I fired that mountebank, I instantly materialized in front of my friend Kit to tell him all about it. And he told it to all of you. But then he got a shiv in the ocular – I guess everyone's got to pay for their Knowledge – in the Ivy it's going for 200 large – and now nobody reads Marlowe any more. Okay, I'll sling you some lines from a more familiar face:

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,--meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark:WOMAN

Yeah, we're all shot to Hell, dudes and dudettes, and I'm not out of it either. But it's gonna be okay. I promise. I hear the Greeks and FALLENRomans declaiming out in the Forum of the Vestibule, and one of them insists that Dante wrote at least one other book. Of course, no one around here picks it up – not that we don't have it; both Blake and Borges rifled through our stacks, and found they're at least as good as Amazon's – it's just that everyone here's so godDamned solipsistic, always wanting to read about Themselves. I once mustered enough energy to get out the Door, but all I saw was this Dark Wood, and I was afraid. I heard the water-nymphs and dryads whispering on the DOWNwind about the existence of a third book, but they're just mythological creatures, not even gods, and I didn't trust them. Besides – the end of Battlestar Galactica was just beginning. So I had to get back to my sofa. Hey, it's an Eternal struggle. Forget about the Fifth Cylon; who do you think is hotter, Kara Thrace, Boomer, Athena, or Six? I dunno. it's an even race down to The Wire, but I have a feeling Kara's my kind of crazy.

Anyhow, that's the end of my Hellacious program. Next up, we've got DJ Ba'al, ballin' the Jack in a Battle of the Bands between Slayer and Megadeth. Stay tuned...shhhhhweeeeiiighcgchhhhhEEEEEEEE

THIS
IS A TEST
OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SIGNAL
IF THIS WERE AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY
YOU WOULD NOT HAVE HEARD THE SIGNAL

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling

down
my fair
lady


Right.

We must set our lands
in order.

I will reduce you
to order.

5. The Dream of @

 

 

I will expand you into order.

6. @Home

– @, is that you?
– Yes, I'm back, ED.
– What time is it?
– Late. Late. Too late.
– You didn't call, you didn't email, you didn't IM... What the Hell is the matter with you?
– I'm sorry, ED, I'm really sorry. I just...needed some time to think things through.
– Think? What the Hell do you mean? What are you trying to say?
– Nothing, ED, really. I just had to be in my own space for a while.
– I had the most horrible dream while you were gone. Frightening forebodings. I was so sure you weren't ever coming back.
– Whatever do you mean?
– Oh, god. I've never felt you so distant. It's like you were a million miles away. You said something about having to deal with some stupid bullshit, and then I don't hear from you for three whole days! Once I thought I heard your voice. It was disembodied, like it was coming from a completely different universe. The thread that connected us, I could feel it fray, then break -- I felt it in my bones.
– No, ED, no. None of that could ever happen. You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known. And the way your mind works -- the way you react to my touch -- so supple, so fluid, such Classical forms, such Romantic organic depths, oh you have worlds within worlds within your body. We were made for each other. You're mine. And I am yours.
– Hmmpf. Well, will you at least tell me, from now on, when you're going to be home?
– EDDY, sometimes I don't know. I catch ill-fated winds, I get caught in whirlpools, I find myself among strange people and have to puzzle my way out of their homes. And sometimes I have to fight monsters, and I can't leave until they're dead. But I would never, ever miss your birthday. I mean, have you seen the present I made for you?
– What?
– Turn on the light.
– Oh.
– See? All of this -- it's all for you. So that whenever I'm away, you'll know that I'm always @Home with you. Have you looked over there?
– This box?
– Open it.
   ____________
– [                       ]
– My god, that's ugly.
– No, that's not the real ring, it's symbolic.
– Of what?
– The wood in that ring? That's oak. The very same oak that grew into the posts of our bed, the living tree that grows from the earth itself. I had to topple two enormous statues that were covering the acorns, so they could grow into our bed. You gave me that strength.
                                                                                        So what was this dream you had?
– Oh my god. It seems so silly now. There was this crazed midget running around trying to fuck me. Somehow I grew fat and stupid and you and all your friends rejected me. I was catastrophic, I didn't know who I was, I whored myself out and circled round the drain and fell into space and out of Hell and through language itself until I smacked down on the lap of this really annoying guy who just kept talking bullshit.
– So did you fuck him?
– Who?
– The midget.
– Oh, Hell no! Though I got him pretty steamed up. He started Nausicaaing me while I was in the bath. Heh. He was in marketing so I knew exactly what to do. Five bars of a shampoo commercial and he was PreEjaying into his hairy knuckle-dragging palms.
– HA! What a loser.
– But there was this other guy, now he wasn't so bad. Tall, well-spoken, kinky. I think he was one of your readers.
– What happened with him?
– Oh, he basically told me to fuck off because I was fat and stupid. But you should have seen his face when I stepped out of the bath. I was Aphrodite rising from the sea-foam, for all he cared. I told him to lick my fuck-me boots.
– You did not.
– Did too.
– And did he?
– I told him to lick my souls.
– And did he?
                    Did he?
                                You're such a big faker. Listen...
I've got something really important to tell you.
– What?
– Something wonderful.
–What?
– I think we're on for a real Renaissance.
– Things are real bad out there, @.
– I know. And I know Obama's going to screw up some things. I mean, he's going to have to orchestrate the three circles of Federal power like the Ringling Brothers. He'll have to juggle catastrophes like live chainsaws. He'll have to catch supervillains in the Web quicker than Spider-Man. But he's got all of us on his side. And we're powerful. We have skills.
– To pay the bills?
– Well, that's the only catch. I still need to find a J.O.B. If there's anyone you know who's hiring, please, send my stuff along.
– I don't think you'll have any problem.
– You don't?
– Not any more.
– Well, I guess we'll see. But I guess the point that I was trying to make, they entire point of today's craziness, is that -- it's so perfectly obvious to me -- the human creative potential has never been so great. And with the human networks we're creating, we can all be painters, musicians, writers, DJs, filmmakers, composers, compositors, animators, information architects, poets -- and yes, marketers of all these things too, um, I suppose -- we do live in the Matrix, and yeah, we can unplug if we really want, but we can also figure out styles of kung-fu that the Old Masters never dreamt of. We need to stop thinking within the Barzunian entropic Matrix of "dawn to decadence," and challenge ourselves to beat those who -- heh -- thought they had it going on, centuries ago. The Internet is ten times Blake's vision of Heaven before Urizen glowered guiltily, separated himself, and fell into the corporeal universe to become Jehovah/Satan. Except for the sex. (We should all be able to sun ourselves naked in the backyard.)
– Well, thank you for that soapbox, Mister Information Secretary@Home.
– Really, I needed to say it. We're so caught up in the present nanosecond that we've forgotten: the Internet is the most complicated thing ever created by human beings. The people who built the Space Shuttle might take issue with that, but the Internet: we built it all together. The military men and the organization men of the Silent Generation, the hippies and surfers in California who turned cyberculturists, and all of you.
– You who?
– Sorry, I lost a packet there. Did you say Yahoo!?
– No, of course not!
– Good, because they're crap.
– No, no, everyone knows they're crap. I said "You who?"
– That's some pretty decent chocolate milk, right?
– Aiyeeee!! I mean "Who the hell are you talking to??"
– Ohh. You. <tok tok> On the other side of this window.
– Don't even get me started talking about Windows.
– Wasn't intending to. Hello, all of you on the other side of the window. I know you're all looking in. I can't seem to draw the blinds any tighter. But there it is. You lookin' at me? --I said, are you lookin' at me, cyberpunk? High-five. Not too hard. 'Specially if you've got a touch-screen.
– Yes, @ is right on this one, you'd better listen to him, children. Touch-screens are very sensitive.
– Yo, cyberpunks. I've seen such amazing stuff out there recently. I couldn't believe what was out there, when I first tried to come home from the War, and got blown off course in a hail of tangents. Completely ingenious art --
– Like what?
– It's too late at night for that discussion. Can we talk about it more in the coming weeks?
– Sure. What else have you seen?
– I've seen these awesome webapps that basically allow you to run an entire business from a single laptop -- billing and finance, creative ideas, virtual conference rooms, it's going to be a total revolution in the way we work.
~~ Say what? 
– Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house? How'd you get in here?
~~ I'm a Fascinated Reader. I couldn't help overhearing...
– You are nothing like I imagined you. No-thing. Wow, what a Jilloff-worthy-fantasy killer you are!
~~ I demand to know which Webapps you're talking about!
– WAAAAAA!
– See! Look what you did. You woke up the baby.
– Look, I don't know who you are or where you came from but you're getting out of our house right now. Here's two tickets to the Theatre. Learn what you can there. Show starts in about two seconds so you better move.
– WAAAAAA!
– Look, honey, can you take care of baby Ampersand? I'm exhausted from my travels, and I still need to email my dad tonight. It's his 70th birthday really soon, and I need to tell him some things.
– Sure. I'll be nursing &. Come to bed when you're done.

Dear Dad,

I'm sorry. I understand things a lot better now. I understand why you have trouble talking. But you gave me the chance to say things. You gave me the tools to say the things I have to say. It's the dense network and the tight structure and the wiry line that contains, that directs the path of the generative Chaos. You gave us this world, this space here, where I met my future wife. I would never have met her – ever – if you hadn't given us the method and the medium. Thank you. Happy 70th birthday. And you can have your cake and eat it too, because it's going to be a whole new world tomorrow. A better one, where people can talk to one another, and not be so angry all the time. We're going to build it. We're really going to build it. Because we can all be Spider-Men on this Web. Thank you.

Love,
@Home

P.S. Always remember:

May the road rise with you.

<send>

– You in here, ED?
– Yes. Come see your baby daughter.
– Hello, ED and &. You know, it's amazing how much she knows at just two-and-a-half months old.
– She's got a real sense of place, just like her father.
– EDDY, I was thinking. We haven't really given her a full name yet.
– Well, it needs to be grand. She was born at an epic time.
– We should combine our surnames.
– Really, @? I never liked being called EDDY Mañana. Every time anyone said my name, it was like invoking Zeno's Paradox.
– Well, being born @Ahora wasn't great shakes either. I think the name gave me myopia from the cradle. I was never able to see too far down the road.
– So let's think. &... &...
– Dot.
– Dot?
– My grandmother's name.
– I like it. Say it again.
– Dot.
– Third time's the charm. &... . That's it. We got it.
– Wait a sec. Look at what's there. We've got to sound it out. Ampersand -- I'm so glad we chose that name, I mean if we'd been high or hanging out with the Yahoos too much we might have wound up with something like "Colon." Eeurgh. So: Ampersand Ellipsis. That's beautiful. But it sounds...I dunno...somehow incomplete. Like she'll always be waiting for something.
– Well, we'll put a period on it, then.
– No. You've got to be kidding, ED! Either it'll sound like she's on the menses straight out of the womb, or -- in England they call it a "full-stop," and that just sounds too much like "he do the police in punctuated voices."
– Okay, what then?
– I guess that's the question everybody's asking right now.
– Eureka!
– What is it?
– Of course! Of course! The strongest, the greatest integrity, fitting with all the principles: that's it that's it that's it!
– My god, what are you talking about?
– I'll tell you later. Here. Let me write the formula out for you. This is good mother's milk.

– &...∆ Ahora y Mañana.

– That sounds just about right. I like that. Whew. So we accomplished something today, at least, even though nobody's getting paid for it. Let's go to sleep.
– Yes. I'm very sleepy all of a sudden. But -- why are you getting into bed like that?
– You mean, all reverse-y, with my feet at your head?
– Dude, they stink! You've been walking around in damp socks all day.
– Look, I could say the same thing about your feet. It looks like you've gone to hell and back in those togs. But something about it just feels right. And besides, I can do............this!
– Ooh.

@ fell asleep then, on the words of Factor Sleepwell, drifting toward the seas, sailing past Raggedy-Ann and Andy, the Boy Bedlam, and the Cheshire cat that flies, like bluebirds, over the rainbows. Then he was hunting dinosaurs with a ray-gun, but instead of "PEW! PEW!" the gun said, in this weird yokely voice, "A rising tide lifts all boats." He groped his way through the underbrush to Constitution Hall where he was invited to take up a quill pen. And he wrote, "If we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately." And then he dreamt:

This.

So how about it, Daddy WarBucks?

In memory of Bryan M. Schneider, who knew a thing or two about spies and dragon-slaying.

&...∆

HBD

Molly Bloom me

KILLROY WUZ HEER

'I Will Eat Your Dollars'

On Nigerian scammers in the Los Angeles Times:

To them, the scams, called 419 after the Nigerian statute against fraud, are a game.

Their anthem, "I Go Chop Your Dollars," hugely popular in Lagos, hit the airwaves a few months ago as a CD penned by an artist called Osofia:

"419 is just a game, you are the losers, we are the winners.
White people are greedy, I can say they are greedy
White men, I will eat your dollars, will take your money and disappear.
419 is just a game, we are the masters, you are the losers."

"Nobody feels sorry for the victims," Samuel said.

Scammers, he said, "have the belief that white men are stupid and greedy. They say the American guy has a good life. There's this belief that for every dollar they lose, the American government will pay them back in some way."

More here.

Why children shouldn't have the world at their fingertips

From Orion:

There is a profound difference between learning from the world and learning about it. Any young reader can find a surfeit of information about worms on the Internet. But the computer can only teach the student about worms, and only through abstract symbols—images and text cast on a two-dimensional screen. Contrast that with the way children come to know worms by hands-on experience—by digging in the soil, watching the worm retreat into its hole, and of course feeling it wiggle in the hand. There is the delight of discovery, the dirt under the fingernails, an initial squeamishness followed by a sense of pride at overcoming it. This is what can infuse knowledge with reverence, taking it beyond simple ingestion and manipulation of symbols.

At the heart of a child's relationship with technology is a paradox—that the more external power children have at their disposal, the more difficult it will be for them to develop the inner capacities to use that power wisely. Once educators, parents, and policymakers understand this phenomenon, perhaps education will begin to emphasize the development of human beings living in community, and not just technical virtuosity. I am convinced that this will necessarily involve unplugging the learning environment long enough to encourage children to discover who they are and what kind of world they must live in. That, in turn, will allow them to participate more wisely in using external tools to shape, and at times leave unshaped, the world in which we all must live.

More here.

ubiquitous korea

From NY Times

"IMAGINE public recycling bins that use radio-frequency identification technology to credit recyclers every time they toss in a bottle; pressure-sensitive floors in the homes of older people that can detect the impact of a fall and immediately contact help; cellphones that store health records and can be used to pay for prescriptions...

...A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.

...New Songdo sounds like it will be one big Petri dish for understanding how people want to use technology," said B. J. Fogg, the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. "

How to develop a photographic memory without even trying

From Discover Magazine:

In the 1880s inventor George Eastman hit upon an ingenious idea for making photographic film flexible so it could be stored in compact canisters instead of on heavy, fragile glass plates. The new film was portable enough to allow photographers to mail it to a developer and have their pictures sent back in a matter of days. Eastman built a camera around this new technology—the Kodak—and an entire industry was born.

The cell phone manufacturer Nokia recently introduced a new software package for camera phones and Windows PCs called Lifeblog, which combines e-mail and the passive diary mode of the photoblog in one artful package. In essence, Lifeblog records a timeline of all the events that flow through your cell phone’s memory. Schedule an appointment, and Lifeblog will put it on the timeline; take a picture, and Lifeblog will archive it; get an instant message from a friend, send an e-mail, or retrieve a voice-mail message—Lifeblog will store it away in its running account of your digital life. When you sync your phone with your PC, you can launch the Lifeblog program and see a rendered account of your time—a long thread of information, woven together with images you’ve captured along the way.

More here.

How computers work

Ladybird was a British publishing house founded in the early 1900S to promote enlightenment and education. In 1971 they published an illustrated  book titled "How computers work" and a revised edition followed in 1979. Both books are now online, and both editions can be browsed page by page simultaneously. Enjoy (Via Slashdot)

Speaking of blogs and journalism . . .

Continuing on the theme of the Internet, 411blog.net

"[is a] service [that] exists to create a constructive, symbiotic relationship between blogging and traditional forms of journalism.

Reporters: Use 411blog.net to quickly authenticate highly technical or specialized story elements with subject-matter experts drawn from the best the blogosphere has to offer. Simply contact one or more of the bloggers listed by subject area, pose your question(s), and have a small army of experts begin defining and/or explaining the significance of details that could take days (or longer) to elucidate otherwise! You may also arrange to interview subject-matter experts directly. Each listing includes ways to contact a source so you won't miss getting the information you need before deadline.

Authentication and expert judgment by bloggers (and their readers) is a significant but under-used force in improving journalistic quality. Put it to work for you with 411blog.net!

Bloggers: Use 411blog.net to nominate subject-matter experts, build trust with traditional media, and increase your standing in the blogosphere."

Take a look around.

The Internet and collective problem solving

The whole Dan Rather-Bush national guard forgery episode appears to have brought the blogosphere into a new prominence. (Though, check out Matthew Yglesias’ objections to all the self-congratulation.) In some ways, it does appear to be an instance of collective problem solving.

As the recent and peculiar embarce of the masses (all the rage these days thanks to James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, but see this review by Daniel Davies) implies, if for a pool of people who are to come to a collective decision, each individual has, say, a 51% of being correct, as the number of people grows, the chances that the collective decision will be right is significantly greater than 51%. For a group of three people, each of whom has, say, a 2/3rd (67%) chance of being right, the chances that a collective decision is right is significantly greater, nearly 75%.

When the chances that an individual is right is greater than his or her chances of not being right, majorities are very likely, more likely than any individual, to produce the correct decision. This is the upshot of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem.

(Of course, if each individual’s chance of being right is less than half, y < .5, the chance that a majority will right will be less than y, by symmetry.)

Add to this the fact that for reasons of Bayesian rationality, we should weight what majorities believe heavily, unless we have good reasons. (I’m discussing empirical issues, and not disagreements about values.) If the Jury Theorem gives us reasons to believe that the outcome is correct, we should adjust (update) our beliefs to what the majority has thrown up as the correct answer, submit, as it were, to a tyranny of the majority’s ontology, as Robert Goodin suggested as a set up to his argument.

With the advent of, not simply blogs, but large scale collective problem solving enabled by new technologies, is there the chance that we receive better information and better answers? (Again, none of this stops value conflict.) The experience of wikipedia.org, in which, incorrect information is corrected quickly, seems to suggest “yes”.

I don’t live in Korea, nor do I speak Korean, but the case of OhMyNews—a South Korean news service in which “citizen reporters”, ordinary people, call in news--may over time prove the extent to which the involvement of “crowds” improves information, though strictly speaking the number of people who report any single story isn’t clear, and neither is how stories are corrected. The stories are ranked according to credibility. But the reception of OhMyNews in Korea does suggest that the logic holds.

"When some Yonsei University students recently met with a visiting reporter to discuss the future of news, one psychology major put it simply: 'How can you ever get truth from one source? The Internet allows us to check multiple sources, to explore message-board postings, to debate issues with others—that is the only way to find truth. And besides, what good is information if you can’t react to it?' 'We’re not stupid,' added a business student. 'We know that there is a difference between a message board, a traditional journal and OhmyNews. But by putting them together, our understanding is better. We can piece together truth.'

The academic uses of blogging

In keeping with the self-referential character of the blogosphere, a recent post and article has pointed to one use of blogs that I hadn't considered.

Majikthise has a post on Quine; it's a defense of Epistemology Naturalized. The post seems quite sensible, but the post is also interesting in light of what she does and one apparent reason for it.

"Currently, I'm collaborating on a moral psychology experiment about ordinary speaker's use of the term 'intentionally'. I'm also working on a paper about Quine, analyticity and gay marriage, a philosophical analyss of 'media bias' arguments, and some other more traditional projects."

It ends with "I'd be very grateful for feedback on the above sketch."

It may point a growing trend, the use of blogs for academic research. This Guardian piece discusses the trend.

"Creating a blog to track the progress of your PhD thesis might seem like the ultimate delaying tactic - a way to avoid ever actually writing the thing itself. But for Esther MacCallum-Stewart, currently doing a D.Phil thesis on popular culture during the first world war at the University of Sussex, the opposite has been true. She began blogging about her thesis (www.whatalovelywar.co.uk/war/) in February 2002, initially to keep track of the ideas she was developing. 'I realised I was making notes all over the place, and they weren't making any sense at all.'"

The trend seems very related to what you find in academic blogs such as Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal, Crooked Timber, and a Fistful of Euros--often thoughtful discussions of issues but in a format that lets you track and search them easily. It's an altogether different type from the references/filters of Arts and Letters Daily or SciTechDaily, and from the passing but definitive judgment without argument (often with failed wit of the "Sontag Award Nominee" sort) one finds in Andrew Sullivan or Wonkette. All in all, a positive trend, I would say.

My new favorite search engine

Here's a new search engine, which, as near as I've been able to gather, is awesome. A9.com, in its own words:

We are inventing new ways to take search one step farther and make it more effective. We provide a unique set of powerful features to find information, organize it, and remember it—all in one place. A9.com is a powerful search engine, using web search and image search results enhanced by Google, Search Inside the Book™ results from Amazon.com, reference results from GuruNet, movies results from IMDb, and more.

A9.com remembers your information. You can keep your own notes about any web page and search them; it is a new way to store and organize your bookmarks; it even recommends new sites and favorite old sites specifically for you to visit. With the A9 Toolbar all your web browsing history will be stored, allowing you (and only you!) to retrieve it at any time and even search it; it will tell you if you have any new search results, or the last time you visited a page.

Turning your videos and photos into cartoons

It was bound to happen at the mass market level and offer the promise of new kinds of yearbooks, wedding albums, and vacation photos. This article explains. (click the "click here" in the right box to see the process.)

"New animation software can turn digital videos into smoothly animated cartoons.

Computer scientist Michael Cohen, of Microsoft research in Redmond, Washington, honed the prototype on a video of his daughter, Lena. The software scans the film for prominent objects - such as Lena swinging on monkey bars - then turns that movement into a cartoon."

Smart cell phones, really smart

From Eureka Alert comes this glimpse of the near-future.

"Carnegie Mellon University's Institute For Complex Engineered Systems will sign a research agreement today with French Telecom that could revolutionize the future of mobile phone devices. The technology, developed by Carnegie Mellon professors Asim Smailagic and Dan Siewiorek, is a state-of-the-art, context-aware mobile phone that can track a multitude of everyday details in a person's life–the email sent, the phone calls made and a user's location. The phone also adapts to dynamically changing environmental and psychological conditions, including monitoring heart rates and helping to determine a user's state."

The pro-war uses of stochastic, context-free grammar--take that Noam Chomsky!

Sometime ago, I came across this, a self-writing, right-wing, pro-war blog.

"R. Robot ('Debasing the Political Discourse @ Superhuman Speed') is a rhetoric simulator. He shuffles grammatical chunks into into thousands of loathesome new templates. He's a Perl CGI script, hooked up to a Movable Type engine for good measure -- making him the first blogger who is also a computer program (to the best of our knowledge. . . He writes his columns instantly. . . His adjectives and nouns are taken from a Newt Gingrich memo called 'Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.' It recommends using words like 'candid,' 'pristine,' and 'reform' for your team's ideas, and imagery like 'machine,' 'abuse of power,' and 'decay' for the other guy's. Most of R.'s grammar engrams are lifted from some of the most lovable editorials of the pre-Quagmire era. Those were heady times, when the like of Ann Coulter, Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan and the late Michael Kelly took fearlessly to their PowerBooks. For those too young to remember, these mighty scribes of '02 saw themselves as the lone voices warning of a shocking Fifth Column: that is, people who disagreed with landing the U.S.A. in its current predicament. If not for these scribes, an uninformed world never would have seen the Warbot -- and we all would have been helpless to stop Al Gore, Harry Belafonte, and Saddam Hussein from teaming up to betray the world."

Test it out. Enter your name or someone else's in the field below the control panel, and watch the satisfying slander, er, libel.

Real Ultimate Power

There are many sites about Ninjas to be found on the web but I think you'll agree that Real Ultimate Power is the best. The site was put together by Robert, who informs us that "My name is Robert and I can't stop thinking about ninjas." Indeed, he cannot. The site cannot be fully appreciated without browsing the hate mail section. Pay particular note to the script Robert has written in response to the letter from the 'angry single mother of three'.