A remarkable quote:

Somebody: I do note, however, that you now have a blog. Not criticizing, just sayin’. You can call it a lead-in to real social software, which would be quite useful, but as yet it’s a blog. If you can make useful collaborative webspace—perhaps a single page where different colored users can manipulate the same stuff (in realtime?)—that would be very cool.

Useful collaborative webspace. I want to meet this request, but what exactly do we need? Surely more than “different colored users”. Right now, all the concepts cluster around blog, wiki, groupware,forum, and chat. Where’s the beyond or, if we must, the synthesis?

• There’s TiddlyWiki. Goofy! Look how people are using it.
• There’s PHPWiki, simpler than Mediawiki , that lets you insert dynamic content plugins into the pages.
• We’ll see what Jotspot brings to the field.

What I Want.
I want I-know-not-what-yet. It’s the old simplicity-depth-information conflict. It’s information systems design. You want a single page, indeed with colored users, to be as useful as possible, but not dizzyingly complex. You want to be able, but not forced, to navigate to more specific pages. You want all the pages to be out in the open and easy for everyone to find, but you also want them organized in some logical (even hierarchical) fashion; you also don’t want to be locked into one form of organization (date-based, hierarchical, category, document, etc.). You want your own stuff, but you want to work with other people, and you never want to wait for an administrator’s permission. You want to be able to do the basics without thinking about it, but you want to be able to do exactly what you want. You want it to be integrated, but you don’t want to have to stretch a metaphor (“pretend the article is a guestbook…”). You definitely don’t want to do everything the way a system, no matter how sophisticated, dictates that you do. You want to rise to the challenge of (ahem) new informational paradigms, but you want to navigate information in a natural, intuitive and potentially deliberative way.

Concretely

• I want a book browser attached to a personal document system. Presently, the document management systems are web filesystems that let you download files that members of a working group have uploaded. I want a system that you can hand a text, word, pdf, docbook file to and it will generate an indexed set of html pages to be read linearly (you know, like in a book). Basically, I want the back-end script the etext sites must have, but I want the books to be discrete entities in a database.

• I also want wiki systems to be able to import any wiki page into any other wiki page, like the {{templates}}. This would be an easy and cool way to handle semi-dynamic content.

A bogus sketch:

Unity and Occupation, and quality thereof.

Quality as:

• For Unity: Perceptibility, Comprehensibility, and Sympathy.
• For Occupation: Interaction, Continuity and Enjoyment.

Kant:

• Unity: Partial (subjective) perceptibility, full (a priori/rational) comprehension, partial (intellectual/moral) sympathy.
• Occupation: No interaction, eternal continuity, partial (intellectual) enjoyment.
• Embodiment: Supreme Rational Being
• Activity:

Hegel:

• Unity: Full (systematic) perceptibility, full (intelligible/rational) comprehension, self-same sympathy (zero or total).
• Occupation: Full interaction, limited continuity (closure and horizontal development), self-same enjoyment (zero or total).

Marx:

• Unity: Full (systematic) perceptibility, partial (economic/material-rationalistic) comprehension, partial (social/moral) sympathy.
• Occupation: Partial (material) interaction, limited continuity (closure and horizontal development), partial (physical) enjoyment

Kierkegaard:

• Unity: (Paradoxical) perceptibility, No comprehension (leap of faith), full (religious) sympathy.
• Occupation: Full (spiritual) interaction, No continuity (no principle), partial (mystical) enjoyment.

I (heart) Huckabees is very good and What the (bleep) Do We Know? is very bad. The two movies talk to each other. The first says to the second, “You are dumb and prey on people’s existential fears”. The first also brings into clear relief what people mean when they say things like “existential fears”. It even has a neat master’s thesis about the relationship between the two strands of postmodern thought, the one that emphasizes connectivity or thoroughgoing connection and the one that emphasizes spiritual aloneness and arbitrariness.

(I got a digital camera)

There’s an essay by Peter Augustine Lawler entitled “The Utopian Eugenics of Our Time” in Perspectives on Political Science that does a good job of cataloging the issues that will impact on human nature in the near future. And he makes the useful point that biological human nature, being the source of our anxieties about change, will undermine our enjoyment of biotechnological advances and perhaps retard radical change, unless we alter human ethical nature dramatically. But then he goes ahead and indicates that this is happening already with psychotropics and agrees that individuals will keep pushing ahead with genetic manipulation. It’s annoying, because he’s trying very hard not be alarmist and be at peace with it all, but the implications of what are supposed to be partially reassuring predictions keep running away from him. Actually, the article is very good, which is why it’s so distressing to perceive that it’s fundamentally in error.

He does throw in a nice formulation about how we will likely have a human future that will cause us to miss our human past. I like the Schismatrix theme better, Life moves in clades.

On a similar note, I have a new thought tool (courtesy of the belle dame).The principle is that if you object to the prospect of some technological or social development, you have to be willing (in theory) to assert your benevolent will over humanity through a global Council of Guardians. Then you must establish specific prohibitions on further human progress. Now, the question is how you and your council will respond to individual abberations.

The first test case is three CS undergraduates who have linked their brains together with coaxial cables. They will die if the cables are disconnected. Failure to act means that within a year the world will see a 50-person wireless “mental network”, with bizarre social transformations thereafter. The upstarts will raise various civil rights and personal autonomy objections. There is a strong case to be made by the establishment side that the groupings violate any concept of “equality”, and that the individuals who dissolve their identities in this way are illegally a)commiting suicide or b)entering into slavery.

But then it’s pointed out that “mental union” would probably be more like a walkie-talkie system for certain frontbrain thought-processes and a shared broadcast of the group’s sensory inputs. So a more advanced test case does not involve the visually frightening (and unrealistic) cables, but a gradual progression from heavy technological social networking behavior to something like a group-mind. Where does the Council step in? Are “bone phones” (Neuromancer) too much? Also thrown into the mix is the fact that religions might be the first to adopt forms of technological communion.

And he hooked me up with some information. One new catchphrase is collective intelligence. Another is democratic money. There’s a lot on this guy’s site: http://www.thetransitioner.org . To be honest, I think he talks funny (I mean, with the jargon) and he whips out some mysticism/PMA (but you know I can git with that) at some points. He claims to be “founder AOL France”, 5 years former stuntman, a martial arts teacher…and the action plans!!! I’m swooning.

So everything’s going back server-side. At least for one flavor of “computer”. The concept will be so ubiquitous that appending “virtual” to it will be superfluous. The philosophical justification for it will be that one’s informational “center” should be this insubstantial, nongeographical pure mind, divorced from a particular earthly coil. Of course, it will actually reside somewhere, but that somewhere will be a sector on a harddrive or distributed across a vast Google-esque cluster. Best of all is if it’s distributed across a reliable peer-to-peer network…

Your data is going to live on the web. This seems to be because 1) you can get it there from anywhere without special software, 2) it can be shared (with your permission) more easily from there 3) companies want it out there so they can ask your permission to interact with it and provide services based on it. These companies (especially Google) are going to keep developing web side applications until the server hosts the best features of a full-fledged operating system. One effect is that a Google (and a Microsoft, and a Sun…) will start offering a “free high-powered computer” to anyone who has access to an Internet cafe or library. Or cheapo portable terminals will be offered (try: an E-ink electronic paper sheet attached to a Gumstix CPU and a Bluetooth unit) at convenience stores.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen to your hardware. It may be that actually owning a computer will be a sign of conspicuous consumption in the future.

Upon further research, Social Software is now a cause of angst for me.

(Yawn)

Wiki is hot right now because of Wikipedia’s 1 million article achievement. This has lead to some confusion between wiki (wikiwiki=quick, quick), a collaborative software concept, and the Wikipedia, the most visible implementation of that concept. For the record: wiki is free editing of pages and keeping revision histories. It is merely a way to rapidly compose a set of non-hierarchical, associated web pages (like an encyclopedia). Other criteria will fall down immediately and are for zealots: allowing edits without signing in (Wikipedia might end the practice); open membership ( Jotspot is a cool corporate application); a specific look, feel or affiliation (the main reason I run MediaWiki is that I can’t abide WikiNames).

This is a bit disingenuous, though, since those two simple features, free edit and revision history, are all-important. Wiki works well because it is an unsophisticated content management system. There is only one rule regarding pages: in general, if it’s a page, you can edit it. In the past, the rule has been:if it’s a page, and the owner gives you permission, or if you own it, you can edit it. Also, because wiki relies so heavily on a “social hack”, it’s hard to imagine wiki without The Wiki Way, the set of infocommunistic mores that hold Wikipedia and other wikis together. Wikipedia solves the previously mentioned design challenges in an elegant and, from most people’s natural command-and-control impulses, non-intuitive way: by letting people assign themselves to tasks, disavowing ownership, and allowing disagreements to resolve themselves through discussion and edit wars.

The success of Wikipedia speaks to the virtues of open systems, but following the same theme as the last entry, I wonder whether open systems don’t favor volunteerism and the ability to donate large amounts of (leisure) time. The Wikipedia has grown as big as it has because early on it established the precedent of a large number of people donating small portions of spare time. The sight of a large volunteer effort provides the initial inducement to contribute. But the underlying reality is that a smaller but substantial group of “marginal” users donate large amounts of time and are responsible for a disproportionate bulk of the contributions.

These people have their reasons, not the least of which is the pleasure they get from writing and receiving positive feedback, but the disparities of output between marginal and normal users would be a problem in a wiki less grounded in volunteerism. Imagine a company wiki where several employees are responsible for maintaining important documentation. A marginal user in the workplace would want to make his larger number of edits known, and would resent sharing the credit for a well-written page with someone whose contribution consisted of cursory spell-checking. This might be considered a problem with capitalism itself, but a similar problem could arise with an academic wiki written by people who consider their time extremely valuable.

As I’ve put more and more time into my own labor-of-love wiki (why, I’m the #1 contributor!), I’ve felt greater misgivings about the prospect of other people adding to or in any way sharing ownership of “my” work. I know that this is not the Wiki Way, but I can’t help feeling somewhat proprietary about my words. Examining my own fragile ego, I think that a sufficient social hack would be to add the “Created by:” label some wikis have, along with an automatically generated credits page that would list percentage of overall and retained contributions made by a user to a page.

I’ve also had a desire for a version-freeze system, so that a page could be frozen at 1.0, 2.0 etc., with the frozen versions being the public face of a document while revisions go on behind the scenes (similar to the CVS development cycle). There are other things that can be done with wiki, including the introduction of complex group decision-making and evaluation processes (e.g., voting and mod points), although these would detract from the current simplicity and openness. And in general, version history is simply a good idea for documents, especially if splitting is tracked in a consistent way. For example, I wrote this blog entry as if it were a wiki, which is why it’s so disorganized.