Been thinking a lot lately about the sort of “information debris” which ends up being left in one’s passing.
See also: Public & Private Datawakes, and Thinware, Thickware & Datawakes.
One obvious example of a datawake is your web history: a list of all the URL’s you have visited online. Another one is what you throw into your physical garbage can: financial, health records, etc. Your datawake is, therefore, quite closely connected to concepts such as “identity theft” - the idea being that if someone has access to data elements within your datawake, then they can “spoof” your identity, and act - under the eyes of certain systems - as though they were you.
I don’t know what the answer to any of this is. I guess you could say I have been swimming in my own datawakes on the issue quite a lot. One of the experiments I have embarked on though lately has been to begin marking up books that I purchase. I used to hate it when books had writing in them. But making notes, underlining and otherwise marking them up has enabled me to more quickly find information later when I am coming back to look for quotes to reference in my writing. And it also helps me by allowing me to immediately and concretely connect diverse ideas.
In a sense, this book mark-up that I have been doing has become part of my datawake, and I have made a conscious choice to have it become that. In every book I buy now I write my name, my location and the year. This establishes a hand-writing sample, a geographic and time marker, and then shows me as the author of the comments etc which I add into each book. Then I have begun passing along these books to other people in my shared value community: in other words, friends who I think would enjoy these original texts, and who maybe even would enjoy reading my notes as well. Or not. But I’ve been giving them with the Creative Commons-esque stipulation that people “share-alike“: they write their names, etc in it, and then make notes of their own, and then pass it on to somebody else.
Haven’t been doing it very long yet, but it seems like a great practice. Not just because it trains you to consciously look at what data artifacts are left in your passing, but also as a way of focusing on what is valuable to me and trying to share it more actively with others who might find value in it as well.
Certainly not a revolutionary idea by any means, but part of my on-going efforts to apply changes to every aspect of my life.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT @TMBCHR (Auto-Generated)
- Private & Public Datawakes
- Microccult.com & Microunions.com are available!
- Skills List Redundancy
- Shared Financial Info = Credit System Crash?
- Fecal Food Wakes
14 Comments
Interesting corrolary:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_5_29/ai_84841845/pg_4
I have a pretty weird datawake. Plus internal processes aren’t in the datawake, neccessarily. So that bookmarking idea is good. But if you were just to read my web history or read the titles on my bookshelf, you would see a lot of weird incongruous stuff.
BTW, I have a question about the “shared value community” what are the values?
Also I notice quite a bit of redundancy in the skills list, I even left some stuff out that I was going to add to mine, because I saw it on other people’s lists. Seems kind of almost like a guild for anti-authoritartian computer nerds into alternative spirituality and conspiracy theories, plus we like dogs.
or somthing like that….of course not everyone participated on your list.
Please tell me (or direct me to the telling) what happened ( and why) to the Odiogo bot who used to read your posts to me. It was my favorite.
I was just writing about marking up books to a freind before you said this, about how HTML was born from the concept (thus its “mark up language”)
I had big thoughts after this post yesterday, but I wasn’t near a computer, now I can’t remember most of it….But some of it was kind of humorous: What if restaurants decided to increase their value to customers by tracking “Food Wakes?” the devices to do this would be placed in their toilets, and analyze their customers “output” to determine what kind of food they prefered eating and what other restaurants they visited. As the system became more widespread, there could be “tracking spices”; non-toxic chemical signatures associated with unique dishes at unique restaurants. There could be an information deal where in sharing their spice keys, they can read the spice keys of other restaurants to extract super detailed data from their customers poo. And of course, the fecal analysis could be insalled discretely, so the customers didn’t have to know.
This is funny to me because its absurd in principle and spirit, but its exactly what some do through the Internet, analyze other people’s crap in an attempt to extract “valuable” information. The question is, should I care?
The really interesting part to me lies in the concept of valuable information. You made an incredibly neat point with your Bank of America post. If SS #’s are a matter of “public record” they have no VALUE to identify you. This also means that they have no value to identity theives. Its the same with credit card numbers or anything else. Once one becomes widely known, its value depletes by bank shutdown or drained money. This is because information is still wrongly viewed as a physical commodity, and scarcity/demand vs supply rules apply. So secrecy creates information “value”, (as with SS#s ket secret) but its an artificial value, because its propped up by enforced scarcity, ie secrecy. This makes it infinitely more delicate than normal market scarcity, such as with a physical commodity.
This delicacy is unique in that it applies to the WHOLE system. If enough SS#s are public, the whole system of using them as identifiers shuts down. If enough credit records are flawed, the whole credit system comes down. In the “poo analysis” system, restaurants only gain general marketing information of value if other restaurants don’t publish their data.
So secrecy creates artificial value, and its a big big thing. When a little man-man action brings a politician down (like Craig) then gay sex information of politicians gains tremendous “value”, because you can actually black-mail them and make them puppets. If we all decided to ignore consensual sex acts on the part of our leaders, our government would be much more secure from control by shadowy influences. The way to prevent control of our government by proxy is to create a society that’s tolerant of human nature, including affairs and gay relationships.
But there are now, and always have been, people who are deeply invested in the artificial value created by secrecy. In the dark ages, they criminalized the most basic human reproductive behavior, so they could have something on everybody (via confession) and they brought the advancement of civilization to its knees: A monopoly is always bad for markets, because it gives a company the power to create and enforce artificial scarcities, and since information can be infinitely reproduced, a secret is always an artificial scarcity, a monopoly.
anyway, I’ve been writing for ever and I feel I still haven’t said all I needed to say. But bringing this back to datawakes:
The way to undermine the VALUE of “secret” information that creates and maintains the survelliance society, be it poop analysis, Internet tracking or whatever, is simply to remove the artificial scarcity, and deliver the benefits of it yourself. The path of doing this I believe is in what I would call “self awareness software”. These are systems that let you see yourself, let you manage and see your own Datawake. With restaurants, it would simply be an application that integrates with your cell phone or whatever, and local access points in restaurants that let you automatically record (and rate if you wish) your experience and allow the sharing of the info with restaurants and other consumers, no poop involved. But the goal is for the individual to gain value by “Knowing Thyself”, and to share this information with the market to tailor better experiences. And its “clean”, its an ethical system that empowers individuals in the market, and companies as well.
Anyway, sorry for gabbing so much. I’m sooooo grateful for your posts, by the way. Its incredibly interesting stuff. Thanks!
The thing with my Datawake, is that there is not much of a record of my internal processes that ties all the data thogether. I think perusing my bookshelf or my web history might not really tell you much other than that i have several really weird seemingly unrelated interests.
Marking books, I think, adds the element of the internal processes.
With regard to the online equivalent of marking up the books that you read: I think very soon there will be an easy and widespread way for us to highlight and make notes on the very webpages we read, allowing us also to make comments (like in MS Word when you collaborate) that can be viewed by other people, etc. In fact, I want to say I’ve read about something like this already (and would otherwise be shocked if it didn’t exist yet, in some form). But I’m sure it will become very much the norm in some fashion.
Imagine, to see turn this mode “on” and see the paragraphs or sentences in each webpage that other users found interesting, as well as read their comments, as well as get links to other pages that are related (either by their direct suggestion, or taken from the data-mind’s dot connector).
There have already been one or two such companies, they ran into trouble because site owners claimed it violated their copyright to assemble public webpages and user-defined comments together in the browser!
This makes total sense!
I wrote about this somewhere else, but the only thing the state REALLY holds is a monopoly on identity. It assigns a fictional datawake to your physical person in the form of records: birth certificate, SSN, school records, driver’s license… etc
Think about this: we carry ID which “proves” that we are who we say we are. But how does it prove it? By a tiny photo of us, and a word (our name). A photo of us only *proves* that a photo was once taken of us, and is meaningless and redundant when compared to the actual person showing you their ID:
“May I see your ID?”
“Sure, here is a tiny photo of me to prove that I’m really me.”
“This doesn’t look like you though…”
Holy shit dude, this is amazing!
Bravo! And hence we see the enormous power of publicly collaborating on ideas. The “selfware” would of course have to itself be self-aware, I think. Or almost.
Right: like your selfware allows you to license certain kinds of content derived from your life and datawake to certain entities (corporate, government, individuals and self-aware electronic entities)
TED:
I don’t think this information is as opaque as it may seem to you now. All you would really need is a Google or Amazon algorithm to run through the content of the book and pull out consistent threads and keyword clusters. It won’t be a complete record of your internal processes, but from an objective study point of view, it’s largely irrelevant what you were thinking at the time.
Been thinking something similar about chess: if you were an expert player and had the final “scene” of check-mate with all the remaining pieces still in position, as well as a list of who took which pieces in what order, you could come very close - I suspect - to recreating the entire chess game step-by-step after the fact. I may be wrong though!
We will need a massively new way of experiencing data on the internet if and when this happens (won’t be long now!). How would a browser like that work? What would a blog become? How about search engines?
btw,
what happened to my comment?
It does not appear that anything happened to it / I’m not sure what you mean. I may have rescued a comment of yours from the spam pile yesterday… I don’t quite remember.
This is a year old so it must have been implemented by now.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/03/google_eavesdropping_software/
2 Trackbacks
[...] Good questions from Ted: I have a question about the “shared value community†what are the values? [...]
[...] Hilarious idea by Svenson: What if restaurants decided to increase their value to customers by tracking “Food Wakes?†the devices to do this would be placed in their toilets, and analyze their customers “output†to determine what kind of food they prefered eating and what other restaurants they visited. As the system became more widespread, there could be “tracking spicesâ€; non-toxic chemical signatures associated with unique dishes at unique restaurants. There could be an information deal where in sharing their spice keys, they can read the spice keys of other restaurants to extract super detailed data from their customers poo. And of course, the fecal analysis could be insalled discretely, so the customers didn’t have to know. [...]