BigMother.dk

Last week we submitted the draft for our coming book on the data-driven company. Big data, small data and most in between. Out August on Gyldendal Business

Follow our series of sneak peeks into the books claim om the /KL7 blog.

A lot of things have happened (hence the silence).

• /KL7 is growing and maturing. Very exiting projects underway, new people hired, and new offices. Please drop by!
• The Danish Quantified Self network is still growing and exiting projects and products surface each week. Next meeting January 29′th at 5
• We are involved in the Open Data movement and have started exploring democratic projects and business concepts i /KL7
• Simon and I have signed a deal with Gyldendal Business on an introduction to strategic deployment of data. The web is flowing with big data, quantified self, data visualization, and other data related hype but the reality in the companies we meet quite different. We have decided to write the book to share our interests and experience with data based strategy and hopefully help the market mature. The book is released in August

To celebrate Marius‘ heroic work to raise Bigmother from the web-ashes (after a Chinese hack-attack) and to test if it actually works allow me to cross post from a recent post from /KL7. A little reflection on the ethics of behavioral engineering.

Even if you – at least for the sake of the argument – admit us the practical value of monitoring to obtain knowledge and thus give up on well-exercised arguments for the inbreachable privacy rights of people, there is still a question of ‘elitist’ ethics: “What allows you or your client” you might ask, “to decide what people ‘ought’ to do in your so called behavioral engineering approach?” That is, you might admit us the right to act ‘bigbrother’ to gain knowledge but not a normative ‘bigmother’ to achieve a certain behavior. That is a perfectly legitimate question. Let us deal with it once and for all.

In their book Nudge – Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness Thaler and Sunstein discuss this issue and argue at length for the legitimacy of ‘paternalism’. As long as it is liberitarian paternalisme leaving agents with a free choice. This basically means lowering the cost (mentally, cognitively, resource-wise) of making the ‘right’ choice not coercively forcing anyone. The basic argument is that humans – as opposed to the theoretical construct homo economicus – quite frequently make bad choices for a number of reasons. As such, humans needs little ‘nudges’ to make the right choices faced with complexity and insufficient information.

But what is our reason in /KL7? They are very different in origin but univocal in consequence: Humans simply need help to make the right choices in a lot of contexts as we tend to act against our own long term interests. The last couple of hundred years of thinking has been one long dethronement of human rationality. Let us have a look at some of the reasons for questioning mans ‘rationality’:

Philosophical: Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx seriously questioned the merits of our explicit motives. Nietzsche was probably most brutal to our self-understanding when he claimed that all rationality is covered up irrationality: The true boss running the show is our hidden drives.

Cognitive: Cognitive science has amply demonstrated how bodily emotions and basically animal drives stands for a majority of actions and decisions.

Neurological: According to neurology rationality – or the frontal lobes in this terminology – can at best ‘orchestrate’ the symphony of impulses rather than originate or control them.

Biological: From biology we know how we are e.g. prone to eat as much sugar and fat as we can come across since such energy-rich nutritions are rare in nature. But we all know how cheap and available sugar and fat are in our modern world without our spontaneous reaction adapting.

Sociological: Humans are embedded in a social and cultural context often blurring the motivation and thus ‘rationality’ of personal choice.

Economical: Homo economicus, the notion of the perfectly rational, optimizing agent suffers badly in the famous ‘ultimatum game’ experiment. Emotions and our sense of fairness simply trumps rationality when it comes to accept an haphazardly uneven distribution of means: You rather have nothing than only $10 out of $100 if your partner takes the other $90.

Branding: We know that some of the most adored brands in this world act as filters of complexity by making a lot of choices on behalf of the customers. Apple, BMW, Google anyone? In design it is called minimalism, in branding identity and in everyday lingo we call it focus. Most people love brands preciselt for the choices they make on their behalf. This is more about emotional coupling than rationality. Add to this religion as an existential coupling that is also about narrowing the window of available actions and interpretations.

Rational impotence: We have worked long enough with health, traffic, smoking etc. campaigns to know that ‘what I ought to’ is totally decoupled from ‘what I will actually do’. If you conducted a multiple choice test with smokers, alcoholics or obese they would probably have most facts relating to their vice right. But sine this ‘rational’ knowledge is decoupled from emotionally based motivation changed behavior remains a fatamorgana.

Self-inspection: Last but not least; we know ourselves and our rational shortcomings too well. It is only too human. And just like you adjust for physical dysfunctions we think it is perfectly empathetic and ethic to help people behave constructively. As long as it’s not against their or others own long term interests (as deemed by themselves).

And what about the opposite: No intended or unintended influence? How about design, management, didactics or a message that does not willingly or unwillingly stimulate a certain behavior? Quite unthinkable right? You would not deny parents the right to enforce a specific kind of behavior on their offspring either (in general that is. There are extreme examples challenging our norms). So yes, KL7′s business model is to stimulate behavior that would not have arisen spontaneously in the same context. But we always make sure to make choices as transparent as possible by making the stimulation explicit or peoples behavior available to themselves through feedback and only support behavior that the agent herself would otherwise sanction or even cherish. As such we are proud of making peoples life a little better and apply our abilities to support consumerism, pushing around even more communication or add to the visual pollution of the world.

Almost four years has passed, and a lot of stuff has happened in my life:

We’ve got another lovely kid – Esther.

The new Danish Liberal party – Liberal Alliance – has tried to hi-jack the meme BigMother and re-stipulate it negatively as the all-encompassing, dank hand of the welfare state.

I’ve changed jobs a couple of times. From strategic consultant in Advice to cosmographic as strategic director and then started /KL7 (seven o’clock in Danish) together with a group of really great and talented people. /KL7 is in many ways a strategic design agency along the lines of Bigmother specialising meaningful, careful and mobilising technology based on monitoring and interaction design. We focus on effect and behavioural change and call our approach ‘social engineering’. Please come and visit us at /KL7

I’ve been going through stem cell transplantation this year and I’m hopefully soon fully rid of the leukaemia that I’ve been living with for six years. A tough ride (pictures are just before and during treatment) but there’s light at the end of the tunnel now.

So now that I’m out of excuses such as baby children, Danish monopoly on the meaning of BigMother, life-threatening illness or energy-consuming ‘employee-jobbing’ I will take up writing a little again (funny how ‘blogging’ would have sounded altmodisch if I had chosen that term)

I’ve been assisting an exiting Danish biotech company called Hypo-Safe for some time and have come out as freelance consultant under the Bigmother moniker. I support Hypo-Safe in several ways, from R&D design, press contact and communication and innovation potentials reports and other companies with challenges at the intersection of research, technology and business are welcome as to contact me.

I’m still full time at Actics, so my Bigmother Consulting venture is a spare time project.

I Just did a survey on the future of the web by The Pew Internet & American Life Project. It asks you to motivate why you agree or disagree with different more or less far-fetched statements on the future of the web. One of them is clearly BigMotherian:

“Transparency builds a better world, even at the expense of privacy: As sensing, storage, and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly “transparent” globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture – at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible – this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.”

To the greatest disgrace of my beautiful mind child one of the other scenarios was the infamous J-curve:

“Autonomous technology is a problem: By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them. We will be on a “J-curve” of continued acceleration of change.”

To this I responded:

“Ha ha, this is simply third grade science fiction. Dangers come much from more subtle (read: less anthropomorphic) issues.”

But now, I need to abandon the BigMother ship. If it belongs to this company, BigMother is surely an absurd idea.

Please go and do the survey here to balance the idiocy that might result from this survey if prudent and knowing people doesn’t voice their perspective. Afterwards, please get back here and share your thoughts.

PS. Sad they don’t conduct this as a Prediction Markets survey. That would have been quite interesting (unless people are already brainwashed by half-wit futurists).

What is it about this craze for blogs? How did it get so overly hyped? Here’s one attempt to modify the euphoria of the blog revolution from a professional writers perspective: it’s just better technology, not anything intrinsically valuable about the writing itself. Soon every commercial publication will be more or less in the blog format. By Simon Dumenco in AdAge.com

After a bad upgrade to WP 2.0 I have had a little downtime. But fortunately, Marius helped me out (again!). While BigMother was down, you missed a very interesting post on counter surveillance, my proof that I invented the iPod back in ’86 and my conclusive idea to end poverty in the world. Think about it. Technology is surely evil in disguise luring us into the comfort of believing that it facilitates sharing of ideas when it actually impedes any true progress with its errors and malfunctions. We better hope that I will not have any downtime again.

This weekend my increasingly bad conscience about taking up space in virtual reality with yet-another-uninspired-waste-of-time-blog-on-nothing-at-all was considerably hurt by several more or less direct attacks. Friday, I acted as a test animal in a pilot course (proof: http://www.23hq.com/mygdal/socialsquare) for corporate blog writing held by Blog Square, also known as Thomas http://www.bootstrapping.net/ and Trine-Maria http://www.hovedetpaabloggen.dk/. Obviously, we discussed good blogging and I got several implicit jabs by relating everything said on engaging blogging to Bigmother. Saturday, I was out for a stroll with two old buddies when one of them said that he had just directed journalists toward ‘his friend’s interesting blog on surveillance’. Only afterwards he consulted Bigmother.dk to see – to his professional shame – that Bigmother had morphed into my personal poster point for everyday stuff.

I admit that the original idea of a bunch of tech-savvies writing on surveillance issues from different points of view has faded away without any focused replacement. But to eat some of the medicine of the blog course, I’ll be totally honest with you: I’m simply in-between ideas. The bigmother angle ran dry on me (due to my illness among other bad excuses) and I haven’t gained strength to come up with a new. Sorry returning reader. I’ll be back. Meanwhile you’re welcome to follow my ongoing struggles to earn any claim-for-fame. But I understand if you don’t bother.

I’ve wanted to change design and features on this page for some time now, but still need some WordPress studying to carry it out. Stay tuned for much more information and dynamics framing the actual blog.