Technology : The Atlantic

Cryppies, Day Ladies, and Whiffling: The Just-Declassified Lingo of the NSA

2012-02-06T16:31:40-05:00

A newly public document provides a fascinating peek into the lives and gibes of the National Security Agency's cryptographers.

Every industry has its jargon. I'm sure yours does. In journalism, we call headlines "heds" and the little teaser sentence after that a "dek." No one knows why we misspell these things, and yet we do because this is our house and everyone must know the rules!

However, if you work for the National Security Agency, particularly in the realm of codemaking and codebreaking, your lingo is of more interest to the public than journalism's orthographic idiosyncrasies. And thanks to a recently declassified document that National Journal's Marc Ambinder dug up, we can now peer in at the secretive agency through the jargon used at Sigint City.

Following is a selection of definitions you can find in the full document, which was cheekily compiled by David Hatch, chief of the Operational History Division of the Center for Cryptologic History. Though, to be honest, we already whiffled the list to find you the good stuff.

Burn: to reproduce xerographically; a burn machine was an early office reproduction machine.
Consumer (aka Customer): those who receive NSA reports through regular distribution channels. This is an attempt to introduce terminology from business and commerce into the intelligence community.
Cryppie: shortened form of "cryptanalyst"; used (and taken) by some as affectionate, by others as derogatory -- listen carefully for the tone of voice and check to see if the speaker is smiling or not.
Day Lady: a mildly pejorative term used by workers on evening or overnight shifts to describe a person of either sex who works only "normal business hours"; often characterized by a compulsive concern for wearing a necktie or avoiding jeans.
Desk Rats: that's OK, you know who you are.
Diddy Bopping: copying manual Morse transmissions.
Flag Carriers: Agency senior executives, so named because the backdrop for their badge photographs includes an American flag.
Fort Fumble: a not altogether affectionate designation for Fort Meade and the NSA headquarters by those stationed elsewhere.
Ghost: to float among offices while awaiting a permanent position.
Hammered: describes text with a significant number of garbles, misprints, or omissions that render it unreadable or call into question its validity.
Hours of Boredom/Moments of Terror: an unofficial slogan used to describe duty in NSOC or other watch offices.
Knobbing: the act of searching for target communications by twisting a dial manually on intercent equipment.
Korling: acronym for "Korean lingust," an occupational specialty. It would look less like a Scottish sport or Canadian beer if spelled with a hyphen.
Mom's: a nickname for the cafeteria, possibly derisive.
Sigint City: a term that came into some currency at the end of the 1980s to refer to the complex of NSA buildings on Ft. Meade, a reflection of the number of facilities and the wide area over which they were spread. While catchy in itself, the term inappropriately slights other important aspects of the NSA mission, for example, information security.
Slip and Slide: to idle or waste time.
U Street U: nickname for the Agency training school overflow building located on U Street in the District of Columbia during the 1950s. In itself, this is a diminutive for the slightly disparaging nickname "U Street University."
Whiffle: to read rapidly through a stack of traffic to cull out usable items; this term is becoming obsolete as computerization reduces the amount of printed traffic routinely delivered to analysts.

Via Marc Ambinder

Image: Oliver Hulland/The Atlantic.

Science Has Achieved the 3D-Printed Jaw

2012-02-06T14:41:33-05:00

After an infection ravaged her jawbone, an 83-year-old woman in Belgium became the world's first human being to receive an artificial jaw made with 3D-printing technology. It's made of titanium, and it is awesome. A team of doctors from the Biomedical Research Institute at Hasselt University in Belgium performed the surgery last June, but for some reason, they've just now publicized the amazing accomplishment. (This is perhaps because they weren't sure how her body would react to a titanium 3D-printed jaw, because as we said, nobody's ever tried one on before.) The implant was made out of titanium powder -- heated and fused together by a laser, one layer at a time," explains the BBC. "Technicians say the operation's success paves the way for the use of more 3D-printed patient-specific parts." The company responsible for manufacturing the janky-looking thing is called LayerWise. After all, 3D-printing is basically just like inkjet printing except with many many layers of material ink that eventually add up to a three-dimensional object. How cool is that?

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.

Why an International Trade Agreement Could Be as Bad as SOPA

2012-02-06T13:48:08-05:00

International agreements for regulating intellectual property are a one-way ratchet process: enforcement and protection provisions can go up but never down.

A few weeks ago a sleeping giant woke up, when the Internet -- average users and Silicon Valley companies -- united in protest against two bills before Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), which would have severely limited online freedom of expression and privacy. But all is not yet well: Another threat to a free and open Internet is in the works.

This time the threat isn't coming from Congress; it's a trade agreement recently signed by 31 nations including the United States and 22 members of the European Union. This accord, called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), is ostensibly designed to address problems of intellectual property enforcement and trafficking in counterfeit goods across national borders. However, critics contend that it suffers from many of the same problems as its recent stateside legislative relatives, SOPA and PIPA. Some have called it SOPA's international "evil twin."

The treaty will enter into force after six of the 31 signing parties formally ratify it. Despite the near certainty of its ratification we still don't really know what it will do. It remains unclear to many what effect the agreement will have on the communicative and civil rights of citizens around the world.

In order to understand how ACTA threatens online free speech in the name of IP enforcement and to evaluate whether it is truly as bad as SOPA, it needs to be viewed within the larger trends in international IP regulations. Viewed in this context, it becomes clear that while many of the alarmists specific claims are inaccurate, ACTA exposes the systemic danger in how international intellectual property regulation has evolved over the last 20 years.

The State of the IP Legal Landscape

The current international regime for regulating intellectual property law is established, largely, by a set of treaties enacted through existing supranational institutions, primarily the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. The ground-rules for modern IP law were established in 1994 by the WTO in the form of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which extended to software and digital artifacts the longstanding protections for literary and artistic works (established in Berne in 1886). Two years later the World Intellectual Property Organization, one of 17 specialized UN agencies, extended this protection further with two treaties that banned the creation, use, and distribution of circumvention technologies that could break DRM (Digital Rights Management) or other technical protection measures. Often these technical protection measures make it difficult for users to exercise legitimate exceptions to copyright like fair use or non-commercial copying for personal use and storage. Legitimate exceptions include things like using short excerpts of copyrighted video for to make a point in a documentary film or using the characters from a copyrighted work in a parody.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States and the EU Copyright Directive of 2000 were implementations of the international standards established by WIPO and TRIPS. In addition to implementing the WIPO requirements that outlawed anti-circumvention technologies, these bills established what have become known as "safe harbor provisions." Essentially, Internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, and websites that host user generated content like YouTube or Wikipedia are not, themselves, liable for infringing content that they host or make accessible as long as they "respond expeditiously to remove, or disable access" to content after being contacted by a rights-holder claiming infringement.

In the U.S. these safe-harbor provisions take the form of "notice, takedown and counter-notice" systems, where rights holders claim infringement, content hosts takedown the material and the original uploader can send a counter-notice asserting that it was not infringement and it is put back up. These provisions are a mixed bag. Chilling Effects, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a handful of universities, has noted that this system assumes rights-holders' cease-and-desist claims are legitimate and tends to undermine fair use exceptions. However, without these safe harbor provisions that limit liability, the landscape would be too risky for websites like YouTube that host user-uploaded content to exist at all. Canada, in contrast, has a "notice-and-notice" system, where ISPs pass the cease-and-desist notices on to the user who uploaded the content, and that person can decide whether or not to comply. This system protects against over-reaching claims of rights-holders and protects exceptions like fair-use.

The recently defeated Stop Online Piracy and Protect Intellectual Property Acts in the United States, among other things, threatened to remove these safe-harbor provisions by holding ISPs and others accountable for infringing material hosted on their servers. This would have led to significant self-censoring and policing of user content by risk-averse ISPs and, likely, the removal of lots of non-infringing material. Cory Doctorow has noted that because computers are general-purpose tools that treat all data the same, the only way to engage in preemptive, rather than notice-based, screening for infringement is to monitor all traffic and lock down users' abilities to participate. Indeed, Digital Rights Management (DRM), taken to its extreme, "always converges on malware" and "attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments." Because IP regulation tends towards these invasive forms, it ends up being an issue of freedom with real gravity rather than merely esoteric policy wonkery.

The Role of ACTA

ACTA is a threat to the future of a free and open Internet. Timothy Lee recently noted the recent proliferation of inaccurate and alarmist claims about the ACTA. Many of these claims seem to be based on proposed provisions that were diluted or removed in the final version. For instance, there was initially a push for a "three strikes" policy where repeat infringers could be cut off from the internet. The other claims seem to be worst-case readings of overly general and vague provisions within the treaty's text. For instance, the treaty mandates that signing nations "promote cooperative efforts within the business community to effectively address trademark and copyright or related rights infringement." This has been read by some as an attempt to require ISPs and content host to play an active role in policing content, rather than merely reacting to infringement notices. An implementation of this requirement that undermined safe-harbor provisions in this way would indeed be damaging, but the treaty seems to leave room for a variety of approaches including existing "notice-and-takedown" and "notice-and-notice" systems.

Alarmist claims are not all unfounded, however. ACTA does mandate a system for determining civil damages in infringement cases that is patently ridiculous. The agreement endorses several possible determination frameworks, including "the quantity of the goods infringing... multiplied by the amount of profit per unit [if they had been] sold by the right holder if there had not been the act of infringement." As any freshman in Econ 101 could point out, consumption levels at price 0 (piracy) will be much much higher than consumption levels at any other price. Assuming that every download is a sale lost by the content industry is plainly inaccurate. Enshrining damage determination criteria along these lines will lead to more judgments like Jamie Thomas-Rasset who was ordered to pay $1.92 million for sharing 24 songs, on the calculation that each song she shared cost the rights-holders $80,000.

The TRIPS agreement enables judicial authorities to act inaudita altera parte -- that is, without prior hearing -- to implement provisional measures to halt activity by the defendant "where any delay is likely to cause irreparable harm to the right holder, or where there is a demonstrable risk of evidence being destroyed." The ACTA text on provisional measures is largely lifted from the TRIPS agreement, with one notable exception that strengthens the position of rights-holders and may threaten the rights of defendants. Both agreements give judicial authorities the power to require evidence of imminent infringement and irreparable damage from claimants prior to enacting provisional measures. In ACTA these measures include, but are not limited to, the ability to "order the seizure or other taking into custody of suspect goods, and of materials and implements relevant to the act of infringement." That is, ACTA appears to legitimate -- but not require -- domain-name seizure similar to those carried out by the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency in the U.S..

However, ACTA omits the TRIPS provision that parties to these provisional measures shall be notified of the actions immediately and the defendant guaranteed a review and right to be heard to contest the provisional measures. In this aspect ACTA appears to be a step away from due-process proceedings that are customary in IP law.

When we look at ACTA we must be aware that the problems are not limited to this particular agreement. Rather ACTA is a natural next-step for a dysfunctional system. It is a system whose structure inexorably pushes it toward ever-stricter regulations, without reciprocal protections for freedom of speech.

International IP agreements, from Berne in the 19th century to ACTA in the 21st, tend to follow some general contours. IP law has always been a balance between the competing interests of the author and the general public. However, international agreements have typically not struck a balance; they are often one-sided. They set minimum standards for protection and enforcement, but they do not tend to set any maximum levels of enforcement that parties may not exceed. Parties are always free to implement more stringent measures. In contrast, the agreements' freedom-of-speech protections -- ensuring the proportionality of punishment and exceptions like "fair use" -- tend to be optional. Indeed, in ACTA "rights, limitations, exceptions, or defenses to copyright or related rights infringement" are left as matters of national law.

This has led to a long-term trend towards greater intellectual property protections. Parties to these agreements tend to implement them in different ways, with different levels of enforcement and different exceptions. Some -- usually the United States -- enact provisions that go beyond the minimum requirements of international standards. Differing implementations leads to a perception that navigating these complexities is an impediment to international trade and multilateral enforcement. In the name of "harmonizing" laws between parties a new round of international negotiation begins to establish new minimum standards. In every case these new minimums have been set at what were previously the "above-and-beyond" optional measures taken under the previous agreements. During negotiations the TRIPS agreement was conceptualized as a "Berne-plus." Similarly, negotiators discussed ACTA as a "TRIPS-plus." Essentially, this is a one-way ratchet process: enforcement and protection provisions can go up but never down.

Understanding this dynamic sheds a troubling light on the negotiation process that created ACTA. Negotiations on ACTA began in 2006 between the United States and Japan with the EU and Canada joining soon after. These negotiations were secret, closed, and took place outside of established institutions for addressing international IP issues such as the World Trade Organization or the OECD.

A set of cables from the WikiLeaks U.S. diplomatic cable dump collected by La Quadrature du Net expose the intentions of these parties during the negotiation process. An early cable describing initial discussions between the U.S and Japan makes clear that the express goal of ACTA from the beginning was to "set a 'gold standard' for IP R[egulation] enforcement among a small number of like-minded countries, and which other countries might aspire to join." In response to a Japanese proposal to conduct negotiations within an established international institutional framework, in this case the OECD, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative's (USTR) Chief Negotiator for IPR Enforcement, Stanford McCoy, "stressed that this should be a freestanding agreement, not related to any international grouping such as the G-8 or OECD, which might make it more difficult to construct a high-standards agreement." Two-time commissioner of the Japanese Patent Office, Hisamitsu Arai, is quoted in one of the cables as saying "the intent of the agreement is to address the IPR problems of third-nations such as China, Russia, and Brazil, not to negotiate the different interests of like-minded countries ... [and] could serve as a yardstick for measuring the market economy status of [these] countries." In an apparent attempt to establish a veneer of legitimacy by including a so-called "third-nation," the U.S. approached the generally IP-regulation-friendly Mexican government who stressed "their willingness to join the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations" and "push-back against Brazilian efforts to undermine IPR." La Quadrature likened this agreement to Mexico offering to play the "good cop" to the U.S.'s "bad cop" in international negotiations with less developed countries.

It is worth noting that the negotiations throughout most of the process were highly secret with negotiators forced to sign non-disclosure agreements, a fact that, according to one cable, made even some of the negotiating parties uncomfortable. There were few avenues for public or civil-society input. Meanwhile many U.S. based multinational corporations and their interest groups, including the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Sony, and Time Warner were consulted via formal USTR advisory boards.

In light of the one-way ratchet dynamic described above, these cables present a clear picture of the intentions of those involved in the drafting of ACTA. The agreement is an obvious tool for cranking the ratchet by going outside of existing institutions to establish a "high-standards agreement," and then pressuring non-signatory countries who rely on trade and aid from wealthy signatory countries to comply with ACTA standards. This would seemingly create the preconditions for yet another round of negotiations within existing supra-national institutions to establish new minimum standards in the name of "harmonization." Of course for this round the starting point for these minimums would be ACTA levels and the result would likely be an "ACTA-plus" framework. Despite the many SOPA comparisons that have been made by anti-ACTA protesters, its content suggests that it is something much closer to a slightly expanded version the U.S. DMCA to be exported abroad.

It is unlikely that ACTA will significantly alter U.S. or European law. What it will do, is entrench those laws so that democratically elected national legislators will have their hands tied by undemocratically drafted international agreements should they choose to alter or repeal their existing IP laws. It is for this reason that Congressman Darell Issa (R-CA) has called it "more dangerous than SOPA." The battle over Internet freedom is being waged on two simultaneous fronts: In non-liberal regimes like China and Iran, as regimes seek to quell dissent through the use of filtering, blocking and packet inspection tools, and in liberal countries, particularly western ones, where the front line is less explicitly about free speech and civil rights; instead it comes in the form of enforcement of ever-stricter intellectual property regulations.

Intellectual property law has, thus, become an Internet freedom issue, and as liberal governments implement increasingly draconian filtering measures for intellectual property (IP) enforcement they legitimate the use of similar measures for other purposes by illiberal governments. Evaluated in context and with these potential ramifications in mind, ACTA -- and certainly the ratchet process that ACTA demonstrates -- may be every bit as dangerous as Darell Issa warns.

Image: William Attard McCarthy/Shutterstock

Why Cognitive Enhancement Is in Your Future (and Your Past)

2012-02-06T12:36:42-05:00

Using technology to enhance our brains sounds terrifying, but using tools to make ourselves smarter may be part of humans' nature.

It could be that we are on the verge of a great deluge of cognitive enhancement. Or it's possible that new brain-enhancing drugs and technologies will be nothing compared to how we've transformed our minds in the past. If it seems that making ourselves "artificially" smarter is somehow inhuman, it may be that similar activities are actually what made us human.

Let's look at the nature of the new technology. Last week a team of ethicists from Oxford released a paper on the implications of using Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS) to improve cognition in human beings. Recent years have seen some encouraging, if preliminary, lab results involving TDCS, a deep brain stimulation technique that uses electrodes placed outside the head to direct tiny painless currents across the brain. The currents are thought to increase neuroplasticity, making it easier for neurons to fire and form the connections that enable learning. There are signs that the technology could improve language acumen, math ability, and even memory. The Oxford paper argues that TDCS has now reached a critical stage where its risks must be carefully considered before the research goes further.

Of course, not everyone is convinced that the technology will pan out. Some remain skeptical of TDCS, calling it a fad, the latest in a long series of "neuro-myths" that bubble up when scientists distort or embellish their findings in the name of publicity. But even if brain stimulation fizzles, the questions raised by the Oxford paper are going to be with us for a long time. That's because TDCS is just one of many promising new technologies that neuroscientists hope will enhance cognition, including smart pills, genetic engineering, and brain-to-computer interfacing. As deep brain stimulation has become the flavor du jour in neuroscience, bioethicists have increasingly given it a starring role in the thought experiments they use to tease out the philosophical dilemmas posed by cognitive enhancement.

Allen Buchanan is one such bioethicist. As a Professor of Philosophy at Duke University and a consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics, Buchanan has written extensively about the ethical implications of human enhancement. In his most recent book Better Than Human he makes a sustained philosophical case for pursuing human enhancement, arguing that its critics often proceed from a deeply flawed understanding of human nature. Last week I spoke with Buchanan at length about the ethics of deep brain stimulation, the history of cognitive enhancement, and what a world of cognitively enhanced human beings might look like.

Some have argued that enhancement, cognitive or otherwise, is somehow antithetical to human nature. Part of your response to that argument, if I understand it correctly, has been to say that the drive toward enhancement is actually very much a part of human nature. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Buchanan: I think that any appeal to the notion of human nature, on either side of the enhancement debate, is tricky and problematic and has to be handled with care. Yes, in one sense we might say that it's part of human nature to strive to improve our capacities. Humans have done this in the past by developing literacy and numeracy, and the institutions of science, and more recently we've done it with computers and the Internet. So, yes, if an alien were looking at humanity and asking "What is human nature?" one of the ingredients is going to be that these beings seem quite concerned with improving their capacities and they seem to have a knack for doing it.

On the other hand, sometimes people say that we shouldn't engage with these technologies because we could somehow damage our nature or interfere with our nature, and in doing so they seem to have a kind of rosy pre-Darwinian view about human nature and about nature generally. They tend to think that an individual organism, a human being, is like the work of a master engineer---a delicately balanced, harmonious whole that's the product of eons of exacting evolution.

Now that's one account of human nature, but I want to contrast it with another one from Charles Darwin who wrote in a letter to Joseph Hooker: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature" and by the works of nature, he's talking about us. And so these are two quite different views about nature and about human nature, and if you begin with the first one, the sort of rosy and pre-Darwinian view, then you're almost bound to conclude that anything we try to do to improve ourselves is bound to be a disaster, that any form of intervention is going to end up looking like reckless, foolhardy behavior. On the other hand if you take the Darwinian view and think of human beings as being like any other organisms---sort of cobbled together beings, products of mutation and selection and the crude development of ways to cope with short term problems in the environment, then you'll be more open to the idea that we should at least consider the possibility of improving ourselves.

Humans have done enhancement in the past by developing literacy and numeracy, and the institutions of science, and more recently we've done it with computers and the Internet.

The list of design flaws in human beings is pretty long, as it is in other organisms, and so to think that somehow we're at the summit of perfection and that we're stable is to have the wrong idea of human nature. The misleading assumption is that if we don't interfere, we're going to continue the way we are, and of course that goes completely contrary to everything we know about evolution. In fact it might turn out that the only way to prevent us from going extinct, or to prevent some great worsening of our condition, is to enhance some of our capacities.

When I was a child, which was quite some time ago, in textbooks in public schools you often saw this depiction of some sort of primordial being pulling itself out of primordial soup, sort of a half fish half mammal sort of thing, and then just to the right of that in this line of development, there would be an apelike creature walking on all fours, then you see a Neanderthal walking partly upright, and then you see a human being walking fully upright, and then that's the end. There's no indication that things could get better or worse after that. And that's the picture that we're the summit of the evolutionary process and of course that's really just importing the old pre-Darwinian view and giving it a superficial coating of Darwinian terms.

Human enhancement has been a frequent subject in popular culture, even if its treatment there has often been superficial. Have films like Gattaca or Limitless primed the public for thinking about the ethical implications of these technologies?

Buchanan: It's interesting you mentioned both Gattaca and Limitless because they're quite different. Gattaca is, in a way, representative of the majority of films that tackle these topics, which tend to be very dark. They tend to play on the anxieties people have about these technologies, and they tend to take a very negative view of their social consequences. Gattaca, for instance, paints a fairly grim picture, because it looks at the effects of genetic engineering on human beings simply in terms of its potential for creating a caste system, and I just think there's more to it than that. Limitless on the other hand, at least as I saw it, seemed to be much more positive and seemed to convey that people could have quite legitimate interests in cognitive enhancement technologies, and that the people who desire these technologies aren't just cranks or people who have inappropriate desires.

"One thing that Limitless missed is the interactive benefit of these enhancements."

One of the most common objections to cognitive enhancement--one that Gattaca addresses in the context of genetic engineering--stems from the fear that cognitive enhancements might exacerbate social inequality by disproportionately advantaging elites. You have argued, persuasively I think, that some examples of previous cognitive enhancement technologies, like literacy and mobile phones, have diffused rapidly across classes after some initial period of monopolization by elites. Are there good reasons to think cognitive enhancement will follow suit?

Buchanan: I think that it depends on which kind of cognitive enhancements you're talking about, especially which modes of technology are being used. If you're thinking about something like surgical procedures for implanting genetically engineered tissue into someone's brain, or if you're talking about very high tech brain to computer interfacing technologies or the genetic engineering of human embryos, presumably those technologies are going to be very expensive and won't be available to a lot of people. So if that's the direction that we go, there might be very serious problems of inequality.

On the other hand cognitive enhancements like TDCS and cognition-enhancing drugs may become inexpensive fairly quickly, and in turn might diffuse much more rapidly than literacy did. This is especially clear in the context of prescription drugs. Right now if you go to Wal-Mart there are over one hundred and thirty drugs that used to be on patent and have now gone off patent and gone generic, and a month supply of each of these drugs is only four dollars. Now that's a lot cheaper than the cognitive enhancement drug that you get at Starbucks. So yes in the future there might be a period when these drugs are on patent, and are expensive, but when they go off patent they could become very inexpensive.

And also it's important to bear in mind that this may not be something where access to the market is an issue at all. If it turns out that some safe version of TDCS has dramatic cognitive benefits, then governments may view these as very important for national productivity and they may subsidize them in the way they now subsidize education for the very same reason.

Cell phones are another example. No one dreamed that cell phones would become available so rapidly to hundreds of millions of people around the world. But some technologies do diffuse slowly, and where they diffuse slowly there's a potential for problems of inequality.

Assuming then that some cognitive enhancements will spread rapidly across socioeconomic lines, is there a fear that they might make society more likely to produce certain outliers on the continuum of human personality--say, evil genius figures capable of horrific atrocities. If this technology increases the set of highly intelligent individuals within a certain population, won't it also increase the chances that those individuals will overlap with the small set of homicidal, or even genocidal maniacs within a population? I'm thinking of someone like Pol Pot with the intellectual capacities of a figure like Richard Feynman.

Buchanan: At present we don't know enough about the connections between intelligence and personality to know how serious a risk that is but I think it's a risk worth considering. I mean there's another way to look at this, and that is that there is a general problem here. We've developed technologies, which are so powerful and so readily accessible that a very small number of people can use them to create great harm, and that's just due to the success of science.

Even today, without a tremendous amount of specialized knowledge, people may be able to produce lethal viruses that we don't have much immunity to, or a small terrorist group can acquire some plutonium and put it in a municipal water supply and kill lots of people. So in one way this is a more general problem about how powerful our technologies are and the fact that they can be used for good or for ill by small numbers of people---people who are not subject to the discipline of large organizations like states, who aren't subject to the logic of deterrence that state actors are subject to.

Now the other side of this coin is that if there's a general ramping up of intelligence, then presumably there's also going to be a lot more people who are very intelligent and who have good motivations, and who will be committed to trying to constrain the bad apples and prevent them from doing damage.

You also have to consider the possibility that cognitive enhancements may go hand in hand with moral enhancements. There's a great debate as to what extent bad behavior results in part from flawed cognitive processes, but even if improving our intelligence is not by itself is not likely to make us behave better, it may turn out that some of the same knowledge we're using to make cognitive enhancements---knowledge about the relationship between our brains and behavior--- may allow us to develop what some people have called "moral enhancements." And if that happens, that may be something that will at least reduce the kind of risk that you're talking about, because you're right that people who have a super-developed intelligence along with a moral sensibility that's dwarfed in comparison could be a real problem.

An incomplete picture?

It strikes me that the development of "moral enhancements" would probably rip open five or six new subfields in bioethics.

Buchanan: Oh I agree and it already is, and it's very tricky. Cognitive enhancement is something that's relatively easy for people to understand, because it's easier for people to see what's controversial about it because it's easier to see what counts as a boost in cognitive performance. When it comes to moral performance, we have all sorts of problems that have to do with disputes about what a moral improvement is, what the moral virtues are, and that sort of thing.

We also have interesting precedents, interesting examples of existing morally enhancing technologies, like religion, social morality, institutionalized morality---there's no question that these have increased our capacity to interact with each other. Even legal systems have been moral enhancements in some respect because they've enabled us to control our aggressive impulses, to find ways of settling disputes that are more morally acceptable.

People who have a super-developed intelligence along with a moral sensibility that's dwarfed in comparison could be a real problem.

And it might turn out that there are some biochemical interactions that might stimulate our moral imagination, increase our empathy towards others, or, in the cognitive dimension, might improve our powers of moral judgment and reasoning. There's a lot of interesting literature now on what are called normal cognitive biases, cognitive flaws in cognitively normal people. Some of these cognitive flaws might have bad moral consequences in certain contexts, and so it's possible that by reducing some of those we might make ourselves better off also.

Putting aside the outliers, the extreme personalities, some neuroethicists are worried about what they call ''hyper-agency,'' the notion that as human beings become more able to control their lives and themselves, they also become less constrained by traditional limits, and that human wisdom will ultimately be insufficient to manage that kind of freedom.

Buchanan: Look, I think this is a genuine problem. It's the old problem of hubris, and it's important to recognize that it doesn't just apply to cognitive enhancement or even biomedical enhancement more generally, it applies to all human interventions, technological or social or economic or political. One thing I would point out is that even though the worry about hubris is a serious one, it's hard to see how it could be a conclusive argument against biomedical enhancements across the board. Instead it's like all genuine concerns---it has to be given due weight and then balanced against the potential benefits of these technologies.

So while I think we should take the problem of hubris seriously, I also realize that it's not a local problem for biomedical enhancements, it's something we face everywhere and that consequently, it can't be a conversation-stopper. We have to take a more fine-grained approach, because there's no sort of general answer to the question "how should we go slow" or "how we should use due caution" for all of these different technologies. Different modes of enhancement in different contexts are going to have different risk benefit profiles.

A lot of people worry that the widespread use of cognitive enhancement will mean raised standards in the classroom and in the workplace. And while that may turn out to be a net positive for society, there is a fear that individuals who would rather not participate in cognitive enhancement will be forced to just to keep up with their enhanced coworkers, and that such pressures would constitute a kind of soft coercion.

Buchanan: That does worry me; I think it's a very reasonable concern. Now, again, it's not a conversation stopper, it's not something that would lead to the conclusion that we shouldn't develop these technologies. I think the situation you've described is quite widespread in sports. Some athletes, or even a majority of athletes, would prefer not to use enhancement drugs, but they do so in a defensive manner to prevent being put at a disadvantage when others use them. It's also a concern with the off-label use of drugs like Adderall, drugs that have not been developed specifically for the kind of cognitive enhancement they are often used for.

It would be better if we would bring these cognitive enhancement drugs out of the closet, and do regular clinical double-blind trails with them

The worst case scenario is where large amounts of people feel this pressure to use a drug even though they would prefer not to do it, and it's happening in a kind of unregulated context as it is now (with Adderall) and many people may be led to set aside reasonable worries about bad side effects because of this pressure, this soft coercion you're talking about. We have a huge unregulated experiment going on in this country, and in many other advanced countries I suspect, where a large population of university students are using these drugs, and that's unfortunate because it might be that five years from now or ten years from now it's going to be discovered that these drugs have some large scale adverse effect. It would be better if we would bring these cognitive enhancement drugs out of the closet, and do regular clinical double-blind trails with them, and genotype the people that take them and later if there's an adverse effect, see if it only affects people with a certain genotype, and be in a better position to prevent the wide diffusion of these drugs before they're safe.

Again, though, it's not confined to cognitive enhancement drugs or biomedical enhancements; I'm sure there are lots of people who used to be able to qualify for a job without an advanced degree, and now they have to have an advanced degree, and so they're "coerced" into getting that degree whether they think it gives them that much benefit or not. Similarly, if you're raising a child in a society where literacy is a necessary condition for any job worth having, you're going to be under pressure to make sure your child learns how to read and write. So these aren't necessarily bad things, they're only bad if they lead people to disregard reasonable worries about the risks of these technologies.

"Yeah, we're going to need you to put those electrodes on now."

Some of the films about cognitive enhancement make it look pretty dull in practice. I remember seeing Limitless and thinking "so this guy ramps up to these breakout levels of raw intellect and creativity and the best he can do is a Wall Street job and a fancy car?" And that's an extreme example---there have been other, deeper explorations of enhancement, particularly in the superhero genre---but on the whole it seems like the subject has been treated pretty unimaginatively. What have you thought of that's really far out there, culturally or intellectually, that cognitive enhancement might bring about?

Buchanan: While I do think Limitless was more sympathetic toward these technologies than most pop culture representations of them, there's no question it was a little disappointing in terms of what was considered to be a fantastic improvement in the quality of this individual's life. I think one thing that Limitless missed is the interactive benefit of these enhancements. Cognitive enhancements in particular tend to have what economists call network effects, meaning that the value of you having the enhancement increases as more people have it.

Think about having a computer. If you have a computer, that's good you can do a lot of things with it, but part of what makes having your computer so valuable is that hundreds of millions of other people have computers. Similarly with literacy, if you were the only person who knew how to read certainly that would give you some advantages, but you wouldn't have nearly as rich a world as the one we live in where billions of people are literate.

So, I think perhaps one of the problems with Limitless was that it portrayed this guy by himself having much more developed cognitive capacities than other people, so it overlooked the fact that if lots of people have cognitive enhancements, there might be completely new forms of interaction, new kinds of social relationships, new forms of productivity and human flourishing, or new kinds of intrinsically enjoyable activities that we just don't have access to now.

I have an analogy for this, and the reason it's an analogy is that by the nature of the case it's hard for us to imagine what these new forms of interaction will be, and how rewarding they might be, but here's the analogy. Consider two card games: one is the child's game of "go fish" and the other is contract bridge. Now it might turn out that in the future if huge numbers of people are cognitively enhanced, they will look back at the kinds of activities that people in our world perform and say "that was like children playing go fish."

Think about the kinds of interactions that we now have, and the kinds of enjoyments and productivity we can have because of the Internet. If you try and ramp that up, if you magnify it by many orders of magnitude, you might begin to get an idea of how human life could be if many hundreds of millions of people were cognitively enhanced.

Because TDCS is thought to pair especially well with active learning, it's been suggested that it might be grafted on to media devices of one sort or another. Some have even imagined that in the future iPads and Kindles may come with these electrodes attached, so that you could read in some heightened state of neuronal connectivity. If such a technology were to become safe and available, what would be the first thing you'd read while attached to it?

I've actually heard that the people using this stuff in labs are using it on themselves the way in the way that the rest of us use coffee breaks

Buchanan: It's funny; I've actually heard that the people using this stuff in labs are using it on themselves the way in the way that the rest of us use coffee breaks. But that's a good question, I might go back and try to read an organic chemistry text that I had a lot of trouble with as an undergraduate. Or maybe I'd try to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the original German and see if it's still as impenetrable to me as it was thirty years ago.

You're obviously someone at the outer edge, the innovating edge, of a particular field. I'm curious as to whether you'd want to use cognitive enhancement technologies in order to go deeper in that field, or would you try to expand your range of abilities, like you mentioned with the organic chemistry.

Buchanan: I think that's a question that many people are facing on a smaller scale, because as information becomes available more readily through the Internet, more forms of independent learning are available, and as people live longer, at least people in relatively affluent societies, they're facing this question. They may have specialized in something for most of their productive life, but now they realize they have another twenty years---I'm 63 years old right now, and I'm sort of thinking about what I want to be doing for the next fifteen or twenty years, however long it is that I'm going to be alive.

And that's a real question, the question of whether I should keep hammering away at the things that I do and try to do them better, or whether I should make some kind of radical change and go into some new area, or a diversity of areas, and I think that if the technologies we're talking about are developed it's going to add to the scope of that kind of choice, and I think that's probably a good thing.

'Where's My Flying Car?'

2012-02-06T12:35:14-05:00

It is humanity's deepest question. Or at least for the one seven-billionth of humanity represented by me. Today AVweb answers the question in an unexpected way.

For previous installments in the "Where's My Flying Car?" saga, see here and here, including this action shot of the charming Terrafugia (which AVweb says will not turn out to be the Flying Car you're looking for).

Keep hope alive.

Google Psyche: 'How Did Madonna ...'

2012-02-06T10:43:37-05:00

Great moments in Autocomplete, courtesy of Google search and collective consciousness

One of the biggest stories of last night's Super Bowl wasn't just its game-deciding cheeky touchdown or the match's history-repeating outcome. It was also Madonna and her awkward (or maybe awesome?) half-time show.

Enter the search above, and -- wait, what? Madonna died?

No, of course she didn't. But rumors of her death -- propelled by arty imaginings of it, SEO-driven responses to those who wonder about it, and a namesake -- persist. So today, one of the big questions the world is asking about the pop star concerns not her name, not her fame, not her impact on music ... but her demise.

Google Psyche is an exploration of the stories that the world's Internet searches tell. The company's autocomplete algorithm predicts the word a random web searcher is most likely to type next, providing a statistical probe for our collective consciousness.

Books May Be Better Objects, but E-Books Are Better Tools

2012-02-06T07:36:10-05:00

Can Kevin Kelly and Nick Carr both be right? A plausible thought about the future of the book.

Nick Carr likes the fixities of the printed book; Kevin Kelly agrees that "these are very real, and very attractive qualities," but likes the fluidities of the e-book.

Both make good points, but both are largely talking about the book as a designed object rather than the book as a tool for use. If we think in the latter terms the picture gets more complicated, not least because we have to think not only of the physical format (ink-on-paper versus pixels-on-screens or e-ink-on-screens) but also of underlying infrastructures.

For instance, consider these facts: (a) Reading is a major part of my job; (b) I annotate quite heavily the books I read for work; (c) I buy a lot of those books from Amazon in Kindle format. A while back I left my Kindle on an airplane, and the airline couldn't retrieve it; but when I bought a replacement I downloaded all the books I had read and there my annotations were, unchanged. In fact, I didn't even have to buy a replacement: I could have used the Kindle app for my Mac, or for the iPhone or iPad, or I could have read the books online, and in any of those environments my annotations would be present and identical. (On the web I can even copy and paste the passages I have highlighted and my own notes.)

So what we have here is best described not as fixity or fluidity, but as transferability -- a reassuring kind of consistency across platforms and formats. You might say that this is fixity enabled by fluidity: the reproducibility of pixels combined with the stability of Amazon's enormous database amount to insurance against the fragility of any particular designed object. (And by downloading my books and annotations to two or three "designed objects" I also insure myself against the failure of Amazon's databases.)

I have some significant concerns about Amazon's increasing dominance over the publishing world, and the company may not keep my loyalty forever; but the transferability they have enabled is a huge boon to me in my work. Years ago, when I was a young book collector, I decided that I had to spend my money on books for use rather than display -- I didn't have the resources to be a collector and a scholar. Similar thoughts have prompted my recent move towards electronic texts. Like Nick Carr, I love the fixities of the book as a designed object; but the resources offered by digital versions of texts make my life as a scholar far easier than it has ever been. I can't resist that.

Image: Amazon/Gerd Arntz/Alexis Madrigal.

Picture of the Day: The East Coast at Night with the Aurora Borealis in the Distance

2012-02-06T07:16:33-05:00

On January 29, one of the members of the Expedition 30 crew currently on board the International Space Station orbiting Earth snapped this incredible picture of the East Coast at night. The hive that is New York City and surrounding areas shine brightly in the lower center. Philadelphia and Boston lie not far from New York's reach. In the north, Montreal and, far off to the left, Toronto round out the urban picture. At the horizon, the green glow of the Aurora Borealis, the result of recent sun storms, shades the night sky.

Below, recent Pictures of the Day:

Image: NASA.

Earth Station: The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World

2012-02-06T02:10:56-05:00

The Jamesburg Earth Station is a massive satellite receiver in a remote valley in California. It played a central role in satellite communications for three decades, but had been forgotten until the current owner put it up for sale, promoting it as a great place to spend the apocalypse. It stands feet from a trailer park and down the road from a Buddhist retreat. This is the story of one of the old, weird ties between Earth and space.

Let me tell you about Jensen Camp. The 30 homes of the trailer park house about 100 people in a variety of ramshackle arrangements. By most accounts, drugs and alcohol are a problem, but many who live there are simply independent souls without much money. The water at the camp has too much fluoride, so people's teeth fall out and kids' bones break and don't heal. Everyone -- tenants, landlord, county officials -- knew about the problem, but no one did anything about it until a pastor at a Monterey megachurch bought the place in 2008. People bought bottled water when they could, but drank from the tap when they had to. A few miles up the road is the Zen monastery of Tassajara, where a sign has to remind visitors, "Life is transient." Jensen Camp is a few miles from Carmel-by-the-Sea, one of those California coastal towns where the average home price is over $900,000.

Jensen Camp may be "wracked with drug and alcohol problems, domestic abuse and unsafe living conditions," but it is more than its problems. A chef named Mike Jones set up shop next to the Cachagua General Store and has kept a blog about the Camp's characters and his organic catering business since 2005. His stories are full of food and family, guns and drugs, drinking and fighting, helping out and being helped.

The Cachagua Valley is wild and beautiful, lichen hanging off trees and wild turkeys running around doing whatever they do. Even radio signals have a hard time penetrating the valley, which is one reason that, less than a quarter mile from Jensen Camp, the Communications Satellite Corporation and AT&T built the Jamesburg Earth Station. The Earth Station is a massive dish-shaped receiver that was used to communicate with satellites perched over the Pacific Ocean for more than three decades.

It was thanks to Jamesburg that people saw the Apollo 11 moon landing and Richard Nixon's trip to China, Vietnam War reporting and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, not to mention tens of thousands of more ordinary events. A Chinese delegation sent by the first prime minister of China even visited Jamesburg, a milestone in helping connect the world's most populous country into the global communications grid.

When we talk about the space program, we think about rockets and command modules and astronauts and blinking satellites in the night sky. But every piece of hardware in orbit required far more infrastructure down on the ground. Satellites, for example, were simple. Their only job was to stay put in space and bounce signals from one place to another; the real magic of satellite communications occurred on the ground in the detection, decoding, and transmission of those electronic signals from space.

Yet while every NASA scrap and tin can is prized by collectors and archived in museums, the history of people like John P. Scroggs, the manager of the Jamesburg Earth Station manager, is almost unknown and on the verge of being lost for good.

In fact, aside from a few references in old newspapers and a stack of photos buried in the archives at Johns Hopkins University, the only person who possessed interesting stuff from Jamesburg's glory days is Eric Lancaster, who I met underneath the canopy of the oak trees outside the Cachagua General Store. He'd told me that he had "some real documentation of Apollo trips. Notes, signatures, serious dated stuff." Lancaster hinted that the documents might be very valuable, and they were certainly the kind of thing I was looking for. He hadn't scanned anything and didn't use the Internet, so we arranged a meeting and my fiancee and I drove to Cachagua.

Lancaster wore a black leather coat and a white shirt unbuttoned to below his chest. He seemed nervous as he rose to shake hands with me. Next to a small backpack, on top of a plastic chair, there was a stack of mildewed manila folders held together by rusting metal clips.

"I was thinking that we might be able to make a few bucks, maybe even sell these to you guys," Lancaster said.

I knew I wasn't going to buy them, but I wanted to see what was inside anyway.

* * *

Neil Armstrong reflected in Buzz Aldrin's spacesuit helmet.

The first trip to the moon is known as a technological triumph, and rightly so. Traveling 238,000 miles, landing on another celestial body, and returning to the Earth is no small feat. But the Apollo 11 mission might have been the single most successful media event in history. Not only did Neil Armstrong say, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," but people across the globe saw him do so live. In the moments before Armstrong actually stepped on the moon, the chatter between Buzz Aldrin and Earth was not only about the moon, but about lunar media production.

"You've got a good picture, huh?" Aldrin asked as Armstrong began to descend down the ladder. "There's a great deal of contrast in it, and currently, it's upside-down on our monitor, but we can make out a fair amount of detail," Bruce McCandless confirmed from NASA's command post in Houston, before dishing out the correct aperture settings for the camera to help the astronaut out. "Okay," Aldrin replied, and Armstrong got to the foot of the ladder.

It was at this moment that something unexpected happened. Apollo 11's transmission was being captured by multiple tracking stations simultaneously. Goldstone in the Mojave Desert had been expected to capture the broadcast and send it on to Houston and the rest of the world. But the best picture was actually coming from a tracking station in Australia called Honeysuckle Creek via the Moree Earth Station on that continent. So seconds before Armstrong touched the moon's surface, NASA made an on-the-fly switch to the Australian feed, which sent the broadcast up to a satellite and down to the earth station at Jamesburg, across the street from the Cachagua General Store, which at the time was also a saloon. A local character, Grandma DeeDee, told a Monterey County Weekly reporter that in the 60s, locals would "ride horses in the bar and shoot pistols at the bartender's feet." Another local, ne'er-do-well Grant Risdon, echoed the hijinx at the bar, fondly recalling a time "when the cops were afraid to come out here, because their radios didn't work on this side of the mountain. It was the last stand for the outlaws."

When the Christian Science Monitor visited the station the day before the Apollo 11 broadcast, the reporter and his photographer would have passed the store on their right, and then hung a left less than a quarter of a mile down the road into the Earth Station. "It has taken man thousands of years to reach the Moon, but it takes less than 20 seconds for a picture from the Moon to be distributed to millions of television viewers on earth," the story concluded.

Earth Station Jamesburg is the principal earth facility that has permitted a worldwide audience to participate in history in the making

So it was that the most glorious moment of the space program and most momentous television broadcast ever, then, ended up routing through this corner of central California. Countless other satellites broadcasts from Asia would soon, too. Science writer Lee Dye summarized Jamesburg's role in a 1972 feature for the Los Angeles Times. "Earth Station Jamesburg is the principal earth facility that has permitted a worldwide audience to participate in history in the making," Dye wrote.

The Jamesburg Earth Station was co-owned by the Communications Satellite Corporation (Comsat) and AT&T. Dozens of similar ones were built in other countries around the world to communicate with newly launched satellites. The earth stations were part of the system initiated by John F. Kennedy, which created the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization. Intelsat, as it was known, was co-owned by more than 80 nations, though basically controlled by the United States and its Cold War allies.

Although NASA launched the satellites, Intelsat paid for them, passing the costs on to the national corporations (like Comsat) that controlled the earth stations and finally on to the customers who wanted to use the satellite links.

In the early 1970s, 98 percent of the traffic on the system was telephone conversations; the earth station could handle 5,000 simultaneous conversations and 12 television hookups. The faintness of the signal from the satellite meant that it had be amplified a lot. That, in turn, meant that Jamesburg needed a massive HVAC system to keep the satellite receiver at the ridiculously low temperature of -450 degrees Fahrenheit, just nine degrees away from absolute zero. "If the temperatures were not kept low," Dye explained, "molecular activity would be so great that it would compete with the weak signal."

Satellite communication was a triumph of 20th-century progress. It is the connection point of the glorious space exploration of NASA and the important but less dramatic telecommunications research at places like AT&T's Bell Labs. When Dye was writing, both of those tremendous projects were bundled together into the 90-foot dish in the valley that was the last stand for outlaws. "The system is so complex and so futuristic that it boggles the mind, but nowhere is that more apparent than here in the Cachagua Valley," Dye wrote. And he was only talking about the technology.

A schematic of how the Apollo broadcasts could reach viewers on Earth. Jamesburg is visible.

* * *

In the early 1970s, 26 people worked in the 20,000-square foot main building at the Jamesburg Earth Station. By the time I visited the place, it was empty except for its owner, Jeffrey Bullis. Though he bought the Jamesburg Earth Station, Bullis did not intend to use it as a communications facility. He already had a business to run, a contract electronics manufacturing firm in San Jose that had made him a considerable amount of money. Before that, he'd worked for the Otis Elevator Company, been a welder, a fleet manager, and a heavy equipment operator. This was his place to relax. "I just bought it for the land really," Bullis said. "It was that kind of thing."

The plan had been to build the Earth Station into a wild house for Bullis and his family, especially his son Adam, who loved to box and play guitar, ride ATVs and shoot guns. He seemed at home in the valley and liked to spend time up there. They went so far as to get an architect to draw up plans to redo the whole thing, busting through some of the walls and dropping a big fireplace right in the middle of the old operations room.

But then Adam was diagnosed with cancer, and succumbed to it in August of 2007. He was 23. Suddenly, Jamesburg was not a happy place for Jeffrey Bullis. Since then, he has been pondering selling it; he finally put it on the market last month. He's asking $3 million for all 160 acres of land and the earth station. A local TV station picked up the story and soon every nerdy corner of the Internet was talking about it. For the first time since the 1970s, Jamesburg was famous! I searched the Internet for more information. But almost everything that you can find on the Internet about Jamesburg was created in the last six weeks in the flurry of attention that the TV news report generated.

I wanted to tell the story of what this place actually was, so I called up Bullis and we met at Jamesburg on a Saturday morning.

There was a small, unassuming sign at the entrance to the property and a gate that looked like it had been left unlocked for us. We drove through it under the eye of a video surveillance camera. Bullis was waiting for us at the small caretaker's house at the bottom of the property. We all shook hands.

You think, "This place was designed for the post-apocalypse." Because it was.

Tall and solidly built, Bullis looked like the cross between Idaho-born kid and electronics millionaire that he is. He's got big hands and wore a fleece with southwestern-patterned epaulettes. When I hopped into his car for the brief ride up the road to the satellite receiver, I instinctively reached for my seat belt. "You're not putting that on," he informed me. No, men do not wear seatbelts on the playground that Bullis purchased from AT&T in 2003.

We drove past some scattered cattle, just a few head that keep the grass down, then curved up a hill. I took stock of what I knew about the Earth Station building. It is 20,000-plus square feet. The dish is ninety feet across and housed in a building several stories tall. There is a massive HVAC system, backup batteries, and room for generators. If the satellite was put back in working order, it could receive communications from all over the place. Fourteen T-1 lines run into the place. The walls are two-feet thick solid concrete. Add in the bucolic setting, the cows and orchard and river and you think, "This place was designed for the post-apocalypse." Because it was.

Security, in these not-quite end times, was mostly incidental. "We shoot our guns off often enough to where people don't want to come up here," Bullis told me.

And suddenly, there it was, gleaming white against the sky and earth. It cast a long shadow, just like it does on Google Earth. Nothing about the shape or nature of the satellite receiver would surprise anyone who has seen a DirecTV dish. But the scale, the size. It's inhuman. I ran around it and up the metal stairs, looking out at the valley, thinking about the people who'd stood there before, and how they thought they were doing their part for the free world and science and progress. In the photos my fiancee took of me at its base, I was almost too small to see.

Jamesburg Earth Station.

The rest of the Earth Station seemed low-slung in comparison to the massive dish, but it is not. The ceilings must have been 20 feet high. Bullis led us in with the exhortation, "Grab a flashlight." He kept the lights and heat off to avoid astronomical energy bills. The first things I saw were the lockers of the men who once worked there. They were empty, but I ran my flashlight inside them anyway, thinking I'd find some traces of the workers. Nothing.

We walked down a corridor. My flashlight illuminated racks of lead batteries to our left. Then, the lights powered on with a sound I'd only heard in empty gymnasiums -- ka-chunk, and a hum. Fluorescents shone above us, revealing the spareness of the space.

Bullis led us into the old breakroom. On the wall was a huge map that plotted the various satellite-earth station connections with push pins and yarn. Blue yarn for the Pacific Routes, yellow for the Atlantic information trade, green atop the Indian ocean. The rest of the room could have been found in any office park in America.

The old map in the breakroom at Jamesburg.

Our next stop was the main operations room, which was as big as a roller-skating rink. When Bullis bought it, the room had been "filled with rack after rack after rack of electronics. Of course it was all obsolete when I bought it."

Now, the room is nearly empty save for a pool table on a dirty patch of carpet, and a podium that looks perfect for giving a military briefing. Cords dangle from the ceiling. Against the wall, a large whiteboard with beautiful mid-century lettering says, "JAMESBURG OPERATIONS STATUS." Nothing is written on the board except for a few inscrutable acronyms and the date, April 2003. Behind the podium, a poster with a waving American flag on it reads, "United We Stand." A chalkboard next to it features a drawing of Beavis from Beavis and Butthead as well as the score of a long forgotten darts game. Our voices echo on my recording.

The now-empty operations room.

"The kids come in here and roller blade and have all kinds of fun," Bullis said, stooping to pick up a cigarette dropped by a careless pool player. We pass by an exercise room with weights and multiple cardio machines. "Like I said, my son used to work out here all the time."

A few offices were converted into bedrooms, but the rest of the building is one huge, empty room after another. Another housed all the old landline telephone equipment. "We converted it into a shooting range, as you can see," Bullis said, gesturing towards a target in front of some hay bales down at the end of the room. A basketball hoop hung to its left.

Passing through, we reached the famous system for chilling the satellite receiver, enabling broadcasts from the moon. It powered up with a sound like a spaceship. The chillers still worked, as did an ancient laptop that the last AT&T employee left behind. It was running DOS.

Finally, we reached a room filled with filing cabinets. The historian in me lit up. Here we'd find records of how the place ran. I imagined schedules with employees' names and rosters with amounts of food and fuel consumed. There'd be lists of broadcasts that ran through the station and photographs of important events, diaries even. Coffee rings would show that humans once labored here, proudly. I would find all the little details to transport me back to the time when this place was part of our national project, and maybe in the smell of the carbon paper and the blue ink of the signatures, I could sense what that time was like.

"What's in there?" I asked Bullis, pointing to the cabinets.

"Old stuff," he said, and he was right.

I started pulling open cabinets and digging through files. But the more I looked, the more I realized that I was looking through manuals for long-lost electronics, directories of parts suppliers, and schematics of the building. Much as I wanted them to exist, there were no people in these documents. The stories had been leached out.

The control room for the satellite receiver itself.

Bullis drove us back down to the caretaker's house at the bottom of the property. That's where he stays most of the time now. I asked to use the bathroom in the house, and as I came back out, I saw a photo of his son on a small wooden table by the front door. When I shook his hand to say goodbye, I said, "I'm sorry about your son." He said, "Life goes on."

All told, while Bullis has owned the station, twenty-six dumpsters worth of stuff have been pulled out of the Jamesburg Earth Station and sent to a recycler. A local guy named Eric Lancaster was hired to do the demolition.

* * *

After our trip through the station itself, I realized I wanted to talk to someone who knew the Earth Station when it was up and running. The Internet, I already knew, returned nothing for this search. The only place where I thought I'd find someone who knew something was the General Store. We made the fifteen-second drive from Bullis' place, pulled into the parking lot, and went inside. I found a woman named Liz behind the counter of the small, surprisingly well-stocked store.

Liz is a mountain person. When I asked for her last name she said, "You don't need my last name," but not in an unfriendly way. Probably in her early 50s, she is strong and spry, country like an oak tree. We started talking and I said something about how strange it was that this tiny little place at the end of the world had been a major node in the global telecommunications grid.

She thought about it for a minute and then told me a remarkable story about her relationship with technology during the last 40 years living up the mountain a bit east of where we stood. She did not exactly answer my question, but made a point nonetheless.

"I pretty much stayed on the mountain. There are no phone lines. There is no electricity," she said. "I have my iPhone and I can get 3G and I can get what I want and I have a little solar panel and propane and candles. I've been off the grid forever. Now, I have the small solar panel and I can turn on the light and charge my cell phone. I'm not used to it. My daughter tells me, 'You can plug things in!' And I say, 'I don't have anything to plug in.' Blow out the lights, not turn out the lights, is my thing."

Her boss, the chef Michael Jones, filled in the rest of Liz's story on his blog (punctuation all his). "Liz lives in a trailer on the mountain with no power and no water...two horses, a goat and two dogs. Cats don't count. She carries water in plastic buckets to the critters....and to her own self," he wrote. "She pays child support to a scumbag in Missouri or one of those other M states or square states.....Her daughter that I know is an honor student at Davis.......Because she has no power or water, Liz hangs with us after working her 10 hr shift at The Store. We are her TV."

There are no phone lines. There is no electricity. I have my iPhone and I can get 3G and I can get what I want and I have a little solar panel and propane and candles. I've been off the grid forever.

And for this couple of minutes, I was her TV and she was mine. Did she know anyone who worked at the Jamesburg Earth Station? "I knew a couple of the people who worked there for a long time, and then some of them have passed away," she responded. "Gosh and some of them are retired and moved away. It was a good job to have if you were out here because it was close to home."

How'd she end up living with no power? She and her man were nomads, living out of their cars and taking in the natural beauty of the place. People heard about them and kept asking them to take care of different properties. So they did, and then she did it alone.

I could have talked a long time, but I didn't want to overstay my welcome. She said I should leave a note about my story, seeing as most people who live around there pass through the store and sit out on the porch chatting. She gave me a lined card and a pen and a push pin and we said goodbye. Before I left, I saw that there were coffee mugs with 'Jamesburg Earth Station' written on them. I tried to buy one from her, but instead, she gave it to me.

The Cachagua General Store on the day I met Liz.

A few days later, I got a message on my voicemail.

"Hi, my name is Eric Lancaster. I found your note down at the General Store in Cachagua. I have some real documentation of Apollo trips, notes, signatures, serious dated stuff. I worked up there and I have some stuff that I kept. I have photos ... Apollo 15, Apollo 16, Apollo 14 trips. Like straight notes from NASA, original stuff. Call me back."

He gave his phone number with the last seven digits, then the area code. He concluded, "I'm serious. I'm not fooling around. It's the real deal stuff dating back all the way to '71 with lots of information. Call me back."

Lancaster sounded so young in his message. I'd been expecting an old man. How could he have worked at Jamesburg with a voice so young? I called him back.

Turned out that Lancaster had spent his whole life around Cachagua. As a kid, he had heard the dish moving to keep fixed on its satellite. "We used to climb up on it," he said. "We used to feel it move." Some people at Jensen Camp thought that the satellite was nefarious. "One guy thought it caused him not to be able to sleep in his house, so he put metal siding on," he said. "But it's the water out here [that] affects the people, not the satellite."

What I wondered was why -- out of all the stuff that had gone in those dumpsters -- he'd decided to keep these few pieces of paper.

It felt like some illicit deal, this meeting out in the middle of nowhere, as if we were being handed some documents we were going to pass off to the Russians before fleeing to Czechoslovakia.

"They are neat. I thought, 'I better keep those.' There are communications between here and NASA," Lancaster told me. "I have photos of when the Republic of China came over here to visit in 1971. It talked about them staying at the Holiday Inn." Lancaster thought they might be important. "There might be stuff in there that's not supposed to get out to the public," he said.

And so it came to pass that we were standing under the huge oak trees staring at four mildewed folders sitting on a plastic chair right before that eventide moment where the golden yellow light retreats and everything goes gray. I had my camera with me and was hoping to photograph whatever was in the folders, so I was anxiously watching the color bleed from the world.

There Lancaster and his girlfriend were, facing my fiancee and me, and they had just asked us to buy the documents and suddenly it felt like some illicit deal, this meeting out in the middle of nowhere, as if we were being handed some documents we were going to pass off to the Russians before fleeing to Czechoslovakia.

My fiancee, also a journalist, quickly explained that the standard ethics of our profession prevented us from buying anything, but perhaps the story we wrote would end up sparking interest in the documents from potential buyers. I explained that I knew a space memorabilia collector who might be able to help them find a purchaser, too. Interest in Jamesburg might be high on account of all the stories about the place floating around the Internet, I said. They stared at me blankly, perhaps because they were disappointed but also because they did not know that millions of people had read about the very bizarre home for sale not five hundred yards from where we were standing.

Seizing the moment, I said I better take some photos quickly before the light got bad and opened up the first file folder.

* * *

A photograph from Eric Lancaster's collection of images taken at the Jamesburg Earth Station.

Lancaster was right. The files did contain several references to the Holiday Inn down in Monterey. That's where the Chinese Satellite Communications Study Group stayed when they came to visit Jamesburg in July of 1973. They rode around the backcountry in a limousine, followed by John P. Scroggs in a station wagon.

During the day, the Americans showed the Chinese delegation how the earth station operated and at night, everyone had dinner together. They ate fruit salad with honey dressing as well as salmon and abalone. One afternoon, they had a BBQ. They drank Monterey riesling and Coors. The visit, along with the rest of the Chinese delegation's trip, was a key event in the opening up of the Chinese communication system. George Sampson, a former general and VP at COMSAT who coordinated the trip, detailed how it all happened in a 1985 oral history.

It all began with Nixon visiting China in 1972, which is widely considered a landmark in global international relations. The visit was broadcast all over the world and to do so, a Nixon assistant sent Sampson over to set up the technical infrastructure. While he was there, he built a relationship with Chinese technologists and talked up joining Intelsat, the global satellite network. He described how earth stations worked and how they could set up their own to communicate throughout their large country and with the rest of the world. Satellite communication was of sufficient interest to the Chinese that Chou En Lai, the first prime minister of the country, met with Sampson in Washington, DC.

Eventually, the Chinese sent a team over to the US to check things out for themselves, and it was this group, led by the government's top long-distance communications official, Liu Yuan, who arrived in Jamesburg on July 18 and stayed at the Holiday Inn.

The recording of the recording of the Chinese communication specialists' trip to Jamesburg.

The visit, recorded in old eight-by-ten photographs and letters, is sitting in one of the folders on the plastic chair. Included is a letter Sampson sent Scroggs, reminding him, among other things, not to "make any reference to the opposite sex" because "such remarks which might be humorous to us are quite offensive to the Chinese."

The decaying, overexposed photos are beautiful. I have two favorites. In one, a young Chinese man talks into a telephone, presumably with someone in China awaiting his call. The grin on his face looks so genuine: We are seeing someone make a transoceanic call for the first time. Two Americans in picture-perfect period costumes look on with smiling faces.

The other is more meta. It is nominally a photo of the combined group of American and Chinese engineers posing in front of the earth station. But a Chinese photographer stepped into the shot, so it actually records the recording of the event, and the satellite pointing west towards China.

As I frantically took photos of the old pictures, Lancaster's girlfriend read aloud from the Apollo documents that formed the rest of their collection. Most of it consists of testing procedures and operations for the various Apollo missions. These are work documents without much flavor. But among the technical bits, we found a letter that Scroggs sent his staff. It was a letter meant to be saved.

The letter John P. Scroggs sent his workers.

If I had to guess, I'd say Lancaster has the last copy of that "souvenier" left on earth. I would also say that it is pretty much the only human trace of what it was like to work at Jamesburg before it was demoted from our national dreams and the site and the people who worked there became subject to the logic of a market that immune to its sublime project. Before the earth station was mothballed, sold, and gutted, the people who worked there did important things. Scroggs, I later found out, died in 1985 and is buried at the El Carmelo Cemetery in ritzy Pacific Grove.

I finished taking photographs. There wasn't much else to say. Lancaster seemed a bit out of sorts, but also excited that I'd be writing about him. I promised to mail him a printout of the story. I think saving the documents he did and holding on to them for years was a kind of heroism, a tribute to his country. He knew that these documents should not be thrown away, for one reason or another. And if he can convert his act of preservation into a few bucks, more power to him.

Lancaster and his girlfriend packed the files into the backpack and walked back across the road over the creek, the one that often floods this whole area. In years past, when the water got too high, the Jamesburg Earth Station was Jensen's emergency shelter.

* * *

A space colony painting that Gerard O'Neill was particularly fond of.

A few years after the Chinese Satellite Communications Study Group left Jamesburg, counterculture icon Stewart Brand published a piece in CoEvolution Quarterly by physicist and space promoter Gerard O'Neill, which proposed the idea of a self-sustaining space colony.

As O'Neill described it, the space colony would have had been a utopia with nice homes and beautiful flora and fauna. The colonies could be modeled on the most "desirable" places on Earth. "A section of the California coast like Carmel could be easily fit within one of the 'valleys' of a Model III Colony," O'Neill explained. Paintings were even made of what that might look like.

Many of Brand's friends and colleagues derided the idea as an abandonment of the values of the counterculture. But one critique, by solar inventor Steve Baer, was more subtle and more damning. It got at the way O'Neill tried to leave behind the inevitable grit of human life.

The project is spoken of as if it were as direct as... flinging people into space. But I know that instead it consists of order-forms, typewriters, carpets, offices, and bookkeepers; a frontier for PhD's, technicians and other obedient personnel.
Once on board, in my mind's eye I don't see the landscape of Carmel-by-the-Sea as Gerard O'Neill suggests... Instead, I see acres of air-conditioned Greyhound bus interior, glinting slightly greasy railings, old rivet heads needing paint - I don't hear the surf at Carmel and smell the ocean - I hear piped music and smell chewing gum. I anticipate a continuous vague low-key "airplane fear."

Space travel would not be like Carmel-by-the-Sea, but Cachagua. It would take a lot of Jensen Camps and Jamesburg Earth Stations to make anything as grand as a space colony work. The area above the Earth might be known as the heavens, but there would be no escaping being human. No matter how glorious the triumph, humans have to grind through all of it, scheduling meetings and making coffee, documenting and processing, trimming and forgetting. No technology stands outside society, and no society exists without the people who build it.

In our technological narratives, progress advances like the tide, lifting up everyone and everything. But we rarely look closely to see the unevenness of the diffusion of our inventions. In a poor valley somewhere a few miles from Carmel, a satellite receiver took in pictures from the moon during a time when locals still rode horses to the camp saloon. Technology may move onward and upward, but everything retains its links to the old and weird and human.

Jamesburg Earth Station is now known on the Internet as a "great place for Armageddon" and also appears on my favorite coffee mug. The building and the last remaining documents that testify to its importance are now both for sale. This is what 20th-century dreams look like in the 21st century.

My Jamesburg Earth Station mug.

The 5-Hour Super Bowl Ad, or, the Event in the Age of YouTube

2012-02-05T09:09:32-05:00

Before you watch the Super Bowl tonight, you could, should you be so inclined, head over to YouTube and watch a preview of an ad Kia will be airing during the game. The spot features the Victoria's Secret model Adriana Lima wearing very little and doing even less: She spends the entirety of the ad, hilariously and (one presumes) at least partially satirically, swaying, saying nothing, and waving a checkered racing flag. Very, very slowly.

The ad -- the "tease," as it were, of what we'll see tonight -- is five hours long.

Five. Hours. Long.

Super Bowl commercials (the experience of, the economics of, etc.) used to be pretty straightforward: Advertisers would gladly pay tons of money for a slot during the game's broadcast because an ad aired during the game's broadcast was an amazingly efficient way of getting a message out to tons of people. That's still the case -- a 30-second space is going, this year, for $3.5 million, up from $3 million last year -- but the mechanics of the messaging are changing, and rapidly. Super Bowl ads are no longer simply ads, in the Traditional Teevee sense; they're campaigns that play out, strategically, over time. Instead of functioning as commercial broadcasts unto themselves, they're acting more and more like episodic touchpoints for an expansive cultural conversation.

In that context, Kia's five hours' worth of semi-satiric substi-porn aren't actually that -- that -- unusual. Many of the other ads that will air during the game tonight won't be airing for the first time, either. They'll have made their debuts already ... on the Internet. Volkswagen's Super Bowl spot has already been posted to YouTube, where it has garnered over 3 million views. Chevy's? More than 1 million views. Honda's, starring a re-Bueller-ized Matthew Broderick? Over 11 million.

In part, that's about marketers racing each other for relevance in an environment where marketing messages no longer need to be confined to TV. But it's a bigger story, too -- of communications, overall, breaking free of the boxes that used to contain them. One function of the media, traditionally, has been the regulation not just of information, and not just of entertainment, but of time itself. Our broadcast networks, in particular, have segmented time into neat little boxes -- 30 seconds here, 30 minutes there -- and populated them with sounds and images that entertain and (occasionally) edify us. They have plotted our days into grids, scheduling our experience and helping us to forget that, in fact, there's very little that's natural about a time slot.

Super Bowl ads have been pretty much the Platonic culmination of the gridded media system. They have operated on the assumption that a Big Event itself (the experience of, the economics of) is significant not just because of its content, but because of the community it convenes (111 million people!). The Super Bowl is time rendered collective and contained -- so of course marketers want to buy themselves a chunk of it. When better to make your pitch to the world than during the period when the maximum amount of eyes are focused on, effectively, the same screen?

***

YouTube, and social networks in general, encourage precisely the opposite marketing model. Rather than containing consumer attention, they disperse it. They take the typical 30-second ad spot and condense it to five seconds ... or expand it to five hours. Or both. Or neither. It doesn't matter, because digital spaces remove time as both a constraint and a value in commercial production, allowing for marketing that insinuates itself on its intended audiences much more slowly, and much more manipulatively, and potentially much more effectively, than its analog counterparts.

You'd think all that would be bad news for broadcast networks, with marketers trading YouTube for boob tube and abandoning the pricey Super Bowl altogether. Why buy the milk, and all that. But: Not only are marketers continuing to pay for something they could ostensibly get for free; they're paying more for it than they ever have before. They're still finding value -- millions of dollars worth of it -- in the connective consciousness that the Super Bowl represents.

And that's because, in a world of atomized attention, anything that can aggregate us is becoming more valuable than it's ever been before. Ads aired during the Super Bowl aren't just ads; they're Super Bowl ads. That branding will give them a spot -- and a continued life -- in Monday's write-ups of Sunday's best Super Bowl spots, and in all those "Super Bowl Ads: 2012" collections that will function as archives for future generations. Their context will make them more than what they are. And that will make them, implicitly, more engaging than they might be otherwise. Super Bowl ads, as my colleague Jordan Weissman has pointed out, have been found to be 58 percent more memorable than regular ads. And while that's partly, sure, because those ads generally represent the best stuff that J. Walter and friends have to offer, it's also because the ads, aired when they are, adopt the warmth of assumed connection that convened attention can confer. I am watching Matthew Broderick as 110,999,999 other people do. There is something epic -- and rare -- about that.

So Super Bowl ads are increasingly valuable because the kind of mass-conscious event they're part of is increasingly rare. Mass-ness itself is increasingly rare. Overall, in the U.S., TV viewership is declining. Audiences are fragmenting. The Gladwellian connectors that used to bring us together -- Lucy, J.R., Oscar -- are departing, leaving individual impulse as the driver of our time. This is wonderful, and liberating, but introduces its own set of quandaries. TV Guide, after all, wasn't just a guide book; it was a framework. It was a power structure. It assembled us, effortlessly, within its neat little boxes. By limiting our experience, it also connected our experience.

No longer. Increasingly, we're looking to social networks rather than TV networks for our entertainment, for our information, for our sense of the world. And those social networks are fluid and box-less and limitless in a way that traditional media never could be. What happens to events themselves -- those shared moments of cultural connection -- in a world where time is unconstrained? Is a Super Bowl ad really a Super Bowl ad when I can watch it long before kickoff?

Image: Kia/YouTube.

One of the Nation's Top Historians Decides It's Time to Embrace Wikipedia

2012-02-04T13:30:37-05:00

The world of academic scholarship -- particularly the field of history -- has at times had a strained relationship with the massive collaborative project that is Wikipedia. In 2007, for example, the history department at Middlebury College banned citations to the encyclopedia. How could the free-for-all of the web produce a reliable source? It was thought to be too susceptible to inaccuracy, whether as the result of malicious or ideological manipulation or just pure sloppiness. Although some of the Wikipedia skepticism was fueled by a gut distrust of anything without a scholarly seal-of-approval, much of it was simply a reservation-in-judgment until the upstart could prove itself.

Now, about a decade in to this great experiment in collaborative creation, Wikipedians efforts are resulting in increased credibility among academic historians, signaled most recently by an essay by the president of the American Historical Association William Cronon in the association's publication Perspectives on History. Cronon writes:

My initial skepticism is now proof of how little I understood what Jimmy Wales grasped far better than I. Wikipedia exploded from an initial 20,000 articles in 18 languages during its first year to more than 19 million articles in 270 languages (3.8 million of them in English alone) written or edited by 82,000 active contributors. Whatever reservations one might still have about its overall quality, I don't believe there's much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history.

I myself use it on a daily basis, and am pretty sure most of my colleagues and students do too even if they won't admit it. . . . Wikipedia is today the gateway through which millions of people now seek access to knowledge which not long ago was only available using tools constructed and maintained by professional scholars.

Wikipedia, Cronon goes on to say, is not perfect, though nothing is. But its imperfections are far outweighed by its strengths: its breadth, accessibility, and -- perhaps its most under-appreciated feature -- its ability to remain current with updates that reflect even just-breaking news. Partly, Cronon writes, this is the result of the medium of the web -- even obscure topics can take up all the space in the world, if there's someone out there who has the knowledge and will to expand the entry. These sorts of obscure entries, Cronon notes, tend to be quite strong, as they are often authored by people with particular knowledge, interest, or experience of them.

But it's more than just the medium. Wikipedia has also devised and implemented successful systems of editing and review for dealing with controversy. "Compare Wikipedia's entry on 'abortion' or 'abortion debate' with Britannica's and ask yourself which does a better job," Cronon argues.

These strengths of Wikipedia are enormously useful to anyone looking for basic information online. But for the academy, Wikipedia has a particular value, one Cronon particularly loves: It is pushing the world of academic scholarship to be more open, for the walls at its edges to fall. Cronon explains:

Wikipedia provides an online home for people interested in histories long marginalized by the traditional academy. The old boundary between antiquarianism and professional history collapses in an online universe where people who love a particular subject can compile and share endless historical resources for its study in ways never possible before. Amateur genealogists have enabled the creation of document databases that quantitative historians of the 1960s could only fantasize. In my own field of environmental history, I've long told students that gardens and cooking, which have only recently begun to attract the academic attention they deserve, have been studied for generations by serious antiquarians and amateur scholars (many of them women) whose interests were marginalized by a male-dominated academy. In the wikified world of the Web, it's no longer possible to police these boundaries of academic respectability, and we may all be the better for it if only we can embrace this new openness without losing the commitment to rigor that the best amateurs and professionals have always shared more than the professionals have generally been willing to admit.

We all stand to benefit from this shifting tide as academics warm to the collaborative vision. After all, they won't be just consumers but creators. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," Cronon urges. He suggests they start with updating the entry for the American Historical Association, which is looking, he says, "pretty inadequate."

11 Million Slices: Inside Domino's Super Bowl Pizza War Room

2012-02-03T16:38:44-05:00

Sunday is the biggest day of the year for your team.You drink lots of water and try to mentally prepare yourself for the huge weekend ahead. It's going to be hard, but you've been preparing for this moment since the season began.

You are an information technology specialist at Domino's Pizza, and 30 percent of the 11 million slices of pie your company will sell on Super Bowl Sunday will be ordered online. This is your war room:

The funny thing is that this story is true. Super Bowl Sunday is Domino's biggest day of the year. The Super Bowl is for pizza joints what Valentine's Day is for florists.

Perhaps the best part of this story is the straight-faced tone that Phil Lozen, Domino's Pizza social media specialist, managed to maintain via email while developing a long football metaphor about the IT of pizza:

Our preparation begins well before kickoff - and even before the season begins - in July or August. It culminates in more than 55 members of our Information Systems (IS) "defense" camping out at headquarters to watch and anticipate every move the system makes to ensure flawless execution... Why over 55 people in one room? Each person has an expertise in a different facet of the system:

* Application owners check the initial code of our applications, making up our defensive line.
* Those watching our operating systems are our second line of defense, or "line backers"... who react to every situation on the "field."
* Those observing the network will jump in and "cover" if anything looks dicey on a larger scale, serving as our "cornerbacks."
* In case someone tries a "Hail Mary" play to hack into part of our system, we have our Security team there as our "safeties" - our last line of defense!

Good luck, team! Win one for Herman Cain!

Images: Domino's Pizza.

Will 2012 Be the Year of the Virtual Protest?

2012-02-03T16:08:39-05:00

With the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation backing off of its decision to rescind funding from Planned Parenthood and the halting of SOPA last month, 2012 is turning out to be the year of the virtual protester. After Komen made its announcement, a bunch of blog posts, tweets, and hacks helped push the cancer awareness organization to revise its position. Before social media evangelists celebrate another victory, it's worth noting that this isn't just the result of the new Internet-empowered class, but also an indication that entrenched public relations pros are scrambling to manage e a new medium and a news cycle that moves faster than ever before.

Komen knew its decision to defund breast cancer examinations for Planned Parenthood would cause a public relations stir, as the internal documents The Atlantic's Jeffery Goldberg posted this morning reveled. Yet its PR team was unprepared for the type of push-back that ensued. In those memos, the foundation outlined ways employees should answer possible questions it might face in light of the move, but nowhere in there does it mention how to handle a social media onslaught, revealing just how little their experts know about how much the terrain has changed.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.

Apple Makes 75% of Mobile Phone Profits, With Only 9% of the Phones

2012-02-03T14:28:18-05:00

Apple's share of the global market in mobile phones -- not just smart phones, but all mobile phones -- has expanded from 3 percent in 2010 to just under 9 percent today. That doesn't quite sound like the dominance you'd expect from the world's most profitable technology company. But then you look at the profit pie, and boom: Apple devours three out of every four dollars of mobile phone profit in the world. From a new quarterly report by Asymco's Horace Dediu (via Fortune):

Here's another way to tell that story, from the perspective of Apple, rather than the mobile phone market:

In January 2006, the iPhone didn't exist. Five years later, iPhones accounted for more than half of the company's $46 billion in revenue and $13 billion in profit over the last 14 weeks of 2011. Here's that graph from Business Insider:

The Difference Between Online Knowledge and Truly Open Knowledge

2012-02-03T13:14:50-05:00

Liberation from the bounds of books and libraries doesn't mean freedom from the constraints of corporate power and culture. A response to David Weinberger's Too Big to Know.

In Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, the simultaneously fascinating and frustrating book by Berkman Center senior researcher David Weinberger, there is a wonderful moment where the mechanisms of "fact-building" are laid bare.

"It's 1983. You want to know the population of Pittsburgh, so instead of waiting six years for the web to be invented, you head to the library," Weinberger begins.

What follows next is the elaboration of the deeply material processes through which even seemingly simple facts are assembled -- from the decision made by you, the curious researcher, to look the answer up in an almanac in a public library, all the way back to the public agencies, research funding mechanisms, and publishing-industry processes that allowed the population of the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area to be certified as 2,219,000 souls. This story provides us a key insight into the nature of facts: they are constructed, yes, but they are not simply constructed out of thin air, and they are certainly not constructed out of words or digital links. Money and materials, documents and discourse, all go into making facts "facts." In the words of Michael Fortun, an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, facts are made, but they are not made up.

I wish there were more episodes like the Pittsburgh almanac story in Too Big to Know. Instead, Weinberger often retreats into a philosophical stance that overemphasizes the power of media technology to reshape the basic epistemological structures of the social world. This theoretical starting point -- which we might describe as a kind of Heideggarian McLuhanism -- ultimately dematerializes and dehistoricizes our notions of what it means to say that a fact is "networked." And this tendency, which I would call a tendency to see networks as coterminous with "the Internet," largely evacuates any understanding of digital power from Weinberger's analysis.

* * *

Just to be clear right from the start: there is no doubt that Too Big to Know is a smart, readable book. All too often the academic response to readable, obviously mass-market oriented books like Weinberger's is to pick nits, helpfully pointing out entire scholarly bodies of evidence that the author missed and using this lack of grounding in the literature as an excuse to toss the entire exercise out the window. Sometimes such criticism is justified, other times, it is less so. In this case, at least, readability is far from a sign of shallow thinking. There are probably hard-edged sociological reasons behind Weinberger's accessible argumentative style, but there is little doubt that he knows his stuff. Indeed, one of the failings of Too Big to Know may be that the book tries to do too much, rather than too little.

Nevertheless, if Too Big To Know is a multi-course meal, it is an ultimately unsatisfying one. Its primary flaw is its open indebtedness to a particular vision of both Heidegger and McLuhan. These commitments are central to nearly all of Weinberger's writings, from The Cluetrain Manifesto onward, and as such, it's doubtful that such an open disagreement on intellectual first principles can be easily bridged. Nevertheless, Weinberger's commitments need not be ours, and there are particularly important reasons why we might wish to avoid them.

MORE ON 'Too Big to Know'

The renaissance of Marshall McLuhan in the era of the Web is disappointing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its rather dull obviousness. There is little surprise that the quotable, evidence-free, technology-obsessed Canadian English professor would thrive in a technology-obsessed era where pithy quotes about the deep meaning of digital devices too often stands in for evidence. McLuhan, of course, was the master theorist of the medium; beyond the over-used "medium is the message," McLuhan's major insight was to argue that socio-technological systems -- such as the media -- operate on a grand scale, largely independent of the day-to-day interest us mere mortals might have in their actual content. McLuhan's primary flaw, on the other hand, was to decouple this understanding of socio-technical system from any relationship to economics, politics, or society. As leading communications theorist James Carey put it, "McLuhan sees the principal effect [of communication technology] as impacting sensory organization and thought. McLuhan has much to say about perception and thought but little to say about institutions."

German philosopher Martin Heidegger is less quoted in Silicon Valley than Marshall McLuhan, and not just because he was a Nazi. McLuhan and Heidegger are equally poor writers, but whereas McLuhan's inscrutable prose has led to him being more read than he ought to be, unintelligibility has had the opposite outcome for Heidegger. A dazzlingly complex philosopher -- probably the greatest of the 20th century -- the most important aspect of Heidegger's thought for our purposes is his understanding that human beings (or rather "Dasein," "being-in-the-world") are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.

* * *

Too Big to Know thus amounts to a fairly straightforward marriage of the Canadian mystic to the gnomic German philosopher. The digitization of 21st-century media, Weinberger argues, leads not to the creation of a "global village" but rather to a new understanding of what knowledge is, to a change in the basic epistemology governing the universe. And this McLuhanesque transformation, in turn, reveals the general truth of the Heideggarian vision. Knowledge qua knowledge, Weinberger claims, is increasingly enmeshed in webs of discourse: culture-dependent and theory-free.

The causal force lying behind this massive sea change is, of course, the internet. Google search results -- "9,560,000 results for 'Heidegger' in .71 seconds") -- taunt you with the realization that there are still another 950,000-odd pages of results to get through before you reach the end. The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The "web world" is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks.

And yet: as the Pittsburgh almanac example has already shown us, facts have always been networked. What do almanacs, census bureaus, government funding streams, volunteers, the notebooks these volunteers carry, and libraries amount to, if not a network? A particular kind of network, true, but a network nonetheless. What Weinberger does in Too Big to Know is to confuse a shift in network architecture with the onset of networked knowledge per se. Particular questions about the materiality and power arrangements of our emerging networked architecture are dissolved in the digital bath of the world wide web. In his rush to make the Heideggerian point about the contextualization of all knowledge, Weinberger falls back on McLuhan -- a particularly unreliable guide to technological change.

If our starting point is that all knowledge is networked, and always has been, then we are in a far better point to start talking about what makes today's epistemological infastructure different from the infrastrucure in 1983. But we are also in a position to ask: if all knowledge was networked knowledge, even in 1983, than how did we not behave as if it was so? How did humanity carry on? Why did civilization not collapse into a morass of post-modern chaos? Weinberger's answer is, once again, McLuhanesque. It was the medium in which knowledge was contained that created the difference. Stable borders around knowledge were built by books.

I would posit a different answer: if knowledge has always been networked knowledge, than facts have never had stable containers. Most of the time, though, we more or less act as if they do. Within philosophical subfield known as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) this "acting-as-if-stability-existed" is referred to as "black boxing." One of the black boxes around knowledge might very well be the book. But black boxes can also include algorithms, census bureaus, libraries, laboratories, and news rooms. Black boxes emerge out of actually-existing knowledge networks, stabilize for a time, and unravel, and our goal as thinkers and scholars ought to be understanding how these nodes emerge and disappear. In other words, understanding changes to knowledge in this way leaves us far more sensitive to the operations of power than does the notoriously power-free perspective of Marshall McLuhan.

* * *

Now all of this has been rather abstract, so I just want to conclude with a real-life example about the operation of knowledge systems in the 21st century. It is 2012, and I want to know the population of Pittsburgh. I type "population of Pittsburgh" into my Google search box, and up come several answers, including a the Pittsburgh Wikipedia page, "Quick Facts" from the U.S. Census Bureau, and a link-less answer titled "Best Guess" (it tells me the population of the city of Pittsburgh -- not the entire metro area -- is 334,563). In theory, there are pages and pages of links following these top three: but I don't look at them. Something tells me that the first page of the Google results is really all I need.

On the one hand, we can stand back and be amazed at the operation of the Google algorithm, and speculate as to how this digital fact-sorting marks a new era in human thought. On the other hand, we can wonder: "how does Google black box the incredible stream of digital data in order to produce a particular result on a particular page that convinces me, more or less, that the population of Pittsburgh is 334,563? And what about Wikipedia? What are it's fact production processes? How do they work? And most importantly, how do they stabilize, both psychologically and sociologically? Why don't I care that the Google results page goes on towards infinity?" If we avoid Marshall McLuhan's easy answers to these complex questions, and retain the core of Heidegger's brilliant insights while also adding a hefty dose of ontology to his largely immaterial philosophy, we might begin to understand the real operations of digital knowledge/power in a networked age.

Weinberger, however, does not care about power, and more or less admits this himself in a brilliant essay 2008 on the distinction between digital realists, utopians, and dystopians. Digital utopians, a group in which he includes himself, "point to the ways in which the Web has changed some of the basic assumptions about how we live together, removing old obstacles and enabling shiny new possibilities." The realists, on the other hand, are rather dull: They argue that "the Web hasn't had nearly as much effect as the utopians and dystopians proclaim. The Web carries with it certain possibilities and limitations, but (the realists say) not many more than other major communications medium." Politically speaking, digital utopianism tantalizes us with the promise of what might be, and pushes us to do better. The political problem with the realist position, Weinberger argues, is that it "is ... [a] decision that leans toward supporting the status quo because what-is is more knowable than what might be."

The realist position, however, is not necessarily a position of quietude. Done well, digital realism can sensitize us to the fact that all networked knowledge systems eventually become brick walls, that these brick walls are maintained through technological, political, cultural, economic, and organizational forms of power. Our job, as thinkers and teachers, is not to stand back and claim that the all bricks have crumbled. Rather, our job is to understand how the wall gets built, and how we might try to build it differently.

Image: Library of Congress.

A Virtual Mirror Uses Face Tracking to Reveal Your Inner Predator

2012-02-03T13:08:55-05:00

Inspired by masked rituals and mirror neurons, Karolina Sobecka's interactive installation is an experiment in mimicry, empathy, and communicating across interspecies boundaries. The premise of All the Universe Is Full of the Lives of Perfect Creatures is simple; the face of an animal -- ranging from wolves to rats -- copies the viewer's facial expressions like a living, responsive mask. The artist created this eerie "blended reality," blurring the lines between real and virtual, with face tracking technology and a one-way mirror. She discusses the creative themes at work in the piece and the impressive range of software involved in an interview below.

The Atlantic: How did you get into art and digital and interactive art specifically?

Karolina Sobecka: I've always been drawn to making things, and the art education was one way to get to do that for a living. I gravitated to the time-based formats, and then to interactivity. I work with the emergent technologies because they are an amazing tool -- allowing for new kinds of expressions and aesthetics, but also because they have become pervasive in our culture and I think it's important to be able to use this new language that the popular culture is expressed in. Interactive projects are a kind of 'procedural representation' (to use a term coined by Ian Bogost). They let us represent a system, a situation, the relationships between elements, rather than a static view. Often the viewer is one of those elements, and he or she actively completes the representation with their actions. Most of these projects are prompted by curiosity, and interactivity allows for really interesting explorations.

What was the inspiration for this project?

This project follows a few others which are about interaction itself. I'm interested in how we communicate with one another and one might argue that interactivity is a kind of communication, a non-verbal conversation. Mimicry is a very basic way of trying to communicate and understand each other. Studies show that it is automatic and pervasive, and has a huge influence on social psychology. This idea of 'being in someone else's skin,' as a way of understanding them, has been with us for a long time -- taking for example masked rituals and performances. Recently a neural mechanism has been discovered that explains how we gain experiential insight of other minds -- the mirror neurons. These special neurons activate when we perform an action as well as when we watch someone perform an action. They have been implicated not only in motor mimicry, but also in playing a role in ‘theory of mind’ concepts such as emotional recognition or contagion, empathy and self-awareness. Emotional contagion is based on interpreting the emotional state of another being expressed through their physical features. Emotions have typical facial characteristics, and the mirror neurons are ‘mapping’ the facial features of another person onto the respective areas in our own brain. So this mechanism suggests that the masked rituals might be far more than simply a symbolic performance -- that they might be actually a kind of 'embodied simulation' of other creatures.

Using a mirror in the installation was also a result of my interest in the combination of the virtual and physical worlds -- inserting a layer of imagination into a physical reality. The chain of causes and effects remains in place, although slightly augmented. The familiar is transformed into the uncanny, prompting us to see the mechanics of perception, interaction, and relationships with others anew. “In a sense, mirrors are the best ‘virtual reality’ system that we can build,” said Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool. Yet they are part of our physical reality. This makes them ideal to use in this kind of 'blended' reality experiment.

How would you describe the setup to someone who is unfamiliar with the technology?

Behind the mirror there's a monitor, a small computer, and a camera that looks out onto the viewers. There are two applications at work on the computer. One is a video tracker that analyzes the real-time video from the camera, recognizes faces in this footage, and their 'architecture' -- which then allows for recognizing facial features and expressions. The information about the face's position, rotation and expression is sent to the second application running (the game application) as a kind of input. The 'game' is built with the same technology as many other video games -- except in this case the interactivity is in the animal's behavior trying to mimic or correspond to what the video tracker has recognized.

The video tracker is made in openFrameworks, a C++ library (openframeworks.cc/) and is using a FaceTracker library from Jason Saragih, and the ofxFaceTracker addon by Kyle McDonald. The game is built with a game engine called Unity3d.

How does the mirror work?

The mirror is a half-silvered (or sometimes called one-way) mirror, the kind that are used in interrogation rooms. The surface reflects about half the light that strikes it and lets through the other half. Whether the surface looks reflective or transparent depends on the balance of light on both sides of it. In this installation the light from an LCD monitor behind the mirror appears on its surface.

How did you craft the animals, and their expressions? What software did you use?

The animals are modeled and animated in an open source 3D application Blender. They are then imported into Unity3d where their movement and the blending of animations are scripted to correspond to the input from the video tracker. The animals represent a spectrum of domestication of species (from a wolf through goat to rat). When I was working on it I realized how much more expressive the predators seem to be compared to ruminants for example.

What's next for you?

I'm working on a few other projects, a series of accessories for environmental awareness, Amateur Human, and other interactive installations that will be on view at the San Francisco Film Society's Kinotek exhibition in April.

For more work by Karolina Sobecka, visit http://www.gravitytrap.com/.

Via Motionographer.

Facebook, Google, and the Future of the Online 'Commons'

2012-02-03T12:55:49-05:00

As part of digesting the meaning of the Era of the Facebook IPO, please check out an essay today by Dave Winer, which builds on one yesterday by John Battelle, which itself was a response to one the previous day by Keith Woolcock. All are worth reading, and all concern the way Facebook's rise is changing -- and distorting -- the overall shape of the internet.

In brief they argue:

- Google's business success depended on a worldwide internet structure as open, untrammeled, and transparent as possible. Therefore most of what Google did for its own corporate interest also advanced those aims -- or at least did not impede them.

- Facebook's business success depends on an internet structure that is increasingly "gated" and segregated into proprietary realms. Therefore most of what Facebook has done is to induce maximum sharing of personal information within its propriety sphere, while erecting barriers to the flow of information from one realm to another.

- The shift of business advantage from the "public" to the "private" model means more than a different subset of people becoming zillionaires. It will also affect the fundamental structure of the Internet and its value to the 99.999% of us who are neither Google nor Facebook IPO-beneficiaries. Already its effects are being seen, as all these pieces argue, with Google's promotion of its "G+" and social-search features. Facebook's ascent leaves Google with no choice but to compete on those terms.

Or as Battelle puts it:

1. The "old" Internet is shrinking, and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb. Sure, Google can crawl Facebook's "public pages," but those represent a tiny fraction of the "pages" on Facebook, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning. Similarly, Google can crawl the "public pages" of Apple's iTunes store on the web, but all the value creation in the mobile iOS appworld is behind the walls of Fortress Apple. Google can't see that information, can't crawl it, and can't "make it universally available." Same for Amazon with its Kindle universe, Microsoft's Xbox and mobile worlds, and many others.

2. Google's business model depends on the web remaining open, and given #1 above, that model is imperiled.

It's not just a battle between companies. (And, for later discussion, Google's* challenge is managing three struggles-for-survival at the same time: against Facebook on the "social" side, against Amazon on the e-commerce side, and against Apple and others in the mobile market.) It's also a battle with important "externality" effects on the rest of us. For instance: Google's success has depended on people spending as much time within its online ecosystem as possible. Thus it had an incentive to offer, free, services like Google Earth, whose commercial predecessors charged subscribers thousands of dollars per year. Or Google Maps, which is expensive to maintain. Facebook's success mainly depends on having users share more and more of their personal information within the Facebook environment. Its business logic leads to fewer "public goods."

To wax geostrategic for a moment, this argument over the Internet "commons" is very much like debates through the post-World War II era about the conflict between relatively open and relatively closed political and economic systems. Ie, the more a closed or beggar-thy-neighbor regime prospers, the worse behavior it evokes -- for survival reasons -- from all other participants.

More on that later -- and, as soon as I can, more on how I have come to peace-of-mind about Google's new privacy settings. Hint if you want to do research on your own: sign in to Gmail or one of your other Google-related accounts (YouTube, Google docs, Blogger etc). Then, while signed in, go to google.com/dashboard. You will be interested in what you see, and the changes you can make. First, read these three pieces. Update: Andrew Keen today on CNN also worth reading.
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* Routine for-the-record disclosure, which at some point I'll have given so often that I can dispense with it: I have no financial involvement (alas!) with any of these companies. But I have many friends, and now a family member, working at Google.

When Our Lightbulbs Became Computers

2012-02-03T12:28:35-05:00

We grew up with cheap, disposable lightbulbs. Now they are gadgets in their own right.

In an effort to reduce energy consumption, many jurisdictions are trying to move people to more efficient lighting by banning incandescent lightbulbs. That's the stick.

LEDO's incredibly stylish mad-scientist-slick BULLED LED bulbs are the carrot. They are designed to be exact retrofit replacements for regular 60w incandescents in terms of shape, coverage, and luminosity, though I can't imagine a situation where you wouldn't want to replace your boring lampshades with something more open, to show off the bulbs.

Those fancy ridges and fins are functional, too. They are made of aluminum and act as heat-sinks, encouraging airflow to keep the bulbs cool during operation. At 11w, they promise significant energy savings over their 60w ancestors.

One of the things that's most interesting about the shift to LED bulbs is the need to change our ideas about what kind of object a lightbulb is. Most of us are used to thinking of lightbulbs as disposable purchases, bought in packs at the grocery or hardware store. The BULLEDs retail for €99 (about $125). They have a rated lifespan of 80,000 hours. If you average using your lights for about 3 hours a day, you can expect own them for 70 years. Imagine! A world where your bulbs last longer than your lamps.

Because of this longevity, the construction of the bulbs requires durable materials. LEDO's marketing proudly touts the polycarbonate light refractors, the heatsinks "made of an aluminum alloy and of technical synthetic materials", and the "thermal vias" that keep chip temperatures low on the circuit board. That's right, there are microchips in your lightbulbs now. It's computers, all the way down.

The New York Times, the Content Farm, and the Power of the Brand

2012-02-03T11:30:05-05:00

It was timing that was either ironic or fitting: Less than 24 hours after Facebook filed for its big IPO, The New York Times Company announced its earnings for the last quarter of 2011 and for the previous year as a whole. While the company isn't doing great, it's not doing terribly, either. The Times itself, along with the International Herald Tribune and the The Boston Globe, now gives the company over 400,000 subscribers to its digital products -- not a landslide, but a definite rebuke to the many who predicted that the paywalls would fail. And while digital revenues are down overall, digital revenues at the Times and other core properties -- isolated out from the company's other holdings -- actually grew by 10 percent between 2010 and 2011.

What's doing notably badly, though -- and making the earnings report seem worse overall than it actually is -- is About.com, the web portal-meets-content farm that the Times Company bought in 2005 for $410 million. In 2011, digital revenues for the unit fell by 25 percent -- and overall profit fell by, yikes, 67 percent.

The decline was due in part to Google's recent update to its search algorithm, which punished About, Demand Media, Associated Content, and other purveyors of SEO-driven churnalism by lowering those sites' content in its search rankings. (The algo-tweak was nicknamed the "Farmer Update.") But the plummet, I think, is also related to a more atomized problem, and one that's particular to content farms as a journalistic strain. The sites, the now-ex-Times writer Virginia Heffernan has put it, create a kind of "sci-fi universe in which every letter, word and sentence is a commodity. Companies make money off chunks of language. Bosses drive writers to make more words faster and for less pay. Readers then pay for exposure to these cheaply made words in the precious currency of their attention."

Content farms and their products are, essentially, words without brands. They float, aimlessly, in the ether, waiting and hoping for just the right search query to make them, suddenly, relevant. They operate in the fickle world of eyeballs and clicks. They cling, because they must, to the whim and whimsy of human curiosity.

If I search for "get red wine stain out of carpeting," and Demand Media can deliver me an article titled "How to Remove Red Wine Stains from a Carpet," then Demand Media wins -- not because it's produced good content, but because it's produced relevant content. The article itself could tell me not to panic about the wine spill and then stop there, with nary a mention of sodas club or baking. What does it care? Either way, it'd get my click, and the meager amount of advertising money that comes with it.

That's not, implicitly, a bad thing. There's room for lots of species in the web ecosystem. The real question is whether the content farm approach, ultimately, is symbiotic ... or parasitic.

Google seems to have decided that it's the latter. And the farms are now feeling the financial pain of that conviction. Where do you go when your host rejects you?

So, back to the Times. What the paper, as a media business, has going for it is the fact that it, itself, is a host. It, itself, is a brand. The Times has a recognition and a loyalty and a cultural relevance and a social significance that both transcend and amplify the content it produces. It is anchored not to Google, but to itself -- even as that "self" becomes increasingly amorphous and atomized. And that gives it, as a media business, power to convert loyal readers into subscribers, and to pitch those subscribers to advertisers. The Times has a strong brand; it has only to be strategic about how it converts that brand into a commercial community.

About.com, on the other hand, has none of that. All it has is fickle, fickle SEO.

So the Times numbers are kind of a metaphor in miniature, a reminder that, as much as things are changing in the media business and in the way it makes its money, some things remain the same. Branding matters. Loyalty matters. Love matters. There's a reason why uber-branded Facebook is worth $75 billion or more, while the comparatively brand-poor Yahoo -- which actually pulls in more revenue -- is worth less than $20 billion. Your community is part of your brand. In a very real sense, it is your brand. Content, floating in the ether, risks matching its attitude to its worth: easy, yes, but also free.

Image: Holly Kuchera/Shutterstock.

The Most Surprising Thing About How People Use Facebook

2012-02-03T11:12:27-05:00

Facebook isn't just for sharing baby photos and YouTube videos, it's also a crucial new political space.

We all know that people are using Facebook every day for keeping up with their friends -- sharing pictures, statuses, and little finds from across the Internet. But it turns out that for the most hardcore Facebook users, the platform is more than social -- it's political.

According to a new report from Pew, the Facebook users who have the most friends, were tagged in the most photos, and received the most wall posts, were more likely than average users to attend political rallies and meetings offline. Additionally, those who used Facebook's "groups" feature were also more likely to try to convince other Facebook friends to vote for certain candidates. (In general Facebook users were more likely than average Americans to vote in an election.)

It makes sense that an overall pattern of engagement extends beyond Facebook to the greater world. And this was true before Facebook too -- people who are more social, more engaged, also have higher rates of civic participation.

But because Facebook is now where so many of those people -- these highly engaged citizens -- spend their time and communicate, the Facebook game is rising in importance for political campaigns. Voter contact -- asking someone personally to vote -- is thought to be the most effective way to get people to the polls, and it's all the more so when the people making the contact are friends not strangers. Facebook, with its dense and active networks, offers campaigns a more efficient way of making those contacts. On Facebook, there is the potential to reach more people, whom they assume to be friends, without sending people into the streets to walk door to door.

Though campaigns are hoping to reach millions of voters online, any actual increase in voter turnout has been at the margins, says Thomas E. Patterson, an elections scholar at Harvard's Kennedy School. There's some indication that there was a net turnout gain due to online organizing in 2008, but the ceiling for how many more people can be convinced to vote online may not be all that high.

One other interesting bit from the Pew report: They found no evidence of "Facebook Fatigue." To the contrary, the study's authors say, the longer someone has been on Facebook, the more active they are. Same is true for people who have more friends. This is good news for Facebook and a sign that it is on a different path than MySpace. As more people use the site and build deeper collections there, they tend to stick around.

Image: Reuters

Google Psyche: 'Why is the Super Bowl Called the Super Bowl?'

2012-02-03T09:38:37-05:00

Great moments in Autocomplete, courtesy of Google search and collective consciousness

The main question on the minds of the Googlesphere as we approach Super Bowl weekend: Why is the Super Bowl, actually, called the Super Bowl?

An answer, via WikiAnswers, offers a possibly-apocryphal-but-still-entertaining-and-therefore-very-Internet-y bit of history:

The Super Bowl was created as part of the merger agreement in 1966 between the National Football League (NFL) and its competitive rival, the American Football League (AFL). One of the conditions of the AFL-NFL Merger was that the winners of each league's championship game would meet in a contest to determine the "world champion of football". Then NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle wanted to call the game "The Big One".

During the discussions to iron out the details, AFL founder and Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt is supposed to have jokingly referred to the proposed interleague championship as the "Super Bowl", a play on words from the new Wham-O Super Ball his daughter then liked to play with and college "bowl" games. Hunt apparently only meant his suggested name to be a stopgap until a better one could be found. Nevertheless, the name "Super Bowl" became permanent.

Picture of the Day: How to Make a 'Blue Marble' Image of Earth

2012-02-03T08:19:12-05:00

Last week NASA released the latest edition in its "Blue Marble" series. The first Blue Marble picture was taken by astronauts on board Apollo 17 as they traveled to the moon. When they took the picture, they were 28,000 miles from the Earth, and they were therefor able to see the entire Earth in their vision. But NASA's Suomi satellite -- the craft responsible for the new Blue Marble picture -- was only 512 miles above the Earth, far too close to get a picture with an entire hemisphere in view. (For comparison, the International Space Station which provides us with all those wonderful "Earth at night" photos is somewhere between 205 and 255 miles over head.) The above image shows how NASA scientists compiled different sets of that up close data to create an image of one of Earth's hemispheres -- on that appears, they say, to have been taken at a distance of 7,918 miles. The data comes from six different passes by Suomi over that hemisphere of Earth during an eight-hour period. Since NASA posted the new image last week, more than 3 million people have viewed it on Flickr, making it one of the most-viewed images for a one-week period in the site's history.

Below, recent Pictures of the Day:

Image: NASA.

Here's the Number That Matters in Facebook's IPO Filing

2012-02-02T16:55:59-05:00

To justify the kind of valuation it is seeking, Facebook is going to need to make a lot more money per user.

After waiting for so long to see the numbers inside Facebook's success, it's easy to be overwhelmed by all the new data we have about the social network and company. But there is one number that matters more than all the others:

Revenue per monthly active user: $4.39*

In particular, I want to explain why this number matters so much to you as a user of Facebook, not just for Facebook at a corporate level.

To justify the kind of valuation that Facebook is seeking, the company is going to have to generate a lot more revenue that they currently do. Some of that revenue growth could come from getting more users onto the service. But Facebook has snapped up a lot of the easy users -- that is to say, people with the Internet who live outside of China. User growth will continue outside the western countries for a few more years.

However, even if Facebook gets to 3 billion users, if it doesn't increase its revenue per user, the company will only generate $13 billion in revenue per year, as analyst Trip Chowdry has pointed out. That's not going to justify a market capitalization of $100 billion. Google, for example, generated $38 billion in revenue -- nearly three times Facebook's hypothetical three-billion-user hypothetical -- and has a market cap of $190 billion.

So, if tripling the size of the social network to 3,000,000,000 users is not going to be enough to justify its valuation with its current revenue per user, there is only one strategic direction for Facebook to go. It needs to generate more revenue per user. A lot more.

Facebook's current model is working well, obviously, but how can they double the amount of money they squeeze out of each user? Two things are likely to happen:

1) A lot more advertising. There's just no way around it. Facebook's main products are the eyeballs of the people on the site, which they sell to advertisers in tiny slices. More display advertising will head to Facebook. We'll probably see different types of advertising, too. Remember that Mark Zuckerberg's vision is the "frictionless sharing" of everything, so I expect to see something like the ill-fated "Beacon" plan resurrected. It'll be more subtle this time, but Facebook will get better at showing you products that you and your friends like. You'll be frictionlessly sharing all your tastes with your friends ... and advertisers.

2) More Facebook Payments. Already, Facebook generates 15 percent of its revenue from other companies selling credits to purchase virtual items, primarily in games produced by companies like Zynga. It seems to me that Facebook has to bend a lot more people into using Facebook Payments. If they can manage to become the default payment method for virtual goods purchased across the Internet, they should have no problem meeting the revenue targets they must have to justify their current valuation.

Point to all this being, when Facebook was merely trying to grow its user base, the incentives between Facebook and you, as a user, were pretty tightly coupled. Now, particularly in the United States, user growth is slowing and getting more money for each user is necessary. My guess is that Facebook's need to monetize at higher levels and users' desires will come into conflict more often the higher its revenue per user climbs.

* Bloomberg's Mark Gimein argues that the revenue-per-user number should actually be $5.02 based on Facebook's mid-year 2011 user numbers, which also seems like a fair way to compute this statistic. Either way, as he told me in an email, "the bottom line is still the same."

Image: Reuters.

The Manhattan District Attorney's Office Subpoenaed Tweets, by Fax

2012-02-02T15:04:48-05:00

Malcolm Harris, a 23-year-old writer and editor, was informed by Twitter early this week that his account had been subpoenaed by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance. He's concerned about law enforcement's reach into the newfangled social platform and is seeking to quash the subpoena, calling out, among other things, the method by which it was delivered. The DA's office, apparently, sent it by fax, handwritten cover sheet and all. How new and old worlds collide!
Joan Vollero, Deputy Director of Communications for the Manhattan DA's office, did not shed light on exactly what prosecutors hope to learn from Harris's Twitter account data, explaining that Harris is "charged with disorderly conduct." The subpoena asks for "any and all user information, including email address, as well as any and all tweets posted for the period of 9/15/2011-12/31/2011" from Harris's account.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.

Tumblr as a City, With Residents, Events, and ... a Newspaper?

2012-02-02T14:37:39-05:00

All the news that's fit to tumble.

About 40 percent of Americans go online to get their news. The Internet is where they find out about the latest machinations of our political leaders, read reviews of a movie they've been curious about, or check the weather. In short, we go online to read about what is going on offline.

But a lot happens online these days. It may be all bits and volts, but it's not other-worldly. And that's why a new effort by the good people at Tumblr is so exciting. Their plan, as reported in The New York Times, is to create a news site for the things that happen in the Tumblrverse. They've hired Chris Mohney of BlackBook Media and Jessica Bennett of the Daily Beast as editor in chief and correspondent, respectively.

Mohney describes his editorial vision for the site by comparing Tumblr to a city of 42 million (the number of Tumblrs -- bigger than the population of Tokyo), and he's got to cover what happens in that city -- its ideas, trends, and, even, events.

Tumblr is not the first website to dabble in this kind of media. In 2003, Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, hired Wagner James Au as an embedded journalist to cover the "emerging society" there -- "its controversies, its personalities, its innovations and ambitions." Au worked for Linden Lab (as a contract employee, in order to retain "editorial independence") for two years. He still maintains "New World Notes" which covers Second Life news and culture, including things like reviews of new Second Life fashions.

Of course, its not as though no one is covering what happens online. Internet life is not a separate reality from offline life, and it gets covered by traditional news outlets when it plays into a traditional news story, such as the logs of chats between Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo, the tweets of Representative Anthony Weiner, or the online interactions and trails of Tyler Clementi and his roommate Dharun Ravi, reported by Ian Parker in this week's New Yorker.

But Tumblr -- and Mohney -- are right: Online life is richer and more interesting than can possibly be covered in the course of traditional news, and that's what we'll have a chance to see with their curation of the City of Tumblr's first local paper.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Rebecca Rosen.