mtl3p

This is an email that I sent to the World Summit Free Information Infrastructure mailing list. If you care about any of the stuff that I write about that is not personal - please read this. It’s something I’ve been thinking (and worrying) about for years. Recently I picked up the idea because of the WSFII conference, a post by Joi which set me off, and some important conversations over the last 2 years with Boris - who is the one that proposed that we call this the immersive web.

I would love to get feedback from some of you on this.

(The Rob and Matt mentioned below are Rob Flickenger and Matt Westervelt - two of the people who started the whole community wifi movement).
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subject: We’re forgetting 3d

I’ve been putting off sending an email here for a week now. Instead of waiting for the time to write an essay, I’ll just fire off a few points. This is not something I feel 100% sure about because I haven’t discussed it enough, but I thought that you would be the right people to tell get feedback from.

A) I tried to talk to a lot of people during the conference and I don’t know if anyone there could really comfortable articulate what free information infrastructures are. That’s a problem - not least of which because it makes it difficult to attract allies. But also it’s a problem because it means we don’t really know what we’re working towards.

Why are projects like: Munich adopting open source, theyworkforyou, mesh networks, ipod linux, google mashups, and creative commons similar? I can *feel* the answer, but I have a lot of trouble articulating it. I think the organizers were geniuses in their vision of bringing these people together, but they failed to supply a political argument for the overlap of players that they assembled.

B) Because of that absence of a political vision/argument, we haven’t really identified what we’re working towards (and against). Until we know more precisely what we’re trying to do, we’re going to make mistakes because we can’t see the situation clearly.

C) Mistake: we forgot about open-source 3d-environments (gaming). We are having lots of success currently on the web know in terms of open-source development, open (and mostly adhered to) standards, a powerful sense of “web-ecology”, creative commons of content, etc. This leads us to be hopeful and optimistic for the future. But what (IMHO) we’re forgetting is that there is a very large chance that the future of the web/internet comes from gaming, and not from the current web/internet.

Even if most of us aren’t gamers, if we’re serious about this Free Information Infrastructures stuff, we can’t ignore the success of stuff like WoW and particularly Second Life. Not their financial success, but the success of their uptake. And the success of their tools (they work really well from the point of view of user satisfaction).

The other reason that we may have ignored this paticular battle (that’s what I think it is) is that we don’t know how we can compete with this. After all, these games take hundreds of people several years to complete, and running them is hugely expensive.

But we’ve showed that we are getting better and better at collaborating across huge projects. From developping artistic content, to writing code, to doing evangelization/marketing - we’re getting better day-by-day.

I think if we had realized the political importance of what we are attempting to do (and already succeeding at in many ways) that we would have seen projects like Rob and Matt’s online course in Second Life with an enormous sense of alarm.

Read what Rob said about his project (an an interactive training course *in* Second Life that covers networking and wireless issues):

. . . “I know, I know, this looks like a complete and utter waste of time, money, and bandwidth. Don’t let all that talk of video games fool you. SL only a video game in the same way that the web is a video game… Think of it as a communications platform and hosting service. Think of it as what VRML should have been and what Metaverse might someday become.”

He’s right. But it’s educational material that’s being created in someone else’s proprietary world. And even if he did have legal ownership rights to that content, it’s not like he can take it and host it somewhere else.

Where is our movement towards an free/open alternative?

It doesn’t matter if the whole world is a beautiful mesh network if we all have to log into Blizzard or Ubisoft every morning to work.

We need a open-standard, open-source immersive environment alternative. It has to be federated or P2P to deal with resource needs (as well as to prevent undue centralization). And it has to have an upgrade path that doesn’t mean starting from scratch every 2 years.This is an almost overwhelming task, but 1) we’re getting really good at those (ex: linux, wikipedia), and 2) it might be our only option. Because if we don’t take it on, then we’re going to just have to hope that market-wise it shakes out that the big guys agree on open-standards between themselves instead of each of them going for the whole pie, and that’s definitely far from being a sure thing. That would be hoping for market fragmentation and there are certain forces like social networks and proprietary content which - combined with huge startup costs and a corresponding inability to “roll your own” - could prevent that from happening - or at least delay it’s occurence.

And I apologize if it seems like I’m trying to sensationalize this issue. I’ve been thinking and worrying about it since the conference (and about the importance of open-source MMORPG’s for years before this).

I would really appreciate any comments/thoughts any of you might have on this. As I said, I’m not 100% convinced that I’m right about this - but you all are probably some of the best people in world to ask.

Sincerely,
Michael Lenczner

Relevent links:
Rob’s blog post
http://nocat.net/~rob/secondlife/cabling.html

Joi Ito’s had a few posts around this:
http://joi.ito.com/archives/2005/10/10/web_x0.html

http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/02/04/croquet_the_os_of_the_future.html

If any of you are interested in this - we’ve just started to tag relevant stuff as “immweb” (immersiveweb)
http://del.icio.us/tag/immweb

I just read the story about Lawrence Lessig’s history of abuse and the ensuing court battle. Via Joi’s post.

It presents me with an excuse to (again ) raise the profile of the MarieVincent Foundation. I don’t know too much about this group, but they have a _great_ communications dep (except they obviously don’t have a budget for their website). They have awesome, hard-hitting pubs that aren’t at all graphic or inappropriate for youth to see because they are difficult for kids to understand. Remember the one they had in the metro last year with the children with the red stains on their clothes.

I wasn’t going to blog about this, but just thinking about this makes me want to kick this idiot off the yulblog list. He’s a new addition. I checked out some of the new people last week and I read a post of his that was way beyond inappropriate (according to me). I was going to write a thought-provoking post asking whether Yulblog was a resource (a list of links - in which case content is less relevant) or a community (in which case I would argue we should lose this guy). Now I’m thinking “screw the thought-provoking post” and just toad this guy. (sorry Pat, I’m not trying to put pressure on you or say that you have to make this decision yourself).

(also, I’m not linking to his post directly, but you can find it on his main page if you want to read it).

yep. Everyone’s cleared out except for a few stragglers. I’m still here because I needed to collect my routers that were all over the place and take our banner off the wall.

I had an amazing time. I won’t do it justice, but it was inspiring - moving - to see people come together for a short period of time and work on a document that represented their values and hopes for ICT as well as their well thought-out criticism of the current system. It’s not that people necessarily believed that the conference in Tunisia is going to be world-changing, or even particularly effective - but we were all gathered here, and people were intent on doing a good job at least on this leg of the larger process. It was certainly a useful exercise for civil society to let the government know of their intentions, and as well as for civil society to do some intense identity-forming.

It was also inspiring to see a bunch of academics working to 2 in the morning two nights in a row - I’m used to seeing them act in a very dispassionate, removed matter. Seeing them do something that they’re perfectly qualified for and believe in was fantastic. I love when you scratch the academic enough and find an activist underneath.

Now I feel like I should link to the document - but I can’t find the wiki it’s being hosted on . . . sorry - will post later.

Which brings me to the technology. I setup the wired and wireless network. I used three routers to cover an area that only needed one network - to share load (not bandwidth, but # of client connections to the router) and for some redundancy (I wanted to be able to enjoy the conference in peace without doing tech-support). More interestingly, the document was put on a wiki, and then when that wasn’t working so well, we moved to Subethaedit. None of the academics had used it before, but they self-seperated into three groups - two doing content, and one doing editing and were working away - simultaneously and effetively.

Robert Guerra was responsable for the wiki and the Bonjour (and a pseudo-blog leading up to the event). Very cool guy, with a remarkable ability to getting groups to work together effectively.

The climax of the summit (for me) was when I stood up to the mike at the last session, surrounded by 200 people that are experts in the field, and made a case for including a mention on spectrum managment in the doc: How it is a public good, and as such, should be managed in the interests of communities. How it was extrememly important, and will become more so, for community organizations and for community media. Shifts in RF technology are happening very soon (as well as the move to digital TV which is going to leave a lot of spectrum for other uses) which is going to require serious re-thinking of the current framework for spectrum allocation. It was very well received (which is impressive when you realize how non-technical this group was) and 4-5 people came up to me after to mention their support for it’s inclusion (like the officer from Industry Canada). So it’s going to be in the doc - I’ll just have to wait to see in what form.

It felt really good because I know that if I had not been here, it would never have been brought up.

So that’s it. Now I gotta go find a place to stay for the next few days before I ship out to Banff.

Background: this conference is a leadup to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that’s happening in Tunisia this fall.

The Tunisian ambassador to Canada has been here the whole conference (and some other guy from the Tunisian gov.) and he was a member of the welcoming commitee. The thing is - the internet in Tunisia is censored, so that Tunisians can’t even visit the websites of the groups that will be at the conference. There’s this human rights guy from tunisia and he keeps on bringing it up, and then the Minister get’s all huffy and has to go and clear his government from blame.

The tunisian government has 9 people in jail for visiting “illegal” websites (according to some guy at the mike)

Now the head of Unesco Canada -Max Wyman- is saying that it’s not an appropriate issue for this group, that we should only be concerned with the document that we are going to deliver to the WSIS conference, and that this stuff should be left up to the Foreign Affairs office.

Oops- now someone from Reporters without Borders is coming up to the mike. This could get ugly ;-) (Their site is one of those blocked in Tunisia).

Also, in case you didn’t know, Nortel is responsable for building the censoring technology in Tunisian as well as China. Apparently they are building a way to sensor sms messages - because China asked for it (china didn’t like all those people sending out sms messages about that whole “SARS” thing).

I’m looking for a patron. Preferably a real one - with money and everything - but a technological patron would do. Someone who would, within limits, take care of servers and cms’s.

mlenczner at gmail dot com

kinda ;-) but also :-|

UPDATE: I thought this might be confusing for some of the francophones. I mean “patron” in the english sense - like “patronage“

“It is no exaggeration to say that the value of individual autonomy, which we have over centuries carved out of the hierarchies and tyrannies of earlier ages, is on the verge of self-defeat as we enter this new century. Without a background of commonality, without some form of civic responsability, autonomy degenerates into mere special pleading. Without a strong notion of commitment to other people and our shared undertakings, without a sense that we are together creating a just world, a world not ruled by cheap acceptance of inevitability or the easy superiority of wealth, our hard-won individualism loses its deeper significance. It becomes a victory without genuine spoils, personal comfort not only restricted in number to the very luckiest few but also cramped in scope, bereft of meaning. This is luxury with no objective beyond itself, freedom minues any sense of direction.”

p15 - The World We Want - Mark Kingwell

Sorry about the attempt for a cute title. This post -inspired by Martin’s moment of genius in tying together ancient and post-modern communication technology- has been something that I’ve played with posting, but probably wasn’t going to get around to it.

I’m reading a bunch of stuff on immersion for my course on the sociology of gaming with Bart. One thing that I’ve enjoyed recently is Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature by Aarseth(it’s old stuff - 1997 - many of you already know most of this, but it’s new to me). In it, he denies the split between “old” text and cybertext being along the lines of paper vs electronics or computers.

“In the current discussions of “computer literacy,” hypertext, “electronic language,” and so on, there seems to emerge an explicit distinction between the printed, or paper-based, text and the electronic text, both with singular and remarkably opposing qualities. The arguments for this distinction are sometimes historical, sometimes technological, but eminently political; that is, they don’t focus on what these textual genres or modes are but on their assumed functional difference from each other.”

Instead, Aarseth says that it’s about the perspective. Old text is linear and corresponds to “the traditional threesome of author/sender, text/message, and reader/receiver”…” In his phenomenology of literature, Ingarden (1973, 305-13) insists that the integrity of the “literary work of art” depends on the “order of sequence” of its parts; without this linear stability the work would not exist.”

Cybertext is only different because of the perspective: “Instead of defining text as a chain of signifiers, as linguists and semioticians do, I use the word for a whole range of phenomena, from short poems to complex computer programs and databases. As the cyber prefix indicates, the text is seen as a machine–not metaphorically but as a mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs. Just as a film is useless without a projector and a screen, so a text must consist of a material medium as well as a collection of words. The machine, of course, is not complete without a third party, the (human) operator, and it is within this triad that the text takes place. The boundaries between these three elements are not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can be defined only in terms of the other two. Furthermore, the functional possibilities of each element combine with those of the two others to produce a large number of actual text types.”

This is cool because it allowed me to think about a lot of paper books as cybertext / hypertext (I already knew you could do that, but i really didn’t understand why - except for the examples people used of books where you could “jump around” in the text and still have some kind of meaning).

And I’ve been reading (and thinking a lot about) communications history, because of the people at CRACIN. An important tenent of Communications is that cultures are, in many ways, based around a certain mode of communication (oral, clay tablets, paper, printing press) and that the mode of communication has large effects on the culture and on the abilities of thought of the people within that culture.

So while waiting for my bus to visit my sister in Seattle, I was shown to a flea market and I found a book on Communication in History by David Crowley. In it, there’s a paper called “Civilization without Writing –The Incas and the Quipu” by Marcia and Robert Ascher.

Basically, every empire / large civilization needed a way to communicate across long distances to keep everyone under control. Every ancient civilization used writing to do this - except the Incas. They didn’t have writing, but they had Quipu. Check out a picture. The quipu was a system of knotted ropes. There was a beginning and an end (horizontal) , and ropes hung off (vertical) the main rope. Then, ropes could hang off (horizontal) those secondary ropes, and so own. Each rope had knots to communicate some kinds of information (numbers, i think) and colours of ropes were used to communicate other kinds of info.

What’s cool is that these texts were not linear. They had alternative branches. The Incas (at least the “scribes” and the minority that could “read” quipu) made and read cybertext / hypertext all the time.

Why didn’t I think of this? Martin Lessard makes the simple, obvious, and brilliant observation that wiki’s are palimpsests. Def of palimpsest is here (or if wikipedia is still down - go here). I hope wikipedia is back up by the time you all read this - I think it’s very cool for you to look up the definition of a palimpsest on an actual palimpsest.

I looked around google, and I can’t find anybody else referring to wiki’s as palimpsests, so maybe he’s the first? Crazy.

I’m adding new categories all over the place. I’m being very influenced by my use of del.icio.us and I’m not trying for exhaustive categories anymore. this category is for my more academic stuff (of which I hope there will be more).

I like the name of this post - ISF-ers will think it’s kinda funny.