Many of the conversations at the Berkman Center orbit the topic of technological determinism. While no one will actually admit to being a technological determinist, it’s pretty common to hear arguments that a new technology will lead, inexorably, to a change in human behavior. For instance, we’re forced to redefine our ideas of privacy in an era of social networks which encourage/demand revelations about our personal networks. (Interesting piece in today’s Boston Globe suggests that researchers at MIT are able to make pretty good guesses about people’s sexual orientation based on their network of friends on Facebook and knowledge about the sexuality of some members of the network.) Some of my colleagues argue that we’re bound for a future where potentially embarrasing personal information is so pervasive that we’ll need to work out new social norms about what’s acceptable to remember and what we’re socially required to forget.

By spending the last decade or so watching technology adopted, rejected, refashioned and hacked in the developing world, I’ve developed the strong sense that nothing is inevitable simply because it’s possible, and an equally strong sense that the influence of a new tech can be strong, subtle and unexpected. In other words, even if determinism in its strongest form isn’t correct, there’s a reason we keep arguing about it… in many cases, tech’s the trigger for a new cycle of behavior.

I’ve been arguing for some time now that language is a critical force that shapes how we do and don’t use the internet. I made the case a year ago that we need sustained, distributed human efforts to make translation more pervasive in a polyglot internet. In recent talks, I’ve been offering a thought experiment – how would our online behavior change if we never encountered a webpage in a language we don’t speak? What if our browsers were smart enough to know what languages we were comfortable reading and when they encountered another tongue, they’d either find a human translation or use an automatic translator to provide a comprehensible (if imperfect) version of the page?

My friend Brian McConnell of WorldWideLexicon – now Der Mundo – has taken a major step towards making this a reality. Brian is one of the pioneers helping think through distributed translation on the internet. Der Mundo is a long-standing project that invites anyone to help translate interesting texts, contributing whole or partial human translations of documents, allowing users to discover translations of documents and server administrators to make their sites open for translation. Brian has now taken a critical new step of introducing a Firefox plugin which determines the language of a page you’re browsing, looks for human translations and offers them to you, and otherwise connects with tools like Google Translate to provide you with comprehensible text.

The plug-in is part of a family of tools that Brian identifies as necessary to bridge online linguistic barriers: browser tools, web server tools (to open sites for translation), global translation memories (letting translators cooperate and share accumulated knowledge) and language service providers (services that can provide rapid, if imperfect, translations of texts between language pairs). The translation plugin is in an early stage – and can be a bit unstable at present – but it’s thrilling to see someone who’s thought so thoroughly about this field take the steps to bring theory into practice. In his essay on the tools, Brian offers his hope that we’ll see translation integrated into browsers like Firefox in the future. From his words to Mozilla’s ears.

In the meantime, Brian is trying to raise money to accelerate and extend his efforts. If you’re interested in the challenges of multilingualism on the net and can lend a hand, either with fiscal contributions or by becoming part of a development team, Brian’s done very important work for a long time and is one of the smartest and most respected people in the field.

Translation integrated into the browser doesn’t guarantee that internet users will become more cosmopolitan and less parochial in their internet usage. But the absence of tools that make it easy to stumble upon, understand and become interested in content in other languages makes it much less likely that we’ll use the internet as a way to bridge cultural and lingustic barriers. I think of Brian’s project as one of many necessary, though not sufficient, conditions to let us achieve a future where we’re all exposed to great ideas online, no matter what original language they were written in.

• Diversity in Foreign News in US Newspapers Before and After the Invasion of Iraq — Choi 71 (6): 525 — International Communication Gazette
  Intriguing paper – uses a mathematical model generally used to calculate monopoly power to analyze diversity of international news coverage in American newspapers. Small data set, but some intriguing conclusions, interesting methodology. Hope to replicate using MediaCloud data.
  (tags: media attention journalism research diversity international)
• Pirates of Somalia
  Shashank Bengali – probably the most responsible and knowledgeable US journalist writing about Somalia – looks in depth at Somali piracy and shatters most of the media myths about the phenomenon
  (tags: somalia africa failedstate piracy shipping)
• Photo Essay: Scenes from the violent twilight of oil | Foreign Policy
  Photo essay on the environmental impact of oil. Includes an unforgettable image of natural gas flaring
  (tags: oil flaring nigeria africa petroleum environment)
• Understanding what drives profits for agents – M-PESA
  Being an M-PESA agent is profitable, but requires a serious cash outlay. A careful look at the economics of M-PESA's network of dealers and ways development interventions could assist
  (tags: development technology kenya mobile m-pesa money entrepreneurship africa)

• Photo Essay: Scenes from the violent twilight of oil | Foreign Policy
  Photo essay on the environmental impact of oil. Includes an unforgettable image of natural gas flaring
  (tags: oil flaring nigeria africa petroleum environment)
• Understanding what drives profits for agents – M-PESA
  Being an M-PESA agent is profitable, but requires a serious cash outlay. A careful look at the economics of M-PESA's network of dealers and ways development interventions could assist
  (tags: development technology kenya mobile m-pesa money entrepreneurship africa)
• A profitable Fon is more Fun
  Fon's had trouble catching on in the US, but it's growing really well in Europe and just posted a profitable quarter. Pretty cool – will be fascinating to see if it can get ISP support, buyin, market share in US
  (tags: fon business martin varsavsky ISP wifi connectivity)
• YouTube – Tupac in Kazakhstan! (Mongol Rally 2009)
  A team of road rally drivers record Kazakh friends they meet along the way singing Tupac's "Changes". Quite wonderful.
  (tags: video youtube music tupac changes kazakhstan globalization culture)

Professor Calestous Juma from Harvard’s Kennedy School leads off the annual luncheon series at the Berkman Center with an overview of policy issues surrounding broadband internet in eastern Africa. Professor Juma has been a pioneer on issues around education and technology on the continent, and we’re lucky to have him here, thinking about ways in which broadband technology is and isn’t transforming East Africa.

To contextualize our conversation, Juma reminds us that the continent is large enough to fit in the US, China, India, Western Europe and Argentina, and to squeeze in the UK. It’s not realistic to scale up pilot projects – connecting South Africa and Mozambique, for instance. We’ve got little infrastructure to build on – power grids and even road grids are radically underdeveloped. The major infrastructure we’ve seen grow is mobile phones, which “provision their own infrastructure”, to a certain degree. To illustrate the problem, he shows the BBC story about a South African consultancy demonstrating that you can transmit data faster via a USB key strapped to a pigeon’s leg than you could download via a Telekom SA line. (Telekom, needless to say, disputes the validity of the test.)

A “speculative” cable map of Africa, showing cables proposed to be built by 2011. A much better .svg version is here.

Professor Juma had the opportunity to see the launch of the SEACOM cable in Tanzania. “I took the trouble to go down into the manhole to actually see the cable. It’s a very modest thing.” Indeed – the actual cable is slimmer than your forearm, a very expensive and very fragile thing. He walks us through some of the existing and proposed cables, mentioning that SAT-3, the West African cable, has less than 5% utilization (I plan to follow up and make sure I understood that figure correctly.) He nods to the London – Lagos cable intended to suplement SAT-3, and new cables, like the Mauritius/Madagascar LION cable.

More visible for most Africans has been the transformation brought about by the mobile phone. A technology that initially was so heavy, it was only useful for the military and had to be carried in a car, is now light, cheap and pervasive. Not only has the mobile phone swallowed the land-line phone business, it’s now likely to swallow the banks, with technologies like M-PESA, which allows inexpensive money transfer from one mobile phone to another.

The driving force between the aggresive timetable to connect Africa more thoroughly to the internet, Juma argues, is the World Cup. To convince Europeans that South Africa could host the cup, there needed to be reassurances that the world would be able to watch the games in realtime. Hence, there’s been intense pressure to improve connectivity. While the cables proposed mostly help urban (and coastal) areas initially, Google’s support for a cluster of middle-earth orbit satellites shows a possible pathway to data services in very rural areas.

The spread of connection infrastructure into Africa now points to the need for devices that can access the internet, content to be delivered and applications. These, in turn, point to the need for institutions, laws and policies to regulate this space, which are currently lagging far behind the technology.

Professor Juma sees dramatic interest on the continent around call centers, and around more creative industries, like animation. (As a side note, Juma wonders whether we’re going to see African entrepreneurs beginning to protect dance as intellectual property, since movement is so critical in African cultures.)

We should expect to see convergence – a world without desktops, the mobile phone as the primary information device – Juma argues. We’re also seeing countries trying to leapfrog into cloud computing, because governments see it as reducing the costs of extending infrastructure. (Juma defines cloud computing as “where you throw everything up, including the kitchen sink. If it rains, you’re in luck. If not, duck, and try again.”)

Making technology mobile and rugged makes it significantly more appropriate for Africa. Juma has been deeply involved in the OLPC project and shows us schoolchildren sitting outside Kigali airport in Rwanda – the airport has one of few open wifi networks the children can use. Perhaps nodding to some of the criticism of OLPC, Juma points out that OLPC has helped spur the netbook movement, and notes that roughly 30 million netbooks will ship this year. But ruggedization affects other technologies as well – he shows us a handheld ultrasound unit that can transmit images to mobile phones.

To embrace the potential of these new technologies, some African countries are creating universities designed to educate a new generation of technologists. Nile University in Egypt is embedded in the Telecoms ministry, supervised by the Education ministry. Ghana has established a new university following the same model. Kenya has built a multimedia university based around a similar model in Malaysia. The idea is to be educating students with contemporary skills, not the skills the education ministries have been teaching for years. “The Kenya government plans to subsdize broadband access by local universities. In exchange universities will be expected to digitize all their collections and make them available online,” Juma was told by Dr. Bitange Ndemo, from the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications of Kenya.

I was struck by the idea that the SAT-3 cable had only seen 5% usage. If that cable usage is so low, why is there such enthusiasm for a web of new cables? Is usage so low simply because SAT-3 is so badly priced? Professor Juma argues that SAT-3 was built to serve a very few users at very high prices. He believes the new cables are being built to serve a much larger audience, with lower per-unit prices. The possibility for monopoly is reduced by having multiple players, he argues, and points to a reduction in broadband pricing of 50% by one South Africa country. Instead, Juma is worried about access devices, and is writing a paper arguing that countries should eliminate duty on refurbished and new imported computers.

Christian Sandvik pushes forward this question about monopolies, wondering if we’re really going to see competitive pricing in East African cables. Professor Juma points out that the TEAMS cable is open access – anyone can buy into the system – and pricing information is supposed to be public.

Rob Faris asks about 03b, a new, venture-backed project to put high capacity data networks above the equator, providing low cost data to developing nations. Professor Juma expects that this won’t be the only MEO constellation of satellites we’ll see, and that with more satellite networks, we’ll see competitive effects. He expects a Chinese network focused on the developing world, and wonders whether the former head of Google China might be heading this new company.

My friend Michael Anti posted a tweet earlier today about Chinese artist and political activist, Ai Weiwei:

Ai Weiwei to undergo cranial surgery in Germany within hours, a month after beaten by Chengdu police. Let’s pray for him.

The post caught my eye because Xiao Qiang, founder of China Digital Times, spoke about Ai’s increasingly vocal protests in talking about the Internet’s transformation of activism in China at the Cloud Intelligence symposium in Linz, Austria.

Xiao Qiang told the audience that Ai had become obsessed with the collapse of school buildings during the Chengdu earthquakes. A disproportionate number of school buildings collapsed in the quake, probably due to shoddy construction performed by contractors who kicked back money to government officials to win bids. Ai Weiwei’s protest was very simple and powerful – he collected the names of children killed in the earthquakes and posted more than five thousand of those names on his blog.

The New York Times topic page on the artist remarked that it was unusual that Ai Weiwei’s blog had remained uncensored, given the fierce critiques he was posting as well as the children’s names. But Ai Weiwei’s an unusual guy, the son of a revered poet and an artist with an international reputation who was one of the designers who concieved of Beijing’s beautiful “bird’s nest” stadium. A year ago, he generated controversy by deciding to stay away from the opening ceremony of the Olympics and writing about his reasons in western publications, including The Guardian.

Ai Weiwei in custody of Chengdu police. From Wen Yunchao’s blog

While his inquiries about the Chengdu schools were initially uncensored, that changed in July, as reported by CBC, which mentioned that his blogs and other online accounts had been shut down, and Ai Weiwei reported that he’d been followed and harassed security agents. In August, Ai Weiwei travelled to Chengdu to speak as a defense witness at the trial of Tan Zuoren, an environmental activist and journalist who helped conduct a three-month investigation of the earthquake and its consequences. Ai Weiwei was detained by Chengdu police, who came to his hotel at 3am, beat him and detained him for 11 hours, making it impossible to attend the trial.

Kathleen McLaughlin, writing for GlobalPost, reports that Ai Weiwei is undergoing cranial surgery in Germany today, possibly caused by the beating he received a month ago in Chengdu. But she’s careful to source the claims only to the artist’s twitter feed, and the headline “Surgery for Chinese activist beaten by police?” makes it clear that it’s not easy to verify that the artist is undergoing surgery, or that the surgery is connected to his time in Chengdu police custody.

I’m interested in Ai Weiwei’s story on at least two levels. First, it’s fascinating to think about the story of a celebrated artist becoming an activist and becoming such a threat to power structures that police would risk detaining and beating him, knowing the potential international attention it could attract. (Rebecca MacKinnon’s interview with Ai Weiwei is useful for understanding his rapid move into activism and politics.) Given his existing fame, it seems like detaining or injuring Ai Weiwei would be an extremely dangerous way to attract attention to the controversy over Chengdu schools.

For me, there’s another level of fascination, which has to do with contemporary newsgathering and newsreading. I hadn’t planned to write about Chinese activism and free speech today – and there are a few editors to whom I owe drafts who likely wish I hadn’t just spent two hours reading about Ai Weiwei and his situation. But one feature of digital media is that it can make you vulnerable to ephemeral obsessions, topics that pique your interest and demand a deep dive, if only to understand the facts of the story.

On reading Michael Anti’s tweet, I wanted to know two things: was it true (i.e., was Ai Weiwei undergoing cranial surgery in Germany, and was the surgery related to injuries he’d suffered while in police custody?) and whether the story was going to get any amplification in English-language media. I’m very poorly placed to answer the first question – I speak neither Chinese or German. But part of the joy (and perhaps the problem) of these ephemeral obsessions is that the Internet makes it possible either to research these questions, or to feel like you’re researching these questions. My hope was that, if I could find a definitive answer to the first question, I could use what tools I have at hand to amplify the story, perhaps in the hopes of getting broader mainstream media attention to the situation.

I’m wondering how much of this dynamic was at work surrounding global interest in the Iranian election protests. My friends at the Web Ecology Project suggest that roughly 480,000 Twitter users posted at least one update regarding Iran during the weeks immediately following the elections. Some small subset of those users became devoted posters on the topic of the Iran revolutions, and not all those who became invested in aggregating, filtering and retweeting the news were of Iranian descent, were Farsi speakers or were particularly directly connected to the story. They’d simply gotten fascinated by it and were doing their part to investigate, report and amplify the story.

I think, in general, this is a really good thing. Most Americans aren’t especially interested in international news – Pew’s research on expressed media interest finds that all 15 of 2008′s high interest stories were either domestic or had a very significant domestic component. (On the other hand, the same report shows that these were the 15 stories to receive the most coverage in a sample of US media. It raises the intriguing question of whether more international reporting would lead to more interest…)

If people are willing to pay very close attention to an international story and become part of the mechanism that investigates and amplifies it, that’s a good thing. Actually, it’s probably something both journalists and activists need to harness – it raises the intriguing possibility that readers will join you in the process of investigating and understanding a story if you both provide them with enough to work with and an opportunity to meanintfully contribute. Even if an individual’s contributions don’t measurably push the investigation forwards, this may be a method to help people become more emotionally invested in stories they’re otherwise detached from.

The downside of this process – triangulating the truth from the reports you’re able to access online – is that all sorts of unwanted filtering effects can come into play. I think a lot of non-Iranians who followed post-election reports may have overestimated anti-Ahmedinejad sentiment because they were primarily able to read English-language blogs and tweets… and many of the people who opposed the post-election protests either didn’t write online or wrote in Persian. As I researched Ai Weiwei’s health, I favored reports from news sources I trust and discounted ones I trust less. Had Xinhua posted an official report on Ai Weiwei’s health, I likely would have discounted that report and waited to see if the New York Times weighed in on the story.

Fine. But what happens when different people discover very different “facts” by selecting news accounts that support their view of the world? Two very different sets of facts floated around the internet this weekend as people discussed the “912″ protest in DC organized by Freedomworks and promoted by radio personalities including Glenn Beck. Right-wing activists celebrated the success of the demonstration, citing an attendence of 1 to 1.5 million, a figure that came from Matt Kibbe, one of the protest organizers. Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin and others edged up the figure to 2 million, while the more cautious Daily Mail ran the headline “A million march to US Capitol to protest against ‘Obama the socialist’”.

Here’s the odd thing. Kibbe told his audiences that the estimate of 1 to 1.5 million had come from ABC News. ABC News explicitly denied reporting this, and cited a figure of 60 – 70,000 protesters, citing an estimate from the DC Fire Department. Most newspapers cited a figure in the “tens of thousands”. There’s a big disparity between a march of 70,000 people – a big number, by anyone’s reckoning – and 1 – 2 million, which would have made the march one of the largest protests in the history of Washington DC.

For lots of readers, it probably didn’t matter. There are enough voices online repeating the 2 million figure that, if you’re trying to triangulate and confirm that figure, you’ll find likeminded voices to support the interpretation. We’d expect ABC’s official statement to carry more weight than Michelle Malkin… but keep in mind that public trust in media appears to be reaching new lows. (The Pew Center’s recent research indicates that only 29% of US respondents believed that news organizations “generally get the facts straight.”)

Megan Garber’s got a great piece in CJR titled, “Tea for two… million?” where she looks at the spread of the (grossly inaccurate) 2 million figure. (The comments on the story are especially fascinating.) She’s particularly fascinated with a post on Pajamas Media/Vodka Pundit by Stephen Green where Green quotes a “back-of-envelope” calculation from a friend who agrees with the 2 million estimate. Green quotes his friend, then says, “Knowing Charlie like I do, I’m inclined to trust his guestimates more than most people’s ‘facts.’”

The motto of Richard Sambrook’s excellent Sacred Facts blog is “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts,” a quote from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. If we want civil, productive debates, we need to have disagreements about our opinions and intepretations, but we need common facts, or we simply talk past one another. When we don’t have facts, someone – professionals, amateurs, crowds – need to do the hard work necessary to excavate them. But I worry that the sort of armchair investigation I’ve been engaged in today can lead to these conflicts over dueling facts that make it difficult to have any sort of meaningful disagreement.

Two weeks ago, filmmakers John Alpert and Matthew O’Neill were denied the visas they needed to present their film on the Sichuan earthquake at the Beijing independent film festival. My Chinese friends who’ve been watching the Sichuan/Chengdu/Ai Weiwei story closely are hopeful that the film will tell the story to a global audience… but Chinese authorities appear to be working very hard to make sure the story isn’t told domestically.

Ai Weiwei, with the Grass Mud Horse

After authorities removed Ai Weiwei’s blogs, he posted this self-portrait on his personal website. The animal covering his genitals is intended to be a “grass mud horse”, a reference to a dirty joke about Chinese censorship so complicated that I’ve got to lead you to a whole other blogpost to explain it.

I still don’t know whether Ai Weiwei is having surgery today, or whether the surgery is connected to his police treatment. I pray that he’s okay.

Update: a friend offers a translation of a recent Twitter post from Ai Weiwei: ” Here the newest photos. Surgery lasted 2 hours, 2 holes in the skull, 30 ml of blood have been extracted, the pressure on the brain is normal again, no head ache any more.” So, good news. Here’s a photo of Ai Weiwei recovering in bed in Munich.

More on Ai Weiwei’s condition from Danwei, who translate a post from Liu Xiaoyuan’s blog.

• Mohamed Atta confronts the historic Muslim monuments and modern high-rises of Cairo. (1) – By Daniel Brook – Slate Magazine
  Lovely reporting from Daniel Brook which links Mohamed Atta's work and thinking as an architecture and urban planning student with his later role in executing 9/11. Makes an interesting case that Atta – and perhaps fellow alienated Muslims living in western cities – sometimes idolize a fictional version of the Arab world independent of western influence
  (tags: theory architecture scholarship academia urbanplanning terrorism islam atta)

• http://civic.mit.edu/blog/csik/a-report-from-gov20
  Chris Csik's review of the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference, with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism. Csik rightly points out that the best projects tend to come from people who already understand the government, not from enthusiastic geeks building cool toys.
  (tags: gov2.0 oreilly csikzentmihayli MIT conferences web2.0 software design)
• Business & Economics Articles | Cheap, Effective Alternatives to One Laptop per Child | Miller-McCune Online Magazine
  Timothy Ogden takes a close look at evaluations of computerized learning programs to make a convincing case that OLPC is unlikely to have a major impact and to argue for other interventions, like deworming programs, separating children by skill level or private schools. Includes an intriguing idea on digital photos to improve teacher attendence.
  (tags: olpc education developingworld development evaluation)
• Common Knowledge : CJR
  Reflections from Megan Garber on the fragmentation of news and the possible community effects that come from lacking a set of common facts
  (tags: journalism news homophily echochambers sunstein essays ideas)
• Opening Lecture
  A lovely lecture from Catherine Denial introducing the key themes of a liberal arts education, using Kwame Appiah's Cosmopolitanism as a lens
  (tags: cosmopolitanism ethics liberalarts reading writing culture bridging academe)

I was walking in Linz with my friend Kristen Taylor. She’s a talented videoblogger and doesn’t leave home without her HD Flip camera. As we watched fireworks over the Danube, she pointed out that just carrying a still camera leaves you incapable of capturing some of the most experiences you have while travelling.

I spent Sunday wandering art exhibitions in Linz and discovered that she’s totally, completely right. Almost without exception, my favorite pieces of artwork made noise and moved, and my cheap digital SLR doesn’t do them justice. But here they are, in their grainy, pixelated glory.

“Headbang Hero” by Tiago Martins, Ricardo Nascimento and Andreas Zingerle. Like Guitar Hero, the game encourages you to score points by wearing a controller (a dreadlocked wig) and banging your head in time to the music. Unlike Guitar Hero, the game issues a printed report on the potential health damage your headbanging has caused, and urges you “to learn how to play a cool instrument, like a flute or maybe the shamisen.”

“Quartet”, by Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska, was one of the winners of an award of distinction in last year’s Ars Electronica Golden Nica awards. It’s a robotic music ensemble, currently installed within the Ars Electronica center in Linz, and it’s utterly hypnotic to watch. The melodic sounds are produced by a set of 35 tuned wineglasses, rotating on individual turntables and gently played by robotic fingers, and by a “ballistic marimba”, an instrument that looks like a percussion section designed by Rube Goldberg. The marima is played by a set of rubber balls, fired by air cannons (I think) about two meters into the air before landing on 42 tuned wooden keys. An “ethnic percussion ensemble” keeps the beat, and it’s a quartet, because you can “play” by visiting quartet.cc and entering a brief theme into the interface, which will be expanded into a three-minute composition, performed in Linz and streamed as video to you.

The Ars Electronica Center features a video installation space called “Deep Space” – it uses a number of projectors and mirrors to create a screen that covers a two-story tall wall, and about half the floor of the venue. This allows for videos that feel extremely immersive – objects sweep and flow over you as they rise up from the floor to the screen. It’s pretty much the perfect place to show Ryoji Ikeda’s data.tron, a gorgeous video of algorithmically-generated black and white images, accompanied by an aggresive, noisy digital score. The video above shows a section of the piece as it’s projected onto my jeans.

Sunday night featured the Grand Concert, “Pursuit of the Unheard” at the Ars Electronica festival, a moveable feast of concerts that spanned five venues in two buildings and one park. One of the highlights for me was a performance on an early synthesizer designed by Robert Moog for composer Max Brand.

The instrument is a beast – a pair of consoles, a set of four pedals, and an array of boards filled with knobs and dials to tune the circuits Moog built for Brand in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was on display as an art object in the ground floor of the Brucknerhaus, where many of the conference sessions took place, and moved upstairs to a small hall for a performance of a work by Elisabeth Schimana, performed by Manon Liu Winter and Gregor Ladenhauf – the work, needless to say, was composed specifically for this one of a kind synthesizer.

I was too blown away by the first movement of the piece – walls of nasty, thick, growling sound produced by rapid, repeated rhythmic figures – to pick up my camera – the video is from the second, quieter section, and features a projection of the keyboard, pedals and knobs being manipulated.

Actually, my very favorite show at Ars Electronica was the one I couldn’t film, an exhibition at the Lentos Museum called See This Sound. It featured an overwhelming number of artworks that focus on making sound visible or otherwise tangible, and in exploring our relationships to sound, music, noise, etc.

The image for the show posters and catalog is of Laurie Anderson’s Hand Phone Table. You seat yourself at the table in an otherwise silent room, place your elbows in the shallow depressions in the tabletop and clamp your hands over your ears. Gently, quietly, you begin to hear music inside your head. Your elbows are touching small, vibrating surfaces, and your bones convey the sound through your body into your head, despite the fact that you can’t “hear” it in any conventional sense. Mindblowing. I want to build one.

A very long day’s worth of looking at art and listening to strange music helped remind me of two critical things:
- It was a very good decision for me to drop out of art school in 1994
- That shouldn’t stop me from making music, or even better, building strange things that make music

And that alone was probably worth the trip.

I had the pleasure of sharing the stage at Ars Electronica’s symposium on “Cloud Intelligence” with Stephen Downes and Anders Sandberg. I wasn’t able to liveblog their presentations, in part because I was jetlagged, and in part because they both gave extremely dense, thoughtful presentations. Better late than never, here are my notes days after the fact.

Canadian researcher Stephen Downes began the conversation on Cloud Computing at Ars Electronica with a complex, sophisticated talk about collaboration, conviviality and communication in virtual worlds. I’m slightly reluctant to blog it, because I’m still wrestling with the ideas, and suspect I won’t do justice to the complexity of the arguments… but here’s a gloss on some of the ideas.

Downes warns that our understanding of human behavior is based on folk psychology, an understanding of human nature based on fictions. Some of these fictions center on an incomplete analogy, an understanding of human communities as analagous to neurons in the brain.

This analogy leads to a picure of collaboration that implies a sort of sameness, where meaning is created out of the sameness of every entity in the network. It’s a unity that looks like a rock, or ingot of metal, a mass of elements, not of distinct parts. But that’s not actually how the brain works. What works in neural networks is diversity, though it’s a diversity of inputs and outputs that distinguishes one neuron from another. “A neuron’s perceptions – its connections – is unique to its network.”

This diversity can resemble our use of language – each person has a different connection to Paris, and everyone has a different connection when they say, “Paris is the capital of France.” To communicate, we need syntactical structures to be consistent. Wittgenstein’s language games show us that, while the meaning for one person and another might be very different, communication is possible via a negotiation process, based on each person’s individual understanding of the world – this negotiation is possible through syntactic structures.

The cloud suggests that we share a common set of (communication) infrastructure. Yet instead of becoming the same, we retain our individuality. The communication and interaction of diverse neurons is what creates consciousness. It’s not a process of collaboration but cooperation. “A city is not a group of people directed to create one goal, but each seeking their own goals.”

Downes references Donald Hebb, who documented the connection by similarity of neurons in the human brain. This research suggests that neurons cluster in a similar way that humans do, by common interest. They also cluster by proximity, which Downes reminds us that Hume saw as the key ingredient in understanding cause and effect. Neurons are effected by events, and experience feedback effects and also appear to seek stable states.

“When we consider a society of syntatically interacting entities, the property of any individual entity is not the property of the whole.” Downes cites Kevin Kelly, who warns us of a new socialism, a content-based socialism that is the same as the “authority-based power-law driven old capitalism.” Instead, we could hope for a form of socialism as personal empowerment, an equality of opportunity and sociality for individual, independent but interdependent entities.

What we need to understand about the cloud is that each entity works based on its own internal needs and drives. In a cloud, there’s an equality of opportunity, the ability for each entity or neuron to connect to the network as a whole. What we’re going to see is a diversity of perspectives, not a shared understanding. But through the interdependence of entities, we expect interaction, truth and knowledge to be emergent properties of this network.

Clouds based on conviviality would offer appropriate, congenial alternatives to social organization, systems that work better that our systems of star power and mass media. But building these systems recognizes that we’re communicating not just with words, but with each act and artifact we create.

I’m confident that I’ve gotten the talk wrong in more than one way, and equally confident that Stephen will join in the conversation and set me straight. Most helpful to me in understanding his themes was a correction Stephen offered to a comment I made in the question and answer session – I made a reference to the motivation of a group of people. Stephen argued that groups don’t have motivations – individuals do, and he argues we can’t understand how cooperation takes place until we focus on the idea that individuals are autonomous and motivated by their individual needs.

Following my talk at Ars, (mad) neuroscientist Anders Sandberg offered a talk on cloud superintelligence, the provocative idea that cooperation via networked technologies could help make humans much more intelligent than we are now. Sandberg offers the provocation that “Austria has 821,000,000 IQ points” before acknowledging that people often turn our minds off to a concept as amazing as superintelligence.

“Someone thinking a thousand times faster would be able to solve a lot of problems.” We might see remarkable gains if humans had more memory, or could maintain multiple forms of attention. Unfortunately, most study of group cognition is the study of how teams complete a task and what barriers stand in the way – Sandberg would like to see a much broader exploration.

He observes that team work studies generally involves logistics equations – the total work = the sum of individual work minus communication losses. “The best cogitive drug gives you a 20% advantage on certain tests. But asking a set of your friends to help you out might make you much better.” He asks us to imagine a dart-throwing contest. Even if you and your friends are all average dart throwers, a normal distribution means that five tries will give you a result one standard deviation away from the norm, and 30 tries will get two standard deviations away. “This pretty quickly turns you into a good dart thrower.” (True enough, though you need to be able to select the throws to keep. Two standard deviations from the norm might mean hitting the bullseye… or the bartender.)

Nodding to my objections that the cloud doesn’t inherently make us cosmopolitans, Sandberg notes “we’ve already got an incredible set of resources at our hand” through the Internet. He looks at “wikimagic”, the strange magic of wikipedia in which group editing appears to lead towards the improving quality of articles. While the quality of articles sometimes drops, “it requires huge amounts of noise to get the process of improvement to fall off.” That’s important, because people overestimate their own abilities and can make unhelpful contributions. As a whole, the quality tends to go up on popular webpages, while “if it’s an obscure neuroscience topic, there’s only three people who know the answer and they all disagree.”

Systems benefit by adding feedback. In building these complex systems, we need to manage social design and master the ethical design of feedback. Information markets, where people are incented to offer projections in the hopes of financial gain, and can sell shares, predictions tend to be surprisingly close to actual results.

Sanberg raises an important archaeological question for the crowd: “Why did Tasmanians lose the use of bone tools, fishing and warm weather clothing?” There’s evidence for these technologies early in their development, but they’d fallen out of use by the time Europeans encountered Tasmanians. He offers an explanation: people imitate other people and rarely innovate. This suggests that the number of technologies that can be retained by a people depends on population size. If you’ve got too small a group, you have insufficient experts. As a result, isolated groups of people tend to lose their cultures and technologies. (Conversely, perhaps we’re more able to preserve and advance cultures and technologies if the Cloud links us into very large groups.)

If we can build simple learning agents, which aren’t especially good at solving problems by themselves, perhaps we can solve more complex problems by adding more agents. He asks us to consider the problem of discovering blogs we want to read. One human reader suggests something, then branches out and lets other readers react to the suggestion. Initially, the participants are bad at communicating as the network is, essentially, random. But it quickly self-organizes to be good at amplifying and spreading particular stories, even though each reader is “resource-limited” – i.e., can consider only a few blogs. “With larger groups, information can cascade very effectively.”

How does this relate to superintelligence? “Often information can substitute for smarts.” He shows us “80 Million Tiny Images“, a project from MIT that’s collecting images of commmon nouns from the web and using them to vastly improve the abilities of computer systems and robots to identify objects. The system, he tells us, is very effective at identifying images, almost up to the human level performance, because it can rely on a huge set of images, which show a wide range of cars, rotated and placed in countless different ways. This sort of “practical form of superknowledge” is something we have to look forward to if we manage to harness the cloud in ways that enhance our skillsets. Perhaps they let us glance forward to a future posthuman realm, where this ability to problem-solve functionally turns us into “superorganisms”.

A few years back, I was in Accra, Ghana with friends who’d helped me organize and fund Geekcorps – they were visiting our projects in the country, staying in one of the country’s nicer hotels on the beach outside of Accra. They received a phonecall one evening from someone who claimed he was the pimp of a prostitute the man had hired and he was demanding payment for his coworker’s services. My friend hadn’t hired a prostitute, and contacted the front desk of the hotel, who explained that this was a pretty common scam. The scammer hopes to reach a tourist who had hired a prostitute and saw himself as a potential target for extortion, or a person who hadn’t hired a prostitute but was sufficiently embarrased by the prospect of being confronted in a hotel lobby that he pays hush money.

The scam works because some tourists do come Accra to pay money for sex, and because some of these folks stay at nice hotels. And because prostitution is illegal, it’s a great opportunity for extortion – I suspect that there’s probably also a practice of following people from bars where prostitutes are common, then threatening to turn them into the police if extortion demands aren’t met. Finally, because sex is a subject most of us don’t like to talk about with strangers, it tends to leave us flustered and unsettled when accusations are made, leaving us more vulnerable to making poor decisions, like paying an extortion fee.

I was thinking about this story because Global Voices ran a fantastic piece on a disturbing new phenomenon happening online in Ghana and Kenya – gay personal ads designed to recruit robbery and kidnapping victims. A website for gay and lesbian traveller to Ghana, quoted in the story, explains that this has become a lucrative business for internet scammers:

…there are some Internet cafes that are *completely* devoted to this type of activity. It is truly a business, with finders fees paid for arranging a meeting with a foreigner, and 11 and 12 year old year-old boys watching pornography en masse and learning how to chat ‘gay’. On the Internet, anybody can be anything, so you really do not know who you are chatting with.

Some scams focus on building online relationships, then asking for money for help in an emergency. Others try to entice foreigners to Ghana, engage in sex with their victims, then call the police, sometimes presenting the used condoms as evidence – the scammer might ask the victim for a payment to avoid police involvement, or might share the bribe provided to the police. The most dangerous ones – and the ones more likely to be focused on local victims – propose meetings in out of the way places (often in Tema, a city near Accra that’s generally unfamiliar to most Accra residents) and then rob the victims when they arrive. Because homosexual sex is illegal in Ghana (as it is in many African nations) there’s little resource to the law after one of these robberies. As Haute Haiku suggests in the post on Global Voices, this type of scam is particularly likely to ensare gay people who are just coming out and trying to discover the gay scene.

A number of websites discuss this phenomenon in Ghana and Kenya and offer worthwhile, practical advice. Other take a more direct approach – Fakers2Go offers a photo gallery and profiles of men believed to be scammers posting their profiles on gay dating sites, and asks anyone else victimized to post information on the website as well.

The Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK) is trying to determine the extent of blackmailing schemes, asking victims to call a hotline and report anonymously. They report that victims have been asked for sums of money ranging from $6 to $25,000. Because GALCK is so involved with this issue and willing to defend victims in court, scammers have evidently taken to asking potential victims if they’ve heard of the organization and backing off if they have.

It strikes me that this story can be read either as an extremely depressing narrative about how human beings treat one another over the Internet, or as a testament to the power of virtual communities. I’ve written and spoken in the past about 419 scams as evidence that the connections we can build over the Internet are at least as likely to be negative as positive ones. It’s no surprise to most of us that random individuals we’ve never met before they contact us on the Internet seldom mean us well. But gay dating sites are a slightly different story – they’re designed to introduce people who’ve never met before, and there is, I suspect, an assumption of a common ruleset for people participating within the community (i.e., if you’re here, you’re probably gay and looking to meet someone.) This sort of community norm may be a dangerous thing in open spaces like the Internet – if you’re assuming that everyone’s motives on the site are the same as yours, you’re susceptible to attack by someone abusing the site for fraud.

But it’s the response by groups like GALCK and Fakers2Go that strikes me as extremely encouraging. Imagine if eBay had begun without a feedback mechanism and a community, say of record collectors, began monitoring bad trades and developing a website to identify scammers. Scammers would surely change names, but there would likely evolve a “whitelist” of known participants in the community who hadn’t defrauded people, as well as blacklists, and there might emerge a karma system more nuanced than eBay’s positive/negative method targetted to the specific needs of a community. (It’s pretty common in record collecting to buy a record that isn’t quite the condition it was advertised as being in. Is this a mostly satisfactory transaction? A completely bad one? Disagreement on condition between buyer and seller or a form of fraud? A community based rating system might address these issues…)

I’ll be interested to see whether community sites emerge to try to police and mitigate the dangers of gay sex scams. The relative anonymity of the internet, the dangers of the scams and the benefits of removing predators from a community seems like the perfect recipe for this sort of community policing – I’d expect to see dating sites encourage this sort of policing as well. What would be more disappointing – but certainly possible – is dating sites eliminating profiles from Kenya and Ghana in the hopes of protecting people from scams at the expense of actual gay individuals in these countries looking to meet people.

The story was also a reminder for me of what Global Voices is able to do that can be difficult for other media outlets to replicate. Because we’ve got an author who’s integrated into the African GBLT community, we were able to find a topic of community discussion that hasn’t crossed into mainstream media yet. While this story has been amplified by a gay-focused blog, I’ll be very interested to see whether it crosses over into mainstream media.