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Thursday, January 23, 2003 |
To Make A Difference
Is there any urge more basic than for your life to be of consequence?
No matter how we define consequence, most of our instincts and actions
seem aimed towards it.
Now consider that we are helping in the birth of a ubiquitous global network,
for it's not the "frozen" Internet Infrastructure that matters,
it's the connecting of most humans who wish to be, using words and gestures
that seem
natural
to them (not yet, but real soon).
We
all know
this is what we're about, but it's good to pause and wonder at our good luck
to be at this place at this time.
I was reminded of this on the phone this afternoon with Doc. We
got off on Infrastructure and what the "A" in NEA
really means.
NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody
can use it, Anybody can
improve it. (Doc Searls)
A friend of Doc's had resisted the A part of the
slogan until he realized Doc wasn't talking about the alphabet
soup of established technical standards but the possibilities we're now building
on them that allow us to, literally, fashion any communications environment
we
want
to,
among
any
people
we welcome
to
our party. Like web logs, f'rinstance.
Forging a Confederation
I used to live in Philadelphia and I'd walk around Old Town and I got it that
the Founding Brothers were technologists in many ways. They too were dealing
with an interesting bandwidth accident exhibiting unintended outcomes. England's
purpose for the Colonies, of course, was to get more stuff as cheaply as possible
and to tax the colonists as much as possible. But bandwidth got in the way.
This was such a wild land that, for the better part of a century, the colonies
were more isolated from each other than from Mother England. Gradually though,
wagon trails were built and it became more convenient for the Carolinas to
deal with Pennsylvania than with England. The other virtue was that the colonists,
though profoundly different north-to-south, related to each other far better
than to the Court of St. James and the East India Company. By the 1770's, the
differences could no longer be ignored. Like any network, the colonies paid
closest attention to the highest fidelity signal.
What's interesting is how few people set the direction for the American Experiment.
Only the 56
white guys in Carpenter's Hall understood
what a leap they were taking with the Declaration of Independence. It's
not
like
they
were being closely controlled by their state legislatures which were several
days' ride away. It was never a certainty that Tom Jefferson's stirring
Enlightenment-era declarations of individual freedom would set the stage for
their conclusions. He did it because he could and he wanted to be of consequence.
Eleven years later, the 39
signers of the Constitution
acted just as independently in setting down the rules of
engagement
for
the people
and
their
rulers. No one paid much attention to their secret work until they were surprised
by the many changes the Constitution proposed. The fight over
the document
was
fierce
and the
debate
thoughtful,
but they
didn't revise
what the standards body had hammered out. So the twig was bent and that was
the
direction
our
nation
inclined. In October 1788, the old Congress disbanded quietly to make way for
an entirely new form of governance.
That was serious standard-setting. Today, under Doc's Anybody can Change
it doctrine,
we're sitting around lobbing ideas and code around, seldom realizing that we're the
delegates setting the standards for the world that will follow us. Relatively
speaking, we're even fewer than the four score or so men who did the real work
of putting symbols on parchment. Some of the symbols we're using are pretty
arcane, but they set standards anyway, which will mold society as surely as
did the Federalist papers.
As Dave Winer has told us so often, big companies don't set the important
standards. Instead, a physicist fires up his NeXT box and wham! the
web is born. He does it by standing on the shoulders of giants whose names
are unknown to any but the most devout. Sure, the standards are set by
guys
working
for someone else, but they're really
holding
their
own
congress,
asynchronously
but
still intimate.
TCP/IP, FTP, SMTP, POP, HTTP and all the rest were never the provenance of
the employers of the originators, because if something's important enough
to make
a
difference,
it will not be understood by management until it's too late to derail it.
Now that the alphabet soup's simmered long enough, its broth supports undreamt
of flavors. RSS gets baked in (metaphor fart) and revised as necessary
to be useful and use decides its fate. Sure, BigCos
rattle their sabers at W3C.org, but what matters is only what web designers
use and web users respond to. Even Jakob Neilson can't herd these cats.
Writing the Human Code
Lawrence Lessig is at once the most impressive and human of us, but the
laws-as-code he's a bulwark against may not be the threat they seem up close.
We'll route around constraints and fashion our own definition of fair use.
If our
behavior
is
technically
illegal, we'll add these new transgressions to the laundry list
of prohibitions
we
already
ignore because we can, since we outnumber the tools in Congress. Eventually
the rules we choose to ignore will wither away like last year's copied tunes.
"Humanity [is on] a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate
the spirit, and light up the brain. On that quest, politics is simply a
roadblock of stentorian baboons" —Tom
Robbins
"[Sony COO Kunitake Ando] startled everyone by speculating that in
the long term, given the nature of Internet copying, record labels may
not
have a future." —Steven Levy
So a few will debate nuances no one else comprehends. Even fewer will lay
down the words that free our progeny. What works will grow and the rest will
wither, as it always has. Someday we'll see that the Toms Jefferson and Robbins
were right in seeing that as long as there are willing followers there will
be exploitive leaders.
So instead we'll follow our collective gut, add what we can, use what works
and leave something better behind. Maybe this isn't an apocalypse but a parenthesis
and
the age of hierarchy is an interruption in organic evolution as it's always
gone on.
Doing sensible things is what makes us consequential. [Escapable Logic]
3:19:26 PM 
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Embracing the Tiger
When both Ming and Jon
Udell point to the same blog on
the same day, ya gotta pay attention. Actually, they both point to Leslie Michael
Orchard's riff on Charles Miller's complaint that
he's as tired as George
Carlin, having to catalogue all his "stuff" on
his computer:
"I no longer want to know where my files are stored. I no longer
care. I have hordes of directories on my various computers called stuff,
downloads and documents, and the effort that it would take to organise
them into a proper hierarchy is just not worth it. The hierarchical filesystem
is a really wonderful thing for programmers and websites, but it just doesn't
cut it for personal use. I no longer care where my files are stored."
Adding to the outcry, my friend Tom Raddemann pointed out today, "With
GigaHertz CPU's, I almost hear the processor laughing at me as I struggle
to do what
it can do better."
Who could argue with that? It's crazy to need to drill down into an arbitrary
structure, either to save it originally or to find it later. Charles wants
his OS to save files by asking for a simple string to remember it by, for example, "Foocom
project plan". But I'm sure that the tiny hint we're willing to provide
at the Save moment is not what we really want.
Ming says,
I think that's
what I want too (he's thought about this before). The thing
is that the world we live in is no longer hierarchical. Any piece of
information
fits into
a bunch
of different structures in different ways, depending on what I'm trying
to do. If I go and drop the item in a file in a folder in a filing cabinet,
in the place that seems logical at the time, chances are I won't find it
next time I'm looking for it. So, yes, maybe there is no good way of easily
storing it multi-dimensionally. Maybe the best is to store some concise
information about the information (which is called metadata), such as date,
person, relations to projects, interests, etc. and then leave it up to
an efficient search engine to find things by those keys later on.
So
there's an argument to be made for structure. Of course, as we start to
add a little structure, being human, we quickly make it hierarchical and
start down that
slippery slope of hierarchical data totalitarianism we all resent so much.
(Shouldn't we have people who take care of these things for us?) Where's
the intersection of good sense, ease of use and a satisfying way to really be
on top of our stuff. I suggest those are not exclusive. Jon thinks it needs
to be in the operating system:
Adding more Ptolemaic circles like that won't really help. Leslie's
right: helper apps aren't the answer. The OS needs to be deeply aware of
various namespaces -- the Mac's systemwide Address Book is a great step
in that direction -- and then surface them into a common completion UI.
Maybe the answer is to assign the tags when you're working with the content,
not in that moment when you know you don't want to lose whatever you're working
on.
Several years ago, I developed a system called MindShare to handle this problem
for workgroups and their stuff. The challenge then and now is to have a bulletproof
way to describe whatever might need to be found later. At that time, we
didn't have the benefit of XML, which is about to become the storage system
for all our stuff.
Steal This Idea
But we did find a bulletproof topology for assigning metadata to business
content strings. MindShare was based on the idea that, if something is worth
keeping at all, it should
be
available
fortuitously
when
we're looking
for
things like
it but
may not even
remember this item specifically. The universal
topology for everything we need to keep track of is the IPIA coordinate
system. IPIA says that the meaningful text strings in any file, correspondence,
meeting,
call, etc. can be classified unequivocally as an Issue, Promise,
Idea
or Appointment. You'll never mistake an issue string
from a promise received string.
And obviously our world is defined by promises payable and promises receivable.
Making them explicit is a Good Thing.
Example You get an email or open a web page or write a letter.
A series of widgets surround the message:
Naturally, the system knows who the email is from, when it arrived, etc. and,
as Charles suggests, provides those metadata tags as it can. Since the system
already knows all your contacts and appointments, new ones can be added by
clicking, typing or dragging them.
If something worth noticing is mentioned, it is always an Issue, Idea, a Promise
Made, a Promise Received or an appointment, a special kind of mutual promise.
Just highlight the text string and click the options. If your file or content
doesn't deserve all this scrutiny, then don't do it. But, whatever you highlight,
drag, click or, maybe, type, you can be sure your Model 2004 4GH XML-o-matic
CPU will not require you to know where the hell your stuff is.
Marc Canter has been urging us to embrace MOM—a
Media Object Model, that might look like this:
Someone, probably us, will add the text namespace options to Xpertweb
transaction forms. But we'll never do it at the system level. Since the IPIA
namespace is as
old as
the Agora. I hope someone applies it. [Escapable Logic]
12:48:07 PM
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Inspiration Software, Cognitive Maps, and the Web. I enjoy this old joke about the farmer and the tourist: the tourist stops by the side of the road and asks the farmer how to get to the local lake. The farmer says "Well, I'm not sure." The tourist is irked and says, "You don"t know much do you?" The farmer, "No, but I ain't lost."
I remembered this joke recently when I was thinking about how to organize the many web sites that I've identified that relate to higher education online instructional resources. What I want to do is categorize and organize the resources so that the EduResources portal that I'm designing will be easy to use; I want the portal web site to be an effective entryway to online instructional resources for faculty and instructional designers. As I attempt to organize the hundreds of relevant web sites I sometimes feel like the tourist and sometimes like the farmer; sometimes I know where I want to go, but don't know how to get there, and sometimes I know where I am but I don't know how to tell someone else how to get to where they'd like to be.
One tool that I've been using to plan the portal design is a mapping/outlining instructional software package called Inspiration (http://www.inspiration.com/productinfo/index.cfm). The software is designed to help students (and teachers) organize subject matter so that they can better learn a subject and better organize and track what they are learning. "Inspiration is a Visual Learning Tool. In Inspiration, you think and learn visually. Inspiration provides you with the tools that let you create a picture of your ideas or concepts in the form of a diagram. It also provides an integrated outlining environment for you to develop your ideas into organized written documents. When you work with visual representations of ideas, you easily see how one idea relates to others. Learning and thinking become active rather than passive. You discover where your deepest knowledge lies, and where the gaps in your understanding are. When you create a visual map of ideas, you can recall the details better than if you had read a paragraph. That's because you can see it in your mind" (Inspiration Software Online Manual; also see "Visual Learning" at http://www.inspiration.com/vlearning/index.cfm).
Here's what one mapping of the EduResources website design looks like in Inspiration (http://facstaff.eou.edu/~jhart/resourcesmap.gif). Files from Inspiration can be saved in the Inspiration special format or as gif or html files. Users can work from either a diagram display or an outline display and easily translate from one to the other. If you quickly compare the previous diagram display of the EduResources portal with an outline for the portal, you'll see that the diagram is much easier to apprehend than the outline (http://facstaff.eou.edu/~jhart/resourcesoutline.htm). The visual representation--with different line thickness, different shapes, and different proximities of one graphic item to another--is easier to assimilate than words. After all we don't see traffic signs of text-only directions, instead symbols and pictures are employed to convey vital information.
One thing I particularly appreciate about the Inspiration diagram display is its ease of use; it passes the "how much can you do without reading the manual" test very readily. This is important because many mapping and planning software packages are so complicated to learn that people won't bother to use them; a learning aid should not take more time to learn than the project or subject that the aid is supporting. (There is even a simpler version of Inspiration available from the company, called Kidspiration, for children in grades K-5.)
I've been interested in cognitive mapping for many years. It seems to me to be one of the most fascinating areas of cognitive psychology and one of the subject areas within psychology with practical importance for learning and teaching. One way that I start courses and workshops is to ask the new students to separately draw a map of how they would tell a visitor to get from the classroom building we are in to another building on campus, say the student union or the library. Discussion of the students' various maps makes it absolutely clear that different students map the route in very different ways; it's also completely clear to students that telling and showing someone how to go somewhere depends upon evaluating what they already know; is the visitor the tourist or the farmer?. After a short mapping exercise like this it's a smooth transition to asking students to map what they know about the subject that we are about to study. Simply giving students an elaborate map or outline from the beginning doesn't allow them to display what they already know--or what they want to learn.
Tim Berners-Lee used a kind of mapping process when he designed the first WWW tool, Enquire; he called the design process, Circles and Arrows (http://www.w3.org/History/1980/Enquire/manual/). "Informal discussions at CERN would invariably be accompanied by diagrams of circles and arrows scribbled on napkins and envelopes, because it was a natural way to show relationships between people and equipment. I wrote a four-page manual manual for Enquire that talked about circles and arrows, and how useful it was to use their equivalent in a computer program" (Weaving the Web, pp. 9-10.) Mapping, drawing, diagramming and other kid stuff can be very important. [EduResources--Higher Education Resources Online]
12:48:03 PM
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When Meatspace isn't Marketspace
Like Doc said,
"It's getting real interesting now." This Digital ID meme
polyblog has been like pulling a string out of a sweater. I've been gnawing
on the problem of reputation and identity since Mitch Ratcliffe pointed
out that I was talking about reputation and everyone else was talking about
DigitalID. I've thrown away a few thousand words, (aren't you glad?) and am
just beginning to get at the core issue that's been troubling me: Digital
ID has nothing to do with Digital Reputation, and we don't want it to.
Andre Durand won't
agree with that, but I think it's implicit in his work. Everyone's quoting Andre's
3 tiers of identity white
paper, which led Doc to come up with his Mydentity, Ourdentity,
Theirdentity model.
Then I read Andre's Anatomy
of a Reputation and I finally got it (well, felt I got it enough to quit
agonizing over my cluelessness). Andre has thought about this longer, harder
and better than the rest of us, and has framed the conversation beautifully.
Despite that contribution, I think Andre wants to tie reputation too closely
with ID, perhaps because his PingID start-up
wants to manage both of them for businesses and us, but more probably because
we're all doing it.
Let's be clear: the only reason we're jamming on this Digital ID stuff is that
we're working out how it affects us on the internet and, more personally, how
we can cooperate to build personas that live on the
net which have higher value than than the ones we can develop in our zip code.
When I need a financial analysis, I need analysis, not an analyst. I don't care
what the creator of my solution does in his spare time with whom of which gender
or species, under what influences. I just want someone who's the Commander Data
relative to my solution, not Jean-Luc Picard, idealized in every regard.
Isn't that our grievance with managerial capitalism? Aren't employees tired
of having to act, look, vote, nod and grovel in particular ways, when the real
assignment is to keep the network up? Every 10,000-job business would be better
off with 30,000 ad hoc experts than with their experts at job-holding. The takeaway
from that viewpoint is that a specialized task—real work—needs a
reputation, an Ourdentity. The real-person carbon-based Mydentity
may be necessary to hold down a job in finance, but not for buying financial
analyses over the internet (is it consulting? an Excel template? a macro? do
you care?).
As Doc points
out tonight, "It isn't who you are, it's how you blog. . .'After
all, who cares who you are?'"
Or, as my old buddy Jerry Vass tells his
Fortune clients, "The buyer doesn't care if the salesman lives or dies,
as long as he doesn't die on the premises."
For those of us not in the business of selling Digital ID services
to businesses:
Forget about linking Digital ID to Digital Reputation. There's no
there there.
Andre tells us in Reputation,
"Reputations only really exist within the context of your interactions
with others, and therefore, a reputation can be viewed as existing in the space
between you and others."
Like your shadow, your reputation is attached to you but doesn't belong to
you. When you want something real done, what you want is work performed under
a terrific reputation that doesn't get ruined during your assignment. The personality
behind the reputation, unfortunately, is no more relevant to your task than
the shadows in Plato's
Cave are related to reality. In the coming world of work-not-jobs, tasks
will be parsed to expertise, rather than referred to the IT people
for further study.
First Principles
To get my head around the possibility of a DigID-DigRep disconnect, I had to
go back to our core dialogue, as inspired by the Great
Hintchoochoo. The market is a conversation, the internet enables a human
voice, peer-to-peer trumps B2C, organizations are dehumanizing, etc., etc.
You know–all the truths we should review every morning instead of the
market report.
But the Cluetrain truths led me into a confusion. In my longing for human voices
in the marketplace, I'd somehow got the idea that my transactions could be truly
like my conception of the old personalized Agora, but it can't be designed that
way. Unless you're an ATM, meatspace has nothing to do with the
marketplace. That's not my or Xpertweb's problem, so I don't have anything to
add to the Mydentity discussion.
Since Xpertweb is all about reputation, we need to understand how best to value
each other. Here are Andre's talking points from Anatomy
of a Reputation, and how Xpertweb is hoping to develop Ourdentities
based on those points:
Attributes of a Reputation
What You Say . . .Of all the ways to create a reputation,
telling people what they should think of you is both the weakest and carries
the least amount of weight in the real world. That said, what you say about
yourself can serve to amplify a positive opinion of you if it is consistent
with your actions (in their experience). Likewise, what you say about yourself
can negatively impact one’s image of you if it is inconsistent with
their experiences with you.
What You Do "Actions speak louder than
words" embodies this attribute of an identity. Nothing serves to more
quickly establish a reputation than one's actions.
Which means: Aggregate your reputation by capturing every
customer's candid rating of the task you performed. Make that a quantitative
and qualitative rating, collected before the tears of happiness
are dry, so it's got to be part of the invoice. Use only your customers'
words and numbers when putting your service or product before the public.
If they like what your customers have said, they may look further, so your
home page looks like
this:
- "My 183 jobs have an average 88.6% rating. Click here for every
task grade and comment."
- Mission/Nutshell Statement: 43 words or so
- A longer How I Work for You statement
- Your even longer Exemplary Projects listing
- Your reflective Things I Care About statement, which feels
like a web log
- Maybe a resume, but by this point, who cares?
What's Public Certain elements of our reputation are
public, that is, generally known by us (the owner of the reputation) and by
others who know us. . .Generally speaking, we work to reinforce positive elements
of our reputation and diminish negative ones. If I knew that I'd been branded
a 'tight-wad' when it comes to paying my bar tab, I might over-pay in the
future to counteract a negative impression of my reputation as being generous.
Which means: Publish every promise and every outcome. Xpertweb transaction
tracking is optional, but when used, the metrics of the task are known to
every successive customer or seller. As Andre suggests here, being observed
improves one's performance. It's both common sense and a management theory
known as the Hawthorne
Effect since the early 1930's. What better way to develop conscientiousness
and competence than to give people a bully pulpit from which to strut their
stuff?
What’s Private Certain facets of my reputation
are private, and will never be known to me or others. Individuals who choose
to create a new identity are doing nothing more than running from their reputation.
Which means: We can't be certain of someone without a reputation. Once
we have a metric for quality, published universally, it may become more
risky to deal with someone without a documented reputation. But the flip
side is compelling as well.
Xpertweb, like shareware, has a way to make it easy to build a reputation
whether starting out or starting over. Deliver your benefit first and calibrate
the price to the buyer's rating. The prospective buyer knows it's a riskless
purchase (not just money-back-after-a-hassle but grade-based pricing), and
has no reason to hesitate to let the seller show what she can do. If a failed
Xpertweb user tries a new persona with a new mentor (perhaps offering more
modest services), it might take just six months to establish a new reputation,
just like the first time. Maybe this time will work.
This is the societal payoff from a system that recycles failure into new
reputation opportunities. Our collective goal is not to banish failed first
attempts to an occupational debtor's prison, but to help anyone find a new
skill or a better approach to a flawed skill.
What Context Lastly, while in real life and in every
day conversation we do in fact attempt to summarize an individual’s
reputation (e.g. "…she’s an amazing person."), the fact
is, our reputation is contextual and it is quite possible for me to have a
positive reputation in one area of my life with individual A and a negative
reputation in another area of my life with individual B.
Which means: When you understand the context of an expert, you can understand
the expertise. One benefit is to recycle failure into success. Another is
the opportunity to know where an expert comes from, by training and mentoring.
Every Xpertweb user has at least one unique ID. If Jim Franklin's ID is
ADCGEFH, then you know that Mary Billing, whose ID is ADCGEFHC
has been mentored directly by Franklin–specifically, his 3rd protegé.
Every ID reveals who mentored whom, published ratings let you know how good
Mary is, as well as all others mentored by Franklin and his mentor as well.
The Digital Reputation
While historically reputations have been somewhat vague and subjective, in
the digital world they are likely to become more objective, binary and long-lasting
(all the reason to take them seriously). Biologically, time is a built-in
eraser, allowing us to forget and move on. In the digital world however, where
memory is cheap and caching the norm, our reputations are likely to become
more persistent . . . Probably more important, in the digital world, our various
reputations which are today disconnected are likely to become more connected,
if not by us, then by others.
Which means: We get the best of both worlds. We'll be able to deal with
proven experts without risk, yet not force them to be more than the skilled
specialists they are, allowing them to be fully human (i.e., flawed) rather
than the perfect employee. Instead of working for their boss, they'll be
working for a customer. And not a consumer in sight.
Might reputation systems spark the productivity renaissance we expected from
computers? People holding down a job are lucky to be on task a third of the
time. Experts focusing their talents are likely to be productive half the time.
That's a 50% productivity jump for everyone attracted into a reputation-enabled craft. [Escapable Logic]
12:47:58 PM
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Ident Therefore I Am
As usual, I've had trouble wrapping my head around the Digital ID discussion.
Last time, it took
me 3 days to say something, which must be a first. Now Andre, Doc, Mitch, Eric and
the rest of the Digital ID brain trust are discussing Andre's thoughtful
article at Digital ID
World.
Finally I'm beginning to get it. I think. Although the following is purposely
cynical. The Digital ID initiative is a new form of the failed Push
technology.
There's no such thing as a federated
Digital ID and there won't be.
The various records about you are currently
owned by others, not by you. That's because you don't own any data and
never have. Data about buyers and employees is always owned
by sellers and employers and never by buyers
and employees. Since a company is no more than its data, no company
will give it
up to support the righteous quest for standards and interop and all the
rest. Sure, they'll talk about it and go to seminars and purse their lips
and seem to be interested,
but, when it's
time
to fish or cut bait, they'll just donate a little chunk of historic data
to the Digital Yellow Pages and keep right on hoarding their own, far richer,
more current dossier on you.
"So what?" you properly ask. Surely that doesn't invalidate the
DigID initiative. But data hoarding is the core of the problem because
the Digital ID resolution (whether
1, 3
or
27 phases in
the
future) won't
substitute a unique ID for the others, it will just add yet another digital
record of you to the multitude already out there, and not a very good one,
at that.
There's no way this incremental ID will be more accurate than all the rest,
because no one
will guarantee
the
accuracy
of what
they
supply. It's just another kind of credit report. Doesn't the following describe
what we'll have if Digital ID ever happens?
Lots of mistakes are made.
The sheer size of the consumer reporting industry is mind-boggling. According
to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, there are more than 1,000 consumer
reporting agencies (CRAs) in the country. You're probably most familiar
with the three biggest CRAs – Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion.
Two million credit reports are ordered each day and two billion pieces
of information are added to these credit files each month. The average
consumer's credit report is updated five times a day. Computers or not,
when you're handling that much information, mistakes are going to happen.
But how bad is it?
Understanding how prevalent errors are depends on
who you listen to and what their biases are. We're aware of four studies
that have been done, all of
which point to either serious errors in credit reports or problematic inconsistencies
in credit scoring across the Big 3 CRAs. The overall consumer reporting
system is very important to our economy and does far more good than bad,
but it's
undeniable that serious errors are made pretty regularly.
(Disclosure: written to get people to buy a fool.com online
course, but
probably accurate)
What will happen when (if) the DigIDialogue gets
to the point that it's serious? Will the huge credit reporting industry let
some tech startup(s)
wrest their franchise from them? That's what's being proposed
here. Hell, this has as little likelihood as Microsoft
giving the Windows source to the Russkies (ya gotta love irony!)
So what's the answer? This DigID meme stirs up so much interest that something
deep is going on, even more than the usual excitement that can be generated
by really smart, intelligent, attractive, energetic young men describing a
non-existent
enterprise that might get some
funding from equally high-functioning other white guys with money.
I suggest our overarching interest is from 2 opposing forces:
Most of us hate the idea of being
no more than a blip in someone's data.
A few of us love the idea of creating
an industry that federates Digital ID.
We want to be of consequence! That
primal urge,
contrasted with our daily reality, is as painful to us as MP3s are to the
RIAA. Consider these truths:
- No seller cares about your kids' Little League record.
- You'll be missed about as much as your dead school buddies.
- The buyer doesn't care whether the seller lives or dies
—
as long as he
doesn't die on the premises.
- In an economic (non-village-based) world of willing
followers and exploitive leaders,
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
— T.S.
Eliot, 1925
Digital ID in its myriad existing and future forms doesn't replace or represent
you or me. Digital IDs are fictional symbols, personas if you will, that have
been created by companies to substantiate bookkeeping entries which they alchemize
into assets at the bank, in the stock market, at the country club and to inspire
employees.
Customers aren't you or me. Customers are data events that, referenced to
other supposedly valid data, pass the auditor's test of which collective fictions
are acceptable
to the capital markets during the current reporting period. Customers are as
evanescent as the money supply.
Economic/Cultural Romanticism
Might there be any way to make digital ID human? (Thanks, Doc!)
NYTimes.com, January 21, 2016
Congress today passed the Carbon Life Form Digital
Identity Act (CLFDIA) by an overwhelming vote, prohibiting
any entity recording or archiving information of any kind
about any carbon-based human persona. This is seen as a strategic win for
President William Sterling who
had made the legislation the centerpiece of his Sociolibertarian/Independent
agenda, and will sign it using his digital signature
at a ceremony at Davos.
Experts agreed that all the technical requirements are in place to support
the bill's implementation. It's estimated that 78% of AmeriEuro adults now
control their own web-based Digital IDs, as do a staggering 94% of people
between 13 and
21. The bill requires anyone who wishes to transact over the internet,
through
the mail or within the EuroDollar Community to maintain a web-based DigID
site supporting biometric validation.
Economists downplayed the significance of the legislation, calling it
largely symbolic, since the bill
does not affect transactions among Algorithm-Based Personas (ABPs),
which comprise 86.3% of the GDP. These self-perpetuating digital entities
will continue to transact with each other, exchanging digital services
for digital money, even though their creators, whether human or corporate,
are no longer involved in maintaining the entities' algorithms.
It is believed that the first ABP was the No Iraq, No Way meme,
started in 2003 and which still is collecting donations from the many pacifist
ABPs
still active. The ancient precursor to the NINW meme, the Stop-the-Taliban-Now
meme, functioned briefly in the early 1990s but failed because there was
no mechanism at that time to automatically fund meme support infrastructure. [Escapable Logic]
12:47:13 PM
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