"weaverluke" blog makeover

After fighting a losing battle with buggy text formatting caused by my various template hacks over the last year, I've bitten the bullet and switched to a new, ready-made template.

The design's more warmly organic and less ultra-minimal, but the sidebar content, by contrast, is now much less cluttered. Just the bare necessities. : )

Africa needs solutions, not handouts

Ethan Zuckerman has published an excellent critique of Live 8 and its attendant ethos.

This is why I think the Oxfam-sponsored Progreso is such a good idea—it seeks to build inclusive business relationships of equals with coffee producer communities in the developing world by granting them shares in the business, rather than merely throwing cash at them (Colin Firth stumped up for the shares for the Ethiopian growers co-op, then went to stay with them for a while recently).

In fact, their MD, Wyndam James, talked to me about the problems they are having with the Fairtrade aspect of their business (which is discrete from their more radical shared ownership approach) at the moment, as the boom in coffee prices has led some growers to try to renege on their Fairtrade-governed contracts to get the now-higher market price.

It seems to me that any top-down approach to ameliorating the huge imbalances of wealth and opportunity in the world is bound to create as many problems as it solves. The solutions will emerge, relationship by relationship, from the grass roots...

Technorati Tags: africa, debt_relief, ethics, fairtrade, live8

Blogging on the hardbacks of giants

Is there a classier way to ergonomically modify one's keyboard position? Now I just have to wait for some inspiration to rub off. ; )

Wikis and community

Ton Zijlstra writes persuasively of the role of community and focus in sucessful wikis.

Metaphors for self-regulating social systems

Interesting indeed. Scoble's metaphor of a flexible membrane that divides an organisation from the outside world clearly has strong resonances with my analogy of phase-locking behaviour in social and cyber-social interactions. In each case, a properly-functioning organic feedback system is posited as necessary for the healthy self-regulation of social systems.

Technorati Tags: blogs, membrane, phase_behaviours

Ethical leadership

Rebecca MacKinnon writes impassionedly about Robert Scoble's defence of his company Microsoft's collusion with the Chinese government to filter politically sensitive words out of the Chinese version of MSN Spaces:

In justifying Microsoft's filtering of politically sensitive Chinese words on MSN spaces, Microsoft's uber-blogger Robert Scoble writes:

"I have ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS forcing the Chinese into a position they don't believe in."

He continues:

"I've been to China (as an employee of Winnov about seven years ago). I met with Government officials there. I met with students. I met with professors. They explained their anti-free-speech stance to me and I understand it. I don't agree with it, and I will be happy to explain to anyone the benefits of giving your citizens the right to speak freely, but it's not my place to make their laws. It certainly is not my right to force their hand with business power."

I lived in China for nine years straight as a journalist, and if you add up other times I've lived there it comes to nearly 12. I don't know what students and professors Scoble met with, and what context he met them in. But to state that Chinese students and professors have an "anti-free-speech stance" is the biggest pile of horseshit about China I've come across in quite some time. And believe me, there are a great many such piles out there these days.

In my experience, most Chinese, like all other human beings I've ever met, would very much like to have freedom of speech. This goes for students, professors, workers, farmers, retirees, religious practitioners, and even many government officials. Many said so to me in on-the-record interviews. Many more told me so privately, in trusted confidence over beers (or something stronger) among friends. 

What they don't want is to lose their jobs and educational opportunities by pushing too hard at the restrictions their government has placed on their ability to speak. They work within the bounds of the possible, and since people in China can say a lot more now than they were allowed to say 20 years ago, most take the long-term view.

It's very true, most Chinese hate it when foreigners lecture them about how they should change. They hate being patronized. Many view the common American attitude of "we're here to save you and make you free" as condescending and hypocritical. They'd rather continue living under their extremely imperfect political situation in hopes that eventually it will change, and that this change will be accomplished by Chinese people in a Chinese way. Only then will they have ownership both of the change and of the result. Otherwise, the change will be considered foreign-imposed, and the Chinese violently detest foreign-imposed anything. Even ones who privately and quietly detest their government.

I agree with Scoble: no outsiders, including Microsoft, can force China to change. But nobody's asking Microsoft to force China to do anything. The issue is whether Microsoft should be collaborating with the Chinese regime as it builds an increasingly sophisticated system of Internet censorship and control. (See this ONI report for lots of details on that system.)  Declining to collaborate with this system is not "forcing the Chinese into a position they don't believe in."  Declining to collaborate would be the only way to show that your stated belief in free speech is more than 空话: empty words. If you believe that Chinese people deserve the same respect as Americans, then please put your money where your mouth is.

But let's not single out Microsoft for trashing on this point. As this Open Net Initiative report and this 2004 Amnesty International report will make abundantly clear, China's filtering, censorship, and surveillance systems wouldn't be what they are today without lots of help from a number of North American technology companies.  Businessman and author Ethan Gutmann wrote about Cisco's particular contribution in this 2002 article which later became a book chapter.

In the name of free enterprise, Americans so far have acquiesced in U.S. companies' collaboration in the building and reinforcement of the Great Chinese Firewall. The Global Internet Freedom Act is being revived again in congress; but while the Act would allocate money to develop censorship-busting technologies, it makes zero mention of the U.S. companies whose technologies and software services are helping to strengthen this very censorship.

Scoble says it's better to be doing business in China than not, implying that this engagement is better for China and its freedoms in the long run. Don't get me wrong, I believe strongly in economic engagement with China. But nobody said Microsoft shouldn't be doing business there. It's a question of how you do business and in what manner.

I can tell you one more thing about the Chinese. They hear what you say, then they watch how you do business. From there, it's pretty easy to figure out what your real values are.

I couldn't agree more with Rececca's analysis. Microsoft is showing the same kind of failure of ethical leadership here (albeit on a rather larger scale and with potentially more damaging consequences) as coffee bar chains like Starbucks and Costa Coffee do in their refusal to match their Fairtrade posturing with a sales strategy designed to actually give people a straight choice between Fairtrade and "Unfairtrade" options at the counter.

In both cases, the companies in question are effectively saying "of course, we're in favour of the ethical outcome (free speech and Fairtrade respectively), but it's not our job to recommend that outcome to our customers (the Chinese government and coffee drinkers respectively). So long as they can make out that they are passive in the un-ethical decision, these companies feel that they have "done enough". Well, that isn't enough for me—I want to deal with companies like Progreso, who have the commitment to an ethical vision to actually work with their customers and partners to seek to transform the status quo for the better.

And Microsoft, through Kim Cameron's visionary work on an inclusive and open digital identity meta-network that respects each individual human being's freedom of self-representation, now has an opportunity to transform itself into one such company.

Technorati Tags: china, costa, ethics, fairtrade, identity, microsoft, starbucks

Art of science

Beautiful.

Breathing new life into old forms?

A grassroots, blogged and podcasted resurgence of Classical Music?

Technorati Tags: classical_music, music, blogs

"Digital entity" on Wikipedia

I've adapted the bulk of my post on Digital anatomy to create a "Digital entity" entry for Wikipedia... Feedback, additions and edits welcome as ever. : )

Digital anatomy

As I ponder the psychological and subjective aspects of digital identity, I find myself thinking of the identity net itself in terms of bodies, brains and minds. These biological and experiential analogies seem to me to hold the promise of valuable insights into both the similarities and the differences between the online and offline dimensions of our existence as human beings.

Let me begin with a few tentative and approximate definitions of three key aspects of "digital entities" (bear with my seemingly whimsical terminology—this abstraction will pay off royally later on):

A digital body is any physical digital device. Digital bodies, like biological bodies, are capable of receiving and transmitting information (in various forms) from and to humans and/or other digital bodies. Digital bodies may be networked with one another (e.g. across the internet) to create larger digital organisms. Each digital body has a digital brain (or sometimes brains).

A digital brain is the aspect of a digital body (device) that stores and processes data (the device's memory store[s], microchips etc.). Digital brains give rise (individually or in combination) to digital minds.

A digital mind is a virtual and subjective entity that is defined by its interactive functionality rather than its physical substance or location. Unlike biological entities' minds, digital minds may arise not only from single digital brains but also from multiple, networked digital brains (e.g. Google's grid computing). Digital minds are not conscious or self-willed like biological minds (HAL 9000 has so far remained firmly in the realms of fiction), but rather act as cyber-extensions of human minds.

Two striking differences (though of course not the only important ones) between biological and digital entities, then, are:

1) Unlike a biological body, a digital body can be physically integrated with multiple other digital bodies, forming a "super body" of individual bodies.

2) Unlike a biologically-based mind, a single digital mind can emerge from multiple digital brains (although it is interesting to note the nice analogy, at a finer structural level, of modularly-networked digital brains to the modular construction of the human brain itself) .

Both (1) and (2) point to a potentially huge resource-sharing advantage for digital entities over biological ones, in terms of both processing power and efficiency (one digital brain can be utilised by multiple digital minds).

Yet this resource-sharing advantage only exists in the context of a mutual willingness to co-operate (which in turn is often predicated on mutual authentication) and technological compatability (e.g. of connection and data exchange protocols, data structures and so on). As digital organisms have no will or consciousness of their own, the onus falls on us humans to negotiate and create the trust and shared machine language necessary for networked resource sharing.

Aside: Hmm... so digital super-entities can only emerge through trust and shared language, huh—sounds a bit like the conditions necessary for the emergence of human community. Who'd have thought it? ; )

So far, so familiar—all this above is just to recapitulate key themes of the ongoing Digital identity debate such as modularity, emergence, mutual authentication and shared protocols and languages. But when we begin to build on this platform of understanding, the analogy of digital and sentient biological entities begins to become quite informative. For the sake of convenience, let's be more specific and deal with a sub-set of sentient biological entities: humans.

Let's take belief systems, for example. Each human's mind* maintains a belief system or ontology of their world, arising from a combination of innate and learnt cognitive structures in their brain. This ontology determines the nature of both the person's perceptions and their actions; conversely, the person's interactions with others and their world provides a feedback loop that ongoingly modifies their ontology.

Digital brains and minds can be seen to function analogously with regard to ontologies. Each digital mind also maintains an ontology: this ontology arises from the associated digital brain's store (I use singular forms of "brain" and "store" for simplicity's sake, but they could equally be plural) of structured data which it mediates with data-processing algorithms. The data store is (loosely) analogous to human memory, and the algorithms to cognitive mechanisms.

And from this perspective, the whole topic of digital identity (as copiously discussed here and elsewhere in the blogosphere) looks rather different. We can simply say things like:

Digital minds have opinions of other digital entities' identity**. Those opinions are in turn shaped by the human being(s) who control the operation of the digital entity, which in effect acts as a cyber-extension of the human(s)'s mind(s).

A digital entity perceives a human user interacting with it through its body (e.g. typing on a keyboard), cognizes in its brain the nature of the interaction (according to its ontology—e.g. this is someone I already know) and then can make its mind up about whether or not to let the human user access certain data and functions.

It's easy to explore, in these metaphorical terms, how social patterns in offline human society could be emulated with profit on the identity net. For example:

1) Digital entities can build on their individual relationships with other digital entities through triangular "mutual friend" trusted introductions.

2) Data discovery can follow a similar pattern ("phone a friend")—entity A asks entity B for information of a particular kind, and entity B returns its own knowledge plus that of entity C, who is the best authority on the subject that entity B knows. Process evolves iteratively.

And, in a cursory attempt to tie in various other threads from my ponderings of the last few months:

The "ontological distance" which I discussed as an expression of identity in a previous post can be understood here as a measure of trust in the reliability and quality of the information a given entity provides (in the context of vouching for another entity or providing a certain kind of information).

The universe that digital minds inhabit is a virtual space with (n-1) dimensions.

Finally, technology that allows the interoperation of diverse ontologies for digital entities will, I think, promote the organically-integrated phase-behaviours that I discussed at length in a previous essay. But we'll just have to wait and see about that I guess, as there remains a little matter of actually building this stuff! : )

*I distinguish between biological brain and mind for practical purposes, in order to be able to sustain a discussion that embraces both the objective facts and subjective experience of biological sentience.

**A digital mind cannot relate directly to a non-digital entity, as the digital mind's "body" digitises all input to its brain. So even if a human being is typing input on a keyboard, the mind is relating to a set of ones and zeros.

Technorati Tags: brain, identity, mind