Fear of a Facebook Planet

And so Facebook has been floated on NASDAQ, leading to lots of economic excitement and Mark Zuckerberg become rich beyond the dreams of Luthor. It’s probably the biggest tech story for a long time, mainly because Facebook has become so pervasive. It’s everywhere.

But I’m a sceptic, bordering on techno-dystopian (maybe a lot of us are and that’s why Blade Runner is getting a sequel). I love the internet, don’t get me wrong, but nowadays Facebook leaves me cold.

I think it might be the privacy thing… No, wait, it’s not. It’s the opposite. It’s the publicity thing. Facebook seems to want to know when we do anything – here’s your timeline, here’s what you’ve bought in Farmville, here’s your Words With Friends score, here’s a picture of you with a traffic cone on your head posted by someone you haven’t even thought about in years… It’s not content, it’s noise.

Now, I admit I’m guilty of that, mainly using my FB profile to tout my blog posts. I hope they’re not noise, but some may see it as such. Fair enough. I admit my hypocrisy.

But while that stuff may be noise to you and me, to marketing gnomes working long and hard in the data mines, it’s information. And now FB is going to make mondo amounts of money by hitting the stock market, it’s going to be under pressure from shareholders to keep making more money.

Now, it doesn’t make stuff, it’s reliant on one thing – our data. And when the pressure mounts to keep growing, to dive ever deeper into Scrooge McDuck-like piles of money, it’ll be our data for sale: our likes, dislikes, the people we’re friends with, the words we write in our status updates. People already look at stuff like that and think ‘ka-ching’, it’s going to get worse. In one sense this is the brave new world of the information society, get used to it, but FB may well be ground zero for this sort of thing…

(I wouldn’t be surprised if someone came up with the bright idea of it becoming a pay-to-use service. That’d be interesting. I suspect Google+ would become a lot more popular…)

(And that’s before we get onto the Twitter joke that’s being doing the rounds: the reason Facebook has gone public is because no-one can find the privacy settings.)

I dunno. I sound like someone telling hoodie wearing kids to get of his digital lawn. At least I haven’t got on to how Facebook’s about to mutate into Skynet.

But the world will still be turning tomorrow; some people will be richer and social networking may or may not change into something unrecognisable or unwelcome.

And the sun will still come up.

World Telecommunication and Information Society Day 2012

I’m not a scientist.

This probably comes as no surprise, given the contents of this blog, but I am interested in the history of science, how discoveries impacted the society around them and vice versa. That’s why I’m interested in today’s commemoration. World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is a UN sponsored celebration of the opportunities afforded by the internet and initiatives to bridge the digital divide. This year’s theme is ‘women and girls in ICT’.

When you’re talking about tuis subject, one woman immediately jumps out. a href=”http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace”>Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, not that they had a relationship; discovering that she had a talent for maths (and earning the nickname ‘the Enchantress of Numbers’, she was the first to recognise the true potential of Charles Babbage’s primitive computing ‘Engines’ going so far as to figure out a prototype computer program. It never got used, more because of the limitations of technology, and somewhere along the line Ada’s contribution to the birth of computing became an oft-forgotten historical footnote.

And that’s just one of the reasons to celebrate female pioneers in science, engineering and computing whose stories aren’t as well recorded as their male counterparts.

For instance, the majority of staff at Bletchley Park were WRENs, working on breaking Nazi codes and operating some of the earliest electronic computers, such as Colossus; some of their memories are recorded here.

Those WRENs fall within something of a tradition, because before computers were computers, computers were people, with the term referring to a fairly menial role manually crunching numbers for navigational charts, scientific data and the like. One of these ‘computers’ was Henrietta Swan Leavitt who, while routinely counting data for Harvard College Observatory, figured out the basis of measuring distances between astronomical objects, which in turn provided evidence for the expansion of the universe. Not bad for $10.50 a week, although sadly you won’t be surprised to hear that she received no recognition for this until after she died in 1921.

Beyond the information society, the list of unsung female heroes of science goes on; Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 – her cells turned out to be remarkably resiliant and became known as the HeLa line, used to make breakthroughs in research into AIDS, cancer and polio, amoung others; Rosalind Franklin did much of the research that lead to our understanding of the structure of DNA, but her research being published later than that of Crick and Watson’s and her early death at the age of 37 meant that her work has often been overlooked.

It would be cool if… Well, I was going to say if the next Steve Jobs was a woman, but a) it’s still soon to be talking about the next Steve Jobs, and b) it’s best to concentrate on being the first you than the next anyone else. And yet there’s something in this – in the UK, men are almost six times more likely to be employed in SET occupations than women. As a UKRC research report states, “The under-representation of women in SET is increasingly seen as an issue affecting economic growth and productivity… Research suggests that diverse teams that include men and women are important to innovation and economic development.”

Novelist Neal Stephenson has written an article on ‘Innovation Starvation‘, about how we seem to have lost a sense of technological optimism and the resulting inspiration that leads us to carry out epic scientific and engineering projects. There are probably many reasons for this, but one seems fairly obvious – about half the population has become marginalised from contributing to a solution. The first programmer may have been a woman, but the general perception of computing is still that of a male-dominated industry, and that sort of perception has ramifications.

One of the potential solutions to this innovation starvation Stephenson has been involved in is a rediscovery of science fiction as a vehicle for big, inspirational ideas rather than an exploration of tech’s darker side. And maybe that will tie in to the growing visibility of women in SF fandom (another field of which there’s a false perception of it being over-whelmingly male). That puts an onus on many sci-fi writers, particularly those in more populist media like comics – write better female characters!

That’s not quite as simplistic as it sounds – we help form our society through the stories and narratives we tell, and, well, you can write education strategies till they’re coming out your ears, but I’m still willing to bet that more people have heard of Watson and Crick that Rosalind Franklin; more people have heard of Charles Babbage than Ada Lovelace. Maybe the importance of days like this is simply in that we tell a wider range of stories and that they’re told well, inspirational and aspirational.

After all, Ada’s dad was a poet…

10 Print “Happy Birthday ZX Spectrum”

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum. It was a 48K model, I think, with rubber keys. You had to plug a tape recorder into it to load games from cassettes. This took minutes, accompanied by a screeching noise and a screen border that flashed primary colours. I’m remembering this now and it seems like prehistory, but back in the day this was the moment that computers really started to enter UK homes.

I eventually upgraded to the 128K model, with a built in cassette player. I think this may have been when I learned the only bit of code that I know, other than WordPress HTML tags (which don’t count):

10 Print “Hello!”
20 Goto 10
Run

This made ‘Hello!’ scroll up the screen forever, or at least until you stopped it. There are kids reading this thinking that this is the most pointless use of processing power ever encountered, but trust me, back when I was young this was awesome. It meant that the computer did what you told it to do. I swear, when the time comes to prevent the Technopocalypse, that bit of BASIC is really gonna come in handy.

And the games! Horace Goes Skiing (little blue man skis down a slope, but first he has to get across a busy road without getting run over!), Manic Miner (Miner Willy has to collect gems without getting killed by bizarre monsters!), Jet Set Willy (Miner Willy gets rich, throws a party, but then has to tidy up his mansion before he goes to bed!), Horace and the Spiders (Horace and some spiders!)… They were primitive and buggy (I’m not sure it was actually possible to finish Jet Set Willy) but they were addictive. Angry Birds makes them look like finger-daubed cave paintings, sure, but you’ve got to remember that this was all shiny and new and we loved it.

The next generation of games was my favourite, especially the stuff put out by Codemasters and the Oliver Twins. I pulled a few all-nighters trying to complete the Dizzy games – you can play Treasure Island Dizzy here. The Play button on my cassette deck fell off, and I had to load games by sticking a pencil into the mechanism. You can’t do that nowadays…

Times moved on, PCs became more advanced, the internet took over and games now look like movies. But the Speccy is worth remembering, as a herald of today’s networked world, and as gateway into technology and gaming and programming. On St. George’s Day, don’t forget to say happy birthday to a bit of technology of which Britain can be proud.

PS. I’m now going to be singing “Just Another Manic Miner” all day…

 

 

How I Learned to Start Worrying and Mistrust My Refrigerator

And so I’m reading an article this morning which basically says that one day my fridge is going to kill me.

Oh, it didn’t say that in so many words. It was just referring to the ‘Web of Things’, where domestic appliances will be networked and therefore our fridges will be able to command us to pick up a bottle of milk when we’re driving past the supermarket. Or we’ll be able to read our emails when looking into a bathroom mirror.

Now, call me a Luddite, but this fills me with dread, mainly for two reasons. The first is geek inspired and insanely paranoid, but I can’t help it. It feels like what would happen if major high street retailers got taken over by Skynet. The technopocalypse won’t start when the network sends battle robots after us all, it’ll be more insidious than that. The appliances will wait until we’re totally dependent on them, then start ignoring the sell-by dates on our food, thus wiping us out through e-coli.

Think I’m crazy? It starts with a fridge telling me to get milk. It goes on to the fridge telling my self-driving car to go to the supermarket without asking me. It ends with the self-driving car taking me to the Soylent Green factory. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

That’s the irrational side of things. More realistically, there’s a concern that we’re already too networked. The concept of time off, of vacations from work, heck, the concept of Sabbath, become compromised when we can be contacted wherever we are – phone calls, text messages, emails, everything’s pushed through to a smart phone that we carry with us all the time. We’re so used to being connected that we never switch off – who hasn’t woken up at 4am and had a sneaky look at their emails before falling asleep again?

Then there’s surveillance culture. We keep getting told that the authorities ‘need’ greater access to our emails and social media – what happens when they want greater access to the things we listen to on the radio, or what’s in our kitchen cupboards? While this sounds only marginally less paranoid than Robogeddon, I guarantee that, should this network world come about to this extent, some politician will suggest legislation to monitor our purchases. The excuse will be terrorism.

Terrorism? Yep. Because doesn’t all this raise geo-political issues? If all this high-tech genius requires Rare Earth Elements, and if those elements are often found in places that either have worrying approaches to human rights (China) or are unstable (Afghanistan), what happens when production of these becomes something worth fighting over? Maybe I’m just cynical because of all the “this-war-is-about-freedom-no-it’s-about-oil” rhetoric of the last few decades, but it’s enough to get me twitchy.

Heck, what am I saying? It won’t be the terrorists that get us, it’ll be the spam. I bet that intrusive leviathan Facebook is already trying to figure out how to update our timelines based on things our white goods are saying. “Matt is driving to church.” “Matt is buying milk.” “Matt is line-dancing.” Zuckerberg’s minions will know all and see all.

Now, there’s someone out there saying that if I haven’t got anything to hide then I’ve nothing to fear. Well, I do have something to hide. I don’t give out my cell phone number to telemarketers. I tick the little boxes that tell companies not to send me junk mail. I don’t have to tell people who I vote for or how much money is in my current account. Corporations already have too much data on us, but when they know exactly what’s in my fridge, or when they know my route to work, that’s too much. They might already know this stuff, but nagging fridges will only make it worse.

It could also kill social media. Are you prepared for a hundred status updates a day telling you every time your friends are buying socks. If a friend gets engaged, sure, I want to know about it. I don’t, however, care if my friend is making toast. But his toaster will, oh yes, because making toast is the whole purpose of its existence, and we’re going to give it a voice, we’re going to enable a toaster to hijack our Twitter feed to tell the world that it’s out-and-proud and is making toast!!! Oh brave new world in which we live, in which kettles have more of a voice than some people.

And then you’ll be watching TV, and all the adverts will be tailored to you, because there’s a chip in there telling everyone your viewing habits and streaming commercials based on the data it’s sucking up. I mean, sure, I’ll fast-forward through them like I always do, but I’ll know they’re there. And they’ll annoy me.

And then my washing machine will eat me.

But at least you’ll know, because it’ll confess to it on Facebook.

Spam, Spam, Blogs and Spam.

I hate spam.

Not the meat product; I have no real opinions there. No, I’m talking about Internet junk mail. I hate it.

This isn’t a unique opinion. Does anyone actually like it? That’s rhetorical of course, because frankly the only sensible response to that question is “KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!”

Most of the time we all ignore it, because that’s the only way to deal with it. In that respect it’s like death asteroids from space, or the situation in North Korea. Today, however, it’s been getting in my face, and therefore I’m prepping my metaphorical flamethrower.

First of all, I wrote a post in honour of Johnny Cash’s birthday. Cash was a legend, he deserves respect. Sadly though, his name attracts accountancy spambots on Twitter. The man was a towering presence in music for decades, and now loan companies and accountants are using references to him to sell us stuff. I swear, if I ever go nuts and personally hunt down the spammers, I’ll be playing The Man Comes Around on my ipod as the police come for me.

Then I take a look at my blog statistics. Look, there’s a spike! Awesome! Have I been retweeted? Freshly Pressed? Has someone discovered the ineffable genius inherent in my writing?

No. No they have not. Some spambotting drones somehow linked to my site for their own nefarious purposes. I’m trying to think of a word to describe this that isn’t quite as pretentious as ‘parasitical’, but I can’t. I’m lost for words.

I probably deserve it, of course, because the whole situation is preying on my ego. Everyone who blogs wants readers – it’s not a pride thing, but it’s just nice to know that people appreciate what you write. So when you get a spike in hits, then realise that this is based purely on some marketing robot… Well, it’s frustrating.

Twitter followers are the worst. I think it’s because so much effort goes into trying to convince us they’re real people. However, they fail on the necessary Turing Test because they say exactly the same things as all the other spambots.

Back when nanotechnology was in its early stages, concerns were raised about the Grey Goo problem – the idea that self-replicating technology could go mad and eat everything. Experts say this scenario is unlikely to occur; I would argue it already has, just in a different medium. How much spam gets generated a day? The whole reason I’m blogging with WordPress and cross-posting to my original LiveJournal account is that the ratio of spam to real comments over at LJ ended up being something like 95%. And I know I should just ignore this as an inevitable part of Internet life, but…

But why should we?! If people push mountains of junk mail through our doors, there are things we can do about that. Same goes for telemarketing. With the internet, we all just sit here and take it. And it’s not quite as it used to be, when your email junk folder used to end up with a hundred messages a day, but it’s more insidious. The Grey Goo is developing a human face, and it’s looking at us and what we write and then sending us messages. It’s like that scene in The Abyss. And while the majority of spam seems to be coming from dodgy retail outlets and porn barons, it’s pretty much what massive corporations want to do – read us, target us, aggressively market to us, and as the internet becomes increasingly pervasive, on our phones and in our appliances and in our socks, this will get worse. Our fridges will be spamming us. And we’ll sit there and take us, as we put a bag of Swedish meatballs in the freezer and get twenty adverts for IKEA appearing the next time we turn on the TV. And probably another from IEKA, featuring a woman in her undercrackers looking to hook up for the weekend. Oh, brave new world. Google are developing augmented reality glasses. Just wait until you can’t even look at something without being spammed.

It’ll fundamentally rewrite how we relate to the world around us. One day we’ll all be wearing augmented reality contact lenses, and we’ll look at our friends and colleagues, and little tags will pop up based on the labels in their clothes, and we’ll all know how much they’ve been spending on personal grooming, and…

Okay, I’m going to stop, because I’ve gone from ‘annoyed’ to ‘despair’ via ‘rage’. But this is the sort of thing that fills me with a philosophical dread about the future – not the idea that technology will achieve sentience and blow us all up, but the idea that something as fundamentally life-altering and magnificent as the internet will become just a billboard with the ability to think, with some artificial lizard brain, about how to sell me stuff. I don’t want the greatest communication and information development of the last century to become a cheap and nasty flyer thrust at me by someone I can’t avoid. It just seems so… Crass.

And you know the irony?

This post is going to get spammed like crazy.