intrust

Information Technology and Trust

2005-05-02T12:35:00.000+02:00

This essay, in two parts, is meant both as an introduction to the basic concepts of information technology in a context relevent for members of the legal community, as well as a positing of IT as a channel for the promotion of trust, both complementary to - and in competition with, legal, mechanical, psychological, and socio-political systems.

The following texts are based on ideas originally presented in "An Essay on Information Technology and Trust" published in "Legal Management of Information Systems" Cecilia Magnusson Sjöberg (ed). Studentlitteratur (2005), and the preparatory notes for my lectures for the Master Programme in Law and Information Technology offered by the Law and Informatics Research Institute, Department of Law, University of Stockholm.

2005-05-02T11:45:00.000+02:00

Part 1 – Technology

1.1 What’s different this time?

1.2 The great commonwealth

1.2.a Commonalization

1.2.b Commoditization

1.2.c Completeness

1.2.d Communalization

1.3 The evolution of Information Technology

1.4 World 3

1.5 dW3 7

1.6 Language

1.7 dW3 that works

1.8 It doesn’t count

1.9 Tiger Shot a Birdie

1.10 Local and Global Taxonomies

1.11 Contextual Frameworks

1.12 W3 technology

1.13 Herman’s punch cards

1.14 The design of a data system in terms of completeness

1.15 Who you gonna' call?

1.16 Programs

1.17 After Hollerith

1.18 Task-specificity

1.19 Ask not what your dW3 can do for us

1.20 The Turing Test

1.21 If we think they think

1.22 Hi, I’m Lara Croft, can I help you.

Part 2 – Trust

2.1 The bell tower

2.2 Social Capital

2.2.a The China Syndrome

2.3 Transaction costs

2.4 Definitions of trust

2.5 Verospheres

2.6 Redundancy and Tolerance

2.7 Real time

2.8 A cow will wince

2.9 Nurture– Nature– Normal

2.10 Who’s buying this round?

2.11 If no logo – what?

2.12 The world wide web of content description

2.13 The Marlboro Man versus the Surgeon General

2.14 38 Six degrees

Part One - Information Technology

2005-04-28T08:16:00.000+02:00

This is the first part of a two part essay. The ordering is traditional (reverse-blog) page flow.

1.1 What’s different this time?

2005-04-28T02:24:00.000+02:00

Technological advancement, particularly rapid advancement, is by nature unsettling. We may hail technologies as revolutionary or evolutionary or even deterministically necessary, but no matter what we call them, there will always be an old way of doing things that must, often reluctantly or obstinately, make way for a new way of doing things, and there will be winners and losers in the scuffle. Of course the latter don’t write history.

In a startling display of enthusiasm for technological progress, the British Parliament, in 1812, passed an act stipulating the death sentence for those found guilty of damaging the new machines that were rationalizing the textile industry. The act was not an empty threat. In early 19^th century England, thousands of workers, shut out literally overnight from their livelihood; desperate over their inability to feed their families and the discovery that their acumen and skills were redundant, violently revolted against the mechanical innovations taking place in their industry. Many were arrested, shot or hanged, including one Abraham Charleston, 12 years old, who is said to have cried out for his mother from the gallows. It is sadly ironic that this group of desperate workers, called Luddites, have given their name to those who are said to “irrationally” oppose technological progress.

In an economically networked free market society, long term resistance to rationalization in the interest of job retention can only be carried out by the state exercising its prerogative to redistribute wealth. Or through individuals practicing vocational voluntarism, – the willingness to work for less, for glory, or for nothing at all. Improvements in cost-benefit ratios for one sector of a networked economy will inevitably put pressure on all other sectors. As Vilfredo Pareto pointed out over a century ago^¹:

As the proportion between capital and labour changes, the former becomes less precious, while the latter grows in value. Wherever technically possible, the machine replaces man’s physical energy. This can be done economically, among civilized nations precisely because there in no shortage of capital; among the other nations the conversion, though technically possible, is not often economical, and therefore man has a greater share in the physical work^². Hence where there is a great abundance of capital, man turns necessarily to work in which the machine cannot compete with him.

Technology does cost people their jobs – and yes, it creates jobs as well, but that is scant solace for those who cannot migrate from the one to the other, scrambling to find work in which the machine cannot compete with him. The cost of labour in the developed world, affected by an abundance of capital has risen almost without a hitch since Pareto wrote those words. Labour costs more –- technology costs less – and the transfer of workloads from humans to machines will not decrease -– on the contrary.^³ The effects of abundant capital and technology, not only promote rationalization, but also encourage the proliferation of services and goods that are immune to rationalization, as workers and entrepreneurs seek a safe haven from technological encroachment of their jobs.

Nevertheless, it is not just the inevitable loss of unprofitable jobs that causes us to resist technology, but also the perceived loss of control, or in the context of this essay: the undermining of trust. We mistrust those preaching disruptive change, we mistrust (selectively) technology: We fear loss of security and privacy, loss of psychological well being, loss of social capital, and loss of cultural identity.^⁴ And yet we continue to innovate, to rationalize, and to disrupt, because we can so readily see how, with the help of machines, our needs can be served – faster, safer, more accurately, and more economically than without them.

Progress, in a nutshell, is the extension of range. How far we can reach – spiritually, materially, socially, and epistemologically. We, albeit disproportionately, extend our reach outwards, internalizing goods, services, pleasures and knowledge via a coalescence of innumerable communication systems, some of which are the traditional fabric of human societies, some institutional, some the product of technological achievement. It is the goal of this essay to touch upon the interactions of these systems.

1The Rise And Fall Of The Elites p:75 : (Palgrave Macmillan, 1993

2The well-to-do in the underdeveloped world thrive on cheap labour luxury. The well-to-do in the developed world thrive on cheap technology luxury materialized by cheap labour..

3This effect is of course mollified by free trade between nations with widely divergent labour costs. Free trade optimists believe that specialization will eventually replace labour cost inequality as the prime mover of trade. But, of course, today specialization is very much a product of labour cost disequilibrium.

4We also fear things that think and move faster than we do, at least initially until we can master them.

1.2 The great commonwealth

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What is unique about Information Technology? What distinguishes computers, IT systems, data stores and interconnecting networks from the weaving frames Ned Lud^¹ and his fellows were so determined to smash? In each of the following four chapters we will cover one of the major differentiating factors.^²

1Ned Lud or General Ludd, who gave his name to the frame-smasher movement, might have been a mythical figure. See http://www.usu.edu/sanderso/multinet/lud1.html

2For contrasting arguments see Debora Spar’s Ruling the Waves Harcourt Brace, 2001

1.2.a Commonalization

2005-04-28T02:22:00.000+02:00

It is generally agreed that Adam Smith, when he suggested that the division of labour leads to inventions because workmen engaged in specialised routine operations come to see better ways of accomplishing the same results, missed the main point. The important thing, of course, is that with the division of labour a group of complex processes is transformed into a succession of simpler processes, some of which, at least, lend themselves to the use of machinery.

Little could the economist Allyn Young, in writing the above in 1928, have dreamed to what extent "simpler processes" would come to dominate industry. Nor that one particular simple process - digitalization would permeate throughout all economic endeavor.

Information Technology thrives on an unparalleled commonalization of human effort. The common denominator, the simplest of all processes, is the bit, the material expression of what is logically true or false. In the IT world everything is cached, counted, carried and consumed in the form of digital bits: Chinese opera recordings, hip bone x-rays, customs declarations, pictures of nude people in compromising poses, building plans, court orders, Shrek II, barometric pressure at the North Pole, the simultaneous chatting of tens of millions of teenagers, the nerve system of your automobile.

Since so much enterprise and activity virtually share the same laboratories, production plants, and distribution channels, the efforts of each are to the benefit of all - one for all and all for one.

Long before the invention of the transistor Young wrote:

Every important advance in the organization of production, regardless of whether it is based upon anything which, in a narrow or technical sense, would be called a new "invention," or involves a fresh application of the fruits of scientific progress to industry, alters the conditions of industrial activity and initiates responses elsewhere in the industrial structure which in turn have a further unsettling effect. Thus change becomes progressive and propagates itself in a cumulative way.

Increasing Returns and Economic Progress The Economic Journal, volume 38 (1928), pp. 527-42

Economists speak of network effects or path dependencies.^¹ If one person takes a particular route through a field it will be easier for those that follow to take the same path, and the more that take the path, the wider it becomes for those that follow^².

Classic examples of path dependencies in technology are the QWERTY keyboard and the VHS player/recorder^³. Whether the network effects of these two solutions shut out technically supperior competitors, or not, is still contentious, but regardless, their scope is limited by the singularity of thier utility and purpose.

The path of digitalization is unbounded, compounding and self-reinforcing the bit is a path, the computer is a path of paths, the digital network is a path of paths of...

As the advantages of digitally encoded music relegate analogue encoding and fossil-fuel-powered distribution to our museums of engineering, consumers, producers, distributors and equipment manufactures will all, in their assessments and expectations of each other choices, collectively supercharge this changeover. Producers choose digital because buyers choose digital buyers choose digital because producers do so. This is a network effect.

But when the photographic industry takes the same digital path as the music industry and countless other industries, then all sectors collectively will supercharge that path. At the moment we are witnessing the technological commonalization of telecommunications, broadcast entertainment and data networks as telephones become mobile computers and computers work as telephones, televisions become computers and computers become televisions^⁴.

addendum and errata

1http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/palgrave/palpd.html

2Further, path dependencies are psychologically reinforced. A decision makers attitude towards a concept or products feature set, tends to change ex post the decision, and her preferences will be readjusted in line with the actual outcome of her choice. For example, in a choice between apples and pears one might chose the former on the strength of their flavour despite the occurrence of less seeds in the latter. After a choice was made in favour of apples, the disadvantage of the seeds would be discounted. Dan Simon, Daniel C. Krawczyk, and Keith J. Holyoak Construction of Preferences by Constraint Satisfaction http://lawweb.usc.edu/faculty/documents/ConstructionofPreferencesbyConstraintSatisfaction.pdf

3The keyboard skirmish concerned not just what sort of typewriter you or your company might buy but also as a consequence of that purchase, what sort of typing skills you would be investing in. And the video recorder fight entailed, beyond what make of machine you chose, the investment in media (cartridges and tapes) that would work in only one type of machine. Path dependencies have network effects. Eventually a large pool of QWERTY trained typists and VHS standard cassettes would seal the fate of the competing Dvorak and Betamax technologies. http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/alternate/P552/p552 FitzPatrick.html

4Actually there is still one large stumbling block for the convergence of television and computing the screen technologies; interlaced for television, and progressive for computer monitors are not readily compatible.

1.2.b Commoditization

2005-04-28T02:20:00.000+02:00

In every great technological epoch, commoditization - the standardization of methods, tools and parts in order to facilitate interchangablilty, has served as as a sister-ship to the division of labour and task specialization. The power of commonalization as described in the previous section drives IT infrastructure into a Legoland of interchangeable modular parts in both hardware and software. The components of the former; processors, memory chips, storage devices, and communication channels, are primarily assemblies of commodity items working equally well in thousands of competitive offerings. For the latter, despite the strategy of industry leaders of building walled gardens of computing tools incompatible with those of rival firms, pools of interoperable, interworking software abound. This is what the current software trend known as web services^¹, is all about – proprietarily unencumbered application modules that facilitate successful interaction between firms and organizations with previously incompatible technology^².

The traditional view of specialization amongst economists, is that larger markets provide for the division of labour, and a narrower range of skills. Yet, as Becker and Murphy point out, the various costs of "coordinating" specialized workers who perform complementary tasks, and the amount of general knowledge available will set limits to just how far this specialization can reach.^³

Due to the unprecedentedly high levels of commonalization and commoditization ocurring in IT, coordinating costs are dramatically reduced as specialized tasks are minimized and shifted to the outer edges of a commons-based, generalized problem domain.

Of course, at some point specialization must interwork: the labourers in Adam Smith’s famous pin factory must be able to pass on the results of their specialized skills to the next in line along a serial path – in the production line, the output of one task is the designated input of the next. But the interworking of software modules, when carried out at appropriate levels of granularity, is not serial but networked. The output of one task is potentially the input of any other task and visaversa.

In his amazingly concise, poignant 1943 “What is life?” lecture, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger noted the importance of size. He pointed out that molecular components in a system must be sufficiently large or significant in order to resist mutation, yet sufficiently small or insignificant in order to be replaceable. The stability of large systems, known in biology, as homoeostasis, is attained when its molecular components (cells) are constantly replaced and regenerated. These dynamicly, reproducing “large systems” will play a similar role as the replaceanble components of even still larger systems. We can say that molecular systems are commoditized.

In software, when we speak of the granularity of systems, we are paralleling Schrödinger’s observations on stable, yet evolving, organic life forms. In granular systems, software objects are large enough to resist mutation, yet small enough to join together as the replaceable parts of a larger whole. As in the poetic title of a book by David Weinberger they become Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

1See http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/

2It should also be pointed out that, increasingly, consumers own and operate their own technology when interacting with firms. Technological interoperability is no longer merely a firm to firm consideration.

3The Division of Labor, Coordination Costs, and Knowledge Gary S. Becker, Kevin M. Murphy Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 107, No. 4 (Nov., 1992) , pp. 1137-1160

1.2.c Completeness

2005-04-28T02:18:00.000+02:00

According to a "law" formulated by Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet:

The value of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of its nodes1

The catch to Metcalfe's law is that in speaking of value, he is not including the costs necessarilly assumed in deriving it. To determine the economies of expanding networks, one would have to factor in the cost of adding nodes. In the construction of many sorts of networks these costs are prohibitive and non-uniform, wiping out any gains promised by Metcalfe's law.

In this essay we are going to take up and differentiate between two types of networks. There are of course many, but we will concern ourselves here with those most apparently relevent to IT: The physical and the virtual. The physical IT network is comprised of hardware; computers, switches and cables. The virtual network is comprised of data.

The physical network (which we will later call a W1 network) can not escape the effects of diminshing returns, nor for that matter can the virtual (which we will come to call a W3 network). But the evolution of digital technology radically favors the latter over the former. The advances made in hardware developement, production and implementation, dramatic as they may be, are trivial in comparison with the advances made in explotating the data that resides upon them.

As I point out further on, these two networks are not only interdependet upon each other - they are in competition. But, for the sake of describing a particular sort of completness - the virtual, I will assume the pre-existence of a hardware network, albeit a definitely incomplete one. I am not discounting the importance of discussing hardware network completeness, there are all sorts of social, political, economic issues of rank to be hashed out - just not here.

When speaking of virtual networks residing upon pre-existent hardward networks. Here is my complement law to Metcalfe's:

The cost of a virtual network does not increase in proportion to the square of its nodes.

If both Metcalfe’s and my laws are correct, virtual networks would seem capable of reversing the law of diminishing returns, and “the more – the merrier” axiom bounded by no practical limits, should rule the day. At some point in maximizing a network's value, as the cost curve for increased membership consistently moves in the opposite (downward) direction to the upwards pointing value curve, the inclusion of each new node will be determined soley on the relevance of its potential contribution to other nodes.

The posibility of near-zero transaction cost environments gives rise to theories of completeness, where "all the bits that fit" are included in a virtual network, increasing the population until every member, and every bit of data, of even the slightest significance are admited to the fold.
The net gain of our actions is the benefit derived minus the costs incurred. It is rational to assume that costs increase with effort, time and distance - the further one must walk to fill a bucket of water, the more energy expended, and and the less time available to do something else. In an physical network, each connected node represents a cost, be it for cables, hardware, resource time, or electrical power. If a new node is added - the network designers must consider the extra costs occurred in relation to the benefits gained.

If we take telephone networks as an example, the infrastructure costs of adding lines and nodes is not uniform – land line installations in geographically remote areas will obviously be disproportionately costly compared to city installations, and many societies provide subsidies or demand bulk service commitments from their telcos to adjust for this. Yet taken as a whole, the costs in infrastructure and power consumption for the world's telephone network are easily offset by gains in utility. Though some infrastructural nodes are “cheap” to include and others “expensive”, in sum, benefits outweigh costs.

Now if we look past issues of infrastructure (hardware and lines) to matters of address-structure we will uncover a fascinating phenomenon. The ubiquity of telephones (in the developed world at least) is so commonplace and humdrum that we forget the startling fact that we have created a network that is immune to overcrowding. Our telephone system is essentially global and homogeneous – using globally accepted standards, and no matter how many new nodes are connected, the benefits of expanding membership outweigh the costs. There is no economic rationale for creating two or more non-connecting telephone networks, no matter how many new telephones, telephone companies, and telephone lines are added to the one that already exists.2

Our global postal network does the same trick - through the technology of distribution we extend past the limitations of time and space. Imagine the following ridiculous conversation.

Call Fiona and tell her we have approved the plan.
I can't call her – she is on GEC and we are on DBB
You mean the two systems can't connect? How stupid. Well then write her a letter!
I can't write her. She is FedEx and we are BRM . I can't email her either. She's on AOL and we are on Gmail.
Why isn't she on Gmail too?
Gmail is full - overcrowded. They have no more room for new subscribers.

For all I know Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoomail etc. might one day refuse new members on grounds of overcrowding, but the prospect seems exceedingly unlikely since the hardware resources per subscriber are, if not trivial, easily absorbed in the greater (profit) scheme of things.

Actually it is the complexity of addressing and connecting nodes that puts the heaviest burdens on digital networks and once (and if) those problems are solved, the complexity of addressing and accessing specific content on or across nodes. Completeness is desirable if it adds to efficiency of access – if not, then the division of networks and the compartmentalisation of resources are preferable alternatives.

The complaint, so often heard in the early stages of Internet development – “too much information”, gradually looses its rationale, as each additional node (or web site) contributes to the description of the entire Internet corpus, making the discovery of appropriate resources easier – not more difficult.

From a state of completeness – we design tools of selectivity. Google – the catalogue of all the web pages, Amazon – the catalogue all the books and eBay – the catalogue of all the PEZ-dispensers, are parade examples of the advantages of cleverly filtered completeness, but above all it is the Internet itself, the medium of Google, Amazon and eBay, that proves the robustness and scalability of completeness in digital networks.

According to the reigning theory of communication which we will deal more with further on, efficiency in transmitting information is increased by pre-existent knowledge – the more someone knows the less you have to tell them, and of course inversely, the more you know the less you have to ask. By removing, once necessary, but now artificial, barriers between data stores in our networks we are increasing efficiency – not reducing it. More costs less. As Bakos and Brynjolfsson have written:

[...] the near-zero marginal costs of reproduction for digital goods make many types of aggregation more attractive. While it is uneconomical to provide goods to users who value them at less that the marginal cost of production, when the marginal cost is zero and users can freely dispose of good they do not like, then no users will value the goods at less than their marginal cost. As a result economic effiency and, often, profitability are maximized by providing the maximum number of such goods to the maximum number of people for the maximum amount of time.3

1 For example, if you have four nodes, or computers, on a network, say, an office intranet, its "value" would be four squared (4^2), or 16. If you added on addition node, or PC, then the value would increase to 25 (5^2). See http://www.mgt.smsu.edu/mgt487/mgtissue/newstrat/metcalfe.htm

2 Of course one might do so for reasons of secrecy.

3 Bakos and Brynjolfsson Aggregation and Disaggregation of Information Goods Internet Publishing and beyond MIT Press, Cambridge 2000

1.2.d Communalization

2005-04-28T02:16:00.000+02:00

IT is the first world-class demonstration of technical innovation as a social act. People have always made ideologically motivated contributions to society, or worked for no greater reward than self-satisfaction and self-esteem, but never on the scale made possible by the Internet. The IT commonwealth provides itself with remarkable tools of collaboration, enabling product development transparency, simultaneous consumer feedback, frictionless distribution and instant donor gratification.

IT rearranges the structure of social capital and challenges the traditional conception of infrastructure. To paraphrase Winston Churchill; Never could so few, create so much, of value to so many, at so little cost, and in so little time – and then give it away for free. Yet we should also keep in mind that open source software is not just the utopian vision of the digerati, but an integral part of the long term strategies of several of the world’s largest software companies. Communalization is not the equivalent of “free” software or “open source” software^¹. Donor communities also form around commercial products.

Rationally, one would think that our willingness to give things away, would be dependent upon the cost incurred in obtaining or creating them. A watch that took 300 hours in the making, would probably seem more valuable to its creator than a watch she spent 30 hours making. A book that costs 40 Euros would be a more unselfish gift than a book that cost 10. But these are what we call material, non-replenishing goods, give them away and they are gone from your possession.

Goods in Information Technology, as it has been pointed out by many writers, are non-deplenishing – give them away and yet you still have them, if no longer exclusively. It appears as if we are prepared to make gifts of non-deplenishing goods, no matter the cost incurred in obtaining them. We might hold tightly to a watch that took 30 hours to make and share freely ideas, solutions, methods, that took thousands of hours to work out.

While the commons can be a physical resource owned jointly by all citizens or members of a community, it can also be seen as a social regime for managing common assets. One type of commons, the gift economy, is a powerful mode of collaboration and sharing that can be tremendously productive, creative and socially robust. The Internet is a fertile incubator of innovation precisely because it relies heavily upon gift-exchange. Scientific communities, too, are highly inventive and stable because they are rooted in an open, collaborative ethic. In some gift economies, the value of the collective output is greater as the number of participants grows — “the more, the merrier.” The result has been called a “comedy of the commons,” a windfall of surplus value that over the long term can actually make the commons more productive — and socially and personally satisfying — than conventional private markets. New America Foundation, 2004^²

As Adam Smith pointed out, the division of labour depends upon the extent of the market. As the "market" embodied in the internet expands, so does room for specialization. But the modular, commoditisized nature of Information Technology and the commonality of its building blocks creates a "higher order" of specialization. Specialization in the majority of tasks deals with the assembling and arrangement of commonized sollutions often in the public domain, thus promoting fruitful interaction between specialists, previously isolated by the highly specific nature of their tasks.

1A good summary of Open Source and Free Software can be found at http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

2See http://www.newamerica.net/Download_Docs/pdfs/Pub_File_649_1.pdf

The evolution of Information Technology

2005-04-27T15:14:00.000+02:00

As we have noted, technological innovation comes seldom without resistance, be it from legacy technologies and business models, or in the defence of the entrenched human position. “Will we be needed in the future?” asked Bill Joy in a famous article in Wired Magazine, contemplating the eventual droidian takeover of the planet. Our more salient fears concern robots – no doubt due to their anthropomorphic characterization in popular media. Yet the fear of machines is perhaps misdirected. We might show more foresight in fearing our books and plays and works of art – or any other objectification of knowledge you choose to think of. As the power of information technology increases – the relative influence of our computing machinery diminishes. Does that sound confusing? The evolution of IT, and many other technologies demonstrates readily that if there really was a struggle between machines and the data they work with, machines would be the losers – hands down.

Primitive machines place heavier constraints on what goes into them and what can come out, while sophisticated machines allow much greater flexibility at both ends. We should not look at technological progress merely in terms of increased power, speed and output, but also in measures of reduced distortion in the goods processed. The elimination of costly pre-process modifications on the raw materials of manufacturing is a keystone of industrial efficiency. When applied to information technology, this translates to the ability to work with our data as it is, without subjection to the contortions caused by stringent media constraints or grammatical, syntactical, or semantic rearrangement. We are entering an age where a modern purveyor of IT does not tell their customer what she must do to get her data to work with their product, but rather asks what they must do to service her data as it is.

World 3

2005-04-27T15:12:00.000+02:00

There are definition problems when talking about the entities of “Information Technology”: what should we call the main ingredients? Intuitively it would seem that there is a technological domain, consisting of machines and programs that work with something called information. Inversely, information would be that which machines and programs can work with. Well, not only is that a recursive definition, but the word information in misleading. Particularly for students of communication theory who learn that information can only be that which is not already known – information is news, once we have it – it ceases to be information. Does it then become knowledge? Do we really want to think of all the terabytes on the Internet as knowledge? Who really knows when we should say information, and when should we say knowledge? What is the difference anyway?

In this essay I will often speak of the hardware of IT intermittently as machines and computers and I choose to call the soft stuff dW3, digitalized world 3. Here is why.

Borrowing from a scheme of classification made famous by the philosopher of science Karl Popper^¹, we can avoid information– knowledge definition disputes by calling all data (knowledge, information, signification, representation, what have you) external to our minds for world 3 or W3, and whatever goes on inside our minds; thoughts, memories, dreams, perceptions and so forth, for world 2. Finally, world 1 is the physical world – all the atoms of the universe in what ever form they happen to combine – be it super novas or milkshakes, jumbo jets or comic books.

In W3, the production of our subjective minds finds a support structure and varying vestiges of permanence. Languages are the dominating vehicle of human discourse and consequently the aristocracy of W3. Joining language is art, architecture, calculation and symbolic science, bookkeeping, music, photography, sound recording, graphic imagery of processes and systems, cartography, signs and much more. W3 is the human mindprint. It might be information at some times, knowledge at others, or just somebody having aimless fun.

The significant thing about W3, is the degree of autonomy it enjoys. Existing on the outside of our heads, objectified in some form of representation that is decipherable by more than one subjective mind with some degree of shared meaning or impetus, W3 lives on, though dependent on its W1 vestige – independent of its W2 origins.

It follows of course that our mental W2 production, once out of the chute, must have some form of W1 (something physical) to hang on to. Some W1 material must be rearranged to represent our mentalese; some marks scratched on a stone, or ashes on the wall of a cave. Take, for example, the idea of a house. Someone can think of a house and then go right out and build it from her vision of that house – off the top of her head so to speak. This W1 house becomes the manifestation of her W2 conception. Alternatively, she could have drawn some plans first and made up a list of the materials she wished to use. Both the plans for the house and the house itself are W3 objectifications of a mental vision, and they each have their advantages as such: You can’t live in the drawing plans and you can’t make 10 copies of the physical house at Kinko’s^².

Anything we can dream of, or reason about; anything we can hear, or see, or touch, can be replicated in W3, though the representation, the form and expression, of the reproductions will greatly vary. Some representations will seek exactitude – others beauty and eloquence, or even purposeful distortion. Yet once represented, once incarnated in W3, all such representations are themselves reproducible.

1Karl Popper is no longer with us to protest against the simplification I have made with his three worlds. He would no doubt argue that I have confused objective with objectified; that world 3 status should be reserved for objective knowledge, or that world 2 is also capable of holding world 3 content – these points are somewhat vague in his texts, and I make no pretence of accurately representing his position. I believe the utility of defining worlds 1-2-3 as I have done here is apparent. There are of course other classification schemes – some of which would also distinguish between types of knowledge based on their a priori truthfulness. I mention this distinction here, because a priori truths, whether they are true or not, are the base of all digital computer programming.

2Kinko’s is a chain of stores in the United States where one goes to print and copy documents.

dW3

2005-04-27T15:11:00.000+02:00

We don’t store physical objects on our computers, only some representational extraction or picture of them , nor do we have, at least for the present I should add, anyway of getting our W2 thoughts unintermediated into our computers, or back again. We must always go through some inbetween of W3 representation; drawings, words, sound waves, whatever.

Our machines can swallow any W3 representation we can make – as the symbolic manifestation of an idea, but not as a corporal object. Ideas expressed in written language, or numbers, or some notational system such as that of music composition, can be passed on to our computers quite smoothly, since written language and other notational systems are already quantified to the equivalent of digitalization. But ideas as expressed in physical houses and bridges and paintings and music must be extracted and quantified first ( a process which of course preceded computers). Once that is accomplished, these expressions may be assimilated along with language and other notational systems into the digital realm. W3 becomes dW3, as the data of all media is digitalized; reduced to a serial representation of ones and zeros. The silicon wafers, magnetic filings, reflecting surfaces, and light years of copper and glass cables of the “world3” age become the hat rack for dW3.

But the process of transferring W3 into dW3 is not unproblematic. Remember W3 is already itself a code. If we see a beautiful landscape and wish to “immortalize” it, then we can paint it, photograph it, write or even sing about it. We express something about the landscape, and almost unfailingly we will apply style to these expressions – we will use the media of choice to personalize our perception of reality. And the media of choice, via it’s physical attributes will stylistically channel our efforts.

If one takes a snapshot in black and white today, it is rarely because colour is not available, but because we hope, by voluntarily removing colour, to dramatize the effect of the picture. If, when digitalizing our analogue b&w photos, we were forced to accept that they would be given back the colours we artfully removed, we would certainly be annoyed. The example is silly perhaps; we would expect the opposite if any thing – like turning a nice colour photo into a grainy b&w copy by sending it as a fax, but the point is that expression gained in the codification of W3 can be lost when transferring to dW3.^¹

When writing, we use the layout of text on the page to express meaning and certainly penmanship is a language of its own. To your child, who hasn’t picked up a thing off her floor for the last two weeks, you might write a note “Clean up your room!” There will no doubt be a great deal of determination in the way you layout your message, the size of your letters, the thickness of your pen strokes. When transferring W3 into dW3, there has always been a temptation to forgo these expressions of meaning through form and style, in order to save on bandwidth or storage space, or due to primitive technology. The precedent for this was of course the typewriter – though you could at least sign your letters. Though it might seem trivial to some, to others the inability of email to facilitate a handwritten signature is a serious deficiency.

Style can achieve a formal status in the codification of contracts, formulas and laws. There are many cases where the intent of a document can only be derived through the combined interpretation of words, formatting and layout. One of difficulties in transferring paper-based W3 into dW3, other than as digitalized photographic replicas, is the perceived loss of tacit intent expressed in text formatting and layout.

You would be forgiven for assuming that this problem is not insurmountable, but the difficulty is exacerbated when no formal laws govern or describe the methods of layout and style that have evolved though praxis. This is the case in Sweden, which still has no viable solution for giving legal status to dW3 encoded laws.

Once W3 becomes dW3, it gains entrance to the digital commonwealth. It can be stored in computers and transported over networks; but though this brings convenience, in many cases truly remarkable convenience, it is only the beginning of what we can do with dW3.

1Though some actually applaud this development: See http://www.ifla.org/documents/infopol/copyright/lanham1.htm

Natural Language

2005-04-27T15:10:00.000+02:00

If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they’d just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting, where everything goes soft. Language in human hands becomes more like a fluid despite the course grain of its components. Douglas Hofstadter:

Natural language with its extensions in domain specific vocabularies is the cornerstone of human interaction. Due to contextual harmonization – our shared knowledge of people and things and the contextual frameworks we live in, we are able to reuse natural language for an enormous spectrum of human endeavour – the same language is used for poetry, gossip and dirty jokes, as is used in the discourse of science, technology, politics and not least the law. As David Mellinkoff wrote in 1963, in his book on The Language & the Law :”The law is a profession of words”.

The success of language lies with its fungibility and ambiguity. All natural language is ambiguous.

When one person uses a word, he does not mean by it the same thing as another person means by it. I have often heard it said that that is a misfortune. That is a mistake. It would be absolutely fatal if people meant the same things by their words. It would make all intercourse impossible, and language the most hopeless and useless thing imaginable, because the meaning you attach to your words must depend on the nature of the objects you are acquainted with, and since different people are acquainted with different objects, they would not be able to talk to each other unless they attached quite different meanings to their words.

The preceding Bertrand Russell’s quote flies in the face of how we would normally like to look at law. If words are ambiguous, then what is the worth of written law, legal documentation, or case history? Of course students of jurisprudence know that things are not this simple. The Post World War I Freirechtschule movement in Germany was a reaction to literal and sometimes absurd adherence to the letter of the codified law. There target was Begriffsjuriprudenz, the jurisprudence of concepts, which imagined it had constructed a seamless network of rules which answered all problems scientifically, and excluded all extraneous values.

Unfortunately, under the National Socialist regime the idea of departing from the strict language of statute and looking instead at values (which were likely to be subjectively and unpredictably appraised) like the the “spirit” of the law [...] was taken to sinister extremes. [...] An amendment of the German Criminal Code on June 1935 imported a new § 2 which read as follows:^¹

Punishment is to be inflicted on any person who commits an act declared by the law to be punishable, or which, in the light of the basic purpose of criminal law, and according to healthy popular feeling, deserves to be punished. If no specific criminal law applies directly to such an act, it is to be punished according to whatever law, in its basic purpose, best applies to it^²

In science, we use numbers, symbols and formalized logic to obviate ambiguity, and all fields of human endeavour create domain specific taxonomies to the same ends. We look for exactitude, but exactitude comes at a cost. In artistic or cultural or social intercourse we try to avoid exactitude – it is tedious, we cultivate vagueness in its place. The interface between exactitude and vagueness is always problematic. Think of a trial in where the court attempts to create ex post facto exactitude in the carryings on of people who were only carrying on quite vaguely. Our creative use of ambiguity and vagueness is the greatest problem of all in our interaction with machines who don’t really know what to make of it.

Here is an interesting problem. Almanacs and appointment books are great tools, in the form of dW3 they are even better when we wish to synchronize our activities with others. If you are invited to someone’s house for dinner the time of your arrival will normally be stipulated and you will be expected to come roughly at this moment, but very rarely will a host tell you in advance that you must leave at certain time: that would be considered almost rude. If you want to enter this dinner date in your dW3 appointment book, it will invariably ask you to enter a time when the party is over, which you don’t know and don’t usually want to think about unless perhaps you have a baby sitter. Computerized almanacs that organize our appointments always want to know when we are going home even when we don’t want to tell them.

Machines are, at least theoretically, unambiguous. Once correctly constructed and in the absence of material failure, they are expected to act uniformly when given uniform input or instructions. The various parts of a machine communicate with each other, again in theory, unambiguously and machines in concert – machines that interwork, are expected to continue this unambiguous chain of communication. There is no parallel in natural language. The famous game of Grapevine whereas a circle of players will gradually garble a message as it is passed between them, won’t be as fun if machines are invited to the party. Machines are built not to garble messages.

1J.M. Kelly A short history of Western Legal Theory Oxford University Press 1992

2ibid

dW3 that works

2005-04-27T15:09:00.000+02:00

We say that language works because we can, at least most of the time, understand each other, and mathematics works because we multiply and divide entities with confidence that the answers will be correct. If you explain something for me, then I can perhaps fit that together with something else I know and formulate an opinion, or ask someone to do something for me based on your explanation, without resorting to numerical calculation.

I might have a book on my shelf containing all sorts of interesting W3. I can take it down and read that Damascus is the capital of Syria and lies to the south. I have another book next to the first and I can take it down and read that Syria is mostly landlocked, with only a short patch of Mediterranean coast line in the North. Someone asks me if the Syrian capital has a nice harbour and I answer that it seems not to be the case from what I have read.

Now lets say I also have on my shelf a stack of little formulas like л = 3 and the square root of X, and someone writes me a letter and asks if I know what the square root of 529 times л is. I take down the two appropriate formulas and I figure out that the answer is 69. I write that down and send it back to my friend. So far, these examples are similar. In both cases I looked up relevant data and came up with an answer. Of course, I wasn’t totally sure about Damascus, north and south can sort of bleed into each other, and I only assumed that a town without an ocean wouldn’t have a harbour.

Suppose I take all my books and formulas and transfer them into dW3 and keep them on my computer. My computer already has a function for finding the square root of a number and it also has a value for л, though it is not 3, even if the old testament thinks so, my computer doesn’t. Now, when asked the same questions all over again, I will have an easier time of it – I can use my search tool to find all references to Damascus quickly – and as for the math problem, well I merely have to submit the appropriate numbers to my software calculator.

As long as problems are couched in terms that can be interworked with numbers and logic, my computer can easily and unambiguously deal with them, but problems or queries framed in natural language are another matter. Even if I have hundreds of volumes in my computer pertaining to Syria, if the information stored, or the questions asked can not be framed in logic and numbers, I am not going to get straight answers. I ask if Damascus has a harbour, but since it really isn’t on the ocean the chances that some text actually would bother to say that Damascus has no harbour is small. Even if that information was available how could I frame the question to address it and receive a correct answer? Unless W3 is formulated in something computers can unambiguously calculate with it doesn’t count.

It doesn’t count

2005-04-27T15:07:00.000+02:00

The phrase “it doesn’t count” is quite telling. When taken literally, it means that to be important things have to be countable – in numbers. My laptop is connected to the Internet via WiFi, so that I can wonder about in the house and work wherever I please. There is a an indicator on my screen that tells me the quality of the signal I am transmitting with. Some clever heuristics engineer has decided that I would rather have this information in a human fashion – with words rather than numbers. My signal is either excellent, very good, good, poor or very poor, according to this indicator. I don’t really have a problem with this, I can figure out the order of connection quality intended. But what the computer can dish out – it can not take in return. I cant ask my computer to do something excellently or poorly, unless an arrangement has been made in advance as to the numerical value of these terms.

I have often thought how much more fun it would be if the engineers had worked out a scale of 99 adjectives, using words like remarkable, fantastic, dodgy, cool, so-so, pretty good, wonderful, miserable, horrendous, paltry, acceptable, catastrophic, and so on. It would be fun to see if I could learn them in relation to the reception I was experiencing.

Some sporting contests are very difficult to count, not downhill ski racing, where we would never know who was the winner without stopwatches accurate to 100ths second, but disciplines like figure skating, diving, and synchronized swimming. Here the aggregated results of a bench of judges determine the winner. If judges had only the 100 adjectives I fantasized about above, even if all were words familiar to them from daily usage, with no mapping allowed to any sort of numbering or ordering system, there would be no way of determining a winner. The judges could argue just as much about the relative values of the adjectives as they could about the perceived quality of the competitor’s performances. Practitioners of law will recognize the imbroglio.

Tiger Shot a Birdie

2005-04-27T15:05:00.000+02:00

There are several solutions to dealing with ambiguous language. One is to gather about you all the contextual help you can find. If you know the context it is formulated in, then the tittle of this section is no longer ambiguous for you – if it ever was. It is a statement about golf. I could have written, “Tiger Woods shot a birdie on the 17^th hole, but then I would have made the riddle too easy for you. Yet for a dumb machine, it would make little difference if I wrote Tiger, or Tiger Woods, or Tiger Woods the Nike guy, or anything else. “What do I know?”, the computer would say.

Imagine that a machine is used to keep score in a golf tournament. The correct procedure is to feed it the results of every hole for every player. The input routine might be something like this:

Input number of hole: ??

Input contestant’s number: ??

Input score: ??

An operator has been giving the machine the holes, players and scores as stipulated – in numbers, but on the 17^th hole she forgets herself and writes “Tiger shot a birdie on the Road”. What does the machine think now? Well for starters, most machines are not going to let you treat them like that, specially dumb machines are going to demand, that if you want to tell them anything, it has to be said their way – not yours. Such a machine would tell her, “I don’t know what you are talking about – Just numbers in the correct order, thank you!

But if the machine was semi-smart, it might accept free text or natural language input, and have a go at figuring out what the operator meant. To do this it would need to have a rough idea of sentence structure, the rules of grammar and a dictionary. It would also need a taxonomy of the terms most often used within a particular domain, in this case Golf.

Some people are surprised to hear that machine translation or transcription works best for discourse which, as outsiders, we normally consider difficult. We might find the language of doctors obscure and hard to understand and wonder why a machine would have an easier time with a lot of arcane terms than with lite everyday conversation. The answer is of course that machines prefer obscure and arcane words because they are less likely to have ambivalent meanings. They are the code words of a domain – their use is constrained within a limited discourse. When the machine knows that now we are talking medicine, it knows that within medicine these words have crisp definitions.

Local and Global Taxonomies

2005-04-27T15:02:00.000+02:00

The meaning of “birdie”, “Tiger”, and “the Road” could all be mapped within the machine of our example to the numbers it was originally asking for. The use of “shot” in golf is ambivalent, but in our example the machine is looking for the total score of a particular hole and not whether Tiger shot into the woods or onto a bunker. So the value of “shot” is the value of score.

An important detail in the example is the need for certain local and temporal facts that are not part of the generalized corpus of golfing knowledge. Knowing the numerical value of a birdie is dependent upon the par value of the actual hole it is scored on. A birdie is one stroke under par. Tiger’s competition number is not a permanent part of his identity, but rather a designator assigned to him for this particular tournament. “The Road” is the nickname of the 17^th hole at St Andrews, the world’s oldest golf course, and would probably have another numerical equivalent if it was used to designate holes at other courses.

In the interest of commonalization and completeness, the taxonomy of golf, both that which has been established by tradition and that which is topical, localized and event specific, could be shared by the human race, just as the human race shares the dictionaries and encyclopaedias of its many written languages.

Though just who should assume responsibility for such a task is debatable, many IT thinkers believe this is the logical extension of the Internet, the next step in the IT revolution. Provided the costs of such an enterprise could be distributed in a feasible manner, the savings would be significant. Though golf might not be their first concern, governments could build infrastructures of taxonomies for utilitarian purposes in order to create efficiency in computer aided transactions.^¹

Ambiguity is not eliminated in our use of natural language unless we disambiguate words themselves. “Hole” for example has many meanings even in golf. Holes are not just the term that describes a section of the course, holes are everywhere, the actual cup in the centre of a green, wherever an animal decides to dig, in our pockets, etc, so even in the eventual existence of a universal taxonomy on golf, there must be way of discerning what sort of a hole is meant.

One method currently in vogue is to to use double-speak. The general idea is that we would use natural language as it is customary for us to do, and then on top of that, we would add an extra layer of reference pointers for words and phrases to clear up any doubts about their meaning. The reference pointers are addresses to a source of authority. If, for example, we were to write “a kilo of gold” then on top of that we could also write the address of an authority, perhaps somewhere in Paris, where the meaning of “kilo” and “gold” could be resolved. For golf the double-speak score notation could look like this:

Tiger (as defined at address A) shot (as defined at address B) a birdie (as defined at address C) on the Road (as defined at address D).

This technique called mark-up, has probably been around since the Sumerians discovered that a written language, as great as it was for counting crops, still lacked precision, but it passed a milestone in the 1970s with the invention of standardized mark-up languages such as SGML which will be discussed in detail in other parts of this book. Unfortunately double-speak in natural language and SGML is tremendously burdensome and resource demanding, and consequently only a few large corporations and military establishments have adapted the language for use in their daily activities.

Of course any formalized interaction in the absence of hard-wiring, uses common points of reference: This is, for example, what standards are all about, and the modern successor of SGML, called XML, does so in a clever way. It utilizes the already proven addressing and hyper-linking technologies of the Internet as its unique addresses. But what is at the other end of such an address? If a computer agent busily parsing information came upon the predicate phrase “is the owner of” coupled to the address of some authority for the canonical definition of that phrase – what would it find there, if not a definition written – in natural language? What is a poor machine looking for logic and numbers to think of that?

1This is actually what happens when trading systems such as EDI, Electronic Data Interchange and EDIFACT are created. Though EDI is a commercial initiative, EDIFACT is sponsored by the United Nations. See http://www.itworld.com/Man/3830/CWD010703EDIXML/

Contextual Frameworks

2005-04-27T14:55:00.000+02:00

Orality, the act of speaking, qualifies as a world 3 construct, even if its W1 vehicle is only ephemeral air pressure, carrying it on short hops in and out of the subjective realm. With the invention of writing, which Walter Ong calls "The technologizing of the word", the human tribe entered a new world of autonomous discourse.

A deeper understanding of pristine or primary orality enables us better to understand the new world of writing, what it truly is, and what functionally literate human beings really are: beings whose thought processes do not grow out of simply natural powers but out of these powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing. Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does... More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness. Walter J Ong Orality and Literacy¹

An initial and revolutionary effect of literacy was the temporal-spatial decoupling of the written word from its immediate surroundings and this applies, though non-uniformly, to all W3 constructs. Yet once W3 objects are removed in time and space from their W2 origins, the faithful reproduction of original intention becomes dependent upon to what degree the contextual framework (the environment and circumstances) of their origin is available to interpreters.

It is easy to understand that the records of some lost culture stored on microfilm would be unreadable if we had destroyed all our microfilm readers, yet that problem is only technical and could perhaps be solved with some alternative apparatus. But if we did not understand the language used, or if we did not know what people and things named were, or what they did; if we did not grasp the motives, the methods of reasoning, the norms and conventions underlying decisions made - then those microfilms would have little meaning for us, even if they had explicit meaning for their creators.

There is a legal term, "the four corners of an instrument" which audaciously implies that there are documents where all there is to know about their contents is that which lies within the four corners of the paper they are printed on, without need of reference to any extrinsic factors. This contention is myopic - it simply neglects to accept that shared context is an absolute necessity to understanding anything at all. See Borge's spoof with "the four corners of an instrument" below.

Economy in all communication lies in shared context. The famous example of brevity in correspondence, between Victor Hugo and his publisher

"?", wrote Hugo.

"!" answered his Publisher

exemplifies this. The writer was enquiring about the reception to his book and his publisher was answering that it was doing marvellously. In order for these two marks of punctuation to express any meaning at all, both correspondents had to share a considerable amount of knowledge and contextual harmonization.

An example to the opposite extreme is Argentina author Borges' tale On exactitude in Science.

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography^².

The above examples help to illustrate "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" as formulated by Claude Shannon, in one of the most seminal papers in the history of modern technology. In layman terms it goes roughly like this.

The amount of energy and bandwidth needed to send signals between a transmitter and a receiver is measured by:

The pre-existing knowledge shared at both ends of the communications channel
The ratio of what-is-said to that which could-be-said
The interference (or noise) inherent to the channel.

In terms of a, Victor Hugo and his publisher were being extremely efficient because they shared so much pre-existent knowledge. They were contextually harmonized and could express a great deal with minimal effort because of that.

In terms of b, Victory Hugo and his publisher were being inefficient because their communications channel - written language, allows so much to be said, and they were saying so little. Of all the letters, words and punctuation marks at their disposal, they were using only two of the latter.

I realize this might seem counter-intuitive, but think of it this way. If these two men had both spent a great deal of time learning their language and internalizing all sorts of knowledge, and all they did were to write a lot of letters to each other using just these two punctuation marks, then they would have been making wasteful use, of not only their learning, but also of the communications channel built to handle a much richer set of signals.

Writing was invented in order to say anything you could speak, nothing more or less. A written sentence is one in a set of all possible sentences. A communications channel is designed to transmit one particular message from a set of all possible messages. The efficiency of any system is the ratio of what is done, used or said to that which could be done, used or said.

In terms of a, Borges's cartographers were being extremely inefficient because their solution precluded all use of contextual harmonization. Without the use of shared context they were forced to build a hopelessly over-dimensioned channel - the 1:1 map.

In terms of b, the cartographers acted efficiently, because they were making maximum utilization of their channel.

For Shannon channels were wires and airwaves, and signals contained code, text, video and audio coding, but in a wider perspective channels of communication are myriad: the flow of energy in machines, Adam Smith's invisible hand, the facial expression of lovers, the firing of neurons in our brains, the evolution of species by genetic code, and so on. And in every instance Shannon's laws apply. We will return to this in the discussion of trust in the second part of this essay.

1Ongs book

2Translated by Andrew Hurley - copyright Penguin 1999

W3 technology

2005-04-27T14:53:00.000+02:00

Early artefacts, such as those produced by chisel on stone, charcoal on wall, hand on clay or pen on paper were, of course, instrumental in the distribution of W3, and qua technologies, their rational was clear – an increase in the economy, permanence , portability, duplicability and veracity of W3. All of these objectives, weighted according to alternating needs, served to drive the evolution of media technology on the heels, or in many cases, at the forefront, of scientific discovery. We will presently take up the story of that progress at one historical moment; the first large scale introduction of computing powered by electricity, 20 years after Charles Babbage’s marvellous vision of an “Analytic Engine”, a steam powered contraption beyond the technical feasibilities of its time, which was fated to be buried together with its inventor.

The 19^th century saw significant advancement in media technology. Through the harnessing of electricity, a greater understanding of chemistry, and increasingly sophisticated mechanical engineering; lithography (1798), the telegraph, the camera, the typewriter, rotary printing machines, the Wharfedale cylinder press, mechanised paper manufacturing, wireless radio, the telephone, the gramophone, the motion picture camera, and Linotype all saw the light of day.

This was the great analogue age, and it continued until the 1950s, by which time practically all major discovery and invention in analogue technology had been made. From then on, digitalization and medium commonalization has ruled the day, as all media channels merge into a common stream. And though digitalization was the key to matching up binary coded W3 production with logical machines – it is the ensuing commonalization of media channels which vies to be the most significant event in human technology.

Herman’s punch cards

2005-04-27T14:37:00.000+02:00

Censi (or censuses if you will) are a big deal. They help to determine the tax base and the make-up of political constituencies and they underlay the decisions of government. At the end of the 19^th century the US Census Bureau, despite being the single largest employer in the land at the time^¹, was having a rough time keeping up with the rapidly expanding population, swelled by millions of immigrants. By federal law the census was to be taken every ten years, and since the 1880 census had taken eight years to complete, it was feared that the 1890 census would not be finished before the 1900 count was due to begin.

Herman Hollerith put together one of three entries in a Census Bureau contest, staged in order to find a way to speed up the process of tabulating census records. He had knowledge of the Jacquard loom invented almost a hundred years earlier, and during a stint of working for the railroads he had observed the use of what was called a "punch photograph": Conductors, in order to discourage free riders, would punch notches in the edges of a passenger’s ticket denoting their height, colour of eyes and hair, etc. Hollerith amalgamated these technologies into a set of machines that were able to tabulate the collected information on 62 million individuals in a matter of months. The punch cards designed by Hollerith, which were purposely the size of the US dollar, were still in use up into the 1970s and the company which he founded eventually became IBM

Herman Hollerith rationalized the US census with the help of tabulating machines and a warehouse full of punch cards. But there wasn’t a lot of room on the punch cards for the information desired – room for W3 has traditionally come at a premium. Hollerith’s machines calculated statistics that were gathered by an army of census workers called enumerators, part time workers who roamed the country gathering facts about the populace. The enumerator carried scorecards, known as a schedules, on which to notate relevant figures.

Any enumerator is going to see and experience all sorts of things in her work, which she might reflect upon, but which will have no appropriate notch on her scorecard, and for that matter, be of no interest to her employer. In the end, census figures are about the generalities of a populace – not an individual’s personal details. But we may note that any attempt to record even a fraction of the W2 observations of one single enumerator, if so desired, would easily outweigh, in terms of data storage, the relevant statistics of the entire populace. So the filtering of excess W3 begins at the source of its collection.

1Today the Census Bureau has nearly 12,000 employees. The workforce expands dramatically when the census is taken every 10 years. About 860,000 temporary workers were hired for Census 2000.

The design of a data system in terms of completeness

2005-04-27T14:30:00.000+02:00

What can we feasibly know? What do we want to know of “what we can feasibly know”? What can we feasibly do with “what we want to know of what we can feasibly know”? Well for starters, we don’t want to know everything. We don’t want to deal with 1:1 maps of reality. But there is no question that our willingness to accumulate knowledge is influenced by our potential for doing so, including the potential for actually making use of that which we accumulate. In Hollerith’s own words, arguing for increasing the statistical base and the computations carried out:

To know simply the number of single, married, widowed, and divorced persons among our people would be of great value, still it would be of very much greater value to have the same information in combination with age, with sex, with race, with nativity, with occupation, or with various sub-combinations of these data. If the data regarding the relationship of each person to the head of the family were properly compiled, in combination with various other data, a vast amount of valuable information would be obtained. So again, if the number of months unemployed were properly enumerated and compiled with reference to age, to occupation, etc., much information might be obtained of great value to the student of the economic problems affecting our wage-earners.

And in the words of his boss, General Francis A. Walker, Superintendent of the Tenth Census in a letter to Hollerith:

In the census of a country so populous as the United States the work of tabulation might be carried on almost literally without limit, and yet not cease to obtain new facts and combinations of facts of political, social, and economic significance. With such a field before the statistician, it is purely a question of time and money where he shall stop.

The savings in “time and money” delivered by Hollerith’s tabulator were astounding. Rather than taking ten years to add up the results of the census, the automated tabulation took only weeks. It was only natural for Hollerith and Walker to wish to reinvest these savings in more elaborate statistical models. In a modern perspective, with the realization that we could carry out the entire 1990 census tabulation on our home PCs, while taking a coffee break, the 1890 constraints of computation seem very distant, but the collection of W3 is still limited by time and money, even if there are exceptions.

The Ministry for State Security – better known as the Stasi – was the "shield and sword" of East Germany’s state party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). [...] At the time just before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the feared secret police had 91,000 full-time employees and around 175,000 unofficial informers whose job it was to spy on people in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This they did to an extent that is barely imaginable and that took on almost grotesque proportions.

"We must know everything," was the mantra that the Minister for State Security, Erich Mielke, never tired of repeating to his employees, who numbered approximately 5.5 people for every 1,000 citizens. And they took him seriously. Over four decades they gathered information about their victims, writing down even the smallest details and accumulating 184,000 metres of written material in the process. Not to mention 986,000 photographic documents, 89,000 films, videos and sound recordings and 17,870 electronic data storage devices – and this is just the material at the Berlin headquarters^¹.

Apparently a state harbouring the paranoiac suspicion that any citizen could be a covert agent of subversion would want to keep tabs on, well, everyone, damned the cost. Stasi believed they could feasibly eavesdrop on the GDR’s 16 million inhabitants and seem to have had the resources to do so. Though just how they actually accessed and drew conclusions about this 184,000 meters of written material, plus pictures and sound recordings, etc., is something I know little about, I would assume there were problems. After all, they didn’t have Google.

Most directories are not as complete as Stasi’s, because such completeness is neither practical nor affordable: Decisions must be made about what to include and what to exclude. The design of the Hollerith punchcards was made at a time where the limits of physical space and technological feasibility still played a decisive role in determining the quality and quantity of what was stored on them, and until quite recently this has always been the case. W3 has always been at the mercy of the medium built to hold it and the tabulating technology meant to calculate it.

1Goethe Institute web page – http://www.goethe.de/kug/ges/ztg/thm/en162253.htm

Who you gonna call?

2005-04-27T14:28:00.000+02:00

A famous American newspaper has as its slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print”. Without examining exactly what that implies in the way of editorial criteria, is seems that a more appropriate motto would be, “All the news that fits in print”, since the paper-based distribution format of the paper can not possibly contain more than a fraction of all the news. As nice as paper is to read off, and as convenient as it is to have it delivered to your door in sync with your morning coffee, it is not the most suitable medium for completeness.

Consider the paper-based telephone catalogue, the size and scope of which is determined by the material it is printed on, the area of distribution intended, the relevance of information to users, various utilitarian considerations, and, not trivially, the business model of the publisher. Further, some (private) subscribers will not want to find themselves listed and other (commercial) subscribers might prefer that their competitors were not.

The digitalization of catalogue media transforms these constraints from being factors determining inclusion and exclusion, to factors determining effective selection through filtering. There is literally no technical hinder for an Internet based catalogue of all the world’s telephone subscribers with their telephone numbers, street addresses, email addresses, professed profession or whatever. And there is, technically, no need for the existence of more than one such catalogue service.

In such a catalogue, proximity relevance is maintained by proximity– relevant search criteria like: find me all the Pizzerias in Durban, or all the Marias on my block. Commercial exposure can still be made possible by paid advertising appearing in conjunction with search results.

Or what if you wished to buy a car? Perhaps you are thinking – well, maybe a used car, that is all I can afford at the moment, and you set out to find some likely prospects. You look in the newspapers and on the Internet and maybe shop around at car lots. But the more extensively you search, the effectiveness of that search diminishes, because only a decreasingly smaller portion of the potential cars that would suit your taste and budget will turn up as you access new sources, and you will begin to see duplicate listings as well. If all the cars for sale were listed at one source, then your task would be different. Rather than having to worry about finding enough potential cars to make an optimal choice from – you would have to worry about having too many good alternatives to bother to evaluate them all.

Why is this not the case then? Why are there so few complete directories? Is it because legacy business models built on outdated technologies are so firmly entrenched in the market? Yes, this is partly true, when the accumulation of data is costly it often leads to a few specialist firms slicing up the pie between themselves. Path dependencies play their part and wannabe competitors find that the thresholds to market entry are high. But there is more to it than that.

If there are things to buy or know about, then we can assume that somebody owns them or somebody knows about them. These owners and knowers normally have some way of representing their holdings. They create w3 or dW3 representations; descriptions, abstracts, catalogues, menus and so forth. Often these representations are created for use within an interpersonal or corporate contextual framework. Without knowledge of the framework and the taxonomies used, representations can be ambiguous or meaningless to outsiders – even in dW3 formats made available over the Internet.

Directory middlepeople, or infomediaries as they are sometimes called, map the taxonomies and contextual frameworks of holders and seekers. Sally wants a Culowop, Kim has an Undel. Depak the infomediary, knowing that a Culowop actually is the same thing as an Undel, helps Sally by mapping between the two terms. Sally, when looking for Culowops, is shown Kims Undel in Depak’s directory.

Or Depak creates his own term, for culowops and undels,, so that both Kim and Sally must learn to map their own taxonomies to Depak’s, in order to find each other. If this is the case, Depak will effectively isolate Kim and Sally from any eventual harmonisation of their taxonomies. Making himself indispensable to both.

At the same time Depak might offer other services to Kim and Sally. He might provide some degree of quality assurance to both buyers and sellers. He might personalize interactions, making recommendations based on his knowledge of particular field. He might offer an appealing solution to the complexity of flimsily structured markets and ambivalent information flows. But above all he offers entrance into a network, albeit a very primitive one, limited by the technology available.

Here is a story I heard at a conference: An attractive position at Charlotte and Bob’s firm had been advertised and 200 applications came in through the post. Bob took 180 of them off the top of the stack and threw them in the trash. Charlotte was shocked, “What in the hell are you doing?” Bob points to the trash and answers, “We don’t want to hire anybody who is that unlucky do we?

It’s a funny story, but it is possible that Bob and Charlotte just didn’t have the resources to thoroughly check out all those 200 CVs anyway, and that Bob’s action was not that irrational. After all, a great deal of selective choice is made quite arbitrarily. What Bob and Charlotte needed was more information working on its own. They needed a better filtering system to avoid making arbitrary choices.

Programs

2005-04-27T14:26:00.000+02:00

Once Hollerith’s cards were punched with the information from the enumerator’s schedules, what did the tabulating machines do with them? That’s simple – they calculated. They counted. They aggregated the figures the census bureau needed to report to congress. But what does that mean? Today we would say that Hollerith wrote a program that added up all the values of some attribute in a certain column or row: Hollerith and his assistants performed a primitive variation of what we, today, call hard-wiring. When one task was finished they had to get down on all fours and open up the machines and rebuild them for the next job, but call it what you may, they were programming.

And in their “programs” W3 data, as perceived and filtered by the enumerators, was run against a set of instructions. The individual cards representing the populace became the variables, the XYZ’s of a mathematical problem. W3 meets logic.

Now, when one thinks logically and perhaps writes down some mathematics or syllogisms on a piece of paper, one creates W3, sure, but there are many people who believe that mathematics and logic are different from other W3 data; that numbers and logic would exist even if we humans were not around to think about them and write them down: They don’t need W2 to get created and they don’t need W3 to keep them alive. Well, that would also be true for most W1 stuff like Mount Everest and the Amazon River, even if they would miss out on having such nice names. As Richard Feynman was fond of saying, “nature doesn’t care what anyone thinks”. But mathematics and logic, as some people believe, would be around even if there was no W1. They would exist a priori to all three worlds.

Mathematics and logic, free from any dependence on sense perception, are the algorithms of our computer programs and corporal machines. This might help to explain the self-assured attitude of the IT work force. Their stock and trade are a priori truths.

After Hollerith

2005-04-27T14:16:00.000+02:00

After the 1890 census, things have only gotten better for the IT industry. Certainly machines are more powerful, ridiculously faster, and apparently one can now put megabytes of data on the head of a pin. I have already pointed out under the four Cs of the Great Commonwealth what I believe to be the most significant aspects of the sector today, commonality, commoditization, communality and completeness, and now I would like say something about the evolution of dW3.

In the industry it is customary to speak of layers^¹ and the metaphor often used in explaining these layers is as follows: There is a train track and any train that observes the wheelbase of the track can travel on it. The track need know nothing about the train, the train need only trust that the track will hold. On any flatcar of the train one can place a container. The container must fit on the flatcar of course, but need not know more about the flatcar than whether it will hold. The container has no business with the train track at all. The container can take any sort of good that fits into the limits of its inner dimensions. The goods have no business with the flatcar, or the train track.

So here we have 4 independent entities, track, car, container and goods, and they are dependent only upon their closest neighbour in the stack of layers. The system is flexible and congenial to the interchangeability of elements. An absurd counter-example would be if all goods had to be adapted to transport themselves directly on the track itself. If somebody made some improvements in the track, then all the goods would have to be redesigned to still use it.

Observe that the individual cars of a train are not considered separate layers, but members of the same horizontal layer. They must all meet the requirements of the track and provide uniformly for the containers.

This metaphor when applied to computing comes out something like this: The computing machinery is the track, the flatcar is the operating system, the container is the computer program and the goods are dW3.

My counter-example is roughly what Hollerith had to deal with. The computer, the operating system and the program,^², were all the track, and the W3 goods had to deal with them as such. The entire arrangement was task-specific, though Hollerith could somewhat adjust the task by getting out some pliers and a screwdriver.

I need not, I’m sure, tell you that through the years the layered approach to computing gradually replaced hardwired monolithic ways of doing things and gave rise to the commoditization of the industry and the commonalization of dW3. Task-specific requirements were moved to the highest layer of the stack, or in the perspective of another metaphor, to the ends of the computing channels.

1The most common system has seven layers and is much more technical than the one I have described here. See http://www2.rad.com/networks/1994/osi/layers.htm

2all of which are modern terms not used in Hollerith’s time

Task-specificity

2005-04-27T14:13:00.000+02:00

Since I have somewhat mixed metaphors, I feel obliged to give you an example. Digital sound or music production might start with a task-specific microphone and end with a task-specific loudspeaker. Digital image processing might start with a task-specific camera and end with a task-specific plasma screen or printer. These devices are the first-in and last-out elements of the production process. Once pictures and sounds are captured and converted into dW3, their task-specificity makes no special demands on the hardware of the computing system^¹. They share memory, keyboard and mouse, processing power, graphic interface, and a host of other functions available on the generic, general purpose computer.

Inside the computer, task-specificity is maintained by software applications designed to work respectively on sounds or pictures, on top of an operating system that is common to them both. But even at application level commonality plays its part , since many of the software modules these applications are built of are the same for both tasks.

This has not always been the case, the initial computer based production tools for calculation, word processing, preprint layout; sound editing, picture editing, CAD (Computer aided design), CAM (computer aided manufacturing), and video editing, all arrived on the market in the form of non-modular task-specific dedicated machines^².

When each of these devices was developed and first introduced, they exhibited superior performance and added additional features to the previous way of “doing things by hand”. They were also better than the software-only products running on general purpose computers that were released in their wake.

But in each case, the general purpose computer, fuelled by commonalization and commoditization, made these task-specific tools obsolete, and software-only products, running on the general purpose computer, eventually drove task-specific machines out of the marketplace.

1There are exceptions to this – for example the video accelerator cards coveted by gamers.

2I am sure this list could be extended into many more domains, but I have included only the ones I have had personal experience with.

Ask not what your dW3 can do for us – ask what we can do for your dW3

2005-04-27T14:10:00.000+02:00

Most W3 works better as dW3. You might prefer an original oil painting to its digital copy, – no matter how fine the resolution of the copy. You might prefer experiencing a symphony orchestra live as opposed to hearing it on a compact disc. I, and most people I know would much rather read a book in its traditional form rather than scrolling through its pages on a computer screen. But if we wish to do things with W3 other than first hand personal consumption, if we wish to copy, to analyse, to edit, modify, compact, index, store, compare, calculate, encrypt or distribute – then dW3 works best.

Since we are already familiar with a metaphor for layers we might as well reuse it again in the context of dW3.

The bits – the ones and zeros of binary logic are the track all dW3 must travel on. The representational syntaxes; the alphabets of written languages, the spatial-temporal encoding of waves of light, electricity and atmospheric pressure, these are the flatcars. The containers are the grammatical rules of each media. And the goods? The goods are the meaning, the message, the expression – the raison d’être for all W3. It is possible to compute at any of these four layers, but the complexity involved increases as one moves upwards in the stack.

Computers can do a great deal with digital bits without having the slightest idea of what they represent. They can dumbly store them and dumbly send them places, dumbly discover redundancies in their sequential patterns and compress them, or dumbly encrypt them to make them secret. This is the railroad track level.

At the flatcar level, the computer must know something about the encoding syntax of the various media forms of dW3. The computer must know that A,B and C are letters of an alphabet, and that certain combinations of bits represent colours or fonts or the amplitude of a wave of sound. At this level computers can sort and filter, index, and hyperlink. More clever forms of data compression and encryption can be employed.

At the container level, computers can spell check and grammar check, flesh out the beats-per-minute in a musical recording, make assumptions about pictures^¹ and find even more sophisticated methods for compression and encoding for purposes of secrecy.

And then there is the goods level where the computer can carry out tasks only possible though some understanding of what it is working with. To compute at the goods level the computer must be able to derive the meaning and intent. In other words computers must be able to think. But can they?

1You have perhaps heard about “decency filters” that look for an abundance of pink flesh in photos in order to block pornography from the eyes of children. Apparently pictures of farm animals, primarily pigs, are the most prominent victims of this technology

The Turing Test

2005-04-27T14:05:00.001+02:00

“The imitation game” is a 1950s thought experiment formulated by Alan Turing, one of the great pioneers in computing. Today we call it the Turing Test. “Can machines think?” was then – still is – a pressing issue. But there is a problem involved in asking this question: Since we don’t really know how humans think, or exactly what thinking is for that matter, how can we reasonably ask if machines do it? If we could deductively determine how a mind works and map it all out and know what and where to measure then we would not need a Turing test.

Either we take the solipsistic view that we don’t really know whether anyone other than ourselves actually does think – or exist for that matter, or we grant that things are as they seem: Other humans do exist and think because they appear to do so. If machines also appear to do so, then Turing was willing to grant them the ability to think.

Turing’s proposal was to test machines in the same way we would test another human. If, to any rational observer, machines seemed to think in the same way that humans seem to think; if machines were indistinguishable from humans in their responses to question that we asked them – then we would have to join Turing in granting them the ability to think just as we grant it to fellow humans.

In Turing’s test an examiner would submit questions in writing to two unseen and unheard examinees, one human – the other a machine. If the examiner could not distinguish between the two by their written answers then she would have to concede that machines can think.

If we think they think

2005-04-27T12:22:00.000+02:00

If you call up the train station and ask them for a ticket for the next train to the moon^¹ and the voice at the other end of the phone chuckles and asks if you will be needing a sleeping birth, you will probably assume that you are speaking with a thinking human, but if the same voice kindly informs you that she has trouble hearing what you are saying and asks if you perhaps meant Thenon, or Thamun, or Des Moines, then you might consider the possibility that you were talking to a non-thinking robot.

But you could be wrong. Since the alternative towns suggested in the latter alternative all lie on different continents, it is very unlikely that the second voice, if she was a robot, would have those destinations in her data bank; it might very well be a person spoofing you into thinking she was a machine just for fun. And since pranksters do call up travel agencies and ask for train tickets to the moon, it is quite possible that the first voice was actually a clever computer system that had learned to parry such an enquiry with a funny answer. You never know.^²

Well whether you know or not doesn’t always matter and call centre personnel are not required to pass Turing tests, but that doesn’t matter either. The point is: did the interactive exchange work? Did you get your ticket to wherever you wanted to go? Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web has proposed the Semantic test, “which is passed if, when you give data to a machine, it will do the right thing with it."

Was the experience pleasurable? Sure that is important too, but that is another sort of Turing test. Could a rational observer discern which of two voices was pleasurable and which was not? I believe so – no matter if they were droid or human. We do get pleasure from cartoons, the figures of which are far closer related to anthropomorphic robots than people. Computer gamers apparently have no difficulty in getting jazzed up over Lara Croft’s extruding body parts.

1This example is inspired by a song by Chantal Kreviazuk.

To get a good idea of what state of the art voice recognition is try Julie, the automated voice at Amtrack in the USA: 1-800-USA-RAIL

Hi there, I’m Lara Croft, and I am going to help you with your income tax filing

2005-04-27T12:20:00.000+02:00

If Lara Croft© was franchised out to polities in order to create a pleasurable citizen-government agency interaction, kindly yet resolutely fielding your enquiries over the phone and on websites; if The Sims© were hired to act as your personal cicerone through the maze of state bureaucracy, tax filings, permit submissions, etc. would anyone complain on any other grounds than silliness?

That depends upon just what sort of authority Lara and The Sims^¹ would be granted. The automation of citizen-government interaction is a touchy business.

Computer games are not silly – well maybe their story lines and characters are, but their systems architecture is anything but.^² A modern computer game is first and foremost an artificial world with spatial and narrative boundaries that can never be transgressed. In the snowboarding game SFX, the ends of the world appear to be defined by laws of gravity. In snowboarding you gain inertia by going down hill and lose it when going up, the principle is familiar to anyone who has ever been on a ski slope. So the ends of the SFX world are never reached, only revealed as uphill and though you can see further your momentum can’t get you there.

In a modern game everything works, that is, every W1 object has properties and rules for interacting with other objects. In SFX there is obviously a great deal of snow and anywhere you run your board over it, the snow will be slightly deformed and show your tracks. The programmers don’t know or care exactly where you wander, they just assign snow certain properties and your snowboard certain properties and when they meet a computation will be made based on them; the type of snow – ice or powder, affects the friction of your board, and the size of your board affects the snow.

In the computer game Grand Theft Auto, you can hit, kick, shoot or run over any man, woman or child you come across. The programmers don’t know who it will please you to injure or kill, so every character must have a script for how they react when being injured or killed in a certain way. Further; windows, walls, lampposts, trash cans, and a host of other objects must be predisposed to act when impacted with any object in any fashion.

“Urban Resolve” is a computer game developed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, is not all that different from Grand Theft Auto, or Counter Strike. It is about people trying to kill each other. Using massive computing power, it is capable of modelling the behaviour of nearly 1 million entities – soldiers, civilians, cars, tanks etc.

The game support around 30 human players, plus thousands of computer-generated robots who make their own decisions without human input: Some of these robots have very complicated personalities and require a whole Pentium processor on their own. The soldiers and the buildings in the system can be replaced with almost any characters or any physical structures in any type of scene, For instance, police could play Urban Resolve, in order to learn how to deal with riots, or deter hooliganism at football games.^³

You cannot easily insert Lara Croft into Urban Resolve, even if her skills would be of a great advantage in the game, because Lara lives in another world, as does the car thief in GTAIII and the street-smart urbanites of the Sims: these worlds despite their graphical similarities are not compatible.

But humans are inserted into Urban Resolve, voluntarily through an interface that is provided for them, or involuntarily via various sensing devices that garner our movements. It is apparent, as computing power increases and the capabilities of realtime computerized sensory perception become more sophisticated, that games such as these can be used not only to simulate combat but to engage in it; not only to simulate business and government, but to transact it.

The key to semi-real – semi-simulated games is in the statistical nature of impersonal interaction. Participating robots are not expected to pass the Turing test, but rather Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic test; they must do the right thing. And the right thing is statistically determined.

A simulation is in some ways quite like any other dW3 representation that can be used in computation. The difference is that a simulation is dynamic, it reflects historic change over time and attempts to model the future through statistically derived probabilities.

1My spellchecker tells me that Sims is not a word despite the fact that Google reports 13,200,000 instances of it on the Internet. There is some interactivity that needs to be improved. My spellchecker which calls itself a spellchecker doesn’t recognize the word spellchecker either!

2The author of this essay is not a computer gamer, nor does he condone the violence in the games mentioned here.

3My knowledge of Urban Resolve comes solely from an article in Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65403,00.html

Part 2 Trust

2005-04-27T12:18:00.000+02:00

This is the second part of a two part essay. The ordering is traditional (reverse-blog) page flow.

The bell tower

2005-04-27T12:14:00.000+02:00

A few summers back, when my wife turned a good round number of years, I commemorated the occasion by building her a tower in a cow pasture on the island of Gotland. The tower, which is approximately 10 meters tall supports a bevy of wind chimes, weighing together several hundred kilos. The chimes which are iron piping tuned to the intervals of a C major 9 chord, hang from the tower top suspended on chains and wires.

Our summer house that looks out over my wife’s birthday present happens to be situated in one of the windiest areas of Sweden; inevitably some hours of my vacation must be reserved for countering the effects of winter storms on dislodged pieces of both tower and house.

I was shopping for some replacement parts at the local hardware store recently, and I asked how many kilos a particular gauge of wire would hold for.

Oh it will hold for a great deal, said the salesperson.
Yeah I’m sure, but isn’t there some system of measurement which states how strong these different wires are. Cows walk under our tower and I really want to be on the safe side.
I see, you are looking for a tested wire – you are looking for wire that costs 4 times more than these here. But we don’t carry them – no one bothers with that sort of thing – the're not worth the extra cost.
I don’t want to pay four times more either – if you can just give me some indication of how strong these wires are and what they will hold for...
These are strong wires. How heavy are your chimes? ... No problem these will do just fine.

Now, If you were to wander about on the farms of this Baltic island you would see wires put to all kinds of uses; binding things together, holding things up, tying things down. What wire, rope or chain to use in what situation, is the kind of tacit knowledge that abounds in agricultural communities: There is a way to do things – the normal way to do things, honed and sharpened by generations of farmers and adjusted here and there for changes in materials and circumstances. an evolutionary collective judgement of reliability and performance: a reputational system.

This knowledge of the normal way to do things has two depths. Firstly, there is the direct solution to a specific problem, and then there is the knowledge that there is a normal way of doing something, and, well, if I don’t know – one of my neighbours will. “In this sort of situation we normally use this type of wire, which we normally buy at Norby’s hardware store, where they normally sell reliable products.”

The everyday this-is-what-we-use wire and the high-priced tested&guaranteed wire represent social capital working in two different ways; one, a formal network of legally enforced responsibility and liability, and two, a loose, unwritten reputation-based pool of common knowledge. Both influence each other and sometimes the boundaries between them might not always be clear.

Social Capital

2005-04-27T12:02:00.000+02:00

Social capital consists of the stock of active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviours that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action possible. (Cohen and Prusak 2001)^¹

The term social capital is slippery. Currently, promoted by the work of Robert Putnam, the term is often interpreted as civic virtue. In Putnam’s best selling, Bowling Alone, he systematically takes stock of the state of social capital in America, and finds it depressingly on the decline. The catchy title of his book refers to the slump in bowling league participation. Bowling is apparently the most popular competitive sport in the United States, and though bowling itself has not declined as an activity, organized competition in leagues has done so drastically. Bowling is just one of hundreds of Putnam’s examples of how Americans are less apt to get together in organized gatherings – becoming increasingly disconnected as traditional social structures disintegrate.

In Europe we are more familiar with the work of Pierre Bourdieu^², who originally saw social capital as an individual or her family’s investment in non-material resources needed to gain entrance to a social network, which “... are not a natural given and must be constructed through investment strategies oriented to the institutionalization of group relations, usable as a reliable source of other benefits.^³

A common denominator when considering social capital is that there is no direct conversion to tangible measurements in Euros, Dollars and Yen. An individual, firm or country might have X amount of money in the bank or a positive trade balance, and this is something we can put on the ledger books, but if these same organisms have stocks of social capital, if we can even agree on what they are, how do we use them to balance the books.

I find it odd that the institution of law is left out as a prime ingredient of social capital. I suppose that law is considered too formal, and that it should belong to some other category of capital – institutional or legal or political. But the influence of law on societal interaction, in all but the most totalitarian of systems must share its impact with the of influence of norms, and who is to say exactly where the one leaves off and the other begins? And how could this be measured?

Nor do the definers of social capital choose to include the externalities of technology, the socially cohesive factors of advertising, loyalty programs and branding, fashion and collective cultural consumption, standardization, or for that matter the four Cs of information technology summarized at the beginning of this essay. Perhaps they too all have their own capital rubric? But then how would we collectively speak of them?

Fukuyama has a point when he say that many [definitions] refer to manifestations of social capital rather than to social capital itself. By his definition, social capital is an informal norm that promotes cooperation between two or more individuals. [...] that must be instantiated in an actual human relationship. [...] trust, networks, civil society, and the like which have been associated with social capital are all epiphenominal, arising as a result of social capital but not constituting social capital itself. ^⁴

I maintain that social capital is that which reduces friction between interacting parties, through the enhancement of trust. Social capital reduces transaction costs. It enables, simplifies, makes more effective, and extends the range of interactions and transaction between people, firms, and rulers/administrators. In the interest of reducing transaction costs, all channels of social capital are in competition with each other, as are various forms of governance and economic activity. In the long run whoever and whatever promotes the most trust wins. In the mould of legal positivism, it is not dependent upon moral or political correctness, and not a matter of virtue at all.

The philosopher John Searle speaks of “collective intentionality” which beyond engagement in collective behaviour, entails the sharing of intentional states, such as beliefs and desires. He believes that this collective intentionality is biologically innate in some species . He points out that it takes no cultural apparatus or convention, or even language for animals to move together in a pack or hunt together. Perhaps it is this innate propensity for sharing beliefs and behaviour that is the root of all social capital.^⁵

In the Social Construction of Reality, Peter Berger and Tomas Luckmann describe the interaction of two individuals de novo: they come from social worlds that have been historically produced in segregation from each other. As they interact, typifications will be produced.

A watches B perform. [She] attributes motives to B’s actions and seeing the actions recur, typifies the motives as recurrent. [...] From the beginning, both A and B assume this reciprocity of typification. In the course of their interaction these typifications will be expressed in specific patterns of conduct. That is, A and B will begin to play roles vis-á-vis each other. [...] it is clear that institutionalization is already present in nucleo.

The most important gain in this development, according to Berger and Luckmann, is that each will be able to predict the other’s actions. Concomitantly, the interaction of both becomes predictable. [...] They save time and effort, not only in whatever external tasks they might be engaged in separately or jointly, but in terms of their respective psychological economies.

Berger and Luckmann mean that these individuals are creating (through habitualization) a Background, comparable to the Contextual Frameworks of communication described earlier in this essay, Bourdieu’s Habitus and Habermas/Schutz Lifeworlds^⁶. The background relieves tension, saves time and effort and stabilizes interactions, as each participant is able to predict the others actions. “...a social world will be in [the] process of construction, containing within it the roots of expanding institutional order.”

These typifications and habitualizations are, of course, the origins of trust. As Berger and Luckmann’s two individuals reproduce and multiply, eventually spawning a society, institutional order will materialize, and their personal trust will evolve into a multifaceted flora of tools. Trust will become mechanised, as technologies of locking, enclosing, and hiding proliferate. Trust will be legalized, as kings and polities refine the distribution of coercive force, and under political panoply individuals seek redress for broken promises. Trust will be normalized through custom, culture, and trade. And trust will be collectively emotionalized, via advertising, branding and public relations. Collectively these channels promote predictability in human interaction. This is the full extent of social capital. Its distribution in society is not uniform.

Trust is essential to the flow of information, the interaction of dW3. All possible channels of trust will unceasingly be in competition with each other in a bid to reduce transaction costs. Diverse cultures, traditions and the various forms of social capital in their widest perspective will adapt to technology in unforeseeable ways, constantly reforming and creating new channels of trust with new opportunities and pit falls.

1Cohen, D. and Prusak, L. (2001) In Good Company. How social capital makes organizations work, Boston, Ma.: Harvard Business School Press

2Putnam, and Italy, names an American, I.J. Hanifan, as the originator of the term Social Capital, and both Putnam and Francis Fukuyama credit sociologist James S Coleman with “putting the term “firmly and finally on the intellectual agenda” in the 1980’s. Putnam mentions Bourdieu summarily in Bowling Alone, while Fukuyama ignores him completely in both “Trust” and “The end of History and the Last Man”. According to Portes, “Bourdieu’s analysis is arguably the most theoretically refined among those that introduced the term in contemporary sociological discourse”.

3Bourdieu, P. The forms of capital. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. JG Richardson, pp.241-58. New York: Greenwood.

4Francis Fukuyama Social Capital and Civil Society The Institute of Public Policy George Mason University, 1999

5John R. Searle The Construction of Social Reality Free Press, New York, 1995

6This subject has its own field of study: Ethnomethodology. See http://www.hewett.norfolk.sch.uk/curric/soc/ethno/intro.htm

China Syndrome

2005-04-27T11:55:00.000+02:00

At the time of this writing China is the world powerhouse in manufacturing. China, according to an Economist global survey, is currently producing two-thirds of the worlds photocopiers, microwave ovens, DVD players and shoes, over half of all digital cameras and around two-fifths of personal computers. It seems almost irrelevant to speak of the importance of social capital and transaction costs in the face of this massive profusion of exported goods, fuelled by an abundance of cheap labour, and in the opinion of some economists, an artificially low exchange rate.

By some estimates, there are almost 200m underemployed workers in rural areas that could move into industry. This surplus labour may take at least two decades to absorb, helping to hold down wages for low-skilled workers (who currently earn less than 50 cents an hour)Economist

It would seem as if cheap labour is the ultimate competitive weapon in trade between regions that still maintain labour market disequilibrium. Yet this is a misleading simplification. Cheap labour is abundant in many parts of the world which come nowhere near to matching China’s performance since the current period of economic and political reform that was begun in 1978. Though the makeup of social capital in China may differ extensively with that of the western world, it nevertheless exists and plays an important part in that country’s double-digit GDP growth. And though guanxi^¹ may not be the equivalent of Parent Teachers Associations and Rotary Clubs it nevertheless seems to work just as well as an epiphenomenon of social capital .

The Chinese system of network capitalism works through the implicit and fluid dynamic of relationships. On the one hand, this is a process that consumes much time and energy. On the other hand, it is suited to handling complexity and uncertainty. Networks offer greater capacities for generating and transmitting new information, and when they are sustained by trust-based relationships they offer a cushion against the possibility of failure that is a concomitant of uncertainty. We have argued that, in this last respect, the networks of the emergent Chinese capitalism are qualitatively different from those within the Western market system, for the latter continue to be based on legal contract and ownership rights rather than on long-term trust relationships.^²

Another factor affecting China’s current successes, could perhaps be called world or planetary social capital, the hedging, hesitating yet visible willingness of sovereign nations and firms to join in global organizations such as the United Nations, the WTO, ISO, and the ITU. They are of course all formal bodies – institutions, but nevertheless manifestations of social capital – the evolutionary extensions of Berger and Luckmann´s two Robinson Crusoes meeting up on a dessert island . They promote trust and reduce the costs of interaction

1Gūanxì, translated as "relationship", has been a central concept in Chinese society and describes a personal non-transferable connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favour or service.

2From fiefs to clans and network capitalism: explaining China’s emerging economic order Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 1996 by Max Boisot, John Child

Transaction Costs

2005-04-27T11:37:00.000+02:00

In his famous essays, "The Nature of the Firm", from 1937 and "The Problem of Social Cost", written in 1960, the economist and Nobel laureate Ronald Coase investigated the dichotomy of firms (command mechanisms) and markets (price mechanisms). He asked why would we choose one method of organizing business over the other. If the Soviet Union was such a bad idea – why is General Motors a good one? Why not give all the workers at General Motors their freedom, close down the GM corporation for automobile manufacturing and replace it with the GM market place of automobile manufacturing? And while we are at it, integrate it with the marketplace of car sales? Let Adam Smith’s invisible hand take care of it all.

Assuming that markets are the most efficient method of conducting business, Coase postulated that the only rationale for the existence of firms is that they reduce transaction costs. We know from personal experience that it is often a lot easier just to tell people what to do – without haggling about it first. From the aspect of an industrial output, the USSR didn’t do too badly, at least in the beginning, though eventually the Soviets hierarchical command mechanisms fell short in dealing with the complexity of manufacturing and distributing goods.

In a marketplace each actor absorbs their own cost of participation. If one sums up the total of each individual actor’s costs this makes for a tidy sum. An argument in favour of firms is that by incorporating all these individual actors into a command hierarchy many of their participation costs will be eliminated. The firm reduces the costs for each individual it commands and internalizes the savings.

General Motors experienced, (is still experiencing) the same sort of problems of inefficiency and waste as did the Soviet Union, but has been partially able to mitigate them by shaving off bits and pieces of their firm and turning them into markets. For example, instead of making car seats, create a market for car seats and let would-be suppliers bid to win GM contracts. The extent of this process of defirming, according to Coase’s theory, is, all other things being equal, a product of transaction costs.

In a hypothetical situation where there were no transaction costs at all – a so-called zero-transaction cost environment, goods and services would be created and distributed solely on the basis of supply and demand and the appropriate system would be the that which dealt best with the complexities involved. Coase believed that in a zero-transaction-cost environment, the firm would be outperformed by traders operating in open markets.

The argument is compelling and Coase’s thinking is often cited amongst the digerati when discussing the development of the Internet. Spellbound by the apparent infallibility of Moore’s law, designers of information systems believe that they are on their way to attaining near-zero-transaction costs in a wide spectrum of endeavour – basically anywhere human action can be replaced by machines operating on dW3. The Internet is of course seen as the prime example of a near-zero-transaction cost environment.

Just as for many other terms in economics, trying to pin down exactly what transaction costs are can be exasperating, as these costs are constantly subsumed by goods and services as they travel down the value path. Once a loaf of bread or a television crosses the threshold of your home, you don’t worry about all the metamorphosing and transactions these items have gone through. Bread costs one Euro, televisions cost 100 Euros – and that’s it. The economist Stephen Cheung estimates that the 80% of the GDP of Hong kong (mainly as a result of servicing economic activity in China) derives from transaction costs and that..

in the modern world, it would be difficult to find a rich country where transaction costs sum to less than half of national income.^¹

Cheung also points out that transaction costs are most often confused with transportation costs.

The truth of the matter, of course, is that transaction cost is not the same thing as transportation cost. Changes in transaction costs, in one dimension or another, would generally lead to changes in the contractual or organizational structure. This is so because it may be possible to reduce transaction costs by rearranging institutions: the society we live in and the way we conduct economic activities depend upon the magnitude and type of cost which govern institutions in its numerous forms.

In the case of the Internet, it was the replacement of the telecommunication industry’s technological institution (dedicated circuit-switched telephone lines) by the Internet’s institution (packet switched networks) that reduced both transportation and transaction costs by an almost unfathomable factor. On the Internet, transportation and transaction costs are commingled in the packet switched technology.^²

Here is an ad hoc list of transaction costs that could be assumed by trading partners::

The marketing of goods and services; the discovery of goods, services, trading partners and agents of intermediation; representations of intentions and capabilities; exploratory, committal, and post committal negotiations; contracts, and the declaration of transaction-specific assets and liabilities; declaration of compliance with laws and treaties, authorizations, certifications, authentications, escrow, bank guarantees; administration of transportation, insurances, asset transfers, settlement and clearance; post-transaction liability and dispute resolution, warranties and service agreements.

Looking at the list above we can imagine separate agents for every individual entry - the intermediaries of transaction. Imagine a bustling city street lined with offices specializing in these tasks. It could be in Algiers, where, according to the World Bank report cited below, there are 16 separate procedures for registering property. Or poor unfortunate Vientiane in Laos, where it takes 53 seperate procedures to enforce a contract. Imagine yourself wandering in and out of crowded office waiting rooms with a briefcase full of paperwork, filling in forms, paying fees, ever in search of signatures and the rubber stamp of approval.

And then think about Amazon.com. It is not just that we transport our orders to Amazon, and authorize payments via our Internet terminals, but that we can also discover goods, discover trading partners (third party used book sellers), get third party appraisals by book reviewers who themselves are appraised by book review readers, and so on. At eBay we can do even more. A recent article in the New York Times estimated that 500,000 people actually made a full– or half-time living buying and selling on eBay.

Once again we are looking at a system of layers. The employees of Amazon do not write the books, nor does eBay produce the goods sold through its network. Amazon and eBay set up markets where friction in transactions are significantly removed. Their effort is primarily a semantic one. There is nothing that is sold through either that could not be offered on other web pages, discovered found by a search engine and bought with a credit card, but these two companies offer a schema for just how information is presented and transacted, and it all happens at one trusted Internet address. Of course it is not, at least technically, inconceivable for a powerful player such as Google to organize such an effort.

The Peruvian economist Herman de Soto believes that formal property titles, or rather the lack of them, explains to a large extent the poverty of many of the poorer regions of the planet. He maintains that there is a great deal of wealth, even among the poor, that can not be put to use, simply because it is not formally accounted for. It has no place in the formal systems of ownership.

“Doing Business in 2005”, a World Bank report tracks “regulation that enhance business activity and those that constrain it” in 145 countries, using 7 sets of measures; Starting a business, hiring and firing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, enforcing contracts, and closing a business. The study leads to three main conclusions:

• Businesses in poor countries face much larger regulatory burdens than those in rich countries. They face 3 times the administrative costs, and nearly twice as many bureaucratic procedures and delays associated with them. And they have fewer than half the protections of property rights of rich countries.

• Heavy regulation and weak property rights exclude the poor from doing business. In poor countries 40% of the economy is informal. Women, young, and low-skilled workers are hurt the most.

• The payoffs from reform appear large. A hypothetical improvement to the top quartile of countries on the ease of doing business is associated with up to 2 percentage points more annual economic growth.

As the Economist points out in a leader dated September 11, 2004, Many of the problems in poor countries are the legacy of European colonists’ laws and bureaucracy, designed to control a local population, not to encourage growth. So the paradox becomes apparent. If the systems that de Soto calls on to harvest the intangible wealth of the poor are dysfunctional, whether by strategy or happenstance, they will have the opposite effect to his intentions. By entanglement in red tape, the poor of underdeveloped countries are doubly disadvantage.

The history of civilisation is also the history of a struggle between loosely and tightly coupled systems of human interaction. In the words of Nobel Laureate Douglas North:

The evolution of societies is a function of the quantity and quality of human beings, the human command over nature, and the structure humans impose on their interaction. An understanding of the interaction between demographic, technological, and institutional factors would provide fundamental insights into societal evolution.

Both formal and informal Institutions are systems that come at a cost. They represent investments, the return upon which, is the reduction of transaction costs. Transaction costs are influenced by the type of system they are transacted in. Transaction costs are primarily the cost of trust.

1http://www.stevenxue.com/ref_134.htm

2http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid7_gci212737,00.html

Costs of network participation

2005-04-27T11:36:00.000+02:00

The above illustration represents six distinct cost positions in the transfer of dW3 from one agent to another. The flow is simplified here as being mono-directional, though that is often not the case.
For the W3 supplying agent

C1 - The static costs of self-produced, self-contained W3, assumed by an organism prior to, or in ignorance of any network capabilities.
C2 - The costs of adapting specific W3 for existence on a digital network
C3 - The overall costs of network participation

For the W3 consuming agent

C4 - The costs of finding and obtaining dW3 on a digital network and adapting it to an existence in the consuming agent's self-contained data store.
C5 - The static costs of self-contained W3, assumed by an agent prior to or in ignorance of any network capabilities
C6 - The overall costs of network participation

Definitions of trust

2005-04-27T11:32:00.000+02:00

It is not easy to find an uncontentious definition of trust. Here is a very short one: Trust is risk upon belief. To trust, is to believe in some outcome of events, and having dependence upon that outcome. You may believe that your waiter has washed his hands recently, your bank is solvent, the bridge you’re crossing wont crumble, or that the sun will also rise tomorrow, and in each case your belief belays your actions: You trust in order to do.

You may also believe that Shakespeare was a woman, that there are many Chinese in China, or that James likes oysters, but unless you are taking some sort of stake dependent on the validity of these statements, you would not use the word “trust” when making them.

Neither do you say “I trust” the dice will come up bull eyes or France win the World Cup, because, even if you are betting something on these outcomes, they are considered within the realm of chance. The risk taken in trusting is due to incomplete knowledge of the true outcome of past and future causal events: Gambling on luck and good fortune, fall outside this categorization.

At least semantically. In truth, we readily include fact, probability and randomness in our risk taking assessments – in a, often, hopelessly inseparable mix. But when it comes to choice of words, we say we trust our husbands to be faithful, while we don’t say we trust our lottery tickets to be winners.

Grossly understated trust makes life easier. Without the ability to make absolute full-turn decisions based on incomplete knowledge, the human race would have evolved no further than potatoes. "No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty," wrote George Eliot. The necessary incompleteness of knowledge can only be navigated by an exposure to risk and the quantification of factual uncertainty into semi-fictional truths.

Trust gives us leverage. Knowing a little, we risk even more: Or, knowing much, we risk less. As knowledge comes at a cost, trusting someone or something with scant grounds for doing so, is a cheap proposition with unlikely prospects for success, albeit high returns when the gods do smile. Inversely, while maximizing our trust of someone or something might increase the odds for a positive outcome for some transaction, it could mean a poor return on our investment. Any speculator looking simultaneously for a safe ride and high dividends will soon learn that there is no such animal. Trust based on knowledge comes at a premium. In the words of Oliver Williamson: Trust is a benefits / risks balance. The goal is to maximize profits and to minimize costs. And trust comes at a cost.

Is all trust knowledge based? Absolutely not – a great deal of trust is flippant, quite irrational, with little knowledge to back it up at all. But that doesn’t mean it don’t work – on the contrary, that which we sometimes call emotional or psychological trust is a cornerstone of society.

The sociologist Gregory Bateson has written “No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels.” But just how does this relegation of that which can be dealt with at unconscious levels occur? On a physiological level, a great deal of our bodily functions are removed from our sphere of conciousness, we don’t have to consciously make our hearts beat or our kidneys do whatever it is that kidneys do. Further, we learn skills that becomes second-nature to us , such as walking and chewing gum. We categorize relations and concepts. Herbert Simon first advanced the concept of ’bounded’ or limited rationality.

Because of limits in human mental capacity, the mind cannot cope directly with the complexity of the world. Rather, we construct a simplified mental model of reality and then work with this model.^¹

But what about larger organisms such as societies? Does society construct a mental model of reality in order to cope with complexity? Society does create libraries of objectified knowledge – facts, and we formulate laws, and institutionalize the ownership of property, but further along side our facts and laws, we accumulate an informal culture of morals, norms and customs, a simplification of life which facilitates trust.

1James G. March., "Bounded Rationality, Ambiguity, and the Engineering of Choice," in David E. Bell, Howard Raiffa, and Amos Tversky, eds., Decision Making: Descriptive, Normative, and Prescriptive Interactions (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Verospheres

2005-04-27T11:30:00.000+02:00

Some authors have a nasty habit of inventing new words – I will succumb to the temptation only once in this essay. The word is coined to describe systematic dependence between things. It describes an arrangement where things must be true for each other: They must act truly in order to act together. The boundaries of such an arrangement is, outwardly, towards things where truth is not a necessity. I call this arrangement a Verosphere.^¹

As a simple mechanical example of a verosphere, imagine a pocket watch where all internal parts, from the casing to the springs, wheels, pivots, balance cock, hands and knobs, must unambiguously work together – they must be true to each other in order for the clock to work properly. The clock, as with all machines, has one or more flows of energy, or information if you so choose to think of it as such, and as this energy passes from one part of the clock to another; from the winding knob to the springs and casings to the cogwheels and to the hands, these interacting parts must act truly towards each other as conceived by their maker. If they act falsely the watch will fail to work properly.

In information technology, the meeting place between discrete parts is called the interface. Discrete entities can meet in many ways, the most elementary of which can be referred to as hardwired. In a hardwired construction, no individual component has any alternatives for who to interact with, nor a choice in what fashion or manner that interaction will occur. The entire information path of our pocket watch is hardwired with the exception of the knob which can be altered to wind the springs or bypass straight through to the hands themselves.

1I was tempted to use Fukuyama’s term Radius of trust – "All groups embodying social capital have a certain radius of trust, that is, the circle of people among whom cooperative norms are operative", but the term has a narrower context than what I mean by a Verosphere.

Redundancy and Tolerance

2005-04-27T11:28:00.000+02:00

In theory one could build a pocket watch where the slightest failure in any discrete part would bring the hands to a standstill, since there are no alternative paths or options for the flow of information. Yet parts of a watch are built to be tolerant with each other. The mechanical wearing down of gears and springs can progress for quite some time before these tolerances are exceeded. Watches are also built with redundancy – parts are stronger than they might need be. The casing might be thicker. or the cannon pinions more solid, or the jewels more numerous than need be.

A society is also a verosphere. The members must act truly in order to act together. The truth of a society is the sum of its norms and laws. As any one over the age of five will immediately surmise, a society is not hardwired, its norms and laws are somewhat relative, occasionally hazy, truths are asymmetrically held and enforced, and acting truly is an objective not always met. The societal verosphere is kept intact because it is for the most part loosely-coupled and because there are redundancies and tolerances in its design.

There are obviously an unbounded and overlapping number of verospheres, beginning with the universe itself. The systems of science are verospheres, and in the concilience of these various branches. one finds the verosphere of all science, albeit with all its tolerances, redundancies, undecidability and incompleteness.

Real time

2005-04-27T11:26:00.000+02:00

A tolerance of particular interest is that of time. Since there is no limit as to how exact time can be, all interactions must be time tolerant to some extent. In our pocket watch example, which is of course about an object built to keep time, tolerance is kept at a minimum, while in the societal verosphere it is customarily more relaxed. You are given perhaps 30 days to pay a bill or file a claim, you may show up a few minutes late to a meeting or class, or even a court appearance. But that doesn’t mean we are not in sync – we most definitely are. Time is the ultimate truth in any verosphere.

Computers are also time tolerant, but the time tolerances of things working at gigahertz speeds are not something users tend to think about. Of course, certain operations seem sluggish, like when programs start up. When we have to wait for our computers we get annoyed. But think about this from the computers point of view: It spends 99.999 per cent of its existence waiting for us^¹.

As long as we set the schedules, lack of synchronization between humans and machines is a manageable problem. Where the everyday human verosphere meets the computer verosphere, the machines must do the waiting – or so it has mostly been in the past. As more super fast machines are inserted into human verospheres this relationship can easily change.

1Don’t quote on that number. It’s an Irish fact – I am being rhetorically scientific.

A cow will wince

2005-04-27T11:18:00.000+02:00

Here are some examples of realtime verospheres ranging from a simple game of poker, unaided by computers, to network comprised of millions of participants.

The constraints of poker are the rules of the game, the tacit codes of conduct gamblers share, and the norms of society. At some point in the game, when all bets have been placed and the call to show hands is made, real time is frozen – lock tight interdependence is established between all the players still in the game. Until all the players lay down their cards the outcome is unknown, yet at this point no player can adjust her bet or change her hand. The gamblers are locked in suspended real-time.
There is a shortage of apartments in Stockholm. It is quite common to acquire a lease or ownership of a new apartment through trading. A couple planning a divorce might wish to exchange a 4-room flat for two 2-room flats – a couple about to have children might wish the reverse. If two traders don’t have exactly what the other wants others can be brought into the deal. Though the wishes of traders might be better served in multi-party deals, the risks for a defection ruining the trade increase drastically as the amount of participants increases. Any single defector will disrupt the deal for all others.

“In the future, when a car buyer in a showroom in Connecticut is tempted to opt for the leather upholstery – a cow will wince in Nebraska.” The preceding quote from a exuberant advocate of Business to Business computer systems, conjures up a vision of real-time end-to-end interaction that is (minus the cognitive role of the cow) serious business for today’s system architects . It epitomises just-in-time business strategies that tie together, via realtime computerized information channels, entire vertical and horizontal value chains, in this case from unhappy cow to slaughter house – tanner – tailor – seat manufacturer – car assembly plant – distributor – dealership to happy customer.

Each node of the Internet is identified and accessed by a unique address, like a telephone number. Since these numbers are long and hard to memorize, the founding fathers decided to give each Internet node a unique name. The relationship between the names and numbers is called a mapping and any time you write the name of a website you wish to visit, that name is converted into the appropriate number by a interconnected network of domain name servers (DNS). Not realizing the eventual consequences, but aware of the administrative problems any other solution would entail, the Internet pioneers decided that names would be allocated on a first-come, first-serve basis – period.

Readers are surely aware of the resulting confusion, but the system is miraculously still intact, though no longer monopolised by one authority. Today you can access an accredited DNS agency and enter a name which you would like to use as a website address. You will, within milliseconds, be informed if that name is not taken, in which case you will be offered the opportunity to buy it (actually lease it) and if you happen to have a credit card handy, or better yet, your credit card is on file at the agency, you may by clicking on your screen, gain exclusive access to the domain name. Keeping in mind that there are tens of millions of Domain names and perhaps millions of aspiring domain owners, hundreds of millions of credit card holders, and billions of web pages, we are beholding a mighty realtime verosphere indeed.

Nurture-Nature-Normal

2005-04-27T00:25:00.000+02:00

Robert Axelrod is a poster child of game theory thanks to his famous Prisoner’s Dilemma computer tournaments introduced to the general public in the Evolution of Cooperation. In Axelrod’s tournaments, computer agents compete against each other using pre-programmed strategies. Their moves, which entail choosing being cooperating with or defecting against fellow agents exercising strategies of their own, will either get them rewarded or punished. The success of of each individuals strategy evolves in a verosphere of interdependence with all other players.

In a later essay “The evolutionary approach to Norms. (American Political Science Review 80, no 4 (Dec 1986) Axelrod essentially added another N to the Nature– Nurture dichotomy: Normal. At first glance the existence of norms would seem to fall within the Nurture camp’s jurisdiction: This is certainly true for the influence on personal development due to the social-cultural environments we are born into, and on the other hand, making the case for Nature, it can be argued that humans are genetically endowed with a natural propensity for adherence to certain norms of behaviour.

Axelrod’s approach focuses on our strategic actions in the presence of existing norms and investigates how those strategies evolve over time, due to their accumulated successes and failures. His model discounts not only what an individual actually is at the start of game, but also an individual’s limited scope for rational choice, thus avoiding one of the perennial problems of theorizing about human behaviour.

Robert Axelrod, lists eight mechanisms which can serve to establish cooperation. It is not difficult to see their relationship to social capital as discussed above.

Reputation – People will tend to respect norms when their violation would cause fellow society members to make negative inferences about them, or restrict their ability to carry out normal activities; specifically those requiring a transacting partners exposure to shared risk.

In the shadow of law^¹ – As we are well aware, norms often precede laws: As norms become firmer there can be desire a to formalize them (or forbid them mala prohibita). But the very existence of laws, leads to the spread and enforcement of related norms. By formally decreeing laws and defining actions that break them, it will make it easier for a populace to make value judgments on areas in the shadows of these laws.

Membership – the accelerated promotion of norms via common-cause or common-circumstance constellations.

Social proof – What do other people do? What is successful for them? Social proof is the snowball or follow-john effect. Group conformism.

Deterrence – When a power exhibits decisive public punishment of a highly visible selection of offenders, eg zero tolerance campaigns.

Internalization – when violating an establish norm is psychologically painful even if the direct material benefits are positive.

Metanorms (Axelrod)– takes the propensity of fellow society members to punish, censor or show disdain for those who break norms or laws, and raises it one level up to – the propensity of fellow society members to punish, censor or show disdain for those who do not punish, censor or show disdain for those who break norms or laws.

Metanorms (my alternative definition) The belief that there is a normal way to do things. That it is normal to be normal.

Axelrod’s compilation of norms occurs in an essay describing agents in computer simulations. Perhaps his long preoccupation with “prisoners” causes him to focus on the formative effects of pain and loss rather than those of joy and gain. Success is overwhelmingly couched as the avoidance of negative consequences rather than the attainment of positive rewards. For example, internalization speaks only of psychological pain suffered for defection, not the possible satisfaction gained in cooperating. Reputation refers to “bad reputation”. He speaks of deterrents but not inducements.^²

In the following example several of the mechanisms from above are at work, yet it is psychological pleasure that ultimately holds the norm intact.

1Axelrod simply calls this norm “law”.

2Axelrod writes that “Social norms are best at numerous small [infractions] where the cost of enforcement is low. Laws on the other hand, often function best to prevent rare but large [infractions] because substantial resources are available for enforcement”.

Who’s buying this round?

2005-04-27T00:23:00.000+02:00

A group of Irish are drinking in a pub. The following shibboleths are heard:

What are you having?

This round is on me

Let me get this one

The pubgoers are engaging in a system of reciprocity – what sociologists would call a gift culture. Amongst locals the ritual of rounds is sacrosanct. In the long run – say after a year or so, the outlay of each drinker will be roughly the equivalent of each paying for his or her own drinks – never anyone else’s, as is the norm in Sweden.

One can imagine a system where the publican keeps track of a groups consumption and settles the bill at the end of the evening, or once a week – dividing up the costs equally among participants. This might be a fairer system and avoid the eventual problem of freeloaders.

Here is why that is not a good idea. Though each pubgoer does have a rough idea of the general lay of expenditures, they are quite capable of forgetting the score in the short term. Each provider of a round can then experience the feeling of being genuinely generous when there turn comes and each beneficiary of a pint offered can experience the pleasure of receiving a genuinely generous gift. The pubgoers, in mentally putting aside their scorecards, if only temporarily (long haul freeloaders will be noticed and eventually ostracized from the group) are able to add an extra measure of pleasure to their gettogethers If they all paid for their drinks this would not happen.

I assume that as pubgoers, the ability to push calculation of facts and figures into the back rooms of our minds when they threaten to interfere with our pleasure, is related to a gamblers splotchy reckoning of her wins and loses, or a soldiers willingness to participate in the first wave of attack on the enemy in the face of hopeless odds.

A systems architect would be hard pressed to make improvements in the system of beer buying rounds. Some things just can’t be rationalized or technified without a depletion in the emotional or psychological well being derived in carrying them out. Much of the social capital cited by Putnam is rooted in face to face encounters; people getting together and doing things, where often the former is more important than the latter. For Putnam even television is a detriment to Social capital.

I know of no computer simulation of rounds at the pub, and I assume that from an evolutionary point of view it would be quite boring, since emotional gratification as a rewarding factor would tend to constrain evolutionary change.

Though Internet communities also afford users emotional satisfaction, it is not easy to imagine them as long run alternatives to their face to face cousins. As to whether the promotion of trust has an edge in either is debatable.

Computerized systems of norms

2005-04-27T00:21:00.000+02:00

We understand how facts and figures, as computed by programming code make up computer systems, but the incorporation of norms is still rather foreign to us. Though we should not confuse computer simulation with what goes on in our everyday lives, let it be pointed out that the strategies employed in Axelrod’s studies are not essentially different from strategies used by system architects in real world environments. Google, for example, uses social proof, dominance, and reputation mechanisms to sort out the ranking order of results for your queries. They also use dominance and membership algorithms to promote their Gmail webmail offering.

Evolutionary approaches to program and system design are a reality of today’s information technology. In loosely-coupled dW3 landscapes agents are given the ability to discover interacting partners amongst a variety of alternatives, they are authorized to negotiate, enter into contract, and trade.

Axelrod’s games, or rather their more complex modern day equivalents are very much a part of our computer-human verosphere. They offer a connection between traditionally formal and informal systems. But they work best in environments with a large population of agents. A human dealing on a one-to-one basis with a computer that was acting autonomously on a strategy of statistically derived norms, might find the experience quite exasperating

If no logo – what?

2005-04-27T00:05:00.000+02:00

The author Naomi Klein has made a successful career of berating big name corporations, such as Nike, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Tommy Hilfiger, etc. In her 1999 book “No logo” she surveys how firms like these, behind their slick life-style marketing campaigns and domination of public space, ruthlessly violate workers rights and destroy “traditional” values. Klein believes that the success of branding is about the failure of social institutions. "We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other." Thus she appears to share the opinions of Putnam, in seeing brands as a gap-fillers for our diminishing stock of social capital.

We put aside for now her criticism of the exploitation of third world labour, and concentrate on the function of brands as a) surrogates for spirituality and social capital, and b) false declarations of product and intent.

In order to replace or usurp spirituality, branding and advertising campaigns must have something spiritual about them. You can’t replace religion with refrigerators or metaphysical contemplation with dog racing, or well, perhaps you can, – if refrigerators and dog racing are perceived as more than their materialistic incarnations. Advertising, as opposed to fact sheets and content declarations, is meant to be emotional, even spiritual, or as one fan of brands waxes:

...simultaneously arousing anticipation and enabling fulfilment by inviting the consumer to recreate and mentally personalize [...] fantasies of omnipotence, of unlimited sex appeal, of importance, of adventure, etc. First, we instil a promise of a certain feeling in the consumers’ mind. Then, consuming or using the product becomes a cue to ’connect’ to that feeling and experience it (think of Marlboro and the feeling of powerfulness that results from self restrain and control). This is a genuinely hypnotic effect.^¹

I have found no proponent for including advertising in the discourse on social capital. Yet arguably advertising and branding are among the greatest promoters of trust in the world today. And at the same time a hefty cultural resource. The combination is remarkably potent. Trust, and enjoy yourself at the same time.

Branding makes life simpler. There are lots of intricate details out there which make the world go around. A lot of decisions to be made. We need help. We need leverage – shortcuts. Brands do that for us. If they are prominent we associate them with success. If they are well crafted they offer personal gratification – even excluding direct consumption of the product involved: We have all enjoyed commercials for products we will never consume.

And everything gets branded; governments, churches, universities, sporting teams, health cures and diets and war efforts, if not directly through the campaigns of ad agencies and spin-doctors, then through circuitous self-enforcing media coverage and word-of-mouth personal networks. Even without the stimulus of a sexy TV personalty or a sports star, we will internally create our own branded versions of most of what we encounter in life. We psychologically flavour the “facts” and more often than not, derive enjoyment in doing so.

Furthermore, inasmuch as an object’s formal and technical connotations are added to a functional incoherence, it is the whole system of needs, socialized or unconscious, cultural practical – in short, a whole inessential system, directly experienced – which surges back on to the essential technical order and threatens the objective status of the object itself. Baudrillard^²

In fairness to Naomi Klein, she does not so much object to the existence of brands and advertising as to the falsehoods she claims they perpetrate. She would prefer if their message was more fact and less fiction – more truth and less emotion. She maintains that in painting cool urban imagery or exalting lone prairie cowboy heroes, rather than declaring actually what a product does, what it is made out of and just how and where it is manufactured, brands fail to inform us of what we really want to – , or at least ought to, know.

At the moment many of the brands Klein criticizes are experiencing hard times, but if they are getting beat it is not by conscientious challengers riding the moral high ground and offering better product description and ethic issue disclosures, but by fresher, trendier brands.

Brands solve complexity problems, through the promotion of trust by the simplification of facts or emotions. They are reputational systems. Our perception of science is for example branded; The theory of relativity, Quantum Physics, Moore’s Law, are things most of us only know through branded simplification. Einstein, along with Marylin Monroe and Winston Churchill is one of the greatest brands of the 20^th Century, and his image fortifies our envisioning of science as both brilliant and humane.

One of the most delightful tracts in the literature of Information Technology’s is George Miller’s “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information”^³ Readily exemplifying the tragedy of the commons, Millers findings are freely cited as proof that humans can’t remember more than seven of anything. And though, when it comes to one-dimensional judgements, such as remembering a series of numbers or selection of colours there is considerable evidence that most of us get stuck at somewhere around seven, we are, Alhamdulillah, gifted with the ability to perceive and think multi-dimensionally. This explains our remarkable ability for remembering faces: we memorize a bevy of multi-dimensional intersections. For example, by keeping track of the intersection of seven sorts of noses, mouths, eyes and hair, we could remember 7ˆ4 or 2401 faces.

But when it comes to making choices, despite the multi-dimensionality of circumstances, environments and specificities, we often – can’t be bothered. We desire simplification and we desire gratification, and though we appreciate, or rely, on the existence of detail and fact, we choose not to carry them around with us in our knapsacks.

1Dan Herman – Pool Number 27: Summer 2004

2Jean Baudrillard The system of Objects translation James Benedict, Verso, London, 1996

3http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html

The world wide web of content description

2005-04-27T00:00:00.000+02:00

According one account there are more than 80 chemicals in the strawberry flavour of a Burger King Milk Shake, in a formulae you would not normally commit to memory. Nor would you normally keep track of just what sort of trees and other substances this book is printed on. Every product tells a story, but we are usually only interested in the punch line.

Since very little is made or done without someone keeping track of the ingredients used and the methods and processes employed, it is not difficult to imagine all such information being made public. Unless a manufacturer or service supplier has some strategic reason for secrecy, then all sorts of relevant data could be posted on the Internet.

It is not far-fetched to imagine that for any shoe made by Adidas, or any medicine sold by AstraZeneca, there is a host of details that could be of interest to consumers. For example a prospective shoe buyer might just be interested in the labour conditions under which a particular model was made. Or a patient might want to know how one sort of pill would work in combination with another.

Yet as we have pointed out, there are considerable limits to our brain’s ability to keep track of details and we gladly let branding and commercials and perceived price advantages steer our choices. A maze of multi-dimensional product declarations on the Internet will only cause us headaches.

But if we never have to address this amount of detail? What if our “agents” do it for us? What if we, as decision makers, never have to bother with more than seven or so “decision components”? Lets say, for example, you wanted to buy some shoes by post order and the choices were products from Nike, Reebok and Puma. You have some notions about the shoe business, leading you to believe that the shoes of most manufacturers are probably made in similar factories somewhere in China, most likely by children, who perhaps should be in school. If in your catalogue, you find an equally attractive pair from each company, all at the same price, how do you choose?

Imagine the year is 2006, and there are 36 measurement systems in place to help you in your shoe purchasing decision. These mechanisms are not flashy web pages or portals; you will not be expected to browse about for the information provided. It will be done for you. Of course you must place your trust in these mechanisms.

These trust mechanisms range from indicators as to the financial health of each of the three firms, test results as to the strength and durability of materials used, sales rankings, the ethical track records of each company, their compliance with environmental— and labour, guidelines and laws (national, international and perhaps tabs kept by NGO’s), post-transaction service performance, and perhaps most importantly for your feet; profile matches between your size, which by now has been expanded from one simple ordinal number to a fifteen fold measurement system encompassing all aspects of podiatry; from the height of your arches to the ballistics of your gait.

Your job will be to let your robot know what matters most to you. Your robot will then weigh your preferences against what is available on the market or in the store you happen to be in. You might be told that you have to lower your ethnic demand level or raise your price.

Let’s define a market as that place where information flows with the least amount of friction. At the centre point of the market, the transaction costs of information flow is near-zero. The more friction involved in the flow of information, the further an exchange will be pushed out to the perimeters. Thus centre stage in our hypothetical shoe market is occupied by those buyers and sellers who can transfer whatever sort of dW3 that is relevant to a sale, with the least amount of effort.

The frictionless flow of information between all agents involved in a transaction is provided by a schema – a functioning taxonomy of all values and measures pertinent to the transaction domain. For example, in the case of our proposed new measurement system for shoes, there must be a common declaration structure for all of the 13 attributes. Any two parties who adhere to this scheme will reduce transaction costs and move closer into the centre of the market. Of course ethic standards will present us with another sort of schema problem. As in the gymnastics competition mention earlier, there must exist judges who dish out computable scores, or there must exist standards such as ISO 9001, that are backed by guarantees of actual compliance. It is the schema that defines the market and not visa versa.

Fact or Fiction

2005-04-26T23:51:00.000+02:00

Emotions represent in part a primitive past, the bubbling influences of a reptilian heritage. An assumption by rationalists, dating back to the ancient Greeks, has been that higher forms of human existence–mentation, rationality, foresight and decision-making-can be hijacked by the pirates of emotion. Indeed, the classic assumption is that emotion wreaks havoc on human rationality, that dispassionate analysis optimizes decision-making. Accordingly, the emphasis in our society has been on cognition and rationality and on ways of diminishing the influence of subjectivity and emotion in decision-making and behaviour.¹ John T. Cacioppo

It came as quite a surprise to theorizers of bounded and unbounded rationality when the acclaimed neurosurgeon Antonio Damasio wrote in 1994 that emotions were not the bane of rational thinking – but rather an essential element: ²

Work from my laboratory has shown that emotion is intergral to the processes of reasoning and decision making, for worse and for better. [...] I suggested that certain levels of emotion processing probably point us to the sector of the decision-making space where our reason can operate most efficiently. [...] Well-targeted and well-deployed emotion seems to be a support system without which the edifice of reason cannot operate properly. These results and their interpretation called into question the idea of dismissing emotion as a luxury or a nuisance or a mere evolutionary vestige. They also made it possible to view emotion as an embodiment of the logic of survival.^³

1Cacioopo, John T : Emotion, Rationality and Human Potential : University of Chicago, 2002 http://www.fathom.com/feature/60800/

2Damasio, Antonio R : Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain New York: Avon, 1995.

3Damasio, Antonio R The Feeling of What Happens Harvest, New York, 1999

The Marlboro Man versus the Surgeon General

2005-04-26T23:20:00.000+02:00

I will conclude this essay with a story. I have attempted to show above the interplay of social capital, trust, and transaction costs. In the interchange of material and immaterial goods, we seek out channels of trust where the transaction costs are low. We balance between the use of formal and informal institutions. We utilize science and technology and we seek emotional gratification when it offers itself, even when simplifying facts or sacrificing truth in the process.

The story is about tobacco. According to The WHO:

Tobacco is the second major cause of death in the world. It is currently responsible for the death of one in ten adults worldwide (about 5 million deaths each year). If current smoking patterns continue, it will cause some 10 million deaths each year by 2025. Half the people that smoke today – that is about 650 million people– will eventually be killed by tobacco.^¹

The most popular cigarette in the world is Marlboro. Marlboro cigarettes were originally introduced in the US in 1924 as a women’s brand, sloganized as “Mild as May”. But in the 1950’s, in one of the most successful ad campaigns ever, Marlboro was relaunched as a filter cigarette for men, and the Marlboro Man was introduced as the epitome of stark, rugged, unfettered and individualistic masculine supremacy. In 1954 Marlboro’s US sales were less than one quarter of one percent of the market. By the time the Marlboro Man campaign went national in 1955, sales were at $5 billion, a 3,241% jump.

There is not a doubt that the American tobacco industry stretched all reasonable boundaries of truth in their advertising during much of the last century: Though the industry was occasionally hounded by the US Federal Trade Commission for all too imaginative slogans such as, “recommended by doctors”, “filters so safe they are used in nuclear power plants”, “good for your digestion” and “extra protection against colds”, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug act had freed tobacco from the supervision of its most likely antagonist, the US Food and Drug Administration. Tobacco was deemed neither a food or a drug, hence exempt from both prohibitions against the sale of adulterated food and drugs, and mandatory “honest” content declarations on product labels.^²

The first strong connection made between lung cancer and smoking was published by I. Adler in 1912, yet during the years up until 1950, when American cigarette consumption reached 10 cigarettes per capita, the public was subject to conflicting claims of science. As late as 1948, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) had argued that, "more can be said in behalf of smoking as a form of escape from tension than against it . . . there does not seem to be any preponderance of evidence that would indicate the abolition of the use of tobacco as a substance contrary to the public health."

But in 1950 both JAMA and the British Medical Journal published reports definitively linking smoking to lung cancer. One study found that 96.5% of lung cancer patients interviewed were moderate heavy-to-chain-smokers, and the other, that heavy smokers were fifty times as likely as non-smokers to contract lung cancer.

These reports plus those of the American Cancer Society and the frequent anti-smoking articles published in Readers Digest, the largest circulation American magazine.^³ put pressure on the tobacco industry to react. Their answer was to reduce particular substances, put filters on cigarettes and advertise more. Philip Morris, in order to counteract the perceived “sissy” image of a filtered cigarette, let the Leo Burnett ad agency in Chicago come up with the Marlboro Man campaign – a nonconformist in his rejection of the modern comforts of urban American for the splendour of the wild outdoors, but also a conformist to the ideals of American individualism and independence.

Law suits against the industry began in 1954, mostly on grounds of negligence and breach of warranty, which the tobacco monopolies countered with the doctrine of forseeability. There was no evidence that could prove producers had prior knowledge of the potential harm of smoking. Up until 1996, 40 years of litigation against the industry had not resulted in one single payout.^⁴ On the contrary, in 1985, the Brown & Williamson tobacco company was awarded $3.05 million – the largest libel award ever paid by a news organization, against CBS and its news commentator Walter Jacobsen who had accused B&W of engaging in a lurid advertising campaign to get young people to smoke.

In 1964, the American Medical Association supported the tobacco industry’s objection to labelling cigarettes as hazardous to health and pocketed a $10 million grant in research money from six cigarette companies: nevertheless the Federal Cigarette labelling and Advertising Act was passed by congress the next year and the first Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health was published and 17 tobacco liability suits were filed.

In 1970 many Americans learnt for the first time that there exits a figure known as “The Surgeon General” and that he has Determined That Cigarette Smoking Is Dangerous to Your Health.

In 1971 tobacco advertisements were banned on television and radio. Yet the assault on tobacco continued, laws were passed forbidding smoking in public places, nicotine was declared an addictive drug by Clinton in 1995, and the FDA was allowed to enter the fray.

The discovery and publication of the tobacco industry’s internal memos showing the industry’s knowledge of the deleterious effects of tobacco use and their awareness of the addictive effect of nicotine effectively stopped the industry’s most steadfast defences and opened the door to new claims. The three major categories of domestic tobacco litigation were and still are; individual personal injury cases, class action personal injury; and health care cost recovery, mostly brought by governments and unions. Litigation has mushroomed in all three categories. ^⁵

In 1997, a settlement, “The tobacco Resolution” was worked out in which the cigarette makers agreed to hand over to the American states $358 billion over a period of 25 years, plus $10 billion upfront in lump-sum damages. The money was to be raised on jacking up the price of cigarettes. As part of the agreement, class-action suits and state claims would be settled, and individual claims against the industry would be capped. This deal failed to pass through congress and a new, and smaller, $206 billion “Master Settlement Agreement” was reached in 1998,, in which the tobacco firms were protected from state claims but not from private litigation. ^⁶

From former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop remarked on the settlement: "Will it be good for public health? Yes. But remember, the tobacco companies are a sleazy bunch of people who misled us, deceived us and lied to us for three decades. Under this settlement, the Tobacco Institute will be gone, but the tobacco lobby will still be there. And they will never stop."^⁷

In July 2000, in the the largest civil-damages verdict in history , a Miami jury decided that America’s largest tobacco companies should pay $145 billion in punitive damages to thousands of Florida smokers for damaging their health. And a $12 billion judgement was given against Philip Morris in March 2003 by a judge in Madison County, Illinois, for misleading advertising that downplayed the hazards of cigarettes marketed as “light”.

Yet the Marlboro man lives on, even though previous Marlboro men have passed away, some famously of lung cancer. The Marlboro Man and the Marlboro brand he fronts are among the most outstanding cultural icons of the 20^th century – not only in the United States but in every country where this cigarette was promoted – either directly, or via product placement in television shows, movies and magazines. Seldom has the common man been offered so much for so little.

By consuming Marlboros you are getting a lot more than a few puffs and a nicotine kick – you are buying into, for a relatively small sum of money, emotional gratification, and possibly self esteem. You are perhaps making yourself more attractive – sexier. In the words of Leo Burnett, “Marlboro is your most frequently shown possession. Every time you expose it, it says something about you”. To some extent you are the Marlboro Man, like him you choose to live dangerously, freely, without interference from meddling surgeon generals and ambulance chasing lawyers – better to die like a wolf than live like a lamb ... and like the Marlboro man you are risking your life.

There are, no doubt, many libertarians who feel that it is a person’s own prerogative whether to smoke or not, and certainly that prerogative has been the rule rather then the exception during much of the history of smoking, but it is also clear that the informal norms that govern so much of our daily activity are no match for the Leo Burnetts hired by the tobacco barons.

It is also clear that the tobacco industry effectively inhibited the executive and legislative branches of the US government from interfering with their lucrative business and though science eventually got around to irrefutably establishing the dangers of smoking, science was often subverted and distorted in the process.

The attack on cigarettes was forwarded through bans on smoking by the states and municipalities that had the least to loose in angering the tobacco lobby, and not least the United States’s conducive climate for tort litigation.

1World Health Organization http://www.who.int/tobacco/en/

2Smoking and Politics: Policy making and the Federal Bureaucracy Fritschler, A. Lee. 1969, p. 37

3That Readers Digest was one of the few medium willing to do battle with the tobacco industry is significant, though the tobacco industry had the largest advertising expenditures bar none throughout the 20^th century, Readers Digest at the time did not accept advertising.

4 In 1988 The Liggett Group (L&M, Chesterfield) was ordered to pay Antonio Cipollone $400,000 in compensatory damages for its contribution to his wife’s death. In the years before the 1966 warning labels, Liggett was found to have given Cipollone an express warranty that its products were safe. This was the first ever financial award in a liability suit against a tobacco company. It was later overturned on a technicality.

5The Tobacco Deal Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Microeconomics, 1998. Jeremy Bulow and Paul Klemperer.

6http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=207003

7Richard Kluger Ashes to Ashes : America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health Knopf 1996

Six degrees

2005-04-26T14:48:00.000+02:00

You have perhaps heard that any two people on this planet are connected through 6 degrees of separation^¹. That the number is so low, if true, is dramatic, but less significant than the fact that we are all actually connected. It just might be that all ideas and concepts, memes, norms and laws are also related by 6 degrees of separation. That is also an interesting notion to ponder. In extension, it might just be that all of the above: peoples, ideas, norms and laws are connected through 6 degrees of separation.

But if there is any truth in that, in what manner are these connections constituted? We could of course say – via communication; That people communicate ideas and concepts to each other or that laws and memes communicate to us. That laws communicate to laws and ideas communicate to ideas is something we are not quite ready to accept, after all they are our laws and our ideas. Even in creating vast libraries of dW3, we are not quite ready to forgo the paradigm of the library goer, who checks out books and reads and thinks and talks and writes perhaps new books. And then she returns to the library, and the book she borrowed, and the ideas therein she internalized, goes back on the shelf waiting for the next lender.

When the library shuts at night, when the lights go off, well that’s it. The books are not supposed to come to life like the toys in the story of the Little Tin Soldier. They’re not supposed to get down off their shelves and start having fun, dancing about, or more appropriately, considering their environment, start discussing issues and debating and showing off what they each know, and teaching each other things. They are definitely not expected to procreate and have little baby books and take off on their own genetically determined evolution. How would survival of the fittest for the species of dW3 play out anyway?

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers – James Thurber

1http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994037

intrust

Information Technology and Trust

Table of contents

Part One - Information Technology

1.1 What’s different this time?

1.2 The great commonwealth

1.2.a Commonalization

1.2.b Commoditization

1.2.c Completeness

1.2.d Communalization

The evolution of Information Technology

World 3

dW3

Natural Language

dW3 that works

It doesn’t count

Tiger Shot a Birdie

Local and Global Taxonomies

Contextual Frameworks

W3 technology

Herman’s punch cards

The design of a data system in terms of completeness

Who you gonna call?

Programs

After Hollerith

Task-specificity

Ask not what your dW3 can do for us – ask what we can do for your dW3

The Turing Test

If we think they think

Hi there, I’m Lara Croft, and I am going to help you with your income tax filing

Part 2 Trust

The bell tower

Social Capital

China Syndrome

Transaction Costs

Costs of network participation

Definitions of trust

Verospheres

Redundancy and Tolerance

Real time

A cow will wince

Nurture-Nature-Normal

Who’s buying this round?

Computerized systems of norms

If no logo – what?

The world wide web of content description

Fact or Fiction

The Marlboro Man versus the Surgeon General

Six degrees