by Ben Atlas on Mar 7, 2010 - 08:16
Is the Google page rank algorithm redirecting our culture? At the end of last year Fred Wilson wrote a post – People First, Machines Second. Fred was saying that the page algorithm elevates linking and anchoring of information, a human action. But there is a peculiar omission from the logic, machines or uncaring humans can link and anchor many times faster, and they do to the tune of billions of pages and millions of dollars. More importantly they poison the well of knowledge by cluttering the “super highway” with the clunkers or should we call them drones. For sure Google is aware that this has the enormous impact on the search results quality. But there is the deep apprehension that Google in fact prefers quantity over quality. Google is an advertising supported business, they need the inventory to distribute the ads, they would rather monetize point of purchase not the point of information (see Chris Dixon on the massive misallocation of online advertising dollars) and they don’t particularly mind the drones because that can multiply page views by the millions (see Aaron Wall – Spam vs. Mahalo).
Now Matt Cuts started to direct humans to the Google Spam report page, “help us maintain the quality of Google search results”. If this is not an admission that a Google bot sees no difference between a splog and a blog than what is? We know that Gmail spam filer works pretty well but then it relies on the reporting benefit of the huge installed base of the darn humans. And it doesn’t look like the usability of the search results will improve anytime soon, not after the massive amount of the social media clutter is now integrated into the pages. Tweets might be a human signal but if the disjointed bits of information, mostly click-through links to the 3rd party sites is not a spam than what is? Inevitably signal to noise ratio in relationship to a particular search is dismal. In short the search no longer gives you the aha “buzz”…
This commentary would remain academic if not for the fact that the “setup” is detrimental to writers and content originators. The machines don’t emote to art, poetry, heck they don’t even properly recognize the significant technical or scientific writing. The bots are not very good at detecting copyright. The robots are way too busy selling the washer dryers and the quantifiable viral amusement. If you think this has nothing to do with the punishing grip of this great recession than you really might be a machine.
by Ben Atlas on Mar 3, 2010 - 23:53
TNR – Washington Diarist: The New Proles:
“Lately, however, I have been observing a high incidence of indecent poverty. Many young writers and journalists I meet are close to penniless. They have almost not a hope of supporting themselves in the pursuit of their calling. A garret is no longer affordable. Jobs are disappearing. Internships are unpaid or barely paid, which has the consequence of corrupting a meritocratic system with the inequities of social class, as the fortunately born become the fortunately hired. And when they publish what they write–well, now we leave the honorable tradition of the struggling young writer for the unprecedented enchantments of the digital revolution.”
by Ben Atlas on Feb 20, 2010 - 12:38
The Internet culture is in crisis. Jewish blogs are stuck. A dignified livelihood is a challenge. Why? In one sentence, when a culture becomes derivative, it mines and depletes its own legacy. I started thinking about this topic when I read this paragraph in Jaron Lanier’s new book:
“It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
Marshall McLuhan declared that “medium is the message”. What he meant was that a new form of expression, i.e. alphabet, writing, print, TV, etc., changes our brain wiring, tastes and values so radically that medium itself is the central cultural event. Inevitably at a dawn of every novel form of expression, a new medium is awkwardly used to reprocess the old, the bleak task comparable to translating poetry into a foreign language. This is the DJ stage where the Internet finds itself at the current moment. The old tunes are remixed, republished, relinked to a new beat, literally and figuratively no new music is created. Occasionally a new app is written for the legacy proprietary code instead of a new OS.
On to the Jews cursed with the satirical task of amplifying a culture. Every potential convert to Judaism needs to be aware of these axioms:
- Marshall McLuhan spoke about the “rear view mirror” phenomena or the propensity of any culture to live in a utopia about its past. Jews amplify this tendency in the worst possible way. Most traditional Jewish communities are consumed with intense utopia and the deliberate subterfuge of history.
- A Rabbi is a DJ, never singing in its own voice and forever spinning someone else’s tracks. There is a derivative throwback tendency in every culture but again amplified by the Jews. The tribe castigated to the two thousand years of the survivalist epic. With the rare exceptions (i.e. kabbalah) the innovation is shut down, conformism is bred and encouraged. People who can’t contain or control their creative impulses are eventually expelled from the traditional Jewish communities.
- Every group on the face of the earth is defined by what this group is not. Jaron Lanier calls this the “mob switch”. Once again this is most sensitive component of the traditional Jewish culture. Although the potential converts are not specifically instructed about the importance of the boundary defining hate, eventually to successfully integrate in the communities they would have to internalize the intense feeling of hatred towards other Jewish groups and denominations, towards the declared heretics, goyim, real and imaginary antisemites, etc.
Now let’s compare the three “Jewish problems” to the Internet. The Internet is definitely not a utopian vision of the past. There is strong revolutionary current, especially in the communal rhetoric of the Open Source movement and the Web 2.0 social. Alas, after a decade, a new server side oligarchy emerged to control the scalable bits. Instead of empowering creativity, no longer under a centralized command, there is a deliberate and impoverishing push for the “free”, the collapse of the copyright boundaries, devaluation of the original unpaid authorship under the assault the ad supported aggregators. The DJ culture is absolutely the internet as we know it today. The disastrous anonymous comments culture and the combustible flame wars take the group/mob hate to the unprecedented levels on the Internet.
And what about the Wall St.? The financial services industry dominated by the derivative contracts became the most important part of the American GDP. There is an easy analogy to the Internet (or any derivatives dominated culture). People often complain that the stocks are the trading instruments removed from the real value of a company. An options contract or a credit default swap contract is like a tweet about a comment on a blog post that links to a different newspaper web site. Derivatives are comments removed from a productive culture, they don’t innovate, don’t create value and eventually pop. To slap a Dell label on a product engineered and fabricated in China is like linking to someone else’s content on a popular web site. Our religions, our ability to make a living and our “internet economy”, the trifecta, is overrun by the derivative thinking. We can no longer extract value from comments about the dried up wells and we can no longer destroy the remaining functioning artisan wells. We can no longer condemn people to the indignity of being replaced by the machines or the outsourced slaves. We can’t DJ, quote, link, mashup or re-aggregate our way from this crisis. You can quote me on that.
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by Ben Atlas on Feb 15, 2010 - 08:29
Chris Hedges wrote a definitively best review of Jaron Lanier’s book. Truthdig – The Information Super-Sewer:
“The Internet has become one more tool hijacked by corporate interests to accelerate our cultural, political and economic decline. The great promise of the Internet, to open up dialogue, break down cultural barriers, promote democracy and unleash innovation and creativity, has been exposed as a scam. The Internet is dividing us into antagonistic clans, in which we chant the same slogans and hate the same enemies, while our creative work is handed for free to Web providers who use it as bait for advertising.
Ask journalists, photographers, musicians, cartoonists or artists what they think of the Web. Ask movie and film producers. Ask architects or engineers. The Web efficiently disseminates content, but it does not protect intellectual property rights. Writers and artists are increasingly unable to make a living. And technical professions are under heavy assault. Anything that can be digitized can and is being outsourced to countries such as India and China where wages are miserable and benefits nonexistent. Welcome to the new global serfdom where the only professions that pay a living wage are propaganda and corporate management.”
Jaron Lanier’s emphasis on a hive behavior is the theme expanded after he wrote the book. Here is the classic description of the Individual/Mob switch:
“Humans, like many other species, Lanier says, have a cognitive switch that permits us to be individuals or members of a mob. Once we enter the confines of what Lanier calls a clan, even a virtual clan, it possesses dynamics that appeal to the basest instincts within us. Technology evolves but human nature remains constant. The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history because human beings married the newly minted tools of efficient state bureaucracies and industrial slaughter with the dark impulses that have existed since the dawn of the human species
“You become hypersensitive to the pecking order and to your sense of social status,” Lanier said of these virtual clans. “There is almost always the designated loser in your own group and the designated external enemy. There is the enemy below and the enemy afar. There become two classes of disenfranchised people. You enter into a constant obligation to defend your status which is always being contested. It is time-consuming to become a member of one of these things. I see a lot of designs on line that bring this out. There is a recognizable sequence, whether it is pianos, poodles or jihad; you see people forming into these clans. It is playing with fire. There are plenty of examples of evil in human history that did not involve this effect, such as Jack the Ripper, who worked alone. But most of the really bad examples of human behavior in history involve invoking this clan dynamic. No particular sort of person is immune to it. Geeks are no more immune to it than Germans or Russians or Japanese or Mongolians. It is part of our nature. It can be woken up without any leadership structure or politics. It happens. It is part of us. There is a switch inside of us waiting to be turned. And people can learn to manipulate the switch in others.”
There is an interesting critique of of James Surowiecki’ crowd adulation. I noticed that Web 2.0 hacks like to talk about tribes in a positive way but they ignore the dark side of a hive at their own peril. Or perhaps more cynically they promote the tribes and hives because they want to own and manage it.
by Ben Atlas on Feb 13, 2010 - 14:26
Two events last week should put all users of Google services on notice. First was the so called “Musicblogocide” as described in the Guardian – Google shuts down music blogs without warning, as years of archives are wiped off the internet. We have seen before similar actions from Google and this one seem to fit the pattern. Google denies service in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, there is usually no warning and most importantly there is virtually no recourse, no innocent until proven guilty, no reasonable possibility to appeal or appease the lawyered up machine.
Similarly on the same week Google announced that they are discontinuing FTP service to the Blogger blogs, a serious disruption to thousands of users. Google’s excuse is that they are spending too much on the resources for the FTP based blogs is laughable. But back to the Musicblogocide.
There is a vast problem on the Internet with the copyright, especially as it relates to music but not only music. Google itself contributes to the ambiguity on this issue if not pushes people away from the admittedly digitally outdated copyright interpretations. The Google Internet as it exist today leads people in a certain direction. Specifically the Internet is viewed as an advertising page inventory with the following dire consequences:
- Quantity trumps quality, keywords trump coherent sentences. This leads to millions of Splogs and the entire Affiliate Marketing industry.
- Original authorship is diluted, share alike and mashups culture is encouraged. This leads to the proliferation of the aggregators (borderline Splogs really).
- The common “share alike” practices encourage republishing or even outright stealing of content (the borders are blurred again).
- There is still no micro payment system to deliver any value to the content originators, the so called “creative class”. You don’t have to look far to see the result of this, even in the current great recession.
Google is in the unique position to change this poisonous climate. But there is an impression that all they care about in the end is the display ads inventory. Today Google presides over the Internet that is anti authorship and anti intellectual property. But instead of tackling the root causes of this decrepit culture Google prefers to pick on the bloggers who only blindly follow where the system created and blessed by Google leads them. One way to solve this is to create a micro payment app to drive the value to the writers and the artists. You want to embed anything, pay the micro price. Shift the value proposition on the Internet from the DJs to the creators and composers. And don’t blame the DJs for the direction you Google yourself googled for them.
by Ben Atlas on Feb 9, 2010 - 21:27
Jaron Lanier in his work studio where he keeps some of the 1,000 instruments he collected over the years. Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle
sfgate – Jaron Lanier says Internet has fallen short. Some of the quotable quotes:
- “That Google-it-now impulse that has wormed its way into our DNA? It’s worth noting that the feeling did not exist in humans 15 years ago.
- The Web 2.o open culture emphasizes the wisdom of the masses, which de-emphasizes the individual and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to moblike behaviors.
- The “free” online culture is not only wreaking havoc on creative types and the middle class, it’s converting people into uncompensated data feeders for powerful new entities – Google, Facebook, Twitter.
- The Internet gets stuck in place with something like permanent anonymity, that changes culture and personhood and society and culture forever. It’s a big deal.
- We shouldn’t have a recession like the one we’re having. We should have been creating so much wealth and so much opportunity that this couldn’t have happened. And instead we just created these big servers that are siphoning value out of the system.
- In a fair and sustainable economy, he says, why shouldn’t the 16-year-old who made a mashup video that generated 1 million views for YouTube get paid? We’re destroying the creative middle classes; we’re destroying reporters, illustrators, songwriters – and we’re not really creating a new industry. We’re creating a kind of centralized set of server-operators.
- The problem with crowd-based synthesis is that there are people who learn to manipulate it.”
by Ben Atlas on Feb 7, 2010 - 17:39
Jaron Lanier, Photo by Aaron Salcido
This is perhaps the most significant lecture in a decade (as is the book, reading it now). Jaron Lanier reflects on the cultural and economic crossroads through the defining prism of the internet culture. Some of his observations like the one about ten years required to overcome a sinisterly held idea is an enlightened epiphany, how true. Jaron Lanier spoke at Zócalo Public Square in Culver City, CA on January 28th, 2010. The full lecture is about 50 minutes plus 20 minutes for questions – Staying Human in a Tech-Driven World (video). “The worst examples of human behavior, Lanier said, occur when humans act as mob members rather than as individuals, which democracies tend to cultivate. The desire to join a mob is within everyone, Lanier said, citing the pack mentality of “people in the comments section of a blog.”
The Decline of Blogging and Commenting
by Ben Atlas on Feb 9, 2010 - 09:09
Nick Carr puts an exclamation point on the Pew Study, he writes Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly:
There are structural problems with blogging namely the value of authorship, the cut and paste aggregators pretending to be blogs, the mob rule of the anonymous comments, most importantly the decline of value due to the faulty monetization models that favor quantity over quality. But certainly teens are not spending less time online, instead they preoccupy themselves with the Facebook statusphere and that is a horrible place to publish, relate or express individuality within a prison-like, predetermined grid (do listen to Jaron Lanier on this). People often say that we now read less, but we know that actually we read more syllables all the time, the question is what are we reading instead or in addition to.