“A blockchain is a magic computer that anyone can upload programs to and leave the programs to self-execute, where the current and all previous states of every program are always publicly visible, and which carries a very strong cryptoeconomically secured guarantee that programs running on the chain will continue to execute in exactly the way that the blockchain protocol specifies.”
-Vitalik Buterin, creator of cryptocurrency Ethereum, early software contributor to Bitcoin

Blockchain and its related system of technologies are often evangelized as some sort of magic machine that will catapult us to the next technological echelon. What started out as a fringe interest for cyber-liberatarians and tech-utopianists has turned into a formidable giant. Bitcoin, the first major cryptocurrency based on blockchain has a market cap of 122 trillion dollars and has spawned global server farms, financial institutions, and corporations solely dedicated to its industry. It’s attracted viral attention from celebrities — Dennis Rodman, a frequent visitor to North Korea had one of his trips sponsored by PotCoin, a currency for buying and selling weed. It’s attracted high profile attention from EU and US regulators, branding ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings – a way for blockchain startups to attract seed funding) as dangerous and highly risky.

I’m not the only one who is skeptical of blockchain and Bitcoin’s potential. I believe this technology is still in its infancy. The Andressen Horowitz podcast a16 discussed that it’s in its infrastructure phase, dealing with issues with scale, governance structure, and purpose. Unlike the internet protocols, whose governance structure is quite stable, the politics of bitcoin can be quite messy.

Andreas M. Antonopoulus, a scholar who is well known for explaining issues in blockchain to governments and engineers uses a good analogy for explaining the relationship between Bitcoin and blockchain by comparing it to apps and the internet. Just how apps run on an internet protocol, bitcoin runs on a blockchain protocol. Bitcoin’s blockchain protocol and related software and wasn’t designed to scale or mitigate unforeseen cybersecurity issues. As such, the protocol needs to update and change to accommodate with current issues and needs, like how a government needs to revise its laws to keep up with the times. The process by which large stakeholders in the technology come to an agreement about the protocol is called consensus. Newer cryptocurrencies and cryptoservices that run on a blockchain protocol look to Bitcoin’s blockchain protocol for history lessons in what works for better consensus.

Bitcoin’s major stakeholders are roughly divided into three types of actors:
Exchanges – These are corporations that provide services that exchange fiat (e.g. USD, GBP) into Bitcoin. They provide the basis by which Bitcoin can be used as an store of value (like gold), a speculatory asset (like stocks), or an exchange medium (like Venmo.) These comapanies are subject to governmental regulations that either impede or facilitate its function. Consumers of exchanges are responsible for driving the demand of bitcoin, which can be measured by its price in a fiat.
Miners – These are owners of enormous server farms that perform a computationally intensive service for the protocol called mining. The protocol requires a large amount of distributed computational power in order to be secure. In return for mining, the protocol creates new Bitcoin and hands them to the miners, thereby increasing the supply of cryptocurrency in the market. Because of the specifications of the blockchain protocol, Bitcoin mining is exponentially harder to do as more people use the protocol. A decade ago, it was profitable to use your computer to mine Bitcoin, but now, it requires server farms with acres of land, cheap electricity, and expensive dedicated hardware. Many of these server farms are in China, which has a government that tries to regulate and inhibit bitcoin mining.
Pretty much everyone else – Users of Bitcoin that use it as a store of value or an exchange medium play an important role. They develop software that increases its utility, or use it for financial services like micro loans, asset liquidity, and currency portability.

These three entities need each other, and although they have differing demands on what the blockchain protocol should provide for Bitcoin, they’ve been able to work together to address major flaws in blockchain’s cybersecurity, scaling issues, and governmental regulations.

However, the political drama starts when a subset of exchanges, miners, and users a have a different vision for the purpose of the blockchain protocol. If enough people agree on a different version of the blockchain protocol, they create a fork where a separate version of Bitcoin is created. (read: fork as in fork in the road) This happens all the time, and creates a large amount of controversy and volatility in the cryptocurrency markets. Some of the biggest forks are the split between Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, or Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash. It’s unfortunate, but these forks create currencies with similar names that involve extremely technical and nuanced changes that are hard to understand but have profound effects on the blockchains’ functionality. These forks means that exchanges, miners, and users have to make an irreversible decision between the two options of the fork. These forks are like the Wild West of the cryptocurrency world, where people embark on an uncertain journey into uncharted protocol territory, incurring risk in hopes of creating a better system of governance, consensus, and functionality. How will these forks affect the functionality of blockchain and its implementation in widely used, mainstream services? I guess we’ll have to wait to hear back from those brave settlers in uncharted territory to see how they’re doing.

 

 

 

 

blockchain

Blockchain is an exciting new technology that has attracted large amounts of capital and developer time. According to evangelist Vitalik Buterin, it provides the following affordances:

1. High Data Availability
2. Trust Between separate entities
3. Non-specific hardware required to access

Buterin gives blockchain a jargon free definition:
“A blockchain is a magic computer that anyone can upload programs to and leave the programs to self-execute, where the current and all previous states of every program are always publicly visible, and which carries a very strong cryptoeconomically secured guarantee that programs running on the chain will continue to execute in exactly the way that the blockchain protocol specifies.”

Sounds like a paradigm shifting technology! According to experts at Andressen Horowitz, this technology is still in its infrastructure stage, and requires myriad apps and implementations until its true potential is realized. The most well known and widely used application of blockchain is the cryptocurrency Bitcoin which is the first application of the technology. At the time of this writing, Bitcoin’s market valuation has been at the hundreds of billions, containing almost countless transactions. It involves a process called mining, where a miner can exchange processing power in return for some Bitcoin. This processing power is used to increase Bitcoin’s supply and provide security. You used to be able to profitably mine on small, cheap computers like microcontrollers. As bitcoin has scaled, it requires a system of global server farms that use highly specialized hardware called ASICs to mine bitcoin for a profit.

As it grew to its current size, it has encountered numerous issues that the community has had to collectively solve. These solutions come in the form of legislation called BIPs (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) that specify a change to the protocol that members must simultaneously adopt, facilitating its execution. This simultaneous adoption is called consensus, and it mimics the way governments must come to consensus in order to affect change.

endlessly scrolling

 

Last week in an interview, Facebook founder Dustin Muskovitz revealed and criticized that Facebook aggressively works to make its app addictive to maximize the amount of attention we give it. They’re not the only ones. Across all services, developers craftily give us series of cues and rewards engineered to make us swipe, tap, and scroll more. When you walk through Doheny Library at USC, you can see students sporadically switching their screens away from work to scroll on filtered pictures of hipster food to get a hit of dopamine. What are the ramifications to a society where mechanics of our brains are massively exploited to aggregate attention for corporate revenue? It’s not only attention that app developers have been able to hack — we live in a technology landscape where it is acceptable for Facebook to accurately manipulate your emotions to improve ad placement, and for game companies to encourage children to pay microtransactions and gamble away money. The internet generation is losing its capacity to mindfully use technology, and instead is having the technology use us.

This isn’t totally new — in the book The Attention Merchants, technology law scholar Tim Wu shows us that advertisers and media makers have been exploiting the neural mechanisms of our attention and social processing since the beginnings of our country.

However, in this modern hyperconnected generation, these technologies command inordinate sway over every aspect of our media, influencing our politics, our culture, and our relationships. Compromising and manipulating these technologies have huge adverse effects — just look at the capability of Russian actors and Macedonian teenagers in cultivating campaigns of misinformation, swaying our election.

The answer for our generation could not be a Luddite rejection of these technologies. It’s practically impossible to boycott these exploitative services because their network effects are too great. With tools like Facebook, I am two degrees away from anyone in the world, and I can instantly rally my community to events or coordinate logistics via group chat. I wouldn’t be able to give up scrolling through memes and cute cat pictures during idyllic moments.

The concept of digital rights is a new one, and to be honest, scholars, governments, and corporations are still trying to figure out what they should be and how we can properly implement them. The European Union has recognized digital rights that guarantees its citizens fundamental protections and services from technology companies — including privacy rights, the right to be forgotten, and protections similar to our First Amendment.

One part of the solution would be implementing digital rights in this country. Just like European citizens, we should demand transparency from corporate tech giants whose rampant data mining and news feed algorithms may be harming our society. We should ask that our First Amendment rights are not selectively curtailed on digital forums and spaces.

Another part of the burden falls on the coders and developers of technology. Engineers and designers must be mindful of the way a technology impacts individual lifestyles, and how its widespread adoption could change a community or society. Coders need to be especially mindful of the way kids and the mentally vulnerable could be affected addictive design features.

The rest of the burden falls on us, the consumer. We must ensure that we lead healthy digital lifestyles, making conscious decisions when and why we use applications and services. We should stave off the urge to scroll and swipe and curtail our use of addictive apps. Even though the technology environment is enormously powerful, most modern services have settings and options that allow you to increase your privacy and tailor the way the media is presented to you.

Navigating the new problems presented to us by modern technologies is going to be difficult as these services and apps become an irreplaceable part of our life. I’m confident that if we can start having the discussion of the role technology should play in our lifestyle, we can be a generation that has a mindful relationship with our technology, rather than on that is conquered by our screens.

 

 

open source intellectual property strategy

In 2014, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, announced that Tesla Motors would open source the patents for key technologies on their industry conquering electric vehicles. Nothing like this has ever occurred in the auto industry— R&D in this industry is exorbitant and crucial to maintain a competitive edge. Open sourcing this technology would devalue these intellectual assets by handing them over to competitors who have more manufacturing capability, and potentially opening up vulnerabilities of the technology to malicious hackers. To any traditional intellectual property business strategist, this would be shooting yourself in the foot. However, as modern intellectual property theory evolves, our understanding of the effects of open sourcing intellectual property have shown us that in a variety of situations, open source is not only a humanitarian endeavor, but a keen business idea that protects the bottom line. In a corporate blog post with the geeky title, “All Our Patent Are Belong To You”, Musk outlines how in his first experiences with software, a patent didn’t defend an intellectual asset, but rather attracted litigation by providing means for companies with larger legal resources and patent trolls to have a point of attack. He continues to outline how traditional patent strategy doesn’t fit Tesla’s situation:

…we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales…
…Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

I believe Elon Musk, and many other technology creators demonstrate that profit is not a zero- sum game, so cooperation and contribution to humanity’s knowledge can be a profitable part of many comprehensive intellectual property strategies. Interestingly, open source was not always a part of a defense mechanism to corporate litigation, but comes from roots of community volunteerism.

Origins — GNU’s not Unix!

Open source has its origins in communal, decentralized development from the early days of computing and software. Back then, it was called “free software.” The use of “free” can be confusing — it doesn’t mean that the software costs no money for purchase, but it means free as in freedom. Richard Stallman is one the towering intellectuals and software developers responsible for some of the first open source movements and contributed immensely to the ethics and morality of open source volunteers in his writings (collected in a seminal digital publication entitled “Free Software, Free Society.”) In the introduction, Lawrence Lessig, the famed law technology scholar, provides a succinct definition of Stallman’s concept of the “free” in “free software.”

Through his works and his words, he has pushed us to see the importance of keeping code “free.” Not free in the sense that code writers don’t get paid, but free in the sense that the control coders build be transparent to all, and that anyone have the right to take that control, and modify it as he or she sees fit. This is “free software”; “free software” is one answer to a world built in code.

This idea came at a time when computers users were stifled by software publishers. Software publishers charged ridiculous amounts for buggy and opaque software. Coders were not allowed to modify the software to add features, but instead had to request the software publisher to add features. Distribution was bottlenecked by the ability of these software publishers to distribute and monetize code, and users of early computers were limited in how they could use the software. Richard Stallman saw the root of the problem in that the kernel (the core of the computer on top of which other software runs) was proprietary and not free. He embarked on a project to develop an alternative to the popular proprietary kernel Unix. With a healthy dose of programmer humor, and keeping with conventions of the time, he gave the project the title GNU, a recursive acronym that stands for “GNU’s not Unix.”

Stallman’s GNU project inspired many —one of his talks inspired Linus Torvalds to create the groundbreaking open source operating system Linux. Because it is free, it remains one of the most popular industrial operating systems, allowing companies to avoid paying Microsoft or Apple and abiding by their rules and regulations. For many in developing areas, the cost of an operating system by Microsoft or Apple can be prohibitive. My friend from a rural farming town in Brazil was able to use computers running Linux with open source word processors, internet browsers, and development tools. To him, not only was open source software “free” as in freedom, but was also “free” as in zero cost. In the age of the internet, where software can be easily distributed, open source allows for the rapid adoption of technology because it can be provided at zero cost and maximum freedom.

Development of these GNU projects, and other open source projects were (and still are) highly collaborative, undertaken over miles bridged by internet forums and complex automated project management software that allowed contributors to simultaneously edit the same code and audit each other’s contributions. Imagine thousands of editors simultaneously editing and commenting the same Google Doc in a (semi) organized fashion.

Fred Ehrsam and Chris Dixon in the a16z tech podcast “Why Crypto Tokens Matter” describe the open source developer community as a militia, tens of millions of coder zealots who volunteer development time on weekends and weeknights. In the context of developing paradigm shifting technologies, they compare the output and resources of this militia against that of a corporate workforce. While corporate workforces have better organization and monetary resources, the open source community has thousands of eyes and fingers and an undying moral vigilance. Work done by the volunteer militia is essentially free, and iterates and innovates much faster as it is unburdened by corporate protocol. In many cases (like Linux), both companies and individuals have leveraged this open source militia to make software that no corporate entity could create.

Today, Github, a company that provides free hosting and organization for open source projects, provides a way for developers to show off their contributions to open source, and easily start their own projects. For modern developers, their Github profile, which details the frequency and quantity of their contributions, is a public mark of continuous professional development and good moral standing. It also makes it easier than ever to collaborate and meet other open source developers, affording the militia a strong communications network and fostering a healthy community.

Licenses and Permissions

According to Richard Stallman, around 1998, a few developers in the free software community started rebranding themselves as open source. He’s noted that it helps ditch the confusing “free” in “free software,” but he also details the difference between the two.

… The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are today separate movements with different views and goals, although we can and do work together on some practical projects.
The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.

If you agree with this distinction, it distinguishes “open source” as a term with a connotation of practicality, sanitizing its implication of goodwill. However, in my mind, open source can be considered an umbrella term for a variety of “free” intellectual property strategies, and it encompasses the methods of the free software movement. Open source strategies can vary in the permissions and freedom granted to users and developers. Unlike other open source licensing strategies, the free software movement employs a radical method called copyleft, which takes the traditional legal protections of copyright licensing and uses them to enforce its ideology of software and any derivative works. This copyleft technique is embedded within the license attributed to “free software”, the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The GPL technique copyleft employs a unique feature in its license that’s colloquially described as “sticky”, with complex implications of the license’s permissions and usability. At the risk of over simplifying, stickiness forces derivative works to include the same licensing rights of the original. This prevents derivative works from turning proprietary. For corporations and individuals, this prevents the relicensing of technology built on a copylefted code, limiting the freedom of corporations and individuals. Because of this limitation, copyleft is considered less permissive than other licenses.

//images

The above chart illustrates license compatibility, which comes into play when technologies combine two open source softwares that use different licenses. A discussion of this is out of scope of this essay, but this graph shows how licenses exist on a spectrum of permission and protection. All of these licenses tend to protect authors from litigation by making the creator not liable for faults in the technology. Permissive licenses allow free sub licensing, nullifying any conflicts where a rival company would use the same technology.

The Open Source Initiative provides guidelines for licenses that must be included in order for a technology to be considered open source. These guidelines pertain to software, and get more complex when considered for hardware, but I’ve included what I think are the main tenets below:

1. Freedom of Distribution – users have should have freedoms to distribute the software to others
2. Transparent Access – users should be able to clearly see a well documented source code blueprints for study and scrutiny
3. Freedom to Modify – users should be able to customize the code or modify the production blueprint
4. Non-Discrimination – users should not be prohibited by their choice in hardware, development preferences, or human attributes such as nationality, race, gender, etc.

Open source washing

Fortunately or unfortunately, open source can be used as a marketing strategy to generate public goodwill for a company’s image, or add extra appeal to a technology product. A simple example is detailed in the book Intellectual Property Strategy by John Palfrey.

Some pharmaceutical companies choose to freely license their drugs in order to spur work relevant to developing countries. GlaxoSmithKline recently created a “patent pool” of eight hundred granted or pending patents that researchers can license freely in order to develop and produce new products and formulations to combat neglected tropical diseases in least developed countries. Not only does this generate public goodwill for GlaxoSmithKline but it also helps generate a network of potential collaborators with whom the corporation can license IP for profit.

This free licensing approach provides a legal mechanism for GlaxoSmithKline to give out their medicine. In other cases, open source is an extra feature that makes a technology product stand out. The Mozilla Corporation, a non-profit, brands their web browser Firefox as open source. They argue that their open source development model fits within Stallman’s ideas for a free code community, provides increased customizability, and rapidly changes to include new technologies. Github has managed to tap into the open source community as customers, gaining its revenue stream by providing developers the same convenient collaborative tools for closed source projects at a cost.

However, many companies try to capitalize on these advantages of community, public goodwill, and perceived product features by branding their product as open source. This is similar to the concept of “greenwashing”, where products are baselessly branded green and friendly to the environment in order to appeal to environmentally conscious consumers. The most famous recent examples of “open source washing” can be attributed to Microsoft’s recent campaign to court open source developers by proclaiming that they love open source, even though a decade ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux a “cancer” (among many, many aggressive oppositions to open source technology over the company’s history.) An easy way to spot if a company is open source washing is if their available source code is sparse or empty, they restrict distribution and modification rights, or they discriminate. Many startups that aim to scam venture capitalists out of their money will employ a marketing strategy with open source washing combined with empty jargon and false promises.

Transparent source access by neccessity

In newer technological paradigms, an open source strategy is required because source access is transparent. Web technologies allow their source to be easily reverse engineered. Try it for yourself— open up your favorite web browser, right click a page, and select an option beginning with “Inspect…”. This pulls up a window that lets you examine the code that created the webpage. Because of this transparent ease of access, it’s incredibly easy for coders to study and reverse engineer web technologies. Without licensing code, rival companies can reverse engineer the code, apply a proprietary license to the technology and aggressively litigate competitors. Open source helps coders defend against this type of frivolous litigation by officially and easily providing a mechanism defending against reverse engineering.

In cybersecurity applications, open source is a necessity. Transparent access allows users to scrutinize the code for weaknesses and make a decision whether or not to trust a piece a technology. It also opens up the technology to many more developers, allowing more eyes to check the code, report flaws, and submit remedies. This is strategy is employed in Apple’s kernel, and many of the main cryptography algorithms. An example where the lack of open source is an issue will be with algorithms that govern news feeds in Facebook. Because of the closed source and secretive nature of the algorithm, it is impossible for the public to understand the effects of Russian misinformation campaigns.

Cryptotokens are an emergent technology which has the potential to provide services and applications with orders of magnitude more computation, data storage, and security. Because its infrastructure is in its infancy, development is staked on open source access. This type of technology’s power scales with the number of users, and still requires enormous amounts of development to get off the ground — so open source allows cryptotoken launchers to gain users and development. Similar to web technologies, the source code is transparent, making it impossible for companies that want to launch cryptotoken infrastructure and make money off of licensing the infrastructure.

Conclusions

The practicality of open source is evident. From lowering development costs to lowering use costs, it seems to encourage technology that is both Stallman’s version of free, as well as our colloquial, monetary version of free. For innovators like Musk, open source counterintuitively makes his intellectual assets more competitive and defends against intellectual property litigation. I hope through a brief discussion of open source’s history, implementation through licensing, branding, and necessities in emergent technologies, I can provide a good starting point for further thinking of open source as a valid tool for the intellectual property strategist.

Breath of the Wild part 1: Technology and Sustainability

_tldr; in the new Zelda game, a new generation of gamers will be immersed in an immense parable of sustainability._

It is hard to overstate the critical acclaim of the new Zelda game (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild). It garnered virtually unanimous perfect scores among both critics and players for its unparalleled beauty, depth, and technical merit. Having spent over 70 hours exploring and wandering its stunning and almost interminable landscape, I have no doubt that this a seminal proof of what current hardware, software, and design is capable of. As Zelda is designed to be compelling for both kids and grownups, Breath of the Wild (abbv. BotW) will be the first introduction to the immersive open-world genre for many young gamers. Through the masterful technical direction, design, and production of BotW, one could handily write a hundred thesis papers in disparate fields, but today I’d like to briefly highlight how certain elements make this breathtaking game a worthy parable of sustainability for the next digital generation. To me, the lessons from the world of BotW stand adjacent to Frank Herbert’s Dune, or Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia — two worlds that inspire a spiritual connection between mankind’s technology and the environment.

Digitally Revering the Environment

The game begins when you awaken in an eery cave-like cryogenic chamber as Link, a young man with no memories, no purpose, and no identity. According to producer Eiji Aonuma, what’s starkly different about BotW as an addition to the franchise is the intentional addition of technology to a series that is typically “swords and magic.”

Within your first few steps the game gives you a tablet (the “Sheikah Slate”) marked with ancient runes and powered by mysterious hardware. Like yourself, the operating system is empty, clearly missing apps and functionality from a former time. It reminds me of Andy Clark, a technology philosopher who believes that our technology is an extension of mind, an expression of our personality. Using the Slate, a rune covered structure authenticates your identity, and opens up a passage to a light at the end of a cave (#plato).

Technology and the world’s established spirituality is seamlessly woven together. In an interview, art director Satoru Takizawa explains that the visual aesthetic of technology and shrines is inspired by the Jomon period of prehistoric Japan.

The seven seconds after you leave the cave is carefully choreographed cinematic moment intended to viscerally show you the beauty and immensity of the world, Hyrule. The game wrests control of the character away and you watch as Link dashes up a hill to a vista encompassing unending mountain ranges, valleys, and ruins, lit by a valiant sun.

The use of light is almost impressionistic; the rendering places an immense focus on the reflection of countless individual blades of grass that part as you wade through meadows and forests. The console’s hardware is slightly bigger than a cellphone, so it’s a merit of technical direction to create such beauty with intense computational constraints.

Unlike other games where weather is simply a visual aesthetic, weather severely affects gameplay. Lightning storms are dangerous and brutal to both you and enemies. Link must dress accordingly for cold mountains and scorching deserts or risk exposure to the elements. One fun part of the game that focuses on this mechanic is when it takes you to Eventide Island, where it strips you of your possessions and clothing and forces you to Robinson Crusoe your way out. In this way, it encourages a closeness and respect to weather.

Community Resiliency, Global Warming

 

While BotW breaks free from many traditions of the franchise, the core legend stays the same. A brave hero Link endeavors to save a noble princess Zelda from an evil monster Ganon. In this game, Ganon is styled as Calamity Ganon who is responsible for rising floodwaters, increased volcanic activity, ravaging dust storms and various other effects of climate change.

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series is one of my favorite resources for getting my feet wet on an academic topic. In Sustainability by Professor Kent E. Portney, Resiliency is defined as the following:

A multi-dimensional concept describing the ability of people or communities of people to resist or adapt to stresses and usually used to define a path that allows communities to return to normal quickly after natural disasters, including major storms and environmental catastrophes.

This concept of community resiliency is quite apparent throughout the series. The game has you visit four different communities that are uniquely struggling with a changing environment brought upon by irresponsible technology gone haywire. One example that illustrates this is the role of the Zora race in Zelda’s world. The Zora are basically aquatic fish people that are responsible for maintaining a large dam that holds back a large reservoir in order to prevent large swaths of habitated areas from flooding. The erection of the dam was heavily subsidized by a central government controlled by another race as a mutually beneficial deal.

In Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, journalist McKenzie Funk highlights myriad shifts in strategies by corporations and governments as they realize how interconnected biomes and regions are. It highlights how Scandinavian corporations and governments are taking advantage of salinity changes and flooding in Bangladesh to push profitable anti-flooding infrastructure projects. Actions like this exist amidst a recent 1 billion dollar payment from Norway to Brazil as a reward for slowing down deforestion. Community resilience is complex when somehow responsibility for a specific biome is shouldered among more than just one community.

Scarcity Mechanics

An innovative mechanic that makes playing BotW uniquely challenging and exciting is that every weapon you hold eventually breaks and deteriorates. Unlike other games where you pick up objects and have a magical backpack that can store endless items, you are forced to constantly scavenge for food and weapons, severely limiting your consumption. You are also prohibited from carrying too much, forcing to selectively scavenge and return resources to the environment as you acquire new ones. It has an emphasis on the abundance the world provides if you limit your consumption, constantly fulfilling your needs as they occur.

This lack of consumption encourages non-violence so you don’t spend resources while fighting. It also encourages an integration and appreciation of landscape features — boulders, crevasses, and fields of grass can provide unique advantages that preserve the consumption of your hard-earned resources.

this is just part 1!

These three elements of BotW show you how important the sustainability is to the plot and mechanics of the game. However, this just the groundwork that lays a background to how the main plot of this game – the abuse of autonomous militarized weapons led to the downfall of a once powerful civilization. As a game, it blends technology. spirituality, and environment quite well, and I hope to use these themes in the next Zelda post, a discussion of Elon Musk’s fear of AI, and how Carlos Perez thinks AlphaGo is sparking a pan-Asian arms race. I may also want to use the joke in the following picture to discuss blockchain:

digital intellectual, @superwuster

Whether you like it or not, this era is written in pixels on a screen shuttled through wireless waves and cables of ethernet. We no longer carve glyphs into stone, dip quills into inkwells, or set a typeface on the press. Like that, the digital intellectual doesn’t stand on a physical soapbox but speaks on top of accumulated social media reputation, delivering content through the shifting protocols and applications that govern the attention of our democracy. In the mirthful video above, you’ve met Columbia law professor Tim Wu while he explains net neutrality to Stephen Colbert on a rollercoaster. To the online generation, no public intellectual has done more to elucidate the nature and exploitation of mass attention by governments and corporations. To governments and corporations, his towering intellect is welcomed for uniquely invaluable legal and moral advice. Among his academic peers, his work is a crucial component for any serious frameworks of the current cyberwar, media dynamics, and technological innovation — his seminal paper receiving tens of thousands of downloads and hundreds of thousands of views.. Tim Wu encourages 21st century content creators to be respectful, transparent, and efficient with their audience’s time, so I’ll be up front with what you’re gonna get in this essay.

1. The inception of net neutrality
2. Aspects of the modern public intellectual, something I’m going to call the digital intellectual.
3. How Wu’s polymathic writings, versatile speaking, and social media strategy is influenced by his academic background.
4. The role of the academic as a digital citizen

Among those aged 18-49, about half of Americans get their news online. About a sixth of Americans have a Netflix subscription, a quarter have an Amazon Prime subscription, and almost all online adults have a Facebook account. Our mass media has transitioned from the homogenous infrastructure of TV to the heterogeneous infrastructure of the internet, with new locuses of control, new actors, and new predicaments. While the clarity and structure of this political and corporate landscape is still contested, it is clear that the owners of the infrastructure (Internet Service Providers) that connect users to resources command inordinate power. It was with this intuition, that, in 2003, five years before the iPhone and the mobile web, and nine years before Facebook’s IPO, Wu published a prescient paper titled “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination.” I’ve included the abstract below.

Communications regulators over the next decade will spend increasing time on conflicts between the private interests of broadband providers and the public’s interest in a competitive innovation environment centered on the Internet. As the policy questions this conflict raises are basic to communications policy, they are likely to reappear in many different forms. So far, the first major appearance has come in the ‘‘open access’’ (or ‘‘multiple access’’) debate, over the desirability of allowing vertical integration between Internet Service Providers and cable operators. Proponents of open access see it as a structural remedy to guard against an erosion of the ‘‘neutrality’’ of the network as between competing content and applications. Critics, meanwhile, have taken open-access regulation as unnecessary and likely to slow the pace of broadband deployment.

This paper has had an explosive role in academics, government policy, and corporate warfare. It’s merit was that it coined a term for the idea that ISPs should not control the type of content that passes through their infrastructure – “net neutrality.” In the same way that the government provides enormous freedom in how you use the road – Wu argues that communications regulators should keep the internet a competitive marketplace, and that anyone should have the freedom to deliver content and services through the internet. ISPs can curtail your freedom by restricting the types of content that load quickly on your computer, or prevent your content from reaching other users. The essay won’t be about the complexity and mechanics of this, but the open source tech hippies of the internet have done great job of explaining the atrocities of ISPs and major concepts in internet freedom on Wikipedia. This paper will be about how Tim Wu, as a public intellectual, is able to effectively take his legal expertise and beliefs about personal freedom to his fellow citizens in myriad ways.

In a previous era, a public intellectual could effectively communicate his message by appearing on TV, penning op-eds for major newspapers, and writing a few popular books. In today’s digital world, the competition for attention is fiercer, requiring a multi-faceted approach including numerous streamed speaking engagements and a robust social media strategy to boost the likelihood that a user happens upon your content. Early in Wu’s career, he wrote a book review of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail on which he writes “uncovers a phenomenon that’s undeniably going on and makes clear sense of it”. Anderson puts a succinct summary of the concept on the book’s website:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The author argues that this has several ramifications, two of which are pertinent for understanding the nature of effective media. First “successful aggregators have to have both hits *and* niches”, meaning that a few pieces must have widespread reach, but there must be a large quantity of less popular pieces that appeal to niche communities. Second, it is indicative of our transition from mass culture to fragmented market segments that require individualized content.

In order to perform a duty as a public intellectual to inform the populace, an academic is tasked with not only targeting the mainstream, but identifying and reaching smaller segmented communities. In the digital world, these communities vary in media consumption habits, social media circles, demographic, and influence. The academic must create a robust strategy in reaching as many of these communities as possible in order to maximize influence. This 21st century duty is an aspect of the public intellectual that I would call a digital intellectual.

Wu is adept at this, maintaining a diverse profile of writing on culture, design, style, and philosophy. His writings for Slate, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times encompass erudite essays and analyses of various seriousness, from extolling fiction, to the effects of technology on interior design. In filtering algorithms for feeds like Facebook and Twitter, this polymathic approach gives his posts an enormous reach, cross pollinating between enclaves of readers. His sincere love of writing on all topics comes clear on his website, crediting Lawrence Lessig and Richard Posner (among many others) as teachers who influenced his style and avarice for crafting prose.

However, our government is far from a direct democracy; Americans submit to a rule by corporate conglomerates. Just how ISPs exert enormous power over us, tech giants such as Google and Facebook also act as gatekeepers of media and stewards of the political landscape. Google is known for putting enormous amounts of money in Wu’s academic field in order to align academic and political interests with their own. While Wu isn’t scared of career repercussions of critiquing these giants, he also maintains a great working relationship with these companies, appealing to the people working within them, providing legal advice, and avoiding direct antagonization. In the following video, Wu introduces his book The Attention Merchants to Google employees. While the book ultimately cautions against the types of attention aggregation that Google uses as its core revenue source, watch how he is able to introduce himself as an ally and familiar friend of the company:

A Chomskyan view of democracy would hold that its effectiveness is related to an informed public. The role and history of the American public intellectual is captured neatly in a blog post by USC professor of writing Stephen Mack. I’ve included a quote from it below:

Trained to it or not, all participants in self-government are duty-bound to prod, poke, and pester the powerful institutions that would shape their lives. And so if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy—and they do—it’s simply to keep the pot boiling. The measure of public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.

In today’s digital landscape of media, the public intellectual needs to fight strategically and be vigilant in constantly putting out diverse forms of content. I think Wu is stellar example of an academic who works to keep digital politics in the ears of informed citizens amidst a stark transition from the mass media of the previous decades.

Environmentalism in Breath of the Wild

 

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