Mapping #OccupyGezi with social media

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Real time twitter score for tweets coming from Taksim Square in Istanbul: OccupyGezi gelen tweets Sayısı (gerçek zamanlı):
Real time twitter tweets coming from Taksim Square in Istanbul: OccupyGezi tweets (gerçek zamanlı):

Tracking tweets from #LeWeb

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See high tweeting from LeWeb site, within 1 KM of the event we are seeing over 200 geo-tagged tweets an hour, with 70% of tweets mentioning LeWeb explicitly.  Use the tool to see tweets geo-tagged for near this location.

Did twitter just break a major UK political sex scandal?

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The newspapers in the UK are reporting that a sex scandal exists near No 10, but they are not disclosing the name.  But on twitter it seems that an emerging consensus is that it was News of the World employees Rebecca Brooks and Andy Coulson.

Our legal system is a joke when I can put on @twitter that Coulson and Brooks had an affair but newspapers can't. #downingstreetaffair
— Paul Cargill (@paulcargill) June 3, 2013

The evidence for this is extremely week. A popular tweeter "Guido Fawkes" (Paul Staines) claims to know, and is a person who probably would know.  

Number 10 #affair Alledged affair is between Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brookscryptome.org/2013/05/acrb.h…Read all about it!
— TheFarepakConspiracy (@Filesxxx) June 3, 2013

Okay based on clues given by Staines this is all I think it comes down to:

1. The are not MPs
2. They are not in the cabinet
3. Is was a man and a woman
4. Staines labelled a image #acrb which is being taken as a hint. 

Okay so it makes sense it might be them two, but this is not really first rate journalism and twitter has had some epic fails.  Lets see what the outcome it, has twitter shown that UK libel laws are meaningless in an age of rapid self publishing, or does the concept of the wisdom of crowds have yet another major failure?

Industrial Convergence is the key concept of future economics

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A nice quick intro to the concept of industrial convergence from explainingthefuture.com

3D printing is quickly demonstrating a key factor in understanding the urban life to come.  Two factors are working to transform industry from the silos of today, dependent on cheap labor living in distant places, and a sustainable future.

I explain why the pace of innovation is creating less high tech factory

Firstly the issue is energy, and the massive dependency on cheap energy that the current economics uses.  The other factor is growing ability to create substances and objects from data that can be shared via open standards on the Interent.

3D printing is showing the possibility of downloading almost anything anywhere and creating it via recycled material near the point of consumption.  Very soon it will be possible to create clothing and most other consumer goods a the point of use using recycled material.

But just because something is technically possible does not mean it will be done.  In fact local production is possible now, its just not economical for the most part.

What will drive convergence uptake will be the cost of energy.  If we do run out of cheap oil and no alternative is found the cost of moving a pair of shoes or jeans from China will become so high it will become better to produce them locally, using 3D printers or other machines of the future.

But there is a possibility that solar, wind or nuclear will provide a new age of cheap energy.  If there is a new age of cheap energy it is possible that not local convergent industry will be able to compete with the low costs of China.

Let me explain.  Why are so many of the things you own made in China?  We all know the answer is cheap quality labor.  But given the amazing possibility of modern technology why do plants in the United States and EU not just put in machines that would so expand human capacity as to make the cheap labor of China meaningless?  Its is a good question.  If you have ever seen how things are done in China you will notice a great deal of inefficiency and wasted human effort.  With modern computers and machines a factory in the United States could easily be so much more efficient than one in China that the difference in wages would become almost nothing.

But that is the issue, the fact that putting machinery in place costs money, in what is called fixed capital.  You need to operate a plant for some time to get the benefit of fixed capital investment and there is always a chance you will never get the benefit if you lose your market or the technology does not work.

Innovation in consumer demand is actually making this worse.  

If you put machinery in a plant you need to run the machines for a certain amount of time to get return on the investment.  If you don't use machines you need to use more people.  Since the items being created change so rapidly it is better not to have fixed capital in machinery and to have capital invested in labor.

Okay, I know this sounds Marxist.  My defence on that kind of lame point is that Marx simply assumed classical economics of the 18th and 19th Century to be true, so this is just Classic economics.

So where is the invisible hand that makes everything right in the market?  Well the only way to argue for that is to say service jobs in the west make up for lost production jobs.  Personally I see that as the case.  When I was 21 I got a job in a chemical plant over the summer.  I was able to get another job for the same wages working with retarded adults.  I found the job working with retarded adults far more rewarding and was happy to leave the old economy and enter a lifetime of service economy work.  Since that time I have, for 25 years, not work one day outside of the service sector.  I think my story is kind of typical.

The necessary #Tumblr #Yahoo post: why its worse than you think

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Who is it who wanted Tumblr to juin Yahoo?  Certainly not the user of either site.
http://www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-users-are-against-yahoo-buyout-2013-5#ixzz2Tv6x4Stw

Okay before I even write I know what you think I think: Tumblr selling to Yahoo! is terrible for Tumblr users.  Well duh?

Yahoo is the guy who is entering his fifth marriage to a woman he meet in rehab who is half his age.  Yahoo is the place that web site go to die.  Given that Internet users have minds of their own it hard to see how this will work, even if Yahoo manages somehow not to screw this one up, which would be a first, its hard to see the users sticking with Tumblr long enough to find out.  Yahoo reputation goes before it and in social networks it's the chaotic mass actions of crowds that have highly unpredictable impacts.  Unpredictable usually means catastrophic for the established players with poor track records.

Screaming Yahoo! in a social network will create a stampede of users out.  User are rational agents who have formed opinions often based on a wealth of previous experience.  After a certain point it is very hard for brands to revive themselves in a market where reputation and information is everything.

But really I could care less about Tumblr per say: its just another blogging social network tool.  So many have come and gone over the past 10 years its hard to get any emotion about one.  Personally I stopped using Tumblr for no other reason than I couldn't be bother about converting TIFFs to JPGs.

Yes, I am that jaded.

But the fact that Yahoo! could buy a successful new platform like this tells us something terrible about the Internet.

There are essentially two points of view about how the Internet could build freedom.  On the left wing their is the idea that the Internet gives citizens a cheap easy to use platform to promote democracy.  The mass ownership of social networks that are prepared to censor content automatically has killed this idea and the hope of an Internet that was managed via democratic means is long gone.

So we have the Internet as a business, for the most part having to be sustainable and profitable.  Thank goodness for Wikipedia and Linux, which still cling to the leftist utopia model of an emergent democratic internet, but for the most part the Internet is about venue flow.

On the right wing of the Internet are the libertarians have said that direct democracy was not necessary, because the Internet was a market and that users moving from platform to platform would have the same result, via the 'magic of the marketplace' that direct elections could have.  Free markets, the story goes, would create a free Internet.

People have pointed to protest movements use of Facebook and Twitter as evidence of this, and frankly something has to be said for it.  Users are not dumb machines, they are not the play things of corporate strategies and even in a fully commodity based platform like Facebook users have found ways to express a wide range of opinions.

But the core idea of the libertarian movement is that the Internet is a market place.

Yahoo! buying Tumblr shows that this is not even true.

If the Internet was a real market, with free entry and 'creative destruction' taking place Yahoo! would not only NOT be buying Tumblr it would have been driven out of business years ago by more agile effective players.  And yet this catastrophic company, perhaps the worst run major company in the US since Enron (I don't say that lightly) has managed to buy one of the most popular and dynamic new blogging and networking platforms.

This is NOT free market capitalism.

The Internet is a more disturbing concentration of power than most anyone is thinking.

The Internet seems to be more like a feudal system before industrialisation.  Revenue comes via ad views, which are controlled by ownership of the platforms.  The users create all the value by publishing content to platforms like YouTube and Facebook, but Google and Facebook make the money as a kind of rent they establish by control of this.

It is important to compare this to Wikipedia which funds via donations.  Wikipedia is capable of an emergent democratic process where users can raise issues, and admins can be convinced to change.  In the years I have worked, modestly, with Wikipedia I have seen major changes in the way power is daily used and shared.

But that is not the norm.

The norm is massive companies too big to fail which dominate more and more of the platforms making profits for their investors.

The Internet is looking more and more like the banking sector.

So what chance freedom?

I will come out and say it, the only opportunity most users have of establishing freedom on the emerging corporate web is being bitches: ignoring rules and working to subvert the system to work in ways that serve their interests.  This seems to be the fate of resistance in consumer society.

But the idea that the Internet would function like a high school was not the promise that motivated me back in 1989.

Epic flood of tweets from #occupygezi continues

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Real time twitter score for tweets coming from Taksim Square in Istanbul: OccupyGezi gelen tweets Sayısı (gerçek zamanlı):
Real time tweeter meter at site of Istanbul protest, giving total geo-tagged tweets for a 1 KM radius.

"..social media is the worst menace to society" Turkish PM blames unrest on Twitter independent.co.uk/news/world/eur…
— saima (@siama7) June 3, 2013

Best picture ever #direngeziparkı #direngezi #occupygezi #occupyistanbul #twitter twitter.com/BatmansTweet/s…
— occopy istanbul (@BatmansTweet) June 8, 2013

In Istanbul we are seeing the most massive crowd generated alternative media network ever created to support any political event anywhere. 

There are even more global tweets using the hashtag #occupygezi

Use the tool below to see what people are saying in that area on twitter:

Tweets about "near:"Taksim Istanbul Turkey" within:5mi"

Tracking #Cannes tweets

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The above tool tells you the level of tweets coming from the Cannes Film festival. Perhaps more interesting is the tool below, where you can read the content of tweets that have the Cannes Filme Festival as a geo-tag. Get the reviews as people are walking out the of theatres, see the stars photos, and experience details of being there on twitter.

Track tweets from #OKC

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How the Real World killed #SecondLife

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There is no question Second Life is beautiful and creative, but I can't help but conclude that the lack of people active on spaces has reached a critical point.

By Eupalinos Ugajin

Spoiler: The conclusion of this article is that mobile technology has transformed cities of the real world in to the largest virtual worlds around, and that now real space, bound with the internet, is providing people the largest of virtual worlds.

These social maps of Jakarta, London and Rio show that mobile technology has create a Virtual World out of the real world.  You can look in on the real world now via the internet, see where crowds are likely formed, read reviews of places, see images, look at tweets, join meetups.  The virtual world technology that drives Second Life is now merged with the real world.

Looking now at a map of central Second Life shows a plague or participation has happened. Bebo and MySpace prove social networks follow a line of time, entropy governs social networks on the Internet.


Second Life passed a tipping point. Social relations already established can work but new social relations can't be formed, like a galaxy there is simply not enough stuff to form new relationships between stuff, the chances of bumping in to new people randomly is too small.

That is not to say nothing is going on in Second Life. Second Life is kind of like a dying galaxy. In a dying galaxy stars can go on for billions of years, there still are a few clusters of established community and relationships that can go on in Second Life.

These is just not enough critical mass of people to form new clusters of people.   I used to meet a new person every day in SL.  Look at the map above and you see few places where people will be grouping to meet, where you can start up a chat and develop a new friendship.  Think of is a large area of space, if there is not enough matter in space new stars can't form from accidental collisions.  There is a minimal density of people in a space required to make an area an exciting destination for social like.  Second Life does not look like a city you would go to on vacation, it has become a suburb people go to in order to carry out private interests.

Compare the Second Life map of all avatars to a map of Lagos, showing only the people who happen to tweet using Geo-location turned on (a tiny minority), clearly a living city like Lagos is offering social opportunity than Second Life, even online.

These two maps of Second Life showing green dots for every person shows a disturbing pattern, spaces are mostly empty, there is simply no hub to meet people.  A few spots have large clusters but there are not enough of them to make new introductions.  So Second Life is stuck in an entropy problem.  Established users with established contacts can use it to carry on personal social interactions, and many still do.  But over time these will be reduced, people get bored or die or fall out with each other.  There is no engine in place to form new relationships.

The problem with a social space like Second Life is that all the social formation has to happen inside of it.  In this way its more like Twitter than Facebook.  Most of my contacts on Twitter are people I meet via twitter, which Facebook depends on established social networks.

But twitter is linked to the real world, I meet people on Twitter via shared real world interests and politics and sometimes I even meet them in the real world.  This link to the real world does not exist in Second Life, SL is a fantasy space that requires it produce its own fantasies, and right now there are simply not enough people playing Princesses and Princes for the ball to go on.

Anyways think about it, what would make make a better virtual world?  A world you have to make entirely and pay to maintain, or the real world that is already there and full of great stuff?

Is the city the future?

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The typically positive message about new technology and cities from IBM and the City of London, but is it just hype?  

Humanity is now living in cities, half of us now live in cities and this is likely only to increase. But is this a sustainable future model for humanity?

 

Steward Brand, the eternal west coast optimist with the Long Now Foundation and founder of Whole Earth Catalogue typically sees this as a technical problem to be solved and full of opportunity. We just need, argues Stewart, more long term thing.

But is this too Utopian?  Derrick Jensen in the documentary END:CIV.



Jensen is not buying any of the Long Now Kevin Kelly hype: cities are not, according to his view a solution but by their nature a problem.  All the technology in the world, according to this view, will not resolve the problem that cities are.

Another view is the Venus Project, which sits somewhere between Brand, who believes are society will likely move towards sustainability via science and free markets, and Jensen who believes it is impossible.  Jacques Fresco of the Venus Project has called for a model of more planning, post capitalism that will use technology to build sustainable long term cities.

So here are our options on cities:

• The Long Now idea: Cities are a natural solution that is emerging to our problems, they will become more green and use energy and resources better than other models.
• Jensen: Cities are doomed to fail.
• Venus Project: Cities can be sustainable only after a central revolution in culture. 

So in studying cities we are looking at the most significant single event of our history.