Alasdair Watson

So, five years ago, I wrote a short piece about “technological shamanism”. When I wrote it, I was one of a very small number of people I knew who had a wifi enabled PDA, or really any ability to get internet access while out and about. My recollection is that some of the more advanced phones of the time did it, badly.

Five years later, and I have an iPhone. As does of one of my more luddite friends, so obviously they’re here to stay. And OK, not every phone is internet capabale, and fewer still do it as well as the iPhone, but still, somewhere like London, you can be reasonable confident that a sizeable percentage of people in any bar will have the internet available to them. To use my metaphor from five years ago, the otherworldly shamen are becoming the tribe.

So what does this mean?

There’s a reason that the job of the shaman in pre-history was not one that most of the tribe wanted, and it’s because the otherworld was not entirely safe. And while I’m not one to get all Daily Mail about the dangers of the online world, the fact remains: there are the same horrors thereon as there are in the rest of the world. Stalkers, sex offenders, friends, co-workers, parents, angry strangers, idiot children, terrorists, criminals and so on and so forth. And while most people might know what to do about these things in the real world (get a restraining order, give them a good shoeing, buy them a pint, and so on) the techniques required to cope with these things in the digital ether are still a matter of fairly esoteric ritual – they must be, otherwise people wouldn’t still be getting their identities stolen, or fired from their jobs over their blogging.

And in the short term, this will probably get a bit worse before it gets better. And the problem and the cure are related.

Anyone bored enough to be tracking my Twitter stream will have seen me lay this notion out there, the other day, following a night’s drinking and idle chat. “RFID+OAuth+GPS/geodata+sensible filtering rules = online privacy solved.”

I’ll expand that at bit: it is reasonable to assume that within the next five years, at least the early adopters will have computers that are capable of identifying their users without requiring a username and password, or any other metric than their sitting down at the computer, any computer. Hell, being a Mac user means I can do this on my own computers now, provided one accepts the notion that the proximity of my iPhone is a decent measure of my location and that it is sufficiently unlikely that anyone else would be carrying it that it can operate as an authenticator or my identity. “RFID” there basically stands for “adequately secure form of near field communication”. Biometrics, bluetooth, wifi, RFID, or more likely some combination of them plus a few other things that aren’t in wide use yet. The point being: any machine someone sits down at will know who they are, log them in (if they’re allowed to use the machine), and call up their personal applications. Which will of course, be stored off in some external account, rather than on the machine itself.

We move on then, to OAuth short version: a means of porividing a single unified login to multiple unrelated websites, and authorising them to share your data among themselves). And like the RFID above, I’m not convinced that OAuth as it currently stands is up to the job, and that it’ll probably be a successor technology that does this, but essentially, what OAuth enables is the idea the act of visiting a site will be sufficient to identify you to that site, without requiring you to login. Your browser will be able to authenticate you to the site, in the background, invisibly. And your browser will know who you are just because you have sat down at the computer.

So far so Neuromancer.

The key step, though, is geodata, which is the key to binding all this ghostly data into place – tying it to the physical world is going to make us able to do a lot clever things. Within the next 18 months, I expect my phone to be quietly logging everywhere I go into an internet-accessible data cache, or at least, to have the option to do so, down to a matter of meters. I’ve got a shitty, cut-down ability to log my location whenever I want at the moment, but it requires me to take action every time I wish to do so, rather than happening automatically. I expect it to improve over time.

Yes, this is a cyber-stalker’s wet dream. Find out where anyone is at any time? Horrors, say the Daily Mail! It will almost certain make things worse in some way before it makes things better.

But bear with me. Five years time, and we’re all routinely letting our computers know where we are, using the successor to something like FireEagle as a basis. Not only that, but we’ll be doing things like setting up regularly-visited locations so that the various computers know that, say if you are within a mile and half of the location you have definied as “home”, then no-one who is not one of your more trusted friends should be allowed access to your precise location (FireEagle does this already, one of their finer ideas). Anyone else just gets “at home”. Ditto “at work”. “Down the pub” might allow more people to find you, depending on your preferences, and, perhaps the specific pub you’re in.

Further, you’ll be able to instruct your computer to at least make reasonable guesses about your relationships with people on this basis. Someone who has been to your home for more than twice for a combined total of at least 6 hours with no-one else present besides you and them, for example, has a high probability of being a reasonably close friend. Or a repairman, or similar. But the odd false positive is OK, because the point is not that the computer makes decisions about who you trust for you, just that it applies some sensible filters before allowing you to confirm or deny who you trust. It doesn’t need to bother you with everyone you pass in the street, or even everyone you are in the same building with. Just people who pass certain thresholds. (And of course, if a given person doesn’t pass a threshold, you could still dig them out of the wider log of people who were present at a given place and time, and bump them past it yourself, if you wish.)

And of course, because everyone’s browser will at least have the option to transparently identify them to the site they’re browsing, we’ll be able to say “on this site, people in my inner circle of trust can see everything, people a step further out can see everything this isn’t about these topics, people a step further can only see things I specifically mark as public, and work colleagues don’t get to see anything, because this about is my personal life” and so on.

Actually, we probably won’t be doing this on a per site basis. We’ll be identifying data we generate, marking it with appropriate access rights, and throwing it into a data cloud for our friends and families to pull down with the tools of their choice. We might well well use the interface of a given website to do that, but increasingly, it’ll be about the data, rather than the site. (Twitter is the obvious excellent example of a site that is all about this. Let’s just skirt past that whole economic-viability problem, shall we?)

I’ve got other lines of thought I want to continue to stretch this metaphor through, but I think they’re starting to veer away from the notion of digital identity management and privacy, so I’ll leave it there for now, and come back to them another time.

The last-but-one of Hester’s, and a few of Andrea’s topics for me to talk about – these were things that I didn’t feel I had a lot to say about, so I’ve kind of thrown them all in here.

Chewing Gum

I only have one real use for most chewing gum – preventing excessive teeth-grinding in certain altered states, and occaisionally chewing it the day after said states as an means to ease a slightly aching jaw. Outside of that, well I am quite fond of Big Red chewing gum, but I prefer to avoid it these days because it contains sugar, and I’ve never found a sugar-free cinnamon gum that didn’t taste bloody foul.

Wearing Black

People often assume I wear black becuase I am something of a goth. This is incorrect. For a start, despite going to goth clubs, and listening to goth music, I don’t really think of myself as one. I’m aware that this is something of a cliche, so let me be clear: I’m not suggesting that I’m not a goth. I’m just saying that in my mental pile of tickyboxes about myself “goth” is one of the afterthought ones.

I wear black because it’s simple, and I am lazy. I wear black out of force of habit – the inertia of dressing myself in black for 15 years now. More black just goes with all the other black I have. I wear black because 90% of the time, it just doesn’t occur to me to buy or wear anything else. I mean, yeah, I could make a concious decision to wear colours, but I just don’t see why I should. Black is easy and comfortable, and requires no thought. There a number of things I chose to expend the power of my mighty brain on, but as anyone who has ever met my can attest how to dress is not one of them. So I wear black.

Constant Fiction

I’m not really sure what this is, or what Andrea might mean by it. I am remarkably inconstant in regard of any fiction I might create, in as much as I give up about a third of the way in, because I’ve just had another thought that I find far more interesting because I have the attention span of a thing with a very poor attention span.

No Hair Days

I shave my head. This after ten years of having had hair halfway down my back. It was a radical and not a little difficult change at the time, but that’s nearly 3 years ago now, and now it’s just how I don’t wear my hair. On balance, I prefer the lack, as it’s less effort to maintain. Plus people that don’t know me apparently find me intimidating looking, which is handy for getting a seat on the bus. Actually, right now I haven’t shaved my head in a fortnight or so, and feel like a hippy. Must sort that out at the weekend.

This is something I wrote back in, oh, November 2003 or thereabouts, just after getting my first wifi enabled PDA, and then it vanished from public view after my blogging software of the time shat itself and died. Some of you may remember it. I’m reposting it so it’s available as context to some more recent thoughts in a similar vein that I want to set down when I get a bit of time.

Fetish

Not the kinky kind. This is the first definition of the word:

1: An object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers, especially such an object associated with animistic or shamanistic religious practices.

I got a new toy the other day. Like most of the new toys I’ve bought over the last few years, it’s designed to increase my level of connectedness to the world around me. It’s a Palm Tungsten C. I bought it because it has wireless network access built in, thus allowing me to do useful things like check my email while standing at the bus stop outside my front door, waiting for the bus in the mornings.

Yes, yes, please stop laughing now. I am going somewhere with this.

I’ve been thinking about the way mobile communications are affecting our public lives – specifically, how they’re allowing us to carry little zones of privacy around with us. Part of the reason most people think it’s rude to talk at length on a mobile phone on public transport is because we’re conditioned to the idea that phone conversations take place in the privacy of one’s own home. When they talk on the phone it’s as if they’ve thrown a little bubble of private space up around themselves while they’re on the phone, but somehow pulled us into it, and forced us to listen. Wouldn’t you feel awkward if a complete stranger dragged you into their home, and then started talking to a friend who was already in there? We’re being made unwilling eavesdroppers into someone else’s life.

And also, it’s a statement of disconnection. It’s saying “I choose not to be stuck in here with you. There is something better and more interesting elsewhere.” This, obviously, isn’t really a big deal from a stranger on a train, but if our friend is forever on the phone to someone else while they’re down the pub, well, we might rightly get our noses out of joint.

And of course, my new toy, with its ability to find an internet connection anywhere there’s wireless network for me to leach onto could be massively offensive in that vein. OK, so it’s pretty unlikely to cause the first problem, unless I take to recording voice memoes in public, but even my head isn’t that far up my own rectum yet. But the second? Not just “I find someone else on the other end of a phone more interesting that you.” but “I find a machine halfway around the world more interesting than you.”

But on the other hand for all it disconnects me from the people around me, it connects me to a much broader world. I could install chat software on it, and talk in real time with someone in San Francisco while sitting in a London pub.

So perhaps my description of these items as kinds of fetish isn’t wholly inappropriate. It disconnects its user from their immediate tribe, marks them out as different, in contact with places that are Not Here, communicating with beings that others cannot see. And of course, the tribe around the user respond with discomfort, although it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that they’ll come to them asking them to use their strange and offensive capabilities for the benefit other members of the group.

New Shamanism. We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Sweat Lodges.

Topic #3 from Hester: Women. This one gave me some trouble, for a number of reasons, but if I keep re-writing this, I’m going to go mad. I’ll just have to ask you to be kind to my flaws, here.

I toyed with idea of writing some ghastly piece of misogynistic trash, and calling it humour. I toyed with the idea of digging around in some area of art, and waffling for a while about the changing depiction of women in, I dunno, 15th century Prussian literature, or something. I thought about talking about some remarkable historic or mythic female figures. I considered the idea of writing a parody of some Romantic poet or other.

And of course, the reason for this is the fear that if I actually talked seriously about the other gender, I might either say something stupid, offensive, or worse still, inadvertently revealing, and it would be out there on there internet for ever and ever and then no-one would ever want to sleep with me again.

Which is a load of rubbish. Frankly, I’ve already said so many stupid, offensive and revealing things on the internet that I will have to reincarnate several times before anyone wants to sleep with me again.^[1]

So, women. As an heterosexual male, I am pretty unconditionally in favour of women. I’m not the sort to wax poetic in the manner of a bad sonnet, offering up paeans to the female form, or to the pleasure of their company, but if I must have other people cluttering the planet up, getting underfoot and stopping me from doing whatever I damn well please (and apparently I must) then I’m glad there are women around. This is traditionally the point in the joke where there is some remark about how women smell nicer than men, or some similarly condescending rubbish, but some time around a few years ago we invented metrosexuality, and then Moulton Brown turned up, the end result being that I know some delightful smelling men as well.

And having skirted the faintly sexist joke, I think we’ll skip past the slightly patronising bit where I wax lyrical about how generally awesome the women I know are. I mean, it goes without saying that they all are, and if any of them are in need of an ego boost, they only have to leave a comment asking me to list a few of the ways I think they’re awesome, and I’ll gladly do so. But for the purposes of this whatever-this-is, we’ll take it as read that the women I know are at the very least least as awesome as the men I know.

So where does that leave me? Well, I could talking about gender equality and equal rights, and the role of women in society, but while I’m not that clever, I am clever enough to know a can of worms when I see it. So we’ll leave it as this: I absolutely believe in gender equality, in more or less the same way I believe in, say, breathing. I am aware that I am privileged just by being born male (among other things) and think that it is outrageous that not everyone enjoys the same privileges that I do (and I am disgusted that in this context “privilege” can mean anything starting from basic things like “walk down the street in security in safety”). I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it, or doing anything about that, though. I feel faintly bad about that, when it occurs to me to do so, but apparently not enough to change my behaviour. Hurrah for being a white middle class male, and having the world laid out on a plate for me.

So that kind of leaves relationships, which is sort of an excuse to talk about me, rather then women, but well I think the last year has actually taught me something about the way I relate to women, at least in a relationship context, and I probably ought to set it down at some point, just because nothing reinforces lessons like writing about them.

I’m aware that I’m approaching the end of my Year Of Saying No. (When Ewa left last year, I decided to be single for at least a year. And I’m not someone who really enjoys casual sex, so this amount to a Year Of Saying No. Not that I have been called on to say no more than about twice.) It’s been interesting. And this is where we get into stuff that might make me sound a little ghastly, so please, bear with me.

I assume that I am not unusual in that if I am single, and I meet someone who ticks all the basic checkboxes of: is mentally interesting, physically my “type”, and is, at least as far as I know single and willing to sleep with my gender, and there is some sort of chemistry between us, I might at some point least entertain the possibility of a relationship with them. The process by which most human relationships start is when one person says to another “I would like to find out if we could be more than friends” either in the traditional manner, by copping off with them while drunk, or by bucking all convention and actually asking them out.

But because (once or twice this year) I’ve found myself actively thinking “hmmmm….” about another person and then deliberately thinking “not allowed/year off/also don’t be stupid”, which has in turn made me think about exactly what compromises I would be willing to make in my life for the right person. Because in theory, if I’m having the “hmmm…” moment – and obviously, my desire alone is obviously no guarantee of success, but equally obviously my lack of action is a guarantee of failure – then surely stopping myself is the act of an idiot. I’m sure there are a few people reading this who would think so, judging by the few conversations I’ve had around this topic over the year.

But here’s the thing: I am, politely, Bad At Relationships. I’m bad at getting into them, requiring to basically be hit around the head before I notice anyone else’s interest in me, and while (I think) I’m a pretty reasonable boyfriend for a while, when things are new and exciting and the oxytocin is flowing freely, after some ill-defined time period of between 8 and 18 months, I start to want to spend more time on my interests and hobbies, which are so nerdy as to put all previously-encountered women right off. (I can’t blame them.) I’m sure this isn’t *that* unusual, but judging from prior history I seem to take it to extremes. It’s not that I’m any less interested in the other person, but I have a reasonable collection of hobbies and interests, and after a while, I naturally want to sort out how I balance the various bits of my life. I just seem to have a regrettable tendency to do this badly.

So starting from a basis of “even contemplating beginning a relationship is compromising a goal I have set myself”, has caused me to think about relationships in a different light. I don’t know if it’s made me likely to be better or worse at them. I think it’s likely to have made me more organised at them – I think in the future, I’d be more disciplined about the amount of space I made for someone in my life, and I think I’d make more effort to ensure that having made the space for another person in my life, I didn’t let my hobbies encroach back on it. I think I’d be a lot clearer (with myself as much as anyone else) about the things that I will and will not put on hold for the sake of a relationship and thus perhaps avoid that gearshift later in the relationship, or at least make it less jarring.

Which, by the sound of it, rather think mirrors the experience of some of my friends who are investigating polyamory as a lifestyle choice, who in juggling multiple partners, are having to be clear about who gets what space in their lives. It’s just that while they are warm and caring people with a lot of love to give, I am a solitary prick who values having a lot of time to arse around on a computer engaging in whatever my pet obsession is at a the moment, and can barely tolerate other people impinging on it at the best of times.

Were I a different chap, this might bother me. But generally, being left alone to get on with whatever I damn well please works for me.

Except for those cold, cold nights, around 2am, lying alone in bed, crying silently in the dark.^[2]

^[1] Put the violins down. I do not actually believe this.

^[2] Don’t be so fucking ridiculous.