Nemo Folkitz has graciously undertaken a German fan-translation of my short-short story Printcrime. The PDF is here, and the text is below.
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My latest Guardian column is “Disorganised but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs,” a piece about a new kind of group that has been enabled by the Internet — a group with no formal structure that can still get stuff done, like Occupy and Anonymous.
The things that one person can do define what is “human”. The things that transcend the limits of an individual – building a skyscraper, governing a nation, laying a telecommunications network, writing an operating system – are the realm of the super-human.
The most profound social revolutions in human history have arisen whenever a technology comes along that lowers transaction costs. Technologies that makes it cheaper to work together lower the tax on super-human powers.
Language (which allowed for explicit communication), writing (which allowed for record-keeping), literacy (which allowed for communication at a distance and through time) and all the way up to assembly lines, telegraphs, telephones, cryptography (which lowers transaction costs by reducing the amount of energy you have to expend to keep attackers out of your coordination efforts), computers, networks, mobile phones and beyond.
Decreasing transaction costs means that the powerful can do more. If you’ve already organised a state or criminal enterprise or church with you at the top, it means that you’ve figured out how to harvest and distribute resources effectively enough to maintain your institutional stability.
Disorganised but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs
Click for the huge, full version
I recently turned in the manuscript for Homeland, the sequel to my 2008 YA novel Little Brother. Tor’s going to be bringing it out next February, 2013. I’ve got two more books coming in the meantime: Rapture of the Nerds (with Charlie Stross) and Pirate Cinema (a YA novel). (All three will be CC licensed)
I am absolutely delighted with this cover — a matched set with the cover for Little Brother!
Click for the huge, full version
I recently turned in the manuscript for Homeland, the sequel to my 2008 YA novel Little Brother. Tor’s going to be bringing it out next February, 2013. I’ve got two more books coming in the meantime: Rapture of the Nerds (with Charlie Stross) and Pirate Cinema (a YA novel). (All three will be CC licensed)
I am absolutely delighted with this cover — a matched set with the cover for Little Brother!
Suicide Girls has published an excerpt from Rapture of the Nerds, the novel Charlie Stross and I wrote, which will come out in September. Charlie and I will be touring the book together briefly after Labor Day. The details are still being settled, but there’s going to be some very exciting stops!
Rapture is the novel-length version of the two novellas Charlie and I wrote, Jury Service and Appeals Court. For this volume, we re-wrote those two, and added a long third section, Parole Board, from which the Suicide Girls excerpt is drawn. It’s a comic novel of the Singularity, party mash-note to technophilia and part indictment. As the title suggests, we’re both a little ambivalent on the idea of machine transcendence.
Of course, the sim is far too realistic. A virtual champagne bath should somehow manage to keep the champagne drinking-temp cold while still feeling warm to the touch. And it shouldn’t be sticky and hot and flat; it should feel like champagne does when it hits your tongue—icy and bubbly and fizzy. And when Huw’s nonbladder feels uncomfortably full and relaxed in the hot liquid and she lets a surreptitious stream loose, it should be magicked away, not instantly blended in with the vintage Veuve to make an instant tubworth of piss-mimosa.
This is what comes of having too much compute-time at one’s disposal, Huw seethes. In constraint, there is discipline, the need to choose how much reality you’re going to import and model. Sitting on an Io’s worth of computronium has freed the Galactic Authority—and isn’t that an unimaginative corker of a name? — from having to choose. And with her own self simulated as hot and wide as she can be bothered with, she can feel every unpleasant sensation, each individual sticky bubble, each droplet clinging to her body as she hops out of the tub and into the six-jet steam-shower for a top-to-bottom rinse, and then grabs a towel —every fiber slightly stiff and plasticky, as if fresh out of the wrapper and never properly laundered to relax the fibers—and dries off. She discovers that she is hyperaware, hyperalert, feeling every grain of not-dust in the not-air individually as it collides with her not-skin.
My latest Guardian column is “Google admits that Plato’s cave doesn’t exist,” a discussion of how Google has changed the way it talks about its search-results, shifting from the stance that rankings are a form of pure math to the stance that rankings are a form of editorial judgment.
Google has, to date, always refused to frame itself in those terms. The pagerank algorithm isn’t like an editor arguing aesthetics around a boardroom table as the issue is put to bed. The pagerank algorithm is a window on the wall of Plato’s cave, whence the objective, empirical world of Relevance may be seen and retrieved.
That argument is a convenient one when the most contentious elements of your rankings are from people who want higher ranking. “We have done the maths, and your page is empirically less relevant than the pages above it. Your quarrel is with the cold, hard reality of numbers, not with our judgement.”
The problem with that argument is that maths is inherently more regulatable than speech. If the numbers say that item X must be ranked over item Y, a regulator may decide that a social problem can be solved by “hard-coding” page Y to have a higher ranking than X, regardless of its relevance. This isn’t censorship – it’s more like progressive taxation.
Here’s a podcast of my recent Tech Review feature, The Curious Case of Internet Privacy:
Why do we seem to value privacy so little? In part, it’s because we are told to. Facebook has more than once overridden its users’ privacy preferences, replacing them with new default settings. Facebook then responds to the inevitable public outcry by restoring something that’s like the old system, except slightly less private. And it adds a few more lines to an inexplicably complex privacy dashboard.
Even if you read the fine print, human beings are awful at pricing out the net present value of a decision whose consequences are far in the future. No one would take up smoking if the tumors sprouted with the first puff. Most privacy disclosures don’t put us in immediate physical or emotional distress either. But given a large population making a large number of disclosures, harm is inevitable. We’ve all heard the stories about people who’ve been fired because they set the wrong privacy flag on that post where they blew off on-the-job steam.
The risks increase as we disclose more, something that the design of our social media conditions us to do. When you start out your life in a new social network, you are rewarded with social reinforcement as your old friends pop up and congratulate you on arriving at the party. Subsequent disclosures generate further rewards, but not always. Some disclosures seem like bombshells to you (“I’m getting a divorce”) but produce only virtual cricket chirps from your social network. And yet seemingly insignificant communications (“Does my butt look big in these jeans?”) can produce a torrent of responses. Behavioral scientists have a name for this dynamic: “intermittent reinforcement.” It’s one of the most powerful behavioral training techniques we know about. Give a lab rat a lever that produces a food pellet on demand and he’ll only press it when he’s hungry. Give him a lever that produces food pellets at random intervals, and he’ll keep pressing it forever. /blockquote>
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
The IEEE’s Computer and Reliability Societies recently published “Embracing the Kobayashi Maru,” by James Caroland (US Navy/US Cybercommand) and Greg Conti (West Point) describing an exercise in which they assigned students to cheat on an exam — either jointly or individually. The goal was to get students thinking about how to secure systems from adversaries who are willing to “cheat” to win. The article describes how the students all completed the exam (they all cheated successfully), which required them to provide the first 100 digits of pi, with only 24h to prepare. The students used many ingenious techniques as cribs, but my heart was warmed to learn that once student printed a false back-cover for my novel Little Brother with pi 1-100 on it (Little Brother is one of the course readings, so many copies of it were already lying around the classroom).
James and Greg have supplied a link to a pre-pub of the paper (the original is paywalled), and sent along a video of a presentation they gave at Shmoocon where they presented the work. The students’ solutions are incredibly ingenious — the audience is practically howling with laughter by the end of the presentation.
(Thanks, Ben!)
