Emergent Aristocracy

The history of democracies is usually told as a rebellion against an overweening King - George III for America, Louis XVI for France. In England it is King John, in 1215, and the rebellion gave rise to the Magna Carta which constrained the powers of a king, and providing for a separate body (of barons) to enforce it.

Cromwell's rebellion against Charles I is not often portrayed as democratic, though the accession of William & Mary in 1688 after James's restoration was notable for the English Bill of Rights which further constrained the King's power and in effect made Parliament sovereign.

The history of democracy can be seen as successive (and expanding) answers to the questions:
Who gets to vote?
Who gets to speak?
Who gets to set the topic?

With a single sovereign, or a single parliament, control of the latter two is still tricky; legislative agendas, though longer than historically, are still constrained, and the introduction of legislation is more often reserved to government or elected legislators, and more rarely allowed by referendum.

In a deliberative body, elaborate rules are adopted to ensure only one person speaks at a time.

There is an inherent funneling of debate because of these procedures.

Conversely, online there are millions of conversations happening in parallel, topics are introduced daily, and votes are largely spurious.

The challenge is help these conversations to focus, converge and produce action.

Faces and names help

Over on the Corante Social Software blog (Aside - you'd think with all those SSA gurus there they'd have managed to get an RSS feed for this one, but no) Liz writes about Friendster and Hydra.
One thing that struck me about the ETCon experience was that Rendezvous iChat had benefits even if you didn't use it to chat - you could see who was in the same room as you, and match faces to names with it without having to peer at badges.
I wonder how the school districts that have an iBook per pupil are using these tools.

Blogs, Wikis, mailing-lists and linguistic forms

Zak picked up on the discussion at Joi's, and Mark commented:

I don't agree with Kevin Marks when he says that conversation is diluted and washed away with wikis.
Signal to noise is increased after discussion over a period of time by distilling it to its main points. To get the data to the reader in the best possible way. (sometimes conversations can get heated, and often conversations are over many months.)
Wikis often act like Weblogs, example is thread mode, one post after another. But the benefit with wiki is that later some one can refractor the conversation to the important information.

He's missing my point a bit. You can do wiki-like things in blogs, and blog-like things in wikis, but you have to work at it. Blogs don't make subsequent editing easy; Wiki's don't make attribution and temporal order obvious. (Did I just refactor his comment? hmm.)

This reminds me of the cross-blog Sapir-Whorf discussion going on.
Language does not limit thought, but different languages do affect how the thoughts end up being expressed and communicated. Some things are easier to say in one language than another - English doesn't have a (formal) third person imperative, for example, which makes translating the Lords Prayer from Greek hard.

It is not inevitable that blogs become personal, wikis become consensual, and mailing lists become confrontational, but that is the tendency of each form, much as Frayn shows the tendency for formal writing to concatenate cliche in a Markovian manner.

Orwell's tastes better

There is an ISO standard for making tea. I'm almost tempted to spend the 40 Swiss francs...
Jonathan Sanderson did buy it and found it disappointing. Score one for George.

Why societies fail

Jared Diamond takes the long view.

Social Software again

I've posted belated Hydra notes from the Social Software Alliance Birds of a Feather and the Journalism Birds of a Feather from Emerging Tech last week. Taking notes using Hydra was an intersting experience, with 3 or 4 other people taking them too, correcting my spelling and so on.

The SSA meeting was fairly chaotic - perhaps reflecting the diverse meanings of 'Social'. Clay Shirky did not show up (or if he did, did not speak up); Dave Winer later poured scorn on the efforts, implying it was all about social climbing.

Friedrich Hayek famously said that the word 'social' empties the noun it is applied to of their meaning. Hayek goes on:

…it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what, after Shakespeare's 'I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs' ( As You Like It , II, 5), some Americans call a 'weasel word'. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one's ideological premises.

At one point in the meeting, writers of social software were likened to scientists at Los Alamos building the bomb, which is certainly hyperbolic, not to say bollocks.

The subsequent Journalism BoF was less hectic, and more measured. One of the most interesting things for me was the various Blogger/Journalist hybrids like Dan, Glenn, Scott and Doc talking about the difference of voice between a blog and a newspaper, where you would have an editor pushing you into the house style. This reminded me of both Boris Johnson's NYT experience and the lamented Tish Williams, who left 'Upside' for 'TheStreet.com' in early 2000, and went from a sparkling original voice to yet another tech journalist. (I wanted to link to some of her stellar pieces at upside, but they are all gone - not even google or the wayback machine can find them)

I think this conflict, rather than layout issues is behind the blog/wiki divide that Joi mentions.

Blogs amplify individual voices. Unlike mailing lists, they don't get lost in the hubbub. Wikis are different - they blur authorship, and drive towards a consensual style. Blogs' temporal flow creates an affordance for conversation that is diluted and washed away in Wikis.

I'm back at etcon again, chatting with Tim Oren.

long-haired troll

Orlowski is trolling again. His latest incoherent rant ends with a declaration that meeting people at a conference is virtual, but watching a movie is 'Real Life'.
Is he a secret mole of the bloggers' conspiracy, sent to discredit journalists by association?

Blogging gets sturdier

Moveable Type just announced funding, by Joi Ito's neoteny.
They've used the money to set up a blogger-like hosting service called TypePad

Missing the point completely

Glenn Fleishman says:
Right now, there's a lot of finger pointing when you buy and try to configure a Wi-Fi adapter. Most of the time, it works. When it doesn't, who do you complain to or even get tech support from? When Linksys and Orinoco cards I purchased didn't work in a Sony laptop, I sent email to five different companies and received 15 to 20 suggestions. Fortunately, the last of these, which trickled in, had the solution (Wireless Zero Configuration was turned off).

This does beg the question 'which part of Zero Configuration didn't they understand?'

If it can be turned off, it's not Zero configuration, is it.

Sapir, Whorf, Pinker, Wonderchicken and Thrash

A while back I mentioned Pinker's 'Blank Slate' in response to one of Chris Locke's missives, and Stavros offered to explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He did so today, in great detail, along with fascinating commentary on Korean grammar and society, and how different forms of words are used depending on who one is talking to. I still think Sapir-Whorf is a load of tosh, but this seems to be a consensus now (unless Simon, Dorothea and Akma want to wade in).
I would agree is that previously heard or read language shapes subsequent utterances. Philip Hensher talks of the long linguistic shadow cast by the King James Bible.

Coincidentally, today I was called upon to interpret a conversation between 'John' and 'Thrash', a member of the popular beat combo 'The Orb' for the benefit of the Pho list:

John:
hear me now.
wot is yous banging on about?

Excuse me old chap, I don't quite follow your drift.

judge me wiv me bits not me mula.

Consider what I have to say, not my worldly goods.

got speed garage in da house. it's the most bestest, innit?

I am listening to an uptempo musical style that was popular 5 years
ago, and enjoying it.

i fink i will be going westside to go to me julie.
so gimme a shout next time yous is going down to the boozer.

I may be visiting the expensive part of London, so let me know if you
fancy a potation.

Thrash responds

Big it up!

I say!

Ease in the manor respec
Look mate check it I is fer real bwoyyy

Quieten down - I speak sooth.

Ali g is a pussy bwoy

Alistair is fey and effete.

And if the staines massive come darn tooting boy
Dey get dare nose bus up

If his chums visit my demesnes they'll get a jolly good hiding.

Believe boy I invented the bowl
When I was about 15 man
Yeah right I used to drive 80 mph the wrong way up charring cross road
Old bill giving it large behind
We just didn?t give a monkeys flying whatever you know

The constabulary never apprehended me for my carefree youthful
indiscretions.

Speed garage ?? that for ninny boyz
Arvo parte much better innit

My musical compositions have more subtlety than up-tempo industrial.

It was behind these bins that me first bang me julie
Ahem sorry

It does not do to bandy about a ladies name.

As fer wot I is banging about
You better read it again innit

The subtler shades of meaning in my prose may require further perusal
for enlightenment to dawn.

Emerging Bloggers

I got to ETCon too late tonight to catch more than the end of the emerging democracy session, but I gatecrashed a bloggers dinner with Greg Elin, Ross Mayfield, Robert Scoble, Glenn Fleishman, Howard Rheingold, Jon Lebkowsky, Peter Kaminsky, David Isenberg,Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls and his son Allen, and some others whose names I have forgotten.

Allen & I had a good long chat about epistemology, Physics and Wolfram's ideas.

Steve and I spoke about the difference between wikis and blogs. I think the main difference is one of voice. A blog has one person's voice, but a wiki is written by committee, and ends up striving for a consensual tone.

Doc, Steve & I talked about how Rendezvous and RSS need to get together for presence-based blogging.

Alienaid - sweets and snacks - London, UK to San Francisco CA, USA

Matt observes his small cognitive disconnects visiting SF:
Realising that all the tiny things about America that I've seen in films, comic strips and so on aren't enormous cultural symbols or meaningful things at all. People skateboarding down the street, wearing baggy trousers, Twinkies et al: they're normal, like Hula Hoops (the crisps).

Sweets and snack foods are very local, and obviously emotionally important in a Proust's madeleines kind of way.
There are several shops in the Bay Area that make a tidy living by importing English/Australian etc packaged junk food and selling it to ex-pats at a huge mark-up. Similarly, there are specialists selling Indian condensed-milk sweets and nibbles (though these are genreally made fresh) and lots of Chinese/Japanese supermarkets full of endless variations on pot noodles.
I remember Dan pining for Oreos in London too...

Toothpaste Tube

If you grew up in London, like me, this map will strongly readjust your mental model of the city.

Opposites react

Dorothea continues documenting her ambivalent relationship with academia by pointing to an essay on academic alienation by a marxist ex-academic, who urges the abandonment of ambivalence for commitment.

I can see that may sound less than enticing, but it may help explain a widely noted phenomenon:

[...] this is not another story about how Berkeley is better than Knoxville.� Most of the ways it is (and of course it is) are obvious, and the last thing the� people reading this essay need is the sense of this superiority reinforced, as though the very real struggles of the UT students who I fell in love with year after year are somehow less significant because Knoxville has fewer cultural and political resources than Berkeley.� Rather, this is the story of the forms of disengagement that structure academic departments in general.� Certainly at the top of the profession, in places like Berkeley, scholars are far more likely than at UT to be engaged in national conversations. Yet at every level of the academic institution, a variety of individuals find that the best or easiest way to keep themselves going is by staying out of the way of department life.� At prestigious schools, where people actually have the money to do so, this results in the incessant flying around the world making connections, and the consequent political overvaluation of the so-called global over working in local institutions.� This itself is a form of disengagement.� At the University of Tennessee -- which is nowhere near the "bottom" as these things are assessed -- most faculty members are involved in neither national or local conversations, and as a result become altogether disengaged.
[...] I went from being a participant in specific, local, political movements to being� "global," or at least travelling all the time.� Because there weren't enough people in Knoxville who shared my interests.� [...]� Some academics build genuinely useful networks; others simply avoid responsibility for what needs to be done where they are.

Wolfram speaks

Stephen Wolfram, Author of Mathematica and 'A New Kind of Science' was invited to speak by my employer today. Here are my running notes of his talk:
How do structures form?
1st assumption - easy to do; didn't work.
Approach fundamentally wrong - mathematical analysis worked for simpler phenomena, what can you do differently?
Previously based on existing mathematics; wanted a more general construct, which led him to programs.
Consider space of all possible programs, and consider what kinds of programs are found in nature. Mathematica is a new tool like telescope or microscope - reveals the computational world.

256 1-d Cellular Automata is a simple program space to explore. (If you're running OS X, try my program that draws them)

Patterns in nature look more complex than man-made things. The simple rules can give rise to natural complexity - mollusc shells have very similar patterns.

Without computational tools it is hard to see these patterns; people looked for regularity not irregularities.

Principle of Computational Equivalence - complex systems are of equivalent computation. Not linear - phase transitions between kinds of sophistication.
Computational limit is achieved often.

Is rule 30 computationally universal? No, but 110 is. You can make a Turing machine from rule 100 - it is computationally universal.

If the observer is computationally more complex than the system, they can see the patterns; in practice the observer is equivalent in complexity, so systems can look complex.

For a system that is linear or repetitive, you can find out an arbitrary future state; for a computationally complex system you can't. Simulation is necessary, not just convenient.

Mathematics has chosen a subset of possible systems that are tractable, rather than complete.

Simple underlying equations of physics - a 14 bn year program. CA's not appropriate. Do not distinguish matter and space, just define space. Think of space as like water - looks continuous, but is made of interacting particles. Underlying space is a network of nodes with connections between them. Look at dimensionality d dimension r^d nodes.

Are space and time different or not? He thinks yes. Global sync like a CA? Not needed. Consider a single active cell that moves change around. Can only follow the causal network, so you only know others have changed when you get updated too.

Can derive special relativity from the low level network model, and move on to General Relativity.

Not yet derived Quantum Mechanics, but can model particle interactions.

Ongoing reduction of 'specialness' - every time we get less special, science gets more general. Simple abstract systems are as computationally complex as we are.

Process of paradigm shifts - see notes in back of book.

Mathematica - algorithm resource base. Mathematica notebooks as publication model. Symbolic language under Mathematica - symbolic structures.

Schr�dinger's equation relating to these systems - do they apply to PDE's? Yes - start with a Gaussian distribution, get the same kinds of complexity. Can one make PDE's from discrete systems? Yes can do it with fluid mechanics.
Can't derive Schr�dinger's equation at the moment. Rigid body mechanics is harder than fluid mechanics.

Bells inequality - atoms can be joined through the 'space' network - only approximately 3-dimensional.

PCE vs awareness & consciousness? Hierarchy - life, intelligence, consciousness.
Life definition gets harder as we get machines and programs. Life as we know it has a common ancestor, so there is a historical definition. PCE says there is not a general notion of intelligence or consciousness - they are connected through our 'computational history' through pre-existing evolution. Self-awareness 'Real-time philosophy is hard'. Neural net approach to brain modelling is static - machinery is continuum dynamics.

Penrose's discrete and continuous equations - discrete space 'spin networks' fit with the network model of Wolfram. Penrose thinks computers are different from humans. Penrose's view of computing is that brains are different - he considers computers do predicate logic, and is wrong. Continuum vs discrete mathematics - had thought that continuum could transcend Turing, but can't prove, but can't find examples.

I asked him about the connection between his categories and the applicability of the Central Limit Theorem, and he pointed out that while it would break down for his complex systems, it will also break down for long-tailed distributions too.

Blogs as Kritarchy

I've been reading a long paper about Kritarchy - governance by justice, and have realised that it describes weblogs rather well. A quote:
it is no more than a historical accident that the word �law� came to be used as the translation of �lex�. It was also and more properly used to translate the Latin �ius�, which has nothing to do with the exercise of political authority. �Ius� denotes a bond or obligation arising out of a personal commitment made in solemn speech (�iurare�, to swear) and in a more general sense the order of human affairs that arises out of such mutual commitments. In other words, �ius� presupposes a condition in which people meet as free and equal persons and arrange their affairs by mutual agreements, contracts or covenants. This is in clear contrast to �lex�, which presupposes that one man can unilaterally oblige another.

The notion is of people interacting through mutual consent, conforming to natural law - justice is determined from the Golden rule and its philosophical ramifications.
In the physical world, contention over scarce resources undermines this; in the virtual world we can all be judges of each other's thoughts and writings, as there is no coercion for others to read them.

Keep the spectrum, keep it open

Mike Godwin has a suggestion to avoid the Digital TV impasse. Allow each TV station to decide whether to keep the digital spectrum and return the analog, or vice versa, and require them to make their programs available for internet download,

Personally, I don't understand why no-one has pointed out the missing principle in this debate. If TV stations are to be given local monopoly rights over big chunks of public spectrum, they should be required to not encumber their transmissions with encryption or access control, so the public can freely receive their shows.

shooting people to create a demand for hospitals

A wonderful anti-DRM analogy from 'Sanity' on Slashdot:
Capitalism is a means to manage scarcity, and it is very good at it, but artifically creating scarcity just so that capitalism may be applied is like shooting people to create a demand for hospitals:

"stop shooting people!"

"what, you don't like hospitals?"

Simultaneous editing

Hydra is a very nice implementation of this idea - you share your document to the net and people can edit it at the same time as you (you get to choose who). It uses Rendezvous and Addressbook, so you get user icons like iChat.
Jem wrote something very similar nearly 10 years ago before we dragged him into Newton development. His ran over LocalTalk, but it did allow two people to modify the same file at once.

NB Hydra is OS X only.

Googlewash? Hogwash.

Andrew Orlowski has written a rant about bloggers 'googlewashing' the phrase 'second superpower'.

Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protesters, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.

In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence:
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his thesis that it's all about the street, man).

As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to. (Update: today the NYT removed its archives from the web, so any links to the original article would now be dead).
Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about.
Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"

Patrick said
No, that's not what democracy looks like.

It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.

But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.

Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.

The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.

Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google rankings by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for many years.

Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.

Coda:
I like to link to Orwell's Politics and the English Language essay at least once a year, if only to remind myself to re-read it. Mr Orlowski could profit from reviewing it too. His neologism 'googlewash' falls down on Orwell's criterion of creating a meaningful metaphor. Orlowski derives it from 'greenwash' which evidently derives from 'whitewash' - to paint over flaws to give a gleaming exterior. Yet 'googlewash' does not follow here - the complaint is not that the new google-friendly definition is hiding the flaws of the old, is it?
As Orwell puts it:
The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

molesworth at Hogwarts

A brilliant literary mash-up by Alice Dryden (via Patrick Nielsen Hayden)