The Spy in the Coffee Machine

Slightly over a year ago, I had a conversation with Erik Duval about privacy in this digital world. He basically argued that losing privacy is not a problem as long as the transparency is symmetric. This is basically the point that David Brin writes about in The Transparent Society. The conversation started my thinking on this topic. Was Bill Joy right when he allegedly said “Privacy is dead, get over it”?

I was hoping that O’hara and Shadbolt’s The Spy in the Coffee Machine would give me some new perspectives on this issue.

The book opens with a chapter on the “disappearing body”. We have less and less face-to-face contact and more and more phone, email and Internet (IM, (micro)blogs, social networks) communications. A physical presence leaves behind few signs, whereas information is persistent.

When the prophetic but currently unfashionable Marshall McLuhan predicted that we would soon be living in a global village thanks to new technologies and media, most people took that to mean that travel would be straightforward, intermingling of diverse cultures frequent and influences wide and strong. But one other property of a village is the absence of anonymity and secrecy. Privacy is at a premium, and that is another aspect of the global village with which we will have to come to terms.

In our society we have a very hybrid view on privacy. It isn’t a value neutral concept. Some cultures regard privacy with suspicion. In “the West” we have a positive opinion on privacy and see it as something to be protected by law:

But on the other hand, many use new technologies to expose themselves to view to a previously unimaginable degree. Webcams and Big Brother provide almost unlimited access to some exhibitionists, while very few people will pass up the opportunity to appear on television. […] Most academics would kill to be interviewed about their work, even as they cling to the copyrights of their unread articles.

The book then provides a comprehensive overview of current technologies and how these relate to privacy. They do this in a matter of fact, objective and entertaining way. A couple of examples:

Moore’s law makes it trivial to search extremely large datasets (the end of practical obscurity) and is especially interesting when it comes to personal memory:

The amount of information that an ordinary person can generate, and store, is now colossal. It is possible to store digital versions of life’s memories in increasing quantities. As human-computer interaction specialist Alan Dix one playfully noted, it takes 100 kilobits/second to get high quality audio and video. If we imagine someone with a camera strapped to his or her head for 70 years, that will generate video requiring something of the order of 27.5 terabytes of storage, or about 450 60gb iPods. And if Moore’s law continues to hold for the next 20 years or so [..] we could store a continuous record of a life on a device the size of a sugar cube.
The ability to record memories, and store them indefinitely in digital form in virtually unlimited quantities has been dubbed the phenomenon of memories for life. This is an important area of interdisciplinary research; we will need to understand how it will affect our social and political lives, and our psychological memories.

Web 2.0 mashups allow you to easily bring multiple public resources together. By combining different databases you can now easily see where in your area all the sex offenders live (see Megan’s law):

In a clever demonstration of the dangers of mashups, consultant Tom Owad mashed up book wishlists published on Amazon with Google Earth, but with a twist. The Amazon users leave a name and a home town, which was often enough to locate them via Yahoo! People Search, at an individual address, of which Google Earth would hold a detailed satellite image. He also filtered out most of the books, to leave only those who read subversive literature. The result was a map of the world with readers of subversive books located upon it; click on the location of such a reader, and get a high resolution satellite image of his or her house. Of course, Owad was merely demonstrating the principle, not building a usable system for genuine deployment by the Thought Police. But ….

There are also technologies that could help in keeping us empowered. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project for example “enables Websites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents”.

The Panopticon is here according to the authors. They use the final chapter of the book to finally give some of their own opinion about whether we have a worrying future ahead of us. They take a very balanced viewpoint: these new technologies also solve many problems and have big advantages. At the same time we should never forget that bureaucracies are information thirsty and that function creep is a reality:

The struggle for personal space between the individual and the community takes place on a number of fronts, and we should not expect sweeping victories for either side. There will be small advances here, mini-retreats there. In the background, the astonishing progress of technology will keep changing the context.

As I finished this book I read about the premiere of Privacy Matters‘ (Dutch spoken) film about the importance of privacy. They do not allow the embedding of their video so I will link to a version on Youtube:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OohrAPiDnMA]

The production quality of the film is incredible and the special effects are great. The final message of the film makes sense: stay aware. However, I found the tone too fear mongering and paternalistic. It made me averse to the video and left a sour taste in my mouth. Where is the constructive look towards the future?

For me this post about privacy is an unfinished conversation. There are lots of things to think about and I guess we should keep paying attention. Privacy will be one the many sociological concepts which will get a completely different meaning over the next decades. What are your thoughts on this topic?

21st International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA)

There are many reasons why I love living in Amsterdam. The International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) is one of them. On Monday the 24th 2008 I went to see two documentaries at the festival.

The first movie I saw was Jos de Putter‘s Beyond the Game. This “western in cyberspace” follows the two top players in Warcraft III: Grubby and Sky. Warcraft is the “thinker’s game” at the yearly World Cyber Games. The documentary did not explain how one plays Warcraft, instead it explored how heroes are created. There were two things that I really got out of it:

At some point in the movie Grubby describes Sky as being the epitome of “Mindless practise”. Sky practises 12 hours a day, whereas Grubby can be competitive with way less hours of work and relies on his creativity as a player. Personally, I could see an analogy with the current global situation where the “west” is banking on out-innovating the “east” where they just work harder.
In the movie Grubby moves to China because he has a ping of 300ms when he plays Warcraft from the Netherlands. This is enough time to make playing useless. We tend to forget that distances stay real in this global economy: You can travel thousands of miles because saving 300ms is important to you. Or in my job: You can have all the video conferencing tools in the world, but you cannot easily overcome time differences.

IDFA usually has the directors of the documentaries present at the screenings. It was very interesting to hear Jos de Putter talk about cutting some scenes because he considered it to be “too TV”.

This is not the first great video game documentary that I have seen this year. I really enjoyed The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. A completely different documentary, but a definite must see (even if you don’t enjoy videogames):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y8u2S9yy8w]

The second movie that I went to see was Leg Before Wicket by Shashi Buluswar (watch the trailer). I have had a weakness for cricket for years now and am always interested in anything cricket related. To me cricket is also about heroes. No other game has such a thin line between being a failure (out for duck) and being a hero (making those much needed runs in the last over, after a 50 run partnership).

Leg Before Wicket uses the LBW concept of cricket (with the often disagreeing viewpoints of the fielding and the batting team) as a metaphor for how both India and Pakistan take a different viewpoint on the partition of 1947. Indians and Pakistanis have a great distrust of each other and a lot of families have painful memories of what happened in 1947.

The movie shows two separate reconciliations: on a macro level the Chicago Giants consists of both Indians (of which the director of the movie was the first one in the team) and Pakistanis struggling together to make the playoffs; and on a macro level where the Indian and Pakistani governments have organised a bi-directional cricket tour, handing out visas to the spectators and building mutual understanding: “cricket diplomacy”. This juxtaposition of different worlds worked very well.

All the proceeds of Leg Before Wicket will go a to a good cause, so please buy the DVD if you are interested.

Moodle at the 2008 Online Educa in Berlin: a Brochure

This year the Online Educa will be in Berlin from 3-5 December. Pieter van der Hijden made a suggestion to me to create a brochure with all Moodle related activities at the Online Educa.

I have done exactly that. Please download the PDF brochure here.

There are a couple of Moodle activities I would like to highlight in advance:

Four different official Moodle partners (CV&A Consulting from Spain, eLeDia – eLearning im Dialog from Germany, MediaTouch 2000 srl from Italy and Stoas Learning from the Netherlands) are be exhibiting in Gardenlounge 2, E147 and E148. They will have Moodle demonstrations all day.
Pieter van der Hijden is hosting a pre-conference session on Wednesday the 3rd with the title: Moodle Introduction – Develop Your Own Online Course Today.
There are two Moodle sessions on Friday titled: Make Mine a Moodle! (part 1 and part 2). The first part will focus on a couple of global implementations (including Shell‘s) and the second part will have more audience participation.

If you are reading this and are planning to go to Berlin, please leave your name in the comments. It would be great to meet up.

Finally a word about the layout of the brochure. This is called a Pocketmod. It is an easy way to create a small booklet with 8 pages. Please watch the video to see how you have to fold the brochure (alternative instructions):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAb31rIeGZo]

I really like these small booklets and use them often when I travel for my flight, rental car and hotel details. A little while ago I wrote a small bash script that uses Imagemagick to create a pocketmod PDF from an eight page PDF file. You can view and download the script at this textsnip page.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, book cover — Here Comes Everybody

I am convinced that the web will change our society in many ways that we cannot currently grasp. Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a book which everybody who is interested in these changes should read. Many books on technology take a very shallow approach. Often they focus on the technology itself or only look at one particular aspect of how technology can be used (e.g. books on “How Wikis can change the way you collaborate”). Shirky’s book is the first one I have read which takes a very deep sociological and often philosophical perspective on the ubiquitousness of the net and its wider implications.

He is not the first author to draw an analogy with the invention of movable type. The social effects of this invention lagged decades behind the technological effects:

Real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable.

We are just now entering the chaotic period. We cannot accurately predict the changes that will happen to society now that we have the Internet. It will be many years before we can oversee and look back at the consequences. I can instantly see how the above is true for education. Currently the old institutions are still in full reign, but they are more and more broken (e.g. look at the percentage of students who prematurely quit their vocational tertiary education in the Netherlands). These institutions have not harnessed the new possibilities of technology.

So what are these new possibilities? The book is full of wonderful examples, but Shirky’s main point is that the Internet allows groups of people to self organize without the need for organizations, firms or (governmental) institutions. Traditional communications were always one-to-one (like the phone) or one-to-many (broadcasting, like television). The net enables many-to-many communication which we never had before. E-mail was the first example of this, but IM, (micro-)blogs and social networking sites enable this too. These new tools are “eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination”.

Shirky has a great observation on media:

The twentieth century, with the spread of radio and television was the broadcast century. The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a small group of professionals and then delivered to a large group of consumers. But media, in the word’s literal sense as the middle layer between people, have always been a three-part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it [..] and they like to share it [..]. Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption.

Social tools are coming into existence that support new patterns of group forming and group production. My personal favourite example is open source software. Clay Shirky attributes the success of this method of producing software to the way that it gets failure for free. For this reason, he considers open source software to be a threat to commercial software vendors:

Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source ecosystem is outsucceeding commercial efforts, but because it is outfailing them. Because the open source ecosystem, and by extension open social systems generally, rely on peer production, the work on those systems can be considerably more experimental, at considerably less cost, than any firm can afford. Why? The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.
The overall effect of failure is its likelihood times its cost. Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood. [..] The obvious problem is that no one knows for certain what will succeed and what will fail. [..] You will inevitably green-light failures and pass on potential successes. Worse still, more people will remember you saying yes to a failure than saying no to a radical but promising idea. Given this asymmetry, you will be pushed to make safe choices, thus systematically undermining the rationale for trying to be more innovative in the first place.
The open source movement makes neither kind of mistake, because it doesn’t have employees, it doesn’t make investments, it doesn’t even make decisions. It is not an organization, it is an ecosystem, and one that is remarkably tolerant of failure. Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free.

Do yourself a favour: If you haven’t read this profound book, please read it as soon as you can.

Barack Obama: Sí se puede

The day before yesterday I had the extraordinary privilege to see and hear an ex-president and the next president of the United States speak at an rally in Kissimmee, Florida.

We were taken to the venue by a Haitian cab driver, who not only is the best domino player of the US (by his own estimation), but also kindly let us listen to some of the Republican radio stations. He loves listening to those stations because of their extreme and ridiculous viewpoints.

We arrived at a big sports field around 17:30 where a very orderly line had already formed. During the wait we could buy all kinds of Obama buttons and T-shirts (my favourite: a Matrix spoof with Obama as “The One” and Biden, Michelle and Powell in the background). There was a heart warming amount of optimism and camaraderie in the line. The doors opened at 20:30 and we were quickly searched at a security checkpoint. Multiple helicopters circled the air, another security measure.

The field slowly filled up with everybody walking to the catheter. When we reached, we were pleasantly surprised to be only about 20 yards away from the speakers. At 22:00 congresswoman Brown, the senator of Florida and Jimmy Smith urged everybody to vote early. A lawyer ensured us that this time the Democratic party has five thousand lawyers in Florida alone, making sure that every vote counts and suing as soon as problems emerge. “They won’t steal the election this time.”

Right on time (23:00) president Clinton and senator Obama appeared. Clinton spoke first with Obama sitting next to him on a stool and smiling. Clinton said that there were four reasons why Obama is the president that the country needs:

He has the best philosophy
He has the best policy
He is capable of making a decision
He is capable of executing on the decision

According to Clinton both candidates had to make two presidential decisions during this campaign. The first is the choice of a vice president (no need to dwell on this point), the second was acting on the economic crisis. Clinton explained that Obama has had a lot of criticism for taking a while to respond, but that during that time Obama was calling his economic advisers, Clinton’s advisers, Warren buffet and other specialists realising that this was a complex situation that needed to be understood well. This is exactly what a president does according to Clinton.

Next it was Obama’s turn. He looked relaxed and spoke with an incredible clarity and purpose (without using a tele-prompter). The presence of the hugely popular Clinton gave Obama the opportunity to refer to those prosperous Clinton years in which the average yearly income rose by 7500 dollars as opposed to the Bush administration where the average income fell with 2000 dollars.

What struck me was the honesty of what he said and his willingness to also talk about the difficult issues. The US needs to tighten its belt. He will have to go through the budget “line by line” and scrap the things that we might like, but do not need. He spoke about investing 15 billion dollars in green technology and creating 5 million green jobs. He addressed the accusation of being a communist (“Yes, I shared my peanut butter sandwich in school, I am a redistributionist”). He praised McCain for his stand against torture but also pointed out the fact that McCain’s voting record has been with Bush on all economic matters. “Bush has been digging a hole for eight years and McCain is ready to take over the shovel.”

Finally he urged everybody to not think that the race has run. Everybody has to go out and vote.

It was an amazing experience being at a historic event like this.

Only a couple more days…