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"Tech stakeholders and analysts generally believe the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards will become more embedded in daily life by 2020, but they are split about how widely the trend will extend. Some say the move to implement more game elements in networked communications will be mostly positive, aiding education, health, business, and training. Some warn it can take the form of invisible, insidious behavioral manipulation."
"Getting acquired while producing no revenue is like performing a card trick without the deck of cards: the magician simply explains how magical the trick is, never actually showing it. (And we are supposed to step back in sheer awe.)
For start-ups, fewer numbers in the equation mean a projected valuation can be plucked out of thin air.
Look how well this worked for Instagram, which had zero in revenue and was bought for $1 billion."
"Each of these technologies, Wu argued, started out as gloriously creative, anarchic and uncontrolled. But in the end each was "captured" by corporate power, usually aided and abetted by the state. And the process in each case was the same: a charismatic entrepreneur arrived with a better consumer proposition – for example, a unified system and the guarantee of a dial tone in telephony; or a steady flow of good-quality movies created by a vertically integrated studio system in the case of movies – that enabled a corporation or a cartel to attain control of the industry. The big question, Wu asked, is whether this will happen to the net."
The dynamic of free and cheaper is not by itself going to solve all the world’s problems, but it is the best news in the world today.
In fact, a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year -- or about 30 workdays.
"A central theme in much of my research and advocacy is ensuring attention to ethical values becomes an integral part of the conception, design, and development of information systems. Various frameworks have been developed to help pursue this goal (ie, value-sensitive design, values at play, critical technical practice), which can collectively be termed Values-In-Design (VID). Broadly, VID seeks to broaden the criteria for judging the quality of technological systems to include the advancement of moral and human values, and to proactively influence the design of technologies to account for such values during the conception and design process. VID has been a motivating factor in my research on vehicle safety communication technologies, Web search engine privacy practices, and book digitization projects, just to name a few examples, and my commitment to achieving VID has also lead to explorations of some of its challenges"
The idea that little machine-guardians at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, like mechanical demiurges on the invisible edge of the world, are at least partially responsible for ensuring that this post can be read in Europe is a comforting thought before bed.
"Cookies and web trackers are constantly monitoring our online lives. But who are the big players tracking us? Help us to identify them and we'll reveal what they're doing with our data"
The Web Is Dead? No. Experts expect apps and the Web to converge in the cloud; but many worry that simplicity for users will come at a price.
Tech experts generally believe the mobile revolution, the popularity of targeted apps, the monetization of online products and services, and innovations in cloud computing will drive Web evolution. Some survey respondents say while much may be gained, perhaps even more may be lost if the “appification” of the Web comes to pass.
"So what does a hunting economy have to say about our times?
Bowles proposes that the Internet has created all sorts of digital resources that are as fugitive and difficult to own as wild game on the hoof. No one can really make a software program all by themselves (it takes a lot of people to make one), and it is difficult to own software privately (because it is so easily copied and therefore very expensive to “fence in” as private property). "
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The question for our time, Bowles proposed: “Is software application more like a kudu or a cow?” Meaning, can software really be practically owned, like a cow? Or does it just make more sense for it to be shared, like a kudu?
Bowles speculates that technological advances (such as software and other digital innovations) and new types of “between-group competition” can over time make new types of property rights regimes more attractive. Strict private property rights may not make as much sense if software and social networking websites and other online information resources resembles kudu.
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So what sorts of governance systems emerge in the simulations?
Bowles found that if property rights are well defined, then the “bourgeois” faction will prevail and become an “evolutionary stable strategy,” meaning it will resists displacement by other approaches. Moreover, the winning group (of bourgeois individuals) will then provide the cultural model that losing agents will emulate. However, if property rights become ambiguous – perhaps because new technologies make them more problematic – then the “civics” can feasibly ally with the “sharers” to become the default equilibrium strategy.
Based on his simulations, Bowles found that communities can handle ambiguities of property rights more readily than state- and market-based systems, but they tend not to prevail when there are already inequalities among people. Interestingly, the digital economy creates both – substantial ambiguity and contestability about property rights (think digital music, film and text), but also high levels of inequality (because in networked economies, dominant players enjoy strong feedback loops and benefit from winner-take-all dynamics).
"I think somebody should start selling T-Shirts that say, in big block letters, I LIE TO FACEBOOK. That may or may not be true for me -- but how would Facebook (or Google Plus, or Friendster, or whatever) know for sure?
So here's the big problem: we've become accustomed to the assumption that the status quo of deteriorating privacy is the only possible world. That's unlikely -- but the alternatives are going to be problematic in their own ways. Is a world of people lying about themselves preferable to a world of asymmetric transparency, where those with money and power can hide themselves but know whatever they want about you?
We're not likely to have a perfect future of (as David Brin says) privacy for me and accountability for everybody else. It's going to be a choice between various imperfect options. Wish us luck."
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Information isn't the new oil; opacity is the new oil. The ability to be opaque -- the opposite of transparent -- is increasingly rare, valuable, and in many cases worth fighting for. It's also potentially quite dangerous, often dirty, and can be a catalyst for trouble. In short, it's just like oil. (Which makes me wonder when we'll have a new OPEC -- Organization of Privacy Enabling Companies.)
Opacity isn't inherently good or bad -- it's both. To people who need privacy and secrecy to survive, opacity is immensely, critically valuable; for people who want privacy and secrecy to hide misbehavior, opacity is also rather important. But for individuals and organizations alike, opacity is becoming harder to maintain.
Some people have argued that privacy is dead. Typically, those making this argument are wealthy white guys, able to buy as much privacy as they want (and likely to get extremely annoyed when their privacy is violated). And for folks like these, opacity will always be easier to come by than for the rest of us.
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It's the last approach that really interests me: Pollution. Poisoning the data stream. Putting out enough false information that the real information becomes unreliable. At that point, anyone wishing to know the truth about me has to come to me directly, allowing me to control access. It's hardly a perfect option -- the untrue things can be permanently connected to you, and it does kind of make you hard to trust online -- but it's the one approach to opacity that's purely social and extremely difficult to stop.
Quick question: for those of you on Facebook, did you provide your real birthday? If so, why?
Part of the reason why commercial entities are able to run roughshod over our personal privacies is that we've become programmed to give them our information. They'll say in BIG SCARY LETTERS that you must provide truthful personal info, but seriously -- if you give Facebook a fake date of birth, how are they going to know? If you check in from fake locations, how can they prove you're not where you say you are? Your actual friends and family will know the truth.
And here's the fun part: if lots of people start lying about themselves on social media, even the truth becomes unreliable.
"What I love most about this is how inclusive it is, and how much of it is about recognizing and embracing what an amazingly creative time this is for artists. All too often, we hear of artists who decry such things, who complain about the fact that their club doesn't feel as exclusive any more. For artists and an art exhibit to not just embrace, but joyfully celebrate the way creativity works today, while recognizing how these tools mean that anyone and everyone are creating art all the time, is really wonderful to see."
"The question of how such coded language emerges, spreads and evolves is a big one. I am interested in a very specific question: how do members of an emerging subculture recognize each other in public, especially on the Internet, using more specialized coded language?
The question is interesting because the Web is making traditional subcultures - historically illegible to governance mechanisms, and therefore hotbeds of subversion - increasingly visible and open to cheap, large-scale economic and political exploitation. This exploitation takes the form of attention mining, and is the end-game on the path to what I called Peak Attention a while back.
Does this mean the subversive potential of the Internet is an illusion, and that it will ultimately be domesticated? Possibly."
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Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. So subcultures have historically relied on their obscurity, illegibility and unimportance to ensure autonomy and security.
The very existence of a subculture is only known to neighboring subcultures. This limited local visibility suggests that the world of subcultures is not a matrix, but a web. Classic Rock fans can tell Punk Rock apart from other kinds. It all sounds the same to a non Rock-fan. Imperceptible distinctions that make no difference in the larger scheme of things.
Under abnormal circumstances, when seditious sentiments are brewing in the subcultural web, the zero-sum game of power swings in its favor, causing a reaction from the class-culture matrix: increased and more visible action by the hidden institutional order to restore the balance.
When slums start to seethe, the secret police gets going in not-very-secret ways.
If the slums win, subversive subcultures become institutionalized, and displaced ones turn into subcultures. If the slums lose, things stay roughly the same. Either way, the scheme of social organization remains the same: a balance of power between an institutional class-culture matrix and a subcultural web.
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The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions.
And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. You don’t have to go to a specific neighborhood, in specific clothes, and drop specific references. You can sit at your desk, dress any way you want, and fake your way into any subculture. Long enough to sell a whole lot of shoes.
It will not take long for businesses and politicians to completely master this game.
The outcome is inevitable. Subcultures will be comprehensively tamed. Institutional sociopaths within the class-culture matrix are now in a position to detect and take control of subcultures before they even come into existence. This will lead on to control over the very inception of subcultures.
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"David closes by returning to his original question: why were old knowledge systems so fragile? These systems assumed knowledge was bounded, settled, orderly and proceeded step by step. But that’s not what knowledge feels like in the age of the internet. It feels unbounded, overwhelming, unsettled, messy, linked and governed by our interests. And those properties are the properties of what it means to be human in the world.
“Networked knowledge may or may not be truer about the world, but is is truer about knowing… This crazy approach to knowledge feels familiar to us, because it’s how we tend to know.” He closes with an observation that’s both hopeful and unsettling: “What we have in common is a shared world about which we disagree, not a common knowledge we share and can collectively come to.”"
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