Twitter Emergent Behavior

I am beginning work on twitter & self-organizing systems/emergent behavior. My first document is a list of relevant definitions compiled from Wikipedia and other sources. A work in progress it is the kernal of my working glossary.

I think that in the end emergent behavior and consciousness will be a function of brute force computing power. Once there is enough working RAM and there are enough nodes with content a gradual awakening will occur.

The Collective Consciousness of Twitter

The term "collective consciousness" has a long history in social theory and has gained some common usage but I am particularly interested in its use pertaining to Twitter. When I was in high school around 1990 I read a book by Marvin Minsky titled The Society of Mind which describes a theory of human intelligence. About that same time there was talk of an "information superhighway" that would be built upon something called the Internet. I put these concepts together along with some other ideas from science fiction and projected that this new thing would become a giant thinking "brain" that would eventually develop its own behaviors and come up with ideas on its own. In other words I thought the internet would develop its own consciuosness. Well back in 1990 I figured that by the year 2000 this would surely have already come about. Now I think I may be lucky if I ever see it happen within my own lifetime. But make no mistake, I think it is happening and I think Twitter is currently the leading edge. I'm still very excited about this, in fact I'm probably more excited than ever. I am going to continue to blog about this concept and I am going to promote it on Twitter. This is one reason I have decided to take a break from my Twitter habit to further develop this idea. When I do finally get back to Twittering on a regular basis I will have an additional focus.

Twitter, AOL & Me Online

Since quitting Twitter I have been thinking and reflecting about what it meant to me and how I am going to replace it as an expressive outlet. I have concluded that I will resume Twitter at sometime in the future but it will be different. Defining my political positions in great detail and building a polemic framework are important and Twitter has been very useful for that. If I approach it more methodically and have my arguments better organized it may be more satisfying on the second go round.

I am tempted to tell my entire online life's story here on this blog and I may eventually get to that. I do now have enough history to identify patterns and how one medium like Twitter can at first intrigue, enthrall, and obsess me for a while only to turn frustrating and unsatisfying. The four month Twitter experience is so much like a compressed version of my six year experience on AOL that I absolutely must explore the parallels. My early AOL experience was as a naïve and curious teenager in 1993. Among other experiments I engaged in some blatantly sexual and exhibitionist behavior and while I managed to quickly supress that aspect outwardly I think there is such a subliminal thread occasionally running through my online presence to this day.

I am going to make an outline and index of all my andilinks tweets and begin a plan for my next Twitter round. It probably won't begin until I'm well settled in my new home, I'd guess around September 1. I will record many of my musings about this here on this blog.

Finished with Twitter

I will not be deleting my account because a situation may arise where I will want to make posts but the mode I had been following over the past several months is finished. I was spending too much time for too little return.

I do appreciate my followers and I want you to know that I will miss those of you who interacted with me from time to time. I will likely be visiting the financial blogs posted on the andilinks home page and will be posting comments on those blogs.

Five Dollar foot-long

1) The grocery bill was way higher than $5.*
2) It's not even a foot long.
3) Prep and clean-up took way longer than a trip to the Subway.
4) It wasn't as good as a Subway.*


*if I prepared such a sandwich everyday I could bring down the unit cost and improve quality. But that would be such a boring diet for every day.

Next time I'll just buy one.

The Firestorm has just begun (h/t Paul Kedrosky)

The importance of this Rolling Stone piece is not so much what it says (thought it says a lot), and not how breathlessly it's said, but the fact that it exists at all where it does and the traction it will get among its readership. This will in turn will inspire more pieces like it and re-awaken the msm to the fact that their only salvation is to draw blood.

Every dying magazine out there will heave a hail Mary pass like this one, but they will get ever-more desperate for a kill and each in its turn will scatter the body-parts further onto the landscape. These pieces will then awaken recriminations and backbiting in Congress whose angry constituencies will be waving a Rolling Stone in one hand and a pitchfork in the other. The appetite for this kind of journalism on this subject is insatiable, people want to know where their money went. This firestorm has only just begun--and THAT's the story here.

Who stole my lunch?

Until very recently the counterparties to the AIG CDS's that were settled with the bailout money were kept a secret. The first person to call attention to this publicly was Paul Krugman and shortly after he did so we learned who those counter parties were. Or did we? The AIG bonus thing was not a secret before this week, it simply came to our attention recently. Complexity and jargon pick up where secrecy leaves off.

This thing in its fullness has not yet hit that famous fan. How will our government behave when at least two of the three branches are completely covered with the digested waste of Goldman Sachs et al and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act?

They will try to protect each other for as long as they can, but the truth will prevail and it won't be pretty. This is a LOT bigger than Watergate.

Pollyanna's Puzzle

This post is a rewrite and expansion of a comment I left on Paul Kedrosky's Blog.

CNBC faces a conundrum and an impossible task; bearish news drives away advertisers. No where on the front page of their website is there the slightest indication that there may be another shock and another leg down in the market. So are they grasping at straws or is luck with them this time? I'm sure that buried somewhere in the articles they've hedged their bets and have warned that this may not be over.

I myself have been decrying the lack of confidence in the messages from the White House and Treasury, a bearish message from there is a self-fulfilling prophesy... So what's a cheerleader to do?