son kite (on finding heaven)

So, i’m supposed to exercise yet i’m always too exhausted to exercise (mostly cause exercising is boring). And i want to socialize but i have no time to socialize. I decided a few weeks ago to combine these two by making dancing rules. I can go dancing iff 1) i only leave the dancefloor for cigs, water, bathroom; 2) i maintain a constant sweat (which translates to staying in the psytrance room); 3) talking is done through body movement; 4) drinking is prohibited.

Last night was round 2 of this plan and it went brilliantly. I went to bed after work, woke up at midnight and went over to 1015. My *FAVORITE* DJ duo in the whole wide world was in town – Son Kite. I went straight to the front of the audience, parked myself in front of the stage and danced danced danced my ass off. Now, Son Kite is the music of my Master’s Thesis. When i was working on that darn thing, i only had one CD after having all of them stolen. So i played it on repeat for the bulk of the duration of my thesis writing. The music is brilliant – it’s what happens when you have classically trained musicians play psytrance with the goal of making genuinely beautiful sounds.

That said, the CD pales in comparison to Son Kite live. OMG. Not only did i get my dance on, but i got to find a meditative peace that i haven’t seen in a long time. I was totally on a different plane, relaxing into the beautiful sounds. The most amazing sounds come out of them when they start playing electric violin. Wow wow wow. For anyone who has any appreciation of electronic music, you must see them live if they come to town. I brought out DnB, breaks and goth kids last night and they lurved it – a rare thing.

I came home, physically exhausted and proceeded to work all day. Exercise truly is a good thing.

techno-ethics (what is “evil”?)

We can all come up with ways to justify even our worst behavior. This is why i’m always a bit wary of “don’t be evil”-esque mantras. Evil on what terms?

When i heard about WordPress’ questionable practices, i couldn’t help but sigh. I totally agree with Waxy’s request that we not engage in angry mob justice. That said, i’m very concerned that folks are justifying, defending or explaining Matt’s decision (ex: 1 2). He is a nice guy – i totally agree. And perhaps we should all be very defensive of nice guys who are friends or friend-of-friends. But he did fuck up. And he did use our collective social capital for his personal gains.

I don’t want to talk about should’ves but i want to talk about what ethics we are promoting and what happens when we drag companies/enemies through the coals for similar behavior.

There is a value in our community that transparency rules. Of course, few of us live up to that value either professionally or personally. We protect our own interests regularly. Yet, we yell and scream when others do the same… unless they are our friends. This has a name – it’s called “team face” (see Erving Goffman). Yet, when team face occurs, the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ get clearly defined. It’s not such an open community when we are engaging in team face. This is an ethic that we must consider.

We all want to make a living (and some of us want to get rich). A mouse-over Erving Goffman’s name makes it very clear that i will make some small amount of money if you purchase his book. Explicit advertisements on blogs lets you know that others are making money off of this practice. I consult and i don’t tell you (my blog readers) everything that i tell certain companies. Of course, we begrudge people for this. And we lynch companies for asking users to pay for currently free things (think of the Six Apart fiasco). There is selfishness and self-interest all-around. Yet, what’s the balance?

The problem that i have with Matt’s decision is that he used community resources (reputation) to engage in a practice that i find despicable for his own gain under the justification that it would be good for the community in the long run if WordPress grew. There’s no doubt that WordPress is a great product but it’s a product built on open source and that’s why the community likes it. They like it for its transparency, for its code of honor that flies in the face of big companies. What upsets me is not that he simply engaged in selfish behavior (because we all do) but that he used the community’s reputation to do so. We had no ability to say “not in my name.” This is the “benevolent” dictatorship problem.

What’s worse is that we all pay for it. Social technology works because of social norms to be honorable. Pagerank works because most people do their best to be honest. And those who don’t are considered spammers. What does our community have to gain from any effort to usurp pagerank? I would argue that we have much to lose. Folks may not like Google’s pagerank system but do you remember what search was like 5 years ago? Google changed most of our lives and perhaps a new iteration is necessary but it should not be done through foul play. That’s a terrible way to innovate.

I think that this situation requires some deep reflection on all of our parts because i suspect that our defensive reactions make us look hypocritical as hell. What kind of community of technologists do we want to build? What ethics do we want to hold onto? Do we have collective values? How are we going to collectively encourage those ethics? How are we going to react when social contracts regarding our collective ethics are broken? I hope that we can get out of our defensiveness and really think about what this implies for all of our endeavors. We all fuck up and i’ll be the first to forgive Matt. That said, i think that we should all take this situation as a lesson and really think about and discuss what does it really mean to be ethical and socially responsible in a technological environment. Let’s learn from our mistakes and that of our peers.

Schiavo, Lakoff and my wishes

When i first learned of Schiavo’s case, my first instinct was to document my desires. For the record, i don’t want to be on life support. Period. If i’m in a lot of pain, i want enough morphine to kill me. I want to be cremated. Nothing horrifies me more than living by machine, being kept alive to meet someone’s whacked ass selfish values justified through abusive uses of religion. I want to face god when the time comes, not be kept alive just because it’s possible. There is beauty in life and beauty in death – they go hand in hand and i have no fear.

So, Schiavo died today which gives me great relief. It is her turn to meet god and she should’ve been given that opportunity 15 years ago. What horrifies me is how her life has been manipulated and used by the most conservative forces for some pretty selfish gains. Of course, everything about it is horribly conflicting. The same agendas who are against universal health care are for keeping people on machines infinitely rather than letting them die in peace. Once again, we’re back to Lakoff. Yeah, it makes sense on that level, but it sure as hell pisses me off. And i’m really cranky for how much the media has taken the conservative side.

A friend of mine, Sascha Becker does a really good job of reading the Schiavo case from Lakoff’s perspective. She highlights an aspect that has been forgotten lately: Schiavo’s eating disorder and how her battle with bulimia resulted in her severe brain damage. It makes the whole situation all the more ridiculous as we’re still incapable of talking about the issues at hand – control and domination. ::sigh::

blogging is not educational

Or so says Proctor Jr.-Sr. High School who banned blogging at school.

liquidate: the end of 43 Norfolk

When i moved to San Francisco, i quickly got involved with False Profit because of friends from college. FP consists of a lot of overeducated, workaholic party kids. The community had a homebase, a warehouse at 43 Norfolk. After the death of the landlord, it was sold and the new people want to move in. Thus, we are losing our space in 2 days.

As can be expected, we threw our final party this weekend. Friends flew in from around the country. 850 people showed up before we locked the doors (probably another 300 came to try to get in but we were at capacity). It was a miracle that the cops did not shut us down – perhaps they knew it was our final party… or perhaps it was our security people. For me, the party started Friday when a bunch of us got together to prep the house and just hang out. Jeff Heer helped me put together a network exhibit using his Prefuse to visualize the Friendster-based social network of my crew and their friends. We started dancing at 10. By 8AM there were still 250 people on the dance floor. When the music ended around 11AMish, there were still 60+ people dancing their asses off. As it soaked in that it was the end of an era, we gathered in a circle… there were tears. And then there was hottubbing to ease the sore muscles.

I love that warehouse to bits and i’m really sad to see it go away. I’m still not sure what it will mean for our crew. Of course, many are splintering off to go back to school. And there is a new smaller live-only warehouse (no party space).

At least we went out with style… A full-on crazy liquidation.

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paying to get it, or why people charge $10K

A few years back, i got utterly irate with a friend when he came back from a cult-esque finding yourself seminar. He was convinced he understood the root of all his problems – he had acquired true insight in this program. “Oh really?” i asked, “tell me what you learned.” He then proceeded to tell me things that i had been telling him for years. I wanted to stomp up and down screaming. He hadn’t listened to a damn word i’d said for years but when he paid money to listen to some experts, he suddenly got it. This was the same story with all of my friends and their shrinks – they’d listen to the shrinks tell them exactly what their friends have been saying for years. Only they paid their shrinks (or their insurance did).

Now, a few years later, i have more appreciation for how he got it. Yes, it was about being in a situation where he could hear it, being open to being vulnerable. It was about having “experts” guide him through. But, still, i’ve never gotten over the fact that it took paying a self-help expert to finally hear things that he’d known and his friends had known for years. Why on earth is that revolutionary?

Lately, i’ve been watching this happen again, only in the work sphere. People come back from this obscenely expensive conferences with revelations. My eyebrows get all furrowed and i’m like, yes, i’ve been telling you this for a while now. And i’ve even been writing it down. Publicly. Still, there’s nothing like going to an event where you’re expected to learn and learning, simply by being open. But why on earth can’t people be more open to all forms of knowledge that come to them, not just the ones that they pay dearly for to hear the “experts”?

Part of why this bugs me is that i think that the “experts” (self-included) are overrated. Even when i take on that foolish role, i’m usually exaggerating to make a point, to be heard. And how does one get declared an expert anyhow? I know plenty of people more knowledgeable about a lot of topics than the purported or wheeled around experts. Ah, social networks.

My mentors are always telling me that i need to charge a ridiculous dayrate to be seen as an expert, to be listened to. As much as i would like to make more than student wages, i find this absolutely absurd. I used to make $4.85 an hour and i lived on that – the idea of making $100 an hour seems absurd, yet my friends tell me this is far too low to charge. I almost choked when i found out that one of my mentors charges $10K a day. What on earth can we say that’s worth $10K??

But i think that my frustration is the answer… it’s worth $10K because that’s enough to make the business people wake up and listen, to make them actually pay attention. And that’s why certain conferences cost $5K – people take them seriously at that rate – they actually want to make something out of it. (What does that say about conferences that i go to where people throw a hissy fit when the cost raises from $60 to $75? Ah, academics, how i do love thee.)

Still, as much as i can recognize that this is how the system works, it feels so ludicrous. Sometimes, i’m convinced that i truly do lack the balls to play this game. How on earth do i overcome that if i want to be heard? How do i actually transmit knowledge without having to be an expert ::cough:: pundit? Or is this a system that i really want to support and encourage? What does it mean to walk away from it?

initial impression of Yahoo 360

Today, Yahoo invited a handful of “influencers” to have early access to their new product 360 degrees. Apparently, i’m one of them so i got to sit around a table at Yahoo, learn about the product and speak my mind. I have to say that i’m impressed that Yahoo folks wanted to hear all of our crankiness head-on rather than waiting for it to appear in our random ramblings online. Even better: they didn’t make us sign any NDAs so we can blog all we want. I lurve that.

So, the tool comes out in like a week. I don’t know how final the version that we saw today is, but i thought i’d offer some impressions based on what i saw since i know folks out there are curious.

360 will be invite-only but they are not seeding through employees, rather, they are seeding through active Yahoo users. This is actually very important because frankly, 360 isn’t meant for people like me (or like you). It’s meant for your average not-technically inclined individual who is scared of blogging but wants to share their thoughts, photos, and recommendations with their friends. Thus, before we all get into a blogizzy, it’s important to remember the target.

The feature set that i saw included integrated YIM, a blogging tool, a recommendations engine (linked to local), photos (linked to Y photos, not Flickr) and a social network. It’s all very integrated and emphasizes Yahoo products (although they were talking about connecting it with other products and they are doing some RSS stuff). Throughout all of this are heavy controls for privacy/publication, although it is all strict categorization schemes where you can make things available to groups (think: LJ).

Of course, it has all of the social problems of bi-directional, articulated social networks (nothing solved there). And the controls are really overwhelming. In fact, a lot of the product is overwhelming for the not-technically-savvy and i think that this will be their major problem unless they figure out how to slowly expose things (one of our strongest recommendations). For the techgeek, it will feel like they didn’t go far enough, didn’t have enough features, etc. That’s actually a lot easier to solve than the overwhelming problem and i expect they’ll build new features soon so i think that the techgeeks should wait. But i’m really worried about the novice user because it has many of the problems of blogging, privacy and social networks rolled into one big problem. Plus, you really need to be heavily integrated into the Yahoo network for it to really make sense.

Frankly, i think that they should take the word “blog” out of the picture entirely. While the service allows you to share your materials with layered groups of friends, the term ‘blog’ is intimidating to the mainstream who see it as publishing or otherwise uber-public. Since Yahoo isn’t requiring uber-public, i think that they should get rid of the term. We’ll see what happens.

I also think that it makes much much more sense connected with photosharing and i really wish that they would wait on this product until Flickr is connected with them – there’s going to be so much overlap and confusion 🙁 Plus, while there are huge problems with Flickr’s system of privacy management, there’s a lot that they have going for them interface wise. For example, you don’t have to click stupid edit buttons – you can edit while consuming. This is soooo cool. I wish more folks would have fun with javascript.

Anyhow, my general impression is that i’m wary, but i don’t think that this is for me and i think it will be nice for the heavily integrated Yahoo user.

guantanamo: honor bound to defend freedom

“Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom'” is a British play that originally opened in London to protest the US’s abuse of human rights in citizens who were taken to Guits Guantanamo Bay prisons. The play tells the stories of 9 British antanamo under questionable pretenses, never told why and kept there for over two years. Seven were released without trials, still with no explanation. The play uses testimonials of the prisoners, their letters to their families and the testimonials of their families. Rumsfeld’s speeches are also included. Every word in the play (except the meta-commenter) comes directly from those involved in this nightmare.

The play recently opened in New York and tonite was the first preview in San Francisco (at Brava Theater running until April 17). While they still have some theatrical kinks to work out, the play was definitely a good reality check, a good reminder of how easy it is as an American to tune out to the human rights abuses that the government is executing in our names. The play is clearly written for a British audience, yet it is so essential as Americans to wake up and listen, listen to the actual people abused by our systems. This is especially critical as Abu Ghraib trials continue. If you’re in SF, make sure you go out and support this play and use it to think about what’s going on.

That said, i wish i knew the next step. I certainly would’ve loved it if Brava would’ve given out more information, action items, etc. Political plays need to give you a direction otherwise it’s just heart wrenching. Still, heart wrenching for a good cause.

(A story of one detainee is in the NYTimes today.)

HICSS: Persistent Conversations

HICSS may look like a boondoggle (it is, afterall, in Hawaii) but one of the reasons that i keep applying to it is because the Persistent Conversation track has amazing researchers interested in visualization, social technologies and privacy. The track is meant to bring together people interested in the implications of persistent, archivable, searchable data surrounding communication. What do you do with it? How do you study it?

Anyhow, the abstract deadline is March 31 (abstract – 250 words). If you have research that you need to write up, consider applying to HICSS: Persistent Conversations Minitrack. In addition to good research, there is still a beautiful beach.

danah boyd | apophenia

making connections where none previously existed