Noah Liebman

We’re the commons

Have any economists modeled the consuming public/workforce as a public good?

It seems to me that corporations are playing a game-theoretic game in which they individually want to pay less money and employ fewer people while simultaneously hoping other corporations will keep employing people and paying them enough to maintain a customer base for their product. In other words, a social contract.

What we're seeing now is the result of too many corporations defecting over the past 30 years. A tragedy of the commons, where we're the commons.

The flip side of this chain reaction, of course, is that consumers demand lower and lower prices because they can't afford what they used to. In order to compete, companies are forced to send manufacturing jobs to countries where labor costs are lower, so even more people can't afford what they used to.

How do we stop it?

Buddy list begone

Ah, the buddy list. Remember when we actually liked advertising to our friends that we were online, and maybe even wanted to chat? That was high-tech — in 1995. The buddy list (also known as presence) is a kind of social transparency, and while we still need social transparency mechanisms built in to our communications media, presence is no longer the appropriate mechanism. Presence comes from a time when the normal state of affairs was that you were unavailable, usually because in order to be available, you had to be at a desktop computer with a modem, and had to dial in to your ISP. Available meant connected, and connected meant available. When always-on connections were still novel, the away message became all the rage. (Remember when, in undergrad, we would regularly leave our computers on all night as an answering machine?) And presence became more sophisticated, using not just away messages, but idle states and times. But in many cases, just being visible on a buddy list is too much presence.

At the other end of the spectrum, historically speaking, was SMS. Being mobile, it was assumed that one was always connected (and therefore available) via SMS; therefore, presence was unnecessary. Yet people aren’t (or at least don’t want to be) always available.

Now that the nominal assumption is one of connectedness, connectedness and availability can no longer be assumed to be the same. And because connectedness is the assumed state, it doesn’t need to be advertised.

This, it seems to me, sets the historical context for a new (except for BBM) trend displacing presence: notifications of engagement. Rather than explicitly articulated status, action (or inaction) by the receiver signal availability to the sender. They do away with status, but provide the social transparency needed to manage sender expectations. Or, more simply, the sender can see whether their message has been received and read.

While right now this is almost exclusively used in mobile-to-mobile systems (BBM, Kik, Whatsapp, etc.), it has always bothered me that there is no desktop client for any of these systems. Finally, Apple — who pioneered FaceTime’s always-available-no-presence-like-a-telephone availability — is poised to bring such a system to the desktop (as well as iOS) with iMessage [1]. It’s instant messaging, without presence, with delivery, read, and typing notifications, that works on the desktop and mobile devices.

Personally, I can’t wait.

1. Fanboy alert [↩]

Tweeting to myself

The next time you think, “Oh, I should tweet that!”, don’t. Experience life as private moments rather than as a performance. #mindfulness
– Me, oddly unironically on Twitter

Some astute observers of Noah (often called “friends” or “stalkers”) may have noticed that I have been tweeting much less than I often have. This is deliberate, and I have to admit, I like it.

I like it for two reasons. First, and this is a little embarassing to admit, but there’s a component of self-validation that goes along with tweeting. I put myself out there, and I want to know that people appreciate what I have to say. By tweeting more, I hope for (and even sometimes get) more @replies, click-throughs, and retweets. Tweeting sets into motion a whole set of other behaviors: engaging in more Twitter conversations, checking Favstar.fm, checking to see if I’ve been retweeted, checking click-through stats on bit.ly. Sure, it’s nice to be loved, but constantly hitting reload to see if I’m getting the kind of social affermation I’m looking for is neither healthy nor a good use of time. Less tweeting means less potentially coming back at me, and that can be a good thing.

Second, Twitter changed the way I live, or at least the way I conceive of life. With Twitter, especially when used for personal rather than professional content, I found myself constantly thinking, “Ooh! I should tweet that!” Have a clever thought? “Ooh, I should tweet that!” Doing something other people would think is cool? “Ooh, I should tweet that!” Just get some exciting news? “Ooh, I should tweet that!” Read an interesting article? “Ooh, I should tweet that!” It’s ridiculous, really. Life becomes performative rather than introspective.

Enter Day One. It’s like Twitter, but to yourself, and with no character limit. Brialliant! Hmm…I think there’s a name for such a thing. Oh, right…a journal! I’ve never been much of a journaler or diarist, but this thing I can do. Day One gets part of the credit: I’d love to see an analysis of the app and how design can influence and encourage behavior…but that’s a different story. (Hint: the small size of the quick entry box makes it feel more Twitter-like and less intimidating.)

But the bigger reason I think I’m so into Day One is that tweeting has trained me to live not only performatively, but with a critical, reflective eye. So many of my “Ooh, I should tweet that!” moments I don’t actually tweet, either because I don’t think my audience would be interested, or because they just plain aren’t appropriate for Twitter (or anyplace else outside my own brain, for that matter). But with an outlet for them, those thoughts are captured.

And despite the mental barrier to entry being lowered by making the text box nice and small and having Twitter to have established norms of observation, reflection, and conciseness, I often find myself expanding on those thoughts, blowing through Twitter’s character limit, sometimes even going on for hundreds of words.

And the cool thing is that, even without the possibility of social feedback, tweeting to myself is just as emotionally rewarding as tweeting to the world — if not more so.

Aesthetics, math, and music

I’ve been talking a lot lately with a couple friends about what imbues music with emotion, why certain chords and intervals are more pleasant sounding than others, whether expectations about resolutions are learned or somehow innate (e.g. I–IV–V7 seems to naturally want to only go to one place: I), and other similar questions. I’ve been saying that a lot of it has to do with the mathematics of music, so the relationship between aesthetics and mathematics was already on my mind when the post about the golden ratio and Apple’s iCloud icon made its way around Twitter the other day, and only made me more excited about that relationship.

So with that motivation, here is a brief primer on the mathematics of music, particularly as it relates to intervals and tuning. It is adapted partially from a 2004 post I made to the AppleNova forum, and partially from some demos I put together (unassigned, of course) for a Physics of Music class I took in fall 2005.

Any interval between notes can be (in theory) defined is a ratio between frequencies, and intervals that have traditionally been considered consonant are part of the natural harmonic series, and therefore have low-integer ratios.

The harmonic series turns up in a couple places in music/audio. In audio, harmonics occur in all natural (i.e. non-synthesized) sounds. It’s the relative weighting of each of the harmonics that give each sound its unique timbre. I’m not really going to be talking about the harmonic/spectral breakdown of individual notes in this post, though. I’m just focusing on the relationship between notes and other notes — what I’m calling the harmonic series in music as opposed to in audio.

The harmonic series is defined as $\frac{1}{1}, \frac{1}{2}, \frac{1}{3}, \dots, \frac{1}{n}$. (Mathematicians, ever wonder why the harmonic series was called that? This is why.)

This makes the theoretical definition of the larger intervals easy. Taking A440 as an example:

Degree	n	Frequency (Hz)
Root	0	$440\times 1 = 440$
Octave	1	$440\times \left(1 + \frac{1}{1} \right) = 880$
5th	2	$440\times \left(1 + \frac{1}{2} \right) = 660$
4th	3	$440\times \left(1 + \frac{1}{3} \right) = 586\frac{2}{3}$
Major 3rd	4	$440\times \left(1 + \frac{1}{4} \right) = 550$
Minor 3rd	5	$440\times \left(1 + \frac{1}{5} \right) = 528$

That’s where it stops working, though. Closer intervals don’t neatly obey the harmonic series. But you know something else about intervals that are not in the harmonic series? They’re perceived as dissonant. Interesting, eh?

Now, the reason I said that these are the frequencies of the notes in theory is because that’s not how western music is actually tuned. The system outlined above is called just intonation; however, this system has several drawbacks, including the inability to be played equally in tune in any key, and intervals other than those listed above being constructed from large integer frequency ratios from much higher in the harmonic series.

Beginning in the late 16th century, a competing intonation system (that was much more difficult to obtain mathematically back in the day), equal temperament, began to gain favor in Europe. (In fact, J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was written in order to demonstrate equal temperament’s ability to be played in tune in all twelve major and minor keys.)

Equal temperament is based on the twelfth root of 2, $\sqrt[12]{2}$, or, if you remember your root, fraction, and log identities, $2^\frac{1}{12}$.

Again taking A440 as an example:

Degree	n	Frequency (Hz)
Root	0	440
Half step	1	$440 \times 2^\frac{1}{12} = 466.16$
Whole step	2	$440 \times 2^\frac{2}{12} = 493.88$
Minor 3rd	3	$440 \times 2^\frac{3}{12} = 523.25$
Major 3rd	4	$440 \times 2^\frac{4}{12} = 554.37$
4th	5	$440 \times 2^\frac{5}{12} = 587.33$
Tritone	6	$440 \times 2^\frac{6}{12} = 622.25$
5th	7	$440 \times 2^\frac{7}{12} = 659.26$
Minor 6th	8	$440 \times 2^\frac{8}{12} = 698.46$
Major 6th	9	$440 \times 2^\frac{9}{12} = 739.99$
Flat 7	10	$440 \times 2^\frac{10}{12} = 783.99$
7th	11	$440 \times 2^\frac{11}{12} = 830.61$
Octave	12	$440 \times 2^\frac{12}{12} = 880$

How different do these look and sound? These are two A major chords (of sine waves), one in just intonation, the other in equal temperament. (Excuse the JPEG compression artifacts. I made these in 2005 before PNG really caught on, and I don’t have access to MATLAB anymore.)

Listen to it!

Listen to it!

What you’ll notice is that the chord in equal temperament has imperfections and asymmetries that the just intonation one doesn’t. While this doesn’t have much impact because these are sine waves, you can imagine that when played on real instruments, the interactions between the upper harmonics would be much more complex in equal temperament.

When you listen to them, listen for the “beats” in equal and notice how the are absent in just intonation, resulting in a more pure sound.

And for your listening pleasure, a C major scale with each note played in Pythagorean, just, and equal tunings.

Listen to it!

Here’s a zip file of all the sounds, graphs, and the MATLAB code to generate it. I haven’t looked at it in six years, but I assume it does something useful.

On atoms and bits: the dying metaphor of the filesystem

Last week on Twitter (during Steve Jobs’s WWDC keynote) I lamented the death of the filesystem. I want to flesh out a few of my thoughts on the subject.

I think one of the reasons I like the filesystem so much is that I’ve actually come to believe the metaphor. When I think about tags, saved searches, even searching in general, I find it uncomfortable because I want to know where the file is actually located. I’m just much more comfortable with knowing where it resides “on disk”. That’s why, to me, one of the great things about having a jailbroken iPhone is that I can actually browse the file system: I just like knowing it’s there. Even MySQL databases make me uneasy because it’s really challenging to interact with it from the relatively low level of the file system. It all feels too abstract.

But now that I think about it, really, it’s a false sense of concreteness and of security. No, in fact, the file system doesn’t really exist either. But the metaphor is so powerful because it gives the impression that each file is located somewhere, like a bunch of atoms — and that feels good.

Is that important? And is losing that such a bad thing? The main problems I see with most systems that don’t rely on the hierarchical filesystem is that they don’t offer any way to share files between applications. Making certain documents accessible only from within the applications they were created in is pretty standard in iOS. I commented a while back that Mac OS X Lion represents a shift on the desktop away from a document-centric model toward an app-centric model, but that must not come at the cost of losing the ability to easily open and operate on documents from within any application. What will that look like if it’s not the HFS?

Designed by Apple in California, assembled where?

While hanging out in Seattle with @amcvitte, @jgerrish, @lizblankenship, and @eaderhold, we decided on a whim to go see a one-man play called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, created and performed by storyteller–turned–investigative-journalist Mike Daisey. I had no idea what to expect, but “powerful” would not have been one of my guesses. The content of the show is already dead-on, so there’s not really anything I can add, so I’ll just expand on a few of his key points.

The show interleaves stories from Apple’s history (Woz calls the Vatican, Jobs asks Scully if he wants to make sugar water or change the world, etc.), tales of life inside the RDF, a brief (and questionable, but that’s beside the point) history of HCI, and stories from Daisey’s trip to China to find out how, and by whom, all of the products we lust after are made. Needless to say, as an HCI guy, Apple fanboy, and anti-corporatist (don’t think too hard about that juxtaposition), I liked it.

But thinking too hard is exactly what Daisey wants us to do. How can I justify simultaneously being an admirer, owner, user, and shareholder of Apple and its products while opposing the corporatist system that created an environment in which 13-year-old girls work 12–15-hour days assembling products just like the very one I’m typing this on?

When Jobs and the Apple team saw the Xerox Star machine at PARC, in all its WIMPy glory, they recognized that the metaphor of computing had shifted. Daisey uses this metaphor as a metaphor (metametaphor?), saying that “if you control the metaphor, you control the way people see the world.” Well, the metaphor of “Made in China”–as–black-box is a dangerous one, and one that has to change.

We think that factories in China are highly automated, using machines to do the precision work required to put together an iPhone. The scary part is that this has become true in the collective mind of the West, but only because we like to ignore the humanity of the millions of workers who assemble these products, by hand, in Chinese factories — 435,000 of whom work for FoxConn, Apple’s primary assembly contractor — pretending that they are, in fact, machines. It’s like I said about the mythology of Ford in my previous post: the assembly line is about mechanizing and menializing human labor. And in China, people are cheaper than machines. This metaphor is what has to shift.

Mike Daisey makes the point that it’s not about the money, it’s about the mindset. I think he’s right. Here’s why:

He says that the total labor cost of an iPhone is 80¢. The number I found is $6.54 [1] [2], so I’ll use that. The theoretical hourly wage of a FoxConn worker is $1.22 [3]. Going with that for the sake of argument, that means it takes

$6.54\frac{\$}{\textrm{iPhone}} \times \frac{1}{1.22}\frac{\textrm{man-hour}}{\$} = 5.36\frac{\textrm{man-hours}}{\textrm{iPhone}}$

to produce an iPhone. Now consider a US factory where a worker makes $20/hour. Even if it takes the same number of man-hours to produce an iPhone, which it wouldn’t because a US factory would be automated (with machines), the labor cost of producing an iPhone would increase to

$20\frac{\$}{\textrm{man-hour}} \times 5.36\frac{\textrm{man-hours}}{\textrm{iPhone}} = 107.21\frac{\$}{\textrm{iPhone}}$

A large percentage increase, yes, but it’s a product that costs upwards of $600. (Remember, the one you bought was subsidized by the carrier.) With a total materials cost of $172.46 [2], that means Apple would only make $320.33 per unit as opposed to $421.00 per unit.

Last quarter, Apple made $6 billion in profits [4]. Its market cap is currently almost twice that of Google, and 50% higher than Microsoft’s or IBM’s. In fact, the only two larger publicly traded companies in the world are PetroChina and Exxon Mobil [5]. As a proud AAPL shareholder, I understand that the raison d'être of a corporation is to make money, and that it isn’t a humanitarian organization. But I don’t want blood on my keyboard — or in my portfolio. Domestic manufacturing can go a long way toward that goal. (It can also increase quality and reduce the financial and environmental costs of shipping products around the world. Oh, and it could help bolster the US economy (remember, I'm a Detroiter) and create some great press.)

As Mike Daisey says, the crime isn’t exporting our jobs, it’s exporting our jobs without exporting our values. [6]

1. http://puntodigital.com/iphone-labor-cost-is-6-54-dollars/224237/ [↩]
2. http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/iphone_3gs_manufacturing_cost_at_179_per_unit/ [↩] [↩]
3. http://www.examiner.com/technology-in-national/ipad-iphone-manufacturer-foxconn-to-raise-employee-wages-again [↩]
4. 13 weeks ending 2011-03-26 [↩]
5. As of 2010-12-31 [↩]
6. http://mynorthwest.com/?nid=577&a=28888 [↩]

On the persistence of culture

A couple weeks ago, I was talking with my friend Ethan about how corporate cultures develop, and he pointed out the importance of origin mythology. For example, Microsoft’s origin story is of a shrewd Bill Gates buying DOS and rebranding it as a Microsoft product. Ever since then, Microsoft has had a culture of following and M&A rather than true innovation. Google, on the other hand, has been about enabling clever people, and giving them an environment in which to assert their cleverness.

How, then, can the Detroit car makers reinvent themselves with cultures that will help them to attract and retain talent? The Ford origin story is the mythology of the assembly line; in other words, of Ford’s ability to mechanize and menialize human labor. Is there a way for them to transform that into a culture that respects the value of individual workers, something demanded by today’s graduates?

Avatar: A disembodied cybernetic dreamscape

I just finished Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture. In it, he tells the story of how the communalist movement of the 1960s evolved into the technoutopian vision of the 1990s. It’s a compelling story, although it left me feeling distressed as I watched the characters tend toward a corporateist libertarianism as they “sold out”. (The pendulum swings yet again….)

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I want to talk about Avatar. Yes, the movie with the blue people set on Pandora. The deep-seated appeal of this singular cultural artifact becomes clear when looked at in the historical context of the cybernetic- and LSD-influanced counterculture as well as, later, the digerati.

Two overarching concepts from the culture Turner describes permeate the movie. First is the cybernetic view of individuals — biological and otherwise — as nodes in a network, sensing, transmitting, receiving, and reacting to surrounding conditions in a giant feedback loop, just as the control sysem of an electromechanical device is, in the literal, electrical engineering sense of the word, a feedback loop. This, in an explicit way, is the very structure of Pandora’s biology, spiritualized by the native people, and romanticized by humans.

The second concept is disembodiment. Whether it was through electronic music (in the 1960s sense), strobe lights, and drugs, or later with networked computing and computer-mediated communication, Turner claims that many in the communalist-countercultre–turned-technoelite sought to leave the confines of the body for “an opportunity to feel a psychic union with others”. As a modern (or hypermodern, cyberpunk) interperatation of the word “avatar” would suggest, Avatar lets us imagine what it’d be like not only to become disembodied, only to reappear in a networked, interconnected virtual reality or cyberspace (whatever those words even mean anymore), but to actually leave one’s human body for a genuine alternative reality in which such connectedness is not only the norm, but real, meaningful, and organic.

But disembodiment is a non-ideal solution to the connectedness people seek. Because human biology lacks the networking hardware of Pandora’s life (c’mon, the pairing of a hunter with his bird is exactly like trying to pair with a Bluetooth device, complete with epic struggle), people use technology to escape their bodies and connect with others. But without that limitation, the protagonist of Avatar ultimately stops experiencing the cyberbiological world through technologically mediated disembodiment, and comes to fully embody that deep, network-like connection with all beings on Pandora.

Decision!

Over the past couple months, I've been agonizing over the most difficult decision it has ever been my pleasure to agonize over: which of several interesting, relevant, and fantastic Ph.D. programs that I was accepted to should I attend?

Well, thanks to an externally imposed deadline, I've made my decision. It wasn't easy (I had to "call in preoccupied" to work yesterday), but…whew.

This fall, I will begin studying in the Technology and Social Behavior program at Northwestern University. This is a young but unique program that offers a combined Ph.D. in Communication and Computer Science, and I'm excited to be a part of it!

The two kinds of privacy

It occurred to me yesterday while talking to some people at shul (after services, of course) that when people express concerns over privacy at Facebook and Google, there are really two types of privacy they’re talking about: privacy from individuals, and privacy from corporations.

Most people, it seems, are more concerned with privacy from individuals. Who can see my information? Friends? Bosses? Potential dates? Would-be stalkers? And what info can they see? Uncertainty (and occasionally surprise) about who can see what is what people like to call air-quotes “creepy”.

But this isn’t what bothers me so much. Although Facebook likes to keep us on our toes with ever-changing privacy settings (and defaults), we at least have some control over it. I could make my Twitter account private, could take my address and phone number off the web version of my résumé, could turn off my Facebook wall. That solves problem #1. (At least in the short term, until some 1337 hax0rz publish all of Facebook’s data on 4chan.)

No, what I find far more insidious is that so much of our data is being collected by companies in which incentive arrangements are set up not to favor the users of the product, but users of the enormous datasets that are being collected. As @librarythingtim so succinctly put it, “Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you're not their customer, you’re their product.”

I don’t have a problem with corporations in general; what I have a problem with is the use-it-for-“free” business model in which we all pay with our data. I don’t use Gmail, but I do use Dreamhost and MobileMe because I pay not with my data, but with cash.

I know there are concerns about privacy becoming a privilege of the wealthy, and that’s a valid concern, but let’s face it: as a service, Facebook does provide a great deal of utility. At the recently-floated $50 billion valuation, each user is worth under $100. Would you be willing to pay Facebook $8/month (which would earn them far more over the life of a customer than $100) for no ads and to have them exclude your data from all aggregation? I know I would, but I don’t know where the public’s values lie.