Confusion & Disinformation

I published What 2013 Has In Store 166 days ago and summed up my discoveries in Professionalism & Propaganda a week ago. This 1,800+ word piece with descriptive links to over thirty posts covers everything from my network of now over 3,000 Facebook Anonymous supporters through the CIA’s application of mindfulness to the analysis process, a direction taken in response to network threats.

During that time I completed a social network analysis class offered by Coursera and I curated nineteen related documents in my SNA Class collection. Humans exhibit a variety of interconnected ways of making decisions, information itself has a network of precursors and successors, and the flow of information through human networks can often be modeled as a spreading contagion.

There are a variety of problems that professional analysts face which have been studied in-depth by the Central Intelligence Agency‘s internal think tank, the Center for the Study of Intelligence. A distributed, grassroots network shares some characteristics with a professional cadre of analysts, but organizing, motivating, and assessing their progress is dramatically different from that of a hierarchical organization.

Here is an overview of the universe for the next stage in my inquiries. This Maltego graph displays five major components. The large group with the most diverse colors is representative of my place in the scheme of things – people who engage me in a bi-drectional fashion and organizations to which I subscribe. The cluster of people(lavender) and Twitter accounts(green) at the lower left represents e-International Relations, which is open and academic in nature. The similar looking cluster at the upper right are the Twitter users among the 156 analysts for Wikistrat. A larger graph of their complete network is seen in the next image. The cluster at the lower right is the LinkedIn-centric International Security Observers, an open, web based think tank.

Consolidated Foreign Policy Network

Wikistrat Analysts Network

The selected networks here – Wikistrat, e-International Relations, International Security Observers, and my own personal contacts, met several criteria for inclusion.

• They are focused on foreign policy
• They are professional or academic in terms of membership
• They are broad enough to serve as proxies for ALL foreign policy discussion
• Their membership is easily discernible from public information
• They conduct a portion of their proceedings in the open
• There are some members who are LinkedIn contacts for me
• They have in some sense taken up the hive mind concept

These are not the only four that fit this mold, they are just the ones that were within easy reach for me, and each has some aspect that makes them innovative in comparison to the rest of the pack.

Like all groups interested in foreign policy these four have ongoing intelligence needs. I am using the term very specifically – intelligence – everything from raw collection to finished prognostication on countries, groups within them, and transnational actors. As a rule they are going to look at mainstream news and the opinions that follow with a very jaundiced eye. The standards for input in terms of the reputation of sources and the quality of content are very, very high, unless there is a specific discussion occurring regarding mainstream reporting and views. Given any input there will be someone who knows the source’s background, track record, and any specific bias that might be present.

Confusion is the norm to one degree or another for international events. Things are happening far away, reporting is in a language not everyone speaks, information arrives in a fragmented form, updates to situations turn up and there isn’t a good method to go back and correct earlier perceptions. Any actor that becomes visible in international affairs has motives and at least some capability to promote or conceal their doings.

Disinformation is different from confusion and I will only apply this term when I mean “mindful deception aimed at one of the groups I am studying”. Deception on the part of a state or some belligerent group is expected in the flow of incoming intel, so I will use this term to denote someone taking a specific interest in one of these groups and feeding false information to it. The individuals in these groups are very savvy and they cross check each other on complex or uncertain issues. The groups are parallel paths – targeting one would be difficult, getting all of them at once would be functionally impossible in the context of this definition, because it would require fabrication on the ground at the source – which would be a de facto component of confusion, as defined above. They are hardened against such activity, but they are not reactive – it is not in their temperament or capability to go after a counter-intel operation, they would merely note it and set up to filter the effects.

There are three main areas of focus for foreign policy – the Muslim world, the Pacific Rim, and South America. I spent the first three months of this year trying to stay on top of the news flow from the Muslim world, and just reading the good quality reporting is a job all in itself. The other two areas have different issues but a similar number of players and ongoing events. The people involved can benefit from improved information handling but this problem is always going to be a group task, sliced by region and along other natural dividing lines.

Many of the sources for groups like this are paid services, personal relationships, the ability to read a language other than English, and other things that are private. The sources available for monitoring are RSS feeds and daily email from organizations like Foreign Policy Magazine, Twitter timelines, and the flow of discussion in LinkedIn groups.

Tweetdeck provides a Twitter monitor, seen here displaying the groups I have mentioned, including a column for the top foreign policy sources. I have corralled other content into Bottlenose, which is morphing towards taking over the ‘all platforms’ role formerly filled by Tweetdeck. This content is vetted sources, it has some personal chatter from individual accounts, and it is good for situational awareness in the moment.

Foreign Policy With Tweetdeck

Foreign Policy With Bottlenose

I have been using Recorded Future and writing about it since around the first of the year. This system samples everything and classifies content via natural language processing. This is an interesting predictive analytic platform but it does not meet the temporal analysis needs of a focused group of analysts. That isn’t a criticism of the product, it’s a recognition that such people are going to be making their own timelines based on their sources and judgment.

News For Syria & Assad

If I had to distill what I am trying to get at here in one paragraph, it would be this:

Groups of analysts need a shared context that can store and display information in chronological order, recognizing entities in the field ranging from states to naval vessels to individuals. The system needs to be able to store documents, images, URLs, and other internet accessible content. The system need not perform link analysis, but it must be amenable to doing so with its content using a tool like Maltego or Gephi, and then making the analysis available as an integral part of the overall offering.

Among the systems I have handled, Silobreaker came closest to meeting these requirements, but it was focused on vetted inputs and including ones own documents would have been a significant integration project, requiring on site servers. The team media monitoring component was $300/seat per month.

There won’t be anything free that accomplishes this fairly specialized set of tasks. There are systems out there that perform portions of it already. The question for the next three months is this: What does the object model of such a system look like? Which pieces are available now as existing free software or services? How much effort wil be required to glue it all together? And most important of all, if made available, what sort of uptake can be expected?

The impulse to form hive minds is broadly present as a natural response to a world that is simply too complex for any one individual. Existing systems offer static shared contexts, such as wikis, but not a maleable, task oriented dynamic system. Key individuals are often keepers of the collective memory and they are subject to overload, fatigue, and attacks involving carefully crafted deception. An open system of some sort that begins to achieve any sort of market penetration will significantly redraw the foreign policy discussion space.

The Only Red Line That Matters

Russian Naval Supply Station At Tartus

The (A) on the map is Tartus, the Russian Naval Supply Station on the Alawite dominated Syrian coast. I first reported on this in Russia Preparing To Evacuate Syrian Port Of Tartus on December 19th, 2012. A few days later Russia Signals Assad Regime Not Viable began with a carefully read pronouncement from a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman and ended with some thoughts on food security if the Alawite do indeed manage to create a rump statelet as part of the ending of hostilities.

The May 17th, 2013 NightWatch brought this interpretation of the situation:

Comment: This week senior Russian officials have made clear that they will not allow NATO to repeat in Syria what occurred in Libya – the expansion of a no-fly zone to an air-supported ground intervention. One analyst judged that President Putin felt deceived by NATO and will not let that happen again. That explains the naval reinforcement and the supply of advanced weapons to the Syrian government forces.

Cyprus& British Overseas Territories

There is a related issue in the region due to the collapse of the banks of Cyprus. This happened due to their exposure to the Greek public debt market. Russians are incensed, as Cyprus served the same role for them as places like the Cayman Islands do here – a banking haven. Also present are British Overseas Territories, two of the sprinkling of outposts left from Britain’s age of empire. The gray line is the UN buffer, the two pink areas are the British holdings. The Russians want to replace the function of Tartus with facilities in Limassol, right next to the western holding.

The island nation has long been quiet, but it is a UN enforced peace between the southern Greek population and the northern Turkish territory, in place since the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus. This ethnic partition left a lot of hard feelings and as it’s just forty years in the past the Cypriot leaders of today were in their teens and twenties when it happened.

Cyprus Ethnic Groups Circa 1960

There has been a lot of loose talk among biased and/or low information opinion sources regarding President Obama’s statement that Syrian use of WMD is a red line that could not be crossed. The media lapped up reports of Sarin gas use, regurgitated neo-conservative approved talking points, and the advocacy campaign for another intervention in the Mideast began. The reality of the situation is dramatically more complex than the black & white Christendom vs. Islam chatter heard in the U.S.

Here are what I hope are a fairly complete laundry list of the issues:

• NATO member Greece has collapsed, triggering regional banking meltdown concerns
• Banks of Cyprus collapsed, Russian offshore banking haven taken out by Greek troubles
• Russian ally Assad’s Syria is failing, loss of Tartus would exclude them from the Med
• Assad regime is the only Iran friendly outpost in the area
• Syrian revolt is funded in part by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Sunni majority regimes
• KSA & Qatar funds come /w Salafist radicalization built into the deal
• NATO members Greece & Turkey are at odds over Cyprus partition
• Syrian instability is spilling into Iraq, fueling Sunni/Shia violence, some refugees
• Syrian instability is spilling into U.S. ally Jordan, many refugees
• Syrian instability is spilling into NATO member Turkey, many refugees
• Israel is concerned over weapons transport to Hezbollah in Lebanon

The Syrian civil war has been metastasizing into all of its immediate neighbors – Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon have all seen violence precipitated by this festering conflict. Regional powers Iran and Russia have connections to the failing Assad regime and have taken indirect steps to protect the status quo. Regional Salafist funders Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funneling support and pushing ideology on Sunni Syrian rebels. I do not envy Israeli policy makers and the menu of unpleasant options that reality has provided them.

Russia has drawn a red line of their own – no NATO intervention in Syria. They’ve backed it up with a naval presence and the transfer of advance anti-aircraft systems to the Assad regime. The Syrian civil war is a multifaceted, multipolar regional issue and there are no soundbite sized prescriptions that will end it.

Professionalism & Propaganda

One of the things I have done over the last six months has involved identifying and observing hive mind constructs in the real world. This happened in the context of examining the publicly visible process of foreign policy making. I wrote thirty three posts that are at least tangentially related to this pursuit. Hive mind constructs will eventually win out over point source propaganda, but it won’t be pretty to watch.

Shifting Priorities (2013-03-12) Taking classes in social network analysis, natural language processing, and looking to refresh my linear algebra and other related math skills.

Global Email, Global Relationships (2013-03-24) A large scale study of email usage reveals global communities.

Foreign Policy Process (2013-03-28) Initial recon of foreign policy discussion space, finding key organizations, noticing Wikistrat for the first time.

Foreign Policy Organizations & Individuals (2013-03-29) More about Wikistrat, foreign policy organizations, and my own personal network.

Exploring WikiStrat With Maltego (2013-03-30) Wikistrat is a declared hive mind, I ended up spending a good bit of time on them.

Wikistrat’s Analysts & Friends (2013-03-31) Digging deeper into Wikistrat analysts on Twitter.

Wikistrat Full Network As Of 3/30/2013 A checkpoint on what I knew about Wikistrat at this time.

Hashtags & Humans (2013-03-31) Looking at recent tweets, extracting content, and mapping discussions.

Foreign Policy OSINT Perspectives (2013-04-01) Another checkpoint, noting some influential folks as well as even more Wikistrat musings.

Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program (2013-04-02) Started looking at the @TTCSP Twitter account, discovered e-International Relations.

Opening Up To OpenIDEO (2013-04-12) I asked Wikistrat about membership, but I am not credentialed enough, and I suspect there might be some other factors that would work against me as well. OpenIDEO does some similar things and they are quite willing to engage all sorts of people.

A Whole New Perspective (2013-04-14) Wikistrat, e-International Relations, OpenIDEO – there are a LOT of collective thinking exercises out there.

Individual Reputation Metrics (2013-04-14) Noting what has happened to my online reputation, pondering where this is all headed. The underlying issue is that any individual who strays outside the bounds set by corporate America will get smeared.

Wikistrart Investigation Summary (2013-04-15) Closing the books on Wikistrat by gathering all the related posts into a single index post.

Exploring e-International Relations (2013-04-16) Starting to give this group the same sort of attention as Wikistrat, but a little more focus on what they said about themselves, to each other, and about the world in general.

Isolating Current Conversations (2013-04-17) A deep dive into the conversations of the moment for e-IR using social network analysis and named entity recognition.

Plowing Up Astroturf. (2013-04-18) I didn’t admit who this was about at the time, but many people guessed that I had been asked to look at @UniteBlue, a right wing sock puppet operation that got it’s start taking over a well regarded hashtag used by liberals.

Mining Data Science Central (2013-04-20) Checking out an off site professional network I found via LinkedIn groups. They proved to be imminently mineable.

Obtaining & Parsing DataScienceCentral Profiles (2013-04-21) I spent a couple of days slow crawling the nearly 12,000 DSC members.

Data Science Defined (2013-04-23) Some thoughts on what ‘data science’ actually means, and how it applies to the work I am doing with discussions, hive minds, and reputations.

DataScienceCentral Users: No Klout Via LinkedIn (2013-04-24) Klout scores benefit from LinkedIn activity, but there is no way to look up Klout starting with a LinkedIn account.

Choosing The Wrong Tool (2013-04-24). A visually compelling analysis of DataScienceCentral profiles. Utterly wrong, but it sure looks interesting.

Looking Forward, Looking Behind (2013-04-24) Reading the Sherman Kent Center Occasional Papers, thinking about the defunct Democratic Study Group, and how hive minds are liable to replace such functions in policy making.

Foreign Policy Recon Review (2013-04-27) I usually change direction every two years and i try to force myself to stick to a particular area each quarter. I recovered from my last lingering Lyme symptom – chronic fatigue – just about a year ago, and now my cycle for each topic is down to six or seven weeks. This one is a sort of bookend for the foreign policy discussion work.

Reputation Reconstruction (2013-04-29) Ruining the reputations of political opponents was the theme behind the schemes of Aaron Barr & HBGary Federal. If we proved nothing else over the last two years we demonstrated that trying this sort of thing on a hardened, reactive target is extremely hazardous. Provoking a hive mind … ANY hive mind … is a recipe for getting your ass kicked.

Mindfulness In Analysis (2013-04-29) The last of the Kent Center Occasional Papers on the CIA’s analytical process, Rethinking “Alternative Analysis” to Address Transnational Threats is an absolute gem. The CIA and our intel sector has, in general, struggled greatly since the end of the cold war. The monolithic, enigmatic, slow moving opponent with denied areas (Soviet Union) was gone, and fifty years of black and white choices were replaced with a rainbow of small, fast moving threats that blended in with innocuous activity. The current urge by the NSA to record everything is motivated in part by managers past the age where mental fluidity diminishes (around 50) seeking that monolithic problem they understood. It’s gone and the more they try the worse things will get for them.

Global Problems, Global Network (2013-05-01) LinkedIn interface changes now provide an easy way to map connection locations.

Analytic Bridge vs Data Science Central (2013-05-01) I mined DataScienceCentral and then noticed that AnalyticBridge was very similar. I later found that they were merging, which was not apparent when I wrote this article.

Data Science Growth (2013-05-05). Hacker is a fair enough description of what I do for a living but the word has a lot of negative connotations. I am going to finish one more class, then start applying the label data scientist to myself. There are two million openings in this area and it’s biased towards managers – those who understand both business and technology. I appear to be in the right place at the right time for once.

Infomous Word Cloud Tool (2013-05-05) An easy to use tool does named entity recognition and then draws a concept map with the information.

LinkedIn Network Progression (2013-05-06) I regrew my professional network and then I started testing the boundaries on LinkedIn, finally getting myself temporarily suspended the day I wrote this. Systems like Twitter and Digg have been utterly fouled by ideologically motivated e-warriors who censor their opponents by gaming the anti-spam features. A little bit of that exists on LinkedIn but you have to push really hard before anything happens. My suspension is temporary and now that I understand the boundaries it’s highly unlikely to be repeated.

Musings On Cognition (2013-05-07) Some thoughts on reputation economics, attention conservation, and the thus far unexamined network of Scribd document creators, curators, and readers.

2,800 Random Anons (2013-05-20) I poached Aaron Socio‘s Facebook friends after his arrest last November and now I have over 2,800 friends, 85% of whom sport some sort of token of Anonymous. I have spent some time examining what they talk about and who influencers are, but this was a purely visual, right brain sort of activity, so I have not written about the specifics.

There are a variety of hive mind constructs, from the closed, monolithic, credentialed Wikistrat to the open ‘supercluster’ of groups that make up Anonymous. Although they did not use the phrase “hive mind” even the CIA has taken up some of the same methods Anonymous uses in an effort to sharpen their analytical work in the face of the new threats the 21st century has brought.

The infrastructure, handlers, and members of such groups can be attacked. A system may go down, a high profile individual might be removed from play, and either of these happenings can serve to splinter a given group. An attacker who is open about motives and methods will be destroyed outright, as was seen with HBGary and the careers of those involved, or badly damaged and left with long term exposure to future retribution, as was seen with a range of actors from Stratfor to the U.S. government itself.

There are a wide variety of means to communicate with a hive mind, ranging from a face to face conversation with a well regarded handler, to whispering to group members using an open public channel such as Twitter or pastebin. Informal, secretive hive minds are in general less well governed than declared groups with a known focus, and they can be baited into taking actions which are against their own interests. Such communications may be confusing for the group in the moment, but they are examined in great detail after the fact, and if the source is identified there will be retribution. The response often reveals hidden relationships and communication channels, as actors and assets which are not normally visible come into play.

Propaganda techniques are evident within and around any hive mind watering hole, but no longer the sole province of state actors or large, well funded entities. A single talented individual can produce and promote themed content, achieving a response completely out of proportion with the individual’s resources. Banksy is one of the premier examples of this. Adbusters serves as an aggregator for such work and they are credited with triggering Occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011. The @Adbusters Twitter account has this to say regarding their culture jammer network:

We are a global network of meme warriors who aim to catalyze an unexpected moment of truth–a global mindshift–from which the consumerist forces never recover.

Monolithic corporate forces heavily invested in the status quo are wrestling with networked humans and finding they face a sort of memetic Devil’s Snare. Their struggles may seem to be momentarily successful, but they are only educating their opponent as to their strengths and weaknesses.

The concept of the corporation didn’t really take off until the Catholic church relaxed usury laws three centuries ago. Compound interest depends on exponential growth and humans have pretty much hit the wall in terms of what our environment will support. Any one of climate change or peak oil could undo the perception that we are all consumers living in a conglomeration of free markets. Those two have arrived pretty much simultaneous with a financial sector meltdown and we are entering a period where our society will wind down to the Earth’s solar maximum. A value system based on exponential growth will not survive a disproof by counter example, and Mother Nature responds to neither paper injunctions nor heartfelt supplications.

Some of those networked humans are starting to realize that they need not tear down the corporatocracy by hand and they are already thinking about how and what to preserve. What role does a hive mind play in this? What role can it play when electrical power is intermittent and the supply chains needed for electronic devices are interrupted?

It’s just over a hundred miles descent from the peak Kilimanjaro to the floor Ngorongoro. A modern jet will traverse that path in ten minutes, while a strong man on foot will need ten days. Another day’s walk west lies Olduvai, which is both the cradle of our species and the source of the name for the theory that industrial civilization is a single transient pulse. As for me, I have ten weeks of a math intensive class ahead and I have some other things I must consider, so you will not see much of me during this time. Take the opportunity to think on what I have revealed here … and what has been explicitly left unsaid.

2,800 Randon Anons

Last fall I took the Coursera Social Network Analysis class for the first time. I got busy with the election and didn’t finish, but one thing I did do was pick up a Facebook network I could use for some of the class exercises. I had deleted my 3,200 Progressive & Labor friends back in late 2010 and had pretty much shunned the platform due to the ridiculous behavior that comes our of the American fringe right. I needed a replacement community, but one that would chew up any obsessive retards who showed up to ‘investigate’ me.

Enter Chaos Magic practitioner Aaron Socio. Many of the people drawn to chaos magic have, unsurprisingly, somewhat chaotic lives. A dysfunctional level of disorder caught up with this kid the day after Thanksgiving in the form of a humorless Missouri state trooper, and I believe he has been stashed somewhere safe until whatever came over him passes. He had contacted me, we traded a few emails, and then he was gone, but not before I started reading some of his work and perusing his Facebook friends.

I decided I’d wade in and see how many of them would be willing to connect with me. I had a black and white photo of me wearing a Guy Fawkes mask which made a suitable avatar, and off I went. A little over six months have passed and something like 85% of my 2,800+ friends have a Guy Fawkes mask or other token of Anonymous in their profiles. I did get one obsessive retard ‘investigator’ who wanted me to ‘crack’ an MD5 hash for them. I should publish the associated chat log, it’s truly precious.

Here’s a peek into what’s in this group of people, only two of whom I actually know. These were produced with the Wolfram Facebook tool.

I was curious about how this network looked, because I had been trying to add Spanish and Arabic speakers, hoping for a little more global view on the various populist outbursts we’re experiencing. This was done using the methods described in Facebook Friends Network Mapping: A Gephi Tutorial. I did not adjust the modularity calculation from the defaults prior to coloring the network.

39.17% in the U.S.? 28.12% in English speaking Europe? 15.21% in Spanish speaking South America? 9.33% in the Arab world? And the 8.1% might be my Aussie and Kiwi friends, but that’s a guess based on the English speaker bias.

A comparison of the geographic distribution of the random sample selected among those who had some token of Anonymous support in their profile versus my 748 contacts that LinkedIn recognizes is a striking match, right down to something I said in Global Network, Global Problems. I knew I had a deficit in South American contacts and that still comes shining through in my professional network.

The geographic correlation is interesting but the word cloud, and more importantly the underlying concept clouds for the two groups is dramatically different. I attribute this to age and education, but deep down we have a mainstream media that has utterly failed in its role as the fourth estate, and social media’s growth into that role is chaotic at best.

Drowning Indochina

Yesterday’s Visualizing 400ppm Carbon Dioxide showed before/after coastline maps of what we can expect given the carbon we have already put into the atmosphere. All of Delaware and Maryland’s eastern shore disappear, Florida south of Gainesville goes for a swim, and the San Francisco Bay reaches Sacramento.

The effects in Indochina and neighboring Bangladesh are even more profound. Yangon, Myanmar (4.4M), Bangkok, Thailand (8.3M), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (7.5M), and Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2.3M) will all be submerged if the increase is only 20M and historically we should expect more like 25M at that level of CO2.

Indochina Sea Level Today

Indochina With 20M Sea Level Increase

Almost all of Bangladesh, population 150 million, will be under water.

Bangladesh Sea Level Today

Bangladesh With 20M Sea Level Increase

I have written about the persecution of the Rohingya, 800,000 of whom live in Myanmar. Half of their land would disappear and almost all of the territory of the Kachin would be submerged.

Myanmar Ethnic Groups

This is going to happen, not in the 150 minutes of an epic disaster movie, not even in 150 years, but by about the year 3,000 this should be a good approximation of the coastline. While this is happening we’re going to be dealing with the effects of increasingly energetic cyclones, like Bhola in 1970, which contributed to the Indo-Pakistani war and the creation of Bangladesh the next year.

The United States has taken two massive hits in the last eight years – Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012. Storms are already bigger, they’re arriving earlier, staying later, and getting into places they’ve never gone in the past. We have to see things as they are and plan accordingly – relief, remediation, and relocation are the watchwords. This applies both here at home and abroad.

Visualizing 400ppm Carbon Dioxide

If we don’t do it this year we will surely reach 400ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 2014. The last 650,000 years this number has been between 180ppm and 280ppm. The world hasn’t had 400ppm since the Pliocene.

Here are maps of Florida, Delaware, and California with today’s shoreline, 20 meter rise maps, and 30 meter rise maps. Geological records from the Pliocene indicate seas were 25 meters higher than today. I use the Geology.com sea level map tool to produce this.

Florida is gone south of Orlando with 20m, south of Gainesville if its closer to 30m.

Florida 21st Century

Florida 20M Sea Rise

Florida 30M Sea Rise

Delaware and Maryland’s eastern shore disappear at 20m, once it’s 30m the parts of New Jersey still above the waterline are an island. We lose D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

Delaware 21st Century

Delaware 20M Sea Rise

Delaware 30M Sea Rise

When the sea rises 20m California’s farmland becomes a shallow inland sea and the Gulf of Baja joins the Salton Sea and reaches as far north as Indio.

California 21st Century

California 20M Sea Rise

California 30M Sea Rise

Musings On Cognition

Interesting Scribd Accounts

When I started writing about social media just over four years ago I included the phrases “reputation economics” and “attention conservation”, both of which I shamelessly stole from author and futurist Bruce Sterling.

Reputation Economics has to do with the idea that there is a parallel, ungovernable economy that happens person to person, and instead of a credit rating one has a reputation. Sterling explored this concept in his 1998 political thriller Distraction. I had read this book half a dozen times since it came out and minus a few technical plot devices I can report that over the last three years my experiences are consistent with scenarios described in the book.

Attention Conservation is a term that first appeared in the Viridian Notes, each of which contained an ‘attention conservation notice’ at the top, so busy list members could avoid wading through things that didn’t matter to them. I use the term more broadly than this and in particular in the context of social media and the cognitive changes that happen to those who get sucked into constant interaction.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish this year was reseting my “attention quantum” to something longer than a single tweet. I literally had to force myself back into the habit of reading and my tablet was a big help there, as context switching isn’t as smooth as it is for a desktop, and my tablet touch screen typing is maybe 10% of my keyboard speed.

Cleaning up and properly filing my PDF library was also part of the process. I had squirreled away a large collection of things I thought were important but I had not read two thirds of them. The finding and saving of documents is a tweet sized attention quantum, but reading things that are twenty pages instead of twenty words is another matter.

I spent an hour or so yesterday looking at the social network aspects of Scribd. You create a presence, you can follow those you find to be of interest, but the content-centric nature of the system keeps the focus on documents rather than those who are uploading them and reading them. Finding interesting accounts is something of a bug hunt, you can see who they follow and who follows them, but this information isn’t available via the API. It might be interesting to automate access to this but it would be a messy screen scraping script.

I found a dozen good foreign policy sources, but their strategies varied wildly – some follow no one, others follow back everyone who follows them. The Scribd system is seen as a document repository and any connectivity between documents and those who produce, read, or curate them is an afterthought. The pagerank concept applies here – a big group of followers is presumably an indication of quality production or curation.

Scribd is the leader of the pack, but they could take a huge step ahead of competitors if they included some social graph functions. They already have the information they need, they just need to expose this via API calls and watch how developers use that metadata.