Showing posts with label the Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the Internet. Show all posts

Thursday, February 2, 2023

The Desperate Need For A Distributed, Peer-to-Peer, Open-Source Search Engine

This year, 2023, is the year in which a desperate need has arisen among those of us who actually try to do useful work via the Internet.  The need I am talking about is the need for a truly open-source, distributed, peer-to-peer search engine that is not owned by any corporate entity.  Google search has turned to absolute garbage.  This is because Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has completely changed the purpose of the Google search engine from helping people find useful information.  The main purpose of Google Search has now become to earn advertising revenue by selling advertising.  I know that some who read these words will say "Well, DuckDuckGo is better!"  But such people overlook the fact that DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Yahoo!, and AOL are all owned by Microsoft.  Therefore they rely on the Bing search engine, an engine whose primary mission has also become to earn advertising revenue.  This means that both Google and Microsoft search have become increasingly useless.

These things make me think of a book I recently found called Obliquity, by John Kay.  In his book, Kay describes a number of companies which used to earn large profits for their shareholders by focusing on providing excellent products and services.  However, when those corporations abandoned their mission of providing excellent products and switched to the mission of maximizing shareholder value, they began to crash and burn.  Two examples of this phenomenon are the British chemical company ICI, and the Boeing Company.  Boeing is especially interesting in that this company used to dominate commercial aviation from the 1960's until the early years of the 21st century.  This was because of Boeing's singular focus on aviation science and the craft required to make the best airplanes possible.  However, when Boeing switched to maximizing shareholder value as its primary goal, its executives made a series of unwise technical decisions which resulted in a number of disasters, especially around the 737 MAX aircraft.  These missteps allowed the European company Airbus to gain a global market lead over Boeing.

A similar process seems to be at work in regard to search engines.  For Google, the process started with providing a best-in-class search engine which outperformed all other search engines during the early days of the Internet.  This was because Google was created by people who were genuinely passionate about computing.  But when Google was taken over by grownups in business suits, the passion became the maximization of shareholder value even if this took place at the expense of what used to be Google's primary mission, which had been to help people find things on the Internet.  (Microsoft, on the other hand, had always been run by greedy grown-ups in business suits.)  Thus we the users are now stuck with garbage.  The thinking at Google and Microsoft may well be that we, the users of their products, have no other options, so they can get away with continuing to give us garbage.  But alternatives to garbage do exist, and when they are discovered, they can take hold in a surprisingly short time.  Then companies which seek to maximize profits by offering garbage may find their profits suddenly collapsing.  Just ask the former employees of ICI and some of the recently laid-off employees of Boeing.

Sunday, July 24, 2022

The Sacking of The Libraries

Imagine if you will a scene in which a young Southern California boy and his mother are about to enter the Norwalk Library sometime during an evening of a school year shortly before the advent of the Internet.  (Note: I have nothing against the Norwalk Library - it's just that I happen to know where it is because I used to live in So. Cal.)  Let's say that the mom has taken the boy to the library so that he may search for books on treatments for mange in animals such as dogs and cats.  Let's also say that the boy needs this information in order to write a book report (remember those?) for his middle-school biology class.  However, just as the boy and his mom cross the threshold, a mysterious space-time bubble phenomenon transports them to a library built 50 or 60 years into the future.  Imagine that libraries of the future have been shaped by the evolution of commercial culture in ways that could not have been imagined by our hapless boy and mom pair.  

Thus, when the boy and mom go to an information terminal to look for books on veterinary medicine, the first thing they see is not the location of the books they desire, but rather a screenful of paid ads for vets, pet stores, pet treats, pet grooming supplies, cat and dog clothes, etc.  Bemused and befuddled by the screen, the boy and mom start walking around the library in search of a librarian.  Once they find her, they ask where the books on veterinary science are located.  The librarian asks whether they want to buy some dog or cat food while they are at the library, explaining that she gets a commission from every sale she makes.  Oh, and by the way, would they like a recommendation for a vet?  Perhaps some "natural, drug-free remedies"? Or maybe some shampoo?  In a state of both mounting confusion and mounting frustration, the mother of the boy grumbles that she is just looking for books written by veterinary authorities so that her son can write a book report for school.  "Besides," the mom says, "our family doesn't have any pets!"  Grudgingly, the librarian leads the mom and her son to the bookshelves that contain books on veterinary science and diseases in pets.  However, the boy and mom notice that most of these books are actually coupon books advertising veterinary services and pet hospitals in Southern California!  In desperation the boy and mom walk out, wondering what on earth happened to their library.  As they are walking through the parking lot to their car, a man sidles up to them and says, "I noticed that you were looking for information on treating mange.  You must like pets! I have some hamsters in the trunk of my car, and I'm willing to let you have one for a special low price..."

Although this scene may sound far-fetched, I'd like to suggest that this perverse "library of the future" accurately describes the state into which our society has increasingly evolved, and that this is a consequence of the monetization of information exchange.  The prime example of this is the evolution of the internet from its inception until now.  This evolution has been especially rapid and widespread during the last seven or eight years.  Perceptive souls can remember a time in which information that was transmitted electronically was not monetized, and those who provided information via the World Wide Web did so for reasons that had little to do with financial gain.  Indeed, the explosive growth of free exchange of information that occurred during the 1990's was a consequence not only of the growth of the Web, but also of the growth of the availability of technologies that allowed people to bypass traditional gatekeepers in order to publish their own creative content.  A case in point is the miniaturization and lowering of cost of technologies for recording and storage that allowed musicians to mass-produce recordings of their own performances without having to sign on to a record label.  (In fact, I own a few self-published CD's from such "indie" artists.)  Such technologies for self-publishing became known as "democratizing technologies" because they allowed large numbers of ordinary people to publish their creative content without needing access to costly centralized infrastructure.

The internet was originally born out of the need for large governmental agencies and public research institutions to share information easily and cheaply.  Yet the internet swiftly became one of the most powerful democratizing technologies, since it drastically reduced the cost any individual had to pay to reach a large audience quickly.  Moreover, the culture and worldview of the original architects of the internet prioritized its democratizing nature.  To quote from an Atlantic article titled, "The Rotting Internet Is A Collective Hallucination":
"The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct
freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise
massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or
expect to make money from their invention.  The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network ... Instead, they settled on the equivalent
of rules for how to bolt existing networks together.
"Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system,
operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow
any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able
to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the
network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key
was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of
whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to
frequent." (Emphasis added.)

Because access to the original internet was not centrally owned or controlled, the internet became self-curating.  In other words, websites naturally began to be ranked according to how many people found their content to be interesting or useful.  A website thus gathered many hits by being genuinely good.  Thus the early internet became a legitimate source of edification, education, often extremely high-quality information, and exhilaratingly interesting conversation between people who might not otherwise have connected with each other.  

But then certain individuals began to see how they could make money from this sudden outburst of connection and conversation.  The first monetizers were creators of centralized platforms for connecting people to each other.  These creators exploited a weakness of the proto-internet, namely the need for early participants to have somewhat deep knowledge of programming languages and things like Java and HTML.  Since most people did not have this knowledge, they welcomed such platforms as MySpace and Facebook which allowed people to connect with each other electronically without needing deep coding knowledge.  Once most users of the internet were aggregated by the owners of these platforms, it was only natural for corporations and capitalists to seek to monetize these platforms.  At first the monetization was rather clunky and clumsy.  (Remember when big corporations like the Ford Motor Company or Eaton were urging us to "like them on Facebook"?)  But the eventual form taken by platform monetization consisted of pushing advertising (both of the obvious kind and of more subtle, sneaky kinds) on these platforms.

Within the last seven or eight years, this pushing of advertising has conquered its final frontier: the monetization of search engines.  This is certainly true of Google (who are now owned by Alphabet Inc.).  But it is also true of Duck Duck Go, Bing, Brave, Smartpage, Yahoo, and every other advertiser-supported search provider.  Thus when one conducts a Web search using any of these engines, the top results are usually either ads or are webpages that have been monetized by hosting ads on them.  The mission of these advertiser-supported search platforms has thus changed from helping people effectively search for information.  The mission now is to direct people to advertising packaged as clickbait.  I'd like to suggest that this is leading to certain consequences which have possibly not been foreseen by the monetizers.

The first of these consequences is the increase in transaction costs, that is the costs involved in exchanges taking place in a given economy.   To quote from Transaction Costs, Institutions and Economic Performance by Douglass C. North:
"It is the cost of measuring the valuable attributes of the goods and services or the performance of agents in exchange that is the fundamental key to the cost of transacting."
In other words, in making an economic transaction between two parties, each party must spend time and resources to accurately determine what kind of value and how much of this value they are likely to get from the transaction.  When each side has unbiased information from impartial sources, the transaction costs are relatively low.  When the only information that is available comes from paid advertisers, the transaction costs become much higher, because part of the transaction costs consists of spending time trying to figure out how much the information sources are lying.  Case in point: about fifteen or twenty years ago, manufacturers of health supplements began to tout the health benefits of fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS).  Some of the things these manufacturers said began to be of interest to people suffering from intestinal disorders.  However, these sufferers were forced to take what they were hearing with a massive grain of salt, because some of the claims made about FOS were outlandish.  In order to make an informed decision regarding FOS, some of these sufferers turned to the internet, where they encountered a massive amount of unbelievable claims.  These sufferers were stymied until they discovered that FOS is also called inulin (not insulin), and they began to do Web searches with the keyword "inulin."  That was when they found the peer-reviewed papers from research institutions that enabled them to make an informed decision.  (Note: since then, things have undergone a further mutation.  Supplement manufacturers discovered that people were researching inulin and that searches for information on FOS were falling off.  So now these manufacturers have modified their Web advertising to push the fact that their products contain "inulin."  "A rose by any other name...")  From this we see the general principle that when people are faced with decisions regarding transactions that have potentially large consequences (either because of the money that must be spent or the effect of the transaction or both), an increase in transaction costs resulting from a decline in the quality of available information about the transaction leads to a decrease in the number and rate of transactions.  Or to put it simply, if when you walk into a market, you know that all the sellers in the market are lying to you, you tend to not want to spend your money.

The second consequence is a decrease in connected conversations resulting from the restriction of the free flow of free (as in free coffee) information.  Monetization of information flows often means that valuable and useful information is locked behind paywalls guarded by rent-seeking corporations.  This is especially true of the kind of academic knowledge formerly disseminated free of charge by publicly funded research institutions.  The flow of this knowledge is increasingly controlled by gatekeepers such as Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons Inc., the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and Science Direct.   The combination of monetization of the channels of conversation (through advertising) and monetization of the valuable things that may arise in any potential conversation (through rent-seeking and paywalls) produces a decrease in productive conversation.  This leads to a decrease in innovation within a society.  To see how innovation in the United States and the West has begun to decline, click here and here.  Note especially how at least one of these sources mentions the restriction of the free flow of information.  Also, a fictional case of this decrease can be found in a recent novel called Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang.  (Ms. Hao has a bachelors degree in physics and a doctorate in economics, is a mother of two, a social entrepreneur, a scholar who is part of a think tank in China, and a member of a new wave of Chinese science-fiction writers who have crafted extremely strong, thought-provoking and awesomely good stories.  More on the Chinese sci-fi phenomenon in another post.)  In that novel, set in the 22nd century, Mars has been colonized by humans (sorry, Elon Musk, but Ms. Hao doesn't mention you at all), and has successfully fought a war of independence to break away from the government and economy of Earth.  In her novel, Earth's economy is described as a hyper-monetized "information economy" obsessed with guarding "intellectual property" while the Martians have created a society of free information exchange in which citizens make contributions motivated solely by their desire to create.  As a result, the Martian society becomes more advanced technologically while Earth begins to stagnate.  Although this is a fictional example, I would argue that it reflects what is seen in real life in organizations, institutions, and societies in which the free flow of information is constrained.  Our problem in the West, particularly in the United States, is that we have failed to recognize the constraints which our very own hyper-capitalist system imposes on our own ability to have the sort of cross-disciplinary, spontaneous conversations in which disparate ideas collide to produce innovation.  The internet in its early days began to provide a forum for those sorts of productive conversations, but the monetization of the internet has begun to choke off those conversations.

I predict that this choking off will lead (perhaps has already begun to lead) to a third consequence: an increasing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and an increasing push by many people to "get back to the garden"; that is a push by many people to re-create spaces in which neither information nor the channels of conversation are monetized.  I don't believe that I'm the only person who is becoming tired of high transaction costs.  And I don't believe that I'm the only one who is looking for a way to build spaces of connectedness and conversation that are free from the corruption of advertising and rent-seeking.   But those of us who seek to build such spaces must know that we must pay a price in sweat equity (that is, our own hard work) to build such spaces.  They don't come for free.  As the old internet adage goes, "If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."  Perhaps some will need to work to build spaces in realspace where conversations between diverse partners can arise.  Such spaces will be the strongest form of the revival I am thinking of.  But such spaces may also be virtual.  However, for such virtual spaces to arise, the participants will need to learn to do for themselves many things which they have been taught to take for granted due to the ease of using centralized platforms for connection such as social media.  In the absence of these platforms, people who want to build networks of conversation and information exchange will have to take themselves back to the mindset that built the internet in the first place.  Some of us may have to learn coding (especially HTML); some of us will have to learn how to build our own Web crawlers.  Some of us may have to read books or take courses to learn these things.  Whether in realspace or in cyberspace, it will be interesting to see the ways in which groups of people reclaim spaces for constructive conversation.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

How I will Save Money if PIPA and SOPA are passed

I guess Congress is trying once again to pass laws that would make the Internet no longer free. These laws are being pushed by lobbyists for large media corporations such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, media providers and providers associations like the Recording Industry Association of America, credit card companies and even Nike, a maker of athletic shoes.

I don't have time here to spell out all the provisions of these laws, but I can say that if they pass, I stand to save a ton of money. It's very simple, really. I will find other ways to communicate with friends and sympathetic acquaintances. Then I will cancel my Verizon internet access account. My contract has already expired, so I can't be penalized.

That's it.

So go ahead. Make my day.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Video Troubles and Citizen Journalists

This weekend I created another video for your enjoyment. Once again, however, the process of uploading that video is anything but enjoyable. Here's the deal:

I made the video from clips I shot three weeks ago. The problem is, I wanted to add a little music to my work. I knew that the only way I could add music without paying huge royalties was to use music that was published under some form of Creative Commons license. So I logged on to Magnatune, because I knew that all the music published through Magnatune is released under Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses to people who want to use the music for non-commercial applications. (That certainly applies to me. I haven't made a dime from this blog. Then again, I haven't charged a dime either.)

I have a couple of CD's of a vocal group that I heard about via Magnatune. Two of their songs seemed to fit my video quite well, so I looked up Magnatune's policy on using their music in noncommercial videos posted online. I was surprised to learn that there are restrictions on the use of Magnatune music in videos hosted on commercial, for-profit sites like YouTube and Vimeo. I think this is because of the “rights” such sites assert and claim on material hosted by them. (I suppose I shouldn't have been so naïve, but then again in many things I'm still a newbie.)

As I read the Magnatune policy, it dawned on me that these restrictions don't apply to videos hosted on non-for-profit sites like the Internet Archive. (At least, I think they don't.) But one problem with the Internet Archive is that it doesn't seem to like Linux users. My computer runs on Linux most of the time. My machine is five years old, and although it came with Microsoft Windows XP when I bought it, I've been trying to move away from expensive dependency on Microsoft. Much of the trouble I've had with trying to upload video to the Internet Archive has had to do with the fact that their site is not friendly to computers that run on Linux or UNIX. They are not the only such site. My troubles uploading to Vimeo were for this very cause; the only reason I was able to upload my “Managing Trees, Stormwater and Hunger” video was that I finally gave up and ran my computer on Windows XP.

All of this had me thinking as I tore myself away from the computer screen and headed for my bedroom in the wee hours of this morning. First, about the Internet Archive itself. After all, the Archive is a product of the protest against the excesses of “digital rights management,” the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the attempt to destroy the public domain in order to create a culture in which everyone must pay rent in order to participate. The Internet Archive is a big promoter of open-source file formats and the Creative Commons licensing model. So why does their site require the use of proprietary software for optimum success in uploading video files? I mean, one can use a computer running Linux, but what happens if after waiting all night for your files to upload, you fail because you weren't using Windows? Believe me, I speak from experience!

But the Internet Archive is but a subset of a larger problem. Linux has proven itself as a stable, capable operating system for computers both large and small. Linux is even being offered pre-loaded on new laptops and notebooks sold in the U.S. nowadays. (By the way, a computer pre-loaded with Linux can be quite a bit cheaper than a computer pre-loaded with the latest version of Microsoft Windows.) And there are entire suites of free, open-source software (such as OpenOffice) available for users worldwide.

All of these things mean that access to computers and to the digital world is within the reach of an ever-larger population – including ever-more people of very limited means otherwise. This includes people in poor countries and poor communities in the U.S. who could become potential citizen journalists, telling their stories accurately and authentically, and making a valuable contribution in forming an accurate picture of our world.

But this access and the democratization of digital media is hindered even today by the existence of proprietary digital systems that restrict access so that their creators can collect rents. This is why you can't buy a DVD from a store in the U.S. and play it in the video player that comes standard with Ubuntu Linux. This is why you can't upload a video to Vimeo from a machine that has only Linux installed. This is why until recently you couldn't even view some sites from a computer that was running on Linux. It's not that Linux is bad. It's just that it's free – and allowing people to meet their needs via a thing that's free is bad for the profit margins of the rentier class. This is the reason for the existence of obstacles to the use of free things. So rising citizen journalists in poor communities and poor countries are nipped in the bud – because they can't afford to pay rent to Microsoft.

The rentier mentality pervades almost all other areas of life in America these days. Take driving, for instance. In most states, if you want to get around, you must buy a car. If you do buy a car, not only are you charged registration, but in some states you are also charged a vehicle excise tax on top of registration fees. The excise tax must be paid even if you never drive the car. If you actually drive anywhere, you must carry insurance. Cars nowadays depreciate in value fairly rapidly, so eventually you will wind up needing a new car. In other words, there are fairly substantial “rents” paid to various persons for the privilege of driving a car. Yet if you can't afford these rents, there are almost no other options than driving. Many places still aren't bike-friendly.

Or take health care. People in this country are dying from lack of affordable access to medical care. This is largely due to the rent-seeking of various bodies – the pharmaceutical companies who squeeze the last bit of profit from their patented medicines, the medical technology companies who push their latest and greatest machines, and the health insurance “industry” which does next to nothing, yet has now been gifted with a national law that requires most of us to buy health insurance. On a similar line, there are the efforts by industrial agribusiness to push everyone into reliance on GMO crops, in order to extract rent from us all for the “privilege” of eating the food made from these crops.

The rentier class is the ultimate example of a something-for-nothing way of life, in which people who do absolutely nothing useful are supported by the enforced contributions of millions of others who are under some sort of specious legal obligation to pay their livelihoods to the rentiers. As their appetite grows, so do the obligations they place on the rest of us. Are you in rags? Sleeping under a bridge? Do your children have skinny arms and distended bellies, like pictures of malnourished people in some Third World country? It matters not at all to the rentiers, as long as you keep paying up.