Lee Maguire graded snobberies, bawdiness, hypocrisy

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

BPM

When I’m in the gym, I pay the other users about as much attention as I’d be comfortable receiving. Which is not to say there are no exhibitionists there, but most of us are focused solely on our own sweaty attempts at entropy deceleration. But if I do stray from the blinkers of unspoken gym etiquette and glance around at the users of the cardio equipment, I’ll often notice that people cover up the LED information display panels with sweat towels.

What’s the cause of the data anxiety? That others may look past their public physical presence and judge them based on the blinkenlights? Or, more likely, that they’re intimidated by the numbers themselves.

I understand why the information can have that effect. Things like time, distance, even kcal burned, that’s all fine. The one that’s always a little scary is heart rate (which gets displayed by the machines with electrodes in the handles, or picked up from transmitter units). I’ve always just mentally filtered it out. I’ve never felt the need to know about my heart rate. It’s icky scary of-the-body stuff. Until I looked it up recently I wouldn’t have know what a normal, resting, heart rate would be. I’ve somehow never even taken my own pulse.

This bugged me for a while. I decided I wanted to develop some kind of familiarity with my heart rate. The idea was, I’d buy a heart rate monitor and try to cultivate a checking reflex – not just during exercise, but any time. Like how you might occasionally check the time, or an unread message count.

So I broke my personal rule about not buying new tech that wasn’t a replacement for something else (it’s not replacing a watch – I haven’t owned one since my Pop Swatch popped off over a decade ago). I poured over the specs of various products and eventually got into the tech buying trap of attempting rationalise paying more for features I previously didn’t care about (GPS, computer-downloads, etc).

Eventually I decided it hold off, for now, on anything too sophisticated and went for a Polar FS3c. And maybe I was a little swayed in my choice by the fact that it’s one of the heart rate monitors sported by Edward Norton in the 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk was one of my favourite movies of last year. Mainly because, by focusing on the fugitive story that drove the 70s TV series, it positioned itself as a geek Bourne Identity. Instead of a trained assassin, Banner is a renegade scientist able to somehow evade a Special Forces snatch-squad (even before his involuntary green ríastrad, a transformation only triggered after local bullies mess with his PC).

A fairly close embodiment of hacker nomad of net-lore. Have encrypted laptop and network radio equipment will travel. He can jury-rig a centrifuge in the favela for grinder-style self experimentation whenever needed. While the Hulk represents the fear of our bodies betraying us, Banner becomes someone taking steps to overcome that fear. (Like the movie hard-men able to perform surgery on themselves.)

It even has a little fun with the current conventions of the genre. Bruce empties the contents of Betty’s handbag on to a motel bed: “Basically we can’t use any of this because they can track all of it.” “My lipgloss – can they track that?”

If there’s any complaint I have about the movie it was that there was too much Hulk. I do appreciate the artistry of CGI monsters hitting each other, but the final half hour takes it a little too far. Apparently sci-fi movie budgets are such that multi-million dollar recreations of the alley-fight from They Live now seem like a good idea.

There’s no word of a sequel yet, but the tying of Hulk into the Captain America origin-story, along with the Tony Stark cameo, firmly establishes it as part of Marvel’s Avengers remscéla – perhaps as hero, perhaps villain.

The heart-rate monitor itself is used cleverly in the movie. It takes the role of a sinister countdown clock. The beeping of the watch heralding the potential for disaster. And while the watch performs as it would in reality, the movie does lie a little.

We see Norton bare-chested (a clear requirement for the role) on several occasions when using the heart-rate monitor. I assumed that the elecrodes were embedded into the strap, but a little research shows that the Polar devices use a chest strap – something I assume has been finessed away from the movie’s world for aesthetic reasons, even though strapless HRMs actually exist.

2002’s Panic Room is another movie that uses medical monitoring in this way. A diabetic’s watch shows their current blood glucose level – it’s suggested that below a certain point and hypoglycaemia kicks in. The watch is a movie fiction – we just have to assume there are wires in the body, either connected to the watch, or relayed from a sensor elsewhere.

The current, real life, version of this continuous blood glucose monitoring is something like the Dexcom system in which a cool little cyborg wart is stuck to your body and is relayed to a hideous tamagotchi-looking receiver unit (that would have looked odd even back when people still carried pagers).

I think I’ve assumed that there was some good reason that personal medical tech always had to look a little out of date, but the iPhone 3.0 preview last Tuesday showed a preview of a iPhone fingerstick (rather than continuous) glucose monitoring application.

So what happens when the device that records your medical status is also the device you use to update your social connections?

I can see some crossover with the grinder and personal infomatics (“Quantified Self”) crowd who aren’t afflicted with the specific aliments these technologies are aimed at. Just adopt the tech as cyborg gadgets providing yet another datapoint – especially for non-invasive measurement techniques.

I’m a member of a generation that’s seen the culture of internet personal sharing and disclosure occur only after our own youthful embarrassments were already behind us. Financial and medical information is private – that much is sacrosanct. Which is why I wouldn’t be surprised to see that attitude challenged over the next decade.

Imagine some ambient representation of your friends list which incorporates this information – marrying the medical telemetry of the USCMC in Aliens with the wearable contact list of clatter

It might be a represented by subtle changes in shape, and colour. Or maybe just like the changing face of BJ Blazkowicz. You might learn to tailor any real-time communication to your recipients present physical state.

It doesn’t seem too far fetched. My girlfriend allows me access to her Nike+ data (in an interesting connection, it was Edward Norton’s voice on the commercials). I’m not a runner myself, so it doesn’t ever represent useful actionable information. Yet the access itself has some meaning, some value that I don’t yet have the tools to describe.

Of course I’m still mentally entrenched in the world of risks and nightmare scenarios. You might not want to keep discretionary medical records that can be subject to discovery by insurance claims investigators. Or, in the UK, the many tentacles of the RIPA-enabled state (the current message to banks and benefit claimants alike seems to be: if you ask for support, you consent to surveillance). Maybe stories of spouses demanding an explanation for jump in heart rate for a partner supposedly working late at the office, or the panic of parents when equipment glitches produce aberrant results.

I’m cautious and conservative when it comes to this sort of thing. It can take years for the technologies, especially those encourage new forms of sharing, to find their way through the following mental sluice gates:

• How is this any different or better than X?
• Why do you care?
• Why do you think anyone else would care?
• What are the potential health/privacy/lock-in risks?
• What are the network benefits?
• Do the benefits outweigh the potential health/privacy/lock-in risks?
• Why is my preferred username already taken?

Whenever I hear about someone preserving a moment of chemical idiocy to a social website it’s usually followed by “that’ll come back to haunt them when they run for political office and discover they’ve inadvertently licensed the indiscretions of their youth to a media conglomerate”. But part of me wonders if there’s really that much value in the idea that we need to maintain some kind of plausible deniability about our lives – in the unlikely event we run for political office (…in an future where only paragons are electable).

Indeed, I recently watched an episode of The West Wing on DVD that seemed to suggests that, for high profile politicians, at best the position of well-guarded privacy will result in culture shock when your entire life is suddenly thrown open to the scrutiny by your enemies, and at worst your secrets become the things other use to influence you.

So maybe, when the issue arises, we should just relax.

Current heart rate: 69 bpm.

Saving us from ourselves

It doesn’t go unremarked that, 10-years after the introduction of the floppy-less iMac, there are still a few applications using the apparently anachronistic icon of the 3½-inch diskette to represent the concept of saving a file.

I have no objections to it, myself.  It’s a lovely little hieroglyph that reminds me how awesome computers seemed to me in the 90s.  They were the go-to MacGuffins of the modern computer-era in movies like Hackers and The Net.

These days memory cards are the size of fingernails and disks can look like anything from tiki statues to laptop humping dogs.  So what do we get as the current representation of data storage? A featureless rectangular slab?

In OS X, Apple choses to represent unmounted .dmg disk images as metallic cases of internal hard-disks, a circular indent showing the location of the platters (something that’s familiar to most computer people, but probably abstract for Mac users). Oddly, when mounted, they then come to resemble an external drive of some kind – a white flat rectangular casing.  Apple’s iconography for online storage (iDisk) is an external drive casing with a abstract cloud symbol on it – possibly enshrining it as a future anachronism.

So the modern floppy-less save icons tend to look like arrows pointing at slabs, or at cylinders, or pointing into file folders (because some metaphors transcend).  Sometimes it’s a sharpened pencil writing directly on to the surface of a magnetic disk.

Of course there are some that regard the question of representing a save icon as moot.  The concept of “save” is apparently tied to a doomed file-centric paradigm, and that files will be replaced by a continually recorded timestream of changes – the file-as-document will become closer to a spool. The play and record buttons are always down.  (The specific user action will be closer to concept of “export” where capturing the state of a “file” at a specific time is still required.)

This concept of auto-saving has been a familiar one in videogames in the last few years,  but that hasn’t removed the need for iconographic communication.  The games still need to communicate when information is being saved to warn the user not to switch the power off or remove devices and risk leaving the data in a corrupted state.  There are no secondary indicators – no whirring noises, no flashing indicator LEDs, no iPod display requesting not to be unplugged.  On PS2 games they would frequently use an iconographic representation of the removable memory cards.  But how do you visually communicate the internal storage of the Wii?

One of the games I’m currently playing uses a spinning DVD (a read-only medium in videogame-land) to represent, not when the DVD is being read (duh), but when data is being written to internal memory.  I assume there was nothing else suitable in their development kit.

So instead of an icon a user selects to instruct the computer to save, we’re now in need of a universal visual representation an instruction from the computer.  “Attention human: I’m saving your work.  Don’t do anything that might prevent me from doing this.” (Something that potentially becomes much trickier when you think about devices with no persistent storage saving directly to the cloud.)

And, really, what communicates this better than an angry cartoon mole?

Crowdsourcing for caveats

If Iggy Pop is just the passenger, why is he the one sorting out the car insurance?  Or indeed selling it.  “I’m not selling insurance, I’m selling time.” 

All of the insurance ads seem to be emphasising speed and convenience at the moment.  One insurance comparison site sponsors “24″ on Sky, which is surely the pornography of effective time-management.

Not being a car owner I’ve never tried these services myself.  I can only assume that their major breakthrough is that they’ve dispensed with the many dense pages of legalese usually presented when buying insurance.  Possibly, they’ve been replaced by a short series of simple manga-style diagrams?

After all, the ads don’t proclaim “Get a quote in minutes… then spend a couple of hours wading through terms.  Bring a sandwich.”

I jest, of course.  The only time anyone reads their insurance policy is after they’ve been denied a claim.  Who has time?  It’s less “caveat emptor”, more “festinet emptor”.

Maybe it’s to be expected from insurance policies, but it seems that every action on a computer presents you with some legal contract of sorts.  Its like a blight on the web.  Want to register for a website, buy something online, install a piece of software?  You’ve just agreed to the following non-negotiated terms…

If I want to watch TV I can somehow do so without being presented with any kind of contract.  If I want to watch the same programmes on my computer, on a service run by the TV station, it’s apparently become a matter for the lawyers.  Computers = risk.

“Print this for your records” they sometimes suggest, imagining that people still have printers at home.  If you’re me you hit print, set the printer type to PDF and file destination to “~/Documents/legalbullshit/”. I rarely read them, of course.  I used to skim through them but invariably you’ll come across a part that says they can modify the terms without notification at any time.  So, complete waste of time then.  It’s like that fabled test which instructs you to read through the paper, has a page full of questions, and at the end instructs you not to answer any of them.

And, in the US at least, anyone breaking these (modifiable without notice) website Terms of Service can apparently be subject to criminal prosecution.  The Internet is serious business.

You end up hoping that the “many eyeballs” axiom of the open source world has some sort of equivalent here; that there’s some dedicated individual looking for the evil “first born” clauses.  Indeed, when a recent change to the Facebook TOS (not widely announced by Facebook, natch) was made, it caused a stink on a few blogs.  Commenters seemed outraged that they would try to slip something like this by.

So these things are prevalent, but where are the tools for managing them?  Where’s the security update tool equivalent?  What if, instead of just saving these documents, I imported them into desktop software or web-service.  When the terms change, I receive notification.  If I’m presented with a new document detailing terms, I get to easily see the diffs – and then be one step away from a wiki discussing the implications. 

Companies could play nice with this ecosystem by presenting downloadable dated and versioned XML formats of their terms. Perhaps even participating in related discussions and providing justifications. But it wouldn’t be necessary, all we’d need is a few healthily paranoid individuals looking out for us all, something that will always be available.