Lee Maguire graded snobberies, bawdiness, hypocrisy

Legally Bound

You know when you go to buy a track on the iTunes store and, without warning, iTunes demands that you again read through many pages of legalise before it’ll deign to serve you. Is that something you’d class as an elegant user experience?

For all the times I’ve confirmed that I’ve “read and understood” these various terms and conditions at best I’ve read it, I don’t think I’ve been confident enough to say I’ve really understood it.

I recently took the Eurostar from London to Paris during which I watched a movie rented from the iTunes store. The journey is usually about 2 hours and 15 minutes – a length so suited to movie watching it would be tragic if they ever spent millions trying to shave another 20 minutes off the trip.

Incidentally the film was Jeunet’s “A Very Long Engagement”, which I’d somehow never seen despite, or perhaps because of, it being pitched as “Amelie… with polio”. I would, however, commend to fans of the First World War Fighting Moustache. Slightly more sex in the movie than I’d like to be seen viewing on a train (those scenes judiciously hidden behind a calendaring application…  but really, the train was full of French and this stuff was, I imagine, no more explicit than a typical continental yogurt advert.)

Just over an hour into the movie, as I passed out of the tunnel and into the French countryside it occurred to me that, by watching a UK rental outside of the UK I might possibly have violated one of those Terms and Conditions I may have skimmed though…

10. Territory. The Service is currently available only in the United Kingdom and is not available in any other location. You agree not to use or attempt to use the Service from outside of the available territory, and that iTunes may use technologies to verify your compliance.

Purchases and rentals (as applicable) from the iTunes Store are available to you only in the UK. If you are not in the UK you may not use or attempt to use the service. iTunes may use technologies to verify such compliance.

Given the definition of “Service” seems to covers the purchasing of licences rather than their activation I appear to be in the clear.  The point of consumption, rather than of purchase, seems to be something unmediated in this case.

Although, if that action was forbidden by the terms, there’d be no technical way of checking to enforce it.  My laptop doesn’t always know where it is, so it wouldn’t be in a position to give me up. I can’t expect to always have a network available, and I’ve no built-in GPS.

But really, we’re not too far away from being able to assume that every computing device we use has some way of determining its location on the surface of the earth.  And when that becomes the norm, will disclosure of physical location end up becoming a pre-requisite for any use of licenced content? If my device thinks I’m not in the UK, will it one day refuse to play my UK-purchased media? Will it refuse to play things licensed for home use if it thinks I’m not at home?

Not that that seems reasonable, of course.  At least at this point in time. But we already live in a world where content providers dictate the types of physical connectors you may use to watch HD content on external screens.  There are already videogames that, despite having no online element, require that players be constantly online while playing the game.  Stories of people horribly inconvenienced by the Microsoft media licensing servers. Etc.

Coming up with plausible scenarios in which DRM would a major pain-in-the-ass never stood in the way of its adoption. Perhaps real-time location verification seems inevitable, we’re just waiting for the devices to catch up. (Want to watch Avatar 4? You’ll need to upgrade to a location-sensing player.)

After all, the markets and territories of the content business are defined by physical territories.  Unlicensed (“grey”) imports are regarded as losses by territorial licensors, equivalent to piracy.  (And no doubt these losses feed into the industry’s total worldwide losses.) Why wouldn’t they demand that widespread availability of a tomorrow’s technology be leveraged to enforce yesterday’s business models?  (And, as a bonus, provide additional valuable marketing data.) There are plenty of reasons the region-based licensing of media content works like it does, and not one of those reasons is anything actual consumers give a damn about.

For the determined, I’m sure there’ll be was around it. VPNs can be used, as they are now, to present a different location.  Cell phone signal isn’t always available, so offline verification might just rely on GPS. GPS is a weak signal, not impossible to fake. But if you’re planning to perform an act of geofraud everytime you want to watch a movie remember you’re still constrained by the laws of physics – there’s still only so much travel time you can allow between an account registered in LA and one in London.

As it turned out, the reason I was asked to read-and-understand revised iTunes conditions was concerned with this issue. Apple have reserved the right to share your real-time location data with whoever they chose and for whatever purpose (i.e. advertisers, advertising).  They then seem to implausibly claim that this isn’t personal data since it’s only the location of the device. Phones aren’t human, right?

I’d blithely agreed to it already, but it seems that it’s caused concern beyond the Jason Bourne-types attempting to stay “off the grid” (hey, what are they going to do? Refuse to agree and forgo the rest of their Chuck season-pass?) Apparently they’ve got the German government concerned.

If I was Apple I’d want to soften the Terms and Conditions anxiety fast becoming associated with their products. I’m sure that most companies will throw up their hands and say they hate this stuff as much as consumers do, that it’s just the cost of doing business in a litigious society, and that they’d never try to hoodwink people into agreeing to things they wouldn’t want to.  But surely there’s some way to finesse the experience?  I’d suggest

• disclose the new Terms and Conditions a week in advance, instead of ambushing people into reading and accepting them on the spot.
• make the T&Cs available in a structured (e.g. xml) plain text format in which the changes can be clearly determined.  i.e. via a “diff”
• and, if you really think your terms are reasonable, maybe pay an independent public/consumer advocacy group with legal knowledge to provide an interpretation of the proposed changes. Then provide links from the form. I’d be less intimidated by n pages of legalese if I knew they’d already been checked over by some EFF-type organisation.
• god, I don’t know…  Present it in the form of a Scott McCloud comic or something?

On Tablets

Hello, I’m excited by the introduction of large touchscreen tablet devices aimed at consumer markets. Are you, or anyone you know on the internet, also excited by this? Anyone?

After all, if you’re reading this, it’s probably on a laptop or desktop with a decent enough screen. Not as light as an iPad, I’d imagine. Not as convenient. Apple seems to have finally cracked the technologist dream of a computing device it won’t seem contextually alien to be using whilst on the toilet. Truly, the successor to the magazine.

Cory Doctorow is pouring scorn on the iPad already. Ostensibly for the closed and controlled ecosystem of the iTunes store, but I do recall him telling me (years before the iPhone, in the context of London Underground ticket machines) “I don’t understand your British obsession with touchscreens”.

And yeah, as Cory points out, the iPad does seem designed for a stereotype of a technophobic mother. Certainly that was my first thought: This seems ideal for my technophobic mother. She refuses, point blank, to touch keyboards. When, as a kid, I got my first computer she asked me if I knew what all the buttons did. “That’s not an answerable question,” I told her, “the function of the keys is contextually dependant. Any key can potentially do anything.” Whoops, turns out that sort of revelation is not an effective way to cure the older generation’s fear of computers. Every home visit involves lugging along a laptop purely for photo display purposes.

(Amusingly, my own long-term fear of touchscreens is based on the LCARS displays on Star Trek: TNG. Rather than have the actors learn where all the functions were located they just had them perform contextual actions and fill in the interface in post-production. Dangerously complex machinery with dynamically inconsistent control interfaces. Whenever the ship got torpedoed and the bridge crew fell against their control panels I used to worry they’d end up accidentally ejecting the warp core or something…)

Myself, I’m still a little wait-and-see iPad-wise. Certainly I’m not overly excited by the prospect of enhanced paperless versions of all the magazines I don’t already buy. (Although comic book downloads may be another story, but that’s for another post.) Of course, my instinct is to think “buy”, but magazine circulation in the UK is dominated by TV listings (already an app) and what appear to be tax dodges of some kind – i.e. not something you’d ever pay for directly. The only other magazine close to a million circulation in the UK is the sort that might be bought by those technophobic mothers.

Many on the net seem confident that the magazine format obsolete anyway, a byproduct of physical distribution constraints that mean nothing in the context of online distribution. I remember buying the Sunday paper and dropping entire sections of it, unread, directly into the recycling bin. The resentment at paying for something you don’t want is likely to be greater for anyone already used to the internet’s a-la-carte.

I’ve only managed to read one magazine cover-to-cover this year. The only reason that happened was that all the seats in the train with power sockets had been booked-up. Paper media is great for when you’re more than ‘n’ hours away from a charge point. (And I imagine charting that ‘n’ against magazine sales might reveal some rough symmetry.) It may turn out that people just want a convenient way to burn through their Instapaper queue, rather than a bundle of editorial consistency.

Certainly, whenever I see Jack Schultz showing off a Mag+ product, I’m more excited his magical CGI desk (he’s like David Warner in Tron!) than the actual real magazine he’s demonstrating. A lot of existing magazine layouts seem a little too gimmicky to me and, as Danny points out, it’s possible that the expensive presentation of text is how these paperless magazines intend to justify themselves.

I could be wrong though. While I recognise that the publishing is attempting to retrofit their pre-existing paradigm, I’m just as guilty of assuming the last decade of web-based media consumption is going to prove healthier as an ongoing model. God knows I wouldn’t wish my own online consumption on others. I learned all my bad habits back when all I had was Email and Usenet. The feed reader always fills, and every night I engage in the same goddamned truffle-hunt.

What am I thinking about? Curation? Quality vs Choice? Curating personal values in choosing quality. Like price comparisons for laptops before understanding the value of not having to use Windows. Liking chocolate fine, before tasting really good chocolate. I’ve been happy to eat the stone soup the web has provided thus far, but I’m not wholly resistant to a finer gastronomy.

I just don’t know what that looks like yet. Or, more importantly, what it feels like.

The Digital Economy Bill vs. flatshares

I’ve avoided getting worked up about the Digital Economy Bill. My income currently depends on people buying music online – I kinda feel I’m obliged to be utterly humourless about how people act with regard to music piracy in the real world.

But.

The most troubling thing about the “disconnection” section of the bill is that it seems to imply that every household has a single point of legal authority. Perhaps those in favour of the bill have only lived in houses with someone like that, a parental figure, a single leaseholder? It’s certainly not a universal experience.

To date, I’ve never been the single point of legal responsibility in a household. Even after graduating I’ve still ended up in a variety of shared flats and houses. Attempting to work in London is like that. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, you end up sharing a house with people you don’t particularly get on with. (And sometimes these people lose their jobs and spend all day in their room smoking and surfing the web. And how do they manage to go through so much toilet paper? It’s mind-boggling.) Anyway, it’s all rich life experience.

Like other utilities it’s usually the case that there’s only one phone line going to a shared house. Which means one DSL connection. Which means one router. Which means a wi-fi router with a shared password. (Unless the different items needing access can’t support a common authentication scheme for whatever reason. Ugh, in a dense enough area it’s hard enough finding a clear channel.)

But, while the DSL connection has a single bill payer, there’s no reasonable way (with today’s domestic networking equipment) for that person to even know what traffic is going over that connection, let alone have grounds to call a house-meeting or whatever it is they’d be expected to do as part of “policing” the house network.

And who even wants that job? “Network nazi”? Who wants to be nominated as the chump in line punished for the risk-taking of others? You can’t even take legal action against your flatmates since actual real evidence implicating them doesn’t even need to exist.

A possible arrangement might be for the bill-payer to require a bond from the network users before allowing them access (on top of the deposit or something). A chunk of money that’s at risk regardless of their personal action. But how much would that bond need to be? What price do you put on being banned from the internet? (Personally? A lot.) If I were the network bill-payer, how reasonable would it be to ask for my flatmates to deposit, say, the equivalent of a year’s rent up-front in order to use the wi-fi? That’s clearly not going to fly.

Just the possibility of this punishment existing punishes everyone in shared living arrangements regardless of any intent to engage in unlicensed file distribution. And it’s likely to increase the costs of accessing the internet for those in tighter financial situations.

Micropatronage and the virtuous paywall

I remember, back in 2008, stepping out of Oxford Circus station and seeing that the Evening Standard news-stand had been updated. A sort of proto-Blade Runner makeover, sandwich boards replaced by updating monitor screens, electronic card payment. It struck me as a moment of overlap, newsprint and ubiquitous infotech, like that point in time that Orville Wright and Neil Armstrong could have met. Within a month the paper been sold on to a Russian oligarch.

I’ve gone from someone who used to buy at least one newspaper a day (often two) as a teenager, to someone who has only bought a single physical newspaper so far this year. So I’m following the stories about the impending newspocalyse with interest and some little sense of guilt.

It’s been a long drawn-out separation. Last couple of years I’d buy The Guardian on a Saturday purely because I liked the physical form factor of the weekly listings guide – these days ‘there’s an app for that’. (Not that I really watch TV anymore – around four hours so far this year, all on my laptop.) The only physical paper I’ve paid for was a copy of the Guardian International edition I picked up at Gare du Nord before hopping on a Eurostar. Because I’m Jason Bourne, obviously.

I don’t even have enough loyalty to visit news site home pages, like most of the news beach-combers I just read that which washes up in my friend’s feeds and searches. Naturally the “paywall” concept, the last desperate gasp of “old” news, seems antithetical to how I and my friends are exposed to news articles. Single source; no sharing? Do remember to label your former customers as thieves when that plan backfires…

And yet, if only because that’s the prevailing net-head axiom, indeed
echoed by the Guardian’s editor, that my contrarian mind awakes. What if there was a paywall scheme for news that was compatible with the customs and values of the current network-news consumer? A “digg this up” for the news?

Let us imagine some fictional Fleet Street ox, say The Daily Brute, sells their online access for cash. Credit-cards, paypal, anonymous code scratchcards bought for spare change at whatever remains of newsagents, whatever. Load up your credits and you can read whatever you like.

But the twist is, it’s not a walled garden, you’re participating in a variation of a threshold pledge system based around granting free access to others.

The very first person to access an article has to pay. But once they’ve done so the article is free to access for the next few people to attempt to read it. Once those “free riders” (although one assumes third-party advertising will still feature) read the article, and assuming they’ve got credit, they have the option of “passing it on”, gifting access, to the next few people attempting to access it. Then once a pre-advertised threshold of payments has been made on an article it becomes permanently “unlocked” (and perhaps ad supported), safe to cite and link to, and (to ensure some semblance of permanence) accessible by the archive spiders and the like under an irrevocable (but not exclusive) license.

In those circumstances the cultural instincts of the web generation, the link sharing and micro-blogging, take on additional meaning. To those behind the news curve, only viewing the highly trafficked links, it might seem like web business-as-usual. And the infofreakos, sitting at the intersection between hard-core news consumers and respected linkers become the king makers. If enough people pay for this thing of value now, that value can be freely shared in perpetuity.

And since there’s potentially a financial transaction involved (for the reader or their friends, or those trusting a linker’s reputation) it might, I’d hope, help correct one of the plagues of the current web newsphere – and financially vote-down the link-bait trolls.

Sometimes it just works

As I’ve pointed out previously: a good benchmark of a technology’s ease-of-use is whether you can use it while holding a conversation.

My normal mode is to complain about all software/hardware, but I thought I’d share a couple of examples where tasks could actually be completed mid-VOIP conversation.

“I need a good photo of myself – can you send me all the photos you have of me?”

Initially this sounded like a “sure, when I get an hour or two, I’ll get back to you”-type request, but then I remembered: I ended up importing the last few years of photos into iPhoto so that I could play with the facial recognition feature. For once, geeky software fiddling pays off in real life. Select her face, export all images to a new directory, compress the directory, drag resulting zip on to the chat window and let it upload in the background. No problemo.

It was one of the few times I’ve felt like an actual use case instead of an edge case.

“I need to be at St Pancras for 8pm on Sunday, what time do I need to leave to make the connection?”

This one I know. Fire up traintimes.org.uk and plug in the details. So far, big deal right?

The trick here is that traintimes.org.uk gives you the result on a page with a terse but readable, hackable, stateless URL. Which means I don’t have to read out the results, I can just copy-n-paste the address into a text chat window. This ability to easily share and bookmark searches, while it seems bleedin’ obvious to me, is curiously absent from so many big sites.

Treading the stones

Cities are public backlots. Cities aren’t galleries and museums, they house the physical locations of stories. And while many find the tales of history compelling, I’ll confess that it’s the city’s fictional narritives I find more attractive.

Paris, in my imagination, is shaped by movies like Diva, Nikita, and Amélie. I’ve recently made a few attempts at visiting locations from The Bourne Identity.

If you’d like to check out the Paris geography of Bourne, I’ve fed the lat/long details into a Google Earth-compatible file, bourne-identity-paris.kmz . Just load it up and hit the play button for a virtual tour, or view via Google Maps.

Self-destructive technology

Our protagonist stands in a dark office, hunched over a desk, face lit by a computer monitor. “Come on. Come on.” We see a file copy progress indicator zipping through filenames. 88%. 89%. We see a handful of armed men in black tactical gear quickly ascending a staircase. The protagonist’s hand hovers over the portable drive connector ready to snap it away. Presumably the seconds it would take to get out of an executive chair could prove critical. 94%.

The armed men have reached their floor, they begin to move down the corridor. Sweat is visible on the protagonist’s forehead. 97%. The armed men are positioned outside the door. Our protagonist looks up, as if aware of imminent danger.

The armed men break down the door and file into a similar, but noticeably lit, office. Room secure, our protagonist not found. A mean-looking man in a suit brushes past and rounds the desk to the monitor on the desktop. “Damn!” We see the screen “Data copied to remote terminal: 100%. Wiping local drive, pass 2: 20%…” before the suited man grasps the computer’s power cord and yanks it out.

“Span out. Check all offices with level 3 access. They may still be here.” We see our protagonist briskly walking down a corridor, placing a portable drive in their pocket, and leaving through a fire exit.

I love seeing, essentially quotidian, technology in dramatic situations – no matter how hackneyed. Especially running backups, which is inescapably tedious. If I’m not being paid to run backups, I’m just not motivated.

Something like The Tao of Backup is cute, but there’s no frisson. It’s usually a dramatic portrayal of data loss that prompts me into action for personal backups. Action usually being: add a reminder to back-up such-and-such to my personal To-do list or, if it’s (inevitably) already there, increase that task priority level… or something. Yawn.

And if we can’t get backups right, what chance do we have with data erasure, its data security twin sister?

Movies are already there, of course. When the secret base is compromised in movies (such as Mr and Mrs Smith and Blade: Trinity) the evacuation procedure involves activating remote data uploads and securely sanitising the local stores.

Sometimes it’s incorporated into the plan, with each stage trading power for mobility. Desktops and servers synced to laptops and abandoned, laptops synced to smartphones. Finessing the computing bulk like segments of an Apollo launch vehicle, cast off sections burning up on the atmosphere.

I sometimes lament that this data evacuation procedure doesn’t really exist for consumer level tech in the real world. Some simple procedure where personal data gets backed up, cleared out, and the device is reset to its virgin state suitable for sending off for repairs, loaning, selling, or even just crossing US borders. A sort of infotech hymenorrhaphy.

I guess the “copy everything and wipe” is the already the standard mode of operation for something like a digital camera. My iPod Touch actually has a self-destruct feature: fail to guess the access code after several tries and its internal storage is wiped. Reassurance that the impact of losing a device has an easily calculable monetary cost rather than the additional unease and uncertainty that comes with loss of personal data, access credentials, etc.

It’s odd that laptops don’t seem to have the same feature as standard. I guess it works on the iPod/iPhone as it’s not that much data, and any notes, calendar events, etc will get synced to my laptop usually within 24 hours. I wouldn’t lose more than I’ll be able to recall. (And I assume having network access and a MobileMe account would allow it to be synced more frequently than that).

So why not, as standard, a self-destruct sequence for a personal computer?

These invisible tendrils of self, of identity, attach themselves around our phones, computers, PVRs, iPods, video games. Our own data transforming into the vulnerable tamagotchi of self. A lost cell-phone contact list, a social-life crisis. A broken Animal Crossing cartridge, the loss of investment in an entire village.

It used to be easier, I’m sure. An older games console such as the PS2 could only store it’s configuration detail on small removable, flash memory cartridges. On games consoles such as the Wii the memory is inside the device. You could sit down and manually copy off just the personal savegame files on to a USB drive or an SD card, I guess. In the case of the Xbox 360, at least, the harddrive is an easily removable, replaceable, part.

The current model of personal computer backup is that of full system restoration, not of personal data. Even if you’ve never created a single document, installation of an operating system and office packages, and a couple of years worth of upgrades and downloaded updates still represents a large number of gigabytes of backup commitment.

Which means my backups get sent to a relatively bulky USB drive rather than, say, a 16GB microSD the size of my fingernail. Something that would be more than enough to backup the variable/irreplaceable stuff that lives on my laptop and be easily carried in my wallet. Or have surgically implanted in my arse.

Which is not to say that backing up full systems isn’t also useful. At least Time Machine exists and is actively bugging people to plug in their backup drives or whatever. It might be more impressive if, on a sufficiently recently backed up machine, there was also an option to set the conditions to securely wipe the original. (OS X doesn’t seem to make it easy to nuke the root device of a running system – I assume you need to first boot from an installation disc.)

I guess I’d just like to be able to “de-personalise” a personal computer. I’d like to transform this sense of ownership into a sense of custodianship. I don’t want it to always be “My Computer”. Wipe out my personal information and leave the tools, the programs, installed in place for someone else. (Like putting /home/ and /var/, on traditional Unix’y systems, on separate partitions that can be securely wiped.)

And then, when I’m in control of my information on the devices I own, I can start worrying about the the information out on the net, on devices I’ve never even seen, for now just assuming that it’s all safe in the hands of professionals.

Guided by the Whispers of Angels

“There’s a tram coming towards you.  Get on it.”  - Bourne, The Bourne Supremacy.

It’s odd when you see a realistic depiction of computer interfaces in fiction.  We’ve been primed to expect one of two different types.

The first is overly simple.  Only things pertinent to the context of the computer use are displayed.  The only actions available are those that will move the plot forward.  Of course, anyone who spends enough time using computers finds this ludicrous.  Real computer interfaces are full of extraneous cruft.

The other type of interface seems chaotic compared to everyday screens.  Packed full of information, constantly updating, changing, zooming.  The effect of just a couple of seconds exposure is disorienting.

The short-hand here is: the person using this computer is smarter and more capable than you.  Or is possibly a cyborg assassin from the future.

(In the office I tend to have six or so semi-translucent terminal windows on my screen, green text on black.  For the last decade many people have remarked that it’s ‘like you’re looking at the Matrix’.)

In the imagined future of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex the information presented is so dense that people get cybernetic brain prosthetics in order to cope.  This leads to a few oddities, such as the the way printed information is conveyed.

Matrix codes have been appearing on London’s streets for a couple of years now (sometimes in advertising, sometimes in asset control systems) but we’re nowhere near the exposure of, say, Tokyo.  And if you don’t have the electronic eyes to see them, they’re just visual noise.  Basiliks in the corner of our illiterate eyes.

From a distance the newspapers of GITS look unremarkable, but, while the headlines are in familiar type, the text of the articles is set in some kind of barcode-like format.  After all, if you have an interest in absorbing information, you’d probably already have a neural-enhancer installed, right?  But then why the old fashioned delivery mechanism?  Since they already have streams of data superimposed on their vision, why not just have the information beamed in wirelessly?

One of the characters, despite having an entirely artificial body and “cyber-brain” wears an old-fashioned wristwatch to remind them of their original humanity.  Both the watch and the the newspaper are just (potentially anachronistic) physical conveyers of information, but with relative inconveniences that give rise to ritual and fetish.

The humans ages are defined by their technology, but this imagines a future where the concept of humanity is alluded to by its practical separation from information.

An idea of humanity that diminishes beyond the point where a wearer of contact lenses could see more than someone without them.

I have an icon on my desktop computer in London that shows me the local current weather.  I’ve never looked at it.  Or rather, I’ve never needed to look at it.  The only time I’m motivated to use a computer to check what the London weather is like is when I’m not actually in London.  Yet I catch a glimpse of this thing many times a day.  So why did I put it there?  Why do I leave it there?  Info Freako?

A recent Microsoft concept video (“2019“) suggests that, if nothing else, the future is going to be full of infomatic detritus you’re going to have to tune out or go mad. It’s perhaps a glimpse of sort of delusory cleptoparasitosis as suffered by arithmophobics. “Can’t you see them?  A thin layer of charts and graphs covering everything!  Everywhere.  Always moving. Can’t eat, can’t drink. Little bastards are all over my coffee cups!”

The video does, however, have a brief moment when someone walking through an airport points his phone at the floor and it projects an arrow of the direction he should be walking in.

Just an arrow. No need to see a constantly updated overhead map of your position or a voice in your ear counting down the distance. (8 metres… 7…. “They can’t be, that’s inside the room.”) Not telling you about the places you won’t be going.  Not showing you what’s behind the doors you won’t be opening.

Just a hint, a gentle nudge.  Like a cheat in a videogame.  Technology finessed to the point that you could easily convince yourself that if you were smarter, a more capable person, you wouldn’t need it.

It’s 2009.  You may be wondering where your rocket-pack is, I want to know what happened to my Travel Agent.

I recently tried to arrange a weekend with my girlfriend in Copenhagen, leaving from Paris.  Two cities of which I have no real local knowledge.  (How easy is it to get to Charles de Gaulle?  A six am, on a weekday?  No idea, but I can check.)

Personal logistics is one of those things I never successfully mastered, but sometimes I like to indulge in the fantasy that I have. Merely a glance at a timetable and Beck-esque transit map, and I’ve potentially mentally absorbed a foreign city. Jason Bourne wouldn’t take the tube from Leicester Square to Covent Garden. Jason Bourne wouldn’t have just missed his bus.

I’m quite a fan of traveling by train rather than plane, so I suggest the possibility to my girlfriend.  Perhaps an overnight sleeper?  I have no idea of the time it might take, or at what price.  But surely this is the sort of thing the web is good at?

It’s a quest that ended in frustration and failure.

Maybe, with a little more laser-focus I’d have been able to uncover the information, but this was attempted during conversation. (Always a good benchmark of a technology’s ease-of-use: can you use it while holding a conversation.  If the answer is no, it probably won’t catch on.)  Searches are shallower, never beyond the first page of results.  Sadly, for travel information, that first page is usually multiple sites, multiple middlemen, all pimping the same affiliate deals.

Even adopting the usual information-gathering strategy of “pretend you’re going to buy something right up to point it asks for payment” failed. I was passed from pre-filled webform to pre-filled webform, each with a differing design and slightly less English, some audibly augmented by the ba-ba-bah-dah of French railway stations. Eventually descending into multi-coloured confusion and a “Serveur introuvable”. Computer says non.

How on earth did people sort this stuff out before? Did they literally go to some shop on the high street and have someone else make the arrangements. I’m sure I remember seeing one once, between the “Our Price” and Wimpy.

Presumably, important people have their personal assistants do it for them.

(The next day I received an email from my, far more organised, girlfriend containing a spreadsheet detailing our travel options – flights only. Apparently the French don’t like long train journeys which is probably why they spend so much money trying to speed them up.)

Whenever you’re booking tickets the question you always have to ask yourself is, what’s the earliest time you’re prepared to travel.  Which usually implies “what’s the earliest I’m prepared to get out of bed?”

No site ever asks that question directly, of course.  Even taking into account the amount of time it takes people to execute morning rituals, the full journey to, say, an airport has its own complexity.  If you’re traveling from “any London”, for example, you have a whole series of choices based on time and budget.  Trains, tubes and buses, all depending on time of day.  Walking routes tolerable with weekend bags, but not with suitcases. If you’ll save money using one airport over another, do you lose it based on the higher train fare?

The TFL Journey Planner displays some of the complexity here, but if you want estimates that incorporate the possibility of taxi usage you need an additional source of information.

You can’t manually go through every possibility for the best match. You either have some enhanced travel estimation skills (a “Bourne sense”), or you just put in a buffer and potentially lament the additional 30 minutes you could have spent in bed.

Applying the web’s current operational paradigm to this problem would result in a solution along the lines of “why not just provide detailed data about every part of our lives to Multivac“.  It’ll act as the middleman, either taking referral fees, or selling your the rich demographic and timely information to advertisers.

I’m still nervous about the collection and consolidation of personal information that’s happening.  These problems all look like nails to the businesses already selling hammers. While a hammer is merely a tool, its potential as a weapon is clear. The weapon potential for personal information is less clear. There are Mjolnirs being constructed with no real guarantee that they will only be wielded by the worthy.

At best, these machines are like the notebook-toting angels from Wings of Desire. The invisible benign presence watching over the people as they read. Hearing their thoughts.  Following them through the city.  Gathering information but incapable of physically interacting with the world beyond occasionally whispering suggestions into people’s minds. They can only observe and record.  Capable of giving detailed city directions; unaware of the taste of blood.

The episode of Ghost in the Shell: SAC “Trans Parent” subverts this by giving guns to the angels.  A doctor inadvertently sees the memories of a patient’s computer enhanced brain (like a computer technician finding a directory of compromising jpegs) suggesting the man is a terrorist and informs the state.  These technologically camouflaged angels move invisibly through the city, looking through emails, diaries.  Ultimately there is physical interaction.  And bloody.  Justified in the context of the story, but certainly not benign.

But beyond the potential privacy concerns, the problem is that these centralised services would be fated to becoming middlemen. Avoiding middlemen is why my instinct wasn’t to go through a comprehensive travel service.  My cultural understanding, informed by advertising, is that middlemen survive by restricting choices to those that benefit themselves and over-charge on top of that. That their use demonstrates a lack of savvy.

It was one of the promises in the early days of the web – disintermediation, the elimination of the middleman. Consumers would deal directly with producers, etc. Odd then, that the biggest successes of the web were the companies that positioned themselves as the über-middlemen.

It’s a situation I blame on the failure of another early promise that failed to deliver: agents.  Software programs that searched through data-sources for us, processed and filtered them, and presented the information in the form most pertinent to ourselves.

What we seem to have ended up with is services emerging to fulfill the tasks that agents would have performed, then taking on the properties of middlemen in order to fund themselves.

I still look to a future where the software runs specifically under my control, for my benefit – even if that means taking direct responsibility for the costs.  For the last few years that’s meant running desktop apps,  but with the availability of cloud-based processing we can be geographically separate from the machines we run our own software on.  (And, assuming efficiencies outstrip resource/power costs, you’d expect the costs to drop over time.)

Tell your automated assistant “Traveling from Paris to Copenhagen for a couple of days in August.”  That’s enough, in the alternate present, for it to spin-up a Travel Agent. A personal WOPR crunching trough the possibility space of your personal trajectories.

Temporary computer space is obtained online. The relevant routines are downloaded, perhaps open source, perhaps not. Some basic travel preferences are uploaded.  Data sources are downloaded.  Short-term-use API keys obtained if necessary. All without direct human interaction.

When ready, it feeds back choices.  Actual real-time possibilities ordered by your preferences. Like an interactive radar chart, you can start windowing it up and down.  Find your preferred dates. Tweak the budget around to reduce the choice, tweak the travel length, the departure time, the arrival time, the buffer for missed connections.  Tweak the environmental impact level.  Adjust for luxury.

Similar to a Mapumental approach covering both intra-city and inter-city travel.

And then, when you’re happy with a handful of possibilities, you make an emotional choice.  Tickets get ordered, calendars updated, full electronic itineraries prepared. Mission complete, the agent self-destructs.

But it doesn’t need to stop there.  The details are monitored for changes, either via requested alerts, or through polling.  A transport strike declared for the day you’re due to travel?  Your automated assistant will let you know, and if necessary a “plan B” is prepared.  Flight delayed?  Adjustments will be made.

And when you actually need to travel, your personal devices will keep you on track.  For example something the “JITwatch“, or that iPhone app that triggers an alarm when GPS indicates you’re within a particular distance from your destination.

They know where you are, and where you need to be.  A voice from your phone will guide you through the streets to your bus-stop.  And if real-time information about the bus network is available, it’ll tell you when you need to be there to catch it.

And later, when you’re smarter and more capable, you may no longer feel the need to keep asking for hints.

Augury

I had a bit of an angry customer moment today. A public strop.

I needed to get an iTunes gift-card this weekend. I tried buying one at the train station’s newsagent.

The thing about these electronic gift-cards is that, even if you have the physical instantiation of the thing, they’re worthless before subjected to an electronic blessing by the cashier. Unfortunately this card swiping ceremony merely resulted in frowns from the cashier. “Are the iTunes cards still not working?” he asked a colleague. No, apparently not.

A weekend malfunction. These things happen. I’d seen it happen to someone else in another store last year. I’d just assumed the gift-card activation process isn’t very robust to communication failure. Apple are already making mad money, so it’s probably not worth the extra effort making it easier for people to give them more.

I was just a little bit peeved that I’d spent time in the queue holding the impotent gift-card when apparently there was already a known problem. Of course, I don’t make a fuss.

So I try again on Monday. Different station, different branch of the same newsagent. Longer queue.

“We’re not selling the iTunes gift-cards.”

No pretence of running it through the machine. No frowny, apologetic faces. A brutal customer slapdown. The weekend’s iTunes gift-card outage had apparently extended into Monday, but nobody thought to take the cards off the shelves? It was the closest I’ve been to a full-on Hulk-out this quarter.

“Why, when you know you can’t sell them, would you still have them out on display? Why would you actively want to convey the impression you were selling something that you’re unable to?”

And, as I asked the question aloud, a possible – speculative – reason occurred to me. When I’d seen the gift-card activation failure before it was at a branch of a formerly major music retailer. A retailer that not long afterwards collapsed, unable to pay its suppliers.

At the time I didn’t see a gift-card failure portending the store’s collapse. But maybe it was an early sign? Maybe the activation ceremony is as much to protect suppliers from distributers as it is to protect the distributers from thieves. If that’s the case, what does an extended failure period imply about the retail distributer? That they’ve been shut-out by their suppliers?

Sooner or later, someone’s going to get narky after queuing and put together a wild thesis based on nothing but scant evidence and conjecture. Not me though. I’m sure the problems I’ve experienced are just a confluence of technical glitches and piss-poor customer experience management. UK business as usual.

Destruction by Advancement of Technology

“The soldier to come is both natural and unnatural. I waited to be called up. You stay fit; stay focused, and stay ready. I wore the blacks and grays. I blended in. But the call never came. It never came.” — Fringe, Bad Dreams

We see patterns, connections.  That’s what human brains are good for.  I’m extremely fond of the point in serialised media when you feel like you’ve been rewarded for sticking around.  When all the pieces coalesce, like reversed slow motion video of a dropped egg.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles didn’t really find its egg-shape until mid-way through its second season, where it shifted from good to very good (and then better).  Lost seems to have sustained its later, post-egg, seasons by suggesting that the real revelation is in the dropping itself.  We hang on the promise we won’t be presented with the parson’s nose.

(Well… that was tortured.)

Fringe may well have shown its egg with “Bad Dreams” (which aired last weekend in the UK) which to pulled together its disparate internet-lunacy-of-the-week story-lines into something approaching coherence.  This Mad Science now has a purpose – to create the post-human soldiers of a future war we are, as yet, unable to comprehend.

At the same time the second issue of Wired UK was also promising some sort of bio-enhancement future. It included a fold-out map featuring an innovative projection map, Here & There by Jack Schultze.

Schultze cites Extremis (Warren Ellis’s 2006 Iron Man reboot) as an influence – the concept that a map projection could be like a superpower.  That you can both be in the city and above it within the same field of vision.

Although Extremis, from 2006, was the pre-crunch Iron Man. Maybe it’s harder these days to root for the billionaire playboy industrialists. Superheroes can’t intervene in real-world atrocities; Stark’s engineering-genius can’t save a real-world Detroit.

(And, maybe it’s just the writers I gravitate towards, but do comics seem more zeitgeisty these days.  Like JMS having Doctor Doom look stuff up on Wikipedia, or seeing Peter Parker’s email inbox full of spam.  Weird that – in a world with the likes of Richards, Stark, and Pym – spam is still an unsolved problem.  Although, to be fair, it’s probably way down on the list of existential threats.)

So now Matt Fraction has disassembled Iron Man again. Extremis is gone. Stark Industries is gone.  His equipment; his social status.  He’s shifted from establishment to fugitive. And, in a move even Unclutterer would consider hardcore, has even dispensed with sections of his own mind.

He’s gone from a Bond to a Bourne. Or to a Banner.

Oh, he’s still a guy stomping around in a form-fitting jet-fighter, just, y’know – less Iron, more Man.  That sort of back to basics, Tyler Durden, philosophy. “I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

Reminds me of when they got rid of the Sonic screwdriver, Doctor Who’s magic-wand, in the 80s.  At the time it was felt that always having this tool available was limiting to the script.  Of course, since reading that I seem to have developed false-memories of entire half-hour episodes consisting of Colin Baker locked alone in room.  Weeping.

The current Who, of course, not only has a multi-function sonic screwdriver but still retains the ability to get out of any situation by McGyvering some other, entirely contrived, nonsense-fueled device.  (“Well.  I would never have thought of that!”)

I’ve recently come into possession of a new Xbox 360 (by dint of being a massive nerd) although sans any games or currently any means to connect it to t’nternet.  All I’ve done so far is played trough the demo for Tom Clancy’s HAWX.

HAWX is a future jet-fighter game that’s only slightly more sim-y than an After Burner.  It’s features that odd arcade perspective where you have a fixed-camera third person view of your jet, but with a first-person HUD imposed over it.  And, what with it being the future, your on-board computer assistant actually takes care of most of the work.  It can do things like project a calculated flight path for either evading enemy missiles, or the optimum approach vectors for missile strikes.  Tanks in cities, hidden behind buildings, may need to be approached by a vertical decent, firing missiles, and then quickly pulling out.  Possibly through the flames of an explosion.  Awesome.

But the game builds weakness into its own technology.  The on-board system has safety thresholds it won’t exceed.  They still need a human on-board, with a pilot’s instinct, to deal with situations the programming hasn’t anticipated.  So, when necessary, you need to “switch off your targeting computer” Skywalker-style, and use the Force.  At which point both the HUD and rear-of-jet view are replaced by a completely third person, almost movie-like, view of the dog-fighting. You’re a sort of floating head in space – the action in view is more distant but still manipulatable.

Strange that, in order the simulate the experience of moving without the guidance of a machine, we are granted the perspective of a god.

“It’s so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you’re one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you’re trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don’t understand any of it, and then you just die.” — Fight Club