the timboucher experience

I downloaded the above graphic somewhere, but I can’t quite remember where. It looks like my version of it above came out rather illegible on account of being shrunk down my integrated image re-sizer for WordPress. So let me highlight some of the parts of what it says that interest me. Understand, that as I say this, I have done absolutely *zero* research into what they “really” mean by the term web 3.0. What little I have seen has been so extraordinarily vague that I feel like I may as well get in on the ground floor of participating in what these terms come to mean through common usage.

Parallel to that exploration, I’ve also done a lot of writing for the past few months about the role technological advancement and the philosophy behind computers will have on the future, especially the relationship between the individual to so-called “classic” political, social and cultural organizations and divisions. I feel like the discussion of what Web 3.0 as a phenomenon (or inter-connected series of individual trends) will be simply has to include the social ramifications of changes brought about in people’s thinking and behavior by technological changes and their likely developments. My use of the term “New World Order” is in a very generic way, simply used as a dramatic device to indicate that I feel as though we’re in for very broad sweeping changes on a systemic level.

That said, let’s begin.

Surveillance & Filtration

The section of this Web 3.0 diagram which interests me the most is the first column, “Intelligent Applications.” Underneath it are listed the following items:

1. Natural language processing
2. Autonomous agents
3. Machine reasoning
4. Machine learning

As much as I’m intrigued by the above developments, I’m also highly suspicious of their uses by human beings. I believe it was Christian anarchist thinker Jacques Ellul who said that any new technology always advances to fill all possible applications: good, bad and in-between.

Natural language processing is a fascinating field. And of the many corporations working on the subject, I recently came across one who’s been around for a while, Virage SoftSound. I feel like the description on their website would be a worthwhile illustration of one such use of technology:

Virage SoftSound delivers audio processing applications to enable live or recorded speech to be manipulated, edited, searched and hyperlinked as easily as text. This is achieved with a wide range of speech processing technologies from audio segmentation and identification through to automatic speech recognition and understanding.

While there are plenty of “legitimate” uses of such a technology, my immediate hunch is that natural language processing will be hooked in to the nth degree to government technology, data processing and analysis centers. In other words, yet another arm of the omni-present surveillance that is creeping into our daily lives on an everyday basis. Aside from governmental profiling of individuals and their datawakes, I imagine that the corporate world will be able to envision some strong uses for such a technology as well: studying customer behavior, product purchasing patterns, lifestyle, what kinds of language and images people use (for marketing), etc. The list goes on and on. At the end of the day, I would personally be more wary of corporate-backed surveillance of consumers, than I would of government-backed surveillance of citizens. At least the government has to pretend like they’re bound by certain laws and regulations, but corporations can collect data on you pretty much willy-nilly (and then, by court-order - or less - have to turn around and hand that info off to the goverment).

Not to pick on SoftSound though, they’re just an example. But let’s apply this example one step farther. Underground news sources have recently had a field day with a new patent Microsoft seems to have been awarded.

So Microsoft has just been awarded a patent for technology designed to automatically detect and remove “undesired words or phrases” from all manner of digital communications, ranging from YouTube broadcasts to internet chat and songs.

The patent describes a system that listens out for phonemes (word fragments) likely to be part of a swearword. If it thinks it hears a forbidden phrase, the software either fades out the offending syllables or simply replaces the rude word with a similar-sounding but clean alternative lifted from earlier speech without a second’s delay.

In other words, Web 3.0 will be a sci-fi wet dream, marrying omnipresent surveillance to ubiquitous filtration technology. It’s one thing to find out that someone somewhere is doing or saying something illegal and rousing the rabble with their example. But it’s quite another to be able to completely snuff out the effects of their speech and actions on-the-fly. By the time Web 4.0 (or maybe 5.0) rolls around, we’ll probably just be able to adjust these settings right on the filters installed in our sensoriums. So we won’t even literally be able to hear someone saying something dangerous or illegal.

Nevermind the fact that you can filter and replace speech using Web 3.0 technology. The trickiest part of the gambit seems to be the fact that it will be in the hands of automated intelligent processes, instead of real people. I could write more about artificial intelligence and its applications, but I’ve done enough of that lately, so let’s move on.

Slave Labor

The next column in our diagram lists the following items:

1. Open API’s & protocols
2. Open data
3. Open data formats
4. Open source social formats

None of these are really “new” on the web. In fact, Web 2.0 was more or less built on these kinds of tools and concepts. “Open” really just means that you make something publicly available and usable by others. I have a good story that relates to this.

A while back I was writing about word-of-mouth marketing and some of the companies on the web who were working in this arena. At the time, there was a bit of a feeding frenzy around the subject, and I ended up getting contacted by a few different companies who were involved in the subject. One advocate of a particular company emailed me saying I should give them a call so we could talk about their services. Alright, I figured.

I called the dude and he proceeded to tell me how their business works. Say they get contracted by somebody like Coca-Cola: what they do is study the effectiveness of existing marketing campaigns for their clients. But focus groups tend to bring biased information, is what the guy said, so what they do is surreptitiously monitor conversations online, where people tend to divulge information in different, more “open”, ways. So if we had a long detailed conversation as consumers about Coca-Cola product offerings on our blogs or discussion forums, they would find that information via relevant keyword searches and then have a human using software tools parse that information down to whatever usable format their client demands.

At the end of our conversation, I asked the guy, “What should people do who don’t want their information used that way on the internet?”

He laughed, and said, “Don’t put it online!”

While open technologies and sharing of resources is a great dream and often has amazing benefits (like in the case of WordPress, an open-source blogging platform I use), my story above may be a more accurate version of how the corporate world looks at the very-same phenomenon. A while back there was a big conversation going on online amongst techie people about user-generated content and how corporations were essentially relying on it as a form of slave-labor. A million and one Web 2.0 sites came along, ostensibly offering users a vast technological playground to fool around in, while all the while mining the massive data sets people created without compensating them whatsoever for their time and involvement. As a result, alternative models like Squidoo were put forward where users generating content were offered a slice of advertising revenue, but most of these kinds of services never really went very far. If Web 3.0 is going to be a real and viable thing in the age of the “prosumer”, I suspect that the fair compensation of users for content they develop will have to be addressed, if not necessarily solved.

And then there’s the below-the-belt usage of open data and similar technologies: spamming and hacking. There was a period with my website where I was getting a lot of what’s called content-scraping attacks. A spammer will program a series of interconnected automated web services to scan for newly-generated unique content and, depending on the keywords, rip it out of its original context and re-post slices of it elsewhere to gain search result rankings and advertising revenue. Though the WordPress community has made many valiant plugins to cut down and track others who are using your content without permission, there is pretty much no way to stop such attacks, because things like RSS feeds, and the “open” nature of the web itself are designed to facilitate such uses. Somebody scraping your original content is a misuse of Web 2.0 technologies, but is more or less how the technologies were designed to be used.

Total Identity Tracking

The third column in our diagram reads:

1. Open ID
2. Open reputation
3. Roaming portable identity and data

On a practical level, what this means is that a user who generates content across a variety of websites with different administrative systems will have some way to correlate all these varying sets of information together under the aegis of one particular persistent identity. This means that you wouldn’t necessarily need to remember 10, 50 or a thousand different sets of login information. You’d have one ID which went with you wherever you went on the web.

On the one hand, this could be very valuable. The benefits as far as simplicity of use are obvious, I think. And the notion that any data you create on somebody else’s website can be either removed at your request or downloaded and duplicated by you, its author is a step in the right direction of user’s rights and full ownership of not only your datawake, but of the meta-narrative of your life.

Lashing all this information together under one package though creates an obvious security risk from the user’s perspective: anyone who gains access to that one set of information suddenly has access to everything, your entire life, all your speech and behavior and buying patterns, your social connections - everything. Identity theft becomes not just a matter of social security numbers and bank records, but of EVERY little bit of information that exists out there by or about you.

Bear in mind, of course, that government is already working with corporations to coordinate all these sets of information together anyway. The Patriot Act, among other things, was partly designed to allow ease-of-access and cooperation between diverse agencies to put together comprehensive data profiles of individual people and of groups. Governments and corporations are *already building* tools to track, modify and predict behavior. Think your credit rating meets your “permanent record” meets your web browsing history and everything you’ve bought over the past ten years. The benefit to having an “open” or publicly-controlled technology which does the same thing - connecting all that information together, but which is controlled by you, should be obvious. It means you have the tools and leverage to maintain your own identity and life story, to be the final arbiter at the end of the day of who and what you really are.

In order to make a “secure” persistent internet identity though, I guarantee that you’re going to have to install biometric applications: finger-printing, eye-scan, face-scan, voice pattern recognition, etc. It’s the “internet driver’s license” they used to talk about married to a national (or global) ID card, connected to all your bank accounts and every other bit of information about you - including ubiquitous video and audio (ie, cell phone) surveillance.

Is the future of web technology sounding super cool yet?

Distributed Identity & Collective Intelligence

The fourth column, labeled “Transformation of the Web” is a re-hashing of the previous column, so I’ll skip onto the fifth:

1. Grid computing
2. Cloud computing
3. Distributed computing

All of these terms point in roughly the same direction: complex data processing which is accomplished by splitting up the tasks on a micro-level to many different nodes. It’s like that program you used to be able download from SETI, where you use part of your computer’s processing power to look for signals from extraterrestrial life. Similar applications have been used for things like genome research and other biomedical stuff, just to name a few. “Cloud computing” is really the new buzzword being bandied about here, so let’s see what the big boys have to say about it:

Supercomputers today are used mainly by the military, government intelligence agencies, universities and research labs, and large companies to tackle enormously complex calculations for such tasks as simulating nuclear explosions, predicting climate change, designing airplanes, and analyzing which proteins in the body are likely to bind with potential new drugs. Cloud computing aims to apply that kind of power—measured in the tens of trillions of computations per second—to problems like analyzing risk in financial portfolios, delivering personalized medical information, even powering immersive computer games, in a way that users can tap through the Web. It does that by networking large groups of servers that often use low-cost consumer PC technology, with specialized connections to spread data-processing chores across them. By contrast, the newest and most powerful desktop PCs process only about 3 billion computations a second.

That still seems kinda vague to me. This is a touch more specific:

Cloud computing comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.

Like in the earliest days of Web 2.0 as a paradigm, it seems like the terms have yet to be fully agreed-upon as to their import. A more practical model might be something like how BitTorrent works, where when you’re downloading a large set of files, the power of many different users in many different geographic locations is leveraged, sending you a bit from here, a bit from there, and so on. Information is stored in multiple redundant overlapping nodes, so that if any nodes are wiped out or otherwise inaccessible, you can still get what you need. This kind of model is what the internet was designed for after all, to preserve the integrity and communications of government agencies in the event of nuclear war.

Distributed intelligence, in a sense, is simply a metaphor for the internet itself: many individual users coming together in a massive “cloud” to solve problems of a social nature: the debate over meaning, business conversations, interests and entertainment. The fact that these conversations happen without regard to national or geographic borders leads to what McLuhan called a “re-tribalisation” of media: people with similar interests being drawn together by what they have in common, forming new types of geographically diverse social units. Look towards things like flash mobs, micronations and peer-to-peer lending as indicators of where some of these trends might lead… Distributed identity and collective intelligences may be one of the strongest defenses regular web users might one day have against ubiquitous AI-controlled surveillance - a subject matter which I will continue develop on this website.

Non-Local Spaces

Which brings me into a subject matter mentioned elsewhere online, but not in our diagram, as being an essential part of Web 3.0 technologies: the integration of real and simulated spaces. We talked about an internet for smart objects. We’ve talked about smart or adaptive cities, immersive real-space which regulate inputs and outputs electronically. We’ve talked at great length about parallel reality, things like free-floating graphics in the real world, virtual 2nd Life-style spaces, augmented reality technologies, and many other variations of the same. But I predict that these things integrated into the other developments described above will form the most interesting technological advances and the most profitable businesses of the next twenty years: the integration of real and unreal, of local and “non-local” spaces and data environments. The indexing of all the world’s information, which is already the stated corporate goal of Google. Maybe this isn’t Web 3.0 though. Maybe this is Web 7.0 or 10.0. But I think we’re likely to see many significant steps forward in that direction when the “next big wave” of technological innovation crests - that is, if civilization doesn’t collapse before then.

• SETI Equivalent Search for AI on the web
• So thats what they mean by semantic web
• Web Restraining Order
• The Age of Sexual Information
• Neighborhood Mesh Networks