"As We May Think" Vannevar Bush - Notes and Response

First, who is Vannevar Bush? 

Wikipedia tells us....
(1890-1974) He was an American engineer who lived during WW2. He headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development. "His office was considered one of the key factors in winning the war." 

#Tags: 

• Analog computers
• Raytheon (American defense contractor and industrial corporation with core manufacturing concentrations in defense systems and defense and commercial electronics)
• Memex ("memory"+"index" an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web)
• Profile trancer
• Differential Analyzer (analog computer that solved differential equations)
• Digital circuit design theory
• First presidential science advisor

-source

"As We May Think" was published in The Atlantic in 1945 (before the nuclear attacks on Japan) (it was republished that same year, after the attacks). "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified," he says in the piece.  

#Tags: 

• Destruction vs. Understanding -- his perceptions about the direction of technology
• Collective memory machine
• Turning information into knowledge

-source (sorry, it's Wikipedia too)


Summary: Quotes & Paraphrases from  "As We May Think"

Editor's note: Bush was among the first to grasp that technology can head toward making tasks easier for the human mind, as before they had made only physical tasks easier.

"First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have
improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence."  Machines have made our bodies stronger #physicallabor #health #medicine #mentalhealth

Science and research foster the best communication between individuals: "It has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual." Specialists are needed to sift through all this information. And now we need to be able to bridge the gap between disciplines.

"...publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record."

Attempts had been made (Leibnitz's calculating machine, Babbage's analytical machine) but it wasn't cost- or time-efficient.

He predicts many improvements for photography as an example of a technology that has much room for growth.

Machines have got "repetitive thought" down, but there still lack machines for "mature" or "creative thought."  Even those existing still stand for much improvement in speed. But there is still a need for the need for Bush's hypothetical technologies. "...the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population," he says.

"Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge."

He proposes ideas that sound a lot like command+F or voice recognition for selection - making it easier to FIND information.

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." Sounds like a hard drive!

He uses the word trail ... it signifies the stream of links from different sources, and he seems to mean it as a stream of consciousness. Earlier, he made a statement that human thoughts are not linear, but web-like and driven on associations. But these trails, unlike a human stream of consciousness, does not fade. 

For example, a friend tries to explain a thought that he made a trail of earlier -- "In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

Translation: Friend recalls memory of something he read up on in the past. He takes his friend through the bookmark of sites he read at the time. Then, he emails the bookmark file to the friend so he can access the links on his own browsers.

"There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record," Bush predicts. Little does he know, that activity will hardly be considered a profession in the future -- instead, a basic, required skill. Those best at this skill, we call professors. The worst, simply bloggers.

Here is where his ideas begin to surpass current technologies. "Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form?" 


Response and Comparison to "Blueprints of the Afterlife"
Bush was getting at the idea of an implanted Internet. He says that the ability one would have with future technology to objectify information in one's life should lift a person's spirit. One should be able to rest his overburdened mind because he can store memories elsewhere, forget about them, and recall them if ever he needs to (sounds like a good counter-argument to Plato's beef with the transition from orality to literacy.) Technology will give people the means to living better-examined and healthier lives. 

This thinking reminds me of the same respite that the Industrial Revolution was predicted to bring to housewives. With so many new appliances for cooking and cleaning, a housewife hoped to finish her chores sooner, having more time for chosen pleasures. On the contrary, the expectation for a cleaner house – especially since it was so easy to achieve with new tools – demanded that women spend more time and energy on those tasks than their mothers did. (Sorry I don't have a source for this – this argument came up in a freshman architecture class I took from Ayad Rahmani called "The Build Environment.")

Knowing what we do now of technologies, Bard's predictions are narrowly optimistic. Science fiction author Ryan Boudinot describes a dystopian world armed with the implanted Internet Bush theorizes in his novel "Blueprints of the Afterlife."
(No spoil alert – I highly recommend reading this book if you're a DTC major)

Boudinot names it the Bionet. It gives a user access to all the Internet's information, plugged into a part of the brain associated with the subconscious. In the book, people in the future who have Bionet implants risk becoming "embodiments" -- versions of themselves that a DJ has hacked and now controls, sometimes not to the host's knowledge. Boudinot exaggerates a type of present day identity theft or brainwashing to such an extreme that individuals lose control of their data, their bodies, and eventually their minds. 

A feature of the Bionet grants Boudinot's characters the ability to remove painful, unwanted, or unnecessary memories and stored them on chips. At times, characters re-access the memories when needed for reflection or problem-solving. In Boudinot's futuristic dystopia, the characters who log away painful memories can never truly escape the original pain. 

In our real present world, there are obvious advantages that technology and the Internet have made to our spirits. But they are often accompanied by feelings of insignificance, depression, misinformation, intolerance, and desensitization (to name only a minor few that I have personally felt). 

Bush had good intentions with his theorization of the would-be Internet, but indeed -- the Net Generation/Millienials/Generation X has been scoffed at by those older for being less intelligent and lazier than they. We never finish books or memorize things we can look up. Why would we commit those things to memory when we have e-books + the find key, bookmarked web pages, or simply an Internet search engine? The new generation sees that with all the accessible information, it would be impossible to thoroughly memorize entire concepts like our parents were required to. I'm getting onto another issue here... see my blog from October on Don Tapscott's "Grown Up Digital" for more on the generation gap.

The Internet has definitely facilitated the type of life Bush aspires technology to provide. It is incredible how far ahead of his time Bush was. But if he thought war and physical destruction were the only negative possible consequences, his big thinking neglected the smaller, more obscure inflictions and vices that technology has brought upon our species – and indeed, our collective memory.

Response to Adam Ward's DTC356 post #2 on Megaupload's FBI Shutdown

Sorry this isn't on Adam's Tumblr, but there was no option to leave a comment there. 

Adam used an anecdote about the government shutdown of Megaupload to point out more unfair treatment online. Unfair treatment meaning the government's pick-and-choose prejudice against certain pirates or pirate hosting sites – like Megaupload, the Pirate Bay, or Aaron Swartz – and not others, like YouTube. 

I agree that the government's bias in dealing with these sites/individuals is pretty blatantly skeezy. Make an example of the little guys who aren't profiting, but allow the profiteers (like Google, for owning YouTube) to keep on profiting. I wonder why... It seems like the same permission given to the architects of the financial bank crisis: they're too big to jail.

Adam explains that Megaupload moved its services to a New Zealand server and changed the mechanics of its site to skirt away from some of the blame. I think the Pirate Bay was getting away with the same thing for a long time. They no longer store the data on their servers and s0 cannot give its users direct access to download the material – now they just linked up the people who have the data so they can share with each other. This type of activity was/is not illegal in Sweden  (not sure what the update is after their lawsuit), where the Pirate Bay has its servers. But that didn't keep American companies like Apple, Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, and others from threatening legal action. The documentary on the Pirate Bay's lawsuit will be piratable soon, I hear.

Adam says, "It’s basically like this: if you let someone borrow your cell phone and they  used it to commit a crime, but then erased any evidence of placing a call, sending a text, or using the internet, you would be none the wiser to anything wrong being done with your property. That’s the theory behind Mega.co.nz, and considering the federal government’s hasty and unnecessary prosecution of people like Aaron Swartz, Kim Dotcom is potentially marching himself right into information freedom martyrdom."

The bootleggers/pirates/whatever you want to call the people who share files are getting more creative to get around current law. I think it's pretty clear that computer programmers get a lot more done in a lot less time than lawmakers do. However, Adam is right. Kim Dotcom is in danger for outsmarting the system, being "civilly disobedient," but in the eyes of the property owners, taking away their livelihood. 

Aaron Swartz: Champion for Internet Freedom and Global Intelligence

Tags: Aaron Swartz, free information movement, Occupy Wall Street, activism, civil disobedience, control

Aaron Swartz is a martyr for the Free Information Movement.

The recent suicide of the computer programmer and activist for Internet Freedom has been distracting me from working on my honors thesis. 

Not to make light of the situation. 

It has been little over 10 days now since I heard the news, and I've put around a month of research into my thesis on collective action demonstrated by Occupy Wall Street. It's been a tempting consideration to switch my topic – not because I don't care about analyzing the #Occupy movement, but because what they so stubbornly sat around protesting, Aaron embodied with his life as well as his death.

The majority of Occupiers were protesters: sleeping in the streets, holding up signs, shouting, complaining, struggling to make their voices heard and pounding their fists against the walls of corporations – sometimes smashing their windows with bricks. I am trying to find merit in their methods (as opposed to their cause), but it has been difficult. Frankly, it has been hard to glean much more from Occupiers than a thorough laundry list of complaints. (However, I'm not giving up on #Occupy. My graduation depends on it.)

Occupiers' demands do make sense, at the root:

End corporate greed.

Give us jobs.

Tell us the truth.

But they're just demands; (justifiably) frustrated feet stomping the ground for change. 

Please don't be mistaken – I'm not hating on the movement. In fact, without Occupy's strong response to unfairness in this country, it would be much more difficult for [empathizers, organizers, and those truly motivated enough to make change] to actually act for the foot-stompers.

My question is, how many people with complaints about #theSystem #theGovernment #CorporateAmerica have actually done anything about it? (I will eventually find an answer to this question. It's basically my thesis' thesis statement.)

Aaron Swarts did more than simply embody both the OWS and Internet Freedom movements. What he accomplished by the time he was 14 is more than most of will in a career #RSSfeed. By the time he was 18, he had helped cofound Reddit, a popular news/social media sites on the Internet. 

And while it would be unfair to compare all Occupiers to Swartz (Aaron undeniably had more than a knack for what he did) he worked in a very real fight for the freedom of information. The fight for information is essentially a fight for human intelligence. It is one for which Swartz shouldered not just political and financial repercussions; it cost him his life.  

He believed that information should be accessible and affordable (arguably, free), and he applied his talents to make real steps forward for mankind. I'm not talking about a website, single bits of information or a web-browser add-on; Swartz was fighting for the advancement of the human race. 

Swartz accessed the online academic digital library JSTOR via MIT computers to download millions of scholarly articles. JSTOR stores published articles on its servers and provides free access to students, libraries and a few other groups (though universities pay to allow students this access). Those outside the "free" realm have to pay to access the articles. To Swartz this must have seemed wrong – after all, much of the research stored in the archive was funded by federal dollars. Essentially, taxpayers were having to pay to fund much of the research, and again to access it.

Swartz' prosecutor (the Department of Justice – NOT the "victims" of the crime: MIT, JSTOR or JSTOR's publishers) assumed that he was intending to make these articles free to the public. Some would say he was close to the spirit of JSTOR's mission: "Our mission involves expanding access to scholarly content as broadly as possible, in ways that are sustainable and consistent with the interests of our publishers who own the rights to the content" –JSTOR FAQ. But the DOJ considered him a felon for his actions. 

"From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way," said Frank Lessig, a lawyer and friend of Swartz. "The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar." 

"What offended Swartz and others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at public expense*," said Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Guardian. "This system offended Swartz (and many other free-data activists) for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors, and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and universities."  

*In this quote (not the second), Greenwald was referring to Swartz' successful download and share of court documents from Pacer (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which charged the public for court documents created at the public's expense.

However, Swartz was caught before he could make the articles accessible. He was threatened with an overzealous sentence: felonies, a million dollar fine, and decades in prison.

Some try to make Swartz out to be thief, greedy to profit from the work of others. Civilly disobedient, yes. But greedy, no. There is obvious merit to the notion that what Swartz was assumed to be doing would potentially lessen the money that JSTOR's publishers earned from the site's access fees. But note that the profit was going to the publishers – the owners of the content – and not to the authors. From what I've heard, published authors make no money directly from publishing articles. This is part of the "system" that must reform to allow for freedom of information at the same time that creators can still earn a livelihood from their intellectual property.

Greenwald continues, "Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded articles. He never intended to profit even a single penny from anything he did, and never did profit in any way. He had every right to download the articles as an authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to violate the company's 'terms of service' by making the articles available to the public. Once arrested, he returned all copies of everything he downloaded and vowed not to use them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors that it had no intent to see him prosecuted, though MIT remained ambiguous about its wishes."

In the recent buzz of Swartz' suicide, JSTOR has made a move to free up some of its articles to registered users. I think this shows progress for Swartz' and other Internet activists' efforts. Some people and organizations understand that it is wrong to withhold information from the public that they essentially helped fund. 

The issue is not black or white, though some make it out to be. One one hand, "Information should be free to everyone" and on the other, "Aaron Swartz stole intellectual property that did not belong to him." 

"The system has got to change!"

And HERE is where I feel like one of the Occupiers. America's governing and judicial systems have simply not caught up to speed with the Internet. The Internet is a place for networking, learning, sharing. Many people have come to appreciate how powerful it is and embrace the Internet (*cough* DTC majors). Others see the Internet's potential for sharing information as a serious threat to their power. Keeping information from people is a form of control, and the DOJ obviously saw Swartz as a direct threat to that control. 

"Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a 'justice' system that fully protects the most egregious criminals as long as they are members of or useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness those who lack power and, most of all, those who challenge power... his real crime in the eyes of the US government: challenging its authority and those of corporate factions to maintain a stranglehold on that information. In that above-referenced speech on SOPA, Swartz discussed the grave dangers to internet freedom and free expression and assembly posed by the government's efforts to control the internet with expansive interpretations of copyright law and other weapons to limit access to information" (Greenwald).

To wrap up, I'd like to post a comment from one of my friends in a debate that happened on my facebook page on a thread about Swartz. Nick said 

"How brainwashed are we by our beliefs to make such strife when this guy just died. As in passed to the next realm of conscious existence. As in people are losing their lives over this issue... you seriously cannot see the bigger picture? 

The future of bio-technology, nano-technology, cold-fusion, solar cells, quantum computing, medicine are in those journals stored [on] private servers like JSTOR. Basically holds the goldmine of future inventions. Are you that selfish that you cant see that one invention invented by man is an accomplishment for all mankind? Should we all have to invent the wheel after we are born?"

By today's rhetoric, Swartz was making copies of others' property and giving it indiscriminately to others. By tomorrow's rhetoric, Swartz will be known as not just an advocate, but a champion for the intellectual evolution of our species.

Pre-Mechanical Computing in Gleik's "The Information" [DTC 356, post 1]

Chapter 4 of Gleik’s “The Information”  titled “To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work” demonstrated themes in the heart of the C in DTC (Digital Technology and Culture) by the story of Charles Babbage's pursuit for mechanical computation. Babbage sought to create a “rational machine. It would be a junction point for two roads – mechanism and thought” (Gleick 99). In Babbage’s time, the culture surrounding technology differed greatly from today’s culture. Much of this was to do with public understanding of technology and the volume of it invented at the time, but culture was also influenced by the rhetoric used to describe thoughts and objects related to technology.

Babbage's attempt at creating a universal language for his technology (I thought of it as a coding language, but for people to understand mechanics) showed him the challenges of capturing the quirks and kinks of communication. "As philosophers came face to face with the multiplicity of the world's dialects, they so often saw language not as a perfect vessel for truth but as a leaky sieve. Confusion about the meanings of words led to contradictions" (90). In his work – and indeed, the work of all mechanical and electrical inventors – clear and precise rhetoric was of the utmost importance. He mentioned the difficulty he had in describing his invention, and even more in explaining its usefulness. On page 104, Babbage was quoted to say of his fellow Englishman, "If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."

In Babbage's time, there was a different attitude toward information. Babbage demonstrated this with his pyramid problem – supposing that a child wanted to find the number of bricks in any layer of a pyramid. It must have seemed not pointless, but because of the difficulty in trying to find the answer, a question unworthy of consideration. "Perhaps he might go to papa to obtain this information; but I much fear papa would snub hum, and would tell him that it was nonsense – that it was useless – that nobody knew the number, and so forth," Babbage pondered (95). That seemed to be Babbage’s most difficult endeavor: not to explain his technology, but to convey its usefulness.

This was a time in history when few may have imagined the ease with which they could do simple tasks with the help of technology. Those who did (Babbage) must have grown frustrated with the hassle caused by the gap in understanding. These days we take advantage of that mutual grasp – the imaginative power we possess that comes from understanding past and current technology, and its potential to make our lives better. Not to mention the ease of we have of explaining concepts or objects with tools like digital images or Google. We reference past technologies as well as those imagined in science fiction movies, and find fuel on the Internet to foster support other ideas. 

It is difficult to even consider what people must have thought about technology (or IF they did) before digital technology, let alone before mechanical technology.  Let alone FURTHER – how they talked about it, and what rhetorical strategies they used to describe.