Author: JP

Just back from reboot. Fantastic conference. Truly participative. Over 20 nationalities, incredible energy. Thomas and Nikolaj and team have really made something special happen. Thanks for inviting me, guys.
I learnt some things, was exposed to different ways of looking at things I thought familiar, met some old friends, made some new ones; even met a few people I’d conversed with for a while, but only electronically. A blogger’s rite of passage.
I’ve known for some time that there are three “I” words that need resolving before I-T can become We-T, before social software  truly socialises information and infrastructure and ideas:

• The Internet as a real “commons” infrastructure rather than a battleground (and graveyard) for dinosaurs; empowering, not restricting
  
• Identity as something personal, yet allowing participation in community and collective activity; empowering, not restricting
• Intellectual Property Rights transformed into something that enables creativity and innovation rather than stifling life; empowering, not restricting

What I realised is how much these Blefuscudian arguments have themselves morphed, to become similar to modern-day politics and elections. That they are all about memes and anchors and frames first and everything else later. That like elections and politics, hey are influenced, almost owned, by traditional media models and lobbies and incumbents.
The words we use have power. More power than we had before, because of the empowering nature of the web, the sheer impact of globalisation, the fuzzying of distinctions between production and consumption, the lowering of barriers to entry as a result of the laws of Moore and Metcalfe and even Gilder.

There’s something poetic, yet ironic, in how this battle is being fought.

Those that want the new renaissance of the digital age to happen are armed with the analogue, the grey, the weapons of words and ideas.

Those that want the status quo to remain arm themselves with the digital, the polemic and polarised debate, the black and white, the weapons of ones and zeros.

I’ll be posting something longer soon; in the meantime, it’s worth thinking about why so many good things are happening in this space in Scandinavia.

I can think of three reasons.

• One, that affordable internet and broadband penetration and connectivity is very high in these parts;
• two, that the lingua franca of this movement just happens to be English, and Scandinavians put us to shame with the command they show in what is essentially a second language; and
• three, they are culturally inclined to believe in freedom of the individual and in the freedom of the community.

These are challenging times. But don’t lose heart. Good things do happen…..take a look below:
I’m currently reading an unusual book called Telegraph and Travel : A Narrative of the Formation and Development of Telegraphic Communication between England and India, Under the Orders of Her Majesty’s Government, with Incidental Notices of the Countries Traversed by The Lines. It was written by Colonel Sir Frederic John Goldsmid, CB, KCSI, in 1874 [Note to self: Don’t need to worry about copyright infringement on this one].

Fascinating book. And hidden in the Appendix, the author reveals:

The tariff in force between England and India from 1865 to the end of 1868 was £5 for a message of twenty words.

Look what happened to the telegraph, despite the way infrastructure used to be owned then. Look what happened to the telegraph, despite the nature of patent and copyright law then. Look what happened to the telegraph, despite the restrictions on personal freedom then.

Even SMS looks cheap when I allow for 140 years of inflation. £5 for 20 words. Wow.

In the past, we used location of consumer as part of the proof of identity, and location of producer as part of the process of delivery. What happens if these are no longer held to be true, if Generation M decides that these constraints no longer make sense? What happens if we have to stop “using the tools of an old paradigm to try and solve the problems of the new“, paraphrasing Einstein?

I remember having dinner some months ago with Professor Richard Scase; he spends time looking at social and demographic trends, and painting pictures of what might be. One of his pet tangents was the structure of information we require of people, whether for job applications or credit ratings or whatever. How age and sex and marital status and number of children and time-at-address and time-in-job were meaningful attributes fifty or more years ago, when people tended to live close to where they were born, get married in their early twenties, stay married, have and raise children when they were between 25 and 44, retire at 65 and so on. Low mobility, high job tenure, low divorce rates, one heterosexual partner, and so on.

These things were then used to help predict people’s behaviour. Take views of their “riskiness” in different aspects of their lives, be it health or wealth or even happiness. Make assumptions on their preferences and project their likely buying habits. Put them into neat classifications of socio-economic status. ABC1 and all that jazz. You get the drift.

Until I heard him, I never questioned why we had boxes to tick the way we had them. What the boxes represented. Why they existed.

My bad.

Generation M has changed all that. I’m not sure that “residence” is a meaningful factor in an employment form; how do I classify members of the opensource community? I’m not sure that “income” is a meaningful factor in determining propensity to buy. If that was the case, then someone would have told Steve Jobs “I think … there is a market for maybe five iPod videos”.

Generation M will not sit down and be classified the way we are used to classifying people. They will not be taught the way we are used to teaching people. They will not be hired and employed the way we are used to hiring and employing people. They will not be compensated and rewarded the way we are used to compensating and rewarding people.

Generation M will not use technology the way we are used to doing. For one thing, they have real mobility. Mobility is key. Multitasking is key. Multimedia is key. The three Ms of Generation M.

What we are used to is Assembly Line and McLuhan. Two wonderful dinosaurs. Gone the way of all dinosaurs.

And we have to work out a way of describing identity in a non-deterministic manner. People in Generation M will have n identities at the same time. N jobs at the same time. N residences at the same time. They may choose to converge these things and settle on one in each case. Merge their different identities into one. In fact I think they will. Over time. But what do I know?
The key phrase is They Choose. Not us. And what we build has to recognise that. Not now maybe, but soon.

Something to think about.

Most people I speak to tend to agree that identity, authentication and permissioning are key issues to resolve in the context of how we live and how we conduct business in the 21st century. Much has been written about these issues, much remains to be written and debated. And done.

But in the meantime……..

I thought I’d test my own thinking by removing one basic principle of identity, that of uniqueness, and seeing what happens. It’s not a big leap to take. All you have to do is move from a deterministic model of identity (which yields uniqueness) to a probabilistic one (which doesn’t).

Let’s see how this plays out. Let me throw a few snowballs.

Competing for identity is not new. We have all heard the story about Charlie Chaplin taking part in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition and coming 3rd. The Chaplin Wikipedia article I’ve linked to even mentions it as part of Trivia. [An aside. Try researching this story. You will find that the event is reported as having taken place in San Francisco, in Los Angeles and in Monte Carlo. In keeping with this argument I’ve taken a probabilistic approach to the provenance of the story, and accepted that on balance the San Francisco story has the highest likelihood of being true.]

Identity is currently based around a scarcity model. What happens to our thinking if this were no longer held to be true, and that we had to deal with an abundance model?

Being unsure of identity is not new, at least from an authorship/actorship sense. Can someone earn a degree at University without having some knowledge of the speculation surrounding Homer’s works, or those of the Bard?

Transferring some aspect of identity is not new. Powers of attorney have existed for a very long time, as a legal instrument to transfer some power that is associated with a unique identity. The Wikipedia entry even uses the phrase “in the principal’s name” to describe the power. The use of per pro in signatures has also been around for a long time. When I was young, I was led to believe that if person A copied person B’s signature on a document with the full knowledge and support of person B, this was acceptable. I may be wrong in this, but there is some anecdotal evidence that this is true.

Having a “double” is not new. Chance doppelgangers have been reported since time immemorial, and a number of officially sanctioned ones as well. Without doing any research, I can recall stories about Churchill, Montgomery, even Saddam. Most such doubles were sanctioned by the owner of the identity, with a clear intent to mislead. Officially. On top of that, there appears to be a veritable industry of celebrity lookalikes. [You’re right, I took great pleasure in using the word “veritable” in that sentence.”]

Using “ringers” is not new. Amateur, community and grassroots sports events have been plagued with stories of professionals pretending to be someone else. No visit to the House of Commons in London is complete without your being told of the nefarious attempts made by MPs of old to send hired hands as alternates for the vote, usually because they themselves were too drunk to show up.

Outsourcing of identity is not new. More and more, I hear stories of online gamers paying someone else to pretend to be them for a while, until Level X is reached, or virtual collateral Y has been acquired, or number-of-lives Z. See the New York Times’ story on this late last year.

Having a parallel identity in a virtual world is not new. The BBC recently rented an island on Second Life for a full year, intending to provide a physical/virtual stereo effect for events like concerts. We have already moved beyond relationship to transaction in the virtual world, with real exchange rates for virtual money. Who says you can only have one virtual identity? Cybersquatters move over, the time has come for simultaneous multiple identity environments. [Are we nearing the time when we will have psychiatrists and lawyers operating across this divide?]

I’m not sure what to make of all this. But I don’t belong to Generation M, and I don’t pretend to understand everything that goes on around me. What I can do is try and learn. Even if it means I have to shed the anchors and frames I am used to and comfortable with.
At least part of the kernel for Four Pillars came from my reading Larry Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. His tale about the neighbours in court, one cultivating deadly flowers, the other breeding pedigree dogs. It never sounded far-fetched to me. Thank you Larry.