Whose tweets are worth following? Twitterers constantly ask this question; in answering it, we determine to whom we will and will not form a direct connection within Twitter, which seems to me a central component of the central nervous system of collective humanity. Simply put, Twitter seems to allow people to connect to more other people more quickly than any other medium on the planet today.

Considering that Twitter occupies this place of central societal importance, we could probably really use a system that automates the process of choosing whose tweets are worth following. This would save people the time spent looking for and evaluating new people to follow; it would also relieve people of the motivation to spend energy trolling for followers. The sets of people whom we follow and who follow us would grow and evolve over time, making more and better connections than we can by the current manual method.

I submit that we're not so different from each other that we need to maintain absolute and final control over whose issuances shall and shall not pass before our eyes. In fact, an algorithm solving this problem could become like a Robert's Rules of Order for a global direct democracy. By intelligently routing tweets based on shared interests and concerns -- however briefly shared -- we may greatly increase the efficiency of our communications and reduce semantic redundancies, i.e.. people hashing out the same issues in separate discussions and arguments. It may actually go a long way toward connecting people so efficiently that a lot of longstanding political impasses finally get resolved.

A simple way to begin would be to automatically follow people who live nearby. I'm sure some 3rd party site already offers this service, but any such service wouldn't have access to location information for most Twitterers, only for those who sign into the service. Twitter itself, on the other hand, could automatically gather this information from the IP addresses from which people log into Twitter. Imagine the service to humanity of simply connecting millions of people to their closest physical neighbors -- millions of new face-to-face friendships could easily be catalyzed.

Of course, any feature that automatically evolves our Twitter stream could start out as an option that you can turn on and off and use in conjunction with the manual method. Twitter, as a company, has tried to remain generally lean in terms of features, focusing on solidifying its core infrastructure and allowing third parties to develop bells and whistles. So it would not seem predisposed to making such a leap as this. But with such far-reaching possibilities, this would seem a natural direction to explore for taking the service to the next level, if an appropriate algorithm can be formulated.

The emergence of a global brain may accelerate significantly when Twitter, already arguably the single most important medium on earth, begins automatically making connections for us.

The power of computerized social networks to dissolve lingering suspicion and mistrust between people

The emerging global hyperconnected human family has reached a threshold of connectivity such that we can now implement mechanisms that will radically accelerate meaningful, value-driven communication and political reconciliation.

The language we use in daily life ("we" including even the most active online networkers) still often retains many assumptions from the pre-hyperconnected era -- for instance, the assumption that most of the messages we send will be received and processed only by a few intimately connected others. So we face the challenge of effectively integrating the realities of global hyperconnectivity into our daily language. This "daily language" includes the language that we transmit across social networks.

Most hardline Palestinian and Israeli militants are probably not on Twitter yet. But I hypothesize that enough people have now joined online social networks that if we can effectively dissolve the barriers of mistrust/suspicion/misunderstanding between these users, this will have enormous real-world political consequences.

Many people have lamented the vacuity of much of what people say on services such as Twitter. People often tweet the most mundane, the most thoughtless, the most malicious, the most whiny things. But face-to-face communication is infected with these same flaws. And with online social networks, we have the possibility of new network protocols/standards/mechanisms emerging that actually increase the quality of the content of our communications:

• automatic meme proliferation: putting the most popular "words (or images) of the day" on our screens automatically... (precursors include Twitter's "trending topics" on the right side of the screen) ... and letting each of us easily define our relationships to these memes
• gathering as much network-comprehensible information as possible about each user; using that information to automate message-routing/meme-proliferation

So as the network learns more about us as individuals, it will more intelligently route relevant memes to our screens, and as we interact with these memes, the network will learn yet more about us as individuals, etc.

Using these sorts of mechanisms, the network will soon automatically identify conflicts and actively mediate between the parties until the conflicts are resolved.

On August 13, 2008, I asked: How can we build universal agreement on "the" worldwide virtual reality, such that all of these virtual reality worlds will become integrated -- internavigable?

With the heads-up display assumptions I made in my last post, maybe we can now answer that question.

Every stream generated by someone with such a heads-up display will become a kind of tunnel through virtual reality, and any other streams superimposed on the recording of the travels of the person whose stream we're following will themselves be like portals to those other streams.

Also, any "instant" of a stream can be automatically linked to other "instants" from the same stream or other streams, based on structural similarity -- things happening in the same geographic location (based on GPS coordinates, etc.), happenings involving similar objects (based on tools like Google Similar Images), etc. can be automatically linked.

If we can imagine everyone with webcams on their foreheads, we can also imagine everyone wearing heads-up displays.

So now, instead of thinking about the webcams sometimes pointed at computers and sometimes not, we can imagine that each person will constantly stream out to the web the contents of their heads-up display -- showing what they see in front of their eyes AND whatever else the display superimposes on that.

In such a case, tuning into someone's output stream automatically includes tuning into their input streams as well

Imagine everyone wears a webcam on their foreheads all the time and streams video constantly to the web.

This will capture any face-to-face conversations/interactions, interesting things you see out the window, and any online videos you look at.

This scenario could serve as a conceptual model for the "ideal" raw stream to be cut up and optimally distributed by an algorithm for directing online streams into human-brain-like pathways. Intelligent, crowdsourced, editing of video could then serve as a rich enough method of expression to supplant text.

We'll still need to work out the algorithm itself, but we now have a possible model for the material on which it will operate -- a kind of recursive material, in that, with the webcams pointed at computers part of the time, you may be watching video of video of video, etc.

The model of a manually fixed set of people whom a microblogger follows necessarily preceded what is increasingly seeming to me the next logical step: a model in which we all follow everyone, but we follow some people more than others, and these ratios change, constantly and automatically, affected by our online behavior.

Current examples of automatic mechanisms for directing streams:

I follow one Twitter account that simply aggregates any post that includes the tag "#singularity", another that aggregates the most popularly tweeted links, and another that aggregates popularly RSS-syndicated links.

Tweeps frequently use 3rd-party websites accessing Twitter's API to manage the list of people they follow, for instance to automatically unfollow everyone by whom one has been unfollowed.

If I RT (reTweet) something, that could probably serve as a pretty definite indication that I want to keep following whoever previously tweeted it.

Why do we give credit to the previous tweeter ("RT @username")? Partly, we figure that many of our own followers might like to follow that person. If I thought that almost all of my followers already follow that person, then I'd probably be a lot less likely to RT it. RTing seems to imply not just that I find something very interesting, but also that I am likely to perceive it as relatively rare.

This appears as a possible crucial missing link -- an emerging semantic connection that is not yet taken into account by microblogging technology.

It appears that for all practical purposes, we may want to treat any RTing (posting of a link found through one of the people you follow) as a recommendation that everybody who follows the RTer also follow the person(s) who previously tweeted it. Most (or some selected portion) of the RTer's followers would then automatically begin following those previous tweeters. In the darkness of cyberspace, what more servicable sign of trust could we ask for? "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." You, my followers, and I aren't identical, but like the goose and the gander, we are of the same species.

In fact, heavy Twitter users probably click on such a small percentage of the links that scroll down their screens that just clicking on a link can be treated as some kind of recommendation.

We often we maintain an interest in continuing to follow people who nevertheless occasionally post spurts of specialized vocabulary that mean very little to us. If we could get some kind of automatic summary of these spurts, this may provide more information more efficiently than the skimming of low-signal-to-noise-ratio material.

With other people/streams, we may find a sort of inverse relationship to the one described in the previous paragraph: we may want to follow them only in certain specific contexts but not generally.

The next generation of microblogging technology will, let's say, automatically continuously adjust whom we follow. Maybe if we inquire as to the processes by which we currently decide whom to follow and unfollow, we can arrive at some definite algorithm or method for making those decisions automatically.

A Global Mind algorithm based on microblogging may work with these variables:
1) who you follow
2) what you post
Both of which Twitter users normally control by hand now.

I noticed a bit of controversy yesterday regarding some changes to Twitter's @reply system. Such flare-ups of emotion seem to me to function nicely to speed along the progression toward a more open, flexible, all-encompassing messaging system.

How many comments or replies on blogs, Twitter, etc., include just a link, or a link and a few words expressing some variation of "if you like that, you may also like this" or "this link points to a resource that solves the problem or answers the question you posed in your post" or "appropos of that, see also this"?

In a new messaging paradigm that will soon emerge, maybe simply navigating to another page soon after looking at a blog or microblog post will automatically link the second page to that post, eliminating the extra step of posting a comment. Not every such proximity will imply a relevant association, but other automatic mechanisms could account for that.

We're trying to automate the handling of information that arrives at our nodes -- to construct a Global Brain by turning our individual computers into the equivalent of neurons in a human brain. Our social senses -- our intuitions about the ramifications of different behavior choices in social settings -- can help us in our formulation of the algorithm.

That Al Gore, famous for his environmentalism and his stiffness, might have won the 2000 election, and enacted relatively planet-friendly policies, if he had been seen as having more rhythm, provides synchronistic support for the hypothesis that a particular algorithm (Al Gore rhythm) will play a pivotal role in the evolving relationship between our species and Planet Earth.

In addition to drawing inspiration from linguistics and other arts, sciences, etc., it seems like we may want to pay particular attention to social contexts in which we mimic, which might include copying the fight/flight/fuck response of another animal, repeating a word or words that someone has spoken, identifying with a tree or a rock, etc.

Hypothesis: Precisely define a high-level logic of interscreen interaction, and maybe a graphical implementation for it will somehow fall into place, especially if the high-level logic can be grafted easily onto already widely used open data schemes (RSS? social graphs? etc.).

The selection of a precise point or line on a screen, by clicking or dragging, implies that 1) the person has focused attention disproportionately on that area, and 2) some effect will happen connected to that particular area.

Beyond some primitive level of development of graphical interfaces, no two screenshots seem likely ever to display the same information and options.

So, how to dynamically and digitally represent the everchanging screen info to the cloud, and the everchanging cloud to the screen?

We recognize that everything will mean different things to different people, etc. We'll want to get the cloud to draw various inferences from our input, and intelligently distribute the information.

My expectations for the effects of my clicks and drags include complex factors of social interaction, when the interface on which I'm clicking and dragging integrates tightly into the cloud. I imagine such interfaces allowing for new modes of interaction with millions of minds, with vastly accelerated rates of feedback, such that we actually feel the reality of the dynamic existence of these millions of other people, from second to second, in new ways. I imagine that looking back from this perspective, the resolution of older media such as television, non-interactive videos, telephone conversations, etc. will appear nearly intolerably low.

Most socially useful software development has become increasingly open and collaborative.

Social discourse
Software development and much of our political, commercial, and legal discourse, when such discourse is organized around a few specific terms and negotiations over the terms' definitions and/or values (interest rates, legal definitions, legal rulings, negotiated legal/political settlements, etc.), seem like good early applications of the new type of interface. If these areas can be successfully absorbed into the new medium, vast amounts of drudgery, carried out by specialists, will evaporate as millions worldwide collaborate with comparatively awesome efficiency to solve new abstract problems arising in the cloud. Of course, institutions with long legacies of doing business through previous media, and with secretive habits, will probably not be among the first to adopt the new, open-to-the-world interface. But if it begins to fulfill its revolutionary promise among early adopters, the legacy systems will obviously integrate into it, as they have with the Web, with Twitter, etc. And since the new interface potentially subsumes and integrates all functions of current GUI software, it can be expected to virally infect and take over any abstract symbolic function of any existing institution.

Thousands of internet forums seem to prove the socio-moral-psychological viability of the idea of crowdsourcing the larger part of our abstract technical, commercial, legal, and political work. (This essay seeks to demonstrate its technical viability.) People at stackoverflow.com constantly hand out valuable technical advice to anyone who can coherently formulate a question. People seem to love to help, even with relatively boring problems, especially in noncoercive high-feedback environments where the impact of the help can be clearly felt and seen.

It seems helpful to face squarely at this juncture the question: what do we mean by clicks and drags? It seems beneficial to assume that the interface will take into account only the beginning and ending positions of drags, not the path between them. (This assumption carries over from most software we currently use.) With that assumption, we seem to have a fairly complete [complete enough? (for?)] structural picture of the basic input and output actions: a person looks at a screen, which displays pixels with occasionally changing colors, moves a pointer, or moves the contents of the screen over/around a pointer, and occasionally clicks or drags. The clicks may be brief enough that the hardware does not register the exact duration, but just associates the selection with a particular point or pixel on the screen at a particular time. A drag will involve two such associations, at the beginning and the end.

Then, we can ask how to program each interface so that the cloud as a whole intelligently distributes pixel colors? Defining "intelligently" here may appear at first as the prohibitively difficult question. But we have already assumed that people are deliberately selecting certain portions of their screens -- which of course we have been doing for several years now, maybe often with some kind of dull or reckless attitude, but maybe also, at other times, with some kind of actual creativity or intelligence. We have been injecting more and more intelligence into the cloud, such that the cloud can now be made intelligent enough to share the intelligence in new, radically decentralized ways, spreading it optimally among the interfaces.

An interface will contain some kind of idea about the meanings of our selections, as it will have already applied some criteria in determining what to display where and when on the screen. In our second-to-second deliberations as we navigate through this highly interactive environment, we will quickly learn to take the reactions of others into account. So my expectations regarding the effect of making a given selection includes considerations about 1) how it will affect my screen, and 2) how it will affect other people's screens.

[Perhaption X: Perhaps the interface/cloud can somehow, on some level, digitally encode any given "screenshot" by giving relative numerical values for the strength of the node's connections at that time to certain other nodes, or by simply listing a finite number of other nodes.]

As the screen pixels get dynamically patched together by the cloud, they will manifest various levels of "noise", with some more "fuzzy" areas where we can make out less definite meaning. Selecting such areas may indicate some meaningful connections between nearby patches containing greater internal coherence. The interface may 1) have already assigned different "fuzziness" values to different areas of the screen, so that it can decide which areas of coherence the person intends to indicate, or 2) calculate these values when the person makes a selection.

Perhaption X implies that whenever a person makes a selection, the node will recalculate its strength values and/or node list. But maybe instead of thinking about each "instant" of a given screen corresponding to a list of strength values or nodes, we can think about each selection as corresponding to such a list, and thus constituting a kind of "virtual node", a node not corresponding to a particular screen, but to a given choice made on a given screen.

Each virtual node connects to other virtual nodes. Here we may hopefully get into the crucial, tricky, precisely definable, recursive situation. Which other nodes does it connect to?

Let M represent a cluster of N nodes on a single user interface, in the center of which I make a selection. The interface will choose a value for N high enough to give valuable information about the selection, but low enough that it can handle the calculations, and will then look at the N closest nodes to the selection in formulating the weighted list of node conections for that selection (node). This list may include some of M or M in its entirety, and also remote nodes.

In order to generate M for the first time, before any selections within the new interface have been made, we will probably create tools that look at a person's blogs, email, social contacts through various social networks, online and offline bookmarks, hard disk contents, etc. These tools may prove useful for migrating our old information onto the cloud, but the new interfaces will then take over the generation and distribution of new content.

Assume that when people focus their attention on a particular area of the screen, they also poise their input device over/around that area, so increased attention given to an area correlates with increased probability of selecting it.

Terence McKenna talked about the elimination of the unconscious portion of the human psyche, about the Internet as the hardwiring of the human unconscious.

Let's look at how some details of this might play out.

How might we merge "private" semantic activity (outgrowths of silent, invisible individual thought processes) with "public" semantic activity (inclusive of social feedback)?

In the currently prevailing Web paradigm, we retain "private" activity by clicking on links, typing/posting words, etc. We experience feedback from these activities -- websites track our clicks and serve up advertising and other content based on the preferences that those clicks seem to reveal, and people respond to the words we post. But soon, as the differences between the various forums/blogs/websites dissolve, we will start to experience "continuous" feedback from our activities (our web browsing will then resemble the process of wandering though the collective human imagination), rather than "discrete" (with definite, noticable, human-defined intervals between input and output).

Okay, I will once again leave it at this very abstract level for now, and hope that someone else does the perspiration-intensive work of writing a Utopia-launching algorithm :)  I continue to intuit that such an algorithm may very well be right on the tip of someone's tongue right now, and that in fact, I could easily write it, given several consecutive free hours and the proper consciousness-altering substances.

Jeb Bush recently suggested Republicans set up a "shadow government."

How could a decentralized, Internet-based "shadow government" work?

It would have no legal standing; it would exist in the most ephemeral of realms. But if it becomes a popular enough application -- if enough people tune in -- then its very popularity may give it power.

We already have a vocabulary of unique identifiers called URLs or URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) for the Web and the Semantic Web. Political progress comes when people agree about what they're talking about, and then agree on the relationships among the things they're talking about. Our political discourse often gets stymied when we skip the step of agreeing on the meanings of terms, and move straight into assertions about the proper relationships among the terms.

Let's say I speak some politically sensitive words, "A B C D." I might know that someone else would prefer "B A C D" but since I disagree, and have some kind of priviledged access to some medium, I assert my preferred ordering, and thereby get my way.

Now, maybe I'm a government official and I'm making these statements on my blog. When I blog "A B C D" the person disagreeing can leave a comment, or link to my post on their own blog (these two methods are quickly becoming indistinguishable) with their own opinion.

If I'm using URIs as values for the variables A through D, then the statement becomes easily searchable. If I'm a widely known public figure, anyone interested in these particular four terms will quickly happen upon 1) my blog post and 2) the comments from others linked to my blog post. Or they may not link to my post, but the search results will turn up their posts since those posts include the same terms.

So we already have mechanisms by which any exactly defined set of terms can be encoded such that anyone can get anyone's opinion virtually instantly on the optimal sequence of the terms. Now, how might those retreiving this information process these competing opinions?

Submitted at Change.gov:

A suggestion for Obama for avoiding getting isolated in a bubble of close advisors:
Maybe twice a week, have a 2- or 3-hour free-wheeling roundtable meeting. Invite new people to sit at the table each time. You may want to keep some close advisors as semi-regulars, but focus on diversity and turnover. Stream the video on the Internet live, and take questions and comments through Skype, Twitter, etc.

At http://www.change.gov/page/s/yourvision the incoming Obama administration invites us to submit suggestions. I sent this:

As technology continues to remove barriers to communication, I expect we'll experience dissolutions of political barriers on many levels, culminating in a system of direct rather than representative democracy that will largely transcend current nation-state borders. Personally I strongly suspect that this new form of planetary governance will emerge as a political reality before the end of President Obama's first term.

As of a few months ago, over half the planetary population owned a mobile phone, and the trend lines for adoption of the newest communication technologies continue to follow exponential growth curves despite the recession. I expect the 18-month-old microblogging monopoly Twitter to give way to decentralized de facto microblogging standards. These new standards will incorporate media-rich exchanges such as video blogging, which Twitter currently lacks, and will in turn evolve into ever subtler, more efficient ways of routing information and thereby coordinating activities, with the direct participation of ever greater portions of the world population. So I see a bright future, if we can avoid catastrophic flare-ups of hostilities in this transitional period.

Girl Talk Has Its Limits
The New York Times, September 10, 2008

Some studies have found that excessive talking about problems can contribute to emotional difficulties, including anxiety and depression.

The term researchers use is “co-rumination” to describe frequently or obsessively discussing the same problem. The behavior is typical among teens — Why didn’t he call? Should I break up with him? And, psychologists say, it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook. And in certain cases it can spin into a potentially contagious and unhealthy emotional angst, experts say.

In Tough Times, Even the Billionaires Worry
The New York Times, September 10, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/10/business/businessspecial3/10PSYCH.html

"Almost everybody is worrying, including people who are billionaires," said Dennis Pearne, a psychologist in Framingham, Mass., who works with wealthy patients. He says lately he has noticed that "the worry increases with the size of the holdings."

The bigger the amount, the more patients have to worry about losing, and these losses prey on their deepest fears about money, Dr. Pearne said. Either they feel that they did not deserve the money in the first place, or they feel entitled to their wealth and are angry when it is gone, he said.
...
“To the extent that they have shame, then the shame multiplies with the size of the fortune,” he said.

Steve: "How to hold back the influx of ever greater information flows? ... We're already so overloaded, maybe the next generation of software will focus on filtering out unwanted information, instead of figuring out how to find the right information to present to us..."

Nick: "Yeah... Now... Hm... My daughter and I just watched a video of a guy manipulating images from Google Earth on a touch screen... He would spin them around with two fingers..."

nearly all the world's dramatic legal, political, territorial, ideological disputes may be on the verge of getting worked out, some even amicably.

i find myself making mini-judgments about people as we interact, vestiges of obscurity/intolerance*, friction, drag, partially conscious damnations of differences on many scales; it seems usually when i investigate the feelings, they appear connected to latent political conflicts of interest on the scale of human economics; ie. fights for survival between me and them in contexts of limited resources.

Our "leaders" tell us they must keep information secret in order to prevent ...?

i've pondered the connections between
1) arguments between people, and
2) arguments (parameters) in computer programming languages

If I've looked up the etymology of "argue" I forget what I found out. Another note to self: look up stories about the paralyzed person who Michio Kaku said can control a computer cursor through an implanted brain chip.

when humans fight, some kind of deception usually seems to come into the picture.
malicious "arguing" may be understood as mislabeled asserting rather than arguing in the programming sense, sort of following RAW's rap (he draws a sharp contrast betw assertions & arguments). a fight ("argument" in one sense) can be seen as a series of assertions disguised as arguments-in-the-other-sense.

* obscurity meaning something like the illusion of separateness or sumthin like that