The status of Charlie Bit My Finger is uncertain. It should be acquired as art by the nation.
The backstory:
Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about this whole story.
HOWEVER,
if you go to /watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM on YouTube (here) you’ll get this message: "This video is private"
What gives?
Charlie was set as Unlisted: a public video to anyone with the link, but it doesn’t appear in on-site searches or recommendations (it’s for personal sharing).
In July 2021 there was a policy change to keep owners of such videos safe: all older Unlisted videos were set to Private – unless the owner decided to opt out of the change.
The new owners of Charlie did nothing… and so the video has gone.
This is sad.
Part of me thought that the NFT thing was just part of the overall NFT craze, and we would all quietly step away from it and it would turn out that the original creators of Charlie still owned the actual video, etc.
But maybe that auction had a whole legit contract behind it?
You can see the Charlie NFT on OpenSea and, from there, the profile of the new owners, 3FMusic. They seem active still… though they’re not the meme-history collectors I assumed they would be. But they own a bunch of different NFTs.
I guess they’re just sitting on this particular asset. Or maybe they’re forgotten they have it.
In 100 years there will be a viral podcast or whatever about tracking down this once-famous, now-lost art, and how it ended up in the hands of a Dubai crypto speculator and then left on an abandoned and rotting blockchain. It’s weird seeing this “losing” step play out in real-time.
So clearly this video belongs in a museum.
(A British museum, probably, given it’s of British origin, although the “site” is American, so there’s a Parthenon Marbles-style dispute for the distant future.)
Charlie is important because it’s one of the first massively popular bits of content of the global scale internet. It’s representative of society in a way that earlier content isn’t. And important! In lieu of knowing what is historically “significant,” mass popularism will do.
Plus it’s a meme. It’s of the internet. Music videos would go big in any medium. But for a home video to achieve this? “User-generated content” (as we used to call it) as big as the professionally produced stuff? It says a lot about what the internet was to become.
Whether it belongs in an art museum or a cultural one I don’t know, but two things need to happen:
/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM have set the video to private or not, this URL now belongs to the world, and at the very least it needs to be preserved and a link added to explain what kind of monument this is. The video itself can be re-added later – it’s the process that matters for now.(In the future, monument URLs should be treated differently. The big sites should retire them from regular service, intercept the request away from whatever app they are currently running, and redirect the URL to a server farm running in the Svalbard Global Meme Vault or whatever.)
To begin with I felt like Charlie, the NFT, should be bought directly by the nation from 3FMusic. I know the UK government has a process for this.
BUT: direct acquisition isn’t traditionally how art has ended up in the big museums.
We need collectors! Philanthropic donators! Tax dodges! The whole kit and caboodle of the art and cultural artefacts ecosystem.
So really what we need is a billionaire who wants to put some real effort into figuring out what it means to collect memes.
How do you collect Charlie Bit My Finger, really? How do you display it? How do you attach your name to it?
How do you do that for another dozen memes of similar value? Not memes that you personally feel are funny, or that are “meaningful” somehow. Let’s be blunt here: the arbiter of value is views.
Then how do you lend a collection to a museum? And eventually donate it?
Museums used to promise to build a new wing to display the famed collection of a benefactor. What’s the novel architecture such that the public can visit and enjoy memes? How do school kids sit down to sketch them and learn the significance?
How are memes valued so that our philanthropic billionaire can get the tax writeoff in addition to their legacy?
There’s a huge pathfinding exercise here. But this kind of process has to start somehow.
I know someone who works in acquiring art on behalf of the country. I’ll have to ask her.
And if you’re a wannabe meme-collecting philanthropist, perhaps I should put the two of you in touch.
Windows let in light… but…
I stayed at a hotel a few years ago which had a sound window.
It was the Juvet landscape hotel in Norway for a retreat about AI. (You may recognise the architecture – Ex Machina was shot there.)
ASIDE:
I was lucky enough to stay in one of the seven wooden cabins. Each faces the woods and the river with floor to ceiling glass windows, artfully arranged to have no other cabins in view.
Next to the bed, where the bedside phone would be in a regular hotel, is a closed hatch in the wall. A small rectangle.
You slide open the plain wooden door. There’s a small ridge on the wall so you can’t see through it lying down, and no breeze reaches you, but it opens directly to the outdoors.
Which means, in the dark of night, you can listen to the forest and the water and the wind.
If the veil were thin, and a small hole tore open to the faerie world, the world next to this one, and you could hear through, that is what a sound window is like.
There’s something about putting your ear to the adjacent-but-unreachable which is compelling.
And this is part of the feeling behind ant farms and snow globes perhaps?
And also the feeling behind the magic of television? Which has eroded because we’ve become accustomed to the other world behind the OLEDs.
BTW: although the appeal of an ant farm is to be able to peer at this unreachable other world, wouldn’t it be cool to actually travel there?
Like: could we make ant-scale robots and teleoperate them with VR glasses, and go for walks around ant hills? Wouldn’t it be fun to cosplay an ant for a few hours?
Sound windows and telepresence!
If I were YouTube, I would lean into ambient live streams (I keep a window open to a waterhole in the Namib Desert, as previously discussed, and it is gorgeous). You could develop an amazing multiplayer experience around that.
(Hey and if you’re at YouTube, or you’re a brand and you want to do this - like the ambient sounds of a factory floor would be incredible, or an HD stream of the glacier where your water comes from - then get in touch and we’ll build it.)
But what makes for a good window anyhow?
I’m part of a small reading group going through A Pattern Language one pattern at a time. I had read a few patterns, and found them incredible useful in designing multiplayer software, but never the whole thing. We meet on Mondays and will finish all 253 sometime at the back end of 2027.
Yeah so we’ve been talking about windows recently.
This paper was cited in APL (pattern #192: Windows Overlooking Life): The Function of Windows – A reappraisal (1967). Full ref below.
The basis being that: "Traditional criteria for window design relate to daylight and ventilation requirements." However it’s worth looking beyond that?
This grabbed me: that a window, on the retina, is visually dynamic and interactive.
Another criterion for successful window design might be a dynamic one – i.e. the amount of change in the view that takes place for a given change in the viewing position of the observer. As a result of this movement parallax not only do objects at a different distance within the view change their relative position but also the window-view relationship changes.
This is why two-dimensional artificial windows, even when very carefully contrived, are unrealistic and soon cease to satisfy; they lack ‘depth’ within the view and the parallax of window aperture-view is also absent. For small movements in a horizontal plane, such as occur when walking a few steps, a vertically orientated window with an axis at right angles to the plane of movement gives a maximum rate of change – a long horizontal window under the same conditions merely changes at its two extremities.
Which as an observation feels PROFOUND somehow!
A window is a continuously changing texture, like a television, but not because the outside view is changing (though it may) but because of parallax. This means that narrow windows are better than big ones.
Also it is responsive - when you move, the view moves! When you are still… it is still.
I hadn’t thought about windows like that. So active.
Refs.
Markus, T. A. (1967). The function of windows – A reappraisal. Building Science, 2(2), 97-121. https://doi.org/10.1016/0007-3628(67)90012-6
I want to make an electronic sound window for my home office, but a window that looks into cyberspace or latent space, with this reactive parallax quality to it.
Yeah I don’t know what that means either. It’s kinda a brief to myself I guess, something to sketch around.
I was invited to speak to the cohort of the Summer of Protocols research program, and took the opportunity to build on last year’s essay about protocol fiction and think about adoption and the links with design fiction.
(Summer of Protocols is an 18 week program to explore, catalyse, and broaden the discourse around protocols. Here’s the cohort.)
The session was a talk, workshop, then afterparty discussion.
The essay version of my talk follows. I’ve added some notes from the discussion at the end.
How could you end up with new infrastructure, such as a national drone delivery network, or an ecosystem of biannual health checks based on MRI and AI – without being a government or a giant corporation?
One answer is to grow like the internet.
First you imagine a future network of actors with aligned incentives.
Then you define a protocol that explains how to work together, even when the network is tiny, with incentives for non-actors to join the actor network. (When ARPANET launched it had 4 nodes.)
(A certain kind of protocol is a technology of cooperation, and I’ll use it in that sense here.)
A couple potential benefits of a protocol are
But the challenge is getting started.
So last year I wrote about protocol fiction for speculative infrastructure, and the point of that fiction is to articulate
Today I want to talk about belief and desire.
I was taken with this cybernetic description of an aircraft factory from sci-fi author Bob Shaw (in his collection Tomorrow Lies in Anguish).
An aircraft factory is a machine for producing aeroplanes and it may be disastrous to attempt to improve production by piecemeal tinkering with individual departments - one must seek out in all its ramifications, and destroy, the machine for stopping the production of aeroplanes, which lurks like a parasite within the organisation.
It shifted my pov. I can now imagine that a system - a factory, an organisation, an ecosystem - is autonomous, its own entity, and I am there to facilitate and to garden.
In the protocol world, one of the best practitioners of ruthlessly rooting out stop-energy is Dave Winer, creator of both RSS and podcasting – which wasn’t just protocol design but also community/network bootstrapping.
Winer distilled his lessons into this typically straightforward, classic essay: Rules for standards-makers (2017).
There are 18 rules. I’ll pick out 8.
It’s worth a close read. The first rules are about creating belief: working code, social proof, etc.
Then the later ones are about reducing friction.
What I think Winer doesn’t say (because he’s so good at it, and therefore takes it for granted) is that you also have to create desire and a kind of gregarious desire – people have to easily see the value and want to get involved! And they have to tell their friends!
The final rule, "praise developers," is a nod to that: positive feedback and imitation is part of human nature.
So how should we think about desire with specs and protocols?
The practice of Design Fiction (as established by Julian Bleeker) is responsible for all kinds of very public, charismatic visions of the future.
Design fiction is the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.
Kickstarter videos: they follow the aesthetic tropes of design fiction. (My favourite is Disco Dog from 2015 – once you see the dog in the context of the street, it’s so real, it’s so compelling…)
There’s something about a gorgeously shot prop in its context of use that makes you trust and want enough to open your wallet.
Of course that’s not all design fiction is. To unpack how it works as a practice and its wider effects, I recommend Matt Ward’s essay Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice (2013). (I first encountered the deliberate use of fiction in design because of Ward, back in 2006.)
To highlight just some of his points:
What I take from this is
Design operates in the market. The ability of artifacts to persuade is what we want.
A protocol network, same same!
Hence protocol fiction.
I’d like to add something:
Material artifacts have an ability to enroll and align different tribes in a way that text doesn’t. The goal is to make “boundary objects” - artifacts that self-translate for all kinds of different tribes, and allow these actors to communicate with one another, even when they’re speaking different languages.
Think of the magical role of self-evident prototypes to align engineering, designers, users, MBAs, and so on. Like that, but projected into the future.
I should give the origin of these terms I keep using.
At the bottom of internal phenomena, whatever they are, the analysis pushed to the limit will never discover more than three irreducible notions: belief, desire, and their point of pure application, pure sense.
– Gabriel Tarde, La croyance et le desire (1880)
I haven’t forgotten them since I first heard them.
Steven Shaviro has written about the sociology of Gabriel Tarde (2003).
Tarde denies the existence of higher-level entities … There is no such thing as social laws and regulations, social norms, social impositions. There are only power relations among individuals. Certain individuals impose on others; certain individuals are imitated by others. Social coherence is merely the result of imitation on a mass scale, together with raw power impositions.
And:
By a similar argument, it cannot possibly be the case that all hydrogen atoms are uniform and interchangeable. The only explanation for the apparent uniformity of nature is that one particular hydrogen atom dominated the others, forced them to obey it, or induced them to imitate it.
And:
The ultimate motivating forces that move all of the world, whether human beings in society, thoughts in a single brain, or hydrogen atoms in a gas, are according to Tarde belief and desire. There’s nothing else. Rocks and stars, indeed atoms themselves, believe and desire just as we do. At the other extreme, things like ideologies and customs and social classes and bureaucracies can be explained merely as statistical aggregations of particular beliefs and desires, amplified by mass imitation.
I find this such a brutal and mind-opening lens.
Beyond thinking through making, this is what protocol fiction must achieve.
So I want to show three levels for building belief and desire, at different scales.
The story of Stripe, the internet payments platform, was told in Businessweek: How Two Brothers Turned Seven Lines of Code Into a $9.2 Billion Startup (2017). The reported valuation today is $50bn.
I remember those lines: "all a startup had to do was add seven lines of code to its site to handle payments" – it was neat!
The more jaw-dropping moment, for me, was when they were still called “/dev/payments”, and half of their page was given over to this:
curl https: //apa.devpayments.com/api \
-d method=execute_charge card \
-d 'card[number]=4242424242424242*' \
-d 'card[exp_month]=10' \
-d 'card[exp_year]=2011' \
-d amount=300 \
-d currency=usd \
-d identifier='hello world' \
-d key=rNY2NaOyVo75otcS0M72NjscobfRMM
You pasted it into your Terminal… and immediately received a token for (test) cash in your account.
Instantly:
So what’s the smallest way to have that kind of experience?
Back in the 1950s that was a belief - or rather a common and unstated understanding - about humanity’s future in space.
To me, there’s a big role for sci-fi’s established future history, the Consensus Cosmogony, summarised here:
When people were sent into orbit, and then landed on the Moon, this was confirmation that we were on the path - if step 1, then steps 2 through 9, right? And it’s exciting! We want it to happen. That was the role of the sci-fi stories: propaganda creating desire.
Activities become easy when they align with a social consensus. Once established, you don’t get stop-energy from doing something that matches this future.
Then given the Brownian motion of society, we collectively tend towards that future.
(Think of Moore’s Law as another Schelling point in action.)
There are other social consensus futures: nuclear apocalypse, climate change… (I wrote in 2022 about the story becoming destiny.)
It’s interesting that, as wild as the Consensus Cosmogony is, what makes it work is that there’s a pathway and the Space Race gave it plausibility. Belief as well as desire. It’s not enough to just imagine and articulate a future, you have to show there-from-here, at least so evangelists can hand-wave it.
So: how do you give people a picture of the future? And how do you provide a plausible pathway there – with your protocol (or whatever) becoming a both required and inevitable step #1?
Another way of looking at this is that you need different types of activity, and not everyone is specialised at doing all of them.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, the character Paul Slazinger writes a book: “The Only Way to Have a Successful Revolution in Any Field of Human Activity.”
Slazinger/Vonnegut puts forward that you need a "mind-opening team" of three sorts of specialists:
It’s not as obviously belief and desire but, I think, it’s a similar light on these different functions that are required.
Propaganda sounds like a dirty word, as does “advertising” to some people, but my favourite piece of persuasive design fiction probably ever is this Zurich tv spot from – well I don’t know exactly but it was uploaded to YouTube 17 years ago.
WATCH: Because Change Happens, Zurich TV ad from 2006 (Youtube, 1 min).
It’s a collection of short scenarios made mundane by being shown incidentally in an entirely believable near future:
(Just as wild, in the minds of the advertisers, is the idea of old people snowboarding. Only 17 years ago!)
Here’s a second ad with vignettes including auto-inflating fall protection jackets for construction workers, and people in suits caring about mental well-being.
And I do wonder: would there have been any other way to get salespeople, management, analysts, and partners thinking about algorithmic insurance for robot cars (which is now a thing) in the early years of the 2000s?
This is belief, desire, and material artifact as boundary object, all wrapped up in one. (Though I think we kinda have a growing immunity to video nowadays. Working code is better.)
So if I could list some challenges for the designers of protocols, it would be to sit and imagine how to do the following - in ascending level of scale:
Today let’s think about the first challenge only.
Maybe, as an exercise:
Whiteboard these using tldraw (go to the menu in the top left and hit File > New shared project. Then everyone can work on the same URL). And we’ll come back to discuss in 15 minutes.
I’m not going to do a full write-up of the workshop here, except to note a two ideas that stuck in my head:
Well done to all four groups!
And from the discussion:
Not all design is the same. Some design is about meeting a need or a user goal. But some design is normative. It is design for the world as it should be, not as it is. Design fiction fits in the world of normative design.
Protocol fiction too.
To riff on Ward’s framing, the Summer of Protocols is inherently ideological and protocols, as a technology of cooperation, if they are intended to grow, are evangelical.
So unpacking desire and belief, and then manifesting it, will be, I believe, part of the story of this summer program, if the researcher cohort is to achieve its goals.
Thank you for inviting me.