We talk a lot about “being online” and “being offline” or “going online” and “going offline,” but what do those terms mean? The distinction between online and offline is an outdated holdover from twenty years ago, when “going online,” through America Online or Prodigy or Compuserve, was like “going shopping.” It was an event with clear demarcations, in time and space, and it usually comprised a limited and fairly routinized set of activities. As Net access has expanded, to the point that, for many people, it is coterminous with existence itself, the line between online and offline has become so blurred that the terms have become useless or, worse, misleading. When we talk about being online or being offline these days, we’re deluding ourselves.

That, anyway, is the argument that some writers at the blog Cyborgology have been making over the past couple of years. They’ve been building, in fits and starts, a case against what they call “digital dualism.” The phrase was introduced by Nathan Jurgenson in a post in February 2011. He took umbrage at people’s continuing use of the words “online” and “offline” to describe their experiences, particularly the implication that the online and the offline are separate realms:

Some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy.

He proposed, instead, an “opposite perspective,” which he termed “augmented reality.” The augmented reality view sees “the digital and physical [as] increasingly meshed”:

I am proposing an alternative view that states that our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once. We are not crossing in and out of separate digital and physical realities, ala The Matrix, but instead live in one reality, one that is augmented by atoms and bits.

The observation that “our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical,” is banal. I can’t imagine anyone on the planet disagreeing with it. Being natural-born toolmakers, human beings have always lived in a world that is both technological and organic, that is at once natural and, as Thomas Hughes put it, “human-built.” Nor can I imagine that anyone actually believes that the offline and the online exist in immaculate isolation from each other, separated, like Earth and Narnia, by some sort of wardrobe-portal. Jurgenson uses the charge of digital dualism to dismiss a host of very different critiques of digital media, by people like Sherry Turkle, Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier, Mark Bauerlein, and myself, but that seems little more than intellectual stereotyping. It is the “meshing” of the offline and the online, the physical and the digital, that is the fundamental subject and the fundamental concern of pretty much every critical examination of the Net—the generally positive ones as well as the generally negative ones—that I’ve come across. If the two states actually existed in isolation, most of the criticism of digital media would be rendered irrelevant.

Jurgenson came close to conceding this point in a later post in which he presented four “conceptual categories” to describe different ways of viewing “the relationship between the physical and digital”:

Strong Digital Dualism: The digital and the physical are different worlds, have different properties, and do not interact.

Mild Digital Dualism: The digital and physical are different worlds, have different properties, and do interact.

Mild Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality, have different properties, and interact.

Strong Augmented Reality: The digital and physical are part of one reality and have the same properties.

As Jurgenson more or less admits, the two extreme categories, perfect separation and perfect sameness, are made of straw. They are purely theoretical constructs, notable for their lack of members. Basically everyone, he grants, agrees that the digital and the physical “have different properties but interact.” So the distinction on which Jurgenson’s digital-dualism theorizing hinges is between those “mild dualists” who see the digital and physical as “different worlds” and those “mild augmentationists” who see the digital and physical as “one reality.” We’ve now entered a realm of very fuzzy semantic distinctions. What the terms “worlds” and “reality” actually denote is not at all clear. As Jurgenson allows, “Sometimes mild dualism and mild augmentation look very similar.” Well, yes. It’s not altogether impossible for “one reality” to encompass “different worlds.” But then, having painted himself into a corner, he leaps out of the corner in order to criticize those who “waffle back and forth across each of these categories.” Given the vagueness of the categories, a bit of waffling seems not only inevitable but wise.

Jurgenson makes his intent clearer in “The IRL Fetish,” an essay he published in The New Inquiry last year. What seems to underpin and inform his critique of digital dualism is his annoyance at people who sentimentalize and “over-valorize” the time they spend offline and make a self-satisfied show of their resistance to going online:

Every other time I go out to eat with a group, be it family, friends, or acquaintances of whatever age, conversation routinely plunges into a discussion of when it is appropriate to pull out a phone. People boast about their self-control over not checking their device, and the table usually reaches a self-congratulatory consensus that we should all just keep it in our pants. … What a ridiculous state of affairs this is. To obsess over the offline and deny all the ways we routinely remain disconnected is to fetishize this disconnection.

Jurgenson is making a valid point here. There is something tiresome about the self-righteousness of those who see, and promote, their devotion to the offline as a sign of their superiority. It’s like those who can’t wait to tell you that they don’t own a TV. But that’s a quirk that has more to do with individual personality than with some general and delusional dualist mentality. Jurgenson’s real mistake is to assume, grumpily, that pretty much everyone who draws a distinction in life between online experience and offline experience is in the grip of a superiority complex or is striking some other kind of pose. That provides him with an easy way to avoid discussing a far more probable and far more interesting interpretation of contemporary behavior and attitudes: that people really do feel a difference and even a conflict between their online experience and their offline experience. They’re not just engaged in posing or fetishization or valorization or some kind of contrived identity game. They’re not faking it. They’re expressing something important about themselves and their lives—something real. Jurgenson doesn’t want to admit that possibility. To him, people are just worshipping a phantom: “The notion of the offline as real and authentic is a recent invention, corresponding with the rise of the online.”

Another Cyborgology writer, David Banks, pushes Jurgenson’s dismissal of people’s sense of a tension between online and offline to an absurd extreme. In a recent post, he observes:

Ever since Nathan posted [his original piece on digital dualism] I have been preoccupied with a singular question: where did this thinking come from? Its too pervasive and readily accepted as truth to be a trendy idea or even a generational divide. Every one of Cyborgology’s regular contributors (and some of our guest authors) hear digital dualist rhetoric coming from their students. The so-called “digital natives” lament their peer’s neglect of the “the real world.” Digital dualism’s roots run deep and can be found at the very core of modern thought. Indeed, digital dualism seems to predate the very technologies that it inaccurately portrays.

If it weren’t for that supercilious “inaccurately,” one might expect, or at least hope, that at this point Banks would take people’s “pervasive” views at face value and would dedicate himself to a deep exploration of why people feel that digital media are eroding their sense of “the real.” Instead, he dismisses people’s concerns. He claims that they’re just reenacting, in a new setting, Rousseau’s view of masturbation as lying outside the natural sexual order:

Rousseau claims at different points in his Confessions that masturbation is a supplement to nature: something constructed or virtual that competes with an existing real or natural phenomenon. Derrida, in his Of Grammatology asserts that erotic thoughts not only precede sexual action (you think about what you do before you do it) but that there is no basis for finding sex any more “real” than auto-affective fantasies. This “logic of the supplement” mistakes something that was “always already” there with an unneeded addition.

That’s an awfully tortured way of denying the obvious: The reason people struggle with the tension between online experience and offline experience is because there is a tension between online experience and offline experience, and people are smart enough to understand, to feel, that the tension does not evaporate as the online intrudes ever further into the offline. In fact, the growing interpenetration between the two modes of experience—the two states of being—actually ratchets up the tension. We sense a threat in the hegemony of the online because there’s something in the offline that we’re not eager to sacrifice.

In a rejoinder to Jurgenson’s “The IRL Fetish,” Michael Sacasas gently makes the point that Jurgenson, Banks, and the other digital dualism denialists go out of their way to avoid seeing:

Jurgenson’s [assertion] – “There was and is no offline … it has always been a phantom.” – is only partially true. In the sense that there was no concept of the offline apart from the online and that the online, once it appears, always penetrates the offline, then yes, it is true enough. However, this does not negate the fact that while there was no concept of the offline prior to the appearance of the online, there did exist a form of life that we can retrospectively label as offline. There was, therefore, an offline (even if it wasn’t known as such) experience realized in the past against which present online/offline experience can be compared. What the comparison reveals is that a form of consciousness, a mode of human experience is being lost. It is not unreasonable to mourn its passing, and perhaps even to resist it.

Nature existed before technology gave us the idea of nature. Wilderness existed before society gave us the idea of wilderness. Offline existed before online gave us the idea of offline. Grappling with the idea of nature and the idea of wilderness, as well as their contrary states, has been the source of much of the greatest philosophy and art for at least the last two hundred years. We should celebrate the fact that nature and wilderness have continued to exist, in our minds and in actuality, even as they have been overrun by technology and society. There’s no reason to believe that grappling with the online and the offline, and their effects on lived experience and the formation of the self, won’t also produce important thinking and art. As Sacasas implies, the arrival of a new mode of experience provides us with an opportunity to see more clearly an older mode of experience. To do that, though, requires the drawing of distinctions. If we rush to erase or obscure the distinctions, for ideological or other reasons, we sacrifice that opportunity.

Yes, digital dualism can go too far. But the realization of that fact—the fact that the online and the offline are not isolated states; that they together influence and shape our lives, and in ways that can’t always be teased apart—should be a spur to thinking more deeply about people’s actual experience of the online and the offline and, equally important, how they sense that experience. What’s lost? What’s gained? An augmentation, it’s worth remembering, is both part of and separate from that which it is added to. To deny the separateness is as wrongheaded as to deny the togetherness. Digital dualism denialism does not open up new frontiers of critical and creative thought and action. It forecloses them.

Photo by Florian.

Some fear that the Singularity, when it arrives, will render the human race obsolete. Even if we survive, we’ll toil under the jackboots of our gizmos. But there’s also a sunnier view. If the Singularity goes well, we’ll not only live in what Richard Brautigan termed “mutually programming harmony” with our computers, but we’ll be immortal, our essence uploaded into massively redundant databases for eternity. Chief Singularitarian and newly minted Googler Ray Kurzweil has said that he even plans to bring his deceased dad back to life, reanimating his spirit from a few stray strands of DNA and a closetful of mementos.

But what if the Singularity doesn’t arrive? What if the Singularity turns out to be, as Kevin Kelly once argued, a “meaningless” mirage? It may not matter. Software allows us to simulate all sorts of real-world phenomena, and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t allow us to simulate our own post-Singularity immortality. Alan Jacobs points to a new article in the Guardian that describes a forthcoming app called LivesOn, which, by analyzing your social networking activity while you’re alive, will be able to algorithmically replicate that activity in perpetuity after you expire:

The service uses Twitter bots powered by algorithms that analyse your online behaviour and learn how you speak, so it can keep on scouring the internet, favouriting tweets and posting the sort of links you like, creating a personal digital afterlife. As its tagline explains: “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.”

LivesOn was created as a lame, if effective, publicity stunt by a British advertising agency. But the idea is sound. As more and more of our earthly self comes to be defined by our online profiles and postings, our digital garb, then it becomes a relatively easy task for a computer to replicate that self, dynamically and without interruption, after we’re gone. As long as you keep posting, liking, and tweeting, spewing links to funny GIFs and trenchant longform texts, circulating the occasional, digitally fabricated instagram photo or vine video, your friends and acquaintances will never need know that your body has shuffled off the stage. For all social intents and purposes — and what other intents and purposes are there? — you’ll live forever. I update, therefore I am.

Who’s to say, for that matter, that most of the presences on social networks aren’t already dead, their ongoing existences merely simulated by software? Would you really know the difference?

Image: Detail from Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

The Economist reports that lenders are beginning to scour social networks for data to refine the credit ratings of would-be borrowers:

Professional contacts on LinkedIn are especially revealing of an applicant’s “character and capacity” to repay, says Navin Bathija, the founder of Neo, a start-up that assesses the creditworthiness of car-loan applicants. … As statistics accumulate, algorithms get better at spotting correlations in the data. Applicants who type only in lower-case letters, or entirely in upper case, are less likely to repay loans, other factors being equal, says Douglas Merrill, founder of ZestFinance … Neo’s efforts to improve accuracy include recording borrowers’ Facebook data: Mr Bathija reckons that within a year there will be enough evidence to determine if making racist comments on Facebook is correlated with a lack of creditworthiness.

The social graph, too, provides a rich store of information for gleaning risk-worthiness. Your friends say a lot about you:

Facebook data already inform lending decisions at Kreditech, [where] applicants are asked to provide access for a limited time to their account on Facebook or another social network. Much is revealed by your friends, says Alexander Graubner-Müller, one of the firm’s founders. An applicant whose friends appear to have well-paid jobs and live in nice neighbourhoods is more likely to secure a loan. An applicant with a friend who has defaulted on a Kreditech loan is more likely to be rejected.

More than that, though, your friends provide leverage should you fall behind on a payment:

 [To borrow from Hong Kong-based Lenddo,] loan-seekers ask Facebook friends to vouch for them. To determine if those who say “yes” are real friends rather than mere Facebook contacts, Lenddo’s software checks messages for shared slang or wording that suggests affinity. What’s more, the credit scores of those who have vouched for a borrower are damaged if he or she fails to repay. Put the word out about this “social-enforcement mechanism” and “boom, the money shows up,” says Jeff Stewart, Lenddo’s boss.

It may give a new meaning to getting poked.

Rob Horning points out that people may need to start redlining their friends:

Better purge all those high school friends from your Facebook who aren’t likely to be successful; get rid of all those college friends who seem weird or who update about unsavory low-class, low-status things. … It is dismaying to see how readily social media can be used not as a tool of connectivity but as a sorting mechanism that helps rationalize social inequality. It doesn’t merely map the social territory, but starts to dictate it, along the segregated lines it reveals and then reinforces.

I see a new revenue stream for Facebook here — some kind of automated friend-portfolio management app that optimizes your mix of friends and alerts you whenever a buddy spends too much time in a bad neighborhood or starts hanging out with low-lifes. Maybe Facebook could even set up an exchange for trading friend-portfolio derivatives. You could have everything from Aaa-rated friend portfolios (stable marriages, high-net-worth zip codes, regular statin intake) to speculative junk-rated friend portfolios (druggies, socialists, poets).

I have to share a tiny bit from Will Sheff’s long, fine essay on Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Live 1974. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Sheff’s piece is what you want to read this weekend.

By this point, the camera has pulled in so close to George’s face that it takes up the entire screen. George’s mouth is hidden behind the red handkerchief, so when his voice comes out it sounds weirdly disembodied, like it was piped in from somewhere else. In spite of the macro close-up, his face barely seems to move. He stands there, stone-still, filling the screen, a frozen giant, so massive you can see every pore in his nose. His eyes, though, are hidden in deep shadow. The camera lingers on this close-up as the disembodied words flow out, holding the shot for so long that for a while it becomes abstracted and you almost forget you’re looking at a face. You get the illusion instead that you’re peering into two deep caves burrowed into the pale side of an ancient cliff, with overgrown black vines shrouding the cave on either side, and with a booming voice off in the distance, or maybe it’s thunder, breaking against itself, or maybe the voice is coming from the miles and miles of endlessness deep inside, a voice of someone thousands of feet below the earth’s surface, a damp, earthy voice, a voice like mud or like dirt or like black grease, intoning “Mmmmmboooooogie….”

Thanks to The Browser.

There are continuing signs that the e-book market is cooling. Sales growth remains strong, but the rate of expansion, which fell sharply over the last year, still seems to be heading down. But whether that’s a blip or a trend, e-books are already a substantial segment of the overall book market, and there’s little reason to believe that they won’t be an even bigger segment in the future.

Which means that the question of the used e-book — what it is, what can be done with it, who controls what can be done with it — is not going to go away. As was widely reported, Amazon was recently granted a very interesting patent on a method that allows e-books (and other “digital objects”) to be resold or given away through a secondary market. The method essentially allows the rights to the file (ie, the ability to open it) to be traded a certain number of times. When the maximum number of transfers is reached, the rights remain with the last “owner” in perpetuity. No further trades are possible.

Marcus Wohlsen provides a lucid explanation of the patent. He points out a crucial difference between a used e-book and a used print book: the former is a perfect copy (in theory), whereas the latter is a degraded copy. Just as a used car is a different product from a new car, a used physical book is different product from a new physical book. They’re not perfect substitutes. A used e-book, on the other hand, is the same product as a new e-book. They are perfect substitutes.

“There are no dog-eared pages or scratches or nicks or cuts or highlighter marks or whatever,” says Bill Rosenblatt, a consultant and expert witness in digital content patent cases. “It’s the same exact product.” In other words, a customer given the choice between a “new” e-book and a less expensive “used” e-book will buy the used copy every time. The extra expense of “new” won’t get you anything better.

Not only that, but since e-books don’t suffer decay, as physical books do, they can essentially be resold, as perfect substitutes, an infinite number of times. For those reasons, people who make their living in the book trade find the very idea of a used e-book awfully scary, which is why they’ve worked to prevent that idea from becoming a reality. Books aren’t songs, but, still, the specter of perfect digital copies of books being traded endlessly over the Net is more than a little discomfiting for those who deal in words.

So why would Amazon patent a method for permitting used e-book sales? One theory is that it’s a defensive patent, intended simply to make it more difficult for others to come up with a viable method for selling used e-books. That seems far-fetched to me. It’s not how Amazon operates. Amazon’s all about the offense. A more plausible explanation is that Amazon wants to restrict the number of times an e-book can be copied — to prevent infinite copying and hence protect new-book sales. By establishing such restrictions on copying, you also, to a small degree, add an imperfection to the used copies: every time a copy is transferred, the e-book loses a little of its value because the number of times it can be transferred in the future is reduced by one.

More important to Amazon, though, is the prospect of being able to set up and control a marketplace for used e-book sales, just as it operates a lucrative marketplace for sales of used print books. Such a marketplace is particularly attractive to Amazon because it cuts publishers out of the picture, or at least provides Amazon with another source of leverage over publishers. Amazon’s long-term goal is to influence the power structure of markets, giving itself dominance. The used e-book could make a good tactical weapon in this struggle. At the very least, it’s a weapon you’d prefer to control rather than allowing control to fall into the hands of another player. Hence the patent.

But there’s another angle here. The fact that a used e-book is a (theoretical) perfect copy of a new e-book is a bad thing for those who produce and sell books. But software has its advantages. As soon as a physical book was sold, the author, publisher, and bookseller lost all control over it—indeed, all knowledge of it. It became the property of the buyer. That, for better or worse, is not at all the case with an e-book. An e-book remains tethered, electronically, to the seller. Amazon knows, for instance, what you do with a Kindle book. It knows when you read it (or don’t read it), it knows when you lend it, and it will know when you sell it—and it will also know when the new owner reads or lends or sells it, and on and on and on. Indeed, that kind of post-sale tracking and control is what made the Amazon patent possible in the first place. The patent would make no sense for print books.

This is where things get interesting. If, for instance, Amazon made it possible to resell (or even give away) the e-books it sells, it could also, via restrictions coded into the file, control the way the resale takes place and even the terms of the sale. So if you wanted to sell a Kindle edition, you might be required to sell it through the Amazon store and you might be required to pay a set fee or a set percentage to complete the transfer. In order to set up such a system, Amazon would need the cooperation of the rights holders (publishers and authors), but now it has a carrot to offer them: a cut of the transfer fee. In this way, the downside of allowing a customer to trade a perfect copy of an e-book is offset, at least to a degree, by the ability to participate in those trades, in perpetuity. So maybe the used e-book is, for the book business, not quite as ugly as it seems.

One thing that all of this makes clearer than ever is this: being able to exert control over the ultimate shape and workings of the e-book market — rules, rights, copy protocols, percentages, etc. — will be critical over the long run. This is a power game — a game of tomes. I’ve argued in the past that publishers should give away a downloadable electronic copy with every copy of a physical book that’s purchased. The e-book should be a complement to the print book. That would not only make a print book more valuable and hence more likely to be purchased. It would also give publishers more control over the future of the e-book market. By setting up their own mechanism for downloads, they’d also gain more control over the rights and restrictions built into e-books, including the ability to make money directly from future transfers. They would not cede to Amazon another important set of tactical weapons. In the short run, though, making an e-book a free add-on to a print book would almost certainly mean sacrificing some e-book sales. And that’s not something that’s easy to swallow.

The big danger for publishers is that their view does not seem to extend out as far as Amazon’s does. In a long war, that could well be a fatal disadvantage.

Photo by How I See Life.

Online crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and the prettily named CrowdFlower provide companies and entrepreneurs with an easy way to tap into the so-called hive mind. Businesses can hire anonymous bee-laborers to perform what Amazon calls “human intelligence tasks,” or HITs, paying them microwages for cognitive piecework. Up to now, this has all been run as something of an underground economy, and the bee-laborers have had few rights and little recourse when their task masters, or “requesters,” stiff them, as the New Scientist‘s Hal Hodson reports:

Mechanical Turk’s entire business model hinges on persuading large numbers of workers to do tiny tasks for pennies at a time. And it relies on turning its group of human workers into “a system that doesn’t talk back”, says Lilly Irani, a computer scientist at the University of California in Irvine. Turkers, as they are known, have no idea whether an individual “requester” is likely to pay them promptly for their work, or even at all, as requesters can choose to reject work without any repercussions. This is vital because around 20 per cent of Turkers say that they always or sometimes need money earned during crowd work to make ends meet, according to a small survey carried out by Irani. “There are people for whom this is a crucial source of income,” she says.

Now, though, an incipient movement is afoot to organize crowdworkers and give them a little more power, individually and collectively. Irani, for instance, has set up a service, Turkopticon, that provides a way for workers to share information about requesters. It makes the hive a little more transparent. Crowdworkers are also beginning to take legal action against the platforms, charging them with violating labor and minimum-wage laws, according to Hodson. Calls for unionization are even being heard:

Without legal redress for online workers these efforts count for little, says Trebor Scholz at New School University in New York City. “People fought for 100 years for the 8-hour work day and paid vacation, against child labour. All of that is wiped away in these digital environments,” he says, and calls for crowd workers to form a transnational union.

At the very least, these efforts call attention to a small but growing part of the economy that has operated in the shadows. Terms like “crowdsourcing” and “hive mind” can obscure the fact that what we’re really talking about are people.

Photo by The Co-operative.