Topic: Cyborg

I’ve been writing a great deal in the past few days: blog posts, the seed content for a wiki, fiction at a somewhat impressive pace (for me). While (at press time) there are still lots of things on my plate and storms on the horizon it’s very true that doing creative things, getting work done makes it considerably easier to do more creative things, and to get more work done. The stuff on my plate and the storms on the horizon in another seem less threatening. It’s not logical, but I’m not going to argue with that.

Of note: I posted another story to Critical Futures from Chapter 6 of Knowing Mars, this is the last scene in this chapter, and I’ll post it in three chapters. After that, we’re going to get PDFs of Chapters 4-6, and I’ll be posting more about that in time. Thanks to everyone’s replies to my post about my emacs process, both on the thread and on identi.ca. I’m much impressed with all of your wisdom, and assistance. I didn’t know about wdired-mode which I shall explore, and while I did know about magit, I hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet. Here I come.

One last thing, if there are any perl, ikiwiki, CGI::FormBuilder, Dreamhost wizards out there, I would be very flattered and indebted if you’d take a look at this bug report I filed on ikiwiki, I’m having some sort of minor problem with CGI form generation, which is such a minor bug that I’m highly annoyed at the concept. On the one hand, it’s a lot of effort to get ikiwiki working under these conditions, on the other hand it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay for a really robust server (with root access) for what will really be a minimal amount of content. Anyway, your help would be much appreciated.

ps. sorry for the late content.

pps. if you record a podcast over a skype (or other VoIP service) with Audacity and you’re running Ubuntu/Debian/Linux… I’d love to hear from you.

I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, “I do SEO,” but I’m not, and I don’t, really. The truth is that I don’t have a good, simple, answer to the question, “How do I succeed on-line with social media.” I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I’ve already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth--like offline--is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that “meatspace” connections are among the most powerful and valuable “cyberspace” resources.

During college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it’s affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact. The argument was that environments and geographies that promoted situations were individuals would come into contact (randomly, casually) promoted opportunity, satisfying social interaction, and interesting conversations in a way that “networking” opportunities (conferences, workshops, cocktail parties, etc.) couldn’t. In illustration of this, Delany describes situations from talking about philosophy in the pornographic theatres of the old Time Square to finding a vacuum cleaner repair service in the checkout line of the grocery store. Furthermore, “contact” between people of different classes (as was present in the pornographic theaters of the old time square,) promotes the destabilization of class-based injustices.¹

Contact has been an incredibly powerful and useful concept for me in a number of different contexts, because it provides an method for affecting social change in “every day life” and in creates a notion of “politics” that’s closer to “people interacting” and further from something tied to institutions of power (“government,” etc.,) which suits my disposition. I think, largely the internet is most powerful when it promotes something closer to “contact” and further from something that resembles “networking.” And by powerful, I mean a number of things: most likely to positively affect people’s work, provide meaningful opportunities for commerce and social relationships, to develop unique cultural environments.

While there are opportunities for contact on contemporary social networking websites, they mostly specialize at helping you find people who are actually quite like you, like people you know in real life, people who are interested in the same things you’re interested in, and people who are friends with people you know in real life. That’s not contact, in the sense provided by Delany.²

There is still, I think, contact. I think microblogging (twitter/identi.ca) particularly with “track” features,³ represents (or did) a move away from “networking” to contact. The communities that form around open source projects, promote contact, as they are often interest specific, and contain members with disparate skills and backgrounds. Once upon a time, general population/topic (ie. non-project specific) IRC channels (chat rooms) were an immense source of contact for their users.⁴

I’m not sure what this means. I remain convinced that contact is a useful and important way of looking at social interactions. I also think it says a lot about my interests in open source. I also think that as technologies and memes in cyberspace (eg. blogs, social networking, microblogging) develop in ways that promote “contact,” and eventually become “networking” opportunities not that the latter is bad, but it is an important conceptual shift. It’s also quite likely that we’d be able to see what ideas are going to be the next big thing based on the degree to which they promote contact. There are other implications I’m sure, but I’ll leave those for another time.

Data, information, in the digital context is really important. Perhaps the most important thing. It’s a shame then, I think, that we’re, on the whole, so bad at managing data and organizing information so that it is useful to us in the future. I keep starting to write posts on the topic with clever lead-ins, and within a hundred words I realize that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. So I’ll spare the introduction and get on with the story.

A couple of weeks ago, I copied all of my music off of my backups (from iTunes and my days as a mac user), and onto my Linux machine. I’d never really looked at the files in years, becuase of course, iTunes abstracts all the files away, so when you play “digital music,” you just play “tracks” rather than having to interact with the realities of the files themselves. This is incredibly user friendly, and I think there’s something in the iTunes model that is pretty useful. That is, creating user interfaces that let users interact with intelligibly bounded data units rather than with file units makes a lot of sense.

Having said that, what ends up happening is that the abstraction of the data often means that we’re less in touch with what’s being stored, and we rely on (often proprietary) tools to keep track of the meta-data associated with our libraries.

As I was going through my Music Library, which I’m using with mocp and Rhythm box (minimally, for syncing, eventually.) I realized that my music was organized in an incredibly ass backwards way. Many “artists” had a number of folders given various alternate spellings of their names (with and with out “the” or with various ampersand forms), which is a trifle frustrating. And as I was looking over the files I realized that there were things that I thought I had deleted, but in fact hung around in my directory (this is a specific flaw with the “are you sure” dialogue in iTunes, but it’s still an issue).

I’m not done, but I know that the next step: going through the files by hand will mean that my music files will be much more well organized. Problems like this arise, largely, when we just rely on the computer to organize the files itself without input from us. While I like the “iTunes” way of accessing my music, I expect that my collection of music files is the kind of thing that I’m going to have around for the rest of my computer-using/music-listening life, and after only 5 years my iTunes has stooped being a part of my life. For sure.

I guess the lesson from this is, interfaces for accessing your files aren’t always the best for organizing the files, and don’t entrust your organizing responsibility to a script.

Another story: PDF files.

When I’m doing research stuff, I have this way of collecting PDF files of articles. When I was in school I would make a folder for each class I took and then throw PDFs into one folder, title them productively (author[s] - title.pdf). This worked until I wanted to start reusing material, or drawing connections between various projects/class. And then--being a geek--I had projects that weren’t quite class related, where did they go? Never mind the fact that the file names were absurdly long.

So I switched to a new system where I keep a BibTeX database of all my files and name PDFs with their cite keys (which are: authorlastYEAR.pdf; if there are more than one paper by an author in a year I append alphabetical characters (eg. a, b, c) to the end in the order that they come into the database. If there are more than one author I take the first author/PI).

It took a few weeks of sporadic work get the files into shape, but the end result of that transformation is the fact that my PDFs are incredibly useful to me, and I never have to look very hard for any piece of data.

The lesson is to use your data no matter what the system is and make sure it’s still working, and then, when needed don’t be afraid to change strategies. On this level, organization really ought to be empirical.

In light of these two experiences I have come to the conclusion that it’s important to really get your hands dirty in the files. While the abstractions are nice, they allow us to be complacent. Touching your data, looking at the files, and deploying a system that is simple and both useful in the present and relevant looking forward is incredibly important. The particulars beyond that are more vague, still but we’ll get there in future posts.

Thanks for reading.

I wrote in “The Advertising Bubble” that one of the ways to more effectively monetize content and “do better on the Internet,” was to combine efforts with other content producers. The key thought here is that, people only have so much time, and cooperation can allow you and your fellow content producers to pool resources, readers' attention, and business strategies.

I’ve also thought of this post as the “just because Wordpress, can be installed in a handful of minutes doesn’t mean you should,” post. The tools (and skills) required to build websites are fast, easy, and non-technical (by now) so that anyone can have a blog, or a website, or (hell, with enough time/money) a full fledged social networking site to rival digg or facebook. Just because sites are easy to build, it doesn’t mean that we need to build new sites. Just because independence is possible, it’s not always called for.

There are a lot of readers on the Internet, but there are only so many hours in the day. And having a dynamic site with new content, is something that requires a lot of work. Lots of people can pull it off, but a lot of people (with really good things to say) can’t. This is sort of the dirty underbelly of the fact that the Internet (and open source) is a great democratizing force: because everyone speaks easily and freely, the challenge to being heard isn’t opportunity, it’s shear volume.

I talk with a lot of people about working with the Internet, about using the internet to promote and build various kinds of projects, about blagging, and about strategies for success. There are things that I can help people do better like having good designs, writing top heavy content (I’m bad at this), ideas for more content, strategies for posting regularly, places to network with the communities that you hope to speak to, and among other tactics. All of these things should help lead to success; but beyond persistence, creativity, good timing, and a little entropy I have no good way of beating the “volume problem,” given current conventions.

The solution of encouraging group blogs rather that individual blogs is a good start. Each bloggers’ responsibility to any given site is much lower than a single blogger’s responsibility to their personal site. There would be fewer (new) blogs as a result of the increase in collaboration, and possibly a consolidation of existing blogs. We would also expect to see blogs more tightly focused on niches rather than individuals: niche focuses tend to do really well on the web with regards to targeting audiences, so this is a good thing indeed.

Before anyone cries that I’m trying to suppress individuality (or expression, or identity), this is very much not the case. I think static websites are really important, my suggestion isn’t that people shouldn’t have websites it’s that they shouldn’t blog on them (by default). Given the state of syndication and aggregation content, it’s even possible for folks to have personal websites that aggregate their content from a number of different sources,¹ we get individuality and dynamic content without dividing efforts or audiences.

There are other solutions (curation springs instantly to mind) to the “volume problem,” and I’ll get to those soon. In the mean time, remember: group blogs are the future.

Onward and Outward!

I wrote an article for my friend Melissa Barton about how to use computers/technology more successfully and more effectively, and it went live over the weekend. I’m really happy with it, and it represents all of the things I’ve been working through here, except tuned for a more general audience. It’s also under my given name (gasp!) as if the tycho thing wasn’t confusing enough as it is.

Emacs is great, and I’m a huge fan, but it’s not for everyone, and for those audences, thinking about what we learn from “advanced useage” and then workind to apply that to more general use can be quite powerful. This is a different take on the “how to attract general audences,” process. I guess I’m mostly arguing that rather than make software/hardware more “friendly,” better to (also) educate users to be more gruff?

In any case, that’s up. I’m also posting an extra tychoish essay on Wednesday because it didn’t get posted (as I would have hoped) due to my error a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for that. Also, maybe new Critical Futures this week?

cheers, ty

I mentioned the other day that I was looking to build a fact file, but that I wanted to follow up on this in a bit more length. As you know and/or have probably guessed, I’m a writer, and I consume a lot of information in the pursuit of this practice. That’s par for the course. The problem is figuring out a way to store collected information so that it’s useful later. Here’s a story:

I have a story that imagines a future where there are colonies and outposts throughout our solar system (among other things). I found myself a few days ago plotting out some details and I realized that I might be imagining a future with not only far flug outposts but also a substantially different system of orbital mechanics. I know about Hohmann transfers and enough about gravity assists, that getting between planets in the solar system is complex. My hope is that by knowing a bit about these things, I can avoid rank absurdity. In any case, I found myself looking up the length orbits of Jupiter and Saturn around the sun.

Now mostly this was just to get a sense of the distance, because unless I also posit free, lightweight, super-powerful propulsion systems, a trip between Jupiter and Saturn is going to take a number of years (say, 5-15; and even with posted amazing-drive, we’re probably still talking several years,) and no matter how fast/what kind of propulsion system you use, there are going to be a very limited “windows” for transport. If you miss the buss from Jupiter to Saturn, it could be 10 or 20 years before you could get off world. Not to mention the huge impact this would have on the course of cultural development on these colonies.

But having said that, this detail about the orbital lengths (though burned into my memory at this point), isn’t the kind of thing that I track very well, and what about the next time I have a question like this? Or what about a news story that I come across, or the abstract of a scientific paper that catches my interest? This detail about orbits of the outer planets was really just the straw that broke the camels back.

It was clear that I needed a system for storing information, facts, notes for later retrieval. I wasn’t sure what that system would look like, or what I would need from it, but I was sure that something was better than the “read and hope” method I’ve been using.

I did some brainstorming and came up with some basic requirements. I needed something pretty unstructured so that “records,” which were just links and a few words would be just as complete as records that had lengthy notes. I needed built in meta-data functionality to store categories, tags, and citation information (links, date, identifiers). Easy capture and editing is a must, and while I was, and am, willing to consider functionality outside of emacs, but emacs is preferred, and it would take a lot for me to want something that couldn’t be stored in plain text files.

When other people (individuals) come to me with similar problems I almost always recommend private instances of Wordpress where people can post notes. This often is just the right thing. Conceptually it works like a notebook or journal in the physical world, but it has good meta-data support (categories, tags, dates), you can use it from anywhere (the web, the API), and it’s a mature system. This works great for a lot of people, but I’m not incredibly happy with the web-interface, and I’d need to rely on search more than I think I’d like.

I put out a call on identi.ca for help on this problem. There were suggestions of PlannerMode and various systems based on org-mode (which is what I’m inclined to use at this point.) I then had this “moment” issue about not wanting my “fact file” to be built on some sort of to-do list. Todo lists are great, I love todo-lists (perhaps too much?) Having my information management software be built around “tasks” and “projects” provides too much of the wrong kind of structure.

I was frustrated, as you might imagine. After all I just wanted some sort of index-able note-card system, that I could use to store some basic information without fuss. I’ve settled down a bit and I’m using a format using a skeleton/org-remember template to store my fact file in an org-mode text file (data.org). The entries look something like this:

* The title                    :a:list:of:tags:
  :PROPERTIES:
  :date: <2009-03-14 Sat>
  :cite-key: a-u/uid
  :link: http://tychoish.com
  :END:

And then finally some notes text

And the input is just an prompt-tab interface. I can also add more details to the properties, section. If that makes sense at a later date. So the creation of these records is pretty quick. I’ll get come code up when I have something a bit more clear. In the mean time, I’d like to continue to have a bit of a discussion about this information management problem. It’s a domain that is clearly very suited to technological enhancement, but at the same time there aren’t a lot of solutions on the ground. I suppose that’s where I come in, but feedback is most appreciated on interface questions, on alternate use cases and applications. I look forward to hearing from you…

I’m working on a longer post on the topic, but the past few days have seen me spend a bit of extra attention trying to develop some way of doing a “fact file” inside of emacs. Basically what I need is some way of storing information (links, quotes, text) along with bibliogrpahic information (where I got it, when I accessed it) and some sort of meta-data (tags, categories, search index) so that I can find things again. Largely, this data isn’t for any specific project, but it is a way to record general notes on the information that I consume in an effort to make that data more useable in the future.

As I firm up the solution, I’ll write more about it, but I’ve discovered something about the software targeted at this domain (generally, “personal information management,”) that’s worth sharing: there are a lot of notebooks and databases around, but they’re all very much alike: anything that’s structured as a database is generally desgined to store addresses, contact information and other “CRM” data, which is nice, but not what I’m going for at all. There are also a lot of notebook applications that are modeled on wikis (too unstructured) or outliners (ok, but hierarchical). Interestingly, it seems every kind of personal information management package that isn’t an address book (for emacs, but I think this is to some degree generalizable) has grown to a point where it can manage and extrapolate todo-lists from your notes.

Once upon a time, emacs itself was critiqued (and still is) because it has the ability to send and recieve email, and that this feature (email sending) was a sign of “feature bloat,” becasue after all, sending email with a text editor. That’s a bit a field. I’ll let you decide how history has dealt with the email issue. I in the mean time am going to write, and figure out some way of doing a better job with this information.

A few weeks ago, a friend told me about this IDE (integrated development environment) called PIDA, and while I’m nothing more than a casual programmer, my interest was immediately piqued.

We’ll call it part of my interest in how programmers work. The truth is, as a text-editor junkie, my impulse is to say “meh, IDEs are passe,” but I think that’s probably unfair, and in my writing IDE post I think I recognized--by analogy--their worth. In any-case there’s something sort of nifty about PIDA: rather than recreate tools, it just makes use of what’s already there: the editor is emacs (or vim), the version control system is whatever you want (and already use). PIDA just brings all these things together in a nifty little package.

On the one hand, it’s not a really big deal. Cobbling together working software from a bunch of different existing tools isn’t particularly new. This is sort of the basis of unix-like computing, and further more it tracks the ways most people/geeks actually use computers: by finding the best tools for all of the jobs they have to do and then using them. This way of interacting seems to hold true for command-line and graphical users, I think. So rather than recreate the wheel, PIDA just uses all the existing wheels. The saddest part is that we don’t see more things like this in the graphical application world.

The end result of this mode of application development is that we’re given/build powerful tools that function in familiar ways and that are more powerful as a result of their integrations.

And that’s about it.

I initially thought that this was going to be a really long and really blathering post about integrated tools, and the power of open source/free software to allow tools to be combined rather than be forced to compete. While these are indeed important issues, they’re pretty self explanatory, and IDEs like PIDA provide a great example of how this can be the case, so much so that I find myself saying “why aren’t there more programs like this?”

Why not indeed?

I wrote in my post on the one true system about the informal systems that we use to interface the way we interact with knowledge and information in the “real world” with the way we represent that information on our computers. Exploring these systems lay at the core of the cyborg question, but today’s essay¹ is more about how our logic systems adapt as we use computers and as the kinds of information we need to store change and grow.

As near as I can tell there are a few kinds of “systems review” that we tend to do. Theoretically if you develop a system that’s flexible and that accounts for all of your future information needs, then you shouldn’t have to modify your system very much. Theoretically this is a good thing: better to spend time “doing things,” rather than thinking about “how you’re going to do things.”

The sad truth is that this doesn’t work out very well pragmatically: we change our work habits, and our information changes, and our projects change, and our informal logic for interacting with our computers fails to address the problems, and eventually everything spirals out of control. This is pretty abstract, but every time you see someone with hundreds of icons stacked on your (or someone else’s) desktop, or you find yourself with hundreds of unsorted (and unread!) email messages, or you have to hunt through half a dozen places for a PDF you are witnessing the symptoms of a flawed system.

The only way to address this is to review your “systems,” and make sure that you capture any problem before information spirals out of control:

1. Have an overflow bin, but only one overflow bin. This is important, but counter intuitive. By overflow bin, I mean something where unfile-able items are placed. This hopefully alleviates the tension to file away information that hasn’t been fully processed, or that doesn’t fit into your system, or might be ambiguously filed².

2. Do major reviews of your system only infrequently. By major review, I mean, think about how you use your information, what has worked, and what hasn’t, and then use this as a model for revising your system. Don’t do it regularly, even if you know that something isn’t working. Think of this as something that you do only about twice as often as you get a new computer. As part of this major review process:

   Keep a regular journal when you aren’t in the process of updating procedures. Track about what works and what doesn’t. Often I’ve found that I have ideas about how things should change, but the changes aren’t the kind of thing that I could reasonably change during normal work. These insights/problems are useful, eventually even if they aren’t always immediately relevant. So record them for later.

3. Do Minor reviews regularly. Look in the “overflow bin” from item one and see what’s falling through the cracks, file things that do need to be filed. The GTD folks call this a “weekly review,” and while GTD-task processing is only part of “the system.”³ It depends on what kind of information you’re managing, but staying on top of and in touch with your “stuff” is important.

4. Be sure to “touch” your information regularly. While I’m in favor of keeping information even when it’s not apparently useful (you never know), I also agree with the idea that information is only really useful if you use it. I’ve often found myself falling into the trap where I’ll stockpile stuff “to read later,” which of course rarely happens. Avoid this and browse from time to time.

I mean in the end, I’m just a guy who writes more than he should, and has a pile of digital information that’s probably a bit too big, but this is how I do things, and I think the lessons I’ve learned (and continue to learn) may be helpful to some of you. Reviewing and thinking about systems before hand is, if nothing else, instructive.

Onward and Upward!

There’s this idea in linguistic/cognitive anthropology that the limitations of linguistic possibility limit what the bounds of what we’re able to think about. If we lack words for a given thing or a concept, it’s really hard to even conceive what it is. I’ll get to the strengths and limits of the hypothesis in a bit, but lets just say the reception of these ideas (i.e. “linguistic relativism”) is somewhat mixed. Nevertheless it’s had a great impact on me and the kinds of ideas I deal in.

For instance, though I’m not an active programmer, I talk to programmers a bunch I tweak code from time to time, and I’ve tried to learn programming enough times that I sort of get the basics of enough stuff to know what’s going on, and if there’s one theme to my interests in open source and software development, it’s looking at the software and tools that developers us, in part for issues related to linguistic relativism. Basically, if the people who develop programming languages, and software itself don’t provide for possibilities, developers and users won’t be able to think about things downstream. Or at least that’s the theory.*

The problem with linguistic relativism in general, is that it’s really hard to test, and we get into causality issues. “Describe this thing that you don’t know about!” is a bad interview tactic and we run into the questions like: Is it really language that limits knowability or is some other combination of typical experiences that limits both knowability and language? I’ve read far too many a number of papers from a couple of different scholars, and I almost always end up in the “relativist camp,” but that might be a personality feature.

In computer science, I suppose it is also not quite so cut and dry. Questions like “Does the advancement of things like hardware limit technical possibility more than programing languages and tools?” come up, but I think for the most part it is more cut and dry: Erlang’s concurrency model makes thins possible, and makes programmers think in ways that they’re not prone to thinking about them otherwise. Git’s method promoting collaboration requires people to think differently about authorship and collaboration. Maybe. I mean it makes sense to me.

These low-level tools shape what’s possible on the higher level not simply in that a programing language implements features that are then used to build higher level applications, but if you teach someone to program in emacs-lisp (say) they’ll think about building software in a very different way from the folks who learn how to program Java. Or Perl. Or PHP.

And those differences work down the software food chain: what programmers are able to code, limits the software that people like you and me use on a day to day basis. That’s terribly important.

I think the impulse when talking about open source and free software is to talk about subjects that are (more) digestible to non-technical users, and provide examples of software projects that are more easily understood (e.g. firefox and open office rather than gcc and the Linux kernel, say.) This strikes me as the wrong impulse, when we could focus on talking about more technical projects and then use abstractions and metaphors to get to a more general audience if needed. I’m not saying I’ve mastered this, but I’m trying, and I think we’ll ultimately learn a lot more this way. Or so I hope. There is always much to learn.

Onward and Upward!

* In a previous era/maturity state I would have been somewhat guarded about that subject which I think is going to be a major theme in oh the rest of my life. But, this is open source and knowledge wants to be free and all that. Actually, less altruistically, I’m much more worried that it’s a lackluster research question than I am that someone is going to “snipe it from me,” and suggestions and challenges I think would be really productive.