digital living

Despite all signs that America is facing an imminent cyber threat from state-sponsored global hackers – maybe something even on the scale of a cyber Pearl Harbor - we continue to plod along in rather nonchalant fashion. Those hackers might break into our Internet accounts, steal a few passwords and take down a few websites now and then, but they couldn’t possibly take down the nation’s power grids or financial markets, right?

We already know that supercomputers, sophisticated algorithms and mathematical models are at the very heart of the modern financial markets. Now, with l'affaire Knight Capital we've just seen how robot traders and rogue algorithms could potentially take down Wall Street. In a span of less than an hour, a rogue algorithm programmed to exploit market efficiencies by buying and selling stocks repeatedly for profit actually inverted the logic of Wall Street: instead of buying low, selling low, the algorithm began to buy high, sell low. All told, the rogue algorithm resulted in a $440 million loss for Knight Capital, causing many to question the state of our modern financial markets.

Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, and I have embarked on an interesting project for Polity. Through a series of dialogues, we’re hoping to produce a book that interrogates our different thoughts regarding participatory culture. The goal is to unpack our differences and agreements and identify some of the challenges that we see going forward.

DARPA – the government organization that brought you the Internet – is back, this time with an audacious five-year, $110 million research initiative to militarize cyberspace. Called Plan X, DARPA's plan reflects a disturbing tendency these days – the willingness of governments – including your very own U.S. government - to weaponize and militarize the Internet.

On the Internet, we’ve reached a tipping point where more than 50% of all Internet traffic is no longer generated by humans – instead, it's generated by a motley mix of search engine spiders, bots, scrapers, scammers, hackers and, yes, spies. We are no longer talking about the Internet, we are talking about the Bot Net – a “bot-mediated reality” where algorithms and bots influence where we go, how long we spend there and with whom we communicate.