Filed under: development, open source
So it seems I’m in a bit of a quandry: I write blog posts about SupraSphere, but we need development support. Now, how could I garner support by writing a post?
Well, as most know, I am completely obsessed with Ubuntu Linux. It’s very stable (including the bleeding edge beta for 8.04) and the ease of use is phenomenal. A few days ago I directed quite a number of people to this very blog from the Ubuntu forums. My thought was *maybe*, just maybe a developer would stumble upon my review of VirtualBox and have their interest piqued about the project. Much to my dismay, this did not unfold as I wished it had. That being said, my next step is announcing the project itself on the Ubuntu brainstorm. Why? If you’ve been following Suprablog, I’m sure you gather that we primarily use the Linux operating system, and to be specific, Ubuntu. Therefore, it’s natural that we would think of integration deep within Ubuntu as if boundaries didn’t exist.
So, why would SupraSphere and Linux make a good team? The truth is, SupraSphere could and should become a key piece of Ubuntu and the evolving Linux Desktop story. The reason is that it has key conceptual attributes that will allow Linux to innovate and leapfrog other approaches. These attributes are these four general areas: services-oriented desktop (web os/desktop), end-to-end security, database filesystem, and virtualization. We have Launchpad, which has incredible community support for a multitude of smaller projects. Now, imagine using Launchpad and SupraSphere hand in hand; improving in a top-notch security environment and being able to communicate and access information/documentaion in providing the best open source projects out there. Sounds like a dream come true for other developers, no?
Running SupraSphere is in fact like running a virtual desktop. It can store all of your files, bookmarks, rss feeds, contacts, and email all in one place, where you can search across them. It has extremely secure messaging and authentication (beyond SSH and SSL even). You can tag across all message types. You can search and view your desktop remotely. It’s the ideal system to fit in with the virtualization trends that are emerging. We already have four distinct and separate user interfaces that all share messaging protocols and the same data store: Eclipse RCP, plain servlet, RAP ajax UI, openlaszlo, and even a prototype XUL interface.
That said, there are of course problems. We don’t even have a .deb or .rpm packaged version of our system. While we have some connections within the Eclipse, Mozilla, Sun/Java, and Apache communities, we have little or no exposure within the the Linux ecosystem, especially within the Ubuntu community. We feel very strongly that if Ubuntu were to embrace the ideas within our project, it would put Ubuntu above and beyond any other distribution, and help lead the way to Linux Desktop bliss.
Please help. Now is the time. With Java and Linux becoming closer, with MySQL now a part of Sun, SupraSphere can tie in numerous different communities and projects, and propel the Linux desktop way ahead of the competition.
If you have experience with Linux (especially Ubuntu), Java, or Ajax, please contact us to volunteer your efforts.
Email us at: developers [at] suprasphere [dot] com
Filed under: open source, sphere
I have become accustomed to using Pidgin for managing my incredibly long IM list. It’s alright for the most part, although it’s lacking in a few departments. Currently file transfer in Yahoo Messenger is broken, well, (I have heard that MSN does work, but I never use it) it seems like all file transfer is broken. Audio and Video Messaging in AIM and Yahoo does not function either.
Yes I know, it seems like I have a lot to complain about, but one thing I really love about Pidgin is the capability to set one icon and one status for all running accounts. Generally I have three running at any given time, Yahoo, GTalk, and AIM, with the occasional Jabber account running. Naturally I have it set to logging all messages and statuses, as well as logging my contacts as when they were “last seen” in military time. Plus, who doesn’t love to chat it up on #ubuntu-forums? Pidgin supports IRC too.
Now, I have yet to get my hands on the web version of SS, but from what I understand, a lot of things I’ve been wanting are coming true. However, this is not about what’s going on with the web development. This is about what I’d like to see in the web version. :)
SS is cross-platform as we all know, so having a truly cross-platform, fully compatible, richly featured IM client would be awesome. But, as we also know, SS is not an IM client. Wouldn’t it be cool though to be able to use SS and its IM feature to communicate with other clients though?
How would it work? In the not so distant future, users of the web-based or the software-based client would be able to open a context specific “social sphere” dedicated to only IM. Using some sort of invite feature, one could invite others to link with them in this sphere and regardless of the protocol used (whether it be AIM, Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, or what have you) users could message their contacts. However, as a user of SS, we’d be able to use it full-featured with the terse messaging, whereas the non-SS users would see every message in the standard view for their client.
What I think would be really outstanding is if there were some way to incorporate voice and/or video into SS, as a more intuitive (and furthermore a multi-platform) version of Skype, Wengo, or even iChat. Voice chat and video conferencing seems to be the new wave for social networking, although many corporations have been pioneering this venture for years now. First hand I know JCPenney uses real-time and on-demand video conferencing and training for associates as well as supervisors and managers, and I have an educated guess that other “fine retailers” do the same. It certainly is not new, but being able to bring this to people not associated with big business would be a big benefit to the whole communication scene.
Myspace has introduced it’s Myspace/Skype IM client in recent history, and although I don’t use Myspace, many of my contacts do and conveniently beg me to install it. Thankfully it doesn’t seem to function under Linux, even with Wine, because for some reason I have a general loathing for all things Myspace. However, the way I understand it, Skype communicates with the Myspace client, so some of my brave friends will Skype me. I’m really hoping Facebook would implement something like this…
There are many more ideas and hypothetical new features that I plan on discussing as a weekly feature. However, I’d love to hear your input on what you’d like to see in the web-client or the software-client. Send me an email, IM me, or more importantly, leave a comment for everyone to read!
Filed under: economy, messaging, mobile
I recently got an iPhone, mostly because I have heard a lot of buzz about it, they recently released an SDK, and since I serve as a sort of personal technology consultant to a number of individuals and businesses, I figured it was time that I developed an informed opinion of it.
Well, it’s quite a different device than the Blackberry, but I can safely say that if you like your Blackberry, do not, under any circumstances, get an iPhone.
The amazing thing about the Blackberry is how transparent it is. It just gets out of your way. Much like SupraSphere, it becomes like an extension of your brain.
On the other hand, here are some of the problems with the iPhone:
- The network is *really*, *really* slow. The Blackberry that I last had ran over the same AT&T Edge network, but was so much faster for browsing, I am guessing because it serves up much smaller pages. Any benefit of having something closer to the “real web” on your phone is totally ruined by how horrible the browsing is with such a slow network experience.
- Not only is the network horrendously slow, but the thing doesn’t seem to multitask. On the Blackberry, you could open a link on the browser and then do other things, like read or write emails or whatever (except calling) while the page was loading. The iPhone forces you to watch the page load, really…….really……..slowly. This also applies to email messages. It’s bad enough that iPhone doesn’t have Blackberry’s famed “push” technology, but you would think it could at least download messages in the background.
- The typing is not nearly as good or as practical as the Blackberry. With the Blackberry, you can type quite quickly, without looking at the keyboard that much at all. Also, you can type pretty effectively and operate the device quite fantastically with one hand. The iPhone requires much more of your focus and concentration to operate.
- The feature of the iPhone where it turns a webpage horizontally for better viewing/reading is kind of a neat gimmick at first, but they definitely should have made a way to lock it out with some sort of hardware switch. It doesn’t always respond quickly, and sometimes gets stuck in one direction, forcing you to turn the thing in all sorts of directions trying to get it to return to the direction you want. As an example, if you’re walking with the phone in your hand while using the browser to look at an address or directions to a location, each time you drop your hand to the side as you walk and then bring it back up to look at it, the screen will be in the wrong direction. As another example, if you try to show someone else something on the screen while still holding the device, it will often switch directions as you angle it over for the other person to see it better. On the whole, the negatives of the feature outweigh the positives at least 5 to 1.
- The WiFi capability is pretty pointless, which in all fairness to Apple, has a lot to do with WiFi itself as opposed to the iPhone. Generally there aren’t many open wireless networks anymore, and even when there are, it forces you to stay within range of the WiFi to have the faster speeds making you a lot less mobile. Most of the time, if you’re going to be in a single place for a while, such as in a coffee shop or at home, you will want to use a laptop anyway. Starbucks is supposedly moving to AT&T and offering two hours of free WiFi a day, but it’s no consolation that the iPhone will operate more quickly for the five or ten minutes you might spend in Starbucks. Then, if I’m at a friend’s house, I am most likely not even going to bother asking them for their wireless key, which is even more of a pain to type into an iPhone than into a laptop. If I don’t have my own laptop with me, I’ll probably just ask to borrow theirs instead of using the iPhone.
- The interface of the iPhone is definitely pretty, but more than occasionally things are not very intelligently laid out. Again, the Blackberry is an absolute interface marvel. Everything is so logical and internally coherent in how it all works together. The most convenient option is always in the right place. For one simple example, with the iPhone mail application, to go back to the Inbox, it’s all the way in the upper left of the screen, which is not the most logical place. For another example, if you go to a web page where you need to login, on the iPhone you have to click and then try to get the cursor into a small text input box or zoom the page so you can even click on the text input box, whereas on the Blackberry the cursor is always automatically selected into a text field and large enough that you can see what you’re typing . That isn’t to say that the Blackberry is perfect, but after using it for years, I can honestly think of only a couple of very minor nits to pick. Generally, you never end up thinking that on the Blackberry something wasn’t supremely logical or intuitive.
- RIM owns the enterprise market, especially in the financial services industry and generally among C-level executives. That makes it particularly impressive that the Blackberry Pearl has strattled the consumer and enterprise markets so effectively. Still, support for the iPhone inside companies, despite news stories such as these, is very lacking and will continue to be for the forseeable future. There are enough challenges as it is trying to manage contacts and keep everything in sync between the Blackberry, Outlook, SalesForce.com and other systems without throwing another device into the mix. Since Apple has not historically had much success in the enterprise, is the iPhone going to be the start of a deeper commitment to business users for other products as well? That remains to be seen, and it’s hard to imagine the iPhone getting deep penetration within the enterprise without Apple’s also becoming more of a business-oriented company as far as its culture and across their other products and technologies.
- The iPhone has no ability whatsoever to select text. That means no Copy/Cut/Paste. Totally pathetic!
- The battery life isn’t that great at all and the battery’s not easily and quickly replaceable on top of it.
- You have to use iTunes to manage it. Blech. Also see #7.
I could go on about the negatives (like it takes way, way longer to connect to a network after returning from a place with no coverage, like the subway). The only thing that is much better about the iPhone is visual voicemail.
Now that I’ve been very specific about the iPhone and the Blackberry, I would like to move to a slightly bigger picture perspective with respect to the mobile web/internet and where things are headed.
First, I’ll start with some of the negative. Here’s a good article that lists some of the reasons why cell phone carriers suck. One of my mother’s friends swore never to deal with AT&T again after they messed up his credit over some sort of incredibly old bill where they had told him that they wouldn’t charge him for something but then did. Unfortunately, it’s not like there is any option that’s even acceptable, much less good. You’ve heard the stories of insane cell phone bills, including this one for close to $85,000.00! Sprint is hemorrhaging customers and considering a merger with T-Mobile, who I hate and think I am going to file a small claims lawsuit against just for fun. I was a loyal and dedicated customer of theirs for 7 years, and they wouldn’t make a change to my bill because I discovered one of their mistakes “too late”. Rebate programs are a complete and total scam (and in some cases more tedious than filing your taxes), and T-Mobile never sent me a single check for any of the ones I filled out. Actually, I once asked one of their sales people to fill one out as a favor so I could make sure there weren’t any mistakes. Same result. With Sprint, another friend of mine got charged two month’s worth of cell phone service for one month because he changed his plan mid-month, and instead of pro-rating it, they charged him for both plans! It was a more expensive option on top of it! Maybe Sprint and T-Mobile deserve one another after all. “SprinT-Mobile, You can’t blame us for trying!™”. Basically, pretty much all the carriers nickle and dime you over petty pricing schemes, roaming charges, text messages, overages, and random fees.
Cell phone companies should absolutely be completely banned from interacting with credit bureaus, not like the lobbies would ever let that happen. I suppose we should be happy we got number portability. That was probably the only concession that will ever be made.
However, that really only scratches the surface of broader trends. You’ve heard the all controversy about telecom immunity. Whatever. Whoever is fighting those battles, don’t waste your breath. You’re like one person trying to stop a avalanche.
Here are some other gems in the news:
FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool
Is the government reading your email?
Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier — Congress Reacts
Here’s a very good, but surface analysis of why it’s all really stupid, totally unequal, and inherently unfair, no matter how good the hardware or how sophisticated the project. It’s not just that we are all counting on falafel to help catch terrorists, it’s that it completely misses the point regarding how completely backwards all of these approaches are to facing the emerging threats to society like terrorism. We are simultaneously missing a really big opportunity while we obsess over all the negatives, leaving no time and space for the positives to flourish. It’s not only that I’m jealous that the government already has the semantic web, I swear!
Without diving too deep into the utopia vs. dystopia false dichotomy, there are very few of us in my generation (as of now yet to be named, certainly not Gen X, but not what any of the marketers have tried to pin on us) who won’t have this image from the Matrix forever sketched in our heads. Do I have any semblance of autonomy, self-determination, rights in the digital age where there are so many shadowy organizations making all sorts of secret assertions about me, who all exercise individually, and especially considered in aggregate, a massively uneven amount of leverage, power, and control over me? They can ruin my credit, where I can’t even put a dent in theirs. I am not a conspiracy theorist at all (although they are often interesting mental exercises to debunk through comprehensive thinking and principles such as Occam’s Razor), but there is most certainly a confluence, not necessarily conscious coordination, of aligned interests in turning the end user into a highly predictable (no matter how irrational) slave to/of consumption and consumerism.
This is not just about privacy. The grievances are many and deep. It’s about the credit system and credit ratings and credit cards. It’s about identity theft and SPAM/SPIM, viruses, spyware, and adware. It’s about incomprehensible and unnecessarily long contracts and privacy policies that can be changed at any time, click-through-EULA’s, proprietary formats/protocols, software patents, and DRM. It’s about having to get fingerprinted to travel. It’s about our debt-dependent and driven financial system. It’s about obscene corruption in government and corporations. It’s about a general lack of trust in our institutions. It’s about every single organization who provides services (web or not) with the ability to pull the plug, or at least the rug out from under us at any time, who all exercise as much leverage and control as possible from every conceivable angle to squeeze as much money out of you as they can, even if they just slow play their hand. It’s like my friend Val says, “There is no burden greater than what the market will bear”.
So, the ideal mobile system would look like this. It would be open source, hopefully even with open hardware. It would run on an open, free, highly secure and private, distributed and redundant wireless mesh networking grid. It would have amazing social networking capabilities, with pluggable social protocols that could spread virally across regions depending on how effectively they normalize and harmonize within certain communities that adopt them.
When you take a picture, or record a video, it would be securely transferred back to your personal cloud, geotagged in the process. Your music would all be available for streaming directly from your phone. Your phone, being tethered to your own sphere and context, could store voice mail privately on your own server with virtually unlimited storage, with easy speech to text conversion. You could leave personalized voice or text messages for people when they call you, instead of having to call them and leave a message. Like what someone’s wearing on the train? Query their context for what they’re wearing. You could choose to let people query your context for your style and the brands that you are wearing or have worn, with an instruction for others to feel free to ask where you got it, which could actually be reported back to the place where you got it. While at the store shopping, you could call someone who recently purchased an item you are looking at for their opinion, and filter it by people who have been called already by someone else, who agreed to a rule that if they answer your call, you have to agree to write your own opinion afterwards and publish it in the context of the person you called so that other people who call the same person will have the aggregate opinion. This could also work for restaurants as well. With all of the social data available, and because privacy can be preserved, mobile search would actually work with all of the deep contextualization that can be applied to queries. Attributes of products could be stored, such as how far a product had to travel, the various organizations that “touched” it on its way, even with the ability to “search inside” any one of the companies at any level in the supply chain to understand attributes and opinions about each company both as the company presents them and within various spheres.
Synchronization would be totally automatic and transparent, where a change made one place would always be reflected in other contexts, simply because everything would be a query back to the individual’s own private context, with everything federated and centralized around the individual. You could use numerous different devices, like a Blackberry and and iPhone :), where they both read from the same data store for contacts and other information and you could choose which one you wanted to use, maybe just switching between them fluidly just for fun for a different experience or change. If you borrowed someone else’s device, or even traded devices with someone for a while, you could switch to your context and have the interface render and populate with your data.
Indeed, context would be king. Anywhere you went and listened to music or saw something interesting, your phone could query the system, and automatically save the music to your sphere. Your own geolocation would be intelligently managed. For example, it could be automatically published to your family or select contacts at all times, or with interesting rules such as “shared for 20 minutes before any meeting with all the individuals participating”, turned off completely or just masked in certain situations. You could walk around and listen to mini “podcasts” about an area (like those guided tour systems, just available anywhere), filtered according to various attributes, such as “historical”.
Don’t get me wrong. Things like this are cool and definitely a step in the right direction. Google Android is promising, especially when considered in conjunction with open social. But they don’t go nearly far enough, and no one has taken the plunge to take it to the next level, which is what it will take before people like us get really excited. One of my friends works for Google, and says that I shouldn’t be so sure that they wouldn’t be open to moving away from their pattern of trying to make people completely tethered to the Google Grid instead of giving people their own personal, private context. That is what we are doing, working to give individuals their own private grid from which they can individually, and collectively, cause any or all of the myriad of the organizations vying for control and influence to conform to the internal aesthetic of beauty as determined by the individual and their conscience, propagated intersubjectively.
My next post will detail how to get the level of cooperation and coordination from all companies and institutions necessary to bring about the mind-blowing opportunities and possibilities that lay dormant in mapping the social graph on our own, without any training wheels or hand holding.
Nothing described in the above is all that challenging technically and needn’t be that far out all, so I don’t mean to sound like one of those lame “visionaries” trying to say how things will be in the future. With all the buzz around “social networking”, the real challenge, not so ironically, is a social one after all.
“We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born — a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of the regeneration of individuality, liberty, community, and ethics such as the world has never known, and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.” –Dee Hock, Founder of Visa International
Filed under: open source
For once, I am writing a more personal post, which in some respects flows easier for me, but in this instance is quite difficult. I’d like to provide some background as to why I write this blog.
Starting way back, when I was about three or four, my mother brought me and my sister to the Windsor Public Library, and signed the both of us up for a children’s computer class. Because I was so young, I remember very little, but what I do remember was playing the Jeopardy computer game on a Mac and completely loving the experience.
As I grew older, both my father and grandfather at one point owned the IBM Wang monochrome desktops. Whenever my father was not home, I would try to “hack” into it by guessing at passwords: shamefully I never succeeded in “cracking the code” but my father did divulge the correct password after he got a new computer.
When I got my first computer I was so happy, a Macintosh LC all for myself! I did loads of schoolwork on that, and attempted at programming simple games which resulted in my mother removing of the mouse and keyboard from the computer because I wanted to stay up all night. I succeeded in making a Tetris game and a Pong-like game.
That is how it all started, but my priorities changed when I reached middle school and high school. Because of my drawing skills, I was drafted into the fine arts program at NFA, and thought about becoming an architect. At the last minute when enrolling for college, I went decided to go for a dual-degree; Information Technology and Architectural Science
Now that we’ve dived into my personal history of being a geek, surely you can begin to see why I write this. One thing that was always hard for me was writing about things I either knew little about or where I did not find any interest in the subject. Obviously, I love SupraSphere.
Honestly, I write this blog because I truly believe in the project, in all the people working to make David’s dream a reality, in “uniting the internet” by creating something way more intuitive and logical than ever thought of before. It is an incredible opportunity for me to be able to have a part in this amazing undertaking, one that I’m sure many would like to take part in.
So, in essence, this is almost a “call to arms” to help make the internet revolve around us individually. How can you help? With the release of the web-version just around the corner, I petition you to submit either here in comments or at suprablog@gmail.com ideas you have for SupraSphere. Also, we have made the project Open Source for developers! If you are a developer and want in, please do join us!
~Andria
Filed under: cloud, economy, sphere
I had an interesting meeting couple of days ago with Andy Lippmann of the MIT Media Lab. He had a hard time seeing the connection between the idea of a secure, private, “personal cloud” and currency, so I figure I have a lot of work to do if someone so esteemed as Dr. Lippmann does not see the connection as obviously and clearly as I do.
First off, there are different connotations of currency, many of which have nothing to do with quantification and numerical accounting, particularly in traditionally understood units and/or denominations. Most people have heard of the concepts of “social capital” or “political capital”, for example. In considering different ideas around currency, there is also a question as to whether currencies are “convertible” into dollars or exchangeable into other forms of currency in other communities and networks beyond those in which they originate. As an example, many people have heard of “Linden Dollars” from the video game “Second Life”, which do have an implicit conversion rate to US dollars. Compare them to World of Warcraft Gold, which, while it used to be purchasable on eBay before eBay explicitly banned the practice, has no implicitly set conversion rate.
Because of my background, I have a fairly good grasp of traditional money and how it works as a system. Most people know that SupraSphere has several installations in some financial services institutions, particularly hedge funds. This has afforded me a pretty in-depth look at how the financial system functions and how people who trade stocks and focus fanatically on increasing the amount of money they have actually think.
Everyone knows that money makes the world go round and is the bottom line. This is why I have been so fascinated by it. It’s more pervasive and prevalent, by far, than any single other psychological construct in the world. As a mindset, it far surpasses both television and organized religion combined in its ability to generate a unified and homogenized world view. So, having grown up in a fairly socially conscious and idealistic family, I was drawn to thinking of the structure and design of money as a particularly fun and challenging lever to pull in terms of changing the world. If there were one single underlying construct where changing its definition would have the single most substantial effect on the world, it would clearly be with money itself.
That said, banking and financial systems themselves are at the core actually very simple accounting systems that only really become complex by how people try to game them, all under the guise of “creating efficiencies”. You deduct from one place, you add to another. Transferring funds is really not that complicated a process. The overall point is that as it becomes more and more the case that money exists primarily a digital phenomenon consisting of overlapping interactions of accounts (in some ways actually a “social network”), how complex is banking really that people can’t have direct control over the overall process of issuing and managing currency? The most important thing to think of in this case is the creation/issuance of money and its underlying definition and value, which is already assumed when you get into the accounting stage. However, if people have their own set of servers (spheres) that can create intersecting relationships with other spheres (accounts), we might very well be able to enter into an era of “open source money”.
Before I get into specifics about how SupraSphere can help to “open source money”, I will provide some more perspective on my background for more context. I have long been a fan of free software, ever since I first compiled a Linux kernel on an old 386 at the Shiva Corporation in high school in the early 90’s. This was before Windows for Workgroups even, where DOS still ruled the roost and where Microsoft was just starting to enter the world of GUIs that Apple Macs had been in for 10 years prior. I had a simple thought. If DOS was more popular than Macs because it was more open, easier to tinker with and fix despite being ridiculously harder to use, then Linux would eventually be more popular than DOS for the same reason, which I incidentally think also applies to Windows NT.
While I loved Linux and tried to install it everywhere I could, my father absolutely hated how I couldn’t see that DOS and Windows were more important for business and that I was investing so much time in a hobbled platform with pretty much no important or critical applications. In fact, if you ask my two younger brothers, they would attest to how much my distaste for the Windows platform actually hurt my relationship with my father who would spend hours trying to lecture me into using Windows. The smart money went with Microsoft, but I didn’t care. It was too late. I had bought into this whole “freedom and openness” thing and was still a bit too isolated from the real world of bills and mortgages to think that I was potentially compromising my future earnings.
Instead, I started to think even more abstractly in terms of currency, value, and exchange. I thought it was really spectacular that GNU/Linux, when considered together, represents the largest collaborative engineering project ever undertaken by humanity, and was being built at the time mostly by volunteers who believed in a common cause of creating a better system than Windows. I know Linus has said that he has never wanted to destroy Windows and instead only focuses on making Linux better, but those of us who adopted Linux as a platform were drawn to a common cause that there simply had to be something better than Windows (particularly because we were the ones who had to fix it for all of our friends and family), not to mention that we hated the idea in principle of a company’s making computers intentionally incompatible or hard to work with, given how hard in general it is to get them to work right in the first place.
So GNU/Linux is a system comprising attributes of emergence, self-governance, anarchy, evolution, openness, freedom, and now with some Ubuntu thrown in. But, there is no real business model for it. There are some awkward ways for businesses to make money off of it, usually involving support and customization, but those have their own problems. Imagine instead if the profit motive could be directly aligned and intertwined with open source software production.
Another area that has no proper business model is digital music. Despite the success of iTunes, I have never bought a single song on it. I hate the idea that I could lose access to what I have paid thousands of dollars for just for moving to a different computer, not to mention that it doesn’t even run on Linux. My mother can’t use it in Hong Kong and many people don’t have access to it around the world. Why would I endorse such a thing as the “proper” solution to how music should be considered in the digital Internet age? Not to mention, I have used better systems, such as AllofMP3 and OINK, which were both actually better than Napster ever was, IMHO.
I think in both cases, GNU/Linux (and other open source systems, including suprasphere) and digital music, we need to think differently about money itself in order to come up with a solution to the problem of how artists will get paid and how to ensure freedom while still being able to make money on software. The key is to think of “creating money” instead of “making money”. Given that two gigantic forces are on a collision course, the financial system on the one hand, and the Internet, which comprises digitally distributed music and video, collaboratively developed free software, the web (both 2.0 and 3.0) ;) on the other, which would you bet will come out on top?
The truth is that the transactional efficiencies and network externalities of the web put the entire financial system to shame. There were hints of this back in the web 1.0 bubble days of the “new economy”. People thought that Internet companies didn’t need to conform to old concepts of “revenue”, “profit”, and “cost of goods sold”. Eyeballs were the new currency of the day. Well, I don’t think it’s as far from what the truth could be, assuming that people allow that the nature of money itself (as opposed to just the application of it) can actually be changed. Even as people talk about a new bubble, and people wonder how companies like Facebook will ever live up to their valuation, I think we can take steps to move the entire financial system on to the architecture of the Internet and the Web, and make it open source on top of it!
In fact, I have numerous times heard the semantic web referred to as an “information bus” (TechnicaLee Speaking), and we are starting to see the convergence of the semantic web and the activities of general financial services companies such as with Reuters Calais. What else is the financial system but a global information bus? Why else would financial services companies want to integrate instant messaging into the kernel of an operating system?
Even as suprasphere contains pretty amazing technology and is a very unique and innovative application, we are not proposing as a vision something that isn’t already happening. Instead, we are trying to suggest clearly what it all adds up to, and certainly hope that suprasphere serves as a reference point outside of just giving us some credibility to suggest this broader vision.
So, here we go. What if, each time an individual or group invents a new concept in a unique semantic namespace, a currency (stock) account for that unique new namespace was also simultaneously created? Such a namespace could represent a new music album, website, Linux module, or just about any project. As other people linked to that unique namespace, downloaded from that namespace, collaborated around that namespace, the stock of of that entity would automatically rise as more people used it and interacted with it. The more interest in the creative output of the group responsible for the project, the more interest would accrue in their account. This even has analogies in the “peer to patent” proposal for how to reform the patent system.
So as currency accumulates in an account/sphere, it can be spent just like with “normal money”, but every time it gets spent (on things like clothes, food, cars, etc.), it must get spent as a proportion of the interest and the principal. As soon as the principal is gone, it can no longer accrue interest. Perhaps if it’s invested in somebody else’s sphere as both interest and principal, it can accrue interest on both. There might be an expiration point where after accumulating interest for so long, the namespace itself becomes public domain.
Or not. That was my freestyle idea of how it might work, but the exact model and details are truly open for debate and dialog, which should at the very least feel exceptionally empowering in and of itself. At this point the details of how the system can work are not as important as achieving consensus around the overall premise, where we can start to set in motion the conditions where the exact attributes can emerge and evolve. Just like the financial system (and the credit system for that matter), one can’t design and manage it centrally in a command-and-control fashion, but we can set in motion the idea that people can be in true control over their own bank account and concept of “net worth” and allow a new system to emerge in true chaordic fashion.
I realize that this is in many respects a crazy idea. I have not only been thinking and talking along these lines for a long time, but also working extremely hard each and every day to help bring this about. However, every day that goes forward the greater the intellectual risk as I spend more social capital to keep the dialog open and the greater the possibility that someday I will wake up bankrupt, not just in my bank account but in the lack of people who care enough even to have a conversation about these concepts. I have sacrificed many, many years pursuing this core idea, and ask that you forgive the raw and unbaked nature of my presentation, and instead of only finding fault and poking holes and dismissing this outright, please give it a chance. We are at a tricky time in the world, with crises and problems of seemingly insurmountable proportion everywhere we look, and as a result I think we deserve the right to think openly and freely about the nature of money, and seize the opportunity to fashion it along lines that will support each of our grandest goals and ambitions.
Posted on March 23rd, 2008 by Andria LeBaron
No Comments »