18 May 2012

Fashion + the New Aesthetic (2.1)

BusinessOfFashion.com asked me to write about what New Aesthetic means for fashion, published on 16th May as Is Fashion Ready For A New Aesthetic?

In the process of writing it became clear there were two quite different audiences: a fashion audience seeking an introduction to a design trend, and the theoretical, mutually-referencing New Aesthetic discourse itself. The BoF article was geared towards the former.

Digital culture is to me about process and transparency. Remix everything. Release early, release often. Always in beta. In that spirit, here’s another version of this blog post oriented towards to you, Twitterati. Enjoy, tweet, reblog…

Instagram, Barbour and vinyl records. Moustaches, gin and vintage dresses. The biography of your potatoes lovingly detailed on chalkboard signs at Whole Foods. As Russell Davies puts it, “I think most of Shoreditch would be wondering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets.”

For the last five years, the stylistic purview of much of the creative class in London (and Brooklyn, and Berlin) has been curiously backward-looking. Perhaps in reaction against economic uncertainty and technological change – what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’ – there has been a retreat into retro and nostalgia, emulating the signifiers of what we hope might have been simpler times. Older brands and products offer a sense of permanence and reassurance based in memories from our (real or imagined) childhoods.

Yet technology is still central to how we consume this nostalgic aesthetic: we share ‘authentic’ experiences on Twitter and Facebook, let Foursquare guide us to the latest artisanal coffee roaster, or use Instagram to rescue our snapshots from the “future shock” of instant, costless digital photography (Verdone 2011).

In contrast, the New Aesthetic seeks to address the relationship between technology and visual culture head-on.

Over the last year, a group of London designers have explored the parameters of this relationship through both found images and original work. Net artists making animated GIFs to glitches in Google Maps. Photographs from military drones in Afghanistan with supra-human vision. Techno-organic forms of contemporary architecture betraying traces of the specific CAD programmes used to design them. United Nude’s Lo Res shoes.

All explorations, one way or another, of a “robot readable world”. The designer Matt Jones asked, “What if, instead of designing computers and robots that relate to what we can see, we meet them half-way – covering our environment with markers, codes and RFIDs”?

Louis Vuitton QR code — QR code for Louis Vuitton by Takeshi Murakami

The New Aesthetic is artistic production oriented towards this other, machinic audience – recognition that, in the future that’s already here, our human points-of-view are no longer the only agencies we must acknowledge.

In such a world we cannot talk of digital ‘versus’ physical. The New Aesthetic is the argument that a ‘digital aesthetic’ means nothing given that every aspect of design is mediated through digital technology. Instead, as James Bridle noted, “The rough, pixelated, low-resolution edges of the screen are becoming in the world.” This transference was something he wanted to document.

The New Aesthetic was born on 6^th May 2011 with a blog post by Bridle – a London-based publisher, writer, and technologist. A Tumblr followed to collect examples of this “eruption of the digital into the physical” – and the ways artists were reacting. Bridle spoke at the Lift conference and Web Directions South, before his panel at SXSW Interactive in March 2012 brought the concept to wider attention.

Speaking under the heading “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices”, Bridle was joined by four friends and collaborators who had become involved as the project developed. Joanne McNeil (Rhizome magazine) spoke about the New Aesthetic’s art historical context, Ben Terret on its relationship to commercial visual culture, Aaron Cope on drones and new geographies and Russell Davies on the New Aesthetic and writing.

This excited a lot of people, not least sci-fi futurist Bruce Sterling, who riffed on the topic in his final SXSW keynote speech and two subsequent essays on WIRED.com, affirming the New Aesthetic as a significant cultural moment. One thing particularly bothered Sterling:

“Although SXSW people do look chic, it’s a rather retro look. They don’t actually look very futuristic. I would suggest, when you come back next year… come back in robotvision glitchcore.”

Daft Punk for Dazed & Confused, by Sharif Hamza

Yet Sterling’s call for “futuristic” fashion seems paradoxically retro – the word implies 1960s Paco Rabanne, or 1990s sportswear neons or minimalism. More than other design disciplines, fashion is engaged in an intense dialogue with its past.

“There’s so little innovation in fashion in its current state”, notes fashion blogger Susie Lau of Style Bubble. “You can’t invent a new skirt, a new hemline, a new colourway.” Instead fashion revives and recycles the past; from Burberry to Barbour, heritage is the most contemporary business model.

Here we look for something different: a particular way of engaging with the present. Which fashion designers, image-makers, magazines and websites might be producing something we can call New Aesthetic work?

i. Pixels and voxels

When digital imagery is translated into physical form, low resolution pictures show their rough, serrated edges. This pixelated imagery appears widely in fashion, from Preen’s Spring 2012 abstracted florals to ASOS t-shirts. In three dimensions, Gareth Pugh and United Nude visually borrow from computer games with their blocky geometries referencing voxels – volumetric pixels once used in constructing computer game environments.

Pixellated imagery is something New York photography duo Reed/Rader have worked with extensively as the leading exponents of animated GIFs. Earlier fashion stories such as ‘Pow’ are explicitly 8bit, with an aesthetic they describe as “lofi, arts and craftsy collage.” They acknowledge, “There’s a nostalgia there of course, something we both grew up with as children of the 1980s.”

But is this New Aesthetic or just retro? Susie Lau of Style Bubble notes that pixellated fashion is often “another kind of nostalgia, a lo-fi way of looking at digital aesthetics. No digital images are really that pixelated any more.”

But Reed/Rader are moving on: “In 2012 computer games are photorealistic – twenty years ago they were just blocks.” They are currently working on a new project called Pyramid Hill, a 3D world using the Unreal Engine (a computer game level-builder) that extends their videos into an immersive, interactive environment. In the last few weeks they’ve been filming video textures and models for insertion into the digital world – a very New Aesthetic blurring of the boundaries between material and virtual.

What will they do next? Reed/Rader see vast possibilities: “Even in the last couple of years you’ve got the Microsoft Kinect, $120 and it’s an infrared 3D death-camera fully accessible to the mainstream.” I can’t wait to see what they create with that…

ii. Digital camouflage

If the New Aesthetic is about “seeing like a machine”, this suggests two strategies: adapt, or hide.

Hiding has received recent buzz in the format of CV Dazzle: make-up patterns that disrupt computer facial recognition algorithms. The key technique lies in “altering the contrast and spatial relationship of key facial features” through asymmetric make-up, hair styling or accessories. DIS magazine has covered this in the photo essay ‘How To Hide From Machines’, cataloguing the radical looks required for technological invisibility in what DIS calls “The perilous glamour of life under surveillance”.

But the much more mainstream approach of adapting to digital vision through “HD-ready” cosmetics should also be flagged as a New Aesthetic moment. Foundation coverage that looks ‘natural’ in person is now no longer good enough for the cruel eye of HDTV: the new digitally-mediated viewer demands hyper-reality.

iii. 3D printing

Iris Van Herpen has made surely fashion’s most beautiful use of digital imaging technology with her Photoshop-designed, 3D-printed polymer dress. As something impossible to draw or construct by hand, we are confronted by its digital origins, yet its inspiration in organic forms creates a sense of naturalness – a very New Aesthetic tension.

While this is was a one-off couture piece, Susie Lau notes that 3D printing “is fast becoming a viable way of producing really small samples” for innovative shoe designers– an opportunity to experiment that several have taken. Maloes ten Bhoemer’s Rapidprototyped shoe is custom-moulded for a perfect fit, but the most definitively New Aesthetic work is surely Andreia Chaves’ Invisible Shoe. The shoe’s mirrored, jagged form creates what Chaves calls “an obscured optical effect with each step taken” – that is, modern camouflage.

iv. Digital glitch

Throughout the New Aesthetic there is a fascination with how technology reveals itself through moments of error and glitch. This imagery isn’t however playing a big role in fashion. Quite the opposite: Mary Katrantzou use digital printing to generate ultra-precise patterns that until recently would have been impossible. Susie Lau comments, “In the fashion industry there’s an emotional attachment to hand process, it’s very valued,” citing examples from Hermes and LVMH. “If you are then championing machines, you emphasise what it does well: price, faultless, mistake-free work.”

Australian fashion designer Josh Goot stands out for taking a different tack, each season producing a collection of ultra-digital prints tending towards the cut up, noisy and distorted.

Nonetheless, Goot’s apparent glitch is carefully designer-controlled. In contrast, Philip Stearns’ Glitch Textiles project uses short-circuited cameras to generate patterns woven into blankets, with hypnotic and beautiful results.

In editorial fashion, Dazed and Confused mines a rich seam of glitched-up image-making. Dec 2010’s Daft Punk X Tron 3D editorial by Sharif Hamza is powerfully New Aesthetic in its chromatic misalignment. April 2011 saw Andre Pejic overcome by a digital eruption of blocky metallic and holographic forms (courtesy of propmaker Gary Card and photographer Anthony Maule). And Maurizio Anzeri’s geometric textile additions to printed photographs gave a tactile take on optical distortions we’re more used to seeing digitised.

Where next?

In his first essay on the New Aesthetic, James Bridle wrote, “We need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder.” Digital methods of image research, image editing and production have quickly become embedded in the fashion industry, but perhaps the more critical approach of the New Aesthetic will never become widespread. As Susie Lau commented, “It’s still not something people are consciously thinking about.”

But perhaps that doesn’t matter. The apparent futurism of the New Aesthetic is in fact a guide to a future that has already arrived before we were prepared.

The generation starting to arrive in fashion schools have learnt to think about visual culture through the ceaseless stream of appropriated and juxtaposed images curated on Tumblr. Retail brands are weighing up social media-enabled dressing room mirrors, real-time location-based mobile offers, and virtual avatars assessing a garment’s fit for the customer’s physical body. These all make digital ways of seeing a ubiquitous part of the fashion landscape – the wider cultural impact of the technology is unavoidable.

As a term, the New Aesthetic may be short-lived: James Bridle shut down the Tumblr after one year on 6^th May 2012, surprising many. But if the New Aesthetic is dead, the incursion of digital technologies into physical space is only just beginning. Long live the New Aesthetic.

With thanks to Vikram Kansara and BusinessofFashion.com for translating between worlds; Reed/Rader for their time, enthusiasm and GIFs; Susie Lau of Style Bubble for another fantastic conversation; and Chris Heathcote’s NAFashion Pinterest for collating and curating.

16 May 2012

Mobile money: the possibilities (and challenges)

First published on the FACE company blog – see the original story in full here.

In the last year we’ve done several research projects on mobile money at FACE, as excitement around the possibilities of “mobile wallet” develops. SXSWi was a chance to hear from leading players in the industry – American Express, PayPal, Intuit and more – on where this technology is going.

What is mobile money?

It’s important to think about the category as “mobile money” rather than simply “mobile payment” or “mobile wallet”. What’s at stake is much bigger than just transfering your credit card to your phone, or simply replicating the functions of a wallet (payment, loyalty cards & receipts) on a mobile device. The technologies available – smartphones, geolocation, the development of 4G and widespread wifi, and of course NFC – mean that what’s possible is in fact much greater: re-imagining the whole human-money interface.

What’s this mean? It’s about looking at every way in which we interact with money, and thinking about the transformations in user experience that are possible if we make it mobile. The transactions up for grabs are many and varied:

payment in a shop (of course)
paying a friend back for the taxi ride last night
checking to see if your credit card payment has gone out
transferring money immediately before making a big purchase to ensure your account doesn’t go overdrawn
adding up your receipts to see how much you’ve spent on eating out this month
calculating whether you’ll be able to get a mortgage
buying a flight (or just a coffee) with reward points – mobile money encompasses stored value, not just legal currencies
getting a discount email like Groupon and redeeming that online
searching for the cheapest iPad retailer online
or searching for a local restaurant offering a discount 2-for-1 deal
…and much, much more.

Making it mobile doesn’t simply mean “available on my mobile phone screen”. The mobile phone is a smart, location-aware computing device, carried almost always within a metre of our bodies, which is always connected to the internet and keeps us always connected to the people we know. Taking full advantage of these properties is what makes mobile money fundamentally transformative. The word “revolutionary” is overused in business, but making money truly mobile is a much bigger deal than the rise of credit cards in the 1960s, the last biggest step-change in payment methods.

Challenges

There are however some substantial challenges in rolling out mobile money to its full potential. Here are five:

1. Money is a difficult sector to innovate in

Regulation is a big hindrance on start-ups in the money space: there is both legal incumbrance and a cultural resistance (aka trust) to companies taking risks, trying something new – and perhaps not succeeding. The big incumbents are also an obstacle – banks own the central customer account (current/checking accounts), and Visa, Mastercard & Amex control payments.

Building new back-end processing systems is very difficult, and even the big over-the-top players (PayPal, Google Wallet) are essentially innovating on top of existing card payments infrastructure. Dwolla – a New York peer-to-peer (P2P) money startup – is worth a note here, for one that isn’t.

2. What’s happening with NFC?

NFC stands for near-field communications. It’s a type of radio communications – like wifi or Bluetooth at a different frequency – that allows for short-range (10cm) communication between devices and tagged objects, other devices, and merchant terminals. It is ultimately the key way contactless payment will be delivered – although it’s worth remembering that mobile money means a lot more than just in-store payment.

Unfortunately NFC uptake is moving extremely slowly. So far there are only a handful of NFC-enabled handsets in the UK, and many of them are unappealing low-spec phones. The big player is of course the Apple iPhone, and so far there’s no news as to when or how NFC will be implemented on this device.

Without a standardised technology, merchants are naturally unwilling to invest in NFC payment terminals so these remain in a few chain stores only – MacDonalds since 2003; Pret A Manger, and so on. We’re 5+ years away yet from “leave your cash & card at home”.

3. UX benefits of mobile payment in-store

One eye-opener for me about our US trip was just how annoying magnetic-stripe payment really is. US banks haven’t been able to agree on a Chip & PIN standard (as in Europe). As such payment requires the merchant taking the card away (a security risk) and two stages of receipts. NFC payment would clearly be much quicker than this, providing a clear driver for consumer uptake. However, it’s got minimal speed and thus user experience benefit in Europe over the faster Chip & PIN.

4. Trust

Many commentators rate the chances of the over-the-top tech players (mainly Google, Apple, Paypal) as ahead of the banks. Despite some bank mobile apps getting rave user reviews (RBS and Natwest’s mobile banking apps) and a strong move from Barclays Pingit on peer-to-peer transfers, there’s a suspicion that banks are likely to stick to “mobilifying” what they already do, rather than really innovating and reinventing the category. That transformative capacity – and also slick UX design – would seem to be more the property of the tech companies.

But PayPal has a trust problem: we see consistent and frequent stories of how it freezes people’s accounts for months without explanation or recourse. That’s infuriating when it’s your tool for P2P and small-merchant payments – it’s completely untenable if they’re operating your current account. There’s also increasing consumer suspicion of just how much Google knows about us – so giving them access to our finances may be a step too far.

5. Who’s actually thinking big enough?

This was the core insight from a fantastic solo SXSW presentation by Omar Green, Director of Strategic Mobile Initiatives at Intuit, the payment technology firm. He talked about “creating a mobile wallet worth having”, and said he thought the company who would “win” mobile money would be the one offering every transaction listed above and more.

As suggested above, the risk is that too many of the mobile money launches we can see on the horizon are thinking too small. Credit cards on your phone and no additional functionality – so what’s in it for me the user? A couple of dozen big-brand partners rather than available everywhere – so why use? There will certainly be some early adopters who’ll take-up simply to be first and look ahead, but they’re a minority. Strategically banks, MNOs and tech firms need to recognise that these standalone offers must only be stepping stones to something much bigger if they’re going to get any real traction. (Barclaycard have had an NFC credit card since 2003. No-one cares.)

Omar Green had a vision of what mobile money could be that I’ve not seen from anywhere else in the industry. The goal is a seamless money experience addressing our fundamental financial and emotional needs – balancing the books, saving for the future, feeling in control and feeling like we’ve spent our money wisely.

Question is, how seriously will the various mobile payment and wallet apps launching this year will really address these?

6 March 2012

Your mobile phone leaks

Published in design/architecture magazine ICON, issue 106 on mobile phones:

This year the number of mobile phones will exceed the 7 billion humans on the planet. For this issue we asked novelists, academics, experts and designers to reflect on this communication revolution, in a 22-page special on how cell phones have changed the ways we behave, connect to and navigate the world. And to make their own predictions about how mobile phone technology will look in the future …

Your mobile phone leaks. Behind the user interface, out of immediate view, it’s sharing a lot more data than many people realise.

Take location. In exchange for offering Google Maps as a free service, Google extracts the price of knowing where your phone is at all times, even when the app isn’t running. Your home and work addresses are easy to identify (your habitual locations at 3am and 10am respectively). These can be cross-referenced against MOSAIC (market research company Experian’s consumer classification) or Zoopla house price records to transform location into income and demographic data, allowing users to be sold as micro-targeted ‘market segments’ of high value to advertisers.

Mobile web surfing habits provide another stream of data. Mobile operators use deep packet inspection and redirect mobile web traffic through their own servers to manage network performance, but this also allows them to monitor the websites people visit. Private internet use through VPNs may also be constrained, allowing fewer channels for private browsing – and child protection agreements mean that everyone not verifying their identity as over-18 will be blocked from much of the web. Legally operators must enforce blocks on a small blacklist of domains (e.g. child pornography), but monitoring web history is also data that is highly commercially exploitable.

Information storage is increasingly cheap and data protection laws some distance behind the technology, meaning that companies are building the biggest possible datasets now to hedge against future restrictions.

Less legitimately, mobile phones can also easily be compromised by malware and spyware. Apps may ask for greater rights than they strictly need, allowing remote access to the phone’s microphone and camera, and sharing text entered (e.g. emails, passwords) and location data. Occupy London protestors have been known to remove batteries and keep mobiles in a separate room while meeting to plan future actions. This may seem paranoid, but the Mark Kennedy case has shown police infiltration of ‘domestic extremist’ groups to be commonplace.

Does mobile data sharing matter? Some would argue no: users are knowingly exchanging their data for free access to entertaining and useful services. But the impact of such bargains goes beyond the individual. Companies such as insurers and financial lenders are keen to use whatever data they can to minimise risk. This may mean denying insurance or a mortgage on factors outside the applicant’s control – simply the likelihood that “people like you” (by location, or web use) are more likely to default on payments.

The customised advertising enabled by mobile data also have their costs. By being delivered on the basis of aggregated and probabilistic data, the recommendations made are normative. Does the working class teenager see ads for jobs in McDonalds rather than university degrees? Is pregnancy advice limited by religious affiliation? Personalised services offer convenience at the price of potentially constraining our possibilities for action.

Behind the commercial value of mobile data is network analysis: modelling our social relationships (call histories, social media friends) as the nodes and links of a graph, and analysing patterns and clusters. This has substantial predictive capacities: where one user is unknown to a mobile operator (or to Facebook), many personal details can be inferred from their patterns of interaction with known entities. An individual does not have to be directly known to be present in the network through their relationships with others.

Social media analysts do not only focus on the ‘social graph’ of relationships between people – they analyse ‘interest graphs’ (relationships between profile interests or topics of discussion, e.g. music or technology) in exactly the same way. To what extent does “the individual” remain the primary unit within these assemblages of behavioural data, social, material and semiotic relationships?

29 December 2011

Influencer marketing, peers and trust: two speculative stories

01. The attraction of influencer marketing is in being able to leverage word-of-mouth and peer recommendations.

02. This is valuable because peer influence is the most effective form of influencing what we buy, or what we feel about a brand. [source]

03. Peer influence has this impact because it’s advice from people we trust. Key to almost every definition of an influencer is their credibility and realness:

“Broadly I define an ‘influencer’ as someone who follows their own path, is rooted in creativity, and is looking for new ways to change or redefine their world. Someone who is an ‘influencer’ not only has broad relationships but also has deep relationships. In short, they are building a community around shared beliefs, principles, and interest.”

Philip McKenzie, Managing Partner at FREE DMC and Founder of Influencer Conference: [source]

04. We trust our friends and family because we have known them a long time and feel emotionally close to them.

05. This means we believe that their recommendations will have our best interests at heart.

But what happens when brands come in and try to get a piece of the action?

1a. MediaCorp have identified Amelia as influential about Personal Personality Monitoring Devices (PPMDs). They send her their new product, SomaTech, in the hope that she will talk about it to her sphere of influence and generate increased purchases.

2a. As a personal branding expert, Amelia is savvy to influencer marketing. She knows she needs to deliver visibility if she’s to continue receiving shiny freebies, so she schedules a series of tweets about the product for the next week. Each is very proper, including the brandname, the hashtag the PR had sent, and exhorting retweets from her followerbase with one too many exclamation marks.

3a. Amelia has 4,000 followers on Twitter, but two-thirds are bots or other personal branding gurus (or both), and the rest she purchased at $2.50 – $4 per follower. [source]. Almost everything she tweets is automated from Oprah Winfrey’s Paper.li, but she does also auto-schedule interactions with her sockpuppet accounts to keep her Engagement score up. This helps keep the free shiny things flowing from the social media PRs

4a. Amelia’s tweets about the SomaTech are retweeted a respectable 30 times each, and along with Amelia’s 15 positive mentions of the product herself, MediaCorp are happy.

5a. However MediaCorp haven’t connected up their Twitter analytics with their store’s Google analytics or purchase data. If they did, they’d see Amelia only generated 20 clickthroughs and no purchases. This is because her highly automated copy-cat content is followed by almost no real, active human beings. (One of the bots did try to buy something but the transaction was declined as their card was registered in Zurich and their shipping address, Belarus.)

6a. Next week Amelia shoots a YouTube segment for MediaCorp’s competitor’s personality monitor, SimSoothe, who sent her not just a free device but $250 as well. The video gets trolled by 4-Chan and goes viral.

The kind of social media user who’s highly receptive to sharing brand promotions may not be generating content that real people value. Influence metrics are highly gameable and, if incentivised by freebies, attract game-players – not the “real people” marketers actually want.

1b. So MediaCorp improve their influencers algorithm and have another go:

2b. Bill’s a normal guy, albeit the linchpin of his group of friends. He’s a bit surprised to receive the free SomaTech device as he’d tumbld just the other day about PPMDs being a bit creepy. This had got a bunch of reblogs and sparked a bit of a debate.

3b. Bill’s not sure what to do with the SomaTech, but his mum raised him proper so he knows that if he receives a gift, he’s got to say thanks. So he writes a blog post as MediaCorp requested, which is auto-shared to his other social networks.

4b. Bill’s ex-boyfriend sees his post. He knows MediaCorp have been exploting child labour in the Philippines, and sees an opportunity to embarass Bill. “Since when were you such a slut that you did everything some big company told you to? I remember that time we were talking about….” An argument breaks out among their friends.

5b. “Mate, seriously? That time you suggested I should get those Blahphonic headphones? Was that you, or, you know, something you’d been told to say?” asks Cate. Bill feels really awkward – it’s the fifth time he’s been asked that question this week.

6b. Bill disables his Facebook account, Tumblr etc – making him an early adopter of the Going Analogue trend, and influencing three friends to follow. But as he no longer has a social media presence, his departure goes tragically un-curated.

If customers know that peer recommendations have been purchased by brands, many will stop trusting these friends’ recommendations. This is pretty corrosive to the friendship – and defeats the brand marketer’s purpose too.

So what if publicly disclosed “I did this because Brand X paid me” is individually toxic to personal credibility – but sneaky (non-disclosed) influencer marketing is socially toxic to friends’ trust?

Perhaps the only circumstances in which it works is celebrity influencer marketing – but only where there is no relationship of trust between celeb and fans. To participate in influencer marketing is to say, “I see my friendships as social capital, and I’ll exchange them for a fee”. Works fine for celebs who’re selling themselves (*kough, Kardashians*) but among almost every other social media user? Rather more double-edged.

17 December 2011

Peak freedom?

I read an article a week ago which argued that this – here, now – is what peak oil looks like

A decade ago, those few of us who were paying attention to peak oil were pointing out that if the peak of global conventional petroleum production arrived before any meaningful steps were taken, the price of oil would rise to previously unimagined heights, crippling the global economy and pushing political systems across the industrial world into a rising spiral of dysfunction and internal conflict.

With most grades of oil above $100 a barrel, economies around the world mired in a paper “recovery” worse than most recessions, and the United States and European Union both frozen in political stalemates between regional and cultural blocs with radically irreconcilable agendas, that prophecy has turned out to be pretty much square on the money, but you won’t hear many people mention that these days.

The point that has to be grasped just now, it seems to me, is that this is what peak oil looks like. Get past the fantasies of sudden collapse on the one hand, and the fantasies of limitless progress on the other, and what you get is what we’re getting—a long ragged slope of rising energy prices, economic contraction, and political failure, punctuated with a crisis here, a local or regional catastrophe there, a war somewhere else—all against a backdrop of disintegrating infrastructure, declining living standards, decreasing access to health care and similar services, and the like, which of course has been happening here in the United States for some years already.

[John Michael Greer, What Peak Oil Looks Like, 7 December 2011]

What if we have also reached ‘peak freedom’ – the maximum extent of individual freedoms and civil liberties?

Europe and America became considerably more free through the 19th and 20th centuries. Slavery was abolished; women gained the vote; homosexuality decriminalised and employment and welfare reforms provided a baseline of freedom from exploitation and freedom for all to have a chance at a decent living. We gained the right to unionise; to (all) own private property; that everyone could access legal representation through legal aid if they couldn’t afford their own defence. From the Chatterley trial, to journalist’s privilege not to name sources, to the rise of internet we have gained increasing freedoms of thought and expression.

Where next?

Wednesday I met up with an old, old friend by name of @metaleptic. We talked about 2011 and the coming end of the world – and what felt significant about our conversation is that perhaps for the first time I was as pessimistic as him.

What happened in 2011?

The Met Police, Tory government and supposedly independent judiciary seeking to criminalise all forms of protest that aren’t walking along a pre-determined march route (and how long will they keep authorising big protest marches, you wonder?)
Kettling, mass arrests, police infiltrators, 944 deaths in police custody since 1990. Et cetera
The US Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which gives the military (not the police) authority over domestic terror investigations and interrogations…
…allows for indefinite detention without trial of absolutely anyone suspected of being a terrorist…
…and defines the whole of the United States as a “battlefield”.
The normalisation of drone warfare and extra-judicial killings of British citizens in Pakistan, a country we are not at war with
SOPA and the Digital Economy Act threatening basic internet freedoms

What’s coming in the rest of my lifetime?

The start of a four-degree or more rise in global temperatures, leading to extreme weather events and potentially the total loss of climate equilibrium (then god knows what)
The oil runs out, as does rather a lot of minerals we use to make rather a lot of things
The water runs out and large parts of the globe become uninhabitable
Starving and/or displaced people in the billions
Fortress Europe to (try to) keep them out of our (collapsing) economies and welfare states
A geriatric population in the West no longer producing wealth but functioning as a massive voting block to stymie any change. (Actually Hugo and I did disagree here – he’s more cynical and doubts even the veneer of democracy, voting etc will survive. I predict a mere move through simulacra into simulation.)

Given that, then – Year of Protest or not – how is there any likelihood that the world will get more free?

The question becomes simply when we passed the peak – before or after 9/11?

8 December 2011

Seeing Like A Database: the problems with big data

“Big data” has been one of the buzzwords of 2011, and grand claims are being made for its power:

The world is becoming data-ized as digital information and numerical measurement is being applied to all aspects of what people do, particularly things that couldn’t be measured before because it was impractical or impossible. (Think: using wireless and GPS in cars to base insurance premiums on where and when people actually drive, as has been possible since 2007.)

The impact will be as profound as the scientific method in the 18th century — which quickly moved past the sciences and left its mark on all areas of human endeavor. For instance, what is “quantitative decision making” in management, if not the scientific method applied to business…. Likewise, the BigData revolution is plowing through the sciences, and also jumped into mainstream areas, such as business and government.

Data; boring but… by Ken Cukier, 6 March 2011

The problem with these claims is that they conflate increased power to capture and store data with (i) being able to extract meaningful insights from it, and (ii) being able to successfully act on and implement these insights, with (iii) no unexpected or adverse effects. Clearly cracking the first part doesn’t save the world on its own.

Further, big data evangelism often trips over into technocratic thinking, a belief that ‘nerdpower makes right’. Excitable blogposts about exabyte datasets, rather than defining the right problems to solve. Wide-eyed admiration for the amount of data that can be gathered, without recognition for the ethical rightness (or otherwise) of doing so.

Which is to say that big data is fundamentally political. Whether we choose to theorise it as technology or knowledge [actually, there's a good PhD proposal...], the act of recording the world in this way privileges particular values, worldviews and types of action.

In his blog post Lessons of the Victorian data revolution, Pete Warden insightfully makes the connection with technocratic thinking and brings in that great study of central planning, James Scott’s Seeing Like A State:

James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” looks at the legacy of the Victorian scientific revolution, and shows how the very success of its ideas had a dark side. [Similarly,] Creating datasets may help technical people [...] to understand problems and propose solutions, but it also means that [...] other people with deep, lived experience of the domains will be overruled. In the 20th century the prestige of the scientific toolkit was used to justify disasters like the collectivization of agriculture, as technocrats around the world wielded numbers to take power away from “inefficient” smallholders. Those figures were mostly proven bogus by reality, as plans with no knowledge of conditions on the ground failed when confronted with the wildly variable conditions of soil, weather and pests that farmers had spent a lifetime learning to cope with.

Lessons of the Victorian data revolution by Pete Warden

If you’ve not read ‘Seeing Like A State’, incidentally, I recommend it. In it Scott surveys the great utopian schemes of the 20th century, from Le Corbusier’s urban planning in Brasilia to Russian collectivisation of agriculture and China’s Great Leap Forward. Each well-intentioned and yet spectacular failures, with millions of deaths. His argument is that centrally-managed planning does not work because it rides roughshod over the complex interdependencies on the ground.

Perhaps, under ‘big data’ ideology, we might ask – is this not simply a problem of too little information? We have the capacity to measure everything now – did Corbusier or Stalin fail because their data was not sufficiently granular?

Scott would disagree. The problem at hand is not quantity of knowledge but its very type. Common to each central planning disaster is a belief in a high-modernist ideology claiming that science can improve every aspect of human life, and an authoritarian central power willing to effect large-scale re-orderings of society and nature. “Big data will solve everything” can, clearly enough, be another iteration of the same. Scott – and, in fact, Friedrich Hayek’s criticism of centrally-planned economies (The Rule of Serfdom, 1944) – is that this disregards local and personal knowledge (Scott might add, embodied and tacit knowledge), and the complex diversity of organisation required and ends sought. (Hayek may believe that this can be summarised through the price mechanism, but Scott’s metis (local knowledge) is rather less reducible than that.)

Central planning – or big data – may seek to make the complexity of local situations legible to systemised, technocratic thinking – but the two are essentially incommensurable. Talk of ‘big data’ needs to be visible as something bringing with it a particular modernist worldview, and alongside that a particular relationship of power over the specificities – places, people – represented as nodes and datapoints. Technology is rarely value-neutral.

This is not to say, however, that ‘big data’ is necessarily socially oppressive. Perhaps there are alternatives – I am still thinking this through.

In my recent Bugged Planet post, I drew attention to Indy Johar’s tweet where he noted “the asymmetry of personal data, open for the 99% & deep analytics for the 1%” [source]. This raises the question, what if the analytics were open to the 99%? What would this take, what would this look like, and would it actually redistribute power in any way?

6 December 2011

Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of @O2′s Twitter audience

Another post via the FACE company blog – see the story in full here: Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter (FACE and O2 @ Warc #Datacentric 2011, London).

This has been some of the most interesting research I’ve done all year and certainly the most technically challenging, so I wanted to share it here too.

In short, FACE and O2 presented at the WARC Datacentric conference in December 2011. To quote Fran’s write-up:

The objective of the O2 Brand Graph pilot was to mine social media data in a way that would allow us to connect it to audience studies. What follows is an initial exploration of how we can you use social media to augment a segmentation model with real-time data.

Whilst tracking social media by keywords allows us to get an understanding of how a specific topic is discussed online, tracking social media by users allows us to build a map of an audience, its hubs, its behaviours and its interests.

We called it the Brand Graph: the conjunction of the Social Graph (defined here as the network of people who are within 2 degrees of separation from the brand through social media channels) and the Interest Graph (the network of interests, topics, activities and behaviours associated with the nodes of the social graph).

What can you do with it?

Dynamically understand who your audience is and how is it changing, in real-time;

Dynamically understand what your audience is about, what makes an interesting topic and how broader cultural conversations affect it;

Segment your audience in clusters based on topics of interest, passions, life stages, professions, online behaviours etc.;

Plan and fine tune the content of your social media strategy;

Engage with your audience in the right way (channels, mechanics, times of the day, tone of voice etc.);

Assess the impact of your strategies in real-time.

Going forward, we see the brand graph becoming one of the key tools to build a seamless connection between your brand and its audience

So, how did we go about building the O2 Brand Graph?

Sample: We defined our sample as the entire audience of O2 on Twitter, i.e. 58.339+ Twitter users who were following @O2 (as of November 2011).

Methodologies: Statistical analysis, Semantic analysis, Network analysis, Netnography and Content analysis.
We then analysed the static data of 58,339 profiles on Twitter gathering insights around 10 key dimensions:

To get this information we had to map 58,339 users following @O2 and who was following each of the 58.339 users.

We ended up plotting a graph of 1 million nodes, 1 million primary connections and 574,278 horizontal connections within the graph.

We then analysed the static data of 58,339 profiles on Twitter gathering insights around 10 key dimensions.

Finally, we analysed 3,120,371 public tweets, 122,220 tweets/day (avg), generated by the @O2 followers over one month (November 2011).

[Source: Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter (FACE and O2 @ Warc #Datacentric 2011, London).]

Here’s the conference presentation:

Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter

View more presentations from Face

5 December 2011

Bugged planet

New Wikileaks release on the ‘bugged planet’ – the $5-billion mass surveillance industry selling telecoms and internet monitoring technology.

To date, we have documented a total of 133 of these surveillance weapons dealers, including 36 in the United States, 18 in the United Kingdom, 15 in Germany, 11 in Israel and eight in Italy. As with “traditional” arms dealers, most of them are located in rich and democratic countries. 12 of the 26 countries documented are also part of the European Union, which accounts for 62 of these companies.

87 sell tools, systems and software for monitoring the Internet, 62 for telephone surveillance, while 20 are for spying on SMS messages. 23 are involved in speech recognition, and 14 with GPS geolocalisation. Seven of the companies are also involved in the area of “cyber-war offensives”, selling Trojans, rootkits and other backdoors used to take control of computers remotely and without the knowledge of their users. These spy systems are distinct from those used by ordinary hackers in that they could not be identified by the “majority” of antivirus systems and other computer security solutions.

In Western democracies, the marketing and use of these systems of surveillance and interception of telecommunications is strictly controlled. There is nothing, however, to prevent their sale to countries with weaker restrictions, including to dictatorships. Although these tools are designed for espionage, they are not considered weapons. As such their exportation is controlled by national, European or international laws. Whether or not this business is moral, as things stand it is completely legal.

SPYFILES: REVELATIONS OF A BILLION-DOLLAR MASS SURVEILLANCE INDUSTRY

Spyfiles.org has an interactive graphic showing where these companies are located. It’s a little misleading; it implies these countries are where the technology is used too. Nonetheless worth a look.

New Delhi journalist Sagarika Ghose live-tweeted Assange’s video speech at the HTC Summit on 3rd December. Her take on his key points:

We are entering an age of transparency. The information of ordinary citizens is being accessed and monitored by secretive corporations. Elites are trying to hide information but the data of the common man is more openly available than ever to big companies. Public data, emails etc are being intercepted regularly. We are heading for bulk surveillance of the public to benefit transnational security elites.

A question to Assange: isn’t it better to give up some liberty and privacy in order to be safe?

His response: Giving up personal data to organisations is not part of the democratic covenant. Organisations should be accountable

Sagarika Ghose’s overall take on the presentation was that “Assange either paranoid and delusional or chillingly prophetic..”

However Indy Johar crucially recognises that this is not just a story about government or military surveillance. He tweeted:

The private platform web Facebook twitter etc has accelerated the asymmetry of personal data, open for the 99% & deep analytics for the 1%. [1]
It’s not the openness of our data that is the issue but the hidden predictive analytics, analysis & surveillance undertaken by hidden corps [2]

How exactly can we parse the differences between the Iranian police monitoring social media to crack down on dissidents… the UK police monitoring social media as part of their policing of protests… Vodafone monitoring social media to get advance warning of UK Uncut protests… and Vodafone monitoring social media to better understand their audience and increase sales?

Different ends, to be sure. But what does it mean that the same methods can be used for each?

For each government / corporation, the overarching aim is the same: knowledge = power. Through greater knowledge, the better they believe can control the actions of their consumer/citizenry.

And in each, the consumer/citizen social media user stands in the same relationship to power: asymmetric.

22 November 2011

Social Media Research & the Underbelly of the Internet

[One written for the FACE company blog - hence the slightly different tone. Original story here.]

An underrated skill in social media research is simply knowing what to search for.

Really? You’re interested in a particular brand, so surely you search for that word or phrase, right?

For brands such as Three, Apple, or the AA? Go ahead, give it a go! Just don’t be surprised when you get back a lot of content about “Three ways to boost your Twitter profile”, apple crumble recipes, and AA rated sovereign debt.

Searching the internet

We often describe setting up a social media research search for a brand as like doing a Google search. This is loosely accurate – like Google, a social media research tool ‘crawls’ news, blogs and forums for instances of your keywords. The research tool will also filter social media APIs (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) for instances of these words or phrases.

The problem is that the internet contains a lot more content than you think it does. Normally you never see it, and much of it isn’t even designed for human readers. Here are a few forms this takes:

Challenge 1: SEO spam

Being at the top of Google’s search results is a very valuable place to be if you want to get visitors to your website or online shop. This has made gaming Google results an industry in itself, called SEO: search engine optimisation.

SEO aims to guess Google’s search algorithms to manipulate clients‘ websites to the top of search listings. Google basically rates sites more highly the more in-bound links they have – i.e. the more popular they appear to be. So gaming Google results entails generating a lot of false links and content, with methods including:

Fake news sites reprinting press releases and “content farms”, e.g. Demand Media or Articlesbase
Promo blogs with high numbers of links to the client’s site, with random or copy-pasted text to make Google believe they are legitimate blogs rather than spam
Legions of Twitter bots (automated accounts with an algorithm rather than a person generating their content) posting links to websites
Using bots or real people (incentivized by micropayments) to post high volumes of blog comments with links to the client’s site

This gives rise to a lot of misleading digital data, all of it only designed to be “read” by Google’s algorithm rather than human eyes. To a reader – or anyone tracking a brand – it is useless. The problem is that it’s got your brand name in it, so any generic brand-name social media search will bring back this “noise” too.

Challenge 2: unexpected content

Do a Google search these days and the internet seems an ordered and relevant place. Even when you search for an ambiguous word with several meanings – let’s say “Orange”, the results are sensible – Orange the mobile company and the Wikipedia page on the fruit.

This is because Google have spent years refining their algorithms to ensure it brings back the most relevant content possible. This doesn’t just mean putting the most popular links at the top of results. Instead Google uses everything it knows about you – your previous searches, your Google profile and Gmail, your stored cookies and more – to deliver personally tailored results.

Social media research tools don’t however work this way. The APIs and scrapers collecting content return all keyword mentions, relevant or not. In searches we’ve run, some of the most unexpected things we’ve found have been:

Searching for banks will bring back posts on “carder forums” – the sites where credit card fraudsters sell the card details they have stolen from databases.
Almost everything is a word in Indonesian. You thought you were searching a specific and unambiguous acronym? No, it also means something in Indonesian – and volumes can be enormous because Indonesians are one of the most active populations in the world on Twitter.
Pharmaceutical searches are near-impossible. Dubious medication sellers will include hundreds or thousands of drugs as keywords on their pages, whether or not they’re selling those products.

Challenge 3: not all relevant content is indexed

So far we’ve described some ways that irrelevant content or “noise” can get into your social media search. There’s also the opposite problem, however – not being able to ‘see’ certain types of social media content, particularly forums:

Message boards are part of the Internet known as the ‘Invisible Web’ and pose many problems to traditional search engine spiders. The dynamic content is usually very deep and hard to search. In addition, many of these sites change their locations, servers, or URLs almost daily presenting special searching challenges
[Boardreader]

This makes it essential to use a social media research tool that allows you to check which forums are tracked, and customize the panel of sources as needed.

Impact on social media research

What this means for social media research is that if you’re using an off-the-shelf monitoring package, you’re probably getting a lot of junk in your results. Brands are often keen on easy usability – type your brand name into the search, and get a volume figure and sentiment stats out. But without tailormade search syntax, those figures are almost certainly meaningless.

So how do you make your social media research search relevant?

1. Specific is better

Using broad search terms and then excluding keywords you’re not interested in doesn’t usually work very well. You’ll never be able to filter out all irrelevant content – language is too varied and dynamic. E.g. if you’re after the mobile brand, search for Orange AND mobile, not just “Orange”.

2. But you can filter irrelevant websites

Not that many big content farms exist – so we exclude everything from them by URL.

3. Also filter particularly spammy keywords

e.g. “Viagra” for anything medical.

4. Boolean search syntax

This is the logic that enables you to search for content including A and B, A or B, or including A but not B. It’s essential not only for designing your social media search strings, but for also searching within the dataset.

5. Test your search terms on Twitter

Enter your search phrases into Twitter Search to see whether you’ve got them right, or if they’re bring back unexpected or irrelevant content instead. Twitter search also helps you understand the volumes of content that’ll come back (is it multiple posts a second, or a couple per day?)

6. Get personal

If you’re specifically interested in what consumers are saying, searching with personal pronouns – e.g.“my iPhone” – will bring back a much more relevant dataset than “iPhone” on its own.

Which is to say, designing a relevant and accurate social media search can involve a surprising amount of time, thinking and ongoing refinement. Few brands have the time or expertise to do this in-house using an off-the-shelf monitoring tool. This is why our clients have come to us instead for our expertise in locating what matters in social media – the signal amongst the noise