Caught in the Net

I can remember the promise of the Internet and then the Web .. originally conceived and developed by academics they were about connection and sharing for personal and common benefit. It was a really amazing feeling when I plugged the UTP calble into the router and our college local area network become part of the Internet ... part of a network of networks.  It was like opening a door to a new frontier ... like opening a door to SanFransico to bring in the "summer of love".

It's difficult to locate the point at which change happened - many point to the dot-com crash in the year 2000 and Google ... under investor pressure Google started to monetise their user data to boost revenue by selling targeted ads to those using its search engine. This new business model was so lucrative that between 2001 and 2004 Google's revenues increased by 3,590%. Capitalists took note .. the new frontier was bought, seed capital sown and money started growing on trees ... but that was not enough. Technology capitalists (as they became known) bought the new frontier and turned it into a farm to milk and fleece us ... that country smell of manure was in fact the smell of greed and the bullshit they told us about changing the world for the better. 

There was inertia, during the noughties we were still moving along from the momentum and potential of the early days but during the 2010s the summer of love turned to autumn ... memories of the good days were still fresh but there was no fresh new growth .. the Internet was dying and the chill winds of Internet winter could be felt. The Internet was private property - it had become a platform on to which we were enticed and the Web used to keep us there wriggling around frantically while the spiders watched. 

Internet winter is coming ... the spider is coming .... how can we escape?

Digital Tech On The Go

Is it just coincidence that Google's machines have been learning to play Go and that Amazon has been developing machine shops called Go?

"Five minutes to learn but a lifetime to master" ... Go is a simple yet complex long term strategy game for positional influence and global dominance. It starts with an empty board and players typically establish positions on the periphery to establish formations for potential territory .. it ends when there are no further opportunities for profitable play.

Google's Go playing Artificial Intelligence could be thought of as signals from the future ... first they beat the best humans and continue evolving through a form of competitive darwinian natural selection between themselves ultimately producing strabnge strategy that humans don't understand and at first consider a mistake but then realise is a winning move.

Amazon's Go stores can also be thought of as signals from the future .. a creepy future that bristles with total surveillance and automation.

Look into the shadows under the stones placed by Google and Amazon and we can see the Go board and the game they are playing ... it is still early in the game and they are still playing to establish new positions of influence that can lead to later dominance ... even a tactical loss can lead to strategic advantage. Amazon is connecting the dots with retail while Google is connecting the dots with search - there seems nothing more important to humans than consuming stuff and being able to find it .. they don't call us consumers for nothing.

However, there is hope before we are surrounded. Go is a non-chance, non-cooperative, zero sum game with perfect information and the real world just isn't like this ... its more chaotic and sensitive to chance events and no matter how hard Amazon and Google try to know everything they never will ... there are also more than two players and new players are joining all the time no matter how hard Google might search and destroy them.

Google has long understood extistential threat ... in the early noughties their founders used to talk about technology cycles and how in digital tech IBM and then Microsoft missed key moments and fell behind. Google understands the shortcomings of playing Go and now wants to be the board everyone else plays on. Google's machines are now playing and winning at poker and learning how to decieve us even better and with smart city projects like Sidewalk Amazon will have to build its Go stores on Google street and play on Google's board. And who knows where Google maps will take us.

So, while resistance might seem futile the real world is more complex than even Google can model - and humans are not the simple behavioristic robots that tech capitalists think they can program and control. As long as you have free will you can make a difference despite the tech that binds - the choice is ours.






 

Fantastic Voyage: Before and After Internet

A Fantastic and spectacular voyage through the human body and into the brain

Apollo 11 was a fantastic voyage ... stepping onto the moon was the crowing achievement human and engineering in the industrial age. 

1969 was also the year when the first message was sent between machines across a network on what could be called "Internet Day". At 21:00, on 29 October 1969, engineers 400 miles apart at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) prepared to send data between the first nodes of what was then known as ARPANET. Charley Kline attempted to remotely log in across to the network  ... Kline typed an “L” and then asked his colleague at the other end via a telephone headset if the letter had arrived.

"Do you see the L?"
"Yes, we see the L," came the response.
We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the O."
"Yes, we see the O."
Then we typed the G, and the system crashed ...

Yet a revolution had begun" 

Its been 50 years since the first moon walk and 50 years since the first message across what would become the  Internet. In the those 50 years the Internet has come to wrap the Earth in its web and human exploration beyond the Earth has ended .. its almost as if a day in 1969 was "Judgement Day" ... but wait ... there's more.

The Internet promised a fantastic voyage ... .if not to the stars then for ourselves - the rising tide for this voyage would lift all boats ... it had the potential to make everyones life better and to improve equality ... and for a while it did.

However, down on Earth technology doesn't happen in a vacuum. Technology is developed in a context and by humans (at least for now) and is subject to human nature and through history we see time and again how technology is either developed by or appropriated by those who have or seek power and control. The Internet and especially the Web  has over the last decade in particular been increasingly appropriated by those of wealth and power ... where once technologists may have been engineers and were interested in the benefit for society now capitalists ... its all about the business ... it reminds me of how Mel Brookes once described showbusiness as shBUSINESS. The positive potential of the Internet today is just for show ... for digital tech capitalists its all about the business and how to fool, entice and entrap us in their Web.

The fantastic voyage for the Internet may be a voyage to a kingdom of ice where we are penetrated and possed by souless digital tech capitalists and the souless machines made in their own image.

The fantastic voyage of the Internet may only be fantastic for some ... the tech capitalists who put us on their life-support system to drain our data and become fantastically rich and powerful as a result. A voyage to the stars may never happen ... it just isn't profitable unless its for some vanity project or a necessity once the erath has been drained and ruined.

A voyage to the stars may not be made by people at all - it will most likely be made by intelligent machines and the only fantastic thing about it may be that the alien consciousness discovered is the alien consciousness of artificial intelligence but if made in the image of digital tech capitalists ... will it have a conscience?

1969: Before and After Internet

The Saturn V Rocket

The 21st of July 1969 was a truly historic day for humanity ... it was of course when a human first stepped onto another world and spoke those deeply significant words 

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

The lunar landing was a crowning achievement of the industrial revolution that had made it possible and on that crown (the lunar lander) was a plaque that read 

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A.D.

WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.

The scale of the project was like nothing before and defined by the Saturn V rocket and the spectacle of its launch ... 110.6m high, weighing 2,970,000 kg and using 20 tons  of fuel per second the Saturn V remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status.

The Apollo mission didn't just carry humans it carried computers - two revolutionary digital computers without which the lunar landing would not have been possible. There were two Apollo Guidance Computers - one in the Apollo command module and one in the Apollo Lunar Module - provided computation and electronic interfaces for guidance, navigation, and control of the spacecraft. 

The Appollo Guidance Computer

Where the huge scale ot the Saturn V rocket symbolised pinnacle of the industrial revolution the tiny Apollo Guidance Computer symbolised the information revolution where progress is defined by how small things can be made. 

The Apollo Guidance Computers had to be small and light -  they were the first personal computers and their development laid the foundations of modern computing - the use of integrated circuits, software engineering, real-time operation and user interfaces. One example of the incredible innovation at the time was how the computer would give a set of co-ordinates that could be used with markings on the window for Neil Armstrong to see the landing site ahead .. it was in a way a form of augmented reality ... incredible.

1969 didn't just mark the pinacle of the industrial revolution with and the start of the information age it also marked the beginning the Internet.

On the 29th October 1969 the first message between two computers was sent across an interconnected computer network ... The ARPANET
"Do you see the L?"
"Yes, we see the L," came the response.
We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the O."
"Yes, we see the O."
Then we typed the G, and the system crashed ...

Yet a revolution had begun" 

The rest so they say is history as the ARPANET was replaced with The Internet.

Technology Trick or Treat

Imagine ... a  cottage built of gingerbread, cakes, and candy, with window panes of clear sugar.

Just like Hansel and Gretel the treats of technology are too much to resist and we are lured inside the tech house to be fattened up and eaten.

"There is no such thing as a free lunch" when we are invited in for dinner we might just find ourselves on the menu - if its free then you are probably the product ... currently its your data that is being sold but who knows how far this might go.

Shiny new tech lures us like a donkey on a treadmill chasing a carrot ... the treat is always just out of reach - that is the trick of tech.

Drawn to tech like moths to a flame we can try to stay way from the light but its not at all easy to go against the crowd as they sleepwalk to the beat of the Neuromancer in their heads.

Wake up and #staywoke see the treats for what they are and take care ... use them to your advantage as best you can. Hansel and Gretel were lucky to get out alive ... if you go into the gingerbread house you may not be so lucky but just like the witch in the story the greed of tech capitalists might just be their undoing and if we are able to share the witch's wealth we might still live happily ever after.

Techlash: Make It Real

Once upon a time I used to marvel at the computer generated graphics in films .... forget the plot and even the acting .. just wonder at the graphics - wasn't it amazing. That was when it was all new ... today, CGI is the norm - the plot and the acting can come second and can be forgotten. Indeed ... the plot and the acting can be forgotten .... there is a trend to let the computer take care of that too - using algorithms and artificial intelligence to generate these as well as the scenes.

The slow boiling frog might be a myth but it serves as a powerful metaphor for how change creeps up on us and before we know it ... its too late.

So much of our lives is now mediated and manipulated by digital technology and this is how the digital tech companies want it - they want us to act out our lives on their platforms ... be creatures in their ecosystems and live happily ever after and comfortably numb in the walled gardens of eden that like gods they have created for us. But ... wake up .. .take a bite out of the Apple and learn what is really going on - its not really a garden but a prison and the walls are closing in.

Some have woken and can see what is happening - #staywoke #techlash.... there are signs of a backlash against digital technology ... a sort of neo-luddite movement - its not anti-tech but simply wants to re-balance our relationship with technology and put people back in the loop.

Just because we can doesn't mean we should ... do we really want our children to watch endless hours of computer generated content or interact with bots? There is a time and a place for computer generated personalities but I'd sooner interact with real people and experience things created by real people ... flaws and all for it is our flaws that make us human.

The danger is not that technology creates any form of whiplash effect from sudden movement but that digital technology, like TV motion smoothing, creates a "soap-opera effect" around us ... reducing friction, smoothing our lives and making us comfortably numb like a slow boiling frog. 

Don't be a puppet in front of a green screen on a digital platform ...  #bereal #stayreal #staywoke and #occupy your world.

Exam Pressure

Its exam time in education and we are talking about the problems of high stakes testing ... again. For as long as I remember those involved in education have been talking about this every year at this time ... its like groundhog day ... we go round and round .. we recognise the problem but can't  get out of the loop.

Not only is formal education stuck in an exam loop but its stuck in a positive feedback loop .. the problem with exams just seems to get worse every year.

The problem is that high stakes testing distorts the education system to its own ends - rather than getting a balanced broad education that draws out and develops the individual we get instead an education that programs and fills the individual with the things they will be tested on, in other words, education increasingly means teaching to the test.

The problem is that those with the ability to change things are the least able to change things - those in positions of power and authority are products of the system ... can the products of the system change the system? Those in positions of power and authority in education have done well by the system - they are well qualified and are good at taking exams ... can we really expect them to deny the system that made them and suggest something else. In fact, those in positions of power and authority just reinforce the the containment of education by exams .. they suggest more competition for more measurement ... league tables for schools and Ofsted gradings are so important but exam achievement is the crucial factor in all of this - everything comes to get related to its impact on exam achievements.

I can only see the effect of exams in education getting more powerful not less. Not only are leaders of education products of the exam system themselves but are the type who are driven by results and driven by data - they crave measurement and to get results they will demand more measurement.

Technology is of course complicit in the hold that testing and measurement has over formal education. Learning environments are now managed learning environments and technology is the meat grinder - processing, analysing dissecting learners as data subjects and discarding those who don't, won't or can't make the grade.

Resistance is futile .. schools, colleges, teachers and students all have to succumb to the system .. their future depends on it - they have to get the best exam results they can for life outside the system can be very hard indeed. ... Poor exam results can affect you for life - it can almost be like a criminal record checked at every transition you make ... you want a job ... the employer will look at your grades first ... want to study ... your college will check your grades. Good grades are a passport to a good life ... no wonder the those with wealth and power are happy with the way things are - entrenching privilege.

The end result of all this is more of the same ... so many see the problem but the formal education system is on exam auto-pilot and automation is where it will ultimately go .. there are so many vested interests it seems inevitable. The formal education system will literally become an exam factory with machines processing our young for tech capitalists in the interests of capitalism. Machine processing is so much more efficient in closing the circle to teach to the test ... exam results will be so much more predictable with personalised learning and your artificially intelligent teacher who can monitor your every move and spoon feed you what you need at just the right time ... if dogs and pigeons can do it people must be able to as well.

Formal education will become an exam factory ... for real learning we will need to look elsewhere.