This part of town. My corner of the internet.

It's basically becoming a derelict wasteland. It's falling to pieces. Neglected. The flows of life, of information, of "voice" have moved elsewhere.

I've successfully avoided the clutches of Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp. Only to be similarly addicted to Quora. And increasingly dependent on Telegram for actual social stuff.

I have online existence. But not "here".

And I'm not only talking about this blog : Composing.

I'm talking about many of my online presences.

I'm talking about ThoughtStorms wiki, which has retreated from an open forum for debate. Via the idea of the Smallest Federated Wiki to a closed, but federal. To now an entirely personal closed thinking space. Perhaps inevitably, given the increasingly hostility to be found online. But is now full of outdated, half-baked, deprecated ideas.


I'm talking about my so called home-page which is now three years out-of-date.

I'm talking about the presentations of my projects which are languishing on public but unvisited static pages. Because, again, these aren't part of the flows  of life.

I am no longer living "publicly", putting what I do online. I don't even know if I want to be living "publicly" in such a way today.

Or to put it another way. I fragment over various places online and IRL. And each fragment has freedom to be what it wants. Unconstrained by the other fragments. How much do I want to try to reunite and reintegrate my fragmented personality? Or do I enjoy the small sense of "privacy" that remains when I allow these fragments to have independent lives of their own? Is becoming the "dividual" the only way to avoid being signed, sealed and delivered into the hands of the machine learning mind controllers today?

But how do you even "live" in a world where "existence" is increasingly tied to participating in the right flows?

Don't ask me. I have no fucking idea.

But ... what I do know is that it's a mess around here. So ... it's time to knock down a lot of stuff and build something new.

So ... in the next few months, I'm going to blow up this blog : Composing. I'm going to be blowing up Synaesmedia. And, perhaps most shockingly, I'm going to be blowing up ThoughtStorms Wiki. And a bunch of other sites.

None of that means that everything is going away entirely. 

What's still valuable will come back in some form.

But I'm going to make big changes. I'm going to break links. (Who cares about broken links?) I'm going to break names (what do my names even mean? Alchemy Islands? Gbloink? Mind Traffic Control? Why are they stuck with the crumbling signifieds they're currently pointing to?) I'm going to break online libraries. (Is anyone really using the ThoughtStorms libraries? If so, pay close attention to what's happening in the online repos)

I just over a year, I want to have achieved a thorough clearing out of the junk and cruft from my online life. And be focused on fewer, more live and dynamic, channels, better suited to today's internet and my current interests.

2017 Q1: What is the politics of the social media age?

Context: 2017 Questions.

Pretty much everything I've believed in and championed over the last 15 years in terms of blogging, social media, freedom for anyone to speak out without gatekeepers etc. has come true.
And the result is what we've seen in 2016 ... President Trump, Brexit, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff etc. All driven by massive disinformation campaigns across social media. We are in a "post-truth" society or as I actually predicted many years ago "the end of consensus". Conspiracy theories are the epistemic mode of netocracy.

So what now?

"What now", in the sense of how can we reinvent a politics which "works"? And "what now" as in what are the responsibilities and strategies for people like me who work in software and have championed the spread of technologies of open communication? What can and should we try to build next to "fix" the problems we've caused? Finally "what now" as in what actual policies can be advocated for netocracy where many traditional gatekeeping epistemic strategies are no longer available.

In one sense we are seeing a burst of authoritarianism which is covering the profound weakness of governments to control what's going on. Everyone in power wants to control borders to prevent the movement of people. When their real "problems" are flow of information and capital which remain harder to control than ever. Scapegoating the poor is the standard tactic of an elite in trouble, of course. I now think we're moving to "scapegoating bodies" for the frustrations and failures to constrain information (including finance which is now revealed as a subset of information).

Three Policies for Pirates

Three policies I'd like to see a Pirate Party (or any forward looking political party) adopt with respect to providers of online services, social networks, communication feeds etc.

1) There should be an option to turn the filter-bubble off. 

If you use an algorithmic filter to prioritise what is of interest to the user within a feed, you MUST also provide a version of the feed without that filter. And an easy way to switch it on or off.

2 Everyone owns their own "data-exhaust". 

If you provide a service that gets its value from observing user behaviour you cannot claim exclusive ownership of that data. The user should have an inalienable right to share or license it with anyone else. (You aren't obliged to make it available to others (which might be genuinely arduous) but you can't complain if the user or another company (with the user's consent) figures out how to do it themselves.

3) Service providers must openly explain what data they are mining / inferring from their users. 

Just as packaged foods must explain what ingredients go in to them. Online data-services must explain what they are inferring from your behaviour so that you know what you are revealing to them.

Facebook Takes Over The World

Some depressing reading. I've been saying for a while that Facebook has basically "reinvented television", the stream fed to passive consumers, reflexively channel surfing or hitting a "like" button like pigeons in a Skinner Box.

But I hadn't realized that it's quite as bad as this. Read these excellent articles from The Awl :

• Content Distributed  
• Territory Annexed
• The Facebook Proposition 
• The Next Internet is TV

Fiverr (Again)

I can't get over Fiverr.

Even when it's full of this stuff it feels incredibly significant to me. Perhaps as significant as Kickstarter. For what used to be known as "pocket money prices" you can hire people from all over the world to do silly (or not so silly) things for you. This is an economy where an extrovert kid can participate on equal (absurd) footing with an extrovert pensioner. It's YouTube retrofitted as an personalized attention economy. A service which unleashes new waves of extraordinary, perverse, comical creativity.

Two more things that are fascinating.

1) Lots of gigs offered by people in the US and UK. Unlike many cheap online markets it's not just for rich Westerners to buy the services of people from the developing world. $5 is a magic price that seems to motivate those from the developed economies as much as anyone else. Maybe it says something about the state of the US / European economies too.

2) At the same time, the number of people from developing countries participating in the silly stuff. Subcontinental Asians are not simply acting as your rather serious PA or cheap Drupal developer. They are figuring out how to exploit every angle and aspect of their culture and (perhaps) enjoying themselves.

Shut Your Facebook

So, I officially shut my Facebook account.

It seems I can reactivate it at any time, just by logging in. And I can keep the option that anyone sends me a message or invite I get an email. So it's not clear exactly how much I'm "gone". (Would be interesting to hear from someone else if they still see me and my posts. What my "absence" looks like.)

But I am (kind of) out of there.

Google+ Comment Integration

So Google have integrated G+ comments with Blogger comments.

This is something I've been wanting for a while. Closer connection between my blog and G+ is valuable in so many ways.

OTOH, I can see how dangerous this road is. G+ is going to eat my blogs. Very conveniently, I'm sure.  I'll value every step of the way. But will I find, in a year or two that there won't really BE blogs here at all? Just my profile on G+. As much of a Walled River as Facebook? (Big question ... will there be an RSS feed from it?)

I'm troubled by how much I'm dependent on Google. I can walk away from Amazon and Facebook if I want. If I need to I can leave LinkedIn and Twitter. But everything I do (and have done) is deeply intertwingled  with Google.

Of course, at least I have my home page. My own address on the web that I control. An essential for the contemporary cybercitizen. I even have several WordPress blogs, but they're specialised things. My 3 real blogs : Composing, Smart Disorganized, Platform Wars are all very much Google properties.

Again I turn my mind to whether I should do something about this?

Facebook Export

So after a couple of hours, Facebook sent me a link to a zip file that contains a rather nice plain html facsimile of my Facebook profile page. Contains the few pictures I uploaded and comments on them. A list of my FB friends' names (and a couple of email addresses where they were available) and the not-very-interesting archive of all the private messages I've sent and received. (Most of which are just co-ordination).

I'd say they did a good job of this. It's probably even possible (theoretically or someone may have already written the script) to import this into another YASN.

What's missing, of course, and the major value (from my perspective) of what I put into Facebook, is the huge amount of writing and discussion I've had in comments on other people's threads and in particular in various groups (including secret groups).

I knew I wasn't going to get this. And think there's a good rationale for it. But it's kind of sad too. 

Looking to what else I can recover and how.

Super Monetization

Very interesting video of Jaron Lanier promoting the idea of a fully monetarised web (all information should be charged for) as a reinvigoration of an economy that works for the middle / professional class.

My notes on ThoughtStorms.

ps : Music heralds, as always.

Exit Planet Facebook

So, this is the last straw. I'm leaving Facebook.

I've been too caught up, not so much talking to real-life friends (which FB is useful for keeping track of) but having discussions with various interesting online people and groups.

This is ludicrous. Most of these conversations could be had anywhere. We used to have them on blogs and wikis. Or on Tribe. Or Slashdot.

We don't need to give this power to Zuckerberg and Facebook. We shouldn't have let our social AND intellectual lives get enclosed like this.

I've been saying this for a long time, of course. But this time ... I mean it. I've logged out of FB. I haven't deleted the account yet because I want to make sure the message I sent to all my FB friends doesn't disappear too. But I'm gone.

There's also a deeper problem, which I may have mentioned before. I think Facebook has essentially reinvented TV. It's an absolutely lousy medium for thoughtful discussion. Long comments are truncated to a couple of lines. Your actual content is squashed into a narrow column between acres of adverts / chat and infrastructure and is unceremoniously flowed off the page as quickly as possible. Facebook's design is ruthlessly optimised not to let you talk and listen but to keep you titillated with NEW items. Little hits of stimulation (an easily shared new image / meme;  status from a DIFFERENT friend you hadn't thought about in the last 10 minutes.) etc. All your emotional / personal connection to people is harnessed to keep you fixated on an overwhelming flux and your response to little more than automatic "likes" and "forwards".

The patterns of Facebook interaction are as disinforming and dis-empowering as the mindless channel hopping that TV promoted.

Marshall Mcluhan was right: the shape of a medium swamps its actual content. It's time to say no this perverse refinement of the flow internet and look for something that enables productive networking, thought and discussion.

Mashup

Interesting cultural mashup : ThinkGeek meets ModCloth. 

Kickstarter Analysed

Some analysis of Kickstarter.

Good Guy Caveman

My Sites

Several of my sites (http://www.synaesmedia.net, http://gbloink.com, http://optimaes.info etc.) seem to be down giving database errors. Nothing to do with me. Probably something with the hosting service.

I'll post here when I find out more.

Your Information Footprint

Good video :



Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo.

Google Gives Up On Search

I think this story is really important.

As Google adapt their search engine to be more personal and more real-time popularity contest, we see the accelerating rise of Netocratic epistemology. Remember, under Netocracy, the idea of a cannon of commonly accepted knowledge collapses into ever changing flows of hot-ideas. The search engines came in, promising to put all human knowledge at our finger tips, but what happens when they decide that filter bubbles sell better than "objective facts" and they've already put the rival institutions such as libraries out of business?

The Digital Divide

Hard to think of a more poignant example of the divide between those inside and outside internet culture than this story.

Pirates And #Occupants

Phil Hunt asks if #Occupy should be forming an alliance with the Pirate Party.

I'd suggest that spontaneous, ad hoc co-operation is probably better for all concerned.

I joined the Pirate Party because I saw Pirates tweeting from and about #occupylsx; plus a couple of posts on the consultation that were sufficient to convince me that Pirates were, generally, well disposed towards #occupy.

The PP should take that as an example of success. It doesn't really need to be more than that. Internet culture is all about loose coupling and simple protocols.

A Conversation Among Machines

Compare and contrast Marc Andreesen and W. Brian Arthur

Narcissus Search on Ars Electronica Blog

Great! The Ars Electronica blog has added an article on the Narcissus (anti)-Search Engine that I've been working on with Aharon Amir over the last couple of years.

Narcissus takes the results from a search of a site or database but measures the "popularity" of the results (in our first example, by counting the number of times a result is clicked on). It then deprioritises popular results, pushing them first to the end of the page and then into a limbo where they aren't shown at all for a number of searches.

The idea is to make an artistic comment on the positive feedback loops that operate throughout most of our social media to reward success with further success. In contrast, Narcissus rewards failure and so helps searchers explore the shadows : alternative and disregarded ideas and opinions.