Archive for ‘Society and Culture’

August 7th, 2009

The Third Replicator

We’re all familiar with genes and we’re becoming more and more aware of memes, even though this second topic is still the subject of some debate. Now, people are suggesting that a third form of replicator is appearing and that it needs a name and a more proper definition. This entry contains my attempt to describe and to name it.

New Scientist recently published an article named “Genes, Memes, and now what?” about this third replicator. It ends with a comment-based discussion where people can suggest what to name this third replicator. Before we get to that part of the discussion, let’s look at the background.

Genes are the first replicators that we know of. Through sexual reproduction, genes combine and recombine in a nearly endless variation to produce the species that we know of and all of the individual expressions within that specie. It sets the ground for a nearly limitless amount of other species that could exist but simply do not at the moment.

Memes are the second replicator, and can be considered to be “cultural genes”. Like their relative, the gene, memes combine and spread from person to person. However, they do this without having to go through sexual reproduction but rather piggyback on information, language and behavior. Christianity, veganism, techno music and tribal tattoos are all examples of memes that have spread from their originator to other people, changing and mutating slightly on the way. Languages and culture are also memes that use us people to spread and proliferate.

In some ways, we can compare memes to the old whisper-game where one person would whisper a phrase to the next who would then whisper their understanding of what was said to the next person. Over enough ‘generations’, the phrase “I like to eat hamburgers” might very well end up being understood as “I threatened three vampires”.

The third replicator, still unnamed, is one that we are letting loose on the world intentionally – the first two are results of things beyond our own control. This has to do with information that is electronically processed rather than biologically or culturally. It is copied by computers and servers rather than DNA or human brains.

If one goes to Amazon already today, we have a service that recommends books based on books we’ve already bought. We have services that study your web browsing history to recommend other pages to visit. The information that Google collects about the Web is processed, cross-processed and re-processed ad infinitum to learn more about the world than is on the homepages themselves. Google’s various services – and they are not alone in doing this – add one and one and get much more than two.

In the case of genes, biological information is copied, mutated and selected in order to further the evolution of the biological entities. In the case of memes, cultural information is copied, mutated and selected in order to further the evolution of the cultural entities.

With this new replicator, which I propose we call denes, we have pure information that is being copied, mutated and selected in order to further the evolution of informational entities. We now have computer systems becoming more adept at sifting through large amounts of information, selecting what they consider to be relevant, processing this information to reach new pieces of information that then becomes available for other computer systems.

The next time you get an e-mail saying “Oh, by the way, we think you might be interested in this book” or a suggestion to get another type of credit card based on your purchasing history, remember that – most probably – no human took the time to look at your reading or purchasing statistics to reach that conclusion. It’s all the result of the denes that you’ve left as information about you traverses though – and is processed by – various digital networks.

While genetics and memetics are already established fields of study, I expect denetics – or something by another name but filling the same purpose – will appear as an interesting and important field of study within long.

July 4th, 2009

Decentralizing the Internets

A popular impression of the Internet is that it is a large, decentralized, almost anarchistic series of tubes. People can do anything, say anything and chat anywhere. However, even though this fits in with the overall model of what the Internet was meant to be, this is not what it has grown into.

A few days ago, it became apparent that The Pirate Bay was being sold. In a blog entry on The Pirate Bay, one of its crew said:

As all of you know, there’s not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It’s the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen.

In some ways, what he says is true, but in other ways, it definitely isn’t. The Pirate Bay was doing fine and enjoyed it’s number one spot in the file sharing world. If somebody wanted to download a movie, they would go to The Pirate Bay, in the same way as they would go to Wikipedia to learn more about a subject or go to Google if they wanted to find something in particular. Rasmus Fleischer of Copyriot (blog mainly in Swedish) sums this perspective up nicely here:

The Pirate Bay never asked to be the sole representatives of file-sharing. When large parts of the world’s internet traffic depends on whether Fredrik is too drunk to fix a server error, a radical diversification is needed to maintaing the power of P2P file-sharing.

I would like to argue that some of the services that we use today are becoming too centralized. A few days ago, I was working on a yet unpublished entry on this blog and needed some reference material from Wikipedia. What normally would amount to a 20 or 30-second search became impossible when I realized that Wikipedia’s servers were temporarilly down for maintainance. What to do, what to do, I wondered. I went to Google and searched for the keyword in question, and – naturally – the first search result was Wikipedia. The sheer dependence we have on Google and Wikipedia – and, to some, The Pirate Bay – is not what the Internet was meant to become.

Therefore, I’d like to suggest something else. This may or may not work as well as my mind currently suggests it might, but I’ll leave that up to the programmers who would implement this.

My suggestion is that somebody code a trans-platform application that allows web services to use the bandwidth and storage of the users of the Internet (as long as they have the client installed). If Wikipedia, for example, were to use this service, all the information contained within Wikipedia would be mirrored n times over the entirety of the users in the system. If somebody else logs onto the service, the data could be spread thinner, if somebody logs off, the data is packed tighter, so to speak.

I’m sure that there are some glaring holes in this suggestion, but I think it might be a good place to begin. What do you think?

June 23rd, 2009

Economy when Scarcity does not apply

Why is the Mona Lisa so expensive and a can of Coca Cola so cheap? What is it that makes an Armani t-shirt cost more than a mass-produced one from your local retailer? Material and transportation costs aside, the only real answer to this question is scarcity. The more there is of a product, the lower prices one can expect it to sell for. Economics itself has been described as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means”. This is why we (still) can’t charge for clean air; there’s simply too much of it. We can’t ask people to pay us for enjoying the sun in some spot; they’d just move to another spot and enjoy it there. However, we still try to charge for information, a resource whose amount may be the only one to actually increase as we consume it.

Scarcity is defined as the problem of infinite human needs in a world of finite resources. We have the possibility to want and need more than there is available. Thus, we have to make trade-offs. I will not buy the expensive car I want because my resources – in this case, money – are insufficient at this moment. Thousands of people starve every week because they lack resources – in this case, food. People sit for a long time waiting for surgery or healthcare because of lack of resources – in this case, doctors.

It seems like wherever we turn our heads, we can see some form of scarcity at work. That is; everywhere except in the field of information.

When it comes to information, the situation that exists today can best be described as a false scarcity or – better yet – an artificial scarcity. This is when a scarcity is entirely made up. It does not exist. Information is a non-rival resource; it does not disappear after one person uses it and more than one person can use it without any significant decrease in usability.

Note that I’m not talking about artificial scarcity of the sort where farmers are told to produce less or where Disney only sells a movie for a short period every seven years or so. While those are artificial ways of producing scarcity; the scarcity itself is very real. When it comes to setting a price on knowledge, however, the scarcity itself is artificial.

Piracy is a very hot topic right now, and rightly so. Copyright and the archaic definitions of ‘ownership’ are well overdue for a complete overhaul and I think the piracy debate is a good way to get that going. Piracy is also a very good example of artificial scarcity in effect. Let’s assume that I were to download the latest album by one of my favorite artists. Firstly, what has happened is not theft, no matter how loud the MAFIAA claim it is. Theft, per definition, is “the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same”. Note the word “deprive” in there. Since nobody has been deprived of “the same” nothing has been stolen.

Similarly, assume that a Brazilian football (I mean, of course, the ‘soccer’ type of football) player discovers a new way to dribble the ball to confuse his opponents. It’s a revolutionary move that is amazingly swift, simple and efficient. Nobody has ever done it before or even considered it to be possible. Within a few weeks, other players will have heard of it, tried it and even adapted it to their own way of playing. This is because the information was free to them to use and adapt however they wanted. Next up, however, a major shoe company decides to make a soccer shoe that makes this particular dribble easier to do without slipping. Since they own the patent to the design they are the only company allowed to create a shoe that even remotely resembles that particular model. This is because they own the sole rights to the information about how to create this type of shoe.

Let’s go back to the example of me downloading an album. What has actually happened if theft wasn’t involved? Since a copy was made, a product that was meant to exist in, for example, 100,000 copies now exists in 100,001 copies. If two of my friends were to copy it from me they would inflate the number to 100,003 copies. Within long, piracy could have inflated this number up well above a million. The only real limitation on piracy today (apart from availability, of course) is storage space, which many interpretations of Moore’s Law would have us believe is becoming cheaper, more accessible and – most importantly – larger at a faster rate than the availability of new information.

Artificial scarcities are said to be necessary in order to promote the further development of new goods. In the example of digital information, it may be ‘free’ to copy information, but it requires a significant investment to develop the information in the first place. The artist who recorded the album needed to buy the musical instruments, maybe pay for guitar class, pay for the studio time, pay for the mixing and mastering of the audio and so on. By copying the album, I am not adding to the sum of money heading back their way for their efforts. This does not motivate the artists to continue making music. However, the open source movement and several crowdsourced operations tell a different story:

In the absence of artificial scarcity, businesses and individuals would create tools based on their own need (demand). For example, if a business had a strong need for a voice recognition program, they would pay to have the program developed to suit their needs. The business would profit not on the program but on the resulting boost in efficiency caused by the program. The subsequent abundance of the program would lower operating costs for the developer as well as other businesses using the new program. Lower costs for businesses result in lower prices in the competitive free market. Lower prices from suppliers would also raise profits for the original developer. In abundance, businesses would continue to pay to improve the program to best suit their own needs, and increase profits. Over time, the original business makes a return on investment, and the final consumer has access to a program that suits their needs better than any one program developer can predict. This is the common rationale behind open-source software, such as Mozilla Firefox. (Wikipedia: Artificial Scarcity. Some grammar corrected)

How do you think this would work for movies, music and literature? Discuss!