TRANSPARENT BUNDLES by Seth Goldstein

Web Alchemy, Josh Harris & Justin.TV

Web Alchemy

Exactly two years ago, in April 2005, I wrote the first chapter on Alchemy in the Media Futures series.  Over the course of history, Alchemy always promised more than it could deliver.  But it was this promise that captured the imagination of people and drew their Attention to the very impossibility of turning “base metal into gold.”

As it relates to the contemporary Web landscape, Alchemy represents the promise of automatic personalized media creation.  It is the nuclear fission of intersecting Web 2.0 services.  "Maybe, just maybe, if I go to Web 2.0 Expo I will find that one service that that connects me most fully?"  This is the process of extreme triangulation that we- maybe without even knowing- are trying to achieve every moment that we use the Internet to express ourselves. The process is not new.  But its reception is.

When Josh Harris broadcast his life in real-time on weliveinpublic.org in 2000, it was received as strange exhibitionism in SoHo.  He and his girlfriend Tanya Corin went online in a Warhol art-house kind of way.  It wasn't clear what exactly Josh was trying to prove, but like many I was fascinated by the embedded cameras he installed in the Turkish-style bath. On Day 93, long after Tanya walked out and Josh had left it to brokers to sell the 4000 sf+ loft on lower Broadway, a recently arrived journalist who needed a place to crash ended up minding after the apt while it was being shown to potential buyers.  All the surveillance gear was very much in place and there was a working live control room where all the cameras flowed into, as well as the external chatter from those across the community grabbing these streams.  This writer describes what it was like to be there during these last days:

I am doing laundry all the next day, sitting alone, and I learn how to take advantage of the chatters. After all, I am a visitor in the house of a man I do not know. But they, they've lived here for a while... I ask them if Harris allows people to smoke in the loft. I ask if they know where an iron is. In one particularly surreal moment, I realize I have lost my keys. I enter the chat room and ask if anybody happens to see where I might have left them. One guy tells me to check my pockets. And there they were. From The Cyber House Rules By Will Leitch, Jan  1, 1999

Eight years ago when he wrote this, we had a different attitude towards pervasive surveillance than we have today.   Now, as American Idol, YouTube, Twitter and countless other social media phenomena would attest, the quickest road to celebrity is via one's willingness to become-  physically or behaviorally- naked.

And so, how then to describe the performance of Justin.TV?  His omnipresent camera cylinder to the left of his perspective is like the pen-above-the-ear of a great investigative journalist- Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in All the Presidents Men.

Despite his camera, Justin doesn't care about coming off as a disinterested reporter.  There is no longer even a pretense that the subject drives the interview.  Maybe it's wrong to think of it as an interview at all.  The  recording instruments are so integrated and obvious that everybody Justin comes into contact with gets their own live studio audience.  This shifts the lens of narcissism from Justin to his audience, making him seem almost, well, selfless.

Michael Goldhaber recently defined a "star" as:

(When an attent typically has many audients, thus taking in more net attention than paying out, that person is of course a STAR.  )

On the Internet, this is based in large part on one's ability to express oneself openly, across multiple networks.  For example, in addition to the live video feed and community chat, Justin makes it easy for us to connect to him via shared social networks:

Justin wants people to pay close Attention to his stream and comment on his blog. This is exactly how stars enrapture their fans:  engaging them in production of the very stardom they wish to worship.  There is a significant difference between celebrity in the first Internet cycle and now.  It is not the tools that matter, since many of them have not changed dramatically, but a growing responsibility that more and more of us feel to express our unique, authentic selves online. Justin.TV, like Tia Tequila of MySpace, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Mark Zukerberg of Facebook and Fred Wilson of Typepad, inspire us to be all that we can be online- to open up our API and let the data flow.   

This is the Summer of Love, 40 years later transposed onto the Web.

 

Media Futures 2007: 4/5, Alchemy: History

The History of Alchemy

Practiced in civilizations across the world from ancient times up through the 19th century, the early proto-scientific and philosophical discipline of alchemy is most widely understood as the quest to achieve the transmutation of base metals into the precious metals of gold or silver, as well as the creation of a panacea, which promised to cure all disease, rendering immortality a fate not only reserved for the gods. Taking the commonality of properties of the known metals (gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, lead and mercury) as evidence of a commonality of composition, alchemists operated on the assumption that they might somehow correct the composition of the base metal, rendering it pure gold. To do so, they needed the philosopher’s stone, or the elixir, which would speed up that process of transmutation which, occurring naturally underground, would require the passage of thousands of years.

We might imagine the history of alchemy as a curious double-helix, its Eastern and Western strands decidedly separate but linked by certain commonalities. The Eastern strand of the history of alchemy finds its root in China, where alchemy was closely linked with the pursuit of health through traditional Taoist forms of medicine (specifically Acupuncture and Moxibustion, a therapy that uses mugwort herb to stimulate the circulation of blood through warm regions of the body and key acupuncture points). In that it was not so much concerned with the transmutation of base metals to previous metals, Chinese alchemy stood apart from its Western cousin, but it had its own version of the Philosopher’s Stone, which they called the Grand Elixir of Immortality.

But it is Egypt that promises to remain immortal when it comes to the discussion of the history of alchemy, its position of privilege perhaps embedded in the word alchemy itself. The etymology of the word is contested, traced to the Arabic al-kīmiya or al-khīmiya, meaning “cast together”, “pour together” or “weld”, as well as to the Persian Kimia, meaning “gold.” Others, though, read al- kīmiya as “the Egyptian [science]”, having been borrowed from the Copic word for “Egypt”, or kēme, which is itself derived from a chain that leads back to the ancient Egyptian term for the color black and the country of Egypt itself, kmt.

It is the god Thoth (also referred to as Hermes-Thoth) to whom mythology attributes the honor of being the founder of Egyptian mythology. It his forty-two Books of Knowledge, Thoth wrote in part on alchemy, but it is his Emerald Tablet, preserved Greek and Arabic translations, that is said to form a critical foundation in the alchemy of the West. Like Thoth’s Emerald Tablet, the only works of Egyptian alchemy available today have survived through such Greek and Arabic translations. As the Macedonians conquered Egypt in the 4th century, so came Greek language and culture in tow – and any Egyptian writings on alchemical philosophy and practice were likely burned as a part of Diocletian’s attempts to suppress a 292 revolt in Alexandria, that center of knowledge which figured so prominently in our histories of Automata and Algorithm.

There in Alexandria, the Greeks brought their philosophies of Pythagoreanism, Ionianism and Gnosticism together with the Egyptian hermetic philosophy, the principle tenet of which is called the macrocosm-microcosm belief: “in truth certainly and without doubt, whatever is below is like that which is above, and whatever is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.” That central belief, that the exterior world, or the macrocosm, affects the human body, or the microcosm, interacted with the belief that numbers rule the universe, that the universe could be explained by examining natural phenomena and that the world was created in a flawed manner, thereby rendering it imperfect (Pythagoreanism, Ionianism and Gnosticism, respectively, and grossly oversimplified) to create a tradition that left us with the idea that everything in the universe was formed from the elements earth, air, water and fire.

As the Greeks adopted Egyptian alchemical knowledge and traditions, so adopted the Romans the knowledge and traditions of the Greeks. But Christianity then swept through the empire, bringing Christian philosophies, and particularly those of Augustine, into contention with Hermetic ideals. Augustine believed experimental philosophy to be evil and ungodly, maintaining people could understand God through reason and faith. Augustine’s philosophies were in turn used to argue that alchemy was evil and ungodly. But alchemy already had its niche in the Christian tradition, grandfathered in by Greek and Roman culture. As medieval Europe saw Christian philosophers challenge Augustinian doctrine, its alchemists worked from the contributions from the Islamic world, which became the premier stage for scientific and alchemical development after the fall of Rome.

Islamic alchemists were responsible for the technique of distillation; they discovered sulfuric, hydrochloric and nitric acids – and, perhaps most importantly, that the latter two could be mixed together and used to dissolve gold, the noblest of metals. The philosopher Jabir Ibn Hayyan, referred to in English as Geber, remains one of the most influential writers in the history of alchemy, for it was he who sought after the artificial creation of life in the laboratory. He described the elements in terms of their hotness, coldness, dryness and moistness – qualities which could be altered in the laboratory and rearranged, thus resulting in a new metal. He thus introduced the search for the philosopher’s stone, a central thrust of the Western alchemical tradition.

Though many philosophized about alchemy in the early stages of the millennium, some historians argue that the first alchemical experimentation in medieval Europe did not occur until the 13th century, when Roger Bacon is said to have brought on the search for the elixir of life. Bacon’s contributions to science were widespread: in addition to his work in alchemy, he analyzed convex glasses and lenses, invented spectacles, theorized about the telescope and, lest we forget, created the talking head automaton.

Bacon’s European contemporaries were to a great extent members of the clergy, those who had access to and the education to read the world’s assembled alchemical oeuvre. As the 13th century drew to a close, there was an established architecture of alchemical belief, including the aforementioned macrocosm-microcosm theories, the four elements and the four qualities. But most importantly, these Christian alchemists believed that their art could reunite man and God – for if man’s soul had been divided with Adam’s fall, so could the separate parts be purified and brought together again. These philosophies would be struck down in the next century, with the edict of Pope John XXII against alchemy removing clergymen from its practice.

The alchemy of the next three hundred years was thus one of a much different character. Alchemists returned their efforts to the search for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of youth, and influential figures like Nicolas Flamel and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa contributed to a major shift in the classification of the art – namely, alchemy went from being characterized as a mystical philosophy to that of an occultist magic. This shift set alchemy up to be struck down by the thinkers of the Age of Reason, who favored rigorous experimentation over such seeds of ancient wisdom. The prescient Paracelsus, perhaps the most important alchemist during the Renaissance, had perceived the occultist label a threat to the alchemical arts as a whole, and as such, he pushed back, casting some occultist threads and Gnostic philosophies out of his alchemical fabric, choosing to focus his efforts on using chemicals and minerals in medicine to achieve a healthy balance in human bodies. But the work of Paracelsus could still not overcome all that occultist image carried with it, all the fallout created by the charlatans and cons who promised transmutation but produced trash.

We might read the intentions of the earliest alchemists as the same as those of the Internet alchemists of today: above all else, the these alchemists concern themselves with the study of changes in the material world and how they might be able to harness the power of these changes for their own purpose and benefit. These solitary materials scientists, mixing various elements together to render their combinations far more valuable than the sums of their parts, set the stage for the Internet alchemists of today, who, in harnessing the power of the changes of Internet media and create entities which are far more valuable. This alchemy takes place in large part in the act of naming – a company, an index, a domain, a category, a database class – for in that move to name, the Internet alchemist creates something far more than simply a representation of some external object or idea.

Thanks to Maggie Dillon for helping with this research

Valleywag is Intimate Attention

The most valuable form of attention is that which you are most reluctant to part with.

This is what you do, privately, that you dont wish to share with anybody else, including your friends, family and maybe even your spouse.  Oftentimes we are even willing to pay subscription fees for content that we wish to consume in complete confidence.     Perhaps this is because we intuit that ad-supported media has a way of capturing information about our attention that we don't wish to share.

A few weeks ago my friend Scott Heiferman of meetup.com came by to visit on the eve of a board meeting in SF.   I was astounded at the hundreds of thousands of live, real-life group meet-ups he has facilicated from a simple software platform.  Scott has always been a champion of expressing yourself on the Internet, from his first days at iTraffic when he taught his clients how to market links to their own web sites.   Before search engine optimization and marketing, remember, the primary traffic generators were banners.  A few years ago he became fascinated with the idea of putting pictures online, even before flickr shifted their focus from mmorgs to images.   So Scott started a company called Fotolog, which is one one of the most popular Spanish-language sites in the world (even if it is driven by intense social media consumption in Brazil).

Over dinner, Scott said that he had swore off mail and rss clients, and had gone entirely to the Web, courtesy of Google.  I asked him if he had seen what Google was now offering to users of its reader product, in terms of helping them understand which feeds they were paying the most Attention to.  No surprise that I believe that the socialization of Attention data will usher in the next great wave of innovation online; and I shared my enthusiasm with Scott about a world where people were able to (selectively) expose various aspects of their online behavior to others that they trust.  I encouraged Scott to log in to his Google Reader account so he could see what i meant.    He paused for a moment, obviously not willing to share this level of intimacy with me and said:

"You know Seth, I would be embarassed for you to know how much time i spend each day reading Valleywag.”

It was only fitting, then, that I got Valleywagged last week for wading too deep in theory: late Monday night I ruminated over how the identity of a blogger essentially becomes the clicks that lead to the blog ("products of environment" in the always clarifying words of Yardley.ca) and then Tuesday morning I awake to see a rash of new incoming clicks from Valleywag.  Valleywag c'est moi.  Not quite sure what to make of the Transparent Bundles - Valleywag mashup.  Reminds me of when Brecht traveled to Hollywood to write screenplays...

At the First Round Capital dinner at Bibibbo in Menlo Park, I ran into Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures who leaned over and apologized for not understanding what I was talking about in my last post.  And so there I was, after a day of absorbing Michael Arrington’s perfect pitch lunch address; Fox’s Heather Hardee establish a modicum of  diplomacy with 3rd party widget networks on MySpace; and Google’s Chris Sacca remind us that there is no better place to find meaning in your work than inside of their work; than I was reminded to start making sense.

“Cookies are worth dimes, but profiles are worth dollars”

Scott Rafer’s performance at Web 2.0 in October, where he pitched 10+ Yahoo! execs in a row, may forever cast him as the Paul Revere of this pending revolution:  “Attention is coming... attention is coming!”   This was a transformative event, if only because it put an real value (ie $10+ million) on otherwise invisible data about people reading blogs.   Sure, we have recognized the economic value of explicit social media- user generated videos (ie YouTube), tags (ie del.icio.us) and photos (ie flickr); but this was the first time that the implicit, behavioral contributions of users were valued as an asset.

Eric and Todd started MyBlogLog as a stats package, which dropped a cookie on each reader so as to report better stats back to the writer of the blog.   As blogs have taken off, MBL was able to drop more and more cookies on the machines of users that it otherwise had no relationship with.   This “worthless traffic” of readers would have remained such if it were not for a unique insight by Rafer.   His contribution, having no doubt listened to one of the many sermons on Attention, was to see the cookie as a social media input.   Why not give readers of blogs the opportunity to express their readership to the writers they visit?  In other words, why not enable users to connect their anonymous implicit cookies to their personal explicit profiles?

This was a simple enough proposition but amounts, in my mind, to something new and important:  the reader as activist.  Offering little more than the ability to have your icon appear on the blogs that you visit, MBL turned the cookie from something that exposes you to something that expresses you.    What had always been limited to passive behavioral data for publishers and advertisers to target against had now become something different- a continuous stream of active Attention gestures.    As Scott recounted, “They [Eric and Todd] were gathering implicit data before I got there.  We added explicit, public rendering of that implicit data."

Yahoo!’s decision to purchase MBL makes sense as a means of converting some of their 150+ million  “worthless” page views into opt-in Attention profiles.  Already, groups are starting to form within the MBL communities that recognize their own opportunity to “vote with their feet” which in this case would be more akin to marketing through their clicks.   For example, just think of small groups of members, organized around a cause or particular passion, descending en masse upon a site.  The widget expressing the last 10 readers suddenly becomes a powerful tool for asserting a certain position.  First comes the inane home town fans click-pack with each user wearing a Cincinnatti Reds baseball hat in the picture on his profile; then come the more interesting political agendas and petitions.

One thing is for sure- behavioral targeting companies such as Tacoda, Revenue Science and Blue Lithium have no choice but to align themselves with the user in control.  In the wake of MBL/Yahoo!, these behavioral networks can no longer sell advertising through publishers without giving some real functional or economic benefit back to the the users creating the behavior to begin with.    And because these networks dont have a profile-based relationship with their audience, they have to start from scratch.

Please allow me to introduce myself

Im a man of wealth and taste

Ive been around for a long, long year

Stole many a mans soul and faith...

Pleased to meet you

Hope you guess my name 

Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

Enabling readers to express their unique identities with minimal transaction costs is what the best social media services are able to achieve.  The vast majority, however, fall on either side of this:  either they are too sheepish to let their users know how much they really know about them, or they are too presumptuous and excite privacy hysteria.  One young entrepreneur who has been building fair-trade Attention services put it best when he said:

I've often wondered if and when users will become aware of the value their data holds, and whether they'll demand ownership of it, or simply throw a fit that such data is being mined.

MEDIA FUTURES 2006: 2/5 ALGORITHM: The Transition from Automata to Algorithm

In the beginning there is the Automata.  It is the prime mover: an intention that drives human action.

Over time, the record of these actions, both individually and across people,  establish a unique pattern of behavior that is known as an Algorithm.  In the context of Media Futures, an algorithm is a computing engine designed to process behavioral data and convert it into content that engages ones Attention.

You can imagine an Algorithm like a strange Rube Goldberg machine with a complex set of routers, pulleys and chutes that turn a certain input into an equally certain output. 

Recall our reinterpretation of Hamlet:

We encourage others to participate so that we may consume them
and we make ourselves interesting for the blogosphere.  Your Internet CEO and your Joe Blogger are just different algorithms- two APIs, but to one network.

Each decision that I make as to what to pay Attention to, and the physical gesture that I use to effect this choice (search, click, form, sign in, etc) establishes a little personal algorithm that gets joined with all of my other personal algorithms.  Together, this bundle of personal information algorithms establishes and maintains my persistent, stable electronic identity.  This is a deeper, more authentic version of me than simply a numeric ID that establishes my offline physical presence.  The me that makes me me online is one that I actively create and reinforce every moment based on a series of interlocking gears (which I control based on data I produce).

 

And now if you pull up from the tree of me as an individual to the forest of all of us in society, then you see a much broader fabric.  The fabric represents Social Media, each of its infinite threads representing one individual's momentary micro algorithmic gesture. 

One would assume that each of these mini decisions was distributed to the edges, and that the control over it was determined by its owner.  But this would be to ignore the gravity of the Attention economy, which is Influence.  On the Internet, Influence is measured by the amount of Attention one gets relative to the amount of information one gives  The most influential online individual is able to syndicate a limited but steady stream of what makes me me-ness through his personal API and nevertheless generate a high pagerank that lands him above the Google fold.

The area that I am most interested in exploring in this current chapter on Algorithm is the rub between what you are searching for and where you emerge from other people's searches.  This is located between (1) the record of your Attention (for example as expressed recently by AOL through their disclosure of "anonymous" search histories) and (2) the position you occupy within the pagerank universe based on what keywords produce results that point to you, above the fold.

For me,  these keywords might include: "Seth Goldstein"  "Media Arbitrage"  "Algorithm Futures" "Transparent Soft Dollars"

Coming next, a brief history of Algorithm

Media Futures 2006: 1/5 Automata: The Human Computer

While the recent inventions of Web 2.0 and User Generated Content (UGC) seem to be radical departures from the computing culture we grew up in, their organic social metaphors are in fact rooted in the beginning of computer science.  In the 1940’s and 50’s work of Alan Turing, John Von Neumann and Norbert Weiner, most discussions of the future of computing evolve into a study of the brain.  The natural automata of human thought, the way in which our ideas express our independence, this is the machine intelligence that technologists tried to design into early computers.   

Alan Turing was fascinated by Automata and its relationship to natural human thought.  In his 1950 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing outlined an experiment that was able to determine whether a computing machine could be defined as having the capacity to think.  The Turing test functions as follows: Human “X” and respondent “Y” take part in a teletype conversation, but X cannot know whether Y is human or a machine.   If, after a specified amount of time, X believes that Y has responded like a human, and Y is a machine, then Y can be defined as having that human capacity of thought.

In his biography of Turing, William Aspray writes that this:

“was among the earliest investigations of the use of electronic computers for artificial-intelligence research...He attempted to break down the distinctions between human and machine intelligence and to provide a single standard of intelligence, in terms of mental behavior, upon which both machines and biological organisms could be judged.   In providing his standards, he considered only the information that entered and exited the automata…Turing was moving toward a unified theory of information and information processing applicable to both the machine and the biological worlds.”

The fusion of machine and biology is promoted as a core computer architectural principle in the Interim Progress Report on the Physical Realization of an Electronic Computing Instrument:  Julian H. Bigelow, James H. Pomerene, Ralph J. Slutz and Willis H. Ware; Princeton: The Institute for Advanced Study; 1 January 1947.  This report was prepared for John Von Neumann, and the rest of the IAS authorities, on the development progress of a machine based entirely on mathematical equations.

Left to right: James Pomerence, Julian Bigelow, von Neumann and Herman Goldstine

Von Neumann had joined Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study as a Mathematician in 1933.  About 10 years later he started concentrating on something less theoretical and more practical (which alienated many of his colleagues): building an electronic computing machine.  This project was a deep meditation on the act of creation.  Some of the greatest minds, across a variety of disciplines (math, biology, engineering, physics) converged in Princeton to help Von Neumann “physically realize” his ideas. 

IAS Report, 1947

According to the report, Organs are:  “portions or sub-assemblies of the machine which constitute the means of accomplishing some inclusive operation or function; as “arithmetic organ.”  Note how the processor in this case is able to extend its influence onto others in an “inclusive operation.”  The organ of social media was anticipated already then, in 1947, even without an Internet to enable it at scale.   

Von Neumann continued to extend his computer research towards an understanding of the human brain.  He described this specifically in his introduction to his 1958 work The Computer and the Brain:

In 1948, Norbert Weiner, the leader of cybernetics wrote Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.  His use of the word animal is different than Turing’s logic or Von Neumann’s brain, but he is similarly concerned with the organs of information and their ability to relay information between systems:

“It is a noteworthy fact that the human and animal nervous systems, which are known to be capable of the work of a computation system, contain elements which are ideally suited to act as relays.  These elements are the so-called neurons or nerve cells... The mechanical brain does not secrete thought <as the liver does bile>, as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity.  Information is information, not matter or energy.”

Weiner, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1947

In late 2004, the creator of del.icio.us Joshua Schachter described to me that tags were simply crystallized attention.  Both terms interested me: while attention has become my chief investigation, the transparent materialism expressed by “crystallized” has also been a key focus.  When you put these together, you get, in Weiner’s words, a “secretion” of passive behavioral data.

Seth Goldstein, April 2006

Just because a tag is a form of  information doesn’t mean that it lacks physicality  Without being matter or energy, can a tag be made of something else, something that comes closer in nature to mirror neurons?  Attentrons.  Remember that mirror neurons are a form of biological material.  These mirror neurons fire when the subject performs an action, but also when it observes somebody else performing an action.  In this latter case, the successful firing of a mirror neuron is based entirely on its ability to passively mimic the behavior of somebody else.  In this quiet absence of a human impulse, attention is full.

Media Futures 2006: 1/5 Automata: A Brief History of Automata: Cranking Away Since Alexandra

 

If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others.  If the shuttle could weave, and the pick touch the lyre, without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not need servants, nor masters slaves.

So wrote Aristotle of the possibilities of the automaton: an object acting of itself, something bearing the power of spontaneous motion.  The advent of such a mechanism not only promised to change labor – eliminating the need for servants and slaves – but also had the potential to change media production and publication. 

In tracing the development of the automaton from its roots in ritual articulated objects to its contemporary versions, (particularly in the context of robots and models of cellular automata in computability theory and theoretical biology), it is useful to keep Aristotle’s commentary from the fourth century B.C. in mind. 

The history of automata begins with “creation” itself.  Genealogies of these self-replicating objects extend back to the creation myths of every religion and culture – from the story of God’s creation of Adam to the story of Prometheus, who made the first man and woman on earth from clay, which he animated with the fire he stole from heaven.  Moreover, the earliest articulated objects from prehistory of early historic times probably served both artistic and religious purposes: used by shamans, priests, and entertainers, these simple clay or wooden dolls with turning heads, arms, legs and hands could provide the illusion of movement as it occurs in nature, thus adding emotional impact to plays and fables.   

This baker kneading dough is an articulated Egyptian toy, one which was probably found in the tomb from the time of the XII dynasty onwards. By being deposited in the tomb, the baker became forever bound to his master, accompanying him into the Beyond to continue to perform his duties through the rest of time.

The purposes of automata were not strictly in the realm of morality and spirituality.  Hero of Alexandria (who is credited with the invention of the crank, the cam-shaft and a system of rotations and counterweights, as well as with having demonstrated the principles of the vacuum and the incompressibility of water) used automata to illustrate scientific principles.  In his Treatise on Pneumatics from A.D. 62, he laid out applications of science in the forms of singing birds, sounding trumpets, animals that could drink and coin-operated machines.  Hero’s most famous automaton, though, is the steam eolipile, which, in showing the expansion of gas when heated and the force of reaction in its escape, is regarded as an ancestor of the steam engine:



Above all, automata were sources of delight and entertainment: mechanical orchestras, living snuff boxes and cuckoo-clocks.   From King-shu Tse’s 500 B.C. flying magpie of wood and bamboo to Jacques de Vaucanson’s A.D. 1738 duck, which could eat, drink, splash around the water and digest its food like a real duck, inventors imitated nature for the delight of man:

 



Over time, the makers of automata moved from simply trying to recreate the motion of creatures in the natural world to trying to use these motions to accomplish the work of those very creatures.  This is not to say that entertainment automata disappeared – after all, fake talking human heads like Roger Bacon’s from the 13th century still capture the wonder (and horror) of onlookers at circus fairs and carnivals, as do automaton scribes, dancers and singers in the tradition of those seen below (and in the tradition of “It’s a Small World”). 

 

Picture: The Jaquet-Droz Writer, 1774.  Artifact courtesy of the Neuchâtel Museum.

technorati tags:automata, mediafutures, root.net, attention, media, attentiontrust

THE WAR FOR ATTENTION: SUMMER 2006

Foreward

Since writing a series of essays on Media Futures in the Spring of 2005, I have spent the last year or so investing in and building out various data services.  These include: a lead generation marketplace at rootexchange.com, whose first vertical is mortgage;  a clickstream media platform at root.net, the command line for a new Attention-based OS; AttentionTrust and the promotion of its four principles of property, mobility, economy, and transparency (AttentionTrust.org is now the #2 organic search result for Attention on Google); the “crystallized attention” (tag) company del.icio.us, which was acquired by Yahoo!; and finally, Majestic Research, the investment firm that uses online consumer behavior for its equity models and which I co-founded in 2002.  Majestic is the name I used for this blog on typepad, and its subtitle transparent bundles was an attempt to describe how investment research and trading should operate. 

Sometimes it feels like I am working on a number of disconnected activities.  But enough of the time it feels like they are all connected in a deeper kind of way.  They all deal with consumer Internet usage; and more specifically, they share the common goal of maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio of online data in order to elicit the highest fidelity copy of an individual’s Attention.  This is not an easy problem to solve, as the interface between one’s mental focus and the TCP/IP protocol is indirect at best.  What we have as proxies are clicks, searches, tags, forms and other types of user generated media.  From the interplay of these artifacts we-- as in the royal Web 2.0 we-- are busy coding a social media fabric, the center of which always seems but one release away.

Unlike most media properties, Attention is inherently unstable and indeterminate.  Describing Attention is like making a movie inside of a house of mirrors, where it is impossible to keep the camera itself out of the picture.  It is because of this Heisenberg-like uncertainty principal that passive behavioral data provides the better indicator of pure Attention than explicit user generated content such as ratings, reviews and tags (which change the substance of Attention as they reflect it).  As we review the history of Attention, it seems always caught in its own shadow; artists and actors want Attention and create works and performances to “attract” and “capture” it.  Only recently have certain of us (guided by Goldhaber’s theories on the matter) come to see Attention in its own light: as a material substance that moves from one human being to another like a language or a liquid.  Our cognitive framework for Attention needs to shift from metaphors of coercion to metaphors of creation.

The distributor of Attention may indeed be influenced by that receiver who provides the most interesting information, but still the former maintains control over who gets his Attention.  It is this choice the individual has over where he spends his Attention that underlies the theory of Media Futures.  This new organon assumes that the user is in control of the media that he and his network of social and commercial relationships create.   With the traditional consumer now in control over the means of social media production, the traditional media company now needs a new value-creation model-- one based on consuming the most relevant electronic gestures of its audience, rather than one based on producing the most engaging content.

For a broader dialectical context, I would encourage you to  tune into the following writers

• Steve Gillmor
• Michael Goldhaber
• John Hagel
• Umair Haque
• Doc Searls
• AttentionTrust.org

Attention:  The underlying instrument of Media Futures

“Attention is scarce,” Michael Goldhaber writes, “because each of us only has so much of it to give, and it can only come from us – not machines, computers or anywhere else.”  It is in cyberspace, he argues, that a new type of economy comes into its own: this is the attention economy, an economy based on what is both “most desirable and ultimately most scarce.” 

Goldhaber’s principles of the attention economy enter into a long-standing dialogue among art historians and cultural theorists about the techniques and implications of attention in the production and reception of media.  As art historian Michael Fried argues in Absorption and Theatricality, it was first in the writings of Diderot that the terms of attention assumed critical in addition to rhetorical significance.  A painting, Fried writes, “had first to attract (attirer, appeller) and then to arrest (arrêter) and finally to enthrall (attacher) the beholder, that is, a painting had to call someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself, and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move.”  Then, it was the media itself being consumed that did the work advertising does today: it was up to the media itself to call out to consumers for their attention.

The Beauty Salon

Of course, in today’s salons, we are more likely to consume the news of celebrity hook-ups than the spectacle of high art: that the salon is still a place for to see and be seen is telling.  In the eighteenth century, the salon was a privileged site for the bourgeoisie to consume, contemplate and discuss art and literature – truly a place for seeing and being seen.  We pay visits to an entirely different type of salon today: we go in preparation for – or to increase our chances of – the condition of being seen.  By doing work on our bodies – by taking clippers to our dead cells, by taking tweezers to our brows, we might too do our own advertising: we might attract, arrest and enthrall the passers-by.  We pay to increase our chances of being beheld – consumed, contemplated, discussed; we pay so that others might pay attention to us.

This is the to be seen half – but that which we see in salons, besides other guests questing to improve their own appearances, is the set of people important enough to be seen by the masses: celebrity.  Magazines like People and Us Weekly, which adorn the waiting areas, promise a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of people who have entertained us on stage or on the big screen, or perhaps even written books for our edification or delight.  These celebrities have captured the public’s attention with their work, and they certainly capture the public’s attention with their play.  And the placement of celebrity magazines in salons suggests the possibility that by altering our appearance, perhaps in the fashion of the star du jour, we might capture more attention.  At the end of this line of fantasy is the possibility of our own presence in such a magazine, the possibility that the banalities of our own lives will be represented in the world of others and put out for consumption by third, fourth, millionth parties.  We will be worthy of attention.

The Internet Salon

The truth is that our own private gestures are constantly being recognized, represented and put out for public consumption – and in real time.  Moreover, these gestures are at the same time being plugged into calculations to predict our future behavior, calculations which promise a personalized experience to those who click (and profit to those who calculate).  The playing-out of these phenomena takes place, of course, on the Internet.  This is an economy of attention – one, as Goldhaber argues, that is different from any economy seen before: “In its pure form, it doesn’t involve any sort of money, nor a market or anything closely resembling one.  It involves a quite different pattern of life than the routine-based, industrial one…What matters is seeking, obtaining and paying attention.”  The economy’s “characteristic form of property” is “the attention that is readily available to its ‘owner’ from other people, which depends on what attention this owner has gotten in the past”; it is a property “located, quite literally, in ‘the minds of the beholders.”

In his work on the attention economy, Goldhaber views the movement toward cyberspace as analogous to the move of western European civilization to the New World of the Americas around the time of the birth of the market economy.  “Unimpeded by the remains of feudalism,” he writes, “the market-industrial system in fact took most complete hold here in North America first.  From here, much later, it swept back to complete its conquest of the western European motherland, along with the rest of the globe.”  Similarly, “Cyberspace will be the ‘place’ where the new economy moves ahead most dynamically, but the strength gained in the process will eventually sweep back to dominate the rest of life.”

If Attention is indeed the substance of focus (that which registers our interests by indicating our choice for certain things and choice against other things), then Internet is the most fertile ground for the development of the Attention Economy;  for the Internet (and particularly web services) allows the recording and sharing of our choices, of our Attention, in real-time.  These choices of ours are manifested by the binary gestures of the keyboard and mouse.  With each click, our own narratives expand.  With each move to create a tag or a link, our narratives expand.  With each search, with each subscription, our narratives expand to tell the story of which team we follow, where we will be taking our next vacation, which conference we are planning to attend.  The gestures of our lives are recorded, and we become represented – on “Top 100” lists, blogrolls and Flickr badges of different  sizes.  And the narratives of our electronic Attention gestures have even crossed back into offline mass media: on CNN’s headline news or American Idol’s SMS voting.  We may not be followed by paparazzi, but airtime on national television is a start.   

The sociological, psychological and economic forces at play in this discussion warrant extended research.  As such, it is a daunting task to wrestle with the history of social media and probe into its future development.  The Internet is a dynamic site of all sorts of production and consumption, a place where familiar models are broken and reinvented, a place where the material being consumed is dynamic, produced on the fly.  We have tags, wikis, social networks and other forms of social media – we have new forms of media being created by everyman for everyman, and at any time, in any place.  And works in these media are being created at a far higher rate than they are being consumed.  Power and value shift, become redefined; the very possibilities of our personhood shift, become redefined.
The more we express ourselves electronically, the more residue we leave behind in this ever-growing, ever-changing landscape – shadows of our digital actions scattered about held together not by gravity, biology, optics but by algorithms and APIs.  The economics of behavioral data, and the electronic media gestures that constitute this data, reveal themselves in an analysis of Attention.   This is the goal of updating Media Futures one year later:   Over the coming weeks, I will write the five-boned skeleton of A’s into the skin of Attention: 

It is a body of work that seeks to better understand our gestures in social media, the very articulations of our attention and intentions – a pyramid topped by Attention and flanked by:

• Automata- Human inspiration
• Algorithm- Patterns of behavior
• API- Natural expression
• Alchemy- Value creation
• Arbitrage- Economic discovery

This is a model I see as most compelling in examining the delta of change, the fertile crescent lying between Wall Street and Madison Avenue.


Note:  I am fortunate to be working with an extremely thoughtful and lyrical research assistant in Maggie Dillon, who recently graduated Princeton and who will be studying art history and media theory next year at the University of Cologne.  She likes to refer to herself as a "an aspiring poet and brewer from the country's heartland," which is clearly the kind of midwestern pragmatic spirit that this blog needs more of!