Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Sure. I think what we have to wrap our heads around, though, in order
to understand this sort of scenario, is that everyware doesn't merely
redefine the way we engage computers.

Among other things, it redefines surveillance, as well - so that we're
not merely talking about surveillance as something that involves
cameras or microphones or wiretaps, but about all of the traces we
leave behind and cannot help leaving behind as we move through the
world. The example I'm about to share will hopefully put all of these
claims in context.

I'm going to posit a few discrete, separate, but interlinked systems.
All of them either exist today as commercial products or services, or
have been prototyped convincingly. The only part of this scenario that
is in any way speculative is the fact of their real-time
interconnection.

Let's say that there's a way to determine your identity, to a
reasonable level of certainty, by analyzing the pattern of your
footsteps - the unique signature of your tread, your gait period and so
on. And let's assume that this is something that's done by load cells
and processors that are built into the flooring itself, which are
imperceptible to ordinary inspection.

And let's also say that there exists on the network an open database
of contributions to political parties and candidates, as well as the
analytic applications necessary to derive high-level inferences from
the pattern of one's contributions over the past few years, so that a
given person can be tagged with a rough precis of their likely
sympathies: Republican, Democratic, Independent, Apathetic...

And finally, let's say that there's a remote door-actuator mechanism,
that either opens or bars a door based on the results of a network
query.

OK, fine. Nothing here is that strange, right? The tread-pattern
sensor has been prototyped by ubicomp researchers Georgia Tech (among
others); the database exists and is a matter of public record; and the
analysis and visualization software certainly exists. The door-actuator
is trivial.

What do you think happens when we put all of these components
together? When it's reasonably easy to build a "public" space that
ascertains your identity, associates a political position with that
identity, and either allows you access or bars your way depending on
your conformity with a desired profile?

And to circle back to your question: this accomodation or restriction
is something that happens entirely as a result of invisible processes.
You see a room and a door, and a stream of people who either get
through that door or do not, but there is *no immediately obvious
correlation* between who gets to pass and who doesn't. And what's worse
is that there's not even necessarily any real-time recourse! The 
whole set-up is implacable, it's "talk to the hand" made utterly
concrete.

OK, so this is admittedly a provocation. But there is nothing in this
scenario that is intrinsically impossible, very little that's even all
that impractical...and it allows a space to be conditioned in a
terrifyingly effective way. And none of its componentry is even
perceptible, from the point of view of someone encountering it under
ordinary circumstances.
  

    
A perhaps less legally-actionable version -- or, to put in another way, a
more likely in the near future version -- of the above would be to replace
the "who did you vote for?" database with the DHS "No Fly" list. Imagine not
even being able to enter the airport, let alone get to the counter.
  

    
Exactly! Or *not even be able to charge a ticket*. And, of course,
there's no legal recourse there either. You'd never know why - you'd
only know that you couldn't.
  

    
I don't get it.  Why does it make any difference whether it's a
security guard who checks the do-not-fly list, versus someone watching
through a camera and buzzing you though the door, versus a fully
automatic system?  In any case you don't know how you got on the list,
and the legal recourse is the same: suing the government somehow.
  

    
I don't think the two situations are equivalent, Brian, and here's
why:

The everyware scenario we're discussing, which presupposes widely
distributed sensor nets, network access to multiple relational
databases, and actuators arrayed arbitrarily throughout public space,
enables a true "defense in depth" to be set up. You can be denied
access to something *without knowing* what (or whose) profile you
violated, and this denial can be effected at a sufficient distance from
your objective in space and/or time that you fail to make the
connection.

The linkage between cause and effect has been (a) obscured and (b)
rendered "technical," ostensibly neutral, and subject only to technical
expertise. Who, indeed, do you complain to? Who do you vent your
displeasure on? The locus of control is somewhere in a mesh of
interlocking systems, but you don't know where, and there's no way
you'll be able to find out in time to catch your flight...or, probably,
your next several flights.

I'll leave the question as to whether or not "suing the government" is
genuinely adequate or sufficient recourse for another time.
  

    
you can be denied access to things without even *knowing* you're being
denied access! You don't necessarily know whether the door locked in
response to *you* being there or whether it was just locked; if the
reservations system just tells you "try again later" rather than "declined,"
you don't know you were denied a ticket rather than the system was on the
fritz; and so on.

Or, the denial could be less than complete -- maybe the door opens for those
in the "wrong" category, but it sticks each time. (PSYOPS approach?) Maybe
if every day is irritiating in these little ways, "wrong" people could learn
to do things the "right way."

That's awful and insidious.

Great book, Adam. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Now, the
standard line of critique we hear so often: But that would be *people
misusing the technology*, nothing inherent in the technology itself.

You've thought about this carefully. What say you?
  

    
Well, I think I need to be careful about just how I word this claim,
lest I inadvertently prop up just the kind of technodeterminism I'm so
opposed to.

But I do think that each new technology enters the world with a
certain spin on it - certain tendencies, certain gradients along which
connection with other technologies and techniques is made easier, and
others along which it is less likely to find purchase.

So, for example, in the book I point out that the next version of
Internet Protocol, IPv6, seems to "want" to make everything in the
world a network node, due to the fabulously large address space it
affords. Or that, because of its simplicity and cheapness, RFID tagging
seems to "want" to mirror every artifact of the actual world in the
virtual.

And given that, I don't think it's inappropriate to say that everyware
as a class of technologies has inherent propensities, and that if we
want to maximize the benefit we derive from it it really does behoove
us to find out what those propensities are. In other words, my concern
is that the "proper" use of everyware can have effects that are just as
deleterious to quality of life and well-being as putative misuse.

Now, I don't think that saying that undercuts pointing out, at the
same time, that the kind of ubiquitous systems we're discussing have
those propensities as a consequence of specific design decisions,
specific purchase decisions, made by knowable institutions at knowable
times. None of this is to deny the place of human agency, or to imply
that the tendencies we can perceive result somehow from some spooky
action. Inherent is not the same thing as immanent, right?

What this all leads me to argue is that yes, this class of
technologies does have some (rather easily) foreseeable potential to
produce less desirable outcomes, *and* that if we do a good job now
raising consciousness about the implications of adopting it, we stand a
much better chance of making responsible design (specification,
purchase, use...) decisions.
  

    
If it's a public place like an airport then I think it's pretty
obvious that you should have access, and if you don't then something is
clearly going on.  Also, the airlines are always going to have
customer representatives to complain to when something goes wrong.  I
think that's generally true of any business serving the public.  As
routine transactions are automated, it's increasingly why businesses
even have front-line people.

As for obscure doors that nobody knows about, I think that's always
been true of some private clubs.  The criteria by which some people get
into some nightclubs, or some people can get reservations at some
restaurants more easily, or people get admitted to universities, has
never been entirely transparent.  And yet we all kind of know what's
going on.

The thing that would be genuinely new would be the ability to automate
this, making it cheaper and more common, and use criteria beyond what
one person controlling admissions could easily deal with.  Maybe there
would be a blurring of the registration process where people somehow
become members of some places without really knowing how that happened.
 But hiding the existence of such places is going to depend on the
ability of members to keep it a secret, which is always pretty dicey
and contrary to what a profit-making business wants to do.  And if the
club is important enough then you get into situations where people sue
to join (as happened with some men-only clubs).

Similarly for the subtle thing where some people get "try again
later."  It's indistinguishable from having a shoddy UI.  Companies
that want to have a good reputation with their customers will want to
avoid that.  There is such a thing as word-of-mouth and it's becoming
increasingly important in the Internet age; the Cluetrain folks have a
few things to say about it.
  

    
So we should just trust in the power of the market, safe in the
knowledge that all these enlightened, post-Cluetrain companies have our
best interests in mind?
  

    
I think the basic complaint here is machines lying to us, as opposed
to the long hallowed tradition of other people lying to us.
  

    
Jef, there's no "complaint" here at all. To quote someone I'm quite
fond of: "What it is...is up to us."
  

    
I'm not saying there's no problem, but rather that we need some more
fleshed-out examples than the "provocation" in #26.  There's certainly
a lot of potential for spooky art installations, and I can see how the
underground scene could really get into this stuff, but mainstream
usage is probably going to be a bit more subtle.
  

    
Isn't that precisely the point, though? That everyware will be subtle,
and therefore exceedingly hard to challenge (let alone counter)?
  

    
Adam, a few weeks ago I was in Vancouver for the IA Summit where there
was a lot of joyful buzz about your book. More recently I found myself
reading your book on plane trips to and from Memphis (where I'm doing
some consulting for a package delivery company that can remain
nameless) and despite the slim contours and cheerful ambience of the
cover of the book, I found that it did not necessarily make great
airplane reading.

And I mean that as a compliment.

I found that every sentence required savoring. That I had to
frequently stop to digest the last paragraph before going on to the
next. Where I might have expected a breezy survey, I was instead
encountering a deep dive.

So my compliments, first of all, to your achievements as a writer. As
someone who has attempted to write about technology and its
implications for sociology in a humane way, I believe I have a lot to
learn from stealing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H studying your approach.

So, a question: Despite all the examples you give of projects in the
works, leaving labs and entering the commercial space, I still found
myself quite skeptical about how quickly these things are going to be,
well, ubiquitous. I recognize that much off this is going on by
stealth, and that computer chips have embedded themselves already in
many common objects that did not formerly harbor them. Still, I get
that "they promised me a jetpack" feeling sometimes reading your book.

Can you talk a little about the timelines for some of these aspects of
real, existing everyware showing up in our day-to-day lives?
  

    
Sure, Christian. And again, I'm delighted you're digging the book.

I should probably at least namecheck the examples I give in the book,
of  a few systems that are ubiquitous by any reasonable definition and
which are already active.

Probably the single most robust such system in the world at the moment
is Hong Kong's Octopus card. It's a touchless, RFID-based stored value
system that was originally intended as an intermodal transit pass, and
has proved to be of such utility that it's been adopted as de facto
currency and access control, throughout the territory.

Something like 95% of Hong Kong's population between the ages of 16
and 65 has used Octopus, it is used in far more transactions each day
than there are people in the city, and you can use it for everything
from paying your fare on the Star Ferry that plies the harbor to buying
a Coke from a vending machine to letting yourself into your dorm or
your office. Octopus has been active since 1997, so no flying cars
here.

MasterCard almost certainly had their eye on Octopus when they began
planning their PayPass system, a similar RFID-based touchless
transaction infrastructure that's marketed by Chase (at least here in
the Northeast) as Blink. (I should mention here that MasterCard derives
real, concrete benefit from the imperceptibility of the PayPass
infrastructure, from the way PayPass transactions "dissolve in
behavior": their own figures indicate that PayPass users spend up to
25% more per transaction than conventional credit-card users.) PayPass
went live at the end of 2005.

Another real-world example of everyware that I cite in the book - this
one very robust, very elaborate - is the city of New Songdo, a
development being brought into existence right now about forty
kilometers southwest of Seoul. New Songdo's designers have some very
ambitious plans involving everyware, including flooring in housing for
the elderly that detects falls and summons emergency assistance, and
recycling bins that automatically credit the buyer's account with a
small refund when the bottles, cans and containers they've bought
properly enter the municipal recovery stream.

The Tokyo ward of Shinjuku has just completed a pilot program in which
some 10,000 of the ward's lampposts and utility standards communicate
with appropriately-equipped mobile phones, to locate the user and
describe nearby public accommodations and services.

And luxury hotels are already beginning to offer their best guests
networked preference files that allow an entire array of in-room
environmental, lighting, entertainment and amenity options to be
adjusted at the moment of check-in. The Mandarin Oriental chain began
offering this, at least in its New York City properties, as far back as
the beginning of last year.

And most of us are familiar with other RFID-based services around us,
even if we weren't necessarily aware of it, from FasTrak and E-ZPass to
veterinary ID transponders.

So there's a pretty broad spectrum of present-day, real-world,
revenue-generating, concrete-as-hell everyware. There are others in the
book, still more that I accumulated in the course of my research that
didn't make it into the book for one reason or another, and a whole
bunch on top of that that folks have pointed me at just in the three or
four months since I locked the manuscript down. This stuff is here and
now, and beginning to knit itself together in just the way I (and many
other folks) had anticipated it would. 

That's why I think it's half-past time we started mounting an informed
collective response.
  

    
(And a reminder: Readers on the Great Wide Web may query, interpose, edify,
or otherwise join the conversation by e-mailing inkwell@well.com to have
their queries, interpositions, edifications, or other joinings posted here.)
  

    
> it's half-past time we started mounting an informed
> collective response

Having written the book, do you see as a next step instigating such a 
response? Or will you leave that to others?
  

    
Well, I expect and hope that mine will be only one of a great many
voices comprising the response, but you better believe I'll be out
there doing what I can to raise consciousness.

I'm imagining that this will something I'll do partly through writing
and speaking, partly through organizing conferences and standards
bodies (should that latter possibility seem practical), and partly
directly, through consulting work.
  

    
Despite having suggested the DHS/airport example, I'm inclined to believe
that we won't have too many of the opaque denial situations, if only because
unexplained barriers tend to provoke people into trying to get around them,
which presumably is something that officials would want to avoid.

However, what does seem likely is that the system Adam describes would be
used to identify No Fly Listees well before they make it to an airline
counter. Moreover, the same tech could be used to essentially "tag" people
for observation in a wide variety of public settings. Not bar them access,
per se, but prompt added attention from security guards and the like.

Then there's the version of the scenario that would identify shoppers and 
target personalized pitches and pricing, already mentioned earlier on.

Adam, another question: the "everyware" world is filled with this kind of 
invisible dedicated technology, but it won't be devoid of general-purpose 
information tools (e.g., computers as we know them now); how do the two 
families of information systems link together, in your view?
  

    
I think you're right, in that there's no reason for conventional
laptops and desktops and mobiles to suddenly disappear from the world
just because everyware has started to appear.

I do think, though, that if these devices and these familiar form
factors survive, it'll be because they afford their users more or less
convenient access to the constellation of ubiquitous systems and
services around them.

As I put it in the book, everyware will "subsume, not supplant"
conventional computing. The two modes will coexist in the world for
quite some time yet to come.
  

    
i know keyboards suck for many purposes but they're still a pretty
good interface for writers of traditional text narratives.
  

    
Adam, would you comment on the relation of everyware to the experience
that humankind has been having in dealing with bureaucracy for some
centuries now?  Perhaps infotech amplifies the problems as well as the
benefits to such a degree that it may be considered a difference in
kind?
  

    
Christian, agreed, in spades - but I think you'll find the standard
QWERTY keyboard instantiated in some surprising ways in the next few
years.

Bureaucracy, hmm. To be honest, I haven't given that specific subject
very much thought.

I'd suggest, though, that everyware is a sword that cuts two ways in
this regard. On the one hand, as a first pass response, I'd imagine
that the vastly enlarged scope of data collection activities implied by
everyware tends to proportionally reduce the necessity for large or
elaborate bureaucracies - which are, after all, nothing but human
data-filtration mechanisms.

Let's say, for example, that all of my financial transactions in the
course of a year generate a data trail. Not merely the dollar amount,
but the context in which that amount of money changes hands. What need
is there for a phalanx of accountants, or an elaborate IRS bureaucracy,
in this scenario? The government merely has to craft an algorithm that
reifies whatever tax code the legislature has passed, and apply it to
those transactions. Nominally, such a thing could even be rolling,
real-time, right? "April 15th" would no longer be a date to fear and
despise.

But something in my bones tells me that this is a naive response, even
if one accepted the assumptions at its heart. If nothing else,
information technology has strewn more hassle through my life than it's
obviated - never underestimate the power of an automated
customer-assistance line to make you want to rip your teeth out of your
head. For sheer Kafkaesque perversity, they can't be beat. I'd rather
deal with a human bureaucracy any day of the week.

So whereas in theory we could design things such that ubiquitous,
ambient information processing provides a much-needed balm for all the
hassles private- and public-sector bureaucracy graces postmodern life
with...I'd never bet on it actually coming to pass that way. Call me a
cynic.
  

    
We can come up with many scenarios for ubiquitious computing, from the
obvious to the far-fetched, but perhaps we should discuss constraints
that might deter the development of truly ubiquitous systems? For
example, the more sources of, and purposes for, messages we conceive,
the greater the complexity of the systems for transmission and
processing. Aren't bottlenecks and errors inevitable?  Or could we
handle this with more distributed networks?
  

    
I'm certainly no expert, but it seems to me that good old IP networks
scale pretty well - and like we've mentioned, the 128-bit address space
provided for in IPv6 is so absurdly capacious that I have a hard time
imagining we'll ever run out of space.

It's also, of course, the case that nothing takes place in a vacuum,
so that while we're over here talking about the ubiquity of computing,
other folks are wrestling with the sort of thing you mention -
distributed processing, grid computing and so on.

When you put these two ideas together - networked processors of
similar capacity to present-day CPUs, costing about what a dimmer
switch does now and similarly strewn through the built environment -
you have the potential for some heavily processor-intensive work to be
shared between them.

Somewhere in the book I have language like "an invisible agora going
in behind the walls." It's gonna be interesting.

At this point, I want to shift gears a little bit. I'm sure everyone's
heard by now that Jane Jacobs passed away yesterday, which was a real
loss for all of us who care about the life of the city. And Jane always
being a major influence on my thought and my work, I've been a little
frustrated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be anyone addressing
the challenges of ubiquitous information technology in public space the
way she might have.

My sense is that, in its way, everyware poses the same sorts of
challenges to the quality of urban life that urban renewal did in the
1950s and 60s. So I'd like to talk about the city a bit, get a sense
for how people reading this imagine that everyware is going to shape
their experience of the urban environment.

Mind you, I'm aware that in the preceding paragraphs I've collapsed
"urban life," "the urban environment," "the city" and "public space,"
and I think it's worth pointing out that these are all different
things. But make of the question what you will.