Considering Net Neutrality...
...while in the loo.
images: left - erictric.com / right - Little Museum

With the rekindled debate over net neutrality and the selective control of bandwidth by ISP’s... an unlikely historical precedent occurred to me while sitting one morning... by chance... on a toilet. Pondering the marvel of modern sanitation, which if you’ve ever used a traditional Japanese toilet it is somewhat more apparent or should I say, in your face -quite literally. Though it might seem something of a base comparison with respect to telecommunications service and infrastructure, I think that it drives a point rather clearly.

I imagine that when running water sanitation was first introduced in the Indus Valley and later popularized in Rome... Such a thing may have at first seemed a novelty, then a privilege, and finally a public service. Though with all technologies, such points throughout their development seldom appear plainly or even apparent to their users at the time... consider ARPANET, then Compuserve, and finally our evolved global network in use today. While most cities do charge a nominal fee for water usage, and with the clean potable form quickly becoming an endangered resource globally, they should, however in most modern cities even the most destitute can still manage a relatively sanitary flush (read Starbucks or McDonalds -which both by the way also happen to provide internet access at many locations).

As cities grow, so do their populations, and so must a city’s infrastructure in order to maintain and improve upon the quality of life. Imagine a sewage system designed for a maximum population of 6 million, left unaltered as the population steadily rose beyond its capacity... the consequences would soon be apparent in outbreaks of diseases that we’ve all forgotten about. It seems as though massive service providers like Comcast and others feel that a viable solution for managing growing subscriber demand is to ration usage rather than expand and redefine standards of quality. While true, nations like the DPRK do effectively ration electricity to its citizens due to limited resources...and just south of its border is the fastest broadband internet in the world. Without becoming engrossed in politics and the formative causation that leads to such disparities as the Koreas.. I think that given a stable and culturally progressive nation as a starting point, though the United States may or may not fit that criteria for some at the moment, we can establish that a network’s infrastructure if managed effectively is not a limited resource but an economic imperative. A network’s value is not defined merely by how many users access it, but by how useful that network is to each user -See Rod Beckstrom’s paper on the valuation of networks. A slow or rationed network is a disadvantage to its users and effectively hinders economic growth to everyone, including its custodians.

Perhaps a model of limiting subscribers’ bandwidth when applied to the management of a city’s sanitation system would in effect be like asking a city’s inhabitants: “Please stop eating so much!”.

With the focused scrutiny over the current Verizon - Google proposal, some worry that it might create higher premiums for prioritized content such as gaming platforms... in turn passing those fees to service providers and/or subscribers... yet, at the same time some have argued that a “Fat Tax” might also be a valid solution to America’s growing obesity problem... together making a 13 hour Twinkie-infused World of Warcraft session a more expensive endeavor than before.

Tokyo, Japan - August 17th, 2010

MEDIZEN

Colleen Wolstenholme Pill Mandala 1999 



I used to tell a joke regarding the paradoxical nature of symptom and cause, condition and treatment... It went something like this:

 '....So I've begun participating in clinical trials of a new antidepressant drug. It's for people who are depressed but don't know it. Apparently if you are depressed, the drug immediately makes you feel great and you realize how joyless and bleak your life has been up until that point, and then if the drug has no effect ...you at least have confirmation that this is as good as it's going to get and though your expectations might have been too high.. you can at least stop worrying about it now."

A cynical rebuke of the monetization of mental health. A multi-billion dollar industry of branding conditions tailor fit for just about everyone and then selling the medicine that can fix them... I suppose.. (for more on that.. read Ethan Watters' book "Crazy Like Us".)

But actually something not unlike the first of the two hypotheses in the joke actually happened to me not long ago... sort of a side hobby of mine; speculative neurochemistry and self experimentation through over the counter dietary supplements. Trying various things over the past few years... trying to optimize my consciousness just slightly... as if by some notion that it could be just slightly better. This time it was a certain combination of a parasympathomimetic acetylcholine precursor (GPC) and a lot vitamin B5. Within days I started feeling not just happy, but really happy.. and it was sustainable happiness.. not the kind that you wake up from with a headache. Through more thorough scrutiny I realized that the effect may have also been catalyzed in some way by listening to extremely upbeat Japanese pop music... which I had been frequently at the time. In short I doubt that this combination would work for anyone else, though it did cross my mind that maybe I should contact the music group in Tokyo and suggest that they market their albums with complimentary dietary supplements.

Segregation and Dynamic Filtering...

Mediation and Content

It only occured to me some 4 months after switching from a Blackberry to an iPhone that among many other significant differences in the user interface ideologies presented on each device the most striking and perhaps of most significance is in how various messaging formats are handled. For example I had grown very used to RIM's philosophy of a single message inbox. Everything, be they emails from various accounts, SMS, MMS, or voicemail messages.. they all went to a single unified place... while on the iphone, with its superior touch interface which one must have to navigate quickly back and forth between the SMS inbox and each inbox of various email accounts; sometimes as many as 4 clicks to get from one to another. I suppose I never thought at length about it particularly because of a generational tendency towards categorization and segregation of different modes of communication rather than converging them. I had forgotten the intuitively brilliant notion of converging all communication to single feed with the option of filtering as quickly as I had reaccepted a convention in the form of a stylish plastic portion plate that is so common to Apples tendencies. Why not? Those curvy edges were quite seductive and perhaps my greenbeans do taste better without the intermingling of the sauce next door.

Even 5 years ago the conceptual distance separating a phone conversation and an email was fairly understood though more and more... mediation of content is becoming optionalized rather than a defining character of the content.. Would you like your eggs scrambled, fried.. sunny side up? But they are all still eggs! -just different ways of interpreting eggs... how then might we begin to revise our relationship with content.. how will we redefine this stuff... this mediated matter that in its various paths of commerce and routing seems to be redefining us ever so quickly. Is its origin of any significance? A voice mail that is converted to searchable text offers an interesting phenomenon while before its conversion its content was neither searchable or accessible outside of its temporal nature; one would have to listen to it in order to determine if it contained say the word "Al Qaeda" rather than entering the query into a search box. Yet the origin will continue to grow less discernable as such speech recognition algorithms get faster and more efficient... a textual version of spoken word being created in realtime may reach completion only milliseconds after the last word is uttered... in this form the defining origin is neither humanly perceptible or of much significance. What is significant is understanding the advantages of each form of mediation and how, when they are bundled together, we gain new insite into our culture. Though the transcribed version of spoken word lacks much of the emotive power that the audio has it is because of that text that it becomes relevant or even existant in a culture quantified and accessed via searchable text. Which does bring up an interesting point in our growing tendency through Google and other forms of navigation to plainly accept text as the default common denominator in our culture. Text is good.. it's easy, fast, and compact, but it will hopefully soon be joined more often by other interpreters. Consider the possibility of searching with sound, image, video, perhaps one day even with some form of passively mediated emotion alone. Not the textually tagged equivalent of these things but the unique subjective version of each... perhaps with an adjustable % of tolerance or fuzziness we might be able to query likenesses that reaffirm the individual rather than dilute it. It's certainly feasible that a wave form could be coupled with meta data that included in addition to a transcript a range of other signifiers. One could search for audio that not only contained the word "mediation" but the word spoken with a particular inflexion or accent. In essence the tendency towards convergent handling and mediation of content can only benefit from a convergence from both sides; wherein the diversified means of mediation is balanced with a diversified means of searching it.

Still puzzled though as to why my different messages cant coexist happily in one place on my iPhone. It might take time for Apple to come around. Perhaps slowly at first? It's true that while it may not seem wrong or even questionable to those of a certain generation... that SMS and email just have differences and they need to be treated differently. Perhaps we could start a bussing program where messages from one folder could be driven a great distance across town so that they might be integrated with other messages? Ahh but such program would never work! The problem is not the geography but rather the reasoning that defines that geography.

Ikee! \m/!! …but not really.

When I first read about the “ikee” worm, the first worm to target Apple’s popular smartphone, my initial reaction was… f@#% Ya!! -Finally… someone did something truly creative with the mobile platform without getting Apple’s approval first, and by this I mean: that the most creative thing you can legally do to your iphone without getting an SDK and waiting for the App Store’s “Approval Process” is probably to crochet a cute cover for it…though I’m not even 100% sure if that wouldn’t be violating Apple’s EULA in some way… there may be an aesthetics or non-fibrous materials clause buried in there somewhere.

Mind you “ikee”, as worms go, was harmless and marginally lame, doing nothing more than change the wallpaper of the user’s locked screen to a picture of Rick Astley. Which… OK, I will admit that there are few places where Rickrolling isn't an appropriate course of action, but whatever happened to obscure political causes? … “Free Gary!!??”... I guess we've moved on.

More to the point, the worm targeted people who had “Jail Broken” their phones. Specifically it exploited a vulnerability left open by people who had “Jail Broken” their devices without really knowing what they were doing… (-forgetting to change the default root password.)

At best “ikee” was a public service announcement to users unknowingly compromising their own data… but accomplishing very little else than slapping those on the hand who try to use their hardware to do things that Apple couldn’t imagine on its own. Rather than taking a rogue stance against the Jobsian overlord’s draconian rule, “ikee” failed to seize the moment. Though to his defense... had the creator of “ikee” targeted the general iphone user-base, the anodized aluminium war machine would have surely put a price on his head rather than merely smirking at those effected while whispering: “See what happens when you don’t follow our rules”.

The worst part about “ikee” was the inspiring of Lithuanian copycats to use the same vulnerability to actually steal user’s data and take control of their devices. However, in the end the real damage is that “ikee” and its Lithuanian spin-off enforce the fear of innovating outside Apple’s guidelines. Illustrating a pivotal ideology; in which Apple hopes to keep its streets clean and its platform dependable through absolute centralized control, yet its platform wouldn’t even exist without the strong formative chaos of users tweaking, coding, and hacking over the past twenty years. Eventually, like all others, their market share will catch up with them at which time perhaps a real worm will hit.

In the end Ashley Towns, the 21 year old Australian author of “ikee” landed a job with an app developer in Sydney. Great Job! I mean, as publicity stunts go, it’s fairly benign… no helicopters were scrambled, no silver balloons tracked on live TV, no children exploited … and I am sure Mr. Astley didn’t mind the brief surge in traffic to his Wikipedia page.

Where the Lonely Things Are
Considering Spike Jonze's film

 'Where the Wild Things Are' - Warner Bros. Pictures

The film, if it were in Ian Bogost's terms to have a "unit operation" it would be loneliness.. Not the romanticized longing of distant lovers or of Morrissey lyrics but a larger loneliness, the original loneliness of our species perhaps... the loneliness of being human.

Few films portray a central character that defies the idealized margins of narrative moralism, be it right or wrong, villain or hero, and even fewer where that character is a child. Max is neither perfectly good or bad, he is like us; human and struggling within an emotionally erratic state brought about by his solo endeavor. Something that we can probably agree we all suffer from on some scale and try desperately through often elaborate means to overcome. We humans.. us "wild things" desire a connection with others, through language, affection, art, and when nothing else works.. violence.

At the outset of the story Max struggles to connect, to have interaction and engagement from outside his womb-like and solitary frozen igloo. Resorting, when his efforts to include his sister in his experience fail, to a playful, though combative and retaliatory gesture in the form of a snowball ambush on his sister's friends as a means of overcoming his isolated and lonely state.

For a moment this works. The skirmish is filled with laughter and wet snow until, on the defense, Max retreats to his snowy lair that is soon after destroyed by his outnumbering opponents. Saddened and angered by his sister's inability to intervene he retaliates again, trouncing her bedroom with snow covered boots and destroying a heart-shaped valentine card that he had given to her earlier. He immediately regrets his actions in a fit of self loathing tears.

Though it has been many many years since I read Maurice Sendak's book as a child, I am fairly certain that none of the film's opening scene occurs in the book, and serves as an elaborated necessity in the cinematic form, yet this sequence was among the most moving in the film because it presents something entirely realistic and reminiscent of childhood frustration. It is as children that we are confronted by this human longing in its simplest form. Perhaps at the very beginning in the form of anxiety from separation with our mothers.. who knows.

Loneliness is a pervasive agent in Max's household. His single mother attempts to overcome her loneliness; depicted in a scene of awkward flirtation on the living room sofa with Mark Ruffalo -viewed from Max's disapproving vantage. Max's sister betrays him for her high school friend's rusted Buick cruiser. Her necessity in the social void of teenagehood is there with her friends not at home with her brother.

This domestic familial dysfunction serves as a draft for the remainder of the film that takes place on a distant island inhabited by a group of bulb-nosed exquisite-corpse-like beasts  (impeccably furry recreations of Sendak's illustrations).

Max sets out in a small sail boat presumably without any known destination in mind, perhaps only "somewhere" other than "here"... other than his failed attempts to connect within his family. It could be equated to the human directive to reach the frontier and its new opportunities. ...be it the hope and freedom that the "New World" might have inspired for persecuted religious groups in 17th century England or our yearning to find life on another planet; a longing for some assurance that we are not alone in the universe.

It is when Max arrives on the island that most pyscho-analologists might assert that the creatures, the "Wild Things",  represent the diverse spectrum of Max's psychosis; each agent rising in and out of dominance. Some more persistent than others.. more conscious like Carol, but each trying in its specialized form to manage the situation. Judith with her distinctive passive aggression, KW with her very passive non-aggression, and so on. Or it can be interpreted as a reductive social model. We humans could be thought of as social units driven by an inclination to form social systems and groups out of necessity, yet it's when these groups grow to larger and larger sizes that they present new and ever more complex problems. One kind of loneliness surmounted we now face another, then social unrest, and alienation; disagreements on a multitude of scales ebbing and flowing from minority to majority. Systems of government, communication, record keeping all become increasingly necessary to manage our growing numbers but alas in managing our societies we create even more complexity and evermore fodder for disagreement.

Max is able to unify the islands inhabitants for some time under the collective effort to construct a massive nest-like fort. Though as with all island-based social experiments... (Gilligan's, LOST, Cuba) it doesn't last.