View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/18/matt-senate/
At a Hackathon in San Francisco at PLoS Headquarters
I love thinking about things like what is a hack? And what is hack? What are all these things? I actually am part of a community. We started a hackerspace in downtown Oakland where I live and we're doing the same process of sorting out what is a hackerspace about? What is hacking? What's acceptable? What's not? Like what are the kinds of projects we want to work on? And maybe something that wouldn't fall into what we want to do? And I think, thankfully, what we're doing today and at this hackathon as well is remixing those ideas a lot and kind of upending any preconceived notion about what a hack must be. But, essentially, hacking is kind of a playful term. There's an element of exploration, an element of like seeing possibilities and in a more colloquial sense and also used in day-to-day conversation today, hack is piecing components together based on the things that are available to you and the affordances that they have. So kind of remixing and reusing it is inherently tied to hacking.
And that can go all the way down. You know it could be bits and pieces of source code that you're able to put together with software, etc. all the way up to a service or a concept. Hacking a concept. . .it's the same thing all the way down. Why do people come in on the weekend to, even some of them the place they work, to do something and collaborate with each other and work on projects? And does that count as labor? Does that count as, like, work? And the reality is, in this hackathon and other ones that I've been a part of at least, we really emphasize that it's not about trying to get more labor out of people who are employed or get paid and compensated, especially on an hourly basis, because you get into all kinds of complexities about overtime and, like, their rights as a worker and all that. That's not what we're aiming for.
What we're actually aiming for is to have an open interface, an open opportunity for folks who want to do things they would typically not be able to or not allowed to or whatever. A really open kind of participation model where things that they're passionate about they can work on and spend their free time as they will. That's the kind of thing we want to support. So that's actually embedded in the way we've been doing our collaborations. The different topics we're interested in and we want to work on. We try to see what everybody else in the room really wants to do and not make them work on something we know we get value out of. It's shared an excitement about our narrow and, like, kind of personal focuses. And those ended up dovetailing. There was a lot of people who happened to have, like, similar passions and wanted to collaborate on that day.
The Internet as a Tool for Collaboration
There's a lot you can do to automate these processes. But, for now, given what we can possibly do with machines and building intelligence in them, most of these things really distill down to human-to-human interaction. To there are lots ways to build these interactions. And they can be mediated and they can be transferred using different communication technologies but it's really reaching out and trying to find other folks and also identifying and learning from each other. So I would say if you want to collaborate out there in the world you should take the perspective that other people want to collaborate too. And that they want to work together and if you can help phrase things in a way that helps you work with each other, things will fall into place. You have to have that reasonable little bit of faith that other people want to work with you too. And fundamentally all these concepts are grounded in, like, actual human life.
But from there, everything up is gravy. You can make things more efficient, you can learn more things you couldn't tell before, there are ways you can analyze and actually utilize affordances of these technologies to either optimize or offer different paths that weren't as easy to do before. But everything in the fundament comes from that human layer. I think it's really, like, understanding that and then taking that to what is available and what is out there.
The Network Society
I really love the domain name you got, networksociety.org, that made me jump a little bit. I was really surprised you got it because I've actually read some of Manuel Castells work and wow, how cool. What is the network society like today. This happens in a really mundane fashion constantly. There will be times where I'm out doing something or going somewhere or trying to figure something out and I'll think about a time, because I was young when the Internet like actually became popularized and accessible and there was a time, even though I am young, where I didn't have the Internet or I didn't have computers, I didn't use all those things. So there were times I couldn't answer my questions. There were times I didn't know where to go or I would get lost or wouldn't be able to schedule things reasonably and all those little, mundane pieces are just, like, poetic moments that are reminders of all this infrastructure that operates around me and around the world and provides all these absolutely insane results that just change every little aspect of what I do and what other people do and what is possible.
So being to, for example, in a second go on Wikipedia and not just read an article about something I'm passionate about and then I can also edit it. I can add new content on top of that and I can change it and I'm doing it because I know other people are going to come back to the same road and find it. That whole conception of having these little things that just totally change what is possible. The only time it really comes up is when something that totally mundane is happening, to be honest. But it's just so pervasive, that's kind of a condition of the machine.
Hubert Dreyfus and What the Computer Can't Do
I started reading Hubert Dreyfus' book "What Computers Still Can't Do," which is kind of like a seminal text that I'd never heard about actually before. And I did some machine learning work before I learned about machine learning algorithms and how to use them and I actually didn't know the earlier history around artificial intelligence. And the thing I appreciated a lot, from even just starting this book, is just the notion of 'good old-fashioned AI.' It's GOFAI, the acronym used in the book. The idea is to explain this period at which philosophers and computer scientists were trying to figure out what was possible with these digital technologies and a lot of engineers and a lot of computer scientists were really pointing out all the potential for artificial intelligence and all these estimations of when and how soon all these things would come to fruition. Which really ended up butting heads with the practical realities about how the human mind works and how knowledge works and actually how, also, how software works and how it can be programmed and how it can operate logically and how it can take inputs and actually respond to them and whether or not you can phrase thing in functional ways.
So I really appreciate that and in one term the whole concept right there is summarized 'there was a time when we had good old-fashioned AI.' This old concept about how AI's going to work. 2001: A Space Odyssey Hal, right? That's some good old-fashioned AI. I mean, he's a little more informed, Hal, but it's like about good old-fashioned AI. And we've learned from that that it's a lot harder and we're learning to narrow-down our domains of actually solving artificial intelligence problems and have been able to, like, get really, really good at some really particular things and also to branch out in other methodologies to start to solve some of the problems AI was looking to solve in the first place. So that, like, diversity is just blossoming as a result of just that one split, that one split where this book was sitting at the crux at. That his book kind of interrupted that whole discussion and apparently it was really contentious on the side of engineers who wanted to make these predictions and had all these assumptions and apparently became combative. But eventually what he said made a lot of sense and has now blossomed into a whole diversity of research that is extremely important and extremely valuable. And a lot more realistic.
The Heritage from the Counter Culture
I've kind of only lived in the wake of, not only the end of the 60s counter culture but everything that happened after it, like all the responses, each wave of responses, and so basically from that point on, especially in this state, especially in California, we will only be in reference to the 60s radical-thing counter culture. And so, like, freedom is a great example. I have a good friend who, he was young and he wanted to travel through California and he's sort of hitchhiking and he realized, and he ended up writing this great article about it in a magazine I was running, he realized that the sort of Jack Kerouac jumping in a car, do the whole thumb out on the highway thing has this romantic quality around that sort of countercultural rejection of what you're supposed to be doing with your life and your time and where you should be and who you should respect and all these notions about authority, but ended up for him really being a little vacant. There were so many other nuances that, like, it's not necessarily legal to hitchhike and how exactly do you pick up a ride and if the people aren't friendly what is that experience like, it's a lot less romantic. At the end of the day, if you call your mom on your cellphone, what does that mean about what you're doing? How is this counter culture and how are you exploring all these social dimensions that the folks did in the 60s. The meaning of that story really is 'if you're doing something romantic like that, you're trying to explore something new, you're really doing it only in reference to this past series of events and all these other past movements and all that.
So today, where does this movement sit? It's all over us. It's everywhere and everything really. And a lot of people harken back to it as, like, the time where we were doing it right. And other people harken back to it as the time we lost our senses. And I don't necessarily see that same countercultural movement resurging today. I actually think, I'm extremely inspired by the Occupy movement actually. A lot of people have asked me that question actually about 'how do I feel about Occupy? What do you think about it? Do you think it's good? Do you think it's bad? What about the problems? What about how cities have to mitigate these issues and deal with infrastructure and deal with public health and all that?' And at the end of the day to me it's really simple, like, people were coming out and getting excited about doing something good, like reformulating and refactoring democracy. That's probably a good thing. And I was really inspired by that in the sense of I've done many things in direct response to that. I wouldn't say it's a counter culture resurgence today. I would actually say it's definitely a response, as it has to be, but it's totally new and totally different and there's a technological layer, that's a component, but there's also a lot that's just about ideology and about economics really and social justice and all those dimensions.
Is Open Science a Counter Culture?
I guess with open and open science and open source and all these other possibilities and potentials, I don't know if I'd classify them as countercultural is the issue, I guess, I wouldn't think of them that way. In a lot of ways I'm proud to see some projects that are using these open paradigms be extremely wise and be extremely open, even to people who would otherwise be close-minded, right? In that way it's very not a resistance-based movement, but it is like I would say, a wise, a very wise movement. One that's like intelligent about understanding the value of not rejecting but accepting, universally and globally.
What's That on Your Arm?
It's a 1971 Arpanet actually. And this is California, this is the East Coast, these are the BBN nodes, the company that actually built the network, the University of Illinois, the University of Utah, University of California Santa Barbara, Stanford Research International, various defense and research-oriented nodes along the way and I got it as kind of like a roots thing, thinking about something I spend a lot of time on, utilize and learn a lot from, the Internet, but it's also a reminder of who built the Internet and why it was built and for whom it is built and it's kind of a lesson about all infrastructure and about power. That many things in the world are really built to support and maintain incumbent powers and are built in such a way they will continue those incumbent powers and I really don't believe this was built for me. The Internet was not built for people to do things innately good for each other, right, on a human scale. They really built for people to be able to transfer global capital, right, in order to ensure that their states are maintained securely and safely and know whatever, to do surveying or to do these other things. And I'm interested in trying to use it, this huge apparatus, this, like, ambling monster of an infrastructure, to do things differently and to help other people realize that we should be doing them differently.
Google - Information or Knowledge?
But with respect to Google, I mean, they're really an interesting example, right, of human pursuit of information and access to it. So there's two components, not just storing information, though they've actually formed a really profitable business doing that storage, on top of it's about finding people who need to get to it or people who want to or people who are paid to get to it, the information that they've stored. It's kind of a great example of what folks think is important to spend time on, as well as what our global economy wants to value. Now Google is extremely valuable as a corporation and the people who are working for them are doing really amazing things and to quote Tim O'Reilly 'totally insane things.' He was describing how when they were doing the streetview truck driving to take pictures of all these cities around the world, all these roads, they were actually scanning the roads at the same time. And they were picking-up wi-fi signals at the same time. They got into a lot of trouble for picking-up the wi-fi signals too and accessing peoples' networks because they didn't ask for permission. And they were also scanning the roads because they wanted to get data about potholes and road quality so they could train their car to automatically run on any kind of road.
It's kind of these insane things that they're doing, right? I like it as a great example of not all the things that we're kind of valuing and doing but it's a good example of what actually is being really very much valued. So it's kind of pursuit of information itself and pursuit of knowledge and all of that. It's extremely noble and, more than that, it's also valuable. I think that's really important because Google's mission isn't, for example, to sustain the human condition. It's not to sustain human life. It's not to sustain life, period. And that's okay, like, that's not what they do but it is something that's really valuable that they do around getting to the information and then letting people access it. With the car thing, right, I can see all buildings, I can see every building, I can, like, get on the street and take a look at it when necessary. And maybe mundanely or if something were extremely important it's, like, available. And that can also, possibly, when they get a car that drives automatically and I don't have to control, it may be extremely safe for the entire systems of vehicles and all of that. But a what costs do all these things come. To me, it's a pig but all I know right now is that these are things we really value, and economically we're valuing them a lot.
What is Information?
I'm not a philosopher, so that's one thing. But I love these questions because I like to think in terms of counter examples. So to ask "what isn't information?" Or what do we usually think about as information that isn't and why it isn't. Because it's really hard to come up with a general statement but it's easy to come up with lots of counter examples that start to shape and phrase exactly the thing you're talking about. So what is information, right? Is it something that can be stored, right? Or is it something that exists only in my mind? Or is it something that gets transferred? Is it something that exists between two nodes, two communicating devices or humans or whatever? I don't know. I would actually sit here musing about it for hours unless you cut me off.
Let's see, so do I have a metaphor for information. If I had to explain to somebody what I think information is, I would say that information is probably most akin to everything that can be stored and everything that is stored. So it's defined in storage. However that, I guess, points to the value of, and the concept of, knowledge. Which I might even say is a filter on information. Knowledge is some information. So that information, for example, that is valuable under some certain conditions or set of values, right, and that is stored, maybe, in a special way as well. Stored, for example, in an individual brain or it's stored between people or it's stored in a web application or in a database or whatever. And somehow it is of significant utility beyond simply existing.
Are the Screens Making People Antisocial?
I get what you're saying with spending time looking at the screen. Sometimes I feel that way, that I'm just watching dots change color. And I know those dots represent things like other people around the world who are viewing the website that I work on but other times I feel like they're just dots. And that's okay. But with a cafe, that's just the exchange of maybe I'm using the computer to meet other people, I can kind of referencing other places and other locations and I'm still operating in a physical realm but my physical realm is now actually networked and it exists across boundaries, across, like, physical dimensions. And so there is I believe there is that social dimension, there is that kind of interaction that is good and heartening and very, actually maybe romantically old, like, being able to connect to other humans through media, networked infrastructure. The thing about a cafe is really interesting today is that, especially in the United States and in the Bay Area as well, establishing a business model around what they're able to sell. So they offer wi-fi as a service in order to get people to come there and stay to purchase goods, subsidize running the whole space, right?
It's a really great business model. You don't just have to sell coffee, you can provide services that people want to stay for a long time, right? It makes a lot of sense. And the way we have regulated and created network infrastructure in this state and in this country is such that wi-fi isn't everywhere. It's not available, you're not actually able to access Internet at any reasonable speed unless you go to a place like a cafe. Some folks might not even have Internet at their house. They might not have it at high-enough speed to do whatever they need to. They'll have to go to a cafe to go do those things. So the sense is when you might see people sitting there with all their computers open, it could be that that was the way they're able to get access to the network infrastructure that we haven't built into our actual cities yet. We haven't built, like, public wi-fi that extends across wherever you need to be to do your work. Although other places have and it's been really successful but because of incumbent interests here and because those who stem to benefit aren't going to benefit monetarily, we don't have it. And so we are actually using cafes in a lot of ways to, like, hack the network. Actually, just get access to the network. And this is kind of classical in a sense because these sort of cafes and, I heard a guy talk about these regions in Egypt where they use telecenters to get access to the Internet, so it's kind of a global thing, like, these centers, a single location to actually access the network. And it's kind of opaque, it's not obvious here but in a lot of ways it really is a mechanism to access the network.
Facebook - Addiction or Tool For Democracy?
What was interesting just now because of your some of the suggestions around the skepticism with people kind of droning into their computer and kind of droning into this virtual world. . .I want to get off Facebook for different reasons around the privacy issues but while I'm still on it, when I use it I'll see a lot of things I'd otherwise never get to read about and can actually learn a lot from my peers and my friends. And it's that kind of, like, news source and other kind of linking, other kinds of, like, content sharing that's extremely valuable. It's really, really great actually. And so, I appreciate those dimensions of it but I also am totally skeptical and I agree that we need to remain skeptical about how we use those things and who runs them and to what end, for what purpose and what is the exchange, what's the value? How many people who wake up in the morning and open Facebook actually know that Facebook takes their money, I'm sorry excuse me, takes their information and sells it for a lot of money so that people can target advertisements back to them, right? Or do whatever they want in such ways that are actually sometimes insecure. So a lot of information about your personal life which might be delicate, it might be sensitive. And so that's one of these territories that we need to be more aware of and skeptical about. But that notion of, like, getting up in the morning and kind of checking it, there's so many positive things that comes out of that, so it's kind of okay. At the same time, if you're just doing that all day what does it really mean, right? They're just dots. Sometimes they're just dots.
CollaborativeSociety.org is a site which explores the thinking of researchers, academicians and thought-leaders on the topic of collaboration, among other things. Thanks to Alfred Birkegaard and Katja Carlsen for providing the video content. The contribution of The Collaboration Project is these transcripts.
