The account is pumped up to a large number of followers with actual content which I guess is what makes its messages enter my primary inbox. When they send this message, the avatar of the account is changed to the official instagram logo, which makes it look real if you don’t read the username.
I didn’t reply and the next day the avatar has been reverted. The account continues its life as a ghost fan account. I wonder whether I’ll catch it again with its avatar changed.
I reported this chat and account to Instagram as a scam but nothing has happened.
It’s nice that these startups guys take a public schooling so well. It would be nice if we could see more of that on Clubhouse instead of the endless rows of bad panels.
“This is all to say that Paul Graham is an effective marketer and practitioner, but a profoundly unserious public intellectual. His attempts to grapple with the major issues of the present, especially as they intersect with his personal legacy, are so mired in intuition and incuriosity that they’re at best a distraction, and worst a real obstacle to understanding our paths forward.”
I am immensely happy to see two friends launch Branch, a magazine about creating a sustainable internet. The way they put the magazine together mirrors the best practices of the future we should live in right now.
It sounds like a great idea here by Albert Wenger to force all major web properties to provide full read and write access to their APIs and in doing so promote the much needed competition.
A Twitter, Instagram or Whatsapp with full-featured commercializable third-party clients would be much better than what we have now.
After having been locked out of my Instagram account for months because of wrongful reports, I have just gotten back access to the account for a week or so and I already get the first people reporting me again.
And how do I know that they’re doing this? They are in my messages and telling me that they are doing it. This is extremely brazen.
I don’t know what they are thinking but let’s hope that Instagram has tweaked some of their abuse processes or that my additional protection will pay off.
And that is definitely not the only one. Though the other attempt (below) to retrieve my handle is so delusional that it’s almost cute.
I found out that there is a large secondary market where Facebook employees sell support and verification status to whoever can pay, but being able to commission an account to be stolen straight up is pretty extreme.
Turns out this guy got so much attention for his case that he got his account returned promptly but in the thread there are a bunch more people who are facing similar issues.
So the Instagram handle that I thought I had lost was returned to me suddenly last week (thanks to a friend). Not sure whether I’ll get to keep it this time round, but let’s try.
At least this time I’ve copied most of my follows to my backup account and I’ll see if I can make a data backup at one point or another.
Looking at some Discord first organizations this describes how they could play out and how much potential is there if you want to put some effort in it.
https://buff.ly/2THEtQ3
An interesting story about the interaction between loving the outdoors and Instagram culture.
I thought I knew how big a deal TikTok was a year ago already but I feel sorry for not diving in back then because it is much bigger a deal than I had thought.
I have my first name as my user name in a bunch of places. I’ve had my Twitter account (Twitter.com/alper) for a very long time but my Instagram account (Instagram.com/alper) got a lot more attention after Instagram got really big. A couple of weeks ago I lost that account.
I didn’t suspect that this time it would be permanent. It happened before that Instagram would lock me out of my account because they claimed I had infringed a not-specified guideline. I would open a support request, they would have me jump through some hoops and then re-enable my account.
Not this time.
Now why does this happen in the first place? A first name account like mine is considered OG (see this episode of Reply All). Lots of people—mostly from Turkey—would really love to have it. I know this because I get messages from them all the time. I ignore these messages. I also get lots of password resets from people trying to break into my account. I have the account secured.
What they then most likely try is to claim that I’m impersonating somebody. I don’t think I can impersonate myself but let’s just go with it. Instagram does not do any due diligence and if they get the right kind or right amount of reports, they just suspend my account. I guess that is the first step in a process through which the attacker believes they can get me kicked off the account permanently and then maybe later acquire the username.
Normally support would give me back my account in a couple of days. This time all my support requests have been black holed.
Instagram support is very well hidden but if you search around you can find three web forms in the support portal for a situation such as this one. I filled those in multiple times. I got in touch with people who work at Instagram through various channels. This dude followed me so I asked him about my account (no reply). I even had people open Facebook internal support tickets which still remain open. A support agent replied to me once but then ghosted me.
Speculation
If they would usually give me back my account, why don’t they do it this time?
One theory is that Instagram support is overwhelmed because of COVID. They seem to have difficulty even normally with the number of support requests so it could be possible that if things get worse, stuff just gets ignored. I don’t really buy this but it’s possible.
My theory is that somebody with some actual clout has put a hold on my username. People and agencies with access to Instagram sell services such as support or verified status illicitly. Maybe somebody is selling access to my username or they are using my username to trade for something more valuable. Facebook is under a lot of pressure to make advertising targets at the moment.
Resolution
By now I don’t think I will get my account back anymore. I’m waiting to see if it gets recycled and who will be using it after me.
It’s a weird feeling losing something that other people think carries significant monetary value.
But it’s a lot more annoying to lose your identity and sense of place. I’ve started a new account but without access to the old one, getting it to the same place has been a very slow and arduous process. I’m still cut-off from several hundred people who I would communicate with over Instagram, for some of whom this was the only communication channel.
Of course I knew that none of this was mine to start with and it could be taken away with the press of a button. I just ignored it. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
Update
I thought I would do a round of submissions of all the support forms again but it turns out they are broken. They request you to login to Instagram before you fill them in which is impossible if your account is suspended.
Let’s see how this develops but it looks like this is deliberate stonewalling.
I can’t say I’ve read a lot of Beyond the Beyond nor been much of a happy Wired consumer in any case, but it’s passing still marks the end of an era. I remember Bruce Sterling’s closing speeches at SxSWi as one of the highlights of the conference (me being too late an arrival to attend his house parties).
The disappearance of Page and Brin is one of the weirder and more foreboding things. You have to wonder whether we will ever hear from them or anybody similarly rich ever again.
When, in their famous 1998 grad-school paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,”they introduced Google to the world, they warned that if the search engine were ever to leave the “academic realm”and become a business, it would be corrupted. It would become “a black art”and “be advertising oriented.”
An interesting reversal here where I once said that any application could be delivered through the chat medium, now Kevin Kwok signals a tendency for one chat platform to permeate all applications.
As an occasional listener to the various Asymco podcasts and somebody very much interested in new forms of mobility, I was taken more than a bit aback by this.
Dediu revealed himself as a founder in Bond which is the same company as Smide. I remembered him having somebody from Smide on in one of the first episodes of the Micromobility podcast but there was never any disclosure then or after about Dediu’s connections there.
A lapse in disclosure and some backroom action is not a big deal and nothing much seems to have come from this, but it is a good reminder that everything you see online (not just the posts on Instagram) is fake.
I love TikTok but it is a very large application with very little checks.
Berlin is finally thinking of fixing its totally and utterly broken website. That’s good news but a shame that we have had to use this monstrosity for the past ten years.
Full disclosure: Joi Ito once paid for my lunch in a café in Beirut when I was traveling there with some tech people.
My exposure to the inner machinations of Ito’s clique didn’t leave me too enthusiastic. It also became clear that underneath the glamorous surface there was very little of interest or value.
I’m glad the only thing he paid for me was a lunch otherwise I would also be rather embarrassed right now.
Update:He just did. But judging from comments by Negroponte, “Nicholas Negroponte, a founder of the lab, said he had told Mr. Ito to take the money and would do it again.”, there is more wrong with the institution than just the one person.
A thorough and humane treatment of alt-right memetic history and 8chan with its associated chans.
Cloudflare is setting a high bar for post-mortem writing but if you want to get started with this, the only parts you really need are: What went wrong & What are we doing about it.
Too aggravating to even read this entire thing. I’ll have to get it together soon to delete my facebook account. Though I’ll still be locked into Instagram and Whatsapp then, so I think it would be best indeed if those services would be broken up.
I’ve stopped using Instapaper for a long time now, but I’m still reading longreads. Let me explain how.
I go through my links in Chrome on my desktop. I close and read whatever I can and anything that’s too long stays in an open tab and floats slowly to the left.
On Chrome on my phone whenever I’m in transit or when I want to read something longer that isn’t a book, I go to the “Recent tabs”screen. Besides those you can also find synced open tabs from all your other Chrome browsers. I then pick something that I want to read.
Now, ideally it would allow me to close the tab on my desktop from my phone but understandably that’s not a feature. So I read a couple of articles, remember those and close the tabs manually next time I’m back on my desktop.
This works surprisingly well. Except for LRB articles. I have no clue what to do about those.
About password managers:
“But I never found a way to get people onto 1password in a single training session. The setup process has a lot of moving parts, involving the desktop app, browser plugin, online service, mobile app, and app store. It requires repeatedly typing a long master passphrase.”
People do not like to hear it but password managers are BAD. Even the best of them is so bad that I struggle to use it. (I do because I have no alternative.)
Tooling has become so good and so empowering that like in this tweet, many commerce ‘startups’ that are really struggling to hire and retain dev teams (and then utilize them to their potential) would be much better served using Airtable, Zapier and Pipedrive until they break.
More likely in any case that the startup will go out of business or be acquired than it hitting the limits of those kinds of tools.
You could run a $100m company today with Airtable and Zapier as your tech stack.
Swisher is doing good work here on Facebook/Fakebook but her handling of the worst of technology is still astonishingly softball given what is happening.
“Changes to one team’s service may be implemented by another team who needs the enhanced capability by what is called an Away Team. This team works on the Home Team’s code to add what it needs according to established engineering standards and then leaves that code in good order to be maintained by the Home Team who owns the service, with help when needed.”
Fully embedding your team in another team’s context to get something done, seems to me a very interesting compromise between autonomy and collaboration. Every team is an island, but it is ok to travel to another island and if that’s not possible, you can still build your own.
Also more than disorienting to see an in-depth piece about engineering organizations like this appear on The Register.
Putting an entire team in another team’s context is something I have considered for all the collaboration, delivery, culture etc. benefits that it will most likely yield in exchange for a minor hit in delivery.
Many years ago I suggested building in async facilities into Django. I got ridiculed for that both for technical feasibility (rightly) and necessity (short-sightedly). Now finally we have a proposal to build those features into the framework that demonstrates the same need and that can be implemented.
Usually it’s not for a good reason but still, it’s nice to see my grand-boss Dror on television regularly explaining cybersecurity to the German public.
Deze Nederlandstalige app van Juf Jannie belooft puzzels voor kinderen vanaf 2 jaar aan te bieden maar de interactie en gebruiksvriendelijkheid zijn erbarmelijk slecht.
Ik heb mijn geld terug gevraagd en ik raad aan andere mensen dat ook te doen bij apps die onder de maat zijn.
Even given that this is an amazing job description, you don’t often see companies describing themselves as a ‘socio-technical system’. This is a great way to show off both your care and your depth of thinking.
The newsworthy thing about the Accenture/Hertz story is not that they failed to deliver but how badly they failed and that they are getting sued for it. Getting something that’s not very good for far too much money is an accepted part of doing business with consultancies of that size.
“Everyone else, money manager big or small, met with him virtually, over Zoom. When Yuan flew to New York for the IPO, it was just his eighth work trip in five years.”
Zoom is the real deal and the story behind its success is immensely inspiring.
The men I work with are not the geniuses of Menlo Park, the ones who retreated to garages and emerged with hardware that changed the world. They’re ensemble actors in an industry that favors singular greatness. They have not made fortunes or founded startups but have benefited from their proximity and physical resemblance to those who have.
Zoom is an excellent video-conferencing app which turns out to be built on some technical excellence of its own (running WASM encoders and decoders in the browser).
The best thing about ContraPoints is that she gives the most charitable possible treatment to in this case Gender Critical people (the other time it was Incels) and then still rips them for all that they are.
I didn’t think I’d live to hear one, but WIDI is a German language podcast (by Igor and a different Johannes) about technology that adds a unique perspective and a more systemic approach to the mix. If they manage to keep it niche, this will be a must listen for a German language audience.
Facebook did a half-hearted push towards a more messaging focused experience during the conversational boom, but didn’t manage to make any inroads and abandoned the effort. Whatsapp could have been the beachhead but with the original leadership and vision gone, nothing interesting will happen there. Instagram (also without original leadership) is slowly being turned into sludge by whatever PMs Facebook has left.
There is room for something new to kill Facebook, that is if they don’t buy or copy it in time.
The origin story of Notion is pretty wild but all of the recipes in it for deep collaboration and radical iteration make a lot of sense. When I briefly tried out Notion, I was struck very much by how tight both its vision and its execution were.
I didn’t think I would be working with MISP, a threat intelligence platform written in PHP but now I am and here you can read a bit more about the various things we’re doing with it.
The people gathered at city hall that night saw Oakland’s DAC as an extension of the tech-fueled gentrification that was pushing poorer longtime residents out of the city.
the Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today. American military interests continue to dominate all parts of the network, even those that supposedly stand in opposition.
An even more disturbing dimension of the AIR’s pacification work in Thailand was that it was supposed to serve as a model for counterinsurgency operations elsewhere in the world—including against black people living in American inner cities, where race riots were breaking out at the time.
He began to see that in a society mediated by computer and information systems those who controlled the infrastructure wielded ultimate power.
Where Wiener saw danger, Lick saw opportunity. He had no qualms about putting this technology in the service of US corporate and military power.
Indeed, intelligence agencies were among the first users of the tools ARPA’s command and control program produced just a few years later.
Like many upper-class Americans of his day, North worried that the massive influx of immigrants from Europe was destroying the fabric of American society, causing social and political unrest, and threatening the nation’s racial purity.47 This fear of immigration would become intertwined with anticommunist hysteria, leading to repression of workers and labor unions across the country. North saw statisticians like himself as technocratic soldiers: America’s last line of defense against a foreign corrupting influence. And he saw the tabulator machine as their most powerful weapon.
Deemphasizing ARPA’s military purpose had the benefit of boosting morale among computer scientists, who were more eager to work on the technology if they believed it wasn’t going to be used to bomb people.
Fliers posted on both campuses railed against “computerized people-manipulation”and “the blatant prostitution of social science for the aims of the war machine.”
Pool saw computers as more than just apparatuses that could speed up social research. His work was infused with a utopian belief in the power of cybernetic systems to manage societies. He was among a group of Cold War technocrats who envisioned computer technology and networked systems deployed in a way that directly intervened in people’s lives, creating a kind of safety net that spanned the world and helped run societies in a harmonious manner, managing strife and conflict out of existence.
The language of Licklider’s proposal—talk about propaganda and monitoring political movements—was so direct and so obvious that it could not be ignored. It confirmed students’ and activists’ fears about computers and computer networks and gave them a glimpse into how military planners wanted to use these technologies as tools for surveillance and social control.
Today, people still think that surveillance is something foreign to the Internet—something imposed on it from the outside by paranoid government agencies. Rowan’s reporting from forty years ago tells a different story. It shows how military and intelligence agencies used the network technology to spy on Americans in the first version of the Internet. Surveillance was baked in from the very beginning.
Indeed, the army referred to activists and protesters as if they were organized enemy combatants embedded with the indigenous population.
In the 1990s the country was ablaze with sweeping religious proclamations about the Internet. People talked of a great leveling—an unstoppable wildfire that would rip through the world, consuming bureaucracies, corrupt governments, coddled business elites, and stodgy ideologies, clearing the way for a new global society that was more prosperous and freer in every possible way.
Kevin Kelly, a bearded evangelical Christian and Wired editor, agreed with his boss: “No one can escape the transforming fire of machines. Technology, which once progressed at the periphery of culture, now engulfs our minds as well as our lives. As each realm is overtaken by complex techniques, the usual order is inverted, and new rules established. The mighty tumble, the once confident are left desperate for guidance, and the nimble are given a chance to prevail.”
Brand disagreed.
In a long article he filed for Rolling Stone, he set out to convince the magazine’s young and trend-setting readership that ARPA was not some big bureaucratic bummer connected to America’s war machine but instead was part of an “astonishingly enlightened research program”that just happened to be run by the Pentagon.
Brand was deeply embedded in California’s counterculture and appeared as a major character in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Yet there he was, acting as a pitch man for ARPA, a military agency that had in its short existence already racked up a bloody reputation—from chemical warfare to counterinsurgency and surveillance. It didn’t seem to make any sense.
Brand took a different path. He belonged to the libertarian wing of the counterculture, which tended to look down on traditional political activism and viewed all politics with skepticism and scorn.
Neuromancer coined the term cyberspace. It also launched the cyberpunk movement, which responded to Gibson’s political critique in a cardinally different manner: it cheered the coming of this cyber dystopia.
Leverage is a good word for Kelly’s sudden religious inspiration. His faith in God matched his faith in the power of technological progress, which he saw as a part of God’s divine plan for the world. Over the years, he developed the belief that the growth of the Internet, the gadgetization and computerization of everything around us, the ultimate melding of flesh and computers, and the uploading of human beings into a virtual computer world were all part of a process that would merge people with God and allow us to become gods as well, creating and ruling over our own digital and robotic worlds just like our maker.
At Wired, Kelly injected this theology into every part of the magazine, infusing the text with an unquestioning belief in the ultimate goodness and rightness of markets and decentralized computer technology, no matter how it was used.
It seemed more a networking hub and marketing vehicle for the industry, a booster intended to create a brand around the cult of technology and the people who made and sold it, and then repackage it for the mainstream culture. It was continuing a tradition that Stewart Brand had started, overlaying an increasingly powerful computer industry with images of the counterculture to give it a hip and grassroots revolutionary edge.
Wired’s impact was not just cultural but also political. The magazine’s embrace of a privatized digital world made it a natural ally of the powerful business interests pushing to deregulate and privatize American telecommunications infrastructure.
John Malone, the billionaire cable monopolist at the head of TCI and one of the largest landowners in the United States, made the cut as well. Wired put him on the cover as a punk counterculture rebel for his fight against the Federal Communications Commission, which was putting the brakes on his cable company’s multi-billion-dollar merger with Bell Atlantic, a telephone giant. He is pictured walking down an empty rural highway with a dog by his side, wearing a tattered leather jacket and holding a shotgun. The reference is clear: he was Mel Gibson of Road Warrior, fighting to protect his town from being overrun by a savage band of misfits, which, to extend the metaphor, was the FCC regulators. The reason this billionaire was so cool? He had the guts to say that he’d shoot the head of the FCC if the man didn’t approve his merger fast enough.
That’s where Wired’s real cultural power lay: using cybernetic ideals of the counterculture to sell corporate politics as a revolutionary act.
Brand saw computers as a path toward a utopian world order where the individual wielded the ultimate power. Everything that came before—militaries, governments, big oppressive corporations—would melt away and an egalitarian system would spontaneously emerge.
People treated the search box as an impartial oracle that accepted questions, spat out answers, and moved on. Few realized it recorded everything typed into it,
The book demonstrates that Page and Brin understood early on that Google’s success depended on grabbing and maintaining proprietary control over the behavioral data they captured through their services. This was the company’s biggest asset.
One thing was certain in the wake of the AOL release: search logs provided an unadulterated look into the details of people’s inner lives, with all the strangeness, embarrassing quirks, and personal anguish those details divulged. And Google owned it all.
Taken together, these technical documents revealed that the company was developing a platform that attempted to track and profile everyone who came in touch with a Google product. It was, in essence, an elaborate system of private surveillance.
The language in the patent filings—descriptions of using “psychographic information,”“personality characteristics,”and “education levels”to profile and predict people’s interests—bore eerie resemblance to the early data-driven counterinsurgency initiatives funded by ARPA in the 1960s and 1970s.
There was only one difference: instead of preventing political insurgencies, Google wanted the data to sell people products and services with targeted ads. One was military, the other commercial. But at their core, both systems were dedicated to profiling and prediction. The type of data plugged into them was irrelevant.
The truth is that the Internet came out of a Pentagon project to develop modern communication and information systems that would allow the United States to get the drop on its enemies, both at home and abroad.
All these CIA-backed companies paid Facebook, Google, and Twitter for special access to social media data—adding another lucrative revenue stream to Silicon Valley.
From their inception, Internet companies banked heavily on the utopian promise of a networked world. Even as they pursued contracts with the military and their founders joined the ranks of the richest people on the planet, they wanted the world to see them not just as the same old plutocrats out to maximize shareholder value and their own power but also as progressive agents leading the way into a bright techno-utopia.
Snowden’s views on private surveillance were simplistic, but they seemed to be in line with his politics. He was a libertarian and believed the utopian promise of computer networks. He believed that the Internet was an inherently liberating technology that, if left alone, would evolve into a force of good in the world. The problem wasn’t Silicon Valley; it was government power.
The cypherpunk vision of the future was an inverted version of the military’s cybernetic dream pursued by the Pentagon and Silicon Valley: instead of leveraging global computer systems to make the world transparent and predictable, cypherpunks wanted to use computers and cryptography to make the world opaque and untrackable. It was a counterforce, a cybernetic weapon of individual privacy and freedom against a cybernetic weapon of government surveillance and control.
I was puzzled, but at least I understood why Tor had backing from Silicon Valley: it offered a false sense of privacy, while not posing a threat to the industry’s underlying surveillance business model.
While couched in lofty language about fighting censorship, promoting democracy, and safeguarding “freedom of expression,”these policies were rooted in big power politics: the fight to open markets to American companies and expand America’s dominance in the age of the Internet.51 Internet Freedom was enthusiastically backed by American businesses, especially budding Internet giants like Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Google, and later Facebook and Twitter. They saw foreign control of the Internet, first in China but also in Iran and later Vietnam, Russia, and Myanmar, as an illegitimate check on their ability to expand into new global markets, and ultimately as a threat to their businesses.
China saw Internet Freedom as a threat, an illegitimate attempt to undermine the country’s sovereignty through “network warfare,”and began building a sophisticated system of Internet censorship and control, which grew into the infamous Great Firewall of China.
The correspondence left little room for doubt. The Tor Project was not a radical indie organization fighting The Man. For all intents and purposes, it was The Man. Or, at least, The Man’s right hand.
Despite Tor’s public insistence it would never put in any backdoors that gave the US government secret privileged access to Tor’s network, the correspondence shows that in at least one instance in 2007, Tor revealed a security vulnerability to its federal backer before alerting the public, potentially giving the government an opportunity to exploit the weakness to unmask Tor users before it was fixed.
From a higher vantage point, the Tor Project was a wild success. It had matured into a powerful foreign policy tool—a soft-power cyber weapon with multiple uses and benefits. It hid spies and military agents on the Internet, enabling them to carry out their missions without leaving a trace. It was used by the US government as a persuasive regime-change weapon, a digital crowbar that prevented countries from exercising sovereign control over their own Internet infrastructure. Counterintuitively, Tor also emerged as a focal point for antigovernment privacy activists and organizations, a huge cultural success that made Tor that much more effective for its government backers by drawing fans and helping shield the project from scrutiny.
Most people involved in privacy activism do not know about the US government’s ongoing efforts to weaponize the privacy movement, nor do they appreciate Silicon Valley’s motives in this fight. Without that knowledge, it is impossible to makes sense of it all.
In 2015, when I first read these statements from the Tor Project, I was shocked. This was nothing less than a veiled admission that Tor was useless at guaranteeing anonymity and that it required attackers to behave “ethically”in order for it to remain secure.
The old cypherpunk dream, the idea that regular people could use grassroots encryption tools to carve out cyber islands free of government control, was proving to be just that, a dream.
Silicon Valley fears a political solution to privacy. Internet Freedom and crypto offer an acceptable alternative. Tools like Signal and Tor provide a false solution to the privacy problem, focusing people’s attention on government surveillance and distracting them from the private spying carried out by the Internet companies they use every day. All the while, crypto tools give people a sense that they’re doing something to protect themselves, a feeling of personal empowerment and control. And all those crypto radicals? Well, they just enhance the illusion, heightening the impression of risk and danger. With Signal or Tor installed, using an iPhone or Android suddenly becomes edgy and radical. So instead of pushing for political and democratic solutions to surveillance, we outsource our privacy politics to crypto apps—software made by the very same powerful entities that these apps are supposed to protect us from.
So instead of pushing for political and democratic solutions to surveillance, we outsource our privacy politics to crypto apps—software made by the very same powerful entities that these apps are supposed to protect us from.
The IBM machines themselves did not kill people, but they made the Nazi death machine run faster and more efficiently, scouring the population and tracking down victims in ways that would never have been possible without them.
But not all control is equal. Not all surveillance is bad. Without them, there can be no democratic oversight of society.
By pretending that the Internet transcends politics and culture, we leave the most malevolent and powerful forces in charge of its built-in potential for surveillance and control. The more we understand and democratize the Internet, the more we can deploy its power in the service of democratic and humanistic values, making it work for the many, not the few.
I was at the 2016 Bot Summit in London a couple of weeks ago. I did my best to capture salient points from every talk in a tweet. Here are all of them in order.
I’ve been running a live open streetmap edits view as a screen saver for a couple of years now and it never fails to draw the attention from people in the room (whether they know what OSM is or not). The OSM visualization is pretty cool and really comes to life when it is displayed full screen. It is also a great way to see a part of the world you might not have known existed. I used to browse atlases when I was a kid, so this is me indulging in virtual travel again.
Will attended me to the fact that I shot a video of it but I never wrote up the super basic process behind it, so here goes.
What it looks like:
This must have been the tweet by Thomas that started it all in early 2013.
@mrtoto That should be made quickly with a web view or not? I still use my Barbarian Group screenstagram.
After I read that I fiddled around a bit with making my own screensaver in XCode. That seems simple enough but building stuff on OS X is a bit of a pain if you’re used to iOS and definitely not something you’ll be able to finish in an hour or so. It turns out that there is a far far easier way.
As of right now I’m frightfully behind on my Latour MOOC. What I have been doing instead is reading up old articles in my Instapaper. One such is this interview with Dutch sociologist/philosopher Willem Schinkel in Vrij Nederland. It’s good to read a fresh Dutch thinker who seems to understand things (and who also is in with Latour). Calling Geert Wilders a proto-fascist and the Netherlands a museum are only a couple of the ringers in there.
The disappointing bit came at the end where he confessed to not having a cell phone out of principle. This is a terrible bit of intellectual laziness which brings me to this point on Sloterdijk by Adam Greenfield which rings true:
The task before us is to discover, or invent, a politics, a mobility and a conviviality that are both authentic to the circumstances in which we find ourselves and capable of giving full expression to the emancipatory potential that remains latent and unrealized in our networked technologies.
So it turns out I’ve fallen immensely behind with the weeknotes over here, but we did start writing them at the new office now, which should make up for something. Those live at http://kantberlin.tumblr.com/ currently.
What happened that week was a bunch of work and getting a desk from IKEA to work on at the new place:
The Möbeltaxi driver took us on an interesting shortcut through the old service tunnels of Tempelhof —I am amazed that Moves tracked it as well as it did— which might be fun to do some urban exploring in at some point:
Back then we were still drinking some horrible leftover coffee brewed in a two step process:
There is no thing as an anonymized dataset. Anybody propagating this idea even tacitly is doing a disservice to the informed debate on privacy. Here’s a round up with some recent cases.
Re:publica
Just today Berlin visualization outfit Open Data City published a visualization of the devices that were connected to their access points during the Re:publica conference earlier this month. The visualization is a neat display of the ebb and flow of people in the various rooms during the event.
It is also a good attempt to change the discourse about data protection in Germany. The discourse tends to be locked in the full stop stance where absolutely ‘nothing is allowed’ without a ton of waivers. Because of that hassle, a lot of things which could be useful are not implemented. A more relaxed approach and a case by case decision on things would be better. In the case of Re:publica there does not seem to be any harm in making this visualization or in releasing the data (here find it on Fusion Tables where I uploaded it).
What I find to be a disservice to the general debate is the application of ‘pseudonymized’ data where the device ids have been processed with a salt and hash. The identifying characteristics have been removed but the ids are still linked across sessions making it possible to link identities with devices and figure out who was where exactly when during the conference.
To state again: at a professional conference such as Re:publica there would in all likelihood be no harm done if the entire dataset would be de-anonymized. The harm done is the pretense that processing a dataset in this way and then releasing it with the interlinkage across sessions is a good idea.
Yesterday the Dutch company, Equens, that processes all payment card transactions announced a plan to sell these transactions to stores. Transactions would be anonymized but still linked to a single card. This would make it trivial for anybody with a comprehensive secondary dataset (let’s say Albert Heijn or Vodafone) to figure out which real person belongs to which anonymized card. That last fact was not reported in any of the media coverage of this announcement which is also terrible.
After a predictable uproar this plan was iced, but they will keep on testing the waters until they can implement something like this.
Today Foursquare released all real-time checkin data but with suitable anonymization. They publish only the location, a datetime and the gender of the person checking in. That is how this should be done.
License plates
Being in the business of opening data we at Hack de Overheid had a similar incident where a dataset of license plates was released where the plates had been md5’ed without a salt. This made it trivial to find out whether a given license plate was in that dataset.
This was quickly fixed. Again this is not a plea against opening data —which is still a good idea in most cases— but a plea for thinking about the things you do.
AOL search data
The arch-example of poorly anonymized search data is of course still the AOL search data leak from back in 2006. That case has been extensively documented, but not extensively learned from.
Memory online is frightfully short as is the nature of the medium but it becomes annoying if we want to make progress on something. Maybe it would be better altogether to lose the illusion that progress on anything can be made online.
For the privacy debate it would be good to keep in mind that the increasingly advanced statistical inference available means that almost all anonymization is going to fail. The only way around this is to not store data unless you have to or to accept the consequences when you do.
I have just watched the above conversation between Jaron Lanier and James Bridle in Conway Hall organized by the School of Life. The event was to mark the occasion of Lanier’s new book “Who Owns The Future?”(Guardian review) and the conversation focused on some interesting ideas from it. I will probably not read the book itself, but I think the things said in the video above can be taken by themselves and though they are provocative they do not motivate me to give Lanier any money1.
The main issue is that Lanier signals some interesting problems (He’s not alone. Om Malik just posted this about Data Darwinism), he makes some terrible comparisons and posits solutions that are wholly unconvincing.
Problems
Laniers big idea is that those with the biggest computers on the network (and the largest collection of brains to program those computers) are in danger of becoming the rentiers of big data. They will be able to out-compute everybody else and figure out what Gibson called the ‘order flow’ in his Blue Ant trilogy: the best set of actions given the circumstances.
That is an interesting if not exactly novel idea. It serves as a jumping off point into some outright crazy ideas about intellectual property. Lanier compares the contraction created by the current austerity measures with what is happening in the music industry. This is a ridiculous comparison. Even if it did hold, then whatever is happening is an overdue correction to a situation that was unsustainably overleveraged.
In the same vein he waves around the scarecrow that ‘the economy will shrink’. A notion that will undoubtedly play well with the same audience that is inclined to buy his book. Rhetoric about shrinking economies is almost always a phantom. Economic shrinkage may very well be in our near future and does not necessarily need to be a bad thing.
Lanier’s point that people are forced into an informal economy is valid but it speaks more to the failure of social systems than anything else. The social democratic contract that may be inconceivable for Americans is working quite well in Europe. It may need updating both for changing demographics and the digital age, but I don’t think many people here would trade it for what Lanier is peddling. Like I mentioned in my data tax post, we don’t have the problem of musicians who can’t pay their medical bills2.
Solutions
The proposed solutions are even more problematic (though if you’re so inclined you might term them ‘thought provoking’).
Lanier seems overly influenced by the music industry and by the concept of private copyright. I would assert that the music industry with its track record is not something worth emulating. The sky is not falling in the music industry. They are facing a long overdue re-evaluation of their social contract because their carrier of value has lost its excludability. There are still lost of people making music and thriving.
Lanier seems to roughly comprehend how a just society should work: ‘For society to be democratic, income needs to be distributed in a way that is roughly a bell curve.’ but at the same time he seems to be confused how it should be implemented: ‘Socialism needs to be off the table in the information age.’
The bidirectional reference networks that Lanier proposes that preserve the context and provenance of data sound fantastic. There are however real reasons why we are doing the ‘profoundly dumb thing we are doing’ instead. His network sounds awfully similar to the idea of the semantic web, where everything online will work perfectly if only we would do it The Right Way (which we of course never will).
His solution to ‘Become as aware as possible of how you fit in other people’s computation schemes.’ is a good idea. It is the same algorithmic literacy pointed to in work by Kevin Slavin, Douglas Rushkoff and James Bridle himself.
I’m afraid that Lanier’s rhetoric of a ‘more honest accounting’ will play particularly well in Germany where similar words are already being used to take Google to court. Germany passed a Leistungsschutzrecht (ancillary copyright for publishers) because they figured out that large American companies were making outlandish amounts of money based on the work of large German publishing houses.
The conversation of a fair distribution of wealth in a power-law based networked economy is one we need to have. I doubt though if this particular book is a good starting point for such a conversation. Lanier’s cultural foundations point us towards a solution that is at best unrealistic3 and tries to extrapolate the problematic private notion of copyright to society as a whole.
The data tax I wrote about yesterday is an approach from a more public point of view. That would focus more on personal data and the revenue generated from such a tax would go into government so it would be subject to democratic controls. Ideas that won’t fly well with Lanier’s Silicon Valley crowd, but maybe that’s all the better.
I try to read as little pop-sci as possible. I try not to give any money to self-proclaimed gurus on the talk trail who have written yet another ‘the internet is fantastic/horrible’ book. [↩]
In fact the myopia particular to the US and Silicon Valley may explain most of Lanier’s issues. [↩]
What are commercial uses? Who gets credit for a particular work? etc. [↩]
There are some interesting similarities between a recent proposal commissioned by the French government and the book out by Jaron Lanier just now “Who Owns The Future?”
Both analyses signal the dominance of corporate actors in a big data world and both suggest new methods of taxation as a potential solution to the problem. An article over at Forbes explains the commission’s proposal by Nicolas Colin and makes a lot of sense.
The French report has been received with predictable knee-jerk responses across the tech world. It is true that governments have not been very good at regulating the internet. But not regulating the internet is not a solution. We could hope for representation that is competent when it comes to the digital world.
The companies that create the internet should not cry foul. They have a track record of evading taxes more than contributing their fair share back to society.
I’ll tackle Lanier’s position in another post. I just watched the conversation he had with James Bridle in Conway Hall and noticed some errors in Lanier’s ideas: they require a fully functional semantic web, they seem overly informed by private copyright practice and complementarily they take a weak government for granted1.
How you would enforce such a law is another question entirely, but it cannot go further off the mark than how large companies manage to evade taxes right now. It may in fact be a lot fairer to tax data at the point of collection/use.
If you don’t bother to read the article above, I can sum it up in two key points below:
Data is hazardous waste material and as such its production and storage should be discouraged (the CO2 tax was given as an example in the Forbes article). Cory Doctorow compared personal data breaches to nuclear disasters, because the fallout is so tremendously hard to contain and control. Whoever collects large amounts of personal data treats the privacy damage caused by breaches as an externality. As such the storage of such data should be discouraged with a tax.
Data is capital and should be taxed as all capital is. Storage, mining and arbitrage using data can generate revenue for sophisticated market actors (those that Lanier terms as those with ‘the biggest computer on the network’). Data is a value adding asset that generates wealth and more data for those who already have it. If we don’t want a situation where a small group of people get richer at the expense of everybody else, we should tax it.
So data is both capital and hazardous. We tax many things with either of those properties so we should definitely tax something that has both.
Most of the problems he states do not exist in a social democracy. Social democracies will face a similar set of problems in the near future, but musicians who can’t pay their medical bills are not one of them. [↩]
It seems to be not completely obvious how to host a website on heroku while at the same time also maintaining e-mail delivery. You would think that this is a very common situation and it would be well documented but unfortunately it is not.
We got a DNSimple account because that’s the way that heroku allows naked domains to function. DNSimple sets up the ALIAS record for you rather easily, but what it doesn’t do is warn you if you have both MX and CNAME records on something. What happens is that the CNAME record always takes precedence as a redirect so your e-mails are then routed to proxy.heroku.com. Something that is undesirably and that DNSimple should warn against.
What turns out to be the best solution is to set ALIAS records for both your apex domain and your subdomains (as proposed here). This way you don’t need a CNAME record anymore that can interfere with other settings. Heroku in their documentation advise you to use a CNAME record, so I’m going to ask them if there are any problems with using an ALIAS for all web routing.
The other option would be to purchase another plan for Zerigo which seems to be heroku’s preferred solution for this issue right now. Again this is rather poorly documented and we would have liked to be informed about that before we chose for the DNSimple option.
Update: Heroku replied with the following.
Great question. The ALIAS record, created by DNSimple, is basically a bunch of magic that does a combination of what CNAMEs and A Records do, but does it behind the scenes. You can read more about the ALIAS records here: http://blog.dnsimple.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-alias-that-works/
That said, DNSimple would likely be better quipped to answer a question like this. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t use ALIAS records in place of CNAMEs. There might be a slight difference in performance between the two, but I’m not certain enough about that to say for sure.
After which I asked the same question over at DNSimple on their blog. That comment is awaiting moderation and an answer but I’ll post that here as soon as it appears.
My small project during Swhack was to create a django version of a delegated voting system partially inspired by Liquid Feedback and the manyfold problems that system has1. In particular that it is written on such an esoteric stack2 that it is near impossible to get running without root on a Linux machine and let’s not even discuss the maintenance. What is even worse is that it makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to join the project and contribute to it significantly.
In this interview about Liquid Democracy you can read quite clearly how the technical mandate drives the direction of the project. Something that may not be very desirable if you think of it as a democracy-centric issue and not a technology-centric one.
So to see how hard it would be to write something similar in vanilla django. It’s easy to hate on django but you can find tons of people who can work on this in just about every major city, the framework and the documentation are mature and many parts of the framework can be called excellent3.
I thought putting something together that at its core implements a delegated voting engine should be doable in an afternoon and it was. What took the most time was playing around with the settings of the testrunner which I hadn’t really used before. So the watersnake app in this project does majority voting on single proposals with support for delegation4. To see it work you have to run the tests, but building this out into a full fledged (web) app that can be deployed to heroku with a single command is technically trivial (and also time consuming).
This wasn’t a stretch to implement right now because I’m also doing some other projects which border on collaborative writing/decision making/filtering. As always, technology is neither the problem or the solution, but certain technical systems grant different socio-technical affordances than others. I will probably not work on this unless there is a clear demand, but I thought it would be useful to debunk the idea that building such a system needs to be difficult or complex.
Among others: the atrocious user experience, the fact that it does not support anonymity, the impossibility of i18n. [↩]
The core is a 4500 line pgsql file which is a solid way to deter outside involvement in a project. [↩]
I for instance can’t really imagine using sqlalchemy over the django ORM. [↩]
We can build it out to support as complex a voting setup and algorithms as you would like, but I would be reluctant to do so without clear indications that it will be actually beneficial. [↩]
Besides the immense amount of things we did over at Hubbub last week, I also spent a lot of time doing various other things which sort of amazed me to be honest.
And on Saturday Jan Lehnardt and I organized the first Swhack Berlin, a commemorative hackathon to do the things that we would normally only talk about. A round-up of the things we did is still forthcoming, but everybody is super-busy of course. It was a lot of fun and I was pleasantly surprised even by the 10+ people who showed up and got busy. We’ll do another one sometime in the near future.
So this Saturday Jan Lehnardt and I are having a small hackathon here in Berlin in remembrance of Aaron Swartz and to in one small way continue doing the work that needs to be done on the internet, in government and especially where those two meet.
We have done a lot of what we used to call ‘civic hacking’ in the past, a phrase that has been used so often by now that I’m slightly sickened when using it. But there is still a lot to be done and both resistance against the movement and co-optation are growing. In Germany, where I live now, things are still in a pre-dormant state. The internet is in a rather sorry state here and people are good at complaining but less so at changing things.
Saturday’s hackathon is meant to focus efforts and do random stuff. The stuff you normally never get around to doing because of the day-to-day business. I have some rather unorthodox ideas to change things but I could use some help. So join us!
I followed the last CCC from a distance reading the Twitter fallout and keeping track of the live streams while getting work done in an empty Berlin. Besides the various controversies playing out, there were some good talks. What I found to be the best of the event was “Long live the protocoletariat” by Eleanor Saitta (@dymaxion) and Smári McCarthy (@smarimc) about a topic that is very near to the things I am thinking about: institutions and networks and all of the opportunities and problems associated with them. The presentation in the first thirty minutes of this video is well worth watching. Pull quotes below are paraphrases.
I have been to CCC once and didn’t feel the need to go again. I have been long disheartened by the odd turn that political consciousness has taken within that particular technological crowd. The combination of information/privacy fundamentalism with a total disdain for normal users is something which is normal in the open source world but not something I can support.
It is refreshing then to hear two people at CCC who pursue an agenda that I think is important in a manner that make sense and is constructive. Briefly the things from the talk that I found noteworthy.
They treat the various levels of obscurity and disfunctionality built into Liquid Feedback but on the whole they do agree that it is a functional system that needs some bug fixing.
Liquid Feedback seems to have been sparked by a blog post some years ago is a good example of the primate of the developer. Because of limitations in development capacity, whoever builds these things builds the definitive version. It remains definitive until somebody builds a better one (or if the problem goes away). We don’t get the option of more consideration, or better design or any of the other things we would want. We get whatever time a volunteer can spare to hack something together that works. This also makes that often we are in local optima because there already is an implementation that is perceived to be ‘good enough’.
People who have the time to solve problems don’t have problems. Those with real problems are too busy coping with their problems to be able to solve them generically. —Smári McCarthy
“Don’t confuse math problems with human problems.” —Eleanor Saitta
An interesting next step is their demand of more thorough thinking from those aspiring to politics. They warn against an information politics that says: ‘We just want our current way of living without the bad things.’ I agree —and many others with me— that idealism needs a clear and functional vision of an alternative world with an implementation plan to get there.
What then follows is a comparison between institutions and networks. I think it is very interesting to think about the importance of these two and why they have such trouble to deal with each other. What we are doing at Hack de Overheid is one attempt at bridging a network with a bunch of Dutch institutions. We should come up with more translator services and adapter structures to make the two work together.
They then treat the protocolization of institutions. How an institution can be decomposed in process and substance. How the symbolic language that an institution accepts can be codified as an automaton and then be translated into a peer to peer communications protocol. One problem of such a protocol is that it lacks institutional memory and tacit knowledge. Networks consist of nodes that adhere to the protocol (by definition) and are in effect interchangeable which means they don’t have to remember over the whole.
Memory and knowledge are essential for the proper functioning of all organizations and that functionality needs to be coded in some way into the networked version. I’m reading James C. Scott right now and he talks at length about the high modernist folly of laying down ‘thin and brittle’ structures that do not work1. Such structures have not been tested or used enough and lack the pliability and adaptations that are necessary for proper functioning.
Saitta and McCarthy propose to build institutions that only do long-term memory and let the process execution be handled by the network.
They then identify the open problems that still need work:
Mapping the complexity classes and executive processes of institutions
A language for protocolization of executive processes
A decentralized but collectivized and compellable taxation protocol for an anonymous crypto currency
Better tools for network-instution interactions
A concept of network jurisprudence and mercy
The complexity theoretical treatment of social institutions is something that rather tickles my fancy. On university we never got to solve anything but the most theoretical of problems during those courses. I recently found some complexity theoretical treatments of games (“Classic Nintendo Games are (NP-)Hard”) and I look forward to even broader applications.
To stay in the vein of games, the problems stated in 1. and 2. are things that have a lot in common with what we do when we build games. The design of games consists of many similar information theoretical problems. Games may also be good staging grounds if you want to replace the nation state. The first thing that comes to mind to model these interactions is Joris Dormans’s Machinations, a finite state machine modeling tool.
Anyway it looks like there are tons of important and interesting problems still to be solved to which we as game practitioners might be able to contribute as well.
There are philosophical problems that we need to solve but they need to be directed towards the real world. —Eleanor Saitta
After the talk there follow a series of somewhat odd questions. The replies fortunately more than make up for it:
You need to have a sufficiently complete philosophical understanding of why your ideas make sense and how they are coherent and how they encompass [agriculture]. Otherwise your [privacy] arguments are going to fall flat. —Smári McCarthy
Instead we should build alternate structures. We are going to build this thing over here and it’s a much better way to run things. That can sort of infect into the world and obsolete other things. —Eleanor Saitta
That last one should be the golden test of activism: are you just complaining or are you doing something to actually make things better? If not, why not?
Such structures are created mostly by a select group of people to pursue an agenda of money or power. [↩]
I’m sitting in the train and get passed a link to a piece from Süddeutsche Zeitung about the internet and its sharing culture. This being my more-or-less favorite German newspaper, I dig into it expecting it to yield a solid piece of thought that will cause me to reflect on my online behaviour.
The real result is a lot less positive. It ends on this note:
Wir müssen nichts mehr erfinden, denn Google und Facebook lehren uns, dass neue Ideen leicht zu haben sind. Es könnte sogar sein, dass fügsame, gelehrige Kopisten jetzt erfolgreicher sind als diejenigen, die innovativ sind.
Some old dude quotes selectively and writes about a subjective divide between digital and analog like you would find in the eighties. And it quotes an interview with Geert Lovink from 2007 that superficially treats ‘blogging’.
The piece opines that because of connectivity we will not be able to pay attention to what is important or come up with original thoughts ourselves. But it turns out that the Süddeutsche has fallen prey to that disease itself. Here as almost everywhere, German writing about the internet follows a predictable course that fails to illuminate.
Monday I was given a Clever coffee maker and a Hario grinder to be able to make slow coffees at the office. Thanks Kars and Lea for being so attentive. I also made a start moving my books over but more and more having a professional1 physical library is feeling like a huge dead weight.
I would like to have these books in digital form but I’m sure as hell not going to pay for them all again at ebook markups. No way in hell. Bittorrent seems like a better option.
We’re very proud of Beestende being a game that actually does what it promises and we submitted it to the Dutch Game Awards.
A trailer for a reality show that I participated in about a year ago was released under the title Heetsel. Doing anything for tv or tv-like media feels intensely surreal and judging from the final edit that surreality is conveyed quite well by the delivered product.
On Wednesday I did random administrative stuff and prepped my visit to Munich the next day.
On Friday I had coffee with Chris Eidhof at the new Barn which is a stunning large venue with a roaster and a very large coffee desk. The coffee is the same quality we’re used to but it’s policies are a bit more restrictive. I won’t talk about the online tumult caused by this, but I hope they can sort it out quickly and then focus again on what they do best: brewing awesome coffee.
And finally I had a cup with Mustafa at the Five Elephant. Mustafa is an all-star programmer who has recently moved to Berlin to build a startup. Another too little publicized —soon to be— success story in the local scene.
Work on the Pigs continues though my part is sort of finished now. The rest of the team is very busy getting the thing into the stable.
On Tuesday I dropped by Open Tech School to do a bit of Python coaching. The entire week I spent a great many hours on kohi getting both the iPhone client and the django server into usable shape. It has advanced to the point where I am using it regularly on the go and it works without too many hickups.
I also wrote the new services overview for Monster Swell. A realign had been in order for a while now.
On Friday Dirk van Oosterbosch dropped by Praxis. A good Amsterdam friend and a notorious hardware hacker.
Also the German net community wants to do something about the Leistungsschutzrecht which is a truly ridiculous piece of legislation. My response to their petition:
https://twitter.com/alper/status/246181714177695744
I just pulled out this stuff from my weeknote into a separate post because I think it merited it.
I was already in the Hague Saturday when the event that prompted my visit happened: we held Apps voor Democratie, a Hack de Overheid hackathon in the Dutch parliament building on invitation by the chairwoman Gerdi Verbeet of our parliament. For this event they also for the first time opened most parliamentary proceedings.
I cannot stress how nice it was to be welcomed into the highest institution of the Netherlands and then hear that institution say that they realize now that openness with their data is the way to go. The atmosphere of the entire day was incredibly positive and uplifting. This event has been a world premier and has set a high bar. But don’t let that stop ups from doing even better.
During my stay in Ghent there was so much rain, I managed to do some work on kohi in the hotel room. This being a self-commissioned project, it can hardly be named work in any of the regular meanings of the word.
Tuesday I travelled onwards to my AirBnB in Paris in the area of Porte de Saint Ouen. A neighborhood far away enough from the city center to be cheap and colorful (a bit like Delfshaven), but just inside the Péripherique boundary so not too threatening.
On Wednesday in Paris I went to La Gaîté Lyrique where a Joust tournament was due to take place. We had a lot of fun playing for an hour or so with all comers. I was going to visit la Gaîté anyway to see the games by Eric Zimmerman and Babycastles and as a nice addition I got to play Fez on one of the consoles they had on display.
La Gaîté Lyrique has as their tagline: ‘Révolutions Numérique’ which translates to Numerical Revolutions and nicely symbolizes the time we are living in right now. The venue hosts a number of events based in art, games, music and net culture that seem to be perfectly in tune with the Zeitgeist but also have the production values to appeal to a large audience. I wish a reboot of the Dutch electronic culture venues may approach this level.
On Thursday I did some preparations for my presentation in Helsinki at the end of the week in some beautiful but horribly expensive Paris cafés like Les Arts et Metiers and in the evening I met Peter Robinett and his sister at the University of Chicago’s Paris Center. There we listened to a lecture on Baudelaire and the bourgeois experience of the city in the 19th century.
I will also be giving a small workshop on Civic Hacking at the Campus Party where I will be sharing all the tricks we used with Hack de Overheid in the Netherlands and which we hope to deploy across Europe to make government more accessible and accountable using the internet.
Friday I flew to Helsinki for my first time over there. Helsinki is a lovely city though a bit empty in July and the Pavilion for the World Design Capital is a beautiful venue.
Saturday we attended the presentations on Transmedia storytelling with again a great report by Jasper Koning on VPRO’s Netherlands From Above project and on Sunday we presented for the social cities program.
A rather interesting capitalist reflection on Facebook by Rob Horning at The New Inquiry and why online activism never changes anything.
Thus, according to Read, a fundamental problem for capitalism is how to maintain a supply of workers who are (a) flexible, creative, and motivated at the same time they are (b) manageable, controllable, and predictable. That seems to explain social media’s underlying ideological function. Not only do social media provide a basis for neoliberal subjectivity, affording us hands-on experience of neoliberal prerogatives and pleasures: branding ourselves, proving our flexibility, maneuvering ourselves into less precarious places in always-reconfiguring networks, and so on; they also serve to contain that subjectivity and neutralize it.
A couple of days ago I got an answer on behalf of Ms. Neelie Kroes with regards to my inquiry about computational literacy (which I asked during her visit to Berlin during re:publica):
OCR’d it says:
Dear Mr. Çugun,
I would like to thank you for your message to Mrs. Kroes. She has asked me to respond to you on her behalf.
I fully share your views that educating our children to become computationally literate is an important topic which should be taken into account in our educational systems. We are indeed aware of the recent debate in the UK, and the studies and discourse papers published on suggesting reforms so as to give a higher prominence to information and communication technology (ICT) in the school curriculum, including programming skills.
As part of the Digital Agenda for Europe, we have been promoting the vision of Every European Digital and the mainstreaming of ICT int he national education systems as a catalyst of innovation and modernisation of education. There are good examples in Europe in this regard, but still much needs to be done before we would see our children widely taught and working wit the new technologies in every course. This would in itself provide a good level of ICT skills to our pupils.
For the future, ICT and learning are high on te Digital Agenda, and we are committed to contributing to educating our European youngsters with the ICT skills they need to succeed in the 21st century.
Yours sincerely,
Khalil Rouhana
We have a long way to go, but we need to push this in every way possible.
Culture flat rates are named both in the Netherlands and in Germany as a solution to the problem of copyright piracy.
The idea is to have everybody pay a set amount of money each month so that they can download all they want and redistribute that money among copyright holders to compensate them for their work.
This stems from the notion that copyright holders deserve some payment for their work and that the current repression being employed to uphold the dysfunctional copyright system, is unacceptable.
It is a horribly bad idea on a great many levels.
1. It cedes to the copyright industry that piracy is an actual problem. It is not. Current piracy does not in any way threaten the creation of new works and in many ways is expediting the switch to new ways of producing culture and new business models.
2. A (semi-)government run systems such as this one removes all entrepreneurship from the production of cultural products and in doing so also removes all innovation. The mediocre will be best served by such a system and those who want to go the extra mile or go into wholly new areas will be hurt.
3. A tariff system by its design works in favor of the old and not the new. New entrants will not have made their arrangements to participate and may never do so because of other inhibiting conditions. People creating wholly new cultural works (DJs, mashups, all manner of interactive experiences and games) may find themselves falling outside of the categorizations on offer. This while the old sit back and reap the rewards for efforts form the past.
4. What should be the most important consideration but is usually left as a detail to deal with later: organizing such a system is practically intractable. Who will compensate the Americans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Brazilian underground movie industry, the bloggers for their writing and the musicians on Soundcloud for their music?
The current organizations tasked with redistributing these tariffs on music played on the radio or in cafes (BUMA/STEMRA in the Netherlands, SEBAM in Belgium) have proved themselves to be mostly corrupt, opaque, poorly organized and exclusionary. It is an illusion to think that a newly established organization will fair any better.
Update: After thinking it over a bit more and reading more misguided German business model ideas for creative production, I think the next three requirements could be used to make a culture flat rate work:
Blanket. A culture flat rate would need to be truly blanket to solve a lot of problems. If it is not, the difference with Spotify or Netflix streaming is zero and it would seem odd to codify into law what is in fact just another business. On the other hand, if the goal is to solve the copyright problem for everybody, a flat rate scheme should ensure that I cannot be sued anymore for any copyright infringement. That was after all the problem to be solved. With current international intellectual property and trade treaties this seems unlikely to happen.
Voluntary. A flat rate should be voluntary. I should not be forced to pay into a scheme I don’t want to or which is of no use to me (like the GEZ). Styled this way, the flat rate would be a kind of legislative insurance for users to prevent getting sued for nonsense and the funds collected could be used to support a couple of starving artists. Though there seem to be altogether too many of those in Germany. This approach would also demonstrate actual market fit of the scheme.
Cheap. A hard requirement on any scheme would be that a flat rate needs to be cheap, cheaper even maybe than the current tv license. That is the only way to ensure incentives for creators to create new products and new business models. If the flat rate is set too high, it risks becoming a cash cow for a sick industry and further stagnate developments in an already conservative country.
Writing these notes on a Sunday afternoon wit a mug of steaming coffee within reach as they are meant to be written.
This Monday I finally made it out to the Finanzamt with a fully filled in form for Steuerliche Erfassung (or something). After that I went to the Agora Collective to get my stuff. It is a great place, but I don’t want to be fixed in a coworking space. There are a myriad reasons why that is not a great fit, but being able to shape and own your own workplace is built-in in most offices and is purposefully left out of coworking.
Then I moved into the contur & konsorten office on Adalbertstraße with my stuff. A Burogemeinschaft with 10 people where everybody has their own independent desk, with its own walls and bookshelves, a place to put my professional library and hang my posters. In short: a place to call my own. In a total coincidence I am now a staircase neighbour of my friends at the Maker’s Loft which could lead to more serendipity in the future.
The office is smack on Kotti, the most important urban maelstrom in Berlin. It is a place where many large streams of traffic and people meet with the U-bahn transport hub (connecting U1 and U8) and the roundabout connecting the main thoroughfare of Skalitzer Straße with the Kottbusser Damm. Betahaus, co-up, the Maker’s Loft and many other creative places are within throwing distance and the area sports equal amounts of hipster cafés and Turkish eateries with the addicts holding their own on the main square. They can be a hassle, but their presence is inseparable from the conditions that made that part of Kreuzberg exactly what it is: a free-haven for people looking for cheap housing be they immigrants or artists —or both.
Tuesday was spent at the new office in presentation prep with the evening closed off by meeting with the local Open Knowledge Foundation chapter. It was a fruitful discussion exchanging various ideas on how to boost the openness movement in Berlin.
On Wednesday, I took a leisurely train ride to Amsterdam which seems to feel shorter and shorter the more I get in the rhythm. That day the long awaited Code 4 video launched. I’m immensely proud of the work we did and I don’t think there’s anybody who has pulled off a game like that anywhere in the world, so it might be well worth a look:
A more detailed write-up on that project is forthcoming.
Thursday I continued working on my presentation at the Open Coop. I also ripped the video of minister of economic affairs Maxime Verhagen endorsing open data from the NOS site, because their site sucks.
I feel like I have to remark on two things that I thought of during the conference:
The entire day was infused with a critical stance against open data and transparency within government. Usman Haque served the opening volley with a criticism of indiscriminate data transparency and an approach to further civic engagement by giving people the tools to collect data themselves. After that Dan Hill also added some criticism against traditional methods of social change.
I agree with their points and criticisms and I would have liked to address them but that was impossible in the time given to me to present our case. I would like to say that if anybody in the Netherlands has been deeply involved on all levels in the government transparency movement and is acutely aware of the problems, issues and realities of data transparency, it is probably us1. Besides that we have employed most of the techniques Dan Hill presented during the last couple of years: shaping decision making processes, deploying long lasting interventions and using the sleights of hand required to realign large organizations and work with far too many people.
We have been and will be hard liners for the cause of government transparency out of necessity and conviction. I will always defend that data that has already been collected by government and carries no issues of privacy or national security with it, belongs to the public and should be accessible by the public.
The other issue is that the conference should was probably most valuable to the people in the Netherlands who are not as current on design and technology as I have come to take for granted. The lack of reflection was painfully clear in some of the questions asked by the audience. This is a common issue, but I have seen it often in the past during Mobile Mondays or the lecture Manuel DeLanda gave in Amsterdam.
Dan Hill talked about going from the matter to the meta level and back again and all three keynoters showed that they are very capable of doing that. In the Netherlands I have found that many practitioners struggle a lot with the matter and they don’t have the time or the interest to ascend to the meta level, even though that would feed back positively into their material undertakings.
I have been looking for collaborators in the Netherlands who look beyond their narrow field and manage to recombine multiple theoretical and practical strands back into their work but there are very few. I hosted the UX Book Club Amsterdam a while, but found that most attendees there took their field of design too narrowly and the field of UX too seriously. Similarly the Berlage Institute is doing a postdoctoral course ‘to explore the forces that shape the built environment in the contemporary world’ which is limited to architects. I don’t know anybody who believes that the problems that will plague our cities in the next fifty years will be solved drawing from the monoculture of architecture school.
It is as if most people in the Netherlands are trapped within the operational closure of their own practice.
I don’t know where I would fall, but I struggle every day with striking a balance between theory and practice and I think if you do not feel that struggle you should take a long hard look at what it is you are doing.
After Social Cities of Tomorrow we had a party at our offices in the Open Coop because they officially incorporated as a cooperation and are set to do great things. The party was rather tremendous and good parties are key to getting things done in Amsterdam.
And now it is Sunday while I am typing these notes and because of a lack of gourmet coffee, it is off to the Hubbub studio in Utrecht to be the murder board for Kars’s LIFT presentation.
For a primer on the issue, read danah boyd’s “Six Provocations for Big Data”. [↩]
Last week was cut a bit short by a commute to Amsterdam at the end (touching on that in a bit).
Monday I settled in at the Agora Collective for the week to work from there. I mentioned before that I really needed a fixed studio space to work from. I wasn’t really aiming for a coworking space, but Agora is a great place to be at.
I spent more of the week in XCode and playing around various iPhone development ins and outs.
Thursday I had to go to the Netherlands early to attend the closing event for ‘Nederland van Boven’ a VPRO series featuring aerial videography and data visualizations. The production team spent a lot of time getting at data to be able to show it on television. I was invited to debate for the cause of open data alongside Alexander Klöpping against the sceptic positions of Marleen Stikker and Arco Groothedde.
On my visit I briefly dropped by the Open Coop and on Friday morning I skated a bit across the canals of Amsterdam before jumping into the train back to Berlin again.
What struck me mainly was that both a professor from the panel and a commenter from the audience held the position that the internet is in fact nothing new. That it is just another medium/channel for people to communicate through. Citing Clay Shirky, I would say that more and faster information flows are in fact different. More fundamentally the internet is the manifestation of a vast new kind of object that interacts with other objects (such as us) in a myriad ways. That alone makes it something new and very significant.
I was asked by somebody from Deutschlandfunk to comment on the proceedings of the evening and I gave them my superficial outsider’s view about privacy and journalism and how the status quo of both is vastly different in the Netherlands.
On the way home what stuck with me most is that every online entity comprises within itself a subjective view of how reality works and how it wishes to interact with that reality. Facebook has notions about the desirability of privacy that permeate through all of its interactions with its users. This is the same for any websites. They are simulations that run on a subjectively chosen subset of reality just like games do.
The tool that we often employ when talking about games is Ian Bogost’s concept of ‘simulation fever’ that says that subjective simulations cause people to either accept or reject the simulation based on their position. The critical alternation (or altercation if you will) between acceptance and rejection puts the user in a moral frenzy termed simulation fever.
The subjective values that websites impose most clearly on users right now are their views when it comes to privacy but there are a slew of other values that are inherent in any web application which users may or may not accept when using them. If you must generalize1 —as a populace— the Dutch mostly accept those subjective realities while the Germans mostly reject.
The Dutch use sites as means of communication and self-expression while grosso modo ignoring the consequences of corporate ownership. While Germans forced by social pressures to use sites such as Facebook, try to mitigate their complicitness by employing sabotage and other defensives strategies2.
There is in both countries a minority of people who are aware of the issues and use these services critically. For any meaningful discussion about the internet, they the most likely people to turn to.
Which I unfortunately must while I recount my experiences as as newcomer in Berlin. [↩]
Last week was my first week in Berlin in earnest and I was more than a bit eager to get back on the horse. On Monday I visited four coworking spaces, on Tuesday I met Marguerite Joly from the Hybrid Plattform and on Wednesday I visited a bunch more. Like I write over at Hubbub, I am looking for a studio space and much much more here in Berlin.
On Thursday I booked a spot at the beta breakfast at Betahaus through Gidsy where I met old friends and some interesting new people.
On Friday I had lunch with Rainer Kohlberger and then worked at betahaus for the rest of the day. I ended the week with drinks with the Gidsy and Third Wave crews.
Going over the list of services that the municipality of Amsterdam offers this week, I couldn’t help but notice this:
the option to change your date of birth (without a foreign certificate)
This is a very interesting option. I am not aware of the reasons one could assert to change their date of birth, but the fact that the option is listed, says something. In any case, it shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a reason that fulfills official requirements.
Why would you want to do this?
I am reasonably sure that most statistical inference methods on databases are pinned fairly rigidly on the fact that somebody’s date of birth never changes. The various parts of your name can be mismatched, but if you do not have an id for somebody (like a social security number), the date of birth is your best bet to reduce the number of possible matches.
If you manage to change your date of birth if only by a day and re-register with that everywhere, you will have shed your privacy tail and can start anew. That by itself, struck me as a hopeful thought. Now just to have somebody try it out.
Post scriptum: I talked about this with Rejo and he suggested I FOIA the number of times this occurs and the reasons why it happens. I put that on my list, for some time in the future.
I taught a minor in data visualization at the Willem de Kooning Academy.
I built bespoke cartography for the PvdA and for the AUB.
I presented at /dev/hague, ODEC, CHI sparks, Ignite Amsterdam.
I presented on cities and games for Virtueel Platform.
I gave several radio interviews.
I ran workshops at the ROOSdagen, the RIVM and the NOS.
I taught at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam.
I published a book review in Vrij Nederland.
I wrote a handful of game reviews in nrc.next.
I visited dConstruct, FOSDEM, the Infographics congress and Playful.
I got an iPhone 4.
I made journalistic visualizations for de Groene Amsterdammer and Sargasso.
I moved house twice, once across the city and the next time across Europe.
I launched a web store with the freshest graphics in the Netherlands.
I judged one app competition and chaired the proceedings of another.
I learned iOS programming.
I participated in a pilot for a interactive design television show.
I went to the Alps for the first time.
I joined the Next Speaker.
I raised funds for Bits of Freedom.
I created a glanceable display for transit in Amsterdam.
I wrote code for a theater play.
I moved studio from Volkskrantgebouw to the Open Coop and got the keys to another.
I taped a video report on the Utrecht game scene.
I was cured from my infatuation with Android.
I participated in a workshop with Manuel DeLanda.
I went to Berlin five times, the last time for good.
We launched the new Hack de Overheid site.
We created a large scale serious game for organizational change called Code 4.
We conceived and ran: Apps for Amsterdam, Apps for Noord-Holland and Apps voor Nederland
We created a bespoke platform for cartographic visualization called Statlas.
We organized five hackathons, among which Hack de Overheid, Nederland van Boven, a hackathon on a historic fortress island, an Open Data Bazaar and Code Camping Amsterdam where hundreds of people came to program dozens of civic applications.
We went to Cognitive Cities and rocked Berlin.
We merged Hack de Ovenheid and het Nieuwe Stemmen into a new entity called the Open State Foundation.
In the beginning of the week I spotted an interesting dataset on Sargasso, requested to play with it and got the following visual published the next day (our write-up).
Then it was off to Berlin to finalize things with the appartment and prepare the move.
Finally my proposal to present on the Apps for Amsterdam project on the Social Cities of Tomorrow conference was aspected and I will be attending and presenting at that conference in Amsterdam. Data commons are a topic that is very near to our practice and I look forward to exchanging ideas with those attending.
Some remaindered weeknotes that have been the casualty of an international move.
This week marked a strategic planning session for the coming year out of which a lot of opportunity flowed. I also finished ‘Where is my Heart?’ for an upcoming nrc.next review. It is a spectacular piece of work and a total mind altering experience. A well deserved five stars.
Next we did some project planning for a fun little thing (saba) we’re going to build in 2012Q1. And then we played Quarriors which I won against all odds1.
The rest of the week was spent actually writing the review. A lot of time goes into writing a good review. Too much for the regular press to do much of it as I’ve written here about Cultural Criticism. I was very pleased with Niels’s criticism and how the thing turned out (though it would of course have been better with another week spent on it).
Thursday I went to the Dialogues House to see Yochai Benkler present on his work and books. The clarity with which he presented complex concepts of value and organization was expected but still good to witness. The Dialogues House though situated a bit unluckily is really a vibrant and creative place.
I think most of the thinking around The Filter Bubble comes from people who are not very procedurally literate to begin with. That is to say they are not very adept at understanding the rules that govern interactive systems nor are they well equipped at reconfiguring them to suit their ends. I touch on this because the same tired argument was parroted in this Zeit interview with Miriam Meckel, a leading German communication scientist1. It starts off with some very sensible sentiments but then it quickly derails on the topic of algorithms and concludes on several sidelines.
Es gäbe keinen kritischen Diskurs mehr, und damit würde unser System auseinanderfallen. Informationen sind der Kitt, der unsere Gesellschaft zusammenhält. In meinem Buch treibe ich diese Idee auf die Spitze: Die Menschheit schafft sich durch die Perfektionierung der Algorithmen selbst ab.
Bei manchen durch Algorithmen betriebenen Werbeangeboten hingegen bekämen Sie diesen Artikel gar nicht erst zu sehen.
While deploring the extremism prevalent in German discourse on the topic of the internet. She herself now takes an extremist and poorly nuanced position herself. The Filter Bubble argument that is currently in vogue (see this treatment by Alexander) is mostly hollow and it creates understanding on the back of fear. I work for the internet and I am sick of hearing this nonsense time and time again.
The Filter Bubble contrasts a previously filtered situation of redacted mainstream media with the new filtered situation of personalized online content and plays off of people’s fears3. There are two main differences in the new situation.
The first difference is that the filters personalize content spheres for each person. I don’t think this is all that problematic. Having trained machine learning algorithms myself, I have seen how coarse they turn out no matter what amount of training. Training which is somewhere between a dark art and trying to hit a subjective target somewhere. Algorithmic filters resemble fractal surfaces more than they do smooth bubbles and personalization will never provide a perfectly sealed off environment. This means that as soon as you get into the technical details the whole thing very quickly falls apart4.
The second difference is that filters are being applied by algorithms instead of editors now. Both are enigmatic creatures, but judging from the cold reception algorithms get, it seems that the traditional humanities are better equipped to deal with human entities than they are with the algorithmic variety. There is nothing new under the sun. Large scale social segregation and associated detrimental effects also happened using traditional media with people logging into their own newspaper or radio station. One of the most visibly polarized societies right now is the USA where the ‘debate’ between the right and the left is raging on talk radio, 24 hour news networks and, yes, also online. If anything the filters may help by making the groups of like minded people too small and too busy to be harmful to society.
My second problem is that while complaining about the lack of technical literacy in the general populace, her discipline and her research does not come over as very technically literate. She says:
Unser Land ist tendenziell eher technikfeindlich eingestellt.
The interviewer then adds that she draws from literary and philosophical sources. Those are interesting but hardly enough to thoroughly treat a subject. Deep talk about about information technology should draw from philosophy but it should also bring a literacy of the field itself. That means knowledge of its technical workings and affordances, the design practices inherent in the creation of technical artifacts and the procedurality and interaction that is so key to them.
So yes I very much agree that we need to instill a large scale procedural, data and media literacy in people and we may well need to start with the humanities. That may be the only way to fix their relevance problems when it comes to digital things (see also Ian Bogost’s two part essay ‘Beyond the Elbow-patched Playground’ on that).
So with those skills in hand, we could discuss the filter bubble drawing from applied research. One finding I would like to see is a technical assessment of the feasibility of trapping people in filter bubbles and measurements of the amount of information isolation that can be achieved. Another would be to research real life internet users and see if in fact they shut themselves off more from other influences and how far this affects their world views. Only with a praxis firmly based in reality can we talk about this subject in a way that is not gratuitous.
Update: This review of the Filter Bubble by Olga Goriunova in Computational Culture mostly vindicates my argument and I agree that we need more writing, not less to bridge the gap of literacy that stands ahead of us.
Friday was for the final preparations for Code Camping Amsterdam (write-up here), our largest Hack de Overheid event to date. We had the entire day hacking at the derelict Shell Tower —I wrote about it before— across the water in Amsterdam with great food and coffee and a party at night for another several hundred people.
I had a great time last week working at the Makers Loft in Kreuzberg while our friends of Gidsy were out and about in San Francisco.
It was interesting arranging stuff for Apps voor Nederland from Berlin, but eminently doable thanks to modern communications.
I also went to see the play ‘Einsame Menschen’ at the Schaubühne. Which was an interesting experience all in all.
I also had an experience with Android that probably forever cured me from the platform. What a horrible mess that is. Tuesday evening I took the train back to Amsterdam while making two presentations.
Mediamatic is currently doing studies in fungus of which this wall is an example:
Thursdays was a bit more of a slow day after the 12 hour ordeal of the day before, starting off with doing e-mails at the Village, my favorite hangout in the Netherlands.
I asked Vlambeer about any indie game developers in Berlin and they came up pretty short on that count. Anytime I inquire about the Berlin game scene I get Wooga1 and if people really know what they are talking about they mention the great people at Spaces of Play. In any case, the Berlin scene seems thin and ripe for disruption.
After that it was off to Lieke’s viva. A smashing display of science if ever there was one:
Friday we did some business development for Hubbub with Kars Alfrink visiting over at the Coop and we paid a brief visit to the Super Mario Experience.
And oh yeah, on Sunday I moved my office from the Volkskrantgebouw to the Open Cooperatie which has already been my main base of operations for a while now, so I thought I’d make it official.
Who are probably ace but hors concours for the kind of stuff we are doing. [↩]
I’m incredibly proud of the team and events coming together in our organization of the biggest Hack de Overheid feature yet. Looking back on the past year, it has been an incredible ride with the various Apps for… competitions and no small amount of personal and professional changes.
At the end of this month, on Saturday the 26th, we’ll be holding a Hack de Overheid event like you’re used to with some notable additions that are going to blow everybody’s mind. The event is called Code Camping Amsterdam, it is part of the Apps voor Nederland program in collaboration with Waag Society and you can register on the bottom of the page.
We’ll be having three internationally renowned speakers whose work alone speaks for itself, let alone their presence on our event. Marietje Schaake is our most favourable representation in the European Parliament but as far as I know a politician of her stature has never before spoke in front of an audience of Makers in the Netherlands before. Marius Watz‘s visual art inspires awe and wonder and I have used his software on several occasions in my work for Monster Swell. Matt Biddulph‘s work and shipped products have been used by most of the people I know and inspired me and I think many more programmers to build more and better.
The location in the derelict Toren Overhoeks1 is a culmination both of convenience and inconvenience. Just across the central train station, but without any facilities left in the building2 it exemplifies a once and future state of our cities. Remnants of an age gone by where hackers gather with makeshift facilities to create something better.
After the event there is going to be a party by the Eddie the Eagle Museum a formation famous in their own right for holding the most out there awesome parties in the city3. It is a privilege working together with people this competent when it comes to fun and so creative when it comes to convention. See their party description:
The future has found us! And its leader is a code. Our digitally hypnotised desire has led to a world without mistakes, governed by spyware and malware. Humanity is an experiment proved inferior. Let’s crack the code to correct it. Enter the Hackathon and exuberantly celebrate a world without errors! With high, low and no-tech, we are the new Trojan Horses marching in, ritually erasing the failings of the past. Let’s roughly and frantic lose our last human bit with a codefest in the Tower of the Shell.
Finally as I have hinted before, the currency for application contests is diminishing along with the consolidation of the open data platforms and the publication of more and more datasets. If after Apps voor Nederland is over, you follow-up with another cookie-cutter competition, that would be missing the point. That also means that this competition is the best moment to get your datasets out and get attention for them in the ecosystem as it is right now. What will be next? We have some ideas, but we don’t know anything for sure yet. The only thing that is certain: you’d better be there next Saturday!
Formerly known as the Shell Tower as it was the location from which Shell’s infamous post-colonial regime was directed from. [↩]
Those were all torn out by Shell when they left. Such pleasant people… [↩]
And I’m not exaggerating when I say that. Their work is legendary. [↩]
It has become even easier to find your way to our office in the Coop. Just follow the green yellow line.
And we are accruing more and more birds:
The start of the week was busy with preparing and presenting at the RIVM, the Dutch institute for public health and the environment about their consumer portal Kies Beter. Kies beter is effectively a public resource for authoritative healthcare information. It will be interesting to see what role it will play in the coming process of opening up such data. It was a great opportunity to talk and work with the team and see how they see their role.
I met with Jaap Stronks of Johnny Wonder and with some friendly people from Dutch broadcasting company NCRV all about the open data revolution and how it can work for them.
Apps voor Nederland continues apace and the event is rapidly approaching right now.
I am in the process of liquidating my superfluous effects in the Netherlands as well as my office in the Volkskrantgebouw. It’s an odd coincidence that just with my leaving (and with the announcement of the re-development of the VKG as a hotel in a couple of years) a bunch of friends and esteemed colleagues are landing in the building. I would have loved to have shared the building with them for the past two years but for me it is onwards and upwards!
I had a chat with Casper Koomen who is very active with Pachube’s Dutch development efforts. Among other things with an event this Friday called “Breathe Amsterdam”. And I’m preparing an Ignite presentation for next week.
Also my long form review of Phone Story which had been published in the newspaper before has now been published on Bashers in Dutch: ‘Phone Story — Gamedesign als kritiek op onze gadgetlust’ The comments are predictable but I had wished for a bit more in depth response to the problem I see where platform builders as Apple become governments of the space they created. Which is problematic in this case because they tightly regulate expression within their platform that would be legitimate in any other public space.
The winter sun hitting the backyard of our North office, makes for some striking pictures:
And then it was off to Berlin to make some more arrangements for the move over there come the new year.
We strolled from Neukölln to the South back to Kreuzberg’s Südstern and Bergmannkiez via the former airport of Tempelhof. That part of Neukölln is developing but before there is anything approaching a comfortable urban fabric, it will be another five years.
Tempelhof Airport itself is becoming a great example of how creating a hole in a vibrant urban area can make space for all kinds of impromptu and impermanent use. The urban gardening plots are just one example of that. The business on a Sunday even with winter approaching is massive with al kinds of wheeled and/or wind based activities taking place.
There seem to be plans to build along the airfield, but that would be very bad obscuring the current urban views into the emptiness. If building is necessary, I would propose to put the buildings on stilts so we can still peer into the Loch.
Nice to see that Peter Robinett is running AMStransit in his office on a spare screen:
Hack de Overheid announced Code Camping Amsterdam which is going to be our biggest event yet in a derelict office across the IJ in Amsterdam. Everything is in full effect to organize that.
Playful was great and it’s always nice to be in London for a short stretch. It was a while that I was last in Conway Hall but it was nice to be back. Niels and Kars have written detailed accounts about the day on Hubbub and Bashers.
Then in the same weekend (flying into Schiphol in the morning, directly in the car to Germany) it was off to the Ruhrgebiet in Germany to visit among others the Jahrhunderthallen and the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord.
To all you who have won awards (and to all you who haven’t):
awards handed out by its organiser who wants to be seen handing out awards to people who want to be seen receiving them. It’s a simple formulae, but unsustainable in a world where more of the demographic that attends communicates over the back-channel. —Jan Chipchase
Ik was twee weken geleden op een bijeenkomst van de STT over serious games en ik was een beetje teleurgesteld dat de enige kritische reflectie op het onderwerp van de dag —kansen in serious games en gamification— kwam van super-filosoof Jos de Mul. Hoe goed zijn kritiek dan ook was, kritiek van een filosoof is te gemakkelijk weg te wuiven door mensen uit de praktijk. Nederland blijf een land van handelaars en nering is hier de makkelijkste manier om de handen op elkaar te krijgen.
Wij blijven serieuze reserveringen houden bij het klakkeloos doorvoeren van gamification. We denken dat een fijnzinnigere aanpak wenselijk is omdat de problemen ingewikkeld zijn en deze spellen dagelijks door echte mensen gebruikt worden. In onze praktijk bij Hubbub maken we serious games en dat doen we tot tevredenheid van klanten en spelers al zeg ik het zelf. Waar het gamification betreft ben ik één van de eerste aanjagers van Foursquare in Nederland. Ik ben me dus terdege bewust van de mogelijkheden en beperkingen van deze aanpak.
Ik wil mensen en organisaties die iets willen doen hiermee oproepen om professionele hulp in de arm te nemen. Je wilt mensen die een track record hebben in het maken van spellen die werken voor de mensen die ze spelen én voor de bedrijven die ze inzetten. Dat betekent in dit geval Hubbub of andere bedrijven die werken met echte spelontwerpers. Wij zitten niet exact te springen om meer te doen, maar we zien tegelijk wel een acute behoefte aan ervaring uit de praktijk.
Communicatie- en interactieve bureau’s doen nu een paar slides over gamificatie in hun strategie-pitches om het concept ‘meegenomen te hebben’ maar ze zijn zich vrijwel nooit bewust van de complexiteit en nuances van games en systemen.
Het zijn goedbedoelde pogingen, maar ze slaan bijna altijd de plank mis. Als je echt duurzame waarde wilt creëren kun je beter direct bij een goede partij aankloppen.
Another piece on an interesting game published in nrc.next. This week a critical review of the selective enforcement of the App Store guidelines in the case of Phone Story a game that is itself a critique of the iPhones it runs on. An indictment of Apple makes for an easy piece to write.
Geodata hero, Simeon Nedkov at the Open Data Bazaar with a very appropriate t-shirt:
Tuesday saw the Hack de Overheid event called the Open Data Bazaar. It was a massive success with well over a hundred people from all over the Netherlands. Lots of students were present and lots of hacking went on throughout the day. There was also a brimful workshop program where birds of a feather discussed the current state of open data in the Netherlands.
During the bazaar I worked together with Dirk van Oosterbosch to make an Arduino driven matrix display that shows the departure time of the next bus from the venue. It doesn’t get more situated than that and I’m glad we can whip something like that up in a couple of hours. It shows that we have come quite a way since first we started with this stuff.
Wednesday I visited OTB at Delft, University of Technology. OTB is the research institute for the built environment, the theoretical backing for the faculty of Engineering, Policy and Management (at which I got a minor in Management of Technology during my studies). I will be consulting with geodata experts in the Netherlands on developer relations so the data and standards they are working on are such that they will be easy to develop with.
I also visited my old faculty which has been taken over by architecture students after their building burnt down. I must say I have never seen our buildings in better order.
In the afternoon we paid a site visit to what is to be the location of the next Hack de Overheid event “Code Camping Amsterdam”. Some of you may already have surmised where it is going to be. Announcements are due next week but suffice it to say that it is going to be massive. We are going to be coinciding with a massive Eddie the Eagle Museum party on the same venue after our event. Something of a departure from previous years but one which should prove to be very fun.
Thursday I spent all day at Bits of Freedom to help them with the #doyourbit fundraiser. Being an independent organization BoF are more dependent on private donations. We love them to death and Hack de Overheid is more than a bit complementary so I try to help them out whenever I can. That Thursday I spent all day at their offices and tweeted like wildfire with a bunch of other volunteers to reach the Dutch internet and get them to donate.
That same night there was an event about games in the Stedelijk Museum. It was somewhat problematic testified to by these pieces written by Arjen and Niels. Arjen’s piece quite precisely mirrors my qualms about the evening (see also my comment).
Friday was something of a write-off due to the volume of activities that had happened during the week. Fortunately the symposium of the STT. The day was a nice get-together with most people in the Netherlands active in the field of gaming.
Gamification interlude
What was disappointing though not very surprising was the fact that all of the critical reflection on the day’s topic —opportunities in serious games and gamification— came from philosopher-hero Jos de Mul. Which solid as it was, coming from a philosopher, may be too easy to dismiss. The rest was profiteering. The Dutch remain a merchant nation at heart and anything that generates income will be applauded however morally dubious it may be.
The issues that we have with both of these concepts are real and they need a considered and nuanced approach. In our practice we make serious games and we seem to be doing quite ok if I may say so myself. When it comes to gamification, I am one of the principal instigators of Foursquare in the Netherlands so I am intimately aware with both the methods and their shortcomings.
Given that, I would urge people and organizations who want to do something in this field to seek professional help. That means get in touch with us or with other organizations that employ bona fide game designers. We are not exactly shy for more things to do but there is a clear need for guidance in this field. In any case make sure to work with people who have a track record in designing playful experiences that cater both to the wishes of the humans playing them and to the goals of the businesses commissioning them.
Agencies are currently including gamification as a slide in their strategy deck, paying lip service to the concept to make a quick buck. If you want to enable them doing that, you are free to do so. But if you want to create real value, why take the long way round?
Interlude over. That Saturday I went to the movie night at Filmhuis Cavia organized by the guys from Popup City. I wrote about that on this blog at: Stop Kicking the Creative Class.
And I also procured a Huawei X5 to play around with. This seems to be the first Chinese manufacturer that has found a low price point for a device that is still highly capable. The Kenyan market has been flooded with the €99 little brother of this phone, the X3.
Mensen die mij kennen weten dat ik nooit echt dingen retweet en me bezig hou met goede doelen. Alleen één keer per jaar maak ik een uitzondering voor Bits of Freedom omdat ik wat ze doen echt heel belangrijk vind en omdat ik weet dat ze het heel goed doen.
Bits of Freedom komt op voor een open en vrij internet in Nederland en Europa en ze doen dat buitengewoon effectief. Als je je privacy wilt bewaren en een ongefilterde toegang tot het internet wilt houden ga je vandaag naar “Do Your Bit!” en doneer je €5 in vijf minuten. Je krijgt een t-shirt en een goed gevoel.
I thought this piece: “Amazon and the reintermediation of the spectacle” my Michael Smethurst was well worth reading. Here are some choice excerpts, but these are mainly for me. You should read the entire thing.
Software is what we write to extract information from data. The worse your data model is, the more software you have to write.
The fact that we will not enter a Golden Age of Reading because of corporate control, may be the greatest loss (in opportunity cost) the digitization of books will bring us.
I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to hack with that kind of data. What could you build around community reading groups, formal education, adult literacy? At the very least it would save me the chore of ticking homework diaries. But I doubt we’ll get that chance.
The following is one of the reasons that privacy is not going to be salvagable in the future.
The most important issue for user experience people to grapple with is informed consent. More and more web services are dependent on user contributed content and data. Every time you make a contribution (explicit or implicit) you’re trading convenience for privacy. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s something we do everyday in real life from mobile phones to loyalty cards. But as the web moves out of the browser and into smart objects, the trade-offs we’re making need to be made explicit so people can make informed choices about when to get involved and when to back away.
Because Amazon are light years ahead of the game we think we’re playing.
With the digitization of everything and the scale required, we are becoming the victims of Extremistan or rather of its overlords: Apple, Google and Amazon.
The organization I’m involved with, Hack de Overheid will be organizing two events end of this year with the first one being an open hacking event on October 4th and the second being a Code Camp in Amsterdam end of November.
The message I am promoting is that this is the time to get on board and get your data out and start building civic apps. This is the last moment in the cycle that any of this is going to be at all special, innovative or unboundedly fun. After we’re done with this event most of the ground will be covered, hearts will be won and anybody talking about open data will be hailed with a ‘Been there, done that!’
Of course there will still be a dozen years of hard work for a great many people to change our institutions, build businesses on top of usable humane applications and educate a populace. There may even be fun to be had here and there, but you would be a fool not to get on board right here right now and help us kick this off.