Synapse

To the outsider, the Singularity looks like madness | #SecondLife

 

In a recent Newsweek cover story, it is asserted that technology in general and (more precisely) access to the Internet and mass communication is somehow driving us insane.

 

 

Tweets, texts, emails, posts. New research says the Internet can make us lonely and depressed—and may even create more extreme forms of mental illness.

 

 

Let’s start the ball rolling by stating this is absolute hogwash. What we are seeing are the effects of an accelerated mind adapting to ubiquitous presence and access.

 

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I know, the kids these days with their iPhones, MP3 players, and computers. Tablets and other electronic cocaine addictions up the wazoo only compound the issue, right? I’m not so certain about that assertion.

 

What I’ve noticed is that these studies clearly take the situation out of context and make half-witted assertions about what they feel is going on with the participants. Yes, they are more apt to multitask and become irritable when disconnected from the Internet. Of course their attention span is lower and not able to concentrate on a single thing… or maybe they really can focus on a single thing but only if they truly are interested in it?

 

That’s something I’ve noticed more than anything.

 

In a world of endless information at our fingertips, we’re mentally adapting to the situation by becoming exceedingly quick at deciding what is important and what isn’t. So when we’re talking to our teenagers and they’re staring at their smart phones in a text messaging conversation, maybe they are deciding in a moment that what you are saying is really not as important as you are making it out to be? More to the point is that in an overwhelming onslaught of ubiquitous information and interaction, it’s not so much what you are saying but how you are choosing to convey that information that counts? Generally speaking, we’re simply not choosing the most efficient manner to convey information, nor is that information worth the sustained attention of the person you are trying to convey it to.

 

I wouldn’t say this is an unhealthy addiction. If anything, this is promising because what I see from my end is a population quickly adapting to the singularity context. Accelerating returns essentially mandates that progress will quicken, information will continue to expand and time will compress. In short, it’ll take less time to do more when compared to the same task in a prior generation.

 

So our population is adapting to this time compression. On the surface, I suppose it looks like a sort of mental illness or addiction. We’re already in a multiplicity of persona through or digital interactions, and we refer to ourselves in many differing contexts. A generation ago that notion would have immediately been characterized as a mental instability, but by today’s standards we are expected to engage the world as a multiplicity.

 

However, that isn’t to say that everyone is actually capable of this transition.

 

There are the digital natives and the digital immigrants, the prior are the younger generation that were born into the digital context and had access to these devices and technologies from birth, while the latter generation is not so lucky to have been a native and must retrain their minds to adapt to the technology and implications it brings.

 

Digital natives are most likely to handle this singularity transition without much of an issue, while the ones who will see the adverse effects are likely the digital immigrants who aren’t mentally prepared for this accelerated time shifting and ubiquity.

 

From a medical standpoint, we term this issue Reactive Psychosis, which essentially boils down to a sudden and overwhelming shift in engagement from relative quiet to an onslaught of information overload. To put it more precisely, we’re back to the notion of the monkey sphere (or Dunbar’s Number if you will) and how the mind is adapting to handle the inner-sphere and the outer-sphere. In the case of digital natives, they are already adapting to handle both inner and outer-sphere through highly adaptive prioritization of importance. To a digital immigrant, however, they have a predisposition to believe that all interactions hold relatively the same attention weight in order to remain courteous, and that mentality is the precursory to a mental breakdown when all things seemingly require full attention to be polite but the sheer number of interactions is overwhelming.

 

When we look at this more in-depth, I suppose we can assert that the recent generation has a much higher affliction of A.D.D. and A.D.H.D. but I’m wary to say that is really a bad thing. I’m sure in an analog context, those things are bad, but instead of diagnosing the individual with an attention problem, maybe we should be diagnosing our means of information stream myopic instead?

 

I’d like to hypothesize that those with attention deficit disorder really have nothing wrong with them at all, but instead they are adapted to handle a hyper-contextual environment which the standard methodologies today aren’t capable of delivering. A single mode of communication and, more importantly, a single thread of interaction is not appropriate in a ubiquitous environment. These digital natives are adapting to handle many things at once and actually perform better when able to interact with many things in shorter bursts.

 

In an education aspect, and I know many reading this are keen to perk up their ears, this means that the textbook approach to learning is dying a quick death. What education needs is a multi-sensory and immersive context in order for our digital natives to focus. Not only that, but there needs to be an open-ended context in which exploration of that immersion and many paths can lead to not just a predetermined outcome but the possibility of different outcomes.

 

If you’re an educator and into virtual worlds, then this is a perfect justification for integrating virtual environments into your classroom context. That doesn’t mean a linear environment that walks students through a lesson plan is appropriate, however. What it means is that the students literally thrive and focus on multi-faceted immersive contexts.

 

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Now, I know Rupert Murdoch isn’t exactly the most trustworthy person to quote concerning all of this, but if you put aside the unsavory actions what you have is at least a man who understood this situation from his own perspective and what would need to be done in order to move forward.

 

I’m not one to agree with Rupert Murdoch, but on this he is absolutely correct.

 

So far our solution has been to diagnose our kids with a disorder and pump them full of drugs to slow them down. I find this disturbing and amusing simultaneously because we’re approaching the situation in the same manner as the scientists in the game Portal where GladOS was becoming too smart and too fast, so the solution was to attach other cores to her in order to add noise and slow her down.

 

It’s disturbing because we’re addressing a symptom and not the problem, and amusing because instead of evolving our own methodologies, the digital immigrants immediately see this behavioral change as bad because it is very different than their own, and so they have to “solve” it by diagnosing it as a problem and prescribing drugs to handle it.

 

The problem isn’t the kids, and the problem isn’t technology. The problem is now that the digital natives aren’t being spoon fed information and context in a trickle that is an analog or singular context scenario, they simply aren’t tolerant of the old methodologies any longer. Yet our classrooms and digital immigrant society is still rooted in analog methodologies and contexts, so they decide that something is wrong with the new generation for not acting like they did at their age.

 

The problem is the methodologies and approach to interaction and learning. It’s no longer a world of single stream context, but instead we’re in a world of ubiquitous and hyper-threading context. Short bursts and high impact.

 

I suspect this is also the reason why my own blog is considered “hard to parse” or read for the average person. We’re used to a single graphic and a burst of text, 30 seconds of context and then we move on. However when we’re faced with long reads and deeper context, many people refer to the Cliff Notes version.

 

That being said, I’m still a digital native myself. I can get on with a smart phone and short burst conversations, but sometimes there are things which need to be given due diligence and time in a discussion. I think when we begin to cultivate a balance between the two, we’ll get along just fine. For those that are full-tilt digital natives; These are the people who are the future. Don’t treat it as a disorder or negative addiction. We’re addicted to information and the world. We’re soaking up all things of interest at a hyper-active pace. We’re retraining our minds to learn like we did when we were children…

 

Think about it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dreams in Digital

A discussion about the premise of Copyright, IP and Artificial Scarcity #SecondLife

 

The premise of Artificial Scarcity is, at the core, flawed at best and woefully inadequate at worst in the context of the digital age. It is no secret that copyright and intellectual property is gravely threatened by the digital culture we live in today, and increasingly so at an alarming rate of advancement. Such is the nature of the Internet to effectively circumvent censorship and treat all attempts to censor as damage and route around it.

 

 

 

 

After all, the Internet is a digital system that was at its very core designed to withstand a nuclear war and come out relatively unscathed.

 

What is most disconcerting is not that the Internet itself is nearly impervious to the worst attempts of censorship, but that the paradigms that fostered the creation of this system are no longer relevant to the situation at hand. Worse, still, is that this understanding of distribution of materials and information in the digital age is entirely counterproductive to the existing paradigms which create these media forms.

 

I can give a quick lesson on the past ten years or so of innovation in this digital culture, but I’m fairly certain most of us already know the drill. Peer2Peer came about in systems like Napster, and the copyright and IP industry lost their nut trying to kill it. All that managed to do was throw fuel on the fire, leading to more advanced networks of distribution and even after those legal battles ensued – first against the networks (which by law should have been protected under safe harbor) but later against individuals as young as twelve years old and as old as your dear grandmother in what amounted to a legal paperstorm.

 

Astronomical fines and penalties, legal cases that no individual could possibly afford to protect themselves against, and what turned out to be further fuel on the fire of piracy in the form of the invention of Bittorrent.

 

Clearly the attempted enforcement of artificial scarcity within the confines of a system that does not acknowledge scarcity at all is likely to lose, or make the problem worse.

 

There are very interesting insights from people like Jaron Lanier who believe that artificial scarcity is a necessity in order to give digital experience value and meaning again, but I will have to disagree with his assertion (at least in part). When it comes to Jaron, I rarely disagree with his vision – but this is one of those topics where I have to respectfully shake my head.

 

It’s called artificial scarcity for a reason, and that reason is because it is an artificial construct in a system specifically designed without scarcity in the form of digital media in all forms. When music was simply on CDs, there was natural scarcity in the availability of the content in physical form, but in the digital world it doesn’t cost anything to copy data. There is no physical cost in duplication, and the very least of the costs is relegated to the production of the original media.

 

But that’s where the costs really end. Unlike pre-digital days, the costs no longer carry over past the production cycle, and such things as marketing and distribution are freely available, if not exponentially so and for free. Even the production cycle has a diminishing cost, as we can see with DJs, Mashups and Youtube.

 

Nobody has to pay a distribution center to get airplay on the radio any longer, or produce physical compact discs for the record store shelves. Terrestrial radio airplay isn’t as important as it used to be in the face of countless internet radio stations, satellite radio subscriptions and more.

 

This is the dilemma.

 

It’s a matter of old school thinking versus new age. In a world that became accustomed to the natural scarcity of products, and literally based their entire business model on that natural scarcity and the control of the distribution channels from start to finish, it must be terrifying to suddenly lose that control – and so we see a constant battle between copyright and IP holders (RIAA & MPAA) and the “Pirates”, culminating in toxic legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, as well as the attempt of leveraging $75 Trillion dollar fines (RIAA vs Limewire).

 

This isn’t a new problem, however. This goes back to the printing press itself, wherein the same arguments were leveraged and fought tooth and nail. It carried on further with the invention of BetaMax and VHS, the Cassette Tape, Blank CD Media, and the MP3 Player itself (Roxio), and even into the right to use the MP3 Format altogether (Thanks, Fraunhofer, for the legal battles).

 

The thing about this history is – no matter how much we cry and complain about the damages that a new technology will bring to an industry in the form of piracy, those fears never seem to materialize. Even more interesting is the seemingly opposite effect that piracy has had on the music and film industry, with the record profits of those industries plain as day despite their constant arguments that piracy is hurting the industry and costing them hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Uproxx provides an excellent insight to this by giving an overview to the situation (further reading)

 

Pirates are your friends (Yarr!)

 

Yes, I just opened up a massive can of worms with this statement, but it had to be said. Given the industry of intellectual property and copyright, it can be shown time and again that the greatest harm to the copyright and IP industry are themselves.

 

Let’s break this down logically…

 

Modern piracy is simply the enactment of a highly efficient and targeted distribution system without any centralized control or overhead of cost. We can’t necessarily claim that piracy is stealing, because theft is the removal of the original instead of making a copy. Piracy is copying, plain and simple. The only difference today versus prior to the Internet is that there was a physical component which acted as the barrier to entry – Cassette tapes, blank CDs, VHS tapes, etc. and those media forms came with an additional blank media tax to compensate for perceived losses to the industry. The only reason that piracy is equated to theft is because of the false assertion that every file downloaded is automatically a lost sale.

 

If we were paying attention, we’ve seen this claim for as long as these industries existed – case in point:

 

 

 

 

 

Clearly this turned out not to be true, as the recording industry continued to make record profits and even today they continue to post profit gains and not losses. The only losses they are claiming are entirely imaginary losses based on fabrication.

 

We could make a convoluted claim that even the unauthorized copying is costing the owners of the copyright and IP the premise of future revenue which is entirely estimated, and based on fuck all, as seen with the RIAA statement that they believed Limewire owed in damages an amount that exceeded all the money in the world. The RIAA and MPAA can spew out all the make believe numbers they want, but it’s not based on anything substantial. It’s a lot like me saying that because people read this blog I estimate the damages from lost revenue to be 400 trillion dollars a year. I’m just pulling a number out of my ass, and totally out of context to the total situation at hand, much like the RIAA and MPAA does regularly.

 

Zen and the Art of Piracy

 

So how do we effectively stop piracy? I’m the first to proclaim that protection of intellectual property and copyright is something that needs to happen – despite my advocacy of piracy in the same breath. It’s really about looking at the bigger picture and actually taking the time to see the widespread implications past narrow interests of the old paradigm.

 

 

 

For instance, think about all the money spent in the promotion and distribution of media by the RIAA and MPAA. More specifically, let’s look at the process for the RIAA wherein they spend an astronomical amount of money to A&R representatives in order to essentially buy a spot on the radio to play a new single for promoting an artist. This is a regular occurrence, and it baffles me.

 

When I was younger, my highschool actually had its own radio station and radio communications was one of the classes offered. Of course, I was enrolled in that class and managed straight A’s (45 days away from having my radio communications license to work as an on-air personality). Even then, the process baffled me due to the no solicitation rules. The station manager would have us regularly listening to new music coming in, and checking to see if it violated any of the rules, but that list of music always came from some A&R representing a label, whereas local bands trying to get heard would be routinely turned down. As DJs, our hands were pretty tied, as the station manager would be approving the playlist and helping to compile them.

 

Even if we were approving music on the list or disapproving it, most of the time that didn’t even matter. Those songs would be inexplicably stricken from the list when we approved them, or oddly added to the playlist when we as DJs decided the music was utter crap by consensus.

 

It more or less came down to who was willing to pay more money to get a band heard and played, and not necessarily based on merit. 

 

The apparent point of this process is to get an artist’s material heard by a large population of listeners, and they treat this process as a marketing expense, yet if we turn the tables and look at piracy – this is exactly the sort of distribution and outcome that Bittorrent has without the overhead. Interestingly enough, piracy is based entirely on merit and not who has the most money or connections for marketing and distribution – a stark contrast to how it used to work. Today, that local band (Garageland) wouldn’t have to be bending over backwards to get their music heard, and instead they’d simply make an official website for the band and distribute their own music via Bittorrent as a marketing loss. Those local bands would simply exist on their own merit and ability – which I always felt was how things were supposed to be.

 

So let’s call this what it is – it’s the inability of the industry to differentiate between personal piracy and commercial piracy. Commercial piracy is the problem and by all means should be fought or at least intelligently channeled, whereas Personal Piracy should actually be encouraged to no end.

 

The moment we stop trying to lump together personal piracy and commercial piracy, the faster we realize the benefits that personal piracy gives us. This idea that personal piracy costs the media industry hundreds of billions a year is absurd (as absurd as the assertion that it cost the RIAA $75 Trillion dollars in damages from Limewire) – because if anything it is actually increasing the revenues through widespread proliferation of new media at a cost that is exactly zero to the distribution channel (and subsequently to the media holders). What scares them the most is that media is now based on the idea of a meritocracy and not who has the most money or connections.

 

Personal piracy is good as long as we’re willing to call it what it is in proper context. The best course of action for the media industry going forward is to literally, and without hesitation, pirate their own media and make it available at a high quality to the masses.

 

 

 

 

Why on earth would I suggest this? I mean, I just offered the equivalent to the digital media apocalypse as the solution to the digital media apocalypse.

 

Natural Scarcity

 

This brings us back the idea of artificial scarcity versus natural scarcity. Natural scarcity was the model that the media industry was originally built on and it worked absolute wonders. It wasn’t until the introduction of mass reproduced media that they began to panic and invent methods of artificial scarcity to sustain a model that is based on natural scarcity. Natural scarcity was the sold out concert you couldn’t get tickets to, artificial scarcity is deliberately limiting the amount of CD’s pressed to inflate worth arbitrarily or (in the digital age) creating convoluted DRM schemes to restrict the usage rights of agnostic digital media.

 

The future of media is authentic experience. Natural scarcity is something you cannot reproduce in a digital form, and thus holds intrinsic value over time. You can film a concert, and maybe sell the t-shirts online, but you can’t pirate the actual unique experience of actually having been there. You can create DRM and other artificial scarcity methods to continue propping up your old business models, or attempt to force the old business methodologies on new media, but the sad truth is – artificial scarcity in an environment built without scarcity is a costly and failed endeavor.

 

In the movie industry, I’ll just cite all the DRM and Ultra-Violet Digital lockers having no effect on Bittorrent distribution except to make it more popular. However, I’d also state that all the unskippable garbage and advertisements on those DVDs are also a major factor, just like advertisements in between and during shows on television send people off to pirate the more authentic experience of the DVD version off of Bittorrent.

 

Physical goods and actual experiences that are unique are the new media paradigm to embrace, while the old media paradigm (currently being propped up desperately by artificial scarcity tactics) should be relegated to marketing channels in order to promote the natural scarcity of unique experiences and sales. Sure there are people out in the parking lots selling knock-off t-shirts for $5 out of their trunks, but the only reason they manage to make a killing is because you’re charging $10 for a cup of beer, $5 for a hotdog and $40 for a t-shirt inside. The problem isn’t the counterfeiters, it’s your inflated sense of worth and douchbaggery to the honest customers and fanbase.

 

Instead of writing piracy off as a revenue loss, we should be saying it is a marketing and proliferation surplus without additional cost. We’re actually saving money through personal piracy, if we’d actually figure out how to embrace it and wean ourselves off the artificial scarcity paradigm, we’d see that it’s actually helping far more than it hurts. As far as counterfeiters – actually curtailing them has less to do with trying to stop them and more to do with stopping yourself.

 

Telling a Story

 

Remember when VH1 had the Storytellers concerts? Only a certain amount of people could attend those intimate concerts, and there was far more natural scarcity for the experience than listening to it in MP3 or watching the recorded show on VH1. There’s a level of abstraction there, and anyone who watched those VH1 Storyteller episodes has at least once thought to themselves how amazing it must have been to actually have been there.

 

 

Authentic experience is the new reality of media | Greenday at Storytellers – Extraordinary Girl

 

 

Hopefully you’re starting to get the bigger picture now. VH1 Storytellers was (and is) a unique experience, an authentic experience, and not easily reproduced. It had intrinsic value – far more than the DVD version or the MP3 Soundtrack. In this manner, we foster the piracy of the VH1 Storytellers albums online, and even offer the videos online without restrictions (but maybe advertising is alright). The end result is you are utilizing the piracy aspect of a lesser experience in order to strengthen the value of the natural scarcity of a greater experience. You can always offer a pay what you want model as well, but you should never be under the delusion that it won’t be pirated for free after a short period of time.

 

If you want to offset that personal piracy as marketing loss, sit down and figure out how to charge for live streaming access to that experience, as well as the much more valuable experience of the tickets to attend that experience in person (since it’s a limited audience). These limited experiences should be more available as the revenue source, creating a value based on natural scarcity and access instead of artificial scarcity. The more authentic the experience, the more it is actually worth.

 

It’s always much better to attend a Broadway show than to watch it online, but if you were streaming it online for free, you’d drastically raise awareness (the point of marketing) and increase the demand for the personal experience of actually attending that play in person as an authentic experience.

 

The other benefit to pirating your own media is that you are immediately sabotaging the bigger threat of commercial pirates who are trying to sell the media illegally. Why would anyone buy what they can get for free? More importantly, what is left to pirate commercially is something that cannot be pirated at all – the authentic experience. Authentic experience creates loyal customers – which is another lesson for Social Media.

 

I actually applaud Deadmau5 in this context for the way one of his recent concerts was handled – it was streamed live on Youtube for the first hour (maybe half hour) as a preview and then turned into a pay-per-view sort of experience. However, this doesn’t entirely grasp the full potential of unique experience or utilize it to the fullest advantage. It’s a good start, but could definitely have been done better.

 

Sure, the ideal here for the limited access to a live streaming concert is still considered artificial scarcity, but it is based on natural scarcity at the root and not just arbitrarily applied as we normally see. For instance, in the context of the Deadmau5 concert, it would have been better to stream the entire concert for free in SD quality and make the HD stream a pay per view stream. The first half hour would have been an HD preview of the live concert, switching to the SD quality free stream afterward unless you had already paid for the stream access in advance.

 

Again, we’re going on the concept of pirating your own media for your own benefit, and writing it off as marketing expenses instead of lost revenue through piracy. It’s a balance between marketing and natural scarcity, creating additional value in a digital product or unique experience.

 

Who got this brilliantly right?

 

Pomplamoose

 

This is how you pirate your own music for marketing benefit. Take note, media industry.

 

 

Even better would have been if those concerts were streamed using not just high definition audio, but a Binaural audio stream for spatial audio fidelity. One step further would have been to offer that binaural stream in conjunction with 360 degree video so the viewers could pan around in real time with full spatial audio.

 

This is a massive step up from the lower definition of a simple SD stream for free, and something that constitutes a unique experience worth more money to the fans. The more authentic the experience, the more value it has in a culture where the lowest common denominator is mass distributed media.

 

And that’s the point, really.

 

It’s not piracy we should be afraid of, but the clear indication that non-authentic experience is nearly worthless in the digital age. It is this understanding that should be shaping our decisions going forward concerning digital media, copyright and intellectual property. Authentic experience has value, and that value can be used as marketing to sell more authentic experiences with increasing tangible value. The very fact that this point is being ignored on the whole is far more troubling than the specter of piracy.

 

Virtual Environments

 

Which brings us to the idea of virtual environments and the idea of prosumer culture. In a virtual environment where the users can create anything they want, it is no surprise that they more often choose to create what is familiar – as in brands that exist to them in real life. Companies have done an excellent job in marketing their brands into ubiquity and pop culture, but seem to be utterly confused when the ultimate result of that comes to pass.

 

Of course people want Coca-Cola in a virtual world and any number of other familiar brands, and they aren’t in a position to have to wait until such time as those brand owners decide to give it to them. This creates a conflict of interest, because we’re trying to apply the artificial scarcity rule to a virtual environment that (much like the Internet) has no such constraint of scarcity.

 

The current accepted practice is to file DMCA notices and have the offending content removed, which is a direct violation of the Streisand Effect, having the exact opposite of the intended outcome. Agnostically, we look at media overall – whether it is an asset or an MP3, and we should already know that it’s not in our best interest to call it piracy, but instead call it marketing.

 

In the end, what is more important to the end-user is authentic experience. As long as you control the authentic experiences, the non-authentic experiences of lesser digital value should serve as marketing in order to support the authentic experiences.

 

Case in point – let’s go back to Coca-Cola.

 

The proliferation of unlicensed digital representations of branded merchandise in a virtual environment like Second Life constitute the lower quality and less authentic experience, and as such act as the user generated marketing and advertising for the authentic experiences which they will gladly pay for in real life. Accordingly, the Coca-Cola merchandise in a virtual environment, generated by the users themselves is the best viral marketing the company could ever hope for, because it creates further brand loyalty (and is in fact a display of that loyalty) which in turn leads to the authentic experience of actually drinking Coca-Cola.

 

Even if those virtual representations are being bought and sold, it is in the best interest not to place that into the category of commercial piracy in that the users themselves are showing a willingness to pay to be advertised to on a wider basis than you could ever hope to achieve had you spent a few millions dollars on a 30 second Superbowl ad.

 

Does this necessarily mean that you should be relinquishing your right to the brand? By no means! It’s more about how you choose to handle that brand in context to the environment of experience. Much like Youtube offers a ContentID matching system for videos, virtual environments should offer something similar – wherein a ContentID match wouldn’t necessarily mean the content is removed, but instead simply labeled as being owned by a certain content or brand owner.

 

This follows the general rule of sanctioned personal piracy as marketing. If a content creator exceeds a certain amount of money in a virtual world from the sales of a branded item, then it should trigger an automatic percentage paid to the brand owner as compensation (a virtual item license fee).

 

In this manner, the brand owners actually make some money on what normally is seen as purely a piracy loss, instead treating it as pure marketing and licensing gain across the board. It also costs a lot less in legal fees, DMCA and litigation because you aren’t in a mindset to try and stop the actions but instead finding ways to foster it to the extreme for your own (and the prosumers) total benefit.

 

The end goal should always be promoting authentic experiences and fostering additional value in things which cannot be pirated, through encouraging personal piracy and brand loyalty to the extreme.

 

This doesn’t mean, however, that DMCA takedown requests aren’t needed. In context, it should be treated as the absolute last resort instead of the first. Explore all of our options first before we invoke censorship as a solution, because the potential for backlash with censorship is far more damaging than trying to work within the system of digital experience and organic community.

 

3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse:

Current Status and Future Possibilities | #SecondLife

 

On December 1st, 2011 there arrived in my email quite astounding news from Dr. Dionisio and Dr. Gilbert that the Association for Computing Machinery had not only accepted our research paper 3D Virtual Worlds and the Metaverse: Current Status and Future Possibilities for publication in their next  journal, but that the reviewers had given the best praise of the paper that the editors had ever seen. As I read through the critiques from each reviewer, I was humbled by their responses.

 

As Dr. Gilbert succinctly put it:

 

After my recent return from the European Summit of the Immersive Education Initiative (I'm still jet lagged as you can see from the early hour I'm writing this!), Dondi sent me the news that ACM Computing Surveys had accepted our paper with relatively minor revisions.  Even more significantly, the impressions of the editors and individual reviewers of the paper were outstanding with all the reviewers suggesting that the work be considered for a best paper award, the main reviewer viewing the work as a  "seminal" contribution to the field, and the Associate Editor calling the first round reviews the best he's ever seen! 

 

What I've also learned is that ACM Computing Surveys is one of the most cited and respected journals in the field of computer science (I had no idea that Dondi had decided to reach so high in submitting the paper). To get accepted into this journal, especially with such high praise, is a great honor and once the article is published our work will be widely read and could have a real impact on the field.  After we submit the revisions in the next few weeks you can crank up all your social media expertise and begin to distribute the article as "in press." 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s definitely an honor, and quite humbling to receive that caliber of review from not one but four independent sources across the industry. My understanding of the process was that we should have expected multiple rounds of revisions before being considered for publication, so having it accepted immediately after the first round of peer review is astounding.

 

In the words of the Associate Editor at ACM:

 

These actually are the most positive first-round reviews of a journal article I have seen. If you revise this and include a document that explains how you did, and did not, address comments, I will not need to send this out for further review if it looks satisfactory to me.

 

Let’s put aside the banner waving for a moment, because despite how groundbreaking this all is, it is only a prelude to a bigger picture concerning the Metaverse as I usually provide in articles like this.

 

The Down Low

 

There is a lot of subject matter covered in the paper for ACM Journal, but the title says it all: Current Status and Future Possibilities.

 

Essentially, what we wrote was a comprehensive survey paper looking into the various areas of virtual environments, or immersive environments as some refer to it, and addressed the fundamental challenges and technologies that can further the progress. There is also discussion in the paper concerning what areas are deficient and in need of further research initiative in hopes that those areas will be focused on by some of the countless people reading and citing the paper.

 

Literary influences that led up to the current state of affairs are also outlined, in order to give a proper history of the subject while framing the further understandings as the paper continued on. As one reviewer put it, we presented the most comprehensive paper on the subject that we could short of writing an entire book about the subject.

 

As the message from Dr. Gilbert suggests, I will be making the entire paper available as a PDF when it is sent off to ACM for publication. While there are a lot of topics covered in the paper,  I’ll only be addressing one of them here in this blog.

 

The Take-Away

 

One of the biggest things that can be taken from the paper concerning the future direction of the Metaverse (in my opinion) is the implicit understanding that centralized networking is our Achilles Heel. It always has been, even before we really got into the hardcore 3D Immersive Environments like we see today. All the way back to Lessons from Habitat in 1991, Bandwidth being a scarce resource has always been a concern in something like this, and centralized networking was pegged as a culprit.

 

Yes, we can alleviate that stress by offloading across a datacenter, or buying more powerful servers. But the limitation is still there, and all we end up doing in the process is kicking the can down the road instead of actually trying to solve the problem at the root.

 

Whatever the future holds for immersive environments, it is likely that decentralized networking will be a major part of it in stark contrast to our massive datacenters today and centralized bandwidth.

 

To Boldly Go…

 

There is also a hint toward the data itself, in that the distribution of that data would likely not be the same as how we are accomplishing this task today. I’d like to say that in order for a powerful Metaverse to really evolve, the data has to be agnostic. The best way to understand this is to imagine the replicators in Star Trek and how they work.

 

When the captain walks up to a replicator and says “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.” the replicator isn’t looking for a cup of tea in its inventory. Nowhere on the ship is there a room with thousands of cups of hot tea on a shelf waiting to be beamed to the replicator. Essentially, there is a holding tank of sorts on the ship which contains the raw molecular “soup” of materials, and the replicators are simply using a digital recipe to pull the components and “replicate” that molecular recipe.

 

 

A replicator works almost like magic. Just like the plot to every Star Trek series.

 

 

If we apply this understanding to purely digital files, the same process works. Let’s say that the replicator is a software program on your computer whose sole purpose is to reconstruct digital files based on digital fingerprints (keys) that you give it. Since we’re already talking about a decentralized network as our future, the “holding tank” full of agnostic data to be used for those reconstructions of files should be spread across every user of the network.

 

Why not? We all have a cache folder sitting on our computers from virtual environments and web browsers. What if that cache folder was simply agnostic data and available to the entire network of users in a P2P manner?

 

First off, it would mean that our cache’s are meaningless to human interpretation. Completely random data not representing anything in particular until we give it the fingerprint to reconstruct the file we need. Secondly, it would mean that the data becomes multi-use data.

 

That last point is very important. It means that 1GB of multi-use data represents or contains any file that is 1GB or less. We can say that Photoshop CS5 is under 1GB for the installer, correct? So that multi-use data would contain Photoshop CS5, and anything else that is 1GB or under. The key, so to speak, is that while such a system just about invalidates the premise of current copyright law, making it impossible to prosecute somebody using such a system, it brings up something even more interesting.

 

11 Herbs and Spices

 

It’s not the data that is really copyrightable, but the means by which such data can be arranged in a unique configuration as a representation of a work. What is really copyrightable happens to be the unique fingerprints which tell the system how to reconfigure multi-use data for a specific file output that is no longer multi-use, or in layman terms – it’s the digital recipe.

 

Another interesting side effect to multi-use data is that you’re not storing a 1:1 representation of anything. Since the data is multi-use, that means (for the most part) that you don’t need the storage equivalent for a copy of every single file in the system. All you really need at the very least is enough agnostic data available in order to cover the largest file on the network.

 

If the largest file you have on the network is about 50GB (and I’m being very generous here), then on a multi-use data system, you would need no more than 50GB of data total for everything you ever store into that network. That’s the bare minimum. Yes, at that level it would take longer to reconstruct the data, but it would still work. the more agnostic data you have in storage, the faster that reconstruction goes. Think of it like over unity…

 

Needless to say that a multi-use data structure in combination with decentralized networking would mean that, in example, the entirety of the Second Life asset servers could be housed in about 100 terabytes or less (for redundancy), and the reliability of that system would mean that the odds of anything in your inventory ever disappearing would be so close to nil as to make no odds.

 

And that, is how you solve the root of a problem instead of addressing only the symptoms.

 

 

 

Down With The Sickness

We live in a very sick world. Here’s how we fix it for real. #Zeitgeist #OWS

 

Usually I’m the sort of person who writes exceedingly lengthy articles about complex ideals or viewpoints, much of which I am fully aware the average person (aside from the most technically devout) essentially tune out in an age of Attention Deficit Media.

 

 

 

 

However, this post concerns something entirely different, and is my official position concerning Occupy Wall Street and the worldwide protests in solidarity. It includes a full video lecture that is likely one of the most important that you could ever watch on the subject, and I highly recommend, just this once, that you put aside your attention deficit and take the time to digest the information that will be presented in this post.

 

I’m an avid supporter of Occupy Wall Street but for entirely different reasons than the #OWS crowd are supporting it for. While the people are protesting inequality, corruption and greed, they are still at a phase of understanding where they believe working within a system that is inherently corrupt will bring them a solution.

 

There is literally no way to pay the mounting debts of this nation, or the world. Period. End of story. Every bank note in your hand is a representation of debt, with interest that can never be repaid. It is the representation for everything that is absolutely wrong in this world today.

 

Take a good look at it.

 

We cannot fix a system inherently designed by nature to deprive a majority of people on this planet in order to provide an excess for a few. A system designed for cyclical consumption and consumerism, infinite growth, in a world of very finite resource. It is a logical impossibility.

 

Nobody, not you nor I, will ever be able to vote these facts out of existence. There are no laws that we can possibly write and enact that will change these immutable laws of nature, or of the nature of this parasite we call money.

 

I support Occupy Wall Street because they are a catalyst to realization, if not still premature. They know something is terribly wrong with the world and this country, and have a vague idea what the root of that problem is. However the solutions they propose at this time are nothing more than addressing the symptoms of the problem, and are doomed to failure on the whole.

 

I still support them, because they are a much needed catalyst, and I am patient enough to wait for those protesters to truly have a revelation as to what the root of the problem is and how we can truly fix it. They, and you, will inevitably realize this immutable fact sooner or later.

 

If you realize this immutable fact later, you will likely be fighting for water, food and basic resources. Wars, famine and disease running rampant in what used to be a 1st World Country.

 

The choice is ours.

 

You can take an hour and forty-five minutes of your day to change your mind and help change the world through education, or you can spend that time looking for pictures of cats on the internet.

 

Weigh it out for yourself. Life is short, use it wisely.

 

 

 

Social Pathology – Full Lecture | The Zeitgeist Movement

 

An Island Unto Themselves

#Marketing in the Prosumer Culture

For many of you, this post will seem a bit dull, but the implications from it are far reaching and profound. I'd like to state up front that this sort of topic is my forte' and I regularly advise on this to what often seems like an entirely baffled room full of executives (not to mention lawyers who are ready to grab pitchforks and torches) - but as I've often said in those situations: Bare with me, because what I'm about to say is probably the most important thing you could hear on the matter.


We live in a digital culture of sharing and mashup, where 1's and 0's are interchangeable and cheap. It doesn't matter to the prosumer culture whether those ones and zeros are configured in a manner that yields a photo, mp3 or streaming video - what matters is the sharing of ideas and media that pertain to their topic of interest at that moment.

On the subject matter, the best advice I can give stems from what I like to refer to as the Gospel of Virtual Environments, but for most you would know it as Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat. Written by Chip Morningstar and F. Randal Farmer in 1991, this synopsis addressed the lessons they learned from running a massive multi-user virtual environment in the late 1980's on the Commodore system known as Habitat, and while the graphics were definitely paltry by today's standards, the lessons are just as important today as they ever were - because they address the underlying nature of technology as well as the attitudes of people that use those types of systems.


One of the most important lessons from that synopsis was simply:

Work within the system

And while this lesson is open to interpretation, the story that accompanied it really set the stage for understanding how not to address prosumers in a digital age if your goal is to protect IP, or system type mechanics/rules.

I won't go into the entire story here (it’s available at the end of the post as a link for reading), but I will address the fundamental understandings that came out it, and how they still apply today in the digital world context.

Essentially what it boils down to is this:

If you are a company with a brand and IP to protect, you have more options today in order to enforce it than you did twenty years ago utilizing traditional methods. The landscape has changed quite a bit, and the 1's and 0's of today are agnostic, while the mentality of the prosumers is that of simply sharing for the sake of conversation or furtherance of devotion to a particular brand or image. In modern context, this still holds true on a much wider basis than it did twenty years ago, and so our defacto arsenal of "cease and desist" and litigation often times is met with an outstanding backlash in the wider sphere of digital culture, causing more damage and loss than had the entity utilized the "Work within the system" lesson.

No better example of this sort of backlash (humorously named the Streisand Effect) can be given than that of the RIAA and MPAA with many years of fighting and litigation efforts to curb or eliminate the acts of piracy among Peer2Peer networks. It is now over ten years later and such an approach has not only cost those entities more than it's worth to enforce, but has had the opposite effect to curbing the "violations" worldwide - eliminating single file P2P systems like Napster, Limewire, etc but giving rise to massive file collection P2P systems like BitTorrent where no longer single files are shared but large quantities of files as a single "set".

Where the RIAA wanted to stop music piracy by shutting down places like Napster which offered single tracks per download, they ended up fostering a worldwide backlash that is BitTorrent where finding a single track is unlikely versus searching for the entire discography of the artist for download. Clearly, this is throwing gasoline on the fire and acting surprised that the fire did not go out.

The interesting thing about all of this is simply the fact that digital culture and mashup mentality often do a much better job at proliferation of ideas and content than even multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, creating new content from multiple sources that transcend the originals – beneficial to multiple entities all at the same time, as we see in the Gwen Stefani vs Britney Spears music mashup below titled “Tick-Toxic”.

Whatcha’ waiting, whatcha waiting, whatcha waiting for? Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think.

Working within the system entails an unorthodox methodology, in that the proper approach to "infringement" no longer is a black or white scenario, but instead many shades of grey for the negative approaches (and in methods that offer mutual gain, 16.7 million colors of awesome) - often entirely dependent on the situational context. While cease and desist options and litigation are still a part of that arsenal of enforcement, it no longer constitutes the cut and dry option, and in fact should be the absolute last option to be enacted - instead of the first or only.

When you find yourself looking to protect IP or a brand, the first question that should be asked is no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" but instead should be "How do we monetize this situation, foster its growth and make it work for our own benefit?" - aka: Working within the system.

Working within the system entails a willingness to work with the people involved in that system on the same grounds and foundation that those people utilize within that particular system, whether that be business or individuals (prosumers) in order to foster a mutually beneficial situation while limiting the constraints that would cause a backlash and do widespread harm. Think of it like trying to disarm a nuclear weapon - you wouldn't go in and bash it with a sledgehammer for fear that you could cause a massive explosion. Instead you handle it delicately and with foresight for the bigger picture. Cease and Desist (litigation) is your sledgehammer, and should only be used as a last resort.

Instead we should first think about ways to work within the system at hand, for our own benefit (because we are still self-interested as companies) but also in a way that addresses the underlying and fundamental need of the prosumer mentality to spread and share IP, Brands and derivatives of those properties.

One of those many shades of grey happens to be simply allowing the proliferation of the IP or brand to continue while adding only monetization or supplemental marketing to the situation. This can be seen today in the general approach by Youtube where music in the user created videos is now more likely to come with a link saying who the artist is, the name of the song, and a direct link to purchase that music. This, in turn, offers a solution to working within the system and IP infringement in that the question answered was no longer "How do we stop this infringement?" and instead "How do we utilize this infringement to our own and their benefit?".

In the case of Youtube, however, while the approach is sound there is still no method to actually handle the mashup and derivative offerings that spawn in abundance from this culture – as we can see from the Tick Toxic video where both Tick Tock from Gwen Stefani and Toxic from Britney Spears is put together for a new take on two songs, Youtube only recognizes the Gwen Stefani part as the music to tag and offer for purchase (catching only half of the potential).

In the long run, prosumer integration of your IP or brand in derivatives or outright is the best form of free marketing for your brand or IP that you could ever hope for. You would never think to shoot down free marketing on your behalf, especially when things like videos on Youtube have this wonderful habit of "going viral" wherein hundreds of thousands if not millions of people share and view those videos, giving the brand or IP massive amounts of free exposure. The trick to all of this is to look at it from a marketing perspective and not a legal perspective.

Prosumer culture is the predominant force in the digital age, and we are best served by allowing that system of understanding to proliferate with little or no negative intervention. While this flies in the face of the crack legal team on call at most companies who want nothing more than to fight the good fight, the benefits far outweigh the costs in the long run - and only serve to offer additional revenue models, and widespread marketing and goodwill among this global system if approached properly with complete understanding.

What we have today are companies that essentially shoot first, and ask questions later (if they bother asking at all) with their DMCAs, Cease and Desists and litigation. This is detrimental on the whole because of the prior notion of the Streisand Effect, moreso because it fosters an "island unto yourself" mentality, cutting you off from the system in ways that would otherwise be beneficial on a massive scale, turning instead to a methodology that actually harms you and your brand/IP.

In order to succeed in the digital age, we must understand that we are not an island unto ourselves. This is true not only in social media of all types, but in the greater scope of the digital culture we rely on today. The rules of engagement here are different than we were taught traditionally, and we need to be willing to think creatively and innovate if we want to truly excel. While cease and desist, as well as possibility of litigation still remains, we need to keep our perspectives in check, resorting to that route only when all other possibilities are exhausted and explored in context.

Remember: Prosumers aren’t as Toxic as you think they are. They could very well be the fountain of youth to invigorate your brand and IP on a global scale.


Further Reading
Lessons Learned From Lucasfilm's Habitat: http://bit.ly/oPbUdr
The Streisand Effect (Wikipedia): http://bit.ly/r5FY8L
Prosumer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosumer#Producer_and_consumer

The Future: Now in Tablet Form

There has been some debate between myself and @atomicpoet about whether or not Apple somehow has killed the WIMP interface, or the “window, icon, menu, pointing device” paradigm, with their iPad tablet system (and maybe iPhone & iPod Touch). Of course, I’m playing Devil’s advocate with this debate because, just like the Devil, I always have an Ace up my sleeve during the game.

Yes, I believe Tablets and touch interfaces have a future, but at the same time I am not likely to say that the classic WIMP paradigm is going to die either. After all, who was the first person to write their entire book solely on their iPad2? That would be computing suicide simply for the lack of ergonomics involved with using the on-screen keyboard.

Of course, @atomicpoet then later informed the world that getting a Bluetooth keyboard for the iPad is a must have, and I replied asking if he was getting the wireless mouse to go with it. I know a wireless mouse doesn’t exist for an iPad, because there is a lack of pointer on the tablet. However, despite this, just like any PC with a touch screen (HP anyone?) you’re going to find out quickly why having a wireless mouse when the Tablet is docked is a good idea.

Having to constantly reach your arm out and tap, swipe, zoom, pinch, etc on your screen in front of you to use the interface when you are also using the wireless keyboard is going to make your arms tired.

Besides, I was told by a very reputable person (Steve… something or another) that Laptops and PCs didn’t do anything well and that Tablets simply did everything well. Except, apparently, the whole keyboard thing… or probably the whole "copy your entire music and video collection to the paltry internal storage” thing. And when you hook up that keyboard to type, doesn’t it seem like you’ve essentially just reverted your “Magical” Tablet into … a half assed, underpowered laptop computer?

Well, except for the lack of having a mouse… which you’ll realize that you need after a few hours of reaching forward to interact with your docked tablet in a now completely non-ergonomic and tiring way. Like I said, I fully believe Tablets have a promising future, but like most things, they aren’t the end-al to be-all solution for the advancement of our technology.

I get the idea that they are a touch screen, and the interface is brilliant for a touch screen. But this is assuming they remain a touch screen for the primary input under the premise of a mobile computing device. The moment you begin to realize that you need to start adding peripherals to the tablet device to make it more productive, you also must realize that it’s a glorified LCD screen meant for mobile access on the go. I call this “short attention span” computing, where everything is pretty much broken up into a quickly digestible bite.

It doesn’t really do anything better, except under the premise of providing “apps” which are essentially short for “applications”, and I’d wager that “apps” is actually an excellent metaphor since these are programs which are scaled down into short-term attention span snippets and not really constituting fully robust “applications” as you would see on a full out computer. Maybe I’m wrong about this… but I somehow don’t expect to see GarageBand or Photoshop running on an iPad anytime soon.

For one, the storage on these tablet devices simply doesn’t allow it, and if you’re dumb enough to “rent” space in the cloud to make up for the fact they screwed you out of storage to begin with, then you deserve to lose your money (suckers). Secondly, the internal processing specifications is paltry compared to your actual laptop computer or home computer. Third, and foremost, these damned things are expensive appliances – they aren’t upgradable.

There is a solution to this collective brain-fart we call “marketing hype”, which also coincides with the crux of my argument.

Did it ever occur to anyone that the future is neither Tablets nor WIMP style computers, but a Hybrid of both? You know… a laptop where the screen detaches and becomes a mobile Tablet (however limited in ability) but then when docked to the Laptop itself, becomes much more powerful (1TB Hard Drive, 8GB RAM, nVidia Graphics Chip, etc)?

Remember, a Tablet is just a fancy touch screen. Imagine the 17” LCD screen on your laptop today, and if it could be undocked from the laptop and instantly become a mobile Tablet.


Presenting: The Future

Lenovo IdeaPad U1 hybrid notebook

Seeing this picture gave me an epiphany as to why Windows 8 is being designed as a hybrid Tablet/WIMP Operating System. With Windows 8 running on a hybrid notebook like the one above, Microsoft would be able to tout a computing environment that truly “just did everything” and leaving iPad owners feeling pretty stupid for shelling out $699 for a device that is paltry in comparison.

I’ll have a Tablet one day, and I guarantee it. But mine will dock to a gaming laptop that will empower me to actually get some serious work (or play) done. My tablet will play Crysis 2 when docked, and you will tell me about the next iteration of Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja.

I’m not against tablets, but I believe they are an intermediary technology at best. A stepping stone to something much more powerful, but on their own aren’t anything to be excited about aside from the part where I say “I can’t wait till they become my screen on a laptop so I can dock and undock”.

I don’t know why we, as self-proclaimed rational thinking people, are acting as absurdly stupid as we are. We’re being easily conditioned to accept less and less for the same price. $699.00 for a device that comes with 64GB of storage? Have we lost our minds? Being told “more storage and power aren’t everything” and actually believing it is making me lose hope for the future of humanity.

I have a portable hard drive that fits in my pocket and gives me 1TB to keep my files. Hell, the internal hard drive on my own laptop is 500GB and puts the iPad2 to shame. To make up for the intentional storage screwing that you’ve already taken, Apple will soon be offering cloud storage and 5GB free, but anything more than that will cost you a rental. I have more storage than what Apple is offering you in my left pocket of my jeans right now – in the form of an 8GB USB Flash Drive.

Seriously, you’re dumb enough to rent storage space to make up for the fact that Apple fsked you over intentionally. We’ve been reduced to drooling idiots, apparently. You can’t even do what you want with your own purchased device, as the App Store will confirm. There is a reason people are constantly trying to jailbreak these devices.

I’m not an Apple, Microsoft, or Linux fanboy by any means. I just look at what “just works” for what I need to do. Apple is too totalitarian about their computing ecosystem for me to ever bother, Microsoft (while not perfect) gives me at least some level of control over my computer, albeit not nearly as much as Linux would. Windows, to me, is a comfortable middle ground.

But aside from that, Tablets alone aren’t a solution. In fact, they don’t seem to “just do” anything particularly well – other than sucker you out of money constantly and deliver less of everything as a result. So I suppose Apple has made the ultimate technology… one which they convince their customers that paying $700 – $900 for a tablet, that is essentially the same price as an entry level laptop many times more powerful, is acceptable. Oh, and also a walled garden under the rule and authority of Apple and only Apple called an App Store. You’d think Steve Jobs hated Open Source or even third party developers.

I think the future is in the Hybrid Tablet/Laptop running Windows 8, to be honest. It’s the best of both worlds, and would run just about every single existing Windows program on Earth out of the box, which makes the fabled Apple App Store a minority bragging right at best.

Don’t even get me started on the Kindle or Nook. My books don’t need batteries and are never “leased” or “licensed”.