spam: the other white meat

MIT’s Technology Review has a short article on Larry Sanger’s involvement with the Wikipedia. Of course the article doesn’t say much at all, but the concluding line I find really interesting: ?What you have to have faith in is human beings being able to work together.”

I wonder about collaborative projects that don’t have codified rules for how the project functions and I also wonder about projects that don’t have a core membership who has a history or a connection outside of the project itself. Give the size and scope of the Wikipedia, it appears that without some kind of structure through which the process of adding and editing entries is processed, fracturing behavior is going to emerge.

Given that Sanger himself moved away from the project because of tension between participants, one can only imagine how many other people have been driven away who found the process frustrating or uncoordinated.

Returning to Sanger’s quote at the end of the article, I have to say I’m suspect. While I see within it a kernel of anarchic sensibilities (here, the idea that cooperative behavior is possible), it seems that over and over again, the reliance on this sentiment, as opposed to having a commonality, based on a history of experience of the people who are participating in the project is essential.

Clearly, the codification of norms in a project can directly address this kind of situation. However, getting to the point where a group can actually put together a set regulations guiding how the group functions is typically another stumbling point. Here, the competing ideas of what directs the project, what its ends are, are difficult places for a group which doesn’t have commonality outside of the project. As much as this process is essential, it stands to be just as fracturing if the group doesn’t have history or commonality outside the project to fall back on. Arguably, one of the necessary conditions for a group to be able to go through such a process of codification of norms is having trust in one another, something that is rarely built in the process of making bylaws.

To argue that groups need conditions that build mutual trust among one another before norms can be codified appears on its face to be an extrapolation of the argument that Sanger posits- faith that people can work together. However, shared history and goals which unify a project among membership is different than faith that the project will work itself out. Here, the reliance is not on the hope that people will act well to one another, but rather that given a situation that builds bonds between people there is a greater chance that a conscious desire to both maintain the goals of the group and the group itself will persist amidst competing interest.

Ultimately, how groups move forward through internal competing interests is a huge question. Obviously there has been a huge amount written on this subject, from Tocqueville to the less famous Tyranny of Structurelessness, yet what is surprising is how often this subject continues to raise its head. There is no shortage of irony that a project like the Wikipedia which seeks to be one of the largest collections of information on the net faces it as well.

Why, oh why, does MT hide this little gem so far away?

This is the way to get an individual entry to link through to it’s category. Seems like such an obvious need, but the only place I found it was via google. of course. Actually the code came from here which is a really good resource.

What seems most interesting to me about Electric Sheep is its aesthetic dimension. Of course, we can debate about the fractals that the sheep servers generate, whether they constitute an aesthetic experience or not, but for the sake of argument, I?m just going to assert that they qualify.

There are numerous distributed computing projects, from seti@home to the failed Lycos DOS spam screen saver which have utilized spare cycles on people?s desktops around the world. While both of these cases are different, they both rely on the donation model that people want to lend cpu power to different ends. And of course, this is interesting in that these models for computing power are based on altruism and (at least in the case of seti@home) seem to be at least a minimally effective at doing large scale distributed computing.

Whether or not altruism can be an effective method for doing distributed computing is an interesting question to consider, but I think that Electric Sheep adds a completely different dimension to this inquiry. What seems most unique is that distributed computing that Electric Sheep does is not for an end outside of aesthetics- those who run the screen saver get to watch it, and the more their computers participate in the creation of the these fractals, the more fractals there are to see.

This seems to me to be such an entirely different dimension of why one might participate in distributed processing. Where seti@home and other projects have very clear goals with their processing, Electric Sheep just gives us more mesmerizing images.

I think it is tempting to talk about the communal nature of people giving up cpu cycles for the generation of aesthetics, that there is an underlying utopian vision of expanding our aesthetic experience of life. I think this would be a mistake. To make such a claim, I think we?d need to be able to explicate a community, demonstrate that there were similar goals and direction. Looking around electricsheep.org, there isn?t much evidence of this. I just happen to know about it because of Kellan.

Instead of an underlying utopian prefiguration which I wish most opensource projects were built on, Electric Sheep seems to use a similar eerie anonymousness that pervades the internet. Of course, this isn?t a criticism of Electric Sheep, it?s a point that the process of creation doesn?t depend on any level of real community. I have no idea who else participates in the creation of the beautiful images that fill my screens, and little recourse to finding out who they are. Yes, of course it?s possible to do so, but the point more is that the process of creating this aesthetic experience is so different from anything else that I?m confronted by in my daily life.

Of course, humans don?t make these images. Computers do. Humans may have programmed it, but this ad hock web of computers that does it for us. And while I still find some of the fractals haunting, I think it is interesting to consider what it means when an anonymous group of individuals help generate an aesthetic experience based on altruism.

I don?t think Electric Sheep is revolutionary. I do think it challenges us to think about the process of living in a world where experiences in our daily lives based on aesthetics are rare enough to prompt me to write about a screen saver. There also seems to be some fundamental kernel of alienation and a dialectical negation and transformation that prompts its functionality.

Living in a world where life experience has been stripped so bare of aesthetic joy, where people are so divided from one another that terms politics and community are on some levels parodies of themselves, the idea that a computer program helps bring individual human experiences closer together is a farce. Yet, the very alienation that so viciously drives human experience apart is precisely what creates the circumstances for something like Electric Sheep to work. No, Electric Sheep doesn?t help render human society self conscious as art and media ought to, but it does shine a dim light into our daily lives, suggesting that there ought to be more aesthetic experiences and society at large ought to help create them.

Putting up with this kind of crap… well, the screen shot says it all. Given that these things opperate on the principle of the “Best Answer” we can all figure it out, but the reality is that this is a poorly formed question and there is nothing one can do about it. No one to call, no way to vocalize any protest. You just suck it up, pay your fee and take the damn test. sigh.

Ok so some more expermimentation with css. I think I just can’t admit that pure css is a good idea for design. With a simple table structure, all the fun of css can be neatly displayed in a reasonably cross browser format. Given how absurd the browser situation is if you don’t use fire fox, well, tables save my butt. I’m surprised, but I have noticed that there are some differences between layout on windows firefox and ppc linux firefox. I don’t think that there should be, but Jason and I often note that there are. My hunch is that the debian version that I’m running is just a version or two be hind (crap, it is). Oh debian. Oh woe is me.

I really like the electric sheep screen saver. I have it installed on my work machine which is of course debian, which makes everything easier. At home though, no such luck. I didn’t find any mandrake packages, so I just installed it. It actually worked first go for me.

Here’s what I did:

1) download source

2) following commands:
[arthur@toaster arthur]$ tar -xzf electricsheep-2.5.tar.gz
[arthur@toaster arthur]$ cd electricsheep-2.5/
[arthur@toaster electricsheep-2.5]$ ./configure
[arthur@toaster electricsheep-2.5]$ make
[arthur@toaster electricsheep-2.5]$ su root
Password:
[root@toaster electricsheep-2.5]# make install

3) start up the Xscreensaver (for me this is menu -> system -> configuration -> other -> screen saver)

4) done!

I find it amazing that MT is so easy to spam. Many of the blogs that I have to pay attention to for work are basically honey pots for spammers. I’ve installed the MT Blacklist extension so that now most of the blogs that I run are protected, but the legacy of spam takes forever to pull out. I’m tempted to just delete all the comments in the system- one blog I’m dealing with had 8500 spams and no real comments that I could find. Ironically, what made me really start paying attention to this is the fact that we burn huge amounts of bandwidth serving pages with thousands of spams on them. This really bugs me.