The Virtual Revolution – Part Two, better
February 7, 2010
The second of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution season was much better than Part One.
This episode directly contradicted the first episode on several occasions, which is a good thing for reasons that I spelt out in my previous post on this subject.
One of my continuing gripes though is this strange meme that the internet is unregulated. Communications traffic is regulated in almost every nation state in the world. The reporter managed to tear herself away from West Coast USA for a few moments, so could easily have asked around to discover this for herself.
Provision of the physical means of communication is regulated in most states and the routing infrastructure is certainly subject to regulatory oversight. Just because you don’t sign a specific ‘internet traffic’ contract with your telecoms service provider doesn’t mean that this traffic is not covered under the contract that you have with them and hence the regulations that they come under.
One of the strangest comments was that ICANN wasn’t subject to national control !? OK, there is no longer a direct chain of command eminanting from the US government, but so long as ICANN is an incorporated entity under US law it is subject to US government oversight. Its only 3 years since they actually let that chain of command slip somewhat, so don’t fool yourself that its gone entirely.
As a former mobile telecoms professional I used to install new national scale mobile phone systems around Europe. Each country had its own stance on control of telecoms; from the former Russian states that only had one provider and which required all handsets and phone lines to be registered to named individuals, to the liberalised markets where only the handset identifier was required to enable pay-as-you-go users to log on. The traffic through both models were equally subject to regulation, only the degree of specificity to a individual’s comms traffic is different.
So again the techno-utopian view was put forward again, that the net subverts and opens, only this time some more realistic downsides were addressed. Don’t misunderstand I like that tech can be used to pry open closed networks, but the thing is that every sub-network has a gateway that can be shut, so to say that what we have now is anything but a learning period for govts is (agreeing with the programme here) premature. That you can get round Iran’s IP filters is no great trick, all that means is that you know more than the Iranians about the technology that is in place. You have to remember that every nation still has access to the big off switch, they can still turn the routers off. So I’ll repeat what I said in my last review – until there is an entirely new infrastructure that is not regulated or government controlled the idea that the WWW is a free space is simply not true. A combination of satellites and dynamic mesh networks wood do the job. Anyone fancy clubbing together to buy a constellation of broadband satellites ? I reckon 20 or so would probably do.
I wish that folks who talk about science & tech in the media would sometimes actually try and seek out people really involved with the deep and dirty bits, not just the headline acts and talking heads. Just because you started a fight 10 years ago it doesn’t mean that you are still up to date on the weapons being employed. Just as the net can become Balkanised, the self-reinforcing argument of automatic internet freedom has also become an unrealistic meme.
Paradigms and popular discourse
February 6, 2010
In my previous post ‘End of Newtonian thinking, please !’ I made that case that the current scientific paradigm exemplified by a statistical view of the physical universe is not being reflected in everyday life. I’m going to explore that a little more deeply here.
Now that I’ve read around the topic a little I find that my view strongly reflects that of Thomas Kuhn, who’s position was that scientific endeavour can be represented by a series of paradigm shifts punctuating a continuum of scientific progress. For Kuhn the long phases of ‘normal’ development provided by a single dominant problem-solving paradigm allow scientists to test how far a particular mode of thought cam be stretched before it breaks down, at which point we must assume that either progress slows or that paradigm is overturned by a new ‘revolutionary’ paradigm.
A classic example of this would be the acceptance of Einsteinian relativistic physics over Newtonian mechanics. Where Newtonian mechanics is a perfectly serviceable worldview for a set of problems, it breaks down when you start to apply it to problems that are outside, what I’ll call here, ‘everyday physics’ involved in stopping a car or building a house.
The Einsteinian revolution was quick in scientific terms. It only took a few decades to become the dominant scientific paradigm, but what I was trying to get across in my previous post was that in popular discourse it remains the dominant paradigm, when in actual fact science has moved on into the statistical worldview. We are not seeing the scientific paradigm being reflected in the dominant popular discourse.
I’ll leave science behind for a few moments to explain what I believe is currently happening at a very high level in popular discourse.
There is a trend within elites to strongly uptake the new statistical paradigm, I think that this is shown in the use of probabilistic modeling of financial markets and climate systems, evidence-based policy-making, and moves to democratise data access. These are all strongly rationalist moves based around complex systems that require non-deterministic analysis if the statistical paradigm is to be met.
I believe that there is a counter-point trend that is strongly deterministic in nature, and that adheres to the scientific paradigm of Newton’s mechanical universe. This is a hierarchical worldview that sees rationality in order and rejects complexity as a fundamental position. I see this position in ideology-based politics, rejection of the new mathematics of complex systems (whether that be climate science or quantitative financial analysis) and positions that advocate security over innovation or risk.
So I think we have a problem since the arguments deployed by adherents of either worldview will not cohere with the arguments of the other. They can’t since they are operating on either side of a scientific paradigm.
As populations age it is generally thought to tend to conservative positions (order, security, predictability), so I don’t think that it’d be much of a stretch to say that this issue is going to get worse in the short term, but I think that there may be things that we can do about it. You will have to indulge me for a moment while I explain how popular discourse could be shifted up the paradigm ladder in a novel and entertaining way.
To me the key is the TV game show. The most populist pursuit known to man. Sit down on a Saturday night and watch some bright lights and loud noises and lose the cares of a working week. Whatever your views on this kind of entertainment you can’t deny their success. They are on virtually every TV channel in the world.
In the 60s and 70s we saw simple question and answer game shows like Ask the Family and Mastermind. In the 80s and 90s we saw problem solving rise as a genre with The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and 3-2-1, and now in the 00s we see the Big Brother phenomenon and the ‘talent’ show as dominant genres. It may seem a strange thing to say but I think that this represents a paradigm shift in popular discourse from Newtonian to a relativistic worldview (with a brief spell of meritocracy between the two).
That requires an explanation.
The simple mechanics of the Newtonian game show seems to me obvious; a problem is presented, it is solved or not solved and a reward or penalty is earned. There is a simple cause and effect relationship between the problem and the reward.
We’ll bypass the meritocratic game shows because I think that, while they may represent the turbulent revolutionary period when paradigms are shifting in the wider populist discourse (they coincide with Thatcherism and all the social and economic changes that it entailed), I don’t think that they themselves actually represent the new scientific paradigm. A new social paradigm maybe, but not the scientific paradigm that we are talking about here.
Into the noughties; Big Brother and its clones, and all the multitude of talent shows (the ‘Idols’, Britain’s Got Talent, Popstar, etc, etc). There is no absolute in these shows, no cause and effect. All individual success or failure is relative to the other participants in the shows. The mechanics have moved from Newtonian to relativistic.
The death of Big Brother and (soon to come) the whole reality show genre, and the popular subversion of the talent show genre (as shown by John Sergeant and Jedward) is starting to offer space for the next generation of game shows and I propose that their dominant rhetorical position should be from the statistical worldview. Populist discourse needs to catch up with scientific discourse if we are ever to have society moving in step. There will always be a lag between science in the fore and populist discourse in the rear, but the statistical worldview has been the dominant scientific paradigm for almost 80 years. That is too long a lag, populist discourse needs to catch up.
The Virtual Revolution – An OK piece, sort of
February 1, 2010
The BBC’s Virtual Revolution season kicked off yesterday with the first in a four-part series The Great Levelling ? Its OK, a decent history of things WWW and some of the people behind the whole ’social change through techno-libertarianism’ movement.
Its mostly wrong of course. The program’s premise that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is somehow divorced from the infrastructure of the internet that it runs on is a stretch at best. To suggest that the web is non-hierarchical simply because you don’t have to ask to join in is falacious and the notion that just because addressing structures are not overtly government controlled, the traffic that they support isn’t subject to oversight is just plain wrong.
The presenter/writer starts from the wrong position. She takes the West Coast hippy route through the material casually disregarding the fact that the internet was designed as a command and control network. DARPANET and its progeny are/were all about hierarchy. Its in the DNA of the Internet Protocol. Domain Name Service is way to organise hierarchical lists of computers. The parasitic technology of TBL’s WWW cannot ignore this fact and at best disguises it through http addressing.
I just don’t see how you can paint over that core design philosophy with some vague San Franciscan musings that amount to a claim to have separated the physical infrastructure from the use of that infrastructure by power of the mind alone.
I prefer to think of the internet and www as a child growing up.
Born into a military family, DARPA laid out its morals, made sure that it ate its greens so that it had strong bones in later life. The de-militarising of the internet was the system going to school and meeting kids from the other side of town. Different folks but still recognisable, still ‘us’. The last 20 years have been it playing high-school football, getting to 2nd base with your best girl behind the bleachers, taking a part-time job to pay for a parts for a clunker to trick out. (I don’t know what any of that means by the way. I’m British. We have cricket. Its not the same)
The recent move to allow non-latin script in website addressing is the kid going to college, meeting radically new people and getting into all sorts of high jinx, maybe getting in trouble with the law over a misunderstanding. In parallel to that is the kid starting to take an interest in travel. Spreading to Africa, seeing poverty at first hand will change it, but still at its core is the Internet Protocol and the design philosophy of Cerf & co. This is where we are now.
Still to come the kid takes a trip around the whole world and graduates from college. Current WWW penetration is around 25% global population, so until over 50% of world population has access World Wide Web is not even an accurate name. That will happen soon enough and the East African Fibre Optic cable will help that process along.
At some point after the internet has reached everyone and everyone has had a chance to define their own space, exert their own influence, only then will we find out what is possible with this tool. The child will have grown up.
But unless a new infrastructure is put in place to run the traffic over, it will still be Vint Cerf and DARPA’s little nuclear resistant command and control network at heart. The values that it grew up with will not change.
The end of Newtonian thinking, please !
January 17, 2010
On July 20th 1969 Apollo 11 landed men on the moon using substantially less computing power than is available in today’s mobile telephone. Its not a direct comparison since the Apollo Guidance computer wasn’t capable of floating point operations and that’s kind of the point of this post.
In 1969 reaching the peak of technology, flying three men to the moon, was possible using Newtonian mechanics and the calculations necessary to do that were available using simple integer-only computers. Cause and effect were still the gold standard of science and the weird world of Quantum Mechanics had not penetrated the public psyche even though it had been out in the open for 40 years. We’re 40 years still further down the line and probability-based interpretations of reality still haven’t gained widespread acceptance only, where this wasn’t an issue for Buzz & his buddies, its starting to cause real problems for science and its wider understanding and acceptance.
This is the famous Solvay Conference where the early developers of Quantum Mechanics discussed their new ideas with Einstein and others. Einstein hated the idea that probability functions and not deterministic processes could be the prime movers in the universe. But by any reasonable measure of science he and his theory of General Relativity are wrong. Perhaps it would be more generous to say that it was incomplete, but when compared to QM it pales by comparison in predictive power and accuracy. Yet Einstein still holds the public heart with his shock of white hair and sticky-out tongue. E=mc2. There is a reason why it is so easy to remember. As a theory to completely describe the relationship between mass and energy, its wrong. This is the Standard Model Lagrangian Expansion that physicists currently believe is the best explanation of that relationship. Bit more complicated isn’t it 
Its also the reason for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since the term dealing with gravitons has not been tested conclusively.
Now I know that, strictly speaking, Einsteinian physics and Newtonian physics are not the same thing but they do share a common philosophical thread; the idea that a single cause will have a single effect. In Newtonian mechanics this is exemplified by ‘every force has an equal and opposite reactive force’. In the Eisteinian universe gravitation is an expression of warps in Space-Time.
Quantum Mechanics has a fundamentally different philosophical standpoint and does not experience or express the universe as cause and effect. Instead probability describes the likelihood of something happening. If you don’t know about this stuff already I’d recommend The Elegant Universe as a starter. Its a bit effects-heavy, but has an open and accessible style.The recent BBC show The Secret Life of Chaos shows the parallel development of complexity and non-deterministic mathematics.
The reason why I say Newtonian mechanics is holding back public understanding of science is that it is so easily testable. Table-top experiments show cause and effect at work, and our real-world experience backs that up. Most belief systems go further still with cause and effect being the structural basis for many moral codes – ‘thieves will go to hell’ – that sort of thing. So our social norms AND out experience of the physical world are predicated on cause and effect. But cause and effect stopped being a good explanation of the observable universe almost 80 years ago and still the public psyche is firmly rooted to that way of seeing the universe.
What we need to start doing is educating kids on roulette, betting odds, and all other manner of statistical analysis because quite simply we are not telling them the truth when we teach them that 2+2=4. What they should know is that there is a high probability that 2+2=4 in most situations, but don’t blinker yourself to other possibilities available under the Bell Curve. Until certainty is left behind humanity is going to have a hell of a philosophical challenge on its hands in living with the duality of macro and micro descriptions of the universe.
The Ethics of Data Mining – Mediated Memory
January 9, 2010
I’m going to pose myself questions questions here rather than answer them. Self-indulgent I know, but hell its my party and I’ll cry if I want to
Digital data has some properties that could or should impact on ethics. I’m going to take a look at three of them this time;
It is non-corporeal, so possibly not as susceptible to the ravages of time as paper would be
It is transmissible, so probably not subject to physical location
It is a record of events that may be edited or erased leaving little or no evidence of those actions
The first two points are similar, in that they relate to inadvertent data loss, but relate to ethics in very different ways. The third is a very different quality.
Non-corporeality – The onwards march of time and technology makes specific media obsolete. That is as true for spoken language as it is for other media formats, but the loss of spoken languages is a large enough topic for a post on its own, so I’ll stick to physical media.
Ask yourself – ‘When did I last buy a 35mm photographic film or a 90 minute audio cassette ?”
For myself, it’d have to a decade or more, and I owned a 35mm SLR camera until 3 years ago ! I just kept a stock of old film in a box in the fridge up to its use by date, and past in some cases. Now as I climb the technology ladder I have my music CDs as reference, but don’t need to touch them as my music is transferred from device to device with no apparent loss of quality. So long as I make those steps up the ladder while technology exists to bridge the gaps no data is lost. So here comes the first question.
Do we have an obligation to keep data in its original form and format, respecting the media that it was originally hosted in, do we have an obligation to retain the information contained in the data, or is the data disposable and only the effect of the data relevant ?
In many ways the existence of the institutions of ‘the museum’ and ‘the library’ answer this question from our ancestor’s point of view. Certainly in the UK, philanthropists saw the advancement of science and the education of the masses as a moral obligation, but what about the curation of data for historical rather than scientific purposes ?
I think that we can say that retained samples are a valuable weapon in the arsenal of scientific endeavour, without much doubt. Whether it be new species of animal in today’s world, samples of pathogens lost to science or the ability to re-examine old specimens with new yechniques, a library of original, physical sample material is an essential part of science, but what about non-corporeal data ?
Audiophiles still see the crackle and hiss embodied in vinyl recordings as adding character and being more authentic than ‘clean’ digital renditions, but to me this would imply that the recording artist, as the author of their own material, would want a degraded recording. I really don’t think that’s true. If I were a musician I would want my recordings to be heard as played, not as recorded. But then the experience of listening to music is not the same as the experience of playing it, so a direct equivalence between the data as recorded and the data as experienced is going to be a tricky one and probably something to consider another day.
Can you imagine the curator of a museum in 1,000 years time carefully handling the mix tape that you made for wassername in ‘88 ? But why not ? Its an excellent piece of social history communicating universal feelings and allowing later generations to connect with past generations on an emotional level. No different from a birthday party invitation sent 2,000 years ago or love letter written 4,000 years ago. But that assumes that the data can be read in hundreds of years time.
The non-corporeality of digital data does hide degradation introduced by copying and by natural stochastic processes, such as cosmic rays hitting storage media or radiometric decay. We should not consider data stored on digital media such as magnetic tapes, CDROMs or laserdisks as immune to degradation, indeed they are more prone to damage than paper in many circumstances. That’s not as surprising as it may at first seem since we have 4,000 years of paper technology under our collective belts, but less than 100 of electronic recording and experience using plastics. In my own lifetime I have seen data storage formats become obsolete (and so have you), but that’s not even considering MIME types.
Every new start-up seems to define their files in a new way. This is 100% understandable in the context of intellectual property rights and the advance of technology, but it also means that the failure of each of these companies will consign their file type to the rubbish bin. Effectively we are spawning and killing a new ‘language’ each time this happens and any data recorded in this language will need either translation into more common languages or the preservation of a Rosetta Stone for as long as that data might be preserved. In this context the decadal lifespan of CDROM and magnetic tapes starts to seem like a long-term issue and the churn of data formats the overwhealming problem. Since we cannot ethically restrict the proliferation of new languages, the best that we can hope for is that file types are translatable. Unfortunately translations almost always result in loss of data fidelity.
So the physical nature of storage media for digital data is less of a defining factor than we might at first believe, but before we reject its potential impacts there is the question of whether the original physical items need to be curated in the same way as any museum piece. Should we collect one of everything just so that the next generation has access to it in something close to context ? This question I will leave for the historians.
The non-corporeality of data may impact more through the potential for high-fidelity copying to multiple locations and this feeds neatly into out next topic;
Transmissibility – Not a new feature of data, after all the telegraph was transmitting non-corporeal data around the world in the 19th century, but perhaps I mean the ability to provide photo-realistic reproduction to anywhere almost instantly.
If we assume that we are not going to get significant data degradation through each copy (i.e. that the fidelity is retained) or that the original reference copy is still available, data becomes a commodity available on-demand. Our data networks make that possibility a reality, whether it be via broadcast media, sharing or sale through websites or via ‘direct’ network connections such as FTP or PPTP.
Generally we do not even think about whether we are receiving what is being sent, unless there is some obvious fault. Our technologies are reliable enough that, at the point of consumption, we consider the data as a good representation of the original. That is not to say that checks on data fidelity don’t happen in the background with most transmission mechanisms, they do, and a significant portion of bandwidth used on the internet is devoted to comparing sent to received.
The question then becomes why are we happy to have copies of original data many times removed from the original when the original (or a much closer removal) is available ?
It is often said that we live in a media age, but most would consider that to refer to the number and availability of media channels, when in fact the most pervasive mediated experiences that we have is with the data that makes everyday life possible.
Just to give an example; even 10 years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of money as a mediated experience, yet in most senses it is just that. Very little cash actually flows through my wallet these days. I rarely visit a bank. I trust all those data transmissions that are running in the background to provide a very real outcome like food on the table. But why should I ? Well the honest truth in this case is that I don’t trust digital money any more than I trust hard cash. Both are copyable, both are stealable. Both are mediated experiences of wealth. To me they are no different, so I have no philosophical problem in a cashless economy. But that’s not the same as the ethics of error checking.
Engineers strive for high fidelity data transmission. It is a matter of honour and professional pride. Depending on the application it can be a matter of life an death.
Bankers (should) strive for high fidelity transactions. It should be a matter of honour and professional pride. Depending on the customer it can be a matter of life an death.
Journalists should strive for high fidelity transactions. It should be a matter of honour and professional pride. Depending on the story it could be a matter of life an death.
But past those three professions, high fidelity data transmission is mostly an aesthetic choice but not universally an ethical one. That’s why we have security certificates, passwords, ID checks and all that apparatus that at first sight looks Orwellian but, when you understand what it is compensating for, is much more depressing. Its plugging the ethics gap between personal and professional.
Is it right that we load our communications technologies sending multiple copies of data rather than consigning a single authoritative item of data to a secure store and simply reference it from there ? Computer programmers working in groups do this already using applications collectively known as Version Control Software. Could we create a Version Controlled repository for all human knowledge ?
This brings us to digital memories as editable and erasable records;
In the Version Controlled world nothing is ever deleted without consensus. Edits are recorded so that if some piece of data was to be found to lead to a dead-end you can back-track to the last useful data and try a different approach.
But what happens if a particular thread of knowledge leads to disaster/evil/daytime TV or whatever, what then ?
Without infinitely reproducible data a society can choose to forget. If data is infinitely reproducible we have to assume that a copy exists somewhere, even if it is only in a router cache that is not immediately accessible. If the potential exists for a copy to resurface, then ethically we have to consider that it will. Forgetting is not a choice that is practically open to us in the massively networked digital world.
Forget is the wrong word in some of these cases, ‘consign to the past and move on whilst retaining full knowledge’ could be a better way of putting it. For example the Truth and Reconciliation commissions in Rwanda and SA, are a way of accommodating of unpalatable facts until they fade a little before merging with the background of history. Anti-Nazi laws in Germany are there to provide several generations space from the shared horror of WW2 and they will not be seen to be successful until at least 2050, when the children of Nazis have died, so providing a removal from the first person experience.
But there are problems with the version controlled world where threads of knowledge are prioritised and the flow of history consciously re-routed.
At a personal level we loose our sense of ourselves and our innate ability to put things behind us, and even the essential personal liberty of simply growing up. Lets take a few examples to illustrate what I’m getting at;
Criminal offenses committed by persons under a certain age are usually dealt with differently to those committed by adults. The dividing line between child and adult is different under different legal systems, but it is present in the vast majority of cases. What is also present in most cases is a statute of limitations which means that offenses are deemed to have no relevance under law after a certain amount of time. The convergence of these two legal principles usually means that offenses committed as a child will be wiped ‘off the record’ after a relatively short period and the child allowed to go on with life as a reformed character having learned its lesson.
I see no reason why data should be treated any differently, yet if a copy of an old web page surfaces that contains embarrassing, or even harmful, personal information any person can act on it. The trope about ‘nothing to hide’ is idiotic. Everyone has something that they would rather wasn’t repeated ad nauseum in public whether it be bad fashion choices, awkward breakups, financial embarrassment or even a physical blemish. There is no small amount of debate on this, but one of the most interesting recent stories is this on from BBC News. How can Facebook ban you from deleting yourself from their platform ? To me this is a great piece of social commentary art.
Anyway. Too long. Move on.
