 I'm Dane. My favorite life hack is smooth DIY projects and I'm a computer science student. So the microphone is just for the people watching from the internet, right? Because otherwise people... My name is Laurel. I work at O'Reilly Media. We're interested in all sorts of technology, especially internet of things, drones, people. And what I'm seeing as a theme here is kindness and how we are kind to each other as we delve more into technology. I'm Heather. I am a citizen of the internet. I don't know. I mean, like the work I do, not super pertinent to this conference. I went to ITP at NYU. It's the Interactive Telecommunications Program. If you want to guess what that actually means. And yeah, I'm just here to listen mostly. Hi, I'm Ivan. I'm a programmer and a computer artist. And I teach programming at NYU. I just have a general kind of interest in technology. I'm just here to hang out with Heather and you guys. Hi, I'm Ben. I'm the co-founder and CEO of an open source social web platform called known. I believe really strongly that the next Facebook is the web. I'm Erin. I'm the other co-founder of known. So it's an open source platform for running your own websites and connecting with other people online through social networks and through this decentralized network that we're building. And I'm interested in social interactions online and what people do with them. This is really strange having just a microphone. Anyway, I'm Sarah Goss. I'm a student of Museum Studies. I'm an undergrad. I'm just mostly interested in using of social media as an institution and kind of what that's like and what might be as Facebook and other kinds of social media are evolving. Hi, I'm Yanis. I'm a researcher at the Harvard Design School and my work focuses on urban infrastructure systems and how to use information technology to improve their sustainability. I'm CJ Carr. I make things. I'm Laura Newhouse. I'm interested in our dress codes. Hi, I'm Leo Canty. I don't do any work. I'm done with that. So I pursue things on an intellectual level and right now I'm seeking the answer to what will humans do when robots do all the work. I'm Irv and I'm a professor of computer science. A topic that really fascinates me is the unintended consequences of technology, both positive and negative. Ciao. My name is Leah and I'm visiting here at Comparative Media Studies. I'm a sociologist and I'm really interested in that. Yeah, so I'm Patrick and like I said, I studied Harvard and I'm also very passionate about technology. So maybe before we start you want to do some introductory remarks? So we all know we're decades on the online has been the rise of search network sites. We all know that. And the past decade has been really characterized by persistence of content, by shareability of content, right? Searchability. But now that seems to be changing with the rise of the ephemeral apps that are transforming the way we perceive others online, how we are presenting ourselves to others through the Internet. And we're moving towards, it seems like we're moving towards this approach where before we were using all these different social media applications as a form of exhibition. We were just saying something and then it would stay there and people could interact with it at a later point in time. And now it seems like we're moving from the exhibition to the experience for itself with apps like Snapchat or other ephemeral apps. So we wanted to find out what do you think about what the future of the Internet is going to look like. Is it going to be fully ephemeral? Will it be something that will still persist? Is Facebook going to stay? Is Facebook going to be replaced? What in your opinion is kind of the future of social online? How are we going to interact with each other say within 10 years? Do you have any ideas about that? So maybe more tangible, you can talk about things that like sort of like problems in your life, like things that are really troubling you right now that you would like to see improved and then because otherwise it's a little bit off the cuff. So what are some things that currently you're doing and you see they could be done in a different way or they could be done better. And then we can start from there. And I think it doesn't have to be related to social online, but he believes the next Facebook is Web, right? So just as when Google was the next, like people ask what's the next Google, people didn't relook in social networking, right? So it doesn't have to be that sort of area. Most likely it will not be social networking which is the next Facebook. Ben, what do you think? So you said Web was important. So I mean I think you can think of the apps that we all use. So Facebook, Snapchat and so on, really still as proofs of concept. We're really at the beginning of development of these technologies and I think the problem that we have right now is we're running we've gone down this road of taking what have been very small proofs of concept to kind of their logical conclusion which is very big billions of users on these proofs of concept. But because of the way they've been built a very small number of companies actually own our interactions and because of that they actually own the form and content of our interactions as well. Their design decisions actually affect the way we all converse with each other. And so the big change that lots of people and Tantek has spearheaded a community that has really is helping to change that. The we're going to see technologies that actually empower us to talk to each other as naturally as we would face to face. Where we control the form of our communication. How do you think that would look like specifically? I think it would, you know, we're talking about sort of cyborgs here I think it's very personal. I think it isn't a one size fits all kind of mentality. It's actually lots of personal technologies that can talk to each other. You know, that have enough in common that they can actually interact with each other rather than a one size fits all, we're all using the social wall, we're all using these profiles kind of experience. Do you see any companies doing that right now? There are some projects that are doing it right now. We're trying to do this. There are other projects that are doing this. The indie web community is certainly looking at this kind of thing. There are certainly projects that are up and coming. We're beginning to see a swing back towards individuality I think on the internet. So this is quite interesting. So you're mentioning individuality and kind of a conscious refusal of the existing human platforms, right? And this is what Tantek has been doing as well, right? Saying I have my own website, I put my content on my own website and only then link that to Twitter so that people can interact with it. Could you maybe talk kind of more about the philosophy that you have? So I actually thought your first question about what's going to be in ten years. What was the question again? Can you repeat the question about ten years? So what is the social intent going to look like in ten years? Is it going to be people having their own websites? Is it going to be really individual or what do you think about it? So how many of you had pagers or ever had a pager? Anybody? How many of you have pagers today? None of you. So here's my prediction. I'll start with this. At the beginning of the year I gave up a phone number. I don't have a phone number anymore. I just use this device. You can call it a phone. It kind of vaguely gives you that kind of functionality. In ten years I predict all of you will have your own site. You'll just call it a site. I have a site. It'll be tied to one or more of your devices that'll just work seamlessly pair with each other. Some of you will probably still have phones to talk to the old world. And in twenty years none of you will have phones just like today. None of you have pagers or fax machines. And all you will have is you'll have a site. You'll buy a device. You'll pay some provider for site service and that's how you'll interact with everyone. You'll sign into things with your site and it'll just be a thing. That everyone just has a site. Just like today everyone has a cell. And it's such a, it's one of those obvious profound changes that's going to happen and flip so fast that people will be like well of course that was going to happen. Why didn't we all see it coming? And some of us are actively working to make that happen as fast as possible. Can you talk a little bit about your own work and how you're trying to make that happen? Okay. Just really briefly. In 2009 I got very frustrated with Twitter. So essentially I built a clone for publishing short text notes on my own site and from then I decided starting with 2010 January 1st I would no longer post content first on Twitter. So since then every tweet that you see from at T got posted to tauntik.com copied to Twitter and then from there Twitter copied it to Facebook. I also don't post natively on Facebook either. Last year because my parents started calling me on FaceTime instead of on the phone I decided oh well let me see if I can just use my iPod and not my cell phone which I'll leave in my backpack. And so then this year I stopped using that. So like phone number as identity is one of those things that will also go away. I predict. Cause we're going to try all these things and make it much easier for people to do. So speaking of identity are you seeing that a site identifier will be much easier to actually identify who people are including number or telephone number like John Smith. He's kind of screwed if he has johnsmith.com so he has to somehow have a very unique identifier but then also we use identity to confirm so many things and purchases, important real life scenarios. So what does the site kind of is it a number? Is it always still going to be a number? Well do you know your own phone number right? Do you know all your credit card numbers? No. Do you know your IP address? No. So the same thing will be true. So one number for all the things. Well it won't be a number. It will just be your name or your site that you've chosen by whatever name. Like phone numbers are no better than IP addresses. It's kind of ridiculous. It's just as ridiculous to remember a phone number as it is to remember an IP address. It makes no sense. This actually brings us to a really interesting point about identity and what it means online. Because we are given a name. There is a wallet name as we call it. Something that's on your ID, something that's on your credit card. But online if you come to create your own site you can choose the name you want to be identified with. So what do you think about kind of the real name web? What do you think about the implications of choosing your own name and having the freedom of choosing an identity marker that will be there potentially forever online? Have you seen the movie Her? And there was also, sorry for my English. I just came from Italy. There is also this a lot of conference here in MIT about verbal technologies. And about someone an inhuman actor that can talk to you saying could be your coach, could be, so I think that it's of course an old question. The philosopher Bruno Latour talk about reassembling the social. To think the social has an interaction between human and non-human actors. And also you can see this kind of identity that come out from the interaction with this non-human. Now we can see just a trace of these when you buy things to Amazon. After Amazon tell you who are you? Like you can be interested in these and that. And there is a kind of memory of you there that is also a construction, a dynamic construction of your identity. So if I think an interactive word in the future, I think a kind of mixed thinking about yourself also. Do you think that such an identity should be fluid or should it be fixed with a certain site? Should it be something that crosses different platforms or should it be, would you want to have an identity on each and every single platform like Amazon and so on? I think that I'm not deterministic. So you know there is technological terms. There is a cultural change first that meets a technology. And I think that it will be really fluid. But maybe there is not at the moment a technology that you can, for example yesterday, I don't know, there was an interesting conference on news. How we stay all the time in our front line, stuff like that. And they are looking at the mobile. The mobile it will be the future. But now there is no technology that support this because there is no technological problem. But I think everything will be converged in one platform. That is really... So if I understood your question, you were wondering is it a good idea if we have one identity on all platforms? And I guess I would wonder if it's a good idea that we have one identity at all. We do have different personas in different environments. I'm in my professional persona right now and later I'll be in a playful persona with my family. Should it be that all those personas should be merged into one? Or should they be separated? So I think there's a point to be made there about control and choice and going back to this morning privacy. I mean we all have different identities. We all have different facets to who we are. Some of those identities are more public than others. And really it's got to be... I mean the danger is if we have an identifier that is enforced on us and it is enforced that we have a single identifier. If we have the ability to create as many identifiers as we need, that's an empowering platform. That allows us to communicate as we do in real life. And there's a real difference there. I think that's something that the existing social platforms really struggle with and partially because they don't have a broad awareness because of that sort of composition of the different kinds of identities and the different kinds of struggles that people can actually have. I would add to that also, we've done a lot of talking over the last few months with a whole variety of different people from all different wakes of life to find out what they think about their identity and their profiles online and how they use social media and how they use their websites. And there are definitely people out there who have in their mind a sort of singular online identity. And they maintain that across the various social profiles and different websites that they participate in. And then some people very much cater personas of themselves to different social networks. And a lot of times it comes down to the audience and the community on those social networks. And some people have said if they understand the audience or the community on that social network, it's easier for them to understand who they're communicating with. And then they tailor that persona, that part of themselves and their communications to that audience or that community. And if they join a new social network or a new group of people where they don't have a clear understanding of who those people are, it's harder for them to interact because they're not really sure what part of me in my showcasing, what kind of conversations are we having. So you might hear people say they have a profile on LinkedIn and that's a very professional business side of themselves. And they have a profile on Facebook and that's a very personal family side of themselves. And they don't necessarily want those two merged together and really closely tied as a singular identity. But other people don't care as much and are much don't mind as much having all those tied together and just sort of sharing the same information with all those groups of people. And some people draw very strong lines and to the point of using completely different names, different avatars, different images with different groups of people and different communities online. Do you think we'll see more segmentation or less segmentation of identities online? I think the closest thing I could think of right now is it's sort of like email addresses. We probably all have at least one email address and probably we've had more than one over time. Some of us probably have just one main email address right now that we use. Some of us might have a personal email address and a work email address and our work email address might have changed over time. And some people have a single email address that they actually share with their family and that family just uses one email address and that is the singular address that group of people use to communicate with other people. And we have the ability right now, if we wanted to set up multiple email addresses associated with different jobs or different projects or different aspects of our lives or different groups of people that we're communicating with. And I think it depends on the individual and who they're trying to reach, who they're communicating with. And it is very easy right now for lots of people to establish and I think in the future maybe email addresses aren't the primary method of communication but whatever is the primary method of communication people will probably treat that in a similar way. So I just want to add a really short addition to that which is that I have four primary email addresses right now and it's a complete pain in the ass. And so anything that allows, and I definitely have more facets than that to my identity. So whatever platform exists in the future has to be easier than managing my four email addresses on this phone which is just cognitively horrible. I don't think we have the right user interfaces for that. I absolutely agree, multi homing is a huge pain in the ass excuse my French. But we had that same phenomenon when Facebook launched. People were on MySpace, people were on Orchid, on Friendster and for a certain period of time they were maintaining a number of separate accounts and kind of growing different personas on these sites. And then at some point all these things converged. So is this where we're going? So every time there's a new app that is launched will there be this certain period of time where people have multiple accounts but in the end one of them will prevail? Or how do you see that? I hope not. I hope they don't go into one. In the same way it is a pain. No question. I mean I have five emails that I'm working with right now. But in the same way that we have different physical spaces that we go into and behave in different ways we can have different social spaces online that we go into and behave in different ways. And to me that's an advantage, not a disadvantage even though it requires you to remember where you are now and who am I with now. But that's part of being human. So how do you associate in different ways in different places? So I don't think different spaces and identity are sort of like mutually exclusive. So I think if you look at the real world you have one identity and then you have different layers with the new identity and you just decide to share different layers to different people. And so I think in the future what you will see is basically the online world will replicate whatever is happening in the real world. And so I think there will just be one sort of identity and then you decide who you want to share what kind of parts of the identity you want to share with other people. But I think we don't want to go back to the pre-Facebook era where everybody's going to be anonymous and I think we're very segmented into this way where people have sort of a passport online and it's like their identity and it's really entrenched and Facebook is really driving this. So maybe if we go back to the initial question which was what is the next Facebook I think a really interesting question to ask yourself how did you look at the future from the past? So if you looked ten years ago the big thing was search as I mentioned previously but you didn't really see Facebook coming. Google Eric Schmidt always regrets that he hasn't invested enough into social networking. So what do you think are some sort of trends right now and Peter Thiel likes to talk about that when he says what are some sort of ideas that nobody agrees with you on? Do you see some companies or do you see some trends that you really see there's potential like Apple when Steve Jobs was still head of Apple? What do you see innovation coming from and what do you see the next Facebook coming from? I talked to one of the guys at the Mozilla Foundation and he said they were trying to design an internet identity and at the user agent level. So your browser is the identity which if apps want to grab content from you you as What is a basic idea? I'm butchering it. The idea is that give we want to give the individual more control over their identity and what kind of information they give out. So is that sort of like what Facebook is doing of giving people more transparency over their own data? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah. Look it up. For a long time we've seen this development that companies like the Mozilla Foundation or even Google Chrome started to use this new layer of control that is between you, the user and the operating system that would provide an identity layer for the people to kind of browse the internet to save all their passwords to be kind of the real you that then exhibits different facets of the self to different sites online. So is this what we were talking about that the browser is going to be kind of this identity layer that's going to be vital for the social thing online? I was going to say I think that's fair because a lot of startups now use your social sign-in as your identity because they want you to tie into some of their platforms so they can give as much data about you as possible. And so whenever I see these I always use my personal email because that's a we're kind of used to in this world having a fake account and a real account. So if you tie like things you're just trying once or twice to your fake account you don't have a lot of data. But when you're trying something new for the first time and tying it to your real identity people don't want to do that. And I think startups forget that because they need the analytics and want the analytics. So they want to know who you are exactly right off the bat. But those of us that have been around for a while don't want to give up our information so easily. So I think that's one of the things that's unpopular is like untie everything from social sign-in. I'm tired of it. Like those buttons don't work for the user. They only work for the person creating the startup. Yeah and even when you have to decide to tie yourself to a platform like we are Apple users or Google users depending on your phone. There's a small handful of Microsoft users as well. But I decided a long time ago I am a Google user so I will use the Android phone because it ties into my email it ties into everything that I do and it's very hard to then separate yourself on different devices with these different methods. Trusting the customer over time. Absolutely. The data that you can get from these kind of social sign-ins. We have a couple of marketing experts here. Mike do you want to talk about that maybe? The data that is available from these social sign-ins and what it means for marketers and people who want to sell people products based on that data? First of all I agree with you. I can't stand the social sign-in for everything. One that's a security issue but at the same time you can get a lot of information from that in your back-end analytics. Google analytics for example has revolutionized itself in the last few years. They've added those variables gender this and that and that's because the advent of Chrome and the Chrome login and ties into everything Google and every time you go to something Google you have to decide if I want to use this login or this login. You can see all these statistics on the website that helps people like myself to identify target markets to see who's using the website and actually gear the website up to cater to these age groups after you get so much data. I don't know. I kind of see the whole social media platforms kind of starting to blend together. You've seen recently how Facebook uses hashtags now and they don't work but 90% of what I was going to say is 90% of the people use them for the wrong reasons. I don't think that there's going to be a new and better Facebook. I think that there's going to be... Facebook's had hashtags for almost a year now, longer. They don't work. It's kind of, they don't work at all. You click them, they don't actually produce results. No results because it results I don't really believe it. Just to follow up on the Mozilla Foundation comment about identity or browser level identity. Mozilla did do something called persona. Trying to make a way for people to use their email address as their identity without having to give everyone a username password pair. It had some success but not a lot of success. But in general, I'm going to say that apply the following filter. If someone's talking about some new identity system or technology or thing that's going to happen or thing that they're proposing, ask them if they're using it on their own website and if they're not, tell them they're full of it until they are. Because they haven't figured out how to get it working. I think there's a couple of things to say. The first is we would just confirm because Erin's a user experience expert and she just confirmed to me that native logins, i.e. the ones that don't use social logins actually have better conversions unless you're actually deeply tying into the network and there's a real reason for you to log in with Twitter or whatever you're putting in with. The reasons to get that data, I think there's a lot of disinformation that was actually a post this week, I guess, by Dustin Curtis the creator of Subtle who was talking about how really you need to gather all this information about your users in order to build better products and do it surreptitiously. Basically have all the tracking codes and really gather all this aggregate data. It's not true. It's really not true. There are all kinds of explicit user research techniques that people use to build websites where you actually get people in. You can do things, when you have people who are who are consenting to be part of user research you can do things like eye tracking, you can do things like movement tracking. You can actually really ask them and really get a sense of what it is they're looking for and really get much, much more insightful feedback than you can out of very aggregate statistical data and build a better product out of that. The only real reason to gather that kind of information is to run targeted ads. I would argue the targeted ads and the existing crop of social networks kind of go hand in hand in a very insidious way. In many ways the existing social networks exist to gather your information in order to show ads at you, which in itself is inherently a violation of your privacy and your rights online. The users are still there. Nobody is migrating to LO. LO does not solve any kind of problem. There needs to be an actual crop of real alternatives and people need to look at different business models as part of that. To actually create sustainable products that take revenue that can actually empower people in different ways in a sustainable way that is founded in solid business practices. This is actually a great concluding remark I guess. We need to empower our users. We need to work with our users together. We can't just exploit the data they are giving. We need to really use a consent rather than just the consent that, because everyone is there, I have to join it, I don't care about the terms and conditions. But that's something that sounds great, but who's going to do that? Who's going to implement that? In theory this is a great idea, but then really startups incentivize to do this. Maybe to go back to the initial question again, anybody has any takes on big ideas or anything like that? Because we talk within social networking which is the existing paradigm, but do you have anything outside the paradigm something different? Ben said making our communications closer to the value of a face-to-face interaction is something that's really important and I think is a paradigm shift away from the current social media, current information sharing methods that we have on the internet now. So I think in the future we should be looking in terms of how do we actually make that happen? How do we convey things like emotions or like humor or in more meaningful ways that create meaningful connections among people? I mean that maybe sounds idealistic but I think that is where the future should lie in these sorts of things and quite possibly does lie. I would add one more sort of technology trend that is very much on the fringe I think right now and hasn't tipped but maybe in the next 10 years will be something that we might see more and that's around Duxerle's idea of VRM, vendor relationship management so that's not something that you really see any platforms or providers doing right now because people are still trying to figure out how to make that happen but where today we sort of live in this world where advertisers are shoving things in your face online that they want you to buy and they track what you look at online and other things that you view and purchase and try and use their algorithms to make assumptions about what you might be interested in. With VRM theoretically it would give you as an individual the opportunity to say I'm looking for this sort of thing so I'm looking for a plane ticket from this airport to this airport on this day in this price range or I'm looking to buy this kind of laptop case for this kind of laptop or I'm looking to buy this kind of house in this price range in this neighborhood you put out things that you're looking for and people are able to grab that information and they compete to give you the best possible matching product or service so it's different than the model we have today and it's not something that platforms and providers have really figured out how to handle or implement or use right now so it's very much like a concept on the fringe but I think we're getting closer to this space where people understand the general concept more and we might in the next 10 years start to see that actually implemented more online I would like to say I'm a bit skeptical about having one single digital identity that consolidates all our digital activities and if we make this comparison with the physical world I mean of course we have one ontologically speaking and socially speaking we have one identity but are we aware of our single identity? That's very difficult maybe it requires years of psychoanalysis I don't know but we're aware of our dispersed identities according to a specific social setting and we adapt according to different experiences so I mean that one thought is that in the future we will be even using more dispersed digital identities and we will be trained and used in changes through different platforms different softwares that will become natural to us to change and maybe it will become so much natural to us that we will think will be thinking directly algorithmically ourselves so we won't be able to understand that now we're using a different software or it will be natural for us to have thoughts on this This big change that we are into is considered market driven but I think that there is I can feel some kind of resisting data and maybe there is I heard about a software named Track Me Know maybe there is a kind of it will be a kind of individual empowerment that we can know how So if you want to continue the conversation we touched upon a lot of really interesting topics we talked about empowerment, we talked about different identities, we talked about people centric advertising where people would say what they actually want we talked about the data approach what advertisers are seeking from these new social network sites so these are great ideas we talked about more emotions, more genuine conversations we talked about this dialogue we are always available at Patrick Daniel at Slava CM thank you so much for the input, thank you so much for the insights we are driven by curiosity we send a robot avatar it can go near the speed of light the Russians tried to send a human out but I thought a decade ago well you are aware that sci-fi writers or futurists in general have an influence on what happens let's communicate now are you a student here? a researcher, or contracted programming for research here a programmer out of a job there's two views of this the pessimist and the optimist when there's no scarcity and they do things out of their own intrinsic motivation with consumer culture just like this momentary blip that's the problem of scarcity smarter people is always a good idea a lot of conflict is based off of scarcity I want what you have people who are doing the most one way to look at it is look at cultures for which scarcity is not a problem it's a program that will solve that problem make sure those brain implants have the right circuits so that people become more charitable social political shame needs to be more effective you can insult all the rich guys you want to get at me you got to get around all my bodyguards and weapons all the money and the billions they have on hand is invested in something bad there's a lot more drivers than just desire and intellect not worried at all so one social company falls servers are cheap early days everyone had email servers what was this decentralized open source software those are tier 3 in Boston on summer street there's a building with the line from it's like a handful of people so the session is starting we have to look like a crowd the way the sessions work if you're here the microphones are on but they're not so if you're talking you should use one and if it's this small the house came with chickens and empty beehive and the entire yard is a garden the great share of migration microcontrollers and hardware I think it's temperature and humidity and motion sensors but especially urban beehives extended sensor network about environmental conditions and have that secondary effect Madrid and Barcelona and Spain is pretty active even before you had sensors the honey is already acting as a sensor of the air quality you find a lot of particulate matter and the honey it's probably not great we haven't officially started yet because we're live streaming so you can unofficially but I was just telling some of the other folks that we're in Norway the next two weeks teaching a course for undergrads called design for non-human clients so we're asking our students to identify a plant or animal and then make some sort of app or social network for that plant or animal so that was part of the inspiration and also something we've been thinking about for a few years I would love to hear about your ideas for incorporating systems besides humans in our cybernetic systems so my name is Kat Kramer and I am an artist one is called the center for genomic gastronomy and the other is called co-climate and they equally deal with food and climate change and technology and people's relationship to those things my name is Erin I'm a user experience architect and co-founder of an open source software company called known and I mostly design for humans but I really like this idea of designing for other things that aren't humans and I've always been really interested in smart home technology and sensors that I could potentially in the future tie into my house plants and then someday if I had a house with a yard and chickens and beehives and things that would be cool too but I'm kind of limited right now to an apartment with house plants but so ideas for the future I'd love to grab them so when I get there I can implement those Hi I'm Jesse I make stuff some physical stuff historically mostly software I've built software for non-humans but it was software for other software not for things that live and grow on their own I'm Irv I'm a professor and one of my main areas of interest is the aspect of what we do on human health and the environment and so this really this topic really fascinates me I'm Dane I'm a student of my professor I study computer science and I was just curious about what this was all about Hi I'm Kevin I'm a PhD student at Harvard and I work on folding robots or robots that fold themselves up I'm interested in how robots can be integrated into our lives in harmonious ways I'm Jess I'm a web developer and also a owner of two parrots and an iguana and I constantly try to find ways to use technology and all kinds of other things and other computers to improve their life and improve their environment so any further ideas I can do or share what I've already learned is awesome I'm Tim I write about architecture and design and so I came here because I'm really interested in cyborgs at the scale of landscapes one of the groups I do a lot of work with is called the Dredge Research Collaborative and we are interested in all the technologies around erosion control and prevention and that kind of thing and how that reshapes at very large scales the planet I'm Zach I'm an artist and a professor and Kat mentioned our groups and I also teach in a collaborative design program in Portland, Oregon and the next two weeks the students are looking at this intersection of technology, the environment, and humankind so I think it might be interesting if people have maybe some examples they've seen of prototyped or imagined projects that are really inspired by I know that we have definitely a hardware hacker actually making stuff for pets but one of the things that got me thinking about this a long time ago now is the Center for Tactical Magic, a truly interesting art group made a piece in the 90s where they proposed to put volume sensors in old growth forests and if the old growth forests were logged the insects that are displaced get really noisy and the volume sensors would fire rockets at loggers and it's really an absurdist crazy idea that I was really inspired by that notion of arming non-humans with a technological system not because I actually want anyone to have more armament at all but just as a sort of provocation and so that's one of the things that got me really interested in this topic like was that eight years ago now? so that was Center for Tactical Magic basically it just created an optimal and comfortable environment sort of trying to do I know with blossoming it gets really cold in the winter but occasionally you have even lost heat sometimes due to oil issues and lots of roommates so I sort of ended up using a combination of various heating utilities heated purchase, heated panels to create a birth same sort of heated environment for them so you know they're always comfortable that way I've utilized various things via YouTube and internet radio to help you entertain during the day while I'm at work or circus so there's always something going on and as I mentioned briefly earlier when I was on vacation one time I also have them set up on a online stream so I can check on them see what they're doing and if I notice that they're getting very anxious, noisy and upset I actually recorded a video of myself on my laptop sending calming words uploaded to YouTube, promoted into my home machine from vacation played the YouTube video for them and was able to sort of interact with them that way and calm them down and keep them happy and anything really to help sort of improve their environment to give them more fun, more entertainment and more comfort is really trying to do. So I have a question and this is the question that occurred to me when I first saw the topic and then when you were talking about what you were talking about just now, do you think it's possible to design for the environment without anthropomorphizing because I don't know that a tree wants to be protected from a logger, maybe it does but how do we know that and is it somewhat presumptuous of us to think that it does? I think it's such a hard question in this space. One of the techniques we've been using in our classes is letting students do that first and foremost. It's like okay to try that as a technique if they're not really disrupting the non-human. We use a lot of the metaphors of client relationships so we have students go out and find a non-human and eat lunch with it, understand its nutrient cycle and its waste stream but another way in is if we can never know what a non-human wants or needs as humans what do we need in relation to that to use ecosystem services as one way of relating to non-humans to understand the services that they might provide for human kinds and then since we want those to give them things that make those better for us. This is like a big deep ecology question like how do we get beyond these anthropomorphic? I think another thing that's interesting is a term we've been throwing around a little bit planetary sculpture and so humans are just for our sheer size and number we are sculpting the planet but kind of unconsciously and so the idea is well what if we were a little bit more thoughtful about the things that we do to change the planet and so by opening up this idea of designing for non-humans it's not necessarily negating the human it's including that in the space but being a bit more aware of everything else as well so taking into consideration ant or actor network theory and how every actant has an effect on everything else and yeah. First thing that comes to mind is home design and I know a lot of homes in the Alston Brighton area will have issues with birds finding little holes to nest into a roost into and oftentimes learners have to find a way to basically kick the guys out which isn't cool but they're nice. They get rid of bugs and they're important things in the environment that a guy could go into but no one right now. But you know homes designed specifically to have areas for you know other animals in the area, squirrels, birds too. We know that they're going to be living in here we'll design it specifically maybe get some use out of it use some of what they produce as fertilizer for local plant and wildlife that we can use and work from then sort of designing a housing system that rather than try to block all this out incorporates into a more intelligent arrangement would be really cool. I just thought of something sort of along the lines of our built urban environment and not necessarily considering the environment that we put things in. A friend of mine who is an architect and very environmentally conscious was tracking on the street where he lived for a while they at one point changed the street lights that they used the lights in the street lights to make them very very much brighter at night than they were and there was a single street light that happened to be right under a tree on his streets and he noticed after they made the switch in the light bulbs or whatever they did there to really increase the brightness at night that that tree in the spot that was all around that light post all of the leaves very quickly died and that whole part of the tree died right there because it was so bright at night after they switched out the light bulb that the tree just couldn't cope with that anymore and he was very distressed about that and I thought that was really interesting because that's not something that occurs to me that often but you could definitely see how we change the technology in something like a street light and it has immediate effect on the vegetation right around it. There was actually one of our students last year chose darkness for his client and that was a kind of curious client to work with because how do you design for something you inherently can't see or actually there's also what's the movement in the UK the I think yeah there's I can't remember the specific name but there is a an organization that's encouraging darkness and they have actually created sort of national parks dark zones so that you can see the stars and yeah they're sort of a bit of a movement on that front as well so would you consider for example terraforming Mars as an example of what we're talking about here totally changing an environment which right now is arguably pretty dead but sending technology out to completely change the surface of a planet would that be a client would Mars be a client we've sort of like I think cases introductory talk looked back and said in some ways we've always been cyborgs any technology tools in some ways we've always been terraforming like the part of like the human ecology ideas that were animals within this system with other animals and organisms and so before we even go to Mars maybe way of thinking about it is we already have these augmented ecosystems that we exist within like the light and that we already had this tech that was affecting the light it was only when it really affected and killed it that we were more conscious of it so a little bit earlier you were speculating what you thought this group might be talking about and you had some really interesting ideas about pipelines and measuring or understanding the surface of the ocean or the ocean's bed or something I wondered if you could elaborate on that idea a little bit more what we're considering is so we have all these cables that are really good and transmitting lots of data and then we have all of the previous cables that were laid down there and it's really expensive to bring those cables back up and so what scientists are beginning to do you can run signals along those like old copper cables and depending on what is happening with the stations in between you can get information about the situation with the cables to measure movement under of the ocean bed and gather other environmental data and so we have accidentally wired up certain channels with substantial amount of sensors right they weren't meant to be sensors they were meant to be conduits and now they've become sensors so I was going to mention that I had gone to Ireland a couple years ago and one of the things that was really interesting there was looking at the industry on the ecology so the entire idea of having peat bogs to harvest as something to burn those peat bogs came about because people settled on the island and found all the trees and so there was this like what we think of as the ecology now has is something that humans had already been terrible for and so it's not something that is I think that there's a tendency to think of it as something new like what we are going to do as opposed to what we have already been terraforming for a long long time. I think it's one metaphor that might be so there's a lot of user interaction coming out of computing that then bled over into the rest of the design world like oh yeah we should ask users what we want or observe them using things and there's maybe an interesting backtracking with non-human type we're always already affecting our environment so we should do that more thoughtfully what's the name of the is there a project of consortium around this cable sensing? I don't remember well someone out there will or we'll find out I think part of the design world is the backwards looking forward so it's not like a break I think also in the if we do the cyborg thing right there was a marked difference in the world of erosion control between a kind of 1960s heroic infrastructure engineering hard lines between armored put down concrete approaches and means of new approaches that deal with and enhance feedback loops that recognize that feedback loops exist and so one famous project in the Netherlands by the way if you're like at all into erosion like a country that is largely under sea water is a really good country to look at so they did a thing called a sand engine so the problem with sand and beaches is that you put the sand there and it probably doesn't want to be there and so then it gets eroded away and so the current technology largely means you just truck out more sand what they did instead is they did a bunch of math a way to put a sand bar that's a very odd shape such as when currents hit it would redistribute the sand along the ocean shore it would require them to do the replenishment far less often but for a certain period of time worked with entropy instead of trying to so just jumping off what you're talking about using nature to control nature I think that's a really important idea again it goes to the deep ecology thing whose business is it of us to control nature maybe what's happening to the planet right now is nature's way of saying bye-bye you've had your time here and now we want to get back to where things were before but assuming that we want to make it habitable for us then probably the things that are going to be most successful are where we work in harmony in communion with nature instead of trying to do our technological things to prevent nature from doing what is natural so if I came in late I don't know if Christopher Alexander has already been brought up but he, so he was originally known for the Timeless Way of Building which is a patterned language for building buildings that are livable and usable and he went on his current work on neighborhoods and how do you build sustaining neighborhoods and grow sustaining neighborhoods I think that the idea of a patterned language has a lot of power for ecological engineering on a pragmatic scale I was also struck about some of the quantified self things how do we know what non-humans want how do we know what humans want so I don't like people prototyping different ways of using tools for measuring organisms and things other than human kind of what they want or how they're doing there's really specific ways in environmental engineering to measure things and ask for is this going to be successful or not based on our needs and I think actually as an artist we're excited about those messy metaphors making it totally great to make some tool to ask the plants how you feel about the charts that have RFID on them so there's examples of like really in your face augmented organisms all over the planet I think also anthropomorphizing is a good empathy building mechanism whereas you wouldn't necessarily consider it at all beforehand if you're suddenly like well how does that you know should I care about that tree should I care about chopping it down to make room for my house so if you think about it as a client for example you might want to keep it alive right if you think the base premises things want to stay alive maybe they don't always but you know so then building for that and to do oh it wants to stay alive and it wants to be healthy and it wants to be and it wants to thrive and so yeah the decision to pick one or another thing as the client already kind of incredibly fraught like every tree that is there is a bush all the other plants that are trying to grow in that forest recently I was doing a little bit of research and the thing is in some parts of the United States where the fire departments get really good and prevent forest fires they actually do have to do some controlled burning sometimes with trees in large forest they need to occasionally have a good burn down get that nutrients back in the soil so new things can grow and trees are going to want that but for the rest of the forest it's important for it to happen and also toss in you know even for other animals if they want something it doesn't necessarily mean it should happen my birds want all my ramen noodles it isn't good for them I'm not going to assess the need like that is not what they need as a client even though that's what they want they're figuring out what not necessarily what it needs or wants but what is in a sense best for it going forward both for your needs and its needs there's sort of the assumption there that preservation or the status quo is our goal or is and I think that that's especially in ecology that's never the case everything is it's about where do we go next rather than how do we keep things alive everything's going to die so I happen to know a bit about some transformations that have happened in the field of chemistry in the past 15 years where a term called green chemistry has emerged which is based on some people sitting around and coming up with so called 12 principles of green chemistry 12 concepts that if you really care about doing chemistry in ways that are safer for human health and environment you will respect these 12 concepts and I think maybe something like that would be a good outcome from the folks that are thinking about this you know what would the 8 or the 12 or the 16 principles of designing for non-human organisms be I mean I think the point is well taken right the second you start designing you're including and excluding certain things that's the difference between academia and intervening in the world I think and that's not a critique they have places but what this might these kinds of lenses might add is just making those decisions at different scales with more consideration and like focusing on an organism or species mix or a landscape really you need to take those all into consideration but partly I think in design because if you were going to do a full systems analysis there's rarely time or money for that having some really well thought out heuristics or rules of thumb that you're talking about could be really helpful because so often when we talk to like industrial design students or students who want to make stuff even just talk about ending end of life issues with their materials you know it was not considered so bringing in some other clients that have a say that aren't just their the company could be quite interesting to have that voice at the table yeah but yeah there's always you're always excluding things the second you start being like this and not this I think one person that's been firing for us in this space is Natalie Jermajenko I didn't know this artist case showed her project from like 20 years ago that was the trip wire was the network traffic line but in the last sort of 10 years she's transitioned to doing stuff called the environmental health clinic and sort of building biotechnologies that connect humans and other organisms and so I know one of her projects was in the Hudson River fish and sort of visualizing right their patterns but also creating these gummy worms that could be humans key or the fish that has she leading agents that process the mercury so a food for both organisms that you could sort of share amongst each other that was a super low tech solution and there's kind of fancy high tech you were nodding in a confusion or approval or disapproval so it was I know her and she did the first species cookbook was she in collaborate because there's also an architecture firm called the Living in New York who also did a thing with the Hudson River and fish and I'm trying to remember if that was the same thing or if they each and it was like so their thing was like they made a floating grid and when there were fish coming by lights would turn on so you could like you could like have a sense that there are fish at all because there's a lot of misunderstanding in New York about how poisoned or unpoisoned the Hudson is it's things are pretty okay now they also did one in Korea they made a they made a like mini map of the city and then they put sensors in all the different parts of the city to see how badly the air was polluted and then the map would glow and they would fool around with these kind of the idea of the feedback loop being about making it consciously making invisible systems or actors visible to people in a kind of playful cartoonish fun art way so I'm curious what are some of the things that your students have done in the past that really blew you away well we've done it with graduate students in Portland as well there was one project where one of the students was really interested in space junk and in order to to clean up space junk and thinking about all of the zombie satellites and sort of other aspects she proposed putting a trash collection of the moon sort of launch out and funded by rich people and then that could start to fund the rest of the space junk cleanup but so the idea was to have a maned mission to the moon to go and sort of look at the leftovers including possible contamination the idea was to auction off the space junk is like high-end art sculpture and so then make it super desirable so you'd have billionaires trying to buy these sculptures and bidding against each other to fund the space junk cleanup there's apparently a ring of human feces and urine around the planet from the early years and space flights when they ejected the waste the internet's out there so I think part of the idea too was scooping up some of that goodness so she had a really amazing diagram of how this was all going to happen and the darkness guy was also quite interesting because he started the project not knowing that there already was a pretty strong movement around these I think they're called darkness parks but it's about reducing light pollution and having sort of zoned areas sort of like a fair day cage like people actively want to seek out spaces where they can't get they want to discourage certain signals and have other ones so you want to discourage light and actually see the stars and to think about the scale that's required to do that is pretty phenomenal because light pollution travels pretty far so it actually creates this sort of interesting no-go zones dark sky initiative that's pretty good Bill I've had the microphone a lot actually so so if somebody else wants to please take it from you right now okay so I think whenever we're I think this conversation if I'm interpreting it correctly it's trying to understand the world around us better is at the point of enabling non-human things to have something that we can understand so to me this is an effort to be to enjoy our world more that's what I'm really seeing it at is just being in the world very zen kind of idea I think that's really what I'm getting out of this I think that's what I'm enjoying with us not only not just but with tools to give that extra ability and give extra power to non-human to enjoy the world in the same fashion but similarly we're also part of the goals so again I don't know if it's mentioned but the companion animal manifesto is amazing also by Donna Haraway and it sounds like it would be like academic feminism but it really isn't it's amazing the companion animal manifesto about our relationship with domestic and dedicated animals in really cool and fun ways and my poor cat now has the maybe later pointer because the poor cat is bored because she has no work to do so but yeah I think that there's a lot there about how do they enjoy themselves I think domesticated pets and animals aside I think a lot of well it's close enough right in the check check I think we're as live with the live stream as we're going to get so let's go ahead and kick this off I propose this session on notifications filtering and prioritizing and postponing inspired by Amber's talk this morning on calm computing and the basic premise is that no matter what situation we're in there are probably some notifications even if you're like out in you like flew to Thailand to go like sit in a hut to go right by yourself and not be away from all technology if there was a tsunami coming you probably would want to be notified for example so there are like no matter how isolated you want to be there are probably some examples of notifications you want to receive but the question is how do we figure out what those are and then how do we build tools that sort of adapt to users and or help empower users to tweak that without giving them the here are 100 checkboxes please navigate and check them all and uncheck them all whenever anything changes in your life according to your like interuptability is it notifications or is it interruptions I guess I see notifications as one form of interruption does that answer your question so this is interesting to me because one of the things that I've been playing with recently is some of the am I eligible so one of the things that I've played with a bit over the past couple of years is some of the apps that are designed to give us emergency notifications so to tell you for example whether there's a tornado warning or if you might be a midwestern transplant in New England whether there's a tornado warning in your hometown so you can check and see if it's still standing an hour later or maybe you know you don't want to know that but some of them will have sort of a classification where they've pre-prioritized okay we think that tornado warnings, hurricane warnings you know some of these most severe weather events terrorism warnings will get what we call a red priority and other things will have a yellow priority green you know et cetera and you can select which priority groups you want to receive which seems like a nice start at filtering without having to have under-checked boxes well and so they should tell you right which ones are in which group on the other hand despite having done that I'm still getting amber alerts from Nebraska which I don't really care about so that's just my first thought. I guess I guess it means somebody to regulate your notifications or whether it's something you want to take control right yourself so I can imagine having something like a tornado warning like we got regulated by the government or kind of local authorities but then some of the more personal stuff especially social notifications from your friends or strangers in your friends list you might want to avoid that or you might have certain preferences about notifications you want to receive so I guess the combination should be having personal notifications that you set yourself but also having some sort of overarching government level notification system that should be available to anyone. I mean SMS does have this level of thing built into it going all the way up as far as I can tell all modern phones are required to not let you disable and describe it was basically intended for that last minute message saying it's been nice knowing everybody the nukes are incoming there's nothing we can do but it's all built into the SMS system. I would actually say anytime someone says like do we need a layer above this it means you don't actually understand the problem like if you don't understand a problem add a layer of abstraction it seems like you solved the problem but you didn't and so it will be aware of any time you think that's the approach to take so I try to solve a problem in my first documenting specific examples so we talked about the different like tsunami is one example tornado warning is another example and you can think about well there's all these if I travel to some location like if I go to Florida and maybe I'm not from the US I don't know that hurricanes are a problem I don't know to turn on hurricane warnings right so asking users to manage every single kind of catastrophe is not reasonable so there needs to be there does need to be some sort of layering I will grant you that or at least grouping, categorizing things like that where it's like warn me about weather events, dangerous weather events or dangerous natural disasters perhaps. Buzz every six seconds because someone I know checked in on Swarm in another city. Days when we all used good old days when we used to check our email in 80 by 24 text windows we had tools for dealing with our notification stream. Proc mail is touring complete not necessarily the best interface but it was a tool for handling exactly this kind of thing you write rules for what you want to deal with and it evaluates the things the messages that come in and it's just that nobody's really building those kinds of tools for social mobile notifications one thing that came to my mind when you said this is that notifications in fact are great habit building affordances so every time habit building affordances so if you if an app wants you to use that app more often a notification is a great external stimuli that will bring you back to the app and get you into a certain it will make you repeat a certain action with a certain frequency that forms a habit right so it's a great design tool. Yeah there's two ways you can get those notifications one is on Instagram hey this person liked your photo this person commented this person sent you a Facebook message but then there's the other you've waited 24 hours and now you have 10 credits that you can use on Farmville which is hey you need to go back and then start another process so it'll start this process to get you some more points for addictive gaming how can you get an alert without having to have that message like without having to get a push notification is there is there a different way that you can get an alert I mean there's the badge on apps right that like show you how many messages you haven't read which can cause quite a bit of anxiety actually so like do you really need all like for instance I got locked out of my work email account and I had been checking that all the time compulsively and I can't check it and I call up service desk and they won't they weren't even there so I just don't you know it's been very relaxing right where I would like maybe a push notification that says check your email now and this is the only time you can check it or something like that but if something really crazy comes through then somebody can elevate it and say you really need this message which is why I tell people send me a text message if I really need to answer this email because I don't want to check it otherwise so would you kind of posit that we need certain degrees of notifications so some notifications that are have just a natural just a strong a big a magnitude or more urgency attached to them the issue is that that already is there with email right there's the urgent message and people have people who send messages that aren't necessarily urgent start to abuse it if they can have it so if I tell somebody hey here's my personal phone number that's opted in that they're close enough to me that they'll be able to tell me about some emergency that needs to happen and that I as a human know that group and a machine can't tell that for me and then I might get the right message that way like right now I'm doing experiment I'm not checking my work mail for a week and seeing if something's urgent enough if people can route around and find a communication channel to reach me at then right that's decided by the recipient not the sender at least in most cases for personal stuff in a business context that could be different I think it's also tied to rising etiquette of how to communicate with each other as there are multiple different ways of communicating so for example I open up Skype and my mom calls me immediately and is like oh I saw you were online yes I'm always online it doesn't mean you need to call me she hasn't quite understood how yeah hi mom she hasn't quite understood how that interface works and I think it's a when people use it in the wrong way I realize that there is an etiquette and a known way of communicating and so as a sender unless I'm a spam bot or you know or company or whatever it is I wouldn't want to tell you this is an urgent message unless I personally thought you really had to see it and right there's that idea of if I'm online I'm automatically available when in reality I might not be but yeah and people do abuse that quite a bit like if but that way I put that I'm available on gchat and then people like show up okay cool but in a way I am available when I do that and I only set that when I'm actually available to talk but there's not one uniform way of doing it either right because I default to invisible right whereas the sort of the email default is like imagine we took that ball of string at the entrance that we have there and we all tied like a little bit of string around our pinkies and then like put that string into the middle anyone else could reach in the middle and be like and like pull on the string that's like hooked to anyone else that's kind of what email does it sort of allows anyone to like reach out and like pull the string that's like holding onto your finger and be like hey pay attention to this yeah and that's but I want to try to separate like the communication person to person notification problem because that's like a whole other discussion from the notification problem that comes from like devices and computers as the extension of self like from a actual like cyborg perspective when the way that we use these things as like just enhancements of our eyes enhancements of our of our hands and and just as like machines right so like sending agents out there do things for you a lot of apps sort of act that way and then tell you when they're done or tell you when things are happening on your behalf even those seem overwhelming so maybe we can come up with examples of technologies that aren't obnoxious when they give us notifications other than the super emergency ones what are low level ones that don't bug you when they give you a notification this is not an answer this is a separate thread but the kind of notifications that I miss and that I would love to have are ways to notify a sender that the communication is going to be shared with more than just the sender and the recipient so I really like having intermediaries for communication and I like publishing communications with me and to be polite to the sender it's usually nice to get some kind of consent or to make sure that they know and there isn't an obvious easy way to do that and so sometimes if I feel that the sender was abusing right to get in touch I don't worry too much about doing that but I would still love to have an even more polite way one thing that comes to my mind as a technology that is super non obnoxious and one example that comes to my mind of a notification technology that is super non obnoxious even though it notifies me of all sorts of things I don't care about is the macOS notifications where it'll sort of float a little rectangle in a corner of the screen in the periphery for a few seconds and then it goes away on its own and if I want to go looking for it there's a couple of things I can click through to go find that notification and otherwise if I don't care to take any action it dismisses itself and I think that is lovely and it drives me up the wall because it breaks me out of flow it's this thing that is not important to me at this second is now in my field of view flashing at me and that's a you versus me thing and I've been tuning it down and further and further but it's just it's one of those things that I'm glad it works for some people because otherwise it'd be really awful one thing I think that works well is Twitter for me because it sits there until I go and I find it and I don't have to engage with it and there's no expectation that I will actually necessarily engage with it there's so there's very low feedback responses but if I want it it's there it's in a summarized easy to scroll through form I actually find the opposite with Twitter because I mean maybe this is partly a username issue I have at T and so my notifications on Twitter are pretty useless people using it to mean all kinds of different things but Twitter also has a whole settings page for email notifications with 22 different checkboxes of do you want to receive emails about this this this there are 22 of those literally and that that's ridiculous to expect people to manage and or tune based on time of day or availability or anything like that it's funny my Twitter email notifications are just set to off but but I thought it was interesting Beth what you were saying about how there's no expectation that you'll engage with it because those expectations are so socially created so there was a time I think when there was no particular expectation that a person would necessarily answer their phone when you called because they might not be available whereas I think we at least went through a phase with cell phones where people would answer them in basically all times and all places and so now it creates a much higher degree of anxiety when somebody doesn't answer a call and there's a greater perception of an obligation to respond immediately that has been created through this sort of pocket notification culture between cell phones and text messages and so I think one of the things I'm hearing is that you don't feel any particular social obligation to engage with Twitter nor do I but maybe Tantech does just because of differences in how we have engaged with the medium previously in our lives and the expectations we might have created there and it's I find it to be sort of this floating problem of any time I engage more with a particular medium I unintentionally create more of an expectation that I will be available by that medium when other people want me there as opposed to when I want to be there. I guess this is more of just like a an observation but I think it's really interesting that the number of options one has kind of like this is the likelihood that your understanding of the etiquette around that service is like wait do I say decrease anyway your understanding of the etiquette becomes much different than like someone else's so like if you DM me I have a notification set up that will like show on my phone and Twitter is a thing that I'm engaged with really actively and so that's actually a pretty good way to get a hold of me a lot of other people are like wait you DM like that's a thing that you do like why did you DM me like there's no way I'll ever see that and I was like wait really because that's like a perfect way to get a hold of me and like that's just because I have created a set of rules that like create my own little Twitter world and I forget that like my Twitter world is not your Twitter world. Aaron I think has something like that on his website now listing off all the contact methods and which ones work best. But it's something I'd love to if that were just in software. Your notification to you in a way that you'll see in the next six hours is going to be different you might change it between now and this time next year I shouldn't need to know how you're changing the tools you use. One thing I just want to say in response to what you said before is that every time you create a new account you're creating a sense of self on that site right you create a self that kind of exists independently from kind of your offline life right and this self can interact with others through these different channels right I'm not sure I agree with your premise but go ahead and then what you typically find is that your preferences of being contacted through these different channels through these different kind of selves on these different sites varies with the people you want to interact with so say you have a preference to keep in touch with your mom through Skype right and keep in touch with your friends through Facebook and through your indie developer community through another site right I mean there they can be different contexts and different contexts afford different channels of communication so in that regard notifications will be necessarily context driven and it is very difficult to find one unique way to manage all these different notifications. I guess I'm weird because I'd rather just have a unified client so that I don't have to think about what transport substrate I'm using to talk to someone I talked to my wife through Slack, Twitter SMS, email I think that's probably it for a day to day basis No, no, no, so she's an example of sort of the standard in my I have a question for you quickly I was wondering so we're still talking about person to person communication in some way and I was just wondering what your and I was wondering what examples you might have of more cyborg type notifications to self things we might find or what you were referencing because Twitter notifications or Instagram notifications they're all still somebody else there's a reaction to something out there rather than a self enhancement of self That's a great question because I was going to ask the same thing but of everyone else I started with the weather slash disaster example where you're kind of using these weather sensory services like I don't identify with that as a friend or like you know it's to me it's just a service it's just a sensor you could say the same thing for traffic sensors so if I am or like civil unrest like that should be another sensor like if I'm walking in a city I would like to get an alert if there is a protest to block away or if I'm walking towards a protest or some other sort of action I should you know walk around it in general there's sort of like the physical space physical hazards category of alerts like that then there are the alerts that you'd like to receive about all the different little pieces of yourself you tend to like your web server so if my web server goes down I would like to get an alert at some priority level that oh I need to go fix that let's see other indicators if there's something happening around my house and I'm not home that's another physical not directly to me but to something that's mine alert indicator so I guess that's or you can also set up filters so I want to know if someone mentions like indie web camp the days or the week before indie web camp actually occurs at a higher level of urgency than say normally or right after like you know between them and when it's not as interesting but yeah I'd love to hear other examples from other people of what kind of notifications do you want or don't want that don't have to do with communication with another person I really want my notification settings to be editable by my friends and maybe there's a fall off like the people who are closest get to edit them more but often the things that I am interested in are not things that I am able to name especially these kinds of environmental changes I mean for instance I'm not home it happens that now there's a tornado season I'm away for a month anyone who lives near me should be able to add that kind of notification somehow to the priority thing for me that would then get passed through whatever the best channels are to send me a priority regional note since this is a cyborg conference I think that like health related notifications would be really nice if you had some type of I mean especially people who have diabetes essentially have this already you can have that little port that is connected to a beeper type device like on your belt loop and it shows you stuff but you can kind of imagine a world in which like other things like your vitamin levels would kind of trigger an alert or some other like chemical balances in your body hormones stuff like that I think that could be like a really cool future thing I would like to be able to subscribe to other people's emotional states or if they haven't eaten in five hours so I can help get them food or if they have diabetes if I can help them with the sugar levels right like if my dad has too much cholesterol or if he's eaten too many hamburgers I want to you know because there are situations in which you might get an alert about yourself but you can't help yourself at all but somebody else can help you right so like I can see that going really awry just thinking about clue the app clue if you're a lady maybe you know what this is it's like a period tracking app and imagine if like your boss or your boyfriend or whoever could subscribe to like when you were a sensibly like PMSing and then every angry thing that you said during that time is like oh well look at this notice that like it's Heather's special time of year so let's ignore all of her concerns something that you need an app for I mean as in other people can tell this is a possible thing what Heather is saying is actually really important because it does establish a certain degree of social surveillance right if you make the data available even if it's just a close circle of really close friends still they know about it and you know that you know so that automatically changes the way you behave or the kind of data you would like to release to that circle of friends right I had an alert that I would I think is really well I think would be really beneficial for everyone to have and that is an alert that tracks our energy usage and consumption so as when you're driving around aimlessly your car would have a built-in system that says hey you've used a lot of gas you know what like that impact has you know around the world that sort of thing or if you leave the lights on you say oh you know you burned like X amount of coal by leaving your lights on and so it's in a sense it's like a health app but for society and make people conscientious of that so one thing I've done is play World of Warcraft and a bunch of the it involves so that it has the ability to add configurable alerts absolutely anything that happens in game basically and it does involve a lot of effort and so I think it's that how do you how do you reduce the amount of effort and anyone who's worked with automatic alert systems for actual systems and operations there's a lot of effort involved in trying to make those important and useful and I think we have the tools yet besides sort of social crowdsourcing things like Twitter retweets for ways so we haven't figured out the automated version of what is this important or not I'm just going to put in a quick comment about a thing that drives me baddie which is there are a lot of times when I would like absolutely no notifications at all except of things that are life threatening right is there a tornado or hurricane whatever and I would really like those things that are life threatening to override the silence setting on my phone I'm not entirely clear on why they don't right so I'm one of the places I often am sitting in a courtroom where everybody has their phone on silent and it's a windowless courtroom and there's a tornado coming for the courthouse I think we all want our phones to go off and make a noise yes including the judge's phone and I have games that can disregard my hardware silent switch I don't understand why my emergency notification app doesn't so just to follow up from the life threatening a lot of people a lot of medical forms have the notion of an emergency contact what about that notification so this isn't necessarily a social thing per se because the person who the emergency is about is probably not the one contacting you it's probably their doctor or some other institution contacting you because your numbers showed up in a form or your contact information showed up in a form should that notification also break the silence on your silent device on your mobile device what's that a product it probably will go into some guidelines on how you might make products that way if it goes into a product then it's just one product but if it goes into some guidelines then many people making then it can affect multiple products and then hopefully it doesn't go into other use cases otherwise it gets brittle I know we're wrapping up I do want to say one thing in response to Tantek's last comment which is I don't know if I want that emergency contact contacting me to break my silent setting but it would be nice if there were some kind of flag that this phone call coming in from a number I don't recognize is somebody's emergency contact on the other hand as Beth said as soon as it's possible to do something like that spammer as well if there is some way for them to dial it my number is this extension 753 or whatever and that extension they would dial it but on your phone it would be like it would be the code to say oh your phone this is when your phone number has been given out as an emergency contact can we go around and introduce ourselves and also maybe one sentence on why we find this important or interesting does that sound good okay my name is Heather the reason why I'm interested in this topic is because we all will die seems reasonable also the conference earlier this year passed away shortly after the conference and his facebook page acted it was rewarding and special I'm interested in this because my aunt has done a lot of genealogical research on our family so I have like 16 generations of family members between analog and digital and how all of that works and I'm interested in this conversation aren't a lot of good solutions right now don't typically do a lot of planning around what happens to content and so that's always reasonable to do with those and what some people who've had thoughts about this before they passed away actually decided for themselves how they wanted their digital presence to be handled after they died my name is Kevin and I'm here because I never thought about this when I should tell somebody about my entire like online life I'm in the circle because you and your data are not any different my hope and dream is that you all will perhaps it's called well fuck comma blue at google you can find a list of people of a lot of very strange and far flung social groups online that some would find each other have no reason to talk to my friend from preschool via the internet and based on my friend's death it really sucks to be told by a faceless mass of internet that someone you are very close to has died and so I really I know that it's impossible to have these instructions in a password vault of how to notify these other communities so academics, family members, et cetera and they have basic instructions of how to find those people in my contact books so the hundreds of people that are included and notified with the wishes that I have of what to do with my data so that if they seek out listening to different threat models I don't have that because sometimes and so I haven't set that up for myself I don't have a reason to code that but if someone in this group has a reason to have it curious how you've thought of drive data I think that when I've been thinking about that for my own like living will or whatever I find it hard to figure out like should my I have some really amazing archivist type friends that don't know me very intimately and would they care probably not but it only takes the proper two of them in order to unlock it and these are people who have no real they opted into that said in the same way that I hope we all have the friend of mine that did these things can be part for my mom gets my computer like that's a really normal thing for people to have set up those people who each have half of your password to your right is going to Yahoo with your letters of administration and saying I am willows personal representative and I need access is not yet extra thank you okay so the thing about password vault is also that one you can have complicated passwords and you only have to remember anyone in and Facebook determines whether or not to make a lot to do with that data which I think is bullshit like it's not acceptable so plus one on that as far as two factor authentication goes Chris do you want to scoot into are you okay everyone to feel warm and fuzzy two factor authentication usually there's a safety code like there's a set of a few codes that you can use if you've lost your phone or whatever and so embedding a couple of those into the password vault is important so I'm going to try to remember that do you have these things and post them or what have you published them do you have like a mechanism that you write to that will only trigger after you pass away so you write blog posts and you publish them so the email but right by awkward it was just like dead and like I really think moment in a lot of short stories and films where someone gets to record that video if you're hearing this but one thing that I do is blog posts that I'm never going to publish but I often finish the drafts and they're interesting and then I realize maybe I should wait personal notes to my metadata after I'm dead is that inappropriate that I'm sure I get it if it's not for going the question of if it's actually me okay it was okay to shut that thing down too but that's fine and an organ as an organ donor have you even considered that is there anything I would open source so one of the outstanding questions is that there doesn't seem to be a place to store a repository I donate it yeah definitely yeah but I mean with the consent of the people that it was linked to one of the things that people compare this to was the analog version of breaking up with someone and Facebook consistently being like hey do you remember this it's like someone walking around and like passing pictures on hey like driving along someone dressed up like your ex like why does this happen all the time and so we see this happening in I don't want to deal with it or aren't ready to documents because nobody expected him to die he didn't leave a will he was just he went like you know doing the how to divide our state and what was I going to do I didn't want to leave this this this part of my father high and dry and I wanted to respect I assumed that he loved her enough to leave her something so I had to figure out I could I could give her were because at the time I wasn't gainfully employed so I can't really do anything so what did my father leave I had to hunt down his pension fund I had to hunt down his social security benefits I had to hunt down several things and land ownership of the house that they were living at at the time and unfortunately there wasn't at the time my father was born he was born in Baguio which is a city on top of the mountain and six months later that city was was completely raised by the Japanese during World War two so I couldn't prove that he was born in the Philippines and I couldn't so then I went to the state department the state embassy to for so we had to go through another like four month waiting period and still that was highly scrutinized by the bureaucrats there house between the proper landowner and him when he built this house and sell it brick by brick so that we could give her something to live on so having all of my digital space so the short answer is that it's haphazardly into the jungle like I did I'm going to add one last statement and then I'm going to ask you all to add in final statements while I go around and do the facilitation thing so I'm sad I won't get it but I'll watch the live stream later I promise only it won't be a live stream anymore haha yes dead stream so one of the things that I'm going to add to and notify the person that's already headed to that neighborhood what restaurant we're meeting them at also makes it even more strange to plan for something like death because it takes so much for planning so much foresight in how to set things that well in my experience geeks are especially prone to I planned out what this looks like now I don't have to actually execute it like oh I solved the problem I don't have to actually like fill out the form and submit it and mail it and whatever else and so one of the cool also I've been working on the spam accounts for the wiki so if you register but it doesn't work out email me we're getting better and better questions but sometimes it doesn't work okay so final comments I'm so sorry to run away while I do this so people who have internet presences on their own domains and domains cost money and I'm really interested in like how will you financially plan for like having that domain be yours like eternity or like doesn't matter at all is it fine if it's just archived in some other way that doesn't require that like should review your death plan also like here is a fund for buying my domain over and over again I don't know I think a lot or there should be some United Nations site called death.com slash your security number in the country and then it has the archive of all the stuff you've ever created and therefore you have a graveyard for your digital data that lives on forever there is a I learned that you had in order to report a death overseas of a I just want to put a plug in here geeks should love estate planning you know why because you get to write code for your death I mean seriously you want to set aside a fund for your executor to buy you can do that okay you want to is there a repository of such code that we can fork well could that but could that repository of code be the wiki of like here are the rules that I decided to execute in my death and so and here's why and so anybody can re-appropriate different parts of it that would actually be really cool if there was some equivalent to create commons for estate planning something where you could assemble pre-made elements I think that would be really cool maybe somebody can do that really nice if this was made into a way that it wasn't a start up and wouldn't like the thing is if somebody makes a service and you pay like $30 or like $30 a month until you have the service as insurance that service as a start up will probably be alive for three years and won't be alive until your death it's like to get somebody set up with like freezing it's like okay I'm gonna pay prepaid really really you can re-create somebody for that long global warming you really think that energy is going to be converted for that purpose which is why I set up mine in a way that my are the people that are entrusted with delivering things we had talked about it still thinks it's a good idea but I wanted it to just do it with a customizable boilerplate and I think our group's start is if you've created some really cool estate plans and you'd like to share them just post them online and ping some of these groups and they'll start to be mirrored the other thing I wanted to tell the domain instead of renting it so you can get access to the domain is describe of course they need some different infrastructure than what we could get a domain name and perpetuity that runs the dot wiki tld it means he's promising to keep the name servers running that's a physical box so if you figure out how to do lifetime electricity you're talking mostly entirely certain with some exceptions and when I talk to my parents about it I want to get to the point where I can talk with them reasonably about it or I can't post after school as my after school day care was lawyers because they were going through this thing and it was really complicated and I was like wow I really want to make a will now so maybe one was like 18 and I haven't revisited it so apparently all my stuffed animals are still going to some person I had a crush on I was just going to say this is good timing because a few days ago I discovered this YouTube channel Ask a Mortician and I actually got into death and has a lot of interesting ideas about death in the modern world Mary wrote ways in which we deal with cadavers as a society and also alternative burial one of which really appealed to me because when you learn about what embalming does and what that actually what happens to your body when you bury it and how that impacts the environment it makes the burial process less appealing stiff by Mary Roach but that's a personal choice if it can help my immediate family and switch before you actually die and just going out for the night and maybe you don't make it home or you're going out for after we die I don't think vampires it's a privileged check I'm really interested in the approach of sharing your passwords or access and all that among your social circle I'm interested in understanding that approach I'm particularly interested in how do you transition that set over time as the inevitable social transitions and divorces and stuff like that I'm interested in the approach of the Google group because it was easy I would say nearly enough and we don't plan for it I think it's awesome it's hard to get right and we should have some kind of meme for test death drill terrible security on their site actually so the people that both provide insurance to take care of your pets after you're taken away at the rapture thank you all so much for your time but he has these five tenets that really need us now and a lot of ways how they feel about time I think this is like right up there with death time reading for me it's learning about topics I already know a lot about where a very high percentage of what I'm reading is just confirming what I already know confirmation bias, active confirmation bias is wasting time that's actually a highly evolved way of looking at it one question for you, you said you're 34 have you always had this relationship with time or do you think it's getting worse I started seeing time collapse any time you feel in 2014 and probably definitely in 2015 I am suffering my body was shaking and my doctor at that time my physician told me well you're exhausted and I said yeah I've been working but I'm on vacation I should be able to relax and the last bit of that you won't you just die of exhaustion, people die of exhaustion all the time but that state where mild forms of this where you lay in bed at night ruminating you know it's kind of the first sign that you're kind of living in this relentless now so for me really this is about the things I do or the things we do and just for me I literally when I leave here I have to do things that involve slowing down you know sometimes I'll literally take big steps when I'm walking I'll move my, if I'm alone I'll move my hand real slow well yeah so you're correlating two pieces of information right and then you've got more and more and more what's really interesting about the Apple Watch is if you look at it you've got stand form your phone became anything but and the touch screen iPod became a complete digitization of everything we turned into a transcription economy I flee fitness, time, and intimate way to communicate is going to change everything but that's not time collapse that's just how they're exploiting time collapse so I think maybe the difference is not even whether or not you wear it it's intentionality it's whether or not you retrieve your email or if your email gets pushed to you because I think that the place where the time collapses is when your phone or whatever device you're using dictates when you get your updates. What to me about the watch I mean I hate to turn this into they have a watch conversation but if you think what was so amazing was like the fact you draw to send something to someone the fact you can tap to send something I have to I can tap to you you can feel it or I can actually send you my heartbeat so I can send you something I manifest I can you send you something that I actually forced to happen right so something I drew myself something I forced to happen or I can send you something biological and they're all tracked over time on your side because you can go back and browse our interactions our haptic interactions over time so as if you were to make Facebook physical and I think that's really profound and then you tie that into just behavior activity tracking edgy edgy or I think a lot of people are giving it credit for but they waited for a reason I mean do you have any feelings about time so I I would have been much I had a really good nine months and wrote a book so before that I was a journalist doing the like five posts a week or more kind of thing and so the difficulty was an inability to distinguish between wasting time on the internet and doing my job so they're the same thing and it's still there's some degree to that in terms of I still have trouble and I don't actually think knowing the difference between when I'm wasting time because often then like six months later that thing needs to be the thing that solves the problem but having to write a book forced a lot of clarity in terms of and breaking habits because in order to write a book I needed to like not do other things and so I've I am not as deeply experienced and it has to do with a lot of like running off all the notifications finding tools software hacks that allow basically offloading that brain thing that like I'm on the internet but I know I should be doing something else problem so that's like this is cognitive load of like should I be doing what I'm doing right now and so finding ways to make take that decision away and to have made that decision and then just live with it for a chunk of time right kindness or a certain amount of discipline right a sort of firm kindness yeah can help a lot yeah so in order to finish the book so I was like what a privilege to be able to take on a fellowship where like I was in the states with a visa that made it illegal for me to earn money so like I could there was nothing for me to do but attend things and write my book there's a pretty radical way of like making a break with a previous set of habits I don't necessarily recommend it to anybody but it was good it was good for me um yeah yeah I'm just starting um good I have I mean I've two days ago I went to my twitter app off of my home screen just to break the habit of reaching for the same spot on the screen every like it's still on my I didn't even delete it it's on my iPad so it's just on a second screen like eventually I'm sure I'll develop a habit of swipe tap and then I'll have to move it again to hide whatever but um but yeah I'm moving I'm doing less things and saying no to more things because it was really nice to have a book and I would like to do more projects that take a longer amount of time which means I have to not do a lot of other projects that I might do and that has helped push off the relentless but just like being more honest with other people about what I can commit to I'll try and keep it super quick but I have so many responses so one thing is as you mentioned um for people in sort of like creative class jobs where it's really important to talk about the role of capitalism I mean you know we've run out of ways to expand graphically we've you know the only place really to expand the economy is into people's time and attention and so I think it's you know it's not really anything at any time and so there is no there is no time if you can do anything at any time yeah it was weird I was talking to a friend the other day if you want to tie corporatism that's the word I like to use with time and she said the only way she knows it's fall is when she can get pumpkin spice in time and I think it's the number of articles that I'm reading I'm consuming hundreds you know dozens of narratives an hour and you know if I jump into a twitter stream that I'm on some narrative in Hong Kong time and so I think the just the whiplash I mean I don't even know if I experienced narratives in a time based way anymore did you watch well that's it's interesting did you watch lost the first two seasons but did you ever notice lost had like four or five time lines simultaneously and then at the end of the show they literally mixed time the last I read about that yeah weird because I've been noticing our media is a lot like that about it like everyone went crazy last year with Game of Thrones was killing off people but like I don't think that was because they were killing I think I