Metamedia

"Neural Rights Management" and Permission Culture

"Neural Rights Management" (found via @hrheingold) is a "future video" designed in the spirit of science-fiction futurology to show us the results of the logical extrapolation of the current attempts to destroy the digital commons.

It uses the Mastercard Priceless narrative technique to show an example of what it would be like to have Neural Rights Management and so have to purchase basic bodily experiences, such as watching the sun set on the beach.

Stuart Candy, researcher at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, on this blog the sceptical futuryst tells the story of how the video was made and put on YouTube were it remained for almost two years - until a copyright claim was made against the background music and it was taken down.

The word ironic hardly covers it. The future is almost here.

• Read the whole story and see the original video here

Eric Schmidt and Transparency in the Social Panopticon

From Charlie Rose's interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google -

Eric Schmidt: Well, the most interesting thing to me is that transparency is how you keep societies honest.

And we’ve now because of the internet and because of the digital revolution given people — we’ve essentially given them the ability to see everything. So you can now take photographs, take videos of everything you see in your world and people discover it. And there are whole communities of people who are interested in these kinds of aspects.

And they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others. It doesn’t necessarily mean for a different outcome, but it means that everybody can’t hide. They have to actually tell the truth. To me, that’s a great step forward.

[From Eric Schmidt Tells Charlie Rose Google Is “Unlikely” To Buy Twitter And Wants To Turn Phones Into TVs]

[Emphasis mine.]

Precisely. Those platitudes sure sound nice when you first hear them - until you realize that one of the great exceptions to this new transparency are corporations, who use control of the law to protect their own inner workings from any type of transparency, scrutiny, and oversight, while extracting exactly that kind of information from their "information suppliers" (more usually but misleadingly called "users".)

There are a lot of strategies available to legal persons like corporations that are not available to actual persons like you and me. They may not be able to hide some things as much as they used to, but as Schmidt notes, the outcomes don't change much - indeed this whole phenomenon would not even be happening if that were so, if companies had more to lose in the battle for social control than they can make in selling goods and services.

Why doesn't this transparency that keeps things honest apply to corporations? In this very interview, Schmidt wasn't exactly transparent about certain of Google's business plans.

Until the day I know as much about Google as they know about me, Schmidt's words will just remain platitudes, deeply ironic ones.

Indeed there is really nothing that new about this type of transparency, for it is just another view of The Panopticon.

In Bentham's Panopticon, the guards watch the inmates. In the Social Panopticon, the guards let the prisoners watch each other, too, for both entertainment and profit. But in neither do the prisoners watch the guards except for exactly when, where, and how the guards want them to.

Scarce InfoWorld and Abundant InfoWorld

The Desert is the Eco-Info System of Scarce InfoWorld that we are leaving behind.

To succeed there, information must survive the harsh environment. Husbanding resources and using them efficiently is important. There are a few types of things and only a few unique giants that easily stand out.

The Forest is Eco-Info System of Abundant InfoWorld we are entering.

To succeed there, information has to stand out from the thousands of varieties similar to it. Exuberance and variation are important. There are many types of things and the differences between them are often minute, and the quality that distinguishes success and failure can appear trivial.

Linktribution: background photos by the one and only cogdog.

On The Way to Info Slavery

From academhack » Blog Archive » Academic Branding and Portfolio Control

But on the other hand I think it is better to develop your own profile, your own set of pages and develop the digital literacy to control your own data. Why? Because of Facebook. If Facebook has taught us one thing it is that the services that provide us with places to store and share information about ourselves, develop an uncomfortable amount of power, and that when these sites decide to change TOS or use your data in ways in which you are uncomfortable with, there is often little you can do.

[Emphases mine]

In ancient Greece, the classical definition of a slave was one who did not have control of their body.

In the digital world, the definition of an info slave is one who does not have control of their digital person.

Control over one's representation of the self to the world is a fundamental component of freedom.

Control over one's digital representation is not just the ability to own ones own content, but also to control "the facts about" one. The fact that I like Beethoven and Jane Austin and play the guitar - those "facts about" are as much a part of my digital persona as the videos I make, the music I record, the posts I write.

And control means to be able to control who can and can not see it, who can and can not profit from it, and who can and can not reuse it. And this right pertains to real humans, not the legal fiction persons of non-human corporations.

There is no "Nation of Facebook." Or any other corporation. It has no citizens. It confers no rights. It's only relationship is monetary and contractual. And when it has power, it can and will arbitrarily change that contract to its own advantage without due process; the only recourse to which is resignation, if possible. It is the master.

The only difference between a walled garden and an info prison is how happy the inmates are. So Facebook just has to keep them entertained by throwing them trinkets and baubles.

And no faux rebellion by its "users" will fundamentally change that.

Facebook is a company which has explicitly designed a tool to make money by collecting personal information about people under the guise of a service, and then selling it.

And no marketing campaign appropriating the language of rights and democracy will change that.

The Facebook TOS Rebellion

[UPDATE: One week later I have heard nothing from FB customer support on my name change request, which normally "takes 24 hours"]

I removed all the data from my Facebook account today - it took about an hour to delete the items one by one by one, as there is no way to remove them otherwise.

Whatever the results of this latest rebellion, and whatever cosmetic changes (if any) in the Facebook Terms of Service, it does not matter to me: Facebook is a company that is inherently (and by that I mean in the character and attitudes of its founder and principal board members) disrespectful of its users and has shown itself to consistently be so.

Rather than deactivate my account, I am leaving it active so I can post items of interest there about Facebook's essentially duplicitous business model and the fundamental attitude of information sharecropping which it embodies.

As a protest, I changed my photo to the default blank with an 'X' through it, borrowing this idea from those whose names were given by their masters when enslaved. And I have formally requested - as is required by the TOS - that Facebook customer service change my last name to X.

[UPDATE:  Some Useful Aftermath Links 

• http://amandafrench.net/2009/02/16/facebook-terms-of-service-compared/
• http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=77069107432
• http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/facebook-battle-ends-major-victory-users

]

What's Wrong With This Picture?

What's wrong with this picture?  You don't really need to look carefully, it should be pretty obvious:

 

No, not those avatars. Those are perfectly normal in SecondLife.

Rather:  Of all the possible new and exciting ways of doing things in a virtual 3D world, we replicate the rank and file seating of the 19th century industrial classroom.

Does Refusing A Viral Application on Facebook Make Me a Bad Friend?

Does refusing to accept and install viral applications on Facebook make me a bad friend? I have friends - real life ones, not fake cyber ones - who send me sometimes rather trivial looking applications or even gifts on Facebook.

But in order to acknowledge them means I have to install an application. And that means allowing the application to access my personal information at the same level as a friend. That is the standard behavior of a viral application. It is highly memetic and gets the humans to do its reproductive work, by exploiting the human behavior of "reciprocal gift giving".

And an application has access to a whole range of information about me: in fact, practically ALL. An application you install has in fact the ability to harvest your information in a way that no human friend could just by sucking out into the application developer's database: unless you step in at tell it not to.

(And even then, are they? Given Facebook's wretched record on protecting user privacy, should we trust them?)

So, to all my Facebook friends, no, I will not install applications for you that ask me to bite Zombies, do Green things,  send "Gifts" or support charities, political causes, or other worthy causes.

No, it doesn't make me a bad cyber-friend, just careful. Think of it this way: I am choosing to share things about myself with you as you are my friend, but I am also choosing not to share that information with some unknown small company that is then turning around and selling that information to advertisers. You are a friend, and they are not.

Oh, and I am not alone in being concerned and annoyed and distrustful of the Facebook management's poor record on privacy. There is now a group on Facebook called Official Facebook Petition: To ban the inviting of friends on Applications  whose aim to to have such applications and such behavior be universally blockable by users.  The group has over 92,000 members so far. 

Just in case you were interested, here is the "fine print"
from Section II of the Facebook  "Platform Applications Terms of Use"

(a) Information That May Be Provided to Developers. In order to allow you to use and participate in Platform Applications created by Developers ("Developer Applications"), Facebook may from time to time provide Developers access to the following information (collectively, the "Facebook Site Information"):

(i) any information provided by you and visible to you on the Facebook Site, excluding any of your Contact Information, and

(ii) the user ID associated with your Facebook Site profile.

(b) Examples of Facebook Site Information. The Facebook Site Information may include, without limitation, the following information, to the extent visible on the Facebook Site: 

• your name,
• your profile picture,
• your gender,
• your birthday,
• your hometown location (city/state/country),
• your current location (city/state/country),
• your political view,
• your activities,
• your interests,
• your musical preferences,
• television shows in which you are interested,
• movies in which you are interested,
• books in which you are interested,
• your favorite quotes,
• the text of your "About Me" section,
• your relationship status,
• your dating interests,
• your relationship interests,
• your summer plans,
• your Facebook user network affiliations,
• your education history,
• your work history,
• your course information,
• copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums,
• metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.),
• the total number of messages sent and/or received by you,
• the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box,
• the total number of "pokes" you have sent and/or received,
• the total number of wall posts on your Wall™,
• a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends,
• your social timeline,
• and events associated with your Facebook profile.

The Passionate Portfolio

I just returned from a NITLE sponsored workshop on e-portfolios (or, if it has reached the point of dehyphenation, eportfolios.) The workshop was facilitated by Wende Morgaine, the moving force behind Portland State University's (ultimately failed) attempt to move to an entirely digital eportfolio system.

Wende was a wonderful facilitator, focusing the group on the practicalities of the institutional process of portfolio adoption and use. As a pioneer, of course, she has gotten her share of arrows in the anatomy.

One of the questions some of us where talking about afterwards is: how is a portfolio different from a resume? What makes it more than just a collection of
artefacts, more than the sum of its parts?

The answer seems to be passion.

Wende's experience with her students was that, though they are reluctant at first to engage with the formal mechanisms of portfolio assessment (usually a rubric of some sort), once they do become engaged, things change.

First,  a portfolio becomes an extension of a person, a virtual persona, or rather another part of their virtual persona. 

As in most analog modes of our world: dress, appearance, cars, houses, hobbies, etc., we invest and care about them as expressions of our self. And if there is one thing we are passionate about, it is the way we project our persona to the world, how we are perceived and judged.

Taking ownership of an eportfolio should help us to learn to take ownership of all the data about us. And that is an increasingly important skill in the digital world.

Secondly, self evaluation against sets of external criteria is more engaging, challenging, and rewarding than non-directed reflection. To paraphrase Frost, an eportfolio without rubrics is like tennis without a net. Rubrics have a pedagogical origin for assessment, but -- when well chosen -- can be a valuable directive for persona construction and growth.

Most portfolio software, as Wende emphasized to our workshop, are little more than clever file managers, with no or few tools for reflection on the process of the portfolio. 

Instead of focusing on the self-evaluative process, such portfolios - or even worse, the archaic process of having students make web pages - only get in the way of good engaged portfolios, by focusing attention on learning the tool (usually pretty badly too.)

And that kills the passion that makes good portfolios.

To learn how to create a passionate portfolio, just look where students are already passionate about presenting themselves, and how well they do it.

Eportfolios could learn a lot from Facebook about designing for passion.

And Facebook could learn a lot from them about designing for reflection.

Matthew Arnold and the Wisdom of Crowds

The ideology of The Wisdom of Crowds has been at the center of some controversy lately, what with the various MySpace (2,3) and Facebook incidents, and the recent Digg and Livejournal debacles, and the continuing wikiphobia and fear of the Internet.

So it was with some glee that I came across a reference, while reading some Lionel Trilling essays this weekend, to an essay by Matthew Arnold entitled "Numbers; or The Majority and The Remnant,'' one of the Discourses in America published in 1885 in the wake of his tour of the United States in 1883-4.

His argument is essentially this: History shows we cannot depend on the wisdom of crowds, but for every crowd there is a Remnant of those who retain an interest in The Serious. This Remnant is always necessarily a small but influential layer of a culture. When a culture is overtaken by The Crowd, it will fail, because the crowd "lacks principle, lacks persistence," and The Remnant will alone carry on the culture, if it can, but it often is not able to because it is simply too few in number.

This is not a new argument of course, but Arnold has a new twist on it that suits the American experience.

While many cultures - Athenian Greece, the Judea of Isaiah, the Rome Empire, and medieval and modern France are given as examples - fall into dissolution even with the presence of a superior Remnant, Arnold holds out hope that America, where the Remnant is small relatively but large absolutely simply because we have so many people, may save America from the fate of its predecessors.

And the symptoms of that fate include:

A life of comfort and craving for amusement were encouraged in every way, and the interest of citizens was withdrawn from serious things. Conversation became more and more frivolous....

He's referring to 4th century Athens, but it has already happened to 21st century America as well.

Even more insightful is his description of the danger of loss of the influence of this Remnant and the conquest of a culture by the Majority. In a culture controlled by the crowd such as in America, 

...the danger is in the absence of the discipline of respect; in hardness and materialism, exaggeration and boastfulness; in a false smartness, a false audacity, a want of soul and delicacy.

Was there ever a more perfect description of everyday life on many social networks, with their ubiquitous "U suck ! I rule !" mentality ?

In fact, I would say that while it may be that Arnold's Remnant arguably provides for cultural survivability by reaching an absolute number, it may likewise be that The Majority paradoxically insures cultural demise by reaching an absolute number, too.

Certainly any veteran of a social network experiencing massive growth - Facebook and Second Life leap to mind - will have been witness to this very phenomenon: at a certain point these communities begin to attract more people to them than the community can absorb effectively by teaching them the proper norms, rules, behaviors, and ethos, to become successful community members.

Has no one in social software networking noticed that communities simply can't keep getting bigger? That there is an optimal size? 

In his book Good Work, E.F. Schumacher once proposed that the optimal size for a business was about 350 people: much larger and you couldn't actually know everyone.

Why should an online community be unlimited in membership simply because its technology can now scale when its communal nature can not?

We are NOT Google's customers!

Link: July 27, 2007, Hour Two: Depression Medication / Baby Talk / Search Engines

On NPR's Science Friday show last week, Javed Mostafa and Andrew Keen discussed Search Engines.

(It was an interesting conversation, not the least for Keen's complete lack of relevance: he seems to have adopted the politician's tactic of ignoring to answer a question but then later interrupting the other speaker's current topic with an irrelevant return to a former question.)

Javed Mostafa, of the University of Indiana was generally excellent throughout, but but but there is one thing he said in passing several times which begs for strident correction, when he described those who use Google search and application as its "customers." Wrong!

    We are NOT Google's Customers.

    We are Google's Suppliers.

He has the entire business model of Google completely backwards. Those who use Google's search engine, mail, calendar, and other applications are NOT customers. A customer is someone who pays you, from whom you make money.

    WE are not Google's customers:

    Advertisers are Google's customers.

Google is in business to serve its customers: the advertising companies that pay it, who measure their investment in it by the return they get from the placement of the ads, just like on other media such as radio and television. (This is one of the reasons why Google's attempted acquisition of Doubleclick is being questioned.)

    We supply the raw material with our labor.

Google turns that raw material into something the customers will pay for.

Google is not in the search engine business, not the webtop business, not the application business.  Google is in the data collection, research, advertising delivery business. Its business model is more akin to Neilson or Arbitron and the many companies that connect media to advertisers than it is to Microsoft.

The corollary of this is:

    Google is NOT free.

    We pay for Google by barter.

Google is not free. We barter our personal information for its use. Google collects and indexes everything we put online in it -- every search, every calendar, every email, every document, every widget choice, every map location, every thing.

It repackages it, bundles it, extracts it, correlates it, and sells it to its customers, the advertisers.

It doesn't pay us any money for this, but instead allows us to use the tools that collect this information.

Meat packers supply McDonalds with beef. McDonalds pays them for it. It then converts that meat into a form that its customers will pay for.

We supply Google with data. Google allows us to use the applications which are at the same time data collection devices. It them converts that data about us into a form that its customers will pay for.

Like other businesses, McDonalds values its relationships with its suppliers. But neither side is under the illusion about the relationship: the suppliers know they are the suppliers.

That the suppliers of Google -- and public commentators on it -- are under the illusion they are customers is rather startling.

And that Google -- who are under no illusions at all as to the nature of their business and their business relationships -- does not do anything to dispel this illusion is surely a sign that something is rotten in Privacyville.

Google doesn't have an issue with its customers. The advertisers are happy. That's why Google is making so much money.

Google does have an issue with its suppliers: who have been living in the illusion they are customers and now they are starting to figure out they are not !