All posts by Paul Raven

Blog

Nominate Joshua Harris for Director of MIT!

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Okay, here’s something of a guest-post. I got a message a few days ago from someone who I’m reasonably convinced is actually Joshua Harris – subject of the movie We Live In Public, which I mentioned a while ago. Why am I convinced that this out-of-the-blue contact is from the actual Josh Harris and not some imposter pulling my leg? Well, I don’t think an imposter could pull off the degree of chutzpah on display here; you see, Joshua Harris wants me – and all of the rest of you, too – to nominate him for the post of Director at MIT’s Media Lab.

No, seriously. Here’s his message to you, verbatim:

dear futurismic readers:

my name is josh harris and i build human chicken factories of the future (or what i call The Wired City).  the idea is to build the future out as far in advance as possible NOW so that we will gain perspective on the world that we are walking into 15 years from now.

i figure any loyalish futurismic reader can extrapolate where The Wired City is headed so i’ll leave that to your imagination and comments.  if elected as the new Director of the MIT Media Lab i promise to hear any and all futurismic reader ideas and suggestions.

read/view the links below, if it what i am saying makes sense to you then by all means please nominate me for Director of the MIT Media Lab.  and pass the word along.

sincerely,

josh harris candidate – Director, MIT Media Lab

Here’s some contextual content for you to browse through, as supplied by Harris himself:

(For my money, the TechCrunch link at the top is the one that’ll get you up to speed quickest.)

And here’s the blurb from a one-sheet run-down on the Wired City project:

THE WIRED CITY

(The Internet Television Network)

The Wired City (TWC) orchestrates millions of hours of audience “self surveillance” into a hierarchical system that generates compelling broadcast and netcast quality programming.

Key production elements of The Wired City include:

  • Real-time chat video switching (next generation social graph).
  • 24/7 netcasting studios that efficiently process mass data signals generated by the audience.
  • Massive multiplayer online gaming element (winning audience members get to live on set and get special powers and privileges).
  • Hollywood style production values produced by and for netcasting audiences.
  • Hearts and minds.  Audience members are letting each other into their homes and lives (the camera is turned on them).
  • Bonafication.  Audience members get their 15 minutes of fame every day.
  • 1 million hours of net generated programming is distilled into one hour of prime time broadcast programming, every day.

Key commerce elements of The Wired City include:

  • Micro aggregation of mass audiences returning broadcast quality CPM revenues.
  • A more direct relationship/bond between audience and sponsors.
  • Coordination of mass audiences as tastemakers and influencers generates traction with sponsors.

Relevant Professional Background – Josh Harris

  • CEO – Operator11 Exchange Corporation (2006 – 2007): Web 3.0 Internet television network.
  • We Live In Public, LLC (2000 -2001): Art project designed to dramatically produce home surveillance (subsequent film won Sundance Grand Jury Prize for documentary in 2009).
  • Quiet (1999): Art project as net studio prototype of The Wired City (compared to Truman Capote’s “Black and White Party” by MOMA NYC).
  • CEO and Founder Pseudo Programs, Inc. (1994 -1998): Internet television network.
  • CEO and Founder Jupiter Communications (1986 – 1994): Internet research and consulting (went public 1999).

And here’s the MIT action that Harris wants to combine with his Wired City idea: a computer system that can precisely identify mouse behaviour patterns from camera footage. In real-time.

If you have no idea who Joshua Harris is, then I’d suggest you should find out; his is a pretty fascinating story, whichever way you look at it. Those of you who do know who he is are either thinking “hell yeah, give the guy the job!” or “giving him that job would be madness of the highest order”… or possibly both at once, which is the camp in which I find myself. There’s no doubt at all that Harris is a loose cannon of prodigious proportions, but it’s also impossible to deny that he saw the rise of the soc-net participatory panopticon and the ultimate ethical outer limits of “reality” television programming long before either actually existed, and he made that vision an undiluted (and pretty terrifying) reality.

He’s a smart guy, possibly dangerously so, but it’s dangerous intelligence that has the best chance of thinking outside the cliches and seeing the futures that we don’t want to imagine; partner Harris with the MIT boffins to regulate the more extreme ethical weirdness, and The Wired City could be a crucial experimental window into our ubicomp-everyware-lifelogged near-future, a Stanford Prison Experiment for the twenty-teens… not to mention a form of reality television more deserving of the name.

I have no idea whether MIT would even honour a mass nomination of Harris to the directorship of the Media Lab or not… but I went and nominated the guy anyway, because I’m a sucker for visionary outliers, and because discovering the surprisingly unknown story of the Quiet project totally blew my mind. If you’re a sucker for mad genius too, or if you think we should be experimenting more boldly with the effects of complete mediation of the human experience, maybe you should nominate him too.

To nominate Joshua Harris for Director of MIT’s Media Lab, go to this webpage, enter your own information as nominator, and the following for Harris as nominee:

  • Name: Joshua Harris
  • Phone:  310 801-2294
  • Email: mjluvvy@gmail.com

[ Yes, I am taking this at face value; no, this is not a joke post. ]

Blog

Non-Newtonian cats

I’m out of town today, so I thought I’d pre-post some stuff to keep you all diverted in my absence*. So to start with, here are some observations of quantum tunnelling behaviours in Felis catus:

In my own residence, I and several other party guests personally observed the case of Chloe, a large black Himalayan. Though the extent of the cat’s fur decreased the certainty with which one could specify the cat’s position and momentum (c.f., the Himalyan Uncertainty Principle), and our garage door is only a few inches thick, the tunneling event was no less remarkable in light of her prodigious girth (she weighed 15 pounds, frequently intimidating our German Shepherd into sharing his dinner). The cat was initially observed sleeping in the driveway. When next observed several minutes later, the cat was nowhere to be seen. We opened the garage door, at which point Chloe left the garage, obviously having tunneled through the closed door. We marveled at this phenomenon, and, as we closed the side door to the garage, discussed plans for further study.

Yeah, I know; cats and quantum uncertainty, old gag. But it made me smile, which was excuse enough to post it. Now, I wonder if quantum weirdness can also explain that infuriating way in which cats will suddenly decide to stare intently at a patch of empty air for no discernible reason whatsoever…

[ * Because Futurismic really is that essential to your daily sense of well-being… it’s okay, you can admit it. I promise not to be embarrassed. ]

Blog

Buy This Satellite!

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Via, well, literally dozens of people (in one fast condensed rush on Twitter last night, in fact, suggesting a very successful viral campaign, be it deliberate or purely serendipitous), here’s a great way to get something good out of the economic collapse: why don’t we all pitch in and buy a bankruptcy fire-sale satellite, which we can then redeploy to provide wireless internet to a developing nation that could really benefit from it?

Not only a brilliant and ambitious bit of humanitarianism for the not-quite-fully-networked world, but confirmation of the practicality of a chunk of sf worldbuilding I’ve been kicking around for years… 🙂

Blog

Pirate Bay founder calls for peer-to-peer DNS

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One tends to still think of the internet as a sort of dimensionless new frontier, a conceptual un-space hovering somewhere between anarchy and ad-hocracy, beyond the reach of the archons of meatspace… and to a great extent it is. But not entirely, as Homeland Security’s seizure of more than eighty infringing web domains over the past weekend demonstrates*. The protocols of the internet itself are inherently anarchic, but the domain name sytem that sits on top of it (effectively governing how we see the web, and more importantly who we see there) is a classic hierarchy… and ICANN has demonstrated that it knows exactly which side of its monopolistic bread is buttered, so to speak.

So cue the beleaguered co-founder of the Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, calling for a peer-to-peer replacement for the DNS system. Ars Technica points out that it’s not going to be easy, cheap, or bulletproof:

There are a number of obstacles standing in the way of P2P DNS. First of all, today Google has a huge array of enormous DNS servers to serve up all the *.google.* domains, while I have an aging Pentium 4 box running DNS and mail for just me. In a new system, people looking for Google may hit my server—as well as the other way around, of course. So I’ll have to invest in a bigger server. With a peer-to-peer system, people also have to depend on the kindness of strangers: random people around the Net have to send people in your direction. This is hard to make secure, and it’s much slower than the existing DNS.

But the biggest problem of all is the ownership of domain names. In a DHT, information is found through hashes of the desired object. With file sharing, this is a hash over the file to be shared. If two people want to share the same file, you actually want to find them both, and download pieces from both of them—that way, the download goes faster. But with the DNS, things work much better if a domain name only maps to a single destination.

[…]

Today, ICANN and the TLDs decide who gets which domain. The Pirate Bay proposes to replace them with an algorithm, one that would reside in the P2P DNS software. The stakes are high: even a small fraction of the traffic of a popular site, or even just an interesting search term, can be worth a lot of money. It’s hard to imagine that with such high stakes there wouldn’t be any abuse of such an open system, or at the very least, widely diverging points of view of what’s best.

All systems will be abused; gaming the set-up is human nature. Everything can and will be hacked. The question here is who we’d rather was able to play the game: should it be anyone with the energy and wherewithal to learn the ropes, or just the unelected appointees of powerful nation-states?

[ * Good on ya, HS; nothing’s gonna spike the wheels of The Terrorists like preventing people from downloading hip-hop albums for free! ]

Fiction

NEW FICTION: WORLD IN PROGRESS by Lori Ann White

Well, here we are: the last piece of Futurismic fiction for a while. But talk about ending on a high note! When Chris sent across Lori Ann White‘s “World In Progress” for me to look at, it felt as if she’d been carefully following the stuff I blog about here day after day, picking out some of my favourite riffs, memes and ideas, and rendering them down into one wonderful – and very human – story. It’s a super piece, and I’m proud to be publishing it; scroll down, read on, and find out why. 🙂

World In Progress

by Lori Ann White

And in The Far Corner, Wearing a
Too-Tight Jock Strap and a Crown of Thorns–

CLOSE UP on a face.  Calm, pale, waves of black hair brushed back from a broad forehead.  Retro Guy.  Grade A, 100% Pure Professional Athlete.  No drugs, no mods, no tweaks, no prods.  Just like the old farts ordered.

He’s staring at the wall above the mirror through eyes blue as an Artic bay.  Pan to the wall, to the framed honest-to-god newsprint, photo of a thick-necked thug in too-tight jacket.  He’s small, like Retro Guy, like they all used to be, but the smug grin and his squinty eyes radiate “big guy” waves.  He’s got one arm around a sad brunette.

The caption: “Bruisin’ Brawler Gene O’Connor: ‘No God-Damned Upgrades!  My Boy Will be a Real Boxer, Just Like His Old Man.'”

The camera pans back to Retro Guy’s face.

“Hey, Old Man,” he whispers.  “This fight’s for you.” Continue reading NEW FICTION: WORLD IN PROGRESS by Lori Ann White →