Matt asked yesterday if I’d written up a version of a recurring rant about why Ebay is not a good model for reputation systems. I think I first started ranting about this at a work foundation conference on social software, and then have subjected various people at the beeb to versions of it. And then today, Clay mentioned the same idea in his talk about the conditions for succesful social environments.

It’s an important point, as Ebay is continually cited as a model for digital reputation, but its not a model that can be transferred outside of the context of Ebay itself. In a way, we have a version of the problem that Clay mentioned elsewhere in his talk – there are very few working reputation systems of a meaningful scale, so we build theoretical models based on this scarce evidence. This is as dangerous as earlier theories of identity based on activities in MUDs and MOOS – a small survey size will give misleading results.

The problem with using Ebay as an example is that its not intended to be a reputation system at all, but a part of a very efffective economic system. Sure, its about trust, but only in as much as trust will help faciliate an economic exchange. I use the reputation system to judge whether to buy a record, but I wouldn’t use Ebay to make new friends.

As Clay said today, reputation can’t be quantified and transferred (perhaps the term ‘social capital’ needs to be revised?) but is an emotional, fuzzy construct. We can help people find ways to recognise and represent this fuzzy warm feeling about each other, but we can’t abstract it altogether. Reputation is not a ‘thing’, but a feeling.

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Ok – this is going to be very muddled. I’ve just been chatting with a bunch a people here about this morning’s sessions. There was a round table on DRM, and whilst there were some great speeches, particularly from Cory, a lot of us felt that the conversation didn’t really go anywhere.

The session was full of passionate calls to action to counter DRM proposals from Microsoft, et al, but this macro-rhetoric felt a bit wasted on this audience. We *do* need really good metaphors for the wider battles about DRM, and Cory provided an excellent one. Having described the accumulation of content through Napster as being the biggest repository since the Library of Alexandria, he said:

“DRM is the answer to a question that none of us should be asking: How can we burn down the library for good?”

Needless to say, this went down a storm, and is no doubt propogating the blogosphere as I type. But, outside of the micro-climate of ETCON, this rhetoric might not take root and grow. In my work environment, I need metaphors that are actually going to mean something in the culture of the organisation. The binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is so important in motivating people to action actually reinforces stereotypes and creates barriers.

I’m looking for local metaphors – stories and role models that can help us create real solutions to the problems of DRM. Stories that are going to get people who still exist in a world of Broadcast and Baftas as excited as the people here at ETCON. The problem is, in order to find these role models, we’re going to have to find out what a wide range of people want to do in the open spaces we’re working so hard to preserve.

We can use ‘rip.mix.burn’ as a mantra, but what if most people want to just ‘pick.watch.chat’? Preserving the diversity and access of information spaces for these passive activities is just as important as preserving them for innovation. We need our passionate calls to arms to make enough noise for the rest of the world to listen. But unless we’ve thought hard about the subtler arguments, when ‘they’ finally decide to listen, we won’t have enough to say.

Ok – this is going to be very muddled. I’ve just been chatting with a bunch a people here about this morning’s sessions. There was a round table on DRM, and whilst there were some great speeches, particularly from Cory, a lot of us felt that the conversation didn’t really go anywhere.

The session was full of passionate calls to action to counter DRM proposals from Microsoft, et al, but this macro-rhetoric felt a bit wasted on this audience. We *do* need really good metaphors for the wider battles about DRM, and Cory provided an excellent one. Having described the accumulation of content through Napster as being the biggest repository since the Library of Alexandria, he said:

“DRM is the answer to a question that none of us should be asking: How can we burn down the library for good?”

Needless to say, this went down a storm, and is no doubt propogating the blogosphere as I type. But, outside of the micro-climate of ETCON, this rhetoric might not take root and grow. In my work environment, I need metaphors that are actually going to mean something in the culture of the organisation. The binary opposition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that is so important in motivating people to action actually reinforces stereotypes and creates barriers.

I’m looking for local metaphors – stories and role models that can help us create real solutions to the problems of DRM. Stories that are going to get people who still exist in a world of Broadcast and Baftas as excited as the people here at ETCON. The problem is, in order to find these role models, we’re going to have to find out what a wide range of people want to do in the open spaces we’re working so hard to preserve.

We can use ‘rip.mix.burn’ as a mantra, but what if most people want to just ‘pick.watch.chat’? Preserving the diversity and access of information spaces for these passive activities is just as important as preserving them for innovation. We need our passionate calls to arms to make enough noise for the rest of the world to listen. But unless we’ve thought hard about the subtler arguments, when ‘they’ finally decide to listen, we won’t have enough to say.

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Stanford Research Institute have a quasi-commercial consulting arm. William Ralston, the VP of Consulting there, led a workshop in Scenario Planning this morning, using a fictional Telco as a context, and future WiFi opportunities as a problem.

The workshop was a pretty straightforward run through the classic scenario-building process, but could have been a lot more ‘interactive’. It was mostly lecture, where I think the group would have got a lot more out of it if he had run through more exercises. A couple of the attendees, inclduing a guy from Vodafone US and another from Accenture, seemed to be having trouble grasping the whole concept of scenario building, and I think they would have understood betting by doing, not listening… Still, it was a good refresher, and made me determined to set in process a programme of sessions for a few groups at work.

We also discussed one scenario that reminded me of a presentation I once gave on modalities in mobile use. I think it was at a pitch to a UK 3G company a couple of years ago, when they had (misguided) ambitions to develop content. I got into a bit of a spat with their head of location-based services. I was saying that users’ modalities (what they were doing) where more interesting and relevant that an absolute location. He was adamant that location was paramount, and it wasn’t until later that I found out that he used to be in the army. That would explain his preference for abstract co-ordinates over the fuzzier, but more human, ‘modality’ concept…

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Pauline from Mute magazine has kindly asked me to tidy up my rather rambling post on the FACT centre for their next issue. I ended up reducing it to just being about FACT, and not really picking up the relationships between the stages of emergent artistic practises I described and blogs/networks. It reads much better as a piece of journalism that way. I never got around to writing the second part of the article, anyway…

[note to self – never call blog entries ‘part 1’ unless you’ve actually already written ‘part 2’….]

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Matt Webb talks about our descriptions of social software as a pre-paradigm, and makes comaprisons with other scientific paradigms:

Social software is like the early days of thermodynamics, before stat mech. Or maybe pre-Newton. Or maybe early electricity: we had to make do with rules-of-thumb. Some day all of this will be filled in with limits so we’ll say: these approximations apply with this number of people; these others with this number.

I’ve always thought that descriptions of the net that focus on its topology in a way mirror euclidean geometry – its an accurate way to describe an abstract space, but it makes assumptions that start to unpick as we develop more sophisticated perspectives.

In the first stages of public understanding of the net, it was important to describe it as a space – to map its topology and the geometry in a way that elucidated its similarities and differences with ‘real’ space. As it has matured as a medium and become integrated into social behviour patterns, the dynamism of these social behaviours creates centres of ‘gravity’, and this creates warps in the abstract maps we have of the topology of the net. A non-euclidean geometrical paradigm is needed, and I think the interest in Power Laws and related network-theory has started to provide this. These geometrical paradigms factor in dynamics, so the static topology of the net is curved according to the patterns of behaviour that occur within it.

If we follow the historical development of geometry further, what would a relativity theory of the net look like? How would it help us describe the effect of social behaviour as a gravity-like force within the topology of net-space? And further still – what about a string theory of the net?

I’m out of my depth here, being a arts graduate whose knowledge of science and maths is gleaned from pop-science books read on the long commute from the south coast to london. Someone like Matt Webb is probably better equipped to know whether i’ve stretched an analogy to snapping point or not. But thats what arts grads are good at – clutching at a few narrative straws, and building a house out of them….

😉

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[NB – this text was originally written for a conference in June 2002, when Matt Jones had just launched the idea of warchalking. In fact, Matt was at the conference, getting freaked out by the incredible velocity of the meme as it worked its way up daypop. The fact that this ephemeral meme might now be on its ebb tide is a poetic metaphor in itself…]

Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen’s Hard Shoulders Soft Verges (Edge Town)

Hard Shoulders Soft Verges is a project about the boundaries of urban space, and about devices that passively map and visualise activity within these boundaries. It invokes the situationist metaphor of the city as a palimpsest – an accretion of unconscious communication in the city, both structured and serendiptious.

Cities are already a forest of signs, but most of these signs are authorised
texts; part of the official story of a city. Public space was already a conflicting narrative of official and unofficial texts before the introduction of mobile communications. Billboards, road signs, street names, shop windows – these are the stories that have fascinated flaneurs since the 19th century.

But the city also has a tradition of writing itself in unauthorised ways, from graffiti tags to the wall paintings marking sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland. These are signs of a city marking its own boundaries, and also a dynamic public discourse about the structure of the city itself. In her book ‘Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England’, Juliet Fleming describes the practice of writing on walls in private and public places as a form of public discourse that has been lost to history, erased both physically and historically in favour of authorised printed texts:

“I imagine the whitewashed domestic wall as being the primary scene of writing in early modern England. That the bulk of early modern writing was written on walls, and was consequently both erasable and, in our own scheme of things, out of place is a proposition with consequences for current assumptions about the constitution of statistics of literacy and schooling in the early modern period.”

Fleming describes a discourse in 16th Century England that has been erased for us. Save for a few etchings in glass windows, on furniture, or on mantelpieces, we have very little evidence of this very vibrant social discourse. There is a similar form of social discourse happening today over SMS – a similarly ephemeral medium to the chalk writing of 16th Century England.

This ephemeral discourse is not part of a city’s official narrative, but can form underground communication network that are critical marginalised communities. A contemporary version of 16th Century wall writing is the ‘Hobo Codes’ that are used by transient communities in the USA. These codes, written on buildings in residential areas, tell stories for other hobos, and offer advice about finding food or shelter. For example, a squiggly line in a black box means “bad tempered owner”, a number of dime and nickel shaped circles means that there is a good chance to get some money, and, one of my favourites, a simple circle with two arrows, meaning get out fast.

Matt Jones recently proposed that we could reform some of these underground symbols to indicate the wireless networks that are starting to open up around our cities. Following on from ‘war dialling’, an old hacker term used to describe random attempts to access closed phone networks, Jones has called this system of ephemeral signs ‘Warchalking’.

Warchalking inscribes invisible communication networks into the physical space of the city, creating an iconic visual language that is deliberately ephemeral. Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen’s Edge Town is a technological version of these ephemeral icons – a vocabulary of small gestures that tell the city small stories about itself, about what happened, what accrued and what was washed away. Their series of sensors and small displays are a city listening to its own background noise. The patterns that emerge are part of a tradition of ‘edge town’ languages, from 16th Century Graffiti to Hobo languages and Warchalking. Edge Town turns the technological infrastructure of the city in on itself, creating a feedback loop of listening and representation. Will the ephemeral language created by this loop be stories about the technology itself? Or will it create a new vocabulary of icons for the inhabitants of the city? What stories will Edge Town tell us? How many of them will be remembered, and how many forgotten?

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

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Rachel Baker’s Platfrom

We have always located ourselves by mnemonics, by having shorthand visual maps of our environment. This is as true for virtual information spaces as it is for ‘real’ geographies. Memory experts use visual mnemonics as a way of remembering lists of information. These techniques propose visualising a room or a house with many shelves or cupboards, and then walking around depositing the bits of information you need to remember around the rooms of this virtual space. When you want to recall the information, you mentally walk around the space until you find the memory object you placed there.

In his classic book on urban planning “The Image of the City” Kevin Lynch describes how important this kind of technique is when we navigate real spaces;

“Way finding is the original function of the environmental image and the basis on which emotional associations may have been founded. But the image is not only valuable in its immediate sense in which acts as a map for the direction of movement. In a broader sense it can serve as a general frame of reference within which the individual can act or to which he can attach his knowledge. In this way it is like a body of belief or a set of social customs, it is an organiser of facts and possibilities.”

Lynch is making a very distinct link between a repository of knowledge -a body of belief as he calls it -and physical space. A contemporary example of this is NYCBloggers.com. NYC Bloggers maps Blogging activity in and around Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, encouraging bloggers to register their physical location by marking their nearest stop on the subway. Visitors to the site can navigate the map of New York, clicking on the subway lines presented as mnemonic linking blogging activity. Using this mnemonic structure, you can find out who is blogging on Canal Street, or who’s blogging at 5th Street , or in Queens or in Brooklyn.

In Platfrom SMS is used as a medium for a similar group of individual mnemonics. The train journey from London to the North is described not just a train journey but as a repository of stories and anecdotes. Train drivers tell stories about work, about how they have to be constantly thinking about the next station ahead, landmarks rushing by triggering them to think further down the line to the next station, the next curve, the next signal. For them the landscape is a series of mnemonics collapsing on themselves; each one a domino knocking a visual memory of what is further up the line.

But the drivers’ stories in Platfrom are tinged with melancholy for the rail industry. The lines that provide the visual mnemonic that enables them to do their job has been cut up and reformed through privatisation. With privatisation, a form of collective memory has been lost too. Kevin Lynch describes a similar disorientation in subjects who have suffered brain injuries:

“These men cannot find their own rooms again after leaving them and must wander helplessly until conducted home or until by chance they stumble upon some familiar detail. Purposeful movement is accomplished only by an elaborate memorisation of sequences of distinctive detail so closely spaced that the next detail is always in close range of the previous landmark. One man recognises a room by a small sign, another knows a street by the tram car numbers. If the symbols are tampered with, the man is lost.”

Platfrom makes an explicit connection between the privatisation of the railways and the corporate ownership of the cellular networks we have come to rely on so much. The cellular network, like the railway network, enables us to augment our environment with stories – mnemonics that root us in dynamic space. But who owns these memories? Are your private reveries really in a public space, or are they reliant on a private infrastructure that can be broken up and resold? If we had invested in memories in such an infrastructure, how would we find our way around then?

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

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Natalie Jerminjenko’s Sniffer Dogs is a playful exploration of intelligence, agency and avatars. At the heart of the project is an inversion – the domestic face of artificial intelligence, exemplified by the recent craze for robotic dog toys, is repurposed for a more sinister task – sniffing out radiation levels in the landscape. Jerminjenko reprograms the toys with a custom chipset and radiation sensor implanted in the dog’s nose. The dog then ‘sniffs’ the air for radiation, following the scent and mapping radioactivity levels as it walks.

The contrast of these cute robot toys with their grim nuclear task gives a frisson of perverse glee. Jerminjenko uses the inbuilt system of behaviours programmed by the toy manufacturer, so the dog wags its tail and perfroms a little dance whenever it senses radioactive material. But perhaps there is an even darker concept lurking underneath. Jerimenjenko suggests in her supporting material that these domestic robot dogs have had ulterior motives all along, killing their time barking and playing with bones and smiling at their owners while secretly awaiting further instructions.

This suggests a new spin on the issue of technological agency – instead of the domesticated avatar, we have the double agent. Most technological futurology see agents as benign, as obedient slaves who only have our best interests at heart. Jerminjenko playfully suggests that a dark heart always exists, even behind the most domesticated technologies. If cute robotic dogs harbour secret alter egos, who knows what ulterior motives lie behind your PC screen, or your mobile phone?

In Bruce Sterling’s short story ‘Maneki Neko’, a similarly domestic icon – the Maneki Neko, a Japanese good luck item in the shape of a cat – is the icon for an intelligent social network co-ordinated by ‘Pokkecons’ – PDA style ‘pocket controllers’. These devices organise their owners lives around a gift economy of seemingly random gestures. Your Pokkecon might order you to buy an extra coffee and hand it to a stranger in the street, then when you return home you find a parcel has been delivered containing your favourite type of sweet. These daily activities are seen as benign to people who have woven the pokkecon into their everyday lives, but a visiting American executive who doesn’t engage with the system find herself under attack, like a foreign agent rejected by its host:

“’I know very well what this is. I’m under attack. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I broke that network. Stuff just happens to me now. Bad stuff. Swarms of it. It’s never anything you can touch, though. Nothing you can prove in a court of law. I sit in chairs, and somebody’s left a piece of gum there. I get free pizzas, but they’re not the kind of pizzas I like. Little kids spit on my sidewalk. Old women in walkers get in front of me whenever I need to hurry.
‘My toilets don’t flush. My letters get lost in the mail. When I walk by cars, their theft alarms go off. And strangers stare at me. It’s always little things. Lots of little tiny things, but they never, ever stop. I’m up against something that is very very big, and very very patient. And it knows all about me. And it’s got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and legs are people’.”

The Pokkecon initially seems like a benign agent for goodwill, but by the end of the story, it’s more like a shadowy double agent for an immoral underworld, as if the Yakusa or Mafia had invented an IM client. Unlike the perfect intelligent agent who understands your every need so well that you don’t need to think or do anything anymore, the double agent is a threat – a shadow lurking around every corner. A double agent isn’t looking out for you, but instead gives you the eerie feeling that you are being watched, making you look over your shoulder. In their benign forms, intelligent agents exist solely to smooth your path towards a technologically seamless future. Its sinister twin, the double agent, is evidence of a complex past returning to haunt you – an uncanny doppelganger from a future that is really a half-remembered, re-engineered past.

The double agent also has an existential literary cousin in the private eye – an agent who has no life except as lived through others. Constantly trying to make sense out of an incomplete picture, the private eye is an imperfect avatar, always a few clues short of the whole story. In the classic gum shoe novels of Raymond Chandler, this anti hero is always getting in the way rather than getting to the truth, getting implemented in the crime and led down dark alleys. How much more interesting are these double agents compared to the dumb shiny world of the intelligent agents? The double agent recognises that intelligence can never be perfect, and those who hold intelligence cast a malign, powerful shadow. After all, even the best, most discrete butler always keeps a few too many of his master’s secrets.

The intelligence we are building into our technological landscapes will be cast with these same dark shadows, so lets build infrastructures that recognises that instead of hiding it beneath an illusory surface of perfection. We need to have more cute robotic dogs turned into Geiger counters. Interactive Barney needs a double life uncovering conspiracy theories instead of reading saccharine-coated bedtime stories. Lets build intelligent avatars that remind us, not of upcoming commitments, but of our past mistakes. We always think we can make the future better, cleaner, and brighter, but we never quite get there. By setting our targets lower, we might achieve something more complex, unpredictable, and truer to our own dystopian lives.

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

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I gave a presentation a while ago at this event organised by Giles Lane. I promised Giles I’d write up my notes, and (only about 6 months late!) I’ve finally done it. I think Giles is publishing them in some form, but I thought I’d put part of it online as well. I was asked to comment on three research projects by artists/designers: Platfrom by Rachel Baker, Sniffer Dogs by Natalie Jereminjenko, and Hard Shoulders, Soft Verges by Shona Kitchen and Ben Hooker. The texts are ok – I’ve rewritten them quite a bit from the original presentation – so i thought I’d stick them up here, starting with my favourite, on Natalie Jereminjenko’s Sniffer Dogs. This brief essay talks about agency in intelligent systems, and pokes a tongue out at the idea that swarms or smartmobs are always benign. I structured the presentation around three themes – Agency, Accretion and Memory – so those are the titles of the essays.

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