Memepark

Another example of why contextual advertising is an inappropriate model for funding web content in a civil society:



Found on Sploid by way of Gawker.

Previously: Advertising on 43 Things

Reading this post on Slashdot today, I had a glimpse of my future:

Yesterday I had the prideful pleasure of watching my eldest daughter show me how she can play ANY of her CD's on her linux box. She uses FireFox, openOffice, Gaim, Thunderbird, Gimp, and soon Blender3D; All on KDE from a Knoppix distro. Her "Jump Start" games are starting to collect dust next to the Win'98se master cd. When she asked what is "BSOD"? I said, "It's just your father dating himself."

When I have kids, they're totally going to be the ones at school with weird-looking second-hand clothes, lunch bags (fabric, not paper!) full of tofu and wheat germ, and GNU/Linux running on their laptops. And they will hate me. And they will probably grow up to be investment bankers working for Citigroup.

Free-market economic theory and democratic political theory share a fatal flaw: they are both premised on perfect information and rational decision-making, neither of which describes the situation of the average political or economic actor. For the last several years, I've been trying to come up with (or discover) tools for addressing these failings. The most promising approach I've seen is an attempt to attach social context (by which I mean anything beyond the personal and immediate, including environmental, political, macroeconomic, legal, historical, or sociological considerations) to everyday personal decisions. I've seen two promising implementations of this idea so far, and I will maintain this page as a clearinghouse for such projects.

Responsible Shopping Based On Trust Networks

Several designers and programmers have tried to attach social and political context to decisions about consumption, including consumption of information.

• James Patten, a friend of mine from the MIT Media Lab, has built the Corporate Fallout Detector, a handheld tool to measure the negative externalities attached to different consumer products. Patten acknowledges the difficult issue of trust in his project description:
  

  
  Also present in the Corporate Fallout Detector are issues of trust and responsibility. By relying on the device when shopping, one places a great deal of trust in whoever is loading the ratings into it. One may not know who this group is, or what agenda they may have. As well, there is a risk in placing the responsibility for buying decisions in an inanimate object, as over time it might become one’s sole source of information related to buying decisions. To try to discourage this possible trend, the Corporate Fallout Detector reveals only a small amount of quantitative information. The goal is primarily to encourage awareness and curiosity, rather than to serve as an educated consumer’s sole source of information.
  



• Stan James's Masters thesis, Outfoxed, implements a web of trust as a Firefox web browser extension connected to a distributed database of recommendations and comments about various URLs. Users can see what members of their trust network have to say about various online resources when deciding how to deal with them. One of the primary applications is to warn surfers about web sites that disseminate spyware and other browser security exploits; another is to give users input from trusted authorities about the labor or environmental practices of various online vendors. (A non-distributed system like Outfoxed also appeared recently, Site Advisor, using a web spider to evaluate sites for malware and spam.)


• It strikes me that handheld tools like Patten's and distributed trust networks like James's are prototypes destined for convergence as a working, distributed network architecture supporting a personal, handheld guide to everyday decision-making. In fact, I wrote a paper last fall for Eben Moglen's Law In The Internet Society class at Columbia Law School that proposed exactly such a system.


• Update (1/24/2006): It looks like the people at Alonovo have taken the first steps in putting together an online marketplace premised on responsible consumption. They have a crude rating system to set your "values": the weight you give to labor practices, customer support, business ethics, environmental impact, etc. It's not clear where their rating data comes from (their site simply includes this sentence when describing how they built their business: "Add a database that continuously receives trusted, accurate data about the practices of manufacturers and merchants, as well as product quality information.")
  
• Kyoko Yamakawa, a researcher at Osaka Seiki University, has designed a restaurant table that displays video images of the farmers who produced the food in the dishes being eaten. [Updated 2005-09-01.]


• Other projects have addressed the general idea of attaching context to real-life spaces: for example, Grafedia and Rixome both use cell phone technology to allow users to attach persistent data to real-world landmarks and objects, overlaying a physical geography with a virtual geography composed of media content. Steve Mann, another Media Lab alum, has used head-mounted camera systems to create "mediated reality", overlaying information about objects in the user's field of vision.
Any of these systems could be used to attach social or political commentary to real-life objects of consumption, including stores, corporate offices, street billboards, etc.

The key to each of these systems, as hinted at by Patten's disclaimer, is the ability of users to choose their sources of intelligence. Moglen has often stated that one of the most disruptive change brought about digital technology, and the battleground on which some of the most contentious legal and commercial battles are being fought, is the question of who will control the "switch" (using the analogy of a packet-switched data network) closest to the user: the ISP, the desktop computer, the laptop, the cellphone, the perceptual system itself. If a system like this were to come under the control of an outside actor -- a media or software or telecommunications company, for instance, or a government -- we would see the dark side of this technology in the form of, e.g., location-sensitive ads on cellphones.

Economic Repercussions Of File-Sharing

Louise W. Klinker's CrimeWire project is a proposed GUI "skin" for the LimeWire peer-to-peer filesharing application that highlights the social costs of a user's activity. The project is illuminating: its ideological assumptions differ from mine, but it serves the same function as my pet projects above in sparking discussion about social costs of consumption and creating a sense of accountability in the consumer. It works by rephrasing the operations of the application: "Download" become "Steal", and a user's file "Library" becomes his or her "Criminal Record". Interestingly, it tries to soften its bold ideological stance by including a "Justification Profile", where a user can calculate the money he or she pays each year to musicians and the recording industry, using this to mitigate in whole or part the "crimes" being tracked by the application.