Protecting The Net From Itself...

The internet is its own worst enemy, according to Jonathan Zittrain (see what I just did there), and I tend to agree with him for the most part. The openness and anonymity of interaction on the net does lead to a great deal of innovation, but at the same time, it also allows for a wide variety of collectivist thought (endless repeated memes and 'remixing'), anti-social behavior (griefing, trolling, flaming, vandalism, spamming) and outright crime (malware, spyware, botnets, etc.).

As a result, many are turning towards 'Tethered Appliances,' technology that is easy to use, all but impossible to tinker with and directly controlled by an external vendor, for their digital content. The appeal is obvious: all the consumer has to do is press and click and they leave all the technical problems to the licensing company to figure out. The downside is not as obvious: the inability of users to modify or enhance the content leads to innovative stagnation.

In Zittrain's estimation, the internet and all its potential for disruptive innovation is doomed to becoming largely irrelevant in the face of tethered appliances in the near future unless something is done to make users feel more secure in their online experiences. He does not see overt regulation as the answer to this, but he does believe that a few systematic changes might help to curb the tide of 'bad code' without overly restricting the generative nature of the net. Those ideas that strongly resonated with my own, in particular where my upcoming research paper was concerned, are detailed below.

ISPs AS GATEKEEPERS

One of the main problems he identifies is the end-to-end nature of content dissemination and the difficulty of monitoring and filtering it. As ISPs act more like super-highways rather than gateways, any information, good or bad, can get to any source and the onus for filtering out bad material is left to the end user, who is usually ill-prepared to do so. A temporary solution for Zittrain, until more effective end-to end solutions can be found, is to get the ISPs to actively filter out malicious content. To act as 'Gatekeepers.' This, of course, makes total sense as the ISP only real consistent choke point in the whole system. If an algorithm could be designed to detect malicious code or the activity of zombies and bot-nets, the internet would become a great deal more secure.

Unfortunately, the ISP providers do not want to engage in this sort of activity for ethical and commercial reasons. It is expensive and time consuming to try and filter out good information from bad, and would require the providers to interact directly with the millions of net users on a regular basis to correct cases of misidentified content. Governments can take control of ISPs, but this leads to a less desirable environment for generative purposes, especially in authoritarian environments, like China, where information is heavily filtered and monitored to protect the government, encouraging users to bypass those particular ISPs in any way possible, taking their business off-road, so to speak, defeating the purpose of the ISP as Gatekeeper.

THE DUAL-BRAINED COMPUTER

Now, this idea had occured to me early on as I read Zittrain's book The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, so I was pleasantly surprised when I came upon his version of it in the solutions section of the book.

Basically, you split your computer into two parts: the frontal lobe that takes in information and is easily 'reset' and the rest of it, which stores your important information and permanent programs. Most knowledgeable users  already do something similar to this through the act of partitioning drives or storing permanent data in external sources. The difference in this case is that your whole computer is separated from its 'desktop' by a tightly controlled gatekeeper. A sort of 'personal ISP' that controls throughput.

You can think of your PC as the castle, with a gate and a moat, and the desktop as the village outside the castle which provides sustenance for the castle's inhabitants. All sorts of things can happen in the village. A spy can enter the village via a trade caravan, for instance, but as long as the gatekeepers check all the goods coming into the castle, he'll never know what goes on behind those walls. The spy can even foment rebellion and get the villagers to turn on you, but as long as you have all your systems of governance inside the walls, you can fight off the rebellion and then sally out to 'reset' the village by clearing out the rabble-rousers (or in the PCs case, the whole village) and starting again.

This whole concept does tend to move internet usage towards the 'tethered appliance' concept, with the internet being a separate appliance from the main computer, but the difference is that the user is the one that decides what is and isn't permissible content and when to reset. The main advantage is that the arduous process of reloading settings and programs becomes a thing of the past as only ephemeral data related to web browsing has to be reset.

The only problem is, again, the technical ability of the user to reinforce their gate properly so that the gatekeeper to distinguish between good and bad code. And then there is still end-to-end contact with every other user on the net, and the most malicious of these may well send an 'army' of bad packets to 'besiege' your gate and overwhelm it. In other words, your castle walls are only so strong as the force defending them.

THE ROTATING SUB-NETWORK PROTOCOL

Ok, this is my own idea, based on the concepts illustrated in Zittrain's book, as well as a few other readings from earlier in the semester concerning network.

The problem with most networks, as pointed out above, is that they are too damned big, diverse and distributed. The only active bottleneck in the system occurs when you build a gate at your end-point, but that gate is often easily overrun or fooled into letting in malicious code.

The solution for these problems comes in two parts. The first is to institute Zittrain's 'Gated Community Network' concept, in which a smaller net of concentrated interest is created (like 'Trekkie-net' or 'Puritan-net.'). Each member of this exclusive community actively participates in it, access outside of the community is not end-to-end, but only allowed through a special ISP like 'gatekeeper.'

The second part is this gatekeeper, but not just a single gatekeeper, but a trio (or more) of gatekeepers who act to validate each other. Basically, one of these nodes acts as out dual-brained computer desktop mentioned above. After any activity is completed within that node, the information filters through a second node to assess long term harm, and eventually into permanent storage. In case of corruption,  the third node can 'reset' the affected node(s) using its base code.

These sub-networks are not mandatory, but are a way for like-minded individuals to gather together and use the principle of motivated self-interest to keep the environment stable, in much the same way the users of Wikipedia 'overwhelm' bad edits. This 'Social' reinforcement is complemented by 'Code' reinforcement in the form of the Gatekeepers, which can be set to heavily reinforce protocol (like 'don't allow pornography' on Puritan-net or 'No Next Generation Content' on Old School Trekkie-net).

I'll be thinking more about this concept and trying to develop it for my research paper, but at first glance, this might be a good method of creating protocol first networks that are resistant to external corruption...

The Wild, Wild Net...

Lessig's Code 2.0 provides a very insightful look into the difficulties of regulating the internet, and in particular, on the rule of law as it pertains to online copyright. Some would say that copyright cannot exist on the internet, while others would say that the very forces that are forcing copyright out of existence (pirates, hackers, amateur cultures, whatever) are creating the commercial motivation for the development of technologies that will cement it ever more firmly, but this time without any means to enforce the freedoms of 'fair use' that existed previously.

One of the more interesting concepts in all of this is that while the internet presents the possibility of a 'world' without government influence, any civil society, be it real or virtual, must agree to a set of protocols which defines how they interact with each other. Without some method of enforcing that protocol, however, all you're really doing is just shaking someone's hand and hoping that they're not crossing their fingers behind their back at the same time. You cannot have law without someone to enforce it and removing the enforcement removes the compulsion to follow the law. So you need some governing body in much the same way as small western towns needed a Sheriff to uphold the law.

In the example of IP, there is no penalty for stealing it on an unregulated net, but then again, there is also no penalty for so restricting its use that doing so won't have consequences. But it doesn't stop there, as any behavior that the producer finds offensive, from content you produce to criticisms you voice, may well see you banned from access to the software, anything else the producer wishes to restrict access to, and anything else produced by other producers who are aligned with that producer. It's kind of like dating, in that way: treat a woman wrong, and you can be certain that your eligible dating pool will be significantly reduced when she starts talking to her friends, who talk to their friends, etc.

While things haven't gotten quite that extreme (yet), there is a move by Microsoft towards shifting all their software online and restricting access to it to yearly license payers. While this might not have  been a brilliant move a few years ago as the delays caused by working from remote software would have been intolerable, real-time online applications have improved dramatically since then and the idea of even running something as complex as Photoshop or even Maya is not outside of the realm of possibility today. It would take an incredible amount of time and money to set up, but the advantage to Microsoft or Adobe would be immense. No more 'First Sale' legal battles. No more 'cracked software.' The question is, will they charge the consumer a reasonable yearly fee or will they, in their position as ultimate gatekeeper, keep the same exorbitant prices? And who would stop them if they chose the latter? I'm reminded of the Cattle Barons of the old west here.

In the end, Lessig's research assistant, Harold Reeves has a point beyond even that given in Code 2.0, in that it is not only Microsoft's responsibility to build a fence and lock its doors to protect its material, but also to ensure that in the process of securing their IP that they don't end up cutting themselves off from the vast majority of their consumers like the crazy old cat lady who lives in the large house down the road, but is so paranoid that she hasn't left the house or talked to anyone in 20 years. Real World Law may have little meaning in the non-geographically distributed boundaries of the internet, but social law and the ostracism of those who refuse to 'play nice' still does as does commercial law and the fact that competition will inevitably produce a cheaper and more friendly product to compete with. So in the end, the big companies will shy away from over-control if for no other reason than cyberspace is just too large to compete with, so you don't really need some legal authority telling everyone what to do.

On the other hand, the whole point of this book is that we cannot reliably predict what the future holds for us technologically or socially. Even though Reeves might be right today, tomorrow might require an entirely different way of viewing the same problem. A bunch of extremely smart man in the 1700's couldn't possibly foresee anything even as wondrous as a telegraph line and how this would affect their new government 200 years down the road, no-one could have forseen the changes brought about by the internet 20 years ago and who would have guessed even 10 years ago that we'd all be carrying that same internet around in handheld phones more powerful than the entire Apollo space program. No one knows what technology is coming down the pike, how it will empower corporations or individuals, and how it will change the network structures and protocols of the future.

So I think Lessig is right. Even if most of our reality becomes virtual, even if our societal structure centers more around our virtual selves than our physical address, there will still need to be some form of regulatory entity to reinforce protocols and protect the ability of culture to spread without undo restriction. The question is: whose going to be the Sheriff, what authority will he wield and how is he going to enforce it? It might take an entirely new form of government to find out...

If You Can't Beat Them, Use Them....

Amongst the dry, academic pages of Information Feudalism by Drahos and Braithwaite, there are a few very interesting factiods. For instance, I doubt that very many people know that the first illegal electronic download occurred in the late 1800's when the entire contents of a book written by then Queen Victoria were telegraphed across the Atlantic over 24 hours and then printed and published within 12 hours of the completion of that transmission. And all without so much as a 'please,' much less licensing fees (see Tom Standage's Book, The Victorian Internet for many more similarities between Victorian era  tech and the modern internet).

Another factoid, and the one I'm focused on for this post, is that claim that early software companies, by pricing their products beyond the reach of the average consumer, had a large role in the formation of software piracy. That is a bit of an oversimplification of a larger problem with modern society, one in which life has become so easy that many feel entitled to own works of intellectual property at no cost and where internet distribution of said ideas has started to really make people question the true value of information and ideas (for a very funny, if highly profane discussion of this subject, see Cracked.com). It is not totally incorrect, however.

As a child of the late seventies and early eighties, I remember the controversy over BETA/VCR home recorders (which was, itself, predated by Cassette Tapes, the Napster of the sixties and seventies). The creators and producers of television and movie programming were very concerned that these devices would be used to record their programs off of TV and, thereby, reduce possible revenues from syndication and re-release ticket sales. I also remember the videotapes they sold back then. A single movie would cost around $75 dollars! And we're talking 1979 dollars, here! That's like asking someone today to pay $230 for Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows on a crappy videocassette tape.

I think it's safe to say that when creating the market for home movies, Hollywood also, by dint of their greed, created the pirate video industry almost simultaneously. I should know, because by the time I saw these movies advertised in TV Guide or in the Sears Catalog, my grandfather had already rigged up a method of copying them. And was trading them at the Saturday Flea Market sale with other like-minded individuals very shortly after that. He also built a satellite receiver out of some spare electronics and a coffee can and had free HBO for years, but I digress.

Is that justification for modern IP piracy, however?

Back! To the Future! And here I am, a self publisher of games, scripts, what-have-you, many of which are in PDF format. One recent release, Barbarians of the Aftermath, a 176 page PDF selling for $15, sold pretty steadily for about a year, but within 3 months of its publishing, my hard work, which I designed, wrote, layed out and did the graphic design for, was being flogged on Torrent sites without so much as a 'please,' much less licensing fees. I never thought I'd have so much in common with some English Queen from the 1800's. If I actually had the sales from those downloads (which far outweigh my actual sold copies), I might actually be able to make a living out of game publishing. As it is, people for whom $15 is really a tiny sum of money, the equivalent of a movie and trip to the concession stand, my work, which gives them years of gaming entertainment value for their $15, is not worth more than the effort it takes to locate and download it over the internet.

A side effect of this pirate economy is the devaluation of perceived worth of physical objects which actually hurts book sales as well. A 176 page full color hardback of Barbarians of the Aftermath costs $44.95. Again, this is not 'greed' pricing, but the realistic cost of publishing and distributing in the modern era. It is an actual tangible product, that you own, and which provides you with more entertainment value than simply reading it would normally provide. The average gaming consumer, however, finds it hard to pay that much for anything book related, when PDFs are so easy to come by.

So what can be done to combat piracy of electronic IP? One idea has been to make the prices so low, that the effort and risks of pirating are no longer worthwhile. Adamant, an RPG and game publisher, recently experimented with 'App Pricing' to stimulate sales and discourage piracy. Basically, every game and supplement was priced like a smartphone app, from 99 cents to $1.99. This experiment failed for various reasons, which the owner of Adamant explains in detail here. I am planning to follow a similar route by actually making the games themselves into apps. With App Pricing and the security offered by the tighter security environment of the smartphone/tablet environment and some sort of software verification scheme, I hope to further discourage piracy. But assuming that piracy is going to happen, and Bittorrents aren't going away how can I make it work for me?

By turning the game into a software product, one that provides something that you can't really recreate with a download and the home printer, the focus of shifts from the game and the rules and even the graphic design as the IP of import. I'm shifting my commercial focus so that the PDF is merely a vehicle for selling the software. The PDF, which is a fully fledged Pen and Paper RPG, can now be sold for 99 cents and if someone goes through the trouble of pirating it, all they are really doing is advertising my game, and in effect, my game software. The Torrents become my marketing tool for the $15 phone/tablet app.

This is all experimental, but I think that history has shown that piracy is here to stay, as long as there is someone who can benefit from it (in much the same way as Elizabeth I benefited from privateers, who were nothing more than 'legalized' pirates). Once you realize that, however, you can redirect your energies to being the one who benefits from it. If you can't beat them... use them.

The Good, The Bad and the Collectivists...

Jaron Lanier is an interesting man. In many ways we couldn't be more different (humanist views, faith in newspaper reporting,  belief in man-made global warming, taste in hair, etc.),  but in his article on online collectivism, Digital Maoism, I find that he and I are very much aligned in our experiences and concerns with the push towards online collectivism. The article sums up the main problems of the collective fairly succinctly and with little of the blather that you might expect from the same subject written within the halls of academia. A practical man with decades of experience in technology as an instigator and creator as opposed to one who theorizes or debates endlessly to no real conclusion, Jared not only identifies the main problems with Collectivism as a goal, but also points out the usefulness of it in limited spheres of influence.

The problem and solution of collectivist output, or group-think, can be summed up in the following ideas: A Collective is best when...

... answering questions, not asking them, and outputs simple answers.

As Lanier points out, a collective is very good at guessing the number of jelly-beans in a jar or serving as the basis of Google's search engine algorithm. What it is not so good at is coming up with lasting ideas or products.

This is, at its base, due to the way the collective averages information to come to simple conclusion. This requires a simple question, like 'do you like X' or 'how much do you think X is worth.' Asking 'what is beauty' will get many, varied and often conflicting answers whose sum total is nonsensical at best. In effect, it is better to ask practical, easily definable questions of a collective, like 'on a scale of 1-10' and leave the vagaries of complex philosophical or creative thought to individuals.

A good example of this can be seen in the episode O' Brother, Where Art Thou. Homer's long-lost brother Herb steps down on the design of a new car to allow the 'average man,' Homer, design it instead. The result makes the Tucker Torpedo look like a 2011 Car & Driver Award Winner and destroys Herb's business (ironically, because the collectivist car industry hated it).

... it is tempered by procedure.

Many people in the United States bemoan the 'gridlock' that plagues congress. 'Congress is the opposite of Progress' some proclaim, and to an extent, that is not only true, but intended.

When they set up our system of government, our founding fathers knew that true democracy would lead to mob rule and that this was not a desirable thing. Even back in the 18th century, they understood the destructive properties of group-think, and (although they didn't have a name for it) the vulnerability of social networks to incitement and exploitation. Instead, they chose a representative form of government to establish a multi-layered process to slow down decision making and established rules to make sure that true majorities, not simple ones based on a fraction of a percentage point over 50, would steer the ship of state.

In this way, state autonomy was virtually guaranteed, as any decision made by the Federal government that affected the states as a whole was sure to be bogged down in debate and unlikely to pass. Only those ideas with true worth, those that could be agreed upon by a large majority of the union, would be allowed to change the entire fabric of the United States. The strength of this system was shown in the passing of the 13th amendment, which was legally above board, leaving the South no other recourse than to secede from the Union to avoid it's effects.

In the end, the United States is a very large collective, but by the use of procedure, we slow down the impulsive nature of collectivist thought, the 'Jitters' as Lanier referred to them, to keep the system from devolving into a constantly changing set of priorities based on whatever ideas are in vogue at the moment, allowing for maximum freedom and a clearly defined culture and set of standards.

... it is overseen and corrected by individuals.

The main complaint that Jared has about collectivist thought is that is terrible for creating, or using active discrimination in the selection of, ideas or products of lasting value. He uses the old and well worn cliché of a 'design by committee' as the perfect example of something a collective should never be allowed to do. I have first-hand experience of this.

In my first job out of college (donkey's years ago), I worked as the graphic designer for a small corporate entity named HBS Systems (the HBS stood for High Class Business Systems, leaving out the C and making the systems in HBS Systems redundant, a fine example of committee design all on its own). We had a hall of middle managers (I called it the Gauntlet) that had to have their say on everything that came out of my office. Products would go up on side of the hall and come down the other. Each manager would add notes on what they thought it needed to have changed (and they all commented), I would make the changes and then it would go back and the managers would then go about undoing the changes of other managers after they appeared. A single 8 page brochure was in the works before I started working there and, two years later, it still wasn't done.

The problem with this job was that as the graphic professional, I should have had some say over which ideas to implement or discard. Instead, my professional skills took a backseat to every mid-level executive in the building, including HR and accounting, and none of them could agree on anything. The individuals who should have had final say, the graphic professional and the head of the company, took second place to the collective of 'everymen' whose input could only make the final product 'average' at best.

The Uber-Human Computer...

My reading for this week centered on The Exploit, by Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, which deals with the way human social structures have changed drastically in the modern era, replacing top-down hierarchies with dispersed social networks, changing the way that human interaction, mainly power/resistance relationships, functions.

Throughout the book, the vast 'super-organism' that Christakis and Fowler imagined (see my previous post) takes on a new paradigm, that of a large biological computer, and is viewed through a mathematical and system oriented lens. Individuals in this set-up are not individuals, per se, but 'dividuals,' semi-autonomous entities (Nodes) which make decisions, but whose decisions are in a large part influenced by the Informatic flow of the network as a whole, the very act of individuation creating a new flow which must, eventually, filter through the other 'dividuals,' undergo further dividuation and then return and influence further decisions.

This brings to mind the 'Memristor' or 'Memory Resistor.' In computer engineering, a two-terminal variable resistor, which not only controls the amount of charge flowing across it, but remembers the amount of charge that has passed between the terminals and changes its resistance based on that last memory. Humans function much the same way in Galloway and Thacker's model, the charge of information passing through them on its way through the network circuit and then the 'dividual' making a decision on how to process and pass that information on based on previous information gathered from its various connections. The practical upshot of this is that humans in a network are often driven by the information within it to make decisions which they think are self-actuated.

Galloway and Thacker explore this relationship to explain how these networks can be exploited with a minimum of force and maximum of effect that could never be matched by older distributed hierarchies. The focus here is different. It is impossible to 'bring down the system' in the traditional revolutionary sense, but much can be achieved by changing the system from the inside through manipulation of the flow of information. Much like the viruses in Black Death (again, see the previous post), or more appropriately, the modern computer virus, the collective nature of modern networks makes it very easy to corrupt  a single node to cause change in the topography of a network and shape it to other purposes.

Like our Memsistor, however, where there is current, there is also resistance. In fact, the more overt  power you exert against a network, the more likely it will be resisted. Attacking a node in our network directly, say by actively disparaging a member of a social network which you are only marginally tied to,  will often strengthen it against further attack due to the panoptic nature of the network to monitor its own nodes and reinforce set protocols. Attacks must be more subtle and are more likely to work if you can get the network to work for you instead.

The classic example is, of course, terrorism. By causing fear  to spread throughout a network, you can change its behavior and ultimately, its shape, as ties (known here as edges) are moved or cut out altogether to isolate the individual nodes from 'contamination.' And it isn't even necessary to attack any specific node: you just need to implant the idea of contamination to get the ball rolling and let the reverberating nature of the network take care of the rest. Terrorists cause fear, the fear causes people to shut themselves off or curtail their normal activities, which damages social and economic systems to which they are tied, which causes more fear which causes more damage, etc.

One of the more subtle ways of exploiting networks and taking them over from within is to gain access to information and modify it slightly, in much the same way as a computer virus does, finding a vulnerable node to spread the new 'meme' about until it is reinforced by the network itself. In biopolitics, this is achieved by taking control of media and education outlets, 'informing' or 'teaching' the corrupted information to vulnerable nodes (the uninformed, the young) and then relying on those nodes to affect change for you by creating new protocols or even restructuring the network.

Is there a defense against this sort of attack? The Exploit references the concept of homogeneity, lack of diversity, as the key vulnerability in networked systems. But without homogeneity, the internet and computer communication in general would be fail. So perhaps there is a biopolitical version of a virus scanner that 'identifies' infected nodes and reacts to them by creating resistance in much the same way as a direct attack? Some sort of documented and set protocol that the network could reference each time information passes from node to node to strengthen homogeneity to such a point that deviations from it are recognized and corrected (Let's call it a 'constitution.' That should do the trick. Well, until one of the nodes decides that it is 'living' and changes at the whim of individual nodes, at which point the whole network falls apart)?

Ok, so we've seen that the system falls apart even with a strong protocol is in play because corruption can come from within a network as well as without (one of the two problems Galloway and Thacker identify). Perhaps the problem in both cases is size. The more nodes in an individual network, and the more diversity in individuation, the more likely corruption can spread. Perhaps the strongest network is made up of several smaller sub-networks that are rigidly homogenized to prevent corruption, but are connected up in a larger and more diverse pattern that can be flexible enough to react to threats? What if, for example, the UN weren't made up of nations but of ideologies? Nations would still exist, in a fashion, as legal and cultural entities, but what if all the world-wide decisions were based on small, focused groups of a million or so like minded people? What would the world look like? I think that's worth looking into...

Art Reflects Life: Christakis & Fowler's 'Connected' as a Boardgame...

While reading the book Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, I had a lot of different ideas flashing around in my head. One that really stuck, as I looked at the social networking maps and read about how they can be applied to look at human activity from various angles as the activity of one vast superorganism, was that this sort of thing would make a great instructional game for teaching about the way our actions affect and are affected by others on a larger scale. The way irresponsible sexual behaviour led to the Rockdale County STD outbreak, the way herd instinct affected behavior in the U.K. Northern Rock Bank incident of 2007, or the way voting patterns develop and emerge as with the 2008 U.S. elections, would all make excellent subjects for a game.

There is, in fact, a precedent for this sort of game in Black Death, by Greg Porter (you can find an updated print and play version here). This game places you in the 'persona' of a virus trying to infect mid-14th century Europe, in the manner of the Black Plague. A quick look at the map-board will be instantly familiar to anyone who has read Connected or used Social Network Mapping software:

Black Death map-board (1993 Blacksburg Tactical Research Center)

There are several concepts from Connected reflected in the structure and game-play of Black Death...

TOPOGRAPHICAL STRUCTURE

The map represents Europe in the mid-14th century with the major cities (including, presumably their surrounding towns and villages) serving as Nodes and the main thoroughfares, be they overland trade route or sea lane, serving as our Ties. The whole of Europe and North Africa could be seen as a single Social Group amongst the massive Social Network that is the human race.

Some ties are actually weaker, in the example of the Black Death map-board, than others, and are marked with a negative number along the route, representing either a difficult and slow journey over mountains, sea or inhospitable terrain that might see plague carriers die before reaching their destination. On the other hand, large cities have 'sections' which give a bonus to infection, representing the poor and disease-ridden sections common in most major cities of the era.

Along with all the social connections within the group itself, we also have Weak Ties to other 'nation groups,' represented by the trade routes leading out from Moskva, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Tunis and Reykjavik, which lead to 'The Orient,' 'Darkest Africa' and 'The Americas.' Our contagions will be coming in along the eastern routes, representing the Asian origin of many of the plagues of that era.

TRANSITIVITY

The number of outgoing and incoming connections one has is described as their Transitivity, the ability for them to spread information (or in this case, viruses). The major, popular cities in Black Death, like Constantinople or Paris, have very high Transitivity, which makes it easier for viruses to spread to them. Reykjavik's isolated nature (a very unpopular destination with a very low Transitivity), on the other hand, makes it very difficult for viruses to spread to it and tends to protect it.

Major Cities are popular targets in the game as spreading from one section to another is easy due to high connectivity. You might think of the individual sections of the city as 'close friends' in this context, a very tight little social group within the larger group, possibly even one with intimate contact, where the '+1' section might represent a friend with high risk behavior.

These connections can be lost in a number of ways by the play of special cards, changing the dynamic of the social network and the way the viruses travel around it. Wars between cities can close off trade routes which also limits the movement of plague carriers along that route as can bad weather, which keeps people at home to die in their own beds. Traders on the other hand bring new and interesting diseases with them from the Orient and a Crusade can take distant and removed infections and drag them along to concentrate in and devastate the middle east, creating new vectors for viruses to spread.

THE VIRUSES
Interestingly enough, the Viruses, themselves, are made up of two attributes that mirror the concepts found in Connected: Virulence and Mortality.

Virulence, the speed by which the virus spreads, reflects the Connected concepts of Connection and Contagion. In a manner, the Virus can bee seen as a 'sub-node' in the individual City Node which represents the individual infection vectors that pass it from person to person in the city. For example, a Virus with a high Virulence which infects humans through a common medium (like an airborne virus or one that clings to objects and spreads by touch) could be seen as a node with multiple ties/vectors to other nodes, while one with a very low Virulence (one that spreads only through sexual contact or contact with blood, for instance) would be an outlying node with only one tie that is limited by the Three Degrees rule to only infecting a few people at a time and relies on carriers moving about a lot.

Mortality represents the Connected concepts of Intrinsic Decay and Network Instability. In the game, a Virus can be very Virulent, very deadly or something in between. As killing off folks is the way to win the game (as evidenced by the scoring track which is based on 'millions served,' a grimly humorous way to represent the dead), it would seem that having the highest Mortality rate would be the way to win. But killing off your host prevents them from spreading you effectively, so high Mortality viruses can end up cutting Ties before they can travel along them to replicate themselves.

Appropriately enough, when I've played the game, high Mortality viruses tend to cluster around cities within three degrees of each other and rarely make it very far into the map as they wipe themselves out or destroy whole cities, cutting off their potential vectors of infection.

A TRANSITIVE IDEA

This sort of rules structure could easily be transplanted to other games with a focus on different types and sizes of social networks. Imagine a game that high school kids could play to show how sexual behavior has much larger ramifications than who they are sleeping with at the moment. Or perhaps political science students could benefit from seeing how 'getting out the vote' organizations really do mobilize voters in an election, with various special play cards to represent outside  influences and events (like a negative media blitz or war in the mid-east). Games typically make this sort of subject material clearer and much more interesting and are increasingly being used for teaching methods in this manner.

The lessons learned from the game structure itself can also be of use. In Black Death, some ties are harder to cross than others, something that is not represented in Connected but could add some three dimensionality to the Social Network structure. Obstructed ties would be represented in a ordinary social network by people who are well connected, but avoided (the rich but mean old miser that everyone knows in a small town and is a central influence on the monetary and political life of the town, but is avoided as much as is possible by the townsfolk).

In any case, the game is fun, educational and is also now Connected to you by Three Degrees of influence: from Greg Porter, to Me to You. So grab a copy, check it out and spread the 'love...'

The Future Is Now...

As instructed by Dr. Parry, I will endeavour to make this post as 'opinion-free' as possible, but it feels rather an odd limitation to put on a blog which is, by it's very nature, a format centered around one's opinion. It would be a reasonable assumption to write, say, a research paper in as neutral a manner as possible, but the very point of a blog is to espouse one's personal views on the subject matter at hand and so it is fairly at odds with that remit. I'll do my best, however.

In reading the three articles assigned for this week (The Public Sphere by Jurgen Habermas, Cyberdemocracy by Mark Poster and Habermas' Heritage by Pieter Boeder) we get a snapshot of a growing concern with the effect of technology upon the 'Public Sphere,' the conceptual foundation of people interacting and exchanging views and ideas as the basis of democratic principles (or more specifically liberal/progressive social welfare mass state democratic principles). Each piece is informed by the technology of the era in which it was written (1964, 1997 and 2002, respectively) but in each case, even the most modern of these seems very outdated as technology is increasing at such a rapid pace that many of the ideas presented about the deconstruction of the 'public sphere' in favor of 'public opinion' and the loss of democractic virtues through commercialization have either not come to pass, or have come to pass, but not in the way the authours envisioned.

Habermas' fear of corporatism turning democracies back into feudal states, where the corporation, whether newspaper, radio or television, controls and dispenses the information as needed to control its subjects while still appearing to provide open information exchange, has been somewhat dulled by the very nature of competition in capitalistic environments. In 1964, there were few stations on the air and Intelstat I, the first commercial communication satellite, had yet to be launched. Today, there are a massive number of channels and communication services available that allow you to see news from around the world, access information from data repositories on every continent and talk in real-time to people on the other side of the world. The ability for people to gather information and compare it with other sources to get a clearer picture of what is actually going on has never been easier and the ability to control information and prevent its dissemination is practically impossible as Wikileaks and the informaiton coming out of Egypt and Libya this year have shown.

If you hate Fox News and think they are the essence of evil mindlessly arrayed against everything good and true and never tell the truth and kill small puppies and feed them to crying children that Rupert Murdoch made cry because he feeds of the pain of innocents, then you have a plethora of other major world news sources to get your information from. If, on the other hand, you think that they are simply another news agency amongst a score of others and that they bring up some good points that are missed by other networks, then you might watch them right alongside BBC News. The number of choices available provide such a massive impediment to even modest control of any message that Habermas might have been pleasantly surprised.

In much the same way, the idea that the internet will turn people from true political activity to 'feel good' political activity that makes them feel involved without actually making any real difference has been contradicted in the last few years by the rise of grass-roots organizations with no firm leadership but a single unifying purpose. The Tea Party, for example, have changed the dynamics of US politics despite disinformation campaigns, attempts to paint them as 'fringe' or unimportant, and a quite panoptic campaign of spies and plants within their ranks to pick out, or in some cases fabricate, any little thing to discredit them as a democratic group. They are the perfect example of Poster's Cyberdemocracy in action: a virtual community that constructs an identity (a minor one that ignores sex and race) for its members based upon the back and forth exchange of ideas and are not controlled directly by any one identifiable leader or entity. They are a decentralized democratic gestalt whose existence is only possible due to the presence of cyberspace.

If anything, the new media has opened up areas of arcane political and economic thought to the common man as people of all walks of life are able to communicate complex ideas back and forth to each other. No single person could have read the 2500+ page healthcare bill and understood it, but many did take the time to read portions of it and explain them to those who had neither the time nor the byzantine political and legal knowledge to decipher it. And you can be sure that whatever side is trying to get the bill passed, the other side will have someone dogging their every footstep and reporting them online. Never before have the voters had so much access and inside knowledge on how our government works and with this knowledge comes the power to make informed decisions and punish those who abuse the system.

This is all happening today, but even these events are simply the seeds of potential for a true democracy that is enhanced, not inhibited, by the technological evolution that the human race is only on the cusp of. In fact, I think I'll write my final paper on how technologies just around the corner could create a sustainable world governing body that would be effective without interfering in the personal lives, cultures and beliefs of its constituent members. That sounds like an interesting paper...