One of those would be, I thought, the gradual quantification of everything that is subjective and ineffable. That would be the last conceptual barrier that machines would need to overcome before being able to contain us (because “understand” would be too romantic a term).

I remember being very excited about that prospect. An increasingly seamless translation of the subjective into the digital, turning “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” into structured data. The ultimate XML. This somehow seemed ideal, friendly and open, and I saw no harm. I predicted a time when The Great Translation would be in its infancy, and that time is here.

If there's no button for it, it didn't happen.

With data mining as its background, the process now has a UI in Facebook’s new “Life event” button. Its subsections are a crudely generalised categorisation of everything that may matter in a person’s life. It is implicitly reductive, potentially insulting to one’s feeling of uniqueness. Fine, I thought, I can overcome that, the same way I push myself to get over the uncomfortable feeling that comes with every new interface.

But this was different. The data was me. Squeezing it into those categories felt very uncomfortable. As if Facebook were going for my Ineffable Parts (my proposed addition to the public and the private kind). The social version of Uncanny Valley.

For some reason, I didn’t feel like helping Facebook understand these things about me. I quickly sat down and asked myself why, panting in fear of being a closeted Luddite.

I found that privacy is not the issue. I’ve made the pact with publicness and agree with Jeff Jarvis’s point, for better or worse.

My problem is that Facebook’s Life Events feels like ancient technology. Because it is among the first visible steps towards the Great Quantification That is to Come, it feels antiquated from the start. Looking at it feels like looking back at it. Like a first generation gadget with revolutionary tech, that you know will be twice as good next year, and then the year after that. It feels ancient and ridiculous the moment you encounter it, because it contains a glimpse of its own extraordinary future. The Newton of next-generation social media.

Not a Luddite then, I concluded, but definitely not an early adopter. Being either too cautious or too lazy, I’m going to wait for data mining to catch up. I want Facebook (or the next corporate repository of human existence) to learn these things on its own, or from the brave front line of early adopters willing to teach it and do the parenting work. I want it to gather signals from places I’d never have thought of and understand things about me without my direct intervention (also, inevitably, without my consent).

All in all, I still welcome our robot overlords, but I just don’t have the patience to help see them through their infancy.

Marius Lobontiu

Studying Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.

    

The procedure involves imaging the author’s hard disk and then using virtualization to simulate their machine on any other computer.

The entire experience looked and felt strangely fascinating. You spend the boot-up time watching a screen that they watched for years. Their desktop is as they left it. Their latest files, some documents half-finished, others done and archived. You see their folder structure and their system settings, their wallpaper. Any games they may have (imagine playing through their saves!). The number of icons on their desktop, their choice of OS and browser… It’s all a surprisingly intense and private experience, and most of all a voyeuristic buzz.

I couldn’t help but drift into thinking about what it would have been like to have a resource like this for authors from the past century. Would Joyce have used a Mac? An obscure flavour of Linux for Ginsberg? Hemingway seems an obvious Windows man. I’d pay good money to see Huxley’s wallpaper… And so on.

The experience is completed by a full all-angle panorama of the authors’ workspace. Ted Hughes uses large planks of wood on his desk to separate his projects. Moving them around, it was suggested, is the physical equivalent of resizing a window.

It would be pointless to go over how important a place the digital now has in our lives, how deeply personal, even intimate, our computers are, as spaces we inhabit.

Catching a glimpse of that, in a state that is frozen forever, would be utterly captivating. It would provide a more meaningful connection to an author than watching pictures of them or even reading their biography. It is not a frozen moment, but a frozen interactive state. A piece of their world, alive and captured at the same time. It goes beyond the static nature of photography and the linear nature of biography. It is better than archive footage, because there is no fourth wall. There is no end to what you can discover and deduce. Any photograph, footage or biography implies a forced mediation, an author of their own, forcing the spectator to view things through their perspective, captured finitely in a single, monolithic object. Browsing a disk image is neither finite, nor mediated, or static. It is literally a living piece, cut out from the world and preserved; the only equivalent would be a 100% accurate holodeck recreation of a slice of time from the author’s life, with no detail left to a director’s imagination. And it is plainly obvious that holodeck simulations have never been 100% accurate.

A sense of history is embedded in the age of the operating system and the design of the interface, while the date in the corner of the screen invites a strange meditation. The author’s works, saved in the original editable files, would seem alive and fresh, so far from the finite, “untouchable” printed editions.

Why not imagine a time when the tour of an author’s home will include precious minutes spent on their computer? Or being able to do this online, from your own home? I could see myself spending countless hours in the digital worlds of my favourite authors. I imagine someone trying to write a book in another author’s style, or world, on their computer. Or writing their biography.

Most of all, I imagine how amazing it would be to be part of the team that creates that first online museum.

Marius Lobontiu

Studying Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.

    

Matthew Yglesias thinks we’re only on the back half of the chess board

David Kravets sees the end of the internet

Mark Graham maps the wikipedian world

Christopher Mims says Google+ is better without you

Rebecca J. Rosen asks how to code Occupy Wall Street

I missed lots, tell me about it below.

Danny Holland

The four bloggers murdered over the past two months in the city of Nuevo Laredo no doubt thought their message would spur collective action. Clearly, there is widespread hatred of the drug cartels, just as their is widespread frustration over the world’s financial institutions. Unfortunately, instead of mass protests they found themselves either hanging from an overpass or decapitated on the side of a road. Beside their bodies signs warned others not to criticize the Los Zetas online. “This happened to me because of my reports, and yours.” Beside the headless corpse of one was placed a keyboard, a mouse, and headphones: certainly a strong message to those who would speak their mind. More recently, after Anonymous said they would leak sensitive information about the cartel in operation #OpCartel, it was reported that a member of Anonymous was kidnapped.

What were these bloggers and anonymous hacktivists attempting to accomplish, exactly? The Los Zetas not only have guns, lots and lots of guns, but they’re run by ex-mexican special forces units, some which are trained in counterintelligence (it was reported that they were hiring security experts to track Anonymous members down). They can do exactly what the anonymous members can do, but they also have guns. Similarly, the OWS protesters are doing nothing that the 1% can’t pay for.

Watching this unfortunate drama and the OWS protests gain nothing but media attention, I’ve become disenfranchised by the current embodiment of collective action. It has created the largest database of human knowledge and many generous online communities, but these are productive changes, not reactionary changes; they use the power of networks and collective action to build new social frameworks. Unlike creation, reactionary changes have the immense problem of attempting to topple that which they are reacting against. Institutions have deep roots spread throughout varying socio-economical strata.

What Anonymous needs to do is get off their asses – and I don’t mean in a let’s go set up tents kind of way – and either infiltrate the institutions they oppose. That, or they could collectively play the same game. Only a small group of highly motivated individuals need to be heavily involved, which is usually the lynchpin of a larger online networks anyway. Why not involve that other less-motivated nodes of the collective and have them crowd-fund to support the action of the lynchpins. For the OWS movement, crowd-fund to pay for real lobbyists who are sympathetic to the cause (one step at a time of course, lobbying is the core of the problem itself).

In the case of the drug cartels, it’s not so easy. People’s lives are in danger and there appears to be no legal way to deal with the Cartels. NLV, the online paper for which two of the bloggers wrote for, was focusing its attention on trying to disrupt the gang’s operations. They set up a map to which people could anonymously post where drug deals were occuring and where they thought stash houses were located. This map was taken down, no doubt out of fear, but it’s fleeting existence remains one positive action the collective can spur at this point in time. If Mexicans can quietly attempt to subvert gang operations by anonymously sharing information, which the government forces can use (supposing they’re not corrupt as well), then they can continue to challenge their authority. Unfortunately, they still have guns, and the 1% still has the cash.

Tyler Handley

Tyler is a Master’s student in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. His interests are in collective intelligence, online cultures, networks, and using new-media for social good.

An inherent lack of organization, leadership and statement of purpose is not compatible with how we, as a society, function today. It is incomprehensible not because it lacks efficiency or power or motivation, but because we cannot hear it.

This movement is the product of a different paradigm that is specific to the web. It is divided from “us” in the common meatspace by a culture gap so wide that its recent physical manifestation appears, to most people, as no more than baffling. Where there is novelty and freedom, many will see incoherence.

As far as I can tell, social movements have always had clear motive and more or less charismatic leaders, manifestos and the type of identity that made it easy for likeminded people to join – and for the powers that be to understand and communicate with them.

Yet in spite of these apparent failings, many do join the Occupy movements. Each brings their own motives and drive, and the sound of all the voices mashed together rings loud, but as communicative to the world at large as the sound of television tuned to a dead channel. And while the common thread may seem impossible to hear, it is still present in a different, more obscure sense, of which all that may get through is a general feeling of disenfranchisement, a vision of the great disconnect between the people and those who lead them. And I am forced to ask, is this enough? Enough for what, exactly?

But all of this speaks more, I think, about the way in which a part of the specific mentality of the web has now gathered enough momentum to spill out into real life. This is a crowdsourced movement, complete with all the misinformation, flame wars, trolling and havoc found on any message board or busy IRC channel. Only there are no real moderators and no forms of physical control. No one can ban you from an Occupy protest. There are no ideological tools for that, and the screens keep filling up and rolling by faster than the eye can read, while the only common banner is a general feeling of displeasement.

A new type of organism is being formed, with only half of its vital organs in place. It has an immune system that can only repel outside threats – any suppression or abuse by law enforcement is quickly made public, and therefore impossible. But this immune system does not extend to smoothing out the threats within – individuals or small groups can act on their own, and engage in reprehensible behavior, with no established mechanism to stop them. Factions may break off and pursue their own agendas. The movement can be infiltrated by other, “classically” organized groups with clear purposes of their own.

Can this devolve into something similar to the London riots? Has that already been avoided, or would it have happened by now if it were possible? Will it happen somewhere no one expects it to?

The web is an appropriately sterile place for social experiments such as this, were the beauty of an immense and amorphous entity can be safely observed and adhered to. The masses may move freely and creatively in the digital space, but something is bound to be lost in translation when switching to the “real” world.

This leaves web citizens like me with a dilemma. While I understand the dynamics of such a movement online, I am reluctant to join a protest that has no apparent clear direction or structure. I would not ask this of a web phenomenon, but I feel compelled to in this case. Am I to bring my own concerns about the world I live in, and have them mashed up into an immense and powerful beast that is very likely to be misunderstood or even hijacked? Am I to stand in a public square and have my voice be reduced to a common noise of dissent?

And, lastly, should I demand a “proper” structuring for this movement, before I know whether I want to be a part of it? Would that not kill it, and deny its specificity, the very thing that keeps it growing strong? It would if it were online.

I seem to find no proper way to approach this. It may feel wrong to just sit and watch, but what else is there?

Marius Lobontiu

Studying Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London.