I had an interesting idea today. There's been a constant back-and-forth in recent years about the balance of privacy protections in the face of both government and corporate desires for increasing levels of access to peoples' data. Often the problem comes down to, well, exactly how much privacy do you need anyway? The "if you have nothing to hide" argument is a way of saying that you don't really need any privacy, which should be transparently false. But conversely it's hard to argue that there is no possible end that could justify an invasion of privacy. If there's some sensible middle ground, where is it?
My idea is this: we already have a notion of state privacy, usually called state secrets or classified information. So let's start there. Given the vast and disproportionate power of a state compared to an individual, you might think that we would have stronger protections in the interests of balance. In fact, the opposite is the case. It's possible (these days, commonplace) for the US government to completely remove information that would violate its privacy from court cases. And outside a courtroom, revealing its private information is punishable by death.
It would be interesting to see what a world would look like where we could label our own secrets as classified information, with accompanying legal protection. A world where we could legally prevent that information from appearing in court cases against us because it would be harmful to our relationships, hurt our business opportunities, or compromise our physical safety. And we could sentence people to death or a lifetime in prison for revealing our secrets without our permission, even if the secret was that we acted immorally or broke the law.
That'd be quite a world to see, though I definitely wouldn't want to live there.
I had an interesting idea for a modern-style disintermediation business today: Ultratemping. Basically, an instant marketplace for short-term casual workers. The hypothetical scenario is this: you're running a restaurant and you've got a surprise rush because someone important on twitter said nice things about you. You're running a retail store and two of the floor staff call in sick an hour before their shift. You're setting up an event and it's running behind schedule because you don't have enough crew. You need people and you need them right now.
So Ultratemping lets you find people quickly. You put up the job you need done and it gets broadcast to everyone in the area with the requisite kind of experience. All the workers have ratings and recommendations from previous jobs so you can pick whoever seems best. They show up and get to work. Obviously you'd be paying a premium, but in certain situations it'd be worth it, especially if they were people who were well-known for their ability to show up quickly and get stuff done with minimal setup time.
Maybe it would even lead to a place where people are using the app as their main source of income, swooping in to help out a different business each night like some kind of cross between Yojimbo and Gordon Ramsay.
I was reminded today of an observation I made a while ago: any commitment means making sacrifices. It's very easy to say "I'm going to get this project done no matter what", but the reality of what that means is actually pretty extreme. That "no matter what" means you would be willing to sacrifice not only other projects but friends, family, sleep, even happiness entirely to get it done. But when the chips are down most people aren't willing to sacrifice that much, and probably for good reason. Usually we either don't really mean the commitment, or don't consider that sacrifice involved.
This lack of realisation also happens in much less extreme examples. Something like "I'm going to exercise every day so it becomes a habit" is a popular and often abandoned commitment, because people don't really think through the consequences. It's not just exercising, it's sacrificing the ability to not exercise – not exercise when you're tired, not exercise when you're busy, not exercise when you feel sick, not exercise when there's something way better and more fun to be doing. It often breaks down because the commitment you made didn't reflect your actual priorities and, confronted with an actual test, those priorities won.
Given that fragility, I think there's a lot of benefit in being more explicit about priorities and sacrifices. If there's something you want to get done, or some commitment you're considering taking on, better to play it off against the other priorities in your head before you commit to it. Where does it really stand? There's nothing wrong with "I'm going to exercise every day unless I have a work thing on or I'm tired", but it is a different commitment. Maybe a less impressive one, maybe one less likely to form a habit, but also a more honest one.
And, really, a dishonest commitment was only ever going to deceive you up until the point where you had to sacrifice for it anyway.
It seems like the world of open source is becoming increasingly irrelevant to end-users. Developers, of course, still value the ability to access, modify and run source code, but for most modern software that model is insufficient. 15 years ago we could run our own copy of Mozilla, but today it's not possible to run our own Facebook or Twitter. Not just because the source code isn't available, but because it's not even meaningful to speak about "running" Facebook. Facebook is the sum of many pieces of software running in data centres, devices and browsers across the world.
Modern software is expected to sync across multiple devices, to be accessible from other computers, and to interoperate with other software including instances of itself. To embrace those requirements means a huge expansion of what open source means into something new entirely. Forget the specific mechanism of source code, we need to recapture the general goal of anyone being able to contribute to and customise the software in their lives. Software that runs over a network is usually called a service, so I'm thinking of it as open services.
An open service is something that you can take and run for yourself in a way that is meaningful. An open service social network would allow each user to run their own instance if they wanted while still maintaining a connection to and sharing updates with the rest of the network. An open service news site would let you create a custom news feed for friends, family, colleagues or a community without that data being accessible to others, but still provide you with the ability to integrate with other news feeds if you want.
Individual parts of this vision already exist, such as the concept of federated systems, but this goes further. An open service is also something like a federation of code. It should be possible to make and share your modifications to code in the modern networked software world as easily as you share the data itself.
This is the Brain Ball, a visualisation I've been working on as part of an EEG project. It shows a top-down view of a (fairly abstract) head, representing frequencies of brain activity as different colours. It's actually running on a Raspberry Pi, doing EEG processing in Python, and then sending the data through a web socket to do the visualisation in HTML using Canvas.
What you see in the video is one of the more remarkable (and earliest!) EEG results: closing your eyes causes a large spike in Alpha wave activity (shown in blue), especially near the rear of the brain.