joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

A couple of days ago a friend asked me, if I could help fighting vandalism on a wikipedia entry about a fairly well known person (that I ma not going to name here). Recently the entry had been edited so it would imply that the person had employed questionable business practices, violated rules and published incorrect information. The Circumstances gave reason to suspect that we were facing a professional attack. The timing of the first attack suggested insider knowledge and the quality of the entry was high and on the first glimpse ot seemed well documented through external links. The editor’s Wikipedia record dated back to June 2005. Having never contributed to Wikipedia myself (shame on me), it was clear that I would look like the bad guy, if I engaged in an edit war. At some point a Wikipedia Administrator even started to role back changes by other users and thus demonstrated confidence in the attacker’s good intentions.

Since Wikipedia has become one of the principle resources for journalists and basically anybody who researches anything, altering a Wikipedia entry can be an extremely efficient move in a disinformation campaign. For victims it is quite hard to react quickly and legal action is no solution either. When it comes to individuals or corporations of public interest, manipulated information can multiply within hours or days when corporate media or even just bloggers trust the information they find on Wikipedia.

In our case the victim finally managed to convince Wikipedia to lock the site for further editing and have someone neutral research the topic. Nevertheless, the malicious content is still up as I write this. Furthermore hostile websites which are referenced in the current article get a lot of advertisement and will improve their ranking in search engines.

Ironically this democratization of disinformation is possible in the days of web 2.0, not because we’re finally all allowed to publish content, but due to the fact that their is a tendency that monopolies establish themselves, be it Google, be it Wikipedia, be it the iPod. Those are not monopolies that evil corporation impose on us. We lazy mainstream followers submit ourselves and only create them by doing so. Therefore no anti trust agency or cartel office can protect us.

There are however a few things one can do:

1. contribute (if you do not, you’re a nobody and can’t be trusted, hence you’re powerless)
2. be consistent (if you’re not, you cannot be trusted either)
3. never stop exploring (avoid using the same service all the time, avoid using what everybody uses, avoid buying what everybody thinks is cool - this is the altruistic part of your duties)

Technorati Tags: disinformation, trust, web 2.0, wikipedia

With almost no snow in the Alps, there is hardly an alternative to hanging out at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. It’s not as hard on the environment as snowboarding either.

My notes start on day 2 (Trust me: 80€ for the week pass were well spent despite missing the first day).

Joi Ito started his talk about MMOs by comparing Second Life and World of Warcraft. He pointed out that both virtual worlds are very different and that we need both rather having to make up our mind between the two. While WoW is a place for social experiences and collaboration, SL is an experimental environment that we can use to learn about virtual worlds. Talking about WoW it was inevitable that the question of computer game addiction came up. Joi does not like to use the term in connection with computer games. I sometimes wonder, if my addiction to physical reality has been damaging to my career, considering all the time running and cycling through woods and up and down mountains that I could have spent with my computer and in cyberspace. Now with the center of action moving into digital worlds like WoW and SL, it might be high time to start fighting my reality addiction.

We (Peter c. Krell of Game Face Magazine and myself) also did an interview with Joi Ito. Joi was very clear about trusting guild members who he spent hours collaborating with and who had had seen acting under stress more than anybody he knew from other social networks. He would not hesitate employing them and actually has arranged jobs for guild members.

Body Hacking, a presentation by Quinn Norton, promised spectacular images and sci-fi quality. Most interesting in her talk was however the idea that altering the body is generally seen as acceptable when it is understood as a cure, but not when it is understood as an enhancement. It takes some time for for society to redefine enhancements that are not allowed as cures that are allowed.

The example of body hacking that was discussed lengthily was inserting of a magnet in fingers which enables one to feel electricity. A possible complication is that the magnet dissolves. Magnets in fingers don’t impress me, I had hoped for more advanced hacking.

A lesson in advanced powerpoint was Lawrence Lessig’s presentation “On Free, and the Differences between Culture and Code“. Lessig’s compared lawyers discussing “fair use” to old communists who in the 80s failed to see that their system was about to collapse and that there was no way to stop that process.

At the end of Lessig’s presentation, John Perry Barlow argued that besides tools like creative commons, civil disobedience was important. Lessig to the contrary fears that copyright violation is displayed as a crime or even terrorism, it will be highly unlikely that we’ll be able to change the laws any time soon. According to Lessig there is only a small time window of about 20 years to achieve that.

I finished day 3 watching Powerpoint Karaoke. Originally this is invention of Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur. Candidates get to give powerpoint presentations they have not seen before. Great fun.

On the last day I saw Bicyclemark talking about podjournalism. The term is apparently banned from Wikipedia. Mark was highly entertaining and obviously enjoyed making fun of Rupert Murdoch the evil personification of corporate media. Here are some quotes from the presentation:

“I look stupid in shorts too, but i don’t own all that media.”

“Some people do drugs, I believed the news.”

“The man changes his mind a lot - now he is a democrat. Fuck the democrats too.”

“Embeded journalism: journalists in bed with the military.”

“You watch belgian news? I do - for the fun. It looks like they’re in a space station.”

“I’m pretty fast on my bike and if I see a cop, I turn around - not that I carry anything around, I just don’t like to get searched.”

“The netherlands is a weird place - I like it , but…”

“I think I called them dumb during this presentation. That’s ridiculous. We have to reach them. I mean we’re all in it together”

“If you name your thing the ‘MacCast’ you get thousands of listeners, if you call it ‘people are dying in Sudan’, nobody is interested”

Monochrom presented various projects, especially their intervention at the Sao Paulo Biennial 2002. They had the virtual artist Georg Paul Thomann represent Austria in the show they had originally been invited to. Monochrom themselves appeared as Thomann’s technical team (”at the bottom of the biennial’s hirarchy”). At the CCC they wrote a song about RFID which they performed in the entrance hall.

Day 4 was completed with the notorious “Security Nightmares” and “Fnord Jahresrückblick” talks by Frank Rieger and Felix von Leitner. Both talks seem like an indispensable preparation for 2007.

Fortunately all talks should be available as podcasts soon. I’m looking forward to seeing all the things I’ve missed in the next weeks.

Technorati Tags: art, Berlin, CCC, Chaos Communication Congress, MMO, MMORPG, trust