Age of Information or Impending Dark Age?
What have you already lost, within your memory, or within your hard drive, and what can that tell you about the temporary nature of our current media and memories?
RMH
art blog(derogatory)
todays bird
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
cherry valley forever
One Nice Bug Per Day
h
$LAYYYTER

Product Placement

titsay

oozey mess

shark vs the universe
Not today Justin
Jules of Nature
Three Goblin Art
wallacepolsom

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Sade Olutola

izzy's playlists!
seen from T1
seen from Ukraine

seen from United States

seen from Italy

seen from Sri Lanka
seen from Ukraine
seen from Hong Kong SAR China

seen from United States

seen from Canada

seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Romania

seen from Malaysia
seen from Hong Kong SAR China

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
@jessehirshca
Age of Information or Impending Dark Age?
What have you already lost, within your memory, or within your hard drive, and what can that tell you about the temporary nature of our current media and memories?
The United States of Uber: Data, Money, and Power
A consistent mistake we make in the era of the internet is to focus on the user experience and ignore the systemic effects. We love to gaze at the shiny object, but we don’t take enough time to step back and understand the big picture. The rise of Uber is a great example of this.
Uber is not a transportation or logistics company. For a long time I liked to argue that Uber was a media company that specialized in algorithms and data. However now I’m starting to see Uber as even larger than that, not just a conglomerate, but an actual sovereign entity.
The United States of Uber is an emerging federation of co-operating entities that uses data, to make money, and accumulate power.
At the heart of this rising state are the algorithms that sort data, and rank subjects. While we do not have a full picture of how these algorithms operate, we are getting glimpses of their purpose and effects via various initiatives and disputes.
Advice for humans who wish to govern
I'd like to offer some advice if you want to get elected, or you're in the fortunate position of wanting to stay elected. Maybe you're a career politician, or you'd like to run for office for the first time. Perhaps you live in a democracy, able to vote for your government, or maybe you don't, and you're wondering why not. Either way, I offer some perspective, a different way of looking at the problem of government, that I encourage you to consider.
At the Academy of the Impossible I operated the Campaign School, which invited successful politicians, campaigners, strategists, and pollsters, to share their knowledge and wisdom about electoral politics. While the focus was primarily directed toward the needs of people running for office for the first time, there was valuable knowledge for anyone interested in democratic processes.
A Crisis of Legitimacy
Specifically one of the recurring themes we tried to address, was the crisis of legitimacy in contemporary democratic politics. Governments, political parties, and especially politicians are generally regarded with cynicism and disdain. People decreasingly trust their elected leaders, and the institutions they are associated with.
It is not so much an issue of apathy, but of relevance, contact, and broader issues of representation in an era of direct interaction. Even our notions of community have radically transformed, from geographically specific constructs, to fluid and flexible configurations based on interests, ethnography, demography, or whatever cool meme or trend is playing out.
Given that our configuration of community has changed, so too has our conception of what a representative is, and what that representative should be. A general consensus among Campaign School participants was that electoral reform was necessary and overdue. Our notions of representation have changed, and existing systems have not kept up at all.
However adjacent to the issue of electoral reform, an interesting insight around relevance emerges.
Advice for struggling media executives
I recently made waves while commenting on the new Apple News app that will be installed by default on the upcoming iOS9 release. In particular, I argued that the management of the Canadian news industry had dropped the ball, and as a result some of the most storied and respected brands in the Canadian media landscape would be done.
nice little evisceration of the entire Canadian media business under the guise of a @jessehirsh Apple commentary http://t.co/UkBJSvbG8l
— marc weisblott (@scroll)
June 15, 2015
Specifically I cited both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star as being destined to the dustbin of history due to their expensive gamble and reliance on new tablet editions. I framed the problem as one of monopoly, given that Apple is in a privileged position as both the manufacturer of the software and of the hardware.
What do you do if you're a city or national brand from a small market and the monopoly provider enters your marketplace and engages in anticompetitive behaviour? I'm not suggesting that these companies curl up and call it quits, however I do think that proceeding as if all is normal is equally foolish and will result in disaster.
Therefore I offer the mythical media executive some advice which I hope will assist in the framing and understanding of the problem at hand.
Chase the Future, Not the Past
“The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” - William Gibson
The first and perhaps largest mistake that modern media executives make is to chase the past. Marshall McLuhan offers a fantastic metaphor in the form of the rearview mirror effect. In an accelerating culture what we perceive as the future is really the present, and what we perceive as the present is really the past.
How often have you heard someone proclaim that "mobile or digital are the future!" A derivative of this sentiment might be, "tablets are the future!" The irony of course is that none of these are the future, instead they're the present. We don't know what the future media may manifest as (I suggest shared hallucinations as one option), but we should not make the mistake of assuming that what we have now will remain the same. If there's anything we can predict, it is that things will change, maybe all things will change, and the dynamism of an internet society will continue.
Toronto is a Failed State
Toronto is a failed state. It has been this way for some time. It failed not through some significant catastrophe, but through the neglect and complacency of a population that wants to believe in a better city, rather than actually create one.
When Toronto had a buffoon as Mayor, it was easy to ignore our status as a failed state, and instead think the problem was with the fool, or the electorate (as fools), but not the city itself. Now that there is a Mayor who is competent and capable, there’s no excuse for the chaos that will befall the city this summer with the arrival of the 2015 Pan Am Games.
Quick Reads for Pedagogues
When I speak to educators and aspiring pedagogues I often offer the following influences for further reading/thinking:
Howard Rheingold
Douglas Rushkoff
danah boyd
Harold Innis
Ramona Pringle
Ursula Franklin
Larry Schmidt
Academy of the Impossible Visits Attawapiskat
From March 2nd until March 4th, 2015, the Academy of the Impossible was invited by the Western James Bay Telecom Network to visit the Attawapiskat First Nation, located on the then-frozen shores of James Bay, in Northern Ontario. The Western James Bay Telecom Network is a community owned and operated initiative to bring high speed fibre optic Internet to the coastal communities of James Bay. It is backed by the Mushkegowuk Council, which represents eight First Nations in North Eastern Ontario.
On March 3rd, we facilitated six sessions with students and community members around issues arising from using and engaging with the Internet.
These sessions all began with the question: What is the Internet? There are computers, smartphones, tablets, and laptops, but what exactly is the Internet?
One way of looking at the Internet is that it is our imagination. Connecting all these computers and devices has allowed our imagination to be shared, and thus allows us to share ideas, media, stories, and cultures.
Another way of regarding the Internet is as a great big learning curve. After all, the Internet has no finish line, it has no end, and there are always new concepts and services to discover. Thus the Internet is an expression of our ability to learn, and continue learning, whatever it is that interests us.
In meeting with members of the community, especially the younger members/students, it was clear that there is already a tremendous amount of knowledge in the community about the Internet, and the potential for the Internet to empower and enable the people of Attawapiskat in many ways.
The following five suggestions arise from several days of discussion, and focus on how the existing knowledge within the community can be further developed and shared.
Uber has been making waves around the world as it disrupts the taxi and transportation industries with its data driven service. Now a new challenger has emerged, named La’Zooz, that seeks to create a peer to peer autonomous transportation service that would be owned by its users! What? How? Where?
Facebooking at work is usually frowned on ...
... all that lost productivity, as you watch your friends' cat videos or someone's dancing baby.
But the social network has just launched a new product called "Facebook at Work" ... a platform geared specifically to companies to allow their employees to be more productive.
Truth or hype?
Is there a public policy response to the rise of Artificial Intelligence?
I believe that one of the big stories of 2015 will be the ongoing rise of Artificial Intelligence. Already in these first few weeks there have been a number of articles trying to make sense of the rapid rise of smart software and the rapid development of deep learning.
Privacy has been a pressing concern over the past few years, and in spite of repeated attempts to argue that it was dead, or undesirable, it remains a priority for pretty much everyone.
Our personal information has been seduced, coerced, and vacuumed from our devices in ways that we will only understand after the fact.
Therefore the big debate for 2015 is what is to be done with that information? Who controls it? Who has access to it? What insights, conclusions, and absurd connections will be made by smart software that sorts through it?
To answer these questions, we require algorithmic transparency. We need to understand how the black box of society works, we cannot cede governance of our society to the smart software and nerds behind its curtain.
The role for public policy in this situation is significant and arguably rather urgent. There's a clear need to assess the environment, properly understand the context, and then formulate an appropriate and possible response.
The irony is that the people who do take the time to understand, the experts, the pioneers, the folks who've had a front row seat this entire time, they're starting to raise some serious concerns about the survival of humanity!
In the face of this growing concern, which government, or elected leader, is going to lead the public policy discussion around artificial intelligence?
Rather than regard Facebook as a social network, it makes more sense to view the company as being in the business of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-the-mobile-industry-2014-11
Next-Level Pattern Recognition
Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are recommended to be changed frequently in order to increase transaction unlinkability. We present an efficient method to deanonymize Bitcoin users, which allows to link user pseudonyms to the IP addresses where the transactions are generated. Our techniques work for the most common and the most challenging scenario when users are behind NATs or firewalls of their ISPs. They allow to link transactions of a user behind a NAT and to distinguish connections and transactions of different users behind the same NAT. We also show that a natural countermeasure of using Tor or other anonymity services can be cut-off by abusing anti-DoS countermeasures of the bitcoin network. Our attacks require only a few machines and have been experimentally verified. We propose several countermeasures to mitigate these new attacks.
A glimpse into the Toronto Public Library System of 2042
In recent years, artificial intelligence has begun to supplant human decision-making in a variety of fields, such as high-speed stock trading and medical diagnostics, and even in self-driving cars. But technological advances in three particular areas have made self-governing weapons a real possibility.
Nintendo is the latest technology company with an eye for health care. The makers of Super Mario have introduced their QOL platform, which stands for Quality of Life, and includes an expanding line of health devices and sensors. Starting with Sleep, the company hopes their background in gaming will enable them to find success in the world of health care. Rick Cluff speaks with Jesse Hirsh