Tom Chatfield's Blog, page 4

Why do tech neologisms make people angry?

I’ve recently been writing a number of pieces linked to my new book about technology and language, Netymology. Below is the start of a feature for the BBC magazine about the history of tech neologisms – and the passions they can arouse.

From agriculture to automobiles to autocorrect, new things have always required new words – and new words have always aroused strong feelings.

In the 16th Century, neologisms “smelling too much of the Latin” – as the poet Richard Willes put it – were frowned upon by many.

Willes’s objects of contempt included portentous, antiques, despicable, obsequious, homicide, destructive and prodigious, all of which he labelled “ink-horn terms” – a word itself now vanished from common usage, meaning an inkwell made out of horn.

Come the 19th Century, the English poet William Barnes was still fighting the “ink-horn” battle against such foreign barbarities as preface and photograph which, he suggested should be rechristened “foreword” and “sun print” in order to achieve proper Englishness.

Forewords caught on, but sun prints didn’t, instead joining the growing ranks of outmoded terms for innovations – a scrapheap that by the end of the century ranged from temporarily mainstream names like velocipede (meaning “swift foot” and used to describe early bicycles and tricycles) to near-unpronounceable curiosities like phenakistoscope (an early device for animation, meaning “to deceive vision”).

I’ve spent much of the last year writing a book about technology and language and, today, the debate around what constitutes “proper” speech and writing is livelier than ever, courtesy of a transition every bit as significant (at least so far as language is concerned) as the Industrial Revolution.

Read the rest of the piece on the BBC website here

Home truths for online falsehoods

My latest BBC column takes a look at social media and the fine art of lying – and how the inevitability of online untruths plays out around breaking news and the notion of expertise.

As Mark Twain once said, a lie can be half way around the world before the truth has got its boots on. Or was it Winston Churchill, or James Callaghan, or Terry Pratchett? The internet is undecided. It seems likely that all of the above were paraphrasing an old proverb – but, depending on where you search and who you ask, you can more-or-less pick your own truth.

When it comes to current affairs, the power of digital falsehood can count for a great deal. Earlier this month, a false message posted by hackers to the Twitter account of the Associated Press – which read “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured” – temporarily wiped 150 points off the Dow Jones index, and led to an FBI investigation. In the appalled aftermath of the Boston marathon bombings, rumours and conspiracies were almost impossible to avoid, ranging from allegations against an innocent Saudi witness to a digitally manipulated hoax clip from the cartoon series Family Guy.

Yet perhaps the most intriguing online untruth of recent weeks – and the most telling indictment of rapid-reaction social media habits – was not a tweet or an attribution, but an entire person: Santiago Swallow.

Swallow’s credentials put most professional tech gurus to shame. A TED and South by Southwest speaker, his dauntingly detailed Wikipedia page described him as a “motivational speaker, consultant, educator, and author” devoted to “understanding modern culture in the age of social networking, globally interconnected media, user generated content and the Internet”. He has a book coming out later this year and over 80,000 followers on Twitter hanging on his every gnomic word.

The only problem is that he doesn’t exist. Swallow was created as an experiment by one Kevin Ashton, a (real) technologist and coiner of the phrase “the internet of things.” In a piece for Quartz magazine, called “How to become internet famous for $68”, Ashton explained how it took him just two hours and less than seventy dollars to breathe life into his brainchild: “I generated his name on “Scrivener,” a word processor for writers and author … I gave Santiago a Gmail account, which was enough to get him a Twitter account. Then I went to the web site fiverr.com, the online equivalent of a dollar store, and searched for people selling Twitter followers. I bought Santiago 90,000 followers for $50…”

And so it went on, from a striking portrait created by mashing up Google images to an automated Tweeting service generating ceaseless cod-expert opinions: “[Santiago’s] breezy platitudes come from half a dozen ‘mad-lib’-like phrases of the ‘if this, then that’ variety, coupled with a list of nouns from the new age TED/SXSW hipster vocabulary: dolphins, phablets, Steve Jobs, mobile, Tom’s shoes…”

Topped by the fake Wikipedia profile and website, Ashton had crafted a near-perfect imitation of the personas crafted by thousands of online “experts”. At least, he had done so long as you didn’t look into the details too closely – which is a large part of the point of social media services. Numbers and popularity are a potent shorthand for credibility and expertise. To adapt the proverb, once someone has got halfway around the world, you don’t always stop to check whether they’ve put their boots on.

Writing in the New Yorker on the aftermath of the Boston bombings, Adam Gopnik reflected on the relationship between social media, journalism and expertise. “We are now,” he argued, “a nation of experts, with millions of people who know the meaning of everything that they haven’t actually experienced.” Making meanings, telling stories: this is what people do. Except that – as a creation like Santiago Swallow elegantly illustrates – much of the time people themselves are more like a medium through which stories flow. Second and third hand experience passes through our hands online as fast as we can retweet it, together with second hand claims and words and beliefs. As anyone who has watched a major event refracted live through the lens of social media will know, simply being part of something – following and then joining the countless ranks of contributors – can both seduce and overwhelm.

Just a few days after his exposure as a fake, Santiago Swallow’s twitter feed was back online, this time under the acknowledgement that he is “a pure product of the internet.” The account has over 50,000 followers, and counting. Most of them appear to be legitimate – while his automated ramblings are increasingly difficult to distinguish from “authentic” provocations (“Morning has broken. It is going to take from now until dusk to fix it.”). Reflecting the world back to itself doesn’t make you right, or mean you have anything to say. But once you’re officially a news event yourself, all justifications are suspended.

For those despairing of any form of honesty, there’s some good news to be found in analyses of what does and doesn’t get weeded out over time. As Jamie Bartlett, head of the centre for the analysis of social media at think-tank Demos, recently observed in the Huffington Post, “Given the immediacy and ease of propagation, plausible misinformation often spreads very quickly… [but] untrue stories are usually fairly short lived due to some of the Twitter user community acting as information brokers who will actively check and debunk information.”

As Bartlett notes, in one study of tweets produced following the 2010 earthquake in Chile, around 96% of tweets containing truthful information were subsequently “affirmed” by users, while around 50% of rumours discovered to be false were “denied” – a statistic that suggests a different kind of principle in operation. Frenzies of speculation may be easy to whip up – and have troubling immediate consequences – but, over time, falsehoods will often be sniffed out.

All of which brings us back to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, James Callaghan and Santiago Swallow. Would Santiago have been outed even if his creator hadn’t exposed him? Almost certainly. An online lie, though, never vanishes. Having leapt across the world, its echoes wait to snare the unwary – or those who simply enjoy choosing their own truths. Perhaps the hardest thing to resist is a story that wants you to tell it.

Bitcoin and the illusion of money

My latest BBC Future column, reprinted here for UK readers, takes a look at Bitcoins, speculative bubbles and the future of money.

Dubai. Greece. Spain. Portugal. Italy. Cyprus. Ireland. The list of countries needing financial bailouts seems to go on and on. And that’s before you include those banks in the US, the UK and beyond which were “too big to fail”.

As well as revealing the fragility of the global economy, the current crisis has also raised some existential questions about the nature of money.

Can any government really promise to protect the value of its currency and be taken at its word? And how – other than by hiding gold bars under their mattresses – can the residents of a country in crisis hope to safeguard their wealth? As a controversial economist once noted, there are times when all that seemed solid can melt into air.

One much-publicized recent answer to the second of the questions above is a form of money that comes pre-dissolved into the ether: Bitcoins. The world’s “first decentralised digital currency” hit the headlines only reecently, but has been lurking at the edges of global attention for considerably longer.

Born at the start of 2009 in the aftermath of global financial crisis – courtesy of a mysterious and possibly non-existent Japanese programmer calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto – Bitcoins are a mathematical concoction, combining the attributes of a scarce commodity, like gold, with the frictionless trading of an electronic currency. And they achieve this through the ingenious combination of three factors: “mining”, peer-to-peer networking and cryptography.

The first of these is one of the central reasons for their appeal. Despite being wholly electronic, every Bitcoin in existence has been “mined” by someone running Nakamoto’s software, which regulates the global supply of Bitcoins by forcing computers to crunch increasingly difficult equations in order to generate each coin. Coins emerge at a pre-determined rate: as more people use the software, it gets harder and harder to create them, with the global supply decelerating geometrically towards a predetermined limit. At the time of writing, on the morning of 12th April, there were a total of 11,023,350 Bitcoins in the world (one of the joys of an open digital currency is the ease of accessing statistics), and there will never be more than 21 million.

Like everything else about Bitcoins, these factors are hard-coded into its software – and it’s the peer-to-peer element of this software that makes the system so compelling. Almost every modern currency is guaranteed by the “fiat” of government regulation or laws. That is, their worth is based on faith in a central authority – and is undermined when faith declines in that authority.

Bitcoins have no central authority and no such promise, and rely on no intermediaries or banks to hold or to transfer money. Instead, each user operates an “electronic wallet” that embodies their money in a highly secure electronic form, and allows them to exchange Bitcoins directly with any other user on the network. Every transaction is automatically confirmed by the software of every other user, and cannot take place if it fails to match the network’s standards: each transaction is “stamped” with the unique time of its occurrence to prevent double spending, while the cryptographic standards in place ensure the network confirms the validity of every action taking place.

There is, in other words, no need ever to trust any central database or authority. It’s a narrative perfectly matched to troubled economic times, and one reason for the staggering increase in the recent value of Bitcoins. Buying a single Bitcon on 9 April 2013 – through any one of the growing number of online exchanges – would have cost you almost $200, more than fifteen times its $9 value in January. As author Paul Ford wrote in Businessweek: “There’s nothing to trust but math… [and] that’s where Bitcoin thrives: where people would prefer to throw in their lot with anonymous strangers instead of the world economy.”

The recent surge of media-driven interest in Bitcoin has, however, shown every sign of becoming a speculative bubble. Come 10 April, the exchange value of Bitcoins plummeted from a brief high of $265 to as low as $105, before recovering slightly – all in less than ten hours. These are numbers that belong more to a volatile commodity than to a currency, and that emphasize an uncomfortable paradox noted by Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon at the start of April: “The commodity value of bitcoins is rooted in their currency value, but the more of a commodity they become, the less useful they are as a currency.”

As a currency, then, failure is already in the air. Yet this does not mean that the Bitcoin effect can be ignored, not least because it can be divided into two halves. On the one hand, there’s the computerised mining of a commodity strictly limited to a certain number of units. On the other hand, there’s a genuinely transnational medium for payment that is free of almost all the friction of a traditional financial system – and that brings with it a promise of security more transparent and verifiable than any bank or government can match.

Bitcoin’s software is entirely open source, and this means that its security algorithms have been subjected to just about the most rigorous testing and attempted cracking the world’s geeks can come up with. The consensus is: they’re extremely secure. Moreover, should the cryptography at some future point be found wanting, its flaws will almost certainly be identified and updated far faster than with any private system (a major software issue in March was resolved within six hours).

Interestingly, your Bitcoin wealth becomes most vulnerable the moment “real” currency gets involved. The central software may be secure, but online exchanges have been being hacked – or closing up shop completely – at an alarming rate (not to mention the problem of what happens when surges in trading meet slow servers). Similarly, users’ computers can themselves be unsafe places to leave open digital wallets containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of virtual assets.

What’s needed is a way of taking advantage of the system’s astonishing openness and transactional security while evading its incentives towards illegality: something that opportunistic start-ups like OpenCoin are trying to tap into, under the tagline “committed to a simple, global and open currency system”.

It may sound outrageously ambitious, but the birth of new monetary concepts is not itself anything new. During the Industrial Revolution, banks eager to fund booming trade and industry began issuing their own private currencies, a system whose booms and busts led to many of the centralized regulations we enjoy (or not) today.

Some economists, certainly, would welcome further disruption. Writing in 1976, Fredrich Hayek argued in The Denationalization of Money for the removal of the legal obstacles preventing people from using any kind of money they wanted, thus creating a kind of global battle between different rival systems.

“We have always had bad money,” Hayek argued “because private enterprise was not permitted to give us a better one.” No government has yet has acted on Hayek’s faith in the power of the open market. The world, though, may already have embarked on just such an experiment.  Betting against Bitcoins is one thing. But the change they represent packs quite a punch – and, with conventional finance on the ropes, it’s still anybody’s fight.