Flaneur Musings by Teodor Mitew
Today, Julian Assange was arrested and then refused bail – even though an anonymous donor offered 60,000 pounds as surety – ostensibly for having committed the crime of using a condom which broke midway through coitus. To make this an even bigger show trial, his defense was not given access to the case documents. Whatever happens next, WikiLeaks have managed another scoop – this time exposing the total hypocrisy of the judicial system of Western democracies.
Way too much has been written on the motives and modus operandi of WikiLeaks, based solely on their image in the media. Arguably a better way to approach their actions and motives is through the two key theoretical essays of Julian Assange – State and Terrorist Conspiracies, and Conspiracy as Governance. I am attaching them below – my commentary to follow.
This is an interesting Sysomos Research study on the use of Twitter, based on a sample of 1.2 billion tweets between July and August 2010. The study concentrated on the reaction to tweets – retweets and mentions – and the characteristics of those reactions. By far the most interesting results concern the percentage of tweets eliciting a response and the practical timeframe for a response.
29% of Tweets Generate a Reaction
“We found that 29% of all tweets produced a reaction – a reply or a retweet. Of this group of tweets, 19.3% were retweets and the rest replies. This means that of the 1.2 billion tweets we examined, 6%, (or 72 million) were retweets.”
Most Retweets Happen in the First Hour
“We discovered that 92.4% of all retweets happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published, while an additional 1.63% of retweets happen in the second hour, and 0.94% take place in the third hour.
This means that if a tweet is not retweeted in the first hour, it is very likely that it will not be retweeted.
The graph below shows the fraction of tweets from the second hour onwards – the x-axis shows the time in hours since the original tweet, while the vertical axis shows the fraction of retweets within a particular hour. The 92.4% of all retweets, which happen within the first hour, are not displayed in the chart. 1.63% of retweets happen in the second hour, and 0.94% take place in the third hour.”
An excellent graph from a Pew Internet Research study (courtesy of Flowtown), illustrating the rising importance of mobile apps. My guess is that the percentage of paid apps downloads will only increase until this becomes the main revenue stream of cloud platforms.
Plenty has been happening while I was immersed in the joys of fatherhood. WikiLeaks, and the whole theater of deception surrounding it, has been the most thought-provoking flow of events by far. Plenty to write about, but for now this quote from Raffi Khatchadourian’s excellent piece on Assange:
“He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare. These ideas soon evolved into WikiLeaks.”
I am now the proud, relieved, worried, and very tired father of a baby boy! Little Baian was born on the 21st of October. My son,
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito, quam tua te Fortuna sinet.
“There is no subtler, or surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debase the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which only one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
–John Maynard Keynes
Here’s the problem with ad hominem attacks during arguments: those who deserve them are not worth the time, and those who are worth the time do not deserve them.
It’s that magical time of the year again, when every flaneur celebrates the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, also known as the Oktoberfest. Happy Oktoberfest, and may your beer taste good!
All things considered, this Julian Bleecker’s Why Things Matter is probably the closest we have to a Manifesto for the internet of things. Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things is also in that category, but it’s a longer text and it lacks the theoretical punch. Besides, any theoretical piece on networked objects has to first deal with the modern separation of the world into the nature/culture dichotomy, and Bleecker does just that with his use of Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern.
