"Orwell was wrong; the government doesn't impose Big Brother. Audiences demand it." - Josh Harris (3)

Josh Harris has fascinated me since I first heard of his early Internet television company, Psuedo.com, when I was still very young.   In today’s world, where uStream and Justin.tv have collected tens of millions in funding and are being heralded repeatedly as the emerging face of internet television, its sad that we have forgotten that almost twenty years ago Mr. Harris had beaten them to the punch. By pairing chat with streaming-video shows about niche content in the early 90s – Josh Harris didn’t just predict the future - he created it. Bandwidth costs, low Internet adoption and slow connections ultimately killed Pseudo (Harris’ running around NYC as a clown named Luvvy did not help either,), but his reputation had been established. If you haven’t seen his name lately, it’s not because he’s not thinking about the future - he’s working on his Web 3.0 startup as we speak - its because every modern technology, from Facebook to Twitter to the iPhone - seems quite primitive to him.  

How Josh followed Psuedo is still more interesting. He embarked on an underground art project in New York City called QUIET. The goal was for quite a few dozen people to live together in subterranean isolation with everything being shared  and everything being filmed. For weeks, a group of young people in New York City lived underground, online, with every shower, meal, nap and argument streaming on the Internet. The cameras were never off and everything was constantly monitored. Residents had TVs that they could tune to watch the feed from other tenant’s sleeping cubicles. It was an exercise in life without any kind of privacy. Later, he took this idea even further when, for his next project, Josh moved in with his girlfriend and wired their apartment with hundreds of cameras and microphones, from the bathroom to the bedroom to the kitchen. The cameras and microphones were never turned off and the Internet stream never cut away. The couple would spend their days online, talking to their voyeurs who, over time, began taking sides in their arguments and, eventually, in their breakup. The name of that project was a telling summary of Mr. Harris worldview for the future, and the name was eventually adopted for the 2009 documentary about him. He called his experiment, “We Live In Public”.

Flash forward to May of 2010: Facebook is in the middle of a PR nightmare. From the leading technology blogs to the cover of Newsweek - Facebook’s recent change from private to public seems to have everyone squirming - except their users. The five hundred million Facebook users generally did not seem to care that their private social network was public. While technology pundits called for the CEO to be fired, mass account deletions and competitors to rise up, normal users seemed to have no problem with these new defaults. Instead of your posts going to your friends, they now go to everybody. You can change it, but what research there is indicates that while most people do noodle with their privacy settings, most do not revert their profiles back to private from public completely.  

Taken as one move, this seems innocuous enough. Facebook makes money off advertising and growing its user-base to increase adoption of its platform services and games that it rakes a fee off of, therefore the more information they make public, the more information can be distributed, searched, indexed and shared. Page views go up, influence goes up and their path to matching their profits with their size becomes much shorter. However, when coupled with other recent Facebook changes the effect is somewhat larger and more interesting. Facebook’s Open Social Graph is spreading Facebook across the Web like a protocol, peppering a majority of major news sites and smaller niche blogs with their trusty and popular “Like” button and using this information to not effect what you see on Facebook, but to personalize what you see everywhere else. 

What they are creating then, is not public pages to share, or content curation tools for publishers to attract attention, but rather your identity. Up until now identity on the web has been a rather fuzzy topic; you can make a blog with a bio, you can have a Google Profile, a Wiki, and a screen name you try to own on every service. You can do a lot of things - but ultimately true identity fails online without aggregation, trust, and one standard supporting the backbone. While most technology-inclined people would love for that standard to be open, for the time being at least the standard that is emerging is Facebook - closed, quiet, and guarding its plans feverishly. 

What Facebook is creating is an identity that exists entirely outside of Facebook. Facebook’s future may not involve news streams, Facebook.com, mobile Apps or Friend Requests. Facebook’s future may be as a key: an identity with thousands of collected pieces of meta-data about you. Who are your friends? Where do you work? What have you been reading? What sites do you go to regularly? If Facebook is currently a vain way of recreating Josh Harris’ experiments in your own social circles, by allowing you to live in public and reap the social benefits of openness - Facebook tomorrow may be more comprehensive. How would you like to buy a car with Facebook? Get your drivers license? Apply for a job? Once Facebook knows who you are, completely and totally, and once they have gotten users to embrace the idea that this aggregated data serves a larger purpose on Facebook, many more things become possible for them. Once you stop thinking of Facebook as a news stream, status updates and Zygna games, you will start thinking of it as, basically, yourself. You will not have a Facebook page that you use to track your friends’ status’, you will use Facebook to transport (and use) your actual identity, a turnkey you, instant approval or denial, everything you decide funneled through your real (Facebook) self. Facebook won’t just display your friends, it will contain them, share them, handle them for you.

Identity and “publicness” are tricky subjects, though. They have immediate benefits, such as trustworthiness and accountability. However, in its rise it is worth noting what we lose: anonymity. I grew up on the Internet using anonymous screen names on anonymous message boards. I grew up making connections from the outside in. It went from content, to discussion, to interests, to friendships. Facebook inverts this, starting with the relationship, putting your interest cloud on display for quick approval or denial and putting the content and discussion after-the-fact. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain explains why this may be good, and why it may be bad:

“There are some conversations that are undeniably improved when the rule going in is that you have to stand behind what you say and have to wear a name tag when you do it. But that's certainly not all conversations. People might be prepared to ethically stand behind what they say, but might be in a position that they can't afford to lose their house over it.” - Jonathan Zittrain (1)

Imagine the 13 year old trying to learn programming by asking questions on a message board of career professionals. If it's anonymous, there is no problem. If identity is involved, who will take the time to answer his questions? In general, if I know who you are, will I still bother to connect with you? Anonymity has until now fueled the Internet's dynamic social pressures -- appearing noisy and facelessness but free of the crutch of real world identity and bias. There was a time when I could read a post online and judge the content, but now I will follow the author’s name to his Twitter profile, to his Facebook profile, to his Wikipedia page. I can find out everything about him, and come up with a thousand reasons to skew my opinion on what is being said. The Internet, it could be said, started out by putting the information first. As various hacker creeds over the years have stated: people, countries and borders do not matter. In the rush to claim our identities online, however, much of that idealism is being replaced by real-word opinions, biases, sways, and judgment by coloring online conversation as surely as talk radio and evening news. The Internet has become media, with all the negative connotations in tow. I wonder, then, if there is a middle ground. When all work and banking and socializing is done online, the need for identity is clear. It is simply critical to be able to vet somebody in a trustworthy way, as a person, as a colleague, and as a friend. It would be unwise to send money or hire blindly.  It would be foolish to share sensitive personal information online without truly knowing who is on the other end. The more complete the identity gets, the more trustworthy the system becomes and the easier virtualizing more and more tasks, functions, and transactions gets. People demand trust and for this new wave of companies - anonymity is the barrier they are up against.  Josh Harris saw a dark downside to this early on, predicting a world in which everything is shared and therefore nothing is personal. His position could be explained as, without privacy there is no individual, and never before have we been rushing to abandon our privacy at such a pace. I believe that as surely as true identity online is needed, the effects of this breakneck rush to it, as well as the methods used to get there (Facebook’s mandatory publicness,) leave us very uncertain of exactly how we live and relate in the future, and possibly have us walking down the wrong road altogether.

“I will argue that if we default to private, we risk losing the value of the connections we can make today. I will argue that we need institutions—companies and governments—to default to public. And I will argue that the more we live in public, the more we share, the more we create collective wisdom and value. I will defend publicness. But I will also defend privacy—that is, control over this decision.” - Jeff Jarvis (2)

 

 1 - http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07EFD71F30F933A25753C1A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

 2 - http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/05/08/confusing-a-public-with-the-public

 3 -  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-kim/rethink-interview-josh-ha_b_336255.html