Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a
standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.

One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in
the Stone Age. ^{^}

As Chris Yeats was fond of saying during all-night shifts at the computer center, the problem with college is that as long as you don’t lose your meal card, you can survive. We’ve lost the wilderness that Jim Morrison so loved, not just for its exhilarating challenge and wide spaces, but for its challenge to our survival. To that I’d add one more thing, which is that if you can spend your time isolated in a place where nothing cares if you die, you will truly conquer your existential doubt and grow massively from the experience. Everyone should go hiking in the desolation and see how long they last in that silence, that total lack of feedback from gods or world. Like milk builds strong bodies, it builds strong souls.

Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.

To us, it seems that a virtual world is natural progression of Google Earth and its 3D representations of… well, the Earth. Users could create avatars, like those in Second Life. The “street view” feature of Google Maps could be incorporated, as well as Google SketchUp, with avatars being able to walk around on actual streets and enter real buildings to check out what’s inside and socialize with other avatars. But the purpose wouldn’t be to rival Second Life and all of its fantasy, sex, and moneymaking schemes.

Google Earth CTO Michael Jones insisted (first comment after the post) in January that Google Earth would always remain true to the real world and not dive into the type of fantasy world that Second Life has become. Therefore, Google’s implementation would be more like “First
Life,” but in virtual form. If “My World” turns out to be a virtual representation of real life, however, it seems natural to question the purpose of launching such a service. We could, after all, just step outside and see these things from the vantage point of a real human, not a virtual one.

Instead, it makes sense for Google to mesh a bunch of its tools into one, thus creating a whole new advertising opportunity aimed at people, er, avatars, who are “walking” down virtual (real) streets to check out virtual (real) stores and businesses. And if Google wants, it could incorporate some of its more social ventures, such as social networking site Orkut and Google Talk, in order to motivate users to spend more time there. Whatever “My World” ends up being, we think that Google will go much further than just competing with Second Life—if the company makes it functionally useful and ties it in with services that people already use, it may have a chance of succeeding at getting average Internet users to participate. ^{^}

We can create imaginary worlds out of symbols, emotions and commerce. We can then sell those worlds to each other. We can recede further from reality. This is not the use I had hoped for from the net. I don’t think it’s a good place to find dates or friends. I don’t think it should be a life-substitute. Like drugs or sex or a promotion at the workplace, it feels good but what else do we miss in the meantime?

Anytime I spend too much time on the computer, I know I have to leave for a walk through the woods by the bayou’s edge. That area is to my mind every bit as mathematical as a computer, but it considers more factors simultaneously. Computers are just now moving toward awareness of application concurrency (I remember discovering that concurrency was not inherent at about age 11, and having that awareness struggle be my major stumbling block to getting started in programming). Nature is concurrent, it is parallel, it is massively scalable and it is resilient. The categorical thinking that processes one item at a time like a mental bureaucracy is far removed from this graceful integral beauty.

A research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a BCI system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second Life while relying solely on the power of thought. To control the avatar on screen, the user simply thinks about moving various body parts — the avatar walks forward when the user thinks about moving his/her own feet, and it turns right and left when the user imagines moving his/her right and left arms. ^{^}

More of us should worry first about our first life, and only after that about our Second Life or birth again.

William Gibson, creator of Neuromancer, tells us about his views of futurism.

“If I had gone to Ace Books in 1981 and pitched a novel set in a world with a sexually contagious disease that destroys the human immune system and that is raging across most of the world — particularly badly in Africa — they might have said, ‘Not bad. A little toasty. That’s kind of interesting.’

“And I’d say, ‘ But wait! Islamic terrorists from the Middle East have hijacked airplanes and flown them into the World Trade Center.’ Not only would they not go for it, they probably would have called security.”
…
Gibson puts a premium on making his details rich. He’s always wanted his world to be “naturalistic — where people used toilets. And dry cleaners. And things got rusty and things broke.”
…
Having said that, Gibson says: “One of the biggest technologically driven changes in my writing is the awareness that every text today has a kind of spectral quasi-hypertext surrounding it.” It is “all of the Googled information that found its way into the book but which isn’t available to the reader as a literal hypertext unless you’re willing to be the animator of the hypertext process” and Google each term that’s distinctive and new.
…
“People are still asking me about the death of the book,” Gibson responds, “and yet here I am and every day I go out to the biggest bookstores that have ever existed and are doing the most business daily of any bookstores in history.

“It’s the oldest and the first mass medium. And it’s the one that requires the most training to access. Novels, particularly, require serious cultural training. But it’s still the same thing — I make black marks on a white surface and someone else in another location looks at them and interprets them and sees a spaceship or whatever. It’s magic. It’s a magical thing. It’s very old magic, but it’s very thorough. The book is very well worked out, somewhat in the way that the wheel is very well worked out.”
…
“Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness,” Gibson acknowledges. “I can work with this,” he says, thinking of recent turns of events. “I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That’s what makes it work. It’s interesting. I’d like to see it get less interesting. But I don’t know that it necessarily will.” ^{^}

That blogs—which generally provide continuously updated commentary on a particular subject, such as politics, economics, local news, or entertainment—are gaining acceptance by old media companies reflects their acknowledgement that Internet users would rather participate in the news than simply consume it. In addition, blogs are typically aimed at a niche audience; and each, with its own particular voice and point of view, develops a “community” of readers, and increases the potential for targeted advertising. ^{^}

More likely, it is the niche factor and the distrust of any human group large enough to afford its own shareholders. Blogs have taken over the thinking person’s internet, because apart from large media outlets and generic services that everyone uses (search, email, twitter, youtube), there isn’t much to read unless it comes from niche indie media, which blogs are. If two guys in a garage are a record label, a lone 30something woman in front of her Mac Mini is a niche publisher.

Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky “second Earth” circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone.

The planet is the most Earth-like ever spotted and is thought to have perfect conditions for water, an essential ingredient for life. Researchers detected the planet orbiting one of Earth’s nearest stars, a cool red dwarf called Gliese 581, 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra.

Measurements of the planet’s celestial path suggest it is 1½ times the size of our home planet, and orbits close to its sun, with a year of just 13 days. The planet’s orbit brings it 14 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. But Gliese 581 burns at only 3,000C, half the temperature of our own sun, making conditions on the planet comfortable for life, with average ground temperatures estimated at 0 to 40C. Researchers claim the planet is likely to have an atmosphere. The discovery follows a three-year search for habitable planets by the European Southern Observatory at La Silla in Chile. ^{^}

Bottom-up systems work by archimedean principles. When there are too many people, they overflow and either conquer other peoples, or they take over new lands that seem unclaimed. As our planet gets overpopulated, our environment loses its ability to compete with humanity, and so many people flood our streets that we feel an alienating anomie, the impulse to overflow and spill over to another star will increase.

As long as we do it in the right spirit, I think it’s a positive thing. If we go in a state of panic and maudlin fear, we will bring our doom with us to the new planet. If we go on a childlike quest for adventure, this could be more than a search for more living room, but a way of rediscovering the unembittered parts of our souls.

Today is Blog Action Day, when we see the power of many chanting in unison, or so the theory goes. Bloggers worldwide will be writing at once on the chosen topic for 2007, which is “the environment.”

I don’t really know if what the environment needs is more emotions, more personal reminscinces, or other blog-like contributions. What it needs is some clarity among human beings about how we’re going to treat it reverently, and re-sacralize it, so in the future we do not see the gross abuses committed during my lifetime.

I don’t consider it optional to recycle – ever. All trash should be reclaimed as much as possible. I don’t think fossil fuels and the private car are a sustainable way of living. I think we need to talk seriously about limiting our population. I think we should design computers to be $5000 gadgets that last twenty years, instead of $500 gadgets that last four. I think we should get leaders to whom these and other decisions are obvious and without question.

The environment is not the much-touted and probably a non issue “global warming.” It is not the fish you catch in deep sea nets, the Texas-sized patch of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, or the extinction of whales. It’s not that we can spot more concrete from space than veldt. It’s not that our atmosphere has radically changed composition since the industrial revolution began in 1600 with our use of large fires, smelters and heaters in cities. The environment is all of these things and more.

I think we should talk about the real challenge of the environment, which relates to blog action day itself. We each have a blog. We each have a job, but would like to own our own businesses, have our own homes, and have our own freedom to travel with cars and planes. We want to be able to buy what we want when we do. When you think about it however, the only problem the environment faces is too many businesses, too many homes, and too many cars and planes and products.

I don’t see many people talking about the environmental issue in these terms, because it looks like an impossible problem to solve. But all problems look impossible at first, and we can solve this as we have other problems in the past, if we work together and are willing to face the truth.

As software proliferated, it grew to accomodate not only specialized function but classes of function. For example, some software was designed to military specifications, and had its own set of requirements. Other software needed to be used exclusively in a business-corporate environment. That type of software, called “corporate” for lack of a better term, is designed around the concerns of groups of people working together. It attempts to verify who is doing any action, keeps logs and accounting, and blocks any actions that could circumvent the corporate objectives.

In contrast to corporate software, consumer software is designed to be easier to use, and to make common tasks into functions, so that Mom and Dad can perform a combination picture edit, upload to web site and send IMs to friends notifying them of the new images. It might be tempting to write it off as junk software except that so many of our innovations come from the consumer world, because people using software for play and not work (hint, humanity) find the more interesting applications which are not directly related to task control.

In The 8 Most Dangerous Computer Technologies, corporate IT is shown its future: consumer ware leads the pack as far as new features, and corporates will have to adapt to keep up. In the article, the writer(s) detail several of the new challenges, including the potential security horror of USB drives, the ubiquity of web mail, cell phones, chat and voice over IP. The solution they edge toward is one corporate America might not like at first.

Instead of banning the consumer software, they began an assimilation program. It was okay to bring in a USB drive, long the bane and fear of administrators, if you used their encryption software on it so that if you lost it, you wouldn’t also give data to the world at large. I think this is a step in the right direction, and I’d take it even further, taking advantage of something I’ve learned from Google. If you offer people free breakfast, free dinner, and a chance to socialize, they’ll hang out around the office. I think Google will find that this is effective only for the first three years of an employee’s time at the company, but it’s equally relevant to an inverse scenario.

That inverse is what most of us face, which is being in an office when we need to be out doing the things we need to do to keep our households in order. I’ll bet most of you have ducked out at lunch to pay a bill, researched a purchase online, or called to make a doctor’s appointment from work. Unlike Google, where they want to keep people at work longer, we are at work longer and want to be doing what we need to do after work but don’t have time. For these two problems, a variation on the same solution exists.

Instead of viewing employees as having a value by the hour, I think businesses should view them as community members with a yearly cost that should balance their direct contribution to business income. For some employees, like receptionists, this is difficult to measure directly but it’s evident that it exists, since a business without a receptionist would have no clients. In those cases, you should measure the amount of their job they do correctly and assign it an arbitrary percentage of the income production. This tells you what the employee returns to the community that is the business.

If you view your employees as community members, it is no longer important to you to see them working every hour of the day. You hire them to get a job done, and you don’t care how long it takes, unless it’s obvious that more people are needed. You might even tolerate people going home early. One thing that you will tolerate in this new view is their use of business resources for personal use. They are members of your community, and in a community, everyone’s Job One is survival, but they recognize that without the community that’s not possible, so it’s a very close second.

With the business as community outlook, it becomes obvious what to do with consumer software. Embrace it. You can relax and stop ranting about people using Gmail, a giant security hole, or USB drivers, or AIM. Plan these into your IT strategy because you are no longer responsible for dividing business needs from employee needs. You’re a community and the business-critical tasks you do are what determines your survival. Even indirect aid to those is important, so keeping employees happily having normal lives is important, which means allowing AIM and MSN on your network is important.

From this mindset, we can see a need for a new strategy and technologies in IT security. Instead of banning products, look at traffic. Who’s sending large files out, and can we determine they’re not MP3s? Is someone’s machine connecting to a lot of other machines briefly and then moving on? Traffic analysis, deep packet sniffing, and behavior profiling are the tools of this new environment. It is one based on community, so it accepts that a wider range of tools will be used, and then tries to limit their use to non-destructive means.

Over the past months, I have seen too many people worry themselves gray about hours accounting and IT security when their real problems are elsewhere. I can’t make people stop screwing off on the internet, and I definitely am not going to be able to intercept thumb drives and AIM. I can do something ultra-draconian like shutting down USB ports and heavily filtering traffic, but that will damage as many legitimate uses as illegitimate ones. Instead a change in strategy is called for.

A Polish crime writer has been jailed for 25 years after authorities found he had committed a murder that had been described in one of his thrillers, officials said Wednesday. ^{^}

I can sympathize with him. Commit a murder, get away with it, and pleased with your own creativity, think maybe you can write a book about it. That turns out well, so you write more… but are there more murders?

He’s become the first professional journalist to be sacked for running a blog, a move that earns his editor at the Houston Chronicle, a minor place alongside spam pioneers Cantor and Spiegel in Net infamy.

Olafson worked for the Chronicle for sixteen years, covering the Brazoria County beat. He also ran a warmly-regarded pseudonymous blog, the Brazosport News, under the name Banjo Jones.

The two proved incompatible for Olafson’s boss, Houston Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen, who told him to “take the fucking site down”, and then dismissed him. ^{^}

I don’t know of anyone who believes in true “free speech,” in that someone will always come up with an exception like posting your credit record on a subway wall or putting child porn in children’s books, but I find this alarming. As you all may know, I worked for “the other paper” back in the day and have never liked the Chronicle, but Jeff Cohen’s actions make me further want to stay away. I don’t think he has the best interests of his paper, or his community, involved. I think this is a control issue by someone terrified about the ground newspapers are losing to blogs and online content.

In that, Jeff Cohen and I share a worry, and I can sympathize with his feelings but not his actions, unless there’s more to this story than our tea-drinking comrades across the sea have revealed. I think however the Chronicle website is doing about the best job it can, in part thanks to the cyber-savvy of technology writer Dwight Silverman, who keeps it alive in parts of the net it otherwise wouldn’t see. Cohen should follow Silverman’s example and reach out to more people instead of trying to defend rapidly eroding turf.

“Climbing the ladder sucks and everyone is obsessed with it, yet few speak out on it.”

And like a good little soldier, I went at it so hard and for so long that it wasn’t until I was 46 that I stopped, took a breath, and realized what was happening. I’d spent exactly half my life working and my life had become about work. I had sacrificed everything in the name of obsession.
^{^}

I’ve seen this quite a few times, usually in those last golden hazy moments of a drunken party when you just know an unsolicited, soul-bearing revelation is about to be thrust upon you. You can politely duck out to the bathroom before it happens, but once it starts, it’s discompassionate to either leave or scream out “TMI” (too much information). Someone has chosen to share their life with you in a small way. They might be attempting to control you with guilt, but usually not. Most often, they want someone to understand in case (as it often feels with alcohol) they’re going home to a DUI death or other cataclysmic end.

Very many of these revelations have been about careers. “If I knew what I know now, I would have just taken a comfortable job and invested my savings wisely,” said one. Someone today said that she had spent over a decade working and now, she just wanted to be a mom (a harder, more important job than anything you’ll find in an office). Others have basically blamed their drug addictions on careerism. Somewhere in this busy world of surrogate symbols, we’ve lost sight of the ends for the means.

I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. ^{^}

Nothing’s that hard once you put a clear, calm mind to it and some effort.