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Here Comes The Sun

I meant to post a note about this last week, but it was too busy with all the pre-holiday family insanity. But here it is, a few days late:

HAPPY SOLSTICE!

I like the holiday season as much as the next guy, for purely sentimental reasons, and having a two-year-old boy certainly makes everything seem a little more magical than it has since I was a kid myself. But the real landmark for me this time of year is the Winter Solstice. Not for new agey reasons, of course -- just because it's a guarantee that, no matter how brutal the rest of the winter turns out to be, there's going to be a little more sunlight with each passing day. I've often thought that the only thing that keeps Northeast winters from being intolerably brutal is the fact that the shortest day of the year comes at the very beginning. If it kept getting darker all the way until February, I think I'd move to Los Angeles. So do your pagan dances or pray to the sun god or whatever else you want to do -- it's only going to be brighter from here on out!

Curatorial Culture

I've penned a fun, short item in the NY Times' "Arts and Ideas" section's annual list of the most overrated and underrated ideas of the year. It's called "Curatorial Culture," and the general premise is that there's something very intriguing in the idea of being able to sell user-assembled playlists of songs via online stores like Apple's. (Something you can only do with per-song pricing.) Here's the core graph:

What's potentially revolutionary here is the ability to buy a compilation of music handpicked by another individual, as opposed to the official compilations released by record labels. No doubt Apple will soon offer a feature that enables ordinary music fans to create public playlists engineered around every imaginable theme (the post-breakup collection, the happy Nick Drake songs, the underappreciated recordings of Miles Davis) and then sell those compilations via the online store. Historically, the world of commercial music has been divided between musicians and listeners, but there's long been a mostly unrewarded group in the middle: people with great taste in music –– the ones who made that brilliant mix for you in college that you're still listening to. They're curators not creators, brilliant at assembling new combinations of songs rather than generating them from scratch.

This is an idea I've been exploring for almost a decade now, though not always in the context of music. In a way, it was one of the core ideas that drove the argument of my 1997 book, Interface Culture: in a world where everything was just one link away, a whole new class of intermediaries becomes crucial, and those people may even have economic role to play. In Interface Culture I talked about these folks as particularly talented linkers, and of course we now have another word for them: bloggers. It made sense to think that this group would start by building links to other web pages, since that was the first widely-available digital resource. But now that you can build annotated meta-lists of songs, and not just pages, everything that's happened in the blogosphere will happen to music -- only there's a $.99 purchase at the end of the music link, which makes it even more interesting.

Frank Rich on Dean

Frank Rich has a great column running in today's Times about the Dean campaign's use of the Web. He does some spot-on debunking of the whole McGovern 2.0 meme, and draws some very interesting parallels to FDR's use of radio. But for reasons that will be immediately clear, I particularly enjoyed this paragraph near the middle of the piece:

"The term blog is now so ubiquitous everyone has to use it," says the author Steven Johnson, whose prescient 2001 book "Emergence" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this culture. On some candidates' sites, he observes, "there is no difference between a blog and a chronological list of press releases." And the presence of a poll on a site hardly constitutes interactivity. The underlying principles of the Dean Internet campaign "are the opposite of a poll," Mr. Johnson says. Much as thousands of connected techies perfected the Linux operating system's code through open collaboration, so Dean online followers collaborate on organizing and perfecting the campaign, their ideas trickling up from the bottom rather than being superimposed from national headquarters. (Or at least their campaign ideas trickle up; policy is still concentrated at the top.) It's almost as if Dr. Dean is "a system running for president," in Mr. Johnson's view, as opposed to a person.

My feelings exactly.

It really is a very sharp piece, and not just because it says flattering things about my book. I just stopped by the Dean blog to see the response there, and it was one of those classic moments of web community interaction: a dozen thoughtful and on-topic posts from people responding to the article, and suddenly a few Clark supporters drop in and make some taunting remarks, a before long everybody's cursing at each other and the Frank Rich article is long forgotten. Seems like 1993 on ECHO or the Well all over again.

SimCandidate

If only there were a LazyWeb for videogames. I've just published a fun little piece in Slate wondering why there's no videogame version of campaign 2004, along the lines of the incredibly detailed sports simulations that come out every year, updated with the latest teams and statistics. If we can have simulations that let you run a theme park or a Caribbean island or a Eastern Bloc insurrection, why can't we have one that lets you run a presidential campaign? As I say in the piece:

This is a strange state of affairs, because presidential politics lends itself naturally to the idiom and audience of today's games. Political campaigns are already structured like games, with an escalating series of discrete competitions that determine the eventual winner. In addition, there's an existing body of readily available data, going back many decades, that could be harnessed to craft the simulation. And the country is filled with Monday-morning Carvilles who cultivate their own theories on how to win the Rust Belt, or why the Republican southern strategy is overrated.

I've already received some interesting emails talking about a few games along these lines from the late eighties and early nineties, including one fascinating message from one of the folks who designed these games. (I'll repost his message if he'll let me.) Sounds like most of these early versions were flops, but it occurs to me that one major thing has happened since then, and that's the aging of the gaming population. There were hardly any 35-year-olds like me buying games in 1988; now we're a dominant part of a huge industry. Sure, teenagers playing Super Mario Brothers for the first time probably weren't ready to role-play as a campaign manager. But those folks have all grown up now, and they're still playing.

Offloading Your Memories

The Times Magazine asked me to contribute a little essay to their always entertaining Year In Ideas issue -- this one on a number of new research projects attempting to record everything in a human life: not just all the email sent and received, or web sites visited, but also the audio of every phone call, and in some cases, video of every waking hour. For space reasons, the piece dropped down a few hundred words, and lost a (somewhat predictable) little riff about how this connects to Vannevar Bush's original vision of the Memex, which was all about using machines to extend our memory. But of course, the Bush vision is really about academic memory -- it's all about being able to track down that reference to the Gettysburg Address that you read five years ago and have almost forgotten. These new projects, on the other hand, are much more clearly directed to the stray details of everyday life. It's not so much remembering some academic treatise as it is being able to determine, for once and for all, who really started that marital spat that's been simmering for three weeks now...

While you're reading through the Times Mag issue, be sure to check out a few ideas that have been percolating around this site for the past year: Social Networks, Video Games As Art, and most recently, Forget The South.

The Anti-Video Game

Discover seems to have recently put most of its content behind a subscriber-only firewall, but I've managed to persuade them to liberate my monthly Emerging Technology column, since so many of them revolve around issues dear to the heart of the blogosphere. But that shouldn't be reason for y'all to avoid buying a subscription to Discover, which has been on quite a roll in the past few years, despite the fact that they've made me a regular contributor during that time.

While you're over there filling out the subscription form, check out my latest column -- a fun one on a new videogame that uses biofeedback technology as the primary controller mechanism. Sort of like a version of Myst where you unlock the puzzles by altering your mood.

Doing The Math On Dean

If Al Gore's surprise endorsement of Howard Dean has you rethinking some of your assumptions about Dean's "electability," take a look at this revealing electoral college infographic that the Times ran last week. To me, it calls into question a lot of what we've heard about how the Democrats can't win without a Southern centrist (the line usually trotted out to explain why Dean will be a huge fiasco in a national election.) But as this chart shows, there's basically no South for the Democrats to win: every Southern state save Florida is firmly in Bush's column, and as we know, Florida isn't really a Southern state anyway. (Too coastal, urban, multicultural, etc.) The undecideds are basically all the Rust Belt states, plus Arizona, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Nevada.

This chart doesn't say to me that the Democrats need a Southerner. It says that they can win decisively if they can find someone who'll play well in the industrial midwest, who can pick up Maine and New Hampshire, and win Florida. Dean could do all those things, I think -- though it does make you wonder whether a Dean/Graham ticket makes more sense than the Dean/Clark ticket I've been fantasizing about since this summer, given the importance of Florida.

It's easy for mainstream Democrats to dismiss the fact that Dean has energized the "democratic wing of the democratic party", but I think that force shouldn't be underestimated. For as long as I can remember, the Republicans have had far more unity between the centrist and their ultra-conservative wings: Bush has passionate supporters at both ends of the party, as did Reagan. (The only Republican president who didn't have the far right's adoration, Bush Sr., didn't get re-elected.) But the reverse isn't true on the Left: the ultra-liberals and progressives were mostly disgusted by Clinton's DLC-style centrism and his welfare reform bills; they were Nader supporters or they believed that all mainstream politicians were beyond the pale. Partially because Bush has been so appalling, and partially because Dean is speaking at least in the tone of their language, if not the substance, that left-wing group finally has a candidate they can whole-heartedly embrace. Assuming that Dean can play his John McCain straight-talking maverick act to the midwest next year, I'm not at all sure that having such a passionate base is a liability, even if they are to the left of the rest of the country. In fact, I'd wager it's a strength.

Excuse Me For Sounding Like A Seinfeld Routine, But...

So I'm on a plane this afternoon, flying back from an extended holiday break with my wife's family in Florida, and I sit through -- for probably the ten-thousandth time -- the extended lecture on how to inflate the emergency life preserver in the event of a water landing. Like most of you, I'm sure, I've always thought that this speech -- not to mention the accompanying demonstration -- was a bizarre waste of time. How many successful commercial aircraft emergency water landings have occurred over the past twenty years? One? Two? Certainly no more than a handful, if memory serves. So the odds of you having to use that life vest are what -- a billion to one? Plane crashes are incredibly rare, but plane crashes where the plane goes down and then everybody suits up in their yellow vests and zooms down the inflatable slides, those are beyond rare.

On today's flight, for some reason, I started thinking about what would happen if you had safety advisories more in synch with the real odds of something going wrong on the flight. Terrorism aside, you're much more likely to have some nut flip out or drink himself to into an insane fury, which means they'd be better off teaching us how to administer a sedative than use our seat cushion as a flotation device. ("In the event that an intoxicated bond trader climbs on the drinks cart and starts defecating on it, please remain seated while the flight attendants locate the stun gun.")

What if other modes of transportation delivered similar safety speeches about equally improbable events? Your average commuter train is much more likely to derail than a plane to land on water, and yet they don't even give you seat belts on trains, much less teach you how to fasten them. Maybe every time you get on a bus, they should advise you what to do if someone plants a bomb onboard that will go off if the bus goes below 50 MPH. (I know, I know -- that was just a movie. But still.) I don't think it's preposterous to suggest that they'd actually save more lives over a ten year period if every flight used the flotation device instruction time to teach a crash course in CPR or the Heimlich maneuver instead. I'm sure you're much more likely to be sitting next to a guy who has a heart attack then you are to be crash landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Even if the plane did attempt an aquatic landing, you'd probably have time to run through the life preserver drill before you hit the water. (The ones where you don't have time usually don't leave any survivors.) And doing the drill right before the crash landing has one other added benefit: for once, people will actually pay attention to what's being said.