The posts here are now on my main blog under the “Reputation” category.

The US government and other organizations did not choose to release this info.  They did not choose to say in public the same thing they say in private, and to allow the public to see within to verify this.  What Wikileaks is doing is holding the various actors involved in its leaks accountable for what they say in private.  It is disrupting the actions done in secret by outing them, as one essay by zunguzungu, much re-tweeted and linked to online in the past week, explains.

Are the Wikileaks cables damaging?  I believe in a free and open society for the United States, and I believe the Wikileaks dump would be far more devastating to a closed government.

Such leaks do not necessarily change the power structure that already exists; the United States is still the global hegemon, China would still retain an authoritarian government that sought “harmony” instead of the “chaos” of democracy, and geopolitics would still dominate, even if countries were found in a lie.

If anything, the public is far more informed.  Maybe the actors involved already knew the contents of the leaks.  But we as a whole now have no excuse for not knowing. (beyond being banned from reading them by our $employers)

Wikileaks would have far more devastating effects, for example, on corporations.  Evidence of fraud or murder or other crimes would bring legal repercussions in most countries, and other companies would quickly fill the gap and pillage the offending company’s brand and identity.

So also people have been asking if we should trust Wikileaks more than the government.  It’s the wrong way to look at things.  No one should always be trusted — what we should seek is an approximation of the truth, based on corroboration and reputation.  We can expect groups to always represent an issue in the light fairest to them.  Knowing this, why don’t we set up systems that allow multiple sides to share the information, present their case, and calculate the best approximation in the middle?

For example, if we know that the US government will say one thing, and a respected journalist says other thing, and Wikileaks says the government actually internally said another thing, and the target country said yet another thing, shouldn’t the best thing be to know all of these sides and figure out what the truth is likely to be?

What if, for elections, votes would go to different entities?  You go place your vote and it goes to the government, a government & voting rights watchdog, and the press?  If anyone’s numbers are off, then we know that someone was doing it wrong.  The different entities have different motivations for presenting their side of the truth.  It, ideally, is a balance of power.

Granted, different entities can be corrupted.  The journalist tribe has been successfully corrupted by government interests (or anti-government interests, in some cases), while its job should be to fact-check everyone else, as well as itself.  People often say the Supreme Court has become politicized and does not strictly adhere enough to what the original documents or the latest precedents say, being influenced by politics and other players instead.

But the more variety we have in the entities who have access to information, the more we can approximate what the truth is and figure out why the outliers had their numbers wrong.  Granted, these entities need to be authenticated, they should adhere to standards, etc., since a direct democratic system would leave us in a similar state as we currently have (where money dominates).

We can’t design perfect one-party systems like having one authority for verifying all votes or clearing all information for release.  There are always flaws.  Centrality draws those who seek to control it.

We also know from recent history that elections do not equal democracy, and also we’ve learned more about the mechanics of corruption.  We’ve learned how even the most ethical organizations can be corrupted into collusion or bribery or ideology.  We have the technology (encryption, cloud, bandwidth, software pliability) to be able to build multi-agent verification systems.

The reason it doesn’t happen is because we do not want it.  It also doesn’t happen, for the reason that people distrust openness and flee to privacy in the name of security.  Trying to remain invisible is not a viable strategy in a world where it’s becoming easier and easier to unearth your personal data, your shopping data, large intelligence caches, internal corporate memos, etc.  What we should do is not attempt security through obfuscation, but build in actual security measures instead of security theater.  What we should do is turn it all on its head, and trust in open accountability systems to keep each other honest.

The good news there is that the FCC just announced its support for some finalized rules surrounding white spaces, meaning there will be some new unlicensed spectrum now for anyone to use without a permit.  I consider this to be a game changer.  We could see some new innovations now that all the devices crammed into the space where cordless phones and garage door openers fight over spectrum will have more room to play in.

So the pieces are being built.

I got to thinking about an idea that I first saw in Cory Doctorow’s book Makers, in which two inventor buddies convert to commercial scale an idea where RFID chips on objects are used to help people organize their stuff.  So when someone is looking for this or that object, the tub or bin it is placed in will glow a certain color to indicate where it is.  The idea is that the tub or bin knows that the object which was uniquely identified (or I guess you could even identify it by class of object or any other variable, including who it’s owned by) is inside itself.

When I went to NYC, I went to Toys ‘r Us and spent considerable time looking at their Lego sets.  I used to have a big garbage bag full of Legos as a kid, and I’d used to construct some pretty cool intergalactic warships or major military bases with them.  Now Lego pretty much sells complete sets to build certain objects, although you can still buy some tubs full of pieces that make a lot of noise as you scrounge around inside them looking for that piece you really want.  They should line those tubs with felt or something.

Anyway.  one thing I always worry about with jigsaws or board games or Legos is losing pieces.  Losing one makes the whole thing incomplete.  Obviously this is more important in board games or in a deck of cards.  But unless you have a lot of Lego sets, you won’t have spares.

So what if you could poll your Lego set and it would look for all its brother and sister pieces and report back a manifest to see which parts were missing, if any?

Now, what if you could be online and query your Lego collection to see if you have the parts to make someone else’s idea/recipe?  Is there something to be said for not having all the pieces, but finding a separate way to make it work?  What if you were required to build a Lego object in the real world, which upon its completion would let the internet know it was completed, thus unlocking achievements or imbuing that object with some digital power? (an idea from the book Daemon (TM))  So, say, you built a city block out of Lego (check out these awesome city sets that Lego has), it would unlock benefits to your digital neighborhood in an online game, like improved grocery logistics, less crime, more tax revenues, etc.  This melding of real world properties with digital properties is the future.

You’re going to have classrooms where kids for their homework will build things, which report the progress to other students and to the teacher online, where there’ll be both automated feedback and criticism/support from the peers and teacher.  Being online won’t be an idle thing like it mostly was for my generation (beyond building our own computers, soldering some things, etc.), because people will be building stuff to unlock things in the digital world.  And vice versa.  The two will interact.

There’ll be some more generic applications of self-aware building blocks too.  If a street light notices that its parts have been separated, it might be able to detect it was hit by a car and report that.  Grocery lists will report that you’re still missing an ingredient while you’re at the grocery store.  Maybe you’ll be like Indiana Jones, traveling the world to collect relics that, when placed in proximity with each other or used at a certain geographical site, will unlock a secret temple.  After all, one inventor using Arduino and GPS geolocation already made a wedding gift puzzle box that only opens when it’s taken to a small island near France.

Excited yet?

He describes how the artifacts of the future meat/virtual space will have to discern our intentions based on the subtle cues that we give and receive through decades of social conditioning as a species.  Until then, the devices will continue to seem clumsy and feel nowhere close to passing a Turing test.

So I was thinking that maybe gaming will be the first area in which this kind of smart intuition will take place.  But even now, computer AI is retarded in games.  It is almost as if the AI is an afterthought for designers who are more interested in coding other aspects of a game.

It’s also probably a pain because the wheel gets reinvented each time.  Each game codes its own AI from scratch unless it licenses an engine, but even then, the designers still have to build the AI to their specific event.

And this got me thinking to another significant problem with any sort of project:  lack of crowdsourcing.  Why would people (particularly 1 or 2 developers) devote more time to things like AI which will only last as long as software is selling on Steam or in the stores?  Why invest in building a community or a feature if no one will use it after a few months?

So what if NPCs (non-player characters) and AI had a standard character set for use across disciplines, games, online user interfaces, etc.?  What if you built different archetypes of bots that could be tweaked for whatever project it was needed for?  What if the AI archetype’s behavior was networked?  That is, say someone meets a female paladin archetype in a Q&A forum for a company and interacts with it, and the results of that interaction are shared to all the other instances of that archetype in other settings (video games, online sexbots, car dashboard interface) so they can all learn specific lessons about interacting with humans?

This would mean they’d learn over time and be enduring archetypes that we want to interact with.  If one instance of a thief learns that it will get in trouble looking a little too suspicious in one online venue, it might disguise itself better in another setting (a multi-player RPG).  AI entities flagged as “tech support” or “Q&A” might collectively share their wisdom just because they are given that same descriptor of tech support.  Different AI entities belonging to “you” would all share your preferences.  Or not.  Maybe you want to have unique experiences and build bonds with them separately.

I don’t know.  I can just see a future where we will be interacting with bots a lot more, and we will expect those bots to have some continuity and to learn about us to make our lives better and easier.  And I think this will require some highly-networked AI pulling from tens of thousands of interactions with real humans to develop something truly useful — otherwise we’ll just have what we get now:  a bunch of throwaway code that barely accomplishes the task of discerning human intention.

One of my favorite discussions in The House Advantage was on hot-hand theory, the idea that people can go on streaks, or simply, that you are more likely to succeed this time because you succeeded the last time, a violation of statistical randomness in most situations.

I think we’ve all sensed that when we are watching a sporting event, sometimes one team may be losing but it’s outplaying the other team and has merely gotten some bad breaks.  Then that team blows it open in the second half and wins.  We’ve seen Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant line up for the shot at the buzzer, knowing they’ll make it.  We’ve seen Big Shot Bob or Derek Fisher take a 3 from the corner after a good ball rotation.  We’ve seen Favre and Elway lead their teams down the field at the end of the game, despite having a horrible rest of the game with no offensive movement.

What’s interesting is that people react to things wildly differently.  Some people see a disaster and run away from it or freeze up, while some charge forward into the fray to see if they can help.  Some athletes lose all their motivation after they’ve sealed a multi-million dollar contract.  Some seem to lose their hunger after they’ve won everything; just look at Roger Federer after he completed his career grand slam.  Some people would make a big shot or throw a nice pass and then feel like they didn’t deserve it, and they start missing the rest of their shots.  Some people always believe resolutely that they will make every shot, and so succeeding gives them even more confidence to feed off of.

These are microcosms of peoples’ larger personalities.  Some push harder when they win or lose, some relent.  Said Dr. John Eliot, by way of Jeffrey Ma, “One shot does not influence another shot.  One shot influences your psychology, and that psychology influences the next shot.”

There are some days when you go out to exercise and you just don’t feel up to it.  While you know how to do what you’re doing, your body doesn’t respond the way you need it to, no matter how much you’ve practiced.  Part of drilling is that your body starts to do certain tasks (like shooting a basketball) naturally or even mechanically, no matter how your mind, heart, or body feel.

There are other times when your legs feel like lead, but then you start making a couple shots and you snap into it.  Or you make a really nice shot and then your legs seem to give way the rest of the time, as your body ran out of juice.

Ma fortunately concludes nicely, saying, “It does a tremendous disservice to the statistics community as a whole if you walk into an audience with anyone who has played sports and champion the theory that there is no such thing as the hot hand. …  I believe that there are some shooters who at times become more confident due to early success, and this confidence leads to future success, that is, the hot hand.”

So how to build this into a real-world system?  You would need to take quantitative data about someone’s life within the context of his qualitative general mood, outlook on life, and typical response to pressure/success/failure.  Two people could have reached the same point but through vastly different ends of the extreme.  Like anything data-intensive, I guess, context is key.

Certainly we are not all just numbers, but shouldn’t we try to explore why and how we generate the numbers that we do?

Basically, I’ve spent 3-8 hours a day pretty much converting what I’ve worked on into a more modular format in PHP, and I’ve had to learn jQuery, which has certainly made the prototyping and constructing the UX much faster and easier.

As you can see below, I envision Galapag.users being able to confirm or deny information that other people add to your profile.  There is a stream of updates that have been confirmed about you.

I haven’t consolidated the navigation or really spent a lot of time figuring out how a person would best use the site, so I’ve just been adding a lot of different entry points into menus for adding info about others.  I hate being on a web site that won’t let me interact exactly when I want to, instead of where it wants me to, and immediacy will be a key for Galapag.us both in providing less impulsively biased info and in collecting MORE data.

screenshot of main profile and addition menus

Below I was just playing with an autocomplete search/console box.

search/console autocomplete

Below is the “evolution sandbox”, where you can create new evolutions (or equations/formulae).  Basically all you have to do is click on the buttons for the variables you want to add, which then enter the variable into the text box below as a “dummy” variable.  That is, it’s (x * 1).  If x exists, then x = 1, so 1 * 1 is added to the final score.  You can of course change the 1 to whatever multiplier you want.  So if you had an SAT score of 600, you might set the multiplier to 0.2 so that 120 points are added to the final score.

I still need to add global variables.  So that your total # of books, the total # of users, etc. can be added.

Definitely I’m influenced by Pandora’s attempt to give individual songs “genomes”.  These are basically tags that help humans create taxonomies for finding things in the way that humans search:  I’m looking for an evolution that predicts good baseball ability, but someone else’s evolution they created may not include “baseball” in any part of the evolution, so tagging it will allow people to find it.

building evolution equations

Once an evolution has been saved, you can vote on it, and create a derivation (by “evolving” it).  It will spit out a total for you based on your own data, and also calculate the maximum number possible in that evolution, thus giving you a “rating”.

browsing evolutions

Here’s a menu that you can access through a mention of any other person’s name.  Still working it out but definitely I think that people will want to classify relationships with other people based on how public it is.  That is, if I’m attracted to some chick and we’ve only gone on a first date, my private status with her might be “sexual interest”, but publicly I may have her as “acquaintance” and between the both of us (bilateral), I may be a “friend”.

changing your interactions with another user

Obviously I’m still working on a lot of data entry-type stuff.  This is pretty tedious, making sure the user can interact with the backend.

I’d rather be working on some of the higher-order stuff.  I think it’d be interesting to be building new evolutions that cross several spheres (including educational variables inside an evolution based around sports).  I think it’d be interesting to start crunching the data in the database and pushing out new hypotheses for people to talk about.

For instance, if people were entering in their individual clothing item data, could they gather more easily to find out where to get another one, or to trade?  Would this be a better way to associate than by google searching?

One could quickly figure out what data men and women tend to focus on when they first get into Galapag.us.  Etc.

So right now I’m constrained by a lack of data since I’m the only one who’s really using the thing right now.  But that means I’m focusing on the core of the platform.

It’s slow-going and I could use the help…but I do enjoy doing this full-time for the first time.

Thoughts?  Suggestions?  Can you help?  It’s a pretty simple jQuery, PHP, MySQL project codebase…

People (Can we start holding people accountable for being douches?)

• People who don’t respond to email ever
• People who are too cool to respond to your email
• People who email you and then call to see if you got the email
• People who declare “inbox bankruptcy”
• People who don’t keep their inbox clean (by archiving) so they “miss” your email mixed in with junk and spam

Job Hunting (Can we start holding companies accountable for being incompetent?)

• Companies with retarded job requirements that no one could ever fill
• Companies that don’t list salary ranges for positions
• Companies that don’t acknowledge job application submissions
• Companies that make you convert/type your resume into their database instead of just uploading .doc/.pdf
  • Having to create separate entries for each job/address/school
  • Having to fix their shit because the text converter put your NAME in the CITY box (thx Ichabod)
• Companies that make you jump through hoops beyond a resume before you even get an email/call back
• USAJobs and its retarded application system that makes you fill out each GS-level qualification, and then go to a 3rd party recruiter to complete it
• Waiting months to hear back from a company.  Really?!  Who are these people who wait that long?
• Companies that don’t tell you whether they even looked at your application or denied you
• 20,000 interviews to maybe get the job
• LinkedIn and its backwards-ass management that don’t push LinkedIn as a standardized resume for EVERYONE

[see:  reddit thread]

Going Out (Can we stop going out like it’s 1915?)

• Splitting up restaurant/bar tabs among multiple people…manually
• Not being able to use a cellphone or device to order at restaurants/bars, especially when waiting to get a bartender’s attention instead of, you know, pressing a touchscreen
• Restaurants/bars that don’t update their web site, especially if they’re throwing a party that night

Etc.

Did you know?  Dating sites are actually at the forefront of innovation…  They actually don’t suck to use.

Final note.  Scott Adams of Dilbert fame suggested a start-up country:

“One of the biggest problems with the world is that we’re bound by so many legacy systems. For example, it’s hard to deal with global warming because there are so many entrenched interests. It’s problematic to get power from where it can best be generated to where people live. The tax system is a mess. Banking is a hodgepodge of regulations and products glued together. I could go on. The point is that anything that has been around for awhile is a complicated and inconvenient mess compared to what its ideal form could be.

…

“I could go on, imagining every element of the startup country as an optimal design, from its local government to the layout of its streets, to the livable nature of its homes. The point is that the startup country could be awesome. And only the most employable folks would be allowed in at the start, so the economy would be blazing, mostly from IT jobs and light industry.”

Anyway, I’ve been continuing the thinking about liquidity from my last post.

Measuring Interaction Liquidity in Jobs

Some ways of life lend themselves to more interactions with other people.  In my case, I had gone from an Army experience to a grad school environment to a shift-work job.  In terms of interaction liquidity, the Army is an extremely poor environment for finding suitable girlfriends (although I had a wonderful girlfriend at the time) and friends outside my team.  I did meet an amazing number of people, but the other hindrance was that social networking was so stigmatized within the military still that no one would start using Facebook until they all (mostly) got out.  Military folks aren’t always the most tech-savvy either.

Grad school was completely different.  Before my grad program even began, I had started a Facebook group for us, and almost all of our new class had joined it before the first day even began — the rest would later join once they heard that Facebook and Google groups were how people were organizing/disseminating info.  My friend count took off, since you meet so many people in school and are in the trade of ideas, partying, and conversations.  I started using Twitter but even now only a limited group of my classmates have ventured onto it.

At my job, my friend count slowed down — but I think most jobs are like that.  You meet your teammates and that’s it.  You have to be in certain positions, like HR and executive-level and PR to be within the swirling eddies of social networking.  It can be stultifying for professional growth to be in a job where you don’t meet many new people.  It’s a virtual death sentence for people who are single and who want to meet potential mates in a peer environment instead of at bars or through dating sites, which work great in DC, but as Dan Ariely pointed out,

“The dating market is perhaps the only market that we moved from a centralized market to a decentralized market.  You know, we used to have a yentl, your parents used to tell you what to do, all this is gone, now you have to fend for yourself.  On top of that, we move a lot, right?  You go to one place for undergrad, then you go to grad school, then you move to another city for a job, two years later you move again.  You have no time to create a social network. We work long hours, so it’s really a system where we don’t have time to find people for ourselves. It’s taboo to date people at the work place, the social networks are weaker in the physical world.  We move all the time and we don’t have a yentl or parents to tell us what to do.”

So you might be asking at this point, does it even matter how much interaction liquidity you have?  I don’t think it matters for most people, but I do think it’s a valuable metric that may show larger trends.

For instance, what if you could compare companies and how much internal and external interaction liquidity they have?  Would you work at a company that doesn’t seem to provide much liquidity for its employees?  Could it signal dysfunction inside a company if it has fewer interactions/period than its peers?  What about cities?  Is it a desirable quality for a city planner to want to increase interaction liquidity?  This would seem consistent with architects and designers in modern theory wanting to build spaces more conducive to public gathering, drawing people in instead of away.

Which leads us to…

Landmark Interaction Liquidity

There’s a key series of scenes in the movie Before Sunrise, that movie with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke which has NOT aged as well as its sequel, Before Sunset, that I think sums up landmark interaction liquidity quite well.

In short, the movie is about two people who meet up on a train in Europe and spend the rest of the evening and early morning falling in love while walking around in Paris.  They visit different places in the city throughout their long date.  But at the end of the movie, they part ways.  It all concludes by showing all the sites they visited, as the sun comes up.  The places, since it’s early, are all empty, and the scene which had previously been so intimate, private, and unique to the couple have resumed form as landmarks, placeholders, statues, squares, etc.

So it interests me that certain locations, over time, build their own interaction histories.  In the same day, or even at the same time, different groups of people converge on those places and use them in different ways that are unique to the different parties.  So at one moment here in DC, Dupont Circle may have a couple flirting with each other, a musician playing for on-lookers, some people meeting up after a bike ride, people playing chess, people on their way home from work, people eating a quick dinner, people reading on the lawn.  This could register, say, 1,000 interactions in an hour.  That space is continually transformed, re-used, and remixed over that time.  This is immensely valuable for social interaction.

Certain locations take on a reputation.  Dupont Circle for instance was used last month as venue to watch two World Cup games.  In this case, it was being used as a shared space by many, many people to experience the same event.  But each person had their own experience within it.  And this is radically different than the epic snowball fight that took place in the circle this winter.

Is there a way to measure interaction liquidity for certain places?  Some places do it, like measuring foot traffic at Grand Central or counting tickets at Nationals Stadium.   Can we build a history for a place, which shows a list of interactions that have taken place there over time, searchable by # of people involved, observability (how many people witnessed it), importance (was it a political rally?  did an interaction lead to socially-agreed positive outcomes like marriage?), etc.?  I think we can.  At the very least, we need the tools to develop these kinds of metrics, and the ability to define our own variables to build those metrics.

Reputation is too important in our daily lives for us to have not done more with it.  Especially when it’s filled with our own individual biases and backed by little hard data and statistical analysis about what the reputations of people, places, and things actually are.  When you start thinking about reputation and identity, you start to see it everywhere.

Victor Turner's book, with cover art representing social network connections

I’ve been studying the news cycle pretty deeply, from how tweets lead to flash reports which lead to news blurbs which lead to breaking news chyrons which lead to fleshed out Associated Press/Agence France Presse/Reuters stories, and then ensuing blog overview/granular commentary and re-posting.

I’ve also started reading my grandfather Victor Turner’s famous work, “Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life”, which discusses his ethnographic work of seeing how different villages use social drama to thicken community ties and play out deep human cultural needs and instincts.  His book’s cover design has an immediately recognizable influence from social network diagramming.

Real Life vs. Internet

Most people see a huge rift between their “real” life and online life.  The usual complaint is that the online world deprecates friendships and relationships to meaningless online gestures which are not as meaningful as meeting face-to-face.  For the “real” world, the complaint from those in the online world is that the real world does not offer enough data, information, or relevance on its own to be efficient.  Why not layer on more data?

There is also a massive conflict between modernity and tradition.  This is seen most visibly through religiously-justified social morality debates, about abortion, science vs. faith, the permanence of marriage and the utility of sexual practices outside of marriage and religion, etc.  But there are other examples, as I read in Stefan Tanaka’s book, “New Times in Modern Japan”, a book about the Meiji Revolution’s imposition of a western calendar on Japan, which caused massive upheaval in a culture dependent on its own calendar for all its rituals, traditions, and even business meetings.

As an aside, a lot of people say that Al-Qaeda is a traditionalist organization fighting western modernity.  I would disagree.  Clearly they use the cutting edge of technology and our understanding of culture and adaptation to bring new followers into their fold and to kill our soldiers.  What I feel they are fighting against is, and always has been, western foreign policy.  They are defending their Muslim culture and land.  Maybe that is not something you agree with, or think they are right to feel, but that is what motivates them and what motivates newcomers, at the core.

Time

I want to approach these issues as a matter of time.  Progressivism for humankind as a whole is moving in a linear path (although it certainly retrogrades and stagnates in the short-term at times) — wouldn’t it be fair to say that we can assume eventually racial tensions will decrease as cultures intermix more over generations?  Is it fair to say that stigmas are being removed around women as independent actors even in the most patriarchal societies and gays and other marginalized groups are eventually going to be protected as reasonably equal citizens?  Stigmas and taboos will exist in some form (we need someone to blame) but in terms of “race” and “gender”, I think a lot of today’s biases will be rendered obsolete.

So we’re moving along a slow path to a destination where some of the parts we can already imagine.  Some people on the journey are moving faster than others.  How does this actually look?

Geography:  Politics & Culture

I see geography as the slowest mover.  It is very hard to change a geographical community’s culture.   For example, France will always be France, and somehow it will always have different attitudes than Germans, who are neighbors with them.  Their cultural DNA is just different.  Different geographical areas become known for different things.  We associate Silicon Valley with start-ups, engineers with lots of money and lust for risk, we associate Manhattan with finance and a maelstrom of cultural creativity.  Sure, these communities can be utterly destroyed (and are, regularly, in insecure areas of the world), but they are VERY hard to destroy completely.

Civilization 4's culture borders. French cultural influence is represented by the purple border, forming a "culture bridge" across the water channel. In Civ4, a city's influence can cause other civ's nearby cities to switch allegiance.

Thus, for foreign policy/international relations (IR) types, knowing history and geopolitics are crucial towards understanding professional IR tradecraft.  One of the most influential books I read was George Friedman’s “The Next 100 Years:  A Forecast for the 21st Century”.  His geopolitical focus on the world reveals inflexible rules of the world we live in, which include Iran being an inescapable regional power in the Middle East, Russia as being perpetually insecure along its borders and hinterlands, and the US enjoying fairly safe borders, access and coastlines for the two key oceans and access to natural resources.

Culture/geography dominates discussion, even online. From http://www.trendsmap.com/

Certain geographies, geopolitical world views would argue, lead to certain kinds of cultures flourishing.  They lead to different attitudes and philosophies.  In this way, cultures can be seen as unchanging in their core, although some more readily adopt modernity or change.

Law/Relationship With Government

The next slowest mover I’d define would be the law.  Changes in regime can lead to massive changes in the largest of civilizations (see Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution), and certain laws can lead to inescapable economic realities (see Sarbanes-Oxley, the Communications Decency Act  (Section 230 leading to a boom in blogging).  Corporations in the US spend a fortune on lobbying precisely because they know that spending a little money now to get a law crafted in a way beneficial to them could lead to decades of easy growth.  As an example, look at how corn subsidies and sugar tariffs in the US along with cheap oil imports led to high fructose corn syrup additives in all foods we eat while sugar was relegated to an utter luxury.

The Internet

I’m skipping over a lot of movers here but I know this blog post will spiral out of control and I think that the Internet has been the huge game changer for human civilization.  The striking reduction of transaction costs to communication and knowledge-sharing and time lags has resulted in true ability to crowdsource and communicate in real-time across large spaces.

Now stories in peoples’ daily lives instantly get polled up on reddit or Huffington Post, so that if BP is restricting the media from taking video of an oil-spilled beach, the internet learns about it pretty quickly.  The internet also knows about other things quickly, like Tiger Woods backing in to a tree to get away from his angry wife, Brittany Murphy dying of an overdose, etc.  In other words, the role of mainstream media as an editor of what the top stories might be was diluted with millions of new editors who considered far more topics as being the “top news”.

Much of the news is useless, true.  Check out thelongnews.org, an organization which attempts to look at the news and figure out which stories will have been seen as huge developments far into the future.  Most of the most important stories come out of scientific research.  Below is a TED Talk explaining what The Long News considers important:

At the fringes and margins of the internet are where the cool stuff is happening and where lightning quick news is being developed.

The internet is a well-spring of innovation.  Instead of people being limited to their geographies and the people who share their environment, they can go online and share with those of similar creative interests and skillsets, thus meaning there is a better, tighter matching of people online than off.  So you can see awesome collaborative projects like Linux and Wikipedia and all the stuff that is fed into disseminators like reddit or digg or Twitter that would never exist in pure meatspace.

Agents in The Matrix detected anomalies through their earpieces

For news, people are taking photos and tweeting about what they see in their worlds, so as soon as there’s a public installation closure because of a police incident, people are talking about it.  Metaphorically, this is like in the Matrix when one of the Agents puts his fingers up to his earpiece because one of the plugged-in humans somewhere is freaking out about an abnormality somewhere in the world.   While the privacy debate is important along with the role of government in keeping people safe, for this scenario I’m more interested in how much technology and the internet have aided us in being able to communicate our realities instantly to each other in the form of tweeting or texting about emergencies/news.

Let’s Merge the Real World and the Digital World

That was a lot of set-up for what I really wanted to talk about.   What is coming is augmented reality, where the real world will be intimately wedded with the online world, so our “real” view will be augmented with data layers showing nearby waypoints, markers where our friends are checking in, where nearby swarms of people are, where public safety incidents are taking place, historical hot zones where crimes have taken place, and perhaps cooler stuff like paths for augmented reality questing (follow a path in your data view that takes you to a quest destination).

The contradictions and weaknesses of either world will be attacked by designers and hackers and capitalists who want to combine the two worlds.

Will this mean that the temporality of the real world will change?  I talked earlier about how slow cultures, geographies, and laws are to change, but that is because there are such high transaction costs there.

If you are born into a rural area with a set of classmates who will eventually graduate school with you, marry you, become your lifelong friends, and all remain in the area your whole lives, while you drive everywhere in your city or village, then the transaction costs are high — the chances are that you won’t receive lots of creative input that you might in a city, and you won’t meet too many people with the exact creative interests you have.  This lends itself better towards a community that values building families and having stable lives (microfamilies).

If you are born into or move into a city (or even a slum), you are constantly bombarded with change, new people coming in or leaving, creative inputs, daily lives where you see hundreds of people a day, etc.  The costs of communicating are lower because you can walk not more than a few blocks to get food, conversation, drink, sex, business.  Driving is less needed, meaning your chances for interaction increase.  Things that impact one person in a rural area might only affect that one person.  In a city, any change is likely to affect multiple people.

So think about the mathematical delta — the amount of change — for different layers of civilization.  The delta for geopolitics, law, government is usually really low.  The delta for anything internet-related is extremely high.

Sometimes there are problems as we try to mediate between the two.  We try to hold reputations and identities that are life-lasting, but often the world we interact with daily exists in a Twitter-like state of constant updates and a lot of irrelevant information.

This is why I consider digital reputation collaboration to be so important for a sustainable cultural future.

Cultural Memory

At Uluru in Alice Springs, Australia, the Anangu Aboriginal tribe used to take its boys and girls to separate caves where they learned how to be adults.

Cultural memory has traditionally been passed along verbally from parent to child, from community to its children, from rumors, old wives’ tales, conspiracy theories, propaganda.  This of course lends itself to high levels of re-interpretation, revisionism, and selective memory.  Arguably this is one of mankind’s strengths, since we are at times fickle, emotional, destructive, unreasonable, and blatantly hurtful, but it also makes us human and passionate and willing to do things outside ourselves.

Layering digital reputations onto our community-held reputations will challenge a lot of our conventions and self-images.  In some ways we will be presented with the cold hard truth of numbers.  In other ways we may use the data to deceive ourselves into thinking something false is actually true.  But the ability to log our lives, crunch the data, and compare it with each other, to see what kinds of people end up being successful in different ways for different paths…that is some really deep, powerful stuff that only our species’ best mentors, teachers, academics, and leaders have been able to express to us in ways we can understand.

Crowdsourcing reputation will be akin to the internet’s crowdsourcing of information, or Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing of knowledge.  It will induce the Nick Carrs and Evgeny Morozovs of the world to write scathing excoriations of free-wheeling privacy slayers.  It will cause grouchy old columnists to write ham-handed pieces on how kids these days just don’t understand.  It will challenge cultures to become more accepting of diversity of practice (just imagine if religious leaders knew what their followers REALLY did).  There is a lot of potential for abuse and gaming and problematic behavior, but there’s no escaping that crowdsourcing reputation will eventually happen and that the good will outweigh the bad.

The technology is getting there, where transaction costs for social networking are becoming cheaper, and where our own data is becoming available to us in formats we can manipulate (thank you Tim Berners-Lee for pushing for linked data).  Social transaction liquidity is increasing across time and space, which will lead to a more networked world that requires new types of reputation not controlled or siloed by governments or businesses.  We are not quite yet there, but it is coming quickly.

Other Thoughts

On the continuum of movers, I can see a reputation system as being highly problematic towards the status quo.

After all, you really can’t change geographical culture very quickly.  Already some  economists are pushing for not just free trade, but free labor movement, as the only way to allow capital and labor to properly aggregate themselves in the clusters they need is to allow free movement of people across borders.  This is unlikely to happen very soon.

Governmental regimes and legal systems are likely to resist data, even if it’s undoubtedly true.  You can see it already in development economics and behavioral economics, where the newer studies show that human behaviors can be highly irrational and defensive in light of trust/paranoia.  Overwhelming evidence to the contrary becomes a weapon that a status quo will fight against.

On the plus side, I think having a system that lets any user join, and lets any user create a profile for any other user until it’s claimed, will lead to census-takers and human rights advocates to catalog every person on the planet, and that can have powerful implications towards giving even the most nameless, invisible person on the planet a voice and an identity.  I’m hoping that an extensive system will stop people from disappearing from the face of the earth.  I’m hoping that, if anything else, the major constituent to benefit will be the individual.

While I’m happy with the internet (and recent FCC enthusiasm for net neutrality), there are significant gaps that affect me professionally and personally which, when addressed, will help the online ecosystem to flourish.  Here they are:

Head Coverings, Niqabs, and Faces:  Visual Security

Some Anglo countries are wrapped up in argument about whether people should be allowed to wear head scarves or niqabs in public or in school.  An incident in Australia where a man wearing a burqa committed an armed robbery has caused some in the opposition government to push for a ban on full-face Islamic veils.  A woman in Italy was told by police to remove a veil covering her face.  In Belgium last week, every single deputy in the lower house voted in favor of a ban on the burqa or niqab in public, so now the vote goes to the Senate.  Germany and France could be following suit.

Certainly Europe is having trouble with integration — it is seen that Muslims and immigrants are not becoming fully European enough.  Arguments against veils also summon the complaint that women are not treated as equals in much of Muslim society.

From Jawa Report: http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/

Both sides have valid complaints here; it is true that Muslim immigrants worldwide (not as much in the US, but that’s really not saying much given the anti-Muslim distrust Americans have right now) are having trouble freely expressing their identity in the face of prejudice.  It is true that some Muslim women choose to cover their faces and bodies, as part of their culture and expressing positively their religious faith.  It is true that Muslims feel under siege by the rest of the world, and this has united the Muslim faith about as much as that is possible (it is still highly fragmented by country, culture, sect, etc. etc. etc.).

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not a terrorist apologist.  I joined the Army to join the hunt in killing those who follow Al-Qaeda’s beliefs.  I respect the sentiment of online terrorist hunters and harassers like those at Jawa Report who point out jihadists who are threatening violence against the US out in the open and are not being prosecuted/shut down for it.  While there are many white Americans who say despicable things about Muslims in general, there has also been a sharp rise in the number of American-born men who have become radicalized.  Some degree of political correctness has muddled efforts to investigate those who are becoming true risks to national security.  It is true that the attackers have all been Muslim, so it would be dumb to not link the two.

This is for another time, but I do regard jihadist-based terrorism as mainly a function of US foreign policy, but it has become inter-mingled with American patriotism, Muslim identity, freedom, and security.  Not simple to unpack.

What I mainly want to talk about here is one way in which I think technology, openness, and transparency can mitigate cultural traditions.  In Daniel Suarez‘s books Daemon and Freedom (which compare with Ender’s Game, The Matrix, and Snow Crash in my mind), he writes about a genius programmer who created a company, successful worldwide, which let players play online in different virtual worlds.  [Here's a good review of the book.]  Eventually though, the programmer, diagnosed with a terminal disease, sought to create a networked game that hooked into the real world.  He ended up creating an alternative economic system that used augmented reality, social reputation, and vast computing power to replace corrupt, established security and economic interests.

To explain, people could wear custom-made glasses which had a HUD which showed datapoints mapped onto their field of view, so you could look at a city street and see text labels of the buildings and reputation scores and online identities for the people who walked by you.  Here’s a sort of mock-up, combining Suarez’s vision with mine in a simple way:

Sam Martin’s article “Envisioning Your Future in 2020″ has some better-designed mock-ups:

This sort of digital identity verification (it used biometrics to verify the wearer’s identity) could turn visual identification on its head.  One big issue I see with the burqa bans is that it shows how primitive our identification system still is.  We consider it less safe in the west if we cannot see someone’s face.  If someone’s face is hidden, we cannot trust them.  We assume they have something to hide or they’re about to do something that requires them hiding their face from us and from the growing number of surveillance cameras.  We cannot read their facial expressions to (oftentimes incorrectly) judge their intentions and mood.

Now, to someone who believes women should hide themselves, this, I would presume, indicates that he feels less concerned about strangers committing a crime against him than he is about acknowledging women as individuals.  To a fair degree, it is the opposite in the west.

There was a good op-ed in the NYTimes about this whole debate just last week.  The US has an analog to burqas by the way:  baggy clothing, sweatshirts, and sagging pants.  These represent a style, an identity, to many kids.  But by security professionals they are seen as clothes that hide one’s face (see in The Wire, the muscle always puts on their hoods right as they attack), clothes that can hide the bulges of firearms and weapons, and clothes that make one appear to be larger than they actually are.

So imagine we had a system where you could use your glasses to see what someone’s rating and reputation was, to see how networked they were within their community, to see whether they had any jail offenses or criminal records, to see how trustworthy they were.  Would it then matter what they wore?  Would it become like online games where people spend many hours tinkering how they appear even though it has no game mechanic value?

Perhaps it could even have positive effects:  in Freedom, Suarez has one of the characters go to a mechanist to imbue a 3D-printed object with “magical” properties — that is, it is a real-world object that is identified (presumably through something like RFID) as something that can unlock things in the virtual world.  Perhaps wearing a burqa in this new system would improve one’s rating as it is seen by those of that person’s religious faith.  While this may or may not be a good thing in terms of women’s equality, it removes much of the tension of visual security vs. individual/tribal identity.

Public Sensors

This brings me to my next topic.  We need more reporting, both intentionally created by observant humans and automatically by sensors and devices.  One of Twitter’s strengths is that it’s so accessible for sharing content quickly.  A sensor that detects changes in its environment can easily use the Twitter API to publish its statistics and results to the web for immediate analysis.  At the same time, mobile phones and cameras are becoming faster and more connected to networks, allowing individuals who witness events such as police brutality, spontaneously-created social gatherings, magical NBA moments (barring copyright restrictions, sigh), massive accidents, terrorist attacks, and weird stuff that happens every day to be immediately reported online.

Trendsmap http://trendsmap.com/ aggregates tweets by location for tracking trends.

This will require more technological literacy.  People will need to be more comfortable using their tools.  That will be the easy part.  The hard part is getting people to understand the utility of sharing what they experience every day.  Most people still think sharing online is narcissistic, useless, and degrading to quality social interaction.  They think it is more important to call or meet up with a friend than to share a photo online to the internet that is directed towards no one in particular.  Further than that, they value their privacy and want to control who knows certain things about them.

While this is understandable, there are considerable reasons to share.  If you witness a car accident, or someone assaulting someone else, you recording footage of the incident and uploading it may allow for justice to be served.  It is evidence.  If you witness an ephemeral moment of kindness or happiness and share it online, it is saved in the digital record of humanity that we will one day be able to search for, catalog, and show as example of our collectiveness as a civilization.  If you live near the beach and you see tar balls coming in from the Gulf oil spill, you putting photos and videos online show on-the-ground proof that it is happening — this is citizen reporting/journalism.  It makes it better for journalists who are trying to get an accurate picture, and it helps civil and governmental leaders allocate resources better when they have better perspective of how bad something is.

Louisiana Bucket Brigade, using the free Ushahidi software to record oil spill-related incidents. http://oilspill.labucketbrigade.org/

Also, as I have argued constantly, I believe that maintaining our personal reputations will become a primary way we receive access to credit and to jobs, as we will have public evidence testifying to our quality of character, ability to share and learn and lead and educate, and more.  Those who decide they value their privacy will not be as trustworthy in the minds of those who do share more.

In other words, they will be seen as wearing a digital data burqa by the rest of the wired society. I see people who are deleting their Facebook profiles and writing long screeds against Facebook and sharing online as the same as media companies.  Media companies are fighting the distributive, massive computing power online.  That data is just about free to share and disseminate means that those who had monopolies on that data before will lose their ability to control (and therefore monetize) that data.  It is no surprise why those who own magazines, book labels, album deals, and so on would fight against the sharing of media freely online.  That is their monetary stream, and they are no longer the only distributors of it.  Their value as aggregators is still needed, but it must adapt to the changing conditions introduced by the internet in the same way that the Gutenburg printing press took away power from monks and scholars.

Individuals, most of whom have little inkling of what privacy actually means or what it should mean to them, attack Facebook instead of the NSA.  Certainly it is more visceral to be worried about what your boss might see about you than what the FBI might obtain about you through a warrantless wiretap (which you might see yourself as something that would never possibly affect you).  But our priorities are off.  People like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Shawn Fanning of Napster and Sergei Brin/Larry Page of Google do not value the old industries and ways of doing things very highly.  They understand the power of the internet and how it can be used to create more efficient, useful systems.  Just like Fanning did not really care about copyrights on music, Zuckerberg doesn’t care about privacy.  I would say that Zuckerberg DOES care about protecting privacy, but he also envisions a digital world (like Fanning does) where data is shared openly and transparently, allowing it to be used by a wider amount of people and getting far more reach than what was possible before.

It is people like these who are unlocking the doors to a more democratized world, where power is more evenly distributed amongst a larger swath of people and away from governments and gatekeepers who seek to hoard that data and sell it off/use it to protect themselves.  I’m not saying Zuckerberg is a peace-loving democracy builder, since he, like Brin, Page, Gates, and Jobs all seek to create models for making money, but I do think that he “gets it” when it comes to the future.  Far ahead of what society claims it’s ready for (yet it continues to flock to Facebook…).

Comment Systems

Another huge gap I see in the internet is within comment systems.  Right now, some news sites allow for comments, while others don’t.  I’ve seen small border town newspapers with vibrant comment communities, and large metro newspapers that don’t even allow you to give feedback.  There still exists no global comment system that lets you give comments on any web site you visit for anyone else to see when they visit (although attempts have been made here).  There doesn’t even exist many good systems that allow you to rate comments and filter them out by post quality, humor, utility, anecdotal evidence, etc.

All of which makes reading comments mostly a useless endeavor.  If I can’t read ONLY the comments that share new insight into a topic, or those comments which are hilarious, then I’m left with YouTube, which has absolutely the most offensive, stupid, and pointless comments anywhere.

Plug-and-play comment systems like Disqus and Intense Debate don’t even let you search all their comments on a topic.

The lack of more sophisticated commenting on the internet is surprising since it was one of the first things one could do online (via replying to e-mail, and writing to Usenet), but I suspect it is because those companies don’t have the massive capital necessary to invest in the computing power it would take to index those comments for global searches.  This hints that such a task is something Google would be especially good at tackling.

We need both supply and demand in comments.  We need news sites to build a network of searchable comments that are aggregated by post quality and also by topic (via standard tagging of the stories the comments are from).  So that I can read all the comments on the internet that relate to the topic of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example.  Right now, those comments are scattered across hundreds of web sites.

If I want to read what oil rig engineers are saying about it, or what beach property owners in Alabama think, or what ecological scientists think, I can only read their opinions at great expense to my personal time by way of searching local blogs, sifting through hundreds of junk comments, and so on.  This must change.  It must be easier, cheaper, and more integrated and ordered.

Topic discussion on reddit. http://www.reddit.com/

Right now the quickest way to get intelligent comments is to use reddit or hackernews or other niche sites.  What’s great about reddit is that it attracts interesting people who do interesting things, and they find the newest cool stuff on the internet.  I would estimate that much of the content you eventually find going viral starts off on sites like reddit and digg.  I love reading reddit comments to get quick feedback.

Another request I would have for the comment system gap is to link all comments one makes to an identity.  This is, fortunately, one of the more developed features within the identity layer right now, as Facebook is letting us log in to web sites, and Disqus lets you view all your comments that you’ve sent using their service.

Humanity

Lastly, the internet needs to find its humanity.  Anthropologically speaking, online folks in my opinion tend to have little understanding of the importance of tradition, ritual, faith, and tribe.  I think they should be able to intuit it, at least, because many of the most hardcore internet folks had to undergo a rite of passage to become a hacker or a web geek/designer.  They know they exist within a virtual tribe that the rest of the world can barely understand or place value in.  I don’t think the online world has provided much to people in the way of religion or faith, though — that is one piece that you can only get offline for now.  Unless, of course, you are Muslim; while Christians don’t really use the internet to organize (while most web geeks I would bet are mostly agnostic/atheist), the cases of jihadists online have shed light into how Muslims disconnected from their people worldwide will use online forums to learn proper Muslim practice of prayer, meditation, and custom.

What I’m proposing is something I’m working on for Galapag.us.  See this screenshot:

I want to build in records of one’s rites of passage, both real and virtual.  Achievement systems within games (like Modern Warfare 2) and on Xbox Live are like rites of passage systems — they mark achievements you have made as you transform from a nub to a pro.  I want to build in digital incentives for public service and volunteering in the real world, to affect your online reputation.  All those good things that can be done that many don’t do because they don’t see it as advancing themselves or being noticed, should be captured.  Right now it, sadly, takes a great amount of caring, dedication, and commitment to do all those good things in the world that receive almost no recognition.  I’m not saying that people should do good deeds or give back to society only if it gets them notice, but I do believe it is inherently human (and even mammalian) to seek external as well as internal encouragement.  We are social beings.

Lastly, I think we’d be able to properly assess and monetize worthwhile careers that have traditionally been paid less well.  For instance, we all know that there are journalists and authors and priests and social workers and mothers and soldiers who provide a public service and who are valuable to the community and those around them in ways that cannot be compensated in money.  Imagine if, like an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, you were rewarded and could level up for doing these deeds?  Imagine if you used your level 20 status to get a job at the Washington Post, or if you used your level 15 hiker rating to get a job with Parks and Wildlife?  What if your high math and quant levels got you in at Wall Street?  Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to create and use all along?

Conclusion

Anyway, these are major gaps I think need to be filled.  Until I find myself in a lot of money, I cannot fund these myself.  If I ever get Galapag.us off the ground, I’m worried that I’ll have to quit my job and do it full-time and raise at least enough money to hire people to work for me.  That is a risky proposition.  I am hoping that the proper funders like Ted Leonsis or Mark Cuban or Bill Gates will invest money in filling these gaps, approaching it from a humanitarian point of view and less of just a venture capital-what’s-in-it-for-me point of view.

I’m happy to see more and more projects just in 2010 geared towards OAuth, OpenID, and distributed online identity projects such as Diaspora* (which I helped back on Kickstarter, and which reached its minimum level of funding).  I think the growth of identity layer tools is actually starting to take off in 2010.  And we’ve needed that for a very long time.

Far from being isolated to only my intelligence and security friends, this permeates itself into all my relationships.  Even with people I know who work with computers and who I know online are actually quite secretive and think sites are “stupid”.  “Stupid” and “pointless” are common descriptors.

I have close friends who make no bones about telling me how much they dislike seeing people using social networking.  However, telling me this is the equivalent of me saying, “I think the fact that you like playing baseball is stupid” or “I think this thing that you enjoy is pointless”.

Back when I was in high school, I had to write a poem for class.  While the poem (and all attempts I’ve made to write poetry) was horrible, the sentiment behind the poem sticks with me now, even though I’m almost twice the age.  Read it:  “Not Unlike Muhammad II’s”.

The idea was that even though there are physical barriers we’ve built throughout history, such as the Great Wall (which, as I learned later, isn’t actually visible from space really), the main barriers on our planet are those of the soft brain tissue.

Humans are quite adept at hating.  They are adept at ignoring that which doesn’t confirm their stereotypes.  They are good at victimizing, humiliating, and taking advantage of others.  They are, not paradoxically, extremely bad at handling being victimized, being humiliated, being hated, being taken advantage of.  Evelin Lindner’s “Making Enemies:  Humiliation and International Conflict” argues that our world’s on-going conflicts are based on mutual humiliations and loss of face.

We have constructed for ourselves prisons within which we live.  See Doris Lessing’s “Prisons We Choose to Live Inside”.

I was reading through my old Soapboxes which spanned basically from when I was just about to graduate high school in 1996 up to about 2005 before I went to Iraq.  Early on, the complaint about my writing online was that anytime you put something online, you must want everyone, the whole world, to read it.  In essence, it would be defined as an act of wanting attention.

By the end of the Soapboxes, in 2005, the internet had matured and cultural norms had changed enough that blogging was about to become huge (as a result of GeoCities maturing into platforms like Blogger).  But also in 2005, I deployed to Iraq in a Special Forces unit as an intelligence collector.  I intended to post my thoughts and experiences from Iraq, being mindful of operational security.  My commander found out about it and hung me out to dry.  This was when the military decided to re-write its rules to silence servicemember online activities.

I felt like I eventually redeemed myself in the unit by working my tail off in another capacity, even though the injuries still smarted.

Luckily I was able to go back to school afterwards, and reconnected with my family’s anthropological roots and studied international power structures.  And now I have a job where I work in the trenches of social media.

But still this resistance exists in the many communities I am a part of.  People go on total black out on Facebook, and delete their Twitter accounts, and stop responding to e-mails, and so on.  People will test the waters of sharing online, but will harshly recoil back and disappear again.

I did my final orals presentation in grad school on Galapag.us, my platform for reputation management and identity formulation.  My panelists had absolutely NO clue what I was talking about.  Seriously.  I could have been speaking another language to these people, who were quite erudite and knew much about their fields.

The internet is now past its adolescence, I would estimate, and now we are beginning to see the emergence of geolocation, massive data crunching, and always-on instant updates from the internet of things.  And what it has helped me to understand is that all those people while I was growing up were wrong.  It wasn’t that I wanted attention.  It was that I wanted to share and to find like-minded people outside the communities I lived in where no one had any clue how to interact with me on certain issues.

The internet has allowed for a massive cultural community readjustment, where we have been freed in many cases from the isolated, narrow communities we are born into.

I am myself a member of many different communities:  midwesterners, Texans, half-Asians, Army Iraq veterans, international affairs universities in DC, online nerds, gamers, tennis fans, avid readers, basketball junkies, anthropology ancestry, IRC users, Obama voters, pro gay rights, DC contractors, Arabic speakers, web developers, iPhone owners, people who had bad skin and braces as teens.  Those are just some of the “communities” that I can associate with comfortably.   They are all important to me in varying degrees, but they help to define who I am, for better or for worse.   Other people would have more difficulty infiltrating the same communities I am a part of.  Amin Maalouf, also someone of diverse descent, writes of having multiple identities and multiple communities which he feels a part of, in his book “In the Name of Identity:  Violence and the Need to Belong”:  “I am posed between two countries, two or three languages, and several cultural traditions.”

Those who were born into money and in urban cities always had an advantage over those born in small villages.  They had more access to different people, different ideas, different eventual mates, more diversity.  Not that there isn’t value within tightly-knit villages or communities, but the circumstances must align very closely with the individual’s personality and values in order for it to work.  Within tightly-knit physical communities, aberrations are often discouraged and punished.

Said Stephen Downes, reviewing Lessing:

It is as though the group mind cannot be resisted, writes Lessing. After all, we all live in groups, we obtain our livlihood, our meanings, our identities, from groups. And when we’re in a group we tend to think as the group does; we may even , she notes, have deliberately sought out a group of “like-minded” people. People know how hard it is to stand against the group, and they often recollect, to their shame, having said something simply because other members of the group said it.

And the mechanics of this are interesting. “This mechanism, of obedience to the group, does not only mean obedience or submission to a small group, or one that is sharply determined, like a religion or political party. It means, too, conforming to those large vague, ill-defined collections of people who may never think of themselves as having a collective mind…” (p. 51)

The thing is, political leaders – and guards at prison camps – know this. They know that, if they eliminate the leaders, the mass of people will follow like sheep, adhereing to what they believe is the group mind, or to whatever has been substituted in place of the group mind. If they are lulled into believing that the group expects this or that they are capable of the most heinous atrocities.

Wouldn’t we then want to teach children: “If you are in this or that type of situation, you will find yourself, if you are not careful, behaving like a brute and a savage if you are ordered to do it. Watch out for these situations. You must be on your guard against your own most primitive reactions and instincts.” (p. 58)

But Lessing is not hopeful. “I cannot imagine any nation – or not for long – teaching its citizens to become individuals able to resist group pressures. And no political party, either.” (p. 61) Political parties use propaganda and manipulation, and the people who say they are in support of democracy, liberty and freedom don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to know, and goodness, they don’t want to enable people to resist instruction – for then the people might be wrong.

We need, argues Lessing, to learn from this; we need especially to learn from the last two and a half centuries (since the French revolution) of “laboratories of social change.” We have to move beyond the picture of society as “insisting on orthodox, simple-minded slogan thinking” (p, 71) as we have seen in the communist world, the Islamic world and – dare I say? – today in the pro-war western world.

If it is society that oppresses us, writes Lessing, it is the individual who stands against it. “It is always the individual, in the long run, who will det the tone, provide the real development in a society.”

At some point, the nature of the internet will be fundamentally altered.  It may be sooner rather than later, because world governments seek to alter the internet’s protocols so as to make policing it more accurate, more structurally accessible to intelligence, more catered to individual countries’ pet interests.

There are two things that I’ve realized from people telling me they disagree with me:

• People who don’t want to use social media are not the exception, still.  They are the rule.  I’m the exception.
• It’s ironic because I’m the one who was in security and who probably manages his actual privacy (that is, IT security, discernment of what to share with others and what to keep secret, personal security and physical safety) better.  And yet I’m told that I’m the one being insecure.

The freedom of intellectual and creative space that the internet has given us is not assured forever.  Identity is always constructed, but it is not always constructed by oneself — mostly I think it is formed by your community, your family, and by your nation.

I can’t anticipate where the future will take us, but I do know that we need to develop tools to protect ourselves.  And “protecting” oneself has often just meant opting to share less, to disappear, to stay away from letting one’s data out into the wild.  This worked when our communities were disconnected, when the internet and eavesdropping did not make feasible attempts to connect all our dots.

Protecting ourselves in the future will mean using our reputations to defend ourselves against attacks.  Celebrities and public figures are the ones who are already dealing with these issues.  They have to ensure that their public reputations remain good enough to defend themselves against the “haters”, at a level that’s sufficient for their tolerance.   Most of us will not be able to hide.  We will want to, then, have a reputation that can be used to shield us from attacks and fraud, which can thus be used as currency to succeed.  If we were born into disadvantage and poverty, we can still opt to be a good, productive person, and build a good reputation to use as credit.

We need to insure ourselves against corrupt governments, against people who want to disappear us, against people who want to rip us off.  At the same time, our data is already being used against us.  If someone were to sue you, they could subpoena your electronic records.  They could interview your friends, get access to your credit card bills.  Companies are using your data already to establish your credit rating, your health insurance premiums, etc.  Your privacy has already been lost, right under your nose.

What most people mean when they are “private” is that they are not sharing their personal feelings, experiences, and time with people they don’t trust.  In other words, while their financial and professional rights have been raped whenever they got a job, applied for a loan, or charged to their Visa, they willingly withheld being open with the people around them.  And as someone who is about to be baptized as a Catholic, even Catholics can be pretty secretive (ask the Vatican) even though it is taught to us that being fully open with our communities and family and friends is the way to bring in the Holy Spirit.

In other words, we have been raised to bring war against those who are closest to us.  Our prisons are our own isolation from sharing and being with those around us.

Getting into the brighter side, about how sharing more of ourselves can lead to more creativity, more shared common information for us to re-mix with each other, to share our DNA and ideas to create better things, to find beauty.

So this is why I’m “into” social media.  This is why I like to share a lot.  I believe in it.  You may not, and that’s fine, but don’t hold it against me.  And, if you end up being right in the cynicism against sharing, then I hope you’re prepared to hack yourself off the internet, to have enough money to build your privatized secure world that protects you against governments, companies, and criminals.

I’m going to get back to work.  But I’m sorry if I’m tired of explaining things anymore.  I’ll see you on the other side.  I think things could be better, and I’m committed to working towards trying to improve them.

I think if one’s life were properly quantified, you could look at his life’s “rings” and see how his development slowed or progressed relative to other people, based on the “size” and “health” of those rings.  Did this person gain weight more in this period relative to others in his neighborhood or demographic?  Did this person start losing income at this age in this profession while his peers advanced?  What would have caused that?  The implications are staggering, once your data set gets wide enough.

From the above, it seems like some of the key inputs are geolocation, health indicators, nationality, demographics, time.

Similar to what 23andMe does, which is record your genotype, and then interpret and analyze based on that, improving the analysis as new research comes out, the key for Galapag.us is to allow people to input their raw data in as many different areas as possible, so that as new links and causations are discovered, people can instantly start comparing their data to other people, nationalities, demographics, countries, etc.

I’d be fascinated to see how a whole company using Galapag.us in the US (say, Google) would differ in different factors like number of children, average education, average weight/height vs., say, a Japanese megabank.  How do their cultures affect the outcomes for their employees?  How does American-style capitalism (get rich or die tryin’) affect its citizens relative to a politically controlled Chinese capitalism?  Beyond GDP/capita, life expectancy, and the other very limited indicators we can get only through national censuses…

We need individual unit-based statistics sets to get to the next level.  These disparate units of measurement for human capital just don’t cut it anymore.  We need tree rings for people before we can get proper tree rings for races, nations, and cultures.

So once I have my results, I’ll be posting what information I can.  I’m pretty excited!

The age of quantifying across human activity/genetic/cultural/international datasets is coming…

The US should be proud.  Clearly sending aid to Haiti after the earthquake is something Americans really care about.  Haiti attention isn’t prominent anywhere else in the world, at least according to Trendsmap.  You can see Vancouver is beginning to spool up for the Olympics.

Here’s a map of the tweets from Haiti.  Hard to say if they’re from the ground or just from people who changed their location on Twitter to Haiti.  The numbers are numbers you can text message to to send aid to Haiti recovery organizations.

The UK and Europe hardly mention Haiti, and seem to be mixed up in their own daily news flow.  Justin Bieber has a YouTube channel.

Indonesia LOVES Twitter.  Its tweets dwarf the rest of Asia, although you can see some tweets from China, which (I can’t read Chinese) might have some Google news since Google is having a hissyfit with the Chinese government right now.  Baidu is Google’s pseudo-competitor/fraudster in China.

India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan:

Australia:

See any other trends?  Indonesia, the UK, and US…massive number of tweets according to Trendsmap (i.e. the keywords show up with dark black backgrounds).

Shortages & Surpluses

In earlier posts I’ve been thinking about how one of the keys to finding a successful business in the internet and information age is looking for where there’s a huge surplus of data and then figuring out a product or service within that.  For ebay, it was providing a marketplace for all peoples’ crap.  For Google it was monetizing all the links and attention put out on the internet by hundreds of millions of users.  Netflix and Amazon monetized the long tail for movies and books, among other things.

The big businesses of old benefit from creating scarcity, whether it be the RIAA and limiting access and remixing of art through copyright and IP strangulation, or De Beers or oil cartels or water bottlers throttling the supplies of natural resources, or insurance providers excluding access to the least profitable/most needworthy users of the services insurance pays for.

The new businesses of the dotcom era are taking advantage of the surplus of data online and in effect are allowing consumers and hobbyists to have greater access to products.

But it is in the nature of companies to grab a foothold through appealing to the public, then fighting tooth and nail to stave off competition — just look at the Model T, providing cars to the masses but perhaps leading to an industry which produces cars that look remarkably similar to the originals.

So Many Choices

Thus capitalism requires a pretty delicate balance (and it’s heavily contested how to maintain this) but capitalism is also immensely powerful.  One aspect that is wonderful about capitalism is that it boggles your mind how people find ways to sell products.  For instance, I was at REI yesterday and you can find fingerholds for your rock-climbing wall, quite a few different kinds and styles of carabiners, different styles of jogging windbreakers, fingerless gloves or ski gloves, tents collapsible into floppy thin stacks, etc.  And as I’ve looked for different services for my work and for other peoples’ businesses, there’s services for everything:  strategic consulting, HR and accounting outsourcing, entire food service sectors that cater towards the late hours of the Wall Street banking community, mobile pet grooming services being run out of trailer-vans, flexible armies of anonymous workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk ready to do mundane tasks for money, security guards and convenience store people willing to work overnights and holidays, even Street Sense homeless people standing out on the corner selling newspapers.

I’m not saying everything’s happy and perfect.  Being an international development person, I’m aware of the great injustices being done against brothers and sisters, exploitation in the name of “free” markets and globalization and worldwide races to the bottom in labor prices.  But come on, there’s some awesome stuff going on out there.

My point is that you could take any interest in the US and there’s probably a magazine dedicated to it.  There’s probably specialized, highly competitive equipment being sold for it.  There’s most likely a uniform that people of that hobby or specialization wear.  Whole lexicons.  Each interest gives off multiple waves that affect other economic sectors.  This is Michael Porter’s supply chain but for everyone.

That’s one thing that’s so amazing about capitalism when it’s working successfully.  In the US, you can make a living doing just about anything.

So Many More Opportunities Now

Another point I wanted to bring up:  what’s so cool about making a living doing anything these days is that it wasn’t always that way.  There used to be a very small number of ways you could make money.  Off the top of my head:  being of nobility, sucking up to nobility, thievery and being a ganglord, being lucky in birth and life.

Even not too long ago, you would have probably needed to be white, a member of white-collar professions like medicine or law.  And even more recent than that, you probably had to be a cog in a corporate wheel.

But turn on your TV now and there are people making names for themselves doing all sorts of insane shit.  Hell, some people we don’t even know how they became rich and famous (the Kardashians).  It’s become that diffuse and abstract.  For all their faults, the branders whom Naomi Klein refreshingly faults in No Logo like Nike and McDonalds and the Mad Men of Madison Avenue probably do deserve a lot of credit for inspiring new business niches.

But it’s all really fucking cool.  And as the Internet becomes so much more pervasive not only for Americans, but for the billions of people in the world, just imagine how much more wild things people will come up with in order to make money.

Now You Don’t Have to Be Beautiful, Be Good at Math, or Know How to Play the Piano

Finally:  what this all means is that you and I are not cursed at birth and upbringing to be a failure.  If you have an interest and are passionate about it, you can get rich and be famous while at the same time doing what you love.

As Doctorow suggests, you can even make money being an assembler or a curator, someone who puts together many different parts that he didn’t create into something new, something extremely valuable.

You don’t have to listen to your parents and study law when you know you hate law, or practice basketball because it’s the only way to get out of your shitty neighborhood, or join the military to get out of some no-name town that no one ever leaves from.  Your life isn’t over just because you hate calculus and can’t write for shit and have bad skin.

Instead of a handful of professions, there are now unlimited professions, and we all have a chance.  “I got a million ways to get it.” I leave it to Jay-Z to provide the rest:

Happy fucking new year and new decade!

At any rate, Simmons has now joined several other writers who have recently written about the volatile relationship between Moneyballization and a statistical revolution in basketball.  There was first Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which was about Bill James, sabermetrics, and the Oakland Athletics bringing on a statistician who sought to buy under-rated, cheap baseball players who had uncanny abilities to avoid outs on offense and get outs on defense.  What this took was an alternative measurement scheme, which valued less the older statistics:  homers, hits, RBIs.  What it valued more was an ability to get an extended pitch count while at bat, to draw walks, to foul off pitches, to have high on-base and slugging percentages, and to throw a lot of strikes consistently.

http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/soxblog/archive/2009/05/06/bill-james-gets-animated.aspx

The site 82games became the source for alternative basketball stats after the statistical revolution of Moneyballization hit.  On it, you can view “clutch” rankings, the best player pairings, etc.  But these do not capture the whole picture.

Michael Lewis recently went on to basketball, to write a formative article about Shane Battier, Houston Rockets forward, which made Battier out to be a thinking man’s forward, studying tape and stats to figure out the best way to limit his opponent’s scoring game.

The FreeDarko blog guys (think Bethlehem Shoals) published a book called The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac:  Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today’s Game, which pushed further, featuring stats, yes, but stating that team ball no matter interested them.  What was fascinating was looking into the heads of the agonizing, troubled superstars of the NBA.  Think Kobe and his Colorado hotel room, or T-Mac and his back (and skeletons in his closet), or Gilbert and his crazy half-court heaves.  This book focused on the personalities and the styles of players.

from http://www.freedarkobook.com/

Bill Simmons’ book seems like a blend of both.  Simmons points out, accurately, that basketball is not a perfectly measurable sport like baseball is.  Baseball is very much individualistic, with controlled standoffs between batter and pitcher.  Basketball, for Simmons, is about The Secret, which is finding players who are willing to give up personal stats in order to play more team ball.  And this chemistry requires that you watch a game in person to see how players react to each other, to see the killer instincts or lack of them.

And yet Simmons says that you can still look at stat lines in basketball and reconstruct a game fairly well:  points scored, free throws attempted, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals.  These can tell you a lot.  Experimental stats like the +/- used now just do not work very well.

So Simmons’ book is genius because it combines statistics with stories.  Yes, Wilt Chamberlain scored over 100 points in a game, but all his teammates hated him and he didn’t set up his teammates to be better players like Bill Russell did:

And yes, certain players put up amazing years, but when it came to the playoffs, they couldn’t pass the ball away faster to a teammate because they didn’t want to be clutch.  They were afraid of failure.

This nexus of stats with stories seems to be unique to basketball as a team game.  You don’t see these sorts of studies in baseball, or football, because those seem to be more individual-oriented.  What I find interesting is how unofficial anthropologists seem so engaged with basketball.  As if the personalities suck in social science hobbyists more in basketball than with other sports.  For instance, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article on a girl’s team led by an outsider Indian dad who always wondered why teams let the other team walk up the whole court without being challenged.  He decided that the only way his less talented girl’s team could win was if they executed a full-court press THE WHOLE GAME.  And it worked fabulously.  While violating the norms of the game.  So other coaches and parents became furious!  These are the sorts of articles you can find about basketball.

From an interview with Simmons on The Onion’s AV Club:

AVC: When you talk about everybody seeming happy on their team… You have these observations that are unquantifiable. Like, for example, the fact that Los Angeles Clippers players hate their coach, Mike Dunleavy, Sr.

BS: That’s why I don’t even really go to other games anymore, other sports. I can watch any football game in HD and probably have a better time than I would at the stadium. The tailgates are obviously more fun, but the actual game experience is more fun on TV at this point. Baseball depends on the seats, and these games are so freaking long now that, I don’t know, I’d rather watch them at home, for the most part. If I lived near Fenway, I’d want to go to games. Basketball’s the one sport that you just pick up so much more when you’re at the games, especially if you have decent seats, or if you’re close to the court. You can watch the guys interact, you can watch them watch the JumboTron during time-outs, and see how they react to the coach. All human-nature stuff. It’s the most human of all the sports. And it’s my favorite part. That’s why I love going. It’s why I freaking pay the Clippers $15,000 every year to watch their latest shitty team.

Bill Simmons

My own experience with basketball has been bittersweet.  I didn’t start playing until after college, since I played tennis (poorly) in high school and baseball as a really young kid (and did okay…).  I’ve got no handles, no moves, and no killer instinct within the paint to finish a layup.

I really could have used some coaching.  Coaching would have taught me more aggressiveness and footwork, which I think are crucial towards making an average player a good player.  What I always felt was my advantage was my defense.  But in pick-up games, defense is not rewarded.  I was willing to run down fast breaks or cut off a slashing player driving to the basket.  And I had the length to disrupt shots or poke a ball away.

I felt like I worked a lot harder than other people on the court.  That doesn’t count much in a pick-up era which is based on ballhogs dribbling at the top of the key and then driving to the basket, ignoring teammates, and drawing a foul.  It’s enormously more frustrating because this me-first, my-stats-mean-everything mentality leads to pick-up games where people argue CONSTANTLY about every call and play and stand around peacocking.

So my love for playing this game has always been inhibited by pick-up stupidity, and I wonder what would happen if I had ever played on a team with a bunch of team players.

Getting to the Point:  Galapag.us

One of the issues for Galapag.us that comes up when I talk about it with people is that they refuse to be reduced down to numbers.  The repulsion is so extreme that the discussion gets shut off just at that initial point.

Certainly it is true that people are not just amorphous bundles of stats that can predict their every behavior.  But at the same time, peoples’ habits, rituals, and ticks are remarkably observable and predictable.  We tend to create myths about ourselves which may not necessarily be borne out of stats. And that variability, that defaulting to personality or character or defect, that is what really makes us the most interesting.

So a system that is built to support one’s reputation or identity, as Galapag.us will, should be built to wed the statistical side (quantitative) with the mythical/qualitative side.

This could be the holy grail of identity and reputation memory, human story-telling and myth, and statistical analysis improving social sciences.

Can someone figure out how to make a web site that allows someone to study his own stats to see where he could improve quantitatively, yet also somehow measure the intangibles, such as his character or quirks or funny stories about him or his nickname or heroic feats he’s done that didn’t square up with his numbers?

I mean, how do you design a system that accurately keeps someone like Dick Cheney in historical perspective (as a universally loathed and feared death dealer) despite on paper having superior credentials?

How do you capture Dwyane Wade’s night-in, night-out hustle on the court, scrambling constantly and relentlessly, while evoking support and inspiration from his teammates who love playing with him?  How do you capture a will for teamwork (or lack of it), determination (my only talent), and charisma (as in those guys who can get a girl to grab the phone out of hand and put her number in it, or an MLK Jr.-like leader who can get people to transcend themselves?).

How would Jesus Christ come out in a purely quantitative system?  In a world of monetary worship and diploma envy, would a guy who never accumulated wealth and who ended up being crucified rank well against a Barack Obama?

I envision a system underpinned with statistical analysis and automatically-fed stats coming in from peoples’ self-quantification devices.  But on top of that is a layer of human subjective input:  things like “if ‘the most interesting man in the world’ existed in the real world, this guy would be him” or “I would never want to work with this guy ever again” or “her children looked at her always with such reverence that others became envious”.  Did people like being around this person?  Was this person a stat whore who didn’t care about being a team player?  These are questions Simmons uses for his basketball analysis, and I love it.

Maybe that will be a component…along with your stats, there are questions such as “Was he a total dick?” or “Could you trust this person to take care of your cat?”  “Did he have killer instinct?  A swagger?”  “Was she so funny that people would laugh at anything she would say before she finished telling a joke?”

I want to figure out how this system will work — I really do think it’s the convergence of anthropology, economics, statistics, technology, sociology, politics, banking, everything.  And I think I’m uniquely placed to pull this off.

But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value. Socializers – those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media – feel this effect more than others do. When asked, 26 percent feel that there is too much information available on the Internet, compared to 18 percent of people who predominantly use portals and just 5 percent of people who primarily use search engines.

But why does too much information lead one to use social media as a navigation tool? The short answer: Socializers trust what their friends have to say and social media acts as an information filtration tool. This is key because Socializers gravitate towards and believe what is shared with friends and family. If your friend creates or links to the content, then you are more likely to believe it and like it. And this thought plays out in the data.

Increasingly, I’ve been having to filter down what I look at because the net is just catching too much stuff.  My blogroll is pretty massive and it takes some time to get through — I’ve had to remove some of the more spammy blogs like DCist, Engadget, etc.

The Nielsen article differentiates between searchers and socializers (searchers tending to be less active socially online, using search engines to find content).  But what if we could combine searching with social trust?

Various obstacles have blocked an identity layer online, but none moreso than peoples’ demands for privacy.  Privacy is used haphazardly as a way to ensure trust.  That is, we protect ourselves in public by restricting who has access to us to only family and friends.  But this is not “trust” per se — it’s obfuscation.  But internet trends such as collaborative wikis, Netflix ratings, and tagging show that open trust systems can provide much more information than small, closed networks.  They open themselves up to abuse but with just a few people and a few tools to manage that abuse, the systems can be massive gains for public knowledge.

[By the way, as a related aside, for my Yahoo!/ISD fellowship research, I wrote a paper talking about the meaning of "privacy" and what is currently happening online with regards to how the US and the advancing BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are dealing with openness and closedness.]

What we are heading towards is some brutal endgame with respect to personal data:  Facebook has been developing a pretty complex privacy infrastructure but it is being lambasted both from security people for exposing too much data and from internet geeks who want portable identities and data that they can use across social networks.

Certainly underlying all this is fear of government monitoring.  The Patriot Act under Bush (and probably under Obama too) has disgustingly blurred the lines between lazy domestic surveillance and strict burden of proof for court orders.  Until the government can reassert that it must require a lot of evidence and court approval (perhaps involving a watchdog representative too) to start spying on someone (not just American citizens), the prospect of freeing up personal data online must be tempered.

But imagine if we could sort out all these issues and build up a proper trusted network online for reputation and identities, ensured by a public trust and not by a for-profit company or by the government?  What if we could ensure transparency not only for individuals but also upon governments and companies?  What I feel is missing in the debate about “big federal government” is that companies have become as powerful or in some cases more powerful than governments.  Unions and large public organizations as well.  Transparency and accountability are not popular ideas across the board.

But I look forward to a day when I can do what should be mundane tasks.  I went to a get-together with mainly girls once, and they were playing with jdate, the dating service for Jews.  They were searching only for guys who had Master’s degrees or above.  And they got the results and were disappointed with men who appeared to me to be absolute all-stars:  doctors, good-looking, wealthy, fun guys.  But the girls were practically yawning.

What if I could search across Amazon for only people who’ve read over 200 books?  What if I could look for opinions on Afghanistan only from bloggers who have served a tour there in the Marines?  What if I could find Digg articles from people who have had at least one child and who own a camera I’m looking at?  What if I could filter out my Twitter follow list so I only view tweets from those with at least 100 users and who post at least 3 times a day and who have had over 20 of their tweets voted upwards?

What of serendipity?  Well, the random public lifestream will still be there.  But I want to be able to filter across networks and across siloed databases.

And sure, not everyone will want to share all this information with the world.  They should have the right not to.  But what about those of us who want to opt-in and start using all this data to make our lives better and to be able to use our reputation and others in order to make better decisions?

Clive Thompson’s always thought-provoking notes in Wired Magazine this month covered the real-time web, quoting Edo Segal:

Edo Segal, a pioneer in real-time search, thinks the field is going to explode as updates become more automatic, with our devices autoreporting where we are, how we’re feeling, and what we’re doing and seeing. Old-school search will never vanish, but real-time news will create a society where we have an omnipresent sense of the moment. “Google organized our memory,” Segal says. “Real-time search organizes our consciousness.”

One of my favorite Twitter tools so far has been Trendsmap.  It shows the trending topics in different regions of the world.  As of Sunday evening (11PM eastern), you can see what the world (or what little of it is represented on Twitter and Trendsmap so far) cares about.  Click the images for larger versions.

Damn, all we’re using Twitter for is to share our feelings about football?

AMERICA.

One comparison I think about is Plato versus Aristotle in the School of Athens painting by Raphael.  Plato points up, to the heavens, while Aristotle points outward, towards the world.

There have been some touchstones in my life that have led me to believe that what my career will end up being.  My suspicion is that I want to make a name for myself studying personalities, biographies, reputation, and identity (both formation and maintenance).

Last year, when I attended the Achievement Summit in Hawai’i, I got to listen to A. Scott Berg speak about his life as a biographer.  He’s written a biography about Charles Lindbergh and is working currently on one for Woodrow Wilson.   I remember being taken by his speech moreso than some others, and I think this quote sums it up well as to why:

“I did tell myself early on: I think it would be interesting, perhaps, to spend a career writing a half-dozen biographies of twentieth-century American cultural figures—each one, as I often use as my metaphor, a different wedge of the great apple pie.”

As a dotcom kid I grew up with extensive biographies swirling around out of Silicon Valley about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (cults of personality if there ever were any), Jeff Bezos, and later Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams and Richard Branson, et al.

The intelligence services worldwide of course keep elaborate leadership databases that try to figure people out based on their backgrounds in order to predict true intentions, biases, and future political/military/economic decisions.

When I was in the Army and when I went to Australia, I wrote some very vivid descriptions of the people I met — I enjoyed studying their ticks and appreciating them for their unique qualities.  Perhaps one of the only writers I’ve seen who admires subtle things about personalities is F. Scott Fitzgerald — if you read his books, he writes about people as if their tendencies are timeless and universally understood by all people.  For instance, from “Tender is the Night”:

“The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way.  However, one’s eyes moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold bath in the evening.”

and

“She did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach.  Her mother’s modest but compact social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly.  But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things.”

I guess what I’m going for is that biographies have been tools of only the well-educated, to describe the elite (those worth talking about).

What I hope Galapag.us will be is a way to allow anyone to form biographies about themselves and others.  The way I see the world, not only should one treat another as an equal human being, but he should also see every other person as having a unique, interesting story.  After all, no one goes through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and growing old without having interesting stories about how they dealt with certain crises, new experiencies, their first loves, bad break-ups, etc.  Each person is a story.

I would like to get those stories out.  For everyone on Earth.

And maybe become, in that way, the biggest biographer ever. =)

One:  while it’s old hat now to talk about, I continue to admire the fact that now we are able to keep past friends, acquaintances, and people we’ve met as touchstones by adding them to Facebook.  Life’s relationships hardly seem as ephemeral — I lost touch with a lot of my childhood friends as I left Texas and they stayed within.  But now with Facebook reaching its tendrils into even the older demographics and smaller countries, people I used to spend time with are now becoming visible to me again.  And I will never lose touch with them again as long as we all retain trust in the Facebook system.

How will that affect the way we age, the way we communicate, the way we organize?  Now that we can keep in touch with people from cradle to grave, how will that affect our ability to deal with all of our friends dying or getting sick as they get older?  How will that affect fund-raising when we now can pull favors from our entire life’s social graphs?  If we’re called out for bad behavior, can we use such an extensive social graph to repair our reputations and defend us as good people?

Second point:  what do we do with the people we actively keep out of our Facebook social graphs?  Facebook has finally added the ability to group people so that certain groups can’t see everything about you (i.e. work people can’t see your photos, if you choose to configure it that way).

John Clippinger calls this a negative identity, based on how the immune system works, only exposing itself as much as needed and allowing in anything once it passes basic verification (blood type, usually).

Certainly, many people do not friend their parents.  This is unfortunate but also a coping mechanism.   It might be fixed by Facebook’s new settings.  But there’s that desire to keep one’s parents out of one’s personal life, for individual identity formation.

But what I’m really getting at is what if you meet someone casually, or know someone a long time, and choose to NOT friend them?  That is becoming, now that Facebook is so ubiquitous, quite noticeable to everyone who knows both parties.  Why didn’t he friend me?  It must be because he really has a problem with me.  Now I get messages saying that they don’t want to friend me because they’re trying to limit exposure — they’ll connect with me on LinkedIn, though.  Considering the effort it takes to divide one’s spheres of life like that, it must be a pretty significant psychological issue for people.

Black markets exist because the formal economy does not either recognize the market for those goods as being legal, or because the formal economy is not doing a good enough job providing access to those goods.

How does the negative identity affect a black market for social capital?  Is there a market for those people who are not included in our social graphs?  Does it go beyond social shunning and become a problem in formation of trust and reputation?  If Galapag.us is trying to offer a complete picture of a person in order to formalize a standard for identity and reputation, how does it address the gaps such as distancing oneself from parents and work colleagues, disavowing knowledge of mistresses and affairs, hiding crimes, etc.?

This underground economy of social capital must be expressed in some way to be valuable for accurate reputation calculations.  But how?

The key to Twitter is that it is phatic – full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you’re looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you’re declaring an emotion and expecting a human response.

I think it would be kind of cool on Galapag.us if, since Galapag.us will be more data collection and analysis than networking and interaction, it could tell people what it THINKS you’re doing.  So you might not even be updating your status like you would on Facebook or Twitter, but Galapag.us, when your profile page is viewed, might tell the viewer that “Ben Turner seems to be analyzing the relative importance of hours worked against productivity and happiness,” sort of like how Track Your Happiness does based on the results of your survey answers.

It is interesting to me to think of something like Twitter (which as a developer is FAR more fun to work with than Facebook is) as ambient awareness, or lifestreaming, or, as the blog post intimates, social grooming.  The same way we take facial expressions, body language, intonation, etc. as cues in real life, Twitter sort of lets us do (but not fully) through its platform.

What if we could really bring this out in more meaningful ways than just letting you foul up a web page with dumb wallpapers and icons like myspace did?

[Final note:  I thought the phrase 'tragedy of the comments' was funny, referring to how useless comments on posts usually are, unless curated/rated.]

The initial datapoint, I think, would be the time it takes for a person from a developed nation to reach the point where he/she is creating something genuinely new for society.  My guess would be that it falls somewhere between 30 and 40 years of age.  Calculating the time it takes to finish school, get some experience working, fail a couple times, and perhaps get more schooling (as more and more people are being forced to do now), that would put someone at least around 30 years of age before he is untethered from educational requirements or the trappings of youthful indulgence or overwhelming financial stress.

At that point, he could be expected to formulate his life’s career then, or to at least begin down that path.  Despite the hand-wringing over athletes who are minors, child prodigies, and college dropout entrepreneurs, it seems to me that overall, the really successful people are well into their 30′s that I’m most interested in.  They’ve served their time and are taking more risks.

Other datapoints I’d like to see would be similar to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours:  # of years for education policies to work, # of months for militaries to respond appropriately to new environments, # of generations to forget a culture’s devastating legacy (like 9/11), # of years before basic science investment turns into scientific renaissance, etc.

But the upshot of this is that a few power users (since social networking always follows power laws) are empowered to build out most of the network.  People who aren’t as active in the network can verify their own details and maybe fill in a few other details that they may know.  This is more of a Wikipedia model, where a small number of people do most of the work, but anyone has the opportunity to add or just use what others have done.

I just started using Nike+ and the Gmail import function is broken.  So even though I have like 800 contacts, I can’t check against them to see if anyone else is using Nike+ that I know.  The result is that I only have 1 friend on it right now, another guy I chat with regularly about exercising.  How am I supposed to be more engaged?  How are we supposed to build a community?

So Galapag.us will let people add anyone else’s profile to the system.  I already planned to beta test the site within my Georgetown network, but I can already envision myself adding basic profiles for all my closest friends and then inviting them to claim it for their own.

People will also, I imagine, add profile pages for celebrities.  Celebrities will be somewhat forced to defend themselves by claiming their profile and either parking it or (preferably) building it out.

Another side effect might be that human rights groups could document small communities in war-torn/oppressed countries.  That is, they could keep censuses on small towns and update their info so the world can see if a lot of people are disappearing because of political violence or dying of disease/malnutrition.

While the costs of storage, bandwidth, and processing time are dropping like a rock, the human population in the world is going to be leveling out, and thus there is a finite number of people.  As population stabilizes, individuals will each become more valuable and more will be invested in each person.  In developed nations, families have fewer children because they are not as likely to lose the children to disease or war or anything else — the time and resources spent having more children is then put into giving them better educations and improved health, among other factors.

So Galapag.us will be right in the sweet spot for providing a way to document more and more of the stabilizing population…and then allowing them to create value for themselves through public reputation.  Doesn’t that sound beautiful?

And as I tinker with the overall structure more, I’ve been coming up with lots of lofty ideas for how I want Galapag.us to ultimately look like.

For example, I would love to extend the Galapagos Islands theme and have different islands for the Galapag.users to play on, in some capacity.  There would be a welcoming island where people have to gather enough social capital and contribute back enough such that they can level up and use the full site.  There would be an island for the role-playing game that I intend to build using each person’s unique profile data.  I haven’t thought about how the islands will work exactly, but I want to layer tribes onto that as well.  One problem/benefit is that people have multiple tribes now, not isolated by geography alone.  Can you tie multiple facets of identity to a geographic location in any meaningful way besides having something as hollow as Facebook groups?

This whole way of thinking about islands allows me to build a sort of cultural map of the islands and layer on different aspects of human and social capital.  I’d love to build atmospherics into the islands such that islands have different weather patterns affected by how many people are using a particular part of the site (congestion, increased heat, dynamism) or how prominent the information on that island has become.  I’m not sure how rainy tropical seasons or perfect beach days could be converted from overall site statistics, but it’s a concept I want to explore in order to make the site a breathing entity.

A couple other ideas I had were to view the site as an ecosystem, and employ the Galapag.users to try to maintain the balance of all the different factors on the island, through incentives.  Was there a typhoon in Indonesia?  Perhaps the charity part of the site would offer more incentives when there are calls for Galapag.user action.  Are the long-time users unhappy with new features?  More attention would go there.  There would be hotspots and coldspots on the islands to direct peoples’ attention.  Obviously there would be multiple constituents and lots of issues, but my approach is to use a collaborative method in which users can help maintain the balance.  I’d like to build in Liz Coleman’s liberal arts education program, focusing students on actionable problems and not just fields of interest.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is how to gather more data without people having to manually enter it.  A lot of the problem could be mitigated by taking on companies and organizations to enter in aggregate data.  Why should you have to enter what groceries or fast food meals you bought when those companies can do it quickly and easily not just for you but for everyone? (given a good registration system)  What if the government was sharing information about you to the database for its health services, social security, etc.?  Already I am working on allowing people to enter in info about you so they can help you complete your profile (with you having the final say in approving/declining that info, of course).

There are big issues, such as privacy concerns and getting organizations to share data.  These solutions are sort of pie-in-the-sky but perhaps in the future, our deathgrips on any shred of info we possess will become looser.  Perhaps we’ll be willing to share our info in order to benefit from the data that companies already enjoy about us.  Perhaps it will allow us to engage with companies and organizations better, if we can use universal logins and social data across sites.

Yahoo! has some wonderful documentation on building social capital and incentives into social networks.  I’ve thought about how to properly align incentives for users (in the way of points and achievement bonuses) with Galapag.us’s goals.  One thing I hate about most social networking projects is that they award people who spend 24 hours a day playing or people who just collect other friends or objects without any meaning behind them.  So the goal is not necessarily to reward those who have more time to play, but who can build more meaningful and important connections — true social capital.

I would like to reward notable figures on Galapag.us, like Nobel Prize winners…while at the same time building new metrics and fame for genuine networkers and builders of social capital.  Different people find different ways to be successful and any social networking site/human data platform should represent that.

So I’m thinking big here, which can be frustrating because the whole mentality for start-ups now is to do something really simple.  Everyone pushes you to refine an idea down to an essence — but that goes against the complex, generalist, all-encompassing nature of Galapag.us.  Everyone’s in search of the next Twitter, a simple platform for messaging asymmetrically.  But who’s going to bring all this data together?

These are interesting (but perhaps statistically untestable) hypotheses that I am more than happy to let Galapag.users play with, experiment upon, and debate with each other about.  While I am interested in providing the tools to let Galapag.users interpret their own data however they want, I also know there must be a ubiquitous economic formula or standardized measure within each of the formulae that Galapag.users will create.

It will include some function of attention and time.  That is, peoples’ attention given towards a certain activity, or towards tracking that activity online (a statistical bias in itself, perhaps), is paramount towards determining what value someone places upon an activity or a subject, but it is not the ONLY measure.  Time perhaps is a more neutral unit of measure.  Despite our very different lives, varying deeply not only from person to person but also from tribe to tribe and country to country , we are all dealt with a hard-coded limit of 24 hours in the day.

A large part of that day is spent sleeping (we cannot track quality of sleep yet, but I’d love to have the ability to), but unlimited permutations of how other activities are mixed into the rest of the day reflect our individual uniqueness and personal interests.  As an example, the average hours of sleep per night in the US seems to be about 6-7 hours, while it is recommended that they get 7-8.  Some people may sleep on average more, around 9-10, while others who have a lot of work to do may get as little as 5-6.  Coders certainly may go on long stints without any sleep at all if they’re in the middle of the coding zone on something they’re engaged in.

But you can extract some fairly accurate time-value pictures of people based on how they compose the activities in their days relative to how long that activity takes.  So therefore if you spend 5 hours a day in the gym and working out, probably because you are an athlete, it goes to say that you exceed the average and value that aspect of your life quite a bit.  It’s also likely that you spend a lot of time also on your eating habits and diet.  But not necessarily.  It could be a symptom of some self-image problem.  Or maybe it’s a short-term program, not indicative of your life-long patterns.  It might be that you spend much of your day doing the wrong thing for you (addiction, bad job, family problems), so in that case your numbers will not represent themselves the same way they would for someone else who doesn’t have those issues.  It might be that the summation of activities you do in a day exceeds 24 hours, because you’re capable of multi-tasking.

Thus this gets complex quickly.  But expecting the amount of time you take versus the average, per day, on certain activities is a rough way to gauge the value you place on those things.  Time, not just over a day, but over years and paying specific attention to how different key events (marriage, divorce, children being born, graduations) affect your patterns would become even more fascinating.

Attention and time belong in a function together.  You might be fully engaged into a hobby, relative to others, but it might be that that doesn’t really eat up a lot of your time.  This would be akin to Malcolm Gladwell’s positing that his 10,000 hours need to be active, fully-focused practice and not just 10,000 hours of hanging out at the tennis court chatting while playing a little bit.

These two data points (attention being harder to quantify) will provide the grounding for the rest of the data within Galapag.us formulae.

I think ultimately that these time-value formulae are akin to productivity calculations, which seem interesting when compared across nations.  Western Europe seems to take a lot of vacation time, while Americans take little at all.  Relatively speaking (compared to, perhaps, GDP/capita), who is more productive?  While we can look at our own personal productivities relative to each other, what will it look like when we compare across nations using the Galapag.us dataset?  Can we tug out interesting observations about the value of time and attention?  Can we employ such data towards strategies for increasing human capital and youth development in developing nations?

Do you have any ideas about how to proceed with these measures of value?

Massive financial crisis?  See Daniel Roth’s Wired article for a plan for radical transparency in the financial markets.  See Toby Segaran and Jesper Andersen of freerisk.org talk about transparent asset rating schemes and database schema.  Or read Umair Haque’s call for Finance 2.0.

Political corruption?  See Transparency International or use Global Integrity‘s corruption assessments.  Or see what tools the Sunlight Foundation is working on.

Our detachment from food production systems?  Read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he proposes slaughterhouses transparent to the world instead of the immensely secretive systems in place now.

I love it.  It seems like ages since David Brin wrote his book, “The Transparent Society:  Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?”, which I consider to be one of the most under-rated books out there but which deserves to be cited as often as, say, Hernando de Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital:  Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else”.

Brin proposes a world of total transparency, where we give up much of our “privacy” (to exclude within our homes) in public, in exchange for the ability to watch the watchmen, police, government, other organizations, and each other.

Sunlight, it is often quoted, is the best disinfectant.  I agree.  The hand-wringing over Facebook’s privacy controls is necessary, but in the sense that we need to have control over our own data and reputations, but not necessary in that we are moving towards a world of publicly visible reputations.

Secrecy — that is, darkness, and being able to hide what you do to different people — allows for corruption, duplicity, and deceit.  It breaks down trust.  It leads to massive Ponzi schemes if combined with favorable regulatory environments (one of the genius outcomes of a radical free-market ideology to allow organizations to bilk people out of all their money).  It leads to realpolitik and cutthroat realism.  It discourages education (the less you know, the more I can exploit you) and human rights (you may know, but you can’t do anything about it).

Transparency has basically become what I’ve become infatuated with, along with reputation and identity.  The research model behind my work for the Yahoo!/ISD fellowship looks at privacy and openness and finds what could happen through the intersection of both:  transparency.  My model is below:

I get really excited about this stuff.  This is the way we have to go in so many areas — towards transparency and accountability — if we hope to achieve sustainable progress.  And this goes for us, in our own lives, in our own countries, before we even hope to press other “evil” or “secretive” or “authoritarian” countries to open up to the rest of the world and be more democratic.

So if you have any more examples of transparency projects in other sectors (like in education or in voting machines, et al), or projects I could get involved with in that area, please let me know.

As you know, I’m hoping to build a massive, transparent reputation system where people will be able to affect other peoples’ reputations, which they must defend and can respond to, creating feedback mechanisms…all out in the open.  People I’ve bounced this idea off of for Galapag.us usually respond with disgust that they don’t want to have their privacy violated.  But consider the alternatives.  When you can use a reputation to build capital and prove yourself, and not just be afraid of people knowing things about you, wouldn’t those benefits outweigh the drawbacks?  What about all those people you know who get over, and get away with screwing other people over?  What about them?  How do we hold ourselves accountable?

How can I convince you that Galapag.us will be huge?

In it, he describes a computer simulation he ran based on the game theory game “prisoner’s dilemma”.  Basically, the game assumes two prisoners, speaking to the police separately.  If both stay mum on the crime they both committed, they get the lightest punishment.  But if both tattle on the other, they both get a fairly bad punishment.  If one tells on the other but the other doesn’t do the same, then the traitor gets a lighter punishment and the other gets a really horrible punishment.  So it would seem to be “safest” to confess on the other party, just to be sure.

Instead of analyzing one iteration of the game, he extended it to run multiple iterations, building on past results, to generate the best outcome for both parties.

What Axelrod concluded was that the best strategy for a party in this game is to reciprocate the other’s move, after opening with a cooperation move.  That is, the first thing you should do is cooperate.  But if the other party defects, then you should reciprocate by defecting too and reciprocate every move henceforth.  But your overall strategy should be to want to cooperate and forget past defections.

Basically, as our professor put it, this strategy is “be nice, retaliatory, and forgiving”.

There are flaws in this game, as my brilliant classmates pointed out:  parties are rarely equal in international negotiations (the US vs. Panama), the first defector ultimately has a slight advantage, and sometimes payoffs for cooperating/defecting are different for each party.

But I am interested in the overall message:  reciprocity.

If I am going to try to build a comprehensive reputation system, then it cannot just be a quantitative measure of your life-long statistics.  It must also incorporate social and qualitative measures, such as what other people think about you.  In other words, your reputation as we tend to think of it now.  It is an amalgamation of all the acts that other people know (and suspect) you’ve done.

If you are going to evaluate someone else’s honesty and trustworthiness, you want to know whether they’ve ever pulled a fast one on someone else.  Even then, would you still conduct commerce with them?

Galapag.us will allow people to post bad things about other people, something that’s fairly neutered online right now (for obvious reasons).  But what mechanism needs to exist in order to counter this is the ability to reciprocate both by the person aggrieved and by the system itself.

Yes, you can post something negative about me.  But the system will see this as a negative attack that should cost you something, and both my friends and myself will have methods to attack you back.  All done in public.  So it’s a transparent system that holds people accountable to their actions.  It allows for reciprocity.

Says Axelrod:

“Once the word gets out that reciprocity works – among nations or among individuals – it becomes the thing to do. If you expect others to reciprocate your defections as well as your cooperations, you will be wise to avoid starting any trouble. Moreover, you will be wise to respond appropriately after someone else defects, showing that you will not be exploited. Thus you too would be wise to use a strategy based upon reciprocity. So would everyone else. In this manner the appreciation of the value of reciprocity becomes self-reinforcing. Once it gets going, it gets stronger and stronger.  This is the essence of the ratchet effect: Once cooperation based upon reciprocity gets established in a population, it cannot be overcome even by a cluster of individuals who try to exploit the others. The establishment of stable cooperation can take a long time if it is based upon blind forces of evolution, or it can happen rather quickly if its operation can be appreciated by intelligent players.”

It will be interesting to see how different personalities approach this functionality.  Will some people defect more often on others?  Will some really come to value being trustworthy?  Will people become hypersensitive about any sort of negative attack like on eBay’s buyer/seller ratings?  How can Galapag.us facilitate an equitable system.

These won’t be easy questions to answer, but my overall goal is to create a reputation management system that rewards cooperation and social capital while at the same time valuing negative feedback, both in the sense of finding it necessary and important, and in the sense that if you say something bad about someone, it should cost you something to take that course of action.

A last point I want to make is about the value Galapag.us holds:  its permanence.  It establishes a long-term view and accountability upon all users.

Axelrod says, “For cooperation to prove stable, the future must have a sufficiently large shadow. This means that the importance of the next encounter between the same two individuals must be great enough to make defection an unprofitable strategy.”

Clay Shirky, who’s been thinking about reputation a lot lately, talks about the “shadow of the future” as well, based on Axelrod’s reciprocity.  You get a sense that the Ayn Randish selfishness and every man for himself attitude is only a short-term game.  Some might call this social Darwinism or survival of the fittest, or Malthusian or gladiatorial (as Wikipedia says in its article on Axelrod’s “The Evolution of Cooperation”).

But the shadow of the future, the mankind and individual memory we have of the past, allows us to play out into the long-term.  And this is where altruism and “mutual aid” come in.  It might serve our purposes better to work together than to play for ourselves (i.e. the prisoner’s dilemma).  We may need to be competitive to advance, but if we destroy each other in a zero-sum game, then we will all die.  The ecosystem we are all a part of thrives when we’re all there, participating.

So Galapag.us was not born of a cutthroat mentality where every person must compete with everyone else.  Galapag.us is that ecosystem, made up of many levels and units and layers of biomass and data, and the more datamass there is, the more information we can learn from it in order to grow more individually.  It is a network of trust and accountability that creates teeming supplies of social capital so that we can conduct better business and social networking and self-awareness.

Mike Neuenschwander wrote a post on how it’s good that social science is coming into the internet security (which feeds off of reputation) discussion, which had been dominated by computer science in the past.  What he says is,

“However, I’d like to add that Axelrod’s work is only a starting point—a portal into the discipline of what I now refer to as “social trust online.” Some of my “Laws of Relation” hark back to Axelrod. But Axelrod’s work on reciprocity isn’t sufficient for developing new pathways to trust on the Internet. In fact, filling in all the other applicable research on trust is the entire purpose of my contributions to this site.”

So with that in humble mind, there’s a lot more to research in order to make Galapag.us the massive all-encompassing trust network for every human and thing on the Earth that I envision it to eventually be.

The start-up/entrepreneur community linked the heck out of Hoffman (like at TechCrunch), so his name kept getting more and more traction.

Although Hoffman is right about making the US hospitable to immigrants (immigrants are shown to very positively impact economic growth), I do not agree with much else of what Hoffman does or says.  Why?

LinkedIn

Listening to Hoffman peddle LinkedIn on Charlie Rose was kind of sad.  Really?  A popular founder posted a question on a forum on LinkedIn and a bunch of people responded?  Wow, you can post recommendations of people on LinkedIn?  That’s amazing!  Only on LinkedIn can you use forums and post things about people!

This probably works pretty well if you’re popular and have a lot of fans willing not only to read you but also to contribute.  But how does this help individuals with little prominence get a job or promote themselves?

Can anyone not affiliated with LinkedIn honestly say it’s helped them professionally at all?  The more people join LinkedIn, the more their job listings become like Monster or other clearing houses for jobs.  i.e. they’re totally useless.  Naturally a lot of bloodsucking headhunting/recruiting companies leech onto LinkedIn and bulk post listings, diluting the value even more.  Now there’s a 6-figure salary professional networking site, TheLadders, which I’m sure looks upon LinkedIn with disdain but is also pretty much useless to most people.

Hoffman dismisses Facebook as a place mostly for photo-sharing.

Uh, what?  That’s a pretty big red flag that he either was making a small off-the-cuff comment, or he has no clue what he’s talking about when it comes to social networking.  Facebook is massive; it’s vibrant, explains who people are, and allows people to be creative.  LinkedIn is stuffy.

It’s unfortunate, too, because LinkedIn could totally become a standardized resume service so that you don’t need to hand someone a resume, they just go to LinkedIn and find you.  Then your resume never goes out of date.  You know, like how the web is supposed to work…

The Future of Social Networking

LinkedIn is an added layer of redundant social graphs on top of something really useful like Facebook.  I’d be more likely to meet people I want to work with and communicate with through Facebook than on the staid LinkedIn.

Hoffman talks about people in the future needed two social networking sites.  One professional, one personal.  I completely disagree.  I think one thing to come out of this Great Disruption and crashing down of old business models is that personal and professional lives will be combined.

It’s unsustainable to live a dual life of your professional self and your personal self.  One should reinforce the other.  People create value when they’re employed in a way that allows them to self-actualize and be creative.  They are useless as drones.  People aren’t comfortable with this yet (privacy concerns) but it’s the only way a future information/service/networking economy is going to work.

Hoffman’s world of two separated social networks is ridiculous.  Most of us play with the people we work with, or at least socialize to some degree.  Our networks overlap quite a bit even though we try to control the degree of convergence to “protect” our reputations.

Identity layer protocols in production right now like OpenID and OAuth and Facebook Connect and Yahoo! Open Strategy and OpenSocial are going to jailbreak our social graph data.  We will be able to use multiple sites simultaneously.  Likely there will be an aggregator through which we use those other sites (Facebook hopes it will be the aggregator), but each site will cater towards specific hobbies and interests (that is, specialization of Facebook into social networking, Yahoo! into social media, Twitter into micro-messaging).  Our daily internet use will look more like a meshy ecosystem of different sites and brands.  Companies will have to fiercely build their brands so that their data doesn’t get absorbed into a ghoulash you see when you open your browser.

Stimulus Plan

So then Hoffman argues passionately in his WaPo column that the stimulus plan should earmark money for giving micro-loans to small businesses.

There’s a canard that the Republicans love to use that the lifeblood of the economy is in small businesses and start-ups.  Now, as someone who wants to start my own company, you’d think that I’d be all in favor of this talk.  But it’s not really true.

Yes, there are far more small businesses than big businesses.  Duh.  You can start and close a business fairly easy in this country (see the World Bank’s Doing Business report).  Obviously the aggregation of human capital into firms is going to consolidate into larger and larger companies, which will be fewer than small businesses.

But those large firms are also usually fairly successful (to have gotten that far), require massive administrative/financing/etc. support and logistics and clustering and supply chains and their own mini ecosystems.  That is why they generate far more actual productive jobs than a small business with a handful of people could.

Small companies far more often than not fail to make money.  They churn quite a bit.  Hoffman of course would like to boast about Google and Amazon and Microsoft (he cites Microsoft in his article) as examples of how small businesses drive the economy.  But these companies are outliers that actually had different, revolutionary ways of doing business.  They don’t represent the majority of small businesses.

In short, most small businesses are trash and will never make it.  They will barely employ anyone.

So Hoffman recommends giving loans to small businesses.  Is this a government function?  To fund businesses?  No.  What Hoffman seems to be advocating is a lot of mini-bailouts for small businesses that can’t monetize or succeed in an open market.  He seems to want to subsidize failing businesses.  How are these people going to pay back their loans if their businesses fail?  Will they blot out their credit records early with a bankruptcy?  Does this funding come along with better bankruptcy/business exit regulation that’s more conducive to entrepreneurial endeavors?

Hoffman says, “The stimulus finances important development of infrastructure, renewable energy and scientific research, which is great for jobs in the short term but doesn’t guarantee the vibrant economic ecosystem required for sustainability.”

What?  How does research and infrastructure only lead to short-term jobs?  Doesn’t he have it backwards?  Research and infrastructure create long-term ecosystems and new sectors for jobs, while micro-loans create short-term jobs?  I’m confused.

To dispute this, let’s take a look at how some companies came about, through small business loans:

FedEx (from “FedEx History”):

“In 1965, Yale University undergraduate Frederick W. Smith wrote a term paper about the passenger route systems used by most airfreight shippers, which he viewed as economically inadequate. Smith wrote of the need for shippers to have a system designed specifically for airfreight that could accommodate time-sensitive shipments such as medicines, computer parts and electronics.

“In August of 1971 following a stint in the military, Smith bought controlling interest in Arkansas Aviation Sales, located in Little Rock, Ark. While operating his new firm, Smith identified the tremendous difficulty in getting packages and other airfreight delivered within one to two days. This dilemma motivated him to do the necessary research for resolving the inefficient distribution system. Thus, the idea for Federal Express was born: a company that revolutionized global business practices and now defines speed and reliability.”

Burger King:

From “Food Metrics”:

“When you think of McDonald’s in San Bernardino and later Des Plaines, Wendy’s in Columbus, Burger King in Miami, and KFC in Corbin, Ky., the one element that combines all these concepts is food. Colonel Harlan Sanders sells the first KFC fran­chise in 1952. Burger King opens its first restaurant in 1954 in Miami. Ray Kroc sees the success that the McDonald brothers are having in their restaurant in California and immediately starts to sell the brothers on the idea of opening other restaurants, first to sell his Multimixers and then to run them himself. He opens his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Ill., in 1955. Along the way, Pizza Hut starts up in Wichita in 1958. The common thread? Food—the American equalizer.

“With the development of the interstate highway system through the 1960s and into the 1970s, we’re on the road, and we find a growing number of meals are being eaten away from home. By using franchise and license systems of development, food vendors are able to develop chains of (continued from page 35) restaurants, thus leveraging purchasing power for all of them and using those franchise and license agreements to leverage standards of operation across franchise net works. McDonald’s is a strong proponent of mandatory standards and leads the way for other chains to develop quickly. McDonald’s targets television advertising to children and drives sales by reaching out to the youngest members of the family. All this occurs at a time when mobility and suburb growth are exponentially expanding.”

I think if you read a lot of histories of successful companies, you will not really read a whole lot on how they got financed.  I mean, some have interesting stories like Charles Ferguson’s company, Vermeer, that he eventually sold to Microsoft.  But mostly these companies were about people, and about ideas.

Hoffman mentions MTV and CNN as start-ups…really?  Too bad he didn’t mention Google and Yahoo!, both started out of a very generous Stanford computer science school that put up with the massive resources they ended up using.

Similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s point in Outliers that people do not just happen to be successful, new firms are very often products of large agglomerations of human capital.  Fast food, as Eric Schlosser discusses in Fast Food Nation, came about after WW2 and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 under Eisenhower, that created a market for food on the go — it is no mystery why all of our greatest fast food chains were created at about the same time in the 50′s-60′s.  FedEx was the product of university research and experience in the military through Fred Smith.  Heck, even Reid Hoffman is a Stanford-born and Berkeley-raised Stanford and Oxford grad, all pillars of human capital agglomeration, a key driver of innovation and growth as Richard Florida describes in his latest book, Who’s Your City?.

Human Capital

Hoffman belittles Obama’s investments into human capital.  Funding university research, private research, improved education systems and schools, technological and logistical infrastructure, these are all keys towards building human capital so that it can continue to innovate.  Green energy research is going to at the same time lower the cost of energy inputs into development and production and consumption, while providing new jobs and new sectors for continued economic growth.  It will also wean us away from having to work long hours to create value, as we transition to a lifestyle where we value living as much or more than working for someone else.

Hoffman’s cute but pithy quote that everyone will be an entrepreneur is quite frankly offensive.  Not everyone has an entrepreneurial spirit.  Certainly most entrepreneurs are not social entrepreneurs, people who seek not just to own a business or make lots of money, but to also (and primarily) to help a lot of people.  Entrepreneurial literature carefully discusses how entrepreneurs are NOT like other people, most of whom just want to earn a comfortable salary and raise a good family.  Far different to take responsibility for your life (as we all should do) than to work on a completely untested, unproven idea (as true social entrepreneurs do).

The money for financing new ideas will always be there.  Forcing investors and financiers to fund bad businesses is just like the Big 3 bailout on a smaller scale.

What we should be doing is investing in people, building their intellectual and creative capacity, while giving them the health and social security to take risks.  Start-ups are most constrained not by lack of funding (except for large capital expenditure ideas like nano or bio research), but by not having the time and living money necessary to dedicate to an idea without having a regular job.

We should invest in training and mentoring people to build their human capital that way, too.  We should encourage people with opportunities to do what they really enjoy to do, to find a way to apply their talents and skills towards something that might be valuable or profitable.  We should invest more into organizations like the National Science Foundation and DARPA and joint partnerships between universities and businesses and government.  We should invest in universities all the way down to K-12, but focus mainly on high school, where most American children fall behind internationally.  We should invest in common areas for knowledge (public centers, co-working, etc.) and internet infrastructure.  We should free companies from having to fund health care for their employees, by universalizing health care.  Why do Republicans support businesses having to pay for health care instead of concentrating on their core businesses and making money?  We should guarantee college for students but also have public schools compete against private schools, as Stanford’s president John Hennessy just told Charlie Rose in a recent interview.

A recent study released by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, entitled “The Atlantic Century:  Benchmarking EU and US Innovation and Competitiveness” (PDF file warning), ranked the US #6 overall out of 40 states/groups of states, and dead last (!) out of all 40 in improvement in innovation and competitiveness in the last decade.  The indicators?  Human capital, innovation capacity, entrepreneurship, information technology infrastructure, economic policy, and economic performance.  Vencap and small business creation, two things Hoffman values, are only small parts of the whole picture.  And even in this downturn, privately funding and ease of starting a business is still something the US does really, really well.  So why is he so focused on that stuff when there are deeper structural problems in our government funding and education systems?  Is it because he’s a financier?  Hmm.

Can we just get rid of this idea of “economic incentives” as the only way to spur growth?  Incentives mean distortions at some level, and what Hoffman wants would be tantamount to nationalizing start-ups and innovation.  The government should invest with human capital, not with money.

Money doesn’t lead to ideas…ideas lead to money…please don’t buy into this crap.  At some point, ol’-money-bags-America will run out of ideas and will have nothing worthwhile to fund.  Then it will cease to have money.  That will happen if we don’t invest in human capital.

I think Obama’s stimulus and budget proposals see the value in this and have provided a lot of money to raise human capital.  I have no idea if the amount of money proposed is enough, but the initiative is there.  I want the US to be competitive and innovative, and therefore I must sharply disagree with what Reid Hoffman had to say.  I hope you feel the same way.

Malcolm Gladwell

I just finished reading “Outliers”.  I found it to be superb; its adoption of cultural legacy as one of the missing inputs for discussion of how people become successful is brilliant.

You can watch Charlie Rose talk to Gladwell about the book on the Charlie Rose site.

Gladwell argues that people are not destined for success, or born with all the talent they need, or have advantage as a pure function of just income.  It is the culture in which those people grow up in that is key.

For example, he starts off by saying that professional hockey players seem to be overwhelmingly born in the first few months of the year.  The reason?  Age cut-offs for youth leagues give these kids an advantage because they’re older and stronger than the kids born later in the year.  As a result, these kids get picked to advance, and receive more training and practice than the other kids.  The other kids are doomed from the beginning.

But even then, not necessarily.  What else could happen is that certain kids find odd circumstances.  Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, for example, logged computer time on local school systems that by chance had terminals, a rarity for the day.  As a result, he had the practice and skill to code at an early age, well before almost everyone else in the world, within the context of the birth of modern computing.

Gladwell also proposes that Asian cultures, based in rice-growing, have a distinct cultural advantage in persistence to attack a problem that wheat-growing Russian or American cultures do not have.  Rice requires a lot of precision, love, and nurturing to grow.  Corn and wheat are fairly easy to grow and don’t take much work (however, read this article in last month’s Wired about the top corn-grower in America).  In school tests, Asian children spend far longer trying to solve math problems than white children.  Gladwell says that this is not because Asians are just “better at math” but because they have been raised and taught not to give up so easily, to diligently solve problems.  He also states this might be rooted in the Chinese numbering system, which is more logical than the English one in the ways it is expressed.

The other crux of Gladwell’s book is that failure is not assured for those not born to privilege.

As an example, Gladwell cites a study that tracks the progress on a standardized test given both at the end of the school year and right after the summer break.  While rich and poor students seem to learn at the same rate during the school year, regardless of socio-economic status, low-income students learn absolutely nothing over the summer while high-income students continue to learn at a healthy clip.

The reason?  Rich kids’ parents keep their minds engaged and challenge them to question authority and to ask a lot of questions.  They might have books around for the kids to read, or send the kids to summer camps.  Poor kids’ parents are more accepting of the environment and defer to authority as if it were not their responsibility as much to push their children.  The children just languish during the entire summer.

Gladwell talks about the life of one guy whose IQ scores rival Robert Oppenheimer’s.  The difference was the first genius came from an environment where he never received breaks, even when he made it to university; the university would not allow him to continue studies and never encouraged his obviously brilliant mind by fostering it.  Oppenheimer on the other hand received the benefits of privilege and was always given opportunities to thrive.

I found another part of Gladwell’s book highly fascinating:  his look at Harvard students.  He concludes that after a certain point, IQ stops mattering.  Someone with an IQ of 120 is not going to be more successful or creative than someone with a 180 IQ.  All that matters is that one becomes smart enough.  Gladwell writes about affirmative-action students at Michigan who had lower entrance scores but who ended up doing just as well as the other students later in life; they were given the opportunity that comes from the degree, along with working with a different class of people, and they turned out as good as everyone else.

Human Capital

I have always been more interested in studying the biographies of people than, say, reading fiction or even reading about historical events.  Gladwell has encapsulated what I’ve found so interesting:  what breaks did these people get to get where they are today, and where would I be if I did or didn’t get similar breaks?

I know in my own life that there have been times when I’ve been given extraordinary opportunities that I didn’t feel like I deserved.  I’ve also had times where I’ve reached out for a mentor, for someone to push me further, and have been let down and disappointed by apathy.  While entrepreneur advocates would have you believe that it takes just sheer will and determination to make it, I think this is only partly true.  It certainly matters who you know, what opportunities you come across, and how lucky you get.  This “luck” is what Gladwell refers back to often, as that intangible that allows certain people to develop a competitive advantage on others through sheer circumstance.

I don’t have a lot of time to play computer games but I do remember contributing to a bulletin board on Prodigy back in the early 90′s that was dedicated to the computer game Civilization.

I was barely in my teens and was talking with programmers and people older than me about this game.  It’s stayed with me up to this day.

So when I was reading about Civilization IV, the latest installment, last semester, I found that they’ve actually created quite a clever approximation of what Gladwell is talking about.  You can call it Michael Porter’s “cluster” or a supportive community (like SanFran for start-ups) or whatever.

In CivIV, you are the ruler of a civilization and you can build cities.  These cities can dedicate their labor in different directions such as food production, mining, or knowledge work.  That knowledge work, if there is enough of it, can birth a “great scientist”, such as Albert Einstein, whose presence gives the city even more knowledge capital — he can build a great scientific work in a city that propels it to the top of the world in science.  The same can all be said about working on entertainment and culture:  Shakespeare could be born in a city and settle there, making it a global cultural powerhouse.

Culture can be an imperial weapon in CivIV as well.  A city’s cultural influence boundaries can be expanded as its culture capital increases.  A foreign civilization’s city that falls within your city’s cultural boundaries may decide it wants to switch over to your civilization.  In this way, capture is bloodless and organic to that new city.  CivIV also allows you to found religions and send out missionaries.  You can build a civilization that is fundamentally founded upon Buddhism, and foreign cities won’t switch to your side solely on that basis, but if they are proximate to your Buddhist cities, they may switch to Buddhism and therefore be more sympathetic to your interests.

A final point:  if you accumulate enough capital, you can trigger a renaissance, which increases the civilizational cultural, scientific, and economic growth per turn for a while.  Gladwell’s stories of personalities and the opportunities they received are like mini-renaissances:  if that person accumulates enough opportunities to keep pushing forward with his interest, then all the sudden he might have the chance to make a key breakthrough!

I think the gaming engine for this is simply brilliant.  Instead of simply a battle to build up military units and economic power in the original games, now the game is a battle of cultural contexts and amassing human capital.

Sometimes it feels as though our policy implementations for education, politics, and international affairs, is all based on a hare-brained view of the world, without the cultural context at all.  Despite the recently deceased Sam Huntington’s seminal work, “The Clash of Civilizations:  Remaking of World Order”, we have just begun to come to terms with a unilateral, western-biased, free-market attack on Iraq, Afghanistan, the banking system, health care sans businesses, low-cost housing, HIV/AIDS strategy in Africa, and so on.

International Development

Malcolm Gladwell uses the well-known cultural context study by Geert Hofstede, which Gaurav, Pav, and I used extensively in our research over on the Yahoo! fellowship blog.  Gladwell does not point out that the study only interviews or surveys IBM employees and not any broad-based country survey.  But still the classifications of context from “uncertainty avoidance” to “power distance index” shaped a lot of debate into how different cultures should perceive and cooperate with each other.

In the international development field, which I’ve been studying for my Master’s, it seems to me that despite some good work to add anthropological perspective to the field, aid and development practitioners still come from a highly top-down oriented perspective.  Only a few rebels like Bill Easterly ask why we spend all this money on projects that have no transparency, accountability for results, and arguable pay-offs.

People like Easterly argue that development must be organic to the culture.  Bottom-up action makes progress sustainable.  In other words, the people have to do it — there can’t be a deus ex machina, which foreign aid agencies and the World Bank/IMF have tried in the last few decades.

Even the most savvy and regionally-trained practitioners are still saddled with a budget and policy daddy that forces them to act in a certain way (the western way) on the ground.  There has been some improvement, particularly from England’s DfID and Scandinavia in terms of how to effectively help developing nations, but it’s a long way from ideal.

Amartya Sen‘s book “Development as Freedom” is massively influential right now; it claims that self-actualization and freedom to pursue one’s own path is the perspective to view international development from.  Sen’s point of view is coming to be the newest, hottest point of view, and in my opinion this is a good thing.  Individual capability (Gladwell’s skill-building) or human capital is always impeded by top-down efforts because the top-down approach is directly in conflict with human rights and actualization.  I am reading similar sentiments in my comparative democratization class, its literature showing just how important organic democracy-building and human/institutional/social capital are towards sustainable democracy.

This has been quite a long post, and I apologize, but I do see something truly remarkable converging out of all these different, recent projects.  While it sounds pithy, we may be truly returning the human (and by extention, environmental and natural) element to modern civilization.

Why would you like to participate in the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship?

For the last two years, I have been thinking about my web start-up idea, taking it through class assignments from crude business plan and online prototype to elevator pitches.  I must formalize my business background, meet inter-disciplinarians, and form a team.  As junior Yahoo!/Institute for the Study of Diplomacy fellow, I studied international values and their effects on social networking site design and individual privacy.  As a Georgetown international development concentrator, I took classes in small-medium enterprise and social entrepreneurship, seeking to create a social business to help the disadvantaged.

What specific goals do you hope to achieve?

I have breadth from past studies (international affairs, social media, anthropology, capital markets), but desire a business background to be a tough-nosed founder, and to find the right founding team of smart, diverse, entrepreneurial-minded people.  I will refine my pitch and will develop monetization metrics along with contingencies for my start-up’s first few years.  Specifically I am looking forward to the modules in negotiation, management communication, and non-verbal communication to shore up my people skills.

What are your entrepreneurial ambitions? If you are currently pursuing an entrepreneurial venture, please be as specific as you can.

My organization will be split into a personal data control advocacy foundation and a social business for persistent identity system for the web.  I believe  all humans (6 billion customers) as well as “the internet of things” can have verified identity online through which they build credit history, reputation, and personal brand for their various transactions and networking.

Imagine viewing my reputation online through a number score in different areas of my life (business, education, personal), and using it to judge whether you should admit me or not.  Imagine if that score contained all my public life datapoints, and you could contribute your knowledge of me to it, a Wikipedia for my reputation.  Global reputation management systems will be the next big killer app once identity-layer standards such as OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial become popularized, which will be within the next two years.

How will the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship help you achieve your career goals?

I attended last year’s Academy of Achievement summit in Hawai’i and met one hundred other grad students from all fields (mainly science and health), who all had different, creative views of the world.  Multi-disciplinarian environments are key towards the viability of my company since it will bridge fields to approximate individual identity.  To operationalize my international development studies, I seek to use my start-up as a social business to improve the welfare of those who had no way to protect their reputations or to build social credit.

What leadership skills, entrepreneurial experience and perspectives will you contribute to the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship?

I served five years US Army enlisted, eventually a sergeant, both in field operations and in headquarters, so I have on-the-ground leadership experience through training new troops and deploying to Iraq, as well as larger strategic experience working with senior officers.  I studied international development as well as telecommunications policy while at Georgetown in Washington, DC, so I can bring in knowledge of how state policies may affect start-up climate.  I researched online privacy in different cultural contexts through my Yahoo!/ISD fellowship, obtained because I was recognized by my program as web-savvy, having coded and maintained databases, using Twitter, multiple blogs, Facebook, and other social networking tools to further my online presence.