David Cameron and The Next Age of Government

David Cameron, leader of the United Kingdom's Conservative Party, gave a very thought provoking speech at a recent TED Conference on how he thinks the information revolution can benefit government and policy. The TED conferences, standing for Technology, Entertainment, and Design are devoted to just that, but more specifically new innovations with the slogan "Ideas Worth Spreading." Speakers are often scientists, researchers, inventors, but rarely politicians. So I was surprised to see that Cameron gave a talk, but it still certainly fit the TED brand.

Here's the gist of what I got out of it - he talked about how information today spreads incredibly quickly, cheaply, and to almost anywhere in the world and government's are not using this to their advantage. He stated that the information age can give more power to the people, and has lead us to understand people better. Understanding people better should lead us to designing policies and programs that treat people the way they actually are, rather than the way we wish them to be. And more power can be given to people simply by translucency of information which is now much cheaper and easier.

One simple example he used was putting government spending, dollar by dollar, available online. He reminded the crowd that the world has over 30 trillion dollars in debt, and the easiest way to start alleviating it is to reduce government spending. And that's exactly why there are always people going line by line through our budgets, trying to analyze what programs work or don't work, in order to decide what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. But what if all of our spending, down to every individual government contract, was put online? Businesses could search the database for contract jobs they could fulfill, and compete to do it for a lower price. And he promised that should the Conservative Party gain control of Parliament, they will do just that in the UK.

He also showed a screen shot from a Chicago website called Clearmap, which updates publicly the occurance, description, and location of crimes committed in the city. Before the internet this is information that only the police department would know, but now it is public for all citizens. Kind of like the e-mails I get from my USC's Department of Public Safety, this information can show people how to avoid being the victim of a crime. It can show where not to go at what hours during the day in a very obvious visual display. Not to mention the fact that this makes the Police Department to their jobs better because they have easier access to and representation of information that had previously been stored in file cabinets or personal memories.

The most interesting thing to me though, being a psychology major, is how he believes we can use behavioral economics and our understanding of ourselves to improve culture. One easy example we're all familiar with is recycling - people started doing it more, when you started offering them money for it. Yes I know it's simple, but that's why it's such an easy way of using something we know about people (they like money) to do something that collectively makes a difference. An example he used, which I'm not sure I agree with but makes a lot of sense, is a simple way of reducing energy usage. Politicians have tried everything from those PSA's telling you to turn the lights of when you leave, to city-wide voluntary no-power hours. Cameron suggests using the vast amount of information we have and giving it to people to really show how they fit in - what if your monthly electrical bill had a bar graph with your energy usage, your neighbors' average energy usage, and an eco-friendly energy aware household's usage? Psychology experiments for years have continued to confirm that people feel uncomfortable giving/taking more/less than everyone else; essentially, people like equality and collaborative altruism. So if Joe Shmoe sees that he's using four times as much energy as the rest of his block, maybe he actually will start turning lights off when he leaves rooms. Obviously this proposal may bring arguments of privacy, but the point of it is really using what we know about people to design more effective policy.

Prezi and Persuasion

Tuesday night I attended a special guest lecture from Peter Arvai put on by USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Arvai is the CEO of a new presentation tool software called Prezi, the third new media start-up he has been involved with that began in Hungary and is beginning to spread. Personally, I think Prezi beats the shit out of powerpoint, and I'm not the only one. The great thing about the software, is that you have one giant interactive pallet to place all your content - text, images, sound, and videos. You can place it all in different sizes and locations to enhance your argument, and when presenting you can come in and out of any part at any time. So, rather than a strictly linear, almost movie style presentation that we're used to, Prezi allows the presenter and audience to interact with each other and spend more or less time on different topics depending on the flow of the presentation. And what makes it even better, is that it's free to use, and it's all online - you build your presentation in a web browser, and save it to a customized URL that can be called up from any computer. No more worrying about saving the powerpoint file somewhere, or worrying about compatibility with other computers.

The presentation Arvai gave using Prezi was mostly about how to give a VC pitch. But whether intentional or not, his outline for a VC pitch was an outline for persuasion in general. He asked the audience what the goals of a VC pitch are, and how you accomplish them. After some back and forth with the crowd, we came to a list of three things you need to do - display potential for your idea or product, competency in yourself, and do it in a way that can be easily communicated to other people. For a VC pitch this makes complete sense; you need them to like your product and see that it's profitable, they have to believe you can come through with it, and you have to package it all in a simple argument they can remember and recount to convince their partners.

But I think this is important in trying to persuade any audience to do anything. Take Obama's campaign as an example: his goal was to get elected. So he had to present his ideas, or platform to the voting Americans and prove they had potential to work. He had to look good doing it, speak well, and convince us he is capable of coming through. And he had to make it all fit into an easily remembered argument - Yes we can. Obviously there was a lot more that went into his campaign than I just outlined, but he hit the three big parts of persuasion right on the money. And how about McCain? He also had to present his platform to voting Americans and convince us he is capable of coming through. But in proving his competency to complete the tasks at hand, he was not nearly as successful. A lot of the flack he got in the media was his running mate's competency and his own age. Jokes about him possibly dying in office, and viral videos of Sarah Palin sounding like she didn't know what she was saying, killed their campaign. And things like Tina Fey's depiction of Palin became that easily remembered and transferable message. Once again let me point out that these weren't the only factors influencing the election, but when looking at the simple act of persuasion, Obama beat the shit out of McCain.

Horizontal Evolution

In this article, a team of scientists outline a new theory of horizontal evolution. And it makes us all ask ourselves, what the hell is that? Well the traditional view of genetic evolution through natural selection, which these scientists are calling vertical evolution, falls under the Darwinian view of "survival of the fittest." Essentially, everyone inherits their genes from their parents, and then pass them on to their kids, and whatever genes in whatever organisms help that species survive best will continue to proliferate the gene pool (and vice versa with genes that aren't fit for survival). But these scientists have found evidence of horizontal gene transfer, meaning the inheritance of genes from one organism to another. But they can explain this much better than I can . . .

In the past few years, a host of genome studies have demonstrated that DNA flows readily between the chromosomes of microbes and the external world. Typically around 10 per cent of the genes in many bacterial genomes seem to have been acquired from other organisms in this way, though the proportion can be several times that. So an individual microbe may have access to the genes found in the entire microbial population around it, including those of other microbe species. "It's natural to wonder if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level," says Goldenfeld.

No, this does not mean that by making out with someone you can inherit their genes. In fact, it is still very unlikely that organisms as complex as mammals exchange genetic information with each other. But, considering the prevalence of this genetic transfer between small microbes that scientists have discovered, it is not unlikely that much of the early evolution of single-celled organisms billions of years ago was due to horizontal evolution. And now many scientists are wondering if and how small microbes can influence our genetic codes today - could a virus be considered horizontal evolution? A virus is a small microbe, it enters your blood stream, and it takes over host cells to do its bidding (i.e. implants genetic code within the cell containing information to create more of itself and often also proteins that lead to the observable biological effects of the virus). If you think of your cells as other microbes, how different is this process from that described by scientists in the study?

And at what point do you draw the line between a virus and horizontal evolution? If a virus changes you biologically, and your genes are the blueprints for your biology, is the dividing line just a frame of reference? Obviously you're entire genetic code isn't changing, but what about the infected cells? Which makes us go back to the kssing thing, if you get mono from someone, is that horizontal evolution? Is changing your body temperature, decreasing your energy, and inflaming your throat signs of genetic change in many of your cells? If you say "no, you can take medicine and get healthy again," who's to say the medicine isn't just another microbe exchanging genes with those infected cells?

Please don't take me out of context in thinking that I believe we're all constantly evolving with every bacterium we come in contact with, but at the same time don't discount the possibility that we sometimes might. And remember that if this kind of thing is happening, it's likely not with complicated and specialized genes for individual organisms. You can't get a virus that makes you grow more arms, or at least I highly doubt it. The kinds of genetic information exchanged could only be the kinds of information that the microbes contain to begin with - and I doubt there's a virus out there with anything more drastic than the ability to replicate and produce some simple proteins.

Art as Antibody

I recently read an article on Transvergence written by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito which they titled Art as Antibody. Transvergence is an idea in the art world of taking things that one might not normally consider to be an art medium, but adapt that medium for some kind of creative expression. Some examples may include genetically engineering a rabbit to have florescent green fur, or spreading a non-harmful computer virus that would be the digital version of graffiti.

In Blais and Ippolito's article, they make a very strong analogy between the way art exists in new media and the way organisms immune systems operate. It's a pretty high-brow article with lots of words I had to look up, but I'll give the gist of what I'm pretty sure they were saying. I'll begin like they did, in describing the basics of our immune systems and then applying those concepts to art won't be nearly as difficult.

Diseases enter our bodies in the form of antigens - little molecules that are all each slightly different in shape and size. What our body does to fight these antigens, is create their opposite - antibodies. Each antigen has one sister antibody that binds to out, allowing our white blood cells to destroy the antigen. This process trillions and trillions of times will, hopefully, eradicate the illness. And to prepare for antigens, our immune system constantly makes antibodies in a process that also randomly modifies them so as to produce small amounts of trillions of different kinds of antibodies. When an antigen enters the blood stream, the immune system eventually finds the appropriate antibody to bind to it, and then begins mass producing it to kill the disease.

Now here is where the article and I begin to disagree. In their article, they then apply this analogy to the internet - the idea that there are trillions of different thoughts and opinions online, and the most effective ones in battling opposing views or societal problems will be mass produced at an alarming rate (via chain e-mails, links, blogs, youtube, etc.) But what I think they should have done is apply this analogy to cultural meme theory in general, and acknowledge that the internet has incredibly increased the speed and effectiveness of memes.

But at the same time, antigens and antibodies should not just be seen as antigens are bad and antibodies are good. Rather, antigens are what your body decides not to include within itself, and antibodies are the means by which your body tries to eradicate them. In the same way, there may not necessarily be good cultural memes and bad cultural memes, just those that the individual chooses to include in their own ideology, and those they choose not to include in their own ideology. And in the same way, a group of people (country, culture, company, anything) may choose to include or exclude memes from their ideology. An easy example would be legislation - what laws do we choose to include or exclude, in order to survive as a country. And as we've progressed over time, our biology and our ideology have both improved in their abilities to survive.

Although they limited their argument to new media, my favorite part of the article is this last part of the analogy I will discuss - the idea that not exposing yourself to enough antigens, may lead your antibodies to turn on the host itself. There are many immune system disorders, or diseases where our own immune systems are the ones doing harm on ourselves. And what some have pointed out, is that these disorders have a strange correlation between how many infectious diseases the individual is exposed to. Many Westernized cultures have nearly eliminated many infectious disease (i.e. Malaria, Polio), but have much higher incidences of immune system disorders. And in countries that still suffer from many of these infectious diseases, immune system disorders are much less common. The argument many make, is that our immune systems are meant to be fighting, and if they don't have anything to fight, they will turn on themselves. In the article I read, they made the same argument for art and culture - if a culture becomes too closed off to allow art to challenge it, then the culture can become its own worst enemy. Biologically, ideologically, psychologically, culturally, and pretty much any giant system you can imagine needs a constant flow if ins and outs in order to retain its vitality. If our immune systems aren't challenged by disease, if our culture isn't challenged by artists and intellectuals, if our own individual brains aren't challenged by new ideas, they will die.

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