Agency is the Intelligent Design of the Internet

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend Microsoft's Social Computing Symposium last week month. Highlights for me were Kevin Slavin's epic talk about hiding in plain sight, Usman Haque getting people worked up enough to actually shout out loud what they were thinking instead of emoting pithy Twitter messages in silence and Alex's beautiful shout-out to the deep city.

Not everyone spoke but we were all encouraged to pitch an Ignite-style talk and we voted on those we'd hear. Mine didn't make the cut which is probably best because I'm not sure I was in any state to pull off weaving together the stampede of ideas I've been tossing around in the margins, the long and twisty conversations with Kellan and the increasingly cryptic notes to myself.

I still haven't managed to form a coherent shape of things but since I don't think the circumstances are going to permit that to happen any time soon I'm just going to toss it all out (t)here as is. The broad theme of the symposium was cities, in that way that everyone is thinking about what it means to be paving the world, in both the private and public sectors, with sensors and a network infrastructure for broadcasting all that data.

If you're hoping for a coherent narrative to follow, you'll probably be disappointed. If nothing grabs you then, just as an exercise, try taking the headers as a starting point for a different five-minute talk and let me know where it takes you.

This is the story I would have told (to Myles).

Data, not answers.

Were it not for that terrible article, in an early issue of Wired, about intelligent agents running around buying you plane tickets while you slept would we still be so hung up on the notion of computers being able to second guess what you're thinking?

I've been talking about the notion of data not answers for a long time. Another way of describing that process is small tools for self-organization, which proved to be a pretty successful approach at Flickr. Computers are still dumb. We are better served by building systems with lots of nubby bits — rough surfaces that allow people grab on and that collect ephemera as they travel through time — and opportunities for people to re-arrange them rather than designing automated thought-leaders.

Rough surfaces and Diebold meters.

There was a great story, in the New York Times, about how people in California are bucking at the smart-meters they've been asked to install because they don't believe they are being fairly billed.

PG&E attributes the higher bills that some consumers complain about to recent rate increases and to quirks in California’s pricing system. Electricity in the state is priced in so-called tiers: consumers get the first few hundred kilowatt-hours at a low rate, but the next few units of consumption are billed at a high rate. A small increase in use can therefore result in a big increase in the bill, the utility says.

Which got me wondering if all smart meters will be mandated to display a new license agreement every time there's a price change. This happens to me all the time in iTunes when I try to buy something: I have to stop what I'm doing, click through yet another EULA presumably because Apple's cut a new deal with producer-X and then go back to and click buy again. Can you imagine having to do that every time you turn on the lights?

Text vesus Stuff.

Joe Gregario wrote a really interesting post about how CCDs are basically p0wning RFID because they're cheaper and easier to use. They are the 80 to RFID's 20.

Text — plain old words — seems to occupy a similar territory.

The Eixample is not a useful parallel.

The problem with talking about Barcelona's Eixample neighbourhood as an example of urban planning and Utopian community-building is that it's failed on almost every level. Born of sturdy, well-meaning, community-minded ideals it was never finished, the original designs (three stories to a building instead of the five that exist today and beautiful interior courtyards) were abused beyond recognition and the Diagonal (the boulevard that runs through it) quickly became a class-based dividing line cutting the entire thing in half.

It's also a pretty awful part of Barcelona to spend any amount time in since it's nothing but block after block of enormous buildings. The part where they're all shaved at the corners gets old pretty quickly. It's worth noting that when the city embarked on another large-scale redevelopment in the 1980's they spent most of their time building lots of small, very simple, parks and public squares scattered throughout the entire city.

They are the pockets that make being in a city the size of Barceloa not just manageable but special.

The role of megalomaniacs.

I don't want to be an apologist for Robert Moses. It's just curious how, after the fact, we may continue to decry the acts of a single person imposing their will (and their ego) on a city but we celebrate the legacy (typically the physical things) those acts leave behind. Moses in New York, Haussmann in Paris, Drapeau in Montréal and so on.

All of this has happened before.

There's often a weird Libertarian streak to these conversations that answers the question of how we'll actually build a shared resource of all this network-sensor love with the invisible hand of the market or self-organizing off-the-shelf DIY can-do resourcefulness. You know, stuff like mesh networks. I've got no problem with ideas like that, in principle, except that there's nothing to demonstrate that it won't be abused and shat all over in practice.

Can you really imagine the people heavily invested in the real estate markets in cities like New York or London or Tokyo operating a shared mesh network that would offer an advantage or even just a level playing field to the people they are competing with? No, me neither.

Which isn't to say it can't be done. In fact, we've done it before. We've built a publicly funded and supervised shared infrastucture that private citizens and commercial enterprises can use: It's called the sewage system and we're the better for it. Say what you want about municipal governments or unions but your toilet still works. Which is to say that we know how to do this stuff but equally that it gets thrown in the ring with all the other needs, wants and priorities that come from living together as communities. It's called public policy and it's not sexy but it's necessary.

Jones' battlesuit is a gateway drug for civic participation.

I wasn't really sure what to make of Matt Jones' The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future the first time I read it. Eventually I decided that it was really an invitation for people to participate, be involved and to help shape the cities and the communities they live in sung in the form of a space-rock-opera.

People there really are walking architecture.

Augmented reality is boring (or: History Clippy must die).

I look forward to being proven wrong about augmented reality but I'm not ready to hold my breath yet. That's all I will say about it, for now. Instead I'll talk about maps.

It took me a while to warm up to Dolores Park when we moved to San Francisco. It's not the prettiest of parks but, over time, what I began to realize and appreciate about it is that it's one of the few parts of the city where people go to be alone, together. So much of the rest of the city is a designed experience whether it's an attempt to get you to open your wallet or, in the case of San Francisco, some place you can take your dog and talk to other people with dogs.

I want more things like Dolores Park, things that embrace the quiet rather than the firehose of ubiquitous broadcasting that is all the rage these days. I want maps like that. I want a map my neighbourhood, or a city I'm visiting, that is just the history of the places the people I know have been. The kids over at UrbanTick have been poking at this idea for a while but it's still a bit wonkish. I want something like Cabspotting for my friends and I want it to be simple.

So I built a poor man's web-based GPS recording device using my phone and the geolocation and local storage APIs that are starting to become available in newer web browsers. Translation: I load a web page that periodically asks the GPS/WiFi robots on my phone where I am and then store that information locally and display a history of my movements on a map.

Here's me walking to work:

Here's me taking a picture of my phone because it's too fucking stupid to know how to take screenshots of itself...

As it's written today there's a export button that will dump your location history to the screen. In the future I'd like to be able to push all that data to a proper web application where all that data can be aggregated and shared and made more than the sum of its parts. You know: To be alone, together.

There's also a purge history button if you're wondering.

It's not perfect. It's not even awesome... well, it's a little awesome. It's definitely the toolset I've been waiting for since the infamous DOOM-DOOM-DOOM geo panel at SXSW in 2007. The part where it just works in a web browser, though, and I don't have to ask people to pay for or install random device-hardware-manufacturer specific crap: That is awesome.

There are still plenty of mistakes like the one where I didn't really duck down to South Van Ness at 18th. My best guess is that's where the nearest cell tower is (the same thing happened on the way home) when you're standing two blocks away waiting for the street light to change. For now, I'm okay with that. It's good enough and I'm betting we can do something interesting with those hiccups.

Right now, I'm trying to decide if I want to run my own infrastructure for this stuff. From a privacy and creepiness factor it makes the most sense. At least for me. Maybe for anyone else, it's an equal kind of toss-up whether they'd be comfortable handing over their location data to me or to someone like Google. Whatever else you want to say about the GOOG they've gotten better and closer at nailing the administrivia involved in setting up these kinds of bespoke applications, with tools like AppEngine. Mike suggested just storing everything in OpenStreetMap and I considered abusing Delicious (again).While it's tempting in a street-finds-it-own-use kind of way both approaches also seem a bit mean-spirited and run counter to the goals of either service so I'm punting on those for now.

Maybe it's possible to continue to use AppEngine but do all the posting over HTTPS while also pulling a Wesabe and encrypting any data, not explicity made public, on the way in to the giant all-seeing Google database in the cloud. I don't know yet. I built this over morning coffee, yesterday. I am writing this blog post over morning coffee, today.

If all of this sounds strangely familiar and prescient it's because Tom Coates was right.

So far, this has been tested using the browser on the Nexus One and Firefox 3.6. I don't know whether it will work with other Android phones or Maemo. There's at least one geolocation plugin for the default browser on the N900 and I think that the geolocation and local storage stuff is part of Fennec, which is Firefox en-mobilized. It does not work in Safari or mobile Safari yet, at least not on my ancient iPod Touch. I'd love to know whether it works on newer iPhones.

As an aside, using and starting to program for the Nexus One is basically like writing bespoke Python applications for Nokia, before the Symbian 9 / Series60 v3 catastrophe (read: 2005/2006), but with better hardware which should give you some idea of just how huge a lead Nokia squandered. Also, I can not begin to tell you how much the camera on the Nexus One sucks soggy rocks. That was always my suspicion looking around at the reviews. I charged ahead anyway. The Nexus One does not move the Earth but it's pretty good and easier to tinker with than any of the alternatives. The part where the camera sucks makes me reconsider at least once a day, though.

You can try it for yourself at:

http://www.aaronland.info/followme/

As always, the source code is available over on GitHub.