Now was once an unconsidered state. It was undistinguished as air, valueless as belly lint. Now was whatever you were doing at the moment, whatever was happening around you or somewhere else at a given instant. It was an adverb, not a place like Cleveland.

On the "Map of the Mind" ..., Flickr, Artepillar, all rights reserved.

Then came the apps of a new meta-Now: Dogpile, MetaCrawlerWeb, and mama; Instagram, Foursquare, Twitter, Hashable, Glancee, Banjo, Intro, Sonar, Kismet, and Mingle; LinkedIn and Facebook. Behind these came the huge engine of Big Data, for whom Now is the ultimate business prize.

Now presently races by us so quickly it replaces the recognition of past and present with a faultless steady state: the sovereign state of new-Now. Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist at Pew cites a ‘network effect’: “Once you reach a critical mass in your network of friends, you begin to text them all the time, and they expect you’ll do that, and you expect them to do it.” (Pew reports teens send 60 texts a day.) In this imaginary place Now is evergreen, perpetually supplanted by more and more Nowness ad infinitum. As we point, tap and scroll through this imaginary place, part Truman Show, part Panopticon, we change time itself, or more precisely change our notion of time. The past is anything that is not-Now, a second-place place because it is, by definition, out of the loop of Nowness. Not that the past doesn’t exist but it is not here in the Now, which in its seamless breadth has no offstage. Now is always-on.

Time, Flickr, Alan Cleaver, some rights reserved.

DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM

Leaping into Now-streams with the abandon of cliff divers, we go with the flow of countless tributaries of consciousness—a billion tweets a week and rising. We seemingly cannot resist the Now undertow. Digital Natives switch their attention between media platforms (TVs, magazines, tablets, smartphones or channels within platforms) 27 times per hour, about every other minute. Our descent is instant, constant, seamless. In the Erehwon of Now, we realize, there are no boundaries; this new reality is edgeless as an egg.

Curiously Now is often divorced from here. Now is only here inside the imaginary mirror world of Now. You are not here with your Facebook friend sunning in Acapulco or here with the Pottermore #storytelling friends on Twitter but you are in the new (imaginary) Now with them. This is possible because Now is an emergent state resulting from being so thoroughly deviced. Shipments of smart devices will surpass 1.1 billion this year and by 2016 more than 1.84 billion devices will ship—doubling the 2011 number and showing a 15.4 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years. Now knows no boundaries.

Know and now, seemingly linguistically close, could not be farther apart. Now is too big to know. Any careful watch of Now dies quickly of nervous exhaustion; luckily it is an imaginary expiration. But, as V.S. Ramachandran reminds us, phantoms in the brain can be as real as knives. These phantoms fuel the current debate over how we deplete ourselves (especially our brains) trying to replace human interaction with a descent into Now.

Imagine walking on a Saturday and saying, “I’m here on a side street in Then, it’s high time to hail a cab to Now.” That Now was unthinkable for most of human history. But today Now is a destination of connected intelligence. Deftly manipulating our devices, we plug into an endless number of simultaneous, recursive Nows. We daisy-chain reality—a reality that is a useful mirror, an emergent reflection. Here in Nowistan a new language is springing up (pedtextrian) and new behaviors are emerging (continuous partial attention); citizen heroes appear, affecting our understanding and experience of Nowness (the 18-year-old Tetris Grand Master who gives us seven valuable life lessons). A chief characteristic of Now is that once you enter this realm, it becomes tricky to leave. You want to know more about New-Now, you want to keep exploring the terrain and hearing about and commenting on and getting moment-to-moment updates on Nowness itself.

Eye see the world, Flickr, PhotoJamin, all rights reserved.

NOW AS REAL-TIME

The changed state of Now is expressed in the phrase “real-time” which means not only ‘in the present instant’; the implication is that any other time frame is not real. Now has become a business strategy, as Big Data enables making “real-time” decisions:

► IBM estimates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day from a variety of sources including sensors, social media, and billions of mobile devices around the world, making it difficult for businesses to navigate and analyze it to improve competitiveness, efficiency, and profitability.

► IDC estimates the market for big data technology and services will grow at an annual rate of nearly 40 percent to reach $16.9 billion by 2015.

► TheWeb-tracking firm Chitika has a site that offers a practically constant view of the smartphone market in near real-time.

► IBM recently acquired Vivisimo, a software that excels in capturing and delivering ‘quality information’ across a broad range of data sources, no matter the format, or where the data resides. Vivisimo software automates the discovery of data and helps employees navigate it with a single view across an enterprise, “providing valuable insights that drive better decision-making for solving all operational challenges.”

► Charles Duhigg reported in the New York Times that marketers at Target asked one of Target’s dozens of data analysts, “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?” The answer was yes. Duhigg writes: “The marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing.”

► RANDA Solutions, a software firm serving the educational sector, recently announced a Big Data Project for K-12 Education. RANDA’s vision: “We want all the data to be part of the intelligence that informs the teacher immediately—when they need it most.”

blurred vision (city poetry), Flickr, frenzypic, all rights reserved.

THE NOW QUANDARY

Now is not a place to visit or a third place like Starbucks; it is the only place. Now has supplanted national places or local places. Seeing this vast connected stream of newness that is ever-updating itself, protean in its methods of changing into new moments, supplanting those moments with newer moments like time itself, we face a curious, previously unthinkable perplexity: how do I get out of Now? Where do I go?

Here we run headlong into the ultimate Now paradox: we have simultaneously compacted Now to a screen or pad and expanded it to universal connected intelligence.

This is a thoroughly new quandary worthy of careful consideration. We quickly see this new place in terms of values that are sustained or eroded. Peggy Noonan worries that the new Now is filled with more disturbing actions and stories than ever before; that Now is a kind of Roman Circus, a Fellini forum where the good, bad, and the ugly parade and share each other’s masks:

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don’t they? And again, these are only from the past week. The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.
Something seems to be going terribly wrong.

It isn’t simply that our values are eroding. Those values were written down in books and books were deemed holy, and thereby encoded in the culture and in individuals through the dissemination and repetition of those values. Whether absolutely right or wrong or in-between, those values became generally accepted and so cultural institutions were built upon them. What is happening here is not that cultural values are eroding; those values are challenged, in some cases exploded, because we have moved from the world built upon the book that enabled states and nations—to a stateless state of Now. With instantly updatable tools in the hands of billions across nations and states the values of Now suddenly become instantaneousness, immediacy, a(ny) reaction in the present.

Decrying the decline of values, even with good reason, not only misses the point, it confounds the real issue. We are seeing the world differently and this seeing changes what we value. This is not a moral issue solely because, as Dr. John Medina reminds us, it begins as brain rules: vision trumps all other senses, we don’t pay attention to boring things.

Tutorial Step I, Flickr, h.koppdelaney, all rights reserved.

In January 1855, Ballou’s Dollar Monthly Magazine published “A London Fog”:

“To walk at this time in the English capital, is absolutely to plunge yourself into a soup of yellow peas, ready to be placed over the fire…. The entire city appears covered with a vaporous tent, beneath which one hears the confused noise of invisible beings…. On a foggy day the laws of optics are reversed. Through a sort of mirage, objects assume gigantic proportions; a dog has the appearance of an elephant, a gas-pillar that of a pyramid; houses acquire strange perspectives, the length of streets becomes a mystery, and their names, hieroglyphics lost in the night of time.”

In order to avoid seeing elephants for dogs, we must recognize the fog that settles in this imaginary place. That is the weather here. It demands new optics. We may even come to see that only our faith and belief in this imaginary Now makes it real. Then we can smile and say we imagined this “Dream Kingdom, built to satisfy travellers bored with reality.”

Will the Dream Kingdom, the Imaginary Now become our new reality? It is already. We imagined this Now and we use what we imagined. That is what we do with our tools.

MORE INFORMATION

Too Big To Know See David Weinberger’s discussion of “the shift from the old private-then-public publishing model to a continuous now….”, p. 140.

You might not be a journalist, but you play one on Twitter Adrienne France writes: “Metzgar and Ibold find the most prevalent journalistic mode among their politically-oriented sample is assertion, which Kovach and Rosenstiel characterize as placing the ‘highest value on immediacy and volume and in so doing tends to become a passive conduit of information.’”

Where Is Here?

Yesterday The Boston Globe ended all your tomorrows Charles Mansbach, page 1 editor of The Boston Globe: “The reason for the change is that articles are no longer written only for the newspaper. Breaking news is posted immediately on the Globe’s websites; stories are then fleshed out, posted again, then put into the process for the next day’s paper and the next day’s web entries. With all that traffic, a reliance on ‘yesterday,’ ‘today,’ and ‘tomorrow’ is an invitation for error.”

Your face is currently under renovation. You won’t see the change in a mirror, but looking around closely you may catch a glimpse of what’s happening. No longer merely the canvas where you express who you are, your face is now what semiotics terms a sign. What once was ‘yours’ exclusively today is “something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity.” This sign, your face, now functions as an interface—“a point of interaction between components … [in] both hardware and software.”

Our faces are now a digitized collage of aspects of ourselves. Source: Madonna Galore | Million Visions, some rights reserved by Village 9991, creative commons license.

Consider a few recent developments in the coming face-off over identity and access:

The new Samsung Smart TV has a built-in camera with facial recognition technology. It recognizes the face of the person watching and goes to channels and web applications they program as favorites.

DARPA wants to supplant computer passwords by reading users’ minds. Capturing what they call your “cognitive fingerprint,” today this initiative focuses on individual keystrokes but may expand in DARPA’s Active Authentication program to include facial recognition and other supporting biometric data.

Face Unlock, a new screen-lock option now lets you unlock your Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) device using face recognition. It takes advantage of the device’s front-facing camera and state-of-the-art facial recognition technology to register a face during setup, and then to recognize it again when unlocking the device. You hold the device in front of your face to unlock.

Like the price of gold in a bearish stock market, the value of this face-sign is going up. The face market is hot because while other global currencies are deflating, face is undergoing a striking revaluation.

In the presence of ever more accurate and pervasive face recognition technologies, your face now not only stands for you, it (this sign) is poised to become a smart object in the Internet of Things. Once a collection of uniquely personal features, face now is an expanding repository of trans-personal information and a portal to whole industries destined to use that information.

Today, thanks to the invisibility of big data accompanying it like the 1930s radio drama character The Shadow (who “had the power to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him”), face’s new power is hidden in the way we take its ownership for granted. This makes face a lucrative corporate target.

I BLINK, THEREFORE I AM

Your face is the de facto launcher of myriad technlogies. As a result you now pass valuable information literally in the blink of an eye.

This interactive billboard at a London bus stop can scan your face and determine if you’re a man or a woman by using facial recognition technology. The display then plays one of two messages based on that information. The set-up cost nearly $47,000 and boasts a 90 percent accuracy ratein determining whether passersby are male or female. Plan UK, a global children’s charity, is using the billboard to raise awareness about the choices unavailable to women around the world in their “Because I’m a girl” campaign. (Men aren’t able to see the full ad, and are directed to the organization’s website instead, to show men “a glimpse of what it’s like to have basic choices taken away.” Women, on the other hand, will see a full 40-second video promoting Plan UK’s cause.)

Face recognition technology is rapidly evolving as evidenced by a new surveillance camera system that can not only recognize specific faces, but is able to compare a single face to 36 million others in just one second.

The system, made by Hitachi Kokusai Electric, is able to achieve its blazing speed by not wasting time on image processing—it takes visual data directly from the camera to compare the face in real time. The software also groups faces with similar features, so it narrows down the field very quickly. When the system finds candidates who could be a match to the person being scanned, it immediately displays their thumbnails. The user can then review the archived footage and see if the person is, say, a repeat customer when it’s being used in a business.

CIA Director David Petraeus finds the confluence of these Internet of Things technologies to be “transformational, particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.” In a recent Wired article he elaborated on how these spy-craft technologies will find their way into the most intimate corners of our homes and lives:

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing, the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”

Petraeus added that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.”

IDENTITY AS CURRENCY

Realizing that your face is now a portal, a gateway to the rest of you and your behaviors, a key turns in the lock. No longer are you just a name, address and social security number. You are now a mob of miscellany. You have become the rising sum of your separated parts. From your cell phone data to your body odor, ear shape, or iris scan, you are going the way of your tools: data, and the tools that track data, deconstruct and atomize. Facial profiling reveals a central fact in the identity business: the money is in the multiplicity. Data is digitized, made miscellaneous, and is ready for sale to a widening swath of eager bidders who are buying at auction, not knowing exactly what they are getting but are willing to bet that something is there in the data that they can put to use. From your keystrokes to your Google and Facebook profiles, you are your deconstruction.

It hardly matters that you are easily sold off for your constituent parts, for your moves and the data those moves leave behind, or that this sale happens in your absence without your consent and mostly without your knowledge. Your face goes with you; it never crossed your mind that you might leave it behind. This odd, even unthinkable, state blinds us to what is happening right in front of our noses.

However, as you are auctioned for your bits and bytes it dawns that you are part of a vast new recalculation: access and convenience for privacy, data for identity. Formerly the banknotes and coins of a government constituted a currency; face is now traded as a commodity and is as valuable as Dinars or Pounds. You are (your face is) a storehouse of markers, characteristics and—especially—emotional indicators. Not only are you for sale, identity is the new currency of the realm. However you may think of yourself in personal, professional or familial terms, you are becoming a generally accepted medium of exchange.

Picasso - Cubism 1937, Flickr, oddsock, some rights reserved, Creative Commons license.

LIFE UNDER DECONSTRUCTION

The one-ness of you is gone. You are now a crowd of measurable emotions. Picasso saw it coming. The deconstruction he drew is now upon us. Our eyebrows are over our mouths, our faces are no longer merely symmetrical, they are subdivided into their components. These emotional elements—face recognition software can apply modeling conventions to generate a ‘spider’ map which maps 143 inter-related points directly to the motion of facial muscles as picked up by a camera—are the raw fuel of trackers who may soon decide the meaning of data movements throughout the world. Those movements are bigger than our imaginations can fathom. According to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (According to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, all human knowledge from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.) You, and especially your face, are now in that traffic flow that is expanding to include every data capture associated with you from grocery store receipts, to bank statements or computer toll records. The NSA, among others, is building a vast data-capture network to examine “every email, phone call and tweet as they zip by.”

Hiding your face is no longer an option.

nViso's sophisticated algorithms capture hundreds of measurement points, tracking 43 facial muscles in real-time. nViso, all rights reserved.

FaceTime is not only an Apple iPhone feature that “lets you be in two places at once.” It is an acknowledgement that thanks to nearly universal digitization there are more of you than there were before. We are all doing face time now. The capture, download, digitizing and dissemination of our faces is the tactical progression of our new identities. Rumi wrote in his love poem “Looking for Your Face”:

From the beginning of my life
I have been looking for your face
but today I have seen it

Now, at long last, we can see our faces for what they are—pure information.

MORE INFORMATION

CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher

DARPA Has a Simple Solution to Authentication: Reading Users’ Minds

DARPA Wants Your ‘Cognitive Footprint’

Face.com Brings Facial Recognition to the Masses, Now with Age Detection: Interview With CEO

Facial recognition technology is ready for mainstream

Face-Recognition Billboard Displays Ads To Women, Not Men, For Plan UK Campaign In London

Free Facial Recognition With KLIK: Point Your Phone At Friends, It Knows Who They Are

Is online privacy worth paying for?

Is your TV watching you? Latest models raise concerns

Liquor stores will laugh in the Face.com at your fake ID

Samsung improves Android’s Face Unlock feature with blink detection

The CIA wants to spy on you through your TV: Agency director says it will ‘transform’ surveillance

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

That boy is us. We are all waking up in Bergman’s Bed. Moving from the technology of the book to the lens and the image, we are all in the search and recognition phase of realizing how our tools and technologies alter and merge our identities. Acknowledging the IBM prediction that mind reading is no longer science fiction and we will soon use computers to see how the brain responds to facial expressions, excitement and concentration levels, and the thoughts of a person without them physically taking any actions; or the realization that ‘most runway models meet the BMI criteria for anorexia’—we confuse and conflate copy and original, fact and artifact, self and other.

Consider the seemingly obvious conclusion of a new multitasking study:

FaceTime, the Apple video-chat application, is not a replacement for real human interaction, especially for children.

According to that recent Stanford University study published in the scientific journal, Developmental Psychology, “Tween girls who spend much of their waking hours switching frantically between YouTube, Facebook, television and text messaging are more likely to develop social problems.” Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor of communications who worked on the study, explains: “No one had ever looked at this, which really shocked us. Kids have to learn about emotion, and the way they do that, really, is by paying attention to other people. They have to really look them in the eye.”

Really look them in the eye? That is the thin young boy’s dilemma, as it is ours.

Increasingly the eye is a surrogate, a screen, a simulation whose ‘reality’ is a merger of what we know and what appears cognate with what we know, but is a world apart. Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor said that our views of cancer and AIDS were actually entwined with and surrogates for our world views. The same may be said for search and recognition, two conjoined factors in our current world view. These two halves of a burgeoning dynamic are not external to a deeper understanding of the human condition in the digital age—they are fundamental to it.

Looking into eachothers eyes, Fedra79, Flickr, all rights reserved.

THE I CHING OF A BILLION LIVES

Search is now the I Ching of a billion lives. Google performs 34,000 searches per second, 2 million per minute; 121 million per hour; 3 billion per day; 88 billion per month (figures rounded). Those figures don’t include the lesser but still impressive numbers from Yahoo (3,200 searches per second) and Bing (927 searches per second). As we are searching, our very movements search us; our secrets are someone else’s business plan. DARPA is now soliciting proposals for biometric research with the intent of developing software-based systems that identify users based on movements or habits while they use their computers or laptops. They’re looking for innovative ways to identify a user by collecting behavior metrics, or what DARPA calls “cognitive fingerprints” or “human secrets.” The fingerprint could include eye movement, keystrokes, mouse tracking or even language usage patterns. While there are plenty of solid reasons to view these stealth search and recognition endeavors as a cause for alarm, as John Battelle writes in his excellent Search Blog something else is going on here:

”Our tools have not caught up with our brains, and vice versa. We have shaped technology, and now it is shaping us – sure – but we can keep shaping it till we get the feedback loop right. So far, we simply have not – the music ain’t flowing, so to speak. In our relationship to what Kevin Kelly calls the technium, we’re awkward pre-teens.”

As awkward pre-teens our restless searching may be part of a larger pattern of growth and understanding. The echoes of the word search are fascinating: from L. circare “go about, wander, traverse,” from circus “circle”, search neatly expresses our wandering ways as navigators through the digital circus that surrounds us from cloud computing, cyber-warfare, photonics and the reputation economy to biometric sensors, telematics, eyewear and skin-embedded screens. Wandering and searching, as teens do, we seek recognition, itself meaning “to acknowledge, know again, examine.” This re-cognition or knowing again is a deeper exercise than we realize. Our tools are changing this knowing again, deconstructing it. Where recognition once meant acknowledging, reaffirming, it now has an opposite meaning: we are now fully suspicious, certain that trust of the the other is a false positive, reconfirming whether we have ever seen this before.

In fact, we have not.

We are doing to ourselves what our software has done to our world: we are making ourselves miscellaneous. Our deconstructed selves, our fingerprints and retinas and saliva and gait are just the beginning. Soon not only will will sensors be able to track matching fingerprints and faces, but they’ll correlate them with heartbeats and bodily movements to make sure that everything checks out. We are already re-cognizing ourselves as a miscellany of facial characteristics and expressions, gait, voice patterns, behavioral patterns, linking and tracking patterns, and pure data. We already have the beginnings of social surrogacy. With fear in our hearts we ask: will identity itself devolve to surrogacy? Once highly sophisticated tools define us by our unique (and ever so deconstructed) characteristics, will we begin, as we have done with all our other tools, to think in the logic of the deconstruction, in the logic of the data-mining tool? We will accept the logic of surrogacy?

Today we are still waking up, touching the screen to try to understand it, sensing that this merger of faces, one turning into the other, one identity merging with the other, is telling us something important. But what?

Identity_6338, kayotepeyote, Flickr, all rights reserved.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

What we are coming to realize is the truth of the commonplace, “when you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.” Or as Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future, said after a 10-year study by the Center incorporating more than 100 major issues involved in the impact of online technology in the United States:

We believe that America is at a major digital turning point. Simply, we find tremendous benefits in online technology, but we also pay a personal price for those benefits. The question is: how high a price are we willing to pay?

As we use tools they define and refine our view of whatever we use the tool to enable. Doing so, we adapt to the logic and grammar of the tool. This adaptation changes us. The change in our lives is what I call a Metalife. What is important here is not that we alter our lives in response to our tools: we are adaptive creatures whose evolution has depended upon—and thrived because of—that very adaptability. What is important is not the pattern but the recognition of that pattern.

We must gain a greater understanding of our response to form.

Here ancient wisdom traditions can guide us. The Buddhist paradox “form is emptiness; emptiness is form” or Philippians’ “peace … which passeth all understanding” invite us to consider the formless as the background to form:

“Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” (Rumi)

However, as we create ever more intriguing objects—an entire Internet of things—form seduces us handily. Of course, we are biological marvels of pattern recognition; we now measure our recognition in nanoseconds as we use Xbox Kinect or play a myriad of games that prepare us to fly airplanes or go into combat. But in our growing facility with pattern recognition and form manipulation we must pay greater attention to recognition itself. We do so by embracing the formlessness that is the context, the landscape, the very oxygen that our forms breathe. Most of us are blind to the pattern of the pattern: namely that we continuously, religiously, adapt to our forms and then, quantocius quantotius, reorder our world.

The question becomes how do we see ourselves, watch ourselves, understand ourselves while we are otherwise engaged? (For this reason I have said that Metalife is the life we live while we’re busy doing something else.) Now as we rapidly change our lives and what we value in response to ubiquitous tools, we encounter an imperative: we must come to know the formlessness that is the base of our constructions in order to truly understand our relation to form, to fully recognize the pattern we’ve been searching for so long.

Bodhisattvas, h.koppdelaney, Flickr, some rights reserved, Creative Commons license.

Note: In Buddhism, a bodhisattva (Sanskrit: बोधिसत्त्व bodhisattva; Pali: बोधिसत्त bodhisatta) is either an enlightened (bodhi) existence (sattva) or an enlightenment-being.

MORE INFORMATION

Biometrics in Argentina: Mass Surveillance as a State Policy

Face Recognition

In the future, can you remain anonymous?

John Battelle’s Search Blog

Jonathan Franzen Continues to Hate Technology

Private Snoops Find GPS Trail Legal to Follow

Tracking, Sniffing & Fingerprinting: The Metalife of Identity

Use an iPhone? Yup, The Government Tracks That

Who Owns Your Personal History?

From Galen’s early explorations of human anatomy to the Blakeslees’ recent survey of body maps, humans have steadily wondered where the body ends and the world begins. In our own neatly skinned consciousness capsule, we travel embodied through time and space. Pathology—witness Oliver Sacks’ patient who didn’t recognize his clothes or even his own face and sang through eating and getting dressed in order to navigate the simplest routines—can make the body a stranger. But perhaps stranger still is that now our extrasensory expeditions are taking us, as e.e. cummings framed it, somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond.

Curves 3, Flickr, some rights reserved by eightprime, creative commons license.

When we populate virtual realms with our thoughts and expressions, as embodied beings we enter those realms in ways we hardly intended.

“In real-life interaction people’s body images and schemas are relatively stable. But with virtual reality your body schema and image, which are integral to how your see yourself and treat others, are as flexible as your wardrobe. Results from [Jeremy Bailenson’s] studies may impact how people end up using virtual reality as more and more social and business interactions migrate into shared virtual environments.”

Google is a kind of statistical marker of just how far we have come, and how much time we spend as virtual entities in emergent body-less digital environments: Google receives 1 billion unique visitors per month who spend a total of 200 billion minutes per month on its sites (that’s 200 minutes per visitor a month).

From: BusinessMBA.org

Once we acknowledge how much this is changing us, there is a tendency (rapidly becoming a cottage industry) to head straight to hand-wringing without passing GO. While there are plenty of reasons to stay wide awake as we filter our actions through ever more gadgets (Sherry Turkle: texting without breaking eye-contact “… is becoming a new, highly valued social skill”), something else is going on here. Our bodily awareness is simultaneously shrinking and expanding. Consider the woman in the mall parking lot on her iPhone standing in front of your car: she is oblivious to her imminent danger or to the fact that you are frozen in her chaotic pattern of zig and zag as she stumbles through her thumb-texted conversation. Obviously here we are witnessing a shrinking awareness of body in favor of gadget fixation.

But the coin has another side. In expanding our bodily transport—which may entail bodily unawareness—to be remotely present with another not here but in a distant there, our proprioception alters, just as Derrick de Kerckhove predicted. In Neuromancer, William Gibson described it as jacking in [to] … “a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix.” And as this gadgeted connectivity takes us out of ourselves, out of our present into the ether of digital realms, we hear echoes of McLuhan who told us that the inevitable dynamic of all media is to alter our sense ratios.

Of course, as the Blakeslees remind us, “in real life there is no such thing as a disembodied consciousness.” But what about a re-embodied consciousness as we focus in a body-absent way on body-absent things? This change of focus brings with it changed levels of awareness (not to mention feelings of insecurity and loneliness).

Oya yubi sedai is Japanese for thumb tribe. We're joining the tribe at ever earlier ages. Flickr, some rights reserved by cesarastudillo, creative commons license.

We now have a new sense of where our body is or is not, even how we understand our body in relation to other bodies. Current debates surrounding the effects of porn and fashion imagery, each having spawned sub-industries of warping bodies to match images and altering the images themselves, revolve around a new body, the Metalife body—a reverberation between real life and an ersatz reality. Fascinatingly one label for our creation of this Metalife body is re-touching, as though the original ‘touch’ of our eyes over a given body was insufficient. There is also an echo of the sensuous here, the idealized sexual drama that has played out in Western human representation in the arts since the Greeks, including Michelangelo, Rodin, Henry Moore, and many others.

NEW BODY MAPS?

What sort of body are we in when we seemingly are so unaware of our actual flesh and bone, the heavy bear that goes with us? I believe the body in question here, though we may not be aware of it, is a revisiting of what philosophers and mystics have labeled the astral body, but some scientists today call the emotional body. We are discovering this body as we go somewhere we have never traveled, using emerging body maps that began in the brain just like the “numerous, flexible, morphable body maps” in our brains that tell us our me-ness and help us navigate through our world.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, founding executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, and founder and former director of its world-renowned Stress Reduction Clinic, explains in his seminal work, Wherever You Go, There You Are:

Each region of the physical body has its counterpart in an emotional body or map which carries a deeper meaning for us, often completely below our level of awareness. In order to continue growing, we need to continuously activate, listen to, and learn from our emotional body.

Body map portrait using cut discarded maps by artist Nikki Rosato.** All rights reserved, Nikki Rosato.

Your metaphorical heart is as ‘real’ as the one that pulses at sixty beats a minute; your sight also includes insight. Writing in 1994, Kabat-Zinn said “the importance of the development of the emotional body is hardly recognized today.” But I would suggest that in our inadvertent travels outside the borders of our immediate here, as we project ourselves into an undefined there, we are encountering Kabat-Zinn’s emotional body unawares. Even though we have yet to recognize or define it, in this situation we need new ways of understanding ourselves as we compromise our mindfulness by adjusting wholeheartedly (pun intended) to the the logic of our gadgets.

Because we cannot truly be dis-embodied, the heavy bear that goes with us when we jack into cyberspace is not heavy at all in a physical sense; it is the emotional body, the body of emotions that is us from hair to toe.

We are encountering it in a completely new context and we now need new maps to help us understand an aspect of our identity that we have for too long ignored. In this process that is at times strange and difficult, we have the potential to re-discover our bodies, ourselves. And that could be exhilarating.

** Of her work, Ms. Rosato says: “Our physical bodies are beautiful structures full of detail, and they hold the stories that haunt and mold our lives. The lines on a road map are beautifully similar to the lines that cover the surface of the human body. In my most recent work involving maps, as I remove the landmasses from the silhouetted individuals I am further removing the figure’s identity, and what remains is a delicate skin-like structure. Through this process, specific individuals become ambiguous and hauntingly ghost-like, similar to the memories they represent.”

We’ve misplaced our nouns. Our persons, places and things used to be here somewhere, but now they are somewhere else. Persons, aka friends, are not here. The lights from our gadgets beckon, we’re skin-hungry and still they’re out there somewhere, at the end of a text or swimming in our Facebook stream. Places like bookstores, once here, are now booted to a virtual there, accessible easily from millions, even billions, of devices but these are not the place—they are access to the place. And things! We now have an Internet of things, a horn of plenty of stuff that is connected to other stuff. Most of that stuff isn’t here either.

I am not particularly bothered that, as David Weinberger told us, everything is miscellaneous. The parceling of all sorts of sortables from books to bicycles into bits by the billions is changing the world in untold peachy ways. No, I am unsettled by something more basic. In the dash to digital dazzle, something odd happened. We left open the door to the future and here got up and left.

Here doesn’t live here anymore. Here is derived from Old English her “in this place, where one puts himself.” So what happens when you are not actually in this place where you put yourself?

What happens is that as here goes there, you can lose your place.

Here ... Flickr, Bhamgal, all rights reserved.

THE HERENESS OF YOU

It’s not the pale moon that excites me
That thrills and delights me, oh no
It’s just the here-ness of you

In Winifred Gallagher’s excellent study of how our surroundings shape our thoughts, emotions and actions, The Power of Place, she reminds us that our sense of place begins in the womb:

“The unique feature of our first place is, of course, that it is also a person.”

She goes on to say:

“Like our intimate social bonds, particularly the first, our relationship with the larger world is built from countless sensory interactions between us and our settings. In a very real sense, the places in our lives get ‘under our skin’ and influence our behavior in ways that we don’t often suspect.”

As highly social animals, we experience a person-ness of place, which entails sharing where we are with someone who is in here with us. But today we outsource the sharing. Shortly after the primal scream, as infants leave wombworld they are greeted by the gynecologist, the scrub nurses—and an iPhone:

“It’s the beginning of an important shift, as parents increasingly are handing their iPhones to their 1 ½-year-old kid as a shut-up toy. And parents who check their e-mail three times on the way to the bus stop are constantly modeling that behavior, so it’s only natural the kids want to use mobile devices too.”

Ezra-Leapster, Flickr, JeremyOK, some rights reserved.

We are learning earlier than ever that there-ness is an acceptable surrogate for here-ness. Ram Dass famously said Be Here Now. He didn’t go on much about there. There was where he thought we shouldn’t be if we are here because if we are here and we somehow believe we are there, or we want to be there when we are here, then we are certainly not here. We may not be there either, we may be off on a tweener mental tangent (somewhere between here and there) or lost in reverie or merely deluded. But we are not here.

“The concern that we have is [screens are] distracting to the parent, so the parent is talking less to the child, there’s less parent-child conversation, which is important for language development,” said Dr. Ari Brown, lead author of the AAP’s revised guidelines on toddlers and TV. “And it’s also distracting for the child.”

Here-ness has the quality of what we might call sacred acknowledgement, also called mindfulness or presence. Researchers say distracted infants and toddlers (not to mention more than a few adults) are more likely to abandon an activity quickly which may affect their ability to learn to organize information and make decisions “when they’re not having the experience of being really focused on the activity that’s at hand,” according to Brown.

Today 40% of people who own smartphones use them while watching TV. So are we here or there? As we increasingly move our lives to digital environments, or move more of our engagements to virtual stages and spaces, being here becomes problematic. This is a core Metalife dilemma. Are my friends on Facebook here? How here is my lover or good friend when I’m trying to text him? Or when I receive a text from her? When I’m an avatar? A Telepresence in the operating room?

Monash University medical students using Cisco TelePresence system, Flickr, Cisco Pics, all rights reserved.

THE POWER OF PLACE

Yet finding our place is problematic not only because we are absent here.

Place-as-prison has driven many a teenager to commit suicide, has made others feel their lives were lived in ‘quiet desperation’ or goaded them to give up hope. Viktor Frankl famously addressed this issue from the hellish confines of a concentration camp where he discovered the marvelous realization of a space or place of freedom between any situation and our view of the situation.

Today our lives and Metalives are encountering the power of place anew. The physicalness of our places is counteracted by the nimble navigability of our tools that seamlessly project us into a virtual resemblance to places we know. While “painted cakes do not satisfy hunger” as the Zen saying goes, we enter (jack into) a Second Life easily enough, revealing that place may not be as fixed as we think. That’s a good thing if you’re feeling stuck. But it might also be bad if you are lonely, thinking your friends are in a certain (virtual) place and you cannot find them or they somehow let you down by not being here, available, present with you.

Virtual reality is challenging our notion of here and there on a number of fronts. It used to be that we all agreed on a place-based reality. We worked in a field or in a factory. We drove down a paved street and worked in an office made of concrete and steel; now a new study reveals that telecommuting is disorienting to workers and may make life more stressful for parents than if they moved the here of home back to the there of the office.

Previously If we went to war, we fought by land, sea or air. Not any more. From the military personnel learning to fly wartime aircraft in virtual simulations or receiving augmented reality therapy (ART) for PTSDs, to people who ‘live’ in augmented reality maps to show us what’s happening in a remote location, reality is changing faster than we realize—and here is no longer here.

Nor is it any longer ours. It now takes a mere 10 digits of information to label uniquely each human being on the planet, according to Dr Ari Juels, the chief scientist of security vendor, RSA. We leave tell-tale snippets on websites that can pinpoint our geographical location, tell what kind of computer and browsers we are using, or carry things in our handbag that act like mini-tracking devices. Small wireless microchips, RFID tags, are in car keys, credit cards, passports, building entrance badges, and transit passes. They emit unique serial numbers that can be traced back to us, so our there-ness now has a here-ness in someone else’s hands. In fact, the very bacteria on our hands can be used in forensic identification, in the same way as DNA. Researchers have discovered that the “communities” of bacteria living on a person’s skin are different for each individual.

Or consider the increasingly ubiquitous gaming places. Economist Edward Castronova wrote:

“We are witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments.”

Today in business-related and gaming settings humans are both here and there, entering virtual worlds as avatars, surrogates of themselves. As the Harvard Business Review reported, “employees at American companies like IBM, Accenture, Cisco, State Farm, Intel, BP and Wells Fargo log into virtual worlds and use avatars to brainstorm with colleagues, recruit employees, sell to customers, attend leadership training, manage programs, direct operation centers, and collaborate with company groups around the world.” While these seem like useful and practical endeavors, beneath the surface of business-as-usual, the here-ness and there-ness of human interaction changes when people interact with digital rather than physical versions of each other. According to Jeremy Bailenson who studies how human interaction changes when people interact with avatars:

Watching “their” avatar eat, human subjects “reported feeling sick, feeling full, really changing their physiology…. If it looks real and it feels real and it smells real, the brain tells us it’s real.”

So, is the virtual there as real as the here where I am?

As one gamer I interviewed admitted to me, speaking of a new gaming rig: “this effectively eliminates the line between video games and real life.”

And that brings us full circle to the question of whether we are losing our place. A central Metalife question looms: where is here, anyway? And am I losing my place in this toggle between the there-ness of digital worlds and my here-ness, whatever that may be?

These are not abstract or fanciful questions. As the Zen masters would say, our true self is neither here nor there. But that may be of little comfort for those of us feeling somehow out of place.

You Are Here - MSCED 19/02, Flickr, Seven_Hundred, all rights reserved.

There is a new logic afoot. It is a meme of staggering proportions that capitalizes on using the endless minutiae of everyday life to inform and enlighten us. From DailyBurn, a web site where you can track your body information (weight, body fat percentage), including workouts, nutrition, and challenges; to Sleep Cycle, an iPhone alarm clock app that analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you when you are in the lightest sleep phase, the quantified self holds a compelling promise: to know yourself, quantify yourself.

Also called self-hacking, advocates like Tim Ferris and Kevin Kelly assert that data about a broad array of quantifiable activities becomes meaning. We know it is meaningful because actionable insight leads to a wealth of enhancements: viewing myself as data I can change, improve, grow, learn, evolve.

This is Metalife as a torrent of numbers, self as a merry quant. We should not take this assertion lightly. It is both highly useful and remarkably seductive. Information has become identity. It is also a new way of seeing ourselves in a world eye-ball deep in tool-accumulated data.

Measured and Fragmented Portrait of a Lady, Flickr, Enrique Castrejon, all rights reserved.

Here is Larry Smarr’s story of how he changed his health by monitoring his blood chemistry:

Realizing the efficacy of quantifying my weight, what I eat and drink, my exercise, and my sleep, I started quantifying my blood chemicals. I began to see the blood as a “window” into the well-being of many of my organs … a pinprick of blood reads out the state of 50 key chemicals in 50 organs (2,500 markers); in today’s world, however, I must have 3 to 12 vials of blood drawn to get the approximately 60 markers I track. I have blood test four to eight times per year and keep a spreadsheet with all the values…. [Now] I routinely use food and supplements to “tune my numbers” to more optimal levels. For instance, when blood tests showed that my vitamin D had dropped to 30, I took vitamin D3 supplements till my tests showed it had come back up to 50. I must say I am not nearly as comprehensive as Ray Kurzweil (who takes 250 supplements a day), but I do believe that my program has greatly improved my health over what just eating well and exercise had done.

[Larry Smarr, Quantified Health: Towards Digitally Enabled Genomic Medicine: A 10-Year Detective Story of Quantifying My Body]

Adriana Lukas, self-hacker and founder of the London Quantified Self group asserts: It’s not about the data, but about how we change, tweak and hack ourselves based on the findings of that data. But surely that is incomplete. Self-hacking is data as a useful mirror or surrogate to be sure; but it is also a way of funneling perception through the data, asking perception to adopt the logic of the data and data-gathering tools. In this regard, the quantified self is another in a lengthening line of Metalife incarnations that create a version of us that starts to define (and occasionally delimit) us. Said differently, this self-knowledge is insufficient without a meta level; we need to broaden our narrower intent to know ourselves by the numbers and include the Metalife process of knowing ourselves as we bend our perceptions and behaviors to our tools.

KNOW, KNOW, A THOUSAND TIMES KNOW

Footsteps, sweat, caffeine, memories, stress, even sex and dating habits—it can all be calculated and scored like a baseball batting average. And if there isn’t already an app or a device for tracking it, one will probably appear in the next few years.
April Dembosky, FT Magazine

“Know thyself” was inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Now that knowledge is inscribed in an app. Gary Wolf, arguably the originator of the quantified self, calls this “a new culture of personal data.” The reason for the rise of this culture, says Wolf, is obvious:

New tools … made self-tracking easier. In the past, the methods of quantitative assessment were laborious and arcane. You had to take measurements manually and record them in a log; you had to enter data into spreadsheets and perform operations using unfriendly software; you had to build graphs to tease understanding out of the numbers. Now much of the data-gathering can be automated, and the record-keeping and analysis can be delegated to a host of simple Web apps.

Tweet What You Eat is a Twitter-based food diary that lets you broadcast, in real time, everything you eat and how many calories you’ve ingested. Literary agent Rachel Gardner tells her wannabe authors, “It’s all about the numbers,” saying that publishers are focused on your Klout score, Twitter followers and page views as much as (or more than) your prose. We are witnessing a wholesale embrace of data empowered to tell us not only what to do, but what we are worth—in the eyes of the world and in our own self-evaluations.

The issue here, as it always is when a new tool provides another way of looking at the world, is wholeness—sometimes referred to as whole systems thinking. Using a digital scale to measure weight and body mass, logging calories and carbs, collecting and correlating data on bodily inputs and outputs, self-knowledge takes on the mantra of computing:

“One cannot change or control that which one cannot measure.”

While true at one level, say when trying to lose weight or log more miles training for a 40k, is it true at all levels? Especially at the higher and deeper levels, whatever that may mean to each of us? And how likely is it that we will fully embrace the logic of measurement when applied not only to external events and milestones in our lives, but when applied to our lives themselves?

Robert P. Crease, a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University and the author of “World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement,” writing in the New York Times describes two different ways of measuring: outer (ontic) things and, the more complex inner (ontological) things, and our tendency to confuse the two:

Confusing the two ways of measuring seems to be a characteristic of modern life. As the modern world has perfected its ontic measures, our ability to measure ourselves ontologically seems to have diminished. We look away from what we are measuring, and why we are measuring, and fixate on the measuring itself. We are tempted to seek all meaning in ontic measuring — and it’s no surprise that this ultimately leaves us disappointed and frustrated, drowned in carefully calibrated details.

INFORMATION IS CHEAP, MEANING IS EXPENSIVE

For the last five years EMC and IDC have collaborated on the Digital Universe study. This year (2011) they forecast that we will generate and consume 1.8 zettabytes of information as a society. That’s up from an estimated 1.3 zettabytes in 2010, with 35 zettabytes forecasted by the end of this decade. According to EMC and IDC, astonishingly enough, the rate of information growth appears to be exceeding Moore’s Law.

EMC, 2001 IDC Digital Universe, Chuck's Blog, all rights reserved.

We love logistics, the UPS ads intone. And now a two-minute Google Ad, “Search On”, tells the story of a music teacher who used Google to quantify baseball stats in order to pitch a perfect game in the 2K Sports Major League Baseball game (MLB2K11) and win $1 million:

Madison Avenue is paving the way for Main Street acceptance of the new order. But things are not so simple. It is not only that we are running headlong into E.O. Wilson’s aphorism, “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.” We are facing a new day. Now we must continually ask ourselves—and create new ways of understanding as we ask ourselves—how much wisdom is inherent in all this information?

In a recent interview with The European, George Dyson,a historian of science with a special focus on the internet and artificial intelligence, said:

We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives.

Quantifying the self, we extract that meaning with new tools and apps. The merry quant mantra is that meaning comes through the data, it is there in the data waiting for us to uncover it. While that is true at one level, there are other levels. The Metalife meaning is that we are altering our identity and focus as we adapt to the data. This is what we have done with every new tool and technology since the advent of alphabets; we would be wise to bet on it happening again here. Moreover, as Dyson goes on to say, today we are in a very new place where different dynamics are present:

The degree and the speed of change are so large that they really have the potential to usher in something that is very different from anything that had been before. That’s what Barricelli saw in 1953 with the first computers, that evolution would never be the same again.

Again, the brilliant Castrejon. Measured & Fragmented: Portrait of a Lady Drawing, Flickr, Enrique Castrejon, all rights reserved.

Quantifying the self seen in this light is a search for enlightenment in the face of massive change. Yet it is also a search that has gone on for thousands of years before we had more wireless devices than humans and is particularly well documented in the Zen tradition. In Zen the self is suspect, considered a figment of the ceaseless striving of the ego and mind. Striving to quantify that figment, we are suddenly confronted by the dubious wisdom of trying to measure the unmeasurable:

“Everything comes out of emptiness. One whole river or one whole mind is emptiness.”

The wisdom we require is the ability to know that which we can measure and that which we cannot; to respect them both and not to confuse them.
In this new place at which we have arrived, what matters is that we realize quantifying and whole systems thinking are equally necessary even if their coexistence is arduous, the measuring ultimately inexact.

MORE INFORMATION

Counting Down to the Era of the Quantified Self

Do we need a line between big data and big brother?

Invasion of the Body Hackers

Is more real-time information a dream or a nightmare?

Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365

Measurement and Its Discontents

Quantified Self, Self Knowledge Through Numbers

Self-hackers blaze a trail in personal informatics

The Quantified Self: You Are Your Data

The first post on this topic was entitled The Blind Men and the Elephant Stampede. Next: Why information and religion have a common root and how the big data dynamics of mining, analytics, finding patterns, and finding-as-learning are the key dynamics of flow. Taken together this tool set of flow is a new grammar of understanding and ultimately, a new worldview.

While Kozlow’s firm focuses on fixed income trading as well as a variety of other tradable derivatives, the derivative we’re most interested in here is the Metalife of online identity and data that makes hacking both possible and exceptionally lucrative. You may be surprised to learn how easy it is to impersonate you; you may also want to think about actively managing and protecting this new shadow self, your Metalife, that is now increasingly attractive to men in hats.

Hacker, Flickr, kenneth_rougeau, all rights reserved.

METALIFE: What is your exact ethical hacker title?

KOZLOW: I am actually an IT administrator for a securities trading firm. We can go ahead and use the designation for a Certified Ethical Hacker, CEH.

METALIFE: So there is actually a certification for a hacker?

KOZLOW: That’s correct. And the EC-Council is the organization that will certify someone who wants to become a Certified Ethical Hacker.

METALIFE: For most people this is going to be an eye-opener. Namely, that there is an entity called an ethical hacker as opposed to just a hacker. So what is an ethical hacker?

KOZLOW: It’s known in the business as a white hat, as opposed to the black hat worn by people like Kevin Mitnick or the folks in Anonymous. The official definition of an ethical hacker is basically an IT professional who has some special set of skills and carries some tools and uses those skills and tools to do penetration testing with authorization from the company or the customer. The ethical hacker assists organizations with internal auditing in order to align certain resources.

Anonymous (TypeFace), Flickr, kenneth_rougeau, all rights reserved.

METALIFE: As I understand it, ethical hacking is a term coined by IBM meant to imply a broader category than just penetration testing. But let me stop you there. What exactly is a penetration test and what does penetration testing do?

KOZLOW: A penetration test (sometimes called a pentest) is a method of evaluating the security of a computer system or network by simulating an attack from malicious outsiders (that is, people who do not have any authorized means of accessing the organization’s systems) and malicious insiders (that is, people who have some level of authorized access). There are different ways to do a penetration test.

An external penetration test is when you have resources that are exposed to the Internet, and that would be your web server, your email server, maybe a way for your users to connect remotely, you have a website—your website is public so anyone can get to it. So when you do a penetration test you will try to find vulnerabilities, holes in the system, maybe whoever is managing your system left some ports open that shouldn’t be open, maybe the system is running services that it shouldn’t be running; they are now infected or maybe you’re running old codes on your website which is something that happens all the time. For example, suppose you’re running Microsoft Windows 95 today or Windows 98. Well, Microsoft is not supporting those, there are no patches anymore. So you can imagine that companies may replace their computers—they’re no longer running Windows 95 or 98—but they forget about their website, running very old HTML code or it could be something else that is not supported. Well, this is a hacker’s goldmine. A lot of the wrong people know about this and try to hack in. So we give the customer information about what they should be doing to prevent attacks.

An internal penetration test is simulating a user within your company. You test many of the same things but internally. In fact, internal hacking is a lot easier because once you’re in there are so many things you can find. This is especially true because these users have local administrative rights on their own computers so it’s easier to find vulnerabilities.

METALIFE: So part of what you’re doing is like a shipyard fixing holes in a seagoing vessel. You’re trying to find all the holes and patch them up. Is that right?

KOZLOW: That is correct.

METALIFE: What if someone didn’t know about ethical hacking, what would they do? How would anyone find an ethical hacker?

KOZLOW: It’s actually quite simple. With any browser you can just type in ‘ethical hacker‘ and you’ll see there is considerable training available, for example with the company I mentioned earlier, the EC-Council. It’s kind of scary actually because without any experience anyone can learn how to use all these tools and learn all these techniques. And not only the tools and techniques. Hackers become expert at social engineering. That is, they can find and talk to someone, become almost a friend to that person, and you’d surprised at all the information the person will release. Probably a lot of the hackers today start playing with tools and they realize how easy that is and then they take hacking to the next level.

Social Engineering, Flickr, karl151k, all rights reserved.

METALIFE: So they are like amateur IT people who have more than a passing interest in computer systems and then they develop their skills and get really good at it and they take their show on the road to find some really powerful target. Is that correct?

KOZLOW: That’s right. Drawing the fine line is getting harder every day. Even to the point where, let’s say, some so-called ‘ordinary person’ encounters a Windows system and then he or she gets a prompt to log in and thinks, “Let me try this password, try that password … OK I’m in.” The rush starts. Then maybe the person tries different combinations just for fun thinking, “Oh that’s cool.” At this point the person is trying to break the code or at another turn he’s lying just to try to get some information—well, that’s a hacker right there. You may think it’s somehow valid because you’re trying to get some information from somebody else and you’re social engineering (telling lies) in order to get what you want. But make no mistake. At that point you’re a hacker. So given whatever ends people may have, the means are easy: these tools are readily available and it’s not hard to learn these techniques.

METALIFE: So what would you describe as the mission and work of an ethical hacker? Isn’t protection at the heart of what you do?

KOZLOW: Well, protection and education. In my opinion many of the vulnerabilities we find are due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes you have a company that segregates roles within the IT department. So you have the web developers who take care of the website; you have a group of people who take care of the software or the server. And sometimes these people don’t talk to each other. The person doing the website design doesn’t have the security background to protect the code. As long as the HTML code is working properly, there are no problems. But when they open it to the outside and it has all kinds of vulnerabilities or they set up a server with extra ports available or protocols that don’t need to be running—the ethical hacker educates the IT people or even the end user just to be careful when they get an email or how to securely set up the servers or how to make sure the code does not have any holes. And once you find those vulnerabilities, we detail how to close those holes or patch the server. This is the primary mission of an ethical hacker: you use the information you’re finding to do something beneficial with it. And as part of the engagement, the partnership between you and the customer, you will never release the information you find.

METALIFE: Last year, 662 organizations publicly disclosed data breaches, according to the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, a figure that includes real-world theft and accidents as well as cyberintrusions. And the actual number is likely much higher than that, since not all hacking incidents get disclosed. So let’s say someone is reading this who realizes that every now and then on Facebook or with their Yahoo account or maybe a server for their own business—let’s say they realize that someone is hacking into these sites and places. Is this on the rise do you think? Tell us what you’re seeing as an ethical hacker.

Personalising the way visual data is used and created, Flickr, russellarnold, all rights reserved.

KOZLOW: Here’s the key: A lot of hackers are trying to avoid going directly to the companies. They’re trying to go through the users. So today if I want to hack into some entity where many customers interact, say a bank, I can start by finding out about their social lives. So I can go on Twitter or Facebook, so many different sites, where I can go and get an idea of what these people are up to, see their family, their pictures, etc. If I know I want to hack the bank but I’m having trouble actually penetrating the bank, instead I’ll focus on 20-30 users whom I can contact indirectly, using social engineering to find what I need, getting as much information on them as I need. For example suppose I send an email on behalf of somebody else, but I’m not really that person. The receiver can click on it, they can go to a link and I can install a new application on their system and I can monitor what they are doing. Now that brings us to passwords. Many times the password people use for their personal email is the same password they use day-to-day within the company. Or they use the same password on many different websites. Well, at that point I can take that information and try to break into the company through the user, through their personal information. That’s actually the easiest way. Any of the users on your website can just send you an email and make a comment … this is my blog if you want to click on it … and then you click on it and the next thing you know you get some information. You wanted to see the blog, but now there’s something running on your PC that you don’t know is there. And this thing you don’t see can start monitoring what you do, recording your keystrokes and at that point they have you. They know everything you’re doing. They can take that information and do something else with it using the same PC to get into your bank records and do online banking. So when people are being hacked on AOL or on GMail, that is frequently a doorway to hack into a company. In other words, as a black hat I start by going through your email but you don’t even know I’m there. I have your password, I have your information, I can search through your old emails—a lot of people keep pictures, financial information, social security number, all sorts of sensitive information in emails—and now I can do simple searches and find a lot of information about you.

METALIFE: Amazing. If I’m a hacker, and I want to get into the bank, I’m going to go through one of the people who banks with the bank, a customer. And I’m going to find something from that customer, let’s say an email, that I can attach myself to. Is that correct?

KOZLOW: That is correct.

METALIFE: And how exactly, without giving away all the secrets, is that done?

KOZLOW: Take Facebook, that’s the number one social website many people visit. Let’s say I become a ‘friend‘ of yours, you’ve clicked on a phishing link, and I know what your email address is, and you start posting your Facebook information, you’re telling me you’re going to be going out and doing this and that. Then I can go ahead and target you with an email. Say, you mentioned going to a concert. I can send you a discount coupon for the concert, for example. You click on the coupon link—people automatically do things like that without even thinking. And then you wonder how you ever got hacked.

Facebook "Are you on Facebook?", Flickr, JoeMitraglia, all rights reserved.

METALIFE: So when you talk about ‘social engineering‘ you mean that a hacker insinuates his or her way into a social network, gets the person to trust the hacker for a moment with some small thing like a coupon or piece of information. But what the hacker has really done is fake out the user and he or she has information coming back now that can be put to nefarious use in ways the user never dreamed of.

KOZLOW: People come to me and say that their Facebook account has been hacked and now someone is actually trying to attack their bank, that is, get at their banking information. The first thing I tell them is: if I go to your Facebook page and I start looking at everything you have on your Facebook page or associated with your Facebook account, am I going to be able to figure out your user name? And what I hear most often from people is, “Wow, I cannot believe that I have all my information on there.” For example, they have their pets‘ names, their kids‘ names and birthdays, the date and place they were born, I mean they have everything online. See there are tools out there that you can use that quickly discover your keywords and start what is known as a dictionary attack which is to take over your keywords. I already know your email address which for many people is their login ID; then I just find your password (which is often some combination of personal data that is on your Facebook page) and I’m in. They don’t realize they’re putting all their information online on all these websites. See, the question is if I take all the keywords on your sites, everything you have on your sites, am I going to get your password? And you’d be surprised how many people say, “Yes.”

METALIFE: Astonishing. Can you elaborate somewhat on that attack?

KOZLOW: There are a number of ways to execute an attack. One is taking over the user’s keywords. We know from experience that a lot of people might be using first names, or might be using 123456 or the word password as a password. So I can just build a simple dictionary attack and start trying every single password and if your company or your website does not lock the account after so many times, I’ll be trying all kinds of different passwords, as many as I want. You’d be surprised at how frequently the twenty most common passwords are used. By the way, here are the top five: number one is 123456, number two is 12345, three is 123456789, four is password, and five is I love you. I could also be guessing passwords based on information that you have on the site, just try them one after the other. But you’d be surprised: a lot of people keep their passwords on their email! And in their Contacts file they keep all their bank information: serial number, pin number, secret word, a passcode—everything is within the Contacts folder.

Dictionary Attack, Flickr, hortont424, all rights reserved.

METALIFE: A lot of us have heard about various hackers, from LulzSec to Anonymous. Recently Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) spokesman Linton Johnson ran afoul of the hacking group Anonymous’ campaign against the commuter-rail system when Anonymous leaked several compromising photos of Johnson on August 24. The next day personal info of 43,000 Yale students, staff and alumni—including social security numbers—was hacked using Google. Names and Social Security numbers were uncovered on an unprotected File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server. This business of hacking Google, also known as Google dorking, is essentially cybercriminals’ enterprising use of Google’s advanced search functions to find caches of valuable data ripe for the taking. USA Today reported that the hackers used a new Google FTP search function to locate this unsecured server: “With the addition of indexing data that is accessible via FTP, hackers can now identify wide-open FTP sites that may contain sensitive data or can be used to leapfrog to other machines on the company’s internal network,” said Tom Rabaut, RedSeal analyst, [a security firm]. “Also, Google offers the ability to restrict searches to a single domain which will make it easier for hackers to limit their data mining to only target companies.” So what is the difference between that kind of hacking and what we might call ‘everyday hacking’? And then remind us, what is the difference between that and what you do as an ethical hacker?

KOZLOW: Good question. The big difference is that an ethical hacker will never compromise the information. Once the ethical hacker finds the information, he will not release or use that information. There are grades of hackers: the white hat hacker basically works with companies to find vulnerabilities and secure information. And you have the gray hat hackers: some people describe them as being white hat hackers during the day and black hat hackers during the night. They release information: they like to find information and then release it.

METALIFE: So you’re saying the gray hat hackers pretend to be ethical hackers, but they’re not really ethical?

KOZLOW: Yes, that accurately characterizes the gray hat hackers. The big difference with an ethical hacker is that once that information is found, we’re just not going to release it. With some of the gray hat hackers, for example, they may see a Microsoft vulnerability and release it to the public. They may do this because Microsoft didn’t pay them what they wanted as developers so they say, if you don’t pay me what I want, I’m going to release this information.

METALIFE: Is this a kind of extortion? They’re extorting the company to either pay them a certain sum or they will commit a bad deed?

KOZLOW: That’s correct. There are some companies like Google who will pay for those findings. But Microsoft, as far as I know, will not. That’s the big difference. Speaking for white hats, once we find the information we’re not going to post it on some website or take advantage of it.

There always has been a deception, Flickr, dagomatic, www.flickr.com/photos/dagomatic/ all rights reserved.

METALIFE: So why would someone become an ethical hacker? We can guess at this but why did you become one? Why would anyone want to do ethical hacking, and who are some of the people you have done ethical hacking for?

KOZLOW: In my case, I became an ethical hacker because I’m fascinated with security and this enables me to do hacking legally. I can do a lot of security work and I can do hacking and if at the end of the day the FBI comes knocking at the door and sees that I have all these tools, well, I have a reason to have them. If they ask me why am I trying to hack into certain companies, I can say because I have an agreement to do this. Regarding why would anyone want to do ethical hacking? To expose the weaknesses of systems, find vulnerabilities in the current infrastructure, with a view to strengthening them. Of course, you could also join one of these penetration testing companies and do hacking legally.

METALIFE: We’re seeing more of the black hat hackers, often times as part of a plea bargain, leave that world and move over to the world of the white hats, right? Take Kevin Mitnick. He broke into the systems of half a dozen high-profile tech companies. The Feds found him and he served a five-year jail sentence. Then he turns around a becomes a security consultant. What do you think of these black hats becoming white hats?

KOZLOW: My personal opinion is that once you’ve been a black hat, then you go from being a bad guy to being a good guy—well I don’t buy it. Once you’ve gone over to the dark side, I wouldn’t trust you around sensitive information.

METALIFE: Looking at this from an ethical perspective, essentially you don’t trust this conversion, you wouldn’t trust this person with your sensitive data?

KOZLOW: Not at all. Once they do that they could just be playing another game. Of course, companies want to hire these people to expose their systems before real hackers can find the holes that will show up sooner or later. They take a proactive approach: let me find them before the bad guys find them. And you do want to hire people like that to find those holes before somebody else does. Further, it’s very unique to have somebody with those skills, even if he’s not 100% dedicated to doing security. When you have someone with those skills in your company they bring something completely different to the table.

Note: I have used the name Anatoly Kozlow and the details of his life and company to shield this ethical hacker’s actual identity. Despite your best hacking skills, you will not find him, or details about his company, in a Google search.

More Information

Can’t stop the tweet: the peril—and promise—of social networking for IT

Custom Word List Generator or

Find your IP or

Go back in time (Use when Looking for an old website posting)

PDF File Scanner

People Search

Tor Network

Who is by IP

Hasan Elahi, ISEA2011 Istanbul, all rights reserved.

So rather than avoid the watching, he abetted it. Instead of pushing against constant surveillance, he embraced it. He sensed that his perceived necessity could spawn a new art form: the surveillance of his life mounted as a museum without walls. Elahi not only chose willing tracking and scrutiny as a means of verifying and documenting every moment and every day of his life; he began to continuously display that ‘work’ in a digital gallery that functions simultaneously as database and witness.

Source: Tracking Transience: Security & Comfort — a collection of over 400 toilets that I have used while in transit between December 2002 and January 2007 as development work for tracking device ongoing. All rights reserved.

Born in 1972 in Rangpur, Bangladesh, Elahi is a professor of interdisciplinary art. Logging more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences, Elahi has documented and ‘lifecast’ virtually his every waking hour since 2002. He posts copies of each debit card transaction, showing what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device reports his real-time physical location on a map. Apparently the US government, while once mistakenly listing the the Bangladeshi-born artist on its terrorist watch list, has not abandoned watching him. Elahi’s server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

Yet Elahi’s Tracking Transcience: The Orwell Project is more than the perfect alibi. It is a statement of identity in the modern world. In this self-induced Metalife, Elahi chose not only an exercise in artistic expression. His Metalife became a way of being in the world, a survival kit cum Weltanschauung. But especially, Hasan Elahi became a new kind of storyteller.

Throughout the past fifteen years, I have found myself with one foot in art and one in science, and consider my media to be databases and other electronic forms of information. I am intrigued by the way humans interact with this information, and prefer to investigate the acceptance of technology rather than technology itself.

In this new narrative Hasan Elahi is both the story and teller, hero subject and harrowing object, text and ironic commentary. By pushing surveillance to its logical extreme, by enfolding and enhancing its contours he deliberately courts what most of us either ignore or avoid. He forces us to look at the stunning level of detail constant monitoring accumulates, moment by moment, day by day, year by year, location by location.

Source: Tracking Transience: Away — a collection of over 1,200 meals that I have eaten while in transit between September 2003 and January 2007 as development work for tracking device ongoing. All rights reserved.

From plastic plates of packaged sushi to airport urinals and a daily GPS update, complete with red arrow signaling his exact residence du jour hovering over a NASA Terrametrics map powered by Google, Elahi displays his life in what he calls Un/Real Time.

It is in the border between society and technology that I am interested, and my work attempts to bridge the human and virtual worlds…. At the same time, this conjunction of the physical and the virtual parallels my exploration of the intersection of geopolitical conditions and individual circumstances. Both quantitative and qualitative information is incorporated into my work, and the entire process results in translations and mistranslations between the physical and the virtual, between the body politic and the singular citizen.

This translation and mistranslation between the physical and virtual is at the core of Metalife. Elahi’s narrative echoes the shared voyeurism we see, for example, in COLOR—the location-based, photo-sharing app that takes voyeurism to post-Twitter levels by letting users see all of the photos that are being taken by strangers who happen to be within a 150-foot radius of the user’s smartphone. (Peter Pham, COLOR co-founder, described the effect of using the app as a sort of bug-eye experience—one where you’re seeing the world through dozens of lenses at once. “Essentially, everybody is sharing one lens,” said Pham.)

Elahi’s world is increasingly similar to ours. His is not a journey to which we can feign indifference: these are the airports, restaurants and toilets that constitute the transient places of our world; we travel through his checkpoints; his food is what we eat too. And so his presentation back to us, using image capture as reverberating realization, reveals him to be at the center of a panopticon. The watched is watching back. He flaunts what English philosopher Jeremy Bentham described as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Effectively Hasan Elahi is using his life to tell us of a science fiction, an alternate reality so close to our own that we might be tempted to see ourselves in it. Said Elahi, “It’s a bizarre feeling watching the government watch you.”

We know the feeling.

Once we created a lens that could see farther than the human eye, we then created technologies that enhanced the lens’s ability to survey and capture images of each other. Surveillance, and now sousveillance, provide an alternative to the injunctions and narratives of alphabetic culture—narratives that sprang from the preceding nomadic tribal cultures that formed our earliest recorded statement of the way the world is and how we ought to behave in it. Today ‘watching’ and its myriad implications is one of our most powerful narratives.

Consider Predator, an algorithm developed by Zdenek Kalal, a PhD student at the University of Surrey in England. Predator enables a camera to track, and thus allows us to watch, virtually any person or thing. After selecting something for Predator to focus on with a bounding box, the system begins recognizing patterns, learning how that object looks at different distances and angles, and even finding it in a sea of similar objects. When Kalal tells Predator to track his face, it is able to pick him out of a page full of small photos of other people. Uses for the Predator technology include, obviously, security cams and criminal identification. The algorithm can also track animals, stabilize videos by focusing on one object, or even create a makeshift mouse as the system tracks your fingers.

“The future is already here,” William Gibson famously said, “it’s just not evenly distributed.” The world Hasan Elahi presents is already here—we are waiting only for perception to catch up with distribution:

► There are 12,000+ CCTV cameras on the London Underground system monitoring the movements of millions of passengers every day. But apparently these are not enough. Now Tubecrush.net invites commuters to post pictures of strangers they find attractive or eye-catching. (Since subways are public places there are no privacy guarantees.)

► Facial recognition cameras enabling automated, long-range face scanning to entice consumers are now coming on stream. A company in Japan actually put these cameras in sidewalk billboards. When a pedestrian walks by, the camera scans their face, loosely calculates the sex and age of the person, and changes the advertisement on the billboard to target the person’s demographic.

► India and Mexico are both incorporating iris-recognition into their national ID programs and using fingerprints as a secondary ID. Bank of America is also incorporating iris identification into its access control system. While iris recognition hasn’t been adopted widely (due to its expense compared with most other biometrics), it is now available in a mobile app. Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System (acronym MORIS) has a built-in iris scanner and biometrics analysis software. A police officer holds the scanner about 5 or 6 inches away from a suspect and it automatically detects the iris and takes a high-resolution image. Like other iris scanners, the MORIS system identifies 235 distinctive features in each iris. It’s like a fingerprint for the eye, assuming no two are alike. An algorithm is then used to search for a match with the signatures of others in a database.

► MORIS is an offshoot of a technology called IRIS, Inmate Identification and Recognition System. Developed by BI2 Technologies, IRIS was initially used to address the problem of mistaken inmate identity (last year a Rhode Island inmate escaped by assuming the identity of another scheduled for release). More than 320 law-enforcement agencies in 47 states are using IRIS to keep track of their inmates.

► Scientists at UK’s Kingston University are developing CCTV that can automatically monitor criminal behavior and track suspects. This new technology works by teaching a computer to recognize specific types of public behavior, known as “trigger events.” The technology is capable of following a person across multiple cameras. (A delicious Elahi irony: the technology was developed by Dr. Orwell.)

► Nielsen now uses a new metering software for smartphones that tracks app usage by time, and by app (installed, of course, with permission). Tracking user habits this way ensures better accuracy and better detail. Monica Bannan, Nielsen’s VP of Product Leadership for Mobile Media, says Nielsen Smartphone Analytics has “tremendous benefits” compared to tracking data by “recall,” or surveys. Going beyond just app usage, Nielsen can use this software to monitor other habits too: messaging, camera usage, battery and power consumption, and how many times a day, for how long, applications or phone features are used.

► At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researchers from Carnegie Mellon demonstrated that the same facial recognition technology used to tag Facebook photos could be used to identify random people on the street. This facial recognition technology, when combined with geo-location, has the potential to redefine our sense of personal privacy. The Carnegie Mellon researchers demonstrated that a combination of simple technologies—smart phone, webcam and a Facebook account—were enough to identify people after only a three-second visual search. If Hackers can put together a face with your birthday and hometown, they can piece together details like your Social Security Number and bank account information.

► The WASP (Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform) is a spy drone created by two security consultants with about $6,000 and a military surplus FMQ-117B target drone. It flies up to 400 feet above the ground. Also revealed at Black Hat, the capabilities of the clandestine mini-plane are “breathtaking,” according to Wired:

“Personal remote-controlled spy plane, complete with WiFi and hacking tools, such as an IMSI catcher and antenna to spoof a GSM cell tower and intercept calls, as well as a network sniffing tool and a dictionary of 340 million words for brute-forcing network passwords.”

The WASP drone is built from a retired Army target drone and equipped with HD cameras and a "cigarette-pack sized on-board Linux computer" with a 340 million-word dictionary for "brute force guessing of passwords. Source: Security News Daily, all rights reserved.

In light of these and other technologies that rapidly advance our ability to monitor, capture and collate information about almost anyone, Hasan Elahi’s work takes on new meaning. You Are Being Watched, the Web site of the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU Foundation, has predicted:

“Video surveillance technology will only grow more sophisticated. There will come a day when the cameras will be routinely linked with other technologies in an attempt to instantly identify you and me via face recognition, RFIDs, or other technologies.”

That day is already here.

Keeping Watch, Flickr, some rights reserved by erban, Creative Commons license.

Someone is already living that life moment by moment, day by day. He is keeping a record of what it means for all of us. He neither chose to live that life nor chose to avoid living it once the possibility arose. Realizing that he could track himself better than any government surveillance scheme, Elahi affirms self-tracking as a safeguard against disappearing. While he started Tracking Transience to protect himself, protection turned quickly into a declaration: he chose hiding in plain sight in order to escape being hidden away.

In Elahi’s narratives, his living is the telling; the contrails of his existence are the story details. He inspires wonder: Is this what tool-inspired publicy will ask of us all? Must our Metalife document our life to safeguard it, make it real? In his exploratory narrative and multidimensional storytelling Elahi, the modern day Richard Kimble, is the un-handcuffed fugitive whose life and travels present to us locale and character, detail and detritus, from a new world.

It is his world, it also belongs to us. He is telling us about a Metalife. It is a story we are telling ourselves.

More Information

Hasan Elahi is currently Associate Professor of Art at University of Maryland where he is Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity in the Honors College. He was a 2010 Alpert/MacDowell Fellow and in 2009, he was Resident Faculty and Nancy G. MacGrath Endowed Chair at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work is frequently mentioned in the media and has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, CNN, ABC, CBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, Fox, and has appeared on The Colbert Report. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sundance Film Festival, Kassel Kulturbahnhof, The Hermitage, and at the Venice Biennale. Elahi has spoken about his work at the Tate Modern, Einstein Forum, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, and at TEDGlobal. His awards include grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, a Ford Foundation/Phillip Morris National Fellowship, and an artist grant from the Asociacion Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain.

Civilian Art Projects: Tracking Transience

Hasan Elahi, University of Maryland

ISEA 2011 Instanbul, The 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art

“Minority Report” Scanners Are Coming: Company Snags $15 Million For Long-Range Facial Recognition Tech

Schneier on Security: Developments in Facial Recognition

‘Smart’ CCTV could track rioters

The Surveillance Catalog: Where Governments Get Their Tools

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online

ThirdSight

DeAndre Upshaw of iwearyourshirt.com whose mission is to wear shirts that engage people and promote companies.

When clients buy a day on IWYS (all 365 days of 2011 are for sale and you can buy multiple days at a time), that day IWYS pros wear a t-shirt with the client’s name on it. Founded by Jason Sadler, IWYS pricing started at $5 a day and goes up $5 each day from the day the company went live. The t-shirt is just a convenient vehicle, a badge cum booster rocket for the bigger idea. Once you buy your day, that day becomes an event to be watched, an event you effectively both sponsor and engage iwearyourshirt.com to build content for. The five key people of IWYS create content on your day, content that is unique to each client. Five “unique/fun/creative” YouTube videos, five live video shows on Ustream (3 hours of streaming), five to fifteen photos. All content is shared to each of the five individuals’ Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Behind the well-designed website and the monogrammed webcam pitches that make local Toyota dealership spots look timid, IWYS is transmedia storytelling gone Monty Python. Note it is not called buythisshirt.com or thisshirtforsale.com. The I in iwearyourshirt is someone real, someone with real connections, a media personality with a growing, evolving audience. Here we are witnessing the morphing of a cultural artifact, the 30-second commercial, into a social media TED-like mashup where technology, entertainment and design come together in a pitch to the burgeoning and ever more networked digerati.

Having connected on Twitter, I caught up with DeAndre earlier this week to talk about iwearyourshirt, storytelling and what sort of life, or Metalife, he lives when he’s online telling stories for the clients whose shirts he wears. We started our discussion with something at the heart of IWYS, the power of storytelling.

METALIFE: What makes a good story?

UPSHAW: I think that every brand and every company has a story to tell. So when a company comes to iwearyour shirt and buys a day, the first thing I do is try to figure out what their story is. What is the best way I can get their message out to a wide audience using the skills that I have to tell their story? So I think that one of the important things when you’re looking at marketing via social media, when you’re thinking about posting things on Facebook or sending out a few messages on Twitter, is you have to ask how does this play into your company’s story? Because everything that you put out into the world, everything that you put out into the atmosphere is a part of your story. So when people come to iwearyourshirt, they’re looking for us to enhance their story using multimedia, become a part of their story.

METALIFE: Well, that blows your hair back if you think about it for a moment. Most clients still want to tell customers their story, not invite customers to become part of it. Which brings us to our first Metalife question: to what extent are you real for your customers and how do you make yourself real for your customers, when you’re just wearing a shirt with their name on it?

UPSHAW: When you’re a person presenting yourself every single day, it’s impossible to some extent not to be real. It’s impossible not to show who you really are. There are people who have been in my chat who have seen me every single day since January 1st. So my life is intertwined with the companies that I work with. However, it’s sort of like being ‘on’ all the time. It’s an amplified version of myself. What you see when you’re watching a video of me—say the company is quick weight loss pills, a fictional company—obviously I am not taking quick weight loss pills every single day of my life. Because they’re one day, they have paid me for one day to promote their products. The line blurs between I am promoting this company and I am using these pills; but I’m saying: “to the best of my knowledge, they’re a pretty cool organization, they’re a pretty good company.” So the fictionalized version of myself, a singer, a dancer, someone who does goofy things is just an exaggerated version of myself. Obviously I don’t spend a good deal of my life singing randomly. What you see when you look at IWYS is a group of people who are making videos and using themselves to push a product. So when people look at me or Jason, or Angela, Neal or Amber, you’re really seeing for the most part who we are—just an exaggerated persona. Of course, sometimes I’m jumping out of buildings—obviously that doesn’t happen to me in real life but as far as our personas and what we present to the world, that’s all us.

METALIFE: And to some extent the ‘realness’ of you is what you’re selling, isn’t it?

UPSHAW: Right. We’re selling ourselves because the thing about IWYS is that community is one of the most important aspects of it. Because I am just one person out of millions who makes videos on YouTube. And the thing that takes a video of mine, a video selling something that otherwise people would not care about—quick diet weight loss pills—is that the community around IWYS knows who I am and they know that my personality traits are coming through in the video. So they’ll watch the video for me, they don’t watch the video because of quick diet weight loss pills; they watch because they think that I am interesting digitally or comedically. They know that I will deliver something that will make them smile or make them laugh. And then they’ll move on with their lives.

METALIFE: How did you find and build that community?

UPSHAW: I came into IWYS this year, 2011. Jason had done a lot of the legwork in terms of building it up. We came in and there were people who were utterly devoted to the community. They would show up every day, every single day at the same time, watch five shows, leave comments on videos, and when I say every single day I’m not exaggerating. There are people I have been communicating with every single day since January 1st. Saturday, Sunday, whatever holidays have been since then. So the community that was in place was already a good community. What I’ve been working on this year is building my own community, and through doing that building up IWYS. I’m reaching out to people who at this point haven’t been touched by the IWYS launch, and that starts with my own community, people that I know, people I’ve grown up with, people I’ve gone to college with, people I’ve worked with; I introduce them to iwearyourshirt and by doing that I grow the community.

METALIFE: You were a filmmaker, you were in drama. What brought you to the point where you wanted to be a YouTube star, a YouTube personality?

UPSHAW: I have a degree in journalism and public relations with a concentration in broadcasting and a minor in film and digital media which is a fancy way of saying I can write things and I can film things. When I was a senior in college, I actually won a job competition, becoming the spokesperson of a credit union. A marketing firm that only works with credit unions was trying to raise credit union awareness for young people. And so they did this big search in Texas to find the person who could represent credit unions in Texas. The job entailed doing a YouTube video every week, posting things, going to events. I got a car with a fancy wrap around it, a whole bunch of logos and things on it, and from there it launched my professional career working in video. About 2009 I started making videos for them: it was a one-year contract. Then when I graduated from college I started working with the marketing firms that ran the competition. I did some stuff with them for a year and that’s when I made my first foray into live video. And interestingly enough, the way I found out about IWYS is that the company I worked for purchased a day on iwearyourshirt. Then Jason announced a public search for people to work with them, and I thought it might be kind of cool to branch out.

METALIFE: If I consider what you guys do, it seems to me you take your personal integrity and personal connections—your reputation and network—and loan them to a company for a day. Is that accurate?

UPSHAW: I would say that is accurate. Nobody wants to listen to or watch someone daily who is not interesting. When people look at me, I am someone they want to spend time with or hang out with or get to know better, if that makes sense.

METALIFE: Makes perfect sense.

UPSHAW: So when people look at the people of IWYS, we’re all people you could see yourself having lunch with, or hanging out with. And, yes, the lines between my personal life and professional life online have always been very blurred because my entire professional life I have worked in social media. And so the people who work for iwearyourshirt are indistinguishable from their personal lives, if that makes any sense.

METALIFE: Absolutely. You’re describing Metalife blur. The blur of our personal, online and professional lives is something I write about regularly on Metalifestream. So, yes, you’ve just touched a nerve here. Given that, where do you end and where does IWYS begin? Do you ever wonder about who is who?

UPSHAW: I don’t. I spend a good deal of my life working. As you can imagine, pushing out content every day is not something that you can just brush aside. I don’t have problems like having alter-egos or anything like that. Obviously I am not ‘on’ 24/7. When the camera’s on or when my show is happening, I’m filming, or I’m recording a track to sing, I’d say it’s an exaggerated version of me, which is a true version of me because I don’t change radically for the camera, I just take what I got and amp it up.

METALIFE: Finally, where is storytelling video going? What do you think is working now, what is going to work or what isn’t going to work in the future? Give us your predictions on storytelling and video and how you see them coming together.

UPSHAW: When I sit down to decide to make a video or do something for a client, I try to figure out what the story is. A few days ago we did a big campaign for Jockey, the underwear company. And they just said, ‘Go out on the street …” They have a new line of products and they want people to test them. They wanted us to go out into the street and get feedback from people. And when I got out there we filmed for an hour and a half, we interviewed people, I tried to pick up as much B-roll as possible, and when I came home I crafted a story around that. If you watch the video, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. And I think that there’s a reason that traditional and conventional storytelling has held up for the past thousands of years: stories should begin, they should have some sort of conflict, and then they should end. And I think when people watch video on YouTube or Hulu or they watch on Funny or Die, this process is so ingrained in people’s heads, in order for videos to be successful, aside from your little flash in the pan—people falling down or LOL cats, aside from those videos that go by because people like to see bad things happen to other people—videos that are successful have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even viral campaigns, things that seem to just pop up out of nowhere, have a beginning, a middle and an end. So when they’re watching a video, people want it to follow a format they’re familiar with. There are things on YouTube that I would gladly watch if they were a series. As the legitimacy of YouTube as an outlet for creativity grows, you’ll see it more and more receptive to real stories and real people.

METALIFE: Well, that raises a question about backstory. You are DeAndre Upshaw of IWYS; you’re DeAndre every day and you’re also a new product everyday. As discussed, you’re infusing that product with your authenticity. And to some extent lending the product your backstory, right?

UPSHAW: I would never look at myself as DeAndre iwearyourshirt.com. In the twenty-first century, in 2011 right now I am DeAndre who works at iwearyourshirt.com. And everything I do at IWYS is a part of my story, but it is not my whole story. And I think when a company is setting out to make their mark in social media or make their mark on the world at large, their employees, the people who work for them, need to keep the personal touch. I mean there is no one person who says I am Best Buy, or I am Phillip Morris or I am Johnson and Johnson. When you allow your employees, when you allow the people you work with and allow yourself not to let work strictly define you, things work better. Instead via social media you can say I am this person and this is what I do. I believe people respect you more for that. People respond to people, they don’t respond to organizations. And I know that when I shoot a tweet to Southwest Airlines, Southwest the business is not responding to me. I know there’s not some person named Southwest sitting in a little room responding to me: I know that it’s a person. And so there’s a difference between having a Twitter handle that’s just Southwest and a Twitter handle that’s Becky at Southwest. Because Becky is a person and Becky can respond to the way that I feel and Becky is a human. Becky is a person. People respond to people and that’s the trend of where I think social media is going.

METALIFE: And that’s the really unique thing about you, isn’t it? You’ve given corporate messaging a real face, a live entity; this message is coming from a personality, a person who has something to say. Isn’t that headed towards a new thing?

UPSHAW: There’s a lot of transparency in what we’re doing. Because people who go to iwearyourshirt.com and people who have been watching my videos know that I don’t work for Quick Diet Weight Loss Pills. They don’t pay my bills all the time. They know when I make a video for them that I am the person who is representing them. That’s my backstory and I’m sticking to it.

DeAndre wearing a shirt for Survival Straps.

Most of us give little consideration to the further life of our digital explorations—the messages we text, the files we send, the photos we store. That is, until something that we thought was ‘ours’ becomes evidence of something else.

Douglas Brush is Founder and Chief Forensic Examiner of The Digital Forensic Group in New York City. The company’s mission is to use specialized computer forensic methodologies and tools for the identification, extraction, preservation, analysis and documentation of electronic evidence as it is used in civil and criminal matters. The Digital Forensic Group provides its services to law firms, corporations, government agencies, and individuals. In essence they devise a framework for investigating moments captured on digital devices in order to provide clarity and ultimately a report of what happened.

As we will see, Brush’s work is fundamentally about the unearthing and documenting of a Metalife. This life is a shadow digital existence with our name and footprints all over it.

Digital Forensics grew out of combining forensic science, computer science, and classic investigative methods. During the 1990s when we began to exchange and retain a much greater amount of electronic information, a need arose to recreate events and create a deeper understanding of what was happening when a digital device was used or when there was some kind of digital communication.

Brush explains the layers hidden underneath the keypads on our tools: “These devices tend to be used for something: either an action that can be possibly criminal or in civil circumstances the device can be used for something that is outside of a policy agreement or a contractual agreement. In addition, our devices can also be a witness to something. So while digital evidence can implicate us in these ways, it can also be an alibi to our actions in real life. You might view digital forensics from that aspect as well: a kind of a time marker of what happened.”

Douglas Brush’s work in digital forensics to “recover, preserve and analyze computer data” shows that our Metalife is becoming persistent, ubiquitous, resident on numerous devices as well as in the cloud—and of particular importance—it is no longer solely ours. Our Metalife is now shared: with investigators, authorities, courts, and effectively anyone who can hack into or compel access to it.

 

Douglas Brush, Founder and Chief Forensic Examiner of The Digital Forensic Group in New York City

 

METALIFE: How would you describe a digital forensic investigation and why would you do one?

BRUSH: Digital investigations are done for a variety of reasons. Many times it can be for investigating someone hacking something that they shouldn’t have access to. A digital investigation can also be used to examine if data was exfiltrated or removed from an organization. Many times we will be brought in by corporations to see if a former employee compromised their data.

METALIFE: What was the word you just used … exfiltrated?

BRUSH: Exfiltration is when data is taken from somewhere. It really comes out of criminal and military jargon. But it means when things are taken out in a clandestine manner. When something is removed from an area of control, say you have a hard drive or a network, something like that, and the data is removed without your knowledge.

METALIFE: Got it. So that is when your services might be called for?

BRUSH: Our firm specializes particularly in intellectual property and data theft. Today we’re in the midst of a major paradigm shift: a majority of the information that is either produced, stored or transmitted is electronic, so in civil litigation when companies have a dispute, to resolve the dispute they have to bring forward their best evidence or require or request information or evidence from the other side. Digital forensics provides a method for people to be able to recover this information so it meets a certain legal standard, assuring that it’s acquired and preserved in a way that is defensible and any information that comes out of that retrieval of information can be defended as well.

There are several steps as an investigation goes along. But at each step there’s a way to validate, to get back to the original. In this way there’s always a method of control. We see the need for digital forensics more and more in civil litigation where two big companies, or even two small companies, or it can be a shareholder dispute—where people will say, you know what, I want to know what was said between these two parties or I want to know what documents exist. Digital forensics provides a method for people to be able to get that data in a defensible manner.

Computer Reality, Flickr, Tony (Xiao) Lan, all rights reserved.

METALIFE: So it’s not just the capture or re-capture of the data, it’s the preparation of the data for the court system or for various kinds of litigation?

BRUSH: That is correct. It is about maintaining control. Again many of these electronic pieces of evidence are effectively a witness to something, or recorded action or recorded language. People tend to have a different memory of how things happened and the idea is to be able to provide an authenticated record of what actually happened or what was said or what is stored; digital forensics provides that record. It also makes it defensible. And the core of it is that forensics is able to bring something to court and to bring something to light: a level of transparency and honesty that humans are not always able to have. We tend to want things to be a certain way versus the way that they actually are, and no matter how you want a document to exist on your computer, it is what it is, and when we find it, we provide a framework to authenticate it.

METALIFE: Previously on this blog I described Metalife as … “a synthetic, virtual version of our so-called real life.” I say further that this matters because “your life and Metalife are complementary and soon they will be competitive: one will feed and at the same time challenge the other.” Do you agree with that or have any comment on it?

BRUSH: I do agree. I think I can even see it going one step further to the Ray Kurzweil concept of the singularity. As humans, we tend to grow slowly and evolve slowly over time, whereas technology has an exponential growth. I think there might even be a time in what you call our Metalife when we can say: the online or digital persona that we have will eclipse our actual person or become one and the same. There might even come a point when the two are so blurred that they could be treated as one. And I think it is going to go more in that direction. I mean right now we are probably in the digital personality creation phase, where we try to create something about ourselves online and put our best face on it. But a digital creation can certainly be in conflict with who we are as a person, and there is going to be a time when there is not going to be a difference.

The Tunnel to the Singularity, Flickr, Stuck in Customs, creative commons license.

METALIFE: How do you see digital forensics in light of online identity creation then? These Metalife phenomena that I document are seemingly expanding everywhere we turn. What do you see as likely to happen in digital forensics as we start to create more and more of these Metalife identities, these virtual identities—as our Metalife merges with our so-called physical life. Will digital forensics be something that is built into this new reality do you think?

BRUSH: It’s something that we’re seeing now. Digital forensics is going to play a greater role not just in legal proceedings but also in the ways that we accurately define the moments of our lives in a digital world. Again because of the way that digital forensics methodology and approaches are applied, it will enable a particular kind of clarity because even what we might remember ourselves doing online can be altered or foggy. Our devices create a record and digital forensics provides the way of recovering and authenticating that record.

We use online personalities now as pretext personalities on Facebook, or we’ll use other online identities as investigators to gather intelligence and information about a subject. So creating what you call a Metalife is something that we’re doing right now. We’re able to create Facebook profiles that will allow us to interact with people to get further information that they might not divulge to somebody if he or she were meeting in person. So they have their guard down a bit. Online you can sometimes get real-world information from their online personalities: information they wouldn’t give you in the real world.

METALIFE: What you’re saying is fascinating. You’re looking for information, you see someone or you encounter someone on Facebook and you think … if I were on Facebook as Person X, they might tell me something that they wouldn’t tell me otherwise. Is that correct?

BRUSH: That’s correct.

METALIFE: Talk about the uses of a Metalife! So you invent a persona in order to get that information?

BRUSH: Yes. We’d have either a female or male persona that you might use to enhance gender relations. Let’s say that you’re trying to get information from a male subject within the 18-34 year old range: you might use a female online persona to gain that information.

Identity, Flickr, jecate, all rights reserved.

METALIFE: This is what I call the deliberate creation of a Metalife (as opposed to a Metalife emerging by other means). Do you anticipate that there will come a time, if we’re not already there, when there will be some confusion over these digital identities, over these Metalives that we create? So it may be harder to keep track of them than it is at the present time?

BRUSH: I think so. It’s because of the resident nature of digital computer storage, particularly now online: things are put out there and don’t need a lot of maintenance. We’re seeing this more frequently in what is called Web 2.0 or the cloud. The idea is, you put data centers out there that almost live on their own with very little maintenance. So once you put information in the cloud, you lose some control, you can also forget, and it could become something later where you don’t want to remember what you did.

METALIFE: So we may not remember who we decided to be! Digital forensics as a transparent record is roughly related to the growing practice of Lifecasting. Our recording technologies have loosed an idea virus upon the world. Namely that our lives can and should be recorded in great detail. So now there are lifecasters who record all their waking moments: in their homes, in their offices, with cameras on hats or even a camera implanted in their skull. Do you see this as a growing reality? I hear you saying that we’re headed in the direction of integrating our identities with our tools, is that correct?

BRUSH: Yeah, in a sense. There’s some technology that supports it. You can see that happening in the social media space with things like Twitter and Facebook. People have a very convenient, fast way now to insert moments of their lives into their online data streams whether it be on Facebook or Twitter, all the time, all day. A lot of people are getting into that and there’s certainly this feeling of being compelled to do so, but there’s also a voyeuristic aspect where people want to know what somebody else is doing. I think part of the human condition is being busybodies.

Once again the brilliant John Seven. Identity Chess/Cubic Time, Flickr, brancusi7, all rights reserved.

METALIFE: Yes, we’re not evil because we like to spy on others, we’re just social animals.

BRUSH: Right, not in a negative sense, rather the more information we have, the more powerful it can really be. So the more intel you can gather on somebody it’s an empowering feeling to be able to have that information. And what I find amazing is that so many people are willing to proffer personal information without any kind of filter or understanding that what you are giving to somebody could be used against you.

METALIFE: And what you’re also saying is that this record is accumulating—on our devices, in the cloud—and for somebody like you, a digital forensics examiner, this is a goldmine.

BRUSH: Yes. People really want to have the ability to erase the past. People have regrets. Or they might want to position themselves to gain something without other people having prior knowledge. With forensics we are able to bring a lot of this information to light. One example I can think of is where investigations can be done on people who are claiming that they are hurt and unable to perform a job function. Yet when you go on their Facebook page and they’re skiing or on a trampoline, they’re showing some kind of physical ability to do something that is contrary to what they might be claiming in a legal proceeding. And you know by these actions that they’re trying to get a financial gain when they possibly aren’t entitled to it. So there are these conflicting points of what’s really happening.

METALIFE: At the Digital Forensic Group, you do hard drive analysis. One of the strangest things about a Metalife is that it is yours—it has your name and even your picture associated with it—but in a very real sense it isn’t yours. And for many of us, a hard drive, whether it’s on our phone or on our computers, is the locus, the epicenter you might say, of that quandary. How much of what is on our hard drives is actually ours?

BRUSH: In a sense, it is under our custody. We physically own it but when you have communication that we have with these devices and how we communicate through them, it’s two-way. For example, there are things that are put onto our hard drives that can be used for tracking and marketing purposes. In an odd sense, it is yours but somebody has put their little flag on what you’re doing on the hard drive. So while you own it, when you open it up to communications you do allow some loss of control. It’s a double-edge sword: you want to be able to use this great technology, go out there and reach out to other people, but you have to go forward knowing that you’re opening the door for people to look back at your activities.

Hard disk platter reflection, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license.

More Information

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DARPA Builds Cyberwarfare Proving Ground

Digital sleuths probe deleted data for cops, corporations

Intel’s ‘Museum of Me’ is Cool, Creepy Facebook Fun

New Patriot Act Controversy: Is Washington Collecting Your Cell-Phone Data?

NSA allies with Internet carriers to thwart cyber attacks against defense firms

Prepare to Have Your Email Read by the NSA

The Digital Forensic Group

The FBI Is Losing the War on Cybercrime

Watch this space: Eye-control to give technology a new look