Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent

Wael Ghonim in conversation: Revolution 2.0

2012-01-08T16:01:03Z

Even more blatant self-publicity this, but it’s good. On February 1st, at a location to be confirmed in central London, I’ll be in conversation with Wael Ghonim:

Named one of Time magazine’s top 100 most influential people, Wael Ghonim, is credited with having sparked Egypt’s revolution with a Facebook page he dedicated to a victim of the regime’s violence.

The ‘We are all Khaled Said’ Facebook page that he created after the young man’s brutal murder and torture by police in Alexandria became such a focal point of the uprising that Ghonim was imprisoned for 11 days.

Tickets from the Frontline Club.

The School of Life Presents…A Trip To The Future

2012-01-08T15:14:46Z

Blatant self-publicity, this. In conjunction with The School of Life, on Saturday February 25th, I’ll be hosting a Trip To The Future – a psychogeographic post-digital stroll around London’s famed Tech City. Well, you know, Shoreditch and surrounds:

During the day we’ll visit studios and micro-factories, and meet the people who are creating the world the rest of us will come to know. We’ll investigate yesterday’s visions of tomorrow to ask whether our cities are shaped more by nostalgia than future-vision. We’ll visit shops and markets to discover how our changing understanding of complexity and communication is opening up new possibilities for commerce and social change. And we’ll peer into a number of different possible futures in order to clarify our own future priorities.

We can’t predict the future. But we can promise the future will never feel the same again.

Tickets are available from The School of Life.

Check Against Delivery. My speech to the IAAC.

2012-01-08T15:14:08Z

Last night I gave a speech to a meeting of the Information Assurance Advisory Council, the UK’s talking shop for government, law enforcement, security services, and private companies around the issues of cybersecurity and the like. The whole thing was under the Chatham House rule, so it’s hard to write about, and most of the audience could have me killed. But here’s the speech I gave. As I say at the beginning, it’s very rare that I give a speech verbatim like this, but I had some very specific points to make.

—

“This evening I am going to be break a habit of a lifetime, and use a prepared speech. Ordinarily, I come up on stage and have slides, and videos, and talk about geopolitics and killer robots and the future of the web.

But tonight I’ve brought a written speech because I want to make a lot of points very carefully, and because you’re all rather scary. The Q&A afterwards will be more relaxed.

So.

So, Hi. As Sir Edmund said, I’m a journalist, and technologist, and a writer and advisor to people. I’m a knowledge worker. I manipulate symbols for a living. To use the old phrase, I’m a futurist, and as the Californian thinker on such things, Kevin Kelly, recently wrote, Futurists have a dilemma, he said, as “Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable.”

So I won’t be making that many predictions tonight. You’d never believe me. Instead I’ll try to describe the world as I see it from my own experience. In the words of the author William Gibson, “the future is already here, just not evenly distributed”. I’m going to try to fix that a little before the dinner gets cold.

Now, earlier this year I give a speech in Geneva, where I painted a picture – perhaps an unfair one – of the world being split down the middle. Those who grew up before the cold war, and those who grew up after.

My theme that day was that the world is currently run by a generation whose upbringing has left them intellectually unable to be deal with modernity.

This isn’t their fault. For someone to be in charge today, they’re more than likely to be in their 50s or 60s. Which means that when the Berlin Wall fell they were most likely already steeped in an intellectual tradition that had bedded in quite far.

But what happened after 1989 was, as we all know, devastating to that tradition. The end of the bipolar world – the end of history as Fukuyama had it – and the end of the relevance of 50 years of political and military planning.

Instead, things got weird. Germany was reunited in 1990, and a few weeks later, on Christmas Day, the first web server was turned on. Nearly 21 years later, and the internet has destroyed and rebuilt everything it has touched. Hierarchies have been under attack from networks for 20 years now. History certainly didn’t end, much to everyone’s disappointment.

We all know this. Everyone in this room has seen it happen, and from beautiful vantagepoints. Indeed, everyone in this room is probably of the generation of the people I’m talking about.

You’re all the same age, and upbringing, as the people that the digital generations are so upset with. Don’t take it personally, but your peers are the sorts of baby-boomers that have been entrusted with the future, while they are obviously so deeply confused by the present.

That’s fighting talk, I know, but looking around, I think I might be ok this evening. You’re all quite smart.

Now, personally, I’m one of those terrible half-breeds. I’m 35, and so sort of third-digital-native, third-pathfinder. And despite the silly moustache and the tattoos, I’m also third-establishment – The Times, the Guardian, the BBC, Downing Street this afternoon, the FCO next week. UN fellowship, and the odd visiting lectureship, RSA, RGS and Chatham House. I may not look like, or even be, a good establishment man, but I can fake it.

So, I’ve given myself a job. I’ve taken it upon myself to be the translation layer. The guy who tells the older guys what’s going on with the younger guys, and explains to the younger guys why the weird decisions the older guys are coming up with are being made.

And I look around here and I see people who do the same thing. This is good.

In the time of revolution, and believe me this is a revolution – easily on a par with the renaissance, or the Enlightenment – the translator has a very important role to play. The communicator, the person who makes the facts palatable to all sides, is the only conduit through which real change can be made.

And in this room today, there are nearly 100 of us.

So this evening, let me help us remind ourselves of the facts at hand: As it’s only through remembering the fundamental truths that we can really do our jobs.

So let’s start at the basics, and work on up.

First. Moore’s law. You all know it: the rule of the thumb that has computing power doubling for the same price every 18 months. It makes planning really difficult. Mostly because people don’t see its relentlessness.

For example, a two term Prime Minister today would end his term of office with an iPhone 64 times as powerful as the one he won the election with. (Or the same thing, but 1/64th of the price.) His policies, therefore, need to written with that future in mind, not the present. Good luck with that.

Another example: a civil servant only gets to do really good stuff in their 40s. If they’d joined up straight out of Oxford, by the time they get a big chair, their desktop machine will be 1000s of times as powerful as when they joined.

The same goes for storage, for network speed, and so on, as you know.

This is all obvious for us, yes, but Truth Number One, is that anything that is dismissed on the grounds of the technology-not-being-good-enough-yet is going to happen. We have to tell people this.

Fundamental Truth Number two is that the internet is the dominant platform for life in the 21st century.

We can bitch about it, but Facebook, Twitter, Google and all the rest are, in many ways the very definition of modern life in the democratic west. For many, a functioning internet with freedom of speech, and a good connection to the social networks of our choice is a sign not just of modernity, but of civilisation itself.

This is not because people are “addicted to the video screen”, or have some other patronising psychological diagnosis. But because the internet is where we live. It’s where we do business, where we meet, where we fall in love. It is the central platform for business, culture, and personal relationships. There’s not much else left.

To misunderstand the centrality of these services to today’s society is to make a fundamental error. The internet isn’t a luxury addition to life; for most people, knowingly or not, it is life.

And this way we live online brings us to the Fundamental Truth Number Three: That technology changes our expectations of each other.

I collect these changes. I really like them. There are lots. A good example is about phone numbers. You might remember a time – I kinda do myself – where a phone number represented a place. That might be a hallway in a house, or a desk in an office, but it was a place – and there was a understanding that someone might not be at that place when you called.

Weirdly, you used to be able to call people and find them in a strange state of being “not in”. Schrödinger would have proud.

Now, of course, a phone number is a person. If you call my number, whereever I am on the planet, more or less, I will answer the phone. Tomorrow I’ll be in Amsterdam, and Friday I’ll be in Athens, but that doesn’t matter.

Call me. I’ll answer, partly because you all seem nice, but also because not answering one’s phone has gained a completely new social significance over the past few years. If you’re “not in” now, something may well be up.

The point is that this switch of the meaning of phone numbers, from place to person, has created a complete change in social behaviour. New technology does that. It creates new norms.

A newer example is that young children consider televisions to be broken. Why doesn’t the touchscreen work? Why can’t you pause things? Where, if we’re being old fashioned, is the mouse? No Angry Birds means it’s broken.

These are gross examples, but there are more subtle ones.

Let’s take opinion. In about ten short years, we’ve gone from there being only a specialist class of people who could have opinions, to it being a standard feature of modern life.

Ten years ago, your verdict about the meal in front of us could only have been shared with a few – your neighbours, your friends, your partner. The only opinion that mattered, that would have travelled, would be the professional critic’s, distributed in print.

The same goes for theatre, or television, music, or our views on the Prime Minister. Now, of course, there is a place to review everything.

We assume that every meal we eat, every hotel bed we sleep in, every piece of culture we consume, is something we can have an opinion on, and have it be given the same importance as an opinion from anyone else. There are rating sites online for you to rate just about anything, legal or not, and the sheer weight of amateur reviews outdoes the professionals for authority most of the time.

It’s another example of a network beating a hierachy, and it’s all pervasive in the national discourse. We are used to having our opinions matter, and so now, at the one end, politics is more shrill – more rabble-like – and at the other end, we have rioting.

Indeed, a small part of the trigger for the London riots can be understood as the gap between the respect given to peoples’s opinions by the internet, and the complete disrespect given by the government and the ruling elites.

In this way, we are undergoing a renegotiation of the social contract because of the internet, and the data up on it. We have become more empowered, more self-actualised. We know what we create simply by existing, and we know its value.

So, more than our opinions, we are used to, in fact, having our data matter.

Don’t be surprised at my meaning of “the social contract” here. People are more sophisticated in their understanding of media than you may think. We know what it means when a service is given to us for free: it means we’re the ones who are being sold. And that’s cool.

The handwringing about teenagers exposing themselves on Facebook is based on the idea that they don’t know why Facebook is so keen on that happening. Far from it.

We understand the value of our data, we have done the sums and we judged ourselves in profit. If advertisers want to know my preferred brand of whisky, or be allowed access to my travel schedule, and these disclosures gets me Facebook for free, with all its associated social utility and delights, then fine. Fair play.

The same for Tesco Clubcard, or Amazon recommendations, or whatever. We sell our data in return for a better world, and we do understand what we’re doing.

But this leads us to the next big social change. Just as we expect to be able to express an opinion – there is a growing expectation of being able to access all the other data in our world.

Let’s take architecture and public transport. I can easily monitor the public transport in London from my phone – and it actively changes the way I use the city. I make routing decisions in realtime, based on realtime data from public services.

This is not just simply cool. It’s a expectation I have to be able to do it. After all, I’m entirely used to giving people my data to improve their systems. I’m simply now expecting people to give me their data to improve my life. The freeing of public data over the past ten years has been driven by geeks, it’s true, but their arguments were merely foreshadowing a general shift in the mindset of the population at large.

The you-show-me-yours-I’m-already-showing-you-mine deal is the next big movement. Nevermind government league tables: we want everything.

We expect everything. And we expect it on our own terms.

I’ve been working through the social evolution of these technologies in this humanistic way for a simple reason. I need to make the point that this technology isn’t a removable part of life. It is ever more interwoven both into the practicalities of our lives, as well as our very mindsets.

Mindsets are good to talk about. You’re all security people, and next week is the anniversary of the event which made security people completely lose their minds: 9/11.

– Well, just as I’m empowered by the internet to be a restaurant critic, I’m also empowered to be critic of national security. So bear with me –

The government, and the security industry, in this country and elsewhere, have spent the past ten years really blowing it. Time and time again there has been a demonstration of security theatre, or overreaction, or overstatement of the risks in hand. From liquids in airports to invading Iraq, no one believes this stuff any more.

While there is no doubt that religious extremism, whatever the religion, has presented a risk to life, that threat has been so overstated as to render any other warnings, on any other subject – including the one in hand today – completely impotent.

A world where Al-Qaeda can be described by the government as an existential threat to the UK, when it is patently not, is a world where warnings about updating your virus scanner because of Chinese cyberwarriors or Russian mafia will be ignored as yet more paranoid security bullshit.

Despite the fact that it probably isn’t.

What’s worse, is that the phrase “security precautions” has become a synonym for “pointless annoying thing to do because politicians are either stupid or oppresive”.

This is bad. But it’s a very common belief. The speeches given after the London riots, about closing social networks down in times of national emergency were triply stupid in this respect.

1. They disregarded the centrality of those services in people’s lives, which made people look out of touch with modernity.
2. They were technically dubious (which pretty much everyone who would have been affected well knew),
3. They reinforced the impression you get when you go through an airport, that this is all self-justification.

In total it both makes one both feel less secure, and be less secure.

Your challenge, then – your challenge as an industry – is to communicate the risks and threats we face, and the measures and trade-offs we can make, in a way that removes yourselves entirely from the framing of the past ten years. The internet equivalent of making everyone take our shoes off at the airport won’t work.

In fact, given that the efficacy of Richard Reid as a terrorist didn’t depend on his being able to detonate his shoe at all – as arguably the downing of that flight would not have lead to the years of airport hassle and distress for millions of people – and simply in using our own overreaction against us, I’d be willing to take a bet that this sort of judo move would be something Anonymous would do, as they say, simply for the lulz.

So we need to work on ways to communicate these issues both up and down. It’s a design problem. A branding problem. It needs skills you find in advertising, or luxury goods, or pop music, not in politics or the military or espionage. And we need to educate. Not only in schools – though as Eric Schmidt of Google pointed out last week in Edinburgh, the state of IT education in this country, from primary school on up, is shameful – but also our political class. How many policy debates have you heard, from security to copyright reform, that have been predicated on technical ignorance? This is a threat to national prosperity itself far more severe than any terrorist organisation could ever be.

It remains, in too many circles, a matter of pride not to be able to programme the video recorder. That’s pathetic.

But more to the point, we have to decide what sort of country we want to live in.

As the 21st century sees us move every aspect of our lives onto the internet, the need for robust security measures is very great. But those security measures come with their own risks, and we need to draw a line in the sand.

What are we protecting, if the protection itself means we become, in some small way, a police state?

Despite the 9/11 anniversary, AQ isn’t an existential threat. Neither, really, are the Chinese.

But your industry, and the authorities you advise, might be. Not through malice, but simply through not understanding the place in society that data has taken.

So my message to you this evening, is simple. While we have Q&A over pudding, while you have your day tomorrow, and every day from then on, remember that we are living through the greatest revolution ever seen in the potential for human achievement and human connection. We can ruin it at birth, or we can nurture it. And one day, in decades to come, we’ll be asked about these years, and what we did at the birth of the internet era. The decisions you make today and tomorrow, will be the answer you will give to your grandchildren. Make it an answer you can be proud of.

I look forward to your questions. Thank you.

Soft power, Murdoch, and Parliament’s Ratner Moment.

2011-09-18T23:33:46Z

While there’s a good deal of substantive policy writing to be had, ad nauseam, about media plurality, freedom of speech, the right to investigate, and so on, those weren’t the things most at risk from this Tuesday’s proceedings. The real risk was to the perception of the UK in the rest of the world. As Marina Hyde wrote for the Guardian,

The nice thing is that the select committee sessions were a global news event, which should finally kill off any vestigial delusions that Britain is run to the ethical standards you might expect of a Peckham market trader, let alone a former empire.

These are men being investigated – questioned, enquired upon, whatever – about an organisation they run that is accused of systematic corruption of our police force, undue influence at the highest levels of power, and the illegal surveillance of private citizens, not to mention the destruction of evidence in a murder case, obstruction of justice, and so on and so on. Our parliament asks them to appear in front of the select committee in charge of media and in the first instance the Murdochs turn them down. A diss. A move that would get you knifed in bits of South London, and they get away with it for a while. This is surely noted by many.

But then, last Tuesday, they’re up in front of the committee. Here’s the setup. A billionaire, a man who owns 200+ newspapers, television networks, and so on, who has pointed out that the News of the World was less that 1% of his organisation (translation: who the fuck are you?), and he’s sat in what appears to be a conference room at the back of a travelodge in Slough. The committee are facing each other, not him, and they’re all at the same height. The Murdochs are practically holding hands, and their guys are sat right behind them. The only message that was coming across from the semiotics of the meeting was that this wasn’t serious at all. Anyone watching from any other country with an ounce of edge to it must have been mystified: where was the gravitas, the awe, the sheer showmanship needed to show not only Murdoch, but the rest of the world, that our values are important to us?

So when Rupert Murdoch says it’s the most humble day of his life, the only answer could be that, no, my friend, not nearly humble enough. We seem to lack the confidence, at a Whitehall level, to make a show of things. And that’s really what it is: a show: the little bits of presentation, of branding, that effects our perception in the eyes of others abroad. That no one thought that there might be a better room somewhere in Westminster to hold that hearing, that no one pays attention to that sort of thing, or even thinks it’s important, is deeply worrying. Parliament thinks of itself as the august and somber institution of power and justice, representing the people, and instead presented itself as a regional sales manager’s meeting, half-arsed, and mugging for the camera. Our nation’s representatives, charged with confronting Murdoch with the accusations of corruption and hideous corporate malpractice, took such care over it that someone was able to hit him with a foam pie. The joke, such as it was, was on us.

It is, perhaps, upsetting that this is the case, but the tragedy is that style does triumph over substance, especially when style is all you have. We in the UK have been working through 70 years of a post-colonial realisation that we’re very soon not to be in the top ten of anything. Not because we’re bad, but simply through demographics and fiscal reality. Military projection will have to take a back seat to paying for all of the old people; our financial system is already globalised and mostly out of governmental hands; our economy slides down the league table simply because the developing world is coming up. None of this is a failure: it’s simply what’s happening.

If the job of the government is to protect its citizens, and promote their wellbeing – and party politics aside, we can at least agree on that – then the UK’s standing will be, and perhaps already is, determined solely by our cultural and intellectual influence. Our Soft Power, in other words. That comes not from being able to bomb Libya, no matter how good the cause might appear, but on how we appear to others. (Indeed, bombing Libya might not actually be helping, but that’s for another day.)

We pride ourselves on certain British values – the rule of law, democracy, fair play, and so on, and it is for these things, plus our intellectual traditions and innovations, the Beatles, and Shakespeare, David Beckham’s right foot, and Beckham’s left foot for that matter, that we should be best thought of. We should have a country that others think of as a good place, full of good people, with whom they have no argument, and with whom they can do business, treated fairly, equally, and justly under our laws. That’s all our foreign policy should be now, and soon certainly all it will be able to be in the future. So when a man accused of systematic corruption of all that we hold dear as a nation is in front of our representatives, we need to be aware that the rest of the world is watching too. They’re paying attention not to the words, but the symbols, the look and feel, the, again, branding, that we’re putting across. All of Westminster again proved itself shamefully bad at this. Which is a problem, because it’s soon to be all we have.

Six Degrees of Dawn Chorus

2011-09-18T23:33:48Z

Matt Jones controls my mornings. He doesn’t know he’s doing this but he does. We’re friends on FourSquare, and his daily commute checkins are pushed to my phone. I’ve been running the beta of iOS5, which displays them elegantly on the screen, and I now realise that I’ve been timing the beginning of my day from the moment he gets to, and checks-in at, his local train station. My alarm clock rides a Brompton.

This has just kind of happened. Matt’s lovely, true, but there’s no reason his commute should be the signal for my dogs to go for a walk. We don’t work in the same office, or anything like that. The timing is just a happy coincidence that once noticed becomes amusing, and once amusing becomes a habit. But nevertheless, there’s something comforting in watching my friends existing somewhere out there. It is the thinest of social ties, but the 4sq push, like the gentle logging in and out of Skype and the rhythms of Twitter posting, have become another kind of sense to me. I can feel my friends out there. London is waking now, Europe already did, and later the East Coast, later still San Francisco, signalled by ever more little glows on my screens all meaning one thing: we are not alone.

Matt’s partner in crime at BERG, Matt Webb, (who, I see from my phone, is right now like me having breakfast) made a thing called Glancing back in the newborn-social-media 2003 which made the same point. It was basically Twitter where you couldn’t actually say anything, but simply raise a digital eyebrow:

The analogy I’m thinking of here is a group of people sitting working at their computers. Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.

That group experience made me think of Russell‘s wonderful meditations on secondary attention.

Mechanical engineers always talk about the importance of background noise. About how, looking back to when something went wrong, they actually, unconsciously knew it was about to happen because the quality of the background noise had changed. It’s a well understood phenomenon; we absorb huge amounts of information about the world through background noise.

Russell mentions Peep, the system that turns network traffic into birdsong. Normal traffic will just fade into the background, but if something goes wrong the engineer will hear it, perhaps subliminally first, without having to look at a screen. It is a beautiful thing.

And so, I’d like this for my friends. Birdsong that signals the rhythm of their days, and that reacts to the social weather. A dawn chorus of my friends waking up, connecting back into world, and going about their business. I want to connect to them intuitively, without breaking flow or opening an app. I want to feel my friends like I feel the weather. It’s a nice day. How are you?

Bigend-Draperism, a memoir, and a desk.

2011-09-18T23:33:49Z

I have a huge crush on this desk. It is disturbing me.

Over the past year or so, and very definitely in the past six months, I’ve been subscribing to the cult of the minimalist glocal: own little but the best, travel light, stay ahead. A good summary might be the end of Bruce Sterling’s talk at Reboot 11, which itself is based on Sterling’s own Last Viridian Note. He writes:

You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space…many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It’s a philosophy that is appearing in many guises. There’s Sterling, there’s the 100 Things Challenge (pah, easy), and the philosophy and economics of the Early Retirement Extreme book, featured in this weekend’s Guardian.. There’s downshifting, and minimalism, and decluttering, and simplification, from everyone from Oprah on up. Combine it with GTD, throwing everything into the cloud, and an emphasis on networks over hierarchies, and that, right there, is pretty much my life at the moment. I’m writing this in a cafe in Barcelona – I’m lecturing here tonight and tomorrow – and being here is functionally, purposefully, designedly no different from writing it at ‘home’ in London, or in a hotel in Beirut, a tent in Afghanistan, or my favourite diners in New York or San Francisco. I’ve spent a lot of effort making this to be the case. It’s not a Monocle style pose, or a How To Spend It affectation, but a hard-fought-for way of life, and it has not been without its dark doubting moments.

The socio-political aspect of this is, of course, entirely self-involved and Pseud’s-cornerist. Patriotism and civic service aside (for the moment, anyway), why does not having much physical stuff make me think I’m some sort of transnational Bourne-like entity, complete with non-ironic personal soundtrack, where for others it means they’re itinerant migrants, or just plain poor? Owning fewer than 100 objects is either a matter of hipster pride, or just, well, poverty. It’s a First World Problem written so large as to be shameful.

I think this is a key issue, and I’m still working through it, if only to save myself from that very shame. There are issues of privilege, certainly, but also of complexity: my affairs are physical simple, as you’ll see if you look through my London apartment’s kitchen cupboards, but of deep complexity in other ways – I have bank accounts in three countries, mailing addresses in two, and have worked so far this year in eight different territories, with at least two more in the diary.

It’s perhaps this shift in complexity, from the physical to the intangible, that marks the new modernity, and this sort of lifestyle reifies that. I don’t know. I’m working on it, as it marks a growing class of people that my clients, business and governments alike, need to deal with. The pan-national migratory digital elite are opting out of a lot of the stuff that makes them governable. That is a problem for a nation state. As Sterling writes:

The 400-year-old Westphalian System doesn’t approve of my lifestyle, although it’s increasingly common, especially among people half my age. It’s stressful to live glocally. Not that I myself feel stressed by this. As long as I’ve got broadband, I’m perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet’s surface is arbitrary. It’s the nation-state system that is visibly stressed by these changes – it’s freaking out over currency flows, migration through airports, offshoring, and similar phenomena.

Freaking out is an understatement.

And yet. And yet, despite my pride in being able to work from anywhere, free from the drag of pointless stuff, I see that desk trunk, and I covet it very badly. Custom made by Louis Vuitton for the conductor Leopold Stokowski, it allowed him to set up his office where-ever he went. You can’t buy it – you have to go to Louis Vuitton and have them make one to your own design. It would be a thing, would it not?

Upcoming talks

2011-09-18T23:33:51Z

I’m doing some more talks and events this summer…

A Breakfast with Jon Snow at Chatham House, Thursday 23 June 2011 09:00 to 10:00
The closing panel at The Sunday Times/ Wellington College Festival of Education, Sunday 26th June, with Anthony Seldon, Master, Wellington College, Professor Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities, University of East Anglia; Professor Niall Ferguson, Harvard University, LSE, Author, ‘Civilization’ and Columnist, Newsweek; Harvey Goldsmith, Chairman, Ignite.
10 en comunicacio, in Barcelona, on 29th June
NPOX 11, in Hilversum, Holland, on 8th September

Random signs of the future, Friday edition

2011-09-18T23:33:52Z

So this was an unexpected popup during a phone call yesterday. It warns of moments when an IMSI-catcher can be used to intercept your calls. It’s new in the iOS5 beta.

Then there’s Net-a-Porter Live, showing live orders (and wishlist-adds) on the couture-selling site. Watching someone buy an eight grand McQueen dress over breakfast was bracing.

And also Greg Smith’s write up and video of Kevin Slavin’s talk critiquing AR at MomoAmsterdam. I was there, dear reader, and it was truly great to watch, but the good meat has come afterwards. I’m really enjoying the to and fro from clever people.

Remember The Clock of the Long Now? Yeah, they’re actually making it. For reals. In the mountain. Right now. This is so lovely a thing it makes me want to weep.

Infrastructure and the State

2011-09-18T23:33:53Z

At the risk of straining a wonk bone or something, the previous post about optimising journeys in London has had me thinking about social policy and the role of the state. Yes, I know, bear with me. I’m about to ramble. But I do have a point.

So, the Adaptive Journey service I describe isn’t possible at the moment, because you can’t get at the user data without breaking TfL’s terms and conditions. Nevertheless, the “We see you’re doing this, perhaps you’d find it better to do that” design pattern is a powerful one, if used properly.

The question, then, is who should do it? Is it a for-profit operation? No. Something for TfL? Well, maybe, but it would have to show non-TfL services, and they’d find that tiresome. Is it something the London authorities should do? Again, maybe. National government? Well, that makes me start to feel queasy. Why? After all, it seems just their sort of thing: a tiny little initiative, and probably sold with a preface written entirely from bits cribbed from WIRED about neuroscience, and the dopamine released as we learn new things about our city. They’d love it.

It’s just that seems like it should be something too small for the government to do. Beneath them, somehow. Heart-breaking to my Jed Bartlet sense of how things should be. Though there are currently a good deal of government projects that feel like that. John Harris’ frustration in the Guardian about us needing more Marx and less Gladwell speaks to this. Although it starts to touch on the old saw of “ignoring the real problems” – a slightly weaselly thing used by both sides to cancel the other’s pet projects, regardless of merit – it is very familiar to anyone who has done anything with the UK government over the past few years. The mean-time from New Yorker article to Policy Unit working group is down to days. Not a bad thing, necessarily, but we can do better.

As on the other hand, the Adaptive Journey idea is one of things that perhaps only the state can do. It’d make no money for anyone, but it would make the world better, if only a bit. Only the state can pay their rent doing that sort of thing.

And here is the debate to be had over the next few years. What is the role of the state? With the demographic changes alone, we’re going to have to rethink this quite substantially. It’s certainly a debate that the Left needs to have Right Effing Now, if it ever wants to come back into power. A lot of blood will be spilt. “What about the demographics?” is really the question for the decade, and for my generation, and its being hidden away behind older stories of class war and banker-hatred.

Personally, at the moment I think we’re getting the role of the state slightly wrong. Even if you want to cut costs drastically you still have to look and say, ok, what is it that we a) want as a society, but b) won’t be provided by the market. And then do have to do that anyway, because as small as a government you might want, or as market-based as you think the country should be, there are still some things that only the state can do, and it’s that category that holds all the difficult bits.

Now, in my fields, that means fewer Prime Ministerial attempts to bring conferences to London, and more long-term infrastructure projects. The fun job of sprinkling nice coffee places around won’t transform a neighbourhood overnight, no matter what a misreading of Richard Florida says, but the coffee, along with the urge to innovate, and all of that stuff so feted right now will happen naturally if the infrastructure is there. That’s the job for the state. Even at a trivial level: after all, the post-developed world’s beloved bike lanes and pavement cafes depend on civil authorities – the state – for their existence.

It’s the infrastructure, then, that only the state can push ahead of the market. Lay fibre, reform copyright, change banking, send a man to the moon, eradicate a disease. These are big projects, with deep benefits. Meanwhile, we seem to be wasting a generation of young politicians in attempts to woo one arm of a Twitter dutch sandwich to Shoreditch by the means of unveiling another logo. These are not big plans. They do not stir the soul, and they should have no place in Westminster. They simply confirm the suspicion that it’s all a bit Fisher-Price down there. What Would Jed Bartlet Do? None of this stuff.

But my over-romanticisation aside, there’s a deeper issue at hand. Perhaps, as
Will Davies’ post “where are the psychologists of the night?” puts it so eloquently, we’ve simply forgotten about human nature.

…could we be finally discovering the true consequences of ‘post-modernity’, whereby policy elites base decisions on subjective impressions, anecdote and a Schumpeterian cult of the entrepreneur?…
…Paradoxically, a psychologist who communicated the dark appeal of winning, beating others, hoarding wealth, abandoning others and ego valorisation might also be able to start a conversation about the sorts of institutions and civic frameworks necessary to cope with those instincts, only some of which will be markets.

We face, as I keep saying in my lectures, a coming couple of decades of complete upheaval, if only because of baby-boomers all getting old. There’s no judgement there, it’s simply true. And while it’s fun to complain that It’s 2011 and Where’s My Jetpack, my worry is that it’s 2011, and we have no Apollo Program.

Adaptive Journeys

2011-09-18T23:33:54Z

A way to make cities, and especially London, a tiny bit better. But first, an explanation. Yesterday I needed to go from Finsbury Park to Old Street, home of the World Famous Silicon Roundabout(TM). There’s a bus that gets me almost there, but that takes about 40 minutes, and on the tube it’s about 20 minutes away, via a two stage journey (Victoria Line to Euston, then Northern Line). It’s a journey I do a lot, and it’s pretty automatic. Even the dogs know which stop to get off at.

Still, yesterday, I was faffing around and thought to look at the TfL Journey Planner – the webapp half of Old Street dreams of redesigning – and there it was. A whole new route. There’s an overland train that only takes 8 minutes. I didn’t know, because I use the standard tube map which doesn’t have the non-TfL but still Oyster-compatible overland (but not Overground) trains. That map, showing all the Oyster routes is much more interesting, but it’s hardly ever seen. It’s kinda hidden away on the TfL site.

But yet: Whole new ways of getting to whole new places.

Now, seasoned Londoners will probably be rolling their eyes at this. But to my credit I’m pretty seasoned myself: I’ve lived here on and off for 15 years. And to be fair, Old Street station is entirely underground. The idea of looking for an overground train line to it is silly. It’s in an island, after all.

So it strikes me that there must be loads of new ways around town that I don’t know. Using the Capital Ring, for example, or by tying together the Boris Bike docking stations into routes with the tube. It’s just we fall into habit and don’t look for them as the services around us improve. That’s a serious problem for cities trying to make themselves better: there may be a lovely mass-transit route just perfect for you, but if you’re automatically getting on the old 138 bus, you’ll never use it.

Here’s something to be built, then. A service that accesses your TfL journey history (not unlike Chromaroma), and compares the time you took getting from A to B with the shortest routing possible at that moment. If there’s a significant difference, it emails you with the shortest route, and asking if there were any problems (because maybe you took the shortest route, only the train or bus was delayed). This way we can all discover quicker ways to places, using services we might not have considered. Anyone fancy building it?

This weekend in Hay-on-Wye

2011-09-18T23:33:56Z

No one knows what starts the migration. Perhaps it is the lengthening of the days, or a flux in the earth’s magnetic core. But whatever the mechanism, this week sees thousands of writers, readers, academics and public intellectuals make their annual murmuration to Hay-on-Wye. This little Welsh-borders village hosts two festivals in the same week, and they Hitchensonianly rut together. How The Light Gets In is the one for philosophy and music and talk of clever things, and I’m pretty much pwning it this year, speaking on three panels, chairing one, and giving a solo talk. In the words of one of the organising team, “Your timetable is now rivalling Mary Warnock’s”. (Which isn’t that great a thing seeing at Baroness Warnock is 87. But still.)

My fellow speakers are very shiny indeed, the music is great, there’s a promise of fine weather and wine, and if you’re around, it’d be lovely to see you.

Here’s what I’m doing:

Friday

14:00 - Cultures of the Body (with Musa Okwonga and Gabriel Gbadamosi, and Mary-Ann Sieghart chairs.)

Saturday

16:00 – Neverending Journey (with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Daniel Miller, and Anita Sethi chairs.)

Sunday

10:30 - Caught in the Net (with Brett Kahr and Daniel Miller, and Gabriel Gbadamosi chairs.)

12:00 - Childhoods End (chairing, with Frank Furedi, Dorothy Rowe, and Michael Hastings speaking)

14:00 - Digital Geopolitics (solo talk)

Post-digital Geopolitics in Salon

2011-09-18T23:33:58Z

Mr. Ambassador, Meet President Zuckerberg, by Cyrus Farivar

“You literally build a foreign service for the company, people whose mission it is to represent the company outwardly, but also to translate the policy environment back into the company.”
When I read heard this, my first thought went back to Lift, an international tech conference I’d attended in Geneva earlier this year. Wired UK editor-at-large Ben Hammersley gave a talk there in which he argued that nation-states?especially the smaller and midsized countries without big-budget foreign ministries?should, instead of sending an ambassador to, for example, the Maldives (sorry, Maldives!), send one to Facebook instead. “Why should there by an ambassador to Facebook? Because that’s where the people are,” Hammersley told me this week. And he’s absolutely right.

British Council Annual Lecture 2011: The Internet of People

2011-09-18T23:33:59Z

From Derry, Northern Ireland, March 2011

British Council Annual Lecture 2011: The Internet of People from British Council on Vimeo.

E-Books – The Bigger Problem

2011-09-18T23:34:00Z

This is a post made of a series of posts I made on an older blog system, back in 2009. It’s been getting hits recently, so I thought I ought to put it back up. It is historically interesting, if nothing else.

I think we’re missing a trick here. With 2010 being the Year of the e-Book, (or, at least, the Year of the Please Apple Release The Tablet Please We Beg You), most of the design work that is doing the rounds is around the interface: BERG’s beautiful work for Bonnier is a great example. We know that a device with a colour HD screen, an always-on connection, GPS, sound, video and so on will give magazine designers all sorts of new toys to play with. From a content-designer’s point of view, I couldn’t be more excited.

From a publishing standpoint, too, e-books are thrilling: the dirty jobs of printing and distribution fall away, replaced with an upload to the iTunes store – or the publisher’s own – and a direct billing relationship with the client. For advertisers it will offer all of the advantages of web advertising with the rich-media and contextual advantages of appearing within a publication, so for a skilled ad-sales team it’s sure thing, and with the Great Media Crisis entering its second decade that sort of talk is catnip to a big media company like Bonnier, or (the one I work for more often) Condé Nast.

But while BERG’s work, and other pieces like it, are beautiful to see, they leave me very frustrated. The client-side development is very exciting to do – especially the systems-thinking that you need to do to take the entire customer journey from browsing to buying to backing-up – but the harder work, the more fundamental work, isn’t done. I’m talking about the editorial workflow. Bear with me.

At the moment, the average magazine is made from a combination of Microsoft Word, Photoshop, In-Design, shared-drives, and PDFs sent to the repro house. As each step of the analogue production process has been replaced by a digital version (film photography to digital, for example) that bit has been swapped out and replaced. The upshot is that we have accidentally efficient production processes that are optimised to getting a print magazine out of the door every four weeks or so. When you then try to put that magazine onto the web, as we do with WIRED every month, the process is mostly cut-and-paste. This is one of the reasons why magazine websites aren’t very good: you lose so much simply because of the way you have to get the content from one medium to the other. The rest of the content you never had in the first place (for example because the original copy wasn’t written in HTML, and so doesn’t have links in it.)

With e-books, and especially with e-book concepts, the stories are published with the implication that the system knows a whole load of stuff that a print magazine doesn’t. The articles are written in hypertext, they have location data and subject cataloging, there is associated video and audio and additional photography, and so on. For a magazine title that is made entirely and exclusively for the e-book format, that’s not a problem. For an existing title trying to make the transition from paper through web to specialised digital device, it’s a show-stopper: the workflow at British Vogue, say, can’t handle it today. Neither could WIRED.

So a real design challenge for e-books isn’t to design the user experience (which is dependent at the end of the day on the device capabilities anyway, which are pretty much unknown) but rather on designing a system that would allow existing publishers to transition their operations from ramshackle print to All Knowing Digital. We already know much of this: you can take the lessons from blogging CMSs, add in photography handling from places like Photoshelter, combine metadata collection from sources like Google Maps and OpenCalais, and version control from Git, and you’re halfway there. Combine it with process changes, where you require writers to file direct to a system that forces them to add in metadata for example, and you’re closer still. Of course, in two sentences I’ve described a process that really encompasses the whole old-media crisis, but I do think it’s a challenge that can be met.

I started making suggestions about the internal changes needed to a magazine editorial process to make it ready for ebooks. Here I’ll go further. But first, let me make some starting assumptions.

1. The ebook (or emagazine, or whatever you want to call it) will not simply consist of a monthly edition of a collection of pages, each made of words and pictures – it will more likely be a rolling collection of pages and services. The traditional monthly magazine cycle being more related to distribution rhythms than anything. Indeed, why do we keep to a regular monthly cycle in print anyway? Why not, say, every three weeks in the winter, every five in the summer? I digress, but.

2. But for the sake of simplicity we’ll call each logical block of meaning a “story”, whether it is a traditional 4000 word prose piece, a slideshow, a video, a graphic, an interactive something or other, a subject-specific chatbot, or something machine-written, or a combination of all of the above.

3. That every medium – magazine, newsprint, iPhone, desktop web, tablet, projector, tv, parchment – is uniquely gifted in a particular way. So while the text and the meaning of the “story” might well be the same, the graphical language at least will be different. This means that at some point the art department and the production department for each medium must become separate from the editorial department, and from each other. It’s right here that the tensions occur within an editorial operation: one of the media will get ignored or sidelined for the sake of another. (How many TV shows have websites, compared to how many websites have TV shows, compared to how many website & tv show properties are there? Compare WIRED in print to WIRED online. And so on.)

4. If you’re going to produce content for more than one medium, therefore, you need to commission content in a strange and abstract way. The story creator’s work for print will be flat text; For an e-book, hypertext; For a web service, hypertext and perhaps an interactive graphic. And more, and so on. This means that the author has to hand in copy that is much much more than a flat text file circa 800 words. It needs to be annotated. It needs to be hyperlinked. It needs to have underlying data. It needs all of this and more to allow the art and production departments of each medium to produce the very best representation they can of the story within their own medium, otherwise their medium will come across as half-arsed. Half-arsed is worse than not doing it at all.

5. Existing content management systems can’t do this. Existing magazine workflows can’t do this either.

The perfect case in point is that of metadata. There’s a word you hear a lot on the web. It means the data about the data – the author’s name, the date it was written, and so on. In its purest and perfect sense, any story has an infinite amount of metadata: this piece you’re reading now was written by me, on my macbook air, on the 29th December 2009, in London, in part in Whitehall, in part in the Milk Bar, Soho, and in part in my office in Notting Hill, this paragraph being written with an ambient temperature of about 20 degrees c, while the local weather was cold and rainy, etc etc etc. It concerns electronic publishing, and refers to…and is classified as…and is linked to…and is part of a collection called…and is built on thinking done in…

You can go on and on.

The problem is that metadata is incredibly fragile. If you don’t capture it when you can, it is lost forever. The date you wrote that piece? The websites you looked at when you were researching it? The music playing during that photoshoot? You didn’t write it down? Ah, then it’s gone.

Even more upsettingly, the way that we file our copy today necessitates losing all the metadata we can. Emailed word documents, or plain text files, contain virtually none of the metadata we could use: stuff that we get for free simply by the passage of the creative process itself is instantly thrown away by the workflow. The only times many reporters have to hand in their metadata is when they’re being sued – but even if they were willing, the content management systems don’t have a place for it. This we’ll come back to.

The necessity above all else of keeping your metadata might seem like a geeky affectation – something that is really only of interest to librarians (itself not a bad reason) or trainspotterish data-completists – but it is in fact the simplest and cheapest route for a publisher to future-proof their business. Your revenue depends on it. Remember, we’re talking about a business sector whose incumbents are trying to transition from having an advantage regarding printing and distribution, to having an advantage regarding content. In other words, Vogue’s printing presses and relationship with COMAG are both lovely, but in a digital world ultimately worthless: it’s the combination of the creative and ad-sales teams upstairs and the rights-owned archive in the basement that gives it value now and in the future. Only one of these things is replicable by others.

So why do everything you can to keep metadata intact? Because it’s from this information that new products can be automatically created, at a scale and rapidity that would be impossible otherwise. With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup. In the case of Vogue today, say, commissioning an editorial product that simply shows every dress designed by Christian Dior that appears in the archive would involve weeks of intern-work, instantly making it unprofitable or too late. A metadata-complete archive in the future would give you that with a single line of code. As an example, here is a sentence that will be spoken in a newsroom sometime this coming decade:

“Right then, website people. Fidel is finally dead, so I need a special page with everything we’ve ever written about Castro, plus any travel writing we’ve had from Cuba, and all the pictures we have from the region mapped by place and time, and everything we wrote about JFK and the Bay of Pigs, and I need it online in an hour. Go.”

The reaction to this request is solely a function of the content management system the newsroom uses. You simply can’t do this in a sane or profitable way without an archive with all the metadata preserved. You could do it slowly, sure, with brute force and interns, but who will have those? More to the point, who will have those and still be able to compete in terms of both cost and speed with those that don’t bother with interns and excessive staff in fancy buildings but instead have a workflow designed with the future in mind?

There is immense potential for new editorial products being created by being able to slice through your existing content in new and interesting ways. Personalisation and location-based services are dependent on this; collaborative filtering works better when you have it; APIs get exponentially richer the more data you have to expose. But without an underlying library of your content complete with metadata, you can’t do any of it very well. If you’re going to rock a multi-outlet, multimedia world, you need to have stories whose parts are way more than their sum. This is new.

An example, then. One of my basic points is that having lots of metadata means you can do lots of really nice stuff when you transition from print to online, or print to multimedia. But that metadata needs to be captured and stored as close to the original author as you can. The moment when you can write this stuff down and store it is fleeting, and once it has passed, it has passed forever, for profitable values of forever at least.

One solution is to have your writers mark-up their copy. As an example, here’s the first bit of something I wrote for WIRED last year:

It’s the hot design company hired by Apple to create its first mouse, (and by Microsoft to create its second), by the Post Office to rework the postbox, by Muji to create its wall-mounted CD player and by Procter & Gamble to reinvent toothpaste tubes. It made the Nokia N-gage, the Palm V and the Head Airflow tennis racquet. Now IDEO is being retained by Barack Obama’s White House to help to reinvigorate the American civil service; by the government of Iceland to help the country to innovate its way out of financial crisis; and by the Kellogg Foundation to reinvent education.

That sits, now, in a few versions. The webpage linked to above, the print copy (in various states of disarray, all over the world), in a few versions of Word docs on the shared drive at WIRED HQ, on my laptop, and inside Gmail. It lived first as a text file, then a word doc, then an InDesign file, then a PDF, then cut and pasted into a web CMS, then as HTML. Apart from the words, it contains nothing useful whatsoever. (obvious gag insert here)

Imagine, however, that instead of a Word doc I had submitted a marked-up document in a flavour of XML, like the following. Read through this, even if it looks weird to you. (And for the semantic web people in the audience, it’s pseudocode. Chill.):

<subject identifier=”Design”/>

<subject identifier=”Industrial Design”/>

<subject identifier=”Bill Moggridge”/>

<subject identifier=”IDEO”/>

It’s the hot design company hired by <company identifier=”APPL”>Apple</company> to create its first mouse, (and by <company identifier=”MSFT”>Microsoft</company> to create its second), by the <company identifier=”UKPO”>Post Office</company> to rework the postbox, by <company identifier=”MUJI”>Muji</company> to create its wall-mounted CD player and by <company identifier=”PANDG”>Procter & Gamble</company> to reinvent toothpaste tubes. It made the <company identifier=”NOKIA”>Nokia</company> N-gage, the <product identifier=”PALMV”>Palm V</product> and the <product identifier=”HEADAIRFLOW”>Head Airflow</product> tennis racquet. Now <company identifier=”IDEO”>IDEO</company> is being retained by <person identifier=”Barack Obama POTUS”>Barack Obama</person>’s White House to help to reinvigorate the American civil service; by the government of <country identifier=”ICELAND”>Iceland</country> to help the country to innovate its way out of <newsevent identifier=”2008-9FinancialCrisis”>financial crisis</newevent>; and by the <company identifier=”KLLGF”>Kellogg Foundation</company> to reinvent education.

Now think of all of the stuff in that we can index against. No use at all for the print magazine, but once you come to put it into digital form an archive full of typescripts like this would be so full of options it starts to get giddy. Give me a thoughtfully built mark-up standard and a year’s worth of, say, Vogue, and I’ll break your heart with beauty.

Now, is this silly? Is it naive to ask writers to submit copy in a marked-up format instead of just typed English? No. People write in marked-up text all the time. Indeed, with blogging, I’d bet that more people write marked-up than not, even without tools to help them. There’s a whole generation used to writing with angle-brackets that wouldn’t blink at the idea that to submit copy you have to submit it in a marked-up format. Tools to pre-validate it could easily be rolled into a publishing workflow too.

If you were designing a new generation of content management systems (which you’ll be shocked to hear I am), it would not be unreasonable to ask for journalists to include markup in their typescripts. It seems to me to be the simplest way to get preserve as much data as possible as close to the original sources as possible – something that I’ve described as utterly necessary for a multi-outlet world.

Having to learn to write in markup isn’t an imposition, any more than having to learn shorthand or telegraphese. And as with learning any new language, you gain a new soul: writing in markup would allow you to embed code.

The ability to embed code within a story gives us whole new realms of possibilities for journalism and publishing. Digital platforms are connected and location aware, so why not use that? At the moment the answer is “because your infrastructure won’t let you,” but if it could, the potential is extraordinary.

Pseudocode Example – you could use it to display live data:

As the temperature in Central London hits <data feed=”London Temp”/>…

Or location:

As the temperature in <data feed=”Device Location Town”/> hits…

Or live forex:

The hotel’s rooms cost a reasonable 5000 Pesos (<data feed=”UKP/Pesos” amount=”5000″/>)…

Or:

The quickest way there is <data feed=”Routing” start=”<DeviceLocation>” end=”Carnegie Hall” />

Or even putting in logic blocks like this:

<IF $UKGovernment = “Tory AND Litigious” THEN unpublish;>
One of the rumours I recent heard about…

We have heard, during the endless discussions of the death of journalism over the past few years, of many new forms of reporting just ready to save us: database journalism, ambient data journalism, sensor-driven-city journalism, interactive infographic journalism. At the same time, if it can be measured chances are there’s a feed for it somewhere online. The world is monitored, live, in millions of internet-addressable ways.

But today there’s no method to bring the world of live data to the multi-outlet publishing world. By allowing a journalist to embed live data and logic into a piece, however, you give them this whole new palette. Yes, live data doesn’t work in a print product directly, and more thought is needed for a variety of issues (such as archiving), and, yes, journalists will have one more set of skills to learn – but digital platforms require us to stop thinking that submitting a flat 800 words of English prose is enough. For publishers and editors to base their expectations of submitted content on the restrictions of paper seems foolish, and yet they are forced to by their systems. That must change.