Trots op Nederland (Proud of the Netherlands) is a new political party, which has gone ‘2.0′ for government. There’s a wiki for deciding what the party platform will be. Anyways, one 2.0 theme they have mastered already: 95% support “change”.
Richard Grusin has a video up called 1-20-09. Along with some others, Grusin has ‘entertained’ the fear that the Warner act of 2006 will keep George Bush in office next year (something Bush could do relatively easily and arbitrarily by claiming a state of emergency based on classified information). Grusin is putting his theoretical concept of ‘premediation’ to the test, wondering if the exposure of this scenario can pre-empt it and keep it from actually occurring. If Bush and the media were able to make the Iraq war seem like a foregone conclusion, can this tactic be used to fight back? Grusin’s work is always inspiring, and it is hard to imagine a more significant topic for him to take up.
My birthday isn’t until tomorrow, but seeing as I have the best friends a geek could ever want or hope for, I already have to plenty to show for it. I got some great gifts, including a pair of ‘keyboard’ cuff-links, beautiful journals with covers made out of a floppy disk and a Commodore 64 motherboard, and so much else! I also got these wonderful t-shirts:
Certified Data Care Specialist
Certified Data Care Specialist (back)
And, of course, the Official Whatever Button T-shirt!
And since the best presents are those you can share, it is likely that these shirts and other great geek gifts will be available soon from our collaborative blog, Masters of Media. Thanks again guys and girls, I don’t know what to say, other than that you’re more lovable, adorable and well-spoken than a bunch of ridiculously cute penguins.
(photos: Anne Helmond)
This is just a quick note on last month’s Chicago Tribune interview with Technorati vice-president Derek Gordon, which is worth reading if you missed it. In about 600 words, the piece is perhaps the clearest, most honest appraisal of blogging that there is (and that from a source whose livelihood probably depends on upholding an image of blogs as revolutionary and enlightening!).
Q Do you have any idea how soon there will be one blog for every person on Earth with Internet access?
A I don’t. Remember that most blogs are only marginally active (that is, about one blog post a month), and most are used for personal journaling purposes.
[…]
Q Any idea how many of the 109.2 million blogs you track get no hits in the course of a year?
A Just over 99 percent. The vast majority of blogs exist in a state of total or near-total obscurity.
That’s right, blogs have an obvious advantage over the large centers of consumer surveillance that we call social networking sites: nobody is watching.
Keeping with the ‘past futures’ theme of a previous post, this is a link to the Online Diary History Project. The project collects written accounts by the pioneers in online journaling, who are asked to look back on their work. Why did they write? How did the various diarists come to form a community? Lurking behind these questions, at least for me, is how the blog form emerged out of (or perhaps in spite of) these personal pages.
I’ve only just started looking through the archive, but some interesting things are popping up. Carolyn Burke, who has republished her diary in full, describes her motivation for making the private self something public (and of course the usually neglected converse, turning the public Internet into something personal):
I believed strongly in the power of good that results from free expression, free information exchange, and open and honest communication between people. I’d been studying Popper and Fyerabend in university, about creating an open society as one aspect in the pursuit of better quality knowledge.
An online diary, a place that exposed private mental spaces to everyones’ scrutiny seemed like a social obligation to me. (source)
I won’t go into why I think this is so important - these are ideas I’m still working out - but the kind of resource the Diary History project provides is really helpful. So if anyone is aware of comparable work being done, i.e. exceptional efforts to document the practices of pre-1999 online diarists, please let me know!
On Thursday night Alexander Galloway, NYU assistant professor and founding member of the Radical Software Group, gave us a peak at his latest project, an online version of the Game of War. This is a ‘remake’ of a board game created by French Situationist Guy Debord in 1978, a somewhat forgotten departure by the filmmaker and writer so closely associated with the Paris riots of 1968.
Antagonism as algorithm
Before showing the work in progress, Galloway spoke some about his interest in games research, as this relates especially to the ways games model antagonism. He asks whether these can help us think about social and political forms of conflict and struggle. Traditional games assume symmetrical forms of conflict, with two opposing sides of equal ability, but is it possible to model different forms?
Here, Galloway is thinking specifically about the distributed networks he theorized at length in his book Protocol. Such networks recall the rhizome and the radical politics of French Post-structuralism, but also describe the material organization of the Internet. If there are games that simulate the swarm-like behavior of the distributed network, do these provide any clues as to how progressive this organizational form is, or can be?
Modeling the network economy: Starcraft and World of Warcraft
Real time strategy games can be distinguished by a couple of traits: they are continuous and not turn-based, they are often played with a bird’s eye view of the action and they tend to be about resource-gathering in some form or another. For Galloway, the best example is Starcraft (image), which he discussed alongside World of Warcraft. Both of these games clearly display some of the swarm characteristics he mentions, but the key is how and why they do so. Galloway argues that simulation of the distributed network goes hand in hand with that of a different kind of economy.
As Fleur noted, cooperation on World of Warcraft depends on an engineered scarcity. It makes certain types of collaboration possible and necessary. And one can draw comparisons between, for instance, the strategies the games facilitate and the project-based work of ‘Tiger Teams’ and other post-industrial forms of labor. What the games suggest is that such distributed behavior is not an abstract, ideal form superimposed on reality, but something that emerges from specific material and economic conditions.
Galloway points out that the relationship between contemporary gaming and the network economy goes deeper than this level of ‘play’. It is no coincidence that the machines we work on also house our games: informatic labor and informatic play are continuous, meaning each can seamlessly transform into the other. And while this echoes theories about the dissolving boundaries of ‘private’ and ‘public’, Galloway’s argument stresses the materiality of this shift.
What is the effect of having such a strong connection between a medium (the Internet and gaming) and a means of production (post-Fordism)? Isn’t the multi-tasking, team-working World of Warcraft player ‘training’ to be a better ‘knowledge worker’? Maybe so, Galloway says, but this would be very different to training in a disciplinary sense. Rather, these games are about liberation and desire. They promote autonomy, even if this must be achieved paradoxically through cooperation. So instead of thinking of games as making us better workers, Galloway argues we should look at how they make us better bosses.
Guy Debord and the Game of War
In the last part of the presentation Galloway talked about Debord’s Game of War, its history and about the project to remake the game in online form (what Galloway calls “a massively two-player online game”).
Here is the original version of the game, which Debord brought out in limited edition, fine silver:
Game of War is strangely traditional: it resembles chess in that the board is square and there are two evenly matched opponents, each with the same set of class-based pieces. However, there are also some twists. On the one hand, the board has an uneven topology, with mountain ranges and immobile defensive forts, and on the other there is a strong emphasis on keeping pieces within lines of communication with command centers, or ‘arsenals’ (the communication lines are visible in the online version). In short, not all squares are created equally, and the degree to which a particular area of the board is strategic changes throughout the game.
Alexander Galloway’s java version of the Game of War, which is not finished quite yet:
Debord wrote that he first came up with the idea for the game in the 1950s, and that it “embodied the dialectic of all conflict”. He was fascinated by it, and saw it as an abstraction and perfection of war. Some now go so far as to say it was his most autobiographical work, though it has received considerably less attention than his films and writings. But Galloway says this is changing, and Debord’s game is especially interesting from the perspective of New Media and Game studies.
Game of War leaves behind some questions. Why would a filmmaker like Debord turn to the politics of the algorithm? Given his involvement in the radical politics of the 1960s, what sense did it make to privilege the strategic and logistical aspects of such a game, when he could have developed something more along the lines of the rhizome? In an age of asymmetric warfare, why the fascination with something so symmetrical? Perhaps the Game of War has a surprising move or two waiting to be discovered.
(Photographs courtesy of Anne, see also her summary of Galloway’s presentation)
Katherine Albrecht is one of the most visible and active critics of Radio-frequency Identification, and the author of Spychips. She spoke really eloquently about her position this weekend at the Recalling RFID conference in Amsterdam.
While she is most well-known for her spychips work, Albrecht also has a history of activism against supermarket loyalty cards, so I could not resist asking her to sign my Albert Heijn Bonus Card. The best part is that, by signing it, she also disabled it:
Excellent photograph courtesy of Anne Helmond.
(cross-posted at Masters of Media)
Here at Masters of Media we’ve done our share of Google criticism, but I think The Last Psychatrist has one up on us. What Hath Google Wrought is a giant-sized portion of skepticism about the ‘accidental monopoly’, which focuses not just on current problems of data retention but some of the long term (cultural) consequences as well. I’ve posted a few choice quotes below.
First, here’s what is meant by ‘accidental monopoly’:
Consider email: you can choose to use Yahoo! Mail and not GMail because you are worried that Google keeps all Gmails. Fine; but if you email to someone with GMail, Google stores a copy and knows what you wrote, but now also knows your IP and email address; consequently, it knows other sites you’ve visited. Etc.
The data retention issue seems manageable with promises like ‘Don’t be evil, but eventually there will be the problem of ‘liquidation’.
Everyone worries about Google’s growth, but who is worrying about its demise? Google has so much data that it actually takes up real estate all over the world. Let’s say Google goes out of business. Who gets all those servers? All that data? Who gets a copy of the world, on the cheap? Whoever it is doesn’t have to give us satellite photos anymore. What can you do with satellite photos that no one else has? Who gets to decide how to control all that data?
My favorite bit, however, is on what else to expect from the narcissistic culture that surrounds, supports and benefits from Google. For instance on parenting:
The focus is on who is monitoring our children. What are they up to?
Well, think about this: your kids are investigating you.
Remember that time when your mom was 19 and she was in that wet t-shirt contest? No? Well, your kids will get to remember yours in AVI format. Oh, and that DUI conviction? Remember that vapid comment you posted on the Daily Kos? (Hint: ten years from now a high school freshman will cringe at its inanity.) And, lo, the IP address search. How did your IP end up on pornotron.org? (Yes, the non-profit.)
Did you realize that your future daughter in law will be checking you out? “Billy, did you know eight years ago your Dad…?” This didn’t occur to you? Then I guess it didn’t occur to you that your son’s reply will be, “Sigh. Yeah. I knew.”
Obviously, the problem with dystopias (and their opposites) is that they’re reductive. But when written well, like good science fiction, they’re an index of possibility at any given moment. And if our current moment is defined by its Cartographic Fever, then the dedication to mapping the future seems as useful (and as inevitable) as anything else.
Great news! The wikiscanner project I’m doing with Erik - where we ‘repurpose’ the WikiScanner to study the local aspect of Wikipedia production - is getting some attention in Dutch academia. My case study on Dutch Universities was noted on scienceguide.nl and on Willem van Valkenburg’s blog related to education and the Web.
Update — see bottom of the post and the discussion at Masters of Media. — /Update
About a week ago there was a small-scale furor on the Masters of Media blog and a Nettime-NL thread surrounding the spinplant. Laura (one of the very creative Masters of Media) wrote a Wikipedia entry on the fictional plant, complete with a taxonomic category and a high-resolution photo. The article was deleted within the hour.
While this was basically a good thing for Wikipedia - a kind of anti-Siegenthaler moment - the reason given for the deletion was not. It turns out that the Wikipedian responsible simply queried ’spinplant’, found no corresponding hits in Google, and that was that. Soon critics brought up the question: what happens when an encyclopedia relies so heavily on a commercial search engine, especially one with worrying censorship ‘issues’? When it comes to Wikipedia, or even Web knowledge more generally, does Google deal in capital-T truth?
In short, my answer is no. Firstly, it is unfair to tag the Wikipolice as lazy or uninformed. Anyone who spends their free time reverting bad edits on Wikipedia cannot but hold ‘exhaustiveness’ as a virtue.
Second, and more importantly, Google does not deal in truth at all. Like the cognitivists, the search engine giant has taken the pragmatic view that truth is immaterial - relevance is where it’s at.
On Google, the search for meaning ends when some presumption of relevance is satisfied (a feat normally achieved within a range of 10 hits) and not, say, once every option has been reviewed. Google has relevance theory, or something like it, at its core. There is a constructivist turn in the famous PageRank algorithm, too: Google bombs make it clear how contextual clues like anchor text (the words attached to a link) are ultimately what defines an object - that is, barring any manual editing. And the power John Battelle attributes to the database of intentions does not require searchers to become epistemologists, but simply to click on the link that looks good enough.
But pragmatic realism (if I’m using the appropriate term) is still realism. Google makes no claim about serving us reality, but nonetheless manages to produce ‘reality effects’. And Nietzsche still hates it:
Only as creators!— This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance, the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always wrong and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their nature and even to their skin—all this grows from generation unto generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns into its very body: what at first was appearance becomes in the end, almost invariably, the essence and is effective as such! How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called “reality”! We can destroy only as creators!— But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new “things”. — The Gay Science, Book II (section 58).
In ditching ‘Truth’, Google is able to present itself as a demystifying agent, a poster child for a techno-libertarian worldview. But as Nietzsche says, we can destroy only as creators. So the question is not about truth, but what exactly Google has created in its place.
How relevant can we make the spinplant? [Try this: link to the non-page http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinplant with the anchor text ‘spinplant‘]
Update — “But let us not forget this either” … Premediating a Wikipedia entry is not the only way to get things done, and Laura has created some more pages for us to link to.
spinplant [http://www.lauravdv.nl/spinplant.html] and spinplant [http://home.student.uva.nl/laurina.vandervlies/spinplant.html]
