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Regulating Search Dec 3rd 2005

Search is big business, and search functionality increasingly shapes the information society. Yet how the law treats search is still up for grabs, and with it, the power to dominate the next generation of the online world. How will this potential to wield control affect search engine companies, their advertisers, their users, or the information they index? What will search engines look like in the future, and what is the role of regulators in this emerging market? This symposium will map out the terrain of search engine law & policy.

Regulating Search? is the first academic conference devoted to search engines and the law. The symposium will bring together technologists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, executives, lawyers, computer scientists, and activists to discuss the emerging field of search engine law. It will examine trends in litigation involving search engines, identify the interests that are implicated by the increasing legal control of search, and discuss appropriate public policy responses.

For full details and registration

Moving to Yale

I'm moving from Ithaca to assume a postion as a resident fellow at the Yale Information Society Project
where i'll be working on my 'open world' research.

POSA 1.0

*The Politics of Open Source Adoption*
Read � Contribute � Win!

Over here you can find a real-time history report about the politics of open source software adoption (POSA).

POSA 1.0 was ponsored by The Social Science Research Council that invites anyone to contribute. This version includes contributions from myself as well as
Gabriella Coleman, Kenneth Cukier, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh,
Eugene Kim, Volker Grassmuck, Bildad Kagai, Nicolas Kimolo, and Jennifer
Urban, and is edited by Joe Karaganis (SSRC) and Robert Latham (SSRC).

Our project begins with the observation that accounts of the Free and/or
Open Source Software (F/OSS) movement, to date, have been oriented
mostly by the improbable fact of F/OSS�s existence. At this stage of
F/OSS development and advocacy, we want to ask a different set of
questions�not how open source works as a social and technical project,
or whether open source provides benefits in terms of cost, security,
etc., but rather how open source is becoming embedded in political
arenas and policy debates. For our purposes, understanding the
�politics of adoption� means stepping back from the task of explaining
or justifying F/OSS in order to ask how increasingly canonical
explanations and justifications are mobilized in different political
contexts. POSA 1.0 maps many of the different kinds of political and
institutional venues in which F/OSS adoption is at stake. It tries to
understand important institutional actors within those venues, and the
ways in which arguments for and against F/OSS are framed and advanced.
It seeks to clarify the different opportunities and constraints facing
F/OSS adoption in different sectors and parts of the world. It is an
inevitably partial account that--we hope--can be extended and deepened
by other participants in these processes. We invite your help in
preparing POSA 2.0.

To sweeten the pot, two prizes of $250 will be awarded to the best
contributions to POSA 2.0

Open Systems Open STS

Over the last few years the tradition has been established among the grad students of the STS departments of MIT, RPI and Cornell to get together once a year for a small grad students conference. Like in the last couple of years, grad students from other institutions (Harvard, Penn, NYU, etc.) and departments (sociology, anthropology, media studies, etc.) are welcome to join (and hopefully will host this conference at some point in the future).

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This year it is Cornell's turn to host this gathering, which will focus on the theme: Open Systems � Open STS, and take place on Friday, February 18th- Saturday February 19th 2005. The idea is to have a low-budget semi-informal gathering where people can present works in progress, get feedback on their research, acquaint themselves with other STS work, and build networks with the current generation of top-flight scholars in the field.

STS has been preoccupied in recent years with the question of boundaries. What are the boundaries of the field? Of its methods? Of the subjects it studies? Of the boundary objects it identifies? In parallel much current attention is given to open systems: in communication, networking, models of knowledge creation and dissemination, emerging technologies, and many other realms �openness� becomes a feature, a value, a yardstick. Thinking of these two themes together this conference aims to encourage discussions along the following lines:

 STS Commons and Collaboration
 Opening the Discourse of Openness
 STS Made Accessible
 Openness and emerging technologies (nano, bio)
 Boundaries, Limits, and Openness
 Openness through historical lenses
 Studies of sciences and technologies: the view from outside S&TS
 Openness, capitalism and globalization
 Openness and disciplinarily (in STS and beyond)

Thrills Beyond Productivity

What thrills us depends on our personal hopes, fears, loves and desires. But now a British designer, working with a computer scientist, is creating a machine that can measure the experience of thrill.

You can read about it here in this article in Wired especially the quotes from my advisor
Phoebe Sengers

fragments on Schizophrenia and the Cyborg Manifesto

Some thoughts after reading Haraway for the Nth time,

What is wrong with the world? It�s dominated by rich, Western, white, males that for centuries have been throwing techno-scientific sand in our feminist eyes reifying the phallogocentric hegemony that has come to be our second nature, our new social order is at one and the same time falsely realist and really false and in it objectivity is anything but objective, our social fabric is a power field that is dominated by the efficiency standards of late-industrialism and the carnivorous market logic of 3rd stage multi-national capitalism, a game in which �others� and underdogs, and especially women (of colour or not) can�t win.

]]> What�s the problem with Marxism, eco-feminism, feminist empiricism, actor network theory and other social constructionist theories when they try to articulate the world�s problems or suggest solutions to it? The key problem is that they go too far in the role they ascribe to the social realm, either because they accept determinist explications as legitimate or, in contrast, because they treat everything as �text� that is amenable to radical interpretation, thus pulling the rug under the feet of any would-be negotiators of a new social order. They also sin by reifing the binary oppositions (p. 154) that permeate our lives, obscuring a complexity of sorts. (p 177: �Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, totaVpartial, God/man.� ).
And this results in a social and political danger, the formation of a strongly bi-modal social structure. (p.169)

So the world is flawed, and the theories that aim to explain the role of knowledge in the world are not working and cannot serve as the basis of political activism. We want to launch a revolution, but�Houston, we have a problem.

As articulated in another article, (Situated Knowledges) �[The] problem is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.�

What we need in order to solve this problem, Haraway argues, is the ability to translate knowledges among very different and power differentiated communities. It is high time, according to Haraway, that we view the world with some kick-ass feminist perspective, one that foregoes the single vision which produces worse illusions than those offered by double vision or many headed monsters. The cyborg imagery, as it turns out, is the right tool for the job. Using cyborg imagery Haraway argues (p. 181) two points

(a) the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now;
(b) taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts.

And to make her argument, Haraway deconstructs the informatics of domination, for which the cartoon version suggests shifts from structures to networks, from boundaries to flows. The troubling element of this haterotopic network is that human bodies become nodes that need to negotiate their place within it. (p. 163: �Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves;� )

And this results in
(p. 172 �a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.� )

Since Haraway�s manifesto influenced my own work in a significant way, I want to offer a skeleton of an argument that I�m working on, speaking to a community of social scientists concerned with technology and technologists concerned with the values embedded in the design of informatics.

I argue that most theories about technology are reductionist stories we tell ourselves to counterbalance a bewilderment of sorts that often arises when we encounter our rapidly changing socio-technological environment. Specifically, the theories surrounding the sphere of information technology (IT) and the extensive explications of the ways in which IT is radically permeating our lives are examples of discursive practices which, as part of an attempt to battle this perplexity, are all too often reduced to techno-revolutionary speech. Within neo-liberal accounts of technology in general and IT particularly we can find pairs of conflicting sub-narratives that when juxtaposed and considered together produce a sense of what I would term 'schizophrenia.' Drawing heavily from Delleuze, I argue that accepting such schizophrenia is an alternative and better approach than futile attempts to explain-away this complexity, attempts that, in the last instance, usually resort to determinisms of the worst kind (economic, technological, or religious.) Though determinism is an efficient rhetorical strategy to alleviate the moral panic that such schizophrenia, when misunderstood, can induce, a better approach, I argue, would be to embrace this schizophrenia as an existential position and to rid ourselves of the hitherto prevailing penchant to tell coherent stories about technology in general and the ever-changing world of IT particularly.
Rather than explaining ourselves to death using grand reductionist isms that leave out of the explanatory frame way more details than they actually include and lack the moral guidelines necessary as north stars in designers� quest for technology�s improvement, from our new position we can hope to achieve two goals: (a) develop modest explanations of technology that introduce the knotted political, social, and cultural dimensions as key factors in the clarification of the processes that govern the production, reproduction, and maintenance of complex socio-technical systems of interactions. (b) develop the sensitivities and respect to the complexity of the world which are necessary for designers that embed competing values in the design of new information technologies.

On one hand, we, the digerati, are sensitized by now to fictional and non-fictional stories which are told using words and images-- we have come to appreciate and fear the dangers of brave new worlds and matrices, we have come to abhor visions of dystopic societies taken over by technology, we are suspicious of the conflation of economy and technology. On the other hand, however, we are less perceptive to the stories that unfold everyday in the form of diodes, printed-circuits, antennas, compilers, and bits. Accepting cyborg politics will allow us to develop this sort of sensitivity.

With this in mind, I argue that for designers of technology, this is the best of times and the worst of times, an age of wisdom and foolishness, darkness and light. But what would ultimately decide who goes to �heaven� and who goes the other way are the choices of certain values over others in the design of technology, and for this cause, Haraway�s argument can serve as a stable stepping stone. The task that Haraway identifies as to �survive in a diaspora� translates to being able to design for schizophrenia.

Digital Cultural Institutions

Last weekend I participated in a workshop organized by the Social Science Research Council as part of the Digital Cultural Institutions Project in which I was one of the summer awardees. This was a great opportunity to meet many of the people whose work I appreciate, and also to take a few days off for deliberations about technology and culture. The fact that no-one was able to clearly define what �digital�, �cultural� or for that matter �institution� clearly was didn�t seem to be a problem, as all participants seemed to have a shared mood, or mindset.
My talk was on reputation economies in online publishing, framed within some bigger concerns. through my own experiences moving across geographical and professional boundaries, I talked of two sub-narratives that we often hear when conversing about digital technology and culture: on the one hand the talk of rupture, disrupt, flux, transformation, revolution. etc. on the other hand, the utopian speak of the world coming together, the global village, the collapse of space and time, etc.
Taken together, these two contradictory narratives of construction and deconstruction produce a sense of what I termed as schizophrenia, which in turn is all too often countered by technological and economic determinism of the worst kind. It is against this counter reaction that I try to write and speak of by bringing in the social and political dimensions back into the picture. Of course, bringing in the social, political, and cultural are key components of what I believe to be good design principles of IT, and this is what we try to do in our research group CEMCOM
Check out the talk section of this website to see the slides of my presentation.

You can read Alex Pang's insights on the workshop here

Wheels of promotion

He was killed by a cellular phone explosion
They scattered his ashes across the ocean
The water was used to make baby lotion
The wheels of promotion were set into motion

But the sun still shines in the summertime
I'll be yours if you'll be mine
I tried to change, but I changed my mind
Think I'll have another glass of Mexican wine
...

(Mexican Wine Lyrics / Fountains Of Wayne)

Watch the video

Feral Robotic Dogs

If you're not familiar with Natalie Jeremijenko's work, read on, you�re in for a treat.

In her engineering projects Natalie mixes engineering, art, and social criticism, blurring the boundaries between these disciplines in a very unique way.

In a recent visit to Ithaca, Natalie presented some of her earlier works at the bureau of inverse technology, and screened her by-now-famous suicide box and bit plane movies.

The feral robotic dogs endeavor is a hallmark project. In this project, Natalie and her students re-engineer toy robot dogs (starting with the famous and expensive Sony models, and going down to simpler, cheaper designs) and upgrade them to include sensors that can be used for environmental monitoring.
In a press covered event, a pack of the feral dogs were released in downtown Ithaca, at a cleaned-up but still contaminated coal-tar site.

Call one of these a robot watchdog if you will, a low-cost and popular way to find environmental hazards or as Natalie puts it � a dog gone feral - any way you have it, this is an example of an unexpected appropriation of technology into critical thought.

For more go to the official site.

ssrg talk

yesterday i presented my research project on free and open source software which aims to understand free software and open source in a cultural context using insights from social constructivism and actor network theory, as part of an attempt to develop a new theory of innovation in IT.

this was part of Cornell's science studies reading group (SSRG)
you can now download the slides

* if you want to see the presentation as it was designed, you should download and install the love letter typewriter font (yes, it's free)

money for email?

in response to this article on CNN that forecasts that email will soon cost, here are some thoughts.

charging (money, cpu power) for email is underscored by a perception of the Net as a market, an economy, and not a community. yes, in many ways it is a market, but there is something fundamentally different about it, and that something is that as long as things like email remain free, collaboration is easy to manage, and information sharing can be done at a negligible cost. Fundamentally, I believe, people are social animals, and finally the Net is a technology that can amplify human need and tendency for social behavior.

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If we insist on market metaphors, then we can see the net today like a multi-player prisoner's dilemma. there is a free resource (email) and a set of players that want to exploit it (exchange information). Some have found ways to do it better than others (spammers), while exploiting the commons, at the expense of others. All players are stuck: users have nothing to do against it. So MS and Goodmail conclude that there needs to be a change in strategy: all players should agree to pay a small cost, in exchange of a mix of their own good (their inboxes will not be bombarded with spam) and of the public good (email would one again be reliable). What they forget to say, and here is their dishonest mistake, is that this new system, only shifts the profits from one hand to another. Instead of profits accruing to smart spammers, now the profits would accrue to software vendors and ISPs. Of course, we are used to corporations like MS making billions of dollars, so this at first sight seems normal, but when you think of it, you realize that this is similar to the stupid scheme by telcos that charge you money to put you off telemarketing call lists to which they sold your personal data to begin with. In other words, the users will become hostages to their software vendors and ISPs, and the premium for this false insurance policy, might just as well be, as in the case of mailing lists or 3rd world countries, too high to pay. Moreover, what if spammers find a trick around the system (as they will surely do. one simple trick is to use false credit cards. the second largest problem after spam is identity theft. with one fake/stolen credit card, at 0.1c per message a spammer can probably send 1m messages before the card gets blocked)? we'll end up paying, and getting spam. So what is the solution? to think of the net as a community, not a market. By increasing the cost of email, the users stand to gain nothing- only the corporate juggernauts will benefit at the end.

the way to get out of this prisoners dilemma is by jolting the system from the false equilibrium through information sharing. What if the prisoners could sneak notes to one another? of course they will coordinate their strategies. But with email we can do that! like many anti-spam solutions ( see for example razor which is a distributed, collaborative, spam detection and filtering network ) the only costs to the user is to install a plug-in to their mail client, which would share facts about known spam. Such a system is, of course, not error free, but it is cost free. And the ISPs should compete on building such spam repositories as part of their service, instead of charging users money.

So, if this solution is so smart, why didn't everybody adopt it? because the movers and shakers in the industry have nothing to gain from it. MS does NOT have a commitment to fight spam as such, only as much as it hinders business. Rolling the costs to users has become such a mantra in our time, and this is why the healthcare system is collapsing, the public educational system is in regress, the US army recruits soldiers in Mexico in exchange of citizenship so that they can fight over-seas and make sure the price of fuel is low, and paying $2 for a gallon of 'spring' water and $40 a month for 20-minute-per-hour-commercials-TV seems natural for us. What's next? maybe Mel Brook's 'spaceballs' in which people get air in cans is not so far-fetched?

Spam is a social problem not an economical one. Telling spam and legit mailing lists apart is the tip of the iceberg, whose core is hidden by this sort of 'market' talk. The question should be: what are we willing to pay for? are we buying into the story that virtual property is the same is physical one, and the unholy marriage between spammers and corporations that from both ends of the spectrum want to make money on the public's back? or do we want to take the unprecedented opportunity given by the Net to once again resurrect a feeling of community, and allow people to hedge risks not through their wallet, but through a commitment to the public good (which of course is their good too).

I, of course, think the latter is the only way.