Alexis C. Madrigal

During the Los Angeles Police Department's forcible removal of the Occupy LA protest last night, they chose 12 reporters and photographers to represent the media as a whole.* This is called a "media pool" -- and it used to be a fairly time-honored, if oft-derided, way of dealing with very specific types of situations. The original idea was that a select group of mainstream media journalists go into a military engagement, report their observations to a larger group, and then everyone could write from the same observed facts.

Growing beyond its military borders, the media pool concept has been deployed during political conventions, high-profile trials, and in a few other cases. In all cases, though, as summarized in the Encyclopedia of Television, the pool "offers those who employ it a way to manage media coverage."

It strikes me as significant that the compromise developed in the 1980s after the media was barred from covering the invasion of Grenada. It also strikes me as significant that we use the term "compromise" to describe it. The first and second meanings of compromised come into play: "to settle a dispute by mutual concession" and "to weaken (a reputation or principle) by accepting standards that are lower than is desirable."

All of that brings us to last night's media pool. The LAPD deployed this old-school method in a decidedly 20th-century way. First, they didn't select a single web-based publication or alternative news outlet. Instead they allowed the Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, AP, the big four television outlets, and a two radio reporters. Anybody not in that group -- which would include reporters for every website not affiliated with a newspaper in Los Angeles, not to mention all citizens performing acts of journalism -- were told that they would be arrested if they came too close to the eviction area.

The LAPD forbade their pool reporters from reporting the events live. (Update: See bottom of the post for details. The restriction was more akin to a kind of tape-delay than an embargo.) This helped to neutralize a key informational advantage that Occupy protesters have exploited. As confrontations with police begin, they are able to use the emotional imagery from those events to draw more support in real-time. Of course, in this case, there were some people writing about the events in real-time and others livestreamed, but only if they were willing to risk arrest.

Let's stipulate that there are real issues surrounding how charged situations can or should be covered by card carrying-media or citizen journalists. Fine. Still, my thought is that this sort of media choreography cannot survive for long. The tools to record and distribute information about the world are too widely distributed. A video of protesters getting pepper sprayed has impact whether it comes from the Los Angeles Times or some dude with an iPhone.

But institutions do not have to take this democratization of reporting tools lying down. Many organizations want to control -- and are used to controlling -- media narratives. They will (I can hear Evgeny Morozov whispering into my ear) have an institutional response to the deployment of new technology by political dissenters. In this case, the LAPD has come up with a way to say that they allowed media into the eviction and they can still arrest people that they don't want to cover the event.

City police departments share a lot of information and if the LAPD's strategy is seen as successful, expect it will be deployed again in other cities. More broadly, it seems plausible that government agencies will continue to buddy up to traditional media members, offering them exclusive access in exchange for agreeing to the exclusion of citizen journalists from important events. Sadly, the incentives of the elite media (many of which have never been all that fond of the non-professionals stealing their show) and the government are aligned here. That's a bad setup, even assuming (as I do) that the individual media members in the pool are acting in good faith.

* UPDATE 3:15 EST: I emailed with Dakota Smith, a Daily News reporter who helped cover the raid from inside the park. She gave me a more complete description of how the pool worked, which I think is worth spelling out. It gives you an idea both of how hard individual news organizations can work on something like this -- and how much the conditions can be altered to help or hinder journalism by the enabling force. In this case, it sounds like the LAPD did not hinder efforts as much as they could have.

"All of the print reporters filed directly to the pool. The POOL consisted of our our editors, editors of other print publications, and a central news service that anyone else (tv, radio, more print) could read," Smith told me. "Once we filed to the POOL... that info could go live anywhere. The premise was that we just couldn't be greedy and publish information from inside the park directly to our own site without first sharing with the POOL so everyone could have it at the same time. I don't know what the other pool reporters did, but I just sent in short news briefs all night long."

Once those briefs were live, that information could be published by any news organization. So, the LAPD did not technically prevent reporters from getting information out in close to real-time. Rather, the process of ensuring equal access to pool reports required time. As a final detail, here's how Smith described the mechanics of getting stories from inside the park onto the web.

"We were inside the park, but there were multiple reporters from each publication outside the park, doing more reporting," she wrote. "Our editors on the outside were reading the POOL and then also taking stories from outside the park, and crafting them for the web, so there were many eyes. So stories that we were writing from inside the park went live on the newspaper sites, and other news sites within minutes."

The Wall Street Journal has an accurate but easy to misconstrue story about the United States' energy picture. "U.S. Nears Milestone: Net Fuel Exporter," the headline reads. The article describes how the US, in a big change from recent decades, may actually export more petroleum products than it imports in 2011. Sounds important, right? And it is. BUT, there is a very big difference between being a net petroleum product exporter and being a net petroleum exporter. We're still importing 8 million barrels of crude oil per day!

What the numbers mean is that we have more refining capacity than we need to supply our domestic needs. So, we import the crude oil, refine it, use almost all of it, and sell a percentage of it to the rest of the world. The biggest surpluses are in "unfinished oils" and "motor gasoline blending components." Mexico's rising petroleum product use is a big part of the story, as you can see in the by-country net import numbers.

So, the Journal's story is good news, in a general sense, but let's not make it bigger than it is. We're still buying massive amounts of crude oil from other countries. Take a look at Atlantic alum Matt Yglesias' post for a quick economic analysis.

Few remember the second chimp launched into space by the United States. Even fewer remember the terrible equipment malfunction that subjected the animal to 76 electric shocks in orbit.



The chimps of space -- Ham, the first primate in space, and Enos, the second primate (after Yuri Gagarin) to orbit Earth -- have a special place in our memories of NASA. These animals paved the way for the United States space program by convincing biologists that animals' bodies *and* minds could function in orbit.

But there was a dark side to the missions. The chimps were the first to be trained by "avoidance conditioning" during which electric shocks were administered to the soles of their feet when the animals responded incorrectly in carrying out simple tasks. So, for example, the animals would be presented with three shapes and were trained to pick out the one that was not like the two others. They made their selections by pressing one of three levers that corresponded to the three symbols. On problem one below, the chimp should press the middle lever. On problem two, the chimp should press the right lever, and so on. Scientists call these oddity problems.


After Enos was in orbit, his first battery of oddity problems went as well as could be expected. After 18 problems, Enos had received 10 shocks. But on his next battery of tests, the center lever malfunctioned as did the switch controlling which question was presented. Enos kept being presented the same problem -- number one above -- in which the correct answer required pressing the center lever, but his center lever was broken. Enos, strapped into a space module orbiting the earth, was subjected to 33 shocks in a row, no matter what he did. The chimp kept trying to press different levers, NASA researchers record, but he kept getting shocked. Mercifully, the test ended after 35 shocks, and Enos performed normally on the other tasks he was given.

But then, as per the preexisting schedule, he was presented with the oddity problem again. Just like the time before, the apparatus malfunctioned and Enos was shocked 41 times. Even NASA scientists were amazed that the chimp soldiered on, despite the horrible malfunction.

Note that the malfunctioning of the center lever, which resulted in the subject receiving 35 shocks on the second session of the oddity problem, did not disrupt his subsequent performance. ... And likewise, the 41 shocks received during the third oddity session did not affect performance during the subsequent fourth session of the CA-DA tasks. Certainly, following a malfunction of this nature, it might be expected that behavior would be disrupted, but this was not in evidence.

Eventually, Enos' flight ended and he came back to Earth. His capsule did not land where NASA anticipated, so he was stuck in the capsule for 3 hours and 20 minutes. By the time the USS Stormes crew extracted him, "The subject had broken through the protective belly panel and had removed or damaged most of the physiological sensors," a NASA report records. "He had also forcibly removed the urinary catheter while the balloon was still inflated."

A little less than a year later, Enos died of dysentery. We know his body was inspected, but the location of his remains is unknown.

It goes like this: a technological innovation opens up the possibility for a new kind of more immediate, decentralized, less hierarchical media form. The people will be empowered! And sometimes, they are. (At least for a while.)

This is the dominant narrative of the Internet as communications medium. But what's fascinating is that if we look in the crevasses of history, we can find a set of people who were blazing the trail that social media advocates would later walk. The new technology that arrived in their midst was the videocamera, and their approach was flavored by the countercultural milieu in which they placed themselves. Throughout the 1970s, video collectives like the one I'll focus on in this essay, Ant Farm, tried to break the three-channel tyranny of the broadcast media long before computer networks were commonly used.

According to scholar Deanne Pytlinski, these groups wanted to "interrupt broadcast television's one-way flow of information." They created video with "the goal of liberating the mind from control by the mainstream media through decentralization... coupled with the desire for deeper and more authentic forms of interpersonal communication."
 
Unlike film, which had to be developed and was expensive, video could be fast, cheap, and on-the-go. This change allowed video collectives to experiment with new ways of producing *and* consuming moving pictures.

Their work is detailed in Pytlinski's essay, which appears in a new book edited by Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, and in objects from Ant Farm productions at an accompanying show at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. The counterculture influenced the videomakers, who influenced more than just the counterculture. Their creative use of the new technology allowed new ways to think about media to spring up. Along with magazines like The Whole Earth Catalog, they promoted a pro-technology, anti-mainstream-media sensibility that was a far cry from neo-primitivism and much closer to the Internet pioneers of the 1990s.

While historian Fred Turner has described how the counterculture became cyberculture, the role of video collectives in creating new modes of networked media creation has gone unremarked upon. The collectives -- especially San Francisco's Ant Farm, Media Access Center, Optic Nerve, Video Free America, and TVTV -- were new media makers before there was a name for such a thing. But without networked distribution, they were forced to create fantastically creative spectacle and sneakernets to get their message out.

I am 65 percent not kidding when I say that the social-media ecosystem is basically the Ant Farm plus the Internet.



On July 4, 1975, the members of San Francisco's Ant Farm architecture and video collective staged what they called the "ultimate media event." After a bit of performance-art frivolity in which a John F. Kennedy impersonator gave a mock speech deriding the media -- "Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? Haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?" -- the group took a heavily modded Cadillac and crashed it through a thin pyramid of television sets.

Local broadcast-television stations covered the event, mostly to mock it. KPIX, the CBS affiliate, cut back from its segment to the studio's two male anchors. "Now *that* was weird," one says, gesticulating with his pen. "You've got to say that that was pretty weird. The car going into the television sets and the Kennedy impersonator." He shakes his head as his colleague says, "I think it's over our heads." 

In footage from that time, KTVU's man on the scene looks into the camera with a clump of televisions flaming behind him and says, "So, what's it all mean? Well, presumably, the message is for the media," he says. "Get it?" The message is obvious to him, but the anchors back in the studio react differently. "I don't think I want to get it," says one anchor. "That's from the culture corner tonight," another anchor says as the third uncomfortably adjusts his jacket. The point, of course, was that broadcast television should burn! Even the faux bewilderment of the anchors shows them to be doltish squares because, really, who couldn't see what the message was? The brilliance of the stunt was to exploit the networks lust for spectacle to get them to broadcast the call for their own demise.

We know all about this stunt because The Ant Farm preserved it in a video piece called, Media Burn, which is now available for free on the art site UbuWeb. While they decried the artifacts and means of consuming moving pictures, they were simultaneously using the new technology of the videocamera to create counterprogramming. While contemporary people of all political persuasions like to paint the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as a neo-primitivist affair, Ant Farm and the rest of the collectives were nothing of the sort. In fact, they were using the latest technology, a technology considerably newer than film cameras, and they were obsessed with cybernetics, an emergent framework for thinking about systems that emerged out of World War II war research. It is easier to paint all counterculturalists as reactionary anti-technologists, but the facts don't match up with the charge.



Ant Farm's fascination with technology went beyond video art. They were obsessed with inflatable buildings (!) because of their mutability, speed of deployment, and low-cost. As they describe in their "Inflatocookbook," a DIY guide to inflatable architecture, they could show up somewhere and create a building within hours with some plastic, tape, and "used fans from Goodwill." They were not against technology but merely optimizing for a different set of properties. The mobility of the buildings was especially important because the Ant Farm's desire for a networked world in which high-bandwidth communication was only possible face-to-face meant that they had to spend a lot of time physically traveling the country.

They did this traveling in considerable style. The group outfitted a van to enable the creation and display of video. As you can see in the print below, the purpose of the van was to allow them to show "unedited, unwashed people's TV" of political candidates debating things. We're so used to seeing politicians on YouTube and in other venues, that it's easy to forget how difficult it would have been to see politicians speeches in their unedited forms. Broadcast television networks had incredible control over how a particular politician would be presented. The Ant Farm Video Van wanted to end that, at least for people who wanted more viewpoints.

When the modern wind industry sparked to life in California during the 1980s, the maximum output of an average wind turbine was measured in the tens of kilowatts. Even stringing together hundreds of these machines only allowed a few megawatts of power to be produced, a far cry from the gigawatt-scale of a large nuclear facility.

But the past thirty years have seen remarkable development in wind technology. Individual turbines have gotten much (much!) larger, so that some individual units are rated at seven megawatts. That's hundreds of times better output than the initial small units. Some turbines are taller than the Statue of Liberty now. And operational experience now keeps wind machines online for a much greater percentage of the time, too.

Add up those changes and you can see a remarkable change in the scale of wind farms, which are measured in the hundreds of megawatts now, comparable to many fossil fuel facilities. Above, you can take a quick tour through the eight largest wind farms in the country.

Our machines' computational biases are not the same as our brain's cognitive biases, which is going to be weird

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate, eminent Princeton psychologist, and godfather of behavioral economics. So, when he speaks about emergent phenomenon, it's probably worth listening.

In this case, he submitted himself to a group Q&A by the readers of Freakonomics, and someone asked him about Apple's Siri and how artificial intelligence more generally might reflect human cognitive biases.

Q. With the launch of Siri and a stated aim to be using the data collected to improve the performance of its AI, should we expect these types of quasi-intelligences to develop the same behavioral foibles that we exhibit, or should we expect something completely different? And if something different, would that something be more likely to reflect the old "rational" assumptions of behavior, or some totally other emergent set of biases and quirks based on its own underlying architecture? My money's on emergent weirdness, but then, I don't have a Nobel Prize. -Peter Bennett

A. Emergent weirdness is a good bet. Only deduction is certain. Whenever an inductive short-cut is applied, you can search for cases in which it will fail. It is always useful to ask "What relevant factors are not considered?" and "What irrelevant factors affect the conclusions?" By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones.

The emphasis above is mine. If what he's saying is a little opaque, let me unpack it. Human brains take shortcuts in making decisions. Finding where those shortcuts lead us to dumb places is what his life work has been all about. Artificial intelligences, say, Google, also have to take shortcuts, but they are *not* the same ones that our brains use. So, when an AI ends up in a weird place by taking a shortcut, that bias strikes us as uncannily weird.

Get ready, too, because AI bias is going to start replacing human cognitive bias more and more regularly.

Via @FelixSalmon

Image: imredesiuk/Shutterstock.

Don't ask me how I stumbled on this photo. But I did and I thought you might want to share in the glory of a technologized Santa. In fact, I thought you might like to participate in the caption contest below. (Image via Southern Methodist University Central Library.)

In the coming weeks, we'll be putting the finishing touches on our inaugural Atlantic Tech Gift Guide. Unlike other gift guides, we're not going to focus exclusively on the newest gadgets. No, we want to put together a guide about what new products can extend your human capabilities, not your technological ones. We're as focused on DIY hacks -- like this pocket-sized espresso machine -- as we are on finished products from the world's biggest companies.

As you can imagine, this is a little more difficult than listing off the latest and greatest smartphone. We want to our selections relevant to the problems and opportunities that you encounter on a daily basis. So, you tell me: do you have a special hack that makes your sister's life easier? Do you want to know the best ways to watch TV without having a television? Would you like to give the gift of better sleep through technology?

Let me know in the comments or feel free to email me at: amadrigal[at]theatlantic.com.

Thanksgiving is coming up, that time when families gather together to share food, extend gratitude, and marvel at how Dad still uses Internet Explorer 6. No, seriously, Dad, how can you be using a browser developed during the Clinton administration? That was like 10 presidents ago.

This year, though, do something different. Don't just explain to Grandpa or Mom or your father-in-law that there is a whole world of secure web browsing out there. No, take a firm stand. Tell them they won't be able to watch funny fishing videos on YouTube with IE6 anymore. Usually, by this point, most parents are begging for help and you can extract excellent perquisites for your labor. That big bedroom your little sister got for some reason? Now's the time to finally occupy it. While you're at it, you will probably fix (or set up) the wifi, which you can helpfully explain is like Internet particles floating in the air.
 
So that's how it may go in happy families, where you're a good kid and your parents trust you. However, stuff happens, and you may find that your parents won't brook even the slightest change to their Internetting. In that case, wait until they slip into a tryptophan-induced coma and then sneak into the den.

If a parent catches you, don't tell them that you're changing their web browser. Say instead that you're checking for viruses or installing new drivers or that you're "freeing up space on their hard drive," which parents always seem to worry about. (And though you're lying, if they do have viruses or are running out of hard drive space or need new drivers for some reason, be a good boy and do that stuff, too.)

A little advice on the browser change. Don't switch brands on them. No putting Chrome instead of Firefox or Internet Explorer. Keep it simple. Make sure to be on hand the first time they open up the browser to accept responsibility for the change on behalf of "The Cloud," which you will testify has started changing people's software without asking. When they ask you what The Cloud is, shake your head, and stare off into the distance. Then point to the nearest telephone (which will probably be rotary dial) and whisper, "Can't talk about it." Then loudly declare, "Those were the best sweet potatoes Uncle Ronnie ever made, don't you think, Dad?"

In any case, you see where I'm going with this. No more excuses! These browsers must be upgraded. Do it for the web developers. Do it for the designers. Do it for your parents. On Friday, November 25, every old web browser must go.

Image: Wave Break Media/Shutterstock.

If you use Twitter, you are no doubt familiar with the hashtag, #firstworldproblems. It's used to convey a sense of ironic perspective as in "Ever since getting my iPhone 4S, I keep trying to talk to my iPad. #firstworldproblems." The hashtag says, "Your/my problem may be annoying, but there are much worse things happening in the world."

Phrased this way, I should like it.  It builds a useful sense that one's problems are not the only significant things in the world. I've probably even used it, and I've certainly thought it. But, for inchoate reasons, I have come to dislike it when people tweet #firstworldproblems. I could not identify what irked me about it, but there was something.

Then I ran across novelist Teju Cole's analysis of #firstworldproblems. It strikes me as a significant and nuanced critique. Here's what he had to say, strung together from 11 tweets.

I don't like this expression "First World problems." It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn't disappear just because you're black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here's a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.

One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion's technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don't wake up with "poor African" pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is--quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.

There's a lot to chew over in there. Cole's perspective as someone who has moved between the US and Nigeria (he now splits time between Brooklyn and Lagos) lets him demonstrate where people in both places connect. Even if that point of connection is not between the depths of their souls, but the phones in their hands.

If you like the way Cole thinks, check out his book Open City, which I bought yesterday and am working through. The first 50 pages are deep, serious, and smart.

A regular guy named John Pike has become the new face of evil among people following the Occupy protests around the country. The UC Davis police officer's matter-of-fact pepper spraying of seated, obviously peaceful students has provoked justifiable outrage. James Fallows summed up the situation with his usual precise moral compass. "This is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population," he wrote. "That's what I think here."

Many are calling for Pike's firing, or worse. He certainly doesn't present a sympathetic figure. What kind of person could do this?


Thinking about the outrage of friends and colleagues, a James Baldwin passage that I've read many times came back into my mind. Here's what he had to say in the New York Times about Jim Clark, an Alabama sheriff and staunch civil rights opponent whose state troopers viciously attacked peaceful protesters.

[Clark] cannot be dismissed as a total monster; I am sure he loves his wife and children and likes to get drunk. One has to assume that he is a man like me... Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman's breasts. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.

Baldwin recognized that Clark was merely the endpoint of a system that shaped the sheriff just as it shaped the people the sheriff attacked.

Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let's not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

That these changes in the police force have occurred is not in dispute. They've been sufficiently open that academics can write long papers detailing the changes in police responses to protests from the middle of the 20th century to today. They are described in one July 2011 paper by sociologist Patrick Gillham called, "Securitizing America." During the 1960s, police used what was called "escalated force" to stop protesters.

"Police sought to maintain law and order often trampling on protesters' First Amendment rights, and frequently resorted to mass and unprovoked arrests and the overwhelming and indiscriminate use of force," Gillham writes and TV footage from the time attests. This was the water cannon stage of police response to protest.

But by the 1970s, that version of crowd control had given rise to all sorts of problems and various departments went in "search for an alternative approach." What they landed on was a paradigm called "negotiated management." Police forces, by and large, cooperated with protesters who were willing to give major concessions on when and where they'd march or demonstrate. "Police used as little force as necessary to protect people and property and used arrests only symbolically at the request of activists or as a last resort and only against those breaking the law," Gillham writes.

That relatively cozy relationship between police and protesters was an uneasy compromise that was often tested by small groups of "transgressive" protesters who refused to cooperate with authorities. They often used decentralized leadership structures that were difficult to infiltrate, co-opt, or even talk with. Still, they seemed like small potatoes.

Then came the massive and much-disputed 1999 WTO protests. Negotiated management was seen to have totally failed and it cost the police chief his job and helped knock the mayor from office. "It can be reasonably argued that these protests, and the experiences of the Seattle Police Department in trying to manage them, have had a more profound effect on modern policing than any other single event prior to 9/11," former Chicago police officer and Western Illinois professor Todd Lough argued.

No one wanted to be Seattle and police departments around the country began to change. "In Chicago for example, paramilitary gear such as that worn by the Seattle Police was quickly acquired and distributed to officers," Lough continued, "and the use of force policy was amended to allow for the pepper spraying of passive resistors under certain circumstances." (That emphasis is mine.)

9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful. The police had armored personnel carriers.

This is what it looked like on the ground in Miami in 2003. Occupy protests have shown that variations on this unprecedented show of force have now become commonplace.


Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale, who has specialized in tracking police tactical changes, found that the the "broken windows" theory of policing, which was introduced to a national audience by this very magazine, has also had a major impact on protest policing. As we wrote in 1982, broken windows policing did not attempt to directly fight violent crime but rather the "sense that the street is disorderly, a source of distasteful, worrisome encounters."

As Vitale would put it, the theory "created a kind of moral imperative for the police to restore middle class values to the city's public spaces." When applied to protesters, the strategy has meant that any break with the NYPD's behavioral preferences could be grounds for swift arrest and/or physical violence. Vitale described how the theory has been applied to Occupy Wall Street:

Consider what has precipitated the vast majority of the disorderly conduct arrests in this movement: using a megaphone, writing on the sidewalk with chalk, marching in the street (and Brooklyn Bridge), standing in line at a bank to close an account (a financial boycott, in essence) and occupying a park after its closing. These are all peaceful forms of political expression. To the police, however, they are all disorderly conduct.

Add up all these changes in the training paradigms and outlooks of police departments and you have an entirely different kind of policing than we knew during the Reagan and Clinton years. Scholars identified this new approach's salient features in 2007, adopting the name "strategic incapacitation":


But now regular people are identifying this new approach's salient features as well. The large-scale deployment of video recording technologies combined with high-speed media diffusion channels have allowed everyone to see what only a tiny number did back in 2003 in Miami. They are seeing kids getting pepper sprayed and hundreds of protesters getting arrested. They're watching police throw flash grenades into groups of American citizens. These images are coming to them through the same Twitter accounts and Facebook updates that show them photos of their friends' new babies and the score of the USC game.

While it's easiest to note the incidents of police violence, the protesters' cameras also record what's *not* in the images. Authorities have long claimed that they were merely battling the "black bloc" of violent anarchists. But when you look at all these videos, the bogeyman isn't there.

Instead, it's a dozen scared kids and a police officer named John Pike spraying them in the face from three feet away. And while it's his finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students. I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn't become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably. Someone has to do it.

And while the kids may cough up blood and writhe in pain, what happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.

You know the old Tolstoy line, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"? I think there should be a new variant for tech products: every good product is alike, every bad product is bad in its own way.

There is a simple rule in separating the bad from good. Good products make you want to use them. Bad products don't. The thing is, though, there are an almost infinitely large number of reasons *not* to use a product. Our surprise should be reserved for when we find ourselves driven to continue our engagement with a thing.

Marco Arment's review of the Kindle Fire is excellent evidence for this idea. He excoriates and details the dozens of little ways that the Amazon tablet doesn't work. Just his detailed review of the interface is quoted extensively below.

By contrast, if you were to describe the basics of iPad navigation, you wouldn't have to mention any of those things because the iPad interface works. The larger lesson: we note the specific ways something doesn't work, but when something does work, we just use it.

• Almost the entire interface is sluggish, jerky, and unresponsive.
• Many touch targets throughout the interface are too small, and I miss a lot. It's often hard to distinguish a miss from interface lag.
• The on-screen Back button often doesn't respond, which is particularly frustrating since it's essential to so much navigation.
• I keep performing small drags when I intend to tap, especially on the home screen. This makes the most common home-screen action -- launching something -- unnecessarily difficult and unreliable.
• The load-on-demand images in various lists and stacks in the interface significantly slow down browsing: I scroll to a screen full of empty placeholders, then I have to wait for the images to pop in, then I can look for the item I wanted. (And then I can move on to the next screenful when I don't find it.)
• Amazon's content-browsing apps don't respond well if lost internet connectivity is regained -- everything just sits there, empty, until you leave and re-enter that screen. This happens a lot when waking the Fire from sleep, when it has no connection for a few seconds before the Wi-Fi reconnects.
• Once, I woke the Fire from sleep after only a few minutes of non-use and it rebooted for some reason. (I've only had it for two days.)

The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe. Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that's surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied.

This idea crystallized for me yesterday when Jonathan Glick, a long-time digital journalist, tweeted, "I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway." If you get the idea, go ahead and skip ahead to the documentation below. If you don't get, let me explain why it might be the most useful way of thinking about #Occupy.

API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface. APIs allow data to be pulled from an online source in a structured way. So, Twitter has an API that lets app developers create software that can display your Twitter feed in ways that the company itself did not develop. Developers make a call to that API to "GET statuses/home timeline" and Twitter sends back "the 20 most recent statuses" for a user.

What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. So, to make the metaphor here clear, Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers don't have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers).

A key feature of APIs is that they require structure on both sides of a request. You can't just ask Twitter's API for some tweets. You must ask in a specific way and you will receive a discrete package of 20 statuses. We decided that breaking down the inputs and outputs of Occupy Wall Street in this way might actually be useful. The metaphor turns out to reveal a useful way of thinking about the components that have gone into the protest. Obviously, many of these tactics owe a debt of gratitude both to traditional organizing training (e.g. consensus decision-making processes) as well as more recent protest movements in North Africa and Europe (e.g. taking the square, distributed leadership). Nonetheless, it is Occupy Wall Street that pushed many of these ideas out across this country.

So, here's your guide to the Occupy Wall Street API.  I realize that this is not a realistic API, just a useful frame, but we employ, for verisimilitude, the REST architecture, just like Twitter. That means we only have a few actions: Get (retrieve info), Post (create or update info), Delete.

*General*

GET Occupation: Occupying physical space stands in for a greater metaphorical occupation of the commons. Actions to permanently occupy or reoccupy a park focus and energize a larger group of temporary protesters and armchair supporters at home. The physical location provides an anchor for virtual activities.
GET Decentralized leadership structure: Repeat mantra that the movement is 'leaderless.' In practice, have no single leader on whom the media and/or public can focus. Avoid profiles of organizers. If necessary, elect a dog as leader of the occupation, a la Denver.
GET Loudly inclusive userbase: Do not require any particular identification, such as labor or ethnic identity. While youth-driven, make sure to highlight examples of older occupiers.
GET Money: With the approval of the General Assembly, other occupations can draw on the funds raised by the main Occupy Wall Street fund. This is not required. Accounting battles in these situations can and have gotten messy.

*Strategy*
GET Strategy/studied police antagonism: Occupy protesters have courted some confrontations with police officers while shying away from others. While the occupations have been almost exclusively non-violent, they have also refused to heed police orders. Hundreds have been arrested and a few injured in clashes with police. In return, protesters have gotten to document the heavy force the police have deployed. Images of hundreds of riot police facing down unarmed protesters has catalyzed support for the movement.
GET Strategy/open source ideology: From the beginning, the occupation was meant to take on a life of its own. Organizers and occupiers alike have not tired to maintain control of the message or methodology for spreading ideas or occupations. Anyone who wants to support Occupy Wall Street can just do something, trusting they'll be able to connect to the movement. Hence OccupyHistory and hundreds of like sites.
GET Strategy/General Assembly: The occupations are governed by general assemblies in which consensus rules. These are generally run by organizers who are familiar with the consensus method. The GAs strive for inclusiveness and bring the whole group together on some predictable schedule. Anyone can speak at the meetings and detailed minutes are taken.  
GET Strategy/working groups: While the big decisions are made by the GA, the thousands of other tasks involved in running the camp have been farmed out to working groups that focus on specific issues. For example, the Internet Working Group works on the infrastructure requirements of the protesters.
GET Strategy/social media: Occupy Wall Street had a social media strategy from the beginning. They encouraged all protesters to record their experiences with cell phones and cameras and then used that media to drive awareness of the protest in its early days. Since then, a whole network of social media has emerged from Twitter accounts to Facebook pages to wikis. This web is woven together by a media team as well as outsiders who have begun to act as signal amplifiers and filters. A particularly effective outside effort was the WeArethe99Percent tumblr, which presented stories of everyday people who were struggling despite their hard work.
DELETE Strategy/Marxist ideology: Despite the dogged determination of some on the right to read any critique of capitalism as pure Marxism, this is just not the case. While some protesters may espouse the desire for massive and structural changes to our economic system, they are not calling for a Marxist revolution. As journalist Bruce Nussbaum put it, "OWS is against Crony Capitalism, not Capitalism. It's FOR Entrepreneurial Capitalism... OWS has splits. Some want a share economy. Others are nihilist. But most see Steve Jobs as a hero."
DELETE Strategy/Mainstream media mediation: In the early days of the protest, it garnered little attention. An NPR editor said they did not cover the protest because it did not "involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective." So, the protesters made their own media and distributed it (see above on social media). While media attention is easier to get now, the channels the protesters created in the early days remain active and provide a direct transmission of what the occupiers think is happening.

*Tactics*
GET Tactic/camp outs: Occupation has meant actually living in Zuccotti Park. That means the protesters have had to learn how to camp out in a city. The structure and rules of the mini-settlement became part of the narrative of the protests, but there were also many practical considerations that were worked out at OWS before the police booted the protesters.
GET Tactic/linked-arm peaceful resistance: To defend the settlement police were attempting to clear out, protesters linked arms around the camp, forcing police who wanted to clear them to physically move them.
GET Tactic/veterans in front: In major clashes with police at Boston and Oakland, the group Veterans for Peace has played a central role. They have positioned themselves between riot police and the protesters protecting the camps. Police have to go through the flag-wielding veterans. This has created very powerful media and highlighted the way state power was being deployed against people who'd served the country.
GET Tactic/medics: Occupiers built their own medical infrastructure to tend both to confrontation-induced injuries as well as more every day problems. Most of the medics are street docs with some first-aid training, not MDs.
GET Tactic/legal: Legal battles were anticipated and support organized. Protesters were instructed to write the phone number for legal help on their bodies in case they were arrested. The National Lawyers Guild initiated a mass defense for occupiers. A variety of other legal help and counsel has been given and received as well.

*Infrastructure*
GET Infrastructure/Internet: Zuccotti park wifi has been run by a group called The Free Network Foundation. They created a $2090 ultra Internet hub called The Freedom Tower that can be easily copied.
GET Infrastructure/network amplification: Though the number of people in any individual occupation has tended to be small (relative to the biggest civil rights marches, say), the number of people acting as network amplifiers has been large. Bloggers like BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin have become key nodes for disseminating information as have internal activists.
GET Infrastructure/kitchen: A fascinating feature of the occupation was the kitchen that occupiers set up to offer free food to all comers. An Occupy field manual detailed the list of sanitary regulations that should be enforced. A system was also arranged whereby food could be purchased at Costco with donations from around the country.
GET Infrastructure/electricity and water: Different types of electrical generators have been employed from traditional fossil fuel units to bike power.
GET Infrastructure/library: The Occupy Wall Street library became a powerful symbol that the camp had a rich intellectual life. It contained more than 5,000 donated books about all kinds of subjects.
POST Infrastructure/livestream: The livestream was a key part of how events at Zuccotti were relayed to outside parties. There was an official livestream but also unofficial ones. The key point was that live video can be very compelling, particularly during periods of conflict with government authorities.
POST Infrastructure/blanket cell-phone documentation: As in protests across Europe and North Africa, the presence of thousands of individuals recording their experiences has changed how the protests are viewed by the outside world. Instead of being experienced through traditional news media genres, a bewildering array of personal narratives have been transmitted by participants in the protests. Streams of live tweets, video streams of meetings, photos posted from the front lines of battles with police. All have played a role in making the protests feel much more active than they would if one read only distilled media accounts.
POST Infrastructure/storytelling: The Occupied Wall Street Journal produces stories about the occupation and is actually distributed as paper to people in the local area. The literary magazine N+1 has also produced a ton of occupy-related content, including a printed gazette. OccupyWriters also publishes new work about the occupation by high-profile writers.

*General Assembly*
POST GA/human mic: In Zuccotti Park, no electrified amplification was allowed. Occupiers responded by creating a human mic in which a speaker's words were repeated by the crowd so that everyone could hear her. The process takes a long time, but some occupiers felt it had good psychological effects and it kept speeches short.  
POST GA/consensus-based decision-making: This form of group deliberation has been a key differentiating component of the occupation. Led by skilled facilitators, the entire group can engage in debate about what courses of action to take. Consensus-based decision-making is not some newfangled idea, but has been developed for years. Take a look at this overview of how it works for more details.

*Ideas and Memes*
POST Idea/economic inequality: The core message that the world's playing field is tilted to the advantage of the wealthy has come through loud and clear. Since Occupy Wall Street began, mentions of economic inequality have skyrocketed in the national media. The protests have become a "news hook" to look at the United States' shockingly unequal distribution of income and wealth. Though OWS' package of complaints was the catalyst, the more reporters look, the more they find.
POST Idea/inadequacy of politics: Approval of Congress and President Obama are near all-time lows. The idea that our politics are not up to the serious tasks we face in fixing our economy and society has become widespread. Instead of pointing that out, as many have, Occupy Wall Street simply ignored mainstream politics. As the press clamored for position papers and lists of demands, OWS responded by paying no attention. There were two messages in that relative silence: 1) your media is inadequate to convey the scale of changes necessary and 2) your politics are inadequate to make the scale of changes necessary.
POST Meme/the99percent: One especially savvy viral idea to come out of the protest was the idea of The 99 Percent, or those Americans who make less than approximately $250,000 per year. Not only did a viral Tumblr spin out of the idea, but it became a kind of rallying cry of solidarity. American progressives have often been torn apart by their micro-differences, but the 99 percent was the biggest tent that could be imagined. It provided space for nearly everyone to ally with the occupy movement. 
POST Meme/occupyX: Occupy has become a cultural token with its own value outside the protests. People don't just occupy cities in the true spirit of Occupy Wall Street. They also OccupySizzler and OccupytheBathroom. It's a meme with a strange power. It's a testament to the flexibility of Occupy Wall Street that Occupy jokes don't seem to subtract power from the movement but add it. 

This essay inaugurates a series of stories on the ways that protesters have shaped technologies to fit their needs -- and how technologies opened up new space for their messages

With the police raids in the past few days of camps from Oakland to New York, the Occupy movement is at a key juncture. We want to step back and look at the role of technology in the protests' establishment, spread, and future. This essay inaugurates a series of stories on the ways that protesters have shaped technologies to fit their needs -- and how technologies opened up new space for their messages.

Let's start with what seems self-evident, but what I'm sure is more complex than it appears: Occupy is different from the protests that preceded it. To be honest, I'm not sure anyone can explain why. The list of factors contributing to its outstanding run is long: economic circumstances, a distance from the enforced patriotism that followed 9/11, disappointment on the left with Obama's presidency, the failure to adequately regulate banks, the neverending foreclosure crisis, the Adbusters provenance, severe cuts to social programs at the state and local level, the language of occupation, and the prolonged nature of the engagement.

But among those factors, technology plays a central role. I don't mean this is in any narrowly celebratory way: "Technology caused Occupy Wall Street!" But I will say that a set of mobile technologies that didn't exist ten years ago offered protesters new human capabilities that they used to record and disseminate information, as well as organize -- or maybe more properly, design -- the protests. These new behaviors, like blanket cell-phone photo coverage paired with social media amplification, were unprecedented in the United States, though activists put them to use in the Arab Spring protests.

To take a small example of the changes in action, let's return to the moment when the protests went viral. A New York police office was caught on video pepper spraying several women in the face. Our James Fallows captured the spirit of the moment and why it brought such support for the protesters: "[T]he casualness of the officer who saunters over, sprays right in the women's eyes, and then slinks away without a backward glance, as if he'd just put down an animal, does not match my sense of 'appropriate' behavior by officers of the law in a free society."

It's possible -- though perhaps unlikely -- that a TV news crew would have caught such a moment. It's possible that in the pre-Internet world such a moment would have circulated quickly on copied videotapes or on cable access shows. But it is not possible that such an event could have been captured in the way that it was and transmitted within 24 hours to thousands of people through dedicated protest information channels, some of whom amplified the signal to their contacts outside the movement, and so on. Millions had seen the clip within a day or two. And though the news media piled on, it would not have taken members of the press to spread the video. Its emotional power pushed easily through the information networks of the Internet that daily spread cat videos and essays about the Thai floods.

The message of the clip's dissemination is clear. Protesters have chanted, "The whole world is watching" for decades. That's never been strictly accurate, and it's not now either. But what is true is that nearly every action is being recorded -- and with the right set of circumstances, that action can be virally distributed to millions. The moral stopping power of citizen observation has been extended.

After the Occupy protests began to gain mindshare, Americans saw something they'd never seen before. The immediacy of protest images taken by protesters felt new. The speed of their distribution certainly was new. The angle and production values of the protesters' videos were different from the produced segments news organizations put out. Social media pushed the media off to the side, turning them (us) into surfers on a wave that they could see but not control.

All this to say: It wasn't just the protests that were novel for Americans, but the way that the protests could be experienced was also new. In addition to reading about them in the paper or on a blog or seeing them on TV, they saw tweets from people on the ground, photos posted to Facebook, and livestreamed video. All this happened in real-time, so new support could be rallied *during* events, not long after them. The support could arise from formalized general social networks, not solely through custom-built protest networks. Occupy intruded into the lives of the digitally connected in ways that were not possible before. Peering out from the cell phones of protesters everywhere, being on the receiving end of government power had never felt so possible, so real. It felt as if *you* were there as the line of riot cops approached, and somehow that felt different from the view from the television news camera. (Twitter, Facebook, and nearly every other social network did not even exist during 1999's WTO protests or the World Bank protests in DC the next year.)

I'd also argue that Internet technology, specifically, has created new habits of mind and expectations of large-scale projects. Whereas before, hierarchy would have been assumed in a national happening like Occupy, protesters could look to other models of organizing work. They could look to open source projects or, more simply, the insta-networks that spring up around metastatic information. Networked organization is a useful reality as well as a sort of psychological support structure. We're running networks around them! Loose bands of young people can defeat the gray suited corporations! They can't fight what they don't understand!

So, stay tuned. We'll be exploring both the technical and conceptual realities of technology as employed by the Occupy movement and those watching it.

Image: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

A working hypothesis for what a brand is in today's media fractured and pulsating ecosystem

I've been thinking a lot about what a magazine brand can be within our current tech-mediated information ecosystem. In the paper days, a brand's identity was fairly simple. The brand was nearly synonymous with the magazine artifact. The artifact, which was a defined printed package of coherent content, served as a clear identity marker that drew a particular demographic. Those particular eyeballs, then, were sold to companies, who would buy pieces of the publication on which they could paste their advertisements.

But in a world where magazine are a lot more than their printed artifacts, what's a brand? I'll go through my evidence in a minute, but here's my current hypothesis.

Brands are probabilistic now. The primary power of a brand is to increase the probability that someone clicks on, upvotes, or links to a story associated with your brand. It is not calculated primarily on a per issue basis as in the past. Instead, it's a kind of implicit regression based on all the stories a publication has produced.

This isn't a completely foreign idea. In the past, a brand's strength would have been measured by how likely people were to buy or subscribe to a magazine. Today's probabilistic brand, though, is less coherent and much broader than before.

The web contains a wider and more diverse universe of readers than the traditional magazine audience, most people will have at best a hazy knowledge of any individual brand. But in this media world, where people don't have to purchase anything, people don't even have to be conscious of liking a brand to contribute to be more likely to click on its stories. It's all about the marginal edge in the war for clicks, votes, and links.

That's my working hypothesis. I've gotten there by looking at how publications are actually interacting with the Intertubes. Here are the three threads that I'm trying to bring together:

• 1. For any site I've ever seen, most traffic comes in through the sidedoor to individual stories. While everyone has a few sites they go to regularly -- The New York Times or The Awl or The Atlantic, say -- but in aggregate, most visitors to a website are not arriving that way.
  1a. Homepages matter less and less. Because so much traffic goes to individual stories, the homepage -- the part of a web publication that nominally gives it coherence -- continues to fall in importance.
  1b. Most people are reading broadly across the web, picking up links from various sources and piecing together ad hoc publications they assemble in their minds.
• 2. Most sites' monthly or quarterly traffic is delivered by a very small percentage of their total stories. Our traffic world is spiky.
  2a. Traffic gets pushed around by increasingly diverse and powerful social news sites. Reddit, Hacker News, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can all drive powerful traffic waves that dwarf an individual site's native traffic.
  2b. These social news sites are increasingly conscious of themselves as communities with editorial power.
  2c. Only four pieces of information are available about stories on most social news sites: Headline, dek (the one-sentence that describes the story), popularity, and the domain on which it resides. This makes domains more important than people think.
• 3. All magazines used to compete for roughly the same audience. Affluent people between the ages of 25 and 60 who might be looking to buy a car or some other expensive item. Our addressable market is much larger now: it's everyone on the web.
  3a. The wider web people are less likely to be intimately familiar with any individual media brand.

The toughest thing for the probabilistic magazine brand is to find some kind of coherence. In the traditional sense, coherence as a package of interrelated content is gone. The story is the unit that matters, after all. But a big part of the value we add *is* structuring the world in a consistent way. So, the question becomes: what can form the basis for a new coherence for magazines?

One answer that is specific to The Atlantic but extensible is very old: moral purpose. This magazine was founded as an abolitionist publication and that helped structure the varied voices that ran in its pages through the early days.

Image: marekuliasz/Shutterstock.

This is the sort of thing that makes you wonder what real names policy is all about. Today on Twitter, Salman Rushdie detailed his adventures with Facebook's name police.

"Amazing. 2 days ago FB deactivated my page saying they didn't believe I was me. I had to send a photo of my passport page. THEN... they said yes, I was me, but insisted I use the name Ahmed which appears before Salman on my passport and which I have never used," Rushdie wrote. "NOW... They have reactivated my FB page as 'Ahmed Rushdie,' in spite of the world knowing me as Salman. Morons."

You know, Ahmed Rushdie, world-famous author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children.

Seriously, what is the point of forcing Salman Rushdie to go by Ahmed Rushdie? How does this benefit the social web?

The thomp-thomp of your heart beat will occur roughly three billion times in your lifetime. Over the last hundred years, scientists have learned a lot about the heart's mechanisms, as described in the dense, but clear video from the Guardian above. This is a summary of how a single heartbeat occurs, based on the description Michael Shattock of King's College London gives therein

Pacemaker cells at the top of the heart get things going, putting out an electrical signal on a steady but variable rhythm based on the body's needs. That signal spread down through the top chambers of the heart to the atrioventricular node, which directs the signal rapidly to the bottom of the heart. The pumping motion then spreads upward. Shattock noted this wiring makes for an efficient mechanism.

The electrical impulses that induce a heartbeat are generated by individual cells exploiting differences in the concentrations of sodium and potassium ions. (Ions are the name we give to molecules carrying an electrical charge.) There is lots of sodium outside the cell and relatively little inside whereas there is lots of potassium inside the cell and not much outside. Proteins open up channels through the cell membrane and like cold air rushing into a warm house, the sodium molecules push into the cell. Remember the molecules are ions, so a higher concentration of them makes the cell more positive. That's the electrical action that we call a nerve impulse. To end the activity, potassium channels open up and potassium rushes out of the cell, bringing down its positivity. Sodium is also pumped out of the cell through what is called active transport.

"How does that electrical activity translate into mechanical activity?" Shattock asked. The key to that action is calcium. During the period in which the cell's membrane is charged -- the action potential -- calcium enters the cell. The calcium triggers the release of more calcium from tiny bags -- sarcoplasmic reticulum -- filled with the element. Then, the calcium diffuses to the muscle filaments themselves and causes the actual movement. To relax the heart cells, the extra calcium that came across the cell membrane gets pumped out, and the heartbeat ends. Then, the process happens again and again until you die.

I see a lot of footage of the Earth from space, and let's be honest, it's all pretty good. Our planet is beautiful from above and as cameras have improved, the views we get of the Earth from orbit get better, too.

This particular video, though, is the best that I've seen. The footage is from NASA, but the editing is courtesy of Michael König. He selected a series of stunning shots of city lights at night and beautiful aurorae. This is meditation moviemaking.

So, turn off the lights, relax your muscles, and hit play.

After all the hullabaloo last week when Groupon debuted on NASDAQ, this week hasn't seen any big Groupon news. Instead, the company's scribbled down to a low on Wednesday of 23.61 and then bounced back a bit to end the week at 24.25, down from its open at 28.

Here's the chart:

I was all prepared to hate Twitter's new 'Activity' feed. The last thing I want is the Facebookification of Twitter. "Can't you leave well enough alone?" I huffed under my breath. But then I tried it.

And I like it. I wouldn't say it's "high value," which is one of Anthony De Rosa's complaints over at the Guardian. But it's fun. I like scrolling through what people are doing. It's a different window onto how people use Twitter, and I think it exposes more of the value that they're putting into the network. Specifically, being able to see the favorites of my followed crowd is fun. I  also like seeing when multiple members of my community decide to follow someone that I don't know. The new Activity section helps me shape my Twitter community, which is what ultimately determines what my Twitter experience will be like.

BUT -- and this is a big but -- Twitter needs to allow people to opt out of having their activity be public. There is just no technical or usage excuse not to allow users that control. Period.