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Link From Twitter

/ Adam / 2 Comments

Twitter have damaged their phone app by adding a feature. This is a problem software is particularly prone to, so let’s sift through it.

I was surprised to find Twitter useful. It had originally seemed a concentration of the least interesting ingredients of online culture: celebrities wittering moments from their shadow lives in a medium where smalltalk was enforced by a strict character limit. That’s not wrong, but it is incomplete. Twitter can be rendered functional, for me, by following interesting people, who link in depth, and by dropping anyone who emits more than two dozen undirected tweets in a week. 

Despite my faddish embrace of the medium du jour, two of the best discussion groups I am a part of are still closed mailing lists of mutual friends. It is also easy, with mail, to copy other random people that might care. This electronic mail thing really seems to have a future. Someone should look into that.

With this use pattern, and the primacy of the smartphone in a busy life, a fair proportion of the times I find something cool on twitter involves mailing a link.

Until recently, the email composed by twitter consisted of a link, my default signature, and an empty subject. This wasn’t great. Typing a subject, like typing anything on the phone, is a bit of a pain. Blankness is lousy microcontent, a terrible breach of information etiquette for a platform focused on short semantic bursts. Feedly – heck even Safari, dog that it is – at least has the sense to use the title of the web page in question.

Twitter fixed this bug. The latest version of the app sets email subjects to “Link from Twitter” and, as well as the link, adds a note to “Download the official Twitter app here. The fix of course is worse than the bug. Not having a subject just looks careless, like leaving your fly undone. “Link from Twitter” looks like somebody paid you €5 to tattoo an advertisement on your arse and then moon out car windows.

The time spent to delete that guff and replace it with something more meaningful is time wasted. Pretty much anything would be more meaningful to most recipients, who care about what was sent, not how it was sent. The empty subject is better. The subject “lol” would even be better, as at least it tells the audience about the content instead of whether it was sent by carrier pigeon or whichever. This is true even if you drink from the twitter firehouse; then you waste even more time.

If Twitter really thought it was important to squeeze some self-promotion into my email, they would find a way that added to my user experience. Why are people using the tool in the first place? It’s for snippets of content in a social network context. I don’t care that something came from Twitter, but I might care that it came from a particular user on Twitter. Maybe quote the tweet the link originated from, or mention the @user. Maybe link back to that tweet. Maybe I followed a few onward links, and am mailing that, so provide a breadcrumb trail of that history with a chain of vias. Do neat things that bring people into your conversation. Don’t make my email look like a spam. And don’t waste my time.

Seeing Like A Facebook

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The insistence on a single, unique, legal identity by Facebook and Google continues a historical pattern of expansion of power through control of the information environment. Consider the historical introduction of surnames:

Customary naming practices are enormously rich. Among some peoples, it is not uncommon to have different names during different stages of life (infancy, childhood, adulthood) and in some cases after death; added to those are names used for joking, rituals, and mourning and names used for interactions with same-sex friends or with in-laws. […]  To the question “What is your name?” which has a more unambiguous answer in the contemporary West, the only plausible answer is “It depends”.
For the insider who grows up using these naming practices, they are both legible and clarifying.
 — James C. Scott, Seeing Like A State

It’s all rather reminiscent of the namespace of open internets since they emerged in the 80s, including BBS, blogs, IRC, message boards, slashcode, newsgroups and even extending the lineage to the pseudonym-friendly Twitter. You can tell Twitter has this heredity by the joke and impersonating accounts, sometimes created in ill-spirit, but mostly in a slyly mocking one. CheeseburgerBrown’s autobiography of his pseudonyms captures the spirit of it.

Practically any structured scheme you might use to capture this richness of possible real world names will fail, as  Patrick McKenzie amusingly demonstrates in his list of falsehoods programmers believe about names.

Scott goes on to show how the consistent surnames made information on people much easier to access and organize for the state – more legible. This in turn made efficient taxation, conscription and corvee labour possible for the feudal state, as well as fine grained legal title to land. It establishes an information environment on which later institutions such as the stock market, income tax and the welfare state (medical, unemployment cover, universal education) rely. Indeed the idea of a uniquely identifiable citizen, who votes once, is relied on by mass democracy. Exceptions,  where they exist, are limited in their design impact due to their rarity. Even then, the introduction of national ID cards and car registration plates is part of that same legibility project, by enforcing unique identifiers. For more commercial reasons but with much the same effect, public transport smartcards, mobile phones  and number plates, when combined with modern computing, make mass surveillance within technical reach. 

The transition to simplified names was not self-emerging or gentle but was aggressively pursued by premodern and colonial states. In the course of a wide survey Scott gives a striking example from the Philippines:

Filipinos were instructed by the decree of November 21, 1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames. The author of the decree was Governor (and Lieutenant General) Narciso Claveria y Zaldua, a meticulous administrator as determined to rationalise names as he had been determined to rationalise existing law, provincial boundaries, and the calendar. He had observed, as his decree states, that Filipinos generally lacked individual surnames, which might “distinguish them by families,” and that their practice of adopting baptismal names from a small group of saints’ names resulted in great “confusion”. The remedy was the catalogo, a compendium not only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography and the arts and intended to be used by the authorities in assigning permanent, inherited surnames. […] In practice, each town was given a number of pages from an alphabetized catalogo, producing whole towns with surnames of the same letter. In situations where there has been little in-migration in the past 150 years, the traces of this administrative exercise are still perfectly visible across the landscape.
[…]
For a utilitarian state builder of Claveria’s temper, however, the ultimate goal was a complete and legible list of subjects and taxpayers. […] Schoolteachers were ordered to forbid thier students to address or even know one another by any other name except the officially inscribed family name. More efficacious, perhaps, given the minuscule school enrolment, was the proviso that forbade priests and military and civil officials from accepting any document, application, petition or deed that did not use the official surnames.

The ultimate consequences of these simplification projects can be good or bad, but they are all expansions of centralized power, often unnecessary, and dangerous without counterbalancing elements. Mass democracy could eventually use the mechanism of citizen registration to empower individuals and restrain the government, but this was in some sense historically reactive: it came after the expansion of the state at the expense of more local interests.

The existence of Farmville aside, Google and Facebook probably don’t intend to press people into involuntary labour. People are still choosing to click that cow no matter how much gamification gets them there. The interest in unique identities is for selling a maximally valued demographic bundle to advertisers. Even with multitudes of names and identities, we usually funnel back to one shared income and set of assets backed by a legal name.

Any power grab of this nature will encounter resistance. This might be placing oneself outside the system of control (deleting accounts), or it might be finding ways to use the system without ceding everything it asks for, like Jamais Cascio lying to Facebook.

The great target of Scott’s book is not historical states so much as the high modernist mega-projects so characteristic of the twentieth century, and their ongoing intellectual temptations today. He is particularly devastating when describing the comprehensive miseries possible when high modernist central planning combines with the unconstrained political power in a totalitarian state.

Again, it would be incorrect and unfair to describe any of the big software players today as being high modernist, let alone totalitarian. IBM in its mainframe and KLOC heyday was part of that high modernist moment, but today even the restrictive and aesthetically austere Apple has succeeded mainly by fostering creative uses of its platform by its users. The pressures of consumer capitalism being what they are, though, the motivation to forcibly simplify identity to a single point is hard for a state or a corporation to resist. Centralization has a self-perpetuating momentum to it, which good technocratic intentions tend to reinforce, even when these firms have a philosophical background in open systems. With the combined marvels of smartphones, clouds, electronic billing and social networks, I am reminded of Le Corbusier’s words. These software platforms are becoming machines for living.

VII.1 Reuse

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子日,述而不作,信而好古,窃比于我老彭. – 论语 七:一

The Master said, ‘I transmit but do not innovate; I am truthful in what I say and devoted to antiquity. I venture to compare myself to your Old P’eng.’ – Analects VII.1 (Lau)

Before contemplating the process implications of this radically static statement, let’s note that from the perspective of designed code itself, it is always true. Code transforms and transmits information. This is the garbage-in garbage-out principle. Designed code (not genetic or evolved code) does not innovate.

Backups of the user directory for the Analects’ source control repository are, alas, lost to antiquity, and though many sophisticated data recovery techniques have been tried, with some success, none have yielded the identity of Old P’eng. Our ignorance of him highlights our relationship with Confucius and with any classical tradition. To us, Confucius founded a philosophical school, but in his own words he merely continued a tradition that we can see indirectly, if at all.

Scholarly consensus is that Confucius is deliberately overstating his lack of innovation for reasons of rhetoric or modesty (see eg DC Lau, AC Graham, or just wikipedia on this verse). Nevertheless the verse is considered pivotal in understanding Confucius’ traditionalism and conservatism in a time of extraordinary violence and social change.

Existing solutions are useful in at least two ways. 

Firstly they may capture unintuitive theoretical results in accessible ways. Many algorithm design and data structure results are now in this category, such as sorting algorithms and efficient concurrent maps (eg the Java 6 lock free implementation of java.util.ConcurrentHashMap). The formal scientific characterization of such solutions in terms of, say, algorithmic complexity and performance benchmarks  make computer theoretic literacy crucial. Programmers will be unlikely to understand the derivation by reading the code, so they must be able to read the documentation. 

Secondly they may capture highly specific details of the environment and robust solutions to managing it. This will include successful workarounds for under-specified elements of protocols, or flat-out incorrect but popular implementations. Any user of say Ruby on Rails or Tomcat takes advantage of this kind of reuse. Consider too the domain specific details and tolerances of a fly-by-wire control system for a particular make and model of plane.

These two kinds of reuse may be contrived to lie on a spectrum, but I’ve chosen to distinguish them here for their correspondence to two different categories of knowledge – logos and metis. In classical Greek epistemology logos is theoretic universal knowledge and metis is hard won cunning, “feel”, or craft knowledge (as an aspect of techne, craft knowledge and theory). James C. Scott describes the Greek hero Odysseus, surgeons and maritime pilots as all relying on metis (Seeing Like A State). Scott also makes the connection between traditional knowledge – which is particular and tied to a society and geography – and common law conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott.

Confucius is claimed as a kind of Burkean conservative, for instance, by James Kalb. Both Confucius and Burke grew up in societies with small literate elites and large impoverished peasantries. They both share senses of the worth of settled convention, the importance of teaching and the literary canon, a paternalistic affection for heredity power, and a sympathy for the welfare of everyday people.  Neither are they reactionaries, but welcome improvement at a humane pace (IX.3).

Seeing Burke and Confucius as similar is not mainstream and deserves a dedicated analysis of its own. (My searches revealed more extant work linking both of them individually to Wittgenstein than to each other, but pointers are always welcome.) In a comprehensive entry for Burke in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ian Harris argues that despite being more often claimed by the right wing, he does not have a clear modern partisan successor. Nevertheless, distinguished scholars like DC Lau or AC Graham stay well clear of Western political comparisons, while happily comparing classical Chinese figures with Western philosophers. 

Unusually, a software library, and all the hard won craft knowledge that comes with it, can be imported into another with extraordinary ease when compared to other forms of craft knowledge. A pilot is of little advantage outside his home port, and Ruby on Rails is of little use for 3D rendering, but in software we can copy the pilot and use him on innumerable ships entering that port. We can also ultimately read the source code to Ruby on Rails and determine how it tolerates the idiosyncrasies of particular browsers and servers. This is because all code is built on a formal information substrate – the computational medium. (This is Harrison Ainsworth’s term and his note on reuse provided a number of the connections in this post.)

Not all craft knowledge of a codebase is encapsulated in the codebase. There are particularities of the install, workaround scripts, configuration, scheduled jobs and so on, but these are ultimately digital artifacts easily included within a slightly broader view of what a codebase is (this latter is a premise of DevOps and for anyone serious about a controlled environment). More problematically, there are conventions of use, design choices, oral traditions of “check here when you change there”, and so on. At the limit, all codebases are incomplete. They depend on co-texts, results and knowledge of the domain that need not be encoded. An air traffic control system does not need a textbook description of Bernoulli’s Principle.

Burke and Scott argue that in an established society important, non-obvious, traditional knowledge is captured in social conventions and established practice, and the practice cannot be simplified without a loss of valuable situational knowledge. Scott additionally points out that such an environment is very difficult for an outsider to navigate and there are strong motivations for central political power to apply simplifications to it.

Yet highly particular, ‘local’ code that requires hands on experience and knowledge of accompanying conventions most frequently has another name in software development: bad. Or: spaghetti. Or: legacy. The sentiment is well captured in Qi’s koan on fear, even if it does riff off an opposing classical Chinese tradition. (In Confucian terms we might note the building is not harmonious.)

In No Silver Bullet, Brooks distinguishes accidental and inherent complexity, with the latter being an attribute of the underlying problem rather than any specific software or hardware implementation. Complexity due to poor or improvable design is always accidental; that due to the problem domain is by definition inherent.

An aesthetic sense of good or poor design becomes crucial when pursuing aggressive reuse (VII.14). Without it you will simply perpetuate junk.

Having argued the link between conservatism and software reuse, it is worth being a little more precise about flavours of conservatism. William F. Buckley famously described it as that which “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Despite its partisan origins, this is a good start, as it illustrates certain threads of environmentalism and the idea of heritage listing fall easily under the same banner. ((It is also useful to think of contemporary US Democrats defending Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, or opposition to changes to Britain’s NHS in this frame.))

In its purest form, this can be “return to a golden age” conservatism. There’s certainly an argument that Confucius would have been happy with a reversion to the society of the Eastern Zhou. We should again temper our interpretation by wondering how much is rhetoric covering adaptation of tradition to new times. In software, certainly, simply reactionary approaches are of little use. Brooks and the founders of eXtreme Programming have both noted that a more effective strategy is to embrace change. Oakeshott argues in On Being Conservative that settings of widespread and enthusiastic change are in particular need of an awareness of the value of what exists now. A traditionalist most often defends the present versus the future, not the past versus the present. This conservative disposition’s usefulness to software is more apparent if taken as an analytic tool rather than an inherent aspect of personality. After all, the greenfield doesn’t exist (see X.18), and any project that pretends to be a greenfield is an interesting lie.

Conservative thought in this vein usually emphasizes working within a tradition and a community – in software we would say platform. This also suggests interesting contours for the breadth of possible reuse; and there are other verses, such as XVI.11, where that might be explored. What is immediately apparent is the narrowness and fragility of an entirely in-house platform due to the smallness of its developer community; and the need for a shared jargon (XIII.3) and perhaps a canon (XVI.13).

Given the corpus of extant code in the form of libraries, to adore antiquity is to know your platform, including its innards, not just thoughtless rote quoting via copy and paste. At this moment in software, to reuse and extend is a greater service than extraneous self-involvement masquerading as innovation.

If you can easily find some code and copy it, you get the result at zero cost. That is an efficiency that cannot be beaten: no amount of programming tool and technique improvements can ever do that. So we want to maximise reuse. – Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet

The Vengeful Angels Of Our Nature

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It’s not surprising, in a movie such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, to find a great deal of hunting vampires, but I did find rather more than I expected of Mr Lincoln. Part of the point of such a piece is of course the glorious joke of its title. Given the basic setup is pretty much explained before reaching the cinema, even more so for those who saw the earlier novel, the challenge is to put something else behind it.

Critics have come out uniformly negative, like a line of Union soliders wielding Springfield rifles of hate. Actually, Timur Bekmambetov and writer Seth Grahame-Smith don’t do too bad a job. Abe: VH has its problems. It doesn’t take the approach (I would think a mistake) of being just a fight movie in 1860s costume. The second act even takes time out for political exposition and smaller scale Whitehouse family drama; a saggy but welcome variation from a simple progression of action scenes. It’s an action movie that makes time for the Gettysburg address. It’s not a long speech, but somehow a little more than expected.

Some parts are flawed. Others are freaking awesome. They are freaking awesome in the same way as Brad Nelly’s George Washington.  They combine mythic fragments of the American Civic Religion with mythic fragments of American action movies and mythic fragments of vampire lore in a mosaic that celebrates their symbolic role while signalling it is also a fiction.

Bekmambetov and Grahame-Smith play the material straight. Again I think this is the right choice when presenting such a flagrant counterfactual. Winking at the content would destroy the premise of the fantastic world. The viewer can always step back to laugh at the absurdity of the hook; they shouldn’t be pushed back. There are some good fights, much influenced by the post-Matrix martial arts style. At 105 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

American presidents have a role not unlike saints or Hellenic gods in the American Civic Religion. And many-named Lincoln is at the heart of the pantheon, equal to the founding fathers in symbolic weight, the great hinge on which the chronology of American statecraft swings. Lincoln even sounds mythic. He had, in Adam Gopnik’s words, “mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis”.

This movie’s Lincoln is not the Lincoln of history books, though the complexity of the man lends him weight as an action hero. Don’t all politicians have secret lives run in parallel with their very public lives? This story reverses the usual superheroic trope – the secret life is the one of clean hits and unambiguous moral purpose. The famous, public life is the compromised one beset by moral quandaries. (Batman is a variation where both identities are famous.)

How much of the real Lincoln is really told by popular history? The Lincoln of this movie doesn’t say anything like those dismaying words of the First Inaugral,

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

… and yet, how often does that enter the foreground in the history of poular memory? Lincoln is the great American nationalist, and the great liberal imperialist too. I view this from a non-American vantage point, so maybe I’m missing some cultural context. Maybe all elementary schools tease out the multifarious economic, demographic and historic causes of the War between the States and all Fourth of July barbeques are accompanied by nuanced discussion of the political factions faced by the 16th president.  Many Americans do know their own history well.

I suspect that even when the history is well known the myths of civic religion require certain narrative simplifications. Conor Cruise O’Brien argues much the same about Jefferson. (Jefferson para-scholarship is also largely silent on whether he was a vampire.) The virtue of a movie like this is acknowledging that mythic need while separating it somewhat from history. Grahame-Smith even constructs a scene where Pickett’s charge makes sense – vampires need not fear bullets and can infiltrate an enemy line with invisibility. It’s far more rational than the psychology of armies and generals failing to learn new tactics in the face of new tech.

Civic religions are worthwhile when they support worthwhile ideals. The American variant supports liberty and democracy and a system that for all its flaws is the great exponent of the same. They let us make the transformation from merely thinking republican democracy is a good idea and truly believing it.

Maybe it’s for the best that in these days of targeted US drone assassinations a movie imagining a president individually killing evildoers with a silver coated axe has not swept all before it. When I put it next to such monumental pieces of kitsch as Harrison Ford’s Air Force One or Mt Rushmore it hardly seems out of character. At least Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is honest about what it confabulates.

Making A Few Enemies

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That idea of the state as a ship and its ruler as the helmsman or captain is a very old one in European culture. It is frequently used by Cicero, and indeed our word ‘governor’ comes from the Latin for ‘helmsman’ – gubernator. Even more enticingly, the root of gubernator is the Greek kubernetes, which is also the origin of our word ‘cybernetics’; so the notions of ruling, steering and robotics all coincide in our language – and in this galleon.
[…]
Observers repeatedly stressed the precision, the orderliness, the grace of mechanisms like this one, which embodied the ideal of the early modern European state as it ought to have been and rarely was, with everything working together harmoniously under the control of one guiding idea and one beneficent sovereign. Its appeal went far beyond Europe: automata like our galleon were presented as gifts to the emperor of China and the Ottoman sultan and were greatly prized. What ruler, from Dresden to Kyoto, would not gaze in delight as figures moved to his command in strict and unswerving order? So unlike the messiness of the real world.
— Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects; corresponding entry at the BBC

Attractive as it is, it’s not really a great metaphor for a state, or even politics at all, is it? There’s no divergent interests, no arguing or lobbying, no betrayal, assassination and backstabbing, and as a result, no trust, no faith no opinion: just harmonious movement. And if it seems naive, now that we carry more sophisticated automata around in our pockets, I don’t think it’s any less seductive. This is essentially how Sid Meier’s Civilization and all its throwoffs work – you have absolute power to push the buttons and pull the levers of not just a state, but an entire Samuel Huntingdon-grade civilization.

The Crusader Kings series shows one way to turn that on its side, with the key mechanic beng to have the player control a dynasty, rather than a state. (Entertaining Rock, Paper, Shotgun review and interview.) The offices and trappings of the state are then resources to be fought over, prestige is a currency like money, and organizing weddings and sending gifts become important game tokens rather than flavour. This is not to discount the wealth of historical detail the makers then hang on that frame; the mechanic makes the game compelling, the detail is what makes it feel right. In a way, the makers have made all the state diplomacy an extension of domestic political squabbling, and that dissolving of the facade of corporate consensus seems bang on, especially for the European middle ages. Its easier to understand Richard the Lionheart if you see him as pursuing dynastic interests on both sides of the English channel than as chief executive of the Eternal Albion. (Echoes of Coase’s The Nature of the Firm here too: companies aren’t monolothic either.)

The original Crusader Kings was released the same year as Facebook launched, in 2004, and the chosen model for the dynastic game mechanic is a social network between thousands of European aristocrats. As much as possible, the developers use historical figures, and even link to their biography on wikipedia. The CKII user interface is definitely influenced by social networks as well, with it being simple to navigate between photos of related individuals. I almost wish they’d taken it further. A history of viewable actions by a character would look rather like the stream of activity on a facebook wall, after all.

Now we have orderly (and brittle) automata as routine tools in our lives, we use them to simulate the messiness of the Holy Roman Empire for kicks. So keeping in mind that The Social Graph Is Neither, a messy network of individuals and competing dynastic interests is a rather more satisfying model of a state to my twenty-first century sensibility. Rather than a ship, perhaps a fleet of nautical automata, all with different captains, would be more suitable: that’s what the Internet is, after all.