I spoke at the ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium on Tuesday. I missed a day or two due to some unfortunate weather flying out of LaGuardia, but the conference was really quite interesting and wound up with a very nice talk by Liz Lawley.

I gave a talk about how Big Games could be used in libraries to bring in different audiences and engage a community of players and kids. Libraries are really such interesting spaces full of elements that would make great big games, from unique identifiers, to persistent identity to cool spaces.

Here are the slides from the talk. It’s full o’ images so it’s kind of big.

What do the painfully oblique term “art” and the wincingly detailed phrase “human-computer interaction” have to do with one another?

Every morning I turn on my computer and log into what I consider to be one of the finest pieces of interactive art I have come across in the last several years. I spend the whole day logged in, staring at the intricacies of the design, considering the ways in which this piece of art has begun to inform and shape my thoughts on the very idea of communication and memory. So successful has it been that this one piece has generated a school of other pieces exploring similar avenues. And at the end of the day I log out of Gmail with an almost wistful reluctance to part with the clarity and moral order laid out by its design.

Now, many people would argue that Gmail in no way qualifies as art. And some days I might tend to agree. Gmail is a work of design, conceived of by a cadre of elite designers and engineers at Google, including Kevin Fox (who designed much of the user interface) and Paul Buchheit (one of the key engineers). Gmail is human-computer interaction at its best. But on other days, such as today, I will staunchly argue that Gmail is a work of art, in much the same way architecture is art or game design is art or Warhol’s silk-screens are art. They are the product of individuals who envision the world in a particular way and conceive a tool to help us see and share that vision. Unfortunately, the art world only considers more prototypical art pieces when considering net art and so misses out on some of the more effective work produced on the Internet.

I’ll explain. But first let’s take a little detour through the more traditional world of “real” art.

The best thing about the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial (its bi-annual survey of the art world) is not the art on display, but the hand-wringing. Every two years publications from ArtForum to the New York Times trot out the same cranky missives asking, “Will the Whitney get it right this time?” Can the curators possibly reflect the mercurial state of the art world, a world predicated on its proud inability to be defined, while also bringing to a wider audience art of lasting import? The inevitable answer delivered every two years is of course: you’d have to be delusional on par with Don Quixote to even try.

But then the world would be a much duller place without the joy of chasing windmills.

(more…)

Following hot on the heals of Fukuyama’s piece, Robert Kaplan addresses the current state of America’s foreign policy and the Pentagon’s new Quadrennial Defense Review in the New York Times with Send in the State Department.

Kaplan focuses on and encourages the use of small units opertaing semi-autonomously in strife torn areas.

Take the Horn of Africa, a low-profile theater where small American military teams comb a large region and engage in military training and civil affairs projects with local forces as a way to build relationships in advance of a major crisis. Never again should we be in the situation that we were in on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where there were no intelligence assets on 9/11 because we had closed all our networks the decade before, following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Kaplan goes on to urge the involvement of the State Department in these missions. This suggests that we need to not only equip military units to operate with force, but to be able to initiate if not state-building, then village-building projects that go beyond picking up garbage or short-term humanitarian relief. Perhaps units will be equipped with city planners or with political scientists who can begin to work with local residents to initiate new institutions. In his article The Mayor of Ar Rutbah in Foreign Policy last November, James Gavrilis suggests the need for such a change. An Army Special Forces officer, Gavrilis had first hand experience with insitution and city-building as his group moved through Iraq. As his unit passed through the town of Ar Rutbah, they stopped and attempted to help the local population implement civil institutions. He writes:

Because we didn’t receive any guidance for governance or reconstruction, and certainly not for spreading democracy, I had to make up everything as I went, based on the situation on the ground and what I remembered from my Special Forces training and a handful of political science classes. I entered the city with only our strategic objective for Iraq in mind: to establish a free, democratic, and peaceful Iraq without weapons of mass destruction. And that is what I tried to achieve in my own microcosm of the war.

In his book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel DeLanda suggests that war has seen a constant evolution based on changes in tactics and technology. He sees military operations set up as machines that run, consuming resources. He tracks the evolution of organization within military efforts, from the swarming machines of barbarian raiders to the supply-side machines of Napolean’s army. Often these changes are predicated on a shifts in technology. For example, the accuracy of the conical bullet provides a technological tipping point for military organization, allowing military organization to shift from large lines of rifle volleys to smaller, more independent units.

The implementation of smaller units that operate not only militarily, but also diplomatically suggests a further evolution of the military machine. The military evolves from not only destructive to constructive work. In DeLanda’s book he raises the ire of actual robots powered by artificial intelligence conducting military operations. Obviously, we have already reached this state of affairs with smart bombs. But each unit as a machine of combat and construction is far more intriguing. In this situation you have the destructive force laying the ground work for re-construction. Focus on re-constrution would seem to be a good development. One of the glaring missteps in the Bush Admininstration’s plan for Iraq was simply wiping away instituions without replacing them. The quagmire in Iraq illustrates the clear need for quick and constant attention to immediate building of civil institutions. As the army and special forces are especially equipped to be deployed quickly and widely, they should carry construction as an implicit goal.

Each group of special forces would serve as a little repair cell, equipped with both military power, and repair power. The unit would take on the task of both military exercises and implementing governmental institutions. Rather than state building, they would be individual units of village-building. The super-structure of the army would connect these individual areas of repair back to the central nervous system of the state. In this way, the structure of the army would then provide the initial network of connecting civil institutions.

While I think the trend to more autonomous and complete units is good, it is not without problems. My biggest fear with this is we tend to build things in our own image. If the military is the organization laying down civil institutions, what sort of civil institutions do you get? In the development of the military machine does embodying both destructive and constructive force in one institution create a sort of perpetual state machine?

In this week’s New York Times Magazine, Francis Fukuyama disavows neoconservatism, writing, “Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.” A little late to the party, but it’s nice to have him anyway.

Fukuyama argues instead for working through institutions, rather than force. The most interesting idea in the article comes when he suggest, “The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a ‘multi-multilateral world’ of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.”

This would seem to suggest a marketplace of authority and action. This certainly seems a valuable idea to explore. Though it could certainly be problematic, it may offer an interesting conceptual model for sussing out order. Has the all-consuming idea emergence taken over diplomacy as well?

With distributed collaboration projects so in vogue, I began wondering if there might be a way to create an investment pool that utilized distributed knowledge and input. From the examples in James Surowiecki’s book “Wisdom of Crowds” to the the phenonmenon that is the Wikipedia, we’ve seen that knowledge and action distributed across large groups can produce coordinated results, given the right binding framework.

I think you could construct a framework that would allow people to invest together, harnessing the insights of individuals. You would need a fairly sizable group of people to raise capital and insure that you were catching a wide variety of opinions. You could create a mutual fund that operates on principles of decision markets.
Possible structure:

• Rather than pick stocks, individuals would identify both specific companies and sectors where they see growth potential. They would do this two ways:
• Picking actual commodities and tagging the picks with sector keywords
• Identifying upcoming areas sectors of the market and creating keywords. These sectors must be different than the commodities you have picked.
• The commodities and sectors would be aggregated to see which stocks and which sectors people believe display the most growth potential.
• A cross-section of the commodities and sectors would be used to make investments, with weight given to companies that fall into sectors that were tagged most often.
• Return for individuals would be weighted to the people who highlighted high-performing investments.
• But input to decisions remains the same for all individuals.