Shifting the bar for Fabulous

Seth Godin claims the Internet is “raising the bar for fabulous” globally. I tend to agree. The increased competition to stand out in a global online community should produce “higher highs” of creativity.

There’s a conundrum here, though. Is this phenomenon purely due to the network enabling us to find more things that are “cool”, or are more & better fabulous things actually being produced as a result of this competition? Or some combination of the two?

And, in a broader sense, are we rewarding glittery, fabulous, attention-seeking works of creative genius at the expense of some of the more boring-but-important stuff?

I think Godin’s assertion needs more data, but it’s thought-provoking…

The Number One Hit for “Arsehole”

(Cross-posted from Tawtof)

Ah Google. Any company that can have three copies of the Internet just kind of lying around is awesome to behold.

And Google Image Search is a modern marvel. All the speed and power of Google Search, now with the nerve-rattling immediacy of images.

However, despite the best efforts of thousands of PhD graduates, image searching is still flat-out wonky.

Text? Ooh yes, we can search text! Is the word I’m looking for in your page? Yes/No. Done.

(I am over-simplifying. The job of then ranking every page on the internet in order of relevance is absolutely horrifying to contemplate, but nevertheless kind of a solved problem.)

And we all know that typically the number one Google hit for a particular word is a definition of that word, or the home page of a company called that word, or very often a serious Wikipedia article summarising the complete history of human endeavour around that word. Serious, relevant, useful.

But image search is another beast entirely.

There is no canonical image for anything. Not even close. Unless it’s an image of an image, and even then it could be a forgery.

And for images of concepts it’s even worse. In text-land, we could point to a bunch of dictionaries for the definition of “wind”, and perhaps even highlight the best definition. By contrast, trying to ascertain the top 10 photos that describe “wind” would be basically pointless.

Same goes for “nancy“, or “shape“, or “old“.

The photos that appear may all contain those things, but they’re hardly the canonical definition of them. The idea that you could rank all the images in the world by relevance to a single word is so painful to contemplate that the very thought would send most PhD graduates flinging themselves off the nearest definition of “balcony”.

All of which is why I love typing “arsehole” into Google Images.

Because – no matter the consequences – whatever comes up is still, by definition, the number one arsehole on the planet.

According to who?

According to machines.

The machines that decide for us that Wikipedia has great definitions (it does), that you have new email and that this is the only new email you have, because we have decided all this other stuff is spam and there’s no need for you to even look at it.

So, what do the machines think is the number one hit for Arsehole?

A young black man on the London tube, looking a lot like he doesn’t want to be photographed.

The story that accompanies the article is hosted on Samizdata.net, a self-described “blog that brings you news & views from a critically rational social individualist perspective”. The Samizdats are a crew of London-based Civil Libertarians that sprang out of libertarian.co.uk led by Perry De Havilland, a “trans-Atlantic Entrepreneur” who casually reels off phrases like “The core of what makes this so wrong lies as usual at the meta-contextual level”.

The whatty-what-what?

When you can discredit the core of someone else’s argument using a word and concept you invented then you’re not just dealing with meta-context, but meta-language and possibly even meta-credibility.

Person A: “You can’t say that. You’re a blurglefincher.”

Person B: “A what?”

Person A: “Blurglefincher. It’s a word that means ‘the person who just lost this argument’.”

Perry rightly dismisses a purely-Utilitarian view of the world (as one must with a purely-anything view of the world – cf. Quantum Mechanics), but the cognitive momentum carries him way out into into the intellectual deep-end where every edifice that society has constructed to keep us fed, educated, safe and healthy has to be disposed of because it somehow affects individual liberty.

For example, they refuse to discuss the Second Amendment in the US in the context of gun control because they reject the very notion that a State should be granting us “rights”. Uh oh.

So, back to the black kid who appears when you search for “arsehole”. It appears at the top of an article.

The article (helpfully titled “Does anyone know who this asshole is?“) asks for help finding the young black man, as he is alleged to have assaulted a Samizdata community member called Jackie.

This act has incensed the Samizdata community, who rail against the unhelpfulness of Police, the lack of civility in society, and the fact that they’re not legally allowed to carry around weapons to they could defend the woman’s honour in the most direct possible way.

So what was the nature of the assault? They helpfully provide a link to Jackie’s blog where she details the attack. In point form:

• She just spent hours detailing the attack to the Police
• The attack was unprovoked
• She said that there was some “physical violence”, but didn’t to go into detail
• She said that the perps followed her down some stairs shouting abuse, and then caught the same train as her (which is how she took the photo)
• Later, the police apparently arrested one of the men.

Now, at no point do I want to imply that there was no physical attack or that it wasn’t completely awful. I actually feel terrible for this woman even for the details she did describe (the verbal abuse).

The point I want to very very carefully make is that we have absolutely no idea what happened, not even from Jackie herself. No details on whether they had weapons, how the attack came about, whether it was a nudge or whether it was rape.

Hey, you know what? That’s completely okay. It’s a private matter for Jackie, her family, and the police.

And also, apparently, hordes of gun-toting new-Libertarians who want to bring their own brand of hate-filled vigilante justice down upon the head of this chubby black kid for [INSERT CRIME HERE].

Because it turns out that they’re a bit odd.

Turning briefly to the comments on the original article, we find plenty of thinly-veiled racism.

Hmmm. It just struck me that Baker Street is the stopping off point for many heading to and from the Baker Street mosque. You dont suppose……?

Nah.

And a dash of homophobia along with brutal and luridly-ironic vengeance:

Sickening. He looks like a pansy and pantywaist just waiting for someone to chin jab his flabby ass in unconciousness.

I hope he dies while painfully violated.

And then downright weirdness, like referring to Somalians a “dirt-scratching savages”, or asking that the police force “DOES ITS FRICKIN JOB INSTEAD OF ATTENDING DIVERSITY LECURES”.

But it gets worse than the threats.

I was in Barbican market this afternoon (3;30pm) and saw someone who I thought looked like a spitting image of the shitbag in your picture. As I walked by him, staring as I tried to figure out if I really was looking at the piece of trash, he gave me a hearty and somewhat aggressive “Alright mate!?” About 5′10″ 150kg. I would say he’s about 15yo. I suspect he studies in the Barbican area and just finished with school.

Okay, so now we’ve gone from “let’s find this person” to the very brink of “kill all people that look like him”. He certainly fits the description though: black, male, and reacts badly to being stared at in a crowded place. Get him!

Imagine what could have resulted if, as many of the bloggers and commenters claim, everyone in Britain should be allowed to carry concealed weapons? Not only would the crime have been worse, the retribution could have been catastrophic.

If this is the alternative to Government, I’d rather live in Myanmar.

There are so many ironic twists to this story I feel dizzy. For example, if it wasn’t for justice-crazed civil libertarians we would have such a need for governments and police to protect us from their vigilante whims. If it wasn’t for people demanding the free trade of deadly weapons there would be a much need to have one. The fact that they encourage a “meta-contextual” view of the world that respects each person’s point of view, yet pay no heed to the fact that this kid might have his own story to tell about what happened. And so on.

So in the end, in a weird kind of way, Google was absolutely right. The top hit led to biggest pack of arseholes I’ve ever seen.

The Internet is an amazing place. Just to cleanse the mental palate, I leave you with the number 2 hit. Goodnight.

Tags: arsehole, asshole, google, libertarianism, libertarians, search

Mah Finance Sector Is Too Big

[Note: Credit for these ideas must go to many people, particularly Joshua Zeidner and Matthew Slater, both of whom are working on mutual credit, LETS and other alternative currency systems. Check out the Matt's Complementary Currencies module for Drupal and, shortly, Josh's JUNO API for connecting these systems together]

I’ve kind of tuned out of my daily Huffington Post emails, but today one arrived that I found pretty interesting (The Dominance of the Financial Sector Has Become a Mortal Danger to Our Economic Security). The title is a bit overblown and the article is selective and shrill, but most of the facts speak for themselves.

Some context: In recent months (well, longer than that really) the Republican party in the US has been trotting out the tired Reaganite “tax and spend liberals” rhetoric to attack every policy Obama tries to implement: the “Cap and Tax” policy for regulating carbon output, the “Socialist” medical system that will push up taxes and several even less creative redefinitions of what’s actually happening.

Meanwhile they crow about the stifling effect of regulation on the financial industry, complaining that the reversal of Reagan’s deregulation and Bush’s nails in the coffin will also roll back America’s prosperity to the mid-80’s.

Two problems here:

• First, that much of the prosperity created after deregulation isn’t real. That’s why they call it a bubble. It’s built on unrealistic speculation.
• Second, that the US Financial industry is so bloated and powerful that around $1 out of every $12 spent in the US goes to the financial sector, an industry, by some measures, produces very little.

You want to talk about tax? How about an 8.5% tax that goes straight into private hands instead of funding the public interest? A tax paid by every man, woman and child in America every day on everything, and one that disproportionately affects the poor.

Or how about the tax imposed on every US citizen by the private medical industry? The amount of money spent on prescription drugs in the US is rising by 20% every year, yet it would be impossible to argue that each year sees a 20% improvement in their citizens’ health.

There is a place for regulation in both the financial and medical industries. There is a place for government institutions that genuinely advocate and, yes, manipulate these markets on behalf of the common interest, because time-and-again history has shown that completely unregulated markets quickly become distorted by vested interests and that the perceived “wealth” created flows disproportionately to private hands rather than the public good.

I call this effect “trickle-up economics”. See what I did there?

So why not just start regulating?

Have you seen what’s happening in the US and other capitalist economies? Now that they have become deregulated, these industries (and I haven’t even touched on the energy sector yet) have become so powerful and tightly controlled by a few large companies that they can buy political influence and prevent the reimplementation of regulations. Here in Australia, our weak-kneed politicians dare not offend large industries with forward-looking legislation to protect the environment, and so we get pathetic half-measures. Just this week our conservative opposition party almost imploded over the question of whether they should even debate legislation to combat climate change. And this in an age when the overwhelming public and scientific consensus says act now.

So what can the little guy do?

Stop using Money… WTF?

We’ve tried protesting. We’ve tried writing to our representatives. We’ve tried to shop thoughtfully and buy Australian, buy Green, buy Ethical. We’ve subscribed to MoveOn, GetUp, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, mailing lists of every political stripe. Yet political rhetoric, and particularly legislation, is completely, provably out of touch with what people actually want.

I think the time has come to devalue money. Think about it: How often do you use actual cash? Me, not that often. At least half my expenditures are on cards, using credit. My speculative ventures (I have a few) use Australian Dollars to subdivide shares in companies, nominating value. Most of the money I shift around is not real – it’s credit in one system flowing into another. It has ceased to be important whether it’s measured in Australian Dollars, US Dollars, Rupees or bottle-caps. Yet I pay fees to move all this non-existent money around. I am paying the bank some insane amount of money just to decrease a number on one computer and increase it on another, only to have it flow back the other way a week later.

What’s more, modern currency systems are no longer backed by physical resources such as gold – they are all Fiat Currencies. Money has become, for better or worse, simply an accounting system – a way of mutually determining who owes who what.

So what’s to stop me and my friends from adopting our own currency for a particular project? Say, for example, we want to build a web site (I’m a programmer). It’s a club with membership fees. The site needs to be designed, built, documented and maintained and all these things take time, and this is before we have any members.

So we create a pool of credits, say a million credits. Let’s call them SiteBucks. This is just like shares in a company. We allocate SiteBucks to particular tasks – 2000 for a design, 10000 for programming, and so on, as decided by the founders of the venture. The people who work on the site accumulate SiteBucks, and we store each person’s tally in a register. When the site is built, we may have expended 20% of the available SiteBucks, spread around everyone who did the work.

So far, this has operated just like any other kind of speculative venture.

The interesting part comes next. How much longer can you sustain your “virtual” currency? How else could you spend it? As membership of the site grows, or offshoots are created, could you continue to use SiteBucks to pay for stuff?

The answer is, surprisingly, yes. The only thing you need is an exchange rate. Some notion of how your SiteBucks translate into other things, whether it’s currency or apples.

This is where computers come in. Computers are insanely good at storing registers of numbers, lists of members and, most importantly, modelling complex systems like exchange rates. Thank you financial industry – you’ve invented suites of tools that can balance hundreds of currencies off against each other. Now let’s scale that up to thousands or even millions of currencies. Easily done – computers are fast and cheap.

But wouldn’t this just result in chaos? Surely most currencies will not be traded enough to have a stable exchange rate against every other currency

Well, yes, but even so most speculative companies fail before they hit the market anyway. Just because you’ve invented a currency doesn’t mean you’ll grow to the size that it can be meaningfully exchanged.

Also, when your venture reaches a size where it’s producing mutually-agreed value, you can swap your unstable currency for a more stable one. Over the last 40 years or so that would typically have been US Dollars. Now it can be anything. I mean, fuckit, it could be WoW Gold. It doesn’t matter.

Or you can continue with your private market in your private currency and only trade for other goods “at the edges”, for goods and services that can’t be produced internally. This is what’s called a Community Currency or LETS (Local Exchange Trading System). A great site discussing issues around community currencies is OpenSourceCurrency.org.

But isn’t this illegal? Actually, no. Creating your own physical currency is illegal. Creating a “points system” that a closed group uses to track mutual credit levels may be in a gray area, but I’d love to see a government try to detect and eliminate it if it’s all happening inside a private computer system.

What about tax? The basis for a Fiat Currency is that it’s the means by which the government demands tax payments. Creating your own currency is a neat way of avoiding paying tax on things like Capital Gains or sales taxes because no money is changing hands. Republicans and Libertarians rejoice! Overdoing it may land you in jail though.

What effect will this have on the Real Economy(tm)?

Oh, a whole bunch! Some positive, some negative. In real terms (i.e. productivity) the economy should grow because of the reduced friction for capital to enter speculative ventures. But the one effect I’m interested in is this: there will be a huge shift in the balance of economic power. The general population will be empowered to shrink the Dollar-economy because Dollars won’t make up as much of the traded currency. This will reduce the influence of companies that have spent most of their energy accumulating financial and political power and not so much of it actually helping people.

In other words, more of the energy you expend working will go towards actual value, and less into hidden, private taxation by banks and other large, opaque, private industries that have flourished in the past 20 years.

I’ll sign off now – no doubt I’ll come back and edit this at some point. Interested on people’s thoughts on this though. I’ve begun meddling in a few virtual currency projects, so if anyone’s interested in hearing more let me know.