Digital Diner » Identity

Between Time and Timbuktu: Reflections on Globalization and the Electric Touareg

Gavin Clabaugh — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:30:29 +0000

It was many years later that I was to remember that day in Seattle. How I had ended up where I was, standing next to who I was, was beyond me. But, there I was — I was at the “top of the WAC” – the Washington Athletic Club — staring out the windows at what seemed to me at the time to be a giant abstract tableau. It was the end of November 1999 and I was looking at Seattle, laid out like a giant game of “Go.” The WTO was about to go into full swing — in what was to be known as the “battle for Seattle.”

From those windows high atop the WAC, I could see the various pieces on the board, see the planned movements and strategies as the police set up barricades and as people in the streets ebbed and flowed in response. It was easy to imagine reaching down and flipping a white stone to black, and thus changing the game. The game of “Go” is that way — the placement of single piece — a single move — can change the outcome of the game.

Seattle holds many fond memories for me, but that day bordered on the surreal. That day, beside me were some of the major pieces in the game, including James Wolfensohn. All in all, in the room were more than a dozen representatives of Globalization, with a capital Gee. I felt like Zelig. I kept thinking to myself that, properly, I should be down in the streets, relishing the scent of teargas in the morning. We were talking about the synergies of philanthropy, technology, and collaboration; I was imagining teargas.

These are the thoughts that swirled about my head as I watched five rather amazing musicians take a stage last week in San Francisco. I was at a concert. In fact it was a week bookended by music. Tonight was Tinariwen. Yo-Yo Ma was next Saturday. In between, philanthropy, technology and collaboration; some themes don’t change it seems.

These five fellows, in flowing Boubou robes, covered head to foot, with turbans wrapped about their heads, were playing Fender electric guitars (now there’s a truly global export) singing a rap song with a distinct West African beat, in a mix of French and Arabic. As the klieg lights shone down on these troubadours, only their eyes showing, guitars flashing, I was struck by the true amazing fact that it was globalization that had put them there; it was globalization that put me there, as well.

And, there in the row in front of me — globalized — were five young quintessentially Californian women dancing and ululating like they had spent their formative years in the High Atlas rather than Marin County. I was struck by the contrasts, by the sense of living on an interconnected planet. I was struck by the facts of globalization; and once again, things are neither black nor white.

The five fellows were Tinariwen, an almost indescribable musical group of Touareg from the southern Sahara. The Tinariwen story sounds like fiction. Guns and guitars, Ghadaffi’s poet-soldiers, Stratocasters in one hand, and a Kalashnikov in the other; supposedly, together, they count 17 bullet wounds among them. These were the Touareg, the nomadic desert warriors, the blue men of the desert. Their songs are the soundtrack of the ishumar (from chômeur, French for “unemployed”). They are the Sahara’s Generation X; once Malian rebels, now full-time musicians. (They are not a Volkswagen, despite what you may have heard.)

Sample Tracks

“Cler Achel” from Aman Iman (World Village)

“Tamatant Te Lay“ from Aman Iman (World Village)

On stage they’re an example of globalization beyond imagination, one of its consequences and one of its effects. It seems in music and the arts, where monolithic American culture has not run roughshod; we are experiencing a new renaissance. All hail rock and roll. All hail the magic mix of music that has me rocking to the Touareg one day, and gently enjoying Yo-Yo Ma the next. [This contrast and intersection is all the more poignant given Yo-Yo Ma's involvement with the "Silk Road" project.]

All around me that evening were the signs, the positive and negative effects of globalization. I rode to the concert in a Japanese hybrid and parked next to a fleet of others; I dined on a meal of sweet potato fries, California greens, topped with seared Ahi tuna, dressed with sesame seed oil and Japanese rice wine vinegar. I had a glass of French Viognier. I was wearing French shoes, a pair of jeans “engineered” in Germany (whatever that means) and made in Romania, and a Canadian shirt. And, I listened to the sounds of the desert, the raw tale of the Touareg, played on electric guitars made famous first by 1950′s rock and roll. Sub-Saharan nomads ripped from their lands, made unemployed and made famous by globalization.

I listened to the sounds of the desert, the sounds of a nomadic people displaced by the 21^st century, and the sounds of a people who suffer the fate of nomadic peoples all over the world.

From the Tinariwen web site (just that statement is amazing, when you think of it):

“…Forget the myths, forget the ‘guns-and-guitars’ fantasies and tales of blue-men on their camels. The humanity, the wonder and the epic sweep of the real Tinariwen story doesn’t need any photoshopping or romantic embellishments. It is the raw tale of an everyman, who was cut off from history and embraced the modern world, who lost his home and found solace in the guitar, who through pain and exile invented a new style of music that could express who he is and where he’s going. Nothing mythical or exotic about that. You can find the same story the world over…”

At the risk of showing my naiveté, clearly the effects of globalization are not all bad. Some are, in fact, grand. But others are frightening, and I often fear what we will lose, for lose we will, I fear. More so, I fear what the world will lose.

Moreover, I am, in fact, truly embarrassed by our current list of mainstream “cultural” exports. It is in music, culture, and entertainment where the west and the north are the great winners. We get better than we give. We trade the “O’Reilly Factor,” in return we get a richness and depth unplumbed. It’s striking and sad that we add so little of value to the trade, yet nevertheless seem to monopolize the market. Take Geraldo. I’ll gladly trade you Disco, the entire 1980′s, and Geraldo, for the richness of Mbaqanga, the pure energy of Tinariwen, and the sultriness of just about any French piano bar.

In this new world, where content is king, where creativity is the true currency, we seem to be rather impoverished.

Meanwhile, as I drive my Ford-but-really-Swedish car north today, into the Great Lakes winter, Afro-French-Arabic rap blaring out of an IPod (made in China no doubt); my imagination drives south, from Timbuktu to Essakane; perchance to the Festival in the Desert, and I remember: the placement of a single piece can change the whole game.

Sow’s Ears and Turing Tests

Gavin Clabaugh — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 13:56:14 +0000

At the risk of being Pollyannaish, I find it pleasing when “good” things are born from “bad.” One of these “good” things caught my eye recently. It something called reCAPTCHA. Not only is it neat, it also turns a sad state of affairs on its head. It helps create a public good, a silk purse in the form of giant, online digital library, from the sow’s ear of having to prove we’re a human to some impersonal computer, over and over again.

We’re now confronted regularly with the requirement of proving our humanity before we’re allowed to comment on a blog posting, or sign up for a Yahoo! account, or send a happy note to Congress. I’ve written about that before — the Congress stuff — probably alienated a few friends in the process. (If you’re interested in my take on the Congressional move to institute so-called “logic puzzles,” look here and here.) Now that I think of it, it might be useful to have members of Congress prove that they’re human. I wonder how many would pass.

I admit it: there are days where I feel I might not pass such test. Moreover, in the grand scheme of things, I also admit there is a part of me that finds it altogether strange that we actually need such a test.

Nevertheless, tests to see if you’re “human” are now part and parcel of daily life on the internet — and appear as such things as CAPTCHA or other forms of logic puzzles. They’re all tricks, barriers to keep the ‘bots from flooding blogs, discussion groups, message boards, and web sites with auto-generated crap about drugs or body parts, or both. I’m always surprised, but apparently Christian Singles want to meet me! Obviously, they don’t know me (or my wife).

Metaphysical and political ponderings aside, tests that make you prove you’re human, officially called “Turing Tests,” are now downright commonplace.

The original “Turing Test” was developed by Alan Turing in the 1950′s. It was based on a parlor game in which a man and a woman would go into separate rooms and, remotely, using only the written word, try to convince other players in the game that they were the other person. Turing took that parlor game and tweaked it a bit, and came up with a test of a machine’s ability to demonstrate intelligence. A classic Turing Test asks whether: “a person could reliably tell the difference between a human in one room, and a computer in another, based solely on their written responses.” If (or when), a computer can fool that that human judge, computers will have passed the test, and have to be considered intelligent. [I'm here to say, right now, I want equal standing. If I can fool a judge into thinking I'm human, I want to be considered intelligent too.]

Today’s anti-spam and anti-bot tests are called “Reverse Turing Tests.” Unlike the classic test in which a human tries to tell the difference between another human and computer, a Reverse Turing Test has a computer judging if you’re a human or if you’re just another spam-generating, Viagra-pushing spam-bot.

Of such tests, CAPTCHA is probably the best known. It’s the one that asks you to use your uniquely human ability to recognize letters and numbers, even when they’re skewed, warped or wiggly. That’s something computers just don’t do well. CAPTCHA, by the way, stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” It’s trademarked by Carnegie Mellon. Here’s a sample of a CAPTCH – actually a reCAPTCHA. Let me tell you what the “re” in reCAPTCHA is all about, and why it’s so damn neat. reCAPTCHA takes the idea behind CAPTCHA and makes it work for a living.

An Example of a reCAPTCHA Turing Test

According to the reCAPTCHA web site, about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day. In each case, some human takes about ten seconds to do what only humans can — recognize some funky text and translate it back into letters and numbers. Ten seconds. Not that much time, and with good effect. It stops the spambots and Christian Singles.

But, when you think about it, though, in the aggregate, those seconds add up. Supposedly they add up to over 150,000 hours a day — 150,000 hours spent closely interpreting a funky image of some text, and then entering that into a form. With this in mind, the reCAPTCHA people apparently had a bright idea: Why not use that 150,000 hours for some positive good.

reCAPTCHA does exactly that. It channels that human effort into helping verify and interpret things that scanners can’t figure out. reCAPTCHA uses this massively parallel human processing system — all those people using their human abilities to recognize badly formed letters — to correct and/or verify OCR mistakes as books are being scanned into the Internet Archive. Damn neat. A silk purse from a sow’s ear.

For all of you that immediately thought: Well, what good is that? If the system doesn’t know what the word is, how can you use it for a Turing Test? I can hear you looking for the comment button… Wait… Hold your horses, the answer here is as brilliant as it is simple. First, take a look at the sample graphic above. What do you see? Two words, not one, right?

reCAPTCHA uses word pairs, one known word, and one unknown word. Only one of the words is from the book scanning process. The reCAPTCHA system pairs up the words, and asks you to translate both. In this way, using known/unknown word pairs, reCAPTCHA allows you to both prove you’re human and extracts free labor, getting you to transcribe and verify some mystery word from a book being fed into the Internet Archive.

Even neater, they use the same mystery word ten or more times, with different people, checking and double-checking the word. Only then is the most common, and most likely correct, answer fed back into the Internet Archive. This, of course, overcomes that pesky thing called human error. After all, humans… well, they’re not to be trusted. Besides, how do we really know you’re really human, anyway…?

One Hundred Years of Internet

Gavin Clabaugh — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:15:59 +0000

The Gilbert Center turns ten this year — that’s a hundred in Internet years. That’s something to be proud of — few things last a hundred years, especially in turbulent times.

Michael Gilbert and the Gilbert Center graciously host this blog. I think of Michael as my somewhat eccentric publisher — and true to publisher form — he occasionally tries to slip me a suggestion about something that I might write about. In recognition of this anniversary, Michael asked if I’d be willing to write some sort of “top ten” posting — a riff on the ten years.

Just between you and me, up till now, I’ve managed to pretty much ignore the suggestions — not purposely. [Really] Things just haven’t worked out that way.

But this one was different. It struck a chord. I got thinking about the number ten and the year 1997. I got to thinking about how things have changed in those ten years — the world has changed, politics has changed, much has changed. Looking back even further, many of the forces that have shaped today’s world barely existed twenty years ago. Ten years seems like a long time; twenty seems an eternity.

Back when I did a lot of speaking, I used to warn audiences “everything you know will be worthless in five years.” Damn if that hasn’t turned out to be true. In the last ten years, I’ve had to relearn things at least twice over, maybe more.

Then, at this year’s NTC, an old friend and colleague mentioned that he had heard Ellen Miller, of the Sunlight Foundation, claim me as her original “enabler.” This made be chuckle. I suppose I’m guilty.

In hindsight, that’s kind of fun to think about, since Ellen now runs one of the most innovative Web2.0 sites on the ‘net. Ellen’s now busy using these fancy new technologies to move ideas, people, issues, and thoughts. I can’t, won’t and shouldn’t take credit. But it does make me chuckle just a little bit.

I remember that “enabling” like it was yesterday. I bring this all up because it was ten, maybe twelve, years ago. And, I figured that I might just “re-use” my notes from that introduction as a core for this post. I admit it, I was looking to get off easy, as it were.

Back then, the deal was this: Ellen provided Chinese Thai (I stand corrected!) carry-out and I was to provide a couple of hours of introduction to this strange thing called the World Wide Web. The audience included our mutual friend, Larry Makinson. Then, both Larry and Ellen worked at the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). They were busy bringing revolutionary transparency to campaign finance. Larry, by the way, is a brilliant fellow and the brains behind much of the campaign finance research done in the last 10 or 20 years. Today, the CRP web site, OpenSecrets.org, is pretty fine damn work. Larry’s now a senior fellow (and a nice fellow too) at the Sunlight Foundation.

I always figured I got the better deal. It was good Chinese Thai food. [This also proves I will work for food.]

Undaunted by the task — and perhaps I should have been — I had put together some notes that I thought not only described the so-called “information super highway” [more like a goat trail back then] but also postulated some of its future impact. In hindsight, I think the themes were spot on.

True to form, I had also come up with a couple of “big” ideas about what the Internet was, and what its impact was going to be. With chopsticks in hand, I laid out a set of concepts and threw in some idle speculation about how it might evolve over time.

The BIG idea was this: The internet was going to be a ubiquitous communications network — connecting everything from toasters to power sub-stations. It was going to smash hierarchies, re-write power relationships, and basically change the dynamics of the game.

But, I figured sagely, in the end, it was still going to be about one-to-one personal interactions, only instead of just one or two people, it was going to be about one-to-one personal interactions between hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people. The emphasis there is on the personal.

Ever one to use a bad analogy, I likened the “web” itself to a Lava Lamp – something that was fascinating in a weird sort of way – but tended to blind us to the real revolution, the underlying communications network. I thought we’d see the real impact in things that rode on the back of that network; that the web stuff was neat, but the real fun would start when we started shoving other stuff across the network. What the other stuff was, I wasn’t sure. But I was sure that it was going to be something wonderful. The quote I had in my notes was from Arthur C. Clarke. It was from the ’60′s. “We cannot stop the world from being digitized.” I still think I’m right there. It’s not the web, it’s the other stuff.

For the web itself, I postulated three phases, each building on the previous. I called these phases Informational, Transactional, and Interactional. In hindsight, those aren’t bad constructs. “Informational” corresponds to the whole “public face” brochure-type web sites, “Transactional” gets us everything from online book sales to banking to music sites, and “Interactional” gets us into this whole community building stuff. To be honest, I missed the whole “social networking” stuff. As is so often the case, it’s the important things you end up missing. That’s one that kicked me in the ass. Still don’t quite understand what it means.

At the time, the seemingly opposite forces of “market disintermediation” and “market aggregation” seemed poised to change some major equations. I was right — and they’re still at work — If I’d been smart, I would have bought eBay and Amazon, each in its own right an example of disintermediation (Amazon) and market aggregation (eBay).

Mind you, in hindsight, all these concepts are not earth-shattering. Nevertheless, I think they still form the core of some of the changes being wrought in our world, and they still provide a useful framework within which to view the world.

Moreover, simply naming or recognizing these forces has not stopped them. Markets are still being torn asunder. Recently, for example, I was blown away to hear the publisher of the New York Times muse “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years.” He then followed by saying: “And you know what? I don’t care either.” As I said, the scale and the pace are phenomenal. It’s sometimes hard to reconcile the fact that we seem to be going two directions at once, both disintermediating existing markets and structures, and aggregating new markets from what had previously been too scattered to matter — the so-called long-tail.

That’s what kicked me in the ass — the scale and pace of change. I was way too pessimistic. In this measly ten years, the world has changed more than I imagined. For example, who now can imagine a time without Google, without the ability to look up song lyrics on a whim, to order underwear online, to flirt and cavort with friends and colleagues scattered across the globe. The Lava Lamp is still there – only it’s a real-time, interactive, socially networked lava lamp. And that underlying ubiquitous network has spawned VoIP, revolutionized entertainment, and is turning politics on its head.

Finally to the future: Ten years out —

As I see it, there are five intertwined and interrelated themes that are shaping the future. These themes keep bonking me in the head with the subtlety of a two-by-four. They provide a framework within which I view and try to make some sense of the world. They are the big countervailing forces and contradictory energies that are at work, shaping what will be.

In my crystal ball, the next ten years is all about how these five themes will intersect with our lives, our work, our life, and our loves, and how they will intersect with that ubiquitous, universal communications network we call the Internet. In a nutshell, the five themes are:

Ownership — Who owns what, and why, and how is it controlled, or not. Is it free, is it open, is it shared? Do I get paid for my ideas, and if so, how?
Identity — How do I preserve that which is me: my name, my time, my eyeballs? How does identity interact with the issues of trust, of ownership, and of privacy?.
Trust — How do I know you’re you? How can I trust you, trust my bank, trust Google? How do I establish trusted relationships for any sort of transactions?
Privacy — How do I preserve my privacy when I want to? How do I keep my identity, and yet participate in a socially networked world?
Community — What is community, what communities – physical and virtual – do I interact with? What binds us together and what doesn’t?

These themes blend into one another. There is no clear delineation and I won’t attempt to make one. Identity, trust and privacy, for example, are clearly three sides of a strangely shaped holographic coin. Our identities are under attack — we actually have a crime called “Identity Theft.” I still cringe when I hear people talk of owning “names” and “lists.” My name is mine, and I want it back.

Identity and trust are all about ownership. Ownership is all about ownership. Open source is all about ownership. Intellectual property is all about ownership. Digital Rights Management is all about ownership. We’re busy redefining what it means to own an idea, own a concept, or own your own name.

Simultaneously, our lives are increasingly public, increasingly defined in a public arena, and subject to public viewing. What Google knows about me is frightening. What I willing share with the world — through blogs, listservs, email, and Flickr — is also frightening. But for some reason, I do it willingly. For some reason I trust you. (Then again, my wife doesn’t. She won’t let me put up pictures of her.)

How do I know who you are, how can I trust you? Is my email mine, what about my signature? Who should I trust, and how will I know? Should I trust the Christian singles that want to meet me? How about that fellow in Nigeria with the $200,000,000?

The New York Times is one of my few “trusted sources” for information. I trust ‘em. [Especially since they canned Judith Miller and that other guy.]

What’s a world like without the Times? What news will I trust? Fox News? The Daily Show? [One is fake news. You pick which.] For that matter, where will anyone get their news, since it’s apparent that every other news source just reads the Times (and sometimes the Washington Post) and rehashes it.

For most of human history, our communities were shaped by geography. For most of human history, people were born, lived their lives, and died inside a 100-mile radius. Now I have breakfast in Brussels and dinner in Detroit. Not counting sleeping, I spend more time in airports than Ann Arbor. Now our lives are shaped not only by geography, but by a global set of issues. Polities are now shaped by our beliefs more than our locations.

In this messy melting pot, we are seeking and exploring new forms of community — some are even living “second lives” — in a virtual space inhabited by seven foot pink cats. I met one — or so she claimed — just the other day. It was kind of scary. I haven’t a clue what it means. But I can tell you this, whatever it is, it’s happening much faster than you think. Trust me..

Michael and the Gilbert Center have weathered these stormy times, although not without casualty. Undaunted and with cheerful alacrity, Michael continues to cast a critical eye, and lend his critical mind to the nonprofit sector. We are all the richer for it.

Congratulations on your first one hundred years. May the next one hundred be just as interesting. Oh… Watch out for the pink cats, I’m not sure who they are, and I don’t know if you can trust them.