Jeg er ude i en uge, så kommentarer og flere posts om fremtiden og moralen og det hyperkomplekse samfund må lige ligge lidt. God sommer.
Efter de første 48 kampe. 10 af 16 tilbageværende hold er fra Europa. Af de ikke-europæiske er de 4 deciderede underdogs i næste kamp. Der er scoret 117 mål indtil videre ellere 2.44 per kamp. Utrolig mange kampe afviklet i virkelig lavt tempo. Ikke en decideret stor slutrunde indtil videre. Vi har ikke haft en god kamp med to gode hold på banen, kun et godt hold ad gangen.
Kampe at se frem til: Tyskland-Argentina i kvartfinalen kunne blive årets kamp - hvorfor pokker skal det være en eftermiddagskamp?. Måske Brasilien-Spanien.
Nemmeste vej til finalen: Italien. De skal bare slå Australien og Schweiz til semifinalen, men så venter til gengæld Tyskland.
Sværeste vej til finalen: Tyskland skal slå Sverige, Argentina og Italien. Hvis de kan det vinder de også finalen.
Mest sandsynlige finale: Jeg tipper Spanien-Argentina. Med mindre brasilianerne alligevel hiver noget ordentligt spil frem mod Spanien og hjemmebane alligevel slår sprudlende angreb så Argentina taber til Tyskland.
Classys totaltip for resten af turneringen:
Vindere i ottendedelsfinalerne:
Den gode halvdel af turneringen: Tyskland, Argentina, Italien, Schweiz, Den svage halvdel: England, Portugal, Brasilian, Spanien
Vindere i kvartfinalerne:
Argentina, Italien, Portugal, Spanien
Vindere i semifinalerne:
Argentina, Spanien
Verdensmester:
Argentina
Sværeste kampe at tippe Holland, Tyskland og Brasilien som tabere ovenfor.
Morale: VM 2006 blev det store latinske VM.
OK, so here's some things I think will be really important for the next 10 years in IT, well for me anyway...
- New languages for new applications. The OS with std GUI is dead as an interesting platform - which does not mean software is over. It's just this model that's over. Anything interesting in software will come from paradigm shifts in CS, new languages, totally new application models. Plain old OO with patterns is *not* going to cut it. What is new (or really old, depending on your view of things) is the depth of change that will happen. No dominant platform. No dominant player, but tons of new languages. I'm not thinking DSL's here - which is basically OO people saying "OO isn't enough we need more of the language to change than just the objects", but deeper change in how language is programming. Interesting languages are springing up at an increasing pace.
- Ubiquity. We've been waiting for that talking fridge for ages - for more realistic ubiquity, the cell phone is going to do so much more than phone and snap photos. (We're making this happen at Imity by the way).
- Ambient devices. A particular extremely interesting subspecies of the ubiquitous devices are the ambient devices. Data that works on our senses on a totally new way, but not really demanding attention but just being around. Indicator lights are so old school. We can do much better now. Lots of spime will be ambient.
- Haptics. Another subspecies of the ubiquitous device is the new sensory interface. Completely new mind blowing uses of our bodily presence to interact with information systems is currently springing up all over the place. These new interfaces will also inform the desktop interface with a ton of new interactions.
- Data density. This is the Google lesson. Data is enough. We don't need smarts. Data is smarts. The semantic web is never going to happen but the data web is just about to explode and do all the semantic web promised to do.
- Remix density. The way data gets used is not through fancy automated reasoning. There's plenty of biological reasoning to go around. Indeed, as the data worlds explode so will the remixes. This constant reinterpretation of data will provide all the intelligence we were hoping the semantic web would.
There's an underlying trend which is simply physicality. Our information interfaces will be much better embedded in our pre-existing understanding of the physical world. And our access to this physicality will be through totally new languages. A new level of data density will provide a lot of the constraints that make this feasible.
[UPDATE: Betaen er lukket nu. Heldigvis tog jeg screenshots. Kommer op i aften N?, det var vist bare en midlertidig glitch...]
En ny dansk upstart prøver at slå igennem med et socialt moralmanagement værktøj. Min reaktion på ideen veksler mellem 1) direkte fysisk væmmelse, 2) alvorlige moralske, etiske og menneskelige indvendinger, og så endelig 3) en lidt mere detached "hvilket fremragende eksempel på de besynderlige ting folk finder på for at tackle verdens tiltagende kompleksitet". Så læn dig tilbage og nyd forestillingen - det her er en lang post, og jeg lover at noget af sproget bliver saftigt.
Actics.com er en ny håbefuld dansk upstart. Dvs. helt ny er den ikke, men produktet er først lige ved at være klart nu. Ideen kort fortalt er en slags moralmanagement værktøj. Man definerer sine moralske mål i systemet og inviterer andre til at rate ens egen moralperformance. Hvis man så underperformer moralsk i en kategori kan man rette det op ved at overperforme i andre. Der er også en moralhitliste hvor man kan se hvilke brugere der er moralske topscorere og hvilke moralske handlinger der er de mest populære. Nej, det er ikke en vittighed, desværre.
For at illustrere giver jeg lige ordet til Actics betaen selv. Og igen, det her er ikke noget jeg finder på, og det er ikke taget ud af hverken Aldous Huxleys romaner eller George Orwells. Fremhævelserne er mine.
My Actics Create your own free ethical profile Develop with a community around you Manage and navigate between feedbackMin første reaktion da jeg så denneher industrialiserede følelsesomklamring var så stærk så jeg har gemt den i et tillæg til posten (jeg citerer direkte fra egen brevveksling med bekendte, minutter efter første kig på betaen. Jeg skal advare om meget stærk sprogbrug). Mine undskyldninger til de involverede parter for ordvalget, men det er vigtigt for mig at tydeliggøre voldsomheden af denne umiddelbare reaktion.Evaluate
Evaluate others ethical performances
Coach through discussion and wishes
Create "wake-up calls" for early warningNominate
Invite others into the Actics community
Help them to a dynamic process of ethical improvement through coaching
Da vreden havde lagt sig fik jeg tid til at forsøge at forklare for mig selv og andre hvad det er, der er så galt med Actics.
Det moralske århundrede
Som man vil kunne læse af tidligere indlæg her på bloggen så har jeg det virkelig dårligt med handlinger der begrundes moralsk. Den basale indvending er at offentlig moral, når det kommer til stykket, oftest er selvopfyldende og selvtilfredsstillende og i virkeligheden bare et magtmiddel på linje med alle de andre.
Den indvending er jeg bestemt ikke alene med. De vigtigste elementer af kritikken genfinder man her. I den alvorlige ende af den kritik er det 20ende århundredes historie de moralske handlingers historie. Moralske handlinger foretaget af Mao, Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama Bin Laden såvel som af utallige kejsere og konger, katolske paver, George Bush, Tøger Seidenfaden, israelske zionister, Baader Meinhof gruppen, Sorte September, osv osv. Nogen vil indvende at lige præcis disse personers moral var på skrømt (altså ikke Tøger Seidenfadens), men mine protestantiske rødder tillader mig ikke den illusion at der er nogen af os andre der er en pind mere ærlige med vores egen moral.
I den lidt lettere ende finder vi moral og etik som mediemagtmiddel. Moral og etik er som offentligt fænomen mest en rationaleophæver og diskussionsstandser. Og moral og etik er i høj grad bundet sammen med modstandsidentiter. Moral er den adfærd de andre ikke har. Det er noget man dunker folk oven i hovedet med. Jo mere synlig man gør sin egen moral, jo bedre er den til at dunke andre i hovedet med.
Actics eget svar på dette problem er at sige at værdidommene skam ikke er globale, men lokale. Det er dig selv, der vælger hvilke peers du vil bruge som moralreference og det er dig selv der vælger dine moralkriterier. Men den forskel er hul.
Offentligheden er det første problem. Uden offentlighed er der ingen moral som socialt fænomen, men til gengæld ensretter offentligheden moralskalaen tilbage til det repressive mareridt jeg tænker på. På Actics' forside kan man aflæse en hitliste over hvem der er mest moralsk. De præcise detaljer er udvaskede. Det er bare en global hitliste.
Det næste problem er selve moralens eller etikkens sprog. Ligeså snart man bruger de gamle universelle værdiord indskriver man jo folks handlinger i universelle, omklamrende, værdisystemer og omvendt er der jo kun ét sprog tilgængeligt for os til at sige "næstekærlig", "miljøbevidst", "delende", "ydmyg" osv. Det er moralens sprog, der har det her problem, ikke handlingerne selv, Sproget er ensidigt og fattigt, handlingerne er ligeså mangfoldige som vi er.
Det virkelig slemme ved offentlige moraldomme er at jeg simpelthen ikke kender nogen eksempler på selvpåstået moral, der tjener andet formål end selvhævdelse. Jeg kan ikke komme i tanke om et eneste menneske jeg sætter højt, der anskuer sin egen adfærd som primært moralsk. Jeg kender mange hvis adfærd jeg selv sætter meget højt rent moralsk, men det er da ikke for at være moralske at de er moralske. Der er en stor forskel her på at gøre noget "fordi det er det rigtige" og så "fordi det har moralkvalitet X". "Fordi det er det rigtige" kan jeg bedre klare - det handler mere om at sproget ikke nødvendigvis slår til, når folk begrunder hvorfor de slider sig selv ihjel for at glæde andre, hvorfor de dør for deres land, eller hvorfor de enten svigter alt for at skabe tusindvis af arbejdspladser eller svigter tusindvis af ansatte for at få mere tid til deres børn eller for at redde miljøet.
Kort fortalt mener jeg at moral og etik ligger bedre på rygraden end i munden.
For at tydeliggøre forskellen kan vi forestille os en konkurrent til Actics som vi kan kalde Nomatics. Nomatics handler om hvorvidt vores handlinger er lovlige. Vi laver samme øvelse som før og påstår at i et moderne, liberalt samfund er loven nødvendigvis pluralistisk og individuel, men den er der dog. Vi er også så moderne at vi er klar til at anvende menneskelig fuzzy logic på loven. Så et mord for at tjene 300 kroner er værre end et mord i affekt, eller et medlidenhedsdrab på en kær, men syg, slægtning som er i dyb, dyb smerte og blot venter på at dø.
Den mest lovlydige person på jordkloden bruger ikke loven som en rettesnor for hvad der er det rigtige at gøre. Faktisk er vores handlingers almene lovlighed ikke mentalt til stede i handlingerne selv om de alle sammen er lovlige. Så selv om loven er en vigtig rettesnor for hvordan man skal (må) opføre sig, så er det ikke på nogen konkret måde en del af de handlinger vi foretager os. Vores handlingers lovlighed er afgørende for os og for samfundet omkring os. Vores anseelse bygger i væsentlig grad på at vi holder os inden for lovens rammer. Og vores anseelse er naturligvis vigtig for os. Men lovlighed er en betragtning man kan gøre om vores handlinger udefra - og bagefter - det er ikke en nyttig mental komponent af selve handlingen og vi foretager ikke handlingen fordi den er lovlig. Det til trods er det fuldstændig forrykt at tale om at vores handlinger på en eller anden måde er ringere, mindre lovlige, bare fordi vi ikke har handlingernes lovlighed på sinde mens vi handler. Det er snarere lige modsat: Hvis først vi er i tvivl om handlingernes lovlighed så er vi jo nok tæt på grænsen og det burde vi måske slet ikke være.
Moral og etik er fuldstændig på samme måde. Det er rammer for hvordan vi bør opføre os. Men det er ikke i selve handlingerne. Rationalet, hvis der da er et sådant, bag vore handlinger er ikke deres etik og moral. Bemærk iøvrigt at loven, på samme måde som moraldomme, har hensigt til at dømme på. Hensigten kommer bare kun i spil når vi gør noget ulovligt. Vores hensigt når vi gør noget lovligt er i og for sig fuldstændig ligegyldig.
Dette tankeeksperiment illustrerer også en anden væsentlig ting: Hverken moral eller lovgivning er en bankkonto. Man kan ikke kompensere en voldshandling ved at overholde færdselsloven overordentlig grundigt. Og man har ikke lidt ekstra på bogen til skattesvindel fordi man aldrig stjæler noget nede i supermarkedet. Aggregatet af al min lovmedholdenhed er meningsløst, ligesom aggregatet af al min moral er det. (jeg medgiver gerne at den moralske bankkonto uden tvivl er en almindelig mental konstruktion hos os allesammen, men det bliver den ikke mindre fjollet af)
Og den sidste væsentlige ting vi lærer er, at moral, ligesom loven, er en rettesnor for hvad man ikke bør gøre snarere end hvad man bør gøre. Det er i virkeligheden den observation der for alvor sømmer låget på ligkisten: Moral er en rigtig ringe rettesnor for at opnå det gode, det er bare en advarselslampe der hjælper os med at undgå det onde. Og det gode er ikke det ondes modsætning (der er en vigtig forskel her mellem den logiske og den diametrale modsætning).
CRM til Samvittighedsindustrien
Altså: Verden er allerede alt for fuld af facitlister for moralske eller etiske handlinger. Aviserne er fyldt med billige meninger i den retning. Der er også alt, alt for mange der anvender etik og moral som noget man kan smykke sig med. Og ja, der er en samvittighedsindustri også, der fodrer sig selv på de mange selvværdsundergravende moraldomme. Jeg bryder mig virkelig ikke om den professionalisering af den gode samvittighed og af samme grund bryder jeg mig slet ikke om forsøg på at effektivisere den med en slags Customer Relationship Management system, sådan som Actics er.
Og det er ikke bare det at jeg ikke bryder mig om den. Jeg kan ikke rigtig forestille mig at den virker til noget som helst andet end at give nogen hovedpine efter at være blevet dunket oven i hovedet.
P.S. I næste post: Hvorfor Actics overhovedet ikke er en overraskende ide i det hyperkomplekse samfund.
P.P.S. Jeg fik en del morskab ud af at Actics et sted forklarer at "Ethics is about creating the good life and ethical values are our guide. Far from all values are ethical. For instance, even if 'Getting Rich' means a lot to you it is not in itself doing good". For det første: Hvorfor ikke? Velstand har da en hel masse med det gode liv at gøre og har det med at smitte. For det andet: Såvidt jeg kan se har Actics registreret selskabsadresse i det mere skattevenlige England - og rygter ude i byen vil vide at firmaet allerede har engageret den 'exit manager' der skal regne ud hvordan biksen skydes af for millioner til en snarlig køber.
Fremragende bylivs rapport fra Neukölln - aka Neubeca - i Berlin. Der er nogen gode observationer om det halvt-åbne halvt-lukkede miljø i sådan et 'vækstlagskvarter': Cafeerne er smarte før de er all service all the time. Der er ingen kædebutikker. Folk går i hjemmelavet tøj. Bor hvor de arbejder. Og deres wi-fi hotspots er åbne.
Jo, han skal hedde Elton John Grundtvig Theander.
Borders boghandlen i Terminal 3 i Heathrow er en ægte moderne boghandel hvor alle synspunkter kan bekræftes. Jeg kommer først nu til at tænke på Borges' berømte uendelige bibliotek og den passage i novellen hvor Borges gør os opmærksom på at der for hver bog i biblioteket jo findes en anden også, der siger præcis det modsatte.
Day one of Where 2.0 was filled with social data aggregation, bottom up open geo-standards and platform owners. A couple of very nice Google demos of new deep integration between SketchUp, Google Earth and Google Maps:
KML annotation now works in Google Maps
Imagery from Google Earth can be put into SketchUp as textures
SketchUp models can be seamlessly added back into Google Earth
Everybody likes criticizing Google's perceived lack of focus and integration - but it was really hard to see any lack of integration today.
There was a Microsoft demo also of Microsofts answer for geodata. And yes, in both cases the question about the interface between the platform owner and the data creators is a big deal.
Underneath the giants we find the platform extenders: Platial and Wayfaring and all that. Some of these do personal "non serious" social stuff. Ownership is still important here, but the importance is more personal and political.
And then you have the "infrastructure extenders" like Zopto. Aggregating data on their own - but relying on the platforms for usefulness...
At the other end of the spectrum we also heard from OpenStreetMap. I'm as impressed with the project now as I was at Reboot.
Great fun and good hacking also in Socialight (very briefly), Gsmloc and most definitely the Gumspots project.
More Imity related notes on the Imity blog.
I don't know if this San Francisco adbusting poster has got anything to do with saturday's DRM protests in the Apple Store here, but at least it's topical.
Hey there - so glad you're still reading classy.dk even though I've been gone for a week. My Reboot coverage is still there.
So there was Matt Webb, Marx, Jyri Engestrøm, OpenStreetMap, networked objects and copyfighters - those were my highlights I think (well, actually not the misdirected Marx). Of interest was the general fact that nobody seemed to be doing anything that was about grabbing people's attention and keeping it. Everybody was doing stuff at the edge of attention or maybe just something that was meant to have some kind of gravitational pull where we dive towards only to be accelerated away again to new and wonderful places. Technology is not the point it is just the medium. I think I like that.
I was missing the stand out keynote that sort of really set a new thinking in motion. Not that the ones we had weren't nice keynotes but they didn't pull everything together. A lot to ask for I know, but it can't hurt to ask.
Quite possibly the best thing about the conference was that it was possible to attend a full set of talks without hearing a single word about blogging. Nice to have conversations instead of just talking about them, so to speak...
First a little gripe: Julian Bleecker should realize that Sterlings word Spime is just a better word (nicer to say and easier to remember) and stop using the horrible word blogjects, even if he's trying to make som point that there's a difference. If there is it's just not essential to the topic.
But anyway, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova's talk on objects with history, identity and agency, was one of those talks where I liked the ideas talked about better than the actual talk. But the ideas are important.
It's interesting that a lot of this stuff is getting framed as an ecological problem or in fact an environmental problem - talking about sustainability. Personally I'm mostly interested in this stuff for the reasons I indicated briefly below. We live in a world of too much data and one could have the suspicion that we're slowly running out of available data sockets to plug our information tools onto. As we're met by more and more data it's just not realistic to think that we'll actually be processing all that data. Info-prosthetics like hypertext can only do so much. Maybe it would be ess taxing on the human biology if we didn't have so many tools we had to know how to use but just better surroundings.
This involves turning information into a living thing embodied in the spime around us and simply stop thinking of all this data as something we have to know. We can just live in it. I think this idea fits very nicely into the ideas about which of our senses actually afford which abilities. Culturally produced information is just too constrained to live in our focal view all the time, whereas we're effortlessly consuming naturally produced information in much greater quantities through the use of the rest of our senses.
This brings back memories of the talk last year about the complexity of information processing in biological systems. If we could somehow "cool down" the cultural information by naturalizing it I'm sure we would all feel a lot better.
OpenStreetMap is a great project and the presentation was great too. I'm getting a GPS for sure.
Jyri Engestrøms talk was nice The gem at the center of the talk was the notion that much current technology (his example is the phone) only addresses and supports the very last stage of the cognitive process that leads to actions, i.e. it simply helps us perform actions. His idea was that we should
work to move the usefulness further back the train of thought to the preconscious sensing part of cognition.
I think (maybe everyone does?) that there's a deep relation between this idea and the other currently hyped idea about networked objects
where we 'untool' our technology and turn it into more of a goalless but information rich environment, but I'll get back to that a little later.
I thought Jesse James Garrett was talking into the past with his, otherwise nice, presentation:
First: The whole "Amazon as the gold standard for this kind of thing"-thing is getting old, and consequently
we all know all of the tricks Garrett tells us they're using
Second: The whole setup of the talk where there's an "old way" with usability testing and IA and a "new way" with live instrumentation
is just so not news: All the cool kids are launching fast and trusting the feedback
from real users of the real experience these days instead of doing extensive "research" during the development phase.
There is no development phase anymore. There's only product lifespan. But I like the ideas and all that. No problems there.
The PirateBay/Piratbyrån guys make tons of good points about the stupidity of the current "solution" to this "problem". Among the points, the technological arbitrariness of the system and
most importantly: The artificial distinction between consumers and producers with the producers forming part of some industry.
Clearly the music and film worlds are not ready to join the aforementioned network economy.
They have no grasp of what value looks like in the network economy. I was reminded of a blog post
I can't remember anymore with a quote from some record industry guy: An internet music guy had approached the industry guy with
the obvious question "Why are you fighting us so hard? We're promoting your product. We're in the same business for crying out loud"
and the industry guy simply said "No. I'm not in the music business. I'm in the blockbuster business." It's an insane backwards perspective
but it's the only way to understand the RIAA policies: The back catalog is a loss leader for top 10 records. Choice is just a marketing instrument not
the real point of the record industry. Obviously the protections the record industry enjoys are based on the policy misunderstanding that
the industry actually cares about choice.
I was kind of hoping for that other definition of play as being about flow and what playing games can teach us about flow
and interfaces that accomodate flow (requires all kinds of interesting things that our normal interface doesn't) but instead
TL Taylor's stimulating talk was another social lecture about the complexity of the social interplay in online games. I liked the field work that carefullly enumerated some of that complexity.
Extensive notes here
.
Adam Arvidsson talk was less good than this mind map of the talk
Yes, the network is a product of technology and the network is what's producing value now and network
economics don't look like old scale economics. +1 for that.
-1 for tagging Marx onto that in a much too obvious personal point of view dressed up as social science.
-1 for completely overblown claims that this is somehow "the end" of some old economics.
The network sits just fine inside market economics.
Indeed one of my favourite points I like to make in my work (writing software) is that the specific details
just don't matter as much as people tend to think. For any kind of knowledge
you put to use there's a ton of alternate slightly different ideas that you could have applied instead
with approximately the same result. Or more precisely, not the same result but another equally beneficial result.
Only very, very few solutions to any kind of problem are really truly "just right". Best possible.
What that realization does is reintroduce the economies of scale for complex cultural product that the Marx observation would have
you believe were alient to the economies of scale.
And in fact we are seeing these reintroduced economies of scale in the rise of the Indian outsourcing giants and also in less obvious places
e.g. the market battle among upstarts for supremacy in podcasting or VOIP or blogging or... the list goes on.
note: I'm blogging this during a later much less interesting talk
Truly stimulating talk on how we use our senses. Their action at a distance and so on and so forth.
There were many other points about other aspects of the senses. I really liked this summary on how senses match language in what they accomplish:
- Sight <=> Nouns
- Smell <=> Adjectives
- Sound <=> Verbs
Sight is iconic and enables to handle enormous vocabularies of knowledge. Smell annotates the other senses with more information. Sound is temporal - and therefore transformative so it matches verbs. Very nice.
The Imity Reboot People Finder is live and operational at Kedelhallen. Only problem: Too many geeks with bluetooth, so the interface is, shall we say, crowded...
At Reboot. We just had a stimulating kick off talk about big ideas and how technology has always changed communication thereby changing us. Later we're asked to come up with our own big questions.
Along the way, Thomas Mygdal in response to a question about how we can have a shared future where all our data isn't owned by Google ran through the audience singing "userowned, userowned" - but it sounded more like he was singing You Sir? 0wned! Maybe he was...
Når jeg ikke er travlt optaget af at holde Cava i luften så er jeg til Reboot de næste par dage sammen med mit posse fra Imity.
Se dig der - eller jeg skal nok blogge nogen af indlæggene undervejs. Husk: Hvis talks bliver liveblogget er det fordi de er en lille smule kedelige og man ligeså godt kan lave noget andet imens. De gode tager al opmærksomheden.