Social networks started on the past (classmates), moved to the present (Facebook), then the future (dopplr). Social networks used to be on people you knew (classmates), people you know more or less (Facebook), people you do not know (dating websites), they will soon also be about people you do not necessarily want to know.

At Lift Asia 09 we welcomed Jin-Ho Hur, CEO of Neowiz, a social network/gaming platform whose fundamental concept is that everybody can hide behind an avatar. Why? Because not knowing who the other users are is a feature! If you spend hours playing online games from the office, do you really want to share that with your network? And what about meeting people randomly like what happens at bars? This is not really covered by existing networks, hence the success of something like chatroulette that “generates one-on-one Webcam connections between you and another randomly chosen user” (NYT link).

I believe this is a trend, not only because it corresponds to a need, but because it is the only place where social networks can innovate under the current framework, where each positions itself along the past/present/future and friends/acquaintances/strangers dimensions.

The red bubble is where we have the less players at the moment. I expect to see many new services in the coming months, reproducing a phenomena that is omnipresent in our lives but mostly absent of online life: serendipity.

The fact these services are used & created by teenagers is also not very surprising. After all this generation seems to have lost many of the opportunities we had to connect randomly: the arcades have been replaced by Playstations, the rave parties have been forbidden, dating happens online rather than in bars, etc etc.

This gut feeling I have had for a while, that we haven’t fully understood the impact of the new technologies and will soon start to notice less productive side effects, is reinforced by Bruce Sterling’s latest State of the World address.

you’ve treated your future as an “unpredictable lurching thing…” and now you’re all morose about that… You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of “disruptive innovation,” “disintermediation,” “offshoring,” “small pieces loosely joined,” “de-monetization,” “plug and play” “the network as a platform”? Of course you’ve heard of all that crap, because you’ve been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don’t have any stability now! Much less guys like you, who move their fingers up and down on keyboards for a living.

Link

Technologies might have disrupted (rich countries’) social organizations a bit beyond what would have been productive course. We now face some of the problems we created (and naively wished for?). Time to put technology back in its place, something I have been preaching for a while, unfortunately without yet having found a solution to apply it to myself.

Following Eric Schmidt’s latest take on privacy, I am getting some link “love” from the big guys, with Techcrunch and Cnet both pointing to an early 2009 article I wrote on my take on privacy, something I believe you are not getting at birth anymore, but need to build around the concept of a “plausible me”. Publicy is a space you can control and where you can regain your privacy by publishing fake information - like 50% of social networks users aged 13-21 who claim they falsified information (see page 28).

Almost one year has passed since that post, and this important topic deserves a few more thoughts:

• More logging planned
  One year later, laws like Hadopi are popping up all around the world, which means every single act you do online is being monitored and logged. In France again, several databases are in the works, some storing information like philosophical, religious and sexual orientation, and other strangely irrelevant information when it comes to something the government should know on you. All this to say that the situation got worse, and definitely, privacy is not a choice anymore. Nobody can shut down all the video cameras capturing our movements in the streets.
• Privacy in the old sense of the word is dead
  Saying this does not make me agree with that development. But whether we like it or not (and I mostly don’t), there are many files on each of us, and we need to find a way to limit their impact. Privacy in the 19th century sense of the word does not exist anymore. Reversing the trend will demand a lot of catastrophes and abuses for public opinion to realize the pitfalls of such systems, and start making the legal, social, and technological changes. It is like the financial system, one government, person or company can not change this alone. It is a global issue.
• Privacy is not something we are granted at birth anymore
  It is not the default setting of our lives. In developed countries babies get their first database entry a couple of minutes after birth. The first data given up is weight, height, gender, name. Trivial and revealing at the same time. What is at stakes here is to find balance between the usefulness of data - tracking babies allows for better public health, and hopefully helps avoid confusions - and their nuisance potential. In the case of babies, it is pretty clear that the positive out gains the negative. But what happens for criminal databases? When they allow the capture of a recidivist, pretty good. When they prevent someone who has changed to get a new job and work himself back into society, they are a negative force. Where the balance point is depends on your political view, on whether you had such a case in your family, on the history of your country, etc.
• Not to mention lost data…
  And I am not even talking about the worrying number of hacked/leaked data making it to the open. There is storing data, then there is securing it. And every time I call my insurance company and witness their global incompetency in handling event the most basic process, I am terrified to think that the same people are managing servers with a lot of my personal data on it.
• The loss of the right to be forgotten is a terrible thing
  Because it prevents one from getting recognized as having gotten over any past mistake. Shrinks (they are put to contribution in the pre-cited CNET article) will tell you that a people can change radically through the long process of therapy. But as the recent Roman Polanski saga shows, there is no need for Facebook or Twitter to have things catch up with you 30 years later. Again, not a new problem, and probably more of a social than technological problem. 21st century is very bad at giving second chances it seems, despite the many stories of former convicts turning into positive forces. It is like, implicitly, society has accepted the total futility of the jail/punishment system. It does not work, criminals will strike again so we need a record on them. It is a shame there is no debate on how to regain trust in the correction system. If it was working 95% of the time we might not need databases.
• The search for fame is not the only driver of online existence
  There are many reasons for us to go online, and therefore try to control our identity. The distance with friends (I’m in touch with my childhood friends now living in Reims, Paris, L.A, Lisbon, etc. It can only happen online), participation in an online community (and something like Lift is only possible through online communities), launching a business (which means having a website with your name on it), etc. There is much more than pursuing an elusive fifteen minutes of fame. For a lateral view on this, take five minutes and read Howard S. Becker on studying new media. He mentions the many reasons why people are active online.
• We are not the only source of negative information on us
  Where I disagree with Eric Schmidt is when he seems to imply that one is the source of all negative information about him/herself. Yes, “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place“, but many exceptions should be taken into account there. I am not sure 14 years old Joseph Ratzinger (a man for whom I don’t have any special sympathy whatsoever) voluntarily engaged in the Hitler Youth, yet this was held back against him when he became Benedict XVI. A disease can also be a source of information you want to rightfully hide from the public, and this should be possible. People do not chose to have cancer, yet a few cases of people fired after searching for data on this condition have surfaced. Some information can hurt us, and we might have nothing to do about them.
• Privacy needs a serious framework
  Trying to find a definitive rule to guarantee an even privacy to all citizens is probably a lost cause, because we all need to solve a different equation. Some of us need total privacy, others need to be semi or fully public figures because of their business, personal or political activities. Being totally transparent can even protect you from government abuse! What we need is more of a framework where anybody can position the cursor as he wants, and more importantly, change its position over time. As the founder of Lift, I have to communicate online as I am the first node of a global community. Whatever my next job is, I might want to reverse the trend and become more secret. This is not really possible right now, and if you have a solution in mind you will be very rich and you should contact me, I will invest whatever I have in your company :)
• Self regulation is already underway
  This kind of larger than life issues tends to self regulate. And I think that in the end, Google and the advertisers - often cited as the ones asking for less privacy - are the ones who have an interest in it. Why? I already mentionned earlier a study showing that 50% of users among the 13-21 age range falsify information. You want to spy on me? I will feed you with fake data to push the envelope to where I want it to be. And I will make your profiling efforts much more complicated in the process. In the contrary, if you give users a system they can trust, one where they can control what is controllable, then they will share the data advertisers need. I am sure Google [Disclaimer: a partner of Lift] understands this, as their recent Data Liberation Front initiative shows. Facebook does not seem to be that far in terms of thinking, but it will inevitably come. This reminds me of the click fraud controversy: you can hardly identify them so the solution is to acknowledge them directly in your bidding for AdWords.For more on the lying habits of online users, be sure to check Genevieve Bell’s talk at Lift08:
  

Many questions raised by this Evgeny Morozov’s article who goes beyond the usual “the web is making democracy inevitable” tune. Social networks can be used by protesters around the world, but once governments pass the door they become a source of information on dissidents, with potentially dramatic consequences:

But that isn’t what happened in Belarus. After the first flash mob, the authorities began monitoring By_mob, the LiveJournal community where the activities were announced. The police started to show up at the events, often before the flashmobbers did. Not only did they detain participants, but they too took photos. These—along with the protesters’ own online images—were used to identify troublemakers, many of whom were then interrogated by the KGB, threatened with suspension from university, or worse. […] Social media created a digital panopticon that thwarted the revolution: its networks, transmitting public fear, were infiltrated and hopelessly outgunned by the power of the state.

Controlling your privacy on social networks is quite complicated - mostly because it goes against the fundamental needs of advertising, and is therefore not encouraged. Bad privacy management can have consequences:

Social networking, then, has inadvertently made it easier to gather intelligence about activist networks. Even a tiny security flaw in the settings of one Facebook profile can compromise the security of many others. A study by two MIT students, reported in September, showed it is possible to predict a person’s sexual orientation by analysing their Facebook friends; bad news for those in regions where homosexuality carries the threat of beatings and prison.

But everthing’s not lost:

[…] the internet can if used properly give dissidents secure and cheap tools of communication. Russian activists can use hard-to-tap Skype in place of insecure phone lines, for example. Dissidents can encrypt emails, distribute anti-government materials without leaving a paper trail, and use clever tools to bypass internet filters. […] Second, new technology makes bloody crackdowns riskier, as police are surrounded by digital cameras and pictures can quickly be sent to western news agencies. Some governments, like Burma and North Korea, don’t care about looking brutal, but many others do. Third, technology reduces the marginal cost of protest, helping to turn “fence-sitters” into protesters at critical moments. An apolitical Iranian student, for instance, might find that all her Facebook friends are protesting and decide to take part.

Conclusion: social medias are, like all innovations, a double edged sword:

Yet while the internet may take the power away from an authoritarian (or any other) state or institution, that power is not necessarily transferred to pro-democracy groups. Instead it often flows to groups who, if anything, are nastier than the regime. Social media’s greatest assets—anonymity, “virality,” interconnectedness—are also its main weaknesses.

Link (via Bruce again)

Bruce Sterling points to the issues created by Google, Facebook and the other online tools allowing jurors to get external - and disallowed - information on the case they must examine:

Last week, a Maryland appeals court upended a first-degree murder conviction because a juror consulted Wikipedia for trial information. Earlier this year, the appeals judges erased a conviction for three counts of assault because a juror did cyberspace research and shared the findings with the rest of the jury. In a third recent trial, a juror’s admission to using his laptop for off-limits information jeopardized an attempted-murder trial.

On Friday, lawyers for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon asked for a new trial in part because five of the jurors who convicted her of embezzlement Dec. 1 were communicating among themselves on Facebook during the deliberations period - and at least one of them received an outsider’s online opinion of what the verdict should be. The “Facebook Friends,” as Dixon’s lawyers call them in court documents, became a clique that the lawyers argue altered jury dynamics.

Link

When dating games become so real, a new form of addiction which brings a whole new level of consequences shows up in couples.

The DS has a mic and a touchscreen, so… one time, she asked me to say “I love you” a hundred times into the mic. I was on the airplane when she asked me that, so I was like, no way. And then there’s the part where you have to kiss her. […] The girl’s face shows up on the screen, and you have to touch her lips to give her a kiss. That’s pretty weird…. this is embarrassing. I’m sweating right now just talking about it.

My husband has a virtual girlfriend

The BBC has a vizualisation of the evolution of premier league players’ birthplace over the past decade. Twenty years during which workers movements have been liberalized after the famous Bosman Ruling ended the quotas restricting the number of non-nationals on teams. What we see here through the lens of sport is the general trend towards globalization of the workforce, where talent gathers in places it can better be leveraged regardless of political or geographical constraints.

Where the Premier League’s players come from (1988)

And in 2009

Arsenal in 1988

And in 2009

Manchester United in 1988

And in 2009

During those years, the English Premier League became the most powerful in the world, and reached multiple continents by capitalizing on foreign stars attracting viewers in their country of origin. Why not think about the lessons that can be drawn here, at a moment where borders are being closed to emigrants because of the crisis.

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire“
William Butler Yeats

“Educated, confident, creative people are dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to a centralized economy, dangerous to a centralized system of command and control. Those in power don’t want you educated. They want you schooled.”
PS Pirro, 101 Reasons Why I’m An Unschooler

Great discussion about education with Philippe Tarbouriech and Salman Farmanfarmaian at our latest entrepreneur gathering. It started when we discussed Philippe’s trip to India to make pictures of Hole in the wall, a project we all discovered at Lift07 and that has, since, inspired Slumdog millionaire.

Sugata’s project showed that a model we took for granted (an adult teaching kids) could be reinvented in an unexpected way; and that in some cases (rural  India) there was actually no other choice than coming up with something new for millions of kids in need of knowledge. Education is evolving, and these shifts are of course driven by new needs, namely:

• In the rich world, the need to adapt to a generation of kids who are more unique, social, connected, autonomous, and collaborative, who sometimes know more than the professors themselves.
• In the developing world, the need to adapt to the social context of millions who are left out of the traditional system.

The debate will certainly rage in the coming years. Interesting ideas are emerging:

• Self education is not new
  We think that self-education is unintuitive and a bit weird. It might even be dangerous to leave kids alone, having to sort out the good from the bad?
  But isn’t it the way we learn how to speak? As babies we hear adults who speak good or bad, dirty or classy words. In the end we make sense of all this and learn by ourselves one of the most complicated thing in the world: a language.
• Collaborative learning beats top down processes
  Learning does not have to be a lonely, humbling, boring, painful experience.
  One of the biggest contradiction of our system is that it wants to prepare us for professional life but creates a different framework than the one we will find at the end of our studies. Why don’t schools tolerate two of the resources one has to master to survive in a corporate environment, namely information retrieval (Google, encyclopedias, books) and collaboration with co-workers. Why can’t we call a knowledgeable person or use Google during exams when we can at work?
  Collaboration is being experimented, notably in computer games. Students are together in a virtual world, each facing a mathematical or logical challenge. When a student is done with his challenge he can help others who are slower. No one can go to the next level unless every single puzzle has been solved. Interesting idea.
• Education can be free
  Bing Gordon at a recent “hacking education” event: “Knowledge is a non-rival good. If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing“.
  Just as software and music tend to become more open and accessible under the assaults of new distribution channels (the web) and vanishing barriers to entry, knowledge is held by a large number of persons who, bearing a well designed and rewarding framework, will want to share what they know, and make it accessible to the world. Things like the University of people or Open Course Ware are already happening.
• Diplomas are increasingly irrelevant
  We know how the most admired entrepreneurs in the world don’t have anything else than post-fame honoris causa diplomas. Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, Bill Gates. Our very coveted paper certificates are challenged in that way, but not only. What if our credentials were stored online and freely accessible via Google, replaced by powerful references like peers and clients endorsements, online portfolios, press articles, etc. Why not have decentralized certification mechanism, one where you get a diploma after a certain number of trusted sources (universities, but also clients, co-workers, bosses, etc) endorse you? Follow a class at MIT, do an internship at Microsoft, write an article for the New York Times, get a degree from these three institutions. I even think there is a nice business model here…

Education is a fascinating topic, one that is hard to deal with because everybody has an opinion on how it should happen. We are about to see a brutal evolution, because what we have in front of us might be one of the biggest ever gap between two generations, between the digital migrants and the digital natives.

Who will vehemently resist these ideas? Teachers of course! Like journalists when they saw millions of web users invade their territory, they will instinctively want to fight back and protect their experts status. It is a lost war, the wrong approach. Educators will eventually settle in their new - and improved - place in society. After all, isn’t it more rewarding to collaborate than to direct, monitor, grade, and punish?

Links (thanks Salman!): An Unschooling Manifesto, Hacking Education.

Here is a quote from Paul Virilio discussing the impact of media on society in a recent French TV show:

There is a phenomena of globalization of affects, a sort of “community of emotions” replacing the community of interests. The community of interests is an economical community, social classes, rich and poor. The community of emotions is something completely new and that can not be mastered by political power.

This is one of the topics that intrigues me the most these days. How we tend to forget our long term interests because of emotions, served in daily and easy to consume capsules by mainstream and social media, all fighting for a bit of attention in the chaos we now have learned to live with.

Like the example I was giving in an earlier post: why is it acceptable to have thousands of policemen run after illegal immigrants when they only cost a fraction of what a trader can lose in a few seconds? Because until this particular crisis came up, immigrants were generating more emotions than bankers. Exactly what Virilio is talking about.

A community of emotions means a society built on patches, constantly trying to deal with the short term without considering the big picture. A community of emotions means a society less and less able to make solutions and problems match.

Maybe people will notice this phenomena, understand it, and become more hermetical to information. Or newsrooms might reinvent themselves, and start wondering if it makes sense to put on the front page of the local paper those sordid “fait-divers”. If a grandma has been attacked in a particularly cruel way somewhere on the planet, should all the senior citizens of the world be freaking out tonight? What exactly do we gain as a community from that news being spread all over?

Information comes with responsibilities. The web might have contributed - directly and indirectly - to make us forget this old adage. Are the side effects just around the corner?

“Ah la crise”, we hear so much about it. I get some questions about it during most interviews: “will you talk about the crisis at Lift09?” Not really, the conference is looking at society 2-3 years down the road, the crisis should be over by then right?

Well, that’s if it ever existed. Is this a crisis or a transition? The numbers that make the news (stocks, commercial balances, etc) are pretty bad, but do they really give us the whole picture?

Yes, the banks are under attack, and deservedly so. Their model is based on a world that does not exist anymore. Like the music industry before, banks have been refusing innovation, sitting on their assets without noticing that society was changing faster than ever. Customers have changed (billionaires now wear sneakers, use Skype and live on the road, while private banks still treat their clients as if they were retired oil moguls), employees have changed, needs have evolved (and customers didn’t wait for the banks to address them, see Loanland or Kiva). There is a price for arrogance (it cuts you from your clients), lack of agility (you can’t follow change), heritage (having an history can be bad for you. Ex: Nokia could never have invented the iPhone). A price to pay for all those things banks seem to have been specializing into recently.

^{Wired: Can innovation - and greentech? - save the world’s economy?}

Then there is unfairness. Switzerland has been making billions off money subtracted from other countries tax authorities. Now the US (other countries will follow) are trying to put an end to that. How sustainable can a business model abusing other countries be in a global world? What leverage do the Swiss have, with their banks having offices all around the world, their existence depending on those same countries that now pressure them? I am not getting into the philosophical debate of whether tax escape is good or bad, I am just saying: how long can you disrespect other countries rules in a global world?

Allow for a short parenthesis here: most Swiss are very pragmatic and understand this is unfair. See for example this interview from yesterday’s night news, the question from the national television’s journalist is “you are subtracting billions from other countries who need them to face the crisis, this money is in your safes, do you think it is normal?”. So think twice before you generalize to “the Swiss”. And don’t believe they are the only ones doing this. Your bank has a branch in the Bahamas too, and it is not only for the nice beaches. Bank of America, Crédit Lyonnais, HSBC, Chase Manhattan, Banco de Santander, they are all attracted by the “country’s progressive legislation and regulatory structure”. And have offices in Jersey, Monaco, Singapore and other tax havens.

So those living their formerly-high-life along those lines are in trouble, and nobody should rejoice because their struggles will impact all of us.

But on the other side there are the smaller companies, the ones whose numbers don’t make the news, those who are based on more simple and human values. The “real economy”. This part of the world seems to be doing much better. This past week, I received at least 10 job openings from start ups or mid-sized companies, all saying they urgently need a developer, a business manager, or an executive. I have never seen the people around me (mostly entrepreneurs and independents) that busy! Lift will be full again (676 participants for 700 seats as I write this) but Tom Hume had to cancel because his company won a huge contract,  Matt O’Neil (who started his company at Lift06) is currently too busy to attend, Scott Smith is stuck with client work back in the US and asked us to transfer his ticket. It seems smaller companies, those who adapted quickly to the new world because they, in part, created it, those companies are striving, acquiring customers all around the world, working on new and exciting projects, proposing changes and progress to an otherwise struggling society. Bruno Giussani told me that this year’s TED was buzzing with more energy and projects than ever, I hear 3GSM was a total blast, and it is precisely the feeling I am getting from my immediate surroundings. Exciting times!

I understand we all have a partial view of the world, and that I am no exception. I also understand these are weak signals, not backed by scientific numbers, which might not weight much in the face of reimbursing thousands of billions of screw ups. But I am asking a question: is this really the sub primes, or are we facing a peak of inadequacy between large companies and the world they live in? Is this a crisis, or a transition to a new world?

Anybody who has been a teenager knows that transitions can be painful. But they normally take you to a next level, a much more interesting one. Wait and see ;)